00:01:59.440And we're digging into the first year in power of the Nazis. So Adrian, do you want to talk us through last time when we went through like late January to early March of 1933 and what the Nazis did when they first came to power?
00:02:13.000Yeah. So our idea, just to recap it for listeners, and if you are new to this podcast, you really should check out episode one first. Basically, we're going to go through the year 1933 as we go through the year 2025. So we're going to go month by month and with a focus sort of both on our bailiwick, which is gender and sexuality, but also on just how it felt.
00:02:37.840Right. So we're not going to just it's not a political history. It's not an institutional history, even though all these things show up. We're always going to be asking, like, how did how do people experience this? You know, there's, as you can imagine, with the Nazi era, there's a ton of information that we have today that they didn't have. And so we're really sort of trying to give a good sense of like what what they were aware of, what they had to work with and how people responded and how history has then judged those responses. Right.
00:03:06.860the the reason for this project is i think a little obvious right like there are parallels
00:03:11.740to our own era where we have like sort of an anti-constitutional no really like authoritarian
00:03:18.100government that's now sees power and is like really changing the form of our government and
00:03:23.900in many cases you know just the structure of our daily lives as it seizes that power and i think
00:03:29.300that you know there there are definitely ways that will emerge in which that comparison is
00:03:33.300actually quite limited right that's one of the things we're going to be discussing but something
00:04:05.820Something we talked about a lot in our first episode covering February was the way that sometimes women, because they were marginal from a lot of these institutions and worlds that were rapidly becoming complicit with Hitler, were often kind of better equipped from that outsider status to see things a little more clearly.
00:04:27.600right? And I think today we're going to get a little more grim insight into the way that women0.99
00:04:34.800were treated by the Nazi regime in those early days. The story of February, we drilled down on
00:04:39.780a couple of points, if you recall. We talked about the fact that in some way, people were still
00:04:45.260trying to figure out who the victims were going to be. It was very clear the Nazis were going to0.84
00:04:48.380have victims, but it was unclear who exactly it was going to be. And like, it seemed to be people
00:04:53.840with names famous people it also was you know communists before was anyone else so because we
00:05:00.740were mostly quoting people who are famous for having written a bunch of stuff we're not dealing
00:05:05.340with a ton of communist activists we were talking about bourgeois writers who found themselves on0.95
00:05:09.640the nazis shit list for what they'd written but of course like the nazis also immediately cracked
00:05:14.640down hard among working class groups and movements especially the communist party0.98
00:05:21.920And there was capable of real savagery, which we'll be able to talk about a bit more today.
00:05:28.420So consider this all somewhat of a rewind and explaining things that we sort of weren't able to talk about last time.
00:05:36.460So in this part, I think what we're going to talk about goes under four big headings, which is terror, which is the enabling law.
00:05:43.280It's Gleichschaltung, which means sort of forced synchronization, and boycott.
00:05:48.720And again, it doesn't mean that there weren't other things happening, right?
00:05:52.480Events move at an incredibly crazy clip.0.80
00:05:56.180We talked about how really Hitler last time needed six weeks to really cement his place0.87
00:08:55.040The Sturmabteilung is basically the Nazis' paramilitary wing, which had grown tremendously throughout the 1930s and was basically responsible for the fact that a lot of German voters felt that street violence was out of control.0.59
00:09:09.000It was out of control because of the S.A.
00:09:11.060Nazi thugs are coming and beating up random undesirables in your neighborhood.
00:09:22.680Vote for us and we will put a leash. It's very much like nice, nice Weimar Republic you got there. It would be a shame if something happened to it. Yeah.
00:09:31.380Exactly. And so in some way, right, you could imagine that after Hitler comes to power, you really want to put those guys on a leash, right? That doesn't end up happening. Even though keeping them leashed would have been kind of the smart play, the Nazis probably couldn't do that. Here we can draw on a book that we still have to do on the pod, Klaus Thieleid's Male Fantasies from 1977, which is a book all about these interwar paramilitaries and their cult of masculinity.0.56
00:09:59.300Of which there were a lot. It seems like basically like every political party in the Weimar era had some group of like disaffected veterans who are still armed, attached to them, who would occasionally cause trouble.
00:10:12.400The distinction between mass politics and like, yeah, having at least people who could rough someone up, whether that was hired muscle for union or whether it was like, yeah, people with machine guns, it was pretty blurry.
00:10:25.300Which is to say that this is not something the Nazis introduced on their own.
00:10:28.680This was a pre-existing condition of Weimar era politics.
00:10:36.540These are often World War I veterans who are in all these weird sort of all-male groups and who frankly are just beating the shit out of each other, right?
00:10:49.620And Fritsch sort of points out like these guys were traumatized, right?
00:10:54.040Their bodies were totally wrecked by years of street fighting.
00:10:57.200He has this amazing statistic. From 1929 to 1932, the size of the Nazi party increased eightfold. But S.A. insurance claims for injuries sustained in the line of duty, meaning beating up people, jumped 16fold to 14,006.0.74
00:11:13.900Yeah. I mean, this is like a generation of guys who may have had some prospect of upward mobility before in this like rapidly industrializing Germany who instead get thrown into these ditches in fucking Belgium and they see all their friends die.0.92
00:11:28.940And it's a really brutal military defeat that comes at the end of like years and years of like really extreme suffering.
00:11:40.740And they come back and they're not just like alienated, disaffected, downwardly mobile young men.
00:11:45.220They're alienated, disaffected, downwardly mobile young men with like wild amounts of trauma.
00:12:22.760They want vengeance and they get it almost immediately.
00:12:26.780There's a consensus among historians that basically creating its own system of prisons,0.83
00:12:30.540which is what Dachau is part of, had not been a Nazi priority.
00:12:34.420But the SA just started abducting way too many people.
