The Ancients - Sparta and the Nazis

Episode Date: June 30, 2022

Ancient Sparta was co-opted by the Nazis as a supposed model civilisation for the Third Reich’s twisted racial and martial ideologies.German children were taught that the Spartans had originally been an ‘Aryan’ tribe, and that they should aspire to Laconian ideals such as endurance, discipline and military self-sacrifice. Yet modern evidence suggests the Ancient Greek city-state may not have been so militaristic after all.In this episode, Tristan is joined by Dr Helen Roche from Durham University to find out more about this ‘Spartan paradigm’ and how it was exploited by the Nazi regime.Tickets to Tristan's talk 'London in the Roman World' with Professor Dominic Perring on July 4 are available here: https://shop.historyhit.com/product/london-in-the-roman-world/

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Entrance on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, we're talking all about the legacy of ancient Sparta, but we're focusing in on one particular case. We're going to the 20th century to the infamous case of the use of Sparta by the Third Reich, by Nazi Germany, how Sparta was wrongly used by the people in this regime to suit their own agendas. We're going to be focusing in on the use of ancient Sparta by the elite schools of Nazi Germany, the Napolans. We're

also going to be looking at the use of Sparta by certain figures high up in the Nazi regime, from the likes of Joseph Goebbels to the historian Helmut Böhr to Adolf Hitler himself. And we're also going to be looking at how Sparta and the Battle of Thermopylae in particular was used by the Nazis during the Battle of Stalingrad. Now this was a really enlightening topic and it's an important topic to discuss, how ancient events and ancient cities can be misused by other people later in history. This is a great example of that and to highlight this I was delighted to get on the podcast Dr Helen Roche from the University of Durham. Helen, she's done a lot of work around

the use of ancient Sparta in Nazi Germany and by Germans during the preceding 20th century too. It was wonderful to get her on the podcast for this episode and I really do hope you enjoy. So without further ado, to talk all about Sparta and the Nazis, here's Helen. Helen, it seems as if ancient Sparta was used as a powerful, infamous tool in many aspects of the Nazi state. Yeah, I think that's fair to say there were many leading figures in the Nazi regime who saw Sparta as some kind of paradigm, some kind of model that Germany could learn from. And this was partially influenced by racial ideologies, as I guess we might expect in the Third Reich, that there was this idea that Sparta was a sort of pure, quote, Aryan racial

tribe or whatever, who had originally hailed from deepest darkest Thuringia and Hitler himself even had the belief that you could prove connections between ancient Germany and Sparta because the peasants of Schleswig-Holstein cooked a black broth that was must be similar to Spartan soup and things like this. They're obviously very tenuous, but they were trying to make all of these racial connections going back to sort of 19th century theorists like Karl Otfried Müller about the Dorian race. We'll definitely delve into all of that as our chat continues.

But it feels important to stretch right to the beginning when we're looking in the background that this love of Sparta, this interest in Sparta, and also this Philhellenism in Germany, it stretched back even centuries before to the late 18th century. Yeah, that's very true. I mean, when we talk about German Philhellenism, love of Greece, in general, we're looking at figures like, you know, Johann Joachim Winkelmann, who greek statuary greek aesthetics as in some way having a kind of kinship if you like with german culture what he called an elective kinship or valverdant shaft and a lot of famous figures in the german enlightenment like goethe and schiller

and so on kind of weimar classics you will, they also had a very strong kind of cultural affinity with Greece and felt that those kind of aesthetic priorities were things that Germany should aim towards. And it was sort of gradually then that I guess these racial ideas perhaps began to overlay that. And I think also the fact that Germany was quite late to unify as a country without going into a sort of Sonderweg or special path debate but that because there wasn't this strong German national identity the idea of Greece as something cultural that they could look back to in a unifying way was also helpful and that played into it. In regards to that unifying I think we'll probably go

now with the big question of why ancient Greece of all of these places in the ancient world why did ancient Greece seem to really appeal to Germany at this time compared to elsewhere in the age of 12? I think part of it was that the Roman model had really been taken on by, say, Napoleon in France. And this was something that in the wake of the wars of liberation in Germany, we're talking early 19th century Germany, really wanted to distance themselves and say, well, you know, you may have conquered lots of Europe, but, you know, we will take you captive with our culture. Greece, again, provides a good model for that. But even at this time, we can find this kind of alternate strand of Philhellenism, this love of Sparta or Laconophilia, I guess, where particularly military men are looking to Sparta as a model.

