82 Minutes NSFW
 Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer 
  Thomas comes right back on the show to explain the rise of the National Socialists in the Weimar Republic/Germany. He gives background into the environment that allowed for their rise, their alliances and their obvious foes
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After hosting Jared Wall on episode 662, I have decided to become an affiliate for The Hemp Spot, that's THC Hemp Spot.

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It's always a pleasure, particularly so soon.

Well, I want to have you on a few times, especially for this 1 subject, because I know it's your specialty.

And World War 2 is absolutely fascinating.

I don't even think we can even bother getting into the Pacific at this point.

A lot of good historians Start with the Treaty of Versailles and say the Treaty of Versailles basically was the foundation for What led up to World War 2 so?

That certainly is what created the political culture of Weimar.

So I mean, that was an essential catalyst, but it wasn't the sole proximate cause.

I really, it was the Bolshevik Revolution, which was an international phenomenon.

Like, I know, I don't want to jump the gun or go too far afield into a kind of theoretical topic that's not totally material to what's right in front of us.

But, you know, I say Ernst Nolte a lot because he gets into the psychological as well as kind of the metahistorical context of the war.

And a lot of people don't like him for a lot of reasons.

I'm not going to flesh out all those reasons right here.

Not because it's controversial, but because again, I don't want to...

But the people who attack him, 1 of the things that they emphasize is they say, like, well, the Russian Revolution, that was happening in Moscow and St.

Petersburg, to a lesser degree, and in these kind of frontier territories, the Baltic.

I mean, yeah, obviously, I mean, those were primary theaters.

But, you know, in Bavaria, there was an actual communist revolution.

And in Berlin, I mean, the communists were fighting the Stahlhelm and, and the Free Corps in the street, quite literally.

It's a It's a really, really stupid movie.

It was this TV movie from about 20 years ago.

It's got Peter Sturmer as Captain Rom, which is kind of cool, but it's called Hitler, Rise of Evil.

I mean, That's an overwrought title if there ever was 1, Rise of Evil.

But there's a scene in Munich where the communists are literally shooting it out with Peter Sturmer as Ram and these Stalholm type guys.

So the, you know, the national socialists, I mean, yeah.

Like that was the only reason there were, like the Treaty of Versailles and the fact that it became clear, you know, that the Allies weren't really interested in creating some kind of workable political order that the, you know, combatant states, or the former combatant states could live with.

They were basically interested in looting Germany.

But national socialism, to understand national socialism and understand the 20th century, generally, you've got to understand communism and you understand the fact that there's a revolutionary paradigm underway.

And like Nolte said, it was like a European Civil War was underway.

And that's so I mean, yeah, but I but again the the treaty conditions were such that I mean that That should not be just that should be indisputable to people.

I mean wherever they fall on the issue were whatever, however, even if they read a very reputative view of Germany, you know any I mean incidentally to that's I've gone to I've got a bad for Wilson before not something Wilson was a good man, or because I think he, he was this great president or something, but you can't really hang responsibility for Versailles and, and the, the kind of disaster of the, of the, of the punitive piece on Wilson.

You know, Wilson's 14 points, I mean, that might seem kind of highfalutin and silly from a real politic perspective, But Wilson didn't want to punish Berlin.

He was disgusted by the Treaty of Versailles, and he threw his hands up.

Instead, because he realized that he basically bailed out, quite literally, London and Paris.

And then they paid him back by saying, okay, now's our chance to loot Germany and not remedy the conditions that gave rise to the war in the first place.

I don't really, but at the same time, it's important not to reduce things just to that.

Like I've heard, I know people like Ian Kershaw, they act like Adolf Hitler was some kind of con man who just capitalized on these kinds of grievances that were kind of middling.

I mean, first of all, Weimar really was tailored to wreck the German economy.

It wasn't just this misunderstanding or this kind of somewhat objectionable piece that these crazy German chauvinists just decided to fixate on.

