Part One: How Nice, Normal People Made The Holocaust Possible

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
It's Behind the Bastards, the only podcast where we have
to edit out large chunks of it because of the
number of veiled threats I make towards social media. CEOs
my guest today to talk about some of the worst
people in all of history. Uh is my my good friend,
one of my favorite stand up comedians and fellow podcast

(00:24):
ear like Musketeer. It spelt like musketeer, but the podcast
Sophia Alexandra. Yeah, I'm so happy to be here. Thank
you for having me. Thank you, Sophia for being here.
How are you doing today? You know, just smiling ear ear,
smiling ear to ear. Sophia, how do you how do
you feel about Nazis? Um? Well, are they hot? I

(00:49):
mean statistically some of them where yes? Of course, still
a no for me, still a no, a no. Okay, okay,
that's a bold, bold stance for you to take you.
Thank you so much. I am braver than than the president,
that's for sure. Yeah, yeah, that's for sure. So you know,
one of the few nice things about the last couple

(01:11):
of months, which have broadly sucked, is that like a
whole bunch of mainstream news sites and pundits, uh and
and influencers and whatnot who were like making fun of
folks like me who were worried about, you know, the
whole fascism thing. Um are now are now talking seriously about,

(01:32):
like this is pretty fascist. A lot of the stuff
that's going on seems like we're in a bad place,
like the Atlantics running articles and ship on you know that.
Um So that's been nice that, like people are taking
the rise of fascism in America more seriously. Um And
except for like, this is the reaction that would have

(01:52):
been appropriate like four years old, four years ago, and
now is just so underwhelmed ing and so much less
than what we need that it's almost negligible. Yeah yeah, yeah,
I mean I'm not giving them credit, but at least
at least people aren't like calling you like a doomsayer

(02:13):
or whatever for for being like, hey, this kind of
seems like what was happening in Germany back in the thirties.
You'll remember Germany back in the thirties, what happened there.
The truth is, people don't they just remember, how like
the haircuts, Yeah, that's why we did, you know. And
one of the earlier episodes we did on this show
was about like the non Nazi bastards who helped Hitler
rise to power UM, which was based on a really

(02:36):
good book that people should still read called The Death
of Democracy, and kind of at the time when I
put that together, I thought it was really important that
people understand how um, like multicultural and progressive the Weimar
Republic was, and how that sort of a place turned
to totalitarian is m because I think it's possible for
any democracy, no matter how progressive, with like the right

(02:57):
number of bad years, and we've certainly had some bad years. UM.
So the thing I wanted to do today, though, like
that episode focused a lot on politicians, on like you know,
high ranking conservative politicians, on members of the aristocracy, on
like you know, left wing politicians, and like like the leaders,
like the different leaders of political parties, and like the
decisions they made that allowed Hitler to to get into

(03:21):
power UM, And I want to focus on I want
to focus on a different group of people today who
were who were as responsible for letting Hitler do what
he did, but who weren't a lot of them, Like
we don't even really know the names of the individuals,
and it's not really important because what we're talking about
today are the little Nazis, the rank and file fascists

(03:44):
who voted Hitler into office and gave him their support,
because I think there's a lot we can learn about
our own modern fascists. And again, not like the not
the proud boys and stuff, not the people taking to
the streets and fighting, but the people who are like willing,
who will who would support President Trump not just in
re election, but in throwing people into camps and you know,

(04:05):
re educating or killing his ideological and enemies. Like the
kind of people who wouldn't stand out on the street
and risk their lives for a fascist regime, but would
kind of stand back and let it happen and give
it just enough of their support that it's able to
go the rest of the distance. We're talking about those
kind of people today, and we're talking about those kind

(04:25):
of people from the Nazi regime, like the the little
Nazis is a is a term that I'm actually stealing
from a very controversial book by an author named Milton
Sanford Meyer. Um and Meyer's book was probably the first
postwar investigation into how and whine normal German citizens joined
the Nazi Party. So it's not a book again about
like the proud boy equivalence, the fascist street paramilitaries who

(04:48):
helped Hitler rise to prominence. It mostly deals with like
bakers and teachers and like policemen who decided pretty late
in the game to to support Hitler and help him
do the things that he did. So that's who we're
talking about today, is the is the little Nazis. And
I think people will recognize a lot of comparisons, um
between those folks and some people they may know in

(05:11):
their daily lives. I think it's a little bit hilarious
when people talk about, like when people would talk about
Nazis like like during the forties and then people just
went along with them and they'd be like, I could
never do that. And now fast forward to today, like
those are the same people that won't even fucking read

(05:33):
a proper article or you know, vote or you know,
do anything that might be helpful for anyone sign a petition.
I don't fucking know, you know, Yeah, yeah, I mean
it's it's um So that passivity, I guess, is what
I'm saying. Is it We all have that to some degree.
It's it's a thing you have to like that. It

(05:54):
is absolutely that passivity is what lets the Nazis get
away with the things that they get away with, exactly.
And we'll be talking about those kind of folks too.
We'll be talking, particularly at the end of part two
about the folks who supported the Nazis even though they
weren't Nazi voters, you know, supported them by their inaction, UM,
because I think that's important to talk about. But a

(06:16):
lot of what we're chatting about are folks, like folks
who kind of the kind of people who would have
said something along the lines of, well, I don't like Hitler, um,
but I don't you know, I think that I don't
think that he's very serious about a lot of this
anti Jew stuff. I think that'll that will die down
once he wins, and like you know, he'll be good
for the economy. And you've heard the people who are

(06:38):
making the same arguments in nine three or whatever that
like folks made in sixteen and are continuing to make UM.
And that's why I think I think UM. Milton Myer's
book is so valuable because it basically what he did
is he traveled to Germany immediately after the war UM,
and he made he befriended a bunch of members of

(07:00):
the Nazi Party, and not again, not like people who'd
had any stance, but like normal working class people who
just joined the party and voted for Hitler. And he
was he was a Milton was a Jewish journalist, um.
Which he didn't talk about the fact that he was
Jewish to them, but he like he made that that's
not really gonna be something that people loved here in
the Nazi Party meetings, He's like, I mean, one of

(07:22):
the things that might be most unsettling, and we'll get
to this, is that, like, I think a lot of
them probably wouldn't have cared all that much because that
wasn't their motivation for supporting the Nazis, which again is
one of the more unsettling things about them, is the
number of people who enabled the Holocaust despite not really
having super like like organized anti Semitic feelings themselves. Um Like,

(07:43):
that's one of the most unsettling things about the Holocaust
is the number of people who enabled it to happen
despite not particularly wanting it to happen, um. Which is
kind of one of the things we don't talk about
enough when we talk about the Holocaust, because that's almost
even scarier to me than the people who whose hatred
and racism moved them to take action. It's the people who,

(08:05):
like you, knew this was wrong and you let it
happen um or you even helped in some way. I don't.
We'll talk about that too, So let's cut straight to
the chase. Though. Are there dead babies in this episode?
There's the insinuation of dead babies in this episode because
a lot of babies died in the Holocaust, but we
don't there's not. Well, actually no, there is. There is.

(08:25):
There is direct baby killing. Yes, what will be talking
graphically about baby killing in part two? Actually? Yes, start
a bit. This is how you get me. I can't
write a Sophia episode without some dead babies in it.
You can't look. It's Sophie grinning over there. I think
she remembered before I did this. Yeah, So when when

(08:52):
When Meyers set out to write this book and you know,
started making all these friends, his goal was to sketch
out quote the delineation of the personal conditions under which
the little man anywhere becomes involved in the development of
totalitarian evil, and the ways in which he assumes or
avoids moral responsibility for his participation in it. Which I
think is a really good premise for a book, um,

(09:15):
especially consider he was kind of the first guy to
look into this. So he moves to Jeremany right after
the war. He makes good friends with like ten male
former members of the Nazi Party, and he titles his
book about them they Thought They Were Free. And we'll
talk a little bit about that title later, and I
think it's one of my favorite, my favorite titles for
any book. UM. Now, there's a lot of good critiques

(09:36):
about Meyer's book, and we'll talk about as fuck. It's
incredibly ominous, and it incredibly pointed, and it makes a
very important point that again we'll talk to in a bit. Um.
There's there's good criticisms of the book, a number of
them being that, like, for one thing, he only talks
to men, right, which is like kind of a bias
of the time, um, which is is definitely a flaw

(09:58):
in the book. He also Tinman isn't a huge chunk
of people, but you get a lot of detail into
why those ten people did you know, the things that
they did, which I think is really valuable. UM. And
you know, they're ten people from one town, so you
can't assume it's like a super broad It doesn't give
us the broader picture on on all of the different
reasons people picked the Nazi Party. So we'll be going

(10:19):
to I have a lot of outside evidence, a lot
of things besides the book that we'll be talking about
that sort of give us that broader picture. Um. I
want to start our episode with a brief overview of
Meyer's life because I think it's really interesting. Uh. He
was born in Chicago in nineteen o eight and he
studied at the University of Chicago, but he got kicked
out before graduating because he was caught hucking beer bottles
at the dean from like the top floor of his dormitory.

