Episode 70 -- Project 1933, Part II: March 15 to April 15

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dawd.

And I'm Moira Donnegan.

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

So, Adrienne, today is part two, the second installment of our new project that was your brain, child, project 1933.

So, today we're going to be covering, well, all of March and some of April.

We'll see how far we get.

I was just joking to Moira that like we're going to be done here in a cool four hours.

And

fun fact, these are hard to edit.

We went on for two and a half hours last time and I was sweating it a little bit.

And so was Mark who ended up doing kind of a final edit on the thing to get the thing down from an hour and 50 minutes down to a measly 90 minutes.

Mark Yoshizumi, our intrepid producer, without whom Inbed with a Right would be even more chaotic

and unprofessional than it is.

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But today we are being very serious.

That is true.

And we're digging into the first year in power of the Nazis.

So Adrian, do you want to talk us through last time when we went through like late January to early March of 1933 and what the Nazis did when they first came to power?

Yeah.

So our idea, just to recap it for listeners, and if you are new to this podcast, you really should check out episode one first.

Basically, we're going to go through the year 1933 as we go through the year 2025.

So we're going to go month by month and with a a focus sort of both on our bailie wick, which is gender and sexuality, but also

on just

how it felt, right?

So we're not going to just, it's not a political history.

It's not an institutional history, even though all these things show up.

We're always going to be asking like, how do people experience this?

You know, there's, as you can imagine with the Nazi era, there's a ton of information that we have today that they didn't have.

And so we're really sort of trying to give a good sense of like what they were aware of, what they had to work with, and how people responded and how history has then judged those responses, right?

Aaron Powell, the reason for this project is, I think, a little obvious, right?

Like there are parallels to our own era where we have like sort of an anti-constitutional,

really?

Like authoritarian government that's now seized power and is like really changing the form of our government and in many cases, you know, just the structure of our daily lives as it seizes that power.

And I think that, you know, there are definitely ways that will emerge in which that comparison is actually quite limited, right?

That's one of the things we're, we're going to be discussing.

But something I do try to bring to this project is that I want to treat the characters we're encountering in the Germany of 1993 with like the generosity with which I hope people of the future will treat us in 2025, you know?

So we're going to try and like dwell on their confusion, their fear, the sets of assumptions they have that are proving to be wrong, the ways that they are prescient.

And we're going to be really looking at the way different people's positionality allow them different gifts.

So something we talked about a lot in our first episode covering February was the way that sometimes women, because they were marginal from a lot of these institutions and worlds that were rapidly becoming complicit with Hitler, were often kind of better equipped from that outsider status to see things a little more clearly, right?

And I think today we're going to get a little more

grim insight into the way that women were treated by the Nazi regime in those early days.

The story of February, we drilled down on a couple of points, if you recall.

We talked about the fact that in some way people were still trying to figure out who the victims were going to be.

It was very clear that the Nazis were going to have victims, but it was unclear who exactly it was going to be.

And like, it seemed to be people with names, famous people.

It also was, you know, communists before it was anyone else.

So So because we were mostly quoting people who are famous for having written a bunch of stuff, we're not dealing with a ton of communist activists.

We were talking about bourgeois writers who found themselves on the Nazis shit list for what they'd written.

But of course, like the Nazis also immediately cracked down hard among working class groups and movements, especially the Communist Party.

there was capable of real savagery, which we'll be able to talk about a little bit more today.

So consider this all somewhat of a rewind and explaining things that we sort of weren't able to talk about last time.

So in this part, I think what we're going to talk about goes under four big headings, which is terror, which is the enabling law, it's Gleichschaltung, which means sort of forced synchronization, and boycott.

And again, it doesn't mean that there weren't other things happening, right?

Events move at an incredibly crazy clip.

We talked about how really Hitler last time needed six weeks to really cement his place in power.

If things are moving at that kind of a clip, you have to sort of decide to place emphases and just kind of ignore some things.

And so it's also good, I think, to always name our sources here.

In this case, we're as always drawing on Richard J.

Evans, which I know you've also started cracking the coming of the Third Reich, which is sort of the classic, I think, account of this.

But I also looked at Peter Fritsch's book, Hitler's First Hundred Days.

I looked at the work of Richard Bessel, a British historian, especially Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism.

And then I looked at a book in German, Philippe Austermann's Entage Maitz, so one day in March.

And I was able to get a hold of a couple of collections of German language documents from the Nazi seizure of power.

At the same time, I'm sure we're going to leave a bunch of stuff out.

I'm sure we're going to have to eventually double back.

All right, let's dig in.

I think there's a theme emerging, and I'll be interested to see whether you identify the same theme that I sort of noticed as I was sort of compiling this.

But the first date of our episode and the first term is actually kind of the outlier from our theme, which is about terror.

And the date is March 20th.

It's the establishment of the first concentration camp in Dachau, which is near Munich.

Because the theme, I think, of the episode will likely be there is out and out terror at this point, right?

There is brutality, galore, but the real damage is really being done by administrative means, right?

It's not the violence of the SA.

It's the fact that the police no longer bothers to contain that violence, right?

It's not the fact that there are slogans painted on Jewish stores.

It's the gradual removal of Jews from all political and economic life that really sort of sets in motion what we associate today with the horrors of the Third Reich.

So it is terror, but in some way it's the developments behind the scenes that are far, far scarier in hindsight, which is something that people at the time experienced.

These laws would come down and people would be like, well, well, what does that actually mean, right?

For me, like this sounds insane, right?

People discovering that they're Jewish because of their grandfather.

They're like, I did not know this.

And they're like almost a little amused, but they're like, it's also deadly serious.

I think historians tell us something that most of our witnesses at the time did not necessarily intuit, that the violence on the part of the Nazis may not have been particularly intentional.

Fritsche suggests in his book that the violence was almost kind of an accident.

The Nazis had, basically, after the various failed attempts to seize power by force, decided that they would attain power, right, the democratic way.

They wanted to win elections, right?

The strategy was paying off, right, by 1933 in a big way, and in a way that really didn't put many constraints on them.

So in some way, the violence didn't do much for them.

But the problem was they also had the SA.

And the SA was really important for them.

Remind us what the SA is.

The Stulmmapteitung was basically the Nazis' paramilitary wing, which which had grown tremendously throughout the 1930s and was basically responsible for the fact that a lot of German voters felt that street violence was out of control.

It was out of control because of the SA.

Nazi thugs are coming and beating up random undesirables in your neighborhood.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And then the Nazis are like, oh, we'll put an end to that, right?

If you vote for us.

Vote for us and we will put a leash.

It's very much like, nice, nice Weimar Republic you got there.

It would be a shame if something happened to it.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And so in some way, right, you could imagine that after Hitler comes to power, you really want to put those guys on a leash, right?

That doesn't end up happening.

Even though keeping them leashed would have been kind of the smart play, the Nazis probably couldn't do that.

Okay, we can draw on a book that we still have to do on the pod, Klaus Tievelid's Male Fantasies from 1977, which is a book all about these interwar paramilitaries and their cult of masculinity.

Of which there were a lot.

It seems like basically like every political party in the Weimar era had some group of like disaffected veterans who were still armed attached to them who would occasionally cause trouble.

The distinction between mass politics and like

yeah, having at least people who could rough someone up.

Whether that was hired muscle for a union or whether it was like, yeah, people with machine guns, it was pretty blurry.

Which is to say that this is not something the Nazis introduced on their own.

This was a pre-existing condition of Weimar-era politics.

That's right.

Although I think the SA was by far the largest by the end, I'd have to double check on that.

These are often World War I veterans

who are in all these weird sort of all-male groups and who, frankly, are

just beating the shit out of each other.

Right.

And Fritz sort of points out, like, these guys were traumatized.

Right?

Their bodies were totally wrecked by years of street fighting.

He has this amazing statistic.

