Latest / The Overlap / Make Germany Great Again: Nazism - Part 2

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Make Germany Great Again: Nazism - Part 2 · The Overlap

• 0:00
  Greetings, listeners and friends of the Overlap podcast. This is Joshua coming to you.
• 0:05
  If you are just tuning in this week, this is actually part two of a two-part episode.
• 0:10
  So, if you go back to the last episode about Hitler and Nazis and making Germany great again,
• 0:19
  part one, you want to go back to next week, listen to that whole thing, and join us right back here.
• 0:24
  If you have already listened last week, and this is not your first time,
• 0:28
  welcome back, welcome back, welcome back.
• 0:30
  I hope you shared it with one of your friends.
• 0:32
  I hope you rated us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you're listening to this podcast right now.
• 0:38
  We are going to take a deep dive, and we have been taking a deep dive into Germany,
• 0:44
  right up into the World War I and World War II eras.
• 0:49
  Will and I are kind of talking back and forth through the perspective of a handful of typical German citizens at the time
• 0:55
  through journals and diaries and things of that nature.
• 0:57
  Without further ado, check it out.
• 1:16
  Yeah, so Hitler was appointed chancellor on January 30th, the very end of January 1933.
• 1:24
  The Enabling Act was passed on March 23rd of that same year.
• 1:30
  Less than two months.
• 1:32
  It wasn't even 60 days from becoming chancellor to the Enabling Act.
• 1:38
  And then two months later, two months after that, he created a law against the founding of new political parties.
• 1:45
  He formally dissolved every other political party and made the Nazi party the only legal party in Germany,
• 1:53
  creating a one-party state, right?
• 1:56
  So now the chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler, and his Nazi one-party state has absolute power secured.
• 2:05
  The regime moved to silence every single piece of dissent.
• 2:12
  The first target was the free press, right?
• 2:16
  First, they gave it a label.
• 2:18
  The Nazis branded the critical press as the enemy of the people or the Volksfind.
• 2:26
  There we go. Volksfind.
• 2:29
  And Joseph Goebbels, the new minister of propaganda, this would be like Stephen Miller in our time,
• 2:36
  accused journalists of spreading malicious lies to weaken the nation.
• 2:40
  So this framed journalism not as a public service, right?
• 2:44
  Like not as a way for the public to be informed of what was happening in their own leadership and government.
• 2:53
  Journalism was now framed directly as treason.
• 2:57
  Now, newspapers had been critical of Hitler, like the Munich Post that called, actually called the Nazis the poison kitchen.
• 3:04
  They were obviously the first to go, right?
• 3:07
  Then came the legal purge.
• 3:09
  October 4th.
• 3:10
  Now, if you're, we're still in the same year.
• 3:12
  Like all of this was, is within one year.
• 3:15
  The regime passed the, here we go, Schriftliedergesetz or Editor's Law.
• 3:22
  This law required all journalists to register with the propaganda ministry and prove they were Aryan.
• 3:29
  It was basically, you know, like, hey, sign this contract that you agree to participate in all of these rules.
• 3:37
  And then you'll also have to produce the documentation that you are Aryan.
• 3:43
  Of white descent, Germanic descent.
• 3:45
  Otherwise, you're going to take away your press pass, right?
• 3:47
  Yeah.
• 3:48
  We'll take away all your press badges and you won't be allowed to come to the press corps meetings any longer.
• 3:53
  So that single act actually purged thousands of Jewish and liberal journalists from their job because either they refused to join the propaganda ministry or register with the propaganda ministry, or they couldn't produce documentation that proved they were Aryan.
• 4:10
  So from then on, the journalists were directly accountable to Goebbels.
• 4:15
  The law basically told them that they had to keep anything out of the newspaper that weakened the strength of the German Reich.
• 4:24
  So it was vaguely worded that way on purpose.
• 4:28
  Anything essentially that would weaken the strength of the German Reich.
• 4:33
  The final nail in the coffin in the silencing of the stint was the destruction of ideas.
• 4:40
  On May 10th, again, same year, we're all in 1933, in Berlin and other university towns, students and essay members held massive book burnings.
• 4:52
  Over 25,000, quote, un-German books.
• 4:56
  Works by Jewish authors like Albert Einstein, if you've heard of him.
• 5:03
  Pacifists like Eirik Maria Remarque.
• 5:07
  And Americans like Helen Keller were thrown into bonfires.
• 5:12
  Just giant book burnings in large cities.
• 5:15
  With those book burnings, Goebbels said that this is the end of an era of extreme Jewish intellectualism.
• 5:24
  And it's now at an end, end quote.
• 5:26
  From the United States, Helen Keller actually wrote a defiant letter to the students of Germany saying, you know, history has taught you nothing.
• 5:34
  If you think you could kill ideas, you can burn my books, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds.
