Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Alfred Hugenberg: The Elon Musk of Weimar Germany

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

World War 1 has begun, and Robert walks Amanda through how Alfred Hugenberg bought up the German media to make the case the the war should go on for ever, and then how he backed the Nazi party and ushered Hitler into power when that didn't go well for some reason. Sources: The Pan German League by Barry Jackisch https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/hitler-oligarchs-hugenberg-nazi/681584/ The Fateful Alliance by Hermann Beck https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/modern-world-history-1918-to-1980/weimar-germany/  https://corporatecitizen.in/issue3/corporate-history-mercedes-was-hitler%E2%80%99s-idea.html  https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-75512-5_1  https://www.topfundsoehne.de/ts/en/site/history/index.html  https://archive.org/details/alfredhugenbergr0000leop/page/11/mode/1up  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Oh boy howdy, we're back having a good time and everything's good. We're podcasting about Alfred Hugenberg, a great asshole who at this point in time has helped make World War I a reality, which you know, I hope to one day make World War I a reality, which, you know, I hope to one day make World War I a reality. So you are, you're keeping its memory alive. Every day, every day. I, as soon as this call finishes, Amanda Montell, our great guest and the author of Coltis, as soon as we finished this recording, I'm going to get back on the phone with Emmanuel

Macron over in France and try to sell him some new machine guns, you know What that moment that that moment when you become your podcast that's right Where do you end and it begins? Look subject verb agreement. I don't know. What's the one thing everyone agreed in in 19 on in 1913? And today too many young people in Europe, you know, we're gonna we're gonna knock that problem out right away Just make a new Western front Exactly, exactly, you know, it's good for the economy It's a hero destroys the whole thing

economy. It's terrible. It destroys the whole thing. Have you ever wondered if your pet is lying to you? Why is my cat not here? And I go in and she's eating my lunch. Or if hypnotism is real? We will use this suggestion in order to enhance your cognitive control. What's inside a black hole? Black holes could be a consequence of the way that we understand the universe. Well, we have answers for you in the new iHeart original podcast, Science Stuff. Join me, Jorge Cham, as we tackle questions you've always wanted to know the answer to

about animals, space, our brains, and our bodies. Questions like, can you survive being cryogenically frozen? This is experimental. This means never work for you. What's a quantum computer? It's not just a faster computer. It performs in a fundamentally different way. Do you really have to wait 30 minutes after eating before you can go swimming?

It's not really a safety issue. It's more of a comfort issue. We'll talk to experts, break it down, and give you easy-to-understand explanations to fascinating scientific questions. So give yourself permission to be a science geek and listen to science stuff on the iHeart Video app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Tariff Whiplash is real, folks. In rapidly changing economic policies, they affect all of us to one degree or another.

Trump 1.0, so that was more tariff talk. Now we are experiencing the widespread tariff action. Totally scattershot, totally random. The theory, Matt, I think is that we're trading short-term pain for long-term gain. That's the tariff theory, at least. But I have a hard time envisioning the long game rosy outcomes if these policy priorities kind of continue. It can be hard to know how to react to news of accelerating layoffs, increasing stock

market volatility. That's why the How to Money podcast exists. We cut through the hype to give you crucial information that can help you to achieve your money goals, no matter what is going on in the world. Yeah, it's our goal to help you make wise money choices that will allow you to build wealth over time and reduce anxiety levels so you can sleep well at night. How to Money comes out three times a week,

but our Friday Flight episodes speak directly to what's happening in the financial news so you can digest this week's headlines without freaking out. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine you're scrolling through TikTok. You come across a video of a teenage girl and then a photo of the person suspected of killing her. And I was like, what? Like it was him? I was like, oh my God. It was shocking. It was very shocking.

I'm Jen Swan. I'm a journalist in Los Angeles, and I've spent the past few years investigating the story behind the viral posts and the extraordinary events that followed. I started investing my time to get her justice. They put out something on social media, so I'd get calls in the middle of the night all the time. It's like, how do you think you're gonna get away

with something like this? Like you killed somebody. It's the story of how and why a group of teenagers turn to social media to help track down their friend's killer. This is their story. This is my friend Daisy. Listen to My Friend Daisy on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream. It happened in Levittown, New York. But reporting the series took us through the darkest corners of the internet and to the front lines of a global battle against deepfake pornography.

This should be illegal, but what is this? This is a story about a technology that's moving faster than the law and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide. I'm Margie Murphy. And I'm Olivia Carville. This is Levertown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope.

Listen to Levertown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are at the point at which World War I is underway. Millions of boys are dying in an industrial form of slaughter heretofore unknown to the human race. And as Germany feeds its future into a steel maw of British and French bullets,

Alfred Hugenberg has an idea. Now the job he's working at this point is pretty close to what we'd call a hedge fund manager today, right? Not in terms of the way he's moving his money, but in the fact that he is the guy who other rich people give their cash to, and he tells them what to do with it

in order to make the most of it, right? And he's always been very bullish on German expansion. That's kind of his whole deal. Like, what if we had more Germany? And he's always felt like Germany deserved a bigger piece of the pie that was Africa. And at this point, World War I, arguably Germany's best military commander

of the entire war is in Africa, like a very actually like actually innovative insurgent kind of commander, running a truly ingenious insurgent campaign. After the initial first few weeks of heavy advances through Belgium and Eastern France, everything gets bogged down for the German army in the West. Africa is going to be one of those places that Germans can look to for like the kind of glorious martial stories of military cunning and courage that make good propaganda.

Cause like, and then another boy died in the mud, not great stories, you know? Not super inspiring, right? So true. So Hugenberg is like, naturally, when we Germans win this war, we're gonna need to expand our African possessions. And for an idea of what it would have looked like had Hugenberg got his wishes, we don't

have to look back much further than like the period that we're in right now, 1914. In fact, we just have to go back to January of 1904, which is when the Herero people of modern day Namibia, led by a chief named Samuel Maharero, launched a rebellion against their German colonizers. So Germany already has Namibia, Hugenberg is looking at, because he wants to take basically British African possessions and make them German. And what had happened 10 years before this in Namibia was the Herero had rebelled, they'd killed about 120-something German settlers. And the Germans had responded by bringing the armed might of, they have the most powerful

army on the planet at the time, to bear against these guys who don't have an army. They just have some men who are warriors, right? So it's not like a military with like an industrial state behind it. And this does not go well for the Herrero. And the actual fighting, the battle is won quite quickly because the Germans have artillery. And as a general rule, if one side has artillery and the other side has not that, the side with artillery wins. This is one of the fun rules of warfare.

That's been generally true. German soldiers pursued the fleeing civilians after they kind of break the fighting forces. They continue to pursue, cause like the Herrero flee, they try to get the fuck out of Namibia, right? Sure. And these colonial soldiers pursue these fleeing civilians

into the desert and massacre thousands of them, a mix of just shooting them to death en masse and poisoning their wells. So they'll be in like the desert and they'll poison like a water supply to kill more of them. Oh my God. It's a genocide. This is a genocide. Yeah. This is universally recognized as a genocide, you know, like, like Germany was doing genocides well before Hitler got into power, right? And around this time, they're also gonna have a hand in the Armenian genocide during World War I. So they're not clean on that either. In October of 1904, a German commander gave this order to Herero civilians seeking to return home to Namibia. Quote, within the German borders, every male Herero, armed or unarmed, will be

shot to death. I will no longer take in women or children, but I will drive them back to their people or have them fired at. These are my words to the Herrero people from the great general of the mighty German Kaiser. Okay, wait, I have a question. So one of the like mind blow moments for me from our part one was the context that so much of German nationalism hinged on them

being jealous of Britain's colonization of various territories. Oh, yeah. Were there still though, Germany's attitude seems especially belligerent. Like they were there other nations that had like newly embraced nationalism around this time that aspired to the level of colonization and brutality that Germany was executing? A great example would be Japan,

who is starting to colonize right around, I mean, in World War I, they take a bunch of German possessions. This is a big part of Japanese colonial expansion and they're going to be hideously genocidal everywhere the Empire of Japan spreads to. Obviously the British have been doing colonizing a lot longer, but one of the first big acts of British colonialism was to kill by some counts, tens of millions of people in Bengal through a famine that was largely the result of business choices made by a British corporation. So the fact that Germans get a colony in Namibia and almost immediately do a genocide, this

is very much the norm, right? Okay. This is like a playbook. Shit. Okay. This is not at all like a freak incident. This is not just the Germans, right? This is a product of... Yeah, yeah. This is not at all like a freak incident. This is not just the Germans, right? This is a product of-

Yeah, yeah. This is just how colonialism always works. Yeah, yeah, for sure. But Hugenberg is aware of what the Germans are doing in Namibia. This is reported on, and his whole attitude is, we need to be doing this to way more of Africa to make room for a bunch of German farmers. You know? Let's get on it.

