The Non-Nazi Bastards Who Helped Hitler Rise To Power

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Mmm, Hello friends, and welcome back to Behind the Bastards.
I'm Robert Evans, and this is the podcast where we
tell you everything you don't know about the very worst
people in all of history. Now on this podcast, I
read a story about someone or someones who are awful

(00:21):
or enabled an awful person to a guest who is
coming in cold and has not been informed about what
you know we're talking about ahead of time. This week,
my guest is Naomi ex Paragon, co host of Couples Therapy,
writer on Broad City, and Naomi, I'm gonna guess probably

(00:42):
black whoa whoa whoa you? Well, I was gonna say
fly Fisher who Well. I wasn't going to bring race
into this. But let's talk about some Nazis. Actually, this
week we're not talking about Nazis. We're talking about the

(01:02):
people who enabled the Nazis to rise to power. Uh,
People who were not Nazis, people who, as a general rule,
everyone on this podcast hated the Nazis and thought Hitler
was terrible. But also these are the people who made
it possible for him to rise to power. We are
talking about the non Nazi bastards behind Hitler today. Yes,

(01:22):
this is a dark and terrible story about how the
Third Right came to power uh and the people who
enabled it. Uh. None of these people wanted Germany to
be taken over by fascist dictatorship, and most of them
would live long enough to be horrified by the extent
of Nazi crimes. Some of them died in concentration camps.
So whoopsie, Yeah, this is Whoopsie Doozel would be the

(01:45):
other title for this episode, The Big Nazi Whoopsie Doozel.
So the story of Hitler's rise to power starts before
World War One, in the mid eighteen hundreds, with the
births of two men, Paul von Hendenburg and Eric Ludendorff,
both of which have fun names to say. I recommend
just saying Ludendorf to yourself when you're feeling down. It

(02:05):
sounds like a cough drop maybe, but not at all soothing,
because then I think about him. Yeah yeah, and he
was not a soothing fellow. Hindenburg himself was born on
August eighty seven. He came from a military family that
could trace its lineage in arms back to the Dred
So gross. Yeah. Well, I'm not into people claiming some
ship from the past. I don't care what your ancestors did.

(02:27):
That's a huge white people thing because big old lists
of what your dead relatives did. Yeah, and and Paul
von Hindenberg is like the epitome of the guy who
cares what his dead relatives did and cares about what
his ancestor his descendants in the future will think about
him when he's their dead relative. That was his whole
animating philosophy in life. Can you imagine, It's like be present, bit,

(02:51):
just just do your own thing. Yeah, well, uh, Hindenburg
started cadet training for the Prussian Army at age eleven
because that was the way ship worked back then. Yeah,
his family were soldiers, So you start as being a
soldier as a child, Like, there's nothing better than arming
a child, you know, because who's more even key old,
more able to manage their emotions and you use their

(03:15):
words and judge situations for what they really are. And
then eleven year old eleven year olds are perfectly competent
to evaluate the world and understand when the use of
deadly force is appropriate. We all, we've all agreed that. However,
for years, I mean, when Hindenburgh was a young child,
his nurse would shout silence in the ranks when he complains.

(03:36):
So that's like even before he was eleven, Like he's
he's being brought up. Like here's a picture of him
at age eleven when he started cadet school and then
the cutest little child soldier. We'll have this picture on
our website, Behind the Bastards dot com. How would you
describe that picture? He is serving an aryan look, Okay,
he's almost like in drag in a way, as a
child just playing this role. I'm all about the crossed

(04:01):
feet in front. Dead eyes. You know that's also a
product of the photographs of the era. You know what
I mean that you can't deal But I actually do
believe his eyes are dead. You know what I mean?
You will continue to believe that throughout the story, I
suspect uh. And again that picture will be on behind
the Bastards dot com, as will any pictures associated with
this episode. Um So. In eighteen sixty six, Hindenberg fought

(04:22):
in the Austro Prussian War, which is a war none
of us have heard about because it's just too old.
The matter. A bullet pierced his helmet increased his head,
knocking him unconscious. But he woke up, wrapped his head
in a towel and continued to lead his soldiers into battle.
Yeah yeah, yeah. He also fought in the Franco Prussian
War of eighteen seventy one. Yeah, because that's a that's

(04:42):
a very important one. That's we got Germany out of
that one, yea, which mixed bag, mixed bag. Uh. And
actually he was present the day the German Empire was
declared in I think of Versailles, so like when they
concluded that war between Prussia and France. Man he became
a thing and he was there to watch it become
a thing. Now, Eric Ludendorff, the other guy that we're

(05:06):
starting with was you may remember him as the bad
guy from the New Wonder Woman movie. Oh my god.
He was a real person. He was. He did not,
he did was not an advocate of using poisonous gas
on women and children in World War One. But he
was a piece of ship that's dope. Yeah. Yeah. So
he was born on April ninth, eighteen sixty five, so

(05:28):
he's a bit younger than Hindenburg. He went into cadet
school also as a kid in nine age nine, probably
like eleven or twelve, something like that. I like the
idea that they were just starting well kind of because
he went into cadet school the same time as Hindenburg,
but he was so good at it that he was
advanced two grades ahead of his classmates. Because taking a
child soldier in advancing them even further beyond where a

(05:50):
child should be is always a good idea. Also, what
makes you a better child soldier? At eleven? I feel
the same thing that makes you good, the same signs
for being a serial killer. This kid was the Michael
Jordan of being a child soldier. But it also means
he was probably like ripping the heads off of rats.
Yeah you know what I mean, like a lot of
starting fires, a lot of bed wedding, a lot of

(06:12):
You will not come to feel that less as this
story progresses. So Ludendorff grew up never knowing anything but
the military. He didn't see combat as a young man,
but he rose through the ranks and wound up working
in the German General staff with a guy named Alfred
von Schlifen. Uh trust him? Yeah? Well, World War One
nerds will know who this guy is. He created what

(06:32):
was called the Schleifen Plan, which was Germany's plan for
how to win a war with Russia and France simultaneously.
And this is the plan that they started World War
One with the gist of it was they had to
put of their army into an invasion of France that
would sweep around and almost touched the English Channel and
then sort of sweep the French armies from behind. Like
that was the gist of this. And it was this

(06:54):
incredibly intricate plan that involved millions and millions of men,
and the Germans, being good at planning, had it down
to like here's how many belt buckles we need, and
here's like all the feet that will pass over this road,
and the very very intricate plan. His job was helping
to make sure that Germany was ready to execute this
plan if the war happened. Um. And he was the

(07:15):
kind of guy who was so into being an army
dude that when he would get vacation time, rather than
using it as a human being, he would take trips
to Belgium because the Schleeping plan involved an invasion of Belgium,
and he would just scout out forts like rather than chilling,
he'd be like he would go scout out Belgian forts
and pretend to be on vacation so that he could
do a better job of Nevadia and Belgium, And hey,

(07:36):
when will you be back from your forts? Scout? And
Junior is really asking about you. He's forgotten your name.
He's tinned, so he's about to go into the army
and he'd like to see you'd like to see you
one last time before he likely dies before he's used
as cannon father. So when World War One broke out,
Ludendorff did great and captured a bunch of Belgium forts.

(07:59):
To thank God, Lord give it all that time and energy.
You better not if you came out on the bottom,
you would have had to rethink all your life. So
he's at least good at the thing that he gave
up his vacations to be good at um. And he
distinguished himself in the fighting against Belgium. Uh and yeah,
his recognition for his brilliance in the field, he was

(08:20):
sent to the undermanned Eastern Front because again the Germans
had put their whole army to invade France. Uh and
he was basically tasked with saving Germany from a Russian invasion.
Now he was paired up in this with an older
retired general who had been sort of out of the
general game for three or four years prior to the
ut Brick of war. Okay, so you're telling me he

(08:40):
was a Riggs and they found his myrtal and his
myrta was Paul van Hendenburg. Alright, alright, alright, I'm seeing it.
So together they won Germany's most decisive victory of World
War One, Tannenburg, which basically meant that Russia was not
going to successfully invade Germany because this victory had so

(09:00):
they become big heroes of this and together Hindenburg and
Ludendorff were, like you said, the Riggs and Murtough. I
compared them to Chris Farley and David Spade of the
German General staff. But both comparisons are at much better
nick yep yep uh. And like the Farley Spade partnership,
this one was destined to end in tragedy. Hindenberg was
the senior of the two men. He wound up getting

(09:21):
most of the credit for the victory at Tannenberg, even
though Ludendorff had done most of the work. This would
prove to be a trope of Hindenberg's career he liked
taking credit for other people's work and not doing much himself.
Uh And if he took credit from other people's work,
he could also shift blame to them, because again, he's
a legacy guy. He's got this deep family history and
he also wants to be a good part of that

(09:41):
family legacy. So he's all about the name. He's a
kind of guy. He like pops up in the photo.
He'll photo Obama moment like, yeah, Hindenberg is the I
was here guy of German history. Yeah, yeah, uh so
is World War One War On Hindenberg and Lundorff rose
to become the military dictators of Germany. They sidelined the

(10:03):
Kaiser and held almost complete control of the state in
what was called a silent dictatorship. The position of secret
military dictator was perfect for Hindenburg because he got to
be in charge, and also Ludendorff would do the hard
work and best of all, any funk ups from either
of them would be blamed on the Kaiser. So it was.
It was a sweet gig while it lasted at least,
But then twenty million people died in Germany lost the war.

(10:23):
We've all been there, um so the worst thing about
Germany's defeat from their point of view, is that the
Kaiser abdicated. This set the expectation that Hindenberg and Ludendorff,
since they were the guys who had been running the war,
would be the ones who'd have to deliver germany surrender.
And they were not about to let that happen. So
they found a fall guy, Matthias Erzberger. Erzberger, Baby, Erzberger. Yeah,

(10:44):
he's the only not shitty guy in the story, and
he's about to get fucked over, maybe harder than anyone's
ever been fucked in the history of politics. Oh my god,
that would be fair to say. I think um Ersberger
was a politician with a German center party because the
Germans did have like quasi democracy prior to World War One,
like the Kaiser held most of the power, but there
was a Reichstag which was like do you remember this

(11:06):
all right? I know? So they had and he was
one of these elected leaders, and he had supported suing
for peace with the Allies in nineteen seventeen, back when
Germany could have worked out a piece with the Allies
that would have ended well, like they wouldn't have had
to sign a treaty that sucked them over. You know.
But Hendenberg and Ludendorff hadn't been willing to make peace

(11:26):
in nineteen seventeen. They wouldn't to try one more time
to win the war, and that had not worked out.
Uh So, when their plan failed, they told Erzberger that
he had no choice but to go and deliver Germany's
unconditional surrender to the Allies. This instantly made Erzberger, how
do you deliver a surrender? He's got to go to
Germany and be like parish. But but I'm saying, like

(11:47):
he's got a what like he's gotta get them to agree. Okay,
So here's the situation at the end of World War One.
There are no no soldiers in German territory, no Allied soldiers.
They're in fact, German soldiers are still in France, they're
still in Belgium. They've taken Ukraine and a huge chunk
of Western Russia from the Russians. Um So to the

(12:08):
German people who don't have a free press, they think
they're winning, but they're almost out of bullets, they're almost
out of shells, they're almost out of men. So they
decided to surrender. Because if the Allies attack once more,
the whole army is going to shut exactly. But it
looks to the civilians like things are going well. Um. So,
rather than Ludendorf and Hendenburg getting up in front of

(12:30):
Germany and being like, we can't fight anymore. They outfought us,
We've lost the war, Erzberger's gotta Dosberger has gotta go
do it. No, so he's got to get up in
front of all his friends, people who don't know him,
and be like, we're losers. Yeah, I'm a loser. I'm
the guy telling you all we're losers. Exactly after four

(12:53):
years of we're winning and it's your sons died, but
we're winning. Yeah. So Erzberger inly becomes the chief villain
of the German nation. Of course. Yeah. Yeah, he can't
go anywhere. He can't. He hasn't know a moment's peace. No,
he does not know a moment's peace. Um. And it
gets worse because, rather than you know, throw their support

