TRIGGERnometry - The Failed Artist Who Became Hitler with Historian James Holland

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00:00:55.560 he's a failed artist you know everything he touches goes wrong hitler ends the war in

00:01:04.560 hospital he's been blinded by a gas attack there is a sort of psycho trauma going on in his head

00:01:12.180 now he's in a defeated nation which has just been kicked into the into the mud by the versailles

00:01:17.140 treaty we didn't fight to come back to a broken germany we need to make germany great again he's

00:01:22.800 able to tap into that anger but he would always then end his speeches with hope we can rise again

00:01:30.440 that german people can be great again suddenly you're kind of you know you found your tribe and

00:01:35.360 you found your people and so suddenly you have a political void because the existing politics in

00:01:40.160 the democracy isn't working so what are the alternatives well the alternatives are communism

00:01:44.540 or National Socialism.

00:01:48.420 If people can't see the comparisons now,

00:01:53.220 then they're obviously not thinking about this in the right way.

00:01:59.160 James Holland, welcome back to Trigonometry.

00:02:01.100 Well, thank you for having me on.

00:02:02.000 Oh, it's great to have you back.

00:02:03.220 Last time we talked about the kind of big picture of World War II.

00:02:06.420 That episode absolutely smashed it, as of course it would be.

00:02:08.600 Today, we really want to focus on Adolf Hitler

00:02:11.260 and his journey through life, if I can say it like that.

00:02:14.860 Before we start, for people watching, I want to make clear

00:02:17.480 we have your book, Sunday Times, best-selling,

00:02:20.240 The Visionaries on the Table.

00:02:21.740 Yes.

00:02:22.260 Let's be very clear, Hitler is not part of that.

00:02:24.340 We're not saying he's a visionary.

00:02:25.540 It features quite heavily in the book, I think it's fair to say.

00:02:27.860 But the visionaries in that case are very much the forefront

00:02:30.380 are Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman,

00:02:34.820 the two presidents that kind of served during the Second World War.

00:02:38.500 And they're kind of an antidote to Hitler.

00:02:40.980 You know, they're different worldviews because both America and Germany are experiencing very, very similar things in terms of Spanish flu, post-First World War, Wall Street crash, global trade war, etc., etc.

00:03:00.080 They don't go down the route that Nazi Germany goes down.

00:03:03.820 And why is that? I think that's very interesting.

00:03:05.720 And so it's a sort of study of contrast.

00:03:09.240 There's a right way to go about things.

00:03:11.660 There's a wrong way to go about things.

00:03:13.380 Those guys kind of, I would say, nailed it.

00:03:15.920 And Hitler, maybe not.

00:03:17.540 Well, it's a relief you take that position.

00:03:19.160 But before we get to that, and we will get to that,

00:03:22.220 actually, Francis and I thought the most interesting thing to start with

00:03:25.140 would be just to understand a little bit about the background of Hitler

00:03:29.360 before he becomes the Hitler of history.

00:03:31.860 Like, growing up, his experience serving in World War I

00:03:36.020 and his political career prior to becoming Chancellor and the Fuhrer.

00:03:41.460 Yeah.

00:03:41.880 Tell us about him.

00:03:42.760 Well, so he's brought up near Linz and then sort of after,

00:03:48.120 as he grows up, he sort of matures and goes to art school in Vienna

00:03:52.440 where he's a failed artist.

00:03:53.820 You know, everything he touches goes wrong.

00:03:56.680 And that's because he's an extremely gauche young man.

00:04:00.980 He's angry.

00:04:03.500 I think he feels that he's for better things,

00:04:06.640 but he's definitely a kind of sort of spectrum,

00:04:10.600 on the spectrum kind of character.

00:04:12.220 He doesn't make friends easily.

00:04:13.860 He doesn't interact with people easily.

00:04:16.320 Resentment is just absolutely broiling inside him.

00:04:20.460 His chance for kind of deliverance from this ordeal

00:04:26.820 of successive failures comes with the First World War.

00:04:30.340 where he gets consumed by a sense of patriotic fervour

00:04:33.760 and wants to do his bit and joins up

00:04:36.280 and really embraces it and spends most of his war

00:04:38.560 on the Western Front where he is a runner

00:04:41.000 and by all accounts he does this very well.

00:04:43.860 You know, he's conspicuously courageous

00:04:47.100 but never gets beyond Lance Corporal,

00:04:51.560 you know, sort of Gefreiter basically in German terms.

00:04:54.620 Everyone always says he's the corporal

00:04:56.020 but he's only a half-corporal.

00:04:57.620 He's a Lance Corporal, you know, he's a one-stripe man

00:05:00.260 and the exhortation that he felt in joining up that patriotic fervor being suddenly belonging

00:05:07.520 being part of something the the comradeship of the trenches of fighting alongside fellows

00:05:15.280 for a common cause all this kind of stuff that dissipates as the war progresses and then there

00:05:20.960 is the terrible shock of 1918 because it looks like they've turned this corner because at the

00:05:25.800 beginning of March they signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk which is Russia's exit from the

00:05:31.080 from the First World War and it's a huge victory and suddenly you know that that reclaims the

00:05:37.260 Baltic states Ukraine parts of Poland all from part of the Russian Empire and it's a huge victory

00:05:45.080 and it also it means of course that the Germans don't have to kind of you know central powers

00:05:48.120 don't have to fight on two fronts and it's Germany that is shouldering the burden of the

00:05:52.800 western front and the eastern front where Austria is burdening the shoulder down in southern you

00:05:58.440 know in the in the Alps against Italy and so on so it's um you know it feels like it should you

00:06:04.500 know this should be this huge release and this should be the kind of impetus that spurs them

00:06:08.280 onto the kind of final victory on the western front and they have this they launched this great

00:06:11.460 offensive in March 1918 and it's what ends the deadlock of stationary static trench warfare

00:06:20.100 but it also offers an amazing lesson for the for the western allies particularly the british which

00:06:26.540 is in their sector where the main thrust of this offensive comes and what the british discover is

00:06:33.860 as they're pushed back they can actually afford to trade space for time and as they go further

00:06:40.300 and further further back so the german lines get more and more extended and as they get more and

00:06:46.380 more extended they become less effective and so what they realized is there is a certain point

00:06:51.420 you reach where the where your attackers when you're on the defensive like this have reached

00:06:56.760 their what is known as their culmination point where they can no longer achieve what they need

00:07:00.500 to achieve with the kind of speed and tactical flexibility they would like because they're so

00:07:05.220 overextended and the British then counter-attack and at that point the Germans are spent because

00:07:09.280 they've they've chucked everything into this this one massive operation that's going to win in the

00:07:15.260 war and it doesn't and the truth is financially economically and in terms of war production

00:07:20.340 they are suffering harder than the western than France and Britain are and so they are

00:07:26.820 no longer able to absorb that and it comes to a point where they just can't go on any longer and

00:07:32.100 then you start to have the sort of you know the communist revolt in the mutiny in the in the

00:07:36.880 German navy and so on and so forth the whole thing crumbles down and this is also presaged by a sort

00:07:42.420 of a slight belief that they're going to sort of, you know, the peace that comes is not going to be

00:07:46.540 too bad because President Wilson of America has come up with his very idealistic kind of 14 points

00:07:51.380 and everything. And the Germans have sort of think, well, OK, maybe we can sort of get away

00:07:55.160 with this. Austria is already bugged out in October. And so that's what prompts them to

00:07:59.540 sue for peace. And then there is this terrible disappointment because the 14 points don't quite

00:08:06.100 end up being the 14 points. And you have the Paris peace talks, which ends up with the Paris

00:08:10.240 peace treaty of late June 1919 where Germany gets frankly absolutely shafted I mean it gets a total

00:08:18.300 shellacking and then you get this sort of terrible absolute gut-wrenching disappointment so you have

00:08:23.820 the terrible disappointment of the of the end of the war and ending up on the losing side but then

00:08:27.820 you get the sort of grinding down into the dust you know you're on your knees we're going to kick

00:08:31.760 you into the mud with the peace treaty and and and that's what is just so hard to stomach for so many

00:08:39.080 of the old um you know people who've been on on the front and hitler ends the war in hospital

00:08:45.160 he's been blinded by a gas attack and it seems quite clear that he's blind beyond

00:08:54.840 purely the gas that there is a sort of psycho trauma going on in his head and it and he comes

00:09:02.200 out of it he emerges out of it um and he's sort of okay but it is clear that it is deeply deeply

00:09:09.000 traumatic and for hitler at the end of the first world war you know what were you going to do you

00:09:12.040 know he didn't have any job beforehand now he's in a defeated nation which has just been kicked into

00:09:16.680 into the mud by the first side treaty you know the reparations are obviously terrible there's

00:09:22.040 a diktat which says you know they have to kind of sign off that it was their fault in the first place

00:09:26.680 blah blah blah was it their fault in the first place oh well you know that's a you know that's

00:09:34.840 an entirely different podcast i mean short version uh it's more nuanced than than just one one

00:09:44.280 this is it's so complicated because the tangle of of of diplomatic alliances is such that it

00:09:50.120 kind of escalates really really badly very quickly in 1970 blaming germany unilaterally

00:09:55.720 is overdoing it a little bit is what i'm reading from you unilaterally yes okay fine before we

00:10:00.760 carry on with the story which you're fast tailing in a fascinating way just can we just come back

00:10:04.600 to before world war one yeah you said that he's this angry man a bit spectrumy uh can't make any

00:10:12.440 friends at this point has he already formed his political views is he ranting about the

00:10:18.600 juden at this point or he's just angry like many young men are angry no no no and there's evidence

00:10:24.200 that he has equated to his stroke sort of friends in the loosest sense who are jews and and no it

00:10:28.700 hasn't come to the forefront at this point but anti-semitism is absolutely rampant you know

00:10:33.540 across europe at this time you know you've obviously had all the pogroms in in russia as

00:10:37.760 well before that you know there's a healthy dose of an unhealthy dose i should say of anti-semitism

00:10:42.900 in britain for example certainly in in france i mean you've only got to look at the drafus affair

00:10:47.080 the turn of the century um etc etc so so it is absolutely there i suspect he probably was

00:10:55.240 anti-semitic but but not rabidly so at this stage and it's certainly not a part of his kind of you

00:11:00.360 know his world view and his his he hasn't thought through his ideology at this point at this point

00:11:05.640 before the war he's a young man who is disappointed by life he has a very close affection with his

00:11:13.960 and relationship with his mother, a very bad relationship with his father.

00:11:19.060 As I say, you know, life hasn't been good to him.

00:11:20.980 You know, he's impoverished.

00:11:22.720 His artwork, you know, he tries to make it as an artist,

00:11:25.180 but his art is terrible.

00:11:26.800 I mean, technically, it's sort of OK.

00:11:29.100 I mean, if he were to become an architect or something,

00:11:31.380 his sort of draftsman-like pictures of buildings would be all right.

00:11:37.000 But he's terrible at human figures.

00:11:39.280 There's no soul in them at all.

00:11:41.000 There's just nothing.

00:11:41.960 I mean, have you ever seen any of his paintings?

00:11:43.820 yes they're totally dead i mean there is just no vitality no life in them whatsoever

00:11:52.780 and you know they are nothing more than kind of sort of cheap postcards i mean you know that's

00:11:57.340 what they are i mean you know and but he gets into disagreements with people he's constantly let down

00:12:03.020 he sort of ends up in a garrison vienna you know it's just it's just a you know his his life is

00:12:08.300 going absolutely nowhere salvation comes with the first world war because it gives him the sense of

00:12:13.740 of belonging, comradeship, which is something he's never really experienced before,

00:12:18.760 because he's always been this outsider, this sort of angry young man.

00:12:22.400 But the problem then comes with the First World War ending.

00:12:25.960 All of a sudden, that sense of camaraderie, belonging, I mean, that's gone.

00:12:31.060 Big time.

00:12:31.600 So where does he go from there?

00:12:33.240 Well, one of his former officers takes pity on it

00:12:36.240 and asks him to help do some sort of propaganda courses

00:12:42.160 to try and sort of bash Bolshevism out of young Germans.

00:12:46.520 And he finds out he's actually a really good orator.

00:12:49.180 And he finds he's rather good at it.

00:12:50.460 He can just stand up and just deliver.

00:12:52.680 And as he's thinking about this and thinking about trying to sort of,

00:12:55.620 you know, dissuade people from Bolshevism,

00:12:57.700 his own thought starts to sort of coalesce.

00:13:01.060 And he's gravitated to Munich as well,

00:13:03.280 because although he's Austrian, Munich is where he ends up.

00:13:06.700 And so he's living in Munich.

00:13:07.720 He's got a job.

00:13:09.260 He's got digs.

00:13:10.640 He's meeting people.

00:13:11.620 And suddenly he's meeting people who have the same ideas as him that are starting to emerge.

00:13:15.740 And he goes to it and he sort of thinks, OK, well, what is, you know, where are we heading here?

00:13:19.060 What is the new Germany?

00:13:20.160 And he starts to have increasingly strong views about how he sees Germany should be.

00:13:24.520 And he goes to a meeting in a beer colour of the Darcher Ibeite Partei,

00:13:29.740 which is the German People's Party, which has been set up by Anton Drexler,

00:13:32.860 who is friends with people like Rudolf Hess and various others

00:13:39.640 who have been part of the Tula Society, which is a sort of, you know,

00:13:45.480 woo-woo kind of, you know, where do we all come from,

00:13:49.080 sort of ancient Aryan myths kind of vibe with some anti-Semitism thrown in.

00:13:55.360 And they've all sort of merged into the DAP, the Deutsche, the German Workers' Party.

00:14:00.940 And he goes there and he stands up and speaks and everyone goes,

00:14:04.020 wow, you know, who is this guy? And he's really good at it.

00:14:07.540 and he starts to speak more and more and he suddenly becomes a star and i can't remember

00:14:14.000 it's 1920 or 1921 that drexler changes the name to the you know the national socialist

00:14:19.260 workers party the nazis um germans by the way don't do acronyms they do abbreviations

00:14:26.680 so you know the stuka for example is a is an abbreviation nazi is an abbreviation uh rather

00:14:33.140 than an acronym. And Hitler then just takes over. And it's just completely obvious that he should

00:14:40.080 take over because he's the leading light. He's the person that everyone listens to. And suddenly

00:14:43.880 he can hold a room. And he finds this incredibly liberating, this ability to stand in a beer

00:14:50.620 cellar, stand in a room and hold everyone's attention with his rhetoric. And he can just

00:14:56.060 speak in fully formed paragraphs and sentences. And all his speeches follow exactly the same

00:15:01.780 They start off, you know, we were robbed. We were kind of, you know, we were stabbed in the back, which is Hindenburg's line from spring of 1918.

00:15:14.620 This idea that it wasn't the fault of the generals and the commanders in the First World War.

00:15:18.300 They were stabbed in the back by the politicians and by commies and, you know, Bolsheviks and so on.

00:15:24.300 But it was entirely their fault. I mean, you know, they were party to going to war in the first place.

00:15:28.820 They were egging on the Kaiser. They were promising military miracles that couldn't be achieved and all the rest of it.

00:15:36.000 So, you know, if anyone in any war, there's always a combination of people that are responsible for what happens.

00:15:43.700 But they had as much blood on their hands as anyone, you know, the Ludendorce and Hindenburgs and all the other senior commanders.

00:15:49.380 So to kind of try and absolve themselves and pass the blame on something else was, you know, cowardly and ridiculous and not true.

00:15:56.080 But it tapped into a kind of need of a lot of these veterans

00:16:04.440 who were coming back who were angry, disappointed.

00:16:06.500 You know, we've just fought through this.

00:16:07.700 We've seen hell.

00:16:08.800 We've seen our comrades blown to smithereens.

00:16:11.220 You know, we fought in the mud, and this is the thanks we get

00:16:14.100 for our sacrifice and for all that we were, you know,

00:16:17.160 all our shattered dreams and aspirations and hopes

00:16:19.700 and all the rest of it.

00:16:21.560 And so Hitler, in his speeches, is able to tap into that anger,

00:16:25.200 But he would always then end his speeches with hope.

00:16:30.140 We can rise again. The German people can be great again.

00:16:34.020 But part of this, reaching this point of hope, was also about setting up the enemy.

00:16:42.340 And so what he does is this us and them.

00:16:45.400 And us is Volksgemeinschaft and Franzgemeinschaft.

00:16:50.340 And there's no literal translation for Volksgemeinschaft at all.

00:16:53.400 But it is it is a sense of. We as Germans are linked inextricably by culture, by race, by being northern Europeans, by being at heart German Christians, even if you don't believe in it.

00:17:13.700 by a sort of a heritage and inheritance that we instigate.

00:17:21.180 It's a bit like sort of, you know, the Pashtun Wadi Code or something

00:17:23.620 to Pashtuns in Afghanistan.

00:17:25.780 You're just sort of, it's something you're born with.

00:17:27.640 And either you're part of this gang or you're not part of this gang.

00:17:29.960 And if you're not part of this gang, it's because you're a Sloth

00:17:31.980 or a Bolshevik or a Jew.

00:17:33.780 I mean, you know, one of the things that they, the mistake they make

00:17:35.860 is assuming that the Jews are, is racial rather than a religion.

00:17:43.700 it's religion not racial and um so so waltzgemeinschaft is this us and them is buying

00:17:51.060 into that us and them we are the true inheritors of our land of germany you know the northern

00:17:56.260 aryan people it goes back millennia to ancient times which is again tapping into the slightly

00:18:02.340 sort of woo-woo to the society kind of nonsense uh um you know this is this is the notions of of

00:18:08.340 of an ancient christ-like figure with a k who's who's this sort of you know it's it's it's the

00:18:15.460 atlantic ice theory it's all this kind of just nonsense sort of runic kind of ancient

00:18:24.900 nordic races kind of heritage stuff that the nazis get into and then the franzgemeinschaft is

00:18:32.580 the same as volksgemeinschaft but it's people who've served at the front and despite the fact

00:18:37.300 that obviously jews have been integrated into german society and prussian society and the

00:18:40.900 german peoples for centuries and millennia is neither here nor there the fact that they've been

00:18:46.580 hugely successful compatriots is neither here nor there the fact that they fought alongside each

00:18:51.540 other in the trenches is neither here nor there and one of the one of the reasons why hitler gets

00:18:57.460 into this in the first place is because when he gets to munich there is a there is a a very brief

00:19:02.020 soviet republic which is announced in in munich i think in 1919 or 1920 and it is organized by

00:19:09.060 munich jews predominantly the leadership is is jews so suddenly he thinks ah you know i've got

00:19:13.780 this this opposition that you know there is us true aryans true germans the volksgemeinschaft

00:19:20.500 the volksgemeinschaft then there is them which are bolsheviks slavs um and jews they're the enemy

00:19:29.540 and there is this international plot of bolshevism and jury which is trying to undermine us the true

00:19:36.820 inheritors of europe and and germany and of course it's totally totally bogus but when you've just

00:19:43.700 been defeated and you're trying to work out what it is you you stand for it's quite potent and you

00:19:49.860 know you see this time and time again it's not you know i remember when you know sort of 15 years ago

00:19:56.900 sort of wondering how on earth could people fall for this total nonsense and then you see what's

00:20:01.340 happened in the world in the last particularly in the western world in the last sort of 15 years

00:20:04.560 you kind of think oh okay i kind of get this now so that's what he's able to tap into and he just

00:20:11.860 gets this growing growing movement but but it's tiny you know it's it's it's totally fringe i mean

00:20:20.320 it's it's more fringe than you know tommy robinson i mean it really is nothing it it it doesn't make

00:20:29.260 a a dent but it has its supporters and with it comes this sort of paramilitary side of it they

00:20:36.260 all wear uniforms you know they have the swastika um and where does the swastika come from well

00:20:42.440 that is debated but but but my understanding of it is is goering goering certainly believed it

00:20:47.860 was him that had done it. And this was because he became friends with some Swedish aristocrats

00:20:53.040 and went to visit a castle there. In fact, actually, his first wife was a Swedish aristocrat.

