Camp Gagnon - Hitlers Secrets, Oppenheimer & The Nuclear War Explained by a WWII Expert

Episode Date: April 16, 2024

Benjamin Hett is a historian, author, and college professor specializing in World War 1 and 2. I don't know anything about WW2, so today he came on to explain the whole conflict to me. He revealed what happened to Hitlers body, how nuclear war happened, and the future of global conflicts. WELCOME TO CAMP!00:00 Intro01:21 Biggest misconceptions about WW204:16 Why Soviets were responsible for winning the war07:00 Soviet incompetence, Siege of Leningrad + Holodomor11:30 Americans’ fondness for W...

And when Hitler killed himself in his bunker in Berlin. And you believe it was all these conspiracies that, you know, they never found his body, he went to Argentina. There's just no evidence for that. His skull was identified by the dental records. The Russians found his remains, and they got his skull and his teeth. Oh, really? So the Russians have Hitler's skull.

Yeah. Military experts will say the hardest military thing to do is to land troops on a hostile shore. D-Day is the hardest thing to do militarily. And the Allies do it incredibly well. Like, the planning for D-Day was amazing. It was an incredible managerial effort that was done really. well. And there was a lot of luck. For instance, weather. The weather wasn't great for D-Day, and there's a sort of dramatic moment where, you know, Dwight Eisenhower has to decide if the

weather's going to be good enough. This great account, it's one of the World War's two stories I love, where they were going to go on June 4th and they had to cancel because the weather was too bad. And then they get a weather forecast that on the sixth, there might be a bit of a clearing, it might be good enough. Eisenhower is in this meeting where they have to decide, and Eisenhower thinks for a moment, and he says, okay, let's go. Talk to me just a little bit about your perspective on the nuclear bombs that were used in Japan. You know, that is an incredibly difficult one because obviously the bombing is so horrible. It's very difficult to sort of come to terms with the fact that that happened.

And there's a big debate about this among historians about whether it was right or wrong to use the bomb. I lean on, if not saying it was right, at least it was, it's defensible and it was probably inevitable. Benjamin Hett, thank you so much for being here, brother. I'm really excited to talk. I don't know anything about World War II. I don't, I genuinely don't know anything. So for the next couple hours, if you could just explain the whole conflict to me, take me from beginning to end. and by the end of this podcast, I will understand everything about World War II.

That would be awesome. I think you're the person to do it. You are a World War II expert. You're a historian, college professor. You've written a bunch of books about World War II, so you can explain all of my dumb questions. Some of them, like why Hitler wanted to make everyone with blue eyes and blonde hair, even though he didn't have blue eyes and blonde hair. I would love to know about Winston Churchill. A lot of people talk about this guy.

Was he actually a good leader? Explain him to me. How the Americans were able to pull off D-Day, how the boys pulled up. on French shore, how did they actually stage a ground invasion against the Nazis? And by the end, explain to me if the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Japan were justified in ending the war, or if it was just a show of power against the Russians. But before we get into all that, tell me, what is the biggest misconception about World War II that you would like to debunk? That's a great question, Mark.

I think that probably the answer to that is that every country that was involved in the war has its misconception, because every country has its kind of patriotic myth about what it did in the war, how it conducted itself. And these patriotic myths are largely untrue. So, for instance, the British have a patriotic myth about Britain's heroic stand in 1940, standing alone against the Germans. And that's not altogether untrue, but there are a lot of sort of shadow size to that. If you think about the role the British Empire plays in the war, they are, of course, in part fighting to maintain their empire. So to maintain their hold over a lot of territories in Africa and Asia, it's not just about defending democracy against the Nazis in Germany. The United States, we tend to think...

We're the actual good guys. We're the actual good guys. We're the ones. And, you know, to be sure, I'm not trying to say that the Germans, you know, the Nazis were fine. I mean, World War II, in my view, World War II is as close as you get in human things to a war that actually kind of is good against evil. Yeah. But the British try to take credit for it, when really it's the Americans that save the day. and we're the only ones that had a pure intention, right?

Well, so, right, that's an exact, great example of, yeah, you know, of course the United States got dragged into the war, kicking and screaming. Yeah. No great enthusiasm on the part of most Americans for, you know, launching a war for democracy against fascism until America got dragged in. Americans also tend to think that America basically won the war single-handed once it came in, and there's been a long tendency to downplay the role that other countries played, and we have often for various reasons not wanted to acknowledge us, but the fact is the

Soviet Union probably played the largest single role in beating Nazi Germany, and that's never been a popular point in the United States, but it's basically statistically, you know, demonstrable. Wow. Wow, that's interesting. Wait, do you want to expand on that now? Like, why would you say that the Soviet Union was responsible? Sure, okay, well, let's think of it in terms of casualties. Like, people dying is kind of fundamental to war. And in World War II, at least in terms of beating Germany. The key thing to beat Germany was Germany had a really formidable, powerful ground army. So for the Allies to win World War II, that really powerful ground army, that powerful military machine had to be destroyed.

And if you look at who destroyed it, the most recent research on German casualties has determined that somewhere, casualty figures are always a little bit imprecise. but we do know that somewhere between 80 to 90% of German soldiers killed in action in World War II were killed fighting the Soviets. Really? So it was the Soviet Red Army that really took on this formidable German war machine and grounded up. And that left, you know, relatively little for the British and Americans to do in terms of fighting. Yeah. Now, was that casualties due to direct combat or was that just due to brutal winter that, you know, killed? That's actual combat deaths, you know, dying of wounds,

dying on the battlefield. So not even including men that just froze to death in the Serbia or whatever. Right, right. Wow. Yeah. And then if you sort of spin it, if you spin it the other way, if you look at who paid a price for victory, both British and American fatal casualties in World War II, you know, service people killed in action, it's about 400,000 for each country.

Now, in any sensible human scale, that's an absolutely appalling number. and I'm not by any means trying to minimize the role of the English-speaking countries in this. My father served in the war. You know, I honor that service. But 400,000 is not 27 million. And 27 million were the losses that the Soviet Union took, of which probably 9 to 10 million were soldiers killed in action, killed on the battlefield. And about 17 million were civilians who died in mass atrocities, died because of the war.

starvation because of the German invasion, that kind of thing. So the Soviet Union paid a horrible price for the war, but also inflicted the greatest share of damage on the German armed forces. Wow. Hey, what's up, guys? Sorry to interrupt this amazing program, but I need a little bit of help. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can probably see our subscriber number right down here. And if you're able to, it would mean the world if you could subscribe. That is the best way to support this show, because when you subscribe, I'm able to show it to potential guests or to different brands and stuff like that. And it really, really helps grow the show, get us cooler guests, have cooler conversations, and it helps everything so, so much. So if you don't mind, thank you so much.

Let's get back to it. And now you would count those 17 million civilian casualties to the German effort and not to, I guess, like, you know, Soviet incompetence or logistical issues or things like that. Well, there's actually a bit of a gray area there because in some cases, Soviet incompetence made worse situations the Germans had created. So one famous example is the siege of Leningrad. So the city that was then called Leningrad, now it's back to being St. Petersburg, northern Russian city on the Gulf of Finland. The Germans laid siege to it in the fall of 1941,

and with the assistance of the Finns, were able to basically cut off all supply routes to Leningrad, which at the time had about 3 million people in it. And over the course of this siege, which actually lasted basically three years, over the course of the siege, about a million people starved to death in Leningrad. Some, I mean, that's primarily because the Germans are blocking it. But it's also because of the incompetence of the Soviets in getting food supplies to people. And some Russians have even argued in recent years.

It's because the Soviet regime, Stalin's regime, made a, bad choice in trying to hang on to the city at all, whereas if they had just evacuated it, many more people could have survived. So to some extent, those people who starved to death, starve to death because of the Soviet Union's kind of prestige, you know, hunt for prestige in fighting the war. So it's, you know, causationally, it's a bit of a mixture. God, the Germans made it bad, obviously. Yes.

And then maybe ego made it worse. Exactly. Oh, wow. So I was always under the impression that all these Soviets starved to death because of communism? Well, that also happened. It mostly happened prior to the war. You know, in saying what I'm saying about the Soviets' contribution to victory,

by no means am I expressing any enthusiasm for that regime, which is a good rival for Nazi Germany for the worst regime in human history. And actually, in terms of body count, by most estimates, Stalin, in terms of sort of direct killing, Stalin probably killed more people than Hitler. And one of the big items in his total of people that he killed, to your point, is the notorious famine that was largely in Ukraine in the early 1930s because of the so-called collectivization of agriculture and the fact that the Soviet government confiscated grain stocks from peasants and basically left them to starve in the pursuit of their more overarching economic goals. And maybe about 5 million people starved to death in that famine, which was basically deliberately inflicted by the regime. So, yes, that regime was terrible. That regime killed a lot of its people.

But once the war between the Soviet Union and Germany gets going, then more of the responsibility for the deaths of Soviet civilians lies on the Germans than probably on the Soviet regime. So when you say 17 million Soviet civilians died from famine in that statement, you're referencing post-involvement in World War II. So you're not even including that number from the, I guess, you know, collectivization of resources. Right, that's correct. The 17 million, not all famine,

and lots of them died in other kinds of atrocities. Sure. But, yeah, that's just civilians killed in the time of the German invasion between 1941 and 1945. Wow. I mean, that is massive, massive loss. It is.

That is wild. And, of course, you know, American civilian losses in World War II are pretty negligible. British civilian losses, you know, casualties, deaths, which come mostly from German bombing raids. That's about 60,000. Again, on any human scale, you know, one person dying is horrific. 60,000 people dying in bombing is horrific.

But again, 60,000 is not 27 million. It's hard to even fathom. Right, it is totally hard to fathom. And, you know, as grim as it sounds, you know, historians do need to sort of keep the proportions in mind and the perspective in mind in terms of sort of thinking of the meaning of this event for people. And it's created a permanent gulf in understanding, I think, between people of the Soviet Union, former Soviet Union and Russia and the West, because their experience of the war was so radically different from ours, you know, especially in the English-speaking countries, especially in America.

Yeah, I mean, we were fighting a way game. Exactly, right. It didn't touch us, certainly in America, it didn't touch us, you know, really physically directly in the way that it touched, actually almost all Europeans in one way or another. Do you think that gives Americans specifically more of a fondness for the war? because it was kind of a way, we got to see the highlights, and our way of life living in the continent of the U.S. wasn't disrupted? Yeah, that's exactly right.

I think, you know, the way in which we talk about it as the good war, you know, and there's always a lot of kind of self-satisfaction and kind of patriotic, you know, glorification of the war, which again, we were on the right side and we did win it. I think that's all good. But to your point, it really didn't touch us in the way that it touched other people's. And that has left a legacy, I think, and that Americans don't quite understand it. And they don't quite understand what war can mean.

And we see this in our, you know, relatively recent events. I read a striking line once from a German woman who had lived through the war and survived it. She was a young girl during the war, and she remembered getting bombed by the Allies during the war. And she said she feels that she has more in common with other people from other countries who had the experience of sitting in bomb shelters during the war

than she did. does with someone like an American who doesn't have that experience and doesn't viscerally know what it means to be sitting in a dark cellar as the planes are flying over and you hear the explosions. And to have that experience means there's a whole different thing imprinted on you that is kind of missing from American culture. That's interesting. So yeah, British women could say I have more in common with someone in Dresden that was hiding in a shelter than I do with an ally force in America that was fighting on the same front as me. Because their experience was so different than what I went through. That's an interesting point.

I mean, the war was kind of, I mean, if you look at it really kind of coldly, the war was nothing but good news for the United States. It pulled us out of the Depression. You know, during the war, American working people had jobs and they had jobs at better pay than they'd had before. It dramatically expanded the American economy. By the time the war is over, the United States economy accounts for literally half of the world's GNP. Like half of all economic activity happening in the world is happening in the United States by 1945. It made the United States the unquestioned superpowers. that it sort of still is. We're still kind of running on the fumes of that. So it has this, in addition to the fact that we were, I think, on the good side of a war that was being fought against a thoroughly evil regime, it was also just practically good for America and economically in terms of political influence and so on. So again, that whole experience, that experience is so different from the experience of anybody in Europe or Asia in terms of what the war. did to societies. Yeah. Well, I mean, Japan benefited a little bit. I mean, they did a pretty good job post, you know, World War II economically. Post, but, you know, Japan was wrecked end to end by the time we were done with it in 1945 from bombing, not just the atomic bomb, but from the

conventional bombing. Of course, which I want to touch on, obviously, which is a really important ripple in this. But I'm curious about as far as the U.S. economic, being an economic beneficiary of the war, was it known at the time to the president and to the people in charge to, I'm Eisenhower that, oh, if we get involved in this, there's actually a huge financial upside? Or do you think that was just a happy accident that happened afterwards? It was more or less a happy accident. It wasn't what people expected. There was a widespread expectation during the war that there would be a post-war depression. That had happened after World War I. And so they thought, well, the same thing will happen again.

We'll have unemployment. You know, we'll have inflation probably. So they didn't really anticipate what was going to happen after the war. And, you know, then what did happen after the war in the United States, but also across the Western world, was a period of about 30 years of economic growth without any even remote historical parallel, which transformed out of recognition the way most people live in most Western democratic countries in the sense of making us all epically more prosperous. Why did we become someone more prosperous after World War II and not after World War I? What was the difference? There are a lot of differences. The kinds of industries that were stimulated during World War II were sort of very technically forward-looking industries, which then served as a kind of basis for further economic growth. I mean, computers are a great example.

Computers are sort of born during World War II to manage ship movements and stuff like this. And then, of course, that becomes a technology, which can be really productive afterwards. There were a lot of lessons learned about domestic economic policy that weren't learned. after World War I. I mean, for instance, actually Britain is a really clear example. The British after World War I had made a lot of efforts to cut back government spending

to try to return to a pre-war norm, of very limited government and so on. After World War II, it was recognized that that hadn't worked. It had created 20 years of bad economics. And that, in fact, more government intervention in economic activity in the sense of, things like better unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, national health care schemes that

would tend to create a more stable of prosperity. To an extent that happens in the United States, not to the same extent as in Britain or in Western Europe, but it happens to an extent in the United States. Then the third thing is the American spearheaded creation of a new kind of global order, which has several components. One is a sort of architecture to create free-trade, free or economic interaction among countries. One aspect is trying to promote democracy with policies like the famous Marshall Plan that the United States did, basically to try and make it easier for European countries

to become or to remain democratic in the aftermath of this war. And the Western Defense of Alliance, which integrated Western democracies into an alliance to resist any encroachment from the Soviet Union in Europe, all of these things created a kind of stable international political system which facilitated prosperity in every country. It's lasted pretty well until now, and now that order is under challenge from all kinds of directions, I think, unfortunately. Wow. So do you think because of America's hand in writing the literature of kind of how the whole

Western world will function post-World War II, they were basically able to kind of like create a system that would benefit them, us? Yeah. I mean, the power, the incredible power and the sort of overbalance of power that the United States had relative to the rest of the world at the end of World War II, you know, made it possible for the United States to basically design a world system, which it did. And I think we were historically fortunate that the people designing that system were very far-sighted.

You know, Secretary of State Marshall introducing a plan to spend a lot of money to help rebuild European economies. It's far-sighted. You know, it's spending American tax dollars to help somebody else, which is not always a popular move. But it was done, and it was done with incredible success in terms of rebuilding a free and prosperous and democratic Europe. You know, policies like that, I think,

which wouldn't have happened without American initiative and wouldn't have happened without fairly far-sighted American initiative. I really think the late 40s are a kind of really good moment in the history of American policy. Wow. Oh, this is so awesome. This is about to be so much fun. This is all, I'm having such a great time.

Okay, and you don't have to answer this right away, but I want to just know for foreshadowing. How familiar are you with Henry Kissinger? Familiar-ish. Okay. Okay. I'm just curious if we can go there after kind of like the progression of things in terms of like, you know, controlling geopolitical movements. Okay.

Awesome. This is a great framework. Let's just start at the beginning. Okay. How did World War II happen? Why did it start? So that's a great and profound question and hard to answer, but let me take a crack out. So, you know, I think almost all historians would agree on one thing.

And this is significant, by the way, because almost all historians generally agree on just about nothing. You know, we argue for a living. But that said, I think most historians agree that if you did not have Adolf Hitler in power as dictator of Germany, you would not have gotten something that looked like the Second World War. In the 1930s, in the world of the 1930s, there were several countries that had something like a fascist government that had some kind of, you know, authoritarian and aggressive government. The lead ones are Japan, Italy, and Germany. All of them are looking to launch a war of aggression

or wars of aggression in sort of their regions to conquer territory. But Germany is by far the most powerful and the most dangerous of those. And Italy and Japan. And the most aggressive, you could say? Definitely the most aggressive. Okay. And the other two would probably not have gotten into war.

that would reach to the scale of a global conflict had not Germany started it and kind of open space for the others. You know, for instance, the fact that German aggression resulted in conquering countries like the Netherlands and France in the early summer of 1940 meant that those countries who had colonies in Asia are now, like those Asian colonies are now much more vulnerable to the Japanese. So the German aggression creates an opening for the Japanese. Oh, that's interesting. It sort of creates cover for the Italians to try and launch an effort to create an empire in the Mediterranean.

