Episode 88 -- Project 1933, Part V: July 1 - July 31

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dah.

And I'm Laura Donnegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So, Adrienne, today we are returning to our perennial project 1933 with part five going through July of 1933.

Do you want to tell any listeners who might be new about our project 1933 and encourage them to maybe listen to parts one through four first?

People are making a lot of comparisons between the year 2025 and the year 1933.

And we thought it might be a good exercise to go through 1933 as we go through 2025 and to think about points of contiguity, points of difference, and to really go through the experience of 1933, what it felt like, not sort of in hindsight, but for people going through it, given that we're currently going through 2025.

The other thing we're obviously doing, given that this is a podcast about gender and conservatism, is to sort of look at conservatives and to look at gender questions quite a bit.

And that's what we're going to be doing today.

So the July episode I had teased and promised would be about two things.

Collaborators and Catholics, who are not necessarily the same people.

I'm sure there's some overlap

between collaborators and Catholics.

Based on what I know from my 11th grade history education, I'm pretty sure we're going to see a pretty big center of that Benn diagram.

Yeah, there's certainly an office in the Vatican that's always like, right-wing dictatorship, you say.

Yes, we'll take their call.

Yes, we're interested.

Very interested.

But I mean, the Catholic population of Germany also had a very deep loyalty to a leader and an institution that was not Hitler and the Nazi Party.

So I imagine that will also create some complications in this alliance.

Exactly.

I've been promising the story of the collaborators.

And I think we're not going to get all of it today.

What we choose to focus on is always partial, right?

Like it's impossible to follow every storyline or every interesting development.

And we sort of try to come up with a focus for each episode.

But with collaboration, it really becomes difficult simply because there were so many different ways for people to morally fail.

That's part of, I think, the story and the tragedy of that year.

And the fact that people then, in hindsight, latched on to every little fucking thing in order to relativize what they'd done.

1933 was not a year that people go, let's just all forget about that.

People go, no, no, no, no.

I'd like to hear more about what you did, right?

Like if we talk about the Nazification of Germany, there was an entire process of denazification at the end of the war, meaning people got very good at rehearsing, oh, I was actually really in the resistance, you know?

Meaning a lot of the historic record is just like pretty tainted by the fact that people were very, very good and very convincing at not necessarily lying.

I mean, some people lied, but in just misrepresenting and misaccentuating what living through that year was like.

And so we're going to, again, mostly focus on Nazism's victims because they saw very clearly how their fellow Germans were coming up short.

And so that limits what we can do today a little bit, but I hope we can at least take a first stab at it.

So I'm excited for that.

As always, I consult quite a bit of literature for this.

I looked again at Richard Evans' book.

I looked at a very nice book by Tirman Allert, The Hitler Salute on the Meaning of a Gesture, and a book by Wofkang Bens, which is all about like how people joined the Nazi Party.

It's one of those wonderful history books that just asks a very simple question.

It's like, how would I do it?

Right?

Like, how did people do it in 1933?

How easy was this?

Like, what were the politics of joining this party?

I also want to mention, because the research for this series is not easy, and we're giving it all away for free.

You could consider subscribing to our Patreon.

I was at a wedding this past weekend and I ran into Leo Steinmetz, a Patreon subscriber.

Oh my God.

I know.

I was so thrilled to meet him.

I've actually met a few podcast listeners and I always apologize to them.

It's always a little shocking to me that people listen to this.

But our Patreon is like why we get to keep doing this.

We take that money and we use it to pay Mark, our producer.

We use it to pay Adrian for editing time.

We use it to be able to have time to devote to doing, especially episodes like this, which are really resource intensive

and which take a lot of time.

They take a lot of attention and it's time we can't spend doing other things.

So if you like this, please throw us a couple bucks over on the Patreon.

It really makes a difference.

And you get a lot in return.

Lots of truly bizarre episodes.

It's a lot of fun.

You get to be part of our Discord community, which is excellent.

There's more merch coming, so you'll be the first in line for that.

But anyway, that's enough.

That's the embarrassing part, and we got that out of the way.

Let's dig in.

Speaking of the moral complication, whatever moral complication we feel shilling for ourselves and trying to get people to give us money, it's nothing compared to what we're about to look at today.

That's right.

So maybe we'll start July 1933 again with our friend Victor Klempera, the literature professor from Dresden, who's famous today mostly for having written this incredible diary where he really chronicles day by day by day the changes in the society around him.

And also because he's a philologist, so he's someone who studies literature and language for a living, the changes in how people talk and express themselves.

And so he's just a really, really good guide for those early days when the changes really were more in the sort of vibes than in like the day-to-day.

Although by July 1933, Klempera's life is unrecognizable already.

He's finishing his set of lectures at the university.

He notes in his diary that, quote, the political situation is bleak.

The only comfort or hope is when the tyranny manifests itself ever more wildly, that is to say, ever more uncertain of itself.

And I feel like that's something I can definitely relate to in July 2025.

That you're like, well, at least they're overdoing it.

Maybe that'll help shake something loose, you know?

Yeah, or this seems chaotic.

Maybe they will fail.

Yeah.

One thing that I didn't realize until I looked at all these diaries in parallel is that people almost seemed to think there was going to be an invasion, that like basically the Allies were going to be like, you're clearly going to go back on the peace treaty of Versailles, so we're going to occupy you.

So there was an element where people seem to have thought there would be foreign intervention.

Aaron Powell, it's a real testament to the hopelessness that these non-Nazi Germans are feeling, that their

idea of the best available outcome is like, well, maybe we'll all get bombed.

They're kind of hoping for the French to come and get mad again.

They probably weren't thinking there was going to be all-out war, right?

The French had occupied, for instance, the Ruhr area in, I believe, 1925, right?

So there was a precedent for the Allies seizing territory in order to enforce the provisions of the Versailles Treaty.

I had not caught that that's something that people really thought was within the realm of possibility and felt was the most likely way the Nazis were going to be dislodged by July 1933.

Templarin notes a bunch of the changes in his diary.

He notices, you know, again, because he studies language for a living, that there's less talk about sort of awakening and movement, which which had been all the rage earlier, and more and more talk about the state, right?

And he's like, aha, yeah, they're consolidating.

They're settling into the long haul.

So the Nazis are now not really pitching themselves as these insurgents anymore.

They are making the party identical with the state.

As we know, because of synchronization, right, they essentially are.

At the university, Klempera was...

had started being very worried about his students, but there were these Nazi student groups that would kind of disrupt by July.

He's in this very weird position where he is starting to get scared of superiors who aren't even officially Nazis, but who are really going along with it.

Meanwhile, his dissertation student is like really nice to him and wants to like have him on her committee.

And he's like, I don't know how to put this, but you're a Nazi.

Why are we doing this?

So like, it's this very weird thing where he's like shifting kind of where his fears come from.

He had thought the institution would protect him.

And now he realizes, no, the real threat is going to come from the institution, not these insurgent kids.

Oh my God, the university is cooperating with the authoritarian regime and we'll get there

and professors are under threat for their speech or maybe their background i think it's maybe useful to remind our listeners about klimperer who in addition to being a professor is unusually for professors by this point in 1933 he's ethnically jewish well that's not unusual at all they haven't been purged yet most of the younger ones yes most of the older ones not because if you remember there is a weird provision in the law that says World War I veterans are exempt.

Oh, that's right, that's right.

So a lot of older men.

A lot of people, his generation, are holding on.

But I think I don't have the quote exactly right, but he's like, well, obviously this is piecemeal.

They're going to get to me.

But they haven't gotten to him yet.

There's already been some purges.

But people are waiting for things to get worse.

And my guess is some people are complying in advance and some people are doing everything they can while they can, waiting for the hammer to fall.

Exactly.

Meanwhile, he also notices that people that he's friends with, and I think at this point, that's many, many Jewish people.

He had a very mixed circle of friends, but obviously in this situation, you turn to people who are going through what you're going through.

And there are friends who are just withdrawing from him.

There are friends he's breaking with because they're basically going Nazi or they're not standing up for people like him.

And he notices in these people what he calls an immigrant mentality, especially among his Jewish friends, right?

The hope for a collapse of the regime or an invasion and so on has totally dimmed.

And people are starting to sort of be like, well, if we go, where would we go?

Right.

So these are not your Thomas Mans or your Leon Feustwangers or your Erich Maria Romarck who were like, oh, we're Audi.

Like the moment the Nazis came to power.

These are people who are like, well, shit, what would we do and how would we do it?

And so people are starting to look to France, to Denmark, and again and again to Palestine, right?

I've had that conversation with Boyo.

If it gets really gnarly here, where would you flee to?

Yeah.

It's a dwindling list of non-authoritarian countries.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Ireland, call us.

I don't want to inflict myself on the Irish.

I feel like they've suffered enough.

They have suffered a lot.

So this is the other thing is the specifically anti-Semitic character of Nazi persecution, right?

Because there's a lot of different classes of people who are being prevented from making a living or from being full participants in public life.

Communists, SPD members, like all of these different big groups of people who are coming in under these punitive policies.