00:20:58.840 And on the fireplace where he was staying at this castle in Sweden was the swastika. I mean,

00:21:04.500 swastika is older than the hills. I mean, you get it in India and Sanskrit and, you know,

00:21:11.200 all over the place. And generally it means, you know, it's a peaceful kind of

00:21:15.180 warm, fluffy sign rather than something that's completely toxic. And what they do is they turn

00:21:22.260 it on its side. So it comes, I think it's, Goering is very, very important in this. And of course he

00:21:28.720 is a, he's reasonably aristocratic. He's well to do. He's been a fighter pilot. He's commanded

00:21:36.100 the, you know, the Richtofen squadron at the end of the war.

00:21:39.600 He's got 40-plus kills to his name.

00:21:41.780 You know, he's a very, very talented pilot.

00:21:43.100 He's also super smart.

00:21:44.760 I mean, really, really clever.

00:21:46.540 Again, another really, really good orator.

00:21:49.180 And he quickly unveils his way into the Nazis and does well

00:21:53.420 because he's this larger-than-life character.

00:21:56.260 He's quicker-witted than almost all the others.

00:21:59.460 And he can run rings around them.

00:22:01.380 And he's a great orator.

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00:23:45.060 Can I just point something out, James? Isn't it also quite interesting that he was somebody who

00:23:50.560 had a lot of purpose in the First World War? He was sort of a mini celebrity, wasn't he,

00:23:54.980 with being a fighter pilot, the First World War ends,

00:23:59.160 he's kind of left without purpose as well.

00:24:01.460 Yeah, and he ends up being a sort of, you know,

00:24:03.400 a bit of a barnstormer and flying commercially and, you know,

00:24:06.200 and just lost.

00:24:07.140 I mean, all these people, they're just lost.

00:24:08.620 You know, there's no money, there's no jobs, there's nothing.

00:24:12.360 You know, society is broken down completely.

00:24:14.240 Now, back into 1923, which coincidentally is exactly the same time

00:24:17.940 as the Beer Hill Putsch, things are starting to get better,

00:24:20.460 which is one of the reasons why the Beer Hill Putsch fails,

00:24:22.220 because actually there's you know there is a shaft of sunlight on the on the on the uplands again

00:24:29.740 and and germany is starting to get out of the mire which isn't very convenient for the for the nazis

00:24:34.240 because they're all about anger and you know they are very much the sort of the politics of division

00:24:39.760 and the us and them and all this kind of stuff um so suddenly as germany is emerging out of the

00:24:44.700 economic mire, just at the same moment as the Nazis are doing this play for kind of, you know,

00:24:52.700 trying to take over Munich and Bavaria and then let's see where it all goes. So it doesn't work.

00:24:58.960 Jen, sorry to interrupt. It just strikes me we've skipped a bit, which may be worth

00:25:02.860 delving into just for people who are far less familiar with this than you.

00:25:06.480 So you mentioned how they're really fringe. It's a few people meeting in...

00:25:10.740 Based in Munich.

00:25:11.420 based in munich how do you go from that to try and take charge of a whole part of germany

00:25:17.100 well it's it's a it's a long and difficult process and you know to start off with i mean

00:25:23.900 these early years sort of 1920 21 22 23 up to the beer hall putsch which is this where they try and

00:25:30.220 take over munich uh and indeed bavaria and the whole country um in november 1923

00:25:37.500 it's it's super small scale so this is lots of angry young men drinking beer drinking their

00:25:45.560 steins working themselves up into a lather hitler kind of compelling them with his oratory others

00:25:52.400 compelling with their oratory and for lots of loft souls this you know this this is the light

00:25:58.260 and they are the moths coming towards it because this is offering answers to the anger the anger

00:26:04.860 and the resentment and the rage i mean this is what happens time and time again through history

00:26:10.780 when people are reduced in status when they are forced to cast aside the things that they held

00:26:18.780 dear and the things that they thought were short and solid and the foundations of their existence

00:26:24.780 suddenly they're looking for answers and there's a lot of pent-up anger which is made worse by the

00:26:31.500 the experience of the First World War, the trauma of the First World War.

00:26:34.480 And don't forget, you know, no one's really understanding battlefield trauma in those days.

00:26:38.660 There's no kind of sort of understanding of PTSD or, you know, you need to come back,

00:26:42.500 you just need to decompress and we need to sort of give you kind of two weeks on Cyprus

00:26:46.080 and then, you know, sit on the beach and have a good time and have some sort of apple spritz

00:26:49.760 and, you know, then come back and then slowly kind of, you know, bring you back in society.

00:26:53.860 There's none of that. You know, you're back to a broken Germany where people are wheeling around,

00:26:58.940 you know wheelbarrows of money and there's hyperinflation and you know bread is going from

00:27:04.620 kind of 10 million in one day to 100 million marks by the end of the day you know it's totally

00:27:11.200 bonkers so how do you make sense of that well you make sense of that by holding on to the things

00:27:15.880 that you do know and if there's a bunch of of lads who've all been through the same experience

00:27:21.380 of you and they've got some finger pointing to do whether it be to jews or bolsheviks or

00:27:27.040 you know global capitalism or whatever it might be suddenly you're kind of you know you found your

00:27:32.040 tribe and you found your people so so those are the people they're attracting but but it is super

00:27:36.600 small scale and there is this paramilitary wing to it which enables people to still wear uniforms

00:27:46.440 and feel in touch and connected to their military past so that the kind of military training they

00:27:53.620 experience the experience they bought from being on the western front or even the eastern front

00:27:57.940 or wherever it was counts for something and so that the you know they start to introduce ranks

00:28:03.700 and all the rest of it in different orders so you have the sa the storm out thailand you have the

00:28:08.340 and then you have the ss cast coming into being and you know for for lost souls this is gives you

00:28:14.420 a gang it gives you a tribe you know and for some people it's a football club uh um for other people

00:28:19.940 it's a knife gang in south london you know for for people in germany it's the nazis or or whatever

00:28:26.980 or the communists who are far more to the forefront than the nazis are this time in in germany so it's

00:28:34.260 about it is it's focusing one's anger focusing one's resentment trying to find a sense of

00:28:40.420 brotherhood trying to trying to tap into that sense of volksgemeinschaft and franzgemeinschaft

00:28:45.620 and that is what hitler is tapping into and that's how he's presenting it it's us

00:28:52.900 who together we've had this experience this bonding life experience of being on surviving

00:28:57.700 the first world war we didn't fight for nothing all this kind of stuff uh you know we didn't we

00:29:02.740 didn't fight to come back to a broken germany we need to make germany great again and how are we

00:29:07.380 going to do this by getting rid of the kind of you know the bad elements we're going to just make it

00:29:11.780 a true Aryan thing, and then we can rise up again

00:29:14.180 and harness our Germanic brilliance

00:29:16.760 and reclaim our rightful place as a preeminent military nation

00:29:21.280 in Central Europe, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:29:24.500 Because it sounds very grandiose,

00:29:27.820 but when we look at the Beer Hall Putsch,

00:29:30.480 I mean, it was a complete failure.

00:29:32.220 Yes, a complete failure.

00:29:33.100 It was a disaster.

00:29:34.080 Yeah.

00:29:34.640 It's badly planned, badly executed.

00:29:37.360 Shots are fired.

00:29:39.500 Hitler gets away with it, he gets arrested.

00:29:40.840 he doesn't get shot but Goering who's by this point one of the leading lights gets shot in the

00:29:45.140 groin very badly nearly dies is rescued by his by his then I don't think they're married at this

00:29:51.020 point by by Karen and ends up recuperating in northern Italy which is where he becomes addicted

00:29:56.920 to morphine Hitler is um sentenced um uh I mean you know he could have had life imprisonment he

00:30:02.940 could have been executed for that um he isn't he's just given a couple of years in Landsberg prison

00:30:07.060 where he writes the first part of Mein Kampf, which is his kind of, you know, his mission,

00:30:12.560 my struggle, my kind of, you know, his vision for the world.

00:30:14.780 And I mean, you know, I don't know if either of you have ever bothered to read it.

00:30:18.540 I mean, I don't recommend it, but it's quite, you don't need to put it this way,

00:30:23.400 you don't need to read it cover to cover, even if you do look at it.

00:30:25.560 But it's interesting, you know, it is an absolute dump of ideas and anger and resentment

00:30:35.660 and so on. And at its core is a vision for the future of how Germany gets out of this,

00:30:44.640 of what Germany needs. And part of the reason why it gets caught in the First World War is because

00:30:48.360 it's too isolated in Central Europe. It hasn't got access to the world's oceans. It's got the

00:30:53.000 Baltic, it's got a little bit of the North Sea, but the Royal Navy is too dominant. What we need

00:30:58.580 is living space, Lebensraum, where we can expand. And we need to expand our own racial identity of

00:31:05.580 Aryans beyond the borders of the existing Germany into the lands of the east where there's going to

00:31:13.300 be this huge struggle but we need to defeat the Jews, we need to defeat the Slavs, we also need

00:31:19.740 to defeat the political concept of communism, Bolshevism and then we've got this terrible

00:31:26.380 struggle that we're going to have to go through and it's going to be a terrible burden for a

00:31:30.380 generation of Germans but afterwards we can have the thousand-year Reich and you know live forever

00:31:34.820 peacefully having created this new order this is where we need to go so it is it is a manifesto

00:31:41.060 but it's a very sort of disturbed one to put it mildly um and then he gets out of out of prison um

00:31:51.620 and and um uh dietrich eckhart is one of the guys who who is one of his um sort of gurus really one

00:32:02.820 one of the people who has a huge influence on him and Eckhart is a is a dissolute and a drunk

00:32:07.460 but he's a man of ideas he's very very bright he's a drunkard um but but he really helps to

00:32:14.740 kind of hone hitler's political manifesto and his and his ideological ideas anti-semitism

00:32:20.780 place of germany in the world that this this constraints this problem that germany has of

00:32:27.400 being in the center of europe where you you can be attacked from all sides you can be attacked

00:32:32.420 from the west, from the north, you know, from the east, from the south.

00:32:37.000 You know, so how do you get around this?

00:32:38.500 And one of the problems with Versailles is those buffer states have been stripped away.

00:32:43.140 You know, we just got those buffer states when we had the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

00:32:47.440 against the Russians because suddenly we had the Baltic states,

00:32:50.380 which rightfully should feel in the sphere of Germany rather than Russia.

00:32:53.820 We got Ukraine, we got Poland, you know, and we had Alsace-Lorraine and the Rhineland.

00:33:00.020 And suddenly that's been taken away. And so we are now kind of bald and exposed and vulnerable once again.

00:33:09.500 And our first job is to get Germany's safety buffers again. And this is why we need Lieber's run.

00:33:15.980 This is why we need these buffer states back again because of our, we're geographically resource poor.

00:33:22.920 You know, Germany doesn't have iron ore. It has coal, but the coal is not of great quality.

00:33:27.980 It doesn't have access to the world's oceans.

00:33:30.460 Its overseas territories were stripped away

00:33:32.180 with the Treaty of Versailles in 1919,

00:33:33.940 so it doesn't even have that anymore.

00:33:35.300 So how are we going to do this?

00:33:36.780 Well, maybe we shouldn't bother with the whole overseas stuff.

00:33:39.760 Maybe we should just sort of push eastwards.

00:33:41.600 That's on, you know, the British Empire has its empire

00:33:44.580 and it has its extra imperial assets in South America

00:33:47.920 and elsewhere around the world.

00:33:49.160 We won't bother with that.

00:33:50.000 What we'll do is we'll spread eastwards

00:33:52.200 and then we'll have the buffer,

00:33:53.480 but then we'll have the living space.

00:33:54.840 We'll have the resources and the space

00:33:57.340 in which we can create a buffer and we can get all the resources we need oil from the Caucasus

00:34:01.300 you know wheat from the Ukraine uh um shipping from the Baltic blah blah blah and so all this

00:34:08.580 just imagine you're Hitler and you're thinking about all this and you're thinking god yeah

00:34:14.140 there's the vision that's how we do it this could be amazing this or this will ensure that we never

00:34:19.940 get ourselves into this terrible situation this invidious situation that we found ourselves

00:34:25.240 in and you can start to convince yourself that this is the only course and that it's a terrible

00:34:32.180 job but this is a dog-eat-dog world and people are going to get killed but but then from thereafter

00:34:38.100 subsequent generations can live peacefully happily together Aryans one and all with this lovely

00:34:43.980 buffer and having all the resources we need it'll be this kind of sort of utopia this Eden

00:34:48.300 where, you know, proper, true Aryan ways

00:34:53.640 of thinking about life can live in peace

00:34:55.740 and families can be happy and kinder can, you know,

00:34:58.580 laugh and cry and grow up with their mooties

00:35:02.380 and their thotties and all the rest of it.

00:35:04.220 You know, I mean, it's total fantasy.

00:35:07.800 But you can see how you can sort of, you can escalate this.

00:35:11.780 And one of the things that Eckhart does

00:35:13.720 is he takes him to Berkesgaden

00:35:16.100 and to the Bavarian Alps near Salzburg right on the Austrian border in south east Bavaria

00:35:22.840 and that is where Hitler falls in love with the Ober Salzburg this this area of hills overlooking

00:35:29.260 Berkus Garden and eventually he buys a house there which becomes the Berghof and from the sales of

00:35:36.240 ultimately I mean I'm jumping the gun here into the 1940s sales of Mein Kampf are such that

00:35:40.320 with the royalties he's able to buy this this this amazing house and completely convert it

00:35:45.700 and turn it into the Berghoff and all the rest of it but but he very much Eckhart and in turn Hitler

00:35:51.260 very much buy into the um the view that that it is um when you're surrounded by nature that you

00:36:00.860 have your greatest thoughts and the beauty of the of the Alps and this is a true German land of

00:36:09.240 of mountains and fresh air and idle vice and you know babbling brooks and mountain springs and

00:36:15.800 wagner playing over the over the top of the you know huntersberg and and so on and so forth

00:36:22.920 and and that is where he has his political awakening and the real no that's where he has

00:36:28.360 his political coalescing and because the second part of mein kampf is written in what's known as

00:36:34.200 is the Kampfhäusel, which is this sort of wooden shack

00:36:38.940 which Hitler rents by on the Obersalzberg in the trees.

00:36:44.840 And you can still see the remains of it in the woods to this day.

00:36:49.780 And he gets up and he walks to a place,

00:36:53.560 this lovely little sort of mountain kind of cafe place

00:36:57.180 where he has hot chocolate and Wintbeutel,

00:37:00.620 which is a sort of pastry dish with berries of the forest with cream and so on and um

00:37:07.500 it's very kind of bavarian so you know think sort of black forest gato but with pastry it sounds

00:37:12.460 rather lovely i would have thought it would chill me out but apparently no no no but this is so he

00:37:16.460 does this literally every day he gets into this routine and then there he goes he has a massively

00:37:22.540 sweet tooth yeah really yeah i mean he's vegetarian doesn't smoke but he's got a very sweet tooth so

00:37:26.700 So he goes there every day and he goes back to the camp house

00:37:29.740 or his little wooden hut and writes this great work.

00:37:32.040 You'd think you'd just write books about nature

00:37:34.160 and do your shitty paintings and just enjoy life.

00:37:37.180 But it's very much part of this.

00:37:38.900 So it's not...

00:37:40.300 But the reason I'm telling you all this,

00:37:41.880 because it's not just about wacko kind of anti-Semitism,

00:37:46.640 anti-Bolshevism.

00:37:48.060 There is a bigger picture here,

00:37:50.180 which is healthy Germans strapping their thighs,

00:37:54.100 you know, wearing Lederhausen, you know,

00:37:55.820 walking over the alps breathing the air you know this is this is what germans should be doing you

00:38:03.080 know and sort of health and happiness you know so what you're saying is he's not all bad right

00:38:09.180 no i'm actually saying he's all bad but he's absolutely saying you know he's bringing

00:38:14.140 it because because if you're going to sell this you've got to sell a vision and the vision is

00:38:21.300 is coalescing in the second half of the 1920s.

00:38:25.600 But meanwhile, the second half of the 1920s

00:38:29.800 are the goldener Zandviger, you know, the golden 20s,

00:38:34.040 because Germany, Weimar Republic, ugh, a democracy,

00:38:38.620 how ghastly, is actually doing really rather well.

00:38:42.140 So therein lies the rub.

00:38:44.140 so he's sort of he's politically neutered after the Beer Hill Putsch and his time in Landsberg

00:38:53.920 so by this time we're talking about 1926, 27, 28 the Nazi party is nothing you know in the

00:39:02.720 elections of 1928 they win 2.6 percent of the vote you know I mean it's it's not quite monster

00:39:09.400 raving loony party kind of levels but it's it's not far off it so he's neutered by the fact that

00:39:14.260 his message is essentially one of doom and despair and therefore the need for recovery while the

00:39:19.280 country is actually doing fine effectively at this point can i just exactly that but but but it gives

00:39:24.220 it because that that isolation no one's interested in nazis no one interested in hitler he's a he's

00:39:28.980 a forgotten man the failed perch spent his time in prison he's on his own in the over salzburg

00:39:35.000 having these sort of great thoughts doing for his vint boitel and his hot chocolate every day

00:39:38.400 you know breathing in the air and dreaming of idol weiss but but he's that is his time to really

00:39:45.600 coalesce from from it's not just i hate jews i hate belsheviks i hate slavs this is where he's

00:39:56.620 applying that to this bigger vision of where germany needs to get to how he can create

00:40:03.500 a Germany that is going to last 1,000 years.

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00:41:23.480 the description. Thank you to Plourde for sponsoring today's episode. Before we go on

00:41:29.060 chronologically, I want to take one detail, which I think is really important, which is to talk about

00:41:33.660 communism and Bolshevism in Europe at this time, because those of us who are not historians like

00:41:39.620 you and who were not taught history very well, which I would put a very much everybody, there's

00:41:44.960 a sort of like, you know, World War One, Treaty of Versailles was not very fair. And then, you know,

00:41:50.460 suddenly the Nazis appear and then we've got the Holocaust. But really, I mean, I think the

00:41:55.840 Bolshevism threat and the threat of communism in Europe at this time, from the perspective of many

00:42:01.240 people who were not on board with it, is actually massive, isn't it? Like, it's a real concern.

