Behind the Bastards - Behind the Insurrections - Hitler's Munich Beer Hall Putsch, Part 1

Episode Date: January 19, 2021

We continue our study of fascist insurrections with the most famous of them all: Hitler's disastrous beer hall putsch.Footnotes:  https://famous-trials.com/hitler/2524-the-hitler-beer-hall-putsch-trial-an-account  https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/adolf-hitler-s-time-in-jail-flowers-for-the-fuehrer-in-landsberg-prison-a-702159.html https://www.thoughtco.com/hitlers-beer-hall-putsch-1778295 https://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00003880/00001/pdf https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XHJ8685/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1  https://www.amazon.com/1924-Year-That-Made-Hitler-ebook/dp/B011J4H47W Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, we're talking about Hitler today. This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the worst people in all of history. I'm Robert Evans, and this is actually a special miniseries of Behind the Bastards called Behind the Insurrections. Last episode, we talked about Benito Mussolini's March on Rome.

This episode, we're talking about another fascist insurrection directly inspired by the March on Rome and carried out by Bastards Pod, side character, and main character, Adolf Hitler. We're talking about the Munich Beer Hall Putsch today. Light it on fire, baby. Light it on fire. So awful. Insurrection. I realize I should probably reference where I got that from. Oh yeah, where'd you get that from?

It's, okay, so Common, the actor. Uh-huh. I'm gonna call him the actor. I'm finishing. That is an interesting choice. Common since the rapper. Okay, okay. And yes, and one could argue of the top 10 list of greatest rap albums of all time.

Common may hold two of those slots. One of which is an album called Resurrection, and that's where I got that from. Was he, because he's saying resurrection, so I was just saying insurrection, deep cut, unnecessary piece of information, but you can pull that out next time. So I might try to judge you about your pop culture stuff. Beautiful. Thank you. I'm more excited about the fact that he was Common since, and then he got into Hollywood and decided to drop the sense. Yeah, no, you know, you know, there was a, there's a band out here in LA, like a local band who sued him.

Whose name was Common since, and they were like almost like a 311 sublime, like white boy, ragged band incredible. And they sued him for the name. They were like, we were Common since first. And I mean, I feel like. I feel like you can't copyright the word or name Common since. Yes. But they won. So he was like, all right, whatever.

Common. And then became a list celebrity. I was going to say, speaking of people who won, we should talk about Hitler, at least for a while, but not in this particular story, although eventually. At least at this moment when, when this particular story ends, it's not the end of the story. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This particular story ends with Nazi defeat, but the broader story of the Nazis is more complicated than that. So I think we're going to start here by talking about the city of Munich, because generally when people talk Nazis, they wind up kind of focusing on Berlin. But Munich is where the National Socialist Germans Workers Party, the NSDAP, the Nazis, that's where they came from.

That's the birthplace of the Nazi movement is Munich. And if you look a little bit into Munich's history, it makes sense. Munich is a city in the German state of Bavaria. And Bavaria is historically the most conservative part of Germany. It's kind of like Texas in that even after German unification in 1870, Bavarians tended to see themselves as different and other from like the rest of Germany, right? Like we're German, sure, but we're more Bavarian, right? Like it's this, this, the attitude that you do kind of see like Texans have a bit of this, right? Like where we're our own thing.

So that's always big in Bavaria. And there's this kind of like traditionalism. They have their own monarchy that's separate from the Kaiser, right? Like the Kaiser's in charge of Bavaria still, but they also have their own king. And there's a lot of Bavarians who aren't super into the idea of being part of Germany, right? Because they're more Bavarian than anything. Now Adolf Hitler, who was again an Austrian, so he's not really a German by the consideration of a lot of Germans. He moves to Munich in 1913, mainly because he was getting drafted to go join the Austrian army.

And he didn't want to join the Austrian army. So he's a draft dodger and he moves to Munich to avoid serving his time in the military. And just based on what happens less, this is less because Hitler was not scared of being in the military. He didn't like Austria. He thought it was like racially polluted. And so he moved to Munich because it was more in line with his right wing sensibilities. So he rented a cheap room and he made a poverty level income in Munich, painting pictures of like famous buildings in town because it's a beautiful city and selling them to tourists.

And this was like a whole industry in Munich. A bunch of little artists would paint pictures of local buildings and sell them as like keepsakes to tourists. Hitler was kind of unique among these artists because while most of them would actually go out to where those buildings were with like an easel and paint the buildings and then sell their pictures and stuff, Hitler would buy cheap postcards of those buildings and paint alone in his room, where he spent most of his time reading fringe political tracts and one presumes masturbating furiously. We have to assume. Yes.

Just unbelievable. Yeah. He was, I mean, he was a pretty right wing guy, but yeah, he's pounding it in his little office and painting from postcards. And he's not a very good artist, which is one of the key. Why did you want to call his office little? Because he lived in like a tiny little, really, that he was renting from a lady. He was very poor. That was objectively true.

His office was little. Yeah. I thought we were just putting him down for no reason. No, no, no. It was objectively little. He was extremely poor. So when Hitler moved to Munich, he had just finished being like a homeless person in Vienna. Like he'd lived in like a men's home and stuff for like people who couldn't afford to stay off the street and whatnot.

So he had just gotten out of like a really dire financial situation. And actually part of why he was in a dire financial situation is he inherited money from his mom, but then his sister needed it for her kids. And so he gave up his inheritance to her, which, you know, kind of his evidence that like everyone who turns out terrible, there was a period of time in which Hitler might not have wound up being Hitler. Yeah. So anyway, important to keep in mind. So Hitler's living in Munich.

He's painting shitty paintings, tugging it all the time. And reading a bunch of like reactionary right wing zines, like poorly mimeographed newsletters about the dangers of the Jews. That's like a huge thing Hitler's doing in this period. Some things never change, man. Yeah. Yeah. It's like he's like hanging out on the day's equivalent of eight Chan,

which is like these tracks that are being passed out in the street. So when World War One kicks off and, you know, in this period, right, the Archduke's assassinated, as we talked about last time, but in the run up to World War One, Mussolini's furiously trying to get his country, Italy, involved in the war. Germany goes to war with the world. And Hitler immediately joins up and becomes an infantryman. And he's almost immediately thrown into one of the most horrifying battles in not just like the whole war, but like ever it's known colloquially as the slaughter of the innocents.

Yeah. Because the Germans sent tens of thousands of basically children to die to like allied machine guns. A horrible battle. Yeah. But at the same time as Hitler's watching his friends get mowed down in the trenches, Hermann Gehring, who would become his future second in command, is becoming one of the first fighter pilots in history. Gehring flew with Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Barons flying circus.

He took command of the squadron after Richthofen got killed in 1918. And he got something he shot down like 29 planes. So he's an extremely good fighter pilot. Yeah. And it's like it becomes like a dashing national hero. Now, another big Nazi you might know, Heinrich Himmler, was too young to serve during World War One. He came from that awkward generation where you were too young to fight in the first World War

and he would have been too old to fight in the second. And so his entire youth was spent like idolizing these soldiers going off to die in France, who he was unable to join. Now, another fella who went to war in 1914 was Ernst Poner. Now, Poner was a middle aged, I know it's a rough name. Yeah. You got to give the guys some credit for, it's a real cross to bear. So Poner grew up or Poner was like a middle aged, conservative, educated Bavarian,

pretty right wing guy when the war starts. And he was commissioned as an infantry officer and eventually rose to regimental command. Now, despite being a Bavarian to his soul and thus being kind of like separate from the rest of Germans, fighting in the war gives him this sense of like unity with the rest of Germany. And he starts to feel like a member of this like this unified nation for the first time in his life. And in fact, all of Bavaria was brought closer and step to the rest of Germany as a result of the war. The region industrialized rapidly to provide armaments. And as the German state devoted itself increasingly to becoming an engine of arms production,

Bavaria becomes like a big part of that, particularly Nuremberg. Or not Nuremberg. I think it might have been, it was Nuremberg. I'm not great on all the other German cities, but like Bavaria starts industrializing heavily. And their military was like... Just the best in the world. Incredibly good. Yeah, like Germany...

Objectively amazing. Goes up against the entire rest of the world in World War One and comes pretty close to winning. They almost won. It's not like World War Two or after a while. They almost pulled it off. They almost won. Yeah. So the Kaiser's propaganda had forbidden...

And that's actually part of the problem is that right up until the end of the war, Germany could win it. Again, not like World War Two, where after 1943, everyone can see the writing on the wall. Yeah. Up until like late 1918, Germany could pull that shit off. Yeah. And this is sort of compounded in the minds of German people who see their soldiers winning by the Kaiser's propaganda. Yeah. Because the Kaiser had forbidden journalists from reporting on the dire situation in the west.

