Transcription
What Hitler does throughout the 1920s is he sticks to this. There is actually, when he comes out of prison in, so he, there's the putsch in November 1923. He gets, uh, charged with treason, which he has been, 'cause he's attempting a coup. And he gets sentenced to five years, which is pretty lenient for what he's done. And he then gets let out after nine months.
The Nazi party is, is, is, is banned at that point, but then comes back into being. And the year that follows, there is then a substantial debate about where the party should go. And there are actually a large number of people who think that actually they should be looking at how the Soviets are doing things and taking some of the, some of the things that they consider to be positive out of the communist state and applying those to the Nazis. And here he goes, "No, no, no, no, no, no. We, we, we've just got to stick to this kind of Jewish Bolshevik thing. This is, this is how we're going to do it. This is we're going to do it."
Goebbels, for example, who is, who is very open. He's, he's very, very Joseph Goebbels is a, he's a, he's a not very successful, um, journalist. He is, uh, but he does have a PhD in German literature. He's very disaffected because he was born with talipes, which is, you know, more commonly known as a club foot. He's disabled. Can't fight in the First World War. He's very frustrated by that. He's in a deep despair about, about the state of Germany in the first part of the early 1920s. He's looking for a, uh, um, a, a political messiah, as a sort of quasi-religious messiah. Thinks it's Hitler, then discovers that Hitler's not open to any ideas at all, uh, about any deviation, but then sees the light. Hitler recognizes that this guy is someone that he wants on his side. And so then goes to him, makes a real special effort. "Come on, come to dinner. I think you're great. You know, all this kind of stuff." Wins him over and Goebbels has this complete volte-face. Discards his earlier kind of, yeah, you know, Hitler's right. I was wrong. Hitler is the kind of messiah figure that that I want to follow. I want to follow the hero, hero leader. And they come on board and they absolutely work out. Hitler completely wins out of all dissenters within the, what had been the German Workers Party, becomes the German National Socialist Party, becomes the Nazis. Um, he comes out, emerges as the absolute undisputed Führer of that leader of that that party. And what he says goes and everyone toes him behind it.
And part of the genius of that, you know, Hitler does have some genius. I just don't think it's military, but he does have some genius. There's no question about it. Is the simplicity of message. What he's doing is, it's that kind of us and them thing that we were talking about earlier on. It's the kind of either or. It's kind of it's my way or the highway. It's kind of this is the only way out. This is how we get to the sun uplands. This is how we we create this amazing master race of the, this unification of German peoples which dominates the world, which is the preeminent power in the world for the next thousand years, or it's decay and despair and being crushed by our enemies. And our enemies are the Jews and and the Bolsheviks, the communists.
And what he taps into as well is *Frontgemeinschaft* and *Volksgemeinschaft*. And these are, there's no direct English translation of *Volksgemeinschaft* or indeed *Frontgemeinschaft*, but but in its most basic form is community. It's people community or front veterans community. So the *Frontgemeinschaft* is, "We are the guys." So we're bonded because we were in the trenches. You know, we were in the First World War. We were the people who bravely stuck it out, saw our friends being slaughtered and blown to pieces. We, we did our duty as proud Germans, but we were let down by the elites and we were let down by the by this Jewish Bolshevik plot. You know, we were stabbed in the back. The myth of the stab, stabbing in the back is very, very strong. So, we're bound, we're bonded by our experiences of the First World War and the fact that we did what we should and what we could and we were, we didn't fail in what we were doing. We were failed by our leaders, um, and by the elites. So, that's that's *Frontgemeinschaft*.
*Volksgemeinschaft* is this sense of national unity. It's, it's, it's a cultural ethnic bonding of people who speak German, who have a have a similar outlook on life. And again, that just reinforces the us and them, good and evil. It reinforces the black and white worldview. And then you add that to this very simple message which Hitler is repeating over and over again. Communists are a big threat. Jews are a big threat. They're the, they're the enemy. You have to have a, you have to have an opposition in the them and us kind of process. And that's what he's doing. And and people just buy into it. They go, "Yeah, we're together. We're Germans. We're, you know, we're a brotherhood. We've got our *Volksgemeinschaft*." And so he cleverly ties into that and taps into that.
