Latest / The Smart Cookies podcast / How HITLER took power... and what's it got to do with DONALD TRUMP? With dr. Timothy Ryback

Transcript

How HITLER took power... and what's it got to do with DONALD TRUMP? With dr. Timothy Ryback · The Smart Cookies podcast

• 0:00
  Dr Timothy Ryback is the co-founder of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation
• 0:09
  in The Hague.
• 0:10
  Some of his previous books include the highly acclaimed Hitler's private library, the books
• 0:14
  that shaped his life, The Last Survivor, Legacies of Dachau, and Hitler's first victims, The
• 0:19
  Quest for Justice.
• 0:21
  His latest book, Takeover, Hitler's Final Rise to Power, just came out and has already
• 0:26
  been showered with praise in all the biggest newspapers and outlets out there.
• 0:31
  Dr Ryback, welcome to the show.
• 0:34
  Thank you.
• 0:35
  If I may, I wanted us to begin this, well, kind of darkly astonishing story by setting
• 0:41
  the stage a little bit.
• 0:42
  It's really easy to just view these events through the lens of the great man of history
• 0:46
  theory, but I always find this approach kind of lacking and also not that exciting, to
• 0:50
  be honest.
• 0:51
  So I wanted us to talk about the Weimar Republic first.
• 0:54
  Especially when we're presented with Germany in this period, so between the two world wars,
• 0:59
  it's in the form of a lot of tropes and cliches, political instability, endless hedonism, particularly
• 1:06
  in Berlin, of course, cabaret culture, drugs on every corner, and lots and lots of deadly
• 1:12
  street fights.
• 1:13
  What's wrong, if anything, with this picture?
• 1:16
  Wait, first of all, all of those tropes that you described about the Weimar Republic are
• 1:22
  legitimate, are real.
• 1:24
  Really?
• 1:25
  Yes.
• 1:26
  However, the Weimar Republic was around for 13 years, and different tropes apply to different
• 1:34
  moments in the Weimar history.
• 1:38
  So it wasn't as if it was 13 endless years of chaos, street violence, political instability,
• 1:50
  and economic collapse.
• 1:52
  And in fact, the time period that we're talking about here, which is basically from July 1932
• 2:00
  until January 1933, was actually we saw the Weimar Republic gradually on the mend and
• 2:15
  overcoming some of these issues.
• 2:18
  I mean, the hyperinflation that we think of with people with wheelbarrows full of money,
• 2:23
  we're talking 1923.
• 2:25
  We're talking a decade earlier.
• 2:29
  The street violence, absolutely at that point.
• 2:34
  And also, I think that the political chaos, but it was a more mixed bag in what I used
• 2:40
  to, I taught a course many years ago at Harvard University on Weimar Nazi culture.
• 2:49
  And I used to like to quote a Hans Frank, who was, I think, as you know, he was Hitler's
• 2:57
  private attorney, the Nazi Party attorney, but went on to become the governor general
• 3:04
  of Nazi-occupied Poland.
• 3:07
  And right before he was hanged at Nuremberg for his complicity in crimes against humanity,
• 3:17
  Frank said something really insightful about democratic processes.
• 3:21
  He said, you know, Hitler was only possible at that moment in time.
• 3:29
  He said, had we tried it a decade earlier, the German people would have gone back to
• 3:37
  the Kaiser and the stability that was there.
• 3:41
  Had we tried this a decade later, meaning, you know, in the 1940s or 1950s, you would
• 3:50
  have had an entire generation of Germans imbued with democratic values.
• 3:55
  But he said, we came at this perfect moment where, this perfectly horrific moment where
• 4:03
  the German people were too far from the old system to retreat back and not far enough
• 4:12
  into the future to escape into democracy.
• 4:16
  So I think what this 1932, well, up to the second half of 1932 was a complex and nuanced
• 4:27
  time.
• 4:28
  The German government realized that they had to respond to a lot of the issues out there.
• 4:36
  And one of Hitler's big talking points was the Treaty of Versailles, you know, the stab
• 4:43
  in the back and in particular, the war guilt clause and the imposition of the reparation
• 4:53
  payments.
• 4:54
  There was a limitation to the German military, restricting the army to a hundred thousand.
• 5:00
  And these were all important talking points, not only for Hitler, but also for all the
• 5:06
  far right politicians who were against Weimar.
• 5:13
  But in fact, some of these conditions were being renegotiated in Geneva at that point.
• 5:21
  And Weimar Republic had an extra six months.
• 5:28
  I should also mention the economy was also recovering.
• 5:31
  Unemployment was still high, but everything was gradually on the mend.
• 5:36
  But Hitler sort of been held from power for another six to eight months.
• 5:44
  There was, maybe we'll talk about this later, but the conflicts even within his own party.
• 5:51
  This notion of the seizure of power, I mean, not the notion, the reality of the seizure
• 5:57
  of power simply never would have taken place.
• 6:00
  That's already super interesting that the Weimar Republic was on the up and the conditions
• 6:06
  were improving for most people.
• 6:07
  And yet the Nazis managed to drive a wedge between this and the public perception.
• 6:13
  And we're going to talk about this more, but I wanted to, just because I used to live in
• 6:17
  Berlin for a very long time, I have to ask you about the decadence in Berlin during the
• 6:22
  Weimar era.
• 6:23
  Was that a real thing or is it just something cool that you put in a TV show or a movie
• 6:28
  because it conjures up this image that we all recognize instantly?
• 6:33
  We were neighbors then because I've lived in Berlin until I had an apartment there.
• 6:40
  Which area?
• 6:41
  In Prenzlauer Berg.
• 6:43
  Oh, nice.
• 6:44
  The more bougie area, at least now it is.
• 6:47
  It's gotten more bougie, but I have to say there are parts of Berlin that are still pretty
• 6:52
  hedonistic.
• 6:53
  That's why I asked.
• 6:56
  And I wouldn't have it any other way, to be honest.
• 6:59
  Oh, absolutely.
• 7:00
  And frankly, I think that the film Cabaret with Liza Minnelli, I actually think captures
• 7:07
  what Berlin was like at that moment perfectly.
• 7:11
  And there was an amazing cabaret scene.
• 7:18
  The drug scene was there.
• 7:19
  It was also very international.
• 7:21
  I mean, you'd had the Russian revolution, so you had a lot of people fleeing into Germany.
• 7:30
  And they tended to come to Berlin.
• 7:32
  So Berlin itself was a melting pot of people from all over Europe, practically from all
• 7:38
  over the world.
• 7:40
  And there was, at the same time, it was called Red Berlin.
• 7:46
  And it was primarily social democrat and very strongly communist.
• 7:52
  I think it is still Red Berlin to a certain degree.
• 7:55
  I mean, they tend to vote much more left than right.
• 8:00
  But there was, and the Nazis were making inroads or working making roads there.
• 8:05
  So there really was a lot of street fighting, a lot of street violence there.
• 8:11
  So I think this chaos that one experiences or hears about, it absolutely existed.
• 8:19
  Now what's funny is the biggest venue there for political rallies was called the Sportpalast,
• 8:26
  which was basically a big ice skating ring, but it could hold, you know, however many
• 8:31
  tens of thousands of people.
• 8:33
  And that's when we see these massive rallies there.
• 8:37
  And what they tend to show is Hitler standing in the Sportpalast in front of a massive number
• 8:42
  of people wearing slasika armbands and ranting and raving.
• 8:49
  What you don't realize is that was on one night when you look at the actual scheduling
• 8:53
  of events at the Sportpalast, the night before, the communists were holding a rally there
• 8:59
  and the social democrats were.
• 9:01
  I mean, it was just the place where you went to get a lot of people together.
• 9:06
  So it was, yeah, it was a very, there was a lot of tension, a lot of conflict.
• 9:14
  There was a massive transit strike right before the November election.
• 9:20
  And this is amazing where the national socialists and the communists joined together to call
• 9:27
  a strike.
• 9:28
  So here you have cooperation between Nazis and communists who are killing themselves
• 9:34
  the day before and killing themselves the day after, but actually both endorsing a massive
• 9:39
  transit strike simply as a way of trying to shake the system to destabilize that.
• 9:46
  And I think the important thing is, I mean, the center was embattled at that time, but
• 9:54
  you had people on the far right and the far left both trying to bring the political system
• 10:01
  down through political chaos and when necessary and very frequently through street violence.
• 10:10
  Okay.
• 10:11
  So for this book, you read a lot of newspapers that were in circulation at the time.
• 10:16
  How did the Germans themselves view this era and the society they were living in?
• 10:21
  Well, this is where I think if there's any added value to take over the book, this story
• 10:30
  has been told innumerable times by very eminent, very generations of eminent historians.
• 10:40
  But what one tends to do is to explain, which is the job of a historian, explain how we
• 10:47
  got from where we were to where we are.
