Joanna Harrer, a Nazi "momfluencer" and author of the bestseller Mother, Tell Me About Adolf Hitler, championed extreme social Darwinist parenting that denied infants affection to forge children as hard as Kruppstahl. Despite her own traumatic upbringing as an illegitimate child, Harrer leveraged state ideology to promote isolation and emotional neglect, methods she allegedly used on her daughter Gertrude, who viewed her only as "the mother." While similar theories existed in the US, Harrer's work uniquely aligned with Nazi goals through official "Mother Schools," potentially contributing to a generation's inability to heal from wartime trauma due to insecure attachment. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Prussianism Welds Germany00:04:49
What's called my opening?
This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast that is now introduced slightly differently.
We are going to talk about a little bit of history, me and Margaret Killjoy, and then we're going to throw back to the start of the episode.
Margaret, what do you know about Prussia?
How do you feel about Prussia?
I couldn't put it on a map because it doesn't currently exist.
It's one of those things that became Germany, right?
Yes, it is the center of the things that became Germany.
Okay, wait, and then Bavaria is like the southern part?
Bavaria is the southern part.
And the Bavarians and the Prussians, most people would now just be like, well, they're all Germans.
But for a very long time, that would get you shot, you know?
Like, it was very serious.
And even up until like when the Franco-Prussian War started, there were a lot of debates about like these, you had these different army corps that would have divisions of Prussians, divisions of Bavarians.
And the fact that they were fighting well side by side was this huge deal.
Like that's what welded Germany into being.
There was a lot of Prussians were like, well, Bavarians won't stand under fire, you know?
There was a lot of debate about that.
And the Prussians were, it's funny, you're like, I couldn't point it out on a map.
Today, I would guess Prussia is most often referenced when people misspell Russia.
But like for most of the last couple of hundred years, it was a really big deal.
And in fact, at the end of World War II, one of the major Allied goals was like, we have to put a fucking end to Prussia finally.
Like we have to end this concept of Prussian militarism because it's been such a plague in Europe.
And we don't, again, they've the Bavarians are the good Germans and definitely not.
Definitely, definitely not.
But what I am saying is that what we now just describe as like German, right, is what people used to call Prussian, right?
It's all been kind of subsumed, but like, the Prussians were...
And this is kind of who invaded like right around the time of the Paris Commune, like 1871 kind of era.
Yes, yes.
This is exactly that.
That's why it's called the Franco-Prussian War, because the Prussians are kind of like the leading light in this confederation of German states that becomes Germany as a result of the Franco-Prussian War.
They really like invading France.
They tried like three times and like once a generation.
They started out being invaded by France.
Like when the Franco-Prussian War starts, if you read their justifications for like why they were doing what they were doing, it's all like, they keep invading us.
We have to stop the French menace.
And the British, like, there's widespread, everyone is sympathetic to the Prussians and the other German states because they're like, yeah, something's got to be done about France.
Like, you can't let them keep bossing everybody around, right?
Yeah, yeah.
It's the 19th century.
He's supposed to do that to other continents now.
Yes, yes.
Which the French are doing, but they, especially like under Napoleon III, he's like futz and he fucks around in Italy a bunch and like eventually he goes too far.
And the Prussians have this reputation for being like the great warrior people of their age.
They are the Spartans of Europe, which the Spartans also are, but from a long, a lot longer ago.
Yeah.
Prussianism forms the core of what we come to know as Germany.
And while the Prussian nobility are often targeted by the Nazis, these guys, these junkers is what they're called, wind up, a lot of them get killed by the Nazis.
It's because they hate Hitler, but not because he's Hitler, but because he's like poor, right?
They hate Hitler for class reasons.
He's like a corporal who should have known his place and he's trying to run the country.
That's why these junkers hate Hitler.
You know, it's not like all of the horrible crimes.
It's, well, but look at the, of course, this war is doomed.
We have a corporal leading it, you know?
Yeah.
He couldn't even make, he was, he tried to make living selling paintings instead of being born to money.
Absolutely not.
I was born to hold a needle rifle.
Prussian nationalism and militarism are a huge factor in the upbringing of the kids who grew up to fight for and lead Germany in World War II.
So again, it's one of those things like Schreber.
Did he cause the Nazis?
Is he just like one of, you know, a number of people who had similarly authoritarian ideas?
And Prussianism is both an opponent of the Nazis when the Nazis are actually in place, like a lot of Prussians are opponents of the Nazis.
And it's also foundational to what we recognize as Nazism, a lot of these attitudes that Prussianism inculcates in broader, in all of these German territories.
And one of the things about Prussianism is that it is an extremely patriarchal system, right?
You have your king, you know, this comes to be the Kaiser.
He is the absolute ruler of the country.
You know, it doesn't fully work out that way, but that's the idea.
And likewise, the father is the absolute ruler of the household, you know?
Yeah.
Like that's how it is supposed to work.
A lot of these ideas are descended from how Romans did things, right?
Patriarchal Family Rules00:02:28
In ancient Rome, the patriarch of the family, your dad, as long as he was alive, you were legally a child.
He could, it's not a thing that often happened, but he could execute you your whole life.
He had that freedom.
That was a legal thing in like Roman society.
I didn't know that it kept going.
I assumed that his ability to kill everyone he's related to stopped when those people turned 18.
No, absolutely not.
You think Rome would be that way?
No.
That's fucking brutal.
Rome never stopped at the point they should have stopped.
That's what made them Rome.
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Ah, welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast with Margaret Killjoy about why the Germans be like they do.
Margaret, host of cool people who did cool stuff.
So good, Robert.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Nazi Mom Fluencer Story00:15:29
We're talking about Prussianism just at the start of this episode.
Again, this is an episode about a mom fluencer, the Nazi mom fluencer.
But I do kind of feel like if we're talking about all these ideas about like how kids should be raised that factor into the Nazis and that, you know, in the post-Nazi era, if we don't say anything about Prussianism, we've kind of fucked up.
So I felt like we had to a little bit.
And to give you an idea of like how patriarchal this was, not in the way that the patriarchy gets talked about today, it's not that people mean a different thing, but they aren't talking about the exact same thing, right?
They're talking about all these embedded attitudes of like masculine superiority and whatnot in pop culture, in the structure of our government and the structure of our society and all of the ways in which that's harmful to both women and men.
When I say that Prussian society was patriarchal, I'll give you an example.
I interviewed an elderly Prussian man once.
His grandfather was one of these Prussian youngers who was murdered by the Nazis.
And he grew up in the early 1900s and told me that at family breakfasts, their regular ritual was everyone would gather around the table and watch his father eat a single egg, the only egg that their family could afford that day, right?
Everyone had to watch him eat it, right?
This was like, in a way, kind of this expression of these ideas that like, okay, you have the Kaiser as the absolute center and head of this nation, and the father is the absolute despot of his family, right?
And this is a version of this after the Kaiser goes away and you have these chaotic Weimar years where things are very progressive and men, a lot of the men who become Nazis feel emasculated, right?
And part of why they feel emasculated is that it is chaotic, jobs are not as reliable, it's harder to provide for your family.
Then the promise the Nazis make is that we will bring back a world in which you as the man can be the absolute dictator of your home if you follow our Führer as the absolute dictator of this nation.
That is one of the very alluring promises of Nazism.
I don't like how naturally this relates to the things that are happening now and the way that the far right is talking about feeling emasculated by.
Nope.
No, I don't like that.
Could you change history a little bit so that the Nazis are a little more different than a modern American right-wing?
So I feel a little safer.
You see, I think that is the mistake people often make when they talk about figures like Schreber, who we just talked about, and the lady who we're talking about today, is they focus too much on them in order to talk about how the Germans were different to allow the Nazis.
And I do think it's important to talk about stuff like this to be like, well, yeah, this is part of the appeal is this shit that is both very Prussian, but also very all the time everywhere.
You know, no one wants to be a trad wife anymore.
Why can't we just have more trad wives?
Why aren't people having more children?
Let's just bring back America being great.
It'll be great.
Yeah.
That's that's good.
So it's kind of ironic due to the fact that like, you know, the Nazis are such a patriarchal movement that they are kind of so obsessed with these ideas of traditional gender roles that the most influential expert on child rearing of the Nazi era was the walking embodiment of female empowerment in that age.
Her name was Joanna Harrer.
Born Joanna Barsch on October 3rd, 1900 in Bodenbach, Joanna's life began when Dr. Schreber was the most influential name in German scientific childrearing practices.
