Episode 67 -- Project 1933, Part I: January to March 15

opposing forces seem as if vanished from the face of the earth.

It is this utter collapse of power only recently present, no, its complete disappearance just as in 1918 that I find so staggering.

Hello, I'm Adrian Dah.

And I'm Moira Donegan.

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

So Adrian, today we are launching a new series that was your idea and I think it's kind of brilliant.

Do you want to tell the listeners a bit about what we're embarking on?

It's a little insane, but it might make sense.

We're calling it Project 1933 because right now 1933 is having a bit of a moment.

Everyone is making comparisons to Germany in 1933.

Anyone who works on Germany gets asked about this stuff.

We got asked about it in the first Trump administration.

We're definitely getting asked about it now.

So I thought it might make sense for a podcast about conservative thought and right-wing thought to really give listeners a sense of what it felt like in 1933.

It's a very well-documented period in history.

People understood they were living through history and kept pretty good records and later reflected on.

This was a year that many people experienced as a massive break in their careers, in their biographies, and what they thought they knew about the world, the same way that 2025 might feel to some Americans as a lot of things that you had assumed about your world just turn out no longer to be true.

There's a wealth of information here.

We're not having to dig in some way.

The tricky part is always to edit, to figure out what to focus on and what not.

Now, this might sound to some of our listeners as like, well, that's a perfectly reasonable idea.

Well, we're getting to the crazy part because the idea is we're going to go month by month.

Now, we had that idea in March, which, yeah, that's how we rolled.

A little late, but you know what?

We're not so deep into the year that we can't catch up.

Exactly.

We didn't even become chancellor until the end of January, right?

That's That's right, January 30th.

So we get a couple of weeks of grace.

Yeah.

So just assume it's February, and we're doing February and part of March.

Then we're going to do March and parts of April.

And then we should be caught up.

And then we're just going to go month by month by month.

There's a bunch of topics I want to hit on.

And there are a bunch of topics that I think will emerge precisely if we

go patiently, give ourselves a little bit more time with various protagonists, with various issues, with various events.

In true In Bed with the Rights style, I think this is going to be the kind of thing where Adrian will occasionally let the comparisons and relevance of our material to our current historical moment emerge from the history itself, right?

And I am probably going to be bursting out with enthusiasm or frustration.

And this is exactly what Elon Musk did last week, you know, something like that.

So hopefully some break in our ongoing historical period will intervene and this project will become less relevant as we go through.

Yeah.

Possibly

that will begin to sound a little naive the way that some of these statements from 1933 sound a little naive in retrospect, too.

And we should say right at the outset, the comparisons force themselves, right?

Like we're going to make them.

At the same time, it's not just that like they're not always perfect.

It's also that they have to be partial.

There's so much happening, right?

There's an entire society changing and a world changing around it.

And the spectacle of that year is just basically absolutely dizzying.

And so we have to place accents.

We have to kind of have a focus.

And that will kind of predetermine the story that we come away with.

And as is our want at In Bedwood, the Right, obviously we'll focus on gender and sexuality.

And I should say that There are a lot of great accounts of what's called the Mach de Greifung, so the seizure of power of the Nazis in 1933.

Gender, as far as I can tell, has not been at the forefront of this.

There are wonderful historians of gender and sexuality in the Nazi period that we will hopefully get to talk to for some of these episodes.

Some of them have already been on the podcast.

But they tend to, I think, focus, and I hope this is fair to them, they tend to focus on the Third Reich and power.

They're looking at the slightly consolidated Nazi regime, sort of more 34, 35, and onwards.

And the really classic studies of how Hitler rises to power, I would consulted, for instance, Richard J.

Evans' very, very good, The Coming of the Third Reich.

That's not a book that is like super gender-focused.

And so, I think we're going to be able to tell a story that people may not get if they check out these sort of canonical narratives, which is not to say that those are wrong.

It's again, like, there's so much here.

You got to pick and choose.

And I don't begrudge anyone for not focusing on this, but I think we can come away with a slightly different and a maybe slightly more timely version of what exactly happened back then and how it compares to today.

So we are going to do this month by month.

So we're going to catch up over the next couple of weeks, and then we'll be doing April and April, May and May, and so on until we either get in December 2025 to December 1933 or until the end of our own republic and the collapse of our freedom to do so.

Or both.

Yeah, whichever comes first, right?

Yeah, yeah.

All right.

Well, on that cheery note, let's do it.

Let's give our listeners first an overview of what they can expect.

For those of us who aren't as well versed in the third right's right to power, why is 1933 so pivotal and why does it ring so many bells for you now?

Well, so 1933 is the year the Weimar Republic, which had been tottering for a few years at this point, just collapses in the span of really six weeks.

And those are the six weeks we're going to cover in this episode, and gives way to a dictatorship almost immediately.

And we'll have to talk about that.

And it's something that surprised people in its swiftness.

It surprised even some of the people bringing it about in its swiftness.

Everyone sort of gets caught up in this maelstrom of events.

There's even, I looked at Goebbels's diaries for this, Joseph Goebbels, so Hitler's sort of right-hand man propaganda minister.

And it seems like he was kind of shocked by how quickly this all went, right?

So like, it's not just that like the good guys are like, oh, Jesus, what's happening?

Everyone's kind of on this roller coaster and it's all moving very, very fast.

So I'm partly basing this on Richard J.

Evans' Coming of the Third Reich, which is very good, sort of day by day.

And then the German historian named Uwe Witchstock did an entire book on February 1933, which is quite focused on literature, on literary Germans, but like he really also goes like day by day by day.

And that was very, very helpful for this.

And part of that is because I don't want to sort of give you just like a Wikipedia style precision.

I want to mention how it felt to people, because I think that's how we're making the comparisons, right?

We're like, this feels to me right now like 1933.

And so then the question like, well, what did 1933 actually feel like, right?

Is central to that.

And one of the tragic and lucky things is that a lot of very smart people were arrayed against the Nazis and were trying to figure out like, fuck, what do I do?

Like, it's dangerous, but how dangerous is it?

Do I have a week?

Do I have a day?

Do I have a month?

Right?

Like, how long is this going to last?

Should I sell my house?

I have an unfinished novel at home.

Do I take it with me or not?

Right.

Do they mean me?

Is it going to get worse than it is?

Are these institutional rumps left over from the previous form of government going to check these excesses or will they collapse before them?

These are questions that were not answered yet, right?

Exactly.

All of what we know about what happened in the future was information they didn't have.

And so as their world was changing, they were trying to update their own assumptions in ways that sometimes were successful and sometimes were not.

And that human uncertainty, it's dizzyingness, it's grief and fear, and also it's just

uncertainty, right?

It's contingency.

It's open possibility.

That's what we're going to try and capture over the next couple episodes.

You'll notice things that we don't talk about.

And in some way, that's deliberate and it's actually pretty informative.

Like I think in this first episode, if I'm not mistaken, we're not going to be talking about Jews a whole lot, which, like, given what happens afterwards, what we all have learned in school, is kind of insane.

I always wondered, like, why didn't people just buy a ticket like

February 1st, 1933?

A lot of them did.

Well, a lot of them did.

A lot of them did pretty soon.

Yeah.

Oh, there's a huge exodus to Palestine of German Jews facilitated by the Nazi government.

But A, this was later.

And B, a lot of people stuck it out for truly shocking amounts of time to our minds who know where this story is headed, right?

And one of the things that you'll realize, hopefully, in listening to our sort of blow by blow today is that like, it really did feel like the anti-Semitism wasn't the focus on those first six weeks.

And I can sort of see that like someone might say like, well, it's bad, but it's bad for everyone.

Like, I don't know, maybe we just give it another month and see.

Part of the advantage of going month by month here is that I think you'll get a sense for how different things could feel.

We always make jokes now about like what a month this week has been, right?

Like that's how 1933 feels, right?

That like people are like, well, surely this isn't happening.

And then that red line is crossed like two days later.

And things that they hadn't even imagined in March would be reality by June, right?

In our episode today, we'll talk about like outlawing the Communist Party.

Well, by June, spoiler alert, all parties will be outlawed, right?

Like this snowball starts rolling down a hill and like, or it's being forced down a hill hill by a bunch of jack-booted thugs and their capitalist enablers.

But Nazis, we are under the benefit of being pretty, I think, rigorously exempt from defamation law, right?

This is the kind of thing where we can call Nazis Nazis.

They call themselves Nazis.

Yeah.

And so I think that it's important to kind of give people a sense of just how much things can shift from month to month, because I feel like that is the fundamental experience of 2025 as well.

Something I'm always struck by this period is not just how quickly things changed, but how many people didn't take Hitler seriously because the Nazis seemed so goofy and incompetent and stupid.

You know, these guys were esteemed to be clowns, especially on the international stage, right?

Especially outside of Germany.

They weren't just thuggish.

They were seen as kind of like vulgar and almost beneath the power that they aspired to.

And I think that is something that is a lesson that the Nazi era demonstrates is that just because people are stupid and clownish and just because they appear ridiculous does not mean that they cannot also inflict tremendous damage.

That's a cognitive dissonance that I think we'll also be teasing out as we explore the experiences of ordinary Germans and intellectuals going into this period.

Yeah, the other thing that we might briefly mention is that, of course, a lot of our everyday experience of 2025 is not knowing what's really going on.

And that's very much what's true of 1933.

You'll see that there's just so much news and they don't have Twitter.

They can't just ask the Nazis what they're thinking by going on the Nazis' own platform, right?

They have to kind of depend on a press that is already kind of feeling the pressure from the new rulers, meaning they're like, well, we don't even know what's happening, who's mad at whom or who's with whom or who's folded and who's still putting up resistance, that kind of thing.

