← Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain History: How Adolf Hitler Destroyed German Democracy in Six Months
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- [00:03]
Derek Thompson
What's up everyone? I'm Nora Princioti. And I'm Nathan Hubbard. And we're coming in like a wrecking ball to announce a brand new series. That's right, it's every single album. Miley Cyrus deep dive with us into the career of one of our most creative and confounding pop stars. We're starting, of course, with the Best of Hannah Montana and ending with her brand new album, Something Beautiful in June. And and don't forget about Miley Cyrus and her dead pets. We certainly will not be doing that. So listen now on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by ServiceNow. We're for people doing the fulfilling work they actually want to do. That's why this was written and read by a real person and not AI. You know what people don't want to do? Boring busywork. Now with AI agents built into the ServiceNow platform, you can automate millions of repetitive tasks in every corner of your business, IT HR and more so your people can focus on the work that they want to do. That's putting AI agents to work for people. It's your turn. Tap the banner to get started or visit servicenow.com.
- [01:21]
Joe
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- [02:08]
Derek Thompson
How Hitler Did It My grandmother was born in Berlin in 1927 during the Weimar Republic. She was Jewish. By the time she was 10, she could roughly divide her life in two. For the first five years of her life, Germany was a democracy, a republic. For the second five years of her life, Germany was a Nazi state and Hitler was its dictator. For those five years as Hitler transformed German society, mandating Heil Hitler greetings, throwing political enemies in prisons and camps, encouraging brutal and violent attacks on Jews, her family remained in Berlin. They Left only in 1938, around the time of Kristallnacht, when Jewish businesses were destroyed across the country. At 10 years old, she was sent along with her sister to Great Britain through a program called Kindertransport, in which Jewish children from Nazi Germany and its occupied territories were sent to live with British families, typically without their parents. For several years During World War II, she lived with a family she's always described as loving and decent, before her parents returned and took them back across the Atlantic to settle in America, in Michigan, where she still lives at the age of 97. For me, the story of Nazi Germany has always been personal, but the rise of Hitler resonates even for families that weren't shaped and destroyed by the Holocaust. It's impossible, I think, to be interested in history and not morbidly fascinated by the rise of Adolf Hitler. How did a rich and prosperous society seem to descend into a bloodthirsty death cult? How did the constitutional Republic of Germany become a genocidal dictatorship? Fascination with Hitler's Germany requires no news, Peg, but I've been particularly interested in understanding this story because in the last few months several prominent podcast hosts, including Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson, have mainstreamed revisionist histories of the Nazi regime and World War II. These new revisionist histories often soften Hitler's antisemitism and treat the Fuhrer as a man of limited ambition, a guy who just wanted to give Germans a bit more living space, who was pulled into a continental war against his wishes by the dastardly Winston Churchill. This swarm of revisionist history is one reason why I've been diving back into Hitler biographies recently. Another reason relates to historiography. The Nazi movement left behind an enormous mass of documentation public speeches, private remarks, government records, bureaucratic paperwork, much of which has only been published in the last few years. We're getting new insight by the year into what motivated the Nazis, from the perpetrators at the top to the rank and file at the bottom. The best book that I've read that makes use of this trove of documentation is Hitler's People by the historian Richard Evans. Evans is the author of a famous three volume history of Adolf Hitler, the Coming of the Third Reich, the Third Reich in Power and the Third Reich at War. He's widely considered the most comprehensive historian of Nazi Germany in the world, and his new book distills his multi thousand page bibliography into an elegant 100 page synthesis of Hitler's life, followed by profiles of his most important advisors. The end of the book Hitler's people is particularly interesting because it profiles ordinary Germans of the time for the purpose of explaining how normal, non psychopathic people nonetheless found themselves involved in a regime so brutal that it's become the global synonym for evil. Today's guest is Richard Evans and the animating question of this episode is very simply stated, how did it all happen so quickly? In November 1932, Germany was a democracy. By the spring of 1933, it was a dictatorship. By July 1933, the phrase Heil Hitler became compulsory for all civil servants. Think about that for a second. In November, a free election by July, it's illegal to say good morning. Before we dive in, I want to try to paint a picture of what it was like to live in Germany in the early 1930s. How unusual was this period of history which produced the most unusually monstrous regime? Germany was not a healthy, long standing democracy by any means. It was not a prosperous or proud era. It was the opposite of those things in every respect. Germany had a thin legacy of democracy. The Weimar Republic was its first lasting constitutional republic. This was a country that knew monarchy and emperors better than it knew presidents or the franchise. In 1932, it was a highly militarized culture as well. Army fatigues were visible everywhere throughout the country. Even in the 1920s and early 1930s. Long after World War I had ended, the country was experiencing several overlapping traumas, national and economic. An extraordinary run of military victories in the 19th century had given Germans a feeling of invincibility that was shattered by its loss in World War I. The Treaty of Versailles struck many Germans as a humiliation, an emasculating surrender document. The Weimar Republic was speckled with economic emergencies, starting with hyperinflation in the early 1920s and then with the Great Depression in the early 1930s which crushed the economy just before this crucial year of 1932. German farmers in particular were radicalized by the collapse in commodity prices and they provided early support for the Nazi political party. By the end of 1932, when our narrative picks up the issues that had dominated the right wing agenda throughout the 1920s. Rearmament, the repudiation of the Treaty of Versailles and rescuing German agriculture had become a winning platform. And the individual who best understood how to alchemize this anger and anxiety into a political movement was an Austrian born ideologue named Adolf Hitler. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain history. Richard Evans, welcome to the show.