• 5:44
  Now, this war on ideas was matched by a brutal attack on people.
• 5:51
  The SA and the new Gestapo, the secret state police, the Blackshirts, were free to crush all political opposition.
• 6:00
  You spit, we hit.
• 6:03
  Opponents were dragged from their homes.
• 6:05
  They were beaten, tortured, and thrown into literally the concentration camps that created our familiarity with the word concentration camps.
• 6:16
  By July 14th, 1933, everything was complete.
• 6:20
  They created a new law that banned all other political parties.
• 6:24
  That was the one party state we were talking about earlier.
• 6:27
  Chaotic, multi-party democracy.
• 6:31
  That was called the Weimar Republic.
• 6:34
  Was replaced by silence.
• 6:37
  And fearful conformity.
• 6:38
  Now it's time to figure out what the new normal is going to be like in the Volksgemeinschaft.
• 6:43
  So you can't just leave the vacuum here now that life has been completely, life has been destroyed.
• 6:48
  Life as they know it has been destroyed.
• 6:50
  Multiple times over.
• 6:51
  Freedom, anyway.
• 6:52
  Yeah, freedom is gone.
• 6:53
  You're not allowed to hear any facts that are not favorable to the current government.
• 6:57
  They have to fill the vacuum with a new normal.
• 7:00
  And for many Germans who weren't targeted as enemies, now, I mean, life just goes on, right?
• 7:05
  I guess, at the very least, there's now not quite so many people competing for limited resources, because many of them are in concentration camps.
• 7:12
  But the life of the average German citizen went from the chaos of the Weimar years to apparent order, right?
• 7:19
  To some semblance of order.
• 7:21
  The economy began to recover, because any economic policies could be backed with threat of force.
• 7:26
  And anybody opposing them or anybody challenging them was subject to being thrown in a concentration camp.
• 7:33
  So, to some extent, to the average German citizen, it appeared that there was a return to normality, to order.
• 7:40
  Yeah, eggs were a specific price.
• 7:44
  Right.
• 7:45
  Gasoline could be purchased at lower prices than ever before.
• 7:49
  Normalcy started to return to Germany beneath the surface.
• 7:53
  Right.
• 7:54
  And beneath that sort of calm surface, you have a deep change that's happening.
• 8:01
  And what's happening is that the Nazi party, led by Hitler, wasn't just content to have control of Germany.
• 8:07
  They wanted to reshape German society in their image, creating a new reality built entirely on propaganda, spectacle, and conformity.
• 8:15
  They wanted everybody to look and think like them and to follow along like good little drones.
• 8:20
  And the way they built that was basically just a whole new mythology, a whole new story of who the German people are and what it meant to be German.
• 8:29
  This Aryan idea of, you know, sort of basically saying what it meant to be a good German from a genetic perspective.
• 8:38
  And the guy in charge of this new reality and in charge of fabricating it out of a whole cloth was this person who's already mentioned, Dr. Joseph Garibalds, the minister of propaganda.
• 8:48
  They weren't even hiding it.
• 8:49
  Like it was just there.
• 8:50
  Right.
• 8:51
  They're just like, he's the one who does the propaganda.
• 8:54
  Right.
• 8:54
  Of course.
• 8:55
  He's the propaganda guy.
• 8:57
  He's the one, the storyteller.
• 8:59
  So they took control of everything.
• 9:02
  I mean, you name it, art, music, films, books, radio, and of course the press, as we've already said.
• 9:08
  And their goal was to create an environment where the Nazi worldview was the only one available.
• 9:14
  It's either our way or the highway.
• 9:16
  If you're not on the Volkswagen, you know, get out of the way.
• 9:20
  So they sort of repeated this story so many times it just became truth.
• 9:24
  Like you're hearing it over and over again.
• 9:26
  Everywhere you turn on a radio, you go to a theater, you read a book, whatever books are left.
• 9:32
  They're all now sanitized and they tell the truth that the Nazi party was putting out there or they were repeating that worldview so often that people just began to believe it.
• 9:42
  And again, you know, you think this can't happen, but it happens over and over again throughout history where these authoritarian governments basically wipe out any memory of the past, any connections to the past, and start with a new narrative.
• 9:58
  And this propaganda was designed, again, like Hitler's speeches, to appeal not to reason, not to facts, but to emotion, to feelings, to perceived slights, and to awaken the imagination of the public and appeal to the hearts of the national masses.
• 10:14
  The ultimate expression of this was the Nuremberg rally, the annual rally.
• 10:18
  These weren't political conventions.
• 10:19
  They were religious festivals for the Nazi faith, carefully choreographed to create a sense of overwhelming power and unity.
• 10:26
  To show people this is the might of Germany, right?
• 10:29
  To parade, literally parade the might of Germany in front of the people to remind them who was in charge and who was here to save Germany from embarrassment and further ruin.
