Dan Snow's History Hit - Hitler and Stalin

Episode Date: February 15, 2021

I am joined by Laurence Rees, the best selling author, who has met more people that had direct contact with both Hitler and Stalin than any other historian. In this episode, we delve into the differences and similarities of these two terrifying, brutal and ruthless megalomaniacs who did more than anyone else to shape the Twentieth Century and the world we live in today.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We've got an old colleague of mine on the podcast now, Lawrence Rees. He was the head of history at the BBC. He was the man responsible for the gigantically

successful documentaries of the 1990s and early noughties, The Nazis, A Warning from History, Auschwitz, The Nazis and the Final Solution. And usually for a senior figure at the BBC, he actually played a very hands-on role producing himself. During that time, as you'll hear in this podcast, he met an enormous number of senior Nazis, senior people on the Allies' side as well. And since leaving the BBC, he has gone on to write more best-selling books. He's been on this podcast before,

talking about his recent history of the Holocaust. His latest book is Hitler and Stalin, the Tyrants in the Second World War. I was lucky enough to get some time with him, and we discussed these two terrifying megalomaniacs. It was fascinating, disturbing, and equal measure. If you want to watch our documentary about the rise of Adolf Hitler, it's one of the best documentaries on history hit TV,

one of the most watched. It's available to be streamed wherever you are in the world. You simply get a history hit TV. It's like Netflix, but just for history fans. You head over there, it's been relaunched, it's looking awesome. More user-friendly than ever. You go over to History Hit TV, you sign up, and then you watch that show and watch many others as well. In fact, we've got a lot coming up on the channel to mark the 80th anniversary of the start of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the largest single military campaign up to that point in history, the beginning of a titanic struggle between the Germans and the Soviets, and pretty much the bloodiest and most awful conflict in history. Let's hope I get some pretty stiff competition.

My eye alights on a history of China on my bookshelf and I think some pretty grim conflict there that's humans folks pretty grim litany of atrocious conflicts stretching all the way back to the beginning of recorded history that's nice if you want to come and watch us talking to wonderful historians like Lawrence Reese we're going to be doing so in October during the live tour just go to history.com slash. You're going to love it. In the meantime, everybody, here is Lawrence Rees. Enjoy. Hi, Lawrence. Great to have you back on the podcast. Thanks very much, Dan. Good to talk. Why is it so useful to study these two men in parallel? What is it that's so important about the comparative analysis of these

two men's lives and careers? Yeah. Crucially for me, it's that, well, first of all, I've met people who worked for both Hitler and Stalin. And so that was the kind of germ of the idea. But secondly, it's that what I could do is look at them during a period in which they were intimately involved with each other. So it's actually the narrative is the Second World War when they were both very, very much aware of each other, first in this alliance of sorts, and then as absolute deadly enemies. So they're dealing with each other at the time. It's not a kind of abstract comparison. So it's actually there and then at that moment. And I think it's that that gives hopefully the book a kind of energy and a forwardness and a narrative to it in which you can make the comparison in kind of real time. What about their journeys towards political power? You hear a lot about the similarities of their birth on the kind of periphery of the Russian and German worlds and their radicalization.

Russian and German worlds and their radicalization. Yes, very much so. I mean, it's really two things. What struck me was you meet people who talk about going into a room for a meeting with Hitler and people who talk about going into a room for a meeting with Stalin, and the experiences could not be more different. In terms of personalities, these people are poles apart. But nonetheless, each of them actually ultimately, and this is kind of the overall theme of the book, ultimately, each of them share something absolutely fundamental, which is what they were trying to do in a post-enlightenment world, in a world where both of them thought God is dead now. What they were trying to do is to provide a meaning in life and create a utopia here on earth. That's what they both strove for. And in the process of

trying to create this utopia, very different utopias, but utopias nonetheless, in the process of trying to create this utopia, they didn't care that millions had to die to do that. And not just millions had to die, but actually they would target their own supporters, or not just supporters, but their own citizens who were trying to live law-abiding, decent lives as much as they could, but they were also at risk. So it was this extraordinary joining in terms of overall conceptual ideas that they both had, which was that the end justifies the means to create this extraordinary utopia, which of course neither of them created ultimately.