You're going to provoke some kind of hostile reaction if you impose something like that on a people.

Even if you hate the Germans, you don't care, or you just don't care about their fortunes as a people.

I mean, why, if you're gonna subject people to a starvation regime, I mean, you're not, you're not looking forward to a workable piece.

You're going to just generate structural instability.

Yeah, it seems that Weimar, 1 of the easiest ways to destroy it was the way they always do it through the banks.

Well it's also the thing with World War I is this, I object strongly, people are always people think they're being smart, you know, when they say smedley butler and I'm like, yeah, you know, war is just about, you know, Wall Street.

I mean, wars are bad for business generally.

The fact that the fact that there's firms and individual men who find ways to profit from war, or the fact that there's guys like Dick Cheney and like Halliburton, who were that's basically their MO.

I mean, you know, there's guys, there's guys who have some kind of run the make in all kind of sectors of political life.

But, but on its face, you know, Wall Street is never shit hot to go to war because there's some way to make money.

But at the same time, like crazy as it might sound to us, I mean, because we take kind of informational awareness for granted, there was a strong financial aspect to the Great War as regards America.

Morgan, they extended a huge amount of unsecured credit to the British crown.

And the British had essentially said this diplomatic delegation that also had these kind of high flying banker types with them.

And they'd approached Wall Street in 1915 when it became clear that kind of a quagmire was setting in.

They secured all this unsecured, they secured this huge unsecured line of credits basically saying, in just a few months, we'll have broken the back of the German war machine and then we're all going to get paid.

And then it became clear that wasn't going to happen.

Morgan essentially got on the phone, quite literally, with a telegram, telegraph, as it were, probably to the Colonel House and Wilson and said, you fix this right now.

You know, you cannot, you are not going to let London lose this war and you're not going to let us eat this loss.

I mean, that wasn't the sole reason why Wilson went to war.

You know, so I mean, it was there's a whole lot of there's a lot of very, very corrupt stuff going on.

And that was it was more a little more opaque and whatever the Second World War Like people lie about the Second World War a lot and say crazy things about it.

And, you know, there's ethno sectarian narratives about it that are negatively political, but it's more kind of clear cut.

Like the Great War doesn't really make a lot of sense.

It was a strange example of security paradigms kind of not really matching up with the technology of the day, like the killing technology, I mean, of the battlefield.

It was like a basic failure at the turns.

I mean, that's why it's really interesting, frankly.

It, you know, and I think I genuinely think, you know, the last we take for granted because, you know, the war between the states, like really, really, really screwed things up in America for decades.

You know, it did like America didn't really normalize until the turn of the century.

But Europe, Europe after Waterloo didn't really fight any major wars.

I mean, there's the Crimean War, but I mean, that was kind of localized in theater like in literally the Crimea you know and there was the Franco-Prussian War which you know was a like this kind of incredible you know German victory.

I mean I realized Prussia wasn't Germany yet but you know the modern German state is the Prussian state until 1945, in my opinion.

But, point being, it's not like Europe had fought some, like, heavy, heavy conflicts in the 19th century, and we're developing a sense of what that modern battlefield was going to look like and how it was going to impact national economies and things and how it was going to create shortages and how it was basically just going to slaughter people.

I even, even, and predict like the, I think the German high command, I think, I think the Kaiser, right.

And this isn't just because I I've got a warmer view of Germany than I do the other combatant states.

They had a better idea of how things were gonna develop.

And that's 1 of the reasons why Holvig, the chancellor was beside himself and it became clear that France was gonna go to war.

Cause I think he, despite He wasn't any kind of military man, but he knew that some kind of slaughter was going to happen.

But I think, you know, if you read the kind of internal memorandums, I mean, what amounts of internal memorandums and kind of internal debate and discussion in London and in Paris, and to a lesser degree, like within the czars kind of inner circle, but that's a bit more complicated.

They thought it was going to be kind of a brush fire affair.

