Make Germany Great Again: Nazism - Part 1

Hello there, podcast listeners, and welcome back to the Overlap Podcast. I'm Joshua.

And I'm Will. The story we're about to tell you doesn't start with a particular date on the

calendar. It starts with a sound, a feeling, if you will. Imagine the faint, distorted echo of

a cheering crowd, the crackle of an old-time radio, a piece of speech, passionate, mesmerizing,

promising to save a country. This isn't a story about monsters from a history book.

It's a story about regular people in a modern, well-educated country who made a series of choices.

This is a cautionary tale about how a democracy dies, not with a bang, but with a series of small,

seemingly reasonable, and often legal steps. It's about the slow turning of a screw, each twist

justified by calls for order, security, and national pride, until the pressure builds and

everything shatters.

Let's get started.

All right. So welcome back, listeners. We hope you enjoyed listening to our music. Don't forget

to give us a like and subscribe now that you're at the beginning of this podcast episode. This is very

obviously part of our sort of ideas about fascism. So from here on out, instead of calling it fascism,

because that was Benito Mussolini's, we're in our new definition phase. Let's call it what it is.

It's authoritarianism. It's totalitarianism. And obviously, based on the intro, the country we're going to be

talking about today is the country of Germany. You guessed that, right? Surely you thought that has to

be Germany, not any country that we're currently living in. So like Will said, the story kind of begins

not with a date, but with a sound, a feeling, all of these sorts of visuals that we provided in the very

beginning, it basically is a not some sudden violent coup, right? Like it's a sequence of reasonable,

very widely popular and often absolutely legal steps. It's a story kind of how the slow, almost

completely unnoticeable turning of that screw justified by the appeals that he mentioned, the

security, the national pride. So to understand this, we're going to kind of look at the lives of like

average Germans pieced together from historical diaries and letters and memoirs. They're kind of

individual choices, their fears, their hopes are the small details that kind of make up this.

For what Germany was a natural, a national disaster, right? The most powerful leaders are ultimately

powerless against the millions of small individual decisions made by the population at large.

History isn't just what happens to people, right? It's the sum of what they do, what they accept,

and why they choose to ignore the steps that got them there.

So we're going to follow Friedrich, a factory worker and kind of bitter veteran of the Great War,

World War I. He feels betrayed by the politicians who he believes surrendered a war that wasn't lost on the

battlefield. He is a firm believer in the stab him in the back mythology and longs for order and national

honor. You've got Klaus. He's a small business owner, a shopkeeper whose family's life savings were wiped

out by the hyperinflation of 1923 in Germany. He represents kind of the middle class that is fragile,

kind of disappearing, terrified of economic collapse and terrified of communism and willing to consider

really out there solutions to protect his family. We have Doris, a young, apolitical woman enjoying the

wild social scene of Berlin inspired by popular novels like The Artificial Silk Girl. She's more interested

in kind of fashion and movies than necessarily politics. She represents the millions of people

who weren't really political, but got swept up in the events of the time. We'll follow Sebastian,

a young law student and journalist whose story is based on the memoir Defying Hitler by Sebastian

Hafner. At first, he's just a detached observer of French politics, pretty confident in his belief that

the German democracy is really just strong enough to survive anything. A belief that we all know was

tragically proven wrong. So kind of through their eyes, we'll see a nation going absolutely crazy,

but a series of logical steps away from freedom, from liberty, from democracy. So this is the story how

the unthinkable actually became believable and then popular and then legalized. And finally,

the terrible reality that led to what we all know as the Nazi regime. So with that, we will start talking

kind of about the situation that was leading up to it, kind of the weight of defeat of World War I and

that stab in the back mythology. Will, do you want to give us a start?

