The Pete Quiñones Show - The World War Two Series: Episode 11-16 w/ Thomas777 - 3/4

Episode Date: October 18, 2025

6 Hours and 55 MinutesPG-13Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer.Here are episodes 11-16 of the World War 2 series with Thomas777 in one audio file.Episode 11: The Nuremberg Regime Pt 1 - Background w/ Thomas777Episode 12: The Nuremberg Regime Pt 2 - Background w/ Thomas777Episode 13: The Nuremberg Regime Pt 3 - Rudolf Hess w/ Thomas777Episode 14: The Nuremberg Regime Pt 4 - Rudolf Hess (Pt. 2) w/ Thomas777Episode 15: The Nuremberg Regime Pt 5 - Rudolf Hess (Pt. 3) w/ Thomas777Episode 16: The Nuremberg Regime Pt 6 - Rudolf Hess (Pt. 4 of 4) w/ Thomas777Thomas' SubstackThomas777 MerchandiseThomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 1"Thomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 2"Thomas on TwitterThomas' CashApp - $7homas777Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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with vouchers from Trump Dunebag. Search Trump Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Thunbiog, Kush Faragea. I'm here again with Thomas 777. How are you doing, Thomas? Very well, Pete. Thanks again. As I said before, it's a great honor to be able to record these episodes. And I think we're doing God's work in the interest of posterity and historical truth.

I'm not saying that to be melodramatic. I really do believe that. And yeah, today, what I wanted to get into, we dealt quite a bit with a battlefield situation in the last few sessions, which is important. And I mean, as I stipulated, I'm certainly not a military veteran, and I'm not a military science expert,

but I do know something about, I do know something about the political history of the war. And I, I drew upon guys who do have expertise and military matters to clarify points of fact that I was not entirely clear on. So I hope people got a lot out of that. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and I appreciate that. But, you know, again, just I want to kind of reiterate after the fact. you know, I'm not, military science is not really my wheelhouse. But what we're going to get into today, we're going to return to the political situation

as the war came to which it's kind of terrible conclusion. And the particularly the political concord between Washington and Moscow is what gave rise to the, you know, the Nureberg Tribunal and the lesser tribunals, like the document. out trials of the men of first SS, which is quite a bit lesser known than the NERB proceedings. But it was by no means a foregone conclusion that these kinds of quasi-courtsmartial by the allied authorities is what would conclude hostilities and kind of set the foundation for the New World Order, quite literally. And I use the term New World Order deliberately.

That wasn't just some campaign trail neologism that Mr. George Herbert Walker Bush coined in, you know, 1988, 89. It, conceptually, it was, it owed its origin to, you know, the writings of, of Cordell Hall and Henry Morgenthau, who's, you know, an ominous character who we, we've discussed in earlier episodes. as well as Justice Frankfurter and Justice Jackson, who are probably not gonna get too much into this episode. My point is that the idea of an old world order, which was the emergent with kind of the, the, you know, the, not just what's known as the Enlightenment era, kind of in commonly accepted court history,

but also like the age of exploration, you know, and kind of the conquest of the planet, quite literally, by European powers. What was implemented therein and how affairs were managed between states, you know, particularly matters of war and peace. That kind of body of theory

and practice, you know, law and custom. And, you know, it came to be known as, you know, the old world order. You know, the new world order being, you know, what superseded it at Nuremberg and thereafter and really kind of erased everything that had come

before it as we're going to kind of get into here. Um, so this is, this is highly theoretical, but I've tried to distill it down as much as possible. I don't want anyone to feel like they're sitting in some, some, uh, some painful college lecture. But, uh, in order to understand what, what, uh, in order to understand how the war resolved in political terms and in order to understand what, uh, that the world system that exists today, although it's deteriorating because it's not particularly suited to uh you know to addressing uh the power paradigms of of the post cold war uh system but it's this isn't just some you know kind of this this isn't just you know factors we're dealing with or trivia this is essential to understand uh

the political map and uh you know to understand the kind of presumptions that are uh that are um the other characterized decision-making and power political corridors so with that said um let's uh let's dive into it um karl schmidt i'm going to invoke a couple times uh here uh not because schmit's the ultimate final authority in anything but schmidt did his book nomads of the earth really did kind of We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast.

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Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. It's the best sort of capsule summary of international law in the modern era that I've come across. Okay. And so when I'm relying upon his analysis, I'll indicate that. But I'm a, Schmidt's conclusions are not particularly partisan. Okay. So I know some people are going to claim that, you know, I'm straightening a partisan posture anyway. and that's fine

but I invite any of them to challenge what Schmidt posited about the character and structure of international law what is Nomos or Nomos like most Greek terms it does not have a simple hard and fast definition

at base nois means law but more than law it describes going to beegis in totality you know the Greek the primary the organizational mode of classical Greece you know it was the city

state, the Paulus okay, within the Paulus people weren't just available to a law like you know there was a whole set of customs normative practices you know values presumed features of public morality you know aesthetic preferences

you know all these things okay there's kind of this total agreement of moors, okay, like across political, juristic, cultural lines, you know, you know, there was moral criteria within there, obviously, too. Some of a public nature, some of a personal nature. This kind of consensus in total

is kind of what no most, like, constituted, okay? Now, obviously, you know, before the age of discovery, as we think of it, you know, the world of the West was a much smaller place. We were basically talking about Europe. We were talking about territories peripheral to Europe. You know, like during the, you know, places like the Near East, like during the era of their crusades, you know,

in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, you know, which I think was established in the 1095 AD. One of the fellows weighing in the comments, if I'm wrong, it's a peripheral point. but even in these territories that were peripheral to Europe and outside of the continent, outside of the territorial space of Europe itself, European law was quite literally extrapolated to these areas.

You know, the kingdom of Jerusalem was a European kingdom. You know, the fact that it happened to be, you know, in the Near East, outside of the landmass of continental Europe didn't matter. You know, it was administered by Europeans. It was, you know, populated by Europeans. you know, the rights and duties imposed upon the people who live there, like, owed to parentage and faith. You know, obviously, you know, obviously Christians had, you know, had a place of privilege under the law. So, I mean, you couldn't, even places that were spatially remote from Europe were in a concrete way, like, built into the European fabric,

only not just, you know, the race and ethnos of the people there, but the structures they created. Okay. Before the age of discovery, it was never an issue with that how do we relate to people, you know, thousands of miles outside of, you know, outside of the continent. You know, outside not just, you know, our territorial sovereignty, but, you know, with whom there cannot be sort of consensus, you know, agreement on, you know, on matters of public or private law. This was handled a number of ways. And if you know, if you're going to with the father of kind of the old world order, was in a very true sense. It was Hugo Grotius. Okay. He was a Dutchman. And as some people probably know, I mean, I'm not being condescending. Like nobody learns anything in public school anymore. And unless you sit around studying history, you're probably not really going to know a lot about, you know, the political map of hundreds of years ago and, you know, what kind of,

what kind of thought current to characterize it. He Hugo Grotius was a Dutchman. Okay, he was born in 1883. He died sometime, he died sometime before the, He died sometime before the end of the 30 years war, okay? But he was a Dutch jurist, polymath type. You know, the Netherlands in those days, they really were like a trade empire, okay? I mean, despite the fact that the Netherlands is tiny, and it's literally just kind of like this kind of like literally sinking principality in the north of Europe.

Like it had, it accrued tremendous wealth, tremendous power. And the kind of wars and practices of Maryland, maritime trade and other things that were uh uh kind of founded by by the dutch became just you know normative across europe okay uh the dutch for the they were mastered shipbuilders they have they had a strong and proud military tradition which is one reason the borers were so damn tough in south africa but primarily i mean they if uh like like with the germans were to warcraft and like what italians are to like find food and sports cars with dutch are to you know the maritime trade. Look at that way. If you want a somewhat silly analogy. But Grochus had an idea that the

the way to understand war between states was the way that one can understand, you know, conflicts between persons, okay? And not unlike John Locke, Grogius, he posited states as, you know, consisting of, you know, emerging out of the aggregate decisions and acquiescence of individuals. Okay, now just like an individual avails himself to the sovereignty of the state by surrendering his private right to punish people, you know, to whom he's entitled to satisfaction and seating that right to the state. Okay, well, you know, similarly in matters of, in matters extrinsic to the, you know, to the eternal situation, you know, the state can assert violence, you know, outside of its parameters as well. you know, when it's people, when it's institutions, you know, when it's, when it's, when it's, when it's economic well-being is threatened from without, okay? So Groves just basically looked at this as a built-in kind of remedy to the state system. You know, in the absence of a higher authority to appeal to, he almost felt up, he almost looked at, you know,

this was kind of like a proto version of like the invisible hand idea of which is kind of like you know the E. Michael Jones always saying the idea of the invisible hand is congruous in a basic way

symbolic psychological way with the idea of Newtonian physics. This idea that there's kind of like this intrinsic order not just not just the physical world but you know to man's affairs Brod is very much the same could be said to him, okay, because his idea was, well, you know, states like men are self-interested, you know, and the self-interested aggregate decisions of, you know, thousands of people who are available to the sovereignty of the state, you know, that's what constitutes the national interest. So, you know, so states, you know, states are only going to go to war with each other, you know, if, you know, A, if the remedy is likely to result in satisfaction of what's owed. so to speak, or if it's likely a result in, you know, in eradicating or mitigating, you know, the threat to, to, to what they aim to protect.

And, you know, the states, states are discouraged from pursuing, you know, irrational wars that, you know, harm the common good because they're basically their cost prohibitive, okay? Now, of course, this depends on that that model that he laid out is all good and well, but it's highly contingent upon a kind of basic moral consensus between the parties to this system. Okay, like basically what Grogius was talking about was he was talking about how political entities within a common federation would and will handle problems. And because most of his writing was done during the 30 years war, he was obviously, looking forward to a time beyond sectarian conflict and the kind of terrible bloodletting that was facilitated therein, you know, he was imagining a time on, okay, you know, like the state can somehow, you know, when we can kind of have like this common like lingua franca politics, you know, wherein, you know, there's several polities of Europe, you know, can kind of join in this federation,

you know, wherein there's a common, you know, kind of, there's, there's a consensus in common on, on how mayor's a war in peace can be resolved but it was also developing as he put this to paper you know 30 years war went on for decades and it you know like all like all wars that kind of drag on beyond the point at which

any kind of any kind of profit can said to be had you know like the ways to mitigate you know future iterations of the of the same phenomenon on kind of the forefront of the intellectual cast, okay?

And that's a good example of this, okay? Now, subsequently, as things like the divine ready kings came into question and, you know, what Roche has kind of envisioned as ideal did in fact come to pass and practice, at least in the Netherlands and in France and the UK, which is one reason this did come to pass and that's one of the reasons why the trauma

the French Revolution was so punctuated and destructive but that's outside the skull in any event you catch them in the corner of your eye distinctive

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From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value. What we just talked about is this kind of a moral consensus of, if nothing else, a practical nature between European states. this came to be known in German speaking lands as a vocaract, okay? Or the Jewish publicum, Europum, okay?

This is the body of positive law, positive and customary that ordered relations between states, derived from the Westphelian peace. And it basically endured until the First World War. It was challenged by the French Revolution, which we could develop a year's one of the podcast to the French Revolution, okay? I don't want to deep dive too much into that But the fact is that Obviously, what had been normative

According to Volker Act and the Just Publicum Europe was reinstated after the French Revolution After Waterloo. So we can't say that it ended in 1789 or 1813, okay? And if nothing else, the Congress of Vienna reconstituted it, okay? And if you want to look at, okay, so even if you accept

that there was a break in the in the in the just public and europe um it it was it was uh it was uh it was reinstated by by by consensus for another century okay now as uh as a a couple of things happened is uh that uh that really disrupted the ability to sustain um the ability to sustain the you know, the Boker Act. Those two things were the colored world, as Spangler referred to it, and as, you know, it was kind of what we called, you know, non-European cultures and, you know, less delegate times, began to develop a political consciousness unto themselves.

You know, it could no longer be said, you know, by the end of the 19th century, you can no longer be said that, you know, people in Southeast Asia, people in Africa, people in Latin America, you couldn't just dismiss these people's ambitions and their ways of life as well these people are barbarians. And even if we, even if we have a certain affinity for them and a fatherly concern,

they're not capable of politics. I mean, they just could not be said anymore. They were organizing in, according to the parameters of the modern state. They were practicing a form of state craft, at least within their geographic neighborhood that was in common with the way Europe had conducted politics since the 30 years war.

Now, okay, that may have been the direct progeny of their European overlords, you know, the fact that they even had these such concepts in mind, but that didn't matter because for practical purposes, you could not just dismiss these features of strategic landscape as meaningless, or, you know, you could not hope to, if nothing else, even if you didn't view these, you know, the ambitions and politics of the colored world is legitimate. You couldn't just kind of sentencingly dismiss. miss these things and hope to maintain anything approaching peace within these dominions okay and particularly particularly the ascendancy of japan which had never been you know truly colonized obviously but it become you know a great power you know this this posed a question as the you know how do you how can you consider uh how can you consider a great military power like Japan, which arguably is even more advanced than, you know, a state like Spain or Russia. How can you claim that there's somehow outside, you know, the community of civilized nation is just because they're not white. And it wasn't, it wasn't man who, you know,

wasn't just woke types of the tie of the day suggesting this or progresses. It was people who had a very practical view of things, you know, like Japan is a great power, you know, what are we going to do? Are we going to abandon any, any pretext of the just public in Europa? Or are we going to extend to them equality of status? you know what how exactly this is going to be managed well kind of uh the anglo-american view of things was that it owed entirely basically the ability to project power okay and that was the second kind of feature of what what changed uh things and and no and made the just public of europe i'm no longer truly sustainable okay because conceptually you know not only is the law as

we talked to with NOMOS, not only does it owe to this kind of absolute consensus, you know, culturally, aesthetically, ethically, um, juristically, but it, the polis is an actual concrete place. It's like literally and figuratively, like, was the center of, you know, ancient Greek life. It's like the state became the center of national life for, say, you know, France or for Germany post-unification. Okay. So we can imagine, you know, a king or we can imagine a chancellor, you know,

subsequently or some combination thereof as the seat of sovereignty and that's almost a model for how we think of God, okay, you know, in symbolic terms, even if one of not particularly religious. And the polis or the state, you know, it's quite literally the physical dominion of that sovereignty,

okay? So, and the degree to which that sovereign, you know, can extend his authority, that's basically the parameters of the national state. You know, it's the parameters of that government's authority.

Quite literally, in physical space, you can draw a line to which it extends to. Okay, this presents a problem if you take a state like the United Kingdom, or if you take a state like America was becoming, that had and has a blue water navy, you know, that can project power

anywhere on this planet with fairly devastating results, even back then, and which also has interests of all kinds in all sorts of far-flung locale. Some of these interests are political, some are military. So are strictly economic. Okay.

So on what basis does a state such as that, you know, derive its authority to intervene? Well, as Schmidt pointed out in the case of the UK and the United States, it did so in terms of, you know, what is a creditor and what is a debtor? There was a deeper mythology in the UK than there was in the United States because in the United Kingdom, any kind of credit extended to any institution or people or nation, you know, derived from the sovereignty of the monarch.

And therefore, you know, the subject debtor population wasn't a very real way availing itself to that sovereignty. but even if we redact that, the United States, the way it characterized the Monroe Doctrine basically was that you know, there's complex center to the hemisphere,

you know, which in a hemisphere would facilitate say it's American wealth. You know, all these lesser states within the Americas partake of American wealth and in order to avail those states to a monarchy would be to appropriate wealth in that dominion. as far as the monarch, but as sores authority, and that's unacceptable. Later on, a military, a strategic military imperative

came to characterize the Monroe Doctrine and its legitimacy far more than a trade and creditor debtor imperative. But initially, it was exactly what Schmidt said and exactly what I just relayed as to where sovereignty was derived from. So understandably, this creates a very, very, very, kind of confused situation as to what the parameters are of sovereign authority and what even should what even be said to be the consensus of you know laws and customs of war so there was a somewhat anarchic circumstance brewing on this planet in conceptual terms even removing um the kind of discreet power political interests of these various actors some state actors some non state actors that gave rise these catastrophes the first and second rule of war and the second world of war and the second world World War, obviously a not just a draconian peace, but an incredibly brutal and broad-based and

unprecedented effort of social engineering was undertaken, and it was done so under the auspices of a New World Order that replaced and swept away what we just talked about. And the only reason that was possible is because in conceptual terms, what I just described here was no longer conceivable and no longer had a context. Even if they did have a context, there was no way to implement it any longer. Now, the first kind of chinks

in the sort of in the sort of structure of the Volcker Act, the just public, in Europe and formal terms. In 1899 and 1907,

there was two there was two peace commerce that's held in the Hague. And those are the first efforts to decouple law and the law of war and peace from any sovereign authority

or territorial imperative. Like, conceptually, the claim was, you know, the vote correct is no more. The world truly has been incorporated into, you know,

into various polities that can be said to span the planet in terms of the interests that are, you know, that they, that interdependence has created, you know, of an economic, military, political nature.

You know, the only way that we can manage the colored world in these ascended states, as well as, you know, manage, you know, overlapping interests of the European powers and the colored dominions and, you know, the kind of nascent national identities that are extening those dominions between each other. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite LIDL items

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Now, this is important what I'm about to say to the, to Schmidt's paradigm, which I'm going to draw upon again to make a point. Which I, is for purposes of existential understanding, not polemical, okay? if you're going to declare now or in 1907 that you know I'm going to declare you know I'm going to draft the treaty document I'm going to declare that you know there's equality of status between all states you know no state has as is more power than another in order to manipulate you know outcomes you know war in peace war is illegal you know and uh you know in any any any any aggressive war is a criminal act or the community of nations i mean who whose values am i am i declaring that in the name of i mean any any state out of the power to enforce such a paradigm hypothetically would be uh

what would be a superpower if not a unipolar hegemon it would be a superpower and just the the very existence of these kind of power disparities between a state that acts as the lawgiver state and the subject states like means that you're dealing with the ruler and the ruled and uh all legal paradigms that are functional or can be said to exist rely at least in part or part of coercion. So added to that, either the state that's issuing these edicts as the lawgiver's state or, you know, a state that's assigned separate from it as the enforcement mechanism of this, you know, edict issued by the lawgiver's state. or, you know, a state that's assigned separate from it is the enforcement mechanism of this, you know, edict issued by the lawgiver. One of those two is going to, by default, be the sovereign owing to its monopoly on violence.

You know, even if all states voluntarily ceded their, you know, acquiesce to this by seating their maintenance of arms to the singular authority. You know, you still would not be dealing with a situation of equality. your consensus, you know, just existentially it's not possible. There's some people, particularly on the left, not the radical left, because generally they tend to accept some bastardized very end of that paradigm, I just explained, but who claim that what I just stated is cynical or that it's a polemical idea that, you know, just, just, just owing to a certain disdain for, for supranational institutions. That's not the case at all.

It's an existential matter. And it doesn't matter who or what is in the role of lawgiver. There is an element of coercion, and any element of coercion creates a disparity of status. There cannot be said to be equality within such a system. And absent that enforcing mechanism, once again, you're dealing with anarchy, and you're dealing simply with a permissive set of guidelines that if states choose to abide, they will abide. And if they do not, the agreement is an illusory promise because it has no mechanism of enforcement.

Now, this seems like a highly academic, kind of highly abstract argument. But in the aftermath of the First World War, this became. very much an issue, okay? Because the claim was, um, what underlay the Kellogg-Bri-on pact, which, uh, in the aftermath of the unwillingness of the United States to acquiesce the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Bri-on pact was, um, it outlawed war quote as a instrument of national policy.

Okay. Um, but again, uh, this was a very Eurocentric conception, and it pertook actually, despite its pretensions of representing a new order, it partook in existential terms of the old world order. Because if you utilize war as a policy instrument, you're talking by definition about a war of choice. You know, you're talking about a cabinet war in order to coerce a rival power into acquiescing to some demand or another, or you're talking about, you know, you're talking about a war within the colored dominions to manage, you know, a colony remote from the primary seat of sovereignty. You know, these are wars which are waived by choice, you know, in order to derive some sort of profit or benefit. You know, an existential war for national existence, one doesn't have a choice in whether or not to wage such a war. and the stakes not profit or, you know, discouragement from, you know, seeking the path to war on account of.

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When the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Lidl, more to value. You know, some kind of potential sanction. You're talking about existence or non-existence. You know, so such things presume not just, you know, the kind of perennial nature of a Eurocentric order

and the kind of permanent subjugation of the colored world, which in turn presumes not just the political will but the material means to do so, but it also, it characterizes a very peculiar kind of warring that really didn't have precedent outside of the early modern period in Europe. You know, I mean, it wasn't nascent great powers like Japan weren't waging wars of choice

and states like Prussia that, you know, had been at war for 600 years only to, you know, then being on the frontier of Europe, quite literally, they weren't fighting wars of choice against, you know, the Ottomans, the Mongols, or the Russians,

and later the Soviet Union. I mean, these were wars of national existence. And in the most bleak and intense terms, you know, race wars. So that, aside from the fact that these things, like a Kellogg-Briam,

the act and like Leganasia to self except the fact that they were premised on a on a kind of progressive fictions they they didn't describe war as was actually developing and the exigencies that

that were giving rise to the need for this kind of discussion in the first place. Now I'm going to bring us back to the Second World War I felt it was important to drop that background extensive and in detail as it may have been because otherwise the kind of the conceptual

horizon of the of the victors doesn't really make sense now as we kind of talked about I mean as we did talk about we talked about in the preceding episodes you know the kind of origin of the war party in the UK you know the focus which had a a deep, deep sectarian, ethno-sectarian hatred of Germany. Okay, and we talked about, you know, how they capitalized on the indigenous element, like Vansitat and others, you know, who had a kind of atavistic fear of Germany, you know, owing to a number of things, including the fact, in my opinion, they kind of, these people were kind of decadent aristocrats who realized they were sort of in the twilight of their existence as,

as an elite past and they associated you know the kind of this kind of this kind of nightmare image of goose stepping prussians you know backed up by you know modern combined arms as some it was kind of like their fear of like you know the new order embodied okay or what potential new order that would render them totally obsolescent i mean it sounds silly but i really believe that this was something that was present in the minds of people outside of the dominant ethnic group of the focus. Because otherwise, I can't think of why they would take on such prejudices. But there was a tangible spirit of revenge, okay? In the United States, among the new dealers, we talked about Henry Morgenthau and his outsized role.

and setting policy in the Roosevelt administration, okay? We talked about the Morgenthau plan. Well, Morgenthau continued to advocate for the Morgenthau plan throughout 93 and 94, okay? And as time went on and Roosevelt's health began to fail, Roosevelt's mind began to fail in large part. And who had access to Roosevelt really could expect, you know, kind of his

own policy initiatives to be greenlit. opposite Cordala Hall opposite Morganthau was Henry Stimson, Secretary of War. We've not talked a lot about Stimson. And

I don't think Stimson was any kind of hero, but compared to his fellows in the Roosevelt White House, I think he was fairly admirable. He was Secretary of War, Stimson was the token Republican. I missed the new dealers.

He certainly didn't run interference with any New Deal policies, and he certainly never has a date to execute. The orders of his commander in chief, but he was more than to be said of anybody else in the cabinet, and there was there on grounds of merit. Okay, that's the reason he was, that's the reason why he was allowed his party affiliation. okay he was noting

fitting in late 1984 um not just the general not just uh the general george marshal who was roosevelt's chief of staff but uh in his own diary that it was pretty clear that you know in the territories that were slated to be seated to Poland

you know the ethnic Germans there were going to be the Germans there were going to be ethnically cleansed okay you know we were talking about two to three million people and this happened okay but uh But he made the, Stipson made the point that, you know, not only is this, it was clear that Poland is going to be delivered to the Soviets out of silver player. So in the court of history, America is going to be, you know, held responsible for better or worse, for the ethnic cleansing of Germans from Central Europe.

You know, just as it's claiming that it's waging this war, you know, of a democratic self-determination for all European peoples and in order to liberate Poland from Tiri, you know. And in those days, the Department of State and the entire diplomatic court, from which the Department of War derived a lot of its key figures, you know, these were guys who generally were privileged, and they very much pursued the career they did, only the fact that they had a very strong historical orientation. Okay. they were motivated by what they believed the historical record would reflect

based upon their actions. Okay, this wasn't in tribe. Whatever I was here, Stimson, these are things he wrote in this private diary, as well as said, confided the people like Marshall. So I think we can rely on its legitimacy. He wasn't just speaking, kind of soaring terms to exonerate himself amidst what he realized was a pretty morally questionable administration. whatever we can say. I rely on Stimson

a lot because for that reason, I believe we can take his testimony at face value. Okay. Stimson is particularly concerned because Cordell Hall, his counterpart in Department of State had essentially taken on the

Morgenthau view. Like, why it's not entirely clear. I've got my own views on that. I think Hull was one of these types who went immersed around strong personalities like Morgan Thel and immersed as

whole would have been in kind of the culture, the focus, because he was meeting with Churchill's people all the time. I think he took on the prejudices of some of these people and I see this today a similar phenomenon. And I think we saw that in men like Donald Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney, frankly. I don't think I need to spell it out further. But Lord Halifax, who was,

As I've noted before, I think was a fairly, fairly reasoned individual, at least compared to his prime minister, he certainly was. He attested in March in 1943. He met with Cordell Hall, and Hall seemed positively unhinged when the issue of the German leadership came up. And he stated that the entirety of the German political military leadership down to the lowliest officers should be liquidated. You know, and obviously Halifax's first thought was, my God, this man is essentially suggesting we should do what Stalin did. You know, not just within his own general staff and then ultimately, you know, to the entirety of the military apparatus down to the company level. but you know what what the soviists did in eastern poland it hit you know this uh this uh the people like halifax realized that this wasn't just some kind of fog of war uh quagmire that you know really you know the the enterprise he was involved in was was not popular by man who be said to be advocating

you know taking the moral high ground okay um Eisenhower was uh i i think Eisenhower was certainly decent compared to people like like, like, like Morgenthau, but unlike Marshall, I think Eisenhower was somewhat small-minded, okay? I think he's a military genius.

I think he was one of the smartest men in the IQ ever sit in the White House, but in terms of the historical implications of this punitive regime that was being advocated and quite literally planned,

I don't think he fully grassbed. He said to he said to Stimson. Ready for huge savings. We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale

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Interestingly, this was just before the July 20 plot that, you know, where Hitler got blown up and survived, of course. but is that the rights leadership be shot even without the benefit of a drumheads court marshal on grounds that the German people must be made to feel a sense of personal responsibility that's a very peculiar thing for a military man do say okay and I believe again um Ijanoir certainly wasn't a milk toast but I I think he basically he basically left political decisions and analyses to what he viewed as you know to who he viewed as you know kind of a kind of the men most qualified to render those decisions and um despite Eisenhower's surname and Disinheritage I I you know he was a northern military officer I think he was naive about the kind of reality of

of a ethno sectarian politics that caused the European war in the first place um however Eisenhower did uh Eisenhower did oppose the excesses of the Morgenthau plan, because the Morgenthau plan was literally a plan to exterminate the German people. And Eisenhower raised this to Morgenthau, and in part, Eisenhower was looking forward to the occupation, wondering, first of all, Eisenhower, because he was a basically decent individual. he wasn't going to avail his men as the exterminators of the German race. Okay, number two, it's not even clear like how such an occupation slash final solution would be implemented. And according to Morgenthau, when Eisenhower challenged him, Corrithel said, quote, the whole of the German population is a synthetic paranoid.

There is no reason for treating a paranoid gently. The best cure is let the Germans stew in their own juice. Meaning, essentially, in metaphorical terms, you know, that the Germans are constitutionally evil. I mean, this was dressed up in the language of psychiatry, which as we get into the next episode, We'll get into how that played into the kind of entire NERM paradigm and the subsequent occupation. But, Morgan Thel, he was able to get an audience with the president, Roosevelt, again in August 1994. There's immediately on his return from Europe to Washington.

and he had great concern that Morgan Thoug did that that some sort of uh that some sort of normal peace would be you know realized with with Germany hung out of national security exigencies or just the fact that you know people were revolted by the suggestion that Germany should literally be starved and depopulated um in particular Morgan Thao was concerned that Churchill uh would object to the morinnell plan not because Churchill was a moral person or because he cared about whether Germans lived or died but the UK

would have uh would have would have would have been an existential jeopardy of Germany was simply wiped off the map okay and looking forward and particularly considering the you know the cozy relationship between Stalin and and Roosevelt of which Churchill had increasingly

been frozen out he was he was looking this was a self-interested concern okay but what Roosevelt said was and this is a direct quote we've got to be tough with Germany

and I mean the German people not just the Nazis you have to castrate the German people or have to treat them in such a manner so that they can't go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past that's metaphor comes Rose overturned his metaphor a few different times

and so did Morganthau I don't know who filched it from who this we have to castrate the German people now I'm not trying to be lurid but that's an incredibly strange metaphor and I've never in my life in both the metaphor of castrating something or somebody

if it speaks of a real of a real moral sickness I think I don't think that I I don't think that I'm on my own prejudices to color my opinion on this and there's something very like go or like organically brutal about it.

You know, the the, even the metaphorical language of the, of, of, of, of, of the more than a plan.

They're, they're, they're, like they're exterminating vermin or they're, or they're precluding some insidious, uh, bloodline in, in a population of cattle from,

you know, from reproducing itself. It's, it's really quite sick. And, um, you know, not even,

not, even like in the in the in the memoirs of guys who fought and these like the Creek War and in these like horrible like race wars in America have I ever come across and I never run across anybody saying we got to cast straight to rain it's like that it's profound I mean saying it's profoundly sick I'm sure some people will disagree and say that I'm just deliberately uh trying to emphasize that point to cast a punitive light of mr. Roosevelt I don't accept that but Stimson

Secretary of Stimson, the way he handled this, he approached General George Marshall. And in those days, even with a chief executive as powerful as Roosevelt, the chief of staff, the Army Chief of Staff, he had tremendous power. Okay. and Stimson Neither Stimson nor Nor Marshall were Jewish And that was kind of a common bond

I mean just only the fact that You know So many people in you know Morganthal's orbit and were animated by adenal sectarian passions But Morganthel But Morganthel

Marshall also Because he was a military man and Stimson was a secretary of war, you know, they had a common interest, not just in policy, but, you know, there was, there was, there was, there was, there was, there was a mutuality of interest there, okay? And, um,

what Stimson wrote, um, in his diary about, um, Stimson was a prolific diarist, like a lot of men of this era were, which is a, a tremendous resource for people like me who are kind of lay historians, but since it wrote about his meeting in 444 with Marshall, he said,

I relayed to Marshall, I quote, I found around I found an atmosphere of personal resentment against the entire German people without regard to individual guilt and I was very much afraid it would result in our taking mass vengeance on the part of our people in the shape of clumsy economic action. And

that really spoke to Marshall, the technocrat, among other things. I mean, don't be wrong. I think Marshall had more of a conscious than most of his peers in this administration. But he also, Marshall was an officer, a general officer cut from the same kind of cloth as Blackjack Pershing had been. And for those that don't know, more than the other things, Blackjack Pershing was a logistics genius. And like a lot of West Point Tice was an engineering genius. And the modern interstate highway system was basically the brainchild of Pershing. So if you approach Marshall and say,

look, you know, the, you know, Roosevelt is just having a late-night conversations with Morgenthau about like literally castrating the Germans as a people and on top of that. You know, if we, if we annihilate Germany and kill 80 million of them and leave this kind of void in the center of Europe, you know, we're going to not only will the world economy

to not recover, we're going to plunge ourselves probably into another nightmare comparable to 1929. This is the guy thing that very much got Morgan Thao's attention, okay? Or not Morgan Thal, Marshall. I'm sorry, I'm tired. But owing to, again, owing to the fact that Morgan Lowe had greater access to Roosevelt, probably, not just as an student, probably than anybody.