(10:42):
Me a bad boy. Yeah. When he was questioned about it,
he was like, my only regret is I didn't hit him.
You gotta love the guy. Um. So he drops out
of college and he gets a job in journalism shortly thereafter,
and he, you know, he does a number of things.
He works for her paper, so he gets some like
muckraking kind of like populist sort of experience. Um. And

(11:05):
he actually he winds up being the guy who comes
up with the actual like the lion that is every
journalist job description today. He's the guy who convinced the
phrase speak truth to power, Like that's that's Milton Meyer. Um,
he's the first person to like put those words together,
which I think still is the best job the best
like job summary you can have as a journalist. That's

(11:27):
not came up with breast cancer, thirst trap, but that doesn't.
That's pretty good to friend as much. I have that
tattooed on my body. Also, Yeah, oh is it? Is
it where you said you were going to get it
above Oh yeah, no, yep, yep, yep, yep, not on
the ankle, because you're going to get it under the dick,
and then he decided to go above that the under

(11:48):
the dick was too full of other tattoos. Smart. I have,
oddly enough the opening to slaughter House five, which was
maybe a poor choice in retrospect, a lot of words
to it on there. So it's your way of telling
us you are huge, because that's not what needs to
happen during this Nazi reckoning episode. Robert Evans, Yeah, I'm

(12:10):
not the president. I'm not going to turn something serious
into talking about my dick. So Milton was fundamentally a
believer in human rights and he felt that people should
fight like hungry dogs to maintain those rights in the
face of state oppression they thought they were free. Came
out of his confusion that citizens of the Weimar Republic,
which is again a very progressive state, would give up
their rights so readily. Like he was kind of baffled

(12:32):
by this, and he just personally needed an answer. And
for his time, you know, he had his biases, like
we just talked about, not really talking, not talking to
women to any meaningful extent, but he was also a
pretty enlightened soul for his time. He repeatedly compares the
bigotry paced faced by European Jews to Jim crow um,
to the oppression of black people in the United States
to the internment of Japanese Americans. Um So, he's he's

(12:55):
a guy who's who's looking. He's not, He's he's very oh,
kind of what the United States represents in his eyes,
but he's certainly not blind to its faults, and he
sees that like, oh, a fascism comes to the United States,
it will be based in bigotry against these different groups.
That I think is pretty accurate. Um So he's he's
he's I think a guy who's worth paying attention to

(13:17):
um And I really, like I said earlier that like
I like his definition of little men, of of what
like a little man is in a culture. And I'm
gonna quote from that now. He's talking about the friends
that he made to write this book. These ten men
were little men. Only Hair Hildebrant, the teacher, had any
substantial status in the community. And when I say little men,

(13:39):
I mean not only the men for whom the mass
media and the campaign speeches are everywhere designed, but specifically
and sharply stratified societies like Germany, the men who think
of themselves in that way. Every one of my ten
Nazi friends, including Hildebrant, spoke again and again during our
discussions of we little people. We have that in the

(14:00):
United States, don't we do a different extent. We don't
call it, they don't call themselves the little people, but
everyday Americans, real Americans, like that's our version of that.
Working class heroes. Yeah, working class heroes. We have our
version of that. You know, it's important not to over
extend comparisons because Germany very different society, a lot of
stuff going on that we don't have going on, just

(14:22):
like we but like you can you can see a
line like you know, people who see themselves that way.
I think that reminds me of the fact that basically, like, uh,
when you don't have a lot, yeah, the one thing
you can like cling to is your identity. Yeah, exactly
is your identity. So if you see yourself as constantly

(14:43):
getting like the short une of the stick, you would
think of yourself as like, yeah, I'm the everyday little man,
you know, and it's it's it's those little men number one.
As Mayer points out, it's the little men that all
of the Nazi electoral campaigns were focused on. They wanted
to win the little men, and it's a little men
who made the Holocaust possible. You know, if you have

(15:06):
a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand people
who want to kill all of whatever ethnic group, the Jews,
the immigrants, like whatever, if you have a few hundred
or a few thousand of them in a society, the
most they're gonna do is commit some hate crimes, which
are terrible, but they're not going to be able to
actually carry out a genocide if there's not a few
million people who get on board just enough to let

(15:28):
it happen, you know, And that that's why I like
Meyer's book. That's why I think it's important. So yeah, again,
not a perfect book, but I think a valuable one. Now,
I want to start this episode by busting a myth,
and we just talked about it, and it's the myth
that every person who would joined the Nazi Party or
supported them actively hated Jewish people. Um. And I think

(15:50):
it's important to counter that, not to give the Nazis credit,
because I think it actually condemns those individuals. More. The
thing that's important for people to understand is that you
don't little men and women don't have to hate in
order to enable genocides. Benign indifference is all that's necessary.
And this is really well illustrated by the story of
one of myers Nazi friends, a former bank clerk named Kessler. Now,

(16:13):
Kessler was late to join the Nazi Party, and he
was never a full convert to the ideology. As late
as nineteen thirty eight, he maintained a fairly close friendship
with a local Jewish man named Rosenthal, who had once
been his boss, the director of his bank. Now, the
day before Christallnacht, when the synagogue in their city was
burnt to the ground, as were so many other synagogues
in Germany. Kessler told his Jewish friend that quote, with

(16:36):
men like me and the party, things will be better,
You'll see. Um can we say though that this has
a real have I have one black friend kind of vibe?
You know? Sure, like I have a Jewish frenz. See
doesn't really seem like it's great if you can. It's

(16:57):
one guy you know that's Jewish and that's fun in it.
That's that's not good. It's certainly not good. And again
I'm not trying to like defend these Nazis by saying
that they didn't actively hate. The point is that, um,
it was it was it was people like Kessler who
and and this guy like that might got to know
him pretty well. He talked about his friendship with this
man a decent amount, and like talked about to the

(17:19):
extent that like you can you can see that Kessler
felt guilty about his party affiliation and was trying to
assuage it with with with comments like this, which means
there was number one, an extent to which he knew
what he was doing was wrong and he was kind
of trying to wash the slate clean in his own
head by saying like, no, by joining this party, I

(17:40):
can pull it back towards a rational side of things,
right Like that was what this guy had to tell
himself in order to kind of deal with the guilt
that he knew he was supporting something bad. Um. And
I think we know a lot of people who are
in that position in our country today. Um, I'm related
to some of them. Uh. Kessler believed quote that has

(18:02):
more and more decent citizens joined it. It being the
Nazi party, it would certainly join it for the better.
And Meyer goes on to write, quote, my friends meant
what they said. They calculated wrong, but they meant what
they said. And the Moral and Religious bank clerk was
on the basis of that mortally wrong calculation to preach
the most barbarous paganism and the decent bourgeoisie teacher who

(18:24):
was to teach Nazi literature from Nazi textbooks provided by
the Nazi school board. Teachers teach what they are told
to teach, or quit, and to quit a public post
mint in the early years of the Third Reich, unemployment
later when one had an anti Nazi political past and
meant concentration camp. Once you were in the party, said
his friend, the baker, who doesn't say he ever wanted
to get out. You didn't get out easily. And again

(18:47):
you see what he's kind of the point he's making
there is that like these people talk about how hard
it is to get out, but they didn't try. And
this is one of the things that if you that
that I think because of when he was writing this,
Meyer didn't know. But there's actually it's over emphasized the
degree to which people would have potentially faced punishment for
refusing to take part in a in an anti Jewish bigotry.

(19:08):
There was not a single leader in the Wehrmacht, not
a single officer in CEO, who was punished for refusing
to take part in a massacre. And some of them did.
The ones who participated did so because they were scared
that it would harm their ability to get promoted, or
because of peer pressure. But like nobody, it actually is

(19:29):
a myth that members like you were punished if you
actively tried to help people hide. Let's just say it
was frowned upon, but it wasn't. You wouldn't like the
people who participated weren't in fear of their lives if
they didn't participate. There's no saying it wasn't prohibited. They weren't.
Like if you do this, you will suffer with this.

