Episode 110 -- Project 1933, Part IX: November 1 - November 30

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb. And I'm Moira Donegan.
Whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So, Adrian, today we are back with another installment of our beloved Project 1933. And also, you have a cold.
Yeah, so

get used to the sultry tones of my lower octave. I mean, I sound very different because, yeah, I am stuffed up horrible.

But I think that's okay because I think this is not going to be one of our longer ones. And I was trying to sort of figure out why that is.

I think one is that like we've been going over the parallels and people have been commenting on social media on how uncanny it is and how scary it is.

This is one I think where people are going to notice a lot of differences. Not to say that there aren't points of comparison or things where we can learn or a thing or two.

But today is about democracy after democracy. Today is about elections.

And if you look at the elections the United States just had and the one that it appears to be ready to have in 2026, you can sort of tell the differences much more so than the parallels, which also makes this a little bit shorter.

This is, at least going into it, my expectation was that this would be kind of more of a history lesson than something that is just going to make everyone go like, oh shit, literally that happened last week.

Yeah, you know, today we are talking about the elections on November 12th, 1933 in Germany.

And we're recording now on November 30th, 2025, about two weeks out from some off-year elections in which the opposition party did very well, right?

And the vibe as we're recording, and there's, you know, there's about 12 months left for things to change, but the vibe as we're recording is that the Republicans seem to expect Democratic victories in the 2026 midterms right now, right?

And that's, you know, TBD.

We do not know yet, but that that is something that would not have been possible in Germany in 1933, both because the Nazis have really like decimated the opposition parties with just actual violence, but also because they've really created this election system in which there's no real stakes and there's no possibility of a Nazi loss.

So I think what we're going to dig into today

is, you know, how did they do that?

Like, what were the mechanisms that allowed them to sort of fix the results of elections? How did they change what elections do and what they're for?

But also, I really wanted to talk to you about like the purpose of elections in an authoritarian regime when those elections are like kind of accepted and

known to be non-competitive, right?

Like why do authoritarian leaders continue to hold elections and continue to keep having these sort of like artificial plebiscites in which they are like constantly reaffirmed in their supposed legitimacy by the people.

You know, that's a, that's an interesting bit of bullshit. It's like, it's sort of confusing to me what the purpose is.
And I hope we can dig into it today. Yeah.

And it's also something that I think has changed over time.

So the first thing to notice about the Reichstag election of November 1933 is that you're like, I didn't know they had one, right? Like the one that mattered was in late 1932.

The one that really mattered was the one in March. But by that time, the Nazis were very much in power and had basically seized power in what was sort of a semi-legitimate democratic coup.

But then they had another one in November when it seemed like everything was sort of kind of done.

Why would you bother? And honestly, that confusion was shared by people in 1933. Gremperand notes in his diary on November 2nd, what shall we do on November 12th?

No one believes that the secrecy of the ballot will be protected. No one believes either in a fair covenant of votes, so why be a martyr? On the other hand, say yes to this government.

It is unbelievably unpleasant, right? He's like, just don't make me say it, you assholes. Like, just dictatorship me like a dictator.
Like, you don't have to, like, we don't have to do this.

It's degrading to both of us, right? Yeah, the compelled participation in the authoritarian spectacle is a dignity harm, right? And Klemperer is like, I like him.

I don't think he would like me, but I like him for his attention to the indignity of living under the Nazi rule, right? He's like, this is humiliating. And he says that quite a bit.

The sort of insult of like the adulthood and the contempt for the self-respect of the people is like a really strong feature that he's just like so alert to.

It's really interesting you say that because I think that is really a feature of more conservative critics of Nazism.

I think a lot of the leftists were sort of, you know, fire breathing, like trying to go out and fight this regime.

But the conservatives, being maybe a little bit more individualistic, being kind of leery of collective solutions, did really sort of experience this dignity harm.

There's this guy, Theodo Heke, who's kind of a Catholic conservative, who starts a diary right around this time. There is Friedrich von Richmales-Sieven, who will start his diary a few years later.

They're both fairly conservative guys who hate the Nazis and it's just page after page, right? They're interesting documents, but they're not as like...

informative as Klimberg is like, here's the problems we're dealing with. And those guys are just like, I heard Hitler on the radio and I wanted to throw up.

And it's like, there's like the revulsion, as you say, the dignity harm is so visceral. Yeah.
Klimper is great because he's so attentive in his diaries to the ongoing political events, right?

As well as the affective.

But it strikes me that one of the harms, maybe not the most immediate harm, of an authoritarian regime is just the submission to being ruled over by idiots and by people who are very kind of open about their contempt for you.

Yeah. And I think there's already a secret theme emerging that I didn't think about, which is contempt.
We're going to end on contempt and on hatred today, which is great.

Classic in bed with the right territory. Ending on contempt, folks.
That's the in bed with the right promise. Yeah.
So that's what we put on our t-shirts. Start with contempt.

So, but one source for Klemper's insecurity about like, what am I even supposed to do on November 12th was about the fact that the Nazis had changed a lot of the legal structures and constitutional structures of the late Weimar Republic, but the election law was essentially unchanged, except that no one believed that.

So, right, like they were running essentially a Weimar-style electoral campaign with the election law was essentially that of the last elections of the Weimar Republic.

But everyone's like, well, I feel like there's another shoe about to drop, right? And that turned out to be true, of course. But everyone's like I don't know.

Like clearly they're going to monkey with it, but like in what way? Am I getting shot?

