The Rest Is History - 295: The Rise of the Nazis

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

Where do the origins of Nazism lie? The Second Reich? Hitler’s time in Vienna? The First World War? Join Tom and Dominic in the first of their four-part series on the Rise of the Nazis as they discuss its origins. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello, welcome to The Rest is History. And this time last year, we were doing an anniversary episode on 1922, the year that some historians have described as the year that modernity began. And this year, Dominic, marks another anniversary, but an altogether darker anniversary, the 90th anniversary of the coming to power in January 1933 of the Nazis, when Hitler became Chancellor. And so we thought that we can't really do justice to the rise of the Nazis in one episode.

So we're going to, well, we'll see how many episodes it takes, but it's a story worth telling. I mean, it is a massive, massive story, isn't it? It is. It's an enormous story. So yes, you're absolutely right, Tom. It's 90 years ago, the 30th of January, 1933, about half past 11 at the Reich Chancellery at Wilhelmstrasse 77 in Berlin. So the Reich President's Palace was being renovated. So Paul von Hindenburg, the iconic general of the Great War in Germany, he was the president. And he welcomes the leader of the National Socialist Party, Adolf Hitler, to become Chancellor of Germany. Hitler swears an oath to uphold the Constitution, to respect the role of the president. He says he will.

These are extraordinary times, but he's determined to bring back normal parliamentary rule as soon as possible. And then the deal is done. And Hindenburg says famously, a now gentleman forwards with God. And that meeting, that moment has gone down as a very baleful landmark in human history. Obviously, the communists have come to power in Russia, but the coming to power of the Nazis in Germany seems to cast an even darker shadow. And one of the reasons for that, you might say, is implicit in the scene that you've just described, which is that the Nazis, unlike the Bolsheviks, they come to power by means of gaining mass support in free elections. And that perhaps is why it so haunts people in

democracies to this day, that something could have happened like that. Because the other aspect of the story that is so unsettling is that this is happening in perhaps the most cultured, economically advanced, industrially advanced, sophisticated country in the whole of Europe, Germany. Yeah. So those two questions, how is it that the Nazis are able to use democracy to destroy itself and how did a country like Germany come to fall under the spell of a man like Hitler both of them very very frightening questions right the way into the present they are absolutely so we've just done haven't we, two podcasts about Auschwitz with Jonathan Friedland, about the story of the escape artist, the man who escaped from Auschwitz.

So we know where the story is heading. And I think you're absolutely right that there are those two elements to the sort of mystery, as it were, a really crucial one that the Nazis didn't seize power. I mean, they didn't quite win power by electoral means because they never won an absolute majority in a free and fair election, but they were the biggest party. Yeah. And they're engaging in the kind of horse trading that is standard. Absolutely standard. Liberal Democrat behavior. Yeah. I mean, absolutely. They get into power by, as it were, constitutional means. Now, obviously, there are lots of gray areas and there's lots of violence that accompanies that. But you're right. It's not a coup. It's not a revolution as it were, constitutional means. Now, obviously, there are lots of gray areas, and there's lots of violence that accompanies that. But you're right, it's not a coup, it's not a revolution as it is with the Bolsheviks in 1917. So there's that element to it. As you

said, using democracy against itself. And then I think you're absolutely right. It's the fact that Germany is an immensely well-educated, sophisticated, civilized, in inverted commas, place. And ever since, I think, I know you think this too, Tom, that we have lived in the shadow of the Third Reich. Because always, for any Western democracy, that fear never goes away. That, you know, you're only a few steps away from heading down the same dark road and how can you put i mean you've seen this so much of course in the last few years people worried about how could it happen again could it happen in france could it happen in the united states could it happen in britain and what does it say about human nature and about modernity

itself that such a regime was able to possibly possibly about do the causes do the roots lie deeper back so obviously the moral catastrophe of nazism which has as you said culminate i mean you know the the dark heart of it are those two episodes that we on auschwchwitz, genocide, I mean, the mass, mass killing. Yeah. Where could this have come from? Yes. And people have been asking that, and they were asking it pretty early on. And there are all kinds of, I mean, we can just sort of touch on the different explanations that people have had.

So there are some German historians who argued that it was unique to Germany, that Germany had always been on a special path, the Sonderweg thesis, this is called. So the idea that Germany didn't modernize properly, that it didn't have a kind of bourgeois politics like Britain and France, that it was more reactionary, that it was more militaristic, that it was special, and that Nazism was uniquely German. I don't actually think many historians still believe that, Tom. There are people who believe that Nazism was prefigured by the Kaiser's regime, by the First World War. So there's a very famous German historian called Fritz Fischer. He basically argued that Germany's war aims in 1914 were paving the way for the Third Reich, and there was a kind of

continuity in German history. Again, I'm not entirely sure about that. There was a historian called Friedrich Meinecker. Again, he said that he blamed Bismarck. He said there's a line that runs from Bismarck and the Second Reich, so the creation of a unified germany in 1870 71 um that that leads to hitler obviously if you're a marxist if you're a really card carrying old-fashioned marxist you would say it's all about um a product of the sort of the dynamics of class struggle and that's one that's contemporary to hitler isn't it so a lot of communists think so brecht and famously in his place it advances the thesis that hitler is brought to power by big business. Exactly, that they're tools of big business.

Again, I don't think that's one that a lot of historians would really subscribe to now. So the great British historian of the Third Reich, Richard Evans, who is very much a historian of the left, he's pretty scathing about that thesis in the first volume of his great trilogy on the Third Reich. Probably the most famous Briton ever to write about hitler is ajp taylor i mean ajp taylor appalled people this was when he was churning out incredibly um provocative columns for the sunday express in the sort of 50s and 60s oh thank god that um historians don't write for provocative columns for tabloids today. Tabloid is the wrong word, so I think mid-market newspaper is the correct term.

