Part One: Alfred Hugenberg: The Elon Musk of Weimar Germany

Speaker 1 Coolzo Media.

Speaker 3 Hey, everybody, Robert here. We had a little mic error for the first couple of minutes of the episode.

Speaker 3 My audio is going to sound a little shitty for literally like three or four minutes, and then it'll be back to normal. Apologies.

Speaker 3 Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where I am eternally frustrating my business partner and the only person who truly cares about me, Sophie Lichterman.

Speaker 3 Sophie, Sophie, why do I do the things that I do?

Speaker 3 Why do I taunt you when you're just trying to trying to help

Speaker 3 make me a successful person? What's wrong with me?

Speaker 4 You like to self-sabotage.

Speaker 3 I love self-sabotaging. Oh my God.

Speaker 3 You do.

Speaker 4 And like I recognize that. So when you do it,

Speaker 4 I still help anyways because I'm rooting for you. So sweet of you.

Speaker 3 Speaking of self-sabotaging, you know who doesn't self-sabotage? God, I hope not. They're a very successful person.

Speaker 3 Our wonderful guest today, Amanda Montel, author of the book Cultish, which I've cited on the show. We've all read.
Yeah, we've all read the book.

Speaker 4 If you haven't, what are you doing?

Speaker 3 It definitely influenced Zizians episodes. It's influenced a lot of my work.
Amanda, thank you so much for being here.

Speaker 4 Hey, it's a joy and a pleasure. And, you know, so many of my sounds like a cult listeners are obsessed with your show.
That's how I learned about it from them.

Speaker 3 So I'm stoked. We love cults over here.

Speaker 3 You know, it's hard. It's one of those things where it's both just objectively, cult leaders have the highest odds of any group of bad people of being incredibly entertaining, right?

Speaker 4 I know, I know. Especially when your definition of cult leader is as loose as mine, loosey-goosey.

Speaker 4 Yeah, endless, endless entertainment. I was thinking also, like, as soon as people stop exploiting others, our podcasting careers are just going to tank.

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, the good news is I do have several generations of people,

Speaker 3 several hundred generations of people being shitty to each other to get through.

Speaker 4 Oh, so true. No, your career stability is like on luck.

Speaker 3 We haven't been to Nixon yet. Oh, my God.

Speaker 4 No, you have, you're basically a tenured professor in the program of bastard

Speaker 3 studies.

Speaker 3 I just realized I sent Sophie the wrong script because I was up until 6 a.m. But she's got the right one now.
And so do I. Amanda Montalt.

Speaker 4 Wow, Robert, Jesus Christ.

Speaker 3 What could be better to do today when we have Amanda Montel on than an episode that's not really about a cult, except for everything.

Speaker 3 I mean, I guess if you want to call the Nazis a cult, it's a little bit about a cult, but he wasn't even really a Nazi. Sure.
Oh, okay.

Speaker 3 He was just, he was actually kind of usually like when you're talking about like a German who was like prominent in the early 30s and you say like he wasn't a Nazi, you're saying it to be like, because he was like some sort of hero, right?

Speaker 3 Or, you know, someone who was trying to do the right thing, you know, in the middle of this dark period.

Speaker 3 Alf, the guy we're talking about today is a man named Alfred Hugenberg, and he wasn't a Nazi in a way that makes him kind of worse than the Nazis.

Speaker 3 Holy shit.

Speaker 4 Oh my God.

Speaker 3 I'm pumped.

Speaker 4 Okay. I said this at the beginning before we started recording, but like, please don't apologize that we're not doing a coal eater.
As you can imagine, I'm like, kind of sick of it.

Speaker 4 But I, I'm, I'm on a World War II kick. I don't, I mean, actually, it's been an extended kick.
It's been an extended kick. So I'm, yeah.
Is it appropriate to say, like, I'm pumped to talk about

Speaker 3 this Hugenberg fellow? We love the big dub-w dose. And this is Hugenberg is number one,

Speaker 3 one of the key guys in making the Nazi regime happen.

Speaker 3 Although, again, he's not a Nazi and he hates them. He hates them because most Nazis are kind of poor for most of the period of time.
And he is a rich dude.

Speaker 3 This is Alfred Hugenberg. It would be fair to call him the Elon Musk of Weimar Germany.

Speaker 4 That's the first thing. That's the first thing that came to mind.

Speaker 3 That is the first thing that came to fucking mind.

Speaker 4 Because, like, Elon, you know, he's playing ball, but he, you know, that he just disdains

Speaker 3 the shit.

Speaker 4 No, he thinks they're pitiful. He thinks they're like small potatoes.
I, I, allegedly, in my opinion. I don't know.
I don't know what's going on in that noggin of his. Thank God.

Speaker 4 But that's the first thing that came to mind.

Speaker 3 No one ever has.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 I guess let's just get into this. Uh, because this is, it's one of those things.

Speaker 3 When it comes to his early life, not a super Elon early life.

Speaker 3 When it comes to his role in the Nazi regime, it's almost beat for beat exactly what Elon has done, right to the point where, like, Elon is now, it looks like getting edged out of Doge.

Speaker 3 There's a number of reports that Trump is kind of tired of him. He said that he's stepping back.
It's all like all of that.

Speaker 3 But by the, it's going to be an interesting history of like a German piece of shit that like doesn't sound all that much like Elon. And then he's going to get in power.

Speaker 3 And it's like, oh, wow, these guys, was he, was Elon just like cripping off this fucker's notes? It's the same story. It's so funny.
Oh my God.

Speaker 4 I'm so excited.

Speaker 4 Again, I'm not sure if that's the right adjective, but like on the edge of my seat, on the tips of my toes.

Speaker 3 I get giddy when I get a new Hitler book in the mail. So I get it.
You know?

Speaker 4 Oh, good. Okay.

Speaker 3 Is that a problem? Sure. No.

Speaker 4 I feel really free.

Speaker 3 I feel really safe. Yeah, this is a safe place for us.

Speaker 3 Probably shouldn't say Hitler stands.

Speaker 3 oh my God, I just love Third Reich knowers.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I just, I, any, anytime someone can pull off saying the words giddy and Hitler in one sentence, I'm like, we are cut from the same cloth, my friend.

Speaker 3 Hitler usually wasn't even giddy talking about Hitler. Didn't like being around himself.

Speaker 3 No, that's why he needed the crowds. Yeah, yeah.
And this is, yeah,

Speaker 3 so we'll get into it.

Speaker 4 This isn't iHeart podcast.

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Speaker 3 Alfred Ernst Christian Alexander Hugenberg was born on June 19th, 1865, in the city of Hanover, which five years or so later would become the city of Hanover, Germany.

Speaker 3 So again, he predates Germany by about five years. These are still just a bunch of states with Austria being general, or with Prussia being the dominant one.
Prussia.

Speaker 4 I was going to say Prussia and then I was like, if that's wrong, I'm going to sound so dumb, but it's all giving Prussian era.

Speaker 3 The goddamn Prussians and the goddamn Prussians, like as a general rule, are

Speaker 3 they just pants Austria, not far from the time that he's born, right? Which is why Austria is on, you know, anyway.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 the fact that Germany becomes a thing is largely the work of a fella named Otto von Bismarck, who orchestrated a series of wars, treaties, and alliances that culminated in the defeat of Napoleon III's France and the rise of the Prussian Kaiser as the emperor of all Germanic peoples, or at least like, because like Austria-Hungary is still separate, most of the Germanic peoples.

Speaker 3 In those heady early days of Imperial Germany, people get very excited about the idea of Germany, right? It's like fucking Pokemon when it starts off, right? Folks can't get enough of Germany.

Speaker 3 They are

Speaker 4 what are they trying to catch

Speaker 3 other germans right like that's the goal we got to get all the germans we got to catamari all of the germans into this thing and that'll probably end well putting all the germans in one box seems like it'll not lead to a series of world wars so there's this kind of academic theory that's being promulgated you know around this time and obviously it's being promulgated before the formation of germany but it really it gets supercharged afterwards and it's called pan-Germanism.

Speaker 3 And this is the assertion that Prussians and Bavarians and Saxons and

Speaker 3 Hanoverians or whatever

Speaker 3 shouldn't see themselves as different peoples and certainly not as different nations, but as one united German people who have a manifest destiny to spread, not just in Europe, but across a grand colonial empire that ought to, because Germans are a great people and they deserve what the British have, right?

Speaker 3 There's a a lot of this like, they're very insecure, the Germans in this period of time, right? And so there's a lot of, why don't we have a lot of stuff? Look at the British.

Speaker 3 The British have so much stuff. Why don't we have any stuff? Come on, guys.

Speaker 4 Here's a cult parallel.

Speaker 4 A cult leader is often someone with a little chip on their shoulder.

Speaker 3 He's like, hey, hey, now

Speaker 3 that is, that's every Kaiser, to be honest.

Speaker 3 And it's certainly Otto von Bismarck. So they start, they start being like,

Speaker 3 how are we going to create a space for us Germans that's worthy of the name?

