Behind the Bastards - Part One: How Nice, Normal People Made The Holocaust Possible

Episode Date: October 13, 2020

Robert is joined by Sofiya Alexandra to discuss the, 'Little Nazis.'FOOTNOTES: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8497.1969.tb00946.x https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/bstewart/files/ordinaryvoting.pdf   https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/i-was-a-nazi-and-heres-why  https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/  https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/everyday-murder-nazi-atrocities-committed-by-ordinary-people-a-542245.html  https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-fuehrer-myth-how-hitler-won-over-the-german-people-a-531909.html  https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-horst-wessel-song  https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/aryanization  https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/0226511928 https://www.amazon.com/Black-Earth-Holocaust-History-Warning/dp/1101903473/ref=sr_1_1dchild=1&keywords=black+earth&qid=1602558619&s=books&sr=1-1 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. It's Behind the Bastards, the only podcast where we have to edit out large chunks of it because of the number of veiled threats I make towards social media CEOs. My guest today to talk about some of the worst people in all of history is my good friend, one of my favorite stand-up comedians and fellow podcasteer, like Musketeer. Sophia Alexandria! Yeah, I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

Thank you, Sophia, for being here. How are you doing today? You know, just smiling ear to ear. Smiling ear to ear. Sophia, how do you, how do you feel about Nazis? Um, well, are they hot? I mean, statistically, some of them were. Yes, of course. Still a no for me. Still a no, a no. Okay. Okay. That's a bold, a bold stance for you to take. Thank you. Thank you so much. I am braver than the president. That's for sure.

Yeah, that's for sure. So, you know, one of the few nice things about the last couple of months of 2020, which have broadly sucked, is that like a whole bunch of mainstream news sites and pundits and influencers and whatnot who were like, making fun of folks like me, who were worried about, you know, the whole fascism thing are now are now talking seriously about like, oh, this is pretty fascist. A lot of the stuff that's going on seems like we're in a bad place, like the Atlantic's running articles and shit on, you know, that. So that's been nice that like people are taking the rise of fascism in America more seriously. Except for like, this is the reaction that would have been appropriate, like, I don't know, four years ago, and now is just so underwhelming and so much less than what we need that it's almost negligible. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm not giving them credit, but at least at least people aren't like calling you like a doomsayer or whatever for, for being like, hey, this kind of seems like what was happening in Germany. Back in the 30s, y'all remember Germany back in the 30s? What happened there?

The truth is people don't. They just remember how much they like the haircuts. Yeah. That's why we did, you know, and one of the earlier episodes we did on the show was about like the non Nazi bastards who helped Hitler rise to power, which was based on a really good book that people should still read called the death of democracy. And kind of at the time when I put that together, I thought it was really important that people understand how like multicultural and progressive for the Weimar Republic was and how that sort of a place turned to totalitarianism. Because I think it's possible for any democracy, no matter how progressive with like the right number of bad years, and we've certainly had some bad years. So the thing I wanted to do today though, like that episode focused a lot on politicians on like, you know, high ranking conservative politicians on members of the aristocracy on like, you know, left wing politicians and like like the leaders, like the different leaders of political parties and like the decisions they made that allowed Hitler to get into power. And I want to focus on, I want to focus on a different group of people today who were who were as responsible for letting Hitler do what he did, but who weren't a lot of them. Like we don't even really know the names of the individuals and it's not really important because what we're talking about today are the little Nazis, the rank and file fascists who voted Hitler into office and gave him their support.

Because I think there's a lot we can learn about our own modern fascists. And again, not like the, not the proud boys and stuff, not the people taking to the streets and fighting, but the people who are like willing, who would support President Trump, not just in re-election, but in throwing people into camps and, you know, re-educating or killing as ideological enemies, like the kind of people who wouldn't stand out on the street and risk their lives for a fascist regime, but would kind of stand back and let it happen and give it just enough of their support that it's able to go the rest of the distance. We're talking about those kind of people today. And we're talking about those kind of people from the Nazi regime, like the little Nazis is a term that I'm actually stealing from a very controversial book by an author named Milton Sanford Meyer. And Meyer's book was probably the first post-war investigation into how and why normal German citizens joined the Nazi Party. So it's not a book, again, about like the proud boy equivalents, the fascist street paramilitaries who helped Hitler rise to prominence. It mostly deals with like bakers and teachers and like policemen who decided pretty late in the game to support Hitler and help him do the things that he did. So that's who we're talking about today is the little Nazis. And I think people will recognize a lot of comparisons between those folks and some people they may know in their daily lives. I think it's a little bit hilarious when people talk about like when people would talk about Nazis, like, like during the 40s, and then people just went along with them and they'd be like, I could never do that. And now fast forward to today. Those are the same people that won't even fucking read a proper article or, you know, vote or, you know, do anything that might be helpful for anyone. Sign a petition. I don't fucking know, you know.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, um, So that passivity, I guess is what I'm saying is, it's, we all have that to some degree. Yeah, it's, it's a thing you have to like that. It is absolutely that passivity is what lets the Nazis get away with the things that they get away with. Exactly. And we'll be talking about those kind of folks too. We'll be talking particularly at the end of part two about the folks who supported the Nazis, even though they weren't Nazi voters, you know, supported them by their inaction. Because I think that's important to talk about. But a lot of what we're chatting about are folks like folks who kind of the kind of people who would have said something along the lines of, well, I don't like Hitler. But I don't, you know, I think that I don't think that he's very serious about a lot of this anti-Jew stuff. I think that'll die down once he wins and like, you know, he'll be good for the economy. And you've heard the people who are making the same arguments in 1933 or whatever that like folks made in 2016 and are continuing to make.

And that's why I think, I think Milton Meyers book is so valuable because basically what he did is he traveled to Germany immediately after the war. And he made, he befriended a bunch of members of the Nazi party and not again, not like people who'd had any stance, but like normal working class people who just joined the party and voted for Hitler. And he was, he was a, Milton was a Jewish journalist, which he didn't talk about the fact that he was Jewish to them, but he like, he made friends with these people. Yeah, I bet that's not really going to be something that people love to hear in the Nazi party meetings. He's like, I brought the rugala. I mean, one of the things that might be most unsettling and we'll get to this is that like, I think a lot of them probably wouldn't have cared all that much because that wasn't their motivation for supporting the Nazis, which again, is one of the more unsettling things about them is the number of people who enabled the Holocaust, despite not really having super like, like organized anti-Semitic feelings themselves. Like that's one of the most unsettling things about the Holocaust is the number of people who enabled it to happen, despite not particularly wanting it to happen. Which is kind of one of the things we don't talk about enough when we talk about the Holocaust, because that's almost even scarier to me than the people who's, who's hatred and racism moved them to take action.

The people who like, you knew this was wrong and you let it happen or you even helped in some way. I don't know. We'll talk about that too. So let's cut straight to the chase though. Are there dead babies in this episode? There's the insinuation of dead babies in this episode because a lot of babies died in the Holocaust. But we don't, there's not, well, actually, no, there is, there is, there is direct baby kill. Yes. What we'll be talking graphically about baby killing in part two actually. Yes, I forgot. You son of a fucking bitch. This is, this is how you get me. I can't write a Sophia episode without some dead babies in it. You know that. You sure can't. You sure can't. Look at Sophie grinning over there. She's so delighted. Oh yeah. I think she remembered before I did. I did. Yeah. So when, when, when Myers set out to write this book and, you know, started making all these friends, his goal was to sketch out, quote,

the delineation of the, the personal conditions under which the little man anywhere becomes involved in the development of totalitarian evil and the ways in which he assumes or avoids moral responsibility for his participation in it, which I think is a really good premise for a book, especially considering he was kind of the first guy to look into this. So he moves to Germany right after the war. He makes good friends with like 10 male former members of the Nazi party and he titles his book about them. They thought they were free and we'll talk a little bit about that title later. And I think it's one of my favorite, my favorite titles for any book. Now there's a lot of good critiques about Myers book and we'll talk about ominous as fuck. It's incredibly ominous and it incredibly pointed and it makes a very important point that again, we'll talk to in a bit. There's, there's good criticisms of the book, a number of them being that like for one thing, he only talks to men, right, which is like kind of a bias of the time,

which is, is definitely a flaw in the book. He also, you know, 10 men isn't a huge chunk of people, but you get a lot of detail into why those 10 people did, you know, the things that they did, which I think is really valuable. And you know, they're 10 people from one town. So you can't assume it's like a super broad. It doesn't give us the broader picture on, on all of the different reasons people pick the Nazi party. So we'll be going to, I have a lot of outside evidence, a lot of things besides the book that we'll be talking about that sort of give us that broader picture. I want to start our episode with a brief overview of Myers life because I think it's really interesting. He was born in Chicago in 1908 and he studied at the University of Chicago, but he got kicked out before graduating because he was caught hucking beer bottles at the Dean from like the top floor of his dormitory. I like me a bad boy. Yeah, when he was questioned about it, he was like, my only regret is I didn't hit him.

