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- [00:00]
Conor
Hi everyone. I'm Conor, head of Programming at Intelligence Squared. As we head into the festive season, what is for many of us, a time of comfort, celebration and gatherings round a table. Most of us won't think twice about the clean water running from our taps that make it all possible. But for millions of people around the world, this is something they simply don't have. That's why here at the Intelligence Squared podcast, we're proud to partner with WaterAid, a charity working to change this and to shine a spotlight on something that connects us all. In a special episode of our podcast, journalist Coco Khan speaks to Amica Godfrey, Water AIDS Executive Director of International Programs. Amica has spent more than 25 years working across the world in the water, sanitation and hygiene sector. She shares powerful stories about how clean water keeps children in school, helps mothers support their families or run businesses and and unlocks potential for entire communities. To hear the full conversation, just search Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts and listen to the episode titled Everything Starts with water released on 17th December. Listen to the full episode now on the Intelligence Squared Podcast.
- [01:16]
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- [02:32]
Mia Sorrenti
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti for this episode. We're rejoining for Part two of our recent live event with Jonathan Friedland, the columnist, broadcaster and former foreign correspondent. Friedland joined us live at the Kiln Theatre in London. He was in conversation with journalist and broadcaster Jenny Kleeman and he drew on his new book the Traitor's Circle to tell the extraordinary and largely forgotten story of the German rebels who risked everything to oppose Hitler from within his own state. If you haven't heard part one yet, we recommend jumping back an episode to get up to speed. But now let's return to the discussion live at the Kiln Theatre in London.
- [03:15]
Moderator
Let's talk a bit about that blue blood. I mean not everybody has blood as blue as Maria's. But to what extent do you think that was a factor in all of this? The privilege that all of these characters had, did it make what they, the risks that they took, did it make it more extraordinary or was it less of a leap for them to feel that they could do exceptional things?
- [03:37]
Jonathan Friedland
So interesting I think it is both because on the one hand it absolutely confirms that this was so needless for them. These were people who would have been completely untouched. They would have been left alone, their country estates would have remained intact. The Nazis were not coming after people like this, they would have been fine, that's on the first part of what you said. But on the second I think it was clear from an example like that, you know, the self belief, the confidence to face down the Gestapo, I mean the sheer cheek of it, the chutzpah, as you said, not a word she would have used, I don't think to do that. It was partly the confidence of her class but while that was necessary as it were, it wasn't sufficient. And the proof of that is the overwhelming majority of aristocrats, of people from the elite did not rebel. In fact they were very, most of them fell in line very quickly and with some enthusiasm for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. And that's because one of Hitler's very clever political ideas was he promised when he was in opposition that he would restore the titles of the aristocracy who had had their titles stripped away from them in the era of the Weimar Republic. So he said to the sort of Duke of Hesse or the King of Saxony, you can call yourself that again if I get into power. And it meant he had some three and a half thousand serious blue blooded supporters fairly early on. So yes, it meant that for somebody like Maria and some of the others in this book, I think it did enable them to take on Adolf Hitler and to not be intimidated by the Gestapo. You know, they looked at the Gestapo men coming there and maybe even Hitler himself as you know, jumped up vulgarians. You know, I think they probably thought Hitler was a kind of nasty little oik who would come and would go, whereas their family were the real Germany who would be here and had been here forever. And I think when the knock on the door comes, it helps if you can think that. And she thought it.
- [05:52]
Moderator
There are quite a few extraordinary women in this book. Tell us about the Solf's mother and daughter who also helped the submarines.