• 10:51
  And in order to do that, you have to take those facts that make sense, that help explain
• 10:58
  the course of events.
• 11:00
  What that in turn does is necessarily weed out a lot of the extraneous noise that didn't
• 11:11
  contribute to where we ended up.
• 11:14
  What that also does then is to imbue events or individuals with kind of a sense of historical
• 11:20
  inevitability.
• 11:22
  I decided to forget everything that I knew about the era and simply started reading the
• 11:31
  daily press on a day-by-day basis, reading diary entries, meeting protocols, occasionally
• 11:39
  memoirs, but really tried to keep it in the moment without any foresight.
• 11:46
  And suddenly you see events that have disappeared from the narrative of Hitler's rise to power
• 11:55
  suddenly playing an incredibly important role.
• 11:59
  I don't want to jump ahead, but I'm in the United States at the moment, and there's an
• 12:04
  election coming up in just over a week.
• 12:09
  No one can tell me, no one can say who's going to win this election at this point.
• 12:17
  I promise you a week after the election, every pundit in America and probably around the
• 12:23
  world is going to explain exactly why this outcome was inevitable and highlight those
• 12:31
  events what led to this final outcome.
• 12:35
  But at this point, nobody knows.
• 12:37
  And so this book takeover is really more about political contingency rather than historical
• 12:46
  inevitability.
• 12:48
  And even until, as I was writing it personally, I knew the final outcome, but I was astonished
• 12:55
  at how many different routes history could have taken and literally at up to literally
• 13:03
  the last minute before Hitler was appointed chancellor, there was as good a chance of
• 13:10
  it not happening.
• 13:12
  In fact, he was lucky that it happened at that point because if it hadn't happened at
• 13:19
  that moment, the history of the Weimar Republic and the 20th century would have been completely
• 13:27
  different.
• 13:28
  So you're saying that reading the newspapers of the time, nobody saw it coming.
• 13:36
  The brightest pundits and political analysts of the time kind of didn't have a clue.
• 13:43
  My favorite quote of the era was a very incisive political commentator who said Adolf Hitler
• 13:51
  is a man with a great future behind him.
• 13:55
  And he was considered by 1932, by late 32.
• 13:59
  He was really considered washed up.
• 14:02
  And once again, we forget all of this, but in the July 32 Reichstag elections, the Nazis
• 14:17
  got 37% of the vote, which was really their high water mark in a free and open election.
• 14:27
  Hitler was aiming for 51%.
• 14:30
  And so they called a second round of elections, forced a second round of elections in November
• 14:38
  of 1932.
• 14:41
  They're expecting to get 51%, absolute majority, so he can just take control.
• 14:48
  Instead, they lose 2 million votes and they're down to 33%.
• 14:54
  Suddenly there are divisions within the Nazi party.
• 14:58
  They've exhausted, and there was a series of five election cycles there.
• 15:05
  The Nazi party was bankrupt financially.
• 15:09
  One estimate put them at 90 million Reichsmarks in debt, which was the equivalent of hundreds
• 15:16
  of millions of dollars today.
• 15:18
  So they were massively in debt.
• 15:21
  They were hemorrhaging members.
• 15:23
  First of all, they hemorrhaged voters.
• 15:25
  They lost 2 million voters.
• 15:28
  And top of that, they started losing party membership.
• 15:32
  And there was a big split within, there were basically two factions in the party.
• 15:38
  There were the hardliners, people we know, Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, who wanted
• 15:44
  sort of all or nothing.
• 15:47
  There was another wing led by men in Gregor Strasser that wanted to enter into a coalition
• 15:53
  government compromise and sort of have the national socialists get a foothold in government
• 15:59
  and then work to expand it.
• 16:02
  There was a split there.
• 16:03
  So as I say, by January 1933, the party was bankrupt ideologically, financially, and in
• 16:15
  terms of membership was on the decline.
• 16:20
  We're going to come back to this moment.
• 16:22
  But I wanted to ask you this before.
• 16:24
  When the Nazis appear on the scene, what are some of the cracks in the public perception
• 16:28
  maybe of the Weimar Republic that they begin exploiting?
• 16:31
  You touched on some already with the Treaty of Versailles, for example.
• 16:36
  Was it more of the kind of unchecked hedonism, the Treaty of Versailles, or was it, like
• 16:43
  you already said, also the famous anti-Semitic conspiracy theory of a stab in the back, which
• 16:48
  posited that Germany didn't actually lose the First World War but was betrayed by the
• 16:53
  inside, I mean, from the inside by the Jews and the socialists?
• 16:57
  Was that the main kind of PR thrust of it all?
• 17:01
  Well, the hedonism was, I don't say exclusively, but primarily in your city of Berlin.
• 17:11
  I mean, that was really the epicenter.
• 17:15
  The German countryside, I mean, these are farmers.
• 17:20
  There's not a lot of—
• 17:21
  There was no cocaine in Bavaria, is that what you're saying?
• 17:25
  There's not a lot of cocaine in Bavaria.
• 17:27
  A lot of lederhosen and a lot of beer.
• 17:30
  That makes sense.
• 17:32
  But I think really the big talking point was the Treaty of Versailles.
• 17:42
  And it was sort of the whipping boy for everything.
• 17:45
  It was used to—it was the economic despair people were feeling, the humiliation of this
• 17:52
  war guilt clause, and the imposition that the German military—you know, these great
• 18:00
  tradition—military traditions in Germany, going back to Frederick the Great, that the
• 18:05
  army was restricted to 100,000 soldiers.
• 18:08
  So these were Hitler's talking points.
• 18:12
  What we forget is that in Geneva there were discussions for undoing—and these were a
• 18:18
  burden on the German society, there's no question about it, and a lot of them were
• 18:23
  unfair.
• 18:24
  But these were Hitler's key talking points, but in Geneva through traditional diplomacy
• 18:35
  the Allies recognized the problem there, and they were gradually undoing these.
• 18:43
  The interesting thing about the anti-Semitism, it was clearly key and core to the Nazi identity
• 18:54
  and political agenda.
• 18:56
  What I find really interesting—and I've read more hundreds, thousands of pages of
• 19:04
  Hitler's speeches, basically—and the guy was holding sometimes five speeches a day.
• 19:12
  This was from mid-July until January of 1933.
• 19:22
  And the references to Jews is actually very limited.
• 19:28
  There are these—it's referenced in points, but the key talking points were, to quote
• 19:38
  Bill Clinton, you know, it's the economy, stupid.
• 19:41
  It's the economy, it's the economy, it's the economy.
• 19:44
  And he's going into these small communities and he's talking to them about the economic
• 19:50
  despair and how the government has abandoned them.
• 19:55
  And it was very similar to the talking points of the communists.
• 20:00
  I mean, everyone knew the economy was a problem.
• 20:05
  And I think that's where, you know, Hitler had increased.
• 20:10
  And keep in mind, after 1929, after the great crash of 1929 and the elections, the Nazis
• 20:21
  increased their share of the vote tenfold.
• 20:27
  I mean, they went from a marginal party to the second large, being the second largest
• 20:33
  party after the Social Democrats.
• 20:36
  And then in this July 1932 election, they claimed 37 percent of the vote, which made
• 20:45
  them the largest political party.
• 20:48
  And it was primarily on—people were just despairing over their economics, primarily
• 20:56
  their economic situation, but also the Nazis wove a lot of other issues into there.
• 21:05
  You know, the war, guilty humiliation, Jewish conspiracies and all of that.
• 21:12
  But for the average German, I think the key issue was the economy.
• 21:20
  And as Hitler would say, sort of this old boys' establishment network.
• 21:28
  I mean, you had in Berlin, you know, basically a lot of aristocrats running the government.
• 21:37
  The cabinet was, you know, the von Papen cabinet, and there was the von Schleicher cabinet.
• 21:43
  The president was von Hindenburg.
• 21:46
  And in one speech, you know, Hitler was criticizing this, you know, this old boys' network.
• 21:53
  Keep in mind, he is the Austrian—he's the Bohemian corporal, okay?
• 21:59
  So he's threefold outsider.
• 22:03
  But you know, one of his rallies, he said, you know, if aristocrats were made to rule
• 22:09
  Germany, we would have all been born with monocles.
• 22:13
  And he was, you know, looking at certain degree the elitism that was existing and that was
• 22:22
  a problem there.
• 22:25
  But the key talking point really was with people's pocketbooks and just being able
• 22:30
  to make a living.
• 22:32
  Do you think Weimar Republic did have some sort of inherent principle weakness?
• 22:37
  Because it always seems so fragile in hindsight.
• 22:39
  But again, we're talking in hindsight.
• 22:41
  Or does it, like you said, all basically harken back to the Wall Street crash of 29 and the
• 22:46
  terrible economic situation that befell most Germans afterwards?
• 22:50
  There was a republic that had its flaws.
