Thank you for listening to the Rest is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, sign up at restishistorypod. Com. That's restishistorypod. Com. We want to be a peace-loving people, but at the same time, co-reliant courageous. That is why you must be peaceful and courageous at the same time. We want our people to be honor-loving. To that end, you must, from earliest childhood, learn the conception of honor. We want to be a proud people, and you must be proud, proud to be the youthful members of the greatest nation. We want an obedient people, and you must learn to practice obedience. We want a people that is not soft but hard as Flint, and we want you from early youth to learn to overcome hardships and privations. There must be no classes or class distinctions among our people, and you must never let the idea of class distinctions take root among you. All we expect of the Germany of the future, we expect of you, we shall pass on. But Germany will live in you. ' That Tom was very much not a friend of the rest of his history.

Führer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler on the afternoon of the eighth of September, 1934. He was addressing the youth formation, so both boys and girls, at the annual Nazi Party rally, which was held in the Bavarian city of Nuremberg. We ended last time, didn't we? With the aftermath of the light of the Long Knives, the apotheosis of the Hitler cult. We did. You didn't want me to give the game away and to use the words Nuremberg rally because you thought that would spoil the excitement and the tension and the cliffhanger. But I think I can now reveal that you're going to be talking about the Nuremberg Rally.

Yeah, so you've done me that. And also you have conveyed the electric magnetic and power of Hitler's oratory.

The charisma.

Spittleflecht.

The diabolical charisma.

Yes, because we had a bit of a discussion about whether you should do it in a German accent, and I'm glad that you did. And also you did it with the hand actions. So the way that you built up to a crescendo, very, very powerful.

Could we be canceled for something the viewers can't see, the listeners can't see?

No, I don't think so, because as you said, I think it is important to convey to people the potency of Hitler as a national leader, because if we don't understand that, If we don't get a handle on that, if we just think he was evil, full stop, let's not think about it any further, then you don't understand what is going to be happening over the course of the years that follow, which is essentially that Hitler and the Nazis set about. I mean, would it be too much of an exaggeration? Their aim is to brainwash the German people.

That's exactly what they want to do, to endoctrinate them.

In a way, this extraordinary gathering of the Nazi Party a couple of months after the Night of the Long Knives and three weeks after the Plebiscite that has seen Hitler become completely supreme, the Führer, the leader of the German people, this extraordinary public rally in Nuremberg. So officially, it's a party Congress for the Nazis. It's not the first one. They've been having these congresses right the way from 1923. The first one is held in Munich. They also had one in Weimar, but they also had a couple in Nuremberg. The last one that they have is in 1929 in Nuremberg. Then they have it again in 1933. That's after they've come to power, and it's described as the day of victory. I suppose in a way, the nearest equivalent would be the party congresses, the party conferences that we have in Britain, or they have in most democratic countries. But this is designed to be overwhelming in a way that say a party conference with Keir Starmer or Risha Sunak.

The comparison with Sunak and Starmer's party conferences is an outlandish one, Tom.

Right. The third and fourth congresses in 1927 and 1929 had been held in Nuremberg. The 1933 one had been held in Nuremberg, and the 1934 one is as well. The day before the 1933 Congress had opened, Hitler had said, We're always going to hold it in Nuremberg from now on, because Nuremberg has an immense symbolic resonance for the Nazis. It's suggested by one of the most sinist... I mean, all the Nazis are sinister, but one of the most sinister of all the Nazis, which is Julius Streicher, who founded the Stürmer, the Stormtrooper, patron of Unity Mitford. He'd grown up there, and he suggested it to Hitler as a suitable location because it is the embodiment of medieval Germany, a Germany that's been uncorrupted by modern humanity by sinister things like modernist architecture. In the official Nazi paper, the Völkisch Observer, an editorial in 1927, when the Congress had come there, had praised it for its turrets, its mighty walls and towers, which give testimony of manly power and fighting spirit.

But Tom, there's all kinds of historic significance to Nuremberg, because Nuremberg was one of the most common locations for the old imperial diets of the Holy Roman Empire.

Yeah, absolutely.

I've been to Nuremberg. I've seen the Holy Roman Empire as the regalia and stuff in the Imperial Castle. It's also the city of guilds and bur graves and all these kinds of things, isn't it? But it's also famous for its history of anti-Semitism. So there had been pogroms in Nuremberg in the 13th and 14th centuries, I think. Its history is interwoven with the Nazi myth of Germany's past.

