Historically High - The Great Depression: Global Edition

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

The fallout of the 1929 crash proved that financial ruin is the ultimate catalyst for chaos. As global trade collapsed, countries turned inward ensuring their own survival. Germany's Weimar Republic fractured under catastrophic unemployment, creating the perfect environment for Adolf Hitler to market radical nationalism as the ultimate cure. Desperate populations traded democratic institutions for the promise of stability, transforming a banking disaster into an authoritarian takeover. Meanwhile, Great Britain and France were too crippled by their own domestic financial ruin to mount a meaningful response without severe public backlash they were unwilling to risk. By the time the dust settled, an isolated Europe had stood completely paralyzed while the guardrails preventing another World War dissolved without anyone watching them.   Thanks for listening and don’t forget to hit subscribe, leave a 5-star rating and write a review. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join us at Patreon.com/HistoricallyHigh and get enrolled for some fun extra content Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Get your passports ready because we're going international for this episode. Part two. We're getting depressed for a second. I was going to say if you weren't depressed enough by part one, it's about to get even more depressing. We're taking our depression all over the world. And it's... Or at least to Europe. No, technically kind of all over the world, right?

Yeah. Oh yeah. No, we visit up north to our friends into the north, Canada. We go to our friends in the deep south today. down in Australia. Far East. Far East. Everyone's feeling this shit.

And that's just to drive home a point before we even get into the episode. That's what the Great Depression the United States did to the world. This was how far in advance our world economy had grown to the point of less than, what, this was the 1930s. So less than 200 years ago, we were just firing cannons off of boats that he had grown. each other and fighting for a revolution. And now we've become such a superpower in the world that a great depression in our country is basically affected the world. I know this is putting on the spot.

But if we can make OJ responsible for the Kardashians, then what responsibility do we have for Hitler? More than I'd like to admit. Yeah. And not like specifically Hitler. but for creating the environment in which someone like that is able to gather the type of control and go on to do what he did. And that's going to kind of be a, the focal point on this is going to be Europe.

And what the climate is in Europe and what the Great Depression does as far as creating this just domino effect of countries turning internal to only look at for themselves and to try to focus not on what other countries are. are doing or keeping watch in other countries that need to be watched after World War I, but then not having the ability. We talk about this during so many World War II episodes. It's like, how the fuck you have France, you have Great Britain, which is on its own island, so it doesn't have a presence on the mainland, but all these other countries that just got

steamrolled. And there's a good chunk of that that's due to the advancement of the German military and everything and the surprise factor. But part of that is also in the complete unpreparedness of these other countries due in a large part to the simple fact that they cannot afford to build up their defenses because of the effects of the Great Depression. I can't even think of the amount of episodes that we've talked about this. How did the rest of Europe let Germany build up such a military force? We hit them with the Treaty of Versailles. There were restrictions on. them left and right. How in the world did everybody turn a blind eye to Germany becoming this powerhouse?

Yeah. And now we get a better, more clear answer because the 1930s for a lot of these superpowers in Europe weren't good. They were so busy looking inward that they weren't focused on making sure that Germany was in compliance with military buildup. And they couldn't afford to you, because had they turned that attention outward or tried to do any type of military buildup, the citizenry which is suffering because of the Great Depression is going to instantly get rid of them or they're going to go ahead and riot.

I don't think we need to do a ton of lead up into this one because it's part two, but if you're one of those weirdos that start shit on a part two, what's wrong? Go back to part one. No, I like it. You freak. No, just kidding. But anyway, if you are here, freak or not, go to patreon.com slash

historically high, get signed up for your bonus content. Ratings, five stars. If you can spare them, Let's keep that number pumping reviews. We love hearing what you guys think about this stuff. It's always pleasant when we throw a little bit of a curveball out. I know that there was maybe a little bit of trepidation throwing Disneyland in directly after Catherine the Great and her crazy Russian escapades going to the mouse and Walt Disney. Yeah, but they're great in their own ways. It's such a, that's why I love doing this because we can switch gears.

to something that's completely different and still enjoyed the research just that much. And from everything that we've seen, the reviews have been fantastic on that. So thank you for writing those reviews. Keep subscribing. Our subscriber numbers are just nice across the board,

and we'd love to see them rise. That's Professor Adam. I'm Professor Chris. Let's get depressed again. I'm ready to be sad again. I'm ready to be hurt again. All right. So just a little.

refresher because, you know, for some of you, it's been a week since our last episode. European agricultural production collapsed because of World War I. Millions of farmers sent to the front line. So the United States picked up the slack. That in turn led to the recovery in Europe, in which case America totally shot the moon. We way over-extended ourselves. Great Depression happens. And the war itself kind of shatters European countries and leaves them heavily in

to the United States. In pretty much all aspects of any conflict in modern history, we have gotten the sweet end of the deal just simply because we are geographically isolated from who we've been fighting against. We don't have to repair any of our cities. In fact, we build so much new shit when war pops off just so we have the capability of rebuilding

all the other shit that gets destroyed. So European countries, are taking out loans from American banks and everything like that, and to pay off the $33 billion in wartime loans that is being ordered by the Treaty of Versailles, which the Weimar Republic that is ruling Germany at this point or running Germany at this point has to pay as far as reparations to France and Great Britain, that completely financially like breaks them.

they have to borrow so much from the United States just to turn around and provide it to France and Great Britain, who then in turn around with payoffs from lend lease and all of that stuff to paying the United States back or banks in the United States. so it creates this insanely fragile loop of international cash where at any point if that money stops flowing into Germany because of oh i don't know financial complications within the united states they're kind of all fucked because france and britain are also banking on this money coming in to help the recovery of their countries So it's just this game of like super dangerous hot potato involving three major players. The right hand of the U.S. hands the money to Germany. Germany hands the money over to France and Britain. And then the left hand of the United States receives the money from France and Britain. Yeah.

And, you know, the moment that the American lending stopped, the whole global system is just completely fucked. So long before the end, actual crash itself in 1929, the world's farmer itself were already filling the depression. So, Europhine farms being completely destroyed, not just farmers being killed, but just the destruction of a lot of land. I didn't even think about that part. Yeah, exactly. Not just the people that were running, it's the land itself to actually do that on.

That, again, led to production in the United States, Canada, and also Argentina being expanded so they could feed the world itself. And in the 1920s, as the European farms recovered, suddenly Europe was like, we don't have to bring in so much shit from outside. But it's still, you know, we can still support ourselves at this point. So we eat cotton and sugar just completely plummet. And for the industry in the United States that we don't have, the countries in Europe are benefiting from their exports coming over. So even though we are kind of dancing around being in a recession and nobody wants to say the R word, nobody wants to admit what's going on, we're still spending money importing things in, this is free trade, there's no tariffs at this point in time. Europe is starting to gain a little bit of traction after the war.

And for a couple of years after World War I, things are on a rebound. They're on a surge. It feels like they're on, but like all isolationist style. Like it's not European countries like working together. It's everybody looking out for themselves to trying to rebuild themselves back up. Because who's going to be, every war feels like there has to be that buildup to see who's going to take the power back. You can be the new like dominant superpower. So there's really just a lot of nationalism. And then when these tariffs are put out, what was it, the Holly Smoot tariffs?

that just again the tariffs that come right back the other direction this just pretty much solidifies this fact that people need to look out for their own countries backfires heavily kills international trade because they're not just able to sell their goods easily to the United States or abroad and it creates this like stagnant global market falling into the same trap that a lot of people did in the United States by 1928 the American stock market being the preeminent you know stock market on the planet at that point was booming so fast that global investors were looking at it being like, we need to be dumping our money into that as well. Back to a previous episode, this is the same stock market that the Dutch put in, right? I believe it is. They always get their revenge. Well, here's what's crazy too, is in American investors who were putting money into Europe for reconstruction, everything like that, also saw the stock market, the stock market,

It's that meme where the guy's walking with his girlfriend, he's looking back, and the girlfriend is European Reconstruction. The girl walking the other direction is the New York Stock Exchange, and it's the guy looking back and American investors being like, we're not going to be making our money as quickly on this whole reconstruction. Philanthropy doesn't really pay the bills a lot. No, not a lot. So we're going to dump all of this investor money into Wall Street.

So foreign investors also pull their money out of their own local economies to gamble on the American stocks, we can it even more. And that sudden drain of capital basically leaves European economies super fragile and entirely defenseless. So when the market finally does break in October of 29, it just takes a light little gust

to knock down the house of sticks or the house of cards, however you want to say it. Everything was so tentative in Europe. It was, and again, it gets back to your point in the beginning. We did the... Yeah, yeah, we did the team music. Whoa.

Yeah, we did. Shit, it's gone. Great Britain. Banana. Gone. The teachings of Billy Blinks. You just pulled it, Chris. I'm the one that usually does that.

Yeah. You want me to try to have you walk it back? We were talking about how... Let's pop it into neutral and see if we can roll start this. Yeah, let's see. Okay. investors, foreign investors putting money into the stock market instead of investing in reconstruction because it maybe wasn't as good of an immediate investment?

Does that do anything for you? Is that tickling your taint at all? Oh, yeah, we'll just, we'll start it down a different path here. You can see how that's an attractive market, because if you are in Great Britain and you're in the middle of reconstruction and you aren't able to put money into your own. economy and get anything out of it, if there's this pretty girl sitting over in the United States and she's waving to you and she's pulling up her skirt and showing you all the money that you can be making. She's not wearing panties. At this point, the stock market is not

wearing underwear. You're going to be less inclined to invest your own British money into a recovery effort. I like how you phrase that, you know, you can't invest your, you can't put your money into your local economy and knock anything out of it. You could definitely put it into your and local economy for the reconstruction. But yeah, again, you're looking over that New York Stock Exchange. She's, she's slutty. She's fast. You're trying to get back to zero in your own country while there's tens over there sitting

on the other coast. And so you can understand the allure that these European countries had for the stock market. It's not the countries. It's the people with a lot of money in those countries. Yeah. And it's, it goes to show that our world economy had just grown. to the point where everything was already so intertwined before World War II. So how we're going to break this down is we're basically going to go country by country.

