Julius Streicher, the executed propagandist behind Der Stürmer, radicalized through anti-Semitic conspiracy theories like the Judensau before leveraging zine culture to build a movement rivaling Hitler's. His journey from a rebellious Catholic youth to a Nuremberg defendant highlights how early far-right tactics, including targeted disinformation and charismatic cults of personality, mirrored modern internet organizing. Ultimately, Streicher's life illustrates that genocide often stems not just from state power, but from the foundational role of radical media in dehumanizing entire populations. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Welcome to Behind the Bastards00:02:06
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Oh boy.
Welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where I just played a trick on Sophie.
I'm Robert Evans.
This is a show about the worst people in all of history.
And to help us talk about one of the worst people in all of history, one of my favorite people in all of history.
Did it happen, Sophie?
Did it happen?
Did you catch my cunning ruse?
Yeah, I asked for the script and it says, ha ha ha, Sophie, this was a trick.
The Worst People in History00:15:54
Uh-huh.
Since you fake documents that's not the real script.
I know, I know.
It was such a shitty thing to do.
And that laugh on the line was Jake Hanrahan.
Jake, you are a...
I'm doing good.
I'm doing good, buddy.
How are you doing this week?
Yeah, man.
Good.
I'm good.
I'm good.
I'm moving forward with looking into dead Russians.
So things are going good.
You've taken on the fun job for yourself this year of looking into the mysterious accidental deaths and suicides of a bunch of Russian oligarchs for your hit podcast, Sad Oligarch.
Yeah, man.
And it's been really eye-opening, actually.
Like, it's a lot of work, but it's very, I mean, the coincidence is being stretched to its absolute limit on what's happening here.
Put it that way.
Yeah, it's a super impressive podcast.
Really happy to have it on the network.
You also, Jake, run an outfit called Popular Front, which does both a regular podcast on conflict all around the world and also has a, you put out a print journal.
I think I'll call it a journal because that sounds good.
I mean, yeah, magazine.
Yeah, yeah.
That's what we're moving forward with.
And documentaries as well.
Yeah.
So in other words, Jake, you are kind of a good version of the bad guy that we're going to talk about today, because the guy we're talking about today is like the evilest example of like a dude who you could technically call a journalist.
He ran a newspaper or a journal or whatever, which was the podcast of the 1930s and 40s.
What do you know about a fella named Julius Stryker?
Nothing, actually.
Okay, okay, very good.
So Stryker was, I mean, the kind of the surface level thing that he was, and sort of the most prominent thing that he was was the dude who ran a newspaper in Weimar, Germany called Der Stürmer.
So he was like the guy who published the primary anti-Semitic newspaper of like the pre-Nazi and the Nazi era.
He was the only dude we executed at Nuremberg who hadn't actually had a government position in the Nazi party.
In other words, when they killed Stryker after the war, they acknowledged like, well, this guy wasn't, you know, he wasn't a military leader.
He wasn't in the government.
He didn't like help start a war.
He didn't like command troops.
He didn't run a death camp.
But we're going to hang him because the propaganda he made was an integral part of the Holocaust.
He should have studied science and he could have been sent to America.
Yeah, if he knowed how to build a bomb.
He missed paperclip with the wrong profession, you know.
I mean, one of the things about Stryker is that he kind of did, he was kind of like that level of evil genius in that he figured out a way to utilize the news media as a weapon in a way that a lot of people today still do.
Like people are hurting folks right now using a lot of the tactics that Stryker pioneered.
But he's also smart.
Why did he die, though?
Yeah.
I mean, the accumulated head injuries that he got in street fights in the 1930s might have blunted him by the end, you know?
Some of that CTE, which I think is an underdiscussed part of a lot of the old Nazis, right?
You can't, you can only have like so many beer bottles broken over your head before you start to yeah, yeah.
He was, I mean, he was, he was like just kind of involved in a lot because he was a big speaker during the Weimar era, right?
And so if you're a big Nazi speaker, you get into a shitload of bar fights.
One of the things that's interesting about Stryker is that, like, so this is getting a little bit outside of topic, but if you, like, spend any time engaging with the actual historiography of the, like, the quote-unquote holy land or the lifetime of the person who has come down to us as Jesus Christ, you'll find out that, like, there were sort of a bunch of messianic figures, like, in that part of the world in that period of time.
People claiming to be, like, messiahs.
people claiming to be, you know uh, holy men and basically the guy that, like you know the, the you get a lot of stories about in the Bible um, is like one of a number of dudes who theoretically, if you're not a believer in Christianity right, if you don't believe, that guy's the son of God.
Theoretically, there were probably other dudes that like, maybe could have been the focus of a big religion if shit had broken a little bit differently, right?
Um yeah, like John, John the Baptist is worshipped by.
Um there's I forget the name now uh, but there's a like specific religion um, in the Middle East.
Most of them actually don't live in the Middle East now because they were persecuted, but yeah, they.
For them, John The Baptist was their Jesus, if you know what I mean?
Yeah yeah, exactly.
And so Stryker is, In addition to being this, very influential propagandist, he's kind of that guy for Hitler.
As in, if a couple of things had broke differently, he could have been the like Fuhrer of the fascist party that rose to power.
Like he had a lot of similarities, and there was a period of time where they were kind of seen as rivals for like the guy who's going to become the center of the far right movement in Weimar Germany.
So he's a really interesting dude for a number of reasons there.
So yeah, that's who we're talking about this week, Julius Stryker, aka Jules.
So Julius was born February 12th, 1885, in a little bitty country town named Fleinhausen, about 15 miles west of the town of Augsburg in Bavaria.
Now, Bavaria is kind of like, sometimes I hear people say it's like the Texas of Germany, right?
It's traditionally the conservative chunk of Germany.
It's quite large.
It's also like heavily Catholic as opposed to kind of the more Protestant parts of the country.
And his family's Catholic.
His dad is the town schoolmaster in this little bitty town.
And his dad is like a lot of folks in Bavaria at the time, a big believer in having as many babies with his wife as she is capable of surviving.
So Julius is his ninth kid, which is, that's a lot, a lot of kids to have.
That's a hell of a lot of kids.
Yeah, back then it was like, just keep going, right?
Yeah, you got to make them out.
Three of them are going to make it to 15, you know, and then you can die at the right old age of 38.
Yeah.
So the strykers were a conservative, traditional family in a pretty conservative and traditional part of Germany.
Julius had been born in, you could call it, he was basically born during Germany's Kinsiniera, right?
Like Germany is like 15 years old when he turns fifth or when he's born.
And his family is pretty excited to be a part of this new country.
So everybody's like, yeah, Germany, great idea.
This is only going to only going to end well.
His mom is kind of a homemaker at the time, while his dad is, again, the school teacher.
And he's, as a very young kid, again, a lot like Hitler.
He's a mama's boy.
He actually calls his mother the fortress of my childhood.
So, you know, very much, very much tied to his mom.
Very much.
It's weird.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
I love my mom.
That is a weird way to describe your mom.
As a fortress.
Yeah.
Not like, oh, my sweet mother.
Like, no, she was the fortress.
She was the verdun of my childhood.
Yeah, that is all.
That's like, my mom's my favorite person.
No.
Yeah.
She's a fortress.
Yeah.
It's interesting.
I mean, Hitler's kind of the same way where, like, the, uh, if you listen to like folks who knew the family at the time or like the doctor who took care of her when she had cancer, he was like, I've never seen anybody who was like so into his mom as this guy.
You know, not that it's bad to be a mama's boy, but an interesting detail for both of these fellas.
It's so good to fuck your mom.
Like, you know, yeah, there's a little bit of like that emotionally going on, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
A little odd.
So in short, his early life is characterized by this kind of both this comforting sort of feeling of a very stable like family, but also this very comforting feeling of like the weight of all of this tradition, you know, that exists in the area he lives in.
But despite this, while his family's Catholic, while Bavaria is Catholic, he's never super into Catholicism as a religion, but he is very culturally Catholic.
And one of the things that he gets out of his cultural Catholicism is a pretty rough attitude towards Jewish people.
Not great relations between the Catholic Church and Judaism in this period of time.
Not that he would have known any Jewish people growing up, right?
Julius would have only occasionally even met other like Christians who had spent time interacting with Jewish citizens of the Reich.
There were a significant amount of German Jews in like cities.
If you grew up in a city, you certainly were going to meet and interact with Jewish Germans.