• 10:37
  So the experience was a sensory overload.
• 10:39
  I mean, it was essentially a concert or a festival, like you might think of a religious festival.
• 10:44
  You know, they had their own, the marching soldiers, the Wagnerian music, right?
• 10:50
  You know, the, was it the March of the Valkyries or the Flight of the Valkyries?
• 10:54
  You know, you can, you can hear the music basically in the background of these Nuremberg rallies.
• 11:00
  And they're basically overwhelming the people's senses and chanting, you know, creating chants about the leader.
• 11:06
  You know, I'm sure there were chants of lock them up for the, uh, the, uh, disgraced former journalists.
• 11:14
  But the visuals were even more powerful.
• 11:17
  Um, the rally grounds were set up as a giant stage with massive stone structures designed by the architect Albert Speer.
• 11:25
  Um, the rallies featured huge synchronized formations of people, seas of uniforms, forests of swastika banners, and torchlight parades.
• 11:34
  The most famous effect was Speer's Cathedral of Light, or Lichtdome, where 130 powerful searchlights pointed straight up, creating a temple of light beams.
• 11:43
  You can imagine.
• 11:44
  The effect was to make every person feel like a small but important part of a vast, powerful collective.
• 11:49
  The Volksgemeinschaft, or people's community.
• 11:53
  At the center of it all was the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler himself, whose dramatic entrance and speeches were the climax of the ritual, right?
• 12:00
  So they would whip the people into a frenzy, and then Hitler would take the stage with his compelling speeches and push them over the edge, reinforcing this cult of personality as the savior of the nation.
• 12:09
  So he appeared on stage at the end to sort of talk about the glorious future of, of, uh, Germany.
• 12:15
  And this focus on spectacle and emotion replaced any rational debate.
• 12:19
  There was no debate that was happening here.
• 12:21
  This was all pageantry.
• 12:22
  And the feeling of belonging to a unified, invincible movement became more powerful than any policy discussion ever could be.
• 12:29
  The rally was a performance of the leader's mystical connection to the people.
• 12:33
  A show of overwhelming support that projected an image of strength and inevitability.
• 12:38
  This model, using mass rallies to forge a direct emotional bond between the leader and his followers, has proven to be a lasting and powerful tool for populists.
• 12:46
  This is where Hitler essentially wrote the playbook for the populist takeover of an existing democracy.
• 12:51
  And then, of course, not to be outdone by Mr. Mussolini.
• 12:56
  Hitler had his own version of the future of the Third Reich, the Hitler Youth.
• 13:01
  Dr. Rima, tell us a little bit about how they indoctrinated the children of the age.
• 13:05
  Absolutely.
• 13:06
  So, ultimately, their goal was a thousand-year Reich, right?
• 13:12
  This Nazi party knew that it had to capture the minds of the next generation.
• 13:19
  This generation, they had to use the techniques of war, right?
• 13:24
  Absolute power, might to crush dissent.
• 13:28
  But they knew that if they were to hold it for the thousand years, they had to capture the minds of the youngest in the bunch, right?
• 13:37
  After 1933, the entire educational system was changed.
• 13:43
  Teachers had to join the Nazi Teachers League.
• 13:46
  And if you didn't, you weren't politically reliable.
• 13:49
  You were fired.
• 13:51
  And good luck to you.
• 13:53
  Because now all schools are owned by the Nazis.
• 14:00
  The curriculum, entirely rewritten.
• 14:03
  It focused on the shame of Versailles and the heroic rise of the Nazis.
• 14:09
  Biology was entirely replaced by the Rassenkunde, or race knowledge.
• 14:16
  It's this weird pseudoscientific belief that kind of taught that Germans were the superiority of the Aryan race
• 14:27
  and the inferiority of other races, especially the Jewish people.
• 14:32
  Even math, even math was Nazified with word problems designed to instill ideology, like calculating the financial burden of caring for the disabled, right?
• 14:45
  To frame them as a drain on the state.
• 14:49
  Now, this was reinforced by total control over the free time of the kids.
• 14:54
  There was no recess.
• 14:56
  There was no unstructured playtime.
• 14:59
  By 1939, six years later, membership in the state's youth organizations were mandatory.
• 15:05
  For boys, it was the Hitlerjugend, or Hitler Youth.
• 15:08
  For girls, it was the Bundesumadl, Mädel, or BDM, not to be confused with BDSM.
• 15:15
  Life in these groups was a subtle process of conditioning.
• 15:18
  It wasn't as very, you know, very Einzweig as, this is the way it will be and we will enforce it with all of our rules.
• 15:25
  This was very subtle.
• 15:27
  For boys, the focus was on discipline and conformity and pre-military training.
• 15:34
  Make sure you keep your faces shaved.
• 15:36
  Make sure you can pass PT exams at least twice a year.