And then it's all going to kind of lead up to let you know what the status of each country it is or kind of how or why they may have reacted to Germany's activities during that time frame. So we start with Great Britain, right? Yeah, the United Kingdom also referred to the Great Depression as the Great Slump, which feels so English to me that we talk about it as depression, but the Englishers, like, yeah, it's a slump. It doesn't sound as bad when it's slump.

Well, this is also the difference between a country that's been a country since 1776 and a country that has been a country for a millennia. Yeah. At this point in time, we're sitting over there all depressed because we're like, we can't believe this is happening. And Britain's like, we fought 100 years war against France. This is a slump.

let's relax on the naming a little bit. We're not depressed yet. We still got the Battle of Britain coming. We'll talk about depression then when they're dropping bombs down the down into the tubes. The effects from World War I were still showing in the UK for a very long time. Economic output had fallen by 25% between 1918 and 1921. This is the point in time when recovery should be.

happening when they're getting a boom 1918 to 1921 economic output's falling well yeah man they're a massive like global exporter so they get devastated when this worldwide trade falls by half as a result of these tariffs and everyone like then throwing

it's just fucking tariff like tariff slap fight and so like heavy manufacturing mining sectors in northern England Scotland and I think Wales suffered like huge unemployment because nothing was going out because there were no buyers. And then British banks had heavily financed, like collapsing German and Austrian

banks and everything. And again, all of this is being done also kind of in work with the gold standard because all these different countries have different currencies and different rates of exchange and all this kind of stuff. And they're trying to figure this out in a post-war reconstruction environment. And there's the creativity that we're going to talk about with kind of playing with fixing currency and gold standards

and all this kind of stuff. It's very interesting because we talked about in the first episode about FDR fixing the price of gold after they had already hoarded all the gold that they had made the act to stop the hoarding from the public happening. Britain does

something that's not too off of that. So it wouldn't fully recover its manufacturing or its economic output until the end of the Great Depression. And of course, the end of the Great Depression is headed into World War II. So that's why manufacturing and everything and the economy comes back. It's just the workforce too. Because they've lost so many people. Yeah.

There had been attempts to fix the slump. They had the pound sterling, was their standard, had been returned to the gold standard. So they had suspended their gold standard into World War I because, again, fighting a war in your manufacturing shit so you need to make it as cheap as possible if you abandon the gold standard you can print a bunch more money. Hello love, how would you like to end my

great stamp or slump? It had been returned to the pre-war exchange rate. It hurts British exports because the world market all of their exports become far more expensive. That leads them to lower workers' wages to become

more competitive cost on the market. If you lower workers' wages, it's going to drop consumer spending power and purchases are going to be made less and less. It keeps industrial areas in a recession pretty much throughout the 20s. So as we were talking about a kind of a false paper tiger situation of manufacturing and the economy happening in the United States, Britain just never gets back to that. Ours is like our economic thing was like a depression mullet.

It was party in the front where all the cities are front and center we could see and it was poverty in the back in all the rural areas. Because Britain has also looked at because of its status and the world is like a power and because of its longevity, when they do that thing of officially abandoning the gold standard in September of 1931, other countries are looking at it being like, oh, so are we not? doing gold anymore. And they end up doing the same thing to kind of save their own economies. So this system that is already so fragile and delicate is just having shit thrown into it that's just making it less and less stable. And at this point with everyone kind of doing their own thing, that's why so much is being done that goes without anyone noticing.

Yeah. You also have a situation in the UK where. you have commonwealth countries like Canada and Australia and not India at this point in time. I think India, it took to like the 60s. But they're tying their currency to the British pound abandoning the gold standard themselves. So now the choice that Great Britain made is going to affect two other countries very far away from them. Yeah. And it creates this market instability.

So just going through the 20s alone, the unemployment rate in the UK hovered right around 14%. Some years it was down to 10. Its peak hit in 1921, so very early at 23%. Also, we're talking about a country whose population is going to be vastly smaller in the United States. A landmass perspective. The Labor Party ends up taking power in 1929. and it wasn't full of economists. Unfortunately for the United Kingdom,

economists weren't rife within this labor party that takes power. They had this classical approach of a balanced budget at pretty much any cost. A balanced budget during this point in time is always going to hurt growth in industry because there's not any money that's being put towards growing these industries. The October market crash was precipitated and we talked about a little bit in the previous episode by British financier Clarence Hattree. He was caught committing fraud. He was trying to float himself a million bucks without any backing.

As his entire empire collapses, there's a contraction in private lending. This isn't just the government lending money anymore. This was a guy who financed a lot of businesses who merged large steel companies inside of England that's now just off the map. After the Wall Street crash, British economists were split on how they were going to go. There was a chance to fall back off of this gold standard and be able to devalue your currency, be able to print more money. It was one choice. By then, worldwide investors were pulling gold from London at a rate of two and a half million pounds a day. that was how fast the gold was leaving England

so if that's going to happen if they're pulling all that gold out moving off the gold standard is probably not a terrible idea right if we don't have any like why would we be held in the standard with it this gentleman named McDonald had back the idea to balance the budget by raising I believe he was the prime minister

He wanted to balance a budget by raising taxes, cutting spending, and cutting unemployment Benis by 20%. Now, at this point in time, we're talking in 1930s. We had an unemployment rate that was hovering around 14%. They have unemployment benefits for these people that are still trying to find work. We're slashing their benefits by 20%, cutting down their buying power, and we're going to raise their taxes. This all sounds like a very, very bad idea.

And it was because this almost gets him axed pretty much immediately. Do you? So like even just getting this far into the ramifications talking about Britain and having this all tie back to Wall Street, are they just like fucking yanks? are they fucking like how did this happen how did they fuck this up like first the revolutionary war now this and then guess what here in just a few years we're all over there and everything yeah and at that point they you know they can't complain because having us over there is going to help them in the war quicker we built up a little goodwill with world war one we did but then i mean we're fucking them now

Yeah, they were waiting for the other shoot of drop. They were probably cool with like the common soldiers because everyone had gotten fucked. Uh-huh. Anybody in the upper echelons, the government or anything like that with the greasy dick that did the fucking, they were probably not welcome. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry for the imagery there. I could see that.

Instead of McDonald getting axed, they decide on this kind of national government conglomeration of parties that's formed. Uh, 20's unemployment rate of the average of 14%. it ballooned to 20% by 1931. Some of these regions were hit so much harder depending on the industry that was in that region. I, it's, there were shipbuilding towns in the northeast that had reached 70% unemployment.

Because I mean, the entire industry is probably, it's like one of those towns you think of like, Norfolk. It's nothing but, you know, Norfolk News. It's just a shipbuilding town. So if like or like think of certain towns in Pennsylvania that might be just completely steel town 70%. Hershey Pennsylvania.

What if Hershey went under? 100% of Hershey's screwed. What do you do if you're still the 30% in that town that has a job? That's the people that are running the stuff that was there to support the larger business like the grocers or the barkeepers or the launders and like all of that stuff. but then what happens when the people who are keeping you in business no longer have jobs? So like what does that do? What's still in business at that point? Luckily, even though it's not a system that anybody wanted to be on,

there was the social safety net of welfare over there. They had been a country long enough and they had seen enough homelessness and unemployment throughout a millennia that they realized that a social safety net was necessary. In late 1931, there's an adjustment to social. social welfare, or to the welfare program, that kind of levels the playing field. Because previously, the amount of welfare that you were receiving was based on your previous contributions. Now it was switched from previous contributions to the need.

So the people that hadn't contributed much before are now able to get it based upon how bad of a situation that's already. Okay. Northeast, like I say, 70% unemployment. The hunger marches that happened in the 20s and 30s came from a lot of these regions. The largest one came in 1932. I don't want to poke fun at the English too much about this because it's a hunger march and it's a sad thing. We had 25,000 march for their bonus on the,

the bonus expeditionary force in America. Yeah, the veterans from World War I. They rounded up 5,000 people. And again, they're small. Yeah. Again, it's not something to poke fun at. They didn't have as far to march. There's not as far of a place to march to pick up, you know, people.

Fair, yeah. They're not just going to do loops around. They're just going to circle London. Yeah, just a swirl. It gets a little closer every time. Recovery proved pretty difficult based upon their death. compared to the GDP that they were producing. Their debts accumulated 180% of their yearly GDP.

That they were paying to go ahead and pay off the stuff that they had accrued during World War I. You're never going to be able to pay off a debt when you're making that much less to make those payments. Their bounce back was due to abandoning the gold standard, dropping interest rates when they abandoned the gold standard because they can start to manipulate their currency. It brings this massive construction boom in the south. And then by 1936, there's... That's unfortunate because that's the area that gets bombed the most. They built it up for a few years just to see you get knocked down.

1936 mass reararmament is starting to buoy the rest of the country to prep for World War II. Those shipbuilding areas in the northeast, all of a sudden they're building submarines, they're building cruisers, they're building everything for the British Navy. You're building the Royal Navy. To start, yeah, the Royal Navy, to start preparing for what is coming. And this is just out of necessity. This wasn't an idea. This wasn't a plan.

And it's not what's coming in the sense of like we know that Germany is going to do something. It's them looking around at Europe and possibly seeing a buildup or an opportunity of saying, we need to modernize. like the same thing that we used in World War I, that's not going to be the same thing that's going to dominate the next, you know, era of war or whatever you want to say. So we need to start doing it.

Now, there probably was some indication of the Germans building it up because they could only do so in certain places. Yeah. That would have been along the waterways that could have access to like the North Sea and everything. But, I mean, even them starting to put a little money back in a buildup, It wasn't huge because you couldn't pull funding away from, like, you were talking about those social programs that were keeping people afloat and being like, well, we need to pour it into soldiers.

Like, why we just fought a war like, what are you guys preparing for? We just fought the Great War 15 or however many years ago it was. We're still recovering from that. There's still people that are unemployed. No way Germany is building themselves back up, right? Because you guys have been keeping an eye on them since that Treaty of Versailles. Well, obviously, like, look at us. We won the war.