So France has like colonies in Vietnam. Yeah. And obviously the French have all these colonies in North Africa. Yes. So if Germany is now agitating in France, agitating in England, all of those colonies are kind of now

a little bit more up for grabs. Yes. So Japan can kind of look towards Vietnam. You could have the Italians looking towards North Africa, Morocco, I'd say, oh yeah, we can step in here. Wow, that's very interesting. And the Japanese do, like, for instance,

what's now Vietnam in those days was known as French Indochina, and it included today's Vietnam, also Cambodia and Laos. And when France falls in 1940, the Japanese see a kind of green light. So they, in fact, invade that territory and take it over.

So, you know, there's a pretty clear, you know, kind of causal relationship. Oh, wait, the Japanese did go into French into China. They did. Oh, I didn't realize that. Oh, wow. Before Pearl Harbor, it was one of their first, well, after their attack on China, which had happened in the 30s, it was sort of the next thing they did in terms of aggression

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is a bit of both. You know, each country has its own particular issues in some ways, but there are collective things happening. You know, there is, there's a widespread ideology in the 1930s, that territory equals wealth and strength. And so direct control of territory equals wealth and strength. And that's a zero-sum game. You know, if I take territory from you, I'm becoming stronger, you're becoming weaker. I can exploit that territory. I can exploit its, you know, human and national resources. I can exploit its food growing capacity. I can exploit its oil if it has it. Yeah, yeah. Excuse me. So they're all feeling that. There's also, there's a kind of widespread spread issue in the world. A lot of countries are confronting a question, are you going to

create a democratic capitalist structure in your country, which has its kind of partner in a world of democratic capitalist states with sort of free international relations and free trade, free exchange of goods and services across boundaries? So a world of integration where countries sort of work together with sort of at the top, you know, an international organization like had been created after World War I in the League of Nations, which is the forerunner of today's United Nations. So there's that kind of world, or there's a world on a very different pattern where you think about your own nation and its control of territory, and you think in terms of creating blocks of power that will be sort of separate blocks of power and will not collaborate internationally.

And in particular, there's a bit of economic jargon for this. Economists speak of a system of autarky. And autarky means your economy is entirely self-sufficient. You take all your resources, national resources, human resources, whatever, from your own territory, all your manufacturing is in your own territory. You're not trading with anybody else. You're not getting resources. You're not selling things to other people.

So the authoritarian, if you will, using the word loosely fascist model, is to create kind of empire blocks. that are atarchic and that are not relating, you know, with other countries. So Japan and Italy and Germany are all kind of in that mold. They're thinking in terms of creating, you know, land-based empires, you know, territorially controlled empires, which will be atarctic, and they will sort of scoop up the resources they can from those. Instead of, you know, thinking more of integrating into a world of, you know, exchange.

That's interesting. That's actually a very succinct kind of definition, I feel like, for fascism. Yeah. There's a term that we hear all the time. Like, oh, you're a fascist and that country's fascist and this guy was fascist. Musilini, obviously. And I don't really know what that means. But I guess if you kind of boil it down that way. No scholar of fascism actually knows what it means. Okay. Okay, good. Here's the dirty little shit. I know as much as a scholar of fascist. You do. You do. The only difference maybe is that you recognize that, you know, that it's an issue. But, you know, I mean, I'm slightly kidding, but only slightly, you know, people who study this kind of stuff,

knock themselves out trying to come up with a definition of fascism and probably no two scholars agree. Because it is really muddy. I mean, what we can identify is that in the 1930s, there are a number of regimes which have certain characteristics. They don't have free elections. They're militaristic. They're aggressive. But is there a fascist ideology? Is there a kind of definable core fascist ideology?

This is something that scholars have close to no agreement about it, in fact. So, you know, we can say that in Italy. In 1922, this guy named Benito Mussolini comes to power, and he leads a party that is called the fascist party. So, okay, pretty clear, whatever fascism is, he's a fascist because he's calling himself a fascist. You know, over a decade later, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis come to power in Germany in 1933.

Hitler leads a party that is called, actually the full name of his party is a real mouthful, the National Socialist German Workers Party. Is it fascist? Well, it depends what you're definite. Having said all that, let me say that. I do think there is a way to think about fascism. There are some kind of core elements, which I think we can identify in several of these regimes and parties in various countries that at the time are formulating this ideology. So it's kind of a matter of, you know, core to fascism is probably nationalism and racism, two things that are maybe slightly different, but related. You know, an idea of we have an identity in our country, like, and we're, and we're, you know, We are defined racially, ethnically, you know, to be German means to be a certain thing racially. And you can't become it.

You can only be born it. Right. It's a really kind of biological. It's like a supremacy, I guess. Absolutely. Sure. Because they weren't all like ideologically racist against the same people. No, absolutely not.

Or like Italians were like, we're the best. And Germans were like, we're the best. Yes. And obviously there's a Jewish component within Germany, of course. But I don't want to undermine that. But that's interesting because, you know, anti-Semitism was really not a part of Italian fascism at the beginning. A lot of Mussolini's supporters, some of his key insiders and his mistress were Jewish. Mussolini should lean on that.

He should be like, hey, look, I'm not a Nazi. Come on. I have friends that are Jewish. Come on. What do you mean? That's some of my best friends. You know, he started to become that much later. Like in 1938, after he'd been in power for 16 years.

And at that point, Hitler is sort of moving up to be. sort of the cooler dictator, basically. So then Mussolini feels he has to start emulating Hitler, so he starts bringing in anti-Semitic policies. But it wasn't originally part of his thing. Oh, he just jumped on the trend because it was cool. Yeah, right. If, like, Hitler, the cool dictator is doing it, I guess I need to.

Oh, what a loser. You're not even going to be an independent dictator. You're going to, like, bite ideas from a different one. That's kind of Mussolini's whole story. That's so corny. And, you know, and then there's all kinds of other things. Like, people sometimes speak of the Nazis as being white supremacist. And, I mean, sure, in some way.

but there's a lot of wrinkles to this. You know, first of all, most of the Nazis' victims in terms of who they killed are people we would think of as being white. Right. Slavs and Poles. Yeah, Jews, European Jews, mostly white, or at least white in, I mean, whatever that means, white in terms of how Americans think about this stuff.

And, you know, one of Hitler's allies was the Japanese. And sometimes the Japanese would, like, turn to the, you know, the Nazis and say, like, wait a minute, what is all this, like, Aryan supremacy? thing, like, where does this leave us? And so Hillary would literally fudge this by saying, oh, the Japanese

are the Aryans of Asia. No. Yeah, so, like, he's trying to sort of smooth this over. Yeah, he literally shut down. Blonde hair, blue eyes. Yeah. But you can also have, you know, brown eyes, black hair. They're sort of Aryan in their heart. It would be kind of how

we put it. That's so funny. You have the spirit of white supremacy. But he has to sort of deal with that. And then, of course, I mean, he had sort of ties to, you know, a Muslim Arabs in the Middle East, and he has to, of course, they're anti-Jewish because they're opposed to Jewish settlement in Palestine, so he's sort of reaching out to them. He reached out to Indian nationalists who were fighting the British for freedom in India, and then he's got to sort of

massage that. So, and, you know, the Nazis were anti-black. They had that kind of racism, but they were never as vicious to, like, African Germans as they were to Jews. So that's another thing that they're, they're sort of finessing a little bit. So like Nazi racism, it's complicated, and it doesn't quite fit a pattern that we would think of as American white supremacy. However, racism in general. I mean, racism as a principle is clearly key to fascism. There's a couple of other things. Anti-communism is probably the second, like really core ingredient.

To be fascist is like centrally to be anti-communist. And fascism really is born as a political movement in a reaction to the Russian Revolution of 1917. I mean, it's a way of responding to that. Oh, wow, that's interesting. Because I feel like people lump that together. Communists, fascists, like, it's all the same kind of thing. But actually, fascists are directly in opposition to Congress. They're directly in opposition to communists, which is not to say there aren't similarities between them in some ways.

There are in some ways. But they see each other as the most clear and bitter enemies. You know, I mean, a lot of politics in the 20s and 30s is, you know, fascism versus communism. That's what's driving a lot of the events. And why can't fascists be communist? Like if you're an autocratic nation and you're taking care of yourself and just fully sustaining within you, what is dogmatically opposed to that? So, you know, I think there's several answers to this. Some of them are kind of ideological theory points.

Some of them are practical. But like, as you put it doctrinally, it's like an ideological theory point. The main difference has to do with nationalism. If you are a communist, if you're following at least the ideology that you're sort of supposed to follow. if you're a communist, you have to be an internationalist. Like, you have to believe working people all over the world are brothers and sisters. I mean, Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto wrote, The Working Man Has No Country.

Interesting, which is directly in opposition to autocracy, which is saying, we are the best, we are supreme, and we're going to only take care of ourselves. Well, if you're, yeah, I would say more directly in opposition to, like, nationalism or racism, their cousins, but, like, if you are a German nationalist, if you are a Nazi, Nazis are German nationalists, you have to believe, as they said, Germans are a master race.

We're superior to French, Russians, Poles, whatever. You cannot say, if you're a real Nazi, French workers are our brothers. You know, you can't say that. But if you are a Marxist, if you're a communist, you are supposed to believe that. Interesting. So that's the kind of core ideological difference.

Wow, that's really, really interesting. Now, can you speak to why all of these racial ideas were seeping into, you know, these countries at this time? Like, why just then? Or was this something that existed forever that just kind of came to a head? So, I mean, that's a great question. And I think it's actually super important. There's a kind of what we would call modern racism

that starts to happen, starts to appear in the world in the last 20 or 30 years of the 19th century. And scholars who studied this, especially recently, have really articulated that, it comes out of the experience of European imperialism. So, you know, in the late 1800s, there's this incredible expansion of the extent to which European countries are ruling chunks of Africa and Asia.

Like, for instance, in the 1880s, there's what's called the Scramble for Africa. At the start of the 1880s, there's very little European colonization of Africa. There's a few around the coast in various places. By 1890, almost all of the continent of Africa is under European control. And similar things are happening in Asia,

Asia, in the Pacific. And what sort of comes out of this is that the experience of empire makes Europeans start thinking about how you define people, and they start defining people much more biologically than they had before. They would previously have generally thought of people kind of differences between peoples would be cultural. You're raised in a different place. You have a different culture.

But if you come to where I am and get my culture and my education, you'll probably be kind of like me. But around the 1870s, 1880s, that's. starts to change. And the idea starts to become common among Europeans, Americans, too, that these things are baked in. It's kind of biological. And if you are from Indonesia, you're like baked in as an Indonesian. And you're not going to become a Dutch person. Or, you know, if you are Indian, you're baked in as an Indian. You're not going to become British. That's a really interesting point. I've always heard this before, but like the Roman Empire, so to speak. Like, there are

different ethnic groups in the Roman Empire. But the idea of race didn't really exist in the way that we understand. No, as a matter of fact, I'm far from an expert on the Roman Empire, but if I sort of reached back to graduate school and things I read, I mean, I think the Roman Empire was actually kind of proudly cosmopolitan. And there was this idea, there was an idea that wherever you were in the Roman Empire, you were a Roman. So if you came from like the Middle East, but you're a Roman because you're part of this

empire, and there's a sort of cultural pattern that you would share. Right, which as an American, it's pretty hard to fathom that we could see a world without race. so baked into who we are. Like, I'm a white guy, that guy's an Indian guy, that guy's a black guy. And you can live in America your whole life. You can have generations of people from, you know, this country,

but you're still a black guy. And it's just baked into how we see the world. And so whenever people say, like, oh, like race is a construct, people will push back and be like, no, that guy's obviously black. But for most of you in history, to my understanding, you can correct me, is like, you know, if you were living in Rome and you were North African and you got

on a boat, you went to Italy, and you were living in Rome, if you adopted the customs and lived as a Rome, You were Roman and people genuinely saw you that way. They were like you are, you might have a dark complexion, but you're Roman. Like the idea of blackness didn't exist necessarily. Right. I think that's right. And that's what we mean when we say race is a construct.

I mean, there's always like, there's bits and pieces of hiccups here. From my knowledge, which again is not expert, but of, you know, Spain at the time of the Inquisition or the time of, you know, the expulsion of Jews in the late 1400s. The Spanish had a sort of racial ideology of Jewishness, which looks a lot more like what the Nazis had. Interesting. But on the whole, I like to use an example. So there was a guy named Macaulay, a British guy who was a historian, but he was also an imperial civil servant in India. And in 1830, I think, McCauley wrote a document called A Minute on Indian Education, in which he sort of sets out a plan to bring kind of British-style education to the people of India. In what years?

1830. Okay. And the basic idea is, I mean, he says, I won't be able to quote this exactly, but he says in this document, you know, but we can educate an Indian person to become British in taste and outlook and thinking. You know, he doesn't see an innate physical difference. Like culturally, you can become something different. That's the thing that changes by the 1870s, 1880s, 1880s,

where you're getting this like really more hard-edged racialized, yeah. Wow. And the Nazis are heirs to that. Like the Nazis, the Nazis have that to the most extreme possible. That's so interesting. So you have these people, you know, Belgians are now, you know, conquering parts of the Congo and you have the French conquering North Africa all the way into the West Africa. And all of a sudden they see these people living a specific way of life and they say they're fundamentally different.

They're not able to become French. They don't have the fundamental intrinsic characteristics of humanity. There may be like a subclass of human that can help us do things and be serving. or whatever else, but they're never going to be us. Right. And it's those ideas that ultimately seep into Germany, Italy, maybe Japan to an extent, around that time. It's predicated on a supremacist, like, colonial belief. Yeah.

Wow. And it's widespread. I mean, most Europeans have this outlook. Most Americans have this outlook around the turn of the 20th century. Wow. It's just the Nazis take it farther. They take it the most extreme. And they mix in some other elements.

You know, I mean, everybody's probably familiar with the term social Darwinism, which is a sort of related idea coming into the world about the same time. The idea of social Darwinism is basically society is all about competition. And, you know, like Darwin writing about the natural world, sees this with animal species. A social Darwinist sees it with humans. We're all competing. The strong survive, the weak just die out. So if you're, like, homeless and living under a bridge, well, you lost. You should just die.

You know, if I'm prosperous and successful, you know, good for me. God loves me. Yeah, God loves me. And I should have lots of kids because probably my kids will be, you know, strong and smart and tough like me and will prosper and thrive and you'll die out. So like the Nazis have that too, like this really kind of, it's all about struggle. It's all about, you know, sort of Darwinian survival of the fittest kind of thinking. It's not an accident that Hitler's famous book, his semi-autobiography is called mine conf.

Kampf means struggle. Yeah. So it's like my struggle. A Nazi can't get through a word without, like, can't get through a sentence without struggle. If you read like Nazi documents, like that word conff is everywhere. Everything is a conf. They even have an adjective form of it. Like if I wanted to really praise you, if I think you're a great Nazi and I want to praise you,

I would say you are kemphidish, which means like struggle-ish. Like you're a fighter. You're a struggler. Yeah. Yeah. And do you think that's baked into German ethos for generations, or is that just post-World War I austerity? No, it's really post-World War I. It in many ways comes out of the experience that, you know, German soldiers had in the trenches of World War I to sort of fosters this idea of life as struggle.

Wow. That is fascinating. And can you speak, again, on the racial component to Aryanness? I just want to add a sort of caveat here. You hear this Aryan idea. This is something that people kind of like tout all the time. Like, you know, Hitler wanted to create this master race. And he was, he subscribed to this Aryan idea, blonde hair, blue-eyed Germans.

And then people always point out like, well, Hitler was not a blonde-eyed. No. Or blonde-haired blue-eyed person. He was blue-eyed. Oh, he was. Yeah, very striking blue eyes, actually. I would have no idea. That's wild.

But like, he doesn't resemble the typical, you know, the typical Aryan attributes. And obviously you mentioned kind of the Japanese component, which I think he was. answered that part. But how did this Aryan idea seep into Germany and into Hitler's mind as sort of a political idea? So it also had quite a long prehistory before the Nazis, and it wasn't particularly a German idea. A lot of European thinkers, using the word loosely, were starting to kick this idea around in the sort of mid-late 19th century. It originally is sort of a linguistic idea. There's this idea that there's a kind of Aryan language, which they thought kind of came from India, actually.

And people migrated into Europe. And from the idea of a language, then it kind of morphs into an idea of certain racial characteristics, which, as you say, like the sort of idea of an Aryan person racially is that they are tall, they are blonde, they are blue-eyed. And also, it has a little bit to do with head shape. If you're an Aryan, you're supposed to have a kind of long, narrow head, not a kind of wide or round head. So these are supposed to be the markers.