But they're an irrelevance by the late 1920s. You know, by 1928, you know, the, he's, he's not going to get a deal for *Mein Kampf* part two. You know, he, he's, he's, he's impoverished. The party's impoverished. The numbers are down. They're they're a kind of, you know, at best and an irrelevance.
"Would you say he wrote *Mein Kampf* at this time when he was in prison?"
He writes, he writes most of, um, *Mein Kampf* in prison in Landsberg prison, and then he writes the rest of it in what becomes known as the *Kaiserschmarrn*, which is this little wooden hut in the, in the Obersalzberg. And you can still see the remnants of that. And unfortunately, there's still little candles there and stuff in the woods and, you know, by, by neo-Nazis and what have you. But that's where he wrote, wrote the rest of it. Um, I mean, it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who says, "Man has his greatest force when surrounded by nature." That was something that kind of Hitler took very much to heart. Um, there's a, there was a mentor of his called Dietrich Eckart. Dietrich Eckart introduced him to the Obersalzberg and the beauty of the southwest, southeast Bavarian Alps around Berchtesgaden. And, um, and that was his favorite place on the planet. And, um, that's where he, that's where he eventually bought the, um, the, uh, the Berghof with the royalties, it has to be said, from *Mein Kampf*, which went from being, you know, almost pulp to suddenly being a runaway bestseller, unfortunately.
"Can you actually comment on that? It's a shitty manifesto as far as manifestos go. I think there's a lot of value to understand from a first-person perspective, the words of a dictator, of a person like Hitler, but it just feels like that's just such a shitty."
Yeah. I mean, you know, it's banned in a number of countries. You don't need to, 'cause no one's going to read it because it's unreadable, you know. Um, I mean, it's, it's very untidy. It's, it's very incoherent. It's, it's got no, um, there's no narrative arc, to use a kind of, you know, a writer's phrase. I mean, it's just, it's, but, but, but it does give you a very clear, you know, the overall impression you get at the end of it is, is a kind of, "Communists and the Jews are to blame for everything."
Yeah. But there's also the component of, you know, predicting basically World War II there. So it's not just they're to blame. He's, he's hungry for war. He, he thinks that this is, this is the natural state. That we have to have this terrible conflict. And once the conflict's over, Germany will emerge victorious. And then there will be the thousand-year Reich. I mean, you, I, I'm finding myself in, in talking to you, I keep saying this kind of, you know, it's Armageddon or the thousand-year Reich. It's because it comes up. It's, it's, it's unavoidable because that's how he's speaking the whole time. It's just this same message over and over and over and over again.
"It's a pretty unique way of speaking. Sort of allowing, uh, violence as a tool in this picture that there's a hierarchy, that there's a superior race and inferior races, and it's okay to destroy the inferior ones."
Yeah, usually politicians will speak that way. They just say, "Well, here's good and evil. We're the good guys." And yeah, maybe we'll destroy the evil a little bit. No, here is like there's a complete certainty about a very large number of people, the Slavic people, they just need to be removed. Well, they need to be made an irrelevance. You know, we have to take it, we have to take it. And if that, if that kills millions of them, fine. Then then they can sort of squish their way over to Siberia. Doesn't matter where they go, whatever they go. We just need to populate this land that belongs to the German people. Yeah. 'Cause they're the superior people. There's no question that he glorifies violence and war. You know, he's absolutely chomping at the bit.
And in a way, I think he's a bit disappointed that that in the 1930s, the, the conquests that he does undertake are also peaceful. You know, March 1938, just goes straight into Austria. There's the Anschluss. You know, not a shot is fired. You know, 1936 goes into the Rhineland, reconquers that, retakes that over that from, from, uh, from the occupying allies, not a shot is fired. You know, he takes the Sudetenland, not a shot, barely a shot is fired. Um, and then goes into, into the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and again, barely a shot is fired. And, you know, it's a bit disappointing. You know, he wants to be, wants to be tested. He wants to kind of have the, have the, the wartime triumph. You can see him being frustrated about this in, in the Munich crisis in 1938. He wants a fight. He's absolutely spoiling for it. He's desperate to go in. He's all ready and gung-ho. He's built his Luftwaffe. He's, he's got his his Panzers now. He's got his his massive armed forces. You know, he wants to test them. He wants to, wants to get this show on the road and prove it. You know, he is, he's an arch gambler. Hitler.