This is going to be a common theme kind of throughout a lot of these countries is it's, if we're doing this bad and we won the war, how bad is the country doing that is having to pay us and lost the war? So not only did they lose, but they're also sending their money to us. So we have our money and their money and we're doing this bad. They have got to be doing just horrible, zero threat, right? They're manufacturing stick guns. they are manufacturing rock grenades. Well, and here's the thing, too.

We talked about in a few of the World War one episodes, but Germany itself wasn't really damaged. That's why there was this big thing, and what leads to something that Hitler's going to touch on a lot, is we weren't in a bad position. We were sabotaged during the Great War. We were broken from the inside. And people believe that because,

unlike World War II, that's going to involve a lot of bombing campaigns, that wasn't really a thing that got close to the populated centers of Germany. So German infrastructure is still very much in place. Its economy is not doing great, but if it makes a few tweaks and really puts all its eggs in one basket,

it has the ability to really get up and running. But that's not the expectation, because why would a country that just lost and has this Treaty of Versailles in place that explicitly tells them, hey, no doing that, they definitely wouldn't do that, right? And it's not like we're going to watch them because we got, you know, our own problems at home. And it's not, I think we've talked about it a lot leading into World War I. Germany was hot.

Germany was a leading center of progress in Europe before World War I. That's the reason why they wanted to feel it out during World War I. one because they had been sitting in probably third, maybe fourth, somewhere in the pecking order in Europe. Yeah. But definitely behind Great Britain, France, and then it probably would have been someone in front of Germany. Yeah. It would have been Austria-Hungary. Probably.

Oh, the empire, yeah. Yeah. So Germany in a sense, when in the World War I. Huh? They were getting ready to get old yellowed. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, they were kind of on their last leg. Same thing with the Ottoman Empire.

It's a The reason why Germany went into World War I Is because they were trying to establish this pecking order So it's not like if they were able to retool and rebuild That they would have to push themselves to new heights Because they had already been able to manufacture a very apt army during World War I Yeah So they know what they're doing

Um France France How did they notice? La Grande de Prisienne Sounds romantic actually A little bit Like someone, like, well, hold on.

Like, I loved her so much that after she left me, I suffered from La Grande Depression. Definitely more emotional sounding for sure. Yeah. Or the crisis. And compared to the U.S. and U.K., France actually had a pretty solid 1920s. Their economy had grown year over year by more than 4%. So they're seeing growth throughout the 20s. the 1930s only saw a decline of about 0.6%.

Unemployment peaked at under 5%. Now, there's a darker side to why unemployment only peaks under 5%. Yeah. I mean, and here's the thing too. We'll get to that. You can sad the people here in just a second. France was kind of initially insulated from a lot of that early crisis because in France fashion, it had a massive cash of the world.

gold and its economy was built on and I actually kind of really like this aspect was built on small to medium businesses rather than like complex stock markets you should love it because that's how it should be I know that's okay yeah so um the crisis didn't like severely strike them until 1931 so like two years after the actual like crash and it's unemployment remained low compared to Germany, but it's economic growth flatline for the rest of the decade. Because while its unemployment remained low, you're still counting on something to occur to create more workers and something that had happened to them that kind of prevented this expected amount of contribution to the workforce to not really be there. Yeah. What was the number 1.2 million soldiers that were lost

in France and casualties and all of these men, young, svelte of working age, are now wiped off the map. So it's hard to have a massive number of unemployment when your workforce is diminished by 1.2 million or however many people it was. So you're, it's so low because you're, you don't have enough people to have a high unemployment. Because you lost a huge portion of them. But it's also making gross stagnant because, As much as some people would like to debate this, youth kind of leads to innovation of certain things. And when you lose a whole segment of that young generation, you're going to stagnate. You're going to have to wait until that next generation comes up to try to play some type of catch-up.

Well, it's not going to occur fast enough. France ends up kind of like refusing to abandon the gold standard or devalue the franc. Because they had so much gold. I know. Yeah. But this also made French exports incredibly expensive. and completely uncompetitive globally, which, again, leads to part of that, like, flatlined growth

because none of the stuff they're sending out people can afford to get. Oh. So what also leads to kind of this, with this kind of financial instability in there as well, is different groups that are controlling the country. So different, like, parties in government. And there's these disagreements over, like,

mandatory government spending cuts, like deflation policies, and all of this political unrest or social unrest that ends up leading to the rise of this popular front coalition that's, I guess, kind of more like left-leaning or whatever that would be considered in France. I don't know how they do their hot and cold. I think they were considered socialist. Okay.

But also the radicals, they had a radical party that was just kind of slightly left of center. So radical seems like a weird title to give them. And this was in 1936. So when you don't have like stability within the government. Some things get thrown to the west side, and some of that could be defense or what you're spending money on, especially if someone doesn't have the opportunity to stay in there long

enough to see like a specific vision completed. There's certainly some things that I just look at France and can smile at, and one of them is just their general disdain for their government. You start to wonder, because France is a very oldest out. country, if that's just the natural order of things. Everything is good until the populace gets pissed off, and then all of a sudden there's a riot that leads in 1934 to the fall of the government. Well, and what this ends up leading to is this decision on France's part instead of saying,

okay, what do we think, you know, the last war was a very static. It's a static is when it's in the same place. A very static war. It's just, it was trench warfare. How do we prevent something like that from happening again? let's just make a wall or a line, the Maginot Line, will pour a ton of resources into that. They won't be able to get back into France to create any, even if they do invade us again. And then instead of having to go ahead advancements in like tanks or planes and things like that,

we still have the most artillery and most of the resources anyway, especially after these countries are kind of have been defeated. And again, looking over at Germany, we're getting paid by them. how bad are they doing if they're having to pay us money and they can't build this thing up because we made them sign that piece of paper on the railroad card? Well, Germany was doing a massive favor to France because throughout the entirety of this depression, production never fell more than 20% in the country of France. And so that means if their production is still going and people are still able to buy, they're not having to sink the reparations that they're getting from Germany necessarily into their

economy. They were also pulling a bunch of resources out of Germany as well because that was one of the big talking points for Hitler was that French bellies are being fed by German crops or something like that. Yeah, well, they had had different times when they had occupied the rur and shit, the other economic hotbed in the area down there. Or that's the rur valley is right there. Yeah. You're thinking, oh God, I saw the name too. The industrial hub? Yeah. Let me look for it. Okay. Sudetland?

Yeah. Maybe. We'll stick a pin in yes for that now. But these German reparations are basically just being passed off to the United States for their war debt. So Germany is paying their war debt when they're paying. And then when Germany's missing payments, France is like, well, fuck you. We're going to come in and take over the rur. We're going to occupy this area because you're not following through.

on your Versailles agreements. And it's kind of a situation where Germany is still getting picked on. But at the same time, the biggest factor in what's going on is being financially picked on. You can be as angry as you want about French occupation, but the French are only there because you were stuck with this enormously high indemnity that you had to pay to them. Right around the time that this popular front. gets voted in that you were talking about in 1936, they embark on some kind of, I guess, some more social safety nets, but they're fighting for the people. They introduce holiday pay,

and they make mandatory 40-hour work weeks. They are revitalizing the, I guess, the workers' rights. There's a rise in wages that happens in June 1936, and increased workers buying power. this is coming at a great time because while everybody else was using the war to pull themselves out of a massive hole, France is kind of treading enough water while just hoping and praying that this doesn't happen a second time. And if it does, the Maginot Line's going to have them protected. Well, France is always won. France will endure. Yeah, even with a hand or two. Somehow they come out on top. well if they've all got the mentality of your boy um the asperius chaldigal then they didn't need anyone's help france would have liberated itself yeah would have taken a little bit longer we're taking some mcgiverr i can't even talk shit about france because having some historical know-how we'd still be fucking speaking british and have really bad teeth if it weren't for the french i hate hot tea

i do not like hot tea love iced tea not hot tea When you do the handoff, there's a new socialist government agenda that finally kind of is bordering on maybe a little too far to the left. There's a correction in government, and you get a new government that's formed in 1938, which is in the goddamn neck of time to get a new government in there. And then at that point, armaments industry is in full swing for World War II. So by 38th, that's happening. I think you said it was 382 with Britain is when the Navy started to get built back up and everything, or very close to it. So they obviously know something is happening. World War II not technically kick off until 39.

But if they're at 38, even 30, it might have been 36 with Britain. They're so far behind because we're going to get to Germany. We're going to save Germany for last because that's where most of this actually comes to really. The chickens come home to roost. But this is what shows you how far. behind. They are. They're probably aware that Germany's up to something, but they're just trying to play desperate game of catch-up. They're closing their eyes and they're putting their fingers in the ears when it comes to Germany. Pretty much. And France should it be especially aware,

considering that they're right there. Here's the other thing too, Spanish Civil War. You have... I was thinking about the whole pilot thing where they were like they were training the pilots over in the Spanish Civil War. Oh, yeah. Okay. You would have to get the planes and the pilots over there, right? Does that mean they're flying over France? And so France is just constantly having these, like, German pilots and fighters flying over the country and being like, where do you think they're going? What are they doing? Or do they have to take a long way around by like ships and then assemble them there?

Like, how does that work? Yeah, because if they even went south, they would be running into the south of France. And even if you're training them over there. And they've got limited distances because they're fighters. Yeah. A question for another day. Yeah, maybe they're hoping to fly down into Italy and then go from Italy. Speaking of Italy.

Let's get to, let's get to Italy. Italy's economy was severely fragile. Now, Mussolini was in power, I think, since 22. 1922 is when Mussolini, we did a whole episode on him. Go listen to, didn't we? I think Benny got, did Benny get two? He might have gotten two. I forgot.

that he jumped in that early. Oh, yeah, that's why Hitler was such a fanboy of him. That's right. That's why he was, you're my only friend, Joe. Hitler had three pictures up in his office. He sent a secret mission to bust Benny out of fancy prison. At that point in time, it was more I need to get a hold of you instead of I admire you. I got to keep the black shirts in check.

I've cleaned up enough of your shit in World War II that I've kind of had enough of you. but Hitler had pictures of Frederick the Great on his wall. He had a picture of Nito, and then he had a picture of Henry Ford sitting on his desk. So those were kind of his three guys. And Italy comes pretty close to failure. It's the deck of cards, or I guess the dominoes and how they could have fallen here. Had Italy come close enough to failure that they had actually failed, I think World War II looks a fuzz different.