He, Morgan Thal also had at Harry Dexter White, who was personally close to Roosevelt in a way that at Treasury's assistant, ordinarily would not be. And incidentally, White was later accused of being a Soviet agent. And there was a substantial evidence to that effect. But FDR, by this point, is in failing health. He's presented with the final proposal of the Morin'au Plan by Harry Dexter White. Okay. What it relayed, what it suggested, was that first and foremost, Germany had to be

demilitarized and stripped of any national army or paramilitary element independent of ally control authority. But in addition of those fairly normal of punitive demands, it was suggested that 18 to 20 million able-bodied Germans be deported to Africa, essentially as slave waivers. And the way Harry Extra White sold it

was the Tennessee Valley Authority, which was, you know, part of the, one of the Mass New Deal projects. It undertook these mass of hydroelectric projects, infrastructural projects, that for a time, employed close to half the able-bodied male population

United States. So the idea was the final morning without plan iteration, you know, we could basically take every able-bodied German man who survived, you know, 945, we can work on a death in Africa and carve out some kind of a... You catch them in the corner of your eye, distinctive, by design, they move you even before you drive. The new Cooper plug-in hybrid range, for Mentor, Leon, and Teramar. Now with flexible PC CP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2,000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Coopera. Design that moves.

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you know as a modern as a modern you know interdependent economy which is a totally insane idea and frankly it's not it's not morally any difference than than Himmler's

and and and the SS and the SD's plan for the Slavic East except arguably in their case you know there's the exigency of, you know, Germany having to develop superpower capability to survives the people. Now, Stimson and Marshall,

what they did, what they did was they, they, they approached Felix Frankfurter, which on his face seems peculiar, owning to Frankfurt's heritage and his sympathies and his involvement with the folks and everything, but it actually was a stroke of genius for what they were trying to do.

So, Frankfurt was shocked and I mean, I had to great disdain at the Morgendau plan, frankly, because it was so obviously punitive and amateurish. Frankfurter, he said, you know, obviously any, whatever we decide moving forward in terms of the, in terms of the occupation regime and, you know, the liquidation of, of, you know, the national socialist element and the control of within Germany, you know, we've got to maintain the appearance of long order at all. You know, this was Frankfurter's big, this was this big, you know, this is what he kept returning to, okay? Morgenthau was essentially roped, owing to Stimson and Marshall's ability to get the year of Frankfurter, but Frankfurter respected both of them, even if they weren't really friendly. you know, Frankfurter was able,

one of the few men who could go over Morganthal's head, and by that point, Roosevelt was practically, you know, on his deathbed anyway. And Frankfurter and his people

were able to essentially keep Morgenthau from getting an audience with the present again, or from literally, you know, being alone with him and getting him to put, you know, his hand to paper and, you know, signing off

with the authority of the, of the executive. on whatever machinations of and white head in mind and thank God for that. What ensued was not particularly great, but it certainly was better than the alternative. So the result of this was on October 30th, 1994, the Allies issued what can be called the Moscow Declaration. What the Moscow declaration did was that the Moscow declaration did was it distinguishes between, quote, major war criminals and minor war criminals.

Minor war criminals were treated like war criminals traditionally had been, okay, only the laws and customs of war. Like, for example, a company commander who, you know, allegedly carried out a massacre, say in Italy, you know, he'd be extradited to Italy, like a local court would present evidence against him, you know, a military jury would be impaneled, you know, considering a man who fought in that heater, you know, they would render a decision based upon, you know, the evidence presented, and that would be that. Major war criminals, however, it was said, you know, regardless of expense, there to be brought

back to stay in trial within, you know, occupied, allied control counsel, occupied territory because, you know, the quote-unquote crimes that they committed were not, we're not bound any territory or locality. So basically, if you were judged to be a major war criminal, based on a criteria that was fairly arbitrary, even

as developed finally a year later on the eve of the proceeding itself, it was never entirely clear what made one a major war criminal, and we'll get into that next episode. But basically, the Moscow declaration, it attempted to have it

both ways, okay? On the one hand, it said, you know, okay, you know, for people who we're not particularly interested in, you know, politically, or for people who, you know, the trial of which won't facilitate any, you know, directly political end, you know, we're going to treat them like, you know, we always would, you know, a man in uniform, accused of a, accused of a, of breaching the laws and customs of war. but for people whom we consider an imperative you know to to try for political purposes you know there's no limitation to where they're charged how they're charged what sovereign authority places them on trial and you know

what what what what the content that the indictment information against them constitutes because you know they they simply offended against moral principles that you know are held by all men um nothing is a point

This isn't a theory of law. And it doesn't even really purport to be other than a most superficial way. In my opinion, that's the that's kind of what remained directly of the

of the kind of Morganfell playing sensibility. Like that's it shining through. And in our next episode, I want to wrap up in a minute's. I think I just threw a lot at our listeners. frankly like I'm going to talk about how Justice Jackson, who quite literally was a small town American lawyer who became a judge, never graduated law school, incidentally, because once upon a time, you order to practice law by practicing law and then you, you know, were admitted by a bar, they acted kind of like a guild of source. you know nobody went to law school um but that's that's interesting in its own right because uh i i i um that's a huge

change compared to the way things are structured today but you know we'll get into the actual proceedings um and uh we'll probably go a little bit longer then they already kind of started my notes like in my and like organizing in my mind we're probably going to have to go for like 90 minutes um but yeah i think i think this might be a good stopping point man um i hope that wasn't too like scattershot or dry. Like I said, I think it's important for context. Otherwise, it doesn't, it doesn't really, it's hard to convey like what the significance of these proceedings were.

That makes any sense. Right. No, you started out by laying down what historical law was, how it was structured. And then you showed how it was basically dismantled for the 20th century. And we see the fruits of it up until today. Great. Yeah. If you're happy, if the listeners are, then I'm happy.

So give your plugs and we'll lend it. Yeah, we'll do. I'm able to report that Telegram, just as a platform, it seems to be blowing up a lot. Like Trump's on there now and he's pretty active, as there are a bunch of people in our thing. We've got some good discussions there. You can find my Telegram channel. It's t.m.m.e. slash the T-H-H-M-A-S-777. You can find me on Substack for my long forum.

is as well as my podcast. It's Real, R-A-L-T-H-O-M-A-S-777. Dot substack.com. You can find me on Gab at Real Thomas 7777. I generally just back up on Gab,

you know what I post on Telegram, but if you like Gab and you contact me there, I will answer it. Well, that was great. I guess we're going to do this again next week. And I've been trying to put him out on the same day. Like I was trying to do Wednesday.

Then we got caught up this week. Like, you weren't feeling well. I'm not really feeling well. I'm trying to get over something that was, that's been bugging me. So, um... Yeah, this allergy scene. I think a lot of people are hit hard by that.

Yeah. So we'll record next week and we'll be back. Thanks, man. That's great, Pete. Thank you. I'm here with Thomas 777. How are you done, Thomas? Very well.

Thanks. Um, what I want to get into today, I realized in the last episode, we delved rather deep into the theoretical foundation of international law and what supplanted, what had been precedent, you know, of the preceding 300 years, really. And that wasn't, I wasn't just trying to, you know, showcase some sort of, you know, knowledge of esoteric subjects. That really is essential, if you want to understand what, uh, what came to pass in the immediate aftermath of, of the war. and what the objectives were of the victors and how and why it was such a house divided. And today, we're going to continue to lay foundation, but in more concrete terms, as to what was arrayed against the vanquished states and what sort of narratives were prioritized in order to, in order to substantiate the legitimacy of the burgeoning.

New order, because as we've talked about, we haven't discussed as extensively as we might on a dedicated, on a series that's, you know, dedicated specifically to the topic. But, you know, we've gotten into how... Discover five-star luxury at Trump Dunebeg. Unwind in our luxurious spa. Savor sumptuous farm-fresh dining. Relax in our exquisite accommodations. Step outside and be captivated by the wild Atlantic surrounds. Your five-star getaway, where every detail is designed with you in mind. Give the gift of a unique experience this Christmas with vouchers from Trump-Dunbeg. Search Trump-Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Dunbiog, Kush Faragea.

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that would favor their political hegemony and their ability to to, you know, to, to vanquish Europe and perpetuity in terms of its ability to reconstitute and challenge, you know, the hegemony of, of the victors. And that was not possible, going to, you know, material considerations of a power of political nature. But also, there really was a revolt, you know, within the United States, you know, politically at the ballot box, I mean, you know, the, it was very much viewed as, um, the voting public I mean, they very much viewed what Paris and London had in mind for Europe as being a very cynical ploy, you know, that really had nothing to do with substantial justice or with establishing a paradigm that would guarantee, you know, a balance of power that wouldn't lead to these disasters, as was the case in 1914. It had nothing to do with that.

They had everything to do with, you know, weapon-onial. you know, the apparatus of international law in order to accomplish political goals and, you know, goals that inevitably were motivated by hostility. By the end of the Second War, things were very different in no small measure because, as we talked about, you know, the 1933 and New Dealer regime really, really did implement a revolutionary paradigm, you know, domestically. as well as abroad. And one of the things that substantiated this was a near total control of information and the ability to shape public opinion that there to four was unprecedented.

You know, particularly not with just the advent of, you know, almost every home having access to radio, but, you know, the advent of visual media, which was exploited to great effects by all major combatant powers, you know, the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, the UK, Japan, the United States. So what I'm getting at is that

the world situation of 1945 was very, very different. And on top of that, Germany had been utterly devastated in, you know, in a way that was not the case in 1918. I mean, Germany had suffered terribly not just in the battlefield, but I grounded the starvation blockade

and other things, but they literally were being subjected to a, they literally been subjected to a genocidal assault. owing to the race war that, you know, where they gave as brutally and as thoroughly as they got proverbially against the Soviet Union. But, you know, the United States and the United Kingdom were offering no quarter in terms of their bomber offensives and the goals they're in. I mean, make a mistake, the objective was to massacre as many German civilians as possible. and they accomplished that to very macabre effect.

And we're going to get into that later, probably next episode, in more detail. And finally, we talked in detail throughout this entire series about the Morgenthel plan. You know, not just the plan specifically, but, you know, the kinds of sympathies and the ethno-sectarian prejudices and kind of radical viewpoints that gave rise to that sort of, that sort of, that sort of, thinking in the first place. You know, there really was a core of, of extremists, you know, who had a great historical animosity made all the more, made all the more vicious by, you know, the excesses that were underway in the most recent hostilities, you know, between, you know, European Jewry and the German Reich and its allied states.

And there was a coterie of men in Roosevelt's orbit who were very, very powerful, you know, not the least of which was Henry Morgenthau, the Treasury Secretary, who was, you know, the author of the Sonian plan. So these circumstances were really not precedented, in my opinion, except in the case of the 30, in the argument of the 30 years war, which obviously was what had established the preceding. paradigm as we talked about that it endured more or less for about 300 years preceding. But moving on to the kind of concrete particulars, the person of Robert H. Jackson, the Supreme Court Justice, he was selected by Truman to lead the American delegation at Nuremberg, okay? And this was very deliberate. Truman, people have mixed feelings about Truman, myself. Obviously, I've got no truck with his politics, but I think Truman was a lot more admirable than Roosevelt, which is sitting the bar very high. But I think he was a pragmatic realist. And he understood he certainly was no new dealer, whatever the shortcomings or limitations of his viewpoint, or whatever his prejudices may have been. And Truman very much had a notion that he wanted the Nuremberg proceedings, particularly of the major war criminals. I mean, if you recall, as I'm sure you do, but also the viewers and listeners,

you know, we discussed in the last episode of this distinction between major war criminals and minor war criminals. This had an independent legal significance in terms of what the victors wanted to accomplish because they were trying to characterize the leadership of the German Reich and its control group as not ordinary actors in the service of a state, but as parties do a kind of criminal conspiracy that was not precedented in modern statecraft. And thus, you know, it was not, you know, the men who constituted this control group, you know, should not be afforded the protections or the presumed, you know,

legitimacy and, and prophylactic assumptions that, you know, allow them to be spared, you know, personal liability for acts of state that would ordinarily be extended to a government, okay? Now, that's however what everyone's politics are. I mean, that's a very dramatic orientation, okay? And it's very much a break with precedent, particularly in the modern era, okay? Particularly in the era that was feeling peace and subsequent. And Truman realized that.

So Truman, his notion was a couple of things in choosing Justice Jackson. First of all, he wanted this, he wanted the Nuremberg proceedings to be conducted in the name of the quote, United Nations. Like, obviously, United Nations as like an instance, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as an intergovernmental institution, you know, who's the founder of states of it, you know, hope for it to become a kind of world government, you know, obviously that hadn't been established yet. You know, it would be established a few years later. But conceptually, this idea of, you know, the Victor States acting, you know, in the name of the United Nations. This was very much a Truman, this was, this was really part of Truman's nomenclature, okay?

And the right man had to be chosen in order to sort of lead that initiative or at least, you know, be front and center in the public mind. Okay. So Robert A. Jackson, despite being a Supreme Court justice, you know, and having a, and that role then is now having tremendous, you know, prestige behind it. Like I've said, arguably, there's even more esteemed then than today, despite, you know, the fact that, you know, Despite the fact that, you know, arguably, you know, post-1973 or so, the seat of sovereignty has shifted to the judiciary. There's a great mystique afforded to the federal judiciary, okay? And there's a reason like Jackson got selected and not, you know, a man like Frankfurter, who, you know, despite his intelligence, despite his qualifications, despite his Machiavellian, despite his aptitude for Machiavellian intrigues, you know, Frankfurter was very much, you know, like an East Coast Jew. And like he had, although he was far more balanced on political questions and some of his co-religionists of the day, you know, he was very much a Zionist. You know, Truman realized you can't have a man like this out front, okay?

That's going to raise the ire of not just the vanquished and have him reject the legitimacy of it outright, you know, even more than they, you know, it's not as if they, they were affording a great deal of validity to begin with. But, you know, even the party states to the Norberg Tribunal, you know, France, the UK, the Soviet Union, you know, they certainly would view this as bad optics, okay? So Robert Jackson, he was born in Pennsylvania, a small town township that his great grandfather literally had founded, okay? Like, this is very Norman Rockwell kind of stuff, okay? Jackson, which was common to litigation attorneys of that generation. He never went to law school or took a law degree. He learned the practice by doing, you know, and by being an apprentice to, you know, learned men that were, you know, that had known his father and his grandfather.

And he demonstrated, you know, he demonstrated a real confidence for litigation, you know, and that's how he got admitted to the bar. I mean, that's the way things were done, you know, in decades past. I mean, that's the whole subject for another dedicated baguess broadly, but he became a solo practitioner, I think, in 1913. But he had a high profile, not just owing to his lineage and things, you know, and kind of being a descendant to the... Employers, rewarding your staff?

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Find out more at airgrid.com.i. ford slash northwest. The kind of town fathers where he grew up, he was an arch, new deal. okay and this you know this uh this uh this uh you know wealthy protestants uh on the east coast didn't think that way like even if they were liberal okay you know and he developed a reputation as as it kind of as as a as a as a go-to lawyer for trade unionists you know who had socialist friendly uh socialist friendly uh you know politics and associations so he was not a uh he was not he i know on the surface, he seemed, you know, very much a kind of a blue-blooded American, like, theoretically, but his politics or anything but. And, and, uh, and, uh, demolished for that,

that was the fact that his career took off in 1934 because Henry Morgenthau himself, you know, here's Morgenthau again, invited him to become general counsel of the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Okay, you know, obviously, you know, everybody, the internal revenue service today, has great power. But everything related to tax authority, you know, decades back, you know, since the Wilson administration, it's been a great way to attack one's political enemies, okay, in less than, in less than savory ways. Okay, so what I'm getting at is that it's not an accident that Morgenthau took this young

lawyer, but a reputation for, you know, being friendly with the trade union movement and who had some radical inclinations that he demonstrated. that he was committed to in his own professional and personal life. It's not an accident that Morgenthel solicited his talents for the Bureau of Internal Revenue. You know, the Roosevelt administration, like many of the administration subsequent. This is one of the, this is one of the, this is one of the, this is one of the, this is one of the offices of the executive branch that would be turned loose on their enemies. Okay. So Jackson, what I'm getting at is despite his kind of squeaky clean reputation and kind of, you know, like I said, there's some.

almost sort of like Norman Rockwell sort of image of him, that, that, that, that, you know, which contributed in large part to Truman appointing him,

you know, to lead the American, uh, uh, delegation jurists to the, to the, to the Norbert tribunal. Um,

this, this was not really his nature, okay, like he, he was very much, uh, he very much had radical sympathies, okay,

you know, he very much had anti-fascist sympathies. You know, he very much was, was on board with, uh, with, with the new,

deal enterprise and its ideological orientation. You know, like it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, they've got to take measures to be balanced in their, in their analysis of, of historical events. And it's important not to just render, you know, the actors in history, you know, to, into caricatures themselves. And, you know, not every, not, not every new dealer with some crazy, uh, you know, uh, with, with, was some crazy New York City, you know, uh, zealid or some, or some, or some or some crazy Jewish guy who, you know, who, you know, who hated the Vatican and hated the Germans and hated, you know,

and considered every, every, you know, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, many happy clansmen. Like, some of these people were men like Robert Jackson who, owing to their ethnicity and faith and everything else, like you would not assume had these sympathies, but some of them did, okay, that's important to keep in mind. One of the, uh, one of the, uh, one of the, uh, one of the, one of the, uh, one of the reasons Truman, uh, uh, was enamored with Jackson as well was that

uh excuse me Jackson very much was a voice in the wilderness around the time that Roosevelt had died okay like we talked about how the Morgenthau plan

even when Roosevelt was literally in his deathbed Morganthal was still intriguing and conspiring to have the Morgenthau plan issued as an executive order you know he'd literally already gotten Roosevelt to sign off on it

and through Roosevelt Churchill to literally initial it at at the at the at the at the at it at it it it but it had not become you know an executive order and why Roosevelt was you know dragging his feet on this as some people might view it is not clear

I mean whether it owed to poor health you know and just disengagement they're in because Roosevelt's mind was failing whether Roosevelt you know he wasn't having pangs of conscience about the fate of the German nation and people but he may have realized the 11th hour that politically this was not going to be feasible in implementing the post-war post-war order because it would have it would have robbed the victors

and particularly, you know, the American delegation of the appearance of legitimacy and fair and even-handedness. But, you know, whatever it was, you know, there was, there was, there was, when Roosevelt was alive, as we talked about in the last episode, Stimson and George Marshall, they were kind of the sole men of portfolio so to speak. Employers, did you know

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you know, to the, to the men who had been identified, however, arbitrarily as major war criminals. Now, a big coup for that perspective was the appointment of Jackson, was the appointment of Jackson, because despite Jackson's limited horizons, he'd never travel aside in the United States. He was not particularly worldly. And despite his politics that we talked about,

he was known as one who sympathized with Reds, you know, not to be crude about it. But his, he was adamant that, he was adamant that the structure and the procedure of whatever ensued as regards to major war criminals, it could not be ad hoc. It had to be fully imagined. It had to be fully fleshed out and developed.

It couldn't just be some 11th hour, you know, decision, you know, like the Soviets had carried out, you know, intermittently to purge their own ranks as well as that have vanquished people. And we'll get into that in a minute. Or, you know, like what the Germans dealt with and the night of the long knives where a potential insurrectionist were just taken out and shot. You know, they had to, you know, it was understood, because Truman understood optics very well,

it was understood that, you know, the appearance of due process had to absolutely be honored, you know, if there was going to be any legitimacy to this enterprise at all. And this becomes clearer, and I'm hopping ahead, but just to make this one point, and we'll get to this later, when you look at the earliest government of the Bundes Republic, with Adonauer at the helm, Adonauer was certainly not. a friend of the German people and he certainly was a man who had come across the anti-fascist, but he was he was exactly the man who should have been installed at the helm and the reasons why are due to the fact that at least the center right and at least uh and what had been,

you know, the national conservative element in Germany was willing to get on board with this enterprise owing to the fact that the appearance of due process. was maintained. And you can say that that's, you know, the people went along with this were lacking in principles or ethics or, or, or,

or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or,

or, it at least allowed them to publicly take this position and retain some semblance of honor. You know, again, it doesn't matter if it's, if objects are superficial, you know,

the appearance of such things must be maintained at all times, particularly when you're talking about power political affairs. Now, what, uh, what what's interesting is that FDR and Stalin as early as

as 943 had been contemplating what really in the aftermath of of Kursk okay because Kursk was sort of I mean I

as I indicated earlier in our in our series I think I think the Second World War in the East was decided in 1941 but oh owing to politics and owing to the fact that no man truly is an auger in terms of what we'll develop in a battlefield, the fate of the Third Reich and military terms was very much sealed at Kursk, okay? That was the last time Germany had the initiative offensively against the Soviet Union, okay? So it's not surprising that around December 16th, 943,

that's when the Soviets had first impaneled a war crimes tribunal, okay, formally. And they did so because there was three German officers specifically who'd be taken prisoner at Stalingrad. Like the overwhelming majority of juror and POWs were sent to, gulags, which were, you know, during the war as they were prior and after, essentially death camps from where virtually nobody returned. But it was unprecedented for German officers to be availed in any kind of trial, okay, at least as the process of which would be familiar in the West.

Part of that was because it's Stalingrad. That was the first time that any general officers had fallen into a, in any meaningful numbers had fallen into Soviet hands. But part of it was because the Soviets were looking ahead. And this is important, okay, why these men were, why these men were availed to this kind of perfunctory court martial. The three-minute questions were accused of murdering Russian civilians. Villains by means of poison gas trucks. Okay? And whether you accept that or not, whether you accept that these apparatus were being employed

or not, isn't important for the point I'm trying to make and for the purposes of a revisionist analysis. The reason why these men on these charges were availed to this courts martial procedure that became really the model for Nuremberg two years later, you know, on a, you It was on a small scale. It's what was implemented on a grand scale. It owed in part to the unique character of the charges, okay? I mean, obviously there's something, you know,

there's something that seemed preposterous even before the true extent of Soviet brutality was known, even before, you know, anybody, everybody, you know, within the area of operations of the Eastern Front was aware of the degree of Soviet violence. against non-combatants and POWs alike. It was well known throughout Europe. It was well known, you know, in America.

It was, it was known throughout this planet that millions of people had been exterminated by the Soviet Union before a shot was even fired in the Second World War, okay? It would have appeared absurd just in some basic way for anything approaching, for the Soviets to be bringing people up on formal charges for any conduct that could reasonably be, you know, recognized as kind of familiar going on. within a modern battle space, okay? I think this is very important. I don't think I know it's very important, okay?

So keep that in mind. This was the first iteration of a dedicated war crimes tribunal being impaneled was these three general officers. And the subject of the informational charging instrument was literally gassing trucks. Okay. Now, what, uh, this was, uh, these men were, of course, sentenced to death, okay, these German officers.

They were executed in a very public square in Karcov. There's a crowd of, some people have claimed 30,000 people, some 50,000. The, uh, the settled number of most revisionists and court stories alike is 40,000 people. So, I mean, this was a big event, okay? what's also significant it was it was meticulously documented and filmed and heavily edited into an actual propaganda film

okay you know emphasizing a course an anti-fascist political message you know it was emphasizing you know the you know the barbarism of fascism and it's it's inherently you know exterminationist character

you know but what was a particular emphasis to anybody viewing it from outside the Soviet Union was the Soviet Relianceman confessions, like often very elaborate confessions, you know, literally drawn out, you know, pages long, you know, the accused would be forced to take the stand, you know, and they often, you know, appearing dead-eyed and dishevelled, you know, showing signs of obvious torture and, you know,

censor deprivation, you know, sometimes for, you know, as long as an hour or longer, you know, there'd be these elaborate, drawn-out confessions, okay? almost ritualized, okay? And the Soviets seemed to think that this conferred some basic legitimacy. It didn't matter. I'm not just speculating here because this pops up again and again, both before the Second World War and after, but specifically this kind of paradigm I'm talking about, this fact of reliance upon, you know, the direct testimony of the accused as somehow neutralizing any inference

of coercion or of due process not being honored okay and um the uh Jackson himself uh and his staff were availed to a screening of this trial execution film on May 17th

1945 so literally this was you know a week after the cessation of hostilities in Europe okay not even or no I was yeah no it was a week a week in two days um jaxson's response was uh in in typical diplomatic double speak um which obviously you know was was very per he was being very purposeful in choosing his words he said it was quote a very interesting exposition of the russian method of proving a case by

the defendants themselves employers rewarding your staff why choose between a shell voucher or a Spend Anywhere card, when with Options Card, you can have both. With Options Card, your team gets the best of both worlds. They can spend with Ireland's favourite retailers or choose a Spend Anywhere card. It's simple to buy and easy to manage. There are no hidden fees, it's easy to use and totally flexible. They can even re-gift or donate to a good cause. Make your awards more rewarding.

Visit OptionsCard.I.E. today. Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4 slash northwest. Now, interestingly, and somewhat against what's presented in most kind of popular histories of Nuremberg, it's characterized sort of implicitly that, you know, the United States and the UK were kind of in one camp, so to speak.

The Soviets were in another camp, and the Soviets just wanted to, you know, kind of murder everybody without even the appearance of a process or, or, uh, or a or or or or or or juristic protocol and the french are just kind of in the background and not really a party to things that's very much at odds with the facts of what developed it was Churchill who initially um was very much opposed to any sort of trial um being a for like a show trial or not just like any sort of any um any any any any any any any any any any any any any any any any any any any any any any any any any any any any any any any any any any the defendants who had been assigned the status of major war criminals. Why he was so adamantly against this, when he can speculate. Some of it has to do with the murky kind of dealings that led to his own ascendancy. Part of this had to do, and we're going to get into this later, as we get into probably next episode, the discrete specific counts of the Charternerichmann at Nuremberg. part of this had to do with ways that not just Churchill, but the entire war camp that had mischaracterized certain acts of the German high command as suggesting that, you know, German strategic bombing of London was just spontaneous and it hadn't been deliberately provoked.

Some of this had to do with, you know, not bomber command. It goes to their credit, and specifically to bomber Harris's credit, he was entirely candid about the operations undertaken by the forces under his command. command um there there was at least uh two occasions where uh churchill include one of which was the the assault on nuremberg and or the assault on dresden in february 45 um there were two there were two documented occasions where he claimed that you know uh incendiary raids that had killed tens of thousands of people had not been carried out by the by the r a f but were exclusively operations uh uh uh of the U.S. Army Air Forces when he knew this to be false, okay? Part of it might have been, and again, this is me speculating a bit,

that looking forward, Churchill knew that there would be real problems that the empire had. I mean, not just because it was falling apart from the center, only the fact that it bankrupted itself, and surrendered not just a good deal of its political sovereignty, but also with actual material wealth. It just would not have had the forces in being or the ability to reconstitute and manage revolts in the colored dominions.

But also politically, that was increasingly becoming unthinkable owing to the world's situation and the kind of fevered anti-fascist narrative that was infecting all quarters as a, as the kind of literally fiery end of the of the war was emerging. It, uh, I mean, it, it, it, it, it, it could have just been that, uh, it could, it could have just

been that, uh, you know, uh, Churchill had been infected very much by the, the, the sort of prejudices of his, of his, of his, of his, of his patrons by that point. And he, you know, he, as be taught out before, you know, he, Churchill seemed to view kind of brutality and manliness as as being synonymous, which was sort of peculiar to a man of his cast and station, but he was a peculiar individual. It's not clear, but my point is that, um, in Washington and Moscow were very much on the same page that there had to be some sort of, uh, that, that, that, that there had to be something to form precedent laid down and there had to be a very public, uh, trial of the major war criminals. It was the UK that was the holdout.

It's the only really point of agreement until after the death of Roosevelt, which we'll get to in a minute. As late as March 13, 1994, the only thing the war cabinet would abide in terms of agreement with the Soviet diplomatic corps and the American Department of State, and this was according to Stimson, you know, as a Secretary of War, who was uncarned with the entire enterprise

in relative terms. The Churchill's War Cabinet declared that it would select a list of, you know, major war criminals of Japanese, German, within the Japanese, German, and Italian commands. It would be not less than 50,

and not more than 100 names. It would be understood that every one of these, men would be liquidated and it was stated that the foreign office was going to make clear that the men in the list would be distinct from those who would be said to be guilty of war crimes and any conventional understanding of the concept rather the criteria for selection would be quote responsibility for bringing about the war now this is interesting too and this is remarkable okay because uh as we talked about in the last episode

Nuremberg was a major breach with precedent because we talked about NOMOS, you know, moral consensus being, you know, the absolute essential character of international law. You know, international law only exists so far as a meeting of the minds as presence, and there is a moral agreement and a really a constellation of moral agreement between the parties to the convention, figuratively and literally. the Nuremberg Enterprise from inception was tailored to constitute a new order, quite literally, you know, premised upon the hegemony of a world regime, you know, with the United States at the helm, you know, the Soviet Union as its junior partner, you know, in the UK as kind of this client state of America that, you know, was sovereign name only, but like nevertheless would benefit from certain privileges within that new order. in a way that, you know, the continent would not being as in part as it was because, you know, the latter would be under direct occupation and the former would not.

But it's also, too, it owes the kind of, we talked about the difference between, you know, the Anglophone sense of a, of sovereign legitimacy, not being bound up with concrete spatial concepts and territorial parameters, but at base with, with moral confidence. concepts that really were boundless and only only limited by the ability of the sovereign to project force. And that was part of it too, just kind of this basic discomfort, not with the idea of, you know, declaring acts of state to be criminal, but with putting any kind of restraint upon sovereign violence at all in any formal capacity. but also as was being hinted at

throughout these conversations between not just the diplomatic corps but the the cabinets and their equivalent of the big three, the Soviet Union United States and the UK it presented a problem

being that America the UK and the Soviet Union and it just waives a total war against the ex's powers and really nothing had been off the table in terms of what instrumentalities were considered legitimate in waging that war including ultimately nuclear assault

and a pro-straight Japan this presents some difficulties in establishing one's own moral credibility if we're just going to treat this enterprise as a conventional issue of war crimes. Aside on the fact that, again, it's fast to all to talk about, you know, it's fast to talk about the laws and customs of war

when there's been a complete breakdown in the moral consensus between the combatant parties or if there never was a consensus to begin with. But it's absolutely fast. aisle if you know you're going to declare that the vanquished states you know are are guilty of you know breaching the laws and customs of war by engaging in conduct which you yourself have you know are are identically culpable for you know within the common battle space so and that you go that continues it continues till today very much so very much yeah yeah Assad is a

terrible person who, you know, killed. And then you look and you're like, okay, so is there any way ever an American president would be charged with war crimes? Right. No. But every one of their quote unquote enemies would be if they had the chance. Exactly. And that's why in some ways, I think, like I said, in some ways the UK's reluctance was born

of Churchill's. idiosyncrasies, part of it was in fact quite cunning and well thought out because and what ultimately ended up what ultimately ended up being the core of the charging instrument

it was very, very careful to not be framed like an ordinary war crimes indictment. That's why we return again to a lot of people misunderstand and I don't want to get into the language of the indictment right this minute because that's going

to be for the next episode, but I do want to lay the foundation explicitly. There's a reason why and it was not just in order to, it was not just for structural reasons, okay? There's a compelling

reason why the Nuremberg indictment does not treat the defendants as ordinary state actors or men in the service of a normal government. And it treats them as men who are operating outside of the law you know, both the law of man and natural law,

who had conspired from the inception of, from the time that Hitler became chancellor, to perpetuate this secret conspiracy of mass homicide, which was completely at odds with not just conventional military objectives and vagaries of statecrafts and the ambitions they're in. But that was in fact a truly, a truly, criminal conspiracy that would not be within the contemplation of any any legitimate regime. Now that seems on its face a difficult case to make if you have the Soviet Union impaneled

as a, you know, with an equal say as the UK, France, and the United States. But that there is no perfect way to establish, there would have been. been no perfect way to establish this you know no war regime going forward but there is an actual within the bound of rationality of the Nuremberg

indictment there was a certain brilliance to it even if I even if one considers the entire thing to be absurd from inception which brings us to

what exactly came of the Morgenthau plan. Morganthal continues to pop up again and again. I mean, he was a key figure in the New Deal regime. And what he wanted for the post-war order, that's what really set the debate in motion as to what the future of Germany would look like. and part of this was decided by circumstances

only to the deterioration of relations between Moscow and Washington but part of it like we talked about to the credit of Stimson and to General Marshall who started about to develop a quorum against Morgenthau and his quite literally genocidal plan for the German people their genocide and their enslavement including I might add a sterilization

of the of the population of childbearing age but the Morgan Lel plan was sort of this was sort of this creature that wouldn't die and it was chimeric in some ways like Morgan Thelot he had a great deal of power just owing to his office any treasury any treasury secretary

wield substantial authority within the cabinet but Morgenthau had more power than even an ordinary secretary of the treasury. He was very well connected. He was very much a zealot. He had the confidence not just of his own people. I'm speaking in ethnocectarian terms as well as political terms. You know, he was a force to be reckoned with, and he very much had the confidence of Roosevelt's. Stimson and Marshall were able to poach.