00:42:06.500 It is absolutely massive. And you're absolutely right to bring that out and to raise that because

00:42:11.200 Imperial Russia is imperial. And it's part of the Ancien Regime. It's a royal house. It's a royal

00:42:18.540 family and it has its own empire and and you know the network of alliances which causes the first

00:42:24.620 world war mean that russia is interlinked with france and britain their cousins uh um you know

00:42:32.100 they all have the same beards you know they all look pretty much the same and so on and so forth

00:42:36.860 so that so that this interconnection of royal dynasties throughout europe is very very tight

00:42:41.740 and what the first world war does it's so cataclysmic and it's so changing that the

00:42:47.300 answer on regime is very now the the peasants revolt has happened and the point about the

00:42:52.460 peasants revolt in in in england for example of 1381 is that it doesn't work and you know royalty

00:42:58.380 reasserts itself the republic of britain of uh of the 1650s is a brief kind of turn of the wind

00:43:09.080 and before it goes back to back to royalty again france is a republic and that was pretty pretty

00:43:13.960 shocking but let's face it you know napoleon is an emperor and so uh those who follow and it is

00:43:20.840 still france's stuff full of aristocrats even into the kind of 21st into the 20th century and so on

00:43:27.160 and it rules although it is a republic it revolves revolves around the old ways um even though it is

00:43:33.640 democratic and suddenly you've got the proletariat rising and and you know communist farms and and

00:43:42.840 cooperatives and and so on and and you know all the flim flam of royalty and regalias and gold and

00:43:50.840 and the brightness of of of the palace ball and you know you know waltzes and and all the rest of

00:43:59.000 that's all gone in favor of drab kind of working class people all kind of you know working together

00:44:04.760 and all the rest of it but of course so so that's that's where marxism where communism comes into

00:44:10.120 it but but of course what what those who are against communism haven't worked out is that

00:44:16.200 communism is going to take many different forms and and to completely jump the gun one of the

00:44:21.480 reasons why america and the west gets involved in a series of wars after the second world war

00:44:26.520 such as korea or vietnam or whatever is because they're worried about the westward spread of

00:44:33.240 communism but what they don't realize is that mao's communism is not the same as lenin or

00:44:38.440 Stalin's communism and ditto in North Korea and so on and that Ho Chi Minh's communism isn't the

00:44:48.600 same either and communism takes different forms but if you're in the 1920s and you're European

00:44:57.480 what you're seeing is

00:44:59.960 a new political movement which seems to threaten everything that the western world stands for

00:45:10.380 whether it's an ancient royal imperial world or whether it's just the democratic world

00:45:15.620 because communism is not democratic and of course communism as it turns out is every bit as

00:45:22.340 autocratic as a dictatorship it's just got a different kind of to put it more clearly and

00:45:28.240 Well, just one thing I would say is, you know, left and right,

00:45:33.360 we think of it as right here, left here, centrist in the middle.

00:45:37.380 In fact, it isn't. It's the horns of the buffalo.

00:45:40.080 And the extremes are kind of unbelievably close.

00:45:42.940 Exactly. So to put it crudely, if you are in the interwar period in Europe

00:45:47.460 and you're not a communist, what you really fear is the great unwashed

00:45:52.160 overthrowing everything in society.

00:45:54.700 Damn right you do, yeah. Yeah, you do.

00:45:56.360 That's what you're seeing.

00:45:58.240 And you're also saying, if you're from a democracy, you're saying, hang on a minute, we've just given women the vote.

00:46:03.620 We are progressing. We don't want all this threatened by some new movement, which is even worse than the kind of sort of imperialist shower of imperial Russia.

00:46:17.660 You know, the last thing we want is Europe and its democracies

00:46:21.680 and its progression and its modernity being overrun

00:46:24.540 by this totally awful, oppressive, proletariat movement.

00:46:34.880 And so on the communist piece, before we get back to the story,

00:46:38.360 the second thing I want to ask you is something you just pointed out,

00:46:40.800 which is about the horseshoe theory of political convergence.

00:46:44.360 if you told me that there was a party which had the word socialist and workers in it

00:46:49.220 i'd say that's a far left party and when we had the philosopher history steven hicks on the show

00:46:57.380 who we love and we talked about nazism he talked about the fact that if you look at the economic

00:47:02.260 program there's not a jot of difference between that and communism actually in terms of the

00:47:06.960 economic side of it and i now see sometimes people on the internet arguing about whether

00:47:12.220 the Nazis were actually left or right wing,

00:47:14.500 which is a conversation that I think

00:47:16.220 is hard for people to understand.

00:47:18.740 How much of...

00:47:19.800 I just think it's the wrong way to look at it.

00:47:21.640 Sure, but how much of a difference

00:47:23.200 and how much similarity was there

00:47:25.020 between national socialist and communist Bolshevist socialists?

00:47:30.620 Maybe this is the wrong phrase.

00:47:32.000 There is a...

00:47:36.220 The communism that emerges from Lenin

00:47:39.460 In the first part of the 1920s, although there is a communist leadership,

00:47:46.740 it is supposed to be more egalitarian and it is, you know, one rule for all

00:47:53.160 and, you know, everyone wears the same drab uniforms and outfits.

00:47:56.520 Sure, sure.

00:47:58.460 Narcissism never pretends to do that.

00:48:01.380 What... Narcissism always wants elites.

00:48:05.240 So that's... And it doesn't pretend anything else.

00:48:08.760 It wants the German race to be emboldened, empowered.

00:48:15.960 It wants everyone to be wealthy, but then so do capitalists.

00:48:19.580 Capitalists aren't trying to put the working class there.

00:48:22.240 The whole point of 1920s America is that everyone gets rich

00:48:26.520 and has a Ford Model T.

00:48:28.560 So there's no conflict there at all.

00:48:31.600 Communism and Nazism are radically different because of that.

00:48:35.620 And if you look at the Nazis, what the Nazis are doing

00:48:38.580 when they finally do get into power in January 1933

00:48:41.060 is they're tapping into a much earlier imperialist Russia.

00:48:47.140 You know, a lot of the uniforms are very, very similar.

00:48:50.220 There's still an imperial eagle, even though now it's a Nazi eagle.

00:48:53.380 The head is pointing a different way than it was when it was imperial,

00:48:57.180 but it's still an eagle.

00:48:59.020 Why is that?

00:49:00.160 Because what they're doing is they're saying,

00:49:02.280 we can make Germany great again.

00:49:04.080 And, you know, Germany was brilliant because it had Frederick the Electra

00:49:06.320 and it had Frederick the Great and it had, you know,

00:49:08.340 what we did was really good military stuff

00:49:10.880 and we were the top dogs militarily.

00:49:12.820 And we're still a militaristic society and, you know,

00:49:15.520 you can wear uniforms that will make you feel cool and proud

00:49:18.220 like we were in the 17... 1870s under Bismarck

00:49:22.460 and following the Franco-Prussian War

00:49:24.760 and the unification of German peoples and all the rest of it.

00:49:27.720 We can hark back to that again and we can wear lots of leather

00:49:30.320 and look shiny and you can be part of our club and wear cool uniforms.

00:49:34.080 and look at the business and get the fro-light.

00:49:36.000 Come on in the water's warm.

00:49:37.800 That's what it is. That's what it's saying.

00:49:39.380 You do not get that in communist Russia.

00:49:43.080 You don't get that in the Soviet Union.

00:49:45.280 It's not until 1943 that the Soviet...

00:49:49.160 The Red Army reintroduces collar tabs.

00:49:52.720 You know, shoulder tabs.

00:49:54.660 Because that's not proletariat enough to have that.

00:49:59.200 And then they think, oh, fuck it, anyway.

00:50:01.240 They just think sod it.

00:50:03.060 You know, so it is really, really different.

00:50:08.080 And I would be very, very wary about saying that actually they're closer than you think.

00:50:14.620 They are closer so much that the two, the horseshoe, the horns, whatever you want to, the analogy you want to use, are coming towards each other.

00:50:21.500 But they are fundamentally different.

00:50:24.120 That's why they hate Shovel's Guts.

00:50:25.060 But where they are similar, I think, is in that they're offering a gang.

00:50:31.480 they're offering a part of a club you know what you get in in europe is these little pockets of

00:50:37.560 communism like yeah yeah we want to be free we don't want these aristocrats look what they did

00:50:41.000 to us last time you know you know even in democracies whether in france or britain or

00:50:45.480 whatever it's still the ruling classes who got us into war and you know if only the working people

00:50:50.600 could you know stand on their own two feet and then we wouldn't have had a global conflict and

00:50:55.880 why can't everyone just sort of you know be happy together and be equal and share the spoils and all

00:51:00.120 the rest of it i mean i'm a capitalist so i kind of you know i i don't believe that works

00:51:05.560 and you know the history of communism will show that communism in its purest form doesn't work

00:51:09.000 it means it's you know it's a bit like brexiteers you never quite get the perfect brexit you never

00:51:13.720 quite get the perfect communism either because it's you're always striving for this for this

00:51:18.360 utopia which obviously doesn't exist because it can't and you know if you ever want to doubt this

00:51:23.640 Let's just read Animal Farm, you know, by George Orwell.

00:51:28.120 Absolutely.

00:51:28.560 Some people are more equal than others.

00:51:30.520 So it's the golden 20s.

00:51:33.040 Yes.

00:51:33.340 We've got the Weimar Republic.

00:51:35.100 Yeah.

00:51:36.520 Cabaret portrayed so famously, the Kit Kat Club,

00:51:39.280 women with their nipples out.

00:51:40.820 All of that.

00:51:41.420 Gay clubs, everything that Hitler hated, ostensibly.

00:51:45.100 How did we go from the glory days of that

00:51:47.480 to the rise of Nazi German?

00:51:50.380 Well, yeah.

00:51:51.180 Can I just point out something?

00:51:52.380 that you're right in that Germany is the most,

00:51:54.540 or certainly Berlin, is the most liberal city

00:51:56.980 in the planet in the late 1920s.

00:51:59.060 But that view of Weimar is pure Nazi propaganda,

00:52:05.180 which endures to this day.

00:52:07.340 Ah!

00:52:08.200 Yes, there is the Kit Kat Club.

00:52:10.080 You know, yes, there is Salon Kitty and all the rest of it.

00:52:12.840 And, you know, if you want to be gay and take lots of drugs,

00:52:16.140 nowhere better to be in the world in 1929 than Berlin.

00:52:19.900 in. But that is not defining Weimar. Weimar is defined by democratic political processes,

00:52:29.180 by a growing economy and the notion that Germany can rebuild itself and its fortunes by its

00:52:38.100 It's immensely capable and competent technological and industrial output.

00:52:48.160 And so it's growing as a major, major exporter of fine stuff.

00:52:53.940 I mean, German engineers are known the world over as the best.

00:52:57.640 You know, these are the people that create the Myrna Dam and the Ada Dam

00:53:00.360 and these huge works projects before the First World War.

00:53:02.940 You know, these are German scientists are absolutely cutting edge of medical science, of astrophysics, of all sorts of things, of engineering.

00:53:16.220 And leading engineers in Weimar are absolutely household names.

00:53:21.040 You know, it's not football players that people are collecting cards of, cigarette cards of.

00:53:25.260 It's, you know, it's engineers and great men of letters and musicians and artists and so on.

00:53:30.860 So Germany is able to do this through a series of help projects that have really come from the United States above anywhere else.

00:53:41.620 I mean, it is the Doors plan of late 1923, which really kickstarts this, where France and Britain are paying back war loans to the United States.

00:53:54.520 United States, and this is obviously massively simplified,

00:53:57.580 but in its basic form, are then funneling those repayments

00:54:01.060 back to Germany, which is then getting an offer.

00:54:03.800 They create this temporary currency to sort of get rid

00:54:06.740 of the Reichsmark, which is, to get rid of the mark,

00:54:08.980 the Deutsche Mark, rather, which is one that's having

00:54:11.120 hyperinflation.

00:54:12.240 The temporary...

00:54:13.300 Currency?

00:54:16.720 Currency, yes.

00:54:17.420 The temporary currency is stabilising things

00:54:20.440 in conjunction with these loans which are coming in.

00:54:23.520 Then comes the Young Plan at the beginning of 1929, which enables, and this is Owen Young, who is the chairman of General Electric in America, and Charles G. Dawes is a banker from Chicago.

00:54:37.680 And the two of them work together under the auspices of the American government to try and alleviate the problems of America and try and alleviate the harshness of the terms of the Versailles Treaty.

00:54:50.320 So first of all, you have the Doors plan, which is money, a massive injection of cash and helping stabilize the currency.

00:54:57.380 Then you have the Young plan of early part of 1929, which reassesses the repayments and reestablishes.

00:55:05.640 So that instead of paying it, you know, X by X, it's now going to be the final loans we paid in 1988.

00:55:13.320 So it's so far off that you might just actually just forget about it.

00:55:16.380 And basically there's gaps in the loan payments which are sanctioned.

00:55:19.940 And, you know, Germany is able to basically see off the worst

00:55:26.100 of the financial burden of the Treaty of Versailles.

00:55:31.300 And that happens at the beginning of 1929.

00:55:34.140 So by the summer of 1929, Germany's in a really pretty good position.

00:55:40.700 You know, FIMR is flourishing, exports are on the rise to a massive extent.

00:55:45.980 The factories are working. People are employed. It's all really good, which is why the Nazi party is just, you know, absolutely kicked into long grass because it's because all of that anger and resentment and that vision is is meaningless because we're actually we're doing just fine.

00:55:59.860 thanks very much. But that view of a sort of drug-addled, you know, sex-obsessed, kind

00:56:13.540 of ultra-liberal Weimar of Salon Kitty, that is 100% pure Goebbels propaganda.

00:56:22.140 That's good to know, Doug.

00:56:22.760 And it is amazing that it still endures.

00:56:25.620 That's good to know whose podcast you've been listening to, mate.

00:56:28.500 Yeah, exactly.

00:56:29.860 That's what I come on this show to do, James, spread Nazi propaganda.

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00:58:17.760 So, but then you had this amazing time, this golden period in German history,

00:58:24.060 but it all ended rather quickly, didn't it?

00:58:26.740 Yes, it does.

00:58:27.600 Because it didn't take long for Hitler to ascend to power.

00:58:30.860 Well, this goes back to the United States.

00:58:34.020 And America has been getting drunk on illegal hooch in the 1920s,

00:58:39.420 but also drunk on money.

00:58:41.240 It's the wealthiest nation in the world.

00:58:42.920 It's the one nation that emerges out of the First World War

00:58:46.040 in sort of economic fairly stable condition and wealthier than anyone else.

00:58:51.320 It's been supplying, propping up the Western allies with arms and with money

00:58:59.140 and all the rest of it all have been paid back.

00:59:01.380 And then suddenly there is this, as well as having that kind of kickstart into the 1920s

00:59:06.760 in a way that others haven't, which means its exports can be massively increased

00:59:10.820 because everyone else is short of everything, it discovers oil.

00:59:16.040 You know, and oil is suddenly, there's suddenly the oil boom.

00:59:19.680 And oil goes hand in glove with the development of the automobile industry

00:59:23.740 and the development of the assembly line,

00:59:26.900 which, although this happens at Ford's factory,

00:59:30.880 is developed by a guy called Bill Knudsen,

00:59:34.440 who is a first-generation Dane who's come over to the United States in 1900.

00:59:37.980 And he comes up with the concepts of assembly line,

00:59:40.020 this idea that you have one person doing the doors,

00:59:41.640 another person putting it on the fender, another person putting it on the lights.

00:59:43.980 And at the end of it, you've got a Model T.

00:59:45.760 And this means that you can have huge economies of scale

00:59:49.220 onto something which is very much, you know, only for the elites.

00:59:53.120 And suddenly you can make it affordable to the masses.

00:59:55.060 You can make it affordable to the masses because banking is very unregulated in this time.

00:59:58.720 So you just borrow it on the never-never.

01:00:00.500 You know, it's like the guy with the proverbial credit card.

01:00:03.040 He's just absolutely crushing it and then worrying about how he pays it back later.

01:00:08.580 And so this all comes to a head.

01:00:10.240 And, of course, what that means is you've suddenly got this huge expansion in 1920s.

01:00:14.580 You've got a population expansion, but you've also got an expansion of building and construction work

01:00:21.300 because with oil and cars comes construction because some you can travel.

01:00:24.600 So you can then expand your towns and you can build up towns because you can now drive from A to B

01:00:28.920 rather than have to walk with your horse and cart.

01:00:30.840 And that also means you need roads.

01:00:33.020 And then on roads, because you're now going to be going, you know, 150 miles,

01:00:36.300 you need someone to stay overnight.

01:00:37.400 So you develop hotels for motorcars, which are called motels and, you know, so on and so forth.

01:00:43.120 And so suddenly, you know, America's absolutely booming and it's got Hollywood and it's got skyscrapers and it's got everything and it's all absolutely fine.

01:00:49.280 And they, for the first time, if they've really started to curb the amount of immigrants, so there's these quotas per country and they're very, very strict quotas.

01:00:56.980 So, you know, to say you've got fewer Austrians and you have Czechoslovakians, you can't sort of take the Czechoslovakian quota and add it onto the Austrians.

01:01:06.580 it's all very strict and you've also got the first part of tariffs coming on which is one of the

01:01:12.880 reasons why Europe is developing its own automobile industry because that and that's why you haven't

01:01:19.300 got that many Model T forwards in Europe because they're keeping it internally because of tariffs

01:01:23.520 but then comes the Wall Street crash of October end of October 1929 where 810 billion is wiped

01:01:31.260 from the stock exchange in New York in five days and 810 billion is a huge sum now. It's a vast

01:01:37.820 sum in 1929 and it is an absolute catastrophe. And banks are going bust and there's more paper

01:01:48.040 money in America than there is actually gold and so people are just being ruined. Millionaires

01:01:55.260 are becoming impoverished you know paupers just overnight um and it is an absolute catastrophe

01:02:01.660 and it is exacerbated by an existing piece of legislation which is then passed which which

01:02:08.800 had been lined up before the wall street crash so in the summer of 19 spring and summer of 1929

01:02:14.920 um two senators smoot and hawley come up with this idea to be more protectionist and try and

01:02:21.560 impose greater trade tariffs on other nations because they could see that Germany and France

01:02:28.440 particularly France had increased its exports by 50 percent in the last couple of years

01:02:32.580 try and protect itself against that against cheaper labor in Europe and protect Americans

01:02:38.260 that will have this this trade act once the Wall Street crash happens Smoot and Hawley think well

01:02:46.200 let's push ahead with this this this tariff act because that will protect us even more particularly

01:02:50.940 it will protect American farmers and what we can do is we can make sure that that we try and blunt

01:02:59.520 the kind of awfulness of the Wall Street crash by protecting ourselves but of course it's a

01:03:05.060 terrible terrible idea because tariff wars only end up with everyone getting poorer and again

01:03:12.160 human behavior there's patterns of human behavior that prove that this is the case and patterns of

01:03:18.020 the ebbs and flows of financial cycles show that this is the case, regardless of President

01:03:23.760 McKinley and his tariffs in the start of the 20th century. And so it's passed by President

01:03:32.620 Herbert Hoover on the 28th of May 1930, despite the fact that over a thousand economists in the

01:03:39.000 US write to him and say, please, please, please, do not do this. This is what's going to happen

01:03:43.800 if you do it. And he feels compelled, Huber is instinctively against signing it, but feels

01:03:49.000 compelled to do it because it is voted for by the Republicans in Congress. And so it goes into being.