From 1929 to 1932, the size of the Nazi Party increased eightfold, but SA insurance claims for injuries sustained in the line of duty, meaning beating up people, jumped 16fold.

Jesus.

14,006.

Yeah, I mean, this is like a generation of guys who may have had some prospect of upward mobility before in this like rapidly industrializing Germany who instead get thrown into these ditches in fucking Belgium and they see all their friends die and it's a really brutal military defeat

that comes at the end of like years and years of like really extreme suffering and they come back and they're not just like alienated disaffected downwardly mobile young men they're alienated disaffected downwardly mobile young men with like wild amounts of trauma and by the way they all have guns yeah and really know how to use them exactly and hitler is one of them right got gassed in the trenches right and it's important to note also that some of the SA members certainly were too young to have participated in World War I, right?

It had been almost two decades.

But

these are the guys who got laid off from their jobs after 1929.

These people are not well.

And starting on January 30th, when Hitler becomes chancellor, they're kind of being let loose, right?

They're out for blood.

They want vengeance and they get it almost immediately.

There is a consensus among historians that basically creating its own system of prisons, which is what Dachau is part of, had not been a Nazi priority.

But the SA just started abducting way too many people.

And under such dubious legal circumstances, they couldn't really drop them off at the police or at the prison.

They'd be like, who the fuck is this?

It's just someone that you have a beef with.

So like a sort of junta using the local soccer stadium, the SA starts incarcerating people in communist and social democratic establishment that they take over, or even, and Fritsche is very good on this, in hostels or bars that they controlled, right?

So you wander into the wrong bar and suddenly it's a prison?

No, no, no.

I mean, like, I mean, they wouldn't let you in.

I mean, like, you would have known that that was sort of the local SA headquarters.

You wouldn't have come in there for a beer.

But it could mean that.

You could get arrested by people in uniforms, but you weren't in a state prison at all.

You were being held by paramilitaries at their lodge, right?

At like some weird weekend cafe outside of Berlin.

And like the early outrages that the Nazis perpetrated had nothing to do with Dachau.

Dachau, they sort of allowed some journalists into.

It was the bowels of these excursion bars and beer gardens that people sort of like would have had like pleasant Sunday afternoons in in the 1920s and now were under the control of the SA.

Cross the wrong guy in the neighborhood and suddenly the place where you used to go out for like a Saturday afternoon.

Is your prison.

So it occurs to me me that Dahau may have emerged for the Nazis in part as like a solution to an administrative problem, right?

Like they don't have anywhere to put all these people.

That's certainly the suggestion, right?

We know that in the week between the Reichstag fire and the elections, and again, these numbers are from Fritsch's book, the police and the SA together arrested some 5,000 people.

By the end of April, that number is 30,000.

people, right?

And it's extremely unevenly distributed, it appears.

It depended on the local political situation, right?

How strong were the communists?

How strong was the Social Democratic Party in the area?

Urban working class areas were particularly hard hit.

But as you say, like sometimes if you had an overactive SA chapter with a fucking axe to grind, like, yeah, suddenly you're like, well, where are we going to put all these people?

So the problem was not sort of evenly distributed either.

We talked about this a little bit the last time, but like as this problem of the Nazi thugs kidnapping people and holding them hostages in random houses and bars is emerging in like February and early March of 1933.

Nobody seems to be going out to beat up the SA guys, right?

There's no counter-militia by the communists at this point, or is that happening on the fringes?

There is some resistance.

At that point, the police always will move in and will arrest the communists and not the Nazis, right?

So that's where the fusion of the party with the state apparatus is already in full swing.

But no, there is some resistance, especially from the Communist Party.

Problem is it's really hard to know who's getting flipped, who is going underground because they want to continue fighting, and who's kind of naming names.

The first thing that they try to torture out of you, obviously, are other names.

Like, where are these people?

Who are these people?

Who is still in your group, et cetera, et cetera.

There's a novel that's not that well known, which is, I think, the only anti-Nazi novel written in Nazi Germany and published before 1945.

Oh, wow.

It's written by the communist writer Jan Petersen.

It's a novel, but it's very clearly based on

his experiences as a communist organizer in Berlin.

And he, at some point in the novel, it says, quote, we know social democratic comrades from previous discussions.

Some of them are so intimidated that they won't even engage in political conversation with us anymore.

With others, we don't know whether they're still genuine, as in quotation marks.

But the social democratic comrades probably have the same worry about us too, right?

So

he's sort of saying, like, we're all in this together, but like clearly people are flipping.

I mean, they'd have to be superhuman not to, right?

And then you don't know what the flip really looks like.

Are they naming names or are they just getting out of jail and keeping their head down?

Are they what some people did, you know, who really did join kind of an act of resistance?

Like, do they just go quiet and basically tell no one about what they're doing, keep it extremely small and conspiratorial?

From the outside, all that looked exactly the the same.

And so people don't know.

All that sort of happens in these working class areas, which is where this novel, Our Street, is set, is that the visibility of the Communist Party under the Social Democratic Party, which was everywhere,

where there were working people at the time,

it goes to zero, right?

Like they have to go to ground one way or the other.

Whether that means that they've given up on these quarters or whether they're trying to figure out alternative ways of organizing, it's impossible for everyday people to see and know, right?

We talked a little last time about the grief of realizing how deep and broad the Nazis' appeal was, right?

Like people who are having the experience of like realizing that some of their friends or social acquaintances are actually supporters of this regime.

But then also it sounds like, you know, there's not just grief, but also fear, right?

Because you actually don't know.

Realizing that people have these sympathies that you didn't understand before means that there are other people out there who have these sympathies who you still don't know about.

And in fact, you can't trust.

Yeah.

But also the fact that people have pressure points and the Nazis were good at finding them.

These were often right, these were often small towns, people knew each other and so people knew what you had to threaten in order for someone to talk in spite of what they might believe.

I don't know if this happens yet, but I mean, famously in 1933, you know, teachers at school were starting to encourage children to report on their parents.

Often the children didn't know that that's what they were doing, right?

They just related conversation that they

didn't know were conspiratorial and reported those and then the parents went to the camps for it, right?

It's really terrifying.

And this is also, this is of course particularly bad and particularly prevalent in working class families where we talked about Alfred Kahl last time and his daughter Judith.

And she didn't know that her parents were considering fleeing the country

because they had a really nice house and they locked the door and were like, don't come in.

We're talking, right?

It's a lot easier for a bourgeois family to be like, we can't have this conversation in front of the kids ever, right?

It's a lot harder if you're all sharing a room, right?

How are you going to do this, right?

It's like these are intergenerational households.

They're much smaller.

And you have to, at some point, meet and talk.

And the question is, how to do that?

Just to give you a sense of how quickly this gets really, really repressive and terrifying, I looked at the example of Maria Yankovsky.

She's a local SPD.

head, social democrat, in Berlin-Krupenik, which is a very pretty part of town in the east of the city.

Maria is arrested on March 12th, 1933, and is brought to the Sturmlochal Demut, which would later attain

notoriety as

this was one of those, like, just a big restaurant that the SA had turned into kind of its makeshift torture dungeon.

And there, she is interrogated and brutalized by the SA

and then is released, right, after some time.

Jankowski is important because she described her ordeal to the London Times for an article that came out on April 1st, right?

So like there were ways of knowing this.

She also seems to, and this is, I couldn't find direct references to this, but indirectly people say that she seems to have posed for pictures with her wounds to expose what was happening.

Wow.

Yeah, we have transcripts of what happened to her.

So we know the kind of torture she was exposed to.

And this gets at something else about this moment that is so galling about 1933 especially the early goings and that is frankly so resonant with our own moment

the fact that

if you spoke out about what was happening the nazis would accuse you of making them victims they had a really good way of like telling these people who were currently brutalizing their fellow citizens that they were actually victims of evil rumors from abroad read from jewish people right yeah

while the people were very much doing what those people were saying, right?