Speaker 3 Now, these kind of nascent ideas, even though they're starting to gain traction, they're not even initially, they're not universally popular and not even within Germany, because among other things, these different German states have been fighting each other up until very recently, right?

Speaker 3 The Prussian Juncker class, which is kind of like their nobility,

Speaker 3 has a bunch of ancestral privileges, right?

Speaker 3 That they they maintain even once Germany becomes a thing. And they're not eager to give those up, right? They're like, what, you mean I have to give up my power over those uncouth Bavarians? No.

Speaker 4 And the idea that's down to be panned.

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 3 No, not everybody.

Speaker 3 This is like, there's a lot of conflict over this. Now, the idea that Germany should expand colonially, largely in Africa, is less objectionable.
People are very into this, but

Speaker 3 also not great at it, right?

Speaker 3 They kind of get like the shit, their attitude and everyone's attitude is they get kind of like the shitty pieces of Africa, like Namibia, a lovely place, but it's like not, it's like a desert, right?

Speaker 3 It's not at the time seen as like, well, it doesn't have that much stuff for us to exploit compared to like what we want to be exploiting.

Speaker 3 And they're looking at the British who own like fucking a third of like a shitload of Africa and like, what the fuck, guys?

Speaker 3 And so this is what's all, this is all what's going on as Alfred Hugenberg has his childhood. Now, unlike Elon, because

Speaker 3 we've made that comparison, he is not born into wealth or into really much privilege at all. Some people will say his

Speaker 3 upbringing was comfortable. That's not

Speaker 3 wildly untrue by the standards of the time, but we would not see this as a comfortable upbringing. And in fact, it's kind of close to Hitler's childhood.

Speaker 3 Alfred's dad is like a civil servant. He's a guy who works in the administrative state.

Speaker 3 And he dies when Hugenberg is very young.

Speaker 3 And Alfred is the only son in the family, which is also like Hitler.

Speaker 3 And the Hitler comparisons keep right on Hitlering because both young men also spend their adolescent years aware of the fact that their mom, since their dad is gone, is

Speaker 3 incredibly financially strained, right? They have this pension, but none of the pensions are enough to take care of a family.

Speaker 3 And so they're like, they're in, they're in a, it's a tremendously difficult time. And he he can't not have been aware of the fact that they were poor now right

Speaker 3 so there are some other similarities between hitler and hugenberg both young men were moved to create art in their early years hitler becomes an obsessive devotee of the opera and has ambitions as a painter meanwhile hugenberg is a really talented creative writer with what biographer john leopold described as quote a flair for literary expression and you know if you're a kid who's good at writing that can be a great way to express yourself and to work through some of your trauma and stuff.

Speaker 3 Alfred does not do any of that.

Speaker 3 Sure. Which is actually a real difference because Hitler throws himself whole hog into being an artist.
He kind of sucks at it. Like

Speaker 3 he's not any good, but like.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Oh, it's definitely giving like George W. Bush's painting endeavors.

Speaker 3 Like, I don't know.

Speaker 4 Although the order of operations was flipped. W

Speaker 4 entered painting after his political tenure. Maybe Hitler should have done that.
I don't know.

Speaker 3 I got to say, Hitler, better painter than George W. Bush.

Speaker 3 Oh, okay. That's something that's not.
But

Speaker 3 less creative. Bush, you know, there's a degree of where like, okay, you're trying to like creatively represent how you feel about the people you're painting.

Speaker 3 Hitler was just sort of like, look at that building. What a great building.
No, they were like really good landscapes 100%.

Speaker 4 He had no point of view.

Speaker 3 At least

Speaker 3 exactly. Exactly.

Speaker 3 But which probably says, anyway, people have tried to psychoanalyze that shit for years.

Speaker 3 What's interesting to me about Hugenberg is that he has, and he'll write some books later, but he has like a literary skill. Like he could have been, you know, a fiction writer or something like that.

Speaker 3 And he's. L.
Ron Hubbard. Well, hey, I didn't say he could be anywhere as good as LRH, you know.
Okay, okay, okay. Sorry.
Nobody. Sorry.
Jump at a conclusion.

Speaker 3 The man who could put a 50,000-word novel out in just seven hours of taking rents,

Speaker 3 just popping pills like you. I mean, we don't have the technology for someone to be as on amphetamines as Ol Ron Hubbard was back then, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, so true. Yeah, it's it really is like

Speaker 3 quite a special time and place.

Speaker 3 So Hugenberg chooses uh what's kind of interesting to me is that Hugenberg doesn't just sort of like fail to explore his potential as an artist. He purposefully forces himself not to write, right?

Speaker 3 Not to to make art because he just like, that's silly. And that's like artists are poor and I am not going to be poor.

Speaker 3 So thereby I am going to make, I'm going to stop myself from exploring this thing that I'm good at in order to study the things that will make me good as a businessman, right? Huh. Yeah.
Okay.

Speaker 4 Very self-flagellating. Interesting.
Yes.

Speaker 3 Well, he, he, yeah, he very much is this like, I,

Speaker 3 this is not an appropriate thing for a man who wants to be rich to do. So even even though this is what I want to do, I will stop myself from doing it.

Speaker 3 No, I don't know. Because

Speaker 3 he is going to be rich. That's his like goal from the start.
And he's going to make generational wealth, right? Like

Speaker 3 he wants his kids to help to part own the Reich. So he initially follows in his father's path.
He studies the law and political economy in his secondary education.

Speaker 3 He does very well in school, very bright guy.

Speaker 3 And he has from the beginning a flair for money, which would have been noticed by his instructors from the jump.

Speaker 3 They also would have acknowledged his skill as a writer, but not for long because he, again, he decides to quote unquote suppress his skill in order to focus on his career.

Speaker 3 Like he talks about it as like, I made a choice to smother the artistic side of me so that I could make more money.

Speaker 3 Now, Alfred makes a couple of friends, but he has no real hobbies outside of his business ambitions.

Speaker 3 And if he had anything we might term a pastime, it was thinking about the way that the state and the economy worked and how they ought to work, right?

Speaker 3 From a very early age, he's thinking about why do the economics of the time function this way? And like, how can I change them to function in what I would term as like better?

Speaker 3 So his first, while he's in college, effectively, he gets, you know, he does his like dissertation, right?

Speaker 3 Which is his first book-length publication. Like, these are effectively books.

Speaker 3 And his first dissertation is titled Internal Colonization in Northwest Germany, which he finishes at the University of Strasbourg in 1891.

Speaker 3 In his book on Hugenberg, John Leopold writes, quote, the young doctoral candidate analyzed in detail the role of the state in fostering economic growth.

Speaker 3 This volume depicted three themes which always undergird Hugenberg's political views. First, the state would have to assist the farmer and totally abandon a laissez-faire approach to agriculture.

Speaker 3 Second, the farmer would have to act as an entrepreneur and form a capitalist bulwark against Marxism. And third, Germany would have to expand its empire.

Speaker 3 So a couple of things are going on here. When we talk about internal colonization, Germany right now, the Imperial Germany, includes a bunch of Poland, right? Now,

Speaker 3 if you're thinking, think back to your maps of Europe, Poland's, Poles, not Germans.

Speaker 3 These are within the boundaries of the German state, a colonized people. And Germany is sending German farmers into this occupied Poland Polish territory to try to Germanify it, right?

Speaker 3 Like, that's very much what's going on. And Hugenberg's writing about that, but he's also writing about like, there's not really enough Poland for us.
Like, maybe we could get some more. I don't know.

Speaker 3 But also, we need to be taking more of Africa because we need to continue

Speaker 3 shotgunning these farmers out. And we can't just sort of let the market take care of them because then they might not succeed.
Like, it's part of this.

Speaker 3 He's not really talking all that much in racial terms, although he is a racist, but he's very much

Speaker 3 the conclusions he comes to are identical to the ones Hitler is going to come to thinking through racial terms, which is interesting to me. Oh.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, do you think, do you think, I actually wasn't aware that Germany was sort of like jealous of Britain's colonization efforts.

Speaker 3 Hugely jealous of Britain and hugely jealous of the U.S.

Speaker 3 Hitler's Hitler is obsessed his whole life with like white ladies.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah. Okay.
Okay.

Speaker 4 That's key context because

Speaker 4 if a whole nation,

Speaker 4 a fledgling nation, whatever, a nation that's trying to build itself has,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 a like popular kid in school. to look up to and feel jealous of,

Speaker 4 that can create, to use the school analogy, some kind of like incel inferiority complex type behavior, which is what I'm getting here.

Speaker 3 This is exactly what's happening to all of Germany. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And for an idea of like how bad this is, we've talked about this in the show. Hitler grows up obsessed with the cowboy novels of

Speaker 3 a guy named... Carl May.
Sorry. Carl May is like the J.K.
Rowling of his day.

