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History As It Happens
Inside the Nazi Mind
00:56:05
Does history provide us with lessons, or does the past offer warnings about what might happen now based on human tendencies that transcend time and culture? In his new book The Nazi Mind, the historian and filmmaker Laurence Rees studies the Nazi...
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- [00:01]
Martin DeCaro
I say this every election cycle and I'll say it again. The 2024 political field was intense. So don't get left behind in 2025. If you're running for office, the first thing on your to do list should be securing your name on the web.
- [00:17]
Lawrence Rees
With the your name.vote domain from GoDaddy.com you'll stand out and make your mark. Don't wait. Get yours today.
- [00:28]
Martin DeCaro
History as it happens May 6, 2025 inside the Nazi mind.
- [00:34]
Lawrence Rees
This year, they say there are 800,000 pairs of boots standing heel to heel, waiting for the Fuhrer's final speech. And the high spot comes when, after a detailed review of Nazi achievements, Hitler cries, my life's fight has not been in vain. Leibish camp is dichtom sanke. Throughout 12 long, the German people were regimented willingly, for the most part, into a machine which substituted for personal freedom, the cult of mass obedience.
- [01:18]
Martin DeCaro
We must continue to study the Third Reich. But which lessons or warnings from the past can be applied to today's global crisis of democracy? What are the right questions to ask? Did Hitler hypnotize his followers? Why were the young susceptible to Nazism's call? How did the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes in history justify or cope with their actions? Why did the German people get behind Hitler? That's next with Lawrence Reiss, who takes us inside the Nazi mind as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
- [01:51]
Lawrence Rees
It is complex because each situation is different, every situation is unique. But I do think you can certainly point to something fundamental that's going on with Hitler that's interesting in broader terms. The first is, I think, that there's a massive overemphasis in popular culture about the great sort of charismatic leadership of Hitler, that he kind of looks in your eyes and you immediately succumb and so on. Hitler hypnotized nobody. He may have been as classic definition of Max Weber, the German sociologist, defined charismatic leadership. He may well fit absolutely into the role of the charismatic leader, but that doesn't mean that he's convincing people by some kind of supernatural tactic. I've met people who heard Hitler talk in the early 1920s who thought he was incredible and wonderful. And I met other people who heard him talk, who thought he was a complete jerk.
- [02:46]
Martin DeCaro
In the opening pages of his new book, the Nazi Mind, historian Lawrence Reese lets us know why he prefers to study the warnings rather than the lessons from history. I focus on warnings, he says, because I don't believe that history has any precise lessons how often, for instance, do we read on social media that a lesson politicians should take from Nazism is that you shouldn't appease a foreign power? Remember, they say Winston Churchill warned against appeasing Hitler, and so appeasement is wrong. But history doesn't work like that, says Reese. While it's true that Churchill didn't appease Hitler, he appeased Stalin a great deal. So what is the lesson here? You can appease some people in some circumstances, but don't appease others in different circumstances. However, unlike a lesson, which is a fixed rule, a warning is only a tendency. This history matters, he says. Many democracies are currently under threat, and it is useful to be aware of the techniques that would be tyrants are likely to use to suborn our freedoms. But I'm conscious, says Reese, that this remains a history book, not a piece of political commentary, and that without knowing the history, the warnings can't fully be grasped.
- [04:01]
Lawrence Rees
The Camaraderie.
- [04:20]
Martin DeCaro
The Nazi mind 12 warnings from history by Lawrence Reese is out today, published by Public affairs, an imprint of Hatchet Book Group. I read an advance copy to prepare for this episode. In fact, all my questions from Lawrence Reese are informed by the arguments he makes about the Nazi mentalities he studies, applying the discipline of psychology without psychoanalyzing people who've been dead for decades. As you know, if you've been listening to my podcast over the past couple of years, the story of the Third Reich always matters. The challenge is when we take what we learn from books like this one, to try to understand our current dilemmas without reaching for FaceTime comparisons, without distorting the definitions of terms like fascism. And yes, you know where I'm going with this. Lawrence's book, as he said, is not a piece of political commentary. But as you read it, you might think, as I did, about how to apply his warnings to what is happening in the United States right now. I mean, think of the conspiracy theories and racist lies Donald Trump has repeated about immigrants, especially during the campaign last year. And some of these statements, you may recall, provoked his critics to compare him to Hitler. What they have done to our country.
- [05:33]
Lawrence Rees
By allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country.
- [05:37]
Martin DeCaro
And look at what's happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don't want to talk. It's not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don't want to.
- [05:46]
Lawrence Rees
Talk about it because they're so embarrassed by it.
- [05:48]
Martin DeCaro
In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in they're eating the cats, they're eating, they're eating the.
- [05:57]
Lawrence Rees
Pets of the people that live there.
- [06:01]
Martin DeCaro
They're poisoning the blood of our country. That's what they've done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world.
- [06:08]
Lawrence Rees
Not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we.
- [06:11]
Martin DeCaro
Think about, but all over the world. They're coming into our country from Africa.
- [06:17]
Lawrence Rees
From Asia, all over the world. They're pouring into our country.
- [06:20]
Martin DeCaro
Nobody's even looking at them. They just come in and it's true. They're destroying the blood of our country.
- [06:26]
Lawrence Rees
That's what they're doing.
- [06:27]
Martin DeCaro
They're destroying our country. They don't like it. When I said that and I never read Mein Kampf, they said, oh, Hitler.
- [06:34]
Lawrence Rees
Said that in a much different way.
