00:02:03.860Yeah. So just assume it's February and we're doing February and part of March.
00:02:08.480Then we're going to do March and parts of April, and then we should be caught up.
00:02:12.820And then we're just going to go month by month by month.
00:02:15.420There's a bunch of topics I want to hit on.
00:02:17.780And there are a bunch of topics that I think will emerge precisely if we go patiently, give ourselves a little bit more time with various protagonists, with various issues, with various events.
00:02:32.220In true In Bed with the Right style, I think this is going to be the kind of thing where Adrian will occasionally let the comparisons and relevance of our material to our current historical moment emerge from the history itself, right?
00:02:49.220and i am probably going to be bursting out with enthusiasm or frustration uh this is like and
00:02:55.560this is exactly what elon must did last week you know something like that so hopefully some break
00:03:01.040in our ongoing historical period will intervene and this project will become less relevant as we
00:03:08.700go through yeah possibly uh that will begin to sound a little naive the way that some of these
00:03:17.460statements from 1933 sound a little naive in retrospect too.
00:03:22.220And we should say right at the outset, the comparisons force themselves, right? Like we're
00:03:25.460going to make them. At the same time, it's not just that like they're not always perfect. It's
00:03:30.140also that they have to be partial. There's so much happening, right? There's an entire society
00:03:34.700changing and a world changing around it. And the spectacle of that year is just basically
00:03:39.740absolutely dizzying. And so we have to place accents. We have to kind of have a focus and
00:03:45.260that will kind of predetermine the story that we come away with. And as is our want in Bed with
00:03:51.100the Right, obviously we'll focus on gender and sexuality. And I should say that there are a lot
00:03:55.680of great accounts of what's called the Machtergreifung, so the seizure of power of the
00:04:00.380Nazis in 1933. Gender, as far as I can tell, has not been at the forefront of this. There are
00:04:05.620wonderful historians of gender and sexuality in the Nazi period that we will hopefully get to
00:04:11.240talk to for some of these episodes. Some of them have already been on the podcast, but they tend
00:04:15.780to, I think, focus, and I hope this is fair to them, they tend to focus on the Third Reich and
00:04:20.740power. They're looking at the slightly consolidated Nazi regime, sort of more 34, 35 and onwards.
00:04:29.360And the really classic studies of how Hitler rises to power, I would consult it, for instance,
00:04:34.960Richard J. Evans' very, very good, The Coming of the Third Reich. That's not a book that is like
00:04:39.900super gender focused. And so I think we're going to be able to tell a story that people may not
00:04:45.560get if they check out these sort of canonical narratives, which is not to say that those are
00:04:50.640wrong. It's again, like there's so much here. You got to pick and choose. And I don't begrudge
00:04:54.940anyone for not focusing on this, but I think we can come away with a slightly different and a
00:04:59.960maybe slightly more timely version of what exactly happened back then and how it compares to today.
00:05:05.860So we are going to do this month by month.
00:05:09.180So we're going to catch up over the next couple of weeks and then we'll be doing April and April, May and May and so on until we either get in December 2025 to December 1933 or until the end of our own republic and the collapse of our freedom to do so.
00:05:31.140Well, on that cheering note, let's do it.
00:05:32.840Let's give our listeners first an overview of what they can expect for those of us who aren't as well-versed in the Third Reich's rights to power.
00:05:42.620Why is 1933 so pivotal and why does it ring so many bells for you now?
00:05:47.440Well, so 1933 is the year the Weimar Republic, which had been tottering for a few years at this point, just collapses in the span of really six weeks.
00:05:59.360And those are the six weeks we're going to cover in this episode.
00:06:01.500and gives way to a dictatorship almost immediately.
00:06:07.880And it's something that surprised people in its swiftness.
00:06:10.880It surprised even some of the people bringing it about in its swiftness.
00:06:14.760Everyone sort of gets caught up in this maelstrom of events.
00:06:18.200There's even, I looked at Goebbels' diaries for this,
00:06:21.340Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's right-hand man propaganda minister.
00:06:25.340And it seems like he was kind of shocked by how quickly this all went, right?
00:06:28.660So, like, it's not just that, like, the good guys are like, oh, Jesus, what's happening?
00:06:32.560Everyone's kind of on this roller coaster, and it's all moving very, very fast.0.75
00:06:36.440So, I'm partly basing this on Richard J. Evans' coming of the Third Reich, which is very good, sort of day by day.
00:06:41.920And then the German historian named Uwe Wittstock did an entire book on February 1933, which is quite focused on literature, on literary Germans.
00:06:50.700But, like, he really also goes, like, day by day by day, and that was very, very helpful for this.
00:06:55.960And part of that is because I don't want to sort of give you just like a Wikipedia style
00:07:13.360And one of the tragic and lucky things is that, you know, a lot of very smart people0.99
00:07:19.140were arrayed against the Nazis and were trying to figure out like, fuck, what do I do?0.97
00:07:23.200Like it's dangerous, but how dangerous is it? Do I have a week? Do I have a day? Do I have a month? Right. Like how long is this going to last? Should I sell my house? I have an unfinished novel at home. Do I take it with me or not? Right.0.98
00:07:36.080Do they mean me? Is it going to get worse than it is? Are these institutional rumps left over from the previous form of government going to check these excesses or will they collapse before them? These are questions that were not answered yet. Right.
