Episode 78 -- Project 1933, Part III: May 1 to May 31

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Loyra Donegan.

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

So, Adrienne, we are coming back with part three

of our Opus Project, 1933, looking at the Nazis' first year in power.

Yeah, if you are only tuning in now, please listen to the first and second episode.

Because, like, this is not one of those series where like you don't have to have read the prequels before you can understand what's going on in the new release.

We're looking at each month of 1933, more or less contemporaneously with that month in 2025.

That's right.

And it is like a really continuous story where things change very quickly.

And I think to get the best version of it, you'll want to listen to the whole thing through.

Yeah.

And we apologize for releasing the May episode, like at the last possible moment.

In our defense, these things do take a ton of time to research.

And on this one in particular, I think we wanted to make sure to incorporate the truly incredible scholarship on gender and sexuality at this point in history.

And it does take us a while to edit these things because they tend to be super long.

Like, if you think these episodes come out long, you should see us in our little like Zoom chat just going on and on for hours.

For hours.

And speaking of the time it takes to research and edit these things, we have a Patreon.

Yes.

You can support us on Patreon.

We have three tiers of support, the pervert, the preacher, and the creep.

So you can decide which one best suits your spirit and come join us over there.

We put out two Patreon episodes every month, and our paid subscribers get access to things like a Discord.

They get early access to our merch.

It's a fun little community, and it's a great way to support the podcast and allow us to keep doing this.

Yeah.

Part of why we're recording so late late is that you were in the UK, right?

Yeah, I went to London.

I have a, I don't know if I should call this my day job or my moonlighting job.

The truth is that I do both of these jobs, like largely like in my pajamas in bed at like the crack of 10 a.m.

But I went to London for my job as a columnist at Guardian US as part of a retreat they were doing there.

And I got to spend some time with some really wonderful colleagues over at the UK UK newsroom and explore London a little bit.

But now I'm back in the US.

We are here.

We're doing it.

We're going to take you through May of 1933.

In terms of setting the scene, I thought we could have Victor Klempere do the honors.

Do you want to remind us who Viktor Klemperer was?

Yeah, so Victor Klemperer was a professor of German and French.

Partly we know about him because he kept a really meticulous and historically useful diary, which recorded recorded not only like the political happenings in Germany, but also like his psychic state and his feelings about them, which makes him like a really useful resource.

He was like a lot of people in Germany at the time, a kind of like ethnically, but not like religiously or particularly culturally Jewish guy.

He was born Jewish, but he was also like.

baptized as a Protestant and he was kind of a conservative.

He's an interesting figure because he was on the political right.

He was like an anti-communist, but he found himself being anti-Nazi.

And his sort of assessments of the Nazis' rise to power is a really nice snapshot.

That's right.

So we've been relying on him quite a bit.

On May 15th, which was a Monday evening in 1933, he has this long entry in his diary, which I think really does sum up what we've been talking about.

So the first thing he talks about is the thing we ended last episode with, which are that many dismissals, forced retirements, et cetera, at the university.

So he lists, quote, Kafka, Holdack in brackets, 50% Jewish, threatened.

Gehrig threatened because he's a Democrat.

Wilbrandt goes because he's a socialist.

Boumler made professor of political pedagogy in Berlin where Spranger has had to go.

So he's like recording the carousel of like academic appointments, but like it's also noting, it's like, this guy has to go just because he likes democracy.

This guy has to go because he's 50% Jewish.

And this is all a kind of...

a nomenclature that I think would have been pretty new to him.

But suddenly, like this kind of bizarre and really rebarbative language of the Nazis kind of starts seeping into people's self-reporting.

I think he's doing this with some sarcasm, right?

He's like, oh, 50% Jewish, is it?

And he's already also pointing with Bohmler in Berlin to like, oh, there are these opportunists who are basically going to lap up these positions that the Nazis have forced others to vacate either by forced retirement or by just removal.

Aaron Ross Powell, I find this line really revealing because, on the one hand, you see this multiplying array of reasons that people are becoming like professionally persona non-grata, right?

Like, it's not just

being Jewish or like being communist as it was in the first couple of months of 1933.

Now, there's this like multiplying number of reasons why somebody might get pushed out of their jobs.

And then it's also just illustrative of how

quickly what had been like really fringe and not particularly widespread ideologies about race and nationality have now become not just mainstream, but like having a definitive impact on like policy and people's employment.

Yeah.

And you don't get that with him, but you get the feeling that some people are in fact adopting it because it is the reason they're going to get a job, right?

Yeah.

So these people who are finding themselves promoted are like, well, you did have to go.

You was half Jewish, right?

Like this vocabulary, they're incentivized to start deploying it because while they're talking into their own pocket, right?

The thing about this kind of racism is that it creates in-groups as well as out-groups, right?

That's an incentive to be like, oh, that's actually a way I could get up in the world a little bit, is because I have this like racial origin, which is not really something that can be taken away from me.

And now it has more currency than it did even a couple weeks ago.

Yeah.

The fact that people now can blame DEI policies for not getting their mediocre ass the job that they really wanted just because they're white, that's the same idea.

You suddenly have something that cannot be taken away from you, and that you can credit for either your fortunes or your misfortunes, and that you can make bank on.

And that is the problem that people, some people may genuinely believe this.

Some people may use it opportunistically.

For the vast majority of people, I think it's a point of indistinction.

Like, who cares whether you actually believe it or not?

If you're getting a job out of it, and once you have the job, you might well tell yourself, hey, I got this fair and square, right?

We all like to think that we got the jobs that we got for good reasons, right?

So that's the first thing, what's called the synchronization, the gleichschaltung of the civil service.

Tease that out a little bit more because the synchronization of the civil service means the bringing into alignment with Nazi ideology and policy prerogatives, not just of the Nazi party apparatus, but like all of the bureaucracy, all of the nationally funded institutions, and then the state governments as well.

Yeah.

Museums, art academies, high schools.

It's a massive administrative task, basically.

It's just like purging people at every level of politics and civil society from positions where they may have been for like quite some time.

Now, and while people might be thinking, Jesus Christ, this reminds me so much of right now, I do want to point out one very important distinction that I think will emerge a little bit more clearly today when we talk about unions, which is that in 1933, of course, we are four years away from 1929, meaning this is a society with a vast standing reserve of unemployed people of just about any profession, Meaning there are hungry people, not literally hungry, but like professionally hungry, frustrated, formerly ambitious people wanting these jobs.

That is, I think, one of the really big salient distinctions right now that what we're seeing is a purging of the federal bureaucracy with very little to take its place.

That is a real point of distinction.

They are like maintaining these institutions, but like mutating them for their own ends rather than destroying the institutions outright, which is like the Doge project, right?

Exactly.

If you remember, the law for the, quote, restoration of the civil service talks about efficiency, sort of doge style, but in the end, of course, actually meant a multiplication of bureaucracies because you now had a party bureaucracy and you had the state bureaucracy, and they were often insufficiently merged.

They were often in competition with one another, which we'll see at some point today when it comes to the book burnings.

And there were different kind of understandings like who they felt fealty to.

So in some ways, actually, the Nazis did speak the language of efficiency, but the first thing we see in 1933 is actually massive inefficiency.

They're building a system that is labyrinthine.

Declaring efficiency and then creating conditions of great inefficiency.

Like, I don't know that I'm not sure that's as a great a distinction.

But I will say, I will, I will, like, grant your point that the Nazis are expanding institutional capacities and creating redundancies of institutional capacities because they had their eye towards this, like, authoritarian control of social life.

Yeah.

Whereas, like, the Trump project is trying to do two things at once, partly because they've got this divided constituency within the MAGA right.

So they're trying to expand control over individual social life and over institutional life and intellectual life.

But they're also trying to cut back on state capacity very dramatically.

And those two projects are a bit at odds.

I will note, though, that there does seem to be in our own era like some evidence that employment purges and grant withdrawals and things like that are happening more often to women and people of color than they are to white men.

So there is at least some correlation between the Trump administration's like disfavored groups and those who are being purged from this kind of federal funding and employment structures.

Absolutely.

So that's the first thing to note.

The second thing is Klempel himself still has a job, but it's very clear, and this is where the sort of grand cancellations you just alluded to become a point of comparison.

It's clear he can't rely on his old professional networks anymore.

This isn't just about removing people from places of power.

It's also, it's destroying structures within the institutions that could push back.

Well, no, this guy is good.

We need him.

Fuck off, right?

For which there still was some legal cover, if you recall.

The law for the purification of the German civil service was supposed to exclude anyone who had served in World War I, which was a ton of people.

So there was a way to be like, not these guys.

Klempela was being protected by a dean named Beste.

I don't know much about him.

Beste, he says, stands up for me, is inwardly embittered, in brackets center party man, but everywhere else, complete helplessness, cowardice, fear.

There's a guy from the Catholic Center Party, which had just signed on to the Enabling Act a couple months ago that functionally was the

Weimar law that allowed Hitler to be a dictator.

But this is a guy within that center party or with those center party loyalties who is not going along with the Nazi project.

Exactly.

There's a lot of gradations.

We've talked about this before.

Yeah.

Right.

But it's like people's actual political opinions and loyalties are very nuanced and sometimes divided.

Yeah.

But then it also does seem that one of the common denominators that basically everybody is exhibiting in their responses to the Nazis' rise to power is like cowardice and like indecision, terror.

Yeah.

And this kind of inward turn, right?

He's inwardly embittered.

He says, besta now dean.

So I don't know anything about this guy, but he just got this job.

Yeah.

Presumably replacing someone.

And he's like, I feel real bad about this.

like, it's like, who knows?

He appears to have protected Kempara at this point.

So that's nice.

But people are also not exactly winning profiles and courage awards.

I am taking that job.

There are examples we have people being offered jobs and being like, fuck off, right?

Like, I would rather chop my hand off.

