Speaker 1: Oh boy, welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where
Speaker 1: I just played a trick on Sophie. I'm Robert Evans.
Speaker 1: This is a show about the worst people in all
Speaker 1: of history and uh, and to help us talk about
Speaker 1: one of the worst people in all of history, one
Speaker 1: of my favorite Did it happen, Sophie? Did it happen?
Speaker 1: Did you catch my cunning roosts?
Speaker 2: I asked you the script and it says, ha ha ha, Sophie,
Speaker 2: this was a trick.
Speaker 1: Uh, your fake documents. It's not the real script.
Speaker 3: I know, I know.
Speaker 1: It was such a shitty thing to do. And that
Speaker 1: laugh on the line was Jake Hanrahan, Jake you are
Speaker 1: I'm doing good. I'm doing any buddy, how are you
Speaker 1: doing this week?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Good, I'm good. I'm good.
Speaker 4: I'm moving forward with looking into dead Russians.
Speaker 1: You've taken on the fun job for yourself this year
Speaker 1: of looking into the mysterious accidental deaths and suicides of
Speaker 1: a bunch of Russian oligarchs for your hit podcast Sad Oligarch.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Mine, and it's it's been really eye open and actually
Speaker 4: like it's it's a lot of work, but it's very
Speaker 4: I mean the coincidence is being stretched to its absolute.
Speaker 3: Limit on what's happening here. Put it that way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's a super impressive podcast. Really happy to
Speaker 1: have it on the network. You also, Jake, run an
Speaker 1: outfit called Popular Front, which does both a regular podcast
Speaker 1: on conflict all around the world and also has a
Speaker 1: you put out a print journal. I think I'll call
Speaker 1: it a journal because that sounds that sounds I mean.
Speaker 4: Yeah, magazine, Yeah, yeah, I'm moving forward, and documentaries as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So in other words, Jake, you are kind of a
Speaker 1: good version of the bad guy that we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about today, because the guy we're talking about today
Speaker 1: is like the evilist example of like a dude who
Speaker 1: you could technically call a journalist he ran a newspaper
Speaker 1: or a journal or whatever, which was the podcast of
Speaker 1: the of the nineteen thirties and forties. What do you
Speaker 1: know about a fella named Julius Striker?
Speaker 3: Nothing?
Speaker 1: Actually, okay, okay, very good. So Striker was, I mean
Speaker 1: the kind of the surface level thing that he was,
Speaker 1: and sort of the most prominent thing that he was
Speaker 1: was the dude who ran a newspaper in Weimar, Germany
Speaker 1: called Der Sturmer. So he was like the guy who
Speaker 1: published the primary anti semitic newspaper of like the pre
Speaker 1: Nazi in the Nazi era. He was the only dude
Speaker 1: we executed at Nuremberg who hadn't actually had a government
Speaker 1: position in the Nazi Party. In other words, when they
Speaker 1: killed Striker after the war, they acknowledged like, well, this
Speaker 1: guy wasn't you know, he wasn't a military leader, he
Speaker 1: wasn't in the government. He didn't like help start a war,
Speaker 1: he didn't like command troops, he didn't run a death camp.
Speaker 1: But we're going to hang him because the propaganda he
Speaker 1: made was an integral part of the Holocaust.
Speaker 4: He should have studied science and he could have been
Speaker 4: sent to America.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if he known how to build a bomb.
Speaker 3: He missed Piper Clip with profession, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, one of the things about Striker is that
Speaker 1: he kind of did He was kind of like that
Speaker 1: level of evil genius in that he figured out a
Speaker 1: way to utilize the news media as a weapon in
Speaker 1: a way that a lot of people today still do.
Speaker 1: Like people are hurting folks right now using a lot
Speaker 1: of the tactics that Striker pioneered.
Speaker 3: But he's also smart why did he die though?
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, I mean python, the accumulated head injuries
Speaker 1: that he got in street fights in the nineteen thirties
Speaker 1: might have blunted him by the end. You know, some
Speaker 1: of that cte, which I think is an underdiscussed part
Speaker 1: of a lot of the old Nazis right. You can't
Speaker 1: you can only have like so many beer bottles broken
Speaker 1: over your head before you start to yeah, yeah he was,
Speaker 1: I mean he was. He was like just kind of
Speaker 1: involved in because he was a big speaker during the
Speaker 1: Weimar era, right, and so you were a big Nazi speaker,
Speaker 1: you get into a shitload of bar fights. But one
Speaker 1: of the things that's interesting about Striker is that, like,
Speaker 1: so this is this is getting a little bit outside
Speaker 1: a topic. But if you like spending the time engaging
Speaker 1: with the actual historiography of the like the quote unquote
Speaker 1: Holy Land or the the what you know, the lifetime
Speaker 1: of the person who uh has come down to us
Speaker 1: as Jesus Christ, you'll find out that, like there were
Speaker 1: sort of a bunch of Messianic figures like in that
Speaker 1: part of the world in that period of time, people
Speaker 1: claiming to be like Messiah's people claiming to be, you know,
Speaker 1: holy Man. And basically the guy that like, you know,
Speaker 1: the you get a lot of stories about in the
Speaker 1: Bible is like one of a number of dudes who theoretically,
Speaker 1: if you're not a believer in Christianity, right, if you
Speaker 1: don't believe that guy's the son of God, theoretically there
Speaker 1: were probably other dudes that like maybe could have been
Speaker 1: the focus of a big religion if shit had broken
Speaker 1: a little bit differently, right, Yeah.
Speaker 4: John the Baptist is worshiped by as I forget the
Speaker 4: name now, but there's a like specific religion in the
Speaker 4: Middle East. Most of them actually don't live in the
Speaker 4: Middle East now as they were persecuted, but yeah, they
Speaker 4: for them, John the Baptist was there Jesus, if.
Speaker 3: You know what I mean.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so Striker is in addition to
Speaker 1: being this very influential propagandist, he's kind of that guy
Speaker 1: for Hitler, as in, if a couple of things had
Speaker 1: broke differently, he could have been the like fearer of
Speaker 1: the fascist party that rose to power. Like, he had
Speaker 1: a lot of similarities, and there was a period of
Speaker 1: time where they were kind of seen as rivals for
Speaker 1: like the guy who's going to become the center of
Speaker 1: the of the the far right movement in Bymar, Germany.
Speaker 1: So he's a really interesting dude for a number of there. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's who we're talking about this week. Julius Striker aka
Speaker 1: Jules So. Julius was born February twelfth, eighteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: in a little bitty country town named Fleinhausen, about fifteen
Speaker 1: miles west of the town of Augsburg in Bavaria. Now
Speaker 1: Bavaria is kind of like sometimes I hear people say,
Speaker 1: it's like the Texas of Germany. Right, it's traditionally the
Speaker 1: conservative chunk of Germany. It's quite large. It's also like
Speaker 1: heavily Catholic as opposed to kind of the more Protestant
Speaker 1: parts of the country. And his family's Catholic. His dad
Speaker 1: is the town school master in this little bitty town,
Speaker 1: and his dad is, like a lot of folks in
Speaker 1: Bavaria at the time, a big believer in having as
Speaker 1: many babies with his wife as she is capable of surviving.
Speaker 1: So Julius is his ninth kid, which is that's a
Speaker 1: lot a lot of kids to have.
Speaker 3: That's a hell little kids. Yeah, back Denvi was like,
Speaker 3: just keep going.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you gotta like, you gotta make him out. Three
Speaker 1: of them are going to make it to fifteen, you know,
Speaker 1: and then then you can die at the right old
Speaker 1: age of thirty eight. Yeah. So the Strikers were a conservative,
Speaker 1: traditional family in a pretty conservative and traditional part of Germany.
Speaker 1: Julius had been born and you could call it he
Speaker 1: was basically born during Germany's kinsinera, right, like Germany is
Speaker 1: like fifteen years old when he turns fifth or when
Speaker 1: he's born, and his family's pretty excited to be a
Speaker 1: part of this new country. So everybody's like, yeah, Germany,
Speaker 1: great idea. This is only gonna only gonna end. Well,
Speaker 1: his mom is kind of a homemaker at the time,
Speaker 1: while his dad is again a school teacher, and he's
Speaker 1: as a very young kid again a lot like Hitler.
Speaker 1: He's a mama's boy. He actually calls his mother the
Speaker 1: fortress of my childhood, so, you know, very much, very
Speaker 1: much tied to his mom, very much.
Speaker 2: Word, Okay, I'm sorry, I love my mom.
Speaker 1: That's the way weird fortress.
Speaker 4: Yeah, my sweet mother, Like no, she was the fortress,
Speaker 4: like she was the verdun of my childhood.
Speaker 2: That's like, my mom's my favorite person.
Speaker 3: No, yeah, she's a fortress.
Speaker 1: Yeah she's Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, Hitler's kind of
Speaker 1: the same way, where like the h if you listen
Speaker 1: to like folks who knew the family at the time,
Speaker 1: or like the doctor who took care of her when
Speaker 1: she had cancer, he was like, I've never seen anybody
Speaker 1: who was like so into his mom as this guy.
Speaker 1: You know, not that it's bad to be a mama's boy,
Speaker 1: but an interesting detail for me, this fellas.
Speaker 3: Good to fuck your mom, like, you.
Speaker 1: Know, yeah, there's a little bit of like that emotionally
Speaker 1: going on, right, Yeah, yeah, a little odd. So in short,
Speaker 1: his early life is characterized by this kind of both
Speaker 1: this comforting sort of feeling of a very stable like family,
Speaker 1: but also this very comforting feeling of like the weight
Speaker 1: of all of this tradition you know that that exists
Speaker 1: in the area he lives in. But despite this, while
Speaker 1: his family's Catholic, while Bavaria's Catholic, he's never super into
Speaker 1: Catholicism as a religion, but he is very culturally Catholic,
Speaker 1: and one of the things that he gets out of
Speaker 1: his cultural Catholicism is a pretty rough attitude towards Jewish people,
Speaker 1: not not not great relations between the Catholic Church and
Speaker 1: Judaism in this period at time, Not that he would
Speaker 1: have known any Jewish people growing up right, Julius would
Speaker 1: have only occasionally even met other like Christians who had
Speaker 1: spent time interacting with Jewish citizens of the Reich. There
Speaker 1: were a significant amount of German Jews in like cities.
Speaker 1: You know, you would if you grew up in a city,
Speaker 1: you certainly were going to like meet and interact with
Speaker 1: with Jewish Germans. But he's out in the countryside and
Speaker 1: basically everybody's you know, Catholic where he is. You know,
Speaker 1: you got a couple of Protestants, Like that's kind of
Speaker 1: a big deal running into Protestants for his folks, let alone, Like.
Speaker 3: Why why did he hate Jews if he didn't annoyny.
