Dan Snow's History Hit - How Did Hitler Seize Supreme Power?

Episode Date: July 23, 2020

I was delighted to be joined by Nicholas O'Shaughnessy, who took me through the remarkable rise of Adolf Hitler. Starting with his experience of the First World War, Nicholas took me through the events and turning points which turned a failed art student into one of the most powerful men in history. We discussed how the Beer Hall Putsch, the Wall Street Crash, the Article 48 Decree, the Reichstag Fire and the death of Hindenburg acting as stepping stones to Hitler's success. This podcast compliments our latest documentary on the Rise of Hitler, available now on History Hit TV. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

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 everyone, welcome to As Knows History. It's a story that never loses its importance, its power. It's the story of Hitler's rise to power.

How does a street corner loudmouth, a ranting politician from the extreme fringe of political life, seize supreme power of one of the world's most advanced, civilised, sophisticated states? In the space of around 10 years, Adolf Hitler managed to impose an iron grip on Germany, leading it down a path of extremism that would lead to global conflict, genocide and unimaginable crimes. A story we tell in one of our latest films, our history hit films, featuring the likes of Professor Frank McDonagh, an old favourite of history hit, and also Professor Nicholas O'Shaughnessy from Queen Mary, University of London. We tell that story and we attempt to explain how it was that Hitler was able to achieve supreme power. In this accompanying podcast, I'm broadcasting the whole of the Professor O'Shaughnessy

interview, because he did such a remarkable job of taking me through that fateful decade. As I say, he's a professor at Queen Mary, University of London, and he's the perfect person to take us through this dark, dark story. This documentary featuring Professor O'Shaughnessy is going up very soon on History Hit TV. If you want to watch it, you go to historyhit.tv. You use the code POD1, P-O-D-1. You sign up for a month for free,

and then your second month is one pound, euro, or dollar. It's pretty sweet. And then you can watch the documentary we're putting up this week, which is on HMS Warrior, the world's most sophisticated warship, when it was launched in 1860. So please go and check that out. We've got great new material coming on stream all the time. So it's very exciting.

In the meantime, this is a sobering podcast with Professor Sean Assey about the rise of Hitler in joy. podcast with Professor Sean Assey about the rise of Hitler in joy. Nicholas, thank you very much for coming on the show. When you look at the rise of Adolf Hitler, do you see inevitability or do you see a mad, chaotic journey of contingency and chance and luck and bad luck? It's absolutely the latter. In other words, there is no sense of predestiny about the whole thing except retrospectively. The fact is that he had a huge amount of luck, not least the fact that there were 25 attempts on his life, all of which he survived. In the end, believed he was a man of destiny. He described himself as a sleepwalker with providence.

Absolutely right. The whole thing is a chaos theory, really. The beating of butterflies' wings caused a storm. So there is no logic, no logic at all, really, to his success. Let's take it step by step. Let's talk, I suppose, about the backdrop to this entire drama, the end of the First World War, the collapse of the German Empire, the Freikorps, the civil war revolutions in Germany that followed 1918, 1919. Did that prove a seedbed for Hitler and his ideas? It certainly did. It actually begins the end of the First World War when the German military have him attend, as many other men did, these lectures. And they make him a lecturer themselves in kind of patriotic power boasting at Camp Lechfeld.

And it really does arise from that the whole mysterious and squalid world of the Freikorps, the ultra-nationalist ideas floating around, the whole kind of miasma of ideology and conflict. Behind it all, I think, over it all, the shadow of communism, Red Munich, the terror of the bourgeois, that they'd be eliminated, murdered in their beds by communists and so forth. In other words, this mobilization of the fair appeal is part of it. So it's a kind of world which is so confused, so perplexing, so full of violence and latent violence. And out of this he emerges, as I say, as a man

who sees himself walking with destiny. You know, moving on to the early 1920s, his first attempt to leap onto the stage is almost farcical, isn't it, in 1923? Yes, it is. But at that stage, he doesn't actually see himself as the Messiah, but actually as a kind of John the Baptist figure, really, someone waiting for the Messiah to emerge from the ranks of angry Germans. It's not, in fact, until the trial that he suddenly realizes that that he is that man and you're right the Beowulf Putsch is farcical the way they arrest the junta in Bavaria and then let them go the march towards the center Ludendorff the whole thing I mean it's basically a pastiche of

