History According to Bob: Nazi Germany

The following extracts come from various podcast episodes in this series:

[Nazi] Biological State:
"Most of the leadership of the Nazi party were closer to the Indo-Aryans of India and Central Asia than they were to the Nordics... at one time, Hitler made the comment that while, no matter what Himmler [doing Nazi archaeology] does, the Greeks are at their high civilisation while the Aryans are barely making pottery"

Nazi Cultural War Part 2:
"This intellectual migration was actually welcomed by the Nazis, who saw the exodus as the beginning of the purification of German culture. When the emigrees began criticising Hitler's dictatorship from abroad, the Nazis reacted by simply charging them all with treason. In the eyes of the Nazis, the activities of the emigrees proved that they had been a threat to the state and that in fact the intellectuals who left Germany never had been true members of the German state. Behind the charges of disloyalty launched against the emigrees stood a a general anti-intellectual sentiment from Hitler's earliest years, because he despised intellectuals and his hatred was shared by many within the Nazi party. Most hardcore Nazis did not value thought, did not value cultivation of intellect. They preferred action. And there's nothing wrong with action, but you need to think before you act, and a reliance on instinct. Actually abstract thinking was degraded to the point of being considered a Jewish characteristic by the Nazis. The results of the Nazi anti-intellectualism became apparent quite early. On May 10 1933, SA men and Nazi students across Germany led huge bonfires, publicly burning thousands upon thousands of books publicly. The treasonous intellectuals had been banished so now their ideas had to be erased from the German memory... Hanns Johst, a Hitler youth leader, dedicated books to Heinrich Himmler and in one of them said, 'whenever I hear the word 'culture' I cock my pistol'"

Nazi Propaganda Part 2:
"Most [Nazi public] meetings were even held in the evenings, because Adolf Hitler believed that listeners' resistance was reduced by being at work all day. They were tired by the end of the day so they really didn't want to fight with the messages, to some extent"

Nazi Cultural War Part 3:
"There are entire sections of Mein Kampf that were devoted strictly to the question of education. And this isn't anything new. Any group that takes over a country and wants to make changes quickly and in a hurry does the education thing. Look what the Taliban did when the Taliban took over in Afghanistan. And what other groups tend to do when they take over and want to make changes, particularly trying to deal with the youth and indoctrinate them into their new philosophy. To some extent you can see this in a different light in the use of children in the various wars in Africa and in the Middle East. You bring them up as little warriors and they know nothing else. So you have a good killer and he doesn't think much. And that's exactly how you want to keep them doing. So education has always been a method of making change. Here in the United States, seemingly every group that has a cause wants their day in the educational process. When I taught in high school, it was hard to figure out what was going on because we had this ribbon for this week and that ribbon for next month, and this ribbon for the time after that and what happens is you overwhelm everybody and they pay no attention to anything"

Nazi Cultural War Part 6: Cinema:
[On Kolberg] They even did an 1813 battle against Napoleon. And this is at the end of the war and they used a whole division to film it... There was a general clampdown on pornography as well as prostitution. It was no longer possible to have writers and movie directors treat moral questions such as sex and prostitution in a realistic social context. Now sex didn't disappear from the Nazi movie screens, but it was greatly restricted. For example, sex had to be used to convey a stern moral lesson. Or sex could never break the purity of the Nazis' proclaimed purification of the German woman. In films, it was always the foreign woman or the Jew who was portrayed as lacking the proper moral restraint. German women were always depicted as chaste and noble and in any German film, the fate of any German girl in the film who violated the moral code was usually suicide by the end of the film

