Adolf Hitler, a devoted fan of Carl Friedrich May's fraudulent Wild West novels, reread all 60+ books between 1933 and 1941, believing May's fictional geography and "super weapons" dictated real military strategy. This delusion fueled the German-American Bund and shaped Nazi ideology regarding Lebensraum, while May's own lies about being Old Shatterhand mirrored Hitler's cherry-picked reading habits. Ultimately, the episode reveals how a con artist's fabricated adventures inadvertently influenced one of history's most destructive regimes, proving fiction can dangerously distort reality. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:30
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
I got you.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Forgotten Tragedy00:16:04
Hey, everybody.
I am Robert Evans, and this is Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
With me today is Lacey Mosley, comedian, writer, podcaster.
Hello.
And Lacey, did you have a favorite book or series of books when you were a young adult, like a teenager?
Oh, like a teenager.
I was about to say Julie B. Jones.
Oh, that's embarrassing.
I don't want to say the horrible set of books that I read.
No, it's okay.
I used to read those horrible Twilight books in high school.
That's fine.
That little kitty, kitty porridge.
No, that's bad.
I'm not going to say that.
Like, like books.
Yeah.
Like little raunchy books for horny teenagers.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Twilight.
Did they have any impact on you growing up?
Like your attitudes about the world?
Did you like come into adulthood like expecting certain things about the world?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mostly I just didn't expect men to be trash.
You know, I thought I was going to find me a nice little porcelain dude to, you know, love on me and wait for me to be a virgin forever.
I don't know.
Yeah, but then I realized the world is like Tinder and Instagram.
Yeah, that's like the, that's like the secret terror behind children's literature is that it has such an impact on little kids' minds because this stuff that you don't have any sense of credibility when you're growing up.
You don't know to like, like, I don't know.
Yeah, things at face value.
Like you take things at face value.
Yeah, so the stuff that we read as kids has a big impact on us, and we grow up believing certain things as a result of it, and then we encounter reality.
Absolutely.
But yeah, it leaves an impact.
Young adult literature changes young adults in meaningful ways.
Have you ever wondered what a guy like Hitler was reading when he was 12?
Ooh, no.
Well, I haven't.
That's what we're going to talk about today.
Carl Friedrich May was born in Ernst Thal, Saxony, in 1842.
Now, at that point, Saxony was a kingdom in the southern part of the German Confederation.
This was far enough in the past that Germans hadn't really locked down the concept of Germany yet.
It's like pre-German Germany.
Carl was the fifth of 14 kids.
Nine of his brothers and sisters died before the age of 18.
14 kids.
Yeah.
And his mom just kept trying.
Well, you got to get a solid like five or six out, right?
Yeah, so they can do work for you, right?
You got to really double and triple down, you know.
Damn, that's a lot of births.
Yeah, she must have been so relieved when like the fifth kid hit 18 and she was like, all right, I'm fucking done.
She's pregnant for like 16 years.
Yeah, that's that's like, yeah, that's the like 20 years of solid pregnancy.
Yeah.
That's like the run of Seinfeld and a half, but half of it.
But just babies.
Yeah.
What a nightmare.
So yeah, when Carl was 12, he started making money at something called a Skittle Alley.
Skittle Alley.
Skittle Alley.
I looked it up and that's no, you would expect, right?
Anything with an alley, somebody's, you know, like, oh, Skittle Alley.
You don't want to go down there.
Forget it, Jake.
It's Skittle Alley.
Like, yeah, it sounds terrible.
It's a term for a bowling alley.
And I think he was basically a bowling hustler.
Like a pool shark, but for bowling?
Yeah, at age 12.
1840s Germany, you know, that's what people were doing.
So you were pretty much a man at age 14, like an adult man at 14 back then.
So that was the age at which you could choose to leave school and work in a factory or go to school for job training.
Carl decided to go to teacher school and made through about two years before he was expelled for stealing six candles.
I guess, well, there's no lights, huh?
There's no electricity.
So candles are probably.
It's like stealing six light bulbs.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which I do all the time.
I haven't been fired.
I steal toilet paper.
Everything's for grabs at work.
It does seem pretty petty.
Like six candles.
But he appealed and he was allowed to continue his education in a different city.
Well, nice.
He graduated in 1860 and he was immediately accused by his roommate of stealing a watch and jailed for six weeks.
Yo, he was shady.
Yeah, he couldn't stop.
We're seeing a pattern on it.
So six weeks he spends in jail and when he gets out, his teacher's license is revoked.
So he can never teach.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah, maybe not the worst decision Germany ever made.
Although maybe, considering what comes next, maybe the worst decision Germany made.
Probably actually, now that we think about it.
So Carl May next opted for the career that came naturally to him, shameless theft.
Here's a quote from somebody writing about Carl at the time.
He had stolen everything from billiard balls and gold watches to baby carriages and horses, had cheated peasants and little storekeepers by presenting himself as a famous physician or the agent of an insurance company.
When he pretended to be a doctor for the purpose of swindling people, his chosen nickname was Dr. Holy.
Dr. Holy.
Dr. Holy.
If that isn't a scammer name, if I've ever heard one, look, I can appreciate a good scam.
You know, people who are dedicated to tomfoolery, you know, I'm with it.
And tomfoolery is the word that immediately comes to mind when you hear, I'm Dr. Holy, step right up, see what's underneath these cards.
Dr. Holy's doing mammograms today.
Oh, no.
Yeah, that's a dark direction for it.
One of his doctor scams involved showing up at a fancy hotel in a new town, dressed as a doctor, and getting a room on credit because he was a doctor who wouldn't trust a doctor.
What?
And then when he was in the fancy room, he would order fur coats and gold and silver things also on credit.
He can order fur coats.
Yeah, on credit.
He's a doctor in a nice hotel.
He's not going to skip out on the bill.
So he would skip out on the bill in the middle of the night and take all the fine stuff he'd gotten and pawn it.
That is crazy.
Yeah, he got away with that for months and months and months.
His favorite con involved pretending to be a police officer, going door to door and saying he was investigating counterfeit currency.
So he would ask people for their 10 Thaler notes, which is like $100-ish dollars now, maybe more.
It's hard to do that.
That's a lot of money.
Give me your big bills.
I'm going to make sure they're not counterfeit.
And then they would always be counterfeit and he would confiscate them.
So he would just go door to door taking people's money.
