Part One: Alfred Hugenberg: The Elon Musk of Weimar Germany

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media. Hey everybody, Robert here, we had a little
mic error for the first couple of minutes of the episode.
My audio is going to sound a little shitty for
literally like three or four minutes, and then it'll be
back to normal. Apologies. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards
of podcasts, where I am eternally frustrating my business partner

(00:23):
and the only person who really cares about me, Sophie Lichtermann. Sophie,
why do I do the things that I do? Why
do I? Why do I taught you when you're just
trying to trying to help make me, make me a
successful person? What's wrong with me?

Speaker 2 (00:40):
You like to self sabotage?

Speaker 1 (00:43):
I love self sabotaging.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
Oh my god, you do, and like I recognize that.

Speaker 3 (00:49):
So when you do it, I still I still help
anyways because I'm rooting for you.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
So you speaking of self sabotaging. You know who doesn't
self sabotage?

Speaker 2 (00:59):
God, I hope not a.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
Very successful person. Our wonderful guest today Amanda Montell, author
of the book Cultish, which I've cited on this show.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
We've all read. Yeah, we've all read the book.

Speaker 1 (01:12):
If you have it, what are you doing inluence definitely
influenced the Zizzy AND's episodes influenced a lot of my work, Amanda,
thank you so much for being here.

Speaker 4 (01:20):
Hey, it's a joy and a pleasure. And you know,
so many of my sounds like a cult. Listeners are
obsessed with your show. That's how I learned about it
from them, So I stoked.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
We love cults over here. You know, it's hard. It's
one of those things where it's both just objectively. Cult
leaders have the highest odds of any group of bad
people of being incredibly.

Speaker 4 (01:42):
Entertaining, right, I know, I know, especially when your definition
of cult leader is as loose as mine, Lucy Goosey.
Uh yeah, endless, endless entertainment. I was thinking also, like,
as soon as people stop exploiting others, our podcasting career
are just gonna tank.

Speaker 1 (02:02):
Well, the good news is I do have several generations
of people, several hundred generations of people being shitty to
each other to get through.

Speaker 4 (02:11):
Oh so true. No, your your career stability is like
on Luck Nixon. Yet, Oh my god, no, you have
You're you're basically a tenured professor in the program of
bastard studies.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
I just realized I sent Sophie the wrong script because
I was up til six am. But she's got the
right one now, and so do.

Speaker 2 (02:35):
I am Robert Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
What could be better to do today when we have
Amanda Motel on then an episode that's not really about
a cult except for everything. I mean, I guess if
you want to call the Nazis ocult, it's a little
bit about a cult. But he wasn't even really.

Speaker 5 (02:52):
Not sure oh okay, he was.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
Just he was actually kind of Usually like when you're
talking about like a German who is like prominent in
the early thirties and you say like he wasn't a Nazi,
you're saying it to be like because he was like
some sort of hero, right or you know, someone who
was trying to do the right thing, you know, in
the middle okay, dark period. The guy we're talking about

(03:15):
today is a man named Alfred Hugenberg, and he wasn't
a Nazi in a way that makes him kind of
worse than the Nazis.

Speaker 5 (03:23):
Holy shit, Oh my god, I'm pumped.

Speaker 4 (03:25):
Okay, I said this at the beginning before we started recording,
but like, please don't apologize that we're not doing a
coal eader.

Speaker 5 (03:31):
As you can imagine, I'm like.

Speaker 4 (03:32):
Kind a sick of it, but I'm I'm on a
World War two kick.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
I mean, actually it's.

Speaker 5 (03:39):
Been an extended kick. It's been an extended kick.

Speaker 4 (03:42):
So I'm yeah, is it appropriate to say like I'm
pumped to talk about Oh yeah.

Speaker 1 (03:47):
Shugenberg, fellow, we love the big dub dub dos and
this is Hugenberg is number one, one of the key
guys in making the Nazi regime happen, although again he's
not a Nazi and he hates them. He hates them,
okay because most Nazis are kind of poor for most

(04:07):
of the period time, and he is a rich dude.
This is Alfred Hugenberg. Be here to call him the
Elon Musca find our Germany.

Speaker 5 (04:16):
That's the first thing. That's the first thing that came
to mind. That is the first thing that came.

Speaker 4 (04:20):
To fucking mind, because like Elon, you know, he's playing ball,
but he you know that, he just disdains like sh No,
he thinks they're pitiful.

Speaker 5 (04:34):
He thinks they're like small potatoes.

Speaker 4 (04:36):
I allegedly, in my opinion, I don't know, I don't
know what's going on in that noggin of his Thank god,
but that's the first thing that came to mind.

Speaker 1 (04:44):
No one ever has, so I guess let's just get
into this because it's one of those things. And when
it comes to his early life, not a super Elon
early life, when it comes to his role in the
Nazi regime, it's almost beat for beat exactly what Elon
has done, right to the point where like Elon is

(05:05):
now it looks like getting edged out of Doge. There's
a number of reports that Trump is kind of tired
of him. He said that he's stepping back. It's all
like all of that, but it's going to be an
interesting history of like a German piece of shit that
like doesn't sound all that much like Elon. And then
he's going to get in power and it's like, oh wow,
these guys was he was Elon? Just like cripping off

(05:26):
this fucker's notes, it's the same story. It's so funny.

Speaker 4 (05:29):
Oh my god, I'm so excited again. I'm not sure
if that's the right adjective, but like on the edge
of my seat, on the tips of.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
My toes, I get I get giddy when I get
a new Hitler book in the mail. So I get it,
you know.

Speaker 5 (05:46):
Oh good, Okay, is that a problem?

Speaker 1 (05:48):
Sure?

Speaker 5 (05:50):
I feel I feel really free, I feel really safe.

Speaker 1 (05:53):
Yeah, this is a safe place for us. Probably shouldn't
say Hitler stands, but.

Speaker 5 (06:00):
Oh my god, I just loved Reich Knowers.

Speaker 4 (06:04):
Yeah, I just I Any anytime someone can pull off
saying the words Giddy and Hitler in one sence, I'm like,
we are cut from the same cloth.

Speaker 1 (06:12):
My friend Hitler usually wasn't even giddy talking about Hitler
didn't like being around himself.

Speaker 5 (06:18):
Oh that's what he needed the crowds.

Speaker 1 (06:20):
Yeah, yeah, and this is yeah, so we'll get into it.
Alfred Ernst Christian Alexander Hugenberg was born on June nineteenth,
eighteen sixty five, in the city of Hanover, which five
years or so later would become the city of Hanover, Germany.

(06:41):
So again he predates Germany by about five years. These
are still just a bunch of states, with Austria being
or without Prussia being the dominant one.

Speaker 5 (06:50):
Russia. I was gonna say Prussia, and I was like,
if that's wrong, I'm gonna sound so dumb. But it's
all giving Prussian era.

Speaker 1 (06:58):
Goddamn Prussians and the goddamn Prussians, like as a as
a general rule, are they just pants Austria? Not not
far from the time that he's born, right, which is
why Austria is on you know. Anyway, So the fact
that Germany becomes a thing is largely the work of
a fella named Otto von Bismarck, who orchestrated a series

(07:20):
of wars, treaties, and alliances that culminated in the defeat
of Napoleon, the Thirds France and the rise of the
Prussian Kaiser as the emperor of all Germanic peoples, or
at least like is like Austria, Hungary is still separate
most of the Germanic peoples. In those heady early days
of Imperial Germany, people get very excited about the idea

(07:41):
of Germany. Right, It's like fucking pokemon when it starts off, right,
You folks can't get enough of Germany there?

Speaker 6 (07:50):
What are they trying to catch other Germans? Right, Like,
that's the go We got to get all the Germans.
We got a katamari, all of the Germans into this thing,
and that'll pro and well, putting all the Germans in
one box seems like it'll not lead.

Speaker 1 (08:04):
To a series of world wars. So there's this kind
of academic theory that's being promulgated, you know, around this time.
And obviously it's being promulgated before the formation of Germany,
but it really gets supercharged afterwards. And it's called pan Germanism.
And this is the assertion that Prussians and Bavarians and
Saxons and you know, Hanover Hanoverians or whatever shouldn't see

(08:28):
themselves as different peoples and certainly not as different nations,
but as one united German people who have a manifest
destiny to spread not just in Europe but across a
grand colonial empire that ought to because Germans are a
great people, and they deserve what the British have, Right,
there's a lot of there's a lot of this, like

(08:50):
they're very insecure, the Germans in this period of time, right,
and so there's a lot of why don't we have
a lot of stuff the British. The British have so
much stuff, any stuff?

