295: The Rise of the Nazis (Part 1)

[Music] Hello, welcome to the Restless History. And this time last year we were doing an anniversary episode on 1922, the year that some historians have described as the year that modernity began. And this year Dominic marks another anniversary, but an altogether darker anniversary. The 90th anniversary of the coming to power in January 1933 of the Nazis when Hitler became Chancellor. And so we thought that we can't really do justice to the rise of the Nazis in one episode. So we're going to, well we'll see how many episodes it takes, but it's a story worth telling. I mean it is a massive, massive story isn't it? It is. It's an enormous story. So yes you're absolutely right Tom. It's 90 years ago, the 30th of January 1933, about half-bast 11 at the Reich Chancellery at Wilhelmstrasse 77 in Berlin. So the Reich Presidents Palace was being renovated. So Paul von Hindenburg, the iconic general of the Great War in Germany, he was the President and he welcomes the leader of the National Socialist Party out of Hitler to become Chancellor Germany. Hitler swears an oath to uphold the Constitution to respect the role of the President. He says he will. These are extraordinary times, but he's determined to bring back normal parliamentary rule as soon as possible. And then the deal is done and Hindenburg says famously, "And now gentlemen, forwards with God." And that meeting, that moment has gone down as a very bale for landmark in human history. Obviously the communists have come to power in Russia, but the coming to power of the Nazis in Germany seems to cast an even darker shadow. And one of the reasons for that you might say is implicit in the scene that you've just described, which is that the Nazis, unlike the Bolsheviks, they come to power by means of gaining mass support in free elections. And that perhaps is why it's so haunts people in democracies to this day that something could have happened like that. Because the other aspect of the story that is so unsettling is that this is happening in perhaps the most cultured, economically advanced, industrially advanced, sophisticated country in the whole of Europe, Germany. So those two questions, how is it that the Nazis are able to use democracy to destroy itself? And how did a country like Germany come to fall under the spell of a man like Hitler? Both of them very, very frightening questions right the way into the present. They are absolutely. So we've just done, haven't we, two podcasts about Auschwitz, which aren't quite freed. And about the story of the escape artist, the man who escaped from Auschwitz. So we know where the story is heading and I think you're absolutely right, there are those two elements to the sort of mystery as it were, a really crucial one that the Nazis didn't seize power. I mean, they didn't quite win power by electoral means because they never won an absolute majority in a free and fair election, but they were the biggest party. Yeah, and they're engaging in the kind of horse trading that is standard. Standard, liberal democrat behavior. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. They get into power by, as it were, constitutional means. Now obviously there are lots of gray areas and there's lots of violence that accompanies that, but you're right, it's not a coup, it's not a revolution as it is with the Bolsheviks in 1917. So there's that element to it. As you said, using democracy against itself, and then I think you're absolutely right, it's the fact that Germany is an immensely well-educated, sophisticated, civilized, in a verticalmer's place. And ever since I think, I know you think this too, Tom, that we have lived in the shadow of the Third Reich because always, for any Western democracy, that fear never goes away. That you're only a few steps away from heading down the same dark road. And how can you put, I mean, you've seen this so much, of course, in the last few years, people worried about how could it happen again? Could it happen in France? Could it happen in the United States? Could it happen in Britain? And what does it say about human nature and about modernity itself that such a regime was able to possibly, possibly about do the causes, do the roots lie deeper back? So obviously the moral catastrophe of Nazism, which as you said, culminate, I mean, you know, the dark heart of it are those two episodes that we on Auschwitz, genocide, I mean, the mass killing. Where could this have come from? Yes. And people have been asking that, and they were asking it pretty early on. And they're all kinds of, I mean, we could just sort of touch on the different explanations that people have had. So there are some German historians who argued that it was unique to Germany, that Germany had always been on a special path, the Sonderevégthesis, this is called. So the idea that Germany didn't modernize properly, that it didn't have a kind of bourgeois politics like Britain and France, that it was more reactionary, that it was more militaristic, that it was special. And the Nazism was uniquely German. I don't actually think many historians still believe that. No, Tom. There are people who believe that Nazi, that Nazism was prefigured by the Kaiser's regime by the First World War. So there's a very famous German historian called Fritz Fischer. He basically argued that Germany's war aims in 1914 were paving the way for the Third Reich and there was a kind of continuity in German history. Again, I'm not entirely sure about that. There was a historian called Friedrich Meinacher. Again, he said that he blamed sort of Bismarck, said, you know, there's a line that runs from Bismarck and the Second Reich. So the creation of a unified German in 1871, that leads to Hitler. Obviously, if you're a Marxist, if you're a really card-carrying old-fashioned Marxist, you would say it's all about a product of the sort of the dynamics of class struggle. And that's one that's contemporary to Hitler, isn't it? So a lot of communist think, say, Brecht, famously in his place, advances the thesis that Hitler is brought to power by big business. Exactly. They're tools of big business. Again, I don't think that's one that a lot of historians would really subscribe to now. So the Great British historian of the Third Reich, Richard Evans, who is very much a historian at the left, he's pretty scathing about that thesis in the First Volume of his Great Trilogy on the Third Reich. Probably the most famous Britain ever to write about Hitler as a J.P. Taylor. I mean, a J.P. Taylor appalled people. This was when he was churning out incredibly provocative columns for the Sunday Express in the 50s and 60s. I think God that historians don't write provocative columns for tabloids today. Tabloid is the wrong word, so I think mid-marking in paper is the correct term. Thank you for acting. So ATP Taylor said that Hitler was a normal German leader. There was nothing unusual about Hitler. Nazis said Taylor represented the deepest wishes of the German people. Now again, I think a lot of people now would say, "A.J.P. Taylor was almost been deliberately offensive with that." And that yes, there is something peculiar to German about Nazism, but Taylor was completely ignoring the fact that Germany had all these democratic and liberal traditions as well as more reactionary ones. But Dominic also on the theme of centuries