Mussolini's march on Rome but Mussolini had organised it properly. This was not so much theatre as slapstick. The whole thing was ludicrous. The idea that people as legalistic as the Germans would actually fall for this cat-trap is again absurd. He was a comical figure. At that time, it's no accident that Charlie Chaplin was later to play him in The Great Dictator. The farce, ironically, seemed to bolster his reputation, did it?

Yes, well, that was really an achievement of the trial. He made these stirring speeches at the trial in his, I think it was nine months incarceration in Landsberg prison. He wrote Mein Kampf. But it was all a retrospective imposition of imagery and ideas. The whole ritual of the blood flag, the creation of the Munich martyrs, every religion needs martyrs and so forth. All this was a retrospective imposition of design on what was actually a chaotic and incoherent episode. You know,

in the beer hall, Hitler leaps on a table, takes out his pistol, and fires shots in the air. The whole thing is comical. It's a sort of South American revolution in the 1930s. It's not like Germany at all. So it's the later imposition of structure and design and imagery on all of this was an achievement of the propaganda. The actual event itself, as it happened, looked and was ridiculous. And, of course, the army and police would hear nothing of it. And remember that four policemen were actually killed in the famous march. It wasn't just the Munich martyrs themselves.

They also killed policemen, which for a right-wing party is not good. You mentioned Mein Kampf. How important was Hitler's book? What was important was the idea of the book. The actual thing was an incoherent stream of consciousness, which all Germans bought and non-read. But it was the notion of a foundation text. But it's not a foundation text like Das Kapital, because it is actually so incoherent. The only coherent thing in it, the only part with a strong intellectual substance, is the notorious fifth chapter, where he talks about his theories on propaganda, and that is quite remarkable. For the rest of it, it's an incoherent ideological spasm, which is contradictory and ridiculous. He gets out of prison after a very short amount of time.

Through the rest of the 1920s, in which the international norms appear to be restored, the economy is doing well, does Hitler's party and Hitler as an individual enjoy much success? No, they don't. I mean, they're just a fringe party with a kind of comical leader no one can treat seriously. They are like a lot of these things, part of the entertainment, part of the rich tapestry of national life. But no one gives them a moment's notice. But they are actually refining various things. They're refining their act. They're refining their iconography. They're refining their imagery. They're refining their act. They're refining their iconography. They're refining their imagery. They're refining their whole competence as an organization throughout this time. So something is going on. It's becoming increasingly focused,

increasingly professional. And at this time, Hitler is developing above all the symbol system. He's spending hours in Munich public library, researching heraldry and finding the designs and so forth, which are going to project his style, his regime. He's designing the uniforms. They're actually trying to find an ideology. What does Nazism actually mean? In many ways, it means nothing at all.

Is it extreme right-wing? Is it extreme left-wing? There is a huge vagueness. They actually have this slogan, we don't want low bread prices, we don't want high bread prices, we don't want bread prices to stay the same. We want National Socialist bread prices. And what they are actually is a kind of catch-all party with a veneer of brutal militarism,

but with all kinds of left-wing and ideological and anti-plutocratic appeals as well, and at the margin, and only at the margin at this time, anti-Semitism. And what about these paramilitary organisations, these sort of groups of thugs that coalesce into become the SA and then the SS? Well, they are derived from the Freikorps, the roving bands of soldiers who fight on Germany's borders, who fight the Reds in Germany, and they coalesce into the SR, Hitler's brownshirt army, which has the function of patrolling the streets. It has the function of protecting Nazis, Nazi speakers at public meetings.

