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- [00:00]
James Holland
Fourth of July savings are happening now at the Home Depot with select appliances starting at $398 plus get free delivery on appliance purchases of $398 or more. No membership required. Upgrade your kitchen with a modern and sleek GE profile refrigerator featuring hands free autofill for the perfect pour every time and make laundry day easier with 2 in 1 washer dryer combo innovation that completes laundry in about 90 minutes. Shop Top brand appliances now at the Home Depot offer valid June 17th July at the US only C store online for details. He's a failed artist, you know, everything he touches goes wrong. Hitler ends the war in hospital. He's been blinded by a gas attack. There is a sort of psycho trauma going on in his head. Now he's in a defeated nation which has just been kicked into the, into the mud by the Versailles Treaty. We didn't fight to come back to a broken Germany. We need to make Germany great again. He's able to tap into that anger, but he would always then end his speeches with hope we can rise again, that German people can be great again. Suddenly you're kind of, you know, you found your tribe and you found your people and so suddenly you have a political void because the existing politics in a democracy isn't working. So what are the alternatives? Well, the alternatives are communism or national Socialism. If people can't see the comparisons now, then they're obviously not thinking about this in the right way.
- [01:32]
Host 1
James Holland, welcome back to Trigonometry.
- [01:34]
James Holland
Well, thank you for having me on.
- [01:35]
Host 1
Oh, it's great to have you back. Last time we talked about the kind of big picture, World War II, that episode absolutely smashed us. Of course it would do. Today we really want to focus on Adolf Hitler and his journey through life. If I can say it like that. Before we start, for people watching, I want to make clear we have your a book, Sunday Times best selling, the Visionaries on the table.
- [01:54]
James Holland
Yes.
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Host 1
Let's be very clear, Hitler is not part of that. We're not saying he's a visionary.
- [01:58]
James Holland
Features quite heavily in the book. Yeah, I think it's fair to say, but the visionaries in that case are very much the forefront are Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, the, the two presidents that kind of served during the Second World War and they're kind of an antidote to Hitler. You know, they're different worldviews because both America and Germany are experiencing very, very similar things in terms of Spanish flu, post first World war, Wall street crash, global trade, war, et cetera, et cetera. They don't go down the route that Nazi Germany goes down. And why is that? I think that's very interesting. So it's a sort of study of contrast as a. It's the right way to go about things, wrong way to go. Those guys kind of, I would say, nailed it. And Hitler maybe, maybe not.
- [02:50]
Host 1
Well, it's a relief you take that position. But before we get to that, and we will get to that, actually, Francis and I thought the most interesting thing to start with would be just to understand a little bit about the background of Hitler before he becomes the Hitler of history. Like growing up, his experience serving in World War I and his political career prior to becoming Chancellor and de Fuhrer. Yeah, tell us about him.
- [03:15]
James Holland
Well, so he's brought up near Linz and then sort of after, as he grows up, he sort of matures and goes to art school in Vienna where he's a failed artist. You know, everything he touches goes wrong. And that's because he's an extremely gauche young man. He's angry. I think he feels that he's for better things. But he's, you know, he's definitely a kind of spectrum, on the spectrum kind of character. He doesn't make friends easily, he doesn't interact with people easily. Resentment is just absolutely broiling inside him. His chance for kind of deliverance from this ordeal of successive failures comes with the First World War where he gets consumed by a sense of patriotic fervor and wants to do his bit and joins up and really embraces, spends most of his war on the Western Front where he is a runner. And by all accounts he does this very well. You know, he's conspicuously courageous, but never gets beyond lance corporal, you know, sort of gefreiter basically. In German terms everyone always says he's the corporal, but he's only half corporal of lance corporal. He's a one stripe man. And the exaltation that he felt in joining up, that patriotic fervor, being suddenly belonging, being part of something. The comradeship of the trenches, of fighting alongside fellows for a common cause, all this kind of stuff that dissipates as the war progresses. And then there is the terrible shock of 1918 because it looks like they've turned this corner because at the beginning of March they signed the Treaty of Precedentovsk, which is Russia's exit from the, from the First World War. And it's a huge victory. And suddenly you know that that reclaims the Baltic states, Ukraine, parts of Poland, all from part of the Russian Empire. And it's a huge victory. And it also means, of course, that the Germans don't have to kind of, you know, Central Powers don't have to fight on two fronts. And it's Germany that is shouldering the burden of the Western Front and the Eastern Front, where Austria is burdening the shoulder down in southern, you know, in the Alps against Italy and so on. So it's, you know, it feels like it should. You know, this should be this huge release, and this should be the kind of impetus that spurs them onto the kind of final victory on the Western Front. And they have this. They launched this great offensive in March 1918, and it's what ends the deadlock of stationary, static trench warfare. But it also offers an amazing lesson for the Western Allies, particularly the British, which is in their sector where the main thrust of this offensive comes. And what the British discover is, as they're pushed back, they can actually afford to trade space for time. And as they go further and further, further back, so the German lines get more and more extended. And as they get more and more extended, they become less effective. And so what they realized is there is a certain point you reach where your attackers, when you're on the defensive like this, have reached their. What is known as their culmination point, where they can no longer achieve what they need to achieve with the kind of speed and tactical flexibility they would like because they're so overextended. And the British then counterattack, and at that point, the Germans are spent because they've chucked everything into this one massive operation that's going to win in the war, and it doesn't. And the truth is, financially, economically, and in terms of war production, they are suffering harder than the Western, than France and Britain are. And so they are no longer able to absorb that. And it comes to a point where they just can't go on any longer. And then you start to have the sort of, you know, the Communist revolt in the mutiny in the. In the German navy and so on and so forth, and the whole thing crumbles down. And this is also presaged by a sort of a slight belief that they're going to sort of, you know, the peace that comes is not going to be too bad, because President Wilson of America has come up with his very idealistic kind of 14 points and everything, and the Germans have sort of think, well, okay, maybe we can sort of get away with this. Austria's already bugged out in October, and so that's what prompts them to sue for peace. And then there is this Terrible disappointment because the 14 points don't quite end up being the 14 points. And you have the Paris peace talks, which ends up with a Paris peace treaty of late June 1919, where Germany gets frankly, absolutely shafted. I mean, it gets a total shellacking and then you get this sort of terrible, absolute gut wrenching disappointment. So you have the terrible disappointment of the, of the end of the war and ending up on the losing side. But then you get the sort of grinding down into the dust. You know, you're on your knees, we're going to kick you into the mud with the peace treaty. And that's what is just so hard to stomach for so many of the old, you know, people who've been on, on the front. And Hitler ends the war in hospital. He's been blinded by a gas attack. And it seems quite clear that he's blind beyond purely the gas, that there is a sort of psycho trauma going on in his head. And he comes out of it, he emerges out of it and he's sort of okay. But it is clear that it is deeply, deeply traumatic. And for Hitler at the end of the First World War, what are you going to do? He didn't have any job beforehand. Now he's in a defeated nation which has just been kicked into the mud by the Versailles Treaty. The reparations are obviously terrible. There's a diktat which says they have to kind of sign off that it was their fault in the first place, blah, blah, blah.
- [09:01]
Host 1
Was it their fault in the first place?
- [09:04]
James Holland
Well, you know, that's an entirely different podcast.
- [09:10]
Host 1
I mean, short version.
- [09:13]
James Holland
It's more nuanced than just one. One. This is, it's so complicated because the tangle of diplomatic alliances is such that it kind of escalates really, really badly very quickly in 19.
- [09:27]
Host 1
Blaming Germany unilaterally is overdoing it a little bit is what I'm reading from you unilaterally.
- [09:32]
James Holland
Yes.
- [09:32]
Host 1
Okay, fine. Before we carry on with the story, which you tailing in a fascinating way, just. Can we just come back to before World War I? Yeah, you said that he's this angry man, a bit spectrumy, can't make any friends at this point. Has he already formed his political views? Is he ranting about the Yuden at this point? Or he's just angry like many young men are angry?
- [09:55]
James Holland
No, no, no. And there's evidence that he has equated to his stroke sort of friends in the looser sense who are Jews. And no, it hasn't come to the forefront at this point. But anti Semitism is absolutely rampant, you know, across Europe at this time. You know, obviously, you've had all the pogroms in. In Russia as well before that. You know, there's a healthy dose of. An unhealthy dose, I should say, of anti Semitism in Britain, for example, certainly in. In France. I mean, you've only got to look at the Dreyfus of air at the turn of the century, et cetera, et cetera. So. So it is absolutely there. I suspect he probably was anti Semitic, but. But not rabidly so at this stage. And it's certainly not a part of his kind of, you know, his. His worldview and his. His. He hasn't thought through his ideology at this point. At this point before the war. He's a young man who is disappointed by life. He has a very close affection with his. And relationship with his mother, very bad relationship with his father. As I say, you know, life hasn't been good to him. You know, he. He's impoverished. His artwork, you know, he tries to make it as an artist, but his art is terrible. I mean, technically, it's sort of okay. I mean, if he. If he were to become an architect or something, his sort of draftsman, like pictures of buildings would be all right. But. But he's terrible at human figures. There's no soul in them at all. There's just nothing there.
- [11:15]
Host 1
If you.
- [11:15]
James Holland
I mean, have you ever seen any of his paintings? Yes, they're totally dead. I mean, there is just no vitality, no life in them whatsoever. And, you know, they are nothing more than kind of sort of cheap postcards. I mean, you know, that's what they are. I mean, you know, and. But he gets into disagreements with people. He's constantly let down. He sort of ends up in a garret in Vienna. You know, it's just. It's just a. You know, his life is going absolutely nowhere. Salvation comes with the First World War because it gives him this sense of belonging and comradeship, which is something he's never really experienced before because he's always been this outsider, this sort of angry young man.
- [11:55]
Host 2
But the problem then comes with the First World War ending. All of a sudden, that sense of camaraderie, belonging, I mean, that's gone so big time. So where does he go from there?
- [12:06]
James Holland
Well, one of his. One of his former officers takes. Takes pity on it and asks him to help do some.
- [12:13]
Host 2
Some.
- [12:13]
James Holland
Some sort of propaganda courses to try and sort of bash Bolshevism out of young Germans. And he finds out he's actually a really good orator and he finds he's rather good at it. And he can just stand up and just deliver. And as he's thinking about this and thinking about trying to sort of, you know, dissuade people from Bolshevism, his own thought starts to sort of coalesce. And he's gravitated to Munich as well, because although he's Austrian, he's. Munich is where he ends up. And so he's living in Munich, he's got a job, he's got digs, he's meeting people, and suddenly he's meeting people who have the same ideas as him that are starting to emerge. And he goes to. And he sort of thinks, okay, well, what is you. Where are we heading here? What is the new Germany? And he has. Starts to have increasingly strong views about. About what, how he sees Germany should be. And he goes to a meeting and a beer. Color of the. Of the Darja Ibeiter Party, which is the German People's Party, which has been set up by Anton Drexler, who is friends with people like Rudolf Hess and various others who have been part of the Tula Society, which is a sort of, you know, woo, woo kind of, you know, where do we all come from? Sort of ancient Aryan myths kind of vibe with some anti Semitism thrown in. And they've all sort of merged into the dap, the Deutsche, the German Workers Party. And he goes there and he stands up and speaks and everyone goes, wow, you know, who is this guy? And he's really good at it. And he starts to speak more and more and he suddenly becomes a star. And I can't remember, it was 1920 or 1921 that Drexler changes the name to the, you know, the National Socialist Workers Party. The Nazis. Germans, by the way, don't do acronyms, they do abbreviations. So, you know, the Stuka, for example, is a, is a, is an abbreviation. Nazi is an abbreviation rather than an acronym. And Hitler then just takes over. And it's just completely obvious that he should take over because he is the leading light. He's the person that everyone listens to. And suddenly he can hold a room. And he finds this incredibly liberating, this ability to stand in a beer cellar, stand in a room and hold everyone's attention with his rhetoric. And he can just speak in fully formed paragraphs and sentences. And all his speeches follow exactly the same pattern. They start off, you know, we were robbed. We were kind of, you know, we, we were, we were stabbed in the back, which is Hindenburg's line from spring of 1918. This idea that it wasn't the fault of the generals and the commanders in the First World War. They were stabbed in the back by the politicians and by. By Commies and, you know, Bolsheviks and so on, when it was entirely their fault. I mean, you know, they were party to the going to war in the first place. They were egging on the Kaiser. They were promising military miracles that couldn't be achieved and all the rest of it. So, you know, if anyone in any war, it's always a combination of people that are responsible for. For what happens. But they had as much blood on their hands as anyone, you know, the Ludendorfs and Hindenburgs and all the other senior commanders. So to kind of try and absolve himself and pass the blame on something else was, you know, cowardly and ridiculous and. And not true, but it. But tapped into a kind of a need of a lot of these veterans who were coming back, who were angry, disappointed. You know, we've just fought through this. We've seen hell, we've seen our comrades blown to smithereens. You know, we fought in the mud. And this is the thanks we get for our sacrifice and for all that we were, you know, all our shattered dreams and aspirations and hopes and all the rest of it. And so Hiller, when he's in his speeches, is able to tap into that anger, but he would always then end his speeches with hope. We can rise again. The German people can be great again. But part of this, reaching this point of hope was also about setting up the enemy. And so what he does is this. Us and them and us is Volksgemeinschaft and Franzgemeinschaft. And there's no literal translation for Volksgemeinschaft at all, but it is. It is a sense of we as Germans are linked inextricably by culture, by race, by being Northern Europeans, by being at heart German Christians, even if you don't believe in it, by a sort of a heritage and inheritance that we. Instinct. It's a bit like sort of, you know, the Pashtunwadi code or something. To Pashtuns in Afghanistan, you're just sort of something you're born with. And either you're part of this gang or you're not part of this gang. And if you're not part of this gang, it's because you're a sloth or a Bolshevik or a Jew. I mean, you know, one of the things that they. The mistake, they make is, is assuming that the Jews are, are, is, is racial rather than a religion. It's religion, not racial. And so, so Volska Mineshaft is this us and them is buying into that us and them. We are the true inheritors of our land of Germany. You know, the northern Aryan people. It goes back millennia to ancient times, which is again tapping into the slightly sort of woo woo Tula society kind of nonsense. You know, this is, this is the notions of, of, of an ancient Cryst like figure with a K. He's this sort of, you know, it's, it's, it's the Atlantic Ice theory. It's all this kind of just nonsense sort of runic, kind of ancient Nordic races kind of heritage stuff that the Nazis get into. And then the Franz combined shaft is the same as Volksgemeinschaft, but it's people who've served at the front. And despite the fact that obviously Jews have been integrated into German society and Prussian society and the German peoples for centuries and millennia is neither here nor there. The fact that they've been hugely successful compatriots is neither here nor there. The fact that they fought alongside each other in the trenches is neither here nor there. And one of the, one of the reasons why Hitler gets into this in the first place is because when he gets to Munich, there is a, a very brief Soviet Republic which is announced in, in Munich, I think in 1919 or 1920. And it is organized by Munich Jews, predominantly. The leadership is Jews. So suddenly he thinks, ah, you know, I've got this, this opposition that, you know, there is us true Aryans, true Germans, the Volksgemeinschaft, the Volksgemine shaft. Then there is them, which are Bolsheviks, Slavs and Jews. They're the enemy. And there is this international plot of Bolshevism and Jewry which is trying to undermine us, the true inheritors of Europe and Germany and all of us. And of course it's totally, totally bogus. But when you've just been defeated and you're trying to work out what it is you stand for, it's quite potent. And you know, you see this time and time again, it's not. I remember when you know, sort of 15 years ago, sort of wondering how on earth could people fall for this total nonsense. And then you see what's happened in the world in the last, particularly in the Western world in the last sort of 15 years, and you kind of think, okay, I kind of get this now. So that's what he's able to tap into and he just gets this growing, growing movement. But, but it's tiny. You know, it's, it's, it's totally fringe. I mean it's, it's, it's more fringe than, you know, Tommy Robinson. I mean it really is nothing doesn't make a, a dent. But it has its supporters and with it comes this sort of paramilitary side of it. They'll wear uniforms, you know, they have the swastika.