of, this has been centuries and centuries in the making, you would not expect me to let a possible mention of Christianity slip by. There is also the thesis that the Holocaust is bred by centuries and centuries of Christian anti-Semitism. The kind of folkloric belief in Jews as the enemies of Christ, that this is the kind of fertilizing the hatred that will be watered by Hitler. There must be some element of truth in that, Tom, that somewhere when you're analyzing the ingredients that lead to the death camps, the weight of history has to play apart, hasn't it? Although, as we will see, the quality of modern anti-Semitism is racial, rather than religious. I agree, I think it is, that is a fact, it must be. Also, I'm sure we'll know, if you were picking a country in 1900 where a Holocaust might happen, Germany probably wouldn't have been top of the list. Russia, France might have been, even as anti-Semitism is probably more virulent in France than some ways with the Drayfers case. Anyway, we're sort of jumping ahead of ourselves. There's always that tension. Is Nazi as a uniquely German? Is it uniquely European? Is it about something to do with modernity? Or, if you were stepping right back, does it speak to something very dark and human nature? Well, isn't there also a question of, is it bread of material circumstances? So, a kind of economic collapse, the hyperinflation, the Great Depression, all that kind of stuff, defeat in war? Or is it bread of the swirl of ideological currents and trends that are readying about? Or, I guess, the obvious answer would be that it's a bit of both, that it's economic crisis amplifies extremist opinions. I think, yes, I think you're right. I think that's a fascinating tension, isn't it? Because I know Gemini in this. podcast, I tend to be Mr. Material and you're much more interested in ideas than I am. So we'll probably, well, we'll tease a lot of this out, I guess. So shall we start by talking about, maybe we'll start by talking about Germany. Yes. Okay. So how far back would you trace the origins of Nazism? Would you trace it back to Medieval Antisemitism? Would you trace it back to Luthor? Would you trace it back to Frederick the Great? Would you trace it back to Bismarck? Well, Richard Evans, who I mentioned already in his magnificent books on the Third Reich. He begins by saying something like, does it make sense to start with Bismarck? And he thinks it does. And I think in a sense, you're right, because there's only really one lifetime, not even one lifetime, that separates Bismarck founding the German Empire in 1871 and the coming to power of the Nazis at the beginning of the 1930s. So it kind of, you know, since somebody could plausibly see both, it makes sense to use that as a span. So Germany didn't exist before 1871. I mean, there's a concept of Germany and there are people who speak German and there's a sense of German culture and German literature and German history, but there's no state, which would include Austria. We should put that out. Yes. So Austria will play a part in this, because of course Hitler is Austrian, but Austria is shut out of the creation of Germany or the Germans in Austria because they're part of the Habsburg Empire. There are definitely elements in, so Bismarck is the great guiding spirit of this new German empire that's created when they beat the French in 1871. And there are definitely elements in Bismarck's creation, the second Reich. We did a whole podcast about this with Katja Hoyer back in the early days of the rest of history, the prefigger Nazism. So Bismarck believes in force to get his way. Famous, blood and iron is the famous phrase that he uses. I don't think that makes him unusual in 19th century Europe at all. He's very ruthless and suckled. It is specifically that he's talking about how the great questions of the day should not be decided by speeches and all that kind of stuff that essentially it's shit. I buy iron and blood, he basically means a military, doesn't he? He doesn't, but I mean, it works. He fights at three wars against the Danes, against the Austrians and then against the French. But that is a contrast I say with Britain. Britain is already, well, Britain is fighting wars abroad. Yeah. I mean, lots of people would say, come on, you know, the British fighting their wars right, the Sudan or Egypt or whatever. But Bismarck is in training a political role for the army. Agreed. And the army obviously is a tool of force. So it could be argued that the idea that force is an violence are acceptable expressions of political will are kind of sold into the German constitution. I mean, I don't have that. I think it's valid, but I think a lot of people in the history, I would agree with you about that, Tom. And they would say the army isn't shriened within Bismarck's second Reich. It's kind of like a state within a state. It's self-governing. It answers only to the Kaiser. It doesn't answer to civilian politicians. Because isn't there this kind of the joke is that politicians in the second Reich are constantly threatened from a coup above that there's, yeah, if they go too far, they know that the generals and the Kaiser will dump on them. Well, this is exactly what will happen actually, Tom. This is the shadow that hangs over the Vimer Republic later on. And in the years before the Nazis come to power, that you have the big man, so initially the Kaiser and then President Hindenburg in the 1920s, with the army. And that's there actually often working against the democratically elected politicians. So there's that. There's the idea of a kind of German them that all German speakers have a destiny to be united in a single empire, a Reich. So that's obviously there in the late 19th century. There is the experience of imperialism, the colonial experience with the Germans. If you were defending the Germans, you would say learning from other European countries example where they behave with great ruthlessness and bloodthirstness, for example, in southwest Africa, where they massacre the Herrero population. There's an anxiety about Bismarck's second Reich. So there's a sense that they have been, their late comets aren't they to their European party. They're, they're a new state welded together by, as you said, by our own blood. And there's a sense that the British and the French in particular have had centuries head start. And I've got all these colonies and all these advantages and the Germans are catching up and feel a little bit resentful about it. That said, Bismarck is clear not an answer. He is reactionary undoubtedly, but then there are lots of reaction, I mean, Lord Salsbeer is a reactionary. There are lots of reactionary politicians in Europe. But also, I mean, there are a lot of. Militaristic politicians. We've emphasized the militaristic character of the second Reich. But it is also very democratic. And in lots of ways, it is more democratic than Britain. Yes, it is, absolutely. I'm much larger franchise. It has a much larger franchise, exactly right, much larger trade union movement. I suppose what you would say again, if you're looking with a benefit of hindsight, you would say they have this huge party, the social democratic party, kind of a left wing party. It's the largest party in the world, right? Yeah, a million members, the largest democratic party in the world. And yet there's always this sense