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Should we decide to stop something in its tracks at whatever cost of life, because ultimately that is the right thing to do? Because we're witnessing the genocide of people, and then we're also witnessing a group that will remain in power that has not just committed genocide but is committed to genocide. Right, so what we were talking about and all of the points I was bringing up on Tucker were all from before that. In fact, they were from a full year before this uh German invasion of the Union that was June 1941. And that's where most of the Jews lived; they were in so if he, you know, if Hitler never invaded the Soviet Union, he never even would have had access to those people.
Now Hitler didn't like the Soviet Union, you know, all the way back in Mein Kampf and everywhere else. I mean, it was central to his ideology that communism, socialism were the enemy, and everything. He may have invaded the Soviet Union someday and gone and gone after all the Jews when he did. When did Hitler start going after the Jews? You mean in terms of um, in terms of R oh uh, so yeah, like if you take him at his word in Mein Kampf, which is, you know, it's a piece of political propaganda, you know, that he wrote as a sort of a politician in Germany in 1924. And so you have to take it with a grain of salt, but it's also one of the few sources we have. Like, and he, given his audience at the time, he probably didn't have a lot of reason to make this part up.
Um, is that, you know, he had been from like small-town Germany, right? And he was from a middle-class family. His father was a civil servant, respectable people. And nationalism back then was very much like a middle-class ideology, and the the the middle-class people, nationalists would complain about the workers and, you know, the proletariats, how they all want to be socialists and none of them have any national feeling and everything. And Hitler really didn't grow up with any really even knowledge of the Jews. He says his father, he never heard him say the word, and you know, if they had any in the small town that he lived in, like they were apparently well assimilated because he didn't he didn't know about them. And so then he moves to Vienna when he's a young adult, and there's a lot of Jews in Vienna, and he starts to, you know, he's he's he's at the bottom of society now, you know, he's literally living in shelters, he's um hungry all the time, he's like down with the underclass after having grown up in the in the middle class. And so he's starting to get a look at uh what the German people, the German masses, you know, that he's like sort of as a as a as a child and a young man has like worked up this deep sense of like nationalistic fervor. He's actually getting an up-close look at the underclass in Vienna, and what he sees is not particularly impressive, you know, which is often the case when, you know, you can you can have sympathy for and um want to lift up, you know, the underclass in any society, but the the reason you want to do that is because they're often living degraded lives and degraded circumstances. And so he gets an up-close look at this, and he doesn't like what he sees, and it he says in Mein Kampf that it really caused him like a moral crisis, you know, an ideological crisis. He's like, are these the German people? Like, really, this is what we're talking about? And then he says, and you know, this is the way he relates it, he says it was actually the key that unlocked everything else for him is that, you know, he would say he realized we could say he came to believe that yes, these German masses, they are in a sorry state right now, but the reason for that is that they're being manipulated by the Jews, by the Jewish press, by the, you know, the the the Jews who own the the theaters and put out them, you know, the films and whatever else, all of that, they're being manipulated and corrupted by these people. And so for him, it became like, I I think, you know, he has the he had a lot of the same explanations and reasons you would hear from any anti-semite then or now, you know, Banking and whatever, like all those things were like in there, but I think the thing that gave it emotional vehemence for him is that his anti-Semitism was what allowed him to love the German people, you know, like it was like the only way for him that he could get around the revulsion he was feeling and actually being up close with the German underclass is he, you know, he he excused their faults by blaming by blaming Jews. And so it his his sense of love for his people.
And I mean, look, Hitler's one of those guys, I I noticed this when I was reading all the Jim Jones books and stuff, which I think I read all probably all of um, they're not very good, you know, some of them are interesting, like they're good reads, but you can't help but uh but notice especially after you've read several of the books that the authors just cannot help but uh be like cynical and turn it into a polemic on every page, like even the thing Jim Jones or Hitler did as a child, they have like negative editorializing to it and everything, and it's like, you know, it it really kind of it's a lot of them are still good books, you know, you read like The the most recent sort of great Hitler biography by Ian Kershaw is a great book, he's a good historian, an excellent writer, and you know, you have to learn to kind of see through that polemic a little bit, and then you have, you know, a good history on your hands. It's almost like it's an obligation if you're going to cover a horrific figure, you have to look at things that way. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and um, you know, it's a uh and so I think that like people who knew Hitler pre before World War I uh and we have like memoirs and interviews with people who did know him pretty pretty well, they say pretty much unanimously like we never heard him mention the Jews back then. And this is the period in Vienna when Hitler says his anti-Semitism was developing and he was figuring these things out. Um, and what I think was probably going on, like my read of it at least up to this point is that his anti-Semitism, just like a lot of people in in Europe at the time uh was it was theoretical and abstract, you know what I mean? Like um um the Jews had never you got to remember like the Russian Revolution, all of the things that people like Hitler would associate with with the Jews, like none of that stuff had happened yet. Like he might not like them, you know, he might think that um whatever all the stereotypes that go along with him, but it was just sort of an abstract thing that it wasn't dangerous, right? You know, it's not like Hitler was going and giving big speeches in at City Square in Berlin going on and on and on about how we're going to kill the Jews and the German people said right on, like let's go do it. That was like the speeches that are out there where he is talking about the Jewish question, like almost all of those are like internal Nazi party like rally speeches, you know, they're not him uh he had to be careful about that. Like in 1938, which is pretty far down the line when uh Kristallnacht happened, it was kind of a nationwide pogrom against the Jews in Germany that was launched by primarily by Goebbels um the propaganda Minister, but there there was outrage in the German cities, people in Berlin a lot of the places were outraged by what was going on, and Hitler had to actually get on the phone with Goebbels and say cut this out, like this is not this is not good, like not because he loves the Jews all of a sudden obviously, but because this is bad propaganda, people are not going for this. And that was the year before the war started, you know, and so these are just nuances that, you know, that that become pretty obvious when you just remind yourself that you're just talking about people, they're just people. I mean, the Germans were sophisticated, uh advanced political and and cultural, you know, uh place, they didn't suddenly turn into demons for 12 years and then go back to being the nice normal Germans that we know now.