- [20:13]
Host 1
And where does the swastika come from?
- [20:15]
James Holland
Well, this is debated, but, but, but, but my understanding of it is it's Goring. Goring certainly believed it was him that had done it. And this was because he became friends with some Swedish aristocrats and went to visit a castle there. In fact, actually his first wife was a Swedish aristocrat. And on the fireplace where he was staying at this castle in Sweden was, it was the swastika. I mean, swastika is older, the hills. I mean, you get it in, in, in India and Sanskrit and you know, all over the place. And generally it means, you know, it's a peaceful kind of warm, fluffy sign rather than something that's completely toxic. And what they do is they turn it on its side so it comes. I think Goering is very, very important in this. And of course he is a, he's reasonably aristocratic, he's well to do. He's been a fighter pilot. He's commanded the, you know, the Richtofen squadron at the end of the war. He's got 40 plus kills to his name. You know, he's a very, very talented pilot. He's also super smart. I mean, really, really clever. Again, another really, really good orator. And, and he's, he quickly unveils his way into the Nazis and does well because he's this larger than life character. He's quicker witted than almost all the others and he can run rings around them. And he's a great orator.
- [21:36]
Host 2
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- [23:34]
James Holland
Yeah. And he's, you know, he ends up being a sort of, you know, a bit of a barnstormer and flying commercially and, you know, and just lost. I mean, all these people, they're just lost. You know, there's no money, there's no jobs, there's no, there's nothing. You know, society has broken down completely. Now by back end of 1923, which coincidentally is exactly the same time as the Beer Hall Putsch, things are starting to get better. Which is one of the reasons why Butch fails, because actually there's, you know, there is a shaft of sunlight on the, on the, on the uplands again. And Germany is starting to get out of the mire, which isn't very convenient for the, for the Nazis, because they're all about anger and, you know, they are very much the sort of the politics of division and us and them and all this kind of stuff. So suddenly as Germany is emerging out of the economic mire just at the same moment as the Nazis are doing this play for kind of, you know, trying to take over Munich and Bavaria and then let's see where it all goes. So it doesn't work.
- [24:31]
Host 1
Jen, sorry to interrupt. It just strikes me we've skipped a bit, which may be worth delving into just for people who are far less familiar with this than you. So you mentioned how they're really fringe. It's a few people meeting and.
- [24:43]
James Holland
Based in Munich.
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Host 1
Based in Munich. How do you go from that to try and take charge of a whole part of Germany?
- [24:50]
James Holland
Well, it's, it's a, it's a long and difficult process. And, you know, to start off with, I mean, these early years, sort of 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, up to the beer hall putsch, which is this where they try and take over Munich and indeed Bavaria and the whole country in November 1923. It's super small scale. So this is lots of angry young men drinking beer, drinking their steins, working themselves up into a lava Hitler kind of compelling them with his oratory, others compelling with their oratory. And for lots of lost souls, this, you know, this is the light and they are the moths coming towards it. Because this is offering answers to the anger, the anger and the resentment and the rage. I mean, this is what happens time and time again through history when people are reduced in status, when they are forced to cast aside the things that they held dear and the things that they thought were sure and solid and the foundations of their existence. Suddenly they're looking for answers and there's a lot of pent up anger, which is made worse by the experience of the First World War, the trauma of the First World War. And don't forget, you know, no one's really understanding battlefield trauma in those days. There's no kind of, sort of understanding of PTSD or, you know, you need to come back, you just need to decompress. And we need to sort of give you kind of two weeks on Cyprus and then, you know, sit on the beach and have a good time and have some sort of apple spritz and, you know, then come back and then slowly kind of, you know, bring you back into society. There's none of that. You know, you're back to a broken Germany where people are wheeling around, you know, wheelbarrows of money and there's hyperinflation and, you know, bread is going from kind of 10 million in one day to 100 million marks by the end of the day. You know, it's totally bonkers. So how do you make sense of that? Well, you make sense of that by holding on to the things that you do know. And if there's a bunch of, of lads who've all been through the same experience of you and they've got some finger pointing to do, whether it be to Jews or Bolsheviks or, you know, global capitalism or whatever it might be. Suddenly you're kind of, you know, you found your tribe and you found your people. So those are the people they're attracting. But it is super small scale and there is this paramilitary wing to it which enables people to still wear uniforms
- [27:20]
Host 2
and
- [27:22]
James Holland
feel in touch and connected to their military past. So that the kind of military training they experience, the experience they bought from being on the Western front or even the Eastern front or wherever it was, counts for something. And so that, you know, they start to introduce ranks and all the rest of it in different orders. So you have the sa, the Storm Ab Thailand, you have the. And then you have the SS carts coming into being and you know, for lost souls, this is, gives you a gang, it gives you a tribe. You know, for some people it's a football club. For other people it's a knife gang in South London. You know, for people in Germany, it's the Nazis or whatever or the communists who are far more to the forefront than the Nazis are at this time in Germany. So it's about, it's focusing one's anger, focusing one's resentment, trying to find a sense of brotherhood, trying to, trying to tap into that sense of Volksgemeinschafts and Franz Gemeinschafts. And that is what Hitler is tapping into. And that's how he's presenting it. It's us who are together. You've had this experience, this bonding life experience of being on surviving the first World War. We didn't fight for nothing. All this kind of stuff, you know, we didn't fight to come back to a broken Germany. We need to make Germany great again. And how are we gonna do this? By getting rid of the kind of, you know, the bad elements. We're gonna just make it a true Aryan thing. And then we can rise up again and harness our Germanic br, reclaim our rightful place as a preeminent military nation in central Europe, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
- [28:57]
Host 2
Because it sounds very grandiose, but when we look at the Beer Hall Putsch, I mean, it was a complete failure.
- [29:05]
James Holland
Yes, it was a disaster. Yeah, it's badly planned, badly executed. Shots are fired, Hitler gets away, everybody gets arrested. He doesn't get shot. But Goering, who's by this point one of the leading lights, gets shot in the groin very badly, nearly dies, is rescued by his. By his. Then I don't think they're married at this point by, by Karen. And ends up recuperating in Northern Italy, which is where he becomes addicted to morphine. Hitler is sentenced. I mean, you know, he could have had life imprisonment, he could have been executed for that. He isn't. He's just given a couple of years in Landsberg prison where he writes my first part of Mein Kampf, which is his kind of, you know, his mission, my struggle, my kind of, you know, his vision for the world. And I mean, know. I don't know if either of you have ever bothered to read it. I mean, I don't recommend it but, but it's, it's quite. You don't need to put it this way. You don't need to read cover to cover. Even if you do look at it a bit.
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Host 2
A bit.
- [29:59]
James Holland
It is interesting. You know, it, it is a, it is an absolute dump of, of ideas and anger and resentment and so on. And at its core is, is a vision for the future of how Germany gets out of this. And what Germany needs. And part of the reasons why it gets stuck, caught in the First World War is because it's too isolated in Central Europe. It hasn't got access to the world's oceans. It's got the Baltic, it's got a little bit of the North Sea, but the British, you know, the Royal Navy is too dominant. You know, what we need is living space, Lebensraum, where we can expand and we need to expand our own racial identity of Aryans beyond the borders of existing Germany into the lands of the east where there's going to be this huge struggle. But we need to defeat the Jews, we need to defeat the Slavs. We also need to defeat the political concept of communism, Bolshevism. And then we've got this terrible struggle that we're going to have to go through and it's going to be a terrible burden for a generation of Germans. But afterwards we can have the Thousand year Reich and live forever peacefully. Having created this new order. This is where we need to go. So it is, it is a manifesto, but it's a very sort of disturbed one, to put it mildly. And then he gets out of, out of prison. And Dietrich Eckhart is one of the guys who, who is one of his sort of gurus really. One of the people who has a huge influence on him. And Eckhart is a, is a, is a dissolute and a drunk, but he's a man of ideas, he's very, very bright. He's a drunkard, but he really helps to kind of hone Hitler's political manifesto and his ideological ideas. Anti Semitism, place of Germany in the world. This constraints, this problem that Germany has of being in the center of Europe where you can be attacked from all sides, you can be attacked from the west, from the north, from the east, from the south. You know, so how do you, how do you get around this? And one of the problems with Versailles, those, those buffer states have been stripped away. You know, we just got those buffer states when we, when we had the Treaty of Brest Litovsk against the Russians, because suddenly we had the Baltic states, which rightfully should feel in the sphere of Germany rather than Russia. We got Ukraine, we got Poland, you know, and, and we had the, we had Alsace Lorraine and the, and the Rhineland. And suddenly that's been taken away. And so we are now kind of bald and exposed and vulnerable once again. And we thought our first job is to get Germany's safety buffers again. And this is why we need Lebensraum. This is why we need these buffer states back again, because of our, we're geographically resource poor. You know, Germany doesn't have iron ore, it has coal, but the coal is not of great quality. It doesn't have access to the world's oceans. Its overseas territories are stripped away with the Treaty of Versailles in 1990. So it doesn't even have that anymore. So how are we going to do this? Well, maybe we shouldn't bother with the whole overseas stuff. Maybe we should just sort of push eastwards. That's on. You know, the British Empire has its empire and it has its extra imperial assets in South America and elsewhere around the world. We won't bother with that. What we'll do is we'll spread eastwards and then we'll have the buffer, but then we'll have the living space. We'll have the resources and the space in which we can create a buffer and we can get all the resources we need. Oil from the Caucasus, you know, wheat from the Ukraine, shipping from the Baltic, blah, blah, blah. And so all this, just imagine you're Hitler and you're thinking about all this and you're thinking, God, yeah, there's the vision. That's how we do it. This could be amazing. This will ensure that we never get ourselves into this terrible situation. This really is a situation that we found ourselves in. And you start to convince yourself that this is the only course and that it's a terrible job. But this is a dog eat dog world and people are gonna get killed. But then from thereafter, subsequent generations can live peacefully, happily together, Aryans one and all, with this lovely buffer and having all the resources we need. And it'll be this kind of sort of utopia, this Eden where, you know, proper, true Aryan ways of thinking about life can live in peace and families can be happy and kinder, can, you know, laugh and cry and, and grow up with their mutis and their fatis and all the rest of it. You know, I mean it's total fantasy. But you can see how you can sort of, you can escalate this. And one of the things that Eckhart does is he takes him to Berkesgarden and to the Bavarian Alps near Salzburg, right on the Austrian border in South East Bavaria. And that is where Hitler falls in love with the Obersalzberg, this, this area of hills overlooking Berkers Garden. And eventually he buys a house there which becomes the Berghoff. And from the sales of ultimately, I mean, I'm jumping the gun here into the 1930s, sales of mein Kampf are such that with the royalties he's able to buy this, this, this amazing house and completely convert it and turn it into the Berghoff and the rest of it. But, but he very much Eckhart and in turn Hitler very much buy into the, the view that it is when you're surrounded by nature that you have your greatest thoughts and the beauty of the, of the Alps. And this is a true German land of, of mountains and fresh air and edelweiss and you know, babbling brooks and mountain springs and Wagner playing over the, over the top of the, you know, Untersberg and, and so on and so forth. And that is where he has his political awakening and real. No, that's where he has his political coalescing. And because the second part of Mein Kampf is written in what's known as the Kampfuzel, which is this sort of wooden shack which Hitler rents, buys on the Obersalzberg in the trees. And you can still see the remains of it in the woods to this day. And he gets up and he. And he walks to a place everywhere, this lovely little sort of mountain kind of cafe place where he has hot chocolate and Vint Boytel, which is a sort of pastry dish with berries of the forest with cream and so on. And it's very kind of Bavarian. It's like, you know, think sort of black forest gateway but with pastry.
- [36:45]
Host 1
It sounds rather lovely. I would have thought he would chill me out, but apparently no, no, no,
- [36:48]
James Holland
but this is so. So he does this literally every day. He gets into this routine and there you go. Hill has a massively sweet tooth.
- [36:56]
Host 1
Yeah.
- [36:56]
Host 2
Really?
- [36:57]
James Holland
Yeah. I mean, he's vegetarian, doesn't smoke, but he. But he's got a very sweet tooth. So he goes every day and he goes back to the. To the camphouse or his little wooden hut and writes this great work.
- [37:05]
Host 1
You think you just write books about nature and do your shitty paintings and
- [37:09]
James Holland
just enjoy life, but it's very much part of this. So. So it's not. But the reason I'm telling you all this, because it's not just about wacko kind of anti Semitism, anti Bolshevism. There is a bigger picture here, which is healthy Germans scrapping their thighs, you know, wearing Lederhausen, you know, walking over the Alps, breathing the air. You know, this is. This is what Germans should be doing, you know, and sort of health and happiness, you know.
- [37:39]
Host 2
So what you're saying he's not all bad, right?
- [37:42]
James Holland
No, I'm actually saying he's all bad. But he's absolutely saying, you know, he's bringing. Because. Because if you're going to sell this, you've got to sell a vision. And the vision is coalescing in the second half of the 1920s. But meanwhile, the second half of the 1920s are the Goldener Zandweger, you know, the Golden Twenties. Because Germany, Weimar Republic, ugh, a democracy, how ghastly. Is actually doing really rather well. So therein lies the rubber. So he's sort of. He's politically neutered after the Beer Hill Putsch and his time in Landsberg. So by this time, we're talking about sort of 1926, 27, 28. The Nazi Party is nothing. In the elections of 1928, they win 2.6% of the vote. I mean, it's not quite monster raving, loony party kind of levels, but it's not far off it.
- [38:45]
Host 1
So he's neutered by the fact that his message is essentially one of doom and despair and therefore the need for recovery, while the country is actually doing fine effectively at this point. Can I just.
- [38:55]
James Holland
Exactly that. But, but, but it gives it. Because that, that isolation, no one's interested in Nazis, no one interested in Hitler. He's. He's a forgotten man. The failed Perch spent his time in prison. He's on his own in the Obersalzberg having these sort of great thoughts, doing for his Vint Boyle and his hot chocolate every day, you know, breathing in the air and dreaming of Edelweiss. But. But he's. That is his time to really coalesce from. From. It's not just, I hate Jews, I hate Bolsheviks, I hate Slavs. This is where he's applying that to this bigger vision of where Germany needs to get to. How he can create a Germany that is going to last a thousand years.
- [39:41]
Host 2
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- [41:01]
Host 1
Before we go on chronologically, I want to take one detour, which I think is really important, which is to talk about communism and Bolshevism in Europe at this time. Because those of us who are not historians like you, and who were not taught history very well, which I would put pretty much everybody. There's a sort of like, you know, World War I, Treaty of Versailles was not very fair. And then, you know, suddenly the Nazis appear and then we've got the Holocaust. But really, I mean, I think the Bolshevism threat and the threat of communism in Europe at this time, from the perspective of many people who were not on board with it, is actually massive, isn't it? Like, it's a degree.
