The Rest Is History - 408. The Nazis in Power: Hitler's Dream

Episode Date: January 15, 2024

“We must have a healthy people to dominate in the world”. In July 1933, Hitler’s Nazi party passed a new law for the compulsory sterilisation of anyone with a physical disability, or “congenital feeble-mindedness”. They claimed this was scientifically sound, and for the moral and biological good of the Aryan race. The measure darkly foreshadowed the tragedies to come, as Nazi Germany ratcheted up its horrific program of racial sterilisation, euthanasia and extermination. But why did the Nazis see their horrific crimes as beneficial to the fatherland, and consider themselves on the right side of History? What motivated Hitler, the figurehead behind these terrifying ideologies, to act on them? And how many of these ideas, propagated by Hitler and his generals, were shared and accepted by the German people? Join Tom and Dominic as they delve into the roots of the Nazis’ pseudo-science: from the glorification of ancient Greece, Rome, and the “Nordic” race, to the intellectual ideals of the 19th century, in which Darwinism and the survival of the fittest flourished. They attempt to unravel one of the darkest ideologies in all world history, and their uniquely hideous brand of anti-semitism.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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They are always the same. We do not want to rebuild our people according to abstract theories elaborated by some foreign brain, but by following the eternal laws shown to us by experience and history, and which we know. We do not live for ideas, for theories or for phantasmagorical political platforms. No, we are living and we are fighting for the German people to preserve its existence, to lead the battle it must fight for its life. So that, Tom, was Adolf Hitler on the 10th of February, 1933. It was his first big public speech as Chancellor of Germany after he was maneuvered into office by the conservative

nationalists at the beginning of the year. It was the first campaign speech of that year's Reichstag federal elections. And that's Hitler's manifesto, isn't it? He believes, unlike Marxism, we haven't got our credo from a philosopher, from a thinker. Our ideology is grounded in concrete empirical reality. And that question of Nazi ideology is what we're going to be talking about today, isn't it? It is, because the question of why the Nazis are doing what they are doing, I think has been hanging over everything that we've done, not just in this series, but in the previous series. And we have obviously touched on it in various ways. We looked at the kind of the wellsprings of Nazism in Germany before the First World War. We've looked at how

Nazi ideology has manifested itself at various instances while the Nazis have been in power. So Dominic, I remember in an earlier episode, you referred to Nazi idealism and then kind of immediately qualified it. You said, I mean, this will sound awful to people, but the question of were the Nazis motivated by a sense of idealism, I think has kind of been hanging over everything that we've been doing. There is no question that Hitler was a cynic. You've repeatedly talked about his genius, his malign genius for opportunism, and definitely he's a man of unspeakably violent hatreds. But is he motivated by a sense of idealism? Do the Nazis as a whole have a sense that what they're doing is for good reasons? It's a terrifying question to ask because we know where this is going. We ended the previous episode with the humiliation of Vienna's Jews. We left them scrubbing off slogans on the streets of

Vienna, being beaten up by Nazi goons. we know that this is preparation for the horrors that will be unleashed during the Second World War. So, I mean, just to reiterate what that will mean, it will mean the targeted murder of six million Jews. And there will be other victims as well. So there will be maybe 250,000, some have said as many as 500,000 Roma and Sinti, gypsies as they're traditionally called. Thousands of disabled people, 10,000 to 15,000 gay men will be murdered. Meanwhile, the whole of Europe will be burning. In the East, particularly, the prosecution of the war by the Nazis will be unspeakably violent. Millions and millions of Soviet prisoners of war will die in labour camps. Almost two million Poles, for instance, will be killed. So the scale of destruction and horror, I mean, just spell it out to make it absolutely clear. Because this isn't just like another war where people die as a result of war. This is a deliberate campaign of annihilation. And that's what people have always found so shocking and what means that the Nazis have a special place, a unique place in our kind of demonology, because

the annihilation of other human beings was such a core part of their project. And that's why I guess a lot of listeners will say, how can you talk about idealism when what they represent is pure evil? But when you say the Nazis, and when we say the Nazis, I mean, who are we talking about? Are we just talking about the leadership? Are we talking about the SS? Or are we talking about a sizable number of the German population? And if the latter, then why are they doing what they're doing? Why are they committing what to us seems unspeakable crimes? Are they aware that they're the baddies? So I guess a good example to stress test that would be someone who we mentioned again in the previous episode, which is Adolf Eichmann, who is the SS guy who comes into Austria and is supervising the forced emigration of Jews to Palestine.