(19:52):
It was, Oh, it's frowned upon, so probably not do it.
Oh do it because it will make me unpopular to
not do it. Like and again, that's much more unsettling
than these people all being radicalized automatons who are just
lockstep in favor of Nazism. Like, it's so much less
scary to me that somebody could be like a straight
up member of the s S and just onboard for

(20:13):
genocide than somebody than that somebody could help with the
genocide because like, well, people won't like me if I
don't like that. That's way scarier to me. I don't know,
um and just real, yeah, and real it speaks to
something ugly in all of us, because I think a
lot of people would do that. I mean, the whole
idea behind the parties that you're joining a group of

(20:35):
people and that gives you something that you don't get
when you're on your own. You know, that can be
positive or negative depending on what the party you're joining is.
And when I read all these stories because there's a
few of them, and Myer's book about people who thought
that joining about like kind of more moderate folks who
thought that joining the Nazi Party would pull it in

(20:57):
a better direction. I'm reminded of General mad Dog Maddis now.
I think you remember, like back when he first got
appointed Secretary of Defense. They are all these think pieces
about like how good this would be and about how
this would like make Trump more moderate and and and
pull him towards the sides side of rationality. Uh. There's
a Mother Jones article titled Democrats hope mad Dog will

(21:20):
call him Trump down. Um, like Senator Jack Reid when
he was like because he had to get a special
dispensation to be the Secretary of Defense that she had
been in the army so recently, Um Jack. Senator Jack Read's,
a Democrat, said that he hoped Madis would be the
saucer that cools the coffee. Um. And Senator Richard Blumenval,
who did vote against giving Maddis a waiver, still said

(21:42):
that like, Uh, in this moment of history, I believe
that your appreciation for the costs of war and blood
treasure in lives and the impact on veterans afterwards, were
enable you to be a check on rash and potentially
ill considered force use of military force by a president
elect who perhaps lacks that same appreciation. And of course
what did we see. Maddis completely failed to drag Trump

(22:02):
towards a reasonable position on absolutely anything. Civilian casualties from
US action increased massively as soon as Trump took office.
The rate of joke drone strikes increased to an enormous degree,
and as a result of the Trump administration's escalation of
violent force, the United States now kills more Afghan civilians
than the Taliban does. Um, there's just no evidence that

(22:22):
Maddis calmed Trump at all, because fascists don't let reasonable
men dictate their policies. If they did, they wouldn't be fascists,
you know. Um, But it's the same people keep making
the same calculation, right. Um. You know, you can cliche
it's the whole thing, Like, oh, you can change it
from the inside. Yeah, that's a cliche for a reason,

(22:43):
because that ship does not work. It's like that might
change it from the inside. You're in the inside. You're
on the fucking inside. That's what the inside is. That's
what it means. Yeah, it's like that lion in the
Simpsons when Homer says, but Marge, maybe if I'm a
part of that angry mob, I can help steer it
in positive directions. He will not. Yeah, Um, but I

(23:07):
think we can all Like you see people today making
the same calculations. Um, And you see people today like another.
I have a lot of family members who kind of
made the calculation. I can remember early in sixteen, we
had a family reunion before Trump was back, when everyone
was still assuming he would he would fail to win. Um.

(23:28):
And like all of my Republican family members were dunking
on the guy because they all loved John McCain and
Trump had said a bunch of shitty things about John McCain,
so they hated Trump. And then he became the candidate
and they all voted for him. Uh. And they insisted
to me that it was it was worthwhile because at
the very least Trump was not a dirty socialist like
Hillary Clinton. And let's let's skip over the fact that, like,

(23:50):
let's skip over everything that's wrong with that statement. It's
something that you all that it's another echo because campaigning
against violent communists was a big part of the Nazis
rested their electoral hopes on um. Myer's friend Herr Kessler
told him quote, Hitlerism had to answer communism with something.
Just as radical communism always used force, Hitlerism answered it

(24:11):
with force. The real, the really absolute enemy of communism,
always clear, always strong in the popular mind, was national socialism.
The only enemy that answered communism and kind. If you
wanted to save Germany from Communism, to be sure of
doing it, you went to national socialism. The Nazi slogan
in nineteen thirty two was if you want your country
to go Bolshevik, vote communist. If you want to remain

(24:34):
free Germans, vote Nazi. Now you go look at some
of the things at the ads Trump has been putting
out over the last two three months, the things he's
been saying about Antifa, and and tell me it's not
the same fucking ad. And in fact, the Friday before
I wrote this, Trump gave a speech where he told donors,
I am the only thing standing between the American dream

(24:54):
and total anarchy, madness and chaos. It's the same fucking
play and acting during the debate by saying um that
the violence UM and white supremacy are not a problem,
and yeah, that that it's a it's actually a left

(25:15):
wing problem. That's where all the violence is from. And
it's definitely not a right wing problem, which is the
same nonsense. And it's it's I mean, which even the
even the FBI will say like no, dude, and have
been pretty consistently saying like no, no, no. All of
the murders pretty much are on one side of this thing.

(25:37):
But like, yeah, it's the it's the reason Trump declared
Portland and a couple of other cities anarchist jurisdiction, even
though we have like the most violent and authoritarian police
force in the country. It's because it doesn't matter what
the truth is on the ground, if you can make
Americans think Portland has been burnt down by anarchists. And
he was hoping like there's good people on both sides. Yeah, yeah,

(26:00):
and then now like can you imagine looking back at that,
Now that's quaint, because that's acknowledging that there's good people, um,
who are not fascists, Whereas what he said at the
debate was that, um, actually all the good people are
right wing and all the bad people are left. Yeah,
and it's it's too early to know how that's all

(26:20):
going to shake out electorally. A lot of the recent
polls make it look like his law and order campaign
has not worked, like it hasn't brought more people to him. Um. Really, again,
we'll see on the election how true, how accurate those
polls are. I'm hopeful and don't give a funk about
a poll now. I don't trust any polls. I've been

(26:42):
hurt too bad. I'm sorry, but we've all been burnt badly,
which is good. I'm actually glad that no one trusts
the polls because the polls are all showed that Biden
has it basically locked down. I don't want anyone to
feel but I don't trust that ship for us a second.
So every time they say, hey, there's substantial lead, that
just makes it so that people are like, I guess

(27:04):
I can stay home. Yeah, I want people to be
scared as well. Pols shut the funk up. So I
am though interested to see how it actually winds out
working for him, because it might if if he fails
to attract a lot of support for the law and
order thing, then maybe it's a sign that the United
States is less less far gone than I had feared. Um,

(27:27):
we'll see, but it's it is worth noting that like
he's he's campaigning on the same fucking lines that Hitler was,
and that that does kind of talking about the degree
to which anti communism was kind of more of it
was more of what got people to vote for the
Nazis than anything the Nazis particularly supported. In some cases,
you know, obviously it differed between like the class of

(27:49):
people who are voting for him, But a lot of
folks supported the Nazis because they hated the Communists and
not because they were all on board with everything the
Nazis was, which which one of the big things that
I think is so irresponsible about the way our schools
teach about Hitler is they they talk about him and
the Nazis as if they were swept into power by

(28:10):
a wave of mass support spurred on by like the
desperate circumstances of the Great Depression, right, Like the picture
I had of it was like you see, you get
like two or three paragraphs about how the Weimar Republic's
economy was shipped that one of those pictures of like
a lady with a wheelbarrow full of of of Deutsche marks,
and then like um and then it's like and then
Hitler was elected because things were so bad, so many

(28:31):
people were out of work, everyone was desperate, and he
promised to to fix things. And that's not what swept
him into power. Actually, UM this idea that like there
were all these starving unemployed workers who swept Hitler into
power um is a historical UM. Workers were not the
Nazi Party's core of support. And I actually found a

(28:55):
very fascinating two thousand eight analysis of German voting behavior
from Princeton and the res searchers looked at the voting
patterns of unemployed workers and blue collar workers who were
at in Germany at the time, and they were looking
specifically at unemployed workers and blue collar workers who were
at high risk of losing their jobs. And they found
that among this population, quote, when the unemployed opposed the government,

(29:17):
they turned primarily to the communists, whose parties catered directly
to them, not the Nazis. Moreover, the Nazis promoted autonomy, entrepreneurship,
and private property ideas which were not directed to the unemployed.
So these like these poor starving workers didn't turn out
for the Nazis in large numbers. Instead, one of the
Nazis strongest basis of support, and in fact their strongest

(29:40):
base of support among Germans who were actually hurt by
the economic downturn, So not like the wealthy or anything.
Their strongest base of support among like Germans who were
hurt by the Great Depression were small time bosses um,
a category of people that the study authors described as
the working poor quote. This is a phrase used in

(30:00):
the field of American politics, within political science, and within sociology,
but it has not been used previously to describe by
our Germany. We use it because the groups described this
way we're indeed working, and they were poor despite having
other important characteristics. The group that fits this description most
directly are the self employed, the independent artisans, shopkeepers, small farmers, lawyers,

(30:21):
et cetera. Most accounts assume the self employed were fervent
supporters of the Nazis. These individuals were hurt economically by
the depression, but they because but because they own their firms,
they were at relatively low risk of unemployment. Instead, bad
economic times would merely mean that they would make less money,
often a lot less. So it was not of the
people who got fucked by the depression. It was not

(30:42):
the people who were starving in the streets. It was
the people whose small businesses suddenly weren't allowing them to
purchase luxuries. Those were the people who really turned out
for the Nazis. And again, reading that number one is
completely counter to what I learned in high school about
how Hitler got elected. That it was it was the

(31:03):
small business owners who were like some of his most
reliable supporters. But it also jells a lot with some
ship that I saw this summer at the start of
the anti lockdown protests in Oregon's capital Salem, a small
business owner named Lindsay Graham ironic name a lady um.
She received a fifteen thousand dollar fine for reopening her