Thank you for correcting me. So A.J.P. Taylor said that Hitler was a normal German leader, that there was nothing unusual about Hitler. Nazism, said Taylor, represented the deepest wishes of the German people. Now, again, I think a lot of people now would say A.J.P. Taylor was almost being deliberately offensive with that. And that, yes, there is something peculiarly German about Nazism, but Taylor was completely ignoring the fact that Germany had all these tradition, democratic and liberal traditions, as well as more reactionary ones. But Dominic, also on the theme of centuries of, you know, this has been centuries and centuries in the making, you would not expect me to let a possible mention of Christianity slip by. I would not.

There is also the thesis that the Holocaust is bred by centuries and centuries of Christian antisemitism. Yes. And, you know, the kind of folkloric belief in Jews as the enemies of Christ, that this is the kind of fertilizing the hatred that will be watered by Hitler. Yeah, and there must be some element of truth in that, Tom, that somewhere when you're analyzing the ingredients that lead to the death camps, the weight of history has to play a part,

hasn't it? Although, as we will see, the quality of modern antisemitism is racial rather than religious but but but i agree i think it is you know that is a fact it must be also i'm sure we'll know if you were picking a country in 1900 where a holocaust might happen germany probably wouldn't have been top of the list russia france might have been even as antisemitism is probably more virulent in france in some ways with the drafus Anyway, we're sort of jumping ahead of ourselves. So there's always that tension. Is Nazism uniquely German? Is it uniquely European? Is it about something to do with modernity? Or if you were stepping right back, does it speak to something very dark in

human nature? Well, so isn't there also the question of, is it bred of material circumstances? So a kind of economic collapse, the hyperinflation, the Great Depression, all that kind of a bit of both, that it's economic crisis amplifies extremist opinions. I think, yes, I think you're right. I think that's a fascinating tension, isn't it? Because I know generally in this podcast, I tend to be Mr. Material and you're much more interested in ideas than I am. So we'll probably, well, we'll tease a lot of this out, I guess. So should we start by talking about, maybe we'll tease a lot of this out, I guess. So should we start by talking about, maybe we'll start by talking about Germany. Yes. Okay. So how far back would you trace the origins of Nazism? Would you trace it back to medieval antisemitism? Would you trace

it back to Luther? Would you trace it back to Frederick the Great? Would you trace it back to Bismarck? Well, Richard Evans, who I mentioned already in his magnificent books on the Third Reich, he begins by saying something like, does it make sense to start with Bismarck? And he thinks it does. And I think, in a sense, you're right, because there's only really one lifetime, not even one lifetime that separates Bismarck founding the German Empire in 1871, and the coming to power of the Nazis at the beginning of the 1930s. So it kind of, you know, since somebody could plausibly see both, it makes sense to use that as a span.

So Germany didn't exist before 1871. I mean, there's a concept of Germany and there are people who speak German and there's a sense of German culture and German literature and German history, but there's no state. Which would include Austria. We should put that out. Yes. So Austria will play a part in this because, of course, Hitler is Austrian,

but Austria is shut out of the creation of Germany or the Germans in Austria because they're part of the Habsburg Empire. There are definitely elements in – so Bismarck is the great guiding spirit of this new German empire that's created when they beat the French in 1871. And there are definitely elements in Bismarck's creation, the Second Reich. We did a whole podcast about this with Katja Hoyer back in the early days of the rest of history, that prefigure Nazism. So Bismarck believes in force to get his way. Well, famously, yeah, blood and iron is the famous phrase that he uses, isn't it?

I don't think that makes him unusual in 19th century Europe at all. He's very ruthless and subtle. But it is specifically that he's talking about how the great questions of the day should not be decided by speeches and all that kind of stuff. That essentially, you know, I buy on and blood. He basically means the military, doesn't he? He doesn't,

but he, I mean, it works. He gets, he fights at three wars against the Danes, against the Austrians and then against the French. But that is a contrast say with Britain. I mean, it's a very obvious question.

Britain is already, well, Britain is fighting wars abroad. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people would say, come on, you know,

the British are fighting their wars in the Sudan or Egypt or whatever. But Bismarck is enshrining a political role for the army. Agreed. And the army obviously is a tool of force. So it could be argued that the idea that force and violence are acceptable expressions of political will are kind of soldered into the German constitution. They are. I mean, I don't know if that's valid but i think a lot of people historians would agree with you about that tom and they would say the

the army is enshrined within brismarck's second reich it's kind of like a state within a state it's self-governing it answers only to the kaiser it doesn't answer to civilian politicians because isn't that there's kind of the um the joke is that politicians in the Second Reich are constantly threatened from a coup above? That if they go too far, they know that the generals and the Kaiser will dump on them. Well, this is exactly what will happen, actually, Tom. This is the shadow that hangs over the Weimar Republic later on in the years before the Nazis come to power. You have the big man, so initially the Kaiser and then President Hindenburg in the 1920s with the army, and that they're actually often working against the democratically elected

politicians. So there's that. There's the idea of a kind of Germandom, that all German speakers have a destiny to be united in a single empire, a Reich. So that's obviously there in the late 19th century. There is the experience of imperialism, the colonial experience. The Germans, if you were defending the Germans, you would say learning from other European countries' example where they behave with great ruthlessness and bloodthirstiness, for example, in southwest Africa where they massacre the Herero population. There's an anxiety about Bismarck's Second Reich.

So there's a sense that they have been, they're latecomers, aren't they, to the European party. They're a new state welded together, as you said, by iron and blood. And there's a sense that the British and the French in particular have had centuries head start. And I've got all these colonies and all these advantages and the Germans are catching up and feel a little bit resentful about it. That said, Bismarck is clearly not a Nazi. He is reactionary, undoubtedly, but then there are lots of reactionary, I mean, Lord Salisbury is a reactionary. There are lots of reactionary politicians in Europe. But also, there are lots of militaristic politicians. We've emphasised the militaristic character of the Second Reich, but it is also very democratic.