Speaker 1: Well, because he's raised on stories about them and largely
Speaker 1: like really negative propaganda. So the church in his hometown,
Speaker 1: and this is the case with hundreds of churches across
Speaker 1: Europe had stained glass reliefs of what's called the Judensao
Speaker 1: j U d E N s A U. You can
Speaker 1: you can look up pictures of this. If you'd like,
Speaker 1: and the Judensao is a pig nursing Jewish babies, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's it's like this it's a racist kind of
Speaker 1: like cartoon or whatever, but this is like literally like
Speaker 1: carved into churches. There were also would have been a
Speaker 1: relative regular talk about what was called the Blood Passover,
Speaker 1: which is this medieval era conspiracy theory that existed up
Speaker 1: until it still exists in some areas that claims that
Speaker 1: like rabbis have to murder Christian children to get their
Speaker 1: blood to make matza, and that's like like fucked up
Speaker 1: and wild and stuff. But these were really common. Again,
Speaker 1: this stuff is literally like in there's stained glass reliefs
Speaker 1: of some of these stories. You know, this is a
Speaker 1: thing that goes back a very long time. And some
Speaker 1: of these myths about Jewish people, these like conspiracy theories
Speaker 1: about rabbis and the like, would have been taught to
Speaker 1: him both kind of as a part of his Catholic upbringing,
Speaker 1: but also by adults who kind of these were not
Speaker 1: just literal beliefs, they were also things that adults would
Speaker 1: kind of embellish for kids as like a form of entertainment.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of this mix of the two things,
Speaker 1: but it all contributes to this kind of general miasma
Speaker 1: of bigotry that is culturally the norm. And this is
Speaker 1: not just in Germany. Right, if you're in France around
Speaker 1: the same time, you're kid in Belgian Scandinavia, Kidden, most
Speaker 1: parts of the UK during this period of time, you're
Speaker 1: getting pieces of this. You know, there's differences culturally kind
Speaker 1: of depending on where you are and what your dominant
Speaker 1: religion is. But like this is a big part of why,
Speaker 1: you know, when when the Nazis take over in France,
Speaker 1: like one of the logistic problems they have is like
Speaker 1: so many people handing in Jewish neighbors and relatives because
Speaker 1: you know, this kind of bigotry is just it's very
Speaker 1: I mean, this is like, yeah, it's already there, and
Speaker 1: this is you know, it's one of those things where
Speaker 1: as much as we're talking about how much bigotry this
Speaker 1: kid and everyone else in this part of rural Bavaria
Speaker 1: is ingesting, this is also simultaneously a period in which
Speaker 1: Jewish people are making great strides towards equality in Germany.
Speaker 1: Prussia had made Jewish people's citizens for the first time,
Speaker 1: albeit kind of second class citizens. In eighteen twelve as
Speaker 1: a part of the Napoleonic Wars, which is only you know,
Speaker 1: like sixty or so years before Strikers born seventy years
Speaker 1: full civic equality had been granted in eighteen forty eight
Speaker 1: in Prussia, although most states in what became Germany a
Speaker 1: little after that still had some restrictions on Jewish people
Speaker 1: doing things like joining the military until eighteen sixty. And
Speaker 1: you know, eighteen seventy is when we have the Franco
Speaker 1: Prussian War, which is what gives us the birth of
Speaker 1: like Germany as a traditional state. So like right before
Speaker 1: the Franco Prussian War, Jews get the right to serve
Speaker 1: in the German military. And then when that war ends
Speaker 1: and Germany is established as an independent nation for the
Speaker 1: first time, one of the things that happens when Germany
Speaker 1: is born is that Jewish people are given full rights
Speaker 1: as subjects of the Kaiser. So it's you've got again
Speaker 1: in this period, you're both you both have this very
Speaker 1: medieval bigotry is still super common, but also you've got
Speaker 1: this very like progressive movement towards recognizing Jewish people as
Speaker 1: the same as anyone else in the country. So both
Speaker 1: of the stuff's happened at the same time his first
Speaker 1: Julius's first direct memory of Jewish Germans came when he
Speaker 1: was about five years old. His mom ordered fabric from
Speaker 1: a shop owned by a Jewish shopkeeper in a town
Speaker 1: near by. The fabric did not meet her expectations for
Speaker 1: whatever region, and because she'd spent so much money on it,
Speaker 1: she got angry. She started crying, and Julius, you know
Speaker 1: who's again about five during this period, recalls, probably from
Speaker 1: the adults around him, hearing that this betrayal of getting
Speaker 1: bad fabric was just like a jew. And in Randall
Speaker 1: Bitework's biography of Striker, he notes the village priest, in
Speaker 1: his regular periods of religious instruction in the school, explained
Speaker 1: how the Jews had fought Christ bitterly, finally crucifying him.
Speaker 1: This was my first inkling that the nature of Jews
Speaker 1: was peculiar. Striker later wrote, So this is kind of,
Speaker 1: you know, it's this again. You've got like this, your
Speaker 1: preacher talking about how Jewish people are responsible for the
Speaker 1: death of Christ, and your mom complaining that like they
Speaker 1: screwed you out of you know, the proper cloth. It's
Speaker 1: just kind of this all encompassing thing. So in this period,
Speaker 1: age fourteen is kind of the start of your adulthood.
Speaker 1: That's when a young man is going to start working
Speaker 1: and apprenticing to learn a trade. Julius actually finished his
Speaker 1: primary school at thirteen and started attending a teacher training
Speaker 1: program where he's like learning how to become a school
Speaker 1: teacher as a as a thirteen year old, which is wild.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's crazy. Imagine going to school tea.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you're like eight's he's thirteen. He's like, I
Speaker 1: can't even imagine the things he's seen that kids are hard.
Speaker 3: Fourteen telling me, shit, I'm alone anything. Yeah, it's funny.
Speaker 1: So he's one of like and you know, it says
Speaker 1: something probably about his dad that of the nine kids
Speaker 1: in the family, five of them following their dad's footsteps
Speaker 1: as teachers, which is not like uncommon. Right, Like, at
Speaker 1: that point in time, you're a coal miner, right, You're
Speaker 1: living in somewhere in the south of England and your
Speaker 1: dad's a coal miner, You're probably going to grow up
Speaker 1: to be a coal miner.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: It's kind of the same thing with Striker's family and
Speaker 1: being a teacher. He's a he does Okay, he like
Speaker 1: passes everything, but he's he's got kind of mediocre grades,
Speaker 1: and he's starts working as a substitute teacher in nineteen
Speaker 1: oh four, having been an indifferent teaching student. Now, the
Speaker 1: Bavarian school system at this point is partly run by
Speaker 1: the Catholic Church, so in villages, the local priest was
Speaker 1: like the administrator of the school, like he would check
Speaker 1: in to see like what the teachers doing, what they're
Speaker 1: teaching kids, whether it's acceptable, and Julius, while he's kind
Speaker 1: of very culturally Catholic, doesn't particularly believe and is kind
Speaker 1: of oppositional defiant, right, Like he's just reflexively angry at
Speaker 1: anyone who's telling him how to do things. So he
Speaker 1: starts getting into a bunch of fights with the local
Speaker 1: priest as he's starting his career as a teacher. Kind
Speaker 1: Of a lot of this starts when he decides he
Speaker 1: wants to change the starting time for Sunday school classes,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, a part of the school teacher's job,
Speaker 1: and the local priest gets really angry and it gets
Speaker 1: him in trouble with his bosses all that stuff. So
Speaker 1: in nineteen oh seven, his kind of reflexive need to
Speaker 1: sort of, I don't know, resist authority causes problems for
Speaker 1: him again because he he has to do his year
Speaker 1: of compulsory military service, which all german Men have to
Speaker 1: do in this period of time. Kind of when you're
Speaker 1: a young adult you have to at some point you
Speaker 1: have some flexibilities to win, but you have to go
Speaker 1: spend a year working as a soldier so that when
Speaker 1: it's time to do a World War one they can
Speaker 1: call everybody up and have them go, you know, do
Speaker 1: a World War one. And he's terrible at this. Like
Speaker 1: his leaders, his officers notice that he like can't be controlled. Basically,
Speaker 1: he winds up going to jail for several days because
Speaker 1: like a guy in the lunch Tint makes fun of him,
Speaker 1: and he just beats the absolute piss out of this dude.
Speaker 1: So his superiors are like, this is not a guy,
Speaker 1: like because he's a school teacher. They were considering, you know,
Speaker 1: sending him to officer school. But they're like, wow, this guy.
Speaker 1: We can't have this guy do anything, right, He's just
Speaker 1: not like a reliable soldier. So nineteen oh yeah, loose
Speaker 1: cannon kind of an asshole, right, He's just kind of
Speaker 1: a giant dick. So nineteen oh eight he goes back
Speaker 1: to teaching, and then the next year he gets in
Speaker 1: trouble when a priest visits his class and says something
Speaker 1: that Julius disagrees with. So Striker kind of like they
Speaker 1: have this big confrontation, maybe it's kind of gets close
Speaker 1: to blows and he forces the priest to leave, which
Speaker 1: gets him in trouble with the church again, and he's
Speaker 1: like pushed out of that town and eventually like comes
Speaker 1: to find a teaching position in the biggest city near him,
Speaker 1: which is Nuremberg. This is a good thing for him
Speaker 1: because like he doesn't really like the Catholic Church. He's
Speaker 1: pissed at how much of a role they have in
Speaker 1: teaching people. And in Nuremberg there's a lot of Protestants
Speaker 1: and also you know, a growing number of people who
Speaker 1: aren't particularly religious at all, who are like why are
Speaker 1: schools run by the Catholic Church? Like this maybe shouldn't
Speaker 1: be the way that we do things and are in
Speaker 1: our new modern Germany that's supposed to have some degree
Speaker 1: of pluralism in it, like why are they in charge
Speaker 1: of this? And so he gets along really well with
Speaker 1: his boss in Nuremberg, he starts to like find some success,
Speaker 1: you know, teaching in Nuremberg. You know, it's this kind
Speaker 1: of interesting place in the early nineteen hundreds, it had
Speaker 1: been like majority Protestant up until the turn of the century,
Speaker 1: and that a bunch of Catholics had moved in along
Speaker 1: with eight thousand or so Jewish Germans. And it's one
Speaker 1: of those things I just talked about how racist his
Speaker 1: upbringing was, But at this period of time in his life,
Speaker 1: there's no evidence from any of his writings at the
Speaker 1: time that he had any particular negative interactions with any
Speaker 1: of his fellow citizens who were Jewish, that he had
Speaker 1: any particular issue. In fact, he seems to have kind
Speaker 1: of been a progressive leftist early on when he moves
Speaker 1: in for the time what you'd call that. When he
Speaker 1: moves to Nuremberg, he sort of was interested in the
Speaker 1: Social Democratic Party, but at that time the government forbade
Speaker 1: state employees from being Social Democrats, so he joined the
Speaker 1: Democrat Party, which was kind of like the center slightly
Speaker 1: liberal option at the time, right, and the Democratic Party's
Speaker 1: primary goal was to end clerical supervision in the schools, right,
Speaker 1: like their big campaign sort of like issue was like,
Speaker 1: maybe we don't have priests running all of our schools.