This idea that like, oh, Maria Yankovsky and people like her are lying was spread by the very same people who like

looked on as people like her were brutalized, right?

The Nazis got incredibly worked up about people making Germany look bad, basically, by pointing out the things that the Nazis were doing.

Yes, how dare you

destroy my reputation by talking about my words and actions?

Yeah, as Nando Revolentis says, stop saying things that I've done.

But this idea that like, it'll be above all applied to German Jews, or basically the pressure is double, right?

On the one hand, it is accede to every one of our insane demands, but also don't complain about it because that would be basically hurting Germany and then we're going to punish you for that.

So that's already here in mid to late March.

In spite of this weird kind of information politics where they're like, oh, you can't say the things that we're obviously doing, as with Dachau, a lot of this is still probably out in the open.

And of course, we should mention, we're going to get to Jewish Germans pretty soon, but for now, concentration camps, as in Dachau, mean political repression, right?

They mean social democrats and communists and a few unlucky others, right?

Labor organizers, some journalists.

They don't yet mean Jewish people.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So when we get to what we think of as the Holocaust proper,

what is happening in the concentration camps, what happens to these people who are being deported, that is officially a secret.

And we can talk about evidence that people knew or didn't know what was going on there.

But the Nazis were making at least some kind of effort to cover that up.

But they don't seem particularly interested in concealing what they're doing, their political enemies.

They'll definitely yell at their political enemies who survive and say, pose with their wounds for the London Times, But that's different than actually wanting to keep it a secret.

Exactly.

The idea that the Holocaust is secret is always a little bit strange to me.

I don't think it really was, but you're right.

It wasn't covered in the paper, right?

Whereas Dachau is opening, Himmler announces in the press, right?

The Nazis' own paper, the Fergusche Bo Uberte, covered the event.

I even have the quote here.

Quote, on Wednesday, the first concentration camp, first, with a capacity of 5,000 people will be built near Dachau, all communists and, where necessary, Reisbane and social democratic officials.

Reisbane is the SPD's paramilitary wing.

Officials who endanger the security of the state will be brought together here.

So none of this is underhanded or secret yet, right?

The Bavarian government in April will, in fact, invite media representatives to visit the camp and report from it.

Not sure how realistic that would have been, but Dachau is covered in international media, right?

We know that at this point, inmates were still in their civilian clothes.

They would not have had their heads shaved.

So there was an attempt to kind of create an air of normalcy around these

and to sort of talk about it as protective custody.

But very soon, newspaper reports began describing prisoners who have been killed, you know, quote unquote, trying to flee or having quote unquote committed cowardly suicide, right?

The murders at Dachau begin almost immediately,

but they sort of have to be introduced sort of through doublespeak.

And we should say that, according to the U.S.

Holocaust Museum, the number of deaths in Dachau by 1945 reached 40,000.

So

last episode, we talked about the banning of basically all other political parties, right?

And we talked about some of these people who are already beginning to flee, either because they're being targeted or because they

start to sense that they will be targeted if they stay, right?

But But this is basically like a formalization and escalation of the same repression we described as beginning pretty much immediately in February.

That's right.

We'll talk a lot about conservatives and the Nazis today.

This was something that was legible to them.

This is what happened in the Spanish Civil War.

This is what happens wherever right-wing authoritarians took over, right?

So the idea that like, oh, we're going to round up a bunch of journalists and communists, like not something that von Papen could completely get behind.

So far, it's also kind of business as usual, right?

Unfortunately, in Europe, 1933.

But there's something else happening at the same time, which I think for us who know where this story is going,

it's absolutely legible what exactly was happening.

At the time,

I think you had to be pretty observant to notice it, at least at this early stage.

Because in the background, the repression we described in the last episode is continuing.

But in this episode, right, we're going to be talking about something a little bit different.

Dachau did not at this point house any inmates who were there for being Jewish, unless they were also trade unionists or communists or social democrats.

Right.

But the campaigns against Jews were ramping up.

So what did that look like?

There were sort of sporadic attacks on Jews and Jewish businesses pretty much continuously during the first months of 1933.

Are those SA attacks?

Who's doing them?

It's mostly the SA.

Okay.

And is it like directed from the Nazi Party?

Like, okay, guys, go rough up some Jewish businesses, or are they just like having these like anti-Semitic redoccur and spontaneously attacking a Jewish business?

So unlike the later pogroms, most famously the Kristallenacht in 1938,

this appears to have been genuinely spontaneous.

That's not to say that the Nazis didn't condone it, but it didn't didn't really fit with their plan that much.

At the same time, that's not to excuse any of this, because in some way, something far scarier was finding expression.

There were beatings and disappearances and violence and the police refusing to investigate sort of throughout February and early March, but there's a marked uptick basically around the time when we're starting our episode around mid-March.

And in Richard Bessel's work, quote, unlike the more frequent assaults on the Nazis' Marxist political opponents, the attacks on Jewish targets essentially were superfluous as regards the actual capture of power, and yet they provided a constant backdrop to the successful political campaign of the NSDLP in the 1930s.

I mean, attacking the SDP, which had previously been a very powerful political party, right?

That makes sense if your aim is to, you know, enact state capture, right?

If your aim is to like get rid of the people who would pose a actual or procedural impediment to your accumulation of the ability to do whatever you want to do.

Exactly.

Jews are not part of that project.

Attacking Jews is something that these Nazis are doing because they want to, and not particularly for a strategic reason.

Exactly.

Right?

It's not calculated.

It's impassioned.

Exactly.

The idea that the more brutal attacks were against SPD, KPD, and trade union targets might make it sound like we're saying like, well, the Jews weren't sort of the intended victims.

That's not true, right?

It sort of makes sense, you know, that the Nazis would go after these people because they'd been fighting them for years and had many of them had gotten whooped and gotten killed by these people, right?

For years.

Now they were basically settling the old scores.

But the violence against Jews appears to not have been particularly instrumental at this point.

People didn't demand it.

It didn't serve any real purpose.

It was just a sign that they wanted to, right?

That this was part of the understanding of the kind of purification that was to come.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: At the risk of making a comparison that's maybe more

intuitive than precise, this reminds me a little bit about the character of attacks on trans people by the Trump regime, right?

Like I understand strategically, tactically, why they are doing things like enacting executive orders against

prominent liberal law firms, right?

Or like...

issuing threats of impeachment to judges who rule against the Trump administration.

And then this shit about trans soldiers or trans teenagers or like trans

people being able to have certain jobs, like that doesn't seem to really have a strategic end point.

It seems to be about like rallying the passions of a base that can be motivated and sort of like take a lot of pleasure and hatred.

Aaron Powell, there's something scary about how extraneous it is, right?

Yeah.

Bessel says that these were quote, almost festive, sadistic outbursts by young toughs who wanted to enjoy themselves at Drew's expense, right?

It's really, really noticeable that like there is like, yeah, there is a kind of ritualistic quality, as Fritscher puts it, to this, which, you know, given the kind of history of ritualized anti-Semitism in Germany and all of Europe, frankly,

you know, with people who knew their history, the alarm bells would have been going off.

Similarly, frankly, the boycotts of Jewish stores at this point and the persistent harassment of their patrons appears to have been intense, but it was neither that well coordinated nor particularly effective, right?

What became effective was pushing Jews from public, political, and commercial life, but almost entirely by administrative means.

So what do you mean by administrative means?

This is by law, right?

It's going to be

through legally depriving people of civil rights and their ability to participate in commercial and political life, right?

But it's important to note that these administrative means, like the boycotts, sort of had another side, which Bessel also mentions, right?

They contained a kind of promise, right?

We are still four years out from 1929, right?

The stock market crash.

We are still in the Great Depression.