00:07:51.500Exactly. All of what we know about what happened in the future was information they didn't have. And so as their world was changing, they were trying to update their own assumptions in ways that sometimes were successful and sometimes were not. And that human uncertainty, it's dizzyingness, it's grief and fear. And also it's just uncertainty, right? It's contingency. It's open possibility. That's what we're going to try and capture over the next couple episodes.
00:08:20.740You'll notice things that we don't talk about.
00:10:23.900Something I'm always struck by this period is not just how quickly things changed, but0.94
00:10:28.400how many people didn't take Hitler seriously because the Nazis seemed so goofy and incompetent1.00
00:10:36.420and stupid. You know, these guys were esteemed to be clowns, especially on the international1.00
00:10:42.380stage, right? Especially outside of Germany. They weren't just thuggish. They were seen as kind of0.97
00:10:47.740like vulgar and almost beneath the power that they aspired to. And I think that is something that
00:10:54.700that is a lesson that the Nazi era demonstrates is that just because people are stupid1.00
00:10:59.620and clownish and just because they appear ridiculous does not mean that they cannot1.00
00:11:05.640also inflict tremendous damage. That's a cognitive dissonance I think we'll also be0.98
00:11:10.680teasing out as we explore the experiences of ordinary Germans and intellectuals going into
00:11:16.540this period. Yeah. The other thing that we might briefly mention is that, of course,
00:11:19.780a lot of our everyday experience of 2025 is not knowing what's really going on. And that's very
00:11:25.140much what's true of 1933. You'll see that there's just so much news and they don't have Twitter.
00:11:31.940They can't just ask the Nazis what they're thinking by going on the Nazis' own platform,
00:11:36.300right? They have to kind of depend on a press that is already kind of feeling the pressure
00:11:40.320from the new rulers, meaning they're like, well, we don't even know what's happening. Who's mad
00:11:43.900at whom or who's with whom or who's folded and who's still putting up resistance, that kind of
00:11:47.900thing. As a motto for this first episode, so February 1933, up until March 15th, 1933,
00:11:55.840I thought I'd start this with a quote from a diary entry from Victor Klemperer, who is a
00:12:01.060professor of French literature in Dresden. He'd been a diarist all his life, but he was like,
00:12:05.900well, I got to write this down. This feels significant, right? And on February 21st,
00:12:11.0201933, he notes, quote, for something like three weeks now, the depression of the reactionary
00:12:16.500government. I'm not writing a history of the times here, but I shall nevertheless record my
00:12:20.900embitterment greater than I would have imagined I was still capable of feeling. It's a disgrace
00:12:26.040which gets worse with every day that passes. And there's not a sound from anyone and everyone is
00:12:31.420keeping their head down. The Jews, most of all, and the democratic press. I feel you, Victor.
00:12:36.540Let me set the scene a little bit. So the last free-ish elections for the Reichstag
00:12:41.540in the Weimar Republic are in November 1932.
00:12:45.380Why do you say free-ish instead of free?0.93
00:12:47.420So the Nazis had already had local success0.86
00:12:50.520and had started sort of monkeying with0.51
00:12:52.200who could actually stand for election in various places.
00:12:55.280So the Communist Party was already being massively interfered with.
00:12:59.260In 1932, a right-wing government had sort of used emergency laws
00:13:05.080to impose a kind of quasi-martial law in Prussia,
00:13:08.400which, as you may remember from some other episodes of ours,
00:13:11.260This was, you know, most of the German Reich at the time or of the Weimar Republic.
00:13:15.440And I should mention, you know, because a lot of parties were just subject to massive political violence, almost all of it coming from the NSDAP, so the Nazi Party.
00:13:25.860So it's important to note that the Weimar Republic is no longer entirely Republican by this point, right?0.61
00:13:31.300So there's laws restricting who can run for election that have been put in place by the Nazis where they have local power.
00:13:38.040And then there's also just like the threat of violence. Like if you try and run, these people will beat you up. Or if we don't get our own way in this election, there's going to be unrest. There's going to be street violence. Yeah.
00:13:52.020Yeah, and the 1932 sort of coup from above that had seized power and pressure had started purging people who were partisans of the socialists, the communists, and the social democrats within the upper administration, within the police apparatus, et cetera, et cetera, right?
00:14:08.860Like the administration of this republic at its end tilted heavily to the right and heavily anti-democratic, really, right?
00:14:15.940The KPD, the Communist Party of Germany, was already basically preparing what to do in case they were legalized.
00:14:21.960And I don't think they were thinking of the Nazis at all.
00:14:23.860They were like, it's just going to be some other right-wing government that's going to do it.
00:14:27.460It's not going to require Hitler for that.
00:14:29.440And basically political violence, mostly from the Nazis, but also some anti-fascist violence from the KPD, is basically spiraling out of control.0.74
00:14:40.420In November 1932, it gets 33.1% of the vote.
00:14:44.400It's actually a little bit less than in the previous election.
00:14:47.420But the real problem is that there's an increasing number of its members in the higher civil service and an even bigger group of people who basically wouldn't vote for them, but who clearly are politically aligned with them or have sympathies for their positions.0.53
00:15:00.660So Nazis have already accomplished a degree of institutional capture before 1933.
00:15:06.760Yeah, and making opposition to the Nazis a real problem, right?