And in lots of ways, it is more democratic than Britain. Yes, it is. Absolutely. A much larger franchise. It has a much larger franchise. Exactly right. Much larger trade union movement. I suppose what you would say, again, if you're looking with the benefits of hindsight, you

would say they have this huge party, the Social Democratic Party, kind of a left wing party. It's the largest party in the world, right? Yeah, a million members, the largest democratic party in the world. And yet there's always this sense in Bismarck, in the state that Bismarck has created, that they're not really legitimate, that there's always this suspicion of them, this idea that the conservative middle classes are terrified of them, they say that they are Marxists. Well, they are Marxists. That they are a threat to the

integrity of the Reich, that they are subversive, all this kind of thing. That said, people are saying similar things in Britain about the Labour Party, about radicals, even saying about the Liberals. Well, they are about the Labour Party. I mean, less so about the Liberals. I mean, the thing about parliamentary democracy in Britain is that you have the notion of Her Majesty's loyal opposition. You do. Which you seem to have less so in Germany, where there is on the part of the, let's call them the bourgeoisie, the bourgeois parties, the parties of the right, the parties of the middle classes, they are terrified of the

social democrats. And they never really regard them as legitimate. And so that is a theme that will feed through into the post-war period, right? Yeah, you're absolutely right, Tom. And that's a fair point. Looking back now, from post-1933, you can say they never trusted the Social Democrats. It's the biggest party, certainly the biggest party from 1912 in Germany. But among the judiciary, the police, big business, the establishment, there was always this sense, oh, they're not legitimate, we should crush them. That said, if the First World War had gone differently for Britain, then you would have looked back at Edwardian Britain, and you would have found people saying the liberals are betraying our country because of home rule, the liberals,

you know, you would have, Gladstone was a traitor, you know, they would have found people saying that. So I wonder whether there's an element of hindsight here. And I suppose also, say Britain had been defeated in the First World War or France, you would also have found, not only within the constitutional World War or France, you would also have found not only within the constitutional structure of each country, but also within the current of ideas

swirling around. So that's also a part of the mix. Absolutely, it is. Yeah, you're absolutely right. So I think across Europe, not just in Germany, but across Europe, you have deep anxiety about modernity, all sorts of political and cultural and social tensions. So you see it in Britain, for example, in the Edwardian period about votes for women and all these sorts of things, about culture generally, distrust of sort of abstract culture and the new music and all that kind of thing. But in Germany, I think we can identify, let's say the 1880s and 1890s. I think a lot of historians would say Nazism is in many ways a creation of the 1880s and 1890s. You can see the ingredients. The 1880s and 1890s across Europe, intellectually, are being reconfigured by one big idea,

which is Darwinism. Yeah. And what Darwinism does is to upend the fundamentally Christian idea that the rich have a duty of care for the poor and so on, that there is a, there is a value in being, you know, in weakness,

if you like, and it upends that at least the way that, that Darwinism comes to be expressed, the idea of survival of the fittest and so on. And that provides intellectual sanction for European countries across the board at their economic, their military, their cultural apex, basically to go around kicking sand in the face of anyone they want to. I think that's probably true. I think Darwinist ideas, I agree with you. I think they permeate into all kinds of different areas. The idea of competition, the idea of struggle, the idea of inevitable confrontation. And as you said, actually, Tom, I think you're probably right.

A disdain for weakness that perhaps wasn't so strong before. And therefore, a kind of an anxiety that different peoples are in a race, and that if you drop behind, then you're going to be crushed. So I was kind of looking at this in the context of all the various themes that will feed into Nazism. And it's very kind of international so you have you have a german wilhelm marr who in 1873 is recalibrating christian anti-semitism in very overtly darwinian terms that it's not about religious prejudice it's about the fact that there are differences within the blood yeah and he absolutely so he's explicit about that it's not not religious. It's racial. It's racial. And he coins the word antisemitism.

And it's something he's tremendously proud of. And he, 1879, he founds the League of Antisemites. So that's the German angle. But then in France, also, you have, as you said, this incredible strain of antisemitism. And it's in France that thinkers coined the idea of the Aryans as a master race, the kind of people from the North as people who should properly be the rulers. I mean, it's kind of an odd thing for the French. What's his name? Gobineau. And that gets translated into German in 1898. So that's obviously also part of it. But then there is also this British figure,

Houston Stuart Chamberlain, who writes this work, The Foundations of the 19th Century. And he further kind of refines this idea that history is forged by the competition between races. And he posits that the two great races, the two racial groups that have kind of retained their original purity amid all the miscegenation that's been going on, are the Aryans and the Jews. And that the Aryans and the Jews are locked, therefore, in a contest for global supremacy. And you can see how this Anglo-French-German swirl of ideas is going to feed into Nazism. But it is there. You know, it's not specific to Germany. Right. Agreed.

Houston Stuart Chamberlain, he was an old boy of Cheltenham College, Tom. And he's drawn into this anti-Semitism because he's a passionate liberal, would you believe? So he hates Benjamin Disraeli. He has an absolute loathing of Benjamin Disraeli, who, of course, has Jewish ancestry. Interestingly, Chamberlain marries the daughter of Richard Wagner. Richard Wagner.

Yeah. So Wagner is a hugely interesting figure. Of course, for some people, he's tainted because of his associations with this. Other people will say, no, listen, the music is separate from the man. Sort of Wagner's shadow, his use of pseudo sort of Nordic and Germanic nationalist mythology in his operas, his intense anti-Semitism, all of that is not unique to him. It's part of that world that you've just been describing, where people are living in a world that on the one hand

is very forward-looking, it's very scientific with all this talk of racial difference. But on the other hand it's very forward-looking with it's it's very scientific with all this talk of racial difference and but on the other hand it's backward looking steeped in history and myth and all that stuff right and that will i mean that is the great tension within fascism and nazism the way that you look back to the heroic days of you know whether it's the germans or the romans or whatever and you look forward to cutting edge science. And the way in which Germany is the scientific brand leader, that its physicians and doctors and epidemiologists have kind of identified all kinds of diseases, have tracked down kind of bacilli, all that kind of stuff. The idea that healthy organisms can be infected by germs. I mean, this provides

a very, very potent metaphor for racists and anti-Semites. Yeah, it's fascinating, actually. The late 19th century is this period of great interest in hygiene, in the idea of social hygiene. Everything is medicalised. People are using medical metaphors all the time. And as you said, it's very easy to slip from talking about social hygiene if you're talking the 1890s or something to talking about racial hygiene so clean cities clean streets but also a clean race where the best people are breeding and and outsiders are kept out because rudolph hess i mean he he defines nazism as applied biology kind of of chilling phrase.