has the function of protecting Nazis, Nazi speakers at public meetings. But the real delight is beating up communists, going into communist ghettos, having a good punch-up, which is exciting for those who are turned on by violence. And the SS is minimal. It's just a tiny personal private bodyguard for Hitler at this time. But the SA have a latent appeal to people who want a bit of action, a bit of mindless thuggery, where it's not necessarily ideological at all. And actually, what increasingly emerges is that the SA is really a socialist group under major realm. This is the extraordinary thing. People often ask me, my left-wing friends ask me, surely there was nothing socialist about the Nazis. Indeed, there wasn't after the night of the long nights. But before that time, they're actually called by the Germans or the SA are called roast beefs. They're red inside

and brown on the outside. I mean, it's the economy, is it? As Bill Clinton says, the economy is stupid. I mean, does everything change with the Wall Street crash in 29? This is absolutely the outside. I mean, is the economy, is it, as Bill Clinton says, the economy stupid? I mean, does everything change with the Wall Street crash in 29? This is absolutely the case. In other words, in 1928, the Nazis have very little, more than 2% of the vote. The breakthrough is 1930, when they get, I think it's 107 members of the Reichstag, and they're the second largest party. He's 107 members of the Reichstag, and they're the second largest party. This is just a couple of years, and the intervening variable is the Wall Street crash. In other words, that really destroys the German factory. You have as many as 7 million unemployed. And although the worker is proof against, the German worker is invulnerable to the Nazi

appeal, as long as he has a job and is a member of the Union, once he's lost his job and has no Union, then he's fair game and he becomes a stormtrooper, joins the SA, joins the Nazi party and is receptive to their message. Why do they turn to the Nazi party? What is that message? That is the interesting point. What is the message? The Nazi Party at that time has been called a catch-all party. The Nazi message is whatever you want it to be, essentially, whatever you want it to be. There is a tone of anti-Semitism, but remember in this period until 1933, only four of the 125 posters produced by the Nazis are principally anti-Semitic.

For the rest of it, the real message is one of grievance. Hitler was a past master of the politics of grievance, and he is history's greatest case study in the power of grievance mobilization. The grievances were not invented, but they were textured and refined by Hitler, specifically Versailles, the iniquity of Versailles, the mistreatment of Versailles, the evil of the reparations, the loss of territory to Poland. He was known as the drummer, and these were the themes he would focus on. But there are other themes as well, like the wickedness of Bob Terrin women. That wasn't the only thing.

So it was generally reactionary in tone. But it was really speechifying in favor of the righting of injustice. There were speeches about injustice and all the injustice Germans had faced and how these wrongs must be righted. And in that sense they fit into a historical category, the mobilization of grievance. If we say Germans had no legitimate grievance, of course we can be dismissive. The fact is that Hitler resonated because so much of what he said was actually true. They had been mistreated at Versailles, and this was the call of the Hitler offer for the rest of it.

The oppression of Jews, Judenrein Europe, conquering all of European Russia and so forth. That was at the margins. It was hardly glimpsed at this time. There were, in other words, very coherent and even moral reasons for voting for Hitler. And this is the truly frightening thing, actually, that not merely an immoral man, a man who inflicted war on the entire world, could indeed be interpreted as fair and decent and generous and high-minded. The real truth is that Hitler was the creation of everybody's imagination. Everyone had their own Hitler.

The conservative forces, for example, thought Hitler may be a mad dog, but they could tame him by their salons, by grand banquets, by bringing him into their homes and hearts. He would become a civilised statesman like Hitler and not a kind of street rabble orator and street thug. Of course that didn't happen. Whilst this is going on, the Weimar democracy is crumbling anyway with things like the Article 48 decree, whatever it's called,

that allows the president extraordinary powers. Political settlement is looking pretty fragile, isn't it? Yes, the great problem you you see, is that increasingly in Germany, you didn't have a majority for Nazism. You had a majority which was against democracy. You had the communists, social democrats and so forth. You had the right-wing bourgeois parties which tended to side with Hitler. You actually had 37 parties in total.

And it was anarchy. Well, I hate to say it, but it is a warning against proportional representation, though that is another subject. But you have this anarchy. You don't have agreement in the Reichstag. And so increasingly, Brüning takes recourse, the chancellor takes recourse, to Article 48 of the German Constitution with the President Hindenburg's agreement, which allows for direct decrees to be made, law,

without the involvement of the Reichstag. And so you say it's crumbling, yes, because they resort to extra-parliamentary means of lawmaking under Article 48 a whole number of times before Hitler takes power. So it makes the notion of dictatorship much more acceptable because we can't create coherent parliamentary rule. This is the core of the matter. Where do we go from here? How does the crisis deepen? Is it the 1932 election? Is that the next stage?