But that's the thing.

These people are still functioning in institutions that are supposed to serve a purpose.

And like.

as people who work in a large institution that is supposed to serve a purpose, like it's easy to say, well, in the end, it's more important that the kids get educated than for me to make my own kind of valiant stand here.

So,

fuck it.

I'll just go to class until they don't let me.

I can also see the effect of the Great Depression and previous Weimar economic deprivation.

Yeah.

These are people of a generation who had really had their dreams destroyed by circumstances outside their control.

The collapse of the Weimar economy, followed very quickly thereafter by the global Great Depression.

Like you just said, there are people who are unemployed en masse, right?

And so they're probably thinking, you know, the cost of principal is high and the temptations to take advantage of these professional opportunities that might be ill-gotten, but are also sort of greater than anything you had been led to believe was possible just a couple months ago.

Yeah.

You know, I bet that's very tempting for a lot of people.

Yeah.

It's important to note that life does go on.

Clempera is also building a house at the same time.

He and his wife bought a nice plot of land and the construction there kind of turned into a nightmare the way these things tend to, right?

For that simple reason, he's like, we're not leaving until we're out of escrow or whatever, right?

People have very real everyday concerns that to them, you know, in hindsight, you're like, my God, how could you fixate on that in such a time?

And it's like, well, they didn't know there was such a time necessarily.

You know, people are buying groceries and like fighting with their parents and trying to get laid.

There's the weird contrast between the ongoingness of the demands of the daily, just social and narcissistic impulses,

and then this collapse, this catastrophe of history that's unfolding around them.

The simultaneity of those could be like kind of uncanny, I think.

The third point I want to point to is that there are terror stories everywhere.

Terror is everywhere now.

But at the same time, you're not supposed to share terror stories.

So what do you mean by terror stories?

Yeah, here's how Klempera puts it.

Quote, the garden of a communist in Heidenau is dug up.

There's supposed to be a machine gun in it.

He denies it.

Nothing is found.

To squeeze a confession out of him, he's beaten to death.

The corpse brought to the hospital.

Boot marks on the stomach, fist-sized holes in the back, cotton wool stuffed into them.

Official post-mortem result, cause of death, dysentery, which frequently causes premature death.

And then he adds acerbically, atrocity stories are lies and severely punished.

So they beat this guy to death, this communist who they wanted to frame for a crime.

They failed to frame him for a crime.

So they beat him to death, and then they forge an official account in which he shits himself to death instead.

Yeah.

Which is supposed to be threadbare, right?

Because Because if you tell the true story, you're spreading quote-unquote atrocity stories.

And the Nazis, this sort of goes away after a while, but like in this first year where they're consolidating power, they become obsessed with like people spreading lies about them, meaning people accurately reporting what they're doing.

Right.

Because it's not just control.

over the human beings via violence.

It's control over the narrative.

It's control over the content of reality.

Yes, but I think that again, there might be some parallels emerging here for our listeners.

Part of it also was that they wanted to give a part of the population that was really living out its most sadistic fantasies, that really was starting to remove all the people from work they didn't like, starting to beat people up, starting to murder people, the cover of reactivity, to say that you were only reacting to these horrible lies that they are spreading about you abroad.

It was a moment when for a non-Jewish right-wing German to think of themselves as a victim was becoming harder and harder because wherever you looked, there were brown churches beating up on people right but no no no no no in spite of appearances you still are a victim and any violence you visit on others is in some ways reactive just to give you an example from april so a little bit outside of our time frame There's a decree that says, quote, in response to the shameless atrocity mongering perpetrated by Jews abroad, the German Student Union is planning a four-week comprehensive campaign against the Jewish spirit of subversion and for nationally conscious thought and feeling in German literature.

This announcement from the Nazi German Student Union would start the process leading up to the book burnings in early May.

But notice that the excesses of these first few months are sort of positioned entirely as reactive to the point of incoherence.

On the one hand, if there is this subversive spirit that's destroying the German soul or whatever, you can see why the Nazis would just want to get rid of these books.

Like, I mean, I don't endorse that, but if that's what you genuinely believe, okay.

But no, they can't say that.

It's also in reaction, right?

It has to be both.

They're like, oh, we have to purge ourselves.

Also, we're doing this just as a reaction, just to be clear.

Yeah, this is something we see a lot with Trumpism, but I think it's a recurring sort of internal contradiction of the logics of the far right, which is that the enemy both has to be like contemptibly and preordained by nature to be like weak and simultaneously very strong and capable of anything.

And by the same token, the in-group, the sort of national group, be it white Americans or non-Jewish Germans, has to be both noble and strong and preordained by nature towards domination and at the same time, like continuously victimized and attacked.

Exactly.

And needing to protect itself maximally.

Just to give you an idea of how pervasive the sense of terror was, there's an incident that Thomas Mann records in his diary the week before Klimper writes his diary entry.

The journalist Felix Manuel Mendelssohn had fled to Switzerland earlier that spring and tried to visit Erich Marielle Marck, right, the author of All Quiet on the Western Front, who, you may recall, had fled Germany the day before Hitler came to power.

Was like, I'm out.

I know what's coming.

I am out.

Yeah.

And after leaving Ramarck's house that night, he somehow died on his property.

And Mann seems to think in his diary entry, and historians largely agree, that he was probably killed by people who thought that he was Erich Maria Ramarck.

Like Mendelssohn himself was not important enough to assassinate, but in the darkness, they got the wrong guy, basically.

And this is in Lugano, Switzerland.

There are Nazi thugs stalking these people even abroad.

Like these people have henchmen.

They have plenty of supporters, including in the United States, right?

It puts the émigrés in a really precarious position.

Yeah, so you're not really safe even after you get out of Germany.

The fourth thing that I wanted to draw out of the Klempera diary is the thing that we're going to be talking about a lot today, the feeling of isolation, of being able to attend only to the stuff that applies to yourself.

So Klemper has the sense that others, like the communists in Heidenau, are suffering even worse, but he isn't able to grapple with it, really.

He's like, oh my God, I'm having a tough enough time understanding what's happening at my own workplace, let alone what's happening to that poor dude who was clearly railroaded and murdered.

I'm just going to mention it, but I'm overcapacity, basically.

The demands of survival in conditions of extreme precarity make solidarity harder and harder, right?

You have less and less resources, less and less time, energy, physical, psychic, to attend to the suffering of other people.

So it's harder to be of help to them.

Or you might not even know how to find them or who they are.

This is still a fairly stratified society.

So Klemper is aware of the even worse crackdown on outsiders, especially communists and proletarians.

But he has to bracket it, and he is very, very explicit about that.

He says, quote, of the National Socialists' criminal and insane acts, I only make a note of what somehow touches me personally.

Everything else can be looked up in the newspapers.

The mood of the present time, the waiting, the visiting one another, the counting of days, the inhibited telephone conversations and correspondence, all that could be recorded in memoirs one day.

But my life is coming to an end, and these memoirs will never be written.

Whoa, that is really dark.

So he's like grappling with this other violence that the rise of the Nazis is inflicting on him, which is like the narrowing of his own moral universe.

Yeah.

You get the sense that he's like grieving for his own ethical capacity, which he finds being like narrowed by circumstances.

It feels so tired to say this, but which is the prerogative of a citizen of a democratic society.

I have no investment in this other group, but I think the way they're being treated is shameful and I want to stand up for them.

That's the basic experience of democratic citizenship.

And he's feeling that slipping away.

It's like, I have to look out for myself right now.

I understand that as a moral failing.

I understand that as a frustration, but what else am I going to do?

Look it up in a fucking book, right?

But like, I would argue that there's, you know, you can understand this, I think, accurately as he does, as a moral failing on his part.

But I can also understand it as a moral injury that is being done to him and to other journalism, right?

Yeah, he understands it that way too.

Yeah.

He is being deprived of the opportunity to be as righteous and good a person as he would in other circumstances have the capacity to be, right?

Exactly.

My guess is he's not thinking about LGBT people.

He's not necessarily thinking about women.

He's thinking probably about proletarians, right?

This is a thoroughly bourgeois guy.

And he's like, if I read the newspaper correctly, it suggests that they're getting it even worse than I am.

We know at this point that the Communist Party has been banned and a lot of the communists have fled.

The Socialist Party, have they also been banned by this point?

Not yet.

The SPD will be around for one more month.

But a lot of them, I imagine, are their leaders are starting to be imprisoned and facing exile.

How are the trade unionists doing?

So that's what we're going to talk about today.

Last time was a lot about lawyers, doctors, professors, right?

Glei Shaltung had a lot to do with the civil service, with the state as an employer.

And today we're going to be talking about how different groups across society, women's groups, LGBT people, and unions experienced the Nazi terror, experienced the synchronization and the legal onslaught of early 1933.

Our dates are May 1st to May 31st, 1933.

And there are a couple of themes that are going to emerge.

One is about these people that Kempela is having trouble imagining, right?

He's like, I know they're out there, I know they're suffering, but I don't understand what's happening with them.

And I don't think I have the capacity to find out.

And we're going to be focusing on four topics.

I have to pick something, right?

The trade unions, the feminist movement, and the question of sexuality.

So, this would be around Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin.

So, we got the proletarians, the feminists, and the queers.

Yeah.

Great.

Famously, people who do really well under the Nazis.

I'm sure this is going to be a very cheery episode.

Also known as Our Base.

Yeah.

Pinkos, feminists, and queers.

Yeah, it's true.

Thank you, listeners.

Those could be another three patrianteers.

Yeah, that's right.

But what if you both?

As always, we should also name our sources.

So we're drawing on Timothy Mason's book of essays, Nazism, Fascism, and the Working Class.

We're drawing again on the work of Richard J.

Evans, but a different work this time, not the coming of the Third Reich.

His first book, I think, is on the feminist movement in Germany, 1894 to 1933.