Her work would owe a great deal to the foundations that he established.
Like most stories of people born in 1900, reading about Joanna's life and family reminds us that dying in a world war was often preferable to living in Europe back then.
Her mother, this is so fucked up.
Her mother is Czech, which is like the family shame, because not only is her mother not properly German, but she's born out.
Joanna's born out of wedlock, right?
So she is ostracized and isolated from her community as a little girl.
Joanna still bore the stigma of this terrible shame and recalled later to her daughter that when her mom came out to her father as pregnant, her father beat her nearly to death.
Like, this is the culture of the time, right?
It is not weird that this happens to her.
Her father's parents died when he was 10 years old.
So on the upside, there was no one to beat him when he has a kid out of wedlock.
The downside is that he has to leave high school as soon as he gets her mom pregnant to raise his new child, and he is isolated from the rest of his family as a result of like the shame that this causes.
His granddaughter, Joanna's daughter, later claimed, in his apprenticeship, he had to carry heavy loads and got a hump.
He and my grandmother ran a stationery shop.
Because of his disability and poor education, my grandfather felt like an underdog, developed strong anti-Semitism, and fled to alcohol.
So Joanna's father passed his anti-Semitism and his alcoholism onto her, which is not abnormal.
What is abnormal is that he also passed on his obsessive feeling that he should have done better in his life.
And this is where this guy is kind of like, he's not, you expect, okay, you've got this story about a woman who becomes very accomplished and powerful.
Her dad is angry that he doesn't succeed as much as he feels like he should.
He becomes an alcoholic.
He's like a drunk and by our standards, abusive.
But at the same time, he is also the way his abuse manifests is he pushes Joanna to excel.
He wants her to achieve the things that he couldn't, which is so different from how you expect this story to go.
Yeah, although since you've told me about Schraber, it kind of makes sense, you know?
Like, oh, I have a hunchback, so that's why I'm going to strap a two by four to your back for your entire life.
Right, right.
And in this case, he's like, I never got to be anything because I had to, you know, be the man of the family from such a young age.
But by God, you're going to make something of yourself.
Now, some of his obsession with this comes down to the fact that her brother, and her brother's two years older than her, dies horrifically of meningitis when Joanna is eight.
Joanna never really writes about her older brother's death.
And when she does, she describes it clinically without mourning or signs of pain.
She claims his death inspired her to study medicine, but in a way that sort of suggests she was more fascinated by the symptoms of his illness than motivated by a wish to have saved him, which is very, very much the person she is.
She is not a, oh, if only I could have saved my beloved brother.
She is a, oh, the way that he's dying is very interesting.
I need to study this more.
She's a creepy kid.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like she, I don't want to know what happens to the neighborhood cats when she lives there.
You know, she might have been torturing some cats.
We'll never know.
But it like given the path this lady and what her kids say about her, I'm going to say 40% chance she was torturing some animals.
Okay.
Not bad.
Not a low odd.
So losing a sibling or a child was not an uncommon experience in Germany during this period.
At the start of the 20th century, Germany had one of the highest infant mortality rates in Europe.
This is why under the Kaiser, it developed the first European national institution dedicated to lowering infant mortality as a result.
So one of the things that's happening during, especially in the Weimar period, it starts under the Kaiser, but during Weimar, this attitude of like scientists are meddling in the way we're treating, we're raising our children kind of becomes chronic along the right.
And the reason is that like, and again, this isn't a progressive thing.
It starts under the Kaiser, but it's because German kids die all the time.
They're like, we have a problem.
We have to fix it.
Let's apply the scientific method.
But it's the early 20th century.
So the scientific method has more to do with like Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde than like.
Yeah, it's both a mix of a lot of what the scientists are saying isn't right.
And when it is, it pisses off these people who have these contra ideas of like how you should treat children that are pretty brutal.
And that's going to be part of what gives Joanna a career is the fact that there are people angry at all these doctors meddling in parents.
Oh my God.
So she is like, she's like anti-vax fucking.
Yes.
Yes.
Cool.
Well, I don't think she's literally it.
She is a doctor.
No, she's the equivalent of the modern anti-vax.
Yeah.
Yes.
Now, Joanna's own mother, she's very close to her father.
Her mother is absent most of her childhood.
And she will describe later that being deprived of her mother's love devastates her.
Quote, nothing could comfort me.
She clung to her father, even though he was a wreck, an alcoholic who drowned his sorrow at bars he dragged her to and from.
Her earliest memories involve walking with, quote, my swaying father who smelled of beer and held me by the hand as I walked through the Bodenbach streets.
My shame was limitless.
But while she expresses shame at her father, Alois Barsh, he also pushed his daughter to lean into her ambitions, which were basically unique in her area and time.
She wanted to be a doctor.
Now, there were women doctors at this point, obviously, in many countries, but they were not common.
And the boarding school that she gets into to prepare her for medical school is an all-boys school.
Her father, this is like such a mix of inspiring and fucked up.
Her father picks this all-boys school for her because it's the best school he can find that doesn't allow Jews.
So you've got like, oh, what a piece of shit.
But then he goes to this school and is like, you won't admit girls?
Wait till you meet my daughter.
And he introduces Joanna to the director of the school who like has a brief conversation with her and says, we'll try it.
We'll take her.
You know, like he's so impressed.
Like, it's this, it's such a weird mix of like the most like feminist story of fatherhood from 1916 Germany with also like in the school can't have any Jews in it.
This is such a like, I mean, this is the classic bastard setup is that like I almost like, because this could be the origin story of a break of a lesson.
Yes.
You know, like against the odds.
And even that her like father like cared, even though he was an embarrassing failure of a drunk with a disease.
He was a complicated man.
He, you know, he dealt with all these challenges, but he focused so much on her.
But which is, and all of that's true.
He was also a raging anti-Semite.
And so she becomes a Nazi.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the first challenge that she faces is that, and again, this goes into like the hero narrative here.
Prior to joining this boarding school, because she was a girl, she had not been given any formal mathematics training.
So when she starts school, she has to make up for six years of lost time and her first year at boarding school.
She develops a habit of waking up at 4 a.m. every morning just to study in order to like make it through this curriculum.
She's excellent at this.
She is very smart.
She does very well in school.
She graduates in 1920, right after World War I ends, and she is the only girl at this school, Schloss Bieberstein, right?
Her performance is good enough that she is admitted to the University of Heidelberg and eventually to Gothen in Munich as well.
And she becomes a pulmonologist.
She's a lung doctor.
Okay.
She receives a license to practice medicine in 1926.
And again, not unique, but very rare and very rare that she goes about it in this way.
Two years earlier, she had met her first husband, Helmut Wies, a pharmaceutical researcher who they, it's kind of unclear exactly what happened.
One story, I think the story Joanna gave is that he cheated on her and like had a child out of wedlock.
It's, it's not fully clear to me what goes down, but she divorces him, right?
Whoa.
Now, she is already, she's not a member of the Nazi party at this point, but by 1929, she is very much into Nazi type shit.
And there's a lot of the far right at this point in 29 is bigger and broader than just Nazis.
There's all sorts of groups that are eventually, the way that like Bavarians and Prussians get folded into all being German, we fold them into Nazis now.
She is into a lot of extreme right-wing stuff, some of which, a lot of which gets folded into the Nazis at the time.
But you might find that surprising mixed with the fact that she gets a divorce, that she is the kind, because we have this idea of Nazis as basically more extreme versions of religious conservatives, right?
The ones that we deal with today.
And they hate the idea of a woman being able to divorce her husband.
That is not an accurate depiction of the Nazis.
The Nazis embraced conservatives.
They eventually co-opted conservative parties and the political power that that gave them.
But the Nazis were radicals.
Their goal was to radically remake society.
And the leadership of the Nazis loved the concept of divorce.
Heinrich Himmler encouraged divorce and wanted it to be easy for both men and women because letting people split up from partners they disliked would encourage them to raise big families, right?
They support divorce because they think it enables more love matches that will lead to a lot of kids.
The Nazis are not anti-sex, they are anti-homosexuality, for darn sure, particularly male homosexuality.
They're a little softer on lesbians.
The Nazis, but the Nazis, and again, yeah, eventually, because there are a lot of homosexual Nazis in this early period that we're talking about, but the Nazis are one of the conflicts they have with the Christian conservatives that they co-opt is the Nazis are very pro-sex and not just pro-having families, but pro-like the female orgasm as a concept.
