620. The Nazis at War: Hitler Strikes West (Part 1)

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Speaker 2 Hi everybody, welcome to The Rest is History. For those of you who are new to the show, a little explainer about where we are.

Speaker 2 For the next two weeks, we'll be looking at one of the most exciting and dramatic moments in modern history. The story of the Nazis in 1939 and 1940.

Speaker 2 But for those of you who are new to the show, just a little explainer about where we are and how we've got here.

Speaker 2 So in our previous episodes about the Nazis, we described how this radical right-wing organization, spearheaded by Adolf Hitler, took power in Germany in 1933 against the background of the humiliation of the First World War and the collapse of the Weimar Republic.

Speaker 2 And then Hitler subordinated everything to his vision of making Germany great again and expanding Germany's borders, wiping away the stain of the Treaty of Versailles and so on.

Speaker 2 So previously we described how he did a deal with Stalin, how he and Stalin dismembered Poland between them.

Speaker 2 But that of course brought Hitler into conflict with the two great Western powers of Britain and France.

Speaker 2 So in these episodes we'll be looking at some of the most exciting and dramatic moments in modern history.

Speaker 2 Hitler survives an attempted coup by his army generals and a bomb plot against him that misses him by minutes.

Speaker 2 The fall of France, one of the most awe-inspiring and tragic stories in modern European history.

Speaker 2 The advent of Winston Churchill, the duel between Hitler and Churchill, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz.

Speaker 2 And finally, Hitler's decision to turn on Stalin and unleash hell on the Eastern Front, Operation Barbarossa. All of this is coming up.
But we start the series with a truly unforgettable moment.

Speaker 2 One of the most remarkable impressions that you will ever hear.

Speaker 1 The continuation of the present state of affairs in the West is unthinkable.

Speaker 1 Each day will soon demand greater sacrifices.

Speaker 4 The national wealth of Europe will be scattered as shellfire.

Speaker 4 and instead of flourishing towns, there will stand only ruins and graves without end.

Speaker 4 Mr. Churchill and his cronies may interpret these statements as weakness or cowardice,

Speaker 4 but I need not occupy myself with what they think.

Speaker 4 I make them simply because it goes without saying

Speaker 4 that I wish to spare my people this suffering. If, however, the opinions of mister Churchill and his followers should prevail, then we shall fight.

Speaker 4 Neither force of arms nor the lapse of time will conquer Germany.

Speaker 4 There will never be another November 1918

Speaker 4 in German history.

Speaker 4 Mr. Churchill may be convinced that Great Britain will win.

Speaker 2 I

Speaker 4 do not doubt for a single moment that Germany will

Speaker 4 be victorious.

Speaker 4 Destiny will decide

Speaker 2 who

Speaker 2 is right.

Speaker 1 So, the unmistakable tones there, Dominic, of Adolf Hitler, and he was addressing the Reichstag on the 6th of October 1939.

Speaker 1 And as ever with Hitler's speeches, it's a little bit over the the top, isn't it?

Speaker 2 Just a little, yeah.

Speaker 1 So the Second World War is a month old at this point. I'm going to catch my breath.
I've been quite exhausted by that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you don't have his stamina, clearly. No, I don't.

Speaker 1 I'm not given to rants summoning people to strengthen the sinews of war. Not my vibe at all.
So Poland is conquered.

Speaker 1 Hitler's been on a visit to the shattered, smoldering rubble of Warsaw, and he's now come back to Berlin from a Poland that has been brutalized, conquered and occupied.

Speaker 1 And the Nazi campaign in the East, in Poland, was one of lightning speed, incredible ferocity. And Hitler has now carved out Lebensraum living room for the German people in the East.

Speaker 1 And now he has to decide what to do about Poland's allies in the West.

Speaker 1 Britain and France, who had declared war on Germany with the aim of defending Poland, but that aim obviously now lies smoldering in rubble like warsaw.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's right. So he is in that speech, he's actually, despite his warlike tone, he's actually offering peace or pretending to offer peace.
And we'll come back to that offer in a few moments.

Speaker 2 But Tom, while you catch your breath, let's just set the scene, set the scene for listeners who may be new to the rest of this history, haven't caught up with previous series.

Speaker 2 So this is actually our fourth series on the Nazis. We've been tracing the rise and fall of the Third Reich.

Speaker 2 In the first series, which is back in 2022, we looked at how the Nazis emerged in the chaos after the First World War. They drew on kind of late Victorian racist nationalist ideas.

Speaker 2 The Weimar Republic broke down, Democratic Experiment broke down, and Hitler was levered into power by conservatives who completely underestimated his radicalism and his ruthlessness.

Speaker 2 Then we did a second series in 2023 about how he cemented his control over Germany, how he began to move against the Jews, and how he prepared Germany for war.

Speaker 2 And then our third series, which was last year in 2024, how he swallows Czechoslovakia after appeasement at Munich.

Speaker 2 He signs his pact with Stalin, which we'll be talking about a fair bit in this series. And then he launches the invasion of Poland.

Speaker 2 And to Hitler's surprise, and he genuinely is shocked and surprised, Britain and France then pile in. on behalf of Poland.
And so Europe is facing a second major continental war in 25 years.

Speaker 1 And Dominic, by invading Poland, Hitler had gambled, hadn't he, that Britain and France wouldn't enter the war, and they do. Yeah.
And Hitler, by instinct, is a gambler.

Speaker 1 He is always likely to roll the dice and see what happens. And this is going to be incredibly important for our discussions of what's going to happen in this, our fourth series.

Speaker 2 Exactly, because in this series, when we look at 1939 and 1940, Hitler will launch effectively two gambles.

Speaker 2 One of them is his attack on the West, and the second is he begins to move towards the greatest bet of all, which is his invasion of the Soviet Union.

Speaker 2 And one thing I will just say before we kick off the narrative, it's interesting that in all the time that we've been recording these series on the Nazis, online, some of the conversation about the Nazis has actually changed a little bit.

Speaker 2 So you see now in this sort of Anglo-American sort of Twitter sphere or whatever, People openly saying, well, the Nazis maybe weren't all that bad.

Speaker 2 They were pushed into radical measures by the pressures of war.

Speaker 2 And actually, churchill was just as bad a villain as hitler so it's actually really important to stress that during this series a lot of which will be about kind of military stuff and foreign policy and things

Speaker 2 hitler's radical exterminatory policies are gathering momentum all the time specifically two things one of them is the persecution of the jews which has been getting worse since the mid-1930s and the other

Speaker 2 which will be an episode in itself in a future series because i know it's something you've written about, is his forced euthanasia program, where he targets the disabled and the mentally ill.

Speaker 2 And that will end up claiming about a quarter of a million lives, I think. So these are in the background the whole time.

Speaker 2 You know, Hitler is not a conservative autocrat like other conservative autocrats. There is a kind of exterminatory edge to him all through this story.

Speaker 1 And that is an important... aspect of his attitude to war, isn't it? That war is a natural condition because it enables the strong to prevail over the weak.

Speaker 2 Yeah, completely, completely. And actually, that's why he's so comfortable in this, you know, unlike, let's say, Neville Chamberlain, who we'll be talking about, Hitler loves all this.

Speaker 2 He regards this as the natural condition of humanity. So let's get into the story.
Hitler attacked Poland on the 1st of September, 1939.

Speaker 2 The Poles fought heroically with very little help from their so-called allies. But just 16 days later, the Soviet Union, as per their secret pact with Hitler, invaded from the east as well.

Speaker 2 So Poland ended up being divided between the two.

Speaker 1 That really is a stab in the back.

Speaker 2 I mean, completely it is.

Speaker 2 So the question now is, how does Hitler see the war? And as you said, Tom, I mean, I think you're absolutely right. Hitler sees the human condition as one of fighting.