But it's Jews in particular who are like, oh, we might have to actually flee.

Being drummed out of your job is an indignity.

It is also, of course, it threatens your very existence, right?

This is four years after the stock market crash.

These people do not have huge savings to fall back on, as a rule.

But that's that's the thing.

Like Klempela's friends are, they're not all university professors, but they're ensconced in positions in institutions, right?

They're like, well, fuck, I'm trained as a banker or a specialist for agriculture in the agriculture ministry.

Like, what transferable skills do I really have if I move to Czechoslovakia now?

These are very serious questions for them.

And they know that in many cases, as we know, if we ever have to leave this country, it'll likely mean giving up the profession that you identify with and that these people are in their 50s, 60s, you know, that they thought they were going to grow old in and retire in.

We'll go back later again to like artists, but like for them, it's a little bit easier, especially the musicians.

We'll see.

Clemora has a cousin that we're going to meet who is a conductor.

And he just kind of like whizzes off because like conducting is great everywhere.

You don't have to speak any language because of records they know of you, right?

Like that's easy.

Actors, actresses, you know, that could work.

Writers could work, but this is now a different class.

These are people who are sort of professional managerial class.

And like, that is hard.

They're like, we are very centered on Germany, not just ideologically, but really.

in our professional development.

Like we have expertise and know-how only in relationship to this country, which is now kicking us out, right?

Right.

Like I am a compliance officer for a bank, say.

Yeah.

I can't go apply my knowledge of German, you know, financial regulation to a French bank because it's apples and oranges.

Exactly.

And Tempara notes in his diary, right?

They're all thinking about leaving, and he says, quote, we hear a lot about Palestine now.

It does not appeal to us.

Anyone who goes there exchanges nationalism and narrowness for nationalism and narrowness.

Wow.

That's Victor Klimperer said that.

Okay.

Don't

report us.

Yeah.

Do not deport me.

I report, you deport.

So the focus of our episode today is on the nature of collaboration with the Nazi regime, right?

This is a

political group that emerged, really kind of exploded out of the fringe far-right, and has now quickly taken over the national government.

And they're quickly making themselves synonymous with Germany itself, right?

Which means the opportunities to be a functioning member of German society without collaborating or cooperating or in some sense aiding the Nazi regime are probably like being foreclosed pretty quick.

This is something you can imagine happening as, say, institutions fall in line, right?

Like suddenly working in your job is a kind of collaboration, or you're trying to keep your institution from being shut down.

And say you maybe pay a $200 million fine to the authoritarian government to try and get them to allow you to continue being a research university.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Purely hypothetically.

But there's a lot of different forms that collaboration takes.

What do we mean by collaboration when we talk about Nazi collaborators?

Aaron Powell, it's such a good question.

And I think this is the central problem with wanting to tell the story of these people.

That as we are finding in 2025, there are many ways you can become complicit.

There are many sort of decision points, and often they may not even become apparent as decision points until afterwards, right?

What makes you a collaborator could be joining the Nazi Party.

That would seem to really qualify.

But then participating in the Nazi state can absolutely be a form of collaboration.

At the same time, we've seen

how that's not obvious, right?

Remember in the June episode, we talked about the events in Küpenik, where the police, for instance, stepped in and stopped the SA from being up on communists, right?

So these people were working for the German state, which was starting to become more and more identified with the Nazi Party, but they're like, please stop, Nazi Party.

You are breaking the law, right?

So there is this weird kind of duality still.

And probably some of them did not think that they were participating, right?

They were participating in the state, but it wasn't their fault that state was becoming identical with this party.

But then there are plenty others who basically, by just doing their job,

participated in that state.

And then there's the other one you mentioned, which in this forced synchronization, participated in the Nazification of the state.

That's another form of collaboration.

And that too can be like, well, look, they're literally putting a gun to my head.

I don't know what to do.

But it could also be obeying in advance, like our universities, right?

It could be like, well, we'll do their bidding.

And I do not think that we will look back kindly on what Columbia University, what Stanford University and others are doing now.

I don't think we will look kindly on people who are discontinuing life-saving care for trans youth.

I think we will judge them.

I will be there to judge them.

And I think that's where people found themselves in that time.

These weren't easy choices, but I think we would definitely call it collaboration when people were kicking out the juice that were working with them, right?

Like there were other people who were like, absolutely fucking not.

Drag me out.

I don't give a shit.

I'm not doing this, right?

There are all these forms of collaboration, and we can't really do adequate justice to all of them.

And then in many cases, it's just invisible what kind it was.

It's really dependent on whether you're talking about the police, a bank, the university, a film studio, an orchestra, et cetera, et cetera, right?

It's really, really tricky.

And then the other thing that I really want to drive home for people is because there were so many inflection points where people could make these kinds of decisions, it was also easy for them to tell themselves a more checkered story than was really true.

Yeah.

I mean, something that is really striking me about our era in 2025 is how

elaborate and robust people's capacity for self-justification is.

Yep.

I wish I could.

I wish I could be like self-righteously pointing at others, but this is also something I've encountered in my own like reflection on my own conduct, right?

Like it is very, very easy to keep acting as if you are not implicated or do not have responsibilities that you do.

And this is something that like

comes

up a lot after the war, right?

People are retroactively altering their own accounts of their participation in the Nazi regime and their own accounts of their conduct during the war to underplay the effectiveness of their aid for the Nazis and then overstate their resistance.

Exactly.

Right.

And that's the point.

Unless they were really complete monsters, they have plenty to pick from on either side.

And they can relativize the stuff that makes them look like collaborators.

Like the number of people who really probably didn't stand up for a single Jewish colleague and were like, oh, but that one's a good one, right?

Like it was probably pretty small.

But like in the end, like, oh yeah, you stood up for your one colleague, but also you threw out the 500 other people.

I don't know.

Not sure you get the anti-Nazi of the Week award here, my friend.

And even some of our heroes have moments, right?

Like, I don't know how to think about it.

But like in one of the very first entries of Thomas Mann's diary that we talked about, there's a passage in it that I didn't read when we discussed it in depth.

I think this was in a March episode, I believe, where he says, look, my publisher asked me to take out this one passage in my article about Richard Wagner, about the Nazis.

And I was like, fine, fuck it.

Let's not bait these animals any further.

Right.

And it's like, on the one hand, yeah, he was trying to accommodate himself to this regime, hoping to get his kids out, etc., etc.

On the other hand, he submitted to censorship for the sake of Nazi interests.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

He's really not something that I would accuse of any kind of moral turpitude in that regard, but no one has a perfect record, which is also to say that, like, you know, I hope that everyone currently muddling through and listening to us takes some courage in that, right?

Yeah.

There are people failing the test of history much more grievously than you are.

And they work at many universities.

And it's also, you know, everybody who has had these lapses, that is not the finite end of their moral story, right?

Exactly.

Many of these people have lapses of exhaustion or naivete or like self-deception and then also find courage at other points in time.

Aaron Trevor Barrett, yeah, exactly.

This gets us back to the conservatism question, too, because of course it was particularly hard, not that I'm shedding a ton of tears with these people, but it was hard for people who agreed with the Nazis on some substantive issues and were happy that some of this stuff was happening, but were maybe not okay with how it was happening.

Again, like world's tiniest violin, but they sort of found themselves in a very interesting position where the Nazis were speaking a language of renewal of folkish nationalism that they sort of like, but they were like, oh, but there's an awful lot of beating going on.

I didn't quite think it was going to look like that.

And that made it really, really hard.

And in terms of participating in Nazification processes, I wanted to have us look at one guy.

I think he might be kind of interesting.

And he's another artist.

And I think the reason I'd like to look at him and why I'd like to look at another artist is simply because these people did all this stuff a lot more publicly.

Someone who's working at a bank, like who knows how much documentation of what exactly happened there in 1933 made it through the war, right?

Whereas like a lot of these cultural fights were conducted in the pages of newspapers that are fully digitized today.

So it's like, well,

sucks for you, man.

You're on record.

And also a place where the people they were attacking were frequently able to leave and able to say like, this is what that motherfucker said about me, just in case you were wondering, right?

Yeah.

So let's meet Hans Fitzner.

Hans Fitzner was born in 1869.

So as a German composer, conductor, and a kind of music theorist.

If you do the math, quite an old man by 1933.

He's in his 60s.

And he is the kind of guy who had a lot to like in the Nazis' cultural politics.

He was a big anti-modernist, hated people like Arnold Schoenberg, was very, very excited that finally someone was going to clean out all this modernist trash.

And through that, sort of started participating in what would become Nazi cultural politics.

So is this a guy who literally loved Rihart Wagner so much that he became a Nazi?

Yeah, no, exactly.

He was a partisan of Wagner.

He wrote operas in a sort of late Romantic mode.

Throughout the 1920s, he began writing about modernism and Verismo, you know, Jewish influences on German music.

So like, it's not that he's this guy is like, oh, I just love Wagner.

Now my right arm is raised.

It's like, no, no, no.

He took several steps along the way.

I do want to walk you through how he spends 1933.