You gotta love the guy. So he drops out of college and he gets a job in journalism shortly thereafter and he, you know, he does a number of things. He works for a Hearst paper. So he gets some like muck raking kind of like populist sort of experience. And he actually, he winds up being the guy who comes up with the actual like the line that is every journalist job description today. He's the guy who invents the phrase speak truth to power. Like that's, that's Milton Meyer. He's the first person to like put those words together, which I think still is the best job, the best like job summary you can have as a journalist. If that's not, I came up with breast cancer thirst trap, but that doesn't seem to trend as much.

I have that tattooed on my body also. Yeah. Oh, is it, is it where you said you were going to get it above? Oh, yeah, no. Yep. Yep. Right on the ankle. Because you're going to get it under the dick and then you had to go above.

That under the dick was too full of other tattoos. Smart. Yeah. I have oddly enough the opening to slaughterhouse five, which was maybe a poor choice in retrospect. A lot of words to get on there. Is this your way of telling us you are huge because that's not what needs to happen during this Nazi reckoning episode Robert Evans. Yeah. I'm not the president.

I'm not going to turn something serious into talking about my dick. So Milton was fundamentally a believer in human rights and he felt that people should fight like hungry dogs to maintain those rights in the face of state oppression. They thought they were free, came out of his confusion that citizens of the Weimar Republic, which is again a very progressive state, would give up their rights so readily. Like he was kind of baffled by this and he just personally needed an answer. And for his time, you know, he had his biases like we just talked about not really talking, not talking to women to any meaningful extent, but he was also a pretty enlightened soul for his time. He repeatedly compares the bigotry faced by European Jews to Jim Crow, to the oppression of black people in the United States to the internment of Japanese Americans. So he's a guy who's looking, he's not, he's very pro kind of what the United States represents in his eyes, but he's certainly not blind to its faults. And he sees that like, oh, if fascism comes to the United States, it will be based in bigotry against these different groups that I think is pretty accurate.

So he's, he's, I think a guy who's worth paying attention to. And I really like, I said earlier that I like his definition of little men, of what like a little man is in a culture. And I'm going to quote from that now. He's talking about the friends that he made to write this book. These 10 men were little men, only Herr Hildebrandt, the teacher, had any substantial status in the community. And when I say little men, I mean not only the men for whom the mass media and the campaign speeches are everywhere designed, but specifically in sharply stratified societies like Germany, the men who think of themselves in that way. Every one of my 10 Nazi friends, including Hildebrandt, spoke again and again during our discussions of we little people. And we have that in the United States, don't we, to a different extent?

We don't call, they don't call themselves the little people, but everyday Americans, real Americans, like that's our version of that. Working class heroes. Yeah, working class heroes. We have our version of that, you know, it's important not to over extend comparisons, because Germany, very different society, a lot of stuff going on that we don't have going on, just like we, but like, you can, you can see a line. Like, you know people who, who see themselves that way. I think that reminds me of the fact that basically, like, when you don't have a lot. Yeah. The one thing you can like cling to is your identity.

Yeah, exactly. What you see is your identity. So if you see yourself as constantly getting like the short end of the stick, you would think of yourself as like, yeah, I'm the everyday little man, you know. And it's, it's, it's those little men. Number one, as Meyer points out, it's the little men that all of the Nazi electoral campaigns were focused on. They wanted to win the little men. And it's the little men who made the Holocaust possible. You know, if you have a couple, a hundred or a couple of thousand people who want to kill all of whatever ethnic group, the Jews, the, the, the immigrants, like whatever,

if you have a few hundred or a few thousand of them in a society, the most they're going to do is commit some hate crimes, which are terrible, but they're not going to be able to actually carry out a genocide if there's not a few million people who get on board just enough to let it happen. You know, and that, that's why I like Meyer's book. That's why I think it's important. So yeah, again, not a perfect book, but I think a valuable one. Now, I want to start this episode by busting a myth and we just talked about it. It's the myth that every person who joined the Nazi party or supported them actively hated Jewish people. And I think it's important to counter that, not to give the Nazis credit because I think it actually condemns those individuals more.

The thing that's important for people to understand is that you don't, little men and women don't have to hate in order to enable genocides. Benign indifference is all that's necessary. And this is really well illustrated by the story of one of Meyer's Nazi friends, a former bank clerk named Kessler. Now, Kessler was late to join the Nazi party and he was never a full convert to the ideology. As late as 1938, he maintained a fairly close friendship with a local Jewish man named Rosenthal, who had once been his boss, the director of his bank. Now, the day before Kristallnacht, when the synagogue in their city was burnt to the ground, as were so many other synagogues in Germany, Kessler told his Jewish friend that, quote, with men like me and the party, things will be better. You'll see.

Can we say, though, that this has a real I have. I have one black friend kind of vibe, you know, like I have a Jewish friend. See, doesn't really seem like it's great if you can. It's not one guy, you know, that's Jewish and that's fucking it. That's not good. It's certainly not good. And again, I'm not trying to like defend these Nazis by saying that they didn't actively hate. The point is that it was it was it was people like Kessler, who in this guy, like I got to know him pretty well.

He talked about his friendship with this man a decent amount and like talked about to the extent that like you can you can see that Kessler felt guilty about his party affiliation and was trying to assuage it with with with comments like this, which means there was number one, an extent to which he knew what he was doing was wrong. And he was kind of trying to wash the slate clean in his own head by saying like, no, by joining this party, I can pull it back towards a rational side of things, right? Like that was what this guy had to tell himself in order to kind of deal with the guilt that he knew he was supporting something bad. And I think we know a lot of people who are in that position in our country today. I'm related to some of them. Kessler believed, quote, that as more and more decent citizens joined it, it being the Nazi Party, it would certainly join it for the better. And Meyer goes on to write, quote, my friends meant what they said.

They calculated wrong, but they meant what they said. And the moral and religious bank clerk was on the basis of that mortally wrong calculation to preach the most barbarous paganism and the decent bourgeoisie teacher who was to teach Nazi literature from Nazi textbooks provided by the Nazi school board. Teachers teach what they are told to teach or quit and to quit a public post mint in the early years of the Third Reich unemployment later when one had an anti Nazi political past in mint concentration camp. Once you were in the party, said his friend, the baker, who doesn't say he ever wanted to get out, you didn't get out easily. And again, you see what he's kind of the point he's making there is that like these people talk about how hard it is to get out, but they didn't try. That's one of the things that if you that that I think because of when he was writing this Meyer didn't know. But there's actually it's overemphasized the degree to which people would have potentially faced punishment for refusing to take part in an anti Jewish bigotry. There was not a single leader in the Wehrmacht, not a single officer in CEO who was punished for refusing to take part in a massacre.

And some of them did the ones who participated did so because they were scared that it would harm their ability to get promoted or because of peer pressure. But like nobody it actually is a myth that members like you were punished if you actively tried to help people hide. Let's just say it was frowned upon. But it wasn't you wouldn't like the people who participated weren't in fear of their lives if they didn't participate. Yeah, it wasn't prohibited. They weren't like if you do this, you will suffer with this. Yeah, it was. Oh, it's frowned upon.