Or is it just that they're like going to like like grab my right hand and make me make a check mark somewhere else like what is this gonna look like right we know they're cheating but how right right the like constitutional skeleton of the weimar regime is still there there's still like these weird forms that are being fulfilled but the like sort of popular sovereignty has been removed right so there's like form without like function or form without spirit yeah that's right partly because parliament's gone right the leistag has dissolved itself it is supposed to be a dictatorship it's supposed to be a temporary one so like technically these structures are all still somehow in place but everyone's like well okay right now it feels like a moment when what technically exactly means really matters and i'd like to know before i walk in there make a as he says make a martyr of myself like is this does this do anything or like would you guys be like oh we lost right or is it just like i may put a mark on my back for no reason whatsoever so one of the things clumperer is worried about and presumably other Germans are worried about is like look if I don't vote the way the Nazis want me to to vote, I might be risking violence.

Yeah. And there is some of that, right?

So something about this election, and maybe political scientists who are listening can confirm or disconfirm this, is that I think it functions differently from the way Republicans in the MAGA world today seem to envision what American democracy will look like.

In this respect, they're probably not looking to Germany in 1933, though they are probably looking to it in other ways, like Schaltung, for instance.

But they're looking to competitive authoritarian regimes, these kind of hybrid regimes, Hungary under Viktor Orban or Putin in Russia, right?

Yeah, Putin in Russia, like Modi's India to a certain extent. Orban in Hungary is the one that they really seem to envy, even though it's just like kind of a...

It's not applicable here.

Hungary is a tiny country entirely dependent on Germany for its economy. Orban is a pretty good example here with these kind of competitive authoritarian states.

You can see that the rulers, they put their thumb on the scale when it comes to elections, but they are worried.

Like every once in a while, someone rises in Turkey and Erdogan seems genuinely worried about that guy. Orban seems genuinely worried about this new figure rising, I think, in Hungarian politics.

So that is not the case.

Hitler and Goebbels are not like staying awake in November of 1933, being like, oh shit, what if insert name here, you know, does better than expected, right? There is no figure like that.

Well, they purged the opposition, all the communists and all the socialists.

And at this point, I imagine some of the like more conservative-minded intellectuals and leaders have all fled the country or been thrown in jail.

Of the conservatives, a lot of them are still there, but just kind of grumbling quietly.

Their moment will come in 1934, I would say, when a lot of them end up on the business end of a SA revolver.

But today, I think some of this has to do with how our thinking about authoritarianism has evolved.

I think after World War II, like political scientists, I think used to look at authoritarian regimes as transitional, like they would eventually democratize.

And this competitively authoritarian paradigm, I think, came about to start describing places that were way more democratic once upon a time and then backslide, right?

That seems closer to what the Weimar Republic is experiencing here, but like no comparison, right?

But the reason I'm bringing all this up is because political scientists tell us that like part of why competitively authoritarian regimes are worth studying is that even though unfair, an election can be this double-edged sword, right?

Like it can create this illusion of popular support, but it also provides an opposition with tools to kind of activate and reach masses.

And it importantly provides elites who are maybe not fully aligned with the regime with a sort of junction point in which they can switch allegiances, right?

And I think that is helpful to understand what the Nazis are trying to avoid here.

The reason why these elections are so incredibly unfree and so incredibly unfair is that they are worried about both those things. They have gotten rid of the opposition.

They don't want anything that reconstitutes the opposition. Basically, you have the choice in this election between national socialists and guests, right? It's just other.

And secondly,

it's very important to them that these elites that they've just sort of bonded to their cause don't get an opportunity to kind of like deviate or nuance or create some daylight or shift the trajectory of the regime in any way, right?

So if elections present all these opportunities for the regime's consolidation of power to be threatened or eroded or undone, how do the Nazis arrange the election to guard against that possibility?

Yeah, so They in some way use it as an opportunity.

They turn the election into a referenda, into backward-looking reflections of a pre-established relationship, right, rather than a genuine decision point that would, you know, shape the country's future.

They also made participation in the election into a repressive mechanism. What do you mean by that? So it was not an expression of popular sovereignty, right? They made it into a control point.

You had to vote, pretty much. And basically, given that there was only one party advertising at you, it was just a big excuse to air tons of propaganda.
So voting is like de facto required?

How is that enforced?

Well, it's hard to tell like whether these are the kinds of showy repressive measures that the Trump administration is so fond of or whether really you couldn't not vote.

But the turnout was pretty spectacular, if it is to be believed. So voting is functionally mandatory.
The options on the ballot are like approving the Nazi regime's past actions, right?

Because these are all votes on things that have already happened. Yeah.
Or saying other.

And there's propaganda everywhere telling you to vote in favor of the Nazis.

But the Nazis also combined the election with a plebiscite, with a kind of what we would call a proposition, which they knew was going to pass, because it had, in fact, widespread support.

So they're really trying to stack the deck here. In October, Hitler withdrew from disarmament talks and from the League of Nations.
And then he called for this plebiscite to ratify that decision.

So it's like, do you guys approve of me ending this decade-long national humiliation that you all hate? And they're like, well, yes, we do. Yeah.
Yeah.

And again, it's backward looking, right? He's saying, I've already done it, by the way.

Are you okay with that? It's just about sort of creating popular legitimacy. But here's the thing.
While the resulting election is totally illegitimate,

this particular proposition would have probably passed without the Nazis manipulating things, right? Hitler yoked himself to an issue where he did enjoy fairly broad support.

And the other thing that I think is pretty clever is he managed to turn an area where he had little to zero success, right, foreign policy, into a strength, right?

He sort of makes it seem like he's made this huge pivot in foreign policy. When in fact, it's not really true.
Nothing's happened yet.

The Nazis have spent their entirety of 1933 scared that the Allies might come and like occupy parts of Germany, that Poland might invade East Prussia or whatever.

Like they're very, they've been very, very careful. There are real sort of frothing at the mouth sort of warmongers in Hitler's orbit, but he himself is fairly scared.

But here he gets to had everyone say, like, hey, that thing I did, pretty cool, right? Pretty cool. And so

this does just garner broad support, not from across the political spectrum, right? People do still vote no sometimes, but again, from these kinds of elites that he's worried about.