Speaker 2 In Mein Kampf in 1925, he had said that basically

Speaker 2 the life of man is a dreadful struggle for existence. And he had made his warlike ambitions very clear to his high command.

Speaker 2 So in January 1939, before the war even started, he told his generals that the German heroes of history had embraced brutality, meaning the sword.

Speaker 2 He said it's time for Germany to stake its claim to the domination of Europe. And then in May 1939, he'd explicitly told them to prepare for war with the West.

Speaker 2 This is always part of his long-term plan. England is our enemy, and the showdown with England is a matter of life and death.

Speaker 2 And as we'll see, Hitler has a very conflicted attitude to what he calls England.

Speaker 2 On the one hand, he admires it it because as a as an empire as anglo-saxon cousins but on the other he does think that at the end of the day you know england is kind of going to be or england or the united states will be the kind of final boss as it were if it was a video game that germany will have to overcome for mastery of the world if only he'd married uh unity mitford if only yeah depressing to get her on the show uh so soon because you know she's not my favorite person Anyway, the thing is, Hitler doesn't think this showdown with England is going to happen anytime soon.

Speaker 2 His generals have told him that the Luftwaffe will not be ready till 1942 and the fleet until 1943. And the Wehrmacht, his army, don't have a plan for a war in the West.

Speaker 2 So actually, when he attacks Poland, right up to the last minute, he's trying to make a deal with the British to keep them out of it.

Speaker 2 And he says, effectively sends a message to Chamberlain, Neville Chamberlain, to say, I will guarantee the borders of the British Empire if you give me a free hand and give me a little bit of Poland.

Speaker 2 And he's really, really astonished when Chamberlain says no, because he had described Chamberlain as a little worm and thought that he would never fight and is really taken aback.

Speaker 1 Underestimated British pluck.

Speaker 2 He had underestimated British pluck or had he? Because the war has now been going on for a month and the Allies really have done nothing.

Speaker 2 And one obvious reason for this is that they are so traumatised by the experience of the Great War, by the massive casualties.

Speaker 2 The French, for example, had lost more than a million men in the First World War, that they don't really have the sort of warlike spirit to force the issue now in 1939.

Speaker 2 So, as we described in the last series, the French troops massed on their borders. They actually went into the Zaarland in the far west of Germany for a few days.

Speaker 2 They outnumbered the Germans five to one. And then they sort of said, Well, you know, we've had a little look around and we'll go back now.

Speaker 1 So, the Germans have this kind of fortified line, don't they? The Siegfried line. But

Speaker 1 I mean, it's really not heavily occupied at all. And the French kind of go up to it.

Speaker 1 And an excellent description in a book by James Holland, my brother, The War in the West, Germany Ascendant 1939 to 1941 and he quotes a French soldier going up to the Siegfried line and they're fired at by a single automatic weapon and faced by this single automatic weapon the French then retreat and my brother writes a generation earlier French Poilu had advanced over Grand torn up by shellfire into withering storms of machine gun and rifle fire now entire advances were being held up by a single weapon.

Speaker 1 And I find that really striking because he's right. I mean, we were talking about this in the series that we did on the early months of the First World War.

Speaker 1 I mean, thousands upon thousands of French soldiers being mown down by German fire. And now it's like they've lost their cojones, I guess.

Speaker 2 Well, I think it's precisely because that happened. They don't want that to happen again.
They know the cost, right?

Speaker 2 And they know that was a terrible mistake, the Battle of the Frontiers in 1914 or whatever, when Frenchmen in kind of 19th century uniforms advanced towards the machine guns and were mowed down.

Speaker 2 They don't want that to happen again.

Speaker 2 And actually, I think the Allied leaders, so Chamberlain and Deladier, who's the French prime minister, they are ultimately hoping that the Germans will come to their senses and get rid of Hitler, that economic pressure will do the job and that there'll be a long standoff and eventually the Germans will get bored or they'll realize that Hitler is a bad, you know, a bad un and they'll get rid of him.

Speaker 1 But do you think it's also because of the the kind of the potency of Nazi propaganda?

Speaker 1 Because actually, this was the perfect opportunity for the French to invade because all the German forces are away in Poland. So they absolutely could have stormed the Siegfried line.

Speaker 1 But the Germans have been brilliant at suggesting that the Nazi forces are invincible. There's some story of

Speaker 1 a French

Speaker 1 air chief being invited to inspect the headquarters of the Luftwaffe and the kind of various aerodromes. And they go from aerodrome to aerodrome.

Speaker 1 And while the French chief is being transported, the Germans are busy moving the planes from one aerodrome to another so that it looks as though the Luftwaffe is actually much larger than it is.

Speaker 1 But I think that must be part of it, this sense that they've swallowed Goebbels' propaganda, that the Nazis are kind of steel-tipped, invincible.

Speaker 1 You know, there's no prospect of defeating them. Whereas in fact, the opposite is true.
This was the chance for the French to kind of overwhelm the German defenses in the West.

Speaker 2 But it's a chance they completely miss.

Speaker 2 And that's why you know the sense of inertia is why people call it the boer war or they call it most famously the phony war you know it's a war in which we're basically doing nothing and there's a definite sense i think that as the autumn of 1939 becomes the winter of 3940 morale in the west is sort of sagging So mass observation, which was like this sort of giant proto-focus group conducted in the late 1930s in Britain, reports, and I quote, a strong feeling in the country that this wretched war is not going on with.

Speaker 2 we can suspect that hitler has won news round one in this war he's been able to give his own people a tremendous success story poland we've got nothing we've done nothing and of all people jean-paul sartre the french existentialist was drafted into the french army and in november he wrote in his diary all the men were raring to go at the outset but now they're dying of boredom the war machine is running in neutral and he tells a story about a sergeant who said to him well i think this is you know this is all going to be sorted it's all going to be arranged england will climb down in other words the french think we've actually been dragged into this really by the british who wanted to stand up to hitler and maybe you know we can it'll there'll be some deal and we can all go home and that's basically what we want so kind of dreams of la gloire not really manifest in the french lines the first world war has wiped away a lot of the um the the war enthusiasm and the sort of fighting spirits and whatnot.

Speaker 2 And for completely understandable reasons, I don't think there's anything weird about that. So all of this leaves Hitler with the initiative.
And actually,

Speaker 2 there is a point now where he could, if he was so minded, he could make a real effort to offer the British and the French a deal.

Speaker 2 So the senior civil servant at the Foreign Office, who's a guy called Erst von Weisecker, tells him, I reckon there's a one in five chance that if you go out of your way now to make overtures to London and to Paris, that they will accept.

Speaker 2 So this is the context for the speech that we began with. And Hitler basically says, look, Poland is finished.
It's never going to be brought back.

Speaker 2 It's divided permanently now between us and the Russians. He says, this is my appeal to the people of Britain and France.

Speaker 2 You have been dragged into this by a quote, Jewish international capitalism and journalism. And the person that he associates with that is Winston Churchill, of course, a former journalist.

Speaker 2 and an enthusiastic defender of capitalism and a man with a lot of Jewish contacts and friends. And Hitler says, why don't we have another Munich, another conference to settle Europe's security?

Speaker 2 Now, of course, Chamberlain rejects this. He was always going to reject it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, of course. Once bitten, twice shy.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and the House of Commons would never have allowed him to accept it. Had Britain and France accepted, what would have happened?

Speaker 2 I think it would only have delayed the inevitable because, as we've seen, Hitler has made it very clear to his generals he thinks war in the West is inevitable one day anyway.

Speaker 2 Anyway, Hitler kind of knows they're always going to reject it. And he is actually in a hurry to get on with the war in the West.
partly because, as you said, he is a gambler.