00:15:10.460There are already people in exile from Germany.
00:15:13.080I'll mention Magnus Hirschfeld, the famous sexologist, and we'll be talking a little bit more about him in our May episode.
00:15:19.740He had basically received so many credible threats that when he went on a lecturing tour in 1931-32, he was like, I'm not going back there.
00:15:27.240Like, these people are going to come for me. I'm not stupid, right?
00:15:29.420So there were already people exiled from the country, which strikes me as a sign that maybe law and order isn't all it's cracked up to be, right?
00:15:38.300So how open were the Nazis going into these like 1932 Reichstag elections about what they were going to do if they won?
00:15:49.380Like, were they like, yeah, we're going to eliminate the vestiges of democratic government and instill a formalized de jure racial hierarchy and alter your daily life?
00:16:00.260Or were they like a little more coy about it?
00:16:02.500Were they like talking in like broader terms about a post-war renewal, et cetera?
00:16:08.300Making Germany great again or something.
00:16:36.020They already had one, and it was published.
00:16:38.300Yeah. I mean, this is, it's a large organization. These things sort of leaked out. Like a lot of
00:16:43.860people who were on these lists knew by the time the Nazis came to power, right? And made their0.74
00:16:48.740calculus that way, right? They're like, I know I'm on this list. I got to get out. But I mean,
00:16:53.040yeah, it's, it was really openly hostile to the Weimar Republic. There's a jurist and prosecutor,
00:16:59.540Robert Kempner, who basically was put on the beat of like, can we outlaw this party?
00:17:04.780And he wrote this study and was like, yeah, absolutely. There are fail-safes in our constitution. You could absolutely prescribe these people.
00:17:13.340This reminds me of some of the legal academics I follow on Blue Sky who are like, yeah, here's all the here are all the like arguments you could make to prosecute, you know, Elon Musk or Donald Trump or like various apparatus in the Justice Department.
00:17:29.120Like, here's all the laws they're violating. Here's a criminal statute. Here's the, like, brief you could file if we had a judiciary that was capable of, you know, like, checking the crimes of those with political power. But we do not have such a judiciary.
00:17:43.620Yeah, and that's exactly the problem here. He and his staff come up with this really well-reasoned and legally sound analysis. And basically, even a bunch of politicians were like, yeah, this sounds right. It's just that there are too many people in the upper administration and the criminal justice system that agree with the Nazis. We're not going to get this through.
00:18:02.920Right. And so he wrote an entire book about this. It's called Justizdämmerung. So Twilight of
00:18:08.320Justice. He's alluding to Wagner's Götterdämmerung. And its subtitle is The Opening Gambit of the
00:18:13.780Third Reich. It came out in 1932. So you could know. Right. And just to give you a sense of
00:18:19.480like just how not far back and how not long someone like Kempner would have to dig. Here
00:18:25.880is the lawyer Wilhelm Frick, who would serve under Hitler in various capacities, including
00:18:31.460the first interior minister for the Nazi party in a state, in a German state, in Turing in 1930.
00:18:37.400But here he is in the National Socialist Yearbook of 1927.
00:18:40.860Quote, our participation in parliament does not mean strengthening, but rather undermining the
00:18:45.160parliamentary system. Not giving up our anti-parliamentary attitude, but fighting
00:18:49.620the enemy with his own weapons and fighting for our National Socialist goals from the
00:18:53.680parliamentary gallery. Our next goal will always be the conquest of political power in the state.
00:18:57.800It is the prerequisite for the realization of our ideals.
00:19:01.180That could be Curtis Yarvin, you know, that could be like on some little odious right
00:25:04.020Like, no new election, nothing has happened.
00:25:05.940It's just like a bunch of right-wing cranks with a real thing about World War I, like getting together, smoking a bunch of cigars and like deciding on what to do.
00:25:15.500And it's also the day of the Berlin Press Ball at the Adlon Hotel, which is still right by the Brandenburg Gate today.
00:25:22.240And this is the event with which Uwe Wittstock starts his book on February 1933.
00:25:27.160And this is already when the first sort of people start leaving.
00:25:32.100The day after the press ball, January 29th, Erich Maria Remark, I don't know if you know
00:25:52.420They basically made it impossible to show the movie based on his book in Germany.
00:25:55.900They kind of roughed up people who would try and go see it.
00:25:58.540And he had bought a villa in Locarno in southern Switzerland years ago, and he hears about Schleicher's fall at the press ball, and I believe is like, oh, can I move my train ticket forward? I'm outie.
00:26:12.020So at least some of the left-leaning elites or anti-Nazi elites who have the means are already exiting.
00:26:18.740Yeah, exactly. And, you know, in some way, it's really it's an astonishing level of foresight, right? Because we're now going to get to our actual six weeks in this episode. And those six weeks are really all the Nazis needed in order to really solidify their grip on power.
00:26:33.200Hitler is named chancellor on January 30th, 1933.
00:30:55.680Once we get to February, the big picture development is von Papen had given the Nazis only three cabinet positions in addition to the chancellor job.
00:31:03.880But the problem was two of them were the Prussian and the Reich ministries of the interior, which controlled the police.
00:31:10.580So suddenly a party with a massive paramilitary arm was in control of the police, which was A, already kind of right-wing, and B, was supposed to actually police the paramilitaries, right?
