May 22, 2018 • 54 mins
Who was Karl May? And why was Hitler so obsessed with him? In Episode 4, Robert is joined by Laci Mosley (@DivaLaci on IG) and they discuss Karl May's young adult novels which were the 19th century German equivalent of 'Harry Potter,' and how they influenced Hitler.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, everybody, I am Robert Evans, and this is Behind
the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you
don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
With me today is Lacy Mosley, comedian, writer, podcaster. Hello
and uh Lacy. Did you have a favorite book or
series of books when you were a young adult, like
a teenager? Oh, like a teenager, I was about Jones.
(00:25):
Um oh, that's embarrassing. I don't want to say the
horrible set of books that I read. No, it's okay.
I used to read those horrible Twilight books. Okay, in
high school. That's fine. That little kitty Kitty poor, I know,
that's bad. I'm not gonna say, like like little raunchy
books for horny teenager. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Twilight. Did you
(00:47):
have any impact on you growing up, like your attitudes
about the world. Did you like come into adulthood like
expecting certain things about the world Twilight? Yeah? Mostly, I
just didn't expect men to be trash, you know. I
thought I was going find me a nice little porcelain
du to, you know, love on me and wait for
me to be a virgin forever. I don't know. Yeah,
but then I realized the world is like tender and Instagram. Yeah,
(01:10):
that's like the that's like the secret terror behind children's
literature is that it it has such an impact on
little kids minds because this stuff that you don't have
any sense of credibility when you're growing up, you don't
know to like like I don't. Yeah, things are face value,
like you take things at face value? Yeah, ab solutely.
The stuff that we read is kids has a big
impact on us, and we grow up believing certain things
(01:31):
as a result of it, and then you know, we
we encounter reality absolutely. Um, but yeah, it leaves an impact.
Young adult literature changes young adults in meaningful ways. Have
you ever wondered what a guy like Hitler was reading
when he was twelve? Oh? No, well I haven't. That's
what we're going to talk about today. Carl Friedrich May
was born in Ernstall, Saxony in eighteen forty two. Now,
(01:52):
at that point, Saxony was a kingdom in the southern
part of the German Confederation. This was far enough in
the past that Germans hadn't really locked down the incept
of Germany yet it's like pre German Germany. Uh. Carl
was the fifth of fourteen kids. Nine of his brothers
and sisters died before the age of eighteen kids, and
his mom just kept trying, Well, you gotta get you
(02:13):
gotta get a solid like five or six out right, Yeah,
so they can do work for you, right, you gotta
really double and triple down. You know, there's a lot
of births. Yeah. She must have been so relieved when
like the fifth kid hit eighteen and she was like,
all right, I'm duck, she's pregnant for like sixteen years.
Yeah that's that's like, yeah, that's the like twenty years
of solid pregnancy. Yeah, that's like the run of Seinfeld
(02:37):
and a half but half but just baby. Yeah, what
a nightmare. Um. So yeah, when when Carl was twelve
he started making money, it's something called a skittle alley.
Skittle alley. I looked it up and that's in sexual
No you would expect, right, like a skittle alley. You
don't want to go down there. Forget a jake at
(02:58):
skittle alley, like, uh, it sounds terrible. It's a term
for a bowling alley. And I think he was basically
a bowling hustler, um like a pool shark. But yeah,
at age twelve um eighteen forties Germany. You know that's
what people were doing. Um so you were pretty much
a man at age fourteen, like an adult man at
fourteen back then. So that was the age at which
(03:19):
you could choose to leave school and work in a
factory or go to school for your job training. Um.
Karl decided to go to teacher school and made through
about two years before he was expelled for stealing six candles.
I guess, well, there's no lights on, there's no electricity.
Some candles are probably like stealing six light bowls. Yeah, yeah,
which which I do all the time. I haven't been fired.
(03:40):
Toilet pay for everything is for grabs at work. It
does seem pretty petty, like six candles, um so. But
he appealed, uh and he was allowed to continue his
education in a different city. He graduated in eighteen sixty
and he was immediately accused by his roommate of stealing
a watch in jail for six he was shady. He
couldn't stop because we're seeing it had her name, yea.
(04:02):
So six weeks he spends in jail, and when he
gets out, his teacher's license is revoked. So we can
never teach. Yeah, yeah, maybe maybe not the worst decision
Germany ever made, although maybe, considering what comes next, maybe
the worst decision. Probably actually, now we think about it.
So Carl may next opted for the career that came
naturally to him, shameless theft. Here's a quote from somebody
(04:23):
writing about Carl. At the time, he had stolen everything
from billiard balls and gold watches to baby carriages and horses,
had cheated peasants and little storekeepers by presenting himself as
a famous physician or the agent of an insurance company.
When he pretended to be a doctor for the purpose
of swindling people, his chosen nickname was doctor Holy, Doctor Holy,
Doctor Holy. If that isn't the scammer name if I've
(04:46):
ever heard one. Look, I can appreciate a good scam.
You know people who are dedicated to tom foolery. You know,
I'm with it, And tom foolery is the word that
immediately comes to mind when you hear I'm doctor Holy.
Step right up, See what's un anything cards? He's doing
mamograms today? Oh yeah, that's a d um. One of
(05:09):
his doctor scams involved going showing up at a fancy
hotel in a new town, dressed as a doctor and
getting a room on credit because he's a doctor. Who
wouldn't trust a doctor. And then when he was in
the fancy room, he would order fur coats and gold
and silver things, also on credit, because yeah, on credit,
he's a doctor in a nice hotel. He's not going
to skip out on the bill. So he would skip
(05:29):
out on the bill in the middle of the night
and take all the fine stuff he'd gotten upon it.
That is crazy. Yeah, he got away with that for
months and months and months. His favorite con involved pretending
to be a police officer, going door to door and
saying he was investigating counterfeit currency. So he would ask
people for their their ten sailor notes, which is like
like like a hundred ish dollars now, abe more like
(05:50):
it's hard to do a lot of check. Give me
your big bills. I'm gonna make sure they're not counterfeit,
and then they would always be counterfeit and he would
confiscate them. So he would just go door to You're
taking people's money. Why would anyone fall for this even
if the money is counterfeit. I was to hold onto
I feel like in the eighteen like sixties, you could
get away with just about everything because there's no way
(06:12):
to verifying. Nobody's got the internet, nobody reads books like
they're like. Well, he said he was a cop, and
he's got a blue shirt. Imagine being a Nigerian prince
in the eighteen fifties, I mean clean up. Yeah, although
you would have to wait a long time for letters
to get two different places, that's true, that's tel And
it was a long con probably die of the typhoid
(06:33):
in the meantime. But yeah, his capers did eventually catch
up with him. He was arrested by the police, uh
and then escaped and for months he evaded law enforcement
by hiding in the woods. People searching for him at
one point, and he was just hiding in the woods.
He finally got caught because he almost starved to death,
so he was not good at living in the woods,
just hiding. Um. And he spent four more years in jail.
(06:56):
Even back then, German jails were nicer than American jails today.
I was allowed access to a vasked library and he
read constantly. He also started writing fiction. His favorite books
were adventurous stories about America by writers like James Finnimore
Cooper who wrote the Last of the Mohicans. He also
loved to read travel guides who has led out in
eighteen sixty nine and jailed again in eighteen seventy for
doing the exact same thing he's done his entire life.
(07:19):
So jail made him like better and made him smarter gradually,
not immediately, because he gets out after that and he
immediately gets caught again doing something dumb. Yeah, it's feels
like a writer. He's been getting high. He's waiting for
his stranger things strive with it. Yeah, which it comes
shop looking from target. Um, in eighteen seventy six. That
(07:40):
feels like a low blow. I'm sorry, you're great, You
are great, But that was plenty girl. In eighteen seventy six,
having spent most of the last sixteen years as a
con man or in jail, Karl May returns to his
hometown and tells everyone that he's spent all that time
adventuring around the world. Um, and this being the eighteen seventies,
no one has any way to check us. And he
(08:00):
read all these books. He's filled with all the knowledge. Oh,
he's such a great scammer. He's he's he's wheeling and
delon right now. He starts writing travel books and articles
for magazines, and eventually starts writing novels. In eighteen ninety three,
he published the first novel in what would become known
as the winn Aitao series. Uh. These books would become
the nineteenth century German equivalent of Harry Potter. I read
(08:24):
the first of these books. I almost don't know how
to start when it comes to conveying how weird these are. Um,
first off, credit where it's due. They're very racist, but
they're less racist than you'd expect from a German in
the eighteen hundreds. Like, so racism wasn't the main motif
that the book is definitely not the main motif is
more like like like the wallpaper. It's like seasoning for
(08:46):
the book, like every now and then, but it's and
it's like the noble, the noble Native Americans sort of
racism where you don't know anything about them, but like
you're putting them on a pedestal as opposed to the
you know, like old Western films where like they're all
monsters or whatever, like Tom Sawyer race Tom Sawyer racial
inward Gym racism. Yeah, yeah, so it's not as bad
(09:11):
a racism as you'd expect from a German in this
period of time. But it's it's really bad. Um, it's
it's it's really bad, but not distracting from the plot,
like you can still enjoy the plots nonsense. Um. So,
Karl may is not a great writer in my opinion,
but what do I know? Um? His His character in
the book is known as Carl for the first page, Um,
(09:33):
Carl is a young German kid who spent hundreds of
hours reading about America, and he travels to the Old
West to make his fortune. Three pages in, Carl gets
into an argument and knocks out a man with a
single punch. Everyone around him nicknames him Old shatter Hand,
and that is the name he's known by for the
rest of the books, Old shutter Hand, because that's how
(09:54):
Carl thought people gave names nicknames in the Old West.
Year old. He's all those Germans now, so they're probably
still Germans like old. That's what they call me Floyd
may Weather in Germany. See he's earned that though. True. Yeah,
(10:16):
this guy Karl has not Yeah no, because because he's
just a liar. Um. So yeah, Old shatter Hand is
like the Mary Sue of all Mary sues he can
beat up any guy with one punch. On his second
day in the wild West, he charges into a herd
of monstrous buffalo on his horse. And in this book,
because Karl May doesn't know anything about buffalo, buffalo are huge,
(10:36):
huge and like violent monsters, peaceful animals that you are
so easy to hunt, that we killed all of them
because they're not aggressive. Um so, he he kills two
of the buffalo bare hands, no with a gun. But
the next day he gets into a knife fight with
a grizzly bear and kills it with a knife without
getting hurt. H And also Karl May authority haatively insists
(11:00):
that bears cannot climb. Okay, that's definitely wrong. Yeah, that's
really wrong. That's like what they're best at. Oh god,
how many uneducated little kids are there just thinking bears
can suspect a lot of German kids died to bears
as a result of these books. Um so yeah. Over
the course of thirty some odd books, Old shatter Hand
(11:22):
oh sorry yeah. Um Right after killing that grizzly bear,
Old shatter Hand meets his Indian friend and by the
end of the book blood Brother win a too, who
was the Prince of the Apaches. Okay, that's actually a
legit sounding Indian name. I thought it was gonna be
something like. You know, the names are not He does
a better job on the names than you'd expect. Yeah,
the names are not offensive, not like angry Wind, like
(11:46):
some crazy americanized Indian name. Okay, he really did some
research on on the names. Uh nothing else about the
Apachees or their life or religion, but the names are
reasonably believable. Um So Yeah, Old shatter Hand and win
a tougo on all sorts of crazy adventures for thirty books.
Old shatter Hand becomes a chief of the Apaches because
(12:07):
they need him. He's got to teach him about how
to be good people. What's a book without a white guy.
What's a book without a white guy teaching not white
guys how to do stuff, you know as you do.
Um so, yeah, that's that's that's the kind of that's
the kind of book we're talking about here. Okay. It
sounds like it would have been made into a movie
like currently made into like thirty Um. Yeah, so that's
(12:28):
where we're getting to. Um. First off, when when a
tow dies in the last of these books, The last
thing he does is convert to Christianity. Oh yeah, because
you know I got to do that. I get with Jesus. Jesus. Yeah,
white Jesus. But if you're almost certainly Germans blue eye Jesus,
German blue white, blonde haired Jesus. I call on him
(12:49):
often tax stuff. I think's where you need white Jesus. Yeah,
he's white. Jesus is so good at Texas getting pulled over.
