Behind the Bastards - Behind the Insurrections - Hitler's Munich Beer Hall Putsch, Part 1
Aired: 2021-01-19
Duration: 01:33:08


=== Behind The Bastards Intro (02:29) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:00:13]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:00:15]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:00:17]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:00:19]  We always say that.
[00:00:21]  Trust your girlfriends.
[00:00:24]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:00:25]  Trust me, babe.
[00:00:26]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:00:31]  I got you, I got you.
[00:00:36]  What's up, everyone?
[00:00:37]  I'm Ego Modern.
[00:00:38]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[00:00:42]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:00:45]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[00:00:46]  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.
[00:00:53]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:00:56]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:01:03]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:01:05]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:01:06]  There's a lot of life.
[00:01:07]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:15]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[00:01:22]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:01:26]  I doctored the test once.
[00:01:27]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:01:32]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:01:34]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Manchini.
[00:01:37]  My mind was blown.
[00:01:38]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:01:40]  This is Love Trapped.
[00:01:41]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:01:43]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:01:47]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:55]  10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
[00:01:58]  How did this ever happen in City Hall?
[00:01:59]  Somebody tell me that.
[00:02:01]  A shocking public murder.
[00:02:03]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[00:02:09]  They screamed, get down, get down.
[00:02:11]  Those are shots.
[00:02:13]  A tragedy that's now forgotten.
[00:02:15]  And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
[00:02:19]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

=== Forgotten Tragedy And Mystery (15:37) ===

[00:02:29]  Hitler!
[00:02:31]  Murder shots done.
[00:02:33]  Sophie, Sophie, Sophie.
[00:02:36]  We did it.
[00:02:38]  I always promise we'd do it again.
[00:02:40]  That's everyone's favorite intro is when I just atonally shout at Hitler.
[00:02:44]  I'm not sure.
[00:02:46]  We're talking about Hitler today.
[00:02:50]  This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the worst people in all of history.
[00:02:53]  I'm Robert Evans, and this is actually a special mini-series of Behind the Bastards called Behind the Insurrections.
[00:03:01]  Last episode, we talked about Benito Mussolini's March on Rome.
[00:03:05]  This episode, we're talking about another fascist insurrection directly inspired by the March on Rome and carried out by Bastards Pod side character and main character, Adolf Hitler.
[00:03:17]  We're talking about the Munich beer hall putsch today.
[00:03:20]  Yeah, light it on fire, baby.
[00:03:22]  Light it on.
[00:03:24]  Insurrection.
[00:03:26]  I realize I should probably reference where I got that from.
[00:03:30]  Oh, yeah, where'd you get it?
[00:03:32]  It's okay.
[00:03:33]  So, Common, the actor.
[00:03:36]  Uh-huh.
[00:03:36]  I'm going to call him the actor.
[00:03:38]  I'm finishing.
[00:03:39]  That is an interesting sense.
[00:03:41]  The rapper.
[00:03:42]  Okay.
[00:03:42]  Okay.
[00:03:43]  And yes.
[00:03:45]  And one could argue of the top 10 list of greatest rap albums of all time, Common may hold two of those slots, one of which is an album called Resurrection.
[00:03:57]  And that's where I got that from was because he's saying resurrection.
[00:04:00]  So I was just saying insurrection.
[00:04:03]  Deep cut, unnecessary piece of information, but you can pull that out next time somebody tried to judge you about your pop culture stuff.
[00:04:10]  Beautiful.
[00:04:11]  Thank you.
[00:04:12]  I'm more excited about the fact that he was common sense and then he got into Hollywood and decided to drop the sense, which completely scale.
[00:04:19]  You know what happened?
[00:04:22]  There was a band out here in LA, like a local band who sued him, whose name was Common Sense.
[00:04:29]  And they were like almost like a 311 sublime, like white boy ragged band.
[00:04:35]  Incredible.
[00:04:35]  And they sued him for the name.
[00:04:37]  They were like, we were common sense first.
[00:04:38]  And I mean, I feel like.
[00:04:40]  I feel like you can't copyright the word or name common sense.
[00:04:43]  Yes.
[00:04:46]  But they won.
[00:04:47]  So he was like, all right, whatever, common.
[00:04:49]  And then became an A-list celebrity.
[00:04:53]  I was going to say, speaking of people who won, we should talk about Hitler, at least for a while, but not in this particular story.
[00:05:01]  Although eventually there's a moment when this particular story ends.
[00:05:07]  It's not the end of the story.
[00:05:09]  Yeah.
[00:05:10]  Yeah.
[00:05:10]  This particular story ends with Nazi defeat, but the broader story of the Nazis is more complicated than that.
[00:05:17]  Yeah.
[00:05:17]  So I think we're going to start here by talking about the city of Munich, because generally when people talk Nazis, they wind up kind of focusing on Berlin.
[00:05:26]  But Munich is where the National Socialist Germans' Workers' Party, the NSDAP, the Nazis, that's where they came from.
[00:05:33]  That's the birthplace of the Nazi movement is Munich.
[00:05:36]  And if you look a little bit into Munich's history, it makes sense.
[00:05:40]  Munich is a city in the German state of Bavaria.
[00:05:43]  And Bavaria is historically the most conservative part of Germany.
[00:05:47]  It's kind of like Texas in that even after German unification in 1870, Bavarians tended to see themselves as different and other from like the rest of Germany, right?
[00:05:58]  Like we're German, sure, but we're more Bavarian, right?
[00:06:01]  Like it's this, this, the attitude that you do kind of see like Texans have a bit of this, right?
[00:06:06]  Like we're our own thing.
[00:06:07]  So that's always big in Bavaria.
[00:06:09]  And there's this kind of like traditionalism.
[00:06:11]  They have their own monarchy that's separate from the Kaiser, right?
[00:06:15]  Like the Kaiser's in charge of Bavaria still, but they also have their own king.
[00:06:19]  And there's a lot of Bavarians who aren't super into the idea of being part of Germany, right?
[00:06:24]  Because they're more Bavarian than anything.
[00:06:27]  Now, Adolf Hitler, who was, again, an Austrian, so he's not really a German by the consideration of a lot of Germans, he moves to Munich in 1913, mainly because he was getting drafted to go join the Austrian army and he didn't want to join the Austrian army.
[00:06:42]  So he's a draft dodger and he moves to Munich to avoid serving his time in the military.
[00:06:47]  And just based on what happens, Les, this is less because Hitler was not scared of being in the military.
[00:06:52]  He didn't like Austria.
[00:06:53]  He thought it was like racially polluted.
[00:06:56]  And so he moved to Munich because it was more in line with his right-wing sensibilities.
[00:07:01]  So he rented a cheap room and he made a poverty-level income in Munich, painting pictures of like famous buildings in town because it's a beautiful city and selling them to tourists.
[00:07:10]  And this was like a whole industry in Munich.
[00:07:13]  A bunch of little artists would paint pictures of local buildings and sell them as like keepsakes to tourists.
[00:07:19]  Hitler was kind of unique among these artists because while most of them would actually go out to where those buildings were with like an easel and paint the buildings and then sell their pictures and stuff, Hitler would buy cheap postcards of those buildings and paint alone in his room where he spent most of his time reading fringe political tracts and one presumes masturbating furiously.
[00:07:38]  We have to just unbelievable.
[00:07:45]  Yeah, he was, I mean, he was a pretty right-wing guy, but yeah, he's he's pounding it in his little office and painting from postcards.
[00:07:53]  I mean, he's not a very good artist, which is one of the key office little because he lived in like a tiny little that he was renting from a lady.
[00:08:03]  He was very objectively true.
[00:08:05]  His office was little.
[00:08:06]  Yeah, when he thought we were just putting him down for no reason, but no, no, no.
[00:08:10]  He was objectively little.
[00:08:11]  He was extremely poor.
[00:08:13]  So when Hitler moved to Munich, he had just finished being like a homeless person in Vienna.
[00:08:18]  Like he'd lived in like a men's home and stuff for like people who couldn't afford to stay off the street and whatnot.
[00:08:24]  So he had just gotten out of like a really dire financial situation.
[00:08:29]  And actually, part of why he was in a dire financial situation is he inherited money from his mom, but then his sister needed it for her kids.
[00:08:35]  And so he gave up his inheritance to her, which, you know, kind of is evidence that, like everyone who turns out terrible, there was a period of time in which Hitler might not have wound up being Hitler.
[00:08:46]  So anyway, important to keep in mind.
[00:08:47]  So Hitler's living in Munich.
[00:08:49]  He's painting shitty paintings, tugging it all the time, and reading a bunch of like reactionary right-wing zines, like poorly mimeographed newsletters about the dangers of the Jews.
[00:08:59]  That's like a huge thing Hitler's doing in this period.
[00:09:02]  Some things never change, man.
[00:09:03]  Yeah.
[00:09:03]  Yeah, it's like, it's like he's like hanging out on the day's equivalent of 8 Chan, which is like these tracts that are being passed out in the street.
[00:09:11]  So when World War I kicks off, and in this period, right, the Archduke's assassinated, as we talked about last time, but in the run-up to World War I, Benito Mussolini is furiously trying to get his country, Italy, involved in the war.
[00:09:23]  Germany goes to war with the world, and Hitler immediately joins up and becomes an infantryman.