• 15:39
  They did paramilitary drills.
• 15:42
  They marched.
• 15:43
  And, of course, competitive sports, right?
• 15:46
  So that there can be this hierarchy of winner and loser.
• 15:49
  And then they also learned about racial hygiene.
• 15:53
  This takeover of their lives, I mean, it had a purpose, right?
• 15:55
  It was to break down the structure of the family.
• 15:59
  The state wanted to be the primary influence in a child's life, not their parents.
• 16:04
  Children were even encouraged to actually report their parents if they criticized the regime, kind of like, you know, DARE.
• 16:10
  If you're in the millennial category, we were asked to report our parents for doing drugs or if we thought anything was a drug to report it into our DARE police officer.
• 16:21
  This process transferred authority from the family to the state, basically making sure that all of this Nazi ideology, this propaganda would be deeply embedded in the next generation so that you're not having to control them.
• 16:37
  They're predisposed to believe what you're telling them.
• 16:44
  And this sort of coordination and control is referred to as the Gleichschaltung.
• 16:49
  Tell us about the Gleichschaltung.
• 16:51
  Yes, the Gleichschaltung, a term that meant coordination or bringing the line, was the methodical extension of Nazi control in every corner of public and private life.
• 17:02
  So to see how this worked, we can look at a single town, Northein, as documented by the historian William Sheridan Allen.
• 17:10
  In a town like Northein, Gleichschaltung was a swift takeover.
• 17:14
  First, as with the national government, the political parties were shut down.
• 17:18
  No other parties other than the Nazi party.
• 17:20
  But it went deeper than that.
• 17:22
  The local veterans association, the singing society, the sports club, all were either dissolved or had their leadership replaced by loyal Nazis.
• 17:30
  So if you wanted to continue to be a going concern, you would just sign your rights over to the Nazi party.
• 17:36
  Otherwise, you were shut down.
• 17:38
  The economy was coordinated.
• 17:40
  Going back to this first year, May 2nd, 1933, all independent trade unions were abolished.
• 17:46
  So no, you know.
• 17:48
  Where do we know about that from?
• 17:50
  Right.
• 17:50
  These labor unions were all replaced because, of course, those are the sources of this vile, you know, communist and socialist methodology and teachings.
• 17:59
  So they were all shut down.
• 18:00
  The regime created the Deutsche Arbeitsfront or German labor front, a single massive organization that nearly all workers were forced to join, of which had its purpose not to advocate for these workers, but to enforce industrial discipline.
• 18:12
  So they basically became a self-policing force controlled by the Nazi party.
• 18:16
  So you had one labor union, but ruled by the political people in power.
• 18:21
  What was remarkable is how quickly this happened and how many people went along with it.
• 18:24
  In fact, Hitler was surprised as well.
• 18:26
  He didn't think it was going to happen this fast, noting that everything is going much faster than we ever dared to hope.
• 18:31
  This wasn't just top-down force.
• 18:32
  Many Germans engaged in more self-coordination, where these people were eager to fit in or protect their careers.
• 18:39
  You know, again, these are people who had just dealt with hyperinflation and the loss of everything, all their wealth and all their established resources.
• 18:46
  And now the fear of losing that again made them sort of want to self-police.
• 18:50
  So these organizations voluntarily aligned with the new regime.
• 18:53
  They could see which way the wind was blowing.
• 18:55
  And so people like Klaus, our shopkeeper, might have joined the local Nazi-affiliated retailers association, not because he believed in their cause, but because it was a practical thing to do.
• 19:05
  If you wanted to keep your doors open, you signed up with the local Nazi party for whatever your job was.
• 19:10
  You know, if you're a shopkeeper, you join the Nazi shopkeepers union.
• 19:13
  If you're a factory worker, you join the factory workers union, which is all really under the control of the Nazi party.
• 19:20
  Because otherwise, it was, you were basically opting out of society and they were going to shut you down and either ship you off to a concentration camp or let you die on the vine from just being cut off from any other resources.
• 19:32
  You know, good luck getting anybody to sell you goods or give you any resources when you were on the outs with the Nazi party.
• 19:39
  So through this mix of force and voluntary, air quotes, their voluntary coordination, the diverse fabric of German society was rewoven into a single monolithic brown.
• 19:50
  So then we had the reckoning, right?
• 19:54
  This time of the rise again to power that Germany never was kind of coming out of this propaganda.
• 20:01
  And it was actually for a brief period of time, kind of an exciting time for people who were part of the central power.
• 20:08
  They actually got to enjoy the benefits of that for a little while.
• 20:11
  Can you tell us about that, Joshua?
• 20:13
  Yeah, sure.
• 20:14
  So we saw, we saw this behavior in the Stanford prison experiment, essentially, right?