And the reason that he's a kind of interesting test case is, of course, because at the end of the war, he gets captured, then he escapes. He goes to Argentina. He is then abducted from Buenos Aires by Mossad in, what is it, 1960? Yeah. Famous trial. He is put on trial in Jerusalem and in 1962 he's convicted and he is hanged. But in that trial and in private conversations in his cell, he never shows any remorse for what he's done. And in fact, his chief regret is that the Nazis didn't go far enough. He expresses regret that the Nazis didn't end up killing 10 or 12 million Jews, because that would have then meant that Europe would have been completely Jew-free,

as he would have put it. Yeah. And just on Eichmann, I think what makes him particularly unsettling, and it's important to stress, is that before he's involved with this, he is not what we would stereotypically call a monster. He came from, I think, a reasonably successful family. His father was a bookkeeper. He came from, I think, a reasonably successful family. His father was a bookkeeper. He'd played the violin at school. He doesn't do terribly well at school, but he's a very methodical, well-organized person. He's not a serial killer.

He's not kind of roaming the streets murdering people. He's a dutiful, conscientious, sort of high-functioning person. And what we find so shocking about the nazis is that that's true of quite a few of them you know we talked about heydrich who you know what's he do play the violin yeah or hans frank or any of these people that's what we find unsettling i think about the nazis that they're not all obvious monsters exactly because to reiterate they think they are doing the right thing and they are doing what they are doing they are doing the right thing, and they are doing what they are doing. They are presiding over genocide in response to hopes and fears that are very, very current in Germany. I think that they have an internally coherent morality. And even though by our lights, what they do has become the absolute epitome of evil. I mean, I think that they serve as for us the embodiment of evil. They do not see themselves

as evil. In fact, just the opposite. They see themselves as doing what they're doing for the good of Germany. And this is obviously really unsettling. And I mean, I don't know whether you'd agree, but I have the sense that this is a subject that historians generally have been reluctant to probe. There aren't a large number of books that kind of explore what I guess the French would call the Nazi mentality, the kind of the world vision, the understanding of the world. And I guess that there are two reasons for that. And the first is, of course, the taboo nature of Nazi beliefs, the fact that they do serve us as the embodiment of evil and i think you know i've talked about this before i think that the nazis

have come to kind of replace the christian mythology with a new mythology and that just as you know in the middle ages christians wouldn't ask well why does satan why do devils do what they do they just do it because they're evil yeah i think there is a kind of sense that when we talk about what the Nazis are doing, we just think, well, they're doing it because they're Nazis and by definition, therefore they're evil. Yeah. I think there is, I think there is, we assume that there's, to use that word again, monsters. They're monsters or mad. Oh yeah, mad. So the idea that Hitler was mad or that Himmler was mad, I mean, they're pretty entrenched, aren't they? We talk about Hitler's kind of insane genius, his demented plans, all that kind of thing. But there's actually no evidence at all that Hitler was mad. I mean, Hitler wasn't mad. I mean, we may find his ideas

horrific, but he's not insane. He wouldn't be locked up in an asylum. So I think you're right. We tend to find that the belief system is so horrific that we don't think of it as what you described, which is an internally coherent system of morality. So it's absolutely not my period. So I'm sure there are people listening to this who will know a lot more than I do. But when I was writing Dominion about Christianity and its moral influence, I was looking for books on the idea of the kind of the Nazi morality. I couldn't actually find many.

So one is a brilliant book called The Nazi Conscience by American historian called Claudia Koontz. And the other, which I think is a really remarkable book, is by a French scholar. I think he's professor of contemporary history at the Sorbonne

called Johann Chaputet. And his book, The Law of Blood, Thinking and Acting as a Nazi. And in it, he writes, to my knowledge, no one has ever yet attempted to map out what might be called the mental universe in which Nazi crimes took place and held meaning.

And so that's an extraordinary book, which I commend to anyone who's kind of interested in this topic. And I think that it is true that by and large, this is an area that historians have been kind of reluctant to probe. But I think the other reason why, for instance, you compared Nazi ideology to Soviet ideology. With Soviet ideology, there is this entire framework of Marxist belief that is very amenable to academic study. You know, there are Marxists still in universities. And even if you're not a Marxist, you can study it. And, you know, there are all kinds of abstract nouns and systems that you can explore. But Hitler, of course, is rejecting that. I mean, he's explicitly displaying contempt for what, you know, to quote him, abstract theories elaborated by some foreign

brain. I mean, he's obviously thinking of Marx there, I guess. Right. Well, that speech at the beginning of the show. Yeah. And instead he's talking about the eternal law shown to us by experience and history in which we know yeah so the we in that that is the german people and so how do they know these eternal laws by virtue of what hitler casts as their racial inheritance and the eternal laws are the laws of nature and for the Nazis, this is kind of the key division, that the laws that the German state, the Weimar state, the Wilhelmine state have had are laws that basically reflect a Jewish cast of mind, as they would describe it, kind of legalistic, dry, dead. The true laws are those that are felt like a kind of song in the blood, and only the Nordic race can properly experience that. So just to look at another talk,

and this was given by Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS in 1936, and he tackles headlong the idea that the Nazi state is a lawless state. And he recognizes that this is how it's seen abroad in other countries. So he's addressing the German Academy of Law. And he says that he knows that the Nazi state is seen as a lawless police state, that there's talk of lawlessness because what we were doing did not correspond to what they, i.e. people in the democracies and so on, understood by the word law. But in truth, with our work, we are laying the foundations of a new law, the German people's right to life. And Himmler explains that this law is the most ancient law of our people, and that it is a law that back in the happy early primordial days of the German people,