I'm like, please, white Jesus specifically, you come down. That's
w yes. I believe when it's out, did the right thing. Yeah.
Um So, these ridiculous books about the American West wound
up being the most popular book series in Germany for
(13:10):
young boys. Uh. To this day, Karl May is the
second most widely read author in all of Germany. He's
only beaten by Martin Luther, who wrote the German translation
of the Bible. Um. So, yeah, he's he's ridiculously popular. Uh.
And when he is at the height of his fame
and wealth and like the biggest author in Germany, Karl
May reveals to everyone in Germany that his stories are
(13:31):
all true. He was old shatter hand the whole time.
It's like if j. K. Rowling declared Harry Potter real
and then insisted she was Harry Potter and also she
had never been to England in her life. Yeah, Karl
could resistance scams like these books are too popular. Hold,
oh wait a minute, it's me. I'm Old Shahan. He's like,
(13:51):
I'm gonna get more mallege out of it. It's ridiculous
because you're you're already a millionaire best selling writer. He's like, look,
I just lived a scam. Okay, that's why he's stealing
poolball and he's like, I just need it. And he
killed off with a No. Everyone's dead and they're not
gonna No one's gonna go to America to fact check this.
(14:14):
So Carl May committed to the bit. He dressed like
the stereotypical idea of an American frontiersman, and his house
was decorated with Native American memorabilia and Old West guns.
Carl himself was rarely photographed with less than six handguns
on his person. You can find his pictures if you
just google Carl mayon. Look, I'm just gonna show you one.
So on the front of his body alone, you can
(14:34):
see three handguns and a knife. So where did he.
First of all, if you run, all these guns are
gonna fall out. This man literally has guns on top
of guns, resting on guns and ropes. What the hell
I think it's a bare tooth necklace. Yes, oh god, oh,
but you know he got the jacket right though it's
got fringe. It's a solid look. It's a solid look. Yeah. No, No,
(14:57):
he's not. He's not bad at excess arising. He just
I don't think those way. So there was no Internet
in those days. Obviously, Um, everybody believed him. Um. And
one of the people who believed him the most was
adorable little Tyke named Adolf Hitler as an adult, non
adorable dictator. Hitler was outspoken about the debt he owed
(15:18):
to Karl May. He talked about May's work regularly, and
we know this because, starting in ninety one, his table
talk was all recorded by a member of the Nazi Party.
Here's one quote. I've just been reading a very fine
article on Karl May. I found it delightful. It would
be nice if his work were republished. I owe him
my first notions of geography and the fact that he
opened my eyes on the world. Yeah, a scammer opened
(15:42):
the eyes to another scammer. Yeah. Yeah. Or here's another quote.
I used to read him by candlelight or by moonlight,
with the help of a huge magnifying glass. I was
carried away by it, and I went on to devour
at once the other books by the same author. The
immediate result was a falling off in my school reports.
Uh so, I mean that's Hitler saying basically I did
(16:02):
bad in school because I was reading this guy's book
way too late in at night. Yeah, consumed, which I
guess you're really bored back then, like growing up in
the late eighteen hundreds in Germany in the middle of nowhere. Yeah,
I mean, but you're not, you know, gathering weeds for
your soup, weeds and potatoes soup. Yeah, I think that
(16:22):
was That was like if you read about Hitler's childhood,
like it was just the opera or being sick and
almost dead in bed for him. So, I guess, like,
you know, terrible wild West books are. Yeah. Um, right
after this, we're going to get into more about how
Karl may is ridiculous wild West novels influenced the War
(16:43):
in Russia, the invasion of Poland, and the entire course
of World War Two. But before we get into that,
we have some commercials and we're gonna do that right now,
So buckle up. We're back and we're talking about Hitler's
favorite young adult fiction author, Carl Friedrich May, a man
(17:07):
who lied about everything, made millions of dollars and influenced
the young growing mind of Adolf Hitler um to a
to a shocking degree. So we're about to get into
how Hitler based aspects of his military strategies in World
War Two off of the Wild West books, written by
a con man who had never been there, who had
(17:29):
never even left Germany. Uh. In nineteen thirty three, right
after Hitler had been made Chancellor of Germany, Hitler spent
his first summer in the Berkhoff, which was his his
mountain supervillain Fortress lair uh. At one point while he
was up there, a guy named Egan came to visit him.
I'm fairly certain it's not the Ghostbuster, but I'm not
(17:51):
sure about that. Uh So. Egan later gave an interview
about meeting Hitler during that time, and he recalled being
in Hitler's office and seeing a bookcase and wondering, like
any of us, what Hitler reads in his free time
uh and quote. Surprisingly, the majority of the books were
the Wild West novels of Karl May as an adult.
As the chancellor of Germany UM and in fact, Hitler
(18:14):
apparently reread all sixties some odd of Karl May's books
between nineteen thirty three and nineteen thirty four. Uh. He
gave a collection of all of May's books to his
nephew as a present, and Hitler was given a very
nice collection of May's books by Herman Gerring as a
gift at one point. Yeah, so this Hitler's mind, Yeah,
it's like if Donald Trump grew up reading I don't know, Yeah,
(18:36):
Harry Potter, like you were saying earlier, and then just
never stopped reading it as adults. It was like, you know,
we gotta base our economic policy on Harry Potter has
a room full of gold. Why don't we try it?
At We literally do that though. So he is a
grown ass man. He is in charge of Germany, and
he is obsessively rereading the Wild West books of a
(18:58):
of a dead con man um. In nineteen thirty nine,
when Hitler's armies were preparing to invade Poland, a Nazi
plane crashed in neutral Belgium carrying two officers with copies
of the invasion plans. So not great, not a great
start to an invision. Yeah. Uh. They did manage to
destroy the plans in time, but the German military wasn't
a certain that nothing had gotten out, and so they
(19:20):
reconfigured their forces just in case. And it was kind
of a clusterfuck. Like they didn't do well at improvising.
Hitler plane cross it's just pages of it's just you know,
it's actually it's scary how close to the truth that is.
Hitler grew frustrated at how bad his journals were at
planning a surprise invasion. He fired several of them and
(19:44):
blamed their incompetence on the fact that while they had
all read their Klauswitz, none of them had read enough. Carl, may,
I'm gonna do some unpacking here. So Carl von Klauswitz
is is like right up there with Sun Sue in
the pantheon of the best military minds and history. He
fought against Napoleon and helped beat Napoleon. He invented the
term fog of war, and he wrote a book titled
(20:06):
on War that is required reading in every military academy
on Earth pretty much to this day. Karl May, on
the other hand, was a con man who pretended to
be a doctor to steal fur coats. Hell. I guess
he read enough Call May. No, you're reading too much
of that. Expert was Hitler and a call like a
(20:26):
cult of one. He I mean, it sounds like Karl
May was like his leader. It sounds like Hitler was
to Karl May what everyone else in Germany was to Hitler,
like everyone's worshiping Hitler. And Hitler was like, no, this guy.
Maybe this is how it works. If you're going to
start a cult, you've got to have something to follow yourself.
You can't get too deep in your own ship. No,
you got to get deep into somebody else's ship. Keep
(20:48):
yourself on those straight and narrow Yeah. So read Karl
May about it was attacked to Hitler would use for
the duration of his warlord career. When the war in
Russia turned against Germany and the Rmacht was bogged down
fighting Soviet and surgeons, one of Hitler's solutions was to
send three hundred thousand copies of Karl May's novels to
his officers. So I learned all that before I read
(21:08):
my first Karl May novel, and so while I was reading,
I kept an eye open for just any brilliant strategic
insights in case I ever find myself like Chancellor of Germany.
You know, you might as well be prepared or whatever. Um.
So I got one insight about midway through the book,
when Old shatter Hand and his co workers are out
on a prairie surveying for a railroad that's going to
be built. They meet the chief of the Apaches out there,
(21:30):
and he gets really angry at them for basically helping
the railroad steal his people's land, and so he gives
them an option. You either leave tonight or I'm gonna
come with my army and I'm gonna kill all of
you guys. So of course they're not going to leave
and not build a railroad. They're white guys. Stop that murder.
You know that's not going to happen. But you know
(21:52):
this is a problem because there's like a dozen of
them and like an army of Apaches. So you know
they've got to come up with some brilliant strategy to
defeat this Apache army. So I'm like, I'm I'm like
waiting here, like, what was it that so impressed Hitler?
And it turns out that the key in this case
to beating the Apaches was that one of Old shatter
Hands friends was friends with the chief of another Indian
tribe who happened to be nearby and had an even
(22:14):
bigger army. And so they just used that. Ye Indians
really loved Old shatter Hands. Just some of them like,
funk our land, We're gonna help this white man out.
So they call this, they call their they call in
the homies. Yeah. Yeah. And so they win because they've
just got this extra army that's bigger than the other army.
(22:36):
So Hitler was like, all right, I gotta gotta have
another art is what we need to do. We need
to have another army, guys. What Well, reading to this
brings to mind the real story of Army Detachment Steiner.
This was a real military unit, well sort of real
military unit that Hitler threw together near the end of
the war in April nineteen forty five, is the Russians
were advancing into Berlin. On paper, it was a mighty force.
(22:59):
In reality, it was made up of units that had
been decimated in many cases had no weapons and often
did not exist at all. Hitler was convinced that this
fake army was going to throw back the Russians. When
its commander refused to attack because it would have killed
had no weapons and where mostly teenagers, Hitler went into
a rage and killed himself eight days later. So so
(23:23):
Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect and and munitions master and
whatnot after the war, wrote that Hitler basically treated Karl
May like the literary equivalent of comfort food after a
bad day of losing the Second World War. Quote Hitler
was wont to say that he had always been deeply
impressed by the tactical finesse and circumspection that Karl May
conferred upon his character Win a Tao, And he would
(23:45):
add during his reading hours at night, when faced by
seemingly hopeless situations, he would still reach for those stories.
They gave him courage, like works of philosophy for others,
or the Bible for elderly people. That really is like,
if you're president and you're like, give me my Harry
Potter book. Oh Harry, these are my Bible? What should
(24:06):
I do? Now? Tell me how to open the Chamber
of Secrets in my heart, how do I be Baltimore
Only it's a whole real ass war that it's the Russians.
It's the Russians, Baltimore, the Russians. I could see similarities
this man. Wow, yeah, I get it. Though Hitler was
a scammer. His whole life was scams. He was literally
trying to kill a grace of people that he belonged to. Well,
(24:29):
that was more of a myth. So there's a myth
that like Hitler, Hitler was actually a Jewish guy. Really
it's my it's unconfised. So there's it's it's one of
those things like there's it's impossible to get completely definitive evidence,
but when you go back to the genealogy that exists,
it doesn't seem like it adds up, like there's no
part of the me. It would have been great irony.
(24:51):
It is true that his family's original last name was
Schickel Gruber, and he only is named Hitler because his
shatter hands. He was he was gonna be eight off
shatter hands. And they were like, nah, bro, that doesn't
it's not ringing, it doesn't ring. Yeah, No, it's it's
it's it's he's he does have a ridiculous backstory, which
I'm sure we'll get to one of these days. Um,
(25:13):
but that part isn't part of it. He was. He
was a scammer and in almost every other way a
man could be a scammer though a fake army. Yeah,
he's he's scammed himself on that one. That was That
was a Hitler double scam there. Um So, yeah, Hitler
was a complicated dude. And I don't want to be
claiming here that, like, you know, everything that he did
(25:34):
was based on Karl May. But it's hard to look at, say,
the invasion to invade Russia and not see a couple
of Karl May's intellectual fingerprints. Um. So this will start
with the concept of Leban's realm, which is a German
word that means living space. Uh and it's it's one
of the Hitler vocab words that a lot of people
probably remember from high school and his The idea is
(25:57):
basically that the German people needed more space. You know,
there were this great up and coming nation. We need
more space for farmland so we can grow, and the
only place to get it is taking it, Yeah, taking
it from Poland, Ukraine, Russia, France. Everybody um and Hitler
when he would talk about this before the invasions, very
much couched it in terms of the American frontier. Uh.
(26:17):
He believed in social Darwinism, some cultures were stronger than others,
and strong cultures deserve to take the land of weak cultures. Uh.
This idea is in full display in Karl May's work.
The Native Americans are portrayed as a doomed but noble people. Uh.