• 20:20
  Once you're, once you're given a little bit of power, you sort of start to internalize it and take it seriously as, as part of who you are.
• 20:26
  In the late East, for many Germans, if you were a Nazi, right?
• 20:32
  This was a time of thrilling success.
• 20:36
  The economic misery was gone.
• 20:39
  We was replaced by full and total employment.
• 20:43
  Now, that full and total employment also included work camps that you didn't actually receive money.
• 20:49
  But the political chaos had actually given way to this powerful sense of national unity.
• 20:55
  And this, this humiliation from Versailles was basically being torn apart by a man who never seemed to make a mistake.
• 21:06
  From the perspective of citizens like Friedrich, Germany was finally standing up for itself and being the power that it was meant to be.
• 21:16
  Right?
• 21:16
  So this kind of led us to this kind of foreign policy as propaganda.
• 21:23
  Hitler's foreign policy.
• 21:24
  Hitler's foreign policy.
• 21:25
  It was, it was a series of bold gambles, right?
• 21:28
  Each one literally breaking international treaties.
• 21:31
  Each one stunningly successful.
• 21:35
  Which basically boosted this, this myth around the man at home in Germany.
• 21:41
  In March 1936, he created this remilitarization of the Rhineland.
• 21:47
  Which was clearly in opposition to the Versailles Treaty.
• 21:51
  He sent troops back into the demilitarized Rhineland.
• 21:54
  His own generals were scared, right?
• 21:57
  They were convinced that the French army, because at the time the French, basically each of the allies had, had a place, had a territory in Germany.
• 22:06
  You had the French section, the Belgian section, the United States section.
• 22:09
  All of these, these areas at the time Rhineland was controlled by the French.
• 22:14
  So they were afraid that the French army is going to, going to rise up.
• 22:17
  Now we know the French are really good at two things.
• 22:19
  Croissants and waving white flags.
• 22:21
  Hitler kind of judged the mood correctly, right?
• 22:24
  France wouldn't act without the British.
• 22:27
  And Britain was perfectly happy to do not a thing.
• 22:30
  Their reaction in Germany was ecstatic, right?
• 22:32
  They had, they had giant parties and celebrations just sweeping the whole country.
• 22:36
  And Goebbels used that triumph to accelerate the propaganda machine.
• 22:44
  He created posters talking about the return of national pride to the economic recovery.
• 22:49
  All of these parts.
• 22:50
  Now, in that two year period between March 36 and March 38th, they decided to annex Austria.
• 22:59
  The Anschluss with Austria.
• 23:02
  Hitler's homeland was Austria.
• 23:05
  It was portrayed as, as a joyous reunion.
• 23:08
  Like German troops were met by cheering crowds.
• 23:11
  The event was framed under the slogan, Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer.
• 23:17
  One people, one empire, one leader.
• 23:20
  And now vote was actually held in Austria to unionize their territory back with Germany.
• 23:28
  99.75% of Austrians supposedly voted for the union with Germany.
• 23:34
  Now, this achieved, was achieved through this, both the enthusiasm and this intense propaganda.
• 23:41
  Of course, it barred Jews and people who weren't Nazis from voting.
• 23:46
  They just weren't allowed to.
• 23:48
  At the time, you couldn't even get an identity document unless you could prove that you had Aryan heritage.
• 23:53
  So, propaganda posters showed a sea of raised hands and a Nazi salute or, you know, the normal Roman salute of an electric car manufacturer billionaire.
• 24:03
  Sort of reinforcing the story that the support of Germany invading, essentially, or annexing Austria was unanimous.
• 24:13
  And each of these things, each of these successes sort of built on the inaction of Britain and France, right?
• 24:21
  So, they just weren't doing anything.
• 24:23
  France wouldn't act without Britain.
• 24:24
  Britain wouldn't act because they didn't have the support of the United States.
• 24:29
  Communication had kind of broken down by this time, right?
• 24:31
  You also had this sort of rush after World War I for intelligence and information between the communists and the allies.
• 24:39
  So, basically, haunted by World War I, right, the French and the British, they sort of pursued this idea of appeasement, right?
• 24:48
  So, failing to enforce the treaties that Hitler openly defied.
• 24:52
  Not on purpose, but because they were all recovering from this giant first ever great war, this war to end all wars, right?
• 25:04
  So, for the German public, this kind of solidified the image of Hitler, yet again, as a political genius.
• 25:12
  Nobody could work out deals like this guy that could restore German honor and didn't even have to use the army.
• 25:20
  There was no tanks, no weapons, no shots, no, you know, shot fired across the tank.
• 25:27
  This pattern didn't actually satisfy the regime, unfortunately.
• 25:32
  It actually emboldened them.
• 25:35
  It made future larger aggression seem inevitable because the thirst for power was a thirst that could not be quenched.
• 25:44
  Now, like all expansions of territory, we're going to have some conflicts.