So yeah, I'll do it because it'll make me unpopular to not do it. Like and again, that's so much more unsettling than these people all being radicalized automatons who are just lockstep in favor of Nazism. Like it's so much less scary to me that somebody could be like a straight up member of the SS and just on board for genocide. Then somebody then that somebody could help with the genocide because like, well, people won't like me if I don't like that. That's way scarier to me. I don't know. And just real. Yeah, and real.

It speaks to something ugly in all of us because I think a lot of people would do that. I mean, the whole idea behind the parties that you're joining a group of people and that gives you something that you don't get when you're on your own. Yeah. So, you know, that can be positive or negative depending on what the party you're joining is. Yep. And when I read all these stories because there's a few of them in Meyer's book about people who thought that joining about like kind of more moderate folks who thought that joining the Nazi party would pull it in a better direction. I'm reminded of General Mad Dog Mattis. Now, I think you remember, like, back when he first got appointed Secretary of Defense, there were all these think pieces about like how good this would be and about how this would like make Trump more moderate and pull him towards the side of rationality.

There was a Mother Jones article titled Democrats Hope Mad Dog Will Call Trump Down. Now, like Senator Jack Reed, when he was like, because he had to get a special dispensation to be the Secretary of Defense and she'd been in the army so recently. Jack, Senator Jack Reed is a Democrat said that he hoped Mattis would be the saucer that cools the coffee. And Senator Richard Blumenvall, who did vote against giving Mattis a waiver, still said that like, in this moment of history, I believe that your appreciation for the costs of war and blood treasure and lives and the impact on veterans afterwards, will allow you to be a check on rash and potentially ill considered force use of military force by a president elect who perhaps lacks that same appreciation. And of course, what did we see Mattis completely failed to drag Trump towards a reasonable position on absolutely anything civilian casualties from US action increased massively as soon as Trump took office. Drone strikes increased to an enormous degree. As a result of the Trump administration's escalation of violent force, the United States now kills more Afghan civilians than the Taliban does. There's just no evidence that Mattis calmed Trump at all because fascists don't let reasonable men dictate their policies.

If they did, they wouldn't be fascists, you know, but it's the same people keep making the same calculation, right? But it's like a cliche. It's the whole thing of like, oh, you can change it from the inside. Yeah, that's a cliche for a reason because that shit does not work. It's like that. Change it from the inside. No, you're in the inside. You're on the fucking inside. That's what the inside is. That's what it means. Yeah, it's like that line in the Simpsons when Homer says, but Marge, maybe I'm a part of that angry mob. I can help steer it in positive directions. Exactly. Yeah. But I think we can all like you see people today making the same calculations and you see people today like another.

I have a lot of family members who kind of made the calculation. I can remember early in 2016, we had a family reunion before Trump was back when everyone was still assuming he would he would fail to win. And like all of my Republican family members were dunking on the guy because they all love John McCain and Trump had said a bunch of shitty things about John McCain. So they hated Trump and then he became the candidate and they all voted for him. And they insisted to me that it was it was worthwhile because at the very least Trump was not a dirty socialist like Hillary Clinton. And let's let's skip over the fact that like let's skip over everything that's wrong with that statement. It's something that you all that it's another echo because campaigning against violent communists was a big part of what the Nazis rested their electoral hopes on. Meyer's friend, Herr Kessler, told him, quote, Hitlerism had to answer communism with something just as radical.

Communism always used force. Hitlerism answered it with force. The real the really absolute enemy of communism always clear, always strong in the popular mind was national socialism, the only enemy that answered communism and kind. If you wanted to save Germany from communism to be sure of doing it, you went to national socialism. The Nazi slogan in 1932 was if you want your country to go Bolshevik, vote communist. If you want to remain free Germans, vote Nazi. Now you go look at some of the at the ads Trump has been putting out over the last two, three months, the things he's been saying about Antifa and tell me it's not the same fucking ad. And in fact, the Friday before I wrote this, Trump gave a speech where he told donors, I am the only thing standing between the American dream and total anarchy, madness and chaos. It's the same fucking play and acting during the debate by saying that the violence and white supremacy are not a problem.

And yeah, that that it's actually a left wing problem. Yeah, that's where all the violence is from. And it's definitely not a right wing problem, which is the same nonsense. And it's it's I mean, which even the even the FBI will say like, no, dude, and have been pretty consistently saying like, no, no, no, all of the murders pretty much are on one side of this thing. But like, yeah, it's the it's the reason Trump declared Portland and a couple of other cities anarchist jurisdiction. Of course, even though we have like the most violent and authoritarian police force in the country, it's because it doesn't matter what the truth is on the ground. If you can make Americans think Portland has been burnt down by anarchists, he was hoping that there's good people on both sides. Yeah.

Yeah. And now like, can you imagine looking back at that now that's quaint because that's acknowledging that there's good people who are not fascists. Whereas what he said in the debate was that actually all the good people are right wing and all the bad people are left. Yeah. And it's too early to know how that's all going to shake out electorally. A lot of the recent polls make it look like his law and order campaign has not worked like it hasn't brought more people to him. Really, again, we'll see on the election how true how accurate those polls are. I'm hopeful about that.

I don't give a fuck about a poll now. I don't trust any polls. I've been hurt too bad. Too bad. I'm sorry. But we've all been burnt badly, which is good. I'm actually glad that no one trusts the polls because the polls are all show that Biden has it basically locked down. I don't want anyone to feel that way.

I don't trust that shit for a second. Every time they say, hey, there's a substantial lead that just makes it so that people are like, I guess I can stay home. Yeah, I want people to be scared as hell. So shut the fuck up pollsters. Shut the fuck up. So I am, though, interested to see how it actually winds up working for him because it might, if he fails to attract a lot of support for the law and order thing, then maybe it's a sign that the United States is less far gone than I had feared. We'll see.

But it is worth noting that like he's campaigning on the same fucking lines that Hitler was. And that does kind of talking about the degree to which anti-communism was kind of more of, it was more of what got people to vote for the Nazis than anything the Nazis particularly supported in some cases. You know, obviously it differed between like the class of people who were voting for him, but a lot of folks supported the Nazis because they hated the communists and not because they were all on board with everything the Nazis was, which one of the big things that I think is so irresponsible about the way our schools teach about Hitler is they talk about him and the Nazis as if they were swept into power by a wave of mass support spurred on by like the desperate circumstances of the Great Depression. Right. Like the picture I had of it was like, you see, you get like two or three paragraphs about how the Weimar Republic's economy was shit. That one of those pictures of like a lady with a wheelbarrow full of of of of Deutschmarks. Yep. And then like, and then it's like, and then Hitler was elected because things were so bad.

So many people were out of work. Everyone was desperate and he promised to fix things. And that's not what swept him into power, actually. This idea that like there were all these starving unemployed workers who swept Hitler into power is is a historical workers were not the Nazi Party's core of support. And I actually found a very fascinating 2008 analysis of German voting behavior from Princeton and the researchers looked at the voting patterns of unemployed workers and blue collar workers who were at in Germany at the time. We're looking specifically at unemployed workers and blue collar workers who were at high risk of losing their jobs. And they found that among this population, quote, when the unemployed imposed the government, they turned primarily to the communists whose parties catered directly to them, not the Nazis. Moreover, the Nazis promoted autonomy, entrepreneurship and private property ideas which were not directed to the unemployed.

So these like these poor starving workers didn't turn out for the Nazis in large numbers. Instead, one of the Nazis strongest bases of support and in fact, their strongest base of support among Germans who were actually hurt by the economic downturn. So not like the wealthy or anything. Their strongest base of support among like Germans who were hurt by the Great Depression were small time bosses, a category of people that the study authors describe as the working poor quote. The phrase used in the field of American politics within political science and within sociology, but it has not been used previously to describe Weimar Germany. We use it because the groups described this way were indeed working and they were poor, despite having other important characteristics. The group that fits this description most directly are the self-employed, the independent artisans, shopkeepers, small farmers, lawyers, etc. Most accounts assume the self-employed were fervent supporters of the Nazis.