It's taken for granted that their struggle is destined to
failure and that it's perfectly normal for white people to
move right on in and take their land. I love
(26:38):
what you call something doomed, because you're the one who's
damning it. Like, look, we all kill them, so they're
gonna be killed. So it's not bad that we're gonna
kill him because we kill him them. Like what kind
of logic is that it's clearly a doomed struggle. Look
at how good we are and murdering them. Yeah, I mean,
we came to kill them, so it's not our fault.
When they did know that some things are just inevitable,
(26:59):
like all this murder we're doing. But that's how you
have to think as a scammer. That's how you get
away with live with people who call yourself dr holy. Like, Look,
if I don't show up and take their money, somebody
else will, so it should be me. Someone's gonna wind
up with that money, either them or someone else or me,
so it might as well be. Um. Here's a quote
(27:20):
from one of the characters in the novel Winitao, who
is a white guy who becomes a member of the
Apache tribe and lives with them for years and years
and years. This is so. This is supposedly a guy
who's sympathetic to their cause. The Red race has been
cruelly outraged and robbed. But as a white man, I
know the Indian must disappear. And here's a Hitler quote
from October one, a few months into Operation Barbarossa, the
(27:42):
invasion of Russia. I don't see why a German who
eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the
idea that the soil that produces this bread has been
won by the sword. When we eat wheat from Canada,
we don't think about the despoiled Indians. Wow. Yeah, The
way to alleviate your guilt like they had all the
tech is like look, okay, yeah, we murdered him, but
(28:03):
if we didn't murder him, we would have murdered him,
so they would have been dead. Canada did it too,
and also Canada. Remember are we any worse than Canada? Yes,
but not by enough. Uh here's another quote. The struggle
we are waging against the Soviet partisans resembles very much
the struggle in North America against the Red Indians. Victory
(28:24):
will go to the strong, and strength is on our side.
Uh So, Karl May isn't the only Old West influence
that that Hitler. Hitler draws from, Like you know, reading
those novels as a kid sparked sort of a fascination
in him with just sort of the whole American frontier,
and he studied everything that we did during that period
of time. And in nineteen thirty nine, Hitler forced ninety
(28:47):
thousand Polish Jews onto a reservation ghetto in direct imitation
of a strategy Kit Carson pursued with a Navajos. So
a lot of Hitler's interest in the Old West was
based on real history, but that obsession with real history
was barked by Hitler's own admission by Carl May's Old
West novels history. Yeah, did he ever realize that it
was fake? The Hitler think that these stories were true,
(29:08):
because remember Carl came out was like this is me. Yeah.
I think Hitler went to his grave believing Karl May
had never told a lie because he because the actual
Karl May was a pacifist, you know, I mean Karl
didn't kill anybody. He just stole from He was just
stealing candles left and right. He kept the piece, but
(29:30):
he was also steal your billion balls, your baby carrits. Yeah,
if only Hitler had jumped out of the stealing billiard balls,
Carl Mays legacy, like, we'd all be fine with Hitler.
Then it was just a silver tongue devil stealing pool
balls so that the checking their money. I need to
check your dollars. Oh Hitler got away again? Yeah he would.
(29:53):
He would literally be a chaplain figure then absolutely. Yeah. Um.
As the war went on, Hitler and his regime propaganda
grew increasingly obsessed with what they called wonderwaffa or miracle weapons.
The V two rocket was one example of these, which
is those those big rockets. They would just shoot over
to the England and you know some of them would
(30:13):
hit people. Most of them would hit nothing. But it
scared the ship out of people because it's like, yeah,
missiles hadn't existed. It's basically like an angel falling on
your house. Um. So yeah, you can make a case
that Hitler's love of super weapons and his faith in
the ability of these wonder weapons to uh to win
the war started with Karl may See. Old shatter Hand
(30:35):
in Wintaw were often heavily outnumbered on the planes by
bandits or hostile Indian tribes or groups of of evil
criminals or whatever, but they always came out on top.
One reason for this is that they had weapons that were,
by eighteen seventy standards, wacko space guns like what like
a like a like a sling shot. No, Old shatter
Hand had a repeating rifle that he claimed and again
(30:58):
he said this was a real gun that he really used.
He said it could fire a hundred rounds a minute
and was effective at more than fifteen hundred yards away. Now,
for comparison, in eighteen sixty five, like five years before
these books are set, a good soldier like a vet
is putting out three or four bullets a minute from
two hundred yards away. So Carl claims he's got a Yeah,
(31:21):
Carl claims he's got an A R fifteen out there
on the plans that he's just and he can carry
seventeen hundred and twenty eight bullets because they're very tiny
but very deadly. It's a really specific number. I don't
know why that's like an odd one to pick, because
you gotta you know, usually you get heavy on the specific. Yeah.
I picture him like putting it thousands of No, no, no, Carl,
(31:42):
you gotta be specific here. No one's going to believe
that sounds belie. Hundred twenty eight. There we go. Um.
And when Hitler was a kid, in the time before
World War One, there were regular rumors in Germany, stoked
by Carl May himself, that he was going to give
his special secret Eifel to the Kaiser so it could
be used by the German army. Um. So May as
(32:04):
a kid was saying like, it's okay, I know we're
surrounded as Germany and we've got all these enemies, but
I got this super space gun and I'm gonna give
it to the King and it's gonna be all right.
We're gonna win this war with my space. He could
not quit lying. He had money, he had fame, and
he was like, what else can I get a political
influence with a fake ass space. Yeah, he's like a
guy who wins the lottery and then it's like, I'm
(32:25):
gonna spend all this lot of money on more lottery tickets.
That's the smart fucking play Listen, this is really like
empowering my life, you know what I mean? The next
time I have opportunity to a lot of somebody or
defraud people like I would take it because if I don't,
somebody else will. Somebody else will, and who knows the
frauds that you commit might might wind up inspiring the
next Hitler, which what everybody wants everyone. Uh. Now, we
(32:50):
we've got some some more of those commercials uh capitalism
ditties to sing. Um, So we're gonna get into that next.
After that, we're going to get back into how Karl
May's ridiculous novels influenced Hitler's ideas of what America was
going to do during the World War Two, and also
(33:10):
how Karl May's ridiculous con story actually ended. Um. So
all of that after some ads and we're back. So
last we were talking about Karl May, the con man
who wrote a bunch of Wild West novels based on
nothing that inspired Hitler and his plans to invade Poland
(33:32):
and Russia. And now we're going to talk about how
Karl May shaped Hitler's ideas about America. So obviously, Karl
May's novels, by Hitler's own admission, were the first time
he really read anything about America. They opened his eyes
to geography. And in May's novels, America is a land
dominated by German immigrants. Almost every white person in the
(33:53):
story with a speaking role in these novels is a
German transplant. In the first book, Old shatter Hand, a
German heads west and meets his mentor or who also
happens to be a German, and they stumble upon an
old man who's been living with apaches for years and
also happens to be German. This pattern continues for dozens
of books, Like almost every new person that they meet
who doesn't suck is a German who just moved to America.
(34:15):
So it's like, oh gosh, was he? It was Hitler's
like overall goal, like he's just gonna keep spreading until
he gets bread into America. Well, he thought he thought
America was doomed by its diversity, but he also thought
America had a chance to survive because there was a
huge German population in America. So if if he could
get those Germans in charge of America and just you know,
push everyone else into the sea, then America had a
(34:36):
real bright future ahead of it, which is why the
Nazi government expended a lot of money establishing the German
American Bund, which was a Nazi organization in America in
the nineteen thirties that attracted tens of thousands of members.
They drew twenty thousand people at one point to Madison
Square Garden up in the Pacific Palisades, there is a
(34:56):
house that's currently a graffiti sanctuary that was bought as
a resort for the Nazi elite um in the Palisades.
The Nazi elite. Yeah, yeah, there's Hitler's house. You can
go hike in it if you live in l A.
And it's actually it's a lovely hike. I bet it's beautiful.
It is in the whole building is like a graffiti sanctuary. Now,
so there's some really cool graffiti artwork. Wait, like people
(35:18):
are doing like anti Nazi graffiti or it's like beautiful
Trafiti Like it's no, it's not Nazi graffiti at least
I haven't seen any swastikas. But it's just it's just
nice graffiti. Yeah, because lately the Nazis don't had that
swag that they used to. They were polos and new balances.
At least back then they had you know, que altfits,
nice villas. Yeah, I'll say this for the Nazis, they
(35:39):
knew how to make a leather jacket, quality stitch, quality stitching.
I mean Hugo Boss, right, honestly, if I could just
remove the SWASTI well, I mean you can go buy
Hugo Boss today. Oh that's very true. Oh man. Yeah,
the Hugo Boss made all the s S uniforms. Yeah,
that's how that got started. And we still buy Hugo
Boss have a great I mean we still buy Mercedes.
(36:02):
Were German engineer, Yeah, yeah, they made tanks and now
they make pretty good cars. You know what, I'm gonna
put them in the bowels of my memory because I
like Mercedes. Yeah. Well, I mean they weren't bad tanks,
so yeah, the fewer never wanted a war with the
United States and believed that the U s could be
(36:23):
brought around to supporting Nazi ideals. Uh And part of
this belief started with the fact that he got his
conception of America through Karl may novels as a nation
that was dominated by sober, goodhearted German punch masters. Um.
And it may seem silly to think that these ridiculous
trash books would have formed the basis of the furious
feelings in America, but other Europeans at the time also
(36:46):
took May seriously as an expert on American culture. I
found this quote from a French newspaper reviewer condemning American
values because of what Carl fucking May wrote about them.
The man who had never been, who had never left Germany,
the traveler Karl May assures us that no single point
in his story is invention or exaggeration. American morals, no
(37:10):
matter what certain admirers of that young civilization may say,
are generally inferior to ours. They sometimes lower themselves to
abject savagery, especially when it comes to the ugly practices
of personal revenge. The writer describes the American version of
Christianity as relayed by Karl May as mutilated. He concludes
that the thirst for both gold and revenge are two
of the most terrible passions of the Yankee. So you
(37:34):
can see why Hitler might have thought America would be
on board with Nazism. Um yeah, and also, I mean,
French guy's conception isn't a d percent off, right? I mean,
as some solid guesses, this is starting to make me
think that when the Bible was first written, it was
supposed to be like some fun fiction came out like
it's all true. In fact, it's me. Oh, this is
(37:56):
taken off. No, no, this is all real me jeez usa.
Um so yeah, I I think the first guy to
draw a direct connection between Karl May and Hitler was Klausmann,
who was the son of Thomas Man, a famous German author.
Klaussmann wrote in an article in nineteen forty called Karl
May Hitler's Literary Mentor, where he made basically all the
(38:18):
allegations I've just made, minus the Russia stuff because Hitler
had invaded Russiette. Um. But but klauss wrote, the Third
Reich is Karl May's ultimate triumph, the ghastly realization of
his dreams. It is, according to ethical and aesthetic standards
indistinguishable from his that the Austrian house painter Hitler, nourished
in his youth by old shatter hand, is now attempting
(38:38):
to rebuild the world. So Man actually blamed Karl May
for not just Hitler, but the fact that all of
Germany been to Hitler's madness. Quote. They're hopelessly estranged from
both reality and art, sacrificing all civilization and common sense
on the altar of a brutish heroism, but stubbornly loyal,
whether consciously or not, to the foul substitute for poetry
and culture represented by Karl May. It's like a it's
(39:01):
like a mental escape too. So you're broke as fun,
and then somebody comes along and tells you that you
can take over the world. And then there's all these
books that are basically saying German people everywhere just like Yeah.
It fills this whole nation's mind with like images of
this this huge amount of territory if you can just
take it from the savage people who own it. And
all it takes is a strong right hook and a
magic rifle. Yeah, and literally what Trump has done to
(39:23):
Middle America. Yo, I wonder what book Trump is reading.
What's his Carl May? I mean Dr Seuss? Does he
read Cat and Had? There's a lot of pictures in that. Yeah,
it's not to read. I'm gonna get those green eggs
in that. Damn ham All. We know that's really what's happening. Yeah,
oh yeah, okay, yeah. So it is worth noting, in
(39:45):
fairness to Carl May, that a lot of non Hitler
Germans also professed to deepen abiding love for Carl May. Einstein.
Einstein was a huge Carl May fan, although he did
not credit May with his breakthroughs on relativity. Um, he
needs to give Carl some credit. Yeah. I used to
wear the same sharts every day, right, didn't that come
(40:07):
from Carl? Six guns? Six guns every day? Einstein was
always strapped. That's a classic Einstein fact. Pack and heat.