So the final chapter of that is all about the collapse of the feminist movement under Nazism.

He also wrote about the working class and the Nazis.

I was mostly drawing on a piece in Jacobin, Workers Didn't Bring Us Fascism.

Richard J.

Evans is really like kind of an unsung MVP of this podcast.

We've been relying on him a lot.

Yeah, he's the 1933 MVP.

The other one we're going to be talking about a little bit is Laurie Marhofer's book, Sex and the Weimar Republic, which is excellent.

Lori has sort of semi-promised to possibly be on a later episode of this.

Very excited for that.

But Sex and the Weimar Republic is really all about the question: like, well, can we understand the rise of Nazism as a backlash politics?

Right.

And Laurie's answer, I think, is sort of like no.

Okay.

The backlash sort of is in there, but it's not as straightforward as that.

I hope I'm not mischaracterizing his overall argument there, but it's a very, very cool book.

And then I'm going to mention two German sources.

I know some of our listeners read German.

So it's Baba Grieven Ashof's Die Bürgerische Fraunbewigung in Deutschland.

So that's about the, how to translate that, the bourgeois, basically, the middle-class women's movement in Germany.

We'll talk about why that distinction matters.

It's a large and powerful constituency.

Oh, yeah.

There's always bourgeois versus proletarian feminisms, particularly in this, like what we might term as like the first wave era at the beginning of the 20th century.

Yeah.

I mean, we'll get to it in a second, but in the Weimar Republic, the salient distinction is what she calls the Bürgerische Fraunbewun.

So the middle class or bourgeois women's movement.

Which we're talking about today.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Is non-partisan.

It says it's not affiliated with a party, which is really code for we're not communists.

And it is true that there is a big communist feminist movement, but of course it understands itself as kind of subservient to the communist cause.

Right, yeah.

So that's it's it's a question of sort of priorities.

But this is something that I think after the Palmer raids, after the first Red Scare, and all the excesses in the wake of World War I, you didn't really, I think, get in the United States quite as much anymore.

There had been that.

But in Germany, that was still very much thriving.

So you do have feminists who are very different from the people we're going to meet today, except they were getting, were pressed for being communists, not for being feminists.

Yeah, like feminism, you always have to sort of add this asterisk that they like, they disagree with each other.

You're talking about a lot of different people who fit under one umbrella.

Yeah.

And we just can't talk about all of them because there's too many contradictions.

Exactly.

And for our purposes, the question of how did they get synchronized is only interesting for the bourgeois women's orgs.

Cause like the communist women's orgs are just like were already banned by May.

Yeah.

They'd all fled.

They're already underground.

Yeah.

And the imposition of

the like Nazi version of leadership on the women's movement is like very fascinating for those institutions that they don't dismantle.

We're talking about like the difference between dismantling an institution versus trying to warp it into something very different for your own ends.

That is something that the Nazis only attempt to do with the bourgeois women's movement.

The other two German language books is Jens Dobla's Polizeie und Homosexuale in the Weimar Republik.

That's Police and the Homosexual in the Weimar Republic.

That's got some really interesting stuff towards the end of the book about what is the transition really like in terms of policing.

And Rainer Hahn's very recent book, Der Lieber und dem Leit, which is the first history of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin.

Magnus Hirschfeld.

It's fascinating that it's the first one.

And I think the reason it's the first one is because of where we're going to end up with today's episode.

So much of their records were burned.

Kahn is like, I think is the head of the Magnus Hirschfeld Society.

So I think he just kind of kept collecting things that by accident had survived.

Like the stories we're telling here are, some of them are very severely impacted by the story that we're telling, right?

Like it's very hard to document some of this stuff because the Nazis were so thorough in destroying.

They were destroying

the means for recording what they were destroying.

They were like not just erasing these people's capacity to continue their work into the future, but erasing the historical document of what they'd done in the past.

Exactly.

As you know, I've been trying to extract sort of certain themes for each of these months.

And that's admittedly always partial, but I think it does reveal just the mutability and the flux that you see in 1933.

And I think in the case of May, the overall theme is not so much about rapid change.

I think that we had a couple of months of really rapid change.

But I think the secret theme today is the way the spring of 1933 really revealed the corrosion of norms and sort of civil society actors that had taken place really in the years before, starting with the Great Depression in 1929, but intensifying after the right-wing takeover of the Prussian government by something akin to a coup from above in 1932.

Because in a bunch of these cases, we're going to find that the break of 1933 is actually not that pronounced.

The real erosion started before January 30th, and the real escalation then happens later in 1933 or even beyond.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

So maybe let's first look at the labor movement.

Okay.

Because we start on May 1st, International Labor Day, big day, and the Nazis celebrate it.

They have a National Labor Day.

Oh, interesting.

But just in case people got wrong ideas, on May 2nd, they then

start a massive assault on the buildings of the independent trade unions.

Like they're bringing out the brown shirts and surrounding these buildings.

Okay.

It's rolling commandos of the SA and SS.

The order had been given in April already.

They just were like, well, wait until after May 1st.

After May Day.

Yeah.

And at 10 a.m.

sharp, they all show up and start ransacking everything and arresting a ton of people.

It's unclear to me like what even the legal basis for this was.

Like they hadn't even created a legal pretext the way they had for the civil service.

They just threw people in jail.

And by May 10th, they banned all trade unions, confiscated all assets, and gave them to the so-called German labor front, which was like their Nazified

union-ish thing.

So they're getting rid of these trade unions and saying the only organization that's going to be in this position is going to be the Nazi organization that already exists.

Yeah.

So how did we get to that point?

Evans points out that the industrial working class was heavily underrepresented among among the voters and supporters of Nazism.

Interesting.

Yeah.

That's not to say that there weren't people in the broader working class who were strong Nazi constituents.

Mostly non-unionized rural laborers saw substantial defections to the Nazis between 1930 and 1933.

And then the urban proletariat had probably been more captured by the socialists and the communists.

Exactly.

Okay, so this is an interesting little Bailey wicket because what I understood of the history of the Nazi Party before Hitler's takeover was that it started out as a fusionist party that ended up trying to rally workers and sort of proletarian Germans around a nationalist ideology, right?

Yeah, I think the socialist part of the National Socialist Party was always fairly attenuated, and I think it got more so the closer they got to power.

Many such cases.

Yeah.

Right, because you have to build a big tent.

Workers who are profoundly committedly anti-Semitic and maybe will like sort of mistake a like anti-capitalist grievance for an anti-Semitic one.

I can imagine you could make that pitch to a sizable number of maybe particularly like the undereducated rural workers in Weimar Germany, but it's not enough people is what you're saying for them to become as powerful as they did by 1932.

Yeah, I guess the question of working class and union membership is a really interesting one, but it's also important to note that these two things are not constants.

Union membership in the German working class was a lot higher at the beginning of the Weimar Republic than at the end.

And Evans, in fact, says, which I think is probably right, quote, what destroyed the German labor movement was not Nazi propaganda, but unemployment, right?

It's really hard to maintain your collective bargaining position in the face of absolutely absurd levels of mass unemployment, right?

It's like, oh, you're on strike.

Cool.

I'll go to the local soup kitchen and get hundreds to take your place.

Right.

It's really, really easy to get people to scab in conditions of that kind of deprivation.

Yeah.

So there was already a weakened trade union movement by 1933.

Starting in the early 30s, basically union membership just plummets.

The leverage also plummets.

And well before 1933, the unions had to accept these increasingly humiliating restrictions on their rights and a rollback of hard won victories, some of them from just five years before.

We're like, okay, fine, fuck it.

Take this one too.

So like the labor was already severely weakened.

But at its heyday, German labor organizations had been instrumental in defending the Weimar Republic against basically the earliest stirrings of a Nazi-like threat.

I don't know if you know much about the Kapputsch.

I've heard about this, but I don't actually know the story.

So in 1923, there was an attempt by right-wing elements of the government to basically make a play for power using just a couple of army battalions.

But, you know, you don't always need very much.

And it got pretty close.

The government in Berlin did flee the city and relocated.

And what brought down that coup attempt was a general strike.

The SPD, which still at the time had control of the presidency, talked to the labor unions.

And basically it was a general strike.

And it made this whole thing fall apart.

Oh, that's beautiful.

I love that.

That's a labor organizing with the pro-democracy forces to defeat a fascist takeover.

Yeah.

And then they all lived happily ever after, right, Adrian?

What this tells you is what the Nazis were most likely afraid of in early 1933.

I don't think they were afraid of the police.

I don't think they were afraid of the Reichstag.

They thought if these guys get their act together one last time and really do a general strike, what then?

So that's why they have to destroy these unions.

They know that the last time they tried this by, well, by extra-parliamentary means, they are the ones who fucked it up for them.

And so they have to come after them.

At the same time, as I say, the dynamics in the 1930s are no longer the same.

A lot has happened since 1923, right?

Like the stock market crash.

Like the labor union has been weakened by subsequent economic history.

And now it is a much easier target for the Nazis to take down as they do on May 2nd.

You remember that there had been this kind of autogeupe, this kind of government-backed coup within the Prussian government in 1932.

They deposed a SBD-led government.

And so there was a chance that the SBD and its trade union allies could try something like that.

Be like, hey, you think you can get rid of us with the army?

Well, like, suck on this general strike, right?

Yeah.

But that is where it turned out that the unions were too weak.

And there was another factor, which was you had the rise of the Nazis.

There was a chance, there's a historian named Hans Mommsen who's argued this, that probably why the SPD did not go for a general strike in 32 in Prussia was that it might lead the moderates to ally with the Nazis.

Like if we do this, we will push the center party, which was not super friendly with unions, into the arms of these fascists, right?

So the unions and the SPD did make the strategic decision to push back against von Papen and take over at the ballot box.

So that's a really important prehistory here.