they instinctively understood this. So this is when they are kind of lurking in forests, pre-Roman Empire or during the Roman Empire, in clans or whatever. They're very hirsute. This is Himmler's kind of vision. This is certainly what Himmler thinks, yes. Whether Hitler does will come to that in a few minutes. But yes, that they live in harmony with this sense of law, and that is what enables them to thrive. This sense of law is basically survival of the fittest. The fact that life is tough, that you have to strain hard to do down your enemies and to prevail for the good of your people. The tragedy of the Germans is that they have forgotten this, but there is hope. The

situation is not completely lost. The German people remain the German people still because the Nazis have a completely essentialist idea of race. If you're a German back in the shaggy forests or a German now, you're still a German. Your racial makeup is unchanging. And the Nazi mission is to reclaim that racial inheritance. And so Himmler sums it up, the basic concepts of our law must's ideas about struggle and about competition and about the survival of the fittest have kind of percolated into society. And so, I mean, we've mentioned a few times, Hitler's ideology is basically stuff that he's picked up by reading in journals that were published in the 1890s, 1900s, that are full of all this stuff about your racial

inheritance and this kind of racial essentialism, which is such a key part of the nationalism that thrives at the turn of the 20th century. Completely. Hitler and the Nazis generally think they are following the science. I mean, it's a phrase we've used throughout this series. They see themselves as scientific. Their racism is scientific and it is founded in the idea of struggle. So, Chapiteau, in his book, he describes a documentary that was put out in 1937 by the Office of Racial Purity. And you can see it online. It's on YouTube. It's called Alice Leben ist Kampf. All life is struggle. So there's that, you know, that echo of Mein Kampf. It's all the struggle. And it's basically encouraging the Germans to recognise that the only way that they as a race can survive is to kind of purge themselves of effete compassion and to commit themselves wholeheartedly to struggle. charging each other and monkeys ripping arms off each other and birds attacking one another. And then you have trees competing for light in forests. And you have this phrase, the weak and the non-viable must submit to the strong. Nature allows only the best vital force

to survive. And this may seem a harsh message, but this propaganda film frames it actually as being something to celebrate because it is what makes possible, the film says, the perfection of all living things. And that message having been delivered, you then get lots of kind of stirring footage of elephants and tigers and so on. And the Nazis are obviously casting themselves and the German people as the equivalent of kind of megfauna, apex mammals. But this is a perspective that in the 1930s is being offered in a spirit of self-pity as well as of triumphalism, because the Nazis have come to power haunted by a sense that the German race is under threat, that Germany is besieged, that it's weak, that it's menaced with the risk of complete oblivion. And this is what explains the urgency of the Nazi mission and why it is consistently being framed in biological terms. Because they believe that the moment of crisis is at hand, right? That this is, as it were, the end times, that the biological struggle is reaching its

climax. Yes. And so, of course, Hitler's been raised a Catholic. He is aware of, say, Christian teachings for the weak and the disadvantaged and the poor. So he knows that what he's saying is liable to be shocking to many people in Germany. But he's absolutely upfront about the fact that basically the German people need to man up, as Hitler might have put it. To quote him, certainly one might find it horrifying to observe that in nature one animal devours another. But one thing is certain, nothing can be done to change it. One cannot rise up against the firmament. If one must believe at all costs in a divine commandment, then it should be this one, to preserve the race.

So that obsession with race is rooted in the Nazi understanding of biology, but it is also rooted in the Nazi understanding of history. Because obviously, if you were making the argument that the German people in, say, 1935 are the same as the German people back in the primordial mists of time, then you need to demonstrate that by constructing an account of history that makes sense of that argument. As it happens, and not coincidentally, history was actually Hitler's favourite subject at school. It was the one subject at which he excelled. His history teacher was the one teacher he really admired and respected. And by the time he comes to write Mein Kampf, he has come to a quite coherent understanding of history as a kind of record of perpetual racial struggle. And the reason that he's interested in history, that he's an incredible autodidact, he reads a lot about it. It's not that

he's interested in history for its own sake, but that it teaches lessons. So he's overt about this in Mein Kampf. He says, we do not study history simply to know the past. We study history so as to find an instructor for the future and for the continued existence of our own race. So it's purely didactic. It's something that everyone should look at to learn their racial destiny. But of course, there is a problem for the Nazis that you touched on earlier, where you talked about the Germans living in their dripping forests and so on, and they're all very hairy and shaggy. And this is kind of a bit embarrassing because they're a bit rubbish. They're not the Romans, are they? I mean, they're not the ancient Greeks or something. Right. So if the ancient Germans are so fitted for rule and for great cultural achievement, then where's the evidence? And Himmler, of course, famously looks for it within Germany himself. So he is commissioning teams of SS archaeologists across Germany and look for evidence of the great cultural achievements of

