Valuetainment - February 12, 2026


“My Father Joined The Nazi Party” - Ritz-Carlton Founder REVEALS Growing Up In Hitler’s Germany

Hosted by
Patrick Bet-David
Mentioned
Hitler Stauffenberg Hattie Fuhrer
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Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

169.33

Word count

1,847

Sentence count

150

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Born in 1939 in Stuttgart, Germany, to a German father and Austrian mother. His father was a Nazi soldier, his mother was a communist, and he grew up in a very poor family. At the age of 11 years old, he went to work in a hotel to support his family.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So let's get right into it. As I'm going through the story, I'm like, wait a minute.
00:00:04.920 He was born in 1939 in Stuttgart, Germany.
00:00:08.680 It wasn't Stuttgart, but it was Germany.
00:00:09.980 Outside of Stuttgart in the wine area, you know, where wine...
00:00:13.360 And apparently it's right next to Luxembourg in France on that area, where it's like perfect market to create wine.
00:00:19.640 So to go from there to where you are today, I want to first go into the story, how everything got started.
00:00:25.140 When you were born, what was Germany going through?
00:00:28.620 Start of the war.
00:00:30.260 Beginning of the war in 1939.
00:00:32.080 In fact, my father was drafted late 1939.
00:00:36.320 And came back in between, but left permanently, if you will, in 1941.
00:00:43.460 I got to know him.
00:00:44.520 I got to meet him the next time when I was seven.
00:00:47.360 So you meet your father first time at seven years old?
00:00:50.400 Well, I consciously met him.
00:00:51.540 I mean, I was a baby, yeah.
00:00:54.620 In fact, I was playing with another kid in the mud heap somewhere in a village. 1.00
00:01:00.340 I lived in a village.
00:01:01.600 Somebody came around and said, go home, your dad came home.
00:01:04.680 Go home, your dad came home.
00:01:06.320 So I ran down the street, go home, was a couple hundred yards,
00:01:09.740 ran there and there was a bunch of people assembled already.
00:01:13.760 Every neighbor, everybody in town.
00:01:15.360 That was the news when a guy came back from prison camp.
00:01:18.680 and he just came back
00:01:22.280 and I went through the miles
00:01:23.920 I knew it was him
00:01:24.740 it's a guy with a tattered uniform
00:01:26.920 and everybody else wasn't
00:01:28.760 so I got in and I looked at him
00:01:31.020 and I said that
00:01:32.380 and he knew who I was
00:01:33.920 what was that reaction?
00:01:35.740 shock and moment
00:01:37.700 people crying and so on
00:01:40.320 that is what you remember
00:01:41.320 the extremes you remember in the moment
00:01:43.340 do you remember that day till today?
00:01:44.720 oh yeah sure
00:01:45.140 no kidding
00:01:48.240 I mean, I was born in Iran in 78.
00:01:53.060 So when the revolution happened and we left in 89.
00:01:56.320 So living in that environment impacts your life in a big way as a kid.
00:01:59.600 No doubt.
00:02:00.120 What did it do to you?
00:02:01.800 Well, I don't exactly understand because I was there and with 11 years old and somehow that must all have an impact.
00:02:13.680 With 11 years, I went to my parents and said, I want to go to work.
00:02:16.980 I want to work in a hotel.
00:02:18.760 At 11 years old.
00:02:19.680 Yeah, and I'd never, there was no hotel in the village.
00:02:22.420 Never been in a hotel.
00:02:23.480 I'd never been in a restaurant.
00:02:25.180 So how do you know this?
00:02:25.940 Are you watching a movie?
00:02:26.900 Are you reading books?
00:02:28.500 Everybody is wondering, I must have read something.
00:02:31.080 Exactly.
00:02:32.120 My mother never forgave me because, never forgave herself
00:02:37.480 because she then inquired, how are we going to do that?
00:02:42.200 When I kept on begging and begging and crying.
00:02:44.460 and so somebody said well he should start in a very good hotel so they look what's the best hotel
00:02:51.420 unfortunately it was only over 100 kilometers away so at 14 i actually left lived in a dorm room