Right. Someone before who got all this, of course, was Wagner. One of his great operas is set in Nuremberg, the meist singer, and Hitler is all over that. The Nazis, when they choose Nuremberg as their base, they are identifying themselves very, very deliberately with all this and with the past. In the 1934 rally, they have a showroom in which they're making It's absolutely explicit. They have Martin Luther. He'd written a notoriously anti-Semitic pamphlet on the Jews and their Lies, and they have a copy of this on display. They also, of course, you mentioned that Nuremberg is the center for the First Reich, the original right, the first Reich, the original Reich, the first Empire. They have a copy of Charlemagne's Orb and Scepter and Crown. This really, really matters, the fact that the Nazis are aligning themselves with the first Reich and also, of course, with the second Reich, the Reich of the Kaiser. So all these parades and displays. That's very, very Kaiser. But of course, we've talked about this before, that the Nazis, what's distinctive about them, it's not just that they look backwards, that they're atavistic, that they are drawing on the wellsprings of an imagined German past, but also that they are absolutely cutting edge, that they're looking to the future, that they're the embodiment of the white heat of technology and everything like this.

This is the context for a famous pronouncement that Hitler makes, actually in his first speech at the 1934 rally, when looking back to what Rome had been wanting, a permanent revolution in a brown, Trotsky-ite sense, Hitler says, No, we're not going to have that. There will not be another revolution in Germany. Then he makes this resonant, symbolic phrase in the next 1,000 years.

The 1,000-year-Reik.

This is where the whole idea of a 1,000-year-Reich coming, a third reich that will last for a 1,000 years. The 1934 Congress is called the Party Day of Unity. It's an emphasis on the fact that all the upheavals, all the bloodshed that had characterized the previous months, these are now over. This in turn, enables it also to serve as the Party Day of Power, because with unity comes power. Even though the revolution has been brought to a close, that doesn't mean that the Nazis do not want to project themselves as the embodiment, well, of urgency, of clamor, of aggression, because this is how they are going to infuse and inspire and excite the German people.

When you say the revolution has been brought to a close, because they have killed Ernst & Thrun, and they've crushed the SA, who are now just... I mean, they're still there, but they're a shadow of their former self. The sense of disorder, they want to lose the disorder, but they want to maintain- Keep the drama. The energy, I guess.

Yes, the sense of drama and excitement. The Nuremberg Rallies are the climax of a whole series of festivals that the Nazis have begun instituting, really to try and replace the old Christian and also the socialist festival. They have a festival on the 30th of January, which is the day that the Nazis seise power, 20th of April, Hitler's birthday, Summer Solstice, which is enshrined as a great pagan ceremony, all this thing. But the Nuremberg Rally is seen as the climax of the year. It's seen as the official way it's phrased is that it's a consummation of the marriage between the party and the people. It's couched in very very symbolic, very religious language. Hitler, he loves an atypistic pagan ritual. At the Nuremberg Rally, you have this weird thing where he consecrates new party colors by touching them with one hand and with his the one, he clasps the cloth of the Bluttfahne, which was the blood banner, which had allegedly been drenched in the gore of Nazi martyrs in the Munich Putsch in 1923. You can imagine the the Wagnerian cord striking up and all that stuff.

How much of this, Tom, is orchestrated by Goebbels? Because Goebbels, of course, has a PhD in theater studies or something, doesn't he?

Goebbels is all over this, but Hitler is as well, because Hitler is a frustrated artist, Goebbels also. Yes, of course. They have this huge stage on which they can parade these incredible, well, I mean, literally Wagnerian dramas.

What I was about to say, you mentioned Wagner. I mean, Hitler's great hobby, when he was a young man, was going to see Wagner's operas with these very lavish, famously, the Ring cycle, when people stage it, it's very over the top. So he must be drawing on that to some degree.

But also, of course, they have huge cast. Wagnerian operas require enormous numbers of people. But Hitler now, he come after everyone in the Nazi Party. As well as all the speeches and the exhibitions that they have at the rally, they also have stupifying parades. There are about 700,000 people who are taking part, who are participating in this. They have a parade of workers. They march through the streets. They've got shovels on their shoulder, and they look tanned, they look fit. They're the embodiment of upstanding German manhood. Even foreign observers are impressed by this. They have a parade of stormtroopers. These are now tamed. So their aggression and their sense of purpose, they've now, again, been yoked to the chariot of the Führer, of the leader. They have a great rally of party apparatchik, so gauleiters, party district leaders, and party members. You talked about the the deliberate staging of rallies that Goebbels and Hitler are both incredibly alert to this. This is staged so that Hitler is able to address them as the sun sets. It's timed so that his closing remarks coincide with the onset of night the sun has set. As he gives the last words of his address, they light bonfires along the horizon and great searchlights.