Sure. So this takes us back to the fall of 1918 of, as you said, WWI. And here we have a Germany that

has clearly been defeated, but it's not clear how that defeat happened, if that makes sense. We don't

have a Waterloo moment, you know, where there's a giant battle and Germany soundly defeated or routed

and returned home. It's more like things are just not making any progress. You know, there's a sort of a

standstill and then a sudden, just sudden collapse. And all of a sudden, Germany's out of it and the war is over for Germany. And a lot of people didn't understand how that happened for various reasons that we'll talk about as we look at the war through the individual or the aftermath of the war through these various individuals' perspectives. But for four years, like to say, the government-controlled press had fed the people of Germany a story of heroic struggle and certain victory.

You know, this is your classic propaganda, right? I think for most of us, it comes from the visuals of the people going to the movie theaters in the World War II era and hearing that, you know, Tinney's voice sounding a news anchor, you know, today in Germany, we have the latest, you know, where they were talking about the great...

Thank you. I'll do what I can. Apparently, there's something about, like, the way that the recordings were back then that it made everybody sound that way. They didn't actually sound that way. I don't know if that's true or not, but it's kind of... We explain a lot why everybody had to have that same voice. Unless they're all imitating someone else. But anyway, this just in. They were being fed propaganda, right? I mean, we're all familiar with how that works.

Nothing bad ever happens. Germany's always coming out victorious no matter what happens. That's the story. And then all of a sudden, one day, the soldiers are returning home. The soldiers who are left are returning home, defeated, beaten, and the people are left to wonder what happened.

But of course, as our story actually begins, these military, these soldiers or armies are still on foreign soil. They're actively pursuing their military goals. And then on November 11th, 1918, the war is over.

So we have a new democratic government, which should replace the Kaiser, signed an armistice, right? So they agreed to peace. And from the perspective of our observers, the story we're telling for Friedrich, our factory worker, who had been pulled into the war, had spent years in the trenches. This was a betrayal that he couldn't comprehend.

From his perspective, he's on the front lines, but he's just not seeing how Germany could lose this war. And so he comes back to this defeated country and a new government. And the gap between the promise of victory that led him to the fight and to carry arms against these other nations for so long doesn't square with the reality of surrender.

And he's got to figure out a new story, right? I mean, there's just no context for him to understand how Germany could have failed. Everything was going in their favor from what he understood.

There was a, you know, it was Germany's destiny to prevail. And yet here we are with an embarrassing defeat.

And the story that comes out of all this begins with the Treaty of Versailles, right, which was a disaster for all involved eventually.

In Germany, it wasn't seen as a peace treaty, but as a diktat, meaning like these are the sort of surrender on, um, uh, what am I? I'm blanking on these, uh, the unconditional, unconditional surrender. Sorry, I couldn't think of the term there.

It's like an unconditional surrender, right, where you don't get any kind of terms carved out or any kind of protections.

You just agree to lay down your arms and whatever they say, whatever the other side says goes.

It wasn't just a political slap in the face to Germany, but it was a personal humiliation.

And here's some examples from the Treaty of Versailles that kind of gives you some idea of what, how bad it was for Germany.

There was what's called the War Guilt Clause, which forced Germany to accept sole blame for starting the war.

For people who believe they fought a defensive war, like Friedrich, like our man Friedrich here, this was a fundamental lie, right?

They believed that they were defending their, their right to exist and their, their integrity, their, their vitality as a nation.

But the victors of World War I forced Germany to say, no, it was all our fault.

You know, this was, we, we set out on a war of aggression that had no justification and now we're dealing with the consequences.

Then you have the fact that not only did Germany not conquer Europe and establish its empire again, it actually lost 13% of its land.

So they lost industrial regions like the Saar Basin, which is a direct economic hit.

And the fact that worried shopkeepers, like our example here of Klaus, and then Germany also lost all of its colonies.

All of the lands that it colonized overseas were all lost, which is a huge blow to an economy in those days.

You know, at that time of empire, empire spread around the globe for Germany to lose its colonies was a devastating hit.

And then the, looking forward, they had military restrictions to deal with.

So the German army was limited to just a hundred thousand men with no air force, submarines or tanks.