The 1932 election is an extraordinary piece of theatre. from here? How does the crisis deepen? Is it the 32 election? Is that the next stage? The 32 election is an extraordinary piece of theatre. You actually have a lot of regional elections as well. So there are five elections in 32. And the core of it is Hitler actually standing against Hindenburg for the presidency of Germany. This is one of history's great set pieces because they had to actually position Hindenburg, who had been in the German army since, I think, 1865, in the war against Denmark, the war against Austria, and was the great hero of the First World War. They had to paint Hindenburg himself

as the candidate of the communists, the libtards, as the new rights say, and the candidate above all of the Jews. And I mean, Hitler is an ex-corporal fighting a field marshal. It cannot work. It cannot work. It's one of the most bizarre elections of all time. But what we have is Hitler over Germany. Hitler has this airborne campaign where he descends from the clouds in a trimotus, heat-frit like one of the gods. And so he can make speeches in five different German cities in a single day. He fights that campaign with all the new methods. We speak about propaganda, of course, but we have a moment of coalition. We have now the point where amplification power in auditoria is much more technically superb.

We have the ability to smooth film so that film doesn't shudder. We have radios owned by the state, but it's an entire new world of communication for technological reasons. And of course, we speak about propaganda and the Nazis. All of them had excellent propaganda facilities. Hindenburg, for example, his own people were making hagiographies about him. He has his own propaganda operation. The communists under Willy Munzenberg, have a superb propaganda organization. So what is happening in 1932 is a crucible of propaganda by everyone. But the Nazis make a fatal strategic error. That is that to prove they're socialists as well as nationalists, they back the Berlin workers in the transport workers' strike. That is a fatal error.

And in the November elections of 1932, which were the last free elections in Germany until 1947, I think, the Nazis lose an awful lot of votes. They lose 34 seats in the Reichstag. Because the bourgeois have become frightened, not of the nationalist part of the author but of the socialist part. They think, my God, these people are really communists in drag or whatever we call them. Then what you have, and this is really very interesting, is a particular mechanism by which the Nazis are accorded power. There is a by-election in a minor state called Lippi. And in this

minor state, the Nazis really bring a great propaganda focus to bear. This is after the November elections. They just flooded with their propaganda resource and they win. And it's that which convinces Hindenburg to invite them to join a coalition government with Fritz von Papen as deputy chancellor. The majority of Germans didn't vote for Hitler, but why did so many vote for the Nazis? 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. 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. Well, certain groups certainly didn't. For example, Roman Catholic women were a strong stance against Hitler. Trade unions, members of trade unions, didn't either.

The problem, I think, is the vagueness of the program that, as I said, Hitler was not offering anything concrete. He was offering emotional spasms, the retrieval of German pride, make Germany great again, the reversal of the verdict of Versailles, of the reparations, the confiscations of territory, the restoration of honor and pride to the German flag. Many people of all kinds were beguiled by this. Remember, too, that although a lot of the working class worked in factories, a lot didn't. They worked in things like small craft shops, small businesses. They worked in landed estates. But the core of the appeal was actually to the group from which Adolf Hitler had himself emerged. It was the lower middle class. And the

lower middle class were a huge social group in Germany. They owned the small businesses. They had very, very good technical skills. They'd know about, for example, buying space in newspapers for an advertisement. They were incredibly important. And their social class, which, for example, in Russia or indeed other countries, was not particularly big, whereas in Germany it was huge. And it was they who felt they had something to lose by a socialist or communist takeover. They were the class from which Hitler had emerged, so he understood their psychosis brilliantly, had a depth insight into the psychology of the social class,