01:03:57.500 And what starts off as a really, really bad knock-on effect for Europe and America with the

01:04:03.980 Wall Street crash becomes a catastrophe as a result of it, because suddenly there's a global

01:04:08.540 trade war and it leads directly to the collapse of the national bank in Vienna and indeed in Berlin

01:04:16.260 and so suddenly Germany which has been doing very nicely thank you very much thanks to the loans

01:04:22.560 it's getting from the United States and to its growing burgeoning export trade is suddenly

01:04:29.700 smashed because the tap of loans for America is cut off inevitably because America can't afford

01:04:36.200 to give them any more and its export market just goes and so what you suddenly get is lots of

01:04:41.900 Germans within a general you know within 10 years from eight years nine years have suddenly already

01:04:48.240 been through this catastrophe once and they don't want to go through it again and what you find in

01:04:54.100 democracies is when the traditional ways or the existing ways of politics seems to be failing the

01:05:02.900 working classes and the middle classes they get unhappy about it and you know this is the truth

01:05:08.780 the truth is is the very rich are usually okay because after all if you've got five million and

01:05:13.660 you lose a million you still got four million you know if you've got 10 billion and you lose

01:05:18.220 two billion you still got eight billion if you're on a salary of today's money you know 500,000

01:05:23.820 bucks and you suddenly get out of a job you've got nothing you know if you're a working class

01:05:28.560 blue-collar worker, and, you know, still works in Pittsburgh, and you get laid off, you've got

01:05:35.140 nothing. So that's the same with Weimar Republic. And this catastrophe, this economic catastrophe,

01:05:43.880 which envelops Germany just at the point where they're kind of emerging quite successfully,

01:05:49.520 the fact that it's been successful makes it doubly worse. And so the president, who by this

01:05:55.900 point is hindenburg is desperately trying to kind of sort it out and has this series of elections

01:06:00.620 and then imposes his own chancellor who's heinrich bruning who's one of the guy who's one of the

01:06:05.780 leading lights behind uh the creation of the different currency in 19 back end of 1923 who's

01:06:12.200 done great works for stabilizing the german economy at the kind of height of it of the

01:06:17.220 awfulness of the early 1920s bruning is an economist comes in takes control and he goes

01:06:23.740 there's only one way we're going to do it we have to tighten our belts we have to impose a whole

01:06:26.960 load of austerity measures and the voting people of germany don't like this because they don't want

01:06:32.880 lower wages they don't want to be out of a job they don't want unemployment they don't want to

01:06:37.340 higher rents they don't want a higher cost of living they were they're very angry about this

01:06:43.260 and so suddenly you have a political void because the existing politics in the democracy isn't

01:06:48.400 working so what are the alternatives well the alternatives into that void are communism or

01:06:54.280 national socialism and the interesting thing is you also have an adolf hitler who tried to gain

01:07:01.140 power through physical force but he also learned his lesson and thought to himself let's go the

01:07:07.860 legitimate route let's go legitimate route and let's let's also try try the modern way let's

01:07:12.760 actually reach as many people as possible let's tap into the into the farmers for example absolutely

01:07:17.580 vital part of the voting public in Germany. Let's tap into the farmers. Let's also use air power

01:07:24.060 to visit and travel around the whole of Germany delivering speeches. And people are mesmerised

01:07:30.360 about it because in the early 1920s, before the Beer Hill push, only a small number of people

01:07:34.040 are hearing him, largely because radio as a means of public address is in its infancy.

01:07:41.900 It's not by 1931, 32, 33.

01:07:45.180 It's much, you know, many more people have radios.

01:07:48.920 And speaking to people, suddenly people go,

01:07:51.380 oh my God, you know, who is this via brand?

01:07:53.800 And of course, he's tapping into the same themes of anger

01:07:58.100 and resentment and disgust that he was doing so

01:08:02.040 in the early 1920s.

01:08:03.820 But where that anger and that cause were dissipated

01:08:07.740 by the golden Zandviger and the golden 20s,

01:08:13.840 suddenly that anger and that disgust and disappointment

01:08:18.020 with the existing status quo has come to the fore again.

01:08:21.500 So suddenly he's got people who are receptive to his more outlandish ways

01:08:26.020 and he's doing the same speeches that he did before,

01:08:28.200 starting with, you know, we were stabbed in the back,

01:08:30.540 we've been shafted, you know, traditional elites can't deliver us.

01:08:33.660 What we need to do is create this new, broader vision,

01:08:36.760 this kind of Germany that's going to, greater Germany,

01:08:39.460 that's going to bring back all the ills of the First World War,

01:08:42.900 you know, the end of the First World War,

01:08:43.980 it's going to make us great again,

01:08:45.020 we're going to be militarily strong,

01:08:46.600 we're going to have Lebensraum,

01:08:48.240 we're going to have this new utopia.

01:08:50.500 And enough people are going,

01:08:52.620 you know, I like the sound of that.

01:08:54.280 You know, it's 33%, it's 32%.

01:08:57.240 It's actually, Nazis go down in the January election

01:09:00.640 and the November election of 1932,

01:09:03.520 compared to the summer election of 1932.

01:09:06.240 um so they're actually losing votes but the political elites in germany think they can

01:09:11.920 manipulate hitler and he was offered the chancellor you know he was the nazis were offered a place

01:09:18.560 in the government in the summer of 1933 but turned it down because hitler said no no no

01:09:22.560 the only way i'm going to be involved in this is if i'm the top dog and so they go okay well you

01:09:26.640 can be the top dog in january 1933 because it's it's him or the communists and none of these

01:09:32.640 politicians want the communists in. That's even worse than the Nazis. And don't worry about him.

01:09:38.640 We'll blunt that particular sword. We'll probably get rid of him in a couple of months and get

01:09:43.000 someone else in. But it doesn't happen because suddenly there's this surge and he gets rid of,

01:09:48.080 he gets with the Enabling Act, gets rid of all political parties, gets rid of democracy in summer

01:09:54.560 of 1933. And that is that. He's no longer the Chancellor. He's the Führer. Before we get to

01:10:00.780 the Fuhrer part, which we're excited

01:10:02.620 about. Not in that way.

01:10:04.620 Kind of.

01:10:05.900 Another quick detour, which is

01:10:07.920 is he selling

01:10:10.740 the racial and

01:10:12.540 extermination message

01:10:14.640 at this point? No, not at all. In 1933...

01:10:17.340 He's doing the racial one, but not

01:10:18.600 extermination. He's not saying we must

01:10:20.840 eliminate the enemies of Germany,

01:10:23.100 the Slavs, the Bolsheviks, the Jews

01:10:24.880 in a physical way. No, he's saying we

01:10:26.540 need to have conquests, we need to get buffer

01:10:28.660 stones, we need to move into... So that is never

01:10:30.560 to be going to involve conflict but but but he's not and and we need to expunge the german state

01:10:36.700 of jews and judaism and all its influences and its culture because it's not the true german way

01:10:42.020 it's not the watske mineshaft you know we got well even though it is part of it um so so we

01:10:47.200 need to change that but he's not no one's thinking in terms of exterminations and cyclone b and you

01:10:54.320 know he hasn't got a postcard of ashwitz behind them saying this is absolutely not no no no no

01:10:58.860 That's not even a sort of, you know,

01:11:00.800 commence on the horizon.

01:11:01.580 Is he thinking it at this point?

01:11:03.340 Do we know?

01:11:04.140 He's not even thinking about it.

01:11:05.960 So by the time he comes to power in 1933,

01:11:10.060 he doesn't have the Holocaust

01:11:12.380 as what he intends to do.

01:11:14.560 No.

01:11:15.160 How are we certain about this?

01:11:17.200 Because he doesn't specify that.

01:11:19.260 He never talks in terms of that.

01:11:20.920 Not in private, not in public.

01:11:22.680 He doesn't in Mein Kampf either.

01:11:24.360 He talks about we've got to get rid of the Jews,

01:11:26.560 but he doesn't say we've got to exterminate them all.

01:11:28.860 You know, he's thinking of, you know, shoving them to Israel or to Madagascar

01:11:31.900 or, you know, just pushing them somewhere else,

01:11:34.340 but just getting them out of Germany.

01:11:37.480 But how you do that is by making them political, you know, cultural pariahs.

01:11:43.300 So you take away the vote, you take away their rights, you take away that.

01:11:47.760 You make it so uncomfortable from the end of here that they'll all go.

01:11:51.680 What about, like, the disabled?

01:11:52.920 So that we don't have to do it.

01:11:53.900 And gypsies and so on.

01:11:55.840 Yeah, the same. That's all tied up into the same thing.

01:11:58.860 And so for a lot of Germans, you know, a lot of Germans sort of go, well, I've never had anything against the Jews, you know, all right, you know, one of my neighbours, one of my best mates is a Jew, all this sort of thing.

01:12:07.240 But, you know, on the other hand, you know, Hitler is promising this.

01:12:10.320 And Hitler is very lucky because he comes into time as a chancellor just at the moment where the economy is just starting to take a dip for the better, a rise for the better.

01:12:20.140 And so he's able to exploit that.

01:12:21.480 And so very quickly, and, you know, he borrows a lot of money.

01:12:25.940 And, you know, this is basically done on IAUs.

01:12:27.540 It's basically the same as selling government bonds.

01:12:30.260 It's the same principle.

01:12:31.540 And so what he's able to do is say, right, I'm going to bring everyone jobs.

01:12:34.680 And he's absolutely implicit that the economy, right from the word go,

01:12:39.720 is going to be directed towards a military economy, right from the word go.

01:12:43.280 There's no doubt about it.

01:12:44.160 He says, you know, our state is at war.

01:12:46.140 We're going to have to go to war.

01:12:47.560 We're not going to do it yet.

01:12:48.460 We're going to build up our strength.

01:12:49.460 We're going to get great again.

01:12:50.260 Then we're going to crush all our enemies.

01:12:51.540 We have to do this because there's no other way of getting back our buffers

01:12:53.840 and our strong position.

01:12:55.140 And we need to make our position in Central Europe much stronger.

01:12:57.540 And everyone's going, well, you know, new jobs, get back all the places that we lost in 1919.

01:13:03.700 You know, what's that like?

01:13:05.020 And how much?

01:13:05.720 And OK, so the whole Jewish thing, you know, I don't quite agree with him on that.

01:13:09.060 But, you know, not everyone's perfect.

01:13:10.880 Right.

01:13:11.180 You can sort of sweep it under the carpet and justify it.

01:13:13.840 And what happens is because he's more and more successful and because visually it's so stunning,

01:13:20.200 because he's so good at manipulating the media and that, you know, he's got Goebbels,

01:13:25.780 Joseph Goebbels, who's head of the Ministry of Propaganda,

01:13:28.720 to help him with this, that this image is relentlessly one of the same.

01:13:36.560 And the message is relentlessly the same.

01:13:39.620 Jews are bad, souls are bad, Germans are brilliant,

01:13:41.780 errands are brilliant, we're the militaristic best in the world,

01:13:45.880 we're fantastic engineers, we can conquer all of Europe,

01:13:49.820 we can be the masters of Europe and indeed the world,

01:13:52.720 we can get this living room, living space,

01:13:55.020 We're going to be the absolute daddy men.

01:13:57.300 We're all going to get rich.

01:13:58.340 There's going to be a thousand years.

01:13:59.100 Right, what's not to like?

01:14:00.560 And, you know, if you've been browbeaten

01:14:03.260 and you've just lost a catastrophic war,

01:14:04.980 then you've recovered only for that to be snatched away from you again.

01:14:08.380 This is quite attractive kind of rhetoric.

01:14:10.740 This is the kind of stuff where you think,

01:14:11.900 yeah, OK, I'll buy into that.

01:14:13.740 And also, there's another thing that I wanted to ask about,

01:14:17.260 which is, obviously, after World War II,

01:14:19.180 we talk about the treaty, the various treaties,

01:14:21.140 but the Treaty of Versailles in particular,

01:14:22.440 the punitive sanctions on Germany, reparations and so on.

01:14:26.420 But isn't one of the things that genuinely happened

01:14:28.500 is a large number of Germans, German-speaking people,

01:14:33.360 ended up outside of the borders of Germany?

01:14:35.760 And this is one of the powerful messages

01:14:37.320 that Hitler sells to the German people,

01:14:40.440 which is, we will be united again.

01:14:43.080 Absolutely, yeah, yeah.

01:14:45.040 Because that was the whole point of 1871,

01:14:47.040 was to unify the German-speaking peoples of the world.

01:14:49.860 And so, yes, absolutely. That's completely it.

01:14:53.060 And you have to remember that Czechoslovakia is a completely new state in 1919.

01:14:58.360 And yes, most Czechoslovakians are quite happy with that,

01:15:00.960 but there are lots of German-speaking people.

01:15:03.740 So, Dayton land is not really... It's not a territory.

01:15:07.320 It's not like Cornwall or Yorkshire or a specific area.

01:15:12.780 It's more a concept than a kind of a place with a kind of clear border and stuff.

01:15:21.280 And, you know, there are huge problems with the Danzig Corridor

01:15:24.900 because Poland hadn't been Poland since 1795.

01:15:29.020 So it's not a brand new country in the same way that Czechoslovakia is.

01:15:33.400 But Czechoslovakia used to be, you know, Bohemia and Moravia and so on.

01:15:38.060 and and and you know western ukraine used to be galicia and lviv used to be lvov used to be

01:15:47.000 lemberg which was part of austria and poland had been divided between austria and russia and

01:15:52.600 and germany or prussia before that before 1871 and so yeah i mean you know they're they're mainly

01:16:00.220 german speaking particularly in the in the in the western half of poland and in the north there is

01:16:05.320 still east prussia which is this enclave of germany east prussia which is then land you know

01:16:12.480 is is separated from the rest of germany by the danzig corridor which is this strip of land where

01:16:18.600 poland goes up to the baltic coast because otherwise poland wouldn't have any coastline

01:16:22.080 and they kind of you know in the planners of 1990 game well that doesn't seem fair it needs to

01:16:25.620 get the access to the sea and all the rest of it but obviously if you're german you kind of think

01:16:29.900 well, no, I don't buy that. I want to get it back.

01:16:33.360 And I think it's entirely understandable

01:16:35.540 why most Germans want to get back Poland

01:16:39.420 because it hasn't been Poland in living memory.

01:16:42.640 It's been German, that part of it,

01:16:44.780 certainly the Western part of Poland.

01:16:47.020 Now, that doesn't mean to say it's the right thing to do

01:16:49.200 and they're entirely justified to go and invade

01:16:51.400 on the 1st of September 1939.

01:16:52.780 They're not at all because it's a different country by that stage.

01:16:56.640 But you can see how there might be a lot of people

01:16:59.220 which are quite sort of sympathetic to that notion.

01:17:02.880 I mean, you know, just to say, I don't know,

01:17:06.760 Cornwall became part of Ireland or something.

01:17:09.260 There'd be lots of people in England who'd say,

01:17:10.500 well, no, you can't have that.

01:17:11.740 I want to get it back again, you know.

01:17:13.740 So it's a similar sort of thing.

01:17:15.360 So I think one has to kind of, from that perspective,

01:17:20.200 you have to kind of sort of park your one's disgust at Nazism

01:17:24.820 and all that it stands for and say,

01:17:27.360 it's no good just sort of

01:17:29.280 going hit it was awful and it was terrible

01:17:31.220 you have to understand why it happened

01:17:33.220 so the rise of the Nazis come

01:17:35.260 into being because of the Versailles Treaty

01:17:36.920 because of the terrible trauma of

01:17:39.320 the end of the First World War

01:17:40.660 they come into power because of the Wall Street crash

01:17:42.980 and the Smoot-Hawley Tower effect

01:17:44.200 it's Americans

01:17:46.280 that happens in 1933

01:17:49.640 he launches

01:17:51.220 World War II in 1939

01:17:53.640 that's a crucial

01:17:55.860 six-year period in which it seems to me a hell of a lot of happens within germany but also within

01:18:00.260 hitler's mind as well take us through that period of time well yeah so so for him it's this is this

01:18:05.460 is um sort of ground zero for the start again to to read to rebuild germany as a modern militaristic

01:18:12.180 state the problem he's got is is to a large extent it's a massive sham because they don't have

01:18:19.540 the resources still you know they don't have access to the world's oceans the moment they go to war

01:18:24.420 with you know if they get a war there and they end up in war with britain there'll be an economic

01:18:28.740 blockade so one of the big things that hitler has to avoid is going to war with britain because

01:18:32.980 britain has the world's largest navy by a comfortable margin and the world's largest merchant fleet

01:18:37.780 the last thing they want to do is be cut off from global supplies until he's done what he needs to

01:18:42.740 do which is get into the east and all the rest of it what he does is he's he clandestinely starts

01:18:48.180 building up the air force again and the army and um uh and a navy but but it but it's sort of

01:18:57.220 slowly but surely and then he announces to the he starts testing the water you know he's an answer

01:19:01.940 to all the the existence of luftwaffen knowing that no one in the west is you know the old

01:19:06.340 peacemakers of 1919 they haven't got the stomach for it anymore even though it's an open violation

01:19:10.900 of the treaty of versa they're not going to do it and britain goes well okay well let's do a naval

01:19:16.180 treaty with berlin will restrict their naval power and that will sort of get and germany sort

01:19:20.740 of goes okay fine because they're never going to get a navy that's going to compete with the royal

01:19:25.140 navy and if they've got a naval treaty that sort of suggests that they've got a a sort of quasi

01:19:30.420 form of alliance which is going to you know that means that the britain's sort of more kind of

01:19:34.340 simpatico kind of you know they might not need to you know they're not antagonizing britain into

01:19:38.660 kind of taking sides in any future conflict and then of course they re um they move into the

01:19:45.060 rhineland which is the sort of you know old traditional uh part of their land which has

01:19:50.660 been occupied by the french since the early 1920s and not a shot has been fired the french just go

01:19:55.940 okay fine and bug out and then you know you go into go into austria and take and unite with the

01:20:03.220 angelus and so that happens and then you go into the dayton land and not a shot has been fired you

01:20:09.780 you know this is by the autumn of 1938 so suddenly you've got marching bands and you've got swastikas

01:20:16.480 everywhere and everyone's in uniform and you've got tanks and you've got the Luftwaffe flying over

01:20:20.840 and you're hosting the olympics in 1936 and everything's looking shiny and colorful and bright

01:20:27.680 and the furor seems to do no wrong because everyone's got jobs and there's autobands and

01:20:33.840 And there's, you know, they've rekindled their pride and their chests are out and they're wearing snappy uniforms.

01:20:40.460 And this actually all seems pretty cool, doesn't it?

01:20:43.000 And, you know, we've taken back some of the wrongs of, we've righted the wrongs of Versailles without a shot being fired.

01:20:49.740 Again, you know, there's not much to dislike about all this.

01:20:53.780 The problem is, is that he goes too far too quickly because he's a narcissist.

01:21:03.840 because because he's a megalomaniac and everyone's telling him oh you know my furor you know you're

01:21:10.720 so wonderful you're so marvelous and he starts to believe it and for someone who's been like that

01:21:15.520 before 1914 and he's emerged out of the second world war blind and broken and beaten right i've

01:21:23.280 shown you bastards and he's just lapping it up you know he's absolutely loving it and everyone's

01:21:30.000 telling him how marvelous he is and he thinks right you know this is the time you know and he

01:21:34.820 sees the purges that are going on in the soviet union 1937 1938 where they've got rid of 22 and

01:21:40.420 a half thousand officers in the red arm and he thinks now's the time i need to push it i need

01:21:46.640 to push on with this i need to get poland i need to get the danzig corridor back you know i need

01:21:51.460 to i need to need to strike while the iron's hot and i know i said originally we weren't going to

01:21:55.840 go to war till kind of 1944 but you know it's not it and okay so our navy's not fine but British

01:22:01.400 aren't going to get a war over Poland why would they they didn't get a war over Czechoslovakia

01:22:05.120 why would they get a war over Poland it's not their fight they don't care and of course what

01:22:09.200 he's doing is he's doing the classic thing which autocrats and dictators do which is viewing the

01:22:15.960 war as you want it to be which is your own narrow world view rather than going hang on a minute I

01:22:22.600 need to put myself in the shoes of my potential enemies and potential people that might disagree

01:22:27.160 with me he doesn't do that and so he hustles into war in september 1939 much quicker than germany is

01:22:35.880 ready for it's just not ready and and and the the truth is for all the chinese swastikas for all the

01:22:43.940 the glitz and glamour of the olympic stadium for all the lever and shiny boots and goose stepping

01:22:51.400 and, you know, Leni Riesenthal films

01:22:54.700 and Triumph of the Will and Nuremberg rallies,

01:22:57.860 it is built on the absolute flimsiest of foundations

01:23:01.540 because it has to be because Germany was kind of broke and busted

01:23:06.200 in the end of 1932 and you can't recover that quickly

01:23:09.540 and you certainly can't recover on the foundations of the Nazi state

01:23:12.220 which are fundamentally flawed and corrupt.