We've got better guns than these people. Wiping them out will be no problem. So when he talks about needing to expand to Africa, I just, I wanted to tell that story because that's what he's talking about, right? Now Africa, things are, I wouldn't say they're going well for Germany in the war, but it's one of the areas where they can take a lot of pride because they've got this like very innovative commander doing very innovative things over there that's a lot sexier than what's happening on the Western front past a point.

The other big win the Germans had had right at the start of the war was that they had conquered Belgium. This is actually a big part of why they lose the war on a strategic level because Belgium is an independent neutral nation. The Germans take Belgium because they need it as a road to get to France because this plan they have says that that's the best way to do these things. And the British are like, if you go through Belgium, maybe we don't have a dog in this fight, but if you go through Belgium, then you're going to be fucking with us, right? And they go through Belgium and the British get involved, right? So this is, it's one of those things where the Germans are very proud to have a Belgium,

but also it kind of is a big part of what fucks them over. But Hugenberg is not really thinking about that at the time. He sees Belgium as an investment opportunity and he's very glad to have it. And he sees the same as, you know, Germany has taken a good deal of French territory at this point and Eastern France, which includes this one reason regional like Southeast France that Germany has occupied is where they the French keep a big chunk of their minds, right? It's like a heavily resourced in this region, right? So he's looking at these new conquests and seeing them as permanent. Even though the war is very much in doubt, he's like, the smart man needs to be thinking, how are we going to take advantage of this?

What are we going to turn these new possessions that we have as a people into? As the war grinds forward, the Pan-Germanic League works overtime, propagandizing that these new conquests are now German territory forever by right of blood. And no peace can even be negotiated if giving up Belgium or any French territory is required. This is a big part. A lot of people wonder, well, it became very quickly obvious. No one's going to win this easily. It is bleeding everyone white. You're all wiping out whole generations of young men to fight this war. why don't we just stop, right? And a big part of why is the allies,

Britain and France are like, well, okay, we'd be happy to end the war. I'm not, they're not initially like this, but there's a lot of willingness to end the war, but Germany has to give up the places they took, right? Like you can just keep all this France, like fuck you. You can just keep all this France, like fuck you. You can just keep Belgium. And the Germans, and this is a big part of why the German state and the Kaiser refused to go along

with this is you've got this very influential Pan-Germanic League being like absolutely under no circumstances can we compromise on these territories, right? Again, that's not all of why this happens, but they're not a small part of why there is no willingness to compromise, which could have ended the war at least a year or two earlier. Maybe in a way that would have been less overall calamitous to the German economy, because a negotiated peace wouldn't have involved Germany completely surrendering. Maybe they would have had to give back a bunch of this territory,

but they could have maintained being a functional state and not had, it wouldn't have been like a Treaty of Versailles situation, right? Potentially it's a much better future, but Hugenberg and his ideological simpaticos are like, the fuck, give up Belgium? We have all sorts of plans for Belgium, you know? The overconfidence, man. I get it. As an Italian man, my natural enemy is the Belgian, you know?

As Caesar said, all Gaul is divided into three parts. And one of those motherfucking parts is the Belgians. And I got to quarrel with them. I'm still hoping to take Belgium one day. I think I could. I think I could. As an Italian, I thought your number one enemy was not eating lunch.

Yeah, not eating lunch, seven hour dinners, the Persians. Yeah, we have a lot of enemies, we Italians. So many enemies. Also, healthcare CEOs apparently, anyway. Ah, yes. The Italians, they're everywhere and they're doing all sorts of things. Our most famous Italian.

Oh my God, is that true? Is that the most famous Italian at the moment? I mean, he's gotta be, right? Who's the most, what Italian is more famous than that guy right now? Ooh. Berlusconi? I know.

Absolutely not. No, no way. I feel like Luigi has even overtaken, like, the Luigi from Mario, which that, he's that's that's He's definitely he's more famous than Mussolini now, which I gotta say is a huge win for Italian Americans, you know What a weird what a weird PR A lot better these days. Now, you got to remember, so the war is on. While he's a part of this group that's pushing, we can't give any of this up,

his job is running this organization made up of all of the rich guys with minds and arms companies, pooling some of their money together. This organization is called the Siegenverbund and it's an association of industrial businesses, mines, and crop. There's companies like Krupp in there too. So it's not just raw material producers, it's people who use those raw materials. And basically just everybody with a big business in the Ruhr, in this industrial heartland region. The Siegenverbund had been founded in 1908

to represent their common interests. In pre-war, this had mainly meant fucking with labor unions. And up through the end of the war, the Zickenverbund was successful at ensuring no one mine union could work with any other mine union, right? They basically made sure legislatively, unions could not ally, right?

So that you can strike at one mine or one factory, but you can't organize any kind of general strike. And the Ziegenverbund also had a strike fund, but for mine owners themselves. So that if the workers at any mine went on strike, other mines that were their competitors would pay to keep them going because it was more important to fight the labor, right? Now that the war's going on, there's suddenly a lot more on the line than just like, you know, fucking with labor unions.

The good news for these guys is that profits fucking soar because Germany needs a lot more weapons now, right? The people making the raw materials that become bullets and cannons, they're doing great. The people making the weapons are great. This is a good time to have stock in crup. Hugenberg helped gently direct the eyes of his hungry fellow mine owner, or of these hungry mine owners towards all of the territory in France and Belgium that they might be able to exploit in the future. He's like, hey guys, I know we're making bank now. The war's got to end someday, but we just got all this new French territory.

Lot of mines there, Belgium, lot of mining potential in Belgium. We should start investing now in being able to take advantage of that once the war ends and we still own all it. And so from Hugenberg's perspective, the thing he is most frightened of in 19 late 1914, 1915, 1916, the thing that scares him is peace. Because if peace goes wrong, he's going to lose a lot of investments that he started to make. Right? Okay. So this is my question. Like just sort of nervous system wise, I can't relate at all to these motherfuckers because-

Well, you shouldn't, they're monsters, they're ghouls. For sure. But even if I'm like at my most empathetic and I'm like, let me get into the mind and body of an arty type just to see what's making him tick. I can't, I still can't understand how one could reconcile wanting wartime and wanting conflict because it will be good for your wallet. But like we're not.

I yeah, I just don't get it how it works. Part of it is because they also tell themselves, we're not being selfish, we're patriots, and this will be better for Germany, right? The sacrifice is worth it for Germany. And justify the means philosophy. But the other thing, I think if you wanna keep, if you wanna get into your head

how these people can be so greedy. I think there's a micro way of kind of looking at it. There was a time, I'm sure in your life, Amanda, the same is true of me, same is gonna be true of most people listening, where you made a lot less money than you currently make, right? You know, when you're 19 or whatever.

Yeah, yeah. You survived, right? You paid rent and you ate food, right? Now you make, I'm presuming more money than you did when you were 18 or 19, and you're still surviving, but you also probably still have a lot of things, like have a lot of economic anxiety, even though you have a lot more, which is very

common. Totally. And that psychological process doesn't stop just because you have more money than you can ever spend. Yeah. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Especially if you grew up without much.

We're not rich enough to get to the- Exactly. Right, right. Right, right. Right, like if you get a billion dollars, statistically the thing you wanna do most, most people, not everyone, like Tom from MySpace seems to have avoided this, but statistically, a lot of people who get a billion dollars, the main thing on their mind is now I wanna get two, I need to get 10, I need to get, right?

Like that's just kind of like, you know, it's why, again, it's why you need to have like societal restrictions that stop people from accumulating like that, because once the process starts mentally, very few people can avoid continuing down that road, even to some extent, even if they're reasonably good people ahead of time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like it's just kind of- No, that's so true. It's a drug, it's a drug. It's like giving someone heroin,, that's so true. It's a drug. It's a drug. It's like giving someone heroin, right? Sometimes people- Yes. You give them heroin, they might get addicted even if they don't want to, because that's

what drugs do. Yeah. I know. It just keeps reminding me of, I mean, obviously we have cultural lessons and axioms and proverbs that try to convince us to resist those impulses. And the one I always think of is that Edward Abbey quote that's like growth for growth sake is the ideology of a cancer cell. Yes, absolutely.