Like there is Nazi writing on that in like the SS digest.
Again, people, this very rarely gets delved into because it's really uncomfortable to look at, but the Nazis are radicals, right?
And that means they are for reimagining every aspect of society.
I think that it like really shows that because fascism doesn't come out of the traditional conservative right.
It comes out of people with similar values to that who are looking at the strategies and the concepts of the left and are like, how do we apply that to right, the right wing and nationalism instead?
You know?
Yeah.
And that is this, again, this comes from like, there's this, this, this attitude, which is not morally wrong, where you're like, at a certain point, everyone just fighting under that flag was a Nazi.
But if you look at like a conservative Catholic who voted for the Nazis because he thought it was the best alternative to the communists as the same as Heinrich Himmler, you're going to miss a lot of who Himmler was and what he believed because he had a lot of disagreements with that Catholic, you know?
Yeah.
And so again, when we're talking about this period in the late 20s, the Nazis are kind of more faith in the early 30s.
The Nazis are more famous for wanting to abolish specific sexual taboos than being obsessed with them.
Herbert Marcuse, a critic of the Nazis who wound up working for the OSS, listed his complaints against the Nazi ideology this way: quote, the deliberate herding of boys and girls in the training camps, the license granted to the racial elite, the facilitation of marriage and divorce, the sanctioning of illegitimate children.
So you can see part of why this appeals to her.
She grows up with the shame of being an illegitimate child.
And a big thing that guys like Himmler and Hitler say is that there is no such, if you are Aryan, you're legitimate.
It doesn't matter if your parents weren't married.
It doesn't matter if your dad was fucking around on a bunch of people.
As long as your bloodline is good, that's all we care about.
It doesn't matter.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Which is Schraber's ideas applied to the nation instead of the home.
The like corrective force comes from not just Schraber, but a lot of this is coming together, right?
Legitimacy and Shame00:06:52
Yeah.
Again, we are picking two people.
I hope I'm repeatedly reinforcing the trends that lead to this are larger than those two people.
Yeah, they're not even dominoes in the chain because there's like, it's not a single chain.
It's like a field of dominoes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're like individual dominoes in a two-dimensional, not one-dimensional domino.
That's a totally useful metaphor.
Anyway, no, I like it.
In 1938, the Nazis actually introduced new divorce legislation that make it legal for the first time in Germany to break up based on the grounds of emotional incompatibility.
That is a thing the Nazis introduced into German law.
You can get divorced if you don't like each other anymore.
In the book Sex After Fascism, which is an amazing book, very well worth reading, Dagmar Herzog writes: Other grounds for divorce could be found in failure to engage in sexual intercourse and thereby fulfill one's marital duties, in the use of contraception, and in childlessness.
While early on in the Third Reich, the Nazi mouthpiece Volkische Beobachter had announced explicitly that Nazism opposed divorce while invoking the popular phrase, marriages are made in heaven.
By 1939, the same paper was publishing articles that not only sought to help women accept the new divorce regulations, but glorified divorce and remarriage as an appropriate means of following the inner law of one's life and nature.
And so, again, you can find plenty of Nazis being like, divorce is horrible, just like you can find Nazis saying contraception is horrible.
You can also find them like a lot of embracing these kind of conservative attitudes towards sex is done when they need the conservatives.
And then these more radical attitudes that are that are geared towards expanding the size of the Volk get to come out in the late 30s, where they're like, no, no, no, people should be able to split up.
And also, if your husband has a bunch of mistresses, you should maybe be fine with that as long as he's having kids with them.
And right?
Like, and it'll be the job of the nation to help support these kids.
We have homes for single mothers where you can come if you get knocked up by some SS man and the state will help you raise your children.
You know, what matters is maximizing kids now.
We need so many more kids now that there's machine guns.
You thought it was easy to kill kids in 1900.
It is so easy to kill kids in the 40s.
Yeah.
We're going to need a lot of your children very quickly.
Yeah.
So yeah, and I think this gets at like a mistake people will still make about modern fascists.
You get some story about like Roger Stone, how he's really a swinger who does like drugs, pretending to be this Christian conservative, or like Trump is the opposite of the person his evangelical followers claim to support.
And you get a lot of liberals and even leftists who will like point out these elements of what they see as hypocrisy as if it's a weakness when it's really evidence of a strength, which is that fascists are great at making temporary alliances to gain power and lying about what they believe to gain power.
And their supporters who are like believe different things than them, in a lot of cases are much more religiously conservative, are willing to work with them to kill the people they hate.
Yeah, it's very frustrating to me when people look at that as like, but they're not, you know, they shouldn't support this man.
It's like, well, that's not because he gains somebody.
Yeah.
That's that's all it's about is power, you know?
I end up with this, like, sometimes I have a certain amount of respect for someone who is my ideological foe as long who is ideologically consistent.
I'm not going to find that in the far right.
No, no, no.
Like, no, because that's not the kind of people that they are.
Yeah.
In Weimar, Germany, the Nazis made hay out of stories of drugs and homosexual debauchery in Berlin as part of their campaign to get middle-of-the-road Protestants and Catholics to pick them over these scary atheist communists and socialists who are, you know, in reality also fighting each other as often as anybody else.
Once the Nazis were in power, these same Christians were often frustrated by the fact that Nazism was not very compatible with Christianity.
And in fact, if you're looking at guys like Himmler, sought to kind of destroy Christianity as it existed.
But by then, it was too late.
In Joanna's case, though, back to back to our lady Joanna.
Her first husband maybe cheats on her.
Maybe she just doesn't get along with him.
Either way, they get a divorce.
And it is interesting if her husband cheated on her and got a friend of hers pregnant, which is what she told her kids.
That is behavior the Nazis encouraged, right?
Wives are kind of advised to ignore, especially like wives in the SS.
A lot of writings in the SS magazine kind of resemble fascist swinger culture, where they're talking about like, it's really weird to read now.
But anyway, Her divorce is both evidence that, like, she is not fully bought in on all of the things the Nazis are going to argue for, but also there's a lot of opportunity for a woman like her in the Nazi party because, for one thing, they don't believe that there's any shame in being born out of wedlock.
And for another thing, they don't believe that there's any shame in being a divorcee, right?
Yeah.
Like, that does not lock you out of anything in the Nazi social hierarchy.
In 1932, she got married for the second time to a pulmonary specialist named Otto Herrer.
Their daughter later described the union as one of great love for her father and a welcome anchor for Joanna.
They had their first twins the next year, 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.
Having served as a full physician for less than 10 years, Joanna had to find, like, basically, she has to quit her job as a doctor because work while having twins is not possible.
So she quits her job.
And this kind of fills her with frustration.
She has been such a driven person her entire life.
She can't just switch off to caring for kids, right?
And doing nothing else.
She is too ambitious.
And more to the point, she's a terrible mother, right?
She has a lot of people.
She's a lot of TikTok.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
She's one of those people who she can't continue what she had been doing when she has kids, but she's also not going to raise them and what we would recognize as raising your kids.
So she has a lot of time for a side hustle.
Yeah.
And that side hustle is she starts putting together like articles on how to raise kids the national socialist way.
She starts her career as a writer, publishing articles for the Nazi party newspaper, the Volkscher Beobachter.
These were successful enough that she approached a publisher, Julius Lehmans, to write a full book on child rearing.
They accepted, even though she had no pediatric training.
And their grounds are basically, well, she's a mom, right?
That's all she should need to be able to write a book.
This is literally what the publisher wrote later.
The fortunate circumstance that this physician was also a wife and young mother who had not simply gained her experiences as a physician, but with her own children, twins at that, gave her books qualities, which others did not have.
I mean, this would be true right now.
If you were like, I have a PhD and a child, they'd be like, of course you can write a book.
Physician Mother Writes Books00:03:55
You're also in the correct political party?
Absolutely.
It would only be easier to be this lady today.
And that's why there's like a million of her, one of whom just pled guilty to child abuse.
Right.
Totally.
That is kind of why I started this episode with that story.
But you know who never pleaded?
Well, shit.
Margaret, how's some ads sound?
Do ads sound good to you?
I love it.
I think about child abuse.
I think about it.
I get so excited every time I get an opportunity to learn about a new product or service.
Absolutely.
That's where I am, baby.
If you are a founder or a freelancer or the friend who always says, hey, you know what?
What if I started that?
This is for you.
I'm telling you, I had nothing to my name.
I didn't know a single person in New York.