• 22:54
  But tell me any democratic system, if you look closely enough, you can't find one or
• 23:01
  the other flaw in the system.
• 23:04
  I think it was fundamentally a solid constitution.
• 23:08
  I think it guaranteed all of the basic rights that you need for a functioning democracy,
• 23:17
  which was freedom of speech, free press, due process of law, public referendum, which means
• 23:26
  if you didn't like someone, you would vote it.
• 23:29
  And the interesting thing that I find about Hitler and actually a lot of the right wing
• 23:37
  forces there, they actually understood democracy as well as anyone and possibly even better.
• 23:46
  And Hitler had to appear in court at one point as a witness to a larger process.
• 23:52
  But keep in mind back in 1923, he held the Beer Hall Putsch.
• 24:00
  It failed.
• 24:01
  He ended up in prison.
• 24:03
  And afterwards, he was released.
• 24:06
  He was allowed to enter political system on the promise that he would not promote any
• 24:15
  kind of violence against the public, the violent overthrow of government.
• 24:22
  But here he is in court once and he basically says, I am intent on destroying democracy.
• 24:33
  I hate democracy.
• 24:34
  I'm intent on destroying democracy through democratic process, which is a pretty amazing
• 24:41
  thing to say in court.
• 24:42
  The judge's response is even more amazing, which is, so by constitutional means only,
• 24:50
  and Hitler's answer was, jawohl.
• 24:52
  And he did very systematically.
• 24:56
  They knew what the touch points were, the weak points in the democratic system, and
• 25:01
  they worked very effectively to undermine it.
• 25:05
  When they entered the Reichstag, the legislative branch, there were 12 guys in a 600 seat
• 25:14
  body.
• 25:15
  But even at that time, Joseph Goebbels was one of the young delegates.
• 25:21
  He was a late 20 something Nazi.
• 25:25
  He was not yet the minister of propaganda that we know him to be.
• 25:30
  This was just this young guy who had been elected as a national socialist and came in
• 25:36
  as one of the first delegates to the Reichstag.
• 25:39
  And he says, we do not enter as friends, we do not enter as neutrals.
• 25:47
  We come here as your mortal enemies.
• 25:51
  And he said, the big joke on democracy is that they give the tools of their own destruction.
• 26:00
  Destruction to their enemies.
• 26:04
  And the Nazis really, when you look at how they use the system, when Hitler, what happened
• 26:11
  was Hitler, after the high water mark, this July 1932 election, which even in the Nazi
• 26:21
  histories, these are the Nazi histories that were being written at that time, this was
• 26:27
  considered a crucial moment in their history because suddenly they had gone, and this is,
• 26:34
  you even hear it in Hitler's speeches when he's talking, you see it, they themselves
• 26:40
  were astonished at what they had achieved.
• 26:43
  The 37%, right?
• 26:44
  Yeah, the 37%.
• 26:47
  Because a decade earlier, you had seven guys sitting around a table trying to create a
• 26:56
  political movement.
• 26:58
  Now the Bolsheviks had the backing from Moscow.
• 27:02
  They had weapons, they had financing, they had an infrastructure that was supporting
• 27:10
  them.
• 27:11
  The Social Democrats had been around since the 1890s as a political party.
• 27:16
  You had the conservative, the Christian parties that had been part of the political system.
• 27:24
  And here you had seven guys entering the system and within a matter of 12 years had become
• 27:31
  the largest political party and system.
• 27:34
  Now this is the point I was getting at with this with democracy is that, you know, Hitler's
• 27:38
  point was, and his logic, he had this meeting with Hindenburg in August of 32, and generally
• 27:46
  what it is, the largest political party, who had the largest percentage in the Reichstag,
• 27:55
  got to have their leader as the chancellor, who would then build a coalition of other
• 28:03
  parties.
• 28:06
  Hindenburg, who was the president, who had the right to appoint and dismiss chancellors
• 28:12
  at will, despised Hitler, he's the one who called him the Bohemian corporal.
• 28:17
  He famously said, if I were to appoint Hitler to any position, it would be as postmaster
• 28:25
  general so he could lick me from behind on my stamps.
• 28:30
  But so he wanted, and you know, he told Hitler to his face for the sake of God, my conscience,
• 28:39
  in the country, I would never appoint you as chancellor.
• 28:43
  So this is August 32.
• 28:46
  Hitler's argument to the contrary was he says, we're functioning in a democracy.
• 28:51
  He said, I have 37% of 51%, you know, a simple majority.
• 28:59
  So I have 37% is 75% of 51%, which gives me the majority of the simple majority, and therefore
• 29:15
  I should have complete control.
• 29:18
  You know, Hindenburg basically said, you know, go home and do some more math.
• 29:22
  He said, this isn't the way it's going to function.
• 29:26
  But what Hitler did very effectively was, and this is where he understood it, he used
• 29:32
  that 37% to either crush, co-opt, or browbeat everyone else in the right wing opposition,
• 29:45
  because all of these other parties are having, you know, 5% or 8%.
• 29:50
  I mean, one of the big problems with the Weimar Republic is that they had literally dozens
• 29:55
  of political parties, which was very democratic.
• 29:59
  It was very representative, but it also led to a fracturing.
• 30:03
  And when Hitler wasn't given power, he said, okay, we're going to go into opposition, and
• 30:11
  we can paralyze the legislature with our 37%.
• 30:16
  We can paralyze the legislative process.
• 30:18
  And that's basically what they did.
• 30:21
  They could not get any laws passed, because with that percentage, they simply blocked
• 30:28
  any legislation.
• 30:30
  And part of the problem was that the communists and the social democrats hated each other
• 30:37
  as much as they hated the Nazis.
• 30:40
  So there was this unwillingness to enter into coalitions that would allow for a functioning
• 30:49
  government with a simple majority of the right stuff.
• 30:54
  If we take a step back yet again, just because I'm fascinated by this aspect, the economic
• 31:00
  crisis, which was global after the crash of 29, it wasn't a local German thing.
• 31:06
  And yet, Nazism didn't spring up in Poland or France, for example, even though these
• 31:11
  countries also had a long history of anti-Semitism, for example.
• 31:16
  What made Germany so susceptible to this threat?
• 31:19
  I know you don't like the great man theory, but I think Hitler was really a unique political
• 31:29
  figure.
• 31:30
  Fair.
• 31:31
  I don't want to say singular, but this man had just...
• 31:40
  There was some kind of charisma about him, but also this ability...
• 31:50
  And this is the odd thing.
• 31:52
  He blinded himself to the most obvious defeats.
• 31:57
  He ran against Hindenburg in the 1932 presidential election.
• 32:03
  He lost by six million votes.
• 32:06
  He claimed voter fraud, and he actually went to court and tried to have the election overturned.
• 32:14
  They threw him out on his ear.
• 32:17
  But what he did was...
• 32:18
  And he had actually gotten 37% personally in that election.
• 32:23
  He then, he claimed victory and went on to this next election, which was the Reichstag
• 32:30
  election.
• 32:31
  And even when they lost those two million votes in the November elections, they lost
• 32:39
  down to 33% from 37%.
• 32:43
  He declared victory anyway.
• 32:45
  And what he said was, now...
• 32:47
  And people said, well, we're hemorrhaging membership.
• 32:50
  We've lost.
• 32:51
  He said, but what we have are the core people who matter.
• 32:54
  He says, we've gotten rid of the weak people, those who have 100% loyalty.
• 33:04
  And every situation he was in, he simply blinded himself to anything that looked like defeat
• 33:12
  and drove forward.
• 33:14
  Now, in some cases, people end up driving off the cliff or into a brick wall.
• 33:20
  But Hitler had a series of events and the circumstances that allowed him to keep moving
• 33:29
  forward.
• 33:30
  The great Hitler biographer, Ian Kiershaw, did this massive two-voluming.
• 33:36
  And he tried...
• 33:38
  At the end of this, he said, you know, the only explanation you really have for Hitler
• 33:46
  is that this man had the luck of the devil.
• 33:49
  And he just...
• 33:51
  Circumstances, again and again and again, just fell in his favor.
• 33:56
  It goes back to the Hans Frank thing.
• 33:59
  Hitler had Hitler not come to power in January of 32...
• 34:04
  I'm sorry, January of 33.
• 34:07
  What would have happened, the party was massively in debt.
• 34:13
  Okay?
• 34:14
  They would have been...
• 34:16
  The people had stepped up to the plate to give him money.
• 34:20
  Suddenly, he got some...
• 34:21
  There were some bankers who wanted nothing to do with him.
• 34:25
  Suddenly, in January, they said, look, we'll put our money with Hitler.
• 34:30
  Had he not been appointed chancellor, they would have backed away.
• 34:37
  The party membership would have been dismayed.
• 34:41
  He would have begun to lose people.
• 34:43
  It would have remained a political force, but I suspect they would have probably gone
• 34:49
  down to...