[00:09:30]  And he's almost immediately thrown into one of the most horrifying battles in not just like the whole war, but like ever.
[00:09:36]  It's known colloquially as the slaughter of the innocents because the Germans sent tens of thousands of basically children to die to like Allied machine guns.
[00:09:46]  A horrible battle.
[00:09:47]  Now, at the same time, as Hitler's watching his friends get mowed down in the trenches, Hermann Gohing, who would become his future second in command, is becoming one of the first fighter pilots in history.
[00:09:57]  Gohing flew with Manfred von Richthoven, the Red Baron's Flying Circus.
[00:10:01]  He took command of the squadron after Richthoven got killed in 1918.
[00:10:06]  And he got something, he shot down like 29 planes.
[00:10:08]  So he's an extremely good fighter pilot and is like a dad, becomes like a dashing national hero.
[00:10:13]  Now, another big Nazi you might know, Heinrich Himmler, was too young to serve during World War I.
[00:10:18]  He came from that awkward generation where you were too young to fight in the First World War and he would have been too old to fight in the second.
[00:10:25]  And so his entire youth was spent like idolizing these soldiers going off to die in France, who he was unable to join.
[00:10:32]  Now, another fella who went to war in 1914 was Ernst Poner.
[00:10:37]  Now, Poner was a middle-aged, I know it's a rough name.
[00:10:41]  You got to give the guy some credit for a real cross to bear.
[00:10:45]  So Poner grew up, or Poner was like a middle-aged, conservative, educated Bavarian, pretty right-wing guy when the war starts.
[00:10:52]  And he was commissioned as an infantry officer and eventually rose to regimental command.
[00:10:55]  Now, despite being a Bavarian to his soul and thus being kind of like separate from the rest of Germans, fighting in the war gives him this sense of like unity with the rest of Germany.
[00:11:05]  And he starts to feel like a member of this like this unified nation for the first time in his life.
[00:11:11]  And in fact, all of Bavaria was brought closer in step to the rest of Germany as a result of the war.
[00:11:16]  The region industrialized rapidly to provide armaments.
[00:11:19]  And as the German state devoted itself increasingly to becoming an engine of arms production, Bavaria becomes like a big part of that, particularly Nuremberg.
[00:11:27]  Or not, I think, yeah, I think it might have been it was Nuremberg.
[00:11:30]  I'm not great on all the other German cities, but like Bavaria starts industrializing heavily.
[00:11:35]  And their military was like just the best in the world.
[00:11:39]  Incredibly good.
[00:11:39]  Yeah.
[00:11:40]  Yeah, like Germany goes up against the entire rest of the world in World War I and comes pretty close to winning.
[00:11:48]  Yeah, it's not like World War II where after a while, like they're almost, they almost pulled it off.
[00:11:54]  They almost won.
[00:11:55]  Yeah.
[00:11:55]  Yeah.
[00:11:57]  So the Kaiser's propaganda had forbidden.
[00:11:59]  So like, and that's actually part of the problem is that right up until the end of the war, Germany could win it.
[00:12:05]  It's not, again, not like World War II, where after 1943, everyone can see the writing on the wall.
[00:12:09]  Up until like late 1918, Germany could pull that shit off.
[00:12:15]  And this is sort of compounded in the minds of German people who see their soldiers winning by the Kaiser's propaganda because the Kaiser had forbidden journalists from reporting on the dire situation in the West.
[00:12:27]  So number one, Germany's in a pretty good position most of the war.
[00:12:30]  They knock Romania and Russia out of the fight.
[00:12:33]  So they beat like two powers, including Russia, which is like a fifth of the world's landmass.
[00:12:37]  Yeah, which is unheard of at the time.
[00:12:40]  They conquer Ukraine, like get it in a treaty, basically, and they spend most of the war within spitting distance of Paris.
[00:12:49]  So on a map, Germans spend most of that war thinking like, we're winning.
[00:12:52]  This is tough.
[00:12:53]  We're losing a lot of men, but like we're going to win this thing.
[00:12:56]  Now, the situation on the map belied some crucial realities, including the fact that as the war went on, Germany was completely hollowed out of soldiers, of supplies, and of food.
[00:13:07]  Three-quarters of a million German civilians starved to death as a result of the Allied blockade.
[00:13:13]  By the time Germany surrenders in the winter of 1918, its army is on the very brink of collapse.
[00:13:20]  The generals who are in charge at the end, a guy named Eric Ludendorff, who you might remember from the Wonder Woman movie.
[00:13:25]  Yes.
[00:13:26]  He's the bad guy in Wonder Woman, but was a real dude.
[00:13:31]  And Paul von Hindenburg, who was his co-general, were not the ones to accept failure gracefully, right?
[00:13:37]  Like both of them had some victories to their name.
[00:13:39]  Both of them made some major strategic errors at the end that were a big factor in German defeat.
[00:13:45]  But when the Germans lose, they don't stay on deck to be like, hey, guys, we tried our best.
[00:13:50]  We fought as hard as anyone could fight and we just lost.
[00:13:53]  They fucking bounce.
[00:13:55]  Like, as soon as it becomes clear they're going to surrender, they're fucking out of there.
[00:13:59]  Yeah.
[00:14:00]  Yeah.
[00:14:00]  So whack.
[00:14:02]  Go.
[00:14:03]  Yeah.
[00:14:04]  And they hand over responsibility for negotiating Germany's surrender because the Kaiser also bounces.
[00:14:09]  Like that motherfucker's off to Belgium on a train.
[00:14:13]  So all of the people who'd gotten Germany into war and had like pushed the war the whole time leave and put the responsibility for negotiating the surrender on the social democrat dominated Reichstag.
[00:14:25]  So Germany overnight is a social democracy.
[00:14:28]  And also the liberals who had been most, a lot of them anti-war up to that point now have to deal with negotiating Germany's surrender.
[00:14:36]  Meanwhile, the guys who were responsible for losing the war start concocting a narrative that the left had stabbed the German army in the back.
[00:14:44]  Yeah.
[00:14:45]  And that's why they lost.
[00:14:46]  And when I say the left, I also mean the Jews because that's what they mean, right?
[00:14:50]  Like they're not, yeah, the left.
[00:14:52]  And it's the same people talk about cultural Marxism today, right?
[00:14:55]  The term back then was Judeo-Bolshevism, but it's the same idea, right?
[00:14:59]  Yeah.
[00:14:59]  So the first days and weeks after Germany's defeat, there were just a bunch of revolutions all throughout these different cities in Germany.
[00:15:06]  And a lot of them were left-wing.
[00:15:08]  Bavaria was not spared in this wave of unrest.
[00:15:10]  As you said, there was a strong, well, Bavaria is very conservative in Munich in particular.
[00:15:14]  There's a very vibrant left wing.
[00:15:16]  And several days before Germany signs the armistice on November 11th, on like November 7th, this huge crowd assembles in Munich and they force the Bavarian king to leave his throne.
[00:15:26]  Now, the guy who orchestrated this was a dude named Kurt Eisner, and he's the head of the Bavarian Social Democratic Party.
[00:15:33]  And his goal was to, you know, what he did, he wanted to kick out the king and establish a Bavarian republic.
[00:15:39]  Now, that worked for a little while.
[00:15:41]  Unfortunately, Eisner, the coalition that Eisner used to kind of kick the king out and establish a republic was only united in their desire to bring an end to the war and get rid of the king.
[00:15:52]  And once that war ended and the king was gone, they didn't agree on anything else because it was a coalition of like the far left, but also a lot of like center left people and even centrists who were just like, this World War I thing doesn't seem to be working out for anybody.
[00:16:04]  It kind of sucks for all of us guys.
[00:16:05]  It kind of sucks for all of us.
[00:16:07]  And when that ends, a lot of these centrists are like, well, we don't really agree with the left on anything else.
[00:16:14]  And there's this huge desire to, we've got the king out, the war is gone.
[00:16:18]  Let's go back to business as usual.
[00:16:20]  Let's go back to the way things were before the war.
[00:16:22]  I think Americans can understand.
[00:16:25]  Yeah, we can.
[00:16:27]  I just want to go back to Brunch, man.
[00:16:28]  Yeah, I want to go back to Brunch.
[00:16:30]  And a lot of these centrists wanted to go back to the center right and the center left arguing because both the extreme right and the extreme left had been empowered by the war and the economic collapse that came with it.
[00:16:40]  And these folks in the middle were scared by that.
[00:16:43]  So this is before like Proust and like the new, like the new democracy or the new like constitution they write.
[00:16:52]  Like this is before this is right.
[00:16:53]  This is before the Weimar Constitution.
[00:16:55]  Yeah, because this is what I'm talking about, the Weimar Constitution.
[00:16:59]  Eisner leads his sort of revolution like five days before Germany surrenders.
[00:17:04]  So this is contemporary, like the Weimar Constitution starts being written during the period where a lot of this is happening.
[00:17:10]  But this starts before, this starts while the Kaiser's still on the throne.
[00:17:16]  I'm fairly sure while the Kaiser's still on the throne.
[00:17:18]  It starts before the official German surrender.
[00:17:21]  So things, you know, the center right decide or the center left decides like we don't really want to work with Eisner.
[00:17:26]  Eisner's support dissolves and he kind of winds up unable to govern because he doesn't really have a lot of people backing him.
[00:17:34]  There's new elections in January of 1919 and this kind of center left dominates as opposed to Eisner's far left.
[00:17:43]  So on the morning of February 21st, 1919, Kurt Eisner starts walking to the Landtag, the Landtag, which is like their, you know, kind of their Congress sort of thing, to resign his position as head of the local government.
[00:17:55]  Now, while he's on his way, this German noble, Count Anton Arco Valley, which is a fucking badass name.
[00:18:03]  Arco Valley?
[00:18:04]  Arco Valley.
[00:18:05]  It's like, he's like a Spider-Man victim, right?