Speaker 3 He is a children's book author who writes these books about like his experiences in the American West fighting alongside Indians. And they're all lies.
Like he's a con man. But

Speaker 3 Hitler is obsessed with this. He like mails copies of them to his generals on the Western Front.
But all of Germany is in the late 1800s and early 1900s obsessed with U.S.

Speaker 3 like, like, with westward expansion, right?

Speaker 4 Yeah, rugged, masculine expansionism, manifest destiny.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 But also this, there's this feeling like, well, America is obviously destined to be a great nation. God has just given them this empty continent with no people on it that they get to take.

Speaker 3 They're jealous. And Hugenberg,

Speaker 3 this is such a foundational aspect of German, like the German character that, like, to this day, there are festivals to this guy in Germany. And, like, people will do the equivalent of like U.S.

Speaker 3 Ren fairs where they're dressing up as Native Americans in Germany. That happened.
This happens today.

Speaker 3 No, yeah. It's a whole thing.
It's a massive deal.

Speaker 4 Wait, I can't, I can't, I can't get over the irony of like

Speaker 4 us throw the United States celebrating the European Renaissance and Europe celebrating like some fictionalized and surely very problematic and fucked up vision of the early days in the U.S.

Speaker 4 It's truly the grass is always

Speaker 3 yeah, the grass is always greener on the other side of the imperialism.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 Hugenberg is not as obsessed with cowboys as Hitler, but he's very much obsessed with this idea of expansion. And

Speaker 3 he sees it as a matter of survival for the German race. And he writes that Germany will only, quote, gain power and significance by taking it from others.

Speaker 3 And when he says others, he's talking a little bit about Europeans, but he's mostly thinking about Africa, right?

Speaker 3 Now, while I said earlier that Alfred was not a man with hobbies or a social life, he does nothing but work.

Speaker 3 I mean, he's getting a doctorate, which you do kind of have to be that way to get a doctorate for a little while at least, right?

Speaker 3 If any of my friends who got doctorates or anything to go by. But he does have one extracurricular activity he starts to engage in around this time.

Speaker 3 The same year he published his dissertation, 1891, he helps to co-found a political club, the German General League.

Speaker 3 Now, you won't find a lot written about this incarnation of the organization, but historian Barry Jackish describes it as a political pressure group critical of the German government's foreign and domestic policy decisions.

Speaker 3 Now, that's a definition so vague, it could refer to an organization of any ideology.

Speaker 3 So I should further say the specific ideological launching point of this group that Hugenberg starts with a bunch of other guys is the idea of pan-Germanism that I discussed at the opening of the episode.

Speaker 3 Jackish continues, the Pan-Germans were an openly expansionist organization that called for German colonies and spheres of influence throughout the world and the creation of a strong navy to reinforce Germany's newly gained status abroad.

Speaker 3 In domestic politics, the League supported an authoritarian monarchy and opposed the growth of parliamentary democracy.

Speaker 3 The League also sought to combat what it regarded as the pernicious influence of a myriad of un-German elements, particularly Slavs, often Catholics, and ultimately Jews.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 these are not Nazis because those don't exist yet, but you're seeing the Nazi in this group, right? Like it's not so much of a leap from this to the Nazis, right? For sure. Strong notes of Nazis.

Speaker 3 Yeah, strong notes of Nazis, right? Yeah. Yeah.
This is like a Sega Dreamcast isn't a PlayStation 2, but like, oh, I can see what people were like working towards, right? Yeah.

Speaker 3 For sure.

Speaker 3 This is the Sega Dreamcast of National Socialism. That's what we can say.
So,

Speaker 3 and also they are playing Crazy Taxi. So a lot of direct elements to the Sega Dreamcast.
I mean, I guess nobody gets my Sega Dreamcast jokes, but whatever.

Speaker 4 I was nodding and I wanted to understand. I really,

Speaker 4 it's like my partner will talk about video games sometimes. That is a video game, right?

Speaker 3 It was a video game system.

Speaker 3 It just didn't, it didn't, it didn't make it. It didn't make it.

Speaker 3 It came out around the N64 and the PlayStation, and it did not last.

Speaker 4 Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.

Speaker 3 We all are. We all are.
We all are. It's a tragedy that rins at me to this day, like the death of my grandfather.

Speaker 3 So Alfred is a founding member of this group, but he's not like the singular driving force behind it. When I say founding, there's like a bunch of guys who get together to do this thing.

Speaker 3 And it kind of, it's going to pretty quickly take a back seat for him because his career gets started and he's just got a lot of other shit on his mind.

Speaker 4 Wait, I have a question.

Speaker 3 Sure.

Speaker 4 What does this guy look like?

Speaker 3 Well, you can pull him up in a, yeah, I mean, I'll have Sophie pull up a picture of him.

Speaker 3 Obviously, most of them are going to be when he's older because people didn't have as many photos of them when they were super young.

Speaker 4 Yeah, but 1865.

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, he's born in 60. This is, we're now in like the 1880s, something like that.

Speaker 4 You're talking about Alfred?

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Boy, Alfie.

Speaker 3 You're gonna, it's a, it's like, this is like the 1880s right now. Yeah, but I mean, in fairness, all of these things look the same.

Speaker 4 So I guess never mind.

Speaker 4 No, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 3 The picture's worth looking at in my opinion.

Speaker 3 The picture's worth looking at. I just, like, forgive me.

Speaker 4 I just, I need a visual here.

Speaker 3 The picture's worth a thousand words, and most of them are going to be, wow, that is a German-ass man.

Speaker 3 The hair is fun, and the

Speaker 4 mustache is fun. Okay, I'll describe it.

Speaker 3 There we go. Yeah, there's Alfie H.

Speaker 4 Oh, my God.

Speaker 3 Okay, so

Speaker 4 he looks like dudes

Speaker 4 on my side of town in Los Angeles, Loki.

Speaker 3 He's got that like Bismarck-style mustache.

Speaker 4 It's the way that I know exactly what neighborhood you live in.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah. Let's not dox me, but

Speaker 3 I'll say that. This is what I'll say.

Speaker 4 This is what I'll say.

Speaker 4 His mustache is shaped like squidward from SpongeBob's legs.

Speaker 3 Yes. Yes.
That's exactly it. Yes.

Speaker 4 And it's white. And his glasses are...

Speaker 3 Perfectly round. They're Harry Potter glasses, honestly.

Speaker 3 He's got squidward legs as a mustache.

Speaker 3 Squidward's legs as a mustache, like perfectly round

Speaker 3 Harry Potter glasses. And his haircut, if you've seen the movie Falling Down, he's got like an old man hyatite.
Like,

Speaker 3 it's a remarkable combination of things. And like, by this point, this is a picture of him when he's older.
You had money for a barber. You were one of the richest men on the planet.
What is going on?

Speaker 4 No, this was super on purpose.

Speaker 3 That does really, that does get us back to the Elon Musk comparisons because it's like, wow, neither of you motherfuckers know how to get a haircut. Jesus Christ.

Speaker 3 I say that looking the way I do today, but Jesus Christ.

Speaker 3 You look great, Robert.

Speaker 4 So although similar to Elon and Alfie, the hairline, the hairline is impressive. I mean, obviously,

Speaker 3 he did not have the ability to have a Turkish man's hair transplanted onto his scalp. Yes, that is not a Turkish man's hair.
That's all Hugenberg.

Speaker 4 Totally, which is honestly amazing, especially considering that he was such a bad person.

Speaker 3 You would think that like that would have affected his life.

Speaker 3 Some terrible people are graced with an incredible head of hair, like Fabio.

Speaker 3 Fabio was a bad person. I'm just insulting him for no reason.

Speaker 3 Who knows? Given his humble beginnings, Hugenberg started his career as an entry-level civil servant. So he's not, he has no nepotism to benefit from, right? He's not getting like a head start.

Speaker 3 He's going to get ahead because he's good.

Speaker 3 He becomes a member. He gets hired for the Prussian Settlement Commission in Posen, which again is Prussia had conquered this chunk of Poland and they have a commission to help settle it.

Speaker 3 And he is helping to manage that from 1894 to 1899.

Speaker 3 This gives him a degree of influence in the German state's attempts to reform some land use policies that were essentially holdovers from the medieval era, right?

Speaker 3 They've got these kind of medieval policies on like the aristocracy owning land that slow down colonizing it because a lot of land is just meant to be like where the where the this duke or whatever hunts.

Speaker 3 And that's great if you're a duke. It's actually probably pretty good from like a wildlife conservation aspect, but it's really bad from a farming, you know.

Speaker 3 And Germany's whole thing is we don't have enough food. We can't make enough food to not die on our owns, right? And this is constantly on our minds.

Speaker 3 So again, Posen is like an eternal colony within Germany. Most of the population is Polish, but there's this small number of German farmers whose expansion was desired by the government.

Speaker 3 However, said said expansion is stymied by the fact that many Polish people already had claim to the land.

Speaker 3 Hugenberg suggested ways to uproot them, but ultimately quit his job when the government refused to revise its inadequate policy towards the Poles.