00:12:38.780And under such dubious legal circumstances,
00:12:41.980you couldn't really drop them off at the police or at the prison.0.99
00:12:44.600They'd be like, who the fuck is this?0.99
00:12:46.280It's just someone that you have a beef with.0.99
00:12:48.520So like a sort of junta using the local soccer stadium,
00:12:51.720The SA starts incarcerating people in communist and social democratic establishment that they take over, or even, and Fritja is very good on this, in hostels or bars that they controlled, right?
00:13:04.060So you wander into the wrong bar and suddenly it's a prison?
00:13:10.360I mean, you would have known that that was sort of the local SA headquarters.
00:13:13.500You wouldn't have come in there for a beer.
00:13:15.180But it could mean that you could get arrested by people in uniforms, but you weren't in a state prison at all. You were being held by paramilitaries at their lodge, right? At like some weird weekend cafe outside of Berlin. And like the early outrages that the Nazis perpetrated had nothing to do with Dachau.
00:13:36.840Dachau, they sort of allowed some journalists into, it was the bowels of these excursion bars and beer gardens that people would sort of like would have had like pleasant Sunday afternoons in in the 1920s.0.82
00:13:50.320And now we're under the control of the of the S.A.
00:13:53.360Crossed the wrong guy in the neighborhood and suddenly the place where you used to go out for like a Saturday afternoon is your prison.0.53
00:13:59.460So it occurs to me that Dachau may have emerged for the Nazis in part as like a solution to an administrative problem.0.75
00:14:05.000They don't have anywhere to put all these people.0.92
00:14:07.100That's certainly the suggestion, right?
00:14:09.680We know that in the week between the Reichstag fire and the elections, and again, these numbers are from Fritsch's book, the police and the SA together arrested some 5,000 people.
00:14:20.820By the end of April, that number is 30,000 people, right?
00:14:24.020And it's extremely unevenly distributed, it appears.
00:14:27.340It depended on the local political situation, right? How strong were the communists? How strong was the social democratic party in the area? Urban working class areas were particularly hard hit. But as you say, like sometimes if you had an overactive SA chapter with a fucking axe to grind, like, yeah, suddenly you're like, well, where are we going to put all these people? So the problem was not sort of evenly distributed either.
00:14:50.140We talked about this a little bit the last time, but as this problem of the Nazi thugs kidnapping people and holding them hostages in random houses and bars is emerging in February and early March of 1933, nobody seems to be going out to beat up the SA guys, right?
00:15:10.220There's no counter-militia by the communists at this point, or is that happening on the fringes?
00:15:14.820There is some resistance. At that point, the police always will move in and will arrest the communists and not the Nazis, right? So that's where the fusion of the party with the state apparatus is already in full swing. But no, there is some resistance, especially from the communist party.
00:15:31.820The problem is it's really hard to know who's getting flipped, who is going underground because they want to continue fighting, and who's kind of naming names.
00:15:43.440The first thing that they try to torture out of you, obviously, are other names.
00:17:00.320And so people don't know all that sort of happens in these working class areas, which is where this novel Our Street is set, is that the visibility of the Communist Party and of the Social Democratic Party, which was everywhere, you know, where there were working people at the time, it goes to zero, right?0.85
00:17:17.040Like they have to go to ground one way or the other. Whether that means that they've given up on these quarters or whether they're trying to figure out alternative ways of organizing, it's impossible for everyday people to see and know, right?
00:17:30.320We talked a little last time about the grief of realizing how deep and broad the Nazis appeal was, right? Like people who are having the experience of like realizing that some of their friends or social acquaintances are actually supporters of this regime. But then also it sounds like, you know, there's not just grief, but also fear, right? Because you actually don't know. Realizing that people have these sympathies that you didn't understand before means that there are other people out there who have these sympathies who you still don't know about. And in fact, you can't trust.0.63
00:17:56.980Yeah, but also the fact that people have pressure points and the Nazis were good at finding them. These were often small towns, people knew each other, and so people knew what you had to threaten in order for someone to talk in spite of what they might believe.
00:18:11.380I don't know if this happens yet, but I mean, famously in 1933, you know, teachers at school were starting to encourage children to report on their parents.
00:18:20.340Often the children didn't know that that's what they were doing, right?
00:18:23.320They just related conversation that they didn't know were conspiratorial and reported those.
00:18:30.600And then the parents went to the camps for it, right?
00:18:34.400And this is also, this is, of course, particularly bad and particularly prevalent in working class families where we talked about Alfred Kahl last time and his daughter Judith.
00:18:44.220And she didn't know that her parents were considering fleeing the country because they had a really nice house and they locked the door and were like, don't come in, we're talking, right?
00:18:54.740It's a lot easier for a bourgeois family to be like, we can't have this conversation in front of the kids ever, right?
00:19:01.020It's a lot harder if you're all sharing a room, right?
00:19:03.860How are you going to do this, right? It's like these are intergenerational households. They're much smaller. And you have to at some point meet and talk. And the question is how to do that. Just to give you a sense of how quickly this gets really, really repressive and terrifying, I looked at the example of Maria Jankowski. She's a local SPD head, so Social Democrat in Berlin-Köpenick, which is a very pretty part of town in the east of the city.
00:19:29.660Maria is arrested on March 12th, 1933, and is brought to the Sturm Lokal Demut, which would later attain notoriety, as—this was one of those, like, it was just a big restaurant that the SA had turned into kind of its makeshift torture dungeon.
00:19:51.160And there, she is interrogated and brutalized by the SA, and then is released, right, after some time.
00:19:58.820Jankowski is important because she described her ordeal
00:20:03.020to the London Times for an article that came out on April 1st, right?
00:20:07.000So, like, there were ways of knowing this.
00:20:09.620She also seems to, and this is, I couldn't find direct references to this,
00:20:13.500but indirectly people say that she seems to have posed for pictures
00:20:16.800with her wounds to expose what was happening.
00:20:20.920Yeah, we have transcripts of what happened to her,0.99
00:20:23.400so we know the kind of torture she was exposed to.