- [06:36]
Martin DeCaro
Donald Trump is not Hitler. Hitler was Hitler. But what is it about conspiracy theories that make them so potent? Why do demagogues sway some people while others, when listening to a figure like Donald Trump, come away thinking he's a buffoon? Can we find the answer in us versus them thinking? That is one warning you'll read about in the Nazi mind. Another is attacking human rights. Another is exploiting faith. Rees says Hitler understood the immense power of faith. If your followers have complete faith in you, then no amount of reasoned argument will convince them that they're wrong. Lawrence Reese is an acclaimed author and filmmaker, the former head of BBC TV history programs. His work includes the TV series and best selling books Auschwitz, the Nazis and the Final solution, World War II behind closed doors and the dark charisma of Adolf Hitler. Our conversation next History is defined by.
- [07:35]
Lawrence Rees
The names that stand the test of time. Names that inspire, unite and lead. Now it's your turn to create a lasting legacy with a dot vote domain. Whether you're running for office, driving change or rallying support, a dot vote domain ensures your name is as memorable as those in the history books. Visit GoDaddy.com, type in your name. Vote and secure a web address that stands out. Claim your place in history with dot Vote.
- [08:03]
Martin DeCaro
Lawrence Reese, welcome.
- [08:05]
Lawrence Rees
Hi Martin.
- [08:06]
Martin DeCaro
This is your first time on the podcast, so just briefly tell our listeners a little bit about your illustrious career. You have been writing about, studying, doing documentary films about the Third Reich for decades.
- [08:20]
Lawrence Rees
Yeah, well, after Oxford, I never wanted to be an academic. I always wanted to make television documentaries. I always wanted specifically to make history documentaries. That's what I always wanted to do. I was lucky enough to get into BBC Television and I started as a researcher, worked my way up assistant Producer, director, producer, started to get to make my own films and then I was making a film about Goebbels as part of a series I was making about propaganda and started coming across former members of the Nazi party and they weren't at all like what I imagined former members of the Nazi party would be. And that pushed me on towards a kind of almost lifetime quest going into this history. From that I was commissioned to do a six part series called Nazis Warning from History which was a co production with History Channel and won them won the Peabody in America. Other series, including a six part series on Auschwitz that I did with pbs. Another series I did, war series I did with pbs. All of these also I wrote books with. So I was doing books really in tandem with the TV series. And then in the last five to ten years I focused more on books. The great joy of my working life was that I got to meet people who were actually there and they're all dead now and almost all of them dead. So I was incredibly fortunate in the period in which I was interested in this because a many former Nazis were just retiring from their jobs and able to speak freely, but they were still compost. Mentis. Terrifying thought to me now that many of them must have been my age. You know, that's really scary thought to me. Think of when I thought how old they were. Anyway, also the other huge lucky break I had and me and my colleagues had was that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 89 opened up the whole of Eastern Europe to us to be able to go and film interviews with people who'd never been able to speak freely about the war before. So that combination was just incredibly fortuitous for both the books and the TV.
- [10:20]
Martin DeCaro
And your most recent book is excellent. The Nazi 12 Warnings from History. Not Lessons. You make it clear you're not talking about lessons, you're talking about warnings. So people who read this, As I read it, I couldn't help but think about what's going on in my own country and the world today about this authoritarianism, this authoritarian lurch in the United States and elsewhere. We do have to be careful, don't we, about drawing comparisons between the Nazis and anyone else. Right?
- [10:49]
Lawrence Rees
Yeah, I don't do that in the book at all. And the reason I don't do that in the book at all is, is twofold. One is it's taken me 35 years or more of study to feel qualified to write a book like this. I'm not qualified to know what's going on politically in your country. At the level of depth, to be able to start talking knowledgeably about it in a way to your audience that they don't know more than I do. I mean, I know no more than an informed person trying to keep in touch with the media and everything, but I've not studied it. But secondly, what I wanted to try and do with this was to create a kind of template that anybody in any of the countries the book's going to, and it's sold to many, many foreign countries, it's I'm going to France in a couple of weeks with the French launch, for instance, or the Spain or South Korea or sort of any different country. What I hope is that anybody who reads it sees themselves, the issues reflected in their own country because of their own knowledge of it. So that's what I hope to do, to provide, if you like, a template by which other people can make the judgment about. Well, that reminds me, just like you were saying, that reminds me of this or that.
- [11:58]
Martin DeCaro
Trying to understand why millions of people, whether it's in Germany in 1945 or, I don't know, Japan today, the United States, Russia, wherever, why they get behind leaders who might be rather terrible people, where they set aside their scruples for political reasons or opportunistic career reasons, what have you.
- [12:18]
Lawrence Rees
Well, it's incredibly complicated. Yes, it's terrible because I started as a TV producer and it used to drive me crazy when I talk to an academic and I'd say, what? What about this? And they just go, well, it's very complicated. I go, come on, meet me a brain. And now I find myself doing it all the time. So karmatic consequence right there. It is complex because each situation is different. Every situation is unique. But I do think you can certainly point to something fundamental that's going on with Hitler that's interesting in broader terms. The first is, I think that there's a massive overemphasis in popular culture about the great sort of charismatic leadership of Hitler, that he kind of looks in your eyes and you immediately succumb and so on. Hitler hypnotized nobody. He may have been, as classic definition of Max Weber, the German sociologist, define charismatic leadership. He may well fit absolutely into the role of a charismatic leader, but that doesn't mean that he's convincing people by some kind of supernatural talents. I've met people who heard Hitler talk in the early 1920s who thought he was incredible and wonderful, and I met other people who heard him talk who thought he was a complete jerk. So it depends on what you're bringing to it? It depends on what you in the audience are bringing to it, to what you think. First point, the second point to make is that in 1928, eight years after Hitler launched the party program in Munich, eight years in 1928, the Nazis got 2.6% of the vote. They were looked on as a joke by many people. So if his charisma and it was so amazing what went wrong and he got 2.6% of the vote, and in just a few years time, five years time, he goes on to be Chancellor of Germany, how come what happened at the head of the largest party? Well, what happened was a number of things, primarily the massive economic depression, but secondly, a sense within Germany that democracy had failed, which is complicated, but nonetheless that's what they felt. And they felt because they were going in this cycle of voting and nothing really was changing, so something had to change. And they turned both to the Nazis and some people to the communists. So you saw the whole country bifurcating. The key thing to remember, one of the key things to remember, 1932, a majority of Germans in voting either for the Nazis or the Communists, knowingly voted for parties committed to destroying democracy. They knew it and they voted for it. And that seems to me to be a phenomenal warning because people think there's a real tendency for us to think that once democracy is established in a country, people are going to think it's so fantastic they'll never vote it away. Well, just study this period.