in Bismarck, in the state that Bismarck has created that they're not really legitimate, that there's always this suspicion of them, this idea that they, the conservative middle class are terrified of them. They say that they are Marxists, well, they are Marxists, that they are threat to the integrity of the Reich, that they are subversive, all this kind of thing. That said, people are saying similar things in Britain about, you know, the Labour party about radicals, even though you can say about the Liberals. Well, they are about the Labour party. I mean, let's say about the Liberals. I mean, the thing about Parliament of the Roxy and Britain is that you have the notion of how majesty's loyal opposition. You do. But you seem to have less so in Germany, where there is, on the part of the, let's call them the bourgeoisie, the bourgeois parties, the parties of the right, the parties of the middle classes, they are terrified of the social democrats. And they never really regard them as legitimate. And so that is a theme that will feed through into the post-war period, right? Yeah, you're absolutely right, Tom. That's a fair point. They're looking back now from post 1933, you can say, they never trusted the social democrats. It's the biggest party, certainly the biggest party from 1912 in Germany, but among the judiciary, the police, big business, the establishment, there was always this sense, oh, they're not legitimate, we should crush them. That said, if the first one had gone differently for Britain, then you would have looked back at Edwardian Britain. And you would have found people saying the liberals are betraying our country because of home rule, the liberals, you know, you would have glad still was a traitor. You know, they would have found people saying that. So I wonder whether there's an element of hindsight here. And I suppose also say Britain had been defeated in the first world war or France. You would also have found not only within the constitutional structure of each country, but also within the current of ideas swirling around. So that's also a part of the mix. Absolutely, it is. Yeah, you're absolutely right. So I think across Europe, not just in Germany, but across Europe, you have deep anxiety about modernity, all sorts of political and cultural and social tensions. So you see it in Britain, for example, in the Edwardian period about votes for women and all these sort of things about culture, generally distrust of abstract culture and new music and all that kind of thing. But in Germany, there are, I think we can identify, let's say the 1880s and 1890s. I think a lot of historians would say Nazism is in many ways a creation of the 1880s and 1890s. You can see the ingredients. The 1880s and 1890s across Europe are being intellectually reconfigured by one big idea, which is Darwinism. Yeah. And what Darwinism does is to upend the fundamentally Christian idea that the rich have a duty of care for the poor and so on, that there is a value in being in weakness, if you like. And it upends that at least the way that Darwinism comes to be expressed, the idea of survival of the fittest and so on. And that provides intellectual sanction for European countries across the board at their political, their economic, their military, their cultural apex, basically to go around kicking sand in the face of anyone they want to. I think that's probably true. I think Darwinism's Darwinist ideas, I agree with you. I think they permeate into all kinds of different areas. The idea of competition, the idea of struggle, the idea of inevitable confrontation. And as you said, actually, Tom, I think you're probably right. A disdain for weakness that perhaps wasn't so strong before. And therefore, a kind of an anxiety that different peoples are in a race and that if you drop behind, then you're going to be crushed. So I was kind of looking at this in the context of all the various themes that will feed into Nazism. And it's very kind of international. So you have a German Phil Helmah, who in 1873 is recalibrating Christian anti-Semitism in very overtly Darwinian terms. That it's not about religious prejudice, it's about the fact that there are differences within the blood. And he absolutely, so he's explicit about that. It's not religious, it's racial. It's racial. And he coins the word anti-Semitism and it's something he's tremendously proud of. And he, 1879, he founds the League of Anti-Semites. So that's the German angle. But then in France, also you have, as you said, this incredible strain of anti-Semitism, and it's in France that thinkers coined the idea of the Aryans as a master race, that kind of people from the North, as people who should properly be the rulers. I mean, it's kind of old thing for the front, you know, it's, what's his name, goby knew. Yeah. And that gets translated into German in 1898, so that's obviously also part of it. But then there is also this British figure who stood and steward chamberlain, who, who writes this work, the foundations of the 19th century, and he further kind of refined this idea that history is forged by competition between races, and he posits that the two great races, the two racial groups that have kind of retained their original purity, I mean, all the miscellulations that's been going on are the Aryans and the Jews, and that the Aryans and the Jews are locked, therefore, in a contest for global supremacy. And you can see how, you know, this Anglo-French German swirl of ideas is going to feed into Nazism, but it is there, you know, it's, it's not specific to Germany. Right, agreed. Houston's Stuart Chamberlain, he was an old boy of Tottenham College, Tom. He's drawn into this anti-Semitism because he's a passionate liberal, would you believe, so he hates Benjamin, D'Israeli. He has an absolutely low the Benjamin, D'Israeli, who of course has Jewish ancestry. And interestingly Chamberlain marries the daughter of Richard Wagner. Richard Wagner. Yes. Yeah. So Wagner is a hugely interesting figure. Of course, it's for some people who's tainted because of his associations with this, other people say, no, listen, the music is separate from the man. Sort of Wagner's shadow, his use of pseudo, sort of Nordic and Germanic nationalist mythology in his operas, his intense anti-Semitism. All of that is not unique to him. It's part of that world that you've just been describing, where people are living in a world that's that on the one hand, it's very forward-looking, with it's very scientific, with all this talk of racial difference. And but on the other hand, it's backward looking, steeped in history and myth and all that stuff. Right. And that will, I mean, that is the great tension within fascism and Nazism, the way that you look back to the heroic days of, you know, whether it's the Germans or the Romans or whatever. And you look forward to cutting-edge science. And the way in which Germany is the scientific brand leader, that it's its physicians and doctors and epidemiologists have kind of identified all kinds of diseases, have tracked down kind of bachelect, all that kind of stuff. The idea that healthy organisms can be infected by germs. I mean, this provides a very, very potent metaphor for racists and anti-Semites. Yeah, it's fascinating actually. The late 19th century is this period of great interest in hygiene, in the idea of social hygiene. Everything