Behind the Bastards - The Non-Nazi Bastards Who Helped Hitler Rise To Power

Episode Date: July 24, 2018

This week we did something a little bit different. In Episode 13, Robert is joined by Naomi Ekperigin (Couples Therapy Podcast) and we will be getting ‘behind’ Hitler again, but our focus is not going to be the Fuhrer himself or any Nazis, for that matter. Instead we’re talking about the men and women who helped Hitler rise to power 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. 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, friends, and welcome back to Behind the Bastards. I'm Robert Evans, and this is the podcast where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. Now, on this podcast, I read a story about someone or someone's who are awful or enabled an awful person to a guest who is coming in cold and has not been in food for a long time. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about that.

I'm going to tell you who are awful or enabled an awful person to a guest who is coming in cold and has not been informed about what we're talking about ahead of time. This week, my guest is Naomi Ekparagin, co-host of Couples Therapy, writer on Broad City. And Naomi, I'm going to guess probably... Black. Whoa, whoa, whoa! What are you guys saying? I was going to say flyfisher.

Very bold. Whoa, whoa! Well, I wasn't going to bring race into this, but... Let's talk about some Nazis. Actually, this week we're not talking about Nazis. We're talking about the people who enabled the Nazis to rise to power. People who were not Nazis, people who, as a general rule, everyone on this podcast hated the Nazis and thought Hitler was terrible.

But also, these are the people who made it possible for him to rise to power. We're talking about the non-Nazi bastards behind Hitler today. Whoa! Yes, this is a dark and terrible story about how the Third Reich came to power and the people who enabled it. None of these people wanted Germany to be taken over by fascist dictatorship, and most of them would live long enough to be horrified by the extent of Nazi crimes. Some of them died in concentration camps.

So... Whoopsie! Whoopsie doozle. Whoopsie doozle would be the other title for this episode. The Big Nazi Whoopsie Doozle. So, the story of Hitler's rise to power starts before World War I in the mid-1800s with the births of two men, Paul von Hindenburg and Eric Ludendorff, both of which have fun names to say.

I recommend just saying Ludendorff to yourself when you're feeling down. Sounds like a cough drop, maybe. But not at all soothing, because then I think about him. Yeah, yeah, and he was not a soothing fellow. Hindenburg himself was born on August 2nd, 1847. He came from a military family that could trace its lineage in arms back to the 1300s. Oh, gross. Yeah, well...

Not into people claiming some shit from the past. I don't care what your ancestors did. That's a huge white people thing, because... They love it. Yeah, big old lists of what your dead relatives did. And Paul von Hindenburg is like the epitome of the guy who cares what his dead relatives did. And cares about what his descendants in the future will think about him when he's their dead relative. That was his whole animating philosophy in life.

Can you imagine? It's like, be present, bitch. Yeah, just do your own thing. Well, Hindenburg started cadet training for the Prussian army at age 11, because that was the way shit worked back then. Yeah, his family were soldiers, so you start as being a soldier as a child. There's nothing better than arming a child. Because who's more even-keeled, more able to manage their emotions

and use their words and judge situations for what they really are than an 11-year-old. Yeah, 11-year-olds are perfectly competent to evaluate the world and understand when the use of deadly force is appropriate. We've all agreed that forever. Right, for years. I mean, my god. When Hindenburg was a young child, his nurse would shout silence in the ranks when he complained. So that's like, even before he was 11, he's being brought up.

Here's a picture of him at age 11 when he started cadet school. Isn't that the cutest little child soldier? We'll have this picture on our website, behindthebastards.com. How would you describe that picture? He is serving an Aryan look. He's almost like in drag, in a way. As a child, just playing this role. I'm all about the crossed feet in front, dead eyes.

You know, that's also a product of the photographs of the era. But I actually do believe his eyes are dead. You know what I mean? You will continue to believe that throughout the story, I suspect. And again, that picture will be on behindthebastards.com, as will any pictures associated with this episode. So, in 1866, Hindenburg fought in the Austro-Prussian War, which is a war none of us have heard about because it's just too old to matter. A bullet pierced his helmet, increased his head, knocking him unconscious,

but he woke up, wrapped his head in a towel, and continued to lead his soldiers into battle. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He also fought in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. I've heard of that one. Yeah, that's a very important one. We got Germany out of that war. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which mixed bag, mixed bag. And actually, he was present the day the German Empire was declared in, I think, Versailles. So, when they concluded that war between Prussia and France, Germany became a thing. And he was there to watch it become a thing. Now, Eric Ludendorff, the other guy that we're starting with, was, you may remember him as the bad guy from the new Wonder Woman movie. Oh, my God, yes. Yeah, that's Eric.

He was a real person. He was a real person? He did not. He was not an advocate of using poisonous gas on women and children in World War I, but he was a piece of shit. Wow. That's dope with a woman. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, he was born on April 9th, 1865, so he's a bit younger than Hindenburg. He went into cadet school also as a kid. Nine, age nine. Probably like 11 or 12, something like that. I like the idea that they were just starting earlier and younger and younger. Well, kind of, because he went into cadet school the same time as Hindenburg, but he was so good at it that he was advanced two grades ahead of his classmates, because taking a child soldier and advancing them even further beyond where a child should be

is always a good idea. Also, what makes you a better child soldier at 11? I feel like the same things that make you good are the same signs for being a serial killer. This kid was the Michael Jordan of being a child soldier. But it also means he was probably just ripping the heads off of rats. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, a lot of starting fires, a lot of bedwetting, a lot of animal mutilation.

You will not come to feel that less as this story progresses. So, Ludendorff grew up never knowing anything about the military. He didn't see combat as a young man, but he rose through the ranks and wound up working in the German general staff with a guy named Alfred von Schlieffen. Don't trust him. Yeah. Well, World War I's nerds will know who this guy is. He created what was called the Schlieffen Plan, which was Germany's plan

for how to win a war with Russia and France simultaneously. And this is the plan that they started World War I with. The gist of it was they had to put 90% of their army into an invasion of France that would sweep around and almost touch the English Channel and then sort of sweep the French armies from behind. Like, that was the gist of this. And it was this incredibly intricate plan that involved millions and millions of men and the Germans being good at planning had it down to like,

here's how many bout buckles we need. And here's like, all the feet that will pass over this road and a very, very intricate plan. His job was helping to make sure that Germany was ready to execute this plan if the war happened. All right. And he was the kind of guy who was so into being an army dude that when he would get vacation time rather than using it as a human being,

he would take trips to Belgium because the Schlieffen Plan involved an invasion of Belgium and he would just scout out forts. Like, rather than chilling, he'd be like, he would go scout out Belgian forts and pretend to be on vacation so that he could do a better job of navigating Belgium. Honey, when will you be back from your fort scout? And Junior's really asking about you. He's forgotten your name.

He's 10, so he's about to go into the army and he'd like to see you. He'd like to see you one last time before he likely dies. Before he's used his cannon fodder. So when World War I broke out, Ludendorff did great and captured a bunch of Belgian forts. Well, thank God. Good Lord, given all that time and energy, if you came out on the bottom,

you would have had to rethink all your life. So he's at least good at the thing that he gave up his vacations to be good at. And he distinguished himself in the fighting against Belgium. And yeah, as recognition for his brilliance on the field, he was sent to the undermaned Eastern Front, because again, the Germans had put their whole army to invade France. And he was basically tasked with saving Germany from a Russian invasion. Now, he was paired up in this with an older retired general

who had been sort of out of the general game for three or four years prior to the outbreak of war. Okay, so you're telling me he was a Riggs and they found his Myrtaugh. His Myrtaugh was Paul von Hindenburg. All right, all right, all right. I'm seeing it now. So together, they won Germany's most decisive victory of World War I, Tannenberg, which basically meant that Russia was not going to successfully invade Germany

because this victory happened. So they become big heroes of this. And together, Hindenburg and Ludendorff were like, you said the Riggs and Myrtaugh, I compared them to Chris Farley and David Spade of the German general staff. Both comparisons are aft. Much better, Nick. Yep, yep.

And like the Farley-Spade partnership, this one was destined to end in tragedy. Hindenburg was the senior of the two men. He wound up getting most of the credit for the victory at Tannenberg, even though Ludendorff had done most of the work. This would prove to be a trope of Hindenburg's career. He liked taking credit for other people's work and not doing much himself. And if he took credit from other people's work,

he could also shift blame to them. Because again, he's a legacy guy. Right, right, right. He's got this deep family history and he also wants to be a good part of that family legacy. So he's all about the name. He's the kind of guy he like pops up in the photo. He'll photo bomb a moment. He'll be like, yeah.

I was here. Exactly. I was here too. Yeah. Hindenburg is the I was here guy in German history. Yeah, yeah. So as World War I wore on, Hindenburg and Ludendorff rose to become the military dictators of Germany.

They sidelined the Kaiser and held almost complete control of the state in what was called a silent dictatorship. The position of secret military dictator was perfect for Hindenburg because he got to be in charge and also Ludendorff would do the hard work. And best of all, any fuckups from either of them would be blamed on the Kaiser. So it was a sweet gig while it lasted at least. But then 20 million people died and Germany lost the war. We've all been there.

Yeah. So the worst thing about Germany's defeat from their point of view is that the Kaiser abdicated. This set the expectation that Hindenburg and Ludendorff, since they were the guys who'd been running the war, would be the ones who'd have to deliver Germany's surrender. And they were not about to let that happen. So they found a fall guy.

Matthias Erzberger. Oh, Erzberger, maybe Erzberger. Yeah, he's the only not-shitty guy in the story and he's about to get fucked over maybe harder than anyone's ever been fucked in the history of politics. Oh my God. That's saying something. That would be fair to say, I think.

Erzberger was a politician with a German center party because the Germans did have like a quasi-democracy prior to World War I, like the Kaiser held most of the power, but there was a Reichstag, which was like a parliament. I do remember this. All right, I know about the Reichstag. And he was one of these elected leaders. And he had supported suing for peace with the Allies in 1917,

back when Germany could have worked out a peace with the Allies that would have ended well, like they wouldn't have had to sign a treaty that fucked them over, you know? But Hindenburg and Ludendorff hadn't been willing to make peace in 1917. They had to try one more time to win the war, and that had not worked out. So when their plan failed, they told Erzberger that he had no choice but to go and deliver Germany's unconditional surrender to the Allies.

This instantly made Erzberger... How do you deliver a surrender? He's got to go to Germany and be like... Paris, or Versailles, yeah. But I'm saying like, he's got to what? Like, he's got to get them to agree? Well, okay, so here's the situation. At the end of World War I,

there are no soldiers in German territory, no Allied soldiers. In fact, German soldiers are still in France, they're still in Belgium, they've taken Ukraine and a huge chunk of Western Russia from the Russians. So to the German people who don't have a free press, they think they're winning, but they're almost out of bullets, they're almost out of shells, they're almost out of men, so they decide to surrender

because if the Allies attack once more, the whole army's going to shatter. They're all out. But it looks to the civilians like things are going well. So rather than Ludendorff and Hindenburg getting up in front of Germany and being like, we can't fight anymore, they outfought us, we've lost the war... Erzberger's got to do it. Erzberger's got to go do it. Oh no, so he's got to get up in front of all his friends,

people who don't know him, and be like, we're losers. I'm a loser. I'm the guy telling you all, we're losers. Exactly. After four years of we're winning, and your sons died, but we're winning. Oh no. Yeah, so Erzberger instantly becomes the chief villain of the German nation. Of course.