So number one, Germany's in a pretty good position most of the war. They knock Romania and Russia out of the fight. So they beat like two powers, including Russia, which is like a fifth of the world's land mass. Yeah, which is... Unheard of at the time. Yeah. They conquer Ukraine, like get it in a treaty basically, and they spend most of the war within spitting distance of Paris. So on a map, Germans spend most of that war thinking like we're winning.

This is tough. We're losing a lot of men, but like we're going to win this thing. Yeah. Now, the situation on the map belied some crucial realities, including the fact that as the war went on, Germany was completely hollowed out of soldiers, of supplies, and of food. Three quarters of a million German civilians starved to death as a result of the Allied blockade. By the time Germany surrenders in the winter of 1918, its army is on the very brink of collapse. The generals who are in charge at the end, a guy named Eric Ludendor,

for you might remember from the Wonder Woman movie. Yes. He's the bad guy in Wonder Woman. But was a real dude. Yeah. And Paul von Hindenburg, who is his co-general, were not the ones to accept failure gracefully, right? Both of them had some victories to their name. Both of them made some major strategic errors at the end that were a big factor in German defeat.

But when the Germans lose, they don't stay on deck to be like, hey, guys, we tried our best. We fought as hard as anyone could fight, and we just lost. They fucking bounce. As soon as it becomes clear, they're going to surrender. They're fucking out of there. Yes. So whack. Go.

Yeah. And they hand over responsibility for negotiating Germany's surrender, because the Kaiser also bounces. Like, that motherfucker's off to Belgium on a train. So much, too. So all of the people who'd gotten Germany into war and had pushed the war the whole time, leave and put the responsibility for negotiating the surrender on the social Democrat-dominated Reichstag. Germany overnight is a social democracy, and also the liberals who had been most, a lot of them, anti-war up to that point, now have to deal with negotiating Germany's surrender.

Meanwhile, the guys who were responsible for losing the war start concocting a narrative that the left had stabbed the German army in the back. Yeah. And that's why they lost. And when I say the left, I also mean the Jews, because that's what they mean, right? Absolutely. Yeah, the left, and it's the same when people talk about cultural Marxism today, right? The term back then was Judeo-Bolshebism, but it's the same idea, right?

Yeah. So the first days and weeks after Germany's defeat, there were just a bunch of revolutions, all throughout these different cities in Germany. And a lot of them were left-wing. Bavaria was not spared in this wave of unrest. As you said, there was a strong, while Bavaria is very conservative in Munich in particular, there's a very vibrant left-wing. Yeah.

And several days before Germany signs the armistice on November 11th, on like November 7th, this huge crowd assembles in Munich, and they force the Bavarian king to leave his throne. Now, the guy who orchestrated this was a dude named Kurt Eisner, and he's the head of the Bavarian Social Democratic Party. And his goal was to, you know, what he did. He wanted to kick out the king and establish a Bavarian republic. Yeah. Now, that worked for a little while.

Unfortunately, Eisner, the coalition that Eisner used to kind of kick the king out and establish a republic, was only united in their desire to bring it into the war and get rid of the king. And once that war ended and the king was gone, they didn't agree on anything else, because it was a coalition of like the far left, but also a lot of like center left people, and even centrists who were just like, this World War I thing doesn't seem to be working out for anybody. This kind of sucks for all of us, guys. It kind of sucks for all of us.

And when that ends, a lot of these centrists are like, well, we don't really agree with the left on anything else. You know, and there's this huge desire to, we've got the king out, the war is gone. Let's go back to business as usual. Let's go back to the way things were before the war. I think people Americans can understand people. Yeah, we get it. Yeah. I just want to go back to brunch, man.

Yeah, I want to go back to brunch. And a lot of these centrists wanted to go back to the center right and the center left arguing, both the extreme right and the extreme left had been empowered by the war and the economic collapse that came with it. And these folks in the middle were scared by that. So this is before like Proust and like the new like the new democracy or the new like a constitution they write like this is before. This is before the Weimar constitution. Yeah, the Weimar constitution. I'm talking about the Weimar constitution.

Yeah, Eisner leads his sort of revolution like five days before Germany surrenders. Okay. So this is contemporary like the Weimar constitution starts being written during like the period where a lot of this is happening. But this starts before this starts while the Kaiser is still on the throne. Okay. I'm fairly sure while the Kaiser is still on the throne, it starts before the official German surrender. Okay. So things, you know, the center right decide or the center left decides like we don't really want to work with Eisner.

Eisner's support dissolves and he kind of winds up unable to govern because he doesn't really have a lot of people backing him. There's new elections in January of 1919 and this kind of center left dominates as opposed to Eisner's far left. So on the morning of February 21, 1919, Kurt Eisner starts walking to the Landtag, the Landtag, which is like their, you know, kind of their Congress sort of thing. Yeah. To resign his position as head of the local government. Now, while he's on his way, this German noble Count Anton Arcovalley, which is a fucking badass name. Arcovalley? Arcovalley.

It's like he's like a Spider-Man victim, right? Yeah. He's a rich Bavarian nobleman. So Arcovalley like comes up and shoots him dead Eisner. So because he's, you know, Arcovalley's a monarchist and a far right kind of guy and he wants to murder this left wing dude, even though the guy's about to leave power willingly. So one of Eisner's Eisner does have some very loyal followers and one of them responds to Eisner being killed by gunning down another politician. And for reasons unknown to history, this like leftist supporter of Eisner, instead of going after one of Arcovalley's allies, picks a moderate liberal, a guy named Ernhard Auer and shoots him. Now, Auer survives and Auer at the time is kind of the head of the Social Democrats in Munich.

So he's like, he's like kind of the Joe Biden, right? Like he's like a moderate liberal. Yeah. And this leftist shoots him instead of one of Arcovalley's allies. For again, reasons that aren't really well known. But Auer survived. What are the theories? You know, I haven't really heard a good one.

It might just be that as a rule, a lot of folks on the far left will always hate liberals more than they hate the right. Sure. It might have been. It was just like personal. It's like that fool hit on my girl. He might have been about as this is a chance, man. I just took my chance. He might have just fucked up, right?

Like guns are great back then, you know, like, you know, I don't really know. Auer survived though. He doesn't get killed, but his injuries keep him out of politics for two years. And while Auer was like kind of a centrist, he was an effective leader of the Social Democratic Party. He was good at getting people in line. And the fact that he's out of the picture for a couple of years means that his party is effectively rudderless. Right at the same time that the far left is energized by Eisner's martyrdom. Now, our successor, a guy named Johann Hoffman was weak and not very competent.

So you've got this position where the dominant center left party loses its effective leader at the same time as the radical left gets energized by the assassination of like one of their big dudes. And I'm going to read a quote now from a graduate dissertation by James McGee titled The Political Police in Bavaria 1919 to 1936 to explain what happens next. The assassination of Eisner had worked as a solvent upon political consensus such as it was in Bavaria. The Hoffman government found itself caught between the advance of radicalism on both the right and the left. The first round in the struggle went to the radical left. No longer able to maintain itself in Munich, the Hoffman government decamped on April 7th, eventually coming to rest in the northern Bavarian city of Bomberg. Authority in Munich was assumed successively by two councils. The first led by an ill-assorted collection of independent socialists and anarchists, and the second by the communists.

So two different successive kind of far left governments take over through like a revolution basically. But neither of them are very good at it, right? Neither of them really have like the anarchists are way more focused on like creating public art and stuff and don't really have a great cohesive set of plan to deal with the needs of a lot of like Munchners, I think it is like people are the people of Munich. Whereas the communists are kind of they're not really that good at building support outside of the people who are already involved in their movement. They're they spend a lot of time going after their political enemies and again, aren't very good at consolidating power. Meanwhile, outside the city, conservative forces start regrouping and preparing to invade Munich because there's been a left wing revolution. What is the right going to do? They're going to murder everyone they can.

So the core of this right wing movement were the Freikor. And that's an organization of right wing veterans that you could see is broadly similar to groups like the Oathkeepers or the 3%ers today. Now, the main difference between these two is the Oathkeepers and the 3%ers are mostly people dressing up like soldiers who if they were in the military, never heard a shot fired in anger. The men of the Freikor are hard sons of bitches. Like they have they have done a ton of killing. They have seen thousands die before their eyes. Like a lot of these guys, these guys are like veterans of the trenches.