Conservative trending, but not quite yet Nazis, right? So President Hindenburg, remember him? He's still around. I mean, barely, but he's still around.
He comes out of bed to campaign for the yes.

Won't say anything about the Nazis. What do you mean he comes out of bed like he's dying? Oh yeah, that guy's dying.
Oh, yeah. He's not going to make it past 1934.

But he's this old marker of the continuity between the Weimar regime and the Nazi regime. Well, I mean, he's really a reminder of the Second Empire.

He made his name in World War I.

He, you know, he's von Hindenburg, right? He's an old nobleman. I really only know the blimp, to be honest.
Yeah. Well, he was about as successful as the blimp.

Both the blimp and the man really stuck the landing, if you know what I mean.

But like Catholic priests who, after the Reichskonkordat that we discussed, I think in episode five or six,

are now allowed to basically voice political opinions, advise their flock to vote yes on this. Gotta love the Catholic priests voting for the war insurance plebiscite.

It's like, we will definitely go to war. All of you will be sent directly to God.

Classic Catholics. Well, just so the Catholics don't have to feel too bad, the Protestant church also comes out.
But it's not a monolith in Germany, right? The Catholic churches are arranged by state.

But so, for instance, the Protestant Church of Schleswig and Holstein says, quote, God wants there to be peace on earth.

Therefore, the fight for true peace to which the Chancellor calls us is our duty of faith. Therefore, the motto for November 12th can only be.
Be faithful and be of good cheer.

War is peace. I've heard that in a book somewhere.
Yeah. Yeah.
Only the best people say that. And so yeah, Klempara is struggling with this.

He himself, obviously, is very clear that he's not going to vote for the Nazis, but the question is like, what do you do with this other thing? Right.

We'll get to what he ends up doing. But like, he just gets mad at all his friends who are like, well, I'm against the Nazis, but I'm for this.
Right.

So he finds out that one of his friends is going to vote yes and says, quote, I completely lost my temper, thumped the table with my fist and repeatedly bellowed at him.

whether he considered these rulers to whose policy he was assenting to be criminals or not. He refused to reply.
I had, he said, no right to put this question to him. Wow.
Yeah.

Good old Plumper for making a scene at the dinner party.

There's a lot of that in his diaries at that time. Yeah.
Right.

So he's basically saying, look, independent of your feelings about this issue, showing up to vote for it obviously will serve to identify the Nazi party and its course with this country.

Can you imagine where that will lead? Right. And history showed us exactly where that led.
So Victor is exactly right. Right.
And that was the thing.

The plebiscite was designed to get people to show up to a pointless election. So the day of the election looked like this.
There were big SA and Hitler youth marches early in the day.

All the polling places were draped in Nazi flags and Hitler portraits. Just in case you forgot what the guy looked like.
Very subtle.

The SA went through the voter rolls sort of at midday and would force people to head to the polls if they hadn't voted.

So they technically didn't violate the secrecy of the ballot, but they'd be like, well, you haven't made a check mark yet. You want to maybe.

I mean, the SA are armed, right? They're armed, violent, thugs. Yes.
Drunk most of the time. Who are showing up your house saying, you haven't voted and we want you to vote.

That's a pretty direct threat, right? Yes, yes. And they were voting badges to single out people who hadn't voted.

So you get the, I voted, but then like people would get sort of like accosted if they didn't wear one of those badges.

You know, thinking about badges and Nazis, you're like, uh-oh, like, yeah, this is where it starts, right?

In the event, Klempera voted no on the withdrawal and against the Nazis, and Eva submitted an empty ballot in protest.

What the Klemperas would not have known because of how the Nazis counted these things, Eva's ballot was almost certainly counted as a yes vote. They're like, oh, sorry, Eva's Victor Klemper's wife.

Yeah. So she's like, I'm just not going to put anything and just stuff it, like a blank piece of paper in there.
But the Nazis counted that as a yes. Yeah, they're like, well, obviously she meant to.

She just didn't get around to it.

Her nationalistic fervor ran so hot that she was like, forgot to actually mark anything. These These little fuckers.

I mean, I don't know. Like, they're just so, they're dishonest in such petty ways, you know? I do think a lot of this was just, you know, the SA we mentioned was very local.

I think a lot of this was about local repression, right? Like, it's a very nice way to sort of stand up and be counted, right?

Like, there's like a couple of hundred people at a precinct, and there's a drunk SA guy being like, oh, Fred hasn't voted yet, right? Like, where's your button, Fred?

Where's your, I have voted button, Fred, right? Like, I've hated this guy since high school.

I'm going to give him a wedgie again yeah and so I think it becomes this kind of enforcement mechanism one interesting thing that this made me realize which I never sort of thought about notice that Klemper not Iofa is Jewish meaning Jewish Germans were required to vote in this fucking thing right it's not that kind of Trump style oh we're gonna get rid of all the voters who are not aligned with our ethno-national racial project no they were still voting they were supposed to vote yes they're making everybody get on board yeah and jewish germans later have their citizenship taken away but that's not for a long time.

Yeah, exactly. And so, but like, I mean, there's already, right, I mean, they can't be in civil service.
They can't participate in parts of the economy.

But they are compelled to give a thumbs up to their own

repression. Yeah.
I mean, like, for Americans who I feel like are steeped in sort of Jim Crow understanding of how a racialized state functions, like, that's so strange, right? Like, the South was.

always about like not letting people vote. Here it's about like, oh, yeah, you should vote.
We're just going to stand next to you with a bully club while you do it, right?

Anyway, so the Nazis did keep statistics on these, and they are a little tricky, but the differences between regions are telling, and I do want to briefly delve into that.

So here are the percentages of invalid ballots. That's to say, ballots marked no,

but not including empty ballots or empty envelopes, right? We don't know the numbers of this because they were counted as yeses,

but basically this is how Klempere voted, right? He would be an invalid ballot. And in his district, it was 8.53% of the voters in Gristen that voted that way.
That's very low. That's low.