• 25:50
  Will, tell us about this next one.
• 25:51
  So, it turns out you couldn't get 99% of Poland to vote for joining this growing German, this new Germany, right?
• 26:00
  So, since the Poles weren't going to go quietly, September 1st, 1939, Hitler decided to invade.
• 26:07
  So, September 1st, 1939, he invades Poland, starting World War II.
• 26:11
  But the real goal became evident on June 22nd of 1941 when they invaded the Soviet Union.
• 26:17
  That was not a small, like, that was not a battle that could be ignored.
• 26:20
  At this point, they were taking on a vast country.
• 26:24
  And anybody who's played risk, right, knows you don't go into the Soviet Union.
• 26:29
  You don't invade Russia.
• 26:31
  Certainly not in the winter.
• 26:33
  That's right.
• 26:33
  But in the warm days of June, mid-summer, beginning of summer here, Hitler was emboldened by his string of victories and his recent pretty complete and uncontested takeover, virtually uncontested takeover of Poland, to go into Russia and invade the Soviet Union.
• 26:52
  And this wasn't a normal war.
• 26:54
  This was a Wernischungskrieg, or War of Annihilation.
• 26:57
  It was an ideological crusade to destroy the Judeo-Bolshevism, this mythological Judeo-Bolshevism, and conquer Labenschrown, or the living space for the German people.
• 27:09
  This was just a secure enough land for the German people to spread out and accomplish their manifest destiny of, you know, ruling the world anew.
• 27:18
  And now this is where our story shifts from the political battlegrounds to the real frontlines of World War II.
• 27:25
  And we're going to tell that story through the letters of the soldiers who were fought there.
• 27:30
  This initial advance into Soviet territory seemed to promise another quick victory.
• 27:34
  You know, again, as with all wars, they start with a, oh, it'll be over in a couple months, right?
• 27:38
  It'll be over in no time.
• 27:41
  And yet it didn't work out that way.
• 27:44
  So, although that promise began that way, when the Germans began, the German 6th Army began to push towards Stalingrad in late 1942, the war changed.
• 27:54
  And we have here the diary of William Hoffman, a German soldier, who gives a chilling account of the descent into hell that was the siege of Stalingrad.
• 28:04
  July 29th, 1942, Hoffman writes,
• 28:07
  The company commander says the Russian troops are completely broken.
• 28:10
  Victory is not far away.
• 28:13
  September 20th, 1942.
• 28:15
  A few months later.
• 28:17
  Our regiment is involved in constant heavy fighting.
• 28:19
  You don't see them at all.
• 28:20
  They have established themselves in houses and cellars and are firing on all sides.
• 28:25
  Barbarians.
• 28:25
  They use gangster methods.
• 28:27
  The Russians have stopped surrendering at all.
• 28:29
  And that's pretty accurate, given that the Russians were told if they surrendered, they'd be shot by their own fellow soldiers.
• 28:37
  By October 22nd, 1942, Hoffman reports,
• 28:41
  Our regiment has failed to break into the factory.
• 28:44
  We have lost many men.
• 28:46
  Every time you move, you have to jump over bodies.
• 28:48
  The soldiers are calling Stalingrad the mass grave of the German army.
• 28:52
  That's a very different tune than we heard back in July.
• 28:55
  The Germans were masters of the open field blitzkrieg, but they were not prepared for the brutal house-to-house urban warfare that they discovered that the Soviet soldiers, far from being the racially inferior Untermensch, you know, this is the way the Nazi propaganda painted them.
• 29:13
  They were not just people who were going to be pushovers.
• 29:15
  They were not barbarians with sticks and rocks.
• 29:19
  They were soldiers who were going to do, who were going to give everything to protect their homeland.
• 29:25
  And they learned this the hard way in November of 1942, when a massive Soviet counteroffensive surrounded the entire German 6th Army.
• 29:34
  Hitler, in an act of supreme arrogance, forbade any attempt to break out, promising the army to be supplied by air.
• 29:40
  They said, just hold out.
• 29:41
  You know, you're surrounded, but don't worry.
• 29:42
  We've got aircraft.
• 29:44
  We can deliver all the resources you need via air.
• 29:46
  When in reality, that was a fantasy on Hitler's part.
• 29:50
  He thought he couldn't lose, right?
• 29:51
  I mean, he had this track record of winning everywhere.
• 29:53
  And so he foolishly thought there was no way that these filthy Russian barbarians could do anything to the mighty German army.
• 30:02
  And yet, in reality, as they were trapped in the ruins of the city that they had managed to capture through the brutal Russian winter.
• 30:08
  But by this point, we're in that winter, a time when you don't ever want to be in a land war in Russia.
• 30:12
  And the 6th Army essentially starved and froze to death.