In between all this stuff, his defenders will point out that like, yeah, he stood up for all these Jewish people in various orchestras and for various conductors, et cetera, et cetera.

Which like, you know, fine, but like literally no one in the German cultural scene where that isn't true to some extent, right?

Just to give you a sense that this guy isn't some accidental Nazi.

In 1923, Pitzner was in the hospital for some kind of surgery and he got a visit from none other than Adolf Hitler, right?

So like this is a guy who is running in those circles very, very much.

It reminds me of people who are like trying to distance themselves from Epstein now.

They're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

We weren't friends.

Right.

You just visited me in the hospital when I was just,

you know?

I was just on the Nazi express.

Yeah.

I was just on the plane and at the island for, you know, casual reasons, like you do.

Yeah, I was in the Lainey Riefenstahl movie for totally understandable reasons.

But so anyway, so how does Hans Fitzner spend 1933?

So you may remember that when Thomas Mann left Germany in February, the last talk he gave on German soil was a lecture on Wagner, first in Munich, then later in Amsterdam, and he would never come back from that lecture tour.

In April of 1933, a bunch of Munich sort of cultural people, mostly musicians, wrote this open letter called the Protest of the Richard Wagner City Munich, right, against this lecture by Thomas Mann and basically attacked Mann for like desecrating the memory of Wagner.

None of them had been at the talk he gave in Munich.

The talk had been well attended and no one had objected at all, nor did they seem to entirely know what was in the thing.

Mann would publish it pretty quickly, but you know, the mail was not that fast in 1933.

I don't think they knew what was in this thing.

So it really starts becoming like, oh, this is code for that man left Germany and you're starting to realize he's not coming back, right?

Yeah.

So it becomes this like call out of this guy for essentially his anti-Nazi politics, right?

Through the medium of like, he's wrong about Wagner and he's defaming this wonderful composer.

You know, Mann was a Wagner super fan.

He was also a Fitzner super fan.

I think he was like a chair of the Fitzner fan club at some point.

But it was very clear that it was just a stand-in.

And that's a really interesting kind of thing, right?

Like, I also like coming at it with 2025 eyes, in terms of picking your battles, it's so interesting, right?

Of all the things you thought you might want to comment on in 1933, spring of, it was a lecture Tumas Mann gave about Jose Schad Wagner.

Anything else important happening in the news that you might want to fucking weigh in on, Hans Fitzner?

Well, it reminds me a little bit about like the Trump administration expressing its own power through the flimsiness of its like pretextual grievances.

Exactly.

I don't think anybody really really thinks, except maybe like the most naive Zionists in the world, that the Trump administration was concerned about anti-Semitism at Columbia University, right?

But that was the very flimsy hook upon which they hung this whole like shakedown enterprise.

And similarly at Harvard, it's a way in which the like container for the grievance is almost arbitrary.

What's really at stake is this like sorting of different actors into like enemy and friend camps.

Yeah.

And now it gets even better.

So we switch to May 1933, where the state opera in Berlin had not been performing Fitzner's work for a little while.

And this Nazi-friendly musicologist had used one of his journals to sort of call them out for boycotting Fitzner, being like, you've canceled this man, basically.

So yeah, so they're adding a literal cancel culture grievance.

Together with this musicologist, Fitzner was able to activate Alfred Rosenberg, the big cultural honcho in the Nazi Party, who had created this thing called the Kampfbund für Deutsche Kultur, so a battle group for German culture, to go after the various opera houses in Berlin and being like, you need to re-Germanize your repertoire.

You need to have more Pritzner and less other people.

And one of the people that this battle group for culture managed to basically bully out of a job is Otto Klemper.

This is Viktor Klempera's cousin,

a famous conductor.

So Victor, our professor diarist, has a cousin who's now being pushed out.

Yeah.

Otto Klempera intersects with our story in super weird and interesting ways in the sense that he was the director of the Kroll Open, which is the place where the enabling laws were signed.

He was indeed famous for having premiered like the greats of German modernism.

Hinden mitz-Matis dermal,

a bunch of interesting Schoenberg.

He did a bunch of very, very cool avant-garde music.

Although he also, I think, was pretty famous for staging Wagner, but like he was Jewish, and so they were like, oh, he's desecrating Wagner by staging him.

And basically, Otto Klemper leaves Germany and starts touring outside of Germany and outside of Europe and eventually will actually make it to Hollywood.

So they're getting these people fired by claiming kind of these conspiracies against like genuine German art, right?

And you can tell like every composer likes to have their stuff performed, but like the nasty sort of politics of personal destruction sort of are intersecting with this kind of of more broader complaint about our woke elites are suppressing genuine German art, right?

Yeah.

And they're jumping onto these insane Nazi cultural groups in order to kind of drum out people.

Like Otto Klepper likely wouldn't have lasted much longer if Fitzner hadn't become active.

Still, he gets this guy fired, essentially.

And at the same time, Fitzna is constantly sending like various important Nazis his writings and being like, here, I'll show you what's wrong with Jewish modernism, right?

And like a lot of that stuff ends up in exhibitions.

And they did a whole like music festival where they were like,

oh, this is all the degenerate music that you shouldn't be listening to, which is kind of weird.

They didn't perform it, but like, whatever.

They were not the most forward thing to do.

They're not the most consistent group of people, but he is like writing to Nazis, like, I love your work.

Here's some other stuff I think you should oppress.

Exactly.

So then in July of 1933, he was supposed to conduct at the Salzburg Festival because because he didn't want to help

the other nations outside of Germany that were oppressing Germany right now by reporting accurately on what was happening within the country.

The foreign oppression has switched from being about the reparations payments mandated by the Versailles Treaty to now just being like, how dare they talk about what we are doing in their evil lying press?

Okay.

Yeah.

Stop saying things that I've done.

So he's like, I am such a German nationalist that I don't even want to perform at a music festival with other nations.

Yeah.

Ironically, I believe the person who steps in for him is Otto Klempera.

He's like, I'll do it.

Fuck the fucking guy.

So that's Fitzna.

He's someone who was predisposed to like Nazi cultural politics, who understood the accession of the Nazis as a personal opportunity, right?

Like I can get people to stop playing music I hate and start playing music I love, namely my own, but also other people's.

And I can get people that I think don't deserve what they get.

They don't don't deserve the adulation.

They don't deserve their status.

Their status is inauthentic.

It's not genuine.

I think I can get those guys fired.

And that's all it took for him to be this absolute pariah after the war, thank goodness.

And one of the people who would see to that is Tomas Mann.

I love our post-war Tomas Man just not letting anybody forget the shit that they did.

He's an icon for this.

You got to admire it.

And I think people might want to take notes on that.

You know, smallness in that kind of situation can be a virtue, right?

When the entire country is trying to forget what happened, to be like, oh, I didn't forget.

I got letters.

If anyone wants to print them.

I remember when you said all this Nazi shit.

I remember when you provided material support to the regime.

I remember, yeah.

Exactly.

Useful pettiness.

I too am taking some notes,

assuming I see the other side of it, which I might not be as optimistic about as you are.

Well, we'll see.

I mean, you know, that pettiness will stand us in good stead either way.

The second example I wanted to give for collaboration has to do with something that becomes more common in the summer of 1933 and does in fact show up in July in Klemper's diary, which is the Hitler salute, right?

This is so weird to me that quite quickly, something as granular and mundane as the way that people said hello

changed.

It seems like quite pervasively, right?

Like people started doing the Hitler salute like in place of waving.

Yeah.

But it's really interesting, the uptake of this thing.

And obviously, like all we have to go by are the recollections of people who were there and who don't have any reason to lie, such as Viktor Klempela.

Because we don't tend to record how we greet each other in day-to-day conversation, right?

Like, there's no way to trace that over time.

But Klempela notes in July of 1933: quote, until now, employees and colleagues, he's talking about the university, greeted me with a nod of the head as always, and I responded in the same way.

But in offices, I now saw employees constantly raising their arms to one another.

Right.

So a couple of things seem important to me about this.

First, the greeting is at this point compelled, at least in some spaces, right?

The TU Dresden, which is where he's teaching, made it mandatory by the 28th of July.

God, this is such a tedious administrative requirement.

You know how like conservatives lose their mind at having to take like a sexual harassment seminar when they get hired?

Imagine if your boss was dictating the very way you greeted your colleagues and your students.

At the same time, it's interesting that they did it on the 20th of July, which I believe was the end of the semester.

So they must have worried about non-compliance, I think.

Yeah.

People were going to come back onto campus or not really campus, but into the buildings and into the lecture halls by, I guess, October.

And so maybe

they were like, well, by then we'll know for sure, right?

Like people will have started doing this elsewhere.

So it is interesting that it takes until then.

And it is very clear that not everyone did it.

But that's risky, especially at a university, because, of course, you're doing it in front of a lot of people.

And again, like a lot of young people, a lot of students are pretty convinced Nazis and huge snitches.

And so basically refusing to do the Hitler salute could get you reported fairly quickly.

It's not clear how consistently you get punished for it.

Often the charge that he refuses to do the Hitler salute was sort of a sprinkling on top of other other charges.