- [15:04]
Martin DeCaro
You say Hitler did not hypnotize anybody, that people who listened to him and liked what he had to say were already inclined to believe or want to believe in those ideas, whether it was anti Semitism, German nationalism, making the country great, getting back up on their feet after the Treaty of Versailles and defeat World War I. Yet Hitler did have an ability to tap into people's emotions. He did have an ability to connect with people, because you're right, 1928, only 2%. But even before that, among the far right in Germany, the Nazis were not extraordinary. They were offering what the other far right fringe parties were offering. But they had Hitler. And in 1932, although the Nazis, that was their high watermark, we can say only 37%. That's actually quite an impressive figure when you consider how, how broken apart late Weimar German politics were. You know, no one was able to get a majority of the vote of all the parties. So 37% is actually quite impressive in that context. And the difference was Hitler. He did have a way of connecting with people.
- [16:08]
Lawrence Rees
Well, the difference is, is Hitler and the organization around him and the people around him and the way it was constructed and Hitler, absolutely. Of course, he had unique personal qualities. But it's a mistake to think that if you met him, you'd be necessarily impressed. I quote the American journalist who met him, I think, in 31 or 32 and was predisposed before he came in to be interviewed that, oh, well, this is going to be the coming man of Germany. And she said something like a minute or two in, I quote it in the book. I realized this guy's, you know, he's a little man. He's not going. Nothing's going to happen. I think the higher up, the elite you were, the more inclined you were to think he's just a waste of space and a jerk. What's going on with, in quotes, ordinary people, unquote, is that he is doing something very special, which is he is speaking to not just their innermost needs and prejudices, but he's doing something extraordinary. What he's doing is. This is where I talk about, having talked to Robert Sapolsky, the great neuroscientist at Stanford. He's taking the them and us dichotomy, which we all naturally have the tendency to split people we're dealing with into them or us. And what Hitler's doing is taking that emotional feeling, which is a look at the themness of people which his audience, many of them, are predisposed to have. And what he's doing is he isn't just saying, you're right to the audience. He's saying it's so much worse than that. He's expanding away their prejudices and their feelings in such a way that the other parts of the brain that come in and go, hold on a minute. Let's rationalize this. He's trying to suppress. He's not doing it because he knows new psychology. So what's happening is he's expanding the space of hatred, fear, prejudice, and so on so that it's an emotionally charged environment. And what he's doing is even more. More important than is often forgotten, is he's offering them a dream. So you do that, and you say, we're under horrendous threat from these people. It's horrendous. It's worse than you thought. It's a nightmare. And then he says, but there's an answer. And the answer is, we all pull together in this Volksgemeinschaft, this fuzzy idea of the people's community, where we're all classless we're all. And Germany will be this wonderful, great nation again because we'll have the people's community that we all belong to, and we'll expel all these people who are causing us damage.
- [18:31]
Martin DeCaro
He spoke in absolutes. He didn't just say, well, if we don't do this, a couple of bad things will happen in a couple of weeks, we'll be okay. He said, if we don't do this, we will simply cease to be a n nation of people. So that's crucial.
- [18:45]
Lawrence Rees
There's a lot of very interesting psychological work done on the use of hyperbole. And I think it is really interesting, which is that what Hitler's doing all the time is massively hyping everything up. It's always either or. It's always, as you say, either we do this or catastrophe. Either we do. And it creates, I think, in people a sense that they're living at a pivotal moment in history. Your life's worthwhile because never before have human beings faced such incredible traumas and challenges and the opportunity for courage. All of these sorts of things which all heighten. Heighten people's emotions.
- [19:23]
Martin DeCaro
It makes you feel like you are part of something. So I do want to ask you, though, about the way you apply the discipline of psychology to try to understand the Nazi mind. To borrow the title of your book. I want to talk about the risks for a historian of applying psychology to the behavior of historical actors, because I don't know, are there some universal truths or theories, us versus them, as you mentioned, that can help us explain the Romans as much as the Nazis, as much as the January 6 rioters, talking about different peoples living in different cultures at different periods of time.
- [19:59]
Lawrence Rees
I think the key. I've always been very, very wary of what they call psycho history. I still am. And I don't consider this a work of psycho history. The reason I don't consider it a work of psycho history is that what the kind of people before I've read who've tried to go down this route do is they go, okay, let's try and analyze Hitler's character. Let's try and look at the moment. What. What pivotal emotions did he have growing up? You know, someone once said to me, oh, he was swaddled wrong as a baby. That's the key, you know, all this kind of nonsense, right? And anyone who thinks that's an idea should read Walter Lang assessment for the OSS during the War of Hitler's Mind, which has been published, is just nonsense. I mean, he goes, hitler wanted to build the Eagle's Nest teahouse at the top of the Obersalzberg, because in getting to it, you had to go through a tunnel and get into a lift. Well, what could be more representative of his obvious desire to return to the womb than this? You know, and actually, it wasn't his idea to build it. You know, he didn't really like that place. Martin Borman wanted to build it. His house was further down the mountain, and no one could describe that as resembling a womb. You know, so it's this kind of thing or labeling, you know, he was a narcissistic sadist of the. You know, and the trouble with psychological labeling of individuals is a how do you know they're dead? You're not talking to them directly, and you're not qualified to make that judgment. But secondly, there's a real risk in doing that that you let people off the hook by labeling them like that. I decry that, which is what I call psychohistory. I'm doing something different. What I'm doing is talking to leading academic psychologists, social behavioral, evolutionary psychologists, and also neuroscientists about general tendencies in human behavior and the structures of the human mind. And we've all got a human mind. We've all got. I hope we've all got minds. We've all got these general tendencies that we go to. That's why I call it warnings from history, because a warning is a tendency. You go to your doctor and say, I'm smoking 100 cigarettes a day. And the doctor says, well, I'm going to warn you that you've got really big health risks doing that. The doctor can't know it's going to kill you. You might live to be 100. You might be one of the tiny, lucky ones, but you're likely not to. It's a warning. So what I'm talking about, every single thing I put into it in this regard as a warning is a tendency. So, for example, the tendency towards them and us. I didn't realize that the frontal cortex, the bit of the brain we use to absolutely analyze different situations, isn't fully formed until we're 25. Which means that younger people, particularly in the Hitler Youth or these other youth organizations across the world, they're much more susceptible to fanaticism and to radical behavior than people once the frontal cortex is fully formed.