(13:15):
behind Erzberger and the new Weimar Republic that replaced the
Kaiser's government, Ludendorf and Hendenberg concocted a scheme. Okay, these
two are like literally they're literally real housewives. They're messy
bitches who live for drama, concocting schemes. I'm imagining white
wine throwing up people's faces. Can you imagine? They're literally evil? Yeah,

(13:36):
they're monsters and and yeah, probably reasoning is a white
run one. That's a German white That's exactly it. You're right,
reasoning be like, you know what we've had to do
because I'm not here to make friends, you know what
I mean, that's what they're giving. And that's a good
T shirt. Ludendorf and Hendenburg basic bitches of the German
general staff. So these guys decide to lie and say

(13:57):
that Germany had lost the war because it had been
betrayed from within by democratic by which they meant Jewish politicians. Uh.
In November nineteen nineteen, Hendenburg and Ludendorff testified together at
a national hearing to determine why Germany had lost the war.
They showed up in civilian clothes rather than their military uniforms, because,
they explained, the mostly social Democrat leaders they were testifying

(14:19):
before didn't deserve to see them in uniform. Okay, it's
not you mean doing nobody no favors so Hendenberg refused
to answer questions that were asked of him and instead
read a statement that he had written. In this statement,
he claimed that Germany could have won up until the
last minute, but quote divergent party interests caused a quote

(14:40):
disintegration of our will to conquer. In other words, left
wing politicians and communists had lost the war for Germany.
Hendenburgh ended his statement by claiming the German army was
stabbed in the back. My god. Now, if you've studied
the Nazis, you know that a major part of Hitler's
rise to power was is use of the stabbed in

(15:01):
the back myth that Germany had been stabbed in the
back by leftists and Jews, and that that's why they've
lost the war. This is one of the things that
helped propel Hitler in the Nazis into power. But that's
skipping ahead to the future. So Mattia Sersberger goes in
signs the armistice with literally with tears in his eyes
because he's a patriotic German, and then gets you know,
rolled over on by Hennenberg and Ludendorff, and he gets

(15:24):
assassinated in shot for being a traitor to the German nation.
My god, this literally I can't you know what. I
wish I had something, you know, pithy and brilliant to say,
but it's that I can't because especially when you read
the receipts, you know what I'm saying, it's all one
long receipt It's like, didn't nobody with power have in power,

(15:49):
Like nobody in that position, Like nobody could be like,
this is not real, this is a lie Mattiaze, why
don't you go move somewhere, babe, maybe just for a
little while, let's stuff cool off. But they were like, nope,
got to kill him. Yeah, And it was just some
it was somebody who hated him because he betrayed the
country by doing what was asked by do by saving
the German army from being completely Anni. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No,

(16:13):
he's like legitimately like heroic person who just like I said,
he might be the most fucked over anyone's been in
the street of politics. He's certainly a candidate. Um. So
after the war, Ludendorf and Hindenberg split up. You know,
the band breaks up a little bit. Um Honestly, it's
gotten it's gotten too ugly, too dirty, you know, what
I mean. They can't look at each other without seeing themselves. Now,

(16:36):
which one of them do you think is the Lenin?
And which one of them do you think is the McCartney,
the Lennen Ludendorff right, No, I think you are right. Actually, um,
Hindenberg did go into politics afterwards. We'll hear more about
him later. Ludendorff became an author and wrote a series
of books about how Germany could win the next war.

(16:57):
He concluded that the only way for them to beat
the world the next time they fought the world was
to embrace what he called totalitarian war, which involved total
state control that could stop discent from the left or
from quote alien Jews inside Germany. Those who were too
weak to contribute to German victory, like the physically handicapped,
might need to be eliminated. See where this is going?

(17:20):
Are you picking up on some trails into this trailer?
So one of Ludendorf, the author's first fans, was a
young man named Adolf Hitler. Yeah, Ludendorff actually marched with
Hitler during his failed nineteen twenty three Munich beer hall Pusch.
This was actually Ludendorf's second coup in three years. He
also participated in the cap Putch, which was another right

(17:43):
wing attempt to take over the government in nineteen There
were a lot of coups in the Weimar Germany. They
just they just be cooing. That's just what they do. Yeah,
they be couping and doing what Yeah. Uh So. Hitler
and Ludendorff also had a falling on after the Pusch,
and when the Fewer finally rose to power, Ludendorff said, quote,
I solemnly prophesied that this accursed man will cast our

(18:06):
Reich into the Abyss and bring our nation to inconceivable misery.
Future generations will damn you in your grave for what
you have done, which is not wrong, not wrong at all.
But also it is a scorned man speaking. Yeah, you
know what I mean. He's only saying it because it's
like he don't like me no more, you know what
I mean, because he's not going to be the one
in power exactly, exactly. Yeah. And and also it's it's

(18:28):
worth noting that Ludendorff became too crazy for the Nazis.
And yeah, he became an Odonist and urged the destruction
of both Christianity and Judaism. Okay, now, how old is
Ludendorff around now, he's like in the sixties. I think
maybe sixties is like in that time. That's like literally
a hundred. Yeah, he's an old he's adult, he's extra.

(18:53):
He's coming in hot on a daily basis. Yeah, he's
always coming in hot, like I'm imagining, like he's I'm
seeing him in an arm chair, you know what I mean,
like with a Bruski kind of really having He's all
in the family moments and this this is the past.
So we have to assume that everyone here is drunk,
Like they're not drunk by twenties standards, but they're alcoholics

(19:14):
by modern standards. Because that was just the world. Yeah,
for survival, you needed your beer and your yeah right,
um so yeah, I mean this is the putch happened
in a beer hall. Everybody was drunk during most of
the except for Hitler of the enough. Oh yeah, he
was fucking razor sharp. Yeah he was well, he was
a teetotaller. I didn't like to drink. I did not
know every now and then you run into a history

(19:36):
of him having a couple of SIPs of champagne or something.
But he was famous when he would do these meetings
at beer holes. He would sip one beer the whole night,
like he wasn't he didn't like alcohol. I bet it
is because if he got drunk he started to cry.
I feel like he would drink and then he would
get all blubberry. He was like, see me, now, when
he's alone, he'll listen. He'll put on his area of

(19:58):
Grand records. And it was either that or Morrissey. Oh
so now it is probably a good time to talk
a little bit about the Weimar government, Like what have
you heard about Weimar Germany? Remember that's that's fine. I
can't remember it. I won't pretend to know. It's okay.
Are this should be like the story that I'm relating here,

(20:20):
I legitimately think might be the most important story in
human history, like how Hitler came to power. It's an
important story, right. We don't hear anything about it in
school because our schools are terrible. Um, but it's a
really important story. And so I'm gonna start by sort
of giving an overview of what the government of Weimar
Germany was like. This is the government that the Nazis destroyed.

(20:42):
The Weimar Constitution was written nine nineteen and It was
one of the most modern and enlightened governing documents ever
put into place. It included a perfectly proportional electoral system,
which ensured that their parliament exactly represented the will of
the people. So like like in our population, right like,
if we held an election and America voted for Democrat,
and of America voted for Republican and six percent voted

(21:05):
for an independent, for you would get that's what Congress
would be. That would divide the seats perfectly equally among
exactly how the popular vote broke down. That's how the
Weimar government is. That that's how the Reichstag is essentially organized. Um.
The Weimar Constitution also guaranteed every man and woman in
the country equal protection under the law and the right

(21:25):
to vote. Yeah. Women, women got the vote under the
Vomar constitution. Women were people. Yeah yeah. The most enlightened
government country in the world in the nineteen twenties was
Weimar Germany. They had the highest literacy, the highest amount
of education, the best schools, the best medical science. Social

(21:46):
justice movement surged in the Weimar years. The feminist movement
started advocating for abortion rights. This is the nineteen twenties,
Germany became home to the first prominent gay rights movement.
What are you telling me? Yeah, this is our Germany.
Magnus Hirschfeld, who was a scientist in Berlin, started publishing
the first research on healthcare for transgender men and women.

(22:07):
During this period of time. The pictures that you see
of Nazi book burnings, our Nazis burning Hirschfeld's library of
transgender research. What you're telling me, that's where they were
coming from. That's where this is what she went so
far south? How Well, we're about to get into how
but first we're gonna get into some ads. And before

(22:29):
we drop into the ads, I would like to do
an unofficial official ad for our unofficial official sponsor, Derrito's. Um.
What I can say for certain is that in the
years since the Derrito's product has entered the world supply chain,
there has never been another Hitler in charge of a country.
So I'm just gonna leave it there. I'm not gonna
say Rito's prevent Hitler, but we've never had a country

(22:53):
elected Hitler and have Dorritos on sale at the same time.
So let's get to the other ads that actually paid us.
All Right, we are back Now we have just talked
about given some background on Hindenberg and Ludendorff too, real
pieces of ship uh, And we have talked about how

(23:15):
from oar Germany was like pretty dope, pretty dope, and
I'm like, what, Yeah, that's not what I thought. It
was all I originally what I always assumed or partially
was taught. But it was like because they had lost
the war, you know, I mean, everyone's downtrodden and feeling shitty,
which is why then someone could come to power and
be like, I got two answers and don't get rid
of a whole bunch of people. And that's usually how

(23:36):
it's portrayed. That is an aspect of the story, but
that is not the whole story of that. Like the
city like Berlin, if you were if you were a
gay person in nineteen twenty, maybe the best place in
the world to live would be Berlin. Now, rural Germany
very different, and they didn't. We'll get into some of
that a little bit later. But the parts of Germany
that were big urban cities were incredibly progressive and it

(23:59):
is now yeah, and it is now still It's it's
come back around to them. The Nazis really messed that
up for a while. And in fact, Hitler always hated
the city of Berlin because it was a hotbed of
social justice and progressives and all that stuff, which is
part of why he was fine with it being destroyed
at the end of World War Two. Yeah, he was
never a big fan of the city. So back into

(24:19):
the tale. Friedrich Ebert was elected the first president of
Imar Germany on January nineteenth, nineteen nineteen, which is that's
a lot of nineteens. I guess it's just three but
it seems like a lot. But it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
I need your theories, Alien Jesus Krishna, that's my theory.