So they're not they're not playing, you know, like they're not dressing up because soldiers look cool. They've they've they've been so broken by war that it's the only thing they can really do. They know Larpin over here. Yeah, they're called the Freikor, the Freikor, the Freikor, right? Okay, yeah. So and the Freikor, not all these guys, a number of like Freikor dudes actually become anti-Nazis later. But a lot of the Freikor are the the genesis of what becomes some of the Nazi street movements too. Okay. And it's kind of like we saw with the Arditi in Italy, right?

Where you've got all these veterans, some of them do become some of them just one order and they're more Republican than anything, but they'll fight the radical left and then they wind up being anti-Nazi. Most of them go more in a Nazi direction. Some of them wind up being kind of more on the left after a while because they get, you know, disillusioned by right wing politics. But you have this melting pot of soldiers who are angry at things and the bulk of them do go to the right. Yeah. Now, yeah, so these guys invade and they make quick work of the Red Forces of the revolutionary government. I'm going to quote from McGee's article again.

By the end of April, the feeble Red Forces had been pressed back into the environs of Munich itself. At this moment, with their backs to the wall, elements of the Red Army executed 10 hostages. Some of the hostages were members of the right radical Tula society. Others appear to have been selected almost at random. None of the 10, however, had done anything to earn so terrible a retribution. With one gratuitous act, the leftist defenders of Munich had opened the floodgates of violence. The aroused white forces poured into the city on May 1st, bent upon the eradication of the Bavarian Soviet Republic and its supporters, in the most literal sense imaginable. The hardened free corps and army troops coursed through the streets of the city, shooting anyone who appeared even remotely suspicious.

The orgy of execution did not stop until May 7th, when it was discovered that the white forces had mistakenly murdered a group of 21 Catholic schoolboys. These schoolboys were by no means the only innocents who fell before the guns. Before this first wave of killing had come to an end, over 600 individuals had been slain. Many of them individuals with no connection to the Red Army or the Soviet Republic. The revolution, which had begun so peacefully six months before, had ended in a bloodbath. Order had returned to Bavaria. Wow. That's kind of the story of the radical left and the radical right, right?

You get the radical left, some of them go a little bit far. They kill 10 people and the right murder 600 people, including several dozen schoolboys. Yeah. God, dog, man. Yeah. Hearing about this, just this time in the world and being a, you know, albeit African-American male, but the reality is I live in America, you know, that like in this, in this era that like the type of violence these people endured all the time, you know, and yeah, stability, like it's just, we really can't get our brain around that. 600 kids, dog.

No. Yeah, you know. It was 600 people, at least 20, like they murder a whole school of Catholic children. They killed 21 kids and like one, you know, famous leftists, the Catholic school. Yeah, right? Yeah. I mean, to be, actually, if we're being honest, like one of the, in Germany, the anti-fascists were a mix of anarchists, communists, social Democrats and Catholics. A lot of very traditional conservative Catholics were anti-fascists because they were against the Nazis, right?

Yeah. And they still believed some pretty messed up stuff. You're talking about Catholics in the 30s and 40s, but. Yeah. Um, we're not Nazis, you know, and you get a lot of credit in my book if you're anti-Nazi, regardless of what you believe in that. Of all the other stuff. Yeah. I can say this about you.

Yeah. You know, this does kind of everything that's happening in Germany in this period makes it clear what I kind of consistently think is the most. The thing that we have going for us the most in our present struggle against fascism, which is that our fascists are fucking wimps for the most part, right? Most of them have never seen heavy combat. They have not seen people shot to death. They haven't shot anyone to death. They have not been in, like that's why a lot of them started to run as soon as like the police started really using force. The fascists, the Nazis, the OG Nazis, most of them are hard, hard people.

Hitler is an incredibly physically tough man. Yeah. Like, Hitler is a guy who got into street fights with a whip, you know? Yeah. Like, carried him all the time. Yeah. These are rough people. Yeah.

And that's one of the things we have going for us is that most of ours just aren't that tough, you know? Yeah. Yeah. There's like this weird like combo of like, there's you're not that tough, but you have something to prove. So you're going to be so you're dangerous because you're going to prove, right? But then there's you are tough and you have something to prove. Yeah. And you ain't scared.

And I'm like, yeah, that's a total that that's a totally different situation. Yeah. Like you'll see a lot of folks in our far right dress up in, you know, plate carriers and carry guns and look like soldiers. The Nazis did that too. They wore military. They dressed like German stormtroopers and most of them had been, right? Yeah. When they dressed like the guys who charged through trenches with an axe and one hand and a hand gun and another.

It's because they charged through trenches with an axe and one hand and a hand gun and another. You know? Yes. Yeah. And I know you've seen that look, bro. I know you've seen it, but like the as much as you've traveled as any war zones you've been in. Yeah. And then even here, like you can see it in a person's eyes to where you like, oh, yeah, you'll cut me.

Yeah. You will cut my throat. Yeah. You won't think twice. You'll cut my throat. Like you can see it in a person's eyes. Yeah. Yeah.

It's the willingness. It's the people and you can really see it in a lot of folks eyes. The folks for whom doing violence is the same as like turning the page in a book, right? Yes. Like it doesn't require a switch in their mental circuitry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

They're just ready, you know? Yeah. And most of them aren't that. Most of the far right in Munich in this period are that kind of person. You know, you've got folks like Heinrich Himmler who were too young and who want to be that and are playing at it, but a lot of them are really tough people. Yeah. So mainstream Munich, which, you know, after the right comes in and massacres everybody,

it's still like kind of the liberals who are in charge of the government for about a year after this point, you know, kind of the mainstream center left. They blamed the far left for everything, even though the vast majority of the killing had been done by folks that were basically proto fascists. And among other things, the fact that the left had taken over the city briefly helped to incite and fuel an extremely active right wing militia scene. So all of these different street militias of armed young men start to form up during this period of time.

So different groups of angry young men, many of them veterans got together to fight the Reds and ensure their city would never fall to the left again. Again, a liberal government is in charge for the next year, but after the fry core and the army come in, the real power in Munich is with the military and the police. And the dominant political ideology in the city among both the center left and center right becomes a thirst for order above all else, right? Which you can understand, like these people aren't just going through like a lot of Americans just won order at this point after the last four years.

And we didn't go through a war that killed like what, one out of every 10 of our young men, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Their calls for law and order are understandable. Yeah. I think they're, you know, the history will show it was the wrong way to go about it.

You have to be more sympathetic to them and the people calling for it now. Like, well, you can't even imagine. No one in America can imagine. We have no categories for this. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So Ernest Poner was one of the first men who stepped in to fill this need for order.

And he'd been enraged by Eisner and, you know, even more enraged by the Soviet Republic that briefly took charge of Munich. And so he gets promoted to be the head of the Munich police force in May of 1919. And he's fresh back from commanding a regiment in World War One at this point. And as soon as he's put in, you know, in charge of the police force, he sets to work not just crushing Marxism, but doing everything he can to encourage the growth of the radical right in Munich. Yeah.

Now, the radical right, there were a number of different parties at this period, but the one that would come to dominate the Munich far right scene was, of course, the National Socialist German Workers Party, the NSDAP. They were founded in February of 1920 by a fellow named Anton Drexler. A lot of people don't know this. Hitler didn't start the Nazi party. He wasn't involved at the very beginning. It was a locksmith named Drexler who had been involved previously in a bunch of other fanatical

nationalist parties. Now, from the beginning, the NSDAP, and they're not the Nazis at this point, nobody calls them that yet. That takes for a while later. So at this point, call them the National Socialists or the NSDAP. Their goal initially was to be the party of the German middle class. And I think you'll remember that from our episodes on Italy. Yep.

Drexler sought robust social aid programs for Arians. So he wanted socialism for Arians, right? And he wanted anyone who was not to not be in his fucking country. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now, at the onset, the National Socialists were a small and secretive group of about 60 people.

Now, the Reichswehr, which is Germany's postwar army, becomes immediately concerned with the small party, namely because they're afraid that it might have subversive or revolutionary goals, right? The army is definitely more anti-left than right, but they're concerned about anyone who might be a threat to order in this period. So they decide to send in a spy to look at this young starting party and figure out if it's a threat. And the spy they send is a young German corporal named Adolf Hitler.

Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Whoa. Like, of all the times, I mean, like, of so there's so much of world history that fascinates me. But this moment, this time, this time, the in between wars, this time is so interesting to me.

Yeah. Is it so interesting that we should take an ad break for a suspect? Yeah. We won't send Hitler in to infiltrate a radical political party and then become its head. Our sponsors? They will not. Our sponsors have never ordered Adolf Hitler to infiltrate a right wing political party. You can say that for a fact.