Still, you got to kind of hand it to them. It's not nothing, right? But here are the differences.
In Hamburg, it's 16.39%.

Berlin, 14.94%.

Leipzig, 13.02%.

East Prussia, 2.87%.

Platinet, 3.32%.

I think this is significant. What's being revealed by these numbers? Is it a difference between like urban and rural areas?

What do they have in common in the places where proportionally more people are voting no? So one thing that really jumps out is the urban-rural divide.

East Prussia is by far the most rural part of the Third Reich. It is also the one where, remember, the Nazis had really done a lot of work to goose kind of employment schemes.

So it was probably a much more thoroughly integrated society. Like people like the Nazis were just everywhere.

Some of this might mean that the farmers really attacked to the right, which we've seen across 1933. Some of this might also be that it's easier to surveil people in rural areas, right?

Like, oh, the village teacher hasn't voted yet. Let's make the village teacher vote, right? Whereas if you have 16% of people in Hamburg being like, fuck this, like they probably knew each other.

They probably went in as a group and were like, look, if they want to beat us up, they can, but like, we're going to vote no on this shit. So there's a little bit of anonymity that people can use.

But it's also the Nazis still did poorly where there were large homogeneous groups opposed to them, above all, ethnic minorities.

For instance, instance, the Danes in northern Schleswig-Hohlstein, and large working-class neighborhoods, above all in urban areas, right?

So people probably realize that, but it's worth saying that like it's not that Hitler somehow persuaded people. The fact that 70% of voters and hamburgers are like, fuck you, right?

At considerable risk, like suggests that like, you know, that there is enduring leeriness over the Nazi project.

So whatever is going to happen to bring these people over eventually to the war effort and to the rearmament effort and to the fascization of German society is still in the future to some extent, right?

Clearly, the Nazis still understand there being an independent popular will that's distinct from the will of the state and which has something of a capacity to constrain the will of the state, right?

Yeah, or these people at least think they have that, right? It's almost this dead man walking. It's a zombie, right? It's kind of...

They're asserting something that has no more import on what sovereignty looks like, but they're asserting it anyway, just because they don't consider what is happening in in the country legitimate, right?

If you look at the same results for the same areas for the plebiscite, it's simpler, right? This is a yes or no question.

And it is a lot more popular than the Nazis, it seems. For instance, in Dresden, where the Klemperers cast their votes, 96.6% of registered voters cast ballots.
Again,

yeah, sus, highly sus.

93.76%

of those voted yes, 2.1% of those weren't valid, and 4.14% voted no.

Compare that to Berlin, their turnout was just 92.57%,

2.8% weren't valid, 89.2%,

10.79%

no.

And in East Prussia, the no votes stood at less than 1%, right? Wow. And just to give you a sense, like in case the question comes up, like, well, is this kind of turnout normal? No at all.

Yeah, I was like 96.6%

turnout

in Dresden. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's high.
Yeah. Weimar election turnouts were really robust by modern standards, but these numbers are fishy as hell.

The July 1932 election, super important, super contested, had a turnout of 84.1%. The ones in November 1932 had one of 80.6%.

It makes more sense to me that there would be a high turnout.

for a election where popular will could influence the outcome, where there are actual stakes and where, like, maybe it's going to be close.

This election doesn't seem like, you know, aside from the threat of violence, it doesn't seem like there's that much of a motivation to come out. Yeah.

Essentially, the turnout really becomes sort of a propaganda coup for the Nazis, right? In East Prussia, the no vote on the plebiscite about the League of Nations and rearmament talks stood at 1%.

Like, you don't get that kind of number unless like either SA or your neighbors are watching what you're doing, right? Like, I mean, those are Curtis Leva numbers.

Curtis Leva's cat could get 1% in East Prussia.

It's got my vote. Yeah.
They've been through so much. Let's give them something.

But so, like, it's essentially a celebration of sort of the repressive capabilities of the Nazi state, but also of a civil society, is my guess.

Like the neighbors surveilling neighbors, turning each other in, pressuring each other. And it's also a test run for the media.
So it's a little tricky.

Goebbels' diaries, there's, I think, a volume missing in late 1933. So we don't have his diary entries from this time, which is very annoying.

But I can tell you that, like, the guy sweated Nazi electoral campaigns, like, down to the smallest detail.

Like, he, he sounds like he's writing like a James Carville style, like, here's what went wrong, kind of bestseller. But Goebbels as Bridezilla, just micromanaging every detail.

His propaganda campaign. Yeah, he's like, I heard the new spots, they're awful, right? And like,

and from what one can see of the November 1933 campaign, they still really sweat at this.

Again, we don't have his diary for comparison, but it really seems like they wanted to stage manage everything. They were working overtime to do this.
And I think that's the other thing.

The election becomes kind of an excuse to just let loose this insane propaganda campaign.

And then to mix that campaign with the high turnout, to sort of say like the people and its rulers are fully aligned, right? Here's how the Schlesik Kolstaden Schetzeitung put it the next day.

Quote, adorned with countless flags,

and as soon as voting began, the inhabitants flocked to the ballot box. The crowds in the individual polling stations were at times so large that the doors had to be temporarily closed.

Well, yeah, I bet you're beating up anyone who's not voting.

It's this interesting thing, right? Like on the one hand, like you use the election campaign as an excuse to really kind of dominate public space with this modern advertising.

And then you use the fact that you're basically driving people to the ballot box to to sort of say like, yes, there's a great enthusiasm, right?

My read on this is that Goebbels and Hitler were still smarting from the actual results of the last sort of semi-free and fair election that they had in March of 1933, where they fell well below 50%, right?

So this is also like kind of self-soothing. They're like, we're going to have the election that we wanted to have all along, where everyone says, you guys are awesome, you know?