00:31:39.660And on February 3rd, Hitler speaks with the generals of the Wehrmacht.
00:31:43.160The content of his remarks does not become public until after the war.
00:31:47.200But he calls for, quote, removing the cancerous damage of democracy
00:31:50.840and promises to eradicate Marxism root and branch.
00:31:55.080And he sort of is like, oh, and you generals will also have a role in our new Germany.
00:31:59.400You can, quote, to secure new expert opportunities,
00:32:02.300perhaps and probably better to conquer new living space in the East0.98
00:32:05.480and pursue its ruthless Germanization.0.99
00:32:07.800So this is like we're doing racial, like ethnic cleansing. We're doing eradication of ideological dissidents and we're doing territorial expansion. But this is not, I'm interested that he's not saying this in public, that he's saying this sort of in a private meeting with those in power. Why do you think he didn't just say this into a microphone?0.88
00:32:27.160I think it's just a different style of politics. All these right-wingers are ultimately backroom
00:32:31.160dealers. He's trying to weaken alternate sources of power. And for that, he doesn't have to talk
00:32:37.540to people. He has to talk to the generals. He has to talk to the heavy industry, et cetera,
00:32:42.040et cetera. And now we should say that like, you know, the ruthless Germanization sounds really0.96
00:32:45.940bad today. There's a way that this could have been taken to be cultural Germanization, right?0.83
00:32:51.500Like forcing people to speak the language, not much better than ethnic cleansing, but that might0.51
00:32:55.680be what he meant. But in the event, Hitler was like, just to be clear, I don't mean culturally.0.63
00:33:00.220I mean, we're going to ethnically cleanse this shit, right? So he's perfectly open with these0.98
00:33:06.180people. But it's very clear he's not at this point playing for their support. He's playing
00:33:11.880for their neutrality. He controls the paramilitaries. He's now controlling the police.
00:33:16.160The one thing he doesn't control is the army. And the fear is what if the army were deployed
00:33:20.580to stop the paramilitaries, for instance, right?
00:33:24.800The Secretary of Defense, Blomberg, is not a Nazi,
00:33:28.420and he has prohibited his soldiers from joining the party,
00:33:30.960not because he disapproved of what Hitler was starting to do,
00:33:50.580on february 4th we get the decree of the president of the reich so hindenburg for the quote protection
00:34:13.860of the german people which restricts basic rights especially freedom of assembly and freedom of the
00:34:18.720press. So that's what, five days after he becomes chancellor? This is what you call a healthy
00:34:24.540assist. So how do people respond to this? Because this seems like scary. There's some indication
00:34:32.900that a lot of people think it's aimed primarily at the communists. And certainly the KPD is like,
00:34:37.620gee, this has our name written all over it. But I looked at the actual decree and like there's
00:34:42.540nothing in there to suggest that this is going to be limited to them. And we know that by early
00:34:48.140February, a bunch of SPDs, the Social Democrat affiliated newspapers are already prevented from
00:34:52.980publication. Distribution centers are being closed down. And most importantly, all police protections
00:34:59.140have been removed, meaning that now if the Nazi thugs show up, they can just disrupt any meeting
00:35:04.600and rough people up. Right. And so already they're having real trouble just communicating with their0.74
00:35:08.720members. And it takes very, very little. On February 7th, the KPD meets in secret to discuss
00:35:14.480its options. The KPD is a little bit more agile in these early weeks than the SPD because it knew
00:35:21.100that it was probably going to get banned at some point. And because they're kind of, right, they've
00:35:25.760learned from the Soviet Union and are connected with the Soviet Union, they are a little bit more
00:35:29.580clandestine. So like they have a party headquarters, but they're not dumb enough to meet there,0.97
00:35:33.620basically. They're like, well, sure, you can beat us up if you can find us, but you got to find us0.96
00:35:37.680first, right? And the other thing that they have is a pretty good system for getting people out of
00:35:42.920Germany if they have to. And a lot of prominent politicians will flee the country that way in
00:35:48.180the following weeks. But the party chairman, Ernst Thälmann, decides basically, we have to stay,
00:35:53.720we have to fight, and decides to appeal to more social democratic workers.
00:35:57.940He's looking to the French, right? He's looking to the example of the popular front.
00:36:00.980Exactly. He wants to see if they can create a united front against the Nazis,0.62
00:36:05.100and they're going to release an open letter. Unfortunately, the day they pick to release0.59
00:36:09.220the open letter will be the day of the Reichstag fire so which they'll get they'll get blamed for
00:36:14.800right of course yeah just terrible timing so this is not on anyone it's just this terrible timing
00:36:20.420well it's on the nazis the nazis did it well we'll get to that in researching this i was like
00:36:25.920like do we know that like it's it's unclear everyone at the time thought it was them but
00:36:29.940like again i think in goebbels's diary he seems surprised by it's possible that a nazi did it
00:36:34.660But, like, the top brass seems to have genuinely been like, this is the first signal of a communist insurrection.
00:36:41.660Like, they believe they're on propaganda.1.00
00:36:43.740They're like, oh, shit, like, we're going to get our throats slit.0.99
00:36:46.520So the Hitler chancellorship is one week old.0.99
00:36:49.720And already left-wing political parties have basically been prohibited from communicating with their members, from meeting in any kind of open or public way.