This sort of cranky science, if you like. Confirming all your darker suspicions of science, Dominic. It is. I've always... Yes, you're absolutely right, Tom. Regular listeners will know that I'm very suspicious of science generally. Yeah, so there are people talking about eugenics. There are people talking about capital punishment.

Right. And eugenics, again, eugenics is absolutely you know it's not a right-wing thing it's across the political spectrum the idea that healthy societies should breed out mental physical defection defects as they see them i mean there are tons of intellectuals in britain george bennett shaw all that all that george bennett shaw lots of people who would see themselves as maybe being on the left who are saying, do you know what? We should have eugenics to breed out all these impurities.

We should just execute lots more criminals, get rid of them, get them out, all of this kind of thing. There are a couple of other ideas, though, Tom, just before we move on. So one of them is this idea of pan-Germanism. So this idea that the German people must all be united in one empire, that their opponents are the Jews. So the pan-Germans, there are all sorts of pan-German movements in the 1890s, 1900s.

They're always looking for enemies within and without. They talk in these very sort of broad brush terms. They talk about Germandom, Jewdom, you know, Slavdom. And they think that these different domes are engaged in this apocalyptic war. A lot of pan-Germans are also interested. And here's another medical idea for you in this idea that a race needs room, needs a big living space. So this comes from an anthropologist called Ludwig Voltmann in 1900. He says the German race has evolved more than others

and we need more space and that we'll have to acquire that space. It's the law of nature that we will have to acquire that space from other races. So there's all that stuff. One other element, I think, we've got time for just quickly, which is very very popular

in germany and again you can see similarities with things going on in britain um is this idea of people bands of brothers these are the guys going off into mountains and hiking and singing and this is the backward looking the boy scouts it's the boy scouts in britain in germany there are all kinds of little groups of boys or young men. They'll sometimes dress up in kind of uniform type things. They'll go off hiking, communing with nature. They sit around a fire. They sing nationalist songs. They talk, but they exchange these very ideas when they're out there sitting in the hills and forests of Germany, dreaming idealistically of this utopia, this nationalist utopia that one day will come.

But Dominic, to repeat, I mean, these are extremist ideas. By definition, they're not the mainstream. There's a lot of antisemitism on the margins. But by and large, most Germans are not obsessing about Jews. Jews are incredibly well integrated in Germany. About 1% of the population. What, 600,000, something like that? Yeah. And they're very well integrated, very assimilated, very successful, actually, professional. But that creates resentment though, Tom, I would say. So particularly when there's downturns, like in the 1870s.

Sure. But I think, I mean, there's a case for saying, isn't there, because we know what's going to happen, historians have understandably gone back and looked for the traces of anti-Semitism in the pre-First World War world. But you can overemphasize it, I think. And so therefore, the question is, what role does the First World War play? Because all of these kind of extremist positions, I mean, they're swirling around. But had the Nazis not come to power, had the Holocaust not happened, we're swirling around. But had the Nazis not come to power, had the Holocaust not happened, we wouldn't be in, you know, historians would not be really interested in them. They're right. They'd be curious. So this is why I think the First World

War is absolutely colossal. Our producer is pestering us to take a break, but let's just talk for a couple more minutes about the First World War. Germany's experience of the First World War is absolutely shattering. So if you're a German in 1914, you're very conscious of living in the most modern, the most industrialized, the most forward-thinking society in Europe. And suddenly you're in this war in which the Germans, by the way, they don't think they started it. They think they are encircled and embattled by Russia and France. They blame the Russians and the French above all for the war. They think they had to get involved to support their ally, Austria. And the war is

really, really tough for the Germans on the home front in the way that it isn't, let's say, for the British. So they're blockaded. The British starve them. The British are starving them. So they have famously the turnip winter in Germany, where there is just so little food, where they're drinking coffee made of dust and all this kind of thing. At that point, some people are looking for scapegoats and they're blaming the Jews. So there more than half of all the 13 million men who were mobilized. So by the end of the war, almost 2 million Germans had been killed. There are half a million widows. There are a million German children without fathers. So their world has kind of fallen apart. And also the value of the mark has collapsed.

Yeah, so basically their currency has been inflated to pay for the war. So incredible figure that taxation only covered 14% of German government expenditure through the war. I mean, incredibly. That is incredible. Is debt and inflation, exactly. So they're kind of pauperizing themselves. And that obviously will be very important in the post-war years. Democracy has not exactly been suspended, but it's been sort of pushed to the margins because by the end of the war, the country is being run by a duumvirate of two generals, General Hindenburg, Paul von Hindenburg, and General Erich Ludendorff, who we will definitely be talking about later on.

So this is to keep it together. This is to kind of keep fighting. And then, to the astonished, partly because of press censorship and so on, the German people are astonished when it all falls apart in November 1918. And almost without anybody really knowing what's going on, the Kaiser is suddenly out. I mean, he's out kind of overnight. And a republic has been proclaimed in Berlin by people, many of whom did not even want a republic. So most famously, Friedrich

Ebert, who's the leader of the Social Democrats, he proclaims a republic, even though he actually wanted to keep the monarchy. So the whole thing is falling apart in chaos. Berlin is racked in the winter of 1918-19 by fighting between different left-wing factions. There's rebellions, there's an uprising by a group of people called the Spartacists on the left that is put down by returning soldiers from the war. So total and utter chaos. Everything has suddenly collapsed in ruins. And ordinary Germans, particularly those who fought in the war, are completely horrified and taken unawares by this. And there's a very, very famous example, which I'll just read to you before we go into the break.

So it's a guy who's a corporal. He's been a corporal. He's won the Iron Cross. He's well regarded by his comrades for his bravery. He's not yet 30. And he had been blinded in a gas attack near Ypres in the final weeks of the war. And he's ended up in a hospital in a place called Passauvalc in Pomerania.