These individuals were hurt economically by the Depression, but because they owned their firms, they were at relatively low risk of unemployment. Instead, bad economic times would merely mean that they would make less money, often a lot less. So it was not of the people who got fucked by the Depression. It was not the people who were starving in the streets. It was the people whose small businesses suddenly weren't allowing them to purchase luxuries. Those were the people who really turned out for the Nazis. And again, reading that number one is completely counter to what I learned in high school about how Hitler got elected, that it was the small business owners who were like some of his most reliable supporters.

But it also gels a lot with some shit that I saw this summer at the start of the anti-lockdown protests. In Oregon's capital, Salem, a small business owner named Lindsey Graham, ironic name, a lady, she received a $15,000 fine for reopening her hair salon in violation of the state's law about COVID. And she immediately drew in this tsunami of right-wing support. And all of these far-right militia types started rallying at her salon with guns and stuff. And it was a grift for her. She raised more than $70,000 during her two or three days in the limelight. But I think she's a really good example of the kind of working-class people who fueled Hitler's rise.

Not down-and-out starving poor, not laborers living paycheck to paycheck, but middle- and lower-middle-class business owners who were scared of winding up in the same low place as the people who were on unemployment. Those are the people who embrace fascism most readily. And I think that's important. Well, it's the same thing that happens now that I think you can see a lot of anger about on social media because you get to see that older people and younger people are having different... Not just older people and younger people are having different opinions and experiences, but it breaks down into marginalized groups being like,

oh, so you're angry now because your kid can't go to college or own a house or you're angry now that you're losing these things. We've never been able to achieve them. So we've always been angry and that's not made us right-wing. And it's the people that are insulted that now they've been taking it for granted that the American dream of your children are going to have it better than you, they were taking for granted that would happen. And a whole bunch of people in society are saying,

well, you just got here now, but we've always been here. We've always known that the dream was horse shit. I mean, we're not welcome because you guys are embracing mass murder instead of... But whatever. Yeah, there's a good line in that Princeton study that I think is important. The party being the Nazi party actively promoted private property and so turned off many unemployed who either had little private property or generally supported more government intervention in the economy.

And that's just not the picture. I don't know. You were Jewish, so maybe you got a better education about the Nazis than I did as a Gentile boy. But that's so different from what I learned in high school. I mean, I grew up with a totally different Nazi understanding initially because the USSR is obsessed with Nazis because... Oh, really? Why is that? Because we kind of bore the brunt of the whole thing.

And so, yeah, World War II is still talked about in a huge amount in Ukraine or Russia. And so growing up, I not only heard from my grandparents and stuff, but there was also just a lot of attention being paid to it by the government and schools always. So I would feel like by the time I got here, I was like, I know a lot more about... And they don't call them Nazis. They say fasciste, which is fascist. But here fascists is for anybody.

You know what I mean? And Nazis is specifically Nazi Germany, but when I was growing up, you just hear fasciste and it's just Nazi fascists specifically. Yeah, yeah. And there's a lot... But you were saying as a Gentile boy, did you do the whole Anne Frank mandatory reading in school? Did you do all of that? Yeah, and I feel ways about that because I would not have wanted my teenage diary to become read by millions of people, but also...

I don't think it's useless that people do read it a lot because she's very sympathetic. I went to the Anne Frank House a few years back and it's a pretty... It's a very good museum, I'll say that. If you're ever in Amsterdam, check it out. Did you ever go to the Museum of Tolerance with your school or anything? I don't think it was called that. We went to a Holocaust museum, yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like as a Jew, you hear a lot. And by the time you go, you're like,

I've seen so much horrible shit. So yeah, I don't know. Maybe the Jewish thing is you get a lot more of it. The thing that really fucked me up was I went to Sachsenhausen, which is one of the very small concentration camps. So not a death camp, a lot of people died there, obviously, but not like there's a difference between the death camps and the concentration camps. Yes. Sachsenhausen was one of the very small concentration camps.

Obviously, but not like there's a difference between the death camps and the concentration camps. Sachsenhausen was mainly for political prisoners, although a number of Jewish people wound up there, too. And they had... We were there, number one, in the dead of winter. So seeing the tiny little uniforms, the threadbare uniforms that they had to wear, and being out there in a German winter was like, oh my God. But they led us to these solitary confinement cells, which were holes in the ground with steel grates over them.

And you could still see bloodstained marks in the concrete where people had tried to claw their way up. And that was like the thing that... Stuck with you? ...has stuck with me the most that I've physically seen as evidence of the Holocaust. Yeah. Okay, back to the little Nazis. But first, it's a really awkward time to add break.

You know who won't put political and racial prisoners into a... No, okay, that's not a good way to lead ads. How do we... That was dark. Hey, you know... Speaking of private property. Speaking of earning things. Yeah. Here's some things you can earn.

Oh. 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. Listen to Alphabet Boys 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 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 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.

We're back. So we had a little, we went on a little bit of, I think, a valuable, valuable tangent there. I was talking about that, you know, how small business owners were a huge core of support for the Nazis. And obviously this is just like one of the demographics they went through. And one of the interesting things that Princeton study found is that kind of, wow, a lot of bad historians try to focus on how, like, like, like how surprising it was that the Nazis won when these Princeton folks,

like, because they compared the election that brought Hitler to power in Weimar Germany to dozens and dozens of other Democratic elections throughout, like, a century of Democratic elections in the United States and elsewhere. And so compared them to how other countries' elections performed during, like, economic collapses and found that, like, no, no, no, all of the trends in Germany were basically the same. This was a very normal election with an abnormal candidate. But it wasn't nothing, nothing different happened in Germany. They reacted the same way as Democratic voters always do.

But there was a Hitler running, you know? It's the Trump factor before it happened. Yeah, exactly. We could not have imagined it. Nope. And now that it's happening, we still can't believe it. It's still pretty wild. And it's been happening for years and we're still, every day,

reaching a new level of being surprised and like, and also, like, of the government, like, changing just because, like, no one knew you had to put in rules about this kind of thing. No one expected that this would happen. Yeah, and this is one of those things that, like, there's a value that's non-zero. I don't think it's something, obviously, it's something we cannot rely on. But there's a value that's non-zero in folks like Joe Biden being, like,

believing in civility. Because as soon as someone who comes along who doesn't, all of these other traditions that we've counted on to keep us safe collapse. And it turns out that there's nothing protecting us, which is why we shouldn't be relying on them in the way that Joe Biden does. But there's not a zero value in everyone deciding not to be complete shit to each other. Civility has its purpose, is what I'm saying. Although, not much of one.

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

who's the head of a right-wing street gang called Patriot Prayer. He's very closely affiliated with the Proud Boys, with other far-right militia groups. And, you know, it's, we'll talk about other people like him, because he's similar to some of the little Nazi folks, too, in some ways that are interesting. I think one of the things that's interesting about that Princeton study is when you're kind of looking at, it points out that a lot of people voted for the Nazis for reasons that were not the stuff that everybody knows about the Nazis,

that weren't, like, their theories about Arianism and, like, the master race and, like, the quasi-spiritual stuff about Hitler is the embodiment of the German people. It was because they thought that he'd make the economy better and that their small business would improve. It was because they were scared of the communists who wanted to take their stuff, and he said that he would get rid of the communists. It was for all of these things that, like, were not any of the fun Nazi stuff. It was none of, like, the kooky shit that actually got the Nazis elected.

And I, yeah, I'm going to read a quote from Meyer's book here that I think is very relevant. None of my friends was the least interested in Nazi race theory as such, not even the Taylor or the Bill Collector, who were two of the more, like, firm Nazis. Five of the ten of them laughed when they spoke of it, including the cabinetmaker. That was nonsense, said Herr Klingelhofer, which is the cabinetmaker, for the SS and the universities. Look at the shape of my head. It's brought as a barnside. Look at my brunette wife. Do you suppose we're not Germans?

No. That they could teach to the SS and the university students. They would believe everything that made them great, and the university students would believe anything complicated. The professors, too. Have you seen the race purity chart? Yes, I said. Well, then you know. A whole system. We Germans like systems, you know. It all fitted together, so it was science, system and science. If you only looked at the circles, black and white and shaded, and not at real people.