Speaker 5 (09:01):
Come on, God, Well, here's a cult. Here's a cult.

Speaker 4 (09:03):
Parallel at a cult leader is often someone little chip
on their shoulder.

Speaker 5 (09:07):
I was like, hey, hey, now.

Speaker 1 (09:10):
That is that's every Kaiser to be honest, and it's
certainly auto von Bismarck. So they start they start being like,
how are we gonna how are we going to create
a space for us Germans that's worthy of the name. Now,
these kind of nascent ideas, even though they're starting to
gain traction, they're not even initially. They're not universally popular,

(09:33):
and not even within Germany because, among other things, these
different German states have been fighting each other up until
very recently. Right, the Prussian Yunker class, which is kind
of like their nobility, has a bunch of ancestral privileges,
right that they maintain even once Germany becomes a thing,
and they're not eager to give those up, right, They're like,

(09:54):
what you mean you mean I have to give up
my power over those uncouth Bavarians.

Speaker 4 (09:59):
No, uh, And the idea not everybody, So not everybody's
down to be panned, No.

Speaker 1 (10:06):
No, not everybody. This is this is like there's a
lot of conflict over this. Now, the idea that Germany
should expand colonially, largely in Africa is less objectionable. People
are very into this, but they're also not great at it. Right.
They kind of get like the shit their attitude and
everyone's attitude is they get kind of like the shitty

(10:26):
pieces of Africa, Like Namibia a lovely place, but it's
like not, it's like a desert, right, it's not at
the time seen as like, well, it doesn't have that
much stuff for us to exploit compared to like what
we want to be exploiting. And they're looking at the
British who own like fucking a third, like a shitload
of Africa, and like what the fuck, guys, And so

(10:46):
this is what's all. This is all what's going on
as Alfred Hugenberg has his childhood now, unlike Elon because
you know we've made that comparison, he is not born
into wealth or into really much privilege at all. Some
people will say his upbring was upbringing was comfortable. That's
not wildly untrue by the standards of the time, but

(11:08):
we would not see this as a comfortable upbringing, and
in fact it's kind of close to Hitler's childhood. Alfred's
dad is like a civil servant. He's a guy who
works in the administrative state, and he dies when Hugenberg
is very young, and Alfred is the only son in
the family, which is also like Hitler, and the Hitler

(11:28):
comparisons keep right on hitlering because both young men also
spend their adolescent years aware of the fact that their mom,
since their dad is gone, is incredibly financially strained. Right,
they have this pension, but none of the pensions are
enough to take care of a family, and so they're like,
they're there, it's a tremendously difficult time. And he can't

(11:49):
not have been aware of the fact that they were
poor now, right. So there are some other similarities between
Hitler and Hugenberg. Both young men were moved to create
art and their early years. Hitler becomes an obsessive devotee
of the opera and has ambitions as a painter. Meanwhile,
Hugenberg is a really talented creative writer, with what biographer
John Leopold described as quote a flair for literary expression.

(12:14):
And you know, if your kid who's good at writing,
that can be a great way to express yourself and
to work through some of your trauma and stuff. Alfred
does not do any of that, sure, which is actually
a real difference. Because Hitler throws himself a whole hog
into being an artist, he kind of sucks at He's
not any good but like yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 (12:38):
Oh it's definitely giving, like George W. Bush's painting endeavor. Yes,
like yes, I don't know, although the order of operations
was slipped, w entered painting after his political tenure, right,
maybe Hitler should have done that. I don't know.

Speaker 1 (12:54):
I gotta say Hitler better painter than George W. Bush.
Oh okay, less Bush. You know, there's a degree of
where like, okay, you're trying to like creatively represent how
you feel about the people you're painting. Hitler was just
sort of like look at that right building building.

Speaker 5 (13:11):
No, they were like landscape hundred percent. He had no
point of view.

Speaker 1 (13:16):
No, no, exactly exactly, but which probably says anyway people
have people have tried to psychoanalyze that ship for years.
What's interestingly about Hugenberg is that he has and he'll
write some books later, but he has like a literary
skill like he could have been, you know, a fiction
writer or something like that.

Speaker 5 (13:32):
And he's Hubbard.

Speaker 1 (13:34):
Well hey, I didn't say he could be anywhere as
good as LRH. You know, okay, okay, sorry, nobody the
man who could put a fifty thousand word novel out
in just seven hours of taking rents, uh, just popping
pills like you. I mean, we don't have the technology
for someone to be as on amphetamines as all Ron
Hubbard was back then, right, yeah, so true. Yeah, it's

(13:58):
it really is like quite a special time and place,
so Hugenberg chooses. What's kind of interesting to me is
that Hugenberg doesn't just sort of like fail to explore
his potential as an artist. He purposefully forces himself not
to write, right, not to make art, because he just

(14:21):
like that's silly, and that's like artists are poor, and
I am not going to be poor. So thereby I
am going to make I'm going to stop myself from
exploring this thing that I'm good at in order to
study the things that will make me good as a businessman.
Right huh yeah, okay.

Speaker 7 (14:39):
Very self flatullating interesting, Yes, well yeah, he very much
is this Like I this is not an appropriate thing
for a man who wants to be rich to do.

Speaker 1 (14:48):
So even those is what I want to do, I
will stop myself from doing it because he wants he
is going to be rich, that's his like goal from
the start, and he's going to He's going to make
generational wealth, right, like he wants. He wants his kids
to help to part own the Reich, so he initially
follows in his father's path. He studies the law and

(15:10):
political economy in his secondary education. He is very well
in school, very bright guy, and he has from the
beginning a flair for money, which would have been noticed
by his instructors from the jump. They also would have
noticed his skill as a writer, but not for long
because he again he decides to quote unquote suppress his
skill in order to focus on his career. He talks

(15:31):
about it as like I made a choice to smother
the artistic side of me so that I could make
more money. Now Alfred makes a couple of friends, but
he has no real hobbies outside of his business ambitions.
And if he had anything we might term a pastime,
it was thinking about the way that the state and
the economy worked and how they ought to work. Right

(15:54):
very early age, he's thinking about why do the economics
of the time function this way? And like, how can
I changed them to function in what I would term
is like better. So his first while he's in college
effectively he gets you know, he does his dissertation right,
which is his first book length publication like these are
effectively books, and his first dissertation is titled Internal Colonization

(16:18):
in Northwest Germany, which he fitishes at the University of
Strasbourg in eighteen ninety one. In his book on Hugenberg,
John Leopold writes, quote, the young doctoral candidate analyzed and
detail the role of the state in fostering economic growth.
This volume depicted three themes which always undergird Hugenberg's political views. First,
the state would have to assist the farmer and totally

(16:41):
abandon a las ai ferre approach to agriculture. Second, the
farmer would have to act as an entrepreneur and form
a capitalist bulwark against Marxism. And third, Germany would have
to expand its empire. So a couple of things are
going on here when we talk about internal colonization Germany
right now, the imperial Germany includes a bunch of Poland

(17:03):
right now. If you're thinking, think back to your maps
of Europe. Poland's Poles, not Germans. These are within the
boundaries of the German state, a colonized people, and Germany
is sending German farmers into this occupied Polish territory to
try to Germanify it right, Like that's very much what's

(17:25):
going on, and Hugenberg's writing about that, but he's also
writing about like there's not really enough Poland for us,
like maybe we could get some more, I don't know,
but also we need to be taking more of Africa
because we need to continue like kind of shotgunning these
farmers out, and we can't just sort of let the
market take care of them because then they might not succeed,

(17:46):
Like it's part of this. He's not really talking all
that much in racial terms, although he is a racist,
but he's very much the conclusions he comes to are
identical to the ones Hitler is going to come to
thinking through racial terms, which is interesting.

Speaker 4 (18:03):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, do you think do you think
I actually wasn't aware that Germany was sort of like
jealous of Britain's colonization.

Speaker 1 (18:14):
Efforts, hugely jealous of Britain and hugely jealous of the
US Hitler killer is obsessed with.

Speaker 4 (18:23):
Yeah, okay, okay, that's key context because if a whole nation,
fledgling nation, whatever, nation that's trying to build itself has
you know, uh, like popular kid in school to look
up to and feel jealous of, that can create that

(18:44):
can create to use the school analogy some kind of
like in cell inferiority complex type behavior, which is what
I'm getting here.

