The Rest Is History - 405. The Nazis in Power: The Nuremberg Rallies

Episode Date: January 4, 2024

“We did not lose the war because our artillery gave out, but because the weapons of our mind didn’t fire” In September 1934, the Nazis held their sixth annual party conference in the Bavarian city of Nuremberg. The location held a symbolic resonance for the party, being not only the embodiment of an uncorrupted medieval Germany, and the centre of the First Reich, but also a bedrock of anti-Semitism. It was therefore here that Hitler would lay out his terrifying vision for the mighty new empire’s future, promulging the superiority and purity of the Aryan bloodline. The rally was a pageant of ritualised fanaticism, recalling the majesty of Germany’s mythic past and all the heroism of classical antiquity. It was the first of many such extravagant displays, replete with parades of marching workers, bonfires, and swastikas, as the Nazi propaganda machine, under the leadership of the grotesque Joseph Goebbels, tightened its stranglehold over Germany. Through the popularisation of the radio, Nazi youth organisations, cinema, and even the Olympic Games, German minds were being steadily remoulded… Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the Nazis' gradual indoctrination of the German people in the build up to the Second World War, and the beginnings of Hitler’s plans for not only the Third Reich, but the entire world. Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett 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. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful, as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert, as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks and only make left turns where it's safe to do so.

Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. Whether in the game or in life, the right coverage can make all the difference. Securian Canada gives you that coverage. For more than 65 years, Securian Canada has been helping Canadians build secure tomorrows. Their insurance solutions are designed to help protect you and your loved ones financially, giving you the peace of mind to focus on what truly matters.

Find their products through banks, credit unions and associations, or visit SecurianCanada.ca. Securian Canada, insurance designed for life. We want to be a peace-loving people, but at the same time, courageous. That is why you must be peaceful and courageous at the same time. We want our people to be honour-loving. To that end, you must, from earliest childhood, learn the conception of honor. We want to be a proud people, and you must be proud.

Proud to be the youthful members of the greatest nation. We want an obedient people, and you must learn to practice obedience. We want a people that is not soft but hard as flint, and we want you from early youth to learn to overcome hardships and privations. There must be no classes or class distinctions among our people, and you must never let the idea of class distinctions take root among you. All we expect of the Germany of the future, we expect of you, we shall pass on. But Germany will live in you. So that, Tom, was very much not a friend of the rest of history, Fuhrer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler, on the afternoon of the 8th of September 1934,

and he was addressing the youth formation, so both boys and girls, at the annual Nazi Party rally, which was held in the Bavarian city of Nuremberg. And we ended last time, didn't we, with the aftermath of the Light of the Long Knives, the apotheosis of the Hitler cult. We did.

You didn't want me to give the game away and to use the words Nuremberg rally because you thought that would spoil the excitement and the tension and the cliffhanger. Yeah. But I think I can now reveal that you're going to be talking about the Nuremberg rally. Yeah, so you've done me that. But I think I can now reveal that you're going to be talking about the Nuremberg rally.

Yeah. So you've done me that. And also you have conveyed the electric magnetism and power of Hitler's oratory. The charisma. Spitalflect. The diabolical charisma. Yes, because we had a bit of a discussion about whether you should do it in the German accent, and I'm glad that you did. And also you did it with the hand actions. Yeah. So the way that you built up to a crescendo, very, very powerful.

Could we be cancelled for something the viewers can't see the listeners can't see no i don't think so because as you said i think it is important to convey to people the potency of hitler yeah as a national leader because if we don't understand that we don't get a handle on that if we just think he was evil full stop let's not think about it any further then you don't understand what is going to be happening over the course of the years that follow, which is essentially that Hitler and the Nazis set about, I mean, would it be too much of an exaggeration? Their aim is to brainwash the German people. That's exactly what they want to do, to indoctrinate them.

And in a way, this extraordinary gathering of the Nazi party a couple of months after the Night of the Long Knives and three weeks after the plebiscite that has seen Hitler become completely supreme, the Führer, the leader of the German people, this extraordinary public rally in Nuremberg. So officially, it's a party congress for the Nazis. It's not the first one. They've been having these congresses right the way from 1923. So the first one's held in Munich. They also had one in Weimar, but they also had a couple in Nuremberg. And the last one that they have is in 1929 in Nuremberg. And then they have it again in 1933. So that's after they've come to power and it's described as the day of victory. And I suppose in a way, the nearest equivalent would be the party congresses, the party conferences

that we have in Britain or they have in most democratic countries. But this is designed to be overwhelming in a way that say a party conference with Keir Starmer or Rishi Sunak. The comparison with Sunak and Starmer's party conferences is an outlandish one, Tom. Right. And the third and fourth congresses in 1927 and 1929 had been held in Nuremberg. The 1933 one had been held in Nuremberg, and the 1934 one is as well. And the day before the 1933 congress had opened, Hitler had said, we're always going to hold it in Nuremberg from now on. Because Nuremberg has an immense kind of symbolic resonance for the Nazis. And it's suggested by one of the most sinister, I mean, you know, all the Nazis are sinister, but one of the most sinister of all the Nazis, which is Julius Streicher, who founded the