Speaker 1: So Striker was, you know, into this. He joins and
Speaker 1: at some of these early meetings he's doing, he starts
Speaker 1: like speaking up and eventually like actually giving speeches, and
Speaker 1: it's kind of one of those things he doesn't have
Speaker 1: as a teacher. He's got some experience being up in
Speaker 1: front of an audience, but the first time he gets
Speaker 1: up in front of an audience at a party meeting
Speaker 1: and starts like you know, teaching, kind of going on
Speaker 1: a little bit of a rant about why he doesn't
Speaker 1: like priests being in charge in the schools. He's kind
Speaker 1: of electrifying. Like people, all of the people running this
Speaker 1: party are like, this guy's actually really good at this,
Speaker 1: and so they're like, hey, Julius, what if we had you?
Speaker 1: But what if we hired you in basically as like
Speaker 1: a regular speaker. So you know, when we have party meetings,
Speaker 1: when we're doing like vote drives and stuff to bring
Speaker 1: in more folks to raise money, we can just have
Speaker 1: you get up on stage and start, you know, doing
Speaker 1: your thing. And so that's how he starts. That's like
Speaker 1: kind of the birth of this guy's political experience is
Speaker 1: he's just kind of like has this natural gift. And
Speaker 1: in this period, you got to remember, people don't have
Speaker 1: radios really, you know, I think they exist, but not
Speaker 1: a lot of folks really are are listening to the radio.
Speaker 1: There's certainly no television. One of the primary methods of
Speaker 1: entertainment is just like at night, you hear like, oh,
Speaker 1: this party's doing a thing and they've got some guys
Speaker 1: given speeches, and it's kind of like it's almost like
Speaker 1: go into a comedy show or something or going to
Speaker 1: a concert, right, you know.
Speaker 4: Just when you give you a house and listen to
Speaker 4: them or yeah, pook about stuff that sounds pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's usually beer. You know, I think from what
Speaker 1: I've heard, like the cost of attending, because these are
Speaker 1: fundraisers for parties too, is usually about the cost of
Speaker 1: a pint of beer, so it's not that pricey. Working
Speaker 1: class people and afford it. Sometimes there's free food, there's
Speaker 1: you know, uh, you know, it's just like it's kind
Speaker 1: of how you go and spend your nights. It's a
Speaker 1: big cultural thing, right, And he just kind of feels
Speaker 1: as he starts giving these speeches and this is sort
Speaker 1: of where you get the problematic elements he the way
Speaker 1: he interprets, you know, it is like you you do
Speaker 1: something you've never done before, and you have kind of
Speaker 1: a knack for it, and you feel like, oh, wow,
Speaker 1: maybe this is a thing I should like work more on.
Speaker 1: That's kind of speaking for him, But instead of just
Speaker 1: being like, yeah, I've got a knack for this, he
Speaker 1: decides that there's this inner voice guiding him, right, Like
Speaker 1: there's this uh yeah, almost spiritual presence inside him that
Speaker 1: he feels as like teaching him how to how to
Speaker 1: speak to these crowds. And you know, the other problematic
Speaker 1: aspect of this is that like he just kind of
Speaker 1: like reflexively. One of the ways he tries to get
Speaker 1: the audience on his side is by like going on
Speaker 1: rants about Jewish people. And he does. He you know,
Speaker 1: he's made just like some side jokes. It's not really
Speaker 1: the focus of anything, but he notices that, like the
Speaker 1: Jewish people in the audience aren't laughing when he's making
Speaker 1: racist jokes. Yeah, funny that, And you know, one of
Speaker 1: the folks that he's like working with in this party
Speaker 1: kind of pulls him aside after one of his speeches
Speaker 1: and says, and this is how Striker related it. Later, Striker,
Speaker 1: let me give you some advice. I work in a
Speaker 1: Jewish firm. I've learned to be silent at times when
Speaker 1: my German heart gladly would have spoken, And often I
Speaker 1: speak when I would rather be silent. The Jews are
Speaker 1: few in number, but great in the economic and political
Speaker 1: power they have achieved, and their power is dangerous. You,
Speaker 1: my dear Striker, are still young and cocky, and don't
Speaker 1: mince words. I'll but never forget what I'm telling you.
Speaker 1: The Jews have great power, and that power is dangerous,
Speaker 1: very dangerous. Now you might note that this was again,
Speaker 1: this is something he relates this speech, you know, decades later,
Speaker 1: when he's a powerful Nazi, this almost certainly didn't happen.
Speaker 1: Part of how we can tell that is like, at
Speaker 1: no point does anyone stop him from having a career
Speaker 1: as like a speaker and a racist. You know, there
Speaker 1: doesn't seem to be any sort of like pushback that
Speaker 1: he actually encounters here. So that's more interesting because that's
Speaker 1: how he chooses to like kind of frame his uh,
Speaker 1: his upbringing. Later.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, Germany was hardly like a place where
Speaker 4: you couldn't be outspokenly anti semi back then.
Speaker 1: The Kaiser was right, Yeah, like, yeah, I don't think
Speaker 1: nobody's getting like canceled in uh in nineteen ten Germany
Speaker 1: for being a little bit racist, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it was a free for all, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you're you're good, You're you're you're fine doing that. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's like a stand up comedy in the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: you know, like there's no rules, you can go be
Speaker 1: Andrew Dice Clay anyway. So the next year, our boy
Speaker 1: Jewels got married to a woman who had the I've
Speaker 1: never heard this first name before, Kunigund. Yeah, no, I
Speaker 1: haven't heard it before. Interesting name. And her dad she
Speaker 1: comes from. He kind of marries up right, like her
Speaker 1: dad's upper middle class. He's like a business owner, whereas
Speaker 1: his dad's kind of like a teacher, which teachers don't
Speaker 1: make a lot of money then or now. And they,
Speaker 1: you know, are going want to get to work making babies,
Speaker 1: you know, creating more Germans. But before they can, a
Speaker 1: historic event occurs that would drastically increase the need for
Speaker 1: additional German babies, World War One. So that kind of
Speaker 1: gets in the way. He's kind of on the way
Speaker 1: up in his life, right, his career as a teachers
Speaker 1: doing good. He's just gotten married. And then, like a
Speaker 1: lot of young men his age, this is a pretty
Speaker 1: universal experience, the war interrupts things. And this is actually
Speaker 1: one of the areas in which he's really different from Hitler, right,
Speaker 1: because he's doing really well and then the war hits
Speaker 1: and he's got to like disrupt his life to go
Speaker 1: fight in it. Hitler's a fucking disaster, and then World
Speaker 1: War One kind of saves him, right, It gives him
Speaker 1: something to like, uh, focus his life around. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: a shit painter. He's making these terrible little postcards in Munich,
Speaker 1: and then he gets to go, uh do something that
Speaker 1: he has an aptitude for. But that is also like,
Speaker 1: you know, Julius, this is more of a disruption for him.
Speaker 1: But Julius also is one of these guys who finds
Speaker 1: out he's kind of got a knack for this. He's
Speaker 1: one of these fellas you hear about people like this.
Speaker 1: Sometimes there's this difference between garrison soldiers and combat soldiers, right.
Speaker 1: A garrison soldier is like a guy who can handle
Speaker 1: the politics and the sort of like the bullshit that
Speaker 1: you have to eat when you're just like a regular
Speaker 1: soldier at peacetime on base and you've got to deal
Speaker 1: with like, you know, kind of warming your way through
Speaker 1: the hierarchy and sort of like making shit work within
Speaker 1: the kind of bureaucratic organization that is an army, Right,
Speaker 1: But when it comes time to act actually like shoot
Speaker 1: people in a trench, you know, and fight. Different folks
Speaker 1: are good at that, who in a lot of cases
Speaker 1: wouldn't be very good at just like sitting at a
Speaker 1: base at peacetime and dealing with the bureaucracy of the army.
Speaker 1: And Striker is one of those guys, right. He's terrible
Speaker 1: in peacetime as a soldier. His officers like can't get
Speaker 1: him to do anything properly, But as soon as he
Speaker 1: starts getting into gunfights, he's really good at it. And
Speaker 1: he loves combat. He is a frontline trooper, and he's
Speaker 1: one of these guys who war seems to like activate
Speaker 1: something within him. He not only like after his baptism
Speaker 1: of fire. He's not one of these guys who is
Speaker 1: considers him self traumatized by war. He's not one of
Speaker 1: these guys who finds the trenches to be a bad place,
Speaker 1: and in fact, he starts volunteering for more combat duty.
Speaker 1: He's like, as soon as he gets a taste of fighting,
Speaker 1: he's like, I want more of this shit, Like put
Speaker 1: me in coach, I'm ready to go. So he does
Speaker 1: well enough that in nineteen fifteen he gets made an
Speaker 1: officer candidate. You know, in peacetime they're like, this guy
Speaker 1: cannot be given any kind of responsibility, and then at
Speaker 1: war they're like, actually, this guy's exactly the guy, the
Speaker 1: dude we need. Yeah, he has no instinct for self preservation.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen sixteen Romania declares for the Allies. Everyone's
Speaker 1: kind of expecting, you know, in World War there's this
Speaker 1: stalemate at the trenches, and then Romania, who's kind of
Speaker 1: like stuck in Germany's flank if you look on a map,
Speaker 1: is like, we're going with the Allies, and there's this
Speaker 1: big hope on behalf of the Allies that'll it'll cause
Speaker 1: a breakthrough, you know, in this this Steymide situation. It
Speaker 1: does not do that, because the Germans take this really
Speaker 1: tiny chunk of their army and just absolutely pants the
Speaker 1: Roman Romanian military, like within a couple of weeks they've
Speaker 1: conquered the country, and Striker is a part of the
Speaker 1: German Army that gets sort of diverted from the Western
Speaker 1: Front to go take over Romania, which gives him his
Speaker 1: first taste of like comprehensive victory. Right, this is a
Speaker 1: really good moment for the German army. Part of why
Speaker 1: this sort of like we got stabbed in the back
Speaker 1: lost cos myth is going to start up later is
Speaker 1: because a lot of these soldiers they have this victory
Speaker 1: in Romania and then this victory on the Eastern Front
Speaker 1: against Russia, and it doesn't feel to them like they
Speaker 1: could have possibly lost the war later, Right, we were
Speaker 1: just winning everywhere? What happened? Yeah, so you know, Jake
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways are conquering Romania was signing
Speaker 1: the advertisers who support this podcast. They're exactly yeah, it's
Speaker 1: exactly the same. We are the conquering German Imperial Army
Speaker 1: marching into Bucharest to try and take its oil fields.
Speaker 1: But with I don't know, a food box company or something. Anyway,
Speaker 1: here's the ads deal with it. Ah, We're back Jake.
Speaker 1: So nineteen sixteen, he goes into Romania, has a great win,
Speaker 1: and in general, his army career is going good. During
Speaker 1: the war. He has one issue, which is that in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixteen, he assaults an army medic based on some
Speaker 1: stuff he'll do later. I think it might have been
Speaker 1: because the guy was trying to vaccinate him and he
Speaker 1: didn't want that to happen. He's going to publish a
Speaker 1: bunch of vaccine related conspiracy theories later when he gets
Speaker 1: his newspaper. We don't know entirely why he like fights
Speaker 1: with this medic, but I think there's a decent chance
Speaker 1: it's related to that. It's just kind of the only
Speaker 1: recurrent conflict that he has with medical personnel in his life.