Such dumb stuff they couldn't teach to us little men. They didn't even try. And that reminds me of a lot of stuff, including some things my dad said about how you shouldn't take Trump seriously. You shouldn't take him literally. Yeah. Everyone in the beginning said, oh, he's just saying that stuff to be controversial. And he's not going to do any of that. Do you really think he's going to do that stuff, the stuff he's saying? And the answer is yes. Oh, this Nazi race theory, it's just for these weirdos at school and intellectuals who let complicated bullshit.

No one really cares about it. It's not going to lead to anything. Oh, no, it led to something. Surprise, surprise. Yeah, but for the little Nazis, for the people who were critical in actually voting Hitler to power, the stability of the Reichsmark had a lot more to do than race hatred or anything like that, which didn't mean these people weren't racist. They all were. It just meant that rather than actively caring about racism, they were people who were very tolerant of racism,

which I think speaks to a lot of Trump's support too, right? And I think we see Trump. We have to start defining racism as not just like, oh, would actively murder someone of a different race in the street, but do nothing while someone else talks about murdering someone else in the street. And I think like the difference between hearing a Trump supporter say, like, if you're telling me you're voting for Trump because of economic policy, that is another way of saying that you're a racist because the well-being of people of other races is less important to you than your economic well-being.

Yeah, you're willing to overlook racism so that you will have more money, right? That's racism. We have to not think of that as softer, you know? Yeah, and I'm certainly not saying that these people weren't racist. I'm saying that like the type of racist, like the way in which they supported the Nazis is different than you might expect. And that you need millions of these people to enable the ones who are, you know, like... Gateway racists. Yeah, gateway racists, exactly. And you see a lot, like Trump is really, you see a lot of him pulling for the same folks.

Like in the debate, he brought up people's 401Ks a lot, right, in the stock market. And those things are not things that matter to most people who are going to be listening to the show and to most working people who are a lot of them paycheck to paycheck, but it matters to the working middle class because that shits their cushion. That's what keeps them from being paycheck to paycheck. That's what stops them from being the poor is that they have those cushions. And, you know, that's who Trump was, what Trump was signaling to. Yeah.

Now, again, as we kind of talked about earlier, another one of Hitler's appeal to the little Nazis was a promise to protect them from the chaos and tumult of like a changing world. And that brings me back to Joey Gibson, who I was talking about being at that hairdresser's kind of fashy anti-COVID rally. And if you sit down and listen to one of Gibson's speeches and if you go through like a few years of interviews and profiles on the guy or on people like him who are kind of involved in these right wing street movements, you'll be struck by how little they really say because there's there's nothing they don't have anything ideologically other than a desire to get into fights with leftists. So everything they say is essentially trying to obscure the fact that they're just there for the violence, and this is a shirt that one of the proud boys, who is very prominent, Joe Biggs, who met with Lindsey Graham, the, the, the congressman, a couple of weeks ago. One of the shirts he wears when he goes to Portland says, I'm just here for the violence. Anyway. So, and it's worth noting like now they don't say anti-communist, Trump doesn't say anti-communist as much as he says anti-anarchist, anti-antifa, like, that's the buzzword now.

But back in like 2017, before Antifa was as much of a buzzword as it is, they were all saying that they were anti-communist. Trump and all of his, all of these little street leaders. And in fact, Joey Gibson did like a stand against communism rally in Seattle that year. And that was like the big buzzword before they realized Antifa really sold a lot better. Same with socialism. They was like socialism, then communism, and then now it's... Yeah. And it's the same, it's the same with the Nazis, you know? Back in Weimar Germany, there were a lot of communists. The KPD was one of those popular parties in the country, and it grew more powerful every year alongside the Nazis,

right before, you know, obviously the Nazis threw them all in camps after they won. But there were actually a couple of armed communist uprisings in Weimar Germany prior to Hitler rising to power. And like this would be like groups of communists occupying large chunks of German cities. They took over a lot of Berlin in 1919, right after the war, like hundreds of, like half a million of them occupied the city, just through sheer weight of numbers. And the uprising only ended when thousands of fascist paramilitary fighters, the Freikorps, which is kind of like the Oath Keepers, who the three percenters are today, invaded Berlin and shot every communist they could get their hands on. And the Freikorps were

like a bunch of anti-communist military veterans, a lot of whom had just stepped out of the trenches of World War One and like were really fucking angry and also dealing with wildly untreated PTSD. And yeah, they got to go on regular murder sprees. And they're kind of the precursors to the SA, to the brown shirts, like the Freikorps were generally seen as a pre-Nazi fascist movement in Germany. And we certainly have that too. You've got a lot of veterans groups or, you know, at least people claiming to be veterans who are defining themselves by their resistance to Antifa and communism. You got Stuart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers, who when that member of Patriot Prayer was shot dead by that BLM guy who stated like the Civil War started now, right? You

already you have these networks here too. Again, the same thing keeps happening. What I like about it is that we learn nothing. Not a thing. I mean, that's my favorite part. I guess this, yeah, we'll see. We'll see what we learned. I see some lessons. Although I think a lot of why things are somewhat different now might just be that like in World War, like the Nazis benefited from the fact that all of their original leaders were like these pretty hardcore veterans. Like they'd seen some shit. Like Hitler would get into a fucking fistfight with you. Like none of them were scared of getting hurt. None of them were scared of like doing violence to people. And you certainly have a lot of fascists who are willing to do violence to people in the

United States. But I've stood toe to toe with some of these guys. And in a one-on-one fight, they're all cowards, almost all of them. You know, there are some dangerous ones out there, but you don't have the density of actual combat veterans of people who like went through enough shit that they're just they don't give a shit about being injured or killed. You don't have as many of them as a percentage of the movement as the Germans did. And that's I think one of the reasons that they haven't been able to move as quickly is they do not have that advantage that the Nazis did. I guess silver linings. Yeah. I mean, it is I would prefer that most of the fascists who are talking about wanting to kill Antifa actually be too scared to get into a gun

fight, then have them all be completely willing to get into a gunfight. Yeah, that's why I said silver linings question mark. Yeah. It's a good thing, Robert. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's better than we got a little easier than the than the Germans had it, is I guess what I'm saying. Sophia was like optimism, Robert. I'm trying to be optimistic here. Yeah. I'm sad. It's good stuff. It's good stuff. So yeah, like that was a that was a big big that was like a big part of why Hitler was able to do what he did is that he was able to really successfully portray himself as the opponent of communism and deteriorating conditions and stuff. And as Meyer wrote, quote, there was the question was not whether communism threatened

the country as with the continuation of deteriorating conditions, it certainly did or soon would. The question was whether the Germans were convinced that it did and they were. They were so well convinced by such means as the Reichstag fire of 1933 that the Nazis were able to ultimately establish anti communism as a religion immune from inquiry and defensible by definition alone. When in 1937, the Pope attacked the errors of national socialism, the Nazi government's defense of its policies consisted of a note accusing the Pope of having dealt a dangerous blow to the defense front against the world menace of Bolshevism. And I find that interesting too, because it's another thing that that is happening again, right? Like Trump and the right are

repeatedly attacking the Pope as a socialist and a communist. I found an article by a far right Catholic journalist who seems to be a straight up Catholic fascist named George Neumeyer called he wrote a book called The Political Pope. And he he told CBS Pope Francis is a socialist and an opponent of Donald Trump. So you're like you're seeing, I don't know, it's weird to me, the 2020 wild man, you're gonna make cheer for like the pope, the pope and the post office. Yeah. These are weird times. Well, I've always liked the pope post office. I didn't have anything against it, but I just didn't know how to like, yeah, be so vocally pro. Yeah, resistance heroes, the postal office. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, I think the thing that I

found most striking about that segment from Meyer's book is the idea that the Nazis established on anti-communism as a religion. Because it's something I never really thought about it in those terms. But I think in my years of documenting the far right and attending these protests and street fights with groups like the Proud Boys, I have like actually watched that happen. And I think there's actually, you can make a strong argument that that's part of what we're saying with QAnon. Because I think QAnon very much is a religious movement. It's a cult. And it's a cult that presupposes, number one, all left-wing foes of Donald Trump are Marxists and that they're all satanic baby eaters trying to kill the United States. Like you're seeing, there is an anti-communist