- [41:39]
James Holland
It is absolutely massive. And you're absolutely right to bring that out and to raise that. Because Imperial Russia is imperial and that it's part of the ancien regime. It's a royal house, it's a royal family and it has its own empire. And you know, the network of alliances which causes the First World War mean that Russia is interlinked with France and Britain, their cousins. You know, they all have the same beards, you know, they all look pretty much the same and so on and so forth. So this interconnection of royal dynasties throughout Europe is very, very tight. And what the First World War does is so cataclysmic and it's so changing that the ancien regime is thrown out. The Peasants Revolt has happened. And the point about the Peasants Revolt in England, for example, of 1381 is that it doesn't work and you know, royalty reasserts itself. The Republic of Britain of the 1650s is a brief kind of turn of the wind before it goes back to royalty again. France is a republic and that was pretty, pretty shocking. But let's face it, you know, Napoleon is an emperor and so are those who follow. And it is still, France is stuffed full of aristocrats even into the kind of 21st into the 20th century and so on. And it rules. Although it is a republic, it revolves, revolves around the old ways, even though it is democratic. And suddenly you've got the proletariat rising and, and you know, communist farms and, and cooperatives and, and so on and, and you know, all the flim flam of royalty and regalias and gold and, and the brightness of, of, of the palace ball and you know, you know, waltzes and, and all the rest of that's all gone in favor of drab kind of working class people all kind of, you know, working together and all the rest of it. But of course, so that's where Marxism, where communism comes into it. But of course what those who are against communism haven't worked out is that communism is going to take many different forms and to completely jump the gun. One of the reasons why America and the west gets involved in a series of wars after the Second World War, such as Korea or Vietnam or whatever, is because they're worried about the westward spread of communism. But what they don't realize is that Mao's communism is not the same as Lenin or Stalin's communism and ditto in North Korea and so on, and, and that Ho Chi Minh's communism isn't the same either. And communism takes different forms. But if you're in the 1920s and you're European, what you're seeing is
- [44:35]
Host 2
a
- [44:36]
James Holland
new Political movement which seems to threaten everything that the Western world stands for, whether it's the ancient royal imperial world or whether it's just the democratic world. Because communism is not democratic. And of course, communism, as it turns out, is every bit as autocratic as a dictatorship. It's just got a different kind of.
- [45:00]
Host 1
To put it more differently.
- [45:01]
James Holland
And. Well, just one thing I would say is. Is. Is, you know, left and right. We think of it as right here, left here, centrists in the middle. In fact, it isn't. It's the horns of the buffalo. Well, and the extremes are kind of unbelievably close.
- [45:16]
Host 1
Exactly. So, to put it crudely, if you are in the interwar period in Europe and you're not a communist, you. What you really fear is the great unwashed overthrowing everything in society.
- [45:27]
James Holland
Damn right you do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That.
- [45:30]
Host 1
That's what you're seeing.
- [45:31]
James Holland
And you're also saying if you're from a democracy, you're saying, hang on a minute, we've just given women the vote. We are progressing. We don't want all this threatened by some new movement which is even worse than the kind of sort of imperialist shower of imperial Russia. The last one we want is Europe and its democracies and its progression and its modernity being overrun by this total, totally awful, oppressive proletariat movement and so on.
- [46:08]
Host 1
The communist piece, before we get back to the story, the second thing I want to ask you is something you just pointed out, which is about the horseshoe theory of political convergence. If you told me that there was a party which had the word socialist and workers in it, I'd say that's a far left party. And when we had the philosopher history, Stephen Hicks on the show, who we love, and we talked about Nazism, he talked about the fact that if you look at the economic program, there's not a jot of difference between that and communism actually in terms of the economic side of it. And I now see sometimes people on the Internet arguing about whether Nazis were actually left or right wing, which is a conversation, I think, hard for people to understand how much of.
- [46:53]
James Holland
I just think it's the wrong way to look at it.
- [46:54]
Host 1
Sure. But how much of a difference and how much similarity was there between national socialist and communist Bolshevist socialists? Maybe this is the wrong phrase.
- [47:06]
James Holland
There is a. The communism that emerges from Lenin in the first part of the 1920s, although there is a. There is a communist leadership. It is supposed to be more egalitarian, and it is, you know, one Rule for all. And, you know, everyone wears the same drab uniforms. Narcissism never pretends to do that. What narcissism always wants elites. And so that's. And it doesn't pretend anything else. It wants. It wants the German race to be emboldened, empowered. It wants everyone to be wealthy, but then so do capitalists. You know, capitalists aren't trying to kind of put the working classes. The whole point of 1920s America is that everyone gets rich and has a Ford Model T, you know, so. So there's no conflict there at all. Communism and Nazism are radically different because of that. And I mean, if you look at the Nazis, you know, what the Nazis are doing when they finally do get into power in January 1933 is they're tapping into a much earlier imperialist Russia. You know, a lot of the uniforms are very, very similar. There's still an imperial eagle, even though now it's a Nazi eagle. The head is pointing a different way than it was when it was imperial, but it's still an eagle. Why is that? Because what they're doing is they're saying we can make Germany great again. You know, Germany was brilliant because it had Frederick the Elector and it had Frederick the Great and it had, you know, what we did was really good military stuff and we were the top dogs militarily and we're still a militaristic society. And you know, you can wear uniforms that will make you feel cool and proud, like we were in the 17, 1870s under Bismarck and following the Franco Prussian War and the unification of German German peoples and all the rest of it, we can hark back to that again. And we can wear lots of leather and look shiny and you can be part of our club and wear cool uniforms and look the business and get the fro light, come on in, the water's warm. That's what it is. That's what it's saying. You do not get that in communist Russia. You don't get that in the Soviet Union. It's not until 1943 that the Soviet, the Red army reintroduces collar taps, you know, shoulder taps, you know, because that's, that's not proletariat enough to have, have that. And then they think, oh, anyway, they just think soda, you know, so
- [49:38]
Host 1
it
- [49:39]
James Holland
is really, really different. And I, I would be very, very wary about, about saying that actually they're closer than you think. They are close in so much. The, the, the tube, the horseshoe, the horns, whatever you want to analogy. You want to use are coming towards each other, but they are fundamentally different. That's why the Haiti, Jeff, is guts. But where they are similar, I think, is in that they're offering a gang, they're offering a part of a club. You know, what you get in, in Europe is these little pockets of communism.
- [50:11]
Host 2
Yeah, yeah.
- [50:12]
James Holland
We want to be free. We don't want these aristocrats. Look what they did to us last time, you know. You know, even in democracies, whether in France or Britain or whatever, it's still the ruling classes who got us into war. And, you know, if only the working people could, you know, stand on their own two feet and then we wouldn't have had a global conflict. And why can't everyone just sort of, you know, be happy together and be equal and share the spoils and all the rest of it? I mean, I'm a capitalist, so I kind of, you know, I. I don't believe that works. And, you know, the history of communism would show that communism in its purest form doesn't work. It means it's, you know, it's a bit like Brexiteers, that you never quite get the perfect Brexit. You never quite get the perfect communism either, because it's. You're always striving for this. For this utopia, which obviously doesn't exist because it can't. And, you know, if you ever want to doubt this, just read Animal Farm, you know, by George Orwell.
- [51:01]
Host 2
Absolutely.
- [51:01]
James Holland
People are more equal than others.
- [51:04]
Host 2
So it's the golden twenties.
- [51:06]
James Holland
Yes.
- [51:06]
Host 2
We've got the Weimar Republic.
- [51:08]
Host 1
Yeah.
- [51:09]
Host 2
Cabaret portrayed so famously. The KitKat club, women with their nipples out, all of that. Gay clubs, everything that Hitler hated, ostensibly. How did we go from the glory days of that to the rise of Nazi Germany?
- [51:23]
James Holland
Well, yeah, yeah. Can I just. Just point out something that you're. You're right in that Germany is the most, or certainly Berlin is the most liberal city in the planet in the late 1920s. But that view of Weimar is pure Nazi propaganda which endures to this day. Ah, yes, there is the Kit Kat Club, you know. Yes. There is Salon Kitty and all the rest of it. And, you know, if you want to be gay and take lots of drugs, nowhere better to be in the world in 1929 than Berlin. But that is not defining Weimar. Weimar is defined by democratic political processes, by a growing economy and the notion that Germany can rebuild itself and its fortunes by its immensely capable and competent technological and industrial output. And so it's growing as a major, major exporter of fine stuff. I mean, German Engineers are known the world over as the best. These are the people that create the Merna Dam and the Ada Dam and these huge works projects and before the First World War these are German scientists are absolutely cutting edge of medical science, of astrophysics, of all sorts of things of, of engineering. And leading engineers in Weimar are absolutely household names. You know, it's, it's not, it's not football players that people are collecting cards of cigarette cards of. It's, it's, you know, it's engineers and great men of letters and musicians and artists and, and so on. So. And Germany is able to do this through a series of, of help projects that have really come from the United States above anywhere else. I mean it is, it is the, it is the Dawes plan of late 1923 which really kicks kick starts this where France and Britain are paying back war loans to the United States. The United States, and this is obviously massively simplified but in its basic form are then funneling those repayments back to Germany which is then giving, getting an offer. They create this temporary currency to sort of, to get rid of the Reichsmart which is to get rid of the mark, the Deutsch mark rather, which is one that's having hyperinflation. The temporary
- [53:49]
Host 1
currency.
- [53:49]
James Holland
Currency, yes, the temporary currency is stabilizing things in conjunction with these loans which are coming in. Then comes the Young Plan of the beginning of 1929 which enables, and this is Owen Young who is the chairman of General Electric in America and Doors and is Charles G. Dawes is a banker from Chicago. And the two of them work together under the auspices of the American government to try and alleviate the problems of America and try and alleviate the harshness of the terms of the Versailles Treaty. So you first of all you have the Dawes Plan which is money, a massive injection of cash and helping stabilize the currency. Then you have the Young Plan of early part of 1929 which Revolution assesses the repayments and re establishes so that instead of paying it, you know, X by X, it's now going to be the final loans we paid in 1988. So it's so far off that you might as well just actually just forget about it. And basically there's, there's gaps in the loan payments which are sanctioned and you know, Germany is able to basically see off the worst of the financial burden of the Treaty of Versailles. And that happens at the beginning of 1929. So by the by, you know, by the summer of 1929 Germany's in a really pretty good position you know, Weimar is flourishing. Exports are on the rise to a massive extent. The factories are working, people are employed. It's all really good. Which is why the Nazi party is just, you know, absolutely kicked into long grass. Because it's. Because all of that anger and resentment and that vision is, is meaningless. Because we're actually, we're doing just fine, thanks very much. But, but, but that, that, that view of a sort of drug add, old drug addled, you know, sex, sex obsessed, kind of ultra liberal Weimar of Salon kitty, that is 100% pure Goebbels propaganda.
- [55:55]
Host 2
That's good to know.
- [55:56]
James Holland
It's amazing that it's still in jail.
- [55:58]
Host 1
That's good to know whose podcast you've been listening to, mate.
- [56:01]
James Holland
Yeah, exactly.
- [56:03]
Host 2
That's why I come on this show to do James spread Nazi propaganda.
- [56:07]
Host 1
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- [57:51]
Host 2
So but then you had this amazing time, this golden period in German history, but it all ended rather quickly, didn't it?
- [57:59]
James Holland
Because, yes, it does.
- [58:00]
Host 2
It didn't take long for Hitler to ascend to power.
- [58:03]
James Holland
Well, this goes back to the United States. And America has been getting drunk on illegal hooch in the 1920s, but also drunk on money. It's the wealthiest nation in the world. It's the one nation that, that emerges out of the First World War in sort of economic fairly stable condition and wealthier than anyone else. It's been supplying, propping up the Western Allies with, with arms and with money and all the rest of it would have been paid back. And then suddenly there is this as well as having that kind of kickstart into 1920s in a way that others haven't, which means its exports can be massively increased because everyone else is short of everything. It discovers oil. And oil is suddenly, this is suddenly the oil boom. And oil goes hand in glove with the development of the automobile industry and the development of the assembly line, which although this happens at Ford's factory, is developed by a guy called Bill Knudsen, who is a first generation Dane who's come over to the United States in 1900 and he comes up with the concept of assembly line. This idea that you have one person doing the doors, another person putting on the fender, another person putting on the lights, and at the end of it you've got a Model T. And this means that you can have huge economies of scale onto something which is very much, you know, only for the elites. And suddenly you can make it affordable to the masses. You can make it affordable masses because banking is very unregulated in this time. So you just borrow it on the. Never, never. You know, it's like the guy with the, with the proverbial credit card. He's just absolutely crushing it and then worrying about how he pays it back later. And so this all comes to a head. And of course what that means is you've suddenly got this huge expansion in the, in 1920s America, you got population expansion, but you've also got an expansion of building and construction work because with oil and cars comes construction, because suddenly you could travel. So you can then expand your, your towns and you can build up towns because you can now drive from A to B rather than to walk with your horse and cart. And that also means you need roads. And then on roads, because you're now going to be going, you know, 150 miles. You need somewhere to stay overnight. So you develop hotels for motor cars, which called motels and, you know, so on and so forth. And so suddenly, you know, America's absolutely booming and it's got Hollywood and it's got skyscrapers and it's got everything and it's all absolutely fine. And they, for the first time, if they've really started to curb the amount of immigrants. So there's these quotas per country and they're very, very strict quotas. So, you know, to say you've got fewer Austrians than you have Czechoslovakians, you can't sort of take the Czechoslovakian quota and add it onto the Austrians. It's all very strict. And you've also got the first part of tariffs coming on, which is one of the reasons why Europe is developing its own automobile industry, because. And that's why you haven't got that many Model T Fords in Europe, because they're keeping it internally because of tariffs. But then comes the Wall street crash of October, end of October 1929, where 810 billion is wiped from the stock exchange in New York in five days. And 810 billion is a huge sum now. It's a vast sum in 1929. And it is an absolute catastrophe. Everyone's just slightly. And banks are going bust and there's more paper money in America than there is actually gold. And so people are just being ruined. Millionaires are becoming impoverished, you know, paupers, just overnight. And it is an absolute catastrophe. And it is exacerbated by an existing piece of legislation which is then passed, which had been lined up before the Wall street crash. So in the summer of 19, spring and summer of 1929, two senators, Smoot and Hawley come up with this idea to be more protectionist and try and impose greater trade tariffs on other nations because they could see that Germany and France, particularly France, had increased its exports by 50% in the last couple of years, try and protect itself against that, against cheaper labor in Europe, and protect Americans. So we'll have this trade act once the Wall street crash happens. Smoot and Hawley think, well, let's push ahead with this tariff act because that will protect us even more particularly, it will protect American farmers. And what we can do is we can make sure that we try and blunt the kind of awfulness of the Wall street crash by protecting ourselves. But of course, it's a terrible, terrible idea because tariff wars only end up with everyone getting poorer and again, human behavior, there's patterns of human behavior that prove that this is the case. And patterns of the ebbs and flows of financial cycles show that this is the case regardless of President McKinley and his tariffs in the start of the 20th century. And so it's passed by President Herbert Hoover on 28 May 1930, despite the fact that over a third thousand economists in the US write to him and say, please, please, please do not do this. This is what's going to happen if you do it. And he feels compelled. Huber is instinctively against signing it, but feels compelled to do it because it is, it is voted for by the Republicans in Congress. And so it goes into being. And what starts off as a really, really bad knock on effect for Europe and America with the Wall street crash becomes a catastrophe as a result of it, because suddenly there's a global trade war and it leads directly to the collapse of the national bank in Vienna and indeed in Berlin. And so suddenly Germany, which has been doing very nicely, thank you very much, thanks to the loans it's getting from the United States and to its growing burgeoning export trade, is suddenly smashed because the tap of loans from America is cut off inevitably because America can't afford to give them anymore and its export market just goes. And so what you suddenly get is lots of Germans, within a generation, within 10 years, eight years, nine years, have suddenly already been through this catastrophe once and they don't want to go through it again. And what you find in democracies is when the traditional ways or the existing ways of politics seems to be failing, the working classes and the middle classes, they get unhappy about it. And you know, this is the truth. The truth is the very rich are usually okay because after all, if you've got 5 million, you lose a million, you still got 4 million. You know, if you've got 10 billion and you lose 2 billion, you still got 8 billion. If you're on a salary of today's money, you know, 500,000 bucks, and you suddenly get out of a job, you've got nothing. If you're a working class blue collar worker and still works in Pittsburgh and you get laid off, you've got nothing. So that's the same with Weimar Republic and this catastrophe, this economic catastrophe which envelops Germany just at the point where they're kind of emerging quite successfully, the fact that it's been successful makes it doubly worse. And so the President, who by this point is Hindenburg, is desperately trying to kind of sort it out and has this series of elections and then imposes his own chancellor, who's Heinrich Bruning, who's one of the guy who's one of the leading lights behind the creation of the different currency back end of 1923, who's done great works for stabilizing the German economy at the kind of height of it of the awfulness of the early 1920s. Bruning is an economist, comes in, takes control and he goes, there's only one way we're going to do it. We have to tighten our belts. We have to impose a whole load of austerity measures. And the voting people of Germany don't like this because they don't want lower wages, they don't want to be out of a job, they don't want unemployment, they don't want higher rents, they don't want a higher cost of living. They were, they're very angry about this. And so suddenly you have a political void because the existing politics in a democracy isn't working. So what are the alternatives? Well, the alternatives into that void are communism or National Socialism.