It does. And I mean, they are suffering from high unemployment. And Italy, like, is in a... exactly flush with like raw materials like oil and coil and to basically distract the public from you know the domestic economic or economic misery you know when you read something in history is just so current it repeats itself so to distract the public from and just sub in anything you want for domestic economic misery you could sub in pedophilia scandals or kind of anything you want Benito Mussolini or any other character

launched the brutal invasion of Abyssinia, which is Ethiopia in 1935. Or you launch the invasion or attack on another country that you're trying to get oil from and stuff like that. Hey, maybe multiples. Yeah. Maybe you're knocking out world leaders in other South American countries.

Exactly. Again, this is just, I don't know, there's a certain playbook to these guys. The Ethiopian campaign combined with Italy's really heavy intervention in the Spanish Civil War, which took place from 36 to 39, pretty much drained their entire treasury.

They weren't smart about this. Musonle, he wasn't a smart guy. He was a very charismatic guy, but he was not smart about this. And everybody he surrounded himself with were friends, and it was not a meritocracy. A lot of sycophants. But what this resulted in is

it leaves Italy's military just completely drained. Their equipment is very subpar and really, really unprepared for a conflict in 1939, which in Ben's defense, they were not supposed to do any type of action according to the H-man. Hitler told him, hey, chill, we're not doing anything for a few years. And then called him Beckham as like, we're going to have to move it up a bit, like to now. and so completely not ready for it

but still attempting because he had gotten down there for Ethiopia he's like I'll just take over the rest of North Africa and reestablish the Roman Empire he needed to get some points up on the board he wanted to get his name on the

trophy so he had to do something when he had to I mean the strategic advantage of trying to pull British resources to have to defend North African everything meant that it was going to buy Hitler more time from getting invaded by Britain

and everything. Musilini thought he was attacking the fat underbelly, and it turns out that he was the only fat underbelly in North Africa at that point in time. The financial kind of crisis ends up peaking in 1932 for Italy. Government, as one would do, in a fascist enterprise that they were running, begins their intervention. There was something called the Industrial Reconstruction Institute

that had formed in January of 1933. And at this point in time, the banks had taken control of a lot of the industry because all of these companies were defaulting on their loans. So the bank owned a lot of these companies. The Industrial Reconstruction Institute then takes over all of the bank-owned companies. And Italy, I mean, say what you will about what they do, had the largest state-owned industrial sector in Europe. And that's with the exception of Russia, of course.

But that shows you what they were able to do. They couldn't do shit. They had the largest industrial capacity and they couldn't do anything with it. Yeah. It took till about 1935 to recover manufacturing levels in 1930. So they had a long way to go to crawl back into it. And as we're talking, I believe it was, was it in 39 when Mussolini had told Hitler that it was going to be two years before they were ready? Something like that, yeah.

And so their industries are already moving up. But as we talked about in the North African campaign, they're sending World War I mechanized armies down into North Africa. They crossed their fingers that the guys in from Britain, they're like, hopefully they're doing the same and sending all their second-rate shit down to North Africa. Turns out they didn't. They sent Monty. We got to do Monty against them.

I know. I miss Monty. Yeah, go ahead. Do you, besides that, I mean, Italy's, this was so much of a different approach. We talked about the way that UK and France kind of had this battle and this dancing around manipulating their currency and different approaches that they took to gold and social programs and all of these different things. and now we jump into a country of Italy who is fascist and just completely lets their country go to the point of where they say, okay, well, instead of letting private industry flourish, we're just going to turn everything into government-run organizations. Yeah. And then makes it also very, very appealing, being clearly not very self-sufficient or not economically stable.

It makes the offer of, hey, come do this thing. with me and I'll let you take over a bunch of this land. You can conquer a bunch and then you guys will be flush with resources and everything. And you guys will be big and powerful. He's like, okay, yeah, I guess. All right, where are we moving on to now? We want to go to one of the

Commonwealths. We want to go to Australia. We can go to Australia. This was known in Australia as the Sousseau. To all our Australian listeners, good day. Great. Just talk to you again. We haven't talked about you in a while. Miss you.

was hit by the downturn with unemployment peaking it more than 32% in 1932. One and three people in the workforce are out of work in 1932. They became very, very reliant on government aid and relief projects to survive. The reason why they call it the Sousseau is because they were given these things called Sousseau stamps or tokens that they were able to use to redeem for just basic rations. like flour and tea and sugar. And the big problem is there are two main industries of wool and meat prices

that tanked because we have a trade war that's going on in the 30s, a tariff war. If there's a tariff war with England, it encompasses all of their areas. Yeah, and these commonwealths are trying to survive with

mild intervention on Britain's part because Britain, for the most part. One of the things that we didn't mention about them was able to gain a lot because they just sucked as many resources as they possibly could and as much money out of India. Because again, they weren't a commonwealth. I don't believe at this point in time. I'm going to keep saying it. I'm going to be so wrong, but I feel like it's the 60s. I'll have to look it up eventually. But that's the two main enterprises that kind of help a country crawl out of a whole gradually is wool and meat prices. And if you're thinking about where the fighting is going on during World War

two, you're going to need a lot of wool. Yeah. And you're going to need a lot of meat that you can turn into rations for these guys. And they go sort of in the way that England goes because they are a commonwealth. Where we want to go next? China? Yes, let's go to the Far East. I couldn't find the fun name for this in China.

Wouldn't have been able to pronounce it. No, probably not. But China responds in a completely different way. We talked about how fascism kind of failed nidly to really make a big response. China responds after being largely unaffected by most of the Depression, partially because they're communist. Yeah. They have this struggle going on in this fight between the communists and the other forces. and they're staying out of more international sectors.

Here's the thing, too. We've talked about China in this way. They got fucked with so much that eventually they just turned isolationist, figured out something that worked for them. Again, I can't speak to if it works for the bulk of their population or anything like that.

Probably not. But it's weird to say that the two countries that were affected the least by the Great Depression were China, the Soviet Union. If you're not playing ball with everybody else in a capitalist society

stuff's going to go different. There were the kids over in the lot behind the ball field hitting each other with rocks. Playing rock tag. What'd you guys lose today? Nothing. We didn't invest in anything. Us too. It was fantastic. Any sort of

fight that they had was counterbalanced by heavy public works projects. And really part of it for China is they didn't really have the full long wait for the run up to World War II because Japan had come into Manchuria in 1931. So this is a situation where China seeing Japan now. It is so weird to think that like there were already these wars like going on between countries. And then, like, eventually enough countries started going to war with each other that everyone was just like, fuck, it's World War. Game on. Yeah, people just start picking sides.

They wouldn't feel the full-scale attack kind of into China proper. I believe it was the second Sino-Japanese War until 1937. But at the same time, you have six years to where China will be responding in their armaments to try to keep Japan out. And as we know, it wasn't enough. Japan was a whole different beast when it comes to trying to deny them land, I guess you could say. Next, Canada? Sure. I couldn't find it for sure, but I'm 95% sure that they consider the Great Depression as the great bummer, eh?

I think it's the, oh, it's the great source. The great sorry. The great sorry, eh? Feel sorry for you. They get double fucked by the market crash and the dust bowl because they are on the same continent of us. And they are connected to the same Great Plains region as us. So not only did they have to deal with the market crash,

which they were heavily invested in because they were neighbors, they also had to deal with the dust bowl just wrecking their agricultural projects. And then also the economic fallout of Great Britain because of the tariffs and all that shit. Yep. industrial production Why are you still all so polite? Yeah, no kidding.

Why in the world do you still have the king's face on your money? Blows me away. Industrial production had fallen by 1932 to only about 58% of what it had done in 1929. So it had almost fallen by half. The total national income had fallen 56% from the 1929 totals By 1933, they had reached 30% unemployment. Another third. It's so incredible that a country could survive that high of an unemployment rate.

Export-driven economy is crushed by plummeting wheat prices, by bad drought that they're going through. Again, anything that we went through from an ecological standpoint, they're going through the same shit. And anything that we're growing, chances are they're growing similar because of the... The environments. Yeah. Yeah. their heavy reliance on exports of raw materials is crushed when these smooth holly tariff acts come online because it turns into this tariff war to where they're not going back and forth in trade

the restriction of imports by the United States and Britain because they were trying to have people buy local themselves saw Canada exports fall from values of 1.3 billion in 1928. to just 500 million in 1932. So more than 50% closer to like 60. Man, four years. It's a quick drop. Maybe the thing that hurt them the most. U.S. imports of Canadian maple syrup.

No. No. It dropped to under 400,000 gallons annually. In the early 30s is when this happens. It's the toughest pill to swallow, this whole thing. The late 20s. Nice. the late 20s

the United States was importing over a million gallons of maple syrup it's a major export for them it's got to hurt I imagine that

that's probably why our depression got so bad was because we didn't have all that extra maple syrup to make us happy I mean it's definitely

going to contribute to it you know what makes like if you're trying to just piece pancakes together with flour and something that's one thing too

that I didn't mention the first episode with like stretching food and making desserts, you have no idea how many desserts I saw with recipes that advertised. They were like, no milk, no egg desserts. And I was like, and like no sugar, I was like, oh my God,

like what is in this dessert? But at the same time, if you just put flour and water together, make a pancake, it might taste horrible, but you put maple syrup on that. Maple syrup can make almost anything edible. Yeah. And if you don't believe us, do us a favor.

Go put Nago in the toaster and just raw dog it and eat it without syrup. Then we can talk about how important syrup is. An ego. An egg waffle. Oh, I thought you said an egg. I was like, the fuck are you cooking your eggs? Yeah, probably not in a toaster.