It's so hard to internalize. It is. And again, and that's why there's gotta be just actual, like you have to, at the kind of collective level, make rules to stop that. Because individual people, not that no one can avoid this, because there are people who have strong enough

senses of self and moral centers that the option won't get that bridge, won't let it happen. But usually this does not happen. The Hugenberg route where people are like, cause again, you have to, again, to go back to the heroin comparison, the amount of money they start making because of the war,

like they don't wanna give that up, period, right? Like that is, this is- It's like Pavlov's dog. It's like if money comes because of war, let's do more war. Delicious, delicious, I love it all. Yes. So, Hugenberg convinces these guys,

the only threat to our future profits is peace, particularly the wrong sort of peace. And if we wanna make that impossible, I need you to give me some of your money and we're gonna start buying up newspapers, right? Because that's how we can stop, we can kill the peace movement. Because from the beginning, once this war starts wiping out generations of young men,

there's a lot, there's an anti-war movement brewing, even within Germany, a pretty sizable one. And they're like, this is all the fault of Bolshevik propaganda. We need to start buying the newspapers and then we can convince everyone their son's dying is a good idea. So the four largest of the companies that are in this organization that Hugenberg's heading, the Zeichenverbund, including Krupp, which is still managed by Hugenberg, send representatives to act as spokesmen for the creation of a private association, the Wirtschaftliche

Gesellschaft. And this is a trust fund regularly topped off by profits from war profiteers and used to quote, countermand threatening dangers in the economic and social fields. Leopold and his biography of Hugenberg continues. Through the use of diverse bank accounts and holding companies administered by additional trustees, Hugenberg and these industrial leaders masked their control. The Ausland, established in 1914, became one of their key corporations.

The Wirtschaftsdienst GmbH, incorporated in May of 1916, concealed investments made for the improvement of economic news service and the management of press corporations. A third firm, the Deutsche Gewerbehaus AG, established in February of 1917, officially managed funds for the erection of business offices for the varied associations of German industry. Its larger purpose, however, was to participate in various businesses and measures which appeared suitable to the corporation for the advancement of general German industrial and national interests.

So they are buying up newspapers and they're creating organizations to manage newspapers as a group. And they're hiding through these shell companies the creating organizations to manage newspapers as a group. They're hiding through these shell companies the fact that they own all of these papers and that it's Hugenberg pulling the strings. This of course means you need to bribe a lot of people and you need to make the kind of investments that act as bribes. But a large chunk of the tens of millions of Reichsmarks that are raised in this period are put towards the purchase directly of media organs.

The fund set its BDIs in a large Berlin publishing house, the August Scherl Company, named after a right-wing newspaper entrepreneur. He was basically the equivalent of the German William Randolph Hearst or the guy who created the Daily Mail back in the UK. He's that kind of guy. These are conservative papers. This is like the Fox News of its day in Germany. Murdoch situation. These guys buy it. The Shirl Company's two big publications are Der Tag, which is for intellectuals

in the capital, and Berliner Lokal Anziger, which is about 10 times larger in terms of its readership and is aimed more at the working class Cheryl also ran a super Robert. Were you always this good at reading and pronouncing German words or has the podcast? People are gonna be talking so much shit about how I'm saying these things. Oh, I mean it sounds like super confident You're not even like fumbling. I I you know, I don't do well at this. I think people are going to be laughing at me. You've got to be convinced. You're pretty good at Ukrainian words, but other than that, you're terrible. I don't know if I'd say that, but-

Oh, does that say something about you? I don't know. That's fascinating. So Sheryl ran a bunch of small weekly papers all over the country, all of which are united only by a shared conservative view of reality and politics. And this stood in opposition. The August Scherl Company is the big conservative publisher. The two bigger publishers in Germany are the Rudolf Moss company, Mossack company, and

the Olstein company, both of which are pro-democratic and generally liberal. August Scherl, the company, had been profitable until 1914 when the war broke out because everything gets more expensive when the war breaks out. There's massive inflation. It's very difficult to afford to put out a newspaper. And part of why people stop reading the August Shirl publications in 1914 is that up to the war starting, they've been telling everyone, hey, this is gonna go great. You're gonna love the war. We're gonna be done in a couple of months. Everyone will be back at home by Christmas. And when that doesn't happen, people are like, well, maybe I don is gonna go great. You're gonna love the war. We're gonna be done in a couple of months. Everyone will be back at home by Christmas.

And when that doesn't happen, people are like, well, maybe I don't like this paper. Now that all four of my sons are dead, perhaps I will stop reading these guys. So, they're kind of, Hugenberg's able to buy this shit on the cheap in 1916 using these pooled industry funds. Now, by the time the August Sheryl company sells

to Hugenberg, things are bad enough that they need like 7 million marks just to settle their debt. And then there's, they got to put a couple, Hugenberg has to put a few million more into it in order to actually like invest so that the company can be profitable again. But he doesn't care.

Is that like chump change to him? Yes. He is all essentially a billionaire at this point, right? Like not literally, cause like nobody had that much at that point really, but he is essentially a billionaire. For our terms, he would have been a billionaire if we're kind of like adjusting shit, right?

Yeah, yeah. Sheryl agrees, cause again, this is chump change to him and he doesn't care about profits. His condition is that if he buys this thing and gets that out of debt, he has full absolute personal control over the publishing house and what they publish. So the Sherrill Company inks an agreement and Hugenberg puts one of his friends from the Pan-Germanic League in charge of the holding company that manages it. Instantly, Sherrill's papers go from being conservative

to adopting the exact same line on war aims that Hugenberg and his fellow war profiteers wanted. No peace unless we get everything. And also, no peace while there's a buck to be made. One of Hugenberg's friends laid out the motivation of this cartel in buying these papers very directly in a letter that says one of Hugenberg's friends writing in a letter about what they're doing.

Well, can't wait. The gentlemen, this is who he's writing to, should not believe that we were involved to have a good investment. We knew that nothing would come out of this and we wanted to have political influence for our money. In other words, we're not, we're gonna make money off of these.

This is a loss leader. It's like, you know, the daily world. We're gonna pump money into this, not because it'll make us money, but because it'll change the culture in a way that makes us money. Oh my God. They're poisoning wells in so many ways.

Yeah, they do the fucking, ah, the Germans and well poisoning, big well poisoning culture at this point in time. Huge. Uh, Ron, speaking of poisoning the well. Speaking of po- you know who loves poisoning? Nope. Uh, here's ads.

Have you ever wondered if your pet is lying to you? Why is my cat not here? And I go in and she's eating my lunch. Or if hypnotism is real? We will use this suggestion in order to enhance your cognitive control. What's inside a black hole? Black holes could be a consequence of the way that we understand the universe. Well, we have answers for you in the new iHeart original podcast, Science Stuff.

Join me, Jorge Cham, as we tackle questions you've always wanted to know the answer to about animals, space, our brains, and our bodies. Questions like, can you survive being cryogenically frozen? This is experimental. This means never work for you. What's a quantum computer? It's not just a faster computer. It performs in a fundamentally different way. Do you really have to wait 30 minutes after eating before you can go swimming? It's not really a safety issue. It's more of a comfort issue.

We'll talk to experts, break it down, and give you easy to understand explanations to fascinating scientific questions. So give yourself permission to be a science geek and listen to science stuff on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Tariff whiplash is real, folks. And rapidly changing economic policies, they affect all of us to one degree or another. Trump 1.0, so that was more tariff talk. Now we are experiencing the widespread tariff action. Totally scattershot,

totally random. The theory, Matt, I think is that we're trading short-term pain for long-term gain. That's the tariff theory, at least. But I have a hard time envisioning the long-game rosy outcomes if these policy priorities kind of continue. It can be hard to know how to react to news of accelerating layoffs, increasing stock market volatility. That's why the How to Money podcast exists. We cut through the hype to give you crucial information that can help you to achieve your money goals,

no matter what is going on in the world. Yeah, it's our goal to help you make wise money choices that will allow you to build wealth over time and reduce anxiety levels so you can sleep well at night. How to Money comes out three times a week, but our Friday Flight episodes speak directly to what's happening in the financial news so you can digest this week's headlines without freaking out. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Imagine you're scrolling through TikTok. You come across a video of a teenage girl and then a photo of the person suspected of killing her. And I was like, what? Like, it was him? I was like, oh my god. It was shocking. It was very shocking. I'm Jen Swan. I'm a journalist in Los Angeles and I've spent the past few years

investigating the story behind the viral posts and the extraordinary events that followed. I started investing my time to get her justice. They put out something on social media so I'd get calls in the middle of the night all the time. It's like, how do you think you're going to get away with something like this? Like, you killed somebody. It's the story of how and why a group of teenagers turned to social media to help track down

their friend's killer. This is their story. This is my friend Daisy. Listen to My Friend Daisy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI-fuelled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts

on my body parts that looked exactly like my own. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream. It happened in Levittown, New York. But reporting the series took us through the darkest corners of the internet and to the front lines of a global battle against deepfake pornography. This should be illegal, but what is this? This is a story about a technology that's moving faster than the law

and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide. I'm Margie Murphy. And I'm Olivia Carville. This is Levertown, a new podcast from I Heart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope. Listen to Levertown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back. And you know what? I just put strychnine in a well, and I gotta say, it feels good. You know, it's a hoot Doesn't hurt anybody except for the people who drink from the well and I don't know them So yeah, you know what? I get it. I I you know, I'm a German nationalist now long live the Kaiser Anyway, in addition to pushing an extreme Sophie you always say every time I try to give the Kaiser praise You just hate the Kaiserizers for some reason.