• 34:50
  Ended up at 24, 26 percent.
• 34:53
  Had been a major...
• 34:55
  Had been a political force, but would not have been in a position to take over.
• 35:01
  So it was really that critical moment in January when he was appointed that allowed it to happen.
• 35:10
  And so why in Germany?
• 35:12
  I mean, I think Hitler in particular, given the fact that he wasn't even German famously,
• 35:17
  he was from Austria.
• 35:19
  And only in February of 32 did he get German citizenship.
• 35:24
  He was basically a stateless person.
• 35:26
  And when he railed against the immigrants, he himself was a foreigner in Germany.
• 35:34
  But I think the size of the economy, the fact that it was relied on an industrial base,
• 35:41
  there was a large force of workers who were either going to go far left or far right.
• 35:49
  And even when you look at voting patterns, the workers, people who were voting communist,
• 35:56
  didn't go to the center.
• 35:57
  They went from the far left to the far right in these elections.
• 36:02
  So it was basically, and it goes back to the economy, it was basically the average person
• 36:08
  just trying to get by.
• 36:12
  I forgot to say something extremely interesting.
• 36:14
  You said that Hitler was actually banned from the Twitter of the day, the X of the day,
• 36:18
  which back then was radio.
• 36:20
  On the other hand, historians like to say that the Nazis were super savvy when it came
• 36:25
  to using mass media.
• 36:27
  Like you said, they were a bunch of young guys, right?
• 36:30
  So how can we square these two seemingly contradictory statements?
• 36:35
  He was banned from radio, which was the Twitter of the day, partially because of his extremist
• 36:42
  rhetoric.
• 36:43
  He just couldn't get on.
• 36:44
  Whereas other, you know, the political leadership could get on.
• 36:48
  And as Hitler himself observed, you know, in 10 minutes could reach tens of millions
• 36:54
  of people.
• 36:55
  Hitler himself was restricted to rallies.
• 36:59
  He was also tended to be banned from or banned.
• 37:03
  He wasn't covered in the mainstream press.
• 37:07
  So his ability to reach beyond his own echo chamber was very limited.
• 37:13
  He did two things that were fairly innovative in 1932.
• 37:17
  One was another technology had come along were phonograph records.
• 37:23
  And what Hitler did was to record speeches on phonograph records and then distribute
• 37:30
  those by the tens of thousands.
• 37:32
  And this was sort of a...
• 37:33
  For free or did people have to buy them?
• 37:36
  They had to buy them, but they were available at kiosks.
• 37:39
  So you bought like a vinyl record from Hitler.
• 37:43
  That's crazy.
• 37:44
  With his first speech in London.
• 37:48
  And what's really interesting about it is there, I have listened to some of these, they're
• 37:53
  pretty hard to find, but this is not ranting and raving.
• 37:58
  This is Hitler trying to talk and there's no talk of anti-Semitism.
• 38:04
  I mean, it's Hitler talking about the economy, about stabilizing the country, about the return
• 38:11
  of the dignity of the German people.
• 38:15
  And not ranting and raving, but actually in a very moderated tone, just letting you know.
• 38:22
  The other thing that he did...
• 38:23
  So one was using phonograph records.
• 38:27
  The other was he realized the only way he could get around in Germany to a rally was
• 38:33
  by train or by car.
• 38:36
  And at most he could do one or two rallies a day.
• 38:40
  He leased a passenger plane from Lufthansa and realized that he could do up to five rallies
• 38:49
  a day.
• 38:50
  And this is the first time in German political history that an aircraft was used for political
• 38:59
  campaigning.
• 39:02
  It was sensational in the day.
• 39:05
  So people wanted to show up to see Hitler arriving in planes, arriving in a plane and
• 39:12
  then coming to a village or a town and talking.
• 39:15
  There are images of him in his plane flying over Berlin and flying over Nuremberg and
• 39:21
  all the big cities.
• 39:22
  But he was also landing in farmer's fields in little villages and walking across the
• 39:30
  field, going into a tent and giving a talk to...
• 39:34
  Or a talk about a speech to villagers for 45 minutes an hour, trapping back to the plane
• 39:44
  and then flying to another location.
• 39:47
  And Hitler, this is where he really reached the heartland of Germany.
• 39:51
  He was in places that most German politicians had never even heard of.
• 39:58
  And it was when you look at the hundreds of places that he visited, large and small, it
• 40:05
  was really a remarkable move on his part.
• 40:10
  And I do think helped establish him in parts of the country that he was completely unknown.
• 40:20
  And also it was great advertising, but incredibly innovative for trying to overcome some of
• 40:29
  these other obstacles that he faced.
• 40:33
  One thing I never managed to get through my head was Hitler's so-called mass appeal.
• 40:38
  Germans always talk about his magnetic charisma, about people literally fainting in his presence,
• 40:43
  his supposedly masterful oratory skills.
• 40:46
  But all I see is some extremely weird, awkward little kind of penguin of a guy with a particular
• 40:51
  mustache.
• 40:52
  And also anyone can go on YouTube and check out one of his speeches today and just see
• 40:57
  Hitler sweating profusely at the podium, making these grand silly chaplain-like gestures,
• 41:04
  screaming like he's having a fit.
• 41:06
  He's not hard to parody, which is probably why Chaplain did it.
• 41:10
  I just do not get it.
• 41:12
  What am I missing here?
• 41:14
  One of the things is these speeches that we see that are recorded are Hitler after he's
• 41:21
  come to power.
• 41:24
  These are at these mass rallies that are organized and orchestrated.
• 41:30
  Most of these clips are from the Nuremberg rallies or from the Sportspalast.
• 41:35
  And you're taking him at his most fanatic moments.
• 41:39
  In some ways, it's Hitler unleashed, it's Hitler unchained.
• 41:45
  Once again, you need to back up.
• 41:48
  And this is where I wasn't...
• 41:49
  This is this issue of historic hindsight.
• 41:52
  We look and we go, oh, how is this possible?
• 41:57
  And I'm not saying he was not a fanatic order, but there is something...
• 42:03
  There was some kind of charisma that he had in these smaller settings even, where you
• 42:09
  heard it from Albert Speer, who had been a student of architecture.
• 42:15
  He went as a student to a Hitler rally, a young man, and was just transfixed and went
• 42:22
  over.
• 42:23
  The same with Leni Riefenstahl, the film director.
• 42:28
  At the time, she'd been a famous actress, and Hitler had wanted to meet her just because
• 42:34
  she was a pretty young thing.
• 42:37
  He then invited her to one of his rallies, and it was the same thing.
• 42:41
  She was mesmerized and transfixed.
• 42:43
  There was something about it.
• 42:45
  The most interesting visit, and once again, this goes back to the early Hitler, there
• 42:51
  was a psychologist named Hans Prinzhorn, and he wrote...
• 42:59
  His legacy is that he wrote the first book about the relationship between artistic expression
• 43:06
  and insanity.
• 43:09
  It was a landmark book at the time, but Prinzhorn...
• 43:13
  He was a critic, he was an analyst, and he went to a Hitler rally and ended up writing
• 43:20
  a fascinating series of articles analyzing Hitler and exactly what you said.
• 43:28
  What was clear to him was Hitler's mastery of not so much the language, but he said the
• 43:37
  rhythm and intonation.
• 43:41
  He said Hitler would bring something up to a peak, like a form of a phonetic peak, and
• 43:50
  then stop and drop like this.
• 43:53
  You can feel the pressure in the room just go down.
• 43:56
  He said it was more an emotional response to this, and his ability to...
• 44:06
  It was as much an emotional experience as it was an intellectual experience.
• 44:11
  He said a lot of what Hitler said was complete nonsense, but this mesmerizing quality, this
• 44:18
  ability to convey emotion and to connect with the audience.
• 44:25
  He said he really knew how to read an audience.
• 44:29
  What we're talking about is not a mass stadium with 10,000 or 20,000 people in it or the
• 44:37
  Nuremberg rally grounds.
• 44:39
  We're talking about a beer hall with a couple of hundred people in it, a crowded setting.
• 44:47
  People are packed in there, Hitler on stage, and his ability to read a crowd and manipulate
• 44:53
  it.
• 44:54
  Prince Horne's...
• 44:55
  This is the most...
• 44:56
  I found the most interesting observation.
• 45:00
  Hitler was one of these Teflon politicians.
• 45:04
  He could make the most absurd statements.
• 45:06
  He could contradict himself.
• 45:09
  It just did not touch him.
• 45:12
  What Prince Horne said was the problem with Hitler's opponents is that they think that
• 45:20
  when they catch Hitler on a contradiction or an inconsistency and they go after it,
• 45:28
  they're going after the intellectual part of it.
• 45:32
  He said what they don't understand is that Hitler's connection to his constituency is
• 45:39
  at an emotional level.
• 45:42
  And that's why they will never bring him down.