religion in the United States right now. And it might be the fastest growing religion in the country. And yeah, it just happens differently, but it's the same idea, you know? I think that's really unsettling to me, I guess. Oh yeah? I feel great. Yeah, I'm not wild about it. So when you have a religion, whether it's an, you know, that religion's anti-communism or something else, any religion that's going to really take off needs martyrs, right? Every religion that's worth its salt has some martyrs. You gotta have some dead people to look up to. And Hitler's anti-communist cult acquired a number of martyrs on its rise to power. And none of them was more influential than a young man named Horst Vessel. You ever heard of Horst? I'm sorry,

did you say Horst Vessel? Horst, Horst Vessel, W-E-S-S-E-L. And yeah, Horst is H-O-R-S-T. Because I thought H-O-R-S-E, V-E-S-S-E-L. No, no, no. Kind of. It does sound a bit like that. Like a vessel shaped like a horse. It's spelled Horst Vessel, but I think it was pronounced Vessel because it's German with the W's and shit. So I don't know if you'd call Horst a little Nazi because he was actually a very radicalized Nazi street fighter who had dreams of being a big man in the movement. Select medium-sized. What would you say? Yeah, he was a medium-sized Nazi when he died. And yeah, I want to read a quote about Horst from the book, Hitler's True Believers, by Robert Glatterley. Because I think the story of Horst Vessel is really worth telling,

particularly in the context of these groups like the Proud Boys. Quote, The essay attracted activists like Horst Vessel, born in 1907, and thus too young to have served in the war, who left a record of his political awakening that he wrote in 1929. He said that between ages 14 and 18, he had been a bundesher, a member of the middle-class youth group involved in wandering and sports, like wandering is hiking. The Germans had just discovered hiking in this period. In fact, nearly all members of the essay, the brown shirts in 1933, had been in such a youth group. At the same time, Vessel was involved in the Black Reichswehr, the underground army, which was like, you had the German army, which was limited to 100,000 men. And because it was

so limited, you had this giant, it was essentially a militia. It was like all of the different militia networks we have in the United States together. You had this illegal army. So Vessel was a member of this underground army. He practiced shooting and even carried a pistol. His worldview perceived of division between us and them, with the us including his comrades, the fatherland, the völkisch, and the German. And them, meaning the communists, social democrats, and Jews. Such emotional experiences were part of Vessel's life before he ever became a member of the NSDAP in the essay. He said that what the Nazis had was an idea, which is to say something that the other paramilitary groups completely missed. And that's one of the things that scares me,

because I think that we might be seeing the collapse of Trumpism. It's too early to say. The fact that he disavowed the proud boys, and they didn't immediately say he's just doing this because he had to, like they got pissed, makes me think that aspects of what Trump has built, because he's bad at being an authoritarian, maybe collapsing. But all of the infrastructure has been assembled and is there. And I think like the thing that scares me is the person who's going to pick up what's essentially a gun lying on the table next. Because it's what Vessel says. When somebody comes around who has the charisma that Trump has to unite the group that Trump has united, and also the intelligence to wield them properly, and that would include having what Trumpism lacks,

which is a meaningful idea that can actually weld more than the coalition that Trump got together. That worries me a lot about somebody like Tom Cotton, you know, whoever comes next, and is better at than Trump at doing this. I don't know. That's something that worries me. So like our little Nazis, Horst came from the middle class, but the working middle class, his father was actually a right wing preacher, like a Protestant right wing preacher who died young, got sick. And yeah, it's interesting. Horst is a guy to study. He was shot dead on February 23, 1930. And the exact reality of what happened is shrouded in rumor from the beginning. At the time there were rumors because he was living with a former prostitute. So there were rumors that he

was a pimp and that he was killed by the former pimp of this woman he was living with. The actual reality is a lot, Mercury. What seems to be true is that his landlady kind of put a hit out on him. So he was living with his, yeah, he was living in a small apartment. Yo, yo, yo, I'm sorry, a landlady murdering their own tenant. Well, she may not have meant for him to die. Like how bad of a tenant was he? He must have been a tap dancer or some shit because this is why people get those like blocks that nobody can get in with. It's a weird story. So like when I say that she was his landlady, they were all living in the same apartment. So he was renting a room from her. And she was fine with him and didn't care that he was a Nazi, even though she was a

widow and her former husband had been like a communist street fighter. But she was apolitical. She was fine with him being a Nazi. But when he brought his girlfriend to live with him, she got really pissed at him. And so she wanted to force him out of the out of the apartment. And so she went to a bar where a bunch of her husband's old not or a communist street fighting friends hung out. And she was like, hey, will you help me clear this guy out? And they were like, well, you let a Nazi live with you. We don't really give a shit. But then they were like, well, but it's this, the Nazi is horse vessel. And he was a pretty prominent member of like the Nazi street fighting group. So why did he need to rent a room? This is so weird. Well,

because there's not, there was not in 19 this time, there was not a lot of money in being a Nazi street fighter at this time. You know, like he was not, he was not raking it in. He was not like a good grifter. I think he had those ambitions, but he was really just like, he was, he was like a Joey Gibson type, right? He was not good at making money from it. And so he, he, again, isn't clear what happens, but as Lain Lee goes to like, to these red front fighters, and when they mentioned horse's name, they're like, okay, we'll beat the guy up. And instead of beating him up, they shoot him to death. And what happens is very unclear. The guy who actually kills him when he goes to trial maintains that he fired out of self-defense because he entered

horse's house with a gun and he says that vessel pulled a gun of his own. And maybe it's entirely possible. The author of one of the books that I've read on this thinks that it's most likely that the guy who shot him fired first and fired as soon as he recognized Horst in the doorway. But it is weird that he only fired once, which he probably wouldn't have done if it had been a hit. So you get, it's very uncertain what happened. But I knew that the shot was good, right? Yeah. It was a good hit. No, yeah. Yeah. Then why did you have, would you need more bullets? Because usually when people are doing something like that, they don't have, yeah, they just kind of spray. If you're not a good hit, man. Yeah. If you're excellent at your job,

you just come and it's one shot and you go home. But I guess the point, these guys weren't good. They were like drunk straight fighters. Sorry, I care more about murder than you do, Robert. This feels. To carry it out properly. It just feels like a weird comic book. The reality of what happened matters less than how it was interpreted by the Nazis, because Joseph Goebbels gets ahold of this story and he immediately declares, like he declares vessel to have been like a martyr to the Hitlerist cause and declares this to have been a communist hit as opposed to it was kind of more like personal. Yeah. Yeah. But he declares him like a victory of the evil communist and vessels who have been

like a young hero of the Nazi movement. They find a poem in horse's house that he had written about like the Nazi party. They set it to song and it becomes the official theme song, like theme music of the Nazi party. And it is for the remainder of the time that the Nazis exist. The horse vessel light. I think light means song or whatever. Yeah. You know who won't become, who didn't write the theme song that became the Nazis, the Nazi song, none of the following goods and services. I told Sophie years ago, no ads from horse vessel. Yep. We will not accept them. Nope. And the fact that he's been dead for close to a century has certainly helped us in that. Yeah. I'm very proud that we've stuck to that line. Me too.