- [09:16]
Richard Evans
Thanks for having me on, Richard.
- [09:18]
Derek Thompson
In the open, I try to give listeners a sense of what it was like to live in Germany at the end of 1932, beginning of 1933, the layers of economic desperation, national humiliation, the militarization of the culture, the frailty of its democratic legacy. What do you think we need to know to understand the psychology of the German people in late 1932 as they're going to the polls to vote for the Nazi party and other German political parties?
- [09:51]
Richard Evans
Well, you have to remember the first thing is that you should never generalize about the German people. This is a country that's more divided than almost any other in Europe at that time. It's unique amongst large European countries in being divided by religion. So there's about not quite 60% are Protestant and the rest are Catholic. And what that means then the second division, what that means is that you can't really have a single conservative party, a mainstream conservative party. There's a Catholic one and there's a Protestant one. And then secondly, it's divided by class. It's really quite hard to think ourselves back into that time. But social class is absolutely crucial. The different working class and the middle classes, they dress differently, they speak differently, they vote differently, and then regions. So there are, you look at Germany's a bigger country, much bigger than it is now, and it extends into East Central Europe. So it's very divided. And in fact Hitler's pitch in elections in the early 30s was that he was going to unite the country. So Germany, as you said correctly, is in deep economic trouble. It was shocked, shattered by World War I. There was a hyperinflation, but that was over by 1924. And what came then was a brief stabilization of the economy. And then in 1929 with the wall street crash, American banks, which had funded this economic recovery, withdrew their short term loans and they plunged the German economy into a massive crisis. 35% unemployment, if you can imagine that. More than 1 in 3 of people lost their jobs, had no jobs. It was completely traumatic. This is no good. This is the first democracy we've had, the so called Weimar Republic. Now you have full democracy with the ousting of the Kaiser at the end of World War I, which Germany had lost. And that's not working. It can't deliver prosperity. So they begin to vote for the Nazi party. So that's a kind of massive political and economic crisis in 1932.
- [12:19]
Derek Thompson
So we've talked about the context of Nazi Germany. Let's talk about the context of Adolf Hitler before we get to 1933. I think one of the more popular stories that's been told about Hitler on the right in the last few years is this idea that Hitler was a reluctant participant in in full scale European war and the Holocaust. He was a constrained realist. His aims were limited. He just wanted to re establish Germany's power and its sense of pride. After the Treaty of Versailles, he wanted to protect ethnic Germans to the east. He didn't set out to be a new Napoleon. It was Winston Churchill's fault that drew him into a continental war. And maybe he even didn't mean for the Holocaust to turn out to be what it ended up being. Obviously this is a huge claim and I don't want to spend all of our time on it. But having spent decades reviewing thousands, tens of thousands of documents and the history of Adolf Hitler's psychology and political philosophy and his work, how do you respond to this sort of new trendy revisionism that says he was a constrained realistic who didn't want what ultimately happened in World War II?
- [13:37]
Richard Evans
Well, the opening chapter, 100 pages of my new book, Hitler's People, that's devoted to Hitler, God help me. I had to read all his speeches all over again and all his writings, including his autobiographical, political Mein Kampf, My Struggle and so on. And it's interesting, there's a big divide. When he comes to power in 1933, he starts speaking, giving his speeches which conceal his real aims because he knows that other countries are listening. Before that he had no such qualms. And I found a speech from 1930 to his own followers, a secret speech, if you like, one that was not public. And in that he says he looks back to the 1880s, which is the era when he was born. He was born in 1889 and that's the time of what we call the scramble for Africa, when the European powers annex and take over huge swathes of Africa and Pacific and the world. And he says in that speech, well, Germany came off really badly in that struggle for supremacy in the 1880s. We only got a few kind of leftovers after Britain and France had taken the lion's share. But next time, he says, and there will be a new war, he says that quite openly to his followers, a new European war. And indeed all the evidence is that he intended there to be a war from the very beginning. That will be different. Germany will achieve world rule, rule over the world. The word he used in Germany is welt, Herrschaft, world rule. And we will rule the world. And that's a kind of astonishing claim to make. But that was what he wanted when he knew that Britain, France, America were all listening to what he said. He portrayed himself as having a much more limited aims. And that was plausible because Woodrow Wilson, U.S. president had established at the end of World War I, which Germany, as you said, lost, that the principle of rebuilding Europe would be national self determination. Every nation should have its own state. And the problem with that is that there's no, it's a kind of jumble of different national, ethnic and linguistic groups. There's no point where you can say Germans end here and then the Poles begin. They're all mixed up. But the one nation that was not given its own state as it were, was Germany. All of the states of course had substantial national minorities because you couldn't draw this clear line. But the Austrians, German speakers, 6 million of them were refused permission after the collapse of their empire over Eastern Europe, the Habsug Empire, they were refused permission to unite with Germany. There were big German speaking minorities in the Czech lands and in Poland and other parts of East Central Europe. And Hitler pretended that he was only interested in, as it were, uniting those with the majority of Germans in Germany itself. But that was a pack of lies to put it bluntly. And of course Hitler, if you look at all the treaties that he signed, he broke every single one of them. He broke the German Polish treaty in 1934, the Anglo German naval agreement of 1935, he broke the Nazi Soviet pact in 1939, he broke the Munich agreement in 1938. All of them, he regarded them as just pieces of paper. And I'm afraid that people who say that's what he really wanted have fallen into the trap of believing him. But he was lying. And there's no, you know, it's quite clear that he did not mean what he was saying because he broke all these, all these treaties. So and as for he intended, you know, there's a lot of evidence from behind the scenes that he intended there to be a European and probably after that even a world war. From the beginning. He tells all the generals in Germany as he's about to come to power, he's going to give them a new European war. He's going to overturn the results of World War I and go on to achieve this rule over the world.