And then from that, there's also this idea that if you're Aryan, you're going to be kind of culturally superior. And the people who put this idea out think that, you know, Aryans have created all the really important cultural advances in the world, scientific advances, what have you. The Nazis would sometimes speak of, you know, culture-bearing Aryans. So all of this kind of comes together. It's almost rooted in cultural supremacy in the way that we talk about colonialism is predicated on cultural supremacy. Like even Macaulay is writing, you know, about these, about Indian people. And he's like, yeah, look, they can become British, but they should become British. Right.

No, there's still a cultural component. Yeah, I mean, McCauley is still racist in his way. It's just like a kind of cultural racism, not a physical, biological racism. And yeah, Aryanism is sort of a mixture of those things. It does have a sort of physical, racial component, but it also has a cultural component. So lots of Europeans in the 19th century are talking about this. French writers are talking about it. You know, British writers are talking about it.

about it. But as with all of this stuff, it's the Nazis that kind of take it to its kind of ultimate, you know, form. And so does Aryanism come out of colonialism as well, that idea that like, we're going around the world, we're seeing how other people are, and obviously we are the cultural arbiters? It's actually less. The idea of there being an Aryan is less to do with the imperial experience and more to do with what some Europeans think is their anthropology or cultural history in the 19th century. It's all crap, by the way. I mean, nothing of this actually exists. It's a sort of fantasy that there is this kind of person. So this is a really interesting framework. So you have these different autocratic dictators

bubbling up. Obviously post-World War I, there's all these sanctions that are put on Germany specifically. They have, it's what, like a billion dollars that they don't have? It's hard to put a number on it because, so you're referring to the reparations that Germany was supposed to pay to the Allies under the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I. and the figure they were supposed to pay kept being renegotiated and changing. It was the treaty of 1919 initially didn't define it. They did a classic bureaucratic thing and said, a committee will figure this out. And then the committee figured it out and said in 1921, the Germans will pay 132 billion gold marks,

which at the time would have been about $40 billion or so. But then they renegotiated it in 1924 and they renegotiated it again in 1929. and then in 1931 under what was called the Hoover moratorium, President Hoover said, you cannot pay for a year. And then in 1932, that moratorium was made permanent and the Germans never paid reparations after that.

So it's hard to say how much exactly. But it was big. It was a big number. And during post-World War I, Germans were in a struggle period as a country. Economically, they were in ruin. They were sort of lost in terms of leadership, Weimar Republic, things like that, things were not going well within Germany.

It fluctuates the first five years after World War I. It's basically total chaos. It's civil war of various kinds. It's economic chaos, the famous hyperinflation to the point that by 1923, when the inflation hit its worst point, the German mark was trading to the U.S. dollar at 4.3 trillion to the dollar. Wait, what? 4.3 trillion marks to the dollar, yes. So if you wanted to buy a loaf of bread for like two bucks, it was going to be $4 trillion? Yeah.

You see photos of people piling up mark notes into a wheelbarrow to go buy a loaf of bread. That's the most insane inflation ever. Yeah, I think it is. I once found something, it was really fun. I found something at a library book in a library in Berlin that was a streetcar ticket that someone had stuck into a book to use as a bookmark, and it had been there by the time I found it, like probably 90 years. And it was a streetcar ticket that cost,

I think it was 50,000 marks. You still have it? I debated what to do with it, and I put it back in the books. I thought I should stay there, but I did photograph it. So I have the photograph. You're a good guy.

And you read books. I mean, you're what a legend. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because it's 2024. And it's time to talk about something important. When you are seriously hurt, your injury could be worth millions.

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So post-World War I, Germany's in ruin. You have these dictators propping up. There's an ideology happening around Europe about Aryanism. Colonization is now creating a supremacy. These countries are autocratic. They're against communism. They're fascist, quote unquote, based off kind of the definition we laid out. And so now you have Italy, Germany, Japan, all with different agendas, and they all kind of want to take over some land.

Then what? So each of those countries are making moves in the 1930s to try and, you know, bring about the takeover of land that they want. The Japanese start by starting to make moves on China in 1931. They take over Manchuria in northern China. There's a bit of a pause. In 1937, they launched an offensive against the rest of mainland China, which they think they'll sort of win quickly, and then it bogs down.

It becomes what we call it quagmire nowadays. So that's kind of happening over there. Sorry, one note on that. Sure. Can you talk to me about Manchuria? I've heard that there's some idea that it could have been like a false flag kind of thing, that there could have been like internal agitation, that it wasn't exactly as clear cut as maybe some people have said.

Have you heard that before? You know, to be honest, I know just about nothing about that. That's totally fun. Okay, so there's agitation in Manchuria. The Japanese are now moving into China. And then what is Italy and Germany done? So Italy then sort of launches the second bit of this, which is an attack on what's now Ethiopia.

In those days, it was called Abyssinia. And there's a bit of an international flap about this. This is clear aggression. The organization called the League of Nations, which is supposed to stop this. And Abyssinia is a member of the League of Nations. So the League of Nations should come and defend it. But the response is weak. They impose some, impose some slight sanctions on Italy, but it's not very effective.

So Italy conquers Abyssinia, and that's kind of that. Oh, wow. So that's basically modern to eat. Ethiopia. Yeah. I always heard that Ethiopia had never been conquered. It was finally. Ethiopia had fought off Italy earlier, but that time in the mid-1930s, Italy didn't go out of it. Interesting. Okay. So now they're making attacks on Eastern Africa. Was that, this is not a part of the scramble for Africa. This is just them. No, this is much later. This is them just trying to like find a place that they could potentially put a flag in.

It's basically, it's one of the last independent countries in Africa. So that's part of the attraction for the Italians. I see. Okay. So they're like, all right, we're going to get our colony and our land. Yep. And now Germany. And now Germany.

The big boys. Right. And so Hitler, you know, Hitler's tricky. A lot of what Germany is doing, I mean, it's Hitler who's going to shape this. He, by the mid-30s, is clearly solidly in control as a dictator. What the German government does is what Hitler wants to do. But it's very difficult for historians to figure out exactly what it was that Hitler wanted to do because there's a lot of contradictory evidence.

There's a huge paper trail for Hitler. He made speeches all the time. We have copious records of those speeches. His propaganda minister, Yosef Goebbels, kept copious diaries. And Goebbels often met with Hitler. And then you read his diary entry and Goebo says, you know, I talked to the boss today. he said we're going to do this and that. So that's a great source.

But there's... Hitler contradicted himself all the time, and he had different ideas all the time. Of course, he wrote two books. He wrote famously his book, Mind Kampf, My Struggle, in the mid-1920s. He then wrote another book in 1928, which he didn't publish.

He stuck in a drawer, and it was published after World War II with the incredibly imaginative title, Hitler's second book. And I never knew that. Yeah, and it's a kind of, it's a sequel to Mind Kampf, where he's talking specifically about what he wants to do in foreign policy,

and there's certain ideas there that he has for what Germany is going to do in terms of aggression. But all of this is totally contradictory. In his second book, written in 1928, he says, we'll make an alliance with Italy and Britain to fight a war against the Soviet Union. That's the kind of concept that he has. And then at other times, he would indicate he wanted or he expected a war against France and Britain. And he talked a lot about the United States, and he worried a lot about the United States. And a lot of recent historical writing, which I think is really interesting and is quite compelling,

has said it was actually the United States and Britain that he worried about the most. He saw as the biggest threat, the biggest danger to Germany, and he wanted Germany to be strong enough to defend against them in the future and maybe to conquer them. And one thing historians really divide on is, was his main thing, was Hitler's main thing that he wanted to conquer, huge territory in the Soviet Union to create a big empire, kind of like what we were talking about, a big empire where the Germans would control resources, at least in the western part of the Soviet Union, like European Russia, Ukraine, et cetera. And that was the thing he really wanted, or was the thing he really wanted a kind of world heavyweight title match against Britain and the United States

to defeat these kind of world democratic capitalist superpowers. Interesting. Could it be both? It could be both in the sense that he could have seen that as a secret. he could have thought, we need to conquer the Soviet Union so that we, Germany, can have the resources and be big enough and strong enough to take on the United States and Great Britain. Historians do differ on just how important the United States and Britain were in his thinking on how much he saw them as the primary enemies. Personally, I think there's a lot to be said that he did see them as kind of the ultimate

primary enemies. Anyway, all this is going around in his mind. And Germany takes a series of steps in the second half of the 1930s, which are increasing aggressively. In 1935, Hitler announces that Germany is going to start drafting young men into its army again, which it technically wasn't supposed to do under the Treaty of Versailles. But he says, we're going to do it and we're going to greatly expand the size of the army. And at the same time, he says, oh, and we already have an Air Force, which again, they weren't supposed to have an Air Force at all under the Treaty of Versailles. But he says, not only are we going to have one, we have one right now.

We have an Air Force right now. So they start building up an Air Force. They start building up their army. A year later in 1936, he breaches another provision of the Treaty of Versailles. The Treaty of Versailles said that Germany couldn't station troops on its western border region with France and Belgium, which is an area called the Rhineland. Clearly part of Germany. People sometimes talk about Hitler invading the Rhineland, which is kind of the wrong way to put it, because it's clearly Germany. But he couldn't station troops there.

But in 1936, he kind of, you know, prefer. formatively orders some units to march across the Rhine bridges and just kind of hang out in the Rhineland. It's called the militarization of the Rhineland. Breach of the treaty, Britain and France could have responded, but they don't. The thing you always read in every book is some London cab driver says, well, Hitler can do what he likes in his own backyard, can he? And it would have been difficult or impossible probably to motivate ordinary people in Britain and France in 1936 to fight a war against Germany, to keep Germany from having some sense.

soldiers hang out on German territory. This is not going to be a popular cell. So the British and French let it go. A couple years go by fairly quietly. And in March of 1938, Hitler moves troops into Austria. Austria is an independent country. Again, the Treaty of Versailles says that Austria and Germany cannot unify. But the people of Austria at this point are almost all ethnically and linguistically German. Hitler himself is Austrian by birth and upbringing. He wants Austria to be part of Germany. He sends troops in, takes it over. Again, the Western allies do not really respond. And Hitler's greeted by such enthusiasm as he enters Austria that's sort of on the spur of the moment, he says, we'll just annex it outright. In other words, we'll, it's not we're going to occupy it.

We will make it part of Germany. It's now completely part of our country. That's a smart strategic move, I guess, from his perspective. It's like, these people are already ethnic Germans. They already want to be a part of Germany. And what was that little area called? I forget the name of it. There's like a part outside of, I guess, Austria. I think it's what we're about to get to.

Oh, this is in the Sudetenland? Yeah, that's in Czechoslovakia, maybe? Okay, got it. So then the next thing is Czechoslovakia. Okay, so I think there's a misconception that's like Germany was there, then they invaded Poland, World War II. But it's actually annexation of Austria. Anxation of Austria. Which as an important note from him that doesn't know, obviously, Hitler was Austrian.

Yes. So you have to think, like, you know, Germany and Austria, these are different countries, ethnically and culturally, very similar. Yeah, and in fact, I mean, prior to, for complicated reasons, but prior to 1866, it would never have occurred to anybody in Europe or in the German-speaking world that those are two different places. Everybody would have thought, it's the German-speaking world, Austria is a part of the German-speaking world. there's no difference. So it's sort of, it's a kind of modern distinction to think of them as being two different places.

That makes a lot of sense. Much like Canada and the United States, for that matter, which it's sort of, they have common historical roots and because of the American War of Independence, suddenly they become two different places. Right.

It's much like that with Germany. If there was something where all of a sudden American Canada or the same country, it wouldn't be that crazy. No. Yeah. So that makes a lot of sense.

So he kind of just says, like, hey, you guys are already us, let's make it official. Now we are one German nation. Yeah. Now there's Czechoslovakia, which is a really complicated country, which had been created only in 1918, had never existed before. And, you know, you think maybe it's going to be a country where people who are Czech live. And that's true.

But there's a lot of other ethnicities in Czechoslovakia, too. Of 14 million people, 3 million are German, for instance. And Germans are actually the second biggest ethnic group in Czechoslovakia. There's also Slovaks who are different from Czechs. And of course, today there's separate countries again. There is a Hungarian population. There's a Polish population. There's a substantial Jewish minority.

There's all kinds of people in this country. And they don't all get along. Basically, every ethnic group kind of dislikes every other ethnic group. Right. Because, again, this is a created nation that was like, yeah, you guys all live together. Right. Yeah. And the Germans in Czechoslovakia live in a very concentrated area called the Sudadenland,

which is a sort of border strip. You know, Czechoslovakia, if you can think of what it looks like on the map, it looks like kind of a fish head pointing into Germany. And so like around the edges of the fish head, that's where the Sudadenland is. That's basically where three million ethnic Germans are concentrated. And so Hitler starts making the point in 1938. They should be included in Germany. And he's clever about this because he's using a concept, which it's hard for Western democracies to argue with. You know, President Woodrow Wilson of the United States had talked about national self-determination.

if any national ethnic group should be able, you know, by right to have its own country, to have its own government, its own state, its own borders. That's a kind of basic human right. This was kind of Woodrow Wilson's concept. So Hitler plays on this. He says, well, look, President Wilson, like you Western democracies, you all say, right of national self-determination. So are Germans like the only people excluded from this?

Germans and Czechoslovakia should be with their brothers and sisters in the father life. If they want to join us. Yeah. If they're interested in being a part of Germany, they have every right. which nobody has much doubt in 1938 that they do, that the Germans of Czechoslovakia would prefer to be in Germany than in Czechoslovakia. So, of course? But they don't really get asked in a democratic way.

I mean, Hitler starts threatening Czechoslovakia militarily. The end result of this is a famous moment in world politics in the 1930s, something known as the Munich Conference. What happens here is the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Neville Chamberlain, goes to the German city of Munich. there he meets the French Prime Minister Edward Deladier. He meets Adolf Hitler. He meets Benito Mussolini.

So these four powers negotiate, these four leaders negotiate, and they agree that Hitler will take over the Sudaden land. He'll do it peacefully. He'll take it over. And then what remains with Czechoslovakia, these countries all agree to guarantee its independence. Wow.

Now you may be thinking, okay, wait a minute, this is Czechoslovakia. Why aren't the Czechs at this conference? And officially they're not. They're not invited because they don't count. They're not the big boys. The big boys decide what's going to happen.

A couple of Czech representatives are literally stuck in a room where these other statesmen are meeting and sort of held in this room and they're told what's going to happen. Really? Yeah, but they don't have a voice. Which is wild to think. It is wild. This is like if Mexico was going to invade America

and annexed parts of southern Texas because they're like, yeah, there's a lot of Mexicans in southern Texas. Like, we're just going to take that and make that part of Mexico. And then they had a whole conference and like Britain and France and Mexico and Canada over there. And then America, the country which is getting annexed, wasn't even given a seat. Yes, that's exactly what it's like.

That's wild. If you accept, you know, it's, America obviously is a big, powerful country. Of course. Chugsughey isn't. But yes, other than that, that's exactly what's happening. Wow. So the checks obviously just get a message and they go, hey, by the way, the Sudetland that you guys have, it's not yours anymore.

Yeah. And so, and again, which I think is a really interesting point, because I think people look at World War II and they say, Hitler's a bad guy, obviously, and he just starts going on this rampage and invading all these countries. But he was doing it through diplomatic means and was getting the permission, quote-unquote,

of other global superpowers. He was very successful, and at this point, the Munich Conference is at the end of September in 1938. At this point, he is massively popular in Germany because, you know, by this point he's been in power for five years, the economy has improved a lot from where it was when he came in,

and he's achieved these spectacular successes on the world stage, bringing in Austria, you know, now bringing in the sedaten land, you know, unifying Germans, building up the armed forces and so to speak making Germany great again and making it sort of respected on the world stage. All of this makes him very popular. And so far there's no real bloodshed, there's no real ethnic cleansing. No. Concentration camps don't really exist to the degree that... Concentration camps do exist.

Oh, wow. There's the thing here that I should say that, there's a lot of misconception about this. I think a lot of people think concentration camps, Holocaust, same thing. Concentration camp is a place where, like, Jewish people get sent to be killed with poison gas. That's not 100% untrue, but it's largely untrue. There were different kinds of camps. Concentration camps, the Nazis start making concentrations camps, building concentration camps,

right away when they come into power in 1933. And in 1933, if you got sent to a camp, it wouldn't. be because you were Jewish. It would be because you're a political opponent of the Nazis. So basically, communist, socialists, liberals, anti-Nazi, intellectuals, artists, lawyers, they're getting sent to concentration. As well as Jews? No, they're getting sent because they are those things. They're getting sent because they're communist, socialists, anti-Nazis. Some of them are Jewish, but you're not getting sent to a camp because you're Jewish. You'd be getting sent to a camp because you're a Nazi opponent. And that's early parts of... That's early and it wasn't a death sentence.