And somehow I'm dressed by Oscar DeLorenda walking down that red carpet.
This month, we sit down with entrepreneurs and creators who actually did it, who turned this Gary Leab into a business, a paycheck, and a life they are proud of.
Direct center of our happiness or our regrets is whether or not we're taking action on the things that matter to us.
They're not selfish.
They're so important.
They actually lead to our greatest contributions because when we're living fulfilled, we actually show up better everywhere.
We lead better.
We're better friends.
We're better relationships and collaborators and all those things because we have passion about the things we're doing.
If you're trying to build something of your own this year, join us in these conversations that will make you braver and smarter with your money.
Listen to Dos Amingos as part of the Michael Turtle Podcast Network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
This is Saigon, the story of my family and of the country that shaped us.
The United States will not stand by and allow any power, however great, to take over another country.
For iHeart Podcasts, Saigon.
Please allow me to introduce Joseph Sherman.
You don't think I'm serious about a free Vietnam?
I should stop talking so much.
I like hearing you talk.
One city, a divided country, and the war that tore America apart.
This is for Vietnam.
I've taken a hit from Japanese ground fire.
During the they're pouring petrol all over him.
He's holding matches.
I'm on a landmine for freedom.
Let's get out.
Freedom for me at night.
Saigon, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Rob Benedict.
Staying here's madness.
There's a fire coming to this country and it's going to burn out everything.
Listen to Saigon, starting on April 22nd on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
Hi, Dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished fire.
I'm going to have cookies and milk tomorrow.
On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to Bene, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
I'm an alcoholic.
And without this program, I'm going to die.
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We're back.
So, now that we're back, if you're just here for the ads, just press forward a bunch of times until you get to the bumper music, and then you can hear the ads.
If you listen to this for like the four minutes of ads in every single episode, that's what you tune in every week.
Manipulation and Ads00:14:45
Yeah.
Because you saw, I mean, the number of people who listen to it, there has to be one person who's like, ah, will they get through these fucking history stories so I can hear an ad?
Yeah.
I want to know about Chumba, goddammit.
That was the one that was in my mind, too.
So she's been some time, first year or so that she's got kids, writing articles for this, you know, the big Nazi party paper about child rearing.
And then she decides, and this is always a bad idea, to write a book.
It's a particularly bad idea in her case because the book that she decided to write wasn't a really good work of fiction like your book, The Sapling Cage, Margaret.
It was a real stinker of a toe with the snoozeworthy title, The German Mother and Her First Child.
Oh shit, was that the title of the sequel?
Because you might need to change it.
No, no, no, no, it's okay.
Yeah, no, because you didn't say it in the original German, and my sequel is going to be in German.
Yeah, yeah, all German.
Yes.
You're using ChatGPT for that entirely.
It's going to be German.
Totally.
This is the equivalent of spreading a rumor that someone has murdered someone is if you spread rumors that I use artificial intelligence for my fiction.
For German?
Yeah.
No, just to translate it.
Just to translate it.
No, totally.
Yeah.
Only my German works are.
Joanna was essentially a career woman who had been forced to curtail her career to raise kids.
Her conclusion as a result of this was that children, and this is what her book is about, children are distractions.
They are petty irritants and even tyrants that need to have their will broken so that they can be molded to more conveniently fit into society.
And one shit.
I know it's shit.
This lady is so Schreber is such a complex figure and you have to like have it.
She is just the worst person who ever lived.
She just shouldn't have had children.
She didn't want them.
She shouldn't have.
It's fine.
Abortion's fine.
Well, no, not.
Well, no, actually, the Nazis were pro-abortion for certain people.
Yes, they sure were.
Very pro for certain people.
You can't box them in simply there.
No.
You can put them in the Nazi box.
If you were put in the box, David.
You knew the Nazis were pro-abortion.
Someone would think for five minutes and be like, not for white people.
You know, I do, just to go back to our earlier thing, I do support looking at Nazis as two boxes.
Nazis of convenience because you wanted something and Nazis because being a Nazi was your again, like Himmler is the perfect example of the Nazis because Nazism, right?
Himmler had a bunch of really weird, specific shit he believed, you know, as opposed to like, again, some of these like religious conservatives who didn't agree with a lot of these other weird Nazi ideas.
Yeah, I think that's kind of worth it.
And Joanna is a Himmler Nazi.
She is a weird, specific fucking Nazi.
And in one chapter of her book, she urges, quote, the child is to be fed, bathed, and dried off.
Apart from that, left completely alone.
This is her talking about like the contact you should have with your child as a parent.
You feed them, you bathe them, you dry them off.
You never touch them otherwise.
They do not have physical contact with the adults in their life.
Other than that, this process of total physical separation from their parents was to begin immediately after birth.
As soon as the umbilical cord was cut, she recommended that infants be left isolated for the first 24 hours after birth, locked alone in a room.
Oh my God.
It's like the most you see.
Again, with Schreber, you see like, oh, this guy was struggling with some of these compulsions and he's trying to solve these real problems.
With Joanna, you're like, oh, you just hated kids.
Yeah, you're just a Nazi that applies your hatred of a marginalized group.
Only your marginalized group is children.
Yeah, your own children are marginalized, which is kind of the Nazi story writ large in a lot of ways.
Totally.
The greatest.
Nazis got a lot of white Germans killed.
Yes, yes.
More than almost anyone.
The greatest mistake in Joanna's eyes that a parent could make would be to pay any attention at all to their children's tears.
If you react to a baby when it cries, quote, the child will quickly understand that all he needs to do is cry in order to attract a sympathetic soul and become the object of caring.
Within a short time, he will demand this service as a right, leave you no peace until he is carried again, cradled, or stroked.
And with that, a tiny but implacable house tyrant is formed.
House tyrant.
I really, I want someone to write a children's book called The Tiny Implacable House Tyrants.
But it's like pro the two-year-old, you know?
Yeah.
And you see where there's a kernel of truth here.
Every parent sometimes, the little kid is like, oh my God, they've turned into a little tyrant, right?
And like very young children, younger than you would expect, learn how to like fake cry to get attention, right?
They're learning because they need attention.
This is, this is, you can call it manipulation.
That's literally what it is.
It's not abnormal or a sign that a child is unhealthy.
It's a sign that they are learning how to communicate and what it means to be a person.
And like decent parents understand it, like, well, if your kid is fake crying for attention, you don't want to give them the same attention that they get when they are actually crying.
But you don't just ignore them or lock them alone in a room because that's child abuse, right?
I think it's a direct so that when they're adults, they don't have to cry in front of people.
Yeah, you can nicely say, like, I know that that's not real.
You didn't really hit yourself.
You like fell down and stopped yourself from hitting yourself and now you're fake crying.
And like, I can see that that's fake.
Like, come on, let's go do something else.
Right.
You don't lock them alone in a room and never touch them for 18 years.
You know, there are a wide variety.
I'll say this.
I think there's a variety of ways to deal with this behavior from children.
None of them are how Joanna teaches people how to do this.
Yeah, totally, because it's like very rarely is lock anyone into a room by themselves for more than like 15 minutes a solution to anything.
Yeah, yeah.
Like I lock myself in a room sometimes away from people, but you know, that's that's a matter of personal choice.
Sigrid Johnny.
Yes, I have been described in such a way.
Sigrid Chamberlain, who analyzed Herrer's book in detail in a book of her own, summarized Joanna's attitude towards child rearing this way.
So from the first minute of life, everything was done to encourage the inability to have a relationship.
Everything that promoted relationships was forbidden because the main goal was not to let the relationship between the mother or parents and the child arise in the first place.
This is also the purpose of Herrer's demands, not to spend any time together except for feeding, changing diapers, getting dressed and bathing.
For this, however, exact periods of time were given.
Bottle feeding should never take longer than 10 minutes.
Breastfeeding, no longer than 20 minutes.
If the child strolls or dawdles, feeding or breastfeeding should be stopped.
There is no food again until the next scheduled meal.
If the child is hungry by then, firstly, it serves him well.
And secondly, he learns that he will have to hurry up next time.
That's such a bad way to be a parent.
I probably don't need to say, keep in mind, this lady is a Nazi, right?
It's not hard to.
But I should emphasize her book also includes a great deal of what you might call social Darwinian child rearing philosophy.
Adults are...
Yeah.
See if they're immune to machine guns yet.
Have we bred that into them yet?
No, not yet.
Next generation, keep them coming.
Eventually, we'll build the German that's immune to Russian bullets.