What about Kaiser Permanente? I wonder what, no, also no. Yeah, that's even worse than the last Kaiser. Yeah, that's a really bad Kaiser. I got the fuck out of that Kaiser. Some fucking guy sat down and was like, I wanna be a Kaiser, but I wanna kill more people than the last, I know, I'll become a health insurer.

Oh my God. Honestly, Kaiser Wilho would probably do a better job. Yeah, totally. I think I'm gonna go. What a nightmare. I think I'm gonna go from no. I think we should let him give it a shot. So in addition to pushing an extreme line on war aims, the papers were also set to the

task of attacking the left, which it defined as anyone supportive of democracy. Alfred didn't write his own propaganda, but he was very involved at the operational level, investing in several major papers to push them further right and also establishing a separate fund to shotgun money off to little nationalist papers all over the empire. So they're not just buying papers, they're giving away money to small independent papers to keep them afloat during World War I. So all of the centrist papers are going out of business because it's a terrible time to be in business in Germany.

So are a lot of the left-wing ones. But the right-wing press thrives because he's paying it with war money, right? Oh my God, oh my God. Is this what's happening in conservative media right now? Because I don't know if you- Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Or it's what was, the Daily Wire might be going bankrupt now,

but the oligarchs got what they needed out of them, right? Yeah, it's this thing of like, wow, it's hard to be an honest newspaper man trying to report accurately on things. And also those people are dangerous to us. What if we made the only profitable kind of news, right-wing news using our infinite monies? Yeah.

Oh my God, did you see that infographic or like some, I mean, I saw it in the form of an infographic talking about how like, yeah, the like biggest thought leaders and pundits right now, like podcasters are all conservative, except for like one exception, that being Trevor Noah. And I was just like, this feels like a conspiracy. Yeah, I mean, it was, it's just a very obvious one, right?

You put a lot of money into buying and building audiences. It's an obvious conspiracy. You get people on the boards of the social media companies, so they make sure the algorithms support it, same as it ever was. So Hugenberg's support of war aims that held German expansion as non-negotiable led him to back the political ambitions of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Eric Ludendorff, both of whom are going to be key players in Hitler's rise. Hindenburg is the guy who hands over control to Hitler when he dies, and Ludendorff is the general who marches with

Hitler during the Beer Hall Putsch. Now, by this point, and the war is still on right now, there's a huge anti-war movement, right? By 1917, a lot of Germans are like, what if we stopped killing our sons? We can call these the sane people. And so Hugenberg hates these folks and he helps develop and advertise a right-wing counterpart, the German Fatherland Party. Now the only real demand of the German Fatherland Party is that Germany should annex everything and keep fighting until the rest of Europe agrees to let them keep it. I really, I just, did you just stop?

That name is, I was triggered by that. I did not enjoy that name. That was bad. Yeah. It's okay. We're like three years away from the American fatherland party, Sophie. It's going to be great. I think we're already there.

We might be. Now, while he's also playing the part of arch propaganda baron of the right, Alfred starts taking investment money from his friends with the end goal of exploiting all of those resources Germany was definitely going to control entirely once the war ended. Per John Leopold, quote, he established three companies which would help Germany exploit Belgian resources. Similarly, at the end of 1917, he formed a company to develop the post-war settlement of French territory, which he expected the Reich to annex.

Much more elaborate plans were formulated for the colonization of the East, which were incorporated in 1918 after the Russian defeat. Now if you know your history, you know that investing in Germany continuing to control France, Belgium, and Western Russia in 1917, not a good investment. About to really, really go badly for Hugenberg. But I read this because by the end of World War I, he has become a bookie for war on a continental scale. He's taken everybody's cash, right?

Like this, you know, and they're in all the cash of the people who are betting on, we're gonna keep all this shit, right? Yeah. He takes in some 37 million marks And all the cash that the people who are betting on, we're gonna keep all this shit, right? Yeah, ugh, dumbass. He takes in some 37 million marks to establish cooperative funds aimed at settling German farmers on conquered land. And then of course, Germany loses the war.

Now again, it is 100% agreed by absolutely everyone, who every professional historian, every military historian, even the German ones, that Germany simply could not continue to fight. At the moment they made peace was the last moment they could have done it without the army shattering entirely and leaving a clear path to Berlin. By the way, without a full scale socialist revolution overtaking the country, and they almost have one anyway, Germany is absolutely out of gas.

They have fucking nothing left. But if you're looking at a map, like a dumb person, it looks like Germany gives up when they're winning. They're still in France. They still have Belgium and they've got a lot of Russian territory. Germany is the biggest it's ever been. It's the largest continental empire that I think had existed certainly since the era

of the Roman Empire. It might've been large. I don't recall precisely, but it looks really good on a map if you're not aware of the fact that all of their soldiers are about to drop dead where they're standing, right? Now, Hugenberg is not a dumb man. He understands the army literally could not have kept fighting, but he can't accept that intellectually, because that would mean that he'd been wrong. And he just is not the kind of guy who can be wrong.

No. So he convinces himself, we've been stabbed in the back. Somebody fucked this up for us. It wasn't me and the other people running this fucking country. And he sets his vast propaganda apparatus. He now controls the papers and he sets the papers to convincing the country of what we now call the big lie, right? Germany didn't lose because we got out fought and outlasted and we pissed off the Americans and boy, maybe we shouldn't piss off the people who have literally all of the resources on planet Earth behind them. Possibly a bad idea when we're Germany. We

lost because a sinister alliance of Jews, socialists and liberal Democrats stabbed the fatherland in the back, you know? That's why all this happened. It's not that we picked a fight with a man who was three feet taller than us and made of solid steel. Again, I'm talking about the US in this period of time. After we were already beaten so bloody that our eyes had swollen shut. It's not that, it's the Jews. The August Sherrill Company plays a substantial role

in spreading this lie. And their propaganda falls on welcome ears. not just among the same group of people where the nation Nazi party did most of its recruiting at this time. He focused a lot on the Bildungsbürgertum, the younger members of that class, these university students, many of whom had been too young to fight. This spelled the final end of liberalism within the Bildungsbürgertum, as Herman Beck lays out in his book, The Faithful Alliance. Students preceded the established Bildungsbürgertum in appropriating a new conservatism.

Before the German defeat in the First World War and the subsequent economic turmoil and inflation, this cultivated bourgeoisie had enjoyed significant material security and comfort as well as greater social prestige than its counterparts in other European countries. To them, defeat in the war was more than a military disaster. It signified personal humiliation and the loss of a distinct cultural identity. As a result, large sections of the educated elite moved further to the political right. Yeah. further to the political right. Yeah, there's nothing that turns like a generous, intellectually rigorous class of people

conservative, like bitterness. Like bitterness, yeah. Loss aversion, conspiratorialism. I thought I was promised more than this. It must be someone's fault. Exactly, exactly. Now, Hugenberg's papers aren't just geared towards these people. And in fact, he's got a bunch of papers that are geared towards different segments of the

population. But because, number one, he's from this group, they're best at messaging to these people. Right? You know, it takes less than two years after the end of the war for like this rage and mania that's being drilled into German conservatives via Hugenberg's propaganda to really start to flourish. One of the conservatives who is influenced by this stuff and is going to have a big impact on things is a fellow traveler of Hugenberg's named Wolfgang Kapp. Now, Kapp, interestingly enough, had been born in New York City because his family fled

during the 1848 revolutions. There's this wave of left-wing revolutions all around Europe in 1848. They don't succeed in toppling the German government, but it's scary. Capp's family comes from money and they leave to be in New York for a while. But he moves back, he spends his youthful years in Germany, and he is kind of sculpted from conception to be a right-wing culture warrior. His family and his wife's family are nationalists, they have strong far-right pedigrees, and Kapp grows up to run an agricultural credit union.