They start sweeping the sky so that it gives the illusion that he's standing in an incredibly austere and colossal Greek temple fashioned out of light. The impact is absolutely visually overwhelming. I think that for those who attend it, you feel dissolved into the totality of everyone who's taking part. I mean, you're dissolved basically into the totality of the folk, the idea of the German people, which is also a German bloodline. This is what it's all designed to conjure.

All distinctions are raised, as you said in that opening speech. No class distinctions. You're just all part of this great collective regimened mass.

But a regimened mass that is being encouraged to feel at a fever pitch of excitement of fanaticism. So under the Nazis, the word fanaticism It becomes to be a word of phrase, blind obedience, which to us, I guess, would be a pejorative. To the Nazis, blind obedience is something to be celebrated. Nuremberg is the visualization, I guess, the dramatization of this newspeak, what Orwell would call newspeak, the recalibration of language in the cause of the totalitarian state. Even foreign observers are overwhelmed and impressed by it. There's an American journalist, isn't William Shira? Oh, yes. Who writes a lot about it, and he's there. And so he witnessed the parade of the guys with their shovels. I can't imagine anything less interesting than watching a load of guys with shovels walking past. But he's all over it. Long columns of bare-chested men standing perfectly at attention, then breaking into chants of ideological slogans and exhibiting extraordinary skill in goose-stepping, all to the spontaneous cheers of the spectators. So Shira, despite himself, is impressed by this.

He talks about Hitler as a Messiah. People looking at Hitler like a Messiah. He talks about them being caught up in the mobs of people screaming and all that thing. It's one of the most amazing descriptions actually, of a Nuremberg radio will ever read, the ecstasy and the intensity of his description.

Well, it's like a rock concert or something. Exactly. Because in due course, that is what the parade grounds will come to hold.

Tom, do you know what? I watched a clip last night and I saw the screaming crowds. It was digitally restored. It looked less like 1940s footage or 1930s footage.

Or like Beatlemania or something. Exactly.

Then a 1960s black and white footage. I thought people at the time, Beatlemania did say, cultural Conservatives said, it's like the Nuremberg Rallies. But this sheer ecstasy, the people sobbing with excitement. You definitely didn't see that when Stanley Baldwin addressed the conservative Party in the 1930s.

No. But again, it's proof of how the Nazis forge a path that people, even after the will follow. Organizers of rock festivals, rallies, whatever, they are using the techniques that the Nazis deploy and are experimenting with. It's a tremendous success. Now, of course, the challenge for the Nazis is how do they get the whole of the German people to share in this experience? Because Nuremberg is one tiny corner of Germany. How do you propagate it across the entire Reich? The answer essentially is to send across that sense of ritualized ecstasy, to try and propagate it across every city, every town, every village in Germany. That's why, for instance, swastikas are everywhere. I mean, this is the default visual signifier for Nazi Germany, isn't it?

Yeah.

The swastika in 1934 is one of the two flags. You also have the traditional imperial German flag. But in the following year, so the 1935 Nuremberg Rally, Hitler announces that the swastika alone is going to be the German flag, and it has to be saluted. And Schirer, actually, in his account of the '34 Rally, describes how he has to keep ducking into side streets and so on because he knows that if he doesn't salute the flag, the SA will beat him up. Yeah.

And the salute that people are doing is the raised arm, what they regard as a Roman-style salute. Have they inherited that from Mussolini? Is that right?

Yeah, they have. It's described by the historian Richard Grunberger, who wrote a brilliant book, A Social History of the Third Reich. He describes it as being one of the most potent forms of totalitarian conditioning conceivable because everybody has to do it. It becomes You know, I'm thinking you do it, it's shaking hands or whatever. There isn't a law saying that you have to salute it, the swastika or whatever. But basically, if you don't- Yeah, an unwritten law, but effectively. You'll get beaten up. Although Grunberger does point out in fairness to the Nazis, that in 1933, it was agreed that dismissal notices issued by firms, especially at Christmas time, were not to end with the phrase Heil Hitler.

Because it couldn't be associated with bad news. Is that right?

Yeah. So you're scrooge kicking people out. He I would have had to say it. That's one way, I think, in which you do it. The swastikas, the Heil Hitler-ing, the salutes. It just becomes unthinking custom for people. But the other way in which you do it is that you invest in overt propaganda. So famously, Rally, one way in which, specifically, the 1934 Nuremberg Rally is propagated around Germany and the world is that Hitler commissions a film to be made about it. The person he commissions is an actress who has developed to become a director called Lenny Riefenstahl. There is great mutual admiration between the two of them. Hitler has been following her career with great interest. She'd been a dancer, but there's this whole weird craze for German films in the '20s featuring skiing and mountain slopes. Lennie Reifenstahl is blonde, so Hitler would call her the embodiment of German womanhood. She ends up directing this film called The Blue Light, in which she plays a noble peasant girl, and there's weird lighting effects and alpine snows and braids and all that thing. He absolutely loves it. She, likewise, adores him. She had first heard him speak in 1932.