Speaker 3 And again, that inadequate policy is you're letting them live in their own homes, right?

Speaker 3 Like that's that's the issue that he has with Poland.

Speaker 4 You know what I just thought?

Speaker 3 Because the

Speaker 4 obviously like the use of euphemism within the Nazi regime and their campaigning is well studied and documented, but I will never get over it.

Speaker 4 And if this guy Alfie had his roots in creative writing, I bet he was a master of euphemism.

Speaker 3 Inadequate policy. Yes.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Now, this is Hugenberg's first foray into entrepreneurship as soon as he quits, you know, this government job because it's not working fast enough.

Speaker 3 And he immediately reveals himself to have a head for this kind of work.

Speaker 3 He creates a series of land co-ops that allow, so he goes into business independently and he starts going to these different groups of farmers who are trying to colonize this, what, this territory that is like the center of modern Poland.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 he starts putting them intogether and making co-ops, right?

Speaker 3 And the purpose of this is because each of these independently, these small German farmers have no economic power and so kind of keep getting fucked over.

Speaker 3 And he forms them into co-ops so that they can basically collectively set prices and bargain for better prices, right? Like it's a very modern thing, you know, that he's doing here. And it works.

Speaker 3 Like this makes all of these farms much more successful and it helps stimulate the growth of like more independent, like more German settlers like farming in this area.

Speaker 3 The project is successful enough that in 1904, he gets hired back to the civil service for in a significantly better position, right? Special advisor for economic development to the east.

Speaker 3 So he's just kind of like a guy stuck in the cogs of the machine. He bounces.
He has this incredibly successful co-op thing for all these farmers.

Speaker 3 And it does well enough that now he's the special advisor for all economic development in the East.

Speaker 3 Now, one of the things that's going on in the East, as I had insinuated earlier, is in Prussia, you've got all these youngers, right? Who are these, they're like the nobility. right?

Speaker 3 And these guys are also a lot of like the fighting nobility because like Prussians are warriors. That's what you do if you're a Prussian younger.

Speaker 3 But they also have these vast family estates, often with thousands of acres of land, and they're just kind of fucking around on them, right? You know, they're the

Speaker 3 aristocracy does that everywhere they can.

Speaker 3 And so, Hugenberg doesn't want things to work that way. He wants this land to be freed up if it's not being farmed for more farmers to buy it.

Speaker 3 Now, like all conservative Germans, and Alfred is very conservative, his interest is in autarky, right? He wants the state to be able to produce all of its own necessities, you know?

Speaker 3 We just had the tariffs come down yesterday. It's kind of the same idea, right? Conservatives never quite get over this.

Speaker 3 What if we didn't need anyone else? And it's like, I don't know, man. Do you like kumquats? Because that's kind of critical that you trade.

Speaker 3 Do you like computers? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 Fuck, Jesus.

Speaker 3 It's a little more understandable in this period as a German because they're always aware of like, okay, well, we've got Russia on one side and they don't always like us.

Speaker 3 And we got France on the other and they don't always like us. And then the English control the sea.
So we're really easy to starve, you know?

Speaker 3 It would be great if we could grow enough food to not starve.

Speaker 3 So Hugenberg set to work applying his three principles to the problem of all these giant useless estates going unmanaged.

Speaker 3 Being a practical guy, he came up with what seemed like a simple solution, and he published a book about his work with the farming co-ops in Posen and how similar tactics could be used to encourage the rapid accumulation and deployment of capital to properly settle the East.

Speaker 3 Alfred insisted that the state's role in all of this was not to stick with the traditional Juncker view of property and instead to use its power to encourage competition.

Speaker 3 He wanted them to pass laws to confiscate large unproductive estates and resettle them with small farmers who would form co-ops.

Speaker 3 I won't give Hugenberg credit for a lot, but this probably would have worked.

Speaker 3 And I base this on the fact that basically 100% of the time shit like this got tried and peasants were given access to large areas of raw land to split up and manage in common, productivity increased.

Speaker 3 And it especially increased over the old way of, quote, letting some rich guy use it as a private park, right? It's just more effective in a farm in terms of yield.

Speaker 3 However, the rich guys that Hugenberg wants to dispossess are the rich guys, right?

Speaker 3 These are the people running things because the Prussians are kind of the most powerful group within imperial germany and they don't like that hugenberg wants to take their

Speaker 3 uh i'm going to quote from leopold's book here confronted with strong opposition from youngers and others opposed to this proposal state officials hesitated in their advocacy of this legislation hugenberg scorned their pedantic political conscience and again left the civil service so he's like fuck you guys i'm i'm going home you know i'm gonna go do my own thing now i tried working through the government it's useless Word.

Speaker 3 Yes.

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Speaker 3 Ah,

Speaker 3 and we're back.

Speaker 3 I don't know. I think Chumba Casino would be a good overlord.

Speaker 3 Seems ethical. Casinos are always nice.

Speaker 3 We could all smoke indoors, you know? That's how casinos work. That is a vibe.
That is a vibe. So he bounces, gets out of government again.

Speaker 3 and his dream is to make East Prussia not a backwater, right? Like that's kind of what he wants in this period of time. But

Speaker 3 he's been stymied. And Alfred, he's not an introspective soul, nor is he to kind of waste his energy being disappointed.

Speaker 3 So he right away gets a job on the board of directors for a bank in Frankfurt that serves several mining concerns. And not just mining, but companies like generally in the metal business.

Speaker 3 So suppliers and producers of raw materials. And job, his role here is reorganizing and rearranging things to enhance the profitability of

Speaker 3 everyone in this industry, right?

Speaker 3 Basically, all of the owners of these different mines and sort of like mineral concerns and whatnot are all putting a chunk of their money in like a common pile to be used.

Speaker 3 And Hugenberg is managing it. He's an early hedge fund manager, right? Wait, it's not that back then, but that's what he's doing.

Speaker 4 I am so dumbfounded by this guy's disposition. Like, he wanted to be a creative writer.
I'm still stuck on that. And then he suppressed it to become someone who's interested

Speaker 4 in hedge funds. I'm just like,

Speaker 4 how does that, how does that make sense? Like, is he truly like a Renaissance man and so adaptable? Or was he never truly an artist to begin with?

Speaker 4 And he just kind of like told himself he was suppressing his artistic tendencies, but really he was meant for this.

Speaker 3 He writes several books.

Speaker 3 I don't know if I'd say he was meant to be a creative writer, but I think the thing is more his, he is utterly obsessed in the way that poor kids sometimes wind up being with, I am not going, I am going to be somebody, right?

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah, and this is how you're ultimate opportunist, however, whatever path will lead me.

Speaker 3 Like come hell or high water, I will fucking be somebody, right? That's that's this dude. Yeah, um, got it.

Speaker 3 So his role in this kind of early hedge fund-ish position is to like, yeah, enhance profitability. And he does.
He does well enough that he gets hired on next to run a bank, like a whole banking firm.

Speaker 3 So like basically a network of banks that's run by a prosperous Jewish family, the Mertens. Now, Hugenberg is a raging anti-Semite,

Speaker 3 as is the German General League, which he's still a member of, which by this point has changed its name to the much catchier Pan-German League.

Speaker 3 And they'd only doubled down on the anti-Semitism since then, but this doesn't seem seem to stop him from being willing to work for this rich family, the Mertens.

Speaker 3 Now, the League at this point, it's not a mass organization, nor does it want to be one.

Speaker 3 It's gotten maybe a few thousand members at this point. It's going to top out at 38,000 people, which is very small for one of these.
Again,

Speaker 3 by the Nazi era, there's going to eventually be a couple million brown shirts, right?

Speaker 3 So this is not a huge organization, but members of them are professional people, often with a lot of money and influence. So the Pan-German League is hugely influential culturally.

Speaker 3 It punches above its weight class, right? Okay.

Speaker 3 Because the members of it are guys like Hugenberg. They're social climbers or they're already rich and influential.

Speaker 3 Now, I quoted from that historian, Barry Jackish, a little earlier, and those quotes were from a book he wrote on the Pan-German League titled The Pan-German League and Radical Nationalist Politics in Interwar Germany, which is a very accurate title, but not very clickable.

Speaker 3 You know, seven things you didn't know about German nationalists. There's a lot of better ways to title it, Barry.
I'm just saying, oh, sorry.

Speaker 4 The BuzzFeed era hadn't hit yet.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 So here's, it's a very good book, and here's how Barry describes the League's membership.

Speaker 3 The pan-German League drew the vast majority of its members from the social strata identified by the German terms Bildung und Besitz, or the propertied and educated middle class.

Speaker 3 And this is where we get to a very important and very German prerequisite for the rise of the Nazis, one that doesn't get discussed a lot.

Speaker 3 We love to talk about, and I do it on this show, the things that graph exactly to shit that's been happening in the U.S.