Absolutely, sir. Yes. I'm a bastard for that transition, by the way. That was a great transition. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way, he's a nasty shark.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Send Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up.

Send to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message

that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh my gosh, we have returned. And I am just loving talking about some old H-bomb.

Hitty hits. Hitty hits. Here we go. Hitty hits. Hitty hits. Here's what you could do, here's what you could do for these people, which is some of the... Well, I don't get into these discussions anymore because they're ridiculous, but help these

people understand this party having the term socialist in it, but they're not socialist. Yeah. Yeah. Help them understand that. They're national socialists, which means they're... And in their conception, that means that we seek a socialist state for members of our race. Yes.

So we want to... And some of that was just lies because the Germans, a lot of stuff is happening here. For one thing, the left is very powerful in Germany during this point. The communists are beating the Nazis for the most part in elections for most of this history. And they're both competing for people who have been radicalized. Like we talked about last time, people who have accepted that the system is fucked. A lot of them can go left or right. So the Nazis have to be reaching out to the workers, have to be trying to recruit from

that. And there's also... You are talking about a period of time in which the German economy is... It's like 5.7 billion marks to the dollar. Like Germany is a nation of trillionaires who can't afford food. Yeah. You have to be able to speak to these people and promise them some sort of aid. And that was a big part.

And the way... Basically, the left is like everybody deserves to be taken care of. We need to take money away from these. We need to nationalize industries. We need to nationalize corporations. We need to give the means of production to workers. The Germans are basically like, we need to take money away from the Jews and businesses away from the Jews and give it to Arians, right?

Because of them. Yeah. Yeah. It's like accepting the fact that you lost this war. Yeah. And I feel like this is part of what's interesting to me about this season to this time in history because it's like you couldn't get your brain around the fact that you just lost. Yeah.

Like it just... You lost... You drained your economy on a war that you shouldn't have been in in the first place. Again, nothing that sounds similar to this country today. Exactly. Yeah, none of this. Yeah. You lost it on a chin.

You lost... You know what I'm saying? Let's figure this out. Were you looking for like, well, we just lost because of them? Like, bro, anyway, yeah, none of this is familiar. And it's also when we're talking about sort of socialism within the Nazis, one thing people do need to understand is that in the early period, and this hasn't even really evolved yet in the episode we're talking about, this is more in like the later 20s, there's a left

wing and a right wing of the Nazi party. There are Nazis who are anti-capitalist, the Knight of Long Knives is the right wing of the Nazi party, which is the dominant chunk of the party murdering all of those people. Yes. Which is not to say the left wing of the Nazi party weren't a bunch of hideous racist monsters. They were. Of course.

They just believed slightly different things and were then murdered, right? Like that's what the Knight of Long Knives was, was a purging of the kind of more socialist elements within the Nazi party that they needed to kind of get into power and get enough workers behind them that they could take the streets. So again, German political history is incredibly complicated in this period. So much is going on. And again, like people who are convinced that the system needs to be destroyed will often have some stuff in common with each other, which is why you do see Nazis and communists

on a couple of occasions like fight together against police in the state. Not because they agree with each other, but because they agree on the fact that the state is shit. Yeah. You know, it's a very messy time because everything is falling apart. Again, I'm sure Americans can identify with that. So yeah, this Hitler's, you know, commanding officer sends him to infiltrate this far right group and learn if it's like a threat to the German government, which I think you have

to count as like one of the worst decisions ever made. Like. I mean, I don't know if anything's ever backfired more than be like, oh, we don't want to, we want to make sure these guys don't overthrow the government. Send Hitler in to check on him. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Hitler at the time was an angry young man still suffering from his war injuries. He'd been pretty badly messed up at the front and he'd been at the front for about

four straight years. He'd lived in a nation on the verge of collapse, the economy is in freefall, people don't have jobs and Hitler's kind of one of the reasons he does this is he's desperate to not get kicked out of the military. Most soldiers are released from the military after the war. He hangs on to his job for a while and this is how and he needs the fucking money, right? Yeah. So he takes this gig, he goes in and shows up at a meeting or two of the Nazi party and

he finds himself kind of enthralled by the group's discussions. Now one of the party's early members was a fellow named Dietrich Eckert. Now Eckert was an anti-Semitic poet and most historians consider him to be the spiritual founder of the Nazi party. Hitler himself in some private writings described Eckert as the spiritual founder of Nazism. Now Eckert was all about nationalism and saving Germany from the Jewish menace that he believed had lost the war for her. Berefte Vekaiser, Dietrich became convinced that an Aryan hero was needed to save the

German race and he spent a lot of his time thinking about who that hero might be and I'm going to quote Dietrich here. This is talking about like what he believes is necessary to save Germany. The rabble has to be scared shitless. I can't use an officer, by which he means a military officer. The people no longer have any respect for them. Best of all would be a worker who's got his mouth in the right place. He doesn't need much intelligence.

Politics is the stupidest business in the world. Shhh. I know, right? I mean, politics is the stupidest business. You have to see Eckert as in a lot of ways one of the most effective and like political thinkers of all time. He's absolutely right about how to take over German democracy. It succeeds.

The plan works. Yeah. Turns out he was right. Yeah. Now, during one early Nazi party meeting, a professor got up and made an impassioned argument about why Bavaria needed to secede from Germany. Hitler got enraged by this and he starts screaming at this professor and he's so eloquent in his arguments about why Germany needs to stay together that everyone who's there is

just struck by his skill as a speaker. This professor actually flees the room in shame because he can't argue against Hitler. This convinces all of the party leaders at the time that Hitler had a future as an orator, that he could be a big voice for spreading the party's propaganda. They start having Hitler give speeches and they're right. He's able to draw a crowd. The guy's a good public speaker. He gets better and better about it over time and in short order, he's the most prominent

member of the National Socialist Party and soon, it's figurehead. The Nazis grew quickly at this point, drawing in other disaffected veterans like Hermann Gehring and Ernst Rom. Rom had been a stormtrooper and he's a really interesting guy. He's one of the members who's purged in the night of long knives. He had in World War I been like a special forces guy, an elite assault trooper. He's covered head to toe in scars. His nickname because he has so many connections in the military, he's able to get like heavy

machine guns for these militias and stuff, like have them smuggled out illegally from the army to these right wing groups. They call him the machine gun king, which is a objectively cool nickname. Badass stuff. Yeah. No, Rom is a terrifying person and if you want to think about the way he's seen by a lot of the radical right at this point in Germany, think about a guy like Chris Kyle, right?

The American sniper, how Republicans talk about him. Rom was that sort of legend. He's just this absolute legendary brawler and warrior. Also very, almost openly gay, which is why he's murdered in the night of long knives, right? Is because like Hitler doesn't want that kind of bad PR. He's a very interesting guy. Yeah.

He's a tough, he's a tough guy. And that's like a huge factor in, you know, again, we talk about all these kind of counter-cultural movements coming together. You see versions of this within the Proud Boys too, right? And that's a big part of like at the time, what, you know, Rom's sexuality wasn't something that they advertised. Now it is kind of an advertising point where it's like, hey, we're not white nationalists. Like, look, you know, our leader is this, our leader is like a black guy.

We've got all these gay people. Like we couldn't possibly be fascist. And it's like, no, no, no, the fascists have had always at the start, a lot of different people represented as long as they're violent. Now once they get into power, they murder those people. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Rom doesn't last after Hitler gets into power. No, no, no, no, no, no. But Hitler's happy to be his friend when he needs him to beat people up. The finesse on that kid, Hitler, man, it's just that the finesse is ridiculous. Like, yeah. Yeah. The finesse is ridiculous. Anyway.

Hitler starts attracting these war heroes because Gehring is also, Herman Gehring is like a fighter ace and he's very handsome as a young man. Like everyone knows like the obese, heroin addicted Gehring that like, you know, gets caricatured. When he's a young man, he's this like very handsome, prominent look, like he looks like a movie star. Yeah. And he's a legendary fighter pilot.

You've got Ernst Rom who's just like tough as nails and all of these like war heroes start joining the Nazi ranks, which of course brings in more guys from the far right. This dude's handsome. Gehring is a young man. Yeah. You need a young one. No, I'm looking at a young one. This dude's handsome.

Young Herman Gehring? Yeah. I don't know. Drop the leak. Yeah. I'll show you a picture of him. I'll show you a picture of him. Drop that in the chat.

You know what I'm saying? I mean, we're going to agree to disagree on this one. This is a pointy motherfucker looking like, no, no, no, no, no, I'm going to throw a, I'm going to throw you like an ugly Lego loss from the rings. Well, you got it. Well, you got a tight nose. So I mean, no, I don't. I don't know.