Frankfurt, as we talked about, into their camp, which was a big coup, as it were. But as of September 94, the Morgan Now Plan was still very much alive and well. Prior to the Yalta Conference, as we talked about, Roosevelt and Churchill, both initialed the plan. And Lord Simon, you know, the Viscount Simon. This Black Friday game stream and go full speed with one gig Sky Broadband. and watch unmissable shows like all her fault on Sky. These nice people killing you, John. And Ballad of a Small Player starring Colin Farrell on Netflix.

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Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community. Find out more at airgrid.i.4 slash Northwest. He drafted a memorandum guaranteeing the summary execution of Adolf Hitler without trial, as well as Ribbon Tropp, as well as Himmler, as well as Gearing.

As noted earlier, you know, Stimson and Marshall were completely opposed to any summary execution or Drumhead's court martial or, you know, of any of any head of state, you know, under the auspices of

a, of a world, right and what really settled the issue of the top leadership, had it off Hitler, Ben, I mean, Hitler never would have let himself be taken into custody, but ultimately, when word of this memorandum, when word of this Simon memorandum came out, the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, you know, headed up by Eisenhower, he got wind of it and he said the American people would not tolerate. he said, quote, the American people not tolerate the extermination in Germany,

like, nor do they tolerate, you know, gangsterism of just, you know, hanging, you know, Edof Hitler. I mean, obviously this became a nullity because all these men were garr, all these men safe were garing were dead by the time, by the time

it became, you know, possible to implement such measures anyway, but the final act of Morgan Thao and his plan, And on April 11, 1945, Morganthau, FDR was literally on his deathbed at this time, okay? Morganthel somehow was able to gain access to FDR,

but, you know, by himself. I mean, which itself goes to show you the power of this man wielded in Morgenthau. I mean, 9040s weren't like today, where a chief executive was a lot more accessible then, but, I mean, Roosevelt was more, was more king than president and getting an audience alone

with the president as Treasury Secretary. I mean, you're talking about a man of remarkable high profile if he was able to pull that off, particularly considering the state of the man's help. Morgan, I told the commander in chief, you know, look, you know, I fought hard for this,

and this is what I'm fighting for. You know, I'm fighting for a just peace. This is what we are fighting for. This is what we fought for since 1933, and he handed Roosevelt supposedly a finalized version of Morgenthau plan. Roosevelt took the plan, didn't sign it, you know, dismissed Morgenthau. Right next day afternoon, Roosevelt died, okay? And Harry Truman was sworn in his president of the United States. Now, Truman's a lot of things like we talked about.

Truman did not trust the Soviets. He had a particular contempt for Stalin. you know Truman as a senator was the one who said that Didn't FDR die in Georgia? I believe so, yeah, yeah. So this would all been happening in Georgia. Yeah, yeah.

But Truman, when he was a senator, you know, he'd said that if if the communists get the upper hand against the Third Reich, America should support the Third Reich. You know, and he was a dogmatic realist in power of politics in some ways, and he had a particular disdain for the Soviets, and he, you know, he very much had an anti-fashist a streak within himself,

but it was, I mean, more than a streak. I mean, but he had no love for Morgenthau when he, he certainly wasn't going to, he certainly wasn't going to play ball with the Morgenth plan. You know what I mean? There was, that died with Roosevelt. Although aspects of it were, or insinuated into the occupation and uh we'll get into that by the last episode but uh the uh the uh

what ultimately if you want to understand how um what ultimately brought uh what ultimately brought uh the UK to the table. I believe I believe it was the fact that Lord Viscount was on ceremonious Lord Simon was unceremoniously dismissed before the

British delegation was impaneled. I would impart to the fact that he he'd reverse himself on on the question of war policy when he'd served a prior this black Friday game stream and go full speed

with one gig sky broadband and watch unmissable shows like all her fault on sky these nice people killing each other and ballot of a small player starring colin farrell on netflix i've made some mistakes right who hasn't get one gig sky broadband essential tv and netflix all for just 44 euro a month for 12 months our lowest ever price Availability subject location, new customers only, 12-month minimum terms, standard pricing thereafter, TV and broadband sold separately, terms apply for more infooshees sky.a slash beads. Governments and men of mouthpiece for the Liberal Party, okay.

He was very much looked upon as somebody who adapted his beliefs to the, you know, whatever the governing current was, you know, or whatever public opinion would abide, okay? and what ultimately was a crate in its stead largely at the behest of Anthony Eden rather than this kind of what ultimately was what ultimately was convened in the stead of

just kind of this this this this um committee of one, you know, being Viscount Simon, was the British War Crimes Executive, okay? They were the ones who really came up with the proposal of, you know,

what became the Nuremberg Court, you know, the four-power representation. What was vetoed in their proposal was they suggested it would consist of nothing but high-ranking general officers, you know, and they'd establish the question of war guilt in two phases. You know, the first being established that a general conspiracy had existed aiming to conquer, you know, Europe and the whole world. And then to identify which man had been a party to this conspiracy that, again, as we talked about, and this was an essential characteristic of the entire Nuremberg enterprise,

this enterprise, you know, had been outside of the scope in contemplation of any sort of normal government or any kind of legitimate. state actor. America considered it, I mean, not just Truman himself and Jackson, but even when Morgenthau had been at his zenith in terms of his ability to sway people in Roosevelt's orbit to his perspective,

it was never facilitating, organizing the Nuremberg Tribune. as a glorified court's marshal, you know, and heading military men, you know, sit as judges. That was something that America never was going to seriously entertain for a lot of reasons. Some words, I don't think you'd be explicated. The UK is not, it's very different than the continent. I think everybody will agree, but there's also basic differences between, you know, America and the UK than is now. It would have been unsteemly, not just, you know, in the court of world opinion,

but for domestic consumption, if America just deployed military brass to preside over this, like some sort of ordinary proceeding. But also, I mean, like we just established, the entire narrative of the Nuremberg Tribunal was that it wasn't the normal proceeding. It was completely outside the scope of ordinary state. spacecraft and owing to its you know the exceptional nature of what was under judgment you know it was something that you know required a unique sorts of men to to preside over it like i don't accept that mythology obviously but that was the suggested raison d'etra okay so i don't think you ever would

have seen um you never would have whether or not whoever was in the white house even if roosevelt that lived, you would not have seen what ultimately transpired, you know, being a tribunal presided over by a bunch of military brass. And the man who really, the man who really kind of was able to placate all these competing tendencies in structural terms was a guy named Samuel I. Rosenman. He was Roosevelt's kind of a legal advisor. another we talked many episodes ago about how Roosevelt in his orbit he had many men who one can think of as minister without portfolio

uh rosamund was another one of these types uh he was a judge he was a long time friend and legal advisor he'd gone to yalta and Roosevelt essentially directed him in uh the last months of roosevelt's life to travel London and try and and try and hash up some kind of agreement with British on a course of action on the war criminals. And that's exactly what Rosamond did. And owing, I guess, to his aptitude for politics,

you know, and specifically the politics of the swamp, when Roosevelt died, Rosenman was able to insinuate himself into Truman's orbit with, you know, very seamlessly. He, uh, he in fact was the one who telephoned the invitation

to Justice Jackson at the Supreme Court in order to, you know, relay Truman's offer to him to head up the American delegation. I mean, that's, um, Rosenman,

uh, is, is, is often discussed just as a footnote. a minor player, but he's not. There's a lot of this he need to read between the lines. Rosenman was a man. One could argue very much of the same sympathies of Morgenthau, but he had the theater finesse that his co-religious Morganthau did not. And he had a zealousness that the kind of plotting Frankfurter didn't,

that I mean, I believe people can understand what I'm getting at. and it yeah that all the thing I want to add is until the next episode where I want to break down the actual proceedings and I realize this may have been dry

this episode but it really is essential understanding everything that comes subsequent and I want this in part the reason why I think it's important what we're doing here is to convey a very complete understanding.

And what, what, um, yeah, no, I think we can, I think we can in here. I don't want to get into what I, yeah, yeah. I don't want to get into the, I was going to say, mind you, these negotiations were underway prior to the, uh, atomic bombing of Hiroshima. And, uh, that was something of a game changer. But obviously, uh, even though, Manhattan Project truly was, you know, of the most secret nature imaginable.

Within the executive orbit, within the national security apparatus, uh, there were men who would have been privileged to this information about what the Manhattan project entailed, at least theoretically, including Truman himself. Um, that's, uh, something of a sideline. We'll get into that in the next episode, but keep that in mind, too, because I'm sure some people are going to be thinking, like, well, what were all these committees doing,

you know, talking about these kinds of nuances and how to insinuate, you know, a kind of moral particularism into, you know, into the Allied war effort versus the German war effort, you know, with the issue of the atomic bomb? And, like, you know, how people weren't paying attention to that? They were, and we'll get into that next time. But I hope this was a,

I hope this was satisfactory content, man. Like I said, it's, it's a, it's a, one's got to strike a balance between, you know, what to leave out because it truly is minutia and what to include. And I think this is what was essential in order to provide adequate foundation. And like I said, the nitty gritty of the charging instrument we're going to get into next time, as well as some pretty controversial topics that a lot of people are very sensitive about. I think everyone knows what I'm talking about. but and then after that um i want to do a dedicated episode to hess and kind of the rebuttal that was

not permitted to the indictment if that sounds agreeable to you mr p and thank you again man and i want to thank everybody for continuing to listen and and drop these wonderful compliments on us and on the entire series do your plugs okay you can find me at on telegram uh we got a very active community there, which is great. It's t.m.m. slash number seven, H-M-A-S, or the number seven, H-M-A-S-777. You can find me on Substack at the Real Thomas-7777.substack.com.

You can find me on GAB, which I'm not terribly active on, but that I do pretty much back up everything I, I post or write, at least, you know, I include a link to on my gab. My gab ID is just at the real Thomas 777, and that is how you can find me. And if somebody asked today about the follow-up to Steelstorm. Oh, yeah, it's, I'm hoping to have it off to my dear friends at Imperium, like literally in the next few days after the 4th of July. But I got sidetracked with some other projects. And that set me back about two weeks.

But yeah, like at the latest, the manuscript will be off for publication literally in a week or two, I promise. Awesome. All right. Until the next time, we are returning with Thomas 777. How are you done, Thomas? Hi, Pete. I'm very well. And thanks, as always, for continuing to host me.

What I wanted to get into today, I know these past two sessions, you know, we've been deep diving as kind of a, as kind of a denoumois to our treatment of the war with the Nuremberg Tribunal and what it represented in terms of, you know, laying the foundation for the, for the prevailing world order subsequent, which now was in some ways being dismantled. I mean, not, not owing to the, you know, not by choice of those who've inherited its, it's, it's levers of power from its architects, but just owing to circumstances and, and the lack of, um, and the lack of the power of the mythology of established there to animate people anymore in terms of their values or in terms of their concepts of uh of legitimacy and statecraft and everything else you know the state system is it's kind of losing its primacy um that it it had really for three centuries i mean that's a bit outside the scope but um i want to it for this episode and for the next one too at least we're part of it i think we've got to deal with the man of rudolph hess he's not just an interesting personage, but the case of Hess, really in some ways, it kind of shines a light on the entire, not just a NERRA proceeding,

but the way that the Third Reich was treated then by the victorious allies in terms of how they characterized it and how it took on this kind of quasi-religious dimension and was not, neither the regime itself, nor the men who had served it were treated as as as as as as was precedented as as as was presented to treat a vanquished enemy or a or soldiers or political officers who'd served an

enemy regime like after the cessation of hostilities you know everything about this is peculiar and when we talk about a political theology surrounding you know the second world war as it's characterize an anti-fascism, you know, taking on characteristics of an ideology or to itself, almost a secular religion. The way the case of Hess is a very concrete example of what I'm talking about. And also, there's many mysteries that Hess took to the grave and there's many intrigues surrounding Hess that I think have to be addressed, everything from whether Operation sea lion as it was codenamed, which was

the alleged planned invasion of the United Kingdom by the Third Reich. That was a strategic ruse is what all the evidence indicates based on direct testimony from Adolf Hitler himself, from Joseph Gerbil's

private diaries that were not intended for anybody's eyes but his own, as well as features of deployment patterns, you know, from May 1940 through the Eve of Operation Barbarossa. But Hess himself defected to the United Kingdom owing to his belief that he could act as an emissary of peace.

And this is kind of dismissed by people, you know, court historians who claim that, well, Hess was just a madman who believed in astrology or he had all these strange ideas or he was just an insane person. And, I mean, the record does not demonstrate that at all. I mean, it proves that it has something of a prodigy. He was an intellectual, unlike a lot of his comrades in the early NSDAP, the kinds of circles that he moved in were a very, very educated people. And first and foremost, among those was Professor Haushofer,

who, both him and his son. sons, feature very prominently in this kind of tragic narrative that we're going to, going to dive into. So I, I want to deal with, just kind of dive into that now when we're going to deal a bit first with, just kind of Hess's biography in his early life.

But before I do that, I, I, I want to discuss the end of Hess's life. They kind of tied into, uh, tied into the, the proceeding to,

uh, discussions we've had. has languished in Spandau prison for 46 years, or not for 40 years, but prior to that, he was, he was at Spandau itself from July 18th, 1947 until August 17, 1987. Previously, he'd been housed at Mayhill Barracks immediately upon his capture, which was in Glasgow, then Buchanan Castle, which was a disused, a castle keep, which I think had been in Surrey, England, which I think had been used by the territorial army,

but I'm not sure. Subsequently, he was held at Miteschit Place. Or before that, he was held at the Tower of London. And I believe, briefly, when he was at the Tower of London, I think he was the last political prisoner ever held there, although some of the Englishmen and ladies who have been watching this series can correct me if I'm wrong. But I believe Hess was the last political prisoner held there as such.

finally he ended up at Michet Place which was designated Camp Z he was a fortified country mansion and a very strange things happened there Hess wasn't tortured in the sense we'd think of

you know in some kind of a horror tale kind of way or like Winston Smith in 1984 you know he wasn't beaten he wasn't he wasn't physically starved but he was psychologically tortured in every deliberate way.

And there was voluminous documentation about the regimen he was being subjected to to try and drive him to the breaking point. Okay, what we would consider to be enhanced interrogation today. And this went on for quite literally years. And by the time he arrived at Nuremberg, you know, the jail adjacent to the ad hoc courtroom has appeared to be quite literally out of his mind.

but mind you, this was after years of incarceration being subjected to this regimen that was very much tailored to break down his psychological faculties and kind of inner core of personality. And for the record, within the years subsequent, when he ended up at Spandau, he became more and more rational as he aged. Okay, and obviously that's not, you know, unless he's Benjamin Button, that's not the way things work. but anyway, Hess languished for over 40 years at his final, his final, in, you know, jail at Spando.

Now, Spando, the listeners got to understand, Spando is not a normal jail. It wasn't like a prison you think of in America or in Europe, and it wasn't even like a barracks. It literally was a castle. It was a disused castle that had been built in 1876 by the Prussian army. Okay.

as one part training ground, one part of military detention center. But it truly was this looming castle, okay? And it was housed there with only six other men. So there's these six defendants who had not been hanged at Nuremberg. You know, they received sentences, you know, ranging from, you know, seven to 10 years to, you know, 25 years, 20 years in the case. I believe everybody who got over 20 years, eventually was at a sentence partially manumitted owing to Adrian Fermity.

But the point is in this kind of massive looming castle keep, you had these seven men house there, and it's it. There were Konstantin van Nurath, who he was the Reich foreign minister before Ribbentrop. He was out of office by 1938. So, I mean, obviously, you know, sentencing him was purely a matter of vengeance. Grand Admiral Eric Rader, who'd been head in naval command until 1943, when he was January 43, when he was replaced by Carl Donnitz. Donuts, who is, he was the chief of the Kriegs Marine from January 43 until the day of defeat.

And Donuts, which not everybody knows, was Eddauff Hitler, successor as head of state by Hitler's last will and testament, which is very interesting. And that was, in my opinion, a very appropriate decision. And Doniston is an interesting case because a lot of the British Admiralty protested the fact that he was even brought up on charges. The remaining prisoners were Albert Speer, who I think is well-known to most people, you know, the armaments minister, Walter Funk, Reich Minister of Economic Affairs, in Balder van Scherach, who was the Gallauder of Vienna and the national leader of the Hitler youth.

So, I mean, this is an odd collection of men, and the fact that there was only seven of them there is bizarre. I've told people, I think of Rudolph Hess as the real man in the high castle. And for 22 years, he was the last prisoner here. So this was one man in this literal castle complex. Now, another bizarre thing, you could not. make this up, Spandau prison, it was the responsibility of the Allied

Control Council. So all four powers had equal dominion over it. The United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France. Now, all the other four power organizations had been dismantled between

1947 and summer 1948, owing to the fact that the British and American zones were combined and then the French zone was assimilated into that and the Soviets objected vociferously and then with the introduction of a national currency that being the Deutsche Mark into the Western Occupation Zone the Soviets simply they refused to cooperate from then on with any allied control counsel derived institution except for Spandau's administration and air traffic safety over over Berlin divided Berlin.

So the even idea of how bizarre this was, okay? Now, because of that, every three months, there would be a changing of the guard, like quite literally, as of which power was responsible for Spandau prison, you know, and there'd be an exchange of flags, you know, the new flag, whether it would be Soviet, the Union Jack, French flag, or, you know, stars and stripes, would be hoisted above the prison and an entire new cadre of guards would come in.

And just like think of the expense of this, okay? But this kind of formality until the day that has died was never done away with. Okay. And some people speculate like, well, that was one way the Soviet Union could it could keep their, could keep a presence on the ground in West Berlin, you know, and this had certain advantages owing to espionage-related activities. That's a very specious argument. And by that rationale, there was any number of other ways they could have insinuated

themselves into allied control counsel derived institutions. Okay, it just, it's, that, that doesn't make any sense. Okay. Um, so we had, uh, you know, for the last, uh, for the last, you know, two decades of this old man's life, uh, he was a single man, you know, imprisoned in a castle under very tight restrictions. And, uh, there were literally the armies of four nations at intervals guarding him. You know, I mean, and, uh, anytime there's discussion of him being released, uh,

there was kind of this bombardment of opponents, you know, talking about, you know, the kind of, you know, the human tragedy, the Second World War and the criminality of the regime, which, okay, even if I accept that, it's like, but what does that have to do with this elderly man who defected the United Kingdom before, you know, before the events in question with the exception of a, of conspiring to wage aggressive war? with that exception, every other count of the indictment, these were acts that were carried out or planned, you know, when he was, after he'd already, you know, defected, and obviously no longer held any kind of a formal office, rank, title, or power within his former, within his former fatherland.

Now, to understand this, to understand, oh, and for the record, you cannot visit Spandau prison because literally the moment that Hess was declared dead, there were bulldozers on standby that destroyed the entire premises. You know, as if it was, it's like something out of like a horror movie or something about some evil artifact or some, you know, I mean, I'm not, I'm not really hyperbole when I describe it this way. You know, this is incredibly strange. And when I was a little kid, I remember when the news story broke. and I, you know, I remember I couldn't conceptualize it and particularly developed terms then, but I, it struck me how strange this was,

you know, and I don't, it defied all rationality, and nobody, nobody, even people that were kind of the staunchest, defenders of, of the status quo that had been, could really rationalize, like, why it had been, why it had been,

why it had been, why it had been, dealt with this way. but let's uh let's uh let's let's let's let's let's let's let's let's let's deal now with the man of ruyov hess like who was hess he was born in eighteen ninety four uh in alexandria egypt uh his father had been a wealthy businessman who'd inherited an import export firm and uh had grown it substantially and his mother was the was the thuringian and i believe her father had been a fairly successful textile magnate at least locally has lived in egypt until he was 14 under conditions of substantial wealth and for those who don't know um

from 1882 onward uh egypt was a what was called the veiled protectorate of the crown or the british crown so Hess grew up under the dominion of the british empire okay um it uh there's a there was a substantial amount of devolved rule, you know, local Arabs had, you know, ran the government and things. And it's not as if, it's not as if the crown had its proverbial heel on their necks. But there was always a substantial garrison of British troops there. And it, it was clear that, you know, a transgression of its borders were considered an act of war against the crown itself. So as far as people can say about some members of the right government, you know that these were provincial people or something or that they didn't have education or that they weren't worldly one can't say that about Hess okay and as we'll get into that's one of the reasons why he was courted the way that he was um by Adolf Hitler and others but uh interestingly there's uh

david irving in his biography of Hess he corralled a bunch of Hess's letters because you know irving among other things he's kind of the king of uh of direct testimony and me because my background is as a lawyer and i Some people tell me that means I'm too prone to inductive reasoning in dealing with historical evidence. And that may be true. I don't think so because if we're trying to get into the minds of the people were studying, what better way than their direct testimony? And even if you don't consider them to be reliable to clearance, that itself tells us something about them. But after Hess ended up at Spandau post-sentencing, you know, he wrote many letters to his wife,

and he wrote a fair amount to his mom. and he wrote to his mom that one of the ways he dealt with his time in Spandau was he tended the garden there there was this courtyard area because it was set up again. It was, you know, a castle keep that had been a military barracks.

And he maintained a garden and he said it reminded him of of learning how to how to cultivate flowers and vegetables from the other Arab servants that they lived with in Egypt. But in the event, Young Hess, he was availed private tutor and he learned to speak English again because he, you know, was, was well familiar with,

though in the majority of other white Europeans, he would have been exposed in early life, would have been English men and women, okay? So he spoke English with a heavy accent, but he spoke fluent English. And that's, I believe, is a key, it's not just trivia. That's a key point, not just of interest, but a real offense as we'll get into later. But after age 14, has attended high school or secondary school, whatever the Europeans called in the era in Switzerland. And when the first world war broke out, he joined the Bavarian infantry August 1914. He was in a heavy action at Verdun.

Personnel records indicate that he, you know, just he got stellar reviews from commanding officers. they did indicate a kind of maniacal recklessness under hostile fire, but it was tempered by discipline self-control. All of his squad mates were laid in later years that, like, the guy was just incredible under fire. He saw heavy action at the Somme. He was ultimately wounded in Romania, so he had an experience of, with the exception of Africa, obviously. He had, he cut his combat teeth in every possible front during the Great War. And what's really kind of remarkable is that when he was convalescing, he was literally laid up in a hospital.

He volunteered for flight training as a combat aviator. And going to his record, and I'm sure as, you know, quasi-aristocratic pedigree helped, he was accepted, he was accepted to flight training, completed it. By the time he deployed him as an aviator, the armistocatic pedigree helped, he was accepted. was only three weeks away, so he never flew in action. But he became a crack pilot. He kept up his flight skills in the years and decades after. Up to an including the point, as we'll get to later,

like by the time of his faithful flight to the Scotland, I mean, he was capable of flying, like, what was then cutting edge military aircraft, you know, which is remarkable. One considers that he didn't even learn to fly until he was, you know, an adult, you know, and this was a new technology. technology anyway. It's not as if he was learning from men who had, you know, decades of experience behind them. So in 1919, Hess arrives in Munich. And Munich was what was to become, not just the heartland of the National Socialist German Workers Party, but it was, you know, it was a stronghold of the KPD.

arguably, too, the KPD in Munich was more aggressive and favored direct action more than the Berlin cell did. Part of that owed the fact that they were challenged in the street by organizations like the Stahlhelm and like the National Socialists. But in 1919, the Munich Soviet was declared as Bavaria was for all practical purposes conquered. by the communists. So Hess joins the Free Corps, and at the same time he joins the Thule Society, which this, you know, this claims that, you know,

this was evidence of Hess being some kind of occultist. It's a, it's a topic for a dedicated podcast or episode, but far too much is made of this. Like, yes, the Thule Society had strange occultic ideas, but as we've talked about generally, this kind of thing was popular. in in in it throughout the western world at the time conventional religion and taken a tremendous hit um i made the point before

those are familiar you know in the book the great gaspy how uh the kind of uh the kind of uh the kind of the kind of the kind of dopey west egg uh you know decadent rich types they talk about going to seances and stuff like this is something people did then okay it's the fact that the fact that uh the kind of right-wing of the time put up of the Thule Society was full of kind of like occultic stuff and references that's I mean yeah that's weird but it's just on its face that kind of thing is weird

it's not evidence of some kind of you know Freemason or satanic conspiracy or evidence that Hess was a crazy man who believed in Viking gods or something but you know this is the only reason it's really relevant is because this is kind of when

this is kind of where Hess's you know he didn't even spend most of his early life in Germany. It's kind of formative experiences and later adolescence and as an adult man are on the battlefield in the military and then in Munich where the communists have taken over and declared, you know,

declared, you know, the Munich Soviet, okay? This led to men being radicalized who ordinarily would not have been susceptible to those sorts of persuasions. Well,

Hess is in the Free Corps. He continued to hone his skills. He continued to hone his skills as an aviator. He also enrolled at the University of Munich, and this is fundamentally important because other than Edolf Hitler, the man who kind of impacted Hess's life, one than any other, was a man named Carl Haushofer. Who is Carl Haushofer?

He was a professor of geopolitics. And geopolitics in those days was taken very, It was something of a nascent discipline both in military academies as well as in conventional university curriculums that dealt with war and peace questions and political economy and all those kinds of things. House Offer has been somewhat redacted owing to a... House Offer was not a national socialist, and we're going to get into that in a minute. But the kind of Milu in which he was situated has led to him being redacted in a way he would not have been otherwise. that's something to keep in mind. Geopolitics, particularly as it was impacted by technology

and the ability to project hard power, this obviously in the 20th century had huge implications, you know, not just in the first half, but even more so in the atomic age. And critically so by the end of the Cold War, when delivery mechanisms that could span thousands of miles and reach their target within, you know, within minutes in some cases,

this cast a whole new significance on a geostrategic questions and kind of the interface of politics with these kinds of questions and how such things can be managed. Howes Hoffer was born in 1869, who was a career artillery officer. He commanded a brigade in World War I,

retired as a major general, but he was not a traditional military officer. He was a son of an economist, strongly academic, from a young age, he taught at the war college. He was an expert on Japan, interestingly. He was a military attach there. He met a bunch of people in the Shaw government and in the Japanese Army. He published extensively on Japan from the Meiji Restoration onward.

He wrote a lot about Japan's, you know, inevitable ascendancy to world power status. He viewed Japan as a far better ahead against the Soviet Union. and then he did China. And that was a minority view at that time. How the third of right came to favor Japan over China is an interesting topic. But it was how to offer was a very heterodox thinker, is the key takeaway here. And the fact that he and Hess became very, very close, okay? So again, this kind of cuts against, this kind of cuts against Huss being cast as wild-eyed,

prank who sat around reading star charts and things you know how Schauffer was uh um i mean we don't have public intellectuals anymore in america but um think about a guy who's kind of at the top of his game like think about uh like think about a guy like john meersheimer okay like he he could how should ever be considered a guy kind of in that role you know uh men like that don't go around befriending radicals you know they just they just don't i mean even in the even in even in even in even in critical conditions of revolutionary unrest. It just really doesn't happen. And incidentally, how Schoffer did not involve himself in politics directly,

and his wife was Jewish. She was a Jewish parentage, I believe, maternally. Okay, and this was well known. So that becomes an issue a little bit later, owing to some of the intrigues around Hess. It's circumstantial evidence kind of in favor of, of what I'm going to suggest about some of his oversures to the U.S. diplomatic corps. But in any event, summer of 1920, this is kind of at the zenith of Hess's free core activity, as well as, you know, after he's befriended and become very close to Haushoffer,

Rudolph Hess meets Adolf Hitler. It's not clear exactly when he did, but on July 1st, 1920, has joined the National Socialist Party. He was member number 16. So, Hess was kind of the old fighter of old fighters. House Offer did not join the Nazi party. Hess very much proselytized the party.

House Offer did something interesting, though. He periodically, as Hess being closer and closer to Adolf Hitler, Houshoffer would ask for Hitler's opinions, particularly on geostrategic questions. Hess would relay those opinions as much as he was aware of them, and he confided to Hitler. He was above board about the fact he was close to Housshafer, and Hitler didn't seem to have a problem with that. And Houshawfer would respond to some of the things Hitler said through Hess. So it's like, Hauschhofer and Hitler had this kind of strange, like, quasi-dial dialogue going, that neither man seemed to be willing to acknowledge was underway, but kind of,

as the intermediary. Or not so it's an intermediary as kind of the messenger. It's very strange, but in context, it makes sense. If nothing else, Houchoffer could tell early on that Hitler was going to be a significant personage. I don't think anybody really could have guessed his ascends he would become as total and meteoric as it was,

but it's clear that Housshafer took him seriously. You know, otherwise, why, why would he have bothered? Interestingly, we talked before about the kind of abuse of language deliberately, but also just somewhat, you know, as a matter of course, due to things being lost in translation. We talked about the term Labensrom, how polemically it has one meaning, literally, you know,

meaning living space, you know, people envision, you know, this kind of a march eastward annihilating, every indigenous element in their path and, you know, quite literally repopulating the east as living space, or the envisioned it is this kind of myth of the national soul of this claiming Germany of someone overpopulated. Again, that's not what they were saying. And it's not what Laban's wrong means. It's, it's difficult to translate

adequately. A better, a better a better way to characterize it would be to think of it as culture space or like space where we are dominant. You know, but even that's kind of imperfect, but Househoffer utilized the term Labens wrong, pretty liberally. You know, not in giving stump speeches or something saying this is what Germany needs, but he'd use it to refer to the process by which, you know, cultures become dominant after appropriating, you know, territory, you know, through conflict or through insinuating themselves in ways short of conflict, yet to utilize hard

power, the threat of it. And then Sloy would surely become, you know, quite literally the dominant political organism in that space. Okay, so was there just a common term in the kinds of things that Hitler read and Haushofer read also? Was there something Hitler picked up from Haushofer through Hess? Very likely, in my opinion, because it's not, it's not, it's not some totally obscure term or it wasn't in the epoch, but it's not as if it was something that was that common. So I find that very interesting.

And as time went on, Hess developed something of a hero worship of Hitler. And again, you know, Hess was a pretty worldly individual. He, you know, he'd been born abroad. He traveled all over the place. He was good pals of the Haushofer, who was kind of his father figure. And, you know, he displayed no signs of mental instability but he consistently in his letters and in his own diaries refer to hitler as the tribune

you know not his hair hitler you know not at the fur but as the tribune which uh is an interesting choice of words uh hess was kind of he he was kind of he had kind of a dilettance fixation with uh with roman stuff but i believe in this case this that's too obscure a term for to be some for him to be like looking for gravitas where, you know, maybe it's not there. Tribune can be translated in a number of ways. You know, it's somebody who speaks for the people. You know, it's somebody who is kind of like the figure who moves and embodies the zeitgeist and is sort of a messianic hero in like the Carlisle sense.

It's got a priestly connotation in some ways. So keep that in mind. I think that that's very instructive. And nobody else, to my knowledge, referred to Hitler in those terms. I mean, has to ever called Hitler that to his face or spoke of him that way around party comrades. He called him the Tribune in his diary, and he called him the Tribune what he'd write to his wife. One of the ways he described Hitler, let me pull it up. I found this paragraph to be telling.

This is what he said in a letter to, he wrote a paper when he was at university. And he said, you sent excerpts of it to house offer. The paper actually won an award. This was when he was most active with the Free Corps. And the subject of the paper was a polemical paper for some kind of, you know, some kind of public speaking course. And the exercise was, you know, describe, describe what type of man would be the ideal leader of Germany. You know, and this was in 1921.