Speaker 1 (18:52):
This is exactly what's happening to all of Germany. Yeah,
badness is we've talked about those in the show. Hitler
rows up obsessed with the cowboy novels of a guy
named Karl May. Sorry, Karl May is like the JK.
Rowling of his day. He is a children's book author
who writes these books about like his experiences in the

(19:12):
American West, fighting alongside Indians, and they're all lies, like
he's a con mad. But Hitler is obsessed with this.
He like mails copies of them his generals on the
Western Front. But all of Germany is, and the late
eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds obsessed with us, like
with westward expansion, right.

Speaker 4 (19:33):
Yeah, rugged masculine expansion is a manifest destiny.

Speaker 1 (19:38):
But also this there's this feeling like, well, America is
obviously destined to be a great nation. God has just
given them this empty continent with no people on it
that they get to take. They're jealous and Hugenberg that
this is such a foundational aspect of German, like the
German character that like, to this day there are festivals

(19:58):
to this guy in Germany, and like people will do
the equivalent of like US renfaars where they're dressing up
as Native Americans in Germany. That happened, This happens to day. No, yes,
it's a whole thing. It's a massive deal.

Speaker 4 (20:12):
Wait, I can't, I can't, I can't get the irony
of like US throw the United States celebrating the European Renaissance,
and Europe celebrating like some fictionalized and surely very problematic
and fucked up vision of the.

Speaker 5 (20:28):
Early days in the US. It's truly, the grass is
always the grass.

Speaker 1 (20:32):
Is always greener on the other side of the imperialism.
So Hugenberg is not, you know, as obsessed with cowboys
as Hitler, but he's very much obsessed with this idea
of expansion and he sees he sees it as a
matter of survival for the German race. And he writes
that Germany will only quote gain power and significance by

(20:54):
taking it from others. And when he says others, he's
talking a little bit about Europeans, but he's mostly thinking
about Africa right now. While I said earlier that Alfred
was not a man with hobbies or a social life.
He does nothing but work. I mean he's getting a doctorate,
which you do kind of have to be that way
to get a doctorate for a little while at least,
right if any of my friends who got doctor it's

(21:17):
there anything to go by. But he does have one
extracurricular activity he starts to engage in around this time,
the same year he published his dissertation, eighteen ninety one,
he helps to co found a political club, the German
General League. Now you won't find a lot written about
this incarnation of the organization, but historian Barry Jackish describes

(21:39):
it as a political pressure group critical of the German
government's foreign and domestic policy decisions. Now that's a definition
so vague it could refer to an organization of any ideology.
So I should further say, the specific ideological launching point
of this group that Hugenberg starts with a bunch of
other guys is the idea of PA Germanism that I

(22:01):
discussed at the opening of the episode. Jackish continues, the
Pan Germans were an openly expansionist organization that called for
German colonies and spheres of influence throughout the world, and
the creation of a strong navy to reinforce Germany's newly
gained status abroad. In domestic politics, the League supported an
authoritarian monarchy and opposed the growth of parliamentary democracy. The

(22:22):
League also sought to combat what it regarded as the
pernicious influence of a myriad of un German elements, particularly Slavs,
often Catholics, and ultimately Jews. So these are not Nazis
because those don't exist yet, But you're seeing the Nazi
in this group, right, Like it's it's not so much
of a leap from this to the Nazis, right for sure, Yeah,

(22:47):
strung notes of Nazis, right, yeah, yeah, this is like
a Sega dreamcast. Isn't a PlayStation two, but.

Speaker 8 (22:53):
Like, oh I can see what people were like working towards, right, Yeah,
for sure, this is the Sega Dreamcast of national socialism,
That's what we can say.

Speaker 1 (23:05):
So and also they are playing Crazy Taxi, So a
lot of direct elements to the Sega Dreamcast. I'm gonna
guess nobody gets my Sega Dreamcast jokes.

Speaker 4 (23:13):
But whatever I was, I was nodding and I wanted
to understand. I really it's like my partner will talk
about video games sometimes. That is a video game, right,
it was.

Speaker 1 (23:24):
It was a video game system. It just didn't it didn't.
It didn't make it. It didn't make it. It came
out around the N sixty four in the PlayStation and
it did not last.

Speaker 5 (23:34):
Oh I'm sorry to hear that. Anyway, we all are, we.

Speaker 1 (23:38):
All are, We all are. It's a tragedy that rins
at me to this day, like the death of my grandfather.
So Alfred is a founding member of this group, but
he's not like the singular driving force behind it. When
I say founding, there's like a bunch of guys who
get together to do this thing, and it kind of
it's going to pretty quickly take a back seat for
him because he's his career gets started, and he's just

(24:00):
got a lot of other shit on his mind. Wait,
you have a question, Sure, what does this guy look like?

Speaker 5 (24:06):
Uh?

Speaker 1 (24:06):
Well, you can pull him up in a yeah, I mean,
I'll have Sophie pull up a picture of him. Obviously,
most of them are going to be when he's older,
because people didn't have as many photos of them when
they were super young.

Speaker 5 (24:17):
Eighteen sixty five.

Speaker 1 (24:19):
Yeah, he's born in sixty This is we're now when
like the eighteen eighties.

Speaker 2 (24:23):
You're talking about you're talking about Alfred.

Speaker 1 (24:26):
Yeah, boy, Alfie, you're gonna it's this is like the
eighteen eighties right now.

Speaker 5 (24:34):
Yeah, I mean in fairness nineties. It's the same.

Speaker 2 (24:36):
So I guess no, no, no, no no, the picture
is worth looking at it.

Speaker 5 (24:40):
Vice.

Speaker 4 (24:40):
Oh yeah, the picture okay, you got I just like
forgive me, I just I need a visual here.

Speaker 1 (24:47):
The picture's worth a thousand words and most of them
are going to be Wow, that is a German ass man.

Speaker 2 (24:53):
The hair is fun, the uh sash is fun.

Speaker 5 (25:00):
Okay, i'll describe it. Here we go.

Speaker 1 (25:02):
Yeah, there's.

Speaker 5 (25:04):
Oh my god.

Speaker 3 (25:05):
Okay.

Speaker 4 (25:06):
Yeah, Like he looks like dudes in in on my
side of town in Los Angeles located.

Speaker 1 (25:15):
He's got that like Bismarck's style mustage.

Speaker 7 (25:19):
It's the way that I know exactly what neighborhood you live. Yeah,
oh yeah, let's not dox me, but no, you know,
I'll say this is what I'll say.

Speaker 4 (25:29):
His his his his mustache is shaped like squidward from
SpongeBob's legs.

Speaker 5 (25:36):
Yes, and that's exactly it, Yes, and it's white.

Speaker 4 (25:40):
And his glasses are perfectly round there, Harry Potter glasses.

Speaker 1 (25:44):
Honestly, he's got he's got squidward legs as a mustage.
Squidwards legs is a mustache, like perfectly round, uh, Harry
Potter glasses and his haircut. If you've seen the movie
Falling Down, he's got like an old man heightened tight
like it's a remarkable combination of things. And like, by
this point, this is a picture him when he's older.

(26:06):
You had money for a barber. You were one of
the richest men on the planet.

Speaker 5 (26:09):
What is no, this was super on purpose?

Speaker 1 (26:12):
That does really, that does get us back to the
Elon must comparisons, because it's like, wow, neither of you
motherfuckers know how to get a haircut, Jesus Christ, I say,
looking the way I do today. But Jesus Christ, you
a great Robert.

Speaker 5 (26:26):
Although similar to Elon and Alfie, the hairline, the hairlines impressed,
I mean.

Speaker 1 (26:33):
And he did not have the ability to have a
turkish man's hair transplanted onto his scalp. Yes, that is
not a turkish man's hair. That's all Hugenberg.

Speaker 4 (26:42):
Totally, which was honestly amazing, especially considering that he was
such a bad person.

Speaker 5 (26:48):
You would think, like, no, that would have affected.

Speaker 1 (26:51):
Some terrible people are graced with an incredible head of
hair like Fabio. Fabio was a bad person, I'm just
consulting him from no.

Speaker 2 (27:01):
Who knows.