It's just ugly. Okay. Throw them in the chat. Throw them in the chat. I got your picture of him. Okay. Hold up. Is this the same picture I was looking at?

Yeah. This is not an attractive man. He looks like he looks like a young Bing Crosby. Yo, that's a little bit of, you know what I'm saying, little Matthew McConaughey, Joe? Yeah. You know what I'm saying? He's traditionally a apologize. I don't want to get caught into the talking about how hot Herman Gehring is.

Okay. Part of this discussion. He's still a monster. Let's do this. He is seen as being an attractive young war hero at this point in time. He's traditionally attractive according to Western standards. All right. We'll give him that.

Also, half of the men in Germany in this period have had their faces blown off. So it's, the bar is not as hot. It's like Ricketts. Shit. Yeah. It's a no for me, dog. Okay. Well, good.

Sophie does not think Herman Gehring is hot. Well, that's a t-shirt right there. On the motherfucking record. We need to. We need to. You know what? Let's get two sets of t-shirts out. Team Herman Gehring was fuckable and team Herman Gehring wasn't fuckable yet.

Sophie, can we get, can we get t-public on that? Is that a good idea? I'm sure we can. DTF. But I don't know if we want to. Just a picture of Herman Gehring and DTF question mark. DTF right under it. That might not go over well for us.

It's all back. Gehring. Yeah, they start to draw in a lot of, like, because they've got all these war heroes, they start to draw in a lot of other people on the right who had idolized these men, soldiers who, you know, these guys had been their heroes in the trenches, and also younger men who hadn't been old enough to fight in the war, but were drawn to wanting to be in the company of these legends, guys like Heinrich Himmler, right? He sees all these heroes joining the Nazis.

He never got to fight in the war, so he joins the Nazis. Now, Hitler gives speech after speech after speech. And while he's doing this Dietrich Eckert is helping Hitler mold his public appearance and create what came to be known as the Hitler myth. And this is the idea that Hitler was not just a politician, but he kind of supernaturally embodied the spirit of the German people and was their defender against their racial enemies. Eckert is the architect of this idea, which is the core of, like, what becomes, like, the Führer principle, like the center of Nazism.

Now, one of Eckert's main points was that a new German revolution was necessary. The 1918 revolution, he felt, which is like the socialist revolution that takes over Munich, had failed because it was soulless and Jewish. Eckert wanted a revolution, but he wanted a revolution that was led by someone he crafted, namely Hitler, that could lead the German people into freedom and wipe away the stain of defeat in World War I. Now, of course, the Nazis were opposed, even from an early period, as they always are, by the left, namely socialists and communists in this period.

And this is before the birth of German anti-fascism as a movement. There are people fighting fascism, but, like, the idea of, like, Antifa, as we know it, comes out of Germany like a decade later than this or so, that hasn't really evolved yet. And anti-fascism in Germany in this period is at a more primitive level than it is in, say, Italy, right? So there are, but they are still opposing the Nazis, and there are frequent fights at Nazi party rallies. Communists and socialists will show up at beer halls where Nazis are meeting and, like,

try to beat the shit out of these guys, and the Nazis will do the same thing at left-wing gatherings. All, everything, every political thing in Munich happens at a beer hall. And you do have to assume that everyone but Hitler is wasted at pretty much all the time. Hitler's not much of a drinker. Everybody else is just fucking dead. Man, how come, like, as unstable as the world is, like, at this time, Matt, you know, I wonder if we would have much more people entering into political discourse if they fought the

way that these people fight. Y'all just drinking scrap. Like, could you imagine that, like, our part, I know our parliament in the 1700s was like this, you know what I'm saying? In the 1800s, we used to actually scrap, you know what I'm saying? But, like, these dudes, like, like, you talking, it's so funny because it's like, this is hood shit. This sound like gangbanging.

Like, y'all pulling up, it's like, yo, you left this, yeah, nigga, I'ma left this, what's y'all saying? It's like, you flashing signs at each other, y'all, y'all politicians, y'all politicians, y'all saying, like, what, that's so, that's what I, I think that, again, that's going back to what I mean by, like, we don't have, we don't have categories for this. Their officials fight, yeah, that's crazy to me. Yeah, they are, like, like, and this is, a lot of these guys are, like, kind of not elected, like, elected leaders do get into fights and stuff at this time, too, but these

are, yeah, a lot of these guys are just sort of, like, campaigning, and a lot of it happens via street fighting, and it's, it's ugly shit, people are being gunned down and stabbed and beaten, like, it's nasty stuff, and in fact, it gets so nasty that not only does, like, Hitler start carrying a whip and a handgun so that he can, like, slash people's faces open during bar brawls, but the Nazis, in order to, like, defend their meetings, develop a powerful and organized street fighting arm. These guys are called the Sturm Abteilung, or the Storm Division, and they were created in early 1920 as a hall protection force, like, a beer hall protection force for, like, the

meetings that the party would hold in Munich. Yeah. Now, in addition to having, like, a bunch of guys who would show up to, like, crack heads and fight communists, they also opened a sports and gymnastics wing, which started training their men in boxing, jiu-jitsu, and exercise, and you see the same thing with modern fascists. There's a lot of fascist and neo-Nazi MMA gyms, a strong, like, lifting culture among groups, like, the rise against movement, who are a big part of Charlottesville, unite the right and Charlottesville, like, you know, the idea of, like, Nazis loving to get into

jiu-jitsu, nothing against jiu-jitsu, it's rad as hell, but, like, the fact that they've been into it, that goes back a century, right? God, dog, man. I tell you what, bro, like, yeah, there's been plenty of times where I'm, like, I'll just, man, I'll just do some, like, somebody, like, calisthenics, like, plyometric stuff. Man, I'm not going to these gyms, just, you just, like, you just feel like it's just full of these, like, fuckboys, you know what I'm saying? And now it makes sense, it's like, yeah, there's a history of this.

Yeah, there's a history, which is, like, there's also some pretty rad, you know, anti-fascist, like, MMA gyms and stuff out there. I need to go find them. Yeah, because I think it's important to train people who aren't Nazis and how to defend themselves against Nazis. Absolutely, yeah. But there's a long history of, like, there's a huge, like, fascist MMA fighting, like, network in Eastern Europe, particularly in Ukraine, like, they'll have these big conventions

and, and competitions and stuff, like, it's a big part of that kind of culture. Yeah, so that, you know, that starts with the Nazis in this period. They're doing jujitsu in 19-fucking-20. So, yeah, and the stormtrooper catchphrase in this period was a very subtle death to the Jews, so not great at keeping a lid on what they're about, you know? Now, in 1922, Hermann Gehring was promoted to lead the Sturmabteilung, hereafter known as the SA. These are the guys that come to be known as the Brownshirts.

Now, by that point, his men had spent much of the last two years imbibing a steady diet of race hatred and revolutionary fascist propaganda. Wilhelm Bruckner, who was the head of the Munich Stormtroopers, told Hitler that year that very soon, Hitler would be unable to restrain his men from doing something. And what Bruckner was warning about is the same thing we saw in Washington, D.C. on the 6th. If you have this movement of young men that you gin up with conspiracies about child-eating pedophiles and the globalist destruction of their race and nation, which is exactly

the kind of, a lot of the shit the Nazis are learning here in this period is like QAnon shit, right? Very similar. If you get a bunch of angry, violent young men obsessed with weaponry focused on that shit for years, they will demand to go shed blood to stop it at some point, and you won't be able to stop them. And kind of one of the areas where, you know, Trump fucked up is he didn't do anything with them cohesive, because I don't think he ever had much of a cohesive plan.

So they raided the capital and caused a crackdown on themselves. Yeah. It's beyond him now. Yeah. It's beyond him now. Hitler doesn't let it get beyond him. He realizes this is happening and that action needs to be taken. Now for a while, he was able to kind of burn out this excess energy among his street fighters

by having them go after journalists and newspaper offices, having them tear down political propaganda and beat up left wing canvassers in the streets. So he has them assaulting his enemies and in part to just try to get off this excess energy so they don't blow up and like tip their hand too early. And of course, all of the fighting and violence in the street they're doing is very illegal under German law at the time. But the police president, Poner, who we've talked about earlier, ensured the Nazis faced few consequences.