00:37:01.100Yeah. And they are looking around and seeing themselves to be kind of out of options.
00:37:06.080Exactly. And on February 10th, Hitler gives a speech at the Berlin Sportpalast, which is
00:37:11.520almost exactly 10 years before it will be the setting for one of Goebbels's most famous speeches,0.52
00:37:17.780the total war speech. Do you want total war? And Goebbels introduces him there, where he sort of0.83
00:37:23.060celebrates the millions who have by acclamation chosen Hitler as their Führer, blah, blah, blah,0.57
00:37:28.120blah blah we have a mandate yeah yeah threatens the jewish press patients will run out etc etc0.95
00:37:33.840very very ominous shit and then hitler's actual speech i must admit i didn't listen to all of it0.85
00:37:38.660there is it was filmed and i am like i'm not listening to this much of this guy but the parts0.93
00:37:43.540i heard were like weirdly culture war specific there's a lot of stuff about german art and cinema
00:37:48.180i'm like huh if i had just started running the government i feel like i'd want to go for more
00:37:53.800meat and potatoes but like no they're going full like no it's what looks like comparatively petty
00:37:58.720stuff exactly the cultural production the social norms the visibility of what to their minds are
00:38:05.440non-ideal persons or ideas in places of like prestige or prominence or just you know access
00:38:12.500that is what really grinds their gears yeah well and also i think by going after these people going
00:38:18.220after the press going after intellectuals etc etc you know there's no internet and anything so they
00:38:23.680they know that these are the voices they have to silence first. Like you're really destroying the
00:38:28.560ability of civil society to respond in any oppositional way to what the government's doing
00:38:33.800if these people are afraid for their lives, are fleeing or are dead. And so I think the focus on
00:38:40.300culture, on art and cinema, it's both a distraction and it's actually pretty central. They're not
00:38:45.320worried about the industrialists. They're not worried about, I mean, they're worried about
00:38:49.200trade unions. They'll come after them too. But they're just a bunch of groups that they're like,
00:38:52.720well i'm not sure what these people can do to us right now we need to get rid of the people who
00:38:57.420could swing public opinion against us they've already got the support of the capitalists right
00:39:02.180and the industrialists they've got rapid consolidation of everybody who has the
00:39:07.980capacity for violence right we've talked about like the street gangs of world war one veterans
00:39:13.160we talked about their like new formalized control over the police and we talked about the sort of
00:39:18.500carrots that they're handing out to the military right so it's like you've got money and violence
00:39:24.000on lock the last kind of remaining avenue of meaningful resistance would be i think like
00:39:29.240ideas right yeah yeah and that seems to be what they are now also working to shut down yeah so
00:39:36.300the same day hitler gives a speech same time basically thomas mann gives a lecture at the
00:39:41.720university of munich on the suffering and greatness of richard wagner it's the 50th anniversary
00:39:46.840basically of Wagner's death um and it'll be the last one he gives on German soil until basically
00:39:51.640the 1950s that evening he leaves or the next day I think he leaves for a lecture trip going to
00:39:56.660Amsterdam Brussels Paris etc etc and basically his kids start saying like do not come back right
00:40:02.740yeah don't risk this for February 14th Victor Klemperer records in his diary um it's not the
00:40:09.180entry for this day he kind of will sum up an entire week or two like in one entry but on February 14th
00:40:15.960He's visited by another couple, also academics, and he says Melanie Thiele, as the couple's
00:40:24.220name, told us that her husband must not know that Wolfgang, their chemistry student, a
00:40:29.080good lad, is wearing a Hitler uniform in Frankfurt.
00:40:31.980He, Thiele, was against Hitler, but he is forebanting the Communist Party, right?
00:40:36.280So, like, there's these millions of gradations that are sort of opening up.
00:40:39.840On the one hand, you get these people are horrified to find out their own kids are involved
00:40:43.880in this or that their own relatives are involved in this.
00:40:45.960But also, like, people are staking out these kind of middle ground positions where you're against much of what the Nazis do, but you kind of conform to certain things.
00:40:55.980Yeah, you know, every Trump voter you'll ever meet will tell you all the things they don't like about Trump first.
00:41:15.060There's too many people at the border or but I don't trust what they're doing with the vaccines or but my friends, friends, cousins, neighbors, ex-boyfriend, sister said that there is a 65 year old grown man on her little girl's, you know, high school wrestling team, like stuff like that.0.94
00:41:31.680This like merger of propaganda and falsity or just like grievance with like a superficial disavowal, right?
00:41:39.880Like all these people say, I don't like Trump.
00:41:42.260I don't like Trump because of X, Y, Z.
00:41:43.520And then they keep voting for him over and over and over again.
00:41:46.940And that is a way to both like preserve a little degree of dignity or like a presumption of reasonableness or like access to claims about like decorum in various different kinds of like like company, while at the same time pursuing these far right political goals.
00:42:06.000Yeah, I mean, there's that famous Dorothy Thompson essay that I think has been making the rounds again this year, Who Goes Nazi, which describes it as a macabre sort of fun parlor game of who goes Nazi. And I think that these early months kind of don't bear out what Thompson is saying in that essay, which is to say, it's not clear that many people go Nazi yet that hadn't gone Nazi before.