Yeah, exactly. He can't go anywhere. No. He doesn't know a moment's peace. No, he does not know a moment's peace, and it gets worse because rather than throw their support behind Erzberger and the new Weimar Republic that replaced the Kaiser's government, Ludendorff and Hindenburg concocted a scheme.

Okay, these two are literally real housewives. They're messy bitches who live for drama, concocting schemes. I'm imagining white wine, throwing it in people's faces. They're literally evil. Yeah, they're monsters, and yeah, probably Riesling's a white one. That's the German one. That's exactly it. You're right.

Sipping on Riesling, being like, you know what we bad to do? Yep. Because I'm not here to make friends. You know what I mean? That's what they're giving every day. That's a good t-shirt. Ludendorff and Hindenburg, basic bitches of the German general staff. These guys decide to lie and say that Germany had lost the war

because it had been betrayed from within by democratic, by which they meant Jewish politicians. Yeah. In November 1919, Hindenburg and Ludendorff testified together at a national hearing to determine why Germany had lost the war. They showed up in civilian clothes rather than their military uniforms because, they explained, the mostly social democrat leaders they were testifying before didn't deserve to see them in uniform.

Okay, Henry. It's not that big of a deal. You ain't doing nobody no favors. So Hindenburg refused to answer questions that were asked of him and instead read a statement that he'd written. In this statement, he claimed that Germany could have won up until the last minute, but, quote, divergent party interests caused a, quote,

disintegration of our will to conquer. In other words, left-wing politicians and communists had lost the war for Germany. Hindenburg ended his statement by claiming the German army was stabbed in the back. Oh, my God. Now, if you've studied the Nazis, you know that a major part of Hitler's rise to power was his use of the stabbed in the back myth, that Germany had been stabbed in the back by leftists and Jews and that that's why they'd lost the war.

This is one of the things that helped propel Hitler and the Nazis into power. But that's skipping ahead to the future. So Matthias Erzberger goes in, signs the armistice with, literally with tears in his eyes because he's a patriotic German and then gets, you know, rolled over on by Hindenburg and Ludendorff and he gets assassinated in 1921, shot for being a traitor to the German nation. Oh, my God.

This, literally, I can't. You know, when I wish I had something, you know, pithy and brilliant to say, but it's that I can't. Because especially when you read the receipts, you know what I'm saying? Because it's all one long receipt. It's like, did nobody with power have, in power, like nobody in that position, like nobody could be like, this is not real. This is a lie.

Matthias, why don't you go move somewhere, maybe. Maybe just for a little while, let stuff cool off. But they were like, nope, gotta kill him. Yeah, I mean, it was just somebody who hated him because he betrayed the country. By doing what was asked of him. By saving the German army from being completely annihilated. Truly. Yeah, yeah.

No, he's like legitimately like heroic person who just, like I said, he might be the most fucked over anyone's been in history of politics. He's certainly a candidate. So after the war, Ludendorff and Hindenburg split up, you know, the band breaks up a little bit. Honestly, it's gotten too ugly, too dirty. You know what I mean? They can't look at each other without seeing themselves.

Now, which one of them do you think is the Lennon? And which one of them do you think is the McCartney? The Lennon Ludendorff. Right? No, I think you are right, actually. Hindenburg did go into politics afterwards. We'll hear more about him later. Ludendorff became an author and wrote a series of books about how Germany could win the next war.

He concluded that the only way for them to beat the world the next time they fought the world was to embrace what he called totalitarian war, which involved total state control that could stop dissent from the left or from, quote, alien Jews inside Germany. Those who were too weak to contribute to German victory, like the physically handicapped, might need to be eliminated. I see where this is going. D, are you picking up on some trends?

I'm into this trailer. So one of Ludendorff the author's first fans was a young man named Adolf Hitler. Yeah, Ludendorff actually marched with Hitler during his failed 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch. This was actually Ludendorff's second coup in three years. He also participated in the Cap Putsch, which was another right-wing attempt to take over the government in 1920. There were a lot of coups in Weimar Germany. They just be couping.

They just be couping. That's just what they do. Yeah, they be couping and doing. What? Yeah. So Hitler and Ludendorff also had a falling out after the Putsch, and when the Fuhrer finally rose to power, Ludendorff said, quote,

I solemnly prophesy that this accursed man will cast our right into the abyss and bring our nation to inconceivable misery. Future generations will damn you in your grave for what you have done, which is not wrong. Not wrong at all, but also it is a scorned man speaking. You know what I mean? He's only saying it because it's like, he don't like me no more. You know what I mean?

Because he's not going to be the one in power. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, and also it's worth noting that Ludendorff became too crazy for the Nazis in the 30s. What? Yeah. He became an Odinist and urged the destruction of both Christianity and Judaism. Okay, now how old is Ludendorff around now?

He's like in his 60s, I think, maybe maybe older. So 60s is like in that time, that's like literally 100. Yeah, he's an old guy. So he's, he's addled. He's extra. He's coming in hot on a daily basis. Yeah, he's always coming in hot. He's always, like I'm imagining him like, he's, I'm seeing him in an armchair.

Yeah. You know what I mean? Like with a Bruce ski. Yeah. Kind of really having his all in the family moments. And this, this is the past. So we have to assume that everyone here is drunk. Like they're not drunk by 20 standards, but they're alcoholics by modern standards.

Right. Because that was just the world. Yeah. For survival, you needed your beer and your wine. Yeah. Right. So yeah, I mean, this is, the push happened in a beer hall. Everybody was drunk during most of the, except for Hitler, oddly enough.

Oh yeah. He was fucking razor sharp. Yeah. He was, well, he was a tea toddler. Didn't like to drink. I did not know that about him. Yeah. Every now and then you run into a history of him having a couple of sips of champagne

or something, but he was famous when he would do these meetings at beer halls. He would sip one beer the whole night. Like he was, he didn't like alcohol. I bet it's because if he got drunk, he started to cry. I feel like he would drink and then he would get all blubbery. And he was like, see it, can't do it. Can't let him see me like that. No.

No. When he's alone, he'll listen. He'll put on his Ariana Grande records. Ariana Grande. It was either that or Morrissey. Oh. So now is probably a good time to talk a little bit about the Weimar government. Like what have you heard about Weimar Germany and the government?

I can't remember. That's fine. That's fine. I can't remember and I won't pretend to. No, it's okay. This should be, like the story that I'm relating here, I legitimately think might be the most important story in human history, like how Hitler came to power. Wow.

It's an important story, right? It is. We don't hear anything about it in school because our schools are terrible. But it's a really important story. And so I'm going to start by sort of giving an overview of what the government of Weimar Germany was like. This is the government that the Nazis destroyed. The Weimar Constitution was written in 1919 and it was one of the most modern and enlightened

governing documents ever put into place. It included a perfectly proportional electoral system which ensured that their parliament exactly represented the will of the people. Wow. Like in our population, right? Like if we held an election and 45% of America voted for Democrat and 45% of America voted for Republican and 6% voted for an independent vote, you would get, that's what Congress would be.

Right. That would divide the seats perfectly equally among exactly how the popular vote broke down. That's how the Weimar government, that's how the Reichstag is essentially organized. The Weimar Constitution also guaranteed every man and woman in the country equal protection under the law and the right to vote. Wait, what? Yeah.

Women? Women got the vote under the Weimar Constitution. Women were people? Yeah. Yeah. In fact, the most enlightened government country in the world in the 1920s was Weimar Germany. They had the highest literacy, the highest amount of education, the best schools, the

best medical science, social justice movements surged in the Weimar years. The feminist movement started advocating for abortion rights. This is the 1920s. Germany became home to the first prominent gay rights movement. What are you telling me? Yeah. This is Weimar Germany. Magnus Hirschfeld, who was a scientist in Berlin, started publishing the first research

on healthcare for transgender men and women during this period of time. The pictures that you see of Nazi book burnings are Nazis burning Hirschfeld's library of transgender research. What? You're telling me that's where they were coming from? That's where this is what the Nazis came out of. Wait, shit went so far south. How?

Mm-hmm. Well, we're about to get into how, but first, we're going to get into some ads. And before we drop into the ads, I would like to do an unofficial official ad for our unofficial official sponsor, Doritos. What I can say for certain is that in the years since the Doritos product has entered the world supply chain, there has never been another Hitler in charge of a country. So I'm just going to leave it there. I'm not going to say Doritos prevent Hitler, but we've never had a country elect a Hitler

and have Doritos on sale at the same time. So let's get to the other ads that actually paid us. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic, and occasionally ridiculous, deep dive into

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do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. 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

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All right, we are back. Now we have just talked about giving some background on Hindenburg and Ludendorff, two real pieces of shit, and we have talked about how Weimar Germany was... Like pretty dope. Pretty dope, right? And I'm like, what? Yeah. That's not what I thought.

I thought it was all... I originally... What I always assumed or made partially was top, but it was like, because they had lost the war, you know what I mean? Everyone was downtrodden and feeling shitty, which is why then someone could come to power and be like, I got the answers. We're going to get rid of a whole bunch of people. And that's usually how it's portrayed.

That is an aspect of the story, but that is not the whole story. Like Berlin, if you were a gay person in 1920, maybe the best place in the world to live would be Berlin. Wow. Now, rural Germany, very different, and they didn't... We'll get into some of that a little bit later. But the parts of Germany that were big urban cities were incredibly progressive. Yeah.

And it is now still. Yeah, and it is now still. It's come back around to that. The Nazis really messed that up for a while. And in fact, Hitler always hated the city of Berlin because it was a hotbed of social justice and progressives and all that stuff, which is part of why he was fine with it being destroyed at the end of World War II. Yeah, he was never a big fan of the city.

So back into the tale, Friedrich Ebert was elected the first president of I'm Our Germany on January 19th, 1919, which is... That's a lot of 19s. I guess it's just three, but it seems like a lot. But it's like 1, 1, 9, 1, 9, 1, 9. Yeah. That's a code. That's a code.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the aliens telling us something. Exactly. I need your theories. The alien Jesus Krishna. That's my theory. This is a secret sign from them. You're not good at conspiracy theories.

I'm not. I'm not. The only one I really believe in is that Ringo secretly wrote all of the Beatles' music. He's just a humble guy. Honestly. He wants everyone to think he's useless. Let's give Ringo that moment. Let's let that live for him.

So Friedrich Ebert's Social Democratic Party held 39% of the vote in 1919, which was great, considering it was a proportional system. In total, three-quarters of Germans voted for progressive candidates after World War I. So the vast majority of Germans are on the left or the far left at the time that the First World War ends, which makes sense. The right had not exactly led Germany to victory in that war. Now there was a downside to all of this, to the system that they had created. The Weimar constitution allowed for a president who acted as head of state and had to appoint

a chancellor who actually did more of the work that we would associate with our kind of a president, essentially like the president and chancellor split the duties that we just put in a president. So the chancellor could only govern with the consent of the parliament. So the chancellor was appointed by the president, but parliament had to want him to stay there. And if most of parliament said they didn't like him, he had to go. Oh no. Yeah, so that's the way this works.