- [18:16]
Derek Thompson
And what about Hitler's antisemitism? Where does that come from and how does it shape his politics?
- [18:22]
Richard Evans
He believes starting with the, starting in 1919 and his first recorded piece of writing is a piece of anti Semitic writing. His last recorded writing is his so called political testament. Also tells the rest of the world to carry on the struggle against the Jews. He believes that there is a world Jewish conspiracy. It's a conspiracy theory on a gigantic scale. And the aim of that is to be subversive, is to subvert and destroy civilization, order, and in particularly German civilization. That's what the Jews are, even if they don't know it, even if. Even if it's something they're not aware of themselves. They're predestined by their blood, as he would put it, by their heredity, to be subversive. And so they must be destroyed immediately, as fast as possible. He believed that the German armies in the West, England, France and America were not defeated militarily though they were. The Germans, for example, didn't have any tanks is amazing. But whereas the Allies had thousands of tanks and the German army gave up in 1918 because they knew that tanks changed the whole nature of warfare. They rolled over the trenches and the barbed wire that had given the advantage to defense from 1914 when the war began. And so it was a military defeat. After the failure of the spring offensive in 1918, the Allies began to advance and the German army gave up when it saw there was no prospect of winning. Now Hitler was actually in hospital when the war ended with Germany's defeat, suffering from temporary blindness brought on by gas attack on the front. He was a soldier on the Western Front. And when he kind of came around Germany being defeated, and he can only explain this sudden shocking reversal of fortune because the fact that the army was going to give up was kept secret from the German population by this Jewish conspiracy, he thought that socialists. And after December 1918, when the communist party in Germany was founded, Communists who previously been socialists and left wing, the extreme left, he thought they were all ruled by Jews and steered from behind by Jewish interests. There's no evidence for this. Absolutely. It's a kind of paranoid fantasy conspiracy theory. But that's what he thought, that the German armies, like the hero Siegfried in Wagner's music drama Twilight of the Gods, which Hitler was a huge enthusiast for. That's what he believed, and he believed it absolutely viscerally. And there's one more point here, which is that in Germany itself, the Jews were less than 1% of the population. It's a tiny minority, most of them, nearly all of them were strongly acculturated. They were part of a German mainstream culture. They were relatively well off. Not all of them were well off. They were strongly represented in professions like medicine, journalism, culture and so on, but they weren't dominant enough of them to be dominant. But that's what Hitler fantasized about. And these two are very obvious points for which there's an enormous amount of evidence. You couldn't trust Hitler. He was driven by fanatical hatred, genocidal hatred of Jews. And he believed that the World War I had ended because Germany was stabbed in the back by a Jewish conspiracy. He believed, therefore, that you needed another war to reverse all of those, but all of those losses in World War I, but you needed that and then to go on and achieve domination over the whole world.
- [22:27]
Derek Thompson
I'm interested in understanding one more aspect of Hitler's philosophy, which is this idea of Lebensraum. After the war, a large number of German soldiers were captured and interviewed. The Allies wanted to understand what they were fighting for. What did they think this whole war was about? And overwhelmingly, the two reasons that they gave for fighting were the struggle against Bolshevism and living space. Lebensraum. And it reminded me of Adam Tooze's book, the Wages of Destruction talks about how for Hitler, the decisive factors in world history weren't labor or industry. It was a struggle for sustenance. It was a struggle for natural resources. And Hitler thought that what Germany needed, this is, according to Tooze, in order to compete with America was. Was a continent's worth of natural resources like America has. And I wonder, because I've always been so interested in this theory, do you think it's fair or misleading, Richard, to say that in some ways, beyond his obvious, as you said, genocidal hatred of Jews, a major driving force for Hitler's expansionism was this kind of North American envy, this interpretation of power and economics. That said the future of geopolitical strength requires commanding a continent's worth of natural resources. And so Hitler has to turn Europe into its own kind of America, not only to help the farmers and grow food, but to support the kind of empire that he saw as essential?