And I'm going to quote from McGee's article on the Munich political police at this point. The debt with which the Nazi movement owed Poner was real. As police president, Poner extended a sheltering hand to protect the activities of the nascent Nazi movement. In doing so, he ensured its survival and gave it an opportunity for future growth. This passive image, however, does little to convey the full dimensions of Poner's commitment to both the radical right in general and Nazis in particular. As a key figure in Bavarian politics during the post-war period, Poner actively aided

the Vokish movement and occupied a central position in its highest councils. And the Vokish movement is like all these ideas about the Aryan race and the German people that kind of feed into Nazism. I mean, they had like that judges. Yeah. Right. We'll be talking about the judge. Oh, okay.

Poner becomes a judge. He's the chief of police now. He becomes a judge. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. These folks sitting in court with their legs all the way up, feet crossed like, yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Yeah. The example of how biased he was at one point during his time as the chief of police in Munich, Poner is asked if he realizes the Nazis are murdering people in the streets of Bavaria. And he replies, yes, but far too few of them. So, now, as an aside, unrelated to anything we're talking about, at present, we now know that at least 28 police officers were present for the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, 2021.

I should note that in 2018, after a series of dueling protests in Portland between left and right-wing demonstrators that ended with police assaulting and hospitalizing a left-wing activist, internal planning documents from the police revealed that they viewed the fascist activists as, quote, much more mainstream than the anti-fascists. This is a long through line, you know? Yeah. Yeah, that mainstream has quite a subtext. It sure does.

Yeah. Sure does, probably. So by 1923, the thrill of beating the shit out of their enemies in the streets was wearing thin for the Sturmabteilung. Now, roughly two-thirds of the Nazi party membership was under the age of 31 at this point. These are young men who want to drink and fight and revolt against the liberals and Jews they see as ruining their country, right?

They look a lot like the Proud Boys. It's a group of, like, macho, like, testosterone-loaded young men who drink and probably do a lot of, like, the Proud Boys do a lot of cocaine. I'm guessing a lot of these guys are on blow, too, you know? Not uncommon in Germany in that period. So Hitler was super on board with getting these guys into the fight due largely to what he and the rest of the world had watched Benito Mussolini's black shirts do in Italy the year before.

Because, again, the March on Rome is the year before Hitler does his beer haul putch. 1922, 23 is the beer haul putch. And I'm going to quote now from a book called The Trial of Adolf Hitler by David King. And this is Hitler talking at first. If a German Mussolini is given to Germany, Hitler said to a journalist for London's Daily Mail on the eve of the putch, people would fall down on their knees and worship him more than Mussolini has ever been worshiped. This journalist was unimpressed.

In private, he dismissed Hitler as another hot-air merchant. But Hitler had, in fact, decided to follow in the fascist footsteps and march on Berlin. The original plan had been to strike on Saturday night, November 10th. This was, after all, the weekend, which Hitler believed was the best time for a revolution. Authorities would be away from their desks, police would be reduced to a minimal staff, and the lighter traffic would not impede on the movement of his trucks and troops. So Hitler becomes convinced after seeing Mussolini that, like, not only did Mussolini have some great ideas, but this will work even better in Germany.

Because we kind of have more of an authoritarian culture. Italy, when Mussolini took over, had a much longer democratic tradition. Germany, a lot more authoritarianism. Hitler's like, if I present myself the way Mussolini did, I'll be even more powerful. Hitler will join me on the road to Berlin and will take over the whole country. Oh my gosh. Hitler was... That's terrifying.

Yeah. He's not... I mean, he was wrong in this instance, but not overall. Yeah. Yeah. There's an interesting, like, even with that, like, Germans, like, at the time, propensity towards, like, authoritarian, like, I still think even... And then their saltiness towards Catholicism, when I think about their, like, Protestant

movement being so informed by sort of, like, reform Calvinist thought, like, just this idea that, like, humans are so depraved at their core because of sin, you know what I'm saying? Like, you can't trust them to make good choices for themselves. So you need a strong man in the same way that Jesus was your strong man, you know what I'm saying, to make these answers... To choose these for you because, I mean, you're full of sin nature, so why would we trust what you would vote for yourselves?

No, you need a guy, you need a guy, a dude in charge that can tell you what's better for you because you can't trust your own instincts. And that theological twist, to me, it's like, it adds to the mythos of how somebody like a good, smooth-talking Hitler could convince this nation who already got authoritarian tendencies. Now you add in this, like, theological worldview to it, it's just, like, it's just gonna work. I thought I'd throw that in there. And it does. And you know what else is gonna work?

Oh, the products and services that support this podcast? Oh, yeah. That part. That is gonna totally deprave my wallet. They are absolutely going to march on Berlin and overthrow the Reichstag. Yes. I think that's been T-Public's goal from the beginning. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated

the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

But the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. Not a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So now Hitler knows he wants to march on Berlin. He wants to do a Mussolini, but better. But he's not a dumb guy.

He realizes that he alone doesn't have a big enough name to successfully push Bavaria. He's very popular within Munich and the Munich right. He's not a national figure at this point. So he has to enlist the help of a national figure. And he picks someone he had idolized, General Eric Ludendorff. Now the old general had already tried to take over the government once before, right after World War One, and had failed at that. But he hadn't really been punished because, you know, he was the war hero.

He's Ludendorff. He was the architect of the victory over Russia. He was just very beloved. And he was a massive figure for the right wing, revered and respected. For his part, the old Field Marshal had spent his declining years becoming an increasingly massive racist and conspiracy theorist and mostly pushing the stab in the back narrative, blaming the loss in World War One on the Jews, all that stuff. You could see him as like a General Flynn figure.

He's this very popular among the far right general who shacks up with this far right political character. Now, the big difference is that General Flynn has been like profoundly loyal to Donald Trump. Yeah. And Ludendorff just kind of saw Hitler as a vector for which he could, you know, push his kind of fringe right wing politics. Yeah. I'm thinking more Storm and Norman, Schwarzkopf, head as.

Yeah. A little. Yeah. I mean, he's not that guy. Yeah. Yeah. He's not like, he's not like loyal to Hitler, but he sees Hitler as a guy he can use and Hitler sees Ludendorff as a guy he can use.

I feel like in that exact sentence is like, was the dagger for almost all day political parties. Y'all thought you could use this man like he wasn't. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. I mean, and so Hitler goes to Ludendorff and is like, hey, I want to overthrow the government. I want to be the dictator and I want to have you be basically like running the country

with me. You'll be in charge of the army and together we'll bring Germany back to greatness. And Ludendorff gives a soft yes, the kind of yes that could mean a no if like the police came to his door and he could say like, but he's like, yeah, if you do it, like I'm on board, I'll take over the army if you win. You know, like that's the kind of yes, Ludendorff gives him. But he's he's he's on board as long as he doesn't have to stick his neck out too much is kind of like Ludendorff's attitude towards this.

So the initial plan for the push is November 10th, but they wound up pushing it up by two days kind of at the last minute to Thursday, November 8th, because Gustav von Kar, who's basically he's the general commissar, he's basically like the governor of of Munich. He's giving a speech at the Burger Brow Keller Beer Hall, which is one of Munich's most prestigious places for people to drink heavily and do politics. Burger. Burger. Burger.

The Burger Brow Beer Hall. That's yeah, man. We need to rename something like that because that's yeah, I would love to still around today, I think. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. So this is where the push actually starts.

He is in charge in Munich, and he is he's been brought to power in what some would call a military coup. It was kind of a soft coup, but basically after the Liberals had let the left seize the city in revolt, the military made sure that a strongman like Carr wound up in charge after the you know, a year or so later. And Carr had vowed during his campaign to turn the city into a cell of law and order. Oh, God. And they keep saying that.

Thank you. They keep saying law and order, but you don't need it. It never happens. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm going to quote from author David King describing Carr's politics here.

He welcomed right wing extremists to settle in the region and many of them in turn joined the paramilitary societies emerging in the aftermath of the war and revolution. Carr also organized many of these bands into a loose coalition called the Einwohnerwerven or Citizens Militia that would soon surpass 300,000 men. Carr would use this volunteer home guard and everything from law enforcement to border patrol. They were necessary, he said, like a fire brigade. So Carr builds this Citizens Militia, basically a private army of himself for his own to crack

down on the left. And Germany at this point is forbidden from having much of a real military. They're capped at about 100,000 soldiers in the Reichswehr. And this is a part of the Treaty of Versailles. And France realizes that Carr is raising up thousands and thousands of private soldiers and they complain that he's building a new German army and he's forced to disband his militia. Now this pisses off the far right, the fact that Carr caves and cancels his militia and

tells his guys to go home. And a lot of them consider him like the fascist equivalent of a rhino at this point, you know, or a public in a name only, like they're like, ah, Carr's not really on the right. Yeah. Look at what he got cooked by the French. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. But he's still very popular with the center right. And he's seen as something of like a resistance hero among like the center right. So he's, you know, he's not like popular on the fringe right, but he's popular on the middle right. So in October, you know, another thing that's happening at this period of time is in August of 1923 Gustav Stresemann is elected Chancellor of Germany.