- [22:56]
Martin DeCaro
Maybe the Nazis didn't understand these psychological concepts, but they did understand the importance of the youth.
- [23:04]
Lawrence Rees
Absolutely. And there's a clear, massive attempt to target youth, first of all, because it chimes with Hitler's absolute belief in the world as a place for the strongest, attacking and destroying the weakest. Pure kind of pseudo Darwinianism. And that's appealing, I think, to many young people because it's about, forget your parents, take what you want. You want it, have it. It's kind of like this hyped up masculinity idea of, you know, whatever you want, if you can take it, it's yours because you're strong and you can have it. Well, obviously if you're older and weaker, you're not going to necessarily subscribe to that, but it's. It's something that can be appealing to young people. Also, the idea of fights and marching and drums and, you know, it's the kind of emotional, visceral feelings that are particularly appealing to people in that kind of age group.
- [23:56]
Martin DeCaro
Some of these bogus psychological ideas have also been applied to society at large, not just Hitler, the idea that Germany was an authoritarian society and that made it susceptible to Nazism. Now, the Nazis were unique in many respects, but they're certainly not the only extremist political movement in history to start wars, commit atrocities. And the German people are not the only people in history to be swept away by a demagogue. And this is where I took what I learned in your book and applied it to my own situation today as an American. And let me just preface what I'm about to say by reminding everyone listening, Trump is not a fascist. We don't have a fascist movement in the United States. Republicans are not Nazis. Donald Trump is not Nazi. He's not a Hitler. The Nazis were poisoning mentally disabled children to wipe them out because they were not worthy of life. They were useless eaters, to borrow a Nazi term. They wanted to conquer all of Eastern Europe, exterminate the Jews and starve to death and dislocate tens of millions of Slavic people. We're not in that universe in the United States today. But Lawrence Reiss, looking at Hitler after the beer hall push in 1923, I'm thinking about how Americans put their faith in Donald Trump again after the January 6 riot. I guess what I'm trying to say is that all peoples, not just Germans, in 1933, all peoples, are susceptible to this type of demagoguery or, I don't know, us versus them, thinking conspiracy theories, paranoia.
- [25:29]
Lawrence Rees
I'm not qualified to make these sorts of judgments about your country. I wouldn't presume to you that would be amazingly presumptuous. I think, though, what one can say about leadership Is one of the things that I discuss with two things that might help in this sort of situation that I don't think necessarily apply with you. You have to make a judgment about that. But the first is what I learned from studying the psychology of leadership. For this is something that surprised me, which is we tend to think when you open a magazine it's like how to be a great leader. 12 point plan, you know, here it is, I've got to turn up earlier than everybody else. I've got to, you know, the whole checklist. And what I understand now about leadership is that actually that's a completely back to front way of looking at it. How you, the crucial, crucial, crucial thing that you do if you want to be a great political leader is you have to convince your followers that you're one of them. We're all in it as us. Hitler was very, very careful all the time to say I'm a simple front soldier. You know, I don't pretend to have the education of all these people, but look where the officer class got us. What we need is leadership of someone who can stand the bullets of the, you know, so what you have to be is projecting yourself as he or she. But in this case with Hitler, he, he's one of us. And the problem with that, if you're an intellectual or you have any kind of intellectual leanings is you can't really viscerally understand it because you go, well, hold on a minute, I remember the Beer hall trial, the trial of the Beer Hall Putsch that you quoted. I mean, there's some amazing testimony from an aristocratic German officer who goes, you know, I just, you know, he's like a rabble rouser. I mean, I just don't get it, it just makes no sense, you know, and of course, because the guy's a highly educated aristocr and he's just bemused, but that's because he's not one of the US that the leaders are appealing to. So that's the first point. You've always got to remember that it's very difficult because certainly in this sort of situation, if you've got any form of intellectual pretensions, you're the very people who are not the US that he's leading. And the second thing to bear in mind, just to finish on, the second thing to finish on is we always think, or we have a tendency to think, don't we, that people make a positive choice about who they're going to vote for or who they want. Actually a lot of the time I think people are making a massive comparative choice. So they're looking at what the other option are and very often going, my God, that's a whole lot worse. So actually what they're doing is going, well, you know, give it a go, because I sure as hell don't want that lot to get power.
- [28:14]
Martin DeCaro
That's right, the Nazis had their die hard fanatics, but that wasn't enough to get them into power. Many people eventually came around to voting for or supporting, supporting or just kind of saying, all right, I'll live with these people. Because everyone else who's tried to run the country has failed too. They didn't suddenly come around and be converted to Nazi ideology.
- [28:33]
Lawrence Rees
No, no, no. There's a huge group who recognize that something's gone really badly wrong with democracy and they need change and they're prepared to give it a go.