And in the hospital, he's been hearing rumors of what's all going wrong. And then on the 10th of November, so literally the day before the war ends, a Protestant pastor comes to visit the hospital to give a speech to them. And he later told the story, he said, I was in a fever of excitement as I listened to the address. The Reverend old gentleman seemed to be trembling when he informed us that the house of Hohenzollern should no longer wear the imperial crown. The fatherland had become a republic, that we should pray to the almighty not to withhold his blessing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then the pastor breaks down and he starts crying. And the soldier says, the corporal says, a feeling of profound dismay fell on the people in that assembly.

And I do not think there was a single eye that withheld its tears as for myself i broke down completely when the old gentleman tried to resume his story by informing us that we must now end this long war because the war was lost and we were at the mercy of the victor it was impossible for me to stay and listen any longer darkness surrounded me as i staggered and stumbled back to my ward and I buried my aching head between the blankets and the pillow. I had not cried since the day I stood beside my mother's grave. And Dominic, the name of that corporal, what was it? It was, of course, Tom, Adolf Hitler. See you after the break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment.

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therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are looking at the rise to power of the Nazis. And Dominic, just before the break, you introduced Adolf Hitler having a, well, basically losing it over germany having been defeated um yeah breaking down and sobbing like a baby beside his mother's grave so we did an episode we did two episodes on hitler didn't we on the life of hitler with um sir ian kershaw but just give us a brief reminder for those who didn't listen to that and who may not know about hitler's background where does he come from so hitler is austrian and i And I think a Syrian would undoubtedly say, the salient thing about Hitler is that up to this point, he is a nobody.

There is nothing remarkable about him at all. He's not particularly, he doesn't appear particularly evil. He's a bit of a failure. He's just a bit of a dropout. So he was born in a place in Austria called Braunau am Inn on Easter Saturday, 1889. He's the fourth child of his Alois and Clara. So Alois' father is just a sort of slightly rubbishy kind of bad-tempered Austrian customs official. He's a civil servant, a sort of minor civil servant. So no Jewish ancestry.

No, nothing interesting. So A.N. dealt with that myth, and he also dealt with the myth that Hitler only had one ball. Tom, you love that. You love that detail, which is completely untrue. Those are the questions that the listeners will be asking, and we just want to put that down. Yeah, so the idea that there's some sort of

physical or extraordinary psychological flaw is not right. It's a cop-out. What we know about Hitler when he was a little boy is that he's perfectly normal and a happy boy. I mean, in Kershaw, his biography describes him playing with his friends in the woods and all this stuff. In 1900, when he's about 11, he moves to a bigger school in the city of Linz. And there, I mean, again, this is really not that exceptional. He's at a big school now, bigger place, doesn't really know anybody,

is very miserable, kind of is lazy, becomes a bit of a dropout, becomes a sort of sullen, surly. Oh, leave me alone. All that kind of stuff. Yeah. He tells his father famously, you know, I want to go and be an artist. And his father shouts at him and says never. Just hanging out in his room.

All that kind of stuff. His father drops dead in 1903. Adolf, who's the apple of his mother's eye, is able to persuade her to let him drop out of school. Then he just spends his time daydreaming and going to concerts. But also, because that's the thing, isn't it?

The stereotype of the teenager in his room listening to music. I mean, Hitler becomes obsessed by Wagner. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, really obsessed. Completely obsessed by Wagner. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, really obsessed. Completely obsessed by Wagner. And you can completely see why this sullen, rather miserable teenager

is obsessed by a composer who celebrates the hero, who conquers, you know, stands atop the bloodied bodies of his enemies. And there are so many, again and again in his operas, the figure of the hero is someone who hasn't been recognised as a hero, who kind of emerges from nowhere so you can absolutely see that a this makes it you know you can you can see the kind of person he is but you also can i think most listeners would say this is not a particularly unusual person i mean there's one in there at mon there are multiple versions of this person in schools the length and breadth of england and they will go on to become loss adjusters, estate agents, small business advisors, you know, perfectly normal people.

So what happens to set Hitler on the path that makes him Hitler? I suppose, so one crucial thing is him going to Vienna. So his mother dies in 1907 when he's 18. He's tried to get into the Fine Arts Academy in Vienna. He doesn't get in twice. Very disappointed by that. It's a crushing blow to him because he's dreamed of being an artist. He ends up as a kind of dropout in a men's hostel, the men's home, and he's painting pictures for tourists, so postcards famously. He gets certain things from Vienna that he perhaps wouldn't have got somewhere else. So Vienna is, of course, it's a largely German-speaking city, but it is the capital of

the Habsburg Empire, what we commonly call Austria. He's spending all his time listening to Wagner. Wagner is very popular in Vienna. But he's also reading stuff. There's a kind of strain of antisemitism that's particularly pronounced in Vienna. It's particularly virulent, because Vienna is a city that is torn apart really by kind of political and racial conflict because the Habsburg Empire is multi-ethnic. Right. Because in Germany, there isn't much mainstream political anti-Semitism. It's on the edges. But in Vienna, that's different. Yeah, it is. Absolutely. So Kershaw says in his biography, you know,

when Hitler goes down to the newspaper kiosk outside the men's home or wherever, it's full of racist periodicals. So we know that he read something called Ostara. We think he read something called Ostara by a guy called Jörg Lanz, which was all about kind of menacing, dark, swarthy figures attacking blonde women, and it's very, very anti-Semitic. But the key figure, I know you're very interested in, Tom, is this guy Georg Ritter von Schönerer. Yes, he wanted to get rid of the Christian calendar,

and he hated Christianity. He wanted to give all the Christian festivals German names. So, you know, Christmas wanted to be Eulafest and all that kind of stuff. But he also wanted to get rid of the Christian dating system and replace it with the date of a defeat of the Romans by the Cimbri and the Teutons.

So that's just before Marius. The Battle of Nerea. And that this should be the equivalent of Grand Zero, the birth of Jesus, replaced the birth of Jesus. Battle of Nerea. That's what it's all about. Which is such a kind of eccentric, mad thing. It's expressive of the kind of the strain of lunatic thinking that characterizes antisemitism. Yeah.