- [24:03]
Richard Evans
That's right. Well, Adam Tooth and I used to teach a course at Cambridge University on Nazi Germany. And of course, I know his terrific book on the economic history of Nazi Germany very well. And he's absolutely right that the problem was he looked back to World War I, and in World War I, there was an Allied blockade. They wouldn't let food supplies and raw materials and goods and services come into Germany from outside. And as a result of that, because Germany was too small to feed itself, had a big population, and it just couldn't grow enough food. And over half a million Germans are reckoned to have died of malnutrition and related diseases in World War I and he thought that that meant that was something of an encouragement on the home front to people who wanted to stop the war, wanted to stab the German army in the back. So it's all kind of interconnected. And what he called living space was what he wanted to conquer. Eastern Europe, particularly Ukraine, Western Russia, the so called breadbasket of Europe, with vast corn fields and huge wheat fields and so on, massive agricultural resources and that would then equip Germany for the next war. It wasn't a case of living space in the sense that Germans were so tightly packed they couldn't actually find anywhere to live. It was an ideological thing. And during World War II, and this is often forgotten, the German government, the Nazi government, Hitler devised this thing called the General Plan for the East. What were they going to do with Eastern Europe when they conquered it? That became official German government policy in 1942 and that envisaged, if you can imagine it, the death by starvation and disease of 45 million so called Slavs, Byelorussians, Russians, Ukrainians, Czechs and so on. It involved the extermination of 85% of the population of countries like Ukraine. It involved the similar massive genocide of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. It was just vast. There's a difference between that and his hatred of the Jews. The Jews were huge in his mind, a huge world enemy, as they called it. The Welts find the hell bent on destroying Germany. The Slavs as he called them, lumping them all together, were simply sub humans, Untermenschen, who had to be clear out of the way to make way for German farmers who would then supply all the food.
- [27:01]
Derek Thompson
Hi, this is Joe from Vanta. In today's digital world, compliance regulations are changing constantly and earning customer trust has never mattered more. Vanta helps companies get compliant fast and stay secure with the most advanced AI, automation and continuous monitoring out there. So whether you're a startup going for your first SoC2 or ISO 27001 or a growing enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta makes it quick, easy and scalable. And I'm not just saying that because I work here. Get started@vanta.com now that we've established the context, the state of Germany, the ideology of Hitler, I want to spend the rest of our time tracing the rise of Hitler and the destruction of German democracy in the few short months between the end of 1932 and the summer of 1933. Let's start with the elections of 1932, where you write that quote. Millions of first time voters flocked to the polls in support of The Nazi Party above all women, the majority of the electorate by some margin and far less likely to have voted previously than men and the young. The Nazis gave them hope amid the gloom and despair engendered by austerity cuts and promised to stem the rising threat of communism. End quote. You've already begun to answer this question in the excerpt that I just quoted to you, but this really surprised me. Who voted for Hitler in 1932 and why was he so popular among German women?
- [28:31]
Richard Evans
Well, first of all, the Nazis did not rise and rise in 1932. Between the elections of the summer where they scored 37% and the election of November, they lost a couple of million votes because the economy was beginning very slowly to recover. And the Nazi Party was actually rather weak. By the end of 1932, it was in a financial crisis, it had lost votes. Some of its senior people, organizers had resigned. Hitler was determined that he would come to power only as leader and header of a government and as a clique of ultra conservative nationalists whose aims actually were more limited than those of his. They wanted to reverse the results of World War I. They did not want to achieve this kind of world domination that hit it. But these people, like President Hindenburg, a former field marshal of the Kaisers Germany, aristocrats like Franz von Papen, who became chancellor briefly head of the government in 32, they thought the Nazis got mass support. Let's bring them into power and we'll surround them, we'll box them in, by conservatives, by our people. So they appointed him head of a government on January 30, 1933, because they thought, on the one hand, the Nazis had mass support, just over a third of the electorate. And on the other hand, they could manipulate them and particularly Hitler, by ensuring that the conservative majority, the mainstream conservatives in the cabinet, could stop him from breaking out. And of course, that was one of the biggest mistakes in history because he was able to outmaneuver them. He used mass violence on the streets. Again, that's often forgotten, if you think in the election campaign of the summer of 1932, over 400 people were killed in street clashes. And political violence is an astonishing figure. He had 2 million stormtroopers, armed and uniformed in early 1933, who ran riots, arresting and beating up, setting up concentration camps, putting the opponents, socialists and communists, into these camps. They were Hitler's fiercest opponents at the time. And that was a kind of combination of pseudo legal measures and mass violence and intimidation that brought Hitler supreme power as the dictator of Germany. By the summer of 1933, it's really very, very fast movement. And Hitler was not elected as head of a government. He was not put into power by an election. He made it a condition of his appointment that there should be elections on March 5, 1933. And even then, when other political parties were in fact terrorized by the Nazis into essentially not campaigning, they weren't allowed to use a radio and so on. He could still only get 44% of the vote, and he needed these conservative partners to push him over the 50%.