Speaker 1 (27:03):
Given his humble beginnings, Hugenberg started his career as an
entry level civil servant, so he has no nepotism to
benefit from. Right, he's not getting like a head start.
He's going to get ahead because he's good. He becomes
a member, he gets hired for the Prussian Settlement Commission
in Posen, which again is Prussia had conquered this chunk
of Poland and they have a commission to help settle it,

(27:25):
and he is helping to manage that from eighteen ninety
four to eighteen ninety nine. This gives him a degree
of influence in the German States. Attempts to reform some
land use policies that were essentially holdovers from the medieval era. Right,
they've got these kind of medieval policies on, like the
aristocracy owning land that slow down colonizing it because a

(27:46):
lot of land is just meant to be like where
that where this did duke or whatever hunts And that's
great if you're a duke, and it's actually probably pretty
good from like a wildlife conservation aspect, but it's really
bad from a farming you know. And Germany's whole thing
is we don't have enough food. We can't make enough
food to not die on our owns, right and this

(28:06):
is constantly on our minds. So again Posen is like
it's an eternal colony within Germany. Most of the population's Polish,
but there's this small number of German farmers whose expansion
was desired by the government. However, said expansion is stemied
by the fact that many Polish people already had claim
to the land. Hugenberg suggested ways to uproot them, but

(28:26):
ultimately quit his job when the government refused to revise
its inadequate policy towards the Poles. And again that inadequate
policy is you're letting them live in their own homes,
right like that, that's the issue that he has with Poland.
You know what I just saw, just like because.

Speaker 4 (28:43):
The obviously like the use of euphemism within the Nazi
regime and their campaigning is well studied and documented.

Speaker 5 (28:51):
But I will never get over it. And if this
guy Alfhie had his roots in creative writing, I bet
he was a master of you.

Speaker 1 (29:02):
Yes, yeah, yeah. Now this is Hugenberg's first foray into entrepreneurship.
As soon as he quits, you know, this government job
because it's not working fast enough, and he immediately really
reveals himself to have a head for this kind of work.
He creates a series of land co ops that allow
so he goes into business independently, and he starts going
to these different groups of farmers who are trying to

(29:24):
colonize to what this territory that is like the center
of modern Poland, and he starts putting them in together
and making co ops, right, And the purpose of this
is because each of these independently these small German farmers
have no economic power and so kind of keep getting
fucked over. And he forms them into co ops so
that they can basically collectively set prices and bargain for

(29:48):
better prices, right, like the very modern thing you know
that he's doing here, And it works like this makes
all of these farms much more successful, and it helps
stimulate the growth of like more independent like more German settlers,
like farming in this area. The project is successful enough
that in nineteen oh four he gets hired back to

(30:10):
the civil service in a significantly better position, right, Special
Advisor for Economic Development to the East. So he's just
kind of like a guy stuck in the cogs of
the machine. He bounces. He has this incredibly successful co
op thing for all these farmers, and it does well
enough that now he's the special advisor for all economic

(30:32):
development in the East.

Speaker 3 (30:33):
Now.

Speaker 1 (30:33):
One of the thing that's going on in the East
is I had insinuated earlier, is in Prussia, you've got
all these younkers, right, who are these They're like the nobility, right,
And these guys are also a lot of like the
fighting nobility, because like Prussians are warriors, that's what you
do if you're a Prussian younger. But they also have
these vast family estates, often with thousands of acres of land,

(30:54):
and they're just kind of fucking around on them, right,
you know. They're the aristocracy does that every where they can,
And so Hugenberg doesn't want things to work that way.
He wants this land to be freed up, if it's
not being farmed, for more farmers to buy it. Now,
like all conservative Germans, and Alfred is very conservative. His

(31:17):
interest is in autarchy, right. He wants the state to
be able to produce all of its own necessities. You know,
we just had the tariffs come down yesterday. It's kind
of the same idea, right. Conservatives never quite get over this,
what if we didn't need anyone else? And it's like,
I don't know, man, do you like coume quats because
that's kind of critical that shays.

Speaker 5 (31:40):
Yeah, yeah, fuck Jesus.

Speaker 1 (31:43):
It's a little more understandable in this period as a
German because they're always aware of like, okay, well we've
got Russia on one side and they don't always like us,
and we got France on the other and they don't
always like us, and then the English control the seas,
so we're really easy to starve. You know, it would
be great if we could grow enough food to not starve.

(32:05):
So Hugenberg set to work applying his three principles to
the problem of all these giant, useless estates going unmanaged.
Being a practical guy, he came up with what seemed
like a simple solution, and he published a book about
his work with the farming co ops, im Posen, and
how similar tactics could be used to encourage the rapid
accumulation and deployment of capital to properly settle the East.

(32:27):
Alfred insisted that the state's role in all of this
was not to stick with the traditional younger view of
property and instead to use its power to encourage competition.
He wanted them to pass laws to confiscate large unproductive
estates and resettle them with small farmers who would form
co ops. I won't give Hugginberg credit for a lot,
but this probably would have worked. And I based this

(32:49):
on the fact that basically one hundred percent of the
time shit like this got tried and peasants were given
access to large areas of raw land to split up
and manage in common, productivity increased, and it especially increased
over the old way of quote letting some rich guy
use it as a private park. Right, It's just more
effective in a farm in terms of yield. However, the

(33:11):
rich guys that Hugenberg wants to dispossess are the rich guys, right.
These are the people running things because the Prussians are
kind of the most powerful group within Imperial Germany, and
they don't like that Hugenberg wants to take their shit.
I'm going to quote from Leopold's book here. Confronted with
strong opposition from youngers and others opposed to this proposal,

(33:31):
state officials hesitated in their advocacy of this legislation. Hugenberg
scorned their pedantic political conscience and again left the civil service.
So he's like, fuck you guys, I'm going home. You know,
I'm gonna go do my own thing now. I tried
working through the government. It's useless. Word, yes, you know,
it's not useless. You know what should be the government,

(33:54):
the products and services that support this podcast. They should
run the country.

Speaker 8 (34:01):
Why not they?

Speaker 1 (34:02):
Could they be worse? Could it be worse?

Speaker 5 (34:05):
Maybe?

Speaker 1 (34:10):
Ah, and we're back. I don't know. I think Chumba
Casino would be a good overlord. It seems ethical casinos
are always nice. Uh, we could all smoke indoors, you know,
that's how casinos were a vibe. That is a vibe.
So he bounces gets out of government again, and his

(34:32):
dream is to make East Prussia not a backwater, right, Like,
that's kind of what he wants in this period of time.
But he's been he's been stymied and Alfred. He's not
an introspective soul, no, nor is he to kind of
waste his energy being disappointed. So he right away gets
a job on the board of directors for a bank
and Frankfort that serves several mining concerns, and not just mining,

(34:55):
but companies like generally in the metal business, so suppliers
and producers of raw materials. And his job, his role
here is reorganizing and rearranging things to enhance the profitability
of everyone in this industry. Right Basically, all of the
owners of these different minds and sort of like mineral
concerns and whatnot are all putting a chunk of their

(35:18):
money in like a common pile to be used in
Hugenberg is managing it. He's an early hedge fund manager. Right, wait,
you know it's not that bad, so, but that's what
he's doing.

Speaker 4 (35:29):
I am so dumbfounded by this guy's disposition. Like he
wanted to be a creative writer.

Speaker 5 (35:37):
I'm still stuck on that, and then he suppressed it.

Speaker 1 (35:41):
To become someone hedge funds.

Speaker 4 (35:43):
You said, yeah, in hedge funds. I'm just like, what,
how does that? How does that make sense? Like, is
he truly like a renaissance man and so adaptable or
was he never truly an artist to begin with? And
he just kind of like told himself he was suppressing
his artistic tendencies, but really he was meant for this.

Speaker 1 (36:01):
He writes several books. I don't know if I'd say
he was meant to be a creative writer, but I
think the thing is more he is utterly obsessed in
the way that poor kids sometimes wind up being. If
I am not going, I am owned to be somebody, right, yeah, yeah,
And this is how you'd.

Speaker 5 (36:18):
Be an opportunist. However, whatever path will lead me.