Why would anyone fall for this?
Even if the money is counterfeit, I would still hold on to it.
I feel like in the 1860s, you could get away with just about everything.
Why?
Because there's no way to verify anything.
Nobody's got the internet.
Nobody reads books.
Like, they're like, well, he said he was a cop and he's got a blue shirt.
Imagine being a Nigerian prince in the 1850s.
I mean, clean up.
Yeah.
Although you would have to wait a long time for letters to get to different places.
That's true.
That's true.
It was a long con.
He'd probably die of the typhoid in the meantime.
But yeah, his capers did eventually catch up with him.
He was arrested by the police and then escaped.
And for months, he evaded law enforcement by hiding in the woods.
500 people searching for him at one point, and he was just hiding in the woods.
He finally got caught because he almost starved to death.
So he was not good at living in the woods, just hiding.
Okay.
And he spent four more years in jail.
Even back then, German jails were nicer than American jails today.
Carl was allowed access to a vast library, and he read constantly.
He also started writing fiction.
His favorite books were adventurous stories about America by writers like James Finimore Cooper, who wrote The Last of the Mohicans.
He also loved to read travel guides.
He was let out in 1869 and jailed again in 1870 for doing the exact same thing he's done his entire life.
So jail made him like better.
It made him smarter.
Gradually, not immediately, because he gets out after that and he immediately gets caught again doing something dumb.
Yeah, this feels like a Winona writer situation.
He's just getting high, still in pool balls.
He's waiting for his stranger things strive to hit.
Yeah, yeah.
Which it comes.
So shock looking from Target.
In 1876, that feels like a low blow.
I'm sorry.
Winona.
You're great.
You are great, but that was Flinty Girl.
Yeah.
In 1876, having spent most of the last 16 years as a con man or in jail, Carl May returns to his hometown and tells everyone that he's spent all that time adventuring around the world.
Wow.
And this being the 1870s, no one has any way to check his.
And he read all these books.
He read all these books.
So he's filled with all these knowledge.
Yeah.
Oh, he's such a great scammer.
He's wheeling and dealing right now.
He starts writing travel books and articles for magazines and eventually starts writing novels.
In 1893, he published the first novel in what would become known as the Winnetau series.
These books would become the 19th century German equivalent of Harry Potter.
Wow.
I read the first of these books, and I almost don't know how to start when it comes to conveying how weird these are.
First off, credit where it's due.
They're very racist, but they're less racist than you'd expect from a German in the 1800s.
Like, so racism wasn't the main motif that the book was given.
It's definitely not the main motif.
It was more like the wallpaper.
It's like seasoning for the book.
Like every now and then, a slur.
But it's like the noble Native American sort of racism where you don't know anything about them, but like you're putting them on a pedestal as opposed to the old Western films where they're all monsters or whatever.
Like Tom Sawyer-y racism.
Yeah, Tom Sawyer-y racism.
Yeah, like Inward Gem racism.
Cool.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's not as bad a racism as you'd expect from a German in this period of time, but it's really bad.
Okay.
It's really bad.
But not distracting from the plot.
Like, you can still enjoy the book.
The plot's nonsense.
Okay.
So, Carl May is not a great writer, in my opinion, but what do I know?
His character in the book is known as Carl for the first page.
Carl is a young German kid who spent hundreds of hours reading about America, and he travels to the Old West to make his fortune.
Three pages in, Carl gets into an argument and knocks out a man with a single punch.
Everyone around him nicknames him Old Shatterhand, and that is the name he's known by for the rest of the books.
Old Shatterhand.
Old Shatterhand.
Because that's how Carl thought people gave names, nicknames in the Old West.
Listen, 18-year-olds.
He's all those Germans know.
So they're probably still Germans like Old Shatterhand?
Old Shatahan.
Old Shatahan.
Yeah.
That's what they call Floyd Mayweather in Germany.
See, he's earned that, though.
True.
Yeah, this guy, Carl, has not.
Yeah, no, because he's just a liar.
So, yeah, Old Shatterhand is like the Mary Sue of all Mary Sioux.
He can beat up any guy with one punch.
On his second day in the Wild West, he charges into a herd of monstrous buffalo on his horse.
And in this book, because Carl May doesn't know anything about buffalo, buffalo are huge and like violent monsters.
Yeah, as they are peaceful animals that you are so easy to hunt that we killed all of them because they're not aggressive.
So he kills two of the buffalo.
With his bare hands?
No, with a gun, but the next day he gets into a knife fight with a grizzly bear and kills it with a knife without getting hurt.
And also, Carl May authoritatively insists that bears cannot climb.
Okay.
That's definitely wrong.
Yeah, that's really wrong.
That's like what they're best at.
Oh, God.
How many uneducated little kids are there just thinking bears can't?
I suspect a lot of German kids died to bears as a result of these books.
So yeah, over the course of 30 some odd books, Old Shatterhand.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah.
Right after killing that grizzly bear, Old Shatterhand meets his Indian friend, and by the end of the book, Blood Brother, Winnetau, who is the Prince of the Apaches.
Okay.
That's actually a legit-sounding Indian name.
Yeah.
I thought it was going to be something like...
No, the names are not.
He does a better job on the names than you'd expect.
Okay.
Yeah.
The names are not offensive.
Not like Angry Wind or like some crazy Americanized Indian name.
Okay.
No, he really did some research on the names.
Nothing else about the Apaches or their life or religion, but the names of the names are reasonably believable.
So yeah, Old Shatterhand and Winnitow go on all sorts of crazy adventures for 30 books.
Old Shatterhand becomes a chief of the Apaches because they need him.
Boo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!
And they need a white guy.
Yeah, he's got to teach him about how to be good people.
What's a book without a white guy?
Yeah, what's a book without a white guy teaching not white guys how to do stuff?
You know, as you do.
So yeah, that's the kind of book we're talking about here.
Okay.
It sounds like it would have been made into a movie currently.
It's been made into like 30.
Yeah.
So that's where we're getting to.
First off, when Winetau dies in the last of these books, the last thing he does is convert to Christianity.
Oh.
Yeah, because of course.
You know, got to do that.
Got to get with Jesus.
That's what we call it.
White Jesus.
Yeah, white Jesus.
Almost certainly German.
German blue-eyed Jesus.
Yeah, German blue-eyed, blonde-haired Jesus.
I call on him often.
Tax stuff.
