I haven't seen it mentioned yet, but another reason Fry might have wanted to hang his story on Hitler is that he lost relatives in the Holocaust. There must have been a personal resonance for him in the fate of his antecedents and what could have been his own fate as a gay man (and one of Jewish ancestry).
That said, I didn't like the romance. Realistically, Steve was a stalker and that's not the stuff of romance. Moreover, the seduction was yet another one of those logical disconnects that had irritated me. Steve stalked "Michael" all over Princeton, taking hundreds of photos surreptitiously. And yet, while they were afraid of being bugged and resorted to that idiotic cover of turning up the music (oh, no, that's not suspicious if someone's listening), they never seemed to have considered that they might be under photo surveillance, also. In that technologically advanced Princeton, there would have been no problem with a motion-sensitive camera and some form of infrared light. One would think.