As a motto for this first episode, so February 1933, up until March 15th, 1933, I thought I'd start this with a quote from a diary entry from Victor Klempera, who is a professor of French literature in Dresden.

He had been a diarist all his life, but he was like, well, I got to write this down.

This feels significant, right?

And on February 21st, 1933, he notes, quote, for something like three weeks now, the depression of the reactionary government.

I'm not writing a history of the times here, but I shall nevertheless record my embitterment, greater than I would have imagined I was still capable of feeling.

It's a disgrace, which gets worse with every day that passes, and there's not a sound from anyone, and everyone is keeping their head down.

The Jews, most of all, and the democratic press.

I feel you, Viktor.

Let me set the scene a little bit.

So the last free-ish elections to the Reichstag in the Weimar Republic are in November 1932.

Why do you say free-ish instead of free?

So the Nazis had already had local success and had started sort of monkeying with who could actually stand for election in various places.

So the Communist Party was already being massively interfered with.

In 1932, a right-wing government had sort of used emergency laws to impose a kind of quasi-martial law on Prussia, which, as you may remember from some other episodes of ours, was, you know, most of the German Reich at the time, or of the Weimar Republic.

And I should mention, you know, because a lot of parties were just subject to massive political violence.

almost all of it coming from the NSDAP, so the Nazi Party.

So it's important to note that the Weimar Republic is no longer entirely Republican Republican by this point, right?

So there's laws restricting who can run for election that have been put in place by the Nazis where they have local power.

And then there's also just like the threat of violence.

Like if you try and run, these people will beat you up.

Or if we don't get our own way in this election, there's going to be unrest.

There's going to be

street violence.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the 1932 sort of coup from above that had seized power in Prussia had started purging people who were partisans of the socialists, the communists, and the social democrats within the upper administration, within the police apparatus, etc., etc.

Like the administration of this republic at its end tilted heavily to the right and heavily anti-democratic, really, right?

The KPD, the Communist Party of Germany, was already basically preparing what to do in case they were illegalized.

And I don't think they were thinking of the Nazis at all.

They were like, it's just going to be some other right-wing government that's going to do it.

It's not going to require Hitler for that.

And basically political violence, mostly from the Nazis, but also some anti-fascist violence from the KPD, is basically spiraling out of control.

The NSDAP is gaining voters, right?

In November 1932, it gets 33.1% of the vote.

It's actually a little bit less than in the previous election.

But the real problem is that there's an increasing number of its members in the higher civil service and an even bigger group of people who basically wouldn't vote for them, but who clearly are politically aligned with them or have sympathies for their positions.

Aaron Powell, so Nazis have already accomplished a degree of institutional capture before 1933.

Aaron Powell, yeah, and making opposition to the Nazis a real problem, right?

There are already people in exile from Germany.

I'll mention Magnus Hirschfeld, the famous sexologist, and we'll be talking a little bit more about him in our May episode.

He had basically received so many credible threats that when he went on a lecturing tour in 1931-32, he was like, I'm not going back there.

Like, these people are going to come for me.

I'm not stupid, right?

So there were already people exiled from the country, which strikes me as a sign that maybe law and order isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Right.

So, how open were the Nazis going into these like 1932 Reichstag elections about what they were going to do if they won?

Like, were they like, yeah, we're going to eliminate the vestiges of democratic government and instill a formalized de jure racial hierarchy and alter your daily life?

Or were they like a little more koi about it?

Were they like talking in like broader terms about a post-war renewal, et cetera?

Making Germany great again or something.

Yeah.

They were shockingly open, right?

They kept saying they wanted to do away with the Constitution.

Mein Kampf was freely available.

I think they'd give you a copy if you asked for one.

In 1931, some media got a hold of the so-called Boxheim documents, which had all these details about what they would do once in power, including liquidation lists.

Oh my God.

I know.

They had a Project 1933.

Yeah.

They already had one and it was published.

Yeah.

I mean, this is, it's a large organization.

These things sort of leaked out.

Like a lot of people who were on these lists knew by the time the Nazis came to power, right?

And made their calculus that way, right?

They're like, I know I'm on this list.

I got to get out.

But I mean, yeah, it was really openly hostile to the Weimar Republic.

There's a jurist and prosecutor, Robert Kempna, who basically was put on the beat of like, can we outlaw this party?

And he wrote this study and was like, yeah, absolutely.

There are fail-saves in our Constitution.

You could absolutely prescribe these people.

This reminds me of some of the legal academics I follow on Blue Sky who are like, yeah, here's all the,

here are all the like arguments you could make to prosecute, you know, Elon Musk or Donald Trump for like various apparatus in the Justice Department.

Like, here's all the laws they're violating.

Here's a criminal statute.

Here's the like brief you could file if we had a judiciary that was capable of, you know, like checking the crimes of those with political power, but we do not have such a judiciary.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's exactly the problem here.

He and his staff come up with this like really well-reasoned and legally sound analysis.

And basically, there's even a bunch of politicians who are like, yeah, this sounds right.

It's just that there are too many people in the upper administration and the criminal justice system that agree with the Nazis.

We're not going to get this through, right?

And so he wrote an entire book about this.

It's called Justitz Demerung, so Twilight of Justice.

He's alluding to Wagner's Goethe Demerung.

And its subtitle is The Opening Gambit of the Third Reich.

It came out in 1932.

So you could know, right?

And just to give you a sense of just how not far back and how not long someone like Kempner would have to dig, here is the lawyer, Wilhelm Frick, who would serve under Hitler in various capacities, including the first interior minister for the Nazi Party in a state, in a German state, in Tüling in 1930.

But here he is in the National Socialist Yearbook of 1927.

Quote: Our participation in parliament does not mean strengthening, but rather undermining the parliamentary system.

My gosh.

Not giving up our anti-parliamentary attitude, but fighting the enemy with his own weapons and fighting for our National Socialist goals from the parliamentary gallery.

Our next goal will always be the conquest of political power in the state.

It is the prerequisite for the realization of our ideals.

That could be Curtis Yarvin, you know, that could be like on some little odious right-wing anti-democracy crusaders substack.

And for all the like, who could have possibly known that they would do this?

It's like, well, they said exhibit A could have been like, well, the saying of it.

It was in fact a campaign promise.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So just to fast forward a little bit, you know, Frick would indeed strip Kempner, who was Jewish, of his German citizenship in 1935.

Although in a way, Kempne had the last laugh because he emigrated to the U.S., practiced law there, and then became one of the lead prosecutors at Nuremberg.

Nice.

Suck it, Nazis.

Yeah.

Will Frick was one of the main defendants there, and he was sentenced to death by hanging.

So getting back to late 1932, the chancellor von Papm resigns, and the new chancellor, Schleicher, tries to create basically a coalition with sort of a left-wing National Socialist offshoot.

But behind the scenes, the former chancellor begins to organize a coalition with the Nazis, hoping to depose the new guy and become chancellor again.

This is his whole project.

They have a sizable minority in the Reichstag.

Yeah.

And how does this sort of like backroom dealing forming the governing coalition work?

Like what are the needs of these outgoing and incoming chancellors?

The incoming and outgoing chancellors are all these right-wing psychos, but they're not Nazis, right, yet.

But as you say, there is this gigantic block of votes in the parliament that they can't really avail themselves of, and that has become so big that really the obvious conclusion would be that Hitler would have to be chancellor, but they don't want to do that.

And so it becomes this entire problem of like, well, we got to govern with these people, but the Nazis are like, well, it kind of feels like we keep winning by not participating in parliamentary democracy.

Like we have this whole cult of Auerführer.

And like imagine if that guy was like the secretary for housing and urban development in a Schleicher Schleicher government, right?

Like that, that really takes the sheen off, right?

Here is the guy who's been yelling about like reversing the dictates of Versailles, and here he's like cutting the ribbon on a subway station or something like that, right?

It's like it's just not, that's not what they saw themselves doing, but that's also why the other right-wing parties were like, we cannot give them the state.

So on January 4th, 1933, Papen meets Hitler in the house of the Cologne banker Kurt Freihau von Schruder.

It's so typical that this is a deal made literally in a banker's house.

Real populist shit, that's yeah.

Yeah.

Just great.

Hitler in this one basically insists that the only way he's going to help von Popen get his job back and get Schleicher out is that he needs to be chancellor.

So Hitler goes in and plays hardball.

Yeah, I mean, he's holding.

He's holding all the cards.

Holding all the cards.

But in some way, right, it's not just about Popen.

Because according to the Weimar Constitution, this is a little bit modeled on the British system.

To be chancellor, you have to be named chancellor, meaning the president gets to say something.

And they're like, well, we could numerically get together and make this guy chancellor or elect him chancellor in the Reichstag, but in the end, the president's going to have to prove it and the president's not going to approve it, right?

This is Hindenburg.

Also not a Democrat, also a massive piece of shit, but a aristocratic piece of shit.

And he did not like the man he called the, quote, bohemian private.

Was his objection that Hitler wasn't aristocratic enough?

Or was it that he seemed kind of thuggish and clowny and not sufficiently serious?

Hindenburg had helped crush democracy in certain parts of the Weimar Republic already.

You know, he was far more worried about communism than he was about fascism.

I think he thought that if there should be a coup, it should emerge from the armed forces, not from the parliament at all.

But eventually, they convince Hindenburg that the German phrase is eineramen.

They could basically create a frame within from which Hitler will not be able to stray, right?

This is the adults in the room phase of their delusion.