But he's out in the countryside and basically everybody's Catholic where he is.
You got a couple of Protestants.
That's kind of a big deal running into Protestants for his folks, let alone like...
Why did he hate Jews if he didn't even know any?
Well, because he's raised on stories about them and largely like really negative propaganda.
So the church in his hometown, and this is the case with hundreds of churches across Europe, had stained glass reliefs of what's called the Judensow.
J-U-D-E-N-S-A-U.
You can look up pictures of this if you'd like.
And the Judensow is a pig nursing Jewish babies, right?
Like that's, it's like this, it's a racist kind of like cartoon or whatever, but this is like literally like carved into churches.
There were also would have been a regular talk about what was called the blood Passover, which is this medieval era conspiracy theory that existed up until and it still exists in some areas that claims that like rabbis have to murder Christian children to get their blood to make matzah.
And that's like fucked up and wild and stuff, but these were really common.
Again, this stuff is literally like in there's stained glass reliefs of some of these stories.
You know, this is a thing that goes back a very long time.
And some of these myths about Jewish people, these like conspiracy theories about rabbis and the like, would have been taught to him both kind of as a part of his Catholic upbringing, but also by adults who kind of, these were not just literal beliefs.
They were also things that adults would kind of embellish for kids as like a form of entertainment.
So it's kind of this mix of the two things, but it all contributes to this kind of general miasma of bigotry that is culturally the norm.
And this is not just in Germany, right?
If you're in France around the same time, you're a kid in Belgium, kid in Scandinavia, kid in most parts of the UK during this period of time, you're getting pieces of this.
You know, there's differences culturally kind of depending on where you are and what your dominant religion is.
But like this is a big part of why, you know, when the when the Nazis take over in France, like one of the logistic problems they have is like so many people handing in Jewish neighbors and relatives because, you know, this kind of bigotry is just, it's very, I mean, this is like, yeah, it's already there.
And this is, you know, it's one of those things where, as much as we're talking about how much bigotry this kid and everyone else in his, in, in this part of rural Bavaria, is ingesting, this is also simultaneously a period in which Jewish people are making great strides towards equality in Germany.
Prussia had made Jewish people citizens for the first time, albeit kind of second-class citizens in 1812 as a part of the Napoleonic Wars, which is only, you know, like 60 or so years before Stryker's born, 70 years.
Full civic equality had been granted in 1848 in Prussia, although most states in what became Germany a little after that still had some restrictions on Jewish people doing things like joining the military until 1869.
And, you know, 1870 is when we have the Franco-Prussian War, which is what gives us the birth of like Germany as a traditional state.
So like right before the Franco-Prussian War, Jews get the right to serve in the German military.
And then when that war ends and Germany is established as an independent nation for the first time, one of the things that happens when Germany is born is that Jewish people are given full rights as subjects of the Kaiser.
So it's, you've got, again, in this period, you're both, you both have this very medieval like bigotry is still super common, but also you've got this very like progressive movement towards recognizing Jewish people is the same as anyone else in the country.
So both of this stuff's happening at the same time.
His first, Julius's first direct memory of Jewish Germans came when he was about five years old.
His mom ordered fabric from a shop owned by a Jewish shopkeep in a town nearby.
The fabric did not meet her expectations for whatever reason.
And because she'd spent so much money at it, she got angry.
She started crying.
And Julius, you know, who's again about five during this period, recalls probably from the adults around him hearing that this betrayal of getting bad fabric was just like a Jew.
And in Randall Beitwerk's biography of Stryker, he notes, the village priest in his regular periods of religious instruction in the school explained how the Jews had fought Christ bitterly, finally crucifying him.
This was my first inkling that the nature of Jews was peculiar, Stryker later wrote.
So this is kind of, you know, it's this, again, you've got like this, your, your preacher talking about how Jewish people are responsible for the death of Christ and your mom complaining that like they screwed you out of, you know, the proper cloth.
It's just kind of this all-encompassing thing.
So in this period, age 14 is kind of the start of your adulthood.
That's when a young man is going to start working in apprenticing to learn a trade.
Julius actually finished his primary school at 13 and started attending a teacher training program where he's like learning how to become a school teacher as a as a 13 year old, which is wild.
Yeah, that's crazy.
Imagine going to school and your teacher's 13.
Yeah, you're like eight.
He's 13.
He's like, I can't even imagine the things he's seen.
That kid's a hard 14.
You're not telling me shit.
I'm not learning anything from you.
Yeah, it's funny.
So he's one of like, and, you know, it says something probably about his dad that of the nine kids in the family, five of them follow in their dad's footsteps as teachers, which is not like uncommon, right?
Like at that point in time, you're a coal miner, right?
You're living in somewhere in the south of England and your dad's a coal miner.
You're probably going to grow up to be a coal miner.
You know, it's kind of the same thing with Stryker's family and being a teacher.
He does okay.
He like passes everything, but he's got kind of mediocre grades and he starts working as a substitute teacher in 1904, having been an indifferent teaching student.
Now, the Bavarian school system at this point is partly run by the Catholic Church.
So in villages, the local priest was like the administrator of the school.
Like he would check in to see like what the teacher's doing, what they're teaching kids, whether it's acceptable.
Young Soldiers and Flexibility00:13:31
And Julius, while he's kind of very culturally Catholic, doesn't particularly believe and is kind of oppositional defiant, right?
Like he's just reflexively angry at anyone who's telling Telling him how to do things.
So he starts getting into a bunch of fights with the local priest as he's starting his like career as a teacher.
Kind of a lot of this starts when he decides he wants to change the starting time for Sunday school classes, which is a part of the school teacher's job.
And the local priest gets really angry and it gets him in trouble with his bosses, all that stuff.
So in 1907, his kind of reflexive need to sort of, I don't know, resist authority causes problems for him again because he has to do his year of compulsory military service, which all German men have to do in this period of time.
Kind of when you're a young adult, you have to, at some point, you have some flexibility as to win, but you have to go spend a year working as a soldier so that when it's time to do a World War I, they can call everybody up and have them go, you know, do a World War I.
And he's terrible at this.
Like his, his leaders, his officers notice that he like can't be controlled, basically.
He winds up going to jail for several days because like a guy in the lunch tent makes fun of him and he just beats the absolute piss out of this dude.
So his superiors are like, this is not a guy, like because he's a school teacher, they were considering, you know, sending him to officer school.
But they're like, wow, this guy, we can't have this guy do anything, right?
He's just not like a reliable soldier.
So 190, yeah, loose cannon, kind of an asshole, right?
Like he's just kind of a giant dick.
So 1908, he goes back to teaching.
And then the next year, he gets in trouble when a priest visits his class and says something that Julius disagrees with.
So Stryker kind of like they have this big confrontation.
Maybe it's kind of gets close to blows and he forces the priest to leave, which gets him in trouble with the church again.
And he's like pushed out of that town and eventually like comes to find a teaching position in the biggest city near him, which is Nuremberg.
This is a good thing for him because like he doesn't really like the Catholic Church.
He's pissed at how much of a role they have in teaching people.
And in Nuremberg, there's a lot of Protestants and also, you know, a growing number of people who aren't particularly religious at all who are like, why are our schools run by the Catholic Church?
Like this maybe shouldn't be the way that we do things in our new modern Germany that's supposed to have some degree of pluralism in it.
Like why are they in charge of this?
And so he gets along really well with his boss in Nuremberg.
He starts to like find some success, you know, teaching.
In Nuremberg, you know, it's, it's this kind of interesting place in the early 1900s.
It had been like majority Protestant up until the turn of the century.
And then a bunch of Catholics had moved in, along with 8,000 or so Jewish Germans.
And it's one of those things.
I just talked about how racist his upbringing was, but at this period of time in his life, there's no evidence from any of his writings at the time that he had any particular negative interactions with any of his fellow citizens who were Jewish, that he had any particular like issue.
In fact, he seems to have kind of been a progressive leftist early on when he moves in for the time, what you'd call that when he moves to Nuremberg.
He sort of was interested in the Social Democratic Party, but at that time, the government forbade state employees from being social democrats.
So he joined the Democratic Party, which was kind of like the center slightly liberal option at the time, right?
And the Democratic Party's primary goal was to end clerical supervision in the schools, right?
Like their big campaign sort of like issue was like, maybe we don't have priests running all of our schools.