In her diary, she describes it in rapturous, mystical terms. She's blown away.

She does see him as a Messiah, do you think?

I think she does. I mean, it's very controversial because, of course, she She survives the war. The question of her role, how imbroiled she is in Nazi ideology is very controversial, but I think it's pretty clear that she is a true believer. She produces this film, Triumph of the Will, which is absolutely classic work of Nazi propaganda and a true reflection of what the Nuremberg Rallies is all about, because you watch it and you feel, yeah, this is simultaneously full of marching and torches and Greek columns rising up with beams of light. It feels simultaneously very, very ativistic and very, very futuristic. I guess the sequence that most potently and notoriously expresses that It's the opening. It begins with Hitler's plane flying over steeply bank clouds, and you hear the drone of it going. He's like Odin, who flew through the skies at the head of the great hunt. But of course, he is also at the cutting edge of technology. He was the first politician to use planes to go around when he was campaigning, when he was electioneering.

Just on Triumph of the Will, for those people who haven't seen it, it's a strange film to watch because, of course, it's evil. We would regard it as evil, celebrating evil. But it is an absolutely brilliant film. As a work of art, it is one of the three or four most influential films ever made. Actually, there's another scene at the end of the film, Tom. You can see it on YouTube. It's Hitler They're flanked by Himmler from the SS and Lutzer, who is the new guy in charge of the SA up, and they're walking through the serried ranks of the stormtroopers to pay homage. I think they're placing wreaths at a First World War memorial. That scene is the scene at the end of the first Star Wars film, when Han, Luke, and Chuy go to get their medals. The Star Wars scene is deliberately modeled on Triumphant the Wild. Even though Triumphant the Wild is a Nazi film, that's a brilliant reflection of its astonishing impact. I mean, it's an amazing film.

Because Reef and Style is a brilliantly innovative director, so she's been very innovative in the Blue Mountain, all kinds of strange lighting techniques. With this, she has all the resources of the state given to her. Her crew is 120 people strong. Stryker puts a house at their disposal, and they are allowed to dress the cameramen up in workers' outfits or essay uniforms or whatever so that they can be part of the parades and get close-up shots there. Hitler and the Nazi leadership absolutely love it. It's Hitler's personal baby. He adores films. Famously, he loved King Kong, he loved Lauren and Hardy, he loved Mickey Mouse. I mean, he loved every film.

Yeah, as Stalin liked films, actually. Why wouldn't they like films? Films are great, but also films are new and exciting and captivating to somebody in the 1930s.

Yeah. Hitler recognizes that film is a perfect way to to win people over to National Socialism. Actually, he says that without talking pictures and without radio as well, there can be no triumph of National Socialism. Right from the beginning, the Nazis had understood the importance of seizing control of the cinema industry and anything that is capable of propagating their message. This is how Goebbels comes to get the power that he does, because barely a week after the federal election in March 1933, Hitler sets up a Reich Ministry of Public Enlight and Propaganda And propaganda, we should say at this point, is a value-neutral word. It doesn't have the negative connotations that it has for us. And Goebbels is put in charge of it. And we mentioned in the previous episode, Goebbels is brilliant at this. I mean, he has a maligned genius for it. And he absolutely sees it as his mission to forge the minds of the German people out of steel. So he has this comment, We did not lose the war because our artillery gave out, but because the weapons of our mind didn't fire. And so his office, he has seized control of all filmmaking in the Third Reich, with the sole exception, actually, of Lenny Riefenstahl's films, because those are Hitler's babies.

And he has challenges because basically a lot of the directing and acting talent has fled Germany. Marlene Dietrich would be the famous example. Peter Law, Fritz Lange, all of these have gone. Also, of course, there is a risk that you shove too much propaganda down people's throats. To begin with, the films are very overtly propagandistic, and people don't like it. And Goebbels is smart enough to realize this, that it's much easier to... A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, that you smuggle in the messages, and they do that quite effectively. The Nazi film industry isn't full of stormtroopers. Triomphe of the Will is an exception. Most of it is actually escapist schlop designed to keep people happy, but Nazi messages are woven in through it. You have the same policy with radio, which is really fundamental to how the Nazis aim to brainwash the German people. Where, again, to begin with, when the Nazis seize power, there's lots of elevated, lots of Wagner, lots of Beethoven. Again, they realized people don't really want that. This matters because radio enables Hitler to address people directly. Yeah, of course. The requirement for that is that everyone basically has to have access to a radio.