(31:23):
hair salon and violation of the state's law about COVID.
And she immediately like drew in this like tsunami of
right wing support, and all of these far right militia
type started rallying at her salon with guns and stuff. Um,
And it was this, you know, it was a grift
for her. She raised more than seventy thousand dollars during
her like two or three days in the limelight. But
I think she's a really good example of the kind

(31:44):
of working class people who field Hitler's rise, not down
and out starving poor, not laborers living paycheck to paycheck,
but little like lower middle and lower middle class business
owners who were like scared of winding up in the
same low place as the people who were on unemployment. Right,
those are the people who embrace fascism most readily. And
I think that's important. Well, it's the same thing that

(32:07):
um that happens now that I think you can see
a lot of anger about on like social media because
you get to see um that older people, UM and
younger people are having different not just older people and
younger people are having different opinions and experiences, but it
breaks down um into marginalized groups being like, oh, so

(32:32):
you're angry now because your kid can't go to college
or own a house, or you're angry now that you're
losing these things, like we've never been able to achieve them,
you know, So we've always been angry and that's not
made us right wing, you know. And it's the people
that are insulted that now like they've been taking it

(32:53):
for granted that the American dream um of you know,
your children are going to have it better than you, Um,
they were taking for granted that would happen, and a
whole bunch of people in society are saying, well, you
just got here now, but we've always been here. It's
kind of we've all we've always known that the dream
was was was horseshit? Like, yeah, welcome to the I mean, well,
not welcome because you guys are embracing mass murder instead

(33:17):
of but like whatever, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a good
line in that Princeton study that I think is important. Um,
the party active being the Nazi party actively promoted private
property and so turned off many unemployed who either had
little private property or generally supported more government intervention in
the economy. And that's just not the picture. I don't know,
like was your you were you were Jewish, So maybe

(33:39):
you've got a better education about the Nazis than I
did as a as a gentile boy. But like that's
so different from what I learned in high school. I
mean I grew up with like a totally different Nazi understanding.
Initially because um, the U s SR is like obsessed
with not like Nazis, Like because really, I said, because

(34:02):
you know, we kind of bore the brunt of the
whole thing, and so yeah, like World War Two is
still talked about in like a huge amount, and like
you know, Ukraine or Russia and so growing up, like
I not only heard from my grandparents and stuff, but
there was also just a lot of attention being paid

(34:23):
to it by like the government and schools always. So
I would feel like by the time I got here,
I was like I know a lot more about and
like they don't call him Nazis. They say fascists. They
you know which is but like here, fascists is like
for anybody, Yeah you know what I mean, And Nazis

(34:44):
is specifically Nazi Germany. But you grew up, grow up, um,
Like when I was growing up, you just here for
sists for scist then it's just Nazi, like Nazi fascists specifically. Yeah, yeah,
there's there's a lot. Yeah, but you were saying as
like a gentile boil boy, did you like did you

(35:05):
do the whole like an frank mandatory reading in school?
Did you love that? Yeah? And I feel ways about
that because I would not have wanted my teenage diary
to become read by millions of people. But also like
I don't think it's it's useless that that people do
read it a lot because she's very sympathetic. I don't.

(35:26):
I went to the Anne Frank House a few years back,
and it's a pretty it's a very good museum. I'll
say that. Like, if you're ever in Amsterdam, check it out.
Did you ever go to the Museum of Tolerance with
your like school or anything? We we don't think it
was called that we went to a Holocaust museum. Yeah, yeah,
I don't know. I feel like as a Jew, you

(35:47):
hear a lot, and like by the time you go,
you're like, I've already seen the the piles of like
little kids shoes and stuff, and like the purses and
all of that. So like by the time you go,
you're like, I've seen like so much horrible shit. Yeah.
I don't know. Maybe the Jewish thing is you get
a lot more of it. Yeah. Yeah. The thing that
really fucked me up was I went to Saxonhausen, which

(36:10):
is one of the very small concentration camps, so not
a death camp, a concentrate. A lot of people died there, obviously,
but not like you know, there's a difference between the
death camps and the concert saxon Housen was like was
it was up mainly for political prisoners, although a number
of Jewish people wound up there too, and they had
we were there number one, and like the dead of winter,
so like seeing the tiny little uniforms, the threadbare uniforms

(36:32):
that they had to wear, and like being out there
in like a German winter was like, oh my god.
But they led us to these like this, the solitary
confinement cells, which were holes in the ground with steel
grates over them, and you could still see bloodstained marks
in the concrete where people had tried to claw their
way up. Um, like that was like one of that.

(36:53):
That was like the thing that um stuck with you
has stuck with me the most that I've physically seen
as evidence of Holocaust. Yeah, um, okay, back to the
little Nazis. But first first, it's a really awkward time
for ad break. You know, who won't put political and
racial prisoners into a debt note. Okay, that's not a

(37:14):
good way toly dads. How do we you know, speaking
of private property, speaking of earning things, Yeah, here are
some things you can earn. We're back. So we had

(37:44):
a little we went on a little bit of I
think a valuable, valuable tangent there. But but I was
talking about that, you know how small business owners were
a huge core of support for the Nazis, And obviously
this is just like one of the demographics they went through.
One of the interesting things that Princeton study found is
that kind of while a lot of bad historians try
to focus on how like like like, how surprising it

(38:08):
was that the Nazis one, when these Princeton folks like
because they compared the election that brought Hitler to power
and from our Germany two dozens and dozens of other
democratic elections throughout like a century of democratic elections in
the United States and elsewhere, and so compared them to
how other countries elections performed during like economic collapses, and
found that like, no, no, no, all of the trends

(38:29):
in Germany were basically the same. This was a very
normal election with an abnormal candidate. Um. But it wasn't nothing.
Nothing different happened in Germany. They reacted the same way
as democratic voters always do. But there was a Hitler running,
you know, um, and that the Trump factor before exactly
we could not have imagined it. Nope, And now that

(38:52):
it's happening. We still can't believe it, and it's still
pretty for years and we're still every day reach any
level of being surprised and like and also like of
the governments like changing just because like no one knew
you had to put in rules about this kind of thing.
No one expected that this would happen. Yeah, and this

(39:13):
is one of those things that like there's a value
that's non zero. I don't think it's something obviously it's
something we cannot rely on, but there's a value that's
non zero in folks like Joe Biden being like believing
in civility, because as soon as someone who comes along
who doesn't all of these other these other traditions that

(39:35):
we've counted on to keep us safe collapse and it
turns out that there's nothing protecting us, which is why
we shouldn't be relying on them and the way that
Joe Biden does. But there's not a zero value in
everyone deciding not to be complete ship to each other.
Civility has its purpose, is what I'm saying. Although, yeah,

(39:56):
if only one team plays by the rules exactly, click
that it doesn't really work. Yeah, so we're talking about
that salon owner in Salem, Oregon, who became like a
bunch of armed militia people started rallying and all getting haircuts.
And one of the people who like supported her grift
and and showed up to get like a very public
haircut as part of his kind of campaign was Joey Gibson,

(40:19):
who's the head of a right wing street gang called
Patriot Prairies, very closely affiliated with the Proud Boys, with
other far right militia groups. Um. And you know, it's
it's well, we'll talk about other people like him, because
he's he's similar to some of the little Nazi folks too,
and in some ways that are interesting. I I think

(40:41):
one of the things that's interesting about that Princeton study
is when you're kind of looking at it points out
that a lot of people voted for the Nazis for
reasons that we're not the stuff that everybody knows about
the Nazis, that weren't like their theories about arianism and
like the master race and like the quasi spiritual stuff
about Hitler is the embodiment of the German people. Um.
It was because they thought that he'd make the economy

(41:03):
better and that their small business would improve It was
because they were scared of the communists who wanted to
take their stuff, and he said that he would get
rid of the communists. It was for all of these
things that like, we're not any of the fun Nazi stuff.
It was none of like the kukie shit that that
actually got the Nazis elected. Um and I I yeah,
I'm going to read a quote from Meyer's book here

(41:24):
that I think is very relevant. None of my friends
was the least interested in Nazi race theory as such,
not even the tailor or the bill collector, who are
two of them, more like uh firm Nazis. Five of
the ten of them laughed when they spoke of it,
including the cabinet maker. That was nonsense, said Harry Klingelhoffer,
which is the cabinet maker for the s S and
the universities. Look at the shape of my head, it's

(41:45):
brought as a barn side. Look at my brunette wife.
Do you suppose we're not Germans? No, that they could
teach to the s S and the university students. They
would believe everything that made them great, and the university
students would believe anything complicated. The professors too, Have you
seen the race purity chart. Yes, I said, well, then
you know a whole system we Germans like systems. You know,
it all fitted together, so it was science system and

(42:06):
science if you only looked at the circles black and
white and shaded and not at real people. Such dumb
stuff they couldn't teach to us little men. They didn't
even try. And that reminds me of a lot of stuff,
including like some things my dad said about how you
can't you shouldn't take Trump seriously, you shouldn't take him literally. Yeah.
Everyone in the beginning said, oh, he's just saying that