Sturmtrooper, patron of Unity Mitford. And he'd grown up there and he suggested it to Hitler as a suitable location because it is the embodiment of kind of medieval Germany, a Germany that's been uncorrupted by modernity, by kind of sinister things like modernist architecture. So in the official Nazi paper, the Volkisch Observer, an editorial in 1927, when the Congress had come there, had praised it for its turrets, its mighty walls and towers, which give testimony of manly power and fighting spirit. But Tom, there's all kinds of significance, historic significance to Nuremberg, because Nuremberg was one of the most common locations for the old imperial diets of the kind of

Holy Roman Empire. Yeah, absolutely. I've been to Nuremberg. I've seen the Holy Roman Empire as kind of the regalia and stuff in the imperial castle. It's also the city of kind of guilds and burr graves and all these kinds of things, isn't it? But it's also famous for its history of antisemitism. So there had been pogroms in Nuremberg in the 13th and 14th centuries, I think.

Its history is interwoven with the Nazi myth of Germany's past. Right. And someone before who got all this, of course, was Wagner. One of his great operas is set in Nuremberg, The Meister Singer, and Hitler is all over that. And so the Nazis, when they choose Nuremberg as their base, they are identifying themselves very, very deliberately with all this and with the past. And in the 1934 rally, they have a showroom in which they're making this absolutely explicit. So they have Martin Luther, he'd written a notoriously anti-Semitic pamphlet on the Jews and their lies. And they have a copy of this on display.

And they also, of course, you mentioned that Nuremberg is the center for the first Reich, the original Reich, the First Empire. They have a copy of Charlemagne's Orb and Scepter and Crown. And this really, really matters. The fact that the Nazis are aligning themselves with the First Reich and also, of course, with the Second Reich, the Reich of the Kaiser. So all these kind of parades and displays, that's very, very Kaiser. But of course, we've talked about this before, that the Nazis, what's distinctive about them, it's not just that they look backwards, that they're atavistic,

that they are drawing on the wellsprings of a kind of imagined German past, but also that they are absolutely cutting edge, that they're looking to the future, that they're the embodiment of the white heat of technology and everything like this. And so this is the context for a famous pronouncement that Hitler makes actually in his first speech at the 1934 rally. When looking back to what Röhm had been wanting, a permanent revolution in a kind of brown Trotskyite sense, Hitler says, no, we're not going to have that. There will not be another revolution in Germany. And then he makes this kind of resonant, symbolic phrase, in the next 1,000 years. Oh, the 1,000-year Reich. Yeah.

So this is where the whole idea of a 1,000-year Reich coming, a Third Reich that will last for 1,000 years. And the 1934 Congress is called the Party Day of Unity. So there's an emphasis on the fact that all the upheavals, all the bloodshed that had characterized the previous months, these are now over. This, in turn, enables it also to serve as the party day of power, because with unity comes power. Even though the revolution has been brought to a close, that doesn't mean that the Nazis do not want to project themselves as the embodiment of urgency, of clamour, of aggression, because this is how they are going to enthuse and inspire and excite the German people. Yeah. So when you say the revolution has been brought to a close, because they've killed Ernst Ruhm and they've crushed the SA, who are now just, I mean, they're still there,

but they're a shadow of their former self. So the sense of disorder, they want to lose the disorder, but they want to maintain- Keep the drama. The energy, I guess. Yes. The sense of drama and excitement. And the Nuremberg rallies are the kind of climax for a whole series of festivals that the Nazis have begun instituting, really to try and replace the old Christian and also the kind of socialist festivals. So they have begun instituting really to try and replace the old Christian and also the kind of socialist festivals. So they have a festival on the 30th of January, which is the

day that the Nazis seize power, 20th of April, Hitler's birthday, summer solstice, which is kind of enshrined as a great pagan ceremony, all this kind of thing. But the Nuremberg rally is seen as the climax of the year. It's seen as the official way it's phrased is that it's a consummation of the marriage between the party and the people. It's couched in very symbolic, very religious language. Hitler loves a kind of atavistic pagan ritual. At the Nuremberg rally, you have this kind of weird thing where he consecrates new party colors by touching them with one hand. And with his other one, he clasps the cloth of the Blutfahne, which was the blood banner, which had allegedly been drenched in the gore of Nazi martyrs in the Munich Putsch in 1923. So you can imagine the kind of the Wagnerian chords striking up and all that kind of stuff.

And how much of this, Tom, is orchestrated by Goebbels? Because Goebbels, of course, has a PhD in kind of theatre studies or something, doesn't he? Goebbels is all over this, but Hitler is as well, because Hitler is a frustrated artist, Goebbels also. Yes, of course. And so they have this huge stage on which they can parade these incredible, well, I mean, literally Wagnerian dramas. Well, I was about to say, you mentioned Wagner.

I mean, Hitler's great hobby when he was a young man was going to see Wagner's operas with these very sort of lavish, you know, famously the Ring Cycle when people stage it, it's very over the top. Yeah. And so he must be drawing on that to some degree. But also, of course, they have huge casts. You know, Wagnerian operas require enormous numbers of people. But Hitler now, you know, he can command everyone in the Nazi party.