Speaker 1: But other than that, his service record is really good.
Speaker 1: By nineteen eighteen, he's back in France. You know, there's
Speaker 1: one last attempt by the Germans to break through the
Speaker 1: enemy lines doesn't quite work out for him. Kaiser abdicates,
Speaker 1: the German militaries demobilized. World War One is over. This
Speaker 1: should have been a good time, because you know, it
Speaker 1: seemed like a bad thing. But as a guy who
Speaker 1: loved the war, Striker does not take this really well.
Speaker 1: And again his perspective is we won every battle. We
Speaker 1: were in you know, when when they declare the armistice,
Speaker 1: I'm still standing on French soil. How could we lose everything?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: How could that be the And you know a lot
Speaker 1: of German soldiers are going to feel yeah, way, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: It's kind of what led well set the groundwork for
Speaker 3: World War Two, right, yeah.
Speaker 1: And I don't know, Jake, this is something I think
Speaker 1: about a lot, like the like my gut, just as
Speaker 1: a person who doesn't like to see people die in
Speaker 1: war is like, well, yeah.
Speaker 3: You're so soft.
Speaker 1: Exactly. Yeah, get more like Striker, Get more like Striker. Well,
Speaker 1: I feel like, you know, if someone had come to
Speaker 1: me in World War One had been like you should
Speaker 1: we do like an armistice with the Germans, yeah, I'd
Speaker 1: be like, yeah, whatever, it stops the killing. This is
Speaker 1: fucking awful. But because of that, the like there's the
Speaker 1: and because like Ludendorf and Hindenberg, who are the generals
Speaker 1: in charge, are able to like they don't want to admit,
Speaker 1: yeah we lost the British and the French and the
Speaker 1: Americans and you know and whatnot. They fought us to
Speaker 1: the point where like we were about to break and
Speaker 1: we had this we had to give up, otherwise the
Speaker 1: entire army would have shattered, you know, which would have
Speaker 1: been a calamity for us. They can't admit that, so
Speaker 1: they're like, no, the government stabbed us in the back.
Speaker 1: We were about to win and then they took it
Speaker 1: from us. And so does that mean like the ethical
Speaker 1: thing would have been like no, no, no, we're not
Speaker 1: negotiating this. We're gonna fight you guys until you break
Speaker 1: and surrender unconditionally, like, which is like what that is
Speaker 1: the that is like a moral question that the leaders
Speaker 1: of the Allied countries take with them into World War Two,
Speaker 1: which is why part of why it's such a fucking
Speaker 1: ugly fight and so much like there's this understanding then
Speaker 1: that like, well now maybe we have to just break
Speaker 1: the fuckers. I don't know, like what moral lesson to
Speaker 1: take out of that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's just like total brutality.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, is that like the justified thing to do?
Speaker 1: Like morally does it save more lives in the long run?
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna guess most people are broadly familiar with,
Speaker 1: like you know what goes down next? In Germany, there's
Speaker 1: this immediate wave of like failed rebellions and pushes on
Speaker 1: the left and right. There's like a number of points
Speaker 1: in which like some right wing or some left wing
Speaker 1: group will try to take over a city or a
Speaker 1: whole region of the country. And you know when this happens,
Speaker 1: when this is like communists or other kinds of leftists
Speaker 1: to try to like overthrow and establish their own sort
Speaker 1: of governments and parts of Germany, the kind of forming
Speaker 1: state winds up relying a lot on sort of ad
Speaker 1: hoc groups of right wing military veterans who form militia
Speaker 1: units and go in and just start killing people, right Like,
Speaker 1: That's that's how some of these things get put down,
Speaker 1: And so you start to get this sort of culture
Speaker 1: of we've got these right wing veterans groups, you know,
Speaker 1: with guns, who are here to like fight the left.
Speaker 1: You know, it really starts as soon as the war ends.
Speaker 1: And obviously alongside this you've got the economy collapsing, prices
Speaker 1: for everything skyrocketing, and this is all put on the
Speaker 1: new democratic government of vymar who has to spend several
Speaker 1: years trying to wrestle Germany into being a vaguely functional state.
Speaker 1: It's a hard gig being a democratic politician in vymar In,
Speaker 1: like nineteen nineteen one of the worst jobs anybody could
Speaker 1: ever get, right, like just trying to trying to make
Speaker 1: Germany work in this period of time. It's a real bummer.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a really interesting period though you don't hear
Speaker 4: oh yeah, enough about like the run up, do you
Speaker 4: know what I mean? And it's really interesting time. I
Speaker 4: mean yeah, like very very early doors chaos.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you have to like have some respect for
Speaker 1: the kind of moral courage, and a lot of them
Speaker 1: get assassinated. Of these early Weimar politicians who are like
Speaker 1: trying to make a because the Czar or not Czar,
Speaker 1: the Kaiser as soon as you know, he loses flees,
Speaker 1: he winds up and fucking Belgium, I think, and these
Speaker 1: generals basically start pretending like, oh, we didn't lose the war.
Speaker 1: It was like and you're you as some like you know,
Speaker 1: elected Social Democratic leader because the Socdems sort of like
Speaker 1: are the first big party in power in Viimar. You're
Speaker 1: like trying to deal with the consequences of all of
Speaker 1: these like shitty Kaiser dudes, like the Kaiser and his
Speaker 1: generals who had just kind of ruined the country and
Speaker 1: then bounced. So I don't know, yeah, it's there's something
Speaker 1: honorable about trying to do that, but it doesn't work,
Speaker 1: you know. Uh, that is the broad story. So Julius
Speaker 1: at this point he had been kind of maybe a
Speaker 1: little bit on the liberal side of things. You know,
Speaker 1: he was certainly not a leftists, but kind of like
Speaker 1: flirting with some center left ideas before World War One.
Speaker 1: But by the time he gets back from the front,
Speaker 1: he is very much into right wing politics.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: A lot of that is there's this this feeling of
Speaker 1: like the brotherhood of the trenches, and the right is
Speaker 1: really successful at sort of talking to these veterans, at
Speaker 1: telling them that like they were betrayed and they were
Speaker 1: betrayed by these social democrats. And so, you know, he
Speaker 1: takes up work as a teacher again, but he also
Speaker 1: joins a local anti Semitic political organization. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like a militia that is blaming a lot of Germany's
Speaker 1: post war problems on the Jews. That's called the Protective
Speaker 1: and Defensive Society. It sounds better in German. Yeah, tons
Speaker 1: of every town's got a bunch of them. Now, Striker
Speaker 1: is still kind of you would say, probably like naive
Speaker 1: enough that he anti Semitic politics are very new to him,
Speaker 1: so he's initially kind of just a spectator. He'll show
Speaker 1: up at these speeches or at these political events. He'll
Speaker 1: listen to speeches by people, and like the folks who
Speaker 1: are speaking at events for the Protective and Defensive Society
Speaker 1: and other kind of anti Semitic political organizations are often
Speaker 1: quoting from and recommending very specific books right and to Striker,
Speaker 1: the most influential of these books, the ones that he
Speaker 1: like buys a copy of and reads and becomes enthralled by,
Speaker 1: is called Handbook of the Jewish Question, and it's by
Speaker 1: a fellow named Theodore Fritch. Now Old Theo was a journalist.
Speaker 1: A lot of the early German anti Semites are journalists, right,
Speaker 1: who in the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds work
Speaker 1: for newspapers or published books that are like quote unquote investigations,
Speaker 1: you know, into various racist conspiracies. An Old Theo he's
Speaker 1: kind of active at the end of the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: you know. And he's basically he's like one generation or
Speaker 1: so earlier than Julie, and he's Prussian. He'd been a
Speaker 1: farmer's kid in the nineteenth century. He's one of these guys,
Speaker 1: like he has seven brothers and sisters, and four of
Speaker 1: them die before they get to adulthood. He winds up
Speaker 1: working in a machine shop as kind of Germany transitions
Speaker 1: to an industrial economy, and in his late twenties he
Speaker 1: saved up enough money that he like he founds a
Speaker 1: publishing firm and they start by making technical manuals, and
Speaker 1: then as soon as they make enough money selling like
Speaker 1: technical manuals to companies, he starts putting out a newsletter
Speaker 1: called Anti Semitic Correspondence. Some great titles in this episode,
Speaker 1: just like racism Letters again, Yeah, quite a title, right there, Frinch, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but they were very much of the show not tell
Speaker 1: you know, sort of Arabat then.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that was more subtle than that, yeah, right, like, yes,
Speaker 5: they hadn't figured out how to like put a shine
Speaker 5: on it yet, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But Fritch is you know, he's a groundbreaking racist, right,
Speaker 1: He's with his first generation of like political anti Semites.
Speaker 1: He loves Friedrich Nietzsche and he actually, once he starts
Speaker 1: putting out his Anti Semitic Correspondence magazine, he sends Nietzsche
Speaker 1: copies every time he puts out a new edition, and
Speaker 1: Nietzsche not a fan of this shit.
Speaker 3: Y Like, for for.
Speaker 1: Months he's just like these letters, like what the fuck?
Speaker 1: Why am I getting this? Did I sign up for
Speaker 1: this when I was drunk or some ship, Like, I'm
Speaker 1: not paying for this.
Speaker 4: SAMI has been like misunderstood by basically everyone ever mine,
Speaker 4: Like every group can just be like, yeah, it's ycha.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 1: Like the shortcut to knowing someone is not talking properly
Speaker 1: about Nietzsche is them saying like I find Nietzsche really inspiring.
Speaker 3: Yeah right, they're doing it wrong. I hope that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And it's it's very funny because Nietzsche eventually gets
Speaker 1: so frustrated at getting all of these fucking letters that
Speaker 1: he responds and he he kind of being Friedrich Nietzsche.
Speaker 1: He responds in this kind of caddy way where he's like,
Speaker 1: thank you for giving me a glance at the muddle
Speaker 1: of principles that lie at the heart of this strange movement.
Speaker 1: Please never send me another fucking letter. I will hurt
Speaker 1: you if you do, like like threatens him basically, like
Speaker 1: it's nice to see how weird you people are. Stop
Speaker 1: fucking talking to me too. Yeah, yeah, that's the right,
Speaker 1: Like he's pretty unequivocal, like fucking stay away from me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he actually, like he wrote quite a lot.