And I think it gives you a sense of 1933 becomes possible because of the erosions of 32, 31, and 30, right?

Yeah, conditions were very ripe, right?

The opposition had already been weakened.

There was a kind of what you might call a birth defect at the heart of the Weimar Republic, especially when it came to labor and leftist politics.

In the wake of the revolution in 1918, the SPD and other moderate parts of the labor movement had established themselves as part of the two main political centers of this young republic by repressing another part of the labor movement, right?

The communists, the Soviet republics that sprang up in Bavaria, for instance, the radical labor movement, et cetera, et cetera.

A bunch of people died.

They had literally gunned these people down.

There were assassinations.

So the left was always going to be split.

There was the ADGB, which is the Federation of Labor that was basically SPD controlled.

And then there were communist unions.

So the problem with the general strike was always going to be that these were people who had some pretty genuine grievances, right?

Yeah.

So it's hard to get those people to ally in your general strike if they've been killing each other just a couple of months or years before.

Exactly.

And where one group allying with the others will always seem like, oh, now we're inviting communism in.

And what will that do to our allies in the center?

This is their quandary at that moment.

On May 2nd, all that comes to a head and basically all unions are dissolved.

It's a really interesting flashpoint.

Tim Mason in his book on the working class in Germany points out that The question of the fate of labor really is central to the question of whether Nazism is best understood as a modernization or an archaic backslide.

Because you might ask, like, well, what the fuck do you replace a union with, right?

You don't want to have a union.

They did not want people to just individually bargain.

It's not like what you get with the Lochner-era court in the United States, where it's just like, you have a private right to a contract and unions would only muck that up.

Your ability to sell your labor for way less than it's worth is being unfairly.

So free, yeah.

Your American freedom to work for slave wages is under attack by the threat of unionization.

That's actually not what the Nazis are going for here.

No, they have communal solutions for this.

They thought the big corporations in Germany were communities, and as per a law that would be passed in 1934, the party would arbitrate via trustees of labor any disputes.

In practice, this obviously ended up mostly weakening labor and strengthening bosses, which is why they liked it.

Yeah, shocking, shocking.

At least nominally, it was a process in which a system of checks and balances, of openly lived antagonism, of negotiation, was replaced by this kind of organicist model.

Like we all get together, but in the end, aren't we all the same?

There's a very much a kind of communitarian element to it.

What you didn't want is the union rep and the boss shouting at each other, right?

Like, no, no, no.

We're all in this together, right?

So artificial papering over of legitimate class and material grievances under an ideological purview.

Exactly.

So that can sound a little bit like a kind of social romanticism in something like Austro-fascism, so the Austrian version of this, which was a statist.

This is made explicit, but Mason points out that this isn't really true, that this is also a form of modernization.

This is essentially a neoliberalization.

And that...

Sure, as you say, the papering over was full of social romanticism, but in practice, it removed leverage from the workers and made their labor more fungible and therefore devalued it.

We should say that Mason wrote this during Thatcherism.

Yeah, he may have had some things on his mind.

Yeah, he was thinking of Maggie, definitely.

When I was in the UK, every time I talked to an English person, they would tell me the story of the neighborhood or the building we were in.

And then there was always some moment in the story where their voice drops and the shadow crosses their face and they go, and then came Thatcher.

So that's the labor movement.

That's where we are with the labor movement.

Or what used to be the labor movement, right?

It's gone over the course of about a week.

It's gone.

It's integrated.

It can only address grievances through these internal processes that do not have a public dimension.

Arbitration, almost, like magnitude arbitration clauses, yeah.

Yeah, the forced arbitration clause, exactly.

Meaning the unions are removed as public actors and, you know, unions had big newspapers and all that stuff.

That's all gone, right?

It also makes solidarity impossible, right?

It fractures everything into

these very specific things.

Like, is this machine dangerous?

Should we do something?

Like, the Nazis did have that, but it's it's just it's deprived of the idea that the public has any say in this be like this is not right these people are right to strike we are supportive right like that is something again like with klempera people are are sensing that their ability to live in solidarity with others whose concerns they share even if they don't share their lives that's being severely curtailed here so now we get to the women's movement because on may 15th the federation of german women's organizations votes to dissolve itself oh lovely.

I knew these ladies were going to embarrass me.

It's just like, what were the feminists doing in the early part of the 20th century?

Ooh, don't ask me that.

I mean, there are some heroes here, and we're going to check in with them periodically, but we haven't spent much time with the organized women's movement because, again, the story we're going to find...

I'm guessing the story is that over the course of the 1920s and 30s, what had been a much more robust and radical women's movement gets weakened and co-opted as political possibilities erode.

Like something sort of similar to what happens with the labor movement, happens again with the women's movement, in which a lot of opportunities for like forward-thinking or maximalist demands slip away under eroding political and economic conditions.

And suddenly you have a smaller and smaller bit of territory that you're defending as a feminist and like a more and more conciliatory position.

Am I basically right there?

Yeah, essentially.

I mean, the movement was huge.

And there is some, I guess you could frame it in some ways as like it became a victim of its own success.

Yeah, that's a story of a lot of feminism.

But you're right.

As with the labor movement, there is a real backslide.

And the movement, because of its size, it really wasn't equipped to deal with it.

Tell me about this like gigantic women's movement.

What was the status quo in like 1932?

So women had attained the right to vote in the Weimar Constitution.

So like at the end of World War I, that's just written in.

Okay.

Yeah.

And in fact, they had had basically full equal rights.

There was an equal rights clause in the Weimar Constitution.

How practicable is that though?

Because the equal rights clause in the Constitution, as we know from the American context, does not always in practice guarantee equal protection of the law, equal access to like legal resources or to like full participation in civic and economic life.

So very good question.

You should have been there and been like, hey, ladies, just quick point over.

Make them write down exactly what they mean by all this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There were people pointing this out at the time too, I should say.

Like they didn't need you to tell them.

But like what you're saying is that they're formally equal in the Weimar Constitution in terms of the actual application of the law and the realities on the ground.

Inequality is persisting, right?

Yeah, it's worse than that, actually.

So women had attained the right to vote and gotten formal equality.

And some of them were in the

Reichstag, right?

They had the right to vote.

But in the Weimar era, which is something that the Nazis do take away, they had the right to run for office.

And some of them, in fact, won office.

Yeah.

The first Reichstag ever elected had something like 9, 10%, I think we said.

So like, on the one hand, the movement, which in its first wave, exactly like in the U.S., had all been about the right to vote, suffrage, had attained its right.

That already led to a fracturing.

So the Weimar Constitution had an explicit paragraph, paragraph 109, stating that men and women are, quote, fundamentally equal.

And even another one that says that they're fundamentally equal in marriage i didn't even realize that i'm sorry this 1918 weimar constitution has more formal equality for women in it than the american constitution does in 2025 just gonna put that out there yeah so i mean that's really impressive but the problem was the weimar republic and this is something we'll see again when we talk about gay people took over the what's called the bürgelichische zetzbuch the civil law of the old german empire a lot of this was just like yes we're a democracy but shoplifting is still against the law.

That's fine.

But it did create this kind of need to piecemeal adjust these paragraphs, meaning it's not what you're saying that, oh, there are these big principles and then they fail to act on them.

It's that there's actually laws contradicting these things, right?

So like you have a paragraph in the Constitution that says men and women are equal in marriage, and then you have divorce law premised on something that is allegedly no longer in the constitution, right?

So what they have is a massive litigation project wherein they have to challenge all of these old civil laws, probably different state-level laws at different parts of the former German Empire, to actually get the constitution to be placed in force.

Exactly.

And it gives conservatives an endless number of grievances and an endless number of rearguard actions.

So like, you know, could women be in the police?

Could women be judges?

Could women...

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So every time you have to re-fight this battle, and every time conservatives go, oh my God, what's happening happening to society?

There's a lady judge now, and that can become a source to rally a lot of gendered grievance.

Exactly.

And to make that one woman judge or the five women judges into like hot rods of controversy and resentment.

Yeah.

And you have to have real fighting spirit to go through all this.

So just to give you an idea, by 1933, there were 24 female professors in Germany.

Right.

And all of them were exhausted.

All of them were used to, I'm guessing, like fairly constant attacks on their qualifications and dignity.

Yeah.

And then you had the fact that the women's movement was so large and really was a big umbrella, especially this non-socialist, non-communist one.

And their economic pressures really started mucking with the overall project.

How are those mucking with the overall project?

Well, think about it.

Same as in the United States.

In 1919, a bunch of demobilized men show up into an economy that had expanded for women?

Because

the home front was largely female dominated.

And so the question is, how do we deal with this as feminists?

Do we say, well, tough shit.

We're in the workforce.

We're going to stay in these remunerative jobs that we took while you guys were all conscripted into World War I?

Or do they say

we are going to

make room by retreating into the domestic sphere, which we can do as bourgeois women, and resume a position of economic dependency that is maybe like a little more palatable to the men in our lives.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Exactly.

And the BDF, the Bundeutsche Fraunfeine, did indeed endorse the latter.

Aaron Ross Powell, the BDF is the major sort of umbrella group of the bourgeois feminist movement.

Maybe something like analogous to now

in the U.S.,

which won't emerge, by the way, for like another 40 years or so.

But it is the group that is the mainstream liberal,

like center-left feminist version.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now would never have done that.

In the U.S., they were very, very fixated on getting women into the workforce and keeping them there.

But it's less about the actual content of the policies than about the position along the political spectrum.

Yeah.

The BDF does very much take the position that it's okay if there are mass layoffs of women.

Which, yeah, I mean, it's a choice to give away your leverage.

I mean, you try getting women to act in their own gendered self-interest.

It's like herding cats.

You can't make them do it.

So the BDF is sort of the main representative of this bourgeois women's movement, which then also in the Weimar Republic under the direction of Gertrude Boumer, who's a politician for a Liberal Party, takes a kind of folkish turn.