00:42:27.960the only thing the regime needs from people at this point is acquiescence. And you get that,
00:42:34.200as you say, for all kinds of reasons. People find a million reasons to acquiesce and to not expose
00:42:39.440themselves to risk, including people who will later, you know, be rabid anti-Nazis, right? But
00:42:45.180the regime does not require your cooperation at this point. It just requires you to do nothing.
00:42:50.580Right. So on February 15th, Göring, then Prussian Minister of the Interior,
00:42:55.040orders the Prussian police to stop surveilling the Nazis and to instead help the Nazi paramilitary
00:43:01.460groups. We're switching sides. We're switching sides, yeah. Also on February 15th, the theater
00:43:06.760critic and satirist, Alfred Kerr, is in bed with a 102-degree fever when a phone call comes,
00:43:13.200and his nine-year-old daughter Judith is sent out of the room, parents debating tensely, and as
00:43:19.500Judith Kerr will later tell it in a fictionalized version of this part of her life.
00:43:24.980Quote, the next morning before school, Anna ran to Papa's room to see him.
00:43:48.100And then she wrote a novel about that experience as an adult.
00:43:51.260So she, this is already where gender becomes kind of interesting.
00:43:54.460What happens, Alfred Kahl was fine.0.69
00:43:56.320He had basically gotten a tip off that his passport was going to be confiscated
00:44:00.480and that that was probably going to lead to his arrest eventually.
00:44:03.500And so he, even though he had a crazy fever, he fled to Prague.
00:44:06.880It's like, well, as long as I'm out of the jurisdiction, I should be fine.
00:44:09.460But notice that basically Anna, or Anna is standing for Judith here,
00:44:14.820goes to school normally the next day, right?
00:44:16.800they're just going to try and keep living their regular lives, partly so that they can also
00:44:21.600eventually leave the country without being accosted. There was some worry that like the
00:44:26.000Nazis might come after people's families. At this early stage, I think that that's not usually what
00:44:30.680happened. They were just too busy torturing and bullying other people. But it's very interesting,
00:44:36.260right? That like, this is very much a male on male kind of thing that's going on here. And the
00:44:41.860families, they're sort of collateralized in all of this. And it's Judith Kerr is one of the
00:44:47.500interesting sort of exceptions to like the fact that she leaves traces, that she's someone who
00:44:53.020actually writes about this from the perspective of a child. We don't have that many. Again,
00:44:58.360these men in the public eye tend to record this stuff very minutely, right? We have Victor
00:45:04.200Klemperer's diary. We don't have hers, right? We don't know that.
00:45:06.960Is this just a symptom or a product of the like broader exclusion of women from public and political life that was like still very typical in the mid 20th century, not only in Germany, but sort of like in the world, you know, like how many women would have been involved in these like trade unions that we're thinking about general strike or how many women would have been involved in like the leadership of the Communist Party?
00:45:32.620this, like, looking at ways to, like, get people out of the country? Like, is this the kind of
00:45:36.960thing where women are just not granted access or they're, like, not educated the same way or0.88
00:45:42.940they're just, you know, not really empowered to, like, live public or intellectual lives instead
00:45:48.160of private, domestic, maternal ones? Or is there something where the Nazis are choosing to go after
00:45:54.200the men first? I think that's the big question for this episode. I would say as a first preliminary
00:45:59.360answer, it's not that they were excluded. The trade unions and especially the SPD and the KPD
00:46:04.360had a, you know, for the 1930s, very respectable number of women in them. And they also were
00:46:11.380victimized by the Nazis, even at this early stage. There is, I mean, with this focus on sort of the
00:46:16.780paramilitary and the veterans that largely obviously excluded women, right? But publishing
00:46:21.640didn't. There is an element here where there are so many stories of 1933 that in some way,
00:46:26.820we print the ones from people who are famous and like yeah obviously like the number of
00:46:32.340male writers in the weimar republic who are like oh honey would you type this up for me
00:46:38.080right and like that's all we know of the wife right like is is high you know there's a bunch
00:46:43.980of people who are you know famous men and the women in their lives we don't have any written
00:46:48.320documents from or nothing where they were like here's my experience of 1933 that's not to say
00:46:52.960it doesn't exist. We're going to meet a few interesting protagonists in other episodes.
00:46:57.200But I do think that is definitely true, that like, we're looking at the Mons, we're looking at
00:47:01.680party leaders, we're going to look at Von Osiecki and people like that. Klemperer, we'll see,
00:47:06.680he's the chronicler, he writes everything down, but it's his wife who actually has all the insights0.58
00:47:10.460about like, who goes Nazi. Like, she appears to be a pretty traditional housewife in some way,0.64
00:47:14.960but like, she's just a good gossip. And she's like, oh yeah, here's why they did this, right?
00:47:18.200She actually understands power quite well and is able to sort of diagnose, you know, what fascism is doing to the country much better than her husband, but he writes it down and his name's on the cover.
00:47:31.020Right. This is kind of a traditional, by excluded, I don't mean necessarily formally so, but discouraged or inhibited from participation by things that can be as informal and even like unconscious as just like convention, right?
00:47:46.980Like it is in the habit of mid-century women, not only in Germany, but sort of in the West more broadly, to understand their intellectual gifts as tools or accessories for those of the men in their lives.
00:48:03.020Or to understand themselves as tools or accessories for the men in their lives in this way that leads to the men's names becoming more prominent and can make the women's own work and contributions get sort of subsumed.