(24:45):
This is a secret sign from them. You're not good
at concy theory. I'm not. I'm not. The Only one
I really believe in is that Ringo secretly wrote all
of the Beatles music. He's just a humble guy. Honestly,
he wants everyone to think he's useless. Let's give Ringo
that ball, but let live for him. So Friedrich ebert
Social Democratic Party held of the vote in nineteen nineteen,

(25:07):
which was great, uh, considering was a proportional system. In total,
three quarters of Germans voted for progressive candidates after World
War One, So the vast majority of Germans are on
the left or the far left at the time that
the First World War ends, which makes sense. The right
had not exactly led Germany to victory in that war. Now,
there was a downside to all of this, to the
system that they had created. The Weimar Constitution allowed for

(25:30):
a president who acted as head of state and had
to appoint a chancellor who actually did more of the
work that we would associate with like our kind of
a president. Essentially, like the president, chancellor split the duties
that we just put in a president. Right, So the
chancellor could only govern with the consent of the parliament.
So the chancellor was appointed by the president, but Parliament
had to want him to stay there, and if most

(25:52):
of Parliament said they didn't like him, they had he
had to go, oh yeah, so that's the way this works.
Uh So he's got to many people like him. All
the time, he's gonna yeah, he's like on you know,
he's constantly campaigning it. And if the chancellor is kicked out,
essentially the president can dissolve the government, which means they
have to hold which means they have to hold an

(26:12):
election immediately to there's no reason in my mind. He
was just like, fine, we're done here, like a giant
tantrum where he was like, no more government, okay, we're
saying a rebuild, yeah, which which sounds okay, but it
means there were times where they would have two or
three elections in a year, or like two elections in
a year where the whole government has to run for
election again on the drop of a hat, which isn't

(26:32):
great for stabilities. Um. So you can see how this
constitution both gave everyone a voice, which is good, but
also caused a huge amount of fragmentation and chaos. And
it meant that in order to get anything done, multiple
parties had to work together and form a coalition so
a chancellor could keep his job and stuff could happen. Right,

(26:53):
But that's good, a nice little coalition. Next, it can
be good. It can be good, And that had been
The guy who wrote the Constitute was a Jewish dude
actually named Hugo Prous and he had planned initially on
sort of copying the US Constitution, but then he got
a look at the US Congress and how deadlock it was. Yeah,
he told interviewers later quote, it was plain that your

(27:13):
system had faults which we should try to avoid. So
he built this trying to avoid America style gridlock, and
he wound up creating another system that caused even more gridlock.
That wasn't his intention. He's not a bastard in this.
He was really trying. It's hard. It's hard. It's hard
to make a government. Yeah. So this is why I
think this is the most important story in history, because

(27:35):
in the space of about a decade or so, the
Weimar government went from the most progressive government in human
history to Nazis, and understanding how that happened is really critical. Um.
A lot of the blame for this goes to the
Social Democratic Party. They were the largest party in post
war Germany, as I had already stated, but they've been
even larger before World War One had broke out. So
in nineteen twelve, the Social Democrats had been the largest

(27:58):
socialist party anywhere on the and it they had more
than a million members when World War One came around, though,
rather than condemning the war, as socialists to do, they
supported their troops and the country, and they voted yes
on the war and yes on massively increased military budgets.
This cost them Yeah what yeah, yeah, this cost them

(28:20):
a lot of support. By nineteen nineteen, they were down
to a quarter of a million voters. Most of the
people who left the Social Democrats either swung swung very
far to the left and either joined the Communist Party
or an independent left wing party that was further left
than the Social Democrats. So even with all that they
had lost it to the war, the Social Democrats were
still in a strong position in nineteen nineteen. The nails

(28:40):
weren't really hammered into their coffin until the end of
nineteen nineteen and early nineteen twenty, when the terms of
the Treaty of Versailles became public. This was the same
time Ludendorff and Hennenburgh started spreading that stabbed in the
back myth. So if the Social Democrats have been ballsy
enough to refuse to support the war in August of
nineteen fourteen, they would have had a leg to stand on.
And it's not true that all of Germany supported World

(29:02):
War One. The largest protests in German history up to
that point occurred in the run up to the war.
There were people gathering in the street to support it.
But there was a hundred thousand people marched in Berlin
against starting World War One, so there was It was
not it was not necessarily a dreamed proposition. It is
a myth that everyone was in favor of their being
a war. Well I'm not really and I'm really getting

(29:24):
whoever is in favor of a war. I don't even
understand how it's the best idea. Well, you gotta, I
mean back then, um, number one, there was this this
long European history of war being glorious and a thing
that makes men and the men. But I mean, come on,
we don't have any medicine. They're putting back on a

(29:45):
damn wound. I mean, anybody who lives to tell the
war tale is terrifying to look at. You gotta think, though,
these guys, all of modern European military experience was fighting people.
They were colonizing with machine guns, so they would have yeah, exactly.
So that's what their view of war was, and everyone
thought it was gonna be war is easy. They keep

(30:07):
trying to give us. Well, but not everybody thought that way.
Enough people had like looked at the American Civil War
to know they're like, oh god, this is gonna be
bad if we all start fighting. Let's not do this.
But nobody listened to them, and the Social Democrats didn't
have the guts to stand up and say this is
a dumb idea. So rather than being known as the
party who had tried to stop Germany from getting into

(30:29):
a losing war, at the end of the war, they
were just one of the other groups who had supported
the worst disaster in German history. UH. And then they
wound up escapegoats. UH sacrificed on the altar of Paul
von Hendenburgh's legacy. So over the next year, the Social
Democratic you know, nineteen nineteen, nineteen twenty or so y one,
the Social Democratic share of the vote dropped from like

(30:51):
to around um. Now this time the members who left them,
a lot of those people split right and joined the
German People's Party or the German National Party. Now, both
of these were fairly and very conservative parties, respectively. And
this brings us to the next group of bastards who
guaranteed Hitler's rise to power, Germany's conservatives. So a lot

(31:11):
of different people had to funk up, like the Social
Democrats and like Heinnenberg and Ludendorff to make Nazi domination possible.
But the simple fact is that none of the other
funk ups would have mattered as much if a sizeable
percentage of the German center right hadn't decided that the
Nazis seemed okay. Now, these people were overwhelmingly not folks
who considered themselves Nazis. William Schier, who was the author

(31:32):
of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and
was an American journalist who lived in Germany during the
rise of the Nazi Party. He interviewed Hitler a bunch
of times. He interviewed like every figure that we're talking
about today, he talked to them, so he's an authoritative source.
And what the hell was going on in Germany in
this period of time, he wrote, quote in the Former
Austrian Vagabond. The conservative classes thought they had found a

(31:53):
man who, while remaining their prisoner, would help them attain
their goals. These goals were multifaceted. The wealthy businessmen and
industrialists wanted the Nazis to destroy the unions and roll back,
essentially the minimum wage. Social conservatives, like Germany's many Protestant voters,
wanted the Nazi help in winning a culture war with
the left. Here's how another wonderful book called The Death
of Democracy describes it. In part, this war was over

(32:16):
newer forms of art in literature, socially critical theater, novels
that dealt frankly with sex expressionist painting. In part it
was about anxiety over new forms of media, such as
films and mass circulation newspapers, their pages filled with sports, crime,
and scandal rather than politics and diplomacy. Sometimes it was
about social changes. The growing feminist in gay movements were

(32:37):
challenging straight male identities. Well I'm going to let the
quote speak to the listener, however they choose to hear it. Yeah, yeah,
we'll we'll talk a little more openly once we've gotten

(32:58):
through all this. Uh yeah. So many conservative voters were
rural again. They felt separated and excluded from life in cities,
Like they all just like beat at a house party.
They're all jelly in Berlin where the ship was popping,
going down, I was going down, you know, you like
I want to go to a party, you know what I
I mean. It just had some rural house parties, get
them jams going. They would have been like it's all love. Yeah, yeah,

(33:21):
the right amount of house parties in the right places,
the right amount of house parties. I'm getting into politics.
If only they'd had burning Man back then, it could
have really helped out a burning black forest or wherever something.
That's the only rural German place I know. But yeah,
conservative rural voters felt excluded from life in the cities
and felt like their concerns were being ignored by mainstream politicians,

(33:45):
which they were. One conservative landowner who didn't like the
Nazis justified his Nazi vote by saying he was quote
hopeful of relief measures by a Hitler cabinet for the
depressed agriculture of the East. It was hard for farmers.
He didn't agree with everything Hitler had to say, but
he thought quote the army and the forces of conservatism
would suffice to prevent a one party Nazi dictatorship. Okay,

(34:06):
we also but also a but also he was worried
about his the agriculture. Yeah, he's a farmer. I give
that part. My question being were they talking about helping farmers? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
that was a big like that was one of they
were saying. They were saying, they were like, okay, we
got you Yeah, the Nazis were very much back to
the land movement. Okay, they were. That was part of

(34:29):
their ruts. And in fact, one of the things the
Nazis did was they were part of this like Hitler
youth thing where they were mobilizing the kids, as they
would have young men from the city's This was during
when the Nazis were in charge. They would have them
go out to farms and basically act as free labor
for the farmers. It was seen as toughening up the
young boys to get them ready for the army, and
it was also helped out the farmers. So the Nazis

(34:50):
were very big on helping rural farmers. Yeah, that was
a big part of their political stance. Yeah. So other
non Nazi conservatives gave their support to Hitler and we're
tangible ways. One such man was Victor von Kerber, a
Northern German aristocrat, war hero and right wing political pundit. Now,
Kerber did not like Hitler, but Hitler liked the cachet

(35:10):
that Kerber had with the right wing. So the Future
Fewer made Victor an offer he couldn't refuse. Hitler wanted
to use Kerber's name and pretended that Kerber was the
author of a biography on Hitler that Hitler himself had
written by basically mashing a bunch of his speeches together.
The thrust of the book was how Hitler's experiences as
a young man and a soldier had revealed to him

(35:31):
the path by which he could make Germany great again. Now,
to Hitler, this was a chance to reverse a mistake
he'd made hard, as it is put to believe now,
in the early nineteen twenties, Hitler's face was not well
known outside of Bavaria. He had actually refused to be
photographed a lot of the time and tried to use
only his voice to win power. By the mid twenty
because he was like I'm busted. He like knew he

(35:52):
was busted. Yeah, he knew he was a weird look
and do Yeah. By the mid twenties, he'd realized that
this was a bad strategy and he needed to brand himself.
His strategy to do that started with by releasing this
secretly an autobiography biography under Kerber's name. Obviously, if he
published it under his own name, it would have seemed
like narcissism. H Kerber's name was a shield and a

(36:13):
trojan horse to convince other conservatives that Hitler was not
too radical for them to support. Now, this one coming
out after the Beer Hall push, when stuff was banned
in Germany. So the book was banned not super long
after its release. It's hard to say how much support
it won him, but it was part of a successful
strategy that made Hitler acceptable to the right right because

(36:33):
it was basically like, oh my god, did you read
that new Kerber joint? Yeah, it was just one of
the and its kind. You know, it's starts a whisper campaign.
People are buzzing everything here. Victor von Kerber wrote a
book about this guy. He's a pretty reasonable dude. Yeah,
that's how you get That's how you get him. So
Victor von Kerber lived to regret helping out Hitler. He
eventually became an ardent ant anti Nazi and even helped
smuggle a German Jew out of Germany. He spied on

(36:56):
behalf of the British and was until he was caught
and thrown in a concentration am. He nearly died there.
So he did his best to make it right, but
were still in power. Yeah, uh, Conservatives didn't need to
help the Nazis directly to still help the Nazis. Take
the example of Edgar Julius Young. Now, he was a
right wing pundit as well and a provocateur who became

(37:18):
a champion of the Young Conservatives movement. Young is in
young an age, not as in his last name. I
know that's confusing uh movement in Germany, and it's confusing
also in German because the German word for like young
is like young man. Anyway, they didn't make it easy,
but didn't make it easy. It's it's messy. Yeah. So
Young wrote an entire book called The Rule of Inferiors

(37:40):
about white democracy was a bad idea. He considered the
Weimar Republic a quote belated breakthrough by the Enlightenment into
the middle of Europe. Germans needed to battle this, he said,
with tradition, blood and historical spirit. Now Young never liked
historical spirit. It's it's this the same thing as the
Hindenburg thing. My family for six warriors and YadA YadA,

(38:02):
YadA ya. Back when we were fighting people, we were
in college and I used to be weapons us. The
Germans didn't have that much of a history of that.
They didn't they didn't get into college and that they
did some, but they didn't get into colonial in that deep.
But I mean, but I don't know if you're thinking
about what you were saying though about you know, this
history of war back when war was glorious. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(38:24):
but part of the glory, right, So you're saying that
more people lived and come back and tell tell the
tale of it. Yeah, they did, and it was not
It wasn't like a war would be a few big
battles and then whatever happens happens. It's not like we
came to knowing World War two where it's like we're
going to destroy the whole country to win this thing.
Like that's what war turned into. But historically it had

(38:45):
been more like we're gonna the army is gonna march
out and it will fight their army, and it will
be this big, heroic couple of days and then whatever
you know, there there will be a treaty and the
people who come home will have stories, which is legitimately
less terrifying than gonna have to stay in a trench
for four years and all your friends are gonna die, right,
good luck if you come back with legs. Yeah, you're

(39:06):
not you're If you get wounded, that's pretty much it
for you. For you because there's poop everywhere, There will
be poop in your wounds. We don't have medicine yet.
How do you feel about poop wound? Yeah? Yeah, you're
good with it? Great, sign your right up. Uh So.
Young never liked the Nazis, but he viewed them as
no worse than the Communists or the treacherous social Democrats.