Speaker 2 And that's an important part of his self-image. He's obsessed with what he sees as the kind of the bold strike, you know, the decisive thrust, all of that kind of thing.

Speaker 2 And he thinks concession and compromise are weakness.

Speaker 1 And he associates that with democratically elected leaders in kind of stiff collars and carrying umbrellas. And that's not his vibe at all.

Speaker 2 Not his vibe in the slightest. But there are also other good reasons why he'd be in such a hurry.

Speaker 2 hurry number one um as we've talked about in previous series hitler is a massive hypochondriac who knows that his parents died young and he thinks that he might die young as well and he is um obsessed with his health and he is drinking he's necking gigantic quantities of gun cleaning oil in an attempt to sort himself out and that's not wise is it just for anyone listening who might be tempted to emulate adolf hitler a bit of medical advice there that's nice don't drink gun cleaning oil or uh invade poland Or invade Poland, right?

Speaker 2 He also knows that Germany's economy is not in a good shape. So basically, his so-called economic miracle is built on sand.

Speaker 2 He has this sort of gnawing need. for more raw materials and more territory and resources and food.
And without expansion, the German economy will just collapse.

Speaker 1 I mean, this is a really important point to emphasize, isn't it? That there is at this point a real Potemkin quality about the German economy and also about the German armed forces.

Speaker 1 They are not as impressive as people in France or Britain tend to assume. And the economy likewise is

Speaker 1 potentially in a terrible state, which means essentially that if it is going to be stabilized, the only way to do that is to plunder wealth and raw materials from conquered territories.

Speaker 2 Exactly. So he's got to keep consuming kind of rubber and oil and all of these kinds of things and food and fats.

Speaker 2 And iron ore, which will also be be important won't it and of course hitler also knows the allies are hoping for a long war you know they had a long war last time and that's how they won he knows that if they have a long war they will be able to up their rearmament programmes they'll get support and resources from their colonies and from the united states maybe in the long run and that's the last thing he wants he wants to knock them out quickly and is it also the specific fact that hitler knows that britain's strategy will be the same as in the Great War, which is to impose a blockade.

Speaker 1 And, you know, the impact of a blockade on an already tottering economy will be lethal. And that effectively is what had brought Germany to its knees in 1918.

Speaker 1 That presumably is absolutely what he wants to avoid.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and the German people know this. I mean, don't forget the German people think they didn't lose the war on the battlefield in 1918.

Speaker 2 You know, they might be wrong about that, but that's what they think. They think they lost it at home, on the home front.
And that's what they want to avoid.

Speaker 2 So the very day that Hitler came back to Berlin from Poland, he said to his commanders, I want you to draw up plans for an attack in the West now. He said, time works against us.
We have to continue.

Speaker 2 And he said, here's the thing. The real threat here are the British.
The French are useless. Hitler never rates the French.

Speaker 2 He said, if we knock the French out first, the British will not have a foothold on the continent. So to bring England to its knees, this is a direct quote, we must destroy France.

Speaker 1 And just to emphasise what he is nervous about with Britain isn't its army, but its fleet and its ability to throttle Germany's economy.

Speaker 2 But he thinks that if they deny the British any foothold on the European mainland, then they won't carry on. His generals say, well, when would you like to do it? Hitler says, I want to do it now.

Speaker 2 I want to do it this autumn in the autumn of 1939. And they are visibly shocked.
They are stunned. Even Hermann Goering, you know, Man Mountain, Hitler, top Hitler crony.

Speaker 2 He kind of the blood drains from his vampiric features. He can't.

Speaker 1 Well, he's commander of the Air Force, isn't he? And he knows that the air force isn't ready for such a campaign.

Speaker 1 And presumably, the generals feel that the Wehrmacht isn't ready for such a campaign either.

Speaker 2 Exactly. So, when Chamberlain says, you know, no, no to a peace deal, Hitler says, great, let's step up the plans for this operation.

Speaker 2 He says to Goebbels, this is good news in a way that Chamberlain has said no. I'm glad we can go for England.
We will definitely win. The only reason we lost in 1918 is because we were betrayed.

Speaker 2 I mean, this is foolish from Hitler. This is the kind of a really good example of how his ideology blinds him to political, military, economic realities.

Speaker 2 And he says the English will have to learn the hard way. And he makes a similar point to his commander-in-chief, who's a man we'll be talking about a fair bit, who is called Walter von Braukic.

Speaker 2 Now, Braukic is from a Prussian military family. He's been raised in the sort of tradition of patriotic service and duty and whatnot.

Speaker 2 He's a really good example, actually, of the army, because Braukic was always very cautious. He didn't want to go into Austria in the Anschluss.
He didn't want to go into Czechoslovakia.

Speaker 2 He was always very nervous of these things, thought they would provoke a war, a world war that Germany would lose. But he is literally in debt to Hitler.

Speaker 2 Hitler has lent him tens of thousands of Reichsmarks to help Braukic divorce his wife and marry his mistress. So he's completely enthralled to Hitler and he's terrified of him.

Speaker 2 Ian Kershaw, Hitler's biographer, calls him, and I quote, spineless. And Braukich is spineless.

Speaker 2 Despite being the head of the army, he is a kind of massive weakling of a man.

Speaker 2 And even though he's anxious about this, Hitler says to him, no, I want you to get at the British as quickly as possible.

Speaker 2 The British are the kind of people that will only talk to you once they've been beaten. You have to beat them first.

Speaker 2 And the attack will be called Falgelp, Case Yellow, and I want it to happen on the 12th of November.

Speaker 2 And in the next few weeks, Hitler is really working himself up. He's very excited in the way only he can be.

Speaker 2 He gathers all his Nazi party officials. He says, we're going to be attacking within weeks.
We're going to bomb the cities of Britain and France.

Speaker 2 My dream, he says, is to recreate the Holy Roman Empire. So let's get Switzerland back.
Let's get Belgium back.

Speaker 1 A bit Holland.

Speaker 2 Yeah, let's make Germany great again in the West. And the more he talks about this, this is one of the things with Hitler.
The more he talks, the more he gets drunk on his own rhetoric.

Speaker 2 So by the 6th of November, when he talks to Goebbels, he says, England's power is now simply a myth. It's not a reality any longer.
All the more reason why it must be smashed.

Speaker 2 They're like teenagers, I always think, getting more and more giddy before a party or something.

Speaker 1 Just to ask, and this is a point my brother makes in his book, there is actually a sense in which it has ever since the time of Frederick the Great, been Prussian and then German strategy in a continental war to kind of plan for rapid attacks because it's the only way that the Germans can possibly have a victory.

Speaker 1 And they'd done it, you know, in the 19th century against Denmark, against France.

Speaker 1 And of course, in 1914, it was exactly the same strategy that they were planning, you know, the rapid attack, the sweep through Belgium, a descending on Paris.

Speaker 1 I mean, this is what German strategy has always been about. So to that extent, Hitler isn't really doing something that unusual.

Speaker 2 No, and I think they have two big problems, obviously, that run right through German history.

Speaker 2 Number one, they're very easily encircled by enemies so because of germany's geographical location and number two also because of its geographical location it has limited outlets to the sea so its trade can very easily be choked off by blockades and so on and both of those things obviously worked against germany in the long run in the first world war and i mean you can argue his strategic vision up to a point is right because i mean he does beat france the problem is the the great problem which will run through all this series that we talk about for hitler his great folly, a tiny bit like Napoleon, actually,

Speaker 2 he doesn't ever have a sense of how this will end. Because if the British don't agree to do a deal, then how does it ever end for him in a good way?

Speaker 2 Because the British have their empire, they have their fleet, as we'll see, they're effectively unconquerable. So, you know, where do you go with this? That's his problem.