Divide and Conqueror:
The lack of a Great Power on Germany's eastern border meant to contain German expansion would require military and political cooperation of several of the small states. Such cooperation was difficult to maintain plus those same countries were more concerned about the Soviet Union, about Russia. So Hitler had plenty of opportunity to divide his opponents and conquer them. Basically he's got Poland on one side, Czechoslovakia and Austria.
Another similar advantage was offered by the mistrust and suspicions that existed between the West and Communist Russia. Now we can talk about these differences between Communist Russia but the Germans have worked out some deals with the Russians before. Remember that the Western powers embargoed industrial equipment to the Soviets. Well, Germany, you know, sold industrial equipment in return for other situations. It was illegal for example for German generals to, y'know, to manoeuvre more than a division because that meant that they wouldn't be able to deal with army groups. Well, they built a school in Russia, they trained Russian commanders along with German commanders and used Russian troops. There's a tank school, there's an airborne school. All this stuff is in Russia. Now that would of course mean that Russian officers were as well-trained as the Germans. The trouble is when World War II broke out, most of them were dead because they were purged in the last purge of Stalin before World War II broke out. So there's some interesting stuff along in there.
You also have conflicting interests and disagreements over how to handle the German problem. That also kept Britain and France from developing a consistent policy for containing Hitler. Britain recognised many of the Versailles treaty provisions were unjust and actually favoured peaceful compromise to accommodate legitimate German demands. The French urged a hard line and would back it up with force. Although when Germany does ultimately move into the Rhineland, France did nothing.
And then of course you have the long and awful story of the legacy of World War I. And obviously it's a great advantage. First of all, anti-war and pacifist sentiment was strong in all countries. It created an aversion to rearmament or even alliances. And it was difficult for democratic states to win popular support to rearm or increase their armaments or to take military action. While Hitler can just build his equipment and whatever. Which is one reason why the British and the French lean so heavily on Mussolini, the good fascist, as a crutch to help deal with Hitler. Of course the Axis Treaty is really going to make that a mess...
Throughout the 1930s, Hitler repeated his call for peace but then warned of the potential for conflict if Germany's legitimate demands were not recognised. By combining calls for peace and negotiation with threats of force, Hitler sometimes created confusions about his actual intentions

March to War 1933 To 1935:
Hitler had not planned the coup but hoped it would succeed. Hitler couldn't even assist his fellow Nazis because Mussolini backed the Austrian government and mobilized the Italian army on the Austrian border to preclude German intervention. So Hitler suffered a major diplomatic defeat and of course here we have Mussolini. And you can see why he's considered by the rest of Europe to be the good fascist because here he is showing that he can stop Germany if necessary. And of course with a strong Italy, hopefully the British and the French don't have to spend as much money on armaments and what have you because they can count on Mussolini. So you can see the catastrophe that occurs later on when the Axis agreement is signed.

March to War 1937 To 1938 Part 2:
The German Army wasn't yet ready for war and Germany wasn't geared up for such a massive effort. During the invasion of Austria, a majority of German tanks and trucks actually broke down... The Soviets mobilised. The Soviets told the Czechs that they were willing to send troops into Czechoslovakia to defend them. Of course the problem is the Czechs were concerned that if the Soviets came in they would never leave...
Some of these pictures... Chamberlain looks like he's been drugged... Chamberlain flew in a hurried amount of time to Munich. He is deathly afraid of flying... they kind of... anesthetised him, maybe give him some alcohol or whatever. But he was not in too good a shape and of course Hitler makes the comments later on that he'd seen the face of Germany's enemy and they were worms

Fall Czechoslovakia:
Czech President Emil Hácha travelled to Berlin to try and negotiate with Hitler. Hitler and his associates intimidated the elderly Hácha with hours of verbal abuse and threats of a bloody invasion of the remaining part of Czechoslovakia, including a devastating bombing raid on Prague until finally the Czech President simply collapsed. After he revived, he granted Hitler a pseudo-legal cover for the destruction of his country

Invasion of Russia Part 2:
We didn't do blackouts... The British transport ships are trying to leave port in the dark to get out to the ocean to beat the submarines and the submarines are sitting outside of American harbours using the city lights as a backdrop, picking off these silhoueted transport ships. I mean there's British soldiers buried all over the East Coast and Gulf Coast of the United States. They even captured a German submarine in the Gulf and they found they had, they'd been coming ashore to the grocery store to buy food. They had Wonder bread wrappers in the submarine