00:20:26.960And this gets at something else about this moment that is so galling about 1933, especially the early goings, and that is frankly so resonant with our own moment.
00:20:38.600The fact that if you spoke out about what was happening, the Nazis would accuse you of making them victims.0.52
00:20:46.860They had a really good way of, like, telling these people who were currently brutalizing their fellow citizens that they were actually victims of evil rumors from abroad, read from Jewish people, right?0.56
00:20:58.680While the people were very much doing what those people were saying, right?
00:21:02.960This idea that, like, oh, Maria Jankowski and people like her are lying was spread by the very same people who, like, looked on as people like her were brutalized, right?
00:21:12.720The Nazis got incredibly worked up about people making Germany look bad, basically, by pointing out the things that the Nazis were doing.
00:21:22.280Yes. How dare you destroy my reputation by talking about my words and actions?
00:21:29.120Yeah. As Nando Relentless says, stop saying things that I've done.
00:21:33.780But this idea that like it'll be above all applied to German Jews or basically the pressure is double.0.87
00:21:40.820On the one hand, it is exceed to every one of our insane demands, but also don't complain about it because that would be basically hurting Germany and then we're going to punish you for that.0.82
00:21:53.580So that's already here in mid to late March.
00:21:58.120In spite of this weird kind of information politics where they're like, oh, you can't say the things that we're obviously doing.
00:22:04.420As with Dachau, a lot of this is still probably out in the open.0.99
00:22:08.160And of course, we should mention, we're going to get to Jewish Germans pretty soon. But for now, concentration camps, as in Dachau, mean political repression, right? They mean Social Democrats and Communists and a few unlucky others, right? Labor organizers, some journalists, they don't yet mean Jewish people.
00:22:26.320So when we get to what we think of like as the Holocaust proper, what is happening in the concentration camps? What happens to these people who are being deported? That is officially a secret. And we can talk about, you know, evidence that people knew or didn't know what was going on there.
00:22:43.300But the Nazis were making at least some kind of effort to cover that up.
00:22:47.540But they don't seem particularly interested in concealing what they're doing, their political enemies.
00:22:54.240They'll definitely yell at their political enemies who survive and, say, pose with their wounds for the London Times.
00:22:59.680But that's different than actually wanting to keep it a secret.
00:23:02.960Exactly. The idea that the Holocaust is secret is always a little bit strange to me.
00:23:07.140I don't think it really was, but you're right.
00:23:09.500It wasn't covered in the paper, right?
00:23:11.600Whereas Dachau's opening, Himmler announces in the press, right?
00:23:15.480The Nazis' own paper, the Völkische Beobachter, covered the event.
00:23:38.660So none of this is underhanded or secret yet, right?
00:23:43.020The Bavarian government in April will, in fact, invite media representatives to visit the camp and report from it.
00:23:50.680Not sure how realistic that would have been, but Dachau is covered in international media, right?
00:23:56.780We know that at this point, inmates were still in their civilian clothes.
00:24:01.140They would not have had their head shaved.
00:24:02.840So, there was an attempt to kind of create an air of normalcy around these and to sort of talk about it as protective custody. But very soon, newspaper reports began describing prisoners who have been killed, you know, quote-unquote, trying to flee or having, quote-unquote, committed cowardly suicide, right?
00:24:23.460The murders at Dachau begin almost immediately, but they sort of have to be introduced through doublespeak.
00:24:32.320And we should say that, according to the U.S. Holocaust Museum, the number of deaths in Dachau by 1945 reached 40,000.
00:24:39.540So, well, last episode, we talked about like the banning of basically all other political parties. Right. And we talked about some of these people who are already beginning to flee either because they're being targeted or because they like start to sense that they will be targeted if they stay. Right.
00:24:59.780But this is basically like a formalization and escalation of the same repression we described as beginning pretty much immediately in February.
00:25:10.240That's right. We'll talk a lot about conservatives and the Nazis today.0.66
00:25:16.160This was something that was legible to them.
00:25:18.880This is what happened in the Spanish Civil War.
00:25:22.260This is what happens wherever right-wing authoritarians took over, right?
00:25:26.500So the idea that like, oh, we're going to round up a bunch of journalists and communists, like that's something that von Papen could completely get behind. So far, it's also kind of business as usual, right? Unfortunately, in Europe, 1933. But there's something else happening at the same time, which I think for us who know where this story is going, it's absolutely legible what exactly was happening.
00:25:50.500at the time, I think you had to be pretty observant to notice it, at least at this early
00:25:56.240stage. Because in the background, the repression we described in the last episode is continuing.
00:26:01.920But in this episode, right, we're going to be talking about something a little bit different.0.92
00:26:06.520Dachau did not at this point house any inmates who were there for being Jewish, unless they were
00:26:12.940also trade unionists or communists or social democrats. But the campaigns against Jews were
00:26:18.080ramping up. So what did that look like? There were sort of sporadic attacks on Jews and Jewish
00:26:23.540businesses pretty much continuously during the first months of 1933. Are those SA attacks?
00:26:30.160Yeah. Who's doing them? It's mostly the SA. Okay. And is it like directed from the Nazi party? Like,
00:26:36.840okay, guys, go rough up some Jewish businesses. Or are they just like having these like1.00
00:26:40.800anti-Semitic would occur and spontaneously attacking a Jewish business.