whereas other social groups, the workers were much more iffy. So were the upper middle class. Whereas other social groups, the workers were much more iffy. So were the upper middle class. I actually discovered from 1932 instructions which ordered the party not to show the swastika very much in middle class areas. Now that's an extraordinary thing to say in 1932 in Germany, but it does show how the Nazis understood market segmentation, for one thing, that they had to give different messages to different groups, different messages, for example, to rural groups. They had to stress different kinds of racism in different kind of areas. For example, in areas with no anti-Semitic tradition, they'd not be anti-Semitic. They might be anti-Danish, for example. They might be anti-Sorp. So fundamentally, when you ask what groups was Hitler appealing to,

he was fashioning different messages to different groups, known as political market segmentation. But he still could not capture the loyalty of large areas of the German public. The factory worker who is a member of a trade union still, the Catholic woman voter, and certain others as well, large sections of the upper middle class, would still not be beguiled by Nazism and not voted for him. But you could still vote for Hitler on a rational premise. One who did, for example, was Pastor Niemöller, later one of his greatest opponents and one of the truly great figures of the anti-Hitler resistance.

The sad thing and the tragic thing is that a lot of people who were of sound mind and sane and fair-minded people and not necessarily wild-eyed fanatics at all, did vote for Hitler. And the interesting question is why people voted for him. And of course, it was the last vote they ever had. Yes, well, let's come on to that. So he's now formed the so-called Hitler cabinet. How does he then go about dismantling any obstacles to his authoritarian rule? It's really rather useful. You have the election in early March 1933, but a few days before that you have the Reichstag fire and you have the Reichstag decree, which enables Hitler to actually imprison communists. Remember, there are a lot of communist deputies of the Reichstag. Stop them standing, close down newspapers, close down communist and socialist PR operations, and so forth. So the Reichstag fire degree enables the elimination of civil liberties.

And then you have, following that, the article after the election, which essentially abolishes democracy. But the point is that before the election they've already, via the fire, been able to control most of the things they want to control. That is the truly astonishing fact. And the second fact is, of course, the government. And they know where the government, admittedly as part of a coalition, the government in Germany controls radio as it had always done. But it now has a monopoly of radio. Their opponents can't get a word in edgeways. But they know how to use radio.

You see, remember Hitler's earlier predecessor, Brüning, as chancellor, only ever made two radio addresses. The previous, if you like, owners of the state hadn't known how to use this new medium. Hitler did. And his government controlled it right from the beginning when Hindenburg invited them into government. At what stage did he literally give up the sort of fig leaf that there's still any form of working democratic constitution? Well, it is a process. and it begins with the Reichstag V degree just before the election. It then follows on after the election that they then abolish using presidential decree from Hindenburg. They then basically abolish democracy. There can be no more elections. The rule will now be from decree with the sanction

of the president. And so democracy is abolished. But the semblance of democracy or of being heterogeneous society is continued. In other words, the newspapers are not closed down for the most part. Some are. But a lot of them continue to be. They continue in being. It continues to look like old Germany. But the message is internalized by everyone. You have to toe the party line. So they retain the husk of being a normal society. For example, between then and the war, Hitler holds five referenda. Of course, they're not real referenda, but the whole machinery of electioneering is cranked up for these so-called referenda. So you still have the facsimile of being a normal Western democratic society. But the fact is that rule is by decree from immediately after the

March election, and it is no longer a democracy. But it takes some time for people to wake up and realize that, both in Germany and elsewhere. Hitler still has, for example, great support in the British press, or at least parts of it, the Northcliffe Press and so forth. It's not until the Nuremberg Laws that the British press really turned heavily against Hitler. So you have, in other words, a kind of facsimile. The reality goes immediately.