=== Radical Left Militia Violence (13:56) ===

[00:18:07]  Or a villain.
[00:18:08]  Yeah.
[00:18:09]  He's a rich Bavarian nobleman.
[00:18:10]  So Arco Valley comes up and shoots him dead, Eisner.
[00:18:15]  So because he's, you know, Arco Valley is a monarchist and a far-right kind of guy, and he wants to murder this left-wing dude, even though the guy's about to leave power willingly.
[00:18:24]  So one of Eisner's, Eisner does have some very loyal followers, and one of them responds to Eisner being killed by gunning down another politician.
[00:18:33]  And for reasons unknown to history, this like leftist supporter of Eisner, instead of going after one of Arco Valley's allies, picks a moderate liberal, a guy named Ernard Auer, and shoots him.
[00:18:46]  Now, Auer survives, and Auer at the time is kind of the head of the Social Democrats in Munich.
[00:18:50]  So he's like, he's like kind of the Joe Biden, right?
[00:18:53]  Like he's like a moderate liberal.
[00:18:56]  Yeah.
[00:18:57]  And this leftist shoots him instead of one of Arco Valley's allies for, again, reasons that aren't really well known.
[00:19:03]  But Auer survived.
[00:19:04]  What are the theories?
[00:19:06]  You know, I haven't really heard a good one.
[00:19:09]  It might just be that, as a rule, a lot of folks on the far left will always hate liberals more than they hate the right.
[00:19:16]  It might have been.
[00:19:17]  What if that mother was just like personal?
[00:19:18]  It's like that fool hit on my girl.
[00:19:20]  Yeah, it might have been personal.
[00:19:21]  It also said, he might have been.
[00:19:24]  I'll just there's a chance, man.
[00:19:25]  I just took my chance.
[00:19:26]  He might have just fucked up, right?
[00:19:28]  Like, guns are great back then, you know?
[00:19:30]  Like, yeah, I don't really know.
[00:19:33]  Auer survived, though.
[00:19:34]  He doesn't get killed, but his injuries keep him out of politics for two years.
[00:19:37]  And while our was like kind of a centrist, he was an effective leader of the Social Democratic Party.
[00:19:43]  He was good at getting people in line.
[00:19:45]  And the fact that he's out of the picture for a couple of years means that his party is effectively rudderless right at the same time that the far left is energized by Eisner's martyrdom.
[00:19:55]  Now, our successor, a guy named Johann Hoffman, was weak and not very competent.
[00:20:01]  So you've got this position where the dominant center-left party loses its effective leader at the same time as the radical left gets energized by the assassination of like one of their big dudes.
[00:20:12]  And I'm going to read a quote now from a graduate dissertation by James McGee titled The Political Police in Bavaria, 1919 to 1936, to explain what happens next.
[00:20:23]  The assassination of Eisner had worked as a solvent upon political consensus, such as it was in Bavaria.
[00:20:29]  The Hoffmann government found itself caught between the advance of radicalism on both the right and the left.
[00:20:34]  The first round in the struggle went to the radical left.
[00:20:36]  No longer able to maintain itself in Munich, the Hoffman government decamped on April 7th, eventually coming to rest in the northern Bavarian city of Bomberg.
[00:20:44]  Authority in Munich was assumed successively by two councils, the first led by an ill-assorted collection of independent socialists and anarchists, and the second by the communists.
[00:20:54]  So two different successive kind of far-left governments take over through like a revolution, basically, but neither of them are very good at it, right?
[00:21:02]  Neither of them really have like the anarchists are way more focused on like creating public art and stuff and don't really have a great cohesive set of plan to deal with the needs of a lot of like Münchners, I think it is, like people of the people of Munich.
[00:21:18]  Whereas the communists are kind of, they're not really that good at building support outside of the people who are already involved in their movement.
[00:21:25]  They spend a lot of time going after their political enemies and again, aren't very good at consolidating power.
[00:21:31]  Meanwhile, outside the city, conservative forces start regrouping and preparing to invade Munich because there's been a left-wing revolution.
[00:21:39]  What is the right going to do?
[00:21:40]  They're going to murder everyone they can.
[00:21:42]  So the core of this right-wing movement were the Freikorps.
[00:21:45]  And that's an organization of right-wing veterans that you could see is broadly similar to groups like the Oath Keepers or the Three Percenters today.
[00:21:52]  Now, the main difference between these two is the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters are mostly people dressing up like soldiers, who, if they were in the military, never heard a shot fired in anger.
[00:22:01]  The men of the Freikorps are hard sons of bitches.
[00:22:04]  Like they have, they have done a ton of killing.
[00:22:06]  They have seen thousands die before their eyes.
[00:22:09]  Like a lot of these guys, these guys are like veterans of the trenches.
[00:22:12]  So they're not playing, you know?
[00:22:15]  Like they're not dressing up because soldiers look cool.
[00:22:19]  They have been so broken by war that it's the only thing they can really do.
[00:22:23]  Ain't no LARPing over here.
[00:22:24]  Yeah.
[00:22:26]  They're called the Freikorps.
[00:22:27]  The Freikorp, the Free Corps, right?
[00:22:30]  Yeah.
[00:22:30]  So, and the Freikorps, not all of these guys, a number of like Freikorp dudes actually become anti-Nazis later, but a lot of the Freikorps are the genesis of what becomes some of the Nazi street movements, too.
[00:22:42]  And it's kind of like we saw with the Arditi in Italy, right?
[00:22:44]  Where you've got all these veterans.
[00:22:46]  Some of them do become, some of them just want order and they're more Republican than anything, but they'll fight the radical left and then they wind up being anti-Nazi.
[00:22:54]  Most of them go more in a Nazi direction.
[00:22:56]  Some of them wind up being kind of more on the left after a while because they get, you know, disillusioned by right-wing politics.
[00:23:02]  But you have this melting pot of soldiers who are angry at things.
[00:23:05]  And the bulk of them do go to the right.
[00:23:08]  Now, yeah, so these guys invade and they make quick work of the red forces of the revolutionary government.
[00:23:14]  I'm going to quote from McGee's article again.
[00:23:17]  By the end of April, the feeble red forces had been pressed back into the environs of Munich itself.
[00:23:21]  At this moment, with their backs to the wall, elements of the Red Army executed 10 hostages.
[00:23:26]  Some of the hostages were members of the right radical Tula Society.
[00:23:30]  Others appeared to have been selected almost at random.
[00:23:32]  None of the 10, however, had done anything to earn so terrible a retribution.
[00:23:37]  With one gratuitous act, the leftist defenders of Munich had opened the floodgates of violence.
[00:23:41]  The aroused white forces poured into the city on May 1st, bent upon the eradication of the Bavarian Soviet Republic and its supporters, in the most literal sense imaginable.
[00:23:50]  The hardened Free Corps and army troops coursed through the streets of the city, shooting anyone who appeared even remotely suspicious.
[00:23:57]  The orgy of execution did not stop until May 7th, when it was discovered that the white forces had mistakenly murdered a group of 21 Catholic schoolboys.
[00:24:05]  These schoolboys were by no means the only innocents who fell before the guns.
[00:24:09]  Before this first wave of killing had come to an end, over 600 individuals had been slain, many of them individuals with no connection to the Red Army or the Soviet Republic.
[00:24:17]  The revolution, which had begun so peacefully six months before, had ended in a bloodbath.
[00:24:22]  Order had returned to Bavaria.
[00:24:25]  Wow.
[00:24:26]  That's kind of the story of the radical left and the radical right, right?
[00:24:29]  You get the radical left, some of them go a little bit far, they kill 10 people, and the right murder 600 people, including several dozen schoolboys.
[00:24:41]  God dog, man.
[00:24:42]  Yeah.
[00:24:45]  Hearing about this, just this time in the world and being a, you know, albeit an African-American male, but the reality is I live in America, you know, that like in this, in this era, that like the type of violence these people endured all the time, you know, and instability, like, it's just, we really can't get our brain around that.
[00:25:11]  600 kids, you know, you know, 600 people, at least 20, like they murder a whole school of Catholic children.
[00:25:18]  You know, they killed 21 kids in like one, you know, famous leftists, the Catholic school.
[00:25:24]  Yeah, right.
[00:25:25]  Yeah.
[00:25:26]  I mean, to be actually, if we're being honest, like one of the in Germany, the anti-fascists were a mix of anarchists, communists, social democrats, and Catholics.
[00:25:36]  A lot of very traditional conservative Catholics were anti-fascists because they were against the Nazis, right?
[00:25:42]  And they still believed some pretty messed up stuff.
[00:25:45]  You're talking about Catholics in the 30s and 40s, but were not Nazis, you know, and you get a lot of credit in my book if you're anti-Nazi, regardless of what you believe in it.
[00:25:55]  All the other stuff, I can say this about you.
[00:25:57]  Yeah.
[00:25:57]  But, you know, this does kind of everything that's happening in Germany in this period makes it clear what I what I kind of consistently think is the most the thing that we have going for us the most in our present struggle against fascism, which is that our fascists are fucking wimps for the most part, right?
[00:26:17]  Most of them have never seen heavy combat.
[00:26:20]  They have not seen people shot to death.
[00:26:23]  They haven't shot anyone to death.
[00:26:24]  They have not been in like that's why a lot of them started to run as soon as like the police started really using force.
[00:26:31]  The fascists, the Nazis, the OG Nazis, most of them are hard, hard people.
[00:26:37]  Hitler is an incredibly physically tough man.
[00:26:41]  Like Hitler is a guy who got into street fights with a whip, you know?
[00:26:45]  Yeah.
[00:26:47]  These are rough people.
[00:26:50]  And that's one of the things we have going for us is that most of ours just aren't that tough, you know?
[00:26:58]  Yeah, there's like this weird combo of like, there's, you're not that tough, but you have something to prove.
[00:27:04]  So you're going to be, so you're dangerous because you got something to prove.
[00:27:07]  Right.
[00:27:08]  But then there's you are tough and you have something to prove.
[00:27:12]  Yeah.
[00:27:13]  And you ain't scared.
[00:27:14]  And I'm like, yeah, that's a total, that, that's a totally different situation.
[00:27:18]  Yeah.
[00:27:19]  Yeah.
[00:27:19]  Like you'll see a lot of folks in our far right dress up in, you know, plate carriers and carry guns and look like soldiers.
[00:27:26]  The Nazis did that too.
[00:27:28]  They wore military, they dressed like German stormtroopers, and most of them had been, right?
[00:27:33]  When they dress like the guys who charge through trenches with an axe in one hand and a handgun in another, it's because they charge through trenches with an axe in one hand and a handgun in another.
[00:27:43]  Yes.
[00:27:43]  And I know you've seen that look, bro.
[00:27:45]  That is a tangent, but like as much as you've traveled as any war zones you've been in, and then even here, like you can see it in a person's eyes to where you're like, oh, yeah, you'll cut me.
[00:27:56]  You will cut my throat.
[00:27:57]  And you're not.
[00:27:57]  Yeah.
[00:27:58]  You won't think twice.
[00:27:59]  You'll cut my throat.
[00:28:00]  Like you can see it in a person's eyes.
[00:28:02]  Yeah.
[00:28:02]  It's the willingness.
[00:28:03]  It's the people.
[00:28:04]  And you can really see it in a lot of folks' eyes.
[00:28:06]  The folks for whom doing violence is the same as like turning the page in a book, right?
[00:28:12]  Like it doesn't require a switch in their mental circuitry.
[00:28:16]  Yeah.
[00:28:16]  Yeah.
[00:28:17]  They're just ready, you know?
[00:28:18]  Yeah.
[00:28:19]  And most of them aren't that.
[00:28:20]  Most of the far right in Munich in this period are that kind of person.
[00:28:24]  You know, you've got folks like Heinrich Himmler who were too young and who want to be that and are playing at it, but a lot of them are really tough people.
[00:28:32]  So mainstream Munich, which, you know, after the right comes in and massacres everybody, it's still like kind of the liberals who are in charge of the government for about a year after this point, you know, kind of the mainstream center left.
[00:28:43]  And they blamed the far left for everything, even though the vast majority of the killing had been done by folks that were basically proto-fascists.
[00:28:51]  And among other things, the fact that the left had taken over the city briefly helped to incite and fuel an extremely active right-wing militia scene.
[00:29:00]  So all of these different street militias of armed young men start to form up during this period of time.
[00:29:07]  So different groups of angry young men, many of them veterans, got together to fight the Reds and ensure their city would never fall to the left again.
[00:29:14]  Again, a liberal government is in charge for the next year, but after the Freikorps and the army come in, the real power in Munich is with the military and the police.
[00:29:24]  And the dominant political ideology in the city among both the center left and center right becomes a thirst for order above all else, right?
[00:29:31]  Which you can understand.
[00:29:32]  Like these people aren't just going through, like a lot of Americans just want order at this point after the last four years.
[00:29:38]  And we didn't go through a war that killed like, what, one out of every 10 of our young men, something like that.
[00:29:43]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:29:43]  Yeah, their calls for law and order are understandable.
[00:29:46]  Yeah, I think they're, you know, history will show it was the wrong way to go about it.
[00:29:51]  But you have to be more sympathetic to them than the people calling for it now.
[00:29:55]  Like world, you can't even imagine.
[00:29:56]  No one in America can imagine.
[00:29:59]  We have no categories for this.
[00:30:00]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:30:02]  So Ernest Poner was one of the first men who stepped in to fill this need for order.
[00:30:06]  And he'd been enraged by Eisner and, you know, even more enraged by the Soviet Republic that briefly took charge of Munich.
[00:30:13]  And so he gets promoted to be the head of the Munich police force in May of 1919.
[00:30:18]  And he's fresh back from commanding a regiment in World War I at this point.
[00:30:22]  And as soon as he's put in, you know, in charge of the police force, he sets to work not just crushing Marxism, but doing everything he can to encourage the growth of the radical right in Munich.
[00:30:32]  Now, the radical right, there were a number of different parties at this period, but the one that would come to dominate the Munich far-right scene was, of course, the National Socialist German Workers' Party, the NSDAP.
[00:30:44]  They were founded in February of 1920 by a fellow named Anton Drexler.
[00:30:48]  A lot of people don't know this.
[00:30:49]  Hitler didn't start the Nazi Party.
[00:30:50]  He wasn't involved at the very beginning.
[00:30:52]  It was a locksmith named Drexler, who had been involved previously in a bunch of other fanatical nationalist parties.
[00:30:59]  Now, from the beginning, the NSDAP, and they're not the Nazis at this point.
[00:31:04]  Nobody calls them that yet.
[00:31:05]  That takes for a while later.
[00:31:07]  So at this point, calling them the National Socialists or the NSDAP.
[00:31:10]  Their goal initially was to be the party of the German middle class.
[00:31:14]  And I think you'll remember that from our episodes on Italy.
[00:31:17]  Yep.
[00:31:18]  Drexler sought robust social aid programs for Aryans.
[00:31:22]  So he wanted socialism for Aryans, right?
[00:31:24]  And he wanted anyone who was not to not be in his fucking country.
[00:31:28]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:31:30]  Yeah.
[00:31:31]  Now, at the onset, the National Socialists were a small and secretive group of about 60 people.
[00:31:37]  Now, the Reichswehr, which is Germany's post-war army, becomes immediately concerned with this small party, namely because they were afraid that it might have subversive or revolutionary goals, right?
[00:31:47]  The army is definitely more anti-left than right, but they're concerned about anyone who might be a threat to order in this period.
[00:31:53]  So, they decide to send in a spy to look at this young starting party and figure out if it's a threat.
[00:31:58]  And the spy they send is a young German corporal named Adolf Hitler.

=== Socialism For Aryans (04:27) ===

[00:32:03]  Here we go, here we go, here we go.
[00:32:06]  Like, yeah, of all the times they, I mean, like, yeah, of so, there's so much of world history that fascinates me.
[00:32:13]  But this moment, this time, this time, the in-between wars, this time is so interesting to me.
[00:32:22]  Um, yeah, is it so interesting that we should take an ad break for a suspect?
[00:32:26]  Yeah, you know who won't send Hitler in to infiltrate a radical political party and then become its head.
[00:32:36]  Our sponsors, our sponsors have never ordered Adolf Hitler to infiltrate a right-wing political absolutely certain.
[00:32:46]  Yes, I'm a bastard for that transition, by the way.
[00:32:50]  That was a great transition.
[00:32:58]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by: Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
[00:33:05]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:33:08]  And rule two: never mess with her friends either.
[00:33:12]  We always say, Trust your girlfriends.
[00:33:15]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my god, this is the same man.
[00:33:21]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:33:26]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:33:28]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:33:30]  The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands.
[00:33:35]  I said, Oh, hell no, I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:33:39]  He's gonna get what he deserves.
[00:33:43]  Listen to the girlfriends, trust me, babe.
[00:33:46]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:33:56]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:34:02]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:34:08]  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.
[00:34:15]  From power to parenthood.
[00:34:17]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:34:20]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:34:23]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:34:25]  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.
[00:34:29]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:34:36]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:34:38]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:34:45]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:34:47]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:34:50]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:34:58]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:35:04]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:35:08]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:35:14]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:35:23]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:35:29]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:35:32]  He related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:35:35]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:35:36]  That's so funny.
[00:35:38]  Share, stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:35:46]  Say you love me.
[00:35:49]  You know I.
[00:35:51]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:35:58]  What's up, everyone?
[00:35:59]  I'm Ego Modem.
[00:36:00]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:36:08]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:36:11]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:36:14]  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.
[00:36:19]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:36:22]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:36:26]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.