00:26:45.660So unlike the later pogroms, most famously the Kristallnacht in 1938, this appears to have been
00:26:53.980genuinely spontaneous. That's not to say that the Nazis didn't condone it, but it didn't really fit0.81
00:27:00.620with their plan that much. At the same time, that's not to excuse any of this because in some way0.71
00:27:07.320something far scarier was finding expression. There were beatings and disappearances and
00:27:14.120violence and the police refusing to investigate sort of throughout February and early March,
00:27:20.600but there's a marked uptick basically around the time when we're starting our episode around
00:27:25.440mid-March, right? And in Richard Bessel's work, quote, unlike the more frequent assaults on the
00:27:32.160nazis marxist political opponents the attacks on jewish targets essentially were superfluous as
00:27:37.980regards the actual capture of power and yet they provided a constant backdrop to the successful
00:27:43.560political campaign of the nsdip in the 1930s i mean attacking the sdp which had previously been
00:27:51.920a very powerful political party right that makes sense if your aim is to you know enact state
00:27:58.140capture, right? Your aim is to like, get rid of the people who would pose a actual or procedural
00:28:04.740impediment to your accumulation of the ability to do whatever you want to do. Exactly. Jews are not
00:28:10.540part of that project. Attacking Jews is something that these Nazis are doing because they want to,0.98
00:28:15.660and not particularly for a strategic reason. Exactly. Right. It's not calculated. It's0.97
00:28:20.060impassioned. Exactly. The idea that the more brutal attacks were against SPD, KPD and trade union
00:28:26.240targets might make it sound like we're saying like, well, the Jews weren't sort of the intended
00:28:29.700victims. That's not true, right? It sort of makes sense, you know, that the Nazis would go after
00:28:34.740these people because they'd been fighting them for years and many of them had gotten whooped
00:28:38.660and gotten killed by these people, right, for years. Now they were basically settling the old
00:28:43.820scores. But the violence against Jews appears to not have been particularly instrumental at this
00:28:48.980point. People didn't demand it. It didn't serve any real purpose. It was just a sign that they
00:28:53.700wanted to right that this was part of the understanding of the kind of purification
00:28:57.880that was to come at the risk of making a comparison that's maybe more you know intuitive than precise
00:29:06.080this reminds me a little bit about the the character of attacks on trans people by the
00:29:09.400trump regime right like yeah i understand like strategically tactically why they are doing
00:29:14.060things like enacting executive orders against uh like prominent liberal law firms right or like
00:29:20.460issuing threats of impeachment to judges who rule against the Trump administration.0.99
00:29:26.380And then this shit about trans soldiers or trans teenagers or like trans people being able to have0.99
00:29:34.320certain jobs, like that doesn't seem to really have a strategic end point. It seems to be about0.99
00:29:41.720like rallying the passions of a base that can be motivated and sort of like take a lot of pleasure
00:29:48.300and hatred. There's something scary about how extraneous it is, right? Bessel says that these
00:29:53.800were, quote, almost festive sadistic outbursts by young toughs who wanted to enjoy themselves0.88
00:29:59.060at Jews' expense, right? It's really, really noticeable that there is a kind of ritualistic0.77
00:30:05.380quality, as Fritscher puts it, to this, which, you know, given the kind of history of ritualized
00:30:12.340anti-Semitism in Germany and all of Europe, frankly, you know, with people who knew their
00:30:17.440history, the alarm bells would have been going off. Similarly, frankly, the boycotts of Jewish
00:30:23.200stores at this point and the persistent harassment of their patrons appears to have been intense,
00:30:28.860but it was neither that well-coordinated nor particularly effective, right? What became
00:30:34.520effective was pushing Jews from public, political, and commercial life, but almost entirely by0.99
00:30:41.340administrative means. So what do you mean by administrative means? This is by law, right? It's
00:30:46.600going to be through legally depriving people of civil rights and their ability to participate0.73
00:30:52.520in commercial and political life, right? But it's important to note that these administrative
00:30:57.620means, like the boycotts, sort of had another side, which Bessel also mentions, right? They
00:31:03.700contain a kind of promise, right? We are still four years out from 1929, right? The stock market
00:31:10.900crash. We are still in the Great Depression. And this is all happening against a backdrop of mass
00:31:17.260unemployment and widespread demiseration, right? Meaning there is kind of a zero-sum thing going
00:31:22.980on here. If a big department store is boycotted because its owners are Jewish, a big department0.76
00:31:28.520store down the street might not hate that idea, right? Yeah. If, as will happen throughout March1.00
00:31:34.100and April, Jewish professors, judges, doctors, and so on are dismissed, well, that means someone else
00:31:39.760gets to take those jobs, right? Unemployment, recall, is still super high, especially among
00:31:44.400these groups, right? There's this German historian named Goetz Ali who's argued that basically the
00:31:50.320redistribution of plunder was what got so many Germans to enthusiastically support the Nazi
00:31:55.740regime, especially at the beginning. It wasn't necessarily that they were anti-Semites and0.54
00:32:00.660therefore stole their Jewish fellow citizens' jobs, apartments, and eventually their wealth,
00:32:05.620although they may have also been anti-Semites0.66
00:32:08.080it was that they wanted to steal those things
00:33:04.500Ah, Potsdam, for those of you not familiar with your Berlin geography, is a fairly large city in the periphery of Berlin. It is the old seat of the Hohenzollern monarchs.
00:33:18.080This is where they would sort of spend most of their time, even though they had a pied-Ã -terre in central Berlin, obviously. And that's significant.
00:33:27.040The ostensible reason, this was supposed to be the opening of the new Reichstag. The reason they couldn't have it in the Reichstag is the Reichstag burned down.
00:33:33.200They had an alternative space, an opera house in Berlin, but they were like, oh, let's do it in Potsdam.
00:33:38.460And it was because of the Hohenzollern.0.89
00:34:03.060This is all to say that there's a lot of, like, signifiers of a glorious German past, right? All in one place.
00:34:11.100Exactly. Oh, and the Catholic Church is there too. Yeah. Wilhelm II, by the way, died in 1941. So Wilhelm II is still alive, but he did not show up for this.
00:34:20.380Yeah. Hanging out in the Netherlands, I believe, at the time.
00:34:22.960And what this all seems to be about is about wooing conservatives who are not yet Nazis in order to, right, like, get the army excited, get the monarchists excited, get the Catholic conservatives excited, right?
00:34:36.340All these groups that were like, well, we like some of what these people are doing, but we're a little creeped out by some other parts.