But Schoenera is important so schoenera is he's a he's a he's a sort of quite a popular thinker um in in vienna at the time because he's proposing also things like universal manhood suffrage and kind of greater state activism and so on so it's hard to pin down politically but some of his ideas are definitely going to be very influential schoenera for example wants to push the anti-semitism further than anybody else politically. But some of his ideas are definitely going to be very influential. Schönerer, for example, wants to push the anti-Semitism further than anybody else. He wants to remove Jews completely from the life of... Yeah, so physically, politically. And he's also the guy who comes up with the Heil, right?

Yeah. And his followers call him Führer, leader. So your Roman stuff that you were just mentioning, he starts shouting Heil when he's in Parliament in the early 1900s. And his followers, yeah, they call him the leader. So this sort of cod Roman, you know, the Nazis

are going to pick up on all that later on. There's also another key character in Vienna, very important, influenced upon Hitler and Nazism, is the mayor of Vienna. He's called Karl Luger. Again, very hard to pin down politically because he's like a sort of anti-Semitic Viennese Joseph Chamberlain, the great mayor of Birmingham in Victorian Britain,

because he carries out all these great municipal reforms. So he really modernizes Vienna and he does stuff for the working classes and the low middle classes and so on. But he wins support by being fanatically and virulently anti-Semitic. And we know- So he's a national socialist then? He's a nationalist socialist. Right. We know that Hitler said to people in his men's hostel, oh, Luger is a brilliant man. He's the best mayor of any German in history. So again, he's picking up all of this stuff. And he's probably picking up, he's almost certainly picking up the antisemitism. So there's some debate about exactly when Hitler becomes antisemitic, but he cannot not have been influenced by it. The thing is, his biographers

don't think that it's pathological at that stage stage because he's just thinking about his rubbishy postcards and how miserable he is and Wagner and art and stuff. What clearly happens to him is he goes to the war because he goes to Munich in the interim. There's the famous photo, isn't there, in 1914? Of course, cheering. He's delighted like lots of people are. He really feels like, although he's born in Austria,

he's from a German-speaking family he's german-speaking himself he feels like his destiny lies in a in a in germandom as he would no doubt have called it so he goes off to the war and i think what obviously happens like to a lot of people in the war and this isn't again not just in germany he's brutalized by it he's surrounded by death he's a dispatch runner i mean lots of other dispatch runners are killed it's not you know it's better than some um posts in the army um but it's still not it's not a barrel of laughs um so he's he's inured to death and to suffering i think this is the point that where yeah because before that nobody had said oh Hitler loves violence. He's an evil guy. But I think at this point, you know, he's surrounded by violence.

And then there's that sense of trauma. And that stuff in Passerbuck in the hospital has been invalided out. I mean, you read in, so that thing that I read was, of course, from Mein Kampf, My Struggle, which he writes in the mid-1920s. And there's long passages in that, you know, it had all been in vain, in vain the sacrifices, in vain the hunger and thirst. Was it for this that the soldiers died in August and September 1914? Had all this been done to enable a gang of despicable criminals to lay hands on the fatherland? Right. I mean, this is obsessive stuff so who is he referring to as the criminals is he referring to well they're called the november criminals aren't they the democratic leaders who um agree to the armistice or is he referring to the jews already as the criminals both i think it's fair to say i think um he i mean don't forget he's writing those words

later so he's looking back but But at the time, there had been a rise, I mean, if Hitler was anti-Semitic already because of what he's experienced in Vienna, it makes sense that he's still anti-Semitic in 1918. There had been a rise in anti-Semitism in the last couple of years of the war as people look for scapegoats

because of the shortages, the rationing. So there's a feeling that the Jews are profiteering. Yes, speculators. People are wittering about Jewish speculators, which is completely untrue and unfounded. People are also saying, oh, the Jewish Germans aren't doing their bit for the war effort. Again, completely unfounded.

Many, many... As evidenced by the cemeteries. By the fact that one of the guys who had nominated Hitler, the guy who had nominated Hitler for the Iron Cross, was a Jewish officer. But, you know, people lash out when they're angry and upset. And this is what's happening, I think, across Germany. But also, presumably, I mean, Hitler has an almost religious faith in Germandom, in the blood of the German people, in the blood of the Aryan people,

and yet they have been defeated. So therefore- And it's the nature of that. Therefore, the only way that he can explain that defeat is by treachery. Yeah, you're right. Whether it's democratic politicians or, more sinisterly, this idea of a basilisk within the German bloodstream. Yeah, and the nature of the defeat, Tom, explains that. Because you see, Germans losing in 1918,

they've gone on this tremendous offensive, attempting to win the war in one blow before the Americans can really turn the balance of the war. And they've actually carried all before them, or appeared to in the sort of spring and summer of 1918. And then the great Ludendorff offensive runs out of steam, they've been driven back. And then suddenly it collapses very, very quickly. And there's this sort of sense that the German people have not been prepared for the defeat. Crucially, of course, there are no Allied troops at that point on German soil.

So it's an away fixture that they've lost, as it were, to their surprise because they thought they were winning. And actually when the troops return to Berlin, Friedrich Ebert, who we'll talk about next time, who's a key figure in the creation of the Weimar Republic, social democratic leader, he famously says to them, no enemy has defeated you. And a lot of Germans believe that. They believe somehow they've lost the war, but they weren't really militarily defeated,

which is completely wrong. They were defeated on French and Belgian soil, but it's sort of been kept from them. And so they say, well, we've been stabbed in the back. We've been betrayed by traitors and so on. Anyway, Hitler comes back to Munich, where he'd been before. He comes back on the 21st of November, 1918. And at that point, Munich is already in utter, utter chaos. So when the Kaiser's regime fell apart in the final days of the war, across Germany, people had just sort of randomly seized power in different places. In Munich, power had been seized by a man who could have been designed to provoke Hitler. He's

a guy called Kurt Eisner. He's a theater critic. He's a very sort of bohemian sort of cafe habitué, wears a black cloak and steel-rimmed glasses. He's not even from Munich, he's from Berlin, and he's also Jewish, and he's very left wing. So he basically sets up his own little Bavarian Republic in Munich. It's a complete shambles. Everybody on the right says, oh my God, this Jewish theatre critic has seized power, what the hell's going on? He's assassinated. An even crazier regime comes in, the Bavarian Council Republic, under another, this time it's a poet and playwright called Ernst Toller.