Speaker 4: I think maybe in I forget what maybe the early
Speaker 4: part before he wrote like quite extensively on like really
Speaker 4: being against anti Semitism. It's I remember reading about it,
Speaker 4: and a lot of people will have to be like, well,
Speaker 4: Hitler liked him. It's like, yeah, Hitler like dogs, dogs
Speaker 4: are still good. Yeah, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's it's kind of like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: like we could. I think the Nietzsche of the modern
Speaker 1: day is like, let let let's say Warhammer, right. A
Speaker 1: lot of Nazis into it, a lot of the people
Speaker 1: who write exactly but it's so cool. Yeah, but it's fine. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Fritch wrote Handbook of the Jewish Question, this book
Speaker 1: that our buddy Julius is going to fall in love
Speaker 1: with in eighteen ninety three, which is, you know, if
Speaker 1: you're talking about the Holocaust, you hear the term the
Speaker 1: Jewish Question an awful lot. That word is in use
Speaker 1: way before the Nazis come to power, right, and Handbook
Speaker 1: of the Jewish Question is you would call it like
Speaker 1: a groundbreaking work of racism for its era. Fritch is
Speaker 1: going to say a lot of things in this book
Speaker 1: that become the cornerstone of Nazi politics. He demands a
Speaker 1: return to what he calls traditional peasant values. He rails
Speaker 1: against urbanization. He talks a lot about the superiority of
Speaker 1: the Aryan race. And you know, he also one of
Speaker 1: the things that's interesting about the handbook, there's ways in
Speaker 1: which it kind of reminds me of like certain things
Speaker 1: on the Internet today, and that it's a it's a
Speaker 1: living document. So he doesn't just put out this book
Speaker 1: and like this is the book. It's done. Every like year,
Speaker 1: he'll add more to it. He'll update it when things happen,
Speaker 1: right like as shit happens in the world that he
Speaker 1: thinks plays into these conspiracies, He'll do an update of
Speaker 1: the book. I want to quote from a write up
Speaker 1: by Martin Kitchen in the Journal of Anti Semitism Studies
Speaker 1: describing this book. At the time, sundry financial crises from
Speaker 1: the Berlin Stock Exchange collapse in eighteen seventy three to
Speaker 1: the Great Depression were blamed on Jewish manipulation. Germany's defeat
Speaker 1: in the First World War and the subsequent peace agreements
Speaker 1: were seen as the result of a Franco Jewish conspiracy.
Speaker 1: Germany is presented as the sole stronghold against a world
Speaker 1: Jewish conspiracy, thereby combining radical anti Semitism with a virulent nationalism, which,
Speaker 1: for all its threadbare scholarship and muddled thinking, was to
Speaker 1: provide the foundations of national socialist racial studies. So that's good.
Speaker 4: It's interesting to all that, like all of this shit
Speaker 4: was not just I mean, obviously, but it wasn't just
Speaker 4: this brainchild of Hitler and his goons. Now, it was like, yeah,
Speaker 4: very prevalent from very many different groups.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, And that's how you get as far
Speaker 1: as we can tell, Hitler's radicalization, like him getting too
Speaker 1: because he becomes keyed into anti Semitic politics before he
Speaker 1: gets like kind of explicitly into like actually like right
Speaker 1: wing political stuff. He's brought into that through racism. And
Speaker 1: probably the thing that pills him is these basically pieces
Speaker 1: of books like like Handbook on the Jewish Question, get
Speaker 1: like mimiographed and hand it out on the street, as
Speaker 1: like zines in pre World War One, you know, Germany,
Speaker 1: it really is a lot like like modern zine culture
Speaker 1: right where you just kind of have. You've got some
Speaker 1: like weirdos who get really into you know, racism or whatever.
Speaker 1: It's not always racism, sometimes it's cool shit, but they
Speaker 1: like they'll take clips from books that they like and
Speaker 1: they want other people to read, and they'll they'll sort
Speaker 1: of like copy and paste that sort of stuff into
Speaker 1: pamphlets handed out on the street. And Hitler, who's basically
Speaker 1: he's a hobo right for a decent chunk of time
Speaker 1: before World War One, he's like homeless on the streets
Speaker 1: of Vienna. He'll just pick up these pamphlets that people
Speaker 1: like toss out when they're out like drinking or stuff.
Speaker 1: You know, they'll hand him out at meetings and then
Speaker 1: he'll like pick them up in the trash, and because
Speaker 1: he's like a doesn't have a whole lot else to do,
Speaker 1: he'll like read them, and then when he falls in
Speaker 1: love with them, he'll like read them out to folks
Speaker 1: at these homeless hostels that he's staying at a bunch
Speaker 1: of times.
Speaker 4: Well imagine you know, you're homeless and you sat in
Speaker 4: the shelter there with your pennies and Hitler comes in like.
Speaker 1: Hey, guys, I have enough problems without a Hitler.
Speaker 4: Right, Like, the reason you're here it's not because of this,
Speaker 4: it's because oh my god, yeah it doesn't sound good.
Speaker 4: But I mean my point was that, like sometimes you
Speaker 4: see people be like, oh well it was it was
Speaker 4: just Hitler's charisma that brought people through. I mean, I
Speaker 4: think Hiller's charisma really helped push people toency. But these
Speaker 4: ideas were very much there, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And that's that's one of the things where like,
Speaker 1: obviously the fact that Hitler is Hitler, that he has
Speaker 1: the skills and the talents that he has as a
Speaker 1: plays a role in everything. But like Germany, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: and Striker is kind of in the same position Hitler
Speaker 1: is at this point where like they are both nineteen nineteen,
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty, starting to give kind of like speeches, get
Speaker 1: into politics, and they're both like showing an aptitude for
Speaker 1: riling people up, for building movements kind of around themselves.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I'm getting ahead of myself. So Julius falls
Speaker 1: in love with this racist book and it's one of
Speaker 1: this This seems to have been the book that kind
Speaker 1: of from this point on, he's not just sort of
Speaker 1: a casual normal anti Semite. He's like a dedicated one
Speaker 1: political anti Semitism becomes sort of the center of his worldview.
Speaker 1: So now that he's been sort of pilled, you might say,
Speaker 1: he returns to public speaking. He starts showing up first.
Speaker 1: And this is what's interesting to me. He doesn't start
Speaker 1: this new stage of his speaking career by like finding
Speaker 1: a party and then going to like speak at their rallies,
Speaker 1: kind of working his way up from inside a political
Speaker 1: party as a speaker. He starts showing up at left
Speaker 1: wing political rallies and heckling the speakers there and getting
Speaker 1: into arguments with them in public. Right, And this is
Speaker 1: what kind of makes him famous in Nuremberg, Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is not an unfamiliar tactic today. Right, Like he's
Speaker 1: a troll, you know, he's very consciously using that as
Speaker 1: a tactic in order to build a reputation for himself.
Speaker 1: Julius is not only a fun speaker, but he's going
Speaker 1: to like show up wherever, you know, these different leftist
Speaker 1: parties are speaking, and he's going to like hassle their speakers,
Speaker 1: he's going to argue with them. So maybe you show
Speaker 1: up just to watch Julius like make fun of this guy,
Speaker 1: just to watch him get into scraps. You know, a
Speaker 1: lot of times he'll start, it'll start as an argument
Speaker 1: between him and this guy, and then there will be
Speaker 1: a big because these are at bars, there will be
Speaker 1: a big bar brawl, right, so it's like kind of
Speaker 1: a fun night. Hey, let's you know, Julius is going
Speaker 1: to be heckling this guy down at the whatever bar.
Speaker 1: Let's all show up, you know, we'll we'll cheer I'm on,
Speaker 1: and then we'll get into a scrap with the social
Speaker 1: Democrats or the communists or whatever.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: That's kind of well, for every group that does that,
Speaker 4: there's going to be a couple that go, actually, this
Speaker 4: guy's onto something exactly.
Speaker 3: Shit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah too, because like again, people, this is not
Speaker 1: a period in which things have solidified. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of folks who go from communists to fascist or fascist
Speaker 1: to communist during this sort of period of time because
Speaker 1: they all kind of feel, well, what we're doing, like
Speaker 1: the government isn't working right, but I don't know what,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm on board with I can be convinced.
Speaker 1: And you know, Julius by being this really kind of
Speaker 1: charismatic guy who's just sort of like making fun of
Speaker 1: speakers who are less apt than he is at commanding
Speaker 1: a room. He's building a following for himself, and he's
Speaker 1: building support for his kind of politics in Nuremberg, so yeah,
Speaker 1: that's cool. He becomes basically a local celebrity doing this,
Speaker 1: and he's like, you know, he's a trigger the Libs
Speaker 1: kind of guy. That's how he starts out. Starts out,
Speaker 1: and he decides at a certain point once he's sort
Speaker 1: of become this guy that people people will show up
Speaker 1: at other political party events just to see Julius. When
Speaker 1: he feels like he's got enough of a following, he announces,
Speaker 1: he puts out like flyers and stuff that he's going
Speaker 1: to be giving a dedicated speech himself. And at this
Speaker 1: speech that he does thousands, by the way, two to
Speaker 1: four thousand something like that, people show up just to
Speaker 1: see him give this speech, he announces that he's become
Speaker 1: a converted political anti Semite. This causes a bunch of
Speaker 1: right wing political parties to start vuying for his membership
Speaker 1: because he's a free agent. Right This is kind of
Speaker 1: like you've I don't know, I don't know about baseball
Speaker 1: to draw a baseball comparison here, but you can you
Speaker 1: can do it at home. He's this like he's really good.
Speaker 1: He's and everybody is kind of like, if we can
Speaker 1: get Julius, you know, that might be the thing that
Speaker 1: makes our party go national. You know, we get this
Speaker 1: guy on our team. Yeah, he's the live wire. Yeah
Speaker 1: he's still he's the straw that stirs the drink. Yeah exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's the he's the he's the fucking messy of racism.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: So, of all these parties kind of vying for his membership,
Speaker 1: the one he picks is the German Socialist Party, which,
Speaker 1: despite its name, the German Socialist Party is a conservative party,
Speaker 1: and they're they're into what are called Volcish, which is
Speaker 1: like folk yeah, values, right, and most the DSP is
Speaker 1: not anti Semitism is not a core plank of the
Speaker 1: German Socialist Party, but most members are anti Semitic, and
Speaker 1: so while the party doesn't have a platform on the
Speaker 1: Jewish question, Striker feels like, well, I can get that added, right,
Speaker 1: this is a place where I can grow. I can
Speaker 1: kind of remake this party in my image in some ways.
Speaker 1: So he helps them run a cast of candidates in
Speaker 1: that year's election. They don't do very well. They get
Speaker 1: basically zero votes nationally and only like one percent to Nuremberg.
Speaker 1: But Striker kind of crucially doesn't give up. He's sort
Speaker 1: of analyzes accurately what the weakness of the DSP is
Speaker 1: and he decides that it's that they do not have
Speaker 1: a dedicated propaganda arm. And in the Vimar era, the
Speaker 1: only way to make a propaganda arm is to establish
Speaker 1: a newspaper. And I want to talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about what a newspaper is in this period of time,
Speaker 1: because today you hear a newspaper, you think like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's a publication that tells you either locally or nationally
Speaker 1: or internationally the news, like what's going on, and you
Speaker 1: know you're gonna get some columns on culture and stuff.