- [06:02]
Jonathan Friedland
Yes, they did. And they. You know, Hannah Solf was the widow of an ambassador, Wilhelm Solf, who'd been ambassador to Tokyo, a very distinguished German diplomat. Just to give you a flavor of how senior these people were, her late husband, Wilhelmsholf. He was the foreign minister at the time of Germany in the First World War. @ the end, it was he who sent the cable to Woodrow Wilson in Washington saying, essentially, we now surrender. That's who these people were. He is outraged. In the night of 1933, I've been able to reconstruct more or less where all of them were the night Hitler took power. And he says, he looks at the torchlight parade and the German, you know, the Nazis, the brownshirts taking power. And he says to somebody with him, finis Germaniae in Latin, this is the end of Germany. But he realized, he tries to intervene with Goebbels. He has a meeting with Goebbels. Goebbels says to him, after Solf has tried to plead for the Jews to be spared, he says, the fact that this poison has infected even you, your excellency, shows you how far it has gone. You know, he thinks it's poison to want to spare Jews. He dies in 1936, and the work continues with his wife and his daughter. As you say, what they do is they are scrambling to get ways out for Jews. She's using all her diplomatic contact. You know, for many years, she and her husband hosted a kind of salon that became known as the Solf salon in their home, where journalists and scientists and clerics and academics would gather. By the time Hitler's in power, that becomes a gathering unofficial for anyone who has doubts or more about the regime. And they use it as a way of making sure that the facts of what's happening that they know get in front of diplomats from abroad, get word out. And sometimes the diplomats charge d' affaires, or an ambassador will come there saying, these stories about concentration camps, we assume these are exaggerated, this is propaganda. And they say to them, every word of it is true. It's even worse than you think. That's the work they're doing. That's Hannah, who will not stop at even getting hold of forged papers to get people out. And eventually they do hide people in their home. But her daughter Largi, who is the one with the shopping bags, she really interests me. Because it's very clear to me reading it now that Lagi itself, we would now say, suffered from anxiety, that she was tremendously nervous. She said that she was fearful when she was at home there would be a knock on the door, but she was terrified when she wasn't home that there would be a knock on the door and that the submarines would be alone. She was anxious all the time and yet she carried on doing it. And to me, I have made a little vow that I'm never again going to use the word fearless as a synonym for brave, because I think we do use it that way to mean courageous. It isn't. She had huge amounts of fears, number of fears, but she overcame them. And that to me is true courage. More than those people who don't have any fear, who are kind of, you know, in a way, the other countess who's so crazily courageous, reckless, this one, she had. She feared it, or she trembled all the time, and yet she did the right thing. I'm sort of awed by that in a.
- [09:30]
Moderator
Way. You also introduce us to the character of Langer, who is absolutely chilling. I don't know if you can retroactively diagnose someone with psychopathy, but he's a really frightening character. Tell us about his part in the.
- [09:49]
Jonathan Friedland
Story. So I half jokingly was saying about. I immediately saw the shape of this as being like an Agatha Christie story. And before I knew really much about it, I did think, well, there will then have to be a detective, somebody who hunts this group down, who will obviously be a villain. And I thought, I wonder who that will be. And I had a picture in my mind of a sort of Gestapo detective, you know, an old kind of Berlin shoe leather, you know, dirty raincoat sort of plod cop. I had no idea that the person who would be the detective chasing them down turns out to be, although not well known, one of the core perpetrators of the Holocaust. Leo Lange was in the gestapo in the 30s. He was then dispatched with the invading Germans to Poland. And in newly occupied Poland, his first job is essentially getting rid of any people who might be Polish resistance. They're sentenced in a sort of jumped up, trumped up charges and he executes them. And he does that very efficiently until word comes from Berlin that they are now experimenting with a new form of killing, and it involves gas and they say, we want to trial this out, try it out first. And they task him with trialing this new method. And they give him a whole group of men, and it becomes the Lange detachment. And they begin by roaming the Polish countryside, and they stop at psychiatric hospitals, and they, with the cooperation of the doctors who run these hospitals, they take people who we would now say had learning difficulties. But then they describe them as mentally defective. And they lead them out to a van that is disguised, and it has the livery on the side of the van of the Kaiser's Coffee Company. So it looks as if these people are going to a sort of coffee truck. And I imagine some of them thought, this is nice. And they are led into the back, and the back is sealed, and it begins driving. And gas is released into the back, initially from cylinders, bottles of gas. Later it will be hooked up to the exhaust. And at the end of the journey, they open the back, and there are 30 or 40 dead people. They dispose of the bodies, they go back to the hospital, and they do it all again. And they do this shift after shift, all under Lange's command, until they have killed hundreds and hundreds of people in different places. The word gets around that they're doing this very efficiently. And different SS leaders in occupy Poland say, well, can you come? And, you