Or,

as we will see in the case of the theologian Karl Balt, who I believe is working in Bonn at the time, it's the fact that he like writes a letter to the ministry being like, here's why I won't do it.

So that's not the way to escape attention.

But some people appear to have gotten into serious trouble for refusing it or avoiding it.

Wow.

There's the case of the law student, Carlos Schmidt, who will later end up being one of the main authors of the post-war German constitution, who is banned from getting his PhD in tubing in it, as far as I understand it, for just tipping his hat in response to people doing the Hitler salute.

It must have also just been so awkward.

Like suddenly everybody is around you doing the Hitler salute and you're like, okay.

It must have, just as a matter of social friction, it must have drawn a lot of attention to those who were not doing that.

There are also weird gradations to the salute, I think.

Like some people don't raise their arm quite as high as others.

Well, in some situations, I think you weren't supposed to, because imagine doing Hitler's salute in like a crowded elevator, right?

Knocking everybody across the face.

I mean, like, Charlie Chaplin obviously explored all these modalities in very funny ways, where it's like a raised arm is fucking...

It takes up quite a bit of space.

It's a huge inconvenience, possibly.

It takes up a lot of space.

And so I think at that point, you were supposed to do that weird sort of angle thing that Hitler was particularly fond of, right?

He didn't do the full salute very often.

He did.

I forget that it has a name.

It's really about like, you can never do enough, right?

It becomes a way to force people to overthink these day-to-day interactions and to always worry about what other people are going to say and think and take away from what they're doing.

So I mentioned Karl Bart, who is a theologian, is pretty famous still today.

Wonderful work on the epistle to the Romans.

And he's an interesting example.

He's Swiss originally, and that's really, really important.

That's someone who is like, well, I have a foreign passport.

I could probably stick my head out a little bit more.

And he's also, I believe, the PhD advisor for Dierich Bonhoeffer, famous resistance theologian.

He's horrified by the Nazis and joins the SPD in 1930.

You'll get a sense of this guy in just a couple of data points, but you know how the SPD was like forced to dissolve itself in mid-1933?

Yeah.

Bart's like, well, I'm not leaving.

He refused to leave a party that was dissolved.

He's like,

I'm good.

I'm staying.

I like this guy.

Yeah.

Like, again, pettiness, right?

He also started his first lecture course in 1933

with a long disquisition on the First Commandment.

For our non-believers in the audience, Moira, what is the First Commandment?

I am the Lord thy God.

Thou shalt not have any other gods before me.

I'm butchering the very Christ King James, but it's a prohibition on the worship of idols.

Yes, such as small Austrian men.

Yes, there were ways for a theologian like Thomas Mann in March of 1933 be like, I'll keep my powder dry.

They hate me already.

I don't need to point a target on my back.

And Halbart is like, where's that spray paint?

I got to put a target on my back, you guys.

And when his university required the Hitler salute, he refused, saying that the Faculty of Theology is exempted from the primacy of the state.

It is a state-organized form of instruction, but one that serves a higher power.

And he was not going to do a salute.

He'd say, you know, Gris Gott, which means like be with God, but he was not going to invoke, you know, the Chancellor, president, or anyone of Germany because it's a fucking theology lecture.

And in August of 1934, he'd be asked to swear an oath of allegiance to Hitler and refused.

And then in 1935, he's offered a job in Basel, in Switzerland, and he's like, okay, I'll take this, I think.

So that gives you a sense of like these very symbolic measures created friction, created pressure, but also created sites for resistance.

Because the regime is reaching into people's daily lives and trying to mandate these minutiae of their social interactions, that also means that those small gestures can also become sites to express discontent or refusal.

Yeah.

This is something that I'm sure Hannah Arendt had in mind when she wrote about the origin of totalitarianism.

This is really the state getting into your most nitty-gritty interactions, inserting itself into these and making fraud what would seem to be possibly extremely personal and extremely small bore interactions where you basically have to constantly think what will the collective think about this what will the state think about this what will the party think about this right you know hannah arendt was still in germany at the time i'm sure this is something she was like yeah someone should write a book about the origins of this you know it's the most personal thing it's the most small bore thing at the same time it is was also understood as an indicator of the overall mood of the populace right the fact that people said it you go shit this guy too ah shit everyone at the office right when klempera says I saw people sort of doing it in the office to each other, he's like, well, that always takes two, doesn't it?

That means that office is already lost.

Like, maybe I don't go in there anymore.

When you drive through Trump country, even if it's a very rural place and you see the big signs everywhere,

it creates a sense of mass popular support for the regime, right?

And when you're walking through your office building and people are making the Hitler salute, it's got to be incredibly isolating, but it also creates a sense of, okay, the popular zeitgeist is in favor of Hitler.

Exactly.

This comes to backfire eventually in the sense that a lot of people use the declining popularity of the salute to indicate the opposite mood swing.

Klemper in June 1941 will note, quote, the overall mood is terrible.

You can tell they're losing the workers.

They used to say Heil Hitler, now they say Gutenthag, right?

It becomes this thing where he starts taking hope in the fact that, oh, this guy got disillusioned.

He's stopped saying the phrase.

He's now just greeting me normally.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Because political expression is repressed and because there's a great deal of

consequence or risk in just speaking frankly about your opposition to the regime, you also have to sort of be decoding and reading the tea leaves of these tiny gestures

to try and suss out where there might be opposition to the regime.

It's often an indicator of the source of the resistance.

It's noticeable, right?

Klimpel living in Dresden and thinking about workers, right?

They're saying Guten Tag.

The uptake of the so-called German greeting, which is the Heil Hitler, was much laxer in the Catholic South because they doggedly and at times pointedly stuck to Grusgot, right?

The religious one, God be with you.

Is that what you said that was?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

So it becomes a site of sort of passive resistance, but also just, again, like, oh, pettiness is made too small, but just being like, I'm stuck in my ways.

I'm not doing this.

You know, I'm going to invoke God.

Yeah.

Or like, it is its own kind of like cantankerous conservatism.

You know,

it is the kind of tiny gesture of like resistance or refusal that can also obscure a broader buy-in.

But then I also imagine that there's a lot of people who retroactively like overstated their own resistance or opposition to the Nazi regime by being like, well, I said Gutenthag all the way to the 1930s, you know?

So on the one hand, yes, the insistence on this greeting does cover out spaces for resistance.

Timan Allet in his book quotes party reports that are worrying that vaudeville performers appear to be teaching monkeys to perform the Hitler salute.

Wait, that's actually hilarious.

And they're like, well, what does that mean?

Is that cute or is that resistance?

Is that pro or anti-us if they're having the monkeys do our thing?

Yeah.

Exactly.

The other thing to note is exactly what you're saying, which is that the smallness of the resistance gesture and the ambiguity of it is something that people turn to and magnify after the fact and be like, yeah, well, I was not saying Heil Hitler.

I didn't say it.

Right.

Like, I was always saying Guskot.

Like, even I think in the moment, it made it possible to feel like you were resisting when, in fact, you were doing fuck all, right?

You were just not doing anything.

No Nazi was shaking in their boots, being like, you didn't say it.

You didn't say it.

Right.

But you, in your own mind were like, haha, I showed those Nazi bastards.

I'm not one of them.

I mean, I'm on board for pretty much everything, but I did not say it.

Yeah, like, look at me refusing.

I imagine that was a source of comfort even at the time to those people who were like torn between principle and self-interest and maybe leaning a little towards the latter.

They can always comfort themselves that they are not fully on board.

Aaron Powell, the number of Germans of that generation who tell you, like, I got in trouble for telling a joke about Hitler.

And it's like, they didn't give a shit.

Yeah, maybe like your principal yelled at you or the boss at your job yelled at you.

Like, you were not in any danger.

We know what danger looked like and how you put yourself in it in Nazi Germany.

You were telling yourself at the time that you were being bold and individual.

All you did was create kind of a permission structure.

You allowed yourself to be part of the system while also deluding yourself into thinking that you were resisting it.

It reminds me of a joke my mom makes about the IRA, where she's like, okay, if every white American who says that their grandfather was in the IRA really had a grandfather in the IRA, the IRA would have won.

No, and it's like, if every German of that generation who said he was resisting the Nazis was really resisting the Nazis, the Nazis would have had a harder time.

Who would have been left to vote for them?

Yeah.

But there's one other thing I wanted to ask you about this.

Yeah.

I don't know.

This might be the kind of thing that makes more sense if you're used to the German vernacular.

But to an English-speaking ear, the word hail,

it's kind of weird.

It's

formal, it's like almost religious, it's anachronistic.

Why were they so obsessed with saying hail, Hitler?

You know, like, why is this the word they use so often?

So, there's a simple answer and a longer answer.

The longer answer is they wanted it to be a Germanic greeting.

What does that mean?

They had, of course, stolen it from Italy.

It was the Roman syllabus of Mussolini, right?

But they couldn't acknowledge that.

They couldn't be like, oh, we're hyper-German nationalists, so we're going to copy the Italians.

And And so they like tried to create this kind of Germanic origin that was complete bullshit.

And it had a long history, sort of right-wing spaces and sort of right-wing pursuits.