And we can find examples of that in the Wars of Liberation, that the self-sacrificial example of Leonidas and the 300 at Thermopylae is something that comes up even there. And I think as we'll see further on in the podcast, that's something which is very common in Spartan reception all the way up to the 20th century, or I guess even beyond. It isn't quite interesting and striking, you mentioned a military man there, that of all of these Greek city-states, whether it's Athens, Corinth, or even the late Kingdom of Macedon, Alexander the Great, why Sparta, of all places, seems to have such great focus on it in Germany in the late 19th and indeed in the early 20th centuries? Yeah, I mean, I think there was this idea, you know, often the Prussian military,

I mean, I've done a lot of research on the Spartan paradigm, particularly in Prussia, and I think it was especially marked there, although I wouldn't exclude it coming up in, say, Bavaria or other German states prior to unification. But, yeah, the Prussian paradigm, the idea like, a military caste from a very young age, and that it would train them to toughness and self-sacrifice. And this was a model that, particularly in the Prussian cadet schools, was really impressed, you know, by staff. Pupils kind of took it upon themselves and even created words like spartanen which means to be like a spartan and it became a really really prevalent part of the culture that even in their old boys networks right up to the 1990s we find it coming up again and again in like newsletters and so forth

and also you mentioned of course the other thing i love to talk about pretty much we keep on the background for a bit longer is this whole idea you mentioned, of course, the other thing I love to talk about as we keep on the background for a bit longer is this whole idea, you mentioned it earlier, unification in Germany. It seems to come quite late in European history. But could that have been another appeal, this idea that there wasn't one single entity

of Greece in ancient times, apart from when, even when the Macedonians had control of it, they never controlled all of it. You had these various city-states, these sometimes very powerful city-states. Was that sometimes a nice kind of parallel for many Germans at that time that led to this divided Germany for much of its time in its history too? Probably Treitschke, one of the most famous 19th century German historians,

actually made that parallel directly. There may be others as well. And the idea that there was strength, not just in unity, but in variety and individuality of states too. So as we get to get into the 20th century, following the First World War, following the Treaty of Versailles, but before the real rise of the Third Reich I mean what's the the status of that kind of filial of love of Sparta in Germany at that time seen in the 1920s? Yeah good question I mean I think there's a sense in which some of the more extreme Prussian style love of Sparta is very much discredited on the left and that's something that people on the right particularly people involved with the military it was almost part of a culture war that was going on like oh you know

they're trying to get rid of sparta from the the curriculum of these new state schools and so forth but there are also trends like in the frayco perculture like the sort of nudism, I guess, the idea of sort of the free body and Spartan imaginaries that come up in that. I think Volker Losemann has looked into that. And there was even, I think it was probably in the Third Reich, but it might have been before there was this brand of sun cream called Sparta-Creme, a sort of moisturising lotion or whatever, and you get these adverts for it

with kind of bronzed blonde looking children and the symbol is a sort of Spartan helmet and so forth but that

might be more in the Third Reich I can't quite remember it's so interesting as we talk about Spartan Nazi regime as we

approach that how there does seem to have been this basis there evident in Germany at that time which the nazis i guess they take advantage of they use as a basis as a springboard for them

taking it really to a very radical extreme next level yeah absolutely and i think you know even the sort of racial ideas about dorians and so forth that was kind of in the air and you had people like Hans Gunther, a notorious Nazi racial theorist who were kind of toying with these ideas prior to the Third Reich. But suddenly when Hitler comes to power and textbooks in schools end up undergoing a radical overhaul

and the new ideology is taking over, then you get people, you know, classicists classicists but also as we mentioned leading figures just going actually the third reich can be like a new sparta and of course the militarism that we've mentioned plays into that but also potentially so-called eugenic ideas the idea of exposing weak infants i think it was hitler who actually called sparta the purest racial state in history because he saw that as something to emulate you know it's a very distressing topic but interesting well importance to highlight in the modern world