Everybody was to steal those theories from him. Okay, yeah.
I also want to point out May espoused a number
of of anti Hitler views in his novel Not he
(40:28):
wasn't like against Hitler because Hitler was like a child
at the time, but like he There's like a point
in one of the books where a guy makes fun
of a of a hunchback dude, and Karl May is like,
it's shitty to make fun of people who have disabilities,
which is not a Hitler. Hitler murdered people with with Yeah. Yeah,
so um May wasn't in lockstep with the Nazis. And
it may seem a little weird that Hitler would idolize
(40:49):
someone who wrote things that contradicted his own beliefs. This
makes a little more sense when you understand what I'm
calling the Adolf Hitler theory of how to read us
laid out in mind comp hit They're stated reading is
no end in itself, but a means to an end.
And to explain that, he said, a man who possesses
possesses the art of correct reading, will, in studying any book, magazine,
(41:10):
or pamphlet instinctively and immediately perceive everything which, in his opinion,
is worth permanently remembering. So basically, cherry pick, pick and
choose what you want, choose your own adventure. Yeah yeah,
he's saying the right way to read is to pull
everything that reinforces your existing opinions out of a book
and ignore the rest um, which is how a lot
(41:31):
of people read. Yeah, it's kind of a shockingly accurate
prediction of how content works on the internet. Um, so
Hitler had our number with that, And and religion like everything,
because you know, Bible thumbers love to pull up those
quotes that are like anti gay, but then they love
to forget about parts that are just like you know,
you could still sell your daughter and like all this
(41:51):
that's just like oh, yeah, the time Jesus beat up
all those bankers, Like no, no, no, he loves capitalism.
He's a big fan. No, he loves it. In for
said flat he would have loved that. Oh the only
time he got violent was when he beat up a
bunch of money lenders. No, no, it doesn't confirm our bias.
Damn Hitler said some real truth though, that was he
(42:14):
was he was on the money with that one. Yeah.
I mean that's not how you should read, but it's
how people do read. Yeah. And I also wonder if
he was reading it from the perspective of like conquering
people and manipulating them. If he was also reading that,
because like that's what a lot of these books like.
They managed to convince other Indians to beat up other
Indians Like yeah, and the Indians are like surprisingly okay,
(42:36):
with a lot of what's happening? Yeah no, we got
you white guys. Yeah. Um. So the last question of
this podcast is what did happen to Karl May in
the end? Uh? And that's a story worth telling to.
As I said, he got rich and wealthy and started
(42:58):
to claim that he himself his old shatter Hand. He
bought a big, fancy mansion, which he nicknamed Villa shatter Hand.
It's really it was so bad, and he's like, I'm
gonna put it every the coolest thing anybody ever thought of.
Villa sounds classic. I'm gonna put shatter Hand on the end.
He filled it with exotic replicas that he claimed were
(43:20):
from his travels, but in reality they came from a
furniture dealer in Dresden. He also had replicas of his
character's famous guns built in Dresden, and I gotta show
you a picture of his guns. Um, what about this?
This one is the A R fifteen supposedly, but divert
your eyes there to the bedazzled hunting rifle. That is
(43:41):
a bedazzled double barreled bear hunting room. Fucking Ryan stoned
that motherfucker up, yo, I mean it's cute though, yeah, yeah, tastes.
He was like he was giving us a little he
was like a rapper. He really gives me the feeling
of like, you know, I'm gonna wear the shiniest ship
on me. That's like a little Wayne so like bedazzling
his Yeah, yeah, it is in that. I gotta give
(44:03):
respect to that, because if I ever get rich, I'm
definitely bedazzling all my Oh you know, how do people
know you're inch no and you you wear that coat
and you yeah, you It's like a knight did agrees out.
He's the sweating. He's sweat pouring out his ankles. We're
criticizing Karl May for the Nazi stuff, but not for
the fashion stuff. If anyone knows how to purport a
(44:24):
lifestyle that they are definitely not living. It is like
if they had cribs back then, like you know, Villa
shatterhand would have been lit. This is the skin of
a bear I totally killed. Yeah literally, Macy's on the tag.
Yeah that was the bear's name. He's like, I got
these from some Indian's um crazy foot and and a birdman.
(44:49):
Birdman his name was yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's in
my book. He's like, all this ship looks like it
came from dressden. Oh no, no, no, so wait does
a guy in dressing all his secrets? You know that
he must have, right, like there has Maybe he was
just getting so many gun orders that he was like,
if I tell this money train in. Oh listen, I
keep all the secrets. Yeah, yeah, you can trust a
(45:11):
gun smith, but dazzles rifles. I have a store of
exact because of everything in Karl Bay's house. Just like, no, no, no,
he got it from America. No, those are the guns
he used to fight a bunch of Frontier wars. Yeah.
Um so. By age fifty six, Karl May was at
the height of his fame and influence. He claimed to
speak more than forty languages and to understand more than
twelve hundred. So he's like that lady who was doing
(45:35):
fake sign language, like doing translations. Yeah, fifty six though
he lived hell along fifty six is hell along he
was back in the day. I mean all the six
is that like he did live long on the curve
that his brothers and sisters set. Um, so he he
didn't die at that point though, this is the height
(45:56):
of his fame. Um. He was so popular that during
one speech in Munich, firefighters had to be dispatched to
disperse the crowd of his fans. That's like some beatleshit um.
He claimed that he had only two great missions left
in life. A visit back to see the Apaches, trip
to see the Shake of the Haddaden Arabs, which he
also read. A bunch of books set in the Middle
(46:18):
East that he also claimed was based about him, where
he does the same stuff, but in the Middle East.
So his last two goals in life are two fake things. Yeah,
that's two goals in life. More lies. I just haven't
told quite enough lies. Like damn, like you couldn't give
us one real thing? He's like, no, like lines are
(46:38):
his achievements. Obviously, He's like, last week, I'm gonna fraud
out some people in the hundreds of millions of books
I've sold er nice, But it's my lies that keep
me warm at night. Maybe gotta be passionate about something, okay.
So in eight he came under a storm of criticism.
A collection of his very early works was republished against
his will, and these writings were semi pornographic. I have
(47:00):
not been able to find them, which is a tragedy. Damn,
he has some erotica. Yeah, he was apparently writing erotica
or semi erotica early in his career. He sued for
defamation of character. Um, but this began a surge of
interest in Karl May's actual documented past. Uh So, May
(47:20):
panicked tried to cover his tracks. He had the original
plates of those photographs that of him in costume thrown
into the Danube because like the pictures had been edited
and he didn't want people to see that they'd clearly
been taken in a photo studio. So he started a
little bow out. Yeah yeah, his doctor It was found
out as fake. Uh oh. He'd also spent years pretending
to be a doctor. Why he was He pretended to
(47:42):
be a doctor again after he was a famous author.
He also lied about being a doctor. You already his author? Well,
but doctor shatter Hand is a pretty sick name. Hand Lord, Jesus,
I love this guy. During the course of the lawsuit
against the people who published his porn, his criminal record
(48:05):
was uncovered, and worst of all, it was discovered that
he'd never actually been to America. D Carl May published
an autobiography in nineteen ten to try and rehabilitate his
image and defend himself. Among other things, he claimed that
his famous candle theft, Remember the six candles. He claimed
that that was so he could give his sister wax
scraps as a Christmas present. Okay, well, I know it
(48:31):
was eating rock SUPs, so I know wax scraps might
actually be nice. Here's your wax scraps. Also, that's still
not a good excuse. He stall six candles so you
could give your sister a terrible gift, not even the
whole king candle. She's done. She doesn't want candle, she
wants scraps. Okay, okay, bam, that was not she dying.
(48:54):
You should at least say she was dying. Just make
a better lie. Carl May, he's admire He's such a
constant liar um. But all the controversy did prompt the
elderly Karl May and his wife to visit the United States.
They made it as far west as Buffalo, New York.
So Karl May died in nineteen twelve, but his ridiculous
(49:15):
books lived on. In the nineteen sixties, they were made
into a series of euro Westerns that are credited with
saving West Germany's film industry. There's still a Karl May
festival in Germany every year that draws tens of thousands
of fans. Thanks to his books and the fascination for
Native American culture they ignited, Germany has a thriving Native
American cause play and festival industry to this day. So I,
(49:36):
in one of my previous jobs, interviewed a guy who
was a Native American and a professor, and his whole
job is like busting people who falsely claimed to be
Native Americans to like sell products and stuff. And one
of the things he pointed out is that some of
the world's best living speakers of languages like the Sioux
language are Germans who learned it so that they can
(49:56):
cause play better in these gigantic festivals. Because no, it's
a you can find these insane pictures online of these
German Native American festivals where and it's all white guys
and and ladies dressing up in costume and like not
bad costume. Like a lot of these people, like some
of them like authentically like hand chip their own stone
(50:17):
axes and stuff, like they're really into it. Are they're
not using Karl No, because everything Carl May wrote was alive.
Now they've gotten better since then. Um, we'll put some
of the pictures up on on the site and in
social media. There's some great ones of the movies where
they cast just the most ridiculous looking man to be
(50:38):
old shatter hands. It's just like throwing Yeah, you owe
it to yourself to look at these. It's it's it
looks a little bit like a Star Trek episode set
in the Old West, like that level of production value. Um,
so yeah, thank you Karl May. Yeah, I'm really proud
of him. This is why we will say, like, if
(51:00):
passionate about something like and obviously Karl May was passionate
about lying to people and fraud, like it didn't even
matter what he was lying about, like and he but
he dedicate his whole life to just being a liar.
And I can't I can't knock somebody lying was his passion.
You have to respect that much consistency. Like if someone
just tells a few petty lies to get out of problems,
(51:22):
that's not respectable. But if you lie your entire life,
even after you no longer need to, for no reason
other than the art of telling you whatever he was
going to do it was going to be not just
a lie, but like the boldest lie, like very fantastical.
It's not even gonna sound real because like most liars
(51:43):
who might might have been like, oh, I traveled to
America as a young man, and I met this guy
and he told me his stories and that's what these
books are based on. But like Karla is like, no,
I'm him, I'm the punch master who can't be beaten.
But it wasn't. He never wanted to be him until
he blew up and then he was like, wait a minute,
it was me the whole time. I gotta say, like
(52:06):
people talk about how J. K Rowling has kind of
gone a little bit a little bit wacky and in
her fame and like all the new stuff she releases
about her characters and whatnot in her social media presence,
but like she's got nothing on Carl May's game, No,
because she never is like I am Harry, I am
Harry Potter and this ship's all real. I used to
run through the platform. Y'all never read the platform before.
(52:28):
Just give it a shot. God, and everyone's dead. Oh man,
Carl May you know big ups. I wish that I
had known him back in the day. Like also, I
kind of wish that I had lived in that time,
like when like think about now how hard you have
to work to scam people. Like back then you could
really just say anything. Yeah, no one's googling you. You
(52:48):
just go to the town over and it's like a
new planet. Like I'm a doctor. They're probably not even
that far apart. It's like it's like probably five miles away.
You think that guy is really a doctor, I don't
know a man he was born ten miles away. There's
no way we can check up there, there's no backtracking.
We just go like, he got the outfit all he
(53:10):
got that coat. Who has a white coat and isn't
a doctor? He's got a bag with a medicine sign
on it. Yeah, that's all you needed was an imagination. Man,
Millennials would have done great in that time period. We
have such great imagination. But maybe it'll come back. Maybe
this whole internet thing will collapse and it'll be like
(53:31):
a whole world of Carl Mays. That's my dream, that's
everyone's dream. Now. Yeah, alright, well that's our podcast for today. Lacy,
you got anything you wanna you wanna plug drop in here? Oh, sure.
You can follow me on Instagram if I ever get
my phone back at a Diva Lacey d v l
A c. My Instagram stars are basically Karl May. It's
(53:53):
just me creating fantastical frauds. Actually fried my way into
All Star Weekends this year without a ticket. Oh nice.
I was reading some Karl mad books. I was like
how I was like, this is my destiny. Yeah. So,
thank you so much, Carl. You've changed my life forever.