Speaker 1 And so that's an anxiety for the generals. But also, I guess

Speaker 1 it's not so much, you know, in the kind of the short term, they would recognize that to certainly knock out France, they do need to go on the attack.

Speaker 1 But I'm guessing it's the timing that's the issue rather than the kind of overall strategy itself.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think it's the timing. It's the, you know, these are people often who served in the trenches in the First World War, who fought on the Eastern Front.

Speaker 2 So the experience of losing the First World War is the single most formative. moment of their lives.
And so, of course, they're going to be anxious about throwing the dice yet again in the West.

Speaker 2 So, you know, there's a guy called Colonel General Ritter von Lieb who writes in his diary, you know, I can't believe we're going to go through Holland and Belgium again.

Speaker 2 You know, they're neutral countries. We're once again.
Worked out so well before. Yeah, we're going to make the same mistake.

Speaker 2 And he writes in his diary, the whole world will turn on Germany, you know, if we do this. And this is the big threat to Hitler's regime.

Speaker 2 The threat to Hitler's regime, for all that he's gone on about, of course, the Jews, communists, social democrats, trade unionists, whatever.

Speaker 2 The real threat has always been from the army, from the kind of nationalist conservative wing of German politics.

Speaker 2 That's why the Knight of the Long Knives, when he purged his own movement, he was basically sucking up to the army because he was worried about alienating them.

Speaker 1 And so with the army, there's a kind of also a class element, isn't there? That they're kind of... Prussian aristocrats and they look down on Hitler.

Speaker 2 Who is this Austrian corporal? You know, who is he to boss us around?

Speaker 2 And even before the outbreak outbreak of the Second World War, so really by the summer of 1938, there are quite a few groups of people in kind of the army or in political establishment circles who think Hitler is bonkers and he's leading Germany to disaster.

Speaker 2 They're nationalists, so they don't necessarily disagree with his aims, but they just think, come on, this is so reckless and so counterproductive. Again, they are not wrong.

Speaker 2 So there's a group at the Foreign Office. There's a group at the Abwehr, which is German intelligence working for Admiral Canaris.

Speaker 2 There is a group of nationalist politicians around a guy called Karl Gödler who'd once been the Reich Price Commissioner and in particular there's a group of army officers who are loyal to the former Army Chief of Staff Ludwig Beck who we talked about in our last series.

Speaker 2 We talked about how Beck resigned in 1938 after failing to get the other generals to turn on Hitler and actually there were plans for a coup.

Speaker 2 At the end of 1938, which were abandoned because Britain and France appeased Hitler at Munich. And so the generals thought, well, yeah, this isn't the time.
And so they dropped the scheme.

Speaker 2 They're still kind of in touch with each other. So they're still kind of informally chatting.
You know, this bloke's a bit bonkers, isn't he? You know, maybe we'll have to get rid of him.

Speaker 2 And amazingly, and this will probably surprise a lot of listeners, the men at the top of the German army are in on this.

Speaker 2 So Walter von Braukich, who I described, the guy who's in debt to Hitler, and his chief of staff, who is a sort of clipped, bespectacled staff officer called Franz Halder,

Speaker 2 they have been privately talking about getting rid of Hitler for months and months. And now that he says that he wants to attack the West, they have a secret meeting on the 14th of October.

Speaker 2 And Halder says to Braukic, look, we've got three options here. Number one, we go along with Hitler and we attack the West.
Number two, We somehow persuade him to wait and to call it off.

Speaker 2 Or number three, we have to make fundamental changes. And what does fundamental changes mean?

Speaker 2 It probably means we're going to have to declare Hitler mad, put him under arrest and launch a coup in Berlin.

Speaker 2 And Braukich, because he is, as Ian Kerschall says, spineless, he's never going to go for the third option.

Speaker 2 He says, look, I mean, I think we're going to just have to try and persuade Hitler to change his mind. So that's what Braukic wants to do.
Now, his deputy, Halder, is not convinced by this.

Speaker 2 He thinks Hitler is unpersuadable. And by early November 1939, Halder, the chief of staff of the army, has made contact with other groups of plotters.
They have a scheme. They will kill Hitler.

Speaker 2 They will arrest the leaders of the other Nazi bigwigs and they'll take Germany over and they will negotiate peace with the Allies.

Speaker 2 Halder actually sends an intermediary to some of the other leading generals, Fedor von Bock, Gert von Rundstedt, generals who will be hearing a lot about in this series.

Speaker 2 And these generals say, yeah, I don't like the thought of attacking in the West doing this, you know, a replay of 1914 either.

Speaker 2 But I don't think we can do a coup because I don't think our junior officers would obey us, you know?

Speaker 2 And actually, I think they're right because this is what happens in 1944 with Operation Valkyrie, Tom Cruise's film, the Stauffenberg plot. And Halder says, well, I wonder what the public would think.

Speaker 2 And this tells you something about the class background of these generals. Halder asks his father's chauffeur.
What do you think the German people would think if there was a coup against Hitler?

Speaker 2 And the chauffeur says, what? People love the Führer. You know, they would be appalled.
This would be a terrible thing.

Speaker 2 And Halder is very shocked by this and then goes back and says, oh, this is probably clearly a bad plan because the chauffeur thinks we're going to bunk off this. Yeah.

Speaker 2 We come to a decisive day, which is the 5th of November 1939.

Speaker 2 If the attack is going to happen on the 12th, as Hitler wants, they have to confirm the orders to make operational preparations at lunchtime this day.

Speaker 2 At midday, Halder and Braukich go into the Reich Chancellery to try to persuade Hitler to call it off. And some of the plotters definitely know that they've gone to have this meeting.

Speaker 2 And they're hoping Hitler will say no, and then Braukic will have the guts to finally order this coup. Braukic goes in.
Halder waits outside.

Speaker 2 Halder is now carrying a loaded revolver in case he gets the chance to be with Hitler alone. And he could shoot Hitler.
So Braukic, weighed down by his debts, goes in to see Hitler.

Speaker 2 He's really nervous, kind of shaky. And he says, oh, mine Fuhrer, you know, I don't actually think we're ready to take on France and Britain.
I think it's a very bad idea.

Speaker 2 When I look at the Polish campaign, there are a few kind of flaws and stuff. I think possibly if we did attack in the West, it might turn out like 1918.

Speaker 1 And this is the kind of fighting talk that Hitler loves, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So as soon as he mentions 1918, right, 1918, the most traumatic moment of Hitler's life when he cried in the sanatorium at the news of Germany's defeat, as soon as Braukic mentions 1918, Hitler goes absolutely bonkers.

Speaker 2 It's kind of spittle-flecked rage. He says, the problem is not the troops.
The troops are great. The troops love me.

Speaker 2 The problem is Army High Command, which is in Zossen, which is a kind of suburb of Berlin. He says, I know the spirit of Zossen and I will destroy it.

Speaker 2 And then he storms out of the room and he slams the door. Braukich, broken man.

Speaker 1 Wets himself.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's basically shaking like a jelly. Or as Americans would say, presumably it's a jello, right? Exactly.
He goes out shaking like a jello

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 terrified, blood draining from his features. And he says to Halda, Halder, this is what happened.
And Halder says, what? He was talking about Zossen, about Army High Command at Zossen.

Speaker 2 Oh, he must know that I've been, you know, we've been having these chats.

Speaker 1 Zossen, is that where Halder lives?

Speaker 2 No, it's where he has his office. So they have, that's the offices of Army High Command.
So he thinks, Christ, the Gestapo are onto us.

Speaker 2 And Halder rushes back to Zossen, to his office, and he gets frantically gets all these papers and kind of destroys them. So meanwhile, while they're doing that, Hitler gives the order.
Go ahead.