(39:29):
They were all equally bad. But Young's writing played right
in the Nazi hands because he was like, we need
to destroy the current government. It's terrible. And the Nazi
code name for the Weimar Republic was the system. They
wanted the system destroyed, so did Young. He helped build
support for that idea among the moderate German right. Of course,
Young didn't want the system replaced by a fascist dictatorship,

(39:50):
and in fact, as he aged, he grew wiser and
came to support the establishment of a European Union, linking
all of Europe together to facilitate trade and travel and
make another World war impossible. He was horrified when the
Nazis took power. He reportedly told a journalist, now, I'd
like to throw my arms around every social democrat Young
became part of the anti Nazi resistance. He helped communists

(40:10):
and social democrats alike escaped Germany, and he wrote a
fiery anti Nazi speech that was delivered by a conservative
politician named Franz von Poppin at the University of Marburg.
For this, he was shot dead by the Nazis during
the Night of Long Knives. Yeah, yeah, so you know
there's consequences, consequencess like you bet to get you gotta
get hit quick. Nobody got time for you to figure

(40:33):
this out. Five seen years in. Yeah, trying to make
a chance, way too late by the time realized, of
course correction was necessary. But we're getting ahead of ourselves here.
Let's pull back a bit and talk about the Munich
beerhole punch. What do you know about that? I don't
know about no punch. Okay, well, Hitler tried to. So
I feel like, literally, whatever comments are gonna get all

(40:54):
this is like why did you have a dumb person? No? No, no, no,
you're not a dumb person. It's like fine, Like this
year alone, I've probably read eleven or twelve books on
this period of time, Like this is the thing. I'm
a nerd about right, So I I obsess over this,
but most people don't because everybody's got other ship to do,
and there's a lot of other things that are important

(41:14):
to know, Like I don't know much about capital gains taxes, right,
I think, well, and I guess if that you know.
Putting it that way, it's very sweet of you to say,
what do you know about the Munich beer beer hall pitch?
Because it implies that I could possibly And that's really
nice of you, you know, to come in here and say,
you know what, Maybe you know about this putch and
I just say I don't, but I appreciate you given

(41:36):
me that respect. Well, And if you don't know much
about it, most people probably don't, and it's it's important
for people to know about this. So in in nineteen three,
Hitler tried to take to seize control of the Weimar government.
It started with a speech in a beer hall in
Munich and the kidnapping of a bunch of local politicians.
Uh Eric Ludendorff was around and he helped convince Hitler

(41:56):
convince these politicians to support him, and then Hitler and
Ludendorff in about two thousand Nazis marched downtown to seize
control of the city. I was there maybe, yeah, he
was there, uh, and he hoped that this would Hitler
hope that seizing control of Munich would spark a domino
effect that would topple the Weimar government lead to an
establishment of a government that he was more you know,
down with. But the government officials that Hitler had kidnapped

(42:19):
basically turned on him the instant. He marched away and
called the police. The police set up a barricade, they
opened fire on the Nazis. Four cops and sixteen Nazis
were killed in the resulting skirmish. Hitler fled the scene
and hit out in the attic of his friend Putsy's house. No,
that bit didn't go on at it. No, Hitler did
not go a minute at it. Oh, it gets even

(42:41):
more embarrassing for Hitler. So Putsy, the friends whose attic
he was hanging in he also would have a friend
named put He totally were like, atic, can I chill
at your place? From trying to overthrow the government? Things
came in. It came in a little too hot. Um,
what a loser. So Putsy's real name was Ernest hump

(43:03):
Hunt Stengel, which I think I'm getting right. So, yeah,
I have no fucking idea. I assume if I knew
more German than I do, that it would make more sense.
But it does not, And I've never seen an explanation.
But that was his nickname. Ernest and his wife Helena
were two of Hitler's early supporters. Now, Helena isn't a bastard,
but she's definitely one of the people responsible for Hitler's

(43:23):
rise to power. He viewed her as a source of
emotional comfort during the difficult early years of the Nazi movement.
Here's a quote from the book n The Year that
made Hitler hunt. Stengel once walked into the living room
to find Hitler laying his head in Helena's lap and saying,
if only I had someone like you to take care
of me. Helena gently rebuked Hitler and removed his head.
She swore to her husband later that Hitler was no

(43:44):
man for any woman. Believe me, he is an absolute neuter. Oh,
Helena's spitting some fire, but also it all lines up,
you know what I'm saying, God? Yeah? Uh So. The
failed putsch was yet another time when Helena helped Hitler

(44:06):
keep going. She hit him under blankets and tried to
have him smuggled out of town by her friends. When
this failed, When the police showed up at her door,
Helena claims, Hitler quote pulled out his revolver with his
good hand he'd injured his hand in the in the
putch his arm actually, and shouted, this is the end.
I will never let those swine take me. I will
shoot myself. First, Hitler tried to commit suicide. Helena wrestled

(44:28):
the gun out of Hitler's hands and threw it into
the flower bind She saved his life and in doing
so kind of doomed seventy five million people to death. Wait,
so that really happened, right? Saying happened to kind of say, oh,
this is the only reason why he's in my house.
She's saying that actually went down. No, that went dad,
damn it, Helena, let it do it, let him let
him do it. You're saying he's a neuter, you obviously

(44:51):
don't like him talking about him, or or maybe you
dig it down with him. You don't want your husband
to know either way, Helena YouTube faced you. She an
he did. It's it's one of those things, like I
think it's always the right thing. If you see some
trying to kill themselves, try to stop it. I'm not
going to say wrong for that, but it led to Hitler.

(45:12):
I guess so he wasn't hit He wasn't the Hitler
window Hitler. Yeah, yeah, he must have brought that stuff up.
You're hanging out with your boy Poosey in his damn
addict and you'd be like, you know what I feel like,
you know what I really want to do one day?
You know what I mean? Like, that's not an idea
that just popped. He was talking about that. This is
one of those things that gets into like a really
deep historical debate that I'm gonna take. One of the

(45:34):
major debates about the Nazi time and power is whether
or not the Holocaust was pre planned from the beginning
or was just sort of something that they decided to
do it later in the war when things turned against them.
There's a debate both sides. You can find very convincing
arguments for We're not going to weigh in either way.
I don't. I don't think she's a bad person for
trying to stop her friend from killing himself. It is

(45:56):
why we have Hitler. At the same time, Hitler came
out of it, so it's not it's good to stop
people like true can't argue with that. And yet in
this one kind, I'm like the guy, there's nothing to
learn from her story here because it's like she did
the right thing and we got Hitler. It's there's not

(46:20):
You can't always take a lesson out of history. Sometimes
it just sucks. And speaking of things that just suck,
you know, it doesn't suck what Derrito's and the other
wonderful products and services that support this podcast, which we're
about to hear some ads from in UH in a moment,
because that's what allows the show to be on the air.

(46:47):
And we're back. We just had a little break. I
had a handful of Derritos, and I just gotta let
you know, I was feeling a little bit of a
rising urge to overthrow democracy and institute a one party dictatorship,
and it just went away as soon as I tasted
that cool ranch on my lips. Cool ranch keeps you cool,
keeps you from instituting the fascist dictatorship again. Dorito's are

(47:08):
our unofficial UH sponsor until they send a legal request
asking me to stop saying that or give us money
and then become our official sponsor either way to Rito's. Anyway,
let's get back into the Hitler tale. So Helena hot
st Angel, the wife of Hitler's best buddy, had just
stopped him from killing himself after his failed beer hole punch.

(47:29):
Um tell me she also late in life, regretted that
like so many other people. You know, I know that
there was a falling out between the hot Strangles and them.
You hear more about Ernest because he moved to America,
but they split up, and I really don't know much
about Helena after this period. I would have researched that,
but I'm a hacking a fraud. Um. So anyway, the

(47:50):
failed putch should have, by all rights been the end
of Hitler's Hitler ring career. Uh, but it wasn't, obviously,
and the bastards responsible for that are the judges and
the police of my our Germany. First off, the cop
who arrested this is just to give you a little
bit of color for how the police treated the Nazis.
The cop who arrested Hitler apologized before taking him away.

(48:10):
While Hitler waited for his trial, he stayed in the
v I P equivalent of a cell and was allowed
to receive gifts, which were mainly sweets and cakes from
his followers. Oh my god. Here's a quote from that
wonderful book nineteen twenty four, which I really recommend reading
if you're a Hitler ner the year that made Hitler.
I don't know if anybody wants to call themselves a
Hitler nerd. Whatever. Hey, you know, some people like star Wars,

(48:34):
some people like to study the Rise and follow the
Third Reich. It's not that different. Actually, here's a quote
from that book that sums up how Hitler was treated
during the trial and how the Nazis in general were
treated by the courts and the police. Quote. The relaxed
treatment of the Nazis and their allies was in stark
contrast to the much rougher handling meeted out to trial
defendants from communist or socialist groups who are prosecuted in

(48:57):
the people's courts around Bavaria. The social list muntion Er
post which I hope I pronounced right, bitterly noted that
in Hitler's trial, the accused carried on animated conversations with
one another until they were asked with great tact if
they wouldn't mind taking their seats, no sign of guards.
Only two months earlier, wrote the newspaper, sixteen socialists had
been brought into a people's court where quote they arrived

(49:20):
manacled and departed manacled. Each had a guard on either side.
They were not allowed to speak with one another. Even
those who sentences were already covered by time served were
led away afterwards in chains. That's the kind of tact
to the court shows to socialists. So can you imagine
going to trial and then just chatting with your buds

(49:40):
like you're at a conference and scramp. It's just very
like them showing up and just like kicking for a while.
And I mean, like, could you guys like quiet downward
trying to ste could you cut it with just a
little bit with saying the government needs to be overthrown,
we gotta do this trial. Sy, I'm sorry the cooker,
you're quiet, the quicker world. And yeah. So Hitler's trial

(50:00):
became the trial of the century, or it would have
been the trial of the century if not for the
Nuremberg trials to prosecute the Nazis. But that was that was,
that was in the future. Up to this point. It
was the Trial of the Century. Um. It was very
heavily publicized, and Hitler was able to use it as
basically a platform to recruit more supporters thanks to his
shitty chief judge George Nightheart. Um, it's George night Court, Nightheart.

(50:23):
Oh you could get almost basically, and I was like
night Court and it's actually I think it might be George,
George Jorg. There's no e. It's George without an e.
It's you know, Germans. Sorry, I love you Germans, but
you spell George wrong. Um. So old George was a
right wing nationalist with a history of throwing the book
at leftists and not really caring so much about right
wing terrorists. He had commuted the sentence of a right

(50:46):
wing terrorist named Count Arco Valley, which is a legitimately
cool name. Arco. That's a that's a Star Wars villain. Yeah,
that's definitely yeah. The Count had been sentenced to death
for shooting Kurt Eisner, a socialist revolutionary and journalist, in
the back of the head. Judge knight Art reduced that
to fortress arrest, which sounds harsh, but it basically means

(51:08):
you get to live in a castle. What. Yeah, that's cool.
Road through um. The judge justified this by saying that
Count Arco Valley had quote a glowing love of his
people in fatherland, and also because a lot of people
didn't like the guy that he'd shot, So it was fine,
Judge Knight the rules. Let's get a lot of people

(51:32):
thought that I was a dick, so I guess it's
cool that you murdered him. Here's a castle German law law.
H Judge and Ihart believe the political murder wasn't a
serious crime of the victim was unpopular, which, in his
casement left wing Nighthart also had granted Hitler's early parole.
A year earlier, when Hitler had received a sentence for

(51:52):
breaching the peace, he'd been sentenced to three months of parole.
Night had reduced it to one. Hitler had received this
sentence for the severe legending of a political rival. Uh
so this is the kind of guy who's Hitler's judge
when he goes to court for trying to overthrow the government,
which again you'd think would be a serious crime. Him
homies Yeah. Night. Heart's first big ruling was on whether

(52:14):
or not the case against Hitler would be an open
or closed session which means whether or not everything that
happens will be available to the public and journalists, or
whether or not it will be hidden. Now, the prosecution
wanted a closed session, which was both to hide Hitler
from public demand and to keep his politics obscure, and
to hide the fact that members of the German army
had kind of, sort of absolutely supported an egged on

(52:36):
the coup. Hitler's defense wanted the case to be open
so Hitler could court the sympathy if the German people
by doing what he did best, giving long speeches. Judge
Nightheart ruled that part of the case could stay open
and part of it would be closed, which is so
let me guesses were open. Yeah, that's exactly what happened.
Hitler got to hide anything that he thought was bad

(52:58):
for his case because night Heart basically said, the defense
will know which part should be open and closed. Yeah,
what kind of law. Yeah, it's he's a shitty judge. Um.
He justified this by saying that the Weimar government had
banned Hitler's publications after he tried to overthrow the government,
so it was only fair that Hitler be allowed to

(53:19):
speak to the people. You know, this is not worn
when you in trouble. You don't need to make no calls.
Oh my god. Yeah, uh so, whit be good. This
is like the whitest guy sentence of all time. Because

(53:42):
for trying to overthrow the government and institute a dictatorship,
Hitler gets a year in a fortress prison where he
gets to live in a fancy whole apartment to himself.
His friends were there too, because they got arrested. He
was there, like a bunch of them, he and his friends.
I'll get to live in a fortress first, basically like
in fraternity party. The party, they had access to alcohol.