especially and it's very interesting also that you mentioned i hope you went by and explained a bit more what was this doric racial theory that you mentioned just there yeah so there was this idea that basically i mean the weird thing about nazi racial ideology was that they kind of tried to appropriate all of what they called culture-bearing races as in some way Aryans so that they could claim their cultural achievements for their own so the Persians were seen as Aryan but then the Athenians also and then that leads to problems when you're trying to theorize the Persian wars of course but the Spartans being Dorians were seen as somehow particularly racially pure and particularly kind of Nordic and having come from you know potentially the north of Germany and some kind of migration so they had all of these migration theories that would legitimize that. Well let's now focus in on

certain aspects of the Nazi regime they did a lot of work on that seemed to really highlight this Spalter connection that they wanted to really focus on and bring out for the wrong reasons and first of all is the NAPLA the NAPLA you've done a lot of work around this but what is first and foremost or what are the NAPLA's yeah so NAPLA is actually an abbreviation for Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt or National Political Education Institute. So you can see why they wanted to shorten it, even if the authorities got a bit annoyed about that sometimes. And they were secondary elite boarding schools for mainly for boys aged 10 to 19. And their aim was to train the future leaders of the Third Reich in all walks of life so they were to an extent modelled on British public schools but also

on Sparta and that was something that came out a lot in the research that I did and I was also able to do interviews and conduct correspondence with many former pupils this way i started doing this research uh over a decade ago so unusual for a classicist talk to living people very much so yes and as i say it's important link that there is to ancient sparta when do we start seeing these nebulolitan emerging? Is it right from well, as the German Reich kind of expanded, particularly during World War II. So by 1945, you had them in what's now Poland, Czechia, Flanders, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, all over. Well, let's delve into the teachings of these Nebulae and how they relate to ancient Sparta.

And talk to us first about the whole selection process right at the beginning because what was the selection process and how is this also influenced by what they thought of ancient Sparta? Yeah so they had to undergo this quite grueling seven-day entrance exam I mean even prior to that there were lots of kind of pre-selection things. They'd be observed in their classrooms by teachers from the NAPLA, like in the primary school, who would come on tours and see who are the likely candidates who've been pre-selected by their teachers. And they had to do not just academic tests and lessons, but also things like physical tests and also what were called mutpubben or tests of courage so this would involve oh I don't know if you couldn't swim you'd be forced to jump off a high diving board into a pool or into the sea without hesitating

or you might be asked to jump out of a three-story window or a balcony and just hope that somebody would be holding a blanket underneath and the idea was to test the character of the boy and see if they could do it without hesitating they were brave enough they would be willing to obey orders enough and if you think these children are like nine or ten when they're doing this, the implications are horrendous. Did these tests of courage and so on in the selection process, did they say that they were harkening back to ancient Sparta? I mean, what's the ancient Spartan link in all of this? Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure if I've come across any documents that explicitly say we are doing tests of courage to emulate Sparta but what I have found is both in the writings of the people who were in charge of the Napolas so Bernhard was the

education minister who was the head of all of the schools and was responsible for bringing them into being and then also the inspectors of the schools, first Joachim Haupt, who was an SA man, and then August Heismeyer, who was a high-ranking SS officer. They're constantly writing about how Sparta is a model for the schools as a whole, for their kind of ethos, how they want to train up a new race of Spartans. And then at the schools themselves we

find teachers this is also from the memories of the former pupils who I spoke to they remember their teachers kind of telling them that they have to be brave young Spartans that they are really hearkening back to it in that sense whether in physical education or whether they're being taught about it in German or Greek or Latin or history lessons. So was it the supposed military prowess of the Spartans that in the Nablus, the teachings, the textbooks, they really try and promote that with the pupils, with the young boys? Yeah, definitely. I think that was a big part of it and education to toughness when we talk about the agogae all of these depictions in in xenophon or plutarch you know boys running around barefoot or having to have their vitals gnawed by foxes and not not crying out or or anything it's promoting an ideal of being able to deal with any pain which I guess

then translates well if you put it into a military context and of course these boys they were constantly doing things like cross-country war games or massed maneuvers and things like that particularly as they got older the training became more and more militarized in a sense and then one of the things which comes up absolutely repeatedly which we touched on earlier is the idea of leonidas and the 300 and self-sacrifice for your country and the epigram well the version by schiller of the simonides epigram of go tell Tell the Spartans that comes up in so many of their memories like it's almost emblazoned on their memory in various versions or translations. So this idea of self-sacrifice harkening back to the Mopeli heroism I'm presuming against