is medicalised. People are using medical metaphors all the time. And as you said, it's very easy to slip from talking about social hygiene if you're talking in the 1890s or something to talk about racial hygiene. So clean cities, clean streets, but also clean race, where the best people are breeding and outsiders are kept out. Because Rudolf Hess, I mean, he defines Nazism as applied biology. Kind of. Yeah, chilling phrase. This sort of cranky science, if you like. I mean, confirming all your dark suspicions of science, Dominic. It's, I've always thought, yes, you're absolutely right, Tom. Regular listeners will know that I'm very suspicions of science generally. Yeah, so there are people talking about eugenics, there are people talking about capital punishment. Right. And eugenics, again, eugenics is absolutely, you know, it's not a right-wing thing. It's across the political spectrum. The idea that healthy societies should breed out mental or physical defection, defects as they see them. I mean, there are tons of intellectuals in Britain, George Benessure, all that glue that kind of yeah. George Benessure, lots of people who would see themselves as maybe being on the left, who are saying, do you know what? We should have eugenics to breed out all these impurities. We should just execute lots more criminals, get rid of them, get them out. All of this kind of thing. There are a couple of other ideas that Tom just before we move on. So one of them is this idea of pan-Germanism. So this idea that the German people must all be united in one empire that their opponents are the Jews. So pan-German, there are all sorts of pan-German movements and the 1890s, 1900s. They're always looking for enemies within and without. They talk in these very sort of broad brush terms. They talk about German dumb, judum, you know, slarvedum. And they think that these different dums are engaged in the Sepocalyptic War. A lot of pan-German's are also interested. And here's another medical idea for you in this idea that a race needs room, needs a living space. So this comes from an anthropologist called Ludwig Vultman in 1900. He says the German race has evolved more than others. And we need more space. And we that we'll have to acquire that space. It's the law of nature that we will have to acquire that space from other races. So there's all that stuff. One other element I think we've got time for just quickly, which is very, very popular in Germany. And again, you can see similarities with things going on in Britain. Is this idea of people, bands of brothers? These are the guys going off into mountains and hiking and singing. And this is the backward looking sketch. This is about the boy scouts. This is the boy scouts in Britain in Germany. There are all kinds of little groups of boys who will or young men. They'll sometimes dress up in kind of uniform type things. They'll go off hiking, community with nature. They sit round a fire. They sing nationalist songs. They talk about they exchange these very ideas when they're out there sitting in the hills and forests of Germany, dreaming, idealistically of this utopia that what this nationalist utopia that one day will come. But Dominic, to repeat, I mean, these are extremist ideas by definition. They're not the mainstream. There's a lot of anti-Semitism on the margins. But by and large, most Germans are not obsessing about Jews. Jews are incredibly well integrated in Germany. There's only percent of population. What? 600,000? Something like that. And they're very well integrated. Very well simulated. Very successful, actually, professional. But that creates resentment, though, Tom, I would say. So particularly when there's downturns like in the 1870s? Sure. But I think, I mean, there's a case for saying isn't it? Because we know what's going to happen. Historians have understandably gone back and looked for the traces of anti-Semitism in the pre-First World War world. But you can over emphasize it, I think. And so therefore, the question is what role does the First World War play? Because all of these kind of extremist positions, I mean, they're swirling around, but had the Nazis not come to power, had the Holocaust not happened. We wouldn't be historians would not be really interested in them. They're right. They're curious. So this is why I think the First World War is absolutely colossal. A producer is pestering us to take a break, but just just talk for a couple more minutes about the First World War. Germany's experience of the First World War is absolutely shattering. So if you're a German in 1914, you're very conscious of living in the most modern, the most industrialized, the most forward thinking society in Europe. And suddenly, you're in this war in which the Germans, by the way, they don't think they started it. They think they are encircled and embattled by Russia and France. They blame the Russians and the French above all for the war. They think they had to get involved to support their ally Austria. And the war is really, really tough for the Germans on the home front in the way that it isn't, let's say, for the British. So the British start them. British are starving them. So they have frisd famously the turnip winter in Germany, where there is just so little food, where they're drinking coffee made of dust and all this kind of thing. At that point, there are some people looking for scapegoats and they're blaming the Jews. So there's that element of it becoming stronger. There's also the fact that the Germans, I mean, they literally incur far more casualties. They've produced seven million casualties. That's more than half of all the 13 million men who are mobilized. So by the end of the war, almost two million Germans have been killed. There are half a million widows. There are a million German children without fathers. So their world has kind of fallen apart. And also the value of the Marcus collapsed. So basically, their currency has been inflated to pay for the war. So incredible figure that taxation only covered 14% of German government expenditure through the war. I mean, incredibly. That's incredible. That is incredible. Is debt and inflation exactly. So they're kind of porporizing themselves. And that obviously will be very important in the post-war years. Democracy has not exactly been suspended, but it's been sort of pushed to the margins because by the end of the war, the country is being run by a duumver of two generals, General Hindenburg, Paul von Hindenburg and General Eric Ludendorff, who we will definitely be talking about later on. So they, there's sort of this is to keep it together. This is to kind of to keep fighting. And then to the astonished because partly because of press censorship and so on, the German people are astonished when it all falls apart in November 1918. And almost without anybody really knowing what's going on, the Kaiser is suddenly out. I mean, he's out kind of overnight. And a republic has been proclaimed in Berlin by people, many of whom did not even want to republic. So the most famously Friedrich Abert who's the leader of the social democrats. He proclaims to republic even though he actually wanted to keep them on a key. So the whole thing is falling apart in chaos, Berlin is racked in the the winter of 1918-19 by fighting between different left-wing factions, between there's rebellions, there's an uprising