So obviously the model for this archetype that Hesse is referring to is Hitler. What he says is, quote, the deeper the tribune's original roots are anchored in the broad masses and the better he understands their psychology, the less workers will mistrust him,

and the more followers he will win among these, most energetic ranks of the people. He himself has nothing in common with the masses. He has a personality in his own rights, like every great man. When necessity dictates, he does not recoil from bloodshed. great issues are always decided through blood and iron

and our issue is to go under or to rise anew again that might sound overwrought because often things do when translated from German to English but people I try to emphasize the people regardless of their dialect people just wrote differently in those days like I read letters from the era of

in English you know and they seem the language doesn't seem corny and stupid and soaring like when these like morons in Washington try and talk these days but it seems like stilted up at the same time like packed with emotion

to the point where it's it seems un like unseemly but that's just the way people wrote you know so that's something to bear in mind but I mean regardless too I mean whatever

however it feels about Hess or however however anybody feels about his kind of worshipful view of Adolf Hitler, what's significant is this is what has thought, okay? And if we're going to unpack his motives, which, you know, going on three quarters of a century now, people have speculated about and said all kinds of strange things about, I'm prone to take what has said at face value, okay, because why else would he have said it? You know, these are things he wrote to his intimates. These things he wrote to his father figure, things he wrote to his, you know, girlfriend or then he gave him his wife,

things he wrote in his own diary. I mean, like, who was he, who exactly was he, if this was an invitation, like, who was he trying to impress, you know? But it, um, what really kind of put Hess on the map

and the NSDAP is, uh, in 19202, um, he had joined, uh, the essay, uh,

and he established a student battalion. Um, and these guys with the forefront of conversation with the KPD, I guess Hazel was able to poach, not just a lot of his a lot of his veteran buddies, but you know, there was a right wing, there's a strongly right wing subculture to, to universities in those days. I'm making a point, I make a point a lot of people,

there's, the caricature, the kind of hostile caricature of the right and of fascists, like in its epoch, was there these kinds of weird, violent guys who like read too many books and were like, you know, believe in crazy things because they spent all their time, you know, know, kind of debating esoterica and coming up with, you know, insane ideas. Then they'd go out and fight with people. Like this idea of them being like ignorant guys who never read anything. Like that was kind of, that was more of the reputation of the KPD.

You know, you had guys who worked on assembly lines in the KPD basically going to fight like demobilized soldiers who are now going to college, like in Vimar. But you could say a lot of things about these guys, probably a lot of which aren't flattering. But it's, there's something a little bit ridiculous. like then as now when anti-fascists act like, you know, act like the extreme right is like a gang of illiterates or something.

It's not, that doesn't, that doesn't make any sense and it's not the ranks from which they draw, but at the same time, there was not a hell of a lot of you know, even in kind of the failing, the failed and failing state of Vimar,

you know, college wasn't like it is now where it's just kind of like, where it's just kind of like, where it's just kind of like with the middle class does with their kids before they can figure out, you know, like, where to, you know, where to try and find them a job, you know, basically, if you were upwardly mobile, you know, you went, you went to a big C university, you know, and it was more egalitarian in a place like than in America or especially in the UK, but point is like these, there was something still

viewed as unseemly about, you know, getting involved in, like, street politics. So guys like Hess were doing like God's work for the party, but basically poaching these college guys and, you know, not just getting them involved as kind of like the political vanguard and for the sake of optics and everything else and building you know cultural momentum and cachet but you know these are the guys also who you want to crack heads against the kpd you know because they're young and full of pissing vintner so that uh that led to him becoming uh becoming he and garing i'd say those him garing max of on shooting a richter who died at uh at uh at uh at uh at Munich in 1923 at the pooch. And Captain Rahm, I'd say we're probably Hitler's inner circle at that point. And at the Munich pooch, it's complex. We can at some point, but I want to reiterate all the intrigues that led to it.

And that were underway as it was initiated by Hitler and Ludendorf and allies. I was going to say in friends. that makes it like a, like, I don't know, like, bollinkle and rocky or something, but it, uh, but, uh, the, um, the, um, the Munich pooch, uh,

Hess was assigned the responsibility to, uh, arrest the, uh, the key ministers in the Munich City Council. And essentially coerced them into, you know, supporting the, the pooch, um, and telling, you know, and, and, and, Hitler gave the responsibility to Hess. Because, I mean, Hess was civilized.

There's no change. He was going to, you know, brutalize her shoot these guys. And the idea, too, was that it has, was he had a kind of pedigree to be able to communicate with these people, okay?

And this becomes significant later that these were kind of the characteristics that were coveted that has exhibited by the party. I mean, I think in a lot of ways, that's a tragic because I think, I think it was reused, frankly, by the party. But we'll get into that too.

but point being has executed these orders he did so correctly he did so without some kind of disaster like any of any of the city councilmen being murdered or anything else and um after uh after hitler was arrested you know after uh out of the pooch ended in disaster and uh and uh you know and and their comrades died charging the police court on uh garing went into hiding um in austria at Hess. And as the trial of Hitler and those who'd been taken into custody was underway and coming to a close,

has self-surrender to the Munich authorities. The kind of court history view is that had he not done that, he would have been convicted in absentia and the case would have been referred probably to another jurisdiction

and he could have been looking at a decade behind bars. I think I don't accept that. And if you look at the way Hitler and the rest of the rest of the, the rest of the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the 20-20-the-revolutionaries are treated. I, I don't, I don't think that's credible. My opinion is that it wasn't just loyalty to Hitler, but that was paramount. Um, Hess was, Hess was going to let Hitler go to prison while he's remained in the free world. But Hess basically, Hess was an upper-middle-class guy.

He had a basic respect for law and order. He's the kind of guy who goes to college. in those days, who joins the army, becomes, you know, a valued NCO, you know, collects a whole row of medals, and then goes on to be, you know, a businessman of a, of a, of a worldly profile, like his father, you know, I mean, guys, guys, like, they had turned themselves in because that's the right thing to do, you know, like he wasn't a gangster, like, Rom. You know, he wasn't, he wasn't a swashbuckling lunatic, like, hair gearing. You know, like, Hess basically was a decent guy, you know, I mean, like, for better and for worse, you know.

And Hess, as everybody knows, he drew an 18-month sentence. Hitler drew a five-year sentence, but ultimately served 264 days in Landsberg. Okay, so basically, Hitler and Hess, their sentence ended up being right about the same. I think Hess walked out of prison, I think something like 10 days after Hitler did. But while they were in prison, Hitler was not a skilled typist, as most people weren't in those days. days, Hess was a skilled typist. And he also had a knack for editing. Hitler dictated Mindcomf and has transcribed it onto his typewriter, which he had brought

in because the Landsberg prison administration was actually like pro-national socialist. So they were doing easy time. I mean, being in prison is horrible no matter what. But, you know, we weren't the prison that, the prison experience of Landsberg was not sadly and rather tragically, like the prison experience of Hess later in life. I mean, it was an easy regime, and it was a lot of things like a typewriter. And during this period, I believe, I, you know, when you collaborate with people on writing, you know, even whether you're, I don't know what it's like for like literary types,

but, you know, political and academic writing and things, you know, that's something that's, you've got very much trust in your editor and you've also, that creates, like, a certain like bond. I mean, has it proven to Hitler that he you know, he was a political soldier, but also I think they're true kind of meeting in the minds like having to Landberg.

Like, I really think that. And, you know, I think that's just kind of a basic human characteristic. And I, you know, I, for the foremost, I consider it as a writer, so I think I understand it and I understand how people relate to one another within the medium.

I don't think I'm just speculating. But interestingly, during these months that Hesahsvigman Kempf, her house offer, her other house offer came to visit Hest no less than eight times, always on a Wednesday, always remaining through the morning and even into the afternoon. So basically like all day. So again, only what we know before, you know, in the free world, about, you know, this kind of a strange quasi-communication between Hitler and Haushofer. Like as, as Hess was writing, or transcribing mind comp, he had to be relaying, you know, even

it was just Housewar saying, what are you working on? And, you know, Hess saying, like, oh, the Tribune has me writing, you know, his autobiography. Oh, like, what? Tell me about it. You know, you got to, there had to be something like cross-pollination there. I don't believe there was not, you know. So it's, there's not as the Housewaffe was a national socialist at all. But a lot of the geopolitical takes in mind comp, as well as some of the historical observations,

are what is kind of most meaty and most relevant. The rest of it's basically an election year spreeed and, you know, kind of the grievances of, you know, 1923. You know, but that I can't prove it. And it sounds like conjecture no matter what. but circumstantially, I believe, and I think there's a pretty good case we made, that more than a little bit of Haushofer, is in mind-compe. And I find that fascinating. The most interesting anecdote to me from Hess's time in Landsberg with Hitler,

Hess relates this to his wife, and this is the kind of thing, obviously, that you wouldn't relate to anybody else. Hitler was kind of like a typical Bavarian you know Hitler was a lot more emotional than say like a Prussian in the way he expressed himself but you know there's

even the southern Germans and even the Bavarians and even the Austrians there is this kind of stoicism they're not emotional in the sense that Latin people are or something okay and I'm not saying that negatively I'm just making an observation so I mean

Hitler was not prone to to displays of emotion. I mean, there are people his intimacy wrote that he'd become agitated or angry, but he he's a guy very close to the chest. And

Hess is the only person other than other than Krebs and Bergdorf, which I think it's somewhat dubious, because I think they were trying to cast a sort of dramatic scene. Has claims he saw Hitler cry once because Hitler came

into Hess's cell and he began reading out passages that he'd written down that he wanted transcribed into the book which became mine comp and he began talking about the Great War and Hitler didn't discuss this apparently like even when the rest of the comrades in Landsberg were talking about the front

and their experiences Hitler didn't really say anything and what Hester laid as he said Hitler came in, it said, he said, Hesse said, said the Tribune, which again was, you know, his idiosyncratic term for Hitler, he said, came into myself and he began reading slower and slower and more and more haltingly. His face expressionless, he groped around a seemingly boundless concept. The pauses grew longer and more frequent until he suddenly put down the pages, dropped this head in his hands and appeared to be weeping.

After a while, I need to Hess, Hitler pulled himself together and burst out. I shall exact a pitiless and terrible revenge on the first day I can. As you'll take revenge in the name of all whom I shall then see before my eyes. And for Hess, apparently this was a turning point because

so in the camp you emphasize enough is that pretty much every man, by the 1920s, pretty much every man under 40 years of age or so in Germany, like it had been at the front. this is like a forative experience of their lives and it created this huge wedge between them and everybody else and you know to some guys this was like their their only experience of adult life you know was like being sent off to the army and then you know going to the front for four years

you know it's not like they were rotating out after eight months or something um the degree to which like that experience is was the core of the nSDAP like really can't be overstated and the only the only uh the only party luminary who didn't serve at the front in the in the great war was helmar shocked which is interesting he was uh he was the he was the chairman of the of the reichsbank and uh we'll uh we'll get into that we get into the meet in nuremberg but i uh that's included his when i talk to e michael jones that e michael jones talked about shock interesting yeah yeah yeah i'm sure yeah and the kind of's a usury i'm sure and uh and uh yeah but it's uh or the inflate the whole inflation thing too yeah yeah like how mar schacht he he was older he was older than most of the men in in the party but he also he something that was

part of it but he he never it's not like he avoided military service it just wasn't um i think i think he was beyond the normal age for uh yeah i mean he was beyond the draft age he was also beyond the age to get a commission like generally you know he had it was he had no uh it wasn't his military service wasn't in his lineage but he that's one of the shocks was respected for his intellect and he never pretended to be something he wasn't but he was you could tell he was always you could tell he was always just like at odds um i correct let me correct myself gerbils uh hemler was too young so himler didn't serve at the front hemler though became a a a as a a very close uh if he had very close to ernst rom in part because himmler uh hemler was in

a heavy action with the free corps against the kpd and i mean rome really was a brute and really was a gangster okay him will himler dropped bodies if he gained respect of rome there's no way that he didn't okay so i got to consider him to be an exception uh gerbils uh the case of gerbils is interesting Grubles was a cripple, too. But it, uh, that, uh, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, as the, as the, as the, as the, as the, as the, as the, as the, as the, as the, as the, was implemented. you know, he grew up in the aftermath and he grew up fighting in the street with men like Rom, like, as, as his kind of,

as his, as his, as his, as his, as his role models. So, the point stands, even though, yeah, I just want to, I, I know what I'm going to be like, what are you talking about? You know, Himmler didn't serve the front, either of Gerbils. So, yeah, I credited myself. But that, uh, that,

uh, but has, has told, uh, has told, uh, he, he wrote in similar to his, wife that in so many words that this is a turning point. Like I'm now like beholden to this man and his cause basically. Okay. Like, um, it, uh, has viewed this, uh,

in, in, in, in, in messianic terms, okay, for better or worse. It, it doesn't matter what anybody thinks of that. That's what Hess thought, okay? And, uh, it, um, we, hear this again and again from people who were, was in the midst and forwards as well this mortal line. There was a very, there was a, there was an otherworldly characteristic to the way

that he affected people, you know, and that, that, that, that, that, that, that, some things like that can't be contrived, okay, um, but, uh, has since was released from Landsberg in 1925, um, as we just mentioned, like, owing to Hitler's sentence being manumitted, uh, he and were released within a week of each other or something, like a week or 10 days. And as we're discussing before we, we began recording, Hess became really the face of the NSDAP. You pointed out that in trying for the will,

Hess is everywhere. Like Hess was a handsome guy for the time, but not not in some way like a matinee idol that would seem, you know, contrived. You know, he was a, he was a, he was a, he was a guy who looked good on camera. but in kind of a rugged, you know, like relatable sense, you know, and he was a war hero. You know, the, and more and more has became one of the most popular speakers that the party had.

You know, like, Garing could always whip up a crowd, but, you know, Garing really wasn't aristocrat. And Garing also, there was something of a thuggishness about Gering, you know, like, Garing related great to, he related really, really well to these, a feat types. You know, Garing literally was raised in a castle, okay? He knew he was one of these odd guys who, or maybe he's not so odd, you know, he was perfectly at home around gangsters as well as around aristocrats, you know, and the men who served under him like love gearing. They thought he was great. But he's not, he's not a guy who, uh, he's the common man found particularly relatable,

you know, which is understandable. But, uh, um, um, Hess and later Gerbils, uh, people really, really responded to them, you know, and, uh, unlike Gerbels was a short, you know, like an attract. guy. I mean, by his own admission, like, he was aware of it. It's not punitive to say that. You know, Hess was a guy who was attractive to people, you know, and like, Hesse was very much, uh, uh, has was very much faithful to Ilsa, who became his wife. And he, he wasn't any kind of womanizer, but like, you know, broads liked him a lot. You know, like he, he, he became the face of the party. And as we'll get into, um, um, um, that,

that that that that became significant now around this time uh 1925 um the uh has uh has took a he took a formal position on karl house off for staff which is interesting um and what was convened uh incident uh to that was a kind of think tank tank as we think of it today, called the Deutsche Academy. It was founded in Munich in 1925. It was one part think tank. It was one part kind of public policy NGO and one part strategic forum. You're dealing with geopolitics, the burgeoning era of strategic competition.

And it also acted as something of a lobbying group and a representative agency for ethnic Germans abroad. Okay. And the third right was later. and the NASA and NSDAP, they took a very strong interest in the German diaspora for a lot of reasons, including the fact that this was politically exploitable. And, you know, with the emergence of a truly global kind of politic, you know, ethnic lobbies were coming into their own. I mean, we saw this dramatically with the gaze at Churchill, but this was not just part of the German Reich. the German rights fixation on race and particularly the

NSDAP's kind of fixation on you know on bloodline and it being you know kind of dispositive of political outcomes and things I mean this this this made sense and Haushofer again was a was not was not was not uh was not any kind of national socialist or radical now the way other people viewed Hess

there's not a lot from Haushofer himself about Hess, but based on their ongoing relationship, which in some ways became remote as the party came to power, but as we'll get into, Hess continued to

continue to advocate, not just for a houseover, but for his family. And as we mentioned, how he offered his wife was Jewish and his housewaffe's sons who has became close to, I mean, under the under the relevant laws of the Third Reich,

you know, they were racial Jews. So we'll get into that in a minute. But Albert Krebs was the party Galliter in Hamburg, and he'd come across, he'd come across Hess a lot. Because, I mean, this was, this is the party was finally breaking through, you know, late 1920. 1990 was, you know, the mass breakthrough. But, you know, 1925, 1926, you know,

after Hitler's release from Landberg Prison, this was an era of really fevered you know kind of kind of politicking you know at the ballot box I mean they did Hitler himself you know it declared early in his prison sentence that you know through Rosenberg that you know

we've abandoned you know the bayonet for the ballot box so Hess he he became something of an intimate of Albert Krebs and uh in Krebs owned words, he wrote, Hess was no primitive simbleton or hide-bound fanatic,

but was almost bordering on the pathological and subtle sensibilities. He could listen calmly to contrary opinions, and his thoughts followed impeccable and legal lines. But it was Hess who innocently created the image of a furor who was an infallible individual. When he spoke of our furor,

the millions would adopt the phrase precisely because Hess himself was so intensely believable, which I think is interesting. David Irving had a, Irving was the first Western historian to translate Gerbill's diaries, which were voluminous. You know, we're talking like thousands and thousands of pages. The Gerbil's diaries had been discovered in, in literally a bank vault underneath Berlin a few blocks from would have been the furor bunker, okay, by the Red Army. and these Red Army troops found it. You know, all these boxes and boxes of Rival's Diaries,

and they sent it back to Moscow. It ended up in the NKVD archives, which then became the KGB archives, which then became the FSB in 1991. And David Irving, being the canny Englishman that he is, he always had a good relationship with the Russians somehow, even during the Cold War. I've got my own thoughts on that.

but it would sound conspiratorial. But Irving, by his own account, in 1991, he's in Moscow. He's at the MSB archives. He's talking to this lady, you know, who's a Russian government liaison there. And he's telling her that, you know, I really wish, you know, there was more documentary evidence on Gerbils by his own hand and things, you know. And she, like, matter of fact, he told him, like, oh, well, you know, we have the Gerbell's diary. So, you can see him if you want. Like, you thought she was joking.

Sharonoff's you like you know shows it to him and he said that he's like you know he was trying to you're trying to quash like any any any kind of visible reaction of hype or like anything because he's like you don't want him to suddenly change their mind but he literally translated the gerbil's diaries you know and uh excerpts of that became his book on gerbils but he extrapolates a lot from that testimony of just gerbils writing in his private diaries to kind of inferring things about gerbill's takes and his views on things um what gerbill said about hess and all he said directly about hess was that he said he found i found him to be quote most decent quiet friendly clever and reserved he is a kind fellow and what irving said was he said

that this was like gerbil speak for you know this guy this guy's a very nice guy but he's a chump you know gerbils is something of a gangster okay uh he even looked apart i mean you know like a lot of um like a lot of like a lot of like a lot of southern john kazal um or what was his name the guy who played fredo in got in the godfather yeah and the guy's in the deer hunter yeah yeah yeah he yeah he looks like gerbils doesn't he yeah yeah but it's i can uh yeah gervils like a lot and you know gerville's always dressed to the nines he was like the best dressed guy on deck you know, like, he, gurbos in some way is like a lot of, like, Gerbils wasn't from the Tyrol, but like, like,

like, like, those kinds of people. He was, like, basically, like, an Italian guy who spoke German, okay? Pretty much, yeah. I kind of imagine, uh, yeah, I, I can imagine, uh, yeah, I think, yeah, they can, like, you know, yeah, this, uh, this, this, uh, this, this, this, this, this, uh, this, this, uh, this hess guy, like, he's, you know, he's a fucking square. Forget about it also, and, um, garbles was also a 5-5. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he was, girl was a short guy.

Um, girls is an enigma too. Like for a guy, yeah, for like a short guy with, with a bad leg who like frankly was not an attractive guy. Like he, not only were people terrified of him,

but he was like a big ladies man. Like he, he really was like a gangster. Like I, strange that might seem. I mean, frankly, whether people like it or not,

I mean, we forget the digression, but what we, what you can, what people consider to be kind of like convention in, in, in, in,

in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in the way media interfaces with political campaigns like i mean gerbils frankly started a lot of that you know i mean it just like a lot of modern film like it was a lenny rife and

stall you know i mean it that people shouldn't feel good or bad about that as with the fact but yeah the but it um has uh as as the party's fortunes uh improved uh so did hess's he by 90 30 you know he had he had a salaried position

you know that was the year that the nsdap broke through with over 6.3 million votes. The liberal centrist, liberal and centrist voters are made wary of them, but nevertheless this was a true milestone, and much that owed to as being the face of the party in the public mind. Like, I really

believe this. Has also, he got, has got to know Willie Messerschmitt because he, you know, the, the aircraft designer, and he has secured a $12,000 Rijksmark loan and

purged a plane from Messerschmitt so that he could keep up, you know, with, uh, with, uh, you can say he could keep his aviation shops with, you know, then current aircraft designs, which is fascinating. Um, just like, I mean, Hess was a remarkable guy. Like, nobody can deny that. But he, he, um, what I want to, uh, I want to conclude this in a minute, frankly, like I, I, I was hoping I'd kind of get farther in my account, but I, I don't want to, next episode will conclude this, uh, this has treatment and deal with this flight to London and um or to Scotland and uh and his uh incarceration and and begin to dive into the Nurember indictment but I do want to add finally on in 1930 after the NSDAP breakthrough

uh he wrote to Haushofer this kind of cryptic letter howshoffer was visiting London the following month and what has said to him was quote you'll probably be asked in England for your views on us us being the, you know, the Nazi party and the situation in Germany at large. He says, describe us as we are, a wall against Bolshevism. As for the meaning of Bolshevism, you can tell the British about that from what you saw before your very eyes, meaning like they're in, you know, in Munich, you know, in days past. The movement, you know, I mean a national socialist movement, is the last hope for millions of people. It is of universal importance for the whole of Europe is threatened by Bolshevism.

How our national socialist movement is assessed abroad, and particularly in Britain, is a fundamental. importance and he will probably be coming into contact with influential men over there. And interestingly, as we talked about, or actually, I'll say that for the next time, because it gets into the diplomatic intrigue that I believe approximately caused in part has his flight. But yeah, I hope the listeners don't view this as too much of like a digression tangent. I don't really agree with it as a tangent because, like I said, it's essential. to uh it's essential to understanding the the disposition of the allies um in in in juristic terms uh with what how has was treated and what status he was availed and and and and and and what have you but also like

what was in his mind um in my opinion uh and what his intentions were are essential to the judging kind of the merits of of the indictment and just uh i'm going somewhere with this which i think will become unclear like our next session. But I, you know, the response so far has been outstanding to our series, and I've got you to thank for that. So once again, I really, really appreciate it, man. And we can, we can continue any time you want after this weekend. Sure. Plugs and. Yeah, you can find me. My substack is a real Thomas 777.substack.com.

You can find us on Telegram. We've got a very active community there. It's t.m.m. slash the number seven, H-O-M-A-S-777. You can find me on GAB as well, but I generally just use GAB to back up my other platforms. It's just at the Real Thomas 7777.

In coming weeks, I'm hoping for Summer's End, we're going to launch a formal YouTube channel. I don't want to get into that here, but we are developing a larger footprint in terms of diversified media. So I hope that people are excited about that. I am. But, yeah, again, I can't thank you enough, and I can't thank the listeners and viewers enough.

Continuing talking about Mr. Rudolph Hess is Thomas 777. How are you doing, Thomas? I'm doing well. Thank you again, Pete. I'm trying to recall where we left off last episode. I think we were talking about some of the intrigues or I wanted to get into some of the intrigues related to Hess and the Haushofer family. Carl Haushofer, the father, you know,

who was Hess's mentor and Hess's father figure in many ways. Hess had a good relationship with his father, but his father was in Egypt, still. That's where he resided permanently. after Hess went to boarding school and then, you know, into the Bavarian army, you know, he

and his father literally remote. They, they're mostly related by correspondence. So Carl Haushoffer and, you know, remained probably other than

Edolf Hitler, probably the most important, like, male figure in Hess's life. And Haushofer, the younger, Carl's son, Albrecht, he took, he, he, he became a key figure, not just in terms of Hess's

efforts to court the United Kingdom, which as much as the furor himself and Rippantrop considered this to be an essential policy objective, Hess was zealously committed to, probably even more so almost. He is in time player kind of, you know, as we discussed Hess, one of the things that created the strong bond between him and Haushofer was, you know, Hess was very much a student

at geopolitics, which in the early to mid-20th century, it was really coming into its own, you know, due to the convergence of political questions and, and, and strategic, power political ones. And there was a

decidedly military aspect. to this too, owing to the world's situations and technologies that had rendered distance that previously would have, you know, precluded, you know, deployment of, um, of, uh, of offensive weapons across national frontiers, obsolescent, you know, like the world became a much smaller place and, you know, being within striking distance of a, of a state's capital, um, in metrics of the hundreds of miles, obviously owing to the advent of strategic aircraft, or at least the potential therein, you know, change everything.

So that's one thing to keep in mind about Hess's orientation towards the world as he experienced it and what he was charged with in his official role as, you know, within the party and within government. and Albrecht, Carl Houshofer's son, he was something of a young prodigy. And we'll get into the fact that a lot of his ascendancy, and he was a very, he enjoyed some very privileged postings in university life prior to during the late Weimar period and into the Third Reich National Social. era and on more than one occasion he'd had an audience with Adolf Hiller. Okay, not all of these meetings were amiable, particularly after Hess's flight.

He was one of the people that was called the task to explain what had happened, and that certainly was not a friendly exchange. But my point being that, how short for the younger especially, kind of his proximity to has and his ascendancy to these professional heights and to these coveted positions within the Third Reich, it kind of shoots to pieces the narrative that there was just kind of one singular policy, you know, towards people who were of Jewish heritage or that there was a singular kind of inflexible standard that was always abided, was always irrational and could not, could not be, you know, could not be compromised.

or nor exceptions rendered. You know, it's indicative of the fact that there was far more nuanced and complexity here. So we've,

and what this all comes back to is that Hess's flight has to not lose his mind and, you know, nor is the under the influence of crazy astrologers or something has his flight to

to the UK was very calculated. It was very sincere and it was very well thought out. And the fortunes of everybody's in Hesse's orbit owed to that. So that's kind of why I'm emphasizing these figures like the Haushoeffers who in a lot of kind of court mainstream history treatments are just treated as sort of peripheral figures. That's that's, you cannot get a complete picture. unless you deal with these dynamics and the character of the personalities involved now moving forward with to hess himself after the uh leading up to and subsequent to the national socialist ascendancy to power um has was in we we talked last session about you know hess sort of was a man who owing to his kind of middle class morality and his overall sort of decency was not really but he was not really was a man who owing to his kind of middle class morality and his overall sort of decency was not really

really cut out for political warfare. I mean, the man was obviously not a physical coward, nor is he afraid of violence. You know, he was a war hero. He'd fought the KPD in the streets as a, as, you know, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, is an battalion leader. But the kind of, uh, the kind of, the kind of Machiavillian ruthlessness that was called for, um, to, uh, you know, to quell revolutionary uprisings, uh, within the party, as we'll see, you know, with the night of long knives, as well as just kind of the intriguing that, that was required against men who had been his comrades, you know, in the immediate past, in order to consolidate, you know, the power of the Hitler wing of the party, you know, to which Hess was sublimely loyal. Like, he didn't really have the stomach for that. And Hitler, I believe, whatever else can be said of the man, Hitler was, he had a, Hitler was, he had a, Hitler. Hitler was, he had a,

tremendous understanding of social psychology and and what what what people were capable of in terms of their in in terms of their moral conscience and he tended to reserve duties and obligations owing to his evaluation of these things so has found himself insinuated into the role of quote deputy furor and and and uh and uh and head of the chancery and that was kind of an ideal role for him because it called for a very human touch you know and because it was a it was a public relations role but also you know in terms of maintaining it establishing and maintaining a quorum within within the party ranks you know Hess was a man who people intrinsically liked and trusted okay and in some ways Hess was a perfect

national socialist and in the Third Reich unlike in a state like the Soviet Union, there really was a clash between the party and the state. It was not a fiction as it was in these communist regimes. You know, the National Socialist Party was not the government of Germany and vice versa. Things became that way as time went on. And the ultimate objective of Hitler himself and of some of these ambitious functionaries within the executive branch, like Himmler, they definitely aim to insinuate the party apparatus formally into the state structure

in a way that it was one was indistinguishable from the other but it was not really an organic process and like I said it was not just some kind of fiction that was maintained so Hitler Hitler maintaining has in his role

as kind of you know supreme executive over party affairs second only to himself made sense and it it's it's it's anecdotal evidence of uh of what i just suggested about the character of hess as those who were his intimates attested to and i think as the historical record substantiates so in april 21st 93 hitler issued the following decree he said i appoint the director of the political central commission, Rudolph has, is my deputy

and authorize him to decide all matters concerning the direction of the party in my name. Now, he stouther was into the central commission itself, obviously in some ways that's mirroring the central committee structure of Marxist-Lennon's parties. That was not

accidental, and again, too, like we talked about in previous episodes, that's not somehow, that's not somehow derivative in some callo sense people really did look to

the Communist Party of the Soviet Union whatever else they might have thought about it in terms of its ethics and in terms of its political values structurally it was viewed as a very progressive and I say progress of value neutral terms

organization for a party apparatus and that's like I said but in the case of the third right too there's the added um variable that you know again there was not there was not some organic union of uh of the party in the state you know the uh the latter preceded the former you know by centuries in the case of germany in some form or another and nor was it really uh within the uh within the national socialist charter to try and replace the state

with itself. That came into past owing to political realities, but I think the point stands. Hess did confide Gearing shortly after this appointment and this kind of formal

disclosure or testament of his role that he did resent the fact that he did not have any formal power within the government, only within the party. And Gearing, you know, and Hess said,

relations. They were both old fighters, but just generally, Hest really didn't have any enemies. Garing himself, I mean, in addition to being a very, a person as an extraordinarily high profile within the party, Garing

had been appointed Prime Minister of Prussia after the National Socialist's ascendancy to power, in addition to its chief of police. And the origins of the Gestapo were in the Prussian police force, which under Garing became a political police force that had dominion over the entirety of the Reich. And then later, it was assimilated into the SS. And Garing stepped away from, you know, his role as any kind of police executive.