They think that, like, look, this guy is an oaf this guy is new to politics we know our stuff we're gonna set very real limits to what this guy can do uh you'll see we'll demystify him in the end and i still don't entirely understand how this happens the deal that hitler negotiates is basically

i get everything you get nothing geniuses of deal making these are grand political strategists right here well hindenburg's declining heavily i think he's like not all there anymore from potten just thinks he's playing a totally different game than what hitler is actually playing and I think that's part of the problem.

He thinks, oh, we'll cobble together a coalition, push some stuff through, and then the government will fall again.

And Hitler's like, oh, no, this government's not going to fall unless it's a Russian tank on top of the Reich Chancellery.

But basically, the idea is the Nazis will enter the government.

Hitler will get the...

top-ish job, right?

He could become chancellor, but not president, obviously.

He'll get some plum ministries, but only three of them.

And there will be new elections called immediately.

That last part, I'm like, what the fuck did you think would happen?

33%, that's not nothing, but like you can govern around that.

Calling of the new election and dissolution of the Reichstag, I've never understood that.

It just seems absolutely bizarre and a huge tactical mistake.

But I think that's part of it, that like the old guard in German right-wing politics just seem to think that they're better at this than they really are.

And you'll notice that like the left-wing parties are not involved in any of this, right?

Yeah, they're not present.

It sounds like they've been largely pushed out of the mainstream political exercise of power, right?

Like the communists are not eligible to to run for election in a lot of places.

I'm guessing a lot of other left-wing parties are sort of like tugging at their collars and anticipating being made illegal pretty soon.

Aaron Ross Powell, no, I think the SPD, the Social Democrats, would not have thought of this, I think, at this point.

I think that is one of those dynamics in 1933 that really took everyone by surprise was how quickly all that happened.

But they also don't necessarily think that this government is really going to last, right?

So on January 28th, 1933, Schleicher falls, the government of Schleicher falls.

As Harry Goff Kessler, a German publicist, puts it in his diary, it's, quote, an orgy of backroom politics, right?

Like, no new election, nothing has happened.

It's just like a bunch of right-wing cranks with a real thing about World War I, like getting together, smoking a bunch of cigars, and like deciding on what to do.

And it's also the day of the Berlin press ball at the Adlon Hotel, which is still right by the Brandenburg Gate today.

And this is the event with which Uwe Witchdock starts his book on February 1933.

And this is already when the first sort of people start leaving.

The day after the press ball, January 29th, Irish Maria Remark, I don't know if you know who that is.

I do not.

He's the author of All Quiet on the Western Front.

Oh, okay.

Hated by the Nazis, quite rich thanks to this book.

He's been on the Nazis' shit list forever because he basically was like, this was not a great war.

We probably shouldn't have fought it.

War is bad.

They basically made it impossible to show the movie based on his book in Germany.

They kind of roughed up people who would try and go see it.

And he had bought a villa in Locarno in southern Switzerland years ago.

And he hears about Schleicher's fall at the press ball and I believe is like, oh, can I move my train ticket forward?

I'm outie.

So at least some of the like left-leaning elites or anti-Nazi elites who have the means are already exiting.

Yeah, exactly.

And in some way, it's really, it's an astonishing level of foresight, right?

Because we're now going to get to our actual six weeks in this episode.

And those six weeks are really all the Nazis needed in order to really solidify their grip on power.

Hitler is named chancellor on January 30th, 1933.

And as Richard Evans says, quote, it's immediately clear that Hitler's appointment as Reichschancellor was no ordinary change of government.

And this is indeed a sense shared by almost all observers at the time.

Weimar had a ton of changes of government, right, especially in his final years.

And that's clearly how von Papen thought of it, like just one more change in government.

But for the Nazis, it's super important to make a symbolic break from that.

Not to be like, oh, cool.

And now we're in the carousel.

We, and then eventually we'll get backstabbed in some backroom deal and some banker's house in Cologne, right?

And then we're out.

The Nazis are trying to make it clear, like, this is not just the revolving door of right-to-side elections you've been having for the past decade.

This is a new order.

This is a new day.

Yeah.

So there are some headfakes towards normalcy and like a transition of power, but they aren't exactly convincing.

And more importantly, I think they're not meant to be.

Right.

So the famous example is that on the night of Hitler's accession, thousands of torch-bearing brown shirts and Stahlhelm paramilitary, so these are right-wing veterans of World War I.

Yeah, there was good context, I think, for our listeners to have is that a lot of the German army after World War I sort of like didn't disarm.

They were these like roving right-wing gangs who would go beat up communists or workers' uprisings or

what have you.

So right-wing political violence is just part of what accounts for like the political norm at the end of the Weimar era.

And so they basically parade through Berlin courtesy of Goebbels.

They still salute President Hindenburg when they sort of file past him, but they do sing, they mix the sort of singing of the German national anthem with the Horseweselit, so the Nazi fight song, right?

So like it's already not clear who's taking over.

Like is this about a party apparatus or is this about the state apparatus?

Now, as you mentioned, there's tons of paramilitary violence in the last years of the Weimar Republic.

Of course, the police is sort of the only thing standing against that.

Well, now the police is in the hands of the Interior Ministry, which is in the hands of the Nazi Party, right?

And the other thing the marches do is create disorder.

So in Charlottenburg, part of Berlin, shots are fired near the march, and a policeman and one brown shirt die.

And the next day, the right-wing press, and not just the Nazi press, starts calling for the prohibition of the Communist Party.

The same day, the SPD, so the Social Democrats with 121 seats in the Reichstag, the Nazis have 196, I believe, for comparison, get together with a a bunch of trade union guys to sort of figure out whether they could do an illegal general strike.

What are our actual leverages of power and influence remaining?

Exactly.

Center-left party is allying with the workers to try and present, I guess, something like United Front against the Nazis.

Yeah.

And so that same day, the 30th, the leftist publisher Karl Fronosiecki gives a talk in Berlin.

where he sort of has to obviously address what just happened with Hitler becoming chancellor, with the marching that's still going on outside.

And he says, quote, all of this will last a great deal longer than you think, perhaps years.

We are powerless against it, but each of us can promise not to cede a single inch to those now in power.

Here's a line from Klaus Mann, Thomas Mann's son.

Just to give you a sense of how this was felt, how much of a bombshell this was.

This is from his memoirs, The Turning Point.

So this is not contemporaneous.

On January 30th, 1933, I left Berlin early in the morning as if driven away by evil forebodings.

The streets were calm, clean, and empty when I rode to the station.

I looked at them, but not carefully enough.

I did not realize that it was for the last time.

I was going to Munich, but planned to interrupt the trip in Leipzig, where I had a date with the leading director of the city's theater, who was interested in a play of mine.

He looked pale and troubled when he greeted me at the station.

What's wrong?

I asked him.

He seemed surprised.

Don't you know yet?

The old gentleman has appointed him.

The old gentleman?

Whom?

Hitler, he said.

Hitler's chancellor.

On January 31st, 1933, the National Socialist Student Bund, which is sort of like their big student union, stages their own march, ending up at the Berlin stock market.

And as traders emerge from work, the students shout Judah Perish.

So like, you know, we're already.

The signals are there.

And it's all in Mein Kampf, right?

There's a lot of

pretty explicit programmatic anti-Semitism in Mein Kampf, which had been out for several years at this point.

Aaron Ross Powell, exactly.

Ten years, basically.

Once we get to February, the big picture development is von Papen had given the Nazis only three cabinet positions, in addition to the chancellor job.

But the problem was two of them were the Prussian and the Reich ministries of the interior, which controlled the police.

So suddenly a party with a massive paramilitary arm was in control of the police, which was A, already kind of right-wing, and B,

was supposed to actually police the paramilitaries, right?

And that becomes a huge problem.

On February 1st, they dissolved the Reichstag.

You You know, this is the agreement that they'd made with the president.

They were like, well, I will become chancellor if you agree to call for new elections.

And that's exactly what they did.

And on February 3rd, Hitler speaks with the generals of the Wehrmacht.

The content of his remarks does not become public until after the war.

But he calls for, quote, removing the cancerous damage of democracy and promises to eradicate Marxism root and branch.

And he sort of is like, oh, and you generals will also have a role in our new Germany.

You can, quote, to secure new expert opportunities, perhaps and probably better, to conquer new living space in the East and pursue its ruthless Germanization.

So this is like we're doing racial, like ethnic cleansing.

We're doing eradication of ideological dissidents, and we're doing territorial expansion.

But this is not, I'm interested that he's not saying this in public, that he's saying this sort of in a private meeting with those in power.

Why do you think he didn't just say this into a microphone?

I think it's just a different style of politics.

All these right-wingers are ultimately backroom dealers.

He's trying to weaken alternate sources of power.

And for that, he doesn't have to talk to people.

He has to talk to the generals.

He has to talk to the heavy industry, et cetera, et cetera.

And now we should say that the ruthless Germanization sounds really bad today.

There's a way that this could have been taken to be cultural Germanization, right?

Like forcing people to speak the language, not much better than ethnic cleansing, but that might be what he meant.

But in the event, Hitler was like, just to be clear, I don't mean culturally.

I mean

we're going to ethnically cleanse this shit, right?

Like, so he's perfectly open with these people.

But it's very clear, he's not at this point playing for their support.

He's playing for their neutrality.

He controls the paramilitaries.

He's now controlling the police.

The one thing he doesn't control is the army.

And the fear is, what if the army were deployed to

stop the paramilitaries, for instance, right?

The Secretary of Defense Blomberg is not a Nazi, and he has prohibited his soldiers from joining the party.

Not because he disapproved of what Hitler was starting to do, he actually approved of it, but he thought that the army needed to be neutral.

But basically, Hitler, I think, shows up there in order to kind of test the water and see: are they going to stick to that?