overwhelming odds from the battlefield was what they were trying to promote in these young Germans, these leaders they thought would be in the future. Absolutely. The idea of it being the greatest honour to die a hero's death and this kind of thing. It's so interesting, those aspects of Sparta, what they perceived to be ancient Sparta

that they really promoted. Are there any other key aspects of ancient Sparta that those people you've interviewed or the textbooks that you read, were there any other key aspects that really come about again and again and again that it's important to highlight yeah let me think i mean i think sometimes the kind of racial aspects were highlighted and also the idea that the spartiates were a kind of equal community which in some way mirrored the supposed Volksgemeinschaft,

racial national community, which was supposed to exist in Nazi Germany, that there's a rhetoric of equality like the homoioi as well comes out a bit, maybe not quite so much. I would say that the militaristic elements are really up there as most important. I guess this also begs the question

if the militaristic aspects are really promoted, Helen, is how did they get around those aspects of ancient Spartan society, which probably didn't appeal to the Nazi regime? And I'm thinking words such as homosexual relations and horribly pederasty too. Yeah, that's a great question. The question of Spartan pederasty, how did they get around that? Interestingly, the first inspector of Annapolis, Joachim Haupt, he was actually sacked because he was accused of having, at the very least, homoerotic relationships with a couple of pupils at various schools. It was never proven that you know they actually had any kind of homosexual relationship but in the third Reich even just writing letters that were seen as a bit dodgy would be enough I think on one occasion he used a ministerial

car to take them skinny dipping in a lake near Berlin and so not exactly the kind of thing you'd be wanting a school inspector to do or someone who's in charge of the institutions and in his defence when he was being tried or whatever and eventually lost his party status he was kind of using the idea that well you know this is just part of what happened in Sparta and the people who were judging him were like it's ridiculous that he's perverting Spartan history by referring to you know this was not a thing basically very defensive about it which interestingly wasn't the case in the Prussian cadet schools there were these sort of buddy relationships often with a kind of homoerotic element and that wasn't something that was

particularly frowned upon but yeah in the Third Reich this was just erased from Spartan history I guess. Throughout June on Not Just the Tudors we're honouring Queen Elizabeth II's platinum jubilee by focusing on queenship in the 16th and 17th centuries. I'm Professor Susanne Lipscomb and all this month with my guests I'll be exploring the coronations of Tudor Queens, Queens Regnant and Queens Consort who wielded power in ways we haven't thought about. Really when we begin to look at Queen Consorts we notice that there's a lot of ways that the Renaissance court that women could hold informal power through their relationship with the king.

Then there's the queen who ruled over the Spanish Netherlands and the female Swedish king. You heard that right. What did a 17th century person actually mean by saying, oh, she dresses like a man? If she would have worn male clothing, she wouldn't have been able to rule Sweden. male clothing, she wouldn't have been able to rule Sweden. So for a month of all things magisterial and monarchical, look no further than not just the Tudors from History Hit. It's really interesting, it's in that, you know, reception of ancient Spalding,

we were focused on Nazi Germany because they complained they were perverting Sparta's history. And actually, when you look at what they were promoting, the militaristic side, a part of Sparta then is very much challenged today, the idea that they didn't surrender and so much. But actually, it was very much the Nazis who were perverting Sparta's history for their own purposes, for their own indoctrinating

of these German boys in the 30s. Absolutely. Actually, the very first bit of research that I did on this topic, it was originally for my master's thesis. And I looked at this textbook from the Adolf Hitler schools, which were another type of Nazi elite school. And this book was literally called Sparta, the Life Struggle of a Nordic Master Race. And it took passages from ancient authors, bits that were made up, the Mopule Stalingrad speech of Goering.