But that's in part because he was slated for bigger and better things. But in any event, Garing approaches Hitler. and he suggests that, you know, it has to be given a role in government, you know, rather than just being relegated to purely administrative matters of the party. So on June 29, I mean 33, Hitler issued a decree allowing her to attend all meetings of the right cabinet. The rationale being to guarantee the, quote, unity of party and state. and thereby confer an equality of status, inequality of status, at least in formal terms, and party functionaries to that of,

or with that of state office holders. So Hess became a Reichs minister without portfolio. So that's significant also because that, obviously because, you know, Hess was sitting in on, on affairs, on cabinet affairs. So he'd be in, he, his, is,

his informational, His situational awareness of the dealings of government were rather complete, which is important in analyzing his motives for the flight to the UK. He would, the only matters, the only substantial policy matters that would have been hidden from his purview would be military ones. but that was really the case for everybody except the high command and Hitler himself and some aspects of the SS

who are liaising with the regular army and of course later the SS you know only to the might of the Vafen SS and its forces in being and its assimilation into the Vermat command structure you know they more than just liaised with

with the Germanite command and they became essentially part of it but that's not moving on though that's not as a Hess was with Hesse was not without real authority it was um and his ideas were digging seriously Hess was really the

the German labor front was really his brainchild and the labor front was a real thing it wasn't it wasn't just this kind of paper organization that had been suggested and then created you know to kind of you know to kind of you know

to kind of provide some sort of ready alibi to offset criticism that, you know, after the, after the trade unions had been, it had been smashed and, and a lot of, you know, a good number of labor leaders had been investigated and or arrested for, uh, for communist activity or Marxist sympathy. the this you know the this the the the labor front was a real thing it wasn't just you know the uh it wasn't just the right government saying oh no you know we we we we've got a formal uh we we've got a formal structure of uh of uh of uh of uh you know of labor representation within the within the party apparatus um it actually had real power and robert lay uh who was who became as the especially during the war years he became instrumental in

uh in dealing with the exigencies of production um and uh and uh addressing labor shortage needs uh in some ways not particularly ethical but

he didn't personally enrich himself by these measures they were just rather brutal but lay was a serious personage and um it has appointed lay uh you know the Hess was not afraid of strong personalities within his orbit and within his immediate uh as his immediate

subordinates and a lot of men in in in power positions are even those were you know even ones who are talented sometimes um has also he had responsibility for turning the need to the volkestoyt the volkdeutsch volkstoych were uh ethnic germans uh outside the outside the boundaries of the third Reich or outside of its borders. And as we talked about last session, as a political force extrinsic to

the, to Germany proper, I mean, it wasn't just a German emphasis on blood in the national community and, you know, defending the national community wherever it wherever it may be found, but also in the pre-war era,

there was an understanding of you know, the nascent as it was, the great power of, you know, mobilized ethnic lobbies, particularly in Europe. But also to, in the United States and Central and South America. And that, that, that was, so that was an important, that was an important role. Hest did appoint Vellhelm Boll who later went on to become a galiter and became something of

an adversary to Hess and we'll return to that but interestingly on October 27, 1933 as as the as the right government was going to consolidate

it was, you know, it was consolidating power and gaining more confidence and implementing its ideological program, obviously, because, you know, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it's sustained a mandate now for, you know, several months. Um, has invited Albrecht Haushofer, the son of Carl Haushofer, who has said, uh, intervened with a quote, certificate of protection. Um, you know, a formal document, uh, attesting. to his good character and indicating that he, you know, any, any, any deprivation of

liberty or property owing to his heritage, Haushofer, that is, you know, howshoffer being, you know, part Jewish in his, in his maternal line. He was quite literally just that, under the protection of the deputy furor. It, and not only has open about his allegiance and friendship with the Haushoeffers,

but he formally appointed Albert's Haushofer to preside over a council charged with addressing policy questions relating to the Volkstoich and the geopolitical situation. So, I mean, not only was he above board about, you know, again, his affinity for and friendship with these people, but he was giving them real power. in the regime, at least within the dominion of it that, you know, has wielded authority. And bear in mind, too, this was the party we're talking about,

not the state apparatus. And that just as incidental to the kind of main points of discussion here, this kind of cuts against the entire, you know, like a Holocaust narrative of this. inflexible, unrelenting rigidity that assembly categorized people, you know, according to biological criteria and from which there were no exceptions allowed and there was just, you know, complete absence of reason, you know, this... Wouldn't the censors to that just say that these people were...

collaborators looking to say in a party in a party in a in a in a party office though of this kind of prestige um why would why would why has this form why would has this fellow national socialist tolerate the presence of these people

you know if in fact there was this was this unheard of thing or that you know this this kind of this principle that just could not be compromised you know i mean Hess was openly associating with people who were quote racial Jews under the NERRA laws and nobody really seemed to care about it You know, there's nothing in the record indicating that, you know, this caused problems for him or for the Haushofer's in any real capacity.

What did happen is William Ball, who by this point was a galiter, he was affronted that a formal advisory council would be dominated by non-party men. And that was his big issue with it, more so than that Hawshawfer the Younger was, you know, a racial Jew. what bull did was he demanded a seat for himself on the on the advisory council um and uh he got it uh the support of martin bourman borman's an interesting case because it has he was his ed judaunt and his personal secretary and uh he was second in command of the uh of the rike uh of the rike chancery and um he'd come to uh even as early as 1933

he'd come to uh he'd come to be a sort of law and to himself on uh on matters of party authority um Hess was a or uh Barman was a head a genius for organization

and he was a workaholic and uh he was a fanatic and he'd uh he was an old fighter who'd uh who'd uh who sort of cut his teeth, as it were, in terms of demonstrating his loyalty to the party by murdering a communist deputy, and he served time for it.

You know, he was a very serious person. But also, it's, you know, not an overt rival that has his power, though, which is interesting. and this comes up again and again in the career of Borman. His relationship to Hess, I think, was mirrored later on, and when he took on Hess's role quite literally, and his relationship to Hitler mirrored his earlier relationship with Hess

in terms of his dynamics, I believe. But that's a bit of a tangent. What's most significant about Albrecht-Haushofer, you know how sharp for the younger at this time is throughout the summer and autumn of 93 um incident at the same time as you know as he took on this appointment um granted to him by hess he began to work with a secret emissary uh abroad uh for uh for hess um why he did this uh yeah part part of this was out of you know loyalty to hess and the relationship, you know, the relationship, you know, between his father and Hess.

But part of this was out of a, out of, um, out of a sense of patriotism. You know, I mean, obviously, how Schoffer was not a national socialist, but he, you know, this to say, he wasn't just that, you know, he was looking out for his own physical safety and trying to be comfortable within this regime that was, you know, basically hostile to, uh, to racial jury as it was. He had some basic affinity for this regime. I mean, otherwise, you know, he would not have undertaken these activities. Thus, that summer,

how Schoffer, he ended up attending talks in Danzig and negotiating seriously with the U.S. Ambassador Thomas Dodd, as well as putting out fears to the United Kingdom on Hess's behalf. That August, Houshofer directly intervened to you on behalf of Heinrich Bruning, who was an academic that both the Haushofer is admired. He was called the last of the Weimar Chancellor's by kind of somewhat derisively. he was he was kind of the last

he was he was kind of the last the last the last chancellor who who was a true kind of vibrant social democrats permitted to remain in government and a standard

and fear of the in the essay named Schoenberg just hated him and he Albert Towshofer was worried that his friend, Dr. Bruning, would quite literally be murdered and has directly intervened and resolved the situation and bringing Bruning, you know, under his protection, as it were, you know, as he'd done in far less critical circumstances for the house shoppers.

But, you know, and again, this is another example of has been able to intervene without protest on behalf of a man who, you know, by virtue of his heritage or his station or profession or politics, would have been categorically or wasn't fact at odds with the regime, yet there was no formal protest when, you know, has intervened to prevent his, you know, deprivation of any of his substantial rights or liberties. And, again, I'm not just, I'm not just single. out discrete instances to try and extrapolate some kind of broader point that's at odds with evidence. I think it can't be overstated that Hess was, his domain of authority was the National Socialist Party. You know, he was not some political secularist.

You know, he was not, you know, some conservative who found himself in government and owing to, you know, a long pedigree, just, you know, could kind of, you know, operate with a free hand. I mean, Hesse was the kind of national socialist of national socialists, okay? And he's intervened on behalf of his Jewish friends and these kinds of socially liberal university professors, and he's not just getting away with it, it's not causing many problems. But the real test of Hess's metal, I don't, I don't want to sound flipping. Perhaps it's the wrong way to describe it. But, you know, we talked about Hess, and, you know, he had a, he had a very developed political conscience and, uh, and moral sensibility, but also just, he had very frankly, bourgeois ethics and values. I don't mean that negatively. I mean, people, when they want to be obtuse these days and they talk about, you know, bourgeois, like some kind of dirty word or something. Like, what I mean is that, you know, Hess was not a gangster and, you know, he was perfectly comfortable with.

with violence when it was necessary, but he did not enjoy or condone, you know, gratuitous bloodletting. And so coming around to, you know, June 1934, the night of the long knives, this caused a real crisis for him. I don't want to deep dive into the, into the ROM pooch and the, uh, the kind of burgeoning civil war between the SA and, um, and, uh, and the, uh, and the, uh, and the, uh, and the, uh, and the, uh, and the, and the, uh, and the conservative elements that had backed the party, including Hindenberg himself, and we'll get into that in a minute. but for those that don't know the essay owing in part to the need to kind of pull the wool over the eyes of of the international community

to demonstrate superficial compliance with Versailles the essay had swelled to ranks the ranks of 12 over 2 million men and they did not demobilize after the

national socialist ascendancy to power. Rom himself was an anarchic individual. You know, he was a, I mean, he was, he was a real war hero. And a great soldier, and a remarkable officer.

But he also was, he also was a, was a real gangster. You know, he was an open homosexual. He, of the, of the most kind of brutal sort, you know, he was, he, uh, he favored what he called a permanent revolution.

You know, not in the sense that one might see a parallel in Trotsky. Like I said, there really was a kind of gangsterish nihilism to Rom. And I think he really got excited at the prospect of the German Reich becoming a battlefronted to itself in perpetuity. and I think he really foresaw kind of a bloodbath wherein you know

conservative elements and anybody else who'd stood in the way and the National Social ascendancy would be slaughtered. I don't think that was just propaganda after the fact to rationalize

what was done and we'll get into what was done in a moment. But even if you have a more charitable view of Rom um regardless of view of Rom, there were many,

men, like Gregor Strasser, who got a bullet in the head or their throat cut, literally, in June 1934, like, owing just to political intrigues, or the fact that, you know, they'd been denounced by ambitious rivals within the party. And, and Hess was well aware of this. and some of these men were his friends. And he had no love for Rahm, and he was in a lot of ways appalled by him and what he represented. But he could not abide in moral terms what was done.

And it's interesting because, you know, and again, this has always seemed to favor reconciliation in lieu of violence. at least within uh within uh within uh within the party's own house as well as in his personal life uh

and like i i believe it's a test to do his bourgeois origins uh victor lutz uh or luta um he succeeded ramm as as chief of the essay at least for a time um some of the german guys or girls or just some of the other revisionists

who are keen of the Third Reich who are watching this, will correct me if I'm wrong. But Lutz, he was a confidant of Hess in the essay, and he brought to Hess a direct testimony that was reliable, relating to Rahm's plans to overthrow the regime. You know, but still, Hess urged a meeting of the party gall-writers that he wanted to convene

in Mecklenburg to at least give them a chance something approaching due process or at least a chance that some sort of reconciliation that would allow for a remedy other than just eliminating these men by taking their lives

you know um but they was by that point that it uh lutsa told him that you know the the the thing had been decided you know rham had made too many enemies um they'd gotten uh heinrich himmler um on board and himler and himler and gearing had been incredibly close um and that's this is what's fascinating too is that this is what really made a lot of the personages in the in the National Socialist Party

um Sep Dietrich he actually he actually pulled the trigger and killed Rom all the all the trigger men all the SS trigger men went on to kind of you know

really storied careers in the party and the uh and it's also i think it's i think like i said i think this is what kind of broke has of of of uh of his willingness to just you know abide uh the trajectory of uh of events without trying to stop what was in motion um that's not to say that you know the uh the war between the UK and Berlin was owed to the furor's decisions. I think Hitler did everything he possibly could to avoid

hostilities with the UK. When you're confronted by an enemy who is simply going to pursue a policy of war at all costs, I mean, your hands are tied, but I believe that this I believe that

in addition to the fact that I think it has, it some kind of shadow over what he had at one time perceived as the inevitable fortunes of the party and state that he served. Okay, let me put it that way.

And I also think in some ways it gave him an out. I don't think that was his primary motivation, but it was part of it. But the, um, it's also too, and this is the last all, this is the last all, uh, this is the last

kind of substantive matter I'll address relating to the night of the long because it's kind of too much of a tangent. But the, you know, Hindenburg at this time was the Reich presidents and people, one of the things these, you know, court historians in addition to being liars and being, you know, kind of peddlers of hysterical

and moral cant, they're, they, they deal in fictions and this idea that Adolf Hitler was some law and to himself in 1934 is nonsense. and the Reich President Hindenburg

probably not the sole proximate cause obviously but kind of you know the first among many essential causes of the bloodletting was Hindenburg demanding that the national socialists

basically pay the cost of Hitler's chancellorship in blood, you know, and clean out their own house because it was unacceptable for men like Rahm to be in uniform. And it was unacceptable for an organization like the SA to be declaring that it was the armed force of the German Reich. Okay?

And in a despite we kind of perceived the We kind of perceive the We kind of perceive the We're trying to perceive the Vimer regime that had no real mandate and it was in a lot of ways

but it was also organized around the sovereign executive. Okay. And Article 4. 48 of the Vimer Constitution, it literally, it expressly delegated the authority to declare an exceptional state of emergency by the Reich President and to essentially take whatever steps he deemed necessary to remedy or annihilate the clear and present threat. Now, of course, there was a a built-in remedy to, you know, perceived overreach in that a majority vote in the Reichstag

could, uh, could veto that declaration, but the Reich president in turn could dissolve the Reichstag. But my point is that, um, Hindberg was very much kind of the, the master of these events. And he was at the end of his life, you know, he died later that summer. Um, Or that autumn, rather. But, you know, he, what happened on June 6,9.34, it was an Article 48 emergency remedy in everything but formal declaration. And the hidden hand of the knives that were wielded was Hindenburgs. so this idea that this was just lawless Nazi gangsterism or something is ridiculous and also there's the fact that Rahm actually did plan Ron actually did have a private army of

millions of men he was a psychopath and he did plan to he did in fact plan to overthrow the government I mean when I you know I mean I again I don't want to I don't want to I don't I don't want to hijack a conversation of Hess but you know there's precedent in our own country for what sorts of measures the executive is willing to resort to when similar conditions are present and it's just as bloody and unrelenting.

And outside of the normal scope of what we consider to be, you know, acceptable remedies. So that's just something that's that has always disturbed me, is the way that's characterized. But

it's getting back I promise that was the last you know digression that's that far outside the scope but

Hess's adjutant at the time was a fellow named Alfred Lichen and he a lot of his testimony is available and some which is prosaic

which is very, very significant. And the most significant to me is that on, um, he was, uh, he was, uh, he was, uh, he was with Hess in Bavaria on June 30th. I said June 6th earlier. I was thinking, I was thinking like Normandy.

Yeah, June 30, 9034 is night of one night. So forgive me. I promise I'm not going to see now. But, uh, uh, uh, uh, probably one of the worst strains on Hess. He was in Munich at the time.

He fought tooth and nail with Hitler to save some of those men. And refused to be intimidated even by the most violent outbursts from Hitler. He saved a lot of men's lives. We'll never know how many, end of quote. Supposedly, too, according not just to Leitken, but other witnesses, has argued with Hitler for several hours. you know this went on throughout the day that uh you know uh these men were our comrades you know we we've got to come to some kind of we can't we can't as unceremoniously we can't as unceremoniously

shoot them the street literally you know they they uh it's just something he couldn't abide and I mean that's you know it the this in some ways uh the seminal uh you know like I said, if you want to understand ultimately who became the key personages in the right government and who was sidelined from then on, or who

just, you know, everything, you know, their conceptual horizon of the conceptual relationship to the regime just changed fundamentally in the case it has the June 934 is

kind of what the was kind of the crucible of that. And that's that's not emphasize enough. In Hess's own in his letters to his wife as well as in his own

diary, he that's Hess, that is, he likened the massacre on the other than other long knives to the Roman practice of decimation. That is, quote, the execution of every tenth man, irrespective of whether he was guilty or innocence.

And he came back again and again to the case of Gregor Straser. And Strasser's a fascinating guy. I mean, for those that don't know, Strasser's cast as representing the, quote, left wing of the National Socialist Party. Yeah, that's true to some degree. I mean, he had more in common with, you know, the, the, the, the revolutionary conservative element in Weimar, you know, people like Ernst Younger himself.

He envisioned a kind of, he envisioned to kind of devolved socialism that actually had more in common kind of the Catholic distributism and, and third way economics than it did, you know, with the traditional left wing. He wanted some sort of concord with the Soviet Union. not for, I mean, this was a geostrategic evaluation. This was not only the sympathy with Marxist-Leninism, but Strasser was, among other,

aside from, you know, his service to the party and everything else, he had early on been the party organization leader, okay, I mean, during the years of struggle. So he had, he had Hess's job. Like, he'd been, like, in Hess's role early on. you know, and he was he was one of the most valuable old fighters of the early

and he'd been with the party since its earliest days. I can't remember if he he joined after Drexler had stepped aside but I'm not, I think, but I'm not certain. But regardless, you know, he'd been, he'd been

a national socialist from the beginning, okay? And it had to have impacted Hest, that Strasser of all people could have ended up just unceremoniously shot in the middle of the night. You know, especially because the man quite literally

was in, you know, the role that Hess had himself was in at that moment. Hitler, interestingly though, July 27th, you know, so

a full about a full month after after the night of the Long Knives and Hess's kind of very public within party corridors

and vocal protest and kind of moral outrage Hitler actually increased Hess's mandate substantially Hillary decreed that he had the aim

of streamlining the party and the state and thus that you know, it has as as essentially, you know, chairman of the party in a de facto sense. You should have a say in the drafting

of all future legislation. You know, of major laws that, you know, things that were, you know, impactful throughout the entire Reich and that dealt with basic issues of national security or with, you know, the integrity of

the national community of, of the national community and things like that you know so like introducing conscription uh stuff like the race laws frankly too uh they would bear they would bear rudolph hess's formal signature now he didn't really have time to scrutinize these things it's almost like in those old movies about the later roman empire where uh you know there's some uh there's some dictator roman procurator or Caesar type and he's just literally being handed like parchments and stamping them without reading it. I mean that's a silly metaphor

but it's actually not that far off like the sheer volume of data that Hess was charged with managing was was incredible. And you know him putting

uh him I mean this was real authority that he had owing to this July 27th decree but It's not as if Hess was sitting there, you know, acting like, you know, acting like a library lawyer and, you know, scrutinizing everything that came across his desk from, you know, from whatever, from whatever quarters, you know, most of his time, too, you know, as, as the party fully consolidated, you know, we talked about, we talked about the party, a chancellery being in many respects a public relations office. You know, an early example of a modern political party truly maintaining a permanent presence,

you know, intermediary presence with the public. So has spent a lot of time quite literally just cutting ribbons or, you know, or showing up to a word, you know, the mother's cross to, you know, to German ladies who, you know, had four or five and six kids, you know, or, or, or, or, or, you know, or giving accolades to, you know, great war veterans who were wounded, you know, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, it's a full-time job, like, then as it is now. I mean, it, uh, you know, Nixon lamented that in a, you know, Nixon was in a very different role in Rudolph Hess, but, um, you know,

Nixon was a man who actually wanted to do, Nixon was interested in waging the Cold War and he was interested in you know kind of restructuring a policy. He was not interested in, you know, kissing babies and, you know, putting his arm around old ladies and you know, flashing toothy grins

at the cameraman. But that's you know, has very much has very much the more the more his power the more his power

increased, kind of the more his role as a politician sort of mitigated its actual his actual ability to exercise that power. And this is

interesting too because in 934-35 Hitler was putting some distance between himself and the National Socialist Party and this was not accidental. Part of this was because, even though Hindenberg was in the grave by, you know, autumn 1934, there was still a lot of national conservative elements who were very suspicious

of the national socialists. And the German public overwhelmingly loved Hitler. You know, Hitler had like, you know, over 90% of the German electorate, you know, supported Hitler, but the National Socialist Party was not especially popular. I mean, they had a mandate and they weren't unpopular, but their fortunes were not at all synonymous. Those are the furor and those are the National Socialist Party. So during this kind of intermediary period between the years of struggle

and, you know, the kind of the kind of post consolidation phase immediately before the onset of hostilities and 1939, you know, you had this strange circumstance where kind of Hitler was getting it, was kind of, was kind of learning, to swim proverbially as an executive.

And, you know, he was, he was identifying more and more with the, with, with, with the German state and, and behaving, like, in a lot of ways, like a very traditional German executive, you know, and so, you know, Hess's role as the face of the party, you know, and kind of the, and kind of the man who most embodied the National Socialist Party, circumstantially, you know, this kind of increased, you know. But again, like we mentioned before, too, the subjects of this was that the staggering value of work, well, a lot of it was being delegated to Martin Borman. And Borman, crude as he was, cunning as he was, conspiring as he was,

he was an organizational genius. This becomes significant later. Because Borman, in many ways, Borman was the end of Hest, but his power in later years owed very much the peribular house that

Hess had built. Now, moving on, I'm going to try and bring it back because I realize I can't keep you all afternoon. Bring it back to the Houshofer. and how Hess's relationship with them relates to his ultimate flight and tragic, you know, effort as a piece of a Siri. On April 7, 1934, Hess met privately with the Japanese naval attach on Admiral Yindo, and he met with him on Professor Haushofer's property. on

Colberger Strasz and has made for all practical purposes an official overture to him and this was significant because at this time this big early 1934 most of the National Socialist Party

at least the aspects of it and the personages within it who had any control over the trajectory of foreign policy, as well as the majority of the Army General Officer Corps, as well as the kind of careers in the foreign ministry, they strongly preferred China to Japan for political reasons, for geostrategic reasons. Past the Haushofer's Ribbentrop, they were the minority that really favored an alliance with Japan.

um the uh and uh has apparently uh which was out of curative of him he threw caution to the wind and invoking the furor's name uh to uh to validate his own authority he said quote well i can inform you speaking now to admiral yendo and in speaking in the name of the furor that we sincerely want germany and japan to draw it together but it must stress that this can't involve anything that might jeopardize their relations with Britain. So again, first and foremost, what is Hess's priority? It's to bring the UK to terms not just in terms of non-aggression, but in terms of, you know, formal alliance moving forward.

this was the lynchpin of of every of every issue that he contemplated relating to geostrategic questions and that's essential to adjudicating in the

in the kind of court of historical opinion as it were what Hess's motives were and what the kind of overall disposition of of, of, of, of, of, Hitler was because, uh, different as they were, um,

you know, has his, has his, uh, emotional and ideological intimacy relative to the furor. It wasn't as a case of, you know, hero worship or whatever, punitive light people cast it as, and Norris has, you know, some kind of slavish follower. um you know aside from any kind of messianic uh pretensions that has uh assigned to ed off hitler he uh he was in basic agreement on on on in matters of worldview okay um particularly of a strategic uh power political nature and um this is essential to uh understanding, you know, not just the kind of

discrete fact of what animated has to do what he did. But it also shoots to pieces, the kind of obnoxious, darkest hour myth where, you know, Churchill was just put upon man who was, you know, leading this country that, you know, was being threatened by Nazi aggression. That's the, that's the term you're again and again, Nazi aggression.

I mean, it's just, it's not just, it's not just, it's not just a misstatement of history. It's the little opposite of what happened. But the, what, and, and Hesse's, has his,

his, dealings with, with the Japanese, with the Japanese Admiralty, that really was kind of, I mean, arguably that was the first step towards what became the anti-commontern pact, which was signed, November

96 the German Reich and Japan were the original signatories. Italy didn't join until 1937

and that's hugely significant and a lot is made by people you know that well the Germans and the Japanese

they didn't coordinate well at the operational level and they didn't integrate politically I think they did as much

as it can be expected Japan even more so than the German Reich German Reich, which I think was remarkably united at this point, and into the, into the era of, into the war years. You know, Japan really was a house divided, held together kind of only by the emperor, in playful terms, I mean.

And there really was, I mean, there was, there was just a fact of distance. I mean, I mean, literal, like, you know, geographic distance. I it's not and the anti-comander in Pact that was a real it was a real

thing I mean it wasn't an affectation and the fact it's got to be it's got to that's got to be considered too in understanding you know

we talked about we talked in an earlier episode about the mythology that you know the non-aggression pack grows in it some kind of quote-to-quote alliance between Moscow and Berlin. I mean, it's absurd for a lot of reasons. You don't, you don't, you don't, you don't, you don't, you don't, you don't, you don't

declare that you're not going to, like, assault and try to destroy your allies. I mean, that doesn't need to be said, but, uh, the, uh, the anti-comitur impact was what really, what really, uh, such that it existed. And again, I, I, I will get into this another time. Um, it, uh, that really is what created the, the Axis alliance. Um, and I believe, like I said, that Hesse's and the Houss offers oratures to Japan or what facilitated, like made that possible, quite literally. During this time, too, and in the years immediately subsequent, um, uh, Albert Houshofer was spending a great deal of time in the UK. and Howchhoffer had become increasingly, you know, anti-Nazi, not an anti-fascist sort of capacity, but owing to his own, you know, parentage, obviously.

But also just kind of the, you know, he was, how Schoffer was an act, he was a, he was a geopolitical, he was an analyst like his father. but he he kind of he coveted the role of diplomats you know and these were not he was not a man of a character even aside from his parentage and everything else

so I think would have really identified with the national socialist but he was a patriot and he did love Germany and he did agree with

with Hitler's sentiment as the Fuera quite literally stated in mind comp, quote, no sacrifice should have been too great in winning Britain's friendship. Plus two, it was, he had a great esteem house offer did for the UK. Like a lot of younger Germans did. And this is one of the things that, I mean, he and Hess, they would have had a personal affinity for another

or under their, you know, over to the fact that, you know, Hess had great love for a house off or the younger's father, Carl. But, you know, Hess had literally been born under British rule in Egypt, and this is where he grew up. You know, he, Hess was,

Hess was, Hess was kind of the good European in the terms described by Nietzsche. Okay, I mean, I, I know some of the, our audience really digs that sort of sentiment. I'm not, I'm not being kind of sending or something.

I take that seriously But You know It has kind of straddling Uh Has kind of straddling the, the Anglophone world and, you know, esteeming the kind of majesty of this

of this great, you know, white empire of, of, of, of, Britain, you know, well also, uh, well also being, uh, you know, the consummate,

uh, the consummate, uh, you know, kind of teutonic, uh, German Patriot, you know,

who views the world in kind of nakedly historicist terms, you know, in in, and, in, and, in, and, in, and, in, and, in, Gaelian terms, uh, that's, uh, that's something that,

um, that's something that, that, that's got to be accounted for to understand the dynamic between, uh, the younger Haushofer and Hess, I believe. Um, the uh howshafer uh the albrecht i mean the younger he he wrote a lot in in a in political and academic journals uh one of which uh i can't remember the name of it it was uh it was a monthly geopolitical journal that uh there were myriad publications like that um in the era but this was kind of the top uh this was kind of the top uh This is kind of the most prestigious one.

And he wrote in April of 1994, The ultimate decision on the fate of Europe lies today in English hands, just as it did in the 10th years, the turn of the century when the British Empire and the Kaiser's Reich, after vain attempts to steer a common course began to drift apart. Now, for about, four years subsequent um from 1935 36 to 1940 uh basically uh basically uh yeah basically from nine and 35 until the the formal onset of hostilities when the UK and and France declared war on the

German Reich has an Albrecht Haushoeffer owing to uh owing to househofer's connections that he'd made in his kind of secret diplomacy missions. They arranged private meetings with British visitors, dozens of whom flocked to Berlin in the mid-30s.

For no other reason, they were eager to witness the National Socialist Revolution firsthand. Whether you loved or hated the German Reich, it was a government and a mode of political organization that was on the cutting edge of statecraft, okay? Um, there were German transcripts, uh, interestingly and not, uh, not, uh, not, uh,

unincentionally, these were destroyed by Allied command after the war. Uh, there were voluminous records of Hitler's meetings with these people that Hassan the Haushofer, uh, had courted and, uh, arranged for the fear to meet. people like Leo Amory Lord Londonderry Lord Beaverbrook which should come as no surprise

I mean we are discussing at church so we're going to deep dive into his career and his sympathies Stanley Baldwin's secretary Tom Jones not to be confused with the with the singer and I mean these are people

of serious pedigree and authority Okay. And I mean, there was probably, there may have been a dozen more that there, you know, the, there was no record of, or the record of which was never duplicated before being destroyed. So we don't even know. But the, and to jump ahead for a minute, after, I mentioned that when we first began this discussion today, that, you know, Albert Haushoffer, he had had an audience with Hitler on a few of incasions. the last of which was two days after Hess's flight in May 940. And Haushofer, Hitler basically demanded interior of Haushofer, and demandity. He revealed all of his contacts and activities, you know, relating to the UK over the preceding, you know, months and a couple of years. and Hauschoffer would he listed for Hitler the names of those on whom he personally uh those whom he personally tried to cultivate successfully successfully or not to um try to sway uh sway the uh the uh the

trajectory of policy in in in the UK um this was a what he called, quote, a leading group of younger conservatives. He mentioned Lord Clydesdale. Now, this, he, Lord Clydesdale later became the Duke of Hamilton. Okay. This was the man who Hess was attempting to contact when he flew to the UK. So this is significant. And it becomes more significant, as will be revealed in a moment.

But another name that Houshoffer listed for the furor, was the prime minister's parliamentary private secretary Lord Dungless Harold Balfour, Kenneth Lindsay, undersecretaries of the air ministry, the education ministry, and the Scottish

office, Hamilton's brother who was related to who was related to Queen Elizabeth and and Hamilton's mother-in-law who

who is similarly related to I guess the House of Windsor I don't like people who are keen to royals correct me if I misstated who who sits on the throne in the liming land but

be as it may in the same circle where Lord Astor Samuel Hoare Oliver Stanley I mean the list goes on and on okay It, uh, it, uh, it, uh, it, this, this went on for years that how Schoffer was cultivating these people, okay?

And, uh, in the case of, uh, in the case of Hamilton, uh, they became very close friends. Um, they went on vacations together. They, they maintained a voluminous correspondence. Okay. Uh, at least some of these people, had to have been swayed to Haushofer's enterprise, or at least his point of view. Okay. And even if none of them had,

Hamilton, again, he became a close, intimate, Kauffinat, companion, if you will, of Haushofer the younger. You can't tell me accounting for all of this that has simply one day

lost his mind and flew to the UK out of cowardice or because you know his his astrologer told him to like that doesn't that just doesn't

that just doesn't pass the straight face test but I realize this Hess sort of a subchapter has been going on for a

long time I promise next session we will wrap it up we'll devote like half an hour to Hess's flight and then we will weave as an incarceration experience into the treatment of the actual trial because

it's not just an effort at towards and that does me you know deciding to abrogate the discussion in the interest of brevity it it makes sense to do it that way

but I thought that his background was important the best because Hess is so kind of lampooned and made a caricature in in kind of court history. So I hope nobody was bored by it or resented the tangent.

It's an essential foundation that needs to be addressed to understand the subsequent proceedings, which is, you know, the big kind of finale to this entire series of discussions. So I hope you're

pleased with what we covered today, Pete. All good. Give your plugs and, well, on. Yeah, indeed. You can always find me in my substack. It's Real Thomas 777.com. It's about half the count of there's free. It's long-in-form essays, and that's where our podcast is posted about every other week.

We got a very active community on Telegram. It's t.m.m. slash the number 7-H-M-A-S-7.7. And like I said, that's my primary social media platform. I mean, that's the only one I really utilize. I do back things up on Gab, even though I'm not purely active there. You could find me there at Real Thomas 777. And just to plug some of my print long forum, I completed my second novelette in my ongoing science fiction brand called Steelstorm.

I completed the manuscript up just the other night. I'm sending it off within 48 hours to Imperial Press who are great people and great friends of ours. And that'll be available

for purchase within weeks. And I was incredibly moved and inspired by the positive response to the first book in the series. So that is

where you can find me and where you can get up on what I do. All right. Until part three. Take care, Thomas. Back to the Pekinejana show, continuing the series. I'm here with Thomas 777. How are you, Thomas? I'm very well.

Thanks again for hosting me, as always. There's some things I need to discuss today relating to the strategic situation, as well as the diplomatic one, um, that, led to Hess's flight. And I know it seems like that it may seem like I interrupted what was a very coherent narrative series

for the sake of an esoteric tangent. That's not my intention, and I don't think that's what I'm doing. I think the case of Rolf Hess is very ill understood. And such that people do contemplate it, they

contemplated it in terms of how strange it is and what became a Mr. Hess, you know, literally the real man in the high castle. Or they deal with the fact that, which I plan to when we finally get around the unpacking the Nuremberg trials, the actual proceedings, people, such that they do give Hess any consideration from a revisionist perspective, they generally just deal with the fact that he was, even within the, even if one accepts the, you know, if one accepts for the take of argument the bounded rationality of the

the Nuremberg indictment even within those parameters it's very difficult to make the case that it should have been there in the first place and under indictment or any kind of jeopardy at all as a matter of law but

what became imperative to me when I first started studying these topics I'm talking like literally 30 years ago even before there was a as great as great as great of access to source documents and things and and and academic resources and contemporaneous uh testimony you know because this was pre internet something that did jump out

at me such that has did figure in revisionist literature was that the narrative around his flight didn't make any sense um on its face you know i i generally uh i generally um there's a subtext to a lot of the Hitchcock movies, you know, where if it's alleged that somebody simply went mad and that explains their behavior, generally, that's, generally you're dealing with something rather conspiratorial. Because sometimes people go mad and behave totally

irrationally, but generally they don't. And when such things are suggested, particularly if you're talking about, you know, truly apoccal events, that's generally not, that's generally not something that should be taken at face value.

but what uh what uh what uh a point i want to emphasize as we kind of get into the substance what we're going to talk about today you know rudolph has as his public profile for lack of a better way to characterize it increased you know uh after uh after the national socialist revolution you know as we talked about before his responsibilities within the party administration grew exponentially and he became very, very visible as literally the face of the party. And in fact, that was in fact his role. I mean, as a matter of law. I mean, he, he was, he was situated at the, at the, at the, at the, at the head of the right chancellor. I mean, this wasn't just, uh, this wasn't just public relations. I mean, there was that aspect to it, too.