Speaker 1 (36:21):
Become hell or highwater, I will fucking be somebody, right.
That's this dude. So his role in this kind of
early hedge fund ish position is to, like, yeah, enhance profitability,
and he does. He does well enough that he gets
hired on next to run a bank, like a whole
banking firm, so like basically a network of banks that's

(36:43):
run by a prosperous Jewish family. The Mertens now Huggenberg
is a raging anti Semite, as is the German General League,
which he's still a member of, which by this point
has changed its name to the much catchier Pan German League,
and they'd only doubled down on the anti Semitism since then.
But this doesn't seem to stop him from being willing
to work for this rich family. The Mertens. Now the

(37:06):
League at this point, it's not a mass organization, nor
does it want to be one. It's got maybe a
few thousand members at this point. It's going to top
out at thirty eight thousand people, which is very small
for one of these. Again, by the time by the Nazia,
there's going to eventually be a couple million Brown Shirts, right,
So this is not a huge organization, but members of
them are professional people, often with a lot of money

(37:29):
and influence. So the Pan German League is hugely influential culturally.
It punches above its weight class, right because the members
of it are guys like Hugenberg. They're social climbers, or
they're already rich and influential. Now, I quoted from that
historian Barry Jackish a little earlier, and those quotes were
from a book he wrote on the Pan German League
titled The Pan German League and Radical Nationalist Politics in

(37:52):
inter War Germany, which is a very accurate title, but
not very clickable. You know, seven things you didn't know
about German National. There's a lot of better ways to
title it, Barry, I'm just saying, sorry.

Speaker 5 (38:04):
The BuzzFeed era hadn't hit yet.

Speaker 3 (38:06):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:08):
So here's it's a very good book. And here's how
Barry describes the league's membership. The Pan German League drew
the vast majority of its members from the social strata
identified by the German terms bildung un Besitz, or the
propertied and educated middle class. And this is where we
get to a very important and very German prerequisite for

(38:28):
the rise of the nazis one that doesn't get discussed
a lot. We love to talk about and I do
it on this show. The things that graph exactly to
shit that's been happening in the US when we talk
about the fall of Vymar and the rise of German fascism,
because there are a lot of similarities, but there's a
lot of differences too, which is I think are important
emphasized now because I think some people get like, oh

(38:49):
my god, we've done all these other things that are
similar to Vymar, We're destined to do this. We're not right.
It can go different for us. And part of why
it's because like it is a very different culture. We're
not Germany at any point.

Speaker 4 (39:04):
Wait, I actually have two questions about that. Well, no,
I have a I have a comment and a question.
So bringing it to colts, people do the same thing
making comparisons between Donald Trump and Jim Jones, and we
loved and including myself like you, I love, I love
to point out rhetorical similarities the way that they weapon
I thinkna, yes, but there are extremely noteworthy differences that

(39:30):
are equally important to emphasize. And Jonestown was unprecedented and
since unreplicated thing, and Jim Jones read Nietzsche and Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 (39:39):
I mean it doesn't read anything one thing. But the
Jonestown story has a courageous US congressman risking his life
and for his constituents.

Speaker 5 (39:48):
Again, no, honestly, that's a great point.

Speaker 4 (39:52):
But there there there was there was some drama with
a plane, and that's that's really happened. There were a
lot of Yeah, but my question related to this somewhat.
And this is a really basic question. So maybe this
will sound like kindergarten level, but like I don't really

(40:14):
understand and have never really understood how German nationalism among
these guys like.

Speaker 5 (40:21):
Hitler and Alfie. How was it so raging? Like, I
don't I don't find that. I mean, I know Trump,
but Trump doesn't have American nationalism.

Speaker 1 (40:32):
I find for one thing. I mean, Trump definitely uses
American nationalism.

Speaker 5 (40:37):
He uses it, yes, but I don't think he feels it.

Speaker 2 (40:39):
In his soul.

Speaker 1 (40:41):
Yeah, this is one of those things to an extent
you simply can't understand because nationalism is a new idea then, right,
The idea of a nation state and the way we
conceive of it is fairly new. And also the idea
of just like being being the idea that like I'm
a Serb and so I should have a certain right.

(41:01):
People haven't always thought that way, right, Like, the these
are kind of new, and especially the idea again, they
had to really it took a lot to convince all
these different Germanic states that you're all Germans. There's a
storyman of telling a little bit that I think will
make some of this make a little bit more sense.

Speaker 4 (41:18):
Yeah, No, that's already helpful, because, like a novelty, when
something is brand new, you like don't really know what
it means yet, because we don't have the context in
the retrospect. But yeah, sexy, it's exciting. It's like AI
stuff now like in seventy years.

Speaker 1 (41:34):
Well, nationalism is the AI of the of the century. Yes, totally.
I mean there's an extent to which, like, at least
in terms of how excited people are by the idea
that that's not totally wrong.

Speaker 5 (41:46):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (41:46):
Now, when we talk about like why did Germany go
in the direction it did, this is really where the
seeds of a lot of the things that that you
know culminate in the thirties are being planted. And a
lot of leftists like to argue that fast evolves out
of capitalism, you know, the bourgeoisie and especially conservatives in
the BOURGEOISI inevitably turned fascist once their material interests are threatened.

(42:10):
Now we'll leave out now talk about well how accurate
that is a depiction of what's happening in the United
States right now, But seeing things that simplistically misses some
very important aspects of how Nazism got going in Germany.
Because Nazism is a radical political movement. Nazis don't like conservatives.
In fact, they kill a lot of them, right that

(42:32):
they don't target them the way they do the left
in any way. But they are not a conservative movement
and they don't see themselves as conservatives, and they're not
really very keen on capitalists either, although a lot of
capitalists eventually do support them out of self interest. I'm
saying this because Hugenberg is never a Nazi in the
ideological sense of the word. He is a monarchist and

(42:53):
he is a social and economic conservative. And the Pandramanic League,
while there's things in it you can see as like, oh,
I see how Nazism arrived from this, it's more that
the soil is the same, right, and so the plants
have some similar characteristics that are coming up. The Pan
German League is not going after the Nazis are initially

(43:13):
going after like the poor and downtrodden, right, those are
Hitler's like earliest recruits and like veterans, disaffected veterans. That's
not who the Pan Germanic League is going after. It
is laser targeted at the group of people that Leopold
identifies as Buildung and Besitz. And there's another term for
that group, and that term is Buildung's burgertam right, and

(43:37):
that is crudely we might say the upper middle class,
it means literally the cultivated bourgeoisie. In his book The
Fateful Alliance, historian Hermann Beck writes Germany owed its reputation
and scholarship, administration, and technical expertise to this numerically small
but socially influential, university trained elite. The buildungs Burgertum was

(43:58):
a uniquely German phenomena on that originated as a distinct
social class in the second half of the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. And these are the people who are
who run things. They're not the people who are in
charge of things, right, that's generally the nobility. They are
the people who are being delegated the task of actually
making shit happen, right, because they have the educations. And

(44:20):
this is a class that in the earliest period, including
the where we're up to the eighteen nineties, is a
progressive and liberal class. That's going to change. They're going
to become extremely conservative in the nineteen hundreds, but they're
not initially. And in fact, the first man to posit
what we would consider a modern view of what homosexuality is,

(44:43):
and the first gay man to come out publicly is
a member of the Buildings Burger TomEE in eighteen sixty seven,
the first modern like guy both too, and when I
say a modern understanding of homosexuality, this guy, Karl Ulrichs
comes to a conclusion that like, oh, homosexuality logically is
something I'm born as. Right, this isn't a choice. It

(45:04):
was viewed as both a choice and as like a
deviant thing. Right, Carl convinces himself like, no, no, no,
this is like a natural thing. And as a result,
we are a discriminated underclass and the laws need to change.
And he comes out in public in eighteen sixty seven
at a town meeting, and so he's like he's simultaneously
like introducing everyone at the meeting to the concept of

(45:25):
homosexuality and also saying, and I am one, which is
wildly brave, Like he is this jam rocks Well, he's
a member of the Buildings Burgertum, as is Alha Shugenberg
and okay, cool in terms of like seeing how this
gets how things shift. Nationalism in the late eighteen hundreds
is a progressive liberal ideology right in part because of

(45:49):
what it means about sort of how pre existing elites
needed to not have the kind of power that they
used to have. And Carl Ulrichs is a national German nationalist,
you know, previous to the existence of Germany. And normally
people see that they're like, okay, well that's right wing. No, no, no,
he is a German nationalist because the state, the German

(46:11):
state he is in, homosexual sex sodomy is legal, but
in Prussia it's illegal, and Prussia is pushing to dominate
all these other states. And so Rix becomes a German
nationalist because he's like, then we we other Germans will
be strong enough to force the Prussians to stop being
big ated against gay people. So when we talk about

(46:33):
German nationalism, this is not always like a right wing,
regressive ideology. There's a and in Hugenberg's earliest days there's
a lot of very progressive aspects to it.