• 30:15
  On February 2nd of the following year, in 1943, what was left of the 6th Army surrendered.
• 30:20
  Of the nearly 300,000 men trapped, only about 5,000 would ever see Germany again.
• 30:26
  Let me repeat that.
• 30:27
  Of the 300,000 men trapped there, only 5,000 of them would ever see Germany again.
• 30:33
  The news of the defeat of Stalingrad was a profound shock to the German home front.
• 30:37
  It shattered the myth of the army's invincibility and planted the first deep seeds of doubt about the Führer's genius.
• 30:43
  So Hitler's first loss, and no one to blame it on.
• 30:46
  Where do we turn next, Joshua?
• 30:48
  Yeah, so after Stalingrad, the war actually came home to Germany.
• 30:53
  The Allied bombing campaign escalated into just a brutal and never-ending assault on Germany's cities.
• 31:01
  So the destruction that Germany had brought to Warsaw and London, right, now actually visited upon its own people at an apocalyptic scale.
• 31:12
  The civilian experience was one of nightly terror.
• 31:19
  They firebombed Dresden on February 13th, 14th, 1945, which actually became sort of a symbol of this, the type of destruction we're dealing with.
• 31:29
  Margaret Freyer, a resident, described the scene as, quote,
• 31:33
  Another survivor, Gerda Drews, recalled the phosphorus, white-hot phosphorus from incendiary bombs running down buildings like, quote, snakes of fire.
• 31:57
  The raids created a firestorm, literally a firestorm, a vortex of fire that sucked in the oxygen and generated hurricane-force winds.
• 32:07
  People in shelters suffocated or were baked alive, and those people who ran into the streets were turned into human torches.
• 32:14
  The devastation across Germany was immense.
• 32:17
  The campaign destroyed 3.6 million homes and killed 300,000 civilians.
• 32:24
  These weren't military.
• 32:26
  These weren't fighters.
• 32:27
  These were just people and families and children.
• 32:31
  The psychological impact of this was just as profound.
• 32:34
  The constant fear and these invading thoughts of loss, it had a devastating effect on the morale of these people.
• 32:45
  After the war, the U.S. did a survey and found the main effects of this to be defeatism, depression, despair, fear, helplessness, fatalism, and apathy.
• 32:55
  Of all those, apathy to me is probably the most surprising.
• 32:59
  But the regime's promises of victory rang hollow with the German people.
• 33:04
  They were angry.
• 33:06
  And it wasn't directed at the Allies necessarily, but increasingly at Nazi leadership.
• 33:13
  They promised them victory and delivered ruin and destruction.
• 33:20
  That was the downfall of the Guterdammerung.
• 33:24
  So the final months of the regime in the spring of 1945 were a Guterdammerung or a twilight of the gods, right?
• 33:33
  A complete societal collapse.
• 33:36
  The most honest account of this time comes from the anonymous diary, A Woman in Berlin.
• 33:42
  As the Soviet Red Army fought its way into the capital, all order vanished, right?
• 33:46
  The diary describes the terror of the final battles with civilians hiding in cellars as the city is destroyed.
• 33:54
  With the city's surrender, a new horror began, right?
• 33:58
  Years of brutal warfare and propaganda.
• 34:01
  Soviet soldiers engaged in a mass wave of rape against German women.
• 34:08
  The diarist describes the ordeal with pretty stark clarity.
• 34:11
  Recounting how she and other women tried to survive by hiding and finding a single high-ranking Russian officer to, quote,
• 34:19
  protect them from the random violence of others.
• 34:22
  In the face of total defeat, the ideology that held the nation together for 12 years imploded.
• 34:30
  For the most fanatical, the only answer was suicide.
• 34:35
  Hitler and Goebbels killed themselves in the Berlin bunker.
• 34:39
  But this wasn't limited to the leadership across the country.
• 34:43
  A mass wave of suicide swept through the civilian population.
• 34:47
  Entire families, terrified by propaganda about the subhuman Bolsheviks, chose to die rather than face defeat.
• 34:55
  The immense suffering of the German people in 1945 was the direct result of the choices made in 1933.
• 35:02
  The same people who cheered for national greatness were left to fend for themselves alone in a landscape of total physical, economic, and moral ruin.
• 35:13
  The grand promises had ended in rubble, starvation, and shame.
• 35:18
  And we now return to, I mean, we can hear these numbers about the hundreds of thousands who died, and that sort of makes it a faceless mass of people.
• 35:27
  But if we bring it home to our characters we've created here, we have our soldier Friedrich, who survived the trenches of World War I,
• 35:36
  only to die in the frozen mud outside of Stalingrad, one of the millions sacrificed for a madman's dream.
• 35:43
  Klaus, our shopkeeper who feared economic chaos, and who was forced to join the Nazi union to keep his store open,
• 35:50
  is now buried in the rubble of his store during an air raid.