So he's got to make people like him all the time. He's got to, yeah. He's like on, you know, he's constantly campaigning in a way. And if the chancellor is kicked out, essentially, the president can dissolve the government, which means they have to hold, which means they have to hold an election immediately to re-elect. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah.

For some reason in my mind, he was just like, fine, we're done here. Like a giant tantrum where he was like, no more government. Okay, we're saying a rebuild. Yeah, a rebuild, okay. A rebuild, okay. Which sounds okay, but it means there were times where they would have two or three elections in a year for like two elections in a year where the whole government has to run for election again on the drop of a hat, which isn't great for stability sake.

So you can see how this constitution both gave everyone a voice, which is good, but also caused a huge amount of fragmentation and chaos. And it meant that in order to get anything done, multiple parties had to work together and form a coalition so a chancellor could keep his job and stuff could happen, right? But that's good. A nice little coalition act. It can be good. And then together.

It can be good. And that had been the guy who wrote the constitution was a Jewish dude actually named Hugo Proust and he had planned initially on sort of copying the U.S. Constitution, but then he got a look at the U.S. Congress and how deadlocked it was. He told interviewers later, quote, it was plain that your system had faults, which we should try to avoid. So he built this trying to avoid America style gridlock and he wound up creating another system that caused even more gridlock.

That wasn't his intention. The best laid plan. He's not a bastard in this. He was really trying. It's hard. It's hard. It's hard to make a government. Government's hard.

Yeah. So this is why I think this is the most important story in history, because in the space of about a decade or so, the Weimar government went from the most progressive government in human history to Nazis. And understanding how that happened is really critical. A lot of the blame for this goes to the Social Democratic Party. They were the largest party in post-war Germany, as I already stated, but they'd been even larger before World War One had broke out.

So in 1912, the Social Democrats had been the largest socialist party anywhere on the planet. They had more than a million members. When World War One came around, though, rather than condemning the war as socialists ought to do, they supported their troops and the country, and they voted yes on the war and yes on massively increased military budgets. This cost them, yeah, this cost them a lot of support. By 1919, they were down to a quarter of a million voters.

Most of the people who left the Social Democrats either swung very far to the left, and either joined the Communist Party or an independent left-wing party that was further left than the Social Democrats. So even with all that they had lost due to the war, the Social Democrats were still in a strong position in 1919. The Nails weren't really hammered into their coffin until the end of 1919 and early 1920, when the terms of the Treaty of Versailles became public. This was the same time Ludendorff and Hindenburg started spreading that stab in the back myth.

So if the Social Democrats had been ballsy enough to refuse to support the war in August of 1914, they would have had a leg to stand on. It's not true that all of Germany supported World War One. The largest protest in German history up to that point occurred in the run-up to the war. There were people gathering in the street to support it, but there was 100,000 people marched in Berlin against starting World War One. So it was not necessarily a doomed proposition. It is a myth that everyone was in favor of there being a war.

Well, I'm not really getting whoever is in favor of a war. I don't even understand how it's the best idea. Well, back then, number one, there was this long European history of war being glorious and a thing that makes men into men. No, but I mean, come on. We don't have any medicine. They're putting vodka on a damn wound. I mean, anybody who lives to tell the war tale is terrifying to look at.

You got to think, though. These guys, all of modern European military experience was fighting people they were colonizing with machine guns. Well, of course, right. So they would have... Machetes versus machine guns. Yeah, exactly. So that's what their view of war was, and everyone thought it was going to be...

They're like, war's easy. They keep trying to give us corn. But not everybody thought that way. Love people had looked at the American Civil War to know that, like, oh, God, this is going to be bad if we all start fighting. Let's not do this. But nobody listened to them. And the social democrats didn't have the guts to stand up and say, this is a dumb idea.

So rather than being known as the party who had tried to stop Germany from getting into a losing war, at the end of the war, they were just one of the other groups who had supported the worst disaster in German history. And then they wound up escape goats sacrificed on the altar of Paul von Hindenburg's legacy. So over the next year, the Social Democratic, you know, 1919 to 1920 or so, 1920 to 21, the Social Democratic share of the vote dropped from, like, 40% to around 20%. Now this time, the members who left them, a lot of those people split right enjoying the German People's Party or the German National's Party.

Now both of these were fairly and very conservative parties, respectively, and this brings us to the next group of bastards who guaranteed Hitler's rise to power, Germany's conservatives. So a lot of different people had to fuck up, like the Social Democrats and like Hindenburg and Ludendorff, to make Nazi domination possible, but the simple fact is that none of the other fuckups would have mattered as much if a sizable percentage of the German center right hadn't decided that the Nazis seemed okay. Now these people were overwhelmingly not folks who considered themselves Nazis. Tim Shire, who was the author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and was an American

journalist who lived in Germany during the rise of the Nazi Party, he interviewed Hitler a bunch of times. He interviewed, like, every figure that we're talking about today, he talked to them. So he's an authoritative source on what the hell was going on in Germany in this period of time. He wrote, quote, in the former Austrian vagabond, the conservative classes thought they had found a man who, while remaining their prisoner, would help them attain their goals. These goals were multifaceted.

The wealthy businessmen and industrialists wanted the Nazis to destroy the unions and roll back essentially the minimum wage. Social conservatives, like Germany's many Protestant voters, wanted the Nazi help in winning a culture war with the left. Here's how another wonderful book called The Death of Democracy describes it. In part, this war was over newer forms of art in literature, socially critical theater, novels that dealt frankly with sex, expressionist painting. In part, it was about anxiety over new forms of media, such as films and mass circulation

newspapers. Their pages filled with sports, crime, and scandal rather than politics and diplomacy. Sometimes it was about social changes. The growing feminist and gay movements were challenging, straight male identities. Well, girl, what you want me to say, because I'm going to let the quote speak to the listener however they choose to hear it. Yeah. Yeah.

We'll talk a little more openly once we've gotten through all this. So many conservative voters were rural. Again, they felt separated and excluded from life in cities like Berlin. I want to say they all just like beat at a house party. They were all jelly-clay, like, warning Berlin where the shit was popping off. Shit was going down. It was going down. You know what I mean?

They were like, I want to go to a party. You know what I mean? We just had some rural house parties, get them jams going. They would have been like, it's all love. The right amount of house parties in the right places could have made this situation. The right amount of house parties. I'm getting into politics. If only they'd had Burning Man back then.

That could have really helped out. It could have really brought people together. Yeah. Burning Black Forest or wherever. That's the only rural German place I know. But yeah. Conservative rural voters felt excluded from life in the cities and felt like their concerns were being ignored by mainstream politicians, which they were.

One conservative landowner who didn't like the Nazis justified his Nazi vote by saying he was quote, hopeful of relief measures by a Hitler cabinet for the depressed agriculture of the east. It was hard for farmers. He didn't agree with everything Hitler had to say, but he thought quote, the army and the forces of conservatism would suffice to prevent a one-party Nazi dictatorship. Okay, but also, but also, but also. He was worried about his, the agriculture.

Yeah. He's a farmer. I get that part. Sure. My question being, were they talking about helping farmers? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That was a big, like that was one of the things. They were saying, they were saying, they were like, okay, we got you. Yeah. The Nazis were very much an agrarian back to the land movement. Okay. Yeah. They were big about that. They were big about that.

So that was part of their ruse. And in fact, one of the things the Nazis did was they were part of this like Hitler Youth thing where they were mobilizing the kids as they would have young men from the cities. This was during when the Nazis were in charge, they would have them go out to farms and basically act as free labor for the farmers. It was seen as toughening up the young boys to get them ready for the army and it was also helped out the farmers. So the Nazis were very big on helping rural farmers.

Okay. Yeah. That was a big part of their political stance. Yeah. So other non-Nazi conservatives gave their support to Hitler in more tangible ways. One such man was Victor von Kerber, a northern German aristocrat, war hero, and right-wing political pundit. Now, Kerber did not like Hitler, but Hitler liked the cachet that Kerber had with the

right wing. So the future furor made Victor an offer he couldn't refuse. Hitler wanted to use Kerber's name and pretend that Kerber was the author of a biography on Hitler that Hitler himself had written by basically mashing a bunch of his speeches together. The thrust of the book was how Hitler's experiences as a young man and a soldier had revealed to him the path by which he could make Germany great again. Now, to Hitler, this was a chance to reverse a mistake he'd made.

Hard as it is to believe now, in the early 1920s, Hitler's face was not well known outside of Bavaria. He had actually refused to be photographed a lot of the time and tried to use only his voice to win power. By the mid-20s he'd realized that this was a bad strategy and he needed to rebrand himself. His strategy to do that started with by releasing this secretly in autobiography under Kerber's name. Obviously, if he'd published it under his own name, it would have seemed like narcissism.

Kerber's name was a shield and a Trojan horse to convince other conservatives that Hitler was not too radical for them to support. Now, this wound up coming out after the Beer Hall Putsch when stuff was banned in Germany, so the book was banned not super long after its release. It's hard to say how much support it won him, but it was part of a successful strategy that made Hitler's acceptable to the right. Right, because it was basically like, oh my god, did you read that new Kerber joint? Yeah, it was just one of the things.

Right, and it was kind of like, it starts a whisper campaign. People are buzzing. I hear Viktor von Kerber wrote a book about this guy and he's a pretty reasonable dude. Yes, that's how you get him. That's how you get him. So Viktor von Kerber lived to regret helping out Hitler. He eventually became an ardent anti-Nazi and even helped smuggle a German Jew out of Germany. He spied on behalf of the British until he was caught and thrown in a concentration camp.

He nearly died there. So he did his best to make it right, but the fucking Nazis were still in power. Nazis didn't need to help the Nazis directly to still help the Nazis. Take the example of Edgar Julius Jung. Now he was a right-wing pundit as well and a provocateur who became a champion of the Young Conservatives movement. Jung is in, young in age, not as in his last name, I know that's confusing. Movement in Germany.

And it's confusing also in German because the German word for like, young is like young man. Anyway. Okay. They didn't make it easy. They didn't make it easy. It's messy. Yeah.

So Jung wrote an entire book called The Rule of Inferiors about why democracy was a bad idea. He considered the Weimar Republic a, quote, belated breakthrough by the Enlightenment into the middle of Europe. Germans needed to battle this, he said, with tradition, blood, and historical spirit. Now Jung never liked- What the hell's historical spirit? It's the same thing as the Henedberg thing. My family for 600 years has been German warriors and yada, yada, yada, yada.