Speaker 2 The invasion will start on the 12th of November. Now, listeners may be thinking, but hold on, there wasn't an invasion in the West on the 12th of November.
And here's the mad thing about all this.

Speaker 2 Hitler gives the order and immediately the weather changes and it just starts raining and they have to call it off for that reason. Basically, the winter rains have started.

Speaker 2 The ground has turned to mud. The panzers won't be able to get through.
because it's so muddy. And they say, oh, well, after all that, actually, we'll have to just postpone it till the spring of 1940.

Speaker 2 Anyway.

Speaker 1 And so even Hitler accepts that.

Speaker 2 Hitler's not going to argue argue with the weather.

Speaker 1 I don't know. Force of will.

Speaker 2 I think even Hitler bows in the face of the climate. At least at this point, of course, he doesn't.
In 1941, they make a terrible mess of it.

Speaker 1 I was going to say, because it didn't stop him invading Russia.

Speaker 2 No, you're right. But anyway, they postponed it.
So the chance for the army to strike is gone and Hitler is actually safe for the time being. Or is he, Dominic?

Speaker 1 Because three days later, so this is the 8th of November 1939, he is going to Munich, isn't he? Because it's the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, a kind of sacred moment in the Nazi calendar.

Speaker 1 And it's traditional that Hitler will go to the Beer Hall and he will address an audience of his old comrades, the old fighters.

Speaker 1 And he's scheduled to arrive at 8.30 and he will then speak for not half an hour, not one hour, but two hours.

Speaker 2 But Dominic.

Speaker 1 And listeners, as Hitler walks into that beer hall, surrounded by his bodyguards, a bomb is literally ticking

Speaker 1 and we will be back after the break to see what happens

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And here is the question, everybody.

Speaker 2 So of all the great moments of change from the fall of Rome to the rise of the internet, what was the single biggest ever turning point in history?

Speaker 2 So Tom, turning points, I mean, I don't know what defines them, scale, speed, legacy, you think of the, I don't know, the fall of Rome, the rise of the printing press.

Speaker 2 Do you have an answer for the greatest turning point in history?

Speaker 1 I think there are two candidates.

Speaker 1 One of them would be the agrarian revolution, so the process by which hunter-gatherers came to settle down, plant crops, and those crops then enabled in the long run the emergence of urbanism.

Speaker 1 But I think possibly even profounder in its long-term consequences than the agrarian revolution is the Industrial Revolution.

Speaker 1 And I'm not saying that just because it began here in Britain, though hooray for Britain for kicking it all off.

Speaker 1 But we would not be able to record this episode and have it heard by you without that process of change. I mean,

Speaker 1 we live in such a technologically advanced world now, and that would not have happened without the Industrial Revolution.

Speaker 2 Massively improved living standards, led to urbanism, all these kinds of things. I suppose the difficulty with all these things is about measuring their impact, isn't it?

Speaker 2 You know, is it about the immediate shock? Is it about the lasting consequences? And those consequences are often very complicated.

Speaker 2 The Industrial Revolution's legacy, for example, are cities, capitalism, carbon. Of course, it gave us the great age of Victorian philanthropy.

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Speaker 1 Oh, we love that.

Speaker 1 And I guess kind of just kind of wrapping up this this these reflections on great turning points, I suppose one of the problems is that you're always liable to think that the the process of change that you are living through is the most significant.

Speaker 1 And then and that some other great revolution, great turning point may happen and people will move on and think that that's the biggest.

Speaker 1 But we are living through the consequences of the Industrial Revolution now, and so that's why I think

Speaker 1 I would choose it. But certainly, the great turning points in history do remind us just how quickly the world can change, and often it kind of creeps up when people aren't expecting it.

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Speaker 1 Hello everyone and welcome back to The Rest is History. It is the evening of the 8th of November 1939.

Speaker 1 Adolf Hitler has arrived in the Beer Hall in Munich for the annual celebration of the Beer Hall Putsch.

Speaker 1 But Dominic, little does he know that his life, the future of Germany, the course of world history itself are all hanging in the balance.

Speaker 2 Right. Now we'll get back to it.
I noticed you skipped pronouncing the name of the beer hall. The Bürgebreukelle in Munich, but we'll get back there.

Speaker 1 I don't want to frighten people with foreign languages.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 Well, we'll get back there in a second, but let's pull back the camera. Let's do that.
Like a top documentary to set the scene and explain precisely why this bomb is ticking.

Speaker 2 So among ordinary Germans, although they were delighted by the quick victory over Poland, they are not suffused with war enthusiasm. They're actually quite anxious.

Speaker 2 And the reason for that is that if you're an ordinary German, life has definitely got worse in the last few months.

Speaker 2 So since the war started, if you work in an export industry, you've lost your export markets. German factories are short of raw materials.

Speaker 2 Every last penny of the government's budget is now going into weapons and munitions. And the Nazis had brought in an immediate austerity program as soon as the war broke out.

Speaker 2 So that means higher taxes, there's no more overtime, they cut leave for workers, wages are frozen, and so on and so forth.

Speaker 1 And there's no coffee, is there? So they're all having to drink, what is it, mucca fuck?

Speaker 1 The fake mocha, which is made from chicory.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's a lot of that kind of stuff. And they, of course, remember it from the First World War.
Older people remember how hard things got.

Speaker 2 Although they can't go on strike, there's a lot of absenteeism. People stop turning up to work.
They start refusing to do overtime. And so daily life is definitely getting harder.

Speaker 2 People feel they're working longer hours for stagnant pay. Food is more expensive.
It's a very, very cold winter in 1939, 1940, but they can't get hold of coal easily. Even the trains.

Speaker 2 So the German trains now actually are terrible. The worst in Europe, the worst punctuality record.
But they're pretty poor in 1939 anyway.

Speaker 2 So the idea that fascists make their trains run on time is wrong. The pressure of war is too much for the German train system.
And there were two crashes that kill more than 200 people.

Speaker 2 So there's great outrage about this. And above all, people are obviously worried.

Speaker 2 You know, Britain and france you know they're serious countries they could beat us as they did you know a generation ago and one of the people who's worried about this is a totally unremarkable guy called georg elser and elzer i think is a really nice example of german politics in the 1930s richard evans kind of uses him in his great book on the nazis precisely because he's not very political.

Speaker 1 He's not Jewish, is he? He's not particularly religious like the White Rose campaigners in due course would be.

Speaker 2 He's just a totally boring everyman. And Elzer came from Württemberg, sort of southwestern Germany, born in 1903.

Speaker 2 His father was an alcoholic and gave him, he was a violent man and gave Georg this kind of lifelong hatred of bullies and of authority. He becomes a carpenter.

Speaker 2 He's a very nondescript person. He's short.
He's kind of quiet. He has girlfriends.
He has a son kind of out of wedlock, but he's not married. He's not a reader.
He doesn't read books.

Speaker 2 He doesn't even really read the newspapers. So he doesn't know what's going on.
And in that respect, he's completely normal.

Speaker 1 Although there are kind of radios everywhere, aren't there? I mean, this is the thing that there are more radios in Germany than anywhere else.

Speaker 1 And even those who don't have them have to listen to them kind of blaring out from cafes and things. So presumably he is familiar with at least the headlines, I guess.

Speaker 2 Yeah, of course. He is familiar with the headlines.
Now, and of course, he's drawn into politics almost despite himself, as everybody is. So he belongs to the woodworkers' union.

Speaker 2 Because he belongs to the union, he voted for the communists in the late 20s and early 30s because he thought they would get workers a better deal.

Speaker 2 And he'd actually joined their kind of paramilitary group, the Red Front Fighters, but he never turned up to meetings. It's just not really his thing.
He doesn't care for the Nazis.