Can we talk about Gertrude for a minute?

Because she's a really interesting figure.

How did she become the leader of the BDF?

So Gertrude Boumer was born in 1873, so she's also kind of getting up there.

She's what, in her 70s by now?

Yeah, kind of an old fighter, you know.

She starts working with the women's movement at the end of the German Empire.

So the otts and the teens, basically.

She also had a PhD, I think in literature, in fact, and had taken over the BDF in 1910.

Was no longer, I think, the head by 1919 because she wanted to join the Reichstag and become a politician.

But basically, her influence was pretty serious.

And she was an anti-Nazi, very clearly.

I had very funny things to say about Mein Kampf.

She read it and she's like, don't read this.

It sucks.

But

was from the beginning, what we would today call a reactionary centrist.

She understood Nazism as a splitting of the body politic and thought the only way to combat that was to prevent further fracture, which often enough just took the shape of kicking left.

We have to be unified, which means we have to move to the right.

Yes, I've encountered this impulse.

Boima sort of isn't as important for the BDF by the time the Nazis come to power.

She's sort of more like the elder stateswoman, but like there had been this kind of nationalist turn.

You know, there's a lot of forms of feminism kicking around in this era that are less about changing and more about like glorifying and instilling value in women's traditional roles.

It's less like women should not be confined to being wives and mothers and more like we need to further value and celebrate our wives and mothers, which is a very different project politically and one that can be like more amenable to conservative projects.

And I think it's the kind of feminist posture that women often retreat to in times of like rising conservatism.

The BDF was enormous, almost 1 million members in 1928,

which does come with its own problem.

The majority of women, and we'll talk about that in a bit, were not factory workers.

The majority of working women were working in their husbands' shops, right?

They were butchers.

They helped farm, right?

This was still, this was a modernizing society, but it was not a modern society yet, right?

The number of women working wage jobs was high, but it wasn't where it would be today, right?

You could make an argument to say, well, we need to reach these women where they're at and to just tell them, like, you need to get out of the butcher shop and get yourself a well-paying office job.

And they're like, I live in a village of 400 people.

Do you know how many offices we have?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like my employment opportunities are limited to those provided to me by my husband, actually.

The sort of economic conditions that enable feminism to be a more robust, like maybe more radical proposition were not in place for big sectors of German society.

Yeah.

And I should say that Gethold Boimer is not involved in any of what we're going to be talking about, but she's kind of emblematic, really, of

this crisis, this pre-existing crisis that comes to a head in 1933.

As to where she is herself, in late April of 1933, she writes to a friend, I've been retired with a pension and also with credit for my previous teaching experience.

Personally, this is the cleaner solution for me.

If I were in office, I would have to issue reports on issues like the regulations regarding Jewish children in schools or the upcoming regulations for history classes, which are intended to defame everything that has happened since the collapse.

That would actually be impossible for me, right?

So she's like, I'm kind of glad they retired me.

This way I don't have to pick a fight with these people.

Yeah.

strikes me as like sort of of a piece with the attitude of a lot of like german political leaders at the time right we have been drifting rightward in our own right for a long time, and we are divested of the power and the energy

to say nothing of the will that would make such an opposition possible.

At the same time, in her defense, she was a longtime member of a party that was about to be outlawed.

She was a gay woman living with another woman.

So she could just be like, I don't know if I want to paint yet another target on my back.

Yeah.

But by this point, it's probably too late.

Like, you know, if we sort of think about what could have been done, it would have had to have been done a long time ago.

I think it's very easy to sit here in 2025 and be like, these people should have acted differently.

Yeah.

And it's a lot harder for them to actually make those choices because of the risks that they were facing.

Sure.

At the same time, I think Evans is very good on this kind of folkish turn in the women's movement and points out that what the BDF really did was replace one form of submission with another, right?

They said, it is a women's lot to submit, but not to their husband, to the nation,

as embodied by their husbands, right?

So it's like...

Right.

That winds up being six of one and half a dozen of the other.

It's a different branding opportunity, I guess.

Yeah, so the BDF's 1919 program placed a lot more emphasis on the family and on women as mothers and wives.

It says it's anti-socialist.

It retreats from sort of equal rights and employment law and focuses

America alert on public decency campaigns, et cetera, et cetera, right?

So this is how we get prohibition in the United States.

So

they find these kind of big tent issues that sort of allow them to represent this broader coalition.

But as Evans is saying, like you can hear sort of in the background, it's like, oh, women can only speak as mothers.

Women can only speak legitimately as guardians of the hearth, as guardians of national virtue, et cetera, et cetera, right?

Right.

It takes a traditional role not as an oppressive one, but as a source of moral authority.

You know, one thing you see in these like conservative turns of these early feminist movements is, I think, just like a lowering of standards.

Right.

It's a calculation that I don't want to like undermine the sincerity or the betrayal of this rightward turn, but it's also something that is responding to the horizon of political possibility being constrained.

Right.

Yeah.

Like if you are not in a position to make women actually

free from the economic and physical domination of their husbands, then you start looking at ways to make that domination more survivable.

Like, okay, well, we can't make women able to leave their husbands, but maybe we could make the husbands a little less drunk.

And by extension, a little less physically and sexually violent, which is how you get to things like, you know,

prohibition campaign in the U.S.

and a lot of, you know, the public decency campaigns around the world.

Yeah.

When Gleischaudung comes for the women's orgs, it does not take particularly long in May 1933.

Evans has a very nice, given that he's basically condensing two chapters of his book into one page, has a very nice, concise account of that in his other book, The Coming of the Third Reich.

And he gives it as an example there of how, quote, organizations that have been living a relatively secure and undisturbed existence for decades were confused, divided, and overtaken by events, which I think is a pretty good description.

Basically, the BDF was dominated by women of the bourgeoisie.

It understood itself as non-partisan.

So it

was neither like the Nazi women's orgs nor like the communist or the socialist ones.

I'm imagining their line is is like, we're not loyal to the communists.

We're not loyal to the socialists.

We're not loyal to the Catholic Church.

We are loyal to the women of Germany.

Or to the nation of Germany.

Right, exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

Although there was a lot of Catholicism in there too, I think.

If you're taking out all these people who would have voted SPD or KPD, that means that their constituency had swung seriously towards the Nazis by 1933.

Once you divide out the people who were like, well, fuck no, I'm voting SPD,

you really are dealing with like a lot of these, right?

The Liberal Party that Getwood Boum

represented was a shadow of its former self, right?

The DNVP, shadow of its former self.

The center party did okay, but like not great.

The rank and file was probably already pretty accommodated to the idea of this dictatorship.

Which is true of the German electorate as a whole, right?

Like the women are swinging to the right politically,

as is everybody else.

Exactly, exactly.

So the BDF was just basically gridlocked and didn't know how to respond.

And then, as Evans notes somewhat acerbically, as discussion dragged on, the Nazis resolved the issue for them.

They do tend to do that.

If you dither and don't know how to respond, the Nazis will respond for you.

Yeah.

So you're like, oh, how should we respond?

Should we oppose?

Should we accommodate?

And the Nazis come in and say, actually, we're just going to appoint, I'm guessing, a Nazi woman to lead your organization and fold your organization into the existing women's auxiliary group of the Nazis.

Is that basically what happened?

Yep.

Yep.

You've been reading letters to Harvard, I can tell.

Exactly.

So on April 27th, a local chapter in Baden, so in southwestern Germany, was sent a brief note by the head of the local Nazi women's group, which said, hey, by the way, you're dissolved.

Bye.

So the national organization basically inquired with the National Nazi Women's Front, what's your legal basis here?

How are we to understand this?

And in response, they got like, it's all legit.

Don't worry about it.

something something i'm sure there's a law and here's a form that you can sign that form included as you say a pledge to expel all jewish members accept direct supervision from noted feminist adolf hitler give the top jobs within its ranks to nazi women and to join the nazi women's front by mid-may Okay, so you are no longer an independent organization now.

You're an extension of the Nazi party.

Everybody who's going to have any leadership position in what you were doing is going to be a Nazi.

But you're making it sound so harsh and dictatorial.

There was a signature.

They were allowed to sign for it.

I mean,

it's almost in itself a gesture of domination.

Like Victor Klumper recording the beating death of that communist that then gets officially logged as a dysentery death, even though nobody's supposed to believe that, right?

It's just a grip over the narrative control, epistemic domination.

In addition, like you're not even actually going to get to tell the truth about what's happening here.

Yeah, exactly.

It's the way that our university leaders keep coming back to the Trump administration with they get these demands that are basically they're invitations to self-destruction and they come back with like,

well, we agree that some mistakes were made and maybe we could like look to those and then you could see it in your hearts too.

Well, no, that's not the point.

They're not doing this because they want you to respond.

It's as you say, it's domination.

Right.

It's about an assertion of their power over you.

So like we looked at why the Nazis really wanted to make sure that they dissolve the trade unions fast, right?

That was a threat to them that had been demonstrated in the past.

Why exactly did they go after the feminists?

Because it does not sound like this was particularly robust.

Like the BTF was like a particularly robust anti-Nazi organization with a great potential for revolutionary resistance.

So like, why bother with these women?

It's a good question.

I'm guessing one reason is just any sources of organization outside of the Nazi party are slowly supposed to be absorbed into the party.

We're not talking about it because it's frankly too small bore.

But I think they're like basically the bunny breeders associations that got synchronized.

We're like suddenly like we have to have a Nazi bunny breeder.

This is where Arendt's point about totalitarianism comes in, right?

Like you're trying to reach into every way in which people might freely associate.

There is no organized social or civic life that is not controlled by the Nazis, right?

This is like if like MAGA came in and was like, guess what?

The Republican Party now controls your bowling league.

There are trivia nights.

Like the pervasiveness and the absolute quality.