It was rough, but a concentration camp was like a rough jail. You might get beat up a bit. You might be made to do hard labor, but you're probably going to get let out. And most people who got sent to a camp in, you know, 33, 34, 35, they get let out again after a while. Wow. It's to beat them up and intimidate them and then you let them out. And everybody, there's nothing secret about this. Everybody knows. I mean, the camps are publicized. When they open the famous camp at Dachau in 1933, it's like big headlines everywhere. Concentration camp opens, you know, it's a big deal. So it's like a gulag. Yeah, it's quite comparable to the gulag. Yeah. That's quite different from what happens later. I mean, the Holocaust, as we speak about that,

like a systematic genocide of Jews starts much later. It doesn't really start until 1941. Interesting. And even that doesn't start with camps. Like the first phase of the Holocaust, the killings are done in mass shootings. And almost half, nearly half, arithmetically of Holocaust are actually killed in mass shootings, the camps come later. Wow. And those camps are different. They're called death camps. And they're basically all in what is today, Poland.

And so those are places where you get sent if you're Jewish, mostly if you're Jewish, to be killed by poison gas in a very systematic way. But that's quite a different operation than the concentration camps that were in Germany, you know, from the beginning. Oh, interesting. Okay. So at this point, they have concentration camps that are work camps, everybody knows about them. Political opponents are there. And if you're someone that's in Nazi Germany at the time, you like Hitler.

So you don't really care about these political opponents, these lawyers and gay people and whatever else getting sent to these things. You probably think, ah, they got it coming. Right. Wow. Damn communist. Fine. Send them to account. Make them do some work. Finally, we have someone that's taken care of our country. Anyone that's in opposition to that, get out of here.

Wow. So at this point, everyone that's in Germany, more or less, is kind of a fan of Hitler. He's very popular. I mean, you can't do a Gallup poll and a dictatorship for obvious reason. Of course. But historians study this, and from any evidence that we can get, he's overwhelmingly popular. Wow. So then this, what is it, the Munich Conference?

Munich Conference, yep. And now Hitler gets green light to take over this part of the Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia. Yeah. Great. That's probably all he does, right? He doesn't go any further on that. Yeah, that's right. And as a matter of fact, there's a famous German historian who wrote one of the classic biographies of Hilder who said,

if he had died right then in the fall of 1938, he would probably be remembered as like the greatest German states when whoever He'd be remembered as a great figure. Wow. But he didn't die right then. Spoiler alert. In the spring of 1939, six months after the Munich conference, he does something which is really fateful. He takes over the rest of, it's complicated to say this, the rest of what is today the Czech Republic. He doesn't actually take over the rest of Czechoslovakia because Slovakia becomes kind of independent as a puppet state.

But he takes over the rest of the Czech part. of what have been Czechoslovakia, two provinces known as Bohemia and Moravia. Why is this important? Because basically the people who live in Bohemia and Moravia are not German by any definition. They are basically ethnically Czech. So for the first time, Hitler has launched aggression

against people who aren't German. He can't justify this. He can't turn to the Western democracies and say, I'm just doing what you say. This is just like self-determination for Germans. No, this is like aggression against people who are indisputably foreign. And there's this incredible revolution in the thinking of Europeans about Hitler at this point.

There's an incredible shift in opinion where suddenly, you know, people realize I'm shocked, shocked to find this man is aggressive and dangerous. And so famously British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who gets kind of unfairly kicked around by historians, I think. But Chamberlain, who has been sort of spearheading efforts to quote unquote appease Hitler and try and make Hitler come. down and not start a war. Chamberlain decides, okay, that's not working. We're going to have to be more aggressive. And so Chamberlain right then in spring of 1939 does a few important things, of which probably the most important is to say to Poland, if the Germans invade you, we will come in and we will help defend you and we will declare war on Germany. Because everybody figures Poland's probably next, given what Hitler's doing. You know, Poland hadn't existed until the end of

World War I. It's another country that's created out of, you know, previously existing empires, and a chunk of what was Poland in the 1930s had been carved out of what had been Germany, and there's a lot of ethnic Germans living in that Poland. And so Hitler can kind of say the same thing that he'd said about Austria or Czechoslovakia. He can say, I want the German areas back. And that's what he does say, although, in fact, what he wants to do is just completely conquer Poland, but he says, I just want the Germans back. But in any case, everybody realizes that Poland's probably next on his list.

So Prime Minister Chamberlain figures, we have to say. stop him now because clearly he's just going to keep going until he's stopped. So he makes a promise to Poland that if the Germans invade Poland, Britain will come in. And this sets up conditions now, which by the way, this is all quite fascinatingly complicated. Until 1939, Hitler had kind of hoped that he could get Poland as an ally because he's thinking now about moving east and invading the Soviet Union. And he thinks we can do this with the Poles. The Poles in the Soviet Union had a very bad relationship. They'd actually fought a war in 1920,

which Poland actually won. And so there's a lot of bitterness between these countries. It's not crazy to think that Poland would be an ally of Germany against the Soviet Union. However, the Poles in the 1930s had a basic principle for their diplomacy,

which is, we want good relations with everybody, we don't want to be an enemy of anybody, we don't want alliances with anybody. So they're trying to navigate between Germany and the Soviet Union. They're in a bad neighborhood. They're stuck between these two really vicious regimes.

And they're in their post-breakup era, where they're like, I just want to be single for a while. Yeah, kind of. We just want to be on our own, and we just don't want to deal with men. That's about it, actually. That's a good way of putting it.

So the polls won't go along with this. And in early 39, like, there's fascinating diplomatic documents about this. The Germans are trying like crazy, like going to the polls and saying, look, let's get together and we'll attack the Soviet Union. The polls are like, nah.

And the Germans are like, what's your problem? Yeah, date us. Like, come on. Sure, we're going to take over some of your country. But, like, who cares about that? We'll give you this other stuff. And, you know. Yeah, and together, look how great we can be.

Totally. We could be a power couple. Yeah. Wow. Exactly. And the polls don't go for it. So the Germans kind of say, all right, well, I guess we're going to have to invade you. So that's how that becomes the next act.

And that's why, that makes more sense. That's why it is commonly seen that Poland is the first instigation of World War II. Because basically, Hitler's pushing around all these places. We're taking this. We're taking this. And Britain, I guess, publicly says, hey, Hitler, If you go into Poland, we're going to defend them. Yep.

And Hitler goes, see you there. He doesn't believe them. As far as he's concerned, they've wept out at every other point in the 30s. So why wouldn't they wimp out again? Wow. And again, just to sort of classify, like, Hitler's desire here is to create a reunified German people. He wants to unite the people. Both because, like we said before, he either wants to gain wealth and resources for Germany.

He wants to defend himself against America in general. He has obviously, you know, racist, ethnic ideas about what people should be and what, you know, supremacy is. All of these things are kind of converging. He does. And he has a longer game, too. And the longer game is to build an empire in the territory of the Soviet Union and use those resources, basically confiscate those resources for Germans. And then eventually, like, drive out or kill the people who live there and settle ethnic Germans there as a, you know, he uses a, you know, American homesteading is kind of a model.

Like he literally wants to sort of do the American West, but in the Soviet Union, moving Germans out there to settle agricultural communities, maybe getting some what he thinks of as related peoples, maybe recruiting Dutch, Scandinavian people to sort of move out there and kind of homestead and create this German empire in the Soviet Union. That's his longer game.

So, you know, moving east, getting Poland, that can be a first step in that longer game. Wow. So the day happens, we're going into Poland. Yep. before that there's a question of what the Soviets are going to do this is another interesting little wrinkle yeah it's a good point the Soviets are obviously seeing this and they're like okay Hitler doesn't like us yeah Poland doesn't like us right that like he's moving our way

yep like obviously the Soviets are gonna defend themselves yep are the Soviets involved in the leave nations they are although they've they've left it by this point got it and why did they leave it they just thought just wasn't going to benefit us this is stupid yeah yeah they saw they had come in kind of late and then they left seeing it as a kind of capitalist democratic plot. Yeah. Got it. The thing here is some of the British leaders and some of the French start thinking,

well, if we're going to have a war where Germany invades Poland, it would be great to have the Soviets on our side because that's actually some stopping power. Like that's a big country with a big population and a big army. They can probably stop the Germans. It's going to be harder for us, especially geographically. It's going to be harder for us. So the British and French and French. French start negotiating with the Soviets in the summer of 1939 about having an alliance

directed against Germany. There are two problems. One is that especially the British leadership, especially Prime Minister Chamberlain, is not incredibly excited about having the Soviets as an ally. He writes a letter, Chamberlain writes a letter to one of his sisters in which he says something that's almost funny. It's sort of sweet in its way. He says, I don't think the Soviets share our ideas of liberty.

Yeah, probably not. Safe call was down. A couple million people starved their last winter. Yeah, like, yeah, I don't think they have the same values. Yeah. I mean, they're really anti-communist. I mean, most people in Europe who aren't actually communist in those days are really anti-communists. That's an interesting predicament.

It's fairly typical for especially conservative Europeans to see the Soviet Union as at least as bad, if not maybe worse, than Hitler's Germany. So there's not a ton of excitement. Wow. So they're like, look, we hate the Soviets. But we hate Germany more, and they're more of a threat to us right now. It's becoming, there's a tipping point here, it's becoming the case, especially in 1939. Prior to that, they would probably have said, actually, we hate the Soviets more. But in 1939, it's becoming the case that Germany does look like more of a threat.

So it's like, I guess we've got to try and talk to the Soviets. Wow. So they do. So they buddy up? Well, they talk, but then what happens is the Soviets say, okay, fine, we can be allies, but we're going to need to send troops into Poland. The polls will have to be okay with this, and the polls kind of aren't. And plus, we'll need the Baltic and we'll need Finland.

We'll need all this stuff. We'll need to be able to control it. And the British and French, I think, understandably. The Baltic states are independent at this point. They've become independent after World War I. And when you say Baltic states? Lafia, Lithuania, Estonia. Got it.

They're newly independent states. Finland, which had been part of the Russian empire before World War I is a newly independent state. Wow. And the Russians are basically saying, well, we've got to take all this over, and the British and France are like, eh. They're like, you're just trying to land grab like Hitler. What the hell? Yeah. So kind of understandably, they have trouble agreeing to that.

And so basically the Soviets say, look, I mean, if you're not going to agree to this, we can't be partners with you against the Germans. Meanwhile, Hitler sort of knows this is going on. And Hitler has no scruples. And so Hitler basically conveys to Stalin, you can have whatever you want. You'd be my ally. Yeah, Baltic, Finland, Romania, like whatever kind of turns your crank. Like, you can have that.

And so Stalin recognizes which side his bread is buttered on. And so Stalin then suddenly makes a deal with Hitler. Famous Hitler-Stalin pact, which is announced to the world in late August, 1939. Suddenly this aligns. Now there's a public and there's a private part to the Hitler-Stalin pact. Public part is there's a non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union for 10 years. They promise not to attack each other for 10 years. The quiet part, the secret part is they sort of divide like Eastern Europe up, Eastern and Northern Europe, up between.

them. So the Soviets can have, you know, the Baltics in Finland and a chunk of Romania, and the Germans get like a chunk of Poland. And the Soviets get half of Poland. They're going to split up Poland. Wow. So they make this deal on August 22nd, 1939. Now, what is Hitler thinking here? Because he's like, I'm trying to take over Russia. So I'm going, or I'm going to try and take over the USSR. So is his angle like, look, I'd rather have you be my ally right now. we can help kind of neuter all these Western European powers and then when the time comes you and I can have a showdown. Yeah, that's exactly.

I mean, Hitler's what you call an opportunist. He makes it up as it goes along. He figures right now, if the problem is, I want to invade Poland and the Soviet Union as a potential enemy right now is a problem, especially if I'm going to be in a war with Britain and France, got to neutralize that problem. So I'll neutralize that problem for now.

I can deal with that problem later. He's just totally making it up as a year. goes. Interesting. So these three powers, you have the British and Western Europe, you have Germany, and then you have Russia. They all kind of hate each other. Yep. But you need to form, you can't fight a war on two fronts. Right. So basically it's like, who's going to make a deal?

Yep. Wow. That's interesting little game theory right there. Yeah. That's fascinating. I never realized that. Yeah. So then the dominoes kind of fall at this point. So, you know, Hillary basically orders his generals to get going, and on the 1st of September, they invade Poland. And then the question is, what will the British and French do?

will this time, will they not wimp out? Well, they said, if you go in there, we're going to get going. Yes. And, you know, the polls are getting invaded now, and they're getting the full brunt of the German army, and already the Germans are committing atrocities, and they're bombing cities, and they're killing civilians, and it's bad. And the polls are kind of like, okay, it's great that you're British and French, you're on our side. You're on our side. Like, you're going to start fighting, right? And nothing happens for a couple of days.

And then there's a really interesting moment, especially in Britain, in British politics, where Neville Chamberlain is still kind of talking about negotiation. He still keeps saying things about, well, if the Germans would just pull out, we could have another conference like at Munich and we could work something out. And at this point, there is a complete revolt in the British House of Commons. There's a famous speech, a member of parliament. One member of parliament stands up to speak, and another famous kind of right-wing politician named Leo Amory

yells at the guy's about to speak, saying, speak for England. Voicing frustration that a lot of members have that Chamberlain is still kind of wimping around and not making a clear statement that it's time to go here. And so- So the national support in England is kind of like, yo, let's step in here. And now is the concern like, oh, they're going to come for us next? Or is the concern like, oh, we need to stand up for our allies and become the police of Europe? Like, what is the mentality? Do you know?

The mentality is basically the British have trouble imagining Germany as a real direct threat to them. They don't imagine that they're going to lose a war. But they are worried about a Europe that Hitler dominates. They have mostly concluded that Hitler is a threat who will only be stopped by force and that this has been abundantly demonstrated by this time. And this famous House of Commons debate in the Speak for England call indicates that there is a mood here that it is time, you know, to get into this and to use force and to stop Hitler. So at this point, with this pressure, feeling this heat, Chamberlain and his cabinet decide,

okay, we'll send an ultimatum. They send an ultimatum to Germany on the morning of September 3rd, basically saying if the Germans don't agree to pull their troops out of Poland, Britain will declare war. And they give Hitler the ultimatum at 9 in the morning. They say it's good till noon. And at noon, nothing's happened. And so Britain's at war. And Neville Chamberlain gives a speech over the radio, which is actually quite dramatic, and it's almost moving.

He was a rather unpleasant kind of obnoxious guy, but the speech is moving. And it's dramatic. And he announces to the people of Britain, you know, this morning our ambassador delivered a note to the Germans saying, if you don't withdraw from Poland, a state of war will exist between us. There's a pause. He says, I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and this country is at war with Germany. Those are very fateful words. Wow. And you have to imagine that anyone who isn't like a child, any middle-aged or older adult in Britain in 1939, had lived through the first World War, had seen three-quarters of a million young British men killed in action.

Most people had lost a loved one in the First World War, and now it's happening again. And, you know, I think it's impossible to exaggerate just how horrible that news was for anyone in the world who had experienced World War I. And so here's this moment where it's come. You know, it's come again. Wow. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because we got to talk about your amazing dick game. Yes, you.

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I mean, that is tough to, I think that's a great distinction. Because, again, in my mind, I'm like, this guy, Neville, what a cuck. Like, get in there. Start cracking heads. Like, you said you're going to defend these guys. Like, get into it. You need to understand the context. Like, in America, we don't really even have, like, an analog for this.

Like, COVID maybe is the closest thing where it's like all of us were subject to some, like, you know, awful virus. Now imagine, you know, like Biden comes on the news and goes, ladies and gentlemen, due to my actions, we now have another pandemic. Like, think about how deflated all of Americans would feel. We'd be like, oh, we just, we lost so many people the last one. And we were all locked down for so long. Like, it's like, I'm sure the, I'm sure Chamberlain also felt such a sense of obligation. Like, I'm prime minister and I'm going to protect our country. We're not going to lose men in these, you know, fraughtless wars.

I'm going to protect England. And now we're back into it. That's exactly. And this is exactly why I think Chamberlain gets somewhat unfairly kicked around by historians. Like, you have to understand. Like, he's sort of seen as this, like, classic wimp. And, you know, it didn't help that he always carried an umbrella. So this guy was kind of old-fashioned high collar and this umbrella, he just looks like, you know, like Monty Python would say upper-class British twit of the year.

But to your point, this is a guy who, in the late 1930s, has enormous responsibility on his shoulders. Wow. Like, it sort of looks like keeping the world out of a war, which everyone expects is going to be far worse than the First World War. And in fact, many people think it's going to be far worse than it became, at least for the first few years. People think bombing of cities In 1938 to 39 People thought bombing of cities Would be like what we think a nuclear war would be now

They think it would be just complete obliteration Hundreds of thousands of people dying And so Chamberlain uniquely Because of Britain's role in the world in the 1930s He uniquely has this on his shoulders Like that could happen Like this absolutely catastrophic war Could happen if he does the wrong thing

And he's trying to make that not happen And I think it's hard to blame a guy For trying to make that not happen You need to sort of keep that in mind. Wow. So he goes on the radio, delivers this fateful message, regretfully, I imagine, and now England is involved in this war. Yep. Then what?