- [66:30]
Host 2
And the interesting thing is you also have an Adolf Hitler who tried to gain power through physical force, but he also learned his lesson and thought to himself, let's go the legitimate route.
- [66:41]
James Holland
Let's go the legitimate route and let's also try the modern way. Let's actually reach as many people as possible. Let's tap into the farmers, for example, absolutely vital part of the voting public in Germany. Let's tap into the farmers. Let's also use air power to visit and travel around the whole of Germany delivering speeches. And people are mesmerized by it. Because in the early 1920s, before the beer Hill Putsch, only a small number of people are hearing him, largely because radio as a means of public address is not very. Is in its infancy. It's not by 1931, 32, 33, it's much, you know, many more people have radios and speaking to people. Suddenly people go, oh my God, you know, who is this? Via brand. And of course, he's tapping into the same themes of anger and resentment and disgust that he was doing so in the early 1920s. But where that, that anger and that cause were dissipated by the goldener zan vigor, the golden twenties, suddenly that anger and that disgust and disappointment with the existing status quo has come to the fore again. So suddenly he's got people who are receptive to his more outlandish ways, and he's doing the same speeches that he did before, starting with, you know, we were Stabbed in the back. We've been shafted. You know, traditional elites can't compete with us. What we need to do is create this new, broader vision, this kind of Germany that's going to greater Germany, that's going to bring back all the ills of the First World War. You know, the end of the First World War, it's going to make us great again. We're going to be militarily strong. We're going to have Lebensraum, we're going to have this new utopia. And enough people are going, you know, I like the sound of that. You know, it's 33%, it's 32%. It's actually. Nazis go down in the January election and the November election of 1932 compared to the summer election of 1932. So they're actually losing votes. But the political elites in Germany think they can manipulate Hitler. And he was offered the chance that, you know, he was. The Nazis were offered a place in the government in the summer of 1933, but turned it down because Hitler said, no, no, no. The only way I'm going to be involved in this is if I'm the top dog. And so they go, okay, well, you can be the top dog in January 1933, because it's him or the Communists. And none of these politicians want the Communists in. That's even worse than the Nazis. And don't worry about him. We'll blunt that particular sword. We'll probably get rid of him in a couple of months and get someone else in. But it doesn't happen because suddenly there's this surge and he gets rid of. He gets. With the Enabling act, he gets rid of all political parties, gets rid of democracy in summer of 1933, and that is that. Well, he's no longer the chancellor. He's the Fuhrer.
- [69:32]
Host 1
We'll do before we get to the Fuhrer part, which we're excited about, not in the middle, kind of another quick detour, which is. Is he selling the racial and extermination message at this point?
- [69:48]
James Holland
No, no. In 1933, he's doing the racial but not his extermination.
- [69:52]
Host 1
He's not saying we must eliminate the enemies of Germany, the Slavs, the Bolsheviks, the Jews.
- [69:58]
James Holland
No, he's saying we need to have conquest. We need to get buffer stones, we need to move into. So that is inevitably going to involve conflict. But. But, but he's not. And. And we need to expunge the German state of Jews and Judaism and all its influences and its culture because it's not the true German way. It's not the V shaft. You know, we can't. Although. Even though it is part of it, so. So we need to change that. But he's not. No one's thinking in terms of exterminations and Cyclone B.
- [70:26]
Host 1
And. Yeah, he hasn't got a postcard of Auschwitz behind them saying, this is what I'm gonna do.
- [70:31]
James Holland
Absolutely not.
- [70:31]
Host 1
No, no, no, no.
- [70:32]
James Holland
That's not even a sort of, you know.
- [70:34]
Host 1
Is he thinking it at this point? Do we know? He's not even thinking about it. So by the time he comes to power in 1933, he doesn't have the Holocaust as what he intends to do?
- [70:47]
James Holland
No.
- [70:48]
Host 1
How do we know? How are we certain about this?
- [70:50]
James Holland
Because he doesn't specify that. He never talks in terms of that. He doesn't in Mein Kampf either. He talks about, we've got to get rid of the Jews, but he doesn't say we've got to exterminate them all. He's thinking of shoving them to Israel or to Madagascar or just pushing them somewhere else, but just getting them out of Germany. But how you do that is by making them political cultural pariahs. So you. You take away the vote, you take away their rights, you take away that, you make it. You make it so uncomfortable for the devotee that they'll go, what about like, the same, we don't have to do
- [71:26]
Host 1
it, and gypsies and so on.
- [71:28]
James Holland
Yeah, the same. That's all. That's all tied up into the same thing.
- [71:31]
Host 1
Huh?
- [71:32]
James Holland
And for a lot of Germans, you know, a lot of Germans sort of go, well, I've never had anything against the Jews, you know.
- [71:36]
Host 1
Right.
- [71:37]
James Holland
You know, one of my neighbors, one of my best mates, is a Jew. All this sort of thing. But, you know, on the other hand, you know, Hitler is promising this. And Hitler's very lucky because he comes into time as a chancellor just at the moment where the economy is just starting to take a dip for the better, a rise for the better. And so he's able to exploit that and so very quickly. And, you know, he borrows a lot of money and, you know, this is basically done on IOUs. It's basically the same as selling government bonds. It's the same principle. And so what he's able to do is say, right, I'm going to bring everyone jobs. And he's absolutely implicit that the economy. Right from the word go is going to be directed towards a military economy. Right from the word go. There's no doubt about it he says, you know, our state is at war, we're going to have to go to war. We're not going to do it yet. We're going to build up our strength. We're going to get great again, then we're going to crush all our enemies. We have to do this because there's another way of getting back our buffers and our strong position. And we need to make our position, Central Europe, much stronger. And everyone's going, well, you know, new jobs, get back all the places that we lost in 1919, you know, what
- [72:37]
Host 1
soft light and how much.
- [72:38]
James Holland
And okay, so the whole Jewish thing, you know, I don't quite agree with him on that. But, you know, not everyone's perfect, right? You can sort of sweep it and just under the carpet and justify it. And what happens is because he's more and more successful and because visually it's so stunning, because he's so good at manipulating the media and that, you know, he's got, he's got Goebbels, Joseph Goebbels, who's head of the Ministry of Propaganda to help him with this. That is this, this image is relentlessly one of the same. And, and the message is relentlessly the same. Jews are bad, stars are bad, Germans are brilliant, errands are brilliant. We are the militaristic best in the world. That is a, you know, we're fantastic engineers. We can conquer all of Europe. We can, we can be the masters of Europe and indeed the world. We can get this living room, living space. We're going to be the absolute daddy men. We're all gonna get rich. It's gonna be a thousand year. Right? What's not to like? And you know, if you've been browbeaten and you've just lost a catastrophic war, then you've recovered only for that to be snatched away from you again. This is quite attractive kind of rhetoric. This is the kind of stuff where you think, yeah, okay, I'll buy into that.
- [73:47]
Host 1
And also there's another thing that I wanted to ask about, which is obviously after World War II, we talk about the treaty, the various treaties with the Treaty of Versailles, in particular the punitive sanctions on Germany, reparations and so on. But isn't one of the things that genuinely happened is a large number of Germans, German speaking people, ended up outside of the borders of Germany. And this is one of the powerful messages that Hitler sells to the German people, which is we will be united again.
- [74:16]
James Holland
Absolutely, yeah, yeah. Because that was the whole point of 1871, was to unify the German speaking peoples of the world, you know. And so yes, absolutely, that's completely, you know, and you have to remember that Czechoslovakia is, is a completely new state in 1919. And yes, most Czechoslovakians are quite happy with that, but there are lots of German speaking people. You know, Sedaten Land is not really, it's not a territory. It's not, it's not like Cornwall or Yorkshire or a specific area. It's more a concept than a, than, than, than a kind of a place with a kind of clear border and stuff. And you know, there are huge problems with the Danzig Corridor because Poland, Poland hadn't been Poland since 1795. So it's not a brand new country in the same way that that the Czechoslovakia is. But Czechoslovakia used to be, you know, Bohemia and Moravia and so on and, and, and you know, Western Ukraine used to be Galicia and Lviv used to be Lvov, used to be Lemberg which is part of Austria. And Poland had been divided between Austria and Russia and, and Germany or Prussia before that, before 1871. And so yeah, you know, they're, they're mainly German speaking, particularly in the, in the, in the western half of Poland. And in the north there is still East Prussia which is this enclave of Germany. East Prussia, which is then land, you know, is, is separated from the rest of Germany by the Danzig Corridor, which is this strip of land where Poland goes up to the Baltic coast. Because otherwise Poland wouldn't have any coastline. And they kind of, you know, in the planners of 1990 game, well, that doesn't seem fair. It needs to get the access to the sea and all the rest of it. But obviously if you're German you kind of think, well no, I don't buy that. I want to, I want to get it back. And you can. I think it's entirely understandable why most Germans want to get back Poland because it hasn't been Poland in living memory. It's, it's been German, that part of it, that certainly the western part of part of Poland. Now that doesn't mean, say that's it's the right thing to do and they're entirely justified to go and invade on the 1st of September 1939. They're not at all because it's a different country by that stage. But, but you can see how there might be a lot of people which are quite sort of sympathetic to that notion. I mean, you know, just say, say I don't know, Cornwall became part of Ireland or something. You know, lots of people in England can't have that. Want to get it back again, you know. Yeah, so it's a similar sort of thing. So I think, you know, one has to kind of, from that perspective, you have to kind of sort of park your, your one's disgust at Nazism on all that it stands for and say it's no good just sort of going hit. It was awful and it was terrible. You have to understand why it happened. So, so the rise of the Nazis come into being because of the Versailles Treaty and because of the terrible trauma of the end of the First World War. They come into power because of the Wall street crash and the Smoot Hawley Tariff Act. That's Americans.
- [77:21]
Host 1
That happens in 1933. He launches World War II in 1939. That's a crucial six year period in which it seems to me a hell of a lot of happens within Germany, but also within Hitler's mind as well. Take us through that period of time.
- [77:36]
James Holland
Well, yeah, so for him this is sort of ground zero for the start again to rebuild Germany as a modern militaristic state. The problem he's got is to a large extent it's a massive sham because they don't have the resources still, they don't have access to the world's oceans. The moment they go to war with. If they go to war and they end up in war with Britain, there'll be an economic blockade. So one of the big things that Hitler has to avoid is going to war with Britain because Britain has the world's largest navy by a comfortable margin and the world's largest merchant fleet. The last thing they want to do is be cut off from global supplies until he's done what he needs to do, which is get into the east and all the rest of it. What he does is he clandestinely starts building up an air force again and the army and a navy. But it's slowly but surely. And then he announces to the, he starts testing the water. You know, he announces to all the existence of Luftwaffe. And knowing that no one in the west is, you know, the old peacemakers of 1919, they haven't got the stomach for it anymore.
- [78:42]
Host 1
Even though it's an open violation of the Treaty of Versailles.
- [78:45]
James Holland
Yeah, they're not going to do it. And Britain goes, well, okay, well let's do a naval treaty with Berlin. We'll restrict their naval power and that will sort of get. And Germany sort of goes, okay, fine, because they're never going to get a navy that's going to compete with the Royal Navy. And if They've got a naval treaty that sort of suggests that they've got a. A sort of quasi form of alliance which is going to. You know, that means that the. Britain's sort of more kind of simpatico kind of, you know, they might not need to. You know, they're not antagonizing Britain into kind of taking sides in any future conflict. And then, of course, they. They re. They move into the Rhineland, which is the sort of, you know, old traditional part of their land which has been occupied by the French since the early 1920s. And not a shot has been fired. The French just go, okay, fine, and bug out. And then, you know, you go into. Go into Austria and take and unite with the Anschluss. And so that happens. And then you go into Sudetenland and not a shot has been fired. You know, this is by the autumn of 1938. So suddenly you've got marching bands and you've got swastikas everywhere, and everyone's in uniform and you've got tanks and you've got the Luftwaffe flying over, and you're hosting the Olympics in 1980, 36. And everything's looking shiny and colorful and bright, and the fur seems to do no wrong because everyone's got jobs and there's autobahns and there's, you know, they've rekindled their pride and their chests are out and they're wearing snappy uniforms. And this actually all seems pretty cool, doesn't it? And, you know, we've taken back some of the wrongs of. We've righted the wrongs of Versailles. We've had a shot being fired again, you know, there's not much to dislike about all this. The problem is that he goes too far too quickly because he's a narcissist, because he's a megalomaniac. And everyone's telling him, oh, you know, my Fuhrer, you know, you're so wonderful. You're so marvelous. And he starts to believe it. And for someone who's been like that before 1914, and he's emerged out of the Second World War blind and broken and beaten, right, I've shown you bastards. And he's just lapping it up, you know, he's absolutely loving it. And everyone's telling him how marvelous he is, and he thinks, right, you know, this is the time, you know, and he sees the purges that are going on in the Soviet Union, 1937, 1938, where they've got rid of 22 and a half thousand officers in The Red Arm. And he thinks, now's the time. I need to push it. I need to push on with this. I need to get Poland, I need to get the Danzig Corridor back. You know, I need to, I need to, need to strike while the island's hot. And I know I said originally we weren't going to go to war till kind of 1944, but, you know, solid and okay, so our navy's not mine, but British aren't going to get a war over Poland. Why would they? They didn't get a war over Czechoslovakia. Why would they go to war over Poland? It's not their fight. They don't care. And of course, what he's doing is, he's doing the classic thing which autocrats and dictators do, which is viewing the war as you want it to be, which is your own narrow worldview, rather than going, hang on a minute, I need to put myself in the shoes of my potential enemies and potential people that might disagree with me. He doesn't do that. And so he hustles into War in September 1939, much quicker than Germany is ready for. It's just not ready. And the truth is, for all the Chinese swastikas, for all the glitz and glamour of the Olympic stadium, for all the leather and shiny boots and goose stepping and Leni Razenthal films and triumph of the Will and Nuremberg rallies, it is built on the absolute flimsiest of foundations, because it has to be, because Germany was kind of broken, busted in end of 1932. And you can't recover that quick. And you certainly can't recover on the foundations of the Nazi state, which are fundamentally flawed and corrupt.