So as well as all the speeches and the exhibitions that they have at the rally, they also have stupefying parades. So there are about 700,000 people who are taking part, who are participating in this. They have a parade of workers. They kind of march through the streets. They've got shovels on their shoulder and they look tanned. They look fit. They're the embodimenthrer, of the leader. And they have a great rally of party apparatchiks, so Gauleiters, party district leaders and party members. Hitler are both incredibly alert to this. This is staged so that Hitler is able to address them as the sun sets. And it's timed so that his closing remarks coincide with the onset of night, the sun has set. And as he gives the last words of his address, they light bonfires along the horizon and great searchlights. They start kind of sweeping the sky so that it gives the illusion that he's standing in a kind of an incredibly austere and colossal Greek temple fashioned out of light. And so the impact is absolutely visually overwhelming. And I think

that for those who attend it, you kind of feel dissolved into the totality of everyone who's taking part. You're dissolved basically into the tattoo of the Volk, the idea of the German people, which is also a kind of German bloodline. This is what it's all designed to conjure. All distinctions are raised, as you said in that opening speech. No class distinctions. You're just all part of this great collective regimented mass. But a regimented mass that is being encouraged to feel at a kind of fever pitch of excitement, of fanaticism. So under the Nazis, the word fanaticism comes to be a word of phrase, blind obedience, which to us, I guess, would be a pejorative. To the Nazis, blind obedience is something to be celebrated. Nuremberg is the visualization, I guess,

the dramatization of this kind of Newspeak, what Orwell would call Newspeak, the recalibration of language in the cause of the totalitarian state. Even foreign observers are overwhelmed and impressed by it. So there's an American journalist, isn't there? William Shira. Oh, yes. Who writes a lot about it. And he's there. And so he witnessed the parade of the guys with their shovels. I mean, I can't imagine anything less interesting than watching a load of guys with shovels walking past. But he's, I mean, he's all over it.

Long columns of bare-chested men standing perfectly at attention, then breaking into chants of ideological slogans and exhibiting extraordinary skill in goose-stepping, all to the spontaneous cheers of the spectators. So Schirer, I mean, despite himself, is impressed by this. He talks about Hitler as a messiah. People looking at Hitler like a messiah. And he talks about them being caught up in the mobs of people screaming and all that kind of thing. I mean, it's one of the most amazing descriptions actually of a Nuremberg rally you'll ever read. The ecstasy and the intensity of his description. Well, it's kind of like a rock concert or something.

Exactly. Exactly. Because, you know, in due course, that is what the kind of the parade grounds will come to hold. Tom, do you know what? I watched a clip last night and I saw the screaming crowds. It was kind of digitally restored. So it looked less like 1940s footage or 1930s footage. More like Beatlemania or something. Exactly. Then a 1960s black and white footage. And I thought people at the time in Beatlemania did say, you know, cultural conservatives

said it's like the Nuremberg rallies. But this sheer ecstasy, the people sobbing with excitement. You definitely didn't see that when Stanley Baldwin addressed the conservative party in the 1930s. No, but again, it's proof of how the Nazis kind of forge a path that people, even after the war, will follow. So organisers of rock festivals, rallies, whatever, they are using the techniques that the Nazis deploy and are experimenting with. And it's a tremendous success. Now, of course, the challenge for the Nazis is how do they get the whole of the German people to share in this experience? Because Nuremberg is one tiny corner of Germany. How do you propagate it across the entire Reich?

And the answer essentially is to send across that sense of kind of ritualized ecstasy to try and propagate it across every city, every town, every village in Germany. So that's why, for instance, swastikas are everywhere. I mean, this is kind of the default visual signifier for Nazi Germany, isn't it? And the swastika in 1934 is one of two flags. So you also have the kind of traditional imperial German flag. But in the following year, so the 1935 Nuremberg rally, Hitler announces that the swastika alone is going to be the German flag and it has to be saluted. And Schirra actually, in his account of the 1934 rally, describes how he has to keep ducking into side streets and so on, because he knows that if he doesn't salute the flag, the SA will beat him up. Yeah. And the salute that people are doing is the raised arm,

what they regard as a Roman style salute. Yeah. Have they inherited that from Mussolini? Is that right? Yeah, they have. So it's described by the historian Richard Grunberger, who wrote a brilliant book, A Social History of the Third Reich. And he describes it as being one of the most potent forms of totalitarian conditioning conceivable, because everybody has to do it. And so it becomes, unthinkingly, it's that kind of shaking hands or whatever. There isn't a law saying that you have to salute it, the swastika or whatever. But basically, if you don't, you'll get beaten up. Although Grunberger does point out, in fairness to the

Nazis, that in 1933, it was agreed that dismissal notices issued by firms, especially at Christmas time, were not to end with the phrase, Heil Hitler. Because it couldn't be associated with bad news. Is that right? Yeah. So he kind of Scrooge, you know, kicking people out. He wouldn't have had to say it. So that's one way, I think, in which you do it. The swastikas, the Heil Hitlerling, the salutes, it just becomes kind of unthinking custom for people. But the other way in which you do it is that you invest in overt propaganda. So famously, one way in which specifically the 1934 Nuremberg rally is propagated around Germany and the world is that Hitler commissions a film to be made about it.