00:02:59.300 in that hotel and all that was an impact of the environment where that came from and
00:03:05.980 we sat down often with my parents and tried to analyze it there was no real answer
00:03:14.140 No movie, no book, no person, no teacher.
00:03:17.760 There was a movie that went on at the time.
00:03:19.160 Are you kidding?
00:03:19.460 I know what I'm trying to find out about, Hattie, because I read somewhere as well that you said as early as four years old, you knew you wanted to be in the hotel business.
00:03:27.220 No, it was 11.
00:03:28.180 11 years old?
00:03:28.840 Yeah.
00:03:28.980 Okay.
00:03:29.360 Yeah.
00:03:29.560 So when I read this, Rob, where was it we read that said as early as four years old?
00:03:33.460 I said four years old.
00:03:34.600 For him to know at four years old.
00:03:36.040 How does that happen?
00:03:36.920 No, no.
00:03:37.340 What was it like?
00:03:38.640 Maybe, you know, because today when we read about it, 39, Germany goes to war.
00:03:43.660 uh in september i think you're born april 25th so five months january 10th january 10th okay so
00:03:49.340 you're born january 10th yeah okay so january online says april 25th by the way and now you're
00:03:54.100 pretty private with your uh with your uh yeah so january 10th you're born a few months later the
00:03:59.160 country goes to war what is the conditions like where you're living i know of course you don't
00:04:03.440 remember that that age yes yes you do because there were some such extremes uh pretty soon we
00:04:09.500 We went to sleep in the cellar.
00:04:12.980 We broke the cellar wall in
00:04:15.840 so in case the house would collapse,
00:04:18.680 we could go into the next neighbor and so on, so on.
00:04:21.360 They were all connected.
00:04:23.820 My mother, my father joined the Nazi party
00:04:27.600 because he was working.
00:04:29.340 My mother was a major negative.
00:04:32.120 And let me give you a story that is hard to believe.
00:04:35.920 My father, we didn't hear from him.
00:04:38.360 My parents didn't hear from him.
00:04:40.500 But my grandfather, who was hated Nazis,
00:04:45.340 every morning came to my house.
00:04:47.760 He lived in a different house.
00:04:49.340 At 7 a.m., took the axe that was there from wood chopping block
00:04:54.100 and stayed behind the door and looked through the slot in the door,
00:04:58.100 the old wooden door.
00:04:59.680 Because the chief Nazi went to work that morning. 0.57
00:05:03.280 When he went to work, he stopped in the families
00:05:06.240 where the sun had fallen.
00:05:07.760 and informed them.
00:05:10.080 And my grandfather was a unique character,
00:05:12.860 said if our son died, he will die too.
00:05:16.260 When he comes in here to report, he's going to die.
00:05:19.500 So you think you don't know that as a kid,
00:05:23.400 Opa is coming to take the axe.
00:05:26.500 That was a normal daily routine.
00:05:29.420 So you can't help but remember those things, you know.
00:05:32.880 or when there was the message that Hitler had been killed
00:05:38.740 for a moment in the radio.
00:05:40.480 My mother was in the grocery store buying grocery when it came. 0.99
00:05:45.460 The Fuhrer has been killed for a moment that was out, 0.93
00:05:49.860 and, of course, that changed a few minutes later.
00:05:52.760 And my mother said, God said, thank God, it's time.
00:05:58.420 She was arrested the next day.
00:06:00.040 Stop it.
00:06:00.700 Just for a day, because her uncle was a Nazi. 0.59
00:06:05.260 So that's what life was.
00:06:07.800 There was nothing.
00:06:08.800 But what was there at the same time, everything was still continuing.
00:06:13.780 You still had something to eat.
00:06:16.500 There still was kindergarten, even though when you had to walk in the kindergarten,
00:06:20.900 you had to greet Hitler, the painting of Hitler.
00:06:26.280 But it was all functioning somewhat.
00:06:29.160 it's right after the war
00:06:32.100 when nothing was functioning anymore
00:06:33.760 there was a total breakdown
00:06:35.360 because there was no control
00:06:36.600 there was nothing there
00:06:38.220 the interesting thing at the time