know, I've got some people I need to get rid of. Come here. And eventually he does. You know, he's rewarded for his work. Heinrich Himmler gives him a kind of prize. He and the rest of the Langer detachment are given a free vacation in newly occupied Holland. But soon they're back at work. And he is told, now we want to step up our operations with the real target, which is Jews. And he does it with the mobile truck at first, and eventually that is static. And they say, we have cleared a place for you to use to do this in a more systematized way. And so is born the first death camp. And we all know about Auschwitz and Birkenau, and maybe people have forgotten now the names of Treblinka and Sobibor and Belzec and Majdanek. But before any of them, the first death camp was called Chelmno. And it was in a village in the Polish countryside. And it consisted of. It was an old sort of. They took over Schloss, a kind of manor house, but built in, there was this van disguised to look like a room. And that was the first. It was the first death camp, and it killed some 170,000 Jews. And the first commandant of the first death camp was Leolenga. He is a pioneering perpetrator of the Holocaust. And he ends up being sent back to Berlin. And one of his tasks, now promoted within the Gestapo, is to hunt down the enemy within. And so he becomes the man who will pursue the people at the Tea Party. I had no idea of that going into it. But it means that this story intersects very directly with a central thing, figure of the.
- [14:20]
Moderator
Holocaust. In about 10 or 15 minutes, we're going to come to you for your questions. I hope that you've got many. I guess perhaps with regard to Langer, we began this conversation talking about moral clarity and the kind of murkiness of the idea that not everyone was bad, not everyone was good. And you have also in the book, Jews who betrayed their own People. I mean, there is the Blond Poison, you know, tell us, tell us about that. What was it like to read about those.
- [14:53]
Jonathan Friedland
People? So, you know, I'm aware that some people might be thinking he must have told us everything in this.
- [14:58]
Moderator
Book. No, there's so much.
- [14:59]
Jonathan Friedland
More. The incredible thing is there is much more, and that's why I feel able to tell you about some of that. Leo Lange, he is just one of these characters in this story. And this thing that you've brought out now is to me, something I knew nothing about. So there were hidden Jews in Berlin, the submarines. And the Nazis knew there were some. They hadn't a sense of the numbers, but they were. It was such an. It was an affront to them that there were Jews living in the center of the capital of the Nazi Imperial, the Nazi empire. And so they were determined to root them out. And they decided that the best way to find them was to use other hidden Jews. And so what they did was they would, when they did apprehend Jews in Berlin, they were taken to a building that was in a. You know, it was just a building, but it had the status of, like, a concentration camp. And there they were interrogated and so on. And the Gestapo man in charge made a deal. He said, I will give you. I will release you from here, or you can. You'll still live here, but your family members will stay here rather than being deported to the East. And by then they had. They were getting an inkling of what deported deportation to the east meant. The Jews in Germany knew much more, actually than the ones in Poland. That's another story. I will cut a deal with you for leniency if you go out into the streets and find and snatch for me Jews in hiding. Now, from this vantage point, we May think, well, we would never have accepted such a terrible thing. And how. Who could? I think, from where we are, you don't know. And you can't judge people who did this, or you can't judge them easily because they thought they were saving their families and so on. But you certainly can judge the ones who took to this work with great enthusiasm. And so they were known as grabbers, snatchers. And they would. Their job was to snatch Jews off the streets. There was one in particular who immediately got the best kind of numbers of any of the others. A woman who was famed among. Among the submarines because she was both astonishingly intelligent and strikingly beautiful. Her name was. Her maiden name was Stella Goldschlag. She had very, very striking blond hair. And she became known, notorious among the Hidden Jews, as the Blonde Ghost or the Blond Poison. They heard that there was this woman out there. She would do things like. And Jewish people are able to recognize other Jews in a way that people who aren't Jewish often can't. She would be out on the streets of Berlin. She would think, I wonder. And she would go up to somebody and say, sir, I'm so, you know, sorry to stop you like this. I'm so hungry. I haven't eaten for two days. Is there any chance you could, you know, pay for a meal for me to have lunch? And she was very beautiful, and she was very charming. And maybe finally they would. She would get somebody who would take her over for lunch, and she would then confess, don't tell anybody, but I'm actually a Jew. And the person having lunch with her would then say, well, so am I, you know, and she would then excuse herself, give the signal, and a moment later, the Gestapo would come in, grab the person who had taken her into her trust, and she continued to do that. And the very first person she portrayed as was a kind of test of how committed she would be to the work was. And I don't. I'm not completely clear if this person was then an ex or not, but the very first person she offered up to the Gestapo to prove her credentials was her own husband. She turned him in. And therefore they knew they had somebody who was going to do what they wanted to do. And so she became this active agent who haunted the remaining Jews of Berlin. And they called her, as you say, the Blond.