(54:06):
He used the time to finish writing editing comcause is
where he wrote mind exactly honestly, Like I would love
a fortress prison. Okay, I need some time to rebuild, reconnect.
I would definitely get into yoga, start clean eating a
fortress prison. Might actually do a fortress prison with all
of your best friends. Yeah, that's not a punishment. That's

(54:27):
not how you stopped someone from being Hitler. Like, you know,
they snuck in ladies party of the fortress. I mean,
what do you think. I don't think it was cool.
I'm sure some of them did. I don't think Hitler
was that cool. No, But I mean like if he
had his boys around somebody, they smuggled somebody, because you know,
a fortress prisons got tunnels, you know what does. But
the trial in Hitler's time and Fortress prison were key

(54:49):
moments in his rise to power. Now, the trial also
provided reams of evidence the German Army and the Bavarian
State police had been helping the Nazis out since their inception.
At one point during the trial, will Helm would run
the Munich police Department from nineteen nineteen to nineteen twenty two,
was questioned. He admitted, quote, we could have easily suppressed it,
it being the Nazis in nineteen nineteen and nineteen twenty,

(55:11):
but we realized that this little national socialist movement should
not be crushed. Frick and his fellow officers saw the
Nazis as quote, the germ of a rebirth of Germany.
We held a protective hand over the national socialist German
Workers Party and Herr Hitler. Uh well, well, well, now
we'll talk later about the history of coordination between the

(55:33):
police and far right Nazi extremists. But there was actually
another time during Hitler's rise to power where he was
saved in court by a sympathetic judge. On May eighth,
nineteen thirty one, Hitler was subpoenaed when four of his
stormtroopers tried to murder a guy. The subpoena was the
ploy of a radical socialist lawyer and fucking hero named
Hans Litton. Now, Hans wanted to get Hitler on the

(55:55):
stand so that he could cross examine him and basically
prove that the violence by Hitler's men had been directly
encouraged by Hitler in the Nazi Party. Here's how The
Death of Democracy describes it. The climax comes in exchange
over a pamphlet written by the Nazi Party's propaganda director,
Joseph Gebbels. The pamphlet is a quick guide to Nazi
ideology for new party recruits. It includes the promise that

(56:17):
if the Nazis cannot come to power through elections, then
we will make revolution. Then we will chase the parliament
to the devil and found the state on the basis
of German fists and German brains. If Hitler's party is legal,
Litton wants to know how could such a thing be
written by the party's designated propagandist and published by the
party's official publisher. In the morning session, Hitler evades this

(56:38):
question by denying that the party ever approved the pamphlet. Then,
over lunch break, Litton learns that the pamphlet is still
being sold at Girbel's meetings and at all party bookstores.
Can Hitler explain this? Hitler could not explain this and
actually screamed in rage while on the stand because he
just he had no answer to it, so he just screamed, Yeah,

(56:59):
he got so angry because he he'd been caught. Well, right,
but my do like think about how pathetic that is.
It should have been the end. End it should have been.
It should have been the end. But the judge, Kurt
owned Sworge, decided to protect Hitler. Now Kurt wasn't a
Nazi either, but he preferred them to the scary socialists
and evil communists. Judge owned Sorge disallowed further questioning. Linton's

(57:24):
case could have potentially led to criminal charges for Hitler
and other Nazis. Instead, it led to basically nothing. A
little more than a year later, Hitler was the new
Chancellor of Germany. Linton was sent to a concentration camp
where he spent more than five agonizing years before committing
suicide and Dachau. The whole incident amounted to little more
than bad press for Hitler, and by that point he

(57:45):
could handle it. Oh so fuck you, Kurt owned Sorge. Yeah, sure,
someone in Germany, go find his grave and pay on it.
We will send you a shirt, unless that is illegal
for me to say, in which case, like hit there,
I never urged anyone to do anything illegal. Never start
any sentence about yourself with like, that's a fair point.

(58:09):
That's a fair point. Thank you for trying to protect me. Uh.
And and yeah, I won't make a Dorito's plug there,
probably will not get us a sponsorship. Um. So let's
talk about the press now. The German and American press
are collectively our next bastard on this tour to bastards. Uh.
There were, of course, a number of great journalists like
William Schier right and left wing, who reported worriedly on

(58:32):
the rise of the Nazis and tried to highlight their
crimes before Hitler came to power. Unfortunately, those people were
not the majority of the mainstream media. Hitler's big speech
at the trial for the Munich Putsch was only able
to reach German citizens and convert new Nazis because the
trial was breathlessly covered by major German newspapers. Hitler said wacky,
insane things. It was easy to get headlines out of

(58:53):
his nuttiness, and people wanted to read about this bizarre character.
Here's how that wonderful book Death of Democracy to scribed
the coverage. He knows how to use all modulations of
his sometimes raw voice, noted the respected Frankfurter Zeitung Zeitung
means newspaper in German. Uh. While no friend of the
Nazi leader, the sophisticated newspaper was committed to a liberal
democratic order in the New Germany and had endorsed the

(59:15):
Treaty of Versailles. The Jewish own Daily nonetheless let its
reporter give Hitler his due as a performer and explained
to an unknowing audience some of the magic of Hitler's method.
He softens his voice, then gradually raises it to a
dramatic shout, even a hoarse screech. His voice then cracks
and sorrow over his fallen comrades. He scornfully mocks the
trembling timidity of his enemies, shaping his words with a

(59:37):
lively play of his hands. Hitler rounds off his periods
with both hands, emphasizes an ironic or offensive comment by
shooting his left index finger towards the state attorney, and
uses his head and even his body to undergird his speech.
The rhetorical impact is strong. Much of what Hitler says
about the lead up to the coup sounds at least
subjectively convincing, wrote the Frankfurter Zeitung. One sees clearly how

(59:59):
hit There's plan grew out of the behavior of the
men then ruling in Bavaria. The only thing dividing them
were some personel questions and the courage to act. Oh
this is the left wing car like envy, you don't
like him. These are the guys you don't like him. Well,
that's very nice. So the vast majority of Germany's newspapers

(01:00:21):
were very anti Nazi and anti Hitler. Uh. This did
not concern the Nazis one bit. They loved the breathless
coverage of the crazy things hit There would say. Joseph
Gebel's repeatedly wrote in his diary, the main thing is
they're talking about us. Wow, wow. Now the American press
also played a big role in Hitler's growing acceptance both
to Germany in the world as a legitimate politician. In

(01:00:43):
the late nineteen twenties, American papers took to calling him
the German Mussolini. Now cool, that sounds bad to us,
because we know Mussolini was murdered in the street by
his own people and strung up because so they could
got at his corpse. But back in those days, Mussolini
was an important world leader, and not yet christ Um.
So I'm going to quote now from a very good
Smithsonian article called how Journalists covered the Rise of Mussolini

(01:01:07):
and Hitler, And this is gonna be a long quote.
The main way that the press defanged Hitler was by
portraying him as something of a joke. He was a
nonsensical screecher of wild words whose appearance, according to Newsweek,
suggests Charlie Chaplin. His countenance is a caricature. He was
as voluable as he was insecure, stated Cosmopolitan. Sure he
had a following, but his followers were impressionable voters duped

(01:01:30):
by radical doctrines and quack remedies, claim The Washington Post
Now that Hitler actually had to operate within a government.
After he was elected, the sober politicians would submerge this movement.
According to The New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor,
a quote keen sense of dramatic instinct was not enough
when it came time to govern, His lack of gravity

(01:01:50):
and profundity of thought would be exposed. In fact, The
New York Times wrote after Hitler's appointment to the chancellorship
that success would only let him exposed to the German
public his own futility. Journalists wondered whether Hitler now regretted
leaving the rally for the cabinet meeting, where he would
have to assume some responsibility. Would he thuh, eventually, I

(01:02:14):
mean shot himself when the Russians were at the gates. Weally,
But it's like, there's no better way to make someone
seem like not a threat. And therefore even if you
don't respect him, right, you still are like, oh, this
is no big deal. Charlie Chaplin, everyone's favorite, good time,
god time, Oh my god. So all this, I hope,

(01:02:41):
has explained how the soil of fascism was fertilized in Germany.
All of these people and many more that I didn't
have the time to get into detail about helped prepare
a political climate that could allow for the rise of
Adolf Hitler in the most progressive, educated and enlightened society
in the world at the time. The only thing left
to explain is how Hitler actually achieved absolute power and
toppled the Weimar Democracy. So we're gonna get into some

(01:03:04):
turn of the century German parliamentary politics here, trying to
make it interesting. I think it will be because it's
interesting to me and my taste is flawless. So here
we go. In the same year that Hitler tried his putch,
a guy named Gustav Stresseman was elected Chancellor of Germany.
Now Stressman was a Liberal and his main achievement in
office was starting the healing process with France. He became

(01:03:25):
friends with their leader, a guy named Briand, and both
of them desperately wanted to avoid their two nations ever
again coming to blows. These are actually the first people
who proposed a European union using the words European union.
That was the dream. Then there's like, okay, if we
have like a common border between us and we we
start trading and our kids can travel and see each other,
maybe there will never be another terrible World war. That

(01:03:46):
was the dream for stress Human and brand. Unfortunately, stress
Human's terms started right when the German economy took a
swan dive into the asphalt. The Social Democrats pulled their
support from him and his government collapsed, which meant new
elections and a new chancellor. So the week al bet
a year. Okay, the collapsed economy did not he was

(01:04:07):
now he was foreign minister. He was like their head
of foreign policy for like eight years after that, so
he was a force in politics. But yeah, he was
no longer in charge. So the collapsed economy didn't sweep
the Nazis into power, as it's often claimed, but it
did lead to a surge at this point in time
in the early twenties in the votes for both the
Nazis and the right wing in general. Now, in nineteen five,

(01:04:27):
Paul von Handenberg gets elected President of the Reich. There
is there's our mannden Bird. No, yeah, so he is
the president of the right now. Over the next few years,
the economy improved, but Germany's political polarization continued unabated. Stressman

(01:04:49):
stayed on as the foreign Minister until he died in
nineteen nine, and while he was in office he pushed
for Germany to join with France into that European Union thing.
This actually might have happened if it hadn't have been
for a guy named alf for Hugenberg. Now, Hugenberg was
a very wealthy conservative who had bought up a ton
of newspapers and owned a lot of wealthy conservatives that
owns a bunch of newspapers, who he wound up at