Things where you need white Jesus.
White Jesus is so good at taxes.
Getting pulled over.
I'm like, please, white Jesus, specifically you.
Come down.
That's when you want white Jesus.
Yeah, so I believe Winetau did the right thing.
Yeah.
So these ridiculous books about the American West wound up being the most popular book series in Germany for young boys.
To this day, Carl May is the second most widely read author in all of Germany.
He's only beaten by Martin Luther, who wrote the German translation of the Bible.
Wow.
So yeah, he's ridiculously popular.
And when he is at the height of his fame and wealth and like the biggest author in Germany, Carl May reveals to everyone in Germany that his stories are all true.
He was old Shatterhan the whole time.
It's like if J.K. Rowling declared Harry Potter real and then insisted she was Harry Potter and also she'd never been to England in her life.
Yo, Carl couldn't resist a scam.
He was like, these books are too popular.
Hold on, wait a minute.
It's me.
I'm old Shatterhan.
He's like, how can I get more knowledge out of this?
It's ridiculous because you're already a millionaire best-selling writer.
You don't need this.
You don't need this.
You don't need this scam.
He's like, look, I just live to scam, okay?
That's why he's stealing pool balls and shit.
He's like, I just need it.
And he killed off Winnetown.
So Winnitows can't talk about.
No, everyone's dead and they're not going to, no one's going to go to America to fact check this.
So Carl May committed to the bit.
He dressed like the stereotypical idea of an American frontiersman and his house was decorated with Native American memorabilia and Old West guns.
Carl himself was rarely photographed with less than six handguns on his person.
You can find his pictures if you just Google Carl May and look.
I'm just going to show you one.
So on the front of his body alone, you can see three handguns and a knife.
So where did he?
First of all, if you run, all these guns are going to fall out.
This man literally has guns on top of guns, resting on guns, and ropes.
What the hell?
I think it's a bear-tooth necklace.
Yes.
Oh, God.
Oh.
But you know what?
He got the jacket right, though.
It's got fringe on it.
No, it's a solid look.
It's a solid look.
The jacket is lit.
Yeah.
No, no, he's not bad at accessorizing.
No.
He just, I don't think, knows what.
So there was no internet in those days, obviously.
Everybody believed him.
And one of the people who believed him the most was an adorable little tyke named Adolf Hitler.
As an adult, non-adorable dictator Hitler was outspoken about the debt he owed to Carl May.
He talked about May's work regularly, and we know this because starting in 1941, his table talk was all recorded by a member of the Nazi party.
Here's one quote.
I've just been reading a very fine article on Carl May.
I found it delightful.
It would be nice if his work were republished.
I owe him my first notions of geography and the fact that he opened my eyes on the world.
Wow.
Yeah.
A scammer opened the eyes to another scammer.
Yeah.
Here's another quote.
I used to read him by candlelight or by moonlight with the help of a huge magnifying glass.
I was carried away by it and I went on to devour at once the other books by the same author.
The immediate result was a falling off in my school reports.
So, I mean, that's Hitler saying basically, I did bad in school because I was reading this guy's books way too late in the night.
A Scammer's Open Eyes00:04:57
Yeah, consumed.
Which I guess you're really bored back then.
Like growing up in the late 1800s in Germany in the middle of nowhere.
Yeah, I mean, when you're not, you know, gathering weeds for your soup.
Weeds and potato soup.
Yeah, I think that was like, if you read about Hitler's childhood, like it was just the opera or being sick and almost dead in bed for him.
So I guess like, you know, terrible Wild West books are, yeah.
Right after this, we're going to get into more about how Carl May's ridiculous Wild West novels influenced the war in Russia, the invasion of Poland, and the entire course of World War II.
But before we get into that, we have some commercials, and we're going to do that right now.
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I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Stat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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City hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
They scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
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There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop.
Even if you did a lot of redistribution, you know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
AI Responsibility Debate00:14:53
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
We're back and we're talking about Hitler's favorite young adult fiction author, Carl Friedrich May, a man who lied about everything, made millions of dollars, and influenced the young growing mind of Adolf Hitler to a shocking degree.
So we're about to get into how Hitler based aspects of his military strategies in World War II off of the Wild West books written by a con man.
Who had never been there?
Who had never even left Germany?
In 1933, right after Hitler had been made Chancellor of Germany, Hitler spent his first summer in the Berkhof, which was his mountain supervillain Fortress Lair thing.
At one point while he was up there, a guy named Egon came to visit him.
I'm fairly certain it's not the Ghostbuster, but I'm not 100% sure about that.
So Egon later gave an interview about meeting Hitler during that time, and he recalled being in Hitler's office and seeing a bookcase and wondering, like any of us, what Hitler reads in his free time.
And quote, surprisingly, the majority of the books were the Wild West novels of Karl May.
As an adult?
As an adult.
As the Chancellor of Germany.
And in fact, Hitler apparently reread all 60 some odd of Karl May's books between 1933 and 1934.
He gave a collection of all of May's books to his nephew as a present, and Hitler was given a very nice collection of May's books by Hermann Gohring as a gift at one point.
Are you serious?
Yeah.
This is Hitler's mind.
He's old Hitler hands.
Yeah, yeah.
It's like if Donald Trump grew up reading, I don't know, yeah, Harry Potter, like you were saying earlier, and then just never stopped reading it as adults.
It was like, you know what, we got to base our economic policy on.
Harry Potter has a room full of gold.
Why don't we try that?
We literally do that, though, so.
He is a grown-ass man.
He is in charge of Germany, and he is obsessively rereading the Wild West books of a dead con man.
In 1939, when Hitler's armies were preparing to invade Poland, a Nazi plane crashed in neutral Belgium carrying two officers with copies of the invasion plans.
So not great, not a great start to an invasion.
No, no.
They did manage to destroy the plans in time, but the German military wasn't 100% certain that nothing had gotten out, and so they reconfigured their forces just in case, and it was kind of a cluster fuck.
Like, they didn't do well at improvising.
Hitler got...
The plane crashes just pages of Carl's book.
It's just copies of Winnitou.
You know, it's actually, it's scary how close to the truth that is.
Hitler grew frustrated at how bad his generals were at planning a surprise invasion.
He fired several of them and blamed their incompetence on the fact that while they'd all read their Clausewitz, none of them had read enough Karl May.
Oh, no.
I'm going to do some unpacking here.