- [19:01]
Moderator
Poison. We really have only spoken about the beginning of the book here. There is so much more to it. And this tea party, it's kind of in the middle of the book, we find out who Betrayer is. The rest of the book is kind of about the fallout and what and how also, you know, the different fates that all of the traitors met. And I'm trying not to give too much away. I guess I'm interested because the book begins with you talking about your relationship to the subject.
- [19:32]
Jonathan Friedland
Matter.
- [19:32]
Moderator
Yeah. And you write about growing up in a house where you couldn't even have a Crips coffee machine. I think a lot of people, a lot of Jewish people in the UK can relate to that kind of thing. Do you think it was easier, perhaps from an earlier generation of Jews to just assume, think of all Germans as evil and.
- [19:53]
Jonathan Friedland
Complicit? Yes. And by the way, one of the revelations to me about talking about this that has come through, talking about this book is. So I do begin the book by saying there was, you know, nothing German was allowed in the house I grew up in. There was, as you say, no Krupp's coffee maker, no Siemens dishwasher, no VW parked outside. And I've mentioned this in a few places, and I've always said exactly what you do, which is, I know that I'm not alone. There are many Jews of my age and all, and I've been corrected in many places by people saying not just Jews. And so, you know, I mentioned this just because he mentioned it, but I was on Andrew Marr's show on LBC and he said they had the same policy in his household. And that was news to me. But there are lots of people and it has to be my age, Andrew, Ma's age or older, whose parents just felt that what the Germans did in the war was so unforgivable that we will have an unofficial sort of boycott. It's more widespread than I'd realized. I really did think it was something that was just sort of us. The working assumption was that there were no good Germans. Every last German was implicated. And like I said right at the start, I think that is reinforced with popular culture. I think we have an image that there were some anti Nazis right at the very beginning. You know, February 1933, socialists, communists, they're rounded up. We know that partly because of the sermon that became a poem. First they came for the communists and so on. But we assume by the time you're in 1934 or 1935, everyone around is a loyal Nazi. And the revelation for me in doing this book was that that isn't quite right, that most were. So I'm not letting anybody off the hook. But, you know, one Allied investigator who came with The Americans in 1945 estimated that 3 million Germans were arrested, jailed, detained during the 12 years of the Reich for crimes of dissent, which is an amazing category, crimes of dissent, which might include nothing more than a critical remark. Three million people, that's not nothing. It's more than my mother realized. You know, that said, you do the percentages, which I got my calculator out and looked, counted how many, what the German population was at the time, and it equates to about 5%. So it means 5% rebelled. 95%. Absolutely did not. And so we have to reckon with that. Germans have to reckon with that. I think that's why, you know, I'm very glad to say this book is now in the process of being translated into Dutch and Italian and French, Portuguese, but not German. There isn't a German publisher for this book yet. And I think I understand why. I think it's because they think it's not right to concentrate on the 5%. We have to wrestle with the 95%. And, you know, for me, as a Jewish person who grew up thinking that every last German was implicated, I need to wrestle with the other number, the 5%. And these people at this tea party are just. They give you a glimpse of what, what was going through the minds of those people who risked everything and gained and could never gain.