Speaker 1: When we think about newspapers in vymar Germany, it's probably
Speaker 1: better to see them as like social media, right, Like
Speaker 1: a newspaper is more like for a political party especially,
Speaker 1: it's more like how today if you're running a political
Speaker 1: party or political advocacy group, your your organization is going
Speaker 1: to have They're going to have a YouTube channel maybe
Speaker 1: where they have some creators put out videos. They're going
Speaker 1: to have like a Twitter account. That is kind of
Speaker 1: how newspapers work in Vimar and I you know, one
Speaker 1: of the things that kind of highlights this is that
Speaker 1: when Julius gets more famous, multiple left wing groups will
Speaker 1: start newspapers. Just then the whole purpose of the newspaper
Speaker 1: is updating folks on Julius Striker and attacking him right,
Speaker 1: sort of in the same way that like you'll have
Speaker 1: a Twitter account that's just like tracking what this one
Speaker 1: group of right wingers are doing, or this like one
Speaker 1: political folk that people don't like, you know, it'll be
Speaker 1: dedicated to them. You know, You've got a whole account
Speaker 1: that's just people covering Trump's legal you know, woes on
Speaker 1: Twitter or whatever. That's the time to how newspapers work.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's actually a really good way of putting it.
Speaker 4: One I've never really thought about before. I read a
Speaker 4: while ago like history of like newspaper news media, and yeah,
Speaker 4: it was it's ironic now that like everyone has a
Speaker 4: you know, slight political leaning or a strong political leaning
Speaker 4: or whatever. It's ironic that like, yeah, it's kind of
Speaker 4: not really changed in that respect. Yeah, what I'm saying,
Speaker 4: obviously it's different now, but it started like that and
Speaker 4: it's almost come full Sirkuena with all this chaos that
Speaker 4: we're seeing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's fascinating in that huh. Yeah, and there
Speaker 1: are you know. I'm actually just going to quote from
Speaker 1: a write up by the US Holocaust Museum on the
Speaker 1: state of the news media in Weimar, Germany. Over forty
Speaker 1: seven hundred daily and weekly newspapers were published annually in Germany,
Speaker 1: more newspapers than in any other industrialized nation, with a
Speaker 1: total circulation of twenty five million. Although Berlin was the
Speaker 1: press capital, small town presses dominated newspapers circulation. Eighty one
Speaker 1: percent of all German newspapers are locally owned. And when
Speaker 1: we talk about these these local newspapers, that's what we're
Speaker 1: talking about is shit like these little papers where it's
Speaker 1: like I'm going to make a newspaper I don't like
Speaker 1: this guy. I'm going to make a newspaper dedicated to
Speaker 1: this guy I hate, you know, Like it's that kind
Speaker 1: of shit a lot of the time. So basically, while
Speaker 1: the most famous papers are newspapers that are like you know,
Speaker 1: traditional newspapers or magazines or whatever, the majority of papers,
Speaker 1: by number are just like some weirdo with a very
Speaker 1: specific acts to grind in some cases, this again means like, yeah,
Speaker 1: Striker's going to do this right, Like this is what
Speaker 1: he decides his party's missing. So he establishes his first newspaper.
Speaker 1: It's called Deutsche Socialist, you know, German Socialists, because that's
Speaker 1: the name of the party. And he had been kind
Speaker 1: of he used their funding to start this newspaper, and
Speaker 1: they wanted a traditional political party paper. But Julius immediately
Speaker 1: goes in his own direction. And I'm going to quote
Speaker 1: from his biographer Randall bite Work here. His goal was
Speaker 1: to provide short articles in simple language that explained to
Speaker 1: a popular audience the intricacies of politics and economics. As
Speaker 1: he reported to the August nineteen twenty dsp National Meeting, gentlemen,
Speaker 1: let us not forget that we want to speak primarily
Speaker 1: to the workers. Brevity is the seasoning. The contents must
Speaker 1: have a popular style. His lead article in newspaper's first
Speaker 1: issue is a good example of his early writing. Addressed
Speaker 1: to communists and socialists, It began by saluting them as brothers. Yes,
Speaker 1: you are brothers, German mothers boor you wan German soil
Speaker 1: the same German blas blood flows in our veins. We
Speaker 1: and you have nothing to lose but everything to gain.
Speaker 1: We have the same desire to escape our present misery
Speaker 1: as fast as possible. We want the same solutions. We
Speaker 1: too want our part of German soil, a small lot
Speaker 1: with a small garden, just like so many others of
Speaker 1: our race. It is the right of being born a German,
Speaker 1: and we want to be free of the yousurious yoke
Speaker 1: of big money. Later in the article, Striker turned to
Speaker 1: the Jews. Do you really think the Rothschilds, Mendelssohns, black Rotors,
Speaker 1: war Burgs and Cones worry about your poverty. As long
Speaker 1: as the blood brothers of the Mendelssohns and the blike
Speaker 1: Rotors and the Cones are your leaders, As long as
Speaker 1: your party officials are Jewish lackeys, you will be no
Speaker 1: threat to the big money men. As long as you
Speaker 1: yourself do not lead the way, and as long as
Speaker 1: the black shadow of foreign blood is behind you, you
Speaker 1: will be betrayed and deceived. The black shadow cares for itself,
Speaker 1: not for you. And he's talking about there is like
Speaker 1: this idea that the German army had been betrayed right
Speaker 1: by Jewish people who are foreigners. They're not really oil
Speaker 1: to the state. That's like what he's sort of saying.
Speaker 1: The black's the black shadow, you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, ritick really is not changed, not much. No, if
Speaker 4: you think about it, if you if you're talking about
Speaker 4: people that are like pedaling.
Speaker 1: Hate, yeah, I guess maybe it never needs to, right,
Speaker 1: like maybe yeah, yeah, yeah, it's maybe just like the
Speaker 1: same thing when hate's gonna work, it always kind of
Speaker 1: works the same way.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I mean that's as on the nose as
Speaker 4: like an out and out modern Danio Nazi.
Speaker 1: I guess it's absolutely Yeah. I obviously they're you know,
Speaker 1: following in his footsteps, but uh, you know whose footsteps
Speaker 1: we're following in today? The sponsors No, no, no, the
Speaker 1: blue apron and and and shit, right, Sophie said, yeah,
Speaker 1: who we're getting money from today?
Speaker 2: We're sponsored by HelloFresh. But yeah, close enough.
Speaker 1: We are back, uh, having a good time talking about
Speaker 1: Julius Striker. So Striker's paper starts to do pretty well.
Speaker 1: It's helping to build a following for the DSP's who's
Speaker 1: not a big party at this point. But the leaders
Speaker 1: of the party are kind of a little worried by
Speaker 1: by this newspaper because for one thing, They're not as
Speaker 1: motivated by anti Semitism as Julius is, so they try
Speaker 1: to rain him in, right. And as soon as they
Speaker 1: try to be like, hey, Julius, you know, maybe maybe
Speaker 1: we focus a little bit more on you know, politics
Speaker 1: and a little bit less on racism, they learned the
Speaker 1: thing that all of these Catholic priests and military officers
Speaker 1: had learned a few years earlier, which is that Julius
Speaker 1: Striker does not take direction.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: You try to tell this guy to do things, and
Speaker 1: it just pisses him off. And as soon as they
Speaker 1: try to, like, you know, force him to make changes,
Speaker 1: they realize that even though he used their money to
Speaker 1: start this paper, it's his. It's legally his personal property. Right,
Speaker 1: So they actually can't. Right, It's like he started the YouTube,
Speaker 1: accare right, Like, yeah, exactly, he's not. He has a
Speaker 1: certain kind of cunning, right, Yes. So this becomes more
Speaker 1: of a problem as his conspiratorial view of the world
Speaker 1: expands to include the Jesuits, who he sees as a
Speaker 1: shadowy force running world politics. Again, Nuremberg is a pretty
Speaker 1: heavily Catholic town and or I mean, it's not majority
Speaker 1: Catholic Bavaria is a lot of Catholics, and Catholics are
Speaker 1: kind of like a lot of the core membership of
Speaker 1: the DSP, and they start leaving, you know, because Catholics
Speaker 1: and Jesuits are, you know, the same thing. And it
Speaker 1: pisses them off that he's like accusing these people who
Speaker 1: they respect as being in league with this sort of
Speaker 1: like grand conspiracy. Some like Catholic members of the DSP
Speaker 1: start sending striker letters basically being like, hey, would you
Speaker 1: stop like lumping us all in and maybe maybe we
Speaker 1: don't focus as much as on racism because I might
Speaker 1: not be as to that. And he like, he writes,
Speaker 1: this is a very modern thing. He like starts posting
Speaker 1: pieces of their letters in a column that he writes
Speaker 1: for the newspaper, making the screen. Yeah right, yeah, he's
Speaker 1: doing the way it's very modern.
Speaker 3: Yeah that's crazy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's wild.
Speaker 3: Right, So what.
Speaker 4: Exactly to do that than like screenshow Like that's bad enough,
Speaker 4: But to be like now I'm going to cut.
Speaker 1: This, it's also like you have to admit though, like
Speaker 1: that's so far ahead of the time, right, he is
Speaker 1: decades ahead of everyone else, an innovator of just being
Speaker 1: horrible Yeah, so conflicts he starts. You know, he keeps
Speaker 1: getting in a conflict. He's always in conflict with the
Speaker 1: organizers of his parties, you know, because he's his loose cannon.
Speaker 1: But they also need him because he brings crowds. You know,
Speaker 1: he's not just making this newspaper, but when he shows up,
Speaker 1: people show up to listen to him speak who probably
Speaker 1: wouldn't show up to a party meeting otherwise. So, you know,
Speaker 1: the paper grows to a few thousand subscribers, and Julius
Speaker 1: is able to keep his newspaper running at a fraction
Speaker 1: of the cost that a normal publisher would have required
Speaker 1: because he has a secret, which is that he does
Speaker 1: not pay for his newspaper to be printed. He will
Speaker 1: find a new printer, He'll have them print a couple
Speaker 1: of episodes or issues and just be like, yeah, the
Speaker 1: money's coming, the money's coming. The just front us this week, right,
Speaker 1: then we'll pay you back front us this week. And
Speaker 1: then as soon as he hits the point where like
Speaker 1: they're not gonna publish any more papers, he bounces without
Speaker 1: ever having paid his debts, and he finds a new publisher.
Speaker 3: Wow, things that must have been so easy. Buck in
Speaker 3: the diard.
Speaker 1: Yeah there's no internet, right, just.
Speaker 4: Like yeah, I'm gone, Yeah, I'm the wind baby.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what are you going to do?
Speaker 3: Send a horse? Yeah.
Speaker 1: So nineteen twenty one, he's kind of sandwiched between this
Speaker 1: conservative party that needs him but is uncomfortable with how
Speaker 1: loudly he says the quiet parts, and you know, that's
Speaker 1: a tough place to be in. But luckily for him
Speaker 1: and unfortunately for everyone else in Europe, the leaders of
Speaker 1: the DSP are also sort of desperate to find a
Speaker 1: way to make themselves more electorally viable. And because even
Speaker 1: with Striker's help, they're not succeeding at becoming like a
Speaker 1: national movement, they decide to start working with another political
Speaker 1: party and the interests of like kind of merging together
Speaker 1: and seeing if that can give them sort of the
Speaker 1: oomph that they need to go national. And the party
Speaker 1: that the German Socialist Party starts talking with about a
Speaker 1: merger is a Munich based right wing party called the
Speaker 1: German Workers Party. Right, so you've got the socialists and
Speaker 1: the workers who are looking at merging together to make
Speaker 1: us socialist workers a national socialist workers party, right, you
Speaker 1: might call it. This is where we get that right.