Or they thought that the Germans just basically wanted to force some kind of concessions on their key demands.

And but, OK, well, we'll just fight for a little while and then we can come to the table and position a strength.

That's not at all the way the Kaiserites saw it.

They certainly didn't think that they were going to lose a million people, But they didn't think it was going to be this four-year-long, just kind of like endless, destructive affair.

So what most people know about Weimar is there's 2 things.

1, that it became really degenerate morally, and 2, the money supply got inflated to the point where people needed wheelbarrows full of money in order to buy a loaf of bread, which is probably just lore, but I hope it's lore.

What's your understanding of what was going on there?

I mean, like I said, the, the, like we're talking about, you know, the,

but was it like, I mean, it, it almost seems like, you know, how now we have these people, it's like, oh, we have to teach kindergartners about queer theory.

Things like, I mean, it's like, it almost seems when you think about it, when you look back and you, if you know anything about the history of Prussia, And then you go forward to Weimar, it's like that looks planned.

That looks like somebody injected that into there on purpose.

Even the degeneracy, even the whole idea of siphoning and looting the country, which I think in the modern day, we could talk about Ukraine.

But it seems like that was all planned, you know, that it was sure a lot of people are going to loot a lot of countries.

But I mean, they made sure that it was going to be catastrophic because they not only defeated them, destroyed their money supply, but they destroyed their morality.

And, well, it's also, too, The starvation blockade endured for months after the cessation of hostilities.

With regard to the kind of moral deviancy, yeah, I mean, it wasn't as centrally orchestrated as was the case post-1945 in the Bundesrepublik.

The Bundesrepublik, and particularly West Berlin, was flooded with pornography after the Second World War.

If you read Wilhelm Reich, he was this German Jewish psychologist.

He wrote about that, about breaking the moral foundation of peoples in order to essentially make them malleable.

I mean, so this is more about boring people think, but that there definitely was an, yeah, there definitely was intentional subversion in that regard, but It's like, I generally agree with E.

I'm not going too far afield because it's material to what we're talking about in a very direct way.

Michael Jones was coming back to the idea that, you know, look, like Marquis de Sade was actually, he considered himself to be a political thinker.

You know, he wasn't just this, he wasn't just this kind of sick individual, sort of degenerate aristocrat, like writing pornography and writing about sex, because that's what kind of decadent aristocrats do.

But he was widely publishing this stuff because his notion was that, you know, well, you know, the, the foundation of what I don't like in France and in Europe generally is this kind of thrown in alter sensibility where you've got this kind of, you've got Roman Catholicism propping up the seat of sovereignty in the monarchy and it derives its legitimacy from a claim that it reflects providential design.

And the basis of that is the preeminence of reason over passion and irrational things.

So it wasn't just that, you know, DeSade didn't like females and he didn't, or that he was a sadist and a homosexual, or that he wanted to kind of screw with people's morals and horrify them.

I like he wanted to do all of those things, but his idea was also that, well, if I can get people to say, why do I want to privilege reason over over my passions?

I just want to, you know, I just want to do things that feel good or I want to pursue, you know, sexually deviant stuff or why why should I be a family man when I can, you know, visit prostitutes or, you know, why, why would I want to be involved with women anyway, when I can, you know, go go with men and just kind of do whatever I want.

You know, I mean, that this this idea that sexuality and like social morals like aren't political like that's nonsense.

And it also, you know, I mean, people in Germany were, it wasn't just like far right guys and stuff.

I mean, people were very cognizant of these things in those days, you know, like not because they were a bunch of prudes or they weren't, you know, worldly or something.

You know, if anything, people then were like a lot more worldly than now.

It was like life and death was kind of like in their everyday life.

And particularly then you had you know, you had millions of guys milling about in Germany who kind of come, they'd, you know, they'd spent their formative years, you know, in the military, you know, it's not this idea that Germany was this provincial kind of place and they freaked out about sex.