Even in triumph of the will, I think you see him more than you see Hitler. Yeah, yeah. And he became, very much the face of the party like we talked about because he was very relatable to people which I think makes sense I mean he seems I mean has seemed like a worldly guy but he also seemed kind of provincial I mean that and to Americans like

in the 21st century they might be like well this guy seems like a bumpkin or it's like well yeah maybe but I mean that you've got to put yourself in in the you know in the minds of viewers in that culture and in that epoch but yeah you're absolutely right

but Hess also it's you know like we talked about before the distinction between the party and the state and the Third Reich it became blurred particularly as regards the police apparatus quite literally but that's its own issue but this wasn't a contrivance like in the Soviet Union or like later in like the German Democratic Republic like the National Zosso's party really was an entity into itself and the German state was an entity unto itself that had centuries of precedent behind it you know and the National Socialist Party was elected. You know, it wasn't, it didn't, it didn't take power by, by way of a violent revolution, and it didn't insinuate itself into an executive role, you know, after, in some kind of, in some kind of crisis situation of, you know, of a failed state, you know, like the War of Three Kingdoms or something, centuries before in the UK, or arguably like Napoleon did. So, I mean, you, when, this distinct, this distinction between, you know, what was within the party's authority and domain and what was, you know, exclusively, you know, under the authority of the state, this wasn't some kind of fiction, like in the Soviet Union, you know, so that's important to consider, okay? But at the same time, as, as the Second World War got underway, has his role in the war really was rather minimal. and this kind of irritated the ever ambitious Martin Borman, you know, as we talked about, Borman was literally Hesse's successor, even though Hester's office was done away with

after his ill-fated flight. But Borman was the number two man at the chancellery, and he, you know, he got, he got Hesse's job, you know, after the, you know, Hesse's, you know, Hesse's, you know, has his, uh, he's, he's flight when he became literally unpersoned, among other things. But, you know, Borman became incredibly powerful within the apparatus of government. And in an indirect way, Borman had a lot of ability to impact the war. We'll get into that on another episode where it seems more proper. But as of 1941, 1940, 1941, you know, it has felt increasingly,

shut out. I don't think that was entirely deliberate. I mean, like we talked about, has his character was not like that at Gerbils, nor was it like that of Gering. It certainly was not like that of Himmler. There wasn't at, despite the fact that, you know, the man was a decorated combat veteran and he had been a street fighter in the days of struggle. He was not a particularly ruthless man, and he, you know, like we talked about, too, it was credit, in my opinion. He was very much possessed of a middle-class morality. And no matter what regime you serve, you know, the, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, when, the, the, the, the war arrives, the, the, the, the war cabinet around the executive, you know, de facto and de jure, it becomes, it becomes a, it becomes a, it becomes a very, very close fraternity. and who is included and who is included and who is excluded from that cadre that

that doesn't necessarily owe to how one is perceived by his fellows in terms of whether he's well-liked or not. I mean, a lot of it owes to what's perceived about his character and just kind of instinctive ways people respond to others when crises kind of force the recognition. of very formal hierarchies but uh it be as it may uh you know hess was close to adolf hitler and he remained close to the center of power so he was in a position to discern the trajectory of policy in a basic way and detroit and he was better he was better situated probably than anybody save um uh yeah probably probably than anybody at this time, save maybe the OKW, to divinate, like, what Hitler's intentions were. But Hitler was notoriously canny in revealing his actual intentions.

And I think some of that was purposeful. But other times, I think it just owed to his basic nature. It's possible to be taciturn with one's emotions in a way that is instinctive, if that makes any sense. but the uh it uh has clearly wanted to take a more active role uh at first uh he tried to convince uh the furor to give him permission to fly uh sorties with the luf off as a fighter pilot which hydric later uh pulled off on the eastern front and after getting shot down finally finally hitler said we're not you know we're not going to we're not going to allow men in these executive roles to go on these combat larks of this nature. So that didn't get that opportunity, but as the war dragged on and Britain wouldn't come to terms,

this came to the forefront of Hess's mind. Like he no longer was possessed of that kind of patriotic fervory, his own correspondence, particularly with the Haushoeffers, with Carl and increasingly with the son, Albrecht, which we'll get into in a moment, because that's very significant to discerning the motives for Hez's flight. You know, the United Kingdom was really all that was on his mind.

Now, keep in mind, that's not because Germany was in some perilous military position at all. Germany was very much winning the war. throughout 1940. German troops had occupied Scandinavia to forestall Churchill's own plans to assault there, which would have been in gross violation of, you know,

of Norwegian sovereignty and that at Denmark. But, you know, it's, as usual, like, whenever Churchill does something, it's okay. It's when everybody else does it, that it's, you know, some sort of slight against against the laws of God and man. But, you know, this was after Dunkirk, where, you know, the British Expeditionary Force had been chased off the continent. The battle in Narvik,

there was a series of pitched battles in 1940 there. And that was actually, that's actually Erhard Milch that's he was awarded the Knights Cross owing to his command of

uh owing to his command of the Luftwaffe there and that that's when he was also promoted to field marshal so it's significant for a lot of reasons but my point is that Germany had tremendous momentum in in military terms okay um

so Hess's concern was not as someone suggested that you know he viewed the furor of some madman who was leading Germany to ruin. Like, it's not what was on his mind at all. What was on his mind was, uh, he viewed, uh, has talked entirely seriously as we talked about

what Hitler described in mind confit as, is, uh, not just, you know, has, has was obsessed with geopolitics and this owed a lot to his affinity for the house offers, which was reciprocal. But also, uh, has viewed, uh, has viewed, uh, uh, uh,

you know, coming to terms with the UK to be essential in historical terms and apocal terms. In his words, you know, it would be suicide for the white race for the UK and Germany to make war with one another. But Hess also, I think owing in part to his worldliness, because, you know, as we talked about, he was raised in Egypt.

He had a, um, despite his kind of earnest naivete, when it comes to, you know, it's kind of hero worship of Adolf Hitler and other things. I think he had a better sense of geostrategic realities than a lot of men of his generation, frankly. You know, he was an aviator, and that that that that affords people unique conceptual horizon, particularly in those days, has to realize that, you know, even if everything continued to go, you know, even if the gods continue to, proverbially speaking, continue to favor Germany on the battlefield.

Having the UK refused to come to terms could lead to a catastrophe. But more than that, I believe that it has thought that Sea Lion would become a reality. Now, I don't want to go do about a field, but what was Seelion? Operation C. Lion was a series of steps and fewer orders relating to relating to order of battle and deployment that indicated a battle plan to invade the United Kingdom okay I believe and I'll get into why I believe this

here you know shortly but also in later episodes I believe this was a strategic ruse when it became which was undertaken by Hitler when it became clear that the Soviet Union was indeed had every intention to to assault Germany at the earliest opportunity and

when Hitler decided that he was going to offset that that threat by striking the Soviet Union first before it's before it before it could adjust its own its own deployment to

defend in depth. But Hitler very much, other than a handful of admirals and and field marshals, Hitler

maintained this illusion. And I don't think Hess was privy to the fact that this was, in fact, a strategic ruse. So, Hess, putting yourself in the mind of Hess in 1940 into 41, Hess believed that at some point, Operation C-Lion was going to be ordered, and there's going to be an invasion of England, and this would be a bloodbath.

I don't think, and it's kind of outside of my wheelhouse, and I also don't want to get into some heavy counterfactual discussion in military matters on this episode, but I think C-Lion would have been impossible, okay, for a lot of reasons, including the fact that if you're going to invade the United Kingdom in 1940 or 41, you've got to sink the Royal Navy. And then you've probably got to land at least 60,000 men ashore in order to establish, you know, a meaningful, a meaningful foothold, you know, and to hold it until you can reinforce in inadequate numbers

to affect a real occupation. I mean, I do not think it was possible, but that's not the point. Had it been implemented, that definitely would have been a bloodbath. And that sea line itself could have proved catastrophic, had it been attempted. But

that's something to keep in mind, or turn it in a minute. And again, forgive me for being a bit scattershot. but um it was uh it was uh in uh in in in in in in in dune 1940 uh hitler was um dining with hess and uh this was just before the french campaign um began or uh it yeah this was in may rather forgive me this is for the french campaign has a ass hitler over lunch uh do you still hold england in the in the same esteem you used to do you still think that we can come to peace, come to terms with them. You know, can we

find a basis for peace with the UK? You know, and Hitler said, you know, absolutely, but, you know, that depends on what man is in, it is, that depends on what man is in office. You know, and if it's a man like

Mr. Churchill, there's a man like Van to Sart, like that will not be possible. Okay. And as we know, it has basically took what the furor said is gospel. not just on its own terms that, you know, everything Hitler said to him when in response to a really direct question, you know, has took it at face value and is entirely sincere, but, you know, he believed it to be as good as, you know, a statement of policy. This seems like a throwaway kind of conversation, but it has mentioned it to Chris De Schroeder, like the first week in June, which she wrote in her own diary. you know, about

Hess's grave concern over the, you know, the future of of diplomatic potential with the UK. And I mean, it, it alarmed her, you know, she thought was remarkable enough to take note of it. I believe this is the moment at which kind of the seed was planted in Hess's mind, okay?

As we get more into the character of the man, and this comes out ultimately at his trial, so I don't want to get too ahead of ourselves. But these things are important. in reconstruct reconstructing the motives of people in a central role

and under their decision making. These kinds of subtle perceptions in the case a man like Hess tell us a lot of things. It has noted another time to the Haushofer's this was around the same time around June 940.

Has having having, you know, has to have come from the the Egyptian British protectorate. His parents had been dispossessed of their property with the

concept of with the conclusion of the Great War and then further with the onset of a stillies in 1939 you know, the remaining assets they had that had been protected. were seized.

So this is obviously a sore spot for, it has, and it has said, it has put it to Hitler, you know, are you going to demand that the, that the crown returned to us,

everything that it took from us? You know, and is this going to be an obstacle to peace? And, uh, Hitler said, very candidly, you don't impose,

you don't impose harsh conditions on a country you want to win around to your side. And I mean, that kind of further, you know, that entire line of questioning, I believe, was Hatch,

tease out what was the what was in the mind of his furor you know and a it's not it's not a some kind of teutonic caricature to say that you know has really did view what the furor said is gospel um that is true I uh

I uh I I think it's misplaced the way people again try and kind of caricature German culture as being this kind of mightlessly authoritarian almost despotic in the Oriental sense, you know,

militaristic sort of of, you know, social order where, you know, adherence and superior order is kind of stands in for judgment at all times. But I think it's a Hess, there really was, you know, that's not caricature. And his

reasons for those sympathies and tendencies, I think, are more personal and cultural, but I just want to clarify that for people who might, misread why I consider that important. July

1940, July August, 9040 was a critical period. The reasons why, I mean, it was critical just, you know,

for, it was critical for a relationship between London and Berlin and the possibility for any kind of peace. It was critical in Hess's decision-making. And it was critical

in what ultimately developed in what ultimately did develop and what didn't develop in terms of the progress of the war. On July 19th, Hitler issued one of his last direct speeches to the Reichstag. After 1941,

he didn't directly address the Reichstag again. And, of course, the 1941 speech was the Declaration of War against the United States. The July 19th, 1940 speech, Hitler declared it, quote, the last appeal to reason. Now, something that's little known because it's deliberately redacted,

and when you pose a question to court historians about the matter, they tend to employ weasel words, or they tend to they tend to proffer any number of answers that don't really address the question. Upon the onset of hostilities, formal hostilities,

after the UK declared war, on Germany, you know, in concert with France in 1939, Hitler absolutely prohibited the bombing of London. It was an absolute embargo. Even when the, even if, because at that point it hadn't happened yet, the REF targeted civilian centers in Germany, Hitler forbade any targeting of civilian centers. In the United Kingdom, in retaliation, including London.

this presented a problem for Mr. Churchill for a few reasons. As we talked about a moment ago, summer 1940, the UK was actively losing the Second World War. You know, and the, the, um,

what had happened, uh, what had happened in Scandinavia, and particularly the final, the reversal at Narvick, that made a hero of, of Earhart and Milch, among other things. You know, Churchill was, looking, Churchill was beginning

to look like a fool, like in military terms, you know, because he, the focus had catapulted him into office obviously, but Churchill had been banging the war drums, you know, on two grounds. You know, first of all, this inflated, these inflated figures and claims

about the forces in being of the German Reich, you know, claims about their capabilities and intentions, but also he was declaring incessantly that, you know, the UK could, you know, wage this, the UK and, you know, could wage

with its expeditionary forces, you know, and with the support of the Royal Navy, you know, that they could fight and win on the continent. I mean, that's otherwise, you know, he would not have gotten the war mandate that he got. And Churchill was suffering defeat after defeat after defeat.

You know, it, so he had a real problem here. You know, not just that, you know, he was looking, he'd be, you know, moving forward, he was, he was, he was looking at a no confidence vote. But also, I mean, frankly, it wouldn't have even had to come to that if it was entire, if his entire foreign policy and war cabinet, you know, basically, you know, as a policy

coup decided to, like, sue for peace, you know, which in the, which in the English system is very possible, you know, in a way that it's not in the United States. Even if, even a guy like Churchill, who's got a lot of, he's got a lot of, he's got a lot of, he's got a lot of international money behind him and a lot of intrigues that put him there. This was a very real possibility. So, Churchill basically, and this should really discuss people, but Churchill basically decided from then on he was going to find a way to provoke Germany into assaulting London. I mean, that'd basically be like a guy, that basically be like if George W. Bush had tried to

had sought out a way to make 9-11 happen instead of he got a war mandate. like he didn't do that. I don't want 9-11 truthers to jump all over the comments. But like imagine like if he did that. You know, and like that Churchill literally conspired, set about as a matter of policy to find a way to provoke an attack on London or undoubtedly, you know,

hundreds of not thousands of people would die, you know, in the initial salvo. Because that's just the kind of guy Piggy Churchill was. But the July 20th, the day after Hitler's addressed the Reichstag Churchill ordered plans

to Bomber Command for the mass bombing of Berlin City Center with all available forces. Now mind you, four engine bombers, you know, the Lancaster of which it was you know, that was kind of the UK's equivalent of the super

fortress type aircraft. The other one, they get like devastating hurt on the target area. They hadn't been fielded yet. And stuff like the Avro, Manchester, which was the two-engine heavy bomber, those didn't fly until November, but the aircraft that were available, like the Vickers-Wellington, they were very, very effective in what we consider to be countervalue targeting. Okay, they could basically

wreck a target area very, very effectively. And so I'm going to keep in mind, too, and again, forgive me if I'm being too scattered shot on this episode, but this is important. You know, one of the big reasons, uh, one of the, the key reason why the battle of Britain failed. If in fact, uh, its purpose was to bring the UK to terms, uh, I don't think that Hitler had in mind that that was possible.

I think the decision was political. I think some, I think Gering's boast and, and Gering's declarations of what was operationally feasible. that definitely had an impact in his decision making. He had an inflated sense Hitler did of the effectiveness

of a of Gehring's operational plans but the Lufa did not have a strategic capability it was a tactical fighting force. It was a ground assault force to be utilized

in you know as a combined arms element you know the it tells you something that from that from from the outset you know from the moment that

uh you know from the moment that uh the uh the uh for the moment that uh the war party as it were you know before mr church always even insinuated into office you know

and the focus was uh was uh was merely one of many albeit you know a very powerful one but one of many kind of lobbying concerns the research and development of a British war industry was very very oriented towards developing a strategic bombing capability um and that uh i think that that's relevant particularly when we get into the uh particularly when we get into the uh the charging instrument um at nuremberg and uh this isn't just something that i it kind of pulled out of the record in order to

you know, a whole wave around as some kind of a rebuttal point. Bomber Harris made that point himself, as did Curtis LeMay

in a very different way. But, you know, if the, as it's cast, you know, in court history, you know, if the Germans were these people

who, you know, the claim is that, you know, the Germans terror bound, Rotterdam, which is ridiculous. for a lot of reasons. You know, and this claim is that, you know, the, you know, the Germans just spontaneously assaulted London for no reason.

And they did so because they had this, like, mighty air force that was tailored basically to, you know, to terrorize civilian populations, you know, with countervalue assault. That's really, really at odds with facts. And, frankly, the, I mean, over, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll bring it back to the topic in a minute, but over the entire battle of Britain, I think something like 55,000 people perished, like civilian casualties in the UK. Now, I'm not going to be, I'm not being flippant or crass, you know, because that's a tremendous loss of life in absolute terms.

but uh there was the at when the allies started hitting hamburg and dresden they were they were killing 50,000 people in one day you know and the over Tokyo uh over Tokyo over Tokyo over 100,000 people were burned to death in 26 or 28 hours okay like over months you know the kind of attrition of luf off achieved that's nothing that's pathetic you know I mean that that's uh that's uh that's uh proof positive of the fact of, you know, lacking a strategic capability at all. And the, interestingly,

at least I think so, I mean, if the, when a luf of a four-engine bomber finally was developed, it really didn't have an impact. And it was, the reason it was designed, it was to strike industrial targets beyond the Earls,

which had been beyond range. of extant aircraft. It wasn't even designed for a proper strategic bombing role, as we would think of it. And then it wasn't fielded in inadequate numbers to have made a difference anyway.

But I think that that is important. That August 2nd has rekindled his his his close dealings

with Albert Househofer. I mean, they'd always been close, they remained close. But Albert Haushoffer, Ed,

becomes something of an important personage. I mean, he was relegated mostly to academics postings. I mean,

these are prestige academic postings. But, you know, he didn't have any official political roles. I mean, for some,

the reasons, for some of those reasons are obvious. others are not so obvious, but Albert Telshoffer was traveling all over the place, and he was making all kinds of connections with various diplomatic

representatives. You know, actual ambassadors representing the United States, the United Kingdom, and people who were acting as unofficial couriers. And he was spending a particular a lot of time in Sweden. Sweden was one of nine neutral

states during the war, if case people didn't know but we'll come in a moment we'll come back to like who exactly these people were that albrecht had been making contact with but he was out of the country a lot of the time okay and Hess obviously you know despite the fact as we talked about you know Hess's responsibilities uh and in some ways uh you know it had been lessened uh by the onset of of of war, he nonetheless still had a very busy schedule of, you know, formal responsibilities to the party. Now,

Hess is basically what it became clear from his conversation with the House offer, in my opinion, is that at the top of his mind was the concern that C-line was going to become a reality. howshelhofer said what howshelhofer relayed to his father

was that has said you know although Hitler was low the force a showdown with Britain you know Hitler will will try to destroy the UK if his hand is forced

you know I mean what would he be describing other than sea lion okay and Hess he said he he appealed to howshoffer you know who were the who were the who were the men in British society of vision with whom we can talk

you know who you know even those who aren't you know who who are not you know apologists for the for our regime and and even those who you know are still kind of smarting from what they feel as

you know the humiliation of Munich you know like who who are the men who be receptive at least you know some some you know some kind of peace to prevent this bloodbath and sea lion okay um now

how Schauffer's response is very interesting and to me David Irving has an not particularly charitable view of a houseoffer my view of him is a bit more so how Schoffer said that the problem with the British government is that it's not one of principles

it's one of it's not one of persons it's one of principles okay he said howsharver told asked that the British, you know, your average British lord or your average your average foreign office

type, he viewed anything, anything, any promise Hitler gave is not what the paper it's written on. And it's kind of, and it's kind of, in kind of his earnest you know, simplicity at the way he looked at,

at power political affairs, has couldn't seem to get his mind around this. Okay. He pointed out, he's like, but, you know, the, you know, we, we acted in good faith in Munich, you know, it was Benes who created a, who created a crisis, you know, through what amount of due disinformation. And how to offer said, no, I realize that, but this is the way it's being presented, you know, these are the, these are the conceptual prejudices of, you know, of men in government in, in, in, in Anglophone societies. You know, he said, you know, he said the Americans will back them up on this

even though there's a you know the there's a there's a less hardened view in the eyes of the man in the street in America than in the UK of Germany and Germans and particularly the Hitler regime you know he said

you know how it's you know how it's offer he kept coming back to this point that it's you know it's not it's not a question of of addressing the right man you know and I mean I think that that that kind of that kind of fixation with moral

uh with moral platitude is a very English thing. Okay, I'm not just saying that to be punitive. I'm saying that there's something, there's something profound in cultural terms about this sort of lack of shared premises vis-a-vis what Hess was trying to convey to Haushofer about, you know, what he believed would facilitate coming to terms, and Haushofer is trying to explain to him in

that uh these uh these uh whether you know even if it's even if we view it as mere moral can't uh the uh this is what this is basically like what makes you know this is the stuff that fuels uh english political culture and why that is it's complicated um i've got my own view on that i think it owes to the experience of the war three kingdoms and a lot of other things but uh basically howshoffer was telling him without telling him the dye is cast and the only way the only way Germany wins this war

is with a battlefield victory and yeah I'm the first person to make the point that you know political problems can't be solved by military measures generally but a stunning overwhelming battlefield victory does settle questions

within certain paradigms in very absolute terms and that this was one of those cases. Now, of course, of course, C-Lion was never going to become a reality, and even were that the intention, which it wasn't, I don't believe it was possible again. But, you know, as we talked about some episodes back,

a victory over Moscow in 1941, that would have been that required victory, and that would have settled the war, because it would have nullified anything the UK could possibly do. Houshofer in Irving's mind was basically a fifth columnist and was basically, you know, trying to play both sides of the coin, was trying to, you know, acting as something of a disinformation agent to,

because, you know, he was trying to feed Hess, you know, kind of defeatist uh accounts of uh you know both the uh the possibility of uh of coming to terms with uh with London as well as uh you know trying to disabuse hast of any notion that you know there's that that a military victory was possible i don't believe that to be the

case uh i i think howshoffer was what he appeared to be and uh i'll i'll explain why as we get more uh get deeper into these into the circumstances that characterized a house offer's secret diplomacy. As the Battle of

Britain dragged on, it wasn't until the 25th of August that Hitler lifted all all restriction on

bombing London and any other civilian targets Churchill knew that by the way, of this prohibition because the Luthlophan command codes had been deciphered and it

it was well it was known basically from the outside of hostilities that there was this prohibition that emerged from the furor himself and so there came be no doubt that it was absolutely Churchill's ambition to provoke, provoke retaliation. The R.E.F. that night had changed the picture dramatically,

25th of August, with a mass assault on Berlin. Hitler then ordered the planning of the bombing of London, but he did not yet give the order. the order was issued on the night of the 28th and the 29th. That was a second REF mass assault on Berlin. The people were outraged. Hitler, Garing told him and Hitler didn't even need convincing at that point, you know, that we're going to lose our mandate if we don't act now. And I believe that's exactly what had happened.

Hitler left Eagle's Nest over Salzburg the following afternoon. He went to Berlin. And he stayed there because he wasn't going to hide out when Berlin was under siege. From the air, unlike Churchill, who would run to his country estate upon the detection of an incoming German assault aircraft, just putting that out there. He, General Thomas of the Vermont, Georg Thomas, High Command. he recorded in his war journal you know that's basically the day is finally here

you know the public mood is of outrage the fear himself is indignant in the way I've never seen him you know the raid the planning for you know massive retaliation on London is is underway and uh Thomas

his war journal was full of task to turn minutia the fact that he documented this and he tells you kind of the gravity of it I mean at least in my opinion I mean it goes about saying, but it, um, it, uh, it, uh, it, uh, the, uh, Hitler is still, uh, and, this is a, in common with, uh, you know, Hess's kind of, uh, in common with Hess's, uh, sort of misunderstanding of the enemy's political culture, uh, Hitler was, uh, he was constantly talking, uh,

about, you know, he had the Avever, which was largely useless in terms of, I mean, ultimately, it's Canaris, who was the head of, you know, foreign intelligence with the Advert was, I mean, ultimately was revealed to be a fifth columnist. But the Abbear got a lot of good intelligence out of the UK, for whatever reason. I've got my own thoughts on that. There's a lot of foreign baby men who joined the Abbear, and there was a... there was a there's a kind of common lingua franca in diplomatic terms between admiralty but you know at least in those days um Hitler's a refusal to authorize the uh you know attacks on London until it became

absolutely it became absolutely uh you know necessary he uh he kept on mentioning uh I'm mentioning Lord Lothian, who was the British ambassador to the United States and Washington, he served as a private secretary of Lloyd George, and he was unfriendly in terms of Ramsey McDonald. You know, Hitler claimed that, you know, he had info that, you know, he was willing to, you know, make peace overtures if he could, you know, build a quorum within his own, you know, within his own, you know, within his own, um, within his own circles,

you know, and that, that would have been, that, those would have been the men to approach if such thing was going to be possible. You know, McDonald,

uh, anybody who'd been close to McDonald, which, uh, Lothian wasn't particularly close to him, but he, he had amical enough relations with him to, you know,

be, uh, McDonald had gone out of his way to afford him a role in government. Um, he really came to his own under Lloyd George, but these guys who were decidedly outside of the focus and outside of Churchill's kind of orbit. You know, this would have been the kind of coterie to approach.

Lord Halifax, who is undersecretary at the Foreign Office, he'd been a long-time critic of the war party. And he named the focus and all but, I mean, it's, he discussed the focus and all but name as, you know, as being a party of war mongers and basically, you know, foreign elements they're intriguing against the national interest. This is a, so Hitler's notion in part was that, you know, if we blitz London, that's going to kill any potential of,

of capitalizing on this diplomatic potential. And again, that makes sense in a certain way. but it goes to show you, I mean, Hitler was quite a bit more worldly on these matters than Hess, but again, there's that kind of, that kind of lack of understanding of kind of anglophone society, as opposed to kind of, you know, teutonic governance and way of diplomacy and everything else.

It would have, the only way in, like, the only way, the only way peace would have been achieved is if Churchill was out of office. You know, the way to achieve peace wouldn't have been to remove Churchill from office by developing a quorum against him because that would not have been possible. I guess that's what I'm getting at. But it's interesting. The, and the fact that, I mean, Hitler was more, he was more wise to the kind of internal dynamics,

both of the United States and of the U.K. that he's credited with. I made that point of people before. I mean, that's why I've written some long for him on the fact of significant Hitler identified Roosevelt as his nemesis, you know, not Churchill,

not Stalin. And that owes the fact that, you know, the animus between the United States and Germany was a matter of pure ideology. So, but I digress. In any event,

while this was going on, Hitler, he'd gone as far as to renew, there's a Berlin lawyer named Ludwig a vice-houseer. And Hitler did not trust the foreign ministry, his own foreign ministry, I mean.

Von Ribbentrop, the sentencing didn't really mitigate that. Hitler trusted Von Ribbenstrap. even if they didn't always see eye-to-eye on geostrategic questions but the foreign ministry uh it was it was shot through with uh with um with with with with with with with hendonberg appointees and you know people uh who are really really rigid in their thinking it was kind of repository of of of old aristocrats you know who who look down to the national socialist party just you know as a as a as a kind of matter of as a as a

kind of as a matter of what they thought was correct social graces but also uh you know it's hard to it's it's difficult to emphasize and i mean henry kisinger of all people made this point and i know that people get upset when i cite kisinger because he's somebody that a lot of people like a burn an effigy apparently but his observations on uh diplomatic cultures and various states uh is fascinating and there was a real to the foreign offices, particularly these continental powers,

that even, you don't have to like Hitler, like the National Socialists or the Third Reich, to imagine that, you know, whoever was at the helm, unless, you know, unless he was, uh, unless he was, you know,

like I said, like, unless he was Hindenburg himself or some, or somebody comparable, we'd been, you know, whose patronage had insinuated the men in control. of the diplomatic corps to whom they owed their position it would be really kind of impossible

to trust that they were adding in good faith, you know, and Hitler deployed a vice officer to Stockholm, and again, Sweden, owing to its strategic situation, but also the fact that it was a neutral country.

There was a lot of diplomatic intriguing going on there by all combatant states. He directed vice officer to who was a contact

who's the UK Malad apparently and I've never Malit was known to be interested in at least creating some kind of avenue to peace with Germany,

you have an unconditional sort. I'm sure he wasn't under any illusion that, again, like, you know, even if he developed a quorum against the war party, that Churchill could somehow just be, you know, unceremoniously removed from office. But it's not an accident by vice officer contacted him. You know, and vice officer was deployed, no less, by Hitler himself, to do so. So I speculate, and this is totally unfound.

founded, Edward the 8th was the guy who would have made this happen. And Edward had been, had advocated back in 1936. But, and he, he ended up somewhere in the Caribbean, I think, and some kind of sinecure role after he married Wallace Simpson, Wallace Simpson. But, uh, I've thought about this a lot and I don't see who else could have, I mean, who would have had, like, who would have had the cloud and kind of the contacts, you know, to get in touch with somebody like mail it and then conveyed a Hitler, you know, Hillary's not

exactly easy to get an audience with, okay? I mean, so I, I speculate strong that Edward the 8th was behind some of the secret diplomacy in terms of arranging, you know, making these meetings possible, okay, but again, I can't, I cannot prove that, and I've never seen any evidence

that effect, but it's just by process of elimination, I don't, I don't see who else he would have been going through, okay, um, to be making, making these things happen, but at any event, And what vice officer, and this was the German position, what he relayed to Mallet is that Germany would withdraw all forces from France, all forces in the low country, it would only retain

those territories in Poland and Czechoslovakia, you know, which had been, you know, which had been Germany's before the Versailles treaty dismantled, be copled done. and Germany would assist the British Empire against all enemies, including Japan. And that was it. I mean, that's an unconditional peace offer. He mailed it. He sent, he relayed the telegram to London. He didn't identify what his conduct was, but, you know, he was a man.

who had enough authority that you know he if he said that this was you know an official an official offer I mean it would be taken as such and the fact that he contacted London in the first place and the fact that he phrased it as he did

I mean it was clear that he deduced that this was an offer coming from Adolf Hitler and London just unconditionally said no you know like it wasn't even it wasn't even taken to a it wasn't even taken to downing street you know and i mean how like like that's inconceivable i mean even if you have no intention of i mean it just goes to show you that like the the the focus uh i mean if it's not clear by now um and it's not clear to anybody who reads the the the you know the who goes

over the evidence with an eye for you know any kind of discrete detail that you know the you know the entire focus position its only policy position was war at all costs. I mean, you know,

and that's not, um, that's not, uh, that's not, that's not, that, that's never a legitimate course unless,

uh, unless, uh, you know, unless you know, unless you're truly engaged in, uh, in a,

in a, in a, in a kind of, uh, uh, belt and chongs creed that is, you know, it's been,

it's been decoupled from any, from any kind of any kind of reasoned geostrategic imperative. Now, later, as summer 940 game to a close,

Albrecht Albrecht Arreve back in Bavaria. And again, like Albrecht, he claimed to be attending to business interests, you know, when he was, you know, doing this globe-trotting.

But he and, Ian Hess met in Vienna, which is, which is, it's interesting too. Not just interesting, but I think it's significant. Then it became rare and rare for the househoppers and has to meet in Germany proper. And when they did, it was

almost always in Munich or thereabouts, never Berlin. But on on September 3rd, Carl Housh offered typed a letter to his son who he'd known had been, you know, back in

close conduct with Hess. And he he stated, as you know, quote, everything is set for a very harsh assault in the aisles in question. So all the top man has to do is press the button.

and reading within the lines, it's this, this validates what I suggested when we began this episode. Hesse was absolutely convinced that sea lion was going to become a reality.