Probably not. Yeah, you get yourself a waffle, you pop it in the toaster, you eat it dry, and then we'll talk about how important maple syrup is. An animal just raw dog in an ego. All right, before we continue on, bathroom break? Sure. Well, hello. Listen, while we had to the restroom and get ourselves something to drink,

Why don't you do something nice for yourselves? Head on over to patreon.com slash historically high and get signed up for a little bonus content. I mean, come on, you deserve it. If you want to keep up with this, our main source of social media is going to be our Instagram, which is historically high pod, P-O-D. You can also head over to its Twitter, it's X, it's Twitter, come on,

at historically high, and that's high-H-I-like, high. If you have any recommendations, you want to get to us, just want to reach out and say hello. You can hit us up on our email at historically high podcast, higah podcast at gmail.com. All right. And with that said, let's get back to the good stuff. All right. Moving on to Madar Russia, the Soviet Union. Because the Soviet Union operated under a closed communist system, it had a lot of insulation, a lot of protection. from the collapse affecting all of the other Western capitalist stock markets. They were kind of just sitting back.

You know what? I don't think they were watching a lot because they were dealing with a lot of shit up to that point. They were in a very unique position of overthrowing their monarchy. So that happened in what, 1918? Because that was what, or 1916-ish? It was like the December Revolution or whatever it was. that saw them exit World War I? Yep, and then it saw Tsar Nicholas overthrown by,

and then Lenin put in, right? And then after Lenin, Stalin went in? Yes. Yeah, that sounds right. So Joseph Stalin basically uses this time that everyone else is kind of at their weakest to buy a bunch of like cheap Western machinery, hire unemployed foreign engineers.

And basically through this, you know, one of his little five-year plans that he did, just goes through this rapid industrialization and kind of reestablishing kind of in the same way that Italy did where they have the control of all of the means of everything since they're rebuilding all this industrialization which is weird because kind of thinking about it in World War II terms like I guess it was not so much that they were super unprepared it was that Hitler kind of boned them after the agreement Yeah. Yes. That was it. Can you imagine, though, like, this actually served to the benefit of the Soviet Union

because they were able to afford all of this stuff on the cheap that all of these other Western countries were getting rid of and basically just, like, build up his country. So he was actually actively advancing while everyone else was just trying to kind of scrape by to survive. With old technology. But he still buying a lot of it, apparently. Yeah. But this kind of creates this massive, heavy industrial base. in the Ural Mountains, which allows the Soviet Union to construct, you know, thousands of tanks and aircraft in that area where it was protected far enough away that Germany couldn't touch it. So that distance, you know, how we always talk about during those episodes between where Germany invaded and actually even getting to Moscow and then even past that further, you know, toward the Ural's, it's like, we're just going to make all our stuff here. We can send it to the front.

but if they can't stop us from making it like there's no point I wonder if intelligence at that point had come back and when they finally spotted them they said all their all their manufacturers in the Ural Mountains they couldn't get that well how would they get that far even if they got it that's the German

high command response is just where are the Ural Mountains that's probably yeah we barely found Moscow we had to drive so far into find Mosk now we have to find the Ural Mountains they're like can we get a hold of of Catherine's maps that she had written or that she had had drafted. Go with me on this one.

We can't touch them flying north. Is there any chance we could touch them flying south? Looping all the way around, not knowing how big Russia is. We're going to go backwards. But this is what allowed Russia after it was able to kind of get its feet under it. And again, with Russia, the biggest problem was Stalin because they had gone through that military purge. This makes me realize how much the purge hamstrung, even Russia, even more so, because Soviet Union has all of this infrastructure to basically match the capacity, if not exceed it,

for like production than Germany does. They just have such anept military leadership from the beginning because of the purge that it takes them a while for just the leadership to catch up with their, I guess, their industrial capabilities. Yeah. I, I, For as much as the depression didn't touch them, it wasn't like the Soviet Union. People were still depressed. Well, yeah, the Soviet Union wasn't free of this because we had in 32 and 33, there was the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine that happened. And in that time, there were at least 5 million people that died and 3.9 million people just in Ukraine alone.

Jesus. So while we were talking. talking about 2 million people homeless kind of towards the tail end of the Great Depression. There was a point in time when 5 million Soviets died because of a famine. See, that just makes capitalism look like even more pussy bullshit because it's like, oh, we're 2 million homeless. Were you homeless? Yeah, we had 5 die because they couldn't eat.

And it wasn't anything besides kind of something that was manufactured by the Soviet. Union. This was a Stalin-esque thing that was going on because he was trying to feed these growing cities and just basically stripped the land of Ukraine of any kind of grain or resources and all those people died. So if I'm going to take one or the other, I do feel like I'm taking great depression over deadly famine. Yes. Puts it in perspective. Definitely does. Anything else with the Soviets?

No. the haponnese Between 1929 and 1931 Japan's economy had shrunk by 8%. They were some logical steps that they end up taking

in the form of a plan kind of hatched I guess it was more of an ideology of belief system maybe from a British economist named John Maynard Kins or Kinse or yeah Kinsie

we'll go Kinsey whatever He does Kinesian economics. His solution to solving the Great Depression was twofold. You're going to, one, reduce interest rates, two, government investments in industry. Easy one two punch. You reduce interest rates. You allow more money into the populace, government invests in industry.

The biggest problem with this, though, is that turns into a massive deficit for your government. your deficit spending so much. Japan understands that there needs to be a solution here. I'm talking about Japan in pretty glowing terms, knowing what they're going to go over and do in China and then to us in the Pacific War. You're going to try to stay in the moment. Yeah.

They introduced this large stimulus package that funded military expenditures. There were rural emergency relief programs for the rice and silk industries because in the Great Depression, there's not a lot of silk buying going on. Rice surprised me. I figured rice, maybe the price was different from wheat, but I feel like rice would have been a pretty cheap. I feel like rice and potatoes would have been kind of the equivalent between the different countries. Oh, yeah. You can see that.

Like a starch or a carb. Yeah. They dump 860 million yen into these programs. They had these massive irrigation projects. They're building roads. There's land improvements. checks for farmers go directly out to try to kind of cushion some of the loss in those industries. This was kind of wild.

So 76% of the towns and villages in Japan were designated for revitalization. And instead of the Japanese federal government, be federal government, right? Country government? Just the Japanese government, I guess. Japanese government, instead of making the choices for themselves, they created these local kind of committees that lived in these cities or these towns and villages. And they allowed them to draft their own like debt reduction plans as far as like where to save money, plans to lower living costs for the citizens in the area.

That makes a ton of sense because everything is individualized because one area is not a, you know, not like the other. Yeah, there's no blanket solution for areas that just do different things. See, I see what you mean here. You got to stay in the moment because you've got to give them their props for doing something so, you know, forward thinking. But at the same time, you're also thinking forward to what they're going to be doing. Yep. I'm thinking about some stuff that happens in Nanjing. I'm thinking about some stuff that happens in the Philippines.

Thinking about all the things, all the things that happen. Thinking about some death marches, some not good stuff. but to follow that up, they end up devaluing the currency by abandoning the gold standard. They devalue the currency off of, it's like 60-ish percent against the U.S. dollar. So yen is growing at a very fast rate to where they can be printing it. exports become wildly desirable because they're so cheap, that boost manufacturing. It just changes the approach to how trade goes, because if you make something so cheap that even the tariff that's put on it will still keep the price competitive, you're going to be

able to move stuff. Yeah. You just have to move it in quantity. Yeah, you might not be doing silk, but as you were talking about with the starch-to-starch comparison, and rice can be sent to a lot of places. People don't need silk to survive. Rice, yeah, rice is always going to be necessary. I feel like Japan, again, notwithstanding what they do later,

this was a very logical response. They weren't scared to spend against their budget to make sure that their people can get moved to the system fed. Correct. In turn, their... That was them taking care of things from like a social aspect, from a material aspect. That's when they get shitty. When they're like, we don't have the material infrastructure or the resources to keep this up long term,

where you've got to go out and do all the horrendous shit to get that stuff. It feels so weird to juxtapose the way that they handled this to kind of what you... It's because, again, anybody that was not Japanese in their eyes. Yeah. But even like their culture today Where they just kind of run their people into the ground At the price of I guess advancement technology I guess yeah

Instead of looking to try to help their people They're like why aren't you at work Go sleep in that bush for three hours Sleep off the hangover from the alcoholism that you have Run over to a vending machine Buy some panties sniff them And get back in that beautiful Get your mind right

Get back in the game All right Speaking of panty vending machines, Austria. I don't think they have those in Austria, but I haven't been there, so I cannot say for 100% certain if they do or not. I bet they have some wild stuff in vending machines. I guarantee you they have cigarettes in vending machines like we used to have here. You think so? Yeah.

Okay. For sure. So even though it's a pretty small nation, Austria really contributed heavily to triggering Europe's financial meltdown. Jumping back a little bit on May 11th of 1931, Austria's largest bank, largest bank which was called Crediton Stalt announced that it had lost over half its capital. It was one of those, I guess, like too big to fail type situations, but it held 27% of the entire country's banking assets. More than a quarter of the countries, and it had lost half of that.

Just millions of people. An eighth of the value is just gone from an entire country? Yes. Oh my God. The government scrambled to basically like bail out the bank caused this huge panic because of course this is going to have to get out with it being a huge bank like this. It triggers these massive bank runs like we had talked about

where people are just rushing into withdraw everything across all of Central Europe and basically driving all of the funds completely out of the region. And I don't know if we've really touched on it because I can't speak to European banking, but during this time, this is when people brought in money, left it there thinking it was safe, leaving the bank, and then the bank using that money to make investments or to loan out and everything. So when that money's gone, that physical money, it's gone. There's no insurance or anything like that. So when that money leaves the bank, it's not like, hey, give us a few days to try to call the banks in the area and gather it back up so you can make your withdrawal.

It's no, I'm sorry, sir, you no longer have a savings account. Can you maybe make a phone call? No, not necessary. There's no one to call. We're the fucking bank, man. There's not a magical place where we keep your money. You speak to a manager. He's on the roof right now.