And the person he commissions is an actress who has developed to become a director called Leni Riefenstahl. And there is great mutual admiration between the two of them. So Hitler has been following her career with great interest. So she'd been a dancer, but there's this whole kind of weird craze for German films in the 20s featuring skiing and mountain slopes. And Leni Riefenstahl is blonde. So Hitler would call her the embodiment of German womanhood. And she ends up directing this film called The Blue Light, in which she plays a kind of noble peasant girl. And there's weird lighting effects and alpine snows and braids and all that kind of thing. And he absolutely loves it. And she likewise adores

him. So she had first heard him speak in 1932. And in her diary, she describes it in kind of rapturous, kind of mystical terms. She's kind of blown away. So she does see him as a kind of messiah, do you think? I think she does. I mean, it's very controversial because, of course, she survives the war. And the question of her role, how embroiled she is in Nazi ideology is very controversial, but I think it's pretty clear that she is a true believer. And she produces this film, Triumph of the Will, which is kind of absolutely classic work of Nazi propaganda and a true reflection of what the Nuremberg rallies are all about.

Because you watch it and you feel, yeah, this is simultaneously full of marching armies and torches and Greek columns rising up with beams of light. So it feels simultaneously very, very atavistic and very, very futuristic. I guess the sequence that most potently and notoriously expresses that is the opening. It begins with Hitler's plane flying over steeply banked clouds, and you hear the drone of it going and he he's kind of like odin who flew through the skies at the head of the great hunt but of course he is also at the cutting edge of technology he was the first politician to use planes to go around you know when he was campaigning when he was electioneering just on triumph of the will for those people who haven't seen it

it's a strange film to watch because of course course, it's evil. You know, we would regard it as evil, celebrating evil. But it is an absolutely brilliant film. As a work of art, it is one of the three or four most influential films ever made. And actually, there's another scene at the end of the film, Tom. You can see it on YouTube.

It's Hitler flanked by Himmler from the SS and Lutzer, who is the new guy in charge of the SA. And they're walking through the serried ranks of the Stormtroopers to pay homage. I think they're placing wreaths at a First World War memorial. And that scene is the scene at the end of the first Star Wars film.

Yeah. When Han, Luke and Chewie go to get their medals. Yeah. You know, the Star Wars scene is deliberately modelled on Triumph of the Wooden. Even though Triumph of the Wooden is a Nazi film, that's a brilliant reflection of its astonishing given to her. Her crew is 120 people strong. Stryker puts a house at their disposal and they are allowed to dress the cameramen up in kind of, you know, workers' outfits or SA uniforms or whatever so that they can be part of the parades and get kind of close-up shots there. And Hitler and the Nazi leadership absolutely love it.

And it's kind of Hitler's personal baby. You know, he adores films. Famously, he loved King Kong. He loved Laurel and Hardy. He loved, you know, Mickey Mouse. I mean, he loved every kind of film. Yeah. As Stalin liked films, actually. Why wouldn't they like films? Films are great, but also films are new and exciting and, you know, captivating to somebody in the 1930s. Yeah. And so Hitler recognises that film is a perfect way to win people over to National Socialism. And so actually, I mean, he says that without talking pictures and without radio as well, there can be no triumph of National Socialism.

And so right from the beginning, the Nazis had understood the importance of seizing control of the cinema industry and anything that is capable of propagating their message. This is how Goebbels comes to get the power that he does. Barely a week after the federal election in March 1933, Hitler sets up a Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Propaganda, we say at this point, is a value-neutral word. It doesn't have the negative connotations that it has for us. And Goebbels is put in charge of it.

And we mentioned in the previous episode, Goebbels is brilliant at this. I mean, he has a malign genius for it. And he absolutely sees it as his mission to forge the minds of the German people out of steel. So he has this comment, you know, we did not lose the war because our artillery gave out, but because the weapons of our mind didn't fire. And so his office, he has seized control of all filmmaking in the Third Reich, with the sole exception actually of Lenny Riefenstahl's films, because those are Hitler's babies. And he has challenges because basically

a lot of the directing and acting talent has fled Germany. So Marlena Dietrich would be the kind of the famous example, Peter Law, Fritz Lang, all of these have gone. And also of course, there is a risk that you shove too much propaganda down people's throats. So to begin with, the films are very overtly propagandistic and people don't like it. And Goebbels is smart enough to realize this, that it's much easier to kind of, you know, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, that you smuggle in the messages and they do that quite effectively. And the Nazi film industry isn't full of kind of stormtroopers. Triumph of the Will is an exception. Most of it is actually escapist

schlop designed to keep people happy, but Nazi messages are woven in through it. You have the same policy with radio, which is really fundamental to how the Nazis aim to brainwash the German people. Where again, to begin with, when the Nazis seize power, there's lots of elevated, lots of Wagner, lots of Beethoven. And again, they kind of realise people don't really want that. And this matters because radio enables Hitler to address people directly. And so the requirement for that is that everyone basically has to have access to a radio. And so they do this in two ways. Goebbels deliberately commissions very cheap, very accessible radio sets. So there's one,