the ancient Germans. Occult artefacts and stuff, you know, the Holy Grail or whatever. You know, he's all into that, isn't he? But not even that. I mean, basically, they're digging up Bronze Age or Iron Age pots and displaying them with great pride and everything. But they're a bit rubbish. And Hitler knows that they're rubbish, and he finds it embarrassing. And he says, look, the stuff that the Germans are producing in prehistory,

he compares it specifically to the Maori in New Zealand. He says, this is the level that they're on. And this really isn't good enough for Hitler. If the Germans are the master race, then it's not enough for them just to be producing kind of a few rubbish bits of pottery. They need to be producing palpable evidence of their cultural greatness. This is very harsh on the Maoris, by the way, Tom. I am quoting Hitler. I'm making no comments myself. So he looks elsewhere for the ancient vitality of the Nordic race. And specifically, he looks southwards and he looks to the great radiant centres of ancient civilisation in Europe, which are, of course, Greece and Rome. And Hitler says, again, to quote him, I cannot help remembering that while our ancestors were making these vessels of stone and clay over which our archaeologists rave, the Greeks had already built an Acropolis.

To be fair, he's not entirely wrong, Tom. Well, he's not. And the reason that he can say this and feel that he's not in any way dissing the racial heritage of the Germans is that he's basically saying that the Greeks and the Romans are the racial kin of the Germans. Crikey, that's an unexpected move. But again, as so often with Nazi ideas, it's not one that Hitler has made up. It's one that he has picked up from very, very reputable strands of intellectual opinion in

19th century Germany. Basically, all German historians and classicists are massively invested in this idea that the Germans are part of a Nordic race as the Greeks and the Romans are, that the North is the womb of Aryans. They famously come to be called the Aryans. So it's not just Greece and Rome, it's India, it's Persia. Some even go so far as to say the great pharaohs in Egypt and even the ruling dynasties in China. They're Aryan too. Wow. They're all Aryan. And that wherever there is a kind of great ancient civilization, it's the Nordic race that is responsible for it. And this is why the swastika has such a kind of key role for the Nazis, because you find the swastika in Northern India and across supposedly

this kind of Aryan world. And so the Nazis adopt it as a symbol of their identity with this ancient culture. And Tom, I suppose what you could say is that this is merely a very, very outlandish version of what almost all nationalist movements are doing in the late 19th and early 20th century, which is inventing these glorious paths for themselves, finding spurious links with ancient civilizations. I mean, Balkan nationalists are doing it. You could argue that the British are doing it with their talk of Anglo-Saxon liberty, that the Irish are doing it. You could argue that the British are doing it with their talk of Anglo-Saxon liberty, that the Irish are doing it. Wherever you find historians and folklorists, and indeed politicians, at the late 19th, early 20th century, you find people

inventing these links to this sort of, as you described it, a radiant ancient history. Absolutely. But no one weaponizes it, and I use the word advisedly, quite like Hitler does. And because Hitler is the Fuhrer and therefore the embodiment of the German state, it's his perspective that basically wins out. So Himmler continues to send his SS men to grub around for pots. But it's Hitler's vision of the Greeks and the Romans being part of this Nordic race that essentially is a key driver of Nazi ideology and the way that the Nazis understand themselves and what they're doing. So essentially what Hitler is arguing, and this of course then percolates down through all the various levels of Nazi society,

is that the Greeks and the Romans come from the North as conquerors. They are blonde, so you start getting all kinds of scholars. I mean, so there's one scholar who writes a book called The Blonde Hair of the Indo-Germanic Peoples of Antiquity. And he's gone through every classical reference to blonde hair, kind of compiling exhaustive lists. And this means, of course, that the Athenians, the Spartans, the Romans can provide the Nazis with role models. So Athens in its golden age is presided over by Pericles, of course, the great hero of Boris Johnson, but he's also a particular hero of Hitler. And Pericles is cast as a Fuhrer, as a leader, who is also an artist.

But he didn't have blonde hair, did he? Pericles? Surely not. He has a kind of long skull, which is identified by Nazi racial theorists as a marker of the Aryans. So this is kind of seen as evidence. Like Virginia Woolf, she had a very long face. Anyway, that's by the by. Well, there you go. Sparta is defined by Hitler as the first racial estate, you know, enormous inspiration to him. And Rome above all is what provides Hitler with both a kind of a model and a challenge.

And so Hitler describes Roman history as being the best teacher. And he admires pretty much everything, not about the mass of the Roman people, but about the Roman elites, the Romans who are guiding Rome to Mediterranean supremacy. He admires everything about them, their customs, their mores, even their teeth. He's very into the idea that they had excellent teeth, and this is proof of their kind of Germanic heritage. Wow, who knew? And, you know, the evidence for this is evident when you look at the iconography of Nazism.