(42:27):
stuff to be controversial and he's not going to do
any of that. Do you really think he's going to
do that stuff, the stuff he's saying, And the answer
is yes, yeah. Oh, this Nazi race theory, it's just
for it's just for these like weirdos at school and
intellectuals who like complicated bullshit, like no one really cares
about it. It's not going to lead to anything. Oh no,

(42:50):
it led to something, yeah, yeah, but like for for
the little Nazis, for the people who were critical and
actually voting Hitler to our like the stability of the
Reichs Mark had a lot more to do than um
with you know, race hatred or anything like that, Which
didn't mean these people weren't racist, they all were. It

(43:11):
just meant that rather than like actively caring about racism,
they were people who were very tolerant of racism, which
I think speaks to a lot of Trump support too, right, Um,
And I think we have to start start definding racism
is not just like oh, would actively murder some we
have a different race in the street, but do nothing

(43:33):
while someone else talks about murdering someone else in the street.
And I think like the difference between um, hearing a
Trump supporter say like, like, if you're telling me you're
voting for Trump because of economic policy, that is another
way of saying that you're a racist because the well

(43:55):
being of people of other races is less important to
you than your economic well being. Yeah, you're willing to
overlook racism so that you will have more money. Right,
that's racism. We have to not think about it often,
you know. Yeah, And I'm certainly not saying that these

(44:16):
people weren't racist. I'm saying that like the type of racist,
like the way in which they supported the Nazis is
different than you might than you might expect, um, and
that you need millions of these people to enable the
ones who are you know, racists, Yeah, Gateway racists exactly. Um.
And you see a lot, you see a lot of

(44:37):
like Trump is really you see a lot of him
pulling for the same folks. Like in the debate he
brought up people's four oh one ks a lot right
in the stock market, and those things are not things
that matter to most people who are going to be
listening to the show, and to most working people who
are a lot of them paycheck to paycheck. But it
matters to the working middle class because that ships their cushion.

(44:57):
That's what keeps them from being paycheck to paycheck. It's
what stops them from being the poor, is that they
have those cushions. And you know that's that's who Trump was,
what Trump was signaling to Um. Yeah now again And
as we kind of talked about earlier, another one of
Hitler's appeal to the little Nazis was a promise to

(45:17):
protect them from the chaos and tumult of like a
changing world. And that brings me back to Joey Gibson,
who I was talking about being at that that hairdresser's
uh kind of fashy anti covid rally. Um. If you
sit down and listen to one of Gibson's speeches, and
if you go through like a few years of interviews
and profiles on the guy or on people like him,
um who are kind of involved in these right wing

(45:38):
street movements, you'll be struck by how little they really
say because there's there's nothing. They don't have anything ideologically
other than a desire to get into fights with leftists.
Um So, everything they say is essentially trying to obscure
the fact that they're just there for the violence. Which
is a shirt that one of the Proud Boys, who's
very prominent, Joe Biggs, who met with Lindsay Graham, the

(45:59):
cong Risman a couple of weeks ago, one of the
shirts he wears when he goes to Portland says, I'm
just here for the violence anyway. Um So, And it's
worth noting like now they don't say anti communist. Trump
doesn't say anti communists as much as he says anti anarchist,
anti antifa, like that they that's the buzzword now, but
back in before antifa was as much of a buzzword

(46:22):
as it is. They were all saying that they were
anti communists. Trump and all of his all of these
little street leaders and in fact, Joey Gibson did like
a stand against Communism rally in Seattle that year, and
that was like the big buzzword before they realized Antifa
really sold a lot better. Same with socialism. They was
like socialism, then communism and then now it's yeah, and

(46:43):
it's the same. It's the same with the Nazis. You know. Um,
back in Weimar Germany, there were a lot of communists.
The kp D was one of those popular parties in
the country, and it grew more powerful every year alongside
the Nazis. Um right before you know, obviously the Nazis
through them all in camps after they won. But there
were actually couple of armed communist uprisings in Bimar Germany

(47:03):
prior to Hitler rising to power, and like this would
be like groups of communists occupying large chunks of German cities. Uh.
They took over a lot of Berlin in nineteen nineteen
right after the war, like hundreds of like half a
million of them occupied the city. Um, just through sheer
weight of numbers and the uprising only ended when thousands
of fascist paramilitary fighters, the Free Corps, which is kind

(47:25):
of like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters are today,
invaded Berlin and shot every Communist they could get their
hands on. And the Free Corps were like a bunch
of anti communist military veterans, a lot of whom had
just stepped out of the trenches of World War One
and like, we're really fucking angry and also dealing with
wildly untreated PTSD uh and who, Yeah, they got to

(47:45):
go on regular murders freeze and they're kind of the
precursors to the essay to the brown Shirts, like the
Free Corps were are generally seen as a pre Nazi
fascist movement in Germany. Uh, and we certainly have that too.
You've got a lot of veter arens groups, or you know,
at least people claiming to be veterans, who were defining
themselves by their resistance to antifa and communism. You got

(48:07):
Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers, who when that member
of Patriot Prayer was shot dead by that BLM guy
who stated, like the Civil Wars started now, right, you
already you have these networks here too. Again, the same
thing keeps happening. What I like about it is that
we learn nothing, not a thing. I mean, that's my
favorite part. I guess this. Yeah, we'll see, we'll see

(48:28):
what we learned. I see some lessons, although I think
a lot of why things are somewhat different now might
just be that, um, like in World War like like,
like the Nazis benefited from the fact that all of
their original leaders were like these pretty hardcore veterans, like
they'd seen some ship, like Hitler would like Hitler would

(48:48):
get into a fucking fist fight with you, Like. None
of them were scared of getting hurt. None of them
were scared of like doing violence to people. And um,
you certainly have a lot of fascists who are willing
to do violence to people in the United States. But
I've stood toe to toe with some of these guys
and in a one on one fight, they're all cowards,
almost all of them. You know, there are some dangerous
ones out there, but you don't have the density of

(49:09):
actual combat veterans of people who like went through enough
ship that they're just they don't give a ship about
being injured or killed. You don't have as many of
them as a percentage of the movement as the Germans did.
And that's I think one of the reasons that they
haven't been able to move as quickly as they do,
not have that advantage that the Nazis did, I guess

(49:34):
Silver Linings, Yeah, I mean it is. I would prefer
that most of the fascists who are talking about wanting
to kill Antifa actually be too scared to get into
a gunfight, then have them all be completely willing to
get into a gunfight. Yeah, that's why I said, Silver
Linings question Mark. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's better than

(50:00):
we got a little easier than than the Germans had it.
As I guess what I'm saying, Sophia was like optimism,
Robert trying to be optimistic here. Yeah, I'm sad. It's
good stuff. It's good stuff. So yeah, like that was
that was a big That was like a big part

(50:21):
of why um Hitler was able to do what he
did is that he was able to really successfully portray
himself as the opponent of communism and deteriorating conditions and stuff.
Um And as Meyer wrote, quote, there was the question
was not whether communism threatened the country as with the
continuation of deteriorating conditions. It certainly did or soon would.

(50:41):
The question was whether the Germans were convinced that it did,
and they were. They were so well convinced by such
means as the Reichstag fire of nineteen thirty three that
the Nazis were able to ultimately establish anti communism as
a religion immune from inquiry and defensible by definition alone.
When in nineteen thirty seven the Pope attack the errors
of national socialism, the Nazi government's defensive its policies consisted

(51:03):
of a note accusing the Pope of having dealt a
dangerous blow to the defense front against the world menace
of Bolshevism. And I find that interesting too, because it's
another thing that that is happening again. Right like Trump
and the right are repeatedly attacking the Pope as a
socialist and a communist. UM. I found an article by
a far right Catholic journalist who seems to be a
straight up Catholic fascist named George Newmeyer. UM called uh.

(51:29):
He read a book called The Political Pope, and he
told CBS, Pope Francis is a socialist and an opponent
of Donald Trump, so you know you're seeing I don't know,
it's weird to me the which the same things keep
happening cheer for, like the Pope, the Pope and the
post Office times. Well, I've always liked the Pope post Office.

(51:52):
I didn't have anything against it, but I just didn't
know what to like. He's so vocally pro Yeah, resistance heroes,
the postal Office. Um, yeah, and yeah. I mean, I
think the thing that I found most striking about that
segment from Myers book is the idea that the Nazis
established on anti communism as a religion, because it's something

(52:13):
I never really thought about it in those terms. But
I think in my years of documenting the far right
and attending these protests and street fights with groups like
the Proud Boys, I have like actually watched that happen,
and I think there's actually you can make a strong
argument that that's part of what we're saying with Q
and On, because I think Q and On very much
is a religious movement. It's a cult, and and it's

(52:33):
a cult that presupposes, number one, all left wing foes
of Donald Trump are Marxists, and that they're all satanic
baby eaters, trying to kill the United States like it.
You're seeing there is an anti communist religion in the
United States right now, and it might be the fastest
growing religion in the country. Um and yeah, it just
happens differently, but it's the same, it's the same idea.