All right, thank you Lazy. I'm Robert Evans. Please remember
(54:13):
to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can
also find us on social media Twitter, Instagram, Facebook at
Bastard's Pod, and you can find us on the worldwide
Web at behind the Bastards dot com. That's all for
this week, uh sia
Hey, everybody, I am Robert Evans, and this is Behind
the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you
don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
With me today is Lacy Mosley, comedian, writer, podcaster. Hello
and uh Lacy. Did you have a favorite book or
series of books when you were a young adult, like
a teenager? Oh, like a teenager, I was about Jones.
(00:25):
Um oh, that's embarrassing. I don't want to say the
horrible set of books that I read. No, it's okay.
I used to read those horrible Twilight books. Okay, in
high school. That's fine. That little kitty Kitty poor, I know,
that's bad. I'm not gonna say, like like little raunchy
books for horny teenager. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Twilight. Did you
(00:47):
have any impact on you growing up, like your attitudes
about the world. Did you like come into adulthood like
expecting certain things about the world Twilight? Yeah? Mostly, I
just didn't expect men to be trash, you know. I
thought I was going find me a nice little porcelain
du to, you know, love on me and wait for
me to be a virgin forever. I don't know. Yeah,
but then I realized the world is like tender and Instagram. Yeah,
(01:10):
that's like the that's like the secret terror behind children's
literature is that it it has such an impact on
little kids minds because this stuff that you don't have
any sense of credibility when you're growing up, you don't
know to like like I don't. Yeah, things are face value,
like you take things at face value? Yeah, ab solutely.
The stuff that we read is kids has a big
impact on us, and we grow up believing certain things
(01:31):
as a result of it, and then you know, we
we encounter reality absolutely. Um, but yeah, it leaves an impact.
Young adult literature changes young adults in meaningful ways. Have
you ever wondered what a guy like Hitler was reading
when he was twelve? Oh? No, well I haven't. That's
what we're going to talk about today. Carl Friedrich May
was born in Ernstall, Saxony in eighteen forty two. Now,
(01:52):
at that point, Saxony was a kingdom in the southern
part of the German Confederation. This was far enough in
the past that Germans hadn't really locked down the incept
of Germany yet it's like pre German Germany. Uh. Carl
was the fifth of fourteen kids. Nine of his brothers
and sisters died before the age of eighteen kids, and
his mom just kept trying, Well, you gotta get you
(02:13):
gotta get a solid like five or six out right, Yeah,
so they can do work for you, right, you gotta
really double and triple down. You know, there's a lot
of births. Yeah. She must have been so relieved when
like the fifth kid hit eighteen and she was like,
all right, I'm duck, she's pregnant for like sixteen years.
Yeah that's that's like, yeah, that's the like twenty years
of solid pregnancy. Yeah, that's like the run of Seinfeld
(02:37):
and a half but half but just baby. Yeah, what
a nightmare. Um. So yeah, when when Carl was twelve
he started making money, it's something called a skittle alley.
Skittle alley. I looked it up and that's in sexual
No you would expect, right, like a skittle alley. You
don't want to go down there. Forget a jake at
(02:58):
skittle alley, like, uh, it sounds terrible. It's a term
for a bowling alley. And I think he was basically
a bowling hustler, um like a pool shark. But yeah,
at age twelve um eighteen forties Germany. You know that's
what people were doing. Um so you were pretty much
a man at age fourteen, like an adult man at
fourteen back then. So that was the age at which
(03:19):
you could choose to leave school and work in a
factory or go to school for your job training. Um.
Karl decided to go to teacher school and made through
about two years before he was expelled for stealing six candles.
I guess, well, there's no lights on, there's no electricity.
Some candles are probably like stealing six light bowls. Yeah, yeah,
which which I do all the time. I haven't been fired.
(03:40):
Toilet pay for everything is for grabs at work. It
does seem pretty petty, like six candles, um so. But
he appealed, uh and he was allowed to continue his
education in a different city. He graduated in eighteen sixty
and he was immediately accused by his roommate of stealing
a watch in jail for six he was shady. He
couldn't stop because we're seeing it had her name, yea.
(04:02):
So six weeks he spends in jail, and when he
gets out, his teacher's license is revoked. So we can
never teach. Yeah, yeah, maybe maybe not the worst decision
Germany ever made, although maybe, considering what comes next, maybe
the worst decision. Probably actually, now we think about it.
So Carl may next opted for the career that came
naturally to him, shameless theft. Here's a quote from somebody
(04:23):
writing about Carl. At the time, he had stolen everything
from billiard balls and gold watches to baby carriages and horses,
had cheated peasants and little storekeepers by presenting himself as
a famous physician or the agent of an insurance company.
When he pretended to be a doctor for the purpose
of swindling people, his chosen nickname was doctor Holy, Doctor Holy,
Doctor Holy. If that isn't the scammer name if I've
(04:46):
ever heard one. Look, I can appreciate a good scam.
You know people who are dedicated to tom foolery. You know,
I'm with it, And tom foolery is the word that
immediately comes to mind when you hear I'm doctor Holy.
Step right up, See what's un anything cards? He's doing
mamograms today? Oh yeah, that's a d um. One of
(05:09):
his doctor scams involved going showing up at a fancy
hotel in a new town, dressed as a doctor and
getting a room on credit because he's a doctor. Who
wouldn't trust a doctor. And then when he was in
the fancy room, he would order fur coats and gold
and silver things, also on credit, because yeah, on credit,
he's a doctor in a nice hotel. He's not going
to skip out on the bill. So he would skip
(05:29):
out on the bill in the middle of the night
and take all the fine stuff he'd gotten upon it.
That is crazy. Yeah, he got away with that for
months and months and months. His favorite con involved pretending
to be a police officer, going door to door and
saying he was investigating counterfeit currency. So he would ask
people for their their ten sailor notes, which is like
like like a hundred ish dollars now, abe more like
(05:50):
it's hard to do a lot of check. Give me
your big bills. I'm gonna make sure they're not counterfeit,
and then they would always be counterfeit and he would
confiscate them. So he would just go door to You're
taking people's money. Why would anyone fall for this even
if the money is counterfeit. I was to hold onto
I feel like in the eighteen like sixties, you could
get away with just about everything because there's no way
(06:12):
to verifying. Nobody's got the internet, nobody reads books like
they're like. Well, he said he was a cop, and
he's got a blue shirt. Imagine being a Nigerian prince
in the eighteen fifties, I mean clean up. Yeah, although
you would have to wait a long time for letters
to get two different places, that's true, that's tel And
it was a long con probably die of the typhoid
(06:33):
in the meantime. But yeah, his capers did eventually catch
up with him. He was arrested by the police, uh
and then escaped and for months he evaded law enforcement
by hiding in the woods. People searching for him at
one point, and he was just hiding in the woods.
He finally got caught because he almost starved to death,
so he was not good at living in the woods,
just hiding. Um. And he spent four more years in jail.
(06:56):
Even back then, German jails were nicer than American jails today.
I was allowed access to a vasked library and he
read constantly. He also started writing fiction. His favorite books
were adventurous stories about America by writers like James Finnimore
Cooper who wrote the Last of the Mohicans. He also
loved to read travel guides who has led out in
eighteen sixty nine and jailed again in eighteen seventy for
doing the exact same thing he's done his entire life.
(07:19):
So jail made him like better and made him smarter gradually,
not immediately, because he gets out after that and he
immediately gets caught again doing something dumb. Yeah, it's feels
like a writer. He's been getting high. He's waiting for
his stranger things strive with it. Yeah, which it comes
shop looking from target. Um, in eighteen seventy six. That
(07:40):
feels like a low blow. I'm sorry, you're great, You
are great, But that was plenty girl. In eighteen seventy six,
having spent most of the last sixteen years as a
con man or in jail, Karl May returns to his
hometown and tells everyone that he's spent all that time
adventuring around the world. Um, and this being the eighteen seventies,
no one has any way to check us. And he
(08:00):
read all these books. He's filled with all the knowledge. Oh,
he's such a great scammer. He's he's he's wheeling and
delon right now. He starts writing travel books and articles
for magazines, and eventually starts writing novels. In eighteen ninety three,
he published the first novel in what would become known
as the winn Aitao series. Uh. These books would become
the nineteenth century German equivalent of Harry Potter. I read
(08:24):
the first of these books. I almost don't know how
to start when it comes to conveying how weird these are. Um,
first off, credit where it's due. They're very racist, but
they're less racist than you'd expect from a German in
the eighteen hundreds. Like, so racism wasn't the main motif
that the book is definitely not the main motif is
more like like like the wallpaper. It's like seasoning for
(08:46):
the book, like every now and then, but it's and
it's like the noble, the noble Native Americans sort of
racism where you don't know anything about them, but like
you're putting them on a pedestal as opposed to the
you know, like old Western films where like they're all
monsters or whatever, like Tom Sawyer race Tom Sawyer racial
inward Gym racism. Yeah, yeah, so it's not as bad
(09:11):
a racism as you'd expect from a German in this
period of time. But it's it's really bad. Um, it's
it's it's really bad, but not distracting from the plot,
like you can still enjoy the plots nonsense. Um. So,
Karl may is not a great writer in my opinion,
but what do I know? Um? His His character in
the book is known as Carl for the first page, Um,
(09:33):
Carl is a young German kid who spent hundreds of
hours reading about America, and he travels to the Old
West to make his fortune. Three pages in, Carl gets
into an argument and knocks out a man with a
single punch. Everyone around him nicknames him Old shatter Hand,
and that is the name he's known by for the
rest of the books, Old shutter Hand, because that's how
(09:54):
Carl thought people gave names nicknames in the Old West.
Year old. He's all those Germans now, so they're probably
still Germans like old. That's what they call me Floyd
may Weather in Germany. See he's earned that though. True. Yeah,
(10:16):
this guy Karl has not Yeah no, because because he's
just a liar. Um. So yeah, Old shatter Hand is
like the Mary Sue of all Mary sues he can
beat up any guy with one punch. On his second
day in the wild West, he charges into a herd
of monstrous buffalo on his horse. And in this book,
because Karl May doesn't know anything about buffalo, buffalo are huge,
(10:36):
huge and like violent monsters, peaceful animals that you are
so easy to hunt, that we killed all of them
because they're not aggressive. Um so, he he kills two
of the buffalo bare hands, no with a gun. But
the next day he gets into a knife fight with
a grizzly bear and kills it with a knife without
getting hurt. H And also Karl May authority haatively insists
(11:00):
that bears cannot climb. Okay, that's definitely wrong. Yeah, that's
really wrong. That's like what they're best at. Oh god,
how many uneducated little kids are there just thinking bears
can suspect a lot of German kids died to bears
as a result of these books. Um so yeah. Over
the course of thirty some odd books, Old shatter Hand
(11:22):
oh sorry yeah. Um Right after killing that grizzly bear,
Old shatter Hand meets his Indian friend and by the
end of the book blood Brother win a too, who
was the Prince of the Apaches. Okay, that's actually a
legit sounding Indian name. I thought it was gonna be
something like. You know, the names are not He does
a better job on the names than you'd expect. Yeah,
the names are not offensive, not like angry Wind, like
(11:46):
some crazy americanized Indian name. Okay, he really did some
research on on the names. Uh nothing else about the
Apachees or their life or religion, but the names are
reasonably believable. Um So Yeah, Old shatter Hand and win
a tougo on all sorts of crazy adventures for thirty books.
Old shatter Hand becomes a chief of the Apaches because
(12:07):
they need him. He's got to teach him about how
to be good people. What's a book without a white guy.
What's a book without a white guy teaching not white
guys how to do stuff, you know as you do.
Um so, yeah, that's that's that's the kind of that's
the kind of book we're talking about here. Okay. It
sounds like it would have been made into a movie
like currently made into like thirty Um. Yeah, so that's
(12:28):
where we're getting to. Um. First off, when when a
tow dies in the last of these books, The last
thing he does is convert to Christianity. Oh yeah, because
you know I got to do that. I get with Jesus. Jesus. Yeah,
white Jesus. But if you're almost certainly Germans blue eye Jesus,
German blue white, blonde haired Jesus. I call on him
(12:49):
often tax stuff. I think's where you need white Jesus. Yeah,
he's white. Jesus is so good at Texas getting pulled over.
I'm like, please, white Jesus specifically, you come down. That's
w yes. I believe when it's out, did the right thing. Yeah.