And this is all happening against a backdrop of mass unemployment and widespread immiseration, right?

Meaning there is kind of a zero-sum thing going on here.

If a big department store is boycotted because its owners are Jewish, a big department store down the street might not not hate that idea, right?

If, as will happen throughout March and April, Jewish professors, judges, doctors, and so on are dismissed, well, that means someone else gets to take those jobs, right?

Unemployment, recall, is still super high, especially among these groups, right?

There's this German historian named Goetz Ali who's argued that basically the redistribution of plunder was what got so many Germans to enthusiastically support the Nazi regime, especially at the beginning.

It wasn't necessarily that they were anti-Semites and therefore stole their Jewish fellow citizens' jobs, apartments, and eventually their wealth, although they may have also been anti-Semites.

It was that they wanted to steal those things and joining into anti-Semitism was the way to do that, or turning a blind eye to it was the way to do that.

Yes, the Jews' loss becomes your gain.

The first six weeks that we talked about last time are about chaos and uncertainty.

And these four weeks really are about an agenda starting to take shape.

It's one step, then the next, then the next.

All that's just me saying we've now moved on a single day.

Wow.

Yeah, sorry.

So we've gotten all the way to March 21st.

March 21st.

What a day.

Sorry.

We've been recording for.

Not even an hour.

Come on.

Come on.

Come on.

Yeah.

What are you, weak?

Let's go.

Let's do this.

Let's do this.

March 21st, dear listeners.

This is the day of Potsdam.

So the Nazis organize a gathering for certain members of the new Reichstag.

The SPD is not invited or is like, we're not coming, in Potsdam.

What is Potsdam?

Potsdam, for those of you

not familiar with your Berlin geography, is a fairly large city in the periphery of Berlin.

It is the old seat of the Hohenzollern monarchs.

This is where they would sort of spend most of their time, even though they had a pair da terre in central Berlin, obviously.

And that's significant.

The ostensible reason, this was supposed to be the opening of the new Reichstag.

The reason they couldn't have it in the Reichstag is the Reichstag burned down.

They had an alternative space, an opera house in Berlin, but they were like, oh, let's do it in Potsdam.

And it was because of the Hohenzollerns.

So Hitler comes to this.

Von Popm is there.

Alved Hugenberg, sort of the other sort of big guy in this coalition government who's not a Nazi, is there.

President Hindenburg is there.

A bunch of the Kaiser's kids are there.

Some in uniform.

Oh, that's right.

The Kaiser's kids would still be like banging around.

Oh, yeah.

The Kaiser is still around, I think.

Really?

I believe so.

This is all to say that there's a lot of like

signifiers of a glorious German past, right?

All in one place.

Exactly.

Oh, and the Catholic Church is there too.

Yeah.

Wilhelm II, by the way, died in 41.

So Wilhelm II is still alive, but he did not show up for this.

He's still banging around.

Yeah.

Hanging out in the Netherlands, I believe, at the time.

What this all seems to be about is about wooing conservatives who are not yet Nazis in order to, right, like get the army excited, get the monarchists excited, get the Catholic conservatives excited, right?

All these groups that were like, well, we like some of what these people are doing, but we're a little creeped out by some other parts.

Well, here is sort of a big show of like, you know, unite the right rally, right?

Like, we're all, we're all in this together.

Yes.

I love their work imprisoning the communists, but I don't know about

this other stuff.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Are you going to put a bunch of civilians and paramilitary thugs in charge of the army?

Yeah.

Our beautiful German army.

You appear to be quite irreligious.

Are you going to be disrespectful of the state-run Protestant church?

You appear to be quite centralized and quite nationalist.

Would you have a problem with a supranational right-wing organization such as the Catholic Church?

Right.

These are all people trying to understand sort of what their role in this new regime can be.

And Day of Potsdam is like one big reassurance.

Yeah.

So what does Hitler give them?

What is his like trade?

Not very much.

I mean the trade is largely symbolic.

It's meant to sway voters.

Goebbels makes sure to broadcast all of it on the radio.

And it's really more about sort of the trappings of power because the thing that Hitler is trying to get them all to do is a thing that happens two days later, a day so momentous that one of the books I mentioned, Philipp Austermann's admittedly short German language One Day in March, is literally just about that day, March 23rd.

It's all there in this title.

Yeah, it's just one day in March.

So March 23rd, what happens March 23rd, two days after Potsdam?

So this is the Enabling Act.

So what is the Enabling Act?

The Enabling Act basically does away with most of the Weimar Constitution.

It's the legal basis for the dictatorship that would follow until 1945, right?

This is the moment when basically a bunch of decisions that normally would fall to the President Hindenburg get centralized around Hitler.

It is the moment when a lot of stuff that you would need parliament for, you don't need parliament for anymore.

It's basically creating a fully executive, no more checks and balances kind of government.

Most historians argue that the events of February were pretty much sufficient for establishing Nazi dominance and dictatorship, right?

The Reichstag wasn't doing much, and Hindenburg appears to have just been interested in like, I don't know, pissing in his diapers at this point.

But Austerman argues that March 23rd adds something that in the moment was probably not as important, but becomes far more consequential for what happens later, right?

It creates the sham legality on which a lot of the perpetrators could rely as they undertook the various crimes against humanity that are World War II, the Holocaust, et cetera, et cetera, right?

They could sort of say, well, this is all still being done in the name of the German people and with some constitutional sanction, however, threadbare, right?

This fiction of constitutionality would not have happened without the Day of Potsdam and without the Enabling Act.

So this is the thing that makes the dictatorship all legally hunky-dory, is that the Reichstag, the nominally democratically elected Reichstag, hands over all the constitutional authority to like Hitler personally.

Aaron Ross Powell, yeah.

And while we don't know what would have happened if the act had not passed, this is like the last time there's any suspense in this story in some way, because Hitler does need a two-thirds majority in the Reichstag in order to pass this thing.

And as you will recall, even after the pretty unfair elections on March 5th, the Nazis are nowhere near that.

They need helpers, and that's what the day of Potsdam has all been about.

So who are these people in the Reichstag who hand away all of their own power, right?

It seems like this wouldn't align with their incentives

to keep power in the Reichstag, but they all handed over their own power to Hitler.

So who is that and why do they do any of this?

I mean, the question of why has been asked ever since.

And I think the answer is different for each of the parties.

And so this is where, unfortunately, we have to delve into the Weimar party system, which is...

in fucking sane.

Chaotic.

Chaotic.

Yeah, it's nuts.

It's nuts.

There was no like, you have to get 5, 10, 15% of the vote before you can get a seat in the Reichstag.

If you got anything, you can get a seat in the Reichstag.

So it incentivized a ton of different parties.

That's right.

And by the end of the Weimar Republic, a bunch of them were just kind of in total opposition.

They wouldn't cooperate with any other parties.

They were just there to fuck shit up, basically.

Right.

So we should say the meeting happens at the Kohloper in Berlin, so an opera house.

And the SA and the SS are both there in the hall, basically, in the voting area, in order to intimidate people.

So it's like,

if you want to vote against this, then we have our jack boots literally outside.

Yeah, I mean, Hitler at several points like threatens, like, blood will run down these hallways, right?

So, like, it's not exactly the easiest start

for people to do the right thing, but some people manage.

We should mention, the KPD and the SPD together would have already enough votes to, I think, prevent a two-thirds majority for Hitler.

But they don't because the KPD, the communists, have already been barred from the Reichstag.

That's right.

They've been locked out by the Reichstag fire decree, by Hindenburg.

They also, many of them are arrested arrested or have fled by now.

They can't vote from prison.

And so they're just not there.

And basically, the Reistach decides to amend the rules to be like, well, if people can't show up for whatever reason, we're just going to adjust what quorum is, right?

That's so funny.

It's like, if we can simply imprison anybody who might vote against us and then have a legitimate vote in our case.