• 45:47
  It was an early analysis, but I think it was really...
• 45:54
  Prince Horne stood back.
• 45:55
  And as you said, it wasn't the penguin-like character or this Hitler caricature of himself
• 46:02
  practically.
• 46:04
  This was actually a man who, in a smaller setting, knew how to read an audience.
• 46:10
  The other thing that you also lack that you don't see in the earlier ones is how much
• 46:15
  humor there was.
• 46:16
  Hitler, believe it or not, based on these transcripts of these speeches, was a very
• 46:24
  funny man.
• 46:25
  Really?
• 46:26
  Oh yeah.
• 46:27
  Can you tell us a joke that he maybe told?
• 46:32
  Funny in what way?
• 46:33
  I mean, I read a lot about Stalin and he had a particular brand of dark humor and it's
• 46:39
  often in his biographies.
• 46:41
  But Hitler, I never heard about that about him.
• 46:44
  What you'll see when you read the transcripts of his speeches, you'll see the word Heiterkeit,
• 46:51
  various words, which means sort of laughter, and Heftige Heiterkeit.
• 46:58
  And then you'll see waves of laughter and it comes up again and again.
• 47:03
  And what he tended to do was to make fun of his political opponents for the most part.
• 47:10
  I mentioned the one about, well, if Germany was meant to be run by aristocrats, with Monocle,
• 47:21
  there was a… one of his main political opponents on the right wing was a man named Alfred Hugenberg.
• 47:33
  And he said, you know, Hugenberg is nothing more than this dog that's brought out for
• 47:40
  tricks on stage to run around and then go back.
• 47:44
  And Hugenberg was kind of this guy with this big handlebar mustache.
• 47:48
  He was this portly guy.
• 47:50
  He was actually a pretty comical looking figure, so he wasn't difficult to parody.
• 47:56
  But Hitler would go after his political opponents like this, and it was sort of mean-spirited
• 48:05
  type of humor.
• 48:07
  But as I say, you forget that… or not forget, we never even knew that a Hitler rally in
• 48:14
  the early days was actually a pretty funny thing.
• 48:18
  It was Hitler made a reference to Ford because Ford was a vicious… Henry Ford, you know,
• 48:25
  the industrialist, was a vicious anti-Semite.
• 48:30
  And Hitler actually really like, you know, embraced Ford's anti-Semitism.
• 48:38
  Ford published two volumes, a book called The International Jew, the World's Foremost
• 48:44
  Problem.
• 48:45
  There was a translation of that, and Hitler used to have copies of it outside of his office,
• 48:50
  you know, translation in German that he used to give to people.
• 48:54
  But it's sort of a phrase like, you know, well, you know, Ford's politics certainly
• 49:01
  runs better than his cars do.
• 49:04
  But sort of, you know, just little things, but you know, constant little jabs.
• 49:11
  There's more jabs.
• 49:14
  Could he take a joke about himself?
• 49:16
  Or was that a step too far?
• 49:19
  I suspect not.
• 49:21
  Okay.
• 49:22
  I suspect not.
• 49:23
  Makes sense.
• 49:24
  I think Hitler, Hitler took himself too seriously.
• 49:32
  And I think those around him took him too seriously.
• 49:36
  I mean, that's a really interesting question.
• 49:40
  But I can't think of anyone who survived.
• 49:45
  There were people who made comments about him that were pretty funny, but they didn't
• 49:52
  live to laugh.
• 49:54
  Okay.
• 49:56
  You already told us what his biographer, Sir Ian Kershaw, said about Hitler and his luck
• 50:03
  of the devil.
• 50:04
  But what do you think?
• 50:05
  Was this guy actually a political mastermind?
• 50:07
  Did he see the path to power clearly all along and was playing some sort of 4D chess?
• 50:13
  Or was it just maybe a combination of some sort of low cunning that he did have, and
• 50:19
  most of all luck?
• 50:21
  I think his grand strategy was, with Weimar, was, as he said from the very beginning, to
• 50:30
  destroy democracy through democratic process.
• 50:34
  I don't think he had a grand...
• 50:36
  That was the grand strategy.
• 50:40
  But he was a political opportunist.
• 50:42
  And when the right opportunity came along, he was able to seize it or manipulate any
• 50:54
  moment or individual to his advantage.
• 51:00
  With that said, this luck of the devil played a really big role because there were so many
• 51:08
  moments when Hitler could have or should have failed or fallen, and things just fell to
• 51:20
  his advantage.
• 51:24
  And to a certain degree, this Teflon quality that Hans Prinzhorn had described, because
• 51:32
  Hitler could do things that could bring down any other politician.
• 51:37
  But somehow was able to get away with it.
• 51:43
  Can I back up for one second?
• 51:44
  Please.
• 51:45
  You mentioned the humor.
• 51:46
  As I mentioned, people making fun of him.
• 51:51
  The Hindenburg quote, first of all, of this Bohemian corporal, but also the postage stamp
• 51:59
  story.
• 52:00
  But the cartoons making fun of Hitler are just endless.
• 52:05
  And a lot of them in the newspapers are endless, are very funny.
• 52:10
  We are talking about how Hitler appeared to be at the end.
• 52:15
  This is a cartoon from mid-January 1933, just before Hitler is two weeks before he's made
• 52:26
  chancellor.
• 52:27
  It shows Hitler standing in a graveyard, in a cemetery, and sort of like this.
• 52:37
  All the headstones, no, holding this, I think, anyway, but all the headstones are broken
• 52:43
  slastica crosses.
• 52:45
  And the title underneath it is The New Hamlet.
• 52:49
  And this guy was just washed up, but they were finding the other one, the other cartoon,
• 52:57
  that I love.
• 52:58
  It's from Hitler, on one occasion, was literally caught with his pants down.
• 53:05
  And it was called Hitler's underwear moment.
• 53:08
  And there are these wonderful cartoons of Hitler out there like this.
• 53:14
  So I should say he was within his inner circle.
• 53:19
  No one was making fun of him.
• 53:21
  But there was a tremendous amount of ridicule.
• 53:26
  And this was actually in the fall of 32.
• 53:29
  And I've heard other politicians in the contemporary situation say the same thing.
• 53:36
  Hitler said, for the last 12 years, people have been laughing at me.
• 53:42
  Nobody's laughing anymore.
• 53:47
  And this is when he went on to add, he said, heads will roll.
• 53:52
  So the man, I talked earlier about Hitler's blindness to defeat, his blindness or whatever
• 54:01
  it is, his inability to be humiliated, or his capacity to hold off humiliation.
• 54:10
  This man was subjected to so much ridicule, to so much humiliation, that you'd say for
• 54:16
  any normal human being, how could you stand it?
• 54:21
  But he was just blinded to this and kept going.
• 54:26
  And as I say, your reaction was my reaction when I saw this in one of his speeches.
• 54:32
  You've laughed at me for the last 12 years.
• 54:35
  No one's laughing anymore.
• 54:38
  You actually managed to interview Hitler's last private secretary, Traud Ljunger, whose
• 54:43
  memories were the basis for the famous film The Untergang or The Downfall, which was depicting
• 54:47
  his last days in the bunker in Berlin and has been memed to oblivion on the internet.
• 54:51
  Anyway, has anything she told you about Hitler surprised you or perhaps has stayed in your
• 54:58
  mind?
• 54:59
  Well, there's this term about six degrees of separation.
• 55:04
  Well, with Traud Ljunger, I was one handshake of separation.
• 55:11
  Yeah, I did right before Traud Ljunger was Hitler's private secretary.
• 55:22
  Hitler had lunch right before he committed suicide in April of 45.
• 55:27
  And there were four people at the lunch table, Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun, Traud Ljunger, and
• 55:33
  another secretary.
• 55:36
  I connected with her because when I was working on my book on Hitler's private library, I
• 55:43
  was coming across repeated marginalia.
• 55:48
  First of all, a large collection of books on the spiritual, on the occult, on various
• 56:01
  religions, different forms of higher powers that shaped the world.
• 56:08
  And I was just curious about this because a lot of them had marginalia.
• 56:12
  And so I sought out Traud Ljunger and I said to her, and was able to spend a half a day
• 56:20
  talking to her about her experience and her time with him.
• 56:25
  But the real question was, I first of all showed her photocopies of the marginalia and
• 56:34
  also these books.
• 56:36
  And she did confirm, she said, he read a book a night and she used to have breakfast with
• 56:42
  him every morning.
• 56:43
  So she said, what she remembered was him sort of holding an endless exegesis about his previous
• 56:51
  night's reading.
• 56:52
  But she said, yes, he was preoccupied by this notion of what he called forseum or providence,
• 57:03
  some higher power that was guiding him.
• 57:07
  And part of this came from the fact that, this is going back to Kyrshel's luck of the
• 57:12
  devil, there were at least 25 assassination attempts on Hitler that he survived.