- [28:43]
Martin DeCaro
Law and order.
- [28:44]
Lawrence Rees
But bear in mind Hitler could never have become Chancellor if it hadn't been for the, as I write, the connivance of the elite above it, him who make a colossal misjudgment about him. Exactly along the lines we're talking about, infamously Franz von Papen, who became Deputy Chancellor. He's just when people say, why have you supported Hitler as Chancellor? And he goes, don't worry, we've hired him, we've hired him. He has the mass popular support. Kind of the great unwashed, but don't worry, we all run him, it's not a problem. Well, look how that turned out. So you can find that the elite, because they were looking at Hitler and going, look at the guy, he's not that impressive, what's the problem? They then make a massive misjudgment about getting into bed with them.
- [29:27]
Martin DeCaro
Von Papen said something like, we'll have him cornered and he'll be squealing like a mouse before you know it. Something like that. And of course, Hindenburg called them the Bohemian corporal. He despised him.
- [29:38]
Lawrence Rees
He said that. Wonderful. Not wonderful, but he said that crude joke about after the first meeting with him, he said, my God, you know, the only office this guy's fit for is Postmaster General. And you should get that because when he's licking my stamps, he's licking my backside.
- [29:52]
Martin DeCaro
That's right.
- [29:52]
Lawrence Rees
You know, complete contempt. Complete contempt.
- [29:55]
Martin DeCaro
Hindenburg on the COVID of the stamp. So it is hard to know exactly how popular Hitler eventually became. But most scholars I've spoken to, like Ian Kershaw, Richard Evans, yourself in your book, he was popular at one point because his successes, especially in the foreign policy realm, in the 1930s did not lead to the all out war that people dreaded. So it seemed like he had this Superman type power of being able to score victory after victory. And Germany was becoming great again and we're avoiding war. My point here is to my earlier observation about people who weren't dedicated Nazis. Maybe they reached an accommodation in their own minds with the regime. Okay, I don't love these guys, but I have to live with them. You know though, he is talking about something we all can agree on and that is Germany was mistreated after First World War and we should be a great nation again. How did the vagueness, those kind of nebulous ideas, the vagueness of the Nazi platform help broaden its appeal and maybe hide the more sinister designs the Nazis had?
- [31:01]
Lawrence Rees
First thing to say, I completely agree in the sense that it's almost impossible to overestimate the effect of the trauma of losing the First World War and the revolutions in Germany immediately after it. If you didn't fight in that war or live through it, or as a kid you saw your parents get, you know, it's an unbelievable trauma that lives on. And the Second World War, it's very, very, very much fought for the Germans, I think in the shadow of all of that. And so many people are incredibly open to a rhetoric which says we're going to be great again. It's a classic of looking back into history and finding in it what you want to in order to justify where you are. That's why not many people realize they call it the Third Reich because they're looking back first to Bismarck and then to the Holy Roman Empire as great period. So it's like it is that we'll be great again. This is the third go. We're going to be great again in the Third Reich and this time it's going to last a thousand years. So it's very much drawing back that we were unbelievably great. We can be again. That's absolutely the message. And that I think is attractive to millions of people dealing still with the depression and the trauma of the war. And that's where this vision of the Volksgemeinschaft is so crucial, which is this vision that we're going to move towards a kind of paradise where all Germans are actually equal. And not equal financially, but equal in the sense of equal dignity and equal respect. And the interesting thing about that is it was always just out of reach. Talking to Professor Sapolsky at Stanford about this is really interesting because I hadn't realized that actually in terms of how the brain functions, having a goal that you're working towards just out of reach actually provides more dopamine, more good feelings than once you've got a goal, you've achieved it. And then you can often have a diplomatic. Which is, well, I've got it now what? Apparently that's not uncommon. Apparently with winning, I wouldn't know. But winning a gold medal at the Olympics, apparently you get it and then you go, hang on, I've struggled through this for 10 years now. What. Whereas the struggle to it. So the idea that you never quite reach Volksgemeinschaft was an incredibly, again, unknowing for the Nazis, powerful method of hope in the future.
- [33:26]
Martin DeCaro
It's a nebulous idea that you can always reach for and redefine as necessary. So I want to move on to.
- [33:34]
Lawrence Rees
Hitler was full of that. I mean, that's why he said he never wanted to redefine the nebulous ideas in the party program. But it's where he came undone in the end in many ways. Because one of the key things to understand about Hitler is that he's a visionary leader. He speaks in visions and he's incredibly shrewd and sneaky about the dealing with the immediate situation. So he'll react, he'll look around and then react off while something else is happening and then leap to do it. But because he has no middle ground of connecting his vision with the immediate reaction to events, he can end up. They end up doing things totally contrary to the vision, like the Nazi Soviet pact. So it's a weird, weird form of governance and shows you really the downside of governing by vision.
- [34:24]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, radical dynamism, where he did want his underlings to compete with one another and he would set the prerogatives and make the major decisions or the major vision, as you say, he would lay out the vision. This applies to the Holocaust too. I say I wanted to move on to the Holocaust and then allow his underlings and Nazi functionaries and department heads to fight it out. And they would work toward the Fuhrer and come up with ever increasingly radical, more and more radical solutions to the problems they thought they had to solve for their fear.
- [34:55]
Lawrence Rees
You're working for a boss who appoints two or three people to more or less the same job. Right. He refuses when you come to him and go, hold on, I don't understand what my version of this is relation to you, what's going on? He says, sort it out yourselves. I'm not getting involved. Sort it out yourselves. So you're in these fights all the time, these turf wars all the time. But what you know is this, which is what excites your boss. What excites Hitler is the more radical idea, the better. He may not always do it, but it excites him. You could go to him and go, I think we should invade the moon or something. Right. It's exciting to him. And so he'll go. You know, you're a kind of can do person. That's pretty impressive. Maybe not now. And so when he had people coming to him and going, I think there's three problems with what we're planning. Those are the people who are not going to succeed in that environment. So it explains this mystery of how somebody who gets up so late, as it were, is still in control of one of the most dynamic regimes the world's ever seen, which is because of this combination of them knowing how fond he is of the radical and the internal competition.