(01:05:12):
the head of the German National Party, which was a
center right wing party. They surged in nineteen twenty four
when the economy fell, but by nine the economy had
started to get better, and that meant that they lost
a huge number of votes to the Liberals. One of
Hugenberg's first moves as head of the party was to
ally it with the Nazi movement. He didn't like the Nazis,
but he saw them as the only way for Conservatives

(01:05:33):
to win at the ballot box. So Hugenberg hated the
Treaty of Versailles and the reparations payments Germany was forced
to make. Continuing those payments, albeit in a reduced form,
was a key part of the plan that Stresseman and
Brian had put together to bring Germany and France into
an early EU sort of thing. The Nazi Conservative Alliance
was successful at stopping any chance this head of becoming
a reality and purse pushing Germany away from reconciliation with France. Now,

(01:05:56):
a lot of Germans actually supported reconciliation and greater integration
into Europe. We don't exactly have opinion polls from that time,
but most Germans in the late twenties were voting for
liberal or leftist parties, or at least centrist parties. The
problem is that the German Communist Party, the kp D,
was not willing to work with the Social Democrats in
the same way the Nazis and the Conservatives were willing

(01:06:16):
to work together. Now, the why the y as in
why the Communists weren't willing to work with the Social
Democrats leads us to this episode's secret hidden Bastard Joseph Stalin.
So back in the nineteen twenties, the Communists of the
world were a very centralized group. The German Communist Party,

(01:06:40):
which saw substantial increases and voters right up until the
Nazis came to power, was run by the Communist International,
which was run by the Soviet Union, which was under
the control of our old homeboy J. Stall Now. In
nineteen the Common Turn had declared that world capitalism was
entering its third period, a time of crisis in which
capitalists ally with fascists for help in fighting back against

(01:07:01):
organizing labor. This part was true, as we will get
into later, but the Common Tern a k. A. Stalin
also said that business would seek the help of the
Social Democrats, who, because of their support for capitalism, were
quote social fascists and thus just as bad as the
Nazi Party. The reality is that Stalin simply didn't want
the French and German relations to improve, because the more

(01:07:22):
united Europe would represent a threat to his dominance and
maybe to the Soviet unions continued survival. So he told
the German Communist Party that they had to fight the
Social Democrats rather than work with them to defeat the
Nazis and stopped the rise of Hitler. So Stalin's in
the mix. Stalin's in the mix. Where my goodness, he's

(01:07:42):
got his fingers in this ship by two. So uh Now,
since I've thrown the Communists under the bus, it's only
fair that I say that capitalists also had a huge
role in allowing the Nazis to seize power. Walter Funk
was a German economist and future Reich Minister for Economic
Affairs under the Nazis. He testified at Nuremberg that by

(01:08:03):
nineteen thirty one, my industrial which means my business owning
friends and I were convinced that the Nazi Party would
come to power in the not too distant future in
the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. William Sharer,
who interviewed both Funk and Hitler a number of times,
describes how German big business came to stop worrying and
love the Nazis in the summer of that year. Funk,

(01:08:23):
a greasy, shifty eyed, paunchy little man whose face always
reminded this writer of a frog. That sounds right, I
like Shire. He's a good journalist. Yeah, you know what
that description sounds about, right, Yeah. Gave up a lucrative
job as editor of a leading German financial newspaper, the
Berlinard Berze Tongue, and joined the Nazi Party and became
a contact man between the party and a number of

(01:08:44):
important business leaders. He explained Nuremberg that several of his
industrialist friends, especially those prominent in the big Rhineland mining concerns,
had urged him to join the Nazi movement quote in
order to persuade the party to follow the course of
private enterprise. Now this is a quote from Funk. At
that time, the leadership of the party held completely contradictory
in confused views on economic policy. I tried to accomplish

(01:09:06):
my mission by personally impressing on the Fewer and the
Party that private initiative, self reliance of the businessman, the
creative powers of free enterprise, et cetera be recognized as
the basic economic policy of the party. The Fewer personally
stressed time and again during talks with me and industrial
leaders to whom I had introduced him, that he was
an enemy of state economy and of the so called

(01:09:26):
planned economy, and that he considered free enterprise and competition
as absolutely necessary in order to gain the highest possible production.
So German bankers and businessmen began to pour money into
the Nazi Party millions of reichsmark's worth. Their goal was
the suppression of labor unions and an end to the
Weimar government's equivalent of a minimum wage. The death of

(01:09:47):
Democracy explains, the industrialist called for cuts and public spending
in wages and a rollback of government regulation. As business
leaders well knew, this was a program that could be
achieved only through the exclusion of the political left, a
especially the Social Democrats. So everybody's on board. We're all it.

(01:10:08):
You get a few get you get to go to
a concentration camp, like half of you go to camps
if you get a camps. Now, the final bastard I'm
going to introduce today in this exceptionally bastardful episode is
a general named Kurt von Schleicher. He was the army's
chief political lobbyist because the army had one of those,
and so he represented the German Army or Reichswear in politics.

(01:10:31):
The army had been severely limited by the Treaty of Versailles.
They wanted an into that, and they also wanted more
money to buy army things like expensive new battle cruisers.
The Social Democrats preferred to spend that money on bullshit
like bridges and foods, and in fact, one of their
election slogans was food instead of a battleship, basically like yeah, um,
so Schleicher in the military like the German industrialist, wanted

(01:10:52):
to push the left entirely out of power. Schleiker did
not like Adolf Hitler. There's a story that at one
point he was talking to a Hitler supporter who kept
gushing over how talented the Fewer was. Schliker responded, yes,
it's just a pity that he's crazy. By the way,
Schliker would be shot to death on the Night of
Long Knives. But at this point in time, Schliker, who
didn't like the Nazis, was still sure that once they

(01:11:12):
got into power, they'd calmed themselves down and moderate themselves.
He said, quote, we will make the Nazis believers in
the state only when we let them at the trough,
when has given somee power made them more moderate, not
once at all of history. Well, okay, I'll put you
in the same thing. Turn eleven year olds into soldiers. Yeah. Yeah,

(01:11:34):
it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea. The reason
that's usually justified for why he thought this is that
the Social Democrats had at one point been a pretty
radical left wing political party, and then they'd had to
govern and it had turned them more moderate. So that
does that happens with reasonable people who weren't from the
get go claiming they want to do install a dictatorship. Right,

(01:11:55):
It's like how Obama starts off with all this left
wing talk and then he's more of a centrist in season.
Power that happens with sane people, you know. It's like, yeah,
it doesn't happen with the crazy people. Um, they don't
get moderated by being given power and they don't compromise.
So in nineteen thirty, a guy named Heinrich Brunning was
elected Chancellor of Germany. Now Brenning was probably the last

(01:12:18):
competent elected leader the Weimar Republic had. Brenning was famous
for being a policy walk who mainly wanted to get
the economy back on track again. He also wanted the
government to ban the essay the Nazi Stormtroopers because he
thought it was unreasonable that a fascist political party would
be allowed to have a paramilitary army. Uh's coming here,
I'm trying to be reasonable. This is not the story

(01:12:40):
for a reasonable men to do well, um schlicker the
German general like lobbyist guy. I thought the stormtroopers were
useful because they were sort of a backup army, the
German army was limited to a hundred thousand men. They
were like a million something stormtroopers at this point. So
we thought they were useful as like a force that
he could call on if the country was invaded. Um

(01:13:00):
So he talked to his buddy, President Paul van Hendenberg,
who would be up for reelection soon. Uh and he
told him that, you know, if he banned the stormtroopers,
it's gonna not end well for you. Uh So Schliker
tried to sabotage the band. He put together a file
mostly filled with right wing news press clippings about violence
perpetuated by the Social Democrats paramilitary organization because oh yeah, yeah, everybody,

(01:13:23):
and during this whole period, it's important to understand there
is a growing amount of fighting in the streets between
the Nazis and the Social Democrats and the communists, and
everybody has a little paramilitary army. It's not official. The
parties usually don't officially endorse them as an army. Like
the Nazis would claim that their stormtroopers were basically like
a sports club, but they were stockpiling guns and and

(01:13:47):
it is true that basically the file that Schliker sends
to Hendenberg, he makes the case that many sides are
to blame for the political violence in Germany, so you
shouldn't blan banned the stormtroopers, and it's true that many
sides had paramilitary armies, but the Nazis had by far
the largest and the most violent, and we're killing the
most people and also wanted to overthrow the state. So yeah,

(01:14:11):
So Chancellor Brunning and the Reichstag passed the band anyway,
even though Hindenberg and Schleicher did not want it. So
Schliker engineered a vote of no confidence against Chancellor running
the Nazis and the Communists backed him on this because
the Communists don't like the government anyway, and they think
that anything that's bad for the current government, which again

(01:14:31):
they're not social democrats, their social fascists, so anything that's
bad for them is good for communism. Why everybody dumb?
Everybody's always dumb. That's democracy. Every that is the tagline
of democracy is everybody gets not just a king's gonna
be dumb. We're all gonna be dumb until we get
a king again because we're all too dumb. That's how

(01:14:53):
it works. So there's a vote of no confidence. But
Brunning actually manages to defend himself well enough that he
wins the vote. Schliker isn't willing to take this lying down,
so he goes to Hennenburg and he convinces Hendenburg to
demand Brenning's resignation anyway, on the grands that Brenning must
be unpopular because people would have asked for a vote
of no confidence. Uh. In reality, Schliker just wanted Brenning

(01:15:13):
out of power because Brenning was a centrist who got
in the way of Schliker's dreams of assembling a right
wing coalition. So on the day Brenning resigned, Joseph Gebbels
wrote in his diary with that the system has fallen.
So I do want to say, if you want more
detail on this whole thing, The Death of Democracy is
a wonderful book that will will tell you much better
than I did, everything that happened. So the gist of

(01:15:34):
this is that increased polarization in the late twenties and
early thirties led to the executive branch President Hendienburgh using
more executive orders to get things done. Hennenberg didn't like
using executive orders because he had the sign them, so
if his policies were bad and things got fucked up.
He couldn't avoid the blame. And if you remember talking
about Hendenburg, his whole bow the blame, making sure his

(01:15:55):
legacy is good exact. So, like Schliker, Hendenburg wanted to
govern at the behest of a right wing coalition and
completely ignored the Social Democrats and the left, who he
hated and did not consider real Germans. Schliker promised Hendenberg
that he could make this happen. So the next guy
he put up for chancellor was a dude named Franz
von Pappen now Poppin, was a conservative politician who was

(01:16:16):
famous for being very dumb in mediocre. They basically wanted
to use him as a puppet. Before World War One,
Poppin had worked in New York City as a spy
for the government, trying to sabotage the Allies. He got
caught doing this and sent home. And when he was
sent home, he sent ahead of him a bunch of
private government documents uh and assumed that no one would
search his luggage. They did search his luggage and the

(01:16:38):
British game lists of all of the names of Germany spies.
So this is the guy they're like, this guy is
a great dude to have as a pawn because he's
just dumb as fucked. He'll do what you said, So
dumb motherfucker friends. Von Poppen is the chancellor now. Schliker
got the Nazis to support this thoroughly mediocre candidate by
promising that Poppin would repeal the ban on their stormtroopers.