He conveyed this to he conveyed this to Albert Taushofer, who conveyed this to his father and both of them found that to be credible. And that also adds another layer and

we won't have time to get into it in this episode and uh forgive me because i realize i'm throwing a lot of tangential data out there but i think it's important and essential to understanding the Hess issue in any complete way but so i mean keep this in mind uh as we do get into that though like not only not only was Hess acting in good faith and the defector but arguably hess was trying to spare English lives as much as he was German ones. I mean, he believed sea lion was going to be implemented.

Carl Howesdor continued his letter, and this is key as well, wouldn't you say, he was speaking, still speaking in obviously this kind of cryptic language of amateur espionage, quote, wouldn't you say that there's a way of overtaking

such possibilities of the middleman on neutral ground, perhaps with the old general Ian Hamilton, or quote that other Hamilton, meaning Lord Clydesdale, who was the Duke of Hamilton, and we talked about last time, was ultimately Hess's intended point of contact

and who was, you know, a close friend of Albrecht. So, this is all coming together, okay, as to why Hess was doing, like, what was in his mind, why he selected Scotland as its target area,

why he was even, why the, you know, why Clydesdale, the Duke of Hamilton, was even within his contemplation, why he considered it essential, why he considered essential to, you know, to act as soon as possible, before, you know, C-Lion became a, a reality

and bear in mind too that you know like we talked about because because Hess obviously did not know as almost nobody did it was only a handful of general officers and admirals who kind of by

nuance Hitler disclosed to them that sea lion was a strategic ruse but you know Hess he's believing that you know he would have been

he would have been has would have been privy to forces in being in some basic way, even though he was not sitting in on OKW briefings or anything like that. You know, and looking around him, he would have been, he would have seen, you know, the, all indications of mobilization towards, you know, an assault across the English channel. And it becomes clearer and clearer,

the more one dives into it. And I don't see how anybody can claim. We take informational awareness for granted today in a lot of ways. But even today, people really are kind of quarantined in their own areas of responsibility. And, you know, particularly, you know, Hess didn't have, I mean, Hess, he was respected. You know, he was a war hero, but Hess didn't have a, Hess wasn't, has didn't have a military rank at that time. He was, there's not any reason why he would have been privy to these things unless he had, you know, a source within, within the Kriegs Marine or within the Vermeck, who for some reason decided to decide to disclose to him the nature was actually underway. But I don't think anybody disclosed that.

Like I said, I believe those who came, I'm even speculating that, I believe Eric Rader, and I believe Yodel and I believe a few others were privy to this, like I said, only to kind of, you know, discerting the nuance and what the furor told them and by having a kind of complete operational picture. I don't think anybody stated, this is strategic ruse. I don't think there was some, like, you know, I don't think there was, you know, some document, eyes only document laying it all out or anything like that. So it doesn't, it doesn't.

doesn't cast as a fool for uh for thinking that quite the contrary um september 4th 1940 uh that's when hitler addressed 10 000 berliners at the sports palace the sports palest um as people might know uh in nineteen 43 that's where uh that's where gerbils gave the total war speech uh which is ominous because uh on september or fourth, Germany having suffered more British raids and Hitler having finally, you know, given the order to

retaliate, this is where he addressed Berliners and he said, if, you know, they proclaim the the little attack our cities, you know, we will, we shall wipe their cities out. You know, it, it, I mean, this was a real,

this wasn't just Hitler, this wasn't just Hitler bluster and anger. I mean, that was part of it, but there and there's like a genuine sorrow here. Like there's no, there was absolutely no, there's absolutely no reason for, uh, for the, uh, for the, for the British war against the Reich to continue.

You know, I mean, and the, like I said, I'm convinced that, uh, as, um, as, uh, as, uh, you know, in centuries subsequent to now, I mean, it, it, uh, it'll be viewed as a rare instance, uh, the UK, I mean, and the, uh, the, the Churchill regime. it'll be it'll be understood the rare instance of a of a of a of a of a of a state taking leave of reason and waging war against like quite literally against the national and material interest it you know it's it's a rare case of uh of um of not even uh of not even being you know considered uh in any way uh justifiable even in terms of the bounded rationality of of of then uh extent conditions but uh i believe that uh this is when has decided to take his flight um end of of august into september um this that same week's number seventh uh the luf off several

hundred lufuf off a tag aircraft bomb the port of london and assaulted the east end and uh lit up the night sky uh you know it's the east end uh you know it's the east end was burning and this this changed everything there was it's it uh you know that coupled with you know his discussions with the house offers um and his you know this disclosures therein and uh and vice versa i i believe this is the moment of which it occurred uh you only tell me that's speculative but i mean it uh based on uh the record as uh what's available and it has his case uh there's there's quite a voluminous amount of direct testimony not just from him

and his correspondences, but from these other parties to these intrigues, like the house offers, I don't think, I don't think, I don't think I'm reaching. But again, forgive me if this was kind of scattershot, man. Like I, I had to kind of fit this all in. and otherwise some of the things that emerged later, I'm going to have a context.

So I hope I didn't bore anybody or anything like that. What do you think the next episode? What are we looking at? We got to deal with Hess's flight, the first half, and the second half. I want to begin the Nuremberg charging instrument and how it was decided who would be charged and named on that indictment.

And the fate of Hess played very prominently in it. So I think it's kind of a natural, like, segue, if that makes sense into that. Because it was not a foregone conclusion that Hess was going to be charged with anything. I mean, what do you do with prisoners of war after the war? Don't you send them home? I mean, and Hess wasn't even a POW in any

in any traditionally understood sense. I mean, he came to them. I mean, he was a defector, if anything. But, yeah, that's, Hess's his flight, his capture and the charging of the nerve indictment will return to Justice Jackson and

the American delegation and how they decided who would be charged. That plays into Samuel Untermeyer and some of these characters of the focus who are based in the United States, you know, primarily New York City but not exclusively.

They reemerge in terms of their contacts with the American delegation in Nuremberg. And wielding quite a bit of undue influence in terms of what conduct would be brought under the penumbra of you know the charging instrument and stuff like that so that that's uh that's what I'd like to cover okay give your plugs please

okay you can find me at uh on sub stack that's where our podcast is as well as various long form essays all in sundry uh it's real Thomas 777. com. You can find us on T-Gram.

We've got a very active community there. It's T.m.m. slash the number 7-H-M-A-S-777. And I back up most of our stuff on Gab. I'm not real active there, but, you know, if you want to find these videos that Mr. Pete and I do here, or, you know, any of my podcast appearances and live streams and things, I generally put them up on Gab.

It's, you find me on Gab at Real Thomas 777. Until the next time. Thank you, Thomas. We're starting to come to the end, Thomas. How are you doing? And I want to reiterate, again, that I really, really appreciate you granting me the opportunity for this series, you know, not just for posterity, but to, you know, kind of raise awareness about revisionism and what it entails.

Can I say something before we start? Yeah. I recently listened to your stream with academic agent on the troubles. Okay. That was great, man. Thank you very much. That was great. I'll try and remember to put that in the show notes.

Anyone who wants to learn about what was happening in Ireland, especially in Northern Ireland, that was, especially having a lady show up there? Yeah, she's really great, man. She's pure class and just a really, really, really, intelligent, really gracious lady. And I mean, I, I, it's a, it's a sensitive issue. I mean, obviously, because I mean, those were horrible times. And, you know, I, I was, I was somewhat hesitant when I got to make age and asked me to speak on it because, you know, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not an Ulsterman and, you know, I'm very much an outsider.

I'm very interested in the subject area, but I didn't want anybody to feel disrespected or like the topic was being treated flippantly or somehow, somehow exploited for some, for some sort of, you know, political purpose or something. But so far, the feedback's been overwhelmingly positive. And yeah, I really appreciate that, man. And academic agent is a great, great guy and a great kind creator. And I'm always, I always appreciate him inviting me.

So, yeah, thank you for that endorsement. no problem at all so we're going to finish off we're going to finish off the story of rudolph hess today yeah i i want to do uh just uh as a kind of introductory statement you know i focused so many episodes on on the person of hess uh he's one of these people who you know i've i've referenced carlyle a lot and you know carlyle is a is was very impactful in my own thinking and still is you know and uh you know carlyle deals with you know heroic personages is is a is a primary they all this that's central to his theory of history okay and uh and historiography um but there's there's men who aren't conventionally heroic you know uh but who who who are very much

whoever much astride the zeitgeist of their epoch and are instrumental in the development of of seminal events they're in. And I consider it has to be one of those people. I mean, like I said, I wasn't just looking for some sort of, I wasn't just looking for some sort of snarky title when I said that Hess really was the, he was the real man in the high castle.

I mean, there's nothing funny about that. Like the fate of Hess was actually really horrible. and it's like something out of science fiction. It's totally bizarre. And so he does, his story is important beyond, you know, the man himself. Although I frankly, I think, I think there was an earnest, I think there's a kind of naive earnestness to Hess that's admirable, okay? I mean, nobody has to share my opinion on that. But he's, and he was, he was central to the intrigues in,

in terms of, you know, the efforts to find, to accomplish a peace with the UK, which obviously, Mr. Churchill on the focus, we're not going to allow to happen. But this was by, it's been very, has it been really slandered at some, it's some crazy, some crazy man, you know, consulting star charts who went on some suicide mission for no apparent reason because he's out of his mind. And this, It's not just a gross insult to Hess and his family, but it does violence to historical truth. Hess was anything but insane. and as we're going to dive more into or delve more into today, what motivated has to take his ill-fated flight in the first place

was the fact that there was fertile ground at, you know, and it was a really critical, not only was there a receptive, was there a potentially receptive audience among the British elite to find a way out of the war, but it was a truly critical juncture. I mean, these are the weeks immediately prior to Barbarossa, okay, so

Europe was on the brink. And that's got to be accounted for. And what was known by Churchill is again essential here, because as we'll get into shortly when we get to that point,

you know, it's another case of Churchill you know, a deceit, quite literally deceiving his countrymen and acting at odds kind of perfectly at odds with the national interest under auspices of falsehood okay so we'll with that we'll uh we'll we'll move on um what happened immediately before has his flight um in the uh in the in the early months of 1941 are essential uh Now, we talked before about how the Haushoeffers, you know, not just Hess's mentor, Carl, but Albrecht Haushoffer, you know, the son who, who, who has became just as close to, in many respects as to the father.

You know, he was very much, first of all, he was insinuated into the foreign ministry as we talked about. And the foreign ministry was quite independent within the Third Reich. and uh you know the uh ribbentrop replaced what was a basically hostile kind of a professional diplomatic class but ribandrop was not at all a yes man okay he classed with with the furor a great deal and he had his own he had his own geostrategic vision um that that was that was very much his own okay so uh how schoffer you know being half jewish and uh you know being very independently minded it makes sense that you know he would have uh he would have a very active role there okay um and that in and of itself uh kind of anecdotally defeats a lot of assumptions and slanders about the german

rike now of course albert taushofer didn't have any formal uh he didn't have any formal political office but you know academics wielded a lot of authority okay in uh in the german rike um as was the case, you know, throughout the continent, okay? And that's, that's somewhat alien to us here because in America, when we did have public intellectuals, they generally were, and it's not where we are, such that they still exist, or can be said to exist, you know, are people in the sciences and things, you know, and who are experts in, in, in, in, in things that, you know, okay, are, are related to apply technologies and things, okay, but, uh, and so how I was tall for the younger,

he was very much engaged as we got into last episode in secret diplomacy, you know, both on the continent and as well as, you know, making overtures, reciprocal overtures to people in the United Kingdom who wanted to bring an end to the war and who, you know, despite a lot of whom despite nominal loyalty to Churchill, you know, understood exactly what was underway, if not the extent of the conspiracy as regards to the focus, you know, they understood that was being presented about the inevitability of conflict with Germany and the justness of the, of the the war the necessity of it was not true okay so many many intrigues uh around uh around people in hesse's intimate circle okay um and as we talked about before you know hess's ultimate intended contact uh you know lord hamilton was uh was a close personal friend of albert houchap or that's why this man was on hesse's mind in the first place okay now interestingly um you know we talked about uh Edward Venice, you know, the last, the last president of Czechoslovakia. You know, and he was very much a client of the United Kingdom. Now, he was in exile, and he was in very close contact with British intelligence, particularly the SIS.

Now, what he recorded in his own private diaries was that SAS had relayed to him that they were, quote, expecting somebody in the form of a high-profile defector. You know, and what it's important not to read too much into these statements, especially if there's not like a context written into them. But, you know, obviously these people that Bennett was talking to at high levels in secret intelligence were. they were convinced that there was going to be some sort of, there was going to be some sort of emissary arriving. And either as a defector or as an unofficial peace emissary, you know, I mean, it's the only thing you can only be inferred from that. Like, did they know that that man would be hest?

Who knows? But, you know, this was something that the people within what we'd consider today, the deep state, they seem to be anticipating this, okay? and that's not uh this wasn't this wasn't wild speculation on their part i mean everything everything indicated uh everything indicated uh everything indicated uh that sort of development there was no objective strategic reason for the uk and germany unlike say france and germany i think france and germany france's declaration of war against germany was very ill-fated and it was considered it wasn't just splendidly at odds of the national interest okay as we've

As we got into quite extensively in the, you know, the series we did on Churchill earlier. You know, this really was not at all, in no way it could this be strategically rationalized. Okay. It was, it was very much a moral crusade that was based very much on dubious premises and ill-defined objectives, you know, that, you know, kind of just came back again and again to the moral cant and rhetoric, quite literally of Mr. Churchill. Now, what's a, I know a lot of our listeners probably and many, and there's actually a lot of revisionists, like, including David Irving, who I've got incredible esteem for, okay, but I part ways with him on some, on some issues. And one of those is, that's, has Irving, um, Irving's got a very conspiratorial view of the fear's knowledge of Hess's intent. Um, the, um, and he bases this on the fact that there was people very close to Hess including his adjutant and we'll get into that in a minute who upon Hess's flight

relayed that they believed that the fear was was feigning surprise and that he was not disclosing what he actually knew okay and people on Edwaffe Hitler's staff some of them relayed the same thing I don't accept that and I'll get into why I don't accept that shortly but um you know i uh i i i i i think it's essential to understand uh to understand has his motivations i mean the fear was in the dark about this as was essentially everybody except the househoeffers and

and um possibly billy messerschmitt although it's dubious we'll get into that in a minute and and like i said um it has his personal staff but uh the diaries of eldrick Albert Haushofer and some of the personal journals of his father, they were seized by the Allies in 1945 from the Haushofer estate, okay? Albert Haushofer, he was the primary link between Hess, Hitler, the various secret diplomacy intrigues within the UK establishment. So, I mean, this was fundamentally important stuff, okay? just not just for historical posterity but for putting together a picture of what in fact developed in in you know the the the months preceding may 941 now these diaries have simply never been seen again historians who sought them out including irving they were they were the department of the army

claim they have no idea what their ultimate hate was the national archives claim the same thing um as far as i understand it uh although i've never i've never presented a formal inquiry you know to like the wilson center or anything uh os s uh you know later cia they they claim that they don't have any knowledge of this whatsoever um it uh and similarly the duke of hamilton himself the air ministry the uk the uk air ministry maintained a file in the duke of hamilton and it'll become clear why this was so as we go on in a little bit. I don't want to jump ahead, but it's not important right now. What is important is that this file was maintained on him, okay, an intelligence file.

This has been entirely redacted, okay? This entire section is documenting the three months prior that has flight in the Hamelin file. They're simply absent from the file, and it's not redacted in the ordinary way. You know, there's not paper inserted in its stead indicating, you know, eyes only, national security imperative and anything like that. It's simply not there. And we only know of this file, it really came to light owing to the papers the Hamilton family itself.

Okay. And like what they disclosed around the time of Hess's death, as I understand it. So, I mean, this is all very strange, okay? Beyond mere, beyond the mere kind of, you know, clumsy sort of pointless secrecy that characterizes intelligence agencies. It does. Here give me a second.

I want to call up a citation. The, we made a lot of, we made a lot of the, or people make a lot of the fact that, you know, just owing to Hess's, owing to his behavior, it should have been pieced together, you know, what his intentions were. But, you know, people don't understand that Hess was insulated in a peculiar, way. He was not a member of the military. You know, he was, he was the top, you know, he was essentially the top party official, but, you know, and he had, he had very much a personal audience with Hitler when he wanted it, but, you know, his sphere of a formal authority, it, where really, where it really was most indicated was in his ability to, you know, make sure people like Albert Haushofer had no problems.

Okay. Or, you know, what we'll get into in a moment, you know, when he, when he approached Willie Messerschmitt and said that, you know, he wanted a special plane to be outfitted for him, Messer Schmidt simply did it and didn't ask questions. I mean, there's no doubt he was an incredibly powerful man. But in terms of, in terms of the particular, the concrete particulars of military planning and, you know, of the security state and things like this, like Hess was very much in the dark about these things.

because, you know, the Third Reich was very much a government of fiefdoms, okay? Like, it wasn't, it was not a revolutionary state, like the Soviet Union, you know, where it had been conquered by a vanguard that overthrown the regime. You know, it was a party that was democratically elected, you know, that was charged with insinuating itself, you know, into a state that was incredibly complex and well-established. and really kind of rigid in terms of its structural authority and that kind of tended to that kind of tended to feed the structure the German state itself kind of served to fuel the already sort of agonistic pluralism between you know various factions and departments and

within the National Socialist Party so it's not it doesn't defy it's not hard to believe that you know, nobody in the military or in, you know, or in Himmler's security apparatus or on, on the fears, you know, staff would be suspecting, you know, things about Hess. And also, too, concerning how powerful what Hess was, you know, in, in terms of clout, you know, spying on a man like Hess would be kind of unseemly. Like, I have no doubt that the Gestapo did, you know, spy on Hess here and there, because, because, you know, that's just I mean there's no way they did not but um like shadowing him or something like that would have that would have been unseemly and that would have had consequences okay so it's uh it's not it's not it's not it's not it's not it's not it's not it's not it's not able to keep his his comrades in the dark about this to that point though there was another I mean there's an added uh there's an added kind of layer of a of a of a a secret he afforded him by accident of fate has approached uh ernst udith who was uh

udith was uh he was part of the rick toffin squadron and he was an old comrade at garrings you know he was he was an air ace really tragic guy uh he came to he committed suicide and uh his uh his suicide note he wrote he he strolled on the wall in his apartment and then he he he professed love for his girlfriend who left him and he said to hermit garing you abandoned me iron man um that that was you know the name that the rick thawven squadron had for garing udet was uh he was the director of air armament um and i mean he was really he was really uh he really was not up to the task okay and milch it took military years to undo the damage he had done uh udith and joshanak did had a horrible effect on the combat effectiveness of the Lufa

in terms of its strategic capabilities. I mean, obviously, no one can say that the tactical capabilities of Lufa or something subpar. But in any event, he would at this point, despite the fact that, you know, he was still in his role as,

as armates minister for aircraft, he was circling the drain. You know, he was, he was draining himself to death. He was, you know, carrying on with, women of ill repute, he was, he was actively self-destructing. So when Hess approached him

and said, you know, I need you to contact Messerschmitt and have him make a plane available for me, which ended up being the Messerschmitt's 110, which was a cutting-edge two-engine attack aircraft. Uda was too mired his own problems and kind of curled up in a liquor

bottle to really, like, do anything in terms of saying, why does Hess want this plane? Okay, even if, I mean, again, I maintain that certain kind of a certain kind of privacy was presumed you know when we were talking about you know people of hess's portfolio and in the third rike but even even if we was particularly disengaged as owing to what i just said so i mean it um he was kind of the perfect uh he was kind of the perfect man and you know did he actually point of contact or has to kind of keep his business private um it uh

And to that point, Udette had initially said, even long before Hesse had any notion of undertaking this ill-fated mission, and before even, you know, the onset of hostilities between the UK and the German Reich. You know, Hesse was an active flyer, you know, and even during the years of struggle, you know, he'd flown a plane, you know, to disrupt, like, communist rallies and things, you know, like kind of funny stuff. I mean, I think so. but he also, I mean, just as, you know, he was an adventurous guy and he wanted to keep up his skills.

But, you know, Hitler ordered him to stop flying, basically, because it's, you know, you're not, you know, just like later he did Hydra, he ordered him grounded because he's, you know, your senior party men can't be taking these kinds of risks. And also it seemed like unseemly, you know, kind of like, it seemed like cowboys stuff or kind of like glory hounding, you know, but, um, Udette, uh, said, you know, well, I. I'll have to, you know, I'll have to get a dispensation of the fur. And, uh, it has just kind of finessed and it's like, well, we, you know, we don't really need to do that. And to do we, like, why should we bother the fear with this? And, uh, you know, uh, you know, uh, Uda had continued to, you know, kind of nagging periodically. And, but, you know, I mean, has said, has said real rank over UDD, eventually just became a non-issue, you know, it, uh, so has got his way, uh, uh, Billy Messerschmitt, who, uh, was, uh,

really kind of an eccentric, you know, genius, but not particularly engaged in politics, I mean, at all. You know, he's kind of like the theory portion, like of, of, of aircraft. I mean, I, this is the way I think of him. He relayed that it has turned up at the Augsburg Aircraft Plant, and he just stated openly, you know, I want to be given flying instruction on the Messerschmitt 110, you know, which, again, was, you know, the cutting edge, long-range, twin-engine, attack aircraft. you know and um in messer smith's in messer smith's mind i mean what he relayed to his subordinate so what he wrote in his own uh personal journal i mean he he took this as like a huge you know i go wow you know

the you know deputy furor you know here hess he you know he's so impressed with what we're doing you know he actually wants to take you know the he wants to take our new kind of a flagship fighter aircraft out for a spin like so to speak you know so we mr smet immediately took one out of production just for Hess, you know, and every few practice flights, you know, Hess became competent at it. You know, and Hess really, I mean, like we taught

it, Hess never flew in combat in the Great War, but, you know, he, after convalescing from his injuries, you know, he did, he did get, received flight training, and he was going to deploy to a fighter squadron when the armist has happened. You know, and he, he was a very, he was a very skilled pilot.

And he mastered the Messerschmits 1-10 within weeks and he started issuing odd demands um he said the range is too limited so needed fuel tanks built into the wings he said he needed better radio equipment you know he um navigating uh in those days was very difficult um military aviation wasn't much beyond uh you know navigating by sight according to terrestrial uh features you know and uh radar was in its infancy um you know radar and a ground control communication was uh was primitive but it was essential um and it wasn't really a backup for these things you know um so it's uh but at the same time you know it's like i you know messers schmidt's alibi could be what he indicated you know

Hess just was taking an interest in you know arm's production the man was a pilot himself he was kind of an eccentric. He was probably just interested in capabilities. Or, I mean, for all he knew, for all Messerschmitt knew, like the party had, you know, Hitler had sent Hess to kind of see what was going on, you know, was kind of an issue, kind of off the books report on what he, what he viewed as the capabilities of the new aircraft. Obviously, like Garing wasn't going to render an objective, an objective view to who is fear,

because, you know, he, his, his, his, his, his, his, his role depended on it, you know, and, uh, Garying was a great man in a lot of ways, but he had quite an ego. And, uh, Garying had a problem with exaggerating things. Like, his, uh, you know, uh, kind of in, uh, in, uh, in accord for his larger than life persona, you know, he was kind of like, he himself was kind of an exaggeration. But, uh, luckily to, uh, you know, another, uh, uh, you know, another, fortuitous kind of accident of of personnel situation. The, uh, the, uh, one of the deputy directors of the, the message was a plant was, uh, Theo Kronis, uh, the has had known, uh, during the First World War, you know, he was in the squadron.

He was in his training squadron. And, uh, he, uh, he was able to get the improvements made without, you know, any undue uh without any undue um you know investigation as to why or anything like that um and towards that end it uh in janet the uh the uh the factory files from uh from billy messers smit himself there's entries from you know like january 1941 the first yeah the first the first the first week in january in kidding you know ruff hess is you know messers smits 110 you know is you know is you know is soon going to be ready, you know, it's an old type heating system, but this needs to be, you know, remedied, blah, blah, blah, you know, and this is key, this period of time in terms of the Hess flight and its implications, that being, this is January and 41, okay, as we talked

about in earlier episodes, specifically January 7th and January 8th, those are the days that Adolf Hitler first briefed as field commercials and generals on the strategic plans for the Soviet Union. The nominal or the cover reason for the briefing was, you know, the, it was to set up strategic plans for the Balkans and, you know, in the war in North Africa. And that was addressed too, but it was, it was, it was, you know, it was. it was informing the you know the general staff uh and all of uh operation barbarosa you know and it was it was in you know and they received the order to begin planning it um and this was absolutely nobody outside of the military was privy to this okay except uh antennascu um you know the the uh grand marshal of romania who uh hitler in my opinion had the most uh kind of amicable relations

with out of any other head of state, say Mussolini. He was advised, obviously, and, you know, the Romanian coordination in operational terms with the Vermacht was incredibly tight. But this was not, again, like, kind of people who have kind of a dilettantish interest in Reich history and World War II history, they act like this is crazy that, you know, Hess would not have known of Operation Barbarossa. It's not crazy at all. Like, in fact, like, he absolutely would not have known.

it was not something that was within his fear of authority and the nature of the operation was remarkably secretive even more so than would ordinarily be for a grand military undertaking and in a large part and we're going to get into the implications of this Hitler is doing everything in his power to you know by way of a ledgered main you know feigned deployments and things like this you know to convince to

to convince onlookers that Operation C-Lion which was the code name for the planned invasion of the United Kingdom was actually underway now this was a ruse okay it was never underway but the intent intended to it was intended to deceive the soviet union okay this was its this was its raison d'etra okay it uh it was not aimed at the german people uh it was not aimed at uh trying to force the uk to come to terms churchill exploited this uh massively um and we're

going to get into that in a minute but uh this uh the fact is that uh the uh for operation Barbarossa to work, there had to be no indication that the Reich was planning an assault against the Soviet Union. Okay, so it, and this also, I mean, this is tremendously significant in terms of Hess's own motivations. Because as we talked about, in Hess's mind, Operation C-Lion is imminently going to be ordered. You know, not only is he working to, you know, bring London and Berlin to terms because, you know, the, you know, he, he like his hero Haushofer and like his other

hero, Edwolf Hitler, you know, not only does he believe in geostrategic terms that an alliance between the United Kingdom and the German Reich is essential, you know, he's also, he also has the notion of a racial solidarity that he believes is essential, but also, you know, in Hess's mind, the clock is ticking until there's an assault order to invade the United Kingdom, and this will be a bloodbath, and he'll also leave, you know, Germany vulnerable. to assault by the Soviet Union, which is its, you know, which is its true enemy to the East. So this is, you know, it's important, it's not as important. It's essential to put oneself in the mind of these historical actors, you know, in the moment.

And in Hess's mind, like in the minds of millions of other people, operating sea lion was a real thing, you know. There, he had no concept of, you know, within, you know, by summertime, this bad, passive assault was going to be ordered against the Soviets. You know, it's, um, now on January 10th, um, this is, this is significant, uh, has his personal adjutant, uh, who I mentioned a moment ago. His name was Carl Heinz, pinch. Now, pinch had been driving, uh, uh, it has to, uh, during these excursions. to the Messerschmitt's factory

and into the factory airfield at Augsburg. And I mean, frankly, for Hess's mission to work, there was, he had to take some people into his confidence. I mean, as few people as possible. I mean, Hess didn't even tell his wife, okay? But, you know, he, he did need somebody to act as courier

for his, you know, final communications that he was issued before he was to depart. But also just, um, you know, for something like this, and considering the nature of it, you know, which was a diplomatic peace mission, by an emissary of the right government, there had to be somebody, there had to be, there had to be at least one trusted person to bear witness. Like if, I mean, for any number of contingencies, including, you know, let's say like Hess is the plane had gone down over the North Sea and Hess would never heard from again, okay, because we clarify things, you know, for posterity. So Hess took pinch into his, into his confidence.

And on the 10th, this was Hess's first, what would begin clear later is that this was Hess's first attempt to undertake the mission to Scotland. It was aborted owing to the weather, okay? Flying over the North Atlantic is incredibly perilous, okay, in those days. and bad weather could make it impassable due to like no you know you would be blinded okay but has said every intention on the 10th of leaving and when on that day when pinch accompanied him to the Augsburg field he handed a has handed him two letters one was

addressed to the furor and the other he instructed pinch to open in four hours time if has had not yet returned um as it as it happened after two hours flying time the uh the uh the the weather did turn and uh you know it literally thickened and has said will abort the mission um when he landed Augsburg he found that pinch had opened the instructions okay already um revealing uh you know that uh that that has it flown to Britain, which of course he didn't, but that was his intent, you know. And what it said was, uh, the bogal letter was that his intention had been to flight of Scotland, landed Dungabel said the Duke of Hamilton upon locating him. And he had, you know, he knew where his estate was, this family estate, um, has intended to

present to him his visiting card from Albert Haushofer. Now, what a visiting card was, like, you know what, everybody knows a business car. is the business card is kind of it's kind of like the it's kind of like the it's kind of like the it's kind of like the madman era like imitation of of the of the visiting card okay what the visiting card was by the bourgeoisie I mean types you know the visit European aristocrats and a men of portfolio and government they'd they'd issue what's called visiting card it basically means that like whoever's holding it like you know they're they're they're there with you know the with uh with the with the blessing and

the good offices of whoever, you know, is indicated on the card. You know, so obviously, you know, Hamilton and Househoffer are being close friends. You know, Hess shows up. He presents the card. You know, I'm how it offers man, you know, let's negotiate. I mean, that was, that was the idea. I just want to add that because I realize probably no one knows the hell of visiting card is these days. Because, like, why wouldn't it?

But it, that kind of customary stuff, I find someone fascinating. but pinch he kept Hess's confidence uh he didn't disclose uh he didn't disclose uh he didn't disclose the plan to anybody i mean like after Hess's flight you know months later he disclosed what he knew but the fact that he didn't tell anybody i think that's anecdotal evidence uh i mean i know it is it's it's firm evidence of the existence of a circle of intriguers for peace like a genuine diplomacy coterie okay i mean if this was just you know if hess was truly you know losing his mind or something which uh among other things people can't plan complex uh aircraft missions if they're in that state but that aside you know it the pinch wasn't on the one hand pinch was

horrified when uh you know he read hessa's letter but on the other hand you know it could be because the danger of it and because he had no idea obviously how the fear would respond but the substance of it and the motivation of it he understood completely okay i mean absent a absent a receptive uh absent the potential for some kind of reciprocity like you know in terms of diplomatic good offices secret or not like that that would not happen okay i mean it's just not the way it i mean if if it it just it just you it just just not okay it would have uh if has was compromised or he pinch would have revealed immediately what you know what what what he knew um now what what did happen is uh is uh i mean who he did

confide do um pinch i mean uh max cough feber um he was in he was another uh he was another uh He was another one of Hess's comrades from the Great War in his training squadron. He came to Berlin to visit Hess. When Hess briefly excused himself to take a call, Tinch confided to Hoff Weber what Hess's intention was, swore him to secrecy. But Hoff Weber too, I mean, he, he really, realized what Hess's intention was, you know, and it was, he didn't respond as one would do, you know, the ravings of a madman. What he did do is he called upon Carl Haushoeffer.

And he called upon Haushofer to reason with Hess, you know, not to tell him like, you know, this is insane, but to tell him, like, wait till the moment is right. And this is frankly, this is frankly, you know, an incredibly dangerous gamble. you know owing as much of the internal situation in the united kingdom as to you know how this would be perceived by by adolf hitler um now housewoffer carl houseoffer one of the reasons hess was so drawn to him as a father figure uh it is not just because you know he was a he was a general and he was this you know kind of great warrior type and a a brilliant mind on and Joe Strategic Affairs, but, you know, he was very much something of a mystic, Haushoeffer was in the tradition of Meister Eckers.