(52:56):
You know. I think that's really um unsettling to me.
I guess, oh yeah, I feel great. Yeah, I'm not
wild about it. So when you have a religion, um,
whether it's an you know that religions, anti communism or
something else, any religion that's going to really take off
needs martyrs, right, Every religion that's that's worth its salt

(53:18):
has some martyrs. You gotta have. You gotta have some
dead people to look up to. And Hitler's anti communist
cult acquired a number of martyrs on its rise to power,
and none of them was more influential than a young
man named Horst Vessel. Have you ever heard a Horst?
I'm sorry, did you say horse vessel? Horst horsed Vessel
w E S s E L. And the horst is

(53:39):
h O R s T because I thought h O
R s E v E S s E L. No, No,
no kind of it does sound a bit like that shape.
Its Horst Wessel, but I think it was pronounced Vessel
because it's it's German with the the ws and ship.
So I don't know. I don't know if you'd call
a Horst a little Nazi because he was actually a

(53:59):
very radicalized Nazi street fighter who had dreams of being
a big man in the movement. Medium sized what would
you say? Yeah, he was a medium sized Nazi when
he died, Um and yeah. I want to I want
to read a quote about Horse from the book Hitler's
True Believers by Robert Gladalley, because I think the story
of Horse Vessel is really worth telling, particularly in the

(54:20):
context of these groups like the Proud Boys. Quote. The
essay attracted activists like Horse Vessel, born in nineteen o
seven and thus too young to have served in the war,
who left a record of his political awakening that he
wrote in nineteen twenty nine. He said that between ages
fourteen and eighteen he had been a bundas a member
of the middle class youth group of involved in wandering
and sports like wandering is hiking. It was the Germans

(54:42):
had just discovered hiking in this period. In fact, nearly
all members of the essay, the Brown Shirts in nineteen
thirty three, had been in such a youth group. At
the same time, Vessel was involved in the Black Reich's
Fair the underground Army, which is like you had the
German Army, which was limited to a hundred thousand men,
and because it was so limited, you had this giant
was essentially a militia. Was like all of the different

(55:04):
militia networks we have in the United States together you
had this illegal army. Um. So Vessel was a member
of this underground army. He practiced shooting and even carried
a pistol. His worldview perceived a division between US and them,
with the US including his comrades, the Fatherland, the Vulcans
and the German and them meaning the Communists, social Democrats
and Jews. Such emotional experiences were part of Vessel's life

(55:27):
before he ever became a member of the n s
d a P. In the essay, he said that what
the Nazis had was an idea, which is to say,
something that the other paramilitary groups completely missed. And that's
one of the things that scares me, because I think
that we might be seeing the collapse of Trumps. Um,
it's too early to say. The fact that he disavowed
the Proud Boys and they didn't immediately say he's just

(55:48):
doing this because he had to, like they got pissed,
makes me think that UM, aspects of what he Trump
has built, because he's bad at being an authoritarian, maybe
collapsing at all of the infrastructure has been assembled in
is there. And I think, like the thing that scares
me is the person who's going to pick up what's
essentially a gun lying on the table next, Because it's

(56:10):
what Vessel says, when somebody comes around, who who has
the charisma that Trump has to unite the group that
Trump has united, and also the intelligence to wield them properly. Um.
And that that would include having what Trump is am lacks,
which is a meaningful idea that can actually weld more
than the coalition that Trump got together. UM. That worries

(56:32):
me a lot about somebody like Tom Cotton, you know,
whoever comes next and is better at than Trump at
at doing this. UM. I don't know, that's something that
worries me. So like our little Nazis, Horse came from
the middle class, but the working middle class. His father
was actually a right wing preacher. Um who like a

(56:53):
Protestant right wing preacher who died young gets sick Um
and yeah, it's it's it's interesting horse does a guy
to study Um? And he was shot dead on February
nineteen thirty. And the exact reality of what happened is
shrouded in rumor from the beginning. At the time, there
were rumors because he was living with a former prostitute,

(57:13):
so there were rumors that he was a pimp and
that he was killed by the former pimp of this
woman he was living with. The actual reality is a
lot mercury, which seems to be true, is that his
landlady kind of put a hit hit out on him,
so he was he was living with his a small
apart yo yo, I'm sorry a landlady murdering their own tenant. Well,

(57:35):
she made for him to die like bad of a tenant.
Was he must have been a tap dancer or some
ship because this is why people get those like walks,
but nobody can get in. It's it's a weird story.
So like when I say that she was his landlady,
they were all living in the same apartment, so he
was renting a room from her um, and she was

(57:58):
fine with him and didn't care he was a Nazi,
even though she was a widow and her former husband
had been like a Communist street fighter, but she she
was a political She was fine with him being a Nazi,
but when he brought his girlfriend to live with him,
she got really pissed at him, and so she wanted
to force him out of the out of the apartment.
And so she went to a bar where a bunch

(58:18):
of her husband's old not or a communist street fighting
friends hung out, and she was like, hey, will you
help me clear this guy out? And they were like, well,
you let a Nazi live with you, We don't really
give a ship. But then they were like, well, but
it's this the Nazi is horsed vessel. And he was
a pretty prominent member of like the Nazi street fighting
groups because there's not there was not in nineties at

(58:41):
this time. There was not a lot of money in
being a Nazi street fighter at this time. You know,
like he was not he was not raking it in.
He was not like a good grifter. I think he
had those ambitions, but he was really just like he was.
He was like a Joey Gibson type. Right, Um, he
was not good at making money from it, and uh
so he he Again, isn't clear what happens, but as

(59:03):
Lanley goes to like to these Red Front fighters and
when they mentioned Horst's name, they're like, okay, well we'll
beat the guy up. And instead of beating him up,
they shoot him to death. And what happens is very unclear.
The guy who actually kills him, when he goes to trial,
maintains that he fired out of self defense because he
entered horsehouse with a gun, and he says that Vessel

(59:25):
pulled a gun of his own. Um, and maybe, uh,
it's entirely possible. Uh. The the author of one of
the books that I've read on this thinks that it's
most likely that that the guy who shot him fired
first and fired as soon as he recognized Horse in
the doorway. Um, but it is weird that he only
fired once, which he probably wouldn't have done if it

(59:47):
had been a hit. So you get, it's very uncertain
what happened. But knew that the shot was good, right,
it was a good hit. No, yeah, yeah, why did
you have would you need more bullets? Because usually when
people yeah, they just kind of spray. If you're not
a good hit man, yeah, this guy was your job.

(01:00:07):
You just calm and it's one shot and you came.
But I guess the point. These guys weren't good. They
were like drunk straight fighters. Sorry, I care more about
murder than you do, Robert. Let's feel to carry it
out properly. It's just that feels like a weird comic book.
The reality of what happened matters less than how it
was interpreted by the Nazis. Because Joseph Gebbels gets ahold

(01:00:30):
of this story and he immediately declares like he declares
Vessel to have been like a martyr to the Hitlerist cause,
and it clears this to have been a Communist hit
Um as opposed to it was kind of more like
yeah yeah yeah. But he declares him like a victory
of the evil Communists and Vessels who have been like

(01:00:50):
a young hero of the Nazi movement. They find a
poem in the horse's house that he had written about
like uh, the Nazi Party, and they said it to
song Um and it becomes the official theme song like
theme music of the Nazi Party, and it is for
the remainder of the time that the Nazis exists, the
horse Vessel ed I think Lightnings song or whatever. Yeah,

(01:01:12):
you know, who won't become who didn't write for the Nazis,
the Nazi song, none of the following good I told
so few years ago. No ads from horse Vessel, we
will not accept them. And the fact that he's been

(01:01:33):
dead for close to a century has certainly helped us
in that very proud that we've stuck to that line.
We're back, okay, so we're we're talking about old horse
horse vessel. So uh yeah, Girbels declares him to be,

(01:01:54):
you know, a martyr to the Hitlerist cause and all
this good stuff. A poem, his poems set to music
comes the theme song of the old Nazis. Um, And
they have a big, huge Google's plays for them to
have like a massive funeral in imitation of like the
state funerals that are given the national heroes. For this
kid who was just like a gang member basically um
and of course the rote a poem. So I would

(01:02:16):
prefer it if you update your description of him as
a Nazi slash poet, Nazi poet gang member. So his
funeral is briefly interrupted by some communists who throw stones
at the Nazis, not really a lot, like literally just
a couple of stones, but the Nazis play that up
to is like, look at how horrible these communists are.
They won't even let us have a funeral. And it works.