He used his position to argue against debt relief for starving farmers and in World War I full-throatedly endorsed the impossible war aims of Hugenberg and his ilk. He was also very bullish on unrestricted submarine warfare. full-throatedly endorsed the impossible war aims of Hugenberg and his ilk. He was also very bullish on unrestricted submarine warfare. You can't this guy thinks, you know what'll win us World War I is if we just shoot everybody's shipping all the time. Yeah, you know what never pisses off?

Again, for example, the United States is killing a bunch of their citizens in boats. They love having their citizens killed in boats. Let's do a lot more of that. Right? Doesn't work out very good. Not a great thing for Germany. Yeah.

So after the war, Kapp co-founds the German fatherland party, or at the end of the war, Kapp is the co-founder of this German fatherland party, or at the end of the war. Kapp is the co-founder of this German fatherland party, right? That Hugenberg is backing alongside a guy named Admiral Tirpitz and it was in this position that Kapp first makes contact with the pan-German League. Germany had been entirely overtaken by a socialist revolution of the aftermath of the war. The whole country barely stops from going socialist because the Weimar government that gets put in place after the Kaiser leaves basically is a compromised government meant to avoid full civil war. And they, to a significant extent, make a deal with a lot of these right-wing forces,

with the military, with the Freikorps, which are these groups of veterans who fought against the left. That's all happening in this period in order to put that down. These Freikorps units that develop, these guys aren't yet Nazis because Nazis don't exist yet, but a lot of them will be later. They basically are the inspiration for the Brownshirts or the SA. And Cap sees these paramilitaries that formed to crush the left in the immediate post-war period. And he realizes there's a lot of potential here.

We can mobilize these people not just to do violence for us, but as a voting block. Now the problem is Cap is not good at waiting for his moment. So once he gets, he forms this umbrella organization to lump these paramilitaries together, and he gets General Ludendorff to agree to join, right? And then he tries to overthrow the government. And one thing that's funny is that Ludendorff gets on board with this plan a few years later in 1923, because this is 1920, he's gonna do the same thing with Hitler. Ludendorff loves trying to overthrow the Weimar government.

He's no good at it, but loves trying. What a nasty little habit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's his cigarettes. So Capp's whole idea here is called the Cap Putsch. And it's the same basic plan that Hitler, in a lot of ways, that's going to try to execute, although different logistically, he's really focused on Berlin from the start. He wants to try to take the capital.

For our purposes today, I'll just say it doesn't work. What's relevant to Hugenberg, who's our focus, is that the League is definitely aware that Kapp is planning this push and they give him a little bit of quiet support. But as soon as it becomes clear that he's not going to win, the league disavows him and is like, we never supported. Oh my God, treason? Absolutely not us. And Ludendorff kind of does the same thing and they all walk away unscathed.

Almost no one is punished for trying to overthrow the government. Kapp even is allowed to go into exile in Sweden, right? Nobody wants to piss off the far right by punishing them for trying to overthrow the government and institute a dictatorship. And a lot of these same guys are going to do it again. Fascinating how that works. So Hugenberg and his fellow plutocrats, they make the public noises they have to make. That's like, oh, that's how horrible.

Why would anyone try that? But Hugenberg is also already trying to figure out how can I overthrow the Weimar government. And he's not a putsch guy. He doesn't want to have a bunch of dudes with guns do it. He's going to overthrow Weimar democracy through the ballot box. Right? That's, that's his plan. Alfred had left Krupp finally in 1918 with a gargantuan fortune and a lot of influence.

In 1922, Germany defaulted on her reparations repayments, which led to a cascading series of problems. The French occupy the Ruhr, this industrial heartland. If you're not going to pay, we're going to take the money out of you by occupying the place where you make everything. The government, in order to counter the French, backs a general strike, you know, in order to, so no one's going to work in the Ruhr. Then it's not worth it for you to occupy it. And the effect of all this is the economy fucking nosedives, right? And since people aren't working, the government starts printing more money to try and keep things going. And, you know, that that's how you get hyper

inflation, right? We're all aware of that. This is the thing people generally know about Weimar. And, you know, this is bad for basically everyone, but it's really good for Hugenberg, because he's got a lot of liquid assets and everything is basically for sale in Germany for pennies on the dollar. So he buys up basically all of the remaining newspapers that he didn't own and wanted to own. Oh my God. And now they're his personal property. He's not just owning them through this organization he's helping to run. He's just the guy who owns all these fucking papers.

By the mid 1920s, he is the single largest media magnet in Germany. He has unparalleled reach. No one, probably no single person had ever had as wide a reach for disseminating their ideas to a culture as Alfred Hugenberg has in this period of time. He has total control. Oh my God.

Yeah. So he's back to his roots. He's back to his roots. He's spent 44 billion on X or whatever. Yeah. Well, he does. He purchases the largest German cinema chain. So he runs the movie theaters too, which means he gets to pick like what sort of newsreels go on ahead of movies in Germany. Like this guy owns the media. Ideology of a cancer cell. That's right, exactly. He's fucking cancer. In 1928, he compounds all of that by purchasing his very own political party.

Now, he doesn't literally buy it, but he uses his wealth and influence and control of the press to become the chairman of the German National People's Party. This is the largest right-wing nationalist party in the country at the time. And his plan is going to be, I want to shift it even further right. And I'm going to read from an article by C.N. Truman here.

In 1931, he produced the party's new manifesto. Hugenberg called for the immediate restoration of the monarchy, the tearing up of the Treaty of Versailles, much greater contact between Germany and Austria, compulsory military service, a new German empire, and a reduction in the perceived economic power the Jews had in Weimar's economy. Hugenberg's most immediate target was Chancellor Heinrich Gröning, who he believed was pushing Weimar inexorably towards socialism. Hugenberg was one of the most influential men at the 1931 Harzberg Front Conference,

which met with the specific aim of trying to persuade the aging president, Hindenburg, to sack Brüning. So he is a major part of the conditions that formed to allow Hitler's rise in this period of time and he is also He wants to be Hitler his goal is to put himself in charge of the company of the country by buying this party, right? Like that's kind of how he is thinking at this period of time now, unfortunately, he's not tired like A while Unfortunately, he's not a great getting tired like oh no, I get tired for a while Yeah, I mean again cocaine is available over the counter. Yeah

easier to energy I guess So fair I'm just thinking like he must be experiencing back pain by now. Yeah. Oh, yeah No, he can't be moving too. Well, although he's never had to work physically a day in his life. So maybe he's doing okay Right in the trenches sitting. Yeah, it's a lot of saying though true now under Hugenberg the National People's Party actually shrinks because there's a lot of conservatives who are like conservatives, but they're not super anti-semitic or even I mean some of them might have just been actual like Jewish conservatives and they're not going to stick around as he makes the party much, much worse on that.

And there's also a chunk of conservatives who are like economic conservatives, but like military nationalism. We just had a horrible war. I'm not really down for it. So the party shrinks under Hugenberg. And the folks who leave tend to join either the conservative people's party or the largest like the center party. Others rejected the monarchist bent and they saw what Hugenberg was doing as watered down

nationalism. So they just went and joined the Nazi party who in this point in time consider Hugenberg and the conservatives one of their big enemies. Because at their root, the Nazis are a poor workers party in this period. And while they have wealthy elites backing them, the whole capital class has not yet gone in for the Nazis, right? There are some early rich backers of the Nazis, like Hitler's friend Putzi, right? That guy, Hans Stengel, who's like a very rich guy who helps bankroll the Nazis early.

But most of the early rich people who bankroll the Nazis are socialites and they get in board with the Nazis because the Nazis are cool and transgressive. Yeah. And they wanna be cool too, right? Yeah. Hitler's first real inroad to wealth, to like serious money was an industrialist

named Fritz Tyson. Now that last name Tyson, T-H-Y-S-S-E-N. If you go into an elevator right now, walk into basically any elevator in the world, wherever you happen to be, and look around, you will see somewhere in that elevator, almost certainly, the name Tyson Krupp. Krupp, of course, is the arms company that we talked about earlier. Tyson is the company of Fritz Tyson. They merge at a certain point and they make all the elevators as well as submarines that get sold to the Egyptians.

Oh, I was already considering taking the stairs more. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. That's right, take the stairs, fight, I mean, you know, they're just kind of a boring company now, but these are the origins of all of that, right? I don't like those roots. I'm taking those stairs. Good for the glutes, good for the soul.

So Fritz Tyson had been social with Hitler for a while from like the twenties. So they become like kind of friends, but Fritz is also like, I don't know if this guy's going anywhere. He's kind of extreme. I'm not gonna like go whole hog in, but in the thirties, he's like, you know what?