(01:16:59):
Poppin was elected, and he did just that. He also
established special courts to deal with political violence by stripping
perpetrators of their constitutional rights. He did this through executive orders. Now,
the Brunning administration, who he had replaced, had also relied
heavily on executive orders, but Brunning had had a parliamentary
majority behind him, most of the country supported what he
was doing. With popping in power, executive orders were used

(01:17:21):
to ignore parliament entirely and govern without the Social Democrats.
This wound up being a disaster by alienating the center
left entirely. Schlicker and Hendenburgh made themselves totally dependent on
the Nazis. Because the Nazis were now the biggest right
wing party in politics, and rather than being content that
they'd won some power, the Nazis started pushing for all
of the power, because that's what Nazis do. Um. This

(01:17:44):
is because the Nazis knew that they and their ideas
could not survive long in power. Gebel's actually complained that
they were winning themselves to death and elections because now
that they had some guys in power, when ship would
go wrong, the blame would on them. Yeah. So the
Nazi Party achieved its best showing at a fair an
open election on July thirty one, nineteen thirty one, with
thirty seven point one percent of the vote. They never

(01:18:06):
got more than that in an election. Wow. Yeah, that's
the highest that in free and open election. That's the
most popularity at seven. They celebrated this victory in true
Nazi fashion with a shipload of violence. Several of them
beat and then shot dead a left wing activist. These
stormtroopers were arrested and because of Poppins new special courts,
they were sentenced to death. The Nazis used this as

(01:18:27):
an excuse to start attacking Poppin's administration. Now, the Nazis
adventual goal was to get Hendenburgh to declare Hitler the Chancellor.
They did this by threatening the thing he valued most,
his legacy. There weren't enough Nazis in the Reichstag to
impeach the president, but they did have enough deputies to
propose to prosecute him for his illegal actions in office,
like the executive orders he'd been using to ignore the

(01:18:48):
Social Democrats. They threatened to do this, and again, the
one thing Hendenburgh doesn't want is his legacy being tarnished
by a court case. Maybe so Poppin, Schleicher and Hendenburg
were left with very few options without Nazi support. Poppin
couldn't remain chancellor since the Conservative Party did not have
that many people anymore. Uh Their options were either to
have Hendenburg dissolved the Reichstag, declare a state of emergency

(01:19:10):
and governed as a dictator, or bring the Nazis into
the government with Poppin the whole to clear a dictatorship,
thing they thought would spark a civil war, so they
decided once again to work with the Nazis. They offered
the Nazis seats in Poppin's cabinet, but Hitler was no
longer willing to compromise. The only thing he would accept
now was the chancellorship, so Handenburgh dissolved the government yet again,

(01:19:31):
in the hopes that the Nazis would lose some votes
and yet another election and finally be forced to cooperate.
But before Popin could dissolve the government, the Communists called
for a vote of no confidence in him. The Nazis
agreed with the Communists and the vote Hendenberg's original plan. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's a wacky tail, right. So, Hindenberg's original plan had

(01:19:54):
been to delay the next election, which was kind of
sort of illegal, but he wanted to wait because the
economy was getting better in an improved a on him,
he would mean fewer votes for the Nazis, but the
no confidence vote in Poppin spooked him. He still dissolved
the Reichstag, but he didn't delay the election. This election
did not go as well for the Nazis, since they
was like the second election that year and they were
running out of money. Now, yeah, the reichstad keep fucking dissolving.

(01:20:18):
The Communists did, however, gain ground um, which scared Schliker
because he thought that if the Nazi support evaporated, he
would not be able to make his broad right wing
coalition work. This was still his fucking goal, so Schliker
betrays Poppin to Hendenberg and tells Hendenburg to fire Popping
and allow Schliker to be chancellor. Because if he was chancellor,
he thought he could assemble enough right wing support to

(01:20:40):
run the government free of the pesky Social Democrats. His
goal was to get some of the Nazis to break
away from Hitler and agree to work with him. Yeah
it didn't work. Yeah, that's not not Nazi. They stick together,
that's why they won. Yeah. Um so Schliker fails miserably
and then Popping backstabs him. Uh so. Poppin had liked

(01:21:03):
being in power, and when Schleiker took his job, Poppin
started talking with Hitler. They eventually came to an agreement.
Poppin was friends with Hindenburg and he basically convinced him
that it would work. The chancellor Schleiker was a bad idea,
and instead Poppin should appoint Hitler chancellor and Poppin would
be the vice chancellor. So now we're adding an advice chancellor.

(01:21:23):
Now there's always been a vice chancellors. But then, can
we see above RePOP and being dumb as fuck? How
is he now in this position where he can convince
anybody to do anything. Just Hendenberg Hendenburger buddies. Oh my god.
So Hindenberg up until this point had expressed nothing but
discussed for Hitler. But now he agreed to make him chancellor.

(01:21:47):
It was the only way that he could box the
Liberals out of government. Poppin assured him that all the
good conservatives in the cabinet would successfully moderate Hitler's behavior.
Poppin said, in a few months, we will pushed him
so far into the corner that he will squeak. As
it happened. Within a few months, the Nazis passed the
Enabling Act with centralized all of Parliament's lawmaking powers within

(01:22:10):
the administration. The Reichstag Fire and the Reichstag Fire Decree
came not long after, and established the legal foundation of
a Nazi dictatorship in Germany. None of this was necessary.
It all came out of the desire by leaders on
the right to completely box the left out of power.
As The Death of Democracy explains, Herman Mueller's government in
nineteen thirty had a stable majority. Heinrich Brunning had won

(01:22:32):
a confidence vote in the Reichstag just days before Hendenburg
sacked him. There was no need to call an election
in nineteen thirty two. The crisis and the deadlock of
thirty two and early nineteen thirty three, to which Hitler
appeared as the only solution, was manufactured by a political
right wing that wanted to exclude more than half of
the population from political representation and refuse even the mildest compromise.

(01:22:54):
To this end, a succession of conservative politicians Hugenberg, Brunning, Schleicher,
Poppin and Hendenburg courted the Nazis is the only way
to retain power on terms congenial to them. Hitler's regime
was the result. If the Holocaust has a tagline, uh,
it's never forget. You know, we've all heard that about it. Uh.
Those are probably the two best words you can attach

(01:23:16):
to a tragedy of that magnitude. But I think they
are often interpreted too narrowly as saying we need to
remember the victims of the Holocaust and the dangers of
anti Semitism. We do need to remember those things, but
we also need to remember how the Nazi Party came
to power. That story is not told often enough, and
when it is, it's usually boiled down to just Hitler
was good at talking um. You know, The reality is
that all of his charisma would have been worthless without

(01:23:37):
a massive gang of people who are willing to cooperate, compromise,
and work with him to try and achieve their own goals.
They were not Nazis. They were journalists who knew Hitler's
any speeches made good stories. They were communists who wanted
to see the Right collapse in on itself and didn't
want to compromise with the liberals. And more than anything,
they were conservative politicians, intellectuals, and businessmen who thought that
they could use the energy and passion of the Nazi

(01:23:59):
movement without enabling its violence and extremism. All these people
were wrong. Hitler was the result. Dorothy Thompson was a
trailblazing female journalist in the early nineteen twenties. She was
one of the first women on the radio, and she
was a general badass. In nineteen twenties, she moved to
Europe to further her career and wound up running the
New York Posts bureau in Berlin. She was in Germany
for the whole rise of Hitler in the Nazi Party,

(01:24:20):
and for a very long time she was certain nothing
would come of Nazism in nineteen twenty eight, she called
Hitler a man of quote, startling and significance. The Nazis
forced her out of the country in nineteen thirty four,
as Hitler solidified his hold on power and instituted a
purge of all journalists, foreign and domestic who threatened his regime.
In nineteen thirty five, trying to understand why she hadn't
seen Hitler coming, Dorothy Parker said this, no people ever

(01:24:44):
recognized their dictator in advance. He never stands for election
on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as
the instrument of incorporated national will. Seeing Hitler rise to
power in and destroy armar democracy made Dorothy wonder if
the same thing was possible in the United States. When
our dictator turns up, you can depend on it that
he will be one of the boys, and he will
stand for everything traditionally American who now okay North They

(01:25:13):
listeners may notice that we have with I think impressive
will Power not mentioned anything about contemporary politics in this podcast.
This is because number one, I want this to be
as shareable as possible with your friends and relatives who
may be on the more conservative end of the spectrum
who may have voted for our current president in office. Um.
This is, however, the point at which we're going to

(01:25:35):
loosen those ourselves and talk about how everything in this
fucking podcast sounds really got down god Like, it's so crazy,
it's so crazy. But it's also you know, yeah, you know,
you can't you can't let too many white men come
together and start talking. They get together, they start talking,

(01:25:59):
and things go heay wire, Okay, things go wrong. It
was under you know, especially in partular to me, the
you know, the industrial industrial men, the the wealthy conservative,
the woods who want to keep their money. Uh, and
we'll go to any lengths to keep it. And it's, um,
you know, I'm not a rich person. I've never been rich,

(01:26:20):
so I don't know what it is to be so
rich that that becomes the only thing that matters is
to just amass the wealth. And then I'm assuming, you know,
against how we get into generational wealth, Like you just
want your kids to be rich and then their kids
to be rich. But I can't imagine h having so
much money a lot of times being born into it
and still being so terrified it's gonna go away to

(01:26:42):
the point where you're like, all right, if a Nazi
is what it takes, the Nazis what it takes well,
and they don't. None of them thought a Nazi meant
the Nazis will be the sole power. They thought they're
just one more political party, and if we work with
them and use their energy, it will help us stop
those people who want to pay our workers more wages.
And that's not gonna happen from But but like certain

(01:27:04):
people in power from the beginning, they said things that
were Craig but Night, and they said things that let
you know who they thought were people and who they
thought weren't. One of my favorite quotes, do you remember
that guy Hans Litton who put Hitler on trial and
wound up dying for it. One of the things he
said in that court case when he was cross examining
Hitler is don't listen to him. He's telling the truth,

(01:27:27):
which is what none of these conservatives would do. Is
like Hitler was said this, I want to be the
sole power in Germany. It's always clear what he wanted, right, Yeah, well,
that's I mean, that's who I I don't the mental gymnastics,
you know, to believe that once someone is in power,
the structures in place will somehow rain them in when

(01:27:48):
the very act of that person getting into power shows
you that the structures don't actually work, or rather, the
structures aren't firm, aren't strong. I mean literally, she said, like,
there are elections, like two, three times, so many fucking elections.
How is that system gonna be the one to keep
a want to be dictator from dictating? Yeah, and that

(01:28:08):
was a big People just got so tired of politics
that they were like, maybe it won't be so bad. Well, also,
it numbs you, right if you're people are constantly running,
which means they have to constantly say make bigger and
bigger promises. They started to mean nothing after a while.
So then you're kind of like, Okay, he says he
wants to run the world, Let him do it. Yeah,
it's like slash, is he gonna do it? Slash, We'll

(01:28:29):
deal with him in three months ago. Yeah, he's probably
not that serious. There'll be another election soon. It'll be fine, exactly,
it will be next election will be out in six months.
One of the things I did want to talk about
that I initially had earlier in the in the episode,
um is the you know, when we talked about sort
of the coordination of the police and the Nazis, now
the police at a very gentle hand, there is a
long history of that that continues to the present day.