It's a dictatorship from the beginning. But the facsimile continues, partly because it's still, in theory, a coalition government, with Fritz von Papen as vice president, with members of conservative parties holding cabinet office with the involvement in the cabinet of people like Hugenberg, who are not Nazis, and they're dealt with later. They're dealt with actually in the night of the long nights. Well, let's come to the night of the long nights, but just before we do, presumably concentration camps

are opening up around this time as well. Concentration camps are, and the first victims are not Jews. They are communists, they're liberals, they're socialists, they're anyone the regime disapproves of, including some conservatives. Remember in 1938, the entire right-wing reactionary, despotic, neo-fascist Austrian regime was put into a concentration camp and emerged as heroes after the war. So the people going in the concentration camps are actually not for the most part Jewish. They're there for

ideological rehabilitation. Concentration camps are actually sold to the German public. They're open to the public. They're sold in the media as being hives of open air activity where people are healed, they're places of healing, they're made patriotic again. There's even a delegation from the FBI and they begin closing them in the mid-30s. So it's just represented as a temporary necessity and people, if they deviate too much, are shot while trying to escape. That is the slogan, shot while trying to escape. People are, of course, beaten up, they're shot. But these are not death camps.

They are internment camps with an agenda. So they open straight away, but the later inmates in the concentration camps are not the same as the earlier inmates in the concentration camps. But they are an important arm of the state, but a very public arm. Every town has its concentration camp, seemingly, and is proud to be host of a concentration camp because they're part of the overall marketing. But basically what they're doing, and the Reichstag fire is so

symbolic in this, is representing Hitler as having saved the company from communism. The communists are a bacillus. The communist is really a disoriented folk comrade who is going to be brought back to the folk state and folk conscience by gentle and thorough and healthy rehabilitation. Remember that the communist was always a target for Nazi propaganda, not as an enemy, but as a potential recruit. So they have a very ambivalent relationship, in fact, with communists. They can always see them as misguided folk comrades who can be brought back into the fold. This is really

quite bizarre, but that is the actuality of what happens. But it's this representation of Germany as having narrowly avoided a communist takeover, a communist coup d'etat, which is at the heart of what they do and why they're able to get away with what they do. In other words, there's a huge amount of false flag and disinformation and fake news behind all this. A whole impenetrable miasma, which in the fog of crisis people can't see through. That sounds scarily familiar. Anyway, the spring of 1934, late spring, early summer 1934, because you get the Enabling Act and then the Night of the Long Knives. That's a huge, I think. The Enabling Act allows rule by decree. In other words,

it's merely the continuity of what had been done by Brüning and by Papen in the late Weimar period. So it doesn't necessarily look so unusual. Remember the great pseudo-monarchic figure of Hindenburg is still on the throne. So you have that important continuity. You have really the symbolic foundation of the Third Reich, that great ceremony in the garrison church in Potsdam, very symbolic theater indeed. The church was torn down by the East German regime in the late 60s. So you have that hot period in 1934 where you have the Enabling Act, you have the final abolition of any semblance of democracy. You have the great disorientation of Hitler's coalition partners. Von Papen makes a famous speech. They're getting very worried, both by the

SA, but also by the emergent characteristics of the Nazi regime as well. They realize that power has not tamed Hitler. So there's open criticism from within the regime at various levels. One is from the conservative party allies, who are getting increasingly restive, not least by the stormtroopers. The other is from Major Röhm and the stormtroopers themselves, who really want a more socialist policy. They want to break up the great landed estates. They want to take control of the army.

And what has happened in the interim is that, according to what I've just checked, the actual size of the stormtrooper operation virtually quadruples. It goes from 400,000 in the beginning of 1932 to a few million, two million. A year later, all that happens in a single year. The German army is 100,000, which is its side limit. So you have 100,000 soldiers and 2 million stormtroopers. You can see why people were getting testy, why the army was getting furious and terrified.

So you have this whole febrile atmosphere in 34. The place is a real mess. People are walking with the shadows of fear and their own extinction. No one knows what's going on or what Hitler is thinking. So he's successful in just clearing out any alternative sources of authority or power within the state? Well, he gets round to doing it, but remember Hitler himself isn't clear in his mind as to whether he takes the stormtroopers on, and particularly with Rome, with whom he has a strong relationship.

The idea of actually killing Rome is difficult for Hitler to follow, but indeed he does come round to that idea. He is persuaded by Himmler, Goering and so forth, that a purge is needed, but a purge is not what modern countries do. We come by a process of inexorable logic to the night of the long knives. But it's still an extraordinary thing to have done.