They do this in two ways. Goebbels deliberately commissions very cheap, very accessible radio sets. There's one, the Volkssimpfunger, or people's receiver, which went on sale in the summer of 1933, so right at the beginning of the Nazi period in power. This has been compared in its impact to the iPod. It's that seismic. It enables pretty much everyone to have access to radios. This is a policy that will be continued throughout the '30s. A few years later, another even cheaper radio goes on the market. This enables pretty much everyone who can afford it to get one. But even those who can't afford a radio, radios are put in offices, in factories, in restaurants, in cafés, in the stairwells of apartment blocks. That's very 1984. Very 1984. Winton Smith, Hearing Big Brother, shout out. That's where Orwell is getting it from. The result is that by 1939, the outbreak of the Second World War, there is no country in the world, and this includes Britain. It includes the United States, which is in so many ways, in terms of the media, much more technologically advanced. But in terms of radio coverage, no country has more radio coverage than Germany.

And Goebbels is absolutely upfront about why this should be so. So this is what he said in 1933, We make no bones about the fact that the radio belongs to us and to no one else, and we will place the radio in the service of our ideology, and no other ideology will find expression here. So it is to be purely totalitarian. It exists to forge the German mind as the German body also has to be forged. Okay.

All right, Tom, after the break, why don't you tell us about a couple of other aspects of the Nazi regime? I was thinking women would be an interesting topic because we haven't really talked much about women, and maybe sports, because I know as an elite sportsman yourself, you would enjoy talking about sports.

I would enjoy that. I think more generally, totalitarianism means that no aspect of life is left alone. So film, radio, whatever, the streets are dominated by naziism, then the home also And so Nazi policies for women, for children, crucially important for the process of brainwashing. Okay.

In the second half, we will move from the parade grounds into the heart of the German home. We'll see after the break. We do not consider it correct for the woman to interfere in the world of the man in his main sphere. We consider it natural if these two worlds remain distinct. To the one belongs the strength of feeling, the strength of the soul. To the other belongs the strength of vision, of toughness, of decision, and of the willingness to act. That was the foe of the rest of his history, Adolf Hitler, again. He was speaking at the Nuremberg Rally in 1934, on the eighth of September. He was speaking to the Frauenschaft, the women's National Socialist organization. Now, I'm guessing the strength of feeling and the strength of the soul is women, and the strength of vision and toughness is men, though a lot of our female listeners may disagree I agree. Hitler is very much a believer in the gender divisions, isn't he, Tom?

He's not a feminist, I think it would be fair to say. I mean, none of the Nazi leaders are feminists. There's a primer on Nazi ideology. It's published in 1933, and it states quite explicitly that the German resurrection is a male event. But just because activities of the Nazi state are seen as being the field of the masculine, this doesn't mean that the Nazis see the dimension of the feminine as being separate from them. They absolutely deserve the right to poke their noses into that as well. Part of the reason for that, of course, is that it is women who have to provide the German Reich with its manpower. But it is also seen by the Nazis as the role of women to bring up children. Therefore, women need to be shaped in an appropriately Nazi way so that they can bring up good little Nazis. This is the thinking. There can be no private space. There can be no purely domestic space.

Everything must be Nazivied.

A German's home is not his castle. I think it's fair to say. Although on occasion, the Nazis will say, as when, say, Hitler is speaking to women's organizations at Nuremberg Rally, We're doing this for your own good. We think that you shouldn't have any political responsibility because that's better for you. We're doing it for you. Right.

Aren't we kind?

Aren't we kind? Yeah. Actually, it reflects a dogma, which it's a dogma that sees the sexes as being unequal in a way that the Arians and Jews are seen as being unequal. The Nazis feel they are following the science, you might say. Oh, right.

Crikey.

Like anti-Semitism, their anti-feminism is absolutely framed in pseudo-scientific terms. So Goebbels, who is a great one for the ladies, I think it's fair to say he's not the best-looking example of area in manhood.

No.

But he's absolutely the inveterate womanizer. He has this extraordinary comment. He says, Women has the task of being beautiful and bringing children into the world. This is by no means as coarse and old-fashioned as one might think. The female bird preens herself for her mate and hatches her eggs for him.

Not a chat-up line I would employ, Tom.

Well, it's also, I mean, especially not to an ornithologist, because, of course, one would immediately think of the peacock. No. Yeah. Okay. As a counter view to that. Yes. Yeah. And Voltaire, who becomes the Nazi Minister for Agriculture and previously had been a pig farmer, he attributed the desire for women to take part in politics, to have the vote, to have roles in government. He thought that this was the result of frustration set up by malfunctioning sex glands. Oh, my word. So both Goebbels and Dare are following the science.

In their own minds, at least.