Um So, these ridiculous books about the American West wound
up being the most popular book series in Germany for
(13:10):
young boys. Uh. To this day, Karl May is the
second most widely read author in all of Germany. He's
only beaten by Martin Luther, who wrote the German translation
of the Bible. Um. So, yeah, he's he's ridiculously popular. Uh.
And when he is at the height of his fame
and wealth and like the biggest author in Germany, Karl
May reveals to everyone in Germany that his stories are
(13:31):
all true. He was old shatter hand the whole time.
It's like if j. K. Rowling declared Harry Potter real
and then insisted she was Harry Potter and also she
had never been to England in her life. Yeah, Karl
could resistance scams like these books are too popular. Hold,
oh wait a minute, it's me. I'm Old Shahan. He's like,
(13:51):
I'm gonna get more mallege out of it. It's ridiculous
because you're you're already a millionaire best selling writer. He's like, look,
I just lived a scam. Okay, that's why he's stealing
poolball and he's like, I just need it. And he
killed off with a No. Everyone's dead and they're not
gonna No one's gonna go to America to fact check this.
(14:14):
So Carl May committed to the bit. He dressed like
the stereotypical idea of an American frontiersman, and his house
was decorated with Native American memorabilia and Old West guns.
Carl himself was rarely photographed with less than six handguns
on his person. You can find his pictures if you
just google Carl mayon. Look, I'm just gonna show you one.
So on the front of his body alone, you can
(14:34):
see three handguns and a knife. So where did he.
First of all, if you run, all these guns are
gonna fall out. This man literally has guns on top
of guns, resting on guns and ropes. What the hell
I think it's a bare tooth necklace. Yes, oh god, oh,
but you know he got the jacket right though it's
got fringe. It's a solid look. It's a solid look. Yeah. No, No,
(14:57):
he's not. He's not bad at excess arising. He just
I don't think those way. So there was no Internet
in those days. Obviously, Um, everybody believed him. Um. And
one of the people who believed him the most was
adorable little Tyke named Adolf Hitler as an adult, non
adorable dictator. Hitler was outspoken about the debt he owed
(15:18):
to Karl May. He talked about May's work regularly, and
we know this because, starting in ninety one, his table
talk was all recorded by a member of the Nazi Party.
Here's one quote. I've just been reading a very fine
article on Karl May. I found it delightful. It would
be nice if his work were republished. I owe him
my first notions of geography and the fact that he
opened my eyes on the world. Yeah, a scammer opened
(15:42):
the eyes to another scammer. Yeah. Yeah. Or here's another quote.
I used to read him by candlelight or by moonlight,
with the help of a huge magnifying glass. I was
carried away by it, and I went on to devour
at once the other books by the same author. The
immediate result was a falling off in my school reports.
Uh so, I mean that's Hitler saying basically I did
(16:02):
bad in school because I was reading this guy's book
way too late in at night. Yeah, consumed, which I
guess you're really bored back then, like growing up in
the late eighteen hundreds in Germany in the middle of nowhere. Yeah,
I mean, but you're not, you know, gathering weeds for
your soup, weeds and potatoes soup. Yeah, I think that
(16:22):
was That was like if you read about Hitler's childhood,
like it was just the opera or being sick and
almost dead in bed for him. So, I guess, like,
you know, terrible wild West books are. Yeah. Um, right
after this, we're going to get into more about how
Karl may is ridiculous wild West novels influenced the War
(16:43):
in Russia, the invasion of Poland, and the entire course
of World War Two. But before we get into that,
we have some commercials and we're gonna do that right now,
So buckle up. We're back and we're talking about Hitler's
favorite young adult fiction author, Carl Friedrich May, a man
(17:07):
who lied about everything, made millions of dollars and influenced
the young growing mind of Adolf Hitler um to a
to a shocking degree. So we're about to get into
how Hitler based aspects of his military strategies in World
War Two off of the Wild West books, written by
a con man who had never been there, who had
(17:29):
never even left Germany. Uh. In nineteen thirty three, right
after Hitler had been made Chancellor of Germany, Hitler spent
his first summer in the Berkhoff, which was his his
mountain supervillain Fortress lair uh. At one point while he
was up there, a guy named Egan came to visit him.
I'm fairly certain it's not the Ghostbuster, but I'm not
(17:51):
sure about that. Uh So. Egan later gave an interview
about meeting Hitler during that time, and he recalled being
in Hitler's office and seeing a bookcase and wondering, like
any of us, what Hitler reads in his free time
uh and quote. Surprisingly, the majority of the books were
the Wild West novels of Karl May as an adult.
As the chancellor of Germany UM and in fact, Hitler
(18:14):
apparently reread all sixties some odd of Karl May's books
between nineteen thirty three and nineteen thirty four. Uh. He
gave a collection of all of May's books to his
nephew as a present, and Hitler was given a very
nice collection of May's books by Herman Gerring as a
gift at one point. Yeah, so this Hitler's mind, Yeah,
it's like if Donald Trump grew up reading I don't know, Yeah,
(18:36):
Harry Potter, like you were saying earlier, and then just
never stopped reading it as adults. It was like, you know,
we gotta base our economic policy on Harry Potter has
a room full of gold. Why don't we try it?
At We literally do that though. So he is a
grown ass man. He is in charge of Germany, and
he is obsessively rereading the Wild West books of a
(18:58):
of a dead con man um. In nineteen thirty nine,
when Hitler's armies were preparing to invade Poland, a Nazi
plane crashed in neutral Belgium carrying two officers with copies
of the invasion plans. So not great, not a great
start to an invision. Yeah. Uh. They did manage to
destroy the plans in time, but the German military wasn't
a certain that nothing had gotten out, and so they
(19:20):
reconfigured their forces just in case. And it was kind
of a clusterfuck. Like they didn't do well at improvising.
Hitler plane cross it's just pages of it's just you know,
it's actually it's scary how close to the truth that is.
Hitler grew frustrated at how bad his journals were at
planning a surprise invasion. He fired several of them and
(19:44):
blamed their incompetence on the fact that while they had
all read their Klauswitz, none of them had read enough. Carl, may,
I'm gonna do some unpacking here. So Carl von Klauswitz
is is like right up there with Sun Sue in
the pantheon of the best military minds and history. He
fought against Napoleon and helped beat Napoleon. He invented the
term fog of war, and he wrote a book titled
(20:06):
on War that is required reading in every military academy
on Earth pretty much to this day. Karl May, on
the other hand, was a con man who pretended to
be a doctor to steal fur coats. Hell. I guess
he read enough Call May. No, you're reading too much
of that. Expert was Hitler and a call like a
(20:26):
cult of one. He I mean, it sounds like Karl
May was like his leader. It sounds like Hitler was
to Karl May what everyone else in Germany was to Hitler,
like everyone's worshiping Hitler. And Hitler was like, no, this guy.
Maybe this is how it works. If you're going to
start a cult, you've got to have something to follow yourself.
You can't get too deep in your own ship. No,
you got to get deep into somebody else's ship. Keep
(20:48):
yourself on those straight and narrow Yeah. So read Karl
May about it was attacked to Hitler would use for
the duration of his warlord career. When the war in
Russia turned against Germany and the Rmacht was bogged down
fighting Soviet and surgeons, one of Hitler's solutions was to
send three hundred thousand copies of Karl May's novels to
his officers. So I learned all that before I read
(21:08):
my first Karl May novel, and so while I was reading,
I kept an eye open for just any brilliant strategic
insights in case I ever find myself like Chancellor of Germany.
You know, you might as well be prepared or whatever. Um.
So I got one insight about midway through the book,
when Old shatter Hand and his co workers are out
on a prairie surveying for a railroad that's going to
be built. They meet the chief of the Apaches out there,
(21:30):
and he gets really angry at them for basically helping
the railroad steal his people's land, and so he gives
them an option. You either leave tonight or I'm gonna
come with my army and I'm gonna kill all of
you guys. So of course they're not going to leave
and not build a railroad. They're white guys. Stop that murder.
You know that's not going to happen. But you know
(21:52):
this is a problem because there's like a dozen of
them and like an army of Apaches. So you know
they've got to come up with some brilliant strategy to
defeat this Apache army. So I'm like, I'm I'm like
waiting here, like, what was it that so impressed Hitler?
And it turns out that the key in this case
to beating the Apaches was that one of Old shatter
Hands friends was friends with the chief of another Indian
tribe who happened to be nearby and had an even
(22:14):
bigger army. And so they just used that. Ye Indians
really loved Old shatter Hands. Just some of them like,
funk our land, We're gonna help this white man out.
So they call this, they call their they call in
the homies. Yeah. Yeah. And so they win because they've
just got this extra army that's bigger than the other army.
(22:36):
So Hitler was like, all right, I gotta gotta have
another art is what we need to do. We need
to have another army, guys. What Well, reading to this
brings to mind the real story of Army Detachment Steiner.
This was a real military unit, well sort of real
military unit that Hitler threw together near the end of
the war in April nineteen forty five, is the Russians
were advancing into Berlin. On paper, it was a mighty force.
(22:59):
In reality, it was made up of units that had
been decimated in many cases had no weapons and often
did not exist at all. Hitler was convinced that this
fake army was going to throw back the Russians. When
its commander refused to attack because it would have killed
had no weapons and where mostly teenagers, Hitler went into
a rage and killed himself eight days later. So so
(23:23):
Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect and and munitions master and
whatnot after the war, wrote that Hitler basically treated Karl
May like the literary equivalent of comfort food after a
bad day of losing the Second World War. Quote Hitler
was wont to say that he had always been deeply
impressed by the tactical finesse and circumspection that Karl May
conferred upon his character Win a Tao, And he would
(23:45):
add during his reading hours at night, when faced by
seemingly hopeless situations, he would still reach for those stories.
They gave him courage, like works of philosophy for others,
or the Bible for elderly people. That really is like,
if you're president and you're like, give me my Harry
Potter book. Oh Harry, these are my Bible? What should
(24:06):
I do? Now? Tell me how to open the Chamber
of Secrets in my heart, how do I be Baltimore
Only it's a whole real ass war that it's the Russians.
It's the Russians, Baltimore, the Russians. I could see similarities
this man. Wow, yeah, I get it. Though Hitler was
a scammer. His whole life was scams. He was literally
trying to kill a grace of people that he belonged to. Well,
(24:29):
that was more of a myth. So there's a myth
that like Hitler, Hitler was actually a Jewish guy. Really
it's my it's unconfised. So there's it's it's one of
those things like there's it's impossible to get completely definitive evidence,
but when you go back to the genealogy that exists,
it doesn't seem like it adds up, like there's no
part of the me. It would have been great irony.
(24:51):
It is true that his family's original last name was
Schickel Gruber, and he only is named Hitler because his
shatter hands. He was he was gonna be eight off
shatter hands. And they were like, nah, bro, that doesn't
it's not ringing, it doesn't ring. Yeah, No, it's it's
it's it's he's he does have a ridiculous backstory, which
I'm sure we'll get to one of these days. Um,
(25:13):
but that part isn't part of it. He was. He
was a scammer and in almost every other way a
man could be a scammer though a fake army. Yeah,
he's he's scammed himself on that one. That was That
was a Hitler double scam there. Um So, yeah, Hitler
was a complicated dude. And I don't want to be
claiming here that, like, you know, everything that he did
(25:34):
was based on Karl May. But it's hard to look at, say,
the invasion to invade Russia and not see a couple
of Karl May's intellectual fingerprints. Um. So this will start
with the concept of Leban's realm, which is a German
word that means living space. Uh and it's it's one
of the Hitler vocab words that a lot of people
probably remember from high school and his The idea is
(25:57):
basically that the German people needed more space. You know,
there were this great up and coming nation. We need
more space for farmland so we can grow, and the
only place to get it is taking it, Yeah, taking
it from Poland, Ukraine, Russia, France. Everybody um and Hitler
when he would talk about this before the invasions, very
much couched it in terms of the American frontier. Uh.
(26:17):
He believed in social Darwinism, some cultures were stronger than others,
and strong cultures deserve to take the land of weak cultures. Uh.
This idea is in full display in Karl May's work.
The Native Americans are portrayed as a doomed but noble people. Uh.
It's taken for granted that their struggle is destined to
failure and that it's perfectly normal for white people to
move right on in and take their land. I love
(26:38):
what you call something doomed, because you're the one who's
damning it. Like, look, we all kill them, so they're
gonna be killed. So it's not bad that we're gonna
kill him because we kill him them. Like what kind
of logic is that it's clearly a doomed struggle. Look
at how good we are and murdering them. Yeah, I mean,
we came to kill them, so it's not our fault.