Back when we were fighting people, we were colonizing, we didn't have weapons to really fight us, right? The Germans didn't have that much of a history of that. You're right. You're right. They did some, but they didn't get into colonialism until a lot later. They weren't really that deep. But I mean, but I don't know if you're thinking about what you were saying though about, you

know, this history of war, back when war was glorious. Yeah. But part of the glory, right, is that you're saying like more people lived and can come back and tell the tale of it. Yeah. They did. There wasn't, like a war would be a few big battles and then whatever happens, happens. It's not like we came to know in World War II where it's like we're going to destroy

the whole country to win this thing. Right. Right. Like that's what war turned into, but historically it had been more like we're gonna, the army's gonna march out and it'll fight their army and it'll be this big heroic couple of days and then whatever, you know, there'll be a treaty and the people who come home will have stories. Right.

And if it is legitimately less terrifying, then you're gonna have to stay in a trench for four years and all your friends are gonna die. Right. Like. Good luck if you come back with legs. Yeah. You're not, you're, if you get wounded, that's pretty much it for you. That's it for you.

Because there's poop everywhere. There will be poop in your wounds, a hundred percent. We don't have medicine yet. How do you feel about poop wounds? Yeah. Just before we get in. You're good with poop wounds? Yeah.

You're good with it? Great. Sign you right up. The Nazis, but he viewed them as no worse than the communists or the treacherous social democrats. They were all equally bad. But Jung's writing played right into Nazi hands, because he was like, we need to destroy the current government.

It's terrible. And the Nazi codename for the Weimar Republic was the system. They wanted the system destroyed. So did Jung. He helped build support for that idea among the moderate German right. Of course, Jung didn't want the system replaced by a fascist dictatorship, and in fact, as he aged, he grew wiser and came to support the establishment of a European Union, linking all of Europe together to facilitate trade and travel and make another world war impossible.

He was horrified when the Nazis took power. He reportedly told a journalist, now I'd like to throw my arms around every Social Democrat. Jung became part of the anti-Nazi resistance. He helped communists and Social Democrats alike escape Germany, and he wrote a fiery anti-Nazi speech that was delivered by a conservative politician named Franz von Pappen at the University of Marburg. After this, he was shot dead by the Nazis during the Night of Long Knives. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, honey. There's consequences. Consequences is like, you got to get hip quick. Nobody got time for you to figure this out five, ten years in trying to make a change. Way too late by the time he realized a course correction was necessary. But we're getting ahead of ourselves here. Let's pull back a bit and talk about the Munich Beer Hall Putsch.

What do you know about that? Don't know nothing about no Putsch. Okay. You know, Hitler tried to take over the government. I feel like literally whatever comments you're going to get on this is like, why did you have a dumb person here? No, no, no, no. This is, you're not a dumb person.

It's like, this year alone, I've probably read 11 or 12 books on this period of time. This is the thing I'm a nerd about, right? So I obsess over this. But most people don't because everybody's got other shit to do, and there's a lot of other things that are important to know. I don't know much about capital gains taxes. Right. Well, and I guess if that, you know, putting it that way, it's very sweet of you to say,

what do you know about the Munich Beer Hall Putsch? Yeah. Because it implies that I could possibly, and that's really nice of you, you know, to come in here and say, you know what, maybe you know about this Putsch. And I just say, I don't, but I appreciate you giving me that respect. Well, and if you don't know much about it, most people probably don't. And it's important for people to know about this. So in 1923, Hitler tried to take, to seize control of the Weimar government.

It started with a speech in a beer hall in Munich and the kidnapping of a bunch of local politicians. Eric Ludendorff was around and he helped Hitler convince these politicians to support him. And then Hitler and Ludendorff in about 2000 Nazis marched downtown to seize control of the city. Ludendorff. I was there, baby. Yeah, he was there.

And he hoped that this would, Hitler hoped that seizing control of Munich would spark a domino effect that would topple the Weimar government, lead to an establishment of a government that he was more, you know, down with. But the government officials that Hitler had kidnapped basically turned on him the instant he marched away and called the police. The police set up a barricade. They opened fire on the Nazis. Four cops and 16 Nazis were killed in the resulting skirmish.

Hitler fled the scene and hid out in the attic of his friend Putzy's house. No, that bitch didn't go in the attic. Yeah, he hit no. No, Hitler's ass did not go up in an attic. Oh, it gets even more embarrassing for Hitler. So Putzy, the friends whose attic he was hanging in. He also would have a friend named Putzy. He totally would.

He was like, uh, you know, Putzy, uh, can I get up in an attic? Can I chill in your place for a minute? I tried to overthrow the government. These came in a little too hot. I need to lay low. Wow. Didn't work out great. Oh, my God.

What a loser. So Putzy's real name was Ernst Honfstangle, which I think I'm getting right. Where did we get Putzy? Yeah, I have no fucking idea. I assume if I knew more German than I do that it would make more sense, but it does not. And I've never seen an explanation. But that was his nickname. Ernst and his wife, Helena, were two of Hitler's early supporters.

Now, Helena isn't a bastard, but she's definitely one of the people responsible for Hitler's rise to power. He viewed her as a source of emotional comfort during the difficult early years of the Nazi movement. Here's a quote from the book 1924, the year that made Hitler. Honstangle once walked into the living room to find Hitler laying his head in Helena's lap and saying, if only I had someone like you to take care of me. Helena gently rebuked Hitler and removed his head.

She swore to her husband later that Hitler was no man for any woman. Believe me, he is an absolute neuter. Oh snap. Helena's spitting some fire. But also it all lines up. You know what I'm saying? God. Yeah.

So the failed putch was yet another time when Helena helped Hitler keep going. She hit him under blankets and tried to have him smuggled out of town by her friends. When this failed and the police showed up at her door, Helena claims Hitler quote, pulled out his revolver with his good hand. He injured his hand in the in the putch, his arm actually, and shouted, this is the end. I will never let those swine take me. I will shoot myself first. Hitler tried to commit suicide.

Helena wrestled the gun out of Hitler's hands and threw it into the flower bin. She saved his life and in doing so kind of doomed 75 million people to death. Wait, so that really happened or I thought that's what she was saying happened to kind of say, oh, this is the only reason why he's in my house. No, she's saying that actually went down. No, that went down. God damn it. Helena, let him do it.

Let him do it. Let him do it. You're saying he's a neuter. You obviously don't like him talking shit about him or maybe you did get down with him and you don't want your husband to know. Either way, Helena, you two faced, she a messy bitch. Helena's a messy bitch. It's one of those things like, I think it's always the right thing if you see some trying

to kill themselves, try to stop it. Okay. I'm not going to say she was wrong for that, but it led to Hitler. I guess so. He wasn't Hitler. He wasn't the Hitler. We know. He wasn't Hitler.

Yeah. Yeah. He must have brought that stuff up. You hanging out with your boy Poozie in his damn attic and you'd be like, you know what I feel like? You know what I really want to do one day? Kill all the Jews. You know what I mean?

That's not an idea that just popped the key was talking about that. This is one of those things that gets into like a really deep historical debate that I'm going to take. One of the major debates about the Nazi time and power is whether or not the Holocaust was pre-planned from the beginning or was just sort of something that they decided to do it later in the war when things turned against them. There's a debate. Both sides, you can find very convincing arguments for.

We're not going to weigh in either way. I don't think she's a bad person if we're trying to stop her friend from killing himself. It is why we have Hitler. You're right. No, no. At the same time, Hitler came out of it. So it's not, it's good to stop him from killing himself. It's like, true.

You can't argue with that and yet in this one context, I'm like, I don't know. There's nothing to learn from her story here because it's like she did the right thing and we got Hitler. You can't always take a lesson out of history. Sometimes it just sucks. Speaking of things that just suck, you know what doesn't suck? What? Doritos and the other wonderful products and services that support this podcast, which

we're about to hear some ads from in a moment because that's what allows this show to be on the air. I love it. Mm-hmm. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism.

I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books.

I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. 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. And we're back. We just had a little break. I ate a handful of Doritos. And I just got to let you know I was feeling a little bit of a rising urge to overthrow democracy and institute a one-party dictatorship and it just went away as soon as I tasted

that cool ranch on my lips. Cool ranch keeps you cool. Keeps you from instituting a fascist dictatorship. Again, Doritos are unofficial sponsor until they send a legal request asking me to stop saying that or give us money and then become our official sponsor. Either way Doritos, anyway, let's get back into the Hitler tale. So Helena Haunfstangle, the wife of Hitler's best buddy, had just stopped him from killing himself after his failed beer haul putsch.

Tell me she also late in life regretted that, like so many other people. I know that there was a falling out between the Haunfstangles and them. You hear more about Ernst because he moved to America, but they split up. And I really don't know much about Helena after this period. I would have researched that, but I'm hacking a fraud. So anyway, the failed putsch should have, by all rights, been the end of Hitler's Hitlering career. But it wasn't, obviously, and the bastards responsible for that are the judges and the

police of Weimar Germany. First off, the cop who arrested, this is just to give you a little bit of color for how the police treated the Nazis, the cop who arrested Hitler apologized before taking him away. While Hitler waited for his trial, he stayed in the VIP equivalent of a cell and was allowed to receive gifts, which were mainly sweets and cakes from his followers. Here's a quote from that wonderful book, 1924, which I really recommend reading if you're a Hitler nerd, 1924, the year that made Hitler.

I don't know if anybody wants to call themselves a Hitler nerd. Whatever. Hey, you know, some people like Star Wars. Some people like to study the rise and fall of the Third Reich. It's not that different, actually. Here's a quote from that book that sums up how Hitler was treated during the trial and how the Nazis in general were treated by the courts and the police. Quote, the relaxed treatment of the Nazis and their allies was in stark contrast to

the much rougher handling meted out to trial defendants from communist or socialist groups who were prosecuted in the people's courts around Bavaria. The socialist Münchener Post, which I hope I pronounced right, bitterly noted that in Hitler's trial, the accused carried on animated conversations with one another until they were asked with great tact if they wouldn't mind taking their seats, no sign of guards. Only two months earlier, wrote the newspaper, 16 socialists had been brought into a people's court where, quote, they arrived manacled and departed manacled. Each had a guard on either side.

They were not allowed to speak with one another. Even those whose sentences were already covered by time served were led away afterwards in chains. That's the kind of tact the court shows to socialists. So can you imagine going to trial and then just chatting with your buds like you're in a conference in Scranton? It's just very like them showing up and just like keking for a while. And I mean like, could you guys like quiet down, we're trying to start your proceedings.

Could you cut it with just a little bit with saying the government needs to be overthrown? We gotta do this trial. We gotta do this trial. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. The quicker you're quiet, the quicker we'll end this. So Hitler's trial became the trial of the century or it would have been the trial of

the century if not for the Nuremberg trials to prosecute the Nazis, but that was in the future. Up to this point, it was the trial of the century. It was very heavily publicized and Hitler was able to use it as basically a platform to recruit more supporters thanks to his shitty chief judge, George Nighthart. It's George... Judge Nightcourt? Nighthart.

Oh, you could... It almost, basically. And I was like, Nightcourt? Well, they're always goofing. And it's actually... I think it might be George. George? George?

George. It's, you know, Germans. I'm sorry. I love you, Germans, but you spelled George wrong. So old George was a right-wing nationalist with a history of throwing the book at leftists and not really caring so much about right-wing terrorists. He had commuted the sentence of a right-wing terrorist named Count Arco Valley, which is a legitimately cool name.