Was it in their characters or in that philosophy of totalitarianism that made them so particularly brutal? I think it's both in the sense that these are very different dictators from, say, someone like Saddam Hussein, who you can call really a kind of mafia boss. These people want to get power because they want to get power. Hitler and Stalin actually each believed they discovered the secret of existence, and they were pursuing that. They were trying to actually create in this world the world that was in their head. But equally, neither of them dreamt up the world they wanted to create from nothing. Each of them relied on the work of others to have that image inside their own minds. Stalin, obviously, going right back through Lenin to Marx and to the communist ideal.

Hitler, back through a whole range of previous Völkisch and racial writers about the idea of a greater Germany, a Germany that was racially pure, a Germany which was purged as he saw it of their enemies, crucially the Jews, who he had all sorts of warped and false ideas about. But nonetheless, he believed these notions and he wanted to create that world excluding a whole variety of people and to create that world, excluding a whole variety of people, and to create this gigantic empire on Soviet territory. So each of them is trying to create this idea, but they're also interpreting and working off other people's work and analysis in the past. I'm so struck by the fact that you've met men who knew the two of them all during the course of your absolutely remarkable career. Tell me about some of those experiences that those witnesses were able to relay to you.

Well, let me give you just in terms of a meeting about Hitler and Stalin. And this really struck me that one of the big problems about meeting Hitler, even if you're a Hitler supporter, the guy very rarely stops talking so that you would go and you would be worried about trigger words that you would say that would then set him off on one, if you like. So that was often a problem if you were going in for a meeting. Less so, actually, when you talk to army officers who met him. Actually, many of them said to me how during the war he was standing, listening, and he was actually coherent and so on about their objections. And none of them ever felt frightened. I'd never met anybody who went into a meeting with Hitler who said they were scared. The kind of worst case scenario in terms of going

into a meeting with Hitler, it seems to me, is just you can't get a word in because the guy has just gone off on one of his rants. And in the process, what he could do is to persuade you. He once said an incredibly accurate line, something like, my whole life has been a battle to persuade other people. He saw it that way. Not how we see him now, but it's how he saw it, which was that he has to persuade other people. I don't believe for a second that Stalin believes necessarily in persuasion. Stalin is believing in the power of threat. So when you talk to someone who goes in and meets Stalin, I remember one guy saying the problem with a meeting with Stalin was that unlike Hitler, Stalin very rarely talked. So you would go into a meeting with Stalin and your big concern was eye contact

initially. And that was because if you looked at him too much, he'd think you were being kind of pushy and aggressive and might be hiding something. If you were shifty and didn't look at him very much, he thought you were being evasive and might be lying. And in each case, it's incredibly dangerous for you. So your very first problem from the beginning is how much eye contact you're giving the guy. That's the initial problem you've got. Baibakov, who worked in the oil ministry, was sent to see Stalin during the war. And Stalin sat him down. And Stalin said to him, I'm sending you down to the Caucasus because the Germans were advancing there to try and get the oil.

to the Caucasus because the Germans were advancing there to try and get the oil. And he said, you should know that if you go down there and the Germans capture the oil fields intact, we'll kill you. But if the Germans are advancing and you blow up the oil fields, and in fact, it turns out they weren't going to capture them, we'll also kill you. So kind of get the timing right. And I remember thinking, that's terrifying. But this guy, Bybakov, he'd grown up in that culture. He didn't see it as a particularly bad thing. He said, well, of course it's important about the oil fields and getting the timing right in what I was doing and that I ought to be careful. He didn't think that the idea that even if you felt you were doing your job right, you would die for it, was in any way unusual. But I thought there,