I don't know what he's doing up there. He's trying to get the window opened up in his fourth floor office. All right. And moving to, I guess, the star of this show. the one who takes the PSDETES instance, the one that takes advantage of this Germany

Germany is the most fragile country in Europe after World War I just because all it relies on for this artificial prosperity or whatever it is is the American loans

to pay off its reparations and as soon as something stops the influx of that money coming in they're done. Is it fair to say that Germany had a oh shit 30-ish year run

of the highest highs and the lowest lows? I mean yeah it depends on how you define it as far as like the people from within that country like what like what kind of fucking roller coaster was that from I mean think if you were like let's go with like 10 to 12 years old during World War I so you're actively aware of what's going on you're old enough once people came back to start understanding the implications for it 20 years later

you're 32 30 32 you're definitely still young enough to serve and you go and fight in this other war and in the time underneath you saw the country being very prosperous during World War I because again that's how the public actually perceived it then you see the downturn, then you see the nationalism kick back in, and what things are happening during the early 40s. Yeah, man, that perspective would be pretty nuts. Especially you go into World War I, kind of the precursor to the Blitzkrieg, you are smoking through France. So not only does it feel like industry and everything was going good leading into this, now you've proven on a stage of battle,

that you are somebody that's not to be fucked with. And then all of a sudden, everybody gets pushed back towards Germany and you stop hearing so much about the wins. And then all of a sudden, this government leaves and this Bimar Republic comes in and replaces them and you have to find out that you just lost a world war. You lost the Great War. And then all the countries that you lost the Great War to

slap this giant contract on you that's basically going to hamstring you for the foreseeable future. It takes away your future. Your future economic success. And the roller coaster that follows that is, I guess, a lending of relief from the United States in the form of a stimulus and capital and then a restructuring of the debts that you owe. So you're thinking that there's hope. There's something great there. We're going to be able to build this.

Yeah, and things still weren't great. No. But at the same time, they were on an upswing. Things are feeling better, and we'll talk about it. This is just a quick five-minute layout of this. Things are turning up. Everything's going great. This is part of the reason why Hitler can't intervene any faster

is because the Vimar Republic is actually making things a little bit better with the help of the United States. Do you think part of that, too, it was ever framed in the way I didn't look this up, but if you have the Treaty of Versailles, and part of the agreement is to allow the leadership that's in place at that point, do you believe to a certain degree or do you play on the fact that that leadership is then in some way, shape or form in bed with these other countries who are technically, as you're phrasing, it's stealing from you in the form of these reparations?

Because those people in leadership were endorsed by the people and agreed to do this to your country. It's a, you got like a fox in the henhouse type situation, and you're rallying the people to get the fox out. It's very much a Vichy situation. Yeah. Except for the roles are reversed. And what's crazy, though, is he never plays it off like that, like in front of Hindenburg. Remember how he's all like the humility and everything like that to him?

But then during speeches, like, he's talking about the status of the country while not implicating directly the leadership of the country, I guess. Which was one of the kind of the, you know, I hate to give fucking clever credit or anything like that. but I mean, he knew exactly what to say. And he was clever. We know that he was clever because pre-Beer Hall-Putch time in prison, he was very loud, outspoken,

an extremist that rallied against Jews and really pushed his feelings out into the public. Beer-Hall Pitch messes up. He goes to prison. He comes back out. He's barred from public speaking and everything like that.

He has to find a way to kind of chameleon his personality and soften his message in a way, to where he's going after the nationalist, then he's going after the socialist, then he's going after the Democrats. And what do you do to that party? Call yourself all of them.

Yep. It's conniving, but at the same time, you can recognize that as, you know, not too nuts. You can recognize even though there's evil because you can recognize evil genius. Back to the quick finish here. Weimar Republic's bringing things back. Great Depression hits.

All the money and resources that the United States was giving. giving you was gone. This sends you back into hyperinflation. This raises all sorts of... It basically lights the fuse on the time bomb. That match has been held there the entire time, and it's not going to take much to set it off.

And as soon as that match goes off, no one at that point, because everything has then turned inside when that financial crisis hits, no one gives a fuck about your country, but then at the same time, Hitler's like, no one gives a fuck about us right now.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So once the Weimar Republic fails, you get Hitler into power. He's actually making things look good under the false pretenses of just trying to create a nation. Then you get liens robin. You're back into Blitz Creek, just like World War I. You are winning wars at home. You're hearing, hey, we're back.

This is where we were before. This is the European dominance that I grew up with. Then all of a sudden stuff goes wrong. And then all of a sudden Hitler falls. And then the ultimate last thing that you have to deal with after this crazy. ass 30 year not all connected ride is you have to come to grips with the your country was responsible for a holocaust yeah that feels like the highest and lowest like a like like well there was like a 20 25 year period where your country was just like not looked upon like and now you just got to hope something like that doesn't happen again there was

nary a boring day in that 30 year stretch in germany yeah so kind of to to laid out as far as kind of how everything ties into Germany and the situation in Europe. So you have the $33 billion debt that was created by the Treaty of Versailles that's supposed to be paid back to Great Britain and France. Do we want to knock out some basics in the treaty? Yeah, go ahead. 1919, Treaty of Versailles, Germany is required to accept full responsibility for World War I, as they should have no problems there.

They undertook reparations payments that amounted to about 100,000, 32 billion gold marks. These were broken up into A and B bonds, which totaled about 50 billion. These gold marks, that Germany was unconditionally obligated to begin paying immediately to the allies that were affected and the countries affected. C bonds totaled about 82 billion gold marks. And they were kind of like an interest-free threat of future payments dependent on the ability of the future economy to pay.

So it was, everything's coming up front with these A and B bonds. These C bonds are if you get way too advanced in your economy just jumps and goes crazy, then you're going to owe us the rest of this. Gotcha. So the more you make, the more you pay. Exactly, yeah. So don't think that you're going to rebuild yourself in a way where you're going to have excellent financials. Because we'll take some of that if you do.

By 1924, there was this thing called the Dawes Plan, and it addresses this hyperinflation that Germany is facing because they owe more than they could ever end up manufacturing at this point in time. I think an economist had came in and said that the very most, and this was during the time that they were drafting the Treaty of Versailles. British guy came in and said, they can only afford at the very max like $10 billion. dollars. Anything else is going to cause the country itself to just go into an economic spiral

and you guys are going to be dealing with a completely different issue. A German, I guess a gold mark at this point in time, this is when they had like the giant bills, when they had like $10,000 Reichmark bills and all that kind of stuff because it didn't matter. You could put whatever value on it. It was pretty much valueless. The Dawes plan injected $800 million of gold marks that were loaned to Germany from U.S. banks to help stabilize this new form of currency, this Reichmark. It fueled industrial recovery. There was a reduction of reparation payments to $250 million a year. It scaled up with improvement of the German economy, kind of like the C-Bonds did. And part of the Doz plan was the Allied troops had to withdraw

all from the Rural Valley that they had occupied after missed payments from Germany. So it gave them a little bit of freedom, a little bit of breathing room. At the same time, they're still, they have this indemnity hanging over their heads, but it does give them an $800 million cash infusion. That's not nothing.

At 1929, the Young Plan stretches the debt wildly so far. So it stretches it into this long-term, kind of manageable payments. It slashes debt to $36 billion, or $36 billion, Reichmarks. So the debt, the indemnity is lowered. The interest payments, interest, Jesus, long day. Interest payments stretched out until 1988.

You would have been born on this planet, and Germany would have still been paying interest payments, had World War II not happened or had we not had a reconciliation. That's good, yeah. average repayment was $473 million a year. So this was actually taken from the Reichmark and moved into U.S. dollars. After the market crash, the U.S., they pulled the rug. That's what it was.

I mean, banks in the United States are terrified. It's kind of the same principles. Like if the homeland is being attacked, you pull all the troops from your colonies or from wherever they're at. So these U.S. banks stop lending money to Germany and immediately go the other direction, immediately demand the repayment of the existing loans, to get as much money back as they possibly can. Well, being completely cut off from the money coming from America, the German economy tanks.

Without those loans, they can no longer afford to pay their reparations to the other allies. When they can't pay the reparations to the other allies, Great Britain and France can no longer afford to pay back the wartime loans to the United States. So it is all just collapsing within this circle that they've created of repayments and loans. Production in Germany plummets by roughly like 50%. By 1932, unemployment hits 30%. And it was nearly, I think they said, 6 million people. So 6 million people out of work.

July 1931, the Danet bank collapses, prompting the government to freeze the Berlin Stock Exchange. and start to implement these really strict, like, financial controls. Other people are looking in on what's going on. This isn't a point, I think, when Germany has started to rebuild up its military or anything like that. But from a financial standpoint, people that are looking and seeing these payments missing from Germany are now kind of looking inward and realize that the system is completely broken. There's this thing called the Lausanne Conference where these international powers basically canceled Germany's in. And not in the form of like tearing up the contract, but they're, I think, just putting the payments on cancel until they show that they can try to recover somewhat and they can try to start getting something out of them at least.

But it's too, too little too late at that point because the economy is completely devastated. It leaves this hollowed out Germany and skyrocketing unemployment. there are so many things that were outside of the Weimar Republic's control in this situation that anyone's smart enough to be able to rally a specific message or to be charismatic enough to make promises of the things that are being missed in Germany. It's all just sitting right there. And it's not like the Weimar Republic can say they're wrong about this. Because the message technically isn't about the Weimar Republic.

the message is about the unfairness of these other countries taking advantage of Germany. They're saying the existing government has not been able to fix it. They're not saying anything other than right now the current system in place is not working. And by that, they're suggesting that change to the leadership needs to take place. Is there a little sniffer of what you were talking about earlier and maybe the connection of the countries that are pulling the money out of our country or the ones that made the deal with the Vymore Republic? Yeah, definitely. There had to be something there.

I mean, they were between a rock and a hard place because I don't even know what happens. I don't even know how you go down that road if the United States requires you to pay back all the funding. What happens if you just say no? I think that's kind of what had to happen because they didn't have any of the money to even pay Britain or Britain. France to pay back those loans as well. Here's how quickly it happened.

So the Nazi party transforms from this fringe extremist group into the dominant political force in Germany by exploiting all of this economic misery from the Great Depression. So before the 29 stock crash, the Nazis were essentially like politically irrelevant. I think they won 2.6% of the vote in the 1928 elections by 1932. So four years later, the Depression had helped them become the largest party in parliament. And Hitler knew exactly who to target because they were the easiest to target in the sense of trying to gather support. Desperate unemployed people, middle class shopkeepers who had lost everything, bankrupt farmers. The people that made up the bulk of the people that were going to be making this decision or the people that he needed to control to put himself in power.

and he had this really simple message. I think we talked about it during the Hitler episodes, but it was the Arbett and Brut, the work and bread, basically just making the really simple promise that listen, under my control, under a strong authoritarian government, we would instantly be able to restore jobs

and stability to the country. And at this point, people are so desperate and so dejected that they're just like, even people that had concerns, had to kind of be like, sure, why not? I get, like, this other stuff isn't working. Why don't let this guy have a shot?