the Volkssimfanger, or People's Receiver, which went on sale in the summer of 1933. So right at the beginning of the Nazi period in power. And this has been compared in its impact to the iPod. Wow. You know, it's that seismic. It enables pretty much everyone to have access to radios. And this has been compared in its impact to the iPod. It's that seismic. It enables pretty much everyone to have access to radios. And this is a policy that will be continued throughout the 30s. And so a few years later, another even cheaper radio goes on the market. And this enables pretty much everyone who can afford it to get one. But even those who can't afford a radio, radios are put in offices, in factories, in restaurants, in cafes, in the stairwells of apartment blocks. So that's very

kind of 1984. Very nice. You know, Wynton Smith hearing Big Brother shout out. That's where Orwell is getting it from. And the result is that by 1939, the outbreak of the Second World War, there is no country in the world, and this includes Britain, it includes the United States, which is in so many ways, in terms of the media, much more technologically advanced. But in terms of radio coverage, no country has more radio coverage than Germany. And Goebbels is absolutely upfront about why this should be so. So this is what he said in 1933. We make no bones about the fact that the radio belongs to us and to no one else. And we will place the radio in the service of our

ideology and no other ideology will find expression here. So it is to be purely totalitarian. It exists to forge the German mind as the German body also has to be forged. Okay. All right, Tom, after the break, why don't you tell us about a couple of other aspects of the Nazi regime? So I was thinking women would be an interesting topic because we haven't really talked much about women and maybe sports, because I know as an elite sportsman yourself, you would enjoy talking about sports. I would enjoy that. And I think more generally totalitarianism means that no aspect of life is left alone. So film, radio, whatever, the streets are dominated by Nazism, then the home also.

And so Nazi policies for women, for children, crucially important for the process of brainwashing. Okay. So in the second half, we will move from the parade grounds into the heart of the German home. We'll see you after the break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news,

reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. We do not consider it correct for the woman to interfere in the world of the man in his main sphere.

We consider it natural if these two worlds remain distinct. To the one belongs the strength of feeling, the strength of the soul. To the other belongs the strength of vision, of toughness,ness of decision and of the willingness to act so that was um foe of the rest is history adolf hitler again and he was speaking at the nuremberg rally in 1934 on the 8th of september and he was speaking to the fraunschaft the women's national socialist organization now i'm guessing the strength of feeling and the strength of the soul is women and the strength of vision and toughness is men though a lot of our female listeners may disagree yeah so hitler is very much a believer in the kind of gender

divisions isn't he tom he's not a feminist i think it would be fair to say i mean none of the nazi leaders are feminists. There's a primer on Nazi ideology, it's published in 1933, and it states quite explicitly that the German resurrection is a male event. But just because activities of the Nazi state are seen as being the field of the masculine, this doesn't mean that the Nazis see the dimension of the feminine as being separate from them. They absolutely reserve the right to poke their noses into that as well. And part of the reason for that, of course, is that it is women who have to provide the German Reich with its manpower. But it is also seen by the Nazis as the role of women to bring up children. And so therefore, women need to be

shaped in an appropriately Nazi way so that they can bring up good little Nazis. So this is the kind of thinking. There can be no private space. There can be no purely domestic space. Everything must be Nazified. A German's home is not his castle. I think it's fair to say. And although on occasion, the Nazis will say, as when say Hitler is speaking to women's organizations at Nuremberg rally, we're doing this for your own good. We think that you shouldn't have any political responsibility because that's better for you. You know, we're doing it for you.

Right. Aren't we kind? Aren't we kind? Yeah. Actually, it reflects a kind of dogma, which it's a dogma that sees the sexes as being unequal in a way that the Aryans and Jews are So Goebbels, who is a great one for the ladies, I think it's fair to say he's not the best looking example of Aryan manhood, but he's absolutely inveterate womanizer. And he has this extraordinary comment. He says, women has the task of being beautiful and bringing children into the world. And this is by no means

as coarse and old-fashioned as one might think. The female bird preens herself for her mate and hatches her eggs for him. Not a chat-up line I would employ, Tom. Well, it's also, I mean, especially not to an ornithologist, because of course, one would immediately think of the peacock. No. Yeah. Okay. As a kind of a counter view to that. Yes. Yeah. And Volta Dare, who becomes the Nazi minister for agriculture and previously had

been a pig farmer, he attributed the desire for women to take part in politics, to have the vote, to have roles in government. He thought that this was the result of frustration set up by malfunctioning sex glands. Oh my word. So both Goebbels and Dare are following the science. In their own minds, at least. As they see it. Yeah. So obviously Goebbels and Darre are following the science. In their own minds, at least. As they see it. Yeah. So obviously they're not kind of downgrading women in the way that they downgrade Jews, but they do feel that science justifies them in confining women within the domestic sphere. And this had always been the case.

So right from the beginning, Nazi party ordinances had banned women from leadership positions in the party. And Hitler saw the fact that women in the Weimar Republic had the vote as being kind of absolutely expressive of everything that made parliamentary democracy corrupt and inefficient. Sort of feminized flabby, because they're part of that kind of we talked about this last time the sort of front generation yeah where the idea of kind of male camaraderie is so important to them and presumably yeah there must be an element in them being frankly slightly frightened of women would you say tom i don't know i don't know i mean the thing is that the nazis again as we have talked about they are simply amplifying traditions that are much, much more broadly rooted in a lot of German thinking. Deep-seated anxieties.