- [36:10]
Martin DeCaro
That's right. Hitler was not lazy, but he was a dilettante when it came to work, as you say. He used to get up very late in the morning and not like Stalin. Stalin was.
- [36:19]
Lawrence Rees
No, no. Stalin is the antithesis. Stalin, who I made a study opportunity. Stalin is the antithesis in terms of types of leader. He's what Weber would call the classic bureaucratic leader. Stalin would sit through meetings all day. Hitler, you know, Hitler, the cabinet, I think, after 1938, never sat so about the Holocaust.
- [36:38]
Martin DeCaro
You also delve into the psychology of killers. People who kill up close, people who kill from a distance. People who. Everybody from ordinary Germans to sadistic or psychopathic Nazi functionaries who took glee in murder. Although, as you point out, most people are not sadists or psychopaths. And we know that Otto Ohlendorff, the head of the SS in one of the Eisenscgruppen, he was an intellectual who thought he was just.
- [37:03]
Lawrence Rees
A lot of them were intellectual. A lot of them were intellectual.
- [37:05]
Martin DeCaro
A clinical killer following orders. Your book reinforced the idea that a major driver behind the radicalization of the Final Solution, basically the gas chamber complexes at Auschwitz, was to make the killing easier on the killers, not just. Not just for efficiency, to kill more people faster.
- [37:25]
Lawrence Rees
No, no, no, no. That's a popular misconception. The fact is that Babi Yar, the dreadful killings in Ukraine in 1941, or the harvest festival killings later on, the Nazis killed proportionately more by shooting than they ever did in a one day in gas chambers of Auschwitz or Treblinka. There was absolutely no need to Develop gas chambers if you wanted to kill the same number of people. One of the prime reasons to develop the gas chambers, as you say, was concern about the psychological damage being done to the killers. And Himmler witnessed this personally when he went out to see murders taking place in Minsk in the summer of 1941. And I met the cameraman who went along with him that day, and he talked about afterwards, the guy who was commanding the executioner squad, coming up to him going, you've got to get me out of this. I can't stand it. I can't take it. It's horrendous. And that wasn't untypical. So you found that you could divide the killers really broadly into three groups, although not equal groups. The main group's the middle one. You had a small group of people who, when faced with it, just couldn't. Just didn't want to do it, Couldn't do it. And crucially, what you have to understand is none of them was ever shot for it. So you could do that. You could do that. You could just say, I'm not up to it. I can't pull the trigger. And then you had a small group of people who discovered when they started killing, they loved it, they were crazy for it. They couldn't get enough of it. And then you had a middle group of people who understood and internalized why they thought it was necessary to do this and did it, but had problems doing it. And it's that bigger middle group that Himmler is trying to deal with, with the push towards more mechanized forms of killing.
- [39:13]
Martin DeCaro
This middle group, they reached an accommodation with murder. Murder up close, standing above a pit and shooting somebody in the back of the head and watching the body fall into the grave. They reached an accommodation in no small measure because of official sanction. Right. This is something their government told them they had to do.
- [39:34]
Lawrence Rees
Yeah. And also, I mean, I met someone who did it. I met someone who shot little children in these pit killings in Lithuania, who was a Lithuania, we sometimes forget. It's one of the things, again, that's a popular trope, which is kind of, oh, the Germans, uniquely evil and all that. Well, actually, many, many people involved in the killing were not German at all. I mean, in Lithuania, large numbers of them were Lithuanian who went and worked alongside the killing, Nazi killing squads and killed. I met one of them who served 20 years, I think, in a gulag after the war for his crimes. And what was interesting about him was the first thing about him was he's an ignorant, uneducated peasant okay. And the thing about them, someone in his position, is he's used to splitting open pigs. And I mean, he's used to the sight of blood is not uncommon for him. That was the first point. Secondly, he was wildly anti Semitic. No question that he had succumbed to the lie that the Jews were behind Bolshevism. The Soviets had occupied Lithuania and deported numbers of people. So he succumbed to the Nazi lie that all the Jews are linked, they're behind Bolshevism, and so therefore they've gotta be dealt with in this way. Plus they benefited for it because. And don't rule this out robbery. They're stealing stuff off these people they're killing. And then they're drunk. He was drunk a lot of the time. He's doing the killing. So you've got a whole range of reasons he's able to do it and come through it. None of which are of the kind of uber intellectual levels that you're talking about with people like Heydrich and Ollendorff.
- [41:05]
Martin DeCaro
I would like to believe that I'm in the first category of people that I would never get used to shooting.
- [41:09]
Lawrence Rees
But everybody does and we know they're not. Although what you've got to remember is they're not picking people off the streets to do these killings. You know, I mean, they're in the security forces. So they've made a certain decision about belonging to the security forces before they're taken off to do the killing. They're not taking the tobacconist at the end of the road and saying, shooting a gun, say, right, kill a kid.
- [41:30]
Martin DeCaro
But in Lithuania, Ukraine, elsewhere, the locals did not have to be forced into helping round up Jews.
- [41:37]
Lawrence Rees
No, no, no. There are massive, massive amounts of anti Semitism in many of these places.
- [41:42]
Martin DeCaro
Speaking of not having to twist people's arms to have them commit horrible crimes, the medical profession in Germany, you get into this when it comes to the euthanasia program. Matter of fact, the first gassings were of the mentally ill, the mentally disabled. The Nazis were experimenting with different ways to kill people. Not to make the death easier on the poor victims, to make it easier on the minds of the people doing the killing. Why did German doctors, I mean, what were they believing in some kind of eugenics or something to go along with this? Talking about the euthanasia program, which is also a misnomer. A big piece of your book is the use of euphemism to hide things and help people cope. Right? It wasn't really euthanasia because there's no consent. But Go ahead.