It's bananas, isn't it?

The SPD, which will be the only party that votes against this law.

They are the Social Democrats.

They were the biggest party in the Weimar era for a long time, and they've been in kind of a slow decline at the Cliff's notes.

The oldest party in Germany, or oldest still-existing party in Germany, founded in 1863, has had that name since the 1890s.

And yes, between 1890 and 1930, it was the largest party in the Reichstag continuously.

In the early Weimar Republic, it was the dominant party.

Friedrich Ebert, the first

ever democratically elected head of state in Germany, was an SPD politician, but they had declined somewhat by the end of the Weimar Republic.

They would be resurrected after the war and are now slowly eroding.

Olaf Schulz's party, former German chancellor,

was the SPD, so that they're still around.

Then we have the center party, Centrumspati, which is a very odd one.

It's the Catholic party.

Right.

This is a turn we also have in our own era with the likes of like Adrian Vermuhl.

Like in the Weimar era, there were a lot of Catholic thinkers who were like, wait, we actually don't think that democracy is compatible with Catholicism.

Aaron Ross Powell, yeah.

There are a couple of reasons this happens.

In the German context especially, Catholics in the Prussian-dominated German Empire, so 1871 till 1918, were always a minority position, meaning

that they sort of discovered the virtues of pluralism for themselves, right?

And civil liberties, right?

The idea that they needed religious freedom, which were all legitimate, but it kind of made a lot of Catholics sort of be baseline liberal.

Am I right that the Catholic population in Germany also tended to be more working class or rural and therefore maybe a little more sympathetic to some of the social democracy arguments?

Certainly the SPD didn't take much away from them in rural areas.

The SPD tended to be fairly weak in rural areas, especially towards the end of the Weimar Republic.

But no, there are Catholic cities, Cologne,

basically anything in the northern Rhine Valley, in the far west,

towards France.

If you think of a place like Tria,

Munich is a big city and deeply, deeply Catholic.

So, oh, and then there were the areas with large Polish population, right?

In what is today Poland, right?

So Silesia,

Breslau, and places like that.

There, the center sort of was kind of anti-nationalist, right?

Like it would be weird for someone who's like Polish person living in occupied territory being like, I am for Germanization.

People got there.

Some people got there, but it's not the most intuitive position to take.

And so the center had been kind of a big force for kind of liberalism and centrism, and hence the name.

But it had, as you say, started to

open itself up to authoritarianism, not necessarily fascism, but there were just a lot of authoritarian governments around Europe at the time that, as part of their reactionary project, advocated a return to basically Catholic doctrine and the importance of the Catholic Church.

Think of Francisco Franco in Spain.

Think of

events in Austria.

Think of Hungary.

Think of Poland.

The idea that right-wing parties could be ascendant and kind of restore Catholicism to what many Catholics, many conservative Catholics felt was its rightful place in society and to restore the societal order that Catholicism, frankly, still envisions, sorry, is,

you know, it just made a lot of sense to these voters.

And so the center sort of started tacking to the right.

The guy who's running it at the time, prelate Ludwig Kaas, basically ends up telling his party to vote for this law based on assurances from Hitler that he wouldn't come for the Catholic Church.

So he's there not advocating for the German constitution or state at all.

He's there kind of advocating for the Vatican.

And in fact, once the center party is dissolved, which happens like three months later, he goes to Rome and starts negotiating a treaty, a concordance with Nazi Germany as a representative of the Vatican.

So like, you know, not to get all Charlie and the board of crazy here, but like there's a very specific form of Catholicism that's that's at work here and that already is kind of making its peace with what is about to happen.

Then who else do we got?

The next is the German state party, the Deutscher Staatspatei.

These are the liberals.

And this is a story that's just going to blow your mind because you'll never have heard it before.

So the liberals, sort of pro-business, socially liberal, this was the party called the DDP.

They kept getting clobbered in elections after the Great Depression started and by 1930 merged with another party, which was virulently nationalist and anti-Semitic.

Oh my God.

Okay, so they're like, what if we just track to the right?

That will work.

Yeah, exactly.

They were a business party with also a pronounced populist nationalist edge.

Oh, wow.

And they voted yes in a total shocker.

Yeah.

Quote, in the interest of the people and the fatherland and expecting a lawful use of these powers, we will put aside our serious reservations and approve the Enabling Act.

Okay, great.

The Susan Collins Award goes to the German State Party.

One little nugget in terms of like whether these people ever were called to account for any of this.

They had only five votes in the Reichstag at the time, the German state party, but one of them, Theodore Hoys, would end up becoming Germany's first president.

So, no, no.

So, post-war Germany, right?

Like, so no real accountability for you know, clubbing democracy over the head like a baby seal.

Wow, great.

Okay.

So who else do we have?

So we have the DNVP, the German Nationalist People's Party, founded in 1918, which is basically like therefore nationalism, national liberalism, anti-Semitism, imperial monarchist conservatism, and ethnoconservatism.

But.

So why aren't they just Nazis?

I know.

Why are they?

It's people in a different party.

They're somehow not Nazis.

I'm like, yeah, okay.

We're the party of quacking like a duck, walking like a duck, but not being ducks.

The party of sparkling wine, if you will.

Yes, yes.

Yeah.

It's like, well, you see.

No, it's very strange.

I think the important thing here is the monarchism, right?

The Nazis were not interested in a restoration of the imperial monarchy.

They didn't like the Hohenzollerns.

They were modernists in that way.

They were like, we have to create a new Germany.

We're not going back to an old one.

These people did want to go back.

They were reactionaries.

And there's some indication, right, that a lot of these right-wingers fooled themselves into believing, oh, this little thug is not going to last, but we're going to use it to reestablish a Kaiser.

Right.

Yeah.

And so that's, that's the difference, I guess, here.

You could imagine that for the average voter, like, that doesn't mean squat, right?

And so the party had gotten pretty seriously ground up by the rise of the Nazis.

They kept trying to sort of be like, hey, do you guys want to like form a government together?

Do you want to do something together?

Do you want to hang out?

Maybe Sunday.

I'm free on Sunday.

And the Nazis are like, no, we're good, bro.

We're okay.

The Nazis were just kind of like, well, we don't seem to need these people.

And it made sense.

Like the memories of the empire were kind of receding into the distance.

It was still a pretty young society, right?

It had been a minute.

The empire had only been formed in the 1870s, right?

Exactly.

Yeah.

So it's not like there's a long tradition.

Like there's people who are alive who were born before then.

Yeah.

And then, you know, Germany had been a republic for approximately 20 minutes and that had gone terribly.

So people aren't really invested as much in these previous forms of government, right?

The past that they're drawing from is more nebulous, more mythological

than historical.

Yeah.

At which point, like you can take or leave the Kaiser, right?

It can be a Kaiser, it can be a Hitler, who cares, right?

Exactly.

And probably the reason why the DNVP still stuck around at all was that they had a sugar dip.

Oh my God, the whole thing is funded by one right-wing rich guy.

Oh my God, this is too real.

Yes.

This is the publisher Alfred Hugenberg, who's basically the Rupert Murdoch of the Weimar Republic and who used his yellow journalism rags and all that shit to basically undercut the constitutional order at every step and every chance he got.

Lovely.

He's the reason why this party sort of still limps along.

Like so many think tanks or magazines, you're like, who even reads this?

And it's one guy and he's cutting the check for the whole thing.

The important thing to note here, by the way, like as we're talking about like these Nazi anti-Semitic excesses, the DNVP is massively anti-Semitic, right?

This is like part of their whole deal.

Meaning the idea that they're going to step in and be like, not like that.

Oh my God.

You know, like is fantastical.

Like these people were fine with that part of it.

It was the Kaiser part that they were upset about.

Nobody seems to have like a principled opposition to anti-Semitism or a principled commitment to pluralism.