the contrast, there's no way Hitler is having a meeting like that with anybody. So at a personal level, clearly what you might call their leadership style is very different. I wonder how similar were their rise. It feels to me like Hitler came to power as a kind of charismatic individual, a leader of a movement built around him, Or Stein sort of worked his way up, didn't he, through the kind of Byzantine court politics of the Bolsheviks. Hitler is never really that concerned about being usurped. He's got the normal kind of dictator-like elements, if you like, of looking around and trying to ensure that there aren't groups plotting against him. And generally,

he hated meetings. The cabinet itself never met after 1938. So he would try and deal with people. Ideally, I think he would like to deal with people one-to-one. And he hated any institutional challenge to him. But he is not focusing all the time on who might be plotting against him in terms of trying to overthrow him. That's not how he's working at all. And partly that is because he was from the very beginning, the central core key charismatic figure that essentially created this party. Without Hitler, virtually impossible to see them having the levels of success that they were having. And they recognized that in

the early 1920s. He was the guy who they could put up, who could sell tickets for meetings. It was actually quite unusual to actually sell tickets to come to a political meeting at that time, but he could sell the tickets. So he's a very valuable commodity in that sense to that political party as it started. And then of course, goes on to lead it. And he is it. The loyalty, the oath is sworn eventually in the 30s to him specifically by name. So he's got a very different sense of himself and sense of any potential threat. Stalin, on the other hand, as you rightly say, he's a creature of Lenin's. He comes through the party, and then it's opaque in the 1920s, early 30s, the exact moment at which one can say he is

actually completely in control of this. And Stalin is a man, he's a kind of anti-charismatic figure. Stalin is somebody who understands the power of bureaucracy and the power of meetings, unlike Hitler. Stalin is absolutely on top of the paperwork. Stalin is reading as much as he can going across his desk and is having a whole series of administrative decisions made himself. So it's very, very different. But it also follows that since he was a follower of Lenin, he stands on Red Square, looks out. There's never just a giant picture of him. It's a giant picture of him next to Lenin.

Lenin is in his mausoleum outside on Red Square. Lenin is the kind of absolute fount of the party, not Stalin. So Stalin is very conscious of the fact that he was a follower who's come into power, but he could be removed and replaced by someone else who would then say they were the new disciple of Lenin's. And I think that's key to understanding why Stalin believes that so many people around him are a potential threat. Everybody's a potential threat. The central core of his personality is the belief that people are potentially out to get him and that he would turn on people before they would even think of turning on him.

So it's a completely different atmosphere. You listen to Dan Snow's history, I'm talking to Lawrence Rees about Hitler and Stalin. It's a classic. More after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores. scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of

History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth

explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Few human beings in history have exercised as much direct control over as vast number of their fellow humans, over vast and intricate empires as these two men. What effect did that have on them as people? I think, first of all, you've got to say, what are the kind of people who crave and get into that? So I don't know that it's that if you or I

were given supreme power tomorrow, which way we might go in the sense that we've not sought it and craved it and longed for it from the beginning. So you've got to say, first of all, it's the type of individual who is going for it and going towards it. The second problem is people who are in the countries and they're ruling them. That's the problem. But if you can use the word problem in this term, the difficulty you face if you are in that position of supreme rule is that nobody or very few people are actually telling it to you exactly like it is. More people, interestingly enough, were telling it to Hitler like it is. It's fascinating. In the book, I show how 1942, 43, Hitler is holding meetings in which people are telling him,

look, we're in big trouble. We can't get the resources. These are all the problems and so on. They actually are not frightened to tell him. Whereas people are not having those kinds of meetings with Stalin. It's extremely dangerous to go to Stalin and say, you're making a mistake here. And I think that one of the problems that happens is this belief that I think all human beings have to a certain extent, which is when things go wrong, it's not my fault. It seems to me it's a common human attribute to believe that when you succeed, it's all down to you. And when you fail, someone else screwed you over. And that feeling, it seems to me, is magnified a millionfold if you are in this kind of supreme leadership position, which is you cannot believe that any mistakes that are