- [31:39]
Derek Thompson
I want to slow down here to appreciate the steps because it's such a remarkable descent into hell. November 1932 is the last free Reichstag election. The Nazi vote share declines, as you say, because of the improving economy. And German conservatives install Hitler as chancellor, thinking we can control him. That's January. One month later, February 27, 1933, the Parliament Building burns down. The Reichstag fire. Nazis blame a communist plot. How does this fire play into Hitler's game plan?
- [32:16]
Richard Evans
Okay, the Reichstag was the German parliament building in Berlin. And on the night of the 2728, February 1933, it burned down. And of course, there are a lot of eyewitness reports and investigations and so on. And it's absolutely clear. One man, Marinus van der Lubbe, he was a young Dutch. Dutchman. He wasn't even German. He wasn't a communist, but he was what was called an anarcho syndicalist. He's a man who believed that revolutions could be caused by trade unions getting together and so on. And he was trying to burn down buildings. He tried and failed to burn down several buildings in Berlin before that as a protest against the government's failure, by now, the Nazi government's failure to deal with the unemployment crisis, over 35% unemployment of the workforce. It's enormous. And Van der Lebe decided there had to be a protest. And he got lucky. He got lucky in the Reichstag. He managed to set fire the curtains in the building. The updraft then began to spread it right through the building. Now, the Nazis, of course, accused the Communists, though, as I said, German Communists were banned, effectively banned. I mean, they were arrested in huge numbers. There's about. At least 100,000 people are thrown into makeshift concentration camps. Socialists who'd been moderate socialists who. They were the mainstay of Weimar Democracy, and. And communists who also wanted to destroy Weimar democracy. So the concentration camps, start with are not made for Jews. Remember, Jews are only less than 1% of the population. They were made for these two big socialist left wing parties, some of whose members, if they were Jewish, were much more badly, brutally treated, of course, than the non Jewish communists. But the fact remains it's these left wing opponents of Hitler. So that's a part of this kind of massive violence, torture and murder which underpinned the Nazi seizure of power from when Hitler is appointed chancellor by this kind of right wing clique and when he becomes a dictator. The communists blamed the Nazis. They thought there was a conspiracy of the Nazis. But there's no evidence for this. It's all supposition, hearsay and invention. And that's a theory which some historians who sympathize with the left still adhere to. But it's not very plausible. But what the Nazis did was they established through their propaganda apparatus the idea the communists had caused the fire. There's no evidence for that either. And they banned the communists. They suspended, using the powers of the aged President Hindenburg, who is not a Nazi. They used that to suspend civil liberties, said, look, look what happened In Russia in 1917, it's only a few years ago. And the communists seized power. Lenin seized power by force. They're trying to do it again. So we've got to suspend civil liberties and civil rights and set up a system in which we can arrest anybody we don't like. And that's what they did.
- [35:53]
Derek Thompson
I think some listeners who are sort of casual readers of history look at the words National Socialist and they think, oh, the word socialist is right there, hiding in the word Nazi. Hitler was a socialist. But I think it's so important in reading your work to understand the internal dynamics here, which is that the economic crisis seems to create this implosion in the center that drives voters both to the left and to the right. And the surging popularity of communism is a very real thing. It's a real phenomenon. And it seems to serve as a rallying point for the conservative movement, not just the Nazis, but also more mainstream conservatives, those who helped bring Hitler to power and government. As we're trying to understand this moment in early 1933, I want to make sure we fold in the popularity of communism on the left and the fear of its popularity that is really, really critical to understanding the right.