• 35:54
  Sebastian, our law student, fled into exile, spending his life trying to explain how the nation of poets and thinkers had embraced barbarism.
• 36:01
  And Doris, our young woman who just wanted to be a star, well, she survived.
• 36:07
  Traumatized and hungry in a city of ghosts, she learns the brutal math of survival in a conquered land,
• 36:13
  her dreams of glamour replaced by the daily fight for a piece of bread.
• 36:16
  One historian described this historical event as a storm passing over the lake of private life.
• 36:21
  Sometimes it's just a shadow and nothing moves, other times it whips the lake into a fury, and sometimes it drains the lake completely.
• 36:28
  For Germany, this storm would drain the lake.
• 36:30
  The story we followed is one of a nation's deep wounds,
• 36:34
  of humiliation, economic despair, and a crippling fear of the future.
• 36:38
  The story of a seductive appeal of a powerful voice that promised simple solutions,
• 36:43
  identified clear enemies and offered the return to a mythical past of strength and unity.
• 36:49
  And this is the story of a slow surrender of freedoms.
• 36:51
  Each one given up for security and order.
• 36:53
  Again, keep in mind, these were people who had seen their daily ordinary lives completely upended following World War I and the Treaty of Versailles,
• 37:02
  and now had given up their freedoms one by one for the promise of this heroic Germany to rise again and reclaim its rightful throne.
• 37:11
  And they were willing to trade their freedoms for that possibility.
• 37:14
  And instead, they were left with neither their freedoms nor that hope.
• 37:17
  And finally, it's the story of the terrible price paid not by the leaders in their bunkers,
• 37:21
  but by the ordinary people in their cellars, on the frozen plains of Russian cities,
• 37:26
  and the price paid by the very people who were promised greatness and who so desperately wanted to believe.
• 37:31
  That story's over.
• 37:33
  That history's written.
• 37:34
  But it leaves us with questions still today.
• 37:37
  These questions are not a shout from the past, but a constant, quiet hum just beneath the surface of our own noisy, complicated times.
• 37:45
  As we watch inflation get out of control, as we watch the threat of economic devastation arise,
• 37:51
  we're going to ask ourselves these same questions.
• 37:54
  We're going to be faced with these same questions that face the German people.
• 37:56
  What are we hearing when we choose to listen?
• 37:58
  So as Will says, when we choose to listen, what are we actually hearing, right?
• 38:02
  Like, what's the purpose of these stories?
• 38:04
  I think the purpose is that we understand the past to avoid repeating it.
• 38:10
  Now, there's lots to be taken from this one.
• 38:13
  There's lots to be taken from the last one.
• 38:15
  But unfortunately, this is not the last of the totalitarian, authoritarian regimes that we have inside of this series.
• 38:24
  But I don't know about you, Will.
• 38:26
  I don't know that I really have a commentary for the end of this one.
• 38:30
  So much as just to go ahead and end it here and let it speak for itself.
• 38:35
  I would just say that the siren song of order and stability and maybe even glory for some still reemerges.
• 38:45
  It never really goes silent, but it certainly can be heard in these uncertain times when fear reigns and chaos seems to be at every turn.
• 38:53
  That siren song of safety and order and familiarity, the glorified past, calls to all of us.
• 39:00
  And the question is, are we willing to answer its call?
• 39:03
  Are we going to crash our ships on the wrecks or the rocks of the sirens when they call with promises of order and glory or promises of returns to better times?
• 39:15
  Are we willing to trade our freedoms for the hope of that future that's promised?
• 39:19
  Or do we choose another path that remains to be seen?
• 39:24
  And what will be of either path is the hard to feel.
• 39:29
  Yeah.
• 39:30
  And that is something that rings true for all of us.
• 39:32
  That's why.
• 39:34
  That is the overlap.
• 39:35
  Thanks for joining me today, Will, for this podcast.
• 39:38
  It was a dark one.
• 39:40
  It was.
• 39:40
  I was going to say it was a pleasure, Joshua, but I don't know if that accurately describes this.
• 39:44
  I wouldn't describe it as a pleasure.
• 39:46
  It's a pleasure to see you.
• 39:47
  It's a pleasure to be with you.
• 39:48
  It's not a pleasure to deal with this sort of depth and weight.
• 39:53
  Yeah.
• 39:53
  But somebody's got to do it and it falls to us.
• 39:57
  Exactly.
• 39:58
  Well, make sure.
• 39:59
  I almost want to say don't like this podcast.
• 40:01
  If you wouldn't mind, give us a review, maybe a share.
• 40:04
  You don't have to like this one.
• 40:05
  We don't like it.
• 40:06
  But it is part of the rise of fascism.
• 40:10
  That's it.
• 40:11
  Goodbye.
• 40:12
  We'll see you next time.
• 40:13
  Thank you.