Speaker 4 (46:43):
It is utterly fascinating that like living through present political times,
we think like, oh, you know this label that describes
this particular group of thinkers, that that correlation will be perennial,
like that will always mean that, but you know, it's

(47:03):
like no, but no, it can flip changes.

Speaker 1 (47:08):
The Republican Party used to be a very different thing.
That's eighteen sixty five or so. So from the beginning,
this uniquely German class, the buildings Burgertum, was characterized by
a close relationship to the state, since its strongest component
came from the upper echelons of state bureaucracies and various
German states. In addition to the people who are kind

(47:31):
of like running the government, there's also a lot of professors.
University professors are generally of this class, as well as
a lot of prominent lawyers. Right. And the origins of
this entire social class actually traced back to a guy
named Wilhelm von Humboldt. Humboldt was an educational reformer in
the early eighteen hundreds who remakes the whole Prussian education

(47:53):
system and he is a big believer in the power
of the individual to reach their full potential or buildung
through education. Right, among other innovations, he codifies the idea
of a national school system for kind of the first
time in the West that starts with primary school and
then secondary school and then university education. Everyone adopts this.

(48:15):
The foundations of our education system, such as it is,
are traced directly back to Humboldt and his reform of
the Prussian system. Right. He is basically the father of
the concept of universal mandatory education, which is paid for
by the state, and it's one of those there's a
lot of modern day criticisms of the Prussian system. People
will argue it only exists to provide soldiers, right, and

(48:38):
so the schools just trying to make you into a
good soldier for capitalism, and like, there's not one hundred
percent wrong. These were Prussians, so that was a big
part of why they wanted to educate people so they'd
be useful for the state. But Humbold's also a very
progressive guy for his time, and it would not be
fair to categorize him as like some sort of like
weirdo fascist, you know, because that's just not what's going
on at this point in time. He was not trying

(48:59):
to make students into little robots. His goal was to
was his citizenry who was capable of reasoning, thinking outside
of the box, and actively learning so is to better
serve the state. But he wasn't trying to like lock
people into a little box. And his reforms work well
enough that by the time Alfred Hugenberg is getting his start,
Germany has the best universities on the planet, and it

(49:22):
is universally agreed the best doctors in scientists are German, right,
And it's because they start having a modern university system
between everyone else in the early nineteen hundreds. Germany is
the font of learning in the West, and very much
is seen as that way, especially in the medical realm.
And this is that's a huge part of this class

(49:43):
that Hugenberg is a part of the buildings burgertomy. These
are they're characterized by their belief that education makes people better.
And because we're educated, we're better.

Speaker 5 (49:53):
Right, better, like morally better, yes, or better?

Speaker 1 (49:58):
Yes, very much that way too. Yes, So you can
see where the problems start to arise. Right, there's this
good thing of like they're like, we need to have
an expansive and well funded education system. Great, and also
we're better than the rest of you.

Speaker 5 (50:11):
Yeah, we're like more valid valuables.

Speaker 1 (50:16):
That's probably going to go in a bad direction. So
as you're starting to see there's some danger in having
a class like this, right, and what starts with a
well deserved sense of accomplishment in their own system morphs
into this overall sense of superiority. Right, if the world
is copying the German education system, which it is. Doesn't

(50:36):
it make sense that Germans should rule more of the world, right,
That's really a lot of how the thinking as this
progressive liberal class becomes more conservative. That's part of what
they're thinking now. Yeah, so you know that's going to
be a problem. It's this kind of thing that like,
by the end of the eighteen seventies they've stopped really

(50:57):
being as liberal, and by the eighteen nineties their advocates
of imperialism and they are aggressive nationalists. It's no longer
oh Rick's very reasonably progressive nationalism. It is a what
if we just took everything kind of nationalism? Right?

Speaker 2 (51:11):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (51:13):
So by early in nineteen oh nine, Hugenberg has made
a name for himself as a great businessman and financier
and an innovative thinker in the field of imperialism. He
gets scouted by the son of one of our old bastards,
a guy named Gustav Krupp, and Gustav is the inheritor
of the Krupp weapons dynasty. These are the guys who
had made Germany possible. Because Germany comes into being in

(51:35):
eighteen seventy when they beat the French in a war,
and they beat the French because Napoleon the Third is
still using brass cannons that are basically identical to the
ones the first Napoleon had used, and Friedrich Krupp his
people figured out how to make modern steel artillery that
is just so much better at killing men.

Speaker 5 (51:54):
Oh my god, wait was that guy was he? Was
he an art collector?

Speaker 1 (52:00):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean there were very rich families,
so yeah, they bought a lot of art.

Speaker 5 (52:04):
I think I went to an art exhibit in Zurich
that was exhibiting.

Speaker 4 (52:11):
He probably did art collection and like trying to reckon
with how those pieces were acquired.

Speaker 5 (52:18):
It was really interesting.

Speaker 1 (52:20):
The Crups, I mean, they're like Bezos level of wealthy
for the time, right, because they are selling the whole
world guns, right, they make the best ones. Now, Krupp
is a member of the aristocracy, right, but he's looking
for he is an understanding of like his limitations financially,
and so he's scouting for a man of quote, really

(52:40):
superior intelligence to become the new chairman of the board
of directors for Krupp and Hugenberg. He immediately recognizes as
a genius and he gives him the job. Right, So
Hugenberg is kind of the CEO of Krupp Arms, of
the biggest gun company in the world right ever existed
up to this point and for more. He is going

(53:03):
to be the guy running a lot of Technically, he's
primarily doing the financial decisions for krup so he's not
designing guns. But he is like the headman at Krupp
for the decade up to leading up to World War One, right,
Oh my god. And what's what Krupp is doing in
this period is pushing the Kaiser to build the machine

(53:24):
of death that is the German mobilization schedule, right. And
part of what they're doing is Crupp is going around
and they're they're going to one country and being like, hey,
we'll sell you these guns. You rarely got to modernize.
Your guns are a generation or two behind your neighbor,
and like they're getting armed, so why don't you get armed?
And then once they arm that country, they'll go to
another and be like, hey, your neighbor just bought a
bunch of You really got to get some new guns, right,

(53:46):
And this keeps everybody's anxiety.

Speaker 5 (53:50):
Yeah, it's just like I just sold your neighbor a
stack of Bibles.

Speaker 1 (53:57):
But this works so well, and heerg is, you know,
on the finance side of things that like dividends expand
from eighteen eight to fourteen percent from nineteen oh nine
to nineteen thirteen, like that's and that's a big deal.
Krupp is making so much fucking money. And because Alfred
is running shit, he becomes spectacularly wealthy. And the balance guy,

(54:19):
I think hundreds of millions of dollars by the standards
of his time, right, that's that's probably that's about where
he is in terms of like our modern concept of things.
He's not like a billionaire yet, but hundreds of millions now,
despite the fact that he is making Gustav Krupp so
much fucking money, the Krupts are again aristocracy, and Hugenberg,
despite his wealth, is just a burger, right, He's he's

(54:42):
not like a he's a common man, you know. He
comes from like the nicer part of the common class.
But Gustav doesn't really mean money. He's not going to
hang with him, right, As biographer Leopold writes, though everyone
was impressed with his extraordinary intelligence and obvious ability, there
is no indication that Hugenberg during his ten years stay
at Krups ever developed anything more than a formal relationship

(55:04):
with his employer. The patrician aloofness of the securely established
Crups contrasted sharply with a dogged determination to succeed which
characterized Hugenberg. Indeed, Hugenberg seemed temple bad hang. He's a
bad hang. Indeed, Hugenberg seemed typical of that class of
general directors which George Bernard described as being driven by
an inferiority complex because they know they are dependent and

(55:28):
in the final analysis, are as disposable as any other employee.
Lack of security made such a director continually harder and
more uncompromising than the owner himself, Possibly as a psychological compensation,
Hugenberg in these years emphasized the inflexibility, stubbornness, and self
righteousness which would characterize his political career. So he knows

(55:50):
you don't need me, you can throw me away if
I stop making you money, and that drives him to
be the son of a bitchiest of the sons of
bitches in business in this period.

Speaker 5 (56:00):
And my god, just you know this is maybe this
is gonna sound like a fucked up thing.

Speaker 2 (56:04):
To say, but like.

Speaker 5 (56:07):
Maybe he needed more love, you know, like did his parents?

Speaker 2 (56:11):
Yeah, you know who.

Speaker 5 (56:15):
Away?