And it is a response, not merely to the size of the stormtroopers, but to the fact that they had no entertainment. Now they could no longer beat up communists on the street and march into socialist ghettos and do all the things a stormtrooper does. They can't do that anymore. So all they can do is get drunk and attack passers-by, even diplomats. In other words, the stormtroopers are the yobs, which is boy spelt backward, and the lagalites of their day. the jobs which is boy spelt backward and the larger lights of their day with attitude they are two million people in brown shirts who are getting drunk and violent and beating up innocent people

and rather cleverly von jureth hitler's foreign minister decides to speak to Hitler with an important interlocutor. He persuades the German ambassador in Italy to speak to Mussolini and asks Mussolini to speak to Hitler. Mussolini himself remembered the murder of Mattiotti, which did his regime an enormous amount of damage. A lot of leading fascists resigned. Mattiotti was a fairly important Italian politician. So got Mussolini to actually speak to Hitler saying, you must do something about the storm

troopers. They're destroying Germany's image. And so this is how it is all working. In other words, there is no predetermined destiny. There is no master plan. Everything Hitler ever did was make up on the hoof. He was not a strategic thinker. He was a tactician, sometimes a brilliant tactician, but he was not a strategic thinker. But you come to the inexorable conclusion that you have to eliminate the stormtrooper leadership. And while you're at it, get rid of a few other people who are becoming awkward for the regime and stand in the way of your path to absolute control. And by the way, if you kill them, you send a message to the entire nation. Know your place. We're almost there, are we? What's left to talk about Hitler's

consolidation of absolute power? Well, I think we should talk a little more about the Night of the Long Nights in that what happened in the so-called night was certainly not as it's portrayed in Visconti's film The Damned, where the SS interrupt a gay orgy. You had all kinds of people from the public world who were murdered. General Kurt von Schleicher and his wife, the leader of the Catholic Action Party, for example, were done away with. A mere music critic for a newspaper was done away with, not deliberately. But you had a lot of collateral damage, and von Papen's assistant was simply

murdered. But then there was the stormtrooper leadership. They were actually not shot in the hotel apart from one of them and his 18-year-old lover. Five generals in the SA and a colonel were shot in prison by Hitler's personal bodyguard regiment, the Liebstandarte, and the rest were shot in their barracks. Paradoxically, the Liebstandart, Hitler's personal bodyguard regiment, are dressed in drag ten years later less for the backing chorus of the film The Great Love, Der große Liebe, which has 20 million viewers, because Zara Leander, its star is so big, that only large SS men dressed in sequins, but blurred, can actually be the backing chorus because no women would be big enough. But that is perhaps wandering from the point. You send a message but you also disturb people. Remember von Schleicher was a general but there was also

Major General von Bredow, people who dipped their toe too far into politics and had become a source of annoyance for the regime. You have this, if you like, clearing out, but at a great cost. The retrospective justification promulgated publicly is in terms of the homosexuality of the SA leadership, but that's actually irrelevant in terms of making the decision to exterminate them. The real reason was their socialism and their threatening a nest to the army. The army were terrified. There are two films, Triumph of the Will in 1934, but there's another one, Victory of Faith in 1933. Triumph of the Will was the rhetorical answer to The Night of the

Long Nights. It's about the 1934 Nuremberg rally and the apotheosis of Hitler. But the other film, Victory of Faith, which was made by Lenny Reichenfeld the year before, showcases Major Röhm. He is Hitler's number two. He is at his side and independently confident. He is a much bigger figure than, for example, Reich Marshal Goering. So that really does show how the priorities have changed

and how Hitler's thinking has changed. But whether and how any element of democracy carries on, there is still a facade. Hitler can still get away with a certain amount of international credibility. He plans and runs and succeeds in the Olympic Games in 1936. The real, though, coup de grace to any optimism or idealism anyone might have had is, of course, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. But meanwhile, Germany has left the League of Nations. It's left the International

Disarmament Conference. So even before the annexations and the gains of territory, it's carving out a very particular kind of positioning strategy for itself, both internally within Germany and globally on the world stage. And then finally, I suppose, Hindenburg dies and Hitler is able to seize the highest office in the land, to add to his other titles. That's absolutely true. You see, what Hindenburg does is personify the monarchic function in a country without a monarchy.