Speaker 3 when we talk about the fall of Weimar and the rise of German fascism, because there are a lot of similarities, but there's a lot of differences too, which is, I think, are important to emphasize now because I think some people get like, oh my God, we've done all these other things that are similar to Weimar.

Speaker 3 We're destined to do this. We're not.
Right.

Speaker 3 It can go different for us. And part of why is because like it is a very different culture.
We're not Germany at any point in time.

Speaker 4 You know, wait, I actually have two questions about that. Well, no, I have a comment and a question.
So,

Speaker 4 bringing it to cults, people do the same thing making comparisons between Donald Trump and Jim Jones, and we and including myself,

Speaker 4 like you, I love to point out rhetorical similarities, the way that they weaponize them as a nickname.

Speaker 4 Yes,

Speaker 4 but there are extremely noteworthy differences that are equally important to emphasize. And Jonestown was an unprecedented instance unreplicated thing.

Speaker 3 And Jim Jones read Nietzsche, and Donald Trump doesn't read anything. One thing.

Speaker 3 The Jonestown story has a courageous U.S. congressman risking his life for his constituents.
That'll never happen again.

Speaker 3 True. No, honestly, that's a great point.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 there was some drama with a plane, and that's really happening.

Speaker 3 There we go. There was a lot of plane drama.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 But my question

Speaker 4 related to this somewhat, and this is a really basic question. So maybe this will sound like kindergarten level, but like I

Speaker 4 don't really understand and have never really understood

Speaker 4 how German nationalism among these guys like Hitler and Alfie, how was it so raging?

Speaker 3 Like I don't.

Speaker 4 I don't find that.

Speaker 3 I mean, I know Trump, but Trump doesn't have American nationalism, i find for one thing i mean trump definitely uses american nationalism he uses it yes but i don't think he feels it in his soul yeah this is one of those things to an extent you simply can't understand because nationalism is a new idea then right the idea of a nation state and the way we conceive of it is fairly new and also the idea of just like being being a nat the idea that like i'm a serb and so i should have a serbia right people haven't always thought that way, right?

Speaker 3 Like these are, these are kind of new, and especially the idea, again, they had to really, it took a lot to convince all these different Germanic states that you're all Germans.

Speaker 3 There's a story I'm going to tell in a little bit that I think will make some of this make a little bit more sense. Yeah.

Speaker 4 No, that's already helpful because like. A novelty, when something is brand new, you like don't really know what it means yet because we don't have the context in the retrospect.
But yeah, it's sexy.

Speaker 4 It's exciting. It's like like AI stuff now.
Like in 70 years, well, nationalism is

Speaker 3 turn of the century. Yes.
Totally.

Speaker 3 I mean, there's an extent to which, like, at least in terms of how excited people are by the idea that that's not totally wrong. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Now, when we talk about like, why did Germany go in the direction it did, this is really where the seeds of a lot of the things that you know culminate in the 30s are being planted.

Speaker 3 And a lot of leftists like to argue that fascism evolves out of capitalism.

Speaker 3 You know, the bourgeoisie and especially conservatives in the bourgeoisie inevitably turn fascist once their material interests are threatened. Now,

Speaker 3 we'll leave out now talk about how well, how accurate that is, a depiction of what's happening in the United States right now.

Speaker 3 But seeing things that simplistically misses some very important aspects of how Nazism got going in Germany, because Nazism is a radical political movement. Nazis don't like conservatives.

Speaker 3 In fact, they kill a lot of them, right?

Speaker 3 That's not that they don't target them the way they do the left in any way, but they are not a conservative movement and they don't see themselves as conservatives.

Speaker 3 And they're not really very keen on capitalists either, although a lot of capitalists eventually do support them out of self-interest.

Speaker 3 I'm saying this because Hugenberg is never a Nazi in the ideological sense of the word. He is a monarchist and he is a social and economic conservative.

Speaker 3 And the Pan-Germanic League, while there's things in it you can see as like, oh, I see how Nazism arrived from this, it's more that the soil is the same, right?

Speaker 3 And so the plants have some similar characteristics that are coming up. The Pan-German League is not going after the Nazis are initially going after like the poor and downtrodden, right?

Speaker 3 Those are Hitler's like earliest recruits and like veterans, disaffected veterans. That's not who the Pan-Germanic League is going after.

Speaker 3 It is laser-targeted at the group of people that Leopold identifies as Bildung and Besitz. And there's another term for for that group.

Speaker 3 And that term is Bildungsburgertum, right? And that is,

Speaker 3 crudely, we might say the upper middle class. It means literally the cultivated bourgeoisie.

Speaker 3 In his book, The Fateful Alliance, historian Hermann Beck writes, Germany owed its reputation in scholarship, administration, and technical expertise to this numerically small but socially influential university-trained elite.

Speaker 3 The Bildungsburgertum was a uniquely German phenomenon that originated as a distinct social social class in the second half of the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Speaker 3 And these are the people who run things. They're not the people who are in charge of things, right? That's generally the nobility.

Speaker 3 They are the people who are being delegated the task of actually making shit happen, right? Because they have the educations.

Speaker 3 And this is a class that in the earliest period, including where we're up to, the 1890s, is a progressive and liberal class. That's going to change.

Speaker 3 They're going to become extremely conservative in the 1900s,

Speaker 3 but they're not initially.

Speaker 3 And in fact, the first man to posit what we would consider a modern view of what homosexuality is, and the first gay man to come out publicly is a member of the Bildungsburgertomen, 1867.

Speaker 3 The first modern, like guy, both, both to, and when I say a modern understanding of homosexuality, this guy, Carl Ulrichs, comes to a conclusion that, like, oh, homosexuality logically is something I'm born as, right?

Speaker 3 This isn't a choice. And it was viewed as both a choice and as like a deviant thing, right? Carl convinces himself, like, no, no, no, this is like a natural thing.

Speaker 3 And as a result, we are a discriminated underclass and the laws need to change. And he comes out in public in 1867 at a town meeting.
And so he's like, he's simultaneously

Speaker 3 introducing everyone at the meeting to the concept of homosexuality and also saying, and I am one, which is wildly brave. Like he is,

Speaker 3 this dude who rocks. Well, he's a member of the Bildungsberger Tumblr, as is Alfred Hugenberg.
And

Speaker 3 in terms of like seeing how this gets, how things shift, nationalism in the late 1800s is a progressive liberal ideology, right?

Speaker 3 In part because of what it means about sort of how pre-existing elites needed to not have the kind of power that they used to have.

Speaker 3 And Karl Ulrichs is a national, a German nationalist, you know, previous to the existence of Germany. And normally people see it and they're like, okay, well, that's right-wing.
No, no, no.

Speaker 3 He is a German nationalist because the state, the German state he is in, homosexual sex sodomy is legal. But in Prussia, it's illegal.
And Prussia is pushing to dominate all these other states.

Speaker 3 And so Ulrichs becomes a German nationalist because he's like, then we, we other Germans will be strong enough to force the Prussians to stop being bigoted against gay people.

Speaker 3 So, when we talk about German nationalism, this is not always like a right-wing regressive ideology. There's a, and in Hugenberg's earliest days, there's a lot of very progressive aspects to it.

Speaker 4 It is utterly fascinating that, like, living through present political times, we think, like, oh, you know, this label that describes this particular group of thinkers, that that correlation will be perennial.

Speaker 4 Like, that will always mean that.

Speaker 4 But, you know, it's like, no, but no. It can flip.

Speaker 4 Shit changes.

Speaker 3 The Republican Party used to be a very different thing, right? Exactly. 1865 or so.
So from the beginning, this

Speaker 3 uniquely German class, the Bildungsbergertum, was characterized by a close relationship to the state, since its strongest component came from the upper echelons of state bureaucracies in various German states.

Speaker 3 In addition to like the people who are kind of like running the government, there's also a lot of professors.

Speaker 3 University professors are generally of this class, as well as a lot of prominent lawyers, right?

Speaker 3 And the origins of this entire social class actually trace back to a guy named Wilhelm von Humboldt.

Speaker 3 Humboldt was an educational reformer in the early 1800s who remakes the whole Prussian education system.

Speaker 3 And he is a big believer in the power of the individual to reach their full potential or Bildung

Speaker 3 through education, right?

Speaker 3 Among other innovations, he codifies the idea of a national school system for kind of the first time in the West that starts with primary school and then secondary school and then university education.

Speaker 3 Everyone adopts this.

Speaker 3 The foundations of our education system, such as it is, are traced directly back to Humboldt and his reform of the Prussian system, right?

Speaker 3 He is basically the father of the concept of universal mandatory education, which is paid for by the state.

Speaker 3 And it's, you know, it's one of those, there's a lot of modern-day criticisms of the Prussian system. People will argue it's, it only exists to provide soldiers, right?

Speaker 3 And so the school is just trying to make you into a good soldier for capitalism. And like, that's not 100% wrong.
These were Prussians.

Speaker 3 So that was a big part of why they wanted to educate people so they'd be useful for the state. But Humboldt's also a very progressive guy for his time.