So Stryker was, you know, into this.
He joins and at some of these early meetings he's doing, he starts like speaking up and eventually like actually giving speeches.
And it's kind of one of those things he doesn't have as a teacher.
He's got some experience being up in front of an audience.
But the first time he gets up in front of an audience at a party meeting and starts like, you know, teaching, kind of going on a little bit of a rant about why he doesn't like priests being in charge in the schools, he's kind of electrifying.
Like people, all of the people running this party are like, this guy's actually really good at this.
And so they're like, hey, Julius, what if we had you, what if we hired you in basically as like a regular speaker?
So, you know, when we have party meetings, when we're doing like vote drives and stuff to bring in more folks to raise money, we can just have you get up on stage and start, you know, doing your thing.
And so that's how he starts.
That's like kind of the birth of this guy's political experience is he's just kind of like has this natural gift.
And in this period, you got to remember people don't have radios, really.
You know, I think they exist, but not a lot of folks really are listening to the radio.
There's certainly no television.
One of the primary methods of entertainment is just like at night, you hear like, oh, this party's doing a thing and they've got some guys giving speeches.
And it's kind of like, it's almost like going to a comedy show or something or going to a concert, right?
You know, you just want to leave your house and listen to them all and talk about stuff.
That sounds pretty interesting.
Yeah.
There's usually beer.
You know, I think from what I've heard, like the cost of attending, because these are fundraisers for parties too, is usually about the cost of a pint of beer.
So it's not that pricey.
Working class people can afford it.
Sometimes there's free food.
There's, you know, it's just like, it's kind of how you go and spend your nights.
It's a big cultural thing.
Right.
And he just kind of feels as he starts giving these speeches.
And this is sort of where you get the problematic elements.
He, the way he interprets, you know, it is like you, you do something you've never done before and you have kind of a knack for it and you feel like, oh, wow, maybe this is a thing I should like work more on.
That's kind of speaking for him.
But instead of just being like, yeah, I've got a knack for this, he, he decides that there's this inner voice guiding him, right?
Like there's this, uh, um, yeah, almost spiritual presence inside him that he feels is like teaching him how to how to speak to these crowds.
Um, and, you know, the other problematic aspect of this is that like he just kind of like reflexively, one of the ways he tries to get the audience on his side is by like going on rants about Jewish people.
Um, and he does, he, you know, he's making just like some side jokes.
It's not really the focus of anything, but he notices that like the Jewish people in the audience aren't laughing when he's making racist jokes.
Yeah, funny that.
And, you know, one of the folks that he's like work like working with in this party kind of pulls him aside after one of his speeches and says, and this is how Stryker related it later.
Stryker, let me give you some advice.
I work in a Jewish firm.
I have learned to be silent at times when my German heart gladly would have spoken.
And often I speak when I would rather be silent.
The Jews are few in number, but great in the economic and political power they have achieved.
And their power is dangerous.
You, my dear Stryker, are still young and cocky and don't mince words, but never forget what I'm telling you.
The Jews have great power and that power is dangerous, very dangerous.
Now, you might note that this was, again, this is something he, he relates this speech, you know, decades later when he's a powerful Nazi.
This almost certainly didn't happen.
Part of how we can tell that is like, at no point does anyone stop him from having a career as like a speaker and a racist.
You know, there doesn't seem to be any sort of like pushback that he actually encounters here.
So that's more interesting because that's how he chooses to like kind of frame his upbringing later.
Yeah, I mean, Germany was hardly like a place where you couldn't be outspokenly anti-Semitic back then.
You know what I mean?
The Kaiser was, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
I don't think nobody's getting like canceled in 1910 Germany for being a little bit racist, you know?
Yeah.
It was a free-for-all, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're, you're good.
You're, you're, you're fine doing that.
Uh, it's like stand-up comedy in the 1990s, you know, like, yeah, there's no rules.
Um, you can go be Andrew Dice Clay.
Um, anyway, so the next year, uh, our boy Jules got married to a woman who had the I've never heard this first name before, Kunigund.
Um, yeah, no, I haven't heard it before.
Interesting name.
Uh, and her dad, she comes from, he kind of marries up, right?
Like her dad's upper middle class.
He's like a business owner, whereas his dad's kind of like a teacher, which teachers don't make a lot of money then or now.
Um, and they, you know, are going, want to get to work making babies, you know, creating more Germans.
But before they can, a historic event occurs that would drastically increase the need for additional German babies.
World War I.
So that kind of gets in the way.
He's, he's kind of on the way up in his life, right?
His career as a teacher is doing good.
He's just gotten married.
And then like a lot of young men his age, this is a pretty universal experience.
The war interrupts things.
And this is actually one of the areas in which he's really different from Hitler, right?
Because he's doing really well.
And then the war hits and he's got to like disrupt his life to go fight in it.
Hitler's a fucking disaster.
And then World War I kind of saves him, right?
It gives him something to like focus his life around.
Yeah, he's a shit painter.
He's making these terrible little postcards in Munich and then he gets to go do something that he has an aptitude for.
But that is also like, you know, Julius, this is more of a disruption for him.
But Julius also is one of these guys who finds out he's kind of got a knack for this.
He's one of these fellas, you hear about people like this sometimes.
There's this difference between garrison soldiers and combat soldiers, right?
A garrison soldier is like a guy who can handle the politics and the sort of like the bullshit that you have to eat when you're just like a regular soldier at peacetime on base and you've got to deal with like, you know, kind of worming your way through the hierarchy and sort of like making shit work within the kind of bureaucratic organization that is an army, right?
But when it comes time to actually like shoot people in a trench, you know, and fight, different folks are good at that who in a lot of cases wouldn't be very good at just like sitting at a base at peacetime and dealing with the bureaucracy of the army.
And Stryker's one of those guys, right?
He's terrible in peacetime as a soldier.
His officers like can't get him to do anything properly.
But as soon as he starts getting into gunfights, he's really good at it and he loves combat.
He is a frontline trooper and he's he's one of these guys who war seems to like activate something within him.
He not only like after his baptism of fire, he's not one of these guys who is considers himself traumatized by war.
He's not one of these guys who finds the trenches to be a bad place.
And in fact, he starts volunteering for more combat duty.
He's like, as soon as he gets a taste of fighting, he's like, I want more of this shit.
Like put me in, coach.
I'm ready to go.
So he does well enough that in 1915, he gets made an officer candidate.
You know, in peacetime, they're like, this guy cannot be given any kind of responsibility.
And then at war, they're like, actually, this guy's exactly the kind of dude we need.
Yeah, he has no instinct for self-preservation.
So in 1916, Romania declares for the Allies.
Everyone's kind of expecting, you know, in World War, there's the stalemate at the trenches.
And then Romania, who's kind of like stuck in Germany's flank, if you look on a map, is like, ah, we're going with the Allies.
And there's this big hope on behalf of the Allies that it'll cause a breakthrough, you know, in this stymied situation.
It does not do that because the Germans take this really tiny chunk of their army and just absolutely pants the Romanian military.
Like within a couple of weeks, they've conquered the country.
And Stryker is a part of the German army that gets sort of diverted from the Western Front to go take over Romania, which gives him his first taste of like comprehensive victory, right?
This is a really good moment for the German army.
Part of why this sort of like, we got stabbed in the back, lost cause myth is going to start up later is because a lot of these soldiers, they have this victory in Romania and then this victory on the Eastern Front against Russia.
And it doesn't feel to them like they could have possibly lost the war later, right?
We were just winning everywhere.
What happened?
Yeah.
So, you know, Jake, in a lot of ways, our conquering Romania was signing the advertisers who support this podcast.
They're our brains.
It's exactly the same.
Yeah, it's exactly the same.
We are the conquering German Imperial Army marching into Bucharest to try and take its oil fields, but with, I don't know, a food box company or something.
Conquering Romania and Advertisers00:02:06
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Hitler's Radicalization Path00:15:42
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Monument.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, we're back.
Jake.
So 1916, he goes into Romania, has a great win.
And in general, his army career is going good during the war.
He has one issue, which is that in 1916, he assaults an army medic based on some stuff he'll do later.
I think it might have been because the guy was trying to vaccinate him and he didn't want that to happen.
He's going to publish a bunch of vaccine-related conspiracy theories later when he gets his newspaper.
We don't know entirely why he like fights with this medic, but I think there's a decent chance it's related to that.