01:23:15.660 But for the first couple of years at least,

01:23:18.780 I mean, he seemed to be smashing it, didn't he?

01:23:22.060 Well, he does, but it's kind of, you know,

01:23:24.620 it's 50% Germans doing well and 50% everyone else

01:23:28.620 cocking it all up, to be perfectly honest.

01:23:30.880 And one of the things where the Germans are able

01:23:33.220 to really take advantage is in their communications.

01:23:37.100 So one of the lessons of the First World War is

01:23:40.140 when you exploit a breakthrough,

01:23:45.800 you need to be able to exploit it to the full.

01:23:47.740 and one of the problems with march 1918 and previous uh breakthroughs that they had along

01:23:53.960 the western front is that they're not able to do that expectation exploitation and the reason is

01:23:58.280 because they can't communicate with their troops quick enough so you suddenly had this breakthrough

01:24:02.040 but you're dependent on runners coming back and then you know he gets knocked over by a shell

01:24:06.240 and so you then have to send another one by the time it reaches people you need to do it's kind

01:24:11.940 of nine o'clock at night and he left at six that morning and then you've got to disseminate that

01:24:17.040 through all your troops and then they've got to move them up and it all just takes too long

01:24:21.680 but what the germans have realized in the 1920s is that we've got to send out this single message

01:24:28.260 and this single message is you know the nazi message of you know we can be great again we

01:24:32.700 hate jews we hate bolsheviks we hate slavs and and you know we are the rightful inheritors of

01:24:37.740 europe blah blah blah blah the arian master race etc etc and how do they do this they do this by

01:24:43.760 swamping the radio network this new technology of radio broadcast and they do that by making

01:24:51.280 them cheap so first of all you get the deutsche fanger which is a german radio and then you get

01:24:56.620 the deutsche kleiner fanger which is a german little radio and the german little radio is

01:24:59.940 is bakelite it's not walnut veneer it's not wood it's not aspirational it's it's it's as universal

01:25:08.000 as the model t ford is to americans in the 1920s and it's about nine inches by four inches by four

01:25:13.260 inches and everyone can have one and even if you can't have one don't worry about that because in

01:25:17.820 apartment blocks and the stairwells we'll have speakers with this stuff blurring out we'll put

01:25:21.720 it in squares we'll put it in restaurants and bars and it's the same old stuff it's partly

01:25:27.320 Hitler ranting and raving with halitosis and spittle it's it's light music it's comedy shows

01:25:33.700 um you know it's it's it's all sorts of stuff but it is fundamentally the same message

01:25:39.120 we Aryans we true Germans are the greatest we're the best you know Hitler our Fuhrer is a demigod

01:25:46.600 blah blah blah it's the same message fundamental same message and and this is because Goebbels

01:25:50.680 recognizes that the best propaganda is one that you just repeat you just say the same thing over

01:25:55.460 and over and over again and people start to believe it's the same conspiracy theory of course

01:25:58.860 you know enough people gets enough people talking about it on x or on Instagram or TikTok or

01:26:04.120 everyone starts to believe it and it's the same principle but what the wehrmacht do the german

01:26:09.480 armed forces is this only thing hang on a minute we've got radios and they're really cheap and

01:26:14.760 hang on a minute we can put them in our panzers and our tanks and we can put them in our trucks

01:26:19.000 we can even put them in our our other groovy motorbikes with sidecars our reconnaissance

01:26:24.760 troops and everyone can we communicate and here's an idea you can have a new formation called a

01:26:30.920 panzer division and a panzer division is not a 15 000 strong unit of troops all beetling around in

01:26:39.700 panzers tanks it is an all arms combined arms motorized unit of motorized infantry of motorized

01:26:49.160 artillery of anti-tank artillery of field artillery you know how it says it can lob at long distance

01:26:53.840 of anti-aircraft artillery of reconnaissance troops of engineers and of course people in

01:26:59.560 tanks panzers that's the panzer division and the great thing is is they can you know our firepower

01:27:05.540 can blast our way through and then the infantry can move forward and cross over the river with

01:27:09.540 the help of the engineers and they can all be communicating like billy o because they've all

01:27:13.000 got radios and then once we've got the bridge over then we can pour over our our panzers and

01:27:17.420 our motorized anti-tank guns and so when the enemy turn up we can blast them to hell and then we can

01:27:22.060 push on foot forward what a great wheeze and that's how they win the blitzkrieg and the weird

01:27:27.700 thing is it's basically exactly the same way that the germans have always fought and actually it's

01:27:33.440 not called blitzkrieg it's called beweganskrieg and this is this idea that you absolutely hammer

01:27:38.440 the point of impact the schwerpunkt and you create a kessel schlacht which is a cauldron war

01:27:43.480 so you envelop your enemy in a massive great sweep and you do it by by off balancing your

01:27:49.500 enemy by being quicker and faster than them and they try to they've always done this is exactly

01:27:54.360 what frederick the elector did it is exactly what frederick the great would always do it and they

01:27:57.620 would always do this because germany knew that it fundamentally it's at the heart of europe it

01:28:03.080 doesn't have lots of resources if you're going to win a war you've got to do it quickly and so you

01:28:08.180 need to work out how you can defeat your enemies very fast and so the operational art that that

01:28:16.200 ability to maneuver swiftly and in an envelopment of kesselschlacht of this this cauldron war this

01:28:23.040 encirclement is key to the whole thing and it's what they've always been doing and it's what they

01:28:27.560 do in 1864 against Denmark it's what they do in 1866 against Austria it's what they do in 1870

01:28:34.000 against France it's what they try and do in 1914 but it doesn't work and it's what they do again

01:28:40.900 in 1940 both in in Scandinavia but in Poland it's Poland doesn't quite count in the same way

01:28:47.120 because they're trying a lot of their things and they're not very good at it actually it's just

01:28:50.980 that they're much, much better than the Poles who are, you know, militarily quite weak.

01:28:54.780 Well, and they have help from the Soviets, don't forget.

01:28:56.720 And they have the Soviets coming in from the east,

01:28:58.900 which means that the Polish are sort of very much the meat

01:29:02.140 in a kind of massive military sandwich between the Nazis and the Red Army.

01:29:07.900 But what they do in 1940, the big one, the daddy, which is case yellow,

01:29:12.540 the invasion of the low countries in France, is they do a Kesselschlacht.

01:29:15.840 You know, they attack with Army Group B, a group of armies coming through the north,

01:29:20.820 into the low countries of Holland and Belgium,

01:29:23.140 and then round the back door through the Ardennes,

01:29:25.340 the wooded, hilly, river-strewn back door of the Ardennes,

01:29:30.920 they come with Army Group A,

01:29:32.400 and that's where most of their mobile forces are,

01:29:34.760 their panzer forces.

01:29:36.320 I mean, so they can bring to bear 135 divisions to Case Yellow,

01:29:40.120 the invasion of the Blitzkrieg in the West.

01:29:42.320 And a division is the unit by which we judge the scale of armies

01:29:45.280 in the Second World War, and if you think 15,000 men for a division,

01:29:48.900 you're not far off, it's some a bit more,

01:29:50.160 some a bit because a lot of them are substantially less but as a rule of thumb then that's kind of

01:29:54.960 roughly where you're thinking and out of that they only have 10 um panzer divisions and seven

01:30:01.400 further motorized divisions out of 135 and it is those 17 divisions which are doing 80 percent of

01:30:07.920 the work and they're able to succeed because they're able to communicate so the big breakthrough

01:30:14.060 happens on the river merz they come through sweep through the belgian ardennes they merge out of

01:30:19.980 this as this sort of big wooded area they merge out of that storm down to the town of sedan

01:30:26.460 where they cross in exactly the same point that they cross in 1870 and where they cross in 1914

01:30:34.480 it is amazing and the french defenses there are really poor so on the other side of the river

01:30:40.140 where they've had there's no mines because the mines have been laid originally at the beginning

01:30:43.940 of the war and they've gone a bit moldy and a bit rusty and they need to be checked and they haven't

01:30:47.180 been relayed there's no machine guns there are bunkers and stuff but they're not at the actual

01:30:51.860 crossing point where they come across and the french aren't very well trained they're very

01:30:55.980 well trained at kind of building bunkers but not very well trained at defending against the enemy

01:30:59.520 and france doesn't do radios they do old school stuff they do hold the ground hold the enemy by

01:31:07.420 kind of weight of fire wait for the reinforcements to come up then do the counter punch but everything

01:31:13.060 happens at a snail's pace compared to what the germans are doing and that's how they're able to

01:31:17.700 win and the germans are able to win in 1940 they're able to do it by defeating the french in penny

01:31:22.340 packets rather than as a mass and so that's how they're able to win and then you know subsequent

01:31:27.700 battles that they're fighting you know against the balkans and yugoslavia and greece and stuff

01:31:31.620 i mean it's just not comparable you know that you're talking about a a military nation which

01:31:36.900 is just better trained it's a better equipped than the greeks or yugoslavs could ever hope to be

01:31:41.400 And so they win.

01:31:43.100 But then comes the invasion of the Soviet Union,

01:31:45.520 and they've completely been hoisted by their own petard,

01:31:48.140 because they start to believe their own military genius,

01:31:50.300 and Hitler believes his own military genius,

01:31:52.880 and everyone tells him he's genius.

01:31:53.920 And all those aristocratic military elites

01:31:57.960 that are in the German army, particularly,

01:32:00.900 who had been very sceptical about these panzer mobile warfare thrusts

01:32:07.460 that were going to be carried out through the Ardennes in 1940,

01:32:10.580 have now completely come over to the other side.

01:32:13.140 We were wrong, Hitler was right, he was the genius,

01:32:15.820 he got it right, we got it wrong.

01:32:17.460 And so they're so enthralled to this

01:32:19.620 that they stop checking themselves and going,

01:32:22.160 hang on a minute, how are we actually going to do this?

01:32:25.540 And have we got the logistics to support

01:32:27.420 such an enormous invasion along a 1,200-mile front?

01:32:31.840 And the answer is no, they haven't,

01:32:33.160 and they haven't fought it through properly,

01:32:34.440 and so they get defeated.

01:32:36.220 And that's the end of it.

01:32:38.080 Got a long story short.

01:32:39.120 A very long story, very short.

01:32:41.660 But it's also, as well, the involvement of the Americans.

01:32:45.180 I mean, how much did Hitler and Nazi Germany have to do with the bombing of Pearl Harbor?

01:32:51.320 Because you look back at that and you go, if there's one country in the world that you didn't want to piss off,

01:32:57.720 it's, as my family would say, the gringos.

01:33:00.140 Yeah, yeah, it's almost none at all. It's more to do with the Soviet Union.

01:33:03.100 So the Soviet Union is traditional enemies of Japan,

01:33:08.020 and they've been fighting each other for kind of 35 years.

01:33:11.340 And the border disputes up in Manchuria,

01:33:13.580 ever since Japan invades Manchuria in 1931, Manchukuo,

01:33:18.580 there's been these border disputes, and they've been fighting each other.

01:33:21.900 And a reasonable-sized proportion of the Red Army

01:33:24.500 is on the Japanese-Chinese border, and they're fighting each other.

01:33:29.400 And Stalin, very shrewdly in the spring of 1941,

01:33:32.600 does a deal with the Japanese where they've got a neutrality pact

01:33:37.720 in place for five years, and he goes, you know,

01:33:40.920 I think what you should do is just head south.

01:33:43.100 That's where you want to be.

01:33:44.300 If you're not getting what you want here, don't look to the north.

01:33:46.960 Go south.

01:33:48.160 So he's egging him on, and there's negotiations going on

01:33:52.060 between the Japanese and the Americans throughout 1940 and 1941

01:33:55.720 about Japan's imperial ambitions,

01:34:02.040 about what it can do about america trying to kind of withhold that and draw back from that

01:34:07.580 and say to the japanese no you can't just go in and kind of take what you want and you know you've

01:34:13.260 made your bed and you can't just kind of conquer the whole of china and and all the rest of it and

01:34:17.700 imposing sanctions and sanctions rather than driving uh japan to the negotiation table actually

01:34:24.800 drives japan to war so it's really it's more stalin and the japanese themselves which are

01:34:32.300 driving it driving themselves to into conflict with the united states because the moment the

01:34:38.980 americans get involved i mean that is end game really well yeah although i mean don't discount

01:34:47.140 the huge impact that britain has because the reason why germany goes into soviet union in june 1941

01:34:53.280 is because it hasn't won the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940.

01:34:57.460 I mean, the Luftwaffe's attack is a catastrophe for Germany

01:35:01.760 because suddenly they've still got Britain in the fight

01:35:05.940 and Britain's got the world's largest navy

01:35:07.880 and it's got the world's largest merchant fleet.

01:35:09.500 And paradoxically, the loss of Europe in one level helps Britain

01:35:15.900 because many of the merchant fleets of the mercantile nations,

01:35:20.460 the Dutch, the Norwegians, and so on, comes over to Britain.

01:35:25.960 So suddenly, where Britain has 33% of the world's merchant fleet

01:35:29.720 in September 1939, by July 1940,

01:35:34.420 it's got access to 80%, 85% of the world's merchant shipping.

01:35:38.040 Wow.

01:35:39.180 And that's kind of useful in a global war.

01:35:43.380 Hitler knows, and all his generals know,

01:35:45.720 that they can't afford to fight a long, protracted war

01:35:48.660 because Germany never has been able to do that

01:35:50.320 because it doesn't have the resources and even less now in the 1940s does it have access to the

01:35:55.340 world's oceans so what are you going to do you're going to take it from the eastern barriers but the

01:36:01.280 problem is all these conquests they've had in 1940 they're like being like kids in a sweet shop and

01:36:06.180 they they've blown it all and so you know for example you know you look at france france is

01:36:10.800 one of the most industrialized nations in the in the planet in 1939 even though it's had these

01:36:16.480 or terrible political upheavals in the 1930s and gone through 19 different changes of prime

01:36:21.080 minister i mean you think britain's bad i mean look at the 1930s uh you know but but it is still

01:36:26.380 an industrial powerhouse and it is the most automotive society in europe in 1939 for example

01:36:36.820 there are eight motorized vehicles for um there are eight people for every motorized vehicle in

01:36:41.380 France. Whereas I think it was 47 in Germany and 106 in fascist Italy, for example.

01:36:47.320 Well, it's three in America. Probably no surprise. But, you know, so it is very industrialised,

01:36:51.860 very motorised. By the 31st of December 1940, France has 8% of the vehicles it had

01:37:00.260 on the 1st of January 1940. So 92% of its motorised vehicles have gone. And where's

01:37:06.540 it gone been half inched by the germans or production stopped you know so it's all very

01:37:14.220 well going oh that's great you know we're germans now we've gone into france and we can overtake

01:37:17.780 their industry but you've got to let the industrial workers work in that industry but if you take away

01:37:22.360 all their cars and they can't get to work anymore and if you half inch all their you know if you

01:37:25.840 steal all their coal then the power stations don't work and their industry doesn't work and so on and

01:37:31.040 so forth and there's no better work in the mines and so everything just grinds to a halt so suddenly

01:37:36.520 Germany's got the problem of having to administer and look after France

01:37:40.400 and keep its Atlantic coastline.

01:37:43.120 That requires manpower, but it hasn't got that much manpower.

01:37:47.560 And because they've stolen everything, and because these countries

01:37:50.860 where they've now invaded and now occupied are no longer functioning

01:37:54.260 in the way that they were, they're no longer functioning very efficiently,

01:37:57.960 they're running out of everything.

01:37:59.800 So even though they've become victorious and they've had these huge sweeping successes,

01:38:04.420 It's masking the fundamental flaws of the Nazi state in the 1930s,

01:38:08.280 which is it's built on these incredibly thin foundations,

01:38:11.060 and they haven't got anything.

01:38:12.340 You know, there's rationing in Germany in the summer of 1939

01:38:14.800 because they're really short of food.

01:38:16.920 And one of the reasons they're really short of food

01:38:18.280 is because agriculture is really inefficient.

01:38:21.340 And one of the reasons it's really inefficient

01:38:22.860 is because they don't have very, very motorised vehicles.

01:38:25.240 And the reason they don't have many motorised vehicles

01:38:26.940 is because in the 1920s, when everyone's becoming motorised,

01:38:30.880 they've got wheelbarrows for money and they're impoverished.

01:38:32.940 so they're playing catch-up and what that means is by 1939 yes you've got mercedes-benz and audi

01:38:38.980 and hawk and you know and so on and so forth and bmws but they're the elites and and that means

01:38:45.680 you haven't got many factories making cars or ships or whatever because their industry's been

01:38:51.680 run down you're playing catch-up and that means you haven't got many people buying cars which

01:38:56.580 means you haven't got many garages maintaining those cars which means you haven't got much

01:39:00.400 fuel and oil and you don't have that many people who know how to drive so suddenly when you want

01:39:06.480 to kind of expand that you can't just put your fingers and suddenly being super mechanized

01:39:10.320 you know there's the you know the german army uses two and a half million horses in

01:39:13.940 the second world war and only one and a half million horses in the first world war

01:39:17.200 you know most of their their their military units are not mechanized we always talk about

01:39:23.320 the nazi war machine but the point is they're actually it's not much of a machine that's the

01:39:27.620 And that's the whole point. They want it to be, but it isn't.

01:39:29.620 And so that's the problem. So it's smoke and mirrors.

01:39:33.620 They're conveying the impression of screaming Stuka dive bombers

01:39:37.620 and panzers and all the rest of it. But actually, it's bullshit.

01:39:42.620 The bark of the army is not like that.

01:39:44.620 And it's interesting you make the point about the Battle of Britain

01:39:47.620 because I think most people think of the Battle of Britain

01:39:49.620 as being really important for Britain, obviously.

01:39:52.620 But your point is... It's really Britain for the world.

01:39:54.620 Quite, because what you're saying is Operation Sea Lion,

01:39:58.360 the Nazis want to invade Britain.

01:40:00.540 Yeah, which is never going to happen in a million years.

01:40:02.080 Well, they've got to destroy the British, the Royal Air Force.

01:40:05.280 Well, yeah, then they've got to destroy the Royal Navy,

01:40:06.980 which is the world's largest.

01:40:07.980 Then they've actually got to get across when they haven't got any landing craft.

01:40:10.800 And they've never really thought about that.

01:40:12.080 And they've never done an amphibious operation in their lives before ever.

01:40:15.580 And they don't have the equipment for it.

01:40:17.160 And they're not set up for it.

01:40:18.660 And they've never planned for it.

01:40:20.460 And you can't just do that again in a couple of months.

01:40:22.640 It takes, you know, June to September, which is when Operation Sea Lion is sort of penciled in for.

01:40:30.120 I mean, that is just nothing for the scale of the operation.

01:40:33.520 And, you know, it literally has not a chance in hell.

01:40:37.460 And they've never, ever come up against a coordinated air defence system before.

01:40:41.640 So they've got a massive problem on their hands.

01:40:44.920 So very quickly, even Hitler, who's a numpty, realises that this isn't going to happen.

01:40:50.480 So what am I going to do?

01:40:52.220 I've gone into this situation, I've gone into war, my bluff has been called, Britain and France have entered it, I've got rid of France, I've got rid of everything else, but the pantry is already half bare by late summer of 1940, I'm running out of everything, this sort of smoke and mirrors show of kind of military grandioseness is kind of going to get called out if I'm not careful, if I'm not careful.

01:41:17.060 I know the Red Army is a bit rubbish because it's just gone to war with Finland and got humiliated.

01:41:23.120 And I know they've had the purges in 1937, 1938.