by a group of people called the Spartacists on the left that is put down by returning soldiers in the war. So total and utter chaos, everything is suddenly collapsed in ruins and ordinary Germans, particularly those who fought in the war, are completely horrified and taken on a wears by this. And there's a very, very famous example, which I'll just read to you before we go into the break. So it's a guy who's a corporal, he's been a corporal, he's won the Iron Cross, he's well regarded by his comrades, his bravery, he's not yet 30 and he'd been blinded in a gas attack near EEP in the final weeks of the war and he's ended up in a hospital in a place called Pasavalk in Pomerania. And in the hospital he's been hearing rumors of what's all going wrong and then on the 10th of November, so literally the day before the war ends, a Protestant pastor comes to visit the hospital to give a speech to them and he says, he related to the story, he said, I was in feverary excitement as I listen to the address, the Rev. Old Gentleman seemed to be trembling when he informed us that the House of Hoen Zolland should no longer wear the Imperial Crown, the Fatherland had become a republic that we should pray to the Almighty not to withhold his blessing blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then the pastor breaks down and he starts crying and the soldier says, the corporal says, a feeling of profound dismay fell on the people and that's assembling. I do not think there was a single eye that withheld its tears. As for myself, I broke down completely when the Old Gentleman tried to resume his story by informeous that we must now end this long war because the war was lost and we're at the mercy of the victor. It was impossible for me to stay and listen any longer, darkness surrounded me as I staggered and stumbled back to my ward and I buried my aching head between the blankets and the pillow. I had not cried since the day I stood beside my mother's grave. And Dominic, the name of that corporal, what was it? It was of course Tom Adolf Hitler. See you after the break. Hello, welcome back to the rest of history. We are looking at the rise to power of the Nazis and Dominic. Just before the break, you introduced Adolf Hitler, having a, well, basically losing it over Germany having been defeated. Breaking down and sobbing like a baby beside his mother's grave. So we did an episode, we did two episodes on Hitler didn't we on the life of Hitler with Sir Ian Kurshaw, but just give us a brief reminder for those who didn't listen to that and who may not know about Hitler's background. Where does he come from? So Hitler is Austrian and I think as Sir Ian would undoubtedly say, the silent thing about Hitler is that up to this point he is a nobody. There is nothing remarkable about him at all. He's not particularly, he doesn't be particularly evil. He's a bit of a failure. He's just a bit of a dropout. So he was born in a place in Austria called Brownow Amin on Easter Saturday, 1889. He's the fourth child of his Alloise and Clara to Alloise's father is just a sort of slightly rubbishy kind of bad tempered Austrian customs officially. It's a civil servant, a sort of minor civil servant. So no Jewish ancestry, no, no, nothing. So he understood that myth and he also he did dealt with the myth that Hitler only had one ball. Tom, you love that. You love that, Cito, which is completely untrue. Those are the questions that the listeners will be asking and we just want to, you know, put that down. So the idea that there's some sort of physical or extraordinary psychological flaw is not right. It's a cop out. What we know about Hitler when he was a little boy is that he's perfectly normal and a happy boy. I mean, in Kurshian his biography describes him playing with his friends and the woods and all this stuff. In 1900 when he's about 11, he moves to a bigger school in the city of Lints. And there, I mean, again, this is really not that exceptional. He's at a big school now, a bigger place doesn't really know anybody, it's very miserable. Kind of is lazy, becomes a bit of a drop out, becomes a sort of solace. Oh, leave me alone. I'm kind of stuff. Yeah. He tells his father famously, you know, I want to go and be an artist and as far as Shouts at him and says, never just hang out and it's for them. All that kind of stuff. Yeah. It's farther drop, stead in 1903. Adolf, whose, you know, the apple of his mother's eye is able to persuade her that he to let him drop out of school. Then he just spends his time day dreaming and going to concerts. But also that, because that's the thing, isn't it? The stereotype of the teenager in his room listening to music. I mean, Hitler becomes obsessed by Wagner. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, really, completely obsessed by Wagner. And you can completely see why this sullen rather miserable teenager is obsessed by a composer who celebrates the hero. Yeah. Oh, Conkers, you know, stands atop the blooded bodies of his end. And there are so many, again, and again, in his operas, the figure of the hero is someone who hasn't been recognized as a hero who kind of emerges from nowhere. So you can absolutely see that A, this makes Hitler, you know, you can see the kind of person he is, but you also can, I think most listeners would say, this is not a particularly unusual person. I mean, there's one in there. There are multiple versions of this person in schools. The length and breadth of England and they will go on to become Loser Justas, estate agents, small business advisors, you know, perfectly normal people. So what happens to set Hitler on the path that makes him Hitler? I suppose, so one crucial thing is him going to Vienna. So his mother dies in 1907 when he's 18. He's tried to get into the fine arts academy in Vienna. He doesn't get in twice, very disappointed by that as a crushing blow to him because he's dreamed of being an artist. He ends up as kind of drop out in a men's hostel, the men's home. And he's painting pictures for tourists, so postcards famously. He gets certain things from Vienna that he perhaps wouldn't have got somewhere else. So Vienna is of course in, it's a largely German-speaking city, but it is the capital of the Habsburg empire, what we commonly call Austria. He's spending all his time listening to Wagner, Wagner is very popular in Vienna, but he's also reading stuff. There's a kind of strain of anti-Semitism. There's particularly pronounced in Vienna. It's particularly virulent because Vienna is a city that is torn apart really by kind of political and racial conflicts. Perhaps by again, Paris, multi-ethnic. Right, because in Germany, there isn't much mainstream political anti-Semitism. It's on the edges, but in Vienna, that's different. Yeah, it is. Absolutely. So Kurschor says in his biography, you know, when Hitler goes down to the newspaper kiosk, outside the men's home or wherever, it's full of racist periodicals. So we know that he read something called Ostarra. We think he read something called Ostarra by a guy called Jörg Lantz, which was all about kind of menacing dark swarthy figures attacking blonde women and there's very, very anti-Semitic. But the key figure, I know you're very interested in Tom, is this guy Gail Gourithov on Schernerer? Yes, he wanted to get rid of the Christian calendar. He hated Christianity. He wanted to give