happening are down to you. And the problem with that, and we see this today with Trump, the problem with believing that you cannot make a mistake, that you have not lost, you are incapable of error, is that if you believe that, you can't learn. If you believe you haven't made a mistake, this is what I can learn from it, change and move on. You can't learn and you can't learn. If you believe you haven't made a mistake, this is what I can learn from it, change and move on. You can't learn and you can't change. And I think that's one of the reasons that ultimately you very often, seems to me, get into a terrible situation with those kinds of roles because most people in those positions, it seems to me, can't accept that actually they're capable of error. I'll come on to the mistakes in a moment, if I may, but what about the cost on them? I mean, I get stressed if this podcast gets posted

late onto iTunes. How did they cope when army group centre collapses for Hitler, or when the breakout from Normandy occurs, or in Stalin's case, the southern front of Soviet armies collapses in the early summer of 1942? I mean, how did they get through the day? How did they sleep? That's a huge question I've often thought about. And indeed, one of the greatest scholars of Adolf Hitler once said to me, I've studied him in all these meetings, and he's actually still holding it together right towards the end, even though he knows he's going to have to kill himself. Imagine that. You're holding meetings. You're trying to keep people's morale up and say, no, now we do this. And you're doing it whilst people are explaining to you that everything's falling apart. And it isn't until really the last days in the bunker that Hitler really loses it in the famous scene that's often used as a meme from Downfall,

where he loses it and actually starts totally screaming and saying the war's lost. But it takes until then for him finally, finally to go that way. So that is an extraordinary thing that he's able to do that. Stalin, it seems to me, actually is marginally less resilient. You look at what's happening to Stalin in the spring of 1941. It's clear that he's drinking a lot more. He's scarcely responding rationally to reports that the German forces amassed on the border. Stalin is less resilient. He retreats to his dacha about a week into the actual war in the summer of 1941. And there's a huge debate amongst historians whether he actually is cracking up there or not, or whether he's just having a bad weekend. But nonetheless, what's clear is his resilience is cracked. And yet,

he then recovers. And by the October of that year, he does something incredible, which I think takes amazing power and strength of character, which is knowing that the Germans are practically the gates of Moscow, and most of his government has already departed and has fled to the east. He decides to stay and tough it out. And I think you can make an argument that that's the moment on which the 20th century turns, because I've met people who were in the secret police serving for Stalin, who then tried to put down the panic that was happening in Moscow at that time. And what they talk about, and other people in Moscow I met who were there at the time, talk about is this sense that Stalin

has stayed, Stalin is with us. This strong man, this strong father figure has stayed, and he's with us. And I think if Stalin had decided to go then, I think Moscow would have fallen. I also think that that would have had a whole series of other knock-on effects. And this, remember, is before the Americans are in the war. So he's toughing it out and has enormous strength. And you ask, why is it possible to do that? And I think ultimately the answer can only be that individual character qualities are distributed massively unequally amongst human beings, and some human beings can do it. I think also it helps if you also have a profound belief in what you're doing.

If I go back to the sense of creating a utopia on earth and believing in something outside of yourself, I think it's much harder to do it if you're just an individual buffeted around. This is where religion in traditional terms had an enormous effect on people. Think of all the people who became martyrs. They actually absolutely have a strength of individual belief. And that belief system is bigger than they are in some respects. And they hang on to, they believe they're not just an individual. They believe they're a statement. They believe they are someone who is representing this gigantic ideal that they're committing their lives to. And despicable as both Hitler and Stalin are, you have to recognize, I think, that they're feeling that. Great men theory is out of fashion at the moment, I think rightly, but these two men, they made

individual decisions at certain points that changed everything, didn't they? Yeah, it seems to me undeniable. I mentioned that one decision of Stalin's. That's a personal decision to stay in Moscow or go. It's a personal decision. Beria, who is the head of the secret police, is convinced that they shall go. Stalin is making that personal decision and you can't shirk that. And of course, it's important to put individuals in a structural context in terms of their own culture and so on, all of that. Absolutely, you can't rip people away from the circumstances of their lives. But nonetheless, within that world, they are making their own decisions. And if you look at the case of Hitler,