I can feel it.
We're close.
Yeah.
So one of the ways in which this manifested is that adults, Joanna encourages like parents and adults around children to point out any time a child makes a mistake or exhibits a weakness in an area.
If they like exhibit that they're weak or flawed in an area, you point it out in front of everyone and you mock it in public every time it happens.
Every time my gym teacher in the middle.
Yeah, like every parent should be a gym teacher.
That is the Joanna-Herrer method.
That is how the Nazi society works.
The primary job, Herrer describes the primary job of a good teacher as being to make fun of kids basically for being wrong about things.
Not to teach them, but to make them ashamed of their ignorance.
Super funny.
Herr describes her teachings as modern and scientific, and Adolf Hitler himself agreed.
He personally recommends her book to German parents.
Like, she is the Hitler-approved momfluencer of the Third Reich.
Her book comes out of the world.
Hitler is the Oprah of Germany in this period.
He's got a lot of Oprah-esque qualities.
A captivating narrator.
Look, we can say it.
He gave everyone cars.
He did give everyone cars.
Oh my God.
Margaret.
The greater Oprah theory of Nazism is gaining a lot of traction.
And like Oprah, he's really good at selling books because he recommends her book to the whole German Reich and it sells more than 1.2 million copies, which is pretty good for now.
That's a lot back then.
Yeah.
That's like three days of deaths on the Eastern Front, you know?
So if you're wondering how this kind of parenting might impact a child, so did Klaus Grossman, who is a, he's a modern day researcher.
He's actually retired now, but during the latter half of the 20th century was a leading researcher on mother-child attachment from the university at Regensburg.
He told Scientific American, quote, Joanna Herrer's view, it is important to deny caring when a child asks for it, but each refusal means rejection, Grossman explains.
The only means of communication open to a newborn are facial expression and gestures, he adds.
If no response is forthcoming, children learn that nothing they try to communicate means anything.
Moreover, infants experience existential fear when they are alone and hungry and receive no comfort from their attachment figure.
In the worst case, such experiences lead to a form of insecure attachment that makes it difficult to enter into relationships with other people in later life.
That is not.
It seems obvious, but again, this is very controversial amongst Nazis.
It's like a self-fulfilling Freud.
Yes.
Yes.
It's like you create people with Freudian-style attachment problems by raising them in this way.
Yeah, by very purposefully going about this.
Yeah.
Now, I started episode one of this series by referencing a recently disgraced momfluencer.
And while that was kind of a joke for Dr. Schreber comparing him to a momfluencer, Joanna Harrer is literally her generation social media mommy guru.
She even writes a Nazi children's book.
Mother, tell me about Adolf Hitler.
Jesus Christ.
Oh my God.
It's so fun.
Time and the implacable child.
Yeah, the implacable child.
I've got to imply that.
Tell me about Adolf Hitler.
Mother.
Introduction.
You shouldn't be surprised to hear that this is a racist book.
Time magazine, German Time magazine, notes that in the book, quote, Jews creep like cats so that the dogs strike.
The Jew should be chased away.
He is foreign to us.
He doesn't concern us and always just wanted to harm us.
God, the book ends, sent us a leader like the world has never seen him.
We want to believe him, trust him, follow him wherever he leads now and always.
This is again published in 1940.
I have found some pictures of this book on auction websites, and it mostly looks like a normal child's book for the era with black and white illustrations every couple of pages.
But I found a list of the table of contents that gives you an idea of the thrust of the story.
Chapter one, from the Great War, How the War Ended.
From Adolf Hitler's homeland, Adolf Hitler starts his fight.
Adolf Hitler wants to help Germany.
How he was betrayed.
From Germany's worst time, Adolf Hitler starts fighting again.
Dr. Goebbels fights for Berlin.
Adolf Hitler becomes our Führer and Reich Chancellor.
Adolf Hitler provides work and bread.
Adolf Hitler alleviates the misery in Germany.
Adolf Hitler creates the German Wehrmacht.
Adolf Hitler continues to build the Third Reich.
It's a shame the book stops right before the Hitler story gets good.
She's like right at the cusp of things getting interesting.
Adolf Hitler alone in the bunker.
Yeah, Adolf Hitler with a 30A or 32.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Adolf Hitler gets all of the German boys raised on Joanna's books killed outside of Stalingrad.
Adolf Hitler finally learns perspective in his paintings.
Just kidding.
Could never happen.
Yeah, no, he absolutely doesn't get that shit right.
One of my favorite things in the world is when every now and then some like Nazi on Twitter is like, see, look, isn't he an amazing painter?
And it's just like, no, man.
This isn't the thing that I want to argue about Hitler about.
No.
But no, the answer is no.
But like, if he was an eighth grader, I'd say he's got promise.
You know, he could have Become a decent painter if he had continued to, if he had learned perspective.
I know there are people who are like, he could have been like a middle-class architect and made houses and probably been okay at something.
Yeah.
But that was not what was going to make Hitler happy.
Nothing actually made Hitler happy.
He was a pretty fundamentally unhappy man.
But that's a story for several other days that we've talked about at length.
No one really talks about Hitler.
That's the thing, isn't it?
Yeah, that's the thing.
Podcasters never really bring that man up.
They're afraid to.
Yeah.
They're the only people who are brave enough to go on a tangent about Hitler.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
Only this podcast.
That's why they call him Hitler, the man who failed to launch a thousand podcasts.
Yeah.
So anyway, I bet you're wondering, believing all these things that she does and preaching them to other Nazis, what was Joanna like as a mother?
Did she actually abide by her own teachings?
And unfortunately, yes.
Just for the sake, yeah, just for the sake of her daughters, you'd wish she had been a hypocrite, but she is not.
Joanna's daughter, Gertrude, would later claim to Time magazine that her mother strictly abided by the parenting teachings she believed in.
Krupp Steel Hardness00:06:59
This led Gertrude to be desperate for affection and deeply cut off from her parents, but physically tough.
She later recalled this.
I broke my arm during a bike trip with my sister in a fall, but we drove on to a forest, spent the day there.
Although my arm grew thicker and thicker, I could only drive back with one hand.
We still went to an ice cream parlor on Leopoldstrasse.
The bright madness, but typical.
I was even proud that I endured the pain and was tough.
And that is, she has, that's horrible.
A child should not fight through the pain of breaking her own arm on a bicycle.
She should go receive medical attention.
But this is what the Nazis wanted.
We're going to talk a little bit more about this later, but she is, she, Gertrude is a little girl, is the kind of kid that Joanna and Hitler are aiming to create.
Now, that whole interview with Gertrude is translated.
I did like an automatic Google translate, much like we were joking about earlier, from German into English.
So I noticed that Gertrude repeatedly referred to Joanna not as my mother, but as the mother.
And I was like, oh, that's probably some sort of like translation fuck up.
But then later in the interview, the interviewer is like, you only refer to your mom as the mother, not as my mother.
That's kind of weird.
And Gertrude clarifies that's how she saw.
She was never my mother.
She was the mother.
That was her title, but she was not my mom.
Quote, she was always the mother.
There was distance.
The mother was the highest authority.
And that is so profoundly fucked.
Damn.
Like, that is.
I hope not the daughter.
I hope the mom finds a way to somehow die in the war.
Alas, no.
The good news is that neither of her daughters are Nazis.
And in fact, both thoroughly reject their mother.
They make some hard-ass partisans.
I got to say, they would have to be able to go all day with a broken arm if you're going to be a partisan.
Yeah, I mean, alas, they are too young to have gotten to do that, but they become the moral equivalent as adults.
As a celebrity in the Third Reich, the first seven or so years that Hitler's in power are great for Joanna and her family.
They get very wealthy.
She deliberately cultivates a career within the Nazi Party and not just as an author and a doctor.
From an article in the Journal of German History, quote, from 1935 until at least 1939, she thus worked as a regional specialist for racial policies for the Munich National Socialist Women's League and the Racial Policy Office.
She also worked for the Mother and Child Relief Agency, an agency set up in 1934 by the National Socialist People's Welfare Organization, which had as its aim to stand by a German mother in physical, spiritual, or emotional need and to help a hereditarily healthy child to healthy development.
So she's doing the worst thing that she could be doing, which is giving other moms direct advice and also directing Nazi policy.
for welfare for mothers, right?
She's helping the establishment of what are called Mutter schools, which are like the mother schools.
This is German schools where, especially if you're like a single mom, it's not just single moms, but like you can go to learn how to be a mother and get help raising your kid, you know?