01:41:25.840 So this is the time they're weakest.

01:41:28.200 You know, we've just overrun France.

01:41:30.140 Let's go into the kind of, you know, inferior Soviet Union with its lack of infrastructure and its backwardness.

01:41:36.040 How hard can it be?

01:41:37.420 But, you know, what they're doing is they're taking the wrong lessons.

01:41:39.520 The reason why they're able to win in France is because there are petrol stations in France.

01:41:43.260 So when their panzer runs out of fuel, they can go into a petrol station and go, you know, fill her up, you know, Jean Hilaire, and the petrol is there.

01:41:52.520 That isn't the case in Soviet Union, which is infrastructurally extremely threadbare and operates at a different railway loading gauge, for starters, and there aren't many roads and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:42:07.580 And so they come up with this madcap idea that, oh, my God, you know, what we'll do?

01:42:12.060 We'll park Britain for the moment.

01:42:14.780 What we'll do is we'll go into the Soviet Union.

01:42:16.600 We'll get all the goodies we need and riches we need.

01:42:18.760 Then we can come back and confront Britain with America hovering in the background.

01:42:23.540 But it's bonkers.

01:42:25.280 I mean, it is so la la land.

01:42:28.440 And the problem is, is the lessons are already there.

01:42:32.420 the hubris behind the decision-making, the kind of lack of...

01:42:36.960 You know, what they're not doing in their planning is they're going,

01:42:38.780 well, we're really great, so we can do this and we'll do this

01:42:40.800 and it's going to be fine.

01:42:41.500 You know, as long as we can get our airfields up there,

01:42:43.320 then we'll do this, we'll destroy the RAF, it'll be fine.

01:42:45.120 What they're not doing is going, hang on a minute,

01:42:47.920 what's the enemy going to do?

01:42:49.900 And how does this work?

01:42:51.360 Right.

01:42:51.660 And so the intelligence picture on the RAF in the summer of 1940

01:42:55.460 is terrible.

01:42:56.800 I mean, they just get it completely wrong.

01:42:59.040 And so they're really shocked when they don't have

01:43:02.160 the same walkover that they do against Poland, against Scandinavia, against Holland, the low

01:43:06.940 countries in France that don't have air defence systems. And the air defence system means that

01:43:12.340 you can see when your enemy is coming. You can make sure that your aircraft aren't on the ground

01:43:16.740 when they come over to that airfield in Biggin Hill or wherever it might be. And they can be

01:43:21.360 airborne. And not only that, you can control them and attack the Luftwaffe when they come over on

01:43:27.580 your terms rather on their terms but that hasn't been the case in aerial conflict in aerial warfare

01:43:33.500 up to that point in the second world war so the germans just go and go well you know slam dunk

01:43:38.360 it's just easy we'll go over we'll go and destroy them all on the ground then we'll run in and we'll

01:43:41.600 drop some paratroopers and all the rest of it and you know jobs job done and it's just they have this

01:43:46.120 terrible shock and it's the same when they go into the soviet union they think it's going to be easy

01:43:51.680 peasy and it isn't because it's vast and they've completely underestimated the the strength of the

01:43:58.920 Soviet Union and they they can see from their own intelligence picture the bulk of the Red Army is

01:44:04.160 is along the western border and that's largely because Stalin is thinking of invading into

01:44:10.180 Europe into Romania and Bulgaria from the southwest anyway so that's why they're all there ready for

01:44:15.620 their own attack which is probably going to attack which is going to begin on the 25th of July might

01:44:20.940 not but that's what they're kind of working towards so they're all mass so it feels like a

01:44:24.680 really easy victory because there they all are there's lots of aircraft and new airfields that

01:44:28.400 the russians have built you know on the border and so it's so it's so it's easy so again they

01:44:33.860 kind of think that they've they've got this easy victory but then suddenly there's a whole new

01:44:38.760 wave of new divisions and new armies which are appearing and the vast mass of military superiority

01:44:45.580 in terms of numbers that suddenly appears on the battlefield

01:44:49.020 slows the Germans down, which is compounded by the fact

01:44:53.540 that they're now operating 500, 750 kilometres

01:44:56.760 from their start place and from their railheads

01:44:59.620 and from where their supply chain's starting.

01:45:02.940 And they can't do it. They just can't maintain it.

01:45:05.960 They have also reached their culmination point

01:45:08.040 where they can no longer operate at the level they want to operate

01:45:11.280 because their supply chains are so long.

01:45:13.360 So, you know, if you've got if you're 500 miles or 500 kilometers from your from your start line to your front panzer troops, that's a thousand miles because you've got to go there.

01:45:24.300 Then you've got to go back again and you've got to extend the railway line.

01:45:28.680 You've got to change the loading gauge all the time.

01:45:30.820 Now, you can do that at a rate of about 20 kilometers a day.

01:45:35.340 You're talking about 750 kilometers.

01:45:38.260 James, I want to talk about Hitler's state of mind, because up until this point, I imagine

01:45:45.080 putting myself in his positions as one ought to do, he's crushing it. He's absolutely crushed.

01:45:51.440 He was, like you said, under the thumb, failure, went from struggle to struggle. Then he goes into

01:45:57.040 World War One. You know, he's finally got this, you know, comradeship and a sense of purpose,

01:46:02.800 but he gets blind, he comes out, things are bad,

01:46:05.940 he builds this thing up, and now he's the Fuhrer.

01:46:09.100 Now he's...

01:46:10.020 He's a demigod.

01:46:11.020 He's a demigod.

01:46:12.060 Maybe just God.

01:46:12.640 They have Fuhrer weather in Germany.

01:46:13.800 Yeah.

01:46:14.400 You know, when it's sunny, it's Fuhrer weather.

01:46:15.740 Exactly.

01:46:16.240 You know, he can do no wrong.

01:46:17.220 And it's always Fuhrer weather,

01:46:18.420 because no matter what he does, everything is going great.

01:46:20.780 Yeah.

01:46:21.580 And then there's the first moment of doubt.

01:46:24.680 Is it doubt?

01:46:25.540 After the Battle of Berlin?

01:46:26.400 Well, I think the greatest moment for him

01:46:27.700 is the beginning of July, when he returns to Berlin.

01:46:31.040 and there's this huge sort of, you know, triumph and, you know,

01:46:35.220 quarter of a million people out in the streets, there's swastikas everywhere.

01:46:38.040 He's in his fancy six-wheel Mercedes doing all this kind of stuff.

01:46:41.440 And, you know, everyone's cheering and it feels like the war is over.

01:46:46.460 You know, he's won. He's won against the odds.

01:46:47.900 No one can believe this victory, the scale of the victory.

01:46:50.980 This is a strategic earthquake that no one had anticipated.

01:46:55.580 You know, when they go to war in 1939 and France and Britain call Germany's bluff,

01:46:59.520 everyone's just thinking oh my god you know how are we going to get out of this mess and he has

01:47:05.220 and it feels certain that britain's going to follow but britain doesn't britain because

01:47:09.920 does he try to negotiate with britain at this well he offer he makes him an offer you know

01:47:13.780 an offer to to reason on the 19th of july does a speech at sports palace in berlin

01:47:19.900 so it's you know appeals to reason says you know well no we're not interested in britain we want

01:47:24.500 to let you carry on as you are and all the rest of it and you know but we should be you know we

01:47:28.660 to be friends and it's it's it's an incredibly weak speech and uncharacteristically feeble speech

01:47:33.960 and in the couple of weeks before that he's been down to the Berghof is his beloved place in in

01:47:40.800 Ober Salzburg in the Berkusgarten in the southeastern Pervéren Alps and you know he's brought

01:47:46.220 even though he's they've created the the OKW the Oberkommando de Wehrmacht which is an inherently

01:47:51.280 sensible idea which is a combined services general staff it's really just his court his mouthpiece

01:47:57.040 And what he does is he gets the Kriegsmariner and the Navy in and says,

01:48:01.060 OK, so what's your plan for the invasion of Britain?

01:48:02.380 They go, well, my Fuhrer, I think we should do this.

01:48:04.600 And then he gets in the army and they go, well, my Fuhrer, I think we should do this.

01:48:07.300 And they're completely different plans.

01:48:09.680 So the Navy has got to be on as narrow a front as possible.

01:48:12.560 The army is sort of going, well, I think let's land in Nine Regions and also in Deal in Kent.

01:48:16.020 And it's like, well, that's 90 miles.

01:48:18.240 I mean, what?

01:48:19.760 And there's no joined up thinking whatsoever.

01:48:23.340 Then he goes and delivers his speech to the British sports palates.

01:48:26.560 And then he goes back to Beirut to go to the Wagner Festival.

01:48:30.600 And he just sits and waits.

01:48:32.320 And one of the interesting things about Hitler is he does prevaricate a lot.

01:48:37.520 And he's not...

01:48:39.280 But at the same time, once he gets an idea into his head,

01:48:41.900 he then tries to find the reasons to support the theory.

01:48:47.320 Which is exactly the wrong way to go about war.

01:48:50.600 You should never be fighting the war as you imagine it.

01:48:53.600 You should be fighting the war as it is in front of you.

01:48:56.920 And this is the big fatal error.

01:48:59.660 But because he seems to produce this miracle,

01:49:03.860 the senior Wehrmacht commanders are now enthralled to him

01:49:07.020 and they feel he can do no wrong.

01:49:08.900 And they think, well, you know, he's got us this far.

01:49:10.580 I mean, well, I might have doubted it.

01:49:12.960 So they're now these converts to him.

01:49:15.560 So even at sort of, apparently early on in July,

01:49:19.540 certainly by the end of July, he's thinking about an early invasion of the Soviet Union.

01:49:23.860 Now, obviously, at this point, the Soviet Union is an ally.

01:49:26.360 They've signed this deal in August 1939, 25th of August,

01:49:30.260 which is going to give them this sort of breakup of Poland

01:49:33.540 and give them a mutual alliance, which means sharing parts and technology,

01:49:39.320 but also resources.

01:49:40.400 So Germany hands over details of engines and certain expertise.

01:49:44.820 And in return, the Soviet Union gives Germany oil and fuel and bauxite and coal and grain.

01:49:54.580 Yes, exactly.

01:49:55.600 So it is largely Soviet fuel that is powering the Luftwaffe as they bomb Britain in the Blitz, for example,

01:50:01.640 which is something that's often forgotten or not appreciated or realised.

01:50:06.560 So once he's crossed that psychological Rubicon,

01:50:10.460 It's very, very difficult then to budge Hitler's mind.

01:50:15.580 So he might change the methodology, but the seed is there.

01:50:19.580 So once it's, I'm going to invade the Soviet Union,

01:50:23.680 there's no going back on that.

01:50:26.820 But come back to the Battle of Britain,

01:50:28.580 because the Luftwaffe tries to destroy the Royal Air Force and the Navy.

01:50:33.360 It doesn't happen.

01:50:34.620 Utterly defeated in that battle.

01:50:36.240 They give up, they abandon the idea of Operation Sea Lion.

01:50:39.360 Does Hitler think at this point, oh, maybe I'm not the demigod?

01:50:44.900 Maybe I need to be...

01:50:46.060 No, he never dives his own genius at all.

01:50:48.760 He's constantly got people doing this.

01:50:50.300 But what he does is he doubts, he prevaricates over the decision-making process.

01:50:54.680 Right.

01:50:55.520 So he's, from the summer of 1940, before the Battle of Britain has played out,

01:50:58.740 he's already in his head he's going into the Soviet Union the following year.

01:51:01.400 OK.

01:51:01.820 And that's scheduled for May 1941.

01:51:03.480 So he goes into the Soviet Union, everything initially goes...

01:51:06.480 Just very briefly, just to tell you about the planning for the Soviet Union.

01:51:09.560 So the large, the directive for the Soviet Union,

01:51:12.300 for Operation Barbarossa, as it becomes known,

01:51:14.860 is signed off in December 1940.

01:51:18.200 So the hope is, well, we'll just keep hammering the British

01:51:22.200 and reduce their ability to do much and, you know,

01:51:25.180 make life difficult for them.

01:51:26.580 And, you know, so that when we do turn back,

01:51:28.480 they'll be an easier, you know, there's no real sense

01:51:30.920 that they're going to, you know, maybe we can so badly hit Britain

01:51:36.240 that they'll come to terms but more likely will just dammit their infrastructure you know make

01:51:41.000 it difficult for them but of course they're not without their own attrition I mean you know

01:51:45.720 liftoff of bombers are getting shot down their numbers are getting lower they're losing loads

01:51:51.060 and loads of highly experienced aircrew etc etc in bombing Britain it's not an entirely one-sided

01:51:56.640 thing and obviously it doesn't bring Britain to its knees by any of its imagination in fact the

01:52:02.120 numbers of factories grows exponentially rather than decreasing with the blitz although it is very

01:52:07.080 traumatic for Britain and it is the first mass sustained bombing attack on a nation ever in the

01:52:13.420 history of the world and it causes untold damage and untold problems but not insurmountable ones

01:52:20.660 because Britain's inherent strength is global reach its friends its allies its dominions its

01:52:27.040 empires, extra imperial assets such as, you know, owning most of Argentina, most of Argentina's

01:52:32.800 assets, for example, and its huge amount of shipping. All those are hugely to its advantage.

01:52:37.480 And the truth is, is Germany's naval strategy is completely cockeyed. You know, the idea was to

01:52:43.100 create a surface raiding force, but also one that could take on other fleets. But they're never going

01:52:47.120 to compete to that. I mean, originally, the Z plan, which is a big naval expansionism, which

01:52:52.740 signed off in 1938 you know that's on the impression that the war is going to last is

01:52:56.520 going to start in 1944 so they think they've got a bit more time than they actually have

01:52:59.720 and of course it starts in 1939 but but the surface three the surface radar idea is on one

01:53:06.440 level is sensible because it's more efficient to destroy shipping with other ships than it is

01:53:10.880 submarines because a submarine is small and only has a few torpedoes whereas a light cruiser for

01:53:16.180 example is 9 000 tons and has you know huge guns and huge firepower and you only need a small force

01:53:22.240 of those to cause absolute mayhem the problem is is they they don't create enough of those small

01:53:27.600 cruisers they start creating battleships and heavy cruisers and pocket battleships which are much

01:53:31.740 bigger than light cruisers and they don't have very many when the war starts and what that means

01:53:37.760 is they've also haven't got very many u-boats and the u-boats are the bits that really could

01:53:41.120 have made the difference but because the u-boat arm is so small in 1939 that means the personnel

01:53:46.940 of the numbers of experienced personnel is also really really small so that's also a problem

01:53:52.100 which means throughout 1940, where Britain is quite vulnerable

01:53:56.980 in terms of its convoy system and its defences of those escorts,

01:54:03.380 there aren't very many U-boats.

01:54:05.340 So in January 1941, the total number of U-boats

01:54:08.160 in the entire Atlantic is six, and that's not very many.

01:54:14.360 And consequently, they don't sink a huge amount of shipping.

01:54:17.340 And even when they're doing quite well in the autumn of 1940,

01:54:21.180 where most of the Navy is defending the coastal waters of Britain

01:54:25.620 so isn't defending convoys, they're still not even getting close

01:54:29.420 to sinking the amount of tonnage that they need to sink

01:54:31.660 to have a dent on Britain.

01:54:33.400 So, you know, in the total war, I mean, I think it's something

01:54:35.760 like 1.4% of shipping is sunk by U-boats and, you know,

01:54:40.920 80% of all convoys get through unscathed.

01:54:43.200 So, you know, in other words, they have this opportunity

01:54:45.260 to make a blow on Britain and they squander that

01:54:49.920 because all their priorities are completely the wrong way around.

01:54:53.760 When it comes to planning for Operation Barbarossa,

01:54:56.940 the invasion of the Soviet Union, they do various plans.

01:54:59.860 And one of the guys who's in charge of the plans is a staff officer at the OKH,

01:55:03.940 which is Oberkommando Tahira, which is the army,

01:55:06.420 Army General Headquarters, a guy called General Paulus,

01:55:09.780 who ends up surrendering at Stalingrad.

01:55:12.560 Yeah, but at the time he's a staff officer.

01:55:14.720 And he does all these plans and he does all this war game

01:55:16.560 and he goes, this isn't going to work.

01:55:18.000 And they go, no, no, no, no, no, no.

01:55:19.920 Go away and do it until it does work.

01:55:21.600 He goes, all right, and goes off and produces nothing.

01:55:24.100 Yeah, that's much better.

01:55:25.320 And then they also look at the economic benefits and the economic costs

01:55:28.220 of going into the Soviet Union.

01:55:29.580 And the person in charge of this is General Georg Thomas,

01:55:33.500 who is in charge of the Economic Division at the OKW,

01:55:36.220 which is the Oberkommander der Wehrmacht, the German general staff.

01:55:39.460 And he comes back and goes, this isn't looking very good,

01:55:42.320 to be perfectly honest.

01:55:43.220 You know, we're not going to get the grain we want.

01:55:44.900 It's going to be much more difficult than we want.

01:55:46.500 The benefits of going to the Soviet Union are not going to come apparent

01:55:49.580 anything like as quickly as you think they're going to,

01:55:51.900 even if we win quickly.

01:55:53.620 And they go, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

01:55:55.300 Go off and do another one.

01:55:56.140 So in the middle of February, he produces another one,

01:55:57.880 which goes, yeah, it's going to be great.

01:55:59.300 And they go, good.

01:56:00.060 Okay, let's go then.

01:56:01.320 And I mean, it is that bad.

01:56:04.820 And all I'm trying to get at, James,

01:56:07.380 you know, one of the things that's always struck me

01:56:11.880 about World War II is that Hitler ultimately

01:56:16.440 not just allows, but creates a situation

01:56:19.140 where his own country is flattened to the ground.

01:56:21.560 Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of civilians

01:56:23.760 killed, burnt alive, women raped en masse, all of this.

01:56:29.080 And as I understand it,

01:56:30.420 it's because he never had the realization like,

01:56:33.440 okay, we're losing here, we need to adjust, right?

01:56:36.520 So Operation Barbarossa,

01:56:37.880 they go in initially very successful.

01:56:39.500 They're destroying army after army after army

01:56:43.280 on the Eastern Front.

01:56:44.600 But then by the time of the Battle of Moscow,

01:56:46.480 the tides start to change.

01:56:47.980 and eventually there comes a point where it's very clear america's entered the war britain is now at

01:56:55.420 its peak the soviet union is recovered from its early defeats is ramping up production working

01:57:01.480 together with lend lease building everything up germany isn't going to win the war but he just

01:57:07.360 doesn't stop why is that because hitler's worldview is this it's a very black and white

01:57:17.020 one it's not got a lot of gray area and it's either a thousand year reich or it's armageddon

01:57:22.640 and the choice is up to people and what he does is part of his part of his rhetoric part of his

01:57:27.860 ideology is destiny and will the triumph of the will it's the famous or infamous depending on

01:57:35.440 which way you look at it filmed by lazy uh laney riefenthal about the nuremberg rallies made in

01:57:40.680 1935 i think it is and it is the will of the german people are over there man enough to be

01:57:46.400 to kind of pull us through and win this great victory is going to secure our prosperity and

01:57:50.540 our futures forevermore or they're not so whenever the shortcomings the kind of the shortcoming gets

01:57:58.620 the infill comes from our head our superiority as soldiers our superiority as Aryans as as as

01:58:06.180 people and either we're up to it or we're not it's all or nothing and so such is his grip on

01:58:12.580 German society so to start off with everyone's in full time because you know you know he's got

01:58:17.840 all these lands back without a shot being fired then he's brought in and then you know he's done

01:58:21.600 it again he's got Poland you know we were all very skeptical and we didn't think that was going

01:58:24.540 to work but he has he's got Poland back you know and then then he was going into France he's mad

01:58:29.320 crazy he can't possibly go into France but never defeat France and then guess what he wins

01:58:33.220 who'd have thought it and then he goes and so you know into the Balkans and the exciting it seems

01:58:38.000 like he can do no wrong and then he goes in the Soviet Union in the first two weeks it's like

01:58:41.540 at an absolute time don't they're just crushing it you know the thousands of soviet aircraft

01:58:46.240 destroyed you know tens of thousands of prisoners captured the whole western front you know the

01:58:51.620 western um soviet border crushed um all the territories which which stalin had taken in

01:58:59.180 the summer of 1940 the baltic states for example which everyone forgets that he does that in june

01:59:03.440 1940 while well you know france and war in france is playing out um that that's just gone in a trice

01:59:10.920 You know, how can anyone doubt him?