What's the risk here of a coup or an army intervention once we unleash our violent campaign?

On February 4th, we get the decree of the president of the Reich, so Hindenburg, for the quote, protection of the German people, which restricts basic rights, especially freedom of assembly and freedom of the press.

So that's what, five days after he becomes chancellor?

This is what you call a healthy assist.

So how do people respond to this?

Because this seems like

scary.

There's some indication that a lot of people think it's aimed primarily at the communists.

And certainly the KPD is like, gee, this has our name written all over it.

But I looked at the actual decree and like there's nothing in there to suggest that this is going to be limited to them.

And we know that by early February, a bunch of SPDs, the Social Democrat-affiliated newspapers, are already prevented from publication.

distribution centers are being closed down.

And most importantly, all police protections have been removed.

meaning that now if the Nazi thugs show up, they can just disrupt any meeting and rough people up, right?

And so already they're having real trouble just communicating with their members.

It takes very, very little.

On February 7th, the KPD meets in secret to discuss its options.

The KPD is a little bit more agile in these early weeks than the SPD because it knew that it was probably going to get banned at some point.

And because they're kind of, right, they've learned from the Soviet Union and are connected with the Soviet Union, they are a little bit more clandestine.

So they have a party headquarters, but they are not dumb enough to meet there, basically.

They're like, well, sure, you can beat us up if you can find us, but you got to find us first.

And the other thing that they have is a pretty good system for getting people out of Germany if they have to.

And a lot of prominent politicians will flee the country that way in the following weeks.

But the party chairman, Anstrann, decides basically we have to stay, we have to fight, and decides to appeal to more social democratic workers.

He's looking to the French, right?

He's looking to the example of the the popular front.

Exactly.

He wants to see if they can create a united front against the Nazis and they're going to release an open letter.

Unfortunately, the day they pick to release the open letter will be the day of the Reichstag fire,

which

they'll get blamed for, right?

Of course, yeah.

Just terrible timing.

So this is not on anyone.

It's just this terrible timing.

Well, it's on the Nazis.

The Nazis did it.

Well, we'll get to that.

In researching this, I was like,

do we know that?

Like, it's unclear.

Everyone at the time thought it was them.

But like, again, I think in Goebbels' diary, he seems surprised by it.

It's possible that a Nazi did it, but like the top brass seems to have genuinely been like, this is the first signal of a communist insurrection.

Like, they believe their own propaganda.

They're like, oh, shit, like, we're going to get our throats slit.

So the Hitler chancellorship is one week old.

And already left-wing political parties have basically been prohibited from communicating with their members, from meeting in any kind of open or public way.

And they are looking around and seeing themselves to be kind of out of options.

Exactly.

And on February 10th, Hitler gives a speech at the Berlin Sportpalast, which is almost exactly 10 years before it will be the setting for one of Goebbels' most famous speeches, the total war speech, Do You Want Total War?

And Goebbels introduces him there, where he sort of celebrates the millions who have, by acclamation, chosen Hitler as their fuhre, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

We have a mandate.

yeah yeah yeah threatens the jewish press patients will run out etc etc very very ominous and then hitler's actual speech i must admit i didn't listen to all of it there is a it was filmed and i am like i'm not listening to this much of this guy but the parts i heard were like weirdly culture war specific as a lot of stuff about german art and cinema i'm like huh if i had just started running the government i'd feel like

I'd want to go for more meat and potatoes, but like, no, they're going full like...

No, it's what looks like comparatively petty stuff.

Exactly.

The cultural production the social norms the visibility of what to their minds are non-ideal persons or ideas in places of like prestige or prominence or just uh you know access that is what really grinds their gears yeah well and also i think by going after these people going after the press going after intellectuals etc etc you know there's no internet and anything so they they know that these are the voices they have to silence first like you're really destroying the ability of civil society to respond in any oppositional way to what the government's doing if these people are afraid for their lives, are fleeing, or are dead.

And so I think the focus on culture, on art, and cinema, it's both a distraction and it's actually pretty central.

They're not worried about the industrialists.

They're not worried about...

I mean, they're worried about trade unions.

They'll come after them too.

But they're just a bunch of groups that they're like, well, I'm not sure what these people can do to us right now.

We need to get rid of the people who could swing public opinion against us.

They've already got the support of the capitalists, right?

And the industrialists.

They've got rapid consolidation of everybody who has the capacity for violence, right?

We've talked about like the street gangs of World War I veterans.

We've talked about their like new formalized control over the police.

And we talked about the sort of carrots that they're handing out to the military, right?

So it's like you've got money and violence on lock.

The last kind of remaining avenue of meaningful resistance would be, I think, like ideas, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And that seems to be what they are now also working to shut down.

Yeah.

So the same day that Hitler gives a speech, same time, basically, Thomas Mann gives a lecture at the University of Munich on the suffering and greatness of Richard Wagner.

It's the 50th anniversary, basically, of Wagner's death.

And it'll be the last one he gives on German soil until basically the 1950s.

That evening he leaves, or the next day, I think he leaves for a lecture trip, going to Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, et cetera, et cetera.

And basically, his kids start saying, like, do not come back, right?

Don't risk this.

For February 14th, Victor Klempera records in his diary,

it's not the entry for this day.

He kind of will sum up an entire week or two like in one entry.

But on February 14th, he's visited by another couple, also academics.

And he says, Melanie Thiele, as the couple's name, told us that her husband must not know that Wolfgang, their chemistry student, a good lad, is wearing a Hitler uniform in Frankfurt.

He, Thiele, was against Hitler, but he is forbanning the Communist Party, right?

So like there's these millions of gradations that are sort of opening up.

On the one hand, you get these, people are horrified to find out their own kids are involved in this or that their own relatives are involved in this.

But also like people are staking out these kind of middle ground positions where you're against much of what the Nazis do, but you kind of can warm to certain things.

Yeah, you know, every Trump voter you'll ever meet will tell you all the things things they don't like about Trump first.

Right.

They're like, I wish you would stop tweeting.

I think he's like kind of an idiot.

He's obviously a clown.

And then they go into like, but wokenness is out of control.

Or like, but like you have to hand it to him like this, immigration.

There's too many people at the border.

Or, but I don't trust what they're doing with the vaccines.

Or, but my friend's friend's cousin's neighbor's ex-boyfriend sister said that there's a 65-year-old grown man on her little girl's, you know, high school wrestling team, like stuff like that.

This like merger of propaganda and falsity or just like grievance

with like a superficial disavowal, right?

Like all these people say, I don't like Trump, I don't like Trump, I don't like Trump because of XYZ, and then they keep voting for him over and over and over again.

And that is a way to both like preserve a little degree of dignity or like a presumption of reasonableness

or like access to claims about like decorum in various different kinds of like polite company while at the same time pursuing these far-right political goals.

Yeah.

I mean, there's that famous Dorothy Thompson essay that I think has been making the rounds again this year, Who Goes Nazi, which describes it as a macabre sort of fun parlor game of who goes Nazi.

And I think that these early months kind of don't bear out what Thompson is saying in that essay, which is to say, It's not clear that many people go Nazi yet that hadn't gone Nazi before.

The only thing the regime needs from people at this point is acquiescence.

And you get that, as you say, for all kinds of reasons.

People find a million reasons to acquiesce and to not expose themselves to risk, including people who will later, you know, be rabid anti-Nazis, right?

But the regime does not require your cooperation at this point.

It just requires you to do nothing.

Right.

So on February 15th, Güring, then Prussian Minister of the Interior, orders the Prussian police to stop surveilling the Nazis and to instead help the Nazi paramilitary groups.

We're switching sides.

We're switching sides, yeah.

Also on February 15th, the theater critic and satirist Alfred Kahl is in bed with a 102-degree fever when a phone call comes and his nine-year-old daughter,

Judith, is sent out of the room, the parents debating tensely.

And as Judith Kerr will later tell it in a fictionalized version of this part of her life, quote, the next morning before school, Anna ran to Papa's room to see him.

The desk was tidy.

The bed was neatly made, Papa had gone.

Have you read this book, Mara?

No.

This is how Hitler Stole the Pink Rabbit, kind of a classic anti-Nazi children's book.

This woman was a

child of like anti-Nazi Germans and was witnessing her parents trying to navigate this regime.

And then she wrote a novel about that experience as an adult.

So she, this is already where gender becomes kind of interesting.

What happens, Eilf Kau was fine.

He had basically gotten a tip off that his passport was going to be confiscated and that that was probably going to lead to his arrest eventually.

And so he, even though he had a crazy fever, he fled to Prague.

It was like, well, as long as I'm out of the jurisdiction, I should be fine.

But notice that basically

Anna, or Anna is standing for you did here, goes to school normally the next day, right?

They're just going to try and keep living their regular lives, partly so that they can also eventually leave the country without being accosted.

There was some worry that the Nazis might come after people's families.

At this early stage, I think that that's not usually what happened they were just too busy torturing and bullying other people but it's very interesting right that like this is very much a male-on-mail kind of thing that's going on here and the families they're sort of collateralized in all of this and it's it's judith care is one of the interesting sort of exceptions to like the fact that she leaves traces that that she that she's someone who actually writes about this from the perspective of a child we don't have that many again these these men in the public eye tend to record this stuff very minutely.

We have Victor Klempela's diary.

We don't have hers.

We don't know that.

Aaron Powell.

Is this just a symptom or a product of the broader exclusion of women from public and political life that was still very typical in the mid-20th century, not only in Germany, but sort of like in the world?

How many women

would have been involved in these trade unions that were thinking about a general strike?