Which is pretty easy.
It's just a bunch of rooms and there's one room per kid and you throw the kid in the room and there's nothing to do.
Yeah, just lock him alone in a room.
Simple.
Yeah.
The Nazi method of parenting.
Joanna was constantly in demand as a speaker and a writer, publishing article after article on the parenting methods that young Germans needed to make their children fit for Hitler's command to be hard as Kruppstahl.
This is important to understand.
Again, this makes her not complaining about her broken arm strong.
Hitler's literal command was, I want children who are as hard as the metal from which we make our guns.
When you refer to Kruppstahl, you're not just referring to like industrial steel.
You are specifically referring to the steel we use for cannons.
That's what our children need to be, right?
Okay.
And that is what Joanna is helping parents create.
Speaking of making your children harder than Kruppsteel, Margaret Killjoy.
Do you know what this podcast is sponsored by?
Gunsteel?
The Tyson Krupp Company, who today makes all of our elevators.
It's fine.
Don't look into it.
Also, submarines.
It's fine.
Don't look into it.
I'm pro-submarines for rich people now.
You know what?
I've come around.
Maybe Krupp could solve some problems for us.
Although they might build good ones.
And so actually Krupp should stay out of that.
I think they mostly build functional ones for like the Egyptian Navy.
I haven't heard of the Egyptian Navy doing much with submarines, but they're probably not up to anything good with them.
Most navies aren't with their submarines.
As a general rule.
We made the transition at some point from like submarines to allow nations to interdict shipping and destroy battleships to submarines contain world-ending death weapons.
They're what we use to end all life if we have to.
That's true.
My grandfather was a torpedo, a torpedo man and a submarine in the South Pacific in World War II.
But I don't think he had nuclear capability.
No, no, one of my favorite stories is that like the French who have nukes, you know, they have their nuclear subs.
Like the British, they always have some subs out with nukes so that if something happens, they can contribute to ending all life on Earth.
And when COVID hit, they had to like not tell anyone aboard for like the last two months, like the first two months of the pandemic.
They were just locking everyone down from outside contact because they were like, well, if everyone loses their minds in here, that maybe their relatives are dying of the plague above, like they've got all these nukes.
We got to be really careful with what we tell these people until they surface.
Except then you're like, you know, we've cut off communication.
They're like, they must be like, we've lost communication with the homeland.
We better nuke Russia.
I think it's one of those things they regularly are like, no one's going to talk to you for two months.
You're submarine people.
Deal with it.
Yeah, okay.
My guess is that that's just kind of a thing you get people you.
It's like making them hard as Kruppstahl.
I think of my grandfather as as hard as Kruppstahl because he would just go and into a coffin, into a war zone and be like, and like one day he like filled out a little form and went off to college.
And then is like the next mission or something, or maybe two missions later, his submarine didn't come back.
Yeah.
So because they sent him to school for engineering, he didn't die in a coffin.
Survived.
God.
Yeah, I have a friend who was a sub pilot during like the Cold War.
There's a book called Blind Man's Bluff about the Kai, but it was like Soviet and American subs basically playing chicken to try to force the other to surface.
And so he has all these stories about like, I am standing in a very crowded room doing math in my head as quickly as possible.
And if I or anyone else fucks up, we might all die in a crack.
Like maybe everybody dies, you know?
Submarine Pilot Friend00:03:00
This, by the way, is the best ad transition anyone has ever done on a podcast.
Submarines, they're real fucked up, folks.
Yeah.
If you are a founder or a freelancer or the friend who always says, hey, you know what?
What if I started that?
This is for you.
I'm telling you, I had nothing to my name.
I didn't know a single person in New York.
And somehow I'm dressed by Oscar DeLorenda walking down that red carpet.
This month, we sit down with entrepreneurs and creators who actually did it, who turned this scary leap into a business, a paycheck, and a life they are proud of.
Direct center of our happiness or our regrets is whether or not we're taking action on the things that matter to us.
They're not selfish.
They're so important.
They actually lead to our greatest contributions because when we're living fulfilled, we actually show up better everywhere.
We lead better, we're better friends, we're better relationships and collaborators and all those things because we have passion about the things we're doing.
If you're trying to build something of your own this year, join us in these conversations that will make you braver and smarter with your money.
Listen to Dos Amingos as part of the My Cotura Podcast Network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
This is Saigon, the story of my family and of the country that shaped us.
The United States will not stand by and allow any power, however great, to take over another country.
From iHeart Podcasts, Saigon.
Please allow me to introduce Joseph Sherman.
You don't think I'm serious about a free Vietnam?
I should stop talking so much.
I like hearing you talk.
One city, a divided country, and the war that tore America apart.
This is for Vietnam.
I've taken a hit from Japanese ground fire.
During the they're pouring petrol all over him.
He's holding matches.
I'm on a landmine for freedom.
Let's get out.
Freedom from Vietnam.
Saigon, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Rob Benedict.
Staying here's madness.
There's a fire coming through this country and it's going to burn out everything.
Listen to Saigon, starting on April 22nd on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I went and sat on the little Ottoman in front of him.
I was, hi, Dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished fire.
I'm going to have cookies and milk come on.
On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
I'm an alcoholic.
Parenting Manuals and Kisses00:16:12
And without this program, I'm going to die.
Open your free iHeart radio app.
Search the Ceno Show and listen now.
We're back and we're thinking about the concept of submarines being.
I mean, when you raise children the way that Joanna Harrow did, it does make it easier to lock them into a metal death tube.
Yeah.
Look, it'll be over soon.
You're in a submarine.
It's not going to last very long.
My granddad was a hobo before that.
He rode freight trains around and stuff.
Like, you know, he was used to being in a scary metal box.
It wasn't.
He said, I pop freight trains and I'm not getting into a submarine.
No, it used to be.
This is my, this all, when I write my mom fluencer book, Margaret, everything's going to come down to the fact that it used to get easier to be easier to get kids on submarines, and it's hard now.
And that's why our culture is sick.
You can't force kids to die underwater as easily.
A generation afraid of submarines causes the world to go soft.
Cowardice, cowardice.
We need to all be like the people in the TV show Sequest DSV, starring Roy Scheider, the drunk sheriff from Jaws, has basically Captain Picard been in a big submarine.
It's a good show.
There was a dolphin.
We do need to all be like that.
There's an episode where William Shatner plays Slobodan Milosevic.
It's quite a series.
Anyway, back to Joanna of the Nazi era.
Yeah.
So Joanna sees herself not just as an academic, but as a racial soldier preparing the future armies of Germany.
In a foreword to her book on parenting, written in 1940, it gets another edition at the start of the war.
She wrote, quote, Today we are witnessing a large-scale campaign by our government in which the healthy genome and the racially valuable are defended against everything sick and declining.
She expresses praise against the anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws, pleads for the four-child marriage in order to counter the, quote, huge danger of popular death, which is how like the German got translated.
I don't know how to better translate that, but I think that means basically we're about to be feeding a lot of our boys to machine guns.
You need to make more of them.
Oh, I just think it is like a great replacement type thing, but yeah, no, that.
No, no, no.
Like, we, we, the Nazis, are about to get rid of a lot of these kids.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
Now, this is all pretty dark, but there's a darker corollary here, which is that since the Reich needed large families to counter all of the deaths they were about to cause for their children, kids who refuse to be raised into obedient Nazis are in the same spectrum as race traitors, right?
This is not just, this is how you have to raise your kid.
If your kid is not perfectly obedient, your kid is a race traitor, and they have to be broken until they fit the mold.
Gertrude Herrer's own sister was disobedient, and this is how she recalls her mother reacting: quote, she wanted to break my sister's will.
When I think of it, I always have in mind how to break apart a flexible young hazelnut so the ends are split in the air.
The future belongs to me.
I'm not going to sing that song.
Never mind.
No, no, it's not.
So the response within Nazi Germany to Herrer's ideas was massive.
Thousands of mothers even wrote the publisher letters thanking them for the invaluable service of providing a work of national socialist parenting advice.
Now, it's worth acknowledging Joanna is not an iconoclast within the budding field of child development experts.
In the United States, John Watson, the American founder of behavioralism, recommended that parents not let children sit on their lap and that they not kiss their children.
A lot of, and he's not the only one, a lot of prominent parenting influencers, I guess, of the time, academics particularly talking about parenting, did recommend against particularly the level of physical contact between parents and kids that we know is healthy today.