The Rhineland, Germany's industrial heart was permanently demilitarized, which made Germans feel defenseless and exposed should other nations decide to take vengeance upon it.

So the document or the event that would eventually become that explanation for people like Friedrich was the Treaty of Versailles.

And treaty makes it sound like a fair process, you know, like this was an agreement between viable parties.

But in reality, it was just a documentary beatdown on Germany.

In fact, it was more, less of a treaty and more of what they might call a diktat, where basically the winning side gets to set all the terms for the losers.

And it's treated like an unconditional surrender.

Just to give you some examples of how badly Germany was damaged by this document.

It wasn't just a sort of political attack, but it was actually a personal attack on Germany.

They made Germany basically accept full responsibility for the war and what's called the war guilt clause, where Germany had to essentially cop to being the entire reason the war happened.

Right.

Nothing about any of any other countries had done or any aggression on anybody else's part.

It was all Germany.

They took the entire blame for the war.

You'll see where that comes back to hurt them in a second.

But they also had to give up a number of territories.

And if you think back to the turn of the 20th century, this is the age of empires spread throughout the world, right?

This is the age of empires where the sun never sets on the British Empire or the Spanish, you know, the Portuguese Empire or whatever.

So to lose all of your colonies like Germany did, they had to give up all of their colonies, which is just a brutal economic hit to them.

You know, probably not a terrible...

They're bringing...

They're bringing...

Right.

Each of these colonies are bringing their own economic engine into Germany as a whole.

So they basically, through this, kind of crippled all of those mechanisms, right?

Right.

Exactly.

It's like, you know, it's like if you took away all the franchises of a major corporation or something like it's...

All their remote offices are now shut down and they've got nothing to bring in, nothing to replace that.

Then on top of that, they lose 13% of their actual national land going into the war.

So they lost...

Over 10% of their country was taken away from them, which included industrial regions like the Saar Basin, which is part of the economic engine that you're talking about there, right?

These are the inputs of that economic engine.

And that worried...

Understandably worried people who were part of the economy in Germany, like our shopkeeper example that we're using, our shopkeeper avatar of Klaus.

Then you have the...

Just as a comparison, and I want...

I think it makes sense to bring this up.

If the United States were to lose 13% of our country in land, it would be Alaska.

Like, literally the biggest state in our entire country, and we lost 13%, it would be Alaska.

So essentially they lost Alaska worth of economic capability, of industrial capability, and of, you know, I mean, overall population.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Which, and just to kind of add a little bit of perspective on this, like, for those of you who don't really think about the size of the landmass of Alaska, there's a joke about how to upset a Texan, which is to tell them that Alaska is going to divide into seven states and Texas will not be the eighth largest state.

So, I mean, it would be also like losing Texas, California, and New York altogether.

Exactly.

It was some serious damage done for them to lose 13% of their land.

Even though it doesn't maybe sound like that much, it is a big hit in the land that they lost.

But then it wasn't just that, but it was forward-looking military restrictions.

So Germany was limited to a 100,000-man army with no air force, no tanks, no submarines.

You know, there were just 100,000 soldiers, which we'll see how Mr. Adolf decided to use that down the road.

That was another hit.

And then finally, and this is, I mean, this is brutal, the Allies demanded $33 billion in reparations, which economists basically agree that that was impossible for them to pay.

So they basically made Germany an indentured state or, you know, an indebted state for the foreseeable future.

So you can imagine what it's like to go from, you know, fighting in the trenches every day to going back home or to being somebody who's, you know, tried to do their best to support the war effort.

And the war's over, and now you're left with a bill for $33 billion.

Much of Germany is taken away from you.

So you can imagine the German people were devastated economically, politically, emotionally, every kind of way you can be.

And into this climate of humiliation and anger, there was a powerful conspiracy theory offered to explain all this.

And I will hopefully not make my German grandmother roll over in her grave as I try to explain this, but Germans are famous for their makeup, making up new words.

By just smashing old words together into one big, long word.

Exactly.

That's incredibly hard to pronounce, yes.

Exactly.