I think it was pretty common among like mountaineers and shit like that.

So it had some history.

There's a very funny passage in Karl Krause's unperformable 800-page play, The Last Days of Mankind, where there's this like Teutonic league meeting.

And there are these Austrians who keep saying Heil, but it sounds like Heidel because they're Austrian.

This had been around for a while.

But the short answer is, and you're not going to believe this, it's Wagner.

Oh my God, of course it's Wagner.

How did Wagner come into the rehabilitation of Heil?

So there is a hailing scene in Luhngren,

and Hitler loved it.

So that appears to be where the Nazi Party sort of jumped on that train.

It's like how every time Donald Trump says that he wants to reopen Alcatraz, it's because that like 1996 Sean Connery movie, The Rock, like just played on cable TV like the day before.

Is that really why?

That's what I heard.

Yeah.

It's like he's clearly seen like either Escape from Alcatraz, which is the John Wayne one.

Or The Rock, which is the Sean Connery one.

It's like it plays on like TNT.

And then the next day he's like, we got to reopen Alcatraz, folks.

He knows the minecarts aren't real, right?

But it's like, oh my God, like Hitler seeing this little bit done in a Wagner opera and being like, we should do that.

Bro, it's so fucking stupid.

I know.

But also, Michael Bay, clearly the Wagner of the 21st century.

God damn it, Commander.

One last time.

You tell your men to safety their weapons, drop them on the deck.

I cannot give that order.

I am not going to repeat that order.

I will not give that order.

What the hell is wrong with you, man?

Get in fast.

Oh, my God.

One last time.

You order your men to safety their weapons.

We've seen all this weird stuff about accommodating yourself to the Nazi state.

Now, you might say, well, the obvious way to become a Nazi in 1933 was to become a Nazi, right?

To sign up.

That's actually kind of difficult.

We think of collaboration as something that a regime welcomes, and the new regime definitely welcomed collaboration.

At the same time, as we saw in our June episode, it's important that the Nazi regime wasn't speaking with one voice.

It was made up of different kind of power blocks.

So we know that the Nazi Party saw a ton of new applications for membership from March to May 1933.

What's funny is that the Nazi Party got so worried about this development that they stopped accepting new members.

What?

Yep, until 1937.

That's insane.

Exceptions were made, but generally they were like, hey, that's too many.

You're schmutzing up our whole Nazi party.

Now everybody wants to join, right?

A lot of this is obviously about like, we saw it with the SA.

These were people who had really, you know, taken blows for the Nazi Party, who'd fled the country for the Nazi Party.

And now they're like, all these Johnny come lately who just want to advance or retain their career are just joining for dumbass reasons.

There was a part of the party that really just hated this stuff.

They even, we're told, coined a term.

for these people, the fallen of march or the marchers.

So people who joined the Nazi party right as it became identical with the state.

Oh my God, it's like when guys see a woman wearing like a Metallica t-shirt and they're like, oh yeah, I named five of their songs.

It's like, I'm a real Nazi.

You're just a poser.

I saw them before they were famous, man.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like, I was beating up Jews back before it was fashionable.

So I looked into this a little bit, the Fallen of March, which is like this sort of play on March 1848, the revolution then, doesn't really matter.

But so there's a historian named Stefan Schoel who points out that we actually don't have many contemporaneous sources actually using that term, the Fallen of March.

It's not in the Nazi press.

It's not in Hitler's or Goebbels' speeches.

It's not in Goebbels' diary, which we have.

And it's attested mostly in later sources.

Most histories I looked at refer back to a dissertation about sort of language and Nazism that was written during the Nazi time, but was, I think, written in 1935.

So on the one hand, we have this story about, oh, in 1933, people coined this term, this derogatory term for these Johnny Come Latelys.

But School thinks it probably was a term that people may have used in everyday speech, but it didn't really circulate in official notes.

That doesn't strike me as crazy.

Like, for a long time, Republican Party social media accounts didn't use terms like rhino

because that was like a common, like, almost slang expression that was considered distinct from the official language of the party's more formal language.

I think that has collapsed now that the like state Twitter accounts are just posting Nazi memes.

Yeah, it's just it all the way down.

What we might be seeing is just a stylistic distinction between like Nazi leadership and like Nazi rank and file, which doesn't strike me as like crazy or unique to them.

At the same time, I think what it might be is that the regime and the party were just not identical in this way, right?

The regime had an interest in being kind of ecumenical and welcoming all comers.

And if there was a discourse that said that these late arrivals were not quite full member and maybe needed to prove themselves, that's also a bit convenient, isn't it?

Right?

Like behind closed doors, we're saying, like, is this guy really for real?

It kind of gives people a real incentive to prove themselves and to overdo it maybe a little bit, to kick out more people out of their organization, to be even worse in what they say in public, right?

And the second thing is that it probably speaks to different factions within the Nazi state.

Parts of it were very backward looking and all about having served and suffered for for the cause or for Germany, right?

Like the SA with its weird World War I fixation and like cosplaying as World War I vets, even when they weren't, right?

And other parts of the Nazi state were forward-looking, right?

They were looking to grow and to absorb the state, right?

They were like, hey, if these people want to identify with us, that is fine, right?

For whatever reason, like, come on in.

You're describing a social milieu in which there's like a really oppressive degree of mutual suspicion and distrust, like even among Nazis.

And so there's a situation for for like new members to the party or people who are trying to be Nazi collaborators in which like even buying in and even capitulating, like it's not enough.

It reminds me a little of how we describe masculinity as like a receding horizon, right?

You've got this identity that's never sufficiently proven.

Yes.

It's never sufficiently expressed.

It's never sufficiently authentic.

Nazism, like masculinity itself, has this like insecure inadequacy just built into it that keeps its participants like chasing it and chasing it and chasing it.

So I think what you get is both a picture of a society where everyone is in acute competition, old guard versus Johnny Kamlately's, true believers who need to distinguish themselves from opportunists, right?

And as you're saying, you could only screw this up, right?

Scholl in his article mentions Baldur von Schirach, the leader of the Hitler Youth, who speaks of, quote, knights of the business cycle or konjung turte.

So people who join a party and movement whenever its stock is rising and then abandon it when it's on the wane.

But Shirach also uses the term, which is also attested in other sources, of the 110%er, i.e.

a Nazi who kind of overdoes it.

So even being too much of a Nazi is suspicious.

Yeah, they're like the lady Doth protest too much.

Yeah, you're not fully committed because you're too Nazi, right?

It's like, you're always going to do it wrong.

You cannot be properly Nazi for the Nazis, right?

Which means everyone is just going to look over their shoulder, is going to think everyone else is doubting them, and is going to try and fall a line all the harder, but not too hard.

This also strikes me as post-hoc rationalizations for like existing hierarchies within the party or within like various essay groups or whatnot, because you know, you know, when you don't like somebody and you wind up having to like try and like retroactively construct a reason why you don't like them that's righteous, there's a lot of messiness here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The Nazi party is like a very messy friend group where you're like, Jesus, you guys got to get together.

And you can imagine if you overlay that kind of messiness over a functioning civil service, like what that does to it, right?

Like that's the kind of transformation that we're seeing throughout 1933.

So that's our detour into elements of collaboration.

But then part two of this episode is about the Catholics and the Catholic relationship to the Nazi Party.

Yeah.

And I mean, collaboration will come up here as well.

And the question of how the Catholic Church sort of reached some kind of of entente with the Nazi regime.

But again, it's also about how sites of resistance and of alternate power centers sort of opened up within the Nazi state.

When we talk about Catholicism in Germany, right, it's a religion that has been both extremely influential, but that had found its temporal power within Germany declining on a pretty long time scale.

Before a

decree called the Reich Deputy Hauptschluss, one of those German words that's extremely short, during the Napoleonic Wars, there had been temporal rulers in Germany who were just Catholic bishops.

That sort of ended after the Napoleonic Wars.

And then, as you remember, in 1871, Germany is united by and under Prussia, which is a Protestant nation, right?

This put German Catholics in a very strange position.

On the one hand, a lot of them were convinced German nationalists and were maybe even happy that Germany was finally finally unifying or thought it was inevitable, right, that this was going to happen.

There were just more Protestants in that area.

If you didn't take Austria on board, like we just were the minority.

But at the same time, they were quite worried because suddenly a nation that had been Protestant since the 30 years war in the 17th century was making official government policy.

And that was new for them.

And then, of course, what pours oil into the fire is the syllabus erorum, which sort of launches the kind of campaign of Vatican anti-modernism, right?

This is the first Vatican Council, which basically coincides with the foundation of the German Empire, right?

Do you remember what that's about?

I do not.

They deliberately educate the Catholic CCD children as little in the actual history of the church as possible.

Yeah, I mean,

we don't talk about that here.

It's mostly bad.

So this is the idea of papal infallibility, right?

Which is, as far as I understand it, not a traditional position of the Catholic Church.

It It is an anti-modern one.

It is meant to prevent a absorption of the Catholic Church into the modern nation state.

Be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, we're going to be separate from that.