(01:02:39):
Horse death radicalizes a lot of Germans. For the Nazis.
It's considered to be like his funeral and everything are
considered to be sizeable inflection points for the Nazi cause
it really kind of spells a death blow for like
the left wing street fighting movements, um, you know the
they're the anti fascist movements, not all of which were communists,
because right there's the German Iron in Front, which is

(01:03:01):
like the social democratic street fighting gang, which is where
you get if you've ever seen the three arrows spray
painted anywhere, that's the Iron Front symbol, and the arrows
each represent anti UH, anti church um, anti UH communist
and anti fascist, right like it's it's like it's it's
it was a whole bunch of things they were. They

(01:03:22):
were again, so like yeah, the the Iron Front um
like all, but but they all get like kind of
looped lumped in as as communists and socialist by the
Nazis and Horsts death and funeral kind of spells the
end for them. And I I feel like everyone who's
heard this, if you're at all familiar with anything I've
been talking about, you're probably already comparing what happened to
Horst to what happened to Aaron J. Danielson, the member

(01:03:44):
of Patriot Prayer who was shot dead last month in
Portland on his way home from a pro Trump rally.
Right Like, you have to see some of the comparisons, um,
Danielson was killed by a pro BLM activist who had
declared himself a hundred percent ANTIFA on social media, although
I can tell you he had a lot of really
negative dealings with a lot of anti fascists. I know

(01:04:04):
because he was. Anyway, it's a complicated story, um. Now,
Immediately after Danielson was shot, the President began recasting him
as a right wing hero, and national media gave long
interviews to uh Cocattle, Patriot Prayer members and Patriot Prayer associates,
people that I've been covering for years and never thought
I would see on national news, like Hayley Adams, who's
a local white supremacist. UM wild that all these people

(01:04:27):
wound up on TV UM, and of course the Proud
Boys took this as an opportunity to announce a justice
for Jay Rally, which was the thing that we just
got over and survived in Portland. UM. And obviously like
it's it's we're very lucky that UM things have not
it doesn't. It seems like maybe I don't know why

(01:04:49):
it is, but but Danielson's death, UM did not turn
into the kind of thing horse Vessel's death dead. UM,
it didn't get that kind of traction, you know, I
don't I don't know if that it's due to aspects
of our media culture that nothing gets that much traction,
that that Trump is too much of a narcissist to
really let the focus be on anyone else. UM. I

(01:05:10):
don't know why it is, but you can see that
when I when I when that first happened, UM, I
was worried that we were going to see that because
the reality is that actually there's a lot of similarities
between danielson shooting and horse shooting, including the fact that
Danielson also had a gun, Like he was prowling through
the streets of Portland with a nine millimeter handgun and
seventy six rounds of ammunition loaded into extended magazines, which

(01:05:34):
is not like what you carry for self defense. You know,
maybe you don't, okay, but there's like seventies six people
at least that hate me. So I never leave the
house with less than seventy six bullets. I mean, I
I'm I feel comfortable walking out doors with usually between
twelve and twenty four rounds of nine millimeter And I'm
pretty paranoid. Um, And you are well more liked than me,

(01:05:58):
way more well liked. Sorry, there are those some similarities, UM,
some weird ones, including the fact that, like the ryanod,
the guy who shot Danielson claimed that it was in
self defense, that like one of the people with him
pulled a knife, and that you know, they all had firearms,
and like they did all have firearms. There's other reports
that one of the people with it it's it's it's again.
It's this kind of like this murky shooting that you

(01:06:20):
don't really know exactly what happened, and it it gets
used politically, and I guess we're lucky enough that it
doesn't seem to have worked the way the way Horse
Vessel's death did. Um. Maybe it's because Jay didn't write
any poems. I don't know. Um, maybe no landladies were involved. Definitely,
no landladies involved. I do feel confidence state like it's

(01:06:43):
entirely there's a very good chance that the guy who
shot Danielson that it was like a targeted hit. Like
I don't know, Um, some of the pictures do indicate that.
But yeah, it's a complicated it's a complicated story. But
I couldn't help thinking about it whenever I think about
the story of Horse Wessel. Um. Now, the yeah, Horst
is again, you said it right. He's kind of a

(01:07:03):
medium Nazi and he believed strongly in fascism. But the
kind of people who were moved by his death and
who like sort of switched again nineteen thirties pretty late
to get on board with the Nazis. But the kind
of people who were who were frightened as a result
of his death of the Communists and turned towards the Nazis.
They weren't true believers in the same way most of
them weren't believers, you know, the little Nazis weren't really

(01:07:25):
believers in anything but their own comfort and security. Um,
they were you know, the thing that united them is
that they were malleable enough to get behind fascism when
they thought that it was the thing that would keep
them safe and secure in their position in society. And
there's a there's a really good line from one of
Myer's Nazi friends, a cabinet maker named Klingelhofer. Uh quote.

(01:07:47):
Inside the system, you see the benefits outside it. When
you are not benefited by it, you see the faults.
I suppose that's the way it is in Russian. Now.
That's the way it is everywhere always, is it? Not?
For all this we thank our leader. The kids said
in school, how they said for this, we thank America.
If communism comes, they'll say for this, we thank Stalin.
That's the way men are. I find that unsettling and interesting.

(01:08:10):
And it kind of goes to the point that, like,
while the Nazis never attained a majority in any electoral um,
like since as soon as Hitler came to power and
started actually delivering on some of the things he'd promised
to them, including jobs in a rebuilt military and retaking
the Studente land and stuff, everyone got behind him. And
they didn't get behind him because they were convinced about

(01:08:31):
like the again, the stuff everyone obsesses over, the weird
racial theories the Nazi had, Nazis had they got behind
him because they were inside the system and it was
protecting them, and so would most people, which is fun
to think about. So I mean to me, I guess

(01:08:54):
one of the things that strikes me is like, it's
very easy to make anything sound like the worst thing
in the world. Umah. And it of course it makes
sense that it's interchangeable for people, whether something is the
worst thing in the world or the best thing in
the world. Um I can tell you someone that has

(01:09:14):
lived under communism that there were some great things about it,
like socialized medicine, you know. So I'm not gonna say, uh,
I'm not gonna say like really radical as ship, because
I think it's pretty easy to see, um, when you
live in a system even from outside that everybody like
has in America been taught like forever communism is like

(01:09:36):
the biggest threat. It's so horrible, so nobody likes to
hear that there's like, you know, even the most terrible
thing has some good things about it. And then I
think it clouds people's judgment to think that like even
the thing that they love could eventually become terrible. But
that's just how it is. Yep, yep, yep. And it's

(01:09:59):
like it's a thing we all need to keep in
mind because like, once you're if you're protected by the
system in the way that like we all we both
are currently as white people to a degree protected by
the system. Um, it's very easy to turn that into
ignoring what happens to people outside the system, because not

(01:10:21):
doing that, you know, when when you care about people
at the border, outside the border of your system, then
that puts you at risk because like then you're then
you're upsetting the apple cart. And that's uh, you know,
that actually brings me to what I think might be
one of the most unsettling parts of Meyer's book, which
is it's the story of an anti fascist activist who

(01:10:42):
became a member of the Nazi Party. UM. A friend
of his name, Heinrich Hilda Brandt, who was the school teacher,
and he joined the Nazi Party late in nineteen seven.
So hither have been and in power about as long
as Trump has been when this guy joins the Nazi
Party and Hilda Brandt was not even really a convert
to the Nazi part party uh. He again had been
a Nazi anti Nazi street activist, and he eventually converted

(01:11:06):
because he was he was afraid for his own life.
Um Meyer writes, quote, he may not have been the
only one of my ten friends who was afraid not
to join, but he was the only one of them
who knew then and now and says so that fear
was his reason. Fear and advantage. But how he said
is one to separate them. He had been an anti Nazi,
an active moderate democrat in East Prussia before he came

(01:11:28):
quietly to Hessa in ninety five, and his past uneasily
buried got a job teaching literature. So that's really scary
to me to think about somebody who could join the
Nazi Party as an anti Nazi activist knowing it's the
wrong thing to do, purely forced because you're scared for
your own life, Because a lot of people will do that.

(01:11:49):
A lot of people who have come out into the
streets now if things really went as bad as they might,
would do that because at the end of the day,
that's what people do, is try to protect themselves in
their family. Um. Yeah, And I guess that's not so
surprising that someone would join a party like that to
protect their own life. What what might be more surprising

(01:12:11):
and definitely is more unsettling, is that once Hildebrant got
inside the Nazi Party and he found he kind of
liked fascism. I was just gonna say, did you fall
in love? This the classic meet cute romantic comedy. Yeah,
I could never. Oh my god, I fascism Actually yeah,

(01:12:32):
still starring Hugh Grant. I'm gonna read another. I'm going
to read another quote from Meyer's book here. Perhaps he
said it was because I wanted unconsciously to justify what
I had done. If so, I succeeded. But I say
it now too, and I know it now. There were
good things, great things in the system, and the system
was itself was evil. For instance, Meyer asked, you mean

(01:12:56):
about the evils. Hildebrant responded, No, I know about those
said fire about the good things, the great things. Hildebrand responded,
perhaps I should make it singular instead of plural, the
good thing. For the first time in my life, I
felt I was really the peer of men who, in
the Kaiser's time and in the Fimar time, had always
belonged to classes lower or higher than my own men,

(01:13:17):
whom one had always looked down on or up to,
but never at. In the labor Front, which is like
the Nazi Workers Organization, I represented the Teachers Association. I
came to know such people at first hand, to know
their lives and to have them know mine. Even in America,
perhaps I have never been there. I suspect that the
teacher who talks about the common people has never known one,

(01:13:37):
really known one, not even if he himself came from
among them, as I with an army officer as a father,
did not. National socialism broke down that separation, that class distinction.
Democracy such democracy as we had didn't do it and
is not doing it now. That's interesting to me that
that's what brought this guy on board with Nazism is

(01:13:58):
the feeling, as he described, of absolute equality. Uh. And
he told Meyer that like, really the thing that got
him was my inferiors accepted me. That's so sad. Yeah,
also similar to what people found in communism. Yeah. Yeah.