As they see it. So obviously, they're not downgrading women in the way that they downgrade Jews, but they do feel that science justifies them in confining women within the domestic sphere. And this had always been the case. So right from the beginning, Nazi Party ordinances had banned women from leadership positions in the party. Hitler saw the fact that women in the Weimar Republic had to vote as being absolutely expressive of everything that made parliamentary democracy corrupt and inefficient.

Sort of feminized, flabby, because they're part of that, we talked about this last time, the front generation, where the idea of male camaraderie is so important to them. Presumably, there must be an element in them being, frankly, slightly frightened of women. What would you say, Tom?

I don't know. The thing is that the Nazis, again, as we have talked about, they are simply amplifying traditions that are much, much more broadly rooted in a lot of German thinking.

Deep-seated anxieties.

The famous slogan everyone will think of, Kinder, Kuker, Kirche, children, the kitchen, the church. This is not a Nazi slogan. It's a slogan that goes back to the 1890s. It's Second Reich and everything. This is why I think there's quite a lot of support. You don't have to be a Nazi in Germany to think that this is an excellent policy. When the Nazis introduced natalist policies, in other words, encouraging women to have more children, they are doing other countries are doing as well. The French have been doing this since 1920. They've been offering medallions to women who have lots of children. The Nazis, in that sense, are following the example of democratic France. They have this whole thing that if you marry, you get a loan of a thousand marks, and you have to pay it back unless you have children. The more children you have, the less you have to pay back. It ends up being calibrated in the way that it had been in France, that you get a bronze medal for so many children, a silver one for so many, If you have 10, then you get a gold medal. Hitler is godfather to your child, which means that if it's a boy, the boy then gets called Adolf.

That's nice.

Golly. There's a lot of pressure then if you've got nine kids, but you don't want a son called Adolf.

Right. We hope it's a girl, I suppose. Adolfina. You get this cross, the cross of honor of the German mother, and everyone has to salute you in the streets. It's very Spartan. This is what happened in Sparta, is that Spartan women could win glory for themselves by bearing lots children. In that sense, the Nazis are going with the grain of policies that have been current, both in Weimar and in other democratic countries. There is also, as well as the carrot of medals and financial bribes. There is also, however, the stick. The Nazis are very keen to force women out of the workplace, partly for ideological reasons, but also because the big challenge, economic challenge they face is unemployment. If you can get rid of women in the workplace, then boosts employment for men. Again, this is a policy that had been current in Weimar, so it's not completely unknown, but it becomes increasingly coercive. By 1936, for instance, It's forbidden to women to act as judges, as public prosecutors, essentially to have any position of authority within the legal profession. They're declared ineligible for jury service on the ground that they're too emotional. They lack logic, they lack the reason necessary, and they are also being denied educational opportunities.

In 1934, the same year that Lenny Riefenstahl is making Triumph of the Will, it's decreed that only 10% of students enrolled in grammar schools, which are the elite schools, can be girls. So 90% have to be boys. In 1937, girls will be banned from grammar schools altogether. They shockingly dominate their band from learning Latin.

That is shocking, Tom.

So some are enrolled in courses that specialize in languages. But others are shunted into a domestic science stream. And this is known as the pudding matrix. And it's a absolute academic dead end. Education is being used to essentially deny girls the education that their mothers had taken for granted.

You get the resentment of people like, so we did an episode many moons ago about the White Rose movement and Sophie Scholl. Of course, somebody like Sophie Scholl would be really chafing who's idealistic who likes reading poetry, all that thing. There must have been a whole generation of bookish girls who were-Yeah, frustrated.Incredibly frustrated.Yeah. Or maybe they just took it for granted. I don't know. It's hard to say, isn't it?

Yeah. I mean, certainly it reflects the fact that the Nazis entirely understand in the Jesuit way, that to control education is to control the future of the people that you're educating. The truth is, you talked about the relish of students for book burning, that it's students who are taking the lead in book burning. The The Nazis can look at that, can look at the enthusiasm for the Nazi Party in the elections. Again, in the episodes that we did last year, you gave the extraordinary stat that one in four people who voted for the Nazis in whatever it was, 1930, was a first-time voter. I think that the Nazis can feel that when they're imposing their policies on education, they're going with the grain of what young people themselves want.

I think actually it's really important for people listening to this series, who haven't listened to The Rise of the Nazis, get it into their heads. If you are young, the Nazis are very exciting, and you think, Brilliant, a break with the old men. You love the torchlight parades. You love the dynamism and the energy. The Nazis have a huge appeal to youth. This is not really an old men's party. It is a young man's party, isn't it, Tom?