Arco Valley? That's a Star Wars villain. Yeah, that's definitely... That is a Star Wars villain. That's a TV villain. Yeah. The count had been sentenced to death for shooting Kurt Eisner, a socialist revolutionary and journalist in the back of the head.

Judge Nightart reduced that to fortress arrest, which sounds harsh, but it basically means you get to live in a castle. What? Yeah. That's cool. I'm imagining him just rollerblading through his empty halls. The judge justified this by saying that Count Arco Valley had, quote, a glowing love of his people and fatherland, and also because a lot of people didn't like the guy that

he'd shot, so it was fine. Judge Nightart believed... Well, there's the rules. Let's get some shit done. A lot of people thought that guy was a dick, so I guess it's cool that you murdered him. Here's a castle. German law. German law.

Judge Nightart believed that political murder wasn't a serious crime if the victim was unpopular, which in his case meant left wing. Nightart also had granted Hitler's early parole a year earlier when Hitler had received a sentence for breaching the peace. He'd been sentenced to three months of parole, Nightart reduced it to one, Hitler had received the sentence for the severe bludgeoning of a political rival. So this is the kind of guy who's Hitler's judge when he goes to court for trying to overthrow the government, which again, you'd think would be a serious crime.

But not with him, those are just homies. Yeah, Nightart's first big ruling was on whether or not the case against Hitler would be an open or closed session, which means whether or not everything that happens will be available to the public and journalists or whether or not it will be hidden. Now the prosecution wanted a closed session, which was both to hide Hitler from public demand and to keep his politics obscure and to hide the fact that members of the German army had kind of sort of absolutely supported and egged on the coup. Hitler's defense wanted the case to be open, so Hitler could court the sympathy of the

German people by doing what he did best, giving long speeches. Judge Nightart ruled that part of the case could stay open and part of it would be closed, which is- Oh, so let me guess, all the long speeches were open? Yeah. That's exactly what happened. Hitler got to hide anything that he thought was bad for his case, because Nightart basically said the defense will know which part should be open and closed.

Yeah. Yeah. What? Kind of law. Yeah, he's a shitty judge. He justified this by saying that the Weimar government had banned Hitler's publications after he tried to overthrow the government, so it was only fair that Hitler be allowed to speak to the people, you know?

This is not how stuff works when you in trouble. You don't get to make no calls. Oh my God. Yeah. Why folks be goofing? Why folks be goofing? This is like the whitest guy sentence of all time, because for trying to overthrow the government and institute a dictatorship, Hitler gets a year in a fortress prison, where he

gets to live in a fancy whole apartment to himself. His friends were there too, because they got arrested. Poozie was there. Well, not Poozie, but like a bunch of them. He and his friends all get to live in a fortress for a year. So it's basically like fraternity. It was a great time. It was a frat house.

They partied. They had access to alcohol. They got food. He used the time to finish writing and editing Mein Kampf. I was going to say he must have. This is where he wrote Mein Kampf. Yeah. Exactly.

Honestly, like, would love a fortress prison, okay? I need some time to rebuild, reconnect. I would definitely get into yoga, start clean eating. A fortress prison might actually do me the good. A fortress prison with all of your best friends. That's not a punishment. That's not how you stop someone from being Hitler. You know they snuck in ladies.

Party at the fortress prison? I mean, what do you think? They got around. I don't think Hitler was cool. I'm serious. Some of them did. I don't think Hitler was that cool. No, but if he had his boys around, they smuggled somebody, because you know a fortress prison's

got tunnels. Mm-hmm. You know it does. The trial in Hitler's time in fortress prison were key moments in his rise to power. Now the trial also provided reams of evidence that the German army and the Bavarian state police had been helping the Nazis out since their inception. At one point during the trial, Wilhelm Frick, who'd run the Munich police department from 1919 to 1922, was questioned.

He admitted, quote, we could have easily suppressed it, it being the Nazis, in 1919 and 1920, but we realized that this little national socialist movement should not be crushed. Frick and his fellow officers saw the Nazis as, quote, the germ of a rebirth of Germany. We held a protective hand over the National Socialist German Workers Party and Herr Hitler. Well, well, well. Now we'll talk later about the history of coordination between the police and far-right Nazi extremists, but there was actually another time during Hitler's rise to power where he was saved in court by a sympathetic judge.

On May 8, 1931, Hitler was subpoenaed when four of his stormtroopers tried to murder a guy. The subpoena was the ploy of a radical socialist lawyer and fucking hero named Hans Lytton. Now Hans wanted to get Hitler on the stand so that he could cross-examine him and basically prove that the violence by Hitler's men had been directly encouraged by Hitler in the Nazi party. Here's how the death of democracy describes it. The climax comes in an exchange over a pamphlet written by the Nazi party's propaganda director

Joseph Goebbels. The pamphlet is a quick guide to Nazi ideology for new party recruits. It includes the promise that if the Nazis cannot come to power through elections, then we will make revolution, then we will chase the parliament to the devil and found the state on the basis of German fists and German brains. If Hitler's party is legal, Lytton wants to know, how could such a thing be written by the party's designated propagandist and published by the party's official publisher? In the morning session, Hitler evades this question by denying that the party ever approved

the pamphlet. Then, over lunch break, Lytton learns that the pamphlet is still being sold at Goebbels meetings and at all party bookstores. Can Hitler explain this? Hitler could not explain this and actually screamed in rage while on the stand because he had no answer to it. So he just screamed? Yeah, he got so angry because he'd been caught.

Well, right, but my idea is like, think about how pathetic that is. It should have been the end. The end. It should have been the end. But the judge, Kurt Ohnsorge, decided to protect Hitler. Now, Kurt wasn't a Nazi either, but he preferred them to the scary socialists and evil communists. Judge Ohnsorge disallowed further questioning. Lytton's case could have potentially led to criminal charges for Hitler and other Nazis.

Instead it led to basically nothing. A little more than a year later, Hitler was the new chancellor of Germany. Lytton was sent to a concentration camp where he spent more than five agonizing years before committing suicide in Dachau. The whole incident amounted to little more than bad press for Hitler. And by that point, he could handle it. So fuck you, Kurt Ohnsorge. Yeah, sure.

Someone in Germany go find his grave and pee on it. We will send you a shirt unless that is illegal for me to say in which case, like Hitler, I never urged anyone to do anything illegal. Never start any sentence about yourself with like Hitler. That's a fair point, that's a fair point. Thank you for trying to protect me. And yeah, I won't make a Doritos plug there, I probably will not get a sponsorship. So let's talk about the press now.

The German and American press are collectively our next bastard on this tour to bastards. There were of course a number of great journalists like William Shire, right and left wing, who reported worriedly on the rise of the Nazis and tried to highlight their crimes before Hitler came to power. Unfortunately those people were not the majority of the mainstream media. Hitler's big speech at the trial for the Munich Putsch was only able to reach German citizens and convert new Nazis because the trial was breathlessly covered by major German newspapers.

Hitler said wacky and sane things, it was easy to get headlines out of his nuttiness and people wanted to read about this bizarre character. Here's how that wonderful book, Death of Democracy, described the coverage. He knows how to use all modulations of his sometimes raw voice, noted the respected Frankfurt or Zeitung, Zeitung means newspaper in German. While no friend of the Nazi leader, the sophisticated newspaper was committed to a liberal democratic order in the new Germany and had endorsed the Treaty of Versailles. The Jewish-owned daily nonetheless let its reporter give Hitler his due as a performer

and explain to an unknowing audience some of the magic of Hitler's method. He softens his voice, then gradually raises it to a dramatic shout, even a hoarse screech. His voice then cracks in sorrow over his fallen comrades. He scornfully mocks the trembling timidity of his enemies, shaping his words with a lively play of his hands. Hitler rounds off his periods with both hands, emphasizes an ironic or offensive comment by shooting his left index finger towards the state attorney and uses his head and even his body to undergird his speech.

The rhetorical impact is strong. Much of what Hitler says about the lead up to the coup sounds at least subjectively convincing, wrote the Frankfurt or Zeitung. Everyone sees clearly how Hitler's plan grew out of the behavior of the men then ruling in Bavaria. The only thing dividing them were some personal questions and the courage to act. This is the left wing coverage of Hitler. I was gonna say, and they don't like him?

These are the guys who don't like him. Well that's very nice. So the vast majority of Germany's newspapers were very anti-Nazi and anti-Hitler. This did not concern the Nazis one bit. They loved the breathless coverage of the crazy things Hitler would say. Joseph Goebbels repeatedly wrote in his diary, the main thing is, they're talking about us. Wow. Uh-huh.

Wow. Now the American press also played a big role in Hitler's growing acceptance, both Germany and the world, as a legitimate politician. In the late 1920s, American papers took to calling him the German Mussolini. Now that sounds bad to us because we know Mussolini was murdered in the street by his own people and strung up so they could gawk at his corpse. But back in those days, Mussolini was an important world leader and not yet disgraced. So I'm going to quote now from a very good Smithsonian article called How Journalists

Covered the Rise of Mussolini and Hitler, and this is gonna be a long quote. The main way that the press defanged Hitler was by portraying him as something of a joke. He was a nonsensical screecher of wild words whose appearance, according to Newsweek, suggests Charlie Chaplin. His countenance is a caricature. He was as vulnerable as he was insecure, stated Cosmopolitan. Sure he had a following, but his followers were impressionable voters, duped by radical doctrines and quack remedies, claimed the Washington Post.

Now that Hitler actually had to operate within a government after he was elected, the sober politicians would submerge this movement, according to the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor. A quote, keen sense of dramatic instinct was not enough when it came time to govern his lack of gravity and profundity of thought would be exposed. In fact, the New York Times wrote after Hitler's appointment to the chancellorship that success would only let him expose to the German public his own futility. Journalists wondered whether Hitler now regretted leaving the rally for the cabinet meeting,

where he would have to assume some responsibility. Would he though? Eventually, I mean, he shot himself when the Russians were at the gates. Well eventually, but it took a while. There's no better way to make someone seem like not a threat. And therefore, even if you don't respect him, you still are like, oh, this is no big deal. But according to Charlie Chaplet, everyone's favorite good time, guys! Everybody's favorite fun dude!

He's a fun dude, having a fun time! Oh my god. Yep. So all of this, I hope, has explained how the soil of fascism was fertilized in Germany, all of these people, and many more that I didn't have the time to get into detail about, helped prepare a political climate that could allow for the rise of Adolf Hitler in the most progressive, educated, and enlightened society in the world at the time. The only thing left to explain is how Hitler actually achieved absolute power and toppled

the Weimar democracy. So we're going to get into some turn of the century German parliamentary politics here. I'm going to try to make it interesting. I think it will be, because it's interesting to me, and my taste is flawless. So here we go. In 1923, the same year that Hitler tried his putch, a guy named Gustav Stressemann was elected chancellor of Germany. Now, Stressemann was a liberal, and his main achievement in office was starting the healing

process with France. He became friends with their leader, a guy named Breonde, and both of them desperately wanted to avoid their two nations ever again coming to blows. These are actually the first people who proposed a European Union using the words European Union. Wow. That was the dream then. It was like, okay, if we have a common border between us and we start trading and our kids

can travel and see each other, maybe there will never be another terrible world war. That was the dream for Stressemann and Breonde. Unfortunately, Stressemann's terms started right when the German economy took a swan dive into the asphalt. The social democrats pulled their support from him and his government collapsed, which meant new elections and a new chancellor. So was he a chancellor for like a week and a half? About a year.