So this was the Dostoslegenda.

Dostoslegenda.

Or, as it might be easier, it's definitely easier for me to say, the stab in the back myth.

So the German army, it was claimed, hadn't been defeated on the battlefield, right?

This wasn't a military loss.

It was actually betrayed from within by socialists, communists, and Jews on the home front.

The November criminals who had surrendered.

So this is the idea that we were winning this thing.

We were going to do just fine.

And this new political force came in and decided to surrender and basically sell Germany down the river for their own whatever horrible purposes they harbored.

So they poisoned the German democracy from the start with this mythology that the people in power now are the reason we're no longer winning the war.

When, of course, the reality was they weren't winning.

That's why this new government was in power.

But the story was told that they came in and betrayed Germany by agreeing to the horrible terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

So the Weimar Republic was branded as illegitimate, born from treason.

And this deep-seated betrayal created a nation primed for a leader who would avenge this crime, right?

Who's going to come back and fight for the Germany of yesteryear, right?

The victorious army that was never defeated on the battlefield.

And that's where we allow our, that's where we pick up the story with the economic impacts of the Treaty of Versailles.

Yeah, so just a little recap there.

So this wasn't, this wasn't like a fringe idea, right?

It wasn't like, you know, Alex Jones off in some corner talking about these November criminals who had surrendered.

And it was, you know, the secret cabal of political elite that were, you know, I don't know, pedoing kids down in the bottom of a pizza basement.

You know, this was.

More like QAnon.

Yeah, right.

This was not like that.

This was much more like legitimate generals and people within the military.

And then the, the leaders of the new country, the new, the new era were saying like, this was real.

This was definitely done by the communists and the socialists and the Jews.

And it was, it was really effective, right?

There was, they had, they were at this brink of this complex emotional national trauma, right?

And they created a scapegoat.

And it kind of, it allowed basically Germany to kind of preserve the honor of their army and the new, the new regime's respect of those institutions.

So it was essentially saying, well, okay, fine.

You're going to make us say our government was bad, but we're going to say that it really was.

It was the government.

That was the problem.

But we're still great by creating this, this sort of idea, this, this scapegoat.

So obviously if, if treaty, the treaty of Versailles was kind of the cut, right?

The death by a thousand cuts.

It was kind of a hyperinflation economically in 1923.

That was the fever that, that almost killed the entire country for Klaus, like the shopkeeper for him, it was a nightmare, right?

The value of his actual work, his savings, a stable middle-class life was destroyed in literally months.

I mean, 60 days, it was pretty much gone.

The crisis started when Germany defaulted on its reparation payments.

Now it was paying reparation payments in January, 1923.

It stopped.

So France and Belgium sent in troops to occupy their industrial region, the Ruhr region, R-U-H-R, to basically take payments in goods like coal and like, like core resources.

Right.

And the German government told workers to strike and printed huge amounts of money to pay them.

Like this kind of threw fire, I mean, threw, threw fire on the fire.

Like it threw gasoline on the fire of, of what was already becoming an inflated market.

So the German mark, the Deutsch mark was basically 4.2 to the U.S. dollar in 1914.

And it plummeted by November.

So between, between January and November of that same year, $1 was worth 4.2 trillion German marks.

So it goes from 4.2 to 1 to 1 to 4.2 trillion.

So daily life became not a joke at all.

It was actually kind of a travesty.

Prices literally changed by the hour.

So a loaf of bread that cost 160 marks in late 1922 would cost 200 billion marks in less than 12 months.

A cup of coffee doubled in price by the time you ordered it to the time you paid for it.

Now, obviously that's an exaggeration, right?

Like there weren't people out there agreeing and, and then getting up there and asking for more.

Basically it was, it's, it's to, it's to point out that the money was useless.

They, they collected their, their actual monthly wages in suitcases and trunks and wheelbarrows.

So one story tells actually of a guy who left his wheelbarrow of cash outside only to find the wheelbarrow was stolen.

And the money was in a pile right next to it.