And Klempera experiences the election as, as you say, a dignity harm, but he really hates, he finds the election campaign even worse because it involves his students, right?

He's like, my students can barely, he has like very few at this point, but the few he has, he's like, they're just constantly taken up with election propaganda. They have to organize parades.

They have to publicize in every possible way, right? It's just busy work and they're deliberately taking them away from us, right? These other sources of news, of

authority and of information, right? So wait, so students are being conscripted into like mandatory propaganda efforts for the Nazi Party? I think they're exhorted to join them. Okay.

I mean, how much of that is peer pressure and how much of it is actual threats of violence? Unclear.

We should mention that all youth organizations that weren't Nazi aligned were essentially dissolved into the Hitler Youth. So basically like your friends are all there, so you might as well go.

And so it's a little hard to say like how much of this is voluntary and excitement. Younger people are more pro-Nazi than their elders to a large extent.

But whatever the case, like they, they need to kind of be active the entire time. Right.

He says the extravagant propaganda for a yes vote on every commercial vehicle, post office van, mailman's bicycle, in every house and shop window, on broad banners which are stretched across the street.

Quotations from Hitler are everywhere and always yes for peace.

So it's like it's inescapable. It's just ubiquitous and relentless.
I have a picture in our dock if you want to have a look at that. Ein Volk, ein Führer, ein ja.

Yeah, a gigantic banner, occluding three floors of a very nice-looking building. It says, you know, one people, one Führer, one yes, right? So it's extremely ominous, it's extremely massive.

It's also this incredible visual, just like presence in everyone's life. And that's, I think, how the Nazis conceives of this.

Really, Election Day is almost an afterthought to the campaign leading up to it.

So part of it is like the exercise of the propaganda itself is both a demonstration of the new regime's power and a way to like enact that power and conscript all these people through threats of violence, through

pressure, through presumably some degree of genuine enthusiasm to renew their purchase and affirm the legitimacy of the Nazi regime. That's right.

And the other thing, of course, is also, this is another important thing about elections that we don't think about.

Elections are, as we sort of suggested at the beginning, beginning, moments where various elites and groups get to sort of chime in and say their peace, right?

Whether it's a union, some intellectuals, it's institutions, et cetera, et cetera.

When Hitler's propaganda says one people, one Führer, one mies, the whole point is like there is no more institutional intercessionary kind of structure between me and the people.

Klemperau reports Hitler's speech after the election quote-unquote victory, right? And he says, content, I know no intellectuals, bourgeois, proletarians, only the people, right?

You know, the whole idea is like any kind of pluralism is division, is dissent, is disharmony. We're doing away with that.
It's one people, right? He goes on, this is again Klempera's summary.

Why have millions of my opponents remained in the country? The émigrés are scoundrels.

And a couple of hundred thousand ruthless internationalists, and then interruption, Jews, want to set nations of millions at one another's throats. I only want peace.

I have risen from the the common people. I want nothing for myself.
I have power for another three and a half years and need no title.

Interestingly, Klempere's gloss on this whole thing is: every sentence mendacious, but I almost believe unconsciously mendacious. The man is a blinkered fanatic, right?

He's like, you actually believe this shit.

This is a moment where I do see a similarity between sort of attempts to decode the Nazis by the likes of Klemper and like my own recognition with the MAGA faithful is

who is lying and who is sincerely crazy

is not always easy to tell, right?

Who is saying an untruth for cynical reasons, consciously in an effort to deceive, and who is saying an untruth because they have been indoctrinated or because they no longer have a grasp on reality is like a question.

It's a question I ask a lot. Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
And I mean, also the way that the Nazis sort of are clearly having to psych themselves up.

You know, if if you've seen Trump's dependence on his crowds and then in the second term, his dependence on those parties at Mar-a-Lago, it's like, why would he keep doing this?

It looks terrible for him. I was like, well, because that's what he feeds of.
And I think that the Nazis are feeding off of this to some extent, right? They need this reflected back at them as well.

They're in the driver's seat, but they're also driven by the course of events here, I think, to some extent. They need that kind of mirroring effect.

Otherwise, they'd be like, oh, shit, what is happening here? Like, do we really have these people? It's narcissistic gratification, folks. It probably feels amazing.
Yeah. Yeah.

So that's the last election of 1933.

And there will be more in the Nazi era. None of them will matter.
Of course, the three and a half years that Hitler claims to have left, he wouldn't have believed at the time.

If you look again, if you look at Goebbels' diaries, like they know full well that the three and a half years are a sham, right? That would have been his normal term as chancellor.

Right, but he's like, I'm not leaving. Yeah.
I mean, that's the funny part. Like the Nazis called the one in March the last election to each other, right?

So it's kind of funny that they then in November do another one. But like, I guess to them, it's, it's no longer really an election.
It's really a ritual, right?

I mean, you and I watched, you know, Parsi fall together with a lot of, like, it feels like that, right? Like, a lot of stuff's foreordained.

There's a lot of smoke and mirrors, lots of sound and fury. But like, in the end, like with any good ritual, the end is preordained.
Well, they've kept all of the sort of

symbolic and like quasi-spiritual function of an election, but disposed of like the actual like material outcome, right?

Like you can't use an election to change who is in power anymore, but you can use an election to mark yourself as a participant in the state to sort of try and express the spirit of the people, you know, the sort of patriotic purchase that an election has

is

here made kind of independent of its actual democratic functioning. That's right.
Right. And the one parallel to the way American elections are conducted, those badges, right?

Like we also put on stickers and say, I voted. Very exciting.
I got to do it for the first time in November, and that was super fun. California has good stickers, too.
They're very.

But of course, you're doing your civic duty, but you also have the incredible privilege of

getting to shape the world around you. And as you say, like this is the duty without any of the risk to those in power that might come with that.
I mean, I will say, like, there's a

it's not that they're not trying to rig the election, right? It's like this gerrymandering effort

is functionally like about making elections non-competitive,

in which case it doesn't matter if large numbers of opposition voters turn out because the outcome has been preordained by maps, right?