Yeah. So the famous slogan that everyone will think of, Kinder, Kuka, Kirche, children, the kitchen, the church. This is not a Nazi slogan. It's a slogan that goes back to the 1890s. It's kind of, you know, second Reich and everything. And so this is why I think there's quite a lot of support. You don't have to be a Nazi in Germany to think that this is an excellent policy. And when the Nazis kind of introduced natalist policies, in other words, encouraging women to have more children, they are doing what other countries are doing as well. So the French have been doing this since 1920. They've been offering medallions to women who have lots more children. They are doing what other countries are doing as well. The French have been

doing this since 1920. They've been offering medallions to women who have lots of children. The Nazis, in that sense, are following the example of democratic France. They have this whole thing that if you marry, you get a loan of a thousand marks, and you have to pay it back unless you have children. The more children you have, the less you have to pay back. It ends up being calibrated in the way that it had been in France, that you get a bronze medal for so many children, a silver one for so many. And if you have 10, then you get a gold medal. And Hitler is godfather to your child, which means that if it's a boy, the boy then gets called Adolf. So that's nice. Golly. There's a lot of pressure then if you've got

nine kids, but you don't want a son called Adolf. Right. We hope it's a girl, I suppose. Adolfina. And you get this kind of cross, the cross of honor of the German mother, and everyone has to salute you in the streets. And it's very Spartan. This is what happened in Sparta, is that Spartan women could win glory for themselves by bearing lots of children. So in that sense, the Nazis are kind of going with the grain of policies that have been current both in Weimar and in other democratic countries. There is also, as well as the carrot of kind of medals and financial bribes, there is also however the stick. The Nazis are very keen to force women out of the workplace, partly for ideological reasons, but also because the big challenge, economic challenge they face is unemployment.

And so if you can get rid of women in the workplace, then that boosts employment for men. And again, this is a policy that had been current in Weimar, so it's not completely unknown, but it becomes increasingly coercive. So by 1936, for instance, it's forbidden to women to act as judges, as public prosecutors, essentially to have any position of authority within the legal profession. They're declared ineligible for jury service on the ground that they're too emotional. They lack logic. They lack the reason necessary. And they are also being denied educational opportunities. So in 1934, the same year that Leni Riefenstahl is making Triumph of the Will,

it's decreed that only 10% of students enrolled in grammar schools, which are the elite schools, can be girls. So 90% have to be boys. In 1937, girls will be banned from grammar schools altogether. Shockingly dominant. They're banned from learning Latin. In 1937, girls will be banned from grammar schools altogether. Shockingly dominant, they're banned from learning Latin. That is shocking, Tom. So some are enrolled in kind of courses that specialize in languages, but others are shunted into a kind of domestic science stream. And this is known as the pudding matrix.

And it's a kind of absolute academic dead end. And so, you know, education is being used to essentially deny girls the education that their mothers had taken for granted so you get the resentment of people like so we did an episode many moons ago about the white rose movement and sophie shull yeah and of course somebody like sophie shull would be really chafing you know who's idealistic who likes reading poetry all that kind of thing And so there must have been a whole generation of bookish girls who were- Yeah, frustrated.

Incredibly frustrated. Yeah. Or maybe they just took it for granted. I don't know. It's hard to say, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, certainly it reflects the fact that the Nazis entirely understand, you know, in the kind of Jesuit way, that to control education is to control the future of the people that you're educating. And the truth is, you've talked about the relish of students for book burning, students who are taking the lead in book burning. The Nazis can look at that, can look at the enthusiasm for the Nazi party in the elections. Again, in the episodes that we did

last year, you gave the extraordinary stat that one in four people who voted for the Nazis in whatever it was, 1930, was a first-time voter. So I think that the Nazis can feel that when they're imposing their policies on education, they're kind of going with the grain of what young people themselves want. I think actually it's really important for people listening to this series who haven't listened to The Rise of the Nazis to get it into their heads. If you are young, the Nazis are very exciting and you think, brilliant, a break with the old men. You love the torchlight parades. You love the dynamism, the energy. The Nazis have a huge appeal to youth. This is not really an old men's party. It is a young man's party, isn't it, Tom? And to a degree, a young woman's as well,

because the Nazis do give things for girls as well as boys. So what happens in 1933, we talked about this, is that anything that is not Nazi stamped gets dissolved, any kind of public organization. So Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, all those things get abolished. And so essentially there are now only Nazi youth organizations that you can join. And for boys, it's the Hitler Youth, and for girls, it's the German League of Maidens. And these are basically militarized versions of the Boy Scouts, of the Girl Guides. And Sophie Scholl loves it, didn't she? I mean, she really adored it, going out, comradeship, all that kind of thing. But I think it's also true to say that over the course of the 30s, certainly the Hitler youth becomes increasingly brutal. And Hitler in 1935 at the Nuremberg Rally, I mean, he's absolutely

explicit about the need to toughen young boys up in the way that the Spartans had toughened their young boys up. Terrifying. He says that this, we have undertaken to give the German people an education that begins already in youth and will never come to an end. It starts with a child and will end with the old fighter. So for a child's entire life, they will be essentially just a cog in the great machinery of the state. And what this means in practice for boys who are joining the Hitler youth is that there is relentless ideological indoctrination. They are taught to adore Hitler as a kind of god. They have military discipline instilled into them far more than they would ever have done in the