all the Christian festivals German names. So Christmas wanted to be Yulefest and all that kind of stuff. But he also wanted to get rid of the Christian dating system and replace it with the date of a defeat of the Romans by the Kimberi and the Tutans. So that's just before Marius of the Battle of Nareia and that this should be the equivalent of Grand Zero, the birth of Jesus, replace the birth of Jesus, Battle of Nareia, that's what it's all about, which is such a kind of eccentric mad thing. It's expressive of the kind of the strain of lunatic thinking that characterizes anti-Semitism. But Schernerer is important. So Schernerer is a sort of quite a popular thinker in Vienna at the time because he's proposing also things like universal manhood suffrage and kind of great state activism and so on. So he's hard to pin down politically. But some of his ideas are definitely going to be very influential. Schernerer, for example, wants to push the anti-Semitism further than anybody else. He wants to remove Jews completely for the life of physically, politically. And he's also the guy who comes up with the Hile, right? And his followers call him Führer, leader. So the all Roman stuff that you were just mentioning, he starts shouting Hile when he's in Parliament in the early 1900s. And his followers, they call him the leader. So this sort of card Roman, the Nazis are going to pick up all of that later on. There's also another key character in Vienna, very important influence upon Hitler and the Nazis. It's the mayor of Vienna, it's called Carl Luger. Again, very hard to pin down politically because he's like a sort of anti-Semitic Viennese Joseph Chamberlain because the great mayor of Birmingham Victorian Britain, because he carries out all these great municipal reforms. So he really modernizes Vienna and he does stuff for the working classes and the low middle classes and so on. But he wins support by being fanatically and virulently anti-Semitic. And we know he's a nationalist socialist. We know that Hitler said to people in his men's hostel, or Luger as a brilliant man, is the best mayor of any German in history. So again, he's picking up all of this stuff and he's probably picking up, he's almost certainly picking up the anti-Semitism. So there's some debate about exactly when Hitler becomes anti-Semitic, but he cannot not have been influenced by it. The thing is, his bloggers don't think that it's pathological at that stage because he's just thinking about his rubbishy postcards and how miserable he is and Wagner and arts and stuff. What clearly happens to him is he goes to the war because he goes to Munich in the interim. Does the famous photo isn't there where he in 1940s? Yeah, he's alive. like a lot of people are, he really feels like, although he's born in Austria, he's from a German speaking family, he's German speaking himself, he feels like his destiny lies in a German dump, as he would know it out of court it. So he goes off to the war and I think what obviously happens, like I hope to a lot of people in the war and this isn't again, not just in Germany, he's brutalized by it, he's surrounded by death, he's a dispatch runner, I mean lots of other dispatch runners are killed, it's better than some posts in the army but it's still not, it's not a baritone laughs, so he's inured to death and to suffering, I think this is the point that the where, yeah because before that nobody had said oh Hitler loves violence, he's an evil guy, but I think at this point he's surrounded by violence and then there's that sense of trauma and that stuff in passive alken, the hospital has been invalidated out, I mean you read in, so that thing that I read was of course from mine camp, my struggle, which he writes in the mid 1920s and there's long passages in that, you know, it had all been in vain, in vain the sacrifices, in vain the hunger and thirst, was it for this that the soldiers died in August and September 1914, had all this been done to enable a gang of despicable criminals to lay hands on the Fatherland, right, I mean this is obsessive stuff, so who is he referring to as the criminals, is he referring to, well they call them November criminals aren't they, the democratic leaders who agree to the armistice, or is he referring to the Jews already as the criminals? Both, I think it's fair to say, I think he, I mean don't forget he's writing those words later, so he's looking back, but at the time there had been a rise, I mean if Hitler was anti-Semitic already because of what he's experienced in Vienna, it makes sense that he's still anti-Semitic in 1918, there had been a rise in anti-Semitism in the last couple of years of the war, is people look for scapegoats because of the shortages, the last days. So there's a feeling that the Jews are profiteering, yes, it speculates as people are whittering about Jewish spec, which is completely untrue and unfounded, people are also saying all the Jews aren't, Jewish Germans aren't doing their bit for the war, if it again completely unfounded, many, many just evidence by the Cemetery's. You know, the Cemetery's? By the fact that one of the guys who had nominated Hitler, the guy who nominated Hitler for the Iron Cross was a Jewish officer, but you know, people lash out when they're angry at all set, and that's this is what's happening I think across Germany. But also presumably, I mean Hitler has an almost religious faith in Germandom, in the blood of the German people, in the blood of the Aryan people, and yet they have been defeated. So therefore, the nature of that. Therefore, the only way that he can explain that defeat is by treachery. Yeah, whether it's democratic politicians or more sinisterly, this idea of a baseless within the German bloodstream. Yeah, and the nature of the defeat, Tom, explains that because you see, Germans losing in 1918, they've gone on this tremendous offensive attempting to win the war in one blow before the Americans can really turn the balance of the war, and they've actually carried all before them, or appeared to in the spring and summer of 1918, and then the great Ludendorff offensive runs out, has seen they've been driven back, and then suddenly it collapses very, very quickly, and there's this sort of sense that the German people have not been prepared for the defeat. Crucially, of course, there are no allied troops at that point on German soil. Yeah. So it's an away fixture that they've lost as it were, to their surprise because they thought they were winning, and actually when the troops return to Berlin, Friedrich Abert, who will talk about next time, who's the key figure in the creation of the Vimar Republic, so to democratic leader, he famously says to them, "No enemy has defeated you." And a lot of Germans believe that, they believe somehow they've lost the war, but they weren't really militarily defeated, which is completely wrong, they were defeated on French and Belgian soil, but it's sort of been kept from them, and so they say, "Well, we've been stabbed in the back. We've been betrayed by traitors." Anyway, Hila comes back to Munich, where he'd been before. He comes back on the 21st of November 1918, and at that point, Munich is already in Otter-Auto-Chaos. So when the Kaiser's regime fell apart in the final days of the war, across Germany, people are just randomly seized power in different places. In Munich, power