00:48:16.400Yeah, we'll meet a woman who kind of doesn't fit that mold, but you'll see something else that's going on here, which is to say that, especially in the Weimar period, German women who defied those conventions were often very successful, but they were also very mobile, meaning the men have an attachment and investment in the power structures, right?
00:48:35.380They're like, oh, but I can't leave my newspaper that I founded.
00:49:17.740They're nannies sort of helping organize these escapes as well.
00:49:21.560Even though, you know, you never know whom to trust in these situations.
00:49:24.840The Mann family will have a weird run-in with that where their driver basically turns out to be a Nazi spy and had been for years, apparently.
00:49:32.860and only acknowledges it after dropping them off at the train station.
00:49:35.900It was like, your car is going to the SS, by the way.
00:51:00.280Yeah. It's a large tent filled with psychos.0.94
00:51:04.000But this is also the beginning of them starting to cannibalize the other right-wing parties,
00:51:08.640being like, hey, wouldn't it be nice if you drew a paycheck through us, right?
00:51:12.260And these groups start raiding communists and trade union offices almost immediately.
00:51:16.720They start arresting union members and union organizers.
00:51:21.080They start targeting SPD members as well.
00:51:23.400On the 23rd, the police shuts down the Karl Liebklingthaus, this is the party headquarters of the KPD, and shuts down the party's newspaper. Two days later, there's a fire in a small federal office building in Neukölln. Doesn't matter, except that it's set by Marinus van der Lube, a Dutch communist anarchist. Fire doesn't go anywhere. And he's like, I got to scale up. I got to go for the Reichstag. And, you know, so little foreboding there.
00:52:15.560Klemperer notes in his diary, eight days before the election, the clumsy business of the Reichstag
00:52:20.440fire. I cannot imagine that anyone really believes in communist perpetrators instead of paid swastika0.89
00:52:26.220work, right? So he knows, he's like, come on, let's be for real here, right? And this is not,0.91
00:52:31.120he's not a socialist. He's a pretty conservative guy. And he's like, this is bullshit. But the
00:52:37.000Nazis claim, and some seem to have believed that the fire is basically opening salvo to a coming
00:52:42.580counterattack from the communist party. They're out to get us. So clearly more crackdowns are0.79
00:52:48.720required. Yeah. And and the next day, basically, parts of the non-Nazi press also go full war on
00:52:54.480terror. But even that night, basically, the Nazis unleash a huge campaign of terror and of
00:53:00.140intimidation and of arrests. It seems like the Nazis are like still pretty popular, right? Like0.80
00:53:05.400they're shutting down these other parties. They're inhibiting on freedom of the press. A lot of like
00:53:09.760people who seem to be fairly prominent are fleeing, right? Like, is this moving the needle
00:53:16.360on German public opinion, or are the German people basically like, yes, good, this is what we wanted?
00:53:21.160It's a little hard to tell, but I mean, certainly by focusing on the supposed communist threat,
00:53:26.500that is certainly something that more right-leaning voters seem to have liked,
00:53:30.420seem to have found legitimate, right? I cited earlier that observation of Klemperers, where
00:53:34.660he's like, this guy doesn't like Hitler, but he likes the anti-communist stuff. So
00:53:37.920I don't see how that guy would have gone around being like, this is an outrage. They would have
00:53:42.640been like, well, it's happening to people I dislike. Therefore, it's probably good. So they
00:53:47.960are making a pitch. They're not trying to reach across the aisle. They're not trying to, you know,
00:53:51.720find disaffected communists to work with. They're just looking to gobble up the other right-wing
00:53:56.100parties before the election, where they're hoping to get more than 50% of the vote. And so that night
00:54:02.920is where we sort of get the first really prominent victims of Nazism. So Karl von Osietzky, whom I0.50
00:54:09.440already mentioned. He's at a gathering at a woman's house who appears to have been his lover.
00:54:14.260And then they hear the news about the Reichstag fire and his friends who all work at his
00:54:19.000periodical, die Weltbühne, are like, you just crash here, don't go home. I think it's too risky.
00:54:24.260But his wife is sick, so he goes home. He's immediately arrested and never gets out of
00:54:28.240prison and dies in prison in 1938. How long, like a week or two after his speech?
00:54:33.500Yeah, 28 days, 29 days. Yeah. So he was right, but unfortunately he did not take his own advice.
00:54:39.440The same night, Erich Müsam, who's a communist anarchist writer, is arrested in Berlin by the SA and he'll die or get murdered, in fact, in Oranienburg concentration camp in 1934.
00:54:50.960So this is where we get sort of the first people whose books people would have read and would have known who just sort of disappear and are never heard from again.
00:54:59.360On February 28th, you then get the decree of the president of the Reich for the protection of people and state.
00:55:05.340This is the so-called Reichstag fire decree, which says in part, quote, articles 114, 115,
00:55:11.780117, 118, 123, 124, and 153 of the constitution of the German Reich are suspended until further
00:58:04.480It gives you a sense that, like, women have at times this kind of extraterritorial quality in these early paramilitary days of the dictatorship.
00:58:11.520This is something we talk about a lot in feminist history, right? Particularly feminist histories of war is that the invisibility that misogyny can confer on women or the insignificance that misogyny assigns to women can paradoxically provide women a kind of freedom under conditions of like political repression and surveillance, right?