Boy Scouts. There's a lot of hazing that goes on both in the Hitler Youth and the League of Maidens. So boys will be made to go on very brutal kind of forced marches in kind of very skimpy clothes in the winter. So again, that's very, very kind of Spartan. I've subjected to very, very brutal punishments, kind of cold showers, all the works, kind of Gordonston cubed. And the girls also, I mean, so teenage girls, the Nazis don't approve of makeup. They don't approve of perms. If you have a perm, your hair is likely to be shaved off. To be fair, I don't really approve of perms. Right. But would you say you had a daughter and she wasn't wearing, you know, the kind of the

Gretchen kind of wreath of braids that was seen as being appropriate to a young German maiden? Would you approve of it being ceremoniously shaved off? Maybe you would. I'd probably be a bit frightened of it because parents were basically terrorized by their own children, weren't they? Because the children had been turned into kind of... Well, the children were being prepared for war.

They're being turned into future military officers. And so as a sort of weak and flabby middle-class sort of professional, I would just be utterly brutalized by my ruthless Hitler Youth honed, League of Maidens honed children, I imagine. Michael Burley, in his great book, The Third Reich, he talks about parents. Their children became strangers, contemptuous of monarchy or religion, and perpetually barking

and shouting like pint-sized Prussian sergeant majors. In sum, children appear to have become more brutal, fitter, and stupider than they were. Oh God. Yeah. I wouldn't want that. You wouldn't want that at all. And I think that that reflects a contempt for bookishness that comes from Hitler himself. So Hitler had been a failure at school, hadn't he? He'd been a kind of a dropout. Yeah. Lazy. And he sees a kind of over-obsession with book learning as not conducive to the forging of a master race. He's all about, well, he says, the breeding of absolutely healthy bodies, which isn't to say that the Nazis don't reform education. They do. And again,

interestingly with this, you kind of have the sense perhaps that teachers would be opposed to this, but they're not really. Teachers, as a profession, are very, very keen. Yeah, they are. As a body, by and large, they're quite in favour of it. I think because they're from that middle-class milieu that the Nazis had always appealed to. Yeah. You know, lower middle class. There's a particular kind of sinister idealism. I mean, to many teachers anyway, Tom, but teachers in 1930s Germany in particular.

Right. And so there is absolutely a sense that children need to be ideologically shaped, that they need to be conditioned by the controlling ideology that the state is decreeing they should imbibe. And so at the primary school level, they get rid of all the kind of biff and chip type reading books, I'm afraid to say. Dominic frowning at this. Well, that is poor. That is shocking. And they bring in loads of stories about German soldiers driving their bayonets into Russians and-

Yeah, Frenchmen. Stirring stories of Hitler's youth and things like that. They get rid of religion. So religious studies get phased out. And in their place, they use German history essentially to inculcate moral lessons. Crikey. Thank goodness something like that would never happen today, Tom. People using history as a branch of theology.

Absolutely. And also something that would never happen today in maths. So again, to quote Richard Grunberger in his Social History of the Third Reich, while mathematics teaching remained much as before, Nazi ideologists adroitly seized on the opportunity for subliminal conditioning presented by the wording of problems, so that a head for figures was now developed by questions about artillery trajectories, fighter-to-bomber ratios, and budget deficits accruing from the democratic pampering of hereditarily diseased families." Crikey. So you're getting maths questions that condition you. Nazi maths.

And also in biology, there's nothing about sex because, don't talk about that. Although, Hitler youth leaders are instructed in the dreadful

consequences of homosexuality. Well, they want you to have a lot of sex within marriage to have all these children, but they don't want you to talk about it. No, because that's

kind of Weimar. And also, pupils in biology are trained to measure skulls and classify them according to racial types. So again, nothing like that ever goes on today in our leading museums. Thank goodness. Yeah. Yeah. But no, so that's all the bookish side, but the main focus is PE. So this is one of the many reasons why I'm glad that I didn't grow up in the third Reich. Yeah. You weren't a big PE person. I't a big person i hated pe i actually hated pe to be fair i mean this is kind of a podcast done by clearly two people who didn't like being yeah weedy bookish types who

would not have been very valkish and uh this is the age of the pe teacher so never in history of pe teachers except perhaps in sparta, have PE teachers had more of a control. So basically they are running the schools. And there's even a proposal that they should all become deputy head teachers by default. Oh, that's a terrible idea. And so this idea that German youth should be made sporty, fit, healthy, that a premium should be set on physical activity. This is the context in which Germany is awarded the Olympic Games. The Olympic Games are due to be staged in 1936. So two years after his triumph in the summer of 1934, getting rid of the SA and Rome. Hitler had initially been

quite sceptical of it because he disliked the fact that it was organised by the International Olympic Committee because he didn't like the idea of an international organisation poking its nose into the affairs of the Reich. And also he kind of despised sport for its own sake. He despised the kind of English Corinthian ideal. So the games are about world peace, aren't they, and brotherhood and all. I mean, obviously often they're not. Yeah, it's all a bit wet. There is a sort of wet side to the Olympic Games that he would have no time for at all. And I think also the idea that as an athlete, you're only concerned with breaking records