had been seized by a man who could have been designed to provoke Hitler. He's a guy called Kurt Eisner, he's a theatre critic, he's a very sort of Bohemian sort of cafe abitue, where's a black cloak and steel-rimmed glasses. He's not even from Munich, he's from Berlin, and he's also Jewish, and he's very left-wing. So he basically sets up his own little Bavarian Republic in Munich. It's complete shambles, everybody on the right has, "Oh my God, this Jewish theatre critic has seized power. What the hell's going on?" He's assassinated, and even crazier regime comes in, the Bavarian Council Republic, under another, this time it's a power in the Highlight, could tell that. Yeah, there, utterly ludicrous. Because that's the weird thing about this, is of course, Hitler is an artist. You have all these guys who are kind of various playwrights and critics, and all that kind of stuff. It's basically people from the arts pages of newspapers, all staging coos, trying to set up dictatorships. You know my view, Tom. Artistic people should never be allowed anywhere in their politics. Yeah, so Ernst Tollis regime, so they declare war on Switzerland for not lending them 60 railway locomotives. One of his ministers famously sends a telegram to Moscow asking for help because he says the previous minister has stolen the key to the ministerial toilet. So it's absolutely shambolic. That regime is then toppled by a communist, a much more hard-line communist regime, which is very much in touch with what's going in at Moscow. They do think this would appeal to you, Tom. They, one of their first initiatives is to turn a church in Munich into a temple of reason. Yeah, very, very robsby RS. Very robsby RS. So Munich is then retaken, and it's retaken by a group who, a lot of people say, anticipate the Nazis, all kinds of ways. They call the Freikor, the Freekor. And these are basically returning soldiers who, they've come back from the war. Some of them, it's still in disbelief that they've lost at all. And these are the same guys who are putting down the communists in Berlin as well. Exactly right. They're killing a razor lutz in Bergen. Other left-wing people call the Spartacists in Berlin. And they put down the red republic in Munich. And they are very right-wing. They are shooting people out of hand. They kill about a thousand, about a thousand communists when they finally fight their way into Munich. So Munich in all this period, this sort of six-month period has been an absolute basket case. And so what is Hitler up to at this point? I mean, what's he doing through? Hitler is still in the army. He's a corporal because he was in the Bavarian army, so the different states of the empire sent their own sort of contingents. So he's in the Bavarian army. And in the summer of 1918, 1919, rather, the officers do what you know, you would do in such a situation. They want to make sure that their men all have the right ideas because they're worried that communist, Bolshevik ideas have spread among the soldiers. So they start to send people to sort of training camps and to a instruction. They listen to lectures and speeches and so on. Hitler, we know, goes to these and he's very good. I mean, there's no other way of putting it. He's very keen. He likes the ideas. And he finds that he has a talent for public speaking, right? This is the moment where he discovers that he has this kind of, exactly, malign genius for rabble rousing, basically. Yeah. So he's basically been sitting in the lectures and answering questions and doing whatever they do, breaking for group discussions, no doubt. And the superiors say he's really good. We'll get him to give some of the lectures. He starts doing it in August 1919. And again, they say he's very, very good at talking to the men because he talks to the men and I'll, because he's one of them. He talks in simple, earthy, direct language. He's burning with bitterness about defeat. He hates the left, the communists and so on. He hates the Jews. So his anti-Semitism is very, very pronounced at this stage. There's a famous letter from this time where he's talking, he describes the racial tuberculosis. So again, it's that idea of disease, that medical language, exactly. So he's found a voice. This nobody has found something. The one thing he's very good at, which is basically ranting and raving to groups of soldiers who listen. Now, his superiors decide to build on that. So Munich, as I've said, is in total political chaos. There are dozens and dozens of different political parties, far left, far right, cranky, extreme, all sorts. One of them is a party called the German Workers' Party. And this had been founded in January 1919 by a locksmith called Anton Drexler. And it's an outgrowth of something that will interest you, Tom. I would call it the fool's society, but you would go, I imagine it's tually, is it? Thule. Thule. Ultima Thule, which for the Romans was the icy land in the Father's North, so Iceland, whatever. So this is a tiny hard-right pan-German group, but it's very antisemitic. So they're also really into the occult and stuff, aren't they? They are. Yes. And also they're very into the idea of Aryanism. And so they use the swastika, which is kind of ancient Indian symbol as a symbol for the Aryans. So that's kind of bubbling away. And they're led by this convicted forger for fraudster who is passing himself off as a barren. Right. The Thurley Society. Yeah. So it's all, and it's Thurley because it's the furthest north. So it's this idea of a Nordic race, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So the German workers parties are kind of like spin off of this by this guy, Drexler. It's selling all those ideas that were floating around in the 1880s, kind of pan-Germanism, nationalism, anti-Semitism. It's aimed at kind of lower middle-class people. It is actually very, very small. It's nothing unusual in Munich. Just one of many such parties. And Hitler was sent by his captain, the guy, I could Karl Meyer, who actually later completely hated Hitler and ended up being killed in the Second World War. Meyer says, "Go along and see what's going on with these guys." So Hitler goes in. This is a little meeting. One of the speakers, in the Q&A, somebody gets up and says, "I think Bavaria should break away from the rest of Germany and become its own country." Hitler jumps to his feet and just starts shouting and says, "This is a terrible idea." You know, ranting and raving. And afterwards, it's very like Twitter. Right. Yeah, I guess. Drexler says to him, "You know, you're very. I was impressed by you, young man. You know, why don't you. We'd love you to join." And Hitler joins. He becomes member 555. Now, they definitely didn't have more than 500 members. Probably they had 55 members, but they would put the. Yeah, they would sort of give the impression they were bigger than they were. Pad it out. He goes to more meetings. It seems probable that the army encouraged him to keep going. They said, "You know, oh great, they like you. They keep going. Keep an eye on them. Maybe we can use them. You know, we can keep tabbess on them. Brilliant. You keep turning up." So, Hitler goes and he gives speeches at them. And he becomes their star speaker. I mean, they're not a highly talented outfit. So, you might say that's not very difficult. Big fish and a small pond. Yeah, but there's no