00:34:41.720Well, here is sort of a big show of like, you know, unite the right rally, right?
00:36:12.620The Enabling Act basically does away with most of the Weimar Constitution. It's the legal basis for the dictatorship that would follow until 1945, right? This is the moment when basically a bunch of decisions that normally would fall to the president, Hindenburg, get centralized around Hitler. It is the moment when a lot of stuff that you would need parliament for, you don't need parliament for anymore. It's basically creating a fully executive, no more checks and balances kind of government.
00:36:40.960Most historians argue that the events of February were pretty much sufficient for establishing Nazi dominance and dictatorship, right? The Reichstag wasn't doing much. And Hindenburg appears to have just been interested in like, I don't know, pissing in his diapers at this point.
00:36:56.960But Austerman argues that March 23rd adds something that's in the moment was probably not as important, but becomes far more consequential for what happens later, right? It creates the sham legality on which a lot of the perpetrators could rely as they undertook the various crimes against humanity that are World War II, the Holocaust, etc., etc., right?
00:37:21.340They could sort of say, well, this is all still being done in the name of the German people and with some constitutional sanction, however, threadbare, right?0.61
00:37:31.200This fiction of constitutionality would not have happened without the day of Potsdam and without the Enabling Act.0.73
00:37:37.540So this is the thing that makes the dictatorship all legally hunky-dory is that the Reichstag, the nominally democratically elected Reichstag, hands over all the constitutional authority to like Hitler personally.0.81
00:37:49.120Yeah. And while we don't know what would have happened if the act had not passed, this is like the last time there's any suspense in this story in some way, because Hitler does need a two thirds majority in the Reichstag in order to pass this thing. And as you'll recall, even after the pretty unfair elections on March 5th, Nazis are nowhere near that. They need helpers. And that's what the day of Potsdam has all been about.0.79
00:38:14.620So who are these people in the Reichstag who hand away all of their own power, right? It seems like this wouldn't align with their incentives to keep power in the Reichstag, but they all handed over their own power to Hitler. So who is that and why do they do any of this?0.81
00:38:32.340I mean, the question of why has been asked ever since. And I think the answer is different for each of the parties. And so this is where, unfortunately, we have to delve into the Weimar party system, which is in-fucking-sane.
00:38:45.640Yeah, it's nuts. It's nuts. There was no, like, you have to get 5, 10, 15 percent of the vote before you can get a seat in the Reichstag. If you got anything, you can get a seat in the Reichstag.
00:38:54.620So it incentivized a ton of different parties.
00:38:57.580That's right. And by the end of the Weimar Republic, a bunch of them were just kind of in total opposition. They wouldn't cooperate with any other parties. They were just there to fuck shit up, basically. Right. So we should say the meeting happens at the Kohloper in Berlin, so an opera house, and the SA and the SS are both there in the hall, basically, in the voting area in order to intimidate people.
00:39:22.400So it's like, if you want to vote against this, then we have our jackboots literally outside.
00:39:27.720Yeah, I mean, Hitler at several points, like, threatens, like, blood will run down these hallways, right?
00:39:32.440So, like, it's not exactly the easiest start for people to do the right thing, but some people manage.0.86
00:39:39.380We should mention the KPD and the SPD together would have already enough votes to, I think, prevent a two-thirds majority for Hitler.0.64
00:39:48.080But they don't because the KPD, the communists, have already been barred from the Reichstag.0.56
00:39:53.020That's right. They've been locked out by the Reichstag fire decree by Hindenburg.
00:39:58.460They also, many of them are arrested or have fled by now.
00:40:01.440They can't vote from prison. And so they're just not there.
00:40:05.000And basically, the Reichstag decides to amend the rules to be like, well, if people can't show up for whatever reason, we're just going to adjust what quorum is, right?
00:40:13.380That's so funny. It's like if we can simply imprison anybody who might vote against us and then have a legitimate vote in our favor.
00:40:21.420It's bananas, isn't it? The SPD, which will be the only party that votes against this law.
00:40:27.660They are the Social Democrats. They were the biggest party in Weimar era for a long time.
00:40:33.460And they've been in kind of a slow decline. Is that the CliffsNotes?
00:40:36.180The oldest party in Germany, or oldest still existing party in Germany, founded in 1863, has had that name since the 1890s. And yes, between 1890 and 1930, it was the largest party in the Reichstag continuously. In the early Weimar Republic, it was the dominant party. Friedrich Ebert, the first ever democratically elected head of state in Germany, was an SPD politician.
00:40:58.440But they had declined somewhat by the end of the Weimar Republic.
00:41:04.120They would be resurrected after the war and are now slowly eroding.
00:41:10.800Olaf Scholz's party, former German chancellor, was the SPD.
00:42:50.880So Silesia, Breslau and places like that.
00:42:54.100There, the center sort of was kind of anti-nationalist, right?
00:42:57.960Like it would be weird for someone who's like
00:42:59.560Polish person living in occupied territory
00:43:03.040being like, I am for Germanization.0.95
00:43:05.920People got there, some people got there,
00:43:07.520but it's not the most intuitive position to take.
00:43:11.240And so the center had been kind of a big force
00:43:14.540for kind of liberalism and centrism and hence the name.
00:43:17.340But it had, as you say, started to open itself up to authoritarianism, not necessarily fascism, but there were just a lot of authoritarian governments around Europe at the time that, as part of their reactionary project, advocated a return to busy Catholic doctrine and the importance of the Catholic Church.
00:43:40.440Right. Think of Francisco Franco in Spain. Think of, you know, events in Austria. Think of Hungary. Think of Poland. Right. Like the idea that like right wing parties could be ascendant and kind of restore Catholicism to what many Catholics, many conservative Catholics felt was its rightful place in society and to restore the societal order that Catholicism frankly still envisions.