=== Complicated German Political History (14:44) ===

[00:36:31]  Yeah.
[00:36:31]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:36:34]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:36:36]  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.
[00:36:44]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:36:47]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:36:54]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:36:56]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:36:57]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:36:58]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:37:08]  Oh my gosh, we have returned and I am just loving talking about some old H-bomb.
[00:37:17]  Hitty hits.
[00:37:17]  H-bomb.
[00:37:18]  Hitty H-bomb.
[00:37:19]  There we go.
[00:37:19]  Hitty hits.
[00:37:20]  Hitty hits.
[00:37:22]  Here's what you could do.
[00:37:24]  Here's what you could do for these people, which is somewhat of a, well, I don't get into these discussions anymore because they're ridiculous, but help these people understand this party having the term socialist in it, but they're not socialists.
[00:37:38]  Like, yeah.
[00:37:39]  Yeah.
[00:37:40]  Help them understand that.
[00:37:41]  That's just.
[00:37:43]  They're national socialists, which means, which means they're kind of, and in their conception, that means that like we seek a socialist state for members of our race.
[00:37:53]  So we want to...
[00:37:55]  And some of that was just lies because the Germans, a lot of stuff is happening here.
[00:38:00]  For one thing, the left is very powerful in Germany during this point.
[00:38:03]  The communists are beating the Nazis for the most part in elections for most of this history.
[00:38:08]  And they're both competing for people who have been radicalized.
[00:38:12]  Like we talked about last time, people who have accepted that the system is fucked.
[00:38:16]  A lot of them can go left or right.
[00:38:17]  So the Nazis have to be reaching out to the workers, have to be trying to recruit from that.
[00:38:22]  And there's also, you know, you are talking about a period of time in which the German economy is, it's like 5.7 billion marks to the dollar.
[00:38:31]  Like Germany is a nation of trillionaires who can't afford food.
[00:38:35]  So you have to be able to speak to these people and promise them some sort of aid.
[00:38:40]  And that was a big part.
[00:38:41]  And the way basically the left is like, everybody deserves to be taken care of.
[00:38:46]  We need to take money away from these.
[00:38:48]  We need to nationalize industries.
[00:38:49]  We need to nationalize corporations.
[00:38:51]  We need to give the means of production to workers.
[00:38:53]  The Germans are basically like, we need to take money away from the Jews and businesses away from the Jews and give it to Aryans, right?
[00:39:01]  Because of them.
[00:39:02]  Yeah.
[00:39:02]  Yeah.
[00:39:03]  The idea of like accepting the fact that like you lost this war.
[00:39:09]  Yeah.
[00:39:10]  I feel like that's what's so it that this is part of what's interesting to me about this season to this time in history because it's like you couldn't get your brain around the fact that y'all just lost.
[00:39:22]  Yeah.
[00:39:22]  Like it just, you lost, you, you drained your economy on a war that you shouldn't have been in in the first place.
[00:39:28]  Again, nothing that sounds similar to this country today.
[00:39:30]  Exactly.
[00:39:30]  Yeah, none of this.
[00:39:31]  Yeah.
[00:39:31]  You just, hey, bro, take it on the chin.
[00:39:34]  You lost.
[00:39:35]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:39:36]  Let's figure this out.
[00:39:37]  You looking for like, whoa, we just lost because of them.
[00:39:40]  Like, bro, anyway, yeah, none of this is familiar.
[00:39:44]  And it's also, when we're talking about sort of socialism within the Nazis, one thing people do need to understand is that in the early period, and this hasn't even really evolved yet in the episode we're talking about.
[00:39:54]  This is more in like the later 20s.
[00:39:56]  There's a left wing and a right wing of the Nazi Party.
[00:39:59]  There are Nazis who are anti-capitalist.
[00:40:02]  The Knight of Long Knives is the right wing of the Nazi Party, which is the dominant chunk of the party murdering all of those people.
[00:40:09]  Yes.
[00:40:09]  Which is not to say the left wing of the Nazi Party weren't a bunch of hideous racist monsters.
[00:40:13]  They were, they just believed slightly different things and were then murdered, right?
[00:40:18]  Like that's that's what the knight of long knives was, was a purging of the kind of more socialist elements within the Nazi party that they needed to kind of get into power and get enough workers behind them that they could, you know, take the streets.
[00:40:32]  So again, a lot of German, his political history is incredibly complicated in this period.
[00:40:37]  So much is going on.
[00:40:39]  Yeah.
[00:40:39]  And again, like people who are convinced that the system needs to be destroyed will often have some stuff in common with each other, which is why you do see Nazis and communists on a couple of occasions like fight together against police in the state.
[00:40:56]  Not because they agree with each other, but because they agree on the fact that the state is shit.
[00:41:02]  You know, it's a very messy time because everything is falling apart.
[00:41:07]  Again, I'm sure Americans can identify with that.
[00:41:11]  So yeah, this Hitler's commanding officer sends him to infiltrate this far-right group and learn if it's like a threat to the German government, which I think you have to count as like one of the worst decisions ever made.
[00:41:25]  Calculation.
[00:41:26]  I don't know if anything's ever backfired more than be like, oh, we want to make sure these guys don't overthrow the government.
[00:41:31]  Send Hitler in to check on him.
[00:41:33]  Yeah.
[00:41:35]  Y'all mostly underestimated big on it.
[00:41:39]  So Hitler at the time was an angry young man still suffering from his war injuries.
[00:41:45]  He'd been pretty badly messed up at the front and he'd been at the front for about four straight years.
[00:41:49]  So he's he's riddled with PTSD and physically injured and he's adrift in a nation on the verge of collapse.
[00:41:55]  The economy is in free fall.
[00:41:57]  People don't have jobs.
[00:41:58]  And Hitler's kind of one of the reasons he does this is he's desperate to not get kicked out of the military.
[00:42:03]  Most soldiers are released from the military after the war.
[00:42:06]  He hangs on to his job for a while and this is how and he needs the fucking money, right?
[00:42:10]  Yeah.
[00:42:11]  So he takes this gig.
[00:42:12]  He goes in and shows up at a meeting or two of the Nazi party and he finds himself kind of enthralled by the group's discussions.
[00:42:19]  Now, one of the party's early members was a fellow named Dietrich Eckert.
[00:42:23]  Now, Eckert was an anti-Semitic poet, and most historians consider him to be the spiritual founder of the Nazi Party.
[00:42:30]  Hitler himself, in some private writings, described Eckert as the spiritual founder of Nazism.
[00:42:36]  Now, Eckert was all about nationalism and saving Germany from the Jewish menace that he believed had lost the war for her.
[00:42:43]  Bereft of a Kaiser, Dietrich became convinced that an Aryan hero was needed to save the German race.
[00:42:48]  And he spent a lot of his time thinking about who that hero might be.
[00:42:52]  And I'm going to quote Dietrich here.
[00:42:54]  This is talking about what he believes is necessary to save Germany.
[00:42:57]  Yeah.
[00:42:58]  The rabble has to be scared shitless.
[00:43:01]  I can't use an officer, by which he means a military officer.
[00:43:04]  The people no longer have any respect for them.
[00:43:06]  Best of all would be a worker who's got his mouth in the right place.
[00:43:10]  He doesn't need much intelligence.
[00:43:12]  Politics is the stupidest business in the world.
[00:43:16]  I know, right?
[00:43:19]  I mean, politics is the stupidest business.
[00:43:25]  Yeah, You have to see Eckert is in a lot of ways one of the most effective and political thinkers of all time.
[00:43:33]  He's absolutely right about how to take over German democracy.
[00:43:37]  Yeah, it succeeds.
[00:43:38]  The plan works.
[00:43:39]  Yeah, turns out he was right.
[00:43:41]  Yeah.
[00:43:42]  Now, during one early Nazi party meeting, a professor got up and made an impassioned argument about why Bavaria needed to secede from Germany.
[00:43:50]  Hitler got enraged by this and he starts screaming at this professor.
[00:43:54]  And he's so eloquent in his arguments about why Germany needs to stay together that everyone who's there is just struck by his skill as a speaker.
[00:44:03]  And this professor actually flees the room in shame because he can't argue against Hitler.
[00:44:08]  And yeah, this convinces all of the party leaders at the time that Hitler had a future as an orator, that he could be like a big voice for spreading the party's propaganda.
[00:44:18]  So they start having Hitler give speeches and they're right.
[00:44:21]  Like he's able to draw a crowd.
[00:44:22]  The guy's a good public speaker.
[00:44:24]  He gets better and better about it over time.
[00:44:26]  And in short order, he's the most prominent member of the National Socialist Party.
[00:44:30]  And soon, it's figurehead.
[00:44:32]  Now, the Nazis grew quickly at this point, drawing in other disaffected veterans like Hermann Gohing and Ernst Röhm.
[00:44:39]  Now, Rome had been a stormtrooper, and he's a really interesting guy.
[00:44:42]  He's one of the members who's purged in the Knight of Long Knives.
[00:44:45]  So he had in World War I been like a special forces guy, an elite assault trooper.
[00:44:50]  He's covered head to toe in scars.
[00:44:52]  His nickname, because he has so many connections in the military, he's able to get like heavy machine guns for these militias and stuff, like have them smuggled out illegally from the army to these right-wing groups.
[00:45:02]  They call him the machine gun king, which is an objectively cool nickname.
[00:45:06]  Badass.
[00:45:07]  No, Rome is a terrifying person.
[00:45:11]  And is just like a...
[00:45:12]  And if you want to think about the way he's seen by a lot of the radical right at this point in Germany, think about a guy like Chris Kyle, right?
[00:45:19]  The American sniper, how Republicans talk about him.
[00:45:22]  Rome was that sort of legend.
[00:45:24]  He's just this absolute legendary brawler and warrior.
[00:45:30]  He's also very almost openly gay, which is why he's murdered in the Knight of Long Knives, right?
[00:45:36]  Is because Hitler doesn't want that kind of bad PR.
[00:45:39]  He's a very interesting guy.
[00:45:42]  Yeah, he's a tough, he's a tough guy.
[00:45:43]  And that's like a huge factor in, you know, again, we talk about all these kind of counter-cultural movements coming together.
[00:45:50]  You see versions of this within the Proud Boys, too, right?
[00:45:54]  And that's a big part of like, at the time, what, you know, Rome's sexuality wasn't something that they advertised.
[00:46:00]  Now it is kind of an advertising point where it's like, hey, we're not white nationalists.
[00:46:03]  Like, look, you know, our leader's this, our leader is like a black guy.
[00:46:07]  We've got all these gay people.
[00:46:09]  Like, we couldn't possibly be fascist.
[00:46:11]  And it's like, no, no, no.
[00:46:12]  The fascists have had always at the start a lot of different people represented as long as they're violent.
[00:46:18]  Now, once they get into power, they murder those people.
[00:46:21]  Yeah.
[00:46:21]  Like, yeah.
[00:46:22]  Rome doesn't last after Hitler gets into power.
[00:46:26]  No, Yeah.
[00:46:28]  But Hitler is happy to be his friend when he needs him to beat people up.
[00:46:32]  The finesse on that kid, Hitler, man.
[00:46:35]  The finesse is ridiculous.
[00:46:37]  Like, yeah, we need you can't.
[00:46:40]  The finesse is ridiculous.
[00:46:41]  Anyway, Hitler starts attracting these war heroes because Gohring is also Hermann Gohing's like a fighter ace and he's very handsome as a young man.
[00:46:47]  Like everyone knows like the obese heroin addicted Gohring that like, you know, gets caricatured.
[00:46:52]  When he's a young man, he's this like very handsome, prominent, like he looks like a movie star and he's a legendary fighter pilot.
[00:47:00]  You've got Ernst Röhm, who's just like tough as nails and all of these like war heroes start joining the Nazi ranks, which of course brings in more guys from the far right.
[00:47:11]  Gohing is a young man.
[00:47:12]  Yeah.
[00:47:12]  You need the young one.
[00:47:13]  No, I'm looking at young one.
[00:47:14]  This dude's handsome.
[00:47:16]  Young Herman Gohring?
[00:47:18]  Yeah.
[00:47:18]  Hold up.
[00:47:19]  Drop the link.
[00:47:20]  Yeah.
[00:47:21]  I'll show you a picture of him.
[00:47:22]  I'll show you a picture of him.
[00:47:23]  Drop that in the chat.
[00:47:24]  You know what I mean?
[00:47:25]  We're going to agree to disagree on this one.
[00:47:28]  This is a pointy motherfucker looking like...
[00:47:31]  No, I'm going to throw a like an ugly Lego loss from Lord of the Rings.
[00:47:38]  Well, you got a tight though in there.
[00:47:40]  So, I mean.
[00:47:41]  No, I don't.
[00:47:43]  He's just ugly.
[00:47:44]  Okay.
[00:47:45]  Throw him in the chat.
[00:47:46]  Throw him in the chat.
[00:47:47]  We need to get a chance.
[00:47:47]  I got you a picture of him.
[00:47:49]  Okay.
[00:47:49]  Hold up.
[00:47:50]  Is this the same picture I was looking at?
[00:47:52]  Yes.
[00:47:53]  This is not an attractive man.
[00:47:55]  He looks like a young Bing Crosby.
[00:47:57]  Yo, that's a little bit of, you know what I'm saying?
[00:47:59]  A little Matthew McConaughey jaw.
[00:48:01]  Yeah.
[00:48:01]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:48:02]  He's traditionally.
[00:48:04]  I don't want to get caught into the talking about how hot Herman Gohring used to be part of this discussion.
[00:48:09]  He's still a monster.
[00:48:11]  He is seen as being an attractive young war hero.
[00:48:14]  Traditionally attractive, according to Western standards.
[00:48:17]  All right.
[00:48:18]  Also, half of the men in Germany in this period have had their faces blown off.
[00:48:22]  So the bar is not as hot.
[00:48:25]  It's like rickets.
[00:48:27]  Yeah.
[00:48:28]  It's a no for me, dog.
[00:48:30]  Okay.
[00:48:31]  Well, good.
[00:48:31]  Sophie does not think Herman Gohing is hot.
[00:48:35]  Well, that's a t-shirt right there.
[00:48:36]  On the motherfucking record.
[00:48:38]  We need to.
[00:48:38]  You know what?
[00:48:41]  Let's get two sets of t-shirts out.
[00:48:42]  Team Herman Gohing was fuckable and Team Herman Gohing wasn't fuckable.
[00:48:46]  Yeah, dog.
[00:48:47]  Sophie, can we get TeePublic on that?
[00:48:49]  Is that a good idea?
[00:48:50]  I'm sure we can.
[00:48:51]  DTF.
[00:48:53]  But I don't know if we won't.
[00:48:55]  Just a picture of Herman Gohing and DTF questioning.
[00:49:00]  Oh, that might not go over well for us.
[00:49:02]  It's all bad.
[00:49:04]  So, yeah, they start to draw in a lot of, like, because they've got all these war heroes, they start to draw in a lot of other people on the right who had idolized these men, soldiers who, you know, these guys had been their heroes in the trenches, and also younger men who hadn't been old enough to fight in the war, but were drawn to wanting to be in the company of these legends.
[00:49:23]  Guys like Heinrich Himmler, right?
[00:49:25]  He sees all these heroes joining the Nazis.
[00:49:27]  He never got to fight in the war, so he joins the Nazis.
[00:49:30]  Now, Hitler gives speech after speech after speech.
[00:49:34]  And while he's doing this, Dietrich Eckert is helping Hitler mold his public appearance and create what came to be known as the Hitler myth.
[00:49:41]  And this is the idea that Hitler was not just a politician, but he kind of supernaturally embodied the spirit of the German people and was their defender against their racial enemies.
[00:49:51]  Eckert is the architect of this idea, which is the core of like what became like the Führer principle, like the center of Nazism.
[00:49:59]  Now, one of Eckert's main points was that a new German revolution was necessary.
[00:50:04]  The 1918 revolution, he felt, which is like the socialist revolution that takes over Munich, had failed because it was soulless and Jewish.
[00:50:11]  Eckert wanted a revolution, but he wanted a revolution that was led by someone he crafted, namely Hitler, that could lead the German people into freedom and wipe away the stain of defeat in World War I.
[00:50:24]  Now, of course, the Nazis were opposed, even from an early period, as they always are, by the left, namely socialists and communists in this period.
[00:50:32]  And this is before the birth of German anti-fascism as a movement.
[00:50:36]  There are people fighting fascism, but like the idea of like Antifa, as we know it, like comes out of Germany like a decade later than this or so.
[00:50:44]  That hasn't really evolved yet.
[00:50:46]  And anti-fascism in Germany in this period is at a more primitive level than it is in, say, Italy, right?
[00:50:53]  So there are, but they are still opposing the Nazis.
[00:50:56]  And there are frequent fights at Nazi party rallies.
[00:50:59]  Communists and socialists will show up at beer halls where Nazis are meeting and like try to beat the shit out of these guys.
[00:51:04]  And the Nazis will do the same thing at left-wing gatherings.
[00:51:07]  Every political thing in Munich happens at a beer hall.
[00:51:10]  And you do have to assume that everyone but Hitler is wasted pretty much all the time.
[00:51:14]  Hitler's not much of a drinker.