doubt he's very good at it. And 1919 becomes 1920. The meetings get bigger and bigger and bigger. And mass meetings and kind of beehals and things. You know, if you read the descriptions by Ian Kershaw and Richard Evans, they make it clear that, you know, it's easy for us to say, "Oh, these are sort of weirdos and cranks and it's easy to win them over." But he is very good at it. He gives these, as Evans says, he uses simple, straightforward language that ordinary people can understand. Short sentences, powerful, emotive slogans. He will start quietly to get people's attention and then they'll get louder and louder. And he'll work himself into a physical frenzy kind of sweating and shouting. And it's the sort of simplicity and the absolutism of the message. No hint of doubt, no hint of nuance. You know, he loves Germany. It's the Jews who are responsible for anything that has gone wrong. And the crisis facing Germany is so complex, is so terrible. It's such a snarl of complexities that I guess very stark, simple explanations for what is going on, have an obvious appeal. Of course they do. Yeah, I mean, imagine that. I've often thought about this, you know, to be German in the Edwardian, what we would call the Edwardian period, was great. You know, your country had come from nowhere and was the dynamo of Europe. Amazing culture, universities, science, industry. And then you go into this war that you don't think, I mean, lots of historians may think it's German as fault. But the Germans themselves don't. You go into this war and life just falls apart. And suddenly, you're in 1919, the Kaiser is gone. The whole, everything that you believed in has been turned upside down is in an absolute and utter chaos. And of course you're looking for artisan. I think as Evans, Richard Evans talks about what he calls the revivalist further of Hitler's meetings. And in such traumatic times, you can absolutely see why people who feel themselves to be suffering and to be humiliated would grasp a message offering salvation and offering scapegoats actually. Yeah, because the Jewish, the anti-Jewish stuff is right there from the beginning interestingly. And I was quite surprised. So thinking about my terrible GCSE history. I mean, the teacher, by the way, Mr. Gorsy was excellent. But I clearly completely misunderstood. Because I always thought that anti-Marxism was so key to Hitler. But both in Kurschen, Richard Evans say, no, he doesn't really talk about Marxism at this point or Bolshevism. What he's talking about all the time of the Jews. So the anti-Bolshevism comes later. But that makes sense, doesn't it? Because to be anti-Marxist would be to be part of a conventional political debate of a kind that is familiar across Europe and has been for decades. Well, really since the French Revolution, you might almost say. But to identify the Jews as the problem is to be talking in a kind of sub-Darwinian mode that perhaps people hadn't realized before. That the blood is all and that therefore if the blood gets infected, then disaster happens. It's a new radical explanation that people in the mood to accept it are going to accept. And actually, another thing to them, though, is the violence of it. We did the podcast about Auschwitz. The question that hangs over all this is at what point is the final solution on the table? I mean, Hitler is saying in April 1920, the Jews are to be exterminated in August 1920. You shouldn't think that you can fight a disease without killing the cause. Without annihilating the Basilis, you won't be able to get rid of the racial tuberculosis. April 1921, the solution of the Jewish question can only be solved by brute force. So all of those ideas are there at this stage. I mean, what the thing is, though, so Hitler has cronies at this point. He, by 1921, he has control of the Nazi parties. They're various internal shenanigans he's threatened to walk out. So when does it become the Nazi party? When does it, when's that name change happened? So it goes from the German Workers Party to the National Socialist German Workers Party in February 1920. And Hitler also designs the flag. So the Swastika, that comes from the Thule society. Yeah. Thule society. The colors, black, white, red, they are the imperial colors. They're the colors of the Kaiser's Reich. So you can see there's a reactionary element, but there's also the kind of slightly cranky occultist element. I mean, very cranky with the Swastikaer exactly. So Hitler's in charge, really, by the summer of 1921, he's threatened to walk out, and there's been made the big man in the party. He has started to get a group of cronies and very recognizable names. So Hans Frank, his lawyer, you mentioned before, Rudolph Hess. So they're both in the Thule society, aren't they? They're both in the Thule society. A guy called Julius Stryker, he comes in from Newerhamburg. He becomes the, he's an absolute obsessive anti-Semite. He edits De Sturma, the famous anti-Semitic newspaper. He's a key figure because he's going to reach out to Protestants, as well as the Catholic population of Bavaria, Herman Gering. Yeah. He comes in, he's an air ace. He'd flay in with the Red Baron. He had it, he'd ended up becoming the commander of the Red Baron's Flying Circus, at the very end of the war. He's amazingly given his sort of copulance later in life. He's seen this great dashing romantic figure in the 1920s. So a bit of a coup for the Nazis to get him. And there's another anti-Semite called Alfred Rosenberg, who is fanatically anti-Christian. So one for you, Tom, he has, Rosenberg has plans to replace all crosses in Germany with swastikers and to replace all copies of the Bible with minecampf. Yeah. Well, he's a head of Hitler there. Yeah, he is. Who for much of the 20s is claiming the Nazis are very Christian. Yeah, but he can see more clearly that that isn't the case. I mean, they're not friends I would personally choose to have. But they're hanging around with Hitler in the early 1920s. So it's a small party, but it's growing. Now, here's the funny thing as we look forward to the next episode. All the ingredients are there. So you've got all the themes, the labens around, the pan-Germanism, the search for scapegoats, the hatred of the Treaty of Versailles. They're settled at the end of the First World War. The hatred of the so-called November criminals, all of that stuff. The violence, the speeches, all of that is there. But the one thing that's not there is that at this point, Hitler does not see himself as a future leader of Germany. As Ian Kurschow puts it, "Hitlers see himself as merely the drummer. He's the propagandist. He's the John the Baptist, who is paving the way for the Messiah, who one day will lead this German national movement to greatness." But that, of course, will change. And I guess we'll have to wait until next time, Tom, to discover how and why. And of course, if you remember the Reston's History Club, you can listen to that right now. I can't wait. I'll straight in. Jenny's waiting to talk. The Firemaster Republic awaits. But if you're not, you will have to wait until Thursday for Firemaster. And I guess we will see you then. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest is History. For bonus episodes, early access, add free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. 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