Speaker 3 And it would not be fair to categorize him as like some sort of like weirdo fascist, you know, because that's just not what's going on at this point in time.

Speaker 3 He was not trying to make students into little robots.

Speaker 3 His goal was to was a citizenry who was capable of reasoning, thinking outside of the box, and actively learning so as to better serve the state, but he wasn't trying to like lock people into a little box.

Speaker 3 And his reforms work well enough that by the time Alfred Hugenberg is getting his start, Germany has the best universities on the planet.

Speaker 3 And it is universally agreed, the best doctors and scientists are German, right? And it's because they start having a modern university system between everyone else.

Speaker 3 In the early 1900s, Germany is the font of learning in the West and very much is seen as that way, especially in the medical realm.

Speaker 3 And this is, this is, that's a huge part. This class that Hugenberg is a part of, the Bildungsbergertum,

Speaker 3 these are, they're characterized by their belief that education makes people better. And because we're educated, we're better, right?

Speaker 4 Better, like, like morally better. Yes.

Speaker 3 Or better, like. Yes, very much that way too.
Yes. So you can see where the problems start to arise, right?

Speaker 3 There's this good thing of like, they're like, we need to have an expansive and well-funded education system. Great.
And also, we're better than the rest of you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 We're like more valid, valuable humans. That's probably going to go in a bad direction.

Speaker 3 So, as you're starting to see, there's some danger. in having a class like this, right?

Speaker 3 And what starts with a well-deserved sense of accomplishment in their own system morphs into this overall sense of superiority, right?

Speaker 3 If the world is copying the German education system, which it is, doesn't it make sense that Germans should rule more of the world, right?

Speaker 3 That's really a lot of how the thinking, as this progressive liberal class becomes more conservative, that's part of what they're thinking. Now,

Speaker 3 yeah.

Speaker 3 So, you know, that's got to be a problem. It's this kind of thing that, like, by the end of the 1870s, they've stopped really being as liberal.

Speaker 3 And by the 1890s, they're advocates of imperialism and they are aggressive nationalists. It's no longer Ulrich's very reasonably progressive nationalism.

Speaker 3 It is a, what if we just took everything kind of nationalism, right?

Speaker 4 Oh my God.

Speaker 3 So by early 1909, Hugenberg has made a name for himself as a great businessman and financier and an innovative thinker in the field of imperialism.

Speaker 3 He gets scouted by the son of one of our old bastards, a guy named Gustav Krupp. And Gustav is the inheritor of the Krupp weapons dynasty.

Speaker 3 These are the guys who had made Germany possible because Germany comes into being in 1870 when they beat the French in a war.

Speaker 3 And they beat the French because Napoleon III is still using brass cannons that are basically identical to the ones the first Napoleon had used.

Speaker 3 And Friedrich Krupp, his people figured out how to make modern steel artillery that is just so much better at killing men.

Speaker 4 Oh my God. Wait, was that guy? Was he, was he an art collector?

Speaker 3 Krupp? Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, they were a very rich family.
So, yeah, they bought a lot of art.

Speaker 4 I think I went to an art exhibit in Zurich that was

Speaker 4 exhibiting his

Speaker 4 art collection and like trying to reckon with how those pieces were acquired.

Speaker 3 It was really interesting.

Speaker 3 The Krupps, I mean, they're like Bezos level of wealthy for the time, right? Because they are selling the whole world guns, right? They make the best ones.

Speaker 3 Now, Krupp is a member of the aristocracy, right?

Speaker 3 But he's looking for, he has an understanding of like his limitations financially.

Speaker 3 And so he's scouting for a man of, quote, really superior intelligence to become the new chairman of the board of directors for Krupp.

Speaker 3 And Hugenberg, he immediately recognizes as a genius and he gives him the job, right? So Hugenberg is kind of the CEO. of Krupp Arms, of the biggest gun company in the world,

Speaker 3 right? That's ever existed up to this point. Oh my god.

Speaker 3 he is going to be the guy running a lot of, technically, he's primarily doing the financial decisions for Krupp.

Speaker 3 So he's not designing guns, but he is like the head man at Krupp for the decade up to leading up to World War I, right? Oh my God.

Speaker 3 And what Krupp is doing in this period is pushing the Kaiser to build the machine of death that is the German mobilization schedule, right?

Speaker 3 And part of what they're doing is Krupp is going around and they're going to one country and being like hey we'll sell you these guns you really got to modernize your guns are a generation or two behind your neighbor and like i they're getting armed so why don't you get armed and then once they arm that country they'll go to another and be like hey your neighbor just bought a bunch of new you really got to get some new guns right and this keeps

Speaker 3 this keeps ratcheting everybody's like anxiety up yeah

Speaker 4 It's just like, I just sold your neighbor a stack of Bibles.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 But this works so well. And Hugenberg is, you know, on the finance side of of things that like dividends expand from

Speaker 3 8% to 14% from 1909 to 1913. Like that's, and that's a big deal.

Speaker 3 Krupp is making so much fucking money. And because Alfred is running shit, he becomes spectacularly wealthy in the balance.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 3 Think hundreds of millions of dollars by the standards of his time, right? That's probably that's about where he is in terms of like our modern concept of things.

Speaker 3 He's not like a billionaire yet, but hundreds of millions. Now, despite the fact that he is making Gustav Krupp so much fucking money, the Krupps are again aristocracy.

Speaker 3 And Hugenberg, despite his wealth, is just a burger, right?

Speaker 3 He's not like a common man. He comes from the nicer part of the common class, but Gustav doesn't really...

Speaker 3 He's not going to hang with him, right?

Speaker 3 As biographer Leopold writes, though everyone was impressed with his extraordinary intelligence and obvious ability, there is no indication that Hugenberg, during his 10-year stay at Krupps, ever developed anything more than a formal relationship with his employer.

Speaker 3 The patrician aloofness of the securely established Krupps contrasted sharply with the dogged determination to succeed, which characterized Hugenberg. Indeed, Hugenberg seemed typical.

Speaker 3 He's a bad hang. He's a bad hang.

Speaker 3 Indeed, Hugenberg seemed typical of that class of general directors, which George Bernard described as being driven by an inferiority complex because they know they are dependent and, in the final analysis, are as disposable as any other employee.

Speaker 3 Lack of security made such a director continually harder and more uncompromising than the owner himself.

Speaker 3 Possibly as a psychological compensation, Hugenberg in these years emphasized the inflexibility, stubbornness, and self-righteousness which would characterize his political career.

Speaker 3 So he knows, you don't need me. You can throw me away if I stop making you money.
And that drives him to be the son of a bitches of the sons of bitches in business in this period.

Speaker 3 Oh my God.

Speaker 4 She just, you know, this is, maybe this is going to sound like a fucked up thing to say, but like

Speaker 4 maybe he needed more love, you know?

Speaker 3 Like, did his parents,

Speaker 3 you know, who his dad? Well, his dad dies right away. No, I mean, okay.
Maybe later.

Speaker 3 Not a big personal life guy, you know? Yeah, he's really

Speaker 4 cleanish, you know?

Speaker 3 Yeah, he's just this fucking lonely, bitter. Scrooge is played by Michael King.
He's a big motherfucker.

Speaker 4 Yes. Yikes.

Speaker 3 He just,

Speaker 4 you know, he needed one of those really, really intensive parent-child therapy sessions where,

Speaker 4 you know, a teenage boy is like forced to sit on his mom's lap and make eye contact with her for like two hours.

Speaker 3 Well, you know, the downside is that they do have psychotherapy by then, but if he had gone to it at this point, he would have just been given a shitload of cocaine by Freud. Like, which is

Speaker 3 this guy's a finance bro that is not going to make shit better. No, no, no, no.

Speaker 3 He needs,

Speaker 4 he should have fast forward to the ketamine, ketamine ties.

Speaker 3 Right, right.

Speaker 3 That would have fixed him. Our ketamine billionaires are in such good health.
Oh, yeah. Wait.
Whoa.

Speaker 3 Oh, do you think, do you think that Alfie was on Coke?

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 he probably took it at some point just because it was in a lot of medications, like a lot of patent medications.

Speaker 3 There's a bunch of different shit you would be given for like a flu that might have had some Coke or some heroin in it, right?

Speaker 4 So maybe that is a parallel again between him and Elon.

Speaker 4 They could be both medicated, Robin.

Speaker 3 They could be both medicated. No way to know.

Speaker 3 No way to know. Alfred is very insecure because of his position, and he takes this insecurity out on his workers, by which I mean Krupp workers.

Speaker 3 He despised socialism, and he found himself violently opposed to anything that smelled slightly of democracy, by which I mean unions. Alfred talked a lot about wanting to make unions obsolete.

Speaker 3 He's one of these guys who's like, well, I'm just going to treat our employees so well that they'll become members members of the petite bourgeoisie. I'm going to give them stock in the company.

Speaker 3 Then why would they want to be unions? They'll be shareholders, right? And they'll be able to buy their own homes. And what he's suggesting here, this is what happens in the U.S.