Speaker 1: The Nazi Party, the National Socialist German Workers Party comes
Speaker 1: out of the German Socialist Party and the German Workers
Speaker 1: Party merging together. Right, This is this is the the
Speaker 1: Reese's pieces that leads us to the Nazis. So in
Speaker 1: May of nineteen twenty one, as sort of the leadership
Speaker 1: of these two groups are talking about merging, one member
Speaker 1: of the German Workers Party reaches out to Striker directly
Speaker 1: and it's like, hey, we got this dude named Hitler.
Speaker 1: He's kind of uru, right, He's our guy who gives speeches.
Speaker 1: He's the guy people really like to follow. And you know,
Speaker 1: Hitler's interested in this you know, absorbing thing. But like,
Speaker 1: we have some issues with like the folks who are
Speaker 1: running our party because Hitler's not This is again Hitler
Speaker 1: in this period is kind of in a similar situation
Speaker 1: to Julius, where the German Workers Party is not founded
Speaker 1: by Hitler. Right, He's actually brought in as a spy
Speaker 1: by the army, like right after the war. He avoids
Speaker 1: getting demobilized and winding up without an income by staying
Speaker 1: in the army, and the thing the army has him
Speaker 1: do is like spy on right wing political parties in Munich,
Speaker 1: and so he shows up at his first German Workers
Speaker 1: Party meeting basically to like see if their plan to
Speaker 1: overthrow the government, and then he gets angry and he
Speaker 1: starts like getting into arguments and he gives a speech
Speaker 1: and people are like, you're actually really good at talking. Hitler,
Speaker 1: And he's similar to Striker in that the dudes who
Speaker 1: had founded the German Workers Party start to have issues
Speaker 1: with him, where they're like, this guy's trying to make
Speaker 1: our party all about himself and like the things that
Speaker 1: we got into are kind of getting lost, and he's
Speaker 1: he's kind of a tyrant, right, And so they're part
Speaker 1: of what the German Workers Party is hoping is that
Speaker 1: by merging with the German Socialist Party they can kind
Speaker 1: of marginalize Hitler, right, they can they can take, you know,
Speaker 1: push him off to the side and just use him
Speaker 1: for what they think he's good for without letting him
Speaker 1: run everything. And the German Socialist Party is hoping to
Speaker 1: do the same thing with Striker, Right, they're both like
Speaker 1: mirrors of each other in this really weird way, right,
Speaker 1: And so, yeah, Hitler is not the kind of dude
Speaker 1: who's going let this happen right, Like he is, he
Speaker 1: has these kind of like honed political instincts, and he sees, well,
Speaker 1: these dudes are trying to edge me out of control
Speaker 1: of the party, right, that's why they want to do this.
Speaker 1: So instead of just going ahead with the merger to
Speaker 1: the German Socialist Party, he resigns from the German Workers
Speaker 1: Party in July of nineteen twenty one. And this is
Speaker 1: he resigns it because the DAP and the DSP leadership
Speaker 1: have worked out an agreement that would give them sort
Speaker 1: of power over the fewer in the new merged political party.
Speaker 1: And Hitler's like, look, I'll take my followers and my
Speaker 1: skill for speaking and I'll go somewhere else. I'll make
Speaker 1: a new party, I'll join another party, and like I'll
Speaker 1: fucking crush you guys, Like, that's the option. Do you
Speaker 1: want to try to like do this without me, or
Speaker 1: do you want to let me back in and give
Speaker 1: me total control? That's the that's the ultimatum he gives them.
Speaker 1: And the leaders of the German Workers Party kind of fold.
Speaker 1: You know, they're like well as much which we didn't
Speaker 1: want him to be in total control. None of us
Speaker 1: know how to like get a following without him, like
Speaker 1: he's kind of the primary appeal of our party. So
Speaker 1: they let him back in and they make him the
Speaker 1: center of the new German Workers Party, which then merges
Speaker 1: with the German Socialist Party. And that is how Adolf
Speaker 1: Hitler becomes for the first time. You know Hitler, right,
Speaker 1: this is that's where that comes from.
Speaker 3: He was like the original influencer basically.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and yeah. So one of Striker's friends, while
Speaker 1: this is all going down, sends him a warning letter
Speaker 1: being like, hey guys, or hey hey Julius. You know,
Speaker 1: Hitler won his power struggle over with the DAP, and
Speaker 1: they're about to merge with our party, and our leaders
Speaker 1: are doing it because they don't like you. They want
Speaker 1: a guy who can do what you do, who can
Speaker 1: bring in you know, followers and stuff, who can like
Speaker 1: give these speeches that attract an audience, and they feel
Speaker 1: like backing Hitler will let us force you out of
Speaker 1: the party. So Striker, when he hears that just go ahead,
Speaker 1: goes ahead and leaves the German Socialist Party. Part of
Speaker 1: why he does this is because his friend, a guy
Speaker 1: named Otto Dickle, has formed a breakaway organization called the
Speaker 1: German Working Community, and the idea behind the German Working
Speaker 1: Community is it's like supposed to be the u win
Speaker 1: of like anti Semitic parties, where that we're supposed to
Speaker 1: be this over organization and all the right wing parties
Speaker 1: can organize with us to get their anti Semitic policies
Speaker 1: in order. It's all very messy. Dickle, the guy who
Speaker 1: forms this group, is a really fascinating early German fascist.
Speaker 1: People don't talk about him a lot anymore, but he's
Speaker 1: really interesting. In the nineteen thirties, he's kind of this
Speaker 1: like proto libertarian, like from this point where he's sort
Speaker 1: of like similar to a lot of the early Nazis,
Speaker 1: he's going to become like a lasi faire capitalist. But
Speaker 1: in nineteen twenty one he's very much in line with
Speaker 1: the kind of shit Hitler and Striker are selling. And
Speaker 1: he writes this book called Resurgence of the West, which
Speaker 1: is interesting in part because it sort of predicts the
Speaker 1: war that Hitler is going to unleash a few years
Speaker 1: later on continental Europe. And I'm going to quote from
Speaker 1: that book now because it's interesting how much Dickle sort
Speaker 1: of sees coming many a time acquaintances.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, it's what dickus seas.
Speaker 3: Come on, man.
Speaker 1: No see, I'm so mature that I didn't even I
Speaker 1: didn't even notice the come down.
Speaker 3: Sorry, sorry to no No.
Speaker 1: Many a time acquaintances have told me that I see
Speaker 1: the world differently from them. That is true, who sees
Speaker 1: it correctly? Men of science, with their mechanistic thinking will
Speaker 1: certainly attack me, will carp and criticize. We'll discover some
Speaker 1: errors and ridicule me. Let them. But if in the
Speaker 1: immediate future, perhaps even before this book is published, events
Speaker 1: take place in Russia as I have foretold, If social
Speaker 1: ferment begins in France, which is heading for the most
Speaker 1: uncompromising imperialism, and as I fear in England too, if
Speaker 1: the German people, overwhelmed by despair, is gripped by the
Speaker 1: irresistible force of national resurgence, then I can only wish
Speaker 1: it be men who see his eye. So men who
Speaker 1: comprehend the meaning of the World War and of the
Speaker 1: contemporary events through their bold action, and can create a
Speaker 1: free German people on its own soil. So you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of folks who sort of see where
Speaker 1: the winds are blowing or at least are hoping to
Speaker 1: help blow the wind in that direction. And Dickle's one
Speaker 1: of them. And Dickle, you know, for this this German
Speaker 1: anti Semitic sort of un that he's going to create,
Speaker 1: he picks as a logo for it, a little thing
Speaker 1: you might recognize as the swastika. Now this is not
Speaker 1: a weird thing. At the time. Knowledge of the swastika
Speaker 1: had come to Germany primarily through the work of a
Speaker 1: bumbling archaeologist named Heinrich Schleimann, who is the He's the
Speaker 1: guy who like finds Troy by sort of destroying most
Speaker 1: of the artifacts of Troy because he doesn't realize initially
Speaker 1: where he's digging and like what he's churning through to
Speaker 1: get to what he thinks is the ruins of Troy.
Speaker 1: But some of the stuff that he does found find
Speaker 1: from Troy is like pottery and shit that's like covered
Speaker 1: in swastikas. Right now, swastika is We're not going to
Speaker 1: get into the history of the swastika yet, although I
Speaker 1: think I'll probably do an episode on that, but like
Speaker 1: maybe the oldest thing that people have ever drawn that's
Speaker 1: like not a super basic shape. It occurs all over
Speaker 1: the world. There are swastikas all throughout, like ancient you know, India.
Speaker 1: The swastika goes back and I think some of the
Speaker 1: oldest ones in Europe are like in Ukraine they found
Speaker 1: swastikas that are fifteen thousand years old. The Navajo people
Speaker 1: in the American Southwest have been using swastikas for again,
Speaker 1: god knows how long, all sorts of different things. Actually,
Speaker 1: it's interesting. In nineteen forty, when like we start gearing
Speaker 1: up for World War two, the Navajo and a couple
Speaker 1: of other Indigenous American tribes have a meeting and like
Speaker 1: announce that we're giving up the swastika, this like ancient
Speaker 1: religious symbol for us as a result of how the
Speaker 1: Nazis have polluted it, which is fat That's such like
Speaker 1: a strange because there's nothing wrong with the swastika inherently, right, Like,
Speaker 1: you know, there's nothing like racist about the fact that
Speaker 1: the Navajo were like putting this in stuff, you know,
Speaker 1: God knows how many thousands of years back.
Speaker 3: Right they were like one day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, one day, this ship hit in Germany.
Speaker 4: But yeah, it's like there's a famous far I can't
Speaker 4: remember where it is, but it's before Hitler, and there's
Speaker 4: like this a girl's like hockey team like that, you know,
Speaker 4: like a young girls they're like ten, and on the
Speaker 4: front of all that jump puts, they've got this huge swastika. Yeah,
Speaker 4: without context, it's like Jesus Christ, what's that? But yeah,
Speaker 4: it was quite Yeah, like you said it was, it
Speaker 4: was a pretty common symbol.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean the Girls Club, which is what you're
Speaker 1: talking about, is like this large organization for young girls
Speaker 1: in the US. There, their magazine, one of the most
Speaker 1: popular women's magazines in the United States, is called the Swastika.
Speaker 1: Like it's just everywhere you know, up there's all these
Speaker 1: wild stories too, of like Americans in kind of the
Speaker 1: twenties and thirties when there's all the street fighting between
Speaker 1: Nazis and communists, like American journalists sparticularly like women journalists
Speaker 1: who will like come to Germany to report on the
Speaker 1: unrest and they'll have like a swastika ring or a necklace,
Speaker 1: and like some communists that they're like you know, talking with,
Speaker 1: will be like you might not want to wear that.