Speaker 1 (56:16):
I mean, okay, maybe later. Not a big personal life guy,
you know.

Speaker 5 (56:21):
Yeah, isn't it you know? Yeah, it's just this fucking.

Speaker 1 (56:27):
Loly scrooge plays by Michael.

Speaker 5 (56:32):
Yes, yikes.

Speaker 4 (56:34):
He just you know, he needed one of those really
really intensive like parent child therapy sessions where like, you know,
a teenage boy is like forced to sit on his
mom's lap and make eye contact with her for like
two hours.

Speaker 1 (56:48):
Well you know, the downside is that they do have
psychotherapy by then. But if he had gone to it
at this point, he would have just been given a
shipload of cocaine by Freud, Like, which is okay, this
guy's a finance bro that is not gonna make shit better.

Speaker 4 (57:00):
No, no, no, no, he needs he should have fast
forward to the Kenmine Kenmine time right right.

Speaker 1 (57:07):
That would have fixed him. Our ketamine billionaires are in
such good health.

Speaker 5 (57:12):
Oh yeah, wait, whoa do you think do you think
that Alfie was on coke?

Speaker 1 (57:18):
I mean, it's it was. He probably took it at
some point just because it was in a lot of medications,
like a lot of patent medications. There's a bunch of
different shit you would be given for, like a flu
that might have had some coke or some heroin in it.

Speaker 4 (57:28):
Right, So maybe that is a parallel again between him
and Elon there. They could be both medicated rob it.

Speaker 1 (57:35):
Could be both medicaid. No way to know. I Alfred
is very insecure because of his position, and he takes
this insecurity out on his workers, by which I mean
Krupp workers. He despised socialism and he found himself violently
opposed to anything that smelled slightly of democracy, by which
I mean unions. Alfred talked a lot about wanting to

(57:55):
make unions obsolete. He's basical. He's one of these guys
who's like, well, I'm just going to treat employees so well,
they'll become members of the petite bourgeoisie. I'm going to
give them stock in the company. Then why would they
want to be unions. They'll be shareholders, right, and they'll
be able to buy their own homes. And what he's
suggesting here, this is what happens in the US post
war to create the most prosperous society in history. So

(58:18):
like within the capitalists new US, this is an idea
that does work. It's going to work in the US
not long after this. But Hugenberg is just bullshitting. He
has no interest in doing any of this. As Leopold notes, quote,
working and living conditions did not change much during Hugenberg's tenure.
He ultimately did find himself forced to work with what

(58:39):
he called yellow unions, which are trade unions that aren't
allowed to strike. Right, So he'll work with these guys
because they don't actually have any teeth. But as a rule,
he found even that kind of union disgusting, and he
starts pushing internal propaganda within Krupp that depicted management and employees,
in Leopold's words, quote, not antithetical classes, but common producers

(59:01):
of shared wealth. You know, you and Krupp, the plutocrat
who owns all of this money. By pushing everyone towards
World War one, you're really the same, you know. That's like,
that's the propaganda. He's not good at propaganda at this stage, now,
got it. Yeah, And again, the wealth's not actually being shared.

(59:22):
And this is something Alfred and his fellow industrialists would
acknowledge cheerfully. They don't think you should share wealth. They
are social Darwinists. They believe the poor and working class
can only be trusted with a certain amount of money,
and if they have any more than that, they'll fritter
it away on harmful nonsense because they're just not smart
enough to reinvest it into the German arms industry, right,

(59:42):
which is obviously what a smart man does with his money.
By nineteen twelve, Hugenberg was one of the most prominent
men in the entire Reich. He was awarded the Red
Order of the Eagle by the Kaiser. Now, this is
one of dozens of made up awards that the Kaiser
would give different German over the years in order to
like because you know, you need to have a bunch

(01:00:03):
of fake awards to hand each other. So everybody can
wear a uniform that looks fancy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and
it's worth it.

Speaker 4 (01:00:10):
The Nexium sash, it's the sash, Yes of Germany at
the stack yes, and.

Speaker 1 (01:00:15):
Alfred's Red Order medal is third class with a bow.
I don't know what that.

Speaker 5 (01:00:20):
Means, Leopold, that sounds dumb.

Speaker 1 (01:00:23):
Yeah. At the ceremonies, the Chairman of the Board delivered
a masterful speech criticizing the attempt to use universal male
suffrage as a means of imposing class rule and the Reich.
He insisted that neither voting nor legislation would advance the workers,
but only a very much richer, very much greater, and
very much more powerful Germany would be continue to ensure

(01:00:43):
continued benefits for the industrial proletariat. And so in the
speech he's saying, the only thing that can make the
poor the working class more comfortable is if we steal
everything from the rest of the world. That's your only hope. Guys,
dam stuff. Speaking of stealing everything from the rest of
the world, Sophie, can we should we show them our sponsors.

Speaker 2 (01:01:07):
I don't think we're stealing things from the rest of
the world.

Speaker 1 (01:01:10):
You never know, I steal shit sometimes, Sophie.

Speaker 2 (01:01:13):
Like Cable allegedly, allegedly.

Speaker 1 (01:01:16):
Allegedly allegedly were we sure as hell are yes? So, now,
as I said, during this whole period, one things that's
going on is this cycle where crupples send their arms
merchants abroad and say, hey, your neighbor just bought all
these great cannons or you know, this machine gun and

(01:01:37):
they're thinking of using it, so why don't you get
some more guns? And one of the things this cycle
of upgrades does. It's great for crup's bottom line and
other weapons manufacturers. They're all taking part in this. This
is not just crupt Germany. It's not just responsible for
the preconditions of World War One, obviously, But one thing
that this cycle that these arms manufacturers all responsible for
means is that every European leader is constantly thinking, Okay,

(01:01:59):
right now, we've got better artillery in French, but their
machine guns are a little better, and in two years
they're going to have new artillery, so maybe we need
to go to war now if we're gonna have a
chance of beating them, right, Like, everyone's always thinking.

Speaker 5 (01:02:11):
How like manufactured escalation?

Speaker 1 (01:02:14):
Legal like this because these people own the government, run
the government to a big extent.

Speaker 5 (01:02:20):
Yeah, and it's fucked up.

Speaker 1 (01:02:24):
Yeah, it's great. So Hugenberg profits from this process, and
he may have been more directly involved than even just
like running the finances and benefiting it, because he winds
up involved in a huge scandal right in late nineteen
twelve to early nineteen thirteen. He's implicated significantly in what's
called the corn Volzer affair. Now I'm going to quote

(01:02:47):
from an article by Lothar Burchart from the nineteen eighty
eight German Yearbook on Business History to describe the Cornsvolner affair.
A Krup employee was found guilty of bribing army and
Navy officers. This proved not only to the German but
also to the foreign skeptics that they were right to
believe that the company would stop at nothing in pursuit
of its interests. In nineteen oh five, George Bernard Shaw

(01:03:07):
had already, in his play Missed Major Barbara, not been
sparing with his insinuations. In nineteen thirteen, even the serious
American journal The Iron Age wrote, following the facts revealed
during the cornwallser affair, that Krupp was obviously recently prepared
to go to any links to agitate a war, even
before the First World War had really started. HG. Wells
had already decided who was the real culprit in the

(01:03:29):
center of this disaster, which had finally become a world catastrophe.
Is Kruppism the dirty, violent trade with the tools of death.
It was shortly afterwards that the often repeated but never
conclusively proved allegation arose that the then company boss, Gustav
Kropp Vi Boland Unhalbach had been informed by the Kaiser
months in advance of the imminent war, and Alfred is

(01:03:51):
directly implicated in this bribery of army and naval officers
as like, because he's the manager of this guy, and
it's too much to say that we don't know. Again,
we don't really know if the Kaiser was literally warned
months in advance of the imminent war, because I don't
actually think it was planned that way. But that's the
rumor going around, right, And it's definitely true that Huggenberg

(01:04:14):
is aware of how tensions are ratcheting up and is
using that as a way he is taking advantage of
this to make money in a way that makes World
War one more likely. Right, he is implied he has
some of the war guilt, right, because of the position
that he has. Again, there's plenty of war guilt to
go around. The French aren't blameless, the British aren't even blameless,

(01:04:35):
and fucking the Russian sure is shit aren't blameless. But
he's one of the He's one of a small number
of men who is directly implicated and creating the conditions
of World War One, Right, now, yeah, given his agent wealth,
there's no chance Hugenberg or too many of the people
he cared about, because he doesn't care about a lot
of people, we're going to have to fight and die

(01:04:56):
in this war. In fact, he was very pro the
idea of having a World War one. He's gotten back
into the Pan Germanic League at this point, and the
league is doing everything they can do to encourage Germany
to go to war with its neighbors. If you're you know,
if you're old enough to remember the biggest cheerleaders for
the war in Iraq, that's that's what these guys are doing, right.