• 57:19
  The most famous one being in the General's plot, the Stalcemberg plot, where the bomb
• 57:26
  goes off next to him.
• 57:28
  Traud Ljunger remembers she was with him, she was in her room at that point, the bomb
• 57:34
  had gone off and she remembers him knocking at her door and opening it.
• 57:38
  And his uniform was still smoldering.
• 57:42
  But he said, he then later claimed that this was proof that he was protected by higher
• 57:51
  powers.
• 57:52
  And she said something really interesting.
• 57:55
  So I said to her, well, was this just for public consumption or did he believe it?
• 58:01
  And she said, he didn't necessarily believe on a bearded god sitting on a cloud with a
• 58:11
  protective halo over him.
• 58:13
  But she said, he did believe, she said, if anything, it would have been in some kind
• 58:20
  of in the realm of physics and metaphysics that somehow were guiding him to a larger
• 58:32
  destiny that he believed in.
• 58:36
  That was her opinion.
• 58:37
  But then she said something very important.
• 58:40
  She says, but how can anyone know what another person actually believes or doesn't?
• 58:49
  Which to my mind, if there's any takeaway from it, it suggested the credibility.
• 58:54
  The woman understood the man that she had been serving and once again, a bit like the
• 59:02
  Riefenstahl and a bit like the Speer had been drawn into this, but found herself at the
• 59:09
  absolute epicenter of this as sort of just a young woman, but had been processing it
• 59:17
  over decades.
• 59:18
  But as they say, for me, it was an experience sort of one degree of separation from really
• 59:26
  one of the most important moments in history.
• 59:31
  It is a little bit, I mean, I don't know what, which were to use ironic or funny that Hitler
• 59:36
  was spiritually closer to some new age yoga mom than to a Protestant pastor.
• 59:43
  Well, actually, and I'll tell you what, there's some very bizarre manuscripts.
• 59:50
  He has this 300 page manuscript that was given to him.
• 59:56
  And once again, this has marginality in it with all of this mapping about how all these
• 1:00:02
  different forces in the world together.
• 1:00:04
  And it really does read like sort of this new age spiritualism, rather than he was raised
• 1:00:11
  as a Roman Catholic, but certainly not sort of your traditional, as they got on the cloud
• 1:00:17
  with the beard and the Thunderbolt.
• 1:00:20
  I interviewed Norman Oller.
• 1:00:22
  He wrote the popular book Blitz, you know, about Hitler taking a bunch of drugs.
• 1:00:27
  Do you think there was something to it?
• 1:00:29
  I think when you look at Hitler's actions and decision making processes early on, I
• 1:00:36
  don't think they touched on the core of who he was.
• 1:00:43
  I think with or without drugs, Hitler was single minded, was blinded.
• 1:00:51
  I mean, you know, the Leni Riefenstein film, Triumph des Villains, you know, the triumph
• 1:00:56
  of the will.
• 1:00:57
  And I think, you know, Hitler, when you listen to his own astonishment in his speech of saying
• 1:01:04
  we started out with seven people and there's never been anything like this in German political
• 1:01:13
  history and there really hadn't been.
• 1:01:15
  It's just an astonishing success story.
• 1:01:18
  And he went from one to the other.
• 1:01:20
  So I think drugs maybe played a marginal role, but I think with or without drugs, the Hitler
• 1:01:30
  that we saw straight through to the end was the same.
• 1:01:34
  And I think, you know, my conversations with Charles de Jong about Hitler in those last
• 1:01:41
  bits was just a man who was incredibly depressed, was in despair, was enraged at.
• 1:01:51
  He felt that, you know, it was the failure of people around him that led to what happened.
• 1:02:00
  So the medication was there and may have had some influence, but with or without, I think
• 1:02:06
  the course of action that we saw was pretty much, you know, the man that we have come
• 1:02:14
  to know.
• 1:02:15
  And with that said, I think the film Der Untergang, you know, Downfall with Bruno Gans playing
• 1:02:21
  Hitler, I think captured who he was in those final days, those final weeks as perfectly
• 1:02:31
  as it's ever going to be captured.
• 1:02:34
  OK, if we go back to the events before Hitler's takeover, I was always fascinated by the accounts
• 1:02:41
  of the intellectuals of the day, in particular, the disdain with which they viewed the Nazis.
• 1:02:47
  I don't remember who it was.
• 1:02:48
  Maybe it was the writer Thomas Mann.
• 1:02:50
  Maybe not.
• 1:02:51
  Who said that Hitler coming to power was actually pretty amazing because he thought that Hitler,
• 1:02:55
  if he did come to power, the absurd caricature of a politician that he was, he would fail
• 1:03:00
  so spectacularly that the left would simply swoosh in and effortlessly pick up the pieces.
• 1:03:06
  Could you talk about this intellectual current of underestimating the Nazis and Hitler at
• 1:03:11
  the time a little bit?
• 1:03:12
  You know, it's interesting.
• 1:03:13
  It goes back to Hitler's reading is that he read a book a night for his entire adult life.
• 1:03:21
  I interviewed most of the people around Hitler's, the surviving people around Hitler's entourage,
• 1:03:28
  and you hear this again and again.
• 1:03:30
  I think what that reflects is this incredible intellectual insecurity on Hitler's part.
• 1:03:39
  He was just intellectually insecure, but also never completed what we'd call high school
• 1:03:50
  and also lacked sort of the critical thinking that went into reading.
• 1:03:56
  So he could read a novel by the adventure writer.
• 1:04:01
  Carl May.
• 1:04:04
  But he could also be trying to read excerpts from Schopenhauer and would just.
• 1:04:12
  A very eclectic mix.
• 1:04:14
  And his library reflects this.
• 1:04:18
  And what it is, Hitler once described reading as, he does this in Mein Kampf, actually.
• 1:04:25
  He says, you know, the problem with people when they read is that they try to learn as
• 1:04:32
  they're going and you get so many ideas that you get confused.
• 1:04:35
  He said, for me, reading is like a mosaic.
• 1:04:38
  He said, I take a preconceived notion and then I read to take those pieces that fill
• 1:04:46
  in the mosaic.
• 1:04:47
  He said, you know, otherwise you really just get too confused by all this.
• 1:04:52
  But it means you can be reading Carl May and using that as military strategy while reading
• 1:05:00
  Klausowitz.
• 1:05:01
  So it is kind of this absurd, pathetic intellect.
• 1:05:09
  And there was a famous quote by Oswald Spengler, who wrote this iconic book, The Client of
• 1:05:17
  the West, who basically said that Hitler really was very similar to Thomas Monsignor.
• 1:05:27
  That's just an intellectual zero when it came to it.
• 1:05:33
  This really this and as I said, Hitler did recognize this lack in him.
• 1:05:42
  And although he I believe he had a photographic memory when you listen to people talking about
• 1:05:47
  him is recall.
• 1:05:49
  But what he lacked was sort of the critical thinking abilities to sort to sort through
• 1:05:55
  all of this.
• 1:05:57
  This issue about, you know, whether it was Thomas Monsignor or someone else, you know,
• 1:06:03
  get Hitler into office and watch him crash and burn.
• 1:06:07
  You have people replacing bets on how long this guy was going to be in office.
• 1:06:13
  And you have to keep in mind Hindenburg as president had the ability to appoint or dismiss
• 1:06:21
  chancellors at will and in the previous eight months had done exactly that with three previous
• 1:06:29
  chancellors.
• 1:06:30
  There was nothing stopping him from doing that with Hitler.
• 1:06:35
  And even after he came to power in February of of of thirty three, you read the press.
• 1:06:45
  This would be the left wing in the centrist press.
• 1:06:48
  And they're all betting on how long he's actually going to be, how much longer he's going to
• 1:06:53
  be in office.
• 1:06:54
  And I there's one amazing and a diary entry from January of thirty four, which is basically
• 1:07:03
  how is this possible that this man is still in office?
• 1:07:08
  So it's you know, and once again, this is not historical inevitability of these.
• 1:07:14
  And then you have to ask yourself, well, why didn't these contingencies play out differently?
• 1:07:20
  You know, why did we end up on this particular road?
• 1:07:25
  OK, so the highest number of votes that Hitler got in an election, like you said, was 37
• 1:07:32
  percent.
• 1:07:33
  However, after this high watermark of Hitler's political career, the fortunes were turning
• 1:07:38
  for the Nazis and they begin to bleed votes as well as funds quite rapidly.
• 1:07:43
  How is it possible then that despite this dramatic turn for the worse, which you outlined
• 1:07:48
  before, Hitler still comes out on top and in January thirty three becomes the German
• 1:07:55
  chancellor?
• 1:07:56
  Well, he's considered he's basically by January thirty three.
• 1:08:05
  He really is considered washed up.
• 1:08:07
  I mean, you have this, you know, you have this Hamlet cartoon.
• 1:08:10
  You have this.