So his identity has the most enormous symbolic resonance, but he has a huge amount of residual power. It's he who can implement Article 43 and legitimate governorship by direct decree. That can only come from him. But he also, as president, controls the army. 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. 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. 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. He controls the army and with his death there is now no intervening power between Hitler and the object of his desire, which is total, indeed you could call it totalitarian, control of the German people.

So what Hitler then does is merge the two offices of Chancellor and President. So he becomes both Prime Minister and President. He becomes both monarch and politician. And with the death of Hindenburg, there is, if you like, a theatrical gap in German consciousness, which Hitler himself fills with really the notion that he is acting out multiple roles, one of which is monarch, the idea that the monarch is somehow a mystical priest-king. All of those resonances which were built into the idea of German monarchy, Hitler then inherits. So it's a multi-role, multi-task operation. But the death of Hindenburg, which was celebrated in a massive funeral in Berlin, showcasing all of the iconic parts of the regime,

is very, very important, not least the funeral, because Hindenburg is absorbed into the Nazi mythology. This is very, very important that the regime has the imprimatur of Hindenburg himself, the great commander of the First World War, the great German soldier, the great stolid image of Prussian-ness, of austere self-denial in the service of the state, all those meanings are now poured into the Nazi regime. They become the inheritors of Hindenburg. So Hindenburg has played a key iconic and strategic role, of course, which from my perspective is very important, but a key political role as well.

His son, Colonel Oskar Hindenburg, has acted as go-between with the regime. But it's Hindenburg who's enabled them to take complete control, complete power through Article 43, through legitimating everything they did and so forth, through signing off. He has allowed this to happen. The one thing he does have is not only the powers of the president, The one thing he does have is not only the powers of the president, but also control of the army. What Hitler wants at this time, most of all, is control of the army. Hindenburg has it. When Hindenburg goes, Hitler has that control.

The only things which stand in his way are the two generals who are at the top of the army. And he actually manufactures sex crises later on, or sex crises happen, which get rid of them in 38. And then he has really total control of the military apparatus. But remember, a plot has been brewing ever since the murder with the army's complicity of Major General von Bredau and General Kurt von Schleicher in the Night of the Long Nights their friends and comrades had been very very worried for example Field Marshal von Mackensen

who was the last Field Marshal apart from Ludendorff of the First World War and Hindenburg himself were very very angry about this and craved and sought their rehabilitation of Schleicher and Breda and eventually got it. So you can see a sort of emergent design to the whole structure, but it is riveting. And, of course, one is haunted by the Night of the Long Knives itself.

It's such a barbarian act, so different from what really any Western country ever seems to have done. Indeed, last night, in preparation from talking to you, I was looking at the images of the dead on Google Images, and it was extraordinary to see this eclectic mix of generals, of conservative politicians, of bureaucrats, of civil functionaries,

including, for example, the Bavarian leader who defied Hitler in 1923 and not allowed him to take power in the Birch Hall porch. He was also eliminated, along with gay stormtroopers, an eclectic mix of people indeed, including some communists, but with this horrible haunting quality that they're all murdered in those few days so brutally and so barbarically. People who were in the end German patriots, many of whom had a real desire to serve their country and they were simply liquidated. And they would not be the last liquidated by Hitler's ambition. What an

extraordinary... Indeed not, indeed not. They were the first, if you like, they were the first of many, many, many, many, many millions in the end. A long, long vista of countless millions of people who died as a result of Hitler's actions. Well, that was remarkable. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast and telling us about that. It's been a great pleasure and I hope we meet again. In the flesh next time. Thank you.

Indeed, when the pandemic is over. Thank you so much. Hi everyone, it's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying, and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it, and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts, and give us a five-star rating and a review. It really helps, and basically boosts up the chart,

which is good, and then more people listen, which is nice. So if you could do that, I'd be very grateful. I understand if you want to subscribe to my TV channel. I understand if you want to buy my calendar, but this is free. Come on, do me a favour. Thanks. 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