It's inescapable.

And that's kind of the point.

Exactly.

And again, like our university leaders today,

the BDF does not seem to understand that.

They respond saying, well, look, we've already done a lot of this stuff.

We're totally on board with your national revolution.

We are already functionally a right-wing organization.

We did eugenics.

We were all for eugenics, right?

Oh, were they really?

Oh, yeah.

Which is not...

That's not crazy out of the ordinary for like white people in the 1920s.

They do love eugenics.

They loved eugenics.

But it also, like, it's just misunderstanding what the Nazis were doing.

Oh, but we agree with you in large part.

And the Nazis are like, that's not the point.

The point is

we don't want any sources of legitimation, of communication, of information outside of our apparatus.

So you'll join us.

It's once again not really about the substantive policy proposals as much as it is about control and domination.

Exactly.

And so by May 15th, the BDF dissolves itself.

Formal vote.

Before that, almost all the local chapters had already dissolved themselves and merged with Nazi groups.

So basically, this would have been a pointless sort of bit of defiance.

So this is the formal organization of women.

What happens to feminist advocacy?

What happens to policy questions that we today associate with feminism?

And so I thought we might briefly look at a topic that's near and dear to both our hearts, which is abortion.

Yay, I love abortions.

Love abortions.

I looked into it a little bit because I knew the outlines of before it looked like this, then it looked like that.

But it was fun to kind of read through the literature and kind of figure out kind of history of abortion rights.

So what were abortion rights like in the Weimar era?

What you see and what we'll see about a bunch of issues, abortion, homosexuality, along the paragraph 175, which we'll talk about, and prostitution.

Weimar was pretty good on a bunch of this stuff, but liberalization only went so far.

Generally, there was energy towards liberalization, but actually in the end, not that much happened.

On July 2nd, 1920, so one year into the Republic, 81 members of the Social Democrats submit a motion to the Reichstag to repeal sections 218, 219, and 220 of the criminal code.

Paragraph 218 is the main one that outlaws abortion.

And is this a criminalization for providers, patients?

Mostly providers, I believe.

And a prohibition against advertising abortion services.

Okay.

Do you want to guess when that was repealed?

218?

Trick question.

It's still on the books.

I was going to say like 2018.

Oh, no.

That'd be nice.

No, really.

So, you still can't advertise abortion in Germany?

Yep.

Wow.

Yeah, it's bizarre.

Is that like one of those laws that's effectively not enforced?

Or

it really is enforced.

I think, so there are people testing this all the time, but there are people who've gotten, who've been charged.

I don't think anyone's been convicted, but you can be charged as a doctor with like, if you put an ad in the newspaper.

That having been said, I think the definition of, and here, if German listeners know more about this debate, I've been away from the country for too long.

My impression is that the definition of advertising has become narrower.

Like you are absolutely allowed to mention abortion services to people, but you're not supposed to do is like have a highway billboard, basically.

I mean, like abort here, you know.

I would, I would put a, if anybody wants to

rent such a billboard in Germany and like abort here, I would totally do that.

The Weimar Republic took exactly the tack that post-war Germany would, which is to say you keep the law on the books.

You say this is a crime, but you start redefining the crime.

The paragraph is basically suspended up to a certain gestational age.

Okay.

The idea is like it's not punished.

It's not investigated, but it's not, in fact, legal technically.

It's very, very strange.

This is like de facto how a lot of abortion law functioned in the U.S.

prior to World War II, right?

Like

it was illegal on the books, but there were all these clinics operating semi-openly.

Well, no, no.

I mean, like, the law is still on the books, but the law also includes these additional provisions that say say it cannot be prosecuted if it's done before the first 12 weeks after fertilization.

You cannot be prosecuted if it's medically indicated, if it is rape or incest, et cetera, et cetera.

That stuff is all in there.

But technically, I think the main paragraph still says this is illegal.

So this comes to naught.

Basically, it's an SPD-KPD joint to try and overturn this thing and to say, like, let's get rid of this.

Let's have legal abortion.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it doesn't work.

In may 1926 there is a law that reduces abortion from a crime to a misdemeanor but kept provisions against offering the service commercially and the supreme court in leipzig upholds that law in 1927

and then in the late 20s there's this big push by doctors and writers really just like an all-out attack on this paragraph 218 plays, articles.

There's basically a deliberate defiance of the law.

In the Weltbün, Karl Von Osiecki, who we met in our first episode, who's in fact, I believe, already dead now that we're talking, he encouraged women to share their stories about abortion.

This was mostly a KPD effort, but among the people who supported it publicly were Albert Einstein, the screenwriter Tier von Habu, and the novelist Leon Freuschwanger, who we're going to be hearing about in future episodes.

This is all like very typical of like abortion legalization efforts.

You get like a combination or an alliance of like medical professionals and feminists and intellectuals.

And then you get a a lot of like first-person testimony about the conditions of like illegal abortion meant to like destigmatize and educate.

And the right and social conservatives and so on basically pushed back hard against this.

So the law in Weimar, if anything, kind of got nuanced and shaded a little bit, but it didn't get repealed.

But when the Nazis came to power, they basically reversed all of that.

Paragraph 219 and 220 are restored.

Advertising and performing abortions started carrying high prison sentences.

And in in fact, this was one of the Nazis' very first legal projects.

They have a bunch of extra legal stuff that they're doing, but like in terms of actually rewriting laws, they're like, we like this.

Let's put the dial exactly where it was, if not more.

So they're really focusing on repression of women's reproductive freedom.

Is this a selective project?

Is it the kind of thing where they're like thinking about how legal abortions might be useful for their own eugenics and racial engineering exercises?

Or are they just like hard, no abortion?

It's a good question.

I think there's a bit of that.

There's a eugenic argument that like the women who avail themselves of abortion are the women that should be having babies but then there's also the fact that yeah it just accords very well with a hierarchized picture of the genders which is what they very much fervently believed in but that i think does get us to the question of like huh gender conservatism and the rise of the nazis how linked

the topic of this podcast yeah

and there's some disagreement in the scholarship about this i realize and it's kind of fun or interesting and i think the abortion issue gives us a pretty good idea of why.

Because yes, gender conservatism was part of the Nazis' appeal, absolutely, but it really wasn't the distinguishing feature of the Nazi party, right?

I'm imagining the center party also had like a pretty big

gender conservatism angle and constituency, right?

Yeah, exactly.

And there is an kind of an odd thing, right?

Like the abortion thing, the pushback on that assault on 218

in the late 20s, early 30s.

The people who were objecting to attempts to liberalize abortion law.

Exactly.

That was not carried by the Nazi party at all.

There was barely a Nazi party to speak of, and it wasn't their bailiwick.

It was a bunch of other parties doing that.

So in some way, yes, gender conservatism clearly played a role, and it may have played a role in establishing broader coalitions, but this was not an issue the Nazis kind of owned, right?

And the other thing is that as with abortion in a bunch of cases, the last few years of the Weimar Republic saw a a backlash against liberalization on questions of gender and sexuality.

So you might think, oh, wow, that's basically people moving to the right on these issues in order to blunt the rise of the Nazi Party.

That would make sense.

The way that European countries now move to the right in order to blunt these far-right forces.

They're like, let's just seem as much like the AFD as possible so that we can pick off some of that AFD vote.

Exactly.

How is that working out for them?

Yeah, it always works 0% of the time.

It always works great.

Just ask the Democrats.

Yeah.

Well, however, the backlash in fact precedes the rise of the Nazi Party, meaning it's probably not in response to that.

Lori Marhofer points out that the story of Libertine Weimar is a little partial.

That's the point of Laurie's book.

Yes, there were some pretty impressive gains early in the Weimar era, but a lot of the big liberation projects of the era had pretty much stalled or even been reversed by 1932.

Paragraph 175, which infamously criminalized homosexuality, there had been some energy towards repealing it, but that energy had stalled out.

Abortion, still illegal.

Prostitution getting more and more regulated, especially at the margins.

If you think of stuff like male prostitution, and if there was less repression, which is where I think we get the idea of the permissive Weimar Republic, right?

The cabaret.

I have read the Christopher Isherwood, and therefore, yeah, it's like I know that there were glamorous girls with haircuts in Berlin doing drugs, but that's just not the whole political picture.

Exactly.

And that was mostly about the fact that the laws were more humanely enforced.

That basically police departments said, look, this is pointless to just constantly bust down these gay establishments.

Let's just let them be, you know?

Right.

Like we will come after them when we want to get a gay person for something else, or we will come after them when it is convenient to a bigger law and order project, right?

Like if there's gambling there, then we want to shut down.

If there's often like in the American context, this is how you see like sodomy laws being enforced.

enforced is really it's like kind of as a tool to get you for something else that might not be strictly illegal that they're mad at.

It reminds me a little bit of the progressive prosecutor panic of our day, except that as Mason points out, it's not a case where people sort of go outside of their house and they're like, gatzooks, there's gayness afoot or abortion afoot.

Like, I must get rid of my progressive prosecutor or something like that.

It really doesn't touch people's lives at all.

These liberalizations happen in very specific places where everyone's pretty cool about these things and like it's mostly these very big cities that didn't have people who had been born and raised there mostly the guardian just did a big retrospective on their foreign correspondent in germany during the rise of the nazis yeah and one of the things they pointed out was that he seems to have actually lived directly above one of five marbler lines most famous gay bars and he like never mentions it in his journals nice or in his reporting it like does not seem to he was busy He was doing other things and there happened to be some guys like dancing and flirting downstairs and it wasn't really his problem.

And that seems to be like,

I don't know, a factor of urban life.

If you're not interested in going to have sex with men, you're probably not going to be that interested in what's going on at the gay bar.

Yeah.

And I mean, there were so many kind of outside groups that we even don't think about as outside groups that much anymore.

Berlin was a city with tons of single women.