And it was written by a supposedly reputable historian called Otto Wilhelm von Vakano, who just also happened to be an instructor at one of the Adolf Hitler schools or at the kind of teacher training college for them and it just totally distorted Spartan history in order to fit these Nazi ideological tropes whether racial or martial and it also tried to get the boys to identify themselves with young Spartans. And so I did this really in-depth analysis of all the ways in which it did that. So this was very sustained. Anyone who went to one of these Adolf Hitler schools would probably have encountered this book after it was published,

and it was later intended that it should be distributed throughout the Hitler youth, and so on. Did many German historians at that time did they also promote this lie this link between sparta and nazi german yeah i think we can look at quite a few if you like the more nazified professors so helmut berger is one example even right up to 1945 or so he was giving lectures about what we can learn from the Spartans in our current wartime situation and stuff like that and interestingly this collocation of the Third Reich with Sparta it's something that people in the Third Reich are pushing but it's also something that foreign observers whether British or French french or even russian you know they're

looking in at the third reich and they're also making these comparisons i think stephen hodgkinson has done some interesting work on that in the british context so so one last thing before we move on to the more particular prominent figures in the nazi regime and their links to ancient starter you mentioned of course that we talked about the Napolites, but you also mentioned the Hitler schools, those also elite schools. So, does it very much feel as if in these elite schools in the 1930s that this idea of ancient Sparta, this militaristic ancient Sparta, was very much promoted to these young Germans, influencing them, as mentioned, in the indoctrination of them becoming these future leaders.

Yeah, absolutely. I think when you look at both of these schools, I mean, it's interesting because it would be possible to write a history of perhaps more of Annapolis than of the Adolf Hitler schools because there were so many more of them without mentioning Sparta that much. And in in a sense that's what I did do because my last book that I've just published

was just a history of Annapolis and I do mention Spartan elements but it's by no means the centrepiece of the narration in the way that it was in my first book on Sparta in German military education but yeah it's kind of this theme that's sort of constantly weaving in and out and I think just my conversations with the former pupils a testament you know the fact that they can remember so clearly what they were taught about Sparta the fact that some of them even thought that they wanted to fight in order to emulate the Spartans. And one of them even could still remember by heart this passage, which turned out to be partly a poem of Tyr Tyrus that his teacher had made the whole class learn by heart in 1942 or 3. That, I think, is a testament to how deeply it was ingrained into this sort of indoctrination so if sparta was so deeply ingrained into this indoctrination do we know of any prominent figures ever visiting sparta itself yeah so i guess goebbels is the prime example he went to what's now sparta and said basically oh I feel at home I feel as if I were in a German

city which doesn't altogether make sense because it was just a pile of kind of archaeological remains and not particularly impressive ones I mean Thucydides sort of prediction about the relative grandeur of what remained of Athens and Sparta has kind of come true but I think the idea was that he was also buying into this idea that you know there's this kinship that you can just feel by standing on this sacred ground and again I guess it's worth mentioning that the Napola pupils at least at the humanistic Napolis that taught Greek as well as Latin they would be taken on trips potentially to Sparta, to

Greece, they might meet archaeologists they might be taken to the site itself and write eulogies to the place as well Because as you mentioned right there Sparta, of all the archaeological sites in Greece, I'm sure Sparta's extraordinary but it's not, as you say visually it's not as stunning as somewhere like athens maybe even somewhere like

olympia or corinth isn't it it's so interesting that still that's a narrative was so deeply ingrained from the time of the naplas and even among hitler's inner elites that it still held this significant importance yeah Yeah, absolutely. This resonance, I guess. And that's something we find, you know, I mentioned Bernhard Rust, who was the Reich education minister and also one of the key creators of the Napola system.

And there's this quote from him. I mean, this was actually what got me interested in the whole topic in the first place, where I found this quotation where he said we must rear a race of Spartiates and anyone who doesn't wish to be part of our Spartan community they can get lost basically and I was just reading this I think it was in a book that my mother had bought from the tv program Hitler's children and so just book of a tv series or whatever but i was like oh that's really interesting i was interested in sparta at the time i was doing my

ba dissertation on it and i thought well maybe there's something to this maybe i can look into the influence of sparta on nazi education and that was where it all began really with the idea for the master's thesis and then then the ph, and then I guess the rest is history. Because as you mentioned, you know, Werner Bellhart's position and his interest in scholarship, it seems to have had a really significant impact and development over the years following, doesn't it, in that position? Yeah, absolutely. And it's worth noting that he himself was, by training, a classicist and had been a classics teacher at various prominent schools in the vicinity of Hanover, where he was from. So he's not just coming at it from soundbites.