- [82:48]
Host 2
But for the first couple of years at least, I mean, he seemed to be smashing it, didn't he?
- [82:55]
James Holland
Well, he does, but it's kind of, you know, it's 50% Germans doing well and 50% everyone else cocking it all up, to be perfectly honest. And one of the things where the Germans are able to really take advantage is in their communications. So one of the lessons from the First World War is when you exploit a breakthrough, you need to be able to exploit it to the full. And one of the problems with March 1918 and previous breakthroughs that they had along the Western Front is that they're not able to do that exploitation. And the reason is because they can't communicate with their troops quick enough. So you suddenly had this breakthrough, but you're dependent on runners coming back and then, you know, he gets knocked over by a shell. And so you then have to send another one. And by the time it reaches people, you need to do, it's kind of 9 o' clock at night, and he left at 6 that morning. And then you've got to disseminate that through all your troops, and then they've got to move them up, and it all just takes too long. But what the Germans have realized in the 1920s is that we've got to send out this single message. And this single message is, you know, the Nazi message of, you know, we can be great again, we hate Jews, we hate Bolsheviks, we hate Slavs, and, you know, we are the rightful inheritors of Europe, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, the Aryan Master Race, etc. Etc. And how do they do this? They do this by swamping the radio network, this new technology of radio broadcast, and they do that by making them cheap. So first of all, you get the Deutsche Fanger, which is a German radio, and then you get the Deutsche Kleinefanger, which is a German little radio. And the German little radio is Bakelite. It's not walnut veneer, it's not wood, it's not aspirational. It's as universal as the Model T Ford is to Americans in the 1920s. And it's about 9 inches by 4 inches by 4 inches. And everyone can have one. And even if you can't have one, don't worry about that, because in apartment blocks and the stairwells will have speakers with his stuff blaring out. We'll put it in squares, we'll put it in restaurants and bars, and it's the same old stuff. It's partly Hitler ranting and raving with halitosis and spittle. It's, it's light music, it's comedy shows, you know, it's, it's, it's all sorts of stuff, but it is fundamentally the same message. We Aryans, we true Germans, are the, are the greatest, we're the best. You know, Hitler, our Fuhrer is a demigod, blah, blah, blah. It's the same message. Fundamental same message. And this is because Goebbels recognizes that the best propaganda is one that you just repeat. You just say the same thing over and over and over again and people start to believe. It's the same with conspiracy theory, of course. You know, if enough people get, gets enough people talking about it on X or on Instagram or TikTok or whatever, and starts to believe it, and it's the same principle. But what the Wehrmacht do, the German armed forces does this suddenly think, hang on a minute, We've got radios and they're really cheap. And hang on a minute, we can put them in our panzers and our tanks and we can put them in our trucks. We can even put them in our rather groovy motorbikes with sidecars, our reconnaissance troops and everyone can communicate. And here's an idea. You can have a new formation called a panzer division. And a panzer division is not a 15,000 strong unit of troops all beetling around in panzers tanks. It is an all arms combined arms motorized unit of motorized infantry, of motorized artillery, of anti tank artillery, of field artillery. You know how it says it can lob at long distance of anti aircraft artillery, of reconnaissance troops of engineers, and of course people in tanks, Panzers, that's the panzer division. And the great thing is, is they can, you know, our firepower can blast our way through and then the infantry can move forward and cross over the river with the help of the engineers. And they can all be communicating like Billy O because they've all got radios. And then once we've got the bridge over then we can pour over our panzers and our motorized anti tank guns. And so when the enemy turn up we can blast them to hell and then we can push on forward. What a great wheeze. And that's how they win the blitzkrieg. And the weird thing is it's basically exactly the same way that the Germans have always fought. And actually it's not called blitzkrieg, it's called Bewegenskrieg. And this is this idea that you absolutely hammer the point of impact, the Schwerpunkt. And you create a Kesselschlacht, which is a cauldron war. So you envelop your enemy in a massive great sweep and you do it by off balancing your enemy, by being quicker and faster than them. And they try to. And they've always done this. This is exactly what Frederick the Elector did. It is exactly what Frederick the Great would always do it. And they would always do this because Germany knew that fundamentally it's at the heart of Europe, it doesn't have lots of resources. If you're going to win a war, you got to do it quickly. And so you need to work out how you can defeat your enemies very fast. And so the operational art, that ability to maneuver swiftly and in an envelopment, a Kesselschlacht, this cauldron or this encirclement is key to the whole thing. And it's what they've always been doing and it's what they do in 1864 against Denmark. It's what they do in 1866 against Austria, it's what they do in 1870 against France. It's what they try and do in 1914, but it doesn't work. And it's what they do again in 1940, both in, in Scandinavia, but in Poland, it's. Poland doesn't quite count in the same way because they're trying a lot of their things and they're not very good at it actually. It's just that they're much, much better than the Poles who are, you know, militarily quite weak.
- [88:27]
Host 1
Well, and they have help from the Soviets, don't forget.
- [88:29]
James Holland
And they have help. Then they have the Soviets coming in from the east, which means that the Polish are sort of very much the meat in a kind of massive military sandwich between the Nazis and the Red Army. But what they do in 1940, the big one, the daddy, which is Case Yellow, the invasion of the Low Countries in France is they do a Kesselschlagt. You know, they attack with Army Group Be a group of armies coming through the north into the Low Countries of Holland and Belgium and then around the back door through the Ardennes, the wooded, hilly, river strewn back door of the Ardennes, they come with army Group A. And that's where most of their mobile forces are, their panzer forces. I mean, so they, they can bring to bear 135 divisions to case Yellow, the invasion of the blitzkrieg in the west. And a division is the unit by which we judge the scale of armies in the Second World War. And if you think 15,000 men for a division, you're not far off. It's some, a bit more. Some a bit, because a lot of them are substantially less. But as a rule of thumb then, then that's kind of roughly where you're thinking. And out of that they only have 10 Panzer divisions and seven further motorized divisions out of 135. And it is those 17 divisions which are doing 80% of the work. And they're able to succeed because they're able to communicate. So the big breakthrough happens on the river Meuse. They come through and sweep through the Belgian Ardennes. They merge out of this as this sort of big wooded area. They merge out of that storm down to the town of Sedan where they cross in exactly the same point that they cross in 1870 and where they cross in 1914. It is amazing. And the French defenses there are really poor. So on the other side of the river, where they've been there's no mines because the mines have been laid originally at the beginning of the war and they've gone a bit mouldy and bit rusty and they need to be checked and they haven't been relayed. There's no machine guns. There are bunkers and stuff, but they're not at the actual crossing point where they come across. And the French aren't very well trained. They're very well trained at kind of building bunkers, but not very well trained at defending against the enemy. And France doesn't do radios, they do old school stuff. They do hold the ground, hold the enemy by kind of weight of fire, wait for the reinforcements to come up, then do the counter punch. But everything happens at a snail's pace compared to what the Germans are doing. And that's how they're able to win. And the Germans are able to win in 1940. They're able to do it by defeating the French in penny packets rather than as a mass. And so that's how they're able to win. And then, you know, subsequent battles that they're fighting, you know, against the Balkans and Yugoslavia and Greece and stuff, I mean, it's just not comparable, you know, that you're talking about a, a military nation which is just better trained, it's better equipped than the Greeks or Yugoslavs can ever hope to be. And so they win. But then comes the invasion of the Soviet Union and they've, you know, and they've completely been hoisted by their own top because they started to believe their own military genius. And Hitler begins and believes his own military genius and everyone tells him he's genius. And all those, those aristocratic military elites that are in the German army particularly, who had been very skeptical about these panzer mobile warfare thrusts that were going to be carried out through the Ardennes in 1940, have now completely come over to the other side. We were wrong. Hitler was right. He was the genius. He got it right, we got it wrong. And so they're so in full to this that they stop checking themselves and going, hang on a minute, how are we actually going to do this? And have we got the logistics to support such an enormous invasion along a 1200 mile front? And the answer is no, they haven't. And they haven't fought it through properly. And so they get defeated. That's the end of it. A long story short, very long story short, very short.
- [92:14]
Host 2
But it's also as well the involvement of the Americans. I mean, how much did Hitler and Nazi Germany have to do with the bombing of Pearl Harbor? Because you look back at that and you go, if there's one country in the world that you didn't want to piss off, it's as my family would say, the gringos.
- [92:33]
James Holland
Yeah, yeah. It's always, it's almost none at all. It's more to do with the Soviet Union. So Soviet Union, as traditional enemies of the, of Japan and have. They've been fighting each other for kind of 35 years. And the border disputes up in Manchuria. Ever since Japan invades Manchuria in 1931, Manchuko, there's been these borders, border disputes, and they've been fighting each other. And a reasonable size proportion of the Red army is on the Japanese Chinese border and they're fighting each other. And Stalin, very shrewdly, in the spring of 1941, does a deal with the Japanese where they've got a neutrality pact in place for five years. And he goes, you know, I think what you should do is just head south. You know, that's where you want to be. You know, if you're not getting what you want here, don't, don't, don't look to the north. Go south. So he's egging him on. And there's these, you know, there's this negotiations going on between the Japanese and Americans throughout 1940 and 1941 about Japan's Imperial ambitions, about what it can do about America trying to kind of withhold that and draw back from that and say to the Japanese, no, you can't just go in and kind of take what you want and, you know, you've made your bed and you can't just kind of conquer the whole of China and all the rest of it. And imposing sanctions and sanctions, rather than driving Japan to the negotiation table, actually drives Japan to war. So it's really, it's more Stalin and the Japanese themselves which are driving it, driving themselves to. Into conflict with the United States.
- [94:10]
Host 2
Because the moment the Americans get involved, I mean, that is end game, really.
- [94:15]
James Holland
Well, yeah. Although, I mean, don't discount the huge impact that Britain has because the reason why Germany goes into Soviet Union in June 1941 is because it hasn't won the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940. I mean, the Luftwaffe's attack is, is, is a catastrophe for Germany because suddenly they've still got Britain in the fight. And Britain's got the world's largest navy and it's got the world's largest merchant fleet. And paradoxically, the loss of Europe in one level helps Britain because many of the merchant fleets of the mercantile nations The Dutch, the Norwegians and so on comes over to Britain so suddenly where Britain has 33% of the world's merchant fleet in September 1939, by July 1940, it's got access to 80, 85% of the world's merchant shipping.
- [95:11]
Host 1
Wow.
- [95:12]
James Holland
And that's kind of useful in a global war. Hitler knows and all his generals know that they can't afford to fight a long protracted war because Germany never has been able to do that because it doesn't have the resources. And even less now in the 1940s does it have access to the world's oceans. So what are you going to do? You're going to take it from the eastern ferries. But the problem is all these conquests they've had in 1940, they're like being like kids in a sweet shop and they, they've blown it all. And so, you know, for example, you know, you look at France, France is one of the most industrialized nations in the, in the planet in 1939, even though it's had these sort of terrible political upheavals in the 1930s and gone through 19 different changes of Prime Minister. I mean, you think Britain's bad? I mean, look at France in the 1930s, you know, but, but it is still an industrial powerhouse and it is the most automotive society in Europe. In 1939, for example, there are eight motorized vehicles for. There are eight people for every motorized vehicle in France, whereas I figure it's 47 in Germany and 106 in fascist Italy, for example, where it's three in America. Probably no surprise. But you know, so it is very industrialized, very motorized. By 31 December 1940, France has 8% of the vehicles it had on 1 January 1940. So 92% of its motorized vehicles have gone. And where's it gone? It's been half inched by the Germans or production stopped, you know, so it's all very well going. Oh, that's great. You know, we're Germans now, we've gone into France and we can overtake their industry. But you've got to let the industrial workers work in that industry. But if you take away all their cars and they can't get to work anymore, and if you half inch all that, you know, if you steal all their coal, then the power stations don't work and industry doesn't work and so on and so forth and there's nobody working the mines and so everything just grinds to a halt. So suddenly Germany's got the problem of having to administer and look after France and keep its Atlantic coastline. That requires manpower, but it hasn't got that much manpower. And because they've stolen everything, and because these countries where they've now invaded and now occupied are no longer functioning in the way that they were, they're no longer functioning very efficiently. They're running out of everything. So even though they've become victorious and they've had these huge, sweeping successes, it's masking the fundamental flaws of the Nazi state in the 1930s, which is it's built on these incredibly thin foundations and they haven't got anything. You know, there's rationing in Germany in the summer of 1939 because they're really short of food. And one of the reasons they're really short of food is because their agriculture is really inefficient. And one of the reasons it's really inefficient is because they don't have very motorized vehicles. And the reason they don't have many motorized vehicles is because in the 1920s, when everyone's becoming motorized, they've got wheelbarrows and money and they're impoverished, so they're playing catch up. And what that means is by 1939, yes, you've got Mercedes Benz and Audi and Hawk and so on and so forth, BMWs, but they're the elites. And that means you haven't got many factories making cars or ships or whatever, because their industries being run down and you're playing catch up. And that means you haven't got many people buying cars, which means you haven't got many garages maintaining those cars, which means you haven't got much fuel and oil and you don't have that many people do know how to drive. So suddenly when you want to kind of expand that, you can't just click your fingers and suddenly be super mechanized. You know, there's the. You know, the German army uses two and a half million horses in the Second World War and only one and a half million horses in the First World War. You know, most of their military units are not mechanized. We always talk about the Nazi war machine, but the point is they're actually. It's not much of a machine. That's the whole point. They want it to be, but it isn't. And so that's the problem. So it's smoke and mirrors. It's, you know, they're conveying the impression of screaming Stuka dive bombers and Panzers and all the rest of it, but actually it's bullshit.
- [99:15]
Host 1
The bulk of the army is not like that. And it's interesting you make the point about the Battle of Britain because I think most people think of the Battle of Britain as being really important for Britain, obviously. But your point is pretty.
- [99:26]
James Holland
Britain for the world.
- [99:27]
Host 1
Quite. Because what you're saying is Operation Sea lion, the Nazis want to invade Britain.
- [99:33]
James Holland
Yeah. Which is never gonna happen in a million years.
- [99:35]
Host 1
Well, they've gotta destroy the British. The Royal Air Force.