It's just kind of the only recurrent conflict that he has with medical personnel in his life.
But other than that, his service record is really good.
By 1918, he's back in France.
You know, there's one last attempt by the Germans to break through the enemy lines.
Doesn't quite work out for him.
Kaiser abdicates.
The German military is demobilized.
World War I is over.
This should have been a good time because, you know, it seemed like a bad thing.
But as a guy who loved the war, Stryker does not take this really well.
And again, his perspective is we won every battle we were in.
You know, when they declare the armistice, I'm still standing on French soil.
How could we lose everything?
Right.
How could that be the and you know, a lot of German soldiers are going to feel that way?
Yeah.
It's kind of what led, well, set the groundwork for World War II, right?
Yeah.
And I don't know, Jake, this is something I think about a lot.
Like the like my gut, just as a person who doesn't like to see people die in war is like, well, yeah, so you're so soft.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Get more like Stryker.
Get more like Stryker.
Well, I feel like, you know, if someone had come to me in World War I and been like, you know, should we do like an armistice with the Germans?
Yeah, I'd be like, yeah, whatever it stops the killing.
This is fucking awful.
But because of that, and because like Ludendorff and Hindenburg, who are the generals in charge, are able to like, they don't want to admit, yeah, we lost the British and the French and the Americans and, you know, and whatnot, they fought us to the point where like we were about to break and we had to, we had to give up.
Otherwise, the entire army would have shattered, you know, which would have been a calamity for us.
They can't admit that.
So they're like, no, the government stabbed us in the back.
We were about to win.
And then they took it from us.
And so does that mean like the ethical thing would have been like, no, no, no, we're not negotiating this.
We're going to fight you guys until you break and surrender unconditionally.
Like, which is like what that is like a moral question that the leaders of the allied countries take with them into World War II, which is why, part of why it's such a fucking ugly fight and so much, like there's this understanding then that like, well, now maybe we have to just break the fuckers.
I don't know like what moral lesson to take out of that.
Yeah, it's just like total brutality, right?
Yeah.
Is that like the justified thing to do, like morally?
Does it save more lives in the long run?
So, I'm going to guess most people are broadly familiar with like, you know, what goes down next in Germany.
There's a, this immediate wave of like failed rebellions and putsches on the left and right.
There's like a number of points in which like some right wing or some left wing group will try to take over a city or a whole region of the country.
Um, and you know, when this happens, when this is like communists or other kinds of leftists who try to like overthrow and establish their own sort of governments in parts of Germany, um, the kind of forming state winds up relying a lot on sort of ad hoc groups of right-wing military veterans who form militia units and go in and just start killing people, right?
Like, that's that's how um some of these things get put down.
Um, and so you start to get this sort of culture of we've got these right-wing veterans groups, you know, with guns who are here to like fight the left.
You know, it really starts as soon as the war ends.
Um, and obviously, alongside this, you've got the economy collapsing, prices for everything skyrocketing.
Um, and this is all put on the new democratic government of Weimar, uh, who has to spend several years trying to wrestle Germany into being a vaguely functional state.
It's a hard gig being a democratic politician in Weimar in like 1919.
Um, one of one of the worst jobs anybody could ever get, right?
Like, just trying to trying to make Germany work in this period of time.
It's a real bummer.
Yeah, it's a it's a really interesting period, though.
You don't hear enough about like the run-up.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, it's really interesting time.
I mean, yeah, like very, very early doors chaos.
Yeah, and you have to like have some respect for the kind of moral courage.
And a lot of them get assassinated of these early Weimar politicians who are like trying to make a because the czar, or not the czar, the Kaiser, as soon as you know, he loses, flees.
He winds up in fucking Belgium, I think.
Um, and these generals basically start pretending like, oh, we didn't lose the war.
It was like, and you, you, as some like, you know, elected social democratic leader, because the sock dims sort of like are the first big party in power in Weimar, you're like trying to deal with the consequences of all of these like shitty Kaiser dudes, like the Kaiser and his, his generals, who would just kind of ruin the country and then bounced.
Um, so I don't know, yeah, it's there's something honorable about trying to do that, but it doesn't work, you know.
Uh, that is the broad story.
Um, so Julius, uh, at this point, he had been kind of maybe a little bit on the liberal side of things, you know, he was certainly not a leftist, but kind of like flirting with some center-left ideas before World War I.
But by the time he gets back from the front, he is very much into right-wing politics.
You know, um, a lot of that is there's this feeling of like the brotherhood of the trenches, and the right is really successful at sort of talking to these veterans at telling them that like they were betrayed and they were betrayed by these social democrats.
Um, and so, you know, he takes up work as a teacher again, but he also joins a local anti-Semitic political organization.
It's kind of like a militia that is blaming a lot of Germany's post-war problems on the Jews that's called the Protective and Defensive Society.
Um, it sounds better in German.
There are a lot of these, right?
Yeah, tons of them.
Every town's got a bunch of them.
Um, now, Stryker is still kind of uh, you would say probably like naive enough that anti-Semitic politics are very new to him.
So, he's initially kind of just a spectator.
He'll show up at these speeches or at these political events.
He'll listen to speeches by people.
And like the folks who are speaking at events for the Protective and Defense of Society and other kind of anti-Semitic political organizations are often quoting from and recommending very specific books, right?
And to Stryker, the most influential of these books, the ones that he like buys a copy of and reads and becomes enthralled by, is called Handbook of the Jewish Question.
And it's by a fellow named Theodore Fritsch.
Now, old Theo was a journalist.
A lot of the early German anti-Semites are journalists, right?
Who in the late 1800s, early 1900s work for newspapers or publish books that are like quote-unquote investigations, you know, into various racist conspiracies.
And old Theo, he's kind of active at the end of the 1800s, you know, and he's basically, he's like one generation or so earlier than Julius, and he's Prussian.
He'd been a farmer's kid in the 19th century.
He's one of these guys, like he has seven brothers and sisters and four of them die before they get to adulthood.
He winds up working in a machine shop as kind of Germany transitions to an industrial economy.
And in his late 20s, he saved up enough money that he like, he founds a publishing firm.
And they start by making technical manuals.
And then as soon as they make enough money selling like technical manuals to companies, he starts putting out a newsletter called Anti-Semitic Correspondence.
Some great titles in this episode.
So on the nose.
Just like racism letters.
Against Jews.
Yeah, yeah.
That's quite a title right there, Fritch.
Yeah.
They were very much of the show, not tell, you know, sort of Arab method.
Even Hitler was more subtle than that.
Yeah, right.
Like, yes.
They hadn't figured out how to like put a shine on it yet.
Right.
Yeah.
But Fritsch is, you know, he's a groundbreaking racist, right?
He's with this first generation of like political anti-Semites.
He loves Friedrich Nietzsche.
And he actually, once he starts putting out his anti-Semitic correspondence magazine, he sends Nietzsche copies every time he puts out a new edition.
And Nietzsche, not a fan of this shit.
Yeah, I could imagine him sitting there going crazy like, for fuck's sake.
For months, he's just like getting these letters like, what the fuck?
Why am I getting this?
Did I sign up for this when I was drunk or some shit?
Like, I'm not paying for this, am I?
Man, Nietzsche has been like misunderstood by basically everyone ever, man.
Like every group can just be like, yeah, it's like Nietzsche.
No, like the shortcut to knowing someone is not talking properly about Nietzsche is them saying like, I find Nietzsche really inspiring.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, they quoted.
They're doing it wrong.
There's a lot of hope there.
Yeah.
And it's, it's very funny because Nietzsche eventually gets so frustrated at getting all of these fucking letters that he responds.
And he, he kind of, being Friedrich Nietzsche, he responds in this kind of catty way where he's like, thank you for giving me a glance at the muddle of principles that lie at the heart of this strange movement.
Please never send me another fucking letter.
I will hurt you if you do.
Like threatens him, basically.
It's nice to see how weird you people are.
Stop fucking talking to me.
Base Nietzsche.
Yeah, it's the right, like he's pretty unequivocal.
Like fucking stay away from me.
Yeah, he actually like he wrote quite a lot.
I think maybe in, I forget, maybe the early part before he wrote like quite extensively on like really being against anti-Semitism.
I remember reading about it.
A lot of people will often be like, well, Hitler liked him.
It's like, yeah, Hitler liked dogs.