A year, okay. The collapsed economy did not, he was now, he was foreign minister. He was like their head of foreign policy for like eight years after that. So he was a force in politics, but yeah, he was no longer in charge. So the collapsed economy didn't sweep the Nazis into power as it's often claimed, but it did lead to a surge at this point in time in the early 20s in votes for both the Nazis and the right wing in general. Now in 1925, Paul von Hindenburg gets elected president of the Reich.

Oh, yeah. There he is. There he is. There he is. There's our man. Oh. Hindenburg. No.

Yeah. There he is. So he is the president for the Reich now. Over the next few years, the economy improved, but Germany's political polarization continued unabated. Stressman stayed on as the foreign minister until he died in 1929. And while he was in office, he pushed for Germany to join with France into that European Union thing.

This actually might have happened if it hadn't have been for a guy named Alfred Hugenberg. Now Hugenberg was a very wealthy conservative who had bought up a ton of newspapers and owned a lot of... Wealthy conservatives. That owns a bunch of newspapers. Whoa. Oh. He wound up at the head of the German National Party, which was a center right-wing party.

They surged in 1924 when the economy fell, but by 1928, the economy had started to get better, and that meant that they lost a huge number of votes to the Liberals. One of Hugenberg's first moves as head of the party was to ally it with the Nazi movement. He didn't like the Nazis, but he saw them as the only way for conservatives to win at the ballot box. So Hugenberg hated the Treaty of Versailles and the reparations payments Germany was forced to make. Continuing those payments, albeit in a reduced form, was a key part of the plan that Stressemann

and Breanne had put together to bring Germany and France into an early EU sort of thing. The Nazi-Conservative Alliance was successful at stopping any chance this had of becoming a reality and pursed pushing Germany away from reconciliation with France. Now a lot of Germans actually supported reconciliation and greater integration into Europe. We don't exactly have opinion polls from that time, but most Germans in the late 20s were voting for liberal or leftist parties, or at least centrist parties. The problem is that the German Communist Party, the KPD, was not willing to work with the Social Democrats in the same way the Nazis and the conservatives were willing to work

together. Now the why, the why as in why the Communists weren't willing to work with the Social Democrats, leads us to this episode's secret hidden bastard, Joseph Stalin! So back in the 1920s, the Communists of the world were a very centralized group. The German Communist Party, which saw substantial increases in voters right up until the Nazis came to power, was run by the Communist International, which was run by the Soviet Union, which was under the control of our old homeboy Jay Stahl. Now in 1928, the common turn had declared that world capitalism was entering its third

period, a time of crisis in which capitalists ally with fascists for help in fighting back against organizing labor. This part was true, as we will get into later, but the common turn, aka Stalin, also said that business would seek the help of the Social Democrats who, because of their support for capitalism, were, quote, social fascists, and thus just as bad as the Nazi Party. The reality is that Stalin simply didn't want the French and German relations to improve because a more united Europe would represent a threat to his dominance and maybe to the Soviet Union's continued survival.

So he told the German Communist Party that they had to fight the Social Democrats rather than work with them to defeat the Nazis and stop the rise of Hitler. So, Stalin's in the mix. God, Stalin's in the mix. My goodness. Yeah, he's got his fingers in this shit pie too. So now, since I've thrown the Communists under their bus, it's only fair that I say that capitalists also had a huge role in allowing the Nazis to seize power.

Walter Funk was a German economist and future Reich minister for economic affairs under the Nazis. He testified at Nuremberg that, by 1931, my industrial, which means my business owning, friends and I were convinced that the Nazi Party would come to power in the not too distant future. In the rise and fall of the Third Reich, William Scheierer, who interviewed both Funk and Hitler a number of times, describes how German big business came to stop worrying and love the Nazis.

In the summer of that year, Funk, a greasy, shifty-eyed, punchy little man whose face always reminded this writer of a frog, gave up a lucrative job as editor of a leading German financial newspaper, the Berliner Bresetung, and joined the Nazi Party and became a contact man between the party and a number of important business leaders. He explained Nuremberg that several of his industrialist friends, especially those prominent in the big Rhineland mining concerns, had urged him to join the Nazi movement in order to persuade the party to follow the course of private enterprise. This is a quote from Funk.

At that time, the leadership of the party held completely contradictory and confused views on economic policy. I tried to accomplish my mission by personally impressing on the Führer and the Party that private initiative, self-reliance of the businessman, the creative powers of free enterprise, etc., be recognized as the basic economic policy of the party. The Führer personally stressed time and again during talks with me and industrial leaders to whom I had introduced him, that he was an enemy of state economy and of the so-called planned economy, and that he considered free enterprise and competition as absolutely necessary

in order to gain the highest possible production. So German bankers and businessmen began to pour money into the Nazi Party, millions of Reichsmarks worth. Their goal was the suppression of labor unions and an end to the Weimar government's equivalent of a minimum wage. The death of democracy explains, the industrialist called for cuts in public spending and wages and a rollback of government regulation. As business leaders well knew, this was a program that could be achieved only through

the exclusion of the political left, especially the social democrats. So everybody's on board. We're all in. You get a Führer. You get a Führer. You get a Führer. You get to go to a concentration camp. You get a camp.

You get a camp. Half of you go to camps. Most of you go to camps. Now, the final bastard I'm going to introduce today in this exceptionally bastardful episode is a general named Kurt von Schleicher. He was the army's chief political lobbyist because the army had one of those, and so he represented the German army or Reichswehr in politics. The army had been severely limited by the Treaty of Versailles, so they wanted an end

to that, and they also wanted more money to buy army things like expensive new battle cruisers. The social democrats preferred to spend that money on bullshit like bridges and foods, and in fact, one of their election slogans was food instead of a battleship, basically. So Schleicher and the military, like the German industrialists, wanted to push the left entirely out of power. Schleicher did not like Adolf Hitler. There's a story that at one point he was talking to a Hitler supporter who kept gushing

over how talented the Führer was. Schleicher responded, yes, it's just a pity that he's crazy. By the way, Schleicher would be shot to death on the night of Long Knives. But at this point in time, Schleicher, who didn't like the Nazis, was still sure that once they got into power, they'd calm themselves down and moderate themselves. He said, quote, we'll make the Nazis believers in the state only when we let them at the trough. When has giving someone power made them more moderate?

Not once in all of history. Not once! Well, okay. I'll put you in charge. Same thing. Turn an 11-year-old into soldiers. Yeah, yeah. It's a bad idea.

It's a bad idea. The reason that's usually justified for why he thought this is that the social Democrats had at one point been a pretty radical left-wing political party and then they'd had to govern and it had turned them more moderate. So that happens with reasonable people who weren't from the get-go claiming they want to do install a dictatorship. It's like how Obama starts off with all this left-wing talk and then he's more of a centrist once he's in power.

That happens with sane people, you know? It's like, yeah, it doesn't happen with the crazy people. They don't get moderated by being given power and they don't compromise. So in 1930, a guy named Heinrich Bröding was elected chancellor of Germany. Now Bröding was probably the last competent elected leader the Weimar Republic had. Bröding was famous for being a policy wonk who mainly wanted to get the economy back on track again. He also wanted the government to ban the SA, the Nazi stormtroopers, because he thought

it was unreasonable that a fascist political party would be allowed to have a paramilitary army. Don't you come in here trying to be reasonable, Heinrich, honey? This is not the story for reasonable men to do well. Schleicher, the German general lobbyist guy, thought the stormtroopers were useful because they were sort of a back-up army. The German army was limited to 100,000 men, there were like a million something stormtroopers at this point.

So he thought they were useful as like a force that he could call on if the country was invaded. So he talked to his buddy, President Paul von Hindenburg, who would be up for reelection soon, and he told him that, you know, if you ban the stormtroopers, it's gonna not end well for you. So Schleicher tried to sabotage the ban. He put together a file mostly filled with right-wing news press clippings about violence perpetuated by the social democrats' paramilitary organization. Do they even have a paramilitary?

Oh yeah, yeah, everybody did. And during this whole period, it's important to understand, there is a growing amount of fighting in the streets between the Nazis and the social democrats and the communists, and everybody has a little paramilitary army. It's not official. The parties usually don't officially endorse them as an army, like the Nazis would claim that their stormtroopers were basically like a sports club, but they were stockpiling guns. And it is true that basically the file that Schleicher sends to Hindenburg, he makes the

case that many sides are to blame for the political violence in Germany, so you shouldn't blame the stormtroopers. It's true that many sides had paramilitary armies, but the Nazis had by far the largest and the most violent, and were killing the most people, and also wanted to overthrow the state. Correct. Yeah. Different agenda.

Yeah, so Chancellor Brunning and the Reichstag passed the ban anyway, even though Hindenburg and Schleicher did not want it, so Schleicher engineered a vote of no confidence against Chancellor Brunning. The Nazis and the Communists backed him on this. What? Because the Communists don't like the government anyway, and they think that anything that's bad for the current government, which again, they're not social democrats, they're social fascists, so anything that's bad for them is good for communism.

Why is everybody dumb? Everybody's always dumb. That's democracy. What? Everybody's dumb. That is the tagline of democracy is everybody gets, not just a king's gonna be dumb, we're all gonna be dumb. We're all gonna be dumb.

Until we get a king again, because we're all too dumb. That's how it works. So there's a vote of no confidence, but Brunning actually manages to defend himself well enough that he wins the vote. Schleicher isn't willing to take this lying down, so he goes to Hindenburg, and he convinces Hindenburg to demand Brunning's resignation anyway, on the grounds that Brunning must be unpopular, because people had asked for a vote of no confidence. In reality, Schleicher just wanted Brunning out of power, because Brunning was a centrist

who got in the way of Schleicher's dreams of assembling a right-wing coalition. So on the day Brunning resigned, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary, with that, the system has fallen. So I do want to say, if you want more detail on this whole thing, The Death of Democracy is a wonderful book that will tell you much better than I did everything that happened. So the gist of this is that increased polarization in the late 20s and early 30s led to the executive branch, President Hindenburg, using more executive orders to get things done. Hindenburg didn't like using executive orders, because he had to sign them, so if his policies

were bad and things got fucked up, he couldn't avoid the blame. And if you remember talking about Hindenburg, his whole goal in life is about avoiding the blame and making sure his legacy is good. So like Schleicher, Hindenburg wanted to govern at the behest of a right-wing coalition and completely ignore the social democrats in the left, who he hated and did not consider real Germans. Schleicher promised Hindenburg that he could make this happen, so the next guy he put up for chancellor was a dude named Franz von Pappen.