- [99:38]
James Holland
Well, yeah. Then they've got to destroy the Royal Navy, which is the world's largest. Then they've actually got to get across when they haven't got any landing craft. Yeah. And they've never really thought about that. And they've never done an amphibious operation in their lives before, ever. And they don't have the equipment for it and they're not set up for it and they've never planned for it. And you can't just do that again in a couple of months. It takes June to September, which is when Operation Sea lion is sort of penciled in for. I mean, that is just nothing for the scale of the operation. It literally has. Not a chance in hell. And they've never, ever come up against a coordinated air defense system before. So they've got a massive problem on their hands. So very quickly, even Hitler, who's a numpty, realizes that this isn't going to happen. So, shit, what am I going to do? I've gone into a situation, I've gone into war. My bluff has been called. Britain and France have entered it. I've got rid of France, I've got rid of everything else. But the pantry is already half bare by late summer of 1940. I'm running out of everything. This sort of smoke and mirror show of kind of military grandioseness is kind of going to get called out if I'm not carefully, if I'm not careful. I know the Red army is a bit rubbish because it's just gone to war with. With Finland and got humiliated. And I know they've had the purges in 1937, 1938. So this is the time they're weakest. You know, we've just overrun France. Let's go into the kind of, you know, inferior Soviet Union with its lack of infrastructure and its backwardness. How hard can it be? But you know, what they're doing is they're taking the wrong lessons. The reason why they're able to win in France is because there are petrol stations in France, so when their panzer runs out of fuel, they can go into a petrol station and go, you know, Fill her up, you know, Jean Hilaire. And the petrol is there. That isn't the case.
- [101:27]
Host 1
No.
- [101:27]
James Holland
In Soviet Union, which is infrastructurally extremely threadbare and operates at a different railway loading gauge, for starters, and there aren't many roads and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and. And so they come up with this madcap idea that, oh, my God, you know what we'll do? We'll park Britain for the moment. What we'll do is we'll go into the Soviet Union, we'll get all the goodies we need and riches we need, then we can come back and confront Britain with America hovering in the background. But it's bonkers. I mean, it is, it is, it is so la la land. And the problem is, is the lessons are already there. The hubris behind the decision making, the kind of lack of what they're not doing in their planning is they're going, well, we're really great, so we can do this and we'll do this and it's going to be fine as long as we can get our airfields up there, then we'll do this, we'll destroy the rf, it'll be fine. What they're not doing is going, hang on a minute, what's the enemy going to do? And how does this work? And so the intelligence picture on the RAF in the summer of 1940 is terrible. I mean, they just get it completely wrong. And so they're really shocked when they don't have the same walkover that they do against Poland, against Scandinavia, against Poland, the Low Countries in France, that don't have air defence systems. An air defence system means that you can see when your enemy is coming. You can make sure that your aircraft aren't on the ground. When they come over to that airfield in Biggin Hill or wherever it might be, they can be airborne. And not only that, you can control them and attack the Luftwaffe when they come over. On your terms, Rather on their terms. But that hasn't been the case in aerial conflict, in aerial warfare, up to that point in the Second World War. So the Germans just go and go, well, you know, slam dunk, it's just easy. We'll go over and we're going destroy them all on the ground. Then we'll run in and we'll drop some paratroopers and all the rest of it and, you know, jobs, job's done. And it's just, they have this terrible shock. And it's the same when they go into the Soviet Union. They think it's going to be easy peasy. And it isn't, because it's vast and they've completely underestimated the strength of the Soviet Union. And they can see from their own intelligence picture the bulk of the Red army is along the western border. And that's largely because Stalin is thinking of invading into Europe, into Romania and Bulgaria from the southwest anyway. So that's why they're all there ready for their own attack, which is. Is probably going to attack which is going to begin on the 25th of July, might not, but that's what they're kind of working towards. So they're all mass, so it feels like a really easy victory because there they all are, there's lots of aircraft and new airfields that the Russians have built, you know, on the border. And so it says you peasy. So again, they kind of think that they've got this easy victory, but then suddenly there's a whole new wave of new divisions and new armies which are appearing. And the vast mass of military superiority in terms of numbers that suddenly appears on the battlefield slows the Germans down, which is compounded by the fact that they're now operating 500, 750km from their start place and from their railheads and from where their supply chains starting. And they can't do it. They just can't maintain it. They have also reached their culmination point where they can no longer operate at the level they want to operate because their supply chains are so long. So, you know, if you've got. If you're 500 miles or 500 kilometers from your, from your start line to your front Panzer troops, that's 1,000 miles because you've got to go there. Then you've got to go back again and you've got to extend the railway line. You've got to change the loading gauge all the time. Now, you can do that at a rate of about 20 kilometers a day, but you're talking about 750 kilometers.
- [105:11]
Host 1
James, I want to talk about Hitler's state of mind, because up until this point, I imagine putting myself in his positions, as one ought to do, he's crushing it. He's absolutely crushed. He was, like you said, under the thumb. Failure. Went from struggle to struggle. Then he goes into World War I. You know, he's finally got this, you know, comradeship and a sense of purpose, but he gets blank, comes out, things are bad. He builds this thing up, and now he's the Fuhrer. Now he is.
- [105:43]
James Holland
He's a demigod.
- [105:44]
Host 1
He's a demigod.
- [105:45]
James Holland
Maybe just Fuhrer weather in Germany.
- [105:47]
Host 1
Yeah.
- [105:47]
James Holland
You know, when it's sunny, it's Fuhrer weather.
- [105:48]
Host 1
Exactly.
- [105:49]
James Holland
You know, he can do no wrong.
- [105:50]
Host 1
And it's always Fuhrer weather because no matter what he does, everything is going great.
- [105:53]
James Holland
Yeah.
- [105:54]
Host 1
And then there's the first moment of doubt. Is it doubt after the Battle of the.
- [105:59]
James Holland
Well, I think, I think the greatest moment for him is the beginning of July when he returns to Berlin. There's this huge sort of, you know, triumph and, you know, quarter of a million people out in the streets. There's swastikas everywhere. He's in his fancy six wheel Mercedes doing all this kind of stuff and, you know, everyone's cheering and it feels like the war is over. You know, he's won, he's won against the odds. No one can believe this victory, the scale of the victory. This is a strategic earthquake that no one had anticipated. You know, when they go to war in 1939 and France and Britain call Germany's bluff, everyone's just thinking, oh my God, you know, how are we going to get out of this mess? And he has, and it feels certain that Britain's going to follow. But Britain doesn't. Britain, because.
- [106:43]
Host 1
Does he try to negotiate with Britain at this point?
- [106:45]
James Holland
Well, he offer, he makes him an offer, you know, an offer to reason. On the 19th of July, does a speech in the Sports palace in Berlin, says, you know, appeals to reason, so saying, well, no, we're not interested in Britain. We want to let you carry on as you are and all the rest of it and, you know, but we should be, you know, we should be friends. And it's an incredibly weak speech, an uncharacteristically feeble speech. And in the couple of weeks before that, he's been down to the Berghof, his beloved place in Obersalzberg, and at Berkesgaden in the southeastern Bavarian Alps. And, you know, he's brought, even though he's. They've created the okw, the Oberkommando de Wermacht, which is an inherently sensible idea, which is a combined services general staff. It's really just his course, his mouthpiece and what he does, he gets the Kriegsmarine in the navy in and says, okay, so what's your plan for the invasion of Britain? They go, well, my Fuhrer, you know, I think we should do this. And then he gets in the army and they go, well, my Fuhrer, I think we should do this. And they're completely different plans, you know, so navy is like, it's got to be on as narrow front as possible. You know, the army is sort of going, well, I think, you know, let's land in Nine Regis and also in dealing Kent. And it's like, well, that's like 90 miles. I mean, what. And you know, and no, there's no joined up thinking whatsoever. Then he goes and delivers his speech to the British Sports palace and then he goes back to Beirut to go to the Wagner festival and he just sits and waits. And one of the interesting things about Hitler is he does prevaricate a lot. But at the same time, once he gets an idea into his head, he then tries to find the reasons to support the theory, which is exactly the wrong way to go about war. You should never be fighting the war as you imagine it. You should be fighting the war as it is in front of you. And this is the big fatal error. But because he seems to produce this miracle, the senior Wehrmacht commanders are now enthralled to him and they feel he can do no wrong. And they think, well, you know, he's got us this far. I mean, what am I to doubt it? So they're now these sort of converts to it. So even at sort of comparatively early on in July, and certainly by the end of July, he's thinking about an early invasion of the Soviet Union. Obviously, at this point, Soviet Union is an ally. They signed this deal in August 1939, 23rd of August, which is going to give them this sort of breakup of Poland and give them a mutual alliance, which means sharing parts and technology, but also resources. So Germany hands over details of engines and, you know, and certain expertise. And in return, Soviet Union gives Germany oil and fuel and bauxite and, you know, and grain and coal. And grain. And. Yes, exactly. So it is, it is largely Soviet fuel that is powering the Luftwaffe as they bomb Britain in the Blitz, for example, you know, which is something that's often forgotten or not appreciated or realized. So once he's crossed that psychological Rubicon, it's very, very difficult then to budge Hitler's mind. So he might change the methodology, but the seed is there. So once, once it's, I'm going to invade the Soviet Union, there's no going back on that.
- [109:59]
Host 1
But come back to the Battle of Britain because the Luftwaffe tries to destroy the Royal Air Force and the Navy doesn't happen utterly defeated in that battle, they give up, they abandon the idea of Operation Sea Lion. Does Hitler think at this point, oh, maybe I'm not the demigod, maybe I need to be?
- [110:19]
James Holland
No, he never dies his own genius at all. He's constantly got people doing this. But what he does is he doubts, he prevaricates over the decision making process.
- [110:27]
Host 1
Right.
- [110:28]
James Holland
So he's from the summer of 1940 before the battle of Britain has played out. He's already in his head, he's going into the Soviet Union the following year.
- [110:34]
Host 1
Okay.
- [110:35]
James Holland
And that's scheduled for the.
- [110:35]
Host 1
So he goes into the Soviet Union. Everything initially, just very briefly just say
- [110:41]
James Holland
about the planning for the Soviet Union. So the large, the directive for Soviet Union for Operation Barbarossa as it becomes known is signed off in December 1940. So all the rest of it, you know, the hope is well we'll just keep hammering the British and reduce their ability to do much and you know, make life difficult for them and you know, so that when we do turn back there'll be an easier, you know, there's no real sense that they're going to. Maybe we can, we can so badly hit Britain that they'll come to terms but more likely we'll just down with their infrastructure, you know, make it difficult for them. But of course they're not without their own attrition. I mean, you know, liftop of bombers are getting shot down, their numbers are getting lower, they're losing loads and loads of highly experienced air crew, etc. Etc. In bombing Britain. It's not entirely one sided thing and obviously it doesn't bring Britain to its knees by any sort of imagination. In fact the numbers of factories grows exponentially rather than decreasing with the blitz. Although it is very traumatic for Britain and it is the first mass sustained bombing attack on a nation ever in the history of the world. And it causes untold damage and untold problems, but not insurmountable ones because Britain's inherent strength, its global reach, its friends, its allies, its dominions, its empires, its extra imperial assets such as, you know, owning most of Argentina, most of Argentina's assets for example, and it's huge amount of shipping, all those are hugely to its advantage. And the truth is is Germany's naval strategy is completely cockeyed. You know, the idea was to create a surface raiding force, but also one that could take on other fleets. But they're never going to compete to that. I mean originally the Z Plan, which is a big naval expansionism which is signed off in 1938, you know, that's on the impression that the war is going to last, is going to start in 1944. So they think they've got a bit more time than they actually have. And of course it starts in 1939. But, but the surface fleet, the surface raider idea is on one level is sensible because it's more efficient to destroy shipping with other ships than it is submarines, because a submarine is small and only has a few torpedoes, whereas a light cruiser, for example, is 9,000 tons and has, you know, huge guns and huge firepower. And you only need a small force of those scores. Absolute mayhem. The problem is they don't create enough of those small cruisers. They start creating battleships and heavy cruisers and pocket battleships which are much bigger than light cruisers and they don't have very many when the war starts. And what that means is they've also haven't got very many U boats. And the U boats are the bits that really could have made the difference. But because the U boat arm is so small in 1939, that means the personnel of the numbers of experienced personnel is also really, really small. So that's also a problem. Which means throughout 1940, where Britain is quite vulnerable in terms of its convoy system and how their, their defenses of those escorts, there aren't very many U boats. So in January 1941, the total number of U boats in the entire entire Atlantic is six. And that's not very many. And you know, consequently they don't sink a huge amount of shipping. And even when they're doing quite well in the very. In the autumn of 1940 where, where most of the navy is defending the coastal waters of Britain, so isn't defending convoys, they're still not even getting close to sinking the amount of tonnage that they need to sink to have a dent on Britain. So, you know, the total war, I mean, I think it's something like 1.4% of shipping is sunk by, by U boats. And you know, 80% of all convoys get through unscathed. So, so, you know, in other words, they have this opportunity to, to make a blow on Britain and they squander that because all their priorities are completely the wrong way around. When it comes to planning for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Soviet Union, they do various plans and one of the guys who's in charge of the plans is as a staff officer at the OkH, which is A. Over Commander Dehera, which is the Army, Army General headquarters called General Paulus, ends up being surrendering at Stalingrad. Yeah, but at the time he's a staff officer and he does all these plans and he does all this war game and he goes, this isn't going to work. And they go, oh, no, no, no, no. No, no, go away and do it until it does work. He goes, all right, and goes off and produces nothing. Yeah, that's much better. And then they also look at the economic benefits and the economic costs of going into the Soviet Union. And the person in charge of this is General Georg Thomas, who is in charge of the economic division at the okw, which is open the German General Staff. He comes back and goes, this isn't looking very good, to be perfectly honest. You know, we're not going to get the grain we want. It's going to be much more difficult than we want. The benefits of going to Soviet Union are not going to come apparent anything like as quickly as you think they're going to, even if we win quickly. And they go, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Go off and do another one. So in the middle of February, produces another one which goes, yeah, it's going to be great. And they go, good. Okay, let's go then. I mean, it is that bad.
- [115:37]
Host 1
And all I'm trying to get at, James, is, you know, one of the things that's always. This always struck me about World War II is that Hitler ultimately not just allows, but creates a situation where his own country is flattened to the ground, hundreds of thousands if not millions of civilians killed, burnt alive, women raped en masse, all of this. And as I understand it, it's because he never had the realization like, okay, we've, we're losing here. We need to adjust, right? So Operation Barbarossa, they go in initially, very successful. They're destroying army by after army after army on the Eastern front. But then by the time of the Battle of Moscow, the tides start to change. And eventually there comes a point where it's very clear America's entered the war. Britain is now at its peak. The Soviet Union has recovered from its early defeats, is ramping up production, working together with Lend lease, building everything up. Germany isn't going to win the war, but he just doesn't stop. Why is that?