This guy is the best speaker I've ever seen. He's enthralled by what he calls Hitler's oratorical gifts. And he says, what impressed me most- Although I don't get that either. Okay, I wanna hear what impressed him most. Let's hear that first. What impressed me most was the order

that reigned in his meetings, the almost military discipline of his followers. Okay. It's hard to tell Hitler's charisma as a Westerner watching these speeches. It is. It is. I do not get it. It's Yelly. It's it's one note.

You know, he doesn't he doesn't follow the rules of like classical dynamics. You know, it's like a bad pop song. That's just Fortissimo the whole way through. Sure. But like It's like a bad pop song that's just fortissimo the whole way through. You know? It's like, where did Mezzo piano go? You know? People say that about Trump and it works, you know?

That's true. That's true, the populist yelling. Hitler's really good at tweaking the amygdala of his followers and at promising them vengeance. And if you can do those two things effectively, you can get about anything you want out of a population. That's so true. It's cathartic.

It's cathartic. Right. So Tyson has been kind of shotgun. He's been funding the Nazis as a little as a side hobby for a while in the late 20s. But in January of 1932, he looks out the communists are also climbing in the polls, right? The Nazis actually look like they're kind of bottoming out, like they've reached their height, but the communists are still getting more popular.

He can see that things are reaching a terminal juncture in Weimar. Something is going to break soon, and he wants it to break for the right. He's like, Hitler's my best bet. He invites Hitler to speak in Dusseldorf before an assembly of industrial magnates. After the speech, all of the richest guys in Germany, the people who own all of the factories, all the big businesses, whose donations had usually gone to the center party or to one of the center-right parties, they start sending money to the tune of around two million marks a year to the Nazis.

And because they don't want to be seen directly funding the Nazis, they reach out to a guy they all knew and had worked with who was really good at funneling money, Alfred Hugenberg. And it's going to be Hugenberg who funnels the money from these industrialists directly into the Nazis. Now in this, he is playing the same role he'd done earlier but he's not a Nazi himself. He does not like Hitler. He hates Hitler as a matter of fact. He thinks he's gross. He's a poor. He's poor. He's a corporal, right? Like he's not as good as me. He doesn't have an education. He's and a lot of these Nazis are...

His mustache doesn't look like Squidward's tentacles. Exactly, exactly. It looks like a little one of those bars you put over someone's dick if they're naked. No, absolutely not. looks like a little one of those bars you put over someone's dick if they're naked. No, absolutely not. I'm convinced at this point that like, well, I'll hold my nose because Hitler and these Nazis, they can be a good weapon against the left. And obviously that's what matters most,

is crushing the left. There's so much of that happening in Germany throughout these years. A lot of nose holding. Not a lot, yeah. And it'll happen elsewhere soon. So Hugenberg doesn't stop running his own political party. And in fact, he gets in the Reichstag, like he gets elected to office. And his message, which is not as effective

as the Nazi message, is in part not as effective because he's really speaking mostly to this educated upper middle class, the Bildungsbürgertum. As Herman Beck wrote in the Fateful Alliance, the educated elite's fate had been closely aligned with that of the Empire. With the Empire's demise, it suffered a decline in reputation that increased its alienation from Weimar, to which inflation added the grievance of material destitution. The inflation broke the economic spine of the Bildungsbürgertum, whose lifestyle had

been supported largely by their savings, as regular salaries rarely suffice to maintain the material accoutrement that went with their exalted social position, such as domestic servants, and a costly education for their offspring. Probably no part of the German population felt the humiliating changes in everyday life more deeply than the educated elite. None felt more distant from a Republican regime with which reconciliation seemed impossible." Again, he's like, hey, you guys are angry because your treats are gone. You can't afford servants anymore.

That's what he's promising. Whereas Hitler's promising workers, I'll get vengeance for you for all these people who have made your lives hard and I'll make sure you have jobs and not just jobs, you'll get vacations. You know, that's a big thing the Nazis did was like made it possible for like working class people. They had like funded vacations and shit like that. So he's talking to, Hugenberg's talking to like the sorta rich who were now sorta poor and like saying, I'm going to bring, I'm going to fix things for you.

So for a time, because this is not that large a chunk of the population, it seemed as if Hugenberg was destined to watch his party shrink while the Nazis grew and grew right alongside the communists. And while he is responsible for funneling some money to Hitler, he refuses to compromise within the party. He is not willing to change what the German national party is saying because he wants it to be his mouthpiece. And in fact, when he gets rid of so many of his rivals

that like the party is insolvent, like he's gotten rid of enough, so many people that were funding it that like it can't be funded anymore, he just pays for the whole party himself. Yeah. Now there's still the matter. Oh my God, he's like just this sad dude

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So Hugenberg is shotgunning some money to Nazis in the early 30s, and he's got his party, which is winning seats in the Reichstag. It's actually doing better and better in 32. Not enough to control anything, but enough to be part of a coalition. But he knows that the left is also still growing and I want to win this larger battle for control of the German state. He admits, I have to work more directly with the Nazis. It's not enough to just help get some money to them.

I have to actually start helping them out using my resources. So Hugenberg diverts his vast media apparatus to the cause of boosting Hitler. By this point, he has a degree of control in some 1400 newspapers and also owns the largest movie studio in Germany. One reporter at the time for a Centrist paper described Hugenberg as the great disseminator of national socialist ideas to an entire nation through newspapers, books, magazines, and films. And he's doing this because he envisions his party governing alongside the other right

wing party and the Nazis as a coalition. And so he's like, well, the more votes the Nazis get, the better our coalition can crush the left together, but we'll be in a coalition together, right? It's in this brief period, 32 to 33, that Hugenberg is going to reach the apex of his evil talents. By this point, he was simultaneously the bag man for the whole far right. He's funneling wealth from Germany's capitalist to the Nazis. He's funding his own party and he's running this vast media empire.

And he's also sitting in the Reichstag as an elected member and directly pushing his own political agenda. And I'm going to quote here from an excellent article in The Atlantic by Timothy Rybek. Hugenberg practiced what he called catastrophe politique, the politics of catastrophe by which he sought to polarize public opinion and the political parties with incendiary news stories, some of them entirely fabricated articles intended to cause confusion and outrage. According to one such story, the government was enslaving German teenagers and selling them to its allies in order to service its war debt.

Hugenberg calculated that by hollowing out the political center, political consensus would become impossible and the democratic system would collapse. As a right wing delegate to the Reichstag, Hugenberg proposed a freedom law that called for the liberation of the German people from the shackles of democracy and from the onerous provisions of the Versailles Treaty. The law called for the treaty signatories to be tried and hanged for treason, along with government officials involved with implementing the treaty provisions. The French ambassador in Berlin called Hugenberg one of the most evil geniuses in Germany. Oh my God. Okay. So you said said like way way earlier in this recording that Hugenberg was not necessarily the most introspective

Motherfucker he was like for his own person now not right. So What do you think? he thinks is The justification for all of this at this point like how is he not feeling cognitive dissonance or guilt or like, how is he? I'm just curious for your take on how he's- He wants to win. I mean, why would he feel guilt? You know, he believes, number one, it's moral for Germany to be, to take its place in the

sun. He believes the Jews are a force for evil. He believes the poor need to be ruled by men like him. And he sees his bottom line is tied to this. I don't think it goes any deeper than that. I think, I mean, is this guy like associate? Like could you die? Could he have been diagnosed as a psychopath?

I don't know. But like, this is not a man whose conscience troubles him for what he's doing over much. Okay, yeah. Clearly. Yeah. In 1932, the Nazis carried the affluent Germans of the Berlin suburbs for the first time, which is a sign that some of the stuff that's going on here to push them, to boost them

is working. Now, Joseph Goebbels does not want credit to go to Hugenberg, right? Even though Hugenberg is a part of why this happens, because Goebbels, who is Hitler's propaganda guy, despises Hugenberg and is repeatedly trying to turn Hitler against Hugenberg is a part of why this happens, because Goebbels, who is Hitler's propaganda guy, despises Hugenberg and is repeatedly trying to turn Hitler against Hugenberg, which actually wasn't really necessary, because one thing Alfred can't do, he can't suck up. Maybe he can to richer guys, but he can't suck up to Hitler, because Hitler's, again, some poor asshole who got wounded in the trenches like an idiot, right? That's how Hugenberg looks at these people.

He's a social inferior. So Hitler doesn't like Hugenberg. Just because no one does, right? Yeah, no one does. No, he's a dick. Like you are. But does Hugenberg not understand the power of youthful cool? Because-

No, no, no, no. And in fact, there's a good bit here. So, Vorwurz, a socialist paper in Weimar, Germany, had taken to drawing Hugenberg as a bloated frog in glasses, like that was their caricature of him. But even Hugenberg's friends had mean nicknames for him. Like, the people close to him called him the hamster. of him, but even Hugenberg's friends had mean nicknames for him. The people close to him called him the hamster. Hitler for his part called Hugenberg wow wow or woof woof, right?