Speaker 2 He never voted in elections and referendums under the Third Reich. And his reason was not ideological.
Really, it was that he didn't think they were for the working man.

Speaker 2 He didn't think they got working people a good deal. He said, you know, our pay is not very good.
All of this kind of thing.

Speaker 2 And Georg Elsa, who's who's too young to have fought in the First World War, when he thinks that a Second World War is coming, he becomes very anxious about it and very alarmed.

Speaker 2 So the key thing for him is late 1938 when Hitler turns on Czechoslovakia.

Speaker 2 And Georg Elser becomes convinced that Hitler's going to drag us into a war and poor working-class Germans like me will pay the price for this. This is where he becomes unusual.

Speaker 2 He decides, well, the only way to stop this is to get rid of Hitler and the Nazi top brass. I need to eliminate the leadership.

Speaker 1 And is he doing this entirely on his own?

Speaker 2 Entirely on his own. This is the mad thing.
So he's just a carpenter, right? He's a nobody. He just says, well, clearly nobody else is going to do this.
So I'm going to do it.

Speaker 1 He's a have-a-go hero.

Speaker 2 He's a have a go hero. And he reads that every 8th of November, you know, the Nazis always meet in the Bürgebreukele, this beer hall in Munich, and they have their little anniversary celebration.

Speaker 2 And so on the 8th of November, 1938, Georg goes off to Munich and he waits outside. He just stands in that street outside.

Speaker 2 He waits till everybody's gone, Hitler, Goering, whoever else, and the crowd has gone. And then he goes inside the beer hall to sort of sneaks in to have a look around.
And he realizes two things.

Speaker 2 Number one, the security is abject. Security is terrible because the Nazis insist on doing the security themselves.
They don't let the police do it. And the Nazis are useless, completely incompetent.

Speaker 2 Number two, he can see where Hitler was speaking and there's a pillar right behind it. And he thinks, well, if I could get a bomb in that pillar, I'd kill Hitler and I'd kill all his entourage.

Speaker 2 Now as luck would have it, like so many Germans at this point, Georg has basically been reassigned to work in an armaments factory. Oh, right.

Speaker 1 So there were lots of timers and explosives.

Speaker 2 Exactly. So over that winter, he steals loads of fuses and detonators from work, kind of just shoves them in his pocket and walks out with them.

Speaker 2 And the following spring, so April 1939, he comes back to the beer hall. He kind of waits till everyone else has gone late at night.
And then he takes photos. He measures it up.

Speaker 2 You know, he's a carpenter, so he knows what he's doing. He works out exactly how big the bomb would have to be.

Speaker 2 He steals some dynamite from a quarry and he starts doing tests in his parents' back garden. God.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, if your son started doing that, you might be perturbed, but clearly not.

Speaker 1 Impressive forward planning, right?

Speaker 2 He's the most impressive person in this whole series, frankly. And this series has got Churchill in it.
So he is so meticulous and he really plays the long game.

Speaker 2 And don't forget he came up with this idea now almost a year ago yeah i mean really playing the long game really playing the long game august 1939 the 5th of august he comes back to munich

Speaker 2 he rents a flat and he starts going to the beer hall every night to have his dinner and to have like a pint of german ale very cunning and every night he gets into a storeroom and he hides in this storeroom and he waits till everybody else has gone and the staff have all gone home Then when the coast is clear, he comes out the storeroom, he goes up to the pillar, he carves out this hole and he is so meticulous so basically he builds a secret door in the wooden cladding of the pillar that only he knows how to open that looks just like the rest of the cladding then in behind that he hollows out a sort of a niche in the brickwork of the pillar with a special chamber he lines this chamber with tin so that if you knock on it it won't sound hollow So that takes him 30 nights.

Speaker 2 30 nights he's going in there having his sausages and stuff. Waiting until everyone's gone home and doing this.

Speaker 1 And becoming a familiar face in the hall.

Speaker 2 Of course, a much-loved regular. And then on the night of the 1st of November, he puts the explosives in.
Three nights later, there's a dance in the beer hall. He buys a ticket to the dance.

Speaker 2 Presumably, he doesn't do any dancing. He waits until one o'clock.
Everyone's gone home. And that's the night that he puts in the timer and the detonator.
So now it's there. It's ready to go.

Speaker 1 What is almost as striking as the kind of meticulousness of his preparations, it's the kind of incompetence of nazi security i mean you would think that they would go around checking for things like this if hitler's coming i don't know because

Speaker 2 i was thinking precisely this about the whole business of hiding in the storeroom i was almost tempted i mean it'd be a mad thing for me to do in part of my research to try hiding the storeroom of a restaurant or something and to see if see how whether i could pull it off whether i could hide in the storeroom come out the headlines would write themselves come out and try to like put a bomb in i don't know the river cafe or something

Speaker 2 i don't think i could do it well i'm rubbish at crafts so i undoubtedly could well also i mean you wouldn't want to experiment with explosives in your garden would you no i wouldn't i definitely yeah but this is all by way of of of making his his preparations all the more striking yeah i guess the other thing is people aren't going to come up to him and say oh i'm a member of the restus history club uh how wonderful to see you in the restaurant yeah that's true what are you doing with with that jellic night you've come here for the last three weeks.

Speaker 2 You have a very strange and unexpected life. Anyway, 7th of November, he visits the beer hall one last time.
He has his pint and whatnot. He waits until after closing.
Then he checks the pillar.

Speaker 2 He puts his ear to the pillar and he can just hear the clock ticking. And he says, brilliant.
They're coming tomorrow. Yeah, tomorrow's the day.

Speaker 2 So he's set the timer. It will go off at 9.20 in the evening of the 8th.
So that will be just over an hour probably into Hitler's speech. All the party faithful, the big Whigs will be there.

Speaker 2 Everything is prepared. And so it is.
On the 8th, the day that it's going to go off, Georg, very contented, leaves Munich and he's heading for Lake Constance.

Speaker 2 And there he's going to cross the border into Switzerland. And by the time he crosses the border, he is confident that Hitler will be dead.
Meanwhile...

Speaker 2 Hitler is on his way to Munich for this meeting. Now he arrives at the beer hall at 8 rather than 8.30, which was originally planned.

Speaker 2 Now the reason for this is precisely because of all the mad arguments with the generals

Speaker 2 about the attack in the west. So just the day before, the 7th of November, that was the day that he had postponed the operation because of the bad weather.

Speaker 2 And they're going to have another meeting about it. on the 9th tomorrow.

Speaker 1 Because there's loads to discuss.

Speaker 2 Yeah, when are we going to do it?

Speaker 2 What will do the troops? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so Hitler was like, oh, I've got to go.
I've got that. Basically, it's like you talking about your diary, Tom.

Speaker 2 It's like, I agreed to do this a year ago. This commitment has been staring at me all this time.
I'd love to get out of it, but I can't.

Speaker 2 I have to go to Munich and get it done and dusted, back on the train, and prepare the next episode of the rest is history.

Speaker 1 So in that way, Hitler is like me.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Very similar.
So turns up to the beer hall. There's 3,000 people there, these so-called old fighters.

Speaker 2 And at 10 past eight, Hitler gets up and he starts delivering this massive rant, I'm sorry to to say, against Britain. So very poor from Hitler.
But here's the thing.

Speaker 2 Now, normally you'd expect Hitler to be ranting about Mr. Churchill and whatnot for two hours.
No.

Speaker 2 It's quite a short speech by his standards. So he gets to his climax, his peroration, at 9.07.

Speaker 1 And the clock is due to go off at 9.20.

Speaker 2 He finishes the speech. There is a torrent of applause.
Everybody has very much enjoyed it.

Speaker 2 Now, normally he would stay in the room for half an hour, working the room and shaking the hands of his old old comrades. But he wants to be back in Berlin by bedtime.