Speaker 3 post-war to create the most prosperous society in history. So like within the capitalist milieu, this is an idea that does work.
It's going to work in the U.S. not long after this.

Speaker 3 But Hugenberg is just bullshitting. He has no interest in doing any of this.
As Leopold notes, quote, working and living conditions did not change much during Hugenberg's tenure.

Speaker 3 He ultimately did find himself forced to work with what he called yellow unions, which are trade unions that aren't allowed to strike, right?

Speaker 3 So he'll work with these guys because they don't actually have any teeth. But as a rule, he found even that kind of union disgusting.

Speaker 3 And he starts pushing internal propaganda within Krupp that depicted management and employees, in Leopold's words, quote, not antithetical classes, but common producers of shared wealth. You know?

Speaker 3 You and your, you and Krupp, the plutocrat who owns all of this money by pushing everyone towards World War I, you're really the same.

Speaker 3 You know, that's like, that's the propaganda. He's not good at propaganda at this stage.

Speaker 4 Now, got it.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And again, the wealth's not actually being shared. And this is something Alfred and his fellow industrialists would acknowledge cheerfully.
They don't think you should share wealth.

Speaker 3 They are social Darwinists. They believe the poor and working class can can only be trusted with a certain amount of money.

Speaker 3 And if they have any more than that, they'll fritter it away on harmful nonsense because they're just not smart enough to reinvest it into the German arms industry, right?

Speaker 3 Which is obviously what a smart man does with his money. Sure, sure, sure.

Speaker 3 By 1912, Hugenberg was one of the most prominent men in the entire Reich. He was awarded the Red Order of the Eagle by the Kaiser.

Speaker 3 Now, This is one of dozens of made-up awards that the Kaiser would give different Germans over the years in order to like, because, you know, you need to have a bunch of fake awards to hand each other so everybody can wear a uniform that looks fancy.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
And it's worth noting.

Speaker 4 It's the Nexium sash.

Speaker 3 It's the Nexium sash of Germany at this time. Yes.
And Alfred's Red Order Medal is third class with a bow. I don't know what that means.
Leopold Reich.

Speaker 4 That sounds dumb. Yeah.

Speaker 3 At the ceremonies, the chairman of the board delivered a masterful speech criticizing the attempt to use universal male suffrage as a means of imposing class rule on the Reich.

Speaker 3 He insisted that neither voting nor legislation would advance the workers, but only a very much richer, very much greater, and very much more powerful Germany would be continued to ensure continued benefits for the industrial proletariat.

Speaker 3 And so, in the speech, he's saying:

Speaker 3 the only thing that can make the poor, the working class, more comfortable is if we steal everything from the rest of the world. That's your only hope, guys.

Speaker 3 Damn.

Speaker 3 Speaking of stealing everything from the rest of the world, Sophie, can we uh should we show them our sponsors?

Speaker 4 I don't think we're stealing things from the rest of the world, but

Speaker 3 you never know. I steal shit sometimes, Sophie.
Like cable.

Speaker 3 Allegedly, allegedly, allegedly, allegedly, allegedly.

Speaker 6 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers, but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

Speaker 8 The answers were there, hidden in plain sight.

Speaker 10 So why did it take so long to catch him?

Speaker 9 I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer, the Investigation into the Most Notorious Killer in New York, since the son of Sam.

Speaker 12 Available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 13 I'm Cheryl McCollum, host of the podcast Zone 7.

Speaker 14 Zone 7 ain't a place. It's a way of life.

Speaker 2 I've worked hundreds of cold cases you've heard of and thousands you haven't.

Speaker 15 We started this podcast to teach the importance of teamwork in solving these crazy crimes.

Speaker 18 Come join us in learning from detectives, prosecutors, authors, canine handlers, forensic experts, and most importantly, victims' family members.

Speaker 23 Listen to zone 7 with Cheryl McCollum on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 1 In 1997, in Belgium, 37 female body parts placed in 15 trash bags were found at dump sites with evocative names like the Path of Worry, Dump Road, and Fear Creek.

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Speaker 3 We felt like we were in the presence of someone who was going to the grave with nightmarish secrets.

Speaker 1 From Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts, this is Le Mansre Season 2: The Butcher of Moss, available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 27 It's okay not to be okay sometimes and be able to build strength and love within each other.

Speaker 28 Thanksgiving isn't just about food. It's a day for us to show up for one another.
I'm Ellie Akani, host of the podcast Family Therapy, a series where real families come together to heal and find hope.

Speaker 3 What would be a clue that we'd be like, I've gotten lots of text messages from him. This one's from a little bit better of a version of him.

Speaker 4 Because he's feeding himself well. It's always a concern.

Speaker 3 Like, are you eating well? He's actually an amazing cook.

Speaker 3 There was this one time where we had neighbors and I saved their dog and I ended up in buying them over for food and that was like one of my proudest moments.

Speaker 28 This is Family Therapy. Real families, real stories on a journey to heal together.

Speaker 28 Listen to season two of Family Therapy every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 3 We're back. We sure as hell are.
Yes.

Speaker 3 So now, as I said, during this whole period, one of the things that's going on is this cycle where Krupp will send their arms merchants abroad and say, hey, your neighbor just bought all these great cannons or, you know, this machine gun.

Speaker 3 And they're thinking of using it. So why don't you get some more guns? And one of the things this cycle of upgrades does, it's great for Krupp's bottom line and other weapons manufacturers.

Speaker 3 They're all taking part in this. This is not just Krupp.
Germany's not just responsible for the preconditions of World War I, obviously.

Speaker 3 But one thing that this cycle that these arms manufacturers are all responsible for means is that every European leader is constantly thinking, okay, right now we've got better artillery than the French, but their machine guns are a little better.

Speaker 3 And in two years, they're going to have new artillery. So maybe we need to go to war now if we're going to have a chance of beating them, right? Like everyone's always thinking about it.

Speaker 4 How is this manufactured escalation legal? Like this

Speaker 3 stuff because these people own the government or run the government to a big extent. Yeah.
Like, and it's so fucked up.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's great.

Speaker 3 So Hugenberg profits from this process, and he may have been more directly involved than even just like running the finances and benefiting it, because he winds up involved in a huge scandal right in late 1912 to early 1913.

Speaker 3 He's implicated significantly in what's called the Kornvalzer affair.

Speaker 3 Now, I'm going to quote from an article by Lothar Burchert from the 1988 German yearbook on business history to describe the Kornsvaler affair.

Speaker 3 A Krupp employee was found guilty of bribing Army and Navy officers.

Speaker 3 This proved not only to the German, but also to the foreign skeptics that they were right to believe that the company would stop at nothing in pursuit of its interests.

Speaker 3 In 1905, George Bernard Shaw had already, in his play Miss Major Barbara, not been sparing with his insinuations.

Speaker 3 In 1913, even the serious American journal, The Iron Age, wrote, following the facts revealed during the Kornwalzer affair, that Krupp was obviously recently prepared to go to any lengths.

Speaker 3 to agitate a war. Even before the First World War had really started, H.G.
Wells had already decided who was the real culprit.

Speaker 3 In the center of this disaster, which had finally become a world catastrophe, is Kruppism, the dirty, violent trade with the tools of death.

Speaker 3 It was shortly afterwards that the often repeated but never conclusively proved allegation arose that the then company boss Gustav Kropp v.

Speaker 3 Boland und Hallbach had been informed by the Kaiser months in advance of the imminent war.

Speaker 3 And Alfred is directly implicated in this bribery of army and naval officers, as like because he's the manager of this this guy. And it's too much to say that we don't know.

Speaker 3 Again, we don't really know if the Kaiser was literally warned months in advance of the imminent war, because I don't actually think it was planned that way. But that's the rumor going around, right?

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 it's definitely true that Hugenberg is aware of how tensions are ratcheting up and is using that as a way.

Speaker 3 He is taking advantage of this to make money in a way that makes World War I more likely, right?

Speaker 3 He has some of the war guilt, right? Because of the position that he has. Again, there's plenty of war guilt to go around.
The French aren't blameless. The British aren't even blameless.

Speaker 3 And fucking the Russians, sure as shit aren't blameless. But

Speaker 3 he's one of a small number of men who is directly implicated in creating the conditions of World War I, right?

Speaker 4 The best.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Given his age and wealth, there's no chance Hugenberg or too many of the people he cared about, because he doesn't care about a lot of people, were going to have to fight and die in this war.

Speaker 3 In fact, he was very pro the idea of having a World War I.

Speaker 3 He's gotten back into the pan-Germanic League at this point, and the League is doing everything they can do to encourage Germany to go to war with its neighbors.

Speaker 3 If you're, you know, if you're old enough to remember the biggest cheerleaders for the war in Iraq,

Speaker 3 that's what these guys are doing, right? They're coming up with justifications for why we have to go liberate Eastern France, right?