00:44:06.340sorry, is, you know, it just made a lot of sense to these voters. And so the center sort of started
00:44:12.320tacking to the right. The guy who's running it at the time, Prelate Ludwig Haas, basically ends up
00:44:19.720telling his party to vote for this law based on assurances from Hitler that he wouldn't come for
00:44:26.220the Catholic Church, right? So he's there not advocating for the German constitution or state0.57
00:44:30.840at all. He's there kind of advocating for the Vatican. And in fact, once the center party is
00:44:35.580dissolved, which happens like three months later, he goes to Rome and starts negotiating a treaty,
00:44:42.780a concordance with Nazi Germany as a representative of the Vatican. So like,
00:44:47.960you know, not to get all Charlie and the board of crazy here, but like there's a very specific
00:44:51.880form of Catholicism that's at work here and that already is kind of making its peace with what is
00:44:57.760about to happen. Then who else do we got? The next is the German state party, the Deutsche
00:45:02.020Staatspartei. These are the liberals. And this is a story that's just going to blow your mind
00:45:06.900because you'll never have heard it before. So the liberals, sort of pro-business, socially liberal,
00:45:13.920this was a party called the DDP. They kept getting clobbered in elections after the Great
00:45:18.360Depression started and by 1930 merged with another party, which was virulently nationalist
00:45:24.580and anti-Semitic. Oh my God. Okay. So they're like, what if we just track to the right? That
00:45:28.380will work yeah exactly they were a business party with also pronounced populist nationalist edge
00:45:33.740oh wow so and they voted yes in a total shocker yeah um quote in the interest of the people and
00:45:41.860the fatherland and expecting a lawful use of these powers we will put aside our serious
00:45:46.820reservations and approve the enabling act oh okay great the susan collins award goes to
00:47:32.060And there's some indication, right, that a lot of these right-wingers fooled themselves into believing, oh, this little thug is not going to last, but we're going to use it to reestablish a Kaiser.
00:47:41.740And so that's the difference, I guess, here. You could imagine that for the average voter, like, that doesn't mean squat, right? And so the party had gotten pretty seriously ground up by the rise of the Nazis. They kept trying to sort of be like, hey, do you guys want to, like, form a government together? Do you want to do something together? Do you want to hang out? Maybe Sunday? I'm free on Sunday. And the Nazis were like, no, we're good, bro. We're okay.
00:48:06.780The Nazis were just kind of like, well, we don't seem to need these people.0.82
00:49:03.900Yes. This is the publisher Alfred Hugenberg, who's basically the Rupert Murdoch of the Weimar Republic and who used his yellow journalism rags and all that shit to basically undercut the constitutional order at every step and every chance he got. Lovely. He's the reason why this party sort of still limps along.0.97
00:49:22.400Like so many think tanks or magazines, you're like, who even reads this? And it's one guy and he's cutting the check for the whole thing.
00:49:31.360The important thing to note here, by the way, like, as we're talking about, like, these Nazi antisemitic excesses, like, the DNVP is massively antisemitic, right?0.59
00:49:39.440This is, like, part of their whole deal, meaning the idea that they're going to step in and be like, not like that.
00:50:25.860Yeah. The final party I briefly want to talk about, there are some other ones. I ain't reading all that. Happy for you, though, or sorry that happened.
00:50:34.340That's you texting the Weimar party system. Okay.
00:50:36.660Yeah, exactly. It's the BVP, the Bavarian People Party.
00:50:42.280So this is exactly what you were sort of thinking about when you were asking about the center. This had a rural Catholic base, right?
00:50:48.680Okay. In Bavaria only. And because of that, it was one of the rare right wing parties that really didn't have much to fear from the Nazis. Their base does not appear to have drifted towards the Nazis very much. So they just vote for it for the fuck of it. Who knows?0.66
00:51:02.340I feel like whenever we're talking about Germany, you talk about Bavaria with like a sigh.
00:51:09.180Is that like your, is it like your Alabama?
00:51:43.040Bavaria did hold out longer against the Nazis.
00:51:45.080I mean, like a week longer than some other parts, precisely because it had this local base.
00:51:50.400So sometimes that localism can be helpful, right?
00:51:54.240It can help sort of sustain pluralism.
00:51:56.020But in the end, Bavarian particularism has always, if we have any Bavarian listeners, I'm sorry, but prove me wrong, has always had a tendency to accommodate itself to state authoritarianism, basically.
00:52:07.800Yeah, in the end, it's just the SPD that votes against the law.
00:52:11.060Once again, while the thugs are standing outside, this is at great personal risk.
00:52:15.220They're voting against the enabling law.
00:52:17.200Yeah, exactly. And it's 94 against, but that's because 26 members of the SPD can't make it on account of they're already arrested.
00:52:24.680And as the head of the parliamentary group, Otto Wels, puts it, quote, you can take away our freedom in our lives, but you can't take away our honor, which completely sets off the Nazis.
00:52:35.400Hitler takes the rostrum and launches into this insane rant, goes on about the lack of honor among Social Democrats, right?
00:52:41.960Like the honor part really gets to him.
00:52:43.640He talks about the persecution that the Nazis sort of had allegedly suffered at the hands of the Social Democrats, specifically by, you know, being held to account legally for crimes that they had committed, something that Nazis, and you may know this or not know this, are deeply allergic to, just deeply allergic to any accountability, really.
00:53:02.080And anyway, Hitler concludes with the line, I don't want you to vote for this law.0.62
00:53:06.300Germany shall be free, but not through you, which is in the midst of all this awfulness does feel like a housewives line, frankly.
00:54:35.320What this means is the composition of state parliaments now has to mirror those of the Reichstag, meaning the regional parliaments are no longer a counterweight to the national government the way it was intended.
00:55:12.200But the word Gleichschaltung goes way beyond that.
00:55:15.640It kind of starts naming an entire process that I think Richard Evans describes very,
00:55:19.960very well, and that is probably going to occupy us for some of this episode and then some
00:55:24.740of the next, because this extends well into May.