So there is an effort to like retain the form of elections, but to mute their function.

That's also something that does happen here.

At the same time, I do think if there are listeners who study competitive authoritarianism, they would probably push back and say even a rigged election can, with its result, even if the party in power is obviously going to return to power,

can really signal something, right?

If an authoritarian suddenly really craters in the polls, but because he's gerrymandered, everything is returned to power, people can look at those results and say, like, well, gee, I wasn't going to risk my high running against this guy, but he seems weak.

I should go for it, right? It is a moment when an elite might say, like, this guy seems epically unpopular. If he has to fake it to get to like 55%, like we might switch allegiances.

I think that's what political scientists would point out, that like there is a risk in elections that are still semi-free and semi-fair.

Well, for many years, in places like Wisconsin and North Carolina, the state houses were gerrymandered so badly that, you know, Republicans would win even though Democrats won like a majority of votes, right?

That's something that happens in our malapportioned Senate, right? Democratic senators represent something like two-thirds of the vote

or the number of votes cast in Senate races, but they cannot get

more than say 51 seats in the absolute best year, you know? Well, yeah. I would like note the diminishing returns of symbolism, right? Yeah.

No, I think it's only within authoritarian states that this does actually matter.

I mean, Moira, are you saying that the citizens of Wyoming don't deserve exactly the same number of senators as, you know, the entire city of San Francisco?

Because we have the same population, you know.

We're actually a little bigger than Wyoming.

I don't, our one listener in Wyoming, I don't want her coming for us. She should get back on her horse and ride into the sunset.
It's a flavor country.

Probably. I don't know.
It's beautiful. It's absolutely gorgeous in Wyoming.
It's also completely empty. Yeah.
Yeah.

We get to share our two centers with 39 million of our closest friends. So that's good.

I love them all.

Right. So that's the election.
The other thing I wanted to talk about, we haven't checked in with Thomas Mann yet. And he's in Switzerland.
He's in Switzerland now? Okay. So he came back from France.

He was on vacation in the south of France. He's sort of shacked up in a house.
He's found a house that he kind of likes. The stuff from Munich is slowly trickling in.

I had always thought that from reading biographies of him and looking looking over the letters, that basically he sort of settles into exile and then kind of goes quiet for a little while.

But it actually sort of sounds like he's in November of 1933 is thinking about return. Oh, wow.
Yeah, which I didn't have on my bingo card at all.

He says at one point in November, nervous restlessness probably related to thoughts of returning to Germany. After all, one wouldn't have to behave like Hauptmann and Strauss.

So this is Gerhard Hauptmann, the dramatist and Richard Strauss, the composer, but could maintain a serious isolation, rejecting any publicity. There would be enough friends for it.

It's an interesting moment because this is the exact kind of inner emigration that he would later excoriate after the war. Be like, how could you?

So we can say like, oh, Tomas Mann is being hypocritical, which is like, what else is new? But like, I do think there's a couple of things happening.

One is, you know, this is the like boiling frog problem, right?

Like the regime is consolidating and he thinks he sort of knows what he's dealing with and he's like oh gee what what would it matter the second thing that happens that this is just about his narcissism i remember his novel was coming out and he was really worried like are they gonna burn my books they didn't uh did well he got a lot of letters from germany saying like how much they liked it the reviews were pretty good both in the exile press and i think some in nazi germany he's like hey so they're they're buying this stuff this is fine he's not the most political writer as a novelist right like it's his essays that really got him in trouble like the joseph tetralogy is about you know, the Bible.

He's not like workers organizing a strike or something like that. That would get you, get you killed real fast.
So it's sort of, he's sort of compatible, right?

And then the other thing that I think is worth pointing out, the other reason I think he's thinking about leaving Switzerland is that people sort of keep coming up to him.

with vaguely pro-Nazi positions. So he says that in the

Neutschule Zeitung, which is still Switzerland's most well-regarded liberal newspaper, although I wrote an entire book about how they no longer really deserve the label of liberal, if you'd read German.

But he says that there's an editorial by a German correspondent about the quote-unquote election that the Swiss should be ashamed of, right?

So like they're like, oh, look at all this unity over there in Germany with the kind of subtext of like, hey, shouldn't we maybe do this too? Or isn't there something to this? The same way that like.

Now European newspaper writers like seem to need to look at Trump and be like, but you got to hand it to him on this or like, well, he's getting rid of wokness, right? And all this stuff.

Like, this is exactly happening in especially the German-speaking world.

Yeah, there's something about like the European gaze on America where it's like rubbernecking.

You know, they both sort of gawk at the vulgarity of the American right and also try to kind of launder it into a more polite form because it reflects so many of their own impulses.

Like America serves a very particular function in the European imagination as a way for them to like both indulge and disavow their own worst impulses. Exactly.

And I mean, like right down to the the fact that they kind of want the same policies for themselves, or they even have them, right?

They can all, they can talk about immigration crackdowns and how brutal they are all they want. Like, you're the ones letting people drown in the Mediterranean, you know?

Like, French people love to act shocked at American racism. And I'm like, you guys are so racist.

They can't be more active. They don't see race.

But yeah, so exactly. There are these elements in other countries and they're kind of looking at Germany and they're kind of liking what they see.

And what's really interesting is that like Mann sort of keeps getting the stuff sort of passed like he's now for the first time really settling down.

He's reading German language newspapers outside of Germany for the first time.

He's reading this, the NSET set, the Neutschüsch at Zeitung, which comes out of Zurich, pretty much daily.

And he's like, oh shit, these people are ready to, it's like some of these people are ready to capitulate, right?