• 1:08:11
  My favorite one being Hitler is a man with a great future behind him.
• 1:08:16
  I mean, it's just it's over for nothing.
• 1:08:19
  Joseph Goebbels in his diaries is just writing about what a catastrophe everything is.
• 1:08:26
  Hitler is just blind to this.
• 1:08:29
  You know, he's still going through.
• 1:08:31
  And what happened was there was concern and this is what we tend to forget about.
• 1:08:36
  There was a real concern about a Bolshevik revolution, a violent revolution.
• 1:08:42
  And the fact is, there really was a threat of a Bolshevik of the possible Bolshevik revolution.
• 1:08:49
  And conservatives who originally had distanced themselves from Hitler said, look, let's put
• 1:08:57
  some money in this particular account and see what happens.
• 1:09:06
  He's the best alternative out there.
• 1:09:09
  The part of the problem was Hindenburg had run out of people that he liked, of possible
• 1:09:17
  candidates because he wanted a conservative chancellor.
• 1:09:22
  And a man named Kurt von Schleicher had been the previous chancellor, thought he was in
• 1:09:29
  a stable position.
• 1:09:30
  He called himself the last horse in Hindenburg's stable.
• 1:09:36
  He really figured there was no alternative.
• 1:09:38
  Well, when Schleicher ran into problems and they had to look for another chancellor, Hindenburg
• 1:09:47
  was gradually convinced that Hitler was really the best man to solve that crisis at that
• 1:09:58
  moment.
• 1:10:00
  And Hindenburg agreed to this on the condition that he would never be left alone in a room
• 1:10:08
  with that man.
• 1:10:11
  So von Poppen, who was another one of these aristocrats and also a former chancellor,
• 1:10:19
  said that once Hitler was in office, his rhetoric would cool.
• 1:10:25
  The operative phrase there was soup.
• 1:10:28
  You never eat soup as hot as it's cooked.
• 1:10:31
  So once he was there.
• 1:10:32
  And the other operative phrases, Hitler only had three national socialists on the cabinet,
• 1:10:41
  so they said, once he's in power, we'll get him into a corner so tight that he'll squeak.
• 1:10:47
  So I think what they did was to, they had this Bohemian corporal, they had this Austrian,
• 1:10:55
  they were all of these Prussian, mostly Prussian aristocrats, wealthy industrialists, the men
• 1:11:03
  who had been controlling Germany for the last decade, well, actually for most of German history,
• 1:11:10
  it was controlled by the elites.
• 1:11:13
  And they get this half educated Austrian in there with the odd accent.
• 1:11:21
  And don't worry, we'll get it.
• 1:11:25
  But just as Hitler knew what the touch points were to bring down democracy, or the democratic
• 1:11:35
  structures and processes, how to paralyze it, he knew the key touch points in coming to
• 1:11:44
  power, where he could push, where he could back off.
• 1:11:48
  And ultimately, he came in fairly modestly, didn't come in ranting.
• 1:11:55
  And when you watch even the video footage, there's actually, not video, I'm sorry, but
• 1:12:02
  there's the actual newsreel footage of the cabinet assembling and Hitler coming in and
• 1:12:12
  taking his place, but not seeming terribly exceptional.
• 1:12:18
  I'm in charge now.
• 1:12:19
  So it was a process where they felt like they had him under wraps and in some ways did have
• 1:12:27
  them under wraps.
• 1:12:30
  He made a career of being underestimated.
• 1:12:37
  And once again, the luck of the devil, the biggest piece of luck he had was the burning
• 1:12:43
  of the Reichstag.
• 1:12:45
  And that was until that point, things were still, Hitler was having to play careful.
• 1:12:52
  This is these bets were on how long is, come on, how long can this guy really stay in office?
• 1:12:58
  And then you have on Monday, February 27, 1933, the Reichstag goes up in flames.
• 1:13:07
  It's considered a national emergency.
• 1:13:11
  Emergency decrees are introduced.
• 1:13:14
  A lot of fake news out there about, you know, there had been this seething notion of a Bolshevik
• 1:13:21
  revolution.
• 1:13:22
  You know, the attempted overthrow, the Bolsheviks were immediately blamed, the communists.
• 1:13:29
  To this day, we don't actually know.
• 1:13:32
  I thought the Nazis did that themselves.
• 1:13:33
  Well, this is the point.
• 1:13:36
  The people on the left said that, you know, the socialists and communists said the Nazis
• 1:13:41
  did it.
• 1:13:42
  The Nazis said the communists did it.
• 1:13:44
  And the most astonishing thing is to this day, we do not know definitively how this
• 1:13:50
  happened, whether it was just this crazy Dutchman, you know, running around in the Reichstag
• 1:13:59
  setting things ablaze.
• 1:14:01
  But the fact is, this is one of these luck of the devil moments, whether if it was orchestrated
• 1:14:08
  by the Nazis, and I'm not sure it was, but Hitler knew how to seize that particular moment
• 1:14:16
  and of all the bits of luck that the man had in his entire political career, that probably
• 1:14:24
  is the key moment.
• 1:14:26
  What are some of the most obvious or glaring parallels between Hitler's takeover and our
• 1:14:31
  own times?
• 1:14:32
  And I'm not even going to mention any names.
• 1:14:35
  But when you were describing Hitler's rise to power, some images, some parallels offered
• 1:14:40
  themselves immediately, like Hitler being impervious to telling lies, not acknowledging
• 1:14:46
  that he lost an election, bullying of political opponents, and so forth.
• 1:14:53
  Could you break these down, these parallels a little bit further?
• 1:14:57
  Well, Donald Trump, I think that's where you're going.
• 1:15:01
  Donald Trump never said heads will roll.
• 1:15:04
  What he said was bring out the guillotine.
• 1:15:06
  More like French revolution style.
• 1:15:09
  Yeah, when heads did roll.
• 1:15:12
  So yeah, the point is, but let me actually start with the biggest difference, if you
• 1:15:16
  don't mind.
• 1:15:17
  Yeah.
• 1:15:18
  The biggest difference between Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump were in the polling numbers.
• 1:15:27
  Donald Trump is polling numbers that Adolf Hitler never could have dreamed of having.
• 1:15:36
  Right around 50%, whether it's 48% or 51, depending on the poll that you're looking
• 1:15:42
  at.
• 1:15:43
  Hitler never did better than 37%.
• 1:15:45
  Well, actually, yeah.
• 1:15:47
  In a free and open election, Adolf Hitler never did better than 37%.
• 1:15:53
  He never had among the German people the current level of support that Donald Trump has among
• 1:16:01
  the American electorate.
• 1:16:04
  And that, to my mind, is, you know, there are lots of unsettling parallels.
• 1:16:13
  But to my mind, that is one of the most striking when you're looking at it in comparison to
• 1:16:20
  the students.
• 1:16:21
  You really have to think about it.
• 1:16:23
  Here we see Hitler as the German people en masse behind him, and yet never able to poll
• 1:16:33
  higher than 37%.
• 1:16:35
  And as I say, could never even have dreamed of the numbers that Trump has at this point.
• 1:16:44
  The similarities, there are a lot of facile ones.
• 1:16:52
  Hitler was telling, when he was telling his followers to show up for the November 32 election,
• 1:17:01
  quote unquote from Donald Trump, which was he says, be there.
• 1:17:05
  It's going to be wild.
• 1:17:08
  There is, as you mentioned, the belittling of political opponents, this tough line ability
• 1:17:20
  to deflect every kind of criticism, frankly, this resilience to being mocked and humiliated,
• 1:17:30
  you know, repeatedly.
• 1:17:34
  But I think that probably the clearest similarity in my mind is this self-imposed blindness
• 1:17:47
  to anything that would resemble defeat, including losing an election and going to court to have
• 1:17:57
  the election results overthrown.
• 1:18:01
  But this blindness to anything that doesn't fit sort of his particular vision of where
• 1:18:11
  things are.
• 1:18:12
  And, you know, Hitler was a man who remarkably was able to take events and shape them to
• 1:18:23
  his will.
• 1:18:24
  And this triumph of this notion of this Nietzschean notion of the Superman really did apply to
• 1:18:37
  Hitler.
• 1:18:38
  And, you know, there could have been a number of people along the way who maybe could have
• 1:18:47
  filled some kind of role but didn't have the luck and for one reason or another fell
• 1:18:52
  by the wayside and Hitler just lucked there, though I cannot think of a single German politician
• 1:18:58
  who came even close to Hitler in terms of what you call charisma.
• 1:19:04
  And it's a bit like, I think, when you look at the American political landscape, I don't
• 1:19:10
  see anyone out there that has this type of character and this nature.
• 1:19:19
  What I would say about this current situation is one of my favorite quotes from an old eminent
• 1:19:26
  historian is that the Weimar Republic died twice.
• 1:19:31
  It was murdered and it committed suicide.