Then they do nothing. Come on. That's the other sort of surprising thing. So the polls are expecting help. What the British and French hadn't told them is that British and French strategy for World War II when it began is wait a few years for the Germans to collapse, basically. They thought Germany would fall apart economically. from a war effort, and maybe they could use bombing to speed that process along. But because of their experience in World War I, they don't really want to get into an aggressive

ground war in Western Europe. They figure the casualties will be too high. So the British and French plan is to sit defensively, basically, on the borders of France and Germany and hold a defensive position for maybe about three years until Germany collapses. Then they'll invade Germany, bring about regime change. change, and then they'll liberate Poland after all that. So their plan is to liberate Poland after the end of war, not to actually defend it militarily right now.

Kind of let Poland be like the bait and be like, hey, they're going to get tired with you guys and then we'll come in. The Polans hadn't understood that point, so they keep waiting for help that doesn't come and they are conquered, you know, in about a month. Wow. I mean, that's like a little semantics thing. It's like, hey, if you invade, we're going to stop Germany. And Poland heard that as like, you're going to help us.

No, no, no, we're not going to help you. We'll liberate you after maybe... We said we're going to stop Germany. Okay. And unfortunately, you're going to be a casualty in that. It's almost, we're not even going to stop. We're going to, like, sort of be there until Germany collapses and then we'll do regime change. Wow.

Which also, I'm curious, like, Germany is all this austerity from World War I. How do they have the money for this war? That's a good question. And there's a great economic historian named Adam Tuse who wrote a brilliant book about this a few years ago. And he basically showed they did this by basically completely orienting their economy. economy towards defense. If you were an ordinary German person in the 1930s, you were actually living at a standard of living far below what your country could have delivered to you because resources are being so massively siphoned off to defense industries. The extent of German

sort of GDP that's being allocated to defense was astronomical compared to any democratic country. They're just pouring all their resources into steel production, tank production, aircraft craft production, that kind of thing. Wow. So for 10 or 15 years after World War I, it's just, all right, let's build up. Let's rebuild this. Well, right after World War I, actually not so much. In the 1920s when Germany is still a democracy, they actually have a very small

defense establishment. There's not much happening there. It's when Hitler comes in. Oh, it was Hitler specifically. Hitler specifically in 33 when he comes in. Interesting. They just really reorient the whole economy towards, you know, military spending. Wow.

Okay. And does Britain know something about their? financial status or their ground troops to say, like, oh, they're going to get worn out, they're going to lose steam. Their model here is the First World War, in which a substantial contribution to the Allies winning had been a British naval blockade of Germany, which had cut off particularly the imports of food, which were really critical. At the time of World War I, Germany got 20% of its calories from imports.

And so you cut that off, you're creating kind of near famine conditions. which Germany had in the last two years of World War I, there's kind of like a creeping famine happening in Germany, which scholars estimate directly or indirectly killed about 700,000 civilians. Wow. So the British think, we can do this again. They think the German economy, and they're not entirely wrong about this, they think the German economy is probably dangerously unstable

precisely because of how much of it is being allocated, how much of economic resources are being allocated into defense. They think that's probably unsustainable. If they can do a blockade and cut off resources, they can make it economically collect. in a few years. That's their strategy. Wow. This, by the way, feeds into something that is a kind of classic British military strategy

going back centuries. The British have generally fought wars by using their financial resources and their Navy as weapons and not so much using boots on the ground, like not so much using ground troops. World War I was the big exception where the British did put a big army on the ground in France and World War I. And after that, the British concluded that was a... a real mistake because they had had terrible casualties and, you know, it took a long time to win, and it did a lot of economic damage to Britain trying to fund this big ground army. So they decided,

we're going to go back to traditional British strategy. If war comes again with Germany, we will fight it with our Navy, we will fight it with our economic and financial resources, and we will wait for them to collapse economically. And now, since aircraft are a factor in World War II, much more than in World War I, they figure we can fight an air war, we can use bombing. And by these means we can beat Germany kind of economically, like in every sense. We can beat Germany on the cheap. That's their strategy.

And so this strategy really does not involve launching an invasion of Germany in 1939 to try and save Poland. It involves sitting on the defense, being very cautious, very conservative, using their naval and air resources and their financial resources to win a kind of long victory. Wow. So now Poland's getting

just pummeled. Yep. And siege, overtaken within a month. Yep. World War II is effectively started. Britain is now kind of waiting still. They're in a holding pattern. So this now launches the period, which even at the time, and historians have used this term ever since,

is called the phony war. So from basically September 39 to basically May of 1940, you've got British and French armies kind of sitting in defensive positions on the borders. Germans are across from them, but they're not really doing anything. And everybody just sort of sits there. Italy is standing there being like...

Italy's not in the war yet. But they're kind of like, oh, that's interesting. That's pretty cool. Well, Mussolini Toiliter, I can't be in this. Sorry, I'm not ready. When Germany invaded Poland... Mussolini takes the high ground. He's like, hey, I can't be a Nazi.

Are you crazy? Yeah. I mean, he says, I don't have the resources. I'm not strong enough yet for this. And then Japan is looking at this. Like, wow. Have they started their invasion of China? Yeah, they started with Manchuria in 1931,

and then with sort of mainland China in 1937. and by 1939 they've won substantial victories as the Japanese have kind of taken over the whole Chinese coast, but they are bogged down in a quagmire because it's a big, populous country, obviously,

and the Japanese just can't get... So they're in their own kind of... Their own phony war, kind of... Well, it's less of a phony war, because they are actually fighting, but they're fighting in kind of a war of attrition, which is kind of stalemated. And Hitler's looking at them just like,

oh, well, there's a war going on over there, but it's not... It means nothing for Hitler. It's not implicating him anyway. point it's not too important to him. Wow. Okay. So now everyone's kind of an standing holding position. The phony war progresses. What ends the phony war? There's a sort of prequel in which the Germans invade Denmark and Norway. That's a kind of long, complicated story of which the only, I think, really important result is because

British military performance in trying to defend Norway is so weak. There's another one of these kind of political revolts in the British House of Commons, which results in a vote going against Prime Minister Chamberlain, and many people in the British House of Commons won a new prime minister. Oh, wow. And as a result of this process, without there being an election, there's a change of leadership, a change of prime minister. And the guy who comes in is Winston Churchill, who no one had expected really to get there.

He'd been an outsider in politics for a long time. But under the conditions of wartime, he looks like maybe the guy who would be the appropriate war prime minister. And so the fiasco in Norway, which ironically was largely Churchill's fault, but because it sort of fit a narrative of Chamberlain's weakness and incompetence, the sort of anger went against Chamberlain and not against Churchill, and Churchill ends up sort of stitching together a coalition and then becoming Prime Minister. Why was it Churchill's fault? What was his role before?

He was, when the war started, Churchill was brought into Chamberlain's cabinet as what they call it first lord of the admiralty, which is like Navy secretary. It's like the British cabinet position that runs the Navy. AKA you're in charge of protected Norway. Oh, no much. And in particular, I mean, the, the, the, The Royal Navy was responsible for a lot of the operations in Norway, and it was a fiasco. It was totally incompetently run, and that's largely Churchill's fault, actually. So the Germans send some boys into Norway and into Denmark, and they're like, hey, we're

going to take this shit, too. And the British are incompetent in defending it. So do they successfully annex parts of Norway? So the Germans occupy then Denmark and Norway and hold them until the end of the war. I don't even know about that. Do people realize that? Yeah, I mean, it's out there, but, you know, it's not one of the, like, Told you I was dumb.

It's not one of the, like, I would say, massively, strategically significant moments of the war, except insofar as the byproduct of Norway is you get Churchill becoming prime minister, which is a massively important outcome. Wow. Because, and the reason it's massively important is because, you know, if you put this in a, like a fictional story in a novel or a movie, people would say, nah, that would never happen like that. That's like so unreal.

But in fact, the day Churchill becomes prime minister, the 10th of May, 1940, is the exact day that the phony war stops being a phony war because the Germans launch a massive invasion of Western Europe, of specifically the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. And the day Churchill is... The very day. Is it because they see Churchill coming in and they're afraid of them? No, it's coincidental.

The Germans have been playing this for a while. You couldn't have predicted the developments in British politics that bring Churchill into office. But as it happens, Churchill becomes Prime Minister, just as the war gets very real. That's a tough first day of the job. I would actually venture to say that probably probably no leader of any country

that I can think of in all of history has come into power facing a bigger disaster. Wow. Day one. Day one. All of our allies are getting invaded by this new superpower in Europe. And the thing is, as I'm sure you know, this is not an obscure fact, the German invasion of France goes really

unexpectedly well. Yeah. Actually, I should stress really unexpectedly well, because I think Americans have an idea that Oh, well, the French are kind of, they were not that into it, and they were kind of wimpy, and they didn't really fight back, and the Germans just kind of walked in and took stuff. And they did so because, I think, we tend to think, the Germans had this really inherently better war machine. They had a bigger army, they had more and better tanks, they had more and better aircraft, they're just innately superior. That's actually totally not true. In fact, the German army of 1940 was inferior to the British and French armies in most ways you can measure it.

including fewer guys, fewer tanks, sometimes even less good tanks. It didn't have more aircraft, and again, some of the allied aircraft were better. The sides were actually pretty evenly matched. The war that starts happening in May of 1940 should have been like World War I. It should have been kind of a deadlock, kind of a stalemate somewhere around the borders of France and Belgium. Wow. Instead, the Germans pull off an incredible... and fluky win.

And they do this with a plan that's incredibly daring and incredibly risky and somehow works. They basically take all of their tanks and drive them through an area that no one thinks you can drive tanks through. An area called the Ardennes Forest,

which is in basically Luxembourg and southern Belgium. And it's like it's forested, it's like hilly, it's got narrow roads, you know, everybody thinks there's no way you can run a lot of tanks through there. We're protected from that geography. It's like a natural barrier. So the Germans, in fact, run all their tanks

through that area. come out the other side and they're in kind of, you know, a flat area of France and then their tanks just drive their kind of northwest to the English Channel. And as they do this, they cut off basically the entire British Army

and a good chunk of the French Army is kind of cut off and surrounded and just crushed. And the British and French kind of don't get what's happening. It's happening so fast and they didn't expect it. And the Germans scored

this amazing victory in about six weeks, they beat France they do what they couldn't do in almost four and a half years of World War I Wow and that's Hitler's strategy He's the one that says He has some responsibility for this The idea for this kind of attack

Was initially formulated By a general named Eric von Manstein Who was Most historians think probably the most talented German general of World War II And this is kind of his idea But Hitler does get some credit If that's the right word for this

Because Hitler wasn't happy with the plans that his generals had, which was to kind of replay World War I, which is what the British and French are expecting, too. And Hitler's kind of thinking, we've got to be able to do something else. And Hitler keeps looking at the map and saying, look at that Ardennes.

Maybe we could do something there. And then Monstein comes to him with this plan. And Hitler says, that's it. That's exactly what I want. Let's do that. Let's do Monstein's plan. Wow. Now, if it didn't work,

they could have gotten stuck in this hilly tree forest. Yeah, it shouldn't have worked. Like, it really shouldn't have worked. And what would have happened? Like, they go there, they get stuck. The French find out of it. They can invade them. They're sitting ducks.

You see the tranks coming through, like air reconnaissance, which actually did see them. They just sort of didn't get it. But, you know, air reconnaissance should have seen those tanks. You could have attacked them. You could have used, like, light bombers to attack the tank columns. You could have, like, blocked the roads. You would have the whole German tank force bottled up in this bad territory. Or even if they got through the Ardennes, once the tank force is in France and it's kind of driving to the sea.

It's this, like, narrow, fast-moving column. You could have cut them off. You could have, like, surround them. of them, like, it shouldn't have worked. But it did, because it was so bold and so unexpected and so fast. Wow. So now they've got this freakish win, and it's impossible to exaggerate how important this was. This is one of the super faithful moments of World War II, because everybody up to this point has been expecting.

This is going to be a replay of World War I. It'll be a kind of long war being fought out in France and Belgium, like World War I. Germany is probably not going to be beaten quickly, but we're not going to be beaten quickly. And we have more resources, we can drive them out. Exactly. We do have, you know, Britain and France are imperial countries with big, you know, resource supply chains. And they should be able to go on for a long time. Now in six weeks, Germans have beaten France.

France surrenders at the end of June. And now there's this revolution. Like now Hitler is basically in control of the continent of Europe one way or another. He's either, you know, European countries are either countries he's conquered and occupied or are allies of him or are states. that are neutral but kind of lean his way, basically the whole continent. So, and there's Britain out there alone with poor Winston Churchill in his first weeks as prime minister facing a disaster with absolutely no historical parallel. Right. All of his allies basically are now in control. What about like Spain and like Portugal?

So Spain and Portugal were both basically fascist regimes. Again, depending on your definition of fascism, but they're more or less fascist regimes. And they more or less, they're neutral. They stay neutral, but they sort of lean towards the Germans. Wow. So, I mean, are there any other allies in Western Europe that the British can kind of lean on? There's no other ally at this point in Europe. The Soviet Union is, in effect, an ally of Germany, so it's hostile.

Wow. So now Hitler's basically controlled all of Western Europe. Yep. That's wild. And this is 1940. It's 1940. And Churchill now faces this situation where, you know, if you look at this coolly and rationally, you have to think there's no path to victory here.

The only sensible thing to do is to make some kind of peace arrangement with the Germans because we can't possibly beat them. That's what has to happen. And looked at rationally, I think that probably, like a rational person would have to say, we can't keep fighting this. This is so hopeless.

Now, quick question, when you absorb a country, when you basically take it over, like France, I guess, didn't become Germany. It just became like a French puppet state of the German empire. do those ground troops now fight for the Germans? Like the Germans still have the same number of ground troops,

but more area to cover. Yeah, that's a good point. You know, each country the Germans conquered was a little bit different in that regard. But in the case of France, what happened is the Germans directly occupied basically the northern, slightly more than half of the country.

And then they left, like southern France, had what was really a puppet regime, a kind of French, fascist regime, sympathetic to the Germans, which was set up under the leadership of a guy named Marshall Petin, who had been a commander in World War I, and he becomes basically the dictator of this French regime. We call the Vichy regime because his capital city was the town of Vichy. And they leaned towards the Germans. They could potentially have become a real military ally of the Germans. There was a potential that French soldiers could have fought on the German side,

and occasionally they did. Occasionally there were French military units who were loyal to Vichy, who at least fought the British in various locations, particularly in the Middle East or in Africa, when the British would try to sort of move on French colonies there. But it never happened at a very large scale. It could potentially have happened, but it didn't. But you're right in the sense that the Germans face this problem of maybe getting overstretched if they have to spread their army around all these countries.

I mean, that was a bit of an issue. Wow. And they still have a pact with Stalin and the USSR. So they're safe on that front. Yep. I actually saw this video recently. I'm curious if you've seen this, but like they, women that had slept with Nazis or had sex with Nazis, they would shave their heads.

Or like there would be like public humans. Yeah. Oh, it was afterwards. Yeah. After the war, after the Germans were driven out, there was, there was, because, you know, this is going to happen, right? Like, armies consist of young men, and you're moving into a place, and now you're on occupation duty.

Say you're a German soldier. You're an occupation duty in France. what is a young guy going to do? You're going to go out and look for French women. That's what most guys are going to do, and they do. And it's sort of natural that some of the French women are going to be open to that, whether purely romantically or at least because the German guys are bringing food and cigarettes and maybe nylons and, you know.

Wow. So there are inevitably relationships. And then the war is over and the Germans are driven out. And if you're one of these young women who had a thing going with the German soldier, suddenly it's convenient for everybody to blame you. There's a lot of, like, scapegoating here. It's like for a country that was beaten as a totality. Yeah.

And, like, a lot of guys are ashamed that they lost. Well, it's easy to blame the women and do, as you're saying, like, there were a lot of instances where they would, like, shave their heads and kind of parade them through the street and say, you know, you slept with the enemy. Wow. And the Prime Minister of France at the time, again, was... So up until the spring of 1940, it was Delaudier who'd been at Munich, and then he was replaced by a guy named Reno. And then Brano didn't last long because... France was beaten, and then he was succeeded by Marshal Petin, who becomes not really the

prime minister, but basically the dictator of this new puppet state, the VC regime. So what do we think of Renault? I mean, if this guy got conquered that easily, is he... Reno was thought to be sort of tougher and more of a fighter than Delardier, but he folded pretty quickly. There's a sort of famous account that five days after the German invasion begins, Renault's on the phone to Churchill, and Churchill is saying, okay, what are we going to do about this? Maybe we can move soldiers here and move soldiers here.

And, excuse me, Rayno says, we're beaten. Wow. And so it's like, no, no, come on. We've got to deal with this. And Rayno is like, no, we're beaten. So, I mean, Neville gets all this flack, Neville Chamberlain. Everyone's like, this guy is a pussy, whatever. It's kind of the French PMs that were sort of passive.