That was pretty new, and people remarked on that, and artists got fascinated with it, and men were not altogether chill about it.

But it really was a kind of almost majority-minority city.

But in the the end, you're right.

Like people just kind of live their lives.

But the interesting thing is there is this fixation on single women, for instance.

Mason points out that about 5 million women worked in small businesses, in family businesses, or care work in 1933.

5 million.

That means that the average voter had no occasion to interact with single urban women working in offices.

And he points out that, as in sort of racism or anti-Semitism, quote, emancipatory changes in the roles and position of women can excite an opposition among men whose own dominance is not immediately challenged.

The woman question becomes a man question and a political question insofar as it arouses general passion and is felt to raise general questions about the quote-unquote moral, natural, and biological order of society.

Geez, what does that remind me of?

Even if they are being told to panic about this social phenomenon as a marker of their own status, that can be a concern that is incited in them out of proportion to its role in their own experience.

Yeah.

So this is what we get, right?

Like a city in which these things are not a big deal.

And then the rest of the country that kind of freaks out about it and like, gatzooks.

I hear that things are really going crazy in Berlin.

And they've got these women with their tits out and men making out everywhere.

Yeah.

Everywhere.

But the important thing is, so like this kind of conservatism really becomes very effective.

Alfred Hugenberg, who we already noted last time, the right-wing yellow journalism king pushes a lot of it.

But importantly, Huggenberg is not in the Nazi party.

The Nazis' position on gender sexuality at this point was not substantially different from the other right-wing parties.

Hugenberg's DNVP, for instance.

And even the center party, as you pointed out, as Catholics, is probably more associated with public morals issues than the Nazis.

There is this kind of backlash mentality, but it's unclear why the Nazis should benefit from it.

And at least initially, and with some exceptions, the Nazis' crackdown on gays, on porn, on prostitution, and so on, really continued trends in the late Weimar Republic, especially after the Prussian coup of 1932.

This is where I'm relying on Jens Dubla's really cool work on the police and homosexuality, right?

The Nazis very quickly went after prostitutes and smut and stores, but so had von Popmen, so had Schleicher, right?

Gay clubs, by contrast, continued to operate by and large throughout 1933.

They would eventually obviously be closed down.

But if you just wanted to go party, you could.

At least initially, then, an individual LGBT person might not have experienced the Nazi seizure of power as a totally radical break, but rather probably as part of an overall sort of darkening trend.

This makes sense to me.

They're coming to power partly because they've tapped into some media and sentimental trends

against perceived excesses of social permissiveness, right?

Like a lot of people are

living urban cosmopolitan lives and are not really bothered by this.

But then you also have big constituencies of people who are maybe not exposed to the banality of like gay and female life in Berlin, who actually imagine it as very frightening.

And the Nazis are able to ride the wave of social discontent around sex and gender that they did not originate.

So one other place where people have made this argument about the fact that the rise of the Nazis really is a backlash phenomenon on sex and gender is people have adduced that as a solution to one of the mysteries we tackled in the last episode, which is why on earth would these other right-wing parties and above all the center party vote for the enabling laws?

Why would they essentially put themselves out of business?

Yeah, it's fascinating.

They seem to have like no sense of self-preservation for their own power when they vote to

give Hitler, who is is a member of a different party,

basically total control.

But you've discovered this other explanation by these backlash theorists.

Well, they suggest simply that could it be that they agreed with the Nazis on a bunch of these cultural war issues.

We hold our nose, we'll vote for this because we need to clean up the mess.

And this is something that always seemed quite persuasive to me.

But Laurie Marhofer's book does suggest not so much.

The parties did say why they supported this law, and none of them gave public public morals reasons.

The center party did have socially conservative positions, increasingly so, but they could have gotten those realized by a von Popen government easily, which was a bog standard right-wing authoritarian government, which is probably what they were angling for in the first place.

The reasons they gave were about something else.

They were a worry about communism, its threat to the Catholic Church specifically.

And their main worry about the Nazis was that the Nazis were anti-Catholic, irreligious, and neo-pagan, which they very much were, right?

Which made them kind of weird carriers for like public morals.

But how prominent was like the neo-pagan strain within the Nazis?

Because that's always struck me as like, okay, a couple of the real nerds are into this like Nordic mythology stuff and they're getting into like runes and then everybody else is

the mainstream of the Nazi party is foregrounding that less.

It's hard to say, right?

I mean, like, it's also a time when public and private are more distinct.

The overall vibe of the Nazi leadership was a lot more libertine.

They were all drugged out of their mind, right?

They were all on stimulants a lot.

Well, that might have been part of it.

But in this way, Nazism was fairly quote-unquote modern.

They were not about a return to Christian doctrine, and they had opportunities to claim that they were the way that in Austria would happen or that with the Falange in Spain would happen.

They declined that, right?

They allowed the Catholic Church a certain measure of autonomy, and we'll get to that in our July episode.

But the idea of churches as co-equal places where people gather, organize, and form opinions was not really high on their list.

And there was a lot of stuff about Germanic mythology that was, frankly, neo-pagan, right?

Think of the Georgia Circle episode we did for our Patreon.

Which is so good.

I think that's one of the best episodes we've ever done.

Subscribe, subscribe.

Well, this strikes me as, you know, one area where a comparison to the MAGA, right, might be illustrative, right?

Because the leadership of the MAGA party is not particularly sexually conservative, right?

They are in favor of a libertine sexuality that is defined by eroticized domination of women, which is one way that you get the integration of some gay men into like visible places in the MAGA movement.

This is why they have

great use for somebody like Milo Iiannopoulos.

And then they are

also granting a kind of permissiveness that is seen as being in opposition to the scolding or moralistic or characterized as almost maternal elements of like feminist and anti-racist social justice movements, right?

There's a way in which libertinism

is coded conservative in the MAGA world.

And I can imagine something like that or somewhat comparable might be at play with the Nazi leadership.

They seem in part new and exciting because they're not just regurgitating what the center party has been saying.

They have this new set of priorities, which can channel a lot of like social grievances without necessarily being seen as limiting the impulses or freedoms of the in-group.

Yeah, I think that's right.

Like there's something untrammeled, unfettered about the kind of politics that the Nazis offer.

Whereas I think the Christianity of the center party was still understood as a kind of restrictive feature, right?

There were things you wanted to do that you didn't get to do, which I feel like is probably one of the basic experiences of Catholicism.

It's kind of the whole point.

I think you're articulating something that a bunch of historians have also pointed out.

Tim Mason, who does seem to think that anti-feminism had a real role to play in the rise of the Nazis, tells the story a little bit differently.

And I think he might be a good person to reply to Laurie Marhofer here.

Like, I don't have an opinion on this, but just to point out what the other side of this would look like, right?

He points out that, quote, the political implications of such common positions, of which this is an interesting example, did not always become clear until after the seizure of power in 1933.

If I'm understanding him correctly, his reply to Marhofer would be, well, it depends on what you mean by the rise of the Nazi Party.

Did anti-feminism uniquely buoy the electoral fortunes of the Nazi Party between 1931 and 1933?

Probably not.

But did it help the Nazis attain dominance after 1933 in the sense that it

maybe made a bunch of conservative elites, as you were saying, more ready to sign on to the project and come into the fold?

Probably, yes, right?

Mason wants to point out, it's probably in the process of synchronization, in the process of Gleicheutung, that this stuff matters, that people are like, well, I don't think it's wrong to get rid of smut in stores.

Well, I don't think it's wrong to close this bar, right?

That is how you get people signing on to this project.

That's, I think, the way Mason addresses this seeming complexity, the fact that clearly gender conservatism coincided with the rise of the Nazis, even though it's unclear why it would help.

So finally, let's talk about LGBT people.

I thought we would start on May 10th, the book burnings.

Yeah, where did these book burnings start?

What was the nominal rationale for them?

Yeah, I mean, we already alluded to the fact that there was a movement within the Nazi student unions to do these book burnings and to throw things out of libraries in response to so-called atrocity propaganda by quote-unquote Jewish interests internationally.

This is completely bullshit.

Basically, they've been wanting to do this for a while, but it becomes this way in which, again, broader constituencies could be brought into alignment with the Nazi Party.

And basically, concerns with public decency and morality could be used to integrate this new state.

And one of the targets that I wanted to talk briefly about is the Institute for Sexual Science, founded by Magnus Hirschfeld.

The institute is founded in 1919.

So a very Weimar project in the sense that its dates, 1919 to 1933, are the exact dates of the Republic.

And it is very Republican in its own way.

It had an expert side.

There were people, like if you went to the building, there were offices where people did empirical research, but it had a strong public-facing side too.

They did public health and public policy stuff, both informing governments and teaching classes.

going into places and like teaching people sexual hygiene and that kind of thing.

There was also some weird eugenicist shit because it was the 1920s.

Yeah, Hirschfeld gets sort of lionized as a martyr and the Institute gets lionized for its martyrdom to Nazism, right?

But this institute was not only doing things that the modern LGBT movement would approve of.

There's also some sense of like trying to like cure homosexuals or like transsexuals and make them

both like affirm their gender and also try and discipline them out of it, right?

Yeah.

So it's not all great, especially the public health stuff, which sort of starts with sexual education very good uh but also like sexual hygiene can like go from like here's how you put on a condom to like much more questionable shit you know such as i mean basically forced sterilization so you know like the feminists these are people very much of their games

and reflecting some of the broader trends in the german electorate exactly and Hirschfeld, of course, one of the first campaigners for gay liberation, and his motto is through science to justice.

By knowing more about LGBT people is how we get equality.

Like once you understand that this is not a disease or a sin or whatever, you will be able to treat us as human beings and as fellow citizens.

And am I correct that he's already left Germany by our period for this episode, May 1933?

He has.

A long time ago.

The other thing about the Institute for Sexual Science is that it's internationally extremely famous.