We will create dual loyalties within our followers, and you're going to have to just be okay with that, right?

Right.

So, if the Pope is divinely ordained as infallible, that creates some tensions for, say, a German subject who is Catholic, who is being told by the Kaiser to do one thing and by the Pope to do another.

Exactly.

And I think this is traced back to Peter, but like, I think they kind of reactivate this anti-modern sort of pushback.

I think if you take the maximally cynical view or the declaration of papal infallibility, you'll probably get pretty close to the truth, right?

They didn't want to be questioned.

And so they

made up a rule.

with a probably quite flimsy pretext in church history

that questioning them was the same as questioning God.

Yeah, and I mean, some of this is about ideology, some of this is about giving the church more breathing room within the nation state.

It is also, right, coming out of the Vatican.

Do you know what was happening with the Vatican in 1864 to 1870?

Probably nothing good.

They were starting to get absorbed into the Italian national state, which is unifying at the same time.

So they're literally being like,

you can't do that.

It's literally just like their ability to remain temporal rulers of what are called the Papal States that is, I think, at issue here, as I understand it.

What this does, of course, is it splits Catholics in places like Germany, right?

Liberal Catholics often chafed against the infallibility doctrine.

That seemed to them very narrow, very medieval.

And often these liberal ones were oddly enough, the most nationalist ones, right?

Because they were modernists.

They thought, well, the Pope being infallible was something that was smart when we had a Holy Roman Empire.

Now we have a government that runs railroads and telegraph polls.

I sort of feel like we're done with this.

Like

the nation state is the carrier of history.

I'm not sure the dude in the purple robe is the carrier of history here.

We're in an era where our nationalists are very regressive.

often have integrated Christianity into their notion definitely of the American nation, right?

And in which like nationalism and religion go hand in hand.

But at the time, nationalism was a new force that was imagining a sort of historical destiny that was going to be fulfilled in the future.

And the loyalties and imagination and vision of like

authority that nationalism offered was in pretty direct competition to the older vision of like authority and loyalty to your church, to your religion.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Exactly.

But the fracturing of the German Catholics goes even further.

Even liberal Catholics in Germany were often worried about the dominance of Protestant Prussia, right?

They charged what they call Borussianism.

So the idea that like, we're not saying that the Pope is right to claim infallibility and we are German subjects first, but you also have to be German subjects first.

You can't be Prussian Protestants and then be like, oh, you have to get with the program because it's the German program.

It's like, well, no, that's also particularism, right?

Like you have this particular cultural tradition and you can't force us into that either, right?

And those are the Catholics that then are gathered in the center party, which we've already encountered in our June episode.

They were concerned with preserving their particularity vis-à-vis the nascent German state, right?

There have to be things, especially when it comes to things like education, where we have to just be allowed to do our own thing by this state.

Right.

The center party, in contrast to its name, we talked about how they are like on the political right before 1933.

Well, we'll get to that.

They drift more to the right.

They really start in the center.

They mean it.

They're like, we're fine with a lot of this stuff.

We think there should be national education.

We just think that you shouldn't be teaching people that the Pope is wrong.

They are in a very tricky kind of political position.

And in some way, the right-wing Catholics had a much easier time just joining these kind of traditionalist parties.

The center party is really staking out this very contradictory ground.

But it gets worse because it wasn't just about the role of German nationalism and particularism.

Catholicism becomes a stand-in for ethnicity.

Not in the sense that like Bavarians are their own ethnicity.

They're not.

Like not really.

But where might there be Catholics within the German Empire where religion becomes a kind of stand-in for ethnic and linguistic questions?

I'm guessing this is happening in the sort of frontier regions, right?

So like in the east, along the Polish border, and maybe in the south, closer to Italy.

Yeah, it's above all on the Polish border, what's today Poland, right?

Prussia was essentially a colonial state in those areas dominating a Polish majority, which was overwhelmingly Catholic and very culturally Catholic.

I mean, Poland still today really identifies with the Catholic Church, right?

This made the center very, very powerful there, but it also made the Prussians really, really allergic to Catholic particularism.

On the one hand, they were like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

If the Bavarians want to do a mass, like that's fine.

Ooh, but I'm getting a little scared about my Polish peasants over here.

Like, that I don't like.

This feels like a standard for something else.

Right.

So not all Catholics are created equal is what you're saying.

Yeah.

Right.

So for a Prussian Juncker like Bismarck, ultramontanism, so ceding authority to the other side of the Alps, meaning Rome, was always going to smack of a negation of national unity.

Now you're negating the national German idea, which technically a lot of these Polish nationalists, in fact, were.

We're like, yeah, we would like to leave Bismarck.

And he's like, well, that's what I'm talking about.

Now I don't feel so good about this.

Right.

This was also like weirdly a fringe accusation against John F.

Kennedy when he became the president.

Can he really be the leader of the U.S.

if he's got this secondary loyalty to the Pope?

It's this like idea of divided loyalties as a threat to the nationalist project.

That's right.

And so what we get is the so-called Kulturkampf, the culture war, where Bismarck starts sort of asserting national dominance over and against the Catholic Church and really goes all in on this fight with the Catholic Church, right?

And he advocates for a separation of church and state, a fight against ultra-montanism, and a separation of church and school, right?

Get the Catholics out.

of the school system.

The actual moves of this culture war were stuff like banning the Jesuits.

They love to be in school.

Yep.

Civil marriage, banning school oversight and inspection by the church.

Preachers can be held responsible if they sow civil unrest.

Read Polish nationalism, right?

Right.

No church subvention by the state, right?

Like the state will not give the Catholic Church any money.

And this becomes a gigantic fight.

I put in our notes for today's episode an 1878 caricature framing this conflict.

It's called Modus Vivendi, so a way of living.

Can you describe what you see here?

Yes, so it is a pope seated in his big papal robes on his nice papal throne with what looks like, I assume that's Otto von Bismarck, the nice military man, raising up one leg to show the pope his boot.

And then in the background, peeking through a curtain, observing them, is a dour-looking man in a bow tie and glasses.

Yes, that's a German observer who's basically trying to pick a side here.

The reason they're both raising their foot is because they're expecting the other to kiss their boot, right?

Oh, okay.

Someone's got to kiss someone's feet, but it's just not clear who it's going to be, right?

And what ends this fight is just that Pius IX died and his successor, Leo XIII, was more moderate.

Both sides kind of disarmed, and time passed.

One of these conflicts that doesn't really end in a clear victory, but more in a sort of gradual disinvestment from the stakes.

Exactly.

But set the Catholic Church in Germany on this course where there were people really coming down on various different sides of these issues.

And it weren't like one side versus the other, although that's how Bismarck thought about it, the ultramontanists versus like people who were German nationalists first.

But German Catholics were in a way divided along really interesting lines, right?

There were German Catholics who accepted the primacy of the German nation, who had rushed to declare their fealty to the Hohenzollerns, they called themselves state Catholics.

You know, this sounds a little creepy.

Yeah, state Catholics, not really a phrase you want to hear.

Sure.

At the same time, remember that Germany was a country still living with memories of sectarian violence and discrimination, right?

The idea that, hey, we're all kind of living in this country together, that that might need to supersede one of us believes in the Pope, the other one doesn't, can be quite a humane and liberal one, right?

To be like, look, we're just, we're going to have to agree to disagree and not bang heads over this, right?

Okay.

Yeah.

There were creeps among this group for sure, but there were state Catholics that absolutely came at this position out of what we would think of as a deeply humanistic thing.

We see almost proto-zoan beginnings of a gesture towards pluralist secularism.

I'm not going to allow

my religion to be the sole determinant of my political loyalties.

Well, in fact, this was an old position, right?

If you think about something like like the Enlightenment in Germany, like the first generation of Enlightenment thinkers, if we think of people like René Descartes, right?

The reason they try to minimize religion in their thinking was not that they were irreligious, but that they had seen what people were capable of.

If you told them that their irreconcilable religious differences were politically salient and that they should maybe murder each other over it, they do end up murdering each other over it.

And say, okay, what if we find something that isn't that and agree on that?

Such as the fact that we can all think and reason together, right?

Like this was an old position within Europe to sort of say, hey, it seems we don't agree on this Catholic Protestant thing.

So let's just shift attention to other things that maybe are better at creating a kind of shared basis for discourse and disagreement for us.

And usually the state Catholics opposed the center party's claim to speak for German Catholics as such, and they instead drew on an estatist understanding derived from the Hegelian right or from historic positivist schools of law.

So what does an estatist understanding mean?

That's not a phrase I've heard before.

Yeah, historic positivism might need some glossing for people.

What this basically means is they said, look, it's ahistorical to oppose church and state, right?

Over the course of centuries, their interactions have developed a logic of their own that you can't abstract from, right?

They had one relationship in the Middle Ages, they had one in early modernity, they had another one in absolutism, and they have a different one in the 19th century.

Okay, so like the notion that these are institutions that have had a changing relationship that are nonetheless somewhat symbiotic and that we don't need to put them against each other.

Yeah, look, we're just not in the Middle Ages anymore.