(01:28:50):
In two thousands sixteen and activists with the Traditional Workers Party,
which is as a Nazi organization. Yeah, that fucking Traditional
Workers Party, you know what that is. Yeah, he was
rested on a domestic violence charge. The police in fucking California,
rather than dealing with this domestic violence charge, sat him
down and gave him pictures of anti fascist activists and
asked him for help identifying them. We're pretty much going

(01:29:12):
after them, they told him, we're looking at you as
a victim. Now. You can read about all this in
a wonderful Guardian article called California police worked with neo
Nazis to pursue anti racist activists, documents show, because that's
not the only case, and there was even in the
fighting in Portland between anti fascists and fucking right wing
Nazi basically guys. Well, also white supremacists were brought into

(01:29:35):
police forces around the country, certainly currently and currently but
still but you know, we're talking back in the you
know what I mean? The forties, fifties, sixties, seventies. You know,
those are the people they said, you know, come join
the police force and help us check these brown people
who are starting to act like people who are starting
to get too big for their bridges, who are starting
to assert their power and their humanity in essence. And

(01:29:56):
you know, then if those are people bought the police force,
and they have children, and those children went to the
police force, and they have communities, and they urged the
communities to get involved in uh policing and security and
government other government offices. When Martin Luther King was marching
in the streets and police were shooting black people with
fire hoses and stuff, those guys weren't all going like, boy,

(01:30:17):
it's terrible that we're ordered to do this. And they
were like, oh good, I get to shoot black people
with the water hose. They actually, um, I have a suggestion.
What if we got water hoses? Umna ben them with those?
It could be fun, almost like a video game. And
they weren't. They didn't because the civil rights movement one.
They didn't just go like, I guess I was wrong.
Time to treat everyone equal. Well that's the thing, right, No,

(01:30:39):
no one went away. Yeah, they just batted down the hutches,
and they just spoke in lower tones. They just kept
to themselves. A couple of years before World War Two
broke out, twenty thousand American Nazis members of the German
American Bund, which was essentially a Nazi organization in the
United States prior to World War Two. Twenty thousand of

(01:31:01):
them gathered in Madison Square Garden to have a celebration
of Hitler in the Nazis. It's scary to think about,
but statistically, a significant number of the men who landed
on the beaches at Normandy would have been perfectly happy
if we'd wound up on the side of the Nazis
in that war, because there was anti Semitism was incredibly
rampant the United States at that time, which is why

(01:31:23):
we refused to take tens of thousands of Jewish refugees
before the Holocaust, many of whom drowned in the ocean
because the boats we sent them back to Germany on
sink Um. There was a huge amount of of fascist support. Lindenberg,
Charles Lindenberg, who was the first guy to fly across
the Atlantic, was a fascist and was a serious candidate

(01:31:45):
for president at one point um and had a huge
amount of support. There was a very prominent fascist movement
in the United States until World War Two happened and
things went underground. But never died, right, never died. When
underground owns, you know, you have to as as it
would underground from six take. Yeah, you know, that's where

(01:32:06):
we get some of our greatest Reddit threads. You know,
a lot of websites and groups. They just went into
the Internet. They got together, they talked across states and
made plans for when their time would come again. And
when people would call them out on saying, like all
these jew jokes you're making, and all these comments about
brown people that you're making. You know, they say, no, no,

(01:32:27):
this is where it's just irony. We're joking. We're joking again,
think Hans Litton. Don't believe them. They're telling the truth exactly. Also,
he ain't Charlie Chaplin, Yeah, he's not. He being our
current president, is not a funny guy. He is not
a man to be laughed at. Don't call him drump
it's fucking dumb. He is a dangerous person. And you know,

(01:32:52):
the inability and unwillingness, the the inabilities because of an
unwillingness to work together. It is. It's so interesting to
see a president that's literally not even pretending to be
a president for everyone, and they're literally like, no, I'm
only president to these folks, and I'm only here for
the greater good of these folks, uh, and not in

(01:33:12):
on one hand, they say like, I'm here for you
working class American who was struggling, knowing that they're implementing
policies that are the exact opposite of that, but truly
that I'm actually only the president for a retroduced anding
behind me, you know. And it's un you know, and
that I think is what is so amazing. But also
you know, I can the unfortunate thing. I mean, and

(01:33:34):
I guess again what you're saying, which is so surprising,
you know, to think that Germany was flourishing, especially in
terms of education and people on the planet. How but
that's how they almost conquered the world because they were
the best educated technologically. What happened here is that they
were just being They soon became so inundated with information

(01:33:55):
because of these two things. I'm wondering, I'm kind of inferring, right,
either get so inundated with information because you are having
these elections every like three six, seven months. Yeah, you
stopped paying attention to the details. And then also that
you then have all these these people in power who
are just intent on ruining everything? Is that what it is? Like?
What happens to the left? Where do they take where

(01:34:16):
do they take themselves? You know? I mean where do
they do to kind of regroup? Well, within like a
year or so with Hitler taking power, the left is illegal,
The Social Democrats are banned, them minister banned, most of
their leaders are in camps or flee the country. Um,
And it's just like the thing is, most people are
willing to vote and maybe protest. Most people are not

(01:34:37):
willing to face down a gun for their beliefs, and
the Nazis made that be the choice, and so people
backed off, even though most of them never supported the Nazis.
Most of them didn't like the Nazis, most of them
thought Hitler was a silly man. By the time he
was in power, it was too late. And I don't
think that's the situation we're in right now. We have
an older democracy and a stronger slightly older But then

(01:34:59):
what I do think you know, as people talk about,
you know, civility and things, it is amazing what you
still see. What happens is you know, uh, when something
doesn't immediately and directly affect you, it doesn't stay on
the radar. There can be even initial outrage, but that
outrage does not stay. Um, is not sustained when you
can still go about your life and your business, you know, um.

(01:35:23):
And so what happens especially you know again, the populations
are so significantly smaller than than they are now and
nowhere near as spread out as they are now. So
where is the collective action of any kind when we're
all over the place. I mean, think about this, the
way the communists came after the left then the less switch,
you know what I mean, Like they're all fighting and

(01:35:44):
get when a nazis just to avoid the other person
being in power. Now, now let's fracture it even further,
which we are now in terms of our alignments in
our policy. And you've got people on the fire left
saying that you know, Hillary would have been just as bad,
that the Liberals can't be trusted, and it's like we
need to sane people on the right, sane people on
the left. Liberals left wingers, conservatives who aren't racist. Everybody

(01:36:08):
needs to begin right. We can get back to arguing
about taxes when this is taxes like you know, you
know the right pronoun and triggering language. Once we've dealt
with the deal with this, we've got to all kind
of be like, Okay, you said the wrong thing or
you said it in the wrong way, but you still
feel me that he's the worst. You still feel me
that we don't want to dictator. Focus on that right now,

(01:36:30):
and let's put a pin in that other issue, you know,
or hashtag put a pin in it? Or can we
or can we fight both issues with or not that fight?
I mean also like you know, discuss you know, the
social issues and things that are important. You know, you
don't want to tear down something and then be left
with nothing. You know, would be still left with fracturing

(01:36:51):
and in fighting. But how do you have the band
with for lack of a better term, to engage on
both fronts. And it's it's hard. It requires The best
thing we have is that there's a lot of us.
Everyone doesn't need to be out in the street every day,
but people need to always be out in the street.
The fact that there are so many protests is a

(01:37:12):
good thing as long as it doesn't lead to numbness. Um.
Direct action is important. Disrupting the system that exists is important,
and the most important thing to do is to vote
and stop these people from being in So many people
have got to be voted, fucking registered to vote, vote
and actually go, yeah, go show up, you know, and

(01:37:36):
it's employers let people go. Make it easy to go,
set up a shuttle, say we're not starting work until noon.
Do you have to do that? People can go. Yeah.
If something like that's one of the things that these
these guys, like fucking Elon Musk want want to be
good guys, want to be the heroes. Paid a bus
people to go vote. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like a
lot of things you could do to help make it

(01:37:57):
easier for folks to vote. Yeah, they don't want you
to vote. Volunteer for a campaign, do a registration drive,
get out in the street, just do do something. Because
the fact it took, as this I Hope podcast has shown,
it took a lot of people collaborating with the Nazis,
but it also took a lot of people not doing anything.

(01:38:18):
There were a lot of artists and musicians and people
who wonderful people in Weimar Germany who just didn't pay
that much attention to politics because it was a bummer
and went on living their lives and then they wound
up in fucking camps. Uh. And it's I do want
to make it clear. I don't think Donald Trump is

(01:38:40):
a Nazi because Nazism is a very specific political ideology,
and I don't think he has a very political idea
specific political ideology. But I do think that he has
fascist instincts. And Benito Mussolini was not a Nazi, but
he was a fascist. Francisco Franco was not a Nazi,
but he was a fascist. The I alone can fix,
which he said in a one of his speeches running

(01:39:01):
up to the election, that's a that's a fascist statement.
Declaring press the enemy of the people, which is again
a direct quote, that's a fascist statement. These are things
fascists do, is declare enemies of the people. In fact,
anytime someone uses the phrase of the people concerned, Yeah,
it's pretty close to Volkska mine shaft, which was one

(01:39:23):
of Hitler's big taglines. Yeah, so pay for the weekend.
I got for a weekend. I'm like every time I
hear some way this, I'm like, Okay, I gotta bulk up.
I gotta get ripped, I gotta get I gotta get shredded,
getting get ready to run, gotta get ready to start
out underground railroads shouldn't need a ride. Maybe it's time

(01:39:44):
for people on the left to start. Well, I'm not
gonna suggest stockpiling arms on my podcast, but well I do,
but I but I do. But I have thought about
the idea. Like all the people who are good at guns,
I want to kill me. Like all the people who
are good at guns are the scary ones. I think
it's important. I'm a I'm a gun owner. I've been

(01:40:04):
a gun owner my entire adult life. I also support
a lot more gun control than we have right now.
And I think are the there's always a dog in
the office, which is part of why this podcast has
such a strong moral compass, because dogs are better than people.
I just thought that should be noted. Um. The dog's
name is Anderson, and it's he's wonderful. Um. So I

(01:40:25):
think that you can you can both uh support way
better gun control than we have and also understand that
all of the nazis having all the guns in the
country is not a good thing the far right, and
because I guarantee you every single person who identifies as
a Nazi has a lot of guns, and there are
they've been marched, they marched in Charlottesville. All those people

(01:40:48):
have arsenals, their stockpiling bullets. You can if you go
to their forums, you can hear them right about how
many bullets their stockpiling. Yep, yes, it taking a weekend.
I want to do some things to make myself ready.
And you know, if you happen to live on the
East coast in the DC area, on the I think

(01:41:09):
eleventh and twelfth, there is the sequel to that Unite
the Right rally in d C. So there will be
more fascists marching in d C, like as marched in
Charlottesville last year. I will be there, uh so you
know you might see me reading out a special neo
Nazi focused episode of this podcast. If you happen to
show up and protest. The actual fucking will call themselves Nazis.

(01:41:31):
Nazis in d C in a couple of weeks, so
be careful. They probably won't be that many of them. Yeah,
but be careful, alright, I think that's I think we're
we're pretty good. We're gonna run this as a one partter,
even though normally an episode this long will be a
two partter because I don't want to break it up.
But please do share this with people who you think

(01:41:53):
can be convinced that there is a problem right now.
We have specifically kept the historical portion of this podcast
free of political editorializing and comments about just in the
hopes that it will be more accessible to more people.
You can tell them to shut it off when Naomi
and I start our conversation. Maybe they'll be on board
by that point. But please, like, do share this. I

(01:42:16):
think this information is important. And also give a read
to the Death of Democracy. It is a deeply important
book that came out this year for good reason, so
it goes into even more to tail about why the
Weimar government led to the Nazis. Please read it, all right, Naomi,
you want to plug your plug doubles? Uh, you know what,
it's so very different. But if you do want to

(01:42:36):
break from some of the real talk and you want
a little joke, why don't you subscribe? Give a listen
to Couples Therapy podcast. On that podcast, co hosted by
me and my fiance Andy Beckerman. We bring the best
sets from our live show Couples Therapy, where two comics
two sets together about their relationship, and we sprinkle my
name with some in studio guests, some in studio combo

(01:42:58):
between Andy and I. It is a fun time. It
is a light time. But also Andy might take a
couple of moments to talk about our national nightmare right
down then, and I was telling him, no national nightmare.
People need a break, and we do. And I recommend
your podcast thoroughly because everyone who just finished listening to
this could probably use a break, need a little boost. Yeah,
I need a little boost, and and hopefully not just

(01:43:19):
more drinking your sadness away, which is what I'll be
doing tonight. You can find me on Twitter at I
write Okay, just two letters. I also have a book
on Amazon, A Brief History of Ice. It's about drugs.
Our podcast is on social media too. You can find
us on Twitter at at Bastards Pod. You can find
us on Instagram the same way you can find us

(01:43:40):
on the internet at behind the Bastards dot com. Every
source for this podcast, including the three books I used,
the Rise and Follow the third Reich year that made
Hitler and the death of democracy. All of those sources
and all the articles that I used for this will
all be on the website, so I absolutely encourage you
to read up. Everybody, have a good weekend, stay safe,
and get out in the streets when you can. H

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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;}The Non-Nazi Bastards Who Helped Hitler Rise To Power