Well, I mean, the people who are currently getting the shit knocked out of them in some restaurant that the SA owns, yes, they are.

And I suppose the Liberal Party probably, but like...

It doesn't seem like there's a big like pro-democracy or pro-pluralism representation in the Reichstag right now.

Also, part of it is just that the entire political spectrum has drifted so far to the right.

There are really only two parties left of center left, and they are just,

they're getting

disappeared, yeah.

Yeah.

The final party I briefly want to talk about, there are some other ones.

I ain't reading all that.

Happy for you, though.

Or sorry that happened.

That's you texting the Weimar party system.

Okay.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Is the BVP, the Bavarian People Party.

Tell me about the BVP.

So this is exactly what you were sort of thinking about when you were asking about the center.

This had a rural Catholic base, right?

Okay.

In Bavaria only.

And because of that, it was one of the rare right-wing parties that really didn't have much to fear from the Nazis.

Their base does not appear to have drifted towards the Nazis very much.

So they just vote for it for the fuck of it.

Who knows?

I feel like whenever we're talking about Germany, you talk about Bavaria with like a sigh.

Is that like your, is it like your Alabama?

It's our Texas.

How so?

It's Alabama with more money.

Okay, it's Texas.

And a huge complex about like how you really have to understand them.

And I'm like, I...

I really don't.

They're right-wing, they're money, they've got their insular cultural

self-regard.

Yeah, that's Texas.

Is there anything you ever, I'm like, okay, they have, they've got some charm.

Like, Texas really does have good barbecue.

Yeah, I mean, like, a beer garden is a nice thing.

I mean,

but like, they are a thorn in the side of German attempts to like modernize.

Yeah, yeah, generally.

Bavaria did hold out longer against the Nazis.

I mean, like a week longer than some other parts, precisely because it had this local base.

So sometimes that localism can be helpful, right?

It can help sort of sustain pluralism.

But in the end, Bavarian particularism has always, if we have any Bavarian listeners, I'm sorry, but prove me wrong, has always had a tendency to accommodate itself to state authoritarianism, basically.

Yeah, in the end, it's just the SPD that votes against the law.

Once again, while the thugs are standing outside, this is at great personal risk.

Exactly.

They're voting against the enabling law.

Yeah, exactly.

And it's 94 against, but that's because 26 members of the SPD can't make it on account of they are already arrested.

And as the head of the parliamentary group, Otto Wels, puts it, quote, you can take away our freedom and our lives, but you can't take away our honor, which completely sets off the Nazis.

Hitler takes the rostrum and launches into this insane rant, goes on about the lack of honor among social democrats, right?

Like the honor part really gets to him, talks about the persecution that the Nazis sort of had allegedly suffered.

at the hands of the social democrats, specifically by, you know, being held to account legally for crimes that they had committed, something that Nazis, and you may know this or not know this, are deeply allergic to, just deeply allergic to any accountability, really.

And anyway, Hitler concludes with the line, I don't want you to vote for this law.

Germany shall be free, but not through you.

Which is, in the midst of all this awfulness, does feel like a housewife's line, frankly.

Yeah, he's unfailingly petty.

He's like,

I'm not a scoundrel.

You're a scoundrel.

You know, you're the puppet.

It's got this like petulant woundedness to it.

It is, right?

Like in the moment, Goebbels has a diary entry where he's like a full triumph.

He's just experiencing this thing and it's like, wow, like we are, like, he sounds almost a little surprised.

Like, we are playing these people like a fucking fiddle.

I mean, the promises that they extract from the Nazis, that several of these parties extract from the Nazis, the Nazis won't put in writing.

Oh, my God.

And then, and they're like, okay, cool.

And the Nazis are like, wait, what?

We didn't think it was going to be that easy, right?

And you're right.

That does not appear to be how Hitler experiences it.

He is still a street fighter.

He's still always punching back, right?

He still has a chip on his shoulder.

It's really quite remarkable.

And my impression is that at least from the diary entry for that day, Goebbels doesn't feel that way.

He's like, we really are in charge now.

So Hitler can't even take a win.

Yeah.

So now we can jump a little bit into the future because I'm mindful that I don't want to get a text from Mark saying, I will kill you.

Sorry, Mark.

Yeah.

March 31st is when the provisional law to bring the states into line with the Reich comes out.

It's a kind of a mouthful.

In German, it's called the Gleischaltungsgeset.

So it's

the synchronization law.

What this means is the composition of state parliaments now has to mirror those of the Reichstag, meaning the regional parliaments are no longer a counterweight to the national government the way it was intended.

They are reflections of it.

Is it that you can't have like a different proportion of parties in your state government?

That's right.

So if the Reichstag is controlled by the Nazis, your Prussian parliament is also controlled by the Nazis.

That's right.

In practice, all this means is that people haphazardly lose their parliamentary jobs in favor of a Nazi, right?

Like it's just, it's complete chaos, doesn't make any sense.

There's another law on April 7th, another sort of synchronization law that appoints local governors.

But the word Leichschaltung goes way beyond that.

It kind of starts naming an entire process that I think Richard Evans describes very, very well and that is probably going to occupy us for some of this episode and then some of the next, because this extends well into May.

It basically comes to define this period in time.

It's the purge of all those who aren't aligned with the Nazi state from any positions of authority.

So synchronization means we're just getting rid of all political opponents.

Exactly.

It's our guys.

It's not even opponents, right?

Opponents probably are already in jail.

It's about like anyone who doesn't belong to our little club.

So the Project 2025 prescription is like, okay, what we're going to do is we're going to purge a federal bureaucracy and we're going to put in like pro-Trump functionaries, getting rid of anybody who's in these positions that isn't like 100% on board and accountable to us so that we can make sure we have like unified control of all levels of government.

Aaron Powell, your words, not mine.

But yes.

This is exactly what it is.

And it happens in a bunch of ways, which I think give us a little bit of a sense of how

March to April 1933 would have felt.

Because this is the part of it that in everyone's diary sort of shows up.

Like if you didn't have a lot of communist friends, if you weren't politically active, the February stuff would have been kind of distant rumbles for you.

Now, right, your mayor is different.

The guy at the insurance company is different.

The teacher suddenly loses their job.

The professor that you worked for is gone, right?

Like this newspaper suddenly has to close, right?

It really

changes the world around people very, very quickly.

And part of that is because it's no longer just the Nazis doing it.

This is where we're starting to see broader-based social movement towards the Nazi state, maybe I'll just walk you through like four strategies that basically the Nazis used for this.

Yeah, like how do they do all this?

Because it also seems like a huge administrative burden.

It is, yeah.

The first strategy is just in the case of mayors and local leaders, it's just a mini coup.

Fritsche tells the story, this is probably one of the most famous ones in Braunschweig, so in northern Germany,

the mayor Anst Büme there is SPD in 1933.

He's still in office, but by March 1933, he basically can't conduct business anymore.

These armed thugs sort of will show up.

And when he calls the police, the police arrest him.

He's then brought to one of these SA prisons.

And eventually on the 13th of March, he's stripped of his job by the new governor of the state, basically, that Hitler had put in power.

But he's allowed to be in the town hall, but like under protective custody of the SA, basically.

Then he's completely removed from office, replaced by the local Nazi leader.

And then the 25th of March, he's arrested at home and brought to a former SBD kind of social club that the SA had taken over and is tortured there until he signs a document basically handing over his job, confessing to all kinds of weird crimes.

After that, they move him to a regular prison.

And basically, there's an interim mayor in place until October 1933 when there's a quote-unquote election it's a sham election and a guy from the NSDAP shockingly wins that one right so um that that sort of gives you a sense of how how this can happen right like you have a local leader who's popular who has support who most likely would have won another election well can't have that and so you do this mix of like legal stuff and these street thugs kind of coming in there's like a little bit of formal cover and then there's an underlying reality of just violence yeah and the violence arguing that like this is the will of the the people, this is the fury of the people now coming for you.