But they, you know, so not only Germans, they saw what was going on in terms of that kind of subversion, but it's also, you know, the National Socialists, for better or worse, they were not conservatives and they didn't pretend to be.

Speaking of Rom, the reason why guys like Rom were in the ranks, particularly in the revolutionary phase, it's like Hitler said when people objected to some of these characters being in his milieu, he's like, you know, yeah, Ron might be a degenerate guy, but he's great under fire.

And I think Hitler said, you know, the SA is a tough fighting force.

It's not a finishing school for young ladies.

So I don't give a shit what these guys do when they're off time as long as they're loyal and they're willing to fight.

And so my point is that it's not like Hitler and it's not, you know, or even Strasser or any of these guys.

It's not the National Social Movement become popular because these guys are a bunch of, you know, kind of moralizing conservatives.

And it's not like they, it's not like they, you know, just fixated on pornography and, and socially deviant things because they, they were these uptight conservatives.

Like, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with conservatism or objecting those things.

My point is that this stuff is so extreme and so nakedly political.

That's why the National Socialists were reacting to it so strongly.

To Jones's point, that kind of stuff is always political.

It's never truly just secular, never truly just incidental political occurrences.

Never truly just, you know, incidental political occurrences, but it was, it was so, it was so nakedly tailored to attack the kind of prevailing social order and, and things that it, it became a priority to, to remedy it to the kind of radical right, the radical, you know, national socialist right.

You had already mentioned that you talk about Rom fighting in the streets, basically of civil war in the streets in Germany in the 20s.

So how does Weimar, how do the National Socialists come out of this?

I mean, my opinion is that Germany was doing a little bit better.

Gustav Strassman, he found a way of kind of mere compliance with the reparations payments.

And he was also able to draw, Germany even at its worst, people have confidence in its ability to produce and get a return on their investments.

I'm not saying he was a good man or that he was like on the side of his own people, like the way he should have been, but you can't dismiss him as this race traitor or bad guy.

Not that I am some kind of authority on economics, but point being, Stressman was able to garner a fair amount of direct foreign investment.

Such that, I mean, there wasn't the kind of complex interdependence in those days that we take for granted today, but The national economy was bouncing back to a degree.

Germany was beginning to come to terms a bit with London, not so much with Paris.

But then the 1929 financial crisis happened, collapse happened, rather it wasn't as a crisis, and that threw Germany into a tailspin in a lot of ways.

And all the kind of ground they gained seemed to have evaporated overnight.

And that really put the National Socialists back on the map.

Plus, the international situation was getting more critical too.

I think it was around 1929, 1930 that it started to become clear.

I mean, even though the Soviet Union was nothing like it was 10 years subsequent, but it became clear that the Soviet Union was going to, was becoming a superpower that those concepts, those kind of geo-strategic concepts weren't really in people's mind yet, but people understood the power potential of America.

And they understood, I mean, especially the Germans, they fought the Americans.

You know, they'd taken the full brunt of the US Army, which is not any fun thing, especially in those days.

But the power potential of the Soviet Union was becoming apparent.

I mean, aside from the fact that Bolshevism had become something of a psychological contagion.

I'm not saying that, it's not melodramatic, that's the best way I can describe it.

There was like the apocalypse, the conditions of the epoch seem to be favoring communism and people really freaked out.

And like I said, it wasn't just that the 1929 collapse, it didn't just kick people's asses.

I mean, it did people all across the planet, but I mean, every major developed economy, but it was especially brutal to the Germans because they'd actually been making ground, you know, after, after, in the wake of, you know, the catastrophe in 1918.

And then, and then they suddenly just, you know, all those gains just evaporate overnight.

It was kind of like the final nail in the coffin of people's willingness to accept that there was some sort of parliamentary democratic solution to their problems.

Adolf Hitler, in a lot of ways, he pioneered kind of what we, what became kind of, you know, modern campaigning techniques of the 20th century.