(01:14:18):
This breaking down of these barriers that were incredibly stressful
to keep up in German society was you know, to
talk about extents that we can't make comparisons between what
happened in Germany and what's happening here. There were actually
like hard barrier if you were a professor in in
Germany in this period of time, there was almost an
absolute wall of social separation between you and any kind

(01:14:40):
of working person. They would see you as elevated beyond
being someone they could just talk to and likewise, and
that was a thing that Nazism did was kind of
try to build this this this this people's racial community
Bolkska mine shaft, that that unified the people who were
in together in one group. And this this school teacher,

(01:15:02):
who again knew enough to be an anti fascist activist,
founded intoxicating once he was inside, found being a part
of this in group to be irresistible and missed it afterwards,
even though he knew all of his life that the
Nazi Party was evil. That that's fucked up. That's so. Yeah,
it's not great, no perceived equalities. A hell of a drug,

(01:15:27):
it is. It is. And you think about, like I've
been to a Trump rally, like and you you feel
that kind of social atmosphere there, you know, it just
seems like you're sick of being bullied, so you become
the bully. Yeah, And it's also this feeling that the
people who are as opposed to this feeling that like
the people in charge are like are are in some

(01:15:51):
way august that there's something, there's something like special and
powerful about the offices. They hold this feeling that they're
they're just like you. It's like when everybody made fun
of Trump's fast food feast for those football players. I'm
sure the football players wish they had gotten some fancy food,
but like Trump's voters loved that because it it made

(01:16:13):
it brought him down to their level. He's good at that.
Like people wonder how can a billionaire like attract those people,
It's because a ship like that it worked. Um yeah,
the whole thing about oh anyone can be president, that
is the appealing thing to people who are his supporters.

(01:16:33):
It's like, well, yeah, it's sure he's an idiot, or
he has he doesn't know about this, or he doesn't
listen to his advisors like they're like, he acts exactly
how I would if I was president. Oh oh he didn't.
He doesn't read any of the reports. I wouldn't either.
I'd also make people write me a memo and that
I would only read the first sentence of that memo

(01:16:54):
or yeah, of course I would tweet whenever and like
call into Fox News with just like any random thought
because like, of course I'll do anything I want, and
I think that is what they love. They're like, oh, yeah,
that's literally what the funk I would do if I
was president, which is whatever the funk I want. Yep,

(01:17:15):
cool stuff. So yeah, uh and in kind of the
same vein, like kind of on this same vein, like
we talked about, like Trump lowering himself making the presidency
seemed more accessible to the kind of people who vote
for him. Another thing that both he and the Nazi
Party really did have in common in terms of like

(01:17:35):
things that they ran on and things that made them
appealing to you know, the same kind of person is
attacking and dewriting experts, right, and the idea of expertise
that's been a huge part of the Trump administration, a
huge part of Trump's what he's campaigned on. It's one
of the things that's biting him in the ass now
as he gets COVID nineteen is his his kind of

(01:17:57):
contempt for expertise, but it's shared by a lot of
these people who don't like like the idea that a
doctor could tell them what to do, could tell them
to wear a face mask or something, just because he
went to some fancy school for a while. Um, And
that that was a thing that you very much saw
in Weimar Germany among the little Nazis. Nazis and rode
into power by harnessing a strong anti intellectual current among

(01:18:20):
very low class Germans. Meyer writes that probably six or
seven out of ten of his Nazi friends saw quote
unquote intellectuals as fundamentally unreliable and untrustworthy people, and academics
were the least trustworthy. This sat very well with a
little Nazis, who resented those with higher education. And this
next paragraph from Meyer's book resonates more strongly with America

(01:18:41):
in than almost any other passage in the book. Quote Nazism,
as it proceeded from practice to theory, had to deny
expertness in thinking, and then the second process was never completed.
In order to fill the vacuum, had to establish expert
thinking of its own, that is, to find men of
inferior or irresponsible caliber whose views conformed dishonestly or worse yet, honestly,

(01:19:04):
to the party line. The non political pastors satisfied Nazi
requirements by being non political. But the non political schoolmaster was,
by the very virtue of being non political, a dangerous
man from the start. He himself would not rebel, nor
would he, if he could help it, teach rebellion. But
he could not help being dangerous, not if he went
on teaching what was true. In order to be a

(01:19:24):
theory and not just a practiced national socialism required the
destruction of academic independence. And of course we could draw
some lines to that ship right now, right like the
Trump just gave an executive order about patriotic education and
banning certain types of historical education from schools, Like we're
seeing a lot of this, yeah, And also the fact

(01:19:46):
that like no ship, Jews got the ship out of
the ship end of the stick in Germany when they
were a lot of the intellectuals and a lot of
the educated because um of their place in German society
and the importance of education and learning in the Jewish community.
And it was a way I in a in a

(01:20:08):
kind of bitter irony. Part of like why that was
such a preferred path for Jewish people in Germany is
because they saw it as a way of same thing
with military service a way of gaining acceptance in a
culture that was kind of hostile to them. Is like, well,
but if I've become a professor, there's respect with that,
and then people will respect me as a Jewish Man,
and people will maybe respect my people more. And it's

(01:20:29):
I mean, you can. There's there's a reason why black
people in Hispanic people would also like LGBT people, serve
in the military at a much higher rate than um
than the general population. It's because there's respect in that
from from pretty much all corners of society. And it's
just this thing, it's a thing a lot of people
do kind of instinctively when you're part of a disadvantaged

(01:20:53):
and targeted group, is you seek the protection that respect
gives you. Yep. Good stuff. So in my episode of
the non Nazi Bastards behind Hitler, I referenced Dorothy Thompson,
who's a really interesting person to study. She was a
journalist who reported from Germany and its last three days
before the war. Um she was forced out of the country.

(01:21:14):
She's also married to the guy who wrote It Can't
Happen Here, UM, that famous book about like what an
American Fascist would look like? UM. Yeah. She wrote a
really good article after getting kicked out of Germany and
returned to the US called who goes Nazi question Mark,
And the whole thing is set. It's her at a
dinner party, looking at all of the attendees and thinking

(01:21:34):
in her head which one of them will support the
American equivalent of the Nazi Party if it comes here,
and like trying to decide, like which aspects of their
personality would make them vulnerable to doing that. It's a
very interesting article, and there's one quote from it in
particular that I want to read. And this is her
kind of moulling on what makes people Nazis. Sometimes I

(01:21:56):
think there are direct biological factors at work, a type
of education and feeding and physical training which has produced
a new kind of human being with an imbalance in
his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with
energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline.
He has been treated to forms of education which have
released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous, his mind

(01:22:17):
is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected. I
just think about a lot of proud boys when I
get so Now, wait a minute, but physically vigorous. Yeah,
a lot of them are like a lot of real
buff dudes that ship like big young people. Yeah, like

(01:22:42):
very like large, the kind of person we call it
shud colloquial, right, yeah, yeah, she's talking about shuds. She's
just she's defining chuds here, and she's not the only one. Mussolini,
his favorite philosopher, a guy named Giovanni Gentile, noted of fascists,

(01:23:04):
we think with our blood. And he was not making
I don't think a racial statement there. He was instead acknowledging,
because this was an Italian fascist and they were kind
of less on the racial thing. He was acknowledging that
violence of action, relentless, aggressive physicality was a key attribute
for the kind of men who became fascists. Thinking and
consideration were effeminate and shameful. Or is the proud boys

(01:23:27):
say today? Funk around and find out. Oh wow, yeah, yep,
that's part one. We're gonna talk about the Holocaust a
lot in part two, so I hope you're looking forward
to that. Thanks as always for inviting me for that.
Oh yeah, it's gonna be a lot of dead babies

(01:23:48):
next episode. Thank you. Robert can't think of can't talk
about dead babies without youself. We can, but I feel guilty. Yeah,
I feel ashamed. Um, yeah, I guess Thanks you guys
for having my back. Yeah, that's that's, that's it, right. Yeah.

(01:24:11):
Do you have any writer or die, Sophia, writer or die? Uh?
Do you have any plug plug plug plug plug doubles?
I sure do. I have an album out called Father's Day.
It's fucking hilarious, Thank you so much, on any of
the platforms. Um. You can also just buy it on

(01:24:32):
my website, Sophia Alexandra dot com. So that's it. Well,
you can find Sophia and you should do that. Don't
find me. I am I am hiding. Now this has
been the episode

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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: How Nice, Normal People Made The Holocaust Possible