It's like, this guy won an election, man.

Like that seems like the will of the people to me, but like, no, like the SA basically takes the mantle of the people, right?

Like it's not just that like the Nazis want you out, the people want you out.

The people no longer trust you.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: The will of the Germans is now embodied by the Nazis.

And anybody who is German and doesn't agree with the Nazis is not a real German and gets excluded.

Like the real Germans want this, and therefore we are acting in their interest.

There's sort of an attempt to sort of make it seem like a popular uprising.

It's not.

It's just a bunch of local, you know, hooligans, basically.

But, you know, the idea is like this was

an unfortunate upwelling of popular anger, right?

And they're like, well, no, it wasn't.

It was your paramilitary group that did it.

Strategy number two is, in the case of many institutions, it simply consisted of an administrative reorganization, which could then purge members.

What is it that they say in like the meeting where you realize you're going to be laid off?

They're like, we're retooling to be more efficient for future challenges.

And it's like, okay, we're all like, we're all getting fired.

And that means the people who you don't think are on board with your agenda are the ones getting fired.

Yeah, but the reorg goes even further.

This is something that listeners who are paying attention to what's happening at Colombia and other places might notice some resonances there.

The good example here are the universities, because part of what's happening with Gleichen at the university is, yeah, they're getting rid of a bunch of people, but they're also reorganizing the university.

They're basically, right, they have this Führer Princip in the state with Hitler as the leader, but they also demand that the university start reorganizing according to this leadership principle, meaning that the rector, who's the president, basically equivalent in Germany, has to take all the reins of power, has to start being able to dismiss students, has to be able to dismiss faculty, has final say-so on everything, right?

And then you can put your guy in charge of that one job that has everything, right?

German universities, like most universities, had been fairly decentralized.

A lot of power had devolved to famous faculty members, to important deans and administrators.

And the Nazis undo all that to kind of make sure that they only had to replace one guy.

It was almost always a guy, in order to make sure that they had full control over the university.

Aaron Ross Powell,

centralized government, we think of it as like an autocratic.

principle motivated by the needs of the or the desires to power of the one central figure but you're also saying it is like an easier thing to manage from above right like when i want to totally change this university if i only have to get rid of the rector right because all the power is concentrated in that office that makes my job easier exactly and of course this is also where you know if you were a right-leaning intellectual and you wanted that kind of job, you suddenly had all this power and could sort of radically reimagine what a university can be, you know, to to use the management speak of today, right?

Martin Heidegger is someone who gets into office that way and gives this absolutely insane speech laying out how he's the leader of the University of Freiburg and what it means to be a follower in academia.

And, you know, it becomes kind of a great moment also for opportunists who both have an axe to grind with their colleagues and love having a little bit more power.

Yeah, it strikes me that this is creating a lot of opportunities for like grift or like grievance enactment, right?

Like, hmm, I don't like this guy.

I'm going to hint that he's not on board to the person who is in charge of these firings or like, that's right.

Oh, I have a lot of ambition and not a lot of principle.

So I'm just going to suck up to the Nazis and see if I can get one of these big cushy jobs whose only requirement is like party loyalty.

Yeah.

One of the big things that sort of amplifies this, on the one hand, the graft aspect of this collides with the legalistic framework of the whole thing, because the Nazis were also starting to make choices that actually restricted what a university leader could make.

On April 7th, 1933, you get the law for the restoration of the professional civil service.

They passed this new law about who can have what jobs on April 7th.

Exactly.

And what is the content of this law?

Well, I'll just read it.

Maybe we'll take turns.

Paragraph one.

In order to restore a national professional civil service and to simplify administration, officials may be dismissed from office in accordance with the following provisions, even if the conditions conditions required for this under the applicable law are not met.

So we can just fire you.

You have no employment protections.

Okay.

This is the big balls clause, basically.

So section three reads, officials who are not of Aryan descent shall be retired.

Jesus Christ.

Yep.

Honorary officials shall be dismissed from office.

What the fuck?

They already have this Aryan distinction and they're already making it a job requirement.

That's right.

And I mean, they're talking about this as a restoration, right?

Nothing was wrong with the German professional civil service.

They had a large professional civil service.

The idea of restoration was purification, right?

It's about it had been destroyed by the woke mind virus.

Oh, I'm sorry.

No, I slipped in my notes.

It had been subverted by Jewish and modern elements and the decadent cosmopolitans and the scourge of modernism.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Cultural Marxism, right?

Yeah.

So wait, but who counts as an Aryan?

So this is what a lot of people ask.

They're like, I think my grandpa was Jewish.

I've never been to a synagogue.

Do I count?

Yeah, they make clear that if you have grandparents, I believe you are, you count as non-Aryan, right?

Meaning that people sort of have to sort of start proving this stuff too.

So, you know, here it is, April 7th already.

There's a limitation to this, which doesn't matter that much pragmatically, but matters for some of our friends from the last episode.

For instance, Victor Clempera.

This is our professor of French, right?

Who Who kept that detailed diary that's so useful for historians.

I'm rooting for him.

I don't actually know what happens to him, so no spoilers, but I'm guessing it's not great.

Okay.

We'll get there.

Basically, on Hindenburg's insistence, World War I vets are for now exempt.

And this will buy someone like Klempera a few months, but he knows it's not forever.

Yeah, if they're making these like big racial classifications about who's allowed to participate in civil society and public life, And they're like, oh, but not you.

Like, you know, the, the, the winking exemption is never, is never very reliable.

We'll get to you later, exactly.

This reminds me a little of like one-drop rules in the segregated South, right?

Like, because what we have in

Germany from, I think, like basically the mid-19th century on is a ton of intermarriage between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans, right?

Like, this is not a like intensely segregated population.

It's a very assimilated, integrated population, like distinctly from other populations of Jews in Europe, right?

Yeah.

And that was also the case in the American South, both through, you know, sexual violence and through other forms of, you know, more benign social mixing is you had a ton of people who had this ancestry who didn't necessarily know.

It wouldn't always come up, but there's this regime of heredity that really limits your access to public life based on your ancestry that might even be in like the quite distant past.

Tremper notes in his diary, quote, for the moment I am still safe, but I'm safe like someone on the gallows who has the rope around his neck.

At any moment, a new law can kick away the steps on which I'm standing, and then I hang.

Get out of there, Victor.

Yeah, I know.

Paragraph four of this law for the quote-unquote restoration of the German civil service says,

Officials who, based on their previous political activities, do not offer a guarantee that they will at all times fully support the national state may be dismissed from service.

Jesus, it's a loyalty oath.

Yeah.

But note that it doesn't say national socialist state yet.

This is still an integralist rhetoric.

The problem is that the civil service is too independent or is not sufficiently in the service of the national state.

Of course, the Nazis are taking over the national state as we speak, but it's still, it's interesting that, like, it's not yet loyalty to the Führer.

But there's still a distinction between the state and the party, which

won't hold.

No, not for a long, exactly.

And just to give you an idea how this plays out in practice, obviously, like this is absolute carnage among German university professors.

I looked at the University of Göttingen, not too far from Braunschweig, which had its rector replaced in late March.

And then the law leads to the immediate dismissal of 45 professors at the university.

Jesus.

Among them, the physicist and mathematician Max Bohn, 1954 Nobel laureate.

Richard Courant, a mathematician, Nikolaus Prevna, who's a famous art historian.

Wolfgang Stechel, another art historian.

A few people sort of hang on for longer.

For instance, legal scholar Gerhard Leibholtz, I'm guessing because he was a veteran.

This also hits a lot of women.

Of course, the women often aren't.

tenured professors.

Right.

They're already more precarious in their employment.

Exactly.

They have less of a cushion.

They're lacking two cushions, right?