So Carl von Clauswitz is like right up there with Sun Tzu in the pantheon of the best military minds in history.
Wow.
He fought against Napoleon and helped beat Napoleon.
He invented the term fog of war, and he wrote a book titled On War that has required reading in every military academy on earth pretty much to this day.
Carl May, on the other hand, was a con man who pretended to be a doctor to steal fur coats.
So I guess we didn't read enough Carl May.
No, you're reading too much of that expert.
Was Hitler an occult?
Like a cult of one?
I mean, yeah, kind of.
It sounds like Karl May was like his leader.
It sounds like Hitler was to Karl May what everyone else in Germany was to Hitler.
Yeah.
Like everyone's worshiping Hitler and Hitler's like, no, this guy.
Maybe this is how it works.
If you're going to start a cult, you got to have something to follow yourself.
You can't get too deep in your own shit.
No, you got to get deep into somebody else's shit.
Somebody else's shit.
Keep yourself all those straight and narrow.
Yeah.
So read Carl May about it was a tactic Hitler would use for the duration of his warlord career.
When the war in Russia turned against Germany and the Wehrmacht was bogged down fighting Soviet insurgents, one of Hitler's solutions was to send 300,000 copies of Carl May's novels to his officers.
So I learned all that before I read my first Carl May novel.
And so while I was reading, I kept an eye open for just any brilliant strategic insights.
In case I ever find myself like Chancellor of Germany, you know, you might as well be prepared or whatever.
So I got one insight about midway through the book when old Shatterhan and his co-workers are out on a prairie surveying for a railroad that's going to be built.
They meet the chief of the Apaches out there and he gets really angry at them for basically helping the railroad steal his people's land.
And so he gives them an option.
You either leave tonight or I'm going to come with my army and I'm going to kill all you guys.
So of course they're not going to leave and not build a railroad.
They came to steal shit.
What do you mean?
They're white guys in the 1870s.
They're building a railroad.
Stop, not murder you?
No.
That's not going to happen.
Rape your women?
No, no, no.
But, you know, this is a problem because there's like a dozen of them and like an army of Apaches.
So, you know, they've got to come up with some brilliant strategy to defeat this Apache army.
So I'm like, I'm like waiting here.
Like, what was it that so impressed Hitler?
And it turns out that the key in this case to beating the Apaches was that one of old Shatterhan's friends was friends with the chief of another Indian tribe who happened to be nearby and had an even bigger army.
Wow.
And so they just used that to...
Yeah.
The Indians really loved old Shatterhan.
Just some of them.
They were like, fuck our land.
We're going to help this white man out.
So they call him the homies.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so they win because they've just got this extra army that's bigger than the other army.
So Hitler's like, all right, got it.
Got it.
Have another army.
This is what we need to do.
Cool, cool.
We need to have another army, guys.
What?
Well, reading to this brings to mind the real story of Army Detachment Steiner.
This was a real military unit, well, sort of real military unit, that Hitler threw together near the end of the war in April 1945 as the Russians were advancing into Berlin.
On paper, it was a mighty force.
In reality, it was made up of units that had been decimated, in many cases had no weapons, and often did not exist at all.
Hitler was convinced that this fake army was going to throw back the Russians.
When its commander refused to attack because it would have killed his men who had no weapons and were mostly teenagers, Hitler went into a rage and killed himself eight days later.
So Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect and munitions master and whatnot, after the war wrote that Hitler basically treated Karl May like the literary equivalent of comfort food after a bad day of losing the Second World War.
Quote, Hitler was wont to say that he had always been deeply impressed by the tactical finesse and circumspection that Karl May conferred upon his character Winetau.
And he would add during his reading hours at night when faced by seemingly hopeless situations, he would still reach for those stories.
They gave him courage like works of philosophy for others or the Bible for elderly people.
Wow.
That really is like if you're president and you're like, give me my Harry Potter book.
Oh, Harry.
These are my Bible.
What should I do now?
Tell me how to open the chamber of secrets in my heart.
How do I be Baltimore?
Only it's a whole real-ass war that's happening.
It's the Russians.
It's the Russians.
Baltimore, the Russians.
I could see similarities.
This man, wow.
Yeah.
I get it, though.
Hitler was a scammer.
His whole life was scams.
He was literally trying to kill a race of people that he belonged to.
Well, that was more of a myth.
So there's a myth that like Hitler was actually a Jewish guy.
Really?
That's a myth?
It's unconf so there's it's it's one of those things like there's it's impossible to get completely definitive evidence, but when you go back to the genealogy that exists, it doesn't seem like it adds up.
Like there's no hard evidence.
There's a huge amount of irony for me.
It would have been great irony.
It is true that his family's original last name was Schickelgruber.
And he only is named Hitler because his shatterhands.
He was going to be Adolph's shatter hands.
Adolf Shatterhands.
They were like, nah, bro, it's not ringing.
It doesn't ring.
Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's, it's, he's, he does have a ridiculous backstory, which I'm sure we'll get to one of these days.
But that part isn't part of it.
He was, he was a scammer in almost every other way a man could be a scammer, though.
He had a fake army that he tried to go to war.
Yeah, he's, he scammed himself on that one.
That was a, that was a Hitler double scam there.
So, yeah, Hitler was a complicated dude, and I don't want to be claiming here that, like, you know, everything that he did was based on Carl May.
But it's hard to look at, say, the invasion to invade Russia and not see a couple of Carl May's intellectual fingerprints.
So this will start with the concept of Liebensraum, which is a German word that means living space.
And it's one of the Hitler vocab words that a lot of people probably remember from high school.
And the idea is basically that the German people needed more space.
You know, we're this great up-and-coming nation.
We need more space for farmland so we can grow.
And the only place to get it is...
Taking it.
Yeah, taking it from Poland, Ukraine, Russia, France, everybody.
And Hitler, when he would talk about this before the invasions, very much couched it in terms of the American frontier.
He believed in social Darwinism.
Some cultures were stronger than others, and strong cultures deserve to take the land of weak cultures.
This idea is in full display in Carl May's work.
The Native Americans are portrayed as a doomed but noble people.
It's taken for granted that their struggle is destined to failure and that it's perfectly normal for white people to move right on in and take their land.
I love that you call something doomed because you're the one who's damning it.
Like, look, we're going to kill them, so they're going to be killed.
So it's not bad that we're going to kill them because we're killing them.