Like we have a deep understanding of how necessary that is.
But the kissing your kids thing, when you watch like old movies and read old books, it's like uncomfortable because parents like kiss their children sometimes on the mouth.
And that's like not normal in modern society.
Is this when that goes away?
This is part, like that is some people are pushing against that, right?
This is, again, the world then is as complicated as the world today, a bit smaller because the population was, but even within German society, these attitudes towards parenting, within American society, these attitudes towards parenting are not universal.
And I find what Gertrude Harrer writes in Time here kind of valuable and kind of trying to determine, okay, so other people were taught, were talking in similar ways about like, well, maybe you shouldn't kiss your kids, you shouldn't touch your kids as much to what Joanna was saying.
What made her methods of child rearing unique?
And this is what her daughter writes.
There is a German peculiarity.
In the Nazi era, these concepts did not remain an expert discourse, but reached the base, the parents, especially through Joanna Herrer's books.
They were so hugely popular because a mother spoke to mothers in them.
Because in Germany, the mothers may have been more receptive to Harris's authoritarian determination because their principles fit so perfectly with the Nazi ideology that wanted their youth as hard as Kruppstahl, and because the Nazis made their books a standard works in mother schools.
So again, what Gertrude is saying is that, sure, you can say John Watson is saying some similar things in America about how you shouldn't kiss your kids.
There are, you know, British and other, in other parts of the West, there are child development experts that are urging less contact between parents and kids, but they are doctors and experts.
Joanna was a mother.
And that is why her work has much more influence in Germany than some similar ideas have in other countries.
Because it's coming from a mom.
Yeah.
And just the like being a popular author thing is just like.
Yes.
And I don't even mean popularism like sells a lot of books, although that's part of it, but like literally like populism popularism.
Yes, you know?
Yes.
Yes.
That is also very important.
And it is important to note that like she is not just, she is specifically advocating her attitude towards national socialist mothering, right?
In the post-war era, this distinction gets lost.
Joanna's book, I told you it sold 1.2 million copies, half of those are after the Nazis' fall.
They like edit the book to cut out some of the Hitler stuff, and it stays, it continues to be popular, right?
And so it kind of gets, it gets sort of marked down as just being, well, she was one of many authoritarian parenting experts.
But Sigrid Chamberlain describes Herr as not just an authoritarian parenting guru, but a national socialist parenting guru.
And I want to quote now from an article by Katharina Rowold in the Journal of German History.
At the heart of her analysis of Herr's manuals lies the contention that this childcare expert promoted ways of caring for babies that consciously sought to prevent the formation of secure attachment between mother and child.
Chamberlain sees an initial lack of attachment leading to an inability to form other attachments later in life as the distinguishing factor of a national socialist upbringing.
Considering herself to have experienced such an upbringing, Chamberlain is primarily concerned with understanding the psychological repercussions of this early childhood socialization.
Even though the Third Reich existed for only 12 years, she explains, this upbringing created particular damage a million times.
Okay.
Now, there's a lot of debate over this.
This is a period of significant historical contention.
Herr's work, how to see it, is this authoritarian parenting?
Is it national socialist parenting?
How should we look at this?
I am sympathetic with how Chamberlain analyzes this, but there's disagreement with that substantially.
There's debate over like whether or not you should, because there is evidence, particularly that this lack of attachment in German culture between mothers and children goes back further than Joanne, and it definitely does.
You can find evidence of this in Prussia and Imperial Germany.
There's even some data on like attachment issues in different German regions being higher than in other parts of Europe.
And I think it's kind of hard to lock down how much of this is like, well, Joanna, Joanna's teachings were able to get so much more purchase in Nazi Germany because it was already kind of fertile terrain for them, right?
And that's also part of why Nazism was able to build is because these attachment issues make it easier to make people into good fascists.
And these were more common, always more common in Germany, you know, starting with kind of like Prussia.
But, you know, I think that if you want to answer the question, what kind of children did Joanna Harrer's advice help to create specifically?
That is difficult to do because you will be by definition looking at the generation of Germans born during and right after the war, which is the kids who are born when her advice on parenting is really popular.
And the children who are born during and after World War II are often emotionally stunted and traumatized because of World War II, right?
So how do you, or at least that's a factor.
So how do you determine how much of it was her teachings and how much of it was the fact that they grew up being bombed in Dresden, right?
How do you separate those things?
That actually makes analyzing the impact of Harrer's teachings difficult because there's also this war.
It confounds one and her own kids are opposed to this ideology, even though they were raised under it, you know?
Yes.
Yes.
I think that's one of the things that's kind of helpful in analyzing like what this does.
But there have been some academics who have tried to account for like what was unique about Joanna's teaching methods and how did it uniquely affect German kids outside of the damage that was done to all kids who were involved in World War II.
One of the ways that this has been accounted for, Roalold in that article for the Journal of German History, compared Herrer's child rearing manuals to popular advice on what was called mothercraft in the UK during the same period.
And some of the logic was that, well, these kids in the UK, a lot of them get bombed too.
You know, they have these same searing or similar searing experiences.
So let's look at these different parenting gurus and see kind of the different ways in which like kids who were raised in these methods turned out when we know that they both had these kind of searing war experiences.
And the guru that Roald compares Herrer to, her UK counterpart, is a doctor named Frederick Truby King.
Like Herrer, King was an, you know, was a doctor, but unlike Herrer, King was a doctor who specialized in children.
He's a pediatrician.
And one way in which their books differ is that Truby King advised a scientific approach to motherhood, utilizing rigorous research done into the causes of infant mortality and sickness to ensure outcomes for children.
Herrer counseled obedience to state services, particularly new Reich departments established to encourage racial health, but she also attacked experts who during the Weimar years had told German mothers to do things like drink pasteurized milk and hug their kids, right?
She was like, these doctors, they don't know what they're doing.
As a mother, you have instincts, and those instincts are that you want to be as far away from your kids as possible.
Lean into those instincts.
That's literally, she's like, too much bookish knowledge will hurt your kids.
You just need to ignore them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Roald writes of her teachings.
Fathers were mostly absent in all the manuals.
For Herrer, it was clear that mothers ought to be caring for young children.
To be a good mother, a woman needed specific characteristics.
She had to be a dutiful, highly principled woman with common sense who had a sense of order, regularity, punctuality, and cleanliness.
Her manuals concurred with Nazi ideology regarding Aryan women, which stressed their reproductive role and saw their place in the domestic sphere.
It also emphasized the Nazi importance given to blood, the central metaphor for a mystical conception of race and inheritance.
According to Herrer, it was the blood relationship between the mother and child that made her the best person to raise her children.
This relationship meant that mothers belonged to their children inseparably, fatefully.
A mother knew the smallest peculiarities and could understand her child because it was blood of her blood.
Children, however, despite the blood bond, started to form an emotional bond with the mother only at the age of about two and a half, according to Harper.
While mothers were in the best position to raise their babies and their young children, these were indifferent as to who looked after them until that age.
And this, again, fits into a lot of these Nazi teachings about you don't need to have a family unit, you can have a dad fertilize a bunch of women.
And for the first two years, it doesn't even matter who looks after that kid.
You can keep them alone in a room as long as you feed them and clean the shit off of them.
And then, you know, the mother is their real blood, and that's who needs to raise them.
The father's going to be off dying, you know?
Yeah.
It's cool stuff.
It's interesting because it seems like overall.
Yeah.
And maybe this is just the conception I came in with it.
It's like we have all of these different ideas about like nature versus nurture, but I think sometimes it's just neither.
It's just like, like most of the time, most kids kind of turn out okay.
Like despite what happens to them, like people should try, right?
People should try to raise their kids good, you know?
But like overall, it's like kids are resilient on some level, you know, like they are.
Like the whole reason why there's hope in humanity is that even when you try to raise a whole generation this way, it doesn't work out the way that you want.
But they, there has been, they have done some research.
Again, it's hard to isolate the war from the impact on some of these different child rearing experiments.
There's a there's a study by Ilka Quindo of Frankfurt University on the generation born during the war.
And it was initially to study to study the long-term impacts of bombing raids on child development.
But after these initial sort of interviews, the researchers were like, these people keep talking about like their family experiences.
So we should probably alter the studies to like interview them more about how they were raised to as children.
And they concluded that a lot of the former kids they interviewed had a pattern of strong loyalty to their parents and a refusal to admit any conflicts with them that was like severe enough to be a relational disorder, which is Quindo is noticing something similar to what Schatzman noted about Schraber's son, right?