Speaker 2 So he leaves the hall immediately. He rushes out of the hall, whisked away by his entourage to catch his special train.

Speaker 2 And the old fighters are very disappointed. They were looking forward to shaking the hand of the Führer.
And they begin to make their way out of the hall, and the staff come in to start clearing up.

Speaker 2 Now, meanwhile, Hitler has got onto, he's made the train, his special train taking him back to Berlin. And he's on the train, they're rattling through the countryside.

Speaker 2 He's actually sitting with Goebbels, and they're having a massive bitch about the Catholic Church. And then at Nuremberg, the train is stopped unexpectedly.
And Hitler's like, what's going on?

Speaker 2 And a load of officers get on the train and they say, there's been an explosion at the beer hall. A bomb has gone off just after you left.
And at first, Hitler thinks it's a joke.

Speaker 2 Or, I mean, God knows what kind of jokes they're telling and kind of Nazi high command, but he thinks this is great banter or it's a hoax of some kind.

Speaker 2 and then more news comes 13 minutes after he left at 9 20 the bomb went off it went just as georg else had planned the upper gallery collapsed the roof collapsed but by that point the place was emptying so three people only were killed at once five more people will die their injuries in the next few hours and more than 60 have been injured but none of them are the nazi big names that else wanted to get and all but one of those who died are members of the nazi party Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 I think they're the person a member of staff of the beer hall maybe? Because

Speaker 1 you're thinking maybe it's members of staff who got killed because they were doing the tidying up, but it is actually Nazis.

Speaker 2 At first people thought when the bomb went off it's an air raid by the British and then they realize it's a bomb. They still think it's the British Secret Service.

Speaker 2 So the British kind of live, as it were, rent-free in the Nazis' heads. And Hitler says to the SS, the SS say we've been monitoring two British agents actually on the Dutch border.

Speaker 2 And Hitler says, right, bring them straight in, like get them across the border, bring them in for questioning.

Speaker 2 And these two British agents, you know, obviously know nothing about it, but they are trumpeted in Nazi propaganda. These are the people who were behind the plot.

Speaker 1 So all this is going on, but what about Gil Gelser? Has he made it across the border into Switzerland?

Speaker 2 No. So completely by chance, when he was crossing the border, a customs post near Constance, a customs official detained him and said, you haven't got the right permit.

Speaker 2 And they sort of, you know, this was not uncommon. They didn't assume there was anything terribly sinister about it.

Speaker 2 But then they searched his pockets a couple of hours later after the bomb had gone off. And they found he had wire cutters, he had a fuse, and he had a postcard of the beer hall.

Speaker 2 That was absolute madness from him. And they said, oh, well, this is clearly the bloke.
Now they beat him up, they tortured him.

Speaker 2 Himmler tortured him personally, I think stamping on him or kicking him or something, and until he confessed.

Speaker 2 And here's the mad thing: they didn't kill him.

Speaker 2 In fact, they treated him quite well. They interned him in Sachsenhausen camp and they made him a kind of special privileged prisoner.

Speaker 2 So he had two rooms and one of them he was allowed to use as a kind of carpentry workshop. And he spent his time, he made himself a zither and spent his time playing the zither and smoking.

Speaker 1 I did not imagine that people in concentration camps would be playing the zither.

Speaker 2 Well, he's playing the zither. He's not allowed to mix with other prisoners, but he was a loner, so he wouldn't have wanted to mix with other prisoners anyway.

Speaker 1 Aren't there prisoners in the camp who think that this is because he had actually been a kind of agent provocateur, that he was actually working for the Nazis to get sympathy for Hitler?

Speaker 2 Exactly, that it's a false flag operation. And in fact, quite a few people thought it was a false flag operation because there was such an outpouring of sympathy for Hitler after

Speaker 2 the failure of the attack. But no, I don't think it was.
I think actually the Nazis wanted to have him.

Speaker 2 fit and healthy for a show trial at the end of the war, which they would use as an exhibit against the British.

Speaker 2 They would basically frame him as a puppet of the British Secret Service, and that this would be good propaganda.

Speaker 1 Because Hitler thinks that it's a British conspiracy right to the end.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Because, you know, Hitler, you know, he has this Wagnerian sense of himself, doesn't he? And he needs Wagnerian enemies.

Speaker 2 A carpenter who's just, you know, a bit worried about the plight of the working classes, doesn't cut it as a kind of Nazi antagonist, I think.

Speaker 1 But also, he wouldn't want to think that an ordinary German would want to kill him. It must be the British.

Speaker 2 Exactly, exactly. Actually, what happened to Elsa? At the end of the war, he was moved to Dachau and he was shot in April 1945.
The Nazis did get rid of him in the end.

Speaker 2 And then he was forgotten for a long time because really post-war Germans didn't really know what to make of him.

Speaker 2 But today, there are more than 60 streets and squares and things named after him in Germany. And the city of Munich has a Georg Elsa Prize for Courage.

Speaker 2 So maybe if I did do that thing where I hid in the...

Speaker 1 You hid out in the River Cafe.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 you could win that. I could win it.
Yeah, that's something to aspire to. But of course, course, at the time, nobody sees him as a hero at all.

Speaker 2 So all the evidence is that most ordinary Germans were absolutely horrified by this, and it led to a big boost in support for Hitler.

Speaker 2 So this is why a good example, a really good source on the Third Reich in the early years of the war is William L. Shirer, the American correspondent who was there the whole time I wrote this diary.

Speaker 2 Richard Evans uses him a lot.

Speaker 2 And Shirer genuinely thought the Nazis had organized this themselves, that it must have been a false flag operation because it was so productive in terms of support for the regime.

Speaker 2 And actually, Ian Kershaw says, you know, had the bomb gone off, had Hitler been killed, would the Third Reich have fallen? You know, maybe in the long run, yes.

Speaker 2 But initially, it would have led to a hardening of attitudes and a hardening of attitudes towards the allies who would have been blamed. So the war would not have ended.

Speaker 1 But they probably wouldn't have attacked in the West or indeed in Scandinavia, perhaps.

Speaker 2 No, I'm sure they wouldn't. They'd have sort of hunkered down, maybe.

Speaker 2 Anyway, the other thing the bomb does, it completely pulls the rug out from under the plotters, the army plotters and whatnot, because they see the public reaction and they think, come on, we're not going to launch a coup now.

Speaker 2 I mean, the public love their Fuhrer. It would be mad to do this.

Speaker 2 So the next couple of weeks is the aftermath of the bomb, really, that's in everyone's minds.

Speaker 2 But then on the 23rd of November, Hitler tells all his senior commanders to meet him at the Reichschancellery. So there's about 200 of them.

Speaker 2 And he says to them, look,

Speaker 2 the last couple of weeks have shown me how much the German people love me and how much Providence loves me. You know, I really am walking with destiny.
I've been saved from death yet again.

Speaker 2 And he says, look at all the things I've achieved. You know, a lot of you doubted me.
The Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland. But

Speaker 2 I was right. I wanted to fight and fight again and Providence rewarded me for it.
And then he goes on, he makes his, he has his usual rant about living space, a racial struggle.

Speaker 2 Fighting is the law of life. In fighting, I see the fate of all creatures.
If you don't want to go under, you can't avoid fighting.

Speaker 2 And he says, look, in all Germany's history, this is going back to your point, Tom, about the sort of strategic sweep of German history.

Speaker 2 Hitler says, our problem has always been fighting a war on two fronts.

Speaker 2 But right now, Stalin's army are knee-deep in snow drifts because they've got into a a right mess in their war against Finland, which we'll talk about in the next episode, in the Winter War.

Speaker 2 And Hitler says, so we have a unique opportunity now to attack France and England at the most favorable and earliest moment. We'll go through Belgium and Holland.
Yeah, they're neutral.