- [42:29]
Lawrence Rees
No, I mean, that's right. So that's why. I mean, part of the scandal is the vast majority of medical professionals involved in this never were charged with anything. Many of them went on to have, you know, become your local doctor after the war. So that's one terrifying point to make about this. Why were they doing it? They were doing it, I guess, because the study of Nazi doctors, plus also I did a. An examination of Soviet doctors who mistreated dissidents. Plus I met and interviewed a Japanese doctor who did some of the most horrendous experiments on Chinese people without anesthetics. Just unspeakable. And he became the local general practitioner after the war, you know, and then when he retired, everybody wrote letters to him saying, oh, you're so kind and lovely. Which I think is interesting about the situational ethic, anyway. Why, in specifically in Germany, are they doing it? Well, the whole thrust of Nazi belief system is the sense of unworthy lies versus worthy lives. That's the whole core of it. How can you be unworthy? You can be unworthy by not being part of the Volksgemeinschaft, by being racially wrong as far as the Nazis are concerned, for example, the Jews or the Slavs or the Sinti and Roma. So you can be in that category, which is an obvious category for them in terms of. There it sits. But you can also not be a worthy part of the Volksgemeinschaft by being seriously mentally or physically disabled. And what we've got to understand here is it's the seriousness. So people often say, oh, they're killing the disabled. They're not. They're killing selected disabled. The majority of disabled in Germany at this period were veterans of the First World War. They're not killing them, they're actually giving them a pension and, you know, treating them as well. You were a kind of great noble sacrifice. So if you're a doctor, you're not being asked to kill every disabled person you come across. You're being asked to say, look, if we kill the most disabled people who really aren't functioning as we see it as human beings, they have no quality of life, they're not really there at all mentally. Is that such a terrible thing? Isn't that they would say a mercy killing? It's a mercy killing. Plus we release budget back into our hospital because we no longer have to care for these people who have no hope of recovery. So they're conning themselves that actually they're doing kind of a business of service to the state. And that fits into philosophically, what's happened to doctors. You know, the purpose of a doctor that we see, I hope has one purpose. How can I beneficially treat the person in front of me? The German doctors of that period were told they did not have that just as one purpose. They also had the purpose of how can I treat the health. Health of the state by treating this person? And so you have two goals, and they could often be competing goals.
- [45:26]
Martin DeCaro
Health of the race as well. Right. Because apparently they believed that these types of problems were hereditary. You could pass them on.
- [45:33]
Lawrence Rees
Yeah. And that's why the first thing they did was pass. In the early 30s, as soon as they come to power, they passed sterilization laws. And bear in mind, lots of other countries, I believe, including America, have passed compulsory sterilization laws. I mean, I may be corrected on this, but I seem to remember that against certain categories of disabled, when people criticize them, they say, well, hold on, we're not doing anything anybody else's. And when it gets to the killing, the actual killings, they're doing that once the war is nearly happening or the war is happening. And so it can all be packaged up in the turmoil of the conflict.
- [46:10]
Martin DeCaro
Ian Kershaw has said the road to Auschwitz was paved with indifference. So there's this idea, and it's not incorrect, that Germans could not speak out publicly, protest the regime, because they would have landed in prison, concentration camp, or worse. We can think of the White Rose Resistance Movement. Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans, they were beheaded by guillotine for a piece of paper. Right. Because they condemned Hitler and the war that was leading Germany down the road to catastrophe. So there's a lot of truth to that. Germany was not a free society. However, in two instances we did see, maybe this is evidence that there could have been more protest, say, about what was happening to the Jews. Germans protested the euthanasia program. That was the Bishop of Munster, I believe, Von Galen, from his pulpit. And the regime did not do anything to him, although they would have liked to. And the removal of the crucifixes from classrooms in a very Catholic area of Germany, I guess that would have been Bavaria, that caused a public uproar. People publicly protested what was going on there and there. The regime did not crack down. What does that tell us?
- [47:24]
Lawrence Rees
The crucial thing you have to understand about those protests is they were protests from members solidly within the Volksgemeinschaft against actions against people in the Volksgemeinschaft. Think of the damage that would have happened to the Nazis if they'd done something about the women in. In Bavaria protesting about the crucifixes, they're writing back to their sons and husbands on the front line of the Eastern Front. The regime had a real problem with that. It goes to the fact they had a real problem in dealing with religion anyway, because Hitler is managing a situation in which he has. Some of his cruelest people are absolutely very strong Christian believers, and a whole load of other of his most crucial people are rabid atheists. So he's managing all this in a way whereby he believes, after the war, I'll deal with religion, but it's too incendiary for me to deal with it now. But the crucial thing about those protests is they are from people within the Volksgemeinschaft protesting about what's happening to other people within the Volksgemeinschaft. If they'd gone out on the streets and protesting about the Jews, I think it would have been very, very, very different that what would have happened would have been very different than what happened with those two specific protests.
- [48:41]
Martin DeCaro
And that's if a large number of people even wanted to protest what was going on to the Jews, not that they wanted them all to be murdered in a gas chamber. Germans saw what was happening. They saw Jews being removed from their communities.