And to act like it is a little bit like you're cosplaying, right?

You may think that the church should have primacy, but if we look at our present historic moment, it's pretty fucking clear it doesn't.

We're not going to rewind history to like St.

Thomas Aquinas.

We've moved on.

Positive law, in this case, does not mean positivistic.

It means law that people have made over time, right?

As opposed to natural law.

They're saying it's not about what ought to be the case from first principles.

It's what ought to be the case from historic development, right?

They're saying like, look, would I enjoy it better if I lived in the 15th century?

Possibly.

I do not, in fact, live in the 15th century.

Here, I can't help but notice that, again, the German Empire is able to have trains that run on time.

The Catholic Church does not have a single fucking train.

So why are we talking about this?

What we call history is...

the re-articulation of the relationship between these two things.

And Hegel famously thought, well, what we really see is the spirit of religion transforming into something else, into kind of a more political, state-bound, what he calls spirit, right?

Objective spirit is what he'll call it.

What we were saying about like the claims of authority and imagination and loyalty of the church in one historic era become the claims of the nation in another.

This is basically a shorthand of this Hegelian process of the spirit of religion transforming into a spirit of the state.

Exactly.

So you have these state Catholics who basically say, look, we have to understand the emergence of the modern state as fundamentally re-articulating the relationship between church and state.

And we have sort of church supremacists who are saying, well, we think that the articulation of the modern state is a mistake.

And we think that ultimately we have to return the church to some kind of stature that it once had.

Like Adrian Vermeule.

Yes.

This is the integralist sect.

Yeah.

But those were often the center.

party, right?

This was often the liberals.

Adrian Vermuel, except with liberal pluralist politics.

It's very, very funny, right?

So by the time we get to 1933, we have these Rechtskatohen or Rechtgatuliken, right-wing Catholics.

But as the historian Olaf Blaszke points out, the term Rechtskatulisch was a left-wing descriptor of these people coined after the war, right?

It wasn't, like the dude, a handle that anyone self-applied in 1933, which creates all these definitional problems.

Like, who are we really talking about?

Who are these Catholics that found themselves in alliance or an agreement with the Nazis in 1933?

Blaschke sort of distinguishes between Rechtskatholiken on the one hand and a bunch of other groups and voting blocs that mixed Catholicism and right-wing politics in the 20s and 30s.

He lists Folkish Catholics, Catholic anti-Semites, philo-fascists, and Brown Catholics, right?

And you can sort of see in the way we've talked about the various subdivisions of these Catholics where they all come from.

This isn't just like, oh, I'm not that kind of fascist.

I'm this kind of fascist.

These are all people who really differ in their Catholicism, right?

Some are state-first Catholics.

Some are church-first Catholics, right?

Some are essentially fascists who also happen to be Catholic.

Some are Catholics who

think that the fascist state will reestablish the primacy of the Vatican, right?

Like there are really interesting mixes that are happening here.

At the same time, Blaszka also stresses that the term, you know, Rechtkatoliken, so right-wing Catholics, tends to suggest that there was a block of people responsible for the shift.

And he and a bunch of other historians of Catholicism point out that it's a far more diffuse set of actors and actions that created the sort of entente cordiale between the Nazis and the Catholic Church, or of Catholicism more broadly.

It wasn't a discrete set of personalities and political groups that underwent this shift.

It was that various Catholic subgroups became more comfortable with fascism and with the Nazis as time went on in the 1920s for a variety of reasons.

The historian Manfred Geilos points out that there was this new, what he calls the hybridity of faith in the 1920s.

For Protestants in Germany, identifying the church and the state was easy, right?

Their church was run by the state.

But Catholics were not immune to this kind of thinking.

that they thought, you know, in some way, the Catholic Church and the German state are also identical, right?

What do they mean by that?

Yeah, the first people to disagree with that would, of course, be the official Catholic Church.

Yeah, I'm thinking of the Catholic being like, why no?

We are

not a worldly power or not holding temporal power.

In Germany, we are a divine power with our own set of institutions.

Yeah, but the idea that, like, well, historically, isn't the Catholic Church an expression of the Germanic spirit, right?

And again, like, an Italian pope would be like, what the fuck?

I'm Italian over here.

Italian here.

I do.

Spaniard here.

I do not accept this, right?

There's an attempt to reintegrate Catholic faith into this broader, like almost metaphysical nationalist sentiment.

Exactly, right?

The way we could think about this is like a traditionalist Catholicism.

Are there Catholics outside of Germany?

Sure.

But isn't Catholicism to some extent integrated into German nationhood and German Volkstums or German folk identity?

You can think about this as like patrimony versus the Folksgemanschev, the people's community, right?

To sort of say like, isn't part of our national patrimony to have been Catholic?

I'm like, yeah, there's something to that, right?

You know, Catholicism may have started as something that came from outside, but it has merged with a lot of German folk tradition.

Well, maybe we can hold on to that.

And then on the other hand, you had like, well, no, no, no, no, no.

We have to accept a temporal power outside of Germany in order to count as German Catholics.

Well, that would be harder to square with German Folksgemannchev, with the kind of the German people, right?

Like being a German Catholic means having a loyalty outside of being German.

And so this becomes extremely tricky.

And what's interesting is it becomes tricky from the bottom up.

This is grassroots.

Individual Catholics sort of find ways to square that circle for themselves and their Vatican trained priests.

They go, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you can't do that, right?

There's the same way that like Catholic churches in colonial societies may merge specific popular traditions or ethnic traditions with Catholicism.

And the Catholic Church is in a really weird ambivalent position that they're on the one hand like, well, cool, they're getting into it, but they're also getting into stuff that isn't really authorized by us.

Well, now that stuff is taking over.

So there's a real alarm among the German bishops about like these people who are like, well, I don't see a contradiction here.

Like, there very much is.

You know, we don't hate the Nazis, but like, there very much is a contradiction here.

Right.

And the center party sort of gets ripped up between all this.

There are more left-wing or liberal Catholic forces vying for control and more conservative ones.

There are more clerical or ultra-montanist.

This might not be how they call themselves anymore, don't app me.

Like people who are just like, no, no, no, no, no, we have to accept the authority of the Pope.

And there were nationalists for whom Catholicism was just part of being the German folk, right?

But most importantly, this was a huge party, one of the largest and perhaps most diverse in the entire Weimar Republic.

There was what people genuinely believed and there was what they believed voters wanted.

Do we lose all our voters if we embrace X or Y?

Do we need to follow them if we follow them down this particular rabbit hole?

Or if we are too open and like, no, German nationalism is incompatible with Catholicism, actually, right?

The center party is kind of sorry, but like...

beholden to two masters, one of which wants to win elections in Germany.

The other one, eh, take it or leave it, right?

It has all these stakeholders.

And this being a Catholic party, those stakeholders aren't just in Germany, right?

I'm thinking here of a man born Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli.

I can see you like making the little like pinching gesture as you say that name.

It is an incredibly Italian name.

It is super Italian, yeah.

So he was the Cardinal Secretary of State in the Vatican and the Camarlago, a position that will be familiar to Dan Brown fans among our listeners.

This has come up enough on the podcast that I do think I have to read the Da Vinci Code now because you bring it up like every third episode.

Well, no, no, it's not the Da Vinci Code, it's in the other one.

He's played by you and McGregor in the movie, I think.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I do assume that the number of Dan Brown fans among our listenership is zero.

So it's probably not.

Now we're going to get emails, you know.

Oh, yeah.

But yeah.

You might know Cardinal Pacelli from his later job as Pope Pius XII.

Aw, famous.

Love his work.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He'll be an important part of our story.

Pacelli was emphatic in wanting the center party to turn away from, well, the center, from the SPD, right?

They're like, you're constantly working with a socialist party.

These people are godless.

Pinky.

These people are godless.

Yeah.

You need to get in bed with the right.

Hey, that's the title of the podcast.

The actual center party leadership, including Chancellor Brüning in the early 1930s, thought this was a mistake.

Franz von Papen, who we met in our very first episode, was also Catholic and Pacelli pushed Papen towards basically cooperating with the Nazis.

I don't know whether he had any influence in the calamitous decisions in late January 1933, but basically this was the push.

Get out of bed with the social democrats.

Let's get something out of the right wingers.

These are traditionalists.

These are nationalists.

These are anti-secularists in some cases.

Let's see whether we can get concessions out of them.

So the Vatican is picking political winners in Germany.

That's right.

And shocker, the horses that they're betting on are the far right.

That's right.

So Pacelli, once the Nazis are in power, helps Pius XI negotiate what's called the Reichskonkordat, which was signed on July 20th, 1933.

That's a treaty between the church and state for the entire German Reich.

There have been several federal states, for instance Bavaria, Prussia, and Baden, which had negotiated earlier treaties of this kind.

Right, but this one is for the entire German Reich.

Exactly.

Many of those negotiated by the apostolic nuncius at the time in Germany, one,

wait for it, Eugenio Pacelli.

Oh, okay.

So he's bringing out this work he's done before

to make a bigger, more general sort of treaty or contract between the Vatican and the Nazi German state.

That's right.