They're utterly ludicrous. Because that's the weird thing about this is, of course, Hitler is an artist. You have all these guys who are kind of various playwrights and critics and all that kind of stuff. It's basically people from the arts pages of newspapers, guys who are kind of various playwrights and critics and all that kind of stuff it's it's basically people from the arts pages of newspapers all staging coups trying to set up dictatorships you know my view tom artistic people should never be allowed anywhere in their politics um yeah so ernst toller's regime so what they declare war on switzerland for not lending them

60 uh railway locomotives one of his ministers famously sends a telegram to Moscow asking for help because he says the previous minister has stolen the key to the ministerial toilet. So it's absolutely shambolic. That regime is then toppled by communists, a much more hardline communist regime, which is very much in touch with what's going on in Moscow. They do think this would appeal to you, Tom. One of their first initiatives is to turn a church in Munich into a temple of reason. Yeah, very, yeah.

Very Robespierre-ish. Very Robespierre behaviour, yes. So Munich is then retaken. And it's retaken by a group who a lot of people say anticipate the Nazis in all kinds of ways. They're called the Freikorps, the Free Corps. And these are basically returning soldiers who they've come back from the war some of them it's still in disbelief that they've lost at all and these are the same guys who are putting down the communists in berlin as well exactly right killing a razor luxembourg and other left-wing people called the spartacists in berlin and they

put down the red republic in um in munich and uh they are very right wing. They are shooting people out of hand. They kill about a thousand, execute about a thousand communists when they finally fight their way into Munich. So Munich in all this period, this sort of six month period has been an absolute basket case. So what is Hitler up to at this point? I mean, what's he doing?

Hitler is still in the army. He's a corporal because he was in the Bavarian army. So the different states of the empire sent their own sort of contingents. So he's in the Bavarian army. And in the summer of 1918, 1919 rather, the officers do what, you know, you would do in such a situation. They want to make sure that their men all have the right ideas because they're worried that communist Bolshevik ideas are spread among the soldiers.

So they start to send people to sort of training camps and for instruction. They listen to lectures and speeches and so on. Hitler, we know, goes to these and he's very good. I mean, there's no other way of putting it. He's very keen. He likes the ideas. And he finds that he has a talent for public speaking, right?

This is the moment where he discovers that he has this kind of malign genius for rabble-rousing, basically. Yeah. So he's basically been sitting in the lectures and answering questions and doing whatever they do, breaking for group discussions, no doubt. And the superiors say, he's really good. We'll get him to give some of the lectures. He starts doing it in August, 1919. And again, they say he's very,

very good at talking to the men because he talks to the men because he's one of them. He talks in simple, earthy, direct language. He's burning with bitterness about defeat. He hates the left, the communists and so on. He hates the Jews. So his anti-Semitism is very, very pronounced at this stage. There's a famous letter from this time where he's talking, he describes the racial tuberculosis. So again, it's that idea of disease.

That medical language, exactly. So he's found a voice. This nobody has found something. The one thing he's very good at, which is basically ranting and raving to groups of soldiers who listen. Now, his superiors decide to build on that. total political chaos. There are dozens and dozens of different political parties, far left, far right, cranky, extreme, all sorts. One of them is a party called the German Workers' Party. And this had been founded in January 1919 by a locksmith called Anton Drexler. And it's an outgrowth of something that will interest you, Tom. I would call it the Thule Society, but you would, I imagine it's Thule. Thule. Ultima Thule, which for the Romans was the icy land in the farthest

north, so Iceland or whatever. Yeah. So this is a kind of tiny, hard-right pan-German group, but it's also very anti-Semitic. So they're also really into the occult and stuff, aren't they? They are, yes. And also they're very into the idea of Arian stuff aren't they they are yes yes and also they um

they're very into the idea of of arianism and so they use the swastika which is kind of ancient indian symbol as a symbol for for the arians so that's kind of bubbling away and they're led by this convicted forger fraudster who is passing himself off as a baron. Oh, right. The Thule Society. Yeah. So it's all... And it's Thule because it's the furthest north. So it's this idea of a Nordic race, all that kind of stuff.

Yeah. So the German Workers' Party is a kind of slight spin-off of this by this guy, Drexler. It's selling all those ideas that were floating around in the 1880s 1890s kind of pan germanism nationalism anti-semitism it's aimed at kind of lower middle class people it is actually very very small it's nothing unusual in munich it's one of many such parties

and hitler was sent by his um his captain a guy called Karl Mayr, who actually later completely hated Hitler and ended up being killed in the Second World War. Mayr says, go along and see what's going on with these guys. So Hitler goes in. There's this little meeting. In the Q&A, somebody gets up and says, I think Bavaria should break away from the rest of Germany and become its own country.

Hitler jumps to his feet and just starts shouting and says, I think Bavaria should break away from the rest of Germany and become its own country. Hitler jumps to his feet and just starts shouting and says, this is a terrible idea, you know, ranting and raving. And afterwards- It's very like Twitter. Right. I guess so. Drexler says to him, you know, you're very, I was impressed by you, young man, you know, why don't you, we'd love you to join. And Hitler joins. He becomes member 555. Now,

they definitely didn't have more than 500 members. Probably they had 55 members, but they would put the, you know, they would sort of give the impression they were bigger than they were, pad it out. He goes to more meetings. It seems probable that the army encouraged him to keep going. They said, you know, oh, great. They like you at this. Keep going. Keep an eye on them. You know, maybe we can use them. You know, we can keep tabs on them. Brilliant.