He has a sound knowledge of the ancient texts and so forth. And so here's this other figure who I've got on my notes here, who also seems to play a significant role. Forgive me if I say it wrong. Richard Walter Darre. Yeah, right. my notes here who also seems to play a significant role forgive me if i say it wrong richard valter d'aray yeah right d'aray so he was really big in the nazi kind of field of agriculture i think he became agriculture minister at some point although he lost favor a bit in the later 30s and 40s I think but he actually in a lot of his writings particularly his big book on I think that was from 1929 actually on the peasantry or the farming class as the fount of the Nordic race or whatever and then in other sort of pamphlets that he wrote during the third reich he saw sparta

as a model for entailed estate law he actually enacted a law called the airpuff gazettes which was drawing on on ancient spartan precedents and he saw the spartiate hellot relationship hell-op relationship as key to you know running a successful agricultural sort of built on boarden if you like community society another figure i've got to ask about in regards to interest in sparta is adolf hitler himself yeah now do we have any evidence that hitler himself was very interested in ancient sparta and and the racial ideas that were being promoted in the Third Reich. Yeah, we do at various points in his writings, both in Mein Kampf and in the unpublished second book, perhaps particularly in the second book, he talks about Sparta as paradigm. I mentioned how he saw her as a model of the racial state a kind of eugenic model

but also the ideas of self-sacrifice and he also famously when himmler for instance was doing all this research into the ancient germans he kind of bit back and was saying well you know what the ancient germans have we should look to the ancient Greeks as our ancestors more anyway, because they had these cultural achievements. But even in the last days in the bunker, he's actually quoted as saying, the worthy fight will be remembered. Look at Leonidas kind of thing. So even, you know, in the days leading up to his suicide,

he still had Sparta on his mind. It's so simple, isn't it? It's so interesting how you mentioned the second published book i said the last days of the bunker how this idea of ancient sparta it endures for the whole length of the third right from start is it right to the very very end yeah absolutely and you know of course the stuff in mein kampf is even before he comes to power, like in the 1920s. So there's definitely a continuity there. Now, I'd like to focus on events as well, but alongside some of the prominent figures.

And the one I've got on my notes, which seems to be big, is Stalingrad. So how does the idea of Sparta fit into the whole narrative around Stalingrad and its aftermath? Yeah, so there was this very famous speech i think it was devised by goebbels but uh declaimed on the radio by goering when the sixth army were kind of encircled in this cauldron situation that looked like it was going to be impossible to escape and basically in the speech Goering made this quite extended parallel between Thermopylae and Stalingrad that wasn't the only thing that he was talking about but basically the soldiers who were listening to it who were encircled were thinking my god he's basically telling us that we need to commit

suicide the idea being that you need to fight to the last for the honor of Germany rather than surrendering and I think in the end General Paulus you know he didn't actually go along with that but the idea that this was a powerful trope which was being mobilised by the might of the propaganda machine and the idea that it would inspire soldiers to kind of final acts of heroism even in the face of death. And did they continue to promote that even after the surrender of the sixth army at Stalingrad? I think definitely it was something that was still prevalent in the discourse. It was something that the napola pupils i talked to they were kind of still buying into that rhetoric and i think you see it in

other soldiers rhetoric as well and if napola peoples were buying into the rhetoric but do we know what other people who are living in the third right thought about this spartan rhetoric being promoted all time and time and time again. Do you know what their thoughts about it were? Yeah, I mean, I think for those who were not so keen on the Third Reich, let's say it just became a symbol of cultural and political bankruptcy of the regime. You get that mentioned on one of the White Roses resistance pamphlets that they were distributing as a

resistance organisation where they say this isn't what Germany should be about basically. So there was definitely some scepticism as well I think but again it's harder to pin down perhaps. It's so extraordinary to talk about now that these figures, they truly believe that there was a true connection between ancient Sparta, what they thought ancient Sparta was, and the Nazi Germans. So it's fascinating how the propaganda machine was able to make so many people so deluded into thinking this great delusion that there was this key visible link between ancient sparta and nazi germany yeah i mean again i think the racial ideology is very much to blame for this because you have people like rustin in speeches i think there's one speech he made at heidelberg university where he's literally claiming that this spartan or greek blood is flowing in German veins. And I guess if you have this weird twisted idea of racial continuity, you can justify that to yourself in a way that wouldn't make any sense in, as it were, the real world or the world today.