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 Aaronson 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 on the good and bad ass

way and nasty sharks. 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. 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 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. We're back. Okay, so we're talking about ol' Horst Vessel. So, yeah, Goebbels declares him to be a martyr to the Hitlerist cause and all this good stuff. His poem is set to music. It becomes the theme song of the old Nazis. And they have a big, huge Goebbels plays for them to have like a massive funeral, an imitation of like the state funerals that are given the national heroes for this kid who was just like a gang member, basically. And of course, the funeral is... I'm sorry, he wrote a poem,

so I would prefer it if you update your description of him as a Nazi slash poet. Nazi poet gang member. Thank you. Yeah. So, his funeral is briefly interrupted by some communists who throw stones at the Nazis. Not really a lot, like literally just a couple of stones. But the Nazis play that up, too, is like, look at how horrible these communists are. They won't even let us have a funeral. And it works. Horst's death radicalizes a lot of Germans for the Nazis. It's considered to be like his funeral and everything are considered to be sizable inflection points for the Nazi cause. It really kind of spells a death blow for like the left-wing street fighting movements, the anti-fascist movements, not all of which were communists,

because right there's the German iron front, which is like the social democratic street fighting gang, which is where you get, if you've ever seen the three arrows spray painted anywhere, that's the iron front symbol. And the arrows each represent anti-church, anti-communist and anti-fascist, right? Like, it was a whole bunch of things they were against. So like, yeah, the iron front, but they all get kind of lumped in as communists and socialists by the Nazis. And Horst's death and funeral kind of spells the end for them. And I feel like everyone who's heard this, if you're at all familiar with anything I've been talking about, you're probably already comparing what happened to Horst to what happened to Aaron J. Danielson,

the member of Patriot Prayer who was shot dead last month in Portland on his way home from a pro-Trump rally, right? Like, you have to see some of the comparisons. Danielson was killed by a pro BLM activist who had declared himself 100% Antifa on social media, although I can tell you he had a lot of really negative dealings with a lot of anti-fascists, I know, because anyway, it's a complicated story. Now, immediately after Danielson was shot, the president began recasting him as a right-wing hero. And national media gave long interviews to Coke-addled Patriot Prayer members and Patriot Prayer associates, people that I've been covering for years and never thought I would see on national news like Haley Adams, who's a local white

supremacist, wild that all these people wound up on TV. And of course, the Proud Boys took this as an opportunity to announce a Justice for J rally, which was the thing that we just got over and survived in Portland. And obviously, like, it's, it's, we're very lucky that things have not, it doesn't, it seems like maybe, I don't know why it is, but, but Danielson's death did not turn into the kind of thing horse vessels death did. It didn't get that kind of traction. You know, I don't, I don't know if it's due to aspects of our media culture that nothing gets that much traction, that Trump is too much of a narcissist to really let the focus be on anyone else. I don't know why it is, but you can see that when I, when I, when that first

happened, I was worried that we were going to see that because the reality is that actually, there's a lot of similarities between Danielson shooting and horse shooting, including the fact that Danielson also had a gun, like he was prowling through the streets of Portland with a nine millimeter handgun and 76 rounds of ammunition loaded into extended magazines, which is not like what you carry for self-defense. Maybe you don't. Okay. But there's like 76 people at least that hate me. So I never leave the house with less than 76 bullets. I mean, I, I, I feel comfortable walking outdoors with usually between 12 and 24 rounds of nine millimeter. And I'm pretty paranoid. And apparently you are well more liked than me. Way more well liked. Sorry.

There are those some similarities, some weird ones, including the fact that like the Rhino, the guy who shot Danielson claimed that it was in self-defense, that like one of the people with him pulled a knife and that, you know, they all had firearms and like they did all have firearms. There's other reports that one of the people with it. It's, it's, it's again, it's this kind of like this murky shooting that you don't really know exactly what happened and it gets used politically. And I guess we're lucky enough that it doesn't seem to have worked the way, the way horse vessels death did. Maybe it's because Jay didn't write any poems. I don't know. Maybe no landlady's were involved. Definitely no landlady's involved. I do feel confident

staying saying that. The crucial difference. Like it's entirely, there's a very good chance that the guy who shot Danielson, that it was like a targeted hit. Like I don't know. Some of the pictures do indicate that, but yeah, it's a complicated, it's a complicated story. But I couldn't help thinking about it whenever I think about the story of horse whistle. Now the, the, yeah, Horst is, again, you said it right. He's kind of a medium Nazi and he believed strongly in fascism. But the kind of people who were moved by his death and who like sort of switched, again, 1930s pretty late to get on board with the Nazis, but the kind of people who were, who were frightened as a result of his death of the communists in turn towards the Nazis, they weren't true believers in

the same way. Most of them weren't believers, you know, the little Nazis weren't really believers in anything, but their own comfort and security. They were, you know, the thing that united them is that they were malleable enough to get behind fascism when they thought that it was the thing that would keep them safe and secure in their position in society. And there's a, there's a really good line from one of Meyer's Nazi friends, a cabinet maker named Klingelholfer, quote, inside the system, you see the benefits outside it. When you are not benefited by it, you see the faults, I suppose. That's the way it is in Russian now. That's the way it is everywhere, always. Is it not? For all this, we thank our leader, the kids said in school. Now they said,

for this, we thank America. If communism comes, they'll say, for this, we thank Stalin. That's the way men are. And I find that unsettling and interesting. And it kind of goes to the point that like, while the Nazis never attained a majority in any electoral sense, as soon as Hitler came to power and started actually delivering on some of the things he'd promised to them, including jobs and a rebuilt military and retaking the Sudetenland and stuff, everyone got behind him. And they didn't get behind him because they were convinced about like the, again, the stuff everyone obsesses over the weird racial theories the Nazis had, Nazis had, they got behind him because they were inside the system and it was protecting them.

And so would most people, which is fun to think about. So, I mean, to me, I guess one of the things that strikes me is like, it's very easy to make anything sound like the worst thing in the world. And it, of course, it makes sense that it's interchangeable for people, whether something is the worst thing in the world or the best thing in the world. I can tell you, as someone that has lived under communism, that there were some great things about it, like socialized medicine, you know, so I'm not going to say, I'm not going to say like really radical ass shit, because I think it's pretty easy to see when you live in a system, even from outside, that everybody like, has in America been taught like forever communism is like the biggest threat. It's so horrible.

So nobody likes to hear that there's like, you know, even the most terrible thing has some good things about it. And then I think it clouds people's judgment to think that like, even the thing that they love could eventually become terrible. But that's just how it is. Yep. Yep. Yep. And it's like, it's a thing we all need to keep in mind. Because like, once you're, if you're protected by the system, in the way that like, we all, we both are currently as white people to a degree, protected by the system. Yep. It's very easy to turn that into ignoring what happens to people outside the system, because not doing that, you know, when you care about people at the border, outside the border of your system, then that puts you at risk. Because like,

then you're then you're upsetting the apple cart. And that's, you know, that actually brings me to what I think might be one of the most unsettling parts of Meyer's book, which is, it's the story of an anti-fascist activist who became a member of the Nazi party. A friend of his named Heinrich Hildemrand, who was the school teacher, and he joined the Nazi party late in 1937. So Hitler had been in power about as long as Trump has been when this guy joins the Nazi party. And Hildemrand was not even really a convert to the Nazi party. He again, had been a Nazi, anti-Nazi street activist, and he eventually converted because he was he was afraid for his own life. Meyer writes, quote, he may not have been the only one of my 10 friends who was afraid

not to join, but he was the only one of them who knew then and now and says so that fear was his reason, fear and advantage, but how he said is one to separate them. He had been an anti-Nazi, an active moderate Democrat in East Prussia before he came quietly to Hesse in 1935 and his past uneasily buried, got a job teaching literature. So that's really scary to me to think about somebody who could join the Nazi party as an anti-Nazi activist, knowing it's the wrong thing to do purely for, because you're scared for your own life, because a lot of people will do that. A lot of people who have come out into the streets now, if things really went as bad as they might, would do that because at the end of the day, that's what people do is try to protect themselves and

their family. Yeah. And I guess that's not so surprising that someone would join a party like that to protect their own life. What might be more surprising and definitely is more unsettling is that once Hildebrandt got inside the Nazi party and he found he kind of liked fascism. I was just going to say, did he fall in love? Yeah. This is a classic, meek, cute, romantic comedy. Yeah. I could never. Oh my God, do I actually love it? Fascism, actually. Yeah. Oh. Still starring Hugh Grant. I'm going to read another, I'm going to read another quote from Meyer's book here. Perhaps he said, it was because I wanted unconsciously to justify what I had done. If so, I succeeded.