One is...

They're not veterans.

They're not veterans, exactly.

And they are often not tenured professor, right?

And so Emmy Neuter, another sort of math genius at Göttingen, loses her job, but I think is not even listed as one of the professors because she was not a professor, right?

So do we have a brain drain starting to begin?

Oh, massive.

Really?

Yeah.

And I mean, one should say that the 45 is almost certainly an undercount.

Historians note that a lot of these people took early retirement in order to avoid this fate.

right hoping that their status might be restored one day this is what happened to current in fact one of the professors i just mentioned he appears to have taken just like when they were like we're about to fire he's like, you can't fire me, I'm retired.

In certain fields, there have been wonderful studies of individual fields.

Like more than a third of the professors as of January 1933 were no longer professors by January of the next year.

Entire fields get completely decimated.

These people are also obviously not distributed equally across fields.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Are these people who are mostly leaving because they're not Nazis or are these people who are leaving because they're Jewish?

Like, what is like, there's a lot of people that can get caught in this law.

It's a big net.

Jr.: Yeah, I think that this is mostly Jewish people at this point.

I mean, it depends a little bit on field.

Like, if you were a physicist and you're a social democrat, you can probably get around this, right?

Political scientists, legal scholars, you're kind of screwed, right?

Like, you're in writing being like,

this is why the constitutional order is important.

And the Nazis are like, well, that doesn't sound very pro-Nazi now, does it?

When I was in college, I lived in Oberholzer Hall, which was one of several dorms named after a bunch of German Jewish humanities scholars who had fled the Nazis and wound up

at Bard College, probably not the worst place to be

because of these kind of purges.

Yeah.

No, I mean, like the American university will be the biggest beneficiary, I get, of the purge, right?

Yeah.

And one should say that the German universities, to my mind, have not recovered from this to this day.

Now, the third strategy is sort of rationalization.

This is a kind of consolidation, right?

Where basically you try to kind of reduce the number of actors that might sort of create a pluralism.

So this is happening mostly sort of in fields where it's actually free market, where the government doesn't have much say one way or the other.

A good example here is the film industry, right?

In January of 1933, the German film industry consists of 49 production companies.

By the late 30s, that number is 15.

Wow.

Yeah.

Many of these companies were already pretty nationalist, at least in terms of ownership, right?

UFA, the largest one of these, is owned by drum roll Alfred Hugenberg.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Our anti-Semitic right-wing creep.

Yeah.

If you are a friend of the Nazis, your business is going to be spared, right?

There's also a little bit of like a patronage thing going on, as well as an ideological purpose.

That's right.

Now, to be clear, the law of April 7th was about civil servants, so it said nothing about private industries.

When the Nazis approached UFA, which was owned by Alfred Hugenberg, in late March,

asking them to compile a list of Jewish employees, they found out that not only had UFA compiled such lists already, but had in fact started purging Jewish employees on March 29th.

Oh, my God.

Right away, sir.

In fact, I've already started the anti-Semitic purge.

Jesus, what a bunch of pussies.

Like, I mean, I think there's a lot of like shock in America right now about the cowardice and willingness to cooperate with authoritarianism among our own elites, but that is highly precedented and perhaps should not be so shocking.

Exactly, right?

I mean, like, this is a great example of anticipatory obedience or what Yin Kershaw will later call working towards the Führer, right?

Like the fact that like the Nazis sometimes had to cajole and force people, but at other times, like, oh, well, you already

did this, right?

Like, basically, people's venality, people's anti-Semitism, people's selfishness basically got them there before the Nazis even made them do anything.

Yeah.

So those are the three strategies of sort of forced gleichscheitung, forced synchronization.

And now briefly, I wanted to talk about the third event, which is on April 1st, which is the boycott of German Jewish businesses, right?

So it's businesses, law firms, doctors' offices, right?

It's when, you know, everyday

Jewish people who are not in a relationship where they owe fealty to the state, right?

Where they're not civil servants, become explicit targets of official Nazi policy.

Most historians say, like, it's kind of a bust.

Goebbers is happy with it, but like, there's not a whole lot of buy-in.

It does appear that basically it shows that, like, in some way, the administrative stuff that the Nazis are doing is far more effective, far more devastating than them trying to sort of channel the anger of what they think of as the street.

Like, every day, people are not yet buying into that part of it.

Here's how Plempera experiences it in Dresden.

Quote, on Saturday, red posters on the shops recognize German Christian Enterprise.

In between them, closed shops, SA men in front of them with triangular boards.

Whoever buys from the Jew supports the foreign boycott and destroys the German economy.

This is the ostensible reason for this, like the Jews spread lies about us by, again, saying the things that we've done and saying we're doing.

Yeah.

And so therefore, now we have to boycott them because there had been some tiny boycott movements of German wares based on the fact that the German government was literal Nazis.

And people were like, I feel like you're playing the Nazi card too fast.

Just because we're Nazis doesn't...

Why would you call us Nazis just on account of us being Nazis?

My grandfather fought real Nazis, and I bought this copy of mine Konf before we knew the truth.

Yeah.

Klempera goes on.

People poured down Prager Straße and looked at it all.

That was the boycott.

For the time being, only Saturday, then a pause until Wednesday, we're told, excluding banks, including lawyers and doctors, called off after one day.

It has been a success and Germany is quote-unquote magnanimous.

But in truth, it's a wild turnaround.

Evidently resistance at home and abroad, and evidently from the other side, pressure from the national socialist mob.

He's like, this didn't work.

They don't know what they're doing.

At the same time, he says, like, I have a feeling that the catastrophe is coming.

He's like, just because this didn't work, just because they haven't yet mastered this, it's going to get worse.

There was a degree of trial and error and accumulation of different strategies and different lessons.

Even when it comes to, I guess I was thinking when it comes to boycotts, Nazis will be a lot more effective later on.

As Peter Fritscher points out in his book, a lot of these early outrages of the Nazi period have this almost ritualistic quality.

They're public, they're spectacular, and yet it kind of feels like people are mostly just going through the motions.

It's not, you know, there's a kind of threadbare quality to a lot of it at this stage.

And you can really tell that in Klemper's description, he's clearly not saying this is nothing.

He's not laughing it off.

But he's also like, it's not clear how much people's heart is really in this, right?

And the other thing I think that Klemper saw that historians have confirmed since is this, that there's this pervasive sense of victimhood that the Nazis sought to instill,

often at the same time as they were relentlessly victimizing others, right?

The idea was that these boycotts were reactive, since, you know, Jews have been quote-unquote spreading lies and led to some very tiny boycotts in other countries, right?

Right.

They're in search of this justification to hang, like a peg to hang their grievance on, right?

A small, little

boycott in another country will become pretextual justification for this outsized victimization of Jews and this outsized sense of grievance against Jews.

And I mean, like, this is obviously something that we don't know of our present moment, that people can control all levers of power and and still go on constantly about how they're the actual victims.

So, you know, like it's it's been 90 years, like people have moved on.

But no, in all seriousness, I do think it's it's really, really noticeable that like people who can not only have untrammeled power but exercise it viciously,

their ability to tell themselves that truly they are the victims here and that outrages are actually being perpetrated against them,

the capacity for that is pretty limitless.

And the Nazis really play that like a fiddle in late March and early April of 1933.

So what are we looking forward to next time, Adrian?

So next time, we're going to get to more gender and sexuality stuff.

We're going to be talking about the women's movement and the Nazi state, which is an interesting story.

We're going to be talking about Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science.

And yeah, we're going to be talking about trans people and the Nazis.

Thank you for going on yet another long journey with me.

We're going to do this.

We're going to make it.

This is a marathon, not a sprint, but, you know, two down, eight more to go.

Thank you, Adrian, and thank you all for listening to your favorite podcast, Inbed with a Right.

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

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

Our title music is by Katie Lau.