=== Primitive Anti-Fascist Fights (10:15) ===

[00:51:16]  Everybody else is just fucking.
[00:51:17]  How come, like, as unstable as the world is, like, at this time, man, you know, I wonder if we would have much more people entering into political discourse if they fought the way that these people fight.
[00:51:30]  Y'all just drinking scrap.
[00:51:31]  Like, could you imagine that, like, our party?
[00:51:34]  I know our parliament in the 1700s was like this.
[00:51:36]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:51:37]  1800s, we used to actually scrap, you know what I'm saying?
[00:51:41]  But, like, these dudes, like, like, you, you talking, it's so funny because it's like this is hood shit.
[00:51:48]  This sounds like gangbanging.
[00:51:49]  Like, y'all pulling up.
[00:51:50]  It's like, yo, you left this.
[00:51:51]  Yeah, nigga, I'm a leftist.
[00:51:52]  What's, you know what I'm saying?
[00:51:53]  It's like, you flashing signs at each other.
[00:51:55]  Y'all, y'all politicians.
[00:51:57]  Y'all politicians.
[00:51:58]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:51:59]  Like, what?
[00:52:00]  That's so, that's what I, I think that, again, that's going back to what I mean by like, we don't have, we don't have categories for this.
[00:52:10]  Their officials fight.
[00:52:12]  Yeah.
[00:52:13]  That's crazy to me.
[00:52:16]  Yeah, they are like, like, and this is a lot of these guys are like kind of not elected, like elected leaders do get into fights and stuff at this leaders.
[00:52:25]  Yeah.
[00:52:25]  A lot of these guys are just sort of like campaigning.
[00:52:27]  And a lot of it happens via street fighting.
[00:52:29]  And it's, it's ugly shit.
[00:52:31]  People are being gunned down and stabbed and beaten.
[00:52:35]  Like it's nasty stuff.
[00:52:36]  And in fact, it gets so nasty that not only does like Hitler start carrying a whip and a handgun so that he can like slash people's faces open during bar brawls, but the Nazis, in order to like defend their meetings, develop a powerful and organized street fighting arm.
[00:52:51]  These guys are called the Sturmabteilung or the Storm Division.
[00:52:54]  And they were created in early 1920 as a hall protection force, like a beer hall protection force for like the meetings that the party would hold in Munich.
[00:53:04]  Now, in addition to having like a bunch of guys who would show up to like crack heads and fight communists, they also opened a sports and gymnastics wing, which started training their men in boxing, jiu-jitsu, and exercise.
[00:53:15]  And you see the same thing with modern fascists.
[00:53:17]  There's a lot of fascist and neo-Nazi MMA gyms, a strong like lifting culture among groups like the Rise Against Movement, who are a big part of Charlottesville, of Unite the Right in Charlottesville.
[00:53:28]  Like, you know, that the idea of like Nazis loving to get into jiu-jitsu, nothing against jiu-jitsu, it's rad as hell.
[00:53:34]  But like the fact that they've been into it, that goes back a century, right?
[00:53:37]  God dog, man.
[00:53:38]  I tell you what, bro.
[00:53:39]  Like, yeah, there's been plenty of times where I'm like, I'll just, man, I'll just do some like, some body like calisthenics, like plyometric stuff.
[00:53:46]  Man, I'm not going to these gyms.
[00:53:48]  Just, you just like, it's just, you feel like it's just full of these like fuckboys.
[00:53:52]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:53:53]  And now it makes sense.
[00:53:54]  It's like, yeah, there's a history of this.
[00:53:56]  Yeah, there's a history, which is like, there's also some pretty rad, you know, anti-fascist, like MMA gyms and stuff out there.
[00:54:02]  I need to go find them.
[00:54:04]  Yeah, because I think it's important to train people who aren't Nazis and how to defend themselves against Nazis.
[00:54:09]  But there's a long history of like, there's a huge like fascist MMA fighting like network in Eastern Europe, particularly in Ukraine.
[00:54:18]  Like they'll have these big conventions and competitions and stuff.
[00:54:22]  Like it's a big part of that kind of culture.
[00:54:26]  Yeah.
[00:54:27]  So that, you know, that starts with the Nazis in this period.
[00:54:30]  They're doing jiu-jitsu in 1920.
[00:54:33]  So that's kind of hard.
[00:54:34]  And the stormtrooper catchphrase in this period was a very subtle death to the Jews.
[00:54:40]  So not great at keeping a lid on what they're about.
[00:54:45]  Yeah.
[00:54:45]  You know, now in 1922, Herman Gohing was promoted to lead the Sturmabteilung, hereafter known as the SA.
[00:54:52]  These are the guys that come to be known as the brown shirts.
[00:54:55]  Now, by that point, his men had spent much of the last two years imbibing a steady diet of race hatred and revolutionary fascist propaganda.
[00:55:03]  Wilhelm Bruckner, who is the head of the Munich stormtroopers, told Hitler that year that very soon Hitler would be unable to restrain his men from doing something.
[00:55:12]  And what Bruckner was warning about is the same thing we saw in Washington, D.C. on the 6th.
[00:55:16]  If you have this movement of young men that you gin up with conspiracies about child-eating pedophiles and the globalist destruction of their race and nation, which is exactly the kind of a lot of the shit the Nazis are learning here in this period is like QAnon shit, right?
[00:55:29]  Very similar.
[00:55:31]  If you get a bunch of angry, violent young men obsessed with weaponry focused on that shit for years, they will demand to go shed blood to stop it at some point, and you won't be able to stop them.
[00:55:42]  And kind of one of the areas where, you know, Trump fucked up is he didn't do anything with them cohesive because I don't think he ever had much of a cohesive plan.
[00:55:53]  So they raided the capital and caused a crackdown on themselves.
[00:55:56]  Yeah, it's beyond him now.
[00:55:58]  Yeah, it's beyond him now.
[00:56:00]  Hitler doesn't let it get beyond him.
[00:56:02]  He realizes this is happening and that action needs to be taken.
[00:56:05]  Now, for a while, he was able to kind of burn out this excess energy among his street fighters by having them go after journalists and newspaper offices, having them tear down political propaganda and beat up left-wing canvassers in the streets.
[00:56:18]  So he has them assaulting his enemies in part to just try to get off this excess energy so they don't blow up and like tip their hand too early.
[00:56:27]  And of course, all of the fighting and violence in the street they're doing is very illegal under German law at the time.
[00:56:32]  But the police president, Poner, who we've talked about earlier, ensured the Nazis faced few consequences.
[00:56:38]  And I'm going to quote from McGee's article on the Munich political police at this point.
[00:56:42]  The debt which the Nazi movement owed Poner was real.
[00:56:45]  As police president, Poner extended a sheltering hand to protect the activities of the nascent Nazi movement.
[00:56:51]  In doing so, he ensured its survival and gave it an opportunity for future growth.
[00:56:55]  This passive image, however, does little to convey the full dimensions of Poner's commitment to both the radical right in general and Nazis in particular.
[00:57:02]  As a key figure in Bavarian politics during the post-war period, Poner actively aided the Volkish movement and occupied a central position in its highest councils.
[00:57:11]  And the Volkish movement is like all these ideas about the Aryan race and the German people that kind of feed into Nazism.
[00:57:17]  I mean, they had like, they had judges.
[00:57:20]  Yeah.
[00:57:20]  Yeah, we'll be talking about the judges.
[00:57:23]  Poner becomes a judge.
[00:57:24]  He's the chief of police now.
[00:57:25]  He becomes a judge.
[00:57:26]  Yeah, these fools sitting in court with their legs all the way up, feet crossed.
[00:57:30]  Like, yeah, yeah, go ahead.
[00:57:32]  Yeah.
[00:57:33]  For an example of how biased he was, at one point during his time as the chief of police in Munich, Poner is asked if he realizes the Nazis are murdering people in the streets of Bavaria.
[00:57:42]  And he replies, yes, but far too few of them.
[00:57:47]  Now, as an aside, unrelated to anything we're talking about, at present, we now know that at least 28 police officers were present for the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, 2021.
[00:57:58]  I should note that in 2018, after a series of dueling protests in Portland between left and right-wing demonstrators that ended with police assaulting and hospitalizing a left-wing activist, internal planning documents from the police revealed that they viewed the fascist activists as, quote, much more mainstream than the anti-fascists.
[00:58:16]  This is a long through line, you know?
[00:58:18]  Yeah.
[00:58:19]  Yeah, that mainstream has quite a subtext.
[00:58:22]  It sure does.
[00:58:23]  Yeah.
[00:58:23]  Sure does, probably.
[00:58:25]  Yeah.
[00:58:26]  So by 1923, the thrill of beating the shit out of their enemies in the streets was wearing thin for the Sturmabteilung.
[00:58:33]  Now, roughly two-thirds of the Nazi party membership was under the age of 31 at this point.
[00:58:38]  These are young men who want to drink and fight and revolt against the liberals and Jews they see as ruining their country, right?
[00:58:46]  They look a lot like the Proud Boys.
[00:58:47]  It's a group of like macho, like testosterone-loaded young men who drink and probably do a lot of, like the Proud Boys do a lot of cocaine.
[00:58:56]  I'm guessing a lot of these guys are on blow too, you know?
[00:58:58]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:58:59]  Not uncommon in Germany in that period.
[00:59:01]  Yeah.
[00:59:01]  So Hitler was super on board with getting these guys into the fight, due largely to what he and the rest of the world had watched Benito Mussolini's black shirts do in Italy the year before.
[00:59:12]  Because again, the March on Rome is the year before Hitler does his beer hall putsch.
[00:59:16]  1922, 23 is the beer hall putsch.
[00:59:19]  And I'm going to quote now from a book called The Trial of Adolf Hitler by David King.
[00:59:23]  And this is Hitler talking at first.
[00:59:25]  If a German Mussolini is given to Germany, Hitler said to a journalist for London's Daily Mail on the eve of the putsch, people would fall down on their knees and worship him more than Mussolini has ever been worshipped.
[00:59:37]  This journalist was unimpressed.
[00:59:39]  In private, he dismissed Hitler as another hot air merchant.
[00:59:42]  But Hitler had, in fact, decided to follow in the fascist footsteps and march on Berlin.
[00:59:48]  The original plan had been to strike on Saturday night, November 10th.
[00:59:51]  This was, after all, the weekend, which Hitler believed was the best time for a revolution.
[00:59:56]  Authorities would be away from their desks, police would be reduced to a minimal staff, and the lighter traffic would not impede on the movement of his trucks and troops.
[01:00:04]  So Hitler becomes convinced after seeing Mussolini that, like, not only did Mussolini have some great ideas, but this will work even better in Germany.
[01:00:12]  Um, because we kind of have more of an authoritarian culture.
[01:00:16]  Italy, when Mussolini took over, had a much longer democratic tradition.
[01:00:19]  Germany, a lot more authoritarianism.
[01:00:22]  Hitler's like, if I present myself the way Mussolini did, I'll be even more powerful.
[01:00:26]  People will join me on the road to Berlin and we'll take over the whole country.
[01:00:30]  Now, oh my gosh, Hitler was terrifying.
[01:00:33]  Yeah, he's not, I mean, it was wrong in this instance, but not overall.
[01:00:37]  Yeah.
[01:00:37]  Yeah.
[01:00:37]  There's an interesting like, even with that, like Germans, like at the time, propensity towards like authoritarian, like, I still think even and then their saltiness towards Catholicism when I think about their like Protestant movement being so informed by sort of like reform Calvinist thought, like this,
[01:01:03]  this idea that like humans are so depraved at their core because of sin, you know, I'm saying, like, you can't trust them to make good choices for themselves.
[01:01:18]  So you need a strong man in the same way that Jesus was your strong man, you know what I'm saying?
[01:01:24]  Yeah, to make to make these answers, to choose these for you, because I mean, you're full of sin nature.
[01:01:29]  So why would we trust what you would vote for yourselves?