And so he's constantly touring the world.

He's being asked to lecture in France and America, I'm guessing like the UK, like all over the place.

And so he just doesn't come back at some point.

Smart move from our boy Magnus.

Yeah.

So in terms of the position

of gay people in the Weimar Republic, it's the same thing we've been finding in regards to labor and the women's movement.

1933 really exposed the rot of 1931 and 32.

The position of the Institute for Sexual Science had eroded quite substantially in the final years of the Republic.

As you say, Hirschfeld had decided not to return to Germany after a lecture tour in 32.

Laws around lewdness, public indecency, and so on were being tightened by various right-wing governments that were coming to power.

LGBT people at the time noted that those are the early rumblings, in case you're later wondering.

That has been going on for years.

And what we see in 33 really in the beginning is a kind of further darkening of that overall picture.

One way in which this apparently showed up in the Institute is that in the early Weimar Republic, it had been sort of cool for politicians to show up and do events there and to meet with people there and get a tour, et cetera, et cetera.

And by like the 1930s.

The 2020-style wokeness.

Yes.

They're all like posting a black square on their Instagram and now, like kind of analogy.

And then suddenly it's very, very taboo.

It's very quiet.

It's a scene with these people.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Okay.

Yeah.

In the beginning of 1933, it's noticeable that the Nazis did not go after LGBT community spaces initially.

Clubs and bars remained relatively unscathed in the first onslaught of terror.

They went after two things.

They went after queer activities in already marginalized populations.

That's above all male prostitution.

The second thing they did was they went after the study of queer people.

And this is where the Institute comes into focus for the Nazi repressive apparatus.

So on May 6th, members of the Nazi Student Union roll up to the Institute, which is in Tiergarten in Berlin, and ransack the place.

They're followed in short order by the SA, which is actually pretty important, I think.

In a lot of universities, the book burnings were organized entirely by student groups, albeit, of course, at the behest of the National Party.

It was supposed to look spontaneous, even though it obviously wasn't.

Criticur of these students who are expressing the true spirit of the German people.

No, no, no, it's actually a directive coming down from the top.

Yeah.

And again, the stuff, they're not really trying to fool anyone.

Like, they're people reciting a script at each of these book burnings.

You're like, oh, oh they just they're critical conspicuously the same yeah as like using the exact same words as happened at the other university earlier this week i think it's like ninthly and tenthly and you're like okay i feel like that's a lot of memorization my friend

as somebody who has tried to get the students to write anything

like let me tell you it's never a 10 point list guys did you all use grok

oh it was just spat out all these nazi talking points how weird this is so um the other thing about white genocide no i'm kidding kidding

the song kill the boar has been yeah

when it comes to the institute it almost seems what is it that the queen of thorns on game of thrones says to i want cersei to know it was me i want cersei to know it was me tell circe here they want people to know it was them this is not spontaneous this is state apparatus coming down on them.

And because the Institute is so famous, because it was the center of this early Weimar social moment, I'm guessing partly it's a symbolic gesture as well.

Yeah.

It's like we are destroying this thing that occupies a place in the German imagination as a like symbol of forward-looking pluralism.

Yeah.

The way some people might think of Harvard University.

Or, you know, a gender studies institute now.

Pay no attention to the Stanford think tank behind the curtain.

Yeah.

At the same time, the fact that our source base on the actual activities of the institute is now so poor.

Is because these fucking little Nazi shit kids came in and literally started a bonfire of all their records yeah well i mean they didn't start the bonfire there because it's germany you still got to follow fire codes so they they they haul it all into that's how spontaneous is this they haul it all into vans and drive off okay for use what is it like four days later right uh so they're storing it somewhere yeah i want to know where where are they holding this all like where are they parking i'm not sure yeah yeah I mean, we have anecdotal evidence that tons of people obviously just stole books and just read them.

Imagine if somebody was getting rid of a gay rights library.

I mean, this literally happened at New College of Florida.

They dismantled the gender studies department and they put all those books in dumpsters outside and kids were taking those books and taking them home.

So they leave with almost 10,000 volumes of the Institute's library.

And then they're burned on what was then the Opera Square in Berlin.

It's today's Bieberplatz.

There's a memorial to this book burning.

And they just throw it in there with a bunch of Marx, a bunch of Heine, a bunch of, I think Thomas Mann is already in there, like everyone who's left Germany basically is on the stack.

And we should say that student union had begun making lists of quote-unquote seditious literature in, I think, late March, early April.

And then by April 12th, you get the theses against the un-German spirit, which is basically like, here's the type of things.

And then I think the first exhortation really was to get rid of books in your own library, right?

So university students, if you have a book of Heine's poetry, get rid of it, please, right?

And then they sort of started scouring the university libraries.

Then you get stuff like the Institute.

And at the same time, of course, a lot of this is centrally coordinated.

I'm not even sure how they would know who to target exactly, but these lists sort of go out.

And I'll spare people the exact details of these book burnings.

It was pretty well documented.

But I think a bunch of themes that we've been tracking throughout these episodes resurface in this book burning, right?

They had been organized in advance, but as you say, they were meant to look like a spontaneous outpouring of the people's anger, right?

Of the youth cleansing finally the altar of German culture, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

At the same time, these were ways of suffusing agencies, right?

Like, these weren't done by the SA mostly.

They were at the Institute, but not elsewhere, but by student groups, right?

The Nazis did use these things to solidify buy-in, to sort of be like, join us, be part of this.

It's not just the insiders doing this.

There is an invitation contained in these really horrifying rituals.

It's public, it's meant to attract a crowd, you know, and it's meant to be participatory.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, you know, we've talked a lot about outside pressures.

And I think at this point, we do have to make clear that Gleischauten was also a process that was embraced by lots and lots of Germans, right?

It provided opportunities for advancement.

It could be a welcome opportunity to strike back at people you hated.

Gleischauten being, just to remind our listeners, that this is a synchronization process, right?

Whereas in all of these civil society organizations are being subsumed by the Nazi organizational apparatus or disbanded if they can't be.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And it was heavily ritualized, right?

This was not a kind of disorganized mob doing something.

This was a very organized mob.

This was a heavily ritualized mob.

The Nazis, as I said, provided a pretty exhaustive script to this whole thing.

It really was about sort of settling on a version of history.

This is what Gettward Boumler, I think, is alluding to in that letter that we cited earlier.

People have to learn how to speak Nazi, right?

And this is like, well, here's how you do it, by the way, right?

These are the things you can't use or can't say.

It strikes me that this is the product necessarily of a very comprehensive and forward-looking strategy, right?

Like, who is writing this script that's going out to all the Nazi student groups to be read out at their book burnings?

Like, who is deciding that this is going to be the next thing the Nazis are doing?

I actually don't know.

It must have been Goebbels.

Right.

because it's so centralized that it seems like the product of a lot of work, you know.

Yeah, that's true.

At the same time, it's also this, it's the dynamic that Ian Kershaw identifies as working towards the Führer, right?

The fact that like, there's a lot of opportunities here for the Nazis, but it's also an opportunity for a lot of individual Nazis.

Right.

So everyone's sort of trying to figure out how to like out-Nazi the other Nazis in hopes of promotion, right?

Like

even within their ranks, this is not all about true belief.

Right.

It's also opportunism and like maneuvering.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You might want to get rid of these books, but you could say like, look, we'll do it over the course of a year.

This feels like too much work.

But no, you wanted to be noticed.

You wanted to be an essential part of the stabilization of this regime.

And, you know, and then there were university professors speaking at these, right?

Reciting poetry at these.

There were people who were running for rector of the university because the last one got shit canned because he was a centrist or half-Jewish or whatever it is.

Yeah, yeah.

And so, you know, this is this is all sort of people positioning themselves.

and some of it's opportunism.

But I think as Tim Mason and I think Lori Marhofer would agree with this too, you know, it's not all opportunism.

It's also that a lot of this was widely shared.

A lot of this distaste was widely shared among more right-wing Germans.

And so now was their chance to take something that they had kind of felt uneasy about, right?

All these queers running around making a mess all over the city and turning it into something very, very useful to their own career and life trajectory, or so they thought.

Right.

There are people who are experiencing this as sort of permission to do something that they kind of wanted to do already.

Exactly.

And so we'll talk about some of that in our June episode, I believe.

We're going to be talking about the SA and about the actual paramilitary apparatus of the Nazi Party.

We're also going to be talking about what collaboration is going to look like in 1933, because that really emerges very, very clearly by May and June.

But we didn't have time for it this week.

And I say this because I know that I am keeping you from going to the opera.

Do you want to tell folks what you're seeing?

I'm seeing Salome.

My friend Brooke and I are going to the opera together and it's going to be really fun.

It's going to be wonderful.

So as a special treat to you, in June, I will update you on what Richard Strauss, who wrote Salome, was doing in 1933.

Uh-oh.

It's not great.

Uh-oh.

Is this going to ruin my evening tonight?

No, I mean, whatever.

It's beautiful music, but

Richard Strauss was fairly old by the time and clearly sort of, who knows how much he still had together, but like he did not cut an altogether great figure in 1933.

And I do think we spent a lot of time with people resisting, which I like, which I think is important.

Not everyone was, you know, a Nazi.

At the same time, I don't want to give the impression that like this didn't have massive buy-in.

And I think given that we ended this episode with the point that like, no, there was massive buy-in for these kinds of awful rituals and these awful purges, let's look at some of the people who

said as much in 1933 and were like, yeah, more purging, please.

And unfortunately, I hate to tell you, and I may have told you after Salome, but Strauss is one of them.

Rats.

All right.

Well, we will be back in June for an episode on Nazi collaborators and June of 1933.

And thank you so much for listening to this epic and I think really fascinating installment of Project 1933 on your favorite podcast, Inbed with a Right.

Thank you.

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

Our title music is by Katie Lyle.