Speaker 1: You're like, that means a real different thing.
Speaker 3: To es now, same thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's very awkward, but it's not weird, right that
Speaker 1: this dude Dickle adopts the swastika. This is starting to
Speaker 1: happen all throughout you know, Germany. It's happened with the
Speaker 1: Nazi Party and stuff. I think it actually goes back
Speaker 1: a bit further than that too, because I think the
Speaker 1: first right wing militants to wear the swastikas are in
Speaker 1: nineteen nineteen. One of these early anti communist veterans militias
Speaker 1: have swastik but that is because it like this is
Speaker 1: also interesting in World War One there are there are
Speaker 1: US military units and German military units with swastikas, Like
Speaker 1: theoretically who might have fought each other both under the
Speaker 1: swastika just because it's like a good luck symbol. Weird stuff,
Speaker 1: But yeah, the the kind of the the first Nazi
Speaker 1: or fascist, i should say, thought leader to start using
Speaker 1: the swastika was the head of an organization called the
Speaker 1: Wotan Lodge. And the Wotan Lodge is this early German
Speaker 1: nationalist secret society. It starts before World War One, and
Speaker 1: one of the guys who runs it is our friend
Speaker 1: Theodore Fritch. Right, Theodore Fritch is a very you know,
Speaker 1: he's he's he's the kind of fascist nerd that still existed.
Speaker 1: That his pseudonym is Thor, Like, that's the name that
Speaker 1: Fritch writes on for under for his like Wotan Lodge,
Speaker 1: you know, columns and stuff.
Speaker 3: Wotan shit has just been cringe from day one there.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, from the fucking jump right, and you know,
Speaker 1: speaking of how crins they are. The thing that the
Speaker 1: Wotanists do is they dress up like knights and vikings,
Speaker 1: they wear like horned helmets, they carry out these candlelit ceremonies.
Speaker 1: Well they're where they'll like march in the shape of
Speaker 1: a swastika, and a lot of like Nazi rituals get
Speaker 1: based on this stuff. Because after World War One, the
Speaker 1: Wotan Lodge gets renamed to the Tulas Society. Right, these
Speaker 1: are the bad guys from hell Boy, you know if
Speaker 1: you've seen the hell Boy movie. Yeah yeah, and a
Speaker 1: lot of these guys become some of the first Nazis.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen eighteen, control of the Tullas Society passes
Speaker 1: from Fritch to a dude named Baron Rudolph von Sebatandorf. Now,
Speaker 1: first off, that's his like fascist and name, Baron Rudolph
Speaker 1: bon sabatandor Von.
Speaker 3: Like, wo, was he born like Rhodesia.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like that's a guy. Indiana Jones punches. That is
Speaker 1: like a stereotypical Nazi name, Like, yeah, well it's it's
Speaker 1: part of why it's stereotypical, is that is not at
Speaker 1: all his real name. So oh right, yeah, that's like
Speaker 1: yeah Vaughan. Obviously he's calling himself a baron. Vaughn is
Speaker 1: like a signifier in Old Germany that you're a noble. Right,
Speaker 1: The actual guy who calls himself Baron Vaughan Sebotandorf is
Speaker 1: not a noble of any kind. He was born Adam Glower.
Speaker 1: He's the uh right, which is.
Speaker 3: I barely would go with the Vaughan name then Marcelfa.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a much cooler name. Yeah, And rather than
Speaker 1: being a baron, he is the son of a train engineer.
Speaker 1: He's got kind of this weird life. As a young adult,
Speaker 1: he like moves to Turkey, he becomes an Ottoman citizen,
Speaker 1: and like, when he becomes an Ottoman citizen, he like
Speaker 1: lies and tells them that my name is Baron Heinrich Subotandorf,
Speaker 1: and the Turks are like, yeah, I guess if you
Speaker 1: want to. So he he fights for the Ottomans in
Speaker 1: the First Balkan War and then he returns to Germany
Speaker 1: to become a wizard and a fascist. And he is
Speaker 1: like he's in a like I said, he's a wizard,
Speaker 1: he's an ocultist. You know, he's into this. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: like a he's like an ocult guy. He's doing like
Speaker 1: magical rituals. And he's also like a Nazi racist. You know,
Speaker 1: there's a few of these guys. That's a big thing
Speaker 1: for the Tulist society. So yeah, he's like pretend noble
Speaker 1: who makes himself into like an occult figure on the far.
Speaker 4: Right' it's funny like Viking stuff. If you're a Viking
Speaker 4: and you're actually doing that, like the Viking ship like
Speaker 4: they did. Yeah, and you look like a Viking, you're
Speaker 4: coolest fuck right. Any time after that that you dress
Speaker 4: like a Viking, it's like the cringiest thing.
Speaker 3: It's weird. It's one or the other, you know what.
Speaker 1: Yah, there is no like, there's no like medium speed
Speaker 1: for those, there's no middle of the road king.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they are the coolest dude ever or they need
Speaker 1: to be tossed into the ocean.
Speaker 4: Yeah, not that, like you know, pillage and mud of
Speaker 4: the Vikings did was cool, but they look cool, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think can be cool and still bad. It's like pirates.
Speaker 1: Pirates are cool. Didn't always do good stuff, but always cool.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, yeah, I mean Vincent from Biker Mice. Oh
Speaker 4: yeah yeahh bad but cool. Bad but cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So in the In a book called The Swastika Symbol
Speaker 1: Beyond Redemption, author and historian Stephen Heller writes that Subatandorf,
Speaker 1: as the new leader of the Tula Society, quote pledged
Speaker 1: his loyalty to Germany, the swastika and destruction of the enemy.
Speaker 1: In one of his speeches, he introduced an additional symbolic
Speaker 1: icon to the language of Volkish occultism, the r Run,
Speaker 1: which signifies Aryan primal fire, the son and the Eagle.
Speaker 1: And the eagle, he announced, is the symbol of the Aryans.
Speaker 1: In order to depict the eagle's capacity for self immolation
Speaker 1: by fire, it is colored red. From today on, our
Speaker 1: symbol is the red eagle, which warns us that we
Speaker 1: must die in order to live. So Subotandorf also the
Speaker 1: other thing that he brings in that you're going to
Speaker 1: recognize is this very particular kind of like straight armed
Speaker 1: salute called the Zighil, which is going to become the
Speaker 1: primary Nazi salute. And he is also Subotanorf, is the
Speaker 1: guy the primary idea that is noteworthy that he comes
Speaker 1: up with. It's called the feurer Prinzip, which is the
Speaker 1: leader principle or leader cult, which is the idea that
Speaker 1: if we are going to have a successful right wing party,
Speaker 1: anti democratic party in this country, it needs to be
Speaker 1: bound to a single leader almost like a religion, right,
Speaker 1: like a messiah, you know. And the thing Subotanorf phrases it,
Speaker 1: calls it a messiah. He's like, we are waiting for
Speaker 1: We on the German right are waiting for our messiah.
Speaker 1: So all of these folks. Part of why these parties
Speaker 1: they don't like Striker, they don't really like Hitler the leadership,
Speaker 1: but they can't get rid of them, right, is because
Speaker 1: there's this building sense all throughout the twenties in German
Speaker 1: right wing politics that we're waiting, we're looking to see
Speaker 1: which of these guys is going to become the messiah
Speaker 1: right and by early nineteen twenty one, if you're trying
Speaker 1: to figure out who is our fewer, Right, the two
Speaker 1: guys who are primarily going to be on your radar
Speaker 1: are Adolf Hitler and Julius Striker. And when you know,
Speaker 1: the DAP sort of yields to Hitler and agrees to
Speaker 1: give him, you know, control over the party. They're saying,
Speaker 1: we think Hitler's the guy who's going to win. And
Speaker 1: when Dickle forms the German working Community and brings in
Speaker 1: his friend Julia Striker, he's kind of betting that Striker
Speaker 1: might be the guy to fill this role. Dicklan Streiko,
Speaker 1: Dickolan Striker, Yeah, little Dick, Dick Striker.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 4: I don't know, it's not like a good yeah, detective
Speaker 4: Dick Streiko.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go. So, yeah, that's where we are
Speaker 1: as Part one closes out. Jake, how you doing? How
Speaker 1: you feeling about this whole tale?
Speaker 4: I mean, it's super interesting considering how long ago this was,
Speaker 4: how many direct kind of similarities there are to the
Speaker 4: modern day file press.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's part of why the thing that
Speaker 1: keeps coming to me is I like read this stuff
Speaker 1: is like, oh, I guess everything that's happened with social
Speaker 1: media isn't really surprising, like this all happened with like
Speaker 1: newspapers and shit back in the day. It's it's the
Speaker 1: same as it ever was in a lot of ways.
Speaker 4: Honestly, I've never actually thought of it like that. When
Speaker 4: you said that, it's so true. It's like almost like
Speaker 4: the original purpose of the newspapers was how social media
Speaker 4: is mostly used now, let's be honest.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, the idea, like we think of
Speaker 1: a newspaper kind of as this like edifice that provides
Speaker 1: information about the world to people. But the thing that
Speaker 1: newspapers primarily did early on was both like a tool
Speaker 1: for people to get out, you know, disinformation, but also
Speaker 1: just like a wave for folks to bitch at each other, right, Like,
Speaker 1: like it's the same thing that Twitter is, you know,
Speaker 1: that was a big part of tweet.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So Jake, you got anything to plug?
Speaker 4: Yeah, man, Hopefully people that listen this, I think they'll
Speaker 4: be interested in a new project that we got going
Speaker 4: are sad Oligarch. It's an investigative podcast series about the
Speaker 4: fact that a dozen rich Russians have died in the
Speaker 4: last nine months. Many of them died in suspicious circumstances.
Speaker 4: Many of them have direct links to the Kremlin. Essentially,
Speaker 4: we're trying to answer the question who is killing rich Russians?
Speaker 4: And each episode is kind of it's like, you know,
Speaker 4: it's true crime, but the way that I would do it.
Speaker 4: And it's a lot of research, a lot of actual
Speaker 4: you know, investigative journalism, not drama, you know, not Netflix
Speaker 4: drama type stuff. So I think people really like it.
Speaker 4: It's doing really well, which I'm glad about. And it's
Speaker 4: it's very it's revealing, i think, to how internal Russia
Speaker 4: actually operates at this stage. You know, it says a
Speaker 4: lot more than just about the murders.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's an excellent podcast. Check it out, listen to
Speaker 1: Sad olig Ark. Check out popular Front.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Please do also check out my platform. You go to
Speaker 4: Popularfront dot CC. You'll see all of our links everywhere.
Speaker 4: Just search popular Front anywhere and you'll find what we do. Brossroots,
Speaker 4: conflict reporting, documentaries, podcast articles, everything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, nobody does it better. Thanks for having me, Yeah,
Speaker 1: thanks for being on. You can subscribe to Cooler Zone
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