Yeah, and also, I guess, the fact that actually this image of ancient Sparta, which they were promoting, never existed. It never existed at all, isn't it? It's the legacy of certain aspects of ancient history. It's important to highlight how they can sometimes, and it's a great example, become twisted in later history. Yeah, it's definitely a facet of the Spartan mirage, which of course is a much longer phenomenon but i'm also

hopefully going to be in the future doing some work where i look at how these kinds of ideas and other ideas appropriated by the far right and in the contemporary world or you know by political extremist movements in general and I guess the thing is if you look at Sparta there are things about it that do map on in a convenient way if you just want to ignore the things that you don't like and I'm aware of the strand of scholarship that's arisen more recently where scholars like Steve Hodkinson saying well actually Sparta wasn't necessarily that militaristic but of course that wasn't in the discourse at the time and if you're reading texts like Plutarch or Xenophon uncritically or not thinking about the fact that obviously

Plutarch is writing so far away from the time that sort of 5th century BC or whatever you can kind of take bits of it without having to almost distort them too much so I think it's really interesting to think about the way in which classics as a discipline brings to light or perhaps in some way legitimizes discourses and how we as historians as classicists can kind of think about that and yeah i think it's also i'd like to know how important it is you know to do interviews like this with figures like yourself to highlight the importance of this in the modern world and to shine a light on the truth behind and what is very much being distorted in more recent history i know we're kind of going beyond Nazi Germany now,

but following the end of World War II and the Nazi following of Germany, was there any attempt also by the Allies, by the victorious powers to get rid of this Sparta promotion association that had become so ingrained during the time of the Third Reich? become so ingrained during the time of the third eye that's a really interesting question i haven't myself come across anything that sort of explicitly tries to denazify sparta i mean it would be really interesting if there's anything out there if anyone knows of anything specific i mean definitely they did things like abolishing Prussia as a state, which, you know, you could say that idea of Prussian militarism is very much bound up with the Spartan militaristic ideology. And then I think a lot of people, again, as we were talking

about disillusionment towards the end of the war, there was a sense in which people just kind of were like okay we're done with this we want to get on with our lives now and we're going to kind of forget that we that we even had any ideas about Sparta and Vacano the historian I mentioned who wrote the Adolf Hitler School textbook he just kind of carried on with his academic career but started writing about the Etruscans instead and didn't write about Sparta anymore so perhaps in that sense we can see the way in which Sparta becomes almost a taboo in a way or something that people don't think about so much as analogous to just what happened with denazification in general where people just said oh well we want to draw a line under this and we're going to kind of pretend that we were

always against nazism and and try and forge a new post-war life or continuing careers without doing anything controversial well helen this is in grades you have written a couple of books around this topic around the napapolitan and also around the use of Sparta in Nazi Germany and the airport. The first one which is more directly linked to the conversation we've been having is called Sparta's German Children which came out in 2013 with the classical press of Wales and I think it's probably still available somewhere on the internet and then My History of the Neapolites is just called the Third Reich's probably still available somewhere on the internet. And then My History of Venapolas is just called The Third Reich's Elite Schools, A History of Venapolas.

And that came out in 2021. Brilliant. Well, Helen, thank you so much for saving the time to come on the podcast today. Thank you so much. It's been a great pleasure. Well, there you go. There was Dr Helen Rush explaining all about how the Nazi regime used Sparta for their own agenda during the mid-20th century, both during and before the Second World War. I hope you enjoyed this episode, a very important and enlightening episode,

as mentioned during the intro, how sometimes ancient history can be used for the wrong reasons and we must always make notes of when that happens now last things from me before i leave you as mentioned at the end of the last episode i have got an event upcoming with the brilliant dr dominic perring professor dominic perring aka mr roman london we have special event upcoming, we're going to be dialling in from the London Mithraeum to talk all about Roman London. The rise, the golden age and in particular the fall of Roman London. What happened to London when the Romans left? Well Dominic will be here to explain all on our special live event in early July. If you're interested in that, if you'd like to learn more, well you can click on the link below and sign up to this special live event.

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I would greatly appreciate it. The team would greatly appreciate it. But that's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.