01:59:13.720 And then suddenly there is this realisation that,

01:59:16.680 oops, we've gone too far, we've overextended,

01:59:18.700 but they've gone too far in.

01:59:20.240 And the irony is, the terrible irony of this whole situation

01:59:24.440 is that by the spring of 19...

01:59:27.800 end of 1940, spring of 1941, he has no choice.

01:59:32.680 He's got no choice.

01:59:33.620 He's got no choice but to invade the Soviet Union

01:59:35.640 because what's the alternative?

01:59:37.660 You can't sit on the border and wait for the Soviet Union

01:59:40.120 to attack, because that is what they're going to do, by the way. Because every month that passes,

01:59:46.700 Soviet industry is building more KVs, heavy tanks, and T-34s, and more aircraft. The Red Army,

01:59:54.860 in June 1941, is the largest military in the world, by a huge proportion. And it may be that

02:00:02.660 the Germans launch Operation Barbarossa with the largest invasion force the world has ever seen.

02:00:08.340 But that doesn't mean to say that the force they're attacking isn't bigger,

02:00:11.860 because it is.

02:00:13.040 They've got 20 times the amount of mortars and artillery pieces

02:00:18.540 that the Germans have.

02:00:19.600 They've got 2.5 times the amount of tanks.

02:00:23.000 They've got 5 times the amount of aircraft that the Germans have.

02:00:26.940 They've got God knows how many more men than the Germans have.

02:00:31.640 So Hitler, if he's going to win, he's got to strike

02:00:35.920 while the Soviet Union is still weak.

02:00:38.560 But what I'm saying is the task is just too big.

02:00:40.920 What I'm saying is you've struck, you had a good go, you failed.

02:00:45.780 Why don't you try and find, give back, you know, Western Ukraine,

02:00:49.960 give back the Baltic states, agree to reparations.

02:00:53.120 Why fight to the last man?

02:00:54.580 Because Stalin is going to invade you and crush you.

02:00:58.360 And he will.

02:00:59.540 I mean, the absolute one thing that is completely certain,

02:01:02.320 The moment that Hitler takes power in January 1933 is that at some point there is going to be a massive clash between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

02:01:14.160 And when that happens and how it pans out and what form it takes, that's all up for grabs.

02:01:19.020 But the one thing that isn't up for grabs is that it's going to happen.

02:01:21.980 And it absolutely is.

02:01:23.380 And I think you can argue there's a very, very strong case for thinking that the Soviet Red Army was going to go and invade in Romania and Bulgaria.

02:01:32.320 in july 1941 the problem is is because he started the war because he hasn't won the battle of

02:01:39.280 britain he's got no let out he's got he's got he's got no alternative he's he's either and

02:01:46.960 and because he's running out of resources because he because there's an economic blockade by by the

02:01:51.680 royal navy because they're pegged in into the center of europe he's got no means of getting

02:01:58.000 the resources he needs and because they don't have the wits to kind of galvanize the french and the

02:02:02.720 dutch and everything else to to operate to their advantage and they don't have oil the biggest oil

02:02:08.880 producer in the world in the 1940s is the united states the second biggest is venezuela the third

02:02:14.960 biggest is you know azerbaijan uzbekistan you know the the caucasus so within the sphere of the of the

02:02:23.200 of the ussr and some way behind that is the oil fields of the middle east germany doesn't have

02:02:30.880 any connection to any of those so it's dependent on its alliance of the soviet union effect getting

02:02:37.040 its oil which the soviet union is going to break if germany doesn't break it

02:02:40.880 or it's dependent on the oil fields of romania

02:02:44.240 at Plouesti, which the Soviet Union have all but kind of surrounded

02:02:51.120 by June 1941.

02:02:55.340 So to get to Germany, that oil from Romania has to cross

02:03:00.280 through Soviet-controlled territory.

02:03:03.020 So it's unsustainable.

02:03:06.940 And so without fuel, a modern army, we've gone from being a coal nation

02:03:12.120 world to an oil-based world the moment you've crossed that threshold from coal to oil

02:03:19.100 the country that has the most oil is going to come out on top and germany doesn't have it and

02:03:25.160 that's the problem so by going into to poland in september 1939 before they're ready he has

02:03:33.680 brought upon nothing but but ruin i think from the moment that they lose the battle of britain

02:03:39.880 they're stuffed. I think you can argue really convincingly that they're now in a trap of their

02:03:47.640 own victories. And this is the irony at the moment where in many ways it looks like the apogee of the

02:03:55.360 Nazi state, you know, the conquest of Yugoslavia and Crete and Greece and, you know, going up to

02:04:00.720 the end of May 1941 with all those, you know, three million troops poised on the Soviet border

02:04:05.960 in the first weeks of June 1941.

02:04:08.520 Beginning of June 1941, that's the high-water mark.

02:04:12.120 But actually, they've got themselves in a situation

02:04:14.300 where they're stuffed already because they can't sustain it.

02:04:18.060 And you can say, yes, before Moscow in December 1941

02:04:21.760 is where it all really, really unravels.

02:04:24.100 But actually, it really unravels in the Battle of Smolensk

02:04:27.140 because Smolensk in Belarus, well, it's now Belarus,

02:04:29.540 it was Belarusia, is captured by Guderian's leading panzer unit,

02:04:34.240 the panzer group two on the 15th of july 1941 but the ongoing battle of the smolensk pocket

02:04:42.480 which is a pocket of three soviet armies the 18th 19th and 20th i think it is they are to the east

02:04:51.340 of smolensk and that pocket is not completely closed until the very end of july beginning of

02:04:58.820 August. And by that point, all the panzer groups, the two panzer groups, the panzer divisions in

02:05:04.840 panzer group two and panzer group three, which are leading army group centre, which is the main

02:05:10.380 thrust into the Soviet Union. There's also army group north and army group south going to the

02:05:14.680 Ukraine, army group north going to the Baltic States and on to Leningrad. But the main effort,

02:05:19.260 the main, the prime panzer units, mobile forces of the Wehrmacht is in army group centre going on

02:05:28.260 this thrust through Belarus towards Moscow. It's stuffed. It's absolutely stuffed. They've

02:05:35.260 reached a culmination point. Their panzers have been destroyed. Their motorised vehicles

02:05:42.080 have been destroyed. And they're being destroyed as much just by Soviet roads and by the huge

02:05:48.020 stretches and the fact that they've, a lot of, you know, they go into the Barbarossa

02:05:52.200 with 2,000 different motorised vehicles.

02:05:55.020 2,000, each of which has a slightly different distributor cap

02:05:59.320 and slightly different gasket and slightly different kinds.

02:06:02.240 And there's only so much you can feed from Peter to feed Paul.

02:06:06.560 And, of course, the wheels literally and metaphorically come off the whole process.

02:06:12.160 And by...

02:06:13.400 So they have this huge leap forward of sort of, you know, 500 kilometres

02:06:16.020 in the first sort of couple of weeks, you know, three weeks of the campaign.

02:06:19.620 and thereafter they do about 100 kilometers in the next month and a half and so suddenly that

02:06:24.940 usp driving fast the castle tracks the kind of lightning war all the rest of it they can't do

02:06:30.580 it anymore and the only reason that they get as far as they do in december is because of the

02:06:35.660 encirclement of kiev kiev as it is now and that the only reason that happens is because stalin

02:06:42.340 refused to countenance the advice of his own military commanders which is to fall back behind

02:06:46.580 the Dnieper and they don't so they get beaten in they're getting circled in front of the Dnieper

02:06:51.660 and the giant encirclement continues but but but that doesn't really help Germany because they

02:06:57.680 still haven't got Leningrad a lot of the factories have been moved east to the Urals which are 400

02:07:02.440 miles beyond or 400 kilometers or whatever beyond Moscow and they still can't get to Moscow and they

02:07:08.080 can't sustain this fight because they don't have enough of anything you know this is this is what

02:07:13.200 one has to get one's head around is that yes they have these encirclements and yes they have this

02:07:17.920 great victory in the summer of 1941 on paper but they are winning themselves to death in the process

02:07:24.900 because they're fundamentally not big enough to be able to compete on a on a geographical scale

02:07:32.200 of the Soviet Union or on the material scale of the Soviet Union they just can't compete and you're

02:07:38.320 absolutely right to point out that you know if you take an arbitrary date such as let's say the 15th

02:07:43.340 of june 1941 nazi germany has got one enemy which is great britain albeit great britain plus dominion

02:07:51.320 and empire and extra imperial assets fast forward six months to the 15th of december 1941 and it's

02:07:57.940 got three enemies it's got great britain plus empire and dominions and extra imperial assets

02:08:01.860 it's got United States of America, and it's got the USSR.

02:08:04.560 It is not going to win.

02:08:07.700 And whilst all this is happening, if we focus on Germany at home,

02:08:13.860 there is the awful spectre of the Holocaust.

02:08:16.460 So when did that start? When did it go from...

02:08:19.400 Which completely shoots them in the foot, by the way.

02:08:23.000 OK.

02:08:23.500 Because it ties up vast amounts of resources.

02:08:25.940 It ties up all sorts of time.

02:08:28.020 It doesn't work.

02:08:29.960 It denudes them of talent and souls and people that could be doing other stuff.

02:08:35.400 I mean, it is, it's a, I mean, quite, but you can't say, I mean, you can say that and you can point that out.

02:08:43.000 But that is to misunderstand the ideology at the heart of Nazism and the heart of Hitler's mind,

02:08:48.220 which is the crushing of Judaism and Bolshevism, the Judeo-Bolshevik yoke.

02:08:54.440 so when did how did it go from look we don't like jews they're kind of responsible for what's

02:09:02.740 happening but we've got bigger fish to fry here to right we're going to exterminate the entire

02:09:07.600 population well it really moves as they move into poland because polish are unto mention and and

02:09:15.640 jewish poles are even more unto mention these i.e they're kind of lowlifes they're kind of

02:09:19.320 They're below us as Arians, whereas in Europe, they're kind of sort of integrating

02:09:25.120 into kind of modern societies and it's sort of, it's not okay, but, you know,

02:09:28.800 we can put up and put them in ghettos or, you know, we can encourage them to get exit visas

02:09:32.680 and move to Israel or the United States or wherever, just shut them down culturally and societally.

02:09:40.160 But suddenly in Poland, you know, we're going to get rid of the intelligentsia,

02:09:43.660 we're going to get rid of the Jews, we're just going to shoot them.

02:09:45.780 Anyone who resists Germany in any way is to be regarded as a partisan.

02:09:53.080 And resisting Germany in any way can mean anyone who just says,

02:09:56.120 I'm not going to do what you ask me to do, pamphleteering, whatever it might be.

02:10:01.760 They are enemies of the Nazi state.

02:10:05.660 And there is an ideological aspect to the invasion of the Soviet Union,

02:10:10.300 which is spelt out very implicitly at a conference in early March 1941,

02:10:17.380 and which is then reiterated at the beginning of June 1941,

02:10:20.700 where Hitler basically says, you know, if you do excessive measures,

02:10:24.320 no one's going to be called over the coals for that.

02:10:28.060 And this is an ideological war, and this is more than just a war of conquest,

02:10:33.400 this is a war of annihilation.

02:10:34.900 We have to annihilate the Soviet state,

02:10:37.400 and we also have to annihilate Judaism within that state.

02:10:41.380 So you suddenly start having kind of burning of villages

02:10:44.440 and rounding up people and just shooting them willy-nilly.

02:10:46.860 And there's a point at the end of July 1941

02:10:49.820 where Himmler, the head of the SS, visits the front

02:10:53.640 up in the Baltic states and sees a mass execution.

02:10:56.740 He goes, oh, that's horrible.

02:10:58.420 You know, our guys didn't have to be doing that.

02:11:00.040 It's absolutely ghastly.

02:11:00.840 I don't want my men having to kind of shoot people

02:11:02.960 in the back of the head.

02:11:03.820 It's really grotesque.

02:11:05.240 And it's really interesting, I think, that his concern

02:11:07.060 is not over the victims obviously it's over the the perpetrators over his men having to do something

02:11:11.700 as horrible as witness sort of brains being splattered all over the place and you know blood

02:11:15.300 going everywhere because there's got to be a more human main way of doing this and when he means

02:11:19.380 humane he means humane for again for the perpetrators and so this is this this leads

02:11:23.620 directly to the development of of gas chambers and and cyclone b and this cyclone b has been

02:11:29.140 developed as a pesticide and you know for agricultural processes and it's very effective

02:11:33.860 and so you think well okay well we can do that and do that and then then what we do is we shove

02:11:38.740 them all in a in a room they get gassed and we just dispose of them we incinerate them no one

02:11:44.500 has to look at blood and brains and you know it can be a bit more remote and a bit more kind of

02:11:48.980 distance between it and it's not so traumatic and that's how it develops and you know hitler never

02:11:53.940 kind of never um says i want you to send murder all these millions of jews it's just it's all

02:12:01.700 done with again with smoke and shadows and euphemism you know the final solution to the

02:12:05.780 jewish problem the final solution to the jewish problem is is what do we do with all these jews

02:12:10.340 how do we get rid of them all and you know you have to remember that out of the six million that

02:12:15.140 get jews that get get killed in the holocaust three million of them are shot in the back of

02:12:18.420 the head or similar means and three million are gassed and so when die of of you know malnutrition

02:12:25.540 or abuse or whatever.

02:12:27.680 And so when did they open the camps?

02:12:30.280 When did they start to actually mechanise the process?

02:12:32.660 Well, in 1942.

02:12:33.880 I mean, one of the delays for Auschwitz, for example,

02:12:36.340 is because the people that are developing the mechanism

02:12:38.520 for the gas insist on patenting it,

02:12:42.500 and the patency takes a little bit of time to come through.

02:12:48.180 Yeah, I kid you not.

02:12:50.900 So from 1942, and the question that people always ask

02:12:55.380 Were the Allies aware of it?

02:12:58.600 If they were, how much were they aware of it?

02:13:00.380 Yeah, yeah, they do know what's going on

02:13:02.020 by the middle of the war, but what can you do?

02:13:03.840 I mean, you know, it's in Poland.

02:13:06.660 What happens if you go and bomb it?

02:13:08.060 I mean, that's not going to work.

02:13:10.640 I mean, you're going to just kill lots of Jews.

02:13:12.860 You know, you're going to bomb the camp,

02:13:14.060 the people you're trying to save.

02:13:15.520 I can't really see...

02:13:17.020 I've never really understood this argument

02:13:18.360 that people have, you know, we knew about it

02:13:20.040 and it was disgraceful, you know,

02:13:21.680 we didn't go and rescue them.

02:13:24.100 We're trying to rescue them.

02:13:25.380 You know, the Soviet armies are coming from the east,

02:13:27.780 we're coming from the west.

02:13:28.540 I mean, what are you supposed to do?

02:13:31.420 Because did it influence their thinking at all,

02:13:34.100 or was it just something that was...

02:13:36.240 Well, I think everyone...

02:13:37.380 You know, we knew about the concentration camps.

02:13:39.340 We knew about...

02:13:40.020 We did know about the death camps.

02:13:41.640 You know, people who escaped and got the word about it,

02:13:43.920 but, you know, we knew about our stories.

02:13:46.200 We didn't know about all of them.

02:13:47.100 We don't know about the details of it.

02:13:48.280 We didn't know the extent of it.

02:13:49.960 We knew that people were being gassed for sure.

02:13:52.040 We knew that lots of people were being executed, of course.

02:13:54.640 But again, you know, what do you do?

02:13:55.600 You can't go, you know, can you go and bomb Auschwitz?

02:13:57.400 Well, you could, but then you just build one camp,

02:14:01.260 you know, got a patent now and just build another one.

02:14:03.060 I mean, you know, that's not going to end the Holocaust.

02:14:07.280 So, you know, they tried to warn the Hungarians about it

02:14:11.180 and the Hungarians chose not to,

02:14:13.800 the Hungarian government chose not to act on that warning.

02:14:18.280 So, because again, they're in a video situation

02:14:21.480 where what can you practically do about it?

02:14:23.640 I mean, it's really difficult.

02:14:25.680 I think what people hadn't appreciated was that the concentration camps

02:14:28.840 by the end of the war were in such a bad state.

02:14:30.800 You have to remember the concentration camps are there for people to be workers

02:14:34.580 and they're not all Jews by any stretch of imagination.

02:14:36.760 They're political enemies, they're people who have done the smallest infringements.

02:14:41.100 But, you know, you're using them as forced labour, slave labour.

02:14:44.320 But Germany's really short of food.

02:14:47.040 I mean, that's why it's going to the east in the first place,

02:14:50.020 getting the bread basket of Ukraine.

02:14:51.720 where hitler is actually right and compared to i mean so the i'm jumping the gun here but one of

02:14:56.940 the big arguments with his commanders was do you go straight for for moscow and to capitate the

02:15:01.520 the machine and then everything else follows or do you go straight to leningrad and get the baltic

02:15:06.740 states and get the get the sea ports and do you go into ukraine and get the bread basket first and

02:15:13.640 then moscow is the secondary um target or which way do you do it but fundamentally the reason we're

02:15:20.980 going to the Soviet Union is to crush Bolshevism and Judaism

02:15:23.900 and this Judeo-Bolshevik plot,

02:15:27.820 but it's fundamentally to try and get the resources

02:15:30.820 that you don't have yourself whilst at the same time

02:15:34.620 denying them to your Bolshevik enemy.

02:15:37.160 So Germany is always short of food right from before the war even begins.

02:15:43.640 I mean, I've already mentioned that they have rationing in Germany

02:15:46.780 in the summer of 1940.

02:15:47.720 You know, France doesn't have rationing by the time it's invaded in May 1940, for example,

02:15:53.320 because it's land of plenty, etc.

02:15:56.900 So that only gets worse as the war progresses.

02:16:00.580 So by the end of the war in 1945, where the Reichsbahn is completely crushed from February 1945,

02:16:05.680 there's nothing left, all the cities are in ruins.

02:16:08.920 You know, what little food they've got, they're not going to be giving them to the prisoners,

02:16:13.360 which is why they're so emaciated in such a bad state by the time camps are being liberated in

02:16:18.580 March and April 1945, or in the case of Auschwitz from January 1945. So they're extra emaciated.

02:16:27.160 But I don't think the West had been expected quite such horrors, whether it be Dachau,

02:16:34.600 whether it be Belsen, whether it be Saxon-Hauser, whatever it be, to see piles of starved,

02:16:40.940 emaciated corpses to come to these camps,

02:16:44.680 that would be riven with typhus and typhoid and cholera

02:16:48.440 and all the rest of it.

02:16:50.360 I mean, it was a horror beyond horrors.

02:16:55.540 And I don't think the West knew about that,

02:16:58.080 not to that extent.

02:16:59.540 They knew there were camps.

02:17:00.900 They didn't realise the state they were in to that degree.