Or how many women would have been involved in like the leadership of the Communist Party that's like looking at ways to like get people out of the country like is this the kind of thing where women are just not granted access or they're like not educated the same way or they're just you know not really empowered to like

live public or intellectual lives instead of private domestic maternal ones?

Or is there something where the Nazis are choosing to go after the men first?

I think that's the big question for this episode.

I would say as a first preliminary answer, it's not that they were excluded.

The trade unions and especially the SPD and the KPD had a, you know, for the 1930s, very respectable number of women in them.

And they also were victimized by the Nazis, even at this early stage.

There is, I mean, with this focus on sort of the paramilitary and the veterans, that largely obviously excluded women, right?

But publishing didn't.

There is an element here where there are so many stories of 1933 that in some way we print the ones from people who are famous.

And like, yeah, obviously like the number of male writers in the Weimar Republic who are like, oh, honey, would you type this up for me?

Right.

And like, that's all we know of the wife, right?

Like, is

high.

You know, there's a bunch of people who are, you know, famous men and the women in their lives, we don't have any written documents from or nothing where they were like, here's my experience with 1933.

That's not to say it doesn't exist.

We're going to meet a few interesting protagonists in other episodes, but I do think that is definitely true.

That like we're we're looking at the Mons, we're looking at party leaders, we're going to look at Vonosiecki and people like that.

Klempera will see, he's the chronicler, he writes everything down, but it's his wife who actually has all the insights about like who goes Nazi.

Like she appears to be a pretty traditional housewife in some way, but like she's just a good gossip and she's like, oh yeah, here's why they did this, right?

Like, so she actually understands power quite well and is able to sort of diagnose

what fascism is doing to the country much better than her husband, but he writes it down and his name's on the cover.

Right.

This is kind of a traditional

by excluded, I don't mean necessarily formally so,

but discouraged or inhibited from participation by things that can be as informal and even like unconscious as just like convention, right?

Like it is in the habit of mid-century women, not only in Germany, but sort of in the West more broadly,

to

understand

their intellectual gifts as tools or accessories for those of the men in their lives.

Yeah.

Or to understand themselves as tools or accessories for the men in their lives in this way that leads to the men's names becoming more prominent and can make the women's own work and contributions get sort of subsumed.

Yeah, we'll meet a woman who kind of doesn't fit that mole, but you'll see something else that's going on here, which is to say that especially in the Weimar period, German women who defied those conventions were often very successful, but they were also also very mobile, meaning the men have an attachment and an investment in the power structures, right?

They're like, oh, but I can't leave my newspaper that I founded.

Oh, I can't leave my university post.

Oh, what about my advisees?

Oh, what about my job in the ministry?

Blah, blah, blah, blah.

And the women are like, well, I was shut out from all of that.

I'm a world traveler and noted lesbian.

I will move in with my girlfriend in Switzerland.

Like, this is no problem at all.

Yeah.

I'm also guessing that most of, and this is also like sadly kind of still true in our age, is that many of the most prominent women intellectuals do not have children.

Yeah.

Which is also something that makes them a little more easily mobile, right?

Exactly.

Like Alfred Kerr can flee to Prague because he's got a wife at home who's going to make sure Judith gets to school.

That's right.

And I mean, also not just wives, right?

A lot of these people have staff.

They're nannies sort of helping organize these escapes as well.

Even though, you know, you never know whom to trust in these situations.

The Mann family will have a weird run-in with that where

their driver basically turns out to be a a Nazi spy and had been for years, apparently, and only acknowledges it after dropping them off at the train station.

Was like, your car is going to the SS, by the way.

They're like, what?

On February 20th, Hitler has a secret meeting with German industrialists where he shakes them down for a huge donation for the coming election campaign.

So there's lots of backroom stuff.

So there are going to be immediate elections.

Yeah, in March, March 5th.

So lots of backroom stuff in these early days, and people feel that too.

Victor Klemper will note in his diary.

Victor Klemper, our professor of French.

Exactly, yeah.

Notes that, quote, what is strangest of all is how one is blind in the face of events, how no one has a clue as to the real balance of power, right?

Like things are moving fast, and everyone's aware that they're not aware of a bunch of things.

Like this is like it's all clicking into place and they're not even sure who's holding the power, right?

Is it the army?

Is it von Pop?

Is it the president?

Is it big balls?

Could be anyone, right?

On February 22nd, Goering sets up a separate police force composed mostly of SA and SS.

So even though the Nazis have basically consolidated control over a lot of the police, they're also setting up their own police.

Yeah.

And it's not just Nazis.

It's kind of a

law.

Yeah, it's a large tent filled with psychos.

But like, this is also the beginning of like them starting to cannibalize the other right-wing parties, being like, hey, wouldn't it be nice if you drew a paycheck through us?

Right.

And these groups start raiding communist and trade union offices almost immediately.

They start arresting union members and union organizers, they start targeting SPD members as well.

On the 23rd, the police shuts down the Karl Liebglichthaus.

This is the party headquarters of the KPD, and shuts down the party's newspaper.

Two days later, there's a fire in a small federal office building in Neukoen.

Doesn't matter, except that it's set by Marinos van der Leube, a Dutch communist anarchist.

Fire doesn't go anywhere, and he's like, I got to scale up.

I got to go for the Reichstag.

And, you know, so little foreboding there.

Yeah, and so on February 27th.

At 9 p.m., the Reichstag catches fire.

Yeah.

Again, unclear.

Van der Leube appears to have started it.

Unclear whether this was helped by the Nazis or whether the Nazis simply interfered with the fire response basically to make sure that this thing burned out of control.

But it was a big boon for them.

They're like, yes.

Yeah, and people knew that, right?

Lemperand notes in his diary, eight days before the election, the clumsy business of the Reistag fire, I cannot imagine that anyone really believes in communist perpetrators instead of paid swastika work, right?

So he knows, he's like, come on, let's be for real here, right?

And this is not, he's not a socialist, he's a pretty conservative guy, and he's like,

this is bullshit.

But the Nazis claim, and some seem to have believed, that the fire is basically opening salvo to a coming counterattack from the Communist Party.

They're out to get us.

Exactly.

Clearly, more crackdowns are required.

Yeah.

And the next day, basically, parts of the non-Nazi press also go full war on terror.

But even that night, basically, the Nazis unleash a huge campaign of terror and of of intimidation and of arrests.

It seems like the Nazis are like still pretty popular, right?

Like they're shutting down these other parties.

They're inhibiting on freedom of the press.

A lot of like people who seem to be fairly prominent are fleeing, right?

Like is this moving the needle on German public opinion or are the German people basically like, yes, good, this is what we wanted?

It's a little hard to tell, but I mean, certainly

by focusing on the supposed communist threat, that is certainly something that more right-leaning voters seem to have liked, seem to have found legitimate, right?

I cited earlier that observation of Klemperlas, where he's like, this guy doesn't like Hitler, but he likes the anti-communist stuff.

So I don't see how that guy would have gone around being like, this is an outrage.

They would have been like, well, it's happening to people I dislike, therefore, it's probably good.

So they are making a pitch.

They're not trying to reach across the aisle.

They're not trying to, you know, find disaffected communists to work with.

They're just looking to gobble up the other right-wing parties before the election where they're hoping to get more than 50% of the vote.

And so that night is where we sort of get the first really prominent victims of Nazism.

So Karl Vonosiecki, whom I already mentioned, he's at a gathering at a woman's house who appears to have been his lover.

And then they hear the news about the Reistach fire and his friends who all work at his periodical, Die Weltbürne, are like, you just crash here.

Don't go home.

I think it's too risky.

But his wife is sick, so he goes home.

He's immediately arrested and never gets out of prison and dies in prison in 1938.

How long, like a week or two after his speech?

Yeah, 28 days, 29 days, yeah.

So he was right, but unfortunately he did not take his own advice.

The same night, Irish Musam, who's a communist anarchist writer, is arrested in Berlin by the SA, and he'll die, or murdered, in fact, in Russian Burg concentration camp in 1934.

So this is where we get sort of the first people.

whose books people would have read and would have known who just sort of disappear and are never heard from again.

On February 28th, we then get the decree of the president of the Reich for the Protection of People and State.

This is the so-called Reichstag fire decree, which says in part, quote, Articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124, and 153 of the Constitution of the German Reich are suspended until further notice.

You might say, well, what do all those do?

Well, get ready for this list.

It is therefore permissible to restrict the rights of personal freedom, habeas corpus, freedom of opinion and expression, including the freedom of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, the privacy of postal telegraphic and telephonic communications, warrants for house searches, orders for confiscation, as well as restrictions of property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.

Aaron Powell, so this is, you know, formal declaration by the Nazis that they're going to ban dissent and punish it.

Well, it's Hindenburg.

It's not even the Nazis, right?

He's doing this for him.

Yeah.

So what kind of

constitutional protections for dissent were in the Weimar Constitution?

Well, I mean, like, it wasn't perfect, but like, it's much closer to what we, well, what we until recently had in this country.

There still are constitutional protections.

Like, it's not that this does away with everything.

It's just that they're also no longer enforced.

We'll get to a couple of examples where basically people can stand for election and people can win elections, which in the Weimar Republic conferred parliamentary immunity upon you, and they would still be arrested.

And they're like, I'm a member of the Reichstag.

You can't actually arrest me.

They have to strip me of my immunity first.

And they're like, look, we don't care.

Well, that doesn't matter.

The law doesn't matter anymore.

We're at law now.

But there's both, right?

There's both the attempt to create a legal framework and then the sort of paramilitary attempt to sort of say, it doesn't matter what the law says.

It's just a paper tiger, right?

There's a reason why we've been focusing on Berlin.

The regions were a little bit more of a mixed picture.