Now Pappen was a conservative politician who was famous for being very dumb and mediocre. They basically wanted to use him as a Pappen. Before World War I, Pappen had worked in New York City as a spy for the government trying to sabotage the Allies. He got caught doing this and sent home, and when he was sent home, he sent ahead of him a bunch of private government documents and assumed that no one would search his luggage. They did search his luggage, and the British gained lists of all of the names of Germany spies.

So this is the guy they're like, this guy's a great dude to have as a pawn, because he's just dumb as fuck. He's dumb, he'll do what you say. So dumb motherfucker Franz von Pappen is the chancellor now. Schleicher got the Nazis to support this thoroughly mediocre candidate by promising that Pappen would repeal the ban on their stormtroopers. Pappen was elected, and he did just that. He also established special courts to deal with political violence by stripping perpetrators

of their constitutional rights. He did this through executive orders. Now the Brunning administration, who he had replaced, had also relied heavily on executive orders, but Brunning had had a parliamentary majority behind him. Most of the country supported what he was doing. With Pappen in power, executive orders were used to ignore parliament entirely and govern without the social democrats. This wound up being a disaster.

By alienating the center left entirely, Schleicher and Hindenburg made themselves totally dependent on the Nazis, because the Nazis were now the biggest right wing party in politics. And rather than being content that they'd won some power, the Nazis started pushing for all of the power, because that's what Nazis do. This is because the Nazis knew that they and their ideas could not survive long in power. Goebbels actually complained that they were winning themselves to death in elections, because now that they had some guys in power, when shit would go wrong, the blame would go on them too.

So the Nazi party achieved its best showing at a fair and open election on July 31, 1931, with 37.1% of the vote. They never got more than that in an election. They celebrated this victory in true Nazi fashion with a shitload of violence, several of them beat and then shot dead a left wing activist, these stormtroopers were arrested and because of Pappen's new special courts, they were sentenced to death. The Nazis used this as an excuse to start attacking Pappen's administration. Now the Nazis' eventual goal was to get Hindenburg to declare Hitler the chancellor.

They did this by threatening the thing he valued most, his legacy. There weren't enough Nazis in the Reichstag to impeach the president, but they did have enough deputies to propose to prosecute him for his illegal actions in office, like the executive orders he'd been using to ignore the social democrats. They threatened to do this, and again, the one thing Hindenburg doesn't want is his legacy being tarnished by a court case. So Pappen, Schleicher and Hindenburg were left with very few options. Without Nazi support, Pappen couldn't remain chancellor, since the conservative party did

not have that many people anymore. Their options were either to have Hindenburg dissolve the Reichstag, declare a state of emergency and govern as a dictator, or bring the Nazis into the government with Pappen. The whole declare a dictatorship thing they thought would spark a civil war, so they decided, once again, to work with the Nazis. They offered the Nazis seats in Pappen's cabinet, but Hitler was no longer willing to compromise. The only thing he would accept now was the chancellorship. So Hindenburg dissolved the government yet again in the hopes that the Nazis would lose

some votes in yet another election, and finally be forced to cooperate. But before Pappen could dissolve the government, the communists called for a vote of no confidence in him. The Nazis agreed with the communists and the vote passed. Hindenburg's original plan, so wacky tale, right? So Hindenburg's original plan had been to delay the next election, which was kind of sort of illegal, but he wanted to wait because the economy was getting better and an improved economy would mean fewer votes for the Nazis.

But the no confidence vote in Pappen spooked him. He still dissolved the Reichstag, but he didn't delay the election. This election did not go as well for the Nazis, since this was like the second election that year and they were running out of money now. Right, there's three months between elections. The Reichstag keeps fucking dissolving. The communists did, however, gain ground, which scared Schleicher because he thought that if the Nazis' support evaporated, he would not be able to make his broad right-wing

coalition work. This was still his fucking goal. So Schleicher betrays Pappen to Hindenburg and tells Hindenburg to fire Pappen and allow Schleicher to be chancellor because if he was chancellor, he thought he could assemble enough right-wing support to run the government free of the pesky social democrats. His goal was to get some of the Nazis to break away from Hitler and agree to work with him. Work with him? Yeah, it didn't work.

Yeah, that's not what Nazis do. Exactly. That's not what Nazis do. No, they stick together. That's why they won. So Schleicher fails miserably and then Pappen backstabs him. So Pappen had liked being in power and when Schleicher took his job, Pappen started talking with Hitler.

They eventually came to an agreement. Pappen was friends with Hindenburg and he basically convinced him that Chancellor Schleicher was a bad idea and instead Pappen should appoint Hitler chancellor and Pappen would be the vice chancellor. So now we're adding in a vice chancellor. There's always been a vice chancellor, it's just not that important. But then can we see above re-Pappen being dumb as fuck? How is he now in this position where he can convince anybody to do anything?

Just Hindenburg, is he and Hindenburger buddies? So Hindenburg up until this point had expressed nothing but disgust for Hitler. But now he agreed to make him chancellor. It was the only way that he could box the liberals out of government. Pappen assured him that all the good conservatives in the cabinet would successfully moderate Hitler's behavior. Pappen said, in a few months we will have pushed him so far into the corner that he will squeak. As it happened within a few months the Nazis passed the Enabling Act which centralized

all of parliament's lawmaking powers within the administration. The Reichstag fire and the Reichstag fire decree came not long after and established the legal foundation of a Nazi dictatorship in Germany. None of this was necessary. It all came out of the desire by leaders on the right to completely box the left out of power, as the death of democracy explains. Hermann Mueller's government in 1928-30 had a stable majority. Heinrich Brunning had won a confidence vote in the Reichstag just days before Hindenburg

sacked him. There was no need to call an election in 1932. The crisis and the deadlock of 1932 and early 1933, to which Hitler appeared as the only solution, was manufactured by a political right wing that wanted to exclude more than half of the population from political representation and refuse even the mildest compromise. To this end, a succession of conservative politicians, Hugenberg, Brunning, Schleicher, Poppen and Hindenburg, courted the Nazis as the only way to retain power on terms congenial to them.

Hitler s regime was the result. If the Holocaust has a tagline, it s never forget. Those are probably the two best words you can attach to a tragedy of that magnitude, but I think they are often interpreted too narrowly as saying we need to remember the victims of the Holocaust and the dangers of anti-Semitism. We do need to remember those things, but we also need to remember how the Nazi Party came to power. That story is not told often enough, and when it is, it s usually boiled down to just Hitler

was good at talking. The reality is that all of his charisma would have been worthless without a massive gang of people who were willing to cooperate, compromise, and work with him to try and achieve their own goals. They were not Nazis. They were journalists who knew Hitler s zany speeches made good stories. They were communists who wanted to see the right collapse in on itself and didn t want to compromise with the liberals.

And more than anything, they were conservative politicians, intellectuals, and businessmen who thought that they could use the energy and passion of the Nazi movement without enabling its violence and extremism. All these people were wrong. Hitler was the result. Dorothy Thompson was a trailblazing female journalist in the early 1920s. She was one of the first women on the radio, and she was a general badass. In 1920, she moved to Europe to further her career and wound up running the New York Post

Bureau in Berlin. She was in Germany for the whole rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party, and for a very long time she was certain nothing would come of Nazism. In 1928, she called Hitler a man of quote, startling insignificance. The Nazis forced her out of the country in 1934, as Hitler solidified his hold on power and instituted a purge of all journalists, foreign and domestic, who threatened his regime. In 1935, trying to understand why she hadn t seen Hitler coming, Dorothy Parker said this. No people ever recognize their dictator in advance.

He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument of incorporated national will. Seeing Hitler rise to power in and destroy Weimar democracy made Dorothy wonder if the same thing was possible in the United States. When our dictator turns up, you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys and he will stand for everything traditionally American. Okay, Dorothy. Listeners may notice that we have, with I think impressive willpower, not mention anything

about contemporary politics in this podcast. This is because, number one, I want this to be as shareable as possible with your friends and relatives who may be on the more conservative end of the spectrum, who may have voted for our current president in office. This is however the point at which we're going to loosen those chains and talk about how everything in this fucking podcast sounds really goddamn familiar. Oh my God. It's so crazy.

It's so crazy, but it's also, you can't let too many white men come together and start talking. They get together, they start talking, and things go, hey, why are things go wrong? It was, especially in particular to me, the industrial men, the wealthy conservative, the ones who want to keep their money and will go to any lengths to keep it. I'm not a rich person. I've never been rich, so I don't know what it is to be so rich that that becomes the only thing that matters, is to just amass the wealth, and then I'm assuming, again,

how we get into generational wealth, you just want your kids to be richer than their kids to be rich. But I can't imagine having so much money, a lot of times being born into it, and still being so terrified it's going to go away, to the point where you're like, all right, if a Nazi's what it takes, a Nazi's what it takes. And they don't, none of them thought a Nazi meant the Nazis will be the sole power. They thought, they're just one more political party, and if we work with them and use their energy, it will help us stop those people who want us to pay our workers more wages,

and that's not going to happen. But like certain people in power, from the beginning they said things that were Crack or Rape of Night Night, and they said things that let you know who they thought were people and who they thought weren't. One of my favorite quotes, do you remember that guy, Hans Lytton, who put Hitler on trial and wound up dying for it? One of the things he said in that court case when he was cross-examining Hitler is, don't listen to him, he's telling the truth, which is what none of these conservatives would

do, is like Hitler was said, I want to be the sole power in Germany, it's always clear what he wanted. Right, yeah. Well that's, I mean that too, the mental gymnastics, you know, to believe that once someone is in power, the structures in place will somehow reign them in when the very act of that person getting into power shows you that the structures don't actually work. Or rather, the structures aren't firm, aren't strong, I mean literally, as you said, there were elections like two, three times a year.

So many fucking elections. How is that system going to be the one to keep a wannabe dictator from dictating? Yeah, and that was a big, people just got so tired of politics that they were like, maybe it won't be so bad. Well also it numbs you, right? If people are constantly running, which means they have to constantly say make bigger and bigger promises, they start to mean nothing after a while. So then you're kind of like, okay, he says he wants to like run the world, let him do

it. Yeah. It's like, slash, is he gonna do it? Slash, we'll deal with him in three months again. Yeah, he's probably not that serious. Yeah. There'll be another election soon, it'll be fine. Exactly, there'll be an election, he'll be out in six months.

One of the things I did want to talk about that I initially had earlier in the episode is the, you know when we talked about sort of the coordination of the police and the Nazis, now the police at a very gentle hand, there is a long history of that that continues to the present day. Yes. There are 16 and activists with the traditional workers party, which is, as a Nazi organization, yeah, that fucking traditional workers party, you know what that is, yeah. He was arrested on a domestic violence charge.

The police in fucking California, rather than dealing with this domestic violence charge, sat him down and gave him pictures of anti-fascist activists and asked him for help identifying them. We're pretty much going after them, they told him. We're looking at you as a victim. Now you can read about all this in a wonderful Guardian article called California Police Worked with Neo-Nazis to Pursue Anti-Racist Activists Document Show, because that's not the only case.