Like, what?
What kind of logic is that?
It's clearly a doomed struggle.
Look at how good we are at murdering them.
Yeah.
I mean, we came to kill them.
So it's not our fault when they dead.
No, some things are just inevitable.
Like all this murder we're doing.
But that's how you have to think as a scammer.
That's how you get away with lying with people and calling yourself Dr. Holy.
Like, look, if I don't show up and take their money, somebody else will.
So it should be me.
Someone's going to wind up with that money, either them or someone else or me.
So it might as well be.
Here's a quote from one of the characters in the novel Winnetau, who is a white guy who becomes a member of the Apache tribe and lives with them for years and years and years.
Oh, gosh.
So this is supposedly a guy who's sympathetic to their cause.
Right.
The red race has been cruelly outraged and robbed, but as a white man, I know the Indian must disappear.
And here's a Hitler quote from October 1941, a few months into Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia.
I don't see why a German who eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the idea that the soil that produces this bread has been won by the sword.
When we eat wheat from Canada, we don't think about the despoiled Indians.
Wow.
Yeah.
The way to alleviate your guilt.
Like, they had all the tactics.
Like, look, okay, yeah, we murdered them.
But if we didn't murder them, we would have murdered them.
So they would have been dead.
Canada did it too.
And also Canada, remember?
So eat that bread.
Yeah, are we any worse than Canada?
Yes, but not by enough.
Here's another quote.
The struggle we are waging against the Soviet partisans resembles very much the struggle in North America against the Red Indians.
Victory will go to the strong and strength is on our side.
Yeah.
So Carl May isn't the only old West influence that Hitler draws from.
Like, you know, reading those novels as a kid sparked sort of a fascination in him with just sort of the whole American frontier.
And he studied everything that we did during that period of time.
And in 1939, Hitler forced 90,000 Polish Jews onto a reservation, a ghetto, in direct imitation of a strategy Kit Carson pursued with the Navajos.
So a lot of Hitler's interest in the Old West was based on real history, but that obsession with real history was sparked by Hitler's own admission by Carl May's Old West novels.
History.
Yeah.
Did he ever realize that it was fake?
Did Hitler think that these stories were true?
Because remember, Carl came out and was like, this is me.
Yeah, I think Hitler went to his grave believing Carl May had never told a lie.
Because the actual Carl May was a pacifist.
You know.
I mean, Carl May didn't kill anybody.
He just stole from everybody.
He was just stealing candles left and right.
He kept the peace, but he would also steal your billiard balls and your baby carriage.
Yeah, if only Hitler had jumped onto the stealing billiard balls, part of Carl May's legacy.
We'd all be fine with Hitler then.
Right.
He was just a silver-tongued devil stealing pool balls.
Showed up to people's houses and checking their money.
They need to check your dollars.
Oh, Hitler.
Got away again.
Yeah.
He would literally be a chaplain figure then.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
As the war went on, Hitler and his regime's propaganda grew increasingly obsessed with what they called Wunderwaffe or miracle weapons.
The V-2 rocket was one example of these, which is those big rockets they would just shoot over to England.
And some of them would hit people.
Most of them would hit nothing, but it scared the shit out of people because it's like, ah, this is the thing.
Something from the sky.
Yeah, missiles hadn't existed.
It's basically like an angel falling on your house.
So yeah, you can make a case that Hitler's love of super weapons and his faith in the ability of these wonder weapons to win the war started with Carl May.
See, old Shatterhand and Winnetau were often heavily outnumbered on the planes by bandits or hostile Indian tribes or groups of evil criminals or whatever, but they always came out on top.
One reason for this is that they had weapons that were, by 1870 standards, wacko space guns.
Like what?
Like a slingshot?
No, old Shatterhand had a repeating rifle that he claimed, and again, he said this was a real gun that he really used.
He said it could fire 100 rounds a minute and was effective at more than 1,500 yards away.
Now, for a comparison, in 1865, like five years before these books are set, a good soldier, like a vet, is putting out three or four bullets a minute from 200 yards away.
So Carl claims he's got a right.
AR-15.
Yeah, Carl claims he's got an AR-15 out there on the planes that he's just, and he can carry 1,728 bullets because they're very tiny, but very deadly.
And it's a really specific number.
Wacko Space Guns00:06:14
It is.
I don't know why that's like an odd one to pick.
Because when you lying, you got to, you know, usually you get heavy on the specifics.
Yeah, I picture him like putting it thousands of, no, no, no, Carl, you got to be specific here.
No one's going to believe that.
That sounds believable.
1728.
There we go.
And when Hitler was a kid, in the time before World War I, there were regular rumors in Germany, stoked by Carl May himself, that he was going to give his special secret rifle to the Kaiser so it could be used by the German army.
Wow.
So May as a kid was saying, like, it's okay.
I know we're surrounded as Germany and we've got all these enemies, but I got this super space gun and I'm going to give it to the king.
And it's going to be all right.
We're going to win this war with my space gun.
He could not quit lying.
He already had money.
He had fame.
And he was like, what else can I get?
Political influence with a fake ass space gun?
Yeah, he's like a guy who wins the lottery and then is like, I'm going to spend all this lotto money on more lottery tickets.
That's the smart fucking play.
Listen, this is really like empowering my life.
You know what I mean?
The next time I have an opportunity to lie to somebody or defraud people, like I would take it.
Because if I don't, somebody else will.
Somebody else will.
And who knows, the frauds that you commit might wind up inspiring the next Hitler, which is what everybody wants.
Everyone.
Yeah.
Now, we've got some more of those commercials, capitalism ditties to sing.
So we're going to get into that next.
After that, we're going to get back into how Carl May's ridiculous novels influenced Hitler's ideas of what America was going to do during the World War II.
And also how Carl May's ridiculous con story actually ended.
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The Phantom Connection00:14:42
So last we were talking about Carl May, the con man who wrote a bunch of Wild West novels based on nothing that inspired Hitler in his plans to invade Poland and Russia.
And now we're going to talk about how Carl May shaped Hitler's ideas about America.
So obviously, Carl May's novels by Hitler's own admission were the first time he really read anything about America.
They opened his eyes to geography.
And in May's novels, America is a land dominated by German immigrants.
Almost every white person in the story with a speaking role in these novels is a German transplant.
In the first book, Old Shatterhand, a German, heads west and meets his mentor, who also happens to be a German.