00:06:40.780 the Allies decided
00:06:42.220 nobody who was a Nazi
00:06:43.740 could work in a leadership role
00:06:46.100 well everybody who was in a leadership role
00:06:49.820 if you were running a
00:06:51.940 war
00:06:52.240 you had to be a Nazi 0.83
00:06:55.200 you had to be a Nazi 0.91
00:06:57.080 otherwise you
00:06:58.260 So who do you put into these roles now?
00:07:02.500 It was Patton, in fact, who said,
00:07:05.020 no, we're not going to do that.
00:07:06.000 We have to put the people back to understand the job.
00:07:10.040 I mean, there was a total breakdown.
00:07:13.480 There was no school.
00:07:14.360 There was no transportation.
00:07:16.420 There was nothing after the war, right after the war.
00:07:20.080 So that was, and of course,
00:07:22.660 it created such extreme moments that you do remember, no doubt.
00:07:28.260 Okay, when I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice.
00:07:33.820 I want to help my kids, and I want to give back to the community.
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00:07:59.040 The inflation, there was some reports I saw that the price of bread could double every two hours, every four hours.
00:08:06.280 Some weird stories that you would read about.
00:08:09.360 So do you remember the day it was announced that Hitler died?
00:08:13.460 No, I don't remember, no.
00:08:14.920 I only knew my mother was in trouble.
00:08:17.700 She got arrested.
00:08:18.600 Yeah, yeah.
00:08:19.140 And this was even the right one.
00:08:20.960 This is a day that she thought he died, that he didn't die.
00:08:23.580 For the moment, for the moment was announced.
00:08:26.380 Stauffenberg, who tried to kill him, thought he was dead.
00:08:28.780 He announced and was open.
00:08:30.000 That's how everybody was exposed because they got a message he died.
00:08:35.580 Consequently, everybody that was part of the plot, 20,000 exposed themselves,
00:08:40.520 took over in various towns and were killed afterwards.
00:08:44.340 That's how they knew they were all involved, that huge plot, yeah.
00:08:48.200 20,000.
00:08:49.220 Yeah.
00:08:49.420 How do you, because when I'm seeing you speak or I watch your interviews or I sit down with you right now or you're coming up to me, read this book, I'm going to help you change your life, you're a very positive figure, right?
00:09:00.920 Your intensity, your energy, you've been married for many years, you're a man of faith, you know, you speak in a very eloquent way.
00:09:07.400 Even at that moment, were you staying positive?
00:09:11.100 Was it your mom that helped you be positive?
00:09:12.880 My mom, my mom.
00:09:13.580 How would your mom make you positive?
00:09:15.260 were very positive about life, about everything.
00:09:20.120 In Germany at that time?
00:09:21.400 In Germany at that time.
00:09:22.340 Good for her.
00:09:22.960 For example, also, my dad, who we didn't hear from for over a year
00:09:27.700 because his group was behind the lines in Russia,
00:09:33.040 so he didn't hear anything for over a year,
00:09:35.020 and we didn't know if he was alive or dead.
00:09:37.440 He was alive in our house.
00:09:39.820 My mother said, oh, that's a good job.
00:09:41.780 I would tell dad, or don't do that.
00:09:43.960 Your dad won't like that.
00:09:44.800 So he was constantly alive there.
00:09:48.800 And she kept him in the house.
00:09:53.300 And it was nearly like he was there, you know.
00:09:56.920 So that was, and it's interesting, that's how mothers are.
00:10:00.200 That's a mother. 1.00
00:10:01.120 I mean, I told you when I finally, she talked me to this job,
00:10:06.120 which was far away from home.
00:10:08.420 She knew I was very homesick, but I wanted to be there.
00:10:11.820 and but she wrote me a letter every day if i didn't have one today i had two tomorrow
00:10:17.960 help me through what an amazing mother what a great story success is built on how you think
00:10:24.980 influence is built on how you show up
00:10:29.080 every detail matters because presence speaks before you do this is more than style
00:10:41.820 The future looks bright.
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