And especially Bavaria had sort of held out.

The right-wing government in Bavaria was not Nazi and were like, no, we're not letting any of this stuff happen.

But in the end, they also bend the knee.

So we're now getting to March.

So in early March, Thomas Mann and his wife Katja arrive in Switzerland.

They're going on vacation, but biographers of Mann will be like, that's the beginning of the exile, really.

Does he know this at this point?

Does he know he's not coming back?

No, he's still talking about going back.

His kids will be the ones who are like, do not do this.

On March 3rd, Ernst Tehrmann, so the head of the KPD, is arrested in Berlin.

So he's a sitting member of parliament and has immunity.

He's arrested first and then a warrant is issued days later, still illegally, and then he will eventually be murdered in Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944.

So this is another example of like his wife Rosa Tehrmann is an organizer and a higher up in the KPD as well and is not arrested.

Same with his daughter Irma.

And in fact, they visit Ernst in prison with some frequency.

He's kept in Moabit, which is part of Berlin, so they can just take the bus there basically.

And they even smuggle directives from Ernst Tehrmann to his comrades in exile.

Irma even smuggles in a camera at some point, taking the last known picture of her father.

So it's an interesting thing, right?

It gives you a sense that like women have at times this kind of extraterritorial quality in these early paramilitary days of the dictatorship.

This is something we talk about a lot in feminist history, right?

Particularly feminist histories of war, is that the

invisibility that misogyny can confer on women or the insignificance that misogyny assigns to women can paradoxically provide women a kind of freedom under conditions of like political repression and surveillance, right?

Because if it's just a teenage girl or a young woman going to visit her dad, that is understood as domestic, it is understood as sentimental, it is understood as trivial, is not understood as a potential source of political dissent.

Yeah, right.

I think this is getting us right into this question that you alluded to before, which is the, yeah, the role of gender in all this, right?

The Nazis begin by targeting politicians and people with a public profile, and they target them by using paramilitaries and the police, right?

This did tend to leave women out of the picture a little bit, right?

They sort of weren't regarded as equal to the people coming to arrest someone.

They're like, is your husband home?

Like, nope.

Yeah, like, how, like, could women vote at this point?

Could they theoretically serve in the Reichstag?

I assume none of them did.

Oh, no, women could vote, and women did serve in the Reichstag.

Oh, really?

Cool.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

At the beginning of the Weimar Republic, I would say about 9% of the deputies were women, but this basically leveled off to 5% to 6%.

And after the election that's coming up in March 1933, the share of women falls to just under 4%.

After that election, after March 1933, women will lose what in German is called the passive right to vote.

They can still vote, but they cannot stand for election anymore.

So the remaining elections, which are sham elections during the Nazi period, so November 1933, 1936 and 1938, will not bring any women deputies into the Reichstag, right?

Okay.

Now, most women members of the Reichstag were from the KPD and the SPD, but there were some in other parties as well.

So there were conservative deputies who were women, not anymore, I think, by 1933.

We should say that the Nazis never, ever, ever had a single woman sitting in parliament for them.

And in fact, the year after the party was founded, the Nazis decided that women could not be admitted to its upper leadership.

Honestly, if there was a Nazi woman official, we would know because every time a woman ran for any office in the U.S., there would be comparisons to her.

Be like, oh, you think women should have ambition?

Well, have you heard that once a woman was a Nazi?

You know, that would be everywhere.

And it makes sense to me that the Nazis who had both, you know, a pretty explicit vision of women's social role and their role in the racial future that they were trying to generate, and also like a real

like cult of masculinity and a masculinity of domination and severity would not think that women were good ambassadors for that project.

Aaron Powell, no, exactly.

And I mean, this is all still sort of revenge for World War I, which was understood to be an entirely masculine, like their entire world.

Like, I mean, we're going to do an episode on Taus Tieverleit's male fantasies, but this is a world that really doesn't know what to do with women that much.

So I think you're absolutely right that there is a kind of fixation on male-on-male violence here in these early moves by the Nazis.

That being said, it's not clear that the Nazis treated women politicians differently, right?

It's a little hard to quantify this stuff.

I couldn't go through this in all that much detail.

But it's noticeable that the very famous communists that are arrested in the immediate aftermath of the Reichstag fire are men, but the women are not super far behind.

So I looked up the people who sat in the last freely elected or semi-freely elected Reichstag, and it's not clear to me, like they don't get treated like Ansteinman, but they definitely don't get off scot-free.

So maybe I'll just read you a few of these people because I thought they were fantastic.

Yeah, sure.

So Lura Agnes is a member of the SPD, I believe.

She gets re-elected in 1933 in Dusseldorf, votes no on the enabling laws, goes underground, and then is arrested sometime in late 1933, and is basically in and out of prison for the remainder of the Nazi years, but does survive.

Marie Allas from the KPD, by contrast, went underground almost immediately.

By underground, what do you mean?

You mean they like assumed a different identity, they remained in Germany?

Switch identity, move into a, right?

Like this is still a pre-digital world.

You move to a different house, assume a different identity, and just don't come back to the address where you're listed and hope that they don't find you, right?

Unless you're rounded up in some kind of union house or like some meeting, you should be okay.

The ability to sort of check Papills' papers just on the street was still pretty limited at the time.

And she remained active in the KPD throughout the entire Nazi years.

And I should say a lot of these people eventually do get arrested.

The ones who sort of stay out of prison or get released again after some time, which often happens to these early KPD arrestees, they get roughed up for a few months and then they get released.

And then they really get moved to concentration camps after the failed coup attempt in 1944, July 20th.

But yeah, Maria Anzorg is arrested multiple times and is eventually liberated from Ravensbrugg concentration camp in 1945.

This is one of those arrestees after July 20th.

Elisa Augustad from the KPD is arrested in 1933 and again in 1934 and does die in a concentration camp in 1940.

Johanna Himmler, an unfortunate name, but no relation, I looked into this, basically goes underground in February 1933, wins re-election while underground.

Good for her.

Yeah.

I want to know a little more about her district now.

Yeah, Kenneth Sika.

It's like, good on you guys.

You're like, we can't find her, but like, we like her politics.

She's like from an undisclosed location.

She's like, vote for me.

And they're like, sure, that sounds good.

And she basically is arrested and then released pretty quickly afterwards.

Marie Juchach from the SPD was in fact the first woman to give a speech in the Reichstag ever.

Oh, wow.

Yep.

What did she say in her first speech?

Ah, I looked this up.

So she said, gentlemen and ladies, laughter.

It is the first time that a woman has been allowed to speak to the people in the parliament as a free and equal person.

And I would like to note here, quite objectively, that it was a revolution that overcame the old prejudices in Germany.

Not so bad.

No.

What happened to Marie?

So Marie leaves for the Tsar area.

So this is a neutral territory between France and Germany until Germany basically re-annexes it.

Yeah.

Where she basically organizes these like

boarding houses for recent immigrants, like just like a pipeline for people to get out.

Like this was hard for people.

She's helping people escape.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just logistically in terms of how much money it took, but there must have been a lot of need.

I mean, a lot of people, I think, had never left the German-speaking area, and then they're going to France.

And they're like, how the fuck do I like, I have a little bit of money.

How do I open a bank account?

How do I put down a first month's deposit?

Am I right that a lot of people who fled Germany were not allowed to take their money or possessions with them?

That stuff happens later.

But like, so legally, I think nothing is restricting them right now.

There are pragmatics.

It's hard to do.

So people needed help with that.

That's the other thing that's easier for the KPD because a lot of their...

They already have this network because they've been the target.

Well, they have a network and they don't have that much money.

They basically show up in a new town and are like, can the union please put me up?

Or like, can the KPD put me up?

Or whatever.

Like, can you send me to Moscow, please?

Right.

So the communists are both, they're less locally entangled and a little more mobile as a result of being broke and marginal.

Exactly.

And you can tell with Marie Juchach, she gave that speech in 1919, right?

So she is just a little older than some of these other women.

And that's another sort of issue that, like, there's more of a lift to kind of disentangle yourself from this only life you've ever known, right?

When you're like, God, there's actually a danger here.

But, you know, she eventually will immigrate herself and will end up in the U.S., which is nice.

So So that's Marie.

Marie Kunat from the SPD is an interesting one.

She gets sponsored by a trade union in Switzerland and leaves Germany, basically.

There were trade unions in other German-speaking countries that are like, just come over here for now.

Like, right?

Well, again, like, it just solves the immediate problem of where do I crash?

How do I, like, where am I even going?

Right.

Like, where am I going to put my bag?

Where am I going to sleep?

What door am I going to walk into when I get to this foreign city?

Yeah.

And then finally, let me briefly mention Eza Maya from the KPD,

gets re-elected on March 5th, loses her mandate after the enabling laws, and she dies in Magdeburg in August 1933.

And it's unclear how.

There is some suggestion it could have been disease, or she might have been murdered by the SA, right?

So like the women are subject to this violence.

It's just there are fewer of them.

So

most of them do die during the Nazi era.

I'm not sure.

I'd have to look at the data to make sure that that's true.

But it occurs to me that after the war, and this is like getting ahead of our time period, so I don't want to spend too much thought on this, but there were people emerging from hiding, from concentration camps, from prison, from abroad, who had been famous before.

You know, these people who are like,

you know, blurry and blinking and diminished by the Nazi regime.

Like, part of what I'm saying is that Germany in the aftermath of the Nazi era also had to deal with this remainder class of people who had been right about the Nazis before and hadn't been listened to.

And what was that that like?

One thing you'll notice that because the KPD was brutalized so early, a lot of them just ended up in Moscow.

Meaning in 1945, the Soviets had a German government ready to go, right?