When they did know that some things are just inevitable,
(26:59):
like all this murder we're doing. But that's how you
have to think as a scammer. That's how you get
away with live with people who call yourself dr holy. Like, Look,
if I don't show up and take their money, somebody
else will, so it should be me. Someone's gonna wind
up with that money, either them or someone else or me,
so it might as well be. Um. Here's a quote
(27:20):
from one of the characters in the novel Winitao, who
is a white guy who becomes a member of the
Apache tribe and lives with them for years and years
and years. This is so. This is supposedly a guy
who's sympathetic to their cause. The Red race has been
cruelly outraged and robbed. But as a white man, I
know the Indian must disappear. And here's a Hitler quote
from October one, a few months into Operation Barbarossa, the
(27:42):
invasion of Russia. I don't see why a German who
eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the
idea that the soil that produces this bread has been
won by the sword. When we eat wheat from Canada,
we don't think about the despoiled Indians. Wow. Yeah, The
way to alleviate your guilt like they had all the
tech is like look, okay, yeah, we murdered him, but
(28:03):
if we didn't murder him, we would have murdered him,
so they would have been dead. Canada did it too,
and also Canada. Remember are we any worse than Canada? Yes,
but not by enough. Uh here's another quote. The struggle
we are waging against the Soviet partisans resembles very much
the struggle in North America against the Red Indians. Victory
(28:24):
will go to the strong, and strength is on our side.
Uh So, Karl May isn't the only Old West influence
that that Hitler. Hitler draws from, Like you know, reading
those novels as a kid sparked sort of a fascination
in him with just sort of the whole American frontier,
and he studied everything that we did during that period
of time. And in nineteen thirty nine, Hitler forced ninety
(28:47):
thousand Polish Jews onto a reservation ghetto in direct imitation
of a strategy Kit Carson pursued with a Navajos. So
a lot of Hitler's interest in the Old West was
based on real history, but that obsession with real history
was barked by Hitler's own admission by Carl May's Old
West novels history. Yeah, did he ever realize that it
was fake? The Hitler think that these stories were true,
(29:08):
because remember Carl came out was like this is me. Yeah.
I think Hitler went to his grave believing Karl May
had never told a lie because he because the actual
Karl May was a pacifist, you know, I mean Karl
didn't kill anybody. He just stole from He was just
stealing candles left and right. He kept the piece, but
(29:30):
he was also steal your billion balls, your baby carrits. Yeah,
if only Hitler had jumped out of the stealing billiard balls,
Carl Mays legacy, like, we'd all be fine with Hitler.
Then it was just a silver tongue devil stealing pool
balls so that the checking their money. I need to
check your dollars. Oh Hitler got away again? Yeah he would.
(29:53):
He would literally be a chaplain figure then absolutely. Yeah. Um.
As the war went on, Hitler and his regime propaganda
grew increasingly obsessed with what they called wonderwaffa or miracle weapons.
The V two rocket was one example of these, which
is those those big rockets. They would just shoot over
to the England and you know some of them would
(30:13):
hit people. Most of them would hit nothing. But it
scared the ship out of people because it's like, yeah,
missiles hadn't existed. It's basically like an angel falling on
your house. Um. So yeah, you can make a case
that Hitler's love of super weapons and his faith in
the ability of these wonder weapons to uh to win
the war started with Karl may See. Old shatter Hand
(30:35):
in Wintaw were often heavily outnumbered on the planes by
bandits or hostile Indian tribes or groups of of evil
criminals or whatever, but they always came out on top.
One reason for this is that they had weapons that were,
by eighteen seventy standards, wacko space guns like what like
a like a like a sling shot. No, Old shatter
Hand had a repeating rifle that he claimed and again
(30:58):
he said this was a real gun that he really used.
He said it could fire a hundred rounds a minute
and was effective at more than fifteen hundred yards away. Now,
for comparison, in eighteen sixty five, like five years before
these books are set, a good soldier like a vet
is putting out three or four bullets a minute from
two hundred yards away. So Carl claims he's got a Yeah,
(31:21):
Carl claims he's got an A R fifteen out there
on the plans that he's just and he can carry
seventeen hundred and twenty eight bullets because they're very tiny
but very deadly. It's a really specific number. I don't
know why that's like an odd one to pick, because
you gotta you know, usually you get heavy on the specific. Yeah.
I picture him like putting it thousands of No, no, no, Carl,
(31:42):
you gotta be specific here. No one's going to believe
that sounds belie. Hundred twenty eight. There we go. Um.
And when Hitler was a kid, in the time before
World War One, there were regular rumors in Germany, stoked
by Carl May himself, that he was going to give
his special secret Eifel to the Kaiser so it could
be used by the German army. Um. So May as
(32:04):
a kid was saying like, it's okay, I know we're
surrounded as Germany and we've got all these enemies, but
I got this super space gun and I'm gonna give
it to the King and it's gonna be all right.
We're gonna win this war with my space. He could
not quit lying. He had money, he had fame, and
he was like, what else can I get a political
influence with a fake ass space. Yeah, he's like a
guy who wins the lottery and then it's like, I'm
(32:25):
gonna spend all this lot of money on more lottery tickets.
That's the smart fucking play Listen, this is really like
empowering my life, you know what I mean? The next
time I have opportunity to a lot of somebody or
defraud people like I would take it because if I don't,
somebody else will. Somebody else will, and who knows the
frauds that you commit might might wind up inspiring the
next Hitler, which what everybody wants everyone. Uh. Now, we
(32:50):
we've got some some more of those commercials uh capitalism
ditties to sing. Um, So we're gonna get into that next.
After that, we're going to get back into how Karl
May's ridiculous novels influenced Hitler's ideas of what America was
going to do during the World War Two, and also
(33:10):
how Karl May's ridiculous con story actually ended. Um. So
all of that after some ads and we're back. So
last we were talking about Karl May, the con man
who wrote a bunch of Wild West novels based on
nothing that inspired Hitler and his plans to invade Poland
(33:32):
and Russia. And now we're going to talk about how
Karl May shaped Hitler's ideas about America. So obviously, Karl
May's novels, by Hitler's own admission, were the first time
he really read anything about America. They opened his eyes
to geography. And in May's novels, America is a land
dominated by German immigrants. Almost every white person in the
(33:53):
story with a speaking role in these novels is a
German transplant. In the first book, Old shatter Hand, a
German heads west and meets his mentor or who also
happens to be a German, and they stumble upon an
old man who's been living with apaches for years and
also happens to be German. This pattern continues for dozens
of books, Like almost every new person that they meet
who doesn't suck is a German who just moved to America.
(34:15):
So it's like, oh gosh, was he? It was Hitler's
like overall goal, like he's just gonna keep spreading until
he gets bread into America. Well, he thought he thought
America was doomed by its diversity, but he also thought
America had a chance to survive because there was a
huge German population in America. So if if he could
get those Germans in charge of America and just you know,
push everyone else into the sea, then America had a
(34:36):
real bright future ahead of it, which is why the
Nazi government expended a lot of money establishing the German
American Bund, which was a Nazi organization in America in
the nineteen thirties that attracted tens of thousands of members.
They drew twenty thousand people at one point to Madison
Square Garden up in the Pacific Palisades, there is a
(34:56):
house that's currently a graffiti sanctuary that was bought as
a resort for the Nazi elite um in the Palisades.
The Nazi elite. Yeah, yeah, there's Hitler's house. You can
go hike in it if you live in l A.
And it's actually it's a lovely hike. I bet it's beautiful.
It is in the whole building is like a graffiti sanctuary. Now,
so there's some really cool graffiti artwork. Wait, like people
(35:18):
are doing like anti Nazi graffiti or it's like beautiful
Trafiti Like it's no, it's not Nazi graffiti at least
I haven't seen any swastikas. But it's just it's just
nice graffiti. Yeah, because lately the Nazis don't had that
swag that they used to. They were polos and new balances.
At least back then they had you know, que altfits,
nice villas. Yeah, I'll say this for the Nazis, they
(35:39):
knew how to make a leather jacket, quality stitch, quality stitching.
I mean Hugo Boss, right, honestly, if I could just
remove the SWASTI well, I mean you can go buy
Hugo Boss today. Oh that's very true. Oh man. Yeah,
the Hugo Boss made all the s S uniforms. Yeah,
that's how that got started. And we still buy Hugo
Boss have a great I mean we still buy Mercedes.
(36:02):
Were German engineer, Yeah, yeah, they made tanks and now
they make pretty good cars. You know what, I'm gonna
put them in the bowels of my memory because I
like Mercedes. Yeah. Well, I mean they weren't bad tanks,
so yeah, the fewer never wanted a war with the
United States and believed that the U s could be
(36:23):
brought around to supporting Nazi ideals. Uh And part of
this belief started with the fact that he got his
conception of America through Karl may novels as a nation
that was dominated by sober, goodhearted German punch masters. Um.
And it may seem silly to think that these ridiculous
trash books would have formed the basis of the furious
feelings in America, but other Europeans at the time also
(36:46):
took May seriously as an expert on American culture. I
found this quote from a French newspaper reviewer condemning American
values because of what Carl fucking May wrote about them.
The man who had never been, who had never left Germany,
the traveler Karl May assures us that no single point
in his story is invention or exaggeration. American morals, no
(37:10):
matter what certain admirers of that young civilization may say,
are generally inferior to ours. They sometimes lower themselves to
abject savagery, especially when it comes to the ugly practices
of personal revenge. The writer describes the American version of
Christianity as relayed by Karl May as mutilated. He concludes
that the thirst for both gold and revenge are two
of the most terrible passions of the Yankee. So you
(37:34):
can see why Hitler might have thought America would be
on board with Nazism. Um yeah, and also, I mean,
French guy's conception isn't a d percent off, right? I mean,
as some solid guesses, this is starting to make me
think that when the Bible was first written, it was
supposed to be like some fun fiction came out like
it's all true. In fact, it's me. Oh, this is
(37:56):
taken off. No, no, this is all real me jeez usa.
Um so yeah, I I think the first guy to
draw a direct connection between Karl May and Hitler was Klausmann,
who was the son of Thomas Man, a famous German author.
Klaussmann wrote in an article in nineteen forty called Karl
May Hitler's Literary Mentor, where he made basically all the
(38:18):
allegations I've just made, minus the Russia stuff because Hitler
had invaded Russiette. Um. But but klauss wrote, the Third
Reich is Karl May's ultimate triumph, the ghastly realization of
his dreams. It is, according to ethical and aesthetic standards
indistinguishable from his that the Austrian house painter Hitler, nourished
in his youth by old shatter hand, is now attempting
(38:38):
to rebuild the world. So Man actually blamed Karl May
for not just Hitler, but the fact that all of
Germany been to Hitler's madness. Quote. They're hopelessly estranged from
both reality and art, sacrificing all civilization and common sense
on the altar of a brutish heroism, but stubbornly loyal,
whether consciously or not, to the foul substitute for poetry
and culture represented by Karl May. It's like a it's
(39:01):
like a mental escape too. So you're broke as fun,
and then somebody comes along and tells you that you
can take over the world. And then there's all these
books that are basically saying German people everywhere just like Yeah.
It fills this whole nation's mind with like images of
this this huge amount of territory if you can just
take it from the savage people who own it. And
all it takes is a strong right hook and a
magic rifle. Yeah, and literally what Trump has done to
(39:23):
Middle America. Yo, I wonder what book Trump is reading.
What's his Carl May? I mean Dr Seuss? Does he
read Cat and Had? There's a lot of pictures in that. Yeah,
it's not to read. I'm gonna get those green eggs
in that. Damn ham All. We know that's really what's happening. Yeah,
oh yeah, okay, yeah. So it is worth noting, in
(39:45):
fairness to Carl May, that a lot of non Hitler
Germans also professed to deepen abiding love for Carl May. Einstein.
Einstein was a huge Carl May fan, although he did
not credit May with his breakthroughs on relativity. Um, he
needs to give Carl some credit. Yeah. I used to
wear the same sharts every day, right, didn't that come
(40:07):
from Carl? Six guns? Six guns every day? Einstein was
always strapped. That's a classic Einstein fact. Pack and heat.