Right. And there was even in the fighting in Portland between anti-fascists and fucking right-wing Nazi basically, guys. Well, also white supremacists were brought into police forces around the country, certainly up north and currently up, but still, but you know, we're talking back in the, you know what I mean, the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, you know, those are the people they said, you know, come join the police force and help us check these brown people who are starting to act like people who are starting to get too big for their britches, who are starting to assert

their power and their humanity in essence. And you know, then if those are the people brought into the police force and they have children, and those children go into the police force and they have communities and they urge the communities to get involved in policing and security and other government offices. When Martin Luther King was marching in the streets and police were shooting black people with fire hoses and stuff, those guys weren't all going like, boy, it's terrible that we're ordered to do this and they were like, oh good, I get to shoot black people with a water hose.

They're like, actually, I have a suggestion, actually, what if we got water hoses? It seems like it'd be fun to shoot them with those. It could be fun. Almost like a video game. And they weren't, they didn't, because the civil rights movement won, they didn't just go like, I guess I was wrong. Exactly. Time to treat everyone equal.

Well, that's the thing, right? No, no one went away. Yeah. They just batted down the hatches, they just spoke in lower tones. They just kept to themselves. Yeah. A couple years before World War II broke out, 20,000 American Nazis, members of the German-American Bund, which was essentially a Nazi organization in the United States prior to World War II,

20,000 of them gathered in Madison Square Garden to have a celebration of Hitler in the Nazis. It's scary to think about, but statistically, a significant number of the men who landed on the beaches at Normandy would have been perfectly happy if we'd wound up on the side of the Nazis in that war, because there was, anti-Semitism was incredibly rampant in the United States at that time, which is why we refuse to take tens of thousands of Jewish refugees before the Holocaust happened, many of whom drowned in the ocean because the boats we sent them back to Germany on sank.

There was a huge amount of fascist support, Lindenburg, Charles Lindenburg, who was the first guy to fly across the Atlantic, was a fascist and was a serious candidate for president at one point, and had a huge amount of support. There was a very prominent fascist movement in the United States until World War II happened, and things went underground, but never died. Right, never died, went underground, as it went underground from 2008 to 2016. That's where we get some of our greatest Reddit threads. A lot of websites and groups, they just went to the internet, they got together, they talked

across states and made plans for when their time would come again. And when people would call them out on saying, like, all these Jew jokes you're making and all these comments about brown people that you're making, they said, no, no, it's just irony, we're joking, we're joking. Again, think Hans Litten, don't believe them, they're telling the truth. Exactly, also, he ain't Charlie Chaplin. Yeah, he's not, he being our current president, he's not a funny guy, he's not a man to be laughed at.

Don't call him Drumpf, it's fucking dumb, he is a dangerous person. Right, right, and you know, the inability and unwillingness, the inability is because of an unwillingness to work together, it is, it's so interesting to see a president that's literally not even pretending to be a president for everyone. And they're literally like, no, I'm only president to these folks, and I'm only here for the greater good of these folks. And not in, on one hand they say, I'm here for you, working class American who is struggling, knowing that they're implementing policies that are the exact opposite of that.

But truly, I'm actually only the president for the rich who's standing behind me. And that, I think, is what is so amazing. But also, again, the unfortunate thing, I mean, and I guess again, what you were saying, which was so surprising, to think that Germany was flourishing, especially in terms of their education. Oh yeah, the most educated people on the planet. How? But that's how they almost conquered the world, because they were the best educated, most

technologically advanced people. So what happened here is that they were just being, they soon became so inundated with information because of these two things. I'm wondering, I'm kind of infirming, right, you there get so inundated with information because you are having these elections every like three, six, seven months that you stop paying attention to the details. And then also that you then have all these people in power who are just intent on ruining everything.

Is that what it is? Like, what happens to the left, where do they take themselves, what do they do to kind of regroup? Well, within like a year or so of Hitler taking power, the left is illegal. The social democrats are banned, the communists are banned, most of their leaders are in camps or flee the country. And like the thing is, most people are willing to vote and maybe protest, most people are not willing to face down a gun for their beliefs, and the Nazis made that be the choice.

And so people backed off. Even though most of them never supported the Nazis, most of them didn't like the Nazis, most of them thought Hitler was a silly man, by the time he was in power, it was too late. And I don't think that's the situation we're in right now. We have an older democracy and a stronger one. Slightly older. But I do think, as people talk about civility and things, what you still see, what happens is when something doesn't immediately and directly affect you, it doesn't stay on the

radar. There can be even initial outrage, but that outrage is not sustained when you can still go about your life and your business. And so what happens, especially, again, the populations are so significantly smaller than they are now. And nowhere near as spread out as they are now. So where's the collective action of any kind when we're all over the place? I mean, think about this, the way the communists came after the left, then the left switched,

you know what I mean? They're all fighting and get went to Nazis just to avoid the other person being in power. Now let's fracture it even further, which we are now, in terms of our alignments and our policies. And you've got people on the far left saying that Hillary would have been just as bad, that the liberals can't be trusted, and it's like, no, we need to sane people on the right, sane people on the left, liberals, left-wingers, conservatives who aren't racist. Everybody needs to get together and say, this isn't OK.

We can get back to arguing about taxes when this is done. We can argue about taxes in the right pronoun and triggering language once we've dealt with the trip big bad. Let's deal with this. We've got to all kind of be like, OK, you said the wrong thing or you said it in the wrong way, but you still feel me that he's the worst, right? You still feel me that we don't want a dictator. Right.

So can we agree on that? Let's focus on that right now. And let's put a pin in that other issue. Yeah. You know, or... Hashtag put a pin in it. Or can we fight both issues with, or not but fight, I mean, also discuss the social issues, the things that are important.

You don't want to tear down something and then be left with nothing and be still left with fracturing and infighting. But how do you have the bandwidth, for lack of a better term, to engage on both fronts? And it's hard and it requires... The best thing we have is that there's a lot of us. Everyone doesn't need to be out in the street every day, but people need to always be out in the street. The fact that there are so many protests is a good thing as long as it doesn't lead to

numbness. Direct action is important. Disrupting the system that exists is important. And the most important thing to do is to vote and stop these people from being in charge. Yeah, so many people have got to be voted out. Fucking register to vote. Vote, vote, vote. Register and actually go.

Yeah. Go. Show up. You know? And it's... Employers, let people go. Yeah. Make it easy to go.

Set up a shuttle. Say we're not starting work until noon. Yeah. Do what you have to do so that people can go. Yeah, if so. Like, that's one of the things that these guys, like fucking Elon Musk, want to be good guys, want to be the heroes, pay to bust people to go vote. Yep.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, a lot of things you could do to help make it easier for folks to vote. Yeah. They don't want you to vote. Volunteer for a campaign, do a registration drive, get out in the street, just do something. Because the fact, it took, as this I hope podcast has shown, it took a lot of people collaborating with the Nazis, but it also took a lot of people not doing anything.

Right. It took a lot of artists and musicians and people, wonderful people in Weimar, Germany, who just didn't pay that much attention to politics because it was a bummer and went on living their lives and then they wound up in fucking camps. Exactly. And it's, I do want to make it clear, I don't think Donald Trump is a Nazi because Nazism is a very specific political ideology and I don't think he has a very specific political ideology, but I do think that he has fascist instincts and Benito Mussolini was not a Nazi,

but he was a fascist. Francisco Franco was not a Nazi, but he was a fascist. The I alone can fix, which he said in one of his speeches running up to the election. That's a fascist statement, declaring press the enemy of the people, which is again a direct quote. That's a fascist statement. These are things fascists do, is declare enemies of the people. In fact, anytime someone uses the phrase of the people, be concerned, it's pretty close

to Volkska Mineshaft, which was one of Hitler's big taglines. So you got anything cool planned for the weekend? I got nothing cool planned for the weekend. Every time I hear stuff like this, I'm like, okay, I got to bulk up. I got to get good at fighting. I got to get shredded. I got to get shredded, got to get ready to run, got to get ready to start my underground railroad, should the need arise?

Maybe it's time for people on the left to start, well, I'm not going to suggest stockpiling arms on my podcast, but there's worse things. I know, but I have thought about the idea, all the people who are good at guns want to kill me. All the people who are good at guns are the scary ones. I think it's important. I'm a gun owner. I've been a gun owner my entire adult life.

I also support a lot more gun control than we have right now, and I think there's always a dog in the office, which is part of why this podcast has such a strong moral compass, because dogs are better than people. I just thought that should be noted. The dog's name is Anderson, and he's wonderful. So I think that you can both support way better gun control than we have and also understand that all of the Nazis having all the guns in the country is not a good thing, the far right.

Because I guarantee you, every single person who identifies as a Nazi has a lot of guns, and they've been marched in Charlottesville. All those people have arsenals. They're stockpiling bullets. If you go to their forums, you can hear them write about how many bullets they're stockpiling. Yep. Okay, yeah, so you know I'm taking a weekend, I'm gonna do some things to make myself ready. And you know, if you happen to live on the East Coast in the DC area on the, I think,

11th and 12th, there is the sequel to that Unite the Right rally in DC. So there will be more fascists marching in DC, like as marched in Charlottesville last year. I will be there. So you might see me reading out a special neo-Nazi focused episode of this podcast. If you happen to show up and protest, the actual fucking, we'll call themselves Nazis Nazis in DC in a couple of weeks. So be careful.

There probably won't be that many of them. Yeah, but be careful. All right, I think that's, I think we're, we're pretty good. We're gonna run this as a one-parter, even though normally an episode this long would be a two-parter because I don't want to break it up. But please do share this with people who you think can be convinced that there is a problem right now. We have specifically kept the historical portion of this podcast free of political editorializing

and comments about just in the hopes that it will be more accessible to more people. You can tell them to shut it off when Naomi and I start our conversation. Maybe they'll be on board by that point, but please like do share this. I think this information is important. And also give a read to the death of democracy. It is a deeply important book that came out this year for good reason. So it goes into even more detail about why the Weimar government led to the Nazis. Please read it.

All right, Naomi, you want to plug your plugables? You know what? It's so very different. But if you do want to break from some of the real talk and you want a little joke, why don't you subscribe, give a listen to couples therapy podcast on that podcast co-hosted by me and my fiance, Andy Beckerman. We bring the best sets from our live show, Couples Therapy, where two comics do sets together about their relationship.

And we sprinkled that in with some in-studio guests, some in-studio combo between Andy and I. It is a fun time. It is a light time, but also Andy might take a couple of moments to talk about our national nightmare every now and then. And I was telling him, no national nightmare, people need a break. And we do. And I recommend your podcast thoroughly because everyone who just finished listening to this

could probably use a break. Need a little boost? Yeah, need a little boost and hopefully not just more drinking your sadness away, which is what I'll be doing tonight. You can find me on Twitter at I write okay. Just two letters. I also have a book on Amazon, a brief history of vice. It's about drugs.

Our podcast is on social media too. You can find us on Twitter at Bastard's Pod. You can find us on Instagram the same way. You can find us on the internet at behindthebastards.com. Every source for this podcast, including the three books I used, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 1924, The Year That Made Hitler, and the Death of Democracy. All of those sources and all the articles that I used for this will all be on the website. So I absolutely encourage you to read up.

Everybody have a good weekend. Stay safe and get out in the streets when you can. 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. Alphabet Boys 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 and 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. 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.