Because the wheelbarrow in that scenario was worth more than the money that was in it.

So it lost all meaning.

People were paid several times a day and they were given breaks to rush out to stores before prices went up again.

Children use stacks of these marks as building blocks and people use them as wallpaper because it was cheaper than the actual wallpaper that they could buy in a store.

This economic chaos led to a social and an entire really moral collapse.

The middle class was entirely wiped out.

I mean, pensions and life savings basically were worth zero.

An American writer actually by the name of Pearl Buck, who was living in Germany, wrote that the people had, quote, lost their self-assurance and lost to were the old values of morals, of ethics, of decency.

Society became pretty primitive, right?

People bartered for, for basic necessities.

Petty theft was incredibly common.

Desperation fueled political extremism.

The streets of Berlin became small battlegrounds for little armed groups from their far right, known as the Freikorps and the far left, engaging in brawls and assassinations.

And basically, I mean, it's not petty crime.

It's political violence back and forth, back and forth.

From his university, the law student, Sebastian, actually watched the constant violence and wondered if this democracy on the brink of collapse with 28 political parties could survive.

The country was just a box of dry sticks and leaves waiting for a little spark.

But a spark came.

It did, it did.

From the beer halls of Munich.

If there's ever a place to start a German revolution, it would be in the beer halls, right?

The beer gardens.

At first...

Cranky old vegetarian.

At first, Adolf Hitler was basically a nobody.

I mean, nobody had ever heard of Hitler.

If you can imagine that in our day and age when Hitler is the end of every online argument.

It's crazy to think about because that's exactly what every argument goes to now.

Everybody I don't like is Hitler.

Right.

But at one time, that would have been a meaningless phrase.

It would have been like, Hitler who?

He was the leader of one of the fringe, one of these 28 political parties and not a powerful one, but a fringe one.

And yet, in the chaos of the early 1920s, his voice started to stand out.

His charisma as a speaker began to gain him some notoriety.

And those who heard him described him as hypnotic.

And he was said to be able to make people believe things they didn't truly agree with.

They would just nod and go along with it because he was so compelling.

He was a master of a new, raw kind of political communication.

And he wasn't the last.

He may have been the first, but he wasn't the last.

His strategy was not to propose some sort of new complex policy that would save Germany.

It was about raw emotion.

He didn't invent problems.

He just expressed the people's anger with a fury that connected with people like Friedrich and Klaus.

So he could whip the crowd into a frenzy and get them all feeling the emotions that were to his advantage.

In a sense, he channeled their anger.

His speeches were a list of the nation's wounds.

He would basically go over the shame of the Treaty of Versailles, the economic ruin that followed, and the weak democratic system.

And then, of course, the ever-looming threat of communism.

Russia, Russia, Russia.

Right.

That ever-threatening enemy to the East.

So, and then he offered simple enemies and simple solutions, right?

It wasn't complexity that he was offering.

It was simplicity.

Here are the bad guys for you.

Let me draw you a map to the bad guys.

For every complex problem, like hyperinflation, he offered a simple enemy.

Here are the people causing it.

He said Germany's problems weren't caused by a lost war or economics.

They were the work of a conspiracy of scapegoats.

These November criminals, as we mentioned before.

And then he added to them the international Jewish financiers and the Jewish Bolshevik plot.

This is basically something that had been crafted.

At the end of the day, I mean, the sad reality is just that the Jewish people in Germany had managed to hold on to some of their wealth and their goods that they had created.

Maybe fall as hard as many did.

And so, by the fact that they were now the wealthy and elite in the country because they still had, you know, something of value.

They still had their willbarrows.

They were made the enemy, right?

They were painted as the enemy that had been conspiring to take down Germany all along.

Never mind that there's not a rational explanation for why they would do that.

That's for another day.

That's for somebody else to figure out.

Hitler was mainly just pointing out the bad guys for them.

Yeah, it was kind of an extension, right, of what the belief generally was held within the country was that the Jewish people were also part of this original Weimar Republic, you know, internal bad government.

