Brad is joined by Dr. Richard Steigmann-Gall, a historian and expert in Nazi Germany. They compare Hitler's failed coup of 1923 and the Jan. 6 Insurrection at the US Capitol. The discussion focuses on several themes present in 1923 Germany and 2021 USA:
Cultural resentment
Right-wing authoritarianism
Extra-military militias
The danger of unity with fascists
Christianity as a marker of cultural identity
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My name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
I am joined for the second time by Dr. Richard Steigman-Gall, who is the Associate Professor of History at Kent State.
Dr. Steigmann-Gall is an expert in many things.
His academic interests concern the cultural and religious dimensions of German National Socialism, specifically the cohort of Nazis who believed in, quote, positive Christianity, and the struggles they waged with Nazism's neo-pagans for religious dominance in the Third Reich.
His articles have appeared in the journals German History, Kirchlich Zeitgeschichte, I'm practicing my German here for the first time in probably a year, Social History, Central European History, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, the Journal of Contemporary History,
His book, which I've recommended in the past and will recommend again, The Holy Reich, Nazi Conceptions of Christianity 1919-1945, came out in 2003 with Cambridge University Press and has been translated into several languages.
So, once again, Richard, thanks for joining me and thanks for being here.
Brad, thanks for having me again.
I really appreciate it.
Well, I wanted to have you on.
You are an expert in Nazi Germany and that historical period and that historical place.
I wanted to just start today by asking you if you could help us understand, at a very basic level, the fact that in 1923, Hitler and his cohorts Really made a first push for power in Germany.
And I, you know, for all of you listening, you might be thinking, well, why are we talking about this?
And the reason I want to talk about it is because as Richard, I think we'll explain here in a second.
That was a failed coup in many ways.
And yet the fallout from it was immensely important.
It really set up what led later to Hitler's rise to power.
And so I think you all can see the kind of historical comparisons I'm trying to provide here with what's happening in our own country.
So with that, I'll just say, Richard, what happens in 1923?
Give us the like very basic I'm a freshman in college.
I know nothing.
What do I need to know about 1923?
I was going to say the napkin version, but if you like the freshman version, Brad, we can do that too.
So Hitler is in Munich, which is a hotbed of far-right agitation at the start of the Weimar Republic.
And this is the fall of the empire, the fall of the Kaiserreich, as it's called.
The, you know, Kaiser Wilhelm flees, he abdicates, and in the chaos at the end of World War I, a republic is declared.
And for a lot of Germans, the very birth, then, of a republic is associated with the humiliation of defeat, right, at the end of World War I. So that's a very inauspicious birth of a new political reality.
So Munich, not the capital of Germany, Berlin, but rather the capital of Bavaria, Munich becomes a hotbed of far-right agitation.
And the Nazi Party, in fact, is not the only Nazi-istic party in Munich.
There are other rival Nazi-ish or fascist parties that are in Munich, such that the Nazi Party, the NSDAP, is simply one of those.
So Hitler becomes a gravitational force in the Munich far-right political sort of ecosystem.
Some scholars think it's his personal charisma that welds these different parties together and 1923 is also a very turbulent year in Germany, because of the inflation that had racked Germany's economy, wrecked the currency.
Now that culminates in the French just marching into one part of Germany to start extracting wealth from the country because Germany had been behind on its reparations payments to France at the end of World War One.
The Treaty of Versailles demanded that Germany pay back for the damage they had done to France in the war, and the French just march in and start extracting resources when the Germans failed to deliver them.
Now that happens to actually take place somewhere else entirely in Germany, not anywhere near Bavaria, but because Bavaria is such a hotbed, a pre-existing hotbed, it's in this kind of environment that in November of 1923 the Nazis, led by Hitler, decide, okay, let's use this moment to strike.
So This is a famously approach that famously begins in a beer hall in a part of Munich, which then got destroyed in World War Two.
So it's not like a place you can visit now.
And the One of the more interesting questions when you ask about comparative analysis with what happened on January 6th in Congress is the role of pre-existing political establishment right in either Looking the other way or winking their eye or perhaps resisting what Hitler was up to so it was a government the the existing government of Bavaria in 1923 was a right-wing
Establishment government.
It wasn't far right.
It was right as you know, plainly conservative and but to be conservative in Bavaria 1923 was to being among among other things already desirous of monarchy, right?
So a centuries-long history of monarchy was also present in Bavaria.
And so five years after the end of that monarchy is you might expect a lot of mainstream.
I'll call them mainstream conservatives have a lot of fondness for monarchy.
and are monarchist in their sentiment.
So, you've got a political establishment which is monarchist and right-wing and then a new radical movement which does not seek the return of monarchy, right?
That's an interesting question in itself, Brad.
Hitler allows for enough ambiguity for certain old elites in the German monarchy, pardon me, the German nobility to suppose that they might be welcomed by the Nazi movement.
But Hitler never actually comes out and says, yes, I will restore monarchy because of course that's never an interest of his.
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