- [36:53]
Richard Evans
You've got to remember that the communists were seen, quite rightly, in many ways, as a threat to democracy. They wanted to establish a Stalinist Germany. And they said so quite explicitly. And if you look what happened to the middle classes in Russia. They'd been expropriated, they had lost their businesses it had all been taken over by the state in the name of communism. So that was deeply frightening to the German middle classes. And most of them flocked to support the Nazis. The centrist parties, the liberal parties, the conservative parties, they all completely collapsed in the course of 1932 and early 33. Their votes went to the. To the Nazis. Similarly, you find that new voters also tended, if they were middle class, to vote for the Nazis. You mentioned women a bit earlier on. Now, the Nazis were quite explicit. We want to send women back to the home. Women's duty is to have children, preferably male children, so they can become soldiers for the Reich a bit later on. But the fact is that most women, they vote for the same reasons as men. So in the class society of Germany, they voted with their social class overwhelmingly, and their religion and their region. So there were more women, of course, in the electorate because World War I had led to the mass slaughter of men on the battlefield. And women live longer than men and there are more of them anyway. So the most of the Nazi voters were in fact women. Obviously not all. I mean, it's a majority, a slim majority. So a lot of them didn't take. A lot of the middle classes who voted for the Nazi, did not take the Nazi violence seriously. They said, oh, they'll calm down once they get into power. They'll obey the law and they'll be regular, but they will destroy the communists and the socialists. Now you raised the question of why did Hitler called the party the National Socialist German Workers Party? And you can see this symbolized in the Nazi flag. The party flag is a red flag symbolizing socialism. That's the color in Europe of the left. And in the middle there's a white circle and then a black swastika. The swastika means racism and antisemitism in the kind of political language, a visual language of the time. And the colors black, white and red together were the colors of the old imperial flag, the colors of the Kaiser. So it's an attempt to appeal to the workers with the red flag and the use of the term socialism. And because Hitler believed, the Nazis believed, that the workers, as it were, had been seduced by internationalism and by the Communist international led from Moscow by Joseph Stalin, and also to the conservative right, who looked back nostalgically to the days of the old Kaiser, the days of the empire. What did Hitler mean by socialism? Well, he didn't mean what most of the left normally mean by socialism. For the left, it means the socialization going back to Karl Marx here, Right. The socialization, the takeover by the state of the means of production, the takeover of businesses by the state in the interests of the majority of the people. And of course that's what was happening in Russia in the 1920s. Right, but Hitler didn't mean that. Hitler left the capitalist system, if you want to use that word, intact. He left big business, the big banks, all of that was intact. What he did was to steer the economic system, steer business and steer the factories and banks and so on into the policy direction he wanted, which is to prepare for war. And that was great for heavy industry, for iron and steel, for arms manufacturers, all of that kind of stuff. And they kept their profits. I mean they did extremely well. They did not support the Nazis until Hitler was in government. It's a myth, it's another left wing myth that Nazis are brought to power by big business. They weren't until, until they'd established themselves in government. But it's also a myth that Hitler's self styled socialism had anything to do with left wing socialism.
- [41:35]
Derek Thompson
Just to continue the chronology here, in January Hitler becomes Chancellor. In February we have the Reichstag fire. Followed shortly thereafter by Hindenburg suspending civil liberties, fearing that the Bolshevik revolution has traveled west and is going to invade Germany as well. There's an election held 3-5-1933 under what is essentially a state of terror. The outcome of this election and the Enabling act essentially turns Hitler into, into the dictator that we know him to be today. Can you fill in the blanks here? How do we go from March 5th, 1933? An unfree election. What might seem like a free democratic election, but I think you well describe in the book it's very unfree. And then how Hitler eventually becomes a dictator of Germany.
- [42:25]
Richard Evans
Yeah, well, part of all the deal by which he had become head of the government, Vice Chancellor was that there would be elections held under massive Nazi intimidation, other parties almost banned from unable to campaign properly. And there'd also be what we call an Enabling act. That is a, a piece of changing a legislation, a piece of law changing the Weimar Republic's constitution so that laws did not require the ascent of parliament or the President. They could only be, they could be made simply by the cabinet, by Hitler and his ministers, without any reference to the parliament. So that's the foundational pseudo legal document which, which allowed Hitler then to become dictator. And he managed to secure a majority by excluding the Communist deputies. He allowed the communists to campaign in the March 5 elections because that would divide the working class, the industrial working Class vote. Some would vote the moderate Social Democrats and some for the communists, even though most of them were in jail by that time. And that was a kind of pseudo election in a way. He intimidated other parties, particularly the very powerful Catholic Center Party. And it was predominantly in the Catholic community. And his vote held up reasonably well against the Nazi onslaught, even the middle class Catholic vote. And he made, he gave him promises that he would respect their institutions, he wouldn't take over Catholic lay organizations. He concluded an agreement called a confidant with the Pope, which allowed him then to force the Catholic Centre Party to dissolve itself and not to be independent. He then forced the middle class parties which had virtually no members of the national parliament left anymore because they'd all gone to the Nazis. They dissolved themselves. And then through this massive intimidation, he essentially forced the Social Democrats, he dissolved the Social Democrats, the Socialists and the communists. And that was that. A one party state by the summer of 1933 and a one party state run by dictator in which then he passes after the Enabling act through the Cabinet, browbeats the other members of the cabinet, the non Nazis, into acquiescence, appoints new Nazi ministers to get a majority. He then uses that to suspend, to destroy civil liberties and pass many, many new laws, making it an act of treason to oppose the regime. Even to tell jokes about Hitler becomes something you can be executed for.
- [45:28]
Derek Thompson
The speed is just unbelievable. I mean to think that in November 1932 there's a free election and by April 1933 Nazis have taken over Germany's entire civil service, teachers, university professors. There's a one party state. By July, eight months later, eight months after a free election, the German greeting of Heil Hitler is compulsory for all civil servants. When you think about the enablers, the collaborators, we can talk about Franz von Papen. Were they stupid? Were they naive? Did they get unlucky by the Reichstag fire, which made possible the Enabling act in a way that, you know, on Earth 2 parallel universe where there is no Reichstag fire. Maybe it's just harder for there to be an inciting event for Hitler. I'm sort of laying out all the options here, some of which which you might violently disagree with.