where Hitler is a truly extraordinary person, which is why for someone like me, he is endlessly fascinating from the first moment that I started to meet people 30 years ago who had either known him or become Nazis or been supporters of him in Germany. From that first moment, it's an extraordinary story and he's an extraordinary individual. We can't get around that. Loathsome as he is, he's nonetheless extraordinary. He arguably made, ultimately on his own, talking to other people, yes, but ultimately on his own, he ultimately made three of the most consequential decisions ever taken by a human being in history. And by those three decisions, I mean the decision to start the Second World War, to invade Poland,

knowing it's likely that this is going to go forward and create this new conflagration. That's ultimately his decision to move when he does. Secondly, the decision to invade the Soviet Union and create the biggest and bloodiest war in the history of the world. That's Hitler's decision. And thirdly, the decision in the context of that war against the Soviet Union to develop what I argue and have argued elsewhere is the most appalling crime in the history of the world, which is the Holocaust. And that is coming as a result of Hitler decisions about what he wants to see happen. So those are three consequential decisions that result in the death and suffering of millions and millions and millions, tens of millions of people. And you can point it at this individual's

door. So there's no question in my mind that if Adolf Hitler had been run over by a horse and cart when he was running to school in Austria in the late 19th century, if that had happened, then we would all have been better off. Right. And that's before we even factor in the sort of operational interventions he makes, be it switching the bombing to London, the decision to advance on Moscow or other targets in the Soviet Union, or the decision to declare war on the USA. Yeah, absolutely. His acceptance, for example, of leaving British troops in Dunkirk and not moving in on them. He's taking advice in that respect from his generals, but nonetheless, these are

his decisions. It's fascinating because he is absolutely not in any way a micromanager. At least he starts becoming that as things go against him, which is examined in the book and is interesting in itself. But certainly, right up to the point at which things start to go against him, he is setting a vision and allowing other people to work out the way in which that vision is actually going to happen. You talk about the invasion of Western Europe and France. This is one of the greatest single military successes and surprises in history as well. Few people thought that was possible. His own generals, I mean, this is one of the interesting contrasts. In late 1939, his own generals, many of them believed it was a disastrous move. It was a ridiculous, insane thing to try and

invade France. In fact, what's interesting is that it's precisely the reverse of the popular consciousness about this. People think, oh, well, Germans practiced blitzkrieg, so it was going to be pretty straightforward for them to conquer France and the low countries in 1940. Actually, no. The Germans had less tanks than the British and French. It was talent in terms of leadership and planning that made that possible and the ineptitude of the British and French response, to be frank. But it's not Hitler's plan. What Hitler is doing is saying, this is my vision. This is going to happen. I want your ideas. Come on. And Manstein and others come up with this idea of invading through the Ardennes,

which is not what the British are planning on and the French are planning on and so on. But that comes as a result of setting the vision and letting others come through with ideas. Stalin doesn't do that. He begins to do that later in the war when he sees that his own micromanagement is losing the war. losing the war. They lose the Battle of Kiev, this disaster for the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1941, because Stalin is trying to micromanage troop movements from hundreds of miles away, and he's an incompetent military leader. It's only later on, once he starts trusting to some degree a general like Zhukov, that actually the whole situation starts to turn around. So they're doing that. So Hitler, even though he's making these massive consequential decisions, isn't micromanaging them,

which I think is one of the reasons that he is capable of having these gigantic, catastrophic for the world, visionary ideas, because he's not sitting down and going, here's exactly how it should happen. He's having the vision and then saying to others, come back to me with an idea on how to make that real. Lawrence, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. It's just the most fascinating book. Tell us what it's called. Hitler and Stalin, The Tyrants and the Second World War, published by Viking. All the very best there. Just the latest triumph in a long, glittering career. Thank you very much, Lawrence. Great fun. Thanks for having me, Dan. Hi, everyone. Thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you are probably asleep,

so I'm talking to your snoring forms, but anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favour. Head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity.

Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. you