And right before he comes to power, the Germans had begged the allies for a moratorium on reparations payments because the German economy is collapsing in this period. Yeah. They just can't afford it. The French had refused to put in a moratorium on payments. And then in order to get money out of Germany that Germany wasn't sending, they invaded and occupied the Rur, which is Germany's industrial heartland. So Germany defaults on their payments after, like, you know, before they invade the Rur

and like the fact that the French invade pisses off all of Germany and particularly the German right wing. Yeah. So this is again, yeah, like a little, little, little human in this story here is like, yeah, so you guys a new chancellor because they had to write a whole new constitution. Yeah. They wrote a whole new constitution, got a new chancellor. They got to pay back all this shit they destroyed for this war.

They already feel salty about that. Like, damn, I got, I got to clean it. I got to pay for all this, you know what I'm saying? And then they like literally were broke. Like, God damn it were broke, you know what I'm saying? So then, and then for France to be like, oh, you go give me my money. And they're like, what money? What money?

We don't have anything. What money? We don't have it. Yeah. Yeah. We starved to death on turnips last winter. Like we have nothing. You saw it.

We lost. Damn, man. We lost. And now we are like, we ain't got it. Yeah. And this, this, a lot of the anger at the Treaty of Versailles and the way the French are behaving gets pushed onto the German liberals who like, because they're internationalists kind of like, try to engage with the French and Gustav Stressman gets elected.

And one of the first things he does is he orders the end of a general strike against the French and the Rur and he starts resuming reparations payments. And this enrages the right wing. And so, and Stressman knows it's going to. So he has the president of the Reich declare an emergency. The Bavarian government gets pissed by this because they hate Stressman. They're all very conservative. He's a liberal.

And they're like, basically, this guy's been cucked by the French and they declare, Bavaria declares its own state of emergency. Now the decision to do that was made by the triumvirate that ruled Bavaria, which consisted of von Kar, General von Lasso, who's in charge of the army in Bavaria, and the commander of the state police, a guy named Cicer, I think. Now this triumvirate had publicly refused a number of orders from Berlin as a show of protest and his red meat to their right wing base. So basically it's like a state in the United States refusing orders from the federal government

because it's against what their political base wants. And this is mostly for show because, yeah, this is mostly for show because like the federal government has the ability to deny funds to Bavaria, right, which kind of fucks them over. And so by early November, the triumvirate is losing heart because they wanted to get red meat to their base and like improve their own personal popularity by saying, fuck you to the central government, but they didn't want to pay consequences. So they're starting to cave by November, but most voters don't know that.

And so when von Kar takes the stage at the Burger Brau Beer Hall on November 8th, like a lot of people show up because they think he's about to announce that Bavaria is seceding from Germany. Now Hitler knows that's not going to happen. He knows that's very unlikely because Hitler sees von Kar as basically a moderate. But he also knows that a huge crowd, including all of the people running Bavaria, are going to be in the beer hall that night, which makes it a great place to occupy with armed men if you're going to do a putch.

If you're putchin, you know, that's where you want to put. This is where you push the put. Yeah. Yeah. This is the beer hall. The Burger Brau Beer Hall is the equivalent of the capital on January 6th here. It's like where all these elected leaders are. If you want to actually capture these people, this is where you do it.

So he gets together his stormtrooper leaders and his key advisors and they work with their police insider, who's a fellow named Frick, because a lot of cops are Nazis. I'm not even going to put like a timeline on that. A lot of cops are Nazis. Let's just let that one settle for a little bit. Okay, cool. So Frick, this cop ensures that the police presence outside the beer hall is minimal. Like all of the guys running Bavaria are there, but they don't have very many cops

protecting them. And that's by design to make it easier for the stormtroopers. So Hitler sets. Yeah. I know. Again. Yeah. So Hitler's other lackeys, the guys who aren't like fighters, get set to the organizing

propaganda. One man was set, was like put to the job of organizing the distribution of posters and newspapers, announcing the Nazi overthrow of the government. Hitler's half American friend, a guy named Ernst Hanschstangl, better known as Putzzi, who's like a Harvard graduate, was in charge of making sure the foreign press was there without knowing why they were there because Putzzi's a charmer. He's a, he's a, like an aristocrat guy. He's good at talking to people.

He's good at talking to like American media. So like the New York Times has a guy there on this night. Now Hitler and his entourage show up at the beer hall that night, like as thousands of people are gathered up outside to get in to watch Von Kar speak. And Hitler's immediately gets out of his, I think it's a Mercedes, and he's immediately greeted by a crowd of 3,000 people outside the hall because Hitler is very popular with the right in Munich. So he gets mobbed by this crowd who wanted to know if like he knew what Von Kar was

going to speak about is, you know, are we going to secede what's happening? And Hitler's like, I'm just a guest. I'm here like the rest of you. And he goes inside to get a beer. And he doesn't get a beer because he wants to drink it. Hitler's not really a drinker. He's not a drinker. Every now and then he'll, he'll like down like some champagne or something.

He's not much of a drinker. He has the beer because Gehring has warned him like, hey, we're going to try to overthrow the government. We don't want people to realize we're onto something early. If you're sitting in a beer hall in Munich with a beer, no one will suspect that you're planning to break the law because it's Munich. So Hitler gets a beer and he's like kind of nursing it. And Kar takes the podium.

Now Kar's speech is boring and pointless and a big bummer to everybody. He just starts like he's not seceding. He starts a standard harangue about the evils of Marxism, about how Munich was going to fight the contagion and quintessential evil of socialism, pretty normal right wing stuff. And Hitler is reported to have asked his men during Kar's speech. Does anyone understand what he's talking about? Like, what the fuck is this guy doing up there? I just started trolling him.

Yeah. So while this is going on, while, you know, Hitler and his kind of inner circle are watching Kar speak and this beer hall's got thousands of people in it, Hitler's storm troopers are assembling nearby. Now a 26 year old cigar dealer named Yosef was the quartermaster. And so he basically like as the troops assemble, he starts handing out rifles and machine guns and grenades to several dozen of the Nazi party's best fighters. The men of Stostrup Hitler or the Hitler assault squad.

Now these guys wore a gray military uniform with a silver death's head badge on their caps. The Stostrup would wind up evolving into the Schuttstaffel, which is the infamous SS, right? Like that's the guys who among other things may in the concentration camps. At this point, they're Hitler's street fighters. Kind of responsible for protecting him and stuff. And these are the guys he's going to use to be the the armed fist of his push. Now before the push, Hitler had given his fighters a few suggestions for how to behave.

He had told them cruelty impresses and don't leave a fight unless you're being carried out dead. God. These are his orders. Green light. Yeah. Look, you don't know yet. Only way you leave is in a bag.

Yeah. Yeah. These guys are fucking, you know, he's a gangster. Yeah. This is a gangster regime. Yeah. A lot of people at the time, actually, like a lot of American newspaper men in the twenties and thirties will say this about the Nazis.

These people are fucking gangsters. They're just gangsters. Yeah. Yeah. Now a little before 8 30 p.m. a hundred stormtroopers swarmed the premises of the burger brow and entered the beer hall, shouting Heil Hitler and waving guns. Herman Gehring, who led the assault team, told the police officers outside that the government was being overthrown.

The dozen or so cops there were easily overpowered. Herman Gehring and his men secured the building. And as he entered, he called for quiet. Now everybody's drunk at this point, so they don't get quiet. So he has to shoot into the roof with his handgun. Then he like basically hands things over to Hitler, who pulls off his trench coat to reveal a black suit with two iron crosses pinned to his lapel. And I'm going to quote next from a write up by Douglas O. Linder.

He jumped up on a table, pulled out a pistol and fired two shots into the ceiling. The second guy is fired into the ceiling that night. It keeps happening. It happens several more times. Yeah. And fired two shots into the ceiling. Silence! He yelled.

Then Hitler and several supporters pushed their way to the front of the room and confronted speaker Carr at the podium. Stormtroopers pointed a machine gun at the crowd. Many who were in the audience later said that they suspected they were about to witness an assassination. Hitler shouted to the crowd. The national revolution has begun. 600 armed men are occupying this hall.