That's why in, you know, in Triumph of the Will, you know, how there's this, it opens up with this, you know, aerial shot of Hitler's aircraft descending out of the airfield, breaches the clouds.

It was kind of like The camera work was pretty radical.

The reason why it's a big deal, It wasn't just Hitler trying to flex about how cool his PR staff was.

Hitler was the first national political figure to shoot all over the place in a plane so that he could campaign face to face.

That was a big deal because people didn't do that before, you know.

I mean, Hitler was basically campaigning his ass off.

I'm always telling people to read Hitler's second book that was unpublished.

It's just called the second book, even though it never actually was a book, it was just a manuscript.

Because it was discovered after the day of defeat.

But that's basically Hitler's geopolitical book.

Like Mein Kopp is like, it's basically, it's Hitler like making his case to the German voter as to why you should vote for a National Socialist.

That's already that's goofy when you get these losers, whether it was, you know, old Chrissy Hitchens or whether it's Ian Kershaw, it's like, oh, my cop's a terrible book.

It's like, well, bro, it's not it's not supposed to be Shakespeare.

It's like it's it's it's a man who's, you know, running for political office saying why you should vote for his party.

I mean, that's not gonna be a compelling reading a century after the fact.

People act like the National Socialists pulled the wool over everybody's eyes by pretending to be this aboveboard party.

They were a political party that wanted people to vote for them and people did.

They accomplished a parliamentary majority.

They were able to finagle a chancellorship out of it.

Their primary opposition was engaged in a war against the legitimate, against the seat of government.

It was entirely legitimate to ban the KPD.

It's like, you don't have to like Hitler, you don't have to like National Socialism.

But unlike the Bolsheviks in Russia, who just kind of killed people because they didn't get what they wanted, the National Socialists were the legitimate government of Germany.

I mean, that, I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves.

I mean, that's 1 of the interesting things about other Nuremberg narratives tailored.

I mean, this idea that, you know, the government of Germany was illegitimate.

I mean, you could say that it was an evil government, I guess, if that turns you on, but it wasn't this illegal, literally illegitimate government.

The election returns that the National Socialists got were above board.

The point I made, the plebiscite that made Hitler the Führer, Hitler had something totally insane, like 89.3% of German voters thought he was great.

They didn't love the National Socialist Party.

They had a healthy plurality, but the key takeaway is that the Germans loved Adolf Hitler, not that they loved the party that he represented.

But That's basically what Adolf Hitler was doing.

When he got cut loose from Landsberg prison, that's just what he said about doing.

It was an interesting give and take between him and the Weimar government.

On the 1 hand, he and Schubert Richter and Ludendorff, who in those days was still an ally of Hitler, they literally merged against the guns of Weimar, but when Hitler found himself in court, they actually treated him pretty, I mean, they treated him really, really, not just efficaciously.

I mean, they really showed him a lot of slack.

So I mean, I think Hitler realized the writing was on the wall and that there wasn't some kind of, he wasn't gonna be able to duplicate what Mussolini had done in Rome in 1922.

It wasn't Hitler being a nice guy or something, but part of it was also that, you know, he realized he wasn't gonna be marginalized by, you know, being locked away for 20 years or being banned from public life or something.

So it's like, well, among other things, it would have been unseemly for him to continue on a revolutionary course after that.

And it probably would have been counterproductive, absent some kind of, absent some kind of situation like happened in the Baltic states where, you know, the, you really did have, you know, a kind of bloody civil war under conditions of parity.

Germany was dealing with a revolutionary paradigm on the ground, but it was localized.

That's why the Munich Soviet was the big communist big coup, because that's where they could pull that off.

They didn't have the political capital, the forces of being to pull it off nationwide.

That does not mean it was any less of an existential threat.

Owing to the international situation, it didn't matter if most Germans weren't communists.

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Episode 720: The Rise of the National Socialists in the Weimar Republic/Germany w/ Thomas777