- [116:45]
James Holland
Because Hitler's worldview is this. It's a very black and white one. It's not got a lot of gray area. And it's either a thousand year Reich or it's Armageddon. And the choice is up to people. And what he does is part of his. Part of his rhetoric, part of his ideology is destiny and will. The triumph of the will, it's the famous or infamous, depending on which way you look at it. Film by lazy Lainey Riefenthal about the Nuremberg rallies, made in 1934. 5 I think it is. And it is the will of the German people over there, man enough to be able to kind of pull us through and win this great victory is going to secure our prosperity and our futures forevermore. Oh, they're not. So whenever the shortcomings, the kind of the shortcoming gets, the infill comes from our head. Our superiority as soldiers, our superiority as Aryans, as people. And either we're up to it or we're not. It's all or nothing. And so such is his grip on German society. So to start off with, everyone's in fraud to him because Fuhrer weather, you know, he's got all of his lands back without a shot being fired. Then he's brought in and then, you know, he's done it again. He's got Poland. You know, we were all very skeptical and we didn't think that was going to work, but he has. He's got Poland back. Phew. You know, and then he was going into France. Is he mad? Crazy? He can't possibly go into France but never defeat France. And then guess what? He wins. He'd have bought it. And then he goes and say, you know, into the Balkans and the excavating. It seems like he can do no wrong. And then he goes into Soviet Union in the first two weeks, it's like an absolute slam dunk. They're just crushing it. You know, the thousands of Soviet aircraft destroyed, you know, tens of thousands of prisoners captured, the whole Western front, you know, the western Soviet border crushed all the territories which Stalin had taken in the summer of 1940. The Baltic states, for example, which everyone forgets that he does that in June 1940, while France and war in France is playing out. That's just gone in a trice. How can anyone doubt him? And then suddenly there is this realization that, oops, we've gone too far, we've overextended, but they've gone too far in. And the irony is, the terrible irony of this whole situation is that by the spring of 19, end of 1940, spring of 1941, he has no choice. He's got no choice. He's got no choice but to invade the Soviet Union. Because what's the alternative? You can't sit on the border and wait for the Soviet Union to attack, because that is what they're going to do, by the way, because every month that passes, Soviet industry is building more KVs heavy tanks and T34s and more aircraft. The Red army in June 1941 is the largest military in the world by A huge proportion. And it may be that the Germans launch Operation Barbarossa with the largest invasion force the world has ever seen. But that doesn't mean to say that the force they're attacking isn't bigger, because it is. They've got five and a, you know, 20 times the amount of mortars and artillery pieces that the Germans have. They've got two and a half times the amount of tanks, they've got five times the amount of aircraft that the Germans have. They've got God knows how many more men than the Germans have. So Hitler, if he's going to win, he's got to strike while the Soviet Union is still weak.
- [120:11]
Host 1
But what I'm saying the problem is
- [120:12]
James Holland
the task is just too big.
- [120:14]
Host 1
Well, what I'm saying is you've struck, you had a good go, you failed. Why don't you try and find Give back Western Ukraine, Give back the Baltic States agreed to reparations. Why fight?
- [120:27]
James Holland
Because Stalin, Stalin's going to invade you and crush you, and he will. I mean, the absolute one thing that is completely certain the moment that Hitler takes power in January 1933, is that at some point there is going to be a massive clash between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. And when that happens and how it pans out and what form it takes, that's all up for grabs. But the one thing that isn't up for grabs is that it's going to happen. And it absolutely is. And I think you can argue there's a very, very strong case for thinking that the Soviet Red army was going to go and invade in Romania and Bulgaria in July 1941. The problem is because he started the war, because he hasn't won the Battle of Britain, he's got no let out, he's got no alternative. He's either. And because he's running out of resources, because there's an economic blockade by the Royal Navy, because they're pegged in, into the center of Europe, he's got no means of getting the resources he needs. And because they don't have the wits to kind of galvanize the French and the Dutch and everything else to operate to their advantage. And they don't have oil. The biggest oil producer in the world in the 1940s is the United States. The second biggest is Venezuela. The third biggest is, you know, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, you know, the Caucasus. So within the sphere of the, of the, of the USSR and some way behind that is the oil fields of the Middle East. Germany doesn't have any connection to any of those. So it's dependent on its alliance of the Soviet Union, in fact getting its oil, which the Soviet Union is going to break if Germany doesn't break it, or it's dependent on the oil fields of Romania at Ploesti, which the Soviet Union have all but kind of surrounded by June 1941. So to get to Germany, that oil from Romania has to cross through Soviet controlled territory. So it's unsustainable. And so without fuel, a modern army, we've gone from being a coal nation world to an oil based world. The moment you've crossed that threshold from coal to oil, the country that has the most oil is going to come out on top and Germany doesn't have it. And that's the problem. So by going to Poland in September 1939, before they're ready, he has brought upon nothing but ruin. I think from the moment that they lose the Battle of Britain, they're stuffed. I think you can argue and argue really convincingly that they're now in a trap of their own victories. And this is the irony at the moment, where in many ways it looks like the apogee of the Nazi state, the conquest of Yugoslavia and Crete and Greece and you know, going up to the end of May 1941, with all those, you know, 3 million troops poised on the Soviet border in the first weeks of June 1941, beginning of June 1941, that's the high water mark. But actually they've got themselves in a situation where they're stuffed already because they can't sustain it. And you can say yes before Moscow in December 1941 is where it all really, really unravels. But actually it really unravels in the battle of Smolensk, because Smolensk in Belarus, well, it's now Belarusian was Belorussia is captured by Guderian's leading Panzer unit, the Panzer Group 2, on 15 July 1941. But the ongoing battle of the Smolensk pocket, which is a pocket of three Soviet armies, the 18th, 19th and 20th, I think it is, they are to the east of Smolensk and that pocket is not completely closed until the very end of July, beginning of August. And by that point the all the panzer groups, the two panzer groups, the panzer divisions in Panzer Group 2 and Panzer Group 3, which are leading Army Group center, which is the main thrust into the Soviet Union. There's also Army Group north and Army Group South, Army Group south going to the Ukraine, Army Group north going to Baltic States and on to Leningrad. But the main effort, the main, the prime Panzer units, mobile forces of the Wehrmacht is in army group center going on this thrust through Belarus towards Moscow. It's stuffed. It's absolutely stuffed. They've reached that culmination point. Their panzers have been destroyed, their motorized vehicles have been destroyed, and they're being destroyed as much just by Soviet roads and by the huge stretches. And the fact that they've a lot of, you know, they go into the Barbarossa with 2,000 different motorized vehicles, 2,000, each of which has a slightly different distributor cap and slightly different gasket and slightly different kinds. And there's only so much you can feed from Peter to feed Paul. And of course, the wheels literally and metaphorically come off the whole process and by. So they have this huge leap forward of sort of 500 kilometers in the first sort of couple of weeks, three weeks of the campaign, and thereafter they do about 100 kilometers in the next month and a half. And so suddenly that USP driving fast, the castle tracks the kind of lightning war, all the rest of it, they can't do it anymore. And the only reason that they get as far as they do in December is because of the encirclement of Kiev, Kyiv, as it is now. And that the only reason that happens is because Stalin refused to countenance advice of his own military commanders, which is to fall back behind the Dnieper. And they don't. So they get beaten in, they get encircled in front of the Genieper, and the giant encirclement continues. But, but, but that doesn't really help Germany because they still haven't got Leningrad. A lot of the factories have been moved east to the urals, which are 400 miles beyond or 400 kilometers or whatever beyond Moscow, and they still can't get to Moscow, and they can't sustain this fight because they don't have enough of anything. You know, this is, this is what one has to get one's head around, is that yes, they have these encirclements, and yes, they have this great victory in the summer of 1941, on paper, but they are winning themselves to death in the process because they're fundamentally not big enough to be able to compete on a, on a geographical scale of the Soviet Union or on the material scale of the Soviet Union, they just can't compete. And you're absolutely right to point out that, you know, if you take an arbitrary date, such as, let's say the 15th of June, 1941, Nazi Germany has got one enemy, which is Great Britain, albeit Great Britain plus dominion and empire, and extra imperial assets. Fast forward six months to 15 December 1941 and it's got three enemies. It's got Great Britain plus Empire and Dominions and extra imperial assets. It's got United States of America and it's got the USSR it is not going to win.
- [127:41]
Host 2
And whilst all this is happening, if we focus on Germany at home there is the awful specter of the Holocaust. So when did that start? When did it go?
- [127:52]
James Holland
Which completely shoots them in the foot, by the way, okay, because it ties up vast amounts of resources, it ties up all sorts of time. It doesn't work. It denudes them of, of talent and, and souls and people that could be doing other stuff. I mean it is, it's a, I mean quite. But, but you can't say, I mean you can say that and you can point that out, but that is to misunderstand the ideology at the heart of Nazism, at the heart of Hitler's mind, which is the crushing of Judaism and Bolshevism, the, the Judeo Bolshevik yoke.
- [128:28]
Host 2
So when, how did it go from look, we don't like Jews, they're kind of responsible for what's happening, but we've got bigger fish to fry here to. Right, we're going to exterminate the entire population.
- [128:41]
James Holland
Well, it really moves as they move into Poland because Polish are untimension and, and Jewish polls are even more intervention. These, I. E. They're kind of low lights, they're kind of, they're below us as areas. Whereas in Europe they're kind of sort of integrating into kind of modern societies. And it's sort of, it's not okay. But, but you know, we can put up and put them in ghettos or you know, we can, we can encourage them to get exit visas and move to Israel or United States or wherever, just shut them down culturally and societally. But suddenly in Poland, you know, we're going to get rid of the intelligentsia, we're gonna, we're gonna get rid of the Jews, we're just going to shoot them. Anyone who resists Germany in any way is to be regarded as a, as a partisan and resisting Germany in any way. It can be anyone who just says, I'm not going to do what you were say to ask me to do, you know, pamphleteering, whatever it might be, you know, they are enemies of the Nazi state. And there is an ideological aspect to the invasion of the Soviet Union which is spelt out very implicitly at a conference in early March 19, 1941, and which is then reiterated at the beginning of June 1941, where Hitler basically says, you know, if you, if you do excessive measures, no one's going to be called up over the coals for that. And this is an ideological war. And this is about, this is more than just a war of conquest. This is a war of annihilation. We have to annihilate the Soviet state and we also have to annihilate Judaism within that state. So you suddenly start having kind of burning of villages, rounding up people and just shooting them willy nilly. And there's a point at the end of July 1941 where Himmler, the head of the SS, visits the front up in the Baltic states and sees a mass execution. He goes, oh, that's horrible. You know, our guys didn't have to be doing that. It's absolutely ghastly. I don't want my men having to kind of shoot people in the back of the head. It's really grotesque and it's really interesting. I think that his concern is not over the victims, obviously, it's over the perpetrators. It's over his men having to do something as horrible as witness sort of brains being splattered all over the place and blood going everywhere. Because there's got to be a more humane way of doing this. When he means humane, he means humane again for the perpetrators. And so this leads directly to the development of gas chambers and Zyklon B and this Cyclone B has been developed as a pesticide and for agricultural processes. And it's very effective. And so I think, well, okay, well we can do that and do that. And then, then what we do is we shove them all in a, in a room, they get gas and we just dispose of them, incinerate them. No one has to look at blood and brains. And you know, it can be a bit more remote and a bit more kind of distance between it and it's not so traumatic. And that's how it develops. And you know, Hitler never kind of never says, I want you to send murder all these millions of Jews. It's just, it's all done with again, with smoke and shadows and euphemism, you know, the final solution to the Jewish problem. The final solution to the Jewish problem is, is what do we do with all these Jews? How do we get rid of them all? And you know, you have to remember that out of the 6 million that get Jews that get, get killed in the Holocaust, 3 million of them are shot in the back of the head or similar means, and 3 million are gassed and so die of, of, you know, malnutrition or abuse or whatever.
- [132:01]
Host 2
And so when did they open the camps? When did they start to actually mechanize the 19?
- [132:07]
James Holland
I mean, one of, one of the delays for Auschwitz, for example, is, is because the people that are developing the mechanism. Mechanism for the gas insist on patenting it. And the patency takes a little bit of time to come through.
- [132:21]
Host 2
Yeah, I could, you know that. So from 1942. And the question that people always ask is, were the Allies aware of it? If they were, how much were they aware of it?
- [132:33]
James Holland
Yeah, yeah, they do know what's going on by the middle of the war. But what can you do? I mean, in, that's in Poland, what happens if you go bomb it? I mean, that's not going to work. I mean, you're going to just kill lots of Jews. You know, you're going to bomb the camp. The people you're trying to save. I can't really see. I've never really understood this argument that people have. You know, we knew about it. It was disgraceful. We, you know, we didn't, we didn't go and rescue them. We're trying to rescue them. You know, the Soviet armies are coming from the east, we're coming from the West. I mean, what are you, what are you supposed to do?
- [133:04]
Host 2
Because did it influence their thinking at all or was it just something that was.
- [133:09]
James Holland
I think, I think everyone, you know, we knew about the concentration camps. We knew about that. We did know about the death camps, you know, people who escaped and not the word about it. But, but, but, you know, we knew about Auschwitz. Didn't know about all of them. We don't know about the details of it. We didn't know the extent of it. We knew that people were being gassed for sure. We knew that lots of people were being executed, of course. But again, you know, what do you do? You can't go, you know, can you go and bomb Auschwitz? We could, but then you just put one camp, you know, got a patent now, and just build another one. I mean, you know, that's not, that's not going to end the Holocaust. So, you know, they tried to warn the Hungarians about it and the Hungarians chose not to. The Hungarian government chose not to act on that warning. So. Because again, they're in a video situation where what can you practically do about it? I mean, it's, it's really difficult. I think what people hadn't appreciated was that the concentration camps by the end of the war were in such a bad state. Now you have to remember the concentration camps are there to, for people to be, be workers. And they're not all Jews by any stretch of imagination. They're political enemies. They're people who done the smallest infringement. But, you know, you're using them as forced labor, slave labor. But Germany's really short of food. I mean, that's, that's why it's going to the east in the first place. Get the red part of Ukraine where Hitler is actually right and compared to, I mean, so the, I'm jumping the gun here. But one of the big arguments with his commanders was do you go straight for Moscow and decapitate the machine and then everything else follows, or do you go straight to Leningrad and get the Baltic states and get the sea ports and do you go into Ukraine and get the bread basket first and then Moscow is a secondary target or which way do you do it? But fundamentally, the reason we're going Soviet Union is to crush Bolshevism and Judaism and this Judeo Bolshevik plot. But it's fundamentally to try and get the resources that you don't have yourself, whilst at the same time denying them to your Bolshevik enemy. So Germany is always short of food right from before the war even begins. I mean, I've already mentioned that they have rationing in Germany in the summer of 1940. France doesn't have rationing by the time it's invaded in May 1940, for example, because it's land of plenty, et cetera. So that only gets worse as the war progresses. So by the end of the war in 1945, where the Reichsbahn is completely crushed from February 1945, there's nothing left. All the cities are in ruins. You know, what little food they've got, they're not going to be giving them to the prisoners, which is why they're so emaciated in such a bad state. By the time camps are being liberated in March and April 1945, or in the case of Auschwitz, from January 1945, so they're extra emaciated. But I don't think the west had been expected quite, quite such horrors, you know, whether it be Dachau, whether it be Belson, whether it be Saxon House or whatever it be, you know, to see piles of starved, emaciated corpses to, to, to come to these camps, obviously riven with typhus and typhoid and cholera and, and all the rest of it. I mean, it was a horror beyond horrors. And I don't think the west knew about that, not to that extent. They knew there were camps, they didn't realize the state they were in to that degree.
- [136:37]
Host 2
Because, and correct me if I'm wrong, when the Nazis knew that the game was up, they essentially doubled their efforts.