- [23:16]
Conor
Anything. Hi, everyone. I'm Connor, head of programming at Intelligence Squared. As we head into the festive season, what is for many of us, a time of comfort, celebration and gatherings round a table? Most of us won't think twice about the clean water running from our taps that make it all possible, but for millions of people around the world, this is something they simply don't have. That's why here at the Intelligence Squared podcast, we're proud to partner with WaterAid, a charity working to change this and to shine a spotlight on something that connects us all. In a special episode of our podcast, journalist Coco Kahn speaks to Amica Godfrey, who water AIDS Executive Director of International Programs. Amica has spent more than 25 years working across the world in the water, sanitation and hygiene sector. She shares powerful stories about how clean water keeps children in school, helps mothers support their families or run businesses, and unlocks potential for entire communities. To hear the full conversation, just search Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts and listen to the episode titled Everything Starts with water, released on 17 December. Listen to the full episode now on the Intelligence Squared podcast. You didn't start a business just to keep the lights on. You're here to sell more today than yesterday. You're here to win. Lucky for you, Shopify built the best converting checkout on the planet like the just one tapping ridiculously fast acting sky high sales stacking champion at checkouts. That's the good stuff right.
- [24:59]
Jonathan Friedland
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Conor
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- [25:10]
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- [25:39]
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- [27:37]
Moderator
Cancel. Do you think that anybody, anyone among us is capable of being one of those 5%? Or do you think that you have to have special qualities to be the sort of person that doesn't look away? Was there one unifying difference between all the people you looked at in your.
- [28:03]
Jonathan Friedland
Book? Such an interesting question. And in a way, it was the thing that drove me to this store or pulled me into this story, because I'm guessing I'm speaking for most people here, but whenever we look at this period, the Second World War, I think it's absolutely natural we ask ourselves versions of the question, what would I have done? It's impossible not to. And I think the thought that then follows that very quickly is I would have resisted. I would have been on the right side. We all think that we want to believe that, and yet that 5% figure is staring us in the face. It requires a tremendous degree of self belief, if not arrogance, to say I would have been one of those 5%. The chances are the high probability is we wouldn't and you know, we need to reckon with that too. It's a hard thing to realize. So what are the things that unite them? Look, this is a small sample size of my group, the people in this book. But they have, there are two things they have in common. And one is we've spoken about a bit, which is this belief in a higher authority. You know, we saw it in Maria von Maunsen. She believes in her family and her lineage and her sort of class. And, you know, that enables her to dismiss the Gestapo. She believes there's an authority higher than the Nazis. That's really important if you're going to take on the Nazis. But for others, the same belief in a higher authority came from a different source, and you mentioned it earlier, which is faith. They are several of them. Elisabeth von Taden is a really strong example. They are deeply committed Christians who believe that Adolf Hitler is there, but above him is Jesus Christ, and that is who they will be answerable to. And if you believe you will be held to account by something bigger than the government and the court system and the, you know, and the Fuhrer, then you may act differently. And you know, I don't know whether I would have, going into it, I don't think I would have known that, you know, a lot of progressive people are either not religious or even anti religious. But I can only pass on what I found here, which is several of the people in this story who did the right thing. They were very committed people of faith. The other thing, which is even less scientific, but I just like it, is we've mentioned how a lot of these, the characters in the story were women. The thing they all have in common and they all have in common is not the thing I would have expected. I would have thought this sort of courage and strength would have come from having strong mothers who were kind of role models. It wasn't the case. What they had was very strong fathers, all of them, and, and crucially, very good relationships with their fathers that somehow these fathers inculcated in these girls when they were children. You are the equal of any boy. There's nothing a boy can do that you can't do. You're as strong as any other person. And that they all went into life with a kind of confidence from that. Even Lagie with her anxiety. There's a confidence there. And under the pressure of the Third Reich, that confidence morphed into courage. And it's too apparent for me to ignore it. These women have this thing in common. It's a small point, but I like it because I'm fond of the women in the.