To a degree, a young woman's as well, because the Nazis do give things for girls as well as boys. What happens in 1933, we talked about this, is that anything that is not Nazi-stamped gets dissolved. Any public organization. So Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, all those things get abolished. Essentially, there are now only Nazi youth organizations that you can join. For boys, it's the Hitler Youth, and for girls, it's the German League of Maidens. These are basically military authorized versions of the Boy Scouts, of the Girl Guides. Sophie Scholl loves it, didn't she? She really adored it, going out, camaraderie, all that thing. But I think it's also true to say that Over the course of the '30s, certainly the Hitler youth becomes increasingly brutal. Hitler in 1935 at the Nuremberg rally, he's absolutely explicit about the need to toughen young boys up in the way that the Spartans had toughened their young boys up.

Terrifying.

He says that, We have undertaken to give the German people an education that begins already in youth and will never come to an end. It starts with a child and will end with the old fighter. For a child's entire life, they will be essentially literally just a cog in the great machinery of the state. What this means in practice for boys who are joining the Hitler youth is that there is relentless ideological indoctrination. They are taught to adore Hitler as a God, They have military discipline instilled into them far more than they would ever have done in the Boy Scouts. There's a lot of hazing that goes on both in the Hitler youth and the League of Maidens. Boys will be made to go on very brutal forced marches in very skimpy clothes in the winter. So again, that's very, very Spartan. I've subjected to very, very brutal punishments, cold showers, all the works, Gordonston cubed.

Right.

Yeah. And the girls also. I mean, so teenage girls, the Nazis, don't approve of makeup. They don't approve of perms. If you have a perm, your hair is likely to be shaved off. Too fair.

I don't really approve of perms. Right.

But would you say you had a daughter and she wasn't wearing the Gretchen wreath of braids that was seen as being appropriate to a young German maiden. Would you approve of it being ceremoniously shaved off? Maybe you would.

I'd probably be a bit frightened of her because parents were basically terrorized by their own children, weren't they? Because the children had been turned into... Well, the children were being prepared for war. They're being turned into future military officers. As a weak and flabby middle class professional, I would just be utterly brutalized by my ruthless Hitler youth honed, League of Maidons honed children, I imagine.

Michael Burley in his great book, The Third Reich, he talks about parents. Their children became strangers, contempluous of monarchy or religion, and perpetually barking and shouting like pint-sized Prussian sergeant majors. In some, children appear to have become more brutal, fitter, and stupider than they were.

Oh, God. Yeah, I wouldn't want that.

You wouldn't want that at all. I think that that reflects a contempt for bookishness that comes from Hitler himself. Hitler had been a failure at school, hadn't he? He'd been a dropout.

Yeah, lazy.

He sees a over-obsession with book learning as not conducive to the forging of a master race. He's all about, what he says, the breeding of absolutely healthy bodies, which isn't to say that the Nazis don't reform education. They do. Again, interestingly with this, you have the sense perhaps that teachers would be opposed to this, but they're not really. Teachers are very as a profession, are very, very keen.

Yeah, they are.

As a body, by and large, they're quite in favor of it.

I think because they're from that middle class milieu that the Nazis had always appealed to, lower middle class. There's a particular sinister idealism. I mean, to many teachers anyway, Tom, but teachers in 1930s Germany in particular. Right.

There is absolutely a sense that children need to be ideologically shaped, that they need to be conditioned by the controlling ideology that the state is decreing they should imbibe. At the primary school level, they get rid of all the Biff and Chipp type reading books, I'm afraid to say, Dominic frowning at this. That is poor. That is shocking. They bring in loads of stories about German soldiers driving their bear nets into Russians and- Frenchmen. Stirring stories of Hitler's youth and things like that. They get rid of religion. So religious studies get phased out. In their place, they use German history, essentially, to inculcate moral lessons.

Crikey. Thank goodness, something like that would never happen today, Tom. People using history as a branch of theology.

Absolutely. Also, something that would never happen today in maths. So, again, to quote Richard Grunberger in his Social History of the Third Reich, While mathematics teaching remained much as before, Nazi ideologists adroitly seized on the opportunity for subliminal conditioning presented by the wording of problems so that a head for figures was now developed by questions about artillery traject, fighter to bomber ratios, and budget deficits accruing from the democratic pampering of hereditarily deceased families.

Crikey.

So you're getting math questions that condition you. Nazi maths. Also in biology, there's nothing about sex, because don't talk about that. Although, Hitler youth leaders are instructed in the dreadful consequences of homosexuality.

Well, they want you to have a lot of sex within marriage, to have all these children, but they don't want you to talk about it.

No, because that's in Weimar. Also, people in biology are trained to measure skulls and classify them according to racial types. Again, nothing like that ever goes on today in our leading museums. Thank goodness. That's all the bookish side. But the main focus is PE. So this is one of the many reasons why I'm glad that I didn't grow up in the Third Reich.