The eagles. Standards, yeah. The standards, the eagles, the style of architecture, you know, like Pericles and Phidias, who designed the Parthenon, Hitler and Speer. It's seen as the same relationship. And Hitler's model for Berlin, this great city that he's going to call Germania, which is the Latin word for Germany, it's all kind of modelled very, very consciously on Roman architecture. But I think the thing that Rome particularly provides Hitler is an example in history of a great power conquering the world, basically. The Romans conquered the known world, and this provides Hitler with the model. A thousand-year Reich,

right? All that kind of thing, yes. So the ancient Greeks, the ancient Romans, these are basically Nordic people. They provide evidence that the Nordic races are superior, that they are racially attuned to conquest and cultural supremacy. So what goes wrong? And this is where Hitler's understanding of history darkens, because it's obvious that things do go wrong. Athenian civilization collapses, Sparta collapses, the Roman Empire collapses. And Hitler's explanation for this is twofold. Firstly, miscegenation, that both in Athens and in Rome, the Germanic elites start to breed with inferior races, and therefore the purity of the racial stock is corrupted. But also, they are targeted by the supreme, the eternal, the utterly malignant opponents of the Nordic race,

which is the Jews. And the reason, the biological, I use inverted commas, the biological reason why the Jews hate the Nordic race is because the Jews themselves are a kind of anti-race. They are a racial melting pot in which, so this is an official account by the SS Department of Racial Expertise, the Jew is a bastard, an aggregate of the oriental, the Asian, of Asia Minor, the hermetic, the negro. So it's the fact that the Jew is a figure in which all these various racial elements have met and been degraded that primes the Jews to hate the racial purity of the Aryans and to target them. Right. Because it's not just that they regard the Jews as, as it were, satanic. That point

about them being degenerate is really important, isn't it? They are kind of biologically the opposite. They are unhealthy. They are a debased version of what humanity should be, all of that kind of thing. There's almost a kind of weird squeamishness to the way that the Nazis talk about the Jews when they talk about them as a virus, as a bacilli, all of those kinds of things. It's not just that they're wicked, which the Nazis believe they are, or that they're corrupt or any of those things. It's that they are somehow inhuman. I mean, I think the Nazis do, of course, in their guts, think that the Jews are wicked or satanic. But publicly, they often deny this. They say, you know, we feel no animus against the Jews. We don't see them as evil. Basile, you wouldn't complain about Basile. And they just do what they

do. They try and frame it in scientific terms yeah but of course i mean they're using this scientific language to justify deep hideous prejudice but i think they would say that it's a kind of scientific understanding both of biology and of history because what hitler is doing when he looks at the past and what happens say to the roman empire he's's saying, look how you can see the evidence of Jewish malignity. And the evidence for this is the rise of Christianity. So he sees St. Paul, who of course is a Jew, as the embodiment of Jewish hatred for everything that makes the Nordic race supreme. So Paul preaches a doctrine of compassion for the

poor, universalism, all these things that the Nazis detest. Himmler condemns the early Christians very, very explicitly as the most repugnant Jewish element, the most disgusting bunch of reds. This seems to me, actually, the most grotesque paradox of the whole horror of the Nazi persecution of the Jews is that basically they're persecuting the Jews and blaming them for Christianity. And it's Christianity, of course, that historically has provided the sanction for persecution of the Jews. So it's a hideous, hideous paradox. Because one of the things that's interesting about Nazi antisemitism, obviously Nazi antisemitism comes out of the climate again of the late 19th century. There's always been antisemitism, but antisemitism had changed, hadn't it, in the 19th century from a largely religious prejudice to a very overtly racial one. So sometimes people argue about this, don't they? I mean, there's arguments at the moment. Is antisemitism a form of racism? And clearly Nazi antisemitism absolutely is, because it's based not on a prejudice of a Christian against a Jew. It's a racial prejudice. This idea of biology is absolutely central to it. and that it exists to corrupt and corrode the traditional Nordic sense of the laws of nature

by kind of introducing compassion for the weak and the poor and all this kind of thing. And that the whole of Western history from the collapse of the Roman Empire is a demonstration of how this meme is percolating and corrupting and destroying the Nordic race. So it's this meme, if you want to put it that way, that generates the Catholic body of law in the Middle Ages that occludes and destroys the traditional German understanding of the laws of nature. You have the Germanic elites of Christian Europe engaged in war with the popes and the Catholic lawyers. This reaches right the way up to the French Revolution, which again is cast in overtly racial terms. So the elites that get destroyed in the French

Revolution are cast as Aryan, kind of blondes. And the plebs, the masses, the people are cast as in some way the embodiment of this kind of this Jewish resentment of a degenerate mass. And the ideals of the French revolution. So what Alfred Rosenberg describes as the infamous slogan of liberty, equality, fraternity, you know, it gets carried into Germany by Napoleon and infects Germany. And in the long run will give rise to Bolshevism, which is the ultimate expression of this to the Nazi way of thinking, eternal and inveterate Jewish hatred for everything that the German people represent. So in other words, it's the Germans who are the real victims in this story.