Speaker 3 They'll welcome us as liberators. Belgium is national.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Did you just imply that because Alfie like had no friends and no loved ones and no family members and thus no one to lose in a war?

Speaker 3 He's just like, yeah, fucking go off. He's got nothing to gain from a war.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Or nothing to lose. Yeah.
Well, nothing to lose. You're right.
Sorry. I fucked up.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Sounds like the, right. He is.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 Ultimately, he's doing life wrong, but he's doing life very wrong.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And to make things worse, you know, he's cajoling European powers to arm each other, both in his job as an arms dealer and through this social club that he's helping to run.

Speaker 3 And then in 1912, something terrible happens. It's the same year of the Kornwalser affair, the Social Democrats win big in that year's German elections.
And Germany is

Speaker 3 a parliamentary monarchy, right? They have a parliament.

Speaker 3 The Kaiser is often described as an absolute ruler, and he has, he can overrule most things, right? But there is a parliament, and they don't have zero power.

Speaker 3 And the Social Democrats win big that year, which scares the shit out of Alfred and people like him, right?

Speaker 3 So he starts talking to other rich reactionary nationalists and he tries to sell them on an idea he's had, which is he wants to create a cartel of the producing classes.

Speaker 3 In other words, he wants to get all of the rich business owners together and form a union of rich guys

Speaker 3 to collectively bargain in their own interests, right? He sees what unions. Are you a gold union, not a union? Yeah,

Speaker 3 a gold union. Yes, exactly.
And this is a thing, he's not alone in thinking this. A lot of magnates in the Ruhr, and the Ruhr is Germany's industrial heartland.
It's where the guns get made, right?

Speaker 3 And a lot of the guys who run and own the mines and the companies making raw materials and the companies turning those raw materials into weapons and other stuff, they're all thinking along the same lines.

Speaker 3 And so in 1913, he is hired to chair the board of directors for an organization that pools money from mine and factory owners in the area for profit.

Speaker 3 And part of the goal here, he's not just like investing it, he is spending it to benefit them. Part of the idea is you will spend a chunk of our money.
We all give like 1% or whatever, right?

Speaker 3 And that money accumulates and you spend it to influence the culture. right? To put out news and stuff and propaganda that's positive for us.
Hugenberg is going to be running that project, right?

Speaker 3 Because these guys, these industrial magnates, have the billionaires billionaires of their day, have come to the conclusion that if we can just change the news stories poor people read, poor people will stop trying to get our money, you know?

Speaker 3 Like, yeah, wow.

Speaker 4 Okay. So when you said that he wasn't good at propaganda yet.

Speaker 3 Yet. And well, also, this is a very Musk thing, right? Like we're coming to the he buys Twitter part, right?

Speaker 3 So again, Hugenberg is not a skilled propagandist in terms of he doesn't make propaganda, nor does he like write it.

Speaker 3 He's not drawing it or anything like that, but he sees the need for for propaganda and he's good at hiring people who are good at stuff.

Speaker 3 So in 1914, he uses a bunch of this pooled corporate money to form a holding company called Ausland GmbH. A month later, that company forms a subsidiary named Ausland Anzigen.

Speaker 3 Leopold explains what happened next, which will sound very familiar to those of you who know anything about the Daily Wire.

Speaker 3 Ausland Anzigen was established to study foreign publications and to coordinate the advertising of heavy industrial firms interested interested in exports.

Speaker 3 So he's sending out people to study foreign media propaganda and bring back advice so that they can create news outlets that will represent the interests of the rich, right?

Speaker 3 That's what he's doing. Now, this is initially just an advertising thing, right?

Speaker 3 Like the idea is, and that way we'll make better ad propaganda, but the study of foreign ads expands to a general study of foreign propaganda.

Speaker 3 And this kind of conclusion starts to develop that, like, you know what, ads, that's not the best way to propagandize people. Journalism is the best way to propagandize people.

Speaker 3 News articles are the best way to propagandize people, right? SpawnCon.

Speaker 3 That doesn't look like SponCon. Yes.
And so they're working. This is what they start working on when, in August of 1914, the shooting starts on the Western Front.

Speaker 3 And we will talk about that, what happens later, and how Alfred Hugenberg finally gets in bed with the Nazis in part two. How are you feeling? Amanda?

Speaker 4 I feel amazing.

Speaker 4 I feel really glad that I.

Speaker 3 That's a normal way to feel when you talk about Alfred Hugenberg. Yes.

Speaker 3 Well, I'm

Speaker 3 America's sweetheart.

Speaker 4 Yeah, exactly. I, well, kind of, because

Speaker 4 I feel whenever I hear stories like this, I feel like, oh, wow, I'm not the worst person in history.

Speaker 3 No, no, no.

Speaker 3 You're a better person than Alfred Hugenberg. A low bar.

Speaker 3 Russell Brand might be a better person than Alfred Hugenberg, and he just got

Speaker 3 charged with some pretty serious crimes.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah. Ooh, that's a fun game.

Speaker 4 But you know what? Who's a worst person?

Speaker 3 I'll say this. Very few historians blame Russell Brand for the outbreak of World War I.
Almost never.

Speaker 3 Almost, almost never.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Honestly, it would be super impressive if he'd managed that somehow.

Speaker 4 I would love to talk to a historian who's like open to discussing a working theory that Russell Brand had something to do with working.

Speaker 3 Just like any of a photo of him in the background in Sarajevo as the Archduke drives past. Oh my God.

Speaker 4 Yeah, Russell Brand, he does have sort of a time traveler's styling to him.

Speaker 3 It is what it is. He could have been from any era at all.
There's some guys like Matt Damon. You You put Matt Damon in like a historical movie from 120 years ago.
I'm sorry. Matt Damon has,

Speaker 3 as people have said, Matt Damon has a face that knows what a smartphone is, right? Like you just can't.

Speaker 3 That's so true. But yeah, Russell Brand, if I saw him in a picture from like 1848, I'd be like, no, that's that.

Speaker 3 He might belong there.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Oh my God.
That's so true.

Speaker 3 He probably committed sex crimes there, but he might belong there.

Speaker 3 For sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 I mean, he belongs there as much as anywhere, which might be nowhere. But do you ever see people, IRL, in

Speaker 4 2025 who are like, whoa, you do. You have a face that looks like an old sepia toned, like faded print from the late 19th century.
Because I do sometimes. Yeah.

Speaker 3 No, I get that a lot, actually.

Speaker 3 You get it yourself. You're like, every time I look in the mirror.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 All right. Well, Amanda, you got any pluggables before we roll out a part one?

Speaker 4 Yes. If people like hearing about cults in a cheeky tone or really just cult-like organizations from the modern day zeitgeist

Speaker 4 and want to participate in determining whether or not they are real cults, they can listen to my podcast Sounds Like a Cult about the modern day cults we all follow from Disney adults to Elon Musk.

Speaker 4 So, um, yeah, and we have an episode coming out with you about Mark Zuckerberg, so that's going to be exciting. Um, yeah, and then uh Cult-ish, my book Cult-ish is coming out in paperback in June.

Speaker 3 Excellent. Well, check out Coltish.
Check out everything Amanda is involved with and check out part two. Coming

Speaker 3 in like a day.

Speaker 4 Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 4 For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 4 Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday.
Subscribe to to our channel, youtube.com slash at behind the bastards.

Speaker 7 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers.

Speaker 6 But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

Speaker 8 The answers were there, hidden in plain sight.

Speaker 10 So why did it take so long to catch him?

Speaker 11 I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer.

Speaker 9 The investigation into the most notorious killer in New York since the son of Sam.

Speaker 12 Available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 13 I'm Cheryl McCollum, host of the podcast Zone 7.

Speaker 14 Zone 7 ain't a place. It's a way of life.

Speaker 15 Now this ain't just any old podcast, honey.

Speaker 15 We're going to be talking to family members of victims, detectives, prosecutors, and some nationally recognized experts that I have called on over the years to help me work these difficult cases.

Speaker 2 I've worked hundreds of cold cases you've heard of and thousands you haven't.

Speaker 15 We started this podcast to teach the importance of teamwork in solving these crazy crimes.

Speaker 18 Come join us in learning from detectives, prosecutors, authors, canine handlers, forensic experts, and most importantly, victims' family members.

Speaker 17 Come be a part of MyZone 7 while building yours.

Speaker 23 Listen to Zone 7 with Cheryl McCollum on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 A new true crime podcast from Tenderfoot TV in the city of Mons in Belgium. Women began to go missing.

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Speaker 1 Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence. Le Monstre, Season 2, is available now.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 14 On this podcast, Incels, we unpack an emerging mindset.

Speaker 3 I am a loser. If I was a woman, I wouldn't pay me either.

Speaker 29 A hidden world of resentment, cynicism, anger against women at a deadly tipping point.

Speaker 3 Tomorrow is the day of retribution.

Speaker 1 The day in which I will have my revenge.

Speaker 19 This is Incels.

Speaker 4 Listen to season one of Incels on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 4 This is an iHeart podcast.