- [31:39]
Moderator
Story. So why write this book.
- [31:44]
Jonathan Friedland
Now? When I started writing it, the political climate was a bit different. But as I was coming towards the sort of conclusion and finishing touches, things were changing around the world. The first thing to say is, look, I'm not. I don't even mention the current politics in the book. So this is outside the scope of the book. But what I do say is the questions of loyalty and to whom one owed one's allegiance. Is it the government or is it something else? Those questions pressed very sharply on the people in this book. But I said that they reverberate down the decades and perhaps especially loudly now. And what I meant by that is I am not saying that any of the regimes or systems we are seeing around the world are the same as the Nazis. That is very facile. I'm not saying Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler. That would be facile. It would be an insult to the victims of Adolf Hitler. What I'm saying instead is that there are authoritarian and tyrannical systems of government that do recur. That we see countries that were previously democracies. Germany was a democracy in 1931 and 32, 33. That then there's a change. And very swiftly there is a move to eliminate or weaken other centers of power so that anything which might hold a check on the center of power is seen as a threat. That might be the courts, it could be the media, it could be the universities, it could be the independent civil service, it could be all of them. But what autocrats do again and again and again is they target those institutions because they want to amass all power at the center. And when we say the center, we mean in their own hands, one individual. And you can see that pattern in Viktor Orban's Hungary. You can see it in Maduro's Venezuela, you can see it in Erdogan's Turkey. And yes, you can see it in Donald Trump's United States. And once that happens, that imposes a set of dilemmas and predicaments on the people who live under that system. They suddenly have to make a decision. Do you go along with this? Do you wait? Do you see how it plays out? Do you try and keep your head down? What do you do? Those questions, they recur, they occur in this book. But I see them being played out now. And so two things don't have to be identical for us to be able to learn from one to the other. And I do think some of those parallels and echoes, as I say in the book, they reverberate especially loudly.
- [34:33]
Moderator
Now. And do you think that the kind of courage, not fearlessness, but the kind of courage that you have uncovered and written about so compellingly in this book, do you think that that level of courage still exists.
- [34:47]
Jonathan Friedland
Today? Yes, people are doing it. I mean, there are in all the places I mentioned, you know, there will be dissenters. I mean, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, I think we mainly took away from it, that it wasn't Donald Trump and that put a smile on a lot of people's faces. But there was also. But the winner was a dissident politician in Venezuela. Not easy to do that. You know, a woman, again, she is doing that. There will be people everywhere. And look, you know, again, I'm not saying saying it's the same. Of course it's not the same. But it's estimated that 7 million people took to the streets in the United States this weekend under a very good slogan, no kings in America. The response to that, by the way, I don't know if you've seen this, this AI video that Donald Trump posted of himself wearing the crown of a king in a military plane, unloading excrement on the millions of people below. So, you know, the battle is not the same, but it is underway. And yes, there are people who are doing it. And because it's not as extreme, they're not tested in the same way. They're not yet. But in corners of the world there are. And you know, I didn't include in my list Vladimir Putin's Russia, partly because it wasn't as clearly a democracy beforehand. But you think of Alexei Navalny and people and his wife, his widow. You know, there are widows in these stories again and again and again. It's not a coincidence. You know, there are people demonstrating that courage and taking great risks. What still intrigues me about this group particularly is they are the group. You know, unlike Navalny, this lot would have been fine. It's still a mystery to me. You know, on one level, this book is a whodunit. There's a, it's a mystery. But there's a deeper mystery in this book, which is how on earth why did these people do these things when they had nothing, nothing to gain from.
- [36:49]
Moderator
It? If you want to buy one of these perfect books, Jonathan is going to be in the foyer immediately after this signing copies. That's all we have time for now. Thank you so much to Intelligence Squared for organizing this event. Thank you to Jonathan. Thank.
- [37:03]
Jonathan Friedland
You. Thank you.
- [37:05]
Mia Sorrenti
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