And so he basically extended that out from those individuals as government to individual human beings in the German population.

Right.

And so to this, he added the urgency of a crisis narrative, which is not hard to find.

But he would constantly frame Germany as a nation on the brink of collapse.

And that, again, not that he's making all this up.

Some of this was pretty accurate.

But the reason for that, again, was these supposedly corrupt leaders and enemies that were coming from within.

And Hitler had this doom scenario drawn up that he was the only one who could save Germany.

Right.

That it would take somebody strong and committed and who knew what was going on to save the country.

Then he created an outsider persona, an us versus them, where he presented himself in the Nazi party as outsiders, untouched by the failures of the establishment.

So, you know, not our fault this happened.

Somebody else, you know, we would, we don't want to be here either.

But we're here because these horrific betrayers or traitors, you know, have failed Germany.

And so now we're stuck in this position.

But we're, we're clean of all that.

Our hands are clean.

We weren't part of that problem.

And so he wasn't really a politician.

He was a man of the people.

A fellow soldier who had fought in the trenches alongside Friedrich.

And he promised to effectively drain the swamp of Berlin politics to use a modern metaphor that, that would help you understand what he promised to do, what he was offering.

And then he used rhetorical tricks.

His speeches were built to sound like the truth without needing any facts.

Well, I wonder where I've seen that before.

He used phrases like,

Donzig was and is a German city.

And you know, or it is known to create a sense of shared understanding and bypass critical thinking.

So he would just say, well, everybody agrees with me.

Of course, that this is the case.

These are just the facts.

Yeah.

And if you state something often enough as a fact, and you just keep insisting that it's a fact, and you only, you know, show on camera the people who agree with you, it's not too hard to eventually make people accept those less facts.

And underneath all of this was the powerful promise to restore a mythical past, right?

So this is, these are people who, you know, like we're talking about in six months, they went from families that had built wealthy, built up wealth and fortunes, or at least built up a comfortable, secure life.

And that was all taken away from them.

They longed for the days of power and Germany's heyday.

And Hitler offered that to them.

His goal was not to just fix Germany's economy, but to regain, to rewrite history, essentially.

He would sweep away the chaos and the humiliation following Versailles and return Germany to its former glory.

The messaging of making Germany great again, so to speak.

It was imaginary.

Right.

That's the problem is Germany was never great.

I mean, they were reasonable.

They had, you know, middle class.

They had a middle class, which is kind of how we determine decent societies, right?

Societies that can kind of have that middle class.

And at this point, it disappeared.

And so he's saying, he wasn't just saying, hey, let's return to the way we were with the middle class and all this other stuff.

He said, we're going to return back to the greatness like Rome.

Right.

So notice if you listen to our Benito Mussolini, same kind of concept.

This sort of fake past.

The difference is Rome actually was a quote unquote great world power at the time versus Germany, which wasn't.

So while Hitler sat here promising or took the stage promising to make Germany great again, he appealed not just to the fanatics, but to the millions of ordinary Germans like Doris, who were tired of the instability and just wanted to feel proud of their country again.

You know, they wanted to be able to take some pride in being German and they weren't able to do that in the current events at the time.

And so people weren't voting for an ideology.

They were embracing a feeling of national rebirth, the hope of Germany, right?

The chance for Germany to emerge from the ashes of defeat and regain its rightful place on the global scale, global stage.

But this was not just a political revolution.

It was a legal revolution.

Joshua, do you want to talk about that aspect?

Yeah. So ultimately, the the I believe it's called the German National Socialists or the Nazis.

Their takeover of Germany wasn't this like rise, like not unlike Benito Mussolini, right, who marched 30,000 of his soldiers into into Milan or not Milan.

Sorry, whatever the capital of Italy is.

I'm on Germany now.

I can't think about Italy.

Instead of just marching him into the capital, right, this was just a very quick, very methodical and completely, quote, legal revolution that used the tools of democracy to actually destroy it.