=== Strong Man Theological Worldview (04:34) ===

[01:01:31]  No, you need a guy.
[01:01:32]  You need a guy, a dude in charge that can tell you what's better for you because you can't trust your own instincts.
[01:01:40]  And that theological twist, to me, it's like it adds to the mythos of how somebody like a good, smooth talking Hitler could convince this nation who already got authoritarian tendencies.
[01:01:57]  Now you add in this like this like theological worldview to it.
[01:02:02]  It's just like, it's just going to work.
[01:02:06]  God, I throw that in.
[01:02:07]  And it does.
[01:02:08]  And you know what else is going to work?
[01:02:10]  Oh, the products and services that support this podcast.
[01:02:13]  Oh, yeah.
[01:02:14]  That is going to totally deprave my wallet.
[01:02:17]  They are absolutely going to march on Berlin and overthrow the Reichstag.
[01:02:23]  Yes.
[01:02:24]  I think that's been T. Public's goal from the beginning.
[01:02:33]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[01:02:37]  Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
[01:02:40]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[01:02:43]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[01:02:46]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[01:02:50]  I'm Anna Sinfield.
[01:02:52]  And in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
[01:02:56]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[01:03:01]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[01:03:03]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[01:03:04]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[01:03:07]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[01:03:09]  I said, oh, hell no.
[01:03:11]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:03:14]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:03:18]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:03:20]  Trust me, babe.
[01:03:21]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:03:30]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[01:03:36]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[01:03:41]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[01:03:46]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[01:03:56]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[01:04:01]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[01:04:04]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[01:04:07]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[01:04:09]  That's so funny.
[01:04:10]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[01:04:19]  Say you love me.
[01:04:22]  You know I.
[01:04:23]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:04:31]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[01:04:37]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[01:04:43]  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.
[01:04:50]  From power to parenthood.
[01:04:52]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[01:04:55]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[01:04:57]  From addiction to acceleration.
[01:05:00]  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.
[01:05:04]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[01:05:11]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[01:05:13]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[01:05:20]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[01:05:22]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[01:05:24]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[01:05:33]  What's up, everyone?
[01:05:34]  I'm Ego Modern.
[01:05:35]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
[01:05:46]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:05:49]  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.
[01:05:54]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[01:05:57]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[01:06:01]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.