You know, Haushofer had a tendency to speak somewhat in riddles, and, you know, he was known for his unironic romantic romanticism. The way he appealed to Hess, and obviously he couldn't disclose it at Hoffvebered and through, you know, pinch had advised him of what else his intentions were. He appealed to Hess his own tendency towards, you know, hero of mysticism, and he told Hess, he said he had a dream wherein Hess found himself in a great English castle having risked everything to bring peace

between the two great nations. You know, and he asked Hess, like, what he thinks this means? You know, and Hess listened intently, like, didn't say anything, and certainly didn't betray it. He planned a flight of England. I find it kind of, I don't believe in augury or anything, but I

find it, I find it fascinating and kind of and kind of creepy that Househauffer was having visions of Hess in some castle. Obviously, that was the fate of Hess, but in a kind of monkeys' pod, Damon Moore, like, it was, you know, not at all what Househoffer Hess himself would have imagined. It was his castle prison. But Hess began drafting and redrafting his letters to Hitler.

there was two of them. One was short, stated his purpose, you know, and why, so that, you know, to disabuse the fewer or anybody else of any notion that, you know, he was a defector or something, you know, or that he was just looking for a way to escape his role within the regime, which, you know, unless he had actually taken leave of reason, like the defecting wouldn't be the way to go about that. but the other the other letter ran to some 14 pages and uh ribbon trop when asked about it contemptuously kind of just said he dismissed it saying it was a long and crazy manuscript but by the time ribbon drop was asked about this um you know that that was kind of the that was like the official claim about it has because the way the third rike the way the the way the proping animinist

Finder Gerbilt as well as the fear himself. Rationalized Texas flight was very defamatory. Okay. And it's that doesn't make it right, but you know, in a calculated way, like it it, there's

nothing else Ravensrop would have relayed. So I think we can take I don't think we can take that as an accurate rendering, whatever the letter said. I speculate that it was some personal testimony about, you know,

that he believed he was honoring Hitler's wishes on grounds that, you know, he knew Hitler's strategic mind by anybody else going back for the Landsberg prison days. If I speculate. And probably disclosing without putting them in jeopardy, some of his, you know, dealing with the, you know, dealings with the context of the Haushoeffers had created diplomatic contacts. But I mean, who's to say?

What I don't believe is that it was what Ruben-Trump said it was. Not because Ribbentrop's an unreliable witness, but in context, I don't think any party official can be trusted really to relay purely inaccurately what any intercepted communications by has indicated um now there's a three-month delay obviously between has his first attempt to reach scotland um and his actual flight now part of that owed to inclement weather which was very temperamental and unpredictable but part of that was that uh part of that was because the italian army was getting hit hard in north africa by the british it had been suffering serious reverses It had begun a long retreat from Egypt to Libya, and it was only the arrival of the

African Corps and the command of then Lieutenant General Irwin Aramel ended the counteroffensive he launched in April that, you know, turned things around. And then Heth waited a little longer still because Germany had just all but one in mainland Greece by the end of April. And, oh, it was really left was the, was the mop-up remaining British resistance in Crete, and the, the Balkans campaign would be over. And he wasn't going to make any, as being a patriot. He wasn't going to make any peace overtures or attempts, even in secret that might be interpreted in London as a sign of weakness. I mean, that makes perfect sense. And I think it also is a testament to, it has this kind of purity of intentions.

You know, like I said, there's an almost naive earnestness to Hess that I think is actually an endearing characteristic. But, you know, there was not really any lying in him. You know, I mean, I think that the, I think we, I think that that's the character. that's the traded character that it kind of most comes out in Hess okay not just in his own testimony but in that of everybody uh everybody you know intimately familiar with him you know um and those weeks that has uh delayed his mission um there was there was more vague keith orishers from the other side um albrecht o'hawfer received a message from uh Carl Jacob Burkhart

You know, he's the International Red Cross Hancho. He asked Housewaffe to come to Geneva. And he said that he had

cordial greetings. These are Housewaffe's words. He said to him he had, quote, cordial greetings from old friends in England. Howshoffer indicated that to the Gestapo, because obviously later he was interrogated aggressively and extensively, unfortunately. But, you know, he, I believe this may have been a direct reference to the, Duke of Handel himself.

Hess certainly interpreted it that way. Burk, I was a former League of Nations official. That's how he got the Red Cross job. I mean, obviously, especially in those days, that's, this isn't a job that would just go to an ordinary diplomat. you know uh burpherr was he was known to favor you know a compromised he a cop a peaceful compromise um and this put him very much at odds with uh you know with the focus and with churchill but also with uh you know even more on the fringes of the war party you know and not as not as zealous in their in their uh in their insistence upon war at all costs so uh you know burkhart was kind of the he was kind of the

perfect man to act and go between for this kind of secret diplomacy um how schoffer uh did did in fact meet with burkhart on april 28th lane 41 uh in large part at the behest of hess uh Hess was insistence upon this meeting. And what Howshawa Schoffer relayed was that Burkhart was very, very torn. The desire to promote a European peace before it was too late. And again, for all Burkhart knew, like virtually everybody else, with the exception of Mr. Churchill, and we'll get into that in a minute, Burkhart would have been just as convinced as millions of other people at Operation C-line was imminent.

Okay, so, but at the same time, you know, he had terrible anxiety that his name was going to be bandied out in public. You know, now that would have cost him his role, okay, his official role in the Red Cross. And that would have brought down the way out of the focus on him. I mean, he, there's no doubt he would have been cast as, you know, either a duplicitous, you know, sort of a sort of fifth columnist, you know, or at worst, as some sort of German agent, you know, and I mean, the Churchill and his cronies and his paymasters and those and his handlers were really capable of anything, you know, I mean, that's something to keep in mind, too. um the way he left it uh burkhart that is with the young houchoffer was uh he said he had a meeting in geneva from a uh a man who's well known in uh london's leading conservative circles uh he didn't release his name's name but uh he said that uh this unnamed you know tory type who was committed to uh you know uh you know accomplishing peace and in doing so defeating the focus said that you know there was a strong desire of men in high places to review peace prospects you know and in the kind of in the kind of soft-pedaled subtle way that the English kind of communicate this to me I mean I understand

I understand why Hess would read that is basically green lighting his mission, okay? And how Schoffer downplayed that in his interrogation. But I mean, what else is there to really glean from that? You know what I mean? And it's, I realize in the intelligence game, particularly at such a critical juncture like that, apocally, I mean, people are going to be speaking on both sides of their mouth all the time. That's one of the reasons why That's one of the things that's effective about films like Tinker, Sailor, Soldier, Spy,

even if you don't like that genre very much, the confused atmosphere makes sense because nobody's really Nobody's really saying what they mean in espionage circles. And even if you're talking to friendlies, you know, like how it's offer would be Burkhart. And even in the context of secret diplomacy,

like nobody really trusts anybody. and it's, you know, nobody wants to be pinned down to do any, uh, any concise statement of facts. So I, like, you know, it's no one's impossible prospect to have full confidence in deciphering the meaning of a statement by a man like Burkhart to, you know, Young House to offer in Geneva on the eve of what they think is, you know, be a massive invading by the Reich of the UK. And Burkhart sitting around thinking, like, am I being watched right now by, you know, British intelligence. Am I going to get a bullet in the back of the head for this meeting? I mean, you know, like how Schoffer's thinking, like, you know, for all he knows, Abbear or SD types, you know, might be watching or listening and saying, like, why is this

half-Jewish, you know, university professor, you know, like meeting with a, meeting with these English society types, you know, I mean, so keep that in mind, too. And the kind of opaque nature of a, of this. of this testimony. It's difficult to piece together, but like I said, I, at the end of the day, one has to ask, like, what the purpose

of such meetings would be in the first place. And in context, I believe that I'm right. And I, I, it was not a reach for it has to believe that, uh, this was something of a, something more than just a dog whistle signal for him to pursue some kind of open ended, uh, open ended, uh, efforts. Uh, I,

I believe it's perfectly reasonable that he decided this was an occulted, as it may be, a communication telling him to, you know, go and seek out Lord Hamilton, quite literally. Interestingly, how should offer made the point that Burkhart's views on a post-Armistice view were kind of close to Hesse's in his own. the British those among the British kind of elite and aristocracy who wanted to pursue peace their notion

I mean aside from the ideological component that you know obviously they were appalled by the you know the ideological opponent that animated the focus I mean which appalled these genuinely patriotic you know British conservatives. Besides a man in simple

strategic terms they viewed Britain's interest in Eastern and Southeast in Europe as really purely nominal which it was okay and interestingly Burkhart

as did Ribbentrop and as did as did a as it some of the foreign office types that preceded a church of the sentence they kept coming back with the

they kept coming back with the They kept coming back to the kind of incentive of giving Germany its colonies back. And, you know, Hitler had no interest in that. And neither did most of the men in his inner circle, military and civilian. It's telling to me that the British, even those who were basically fair-minded, like their idea was that, you know, well, you know, we should, you know, It's like they could only envision, like, their idea of granting Germany inequality of status within, like, the New World System was basically Germany behaving kind of like the UK. And that's, that betrays a kind of lack of understanding of power political realities in the 20th century.

And, you know, the emergence of the superpower is, you know, the, as the, as the, as the seminal actor on the world stage. I just find that really interesting. Like, maybe that was their way of coping with, like, like, like, the latent anxiety of like the fact that you know the kind of empire like even if even the british had not had you know even if britain had not been captured by the focus and you know led down this kind of suicide path um empire building of the of the type uh you know that afforded the uk its great power and wealth was was dead and it you know what were colonies like that you know it's a fool's errand i just

pretty bad tangent. I just think it's an important point and it's often overlooked. But on May 1st, has visited Willie Messerschmitt again. And David Irving is kind of hard on Messerschmitt because Messer Schmidt documented that in his diary, you know, he said that has was asking like, you know, a question about the radius if autopilot was engaged. You know, like, he was asking all these, like, you know, questions about basically, like, you know, he's like, you know, I want to, is it possible for me to, like, outfit, you know, the second seats, oxygen bottles, like, into those, like, the pilot and, like, you know, all these, always, like,

all these very particular, requestant modifications and inquiries about possibilities for modification that would seem to indicate nothing if not an intent to fly the plane on a high-risk mission. But again, at the same time, I mean, Mezsche made me very well believe

that he was being, you know, kind of a... that he, you know, that Hitler was keeping an eye on him and what the new aircraft were capable of. And, I mean, Hitler, too, like, you know, Hitler was fixated on hardware

and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of it. But it's not beyond the realm of possibility that, you know, this is what was afoot. And plus, too, I mean, in a culture like the Third Reich, if, you know, Deputy Fuhr, like, Reich's minister, like, Hess shows up, you just kind of do what he says, like, within reason. You know what I mean? It's like people neglect that, too. Like, it's, you know, I don't know. I don't, I don't, I don't, I mean, like, what, I don't know what an Irving's view,

like, Messerschmitt was supposed to do. And, I mean, again, I've got mad respect for Irving. I think he's the greatest of all revision. in most respects, but like what, like what, like what, like, what, like,

what, like, became as a conclusion. It should be like, taking on Billboard space and, like, hey, Hess was going to fly to the UK, like that crazy bastard.

I mean, like, it's like, who would he call anyway? Like, I, what would the impact be, like on Hess's life?

I mean, frankly, Messer Schmidt, like pretty much everybody liked Hess, you know, he didn't want to, he didn't want to cause problems for him.

I mean, I don't know. But that's, that's something to keep in mind, too, because everybody, not just Irving, who kind of reads up on the on the um on the entries around has his flight or like well how could how good how good messerschmitt of all people like like like what the hell would he think has was

going to do it which like i i don't know man like i you know the uh like uh like uh i mean even most people in this country it's like it's it's like if uh if you're like doing your thing you know like let's say you're like an auto designer or something or let's say like i like Elon Musk or like Donald Trump like showed up instead of saying you wanted to like you know crank out some specialty item form like you'd probably just be like most people like what you know even though these guys don't have the kind of cultural cloud and prestige that a man like hesswood in that in that epoch and that garment and most people just be kind of like starstruck and be like oh this is great you know he's interested in what we're capable of at this facility and you know i mean

that there's something to keep in mind okay i mean because it's a common refrain from not just from irving and not just from the english but pretty much from everybody and um a particular concern and i or I raise it what's the light stall. I'd probably butchering that pronunciation. The light stall device was a, it was a navigational device that interfaced with the navigation beam that had to be shot out so that assault aircraft could find their path. Okay, this device was temperamental.

It was cutting edge tech at the time. It was difficult to use. It's really extraordinary that it has good master, the new Messerschmitt's aircraft and that he was totally comfortable with all these new technologies like that's really really amazing you know

Hess was obviously like a prodigious warrior type among other things and he was like an infantry war hero he he uh he was a gifted pilot you know he was totally comfortable with these you know kind of nascent technologies

that were incredibly complicated and required the pilot, among other things, to do pretty advanced calculations in his mind, including potentially in the heat of combat. And interestingly, Ernst Udett, you know, poor Udett, again, he was one of the First World War's greatest aviators. I mean, he was, the Ritthoff and squadron

did not have any second-rate combat pilots, and Udett was one of the best of the best. That's why despite his difficulties, Gering, you know, gave him the job that he did. But Udett said he was trying to reassure Hitler that Hess could not have completed such a risky flight. And Garing also said he doubted it. And that he said that, you know, it was almost certain that, that Hess had, you know, ditched the aircraft and drowned.

And Hitler disagreed. Hitler said one of the, one of the, one of the Hitler said. It might have been Krista Schroeder that quote the fear believes in Hess's ability and Apparently what Hitler said to garing and to Udett and all assembled was when Hess gets his teeth into something he does it properly You know has wouldn't have flown to If Hess was gonna fly to Scotland it was because he it was something that he could do You know he would have found a way I mean that's just again that cuts against

I mean, I realize that there's this Kehotic eccentric who sometimes undertake kind of crazy daredevil missions, but that, you know, we're talking, the complexity and the danger and the skill required to fly his Messerschmits across

across the North Sea that's really, really remarkable, and it's something most kind of pilots cannot pull off, you know, and Hesse was a middle-aged man, and he you know he he he uh he hadn't flown in combat you know he basically you know he got trained uh he got trained on the old prop planes the great war and uh you know these this two engine fighter this messers smits

one 10 you know again this is the cutting edge of uh of german uh war tech and he mastered it within weeks you know that's remarkable and i don't think that's something a crazy person could do i mean i i just don't you know that's something to keep in mind too May 4th, 1941, the right victory in the boggans was complete. Airborne Lufava troops were mobilized to assault pre. As we talked about, and they were poised to wipe out the final British Army stronghold. Hitler, this, Hitler's famous Krawl Opera House speech was issued on this date. it uh it was it was the assembled ritesygstike deputy deputy's national socialist party luminaries

many other people at the crow opera house the speech is broadcast across all in europe heller was accompanied by villehelm frick minister of the interior garing himler and hess and in the speech uh heller sad was church you know he could it was uh it was basically a flex you know he uh he contrasted the Vermeck's prowess with, you know, Churchill's bumbling retreats, you know, and the failure in Norway and Greece and North Africa, you know, and he, you know, he said, it was, the speech was less restrained than in the past vis-a-vis Britain. And this prompted it has, in my opinion, this would prompt the query. Has it asked for the final time, he put it to Hitler personally at the conclusion of the speech.

You know, he asked him if, you know, his, you know, his, if Hitler's policy vision towards the UK remained what was set out in mind comp all those years back in Landsberg. And, uh, Hitler was, uh, being rushed away by his entourage and, and by his, uh, Schuztafel, uh, escort because he was on his way to, uh, he was on his way to, uh, he was on his way to Gothen to inspect the new battleships, the Bismarck and the, uh, uh, turpenter. he briefly told Hats, yes, of course. You know, this doesn't change anything. And incidentally, that's the, that's the last time

the Hats ever saw or spoke to Adolf Hitler. It's like that was just the final, you know, he needed that clarity that, that clarification that this was in accordance with the will of the floor, literally, you know, to bring peace between the United Kingdom and the German Reich. It, you know, May 9th, interestingly, has telephoned Garehav Klepper. He was a legal expert on the staff of Borman.

You know, and Borman was Hesse's number two. And Borman, one of the ways he became so powerful, wasn't because of his ruthless nature and is this kind of meticulous, obsessive, like, workaholism. But, you know, because it has supposed to public face, the party, among other things, the kind of the nitty-gritty of the chancellery and, you know, kind of interface of policy with the execution of the law and of policy in relation to the law. Borman really, really, this was kind of his role, okay? So Bormann had this army of lawyers quite literally, like, under him, uh, to, uh, you know, to the kind of connoissee, giving him feedback on what was possible, what was not, you know, what had to be done to kind of finesse the, the machinery of party and state into a singular effective apparatus that wasn't, you know, going to step on anybody's toes or alienate some needed, you know, a kind of state office or whatever. But, um, what has asked Klopfer is, uh, he asked him basically what the foreign position was in policy in terms of the king of England you know what what ability did he have to negotiate policy um on war and peace matters

on matters diplomacy like what is his role what is his position quite literally clefler was taking aback he said you know but hess was i mean has was hess he you know he said i can't answer that at once you know he said i'll get information you know he's like I'll let to consult, you know, university professor, but I'll call you back. So, I mean, looking ahead, um, has was obvious, like, why, the only only to make note of this is, is, I'll, has obviously viewed himself as, uh, potentially having an audience with the British monarch, okay, um, and on its face, like, nutty as that seems, there's, uh, an internal logic to it that I don't think is perverse.

You know, has always planned to return assuming he didn't die. And, you know, the Battle of Britain was underway and he was flying an assault aircraft across the North Atlantic. So, I mean, there was, aside with just the danger mission itself, if he didn't go down in the North Atlantic, there was a chance that he'd be intercepted and shot down. He did time his flight in part

behind a large German blitz assault said he basically had cover in the form of of attacking aircraft and this was incidentally the last the last large scale aerial blitz by the Luftwaffe

against London but you know failing has dying has said every he had a very expectation he'd be returning at some point. He was flying on enemy country as a

parliamentary courier conveying terms of truce to an honorable foe, and this was a time-honored usage. Hitler himself had accepted such emissaries at Warsaw in subsequent campaigns. Hest didn't consider that he needed

any kind of special dispensation for, like, a letter of authority. Neville Chamberlain didn't need some special dispensation or invite when he came to when he came to Munich and Godesburg to negotiate with the furor about German you know, about the status of

of hostilities between, you know, Germany and Czechoslovakia. So why would Hess require such things? I mean, okay, yeah, that's naive to think that he could be able to speak in terms of equality of status in that way. But it's not it's not totally outlandish. And has had a luthvaitha captain's uniform made because he, if he flew as a civilian, he'd have no protections under the Geneva Conventions and he could be treated as a spy. I mean, this was very, this was very thought out, okay, according to the letter of what was law and

custom for the time. And that's another reason why I've emphasized this, the story that it has so much, going into the, uh, episode or episode dealing with, um, the process of Nureberg and how, uh, and how the indictment was, was, was, was drafted and litigated. Um, it, uh, it, um, the, some days earlier prior to name 9th. Peses of the flight was on May 10th. But some days earlier

you know, Albrecht had returned Albert Haushofer, the younger Haushoffre. He returned from Geneva, where he met Burkhart again. He had instructions to return to Switzerland where, quote, he would be flown to Madrid and have a conference with Samuel Horr.

Hor was the British ambassador to Spain. Hoare had, he was very much, he had a very conciliatory view of Germany, which is fascinating to me. And that owes in part undoubtedly to the fact that he was very proximate to the Spanish War, okay? And if that didn't insinuate

at least a passing sympathy for the German Reich, I don't really see what could unless somebody was ideological zealousness. That unfortunately it when worse finally did come from Madrid

that was after Hess's departure and Albrecht it was in the custody of the Gestapo okay so that was that potential avenue of peace it's fascinating as as a

anecdotal and in part testimonial evidence of uh of uh you know the feasibility of this or the existence as well as the feasibility of this the secret diplomacy effort that was underway but it you know it obviously that

avenue was cut off by Hess's flight ironically um has some has wrote a farewell letter to his parents to brother to his wife Ilsa uh has had a young son um and uh it's uh Elsa said that she thought something was peculiar because on May on May 9th uh has had uh Alfred Rosenberg and Hess had a close friendship and uh in some ways had a similar background uh Rosenberg was a Baltic German

you know uh Hess uh grew up in Egypt they were both worldly uh in a way that uh I think kind of was a tie that found them together. Rosenberg was actually a brilliant guy. He's a he's represented as something of a milk toast or some kind of neo-pagan crank. He was neither of those things.

So, you know, Hess had lunch with Rosenberg and then, you know, he put his son down for a nap, but then, like, about an hour later, like, you know, he got his son back up so we could, like, play with him some more, you know. And I find that really tragic and sad. You know, but it, I don't know.

It dehumanizes Hess in a way, in a basic way. But it has to also throw a letter to Heinrich Himmler. Part of that was practical because he wanted, he, he's, you know, he wanted to make it clear. He's like, look, my men, my staff didn't know what I was going to do. They're not responsible for anything. He didn't, he wanted to make sure that his, you know, no friends of his were implicated.

But also, it's, I, it has. had some kind of admiration for him or you know um strange that makes me to people um you know it's uh you really it revealed a certain complexity of character um to both men i guess but it i um you know when the uh the house offers had uh had a had a very uh at every bad time of things from this point onward you know it um it uh how show off for the elders said you know years later towards the end of the war he said uh you know he wished that uh hasn't confided with him confided in him you know more directly and and more candidly um you know if anybody if anybody could have talked him out of the mission it is it is

it probably would have been Haushofer. But so the whole thing is tragic. In a letter to Albrecht, it has to apologize to him, which is interesting. I mean, I think he realized that things are going to be difficult, even the best of circumstances, things were going to become very difficult with the house offer's family, and he couldn't protect him anymore. He said in the letter to Albrecht, he said he was sorry, and he said, you only saw one possible solution to the, quote,

Gordian knot of this unhappy entangelo. element um has uh in 1950 uh these are hess's words and again i mean people can take this for what it's worth just at face value again i think it pretty it pretty clearly defeats uh any inference of madness uh has said quote i'd lived those months he means those months leading up to the uh the flight In a whirl of instruments, cylinder head pressures, jettison fuel containers, auxiliary oil pumps, cooling temperatures, radio beam widths, which didn't even work when the time came. The heights of the Scottish mountains and God knows wells. I put blinkers that shut out everything else around me apart from the broad reality of the war and daily politics. Today, I am glad to have been driven like that into finally taking the plunge over there.

I've desperate struggle to extricate myself from an obstinate charger that refused to let me go. True, I achieve nothing. I couldn't stop this lunatic struggle between nations. I couldn't prevent what came and what I saw was coming. I was unable to bring salvation, but I'm glad, at least, that I tried. Now, something, I'll wrap this up, because I realize we were going for a minute,

but something that I'm sure people are going to raise about the treatment of Hess and the bizarre, not just draconian and brutal, but bizarre. treatment of him people are going to say um people are going to say uh well you know for all mr churchill knew uh um you know uh this was this was some sort of precursor to the sea lion invasion you know churchill knew that uh there would be no invasion only to his codebreakers uh he knew that Germany was mobilizing for war against the against the Soviet Union.

He didn't even tell Anthony Eden, his foreign minister. And he went on the radio claiming that, quote, part of Hitler's invasion plan is to terrorize women and children. And, you know, he, what did he say? You know, part and parts of the, quote, ferocious onslaught he's preparing. you know the uh the uh he's trying to this monster meaning edo fiddler is trying to break us by a process of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction i mean just typical typical shrieking moral

can't by piggy but there's like something you know it's just so it's so characteristic you know the uh the fewer issues a general prohibition on bombing london so churchill orders in germany churchill orders berlin to be bombed over and over and over again until the prohibition is lifted over to public outrage of the fact that Berlin is not bombing London back. So then Churchill declares that, you know, they're being subjected to unprovoked attacks to slaughter women and children.

Then, like, lo and behold, Churchill maintains a lie that he knows to be a ruse of sea lion for the sole purpose to perpetuating a war against the national interest. You know, like I said, it's just, it defies all the reason. that it's this was literally a man you know acting against the national interest and in doing so just lying to 10 to million of his countrymen day after day after day it's it bottles the mind and um it's a kind of historical stockholm syndrome that this this man is is he's like he's like

worship by a population of of the descendants of those that he he deceived it's incredible but um in any event the um the uh as it kind of the final uh the final uh um kind of piece of this uh of uh of this particular story um uh november uh november uh in november 9040 uh a letter from albre houchhoffer to the duke of hamilton was intercepted by uk postal censors which were very active in the warriors, okay, which makes sense, you know, I mean, especially considering that, you know, traditional mail was, you know, the primary, you know, communication modality across national frontiers. But, uh, um, it was written in a light code. At first, it seemed to be anonymous. Um, it was actually a letter, it was a note, uh, sent, uh, by an unidentified man, who identified

myself as a from a city called B like literally asking a miss violet robbers the forward and lowest three-page message to the Duga Hamilton and the the letter upon them kind of decode like I said it was like this light kind of cipher it said uh my dear Douglas even if it's only a slight chance the letter should reach one good time there's a chance and I'm determined to make use of it letter offered condolences in the death of Hamilton's father and brother-in-law. He, he continued, like the bulk of it,

what's important is he continued saying, quote, if you remember some of my last communications in July, you and your friends and I have places may find some significance in the fact. I'm able to ask you whether you could find time to have a talk with me somewhere in the outskirts of Europe, perhaps in Portugal. I could reach Lisbon at any time

and without any difficulties. Within 40 days of receiving news from you, of course, I do not know whether you can make your authorities understand so much that they give you lead, but at least you may be able to answer my question. this letter was passed on to MI5, which was in turn passed under the Air Ministry, where Hamilton

was at, it was fast as the airmanaging as Hamilton was an REF officer by that time. Okay. And finally, in February, an an RAF group captain,

obviously had, you know, some kind of liaison to between MI5 and Air Ministry intelligence. one captain stammer's he wrote a letter to the duke saying that the ministry was anxious for a chat with him when he was next in London and apparently in March Hamilton met this captain stammer's at the at the air ministry and he asked him

about the letter you know he said like what you know do you do you do you still have the letter and is that the most recent one And Hamilton said, yes, you know, I've been totally open about this, you know. Stammer said, yeah, you know, we're aware of that. But then he said, it seems to us that Haushofer was pretty significant. Hamilton agreed. And how Schafer, you know, a particular interest to Stammers was that how Schoffer was insinuated into the foreign ministry, which, as we talked about, was

a moderating influence even, and perhaps even more. under Ribbentrop's ambassadorship, okay? Stammer said, quote, that it might be a considerable value to make contact with the Haushofer. And,

again, as we talked about everything relating to the Hamilton's correspondence to the Haushoffers and everything related to the months prior to

Hess's flight had been redacted, or just totally removed from Haushofer's intelligence files the air ministry but this information is all in the personal family papers of the duke's family and that's where we got all that's how we know about this otherwise it would have been completely lost

so there's that too um and what i just relayed these are the notes uh incident to the letter um the original letter uh m i 5 and the air ministry had copies um that uh that was included in the in the Hamilton family record. So, I mean, take that for what it's worth. I think there's not any, there's not any case we make that a reasonable doubt in history. We're talking about, you know, people's motivations and things and possibilities, you know, rather than concrete occurrences. But the case that HESO's responding to reciprocal overtures, and there's real potential

of a piece turned being arrived at uh i think that is irrefutable so that i know i threw a lot at the listeners um this episode but it was important and this all could tie sea lion into uh into uh you know the overall strategic picture but uh yeah that that uh that concludes i think uh the story of mr hess uh at least as a dedicated uh subject you know uh we're going to get into the the the actual trial of uh of the nuremberg defendants next episode and obviously like we're going to get into like the treatment of hess and you know how his trial resolved and all of that but um i uh uh This will be the last dedicated episode of the man himself. So you, these were negotiations that were, they were real.

They thought that they could, was there any way that this was going to defeat the focus? I mean, it, I mean, really. If there had been some kind of, if, if there had truly been like a Tory insurgency, and if the foreign ministry had been put in touch, let's say to Duke and Hamilton and a bunch of his aristocrats. of his aristocratic buddies, you know, all of whom are serving the RAF and the army at that time. So, I mean, you couldn't question their, you know, patriotism. If a true quorum developed among the British aristocracy, which still had tremendous authority then, like socially, I mean.

And they said, you know, we've talked to the, you know, we've been dealing with, you know, the eminent, you know, young Haushofer, whomself has half Jewish, who is, you know, insinuated into the foreign ministry and you know he's he's got access to you know here rivenrop himself and they're offering us unconditional peace you know well and this uh you know i i i don't see how in the wake particularly again too like uh by that point you know churchill made a fool himself uh at uh i mean this was the way this was the average of the dunkirk as well as church let me to fool himself with this the ill-fitted Norway operation. The British just been defeated

in the Balkans and Greece. You know, Churchill was bombing Germany for the sole purpose of provoking a countervalue assault on his own people so that, like, public outrage, but, you know, he could exploit that to keep him

and keep the UK in the war. Like, he was in a very perilous position. You know, I mean, so yeah, I think it could have. It's, uh, plus to like the British aristography was insinuated into the military in ways that

could have I mean they're situated in key ways okay and it's they could have if anybody could have derailed the focus enterprise they could have especially because again you know it was

Churchill was actively losing the war I mean like in battlefield terms like not just you know in terms of it being against the you know the historical and strategic and strategic interest. You know,

he was just, he was just, he was just talking of a series of, of, of kind of devastating losses, you know, one after the other. So,

I mean, it's a good, it's an interesting question. But, um, well, when these things are being kept from the, these things are being kept from the,

the, the British population. Like, you know, I mean, it's like, uh, if,

uh, you know, if there's, you know, if there's, you know, if, if there's, you know, if, if, if the secret diplomacy became,

like, above board, uh, And there was people that, you know, men of like literal title, you know, who, who had the esteem and trust of the people in England and Scotland. You know, and they were saying, look, you know, the Germans want unconditional peace. Like, why are we fighting them? Like, our foreign policy has been hijacked by an alien element. I mean, what would be the rebuttal of that?

Like, there was nothing to it, but moral can't. I like the focus narrative. It was literally, it was the epitome of style over substance. You know, it's like today, like, the kind of ever-pityable Joe Biden. Like, I remember, like, even before, I mean, even before the United States and its, it's an unsectarian master class, you know, launches, we're sitting as Russia, like, Pityable Joe Biden was going on TV, talking about how proud himself he was, and he was insulting

Vladimir Putin to his face. You know, like, calling him a killer and a monster or something. Like, why would you even do that? That's bizarre. It's kind of like ritualized, like shrieking at people, how evil they are. Like, that's, that's, uh, that's both very Semitic.

And it's very, pure leftism. Yeah, it's very counterproductive. But it's like, but it's also like the void of substance. You know, it's like, I'm going to go on TV and I'm going to go on the radio. and scream about how the Germans are monsters. I'm going to insult Vladimir Putin to his face. Like, I mean, that's not politics, but it's cathartic for certain types of people.

But yeah, but what it's not is it's not strong, it's not strong ethical or philosophical ground to stand on. And, you know, so it would, over time, it would have, it would have raised questions that I don't think the focus could have, but of neutralized just by more like you know kind of moral can't and whatever all right well do your plugs and we will yeah certainly

um as uh I'm very excited to say that the second installment my science fiction series uh is going to be released by Imperium Press eminently

um you'll be able to buy it through Imperium and please do that instead of ordering it through Amazon or something because Imperial Press are great friends and you know they're doing they're doing god's work uh and uh jeff basos doesn't need uh need our money um so i'm very excited about that i've been getting over to act about truth social um and i'm going to be more so as kind of election season gets underway not because i'm something like mega partisan but uh i think it's important to kind of get a sense of what's going on in that sort of you know

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It's t.m. slash number seven HOMAS 777 and we've got a you know we've got a really good community there and it's very active and even when I can't be active you know like a few days ago I mean I'm active there at least every every other day or so but you know in the days I'm like I can't be up in there dropping new stuff like people are very active and keep it live so that's really great please dip in there and you know just kind of share your perspectives and that would be a real real blessing until the next episode thank you everyone much beat