Like he's a barking dog, right? He won't shut the fuck up. He's annoying the hell out of me. Now that same year, Alfred opposed Hitler in the presidential election. So again, he's been putting money into Hitler and his propaganda has been boosting the Nazis, but he is still trying to oppose him politically. And he backs, I forget who he backs, it doesn't matter, but he backs someone who's not Hitler for the presidential election. And during this election, for the

first time, his party actually takes seats from the Nazis, which does force Hitler to come to the table. Hitler is like, okay, well, I guess I do have to work with this guy who I don't like very much because he just took some seats from me and my party's kind of maybe starting to bottom out. The meetings go by. They try to see if they can work out an agreement to govern together and they absolutely can't because Hitler's line, and he always sticks to this,

is that we'll form a coalition government, but every ministry has to be headed by one of our people. We need them all, no compromise. And Hugenberg's not willing to compromise yet on that. Hugenberg himself is convinced that since his party has managed to capture a lot of seats, he and other conservatives, if they work with Hitler, can quote box Hitler in, right? So if we let the Nazis rule with us, we can kind of surround them and we'll stop them from doing any crazy shit. We'll be the adults in the room, right? So by late 1933, Hitler and Hugenburg are trapped in this incredibly difficult situation

where Hitler has the ability to become chancellor because he's got Hindenburg starting to support the idea, his party's got enough electoral success, but he needs Hugenberg's support to cross that line, both his money and his voting support. Hugenberg can't be chancellor on his own. He doesn't have nearly the votes. So he can help make Hitler the chancellor, but he can't, he has no chance of getting that for himself.

And the Nazis sure as shit aren't going to make him chancellor. So a compromise is reached, right? As one of Hitler's friends put it, Hugenberg had everything but the masses. Hitler had everything but the money. In that excellent piece for the Atlantic, author Timothy Rybeck describes what happened next. After cantankerous negotiation, a deal was reached. Hugenberg would deliver Hitler the chancellorship in exchange for Hugenberg being given a cabinet

post as head of a super-ministerium that subsumed the ministries of economics, agriculture, and nutrition. Once in the cabinet, Hugenberg didn't hesitate to meddle in foreign relations when it suited him. Reinald Quatz, a close Hugenberg associate, distilled Hugenberg's calculus as follows, Hitler will sit in the saddle, but Hugenberg holds the whip. In other words, I am writing Hitler to success and I can whip him if I need him to move in a direction.

Oh, God. Now, there is immediately, everyone gets scared when Hitler winds up, you know, directly in power in Germany. And then Hugenberg gets this position where he's running all the ministries and all of the dumb papers do the same thing they're doing today with Musk where they're like, huh, you were so scared of this Hitler guy. This Hugenberg dude is running things. Obviously. The New York Times publishes a column where they describe Hugenberg as an arch capitalist

who quote, stood in strongest discord with economic doctrines of the Nazi movement. And they're like, well, he's running the finances. This Nazi schmotsy, like Nazi schmotsy, they're not gonna be that scary. This guy is gonna run things, right? And- Not when you put schmotsy after it. Yeah. And the New York Times-

Sounds like the name of a little poodle. They're usually wrong about stuff like this, but even the left gets confused. The communist daily paper in Berlin, the red banner, argues that Hugenberg is in charge, not Hitler. In fact, says that Hitler's socialist mask has slipped. Ha ha, he revealed his cards. It's the evil capitalists running things, you know, just like we said, and they're doomed to fail. And then it'll be our turn next. The weekly journal Die Weltbund described the new government as Hitler, Hugenberg and co.

Roughly a day after Hitler was appointed chancellor, Hugenberg is said to have talked to a friend, the mayor of Leipzig, and told him, I've just committed the greatest stupidity of my life. I have allied myself with the greatest demagogue in the history of the world. So while everyone else is like, oh, thank God, Hugenberg's running things. That crazy Hitler guy is just a figurehead. Hugenberg, who has a lot of power right now, but he's become aware enough and is smart enough to be like, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. This could go badly.

This guy I might not be able to control for long. And is that just, was it really just like Hitler's personality? Like everyone underestimated him and then just got fucking clobbered by the guy. Well the thing that people don't, it's the same thing with Trump, right? I always try to push back when people talk about how dumb Trump is or what an idiot he is. He's not, he doesn't know a lot of things you know, but he knows his business, which is getting number one, populist support.

And also he is really good at maneuvering through organizations to crush dissent and reform them in his image. And Hitler has a similar, Hitler is a genius politician. He is extremely skilled. This is an intellectual skill. He is extremely skilled. This is an intellectual skill. He is not lucky. I mean, he's got luck behind him too. It's always a factor, but he is not accidentally succeeding.

He is succeeding because he's better at the stuff that matters than the people opposing him. That's the reality. I guess too, one of the reasons why people call Trump stupid is because of Data that will come out from time to time saying that he like speaks at a third grade reading level Where is like the average presidential candidate speaks at a 10th grade reading? do right yeah Yeah, you know who beats a bunch of people who read it like a 12th grade level? A bunch of people who read at a fifth grade level with more guns.

Like come on now. I know, I know. Who gives it? Yeah. And Hitler's the same. Hitler's very good at what he does. He's good at building personal loyalty and he's good at keeping his people in lockstep. They don't act without his approval, right?

So that said, right after Hitler becomes chancellor and Hugenberg is made this economic minister, he is a kid in a candy store. For the first few months of the Third Reich, Hugenberg has nominal control over the entire German economy. He describes himself as the economic dictator of Germany. And his first big step is to fire every government employee he can, trying to wipe out the entirety. He does a doge. He's trying to wipe out as all of the administrative state, right?

So he had, because he's angry that he is said to pay for taxes for public. So he wipes out every public employee he can. And at the same time, he starts executing a one-man war against workers' rights. He cuts his own employee wages by 10% across the board. He gives everyone a pay cut as soon as he gets into power. And he guts labor rights and the right to strike across Germany. All of this he justifies as necessary in order to get the German economy back into shape. And he uses his vast network of newspapers to manufacture consent for extremist policies

that damage the average German. One of his pet columnists wrote at the time, A real battle against unemployment lies singularly and alone in reestablishing profitability and economic life. Parodying Alfred's personal beliefs, this editor argued that the goal of state policy should be to rescue the merchant middle class, aka small business owners, no matter the cost to everyone else. Now the focus on the middle and upper middle class was reflected in the few good moves that Hugenberg made, including he puts in a temporary foreclosure moratorium.

Now he doesn't do an eviction moratorium, and that should tell you who he's working for, right? The people who are this kind of middle class that has just lost everything, he sees them as his base of support. He doesn't give a fuck about the renters, the people who are really poor, right? So there's a foreclosure moratorium, not an eviction moratorium. He also launches a limited debt jubilee calculated to support struggling members of the Bildungsbürger Tum. And again, it's just kind of worth looking at sort of some of the stuff that he's doing because it's not some of these policies you could look at it a vacuum is good, but his

overall goal is fuck the poor. I'm going to build support among this kind of educated upper middle class elite. And of course, Hugenberg also pursues a tariff program focused mainly on agricultural goods and an ill-conceived attempt to rescue German farmers. If I tariff all of these foreign agricultural goods, then Germans will farm and be profitable. It'll be great. Now, the only result to these tariffs was that they skyrocket the cost of living. People who couldn't afford food can now afford food even less.

And it goes so badly that Hitler has to intervene. At one point he blows up during a meeting with Hugenberg and says, it just won't do that the financial burdens of these rescue measures fall only on the poorest. Like when Hitler is being like, Exactly. Wow, this is unjust. You're a real dick. Exactly.

Seriously. So Hugenberg. Bunk and Alf. For his part, Hugenberg is not afraid to argue with Hitler. And he says, quite literally, we have to let the poor suffer. That eventually will even out the hardships, but they have to suffer first.

This does not work. More Germans go hungry, the hardships, but they have to suffer first. This does not work. More Germans go hungry. The economy, which had recovered a lot from the hyperinflation a few years back, plunges. One of the few papers Hugenberg didn't control that was still allowed to operate nicknamed him the Confusionsrat, or confusion consultant. As is the case today, the mean nicknames don't hurt Hugenberg's feelings. Ryback describes him as being utterly calloused to the idea of being despised. And it was true that the hatred of a- Oh my God.