And they stumble upon an old man who's been living with Apaches for years and also happens to be German.
Shocking.
This pattern continues for dozens of books.
Like almost every new person that they meet who doesn't suck is a German who just moved to America.
So it's like...
Oh gosh, was Hitler's like overall goal?
Like he was just going to keep spreading until he could spread into America.
Well, he thought he thought America was doomed by its diversity, but he also thought America had a chance to survive because there was a huge German population in America.
So if he could get those Germans in charge of America and just, you know, push everyone else into the sea, then America had a real bright future ahead of it, which is why the Nazi government expended a lot of money establishing the German-American Bund, which was a Nazi organization in America in the 1930s that attracted tens of thousands of members.
They drew 20,000 people at one point to Madison Square Garden.
Wow.
Up in the Pacific Palisades, there is a house that's currently a graffiti sanctuary that was bought as a resort for the Nazi elite in the Palisades.
The Nazi elite.
Yes.
Yeah.
There's Hitler's house.
You can go hike in it if you live in LA.
And it's actually, it's a lovely hike.
I bet it's beautiful.
Yeah, it is.
And the whole building is like a graffiti sanctuary now.
So there's some really cool graffiti artwork.
Wait, like people are doing like anti-Nazi graffiti or it's like beautiful Nazi.
It's not a graffiti.
No, it's not Nazi graffiti.
At least I haven't seen any swastikas, but it's just nice graffiti.
Yeah.
Because lately the Nazis don't have that swag that they used to.
They're wearing polos and new balances.
At least back then they had, you know, cute outfits, nice villas.
Yeah, I'll say this for the Nazis.
They knew how to make a leather jacket.
Quality stitching.
Quality stitching.
I mean, Hugo Boss.
Right?
Honestly, if I could just remove the swastika.
Well, I mean, you can go buy Hugo Boss today.
Oh, that's very true.
Yeah, that's how.
Oh, man.
Yeah, Hugo Boss made all the SS uniforms.
Damn.
Yeah, that's how that got started.
And we still buy Hugo Boss.
I have a great person.
I mean, we still buy Mercedes.
We sure do.
German engineering.
Yeah.
Yeah, they made tanks and now they make pretty good cars.
You know what?
I'm going to put that in the bowels of my memory because I like Mercedes.
Yeah, well, I mean, they weren't bad tanks.
So, yeah, the Führer never wanted a war with the United States and believed that the U.S. could be brought around to supporting Nazi ideals.
And part of this belief started with the fact that he got his conception of America through Carl May novels as a nation that was dominated by sober, good-hearted German punchmasters.
And it may seem silly to think that these ridiculous trash books would have formed the basis of the Führer's feelings on America, but other Europeans at the time also took May seriously as an expert on American culture.
That is wild.
I found this quote from a French newspaper reviewer condemning American values because of what Carl fucking May wrote about them.
The man who had never been there.
Who had never left Germany?
The traveler, Carl May, assures us that no single point in his story is invention or exaggeration.
American morals, no matter what certain admirers of that young civilization may say, are generally inferior to ours.
They sometimes lower themselves to abject savagery, especially when it comes to the ugly practices of personal revenge.
The writer describes the American version of Christianity as relayed by Carl May as mutilated.
He concludes that the thirst for both gold and revenge are two of the most terrible passions of the Yankee.
So you can see why Hitler might have thought America would be on board with Nazism.
Yeah.
And also, I mean, French guy's conception isn't 100% off.
Right?
I mean, these are some solid guesses.
This is starting to make me think that when the Bible was first written, it was supposed to be like some fun fiction.
And then it came out like Carl May, like, it's all true.
In fact, it's me.
Oh, this is taking off?
No, no, this is all real.
It's me.
Jesus.
Gig it.
So yeah, I think the first guy to draw a direct connection between Karl May and Hitler was Klaus Mahn, who was the son of Thomas Mahn, a famous German author.
Klaus Mahn wrote in an article in 1940 called Karl May, Hitler's Literary Mentor, where he made basically all the allegations I've just made, minus the Russia stuff, because Hitler hadn't invaded Russia yet.
But Klaus wrote, the Third Reich is Karl May's ultimate triumph, the ghastly realization of his dreams.
It is according to ethical and aesthetic standards indistinguishable from his that the Austrian house painter, Hitler, nourished in his youth by old Shatterhand, is now attempting to rebuild the world.
So Mahn actually blamed Karl May for not just Hitler, but the fact that all of Germany bent to Hitler's madness.
Quote, they are hopelessly estranged from both reality and art, sacrificing all civilization and common sense on the altar of a brutish heroism, but stubbornly loyal, whether consciously or not, to the foul substitute for poetry and culture represented by Carl May.
It's like a mental escape, too.
Yeah.
So you're broke as fuck, and then somebody comes along and tells you that you can take over the world, and then there's all these books that are basically saying German people everywhere are just like...
Yeah, it fills this whole nation's mind with like images of this huge amount of territory if you can just take it from the savage people who own it.
And all it takes is a strong right hook and a magic rifle.
Yeah, this is literally what Trump has done to Middle America.
Yo, I wonder what book Trump is reading.
What's his Carl May?
I mean, Dr. Seuss.
Does he read Cat in a Hat?
There's a lot of pictures in that.
Yeah, you don't have to read as much.
I'm going to get those green eggs in that damn ham.
For all we know, that's really what's happening.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, okay.
Yeah.
So it is worth noting, in fairness to Carl May, that a lot of non-Hitler Germans also professed a deep and abiding love for Carl May.
Einstein, Albert Einstein, was a huge Carl May fan, although he did not credit May with his breakthroughs on relativity.
He needs to give Carl some credit.
Yeah.
I used to wear the same shirts every day, right?
Didn't that come from Carl?
Einstein's always got six guns.
I thought he wore six guns every day.
Einstein was always strapped.
That's a classic Einstein fact.
Pack and heat every day.
Nobody was about to steal those theories from him, okay?
Yeah.
I also want to point out, May espoused a number of anti-Hitler views in his novel.
He wasn't like against Hitler because Hitler was like a child at the time.
But there's a point in one of the books where a guy makes fun of a hunchback dude.
And Carl May is like, it's shitty to make fun of people who have a disability, which is not a Hitler point of view.
No, he wanted to kill them.
Yeah, Hitler murdered people with...
Yeah, yeah.