=== Bavaria Police On His Side (14:48) ===

[01:06:06]  Yeah.
[01:06:06]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[01:06:09]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[01:06:10]  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.
[01:06:19]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:06:21]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[01:06:29]  Yeah, it would not be.
[01:06:30]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[01:06:32]  There's a lot of luck.
[01:06:33]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:06:43]  We're back.
[01:06:44]  So now, Hitler knows he wants to march on Berlin.
[01:06:46]  He wants to do a Mussolini, but better.
[01:06:48]  But he's not a dumb guy.
[01:06:50]  He realizes that he alone doesn't have a big enough name to successfully push Bavaria.
[01:06:55]  He's very popular within Munich and the Munich Reich.
[01:06:58]  He's not a national figure at this point.
[01:07:00]  So he has to enlist the help of a national figure.
[01:07:02]  And he picks someone he had idolized, General Erich Ludendorff.
[01:07:06]  Now, the old general had already tried to take over the government once before, right after World War I, and had failed at that.
[01:07:13]  But he hadn't really been punished because, you know, he was the war hero.
[01:07:17]  He's Ludendorff.
[01:07:18]  He was the architect of the victory over Russia.
[01:07:20]  He was just very beloved.
[01:07:22]  And he was a massive figure for the right wing, revered and respected.
[01:07:26]  For his part, the old field marshal had spent his declining years becoming an increasingly massive racist and conspiracy theorist and mostly pushing the stab in the back narrative, blaming the loss in World War I on the Jews, all that stuff.
[01:07:39]  You could see him as like a General Flynn figure.
[01:07:43]  He's this very popular among the far-right general who shacks up with this far-right political character.
[01:07:49]  Now, the big difference is that General Flynn has been like profoundly loyal to Donald Trump, and Ludendorff just kind of saw Hitler as a vector for which he could, you know, push his kind of fringe right-wing politics.
[01:08:01]  Yeah, I'm thinking more Stormin' Norman, Schwarzkopf, headass.
[01:08:05]  Yeah, a little, yeah.
[01:08:06]  I mean, he's not that guy.
[01:08:08]  He's a military hero.
[01:08:10]  Yeah, he's not like a, he's not like loyal to Hitler, but he sees Hitler as a guy he can use, and Hitler sees Ludendorff as a guy he can use.
[01:08:17]  I feel like in that, that exact sentence is like, was the dagger for almost all their political parties.
[01:08:22]  Y'all thought y'all could use this man.
[01:08:24]  Like he wasn't.
[01:08:25]  Yeah, anyway.
[01:08:26]  Yeah.
[01:08:26]  I mean, and so Hitler goes to Ludendorff and is like, hey, I want to overthrow the government.
[01:08:31]  I want to be the dictator and I want to have you be basically like running the country with me.
[01:08:35]  You'll be in charge of the army and together we'll bring Germany back to greatness.
[01:08:40]  And Ludendorff gives a soft yes, the kind of yes that could mean a no if like, the police came to his door and he could say, like I, but he's like yeah, if you do it like, I'm on board, I'll take over the army, if you win, you know yeah, like that's the kind of yes Ludendorff gives him, but he's he's, he's on board, as long as he doesn't have to stick his neck out too much is kind of like Ludendorff's attitude towards this.
[01:09:04]  So the initial plan for the putsch is November 10th, but they wound up pushing it up by two days, kind of at the last minute, to Thursday November 8th, because Gustav Von Karr, who's basically?
[01:09:14]  He's the general commissar, he's basically like the governor of of, of of Munich um, he's giving a speech at the Burgerbraukeller beer hall, which is one of Munich's most prestigious places for people to drink heavily and do politics.
[01:09:26]  Burger Burgerbrau, the Burgerbrau Beer Hall, beer hall, that's yeah man, we need to rename something like that because that's yeah, I would love still around today.
[01:09:35]  I think uh oh really yeah, yeah.
[01:09:37]  So this is where the putsch actually starts.
[01:09:38]  So Carr is in charge in in Munich and he is he, he's been brought to power in what some would call a military coup.
[01:09:46]  Um, it was kind of a soft coup, but basically, after the liberals had let the left seize the city in revolt, the military made sure that a strong man like Carr wound up in charge after the, you know, a year or so later, and Carr had vowed during his campaign to turn the city into a cell of law and order.
[01:10:05]  Oh god, they keep saying that, you know, keep saying that he just keeps saying law and order, but I just, you don't.
[01:10:12]  It never happens yeah never yeah yeah, yeah.
[01:10:16]  So i'm in a quote from author David King Describing Carr's politics here.
[01:10:21]  He welcomed right-wing extremists to settle in the region, and many of them, in turn, joined the paramilitary societies emerging in the aftermath of the war and revolution.
[01:10:29]  Carr also organized many of these bands into a loose coalition called the Einwonnerwerven, or citizens' militia, that would soon surpass 300,000 men.
[01:10:38]  Carr would use this volunteer home guard in everything from law enforcement to border patrol.
[01:10:43]  They were necessary, he said, like a fire brigade.
[01:10:47]  So Carr builds this citizens' militia, basically a private army of himself for his own to crack down on the left.
[01:10:55]  And Germany at this point is forbidden from having much of a real military.
[01:10:59]  They're capped at about 100,000 soldiers in the Reichswehr.
[01:11:03]  And this is a part of the Treaty of Versailles.
[01:11:04]  And France realizes that Carr is raising up thousands and thousands of private soldiers.
[01:11:10]  And they complain that he's building a new German army and he's forced to disband his militia.
[01:11:16]  Now, this pisses off the far right, the fact that Carr caves and cancels his militia and tells his guys to go home.
[01:11:23]  And a lot of them consider him like the fascist equivalent of a rhino at this point, you know, a Republican in name only.
[01:11:29]  Like they're like, ah, Carr's not really on the right.
[01:11:32]  He got cucked by the French.
[01:11:34]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:11:38]  But he's still very popular with the center right.
[01:11:40]  And he's seen as something of like a resistance hero among like the center right.
[01:11:47]  So he's, you know, he's not like popular on the fringe right, but he's popular on the middle right.
[01:11:52]  So in October, now another thing that's happening at this period of time is in August of 1923, Gustav Stressman is elected chancellor of Germany.
[01:12:01]  And right before he comes to power, the Germans had begged the Allies for a moratorium on reparations payments because the German economy is collapsing in this period and they just can't afford it.
[01:12:10]  The French had refused to put in a moratorium on payments.
[01:12:14]  And then in order to get money out of Germany that Germany wasn't sending, they invaded and occupied the Ruhr, which is Germany's industrial heartland.
[01:12:22]  So Germany defaults on their payments after, like, you know, before they invade the Ruhr.
[01:12:27]  And like the fact that the French invade pisses off all of Germany and particularly the German right wing.
[01:12:32]  Yeah.
[01:12:33]  So this is again, yeah, like a little, little, little human in this story here.
[01:12:37]  It's like, yeah, so you guys are new chancellor because they had to write a whole new constitution.
[01:12:41]  They wrote a whole new constitution, got a new chancellor.
[01:12:44]  They got to pay back all this shit they destroyed for this war.
[01:12:47]  They already feel salty about that.
[01:12:48]  Like, damn, I got to clean it.
[01:12:50]  I got to pay for all this.
[01:12:51]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:12:52]  And then they like, literally, we're broke.
[01:12:55]  Like, goddamn it, we're broke.
[01:12:57]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:12:58]  So then, and then for France to be like, oh, you going to give me my money?
[01:13:02]  And they're like, what money?
[01:13:04]  What money?
[01:13:04]  We don't have anything.
[01:13:06]  What money?
[01:13:07]  We don't have it.
[01:13:08]  Yeah.
[01:13:08]  Yeah.
[01:13:09]  We starved to death on turnips last winter.
[01:13:12]  Like we have.
[01:13:13]  You saw it.
[01:13:14]  We lost.
[01:13:15]  Damn, man.
[01:13:16]  We lost.
[01:13:16]  And now we have, like, we ain't got it.
[01:13:19]  Yeah.
[01:13:19]  And this, this, a lot of the anger at the Treaty of Versailles and the way the French are behaving gets pushed onto the German liberals who, like, because they're internationalists kind of like try to engage with the French.
[01:13:34]  And Gustav Stressman gets elected.
[01:13:35]  And one of the first things he does is he orders the end of a general strike against the French in the Ruhr.
[01:13:40]  And he starts resuming reparations payments.
[01:13:43]  And this enrages the right wing.
[01:13:45]  Yeah.
[01:13:45]  And so, and Stressman knows it's going to.
[01:13:47]  So he has the president of the Reich declare an emergency.
[01:13:51]  The Bavarian government gets pissed by this because they hate Stressman.
[01:13:54]  They're all very conservative.
[01:13:55]  He's a liberal.
[01:13:56]  And they're like, basically, this guy's been cucked by the French.
[01:13:59]  And they declare Bavaria declares its own state of emergency.
[01:14:02]  Now, the decision to do that was made by the triumvirate that ruled Bavaria, which consisted of von Carr, General von Lasso, who's in charge of the army in Bavaria, and the commander of the state police, a guy named Seisser, I think.
[01:14:13]  Now, this triumvirate had publicly refused a number of orders from Berlin as a show of protest and as red meat to their right-wing base.
[01:14:21]  So basically, it's like a state in the United States refusing orders from the federal government because it's against what their political base wants.
[01:14:29]  And this is mostly for show because, yeah, this is mostly for show because like the federal government has the ability to deny funds to Bavaria, right?
[01:14:37]  Which kind of fucks them over.
[01:14:38]  And so by early November, the triumvirate is losing heart because they wanted to get red meat to their base and like improve their own personal popularity by saying fuck you to the central government, but they didn't want to pay consequences.
[01:14:50]  So they're starting to cave by November, but most voters don't know that.
[01:14:54]  And so when von Carr takes the stage at the Bergerbrau beer hall on November 8th, a lot of people show up because they think he's about to announce that Bavaria is seceding from Germany.
[01:15:05]  Yeah.
[01:15:06]  Now, Hitler knows that's not going to happen.
[01:15:08]  He knows that's very unlikely because Hitler sees von Carr as basically a moderate.
[01:15:13]  But he also knows that a huge crowd, including all of the people running Bavaria, are going to be in the beer hall that night, which makes it a great place to occupy with armed men if you're going to do a putsch.
[01:15:23]  If you're putsching, you know, that's where you want to put.
[01:15:26]  This is where you push the puts.
[01:15:27]  Yeah.
[01:15:28]  This is the beer hall, the Burger Brau beer hall is the equivalent of the capital on January 6th here.
[01:15:33]  It's like where all these elected leaders are.
[01:15:35]  If you want to actually capture these people, this is where you do it.
[01:15:40]  So he gets together his stormtrooper leaders and his key advisors, and they work with their police insider, who's a fellow named Frick, because a lot of cops are Nazis.
[01:15:48]  I'm not even going to put like a timeline on that.
[01:15:50]  A lot of cops.
[01:15:52]  Let's just let that one settle for a little bit.
[01:15:55]  Okay, cool.
[01:15:56]  So Frick, this cop, ensures that the police presence outside the beer hall is minimal.
[01:16:01]  Like all of the guys running Bavaria are there, but they don't have very many cops protecting them.
[01:16:06]  And that's by design to make it easier for the stormtroopers.
[01:16:10]  So Hitler sets, yeah, I know, another thing that has never happened again.
[01:16:14]  Yeah.
[01:16:17]  So Hitler's other lackeys, the guys who aren't like fighters, get set to organizing propaganda.
[01:16:22]  One man was like put to the job of organizing the distribution of posters and newspapers announcing the Nazi overthrow of the government.
[01:16:30]  Hitler's half-American friend, a guy named Ernst Honfstangl, better known as Putzy, who's like a Harvard graduate, was in charge of making sure the foreign press was there without knowing why they were there because Putzy's a charmer.
[01:16:42]  He's an aristocrat guy.
[01:16:45]  He's good at talking to people.
[01:16:46]  He's good at talking to like American media.
[01:16:48]  So like the New York Times has a guy there on this night.
[01:16:51]  Now, Hitler and his entourage show up at the beer hall that night, like as thousands of people are gathered up outside to get in to watch von Carr speak.
[01:17:00]  And Hitler's immediately gets out of his, I think it's a Mercedes, and he's immediately greeted by a crowd of 3,000 people outside the hall because Hitler is very popular with the right in Munich.
[01:17:11]  So he gets mobbed by this crowd who wanted to know if like he knew what von Carr was going to speak about.
[01:17:17]  Are we going to secede?
[01:17:18]  What's happening?
[01:17:18]  And Hitler's like, I'm just a guest.
[01:17:20]  I'm here like the rest of you.
[01:17:21]  And he goes inside to get a beer.
[01:17:23]  And he doesn't get a beer because he wants to drink it.
[01:17:25]  Hitler's not really a drinker.
[01:17:26]  Every now and then, he'll like down like some champagne or something.
[01:17:31]  He's not much of a drinker.
[01:17:32]  He has the beer because Gohring has warned him, like, hey, we're going to try to overthrow the government.
[01:17:37]  We don't want people to realize we're onto something early.
[01:17:39]  If you're sitting in a beer hole in Munich with a beer, no one will suspect that you're planning to break the law because it's Munich.
[01:17:46]  So Hitler gets a beer and he's like kind of nursing it.
[01:17:50]  And Carr takes the podium.
[01:17:51]  Now, Carr's speech is boring and pointless and a big bummer to everybody.
[01:17:55]  He just starts like, he's not seceding.
[01:17:57]  He starts a standard harangue about the evils of Marxism, about how Munich was going to fight the contagion and quintessential evil of socialism.
[01:18:04]  Pretty normal right-wing stuff.
[01:18:08]  And Hitler is reported to have asked his men during Carr's speech, does anyone understand what he's talking about?
[01:18:13]  Like, what the fuck is this guy doing up there?
[01:18:16]  Started trolling him.
[01:18:17]  Yeah.
[01:18:18]  Savage.
[01:18:19]  So, while this is going on, while you know, Hitler and his kind of inner circle are watching Carr speak, and this beer hall's got thousands of people in it, Hitler's stormtroopers are assembling nearby.
[01:18:30]  Now, a 26-year-old cigar dealer named Josef was the quartermaster.
[01:18:34]  And so, he basically, like, as the troops assemble, he starts handing out rifles and machine guns and grenades to several dozen of the Nazi Party's best fighters, the men of Stostrup Hitler, or the Hitler Assault Squad.
[01:18:46]  Now, these guys wore a gray military uniform with a silver death's head badge on their caps.
[01:18:52]  The Stostrup would wind up evolving into the Schutzstaffel, which is the infamous SS, right?
[01:18:57]  Like, that's the guys who, among other things, man, the concentration camps.
[01:19:01]  At this point, they're Hitler's street fighters and are responsible for protecting him and stuff.
[01:19:05]  And these are the guys he's going to use to be the armed fist of his putsch.
[01:19:10]  Now, before the putsch, Hitler had given his fighters a few suggestions for how to behave.
[01:19:14]  He had told them, cruelty impresses and don't leave a fight unless you're being carried out dead.
[01:19:21]  God, these are his orders.
[01:19:23]  Green light.
[01:19:25]  Yeah, look, the only way you leave is in a bag.
[01:19:30]  Yeah, these guys are fucking, you know, he's a gangster.
[01:19:34]  This is a gangster regime.
[01:19:35]  A lot of people at the time, actually, like a lot of American newspaper men in the 20s and 30s will say this about the Nazis.
[01:19:41]  These people are fucking gangsters.
[01:19:42]  They're just gangsters.
[01:19:45]  Now, a little before 8:30 p.m., a hundred stormtroopers swarmed the premises of the Bergerbrough and entered the beer hall, shouting Heil Hitler and waving guns.
[01:19:54]  Hermann Gohring, who led the assault team, told the police officers outside that the government was being overthrown.
[01:19:59]  The dozen or so cops there were easily overpowered.
[01:20:02]  Gohing and his men secured the building, and as he entered, he called for quiet.
[01:20:06]  Now, everybody's drunk at this point, so they don't get quiet, so he has to shoot into the roof with his handgun.
[01:20:11]  Then he like basically hands things over to Hitler, who pulls off his trench coat to reveal a black suit with two iron crosses pinned to his lapel.
[01:20:19]  And I'm going to quote next from a write-up by Douglas O'Linder.
[01:20:22]  He jumped up on a table, pulled out a pistol, and fired two shots into the ceiling.
[01:20:26]  This is the second guy who's fired into the ceiling that night.
[01:20:29]  It keeps happening.
[01:20:30]  It happens several more times.
[01:20:31]  We're drinking guys.
[01:20:32]  And he fired two shots into the ceiling.
[01:20:34]  Silence, he yelled.
[01:20:35]  Then Hitler and several supporters pushed their way to the front of the room and confronted Speaker Carr at the podium.
[01:20:40]  Stormtroopers pointed a machine gun at the crowd.
[01:20:43]  Many who were in the audience later said that they suspected they were about to witness an assassination.
[01:20:47]  Hitler shouted to the crowd: The national revolution has begun.
[01:20:51]  600 armed men are occupying this hall.
[01:20:53]  No one may leave.