Dogs are still great.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's kind of like, I don't know, like we could, I think the Nietzsche of the modern day is like, let's say Warhammer, right?
A lot of Nazis into it.
A lot of the people who write.
Yeah, exactly.
But it's still cool.
Yeah, but it's fine.
Yeah.
So Fritsch wrote Handbook of the Jewish Question, this book that our buddy Julius is going to fall in love with in 1893, which is, you know, if you're talking about the Holocaust, you hear the term the Jewish question an awful lot.
This, that word is in use way before the Nazis come to power, right?
And Handbook of the Jewish Question is, you would call it like a groundbreaking work of racism for its era.
Fritsch is going to say a lot of things in this book that become the cornerstone of Nazi politics.
He demands a return to what he calls traditional peasant values.
He rails against urbanization.
He talks a lot about the superiority of the Aryan race.
And, you know, he also, one of the things that's interesting about the handbook, there's ways in which it kind of reminds me of like certain things on the internet today, in that it's a, it's a living document.
So he doesn't just put out this book and like, this is the, the book it's done.
Every like year, he'll add more to it.
He'll update it when things happen, right?
Like as shit happens in the world that he thinks plays into these conspiracies, he'll do an update of the book.
I want to quote from a write-up by Martin Kitchen in the Journal of Anti-Semitism Studies describing this book.
At the time, sundry financial crises from the Berlin stock exchange collapse in 1873 to the Great Depression were blamed on Jewish manipulation.
Germany's defeat in the First World War and the subsequent peace agreements were seen as the result of a Franco-Jewish conspiracy.
Germany is presented as the sole stronghold against a world Jewish conspiracy, thereby combining radical anti-Semitism with a virulent nationalism, which for all its threadbare scholarship and muddled thinking was to provide the foundations of national socialist racial studies.
So that's good.
It's a very, it's interesting to know that like all of this shit was not just, I mean, obviously, but it wasn't just this brainchild of Hitler and his goons.
It was like, yeah, very prevalent from very many different groups.
Yeah, I mean, and that's how you get, as far as we can tell, Hitler's radicalization, like him getting to, because he becomes keyed into anti-Semitic politics before he gets like kind of explicitly into like actually like right-wing political stuff.
He's brought into that through racism.
And probably the thing that pills him is these basically pieces of books like Handbook on the Jewish Question get like mimeographed and handed out on the street as like zines in pre-World War I, you know, Germany.
It really is a lot like like modern zine culture, right?
Where you just kind of have, you've got some like weirdos who get really into, you know, racism or whatever.
It's not always racism.
Sometimes it's cool shit.
But they like, they'll take clips from books that they like and they want other people to read and they'll sort of like copy and paste that sort of stuff into pamphlets and hand it out on the street.
And Hitler, who's basically, he's a hobo, right?
For a decent chunk of time before World War I, he's like homeless on the streets of Vienna.
He'll just pick up these pamphlets that people like toss out when they're out like drinking or stuff.
You know, they'll hand him out at meetings and then he'll like pick them up in the trash.
And because he's like, doesn't have a whole lot else to do, he'll like read them.
And then when he falls in love with them, he'll like read them out to folks at the these homeless hostels that he's staying at a bunch of times.
Well, imagine you, you know, you're homeless and you sat in the shelter there with your pennies and Hitler comes in like, hey guys.
Propaganda Arms and Newspapers00:11:06
Fuck off.
I'm going to listen to this.
Fuck.
I have enough problems without a Hitler.
Right.
Like the reason you're here, it's not because of this.
It's because, oh my God.
Yeah, it doesn't sound good.
But I mean, my point was that like, sometimes you see people be like, oh, well, it was, it was just Hitler's charisma that brought people through.
I mean, I think Hitler's charisma really helped push people into emergency, but these ideas were very much there, right?
Yeah.
And that's, that's one of the things where like, obviously, the fact that Hitler is Hitler, that he has the skills and the talents that he has as a plays a role in everything.
But like Germany.
Yeah, exactly.
And Stryker is kind of in the same position Hitler is at this point where like they are both 1919, 1920 starting to give kind of like speeches, get into politics.
And they're both like showing an aptitude for riling people up, for building movements kind of around themselves.
But yeah, I'm getting ahead of myself.
So Julius falls in love with this racist book.
And it's, it's one of this, this seems to have been the book that kind of from this point on, he's not just sort of a casual normal anti-Semite.
He's like a dedicated one.
Political anti-Semitism becomes sort of the center of his worldview.
So now that he's been sort of pilled, you might say, he returns to public speaking.
He starts showing up first.
And this is what's interesting to me.
He doesn't start this new stage of his speaking career by like finding a party and then going to like speak at their rallies, kind of working his way up from inside a political party as a speaker.
He starts showing up at left-wing political rallies and heckling the speakers there and getting into arguments with them in public.
Right.
And this is what kind of makes him famous in Nuremberg.
Right.
This is not an unfamiliar tactic today, right?
Like he's a troll, you know?
He's very consciously using that as a tactic in order to build a reputation for himself.
Julius is not only a fun speaker, but he's going to like show up wherever these different leftist parties are speaking and he's going to like hassle their speakers.
He's going to argue with them.
So maybe you show up just to watch Julius like make fun of this guy, just to watch him get into scraps.
A lot of times he'll start, it'll start as an argument between him and this guy and then there will be a big, because these are at bars, there will be a big bar brawl, right?
So it's like kind of a fun night.
Hey, let's, you know, Julius is going to be heckling this guy down at the whatever bar.
Let's all show up.
You know, we'll, we'll, we'll cheer him on and then we'll get into a scrap with the social democrats or the communists or whatever.
You know, that's kind of horrible.
For every like group that does that, there's going to be a couple that go, actually, this guy's onto something.
Exactly.
You've got all this shit.
Yeah.
Yeah, too, because like, again, people, this is not a period in which things have solidified.
There's a lot of folks who go from communist to fascist or fascist to communist during this sort of period of time because they all kind of feel, well, what we're doing, like the government isn't working, right?
But I don't know what, you know, I'm on board with.
I can be convinced.
And, you know, Julius, by being this really kind of charismatic guy who's just sort of like making fun of speakers who are less apt than he is at commanding a room, he's building a following for himself and he's building support for his kind of politics in Nuremberg.
So yeah, that's cool.
He becomes basically a local celebrity doing this.
And he's like, you know, he's a triggering the libs kind of guy.
That's how he starts out.
And he decides at a certain point, once he's sort of become this guy that people, people will show up at other political party events just to see Julius.
When he feels like he's got enough of a following, he announces, he puts out like flyers and stuff that he's going to be giving a dedicated speech himself.
And at this speech that he does, thousands, by the way, two to 4,000, something like that, people show up just to see him give this speech.
He announces that he's become a converted political anti-Semite.
This causes a bunch of right-wing political parties to start vying for his membership because he's a free agent, right?
This is kind of like you've, I don't know, I don't know about baseball to draw a baseball comparison here, but you can, you can do it at home.
He's this like, he's really good.
He's, and everybody is kind of like, oh, if we can get Julius, you know, that might be the thing that makes our party go national, you know, get this guy on our team.
Yeah, he's the live wire.
Yeah.
He's the stall.
He's the straw that stirs the drink.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, he's the fucking messy of racism.
So of all these parties kind of vying for his membership, the one he picks is the German Socialist Party, which despite its name, the German Socialist Party is a conservative party and they're into what are called Volkish, which is like folk, yeah, values, right?
And most, the DSP is not.
Anti-Semitism is not a core plank of the German Socialist Party, but most members are anti-Semitic.
And so while the party doesn't have a platform on the Jewish question, Stryker feels like, well, I can get that added, right?
This is a place where I can grow.
I can kind of remake this party in my image in some ways.
So he helps them run a cast of candidates in that year's election.
They don't do very well.
They get basically zero votes nationally and only like 1% in Nuremberg.
But Stryker kind of crucially doesn't give up.
He sort of analyzes accurately what the weakness of the DSP is.
And he decides that it's that they do not have a dedicated propaganda arm.
And in the Weimar era, the only way to make a propaganda arm is to establish a newspaper.
And I want to talk a little bit about what a newspaper is in this period of time, because today you hear a newspaper, you think like, oh, it's a publication that tells you either locally or nationally or internationally the news, like what's going on.
And, you know, you're going to get some columns on culture and stuff.
When we think about newspapers in Weimar Germany, it's probably better to see them as like social media, right?