00:58:35.520Because if it's just a teenage girl or a young woman going to visit her dad, that is understood as domestic, it is understood as sentimental, it is understood as trivial, it is not understood as a potential source of political dissent.
00:58:49.760Yeah, right. I think this is getting us right into this question that you alluded to before, which is the role of gender in all this.
00:58:55.960The Nazis begin by targeting politicians on people with a public profile, and they target them by using paramilitaries and the police, right?
00:59:03.420this did tend to leave women out of the picture a little bit, right?
00:59:08.480They sort of weren't regarded as equal to the people coming to arrest someone.
01:01:44.240It's a little hard to quantify this stuff. I couldn't go through this in all that much detail, but it's noticeable that the very famous communists that are arrested in the immediate aftermath of the Reichstag fire are men, but the women are not super far behind.
01:01:59.400So I looked up the people who sat in the last freely elected or semi-freely elected Reichstag, and it's not clear to me.
01:02:08.100Like, they don't get treated like Ernst Thälmann, but they definitely don't get off scot-free.
01:02:12.340So maybe I'll just read you a few of these people because I thought they were fantastic.
01:05:43.120That's the other thing that's easier for the KPD because a lot of their.
01:05:45.940They already have this network because they've been the target.
01:05:48.380Well, they have a network and they don't have that much money. They show up in a new town and are like, can the union please put me up? Or can the KPD put me up? Or whatever. Can you send me to Moscow, please?
01:05:58.020So the communists are both, they're less locally entangled and a little more mobile as a result of being broke and marginal.
01:06:06.360Exactly. And you can tell with Maureen Juchat, she gave that speech in 1919, right?
01:06:11.120So she is just a little older than some of these other women.
01:06:13.760And that's another sort of issue that like there's more of a lift to kind of disentangle yourself from this only life you've ever known, right?0.91
01:06:22.420When you're like, God is actually a danger here.
01:06:24.180But, you know, she eventually will immigrate herself and will end up in the U.S., which is nice.
01:06:51.680What door am I going to walk into when I get to this foreign city?0.96
01:06:54.180And then finally, let me briefly mention Elza Maya from the KPD, gets reelected on March 5th, loses her mandate after the enabling laws, and she dies in Magdeburg in August 1933.
01:07:49.740Like part of what I'm saying is that Germany in the aftermath of the Nazi era also had to deal with this remainder class of people who had been right about the Nazis before and hadn't been listened to.
01:08:00.900One thing you'll notice that because the KPD was brutalized so early, a lot of them just ended up in Moscow, meaning in 1945, the Soviets had a German government ready to go, right?
01:08:12.500They're like, these are people that we know they're anti-Nazis because they got tortured by the Nazis and they fled, right?0.74
01:08:18.380Like, why don't we put them in charge?0.96
01:08:20.340Whereas in West Germany, a lot of the American exiles were like, we're not going fucking back there.0.99
01:08:38.300But the point is, West Germany drew on a very different class of people to rebuild, which was people who had sort of gone along with the Nazis.
01:08:46.100And you get the role of people like, remember, Ernst Thielmann's daughter and wife, they become super important in the founding of the German Democratic Republic because they become the people who sort of carry these anti-fascist stories forward.
01:08:59.860They become like the mothers of the new Germany by being like, here's what Ernst Thielmann told me during our last meeting in prison.
01:09:06.300And that's an alternative vision of German pride and German self-respect.
01:09:11.000Exactly. Not all of us were like him. Exactly.
01:09:13.280Yeah, not all of us were going along with this. Some of us were resisting. It's like how, like, if you meet a French person of a certain generation, they'll always tell you that their grandparents were in the resistance. It's like, well, if all of your grandparents were in the resistance, they would have won, you know, like, and I wonder if there's a degree to which, like, have these examples of German anti-Nazi resistance taken on an outsized role beyond maybe their actual significance in the post-war German imagination?
01:09:41.720Like something that comes up in our conversations, Adrian, is that as an American, I always look at Germans now and assume that they're ashamed of their past.
01:09:49.900And you're always telling me like, eh, not really.
01:09:52.920It can take a lot of shapes, I guess, is what I'm saying.
01:14:38.560Our state government is pretty like lefty and will be OK because there's these constitutional checks on how they can reach downward into local government.
01:14:45.740No, at this point, Hitler is saying, no, no, no, no, no.
01:14:48.240So your provincial governor is who I'm going to say it is, and he's going to take orders from me.0.90
01:14:55.180And that's when the Mann children, who just told their dad not to come back a couple weeks ago, that's when they're getting out of here.0.78
01:15:01.860It was to the extent that Klaus earlier had said, my first exile would be in Bavaria, right?0.67
01:15:07.180He was like, I can probably sit it out here.
01:15:09.440And this is the day when he's like, oh, no, that's not going to work.
01:16:10.880They're probably a little spoiled.1.00
01:16:12.280But they are also like super interesting people in their own right and pretty good writers in their own right.1.00
01:16:17.380It's so annoying when a Nepo baby has talent.1.00
01:16:19.460It's a big relief when they're like Gracie Abrams and you're like, OK, there is no way that like without dad this would have worked out.0.99
01:16:28.020But some of them are really good and it's irritating.