=== Ludendorff Threatening Murder (08:20) ===

[01:20:55]  The governments of Bavaria and in Berlin have been overthrown.
[01:20:58]  Army barracks and police headquarters are now under the control of this party.
[01:21:01]  None of this was true, but Hitler hoped and suspected that it would be soon enough.
[01:21:05]  Hitler then told Carr and two other important political leaders, General von Lasso and Colonel von Seisser, that they should join him in a side room for a conversation about Bavaria's future.
[01:21:14]  After the men leave, Gohing told the crowd, You all have your beer.
[01:21:18]  Keep drinking.
[01:21:18]  You have nothing to worry about.
[01:21:20]  It's gonna be fine.
[01:21:22]  It's just a putch.
[01:21:22]  Chill out, guys.
[01:21:23]  Hey, you're gonna be able to get it.
[01:21:24]  Give some more beer.
[01:21:25]  Nobody has to die, man.
[01:21:26]  Keep drinking.
[01:21:27]  Just know I'm in charge.
[01:21:28]  That's it.
[01:21:28]  Yeah.
[01:21:28]  You good?
[01:21:29]  Yeah, we're in charge.
[01:21:30]  We're the Nazis.
[01:21:31]  It's fine.
[01:21:32]  It's fine.
[01:21:34]  So Hitler's goal was to convince the triumvirate to back his plan.
[01:21:39]  He wanted Bavaria's army units and police on his side.
[01:21:42]  He doesn't want to fight these guys.
[01:21:44]  His plan is to do a grander version of what Mussolini had done and start marching with tens basically all of the right-wingers in the military of Bavaria and start marching up to Berlin.
[01:21:53]  And he imagines thousands of people are going to join him on the way.
[01:21:55]  And once they reach Berlin, they're going to overthrow the liberal government easily and institute a fascist state run by Hitler and Ludendorff.
[01:22:02]  And of course, for that to happen, they can't get bogged down fighting the Bavarian state, right?
[01:22:07]  Yeah.
[01:22:08]  Now, Seisser, Lossau, and Carr were all pretty close to being fascists themselves, but these guys are all state loyal, right?
[01:22:16]  They're not revolutionaries.
[01:22:17]  They don't want to overthrow the government.
[01:22:19]  They want the government to change into a more right-wing government, but they're not like bomb throwers like Hitler is.
[01:22:26]  So they didn't want to follow this weird little Nazi guy in open rebellion against the state.
[01:22:31]  Now, Hitler tried to smooth talk them.
[01:22:33]  He promised them cushy positions in the new regime.
[01:22:35]  Carr is a monarchist, and Hitler tells him, like, hey, man, I'm going to bring back the king of Bavaria and you can be his envoy to the government.
[01:22:42]  Isn't that like your dream?
[01:22:44]  It's cool, right?
[01:22:45]  Yeah, look sweet, dude.
[01:22:47]  Come on, bro.
[01:22:48]  So they resist.
[01:22:50]  Carr and Losso and everyone.
[01:22:52]  Like, they're not on board with this.
[01:22:54]  And before very long, Hitler did what Hitler's do, and he starts threatening to murder them at gunpoint.
[01:22:59]  Now, Ludendorff, who like when the occupation of the beer hall starts, Ludendorff, like some Nazis, show up at his house and are like, hey, you know that thing you kind of agreed to?
[01:23:07]  We're doing it.
[01:23:08]  And Ludendorff shows up and is like, okay, I guess we'll see if this works.
[01:23:12]  And he's kind of horrified by Hitler's behavior because Ludendorff is a, he's like a classic imperial German manners dude, right?
[01:23:19]  There are ways in which you, especially these people are nobles.
[01:23:22]  Yeah.
[01:23:23]  You don't, you don't point a gun in their face, right?
[01:23:26]  Like that's very gauche.
[01:23:27]  And he's, he's not, he doesn't like Hitler in a lot of ways because Hitler's a fucking, you know, a kind of a peon to him.
[01:23:34]  Yeah, Ludendorff's not a dominer, but he's not, you know, he's, he's, he's gotten acclimatized to being in high society.
[01:23:41]  Hitler is very much crude.
[01:23:43]  Damn.
[01:23:44]  And Ludendorff's kind of like horrified by this, but he's in, he's still on board with the general plan because he wants to take over the government and institute a right-wing military dictatorship.
[01:23:53]  And eventually, now that once Ludendorff shows up too, these guys, Carr and Losso and Seisser, kind of agree to help the putsch and agree to like basically put the powers of the Bavarian state behind Hitler's putsch attempt.
[01:24:09]  And they didn't really mean it, but a guy was threatening to murder them.
[01:24:12]  So they're like, all right, whatever you want, bro, whatever you want.
[01:24:16]  Yeah.
[01:24:18]  Now, while this was happening, different armed groups of Nazis were out capturing key parts of the city.
[01:24:23]  The Bavarian War Ministry was taken by Ernst Röhm and his men, including young Heinrich Himmler, and they proceeded to fortify it.
[01:24:30]  Another group of 400 stormtroopers was sent to take guns and equipment from the army engineer barracks.
[01:24:36]  Now, this is a very fun story because these Nazis all show up and the captain on duty, who's like in charge of handing out guns and stuff, they're like, hey, we're here to do maneuvers.
[01:24:45]  Can we borrow the guns?
[01:24:47]  And the captain realizes something is very fishy and is like, you can use the guns, but you can't go on maneuvers outside.
[01:24:53]  You got to show up inside in like the big gymnasium and then I'll hand you the guns there and you can do your maneuvers inside.
[01:24:59]  And so all 400 Nazis go into the gymnasium and he locks it from the outside.
[01:25:04]  Brilliant.
[01:25:04]  Brilliant.
[01:25:07]  That's like one of the oldest tricks in the book.
[01:25:09]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:25:09]  Come here.
[01:25:10]  Come here, bro.
[01:25:11]  Yeah, yeah, I got you.
[01:25:11]  It's right here.
[01:25:12]  No, no, yeah, everybody's going there.
[01:25:14]  Yeah, right inside this door.
[01:25:15]  I got you.
[01:25:17]  Yeah, this guy's name should be remembered.
[01:25:19]  His name is Captain Oscar Canceler, and he ruled.
[01:25:22]  He saves the German state that night.
[01:25:23]  He definitely stays the Germans.
[01:25:25]  At least for a little while.
[01:25:26]  You know, it didn't last, but he did his bit.
[01:25:29]  So the Nazis who were locked inside couldn't call Hitler to let him know they had the guns and were ready to take part in the putsch.
[01:25:35]  And Hitler was waiting for that call, right?
[01:25:36]  He's got teams going out and seizing places in the city.
[01:25:39]  And he realizes like these dudes haven't called in from the barracks yet, right?
[01:25:43]  Something must be wrong.
[01:25:44]  And this was a key part of his intricate plan.
[01:25:47]  And he knew, so this kind of puts Hitler in a bind.
[01:25:51]  He knew that the triumvirate were not enthusiastic about this plan.
[01:25:54]  And if he was going to keep them enthusiastic and like kind of force them to be enthusiastic, his men were going to have to be in total control of the city, right?
[01:26:03]  If he could really be in charge in Munich, they weren't going to fight him.
[01:26:07]  They give the army the orders to go along with it, right?
[01:26:09]  Because they don't want to die.
[01:26:10]  But he's got to actually be in charge.
[01:26:13]  And making his first critical mistake, Hitler decides it's necessary for him to leave the Burger Brow beer hall late that night to see what's going on at the engineer barracks.
[01:26:22]  And he leaves Ludendorff alone with the triumvirate.
[01:26:25]  Uh-oh.
[01:26:26]  This is a bad call.
[01:26:27]  Uh-oh.
[01:26:28]  So Hitler and his Nazis know these guys are captives.
[01:26:31]  He knows that he's holding them against their will.
[01:26:33]  He knows that if they're agreeing, it's they're not really that on board with the idea.
[01:26:39]  Ludendorff, again, is kind of not being told the entire truth about what's happening.
[01:26:44]  And he thinks these guys are fellow German patriots, right?
[01:26:48]  And he also thought they looked tired.
[01:26:50]  You know, it's been a long night.
[01:26:51]  And he's like, do you guys want to go home and like take a nap or something?
[01:26:54]  And they're like, yeah, we would like to go home.
[01:26:56]  And he's like, bro, yeah, man.
[01:26:58]  You guys are German officers.
[01:27:00]  I, as a German officer, know that no German officer would ever lie.
[01:27:03]  Give me your word of honor that you'll come back to help us finish the coup tomorrow.
[01:27:09]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:27:10]  We'll be back.
[01:27:10]  What time?
[01:27:10]  We'll be.
[01:27:11]  Yeah, they say, of course, we'll come back.
[01:27:12]  Of course, bro.
[01:27:13]  What time?
[01:27:13]  What's time?
[01:27:14]  Like, 10?
[01:27:14]  Yeah.
[01:27:15]  When do you win a coup?
[01:27:16]  Yeah.
[01:27:16]  We went to good.
[01:27:17]  Yeah, we'll see you in the morning.
[01:27:18]  Yeah.
[01:27:19]  So some of the Nazis, there are Nazis in the room too.
[01:27:22]  And they see Ludendorff doing this.
[01:27:23]  They're like, dude, they're not going to come back.
[01:27:25]  And Ludendorff gets pissed at them.
[01:27:27]  And he's like, I forbid anyone in this room from doubting the word of a German officer.
[01:27:33]  How dare you?
[01:27:36]  So Van Lasso, when I was a kid, you know, the clue you was about to get knocked out but robbed by somebody like, hey, hey, hey, hey, can I borrow your phone right quick?
[01:27:49]  Let me use your phone.
[01:27:51]  Yeah.
[01:27:52]  You would look and be like, don't get that man your phone.
[01:27:56]  Do not walk over there and get at me.
[01:27:58]  What are you talking about, man?
[01:27:58]  You just want to borrow my phone.
[01:28:00]  Don't give him your phone.
[01:28:01]  Yeah, don't give him your phone.
[01:28:03]  What do you keep walking, bro?
[01:28:04]  Like, hey, hey, man, come on.
[01:28:06]  Let me just use it right quick.
[01:28:08]  No, man.
[01:28:09]  Like, so you're like, yo, what do you, what do you, what are you doing?
[01:28:12]  What are you doing?
[01:28:13]  Oh, well, there it is.
[01:28:14]  Now you're, now you're sleeping.
[01:28:17]  He just put you to sleep and you're barefoot.
[01:28:19]  The guy just stole your shoes.
[01:28:21]  I told you not to.
[01:28:22]  Yeah.
[01:28:22]  So that's totally funny.
[01:28:24]  Like the guys in the room saying, yeah, the boss is like, yo, let him go take a nap.
[01:28:28]  And the dudes are like, hey, I don't think that's a good idea, man.
[01:28:30]  You really think they're going to come back?
[01:28:32]  Like, I don't think they're going to come back.
[01:28:34]  Hey, boss, maybe you shouldn't let them leave.
[01:28:37]  You kind of see in this why Ludendorff didn't win the war, right?
[01:28:40]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:28:42]  Oh, it was a good idea, coach.
[01:28:44]  Yeah.
[01:28:44]  Hey, hey, boss, this might not be the plan.
[01:28:48]  So that is where we're going to leave it in part one.
[01:28:51]  General Ludendorff, the genius of German military tactics, is just let everyone go that he needs in order to make his trustworthy man ever.
[01:29:01]  Germans don't lie.
[01:29:02]  German officers don't lie.
[01:29:05]  Spoilers.
[01:29:06]  I swear to you, I'm coming back.
[01:29:07]  I'll bring back coffee.
[01:29:07]  Oh, yeah, absolutely.
[01:29:08]  Tons of coffee.
[01:29:09]  We're going to push the hell out of this state.
[01:29:11]  Yeah, dude.
[01:29:12]  Give me a minute.
[01:29:13]  Yeah.
[01:29:13]  Let me get a nap.

=== Leaving It In Part One (03:52) ===

[01:29:16]  Prop, you want to plug any pluggables before we roll out?
[01:29:18]  And then I do, man.
[01:29:20]  I do.
[01:29:21]  Yeah.
[01:29:21]  You can follow me on all the things.
[01:29:22]  Prop Hip Hop.
[01:29:23]  Got a podcast called Hood Politics.
[01:29:25]  We'll prop that giving all the good takes.
[01:29:29]  And I got some t-shirts and music.
[01:29:32]  I got a lot of music rolling out this year, so I can't wait to show y'all that.
[01:29:35]  Pops merch is like the highest quality.
[01:29:38]  Like I wear his shirts all the time.
[01:29:41]  Yeah, I try to.
[01:29:42]  They're so they're all like, they're all like, you know, ethically sourced.
[01:29:47]  That thing.
[01:29:48]  Recyclable material.
[01:29:49]  Yeah.
[01:29:51]  So that's me.
[01:29:52]  Highly recommend.
[01:29:54]  And you can find me somewhere on the internet if you first hold me in your heart, but only then.
[01:30:00]  Only if I am with you and you will.
[01:30:03]  You can follow me on Twitter.
[01:30:05]  I'm.
[01:30:06]  I Underscore Sophie, underscore why I was here.
[01:30:11]  Happy plug for myself.
[01:30:12]  Shame you should.
[01:30:16]  And uh yeah, check out Sophie, check out Prop, find me in your heart and come back on Thursday to hear the thrilling conclusion of Puts Puts Tabulous, puts dirty puts, dirty.
[01:30:33]  There you go.
[01:30:34]  Yes, all right, Bazam.
[01:30:37]  Yes, when a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:30:49]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:30:51]  He is not gonna get away with this.
[01:30:53]  He's gonna get what he deserves.
[01:30:55]  We always say, trust your girlfriends, listen to the girlfriends, trust me, babe.
[01:31:02]  On the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:31:12]  What's up everyone?
[01:31:13]  I'm Ago Modern.
[01:31:14]  My next guest.
[01:31:15]  It's Will Farrell.
[01:31:18]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:31:21]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[01:31:22]  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.
[01:31:29]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:31:32]  It would not be on a calendar of you know the cat.
[01:31:38]  Just hang in there.
[01:31:39]  Yeah, it would not be right.
[01:31:41]  It wouldn't be that.
[01:31:42]  There's a lot of life listen to.
[01:31:44]  Thanks, Dad.
[01:31:45]  On the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts in 2023.
[01:31:52]  Bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[01:31:58]  You doctored, correct.
[01:32:02]  I doctored the test once.
[01:32:03]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern, two more men who'd been through the same thing, Ray Goespi and Michael Mancini.
[01:32:13]  My mind was blown.
[01:32:14]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[01:32:16]  This is love trapped.
[01:32:17]  Laura Scottsdale police.
[01:32:19]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[01:32:23]  Listen to love trapped podcast on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:32:31]  10-10 shots fired in the City Hall building.
[01:32:34]  How did this ever happen in City Hall?
[01:32:35]  Somebody tell me that.
[01:32:37]  A shocking public murder.
[01:32:39]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[01:32:45]  They screamed, get down, get down.
[01:32:47]  Those are shots.
[01:32:49]  A tragedy that's now forgotten.
[01:32:51]  And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
[01:32:54]  That may have been about sex.
[01:32:56]  Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:33:04]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:33:07]  Guaranteed human.