Right? Right? I don't- How do I get just the tiniest little bit of that energy? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I mean it's you have to right if you're gonna do anything Unfortunately, he is ignoring the fact that people are angry because he's making them starve right now It was true that the left hating him that doesn't really hurt Hugenberg in this point They they're sure they don't have any gut any any yeah But he makes a major tactical error at this point because he chooses to believe But he makes a major tactical error at this point because he chooses to believe my money, which Hitler needs, will protect my position relative to Hitler. I'll always be co-equal with him because I'm rich.

And that just ain't the way it's going to play out. I want to quote from Rybeck again, summarizing what happens next. In late June, 1933, while Hitler was trying to assuage international concerns about the long-term intentions of his government, Hugenberg appeared in London at an international conference on economic development. To the surprise of everyone, including the other German delegation members present, Hugenberg laid out an ambitious plan for economic growth through territorial expansion. The first step would consist of Germany reclaiming its colonies in Africa, Hugenberg explained. The second would be that people without space would

open areas in which our productive race would create living space. The announcement made headlines around the world. Reich asks for return of African lands at London Parlay, reads one New York Times headline. Below that a subhead continued, also seeks other territory, presumably in Europe. Such a funny way to write about what World War II is gonna be. They want Africa back, also some other stuff, maybe in Europe, who knows?

Now, today we can say, well, Hugenburg, which has given everyone a very accurate warning about what was about to happen. That is what goes down next, right? But Hitler and everyone else- In so many words. Hitler's furious. So was everyone in German government.

For one thing, they don't have an army yet, right? Like the German army is bullshit at this point. Now it's strong enough that it could overthrow Hitler, which is a big thing he's scared about, but it cannot conquer anything right now. So they're like, why, you're threatening people, you're like threatening to punch somebody and our arms are both still in fucking traction.

Like we can't, you can't be doing this yet. Like we have, there's steps before we start acting like this. And so Hitler has his other top people try to pull back from Hugenberg statements. A bunch of other like cabinet members start Being like no, of course, we're not gonna take any Europe. We're not gonna we're gonna get back in it We're just trying to fix Germany, baby, you know Hugenberg is Incapable of reading a room and he doubles and then triples down

He keeps talking about how Germany is going to try to conquer everyone around them keeps talking about how Germany's going to try to conquer everyone around them. Oh my God. The Nazis are like, bro, fuck. Yeah, yeah. Keep that shit on the down low. Yeah. Ultimately, the conflict culminates in a cabinet meeting with Hugenberg on one side and everyone else on the other with.

This tells you how bad things are. Hitler's the mediator. OK, OK. Oh my God. Let's be honest. Oh my God. Everybody calm down. Just shouting. I can't think of a worse mediator in all of human history than Adolf Hitler.

If Hitler's the guy in the middle trying to keep everybody calm, things are not going to go well. Hitler's like meeting gently with Alfie, meeting gently with everyone else. He's got a hand on his shoulder. Hey buddy, nobody is angry, you know? Yeah.

So Hitler still at this point has some hesitation of totally dispensing with Hugenberg. And he tries to insist like, hey, if you'll stop, everything's forgiven. You know, he tells the other people in the room, what already happened is no longer of interest. But Hugenberg again, refuses to read the room and he doesn't mediate his language at all. And ultimately, Hitler forces him out of his job as economic dictator in late June 1933.

Hugenberg technically resigns, but it's obvious what happened. And this is the end of Alfred's major period of influence in the Nazi regime. He will spend the remainder of the Third Reich living at his estate as essentially a small local dictator, right? He's got this little country home with some towns around it and he just kind of runs things there, right? And the Nazis more or less leave him alone. They make him sell off all his newspapers.

He has to sell his media empire, but he gets a good price for it, right? His party is dissolved pretty quickly after this, but he gets to remain a guest member of the Reichstag, which isn't really in charge of anything anymore. It's just sort of a, we'll let you keep this because we don't really wanna have a fight with you. His wealth and connections did protect him from the night of long knives.

He's never purged, but he clearly understands it's time I have to stay out of the spotlight if I don't want to lose my money and my nice shit. And that's what he does for the remainder of the Third Reich. No way. Yeah, he's just kind of chilling. And when Hitler shoots himself in that bunker and the Third Reich falls, Hugenberg had been out of direct power long enough that the Allies don't really focus on him as a danger He doesn't get up. Yeah No, they they kind of he does get arrested in 49 as part of like this denazification process But he gets he gets basically ruled to be like ah, you weren't really a Nazi. You know what? He's really old by then. He's old he dies two years later

But he's never punished. Oh my God. He's allowed to keep his possessions and his business, and he dies, you know, peacefully on March 12th, 1951. Oh my, did he ever have a family? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think he had some. Oh, he did. I don't think he thinks much about them, so whatever.

I'm not gonna. Yeah. Oh, I'm sure they hated his guts. He sounds awful. He sounds like a real dick. They might not have been great themselves. I'm sure, yeah. Whoa, wow, what a random piece of shit.

Yeah, I mean, he's a piece of shit that is very much crafted by his social class and his time and he's very much Again, he's he is there there Elon Musk He's this guy who as soon as the fascist come into power Gets the job of wiping out the administrative state and completely fucking the economy And then he gets shit can't write as soon as it's no longer useful Yeah, yeah, and I mean it is true that like a major difference between him and Elon is that he came from? Not nothing but nothing compared to Elon and so no rich dad eyes Exactly, and so like his rise is a little

Scary because there was like no warning. He was just like bobbin' and weavin', bobbin' and weavin' his way to this like opportunistic position and it kinda inspires two feelings like, holy shit, like who's gonna be the next this guy? And wow, I'm kind of like, soothed that more people like this are not comin coming up already.

I mean, they are. This is what Peter Thiel's got a little bit of Hugenberg in him. Musk has a little bit of Hugenberg in him. No, it's true. I think the difference is that, number one, most of those guys didn't bother to buy a political party of their own instead. Or like get involved with weapons manufacturing

and selling weapons all, really? I mean Peter T alone Palantir Yeah I mean weapon it's a it's a kind of weapon system. Yeah, right, right, right, right Yeah, and I mean that must hasn't so much gotten involved in that entirely But like, you know, but I guess to find weapon in the digital. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, yeah Damn, but I guess define weapon in the digital. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Damn. OK. Fuck. Well, it's all that's the same people.

Yeah. And it's always a dude who has weird, weird face. Yeah. It's always it's always a fucking. Yeah. Some busted weird face. Yep. It's always it's always a fucking ass. Yeah. Some busted weird asshole. That's that's. Oh, what a bastard. Yeah.

Wow. Thank you for regaling me with that tail. It was a roller coaster. I'm I'm I'm I keep thinking back on this art exhibit I went to in Zurich where, what's his name? Clumped, Gloop? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Was it Clumped? Crumped.

No, no, no. Crumped was the arm manufacturer, but I think there was a, there's a Clumped artist. Gustav Clumped, yeah. Oh, not Gustav Clumped. I'm talking about the weapons manufacturer Many of the arms. We actually Yeah, yeah, that's corrupt Crum Krupp Krupp Krupp family collection of artwork. Yeah that travels around

massive yes well Then that's where their money came from Yes. Well, then that's where their money came from. Yeah, that's that's wild. I I was just like pondering the how weird, how weird it was. And this was like the point of the exhibition to like admire this. These beautiful artworks. I mean, there were like monies in there and digs in there.

You get the money to buy them. Yeah. And like he was like celebrated as an art collector, like this amazing taste or whatever. And like the reason he was able to acquire that artwork was because he was like making weapons that did World War Two or made World War Two possible and World War One and two because Krupp is Krupp is arming Germany in both. But every one of those paintings represents a pile of corpses of teenage boys, primarily. Oh, God.

It's good. It's good stuff. Yeah. You love to see it. You don't. But you see it. No. You do.

You do see it. No, you do. You do see it. Speaking of what you see, where can people see you? Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This was awesome. I love, well, I love and I hate and I feel icky and I feel great about knowing stories like the one you just told me. And if people want to know stories that will make them chortle and also feel a little disturbed,

they can find me at Sounds Like a Cult pod. Wherever you stream podcasts, I have another podcast called Magical Overthinkers and I got a bunch of books. Cultish, the age of magical overthinking. I love talking about social science in a cheeky way. Uh-huh, excellent. All right, we'll check out Amanda and her work and check out our modern Alfred Hugenbergs

as they engage in the process of flaming out and getting forced out by the fascists who are going to use the power given to them by these people to do God knows what. Hopefully, not as much as the last ones. We'll see. Everybody have a great weekend.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. Are your money skills total trash? Well, trust me, you are not alone. Personal finance ignorance is as American as apple pie, but you can improve. Think, Matt, if your emergency fund was invested, especially given the volatility we're experiencing

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