(01:05:16):
They're coming up with justifications for like, why we have
to go liberate eastern France. Right, they'll welcome us as
liberators Belgian Is naturally.

Speaker 4 (01:05:27):
Yeah, did you just imply that because Alfie like had
no friends and no loved ones and no family members
and thus no one to lose in a war, He's
just like, yeah, fucking go off.

Speaker 1 (01:05:38):
He's got nothing to gain from a war. Yeah, so
nothing to lose, Yeah, well, nothing to lose. You're right,
Sorry I fucked up?

Speaker 5 (01:05:45):
Yeah yeah, yeah, and sounds like the right he is. Yeah,
Ultimately he's doing life wrong.

Speaker 1 (01:05:53):
But he's doing life very wrong. Yeah, and to make
things worse, you know, he's cajoling European powers to arm
each other, both in his job as an arms dealer
and through this social club that he's helping to run.
And then in nineteen twelve something terrible happens is the
same year of the cornballser affair. The Social Democrats win
big in that year's German elections, and Germany is a

(01:06:15):
parliament parliamentary monarchy, right, they have a parliament. The Kaisers
I'm described as an absolute ruler and he has he
can overrule most things, right, but there is a parliament
and they don't have zero power. And the Social Democrats
win big that year, which scares the shit out of
Alfred and people like him. Right, So he starts talking

(01:06:37):
to other rich reactionary nationalists and he tries to sell
them on an idea he's had, which is he wants
to create a cartel of the producing classes. In other words,
he wants to get all of the rich business owners
together and form a union of rich guys to collectively
bargain in their own interests. Right, he sees what union

(01:06:58):
is now, Yeah, oh yeah, gold union, Yes, exactly. And
this is a thing He's not alone in thinking this.
A lot of magnates in the Ruh and the Rure
is Germany's industrial heartland. It's where the guns get made, right,
And a lot of the guys who run and own
the minds and the companies making raw materials and the
companies turning those raw materials into weapons and other stuff,

(01:07:19):
they're all thinking along the same lines. And so in
nineteen thirteen he is hired to chair the board of
directors for an organization that pools money from mine and
factory owners in the area for profit. And part of
the goal here, he's not just like investing it, he
is spending it to benefit them. Part of the idea
is you will spend a chunk of our money we
all give like one percent or whatever, right, and that

(01:07:41):
money accumulates and you spend it to influence the culture,
right to put out news and stuff in propaganda that's
positive for us. Hugenberg is going to be running that project,
right because these guys, these industrial magnates, have the billionaires
of their day, have come to the conclusion that if
we can just change the news stories poor people read,

(01:08:03):
poor people will stop trying to get our money.

Speaker 5 (01:08:06):
You know, like, yeah, wow, Okay. So when you say
that he wasn't good at propaganda yet.

Speaker 1 (01:08:12):
Yet, well, also this is a very musk thing, right,
Like we're coming to the key buys Twitter part. Right.
So again, Hugenberg is not a skilled propagandist in terms off,
he doesn't make propaganda, nor does he like write it.
He's not drawing it or anything like that. But he
sees the need for propaganda and he's good at hiring
people who are good at stuff. So in nineteen fourteen

(01:08:33):
he uses a bunch of this pooled corporate money to
form a holding company called Ousland GmbH. A month later,
that company forms a subsidiary named Ousland Azigen. Leopold explains
what happened next, which will sound very familiar to those
of you who know anything about the Daily Wire. Ouceland
Azigen was established to study foreign publications and to coordinate

(01:08:55):
the advertising of heavy industrial firms interested in exports. So
he's sending out people to study foreign media propaganda and
bring back advice so that they can create news outlets
that will represent the interests of the rich. Right, that's
what he's doing. Now, this is initially just an advertising thing, right,

(01:09:19):
Like the idea is and we'll make that way, will
make better ad propaganda. But the study of foreign ads
expands to a general study of foreign propaganda, and this
kind of conclusion starts to develop that, like, you know what, ads,
that's not the best way to propagandize people. Journalism is
the best way to propagandize people. News articles are the
best way to propagandize people.

Speaker 5 (01:09:39):
Right, spon con that doesn't look like spon con.

Speaker 1 (01:09:42):
Yes, And so they're working This is what they start
working on when in August of nineteen fourteen, the shooting
starts on the Western Front, and we will talk about
that what happens later and how Alfred Hugenberg finally gets
in bed with zen Nazis in Part two. How are
you feeling, Amanda.

Speaker 5 (01:10:01):
I feel amazing. I feel really glad that I it's
a normal way to.

Speaker 1 (01:10:06):
Feel when you talk about Alfred Hugenberg. Yes, well, I'm
America's sweetheart.

Speaker 5 (01:10:13):
Yeah exactly. I well kind of because I I feel
whenever I hear stories like this, I feel like, oh wow,
I'm not the worst person in history.

Speaker 1 (01:10:24):
No, no, no, you're You're a better person than Alfred Hugenberg.
A low bar Russell Brand might be a better person
than Alfred Hugenberg and he just got some pretty serious cris.

Speaker 5 (01:10:39):
Yeah, yeah, that's a fun game. But you know who's
a worst person.

Speaker 1 (01:10:45):
I'll say this, very few historians blame Russ Russell Brand
for the outbreak of World War One. Almost never, you know,
almost almost No. Honestly, would be super impressive if he'd
managed that somehow.

Speaker 4 (01:10:59):
I would love to talk to a historian who's like
open to discussing a working theory that Russell Brand has something.

Speaker 1 (01:11:06):
To do with, just like any of a photo of
him in the background in Sarah Jevo as the Archduke
drives past.

Speaker 4 (01:11:12):
Oh my god, yeah, Russell he does have sort of
a time travelers styling to him.

Speaker 5 (01:11:23):
It is one of these could have been any era
at all.

Speaker 1 (01:11:26):
There's some guys like Matt Damon. You put Matt Damon
in like a historical movie from one hundred and twenty
years ago. I'm sorry, Matt Damon has as people have said,
Matt Damon has a face that knows what a smartphone is, right,
like you just can't get so true. But yeah, Russell Brand,
if I saw him in a picture of from like
eighteen forty eight, I'd be.

Speaker 2 (01:11:42):
Like, no, that's good bad.

Speaker 5 (01:11:43):
Yeah, you might belong there. Yeah, oh my god, that's
so funny.

Speaker 1 (01:11:47):
With sex crimes there. But he might belong there for sure.

Speaker 4 (01:11:51):
Yeah yeah, yeah, I mean he belongs there as much
as anywhere, which right nowhere. But do you ever see
people I r L in twenty twenty five You're like,
whoa you do you have a face that looks like
an old cepia toned like faded print from the late
nineteenth century?

Speaker 5 (01:12:11):
Because I do sometimes.

Speaker 1 (01:12:13):
Yeah, No, I get that a lot.

Speaker 5 (01:12:14):
Actually yourself, you're like every time A look in the mirror.

Speaker 1 (01:12:19):
Yeah, all right, well, Amanda, you got any pluggables before
we roll out a part one?

Speaker 3 (01:12:25):
Yes.

Speaker 4 (01:12:26):
If if people like hearing about cults in a cheeky
tone or really just cult like organizations from the modern
day site geist and want to participate in determining whether
or not they are real cults, they can listen to
my podcast sounds like a cult about the modern day
cults we all follow, from Disney Adults to Elon Musk.

Speaker 3 (01:12:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:12:46):
So yeah, and we have an episode coming out with
you about Mark Zuckerberg. So that's going to be exciting. Yeah,
and then Cultish. My book Cultish is coming out in
paperback in June.

Speaker 1 (01:12:57):
Excellent well, check out Coldish, check out everything Amanda is
involved with, and check out prtoon coming in like a day.

Speaker 3 (01:13:09):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever.

Speaker 5 (01:13:20):
You get your podcasts.

Speaker 3 (01:13:22):
Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes
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Speaker 4 (01:13:27):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: Alfred Hugenberg: The Elon Musk of Weimar Germany