They got invaded really easily. They got, they didn't. They did just as little as the British, but they also got invaded. Yeah. And the only qualification I put here is, I mean, Reno did not do a great job. as leader at that time, nor did the French military commanders. French soldiers fought back more than we sort of imagined they did. To give you an idea of this,

in the six weeks of fighting, the French had, if I recall, the figure correctly, this is roughly right. 100,000 soldiers killed in action. You don't do that if, you don't have those losses if you're not fighting. Of course, the soldiers are brave, no question. But I guess the military leadership. The military leadership was weak and incompetent, and the civilian political leadership was weak and incompetent.

I think without any doubt. Don't be wrong. I'm a French fan. I was born in Paris, actually. Oh, really? Yeah, of course. I'm not French, but I have strong French licenses. I support them in every World Cup since I was six years old.

But you've had some good ones then. Oh, hell, yeah, did. 98? I mean, the last one, Mbapes. Is it 18, I think the... Wait, which one? 1998? The one, or 2018.

Oh, yeah, 98, but they won 18, and then they won 18, and then went to the final last year two years ago. Yeah. I cheer for Germany, no offense. Really, after all this, after everything we're going through. Yeah. I'm going to shave your head. You're a turn code.

You're a traitor. It's all right. Don't worry. Okay, so now Germany seems like they're at the peak of their power. Everything's going great for Hitler. He's probably adored still in Germany. There's probably some dissenters because they're like, all right, there's a lot of bloodshed, but hey, we're the good guys. Relatively speaking, there hasn't been that much bloodshed.

German casualties were not yet too heavy. Wow. And people in Germany were relieved that the war was not longer. They were expecting a World War I replay like everybody was. So when France was defeated, this. may be the peak for Hitler's popularity. Wow. And you can read this different ways. Like you can read this as

oh, the nasty Germans are excited that they've conquered France. But there's another way to read it which is they're relieved. They think the war is over now. So, you know, because they're worried about a long war. They're worried about a World War I replay. So then what? So then the question is, what's Britain going to do?

And this is where it's world historically important that Churchill sort of freakishly became Prime Minister. Because as I was saying, the logical, sensible thing, would be to fold, like to negotiate some kind of way out, because there truly is no path to victory here for the British at this point. And Churchill, for non-rational reasons for the most part, out of his patriotism, out of his, you know, courage, out of his defiance, and out of his hatred of the Nazis, he performs a remarkable act of leadership. And first, he kind of rallies his cabinet around the

idea of keeping the war going, because he has to convince them. And there are powerful people in his cabinet who don't like him and could be political opponents. And so it's a real political thing that he bit by bit kind of gets them on side. And then he has to kind of sell this to the politicians in the House of Commons and ultimately he has to sell it to the country that we can keep going and there is a path to victory. Wow. And he does this with his incredible ability to speak and his ability to sort of summon up, you know, an idea of what the fight means, that this is a war for freedom against the most inconceivably terrible regime. And he does frame it that way.

And that this is a war for British freedom and independence. And he does this in a series of memorable speeches where he does succeed in rallying people to the idea that they can defend. Privately, the thing he knows but doesn't say publicly is that the only path to victory is to get the United States into the war. Oh, he knows that. He knows that. And he's, as all this is happening, like as France is falling,

as Britain now is sort of stuck alone, as he's still new in the office of prime minister, he's like cabling FDR like crazy. He and FDR had started sending each other cables even the previous fall. Now, Churchill's really working on this, and basically he knows that his job description is figuring out a way to persuade FDR

to bring the United States into the war, and that's the only way Britain's ever going to come out winning. Wow. And for basically a year and a half, from the fall of France in June 1940, until Pearl Harbor in December 41, this is Churchill's day job, basically. This is the thing he's doing all the time.

And the attitude from the American side about this whole war in Europe is like, not my job. No, pretty much. I mean, it's over that year and a half time, opinion moves a bit in the United States. But on the whole, at the beginning of that period and even probably at the end, most Americans think it's over there.

You know, the mood of, as we say, isolationism was really widespread in the United States, most Americans thought this is nothing to do with us. We don't want a war. It's kind of their problem. There's a lot of anti-British feeling, of course, because if you think of who Americans are, very large numbers of Americans

are of either Irish or German heritage, for instance. Oh, wow. As a matter of fact, I'm both. So for different reasons, people, you know, Irish, you know, Americans of Irish descent or Americans of German descent, are not super stoked about, joining Britain in a war against Germany.

A lot of Italian Americans, too, who are also not super stoked about this, because Italy comes into the war. Once France is defeated, you know, Italy literally, Mussolini literally comes in and says, oh, yeah, me too, and I'm going to take a little bit of France while we're at it. Oh, wow, that's when Italy really gets involved.

Yeah. So these people that have been in America for maybe a generation, maybe two generations, are looking at this and they're like, all right, you know, we're not Nazis directly, but hey, what's the problem? We're German. Or, you know, Irish American, I mean, I can tell you from people in my own family,

Irish Americans hate nobody quite as much as the British. Yeah, they're like, fuck them. They starved us out in a famine for hundreds of years. Like, eat dick, who cares? Wow. So, you know, it's, and then there is an element, too, that a lot of people in America think, the only people who really are upset about Hitler and the Nazis are Jews. And, like, that's their problem.

Like, you know, the Nazis are a Jewish problem. Who cares? We're not going to war for Jews. Of course, a lot of that is coming from a really anti-Semitic place. Of course. Famously Charles Lindberg, like the famous pilot, who in 1940 and 41, becomes the main spokesperson for what is called the America First Committee.

And he goes around giving speeches in which he basically says, I mean, he says straight out, this war has nothing to do with us, it's not an American war. The only reason to go to war against Germany is to defend the British and defend Jews. And the British and the Jews are not Americans. Who cares? This is not us.

Let's stay. out of it. Oh, wow. So even by that time, there is an understanding of there's an anti-Jewish movement that's happening. Absolutely. This is when stars are now put on Jewish people in Germany and German businesses are now denoted. Do people understand that a Holocaust is occurring, or do they just know, like, oh, Jews or opponents of Hitler? So in 40 and 41, the Holocaust isn't, well, in 40 and the first half of 41, the Holocaust isn't happening yet. But people do know because it's been a feature of the Nazis since Hitler came to power in 33. People do know that the regime is anti-Semitic and that Jews face oppression of various kinds.

That part is well understood, even though people don't know yet, mostly because it's not happening yet, that part of this is actually mass murder. Wow. And now I know we talked about the racial component a little bit. At this point, Hitler's focus is ethnic cleansing of the Jews, or at least to put them into work camps or some version of that or to exile them, something. What is the main motivator for his anti-Semitism? It's still this Aryan ideas. Is it still this ethnic supremacy or is there something else happening? That's a great question.

And again, that's something that historians puzzle over and argue over and try to figure out. Some of it for sure is this racial idea that to be German is to be Aryan, and that means by definition not Jewish. Part of it is a feeling that Jews are basically behind everything Hitler hates. And when I talk about this with my students, I always preface it by saying, please do not ask me to make this make sense. I'm going to tell you what Hitler thought. It doesn't make sense.

You'll be thinking, how does that make sense? And the answer is it doesn't make sense. But here's what he thought. He's a racist psycho. Well, I mean that, but specifically, Hitler is sort of both in a way, anti-capitalist and anti-communist. And he thinks that both, like,

British and American-style capitalism and Soviet communism are actually just two faces of the same coin, and that coin is a Jewish world conspiracy. A Jewish world conspiracy that articulates itself basically and manifests in the world as Soviet-style communism and British and American capitalism. This is the part that I always say to my students, please do not ask me to make this make sense. Because, you know, I mean, I personally, I know people who work in finance, and I actually know a couple of communists. And I assure you they're not the same people.

And they do not. I thought you were going to say Jews. They do not look at the world the same way. They are not part of the same movement. But to hither they are. And he expresses this very clearly in particularly famously a speech that he gave in 1939 before the war started. In January 1939, he gives a speech, which is a long speech, it's about two hours. It's remembered for sort of one sentence in the speech, and he calls it his prophecy speech.

And it's because in this kind of one sentence, he says basically, I'm kind of roughly quoting, if the Jews succeed once again in driving the world into a world war, the result will not be the triumph of world capitalism and Bolshevism. The result will be the annihilation of the Jews. So there's like a couple interesting things here. One is that he's clearly articulating this idea that both capitalism and communism are two faces of a world Jewish conspiracy. and he's saying, if there should be a war, and his definition of a world war, it comes out of this,

is a war in which Germany is fighting both capitalism and communism. And he says, if that is to happen, then the result will be the annihilation of the Jews. And one of the many reasons I think this is super important, it's worth considering these words of Hitler, is that because if you move to 1941, you know, by the... the end of 1941, Hitler's Germany is at war on one side with the Soviet Union, and on the other side, you know, after Pearl Harbor with the United States, as well, of course, as Great Britain. So there is a war here now in which Germany is at war in a sense with both capitalism and communism. Oh, wow.

And as it happens, it's at that point that the Holocaust, as we think of it, starts. I do not think this is coincidental. I think these things are kind of coming together in Hitler's mind and he sees that war has come so it is time to start moving on my prophecy and to end this jewish conspiracy of global power we got to neutralize this thing yeah that is i mean insane yes it is wow it is completely nuts wow okay so germany's at this peak in 1940 like Churchill's trying to get fDR to bring the boys in bring america into this why does pearl Harbor have and why did the Japanese get involved and what is the relationship between Germany and Japan at that point? I mean that that's also all really interesting so I've spent a bit of time

reading the documents that reflect the Japanese cabinet debates in the run-up to Pearl Harbor and you see how their thought process worked and in some ways they were interestingly more realistic than Hitler and in a way more pessimistic about their predicament but they still sort of end up with the same answer they decide I mean they feel that they're kind of trapped by the the United States they really feel that the United States is out to get Japan. In the months before Pearl Harbor, the United States had taken several initiatives against Japan, like for instance, the oil embargo that FDR imposed, they're trying to cut off oil imports. They're kind of kind of, they're trying to strangle the Japanese war economy.

And why specifically Japan? Because of their involvement? Because of the attack on China, but also very particularly the attack on French Indochina. And the United States is responding to what they see as aggression, trying to shut it down, in particular trying to shut it down by cutting off oil. So the Japanese... They engage in proxy war, basically. Interesting. The Japanese feel, like we were talking about earlier, in this situation where they feel

what they have to do is create an empire from which they can draw resources. They feel the United States is just blocking them, and it's their just destiny to create this empire, but the United States is in the way. So they're thinking about how to clear this problem. And they are a little pessimistic. They're realistic enough to be pessimistic about their chances in a war against the United States. but they think if we can do one really bold thing,

if we can knock out the fleet at Pearl Harbor, that will sort of keep the United States out of the Pacific and sort of screen us. And so it does two things. It creates a moment like a window where we can act without having to worry about it an immediate American threat because their Pacific fleet will be knocked out. And also maybe the Americans will be so demoralized

by having their fleet knocked out at Pearl Harbor that they'll just say, ah, okay, fine. Japan, you can have the Pacific and you can have, you know, Southeast Asia. So they think it's a kind of risky move, and they're conscious of it being kind of desperate move, but they think they don't have any choice. So that's the kind of strategic impetus behind the attack on Pearl Harbor.

I mean, from my vantage point, obviously, retroactively, I'm like pretty dumb. Well, yes. I mean, in retrospect, and actually, I think if you understood American psychology, it would be dumb even at the time. It's hard to think how they didn't think the United States wouldn't respond. And then once that happens, you know, the resource disparity, the much greater American industrial capacity is going to swamp them as it did. But they feel, I mean, I think the thing here is they feel they're in a desperate situation with no good outcome. I mean, if you sort of, it's like with anything, if you sort of accept their starting point, if you accept their initial premise, then so on what they do,

makes a certain kind of sense. I mean, their initial premise is what's really crazy. Their initial premise is that they have to build this empire, they have to conquer territory. Given that premise, and given what the United States is doing to try and stop it,

their response makes a certain amount of sort of desperate sense. I mean, how bad was America's proxy war against Japan, like stopping these oil exports? Like, was it really messing of Japan that much? The Japanese felt that was critical. I mean, they felt, and they felt it was probably going

to escalate and get worse. And so they feel they're up against a really desperate, you know, predicament. So Pearl Harbor happens. FDR says, all right, y'all wanted this. Then what? Then the last, and I think, in a sense the last, in terms of the war expanding,

the last and also fascinating part of this is that. Pearl Harbor, of course, meant that the United States was at war with Japan. Hard to not be at war with someone who's attacking you like that. That's a given. And FDR moves right away to give. to get a declaration of war out of Congress. Presidents did that in those days, like the Constitution says.

We can't go to war without Congress declaring it. 1941 is the last time we ever did that. I think there have been war since. No, that was the last war we've been. So anyway, so he gets an almost unanimous vote. There's one holdout, a pacifist woman member of Congress who votes against, but everybody else votes for. However, we're not in the war against Germany yet,

and there's no immediate move to make that. So Pearl Harbor doesn't bring the United States into the war against Germany. I think a lot of Americans don't know this. That's what I thought. I was like, Pearl Harbor happened. Of course we're going to attack Germany. Yeah. It doesn't really make sense.

And Churchill thought that. I mean, Churchill was probably the one person in the world. Well, probably the Japanese were happy about Pearl Harbor, but Churchill was the one person on the Allied side who's like ecstatic. Wow. Because, you know, as we were saying, you know, for a year and a half, his one job has been to bring the United States into the war. And he hears about Pearl Harbor.

And he's literally, he actually had the American ambassador over for dinner and they're dancing because it's like it's finally happened and he calls fDR and gets him on the phone and he says we're all in this together now and Churchill's like super psyched except it hasn't quite happened yet and fDR is not sure if he can get a declaration of war against germany out of congress that that's there's still enough isolationist feeling and it doesn't logically follow that you have to fight germany if you're fighting in japan at this point japan and germany have a public relationship yes they are they are allies they've officially said hey we are fighting the same war here.

Yes, and that's what gets us to the thing. Got it. Hitler now takes the initiative. And Hitler, in a burst of enthusiasm for his Japanese ally, and probably a desire to support his Japanese ally, and probably a feeling of gratitude because he thinks Japan will now distract the United States from him. Because for actually years, for at least about a year and a half, Hitler has actually been quite convinced that the United States is coming into the war against him. In fact, Hitler

kind of thinks the United States is in the war against him. And in a way it is, because by this point, the United States, through the famous Lenleys program, is supplying a lot of stuff to Britain. And it's certainly economically at war with Germany. And one of the interesting things about Lenleys, and again, a lot of Americans, I think, don't recognize this. But FDR sort of logically decides if we're sending stuff, like, you know, weapons, food across the Atlantic ocean to Britain. It doesn't make sense to do this if it all gets sunk by U-boats, German U-boats, on the way. So the U.S. Navy should escort the ships at least halfway across the Atlantic. So the U.S. Navy starts escorting merchant ships, carrying stuff to Britain. This is already in the

like spring of 1941. And inevitably, if you've got U.S. Navy destroyers sailing with merchant convoys in waters in which German U-boats are trying to attack those ships, you're going to get combat. German U-boats and American destroyers, and you do. There is, in fact, a low-grade sea war going on between America and Germany in the summer and fall of 1941 well before Pearl Harbor. Oh, wow. And Hitler sees this, and he thinks, it's just a matter of time.

The United States is going to, like, really officially come in against me. They are already kind of unofficially fighting me. Oh, wow. So when Pearl Harbor comes, Hitler thinks, okay, well, the United States is now fighting Japan. Japan's my ally. The United States is already, he thinks, really fighting me. So I'll just make it official. So on the 11th of December, so four days after Pearl Harbor, Hitler goes in front of the Reichstag, the parliament, which is now just filled with Nazi Stooges, but Hitler uses it for speeches.

He goes to the Reichstag and gives the speech, and he announces he's declaring war on the United States. So he takes the initiative out of FDR's hands. Hitler did it for us, effectively. FDR had probably always wanted this to happen. FDR, I think, always favored coming into the war on Britain's side against Germany. But now Hitler's done it. He's taken the initiative. He's declared war on the United States.

So FDR can go to Congress and say, you know, well, hey, it's done. Right. And he gets a vote out of Congress to declare war on Germany the next day on the 12th. No one wants to throw the first punch, so they're both looking at should like, do something. And Hitler does something. Yeah, Hitler does something. So, you know, America then has been dragged into both wars, in a sense, against Japan and against Germany, not in either case by American initiative.

Wow. So there was no direct event that made Hitler declare war on the U.S. other than, okay, we have this covert sort of sea war happening. Yeah, well, I mean, Pearl Harbor, you know, precipitated it. Got it. But, I mean, he probably wouldn't have declared war when he did without Pearl Harbor. But Hitler did think war with the United States was inevitable, to some extent, was already happening. And did he see this as an opportunity, like, oh, if they're going to already be fighting Japan,

This is a great time to fight the U.S. Yeah. And he thought the U.S. would be busy with Japan. He didn't think the U.S. would have the resources to send anything his way. So he thinks it's great. I think he thought it sort of didn't matter. This is inevitable. Because the Japanese will be tying up the Americans.