Two of his professor friends who sort of like put him on a lecture tour, give him this book, Das Geistie Reich, the Spiritual Realm, quote, which I read at length last night.

He's a Swiss man with average thoughts and quite professorially glorifies national socialism without sense, inside, or feeling for its reality, the hideousness of its intellectual and moral level, the lies, the intellectual dishonor.

So he's like, look, if I got to read that, I might as well be at home in Munich, right? Like, I don't need to move to the fucking mountains for this.

If everybody around you is starting to capitulate to Nazi ideology anyway, the utility of having emigrated and exiled yourself is probably starting to seem, you know, kind of limited, right?

You know, it's like, what's the point? This is futile.

I ran away from the Nazis, but the Nazis followed me here. Exactly.

And I think that's the sense that a lot of them are getting that, like, there's a lot of sort of anti-boycott kind of discourse, both in the United States and in Europe, right?

This idea that we have to normalize.

We have to come to terms with Germany. And Germany at this point is identical with the Nazi state, right?

And all the émigrés are like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not legitimate.
That is not Germany.

Sure, they may have voted for this shit 92% allegedly, but I need you to not pay attention to that or I need you to not credit that, right?

Yeah, that Thomas Maan, we've also seen and to a lesser extent in Klemper, but really in Thomas Maann, like the idealized other Germany, right? The better Germany, trying to preserve it.

It reminds me a little bit of American liberals going like, this is not who we are. It's like, well, this is also who we are.
You have an effort and a desire to preserve this different American ideal.

And that desire might be noble, but it also involves a certain like disavowal of reality.

I mean, that is, I don't know if this is apocryphal, but I think around the conspirators of July 20th, 1944, the general's coup where they tried to assassinate Hitler, the phrase, the world must know we were not all like him.

Oh, I don't really buy that from German generals in 1944.

But these people get there in, you know, in 1933. They're like,

they're torn between two things, right? They're trying to say, on the one hand, there's something about Germany that allowed for this to happen, right? There's something that's wrong here.

But it is also important that it's not faded, that this is not, the Germans aren't necessarily like this. Like

there are still decision points here, right?

Thomas Mann's brother, Heinrich, will write also in November, the saddest thing about the contemporary history of Germany is that it could have turned out entirely differently.

He's like, this is, he's like, that's important to me. Like, this is not like where Germany was going to end up anyway.

Like, like this there were choices being made here and people are morally responsible for them right it's not germans are always bad right it's it's important for them to recover this kind of germany because they think

otherwise like you're just you're you're you're giving in to the nazi identification of their own state with the german people which is indeed what ends up happening right the question of collective guilt raises itself because of that speaking of heinrich while man is sort of contemplating maybe going back like what's the difference uh he he winds up not considering it for very long.

Part of it is that his brother, who remember, has already had his books burnt, he was the president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and he was thrown out of that.

He's living in Paris, I believe, at this point. And he sort of gets in on the other big trend of late 1933 among German immigrant intellectuals, which is like, you make the final break.

You light the torch, you walk up to, you know, to the building, and you're like, all right, here goes nothing. So he writes a book called De Hasse.

It's first published in French as La Aene, so Hatred, with Gallimard.

And then it comes out in German almost immediately, a couple of days later, with Quéridou, so the new publishing house that exiles have built up together with a Dutch publisher in Amsterdam.

And he basically wants this out there very quickly. It's an interventionist book.
And it's brutal. It's basically like ensuring that if they ever catch him, like that's it.

So that's the other thing that people do, is which is really, really kind of interesting. And it's an interesting reflection on hatred.
Maybe I'll start with that.

He sort of says, we're watching what's happening in Germany and we realize that we hadn't previously understood the phenomenon of hatred.

And that's so interesting because, like, whose hatred do you think he's talking about?

Yeah, is it his hatred for the Nazis or the Nazis' hatred for the world? It's both, I think. Yeah.

So he's saying, like, there is this kind of hatred that I didn't know my neighbors were capable of, of Jews, of LGBT people, of socialists, of intellectuals, et cetera, et cetera.

And then there is this hatred that I feel about them. He says, like, you know, in a democracy, there is in the end a kind of commonality that you sense, even with people who you fully disagree with.

And he's like, I think I have to let go of that. Like, I think they have let go of it, and I think I have to as well, right? I hate them.
I hate them, right?

He says, an excessive hatred wouldn't be healthy, and it would be an insult to to your own intelligence. You compare your foe to your friend and you realize that in the end, both of them are human.

And he's like, not sure I can do that right now. Yeah.
I'm sure they're not doing it. And I don't think I can do it either.
Right.

And he sort of traces the end of the Weimar Republic in a way that I think is really kind of interesting for 2025 United States to the inability of elites to really counter the dehumanization that came along with Nazi hatred, right?

It's always like you always were trying to understand this within the ambit of Republican exchanges of opinion and ideas, when in fact, what it was, was just in Kuwait screaming at you, right?

Like your mistake was mistaking for an opinion, what was a threat, what was an assault, right?

Yeah, I think this might go back to our point that we made at the top of the show about dignity harm, right?

Like living under authoritarianism compels a kind of moral degradation, even among opponents of authoritarianism, right?

Like, I think we dealt with this in the US a lot in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination, right?

You don't want to be a person

who can feel relief at violence, but living under an authoritarian regime, even one that's, you know, not as successfully consolidated as the Nazis were by this point in 1933, can create the conditions that make you feel that way.

I think that's something that like people

resist for reasons that I empathize with, but which also might, you know, not be a full reckoning with the reality of their time.

Yeah, exactly.

The point that he makes in this essay called On Hatred or On Hate is that even the Nazis had to get themselves to this point, right?

He says, in truth, there are within the party which vanquished Germany two classes of people.

They are the animals and they are the apostates from civilization who had to force themselves to return to barbarism once more.

But he adds, it is to be expected that the second kind of hatred will go further than the first because the first doesn't have to prove to itself its own bestial nature.