- [46:18]
Richard Evans
Yeah, there would have been, I mean the Nazis would have found a different excuse for suspending civil liberties. It just happened that the Reichstag fire sort of played into their hands. But if that hadn't happened, there would have been something else. That was what they were, that's what they wanted to, wanted to do. And it is a very Fast process of the destruction of democracy. But remember, democracy had only been in place in Germany since 1919. This is now 1933. It has very shallow roots. Almost all of the civil service, the judges, the police, the military, they had all been appointed and grown up, as it were, in the Kaisers Germany, which treated the socialists and the democrats and the liberals as traitors, essentially, who wanted, because they wanted to change, they wanted to democratize the political system. So it was quite easy to sweep it all away. Just as an aside, let me say, in my view, I think the roots of democratic political culture in the United States today are far deeper. The reverence for the Constitution goes back centuries. The law is massively more powerful than it was in Germany, and many, many judges are wedded to constitutional practice and principles. There are huge differences there, I think. And the astonishing speed of the destruction of democracy in Germany in 1933 reflects, I think, the weakness of democratic political culture. You can say the same of a number of Eastern European countries, such as Hungary, for example, where there has been again an overthrow of democracy. But democracy only goes back there to 1990. Before that you have a communist dictatorship in Hungary. And then before that you have the Habsug monarchy, which again is an authoritarian system.
- [48:11]
Derek Thompson
You have this beautiful passage in the book that I want to quote back to you to begin to invite you to talk about the German people. You write, quote, the Nazi perpetrators whose lives are recounted in this book were not psychopaths, nor were they deranged or perverted or insane, despite the portrayal of many of them as such in the media and the historical literature. They were not gangsters or hoodlums who took over the German state purely or even principally in order to enrich themselves or gain fame and power. Though when opportunity knocked, many of them did not hesitate to take advantage of it. Nor were they people who existed on the margins of society or grew up beyond the social mainstream. They came overwhelmingly from a middle class background. There was not a single manual laborer among them. If they were diverse in some ways, diverse in background, diverse in occupation, even in some cases, somewhat diverse in class and status, what did these people have in common?
- [49:10]
Richard Evans
Well, the people who supported the Nazis are different levels. So I have a section of the book Hitler's People on what I call the paladins who are the leading Nazis who helped to make policy themselves, like Hermann Goering, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and the main architect of the Holocaust and others like that. And then I have another section on called the Instruments These were people more like middle ranking Nazis who carried out the policy without actually making it so. Things like Adolf Eichmann or Reinhard Heydrich. And when you look at them, I mean, I had these biographical essays on all of them. And then you get a lower level perpetrators, people who were SS officers, concentration camp guards or led columns of extermination squads, of shooting thousands and thousands of Jews in Eastern Europe, people like that, and sympathizers, people who supported the Nazis without actually becoming perpetrators, you might say. And they were all, they had a lot of things in common. First of all, they were not personally psychopaths. It wasn't some internal psychological disease that led them to become Nazis. These were in most respects ordinary, respectable Germans. They were overwhelmingly middle class. They were, as you said, no, they were not workers. They were not by and large former socialists or former communists. These were people who came from the respectable political conservative right. I mean, this is a strongly conservative milieu who believed in the German nationalism, German national interests as they saw it. And so there's a kind of overlap between their views and those of the much more extreme Nazis. So that makes it more difficult. It's very easy. You know, if you say they're all mad, it means we don't, it's nothing like to do with us. It's, they're kind of not, not normal human beings. And so we don't have to ask ourselves about what we think and what we do. We don't have to take responsibility. And, and in the sense also most Germans would not have to take responsibility. So I wanted to counter the idea that they were psychopaths and deranged. And the second is about criminals. These are not kind of professional criminals who are in it for themselves. There's a fantastic movie made by John Farrow, best known now as father of the actress Mia Farrow, for American troops who are going to Europe in 1941 until the end of the war to tell them, give them an idea of what the Nazis were like, what they were fighting against. It's called the Hitler Gang and it shows. It uses lookalike, unknown actors who looked like Himmler or Goebbels and so on. And it's in the style of a 1930s gangster movie. I mean, it's sort of unintentionally hilarious, I think worth looking at. They're not that kind of criminal either, though they commit some of the greatest crimes in history. They're not in it as gangsters themselves. They come from the German people and that makes it more difficult to Understand, of course.
- [52:44]
Derek Thompson
Did the perpetrators and even the lower level officials understand that what they were doing would be seen as unforgivable by the world? Do we have testimony and quotes from some of these folks defending their actions in a way that might reveal to a wise historian that they knew this would be seen as crazy and crazily immoral and monstrous? I mean, what can we say about the degree to which the Germans perpetrating this violence against communists and Jews and other ordinary German civilians understood that the world would not understand what they were trying to do? Their actions were, had an internal logic and an internal defense mechanism, but would not be understood externally.