Right. Because they've been cheated of their rightful place at the top of the evolutionary ladder, if that's a viable metaphor. Exactly. Yes. And it's been a continuous and ongoing war launched against them by the Jews. So their ability to identify with their primal law has been corrupted by this kind of Jewish style of legalism. Their will to power has been softened by Christian compassion and by the egalitarianism that's been preached by the French Revolution. They are hemmed in all around by Slavs and other racial inferiors who are outbreeding them. And they've been bled of their manpower by the bloodletting in the Great War.

And these are the perils that haunt Hitler and which he is determined to see off. And this is what has always inspired him. So in 1922, he'd said that long ago when Rome was collapsing, an endless flow of Germanic hordes came from the north to save it. So that's casting the barbarian invasions as basically replenishing the depleted Nordic blood of the Roman state. Oh, right. Yeah. But if Germany disappears, who will come after? Little by little, Germanic blood is being drained from this earth unless we pick ourselves up again and set ourselves free. And in 1922, that might seem a pipe dream, but in the 1930s, Hitler is in power and he is in a position to act

on that understanding of history and of biology. All right. Well, we'll take a break right now, and we will return to discuss exactly how Hitler goes about trying to put that into operation. 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 start from the individual. We do not believe that the starving should be fed, that the thirsty should be given to drink, that the naked should be clothed. These are not valuable motives in our eyes. Our motives are of an entirely different nature. They may thus be summed up in a lapidary manner. We must have a healthy people to dominate in the world. That was Joseph Goebbels, Tom, in 1938, talking about Nazi morality. Now, Theo, our producer, has asked me to stress, Theo obviously holds the listeners in low regard

because he's worried that listeners will think that we ourselves are Nazis. Tom, are you a Nazi? I'm happy to put on record I'm not a Nazi. So we don't actually agree with these quotations, do we, Tom? It's very important. Let's just emphasize that. Now, so Goebbels' idea of morality is basically that everything is about health. I mean, the Nazis are obsessed with hygiene, aren't they? Racial health. Racial hygiene, yeah. So what is moral is what benefits the German people, and anything that doesn't benefit them- Is immoral.

Is either amoral or immoral. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so this is a message that is over the course of the thirties being endlessly pumped out by the Nazi leadership, by the SS, by propagandists, by academics, by public officials, by teachers. I mean, it is relentless. So if you're a child, you get this in school, you get this in the Hitler Youth, you get this on the radio, you see it in posters. Now, here's my question. Everything that we've talked about so far, the ideas about ancient Greece and Rome

and all that sort of stuff, obviously most ordinary people, if you're a kind of lathe operator in Hamburg, you're probably not thinking about the Romans very much or indeed the sort of origins of the Germanic race or any of this stuff. So how much do you think these ideas, some of which are pretty fringe ideas, how much have they seeped into the German population as a whole during the course of the 1930s? Well, that's hugely debated, isn't it? And I certainly don't feel qualified to rule on that. But my sense would be that the war would not have been fought in the way it was, had large numbers of people not kind of accepted, maybe even in just a gut way, the essential validity of what was being propagated.

I mean, I suppose a comparison might be with how deeply did people in the Soviet Union believe in Marxist ideology. I mean, if you're in a totalitarian state and this kind of stuff is being pumped at you all the time, then the default mode is basically just to accept it. And some people may well become true believers. And I think actually a kind of unsettling large number of people do. Because once you buy into the idea that morality is to be judged by the good of the race rather than by individuals or by universal standards. That's the big gear shift. And then everything follows from that. And if you're living in a society that is preaching that idea, the primacy of race, that everything is to be understood in terms of race, there is no other way of interpreting history or public morality or whatever, then I guess it would be very hard to kind of resist the implications of that.

Yeah. If there is no other way of thinking that is licit or permissible. And as you said, it's a shocking idea, but it is also one that has roots, as it were. Because even if you're not a sort of card-carrying racist, the language of race is kind of everywhere, isn't it, in the late 19th, early 20th century. Growing up in the 1920s and 1930s, even if you're not part of a Nazi milieu, the idea of racial struggle and the idea of there being races. Yeah. I mean, people in the democracies believe that.

People in the United States or in Britain or France or wherever. Yeah. Well, so Thomas Mann, the great novelist who gone into exile by this point, I mean, he says that Hitler is the kind of the monstrous younger brother of the educated elites in Germany, and that effectively his genius is for articulating their kind of darkest desires and impulses. And I think there's probably a kind of element of truth to that. But of course, it does require an enormous moral revolution, because basically what the Nazis are saying is that the German people cannot afford to show compassion as it has been taught by the Christianity that has been the dominant ideology in Germany for centuries and centuries and centuries. The idea that individual rights or indeed universal values should govern how Germans think,

this is an expression of Jewish malevolence, that it has to be countered, that therefore there can be no place for compassion that is grounded in concern for the individual. Instead, the compassion must be framed in explicitly racial terms. So the good Nazi has to think, kind of, if you like, in terms of what is good for public racial health. And to be sure, you might come across a good Jew or a good gypsy, but so what? So there's an SS publication that gives a kind of very, very familiar scientific tinge to this question of, you know, what do you do with Jews you might be friends with or who've done you good turns or whatever. When you lie down in a hotel bed infested with bedbugs, you don't ask one specific bedbug, tell me, are you a good or a bad bedbug?