• 1:19:37
  We know who the perpetrator of the murder was, that's very clear, but the fact was for
• 1:19:43
  an act of state suicide is much more complicated, especially when it involves a constitutional
• 1:19:50
  republic with all the protections of freedom of speech, public referendum due process.
• 1:19:58
  And you have in some ways, I think that can apply to the United States.
• 1:20:06
  Donald Trump has called himself, said that he would be dictator on day one.
• 1:20:14
  And I'm not saying that American democracy will be dissembled, but I think it is when
• 1:20:20
  you listen, when you take Trump at his word, one should find some of this worrying.
• 1:20:27
  When you talk about vengeance on political opponents, when you talk, when you look at
• 1:20:33
  this fomenting of hatred against different groups of people, whether they're immigrants
• 1:20:43
  or whatever, when you look at that accumulatively, one should be unsettled by that.
• 1:20:56
  And the fact that you have 50, possibly 51% of Americans hearing this and are willing
• 1:21:08
  to accept it, I think this old notion of dying twice does apply in this case.
• 1:21:19
  Well, do I think that America will collapse into a dictatorship?
• 1:21:23
  No.
• 1:21:24
  But I think the guardrails of our democratic system are being tested to the extreme.
• 1:21:35
  But also this maybe you talked earlier when we began about the structures of, were there
• 1:21:43
  structural flaws in the Weimar Republic, in the Weimar Constitution?
• 1:21:50
  There may be fundamental flaws in what we call a democracy.
• 1:21:57
  Does it require people being willing to play by the rules?
• 1:22:02
  Hitler's avowed goal to destroy democracy through democratic process, which he did.
• 1:22:10
  The one piece here, maybe to close this up, is that the one thing that did survive the
• 1:22:18
  entire Nazi period was the Weimar Constitution.
• 1:22:28
  It was never revoked.
• 1:22:31
  The Weimar Constitution remained in place as the legal basis for the government all the
• 1:22:40
  way until the end of the war.
• 1:22:43
  And then only after the war did they come up with what's called the Grundgesetz, this
• 1:22:49
  founding law.
• 1:22:50
  But that then suspended the Weimar Republic, which means that everything that happened
• 1:22:56
  in Nazi Germany, there were various emergency decrees and special, this enabling act and
• 1:23:03
  all of that, but the Constitution itself remained intact through that entire period.
• 1:23:12
  I do believe that the American Constitution will remain intact, but one can worry about
• 1:23:23
  how it's interpreted, how it's used, how it's misused, how it's abused.
• 1:23:29
  Very last question.
• 1:23:30
  If I may offer just an important distinction between Trump and Hitler, maybe that is that
• 1:23:35
  Trump just seems like an obscene con man more of that kind of type who believes in nothing
• 1:23:40
  really and will basically say anything he needs to propel himself forward, basically
• 1:23:45
  an opportunist and not a very bright one at that.
• 1:23:48
  I doubt that Donald Trump reads books much less one a day.
• 1:23:53
  Hitler on the other hand actually had a vision, an extremely terrifying one at that, but it
• 1:23:57
  was there because he detailed it in his book long before he came to power or shortly before
• 1:24:03
  he came to power.
• 1:24:04
  Would you agree that there is this kind of crucial difference between the two?
• 1:24:08
  Yeah, I think yes.
• 1:24:12
  And I think that with Donald Trump, he's a businessman and everything is transactional.
• 1:24:21
  And I think that's the word that he uses that he is completely open about it.
• 1:24:29
  Hitler was a dark visionary, you might say, but what really did surprise me, even when
• 1:24:37
  the party was in its deepest crisis, this was in December of 32 when they'd lost their
• 1:24:43
  votes, when they were bankrupt, when they were hemorrhaging votes and members, Hitler
• 1:24:50
  was not going to move from his particular vision for Germany.
• 1:24:56
  I guess both men have written books and maybe it reflected, I think Hitler did Marok Mein
• 1:25:04
  Kampf in which he kind of laid out everything that you needed to know about Hitler and what
• 1:25:11
  was to happen.
• 1:25:13
  It can be found in pages of Mein Kampf.
• 1:25:16
  And I think if you're looking for the parallel or the bookend one to that, I think Trump's
• 1:25:22
  art of the deal is transactional.
• 1:25:28
  But I heard he didn't even write that.
• 1:25:29
  I heard that he had a ghostwriter.
• 1:25:31
  Yeah, well, he did, I guess.
• 1:25:33
  Well, I mean, there are those claims also about Adolf Hitler because one of his aides
• 1:25:44
  was, the question was, actually it was Hitler dictating it, but when Rudolf has hammering
• 1:25:54
  this out on a typewriter, how much was edited or not?
• 1:25:59
  Very, very quickly, the very last question, I promise, our era is maybe a bit different
• 1:26:06
  in that we are facing many existential global challenges today, like from growing wealth
• 1:26:12
  inequality, climate breakdown, AI and so forth.
• 1:26:15
  As somebody studying one of the worst times in human history, do you think these sort
• 1:26:19
  of collective challenges are more likely to bring us all together or to produce another
• 1:26:24
  Hitler or many local Hitlers?
• 1:26:27
  My main concern when you look for parallels or similarities is that it's no secret Trump's
• 1:26:37
  affection for Putin.
• 1:26:40
  And I think in a trans or other authoritarian leaders, my concern is that both of these
• 1:26:52
  men have very similar personality types, which is also Hitler's personality type, which you
• 1:26:58
  never admit defeat.
• 1:27:00
  When you're confronted, you double down.
• 1:27:04
  We have, if they can be these transactional relationships until it reaches a point of
• 1:27:13
  confrontation.
• 1:27:14
  And what I keep remembering is the Molotov-Frigentroth Act, where there was a transactional relationship
• 1:27:22
  between Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler to carve up, to invade Poland in 1939.
• 1:27:30
  I mean, we keep remembering, and clearly it's the German invasion of Poland from the west
• 1:27:40
  into the east, but we forget that the Red Army came into Poland from, moved west, and
• 1:27:49
  that the two men divided up that country.
• 1:27:53
  But what happens two years later in spring of 1941, we end up with the greatest land
• 1:28:02
  battle in history as these two men confront each other and end up with the absolute cataclysm.
• 1:28:11
  And I guess my one concern would be that when you get these, and this is becoming an era
• 1:28:19
  of strong authoritarian leaders.
• 1:28:23
  We've seen that across.
• 1:28:24
  You have Germans call it zeitgeist.
• 1:28:27
  My one big concern is not only what the domestic implications might be of a second Trump presidency,
• 1:28:36
  but also in terms of global affairs.
• 1:28:39
  People will find common cause in dealing however they want to deal with a situation like Ukraine.
• 1:28:49
  And one can be very fearful of that outcome.
• 1:28:54
  But I think in the long, or the Baltic states for that matter, or whatever, what the implications
• 1:29:00
  would be.
• 1:29:01
  I think in the longer term, these two men are too similar in terms of personality and
• 1:29:11
  reaction.
• 1:29:12
  And there you could lead, I could imagine, an absolute worst case scenario.
• 1:29:20
  And as I say, to my mind, this Stalin-Hitler relationship keeps resonating strongly when
• 1:29:28
  it comes down to these transactional relationships rather than what we used to call diplomacy.
• 1:29:36
  Dr. Rybeck, thank you so much for taking the time.
• 1:29:40
  Where can people find your book, take over, find bookstores everywhere, I suppose, including
• 1:29:46
  online?
• 1:29:47
  Yes, and online.
• 1:29:48
  And there's an e-book, there's the Kindle version and Amazon.
• 1:29:54
  It's again, absolute pleasure and I hope we get to do this again in the future.
• 1:30:00
  Wonderful talking.
• 1:30:01
  Thanks so much.
• 1:30:02
  Hey, thank you for listening.
• 1:30:03
  I really appreciate it.
• 1:30:04
  This podcast has no sponsors, no production team and no editors.
• 1:30:07
  It's just little me and as such, I'm at the mercy of you lovely folks watching and listening.
• 1:30:12
  So please do subscribe on YouTube, click that little bell thing, follow on Spotify and Apple
• 1:30:17
  podcasts.
• 1:30:18
  Also, I don't want to sell you an ugly t-shirt that you don't really need.
• 1:30:21
  So if you can, and most of all, if you want, please support me on Patreon.
• 1:30:25
  And at this point, I have to express my eternal gratitude to my patrons on Patreon, aka the
• 1:30:30
  producers of this show.
• 1:30:31
  As always, without your comrades, this podcast simply wouldn't exist.
• 1:30:35
  So massive, massive thank you to Ole, Marin, Ferrara, Alias, Strole, Aida, Mancian, Mika
• 1:30:41
  Medved, Medinjo, Goran, Gordon, Lorenzo, Yurechuk, Mila, Carmen, Veronica and Taichi.
• 1:30:47
  You guys are the best.