And that's July 20th, 1933, you said?

The negotiations finished in early July, and then they signed it on July 20th.

These kinds of treaties were part of a long-time project of the Holy See.

And we might want to talk about why.

Since 1918, most monarchies in Europe had fallen.

So basically, the relationship between church and state needed to be reconfigured or at least reaffirmed.

Note that these guys in the Vatican are thinking weirdly, given what we know the stakes to be today, looking back, in shifts and matters bigger than day-to-day politics, right?

They're wondering about the role of faith in government in society as a whole.

Surely the way to get a modernizing population to maintain their faith in God is for the institutions that represent God on earth to get in bed with the Nazis.

That has never given anybody a crisis of faith.

The Catholic Church is just playing a very different game.

They think of themselves as playing the long game, right?

We might think of them today as extremely narrow-minded and short-sighted in concluding a treaty with a literal devil.

At the same time, what they think they're doing is rolling back the effects of the fall of the great monarchies across Europe and the sudden precarity of the church's position in those societies as a result of that.

Brüning claims that Hitler and von Patten had first contacted the Holy See about a Germany-wide concordat.

If you remember, during the negotiations over the enabling laws in April of 1933, Ludwig Haas, the head of the center party, quite a right-wing member of that party, part of that right-word authoritarian shift in that party, had made negotiating such a concordat, such a treaty with the Vatican, part of his negotiations with Hitler, being like, I will support you if you then reach out to the Holy See and see if you can't get an agreement figured out the negotiations took place on easter in the vatican hilariously enough with germans on both sides of the table kaas would move to the vatican you know his job at the center party was gone because the center party was gone so he moved to the vatican and participated in the second round of negotiations in july So basically the Nazis were now negotiating again with Ludwig Kaas for a second time to roll over.

He's the rare man who sold out to the Nazis twice.

Really, takes a little bit of doing.

And they start ironing out the real sticking points in July of 1933.

Hitler keeps pushing for an apolitical clergy.

It was important to him that the clergy could not preach politics from the pulpit, and ironically, kept offering more of a role for Catholicism in education, right?

He'd be like, well, we're okay with some religious schools.

I just don't want them to say I'm bad or thou shalt not kill shit from the pulpit.

Especially after the ESA began also beating up on Catholic groups, the German bishops were far more concerned.

We're like, we're okay with less religion in schools, to be honest.

We want guaranteed autonomy for Catholic civil society orgs.

We don't want these to be dissolved the way we're seeing everything else dissolved, the way we're seeing the center party being dissolved.

Aaron Ross Powell, we talked about how a general German women's group in, what was it, June or May 1933?

Yeah.

Was just taken over, and all of the leaders were replaced with Nazi-affiliated women, and suddenly it was a Nazi women's group, right?

The Catholics are looking around and being like, well, we've got our charity advocacy churches, what have you, and we don't want you to fire all of our people and put in yours.

We would like a degree of independence.

Aaron Powell, exactly.

And this is exactly what the Reichskonkordat will then include.

So the German Reich will guarantee freedom of profession and the public practice of the Catholic religion.

The Catholic Church gets to regulate and manage its own affairs within the strictures of the law.

The original concordances basically concluded with Bavaria, Baden, Prussia, etc.

etc.

are recognized as sort of being special and like still holding, right?

They are not getting synchronized in that way.

There's going to be a bunch of stuff about how clergy can be appointed, how clergy can be removed, et et cetera, et cetera.

The German state also subsidizes Catholic religious education.

This still, by the way, is true today.

Wow.

Yeah, they did play the long game and I guess they kind of won in a really fucked up way.

Catholic parishes, the bishoprics, et cetera, et cetera, religious orders and congregations, as well as institutions and foundations, are recognized by the state and will not be synchronized.

The church basically freely appoints church dignitaries and office holders.

and it has a secret codicil.

The Reichskonkart has a part that wasn't public.

Uh-oh.

Yeah.

Which is interesting.

It starts with, in the event of a restructuring of the present German military system in the sense of the introduction of general conscription.

Oh.

Oh.

When we rearm

and violate the very specific provisions in the Treaty of Versailles telling us not to do that.

So the Nazis are admitting in this secret clause of their contract with the Vatican that they are intending to rearm and presumably pursue a military expansion.

Aaron Powell, exactly.

They're saying, in that case, we will not call up priests.

They're exempt from universal conscription.

So are people studying to be priests, et cetera, et cetera.

What they do is go and invade Poland in 1939, the majority Catholic countries.

I want to be very clear.

The Catholics are being put on

that their own faithful are going to be terrorized.

Yeah, it's really quite remarkable, isn't it?

This thing basically acknowledges that the Nazis are planning an expansionist foreign policy, a violent foreign policy, that it will require a large and expanded army, that it fully intends to, as you say, do away with the Treaty of Versailles.

And the Catholic Church not only goes along with it, but basically says, we'll agree to keep the secret, right?

It's really quite a remarkable document.

Those kid-rubbing motherfuckers.

I know.

So maybe we'll leave it there for our July.

But looking back, I think you kind of get a sense of like the Catholic Church is looking to reset its relationship with the German state.

And I think on the one hand, we have to be clear, this is the official Vatican.

These are a bunch of Italian dudes who frankly already have made some real strides towards getting into bed with Mussolini.

And now they're like, yeah, cool, we'll do this one too.

Like, we can collect these dudes.

Fascists, we love those.

We invented that here in Italy.

Yeah.

That's right.

At the same time, it is also important to note that at least when it came to the Center Party, a guy like Kaas is not an agent of the Vatican who like hijacks the formerly liberal center party and drags it to the right, right?

He's not some foreign actor.

The center party moved to the right because German Catholics did.

The reason why the Nazis are like, hey, please prohibit German priests from condemning stuff from the pulpit is because German priests were in fact being like, yeah, I don't think this is kosher, you guys.

You cannot.

Whatever is Catholic for kosher, who knows?

But like, they're just like, you should not be beating up people in the street, by the way.

Like, that is bad.

That is sinful.

The Catholic clergy is in a far better position to push people to anti-Nazi positions.

And And as we saw with the Protestant theologian Karl Baut, has a much better reason for being like, I'm not party to this.

Like my conscience belongs to God, not to the German people.

And I will tell you, you should not be beating up those people.

Murder is wrong.

I've got a couple of commandments here that suggest this.

And I don't give a shit what Hitler tells you to do.

Don't do that.

And it's very important for the Nazis to silence them.

So it's this very interesting thing where on the one hand, you have like rank and file Catholics and you have the kind of, you don't even have like the institutional church.

You have different factions within the institutional church, part of which is quite anti-Nazi clearly, right?

Hitler is not trying to get the Concordat done in order to shut up like rank and file Bavarian Catholics.

He's worried about the parish priest, right?

He's like, that guy needs to shut the hell up.

Like I don't want him spreading ideas about like, you're going to hell for going along with this asshole, by the way, right?

Like that's what he doesn't want to hear.

He's worried about bishops.

He's worried about deacons.

He's worried about all that stuff.

He's not worried about Pacelli.

He's not worried about the Pope, but he's also not worried about like your everyday Catholic because he knows like they have come up with these kind of hybrid positions of nationalism and Catholicism already.

It's not like the elites versus the people, the voters versus the party, the Vatican versus the locals.

Like these are questions of conscience and of interpretation that are 50 years in the making and where people have maneuvered themselves over time into these very different camps.

And it's very, very tricky by 1933 to say, like, what do Catholics do?

Because, like, yeah, there isn't one thing that the Catholics do.

They break down along extremely unpredictable lines, which is another place where you sort of see like we're dealing with a complicated set of historical precedents that allow people to find their courage or to find their seemingly limitless capacity for collaboration.

There's always a new bottom.

Yeah.

We just keep digging.

Yeah.

Also, sites of resistance that are kind of unpredictable, right?

And the Nazis are good at sniffing those out and be like, oh shit, there's actually something really explosive here.

And shutting it down.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you for taking me on this wild, weird journey through 1933.

It's always a pleasure to record these with you because I feel like I learned so much in such a short amount of time.

Well, in this case, I learned a lot too, because I do have to say, like, not being Catholic and not having spent much time thinking about sort of various churches on the Third Reich, like I really learned a lot.

And I have to thank all the wonderful historians whose work I was able to draw on here and who really have taught me, I think, collectively how to distinguish between like Catholicism as a way of life, Catholicism as doctrine, Catholicism as something that's taught at universities.

how these kinds of things to me as an outsider, it doesn't always matter.

But like, yeah, no, it mattered in 1933 and it mattered in ways that weren't always predictable.

And I want to pat myself on the back for having made it through two and a half hours of recording with an Irish Catholic person without ever having said the Catholics.

So I'm going to do it at the end.

You were resisting it and it just came bursting out.

Yes.

The entire time.

Like the Catholics.

Thank you so much for listening to your favorite podcast, Inbed with a Right.

In Bed with the Right is made possible by hundreds of listeners who support us via patreon.com.

Our episodes are produced and edited by Mark Yoshizumi and Katie Lau.

Our title music is by Katie Lau.