Like a newspaper is more like for a political party, especially, it's more like how today, if you're running a political party or political advocacy group, your organization is going to have, they're going to have a YouTube channel, maybe where they have some creators put out videos.
They're going to have like a Twitter account.
That is kind of how newspapers work in Weimar.
And one of the things that kind of highlights this is that when Julius gets more famous, multiple left-wing groups will start newspapers just that then the whole purpose of the newspaper is updating folks on Julius Stryker and attacking him, right?
Sort of in the same way that like you'll have a Twitter account that's just like tracking what this one group of right-wingers are doing or this like one political folk that people don't like.
You know, it'll be dedicated to them.
You know, you've got a whole account that's just people covering Trump's legal woes on Twitter or whatever.
That's kind of how newspapers work.
Yeah, it's actually a really good way of putting it.
One, one I've never really thought about before.
I read a while ago, like a history of like newspaper news media.
And yeah, it was, it's, it's ironic now that like everyone has a, you know, slight political leaning or a strong political leaning or whatever.
It's ironic that like, yeah, it's kind of not really changed in that respect.
Yeah.
Obviously it's different now, but it started like that.
And it's almost come full circle now with all this chaos that we're seeing.
Yeah, it's, it's, it's fascinating in that, huh?
Yeah.
And there are, you know, I'm actually just going to quote from a write-up at the U.S. Holocaust Museum on the state of the news media in Weimar, Germany.
Over 4,700 daily and weekly newspapers were published annually in Germany, more newspapers than in any other industrialized nation with a total circulation of 25 million.
Although Berlin was the press capital, small town presses dominated newspaper circulation.
81% of all German newspapers are locally owned.
And when we talk about these local newspapers, that's what we're talking about is shit like these little papers where it's like, I'm going to make a newspaper.
I don't like this guy.
I'm going to make a newspaper dedicated to this guy I hate, you know?
Like it's that kind of shit a lot of the time.
So basically, while the most famous papers are newspapers that are like, you know, traditional newspapers or magazines or whatever, the majority of papers by number are just like some weirdo with a very specific axe to grind.
And in some cases, this again means like, yeah, Stryker's going to do this, right?
Like, this is what he decides his party's missing.
So he establishes his first newspaper.
It's called Deutsche Socialist, you know, German socialist, because that's the name of the party.
And he had been kind of, he used their funding to start this newspaper, and they wanted a traditional political party paper.
But Julius immediately goes in his own direction.
And I'm going to quote from his biographer Randall Beitwerk here.
His goal was to provide short articles in simple language that explained to a popular audience the intricacies of politics and economics.
As he reported to the August 1920 DSP national meeting, gentlemen, let us not forget that we want to speak primarily to the workers.
Brevity is the seasoning.
The contents must have a popular style.
His lead article in the newspaper's first issue is a good example of his early writing.
Addressed to communists and socialists, it began by saluting them as brothers.
Yes, you are brothers.
German mothers bore you on German soil.
The same German blood flows in our veins.
We and you have nothing to lose but everything to gain.
We have the same desire to escape our present misery as fast as possible.
We want the same solutions.
We too want our part of German soil, a small lot with a small garden, just like so many others of our race.
It is the right of being born a German, and we want to be free of the usurious yoke of big money.
Later in the article, Stryker turned to the Jews.
Do you really think the Rothschilds, Mendelssohns, Black Roeders, Warburgs, and Cohns worry about your poverty?
As long as the blood brothers of the Mendelssohns and the Blaichroaters and the Cohns are your leaders, as long as your party officials are Jewish lackeys, you will be no threat to the big moneymen.
As long as you yourself do not lead the way, and as long as the black shadow of foreign blood is behind you, you will be betrayed and deceived.
The black shadow cares for itself, not for you.
And what he's talking about there is like this idea that the German army had been betrayed, right?
By, you know, Jewish people who are foreigners, they're not really loyal to the state.
That's like what he's sort of saying, that's the black shadow, you know?
Yeah.
The rhetoric really has not changed that much.
Nope.
If you think about it, if you're talking about people that are like peddling hate.
Yeah.
I guess maybe it never needs to, right?
Like maybe, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's maybe just like the same thing.
When hate's going to work, it always kind of works the same way.
Yeah, and I mean, that's as on the nose as like an out-and-out modern-day neo-Nazi, I guess.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, obviously they're, you know, following in his footsteps, but you know whose footsteps we're following in today?
Rhetoric That Never Changes00:02:05
The sponsors.
No, no, no.
The blue apron and shit, right, Sophie?
Yeah, that who we're getting money from today.
We're sponsored by HellaFresh, but yeah, close enough.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
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On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
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.
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Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
Merging Parties and Swastikas00:15:56
You know I.
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I'm Ego Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We are back.
Having a good time talking about Julius Stryker.
So Stryker's paper starts to do pretty well.
It's helping to build a following for the DSP, who's not a big party at this point.
But the leaders of the party are kind of a little worried by this newspaper.
Because for one thing, they're not as motivated by anti-Semitism as Julius is.
So they try to rein him in, right?
And as soon as they try to be like, hey, Julius, you know, maybe we focus a little bit more on, you know, politics and a little bit less on racism.
They learn the thing that all of these Catholic priests and military officers had learned a few years earlier, which is that Julius Stryker does not take direction, right?
You try to tell this guy to do things and it just pisses him off.
And as soon as they try to like, you know, force him to make changes, they realize that even though he used their money to start this paper, it's his, it's legally his personal property, right?
So they actually can't, right?
Like, it's like he started the YouTube account, right?
Like, yeah, exactly.
He's not, he has a certain kind of cunning, right?
Yes.
So this becomes more of a problem as his conspiratorial view of the world expands to include the Jesuits, who he sees as a shadowy force running world politics.
Again, Nuremberg is a pretty heavily Catholic town.
And I mean, it's not majority Catholic.
Bavaria is a lot of Catholics.
And Catholics are kind of like a lot of the core membership of the DSP.
And they start leaving, you know, because Catholics and Jesuits are, you know, the same thing.
And it pisses them off that he's like accusing these people who they respect as being in league with this sort of like grand conspiracy.
Some Catholic members of the DSP start sending Stryker letters, basically being like, Hey, would you stop lumping us all in?
And maybe we don't focus as much as on racism because I might not be as into that.
And he like he writes, This is a very modern thing.
He like starts posting pieces of their letters in a column that he writes for the newspaper, making a screenshot.
Yeah, just screenshotting, right?
Yeah, he's doing it's very modern.
Yeah, that's that's crazy, man.
Yeah, it's wild, right?
So, what a bastard!
Yeah, exactly.
He's like, It's even harder to do that than like a screenshot.
Like, that's bad enough, but to be like, no, I'm gonna cut this in fucking out.
It's also like you have to admit, though, like, that's so far ahead of the time, right?
He is decades ahead of everyone else.
He's like an innovator of just being horrible.
Yeah.
So, conflicts, he starts, you know, he keeps getting in conflict.
He's always in conflict with the organizers of his parties, you know, because he's his loose cannon, but they also need him because he brings crowds.
You know, he's not just making this newspaper, but when he shows up, people show up to listen to him speak who probably wouldn't show up to a party meeting otherwise.
So, you know, the paper grows to a few thousand subscribers.
And Julius is able to keep his newspaper running at a fraction of the cost that a normal publisher would have required because he has a secret, which is that he does not pay for his newspaper to be printed.
He will find a new printer.
He'll have them print a couple of episodes or issues and just be like, Yeah, the money's coming.
The money's coming.
Just front us this week, right?
Then we'll pay you back.
Front us this week.
And then, as soon as he hits the point where like they're not going to publish any more papers, he bounces without ever having paid his debts and he finds a new publisher.
Wow.
Things like that must have been so easy back in the day.
Yeah, there's no internet, right?
And internet.
Just like, yeah, I'm gone.
Yeah, I'm the wind, baby.
Yeah.
What are you going to do?
Send a horse.
Yeah, you're gone.
So 1921, he's kind of sandwiched between this conservative party that needs him, but is uncomfortable with how loudly he says the quiet parts.
And, you know, that's a tough place to be in.
But luckily for him, and unfortunately for everyone else in Europe, the leaders of the DSP are also sort of desperate to find a way to make themselves more electorally viable.