You crush it. And Tom, this thing about suppressing individual morality and it being replaced by the collective morality, the idea of crisis, the idea of national struggle and all that, don't you think that it wouldn't have reached this sense of sort of almost hysterical urgency had it not been for the Great War? Because, of course, Germany has been through this enormous national trauma. Yeah. It's been humiliated. There has been a conflict in which individual rights have had to

be subordinated, not just in Germany, of course, but in the other competent nations as well, to the demands of the collective. And so that's laid a lot of the groundwork, hasn't it? And also, of course, it's meant that a lot of people are desensitized to violence. They've been brutalized on the Western Front or the Eastern Front. Do you think that's part of it too? Completely, because I think that the animating spirit of Nazism isn't necessarily, as I said before, a kind of strutting, arrogant self-confidence, although that I think comes in due course with the victories in the Second World War, but a kind of dread, a terror that Germany is going to disappear unless very,

very radical steps are taken. And the implications of this for people who are cast by the Nazis as racial enemies, so the Jews most obviously, but also the Roma, and of course the Slavs, the Poles, the Russians, whatever in due course, is completely terrifying. But it's terrifying also for racially pure Germans, as they would be defined by the Nazis, who can be cast as the equivalent of cancerous cells in the body politic of Germany, because they also have to be dealt with from the Nazi point of view. So an obvious example of that would be gay men who are targeted. Now, condemnation of homosexuality, which is a German word coined in the late 19th century, I mean, this is a Nazi inheritance. But actually, the Nazis are not opposed to male homosexuality really for moral reasons,

but for racial reasons. Because if you are a gay man and you are not breeding children, you are failing in your duty to the inheritance of the race. So this is why the Nazis had no real problem with lesbians, for instance. They regard lesbianism in the Reich as a consequence of the lack of men following on from the Great War. So they describe it as sexual distress caused by lack of men. And so once the Reich starts breeding enough men to keep women happy, lesbianism will end. This is the kind of thesis. And the Nazis also don't have a problem with foreign homosexuals because that's tremendous because it means that they won't be breeding. So that's absolutely brilliant. And predictably, they cast homosexuality

as being a Jewish disease that has been brought to the primordial swamps of Germany by Christian monks, and that it's monasticism that breeds the habit of homosexuality. Himmler, who's obsessed by this issue, says, well, we can see this from the evidence of ancient Germany. It's not clear quite how he knows all about this. He's probably drawing it from Tacitus. But he says, occasionally occasionally when incidences of homosexuality were discovered in the ancient german woods they would drown the offenders in bogs and he says again you know this was not a punishment but simply a matter of eliminating an abnormal life so it's kind of medicalizing morality okay so just on himmler can i just ask you a quick question about himmler i mean he'd

be a brilliant subject for a podcast in itself, although a very sinister one. Himmler hates Christianity, doesn't he? He does. Does he hate Christianity because he thinks it's Jewish, or does he hate Christianity as it were, per se, Christianity in itself? Well, he hates Christianity because it's Jewish, but he recognises it as being Jewish because he sees it as fostering everything that he detests. So, I mean, he blames Christianity for homosexuality, for instance, which would come as news probably to quite a lot of people, but he blames it for fostering the ideals of softness and weakness and compassion that he

regards for the reasons that we've spelt out as being contemptible. So the same is, I think, even more evident in the Nazi attitude to people who are physically or mentally handicapped. And here again, the need to purge the Germans of the infection of Christianity is very, very palpable because of course you have the fifth commandment, thou shalt not kill. And Hitler explicitly detested the 10 commandments. He saw them as everything that the Nazi state existed to oppose. He declared that the Nazis were leading a great battle to save humanity from the curse of Mount Sinai, the mount on which Moses had received the Ten Commandments from God. And he sees the obedience of the Germans to the Ten Commandments,

that it's this that has led Germany to become diseased and the German people to be in, you know, kind of wasting away. And again, this is this attitude that a nation is faced with declining numbers, that the birth rate is falling, all this kind of thing, and that the racial stock is becoming corrupt is a common anxiety. But it's only in Nazi Germany that it gets weaponized to this, I mean, objectively mad degree. But there are eugenics, there are eugenicists everywhere. I mean, United States, in Britain, in France. I mean, eugenics is a big deal in the early 20th century, isn't it? It is. I mean, in pretty much every country,