Right.

So for a nation that was tired of street violence and tired of politicians being constantly gridlocked, the promise of like official action that we could actually make movements was a trade that a lot of people were like, yeah, I mean, I would sign up for that.

Right.

So this sort of led to what's commonly known as the Reichstag fire.

But it was it was an emergency that was created or existed.

It's still not entirely known who exactly started the fire, but it was it was an emergency that brought everything to a pinpoint.

It brought everything to a head.

So on the night of February, 1833, just a little less than a month after Hitler became chancellor, the Reichstag building, which was the quintessential like symbol of German democracy would be the equivalent of our Capitol building.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's fair.

Yes, it was was set on fire.

The police arrested one person at the scene.

His name was Marnus van der Lube, a young Dutch laborer with communist sympathies.

So he was a communist sympathizer, someone that they considered from the far left.

Nazi leadership.

They just absolutely loved this opportunity because it allowed them to before the fire, the fire had even been put out, seize that opportunity.

They launched a gigantic, massive propaganda campaign with Herman Goering declared that, quote, this is a communist outrage.

Hitler called the fire a sign from God, a signal for a communist uprising that threatened to throw Germany into chaos, essentially saying that this act of this one person with with communist sympathies.

Basically, it's a communist uprising that we have an opportunity and responsibility to to quash simply because it was going to throw Germany into chaos.

So the next day, right.

The newspapers spread the story, a giant headline, you know, about this this communist craze.

They created a wave of public panic.

And skeptics like the doctor, Eirik Seligman, suspected it was a setup.

And he wrote in his diary.

We have records of this that he believed the Nazis had set the fire themselves as an excuse to start this this new democracy.

So using a template of crisis.

Right.

Hitler went to the 85 year old president at the time, Paul von Hindenburg.

And we if we know one thing, Hindenburg's always stay upright.

And basically argued it argued, argued to President Hindenburg that the country needed extraordinary measures to fix an extraordinary problem.

So on February 28th, the day after the fire, Hindenburg signed the Verdenung des Reichspräsidenten zum Schutz von Burg und Stadt.

The decree of the Reich president for the protection of people and state.

Now, this is known colloquially as the Reichstag fire decree, mainly because Americans don't like to pronounce German.

And it's very hard to pronounce.

And it's a very long title.

It was a one page document.

Chancellor's referendum.

You could you could absolutely call it that.

But it was it was just a one page document.

It read more like a social media post than necessarily a, you know, a legal decree.

But it was it was certainly that it suspended the German constitution.

With that little signature, it wiped out every basic civil liberty of German society.

There was no more freedom of speech, which was previously supported through through the Constitution.

The freedom of the press through the German Constitution.

The freedom of assembly.

The privacy of mail and phone calls and protection from warrantless searches.

Now, look, this decree, if you just put it out there into the world,

as is would freak anybody out.

Right.

Your average German Doris is even mad at this point.

But it was sold to the public as a as a very temporary thing.

Right.

It's just right now.

We just need to protect the entire state from terrorists.

But in reality, it turned Germany into a police state.

It was essentially a declaration of martial law.

With the new power.

With the new power.

Adolf used the regime that he had now collected this hundred thousand army and arrested thousands of suspected communists, socialists and other political opponents, you know, without charging them with anything.

And threw them into the first alligator Alcatraz is the first concentration camps like Dachau, which if you're not familiar with, is a horrible place.

But the problem was the law was no longer a shield for the average citizen.

Right.

It was a weapon for the state to wield.

This final legal destruction took place on March 23rd, 1933.

Will, why don't you tell us more about that?

Although not content to sort of just be the de facto authoritarian ruler of the Republic, Hitler and his allies decided to end the Republic altogether.

And they held a vote in the Kroll Opera House, which was the replacement venue for the Reichstag, since that was unusable due to the fire.

At this vote, essentially, there were armed SA and SA troopers that swarmed into this opera house.

And they were not there to protect the people so that they could they could make a fair vote.