So they'll keep the Americans off me for a while. Hitler recognized that he would win his war in Europe probably in the next year or he wouldn't win it at all. So he thought it sort of doesn't matter. I mean, I think he thought it didn't matter much if I declare war in the United States. I might as well make this statement supporting my ally. Yeah. What does it even really mean, right?

You're not sharing a border. So you're basically just saying, like, hey, if you send any boats over here, we're going to shoot them. Right. Yeah. Wow. Okay, then what? And then the war happens. And then it ends and Germany loses.

You know, so actually, I think one of the things historians think about a lot is, well, what's the big turning point in World War II? And to my mind, it's right there. I think there's a super interesting moment or a few moments. moments in late November and early December in 1941 where the war really hinges from a war that's going pretty well for Germany and going kind of okay for its allies. But in November 1941, so the Germans have attacked the Soviet Union. They attacked the Soviet Union in June of 41. They've advanced rapidly. German units are getting close to Moscow by November. But now they're getting to be exhausted. The Germans were already

taking really heavy casualties in the Soviet Union. A lot of units were down to half strength. The Stalin Pact is off. So the Stalin Pact is way off. And Hitler's basically publicly declared war against USSR. And his armies are deep inside Soviet territory and killing millions of people. Right. And they've advanced so far that they are literally at the sort of suburbs of Moscow in late 1941.

Everybody in the world kind of thinks Moscow's about to fall. When Moscow falls to the Germans, that's probably it for the Soviets. Except, as I said, the German army is exhausted now, and they're running out of, they're starting to run out of guys, and they're running out of resources. Their supply lines are really stretched. It's now winter, brutally cold winter in Russia. And an interesting thing happens. The guy who is basically the German equivalent of the commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, a general named Fritzthot, has a meeting with Hitler in late November. And he says to Hitler,

I don't think we can win this war militarily anymore. You know, he says to Hitler, you're going to have to find a political solution, meaning Hitler's going to have to negotiate a way out somehow, like negotiate some deal with Stalin, negotiate some deal with the British, get out of it. I think it's amazing that Toad says this. We can't win militarily at this point.

He recognizes that the German army is already getting exhausted in the Soviet Union. And that's really interesting. And Hitler's response is also really interesting because you might think, Hitler's going to rant and rave and say, you traitor, you defeatist, I'm going to have you shot. But he doesn't. Hitler sort of calmly thinks about it and he says, yeah, I don't think we can do that, actually. We're going to have to just do our best and fight it out.

So that's late November. Then about a week later, on the 5th of December, the Soviets launched a huge counterattack in front of Moscow, push the Germans back about 100 miles. And there's a couple things that are important about this. One is they're counter-attacking the troops the Germans didn't think they had had because they've moved them from the far east where they were sort of guarding against Japan because the Soviets have intel that the Japanese are going to strike the Americans, not them. So they can move their troops away from the Pacific coast, basically, of the Soviet Union

and move them to Moscow and attack the Germans. Wow. And the Germans think they've kind of killed the whole Soviet army, but now they realize they haven't. And in military terms, it's not such a massive deal that they get pushed back 100 miles from Moscow. But the point is there's a meta message here. Because the German commanders had all understood when they invaded the Soviet Union, big country, big population, lots of resources. Cold winter.

Cold winter. We can win a quick war there. But to win, it has to be quick. We will lose a long war. If it becomes a long war against the Soviet Union, the disparity of resources will tell against us and we will lose. So the meta message of that Soviet counterattack on December 5th is you're not going to win quickly. It's going to be a long war. And smart Germans in powerful positions like military commanders realize, ah, we're going to lose

because it's not going to be a quick victory. Our only victory would be a quick one. So we're going to lose. Wow. So that's December 5th. And then December 7th is Pearl Harbor, of course. And then December 11th is Hitler's declaration of war against the United States. Now Hitler is in an utterly transformed position with the Soviet.

Union that's not dead, that is fighting back and is telegraphing that probably the long-term outlook for Germany here is quite bad. And now he has, as an enemy, a country that at that point represents 40-some percent of world industrial resources. And as we talked about at the beginning, it's on its way to being 50 percent of world industrial and economic resources. He's bitten off a massive thing. Wow.

That's... He cannot, at this point, he cannot basically dream of winning. That's a tough week. Yeah. That's wild. You go from basically having everything and within one week you're now fighting war with America Yeah, you're now realizing oh, we're gonna lose this war with Russia or with the USSR and Yeah, I mean that you just those two powers you went from having an alliance with USSR just a couple years before and America out of the picture It's now fighting both of them. Yes and a week and the British Empire which is not as powerful as either the United States or the Soviet Union but is certainly non-trivial in terms of the resort

Right. And strategic position. Yeah, absolutely. And so all of this together, like, that's a coalition of enemies that there's just about no chance that the Germans could win against that coalition. Now, why is Russia trying to create a blockade or Soviet Union to create a blockade against the Japanese? Is Japan and Russia now in agitation with each other? They had been. They had actually fought a war earlier. Well, they fought several wars earlier. Japan and Russia slash the Soviet Union had always been kind of adversaries and in the late 30s, early 40s,

the Soviets are worried about the Japanese because they think it's possible the Japanese might attack us and in fact Japanese military commanders have thought about that. One of their sort of possible routes of expansion they thought had been to attack the Soviet Union from the eastern side of the Soviet Union.

Oh, wow. So they're like, we're going to expand into China we're going to expand into Korea and then we're going to expand into USSR. It was at least an option they had considered. They decided not to. Wow. And the Soviets had intel on that.

So it's at that point that they're able to redeploy the troops that they have faced in Japan, redeploy them to the front against the Germans, and then start pushing the Germans back. And that's because of America's involvement, that the Japanese are a little bit distracted. Well, the Russians get intel that the Japanese are going to move against America. so sort of before Pearl Harbor so they know that they know that Japanese aren't going to move against them so they can redeploy their troops

Wow so in a week Hitler goes from being like hey we're going to definitely win this war to there's impossible to win this war and I think even Hitler realizes that I think Hitler was not stupid he was many things but he was not stupid and there's lots of evidence from things he said around this time that even as early as that December 41

he realized that he was probably going to lose. And certainly people around him. Again, I think most Germans who were both smart and in a high position so that they got real information, you know, not just the sort of propaganda garbage in the media, but people who are in a position that they can actually know things,

they understand pretty well in December 41 that they're going to lose. Wow. And so then the amazing thing is the war goes on in Europe for three and a half more years after that with Germany's defeat pretty much, you know, telegraphed. And what are the decisive battles that are happening here that is weakening the German Empire? Well, the fighting in Russia is the thing that really, I mean, the fighting all through

the four years that they're fighting the Soviet Union, that really drains them in terms of casualties and resources. As we mentioned before, I mean, a huge percentage of their casualties. 80 to 90 percent of their fatal military casualties. And Italy at this point, are they deploying troops? Are they fighting in conjunction with the Nazis? Lusely in conjunction. The Italians do several things. They attack Greece in 1940. That goes very badly and the Greeks sort of push them back.

So Hitler feels forced to intervene and then Hitler comes in and invades both Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941 kind of to bail his ally Mussolini out and then the Germans end up conquering Greece. Mussolini is also

directing Italian troops to fight in Africa. The Italians already had Libya that had been an Italian colony for several decades. They start attacking the British. They start moving towards Egypt, which the British are basically in control of. So the British and the Italians are fighting in North Africa. Again, the British mostly win those battles.

And again, Germany then has to deploy troops to North Africa to sort of bail out the Italian ally. And as usually happens early in the war, at least, the German troops are a lot more effective, and when they get there, they start beating the British. Oh, wow. So all of that's happening. Does that also over-extend the British military capacity?

It doesn't really overex- I'm sorry, the German military capacity? Oh, well, the thing is the Germans deploy relatively small numbers of troops to places like Africa. And this is something that, especially the British for whom the fighting in Africa is a big part of their kind of war narrative. The British don't always like to acknowledge this. But in Africa, famously, it was the German General Evan Rommel,

who was in command there of, you know, a unit called the Africa Corps. And most of the time, the Africa Corps consisted of four divisions of troops. A division is a standard way of measuring army size because basically every army has divisions and they're all about the same size. So the Germans have four divisions in Africa. They have about 180 divisions, if I recall correctly, in the Soviet Union. Wow.

So you see the disparity of force. Wow. So relatively speaking, it's sort of a sideshow. It could have been strategically important if the Germans had been able to advance into Egypt and then into the Middle East they could have done a couple of things they could have cut off the Suez Canal

which the British depended on heavily for supplies and if they had gotten into the oil producing areas there they would have had oil supplies which they desperately needed and they would have been able to cut off those oil supplies for the British which would have also been critical but they never quite got there the Germans got into Egypt a little bit

but eventually the British were able to stop them Wow. I mean, that's decisive. Yes. In a sense, yes. It's decisive with sort of small numbers of truth, but it's kind of strategically important. So the fall now of Hitler is a thousand cuts, I'm assuming. It's like, okay, we don't get the Suez Canal. We lose in Russia, which is critical. They ultimately retreat from Russia? Yeah. I mean, in a way, the narrative of World War II after December 41 is the narrative of kind of inevitable consequences unfolding from the fact that World War II basically becomes a war of industrial strength. the war of economic strength. If you have more oil,

if you have more raw iron that you can make into steel, if you have more factories, if you have more people, you can make more tanks, you can make more planes, you can deploy more troops, you can run all this

because you have the oil supplies to run internal combustion engines. And basically the allies just sort of pile up stuff on the Germans and crush them. I mean, that's kind of the overarching narrative of the last three years of the war. I mean, the details are obviously

more dramatic and more horrible. And lots of historians would say, I should, you know, full disclosure, I should say there are lots of historians like great and smart historians who say, it's not such a done deal in December 41. There are still things the allies had to figure out how to do well, and they had to do well

to beat the Germans. You know, it wasn't so decisively over in December 41. I would argue, yeah, sure, except given the disparity of economic resources, the allies would have had to really screw up, you know, to lose after that point. Like, the cards are really in their hands. If it's a soccer game by 41, like the Allies are winning like 3-0? Kind of like that, yeah.

Got it's like halftime. They're winning 3-0. Or at least they're playing the entire game in the other side's end might be, you know, like the Germans aren't getting down the field. I mean, maybe that would be a closer analogy, but yeah. So unless you have like a major screw-up or something crazy happens. Yeah. But then you have these decisive victory. You have Normandy, obviously, which is probably the most famous American battle.

And certainly important. You know, I mean, one of the many interesting things that I think a lot of people don't always realize is that between 1940 and 1944, Britain and America, well, Britain and then America when it comes in, we're not really fighting a ground war against anybody. We're fighting an air war and a sea war against the Germans, and to an extent against the Japanese. It's with D-Day, so June 1944, when British and American troops launched their invasion of the continent landing in France and Normandy, it's at that point that Britain and America starts fighting a major ground war against the Germans, but not until then. Up until then, it's really, it's an air war and a sea war.

We're fighting with Air Force, we're fighting with Navy, both Britain and America alike in that regard. And is that what makes Normandy so important and so, I guess, revered in American history? Is that that that is the ground war? I think, yeah, that's part of it. it's sort of the beginning of the end for the Germans. It was an incredible feat. Military experts will say the hardest military thing to do is to land troops on a hostile shore.

So, like, D-Day is the hardest thing to do militarily. And they always do it incredibly well. Like, you know, all the planning for D-Day was amazing. Like, the sort of the brains that went into planning it and thinking about it, the sort of skill with managing the logistics. Like, you know, it was an incredible managerial effort that was done really well. And there was a lot of luck, you know,

as often happens in war, things went the Allies way, in part out of luck. For instance, weather. The weather wasn't great for D-Day, and there's a sort of dramatic moment where, you know, Dwight Eisenhower has to decide if the weather's going to be good enough.

And this great account, it's one of the World War II stories I love, where they're getting this weather report and they were going to go on June 4th and they had to cancel because the weather was too bad. And then they get a weather forecast that on the sixth there might be a bit of a clearing, it might be good enough.

We can chance it. And then there's, you know, Eisenhower's in this meeting where they have to decide. And Eisenhower thinks for a moment. Then he says, okay, let's go. I just love that because of the sort of understated quality of it. Again, think of the responsibility that's on this man's shoulders. He's in the command of this massive international allied, you know, British-American, Canadian army that's about the land. And if it goes badly, the fate of the world might look quite different. If it goes well, fine. And in that moment, he has to make this decision.

And I think a different kind of person, you know, a German officer or a British officer might have done something really rhetorical. In this great moment, I will make the decision. Like imagine if MacArthur was like doing this. There would have been some like, you know, grand speech. Eisenhower sort of undemonstrative guy that he was. He just says, okay, let's go. And that launches D-Day.

I love that. Wow. So they do it. The weather is good enough. If they had waited, if they had held off, the next moment where the sort of tides and moon and stuff would have been right was two weeks later. Two weeks later came like the worst storm in the English Channel in history. And if they had been trying to do D-D-D-A on that day, everything would have gone completely south. Wow.

So there's always elements of luck here. To some extent the Allies made their own luck, too. one of the interesting things is they ran this really clever deception operation to convince the Germans that the landings weren't going to be in Normandy. They were going to be at the Potta Calais, which is closer to Britain. And so it makes sense as a landing spot. And they created a fake army. They created the illusion of an army under the command of Patton

that was stationed in a place in Britain where it made sense that you would be deploying it to Calais. And they used disinformation through intelligence sources to convince the Germans that the landing is going to come at Calais and Patton's army is going to be the one landing there at Calais and all the while they're planning for Normandy. Oh, wow. And the Germans completely swallowed this.

And so when the landings came at Normandy, Hitler thought, that's a diversion. They're trying to draw us there because the real landing is coming at Calais. So they had all kinds of units, like tank units and stuff, poised to defend Calais that didn't get deployed to Normandy. Wow. So it gave the Allies, you know, a big advantage in trying to get ashore at Normandy. Wow.

It's kind of the reverse of the French invasion from the Germans. It's like we're expecting them to come from here, and all of a sudden they come from a completely different side or undermanned and the allies, the U.S. are basically able to control Normandy. Yeah, exactly. Wow. Okay, what are the other decisive sort of falls or battles

or maybe leadership moments that you think are super poetic for the fall of Hitler? I don't know about poetic, but I think there were two other things that the Allies did that were important. One is they got control of the North Atlantic. This was really critical to keep Britain supplied from the United States, but also really critical if the British and Americans are going to do a landing like D-Day. You know, you have to get the American troops.

You have to get all their equipment, their tanks, their guns, everything over to Britain. You can't do this if you can't safely control the North Atlantic because you've got to ship all this stuff. If the German U-boats can sink like a high percentage of the shipping, then nothing else is viable. So in what we now call the Battle of the Atlantic and in a several-year process, Little by little, the British and Americans managed to get control of the Atlantic. They managed to neutralize the threat of German submarines so that ships can sail with by about the middle of 1943.

They have won the Battle of the Atlantic and by the middle of 1943 ships can sail across the Atlantic without too much risk of getting sunk by a U-boat. And in fact, serving on a German U-boat became the statistically most dangerous thing you could do. in any armed service of any country in World War II, like the highest casualty of any branch of any service was the German Ubo cruise. Wow. So that's one thing that was key. And then the other thing is control over the air.

And this came about largely because of the British and American bombing campaign against Germany, which sort of got going in a loose way with the British doing this in 1940. And then when America entered the war, America famously sent the 8th and 15th Air Forces over to Europe,

and they were engaged in bombing operations. against Germany too. The Allies had a division of labor. They didn't really plan it this way, but it worked out because of what they thought was better in terms of avoiding casualties, where the British would fly missions at night to bomb, and the Americans would fly by day. And the thing here is, if you're flying bombers by day, you're probably going to suffer high casualties because it's easy for fighters to find them and shoot them down.

So the Americans tried occasionally bombing German cities in daylight, and they would get all their, or at least a large percentage of their plane shot down, and so the Americans decided, we're not going to do this. We will bomb German targets in France and Belgium instead, because we can get fighter escort that far. We can't get fighter escort all the way to Germany, so we're not going to do this. The British are bombing German cities by night and taking quite high casualties. After a German U-boat, the second most dangerous thing you could do in World War II is flying a British bomber. Their casualty rate was extremely high on these rates. But the decisive moment comes, to cut to the point here, in the spring of 1944, the Americans suddenly have available a new fighter plane, the famous P-51 Mustang, which has a really long range, especially if it's fitted out with external drop tanks, gasoline tanks that you can carry for a while and then drop.

And so the P-51 Mustang can fly all the way to Germany and back and escort bombers. So now the Americans can do daylight raids over German cities. And as it turns out, the real significance of this is, of course, the German fighters have to come up to defend this. And with the P-51 Mustang, the Americans can kind of wipe out the German fighter force. So basically in the spring and kind of early summer of 1944, mostly the Americans just crushed the German air force. So Germans don't really have air defenses anymore. And that's really key in all kinds of ways. It's super key for D-Day because it would be a lot harder to do D-Day if the Air Force.