Speer and the German War Economy:
Overt resistance or violence of strict Nazi regulations, particularly against sexual relations with Aryan women meant execution. Yet here Nazi policy clashed with traditional culture and individual choices. German women and men, as well as Nazi officers, had sexual relations with foreign workers. And German Catholics opposed executions. And the German priests often sympathised with the the Poles because they were, of course, fellow Catholics. So it's a real mess... and there is sabotage

German Homefront:
The cruel reality of war to the German home front. Some of these effects were offset by Hitler's demand that civilian consumption not be drastically reduced believing that Germany had lost World War One because of the breakdown on the home front. Hitler saw civilian morale as an essential component of the war effort. Economic hardships and shortages gradually increased but the Germans never had to endure the starvation and other privations that they experienced between 1914 and 1918

The Tide Turns Part 2:
German soldiers started to exhibit mental and physical exhaustion as well as suffering from disease and hunger. Under such conditions German soldiers became more susceptible to Nazi propaganda

Holocaust Part 1:
Before the war it had been Nazi policy to make Germany... Jew free by forcing the the Jews to emigrate and to a large extent the approach worked. The conquest of Europe however brought several million more Jews under Nazi control in an area that was to be completely German. During the first years of the war genocide was not planned to be the solution to the new problem. As late as 1940 the Nazis were still discussing the possibility of shipping the Jews to the French colonial island of Madagascar where they would live under Nazi guard... I think most people are probably familiar with the famous gas buses. These are buses that were designed to recycle the carbon monoxide so that the people riding in it would be gassed and die before they get to the next location wherever there was being being taken to. These were quite frequently used in old age homes for people because the families would suddenly get a notice that grandpa appeared to be pretty good the last time they were there was suddenly dead for unexplained reasons. Then we have the plans for those, they survived, and you know that was well let's get in and of course the area where the bus driver is was sealed off

Holocaust Part 2:
[The SS] were reinforced by reserve police battalions consisting of older or militarily ineligible Germans whose official duty was merely to maintain order in the occupied area. When ordered to participate in the round up and shooting of Jews most of these "ordinary Germans" proved just as capable as the SS in carrying out the murder of Jewish men, women and children

Holocaust Part 4:
The Germans used sonderkommandos. These were Jewish prisoners who did all the you know - they are the ones who move the people into the gas chambers. They're the ones who moved the bodies, they are the ones who cremated them. You know these people are doing that because they believed that would keep them alive. And what they didn't know was every so many months they were all gathered together, machine guned and then a new group of Saunders commandos was collected... Auschwitz is liberated by the Russians and the Russians liberated several other camps as well and the odd thing is is once the war is over those camps were used by the Russians to get rid of political opponents and included lots of communists from other parts of Europe... Stalin is an equal opportunity mass murderer. He killed as many if not more people and Hitler did, it's just that Hitler had a specific hit list. In the case of Stalin it was anybody who was disloyal and that included just about anybody that would come into play

Holocaust Readings:
You had the Commandant's wife who collected tattoos and made them into lamp shades and book covers and all sorts of other things after they were removed from the prisoners' bodies... You know the old joke was that you know that if given the choice of being thrown in with a pile of wild dogs and a bunch of humans in a difficult situation you'd take the dogs because you know exactly what they were going to do

The Fall of Prussia:
Hitler claimed that the German people were the reason for the fall of the third Reich because they were unworthy and incapable of fulfilling the great historic mission... Although Goering committed suicide shortly before his execution he was still hanged with the other eleven in October of 1946... Stalin thought it was ridiculous to have a war crimes trial. He simply said just take him out and shoot him... one of my roommates in college who adored Adolf Hitler and listened to his speeches even though he didn't understand a word of German. Actually wore a German officer's uniform to class on Halloween and did all sorts of stuff. You know he used to, we used to get him drunk and he'd say: well you know I wish I was born so I could have fought for the Fuhrer and we would say yeah we do too because you'd be dead