They were there.

It was clear to intimidate people and to stop anybody who would vote against Hitler from doing so.

Which we also heard last time, too.

Exactly.

That's that.

This may sound familiar from our last episode.

So it's a sham sham vote, you know, just a farce.

And basically, the the 81 elected communist deputies couldn't attend because they were either already in a gulag or in a concentration camp or they were being threatened with arrest.

So they were either in hiding or already in jail.

So you didn't have any votes from the Communist Party members.

And Hitler basically took the stage to propose a new law, which he called the law to remedy the distress of the people in the Reich.

The name itself was propaganda.

Right.

So he's actually using the title of the law as propaganda because who doesn't want to vote for a law to remedy the distress of the people in the Reich?

That sounds familiar.

Yeah.

It does, doesn't it?

So Hitler gets up and comes to speak in favor of this law that he's bringing with him.

And in his speech, Hitler gave the remaining politicians a choice.

You can either vote for this bill and have peace or vote against it and face war.

That's not really much of a choice now, is it?

So the bill, which became known as the Enabling Act, would give Hitler as chancellor the power to make laws without the Reichstag's approval for four years.

Only four years?

Yeah, just four years, just a temporary emergency.

But he just needed four years of no Congress essentially being involved, no representatives of the people so he could make his own laws, and then would allow him to ignore, again, the Constitution.

He's made the Constitution now meaningless.

So to pass, it needed a two-thirds majority, which, again, may sound familiar.

It's essentially like amending our Constitution.

He needed a two-thirds majority.

And with the communists gone, the Nazis needed the support of the center parties.

So in order to get the center parties on board, Hitler basically promised to respect the rights of the Catholic Church, which was a crucial center party, or they held the power in the crucial center party.

And with the promise of Hitler promising not to take it out on them, they went along and gave him the power that he sought.

So that was enough to get the votes across.

And only the Social Democrats, led by Otto Vels, stood against the law.

Vels gave a brave speech saying,

You can take our lives and our freedom.

Apparently, they could take more than they could take from Braveheart.

You can take our lives and our freedom, but you cannot take our honor.

That's the German version of the William Wallace speech.

Sounds like it.

So with that, the German parliament voted—I'm sorry.

The vote following his speech was 444 to 94.

So 444 members of the German parliament voted in favor of Hitler's law.

94 voted against.

And with that, the German parliament had legally voted itself out of existence.

But only for four years.

Yeah, only for four years, though.

We'll be back, right?

Surely he'll hand back power once this emergency is resolved.

Yeah, we all know how that turned out.

So this was a legal revolution that used the procedures of democracy to kill it.

So this is a democracy died by suicide, essentially.

The Reichstag fire decree was signed by the legitimate president.

The Enabling Act was passed by the elected parliament.

And that created an illusion of legitimacy that made it easier for people.

Right?

So we're going to take away your constitution.

But don't worry.

It's got to be legit because over two-thirds of the sitting politicians voted in favor of it.

So it's got to be the right thing, right?

It's democracy.

It's the will of the people.

So the other guardians of the state, the courts, the judges, the conservative politicians, all failed to act.

They thought they could control Hitler, but they were just stepping stones on his path to absolute power.

So we've got a timeline that we'll try to post in our show notes here of the steps that we've just gone over.

But this was essentially the final step in the process to give Hitler, again, absolute power.

And once he did that, then he was free to carry out his real agenda.

Which, Joshua, you want to speak to that?

I know you're probably thinking, it was just getting good.

What are you doing?

Well, unfortunately, we try to limit our episodes to about 40 to 45 minutes every single week.

And this one we had to split up in two yet again.

So if you liked what you're listening to and you would like to hear the conclusion of it,

join Will and I next week as we finish up this series on making Germany great again.

Journey into Nazism.

Thanks so much for following us.

Make sure you follow us on all of the social media sites.

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And you can find our website and connect with Will and I.

Anyway, we will see you next week and enjoy.

We'll see you next week.

We'll see you next week.

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