- [136:45]
James Holland
Yeah, they do. I mean, we've all seen the famous picture of the, or infamous picture of, of the huge great entrance block of Auschwitz. Or when we talk about Auschwitz, we're talking about Birkenau, which is the Auschwitz three. And because the first camp was the old original Polish army camp. And you see the railway line, this sort of, you know, monochrome railway line going straight through the middle of it that was built in May 1944 to accelerate it because they were coming, coming to a platform about a mile and a half away and then they'd have to walk across this open ground and then go into the camp. Now they had platforms that were just going straight down to the gas chamber. And that was to accelerate it to get rid of the Hungarian Jews.
- [137:27]
Host 1
So this brings us back.
- [137:30]
James Holland
It's absolutely insane. I mean, it's just bonkers.
- [137:32]
Host 1
Well, this is what I'm trying to ask you about, because in 1933, in your telling of it, Hitler says literally nothing about this. Nothing.
- [137:40]
James Holland
Well, they haven't worked because they're all making up as they go along. He's come fully formed with his overall ideology, but the mechanism of government, the mechanism of operating this new la la land, and, and you have to think of the Nazi state as la la land. It's, it's, it's a warped, black, deeply malevolent fantasy world. But it's a fantasy world. And everyone who's involved in it, the Nazi elites through to the military commanders, they're all, they've all bought into and complicit in the creation of this la la land. So the whole thing about the Jews and everything and the anti Judaism and anti Bolshevism, it's not fully formed. It's, it's. We have to get rid of the Jews in Germany. But how we get rid of them is it escalates. It escalates. And, and, and, and this is where Kristallnacht is so important. Because Kristallnacht in, in November 1938 is, is a testing ground. It's like, what can the German people put up with? What can the rest of the world put up with? What can we get away with here? How far can we push this? And it's a signifier. And Kristallnacht is a big escalation. Jews being beaten up, synagogues being burned Bricks through windows of Jewish properties and enterprises and so on and so forth. And they get away with it. The nation takes it, they accept it, the world accepts it.
- [139:03]
Host 2
And
- [139:07]
James Holland
there are just these forks in the road all the time that the, the Nazis keep coming to. It's like, okay, so we don't really like Jews, but how far do we push this? Well, first of all, well, let's just sort of make them difficult for them. We'll, we'll delegalize them. We'll try and encourage them to go off under their own steam. But they're still here, so why would we do. Well, let's up it up a bit more. Let's make, make the laws even more stringent still here. Let's, let's, let's do another whack. Let's go, Let, let, let's, let's have crystal now. Let's have a night of marauding militias where thugs are kind of, you know, beating them up. And then let's see what happens. It just escalates. And then they're going into the eastern territories where they're intervention and so they're extra kind of worse than. So it's far from prying eyes, it's far from Western eyes. We can get away with stuff. This is an ideological war suddenly, you know, where anyone's a partisan, so you round people up and you shoot them. And the VERM actor is very every bit as responsible and complicit in this as the EISAT's Gripen of the SS, which, for example, the outcome group in these action squads that are especially designed to kind of come up behind the advancing German front lines and, you know, clear out people in burn villages and, you know, and what have you.
- [140:14]
Host 1
One other question before we head to questions from our supporters that I wanted to ask, I've always wanted to ask someone with your expertise is after the war, the surviving German generals as one. Well, there's some exceptions, but as sort of basically. So Hitler was actually an idiot. He messed this up, he messed that up. We told him this. These are mostly people who followed him, you know, with burning eyes through thick and thin. How much of that is deflecting blame for their own responsibilities or how much of it is it? What you said earlier, which is you, I think you call Hitler numpty.
- [140:47]
Host 2
Yeah.
- [140:48]
Host 1
You know, he, he makes mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes, but he makes some catastrophic mistakes. Where does the blame for Germany's failure in the war lie with respect to generals and Hitler's?
- [141:00]
James Holland
Yeah, they're absolutely up to their Neck in it and don't fall for that crap trap ever. They absolutely believed it. They fell in with it. They condoned the anti Semitism. There's examples of, literally. Callum. On one hand, German commanders that don't buy into this. They're so few and far between, most of them are completely guilty and,
- [141:27]
Host 1
you
- [141:27]
James Holland
know, they bought into it, they swallowed it, they were excited by it, they were driven by a desire to make Germany great again. Yes, absolutely, all of that. And their grievances were to a certain extent justified. But it whole thing just got out of hand. They got themselves into a. Into a mess in which they couldn't get themselves out of it. And their earlier theories which were proved correct, you know, mobile armored theories and all of Guderian and Manstein and so on and so forth that seem to kind of be playing out to their advantage in 1940. By the time they get into Soviet Union, it's a different, different ball game. And this is not a war of conquest, it's a war of annihilation. And that's a game changer. And they've all got blood on their hands. And the truth is they all believed it. They believed the miracle of Hitler and what they were doing. They weren't asking the right questions, they weren't going, hang on a minute, we're just assuming that we're going to be brilliant and better than the Red Army. We're just assuming that we can beat them all within 500km and annihilate the Red army within 500km. What if we can't? What happens if we go in with this ideological war and actually we don't win, and then suddenly violence begets violence and suddenly you're in this. You're in this doom loop of extreme violence that you can't get out of. And so at the end of the war, you can say, oh, it wasn't me, I was surveying orders and all that sort of stuff. But no, you know, you could have assassinated Hitler. You could have said no, you could have had a coup, you could have done anything. You could have said, this isn't going to work. You could have actually had the moral balls to stand up to this nonsense. But they don't.
- [143:08]
Host 2
Quick question before the end. I always find the character of Albert Speer fascinating.
- [143:13]
James Holland
Yeah, me too.
- [143:14]
Host 2
Particularly when it comes to this. Could you very just quickly explain to Albert Speer is. And why his story is one of the more fascinating ones that come out of Nazi history?
- [143:23]
James Holland
Yeah, so he's a. He's a young architect, he catches Hitler's eye in the 1930s becomes his favorite. You know, he's a good, tall, strapping, good looking looking lad. Hitler does like kind of younger guys who, you know, he, and he doesn't feel threatened by him because he's not of the same age. He's obviously much younger. He's very obviously in fraud to Hitler. So Hitler gets him on these big projects and Hitler's. Hitler likes big stuff and he wants to completely rebuild Berlin and turn it into Germania. And he, and he gets Speer to design a new Reich Chancery, a new government building which he does and does brilliantly and Hitler loves it. And then, you know, he comes up with these designs for Germania and suddenly he's a kind of the golden boy and he's there in the court of Hitler. He's a leading Nazi and all the rest of it. And then Fritz Todd, who's the armaments minister gets killed in a, in a, in a car, in a plane crash in February 1941 and February 1942 rather. And Spear takes over. And because he's young and dynamic and all the rest of it, he can sort of make certain miracles happen. Even though the miracles again are kind of sort of paper thin and, and not good enough. I mean, you know, they're stop gap is sort of paper over cracks, that kind of thing. And somehow he managed to wriggle out of it at the very end of the war. You know, he gets put on trial at Nuremberg and he doesn't get hanged, he gets put in prison and gets released.
- [144:46]
Host 1
Well, the narrative about him is, is like he wasn't the real Nazi. Like he built, he built nice stuff. He managed the munitions ministry very well. But he didn't, you know, he wasn't, he wasn't a fan of the Holocaust and he wasn't.
- [144:58]
James Holland
Yeah, no, no, that's all nonsense. He's upset his neck in it and completely complicit in it and, and you know, Kisses Rennie, who, who wrote a series of very, very good books, not, not least on Fran Stangle who was, was he Sobibor or Treblinko? He's one of them commandants in the deaf camps. Read a brilliant book called into that Darkness, which is fantastic book about him. Series of interviews that she did with him in his prison cell about his, his journey to becoming a terrible, terrible death camp commandant and who recognizes what he's done and sort of feels regret and then kills himself after, in his prison cell after she's finished her interviews. And then she did a Book on Speer, and Speer actually was doing an interview in London the night before he died and actually had been sleeping with one of his mistresses. And it sounds like he died on the job, to be perfectly honest. Anyway, the annoying thing is the BBC have lost the transcript of this. This interview that he did that night before he died. Yeah, it's somewhere in an archive in a basement somewhere in Croydon or something. No one can find it. But anyway, I mean, you know, he. He was rotten to the core, absolutely, you know, despicable individual and. And requires no sympathy. And, you know, it is not possible to be in the court of Hitler and amongst the Nazi elites and not be completely complicit with blood on your hands and totally up your neck in it.
- [146:20]
Host 1
It's.
- [146:21]
James Holland
It's just not possible.
- [146:22]
Host 1
One more pre. Final question. What did you. What was your take on Nuremberg? The film, not the trial.
- [146:27]
James Holland
Oh, I thought the film's pretty good.
- [146:28]
Host 1
I. It was great, wasn't it?
- [146:30]
James Holland
Obviously, you know, I see anything to do with the Second World War and I'm expecting to be completely awful and just get where it wasn't like that. And that didn't happen. That's not right, that's wrong. But actually, I thought it was pretty good. I thought Russell Craig was fantastic.
- [146:40]
Host 2
He was indeed. When we ever. We talk about World War II now, it's this very simplistic way of speaking about it, you know, and we compare it to modern times. He's a Nazi. They're worse than Hitler, Baba. All the usual stuff. But if we look at 2026 and we look at that period of time and just before, what comparisons can we make that are actually valid? And what are some of the myths that need exploding?
- [147:09]
James Holland
Yeah, yeah, lots, actually. And I think it's really interesting because if you think about it sort of 100 years ago, but certain things that happened which have a sort of weird mirror with what's happened in the last 25 years. So, first of all, there was a massive pandemic, global pandemic. There was a catastrophic war which, quite apart from the tragedy of lost lives, was economically ruinous in a way that to America and Britain and the Western world, Iraq and Afghanistan were economically ruinous. There was then there was a huge financial crash in 1929, as it was in 2008. And there was also. There's also been a trade tariff war in 1930, as of what has been, you know, with the advent of Trump in his second term. So there's lots and lots of parallels and one of the Things I think is really interesting is that history doesn't repeat itself, because it can't possibly, because that was then and this is now. And we're constantly living in constantly evolving world, but patterns of human behavior don't change at all. I mean, one of the reasons why Shakespeare is still relevant is because he's dealing with fundamentals of human character which are as relevant today as they were in 1592. So fundamentally we don't change. And where you can apply economic theories, which is why someone like John Maynard Keynes, the great economist, is so important and still so valid, is that you can see how people respond to economic crisis and the ebbs and flows of economies. And 1929 wasn't the first crash. It wasn't the first economic global crisis, and obviously it wasn't the last either. And you can see how things develop. And there were plenty of crises in the 19th century, for example. There was plenty of theories about free trade and open seas and all free markets and all the rest of it. The novels of Thomas Hardy, for example, are set to the backdrop of agricultural decline as a result of free trade and cheaper grain coming from the Americas and meat coming from the Argentine and refrigeration and all the rest of it. That's the backdrop to Jude the Obscure and Tesla d' Urbervilles and all the rest of it. So you can see how patterns of human behavior behave, but follow one after the other. Which means from an economic point of view, you can actually plan and theorize fairly accurately. And one of the things you can theorize about is how people will respond to massive dips. And in a democracy, you will always have the same thing. Economic decline leads to political unsettlement and dislocation in a democracy. And when you have economic decline and a political dislocation together, you're that much closer to war. And the converse is also true. So when you have economic growth and you have economic stability, you tend to have political stability, and you tend to have police, you tend to have peace. So that's why the age we're living in now is quite worrying. And what you see is that people respond in pretty much the same way. So why is it that Hitler comes into power in 1933? It's because the established political democratic order in Germany isn't working, and people are poorer and they're having higher costs of living, and wages are going down as costs are going up and rents are going up, and their standard of life and chances of employment and future prosperity are declining. So this existing political system isn't working. So I am going to go to the extremes to see an alternative because although the wrecking ball is offering something quite wacky, the conservative view isn't working either. So I might as well give the wrecking ball a chance. If people can't see the comparisons now, then they're obviously not thinking about this in the right way. And this is why history is there to help us and if you can predict these things. So one of the things that I find so frustrating about the current state in the UK at the moment, for example, is it's all very well saying we can't afford it, we can't afford it, we need to be stringent, we need to kind of tighten our belts, we can't afford defence, blah, blah, blah, whatever it might be. Debt as a percentage of GDP is 93% in this country at the moment. It is not going to get better until you start investing in the country. Stagnating austerity measures don't work, just as they didn't work for Heinrich bruning in the 1932, 1931, 32, they're not going to work for Rachel Reeves in this country now. And Maynard Keynes, for example, came up with this idea of counterceptral economics, which is idea in times of plenty, you tax harder and you tighten the belts, and in times of hardness, you actually spend more. And that's what we need to do. And this idea that you can't spend and also invest and improve your economy and make yourself safer is clearly absurd because that's exactly what America did in the 1940s as it was emerging out of the Great Depression in 1940. It was not by any stretch of the imagination out of the woods borrowing to invest in the armaments industry in 1940 and into 1941 and 42 was considered a massive risk. But counterceptical economics, as laid out by economists such as John Maynard Keynes, suggested that this was all going to work out okay in the long run. And I would argue that this is exactly what Britain needs to do right now. And this is exactly what Germany's been trying to do. The moment that Mertz came into power, he kind of put in a kind of huge hundred billion euro investment into defense. There's no accident, I think, that Poland has one of the fastest growing economies in northern Europe and is doing so by spending on defence. So this idea that it's either or is just clearly nonsense. And what we have to do is we have to look at history and go, okay, what are the warnings from similar patterns of behavior and by similar experiences that happened before, and then preempt that and work out a plan of how to get around that.
- [153:18]
Host 1
Well, the one thing you said is you borrow to invest in things rather than wasting it or spending it on welfare. There's not necessarily wasting it, but it's
- [153:26]
James Holland
not wasting on welfare, but it's not production. Okay, so how you reduce your welfare bill is by getting more people employed.
- [153:34]
Host 1
That's right.
- [153:35]
James Holland
And by making few people feel better about themselves. And there's nothing like being part of a gang and a national movement and a sense of national urgency to get you into that sense of purpose. And the moment you've got a sense of purpose, you stop feeling blue and down in the dumps and you think, actually, no, I've got a reason to be getting on with things. Oh, and by the way, I've got a salary now, which is where I'm now contributing to the tax coffers, which is bringing more money in, which means that less money is going out, everyone's a winner. I mean, I make it sound very, very simple. Actually, it is quite simple.
- [154:07]
Host 1
Not easy, but it is simple.
- [154:08]
James Holland
It is simple. And there are really, really simple solutions. It's just the current government and recent governments don't seem to want to be able to take those solutions.
- [154:17]
Host 1
James, that was the perfect answer to the question we normally ask but didn't need to, which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about? What a pleasure it's been to have you on to talk about this. Thank you so much. People should read all your books. They should listen to your podcast with Al Murray, of course. And you are now going to join us on Substack, where we'll put a few questions from our audience, too. So thank you so much.
- [154:36]
James Holland
Yeah, yeah, please do.
- [154:37]
Host 1
Thank you for watching. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk. if Hitler had been accepted into the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and did not become the leader of Germany, would another version of World War II have still been inevitable?
- [154:57]
James Holland
Sam.