What's the alternative? I mean, and he's directly, here's the thing, too, is people that still had the faith at the White Woman Republic, which was effectively operating as a, you know, democracy, he's looking at this and saying, like, look what it's doing for you. Like, this was what was set up and is supposed to work. Like, this is completely inept.

It's weak. It's chaotic and it's broken. We need to install something that's going to be working for us. And so they present themselves as, you know, disciplined and orderly and very competent in comparison to like what they're presenting as the incompetence of democracy. They have the stormtroopers that were basically running public services like storm or sorry like soup kitchens for the poor and creating this. visual, basically like smokescreen, that they are the ones that are helping people, not the government. This is a Yakuza, Yakuza.

Yeah. They're out there showing their way. I have a hard time going down this line of thought because there's a kind of a tradeoff that you would have to make. And I don't know how bad my life would have to be to kind of agree to go along with these plans. while at the same time having to remind myself that Hitler's plans weren't ultimately so front-facing that you would have any knowledge of how horrendous things are going to get.

And then the realization of how much malnutrition and poverty and hunger... Influence you taking a risk? Yeah. I mean, the trade-off when you lay all those things out, I can definitely understand Hitler's popularity in a situation that you didn't have to be even a believer that World War I was stolen. You just had to be so ground down that anything else was going to look different. Someone was telling you, you don't deserve this. This isn't your fault.

You deserve all these things. You deserve all the good things. And I want you to have the good things. And through me, you can have the good things. And so not only do you have, and I'm not saying, that just simply his rise is what led to World War II and everything. But the environment that it created definitely did. But it also created how the response to what he was doing was going to be dictated. So the Great Depression kind of cripples the military, financial and political capacity

of both Britain and France, leaves them in a position where they're not really willing to cooperate with each other. They're focused inward on what they can do. And so there's not really any cohesive oversight of what Germany is actually going to be doing. It puts them in kind of a position where, although Hitler's not looking to attack them directly right now, he knows that maybe they're not going to be paying close attention to what he's doing. There's rules, the German standing army can only, I believe, be 100,000. So, yeah, so they had that there was basically double-digit employment rates in Britain. so the government had this domestic relief over military spending, and I think we talked about

that a little bit, but there was a 10-year rule. The military planners assumed no major war would occur, so they kept defense budgets really, really low, well into the 30s. So there wasn't even really room for like design or advancement or anything like that. It was basically just keeping a standing military in case something small needed to happen in one of the colonies or a response like that. With France, again, like we talked about, they're just pouring their limited defense resources into the Maginal line and hoping that that's enough to hold anyone off. It also creates this situation where public opinion, because of the effect on the war on father's sons, is very, very against any type of defense spending. So even any type of visual buildup of the military,

whereas you're thinking you can't point to Germany and say, well, Germany's doing something or anything like that because they're like, Germany's in the shit. And you guys are spending our money on defense, like spend it on something else. So you have public opinion working against you as well to even maintain positions of, you know, being in political positions where you can actually affect any change.

Political positions in some countries, I guess maybe it's the makeup. because we would all like to believe that our politicians have our best interests at heart, right? At this point, you can't. You can't. You would like, like, yes, you would in an ideal world, you would believe that, yeah, that would be accurate. And I'm sure that that would have to weigh heavy on some of these governmental people's heads. Well, at the same time, you're in, I don't know, a situation that nobody else would

want to find themselves in. Like you have the fate of the population of the country that you're supposed to govern hanging in the balance. And you know that a strict adherence to a balanced budget is going to keep you in a position to try to help them. But unfortunately, the strict adherence to the balanced budget is also the reason why you can't help them. Exactly.

I mean, when Hitler ends up remilitarizing the Rhineland in 1936, he annexes Austria. I think that's 1938. And then he demands the sedate and land in 1938 as well. British and French, like intelligence offices between those countries, they're like, just so you guys know, our economies and militaries, we can't sustain a war right now. There is nothing we can do at the moment to stop what's going on there. And Chamberlain, who we've talked about several times,

the biggest knock on him is the whole appeasement thing. But now we get to see it from a different perspective of, looking at Chamberlain and saying maybe he's using the appeasement as like a stalling tactic to avoid a situation where they can't afford to be an war at that point. Inflation, bankruptcy, just hoping to delay the conflict

until British factories can actually ramp up the production of the stuff they're going to need to fight a war that he probably assumes they're going to inevitably be in. But that's going to require Britain to defend itself. That means radar has to be developed and all that

manufactured and the things they're going to need to protect the island, which is going to be advancement of aircraft like the Spitfire. From the exterior, that's, you're in a hurry up and go. We got to get this figured out because our defense spending has been so low. Hitler, as we talked about during his episode, is appointed Chancellor January 30th, 1933. Very shortly after that, you have the Reichstag fire. that gets blamed on a communist. Questionable as to who

lit the Reichstag on fire, I think... I mean, go back and listen to the episode. You'll probably make your own determination. That basically nullifies the... What would be the... Parliament. Yeah, Parliament. Congress. Along with that, in 1933,

this guy named Heilmar Schrasach, I don't know, some shitty German name, is appointed president of the Reich Bank, and basically he's calming these business fears saying there's a new regime and things are going to change. He starts structuring all of the regimes financing. By June 1933,

you have the Rine Art program that's introduced and it's heavily subsidizing all of this infrastructure. You're directly injecting state funds into waterways, railroads, and you have this burgeoning national highway system known as the Autobahn. The Autobahn. That's being constructed. Between 33 and 34, this volunteer labor service that was later named the Reich Labor Service is created,

and this is a forcing young men in manual labor to improve the unemployment statistics. So you are lending out all of this money from a bank that you just put the guy in power in, and this basically gives you unlimited funds. Because whatever money you're floating out there, whatever debt that you're accruing, will ultimately be taken care of by all of the extra lands that you're planning on conquering and the future. The acquisitions that you're hoping that you can acquire. Yeah. And you're kind of printing your own money at this point.

Mm-hmm. And this leads to kind of an increase in industrial output and everything. But he's doing it in a way as well to not at this point just completely flaunt in the face of like the Treaty of Versailles when it comes to the military buildup aspect of it. They are building tractor parts that are actually like tank parts. They are training pilots in commercial airliners or like flight like that or glider clubs instead of making military aircraft. So they're building the infrastructure and the training needed for this kind of, you know, thing and making it very easy to just simply switch, you know, flip the light switch or switch out some equipment and they're making, you know, weapons of war and everything. They're designing They're building U-boats in sections

In different spots of the country And then sending them all to one location To be constructed and put into the water Was this taught? That was who built like the submarine pens And everything I don't know who was actually designing Like the U-boats and everything

Well If you think about it Volunteer Labor Service sounds great It is forced labor But if you are trying to prove to the electorate that put you into power that you're going to be different from the Bymar Republic if you can slap an unemployment rate

that's much less than what was previously at the headline that follows that is not going to say unemployment drop due to forced labor. No, it's not. And it's going to give people that aren't in maybe in the forced labor the perspective

that you're fixing it and doing what you're saying. Yeah. Regardless of what you're planning on as the repayment plan, which again is taking land and everything. What was it? Ribbon. Reuben Straubin.

Leibn Straubin. Leven Straubin, right, living space. Kind of jumping over to France and everything, while they're gearing up to do all this stuff, a couple decades of this like industrial halt that France has had on their factories meant they couldn't produce

or mass produced like modern aircraft or communications equipment. And because they got a late start on it, when Germany invaded, French forces were just like drastically outpaced. and under-equipped, because they're going through this time frame where, again, everything's built on, like, civilian, the civilian economy, basically, and because Germany's doing this on the sly and manufacturing this stuff under the guise of, like, train parts and all this other stuff putting people to work, no one really knows what's going on. They haven't come out yet. It's, they're just not ready. No, they're not. And countries in central and eastern Europe, like Poland, Czechos,

Slovakia, Yugoslavia, they'd been just hollowed out by the Depression. They had no industrial base because they'd also been kind of traded and fought over and all this kind of stuff. They couldn't build modern weapons and they couldn't afford to buy them, even from like Britain and France who were insanely strapped for cash and would be willing to sell them. They just didn't have the money to do it, which in turns is what makes these countries very easy to overrun and to take over once Germany decides that that's the route they're going to go. Well, and you have a, what, a bloodless absorption, a happy greeting into Austria. I mean, yeah, by 1940, that was when Britain had stood alone against Germany.

So, I mean, within just a couple of years, it's just Britain and Europe. The strain of that fighting had completely emptied the British Treasury. They were on the verge of a total financial bankruptcy. until the U.S. stepped in with the lend lease in 1941 to basically keep them in the fight and to supply them with what they were needing. That didn't single-handedly pull the U.S. out of the Great Depression, though. It just kind of served as this change of direction in which we could kind of start the ball rolling in the right direction. And that would allow us to kind of accelerate the transition to that full wartime production,

which is what essentially did bring us out of it. but I mean the act required billions of dollars worth of like military hardware ships aircraft agricultural goods so that was ramping up again factories that had been previously quiet back in the United States

that had been making cars or fucking furniture refrigerators were now repurposed to create machine or you know trucks and planes and all that kind of stuff and had to hire around

the clock shifts. So you go from half capacity or that were shut down with 50% workforce to needing 150% workforce to be able to do this. So like you were saying, the US employment, 1940 was about 14.6. By late 41, it was under 10. And then it dropped near zero as the war continued to progress. And as the US government's pumping billions of dollars into private manufacturing to build new factories, new machinery, all of this kind of stuff, that kind of gets us on, you know, that's what gets us on our feet. On what Ford went from producing, I think it was a Model A at that point maybe, to being full blown into making jeeps, into making planes.