Germans had air control and could attack, you know, your ships and your guys on the beach. Before you can get into the beach, you're getting just shelled. The German Air Force has been wiped out at that point, so it's not a factor. Oh, wow, because of the Mustang. Yeah, basically. The P-51 Mustang. Yeah. Oh, that's awesome.

And then, you know, almost anything else you can do. I mean, we see this in, now today in, like, Ukraine, in the war with Russian Ukraine. Like, air control is so key. If you have control of the air, you can do anything else. So you can move around. You can move your, you know, troops around. Intelligence, everything. Yeah.

And the Germans can't. because the Germans have lost control of the air. So one thing the Allies do is sort of stop the Germans from being able to move. It's hard for Germans to, like, move troops around. It's hard for them even to get supplies from a factory to their front because they just can't move. Trains get knocked out. You know, trucks on the road get knocked out. So, but in the sort of last year of the war or so, the Allies can kind of paralyze the Germans, like pretty much literally.

So that, air control and control of the Atlantic, those are key. And that comes from the Americans, the ability to basically knock out the Germans. Louiswaffe. Yeah. Oh, wow. Which is, it can't be understated, I guess.

No, it's not, it's a totally non-trivial contribution to victory, absolutely. Wow. Okay, so then when does Hitler kill himself?

So Hitler kills himself in his bunker on the 30th of April, 1945, with by this point, the Russians, Russians having advanced all the way from,

you know, where we were in 1941, where the Germans are basically at Moscow, and in 1942, they get famously to the city of Stalingrad, where there's a big battle.

But from like 48 42, early 43 on, the Russians just bit by bit advance all the way back, you know, across a bit of Russia that the Germans got into, like Russia proper, and then across Ukraine and Belarus and Poland and then into Germany. And the Soviets got all the way to Germany. They got all the way to Germany. In the spring of 45, they're into Berlin.

Oh, wow. And when Hitler kills himself in his bunker in Berlin, there's literally Russian troops like up above him. And he kills himself at the point where he figures they're going to get me soon. they're going to take me prisoner or whatever, and that's literally the last thing he wants. So at that point, he kills himself. And you believe he killed himself? Oh, yeah, absolutely.

So I was all these conspiracies that, you know, they never found his body, he went to Argentina. Yeah, there's just no evidence for that, and there is evidence. The Russians found his remains, and they got his skull and his teeth, and, you know, his skull was identified by the dental records. So, you know, there's pretty good evidence. Oh, really? Yeah. So the Russians have Hitler's skull? Yeah.

Oh, wow. Including his teeth. Yes. Oh, I had no idea. Yeah. And so the Americans, what are they doing while basically like Berlin is being seized by? The Americans are advancing and the British are advancing into Germany from the other side. One of the issues right at the end of the war was who's going to take Berlin.

And Churchill in particular really wanted the out, like the Western Allies, the British and Americans to get to Berlin before the Russians. and Churchill put a lot of heat on Eisenhower over this and Patton, and George S. Patton, of course, the great American commander, he really wanted, he's drooling to get to Berlin, and he really wants to do it. But Eisenhower made the decision, and I think there's wisdom to this, that it wasn't worth the casualties, that it would take a lot of casualties to get from where the Allies were

kind of in Western Germany to get through to Berlin, and it wasn't worth it because by this point, the Allies, the British and Americans and the Soviets, had already worked out occupation zones for Germany. So if the Allies had gotten to Berlin, they would have just pulled back to their designated occupation zone anyway. So why is it worth a lot of young Americans dying or young Brits dying for this sort of ceremonial thing to get to Berlin first?

Churchill's fear was that it was more than ceremonial. And Churchill, I think, was kind of thinking, let's get it and keep it and keep the Russians out of there. But that wasn't the agreement that had been made. There had been agreements about occupation zones, and Eisenhower didn't think it was, worth, you know, like I said, dying for Berlin. So the Allies ended up meeting, there's a sort of famous moment where the Elba River that runs kind of north and south through the middle

of Germany. The Elba River has always been, like historically for centuries. It's kind of been the symbolic boundary between Eastern and Western Germany. And that's where American and Soviet troops met in the spring of 45. They met literally on the Elbe River. There's like famous moments where they meet and they shake hands and they say, we've done it. At this point, pretty much literally every inch of Germany is under occupation by Russian or British or American or even some French troops. Wow. And it's only at that point that Hitler kills himself and they surrender. Wow. And so, I mean, it's fair to say that the Russians and Americans were fighting together. Yes. And at that point, not too many people see the Cold War coming at that point. At that point, most people assume

we're all going to get along. You know, we'll meet his allies and we'll divide up Germany between us in a kind of amicable way. and we'll run it collectively until we'll get a German government going again and we'll sort of teach them to be democratic. But we'll all be getting along. That's kind of what most people imagine. Churchill is one of the few who sees the Cold War, sees the shape of the Cold War coming before most. Churchill usually saw the shape of things coming, you know, accurately more than most people.

It's one of the reasons that I think he deserves some admiration. But this one, he definitely, he saw the Cold War coming, but feud others did. Wow. And then, so we kind of skip this part, but France obviously is able to get liberated by the Americans and the British. They come in, they're able to neutralize

whatever public government was put in there, reignite the French troops, and then the French troops are able to now join the force. Yeah, the French are fighting in the last year or so of the war, French troops are fighting alongside the British and Americans. Norway gets liberated. Norway gets liberated at the end.

I mean, there isn't fighting to liberate Norway. It's after the German surrender, they pull out and it's liberated. Denmark, same thing. Okay, and then Italy? Italy actually surrendered to the Allies in 1943. And at that point, when Italy surrendered, the Germans moved in and occupied it.

And so then there was fighting in Italy in the last couple years of the war, but the fighting was between British and American troops on one side and German troops on the other, with the Italians then becoming sort of like, you know, people's in other kinds of, occupied by the Germans. So they're sort of spectators to a war being fought on their territory by other armies. Got it. So they are kind of neutralized, I guess. Like, what is the main reason

for their surrender? They just feel like there's no progress for their cause? They were losing. I mean, they were defeated in basically every battle they fought. And by 1943, they've been driven out of North Africa, and then the Allies landed in Sicily and took Sicily. And then the Allies are preparing landings in Italy. And at this point, Italy was a kind of funny regime because Mussolini was the dictator, but the king was still there. The king who had appointed Mussolini in the first place is still there. And so there's this sort of, you know, backstairs intrigue where what was called the fascist council, which was sort of the Italian cabinet, they agree with the king to fire Mussolini.

So they fire Mussolini and they arrest him and then they surrender to the allies. Wow. And then the liberation of the Jewish death camps in Auschwitz and Daqao. Is that done by the Russians and the Americans? So, yeah, it depends where the camp is. So Auschwitz and there were other camps that were – so Auschwitz is in what is today Poland and all of the death camps, strictly speaking, where the Holocaust happened. They're all in Poland.

They get liberated by the Russians. Oh, wow. Dachau, which was a concentration camp and was in Germany, wasn't strictly speaking a death camp. and a number of other concentration camps in Germany get liberated, generally either by the Americans or the British. So Dachal got liberated by the Americans, for instance. Another notorious one, Berg and Belsen, got liberated by the British. So, yeah, if a camp was in the path of the oncoming army, you know, that's who liberated.

It's just like... Whatever was on the way. Yeah. That makes sense. And did the allied forces know that, like, the atrocities of what was happening in the death? up until they liberated them? They knew and didn't know. This is a whole complicated, interesting thing.

What the Allies knew about, the Allies actually had pretty good and basically real-time intelligence on what the Germans were doing in the Holocaust. First, when it's killings by mass shootings, and then when it develops into killings with poison gas and death camps, British and American intelligence basically

had this information right away, then governments had it, and they put it out into the media. Like you could read the New York Times in 1942, and you could learn that there is extermination, you know, happening, including in camps. Wow. But it's one thing to sort of get this intel, and it's one thing for it to be on, like, page 20 of the New York Times, which is where it was always put. It was never headline news. And it's another thing, if you're a soldier, you know, to find the camp and to find, like, emaciated bodies stacked up, like, firewood and, you know, like, just the scale of the horror of it.

the full realization of the horror did not, you know, sort of descend on the allies until they got to the camps in 1945. Wow. And so I'm wondering, yeah, I was curious about like, why wouldn't U.S. air control, the U.S. Air Force, just bomb the trains that were sending people to these death camps? So this is something that historians talk about a lot. And the answer is basically, I mean, A, it goes back a little bit to what we were talking about before, about, like, the ability of. the Americans to do daylight raids into German territory with fighter escort. That doesn't become possible until 1944. By 1944, when that's possible, the Holocaust has mostly happened.

In fact, about three quarters of the people who were killed in the Holocaust were dead by the beginning of 1943. So by 1944, it's kind of over. And the thing is to bomb the death camps or to bomb railway lines leading to the death camps, That would be a very long mission from Britain. And it would have to be a precision mission, so you'd have to do it in daylight. So it would have to be the Americans and would have to be with fighter escort, right? And it would still probably be a high-cadulty mission. You'd be asking crews to do a lot.

And the Russians couldn't do it. The Russians could have done it, but they didn't. The Russians didn't really, the Russians didn't do what we call strategic bombing the way the British and Americans said. The Russians didn't have bombers that flew missions over Germany. So it's not possible until maybe the summer of 1944. And then there's a question of, would it do any good? So if you're going to bomb the railroad tracks, well, the Germans will just repair them.

They could repair them in a day. If you bomb the camp itself, okay, you might knock out the camp, but you're going to kill people there. All the prisoners. And then the Germans will just rebuild it. The Germans were really good at rebuilding stuff. So it's a high casualty mission that you basically have to do during the day

that you have to do a long route across Germany or around the sea and basically try to get around a ground assault to then bomb a train line that can be repaired in a week or a day. So, you know, the idea of people sometimes raise that, oh, well, you know, it could have been stopped if we had flown these kinds of missions. It really couldn't have been. Okay, two things that I want to talk about

just as things kind of end with World War II, Operation Paperclip. obviously the U.S. is now kind of like brokering some deals with the Germans. Obviously the Germans have very advanced technology that have advanced medical records. Like they discover a lot of things. And the U.S. is kind of using that as like a brokering tool.

What is your knowledge and kind of like the breadth of what you think Operation Paperclip was about? You know, I have to be honest, I don't know a ton about it. Other than just basic point, they were looking for nuclear physicists in particular. The Allies thought or worried that the Germans might have been ahead of them

on the development of an atomic bomb. In fact, they weren't. But they were very interested in trying to get, trying to find and identify a nuclear physicist and get them away from the Russians and bring them to the West. As it turned out, maybe a bit more importantly, was scientists who had been developing rockets.

So, like, famously, towards the end of the war, the Germans have something called the V2, which is a kind of primitive ballistic missile, famously designed by a guy named Vernet von Braun. and they always really want to get him too because they'd like to have access to the ability to do that technology. And they do, and Vanne von Braun ends up in the United States

and famously he's the designer of the Saturn 5 rocket. So he puts Americans on the moon a couple of decades later with kind of the same technology that they were using to send bombs flying via rockets to London. Wow. Yeah, that's really interesting. He's the one that's using all this rocket propulsion technology, creating nuclear weapons, things like that. and then is able to eventually put Americans on the moon.

Yep. Yeah, it's fascinating. Yeah. And then, I guess, one of the decisive final moments of the war is, obviously, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yep. Many people see this as a use of overforce. The war was effectively over, and the Americans just wanted to test out this technology. And so they chose to use it on, you know, the country that perpetrated Pearl Harbor.

And that, for, I think, reasonably did a lot of atrocious things during the war, obviously. I think we kind of view Japan now as like a very kind and sort of like peaceful, you know, like economic power. But obviously during the war, like every other country in the war, they were quite brutal. Talk to me just a little bit about your perspective on like the nuclear bombs that were used in Japan. You know, that is an incredibly difficult one because obviously the bombing is so horrible. Like the experience of the things that the Japanese people in those cities experienced from that bombing, it's so horrible. you know, it's very difficult to sort of come to terms with the fact that that happened and it's easy to think, is there a way it could not have happened?

And there's a big debate about this, often a very emotional debate among historians about whether it was right or wrong to use the bomb. I lean on the whole to, if not saying it was right, at least it was, it's defensible and it was probably inevitable. And there's a bunch of factors for this. Like, you know, if you think about what the alternatives were, You know, the alternatives were perhaps invading the Japanese islands to bring about a surrender. That would have been a horrifically high casualty fight, and for the Japanese as well, maybe more so than for allied forces.

Or maybe the allies could have just like blockaded Japan and waited for it to surrender and give up, but who knows how long that would have taken. Again, the toll for the Japanese people would have been very high from that because there probably would have been starvation, disease, who knows. And if you are President Truman, who's the guy who has to make the decision by that point or other allied leaders, it's important, again, always to think about context. They've just been through the most horrific high-cassalty war in history. They've inevitably become a bit brutalized, and they are much less sensitive about casualties than we would be, because we haven't had that experience of directing a war in which literally tens of millions of people are dying.

So Truman is president of the United States. He's not president of Japan. If you sort of look at this maybe coldly, he's responsible for getting the war over quickly and for bringing American service personnel home alive. And you can't blame him for making a decision that's going to facilitate this. I guess the other thing I would say is the understanding of how qualitatively different an atomic bomb is has not fully penetrated everybody's mind yet at this point. There have been lots of new weapons introduced during the war.

and lots of them have been horrible in terms of the effects they have in terms of the casualties they cause. And, you know, the American bombing of Japan before the atomic bomb, using, for instance, incendiary bombs on largely wooden cities, had been really horrific in terms of casualties too. I mean, famously in March 45, we bombed Tokyo with conventional bombs, causing huge fires and killing a bit above 100,000 people. Oh, wow. probably more than were killed, at least initially, in either of the atomic bombings. Oh, wow. That's an interesting point.

Like, there's been bombings in Japan. There's been full-fledged, like, air raids in Japan. Yeah. There's been, so I guess from the perspective of the Americans, rightly or wrongly, they said, yeah, we have more bombing technology. Let's initiate our other bombs. This, to many people, I'm sure, to Truman, this just seems like another weapon. It may be a successful weapon. Why not use it?

You know, sometimes people say, oh, you could have done a test. could have invited Japanese and done a test and shown them what it was. But, okay, maybe they still wouldn't have surrendered. I mean, the debates were intense within the Japanese government. Even after the atomic bombs, they're still debating, even after they've seen what happens to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So would a test have done anything? And maybe a test wouldn't have worked.

No one knows, of course, if things are going to work yet. Wow. That's a thing they could have done. It said, hey, come over. Yep. Come look at our technology and then tell me if you want some of this. Yeah. Or tell me if you want to surrender.

Wow. That's happened before. But, you know, would it have worked probably unlikely if that would have worked? And then they only had like three atomic bombs in 1945. So if you're using one on a test, you're going to test one yourself. Like famously, they tested it in the desert in July 45. And then if you test another one with the Japanese to demonstrate them, well, then you've got one left. And then what?

I mean, you know, so in terms of getting the war over with minimal or the most minimal possible casualties for the allies, and even take it into account what's going to be minimal casualties for the Japanese, it sounds really cold to say this, but it was still probably the best outcome. Even as horrific as the atomic bombs were, they probably took fewer Japanese lives than any of the other possible courses would have done. So it is, it's not a nice thing, but it is a defensible decision, I think, that Truman made. Wow. Yeah, that's an interesting perspective.

I guess my introduction, like my family and I, we went to Hiroshima when I was sort of younger. And it was just such a moving experience for me kind of being there and just thinking like, how could anyone, like, why would they use this type of force like so late in the war? It's just so, the casualties were just so great that I guess in my mind, I was just always like, this just seemed unnecessary. Just kind of like a show of force to the rest of the world. And yeah, I guess a desire to test out this technology. but I guess I get a little bit of the context. Yeah, I'm still kind of on the side of like, it's just so devastating.

Which is totally legit. I mean, on some human level, you know, I feel torn on this. On a human level, I feel, yeah, that's the right path. I guess it's the historian part of my, the cold, scaly, reptilian historian part of my mind that says, actually it makes sense to do it this way. You put yourself in Truman's shoes at the time, with the information he has, it is a little bit of a different picture.

Yeah, I think it is. And, you know, any historian will tell you over and over again, context is everything. So, you know, it's a difficult issue. Yeah. You know, for sure, reasonable people can differ on that. That makes a lot of sense. This, Dr. Head, this was unbelievable. You are a wealth of knowledge.

I had such a fun time chatting with you. This was really fun. Yeah, I really enjoyed this. I would love to have you back, and we can talk more about, you know, details of World War II, how things kind of transpire afterwards, how that turns into the Cold War, how, how basically Berlin gets split in half, all the divvying up of the colonies all through North Africa and Central Africa

and then even talk about World War I everything that predicated this event. All of these are sort of favorite subject in mind. So yeah, I would always be happy to talk about them. Amazing. I really, really appreciate it. Let's do this again soon. Okay, cool. Thanks. Thank you.