00:55:27.600It basically comes to define this period in time.
00:55:30.480It's the purge of all those who aren't aligned with the Nazi state from any positions of authority, right?
00:55:37.120So synchronization means we're just getting rid of all political opponents.
00:55:41.560Exactly. It's our guys. It's not even opponents, right? Opponents probably already in jail.
00:55:45.720It's about like anyone who doesn't belong to our little club, right?
00:55:49.500So like the Project 2025 prescription is like, okay, what we're going to do is we're going to purge a federal bureaucracy and we're going to put in like pro-Trump functionaries.
00:55:57.260It's getting rid of anybody who's in these positions that isn't like 100 percent on board and accountable to us so that we can make sure we have like unified control of all levels of government.
00:56:11.020And it happens in a bunch of ways, which I think give us a little bit of a sense of how March to April 1933 would have felt.
00:56:21.700Because this is the part of it that in everyone's diary sort of shows up.
00:56:25.760Like, if you didn't have a lot of communist friends, if you weren't politically active, the February stuff would have been kind of distant rumbles for you.
00:57:09.360The first strategy is just in the case of mayors and local leaders, it's just a mini coup.
00:57:16.080Fritsche tells the story, this is probably one of the most famous ones, in Braunschweig,
00:57:20.680So in northern Germany, the mayor Ernst Böhme there is SPD.
00:57:26.680In 1933, he's still in office, but by March 1933, he basically can't conduct business anymore.
00:57:33.060These armed thugs sort of will show up.
00:57:35.020And when he calls the police, the police arrest him.
00:57:37.420He's then brought to one of these SA prisons.0.52
00:57:39.900And eventually, on the 13th of March, he's stripped of his job by the new governor of the state, basically, that Hitler had put in power.0.64
00:57:49.620But he's allowed to be in the town hall, but like under protective custody of the SA, basically.0.71
00:57:57.760Then he's completely removed from office, replaced by the local Nazi leader.
00:58:02.420And then the 25th of March, he's arrested at home and brought to a former SPD kind of social club that the SA had taken over and is tortured there until he signs a document,
01:00:11.220Yeah, but the reorg goes even further. This is something that listeners who are paying attention to what's happening in Colombia and other places might notice some resonances there.
01:00:22.260A good example here are the universities, because part of what's happening with Gleichschaltung at the university is, yeah, they're getting rid of a bunch of people, but they're also reorganizing the university.
01:00:30.980They're basically, right, they have this Führerprinzip in the state with Hitler as the leader, but they also demand that the universities start reorganizing according to this leadership principle, meaning that the rector, who is the president, basically equivalent in Germany, has to take all the reins of power, has to start being able to dismiss students, has to be able to dismiss faculty, has final say-so on everything, right?
01:00:53.380And then you can put your guy in charge of that one job that has everything, right?
01:00:59.240German universities, like most universities, have been fairly decentralized.
01:01:02.800A lot of power had devolved to famous faculty members, to important deans and administrators.
01:01:08.900And the Nazis undo all that to kind of make sure that they only had to replace one guy.0.82
01:01:13.580It was almost always a guy in order to make sure that they had full control over the university.0.60
01:01:19.380So centralized government, we think of it as like an autocratic principle motivated by the needs of the or the desires to power of the one central figure.
01:01:30.380But you're also saying it is like an easier thing to manage from above, right?
01:01:34.120Like when I want to totally change this university, if I only have to get rid of the rector.
01:01:47.160And, of course, this is also where, you know, if you were a right-leaning intellectual and you wanted that kind of job, you suddenly had all this power and could sort of radically reimagine what a university can be, you know, to use the management speak of today, right?
01:02:02.420Martin Heidegger is someone who gets into office that way and gives this absolutely insane speech laying out how he's the leader of the University of Freiburg and what it means to be a follower in academia.
01:02:12.100And, you know, it becomes kind of a great moment also for opportunists who both have an axe to grind with their colleagues and love having a little bit more power.
01:02:22.940Yeah, it strikes me that this is creating a lot of opportunities for like grift or like grievance enactment, right?
01:02:29.900Like, I don't like this guy. I'm going to hint that he's not on board to the person who is in charge of these firings.
01:02:35.940Or like, oh, I have a lot of ambition and not a lot of principles, so I'm just going to suck up to the Nazis and see if I can get one of these big cushy jobs whose only requirement is like party loyalty.0.60
01:02:47.740Yeah. One of the big things that sort of amplifies this, on the one hand, the graft aspect of this collides with the legalistic framework of the whole thing. Because the Nazis were also starting to make choices that actually restricted what a university leader could make.
01:03:05.380On April 7th, 1933, you get the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.0.69
01:03:11.940They passed this new law about who can have what jobs on April 7th.
01:07:13.000Of course, the Nazis are taking over the national state as we speak, but it's still, it's interesting that, like, it's not yet loyalty to the Führer.0.51
01:07:21.220There's still a distinction between the state and the party, which won't hold.
01:08:59.020when they were like, we're about to fire,
01:09:00.180he's like, you can't fire me, I'm retired.
01:09:01.760In certain fields, there have been wonderful studies of individual fields, like more than a third of the professors as of January 1933 were no longer professors by January of the next year.
01:09:13.240Entire fields get completely decimated.
01:09:16.200These people are also obviously not distributed equally across fields.
01:09:20.420Are these people who are mostly leaving because they're not Nazis or are these people who are leaving because they're Jewish?
01:09:25.700Like what is like, there's a lot of people that can get caught in this law.
01:09:29.800Yeah, I think that this is mostly Jewish people at this point. I mean, it depends a little bit on field. Like, if you were a physicist and you're a social Democrat, you can probably get around this, right? Political scientists, legal scholars, you're kind of screwed, right? Like, you're in writing being like, this is why the constitutional order is important. And the Nazis are like, well, it doesn't sound very pro-Nazi now, does it?