But I say it now too, and I know it now. There were good things, great things in the system, and the system was itself was evil. For instance, Meyer asked, you mean about the evils Hildebrandt responded? No, I know about those said Meyer about the good things, the great things. Hildebrandt responded, perhaps I should make it singular instead of plural, the good thing. For the first time in my life, I felt I was really the peer of men who in the Kaiser's time and in the Weimar time had always belonged to classes lower or higher than my own. Men whom one had always looked down on or up to but never at. In the labor front, which is like the Nazi workers organization, I represented the teachers association. I came to know such people at first

hand to know their lives and to have them know mine. Even in America, perhaps I have never been there. I suspect that the teacher who talks about the common people has never known one, really known one, not even if he himself came from among them as I with an army officer as a father did not. National socialism broke down that separation, that class distinction. Democracy, such democracy as we had, didn't do it and is not doing it now. That's interesting to me that that's what brought this guy on board with Nazism is the the feeling as he described it of absolute equality. And he told Meyer that like really the thing that got him was my inferiors accepted me. That's so sad. Yeah. Also similar to what people found in communism. Yeah. Yeah.

This breaking down of these barriers that were incredibly stressful to keep up in German society was to talk about extents that we can't make comparisons between what happened in Germany and what's happening here. There were actually hard barrier. If you were a professor in Germany in this period of time, there was almost an absolute wall of social separation between you and any kind of working person. They would see you as elevated beyond being someone they could just talk to and likewise. And that was a thing that Nazism did was kind of try to build this people's racial community, Volksgemeinschaft, that unified the people who were in together in one group. And this this school teacher, who again knew enough to be an anti-fascist activist,

founded intoxicating once he was inside, found being a part of this in group to be irresistible and misted afterwards, even though he knew all of his life that the Nazi party was evil. That that's fucked up. That's so fucked. It's not great. No. Perceived equality is a hell of a drug. It is. It is. And you think about like I've been to a Trump rally, like and you you feel that kind of social atmosphere there, you know, it just seems like you're sick of being bullied so you become the bully. Yeah. And it's also this feeling that the people who are as opposed to this feeling that like the people in charge are like are in some way a gust that there's something there's something like special and powerful about the offices they hold this feeling that they're

they're just like you. It's like when everybody made fun of Trump's fast food feast for those football players. I'm sure the football players wish they'd gotten some fancy food, but like Trump's voters loved that because it it may it brought him down to their level. He's good at that. Like people wonder how can a billionaire like attract those people? It's because of shit like that. It worked. Yeah. The whole thing about oh, anyone can be president. That is the appealing thing to people who are his supporters. It's like, well, yeah, it's sure he's an idiot or he has he doesn't know about this or he doesn't listen to his advisors like they're like he acts exactly how I would if I was president. Exactly. Oh, oh, he didn't he doesn't read any of the reports.

I wouldn't either. I'd also make people write me a memo and that I would only read the first sentence of that memo or yeah, of course I would tweet whenever and like call into Fox news with just like any random thought because like, of course, I'll do anything I want. And I think that is what they love. They're like, oh, yeah, that's literally what the fuck I would do if I was president, which is whatever the fuck I want. Yep. Cool stuff. So yeah. And in kind of the same vein, like kind of on this same vein, like we talked about like Trump lowering himself, making the presidency seem more accessible to the kind of people who vote for him. Another thing that both he and the Nazi party really did have in common in terms of like

things that they ran on and things that made them appealing to, you know, the same kind of person is attacking and deriding experts, right? And the idea of expertise that's been a huge part of the Trump administration, a huge part of Trump's what he's campaigned on. It's one of the things that's biting him in the ass now as he gets COVID-19 is his kind of contempt for expertise. But it's shared by a lot of these people who don't like like the idea that a doctor could tell them what to do, could tell them to wear a face mask or something just because he went to some fancy school for a while. And that was a thing that you very much saw in Weimar Germany among the little Nazis. Nazis and wrote into power by harnessing a strong anti-intellectual current

among very low-class Germans. Meyer writes that probably six or seven out of 10 of his Nazi friends saw quote-unquote intellectuals as fundamentally unreliable and untrustworthy people and academics were the least trustworthy. This sat very well with the little Nazis who resented those with higher education. And this next paragraph from Meyer's book resonates more strongly with America in 2020 than almost any other passage in the book. Quote, Nazism as it proceeded from practice to theory had to deny expertness in thinking and then the second process was never completed in order to fill the vacuum had to establish expert thinking of its own. That is to find men of inferior or irresponsible caliber whose views conformed dishonestly or worse yet honestly to the party line.

The non-political pastors satisfied Nazi requirements by being non-political. But the non-political schoolmaster was, by the very virtue of being non-political, a dangerous man from the start. He himself would not rebel, nor would he, if he could help it, teach rebellion. But he could not help being dangerous. Not if he went on teaching what was true. In order to be a theory and not just a practice, national socialism required the destruction of academic independence. And of course we can draw some lines to that shit right now, right? Like the Trump just gave an executive order about patriotic education and banning certain types of historical education from schools. Like we're seeing a lot of this. Yeah, and also the fact that like no

shit Jews got the shit out of the end of the stick in Germany. They were a lot of the intellectuals and a lot of the educated because of their place in German society and the importance of education and learning in the Jewish community. And it was a way, in a kind of bitter irony, part of like why that was such a preferred path for Jewish people in Germany is because they saw it as a way of, same thing with military service, a way of gaining acceptance in a culture that was kind of hostile to them. It's like, well, but if I become a professor, there's respect with that. And then people will respect me as a Jewish man and people will maybe respect my people more. And it's, I mean, you can, there's a reason why black people and Hispanic people would also

like LGBT people serve in the military at a much higher rate than the general population. It's because there's respect in that from pretty much all corners of society. And it's just this thing, it's a thing a lot of people do kind of instinctively when you're part of a disadvantaged and targeted group is you seek the protection that respect gives you. Yep, good stuff. So in my episode of the non-Nazi bastards behind Hitler, I referenced Dorothy Thompson, who's a really interesting person to study. She was a journalist who reported from Germany in its last free days before the war. She was forced out of the country. She was also married to the guy who wrote It Can't Happen Here, that famous book about like what an American fascist would look like.

Yeah, she wrote a really good article after getting kicked out of Germany and returned to the U.S. called Who Goes Nazi? Question mark. And the whole thing is set. It's her at a dinner party looking at all of the attendees and thinking in her head, which one of them will support the American equivalent of the Nazi party if it comes here. And like trying to decide like which aspects of their personality would make them vulnerable to doing that. It's a very interesting article. And there's one quote from it in particular that I want to read. And this is her kind of mulling on what makes people Nazis. Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work, a type of education, feeding and physical training, which has produced a new kind of human being with

an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected. I just think about a lot of proud boys when I hear that. Yeah. So now, wait a minute, but physically vigorous? Yeah. A lot of them are like a lot of real buff dudes do that shit. Like huge, big, young people. Yeah. Yeah. Like very like large. The kind of person we call a chud colloquial. Yes. Right. Of course. You should have said that. Yeah. Yeah. She's talking about chuds. She's defining chuds here.

She's not the only one. Mussolini's favorite philosopher, a guy named Giovanni Gentile, noted of fascists we think with our blood. And he was not making, I don't think, a racial statement there. He was instead acknowledging, because this was an Italian fascist and they were kind of less on the racial thing, he was acknowledging that violence of action, relentless, aggressive physicality was a key attribute for the kind of men who became fascists. Thinking and consideration were effeminate and shameful. Or as the proud boys say today, fuck around and find out. Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay. Yep. That's part one. We're going to talk about the Holocaust a lot in part two. So I hope you're looking forward to that. Thanks as always

for inviting me for that. Oh yeah. It's going to be a lot of dead babies next episode. Thank you, Robert. Can't think of strapping. Can't talk about dead babies without you, self. We can, but I feel guilty. Yeah. I feel ashamed. Yeah. Yeah. I guess thanks, you guys for having my back. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's it. All right. Hell yeah. Do you have any writer die, Sophia, writer die? Do you have any plug, plug, plug, plug, plugables? I sure do. I have an album out called Father's Day. It's fucking hilarious. Thank you so much on any of the platforms. You can also just buy it on my website, sophiealexandra.com. So that's it.

Well, you can find Sophia and you should do that. Don't find me. I am, I am hiding now. Yes. This has been the episode. 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.