He's making a comparison to a man like Goebbels, right? He's like, this guy knows better.

This guy fancied himself an intellectual, and he lets go of all this for this kind of overly emotional, racially dominated fellow feeling with people who have nothing in common with him, right?

He says, demanding the heads of Jews, intellectuals, and Marxists year after year, every day, wasn't that hard for a man like Güring, who is close to an animal anyway, an animal with some mysticism.

The great Hitler too likely didn't encounter any resistance from any conscience when he undertook to become the high priest of hatred, right?

But he's like Goebbels has to force himself and that's what makes him so dangerous. Like it's not, it doesn't come natural to him.

And he thinks it doesn't come natural to most of the German elites, right?

Yeah, I think it's a great text. And I do think it's important that like, it's also like about what exactly is being being demanded of others, right? And like it's a kind of performative text.

It's saying, I hate you guys, just so we're clear, right? I'm not trying to persuade. I'm fulminating now.

Yeah, it's the notion that these people cannot be reconciled with or argued or assuaged or compromised with. They have to be defeated.
Yeah, exactly. And I think that's so key because

people at the end of 1933 will often sort of reach for almost biblical or kind of religious language.

And like, these are fire and brimstone kind of sermons right you remember you did kerr a little girl we've been following a little bit yeah so she she settled down a little bit and her father alfred kahr ends up writing an article about someone we've already mentioned briefly the dramatist geart hauptmann who had decided to basically join the nazi cause This is another one of these sort of kiss-off texts.

It's called Georg Hauptmann's Shame, but it's basically he's just cursing his name.

At the end, he says, so Hauptmann has sort of reached out to the Nazis, has sort of tried to be part of their their celebrations around Host Wesse.

And this is how Alfred Kahr ends his little Philippic here. And what was gained by that all? The Nazi press ridiculed Hauptmann's visit to the Hitlerites.

They wrote sarcastically that it was a sight for the gods when the socialistic poet stretched out his arm in a Hitler salute.

This was at a celebration in honor of Host Wesse, the procurer, indeed a site for the gods. But at the Gerd Hauptmann Lyceum, his name is extinguished.
It is extinguished also in my heart.

He died before his death, despised even by those who are despised. May his gravestone be hidden under weeds, his picture buried in dust.

A great warning to those who are taking the wrong side now is that we will not forget, we will hate you until you die and go fuck yourself. That's right.
I love that Cal has this like, this clarity.

He's just like, you do not argue with these people. You do not find a better argument to snap them out of this.

You have to be like, explain this to the grandchild you can imagine, right, having one day.

You know, as a grandchild of someone alive in 1933 and going along with it all, I can tell you, like, he was onto something.

Their descendants' love for them was always tinged with the fact that, like, we knew that they had done this, that they had participated in this.

And yeah, if that is not the future you envision for yourself,

get busy. I do think about this all the time with Trump supporters and collaborators of how their descendants will

either like confront with great shame or try to obscure them from their family histories, right? Like you see this happening with people who are descended from slave owners.

You see it happening with people who are descended from Nazis. There's shame.
There is disavowal. There's regret.

There is a sense of being contaminated that these people are passing down to their posterity.

There is a Nazi family, I forget which one, where the children all got their tubes tied or got vasectomies. Wow.

Because they're like the seed has to end with us right which i frankly find a little absurd too like it's kind of metal i like it yeah but like yeah they were just like this ends now yeah right it ends with us it's it's really quite striking and i think at the same time i mean as someone who studies sort of how people avoid these kind of reckonings and i mean you do too the the sad thing is like the the moral failure in calling out earlier accommodations, transgressions, of course, enables the next wave because like people know that there is no reckoning coming, right?

The fact that slave owners got to be integrated into post-war American society, and that the people who were spitting at integrated lunch counters and got to go back to their subdivision, you know, without a care in the world, like

the fact that the people who talked the United States into murdering, you know, hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East got to die in their beds.

Yeah, no, I think punishment, social rejection,

like mass pillaring of those responsible for great injustice and violence. These are actually noble causes, right?

We live in an era where a lot of people are, I think, fairly or understandably wary of punishment. But punishment has a

purgative function. It is socially expressive.
It delineates what we will accept and what we will not. And when you do not punish, you signal acceptance of the unpunished conduct.
Exactly.

And I mean, you know, we say that as two people who work at a university, that is, I think, you know, collaborating with a lot of things that the Trump administration is doing.

I work for a newspaper that had its founding money based off a Caribbean slave plantation. Wow.
These are not lineages that we can escape, right? We can choose what to do with them. Exactly.

Well, should we leave it there? This was a short one, but I think it was a good one. I think we got a lot done.
And there's one more of these and then we are

done. I know.
How do you feel coming up on the end of the project? Well,

I'm excited. And for me, it may not be the end of the project.
That's right. Stay tuned, listeners.
Yes.

Both because I think that 1933 might continue in some ways, but also because we have maybe a project for next year.

We're still kind of conceptualizing it, but we're circling around this question that we just ended this episode with, which is, what do you do afterwards?

And so we thought we'd look into the process of denazification. Wait, Project 1946? Basically, yeah.

You have not told me about this. You say we.
Who's you? Like, you got a turd in your pocket? No, we talked about denazification.

I would love that. I think that'd be really fun.
I think it'll be good to just kind of figure out what did they do right? What did they do wrong?

How does one come back from this? Because in the end, we will have people in our lives who participated in this.

And the question was like, what do our forebears have to teach us about when to extend a generous hand and when to say like, nope, this is it.

You made your decisions and now uh you inhabit the world that those decisions have created for you so i think it'll be fun to delve into that but i'm for now i'm still really excited about our december episode which i will likely be recording from munich if if our production schedule works out we should probably also ask people to write and review us on iTunes and sign up for our Patreon.

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