Everybody was to steal those theories from him. Okay, yeah.
I also want to point out May espoused a number
of of anti Hitler views in his novel Not he
(40:28):
wasn't like against Hitler because Hitler was like a child
at the time, but like he There's like a point
in one of the books where a guy makes fun
of a of a hunchback dude, and Karl May is like,
it's shitty to make fun of people who have disabilities,
which is not a Hitler. Hitler murdered people with with Yeah. Yeah,
so um May wasn't in lockstep with the Nazis. And
it may seem a little weird that Hitler would idolize
(40:49):
someone who wrote things that contradicted his own beliefs. This
makes a little more sense when you understand what I'm
calling the Adolf Hitler theory of how to read us
laid out in mind comp hit They're stated reading is
no end in itself, but a means to an end.
And to explain that, he said, a man who possesses
possesses the art of correct reading, will, in studying any book, magazine,
(41:10):
or pamphlet instinctively and immediately perceive everything which, in his opinion,
is worth permanently remembering. So basically, cherry pick, pick and
choose what you want, choose your own adventure. Yeah yeah,
he's saying the right way to read is to pull
everything that reinforces your existing opinions out of a book
and ignore the rest um, which is how a lot
(41:31):
of people read. Yeah, it's kind of a shockingly accurate
prediction of how content works on the internet. Um, so
Hitler had our number with that, And and religion like everything,
because you know, Bible thumbers love to pull up those
quotes that are like anti gay, but then they love
to forget about parts that are just like you know,
you could still sell your daughter and like all this
(41:51):
that's just like oh, yeah, the time Jesus beat up
all those bankers, Like no, no, no, he loves capitalism.
He's a big fan. No, he loves it. In for
said flat he would have loved that. Oh the only
time he got violent was when he beat up a
bunch of money lenders. No, no, it doesn't confirm our bias.
Damn Hitler said some real truth though, that was he
(42:14):
was he was on the money with that one. Yeah.
I mean that's not how you should read, but it's
how people do read. Yeah. And I also wonder if
he was reading it from the perspective of like conquering
people and manipulating them. If he was also reading that,
because like that's what a lot of these books like.
They managed to convince other Indians to beat up other
Indians Like yeah, and the Indians are like surprisingly okay,
(42:36):
with a lot of what's happening? Yeah no, we got
you white guys. Yeah. Um. So the last question of
this podcast is what did happen to Karl May in
the end? Uh? And that's a story worth telling to.
As I said, he got rich and wealthy and started
(42:58):
to claim that he himself his old shatter Hand. He
bought a big, fancy mansion, which he nicknamed Villa shatter Hand.
It's really it was so bad, and he's like, I'm
gonna put it every the coolest thing anybody ever thought of.
Villa sounds classic. I'm gonna put shatter Hand on the end.
He filled it with exotic replicas that he claimed were
(43:20):
from his travels, but in reality they came from a
furniture dealer in Dresden. He also had replicas of his
character's famous guns built in Dresden, and I gotta show
you a picture of his guns. Um, what about this?
This one is the A R fifteen supposedly, but divert
your eyes there to the bedazzled hunting rifle. That is
(43:41):
a bedazzled double barreled bear hunting room. Fucking Ryan stoned
that motherfucker up, yo, I mean it's cute though, yeah, yeah, tastes.
He was like he was giving us a little he
was like a rapper. He really gives me the feeling
of like, you know, I'm gonna wear the shiniest ship
on me. That's like a little Wayne so like bedazzling
his Yeah, yeah, it is in that. I gotta give
(44:03):
respect to that, because if I ever get rich, I'm
definitely bedazzling all my Oh you know, how do people
know you're inch no and you you wear that coat
and you yeah, you It's like a knight did agrees out.
He's the sweating. He's sweat pouring out his ankles. We're
criticizing Karl May for the Nazi stuff, but not for
the fashion stuff. If anyone knows how to purport a
(44:24):
lifestyle that they are definitely not living. It is like
if they had cribs back then, like you know, Villa
shatterhand would have been lit. This is the skin of
a bear I totally killed. Yeah literally, Macy's on the tag.
Yeah that was the bear's name. He's like, I got
these from some Indian's um crazy foot and and a birdman.
(44:49):
Birdman his name was yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's in
my book. He's like, all this ship looks like it
came from dressden. Oh no, no, no, so wait does
a guy in dressing all his secrets? You know that
he must have, right, like there has Maybe he was
just getting so many gun orders that he was like,
if I tell this money train in. Oh listen, I
keep all the secrets. Yeah, yeah, you can trust a
(45:11):
gun smith, but dazzles rifles. I have a store of
exact because of everything in Karl Bay's house. Just like, no, no, no,
he got it from America. No, those are the guns
he used to fight a bunch of Frontier wars. Yeah.
Um so. By age fifty six, Karl May was at
the height of his fame and influence. He claimed to
speak more than forty languages and to understand more than
twelve hundred. So he's like that lady who was doing
(45:35):
fake sign language, like doing translations. Yeah, fifty six though
he lived hell along fifty six is hell along he
was back in the day. I mean all the six
is that like he did live long on the curve
that his brothers and sisters set. Um, so he he
didn't die at that point though, this is the height
(45:56):
of his fame. Um. He was so popular that during
one speech in Munich, firefighters had to be dispatched to
disperse the crowd of his fans. That's like some beatleshit um.
He claimed that he had only two great missions left
in life. A visit back to see the Apaches, trip
to see the Shake of the Haddaden Arabs, which he
also read. A bunch of books set in the Middle
(46:18):
East that he also claimed was based about him, where
he does the same stuff, but in the Middle East.
So his last two goals in life are two fake things. Yeah,
that's two goals in life. More lies. I just haven't
told quite enough lies. Like damn, like you couldn't give
us one real thing? He's like, no, like lines are
(46:38):
his achievements. Obviously, He's like, last week, I'm gonna fraud
out some people in the hundreds of millions of books
I've sold er nice, But it's my lies that keep
me warm at night. Maybe gotta be passionate about something, okay.
So in eight he came under a storm of criticism.
A collection of his very early works was republished against
his will, and these writings were semi pornographic. I have
(47:00):
not been able to find them, which is a tragedy. Damn,
he has some erotica. Yeah, he was apparently writing erotica
or semi erotica early in his career. He sued for
defamation of character. Um, but this began a surge of
interest in Karl May's actual documented past. Uh So, May
(47:20):
panicked tried to cover his tracks. He had the original
plates of those photographs that of him in costume thrown
into the Danube because like the pictures had been edited
and he didn't want people to see that they'd clearly
been taken in a photo studio. So he started a
little bow out. Yeah yeah, his doctor It was found
out as fake. Uh oh. He'd also spent years pretending
to be a doctor. Why he was He pretended to
(47:42):
be a doctor again after he was a famous author.
He also lied about being a doctor. You already his author? Well,
but doctor shatter Hand is a pretty sick name. Hand Lord, Jesus,
I love this guy. During the course of the lawsuit
against the people who published his porn, his criminal record
(48:05):
was uncovered, and worst of all, it was discovered that
he'd never actually been to America. D Carl May published
an autobiography in nineteen ten to try and rehabilitate his
image and defend himself. Among other things, he claimed that
his famous candle theft, Remember the six candles. He claimed
that that was so he could give his sister wax
scraps as a Christmas present. Okay, well, I know it
(48:31):
was eating rock SUPs, so I know wax scraps might
actually be nice. Here's your wax scraps. Also, that's still
not a good excuse. He stall six candles so you
could give your sister a terrible gift, not even the
whole king candle. She's done. She doesn't want candle, she
wants scraps. Okay, okay, bam, that was not she dying.
(48:54):
You should at least say she was dying. Just make
a better lie. Carl May, he's admire He's such a
constant liar um. But all the controversy did prompt the
elderly Karl May and his wife to visit the United States.
They made it as far west as Buffalo, New York.
So Karl May died in nineteen twelve, but his ridiculous
(49:15):
books lived on. In the nineteen sixties, they were made
into a series of euro Westerns that are credited with
saving West Germany's film industry. There's still a Karl May
festival in Germany every year that draws tens of thousands
of fans. Thanks to his books and the fascination for
Native American culture they ignited, Germany has a thriving Native
American cause play and festival industry to this day. So I,
(49:36):
in one of my previous jobs, interviewed a guy who
was a Native American and a professor, and his whole
job is like busting people who falsely claimed to be
Native Americans to like sell products and stuff. And one
of the things he pointed out is that some of
the world's best living speakers of languages like the Sioux
language are Germans who learned it so that they can
(49:56):
cause play better in these gigantic festivals. Because no, it's
a you can find these insane pictures online of these
German Native American festivals where and it's all white guys
and and ladies dressing up in costume and like not
bad costume. Like a lot of these people, like some
of them like authentically like hand chip their own stone
(50:17):
axes and stuff, like they're really into it. Are they're
not using Karl No, because everything Carl May wrote was alive.
Now they've gotten better since then. Um, we'll put some
of the pictures up on on the site and in
social media. There's some great ones of the movies where
they cast just the most ridiculous looking man to be
(50:38):
old shatter hands. It's just like throwing Yeah, you owe
it to yourself to look at these. It's it's it
looks a little bit like a Star Trek episode set
in the Old West, like that level of production value. Um,
so yeah, thank you Karl May. Yeah, I'm really proud
of him. This is why we will say, like, if
(51:00):
passionate about something like and obviously Karl May was passionate
about lying to people and fraud, like it didn't even
matter what he was lying about, like and he but
he dedicate his whole life to just being a liar.
And I can't I can't knock somebody lying was his passion.
You have to respect that much consistency. Like if someone
just tells a few petty lies to get out of problems,
(51:22):
that's not respectable. But if you lie your entire life,
even after you no longer need to, for no reason
other than the art of telling you whatever he was
going to do it was going to be not just
a lie, but like the boldest lie, like very fantastical.
It's not even gonna sound real because like most liars
(51:43):
who might might have been like, oh, I traveled to
America as a young man, and I met this guy
and he told me his stories and that's what these
books are based on. But like Karla is like, no,
I'm him, I'm the punch master who can't be beaten.
But it wasn't. He never wanted to be him until
he blew up and then he was like, wait a minute,
it was me the whole time. I gotta say, like
(52:06):
people talk about how J. K Rowling has kind of
gone a little bit a little bit wacky and in
her fame and like all the new stuff she releases
about her characters and whatnot in her social media presence,
but like she's got nothing on Carl May's game, No,
because she never is like I am Harry, I am
Harry Potter and this ship's all real. I used to
run through the platform. Y'all never read the platform before.
(52:28):
Just give it a shot. God, and everyone's dead. Oh man,
Carl May you know big ups. I wish that I
had known him back in the day. Like also, I
kind of wish that I had lived in that time,
like when like think about now how hard you have
to work to scam people. Like back then you could
really just say anything. Yeah, no one's googling you. You
(52:48):
just go to the town over and it's like a
new planet. Like I'm a doctor. They're probably not even
that far apart. It's like it's like probably five miles away.
You think that guy is really a doctor, I don't
know a man he was born ten miles away. There's
no way we can check up there, there's no backtracking.
We just go like, he got the outfit all he
(53:10):
got that coat. Who has a white coat and isn't
a doctor? He's got a bag with a medicine sign
on it. Yeah, that's all you needed was an imagination. Man,
Millennials would have done great in that time period. We
have such great imagination. But maybe it'll come back. Maybe
this whole internet thing will collapse and it'll be like
(53:31):
a whole world of Carl Mays. That's my dream, that's
everyone's dream. Now. Yeah, alright, well that's our podcast for today. Lacy,
you got anything you wanna you wanna plug drop in here? Oh, sure.
You can follow me on Instagram if I ever get
my phone back at a Diva Lacey d v l
A c. My Instagram stars are basically Karl May. It's
(53:53):
just me creating fantastical frauds. Actually fried my way into
All Star Weekends this year without a ticket. Oh nice.
I was reading some Karl mad books. I was like
how I was like, this is my destiny. Yeah. So,
thank you so much, Carl. You've changed my life forever.
All right, thank you Lazy. I'm Robert Evans. Please remember
(54:13):
to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can
also find us on social media Twitter, Instagram, Facebook at
Bastard's Pod, and you can find us on the worldwide
Web at behind the Bastards dot com. That's all for
this week, uh sia
Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
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