- [48:54]
Lawrence Rees
Yeah, but you see, a really interesting thing about that, Martin, is I met a lady who had been teenager during the 30s, and she was so pro the Nazi regime, she said it was a better time for me than it is for today. I mean, that was back in the 90s when I met her. Imagine it. It's a better time in her view. And so we said to her, well, hold on a minute. What about 1941 and the Jews wearing the yellow star and so on? She said, well, obviously, that was terrible. She said, we had this nice woman living in the street behind us. We didn't know she was Jewish until we saw the yellow star. And we saw her, you know, it was terrible. I felt so sad for her. It was awful. And she was deported the following year, 1942. And I said, how did that go? And she said, well, that. You know, I'm paraphrasing it now, but there was a sense that it was easier because they just weren't around anymore, and they'd probably gone off somewhere to some other country or place or. You know. And I thought, this is terrifying because it shows how you react to suffering when it's right in front of you. But actually, as long as the person is just taken away. One day you go, well, you know, it just simply stops being top of mind.
- [50:00]
Martin DeCaro
Why was Nazi propaganda effective?
- [50:03]
Lawrence Rees
That's, Give me a break. That's like one of my, my earliest influences around. Professor David Welch has spent his entire life as far as I can see. Yeah, I know it's a big question studying Nazi propaganda. So, you know, fast, fast question.
- [50:19]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah. Well, you know, Goebbels, he understood that you couldn't lie to people, right? That there was a cost of over promising and under deliverance. And he didn't want Nazi propaganda to be too Nazi. He didn't want to hit people over the head with it because he knew it wouldn't be effective.
- [50:34]
Lawrence Rees
Yeah, that's right. I mean, he, you know, going back 35 years, I made a film and wrote a book about Goebbels and I met many of the people who work with him. One of the things that surprised me about it was a, his, his enormous love of entertainment films. You know, one of his favorite films was Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. I mean, he was amazed at, at the Disneyness of that. He loved Disney and he loved Gone with the Wind was another film he absolutely loved. You know, and he loved the emotional impact that film can have. The vast majority of films that he presided over had no overt propaganda in them at all. Why was that clever? It was clever because he understood. One meeting he had with people from the involved in German radio, the first thing he said was at all costs, at all costs, avoid being boring. That was his message to them. At all costs, avoid being boring. And the trouble with most propaganda is he's incredibly boring. He was always trying and sometimes often failing not to make boring propaganda. But with entertainment films he could actually enthuse and reward the audience by this kind of schlock stuff. But also one of the most powerful, horrendous, insidious pieces of antisemitism ever made is a quote, entertainment unquote film he made or oversaw called Jud, which is a historical story. Allegedly he altered the history completely of a Jew who was an advisor to a ruler of a German state, who then through his Machiavellian techniques ends up raping this Aryan woman and so on. That film was tremendously effective as a piece of entertainment with this message, with this vast anti Semitic message in it. And that was a very, very sophisticated way of getting this horrible evil message across.
- [52:28]
Martin DeCaro
He understood there was a cost to lying to the people about what was going on. The context there was the war. You couldn't keep Telling people, winning the war when reports keep coming in of battles being lost. But even so, he was given to flights of fantasy by the end. He was living in a fantasy world of his own creation by the end. And as you say here on page 313, he and his wife are remembered as two of the most heartless parents who have ever lived because they poisoned their six children at the end of the war because they did not want them to grow up in a world without Hitler. So he was a fanatic, even though he could sound logical at times.
- [53:04]
Lawrence Rees
And also the crucial thing, when I talked about that to one of the people who knew him long time ago, and I was talking about it in the context of film, and this guy said to me, yeah, you got to understand, that's a film ending. You know, he's trying to create this kind of epicness of sacrifice to Hitler and so on. The. One of the last films he made an extraordinary film that people don't know about, a color feature film called Kohlberg, about a German historical example of German resistance to the Napoleon Napoleonic War. And he was direct. He was diverting troops from the front line to act in it as extras. One of the guys I met said he questioned Goebbels and said, what are you doing that for? And he said, well, we're going to lose the war, but at least we can make this great film that will live on. And. And then, you know, years afterwards, people will look at it and go, my God, that was an incredible film that we made about resistance to foreign forces and so on. So he's beginning, I think, in his mind at the end, to kind of see himself as some kind of movie character.
- [54:08]
Martin DeCaro
This is madness. So last thing here, Lawrence Rees. And this also tells us something about the human condition or human beings across cultures, across time, maybe something we all have in common. And that is when Hitler begins to lose his charismatic grip on the German people, it wasn't because of anything he necessarily did or because suddenly people realized that he was a bad person. It was because the war went bad for Germany. So now people are having second thoughts.
- [54:37]
Lawrence Rees
Yeah, I mean, but this is absolutely typical of a charismatic leader. If you're a charismatic leader, this is why you're so vulnerable. You're vulnerable when there's such a gap between the rhetoric and the reality they split apart. You go back to the Pharaoh Akhenaten thousands of years ago, and he did something radical in ancient Egypt, which is very much portray himself as God. And the trouble with portraying yourself as God is what happens when God gets old and sick. Well, you're not such a God now. And so your charismatic authority begins to wane. And eventually it goes, because, hey, you're not. The promises simply are so at odds with the reality that it becomes a joke. And that's when you get involved with terror and violence in a big way. What you do then is you fill that gap with oppression. It was always an oppressive regime. Of course it was. It was always a terror regime. Of course it was. But that post Stalingrad in 1943 is really hyped up with the appointment of Himmler of the SS as interior minister. And they start hanging deserters. Not just hanging deserters, but hanging people who are moaners. And Goebbels, as I quote in the book, starts writing in his diary about how things have picked up a bit since we're hanging people who are complaining. You do that in that situation because all that's left for you as a charismatic leader whose promises now are nonsense, the only thing left for you is to stay there and fill it with violence.
- [56:21]
Martin DeCaro
On the next episode of History As It Happens, we'll stay with the topic of political repression. It will travel back to the Second World War and the issue of due process and Japanese Americans, American citizens who were putting in concentration camps and denied their rights based on paranoia and lies. That is next with David M. Kennedy as we report History as it Happens. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday. My newsletter every Friday. Sign up@historyasithappens.com or just go to Substack and search for History As It Happens.