but it's in Nazi Germany that they really push it and that they kind of put their shoulder to the wheel of what the implications of eugenics properly are. So this is seen as an absolute priority for the Nazis when they come to power. So July 1933, a law is passed for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring. And this means compulsory sterilization for a broad array of medical categories. So people who suffer from schizophrenia, from cerebral palsy, hereditary epilepsy, hereditary deafness, blindness, manic depressive psychosis, severe alcoholism, or a very sinister phrase, congenital feeblemindedness. Feeblemindedness. Which of course, I mean, it's a catch-all yeah exactly so vague anyone could fall

within that category but again the nazis are casting this as rigorously scientific so they're very proud of this they set up health courts where you have you have a judge and you have two doctors and the preamble to the law which sets this up explains that any resemblance to a criminal trial should be avoided because they're not blaming the diseased peoples, as they would describe them, in moral terms. You know, it's not their fault that they have it. But, you know, in a way, it's a sacrifice that the person who's being sterilized is taking on for the good of the race. And it's cast therefore as being both biological and as very moral. And again, history is invoked because you have the example of Sparta here, which is endlessly, endlessly being cited. The way in which the ancients

kind of got rid of babies or infants or whatever, who didn't measure up to the standards that were required by the city or whatever. And because of this, because they're successfully able to frame these laws as being simultaneously scientifically justified and moral, they are able over the course of the thirties to kind of ratchet up the provision. So say 1935, so that's two years after the initial law is brought in. The period of appeal that the person who is condemned to sterilization has is reduced to 15 days. And 100,000, 200,000 in all over the period of the Nazi power are forcibly sterilized. But of course, Hitler, as war nears, as the prospect of a European conflict approaches, is worried that they're still not doing enough. The logical implication, again drawing on Sparta, is that you don't just content yourself with eugenic policy, but you go for a program of euthanasia and involuntary euthanasia.

In October 1939, Hitler makes the decision that people who he casts as genetically diseased should be eliminated. And he backdates this order to the 1st of September, which is the day the Reich goes to war. And I mean, you asked to what extent has this Nazi ideology kind of percolated through the whole of Germany? I mean, this causes a lot of moral revulsion in Germany. And in fact, in 1941, it inspires a bishop, the Bishop of Münster, Clemens von Galen, to openly condemn it in a sermon. And this sermon is widely, if illegally, reproduced. And it's actually one of the inspirations for the White Rose. The resistance movement that we talked about in a previous episode. But what is really striking is how many physicians back it.

So, I mean, the idea that Nazism appeals only to the, you know, goons of the SA or whatever. I mean, this is a comforting nonsense for anyone with pretensions to kind of intellectual aspiration. Physicians massively, massively back it yeah so chapiteau's book the law of blood opens with a trial of physicians who had participated in this program of involuntary euthanasia under the nazis in 1949 and they are exonerated they say look we're just doing what you know what the greeks and the romans did yeah we were doing nothing wrong we were following the science and they get let off in 1949 but this anticipates what we'll talk about next time, Tom, with anti-Semitism, with the Nazi dreams of the Jews, in which civil servants, people who work for local councils, doctors, lawyers were all ultimately implicated.

Yeah, absolutely. And so on that note and setting up where we're going to go in the next two episodes, I just want to quote a physician in 1940 who is responding very specifically to misgivings that have been expressed by a Lutheran pastor. So objections to this program of forced euthanasia being expressed both by Catholics and by Protestants. And this physician, a guy called Jürgen Stahler, replies, Where God's will truly reigns, that is in in pure nature one finds no trace of pity for the weak and diseased you will not see a diseased rabbit survive more than a few days it will fall prey to its enemies and in this way will be relieved of its suffering this is why rabbits are a society which is always a hundred percent healthy i mean right that's clearly not true but

by the by the fifth commandment thou shalt not kill is not a commandment from god but a jewish invention through which the jews the biggest murderers history has ever known always attempt to prevent their enemies from effectively defending themselves all the better to exterminate them after that and this is a doctor saying this this is a doctor saying this and i think again in answer to your question how widely have nazi ideas that are coming from the Nazi hierarchy percolated down? I mean, I think that that is a perfect illustration of all the themes that we've been talking about. Because what you have in that answer is an emphasis on the health of the race over the health of the individual, that true morality exists in protecting the racial stock rather than diseased individuals.

The biological metaphors, you know, comparing humans to rabbits. The emphasis on struggle. Yeah. The contempt for the Ten Commandments, for biblical injunctions from the dictates of religious dogma. And of course, blaming the Jews. The Jews are the biggest murderers history has ever known. Everything is always the fault of the Jews.

And Dominic, in the next two episodes, the last two episodes of this series that we've been doing on the Nazis in power, we're going to look specifically at what this ideology meant for German Jews. Yes, a fascinating subject, but also a very chilling one and a particularly chilling note, Tom, on which to end. Thank you for that. That was incredibly interesting and also terrifying. So everybody, we will see you for the last two episodes of the series. Of course, if you remember the Reuters History Club, you can listen to them right away. But if not, we will see you next time for The Nazis Against the Jews. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. 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 the