That he cannot see his father as having made a mistake, even though his parent did something very bad to hurt him, right?
And that's this whole generation of kids like raised under the bombs have trouble adequately blaming their like seeing their parents in some ways.
They have like this sense of loyalty to them that is kind of like noted.
It's there's a lot of like, I don't want to get too much into like the psychology here because it's all pretty wonky and controversial.
Quindow has pointed out that Germany is the only country in Europe where what happened to the children of the war has been so broadly discussed, even though like destruction and bombings, you know, occurred in a lot of other countries.
Like German kids were not by far the ones who suffered the most, but they have been like the impact of the war on them has been studied the most.
And she's also noted that psychoanalyst Anna Freud found that children with a healthy attachment to their parents were less traumatized by things like war and violence than those with a less solid attachment.
Putting everything together, Quindo concludes from the interviews that she conducted about bombings that basically a lot of German children were still after the war dealing with grief, deep grieving because they had had like they had not been prepared by their upbringing to heal from the experience of war.
That maybe that was like the more most direct consequence of Joanna's parenting style is that it raised kids who could not effectively heal and learn from the violence they experienced in a way they would have been able to if they'd had more direct attachment to their parents.
Healthy Attachment Matters00:07:27
And that's going to be really relevant to what we have to talk about next week, which is what the generations after the war start to believe about child rearing.
I bet it'll be good because this is the show about good stuff.
The show about good stuff.
Flowers in the cracks of the pavement is the name of this show.
It's good stuff.
So, again, as I said, like Herr's book, Shorn of Some of its Worst Nazi dialogue, gets re-released after the war and remains a bestseller.
And that's going to be a meaningful part of the story we tell next week, right?
Her work kind of helps prepare a generation of Germans to accept some truly unacceptable things, or at least makes it more difficult for the war generation to heal.
The fact that a lot of kids are raised according to Joanna's principles is going to have echoes that go on long after the war.
But before we get to that, I want to end this week by concluding Joanna's story.
As a prominent Nazi with membership in several party organizations, as well as the NSDAP, Joanna was someone who had good reason to fear Allied victory.
And in fact, when the Americans come and like she's afraid of getting arrested leads to the only instance in Gertrude's childhood where she recalls her mom being physically affectionate to her.
And it's so much worse than you might guess.
Quote, only once in my memory did she hold me in her arms.
That was in the war during the evacuation.
I must have been two years old.
Our father had stayed in Munich with my mother's parents.
He had not been drafted because he was a lung specialist in Upper Bavaria.
We children were evacuated with the mother in a hag in Upper Bavaria in an inn.
When the Americans approached, my mother should talk to them because she spoke German very well.
And then she hugged me because she knew that the Americans were fond of children.
That's the only instance of physical affection.
I know Americans like kids, so I'm going to pretend to like my kids to get better treatment, right?
The only time this girl's mom holds her.
Oh my God.
I was hoping she just suddenly volunteered for the inventory and they created an all-women's unit and they all got killed.
It's not nearly that nice.
It is kind of nice that her attitude is like, Americans, the people who like children.
I know.
It speaks well of us.
Yeah.
Well, they don't hate their kids.
I better pretend to like mine.
Yeah.
Joanna does get interned after the war, as is her husband.
And he is so desperate by the trauma of the war's ending, of defeat, of being interned, of the loss of his own hopes for the future, that he commits suicide.
He like flings himself into a river, and Joanna hates him for it.
She shit talks her husband to her daughters for the rest of their lives for his weakness.
Her mother's strongest like recollection of her mom and dad is her mother repeatedly calling her father a coward because he's afraid to get arrested by the Allies.
Such a piece of shit.
While Joanna would write summaries of her own life in the future for professional purposes, she would spend the rest of her life basically leaving out the years from 1932 to 45.
Gertrude did not learn anything about the Nazi period until age 14.
And this is amazing.
She's in a high school and they're like having a debate in history class and Gertrude speaks up in the debate.
And I don't know what she said, but her history teacher snaps at her.
Given what your mom did, maybe you should keep your mouth shut during this part, which is, ooh, damn.
Even with this experience, Gertrude is never able to talk to her mom about Nazism.
She just says it would have been impossible to talk to her about this.
And I don't think she's wrong.
Gertrude does say my mom was an unrepentant Nazi until the end.
Her sister Anne concurred with this view, telling an interviewer, until her death, no one could talk to her about the Third Reich.
All children had to suffer from the mother's cold feeling, while problems within the family were solved with violence.
Joanna was not allowed to practice medicine under the new Federal Republic, but she worked in health departments in Germany until retiring in 1965.
I'd rather she was a doctor than a bureaucrat.
God almighty, yes.
At least a pulmonologist, you assume there's only so much damage a lugging doctor can do.
Right.
The only evidence that she suffered at all from her convictions was the fact that she grew increasingly addicted to alcohol and pills at some point as she aged, eventually forcing her daughters to care for her.
And Gertrude describes at some point the mother grows frail and broken enough that Gertrude starts seeing her as my mother.
And this happened shortly before Joanna dies on April 30th, 1988.
She like becomes weak and pitiful enough that Gertrude is able to view her not as this figure of the mother, but as my mom.
Wow.
There's so much going on there.
I know.
And I'm like going through my own, like, I try not to be like a vengeance girl, but like, I'm like, yeah, I'm struggling with some empathy here.
Yeah.
There's no empathy to have for Joanna.
Like for Gertrude, sure.
For Gertrude and Anne.
Oh, my God.
Like, what a cross to bear.
This lady being your mom.
But no, Joanna.
Who do you think would have survived in a room?
Joanna or the mother god lady that turned silver?
Oh, no, Joanna.
Joanna would fucking cut that lady.
Oh, I just figured out who you're talking about.
I assumed you were talking about some weird mythical goddess that was not made out of silver.
But you mean one of those people silver?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Where her cult members kept her dead body for so many days.
So many days.
Yeah, that lady was like very different attitude.
Joanna could have been a cult leader, but she would have been like the hitting kind of cult leader.
She would have loved Scientology.
Yeah, she would have been, she would have fit in there very well.
That would have offered her a place as well.
She could have been disappearing people for L. Ron Hubbard if she'd been born in a slightly different period.
Actually, in around the same period of time, it just shows in different things.
Yeah, I think wrong, right time, wrong place.
I don't know that she could have, I think she was, I think she only could have dished it out.
I don't think she could have broken her arm and kept camping.
Yeah, you're probably right about that because like her dad is ultimately like, she has such a supportive parent figure.
It's not her mom.
She like that probably explains some of her feeling that mothers shouldn't be connected to their kids.
But like everything she has is kind of rooted in the fact that her dad is willing to stand up for her as a kid.
Yeah.
Which is interesting.
Yeah.
Anyway, well, we're going to talk about the aftershocks of these two people and like what the generation raised under Joanna's tactics and the generation right after that one, the during the war and the immediately post-war children of Germany.
Some of the things some of them come to believe about how you should raise kids as a response to the Nazi era and a response to people like Joanna.
And spoilers, Margaret, it's not very good either.
Yeah, no, you've already explained that this was the fun week.
This is the fun week.
This is the good week.
Next week, baby, it's pedophiles all the way down.
Yay.
Next Week Pedophiles00:03:12
Not even a good bit.
It's not a bit.
That's just an accurate description of next week's episodes.
There is no joke there.
There's not a single.
There's not a single bit.
I'm just laughing because it was, I had to write 12,000 words about that and it was not pleasant.
I wrote them while I was in the ICU with my dad and it was, you know, still a notably unpleasant part of that experience.
It's such an interesting, because like the work that you do with Behind the Bastards is like explaining some of the bad things that humans are capable of.
And I think it's very useful.
But then the format of the show is that you also have to like, we have to keep it entertaining, right?
Got to have some bits.
Yeah.
Yeah, I wonder how you're gonna pull this off next week.
I don't envy me.
I was gonna open an episode with variations of my what's Xing my whys and the word pedophiles, but there's no way to do that.
And that would be okay.
There's absolutely no way to kill pedophiles.
Sure, what's killing?
But calling the audience my pedophiles is probably a bad idea.
I don't allow that.
Thank you so much.
Okay.
Well, you'll get to hear what we come up with.
Yeah.
It's going to be spending a week figuring out to introduce next week's episodes, my me.
But we record them tomorrow, so really you only have 24 hours.
All right.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
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