So May wasn't in lockstep with the Nazis, and it may seem a little weird that Hitler would idolize someone who wrote things that contradicted his own beliefs.
This makes a little more sense when you understand what I'm calling the Adolf Hitler theory of how to read, as laid out in Mein Kampf.
Hitler stated, reading is no end in itself, but a means to an end.
And to explain that, he said, a man who possesses the art of correct reading will, in studying any book, magazine, or pamphlet, instinctively and immediately perceive everything which, in his opinion, is worth permanently remembering.
So basically.
Cherry pick.
Yes.
Pick and choose what you want.
Choose your own adventure.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's saying the right way to read is to pull everything that reinforces your existing opinions out of a book and ignore the rest, which is how a lot of people read.
Yeah, it's kind of a shockingly accurate prediction of how content works on the internet.
Yes.
So Hitler had our number with that one.
And religion, like everything, because, you know, Bible thumpers love to pull up those quotes that are like anti-gay, but then they love to forget about parts that are just like, you know, you could still sell your daughter.
Yeah.
Like all the shit that's just like, oh.
Yeah, the time Jesus beat up all those bankers.
Like, no, no, no.
He loves capitalism.
He's a big fan.
No, he loves it.
No.
10% flat.
He would have loved that.
Oh, the only time he got violent was when he beat up a bunch of moneylenders.
I don't know.
No, no, no, no.
Doesn't confirm our bias.
Damn, Hitler said some real truth, though.
That was, he was on the money with that one.
Yeah, I mean, that's not how you should read, but it's how people do read.
Right.
Yeah.
And I also wonder if he was reading it from the perspective of like conquering people and manipulating them if he was also reading that.
Because like, that's what a lot of these books do.
Like they manage to convince other Indians to beat up other Indians.
Yeah, and the Indians are like surprisingly okay with a lot of what's happening.
Yeah, like, yeah, fam.
Yeah.
No, we got you, white guy.
Yo, yeah.
If there's anybody doomed.
So the last question of this podcast is what did happen to Carl May in the end?
And that's a story worth telling too.
As I said, he got rich and wealthy and started to claim that he himself was old Shatterhand.
He bought a big fancy mansion, which he nicknamed Villa Shatterhand.
He really likes that name.
It was so bad.
And he's like, I'm going to put it everywhere.
It's the coolest thing anybody ever thought of.
Villa sounds classy.
I'm going to put Shatterhand on the end.
He filled it with exotic replicas that he claimed were from his travels, but in reality, they came from a furniture dealer in Dresden.
He also had replicas of his character's famous guns built in Dresden.
And I got to show you a picture of his guns.
What about that AR-15?
This one is the AR-15, supposedly, but divert your eyes there to the bedazzled hunting rifle.
That is a bedazzled double-barreled bear hunting rifle.
This is gaudy as hell.
He fucking rhinestoned that motherfucker up.
Yo, I mean, it's cute, though.
Yeah, he had taste.
He was like, he was giving us a little awesome.
He was like a rapper.
He really gives me the feeling of like, you know, I'm going to wear the shiniest shit on me.
That's like if Lil Wayne started like bedazzling his yeah, yeah, it is in that.
I got to give respect to that because if I ever get rich, I'm definitely bedazzling all my guns.
Oh, you know, how else do people know you're rich?
No, and you wear that coat and you, yeah, you, you.
It's fucking 90 degrees out.
He's still sweating.
He's sweat pouring out his ankles.
We're criticizing Carl May for the Nazi stuff, but not for the fashion stuff.
No, if anyone knows how to purport a lifestyle that they are definitely not living, it is him.
It is Carl May.
Like, if they had cribs back then, like, you know, Villa Shatterhand would have been lit.
This is the skin of a bear I totally killed.
Yeah, he literally says Macy's on the tag.
Yeah, that was the bear's name.
He's like, I got these from some Indians, Crazy Foot and Birdman.
Birdman?
His name was Birdman.
Yeah, It's in my book.
He's like, oh, this shit looks like it came from Dresden.
Oh, no, no, no.
So wait, does the guy in Dresden know all his secrets?
Does he know that?
He must have, right?
Like, there has to be, maybe he was just getting so many gun orders that he was like, if I tell this money train ends.
Oh, listen, I keep all the secrets.
Yeah.
Yeah, you can trust a gunsmith who bedazzles rifles.
I'd have a store of exact replicas of everything in Carl May's house.
Just like, no, no, no, he got it from America.
Yeah.
No, those are the guns he used to fight a bunch of frontier wars on his own.
Yeah.
So by age 56, Carl May was at the height of his fame and influence.
He claimed to speak more than 40 languages and to understand more than 1,200.
Wow.
Wow.
So he's, it's like that lady who was doing fake sign language.
Carl May's out here doing translations.
Yeah.
Yo.
56, though.
He lived hella long.
56 is hella long.
Back in the day, I beat all his sips, died.
He did live long on the curve that his brothers and sisters set.
Yeah.
So he didn't die at that point, though.
This is the height of his fame.
He was so popular that during one speech in Munich, firefighters had to be dispatched to disperse a crowd of his fans.
Wow.
That's like some Beatle shit.
He claimed that he had only two great missions left in life: a visit back to see the Apaches and a trip to see the Sheikh of the Haddad and Arabs, which he also wrote a bunch of books set in the Middle East that he also claimed was based about him, where he does the same stuff, but in the Middle East.
So his last two goals in life are two fake things.
Yeah.
His last two goals in life are more lies.
I just haven't told quite enough lies.
Like, damn, like, you could have given us one real thing.
He's like, no.
Like, lies are his achievements.
Obviously, he's like, last two, I'm going to fraud out some people in the middle of the day.
The hundreds of millions of books I've sold are nice, but it's my lies that keep me warm at night.
You got to be passionate about something, okay?
So in 1899, he came under a storm of criticism.
A collection of his very early works was republished against his will, and these writings were semi-pornographic.
Oh, I have not been able to find them, which is a tragedy.
Damn.
He has some erotica.
Yeah, he was apparently writing erotica or semi-erotica early in his career.
Pulled out my bedazzled gun.
He sued for defamation of character, but this began a surge of interest in Carl May's actual documented past.
So May panicked, tried to cover his tracks.
He had the original plates of those photographs of him in costume thrown into the Danube because the pictures had been edited and he didn't want people to see that they'd clearly been taken in a photo studio.