No one may leave. The governments of Bavaria and in Berlin have been overthrown. Army barracks and police headquarters are now under the control of this party. None of this was true, but Hitler hoped and suspected that it would be soon enough. Hitler then told Carr and two other important political leaders, General von Lasso and Colonel von Seisser, that they should join him in a side room for a conversation about Bavaria's future. After the men leave, Gehring told the crowd, you all have your beer.

Keep drinking. You have nothing to worry about. It's going to be fine. It's just a punch. Chill out, guys. Hey, you're good. You're good. Have some more beer.

Nobody has to die, man. Keep drinking. Just know I'm in charge. That's it. It's fine. It's fine. So Hitler's goal was to convince the triumvirate to back his plan. He wanted Bavaria's army units and police on his side.

He doesn't want to fight these guys. His plan is to do a grander version of what Mussolini had done and start marching with 10s, basically all of the right-wingers in the military of Bavaria and start marching up to Berlin. And he imagines thousands of people are going to join him on the way. And once they reach Berlin, they're going to overthrow the liberal government easily and institute a fascist state run by Hitler and Ludendorff. And of course, for that to happen, they can't get bogged down fighting the Bavarian state,

right? Yeah. Now, Cicer, Lausau, and Carr were all pretty close to being fascists themselves, but these guys are all state loyal, right? They're not revolutionaries. They don't want to overthrow the government. They want the government to change into a more right-wing government, but they're not like bomb throwers, like Hitler is.

So they didn't want to follow this weird little Nazi guy in open rebellion against the state. Now, Hitler tried to smooth talk them. He promised them cushy positions in the new regime. Carr is a monarchist and Hitler tells him, like, hey, man, I'm going to bring back the king of Bavaria and you can be his envoy to the government. Isn't that like your dream? Dude, it's cool, right? Yeah, it'll be sweet, dude.

Come on, bro. So they resist Carr and Lausau and everyone like they're not, they're not on board with this. It's really long, Hitler did what Hitler's do and he starts threatening to murder them at gunpoint. Now, Ludendorff, who, like, when the occupation of the beer hall starts, Ludendorff, like some Nazi show up at his house and are like, hey, you know that thing you kind of agreed to?

We're doing it. And Ludendorff, like, shows up and is like, okay, I guess we'll see if this works. And he's kind of horrified by Hitler's behavior because Ludendorff is a, he's like a classic imperial German manners, dude, right? There are ways in which you, especially these people are nobles, you don't point to the gun in their face, right? Like that's very gauche and he's not, he doesn't like Hitler in a lot of ways because Hitler's a fucking, you know, a kind of a peon to him, like Ludendorff's not a nobler, but he's not,

you know, he's, he's, he's gotten acclimatized to being in high society, Hitler is very much crude. Damn. And Ludendorff's kind of like horrified by this, but he's still on board with the general plan because he wants to take over the government and Institute of right wing military dictatorship. And eventually, now that once Ludendorff shows up to these guys, Carr and, and Lasso and Cicer kind of agree to help the push and agree to like basically put the, the, the powers of the Bavarian state behind Hitler's push attempt.

Okay. And they, they didn't really mean it, but a guy was threatening to murder them. So they're like, all right. Yeah. Whatever you want, bro. Whatever you want. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, while this was happening, different armed groups of Nazis were out capturing key parts of the city. The Bavarian war ministry was taken by Ernst Roman, his men, including young Heinrich Himmler and they proceeded to fortify it. Another group of 400 stormtroopers was sent to take guns and equipment from the army engineer barracks. Now, this is a very fun story because these Nazis all show up and the captain on duty who's like in charge of handing out guns and stuff, they're like, Hey, we're here to do maneuvers.

Can we borrow the guns? And the captain realizes something is very fishy and is like, you can use the guns, but you can't go on maneuvers outside. You got to show up inside and like the big gymnasium and then I'll hand you the guns there and you can do your maneuvers inside. And so all 400 Nazis go into the gymnasium and he locks it from the outside. Brilliant. Brilliant.

That's like one of the oldest tricks in the book. Yeah. Come here. Come here, bro. Yeah. Yeah. I got you. It's right here.

Right inside this door. Yeah. Right inside this door. I got you. Yeah. That's the rule. He saves the German state that night. He definitely saves the German state that night.

At least for a little while, you know, it didn't last, but he did his bit. So the Nazis who were locked inside couldn't call Hitler to let him know they had the guns and were ready to take part in the push. And Hitler was waiting for that call, right? He's got teams going out and seizing places in the city. And he realizes like these dudes haven't called in from the barracks yet, right? Something must be wrong. And this was a key part of his intricate plan.

And he knew, so this kind of puts Hitler in a bind. He knew that the triumvirate were not enthusiastic about this plan. And if he was going to keep them enthusiastic and like kind of force them to be enthusiastic, his men were going to have to be in total control of the city, right? If he could really be in charge in Munich, they weren't going to fight him. They'd give the army the orders to go along with it, right? Because they don't want to die. But he's got to actually be in charge.

And making his first critical mistake, Hitler decides it's necessary for him to leave the Burger Brow beer hall late that night to see what's going on at the engineer barracks. And he leaves Ludendorff alone with the triumvirate. This is a bad call. So Hitler and his Nazis know these guys are captives. He knows that he's holding them against their will. He knows that if they're agreeing, it's they're not really that on board with the idea. Ludendorff, again, is kind of not being told the entire truth about what's happening.

And he thinks these guys are fellow German patriots, right? And he also thought they looked tired, you know, it's been a long night. And he's like, do you guys want to go home and like take a nap or something? And they're like, yeah, we would like to go home. And he's like, all right, bro, yeah, man. You guys are German officers. I, as a German officer, know that no German officer would ever lie. Give me your word of honor that you'll come back to help us finish the coup tomorrow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll be back. What time? We'll be, yeah, they say, of course we'll come back. Of course, bro. I like tan. Yeah. When you win a coup.

Yeah. We'll see you in the morning. Yeah. So some of the Nazis, there are Nazis in the room too, and they see Ludendorff doing this and they're like, dude, they're not going to come back. And Ludendorff gets pissed at them. And he's like, I forbid anyone in this room from doubting the word of a German officer. How dare you?

Sovon Lasso. Yeah. When I was a kid, you know, the, like, the, the, the, the clue, you was about to get knocked out, but robbed by somebody who was like, Hey, hey, hey, hey, can I borrow your phone right quick? Let me use your phone. Yeah. Well, you would look and be like, don't get at man, your phone, do not walk over there

and get at me. What are you talking about, man? You just want to borrow my phone. Oh, don't give him your phone. Yeah. Don't give him your phone. What do you, do you keep walking, bro? Like, Hey, hey, man, come on.

Let me just use it right quick. No, man. Like, so you're like, no, what are you, what are you, what are you doing? What are you doing? Oh, well, there it is. Now you're, now you're sleeping. He just put you to sleep and you're barefoot. The guy just stole your shoes.

I told you not to. Yeah. So this is totally funny. Like the other guys in the room saying, yeah, the boss is like, yo, let him go take a nap. And the dudes are like, Hey, I don't think that's a good idea, man. You really think they go come back? Like I don't think they go come back.

Hey boss, maybe you shouldn't let them. Leave. You kind of see in this why Ludendorff didn't win the war. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Hey boss, this, this might not be the plan. So that is where we're going to leave it in part one. General Ludendorff, the genius of German military tactics is just let everyone go that he needs in order to make as much work as he's like, ever. Germans don't lie. German officers don't lie.

Yeah. Spoilers. I swear to you, coming back, I'll bring back. Oh yeah. Absolutely. Tons of coffee. We're going to, we're going to push the hell out of this state. Yeah.

Just give me a minute. Yeah. Let me get a nap. Prop. You want to plug any plugables before we roll out and then I do, man. I do. Yeah. You can follow me on all the things.

Prop hip hop. Got a podcast called hood politics will prop that I'm giving all the good takes. And I got some t-shirts and music out, a lot of music rolling out this year. So I can't wait to show y'all that's merge is like the highest quality. Like I wear his shirts all the time. Yeah. I try to, they're so they're all like, they're all like, you know, ethically sourced and that's the recyclable material.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's me. Highly recommend. And you can find me somewhere on the internet if, if you first told me in your heart, but only then. Only if I am with you and you want me.

You can follow me on Twitter. I'm at my underscore Sophie underscore Y. I was just a happy plug for myself. Shame on you. You should. And yeah, check out Sophie, check out prop find me in your heart and come back on Thursday here, the thrilling conclusion of push, push, tabulous, push. There it is.

There you go. There you go. There you go. There you go. Yes. Push it. Buzam. Yes.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse with like a lot of guns, but our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

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podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.