And it wasn't just from a standpoint of war machinery and like transportation. They were buying everything, man. like it was food, it was tobacco, it was clothing, any of that kind of stuff. Like anything that they would need over in Europe that just normal people needed over here, they were sending that kind of stuff over. That's why there was also rationing and things like that back home, because anything that they could send over there, they were trying to do that. So much of the Germany plan was a little bit of a cloak and dagger,

because along with hiding these unemployment statistics with forced manual labor, there's this thing called the new plan that's a same. established and it's just basically introducing a control over all foreign trade and currency so they can try to achieve what they consider this national economic self-sufficiency. So you're contracting everything that's going on, any relations that are going on outside of the country are being handled by the government. Then in 1935, conscriptions reintroduced. And that's a big no-no because the Treaty of Versailles said you will not ever do that again.

Also, if you're shifting this big massive military, or shifting to a big massive military expansion, you're absorbing hundreds of thousands of workers into a military force. You're also folding in the SA, which at one point in time, I think they said the essay was 10 times the size of the standing German military, like prior to... Because it was such a small standing military, yeah. But if you do that,

anybody else that's unemployed at that point now has these free jobs open up in these factories. And you're also reducing your population through prison camps, work camps, pushing Jews into ghettos and kind of taking them off the board for really any sort of statistical analysis. By 1936, as you were talking about,

with kind of all of these, you're training pilots and these private clubs, you're building U-boats and different pieces, and everything like that. 36, they hit this four-year plan, and it just shifts the economy into high gear for total war readiness. At that point, that's kind of like them saying,

we don't really need to hide it, but if someone asks about it, we're just going to be like, what? We're just making a few things. And at that point in time, if we were ready enough to go in four years, they're not going to be,

because as you were talking about, they had such minimal spending. They weren't ready to go at that time. That's the whole thing. Like Germany still had a little bit of a head start even without anyone knowing. And at that point, it was just kind of like, they said they're just building it for, it was almost Germany looking, being like, so do something about it. And Britain was like, we will. I mean, don't make us.

Slow down what you're doing. They're like, all right, we'll slow down. They're like, good. All right. We'll see in another six months. Yeah. Britain goes back and they asked, you know, what's our war readiness? And they say, eight years, sir.

And then all of a sudden they hear, Germany's got a four-year plan. Yeah. What do we do? Uh-huh. And I think through most of it, because what, Czechoslovakia was very little fighting, correct?

Mm-hmm. Poland was really the first kind of... That's when the British got involved because Poland had the agreement that it was the, what do you call that the mutual, whatever it is, mutual protection or agreement or like that.

It becomes the same thing. situation where even though they have a four-year plan, if the four-year plan starts in 1936, and they're already into Poland in Czechoslovakia and Austria in 1939. Their four-year plan is to be able to take France by 1940s. Yeah. They had everything working in their favor as far as the timetables go because... And they're able to do it because no one else can do anything because they're still recovering from the depression. I guess to kind of go the other direction,

positive things that might have come out of the Depression a little bit. This was when, you know, this introduced the mass entry of women into the workforce during World War II. And this fundamentally revolutionizes the American economy. So you, like you said, in Germany, they're pulling able-body workers out of these factories to serve in the military. We're doing the same thing where we're pulling people out.

of factories and we're going to be replacing them with this previously kind of untapped resource we have in the female workforce. Rosa the Riveter baby. Exactly. So, you know, represented the conscription of over 16 million men for World War II. That leads to the 50% expansion of like the female labor force between 1940 and 1945. So women built 40% of America's military aircraft. and made up over a third of the workforce in defense plants. And as where's this sounds, I mean, we see the result of this very prominently in our society today. I mean, this lays the early groundwork for like the dual income family,

which in turn, you're coming out of the war and you got two earners in the house and everything. That's like a wet dream for the economy of like increased spending, trying to avoid a recession or dipping back into like a depression or anything. like that. And, you know, even though women were still paid less of the time than men for the same work, their wages brought this massive influx of cash into American households and kind of transformed part of the country in the sense of people could buy more homes now. People bought more automobiles because guess what? Now you have two people going to work. You need two cars so both of you can go. So it, I mean, it really does shift the way that pretty much the entirety of the American economy.

functioned. You have the urban sprawl that is generating, building more highways and building more road systems out to these communities that don't have to be linked to town. Kind of the advent of suburbs, almost a little bit. Because you had factories that there was no room within these urban centers to build something of that size. So you had to build them out in rural centers away from the city. But then you had suburbs that had to spring up with all of the workers to actually work there. It's the way that the Great Depression

gets solved by the war the war. The way that it both causes Yeah. But what's like, think of it this way. It solved it for us. Did it solve it for any of the other countries? Well, they were just back to reconstruction after the war

themselves. And at that same time, we had so much money that they were just like more money please and we're like, sure. Uh-huh. Because us lending a ton of money and doing all that kind of stuff didn't totally lead to the instability that led to this in the first place. There was so much confidence after World War I that there wasn't going to be World War II. It was still the same blind, stupid.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have contributed because, yeah, our planes fucked up a lot of shit over there and everything. And you can't just slap Germany with the same type of shit because then it's going to be the same stuff all over again. So there had to be a different way. So what? You just cut it in half and then you cut a city in half and you just run it that way. The confidence that you're not going to have a World War III

has to already be sitting in an all-time low because you're over there while I in the Soviet Union. You had to pray that you came out of that economically in a much better spot than you went into it because you're looking at the Soviet Union as the next enemy that's going to be across from the Cold War and you're seeing what they accomplished during World War

and it's like, okay, thank God you know we're in this position now and maybe that's the impetus to invest so much in Europe is to try to build back up that buffer zone I think that's a huge thing too is to make sure that yeah because essentially that's whose problem it's going to be

when it comes on to a you know boots on the ground type scenario you're hoping to just have to again like we've always done send the support over and hope that it never actually comes knocking on our door You also had that the new opportunities in Germany. Because I think we talked about it kind of in prep. You have occupation in Germany.

You have West Germany that you are building in the image of economically being capitalist. You have West Berlin that you're kind of training to put this in an area where they can be a market that not only can you build up their industry, you're building up another trade partner that you're going to be able to send things over. If you're inserting yourself in there to be a part of that trade as it grows as it is, and at the same time, you're looking at it from a perspective of what failed the last time. We tried to let them. I almost feel like it's a, no, we tried to let you guys do it on your own the first time with the Treaty of Versailles.

Yes, you guys did get fucked over with the amount that you had to do for the reparations and all that and how it was handled. But just fucking let us do it. And then you get in there and you build it kind of with yourself within the infrastructure. So you always have a measure of control. So there's definitely some like self-serving. Basically, if we're going to lend you the money, we need to have enough control of the situation to make sure you're in a position to pay us back. And if we're taking a little off the top is we're rebuilding you. Yes.

That's just a few more McDonald's in, you know, West Germany and West Berlin, you know, what about it. We've set up a whole new foreign country that private indisputs. from our country can go ahead. Just got to kind of rebuild, right? Intercede in there. Yeah, we can, the restaurants, you guys are going to have a Bloomingdale's in West Berlin. This is going to completely transform everything.

Oh, and by the way, if you think that maybe you don't want the allied powers in here rummaging around in your German business, go ahead and take a look to the East. You have other options if you'd like to go ahead and call your buddies over in East Germany and East Berlin, yeah. See how they're doing over? there. Nobody built a wall yet, so just go ahead and stroll over there. See what's going on in their

neck of the woods. Yeah. But yeah, no, no idea that it was this far reaching. No idea had this much of a cause on World War II. It's always just kind of framed as a bunch of stockbrokers lost their ass on this day, jumped out of some buildings, and people were sad for a little bit. it's like no this was a global spanning just cluster fuck that affected so many different people and was bookended

by the two largest conflicts that have ever occurred here's a shitty book man yeah yeah one of us got one of them got us into it the other one got us out of it and we just kind of have to look back at this period of time and think what went wrong

what can we fix in the future? Didn't really fix a whole lot in the future because we still have recessions that have happened after this. And there's still the same stuff that's happening to try to pull attention or try to go ahead and make people feel better about it.

It's history repeats itself. And you'd think that we would learn our lesson in speculation. Oh, no, come on. That's asking too much. You think that there wouldn't be other speculation markets that would crash and cause us to have all of these problems. You would think, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, we've touched on just a very few, what, eight countries, maybe, something like that. Mm-hmm. This involves so many other countries. Countries that were smaller countries that were dependent on the larger countries,

that by their failure, the larger countries failure, the smaller countries just simply went down. And that's the story of the Great Depression is, like we talked about the first episode. The Depression didn't necessarily hurt the upper class, and it didn't necessarily hurt the poor. It gave the poor more competition because it lowered the middle class into being in the same. It created a much larger percentage of poor, is what it did. So the impact on countries like Argentina and some of the countries in South America or some of the other countries, I guess pretty much all the countries were involved. in Europe. But they were affected in different ways based upon international trade, if they were

a growing country that were pushing into kind of stock market type situations or anything like that. They had to come out of this without being a part of the war. Yeah, which was very difficult. If not impossible. They had to find their own solutions. I do wonder if that's why so many other countries kind of helps join in. As far as not putting boots on them. the ground, but as far as like manufacturing or sending goods. There's going to be an interesting section of history of countries that we do here coming up pretty soon.

Because I know we want to do Spain. I know we want to do Portugal. But there's going to be a very interesting time frame during this 1939 to 45 period where we try to figure out like, hey, everything's on fire around you guys. Like, what the fuck are you guys doing during World War II when you're right in the middle of it or even talking about like Switzerland and things like. like that. It's going to be really interesting. But as far as the depression goes, yeah, hopefully you guys learned something.

If anything, was this, was it during the first episode that I explained the soap operas? Yeah. That was. Okay. I don't know what you're going to remember out of this one. I don't know. I didn't have any fun little facts on this one. Maple syrup reserves. Okay, I like that one. Yes. Yeah. Great Depression was only fueled by lack.

of maple syrup in the United States. Could have added it. It could have been a little bit sweeter. All right. Well, we hope you guys enjoyed this two-parter, and we'll catch on the next one. Peace.