So he started the Lil Bow Wow challenge.
Yeah.
Yeah.
His doctorate was found out as fake.
Oh, he'd also spent years pretending to be a doctor.
Right.
He was Dr. Holy.
Well, no, he pretended to be a doctor again.
No.
After he was a famous author, he also lied about being a doctor.
And he went back to being a doctor.
You're already a famous author.
Well, but Dr. Shatterhand is a pretty sick name.
Dr. Shatterhand.
Lord Jesus.
I love this guy.
During the course of the lawsuit against the people who published his porn, his criminal record was uncovered.
The Liar's Autobiography00:05:31
No.
And worst of all, it was discovered that he'd never actually been to America.
Damn.
Carl May published an autobiography in 1910 to try and rehabilitate his image and defend himself.
Among other things, he claimed that his famous candle theft, you remember the six candles he stole?
He claimed that that was so he could give his sister wax scraps as a Christmas present.
Okay, well, I know they was eating rock soup, so I know wax scraps might actually be nice.
Here's your wax scraps.
Also, that's still not a good excuse.
You stole six candles so you could give your sister a terrible gift.
Not even the whole candle.
You're not even going to give her the candle.
No, she doesn't want candles.
She wants scraps.
Okay.
Okay, fam.
That was not.
Is she dying?
You should at least say she was dying.
Just make a better lie, Carl May.
He's such a liar.
He's such a constant liar.
But all the controversy did prompt the elderly Carl May and his wife to visit the United States.
They made it as far west as Buffalo, New York.
Wow.
Uh-huh.
So Carl May died in 1912, but his ridiculous books lived on.
In the 1960s, they were made into a series of Euro-Westerns that are credited with saving West Germany's film industry.
There's still a Carl May festival in Germany every year that draws tens of thousands of fans.
Thanks to his books and the fascination for Native American culture they ignited, Germany has a thriving Native American cosplay and festival industry to this day.
Oh, no.
So I, in one of my previous jobs, I interviewed a guy who was a Native American and a professor, and his whole job is like busting people who falsely claim to be Native Americans to like sell products and stuff.
And one of the things he pointed out is that some of the world's best living speakers of languages like the Sioux language are Germans who learned it so that they can cosplay better in these gigantic festivals.
No, it's a huge, you can find these insane pictures online of these German Native American festivals where it's all white guys and ladies dressing up in costume and like not bad costume.
Like a lot of these people, like some of them like authentically like hand chip their own stone axes and stuff.
Like they're really into it hard.
So they're not using Carl May's description.
No, no, no.
Those were all lies.
Because everything Carl May wrote was a lie.
No, they've gotten better since then.
Oh my God.
We'll put some of the pictures up on the site and in social media.
There's some great ones of the movies where they cast just the most ridiculous looking man to be old Shatterhand.
He's just like throwing gigantic rocks.
Cardboard rocks at people.
Yeah, you owe it to yourself to look at these.
They're insane.
It looks a little bit like a Star Trek episode set in the old West, like that level of production value.
So yeah, thank you, Carl May.
Yeah, I'm really proud of him.
This is what I will say, like, if you're passionate about something, like, and obviously Carl May was passionate about lying to people and fraud.
Like, it didn't even matter what he was lying about.
Like, and he, but he dedicated his whole life to just being a liar.
And I can't, I can't knock somebody.
Lying was his passion.
Yeah, you have to respect that much consistency.
Right.
Like, if someone just tells a few petty lies to get out of problems, that's not respectable.
But if you lie your entire life, even after you no longer need to, for no reason other than the art of lying.
You can always count on Carl May not telling you the truth.
Whatever he was going to do, it was going to be not just a lie, but like the boldest lie.
Very fantastical.
It's not even going to sound real.
Because like most liars who might have been like, oh, I traveled to America as a young man and I met this guy and he told me his stories and that's what these books are based on.
But like Carl May's like, no, I'm him.
I'm the punch master who can't be beat.
But it wasn't, he never wanted to be him until he blew up.
But then he was like, wait a minute.
It was me the whole time.
Which I got to say, like, people talk about how JK Rowling has kind of gone a little bit, a little bit wacky in her fame and like all the new stuff she releases about her characters and whatnot and her social media presence.
But like, she's got nothing on Carl May's game.
No, because she never is like, I am Harry Potter.
I am Harry Potter and this shit's all real.
I used to run through the platform.
Y'all ain't never ran through the platform before.
Just give it a shot.
Oh, God.
Everyone's dead.
Oh, man.
Carl May, you know, big ups.
I wish that I had known him back in the day.
Yeah.
Like, also, I kind of wish that I had lived in that time.
Like, when, like, think about now how hard you have to work to scam people.
Yeah.
Like, back then, you could really just say anything.
Yeah, no one's Googling you.
You just go to the town over, and it's like a new planet.
Like, I'm a doctor.
They're probably not even that far apart.
It's like, it's like probably five miles away.
The community.
You think that guy is really a doctor?
I don't know.
Man, he was born 10 miles away.
There's no way we can check up on him.
There's no way.
There's no backtracking.
We just got to believe him.
Look, he got the outfit on.
He got who has a white coat and isn't a doctor.
He's got a bag with a medicine sign on it.
Yo, that's all you needed.
It was an imagination.
Man, millennials would have done great in that time period.
We have such great imaginations.
Maybe it'll come back.
Maybe this whole internet thing will collapse and it'll be like a whole world of Carl Mays.
That's my dream.
That's everyone's dream now.
Yeah.
No Way to Check Him00:02:52
All right.
Well, that's our podcast for today.
Lacey, you got anything you want to plug?
Drop in here?
Oh, sure.
You can follow me on Instagram if I ever get my phone back at Diva Lacey, D-I-V-A-L-A-C I. My Instagram stories are basically Carl May.
It's just me creating fantastical frauds.
Yeah.
I actually frauded my way into All-Star Weekend this year without a ticket.
Oh, nice.
I was reading some Carl May books.
I was like, how am I?
I was like, this is my destiny.
Yeah.
So thank you so much, Carl.
You changed my life forever.
All right.
Thank you, Lacey.
I'm Robert Evans.
Please remember to rate and interview us on Apple Podcasts.
You can also find us on social media, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, at BastardsPod.
And you can find us on the World Wide Web at behindthebastards.com.
That's all for this week.
See ya.
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