You keep turning up. So Hitler goes and he gives speeches at them and he becomes their star speaker. I mean, they're not a highly talented outfit. So you might say that's not very difficult. Big fish in a small pond. Yeah. But there's no doubt he's very good at it. And 1919 becomes 1920. The meetings get bigger and bigger and bigger. And mass meetings and kind of beer halls and things. If you read the descriptions by Ian Kershaw and Richard Evans, they make it clear that it's easy for us to say,

these are sort of weirdos and cranks, and it's easy to win them over. But he is very good at it. He gives these, as Evan says, he uses simple, straightforward language that ordinary people can understand, short sentences, powerful emotive slogans. He will start quietly to get people's attention, and then he'll get louder and louder, and he'll work himself into a physical frenzy, kind of sweating and shouting. And it's the sort of simplicity and the absolutism of the message. No hint of doubt, no hint of nuance. You know, he loves Germany.

It's the Jews who are responsible for everything that has gone wrong. And the crisis facing Germany is so complex, is so terrible. It's such a snarl of complexities that I guess very stark, simple explanations for what is going on have an obvious appeal. Of course they do, yeah. I mean, imagine that. I've often thought about this. To be German in the Edwardian, what we would call the Edwardian period,

was great. You know, your country had come from nowhere and was the dynamo of Europe. Amazing culture, universities, science, industry. And then you go into this war that you don't think, I mean, lots of historians may think it's Germany's fault fault but the germans themselves don't you go into this war and life just falls apart and suddenly you're in 1919 the kaiser is gone the everything that you believed in has been turned upside down is in an absolute and utter chaos and of course you're looking for artists and i think it's evans richard evans talks about what he calls the revivalist fervor of Hitler's meetings, and in such traumatic times, you can absolutely see why people who feel themselves to be suffering and to be humiliated would grasp a message offering salvation and offering scapegoats actually yeah because the jewish the anti-jewish stuff is right there from the beginning interestingly and i was quite surprised um so thinking back to my my terrible gcse history i mean the teacher by the way mr gorsy was excellent but i but i clearly had completely

misunderstood because i always thought that anti-marxism was so key to hitler but both uh in kershaw and richard evans say no he doesn't really talk about marxism was so key to Hitler. But both Ian Kershaw and Richard Evans say no. He doesn't really talk about Marxism at this point or Bolshevism. What he's talking about all the time are the Jews. So the anti-Bolshevism comes later. But that makes sense, doesn't it? Because to be anti-Marxist would be to be part of a conventional political debate of a kind that is familiar across Europe and has been for decades. Well, really, since the French Revolution, you might almost say. But to identify the Jews as the problem is to be talking in a kind of sub-Darwinian mode that perhaps people hadn't

realized before, that the blood is all, and that therefore, if the blood gets infected then disaster happens it's a new radical explanation that people in the mood to accept it are going to accept and actually another thing tom though is um it's the violence of it we did the podcast about auschwitz the question that hangs over all this is at what point is the final solution on the table? I mean, Hitler is saying in April 1920, the Jews are to be exterminated. In August 1920, you shouldn't think that you can fight a disease without killing the cause. Without annihilating the bacillus, you won't be able to get rid of the racial tuberculosis. April 1921, the solution of the Jewish question can only be solved by brute force. So all of those ideas are there at this stage. I mean, what the thing is, though, so Hitler has cronies at this point.

By 1921, he has control of the Nazi Party. There are various internal shenanigans. He's threatened to walk out. So when does it become the Nazi Party? When's that name change happened? So it goes from the German Workers' Party to the National Socialist German Workers' Party in February 1920. And Hitler also designs the flag.

So the swastika, that comes from the Thule. Thule Society. Thule Society. The colours, black, white, red, they are are the imperial colors they're the colors of the kaiser's right so you can see there's a reactionary element but there's also the kind of slightly cranky occultist element very cranky with the with the swastika exactly um so he lives in charge really by the summer of 1921 he's threatened to walk out and he's been made the big man in the party. He has started to get a group of

cronies, some very recognisable names. So Hans Frank, his lawyer, you mentioned before, Rudolf Hess. So they're both in the Thule society, aren't they? They're both in the Thule society. A guy called Julius Streicher, he comes in from Nuremberg. He becomes the, he's an

absolutely obsessive anti-Semite. He edits Der Stürmer, the famous anti-Semitic newspaper. He's a key figure because he's going to reach out to Protestants as well as the sort of Catholic population of Bavaria. Hermann Goering. Yeah. He comes in, he's an air ace. He'd flown with the Red Baron.

He had, well, he'd ended up becoming the commander of the Red Baron's flying circus at the very end of the war. He's amazingly, given his sort of corpulence later in life, he's seen as this great dashing romantic figure in the 1920s. So a bit of a coup for the Nazis to get him. And there's another anti-Semichot, Alfred Rosenberg, who is fanatically anti-Christian. So one for you, Tom. Rosenberg has plans to replace all crosses in Germany with swastikas and to replace all copies of the Bible with Mein Kampf.

Yeah. Well, he's ahead of Hitler there. Yeah, he is indeed. Who for much of the 20s is proclaiming the Nazis are very Christian. Yeah. But he can see more clearly that that isn't the case. I mean, they're not friends I would personally choose to have. No.

But they're hanging around with Hitler in the early 1920s. So it's a small party, but it's growing. Now, here's the funny thing as we look forward to the next episode. All the ingredients are there. So you've got all the themes, the Lebensraum, the pan-Germanism, the search for scapegoats, the hatred of the Treaty of Versailles that has settled the end of the First World War, the hatred of the so-called November criminals, all of that stuff.

The violence, the speeches, all of that is there. But the one thing that's not there is that at this point, Hitler does not see himself as a future leader of Germany. As Ian Kershaw puts it, Hitler sees himself as merely the drummer. He is the propagandist. He is the John the Baptist who is paving the way for the Messiah who one day will lead this German national movement to greatness. But that, of course, will change.

And I guess we'll have to wait until next time, Tom, to discover how and why. And, of course, if you're a member of the Restless History Club, you can listen to that right now. Don't need to wait. Pile straight in. Don't need to wait at all. The Weimar Republic awaits.

But if you're not, you will have to wait until Thursday for Weimar. And I guess we will see you then. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community,

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