And because even with Stryker's help, they're not succeeding at becoming like a national movement, they decide to start working with another political party in the interest of like kind of merging together and seeing if that can give them sort of the oomph that they need to go national.
And the party that the German socialist party starts talking with about a merger is a Munich-based right-wing party called the German Workers' Party, right?
So you've got the socialists and the workers who are looking at merging together to make a socialist workers, a national socialist workers' party, right?
You might call it.
This is where we get that, right?
The Nazi Party, the National Socialist German Workers' Party, comes out of the German Socialist Party and the German Workers' Party merging together, right?
This is this is the Reese's pieces that lead us to the Nazis.
So in May of 1921, as sort of the leadership of these two groups are talking about merging, one member of the German Workers' Party reaches out to Stryker directly and is like, hey, we got this dude named Hitler.
He's kind of our you, right?
He's our guy who gives speeches.
He's the guy people really like to follow.
And, you know, Hitler's interested in this, you know, absorbing thing, but like we have some issues with like the folks who are running our party because Hitler's not.
This is again, Hitler in this period is kind of in a similar situation to Julius, where the German Workers' Party is not founded by Hitler, right?
He's actually brought in as a spy by the army.
Like right after the war, he avoids getting demobilized and winding up without an income by staying in the army.
And the thing the army has him do is like spy on right-wing political parties in Munich.
And so he shows up at his first German Workers' Party meeting basically to like see if they're planning to overthrow the government.
And then he gets angry and he starts like getting into arguments and he gives a speech and people are like, you're actually really good at talking, Hitler.
And he's similar to Stryker in that the dudes who had founded the German Workers' Party start to have issues with him where they're like, this guy's trying to make our party all about himself.
And like the things that we got into are kind of getting lost and he's kind of a tyrant, right?
And so they're part of what the German Workers' Party is hoping is that by merging with the German Socialist Party, they can kind of marginalize Hitler, right?
They can take, you know, push him off to the side and just use him for what they think he's good for without letting him run everything.
And the German Socialist Party is hoping to do the same thing with Stryker, right?
They're both like mirrors of each other in this really weird way, right?
And so, yeah, Hitler is not the kind of dude who's going to let this happen, right?
Like he is, he has these kind of like honed political instincts and he sees, well, these dudes are trying to edge me out of control of the party, right?
That's why they want to do this.
So instead of just going ahead with the merger to the German Socialist Party, he resigns from the German Workers' Party in July of 1921.
And this is, he resigns because the DAP and the DSP leadership have worked out an agreement that would give them sort of power over the Fuhrer in the new merged political party.
And Hitler's like, look, I'll take my followers and my skill for speaking and I'll go somewhere else.
I'll make a new party.
I'll join another party and like, I'll fucking crush you guys.
Like, that's the option.
Do you want to try to like do this without me?
Or do you want to let me back in and give me total control?
That's the, that's the ultimatum he gives them.
Um, and the leaders of the German Workers' Party kind of fold, you know, they're, they're like, well, as much as we didn't want him to be in total control, none of us know how to like get a following without him.
Like he's kind of the primary appeal of our party.
So they let him back in and they make him the center of the new German Workers' Party, which then merges with the German Socialist Party.
And that is how Adolf Hitler becomes for the first time, you know, Hitler, right?
This is, that's where that comes from.
He was like the original influencer, basically.
Yeah, yeah.
And yeah.
So one of Stryker's friends, while this is all going down, sends him a warning letter being like, hey, guys, or hey, hey, Julius, you know, Hitler won his power struggle over with the DAP and they're about to merge with our party.
And our leaders are doing it because they don't like you.
They want a guy who can do what you do, who can bring in, you know, followers and stuff, who can like give these speeches that attract an audience.
And they feel like backing Hitler will let us force you out of the party.
So Stryker, when he hears that, just goes ahead and leaves the German Socialist Party.
Part of why he does this is because his friend, a guy named Otto Dickel, has formed a breakaway organization called the German Working Community.
And the idea behind the German working community is it's like supposed to be the UN of like anti-Semitic parties where we're supposed to be this over-organization and all the right-wing parties can organize with us to get their anti-Semitic policies in order.
It's all very messy.
Dickel, the guy who forms this group, is a really fascinating early German fascist.
People don't talk about him a lot anymore, but he's really interesting.
In the 1930s, he's kind of this like proto-libertarian, like from this point where he's sort of like similar to a lot of the early Nazis.
He's going to become like a laissez-faire capitalist.
But in 1921, he's very much in line with the kind of shit Hitler and Stryker are selling.
And he writes this book called Resurgence of the West, which is interesting in part because it sort of predicts the war that Hitler is going to unleash a few years later on continental Europe.
And I'm going to quote from that book now because it's interesting how much Dickel sort of sees coming.
Many a time, acquaintances.
I'm sorry.
It's quite what Dickel sees coming.
Come on, man.
Oh, man.
I'm 12 in my head.
No, see, I'm so mature that I didn't even, I didn't even notice the come to the.
Oh, that hit me like a front.
Sorry, sorry.
No, no.
Many a time, acquaintances have told me that I see the world differently from them.
That is true.
Who sees it correctly?
Men of science with their mechanistic thinking will certainly attack me, will carp and criticize, will discover some errors and ridicule me.
Let them.
But if in the immediate future, perhaps even before this book is published, events take place in Russia, as I have foretold, if social ferment begins in France, which is heading for the most uncompromising imperialism, and as I fear in England too, if the German people, overwhelmed by despair, is gripped by the irresistible force of national resurgence, then I can only wish it be men who see as I so, men who comprehend the meaning of the world war and of the contemporary events through their bold action and can create a free German people on its own soil.
So, you know, there's a lot of folks who sort of see where the winds are blowing, or at least are hoping to help blow the wind in that direction.
And Dickel's one of them.
And Dickel, you know, for this German anti-Semitic sort of UN that he's going to create, he picks as a logo for it a little thing you might recognize as the swastika.
Now, this is not a weird thing at the time.
Knowledge of the swastika had come to Germany primarily through the work of a bumbling archaeologist named Heinrich Schliemann, who is the guy who like finds Troy by sort of destroying most of the artifacts of Troy because he doesn't realize initially where he's digging and like what he's he's he's churning through to get to what he thinks is is the ruins of Troy.
But some of the stuff that he does found find from Troy is like pottery and shit that's like covered in swastikas, right?
Now, the swastika is, we're not going to get into the history of the swastika yet, although I think I'll probably do an episode on that, but like maybe the oldest thing that people have ever drawn that's like not a super basic shape.
It occurs all over the world.
There are swastikas all throughout like ancient India.
The swastika goes back and I think some of the oldest ones in Europe are like in Ukraine.
They found swastikas that are 15,000 years old.
The Navajo people in the American Southwest have been using swastikas for, again, God knows how long, all sorts of different things.
Actually, it's interesting.
In 1940, when like we start gearing up for World War II, the Navajo and a couple of other indigenous American tribes have a meeting and like announce that we're giving up the swastika, this like ancient religious symbol for us as a result of how the Nazis have polluted it.
Which is fat.
That's such like a strange because there's nothing wrong with a swastika inherently, right?
Like, you know, there's nothing like racist about the fact that the Navajo were like putting this in stuff, you know, God knows how many thousands of years back.
Right.
They weren't like, one day Hitler's going to use this.
Yeah, one day this shithead in Germany.
Yeah.
It's like there's a famous photo.
I can't remember where it is, but it's before Hitler.
And there's like this Girls, like hockey team, like they're you know, like a young girl's, they're like 10.
And on the front of all their jumpers, they've got this huge swastika.
And without context, it's like, Jesus Christ, what's that?
But yeah, it was quite a, yeah, like you said, it was a pretty common symbol.
Yeah, I mean, the Girls Club, which is what you're talking about, is like this large organization for young girls in the U.S. Their magazine, one of the most popular women's magazines in the United States, is called the swastika.
Like, it's just everywhere, you know?
Thanks.
There's all these wild stories, too, of like Americans in kind of the 20s and 30s when there's all the street fighting between Nazis and communists, like American journalists, specifically like women journalists, who will like come to Germany to report on the unrest and they'll have like a swastika ring or a necklace.
And like some communists that they're like, you know, talking with will be like, you might not want to wear that.
Like, that means a real different thing to us now.
Occult Names and Street Fighting00:06:07
It's very awkward, but it's not weird, right?