02:17:04.560 Because, and correct me if I'm wrong,

02:17:07.020 when the Nazis knew that the game was up,

02:17:09.840 they essentially doubled their efforts, didn't they?

02:17:12.540 Yeah, they do.

02:17:14.000 I mean, we've all seen the famous picture of the,

02:17:17.400 or infamous picture of the huge, great entrance block of Auschwitz.

02:17:21.460 When we talk about Auschwitz, we're talking about Birkenau,

02:17:24.100 which is Auschwitz III,

02:17:26.620 because the first camp was the old original Polish army camp.

02:17:30.740 And you see the railway line, the sort of monochrome railway line

02:17:35.040 going straight through the middle of it.

02:17:36.580 That was built in May 1944 to accelerate it

02:17:40.500 because they were coming to a platform about a mile and a half away

02:17:43.840 and then they'd have to walk across this open ground

02:17:45.340 and then go into the camp.

02:17:47.300 Now they had platforms that were just going straight down

02:17:49.760 to the gas chambers, effectively.

02:17:51.640 And that was to accelerate it to get rid of the Hungarian Jews.

02:17:54.580 So this brings us back...

02:17:57.060 It's absolutely insane. I mean, it's just bonkers.

02:17:58.960 Well, this is what I'm trying to ask you about

02:18:00.860 because in 1933, in your telling of it,

02:18:04.380 Hitler says literally nothing about this.

02:18:07.260 Well, they haven't worked it because they're all making up as they go along.

02:18:11.180 He's come fully formed with his overall ideology,

02:18:14.460 but the mechanism of government, the mechanism of operating this new la-la land,

02:18:19.560 and you have to think of the Nazi state as la-la land.

02:18:22.260 It's a warped, black, deeply malevolent fantasy world, but it's a fantasy world.

02:18:27.680 And everyone who's involved in it, the Nazi elites through to the military commanders,

02:18:31.780 They've all bought into and complicit in the creation of this la-la land.

02:18:37.420 So the whole thing about the Jews and everything,

02:18:39.340 and the anti-Judaism and anti-Bolshevism, it's not fully formed.

02:18:45.200 We have to get rid of the Jews in Germany,

02:18:47.280 but how we get rid of them is it escalates.

02:18:50.820 It escalates.

02:18:52.460 And this is where Kristallnacht is so important,

02:18:56.440 because Kristallnacht in November 1938 is a testing ground.

02:19:02.240 It's like, what can the German people put up with?

02:19:04.320 What can the rest of the world put up with?

02:19:05.800 What can we get away with here?

02:19:07.300 How far can we push this?

02:19:10.060 And it's a signifier.

02:19:13.040 And Kristallnacht is a big escalation.

02:19:16.180 Jews being beaten up, synagogues being burned,

02:19:19.040 you know, bricks through windows of Jewish properties

02:19:20.920 and enterprises and so on and so forth.

02:19:24.820 And they get away with it.

02:19:25.740 that the nation takes it they accept it the world accepts it and

02:19:31.260 you there are just these forks in the road all the time that the the Nazis keep coming to saying

02:19:39.400 okay so we don't really like Jews but how far do we push this well first of all well let's just

02:19:43.080 sort of make them difficult for them well we'll we'll de-legalize them and we'll try and encourage

02:19:47.440 them to go off under their own steam but they're still here so wow what do we do well let's up it

02:19:52.160 up a bit more let's make make the laws even more stringent they're still here let's let's let's do

02:19:56.600 another whack um let's go let let's let's have crystal now let's have a night of marauding

02:20:01.660 militias where thugs are kind of you know beating them up and then let's see what happens it just

02:20:06.260 escalates and then they're going into the eastern territories where they're intervention and so

02:20:10.760 they're extra kind of worse and so it's far from prying eyes it's far from western eyes we can get

02:20:15.920 away with stuff it's an ideological war suddenly you know uh where where anyone's a partisan so

02:20:21.620 round people up, you shoot them.

02:20:22.980 And the Wehrmachter is every bit as responsible

02:20:26.360 and complicit in this as the Einsatzgruppen of the SS,

02:20:29.520 for example, the Einsatzgruppen, these action squads

02:20:31.080 that are especially designed to kind of come up

02:20:33.200 behind the advancing German front lines

02:20:35.040 and, you know, clear out people in burn villages

02:20:38.000 and, you know, shoot Jews and what have you.

02:20:41.000 One other question before we head to questions

02:20:43.080 from our supporters that I wanted to ask,

02:20:44.740 I've always wanted to ask someone with your expertise,

02:20:46.700 is after the war, the surviving German generals

02:20:50.740 as one well there's some exceptions but as sort of basically so hitler was actually an idiot he

02:20:57.940 messed this up he messed that up we told them this these are mostly people who followed him

02:21:02.840 you know with burning ice through thick and thin how much of that is deflecting blame for their

02:21:09.120 own responsibilities or how much of it is it what you said earlier which is you i think you called

02:21:13.500 hitler a numpty yeah you know he he makes mistakes everyone makes mistakes but he makes

02:21:19.700 some catastrophic mistakes.

02:21:21.660 Where does the blame for Germany's failure in the war lie

02:21:24.780 with respect to generals and Hitler themselves?

02:21:27.160 They're absolutely up to their neck in it

02:21:28.660 and don't fall for that crap trap ever.

02:21:31.360 They absolutely believed it.

02:21:33.120 They fell in with it.

02:21:35.040 They condoned the anti-Semitism.

02:21:38.560 There's examples of literally Canaan on one hand

02:21:42.000 German commanders that don't buy into this.

02:21:46.240 They're so few and far between.

02:21:48.020 most of them are completely guilty and you know that they they bought into it they swallowed it

02:21:57.920 they were excited by it they were driven by a desire to make germany great again yes absolutely

02:22:04.400 all of that um and their grievances were to a certain extent justified but it whole thing just

02:22:12.580 got out of hand they got themselves into a into a mess in which they couldn't get themselves out of

02:22:18.620 it and their earlier theories which were proved correct you know mobile armored theories and all

02:22:24.900 the sort of Guderian and Manstein and so on and so forth that seemed to kind of be playing out to

02:22:29.340 their advantage in 1940 by the time they go into the Soviet Union it's a different different ball

02:22:34.460 game and this is not a war of conquest it's a war of annihilation and that's a game changer and

02:22:41.540 They've all got blood on their hands.

02:22:43.160 And the truth is, they all believed it.

02:22:45.440 They believed the miracle of Hitler and what they were doing.

02:22:48.440 They weren't asking the right questions.

02:22:50.700 They weren't going, hang on a minute,

02:22:52.300 we're just assuming that we're going to be brilliant

02:22:54.220 and better than the Red Army.

02:22:56.080 We're just assuming that we can beat them all within 500 kilometres

02:22:59.860 and annihilate the Red Army within 500 kilometres.

02:23:02.860 What if we can't?

02:23:04.280 What happens if we go in with this ideological war

02:23:07.040 and actually we don't win?

02:23:09.680 And then suddenly violence begets violence.

02:23:11.540 and suddenly you're in this doom loop of extreme violence

02:23:16.540 that you can't get out of.

02:23:18.440 And so at the end of the war, you can say,

02:23:20.100 oh, it wasn't me, I was just obeying orders

02:23:21.620 and all that sort of stuff.

02:23:22.420 But no, you know, you could have assassinated Hitler,

02:23:24.800 you could have said no, you could have had a coup,

02:23:26.760 you could have done anything.

02:23:27.860 You could have said this isn't going to work.

02:23:29.700 You could have actually had the moral balls

02:23:31.860 to stand up to this nonsense, but they don't.

02:23:35.180 Quick question before the end.

02:23:36.900 I always find the character of Albert Speer fascinating.

02:23:39.920 Yeah, me too.

02:23:40.840 Particularly when it comes to this.

02:23:42.500 Could you very just quickly explain to you who Albert Speer is

02:23:44.920 and why his story is one of the more fascinating ones

02:23:48.540 to come out of Nazi history?

02:23:50.420 Yeah, so he's a young architect.

02:23:52.180 He catches Hitler's eye in the 1930s, becomes his favourite.

02:23:56.060 You know, he's a tall, strapping, good-looking lad.

02:24:00.060 Hitler does like kind of younger guys who, you know,

02:24:04.100 and he doesn't feel threatened by him because he's not of the same age.

02:24:07.440 He's obviously much younger.

02:24:08.480 He's very obviously in fraud to Hitler.

02:24:10.040 So Hitler gets him on these big projects and Hitler likes big stuff

02:24:13.200 and he wants to completely rebuild Berlin and turn it into Germania

02:24:16.580 and he gets Speer to design a new Reich's Chancery,

02:24:20.620 a new government building, which he does and does brilliantly

02:24:23.060 and Hitler loves it.

02:24:24.660 And then he comes up with these designs for Germania

02:24:28.440 and suddenly he's the golden boy and he's there in the court of Hitler,

02:24:31.620 he's a leading Nazi and all the rest of it.

02:24:33.140 And then Fritz Tod, who's the armaments minister,

02:24:35.740 gets killed in a plane crash in February 1941.

02:24:39.640 and um february 1942 rather and spear takes over um and because he's young and dynamic and all the

02:24:46.920 rest of it he can sort of make certain miracles happen even though the miracles again are kind

02:24:51.880 of sort of paper thin and and not good enough i mean you know the the the their stopgap is sort of

02:25:00.520 paper over cracks that kind of thing um and somehow he managed to wriggle out of it at the

02:25:04.840 very end of the war you know he gets put on trial at nuremberg and he doesn't get hanged he gets put

02:25:08.360 put in prison um and um gets released well the narrative about him is is like he wasn't a real

02:25:16.180 Nazi like he built he built nice stuff and he managed the munitions ministry very well but he

02:25:21.600 didn't you know he wasn't he wasn't a fan of the holocaust and he wasn't yeah no no that's all

02:25:26.620 nonsense he's absolutely up to his neck and it um and completely complicit in it and and you know

02:25:31.460 I'm getting serenity who who wrote a series of very very good books not not least on friend

02:25:35.960 stangled who was um uh um was he soberbo or troblinka he's one of them commandants of the

02:25:41.160 death camps read a brilliant book it called into that darkness which is a fantastic book about him

02:25:45.240 series of interviews that she did with him in his prison cell um about his his um journey to becoming

02:25:51.960 a terrible terrible death camp commandant and who recognizes what he's done and and sort of

02:25:59.480 feels regret and then kills himself after in his prison cell after she's finished her interviews

02:26:06.800 and then she did a book on Speer and Speer actually was doing an interview in London the

02:26:13.200 night before he died and actually had been sleeping with one of his mistresses and it sounds like he

02:26:18.560 died on the job to be perfectly honest anyway the annoying thing is is the BBC have lost the

02:26:22.500 transcript of this this interview that he did that night before he died you know it's somewhere in

02:26:27.840 an archive in a basement somewhere in Croydon or something where no one can find it but anyway I

02:26:32.100 mean you know he he was rotten to the core uh absolutely you know despicable individual and

02:26:37.580 and requires no sympathy and you know it is not possible to be in the court of Hitler and

02:26:43.000 and amongst the Nazi elites and not be completely complicit with blood on your hands and totally up

02:26:46.960 your neck in it it's it's not possible one more pre-final question what did you what was your

02:26:51.880 take on Nuremberg the the film not the trial oh I thought the film was pretty good I it was great

02:26:56.780 wasn't it i was you know i see anything to do the second world war and i'm expecting it to be

02:27:00.220 completely awful um and just get where it wasn't like that and that doesn't happen that's not right

02:27:03.820 that's wrong um but actually i thought it was pretty good i thought russell crowe was fantastic

02:27:07.500 he was indeed one of when we ever we talk about world war ii now it's this very simplistic way

02:27:15.660 of speaking about it you know and we compare it to modern times he's a nazi they're worse

02:27:20.620 Hitler, all the usual stuff. But if we look at 2026 and we look at that period of time and just

02:27:28.940 before, what comparisons can we make that are actually valid? And what are some of the myths

02:27:35.680 that need exploding? Yeah, yeah, lots actually. And I think it's really interesting because if you

02:27:39.920 think about sort of 100 years ago, there were certain things that happened which have a sort

02:27:43.560 of weird mirror with what's happened in the last 25 years. So first of all, there was a massive

02:27:48.120 pandemic global pandemic there was a catastrophic war uh um which quite apart from the tragedy of

02:27:54.600 of lost lives was economically ruinous in a way that to america and britain and the western world

02:28:00.440 iraq and afghanistan were economically ruinous um there was then um uh there was a a huge financial

02:28:08.280 crash um in 1929 as it was in 2008 and there was also there's also been a trade tariff war

02:28:15.320 in 1930 as of what has been you know with the advent of trump in his second term so there's

02:28:20.120 lots of parallels and one of the things i think is really interesting is that history doesn't

02:28:22.920 repeat itself because it can't possibly because that was then and this is now and we're constantly

02:28:26.200 living in constantly evolving world but patterns of human behavior don't change at all i mean one

02:28:32.360 of the reasons why shakespeare is still relevant is because he's dealing with fundamentals of human

02:28:36.040 character which is relevant in um today as they were in you know 1592. so fundamentally we don't

02:28:44.200 change. And where you can apply economic theories, which is why someone like John Menard Keynes,

02:28:52.760 a great economist, is so important and still so valid, is that you can see how people respond

02:28:57.680 to economic crisis and the ebbs and flows of economies. And, you know, 1929 wasn't the first

02:29:04.800 crash. It wasn't the first economic global crisis. And obviously it wasn't the last over.

02:29:10.500 And you can see how things develop, and there were plenty of crises in the 19th century, for example.

02:29:17.780 There was plenty of theories about free trade and open seas and all the free markets and all the rest of it.

02:29:24.340 You know, the novels of Thomas Hardy, for example, are set to the backdrop of agricultural decline

02:29:31.620 as a result of free trade and cheaper grain coming from the Americas

02:29:35.840 and meat coming from the Argentine and refrigeration and all the rest of it.

02:29:38.680 That's the backdrop to Jude Ibskia and Tessa D'Ubervilles and all the rest of it.

02:29:43.060 So you can see how patterns of human behaviour behave,

02:29:47.820 but follow one after the other, which means from an economic point of view,

02:29:51.660 you can actually plan and theorise fairly accurately.

02:29:56.000 And one of the things you can theorise about is how people will respond to massive dips.

02:30:01.480 And in a democracy, you will always have the same thing.

02:30:04.740 economic decline leads to political

02:30:08.540 unsettlement and dislocation in a democracy and when you have economic decline and a political

02:30:16.360 dislocation together you're that much closer to war and the converse is also true so when you have

02:30:21.960 economic growth and you have economic stability you tend to have political stability and you tend

02:30:26.440 to have police you tend to have peace so that's why the age we're living in now is quite worrying

02:30:33.300 And what you see is that people respond in pretty much the same way.

02:30:37.780 So why is it that Hitler comes into power in 1933?

02:30:41.200 It's because the established political democratic order in Germany isn't working.

02:30:48.560 And people are poorer and they're having higher costs of living.

02:30:53.120 And wages are going down as costs are going up and rents are going up.

02:30:57.260 And their standard of life and chances of employment and future prosperity are declining.

02:31:02.500 So this existing political system isn't working.

02:31:06.460 So I am going to go to the extremes to see an alternative

02:31:09.640 because although the wrecking ball is offering something quite wacky,

02:31:14.460 the Conservative view isn't working either.

02:31:16.580 So I might as well give the wrecking ball a chance.

02:31:21.460 If people can't see the comparisons now,

02:31:26.120 then they're obviously not thinking about this in the right way.

02:31:29.840 and this is why history is there to help us and if you can predict these things so one of the

02:31:37.380 things that i find so frustrating about the current state in the uk at the moment for example is it's

02:31:41.780 all very well saying we can't afford it we can't afford it we need to be stringent we need to kind

02:31:46.640 of you know tighten our belts we can't afford defense blah blah blah whatever it might be

02:31:50.700 dead as a percentage of gdp is 93 in this country at the moment it is not going to get better

02:31:57.400 until you start investing in the country.

02:32:01.260 You know, stagnating austerity measures don't work,

02:32:04.240 just as they didn't work for Heinrich Brüning in 1931-32.

02:32:09.000 They're not going to work for Rachel Reeves in this country now.

02:32:13.060 And Maynard Keynes, for example, came up with this idea of counter-sickle economics,

02:32:16.180 which is this idea in times of plenty, you tax harder and you tighten the belts.

02:32:20.940 And in times of hardness, you actually spend more.

02:32:24.760 And that's what we need to do.

02:32:26.360 And this idea that you can't spend and also invest and improve your economy

02:32:31.560 and make yourself safer is clearly absurd because that's exactly what America did in the 1940s.

02:32:39.940 As it was emerging out of the Great Depression in 1940,

02:32:43.660 it was not by any stretch of the imagination out of the woods.

02:32:47.240 Borrowing to invest in the armaments industry in 1940 and into 1941 and 1942

02:32:52.920 was considered a massive risk.

02:32:54.820 But counter-sectoral economics, as laid out by economists such as John Maynard Keynes,

02:33:00.420 suggested that this was all going to work out OK in the long run.

02:33:03.620 And I would argue that this is exactly what Britain needs to do right now.

02:33:06.880 And this is exactly what Germany's been trying to do.

02:33:08.880 The moment that Mertz came into power, he kind of put in a huge 100 billion euro investment into defence.

02:33:17.640 There's no accident, I think, that Poland has one of the fastest growing economies in Northern Europe.

02:33:24.820 and is doing so by spending on defence.

02:33:27.560 You know, so it's this idea that it's either or is just clearly nonsense.

02:33:31.340 And what we have to do is we have to look at history and go,

02:33:34.380 OK, what are the warnings from similar patterns of behaviour

02:33:38.840 and by similar experiences that have happened before,

02:33:41.560 and then pre-empt that and work out a plan of how to get around that?

02:33:45.440 Well, the one thing you said is you borrow to invest in things

02:33:48.680 rather than wasting it or spending it on welfare.

02:33:51.760 It's not necessarily wasting it, but it's not productive.

02:33:54.820 But how you reduce your welfare bill is by getting more people employed.

02:34:01.900 That's right.

02:34:02.360 And by making people feel better about themselves.

02:34:04.580 And there's nothing like being part of a gang and a national movement

02:34:07.720 and a sense of national urgency to get you into that sense of purpose.

02:34:13.040 And the moment you've got a sense of purpose, you stop feeling blue and down in the dumps.

02:34:16.600 And you think, actually, no, I've got a reason to be getting on with things.

02:34:19.160 Oh, and by the way, I've got a salary now, which is where I'm now contributing to the tax coffers,

02:34:23.880 which is bringing more money in which means that less money is going out everyone's a winner

02:34:28.520 I mean I make it sound very very simple actually it is quite simple not easy but it is simple it is

02:34:35.620 it is simple and there are really really simple solutions it's just the current government and

02:34:41.300 recent governments don't seem to want to be able to take those solutions James that was the perfect

02:34:45.360 answer to the question we normally ask but didn't need to which is what's the one thing we're not

02:34:48.800 talking about what a pleasure has been to have you on to talk about this thank you so much people

02:34:52.860 should read all your books they should listen to your podcast with al murray of course um and you

02:34:58.640 are now going to join us uh on substack where we'll put a few questions from our audience too

02:35:02.960 so thank you so much yeah please do uh thank you for watching head on over to triggerpod.co.uk

02:35:08.040 if hitler had been accepted into the academy of fine arts in vienna

02:35:13.200 and did not become the leader of germany would another version of world war ii have still been

02:35:17.640 inevitable.

TRIGGERnometry - July 08, 2026

The Failed Artist Who Became Hitler with Historian James Holland

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