01:09:51.720When I was in college, I lived in Oberholzer Hall, which was one of several dorms named after a bunch of German-Jewish humanities scholars who had fled the Nazis and wound up at Bard College, probably not the worst place to be because of these kind of purges.
01:10:11.120Yeah. No, I mean, like the American university will be...
01:10:14.080The biggest beneficiary of the purge, right? Yeah.
01:10:17.340And one should say that the German universities, to my mind, have not recovered from this to this day.
01:10:22.800Now, the third strategy is sort of rationalization.
01:10:27.020This is a kind of consolidation, right, where basically you try to kind of reduce the number of actors that might sort of create a pluralism.
01:10:37.760So this is happening mostly sort of in fields where it's actually free market, where the government doesn't have so much say one way or the other.
01:10:44.580A good example here is the film industry, right?
01:10:47.340In January of 1933, the German film industry consists of 49 production companies.
01:11:50.240Like, I mean, I think there's a lot of like shock in America right now about the cowardice and willingness to cooperate with authoritarianism among our own elites.0.99
01:11:58.800But that is highly precedented and perhaps should not be so shocking.
01:12:03.620I mean, like this is a great example of anticipatory obedience or what Ian Kershaw will later call working towards the Führer, right?0.59
01:12:11.000The fact that, like, the Nazis sometimes had to cajole and force people, but at other times, like, oh, well, you already did this, right?
01:12:19.060Like, basically, people's venality, people's anti-Semitism, people's selfishness basically got them there before the Nazis even made them do anything.0.52
01:12:27.940Yeah, so those are the three strategies of sort of forced Gleichschaltung, forced synchronization.
01:12:33.100And now, briefly, I wanted to talk about the third event, which is on April 1st, which is the boycott of German-Jewish businesses.
01:12:41.000Right. So it's businesses, law firms, doctors' offices. Right. It's when, you know, everyday Jewish people who are not in a relationship where they owe fealty to the state, right, where they're not civil servants, become explicit targets of official Nazi policy.
01:13:01.260Most historians say, like, it's kind of a bust.
01:13:04.180Goebbels is happy with it, but, like, there's not a whole lot of buy-in.0.53
01:13:07.840It does appear that, basically, it shows that, like, in some way, the administrative stuff that the Nazis are doing is far more effective, far more devastating than them trying to sort of channel the anger of what they think of as the street.
01:13:22.020Like, everyday people are not yet buying into that part of it.0.54
01:13:25.460Here's how Lempere experiences it in Dresden.
01:13:30.460Quote, on Saturday, red posters on the shops recognize German Christian enterprise in between them, closed shops as amen in front of them with triangular boards.0.83
01:13:40.140Whoever buys from the Jew supports the foreign boycott and destroys the German economy.0.90
01:13:45.080This is the ostensible reason for this.0.98
01:13:46.860Like the Jews spread lies about us by, again, saying the things that we've done and said things we're doing.0.97
01:13:52.300And so, therefore, now we have to boycott them because there had been some tiny boycott movements of German wares based on the fact that the German government was literal Nazis.0.71
01:14:03.420And people were like, I feel like you're playing the Nazi card too fast just because we're Nazis doesn't – why would you call us Nazis just on account of us being Nazis?
01:14:12.760My grandfather fought real Nazis and I bought this copy of Mein Kampf before we knew the truth.
01:14:46.820They don't know what they're doing. At the same time, he says, like, I have a feeling that the catastrophe is coming, right? He's like, just because this didn't work, just because they haven't yet mastered this, it's going to get worse.
01:15:00.040There was a degree of trial and error and accumulation of different strategies and different lessons.0.87
01:15:07.880even when it comes to, I guess I was thinking when it comes to boycotts, Nazis will be a lot0.94
01:15:12.420more effective later on. As Peter Fritscher points out in his book, a lot of these early0.90
01:15:17.080outrages of the Nazi period have this almost ritualistic quality. They're public, they're
01:15:22.300spectacular. And yet it kind of feels like people are mostly just going through the motions. It's
01:15:27.460not, you know, there's a kind of threadbare quality to a lot of it at this stage. And you
01:15:32.360can really tell that in Klemper's description, he's clearly not saying this is nothing. He's
01:15:37.020not laughing it off, but he's also like, it's not clear how much people's heart is really in this,
01:15:43.100right? And the other thing I think that Klemper saw that historians have confirmed since is this,
01:15:48.600that there's this pervasive sense of victimhood that the Nazis sought to instill, often at the
01:15:54.020same time as they were relentlessly victimizing others, right? The idea was that these boycotts
01:15:58.840were reactive since, you know, Jews have been, quote unquote, spreading lies and led to some1.00
01:16:04.200very tiny boycotts in other countries, right?1.00
01:16:07.740They're in search of this justification to hang,
01:16:10.640like a peg to hang their grievance on, right?
01:16:12.260A small little boycott in another country
01:16:16.280will become pretextual justification1.00
01:16:18.360for this outsized victimization of Jews
01:16:21.820and this outsized sense of grievance against Jews.
01:16:24.460And I mean, like, this is obviously something
01:16:25.720that we don't know of our present moment,
01:16:27.620that people can control all the levers of power
01:16:29.560and still go on constantly about how they're the actual victims.
01:16:32.960So, you know, like it's been 90 years, like people have moved on. But no, in all seriousness, I do think it's really, really noticeable that like people who can not only have untrammeled power, but exercise it viciously, their ability to tell themselves that truly they are the victims here and that outrages are actually being perpetrated against them.
01:16:54.140the capacity for that is pretty limitless and the nazis really play that like a fiddle
01:17:00.080and in late march and early april of 1933 so what are we looking forward to next time adrian
01:17:06.820so next time we're going to get to more gender and sexuality stuff we're going to be talking about
01:17:11.460the women's movement and the nazi state which is an interesting story we're going to be talking
01:17:16.320about magnus hirschfeld's institute for sexual science uh and yeah we're going to be talking