That this dude, Dickle, adopts the swastika.
This is starting to happen all throughout, you know, Germany.
It's happened with the Nazi party and stuff.
I think it actually goes back a bit further than that, too, because I think the first right-wing militants to wear the swastikas are in 1919.
One of these early anti-communist veterans militias have swastikas.
But that is because it like, this is also interesting.
In World War I, there are U.S. military units and German military units with swastikas, like theoretically who might have fought each other both under the swastika.
Just because it's like a good luck symbol.
Weird stuff.
But yeah, the kind of the first Nazi or fascist, I should say, thought leader to start using the swastika was the head of an organization called the Wotan Lodge.
And the Wotan Lodge is this early German nationalist secret society.
It starts before World War I.
And one of the guys who runs it is our friend Theodore Fritsch, right?
Theodore Fritsch is a very, you know, he's the kind of fascist nerd that still exists today.
His pseudonym is Thor.
Like, that's the name that Fritsch writes on for under for his like Wotan Lodge, you know, columns and stuff.
That Wotan shit has just been cringe from day one then.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, from the fucking jump, right?
And, you know, speaking of how cringe they are, the thing that the Wotanists do is they dress up like knights and Vikings.
They wear like horned helmets.
They carry out these candlelit ceremonies where they'll like march in the shape of a swastika.
And a lot of like Nazi rituals get based on this stuff because after World War I, the Wotan Lodge gets renamed to the Tula Society, right?
These are the bad guys from Hellboy.
You know, if you've seen the Hellboy movie.
Yeah, yeah.
And a lot of these guys become some of the first Nazis, right?
So in 1918, control of the Tula Society passes from Fritsch to a dude named Baron Rudolf von Sabottendorf.
Now, first off, that's his like fascist a name.
Baron Rudolf von Sabatendorf, von Sabotendorf.
Where was he born?
Like Rhodesia.
Yeah.
Like that's a guy Indiana Jones punches.
That is like a stereotypical Nazi name.
He's like born racist.
Yeah.
Well, and it's, it's part of why it's stereotypical is that is not at all his real name.
So oh, right.
Yeah.
Not surprised.
Yeah.
Vaughn, obviously he's calling himself a Baron.
Vaughn is like a signifier in old Germany that you're a noble, right?
The actual guy who calls himself Baron von Sabottendorf is not a noble of any kind.
He was born Adam Glauer.
He's the which is I apparently would go with the von name then myself.
Yeah, that's a much cooler name.
Yeah.
And rather than being a Baron, he is the son of a train engineer.
He's got kind of this weird life as a young adult.
He like moves to Turkey.
He becomes an Ottoman citizen.
And like when he becomes an Ottoman citizen, he like lies and tells them that my name is Baron Heinrich Sabotendorf.
And the Turks are like, yeah, I guess.
Sure.
Sure.
So he fights for the Ottomans in the First Balkan War.
And then he returns to Germany to become a wizard and a fascist.
And he is like, he's an occult.
Like I said, he's a wizard.
He's an occultist.
You know, he's into this.
Yeah, he's like a, he's like an occult guy.
He's doing like magical rituals and he's also like a Nazi racist.
You know, there's a few of these guys.
That's a big thing for the Tula Society.
So yeah, he's like a pretend noble who makes himself into like an occult figure on the far right.
It's funny, like Viking stuff.
If you're a Viking and you're actually doing that, like the Viking shit, like they did.
Yeah, sure.
And you look like a Viking, you're cool as fuck, right?
Anytime after that, that you dress like a Viking, it's like the cringiest thing.
It's weird.
It's one or the other.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
There is no like, there's no like medium speed for those kinds of people.
There's no middle of the road Vikings.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They are the coolest dude ever or they need to be tossed into the ocean.
Yeah.
Not that like, you know, pillage and murder that Vikings did was cool, but they look cool, you know?
Yeah.
I think can be cool and still bad, right?
It's like pirates.
Pirates are cool.
Didn't always do good stuff, but always cool, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, Vincent from Weichermeis.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Bad but cool.
Bad but cool.
Yeah.
So in the swasti, in a book called The Swastika, Symbol Beyond Redemption, author and historian Stephen Heller writes that Sabatendorf, as the new leader of the Tula Society, quote, pledged his loyalty to Germany, the swastika, and destruction of the enemy.
In one of his speeches, he introduced an additional symbolic icon to the language of Volkish occultism, the Ar-rune, which signifies Aryan, primal fire, the sun and the eagle.
And the eagle, he announced, is the symbol of the Aryans.
In order to depict the eagle's capacity for self-immolation by fire, it is colored red.
From today on, our symbol is the red eagle, which warns us that we must die in order to live.
So Sabotendorf also, the other thing that he brings in that you're going to recognize is this very particular kind of like straight-armed salute called the Ziegheil, which is going to become the primary Nazi salute.
And he is also, Sabotendorf is the guy, the primary idea that is noteworthy that he comes up with.
It's called the Führerprinzip, which is the leader principle or leader cult, which is the idea that if we are going to have a successful right-wing party, anti-democratic party in this country, it needs to be bound to a single leader, almost like a religion, right?
Like a messiah, you know?
And the thing, Sabotendorf phrases it, calls it a messiah.
He's like, we are waiting for, we on the German right, are waiting for our messiah.
The Leader Principle Cult00:06:08
So all of these folks, part of why these parties, they don't like Stryker.
They don't really like Hitler, the leadership, but they can't get rid of them, right?
Is because there's this building sense all throughout the 20s in German right-wing politics that we're waiting, we're looking to see which of these guys is going to become the Messiah, right?
And by early 1921, if you're trying to figure out who is our Führer, right?
The two guys who are primarily going to be on your radar are Adolf Hitler and Julius Stryker.
And when the DAP sort of yields to Hitler and agrees to give him control over the party, they're saying we think Hitler's the guy who's going to win.
And when Dickel forms the German working community and brings in his friend Julius Stryker, he's kind of betting that Stryker might be the guy to fill this role.
Dickle and Stryker.
Dickel and Stryker.
Yeah, little Dick Striker.
Yeah.
It's great.
I don't know.
It's like a good detective pair.
It's Dickle and Stryker.
Yeah, there you go.
So yeah, that's where we are as part one closes out.
Jake, how you doing?
How you feeling about this whole tale?
I mean, it's super interesting considering how long ago this was and how many direct kind of similarities there are to the modern day far-right press, you know?
Yeah, I think that's part of why the thing that keeps coming to me as I like read this stuff is like, oh, I guess everything that's happened with social media isn't really surprising.
Like this all happened with like newspapers and shit back in the day.
It's the same as it ever was in a lot of ways.
Honestly, I've never actually thought of it like that when you said that.
It's so true.
It's like almost like the original purpose of the newspapers was how social media is mostly used now.
Let's be honest.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
The idea, like we think of a newspaper kind of as this like edifice that provides information about the world to people.
But the thing that newspapers primarily did early on was both like a tool for people to get out, you know, disinformation, but also just like a way for folks to bitch at each other, right?
Like it's the same thing that Twitter is, you know, that was a master.
It's a tweet.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So Jake, you got anything to plug?
Yeah, man.
Hopefully people that listen to this, I think they'll be interested in the new project that we got going.
Sad oligarch.
It's a investigative podcast series about the fact that a dozen rich Russians have died in the last nine months.
Many of them died in suspicious circumstances.
Many of them have direct links to the Kremlin.
Essentially, we're trying to answer the question, who is killing rich Russians?
And each episode is kind of, it's like, you know, it's true crime, but the way that I would do it.
And it's a lot of research, a lot of actual, you know, investigative journalism, not drama, you know, not Netflix drama type stuff.
So I think people will really like it.
It's doing really well, which I'm glad about.
And it's, it's very, it's revealing, I think, to how internal Russia actually operates at this stage.
You know, it says a lot more than just about the murders.
Yeah, it's an excellent podcast.
Check it out.
Listen to Sad Oligarch.
Check out Popular Front.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Please do also check out my platform.
You go to popularfront.cc.
You'll see all of our links everywhere.
Just search Popular Front anywhere and you'll find what we do.
You can subscribe to CoolerZone Media, folks, if you want to listen to this show or all of our other shows without ads, including Sad Oligarch.
So go to CoolerZone Media, pay us a couple of bucks, and you can become free of the advertising industrial complex, which we love and are grateful for.
Goodbye.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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