Speaker 2 Who cares about them? You know, history will reward us for it.

Speaker 2 This is about national survival. He says, do you know who I'm like? I'm like Frederick the Great.

Speaker 1 He did love Frederick the Great, didn't he?

Speaker 2 He's always going on about Frederick the Great. He said, Frederick the Great in the Seven Years' War was facing total defeat and disaster.

Speaker 2 His advisors told him to make peace, but he rolled the dice and he won. And he says, the brilliant thing for Germany, though, is that we have a secret weapon.
Do you know what the secret weapon is?

Speaker 1 Would it perhaps be Adolf Hitler?

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's not a modest man. He says, Germany's secret weapon is me.
As the last factor, I must in all modesty describe myself. I'm irreplaceable.

Speaker 2 I couldn't be replaced by either a military man or a civilian. I'm convinced of my powers of intellect and of decision.
Wars are always ended only by the annihilation of the opponent.

Speaker 2 No compromises, hardness. I shall strike and not capitulate.
The fate of the Reich depends on one man, on me.

Speaker 1 But I mean, he's not entirely wrong, is he? Because actually,

Speaker 1 the kind of the

Speaker 1 sense of aggression that Germany will display over the next year kind of is focused on Hitler. Without Hitler, probably those campaigns wouldn't have happened.
Do you think that's fair to say?

Speaker 2 No, I think you're right, Tom. I think William Kershaw in his mighty two volumes about Adolf Hitler has this idea that underpins the whole thing, which is working towards the Führer.

Speaker 2 So this idea that basically the whole time, people in the regime have this ideal of Hitler and what Hitler would want.

Speaker 2 And they're constantly trying to using that as their kind of their inspiration, their lodestar.

Speaker 2 And that has a ratcheting effect because they assume that Hitler would always want the most radical, most decisive and reckless possible outcome. It's driving them towards ever greater radicalism.

Speaker 2 And that basically, if you took the ideal of the Führer and Hitler out of that, then they might not behave in the same way.

Speaker 2 So Hitler is, to that extent, you're right, that Hitler is actually essential to the whole operation.

Speaker 1 But also, I mean, just in the context of launching war against the West in 1939, I mean, even Goering is against that.

Speaker 1 So there is a sense that Hitler is too radical even for the Nazi high command in that sense.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, is he too radical? I mean, in a way, no, because they've crumbled, right?

Speaker 2 I mean, he has definitely pushed them into a reckless gamble that they think could end up with having disastrous consequences, but they lack the spine and the support to stop him.

Speaker 2 So that afternoon, after they've had that meeting, he summons Braukic and Halder, and he's still absolutely furious with them and says, you know, defeatists, you're cowards and all this.

Speaker 2 Braukich offers to resign and Hitler says, no, I won't accept it. You stay and do your duty.

Speaker 2 and in his biography Ian Kerschel portrays Braukic as a man totally crushed totally depressed because he is about to take responsibility for an invasion in the West that deep down he opposes and he thinks will end in disaster but with that the last chance to stop Hitler is gone and the obvious question which is why were they so weak you know they had the guns they had the men partly because they're divided they know that the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine the Navy were much keener on Hitler than they were.

Speaker 2 But also, I think the biggest problem, he's popular. The German people like him.

Speaker 1 And the chauffeur. The chauffeurs love him.

Speaker 2 The chauffeurs, everybody. Ian Kershaw says, you know, Hitler was more popular than any other political leader in Europe in this period.
There was a massive consensus.

Speaker 2 Not everybody, of course, certainly not if you're Jewish, but among a broad swathes of society, there is this consensus that Hitler has accomplished great things, you know, that he's a good judge, that when the Fuhrer goes for something, you know, he does it.

Speaker 2 And most people, you know, especially after the bomb attack, are very much on his side. So

Speaker 2 now the course is set. The attack on the West, because of the weather, has been postponed to the spring of 1940, but it is definitely going to happen.

Speaker 2 And in the meantime, the Navy have gone to Hitler, Grand Admiral Rader, Rader, and persuaded him to start looking at another operation, which is further north in Scandinavia, which is to safeguard shipments of iron ore.

Speaker 2 I know you love a bit of iron ore, Tom, because I noticed you mentioned it gratuitously earlier in the episode, showing off your enthusiasm for iron.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I love some iron ore stats. And the people who are interested in iron ore stats are going to have loads in the next episode.
So that's definitely something to look forward to.

Speaker 2 So as we get to the end of 1939, so many kind of threads are underway. The Nazis are thinking about the attack in the West, they're thinking about an attack in the north, as we'll come to.

Speaker 2 Their euthanasia programme has begun. They have started herding Jews into ghettos in Poland.
The very first ghetto in the general government, occupied Poland, is set up in December.

Speaker 2 And Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich are already talking about schemes for mass deportations of Jews from Poland, perhaps to some reservation somewhere, though where has not yet yet been determined.

Speaker 1 Because they're not yet talking about a programme of mass genocide, are they?

Speaker 2 This is to come. Not yet, but in December, Hitler and Goebbels have a meeting where they explicitly say we must eradicate what they call the Jewish danger once and for all.

Speaker 2 So the direction of travel, you know, you can see where this is going. But of course, none of this is possible if they don't win the war in the West.

Speaker 2 As Hitler marks the new year, this is his priority.

Speaker 2 On the 15th of January, he has lunch with Goebbels, and they spend a lot of time talking about the weather and how they need it, a fine spring weather to launch the offensive.

Speaker 2 And then, as always, Hitler talks about history.

Speaker 2 He talks about Bismarck and Frederick the Great, his great heroes, and he says, the lesson of history is that only when there is no more going back is the courage found for very big decisions.

Speaker 2 He says, when the German people are up against it, in times of struggle, they always find their historical genius.

Speaker 2 If we keep going, keep rolling the dice, take the fight to the British, the prize of total victory is in sight.

Speaker 1 So people talk about learning the lessons of history, but it's not always a good thing, is it?

Speaker 2 No, not in this case. Not in this case.
So the date is set. The first blow will come in 12 weeks, and it will be the invasion of Norway and Denmark.

Speaker 1 Then on the 10th of May, Hitler will launch his greatest gamble yet, the attack in the west through Holland and Belgium and the Ardennes Forest into the the heart of france an attack that will go down in history as the lightning war the blitzkrieg massive tension so next time in the series the blitzkrieg will begin although important to note the germans didn't actually call it the blitzkrieg i think that was a a british appellation and after the attack on france uh we'll have dunker we'll have the defeat of France, the Battle of Britain, and then Hitler's plans for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

Speaker 1 And members of the Rest is History Club can hear all those episodes right now. So if you want to join them, sign up at therestishistory.com.

Speaker 2 And Tom, here's the thing, with Christmas on the way, guess what?

Speaker 2 You can give the exquisite joy of membership of the Rest is History Club to the history lover in your life because you can give them a full year's membership of the Rest is History Club.

Speaker 2 It is the perfect gift for anybody who likes history um actually if people you don't have to give us a gift you can get it for yourself why not just get it for yourself you could couldn't you yeah and here's the thing it comes always membership of rest is history club with amazing benefits but this year this christmas it comes with a benefit that needs to be seen to be believed it is an exclusive rest is history t-shirt designed in collaboration with our very own theo young smith who describes himself in the copy as a very stylish man.

Speaker 1 And so he is, and so will you be if you get to wear this sensational t-shirt, which I have seen. And my goodness, it's the ideal festive gift.
So thank you, Dominic.

Speaker 1 Thank you, everyone, for listening. We will be back in the next episode with the Blitzkrieg.
Avida Seine.

Speaker 2 Bye-bye.