They're like, these are people that we know they're anti-Nazis because they got tortured by the Nazis and they fled, right?

Like, why don't we put them in charge?

Whereas in West Germany, a lot of the American exiles were like, we're not going fucking back there.

You tried to kill us.

Also, weren't a lot of those people Jewish, like the Germans who wound up in the US?

Weren't they largely Jewish?

Many, but not all.

They were Jewish Germans that fled for the Soviet Union, too.

But like, it's true.

It's probably more in the U.S.

But the point is, West Germany drew on a very different class of people to rebuild, which was people who'd sort of gotten along with the Nazis.

And you get the role of people like, remember, Anst Tehrman's daughter and wife.

They become super important in the founding of the German Democratic Republic because they become the people who sort of carry these anti-fascist stories forward.

They become like the mothers of the new Germany by being like, here's what Ansteyman told me during our last meeting in prison.

And that's an alternative vision of German pride and German self-respect.

Exactly.

Not all of us were like him, exactly.

Yeah, not all of us were going along with this.

Some of us were resisting.

It's like how like if you meet a French person of a certain generation, they'll always tell you that their grandparents were in the resistance.

And it's like, well, if all of your grandparents were in the resistance, they would have won, you know, like,

and I wonder if there's there's a degree to which, like, have these examples of German anti-Nazi resistance taken on an outsized role beyond maybe their actual significance in the post-war German imagination?

Like, something that comes up in our conversations, Adrian, is that as an American, I always look at Germans now and assume that they're ashamed of their past.

And you're always telling me, like, eh, not really.

It can take a lot of shapes, I guess, is what I'm saying.

Some of them are not shame.

So there is this kind of like bullshit anti-fascism that people discover about themselves like after 45 because it's convenient.

At the same time, that's going to be, I think, in a later episode.

These people, right?

If you're on the Nazis list, like...

In 1933, that means you're the real deal.

You're the real deal.

You've been, I mean, you've been giving speeches, right?

Like Osietsky, Mann, whatever.

Like, the reason they're on these lists is that they've been like...

Here's an entire speech about how these people are cancer and democracy and have to be exercised and how when they come to power, it'll be the end of Germany.

BOGs, these people were right.

Exactly.

They were were right from the 1920s.

They're right now and they're being punished for being right.

Well, and we should say that the women of the KPD that I mentioned didn't get to vote anymore, but we'll cover that in our next episode.

When the enabling laws are voted upon, the SPD to a person, including these women, votes against it, right?

This is the last chance that the Weimar ⁇ who knows what would have happened in the end, but technically there was a law that they could have rejected and they did.

So these women went on record being like, fuck you.

So much more than I'm expecting from the Democrats on the street.

Exactly.

Like, I mean, with like paramilitary is outside the door and they're like, Democrats are going to sign their own arrest warrants, you know?

There's the fucking SS outside, and you're like, no.

That's going to be a no from me, dog.

That's some spine.

Later, we'll meet people whose relationship to the Nazis and whose disappointment or whose hatred of them is actually not very productive.

And it's like, we're actually part of the problem, even though you clearly...

don't like these people.

But these people are not them.

Like these people really make choices that I wouldn't want to be faced with and they handle them quite impressively.

So on March 5th is the last Reichstag election in which more than one party takes part.

And the result is the NSDAP, so the Nazi party gets 43.9%,

more than doubling its results in Bavaria, for instance.

But the Nazis had hoped for more than 50%.

They didn't get that.

The SPD gets 18.3%, the KPD, 12.3, Center Party, 11.2.

The DNVP, which doesn't matter anymore, is 8%.

Meaning, it's basically the Nazis Nazis have gobbled up the right part of the spectrum.

The SPD and the KPD are too weak.

And the center party, which is sort of this Catholic centrist party, sort of is weakened enough that it basically goes along with the enabling laws later on.

Because it's an election, the Nazis still sort of feel the need to play along, even though they had...

in the campaign pretty clearly said this is going to be the last election by the way it's a figurative this will be the last election yeah yeah it's a metaphor when they say to eat our faces it's just a metaphor exactly

Klempera notes in his diary an immediate indignant denial that no harm will come to loyal Jews.

Directly afterwards, the Central Associations of Jewish Citizens in Thuringia is banned because it had criticized the government in, quote, Talmudic fashion.

What?

What does that even mean?

It's completely insane.

But that's the thing, right?

They do the dog whistles while sort of still being like, how dare you say that?

Yeah.

We're not sticking with the law.

We just had an election, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Klempera also notes in a quote that that i think about a lot these days quote all opposing forces seem as if vanished from the face of the earth it is this utter collapse of power only recently present no it's complete disappearance just as in 1918 that i find so staggering and then on march 8th the 81 mandates that the kpd wins in the election are annulled reichstag fire decree you can't can't do this things get banned buildings taken over, provincial governments get set aside, weird new commissioners get appointed that no one like really ever voted on.

Really?

Somebody just has an extra constitutional

oversight role that is endowed with all this power that would normally require some kind of legislative check?

Wow, that's crazy.

Yeah, you also get these firings, these random firings of people.

And Klemper, who will eventually, who's a linguist by training and who will eventually write a book called LTI, The Language of the Third Reich, points out that by now, a lot of these are, quote, by order of the Nazi Party, Party, right?

Not even in the name of the government, right?

It's like the party is fusing with the state.

This is March 12th.

March 10th, sorry.

We've gone through a period of, what, like six weeks?

Yeah.

This is nuts.

Yeah.

On March 13th, Klaus and Erika Mann arrive back in Munich and witness the installation of Hitler's new Gauleiter.

So the new provincial governor who is not elected democratically, he's just imposed.

And by this point, basically, the minimal resistance offered by Bavarian regional forces has been entirely broken.

And they read that as like, this is it.

So there's not even like an, okay, but I'm in California.

Yeah.

Our state government is pretty like lefty and will be okay because there's these constitutional checks on how they can reach downward into local government.

No, at this point, Hitler is saying, no, no, no, no, no.

Your provincial governor is who I'm going to say it is.

And he's going to take orders from me.

And that's when the Mon children, who just told their dad not to come back a couple of weeks ago, that's when they're getting out of here.

It was to the extent that Klaus earlier had said, my first exile will be in Bavaria, right?

He was like, I can probably sit it out here.

And this is the day when he's like, oh, no, that's not going to work.

Yeah.

They tell their dad, you're not coming back here.

Tell us what you need us to bring.

Like he has the first complete manuscript for his, the first volume of his tetralogy on Joseph, the biblical Joseph, in his death drawer and he's like, you can't leave that behind.

They do leave behind some of Mann's diaries, which causes Mann a huge amount of consternation because he's extremely frank and a little gross in his diaries.

About what?

Wait, wait, wait.

No, I want the Thomas Monn diary gossip.

Oh, thank God.

That's an entire episode.

Some of it's very amusing, some of it's very much not.

Okay.

But yeah, so he didn't want that out there.

In any case, the children basically agree that they need to leave right away.

Do you know much about Mann's children?

He had six of them, but these are sort of the two most famous ones.

Do you know anything about them?

No, I know almost nothing about his family.

So Klaus and Eric Aman, sort of, I don't want to say I'm picturing John Ralfio and Winnie's a Zapristine, but they're like, they are kind of trading on their dad's immense, you know, stature.

They're Nepo babies.

They're Nepo babies.

They're probably a little spoiled.

But they are also like super interesting people in their own right and pretty good writers in their own right.

It's so annoying when a Nepo baby has talent.

It's a big relief when they're like Gracie Abrams and you're like, okay, there is no way.

And like without dad, this would have worked out.

But some of them are really good and it's irritating.

It is irritating.

So Klaus was famous in the Weimar Republic for his, you know, he wrote novels and plays.

Irich Hammann was really successful in the theater.

They sort of cause an early scandal and like make their names by Irich Hamann played.

I think the first on-stage lesbian role in a play written by her brother, where she has to make out with Frank Wiedekin's daughter, I want to say.

Weird.

You had me in the first half of that description and then I like sort of weird way off.

off like oh first lesbian role.

Oh written by her brother.

Yes written by her brother who was dating the woman I think she was kissing at the time or was even married to her I want to say but it was also as gay as the day is long.

Both of these children are as gay as the day is long.

Erica Mann will later marry Auden.

Oh, that was she was Auden's beard.

Okay.

I didn't know that was Thomas Mond's daughter.

Yeah, well, he was her beard too.

Yeah.

Well, or whatever the opposite of a beard is, shaver.

Well, they call these like, what are they, like companionate marriages?

Lavender marriages, yeah.

Lavender marriages, yeah.

So both of them had a bunch of these.

She would always, quote unquote, date or marry or be betrothed to these men that actually her brother was fucking at the time.

Another one is Gustav Gruntens, a famous actor who would become a huge deal in the Third Reich, much to Klaus's chagrin.

And Klaus would basically, who was his ex, right, wrote this long novel about a gay actor compromised by the Nazis and by his association with them called Mephisto, which is all about Gustav Gruntgens.

Yeah, they're fascinating people.

Gonna be a weird Christmas.

Oh, yeah.

But anyway, so they sort of understand, they read the science quite clearly and they're like, we're fucking doomed here.

Let's go.

Yeah, this is weeks.

This is mere weeks when other people, I think, are just starting to understand what's happening.

Yeah, including their dad.

This is why they kind of know better.

But there were some, you know, more centrist intellectuals that the Nazis sort of tried to like cultivate.

Stefan Georgia, I mean, he's not exactly a centrist, but was not a Nazi.

They sort of were like, oh, can we get this guy?

Right.

And maybe they would have made a play for Mann.