- [53:35]
Richard Evans
That's really, that's a really good point. There's some notorious speeches to senior SS officers, generals, ministers, top Nazis, by Heinrich Himmler in the war, in the middle of the war, when the SS have already been murdering millions of Jews and Slavs. And Himler describes the extermination of the Jews as a page of glory in our history that will never be written. He knows the world disapproves. The world regards this as wholly immoral and criminal. The Holocaust I'm referring to here, and he describes it quite explicitly. He says in one of our achievements is to shoot thousands of Jews into pits and still remain decent as he thinks of it, I. E. Not committing minor crimes. Of course, that was actually not true. They did, but so he knows. And the reason for giving these speeches in the middle of the war is to bring the senior leading Nazis and SS men into complicity, to get them, prod them into fighting, carrying on fighting as they know they'll be held to account by the Allies after the end of the war, as indeed they were in the Nuremberg war crimes trials and many other trials as well. So they do this. And why did they commit these crimes? Well, their justification was it's historical necessity. And what's driving all of these people is ideology. Wherever you look, they have some big set of ideas that drives them that says this is necessary, we have to do this, we have to kill the Jews because they are subversive, for example, they're destructive. Although other people may not agree, they kind of appeal to these ideological beliefs. It's belief, it's fanatical belief in the principle of Nazism that drives them in the end.
- [55:34]
Derek Thompson
The last myth that I'd like you to address is this idea that if ordinary Germans in the 1930s, early 1940s, that they might have simply been ignorant of the realities of Nazism, that only a small minority of fanatics lent themselves to the ideas and practices of Nazism. And a lot of Germans just knew nothing about what was going on. And one thing that really struck me is that in the months Of March through June 1933, hundreds of people are killed, hundreds of thousands of communists and Social Democrats are arrested and put into makeshift torture centers and concentration camps. And if they're released, they're just released after promising to never practice politics again. There's no way, it seems to me, that you could have this kind of campaign that affects hundreds of thousands of Germans, and ordinary Germans wouldn't know about it, wouldn't react to it, wouldn't be aware that their country is descending into a militarized police state. From the very end of your book, which looks at the most ordinary, let's call it Germans, what story did they tell themselves about what was happening to their country and why it was acceptable and even grand?
- [56:47]
Richard Evans
Yeah, well, of course, roughly, according to some estimates, roughly half the German population were working class. And these are the targets because they voted for socialism or communism. These are the targets of Nazi violence and repression. So you have to remember that the German middle classes and the much, much smaller upper classes, again, they tended to think, well, this is just a kind of, you know, an early immaturity of the Nazis. They're so vigorous, they're so dynamic, and it has a kind of. A kind of accompaniment of violence, but it'll all die down once they get into power. I go through the case of a Hamburg schoolteacher, Louisa Solnitz, who was not a Nazi, but I thought it was great that they were bringing Germany and Germans together. And if I can use the phrase making Germany great again. And she recorded, she said, well, there are some violence incidents and so on, but it'll all pass. They'll all stabilize, they'll all settle down. And that's what they told themselves. Of course, they knew what was going on. And when you get to the Holocaust, the mass murder of 6 million Jews during the war from all over Europe taken to Auschwitz, Treblinka and other extermination camps. Of course, the soldiers knew about this. There's never any point of the war where, from 1941, summer of 1941 till the end, where there's less than two thirds of the German armed forces are engaged on the Eastern Front. We often forget that. And these millions of German troops, of course, they went home on furlough. They wrote letters for home which were censored, but you couldn't censor millions and millions of letters. Some got through. It was quite common. Knowledge in Germany by the middle of 1942 that Jews are being murdered in vast numbers in Eastern, Eastern Europe. We have a wonderful diaries of a German Jewish professor called Victor Klemperer who survived because he was married to a non Jewish German who stood by him all the way through. And Victor Klemperer knew about the mass shootings on the Eastern Front, behind the Eastern Front by the spring of 1942. The Allies knew by the end of 1942 and they actually dropped billions of leaflets over Germany describing what was going on and saying the people responsible will be heads held to account. So it's widely known, of course, after the war, Germans all said, I didn't know what was going on because they wanted to evade prosecution, they did not want to stand trial. The prime example, and I have a chapter relating to him, is Albert Speer, who was a young architect who became Hitler's Minister of Munitions through a series of chances and he claimed at the end of the war and the Nuremberg war times trials. And he didn't know anything about Auschwitz, which is a lie of such fantastic, absurd proportions that it's amazing that people fell for it. But he was given 20 years in prison and got out at the end. Yeah.
- [60:13]
Derek Thompson
The tragic irony is that this is a regime brought into power by, in part, a sense of national humiliation. And I think you're beginning to describe a different kind of national humiliation that followed World War II in the 1940s, 1950s, that many laws in Germany are still a reflection, I think, of that national humiliation. Well, Richard, thank you for your book and thank you in particular for really helping me understand the internal dynamics that made this revolution possible. The nationalist dynamics, the class dynamics, this ideological conflict between communism and the ironically named National Socialist Party. Really rich book, both at the level of ideas and the level of human beings. Because one of the most terrible things about this period of history is that it was all too human. So, Richard, thank you.
- [61:01]
Richard Evans
Thank you very much, Derek. A pleasure to be on your program.
- [61:17]
Derek Thompson
Sam.