rather than subordinating yourself to the entirety of a team. He sees that also as kind of ideologically dubious. He's not interested in sport, but he absolutely recognises, and Goebbels, of course, also recognises that it's a chance to showcase the Reich, to showcase German physical prowess, and to do on a world stage what the Nazis have been doing for the past three years in Nuremberg. And Hitler had actually, in 1933, he had expressed his hope that Nuremberg, he compares it to the Olympic Games, he hopes that Nuremberg will become the Olympic Games of Germany. And even though Nuremberg is a kind of the classically German city, that's why they hold it there. Hitler is fascinated by ancient Greece. He absolutely associates it with the kind of

primordial origins of Aryanism. He sees the ancient Greeks as being Aryan. And so the Olympic Games offer him the perfect opportunity to fuse classical traditions with Germanic traditions and to rebrand them both as Nazi. And so who are you going to call to propagate this message and to commemorate it and to send it out across the world? You're going to call Lenny. Oh, Lenny Riefenstahl. So Lenny Riefenstahl.

But just before we get into Lenny Riefenstahl, I mean, we won't go massively into this, but he uses the Olympics, doesn't he, as a shop window. So they clean up anti-Semitic slogans, the SA are on their best behaviour, loads of foreign dignitaries arrive at the Olympics, and it is actually, for Hitler internationally, a colossal propaganda success.

It is, yeah. Lots of people come and they say, you know, the Nazis, maybe not everyone's cup of tea, but Germany is very clean and there's no disorder. And actually I didn't see any antisemitism at all. They handle all that very ruthlessly and cleverly. And so that's why Lenny Riefenstahl film Olympia is the perfect illustration of that. With Triumph of the Will, it's one of the very few cultural apogées of Nazi culture, and it's brilliantly done. Basically, it to this day serves as an inspiration for the way that sports is presented. It's a buried influence, but it's undoubtedly there. Riefenstahl has this brilliant opening where she sent a camera crew to Greece

and they filmed the Acropolis, they filmed the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, lots of Greek statuary, which is all, you know, there's no nonsense about painting them. They're all very, very, very white. And then he has this famous shot where they shoot the statue of the Discobolos, the guy who's holding the discus, and it turns into a real figure who then unfurls himself and hurls the discus. And there's then a succession of nudes, so very homoerotic male nudes, and then female nudes. So these were not shot in Greece. They were shot on a beach in the Baltic because Riefenstahl felt that the footage she got from Greece needed spicing up.

And so there's all kinds of nudity going on. And one of them is actually Lenny Riefenstahl herself. So there's a shot of a woman on a beach and she's got her arms extended to the heavens and that's Lenny herself. And then this sequence ends with a runner bringing the torch and he's running from Greece into the German stadium in Berlin. So it's Greece blurring and being succeeded by Germany. with a runner bringing the torch and he's running from Greece into the German stadium in Berlin. So it's Greece blurring and being succeeded by Germany. And part of the reason why this is so potent is that Olympia, for instance, it doesn't cut out from the Nazi perspective,

racially problematic victors. So Jesse Owens, who is the black American athlete, who is the star of the Olympics, he's in the film. So also is Kite Son, who is from Korea, although he's racing under the flag of Imperial Japan, which has conquered Korea and wins the marathon. He's in it as well. And so this is part of why Olympia, the film, does hold up a mirror to the impact of the games as a whole. It gives a kind of sanitized take on the Nazi regime. And actually, it's a measure of how successful the Nazis are promoting their message that the Olympics have been a brilliant success, that actually it's been claimed that it has a kind of interplanetary impact.

Interplanetary, Tom. Interplanetary, because it's been claimed that the first television broadcast that was able to reach out beyond our atmosphere and out into outer space was the speech by Hitler with which he introduces the Olympic Games. So that'd be nice for aliens out there wondering what planet Earth is all about. Depressing thought. Yeah. However, there is a problem, which is that Olympia is broadcast on the 20th of April 1938, which is Hitler's 47th birthday. That's the premiere. That's the premiere. And so by the time it is premiered, any notion that Nazi Germany is not virulently anti-Semitic and is not dangerously militaristic is basically gone. And so that message actually falls on

very soily ground. Because since 1936, a lot has changed in terms of Germany's international position. And Dominic, I think it would not be an exaggeration to say that the storm clouds of war are gathering over Europe. Would you be prepared to go that far? I think we do love a storm cloud of war and the rest Europe. Would you be prepared to go that far? I think we do love a storm cloud of war and the rest is history, Tom. We always have. And these are the storm clouds to end all storm clouds. It's a veritable tempest, a hurricane is coming for Europe. Right.

Well, thank you, Tom. That was not merely a fantastic tour d'horizon. It was a veritable tour de force and next week we'll be digging more closely won't we into the nazis and their foreign policy because we'll be doing an episode about hitler his vision of war and his plans for war and then we'll be doing an episode specifically looking at hitler and the conquest of austria the anchelus and tom rest is history club members will be able to listen to those episodes right now won't they they absolutely will you know the routine restlesshistory.com you can sign up there but if you don't want to do that doesn't matter you can wait till next week you'll still get to hear them so thanks very much for listening and bye-bye bye-bye I'm Marina Hyde and I'm Richard Osman

and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain

on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to

therestisentertainment.com