His brother Heinrich will meet him in the next episode.

Basically, he's already like, yeah, no, my bags are packed.

Fuck off, right?

And they're trying to get Thomas Mann to do the same thing.

Just like, you know, tell these people to fuck off and let's get busy emigrating.

Klaus writes, quote, My luggage consisted of two suitcases, a typewriter, a top coat, and a bunch of magazines and books.

I packed a few things as though it were for just another journey.

journey.

In fact, I had hardly expected to stay away for more than a couple of months.

Not that I ever considered returning to a Germany dominated by Hitler, certainly not.

But I took it for granted that the Nazi farce wouldn't last.

No doubt, the powerful democracies would know how to cope with those primitive rascals, right?

Yeah.

He heads, I think, to Paris and Erika and her girlfriend, then girlfriend, who I think she might have been a dancer, they head to Aroza to meet with Thomas and Katya there.

It's very funny.

The Mann parents are just like, oh, it's our daughter and her girlfriend.

How wonderful.

It's like really fun to see that.

They're like, 1933.

They don't know that they're refugees yet, right?

They're probably living in a hotel.

They think they're on vacation.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They're starting to sort of like think about what if we have to do this longer term, exactly.

We skipped over this, but Hitler has given Goebbels a new department.

That's right.

Like around the time that Klaus and Erike, like, hightail it out of there.

That's right.

The same day that they hightail out of there is the founding of the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.

So this is Goebbels' new day job, the one that he will, you know, find his calling in.

And I think that he'll have until he dies.

It's also, again, like this focus on culture is really, really quite remarkable.

They don't

really work to strengthen their hold on other parts of society quite as as much as they do on art and culture.

A final thing I wanted to spotlight in terms of the gender politics of this moment is something that happens in two different places on March 14th and 15th.

On March 14th, Klempera has a young friend over whom he had sort of adopted a decade prior.

And this younger couple declares themselves as being pro-the new regime.

And Klempera is aghast, right?

But he notes in his diary, quote, Eva, so his wife, already realized this years ago.

She says, he lacks any sense of judgment, but that he would go so far, I am breaking with him.

So this is Klempa's first and most painful sort of break with someone just

for supporting this new regime.

This is like a weird pain of living under the collapse of a

democracy is understanding that people around you who you thought shared your values are in fact like enthusiastic supporters of the illiberalism and retrenchment.

And in some cases, of like, you know, a regime that is personally attacking your rights or your family or your lifestyle or your ideals or whatever it is, this like alienation and breakdown of just social relation.

And I like that Eva, you've mentioned this already, but like his wife did call it, right?

This is also the other thing, like I understand,

where like, how many times have you had that conversation with a friend about a third party where you're like, She voted for Trump, dude, I'm telling you.

And your friend is like, no, she would never come.

I know she's loopy, but she's not doing that.

And there's like this series of like domino revelations about how deep the support for the illiberalism extends into what you thought was your own safe social world that is like kind of heartbreaking.

It is, yeah.

Or this like, you must understand, right?

Like, and then eventually you're like, no, I must not understand anything.

I don't know what, what the hell.

Like, this is just bullshit, right?

Don't do this.

Right.

And I think this people are starting to sort of come out of their cocoons and not just signal, hey,

we're staying neutral and waiting and seeing, like, no, we're actually in support of this.

Right.

And you're right.

Eva is really really good at this like clemper keeps like attributing to her every few months she'll be like called it right like she completely knows who these people are is another example from 34 that i found about a year later quote eva says the rudiger woman and tima represent hitler's followers hysterical women and petit bourgeois so she's just like she's like ready with a judgment i like her i like her too yeah she's a little bit of a bitch but like one of the features that allows people to survive in this moment is cynicism, right?

Yeah, but also I think it's because these are all his co-workers, right?

Like he's incentivized to be nice.

And she is like the one who's like, that guy's a gas bag.

And now she's like, oh, also, he's a Nazi.

In some way, he's ensconced in this kind of professional environment where he thinks.

I mean, surely we all kind of agree.

He's optimistic, but he's also like institutionally and circumstantially incentivized by his social position to be optimistic.

Whereas like, this is another feature where, like, the socially enforced marginality of women can actually

prove to be useful for them, right?

Like, not only are they esteemed irrelevant, but their marginality or their position as something of an outsider might allow them a degree of greater clarity of perception, right?

Like, because I am less directly implicated in these people's pretexts about their own beliefs and position, I can see them a little more clearly than they can see themselves, or a a little more clearly than my husband, who is implicated in this world to a greater degree, can see them.

Yeah.

And I mean, this is something that I always think about with regards to our institutions today, right?

If I concede that people that I work with are idiots and are fascist idiots, in fact, I'm kind of also saying like this institution never had that much legitimacy and maybe my own position within it doesn't have as much legitimacy as I used to think, right?

It's a life hack to never respect yourself or your own work.

It's true.

This is what I found.

Yeah.

I think that's part of it, that he thinks, like, well, surely a man of the German university wouldn't.

And Eva is like, oh, really?

Well, they're all hysterical women and petit bourgeois.

What do you want?

Right.

And he's like, yeah, I guess you're right.

Fuck.

There's a lot of that, that like people just have a certain buy-in, especially at the university, a kind of institutional conservatism that allowed them to miss the fact that some of what seemed like institutional conservatism was in fact just straight-up pro-Nazi sentiment, right?

And just to give you a sense of like how pervasive this is, we go back to Thomas Manina Rosa, where Erika has now arrived on March 15th, right?

And he says in his diary, and I apologize, I'm going to have to cut up these sentences here because like Mann's sentences are interminable in his novels.

Yes.

In his diaries for himself, he just doesn't fucking make a period.

So these periods are not there in the original.

I apologize, but I was like, what the fuck am I going to do with this?

Anyway, he says, Erika has been with us since the day before yesterday.

So my two favorite children, the eldest and youngest daughter, are with me these days.

Iri's arrival and the stories of Munich antics and atrocities, arrests, tortures, etc., that it brought with it have taken on ever more decisive tones.

As has the fury and the disgust and the warnings that none of the endangered family members should return to Munich, right?

There's a part of him who's like, I'm too important that they would do anything to me.

And he might well be right.

But Irika is like, I see where this is going.

And I'm telling you, you're going to end up either compromised or hurt.

And he respects her enough that he's starting to listen.

Yeah, we'll read about that in our next episode.

It's really moving how he concludes that entry because he's like 57 at this point or 58 or something like that.

And he's like, God, I mean, like starting over at this age really sucks.

But the things that I wanted to pull out of these two things that happen as it happens two days apart in Dresden and Switzerland, it really highlights the role of women in these takes.

So a lot of these diaries are from professional men that are still ensconced and with a certain buy-in

with regards to established institutions, right?

But their wives and their daughters and so on are not.

And they can sense much more clearly what's coming and just how deep the rot in these institutions really goes.

And the second point I wanted to make is that Mann speaks of exposed or vulnerable family members.

And this is, I think, where we should maybe conclude this episode.

It doesn't include Thomas Mann's wife, Katja, who is in fact Jewish.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

So she will go back to Munich to fetch the diaries and all this other stuff.

And no one thinks twice about it.

Among the people he's in touch with, it's the people with a high public profile who are in danger, right?

It's Erika as a playwright.

It's Klaus as a playwright.

It's not his wife as a Jew yet, right?

Like, so there is this funny, like, whether or not he's right about that, it's something you read in a lot of these diaries that people are still kind of thinking,

People who get hurt are the people who are active in the public sphere as politicians, as writers, as columnists, as critics, etc., etc.

Alfred Kowl.

It's the public intellectuals, it's the squeaky wheels.

Yeah.

And it's not the ordinary people who are not sticking their necks out, right?

Otherwise, Alfred Kahl in Berlin would not have let his daughter and his wife stay behind, right?

His two daughters and his wife stay behind.

He would have been like, you're all coming with me to Prague, but he's like, oh, no, I'll find an apartment and you bring the kids in a week's time or whatever, right?

Yeah.

So like there's a change coming, but it's not quite here yet.

Or at least if the change is already here, these people are not yet recognizing it, right?

Kerr, Mann, I mean, like Mann and Katya have a slightly contentious marriage at times, but like he obviously wouldn't have sent her into like mortal danger.

They don't read that particular danger as mortal yet, even though in hindsight, we're like, there's a Jewish woman who just left Germany and you're sending her back in.

Don't do that, right?

Yeah.

But like, it also seems like that's a decent assessment of the Nazis' priorities in these first days, right?

People are responding to not the information we have at a remove of 70 years.

They're responding to the information they have at the time.

And I see how Thomas Mond gets to that.

Like, I would not do the same thing with the information I have, but with the information he has, I get it.

I get it based on what the high-profile arrests that he saw.

So that's the first, we've only gotten to March 15th.

March 15th.

Right.

Like we're, what is it, like seven weeks, not even that Hitler has been in power and people are fleeing.

Large sections of political political life has been declared illegal.

What we think of from our 2025 American standpoint is basic constitutional freedom to like press, assembly, opinion.

These have been formally revoked.

And the opposition has like looked around and seen that they don't really have many options left.

And a lot of people are getting the hell out of Dodge.

That's right.

And then next time we record, we're only covering our couple of weeks.

Yeah.

Right.

We're going to like look at a very, very densely packed period in Hitler's transformation of Germany.

That's right.

Well, thank you for coming on this first journey with me.

This is going to be interesting.

I really don't know how this is all going to go, but thank you for bearing with me and we'll see what happens next.

Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you next time on Project 1933 at your favorite podcast, Inbit with a Right.

See you next time.

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

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

Our title music is by Katie Lau.