You weren't a big PE person?

I wasn't a big PE person. I hated PE.

I actually hated PE, to be fair. I mean, this is a podcast done by clearly two people who didn't like PE.

Weedy, bookish types who would not have been very valkish. And this is the age of the PE teacher. So never in history have PE teachers, except perhaps in Sparta, have PE teachers had more of a control. So basically, they are running the schools. There's even a proposal that they should all become deputy head teachers by default.

That's a terrible idea.

This idea that German youth should be made sporty, fit, healthy, that a premium should be set on physical activity. This is the context in which Germany is awarded the Olympic Games. The Olympic Games are due to be staged in 1936. So two years after his triumph in the summer of 1934, getting rid of the SA and Rome. Hitler had initially been quite skeptical of it because he disliked the fact that it was organized by the International Olympic Committee because he didn't like the idea of an international organization, poking its nose into the affairs of the Reich. Also, he despised It's a sport for its own sake. He despised the English Corinthians ideal.

Also, the games are about world peace, aren't they? And brotherhood and all. Obviously, often they're not.

Yeah, it's all a bit wet.

There is a wet side to the Olympic Games that he would have no time for at all.

I think also the idea that as an athlete, you're only concerned with breaking records rather than subordinating yourself to the entirety of a team. He sees that also as ideologically dubious. He's not interested in sport, but he absolutely recognizes, and Goebbels, of course, also recognizes is that it's a chance to showcase the Reich, to showcase German physical pro-ess, and to do on a world stage what the Nazis had been doing for the past three years in Nuremberg. Hitler had actually, in 1933, he had expressed his hope that Nuremberg, he compares it to the Olympic Games, he hopes that Nuremberg will become the Olympic Games of Germany. Even though Nuremberg is the classically German city, that's why they hold it there, Hitler is fascinated by ancient Greece. He absolutely associates it with the primordial origins of Arianism. He sees the ancient Greeks as being Arian. And so the Olympic Games offer him the perfect opportunity to fuse classical traditions with Germanic traditions. And to rebrand them both as Nazi. And so who are you going to call to propagate this message and to commemorate it and to send it out across the world? You're going to call Lenny.

Lenny Riefenstahl, of course.

Lenny Lenny Riefenstahl.

But just before we get into Lenny Riefenstahl, we won't go massively into this, but he uses the Olympics, doesn't he? As a shop window. So they clean up anti-Semitic slogans, the essay on their best behavior, loads of foreign dignitures arrive at the Olympics. And it is actually for Hitler, internationally, a colossal propaganda success.

It is. Yeah.

Lots of people come and they say, the Nazis may be not everyone's cup of tea, but Germany is very clean and there's no disorder. Actually, I didn't see any anti-Semitism at all. They handle all that very ruthless and cleverly.

That's why Lenny Riefenstein's film, Olympia, is the perfect illustration of that. With Triumph of the Will, it's one of the very few cultural apoges of Nazi culture, and it's brilliantly done. Basically, it, to this day, serves as an inspiration for the way that sports is presented. It's a buried influence, but it's undoubtedly there. Riefenstahl has this brilliant opening, where she sent a camera crew to Greece, and they filmed the Acropolis, they filmed the Temple of Zus at Olympia, lots of Greek statuary, which is all... There's no nonsense about painting them. They're all very, very, very white. Then it has this famous shot where they shoot the statue of the Discobellos, the guy who's holding the discus, and it turns into a real figure who then unfurls himself and hurls the discus. There's then a succession of nudes, so very homo erotic male nudes and then female nudes. Lenny Riefenstahl... So these were not shot in Greece. They were shot on a beach in the Baltic because Riefenstahl felt that the footage she got from Greece needed spicing up. So there's all kinds of nudity going on. One of them is actually Lenny Riefenstahl herself. There's a shot of a woman on a beach, and she's got her arms extended to the heavens, and that's Lenny herself.

Then this sequence ends with a runner bringing the torch, and he's running from Greece into the German stadium in Berlin. So it's Greece blurring and being succeeded by Germany. And part of the reason why this is so potent is that Olympia, for instance, it doesn't cut out from the Nazi perspective, racially problematic victors. So Jesse Owens, who is the black American athlete, who is the star of the Olympics, he's in the film. So also is Kitai Son, who is from Korea, although he's racing under the flag of Imperial Japan, which has conquered Korea, and wins the marathon. He's in it as well. And so this is part of why Olympia, the film, does hold up a mirror to the impact of the games as a whole. It gives a sanitized take on the Nazi regime. Actually, it's a measure of how successful the Nazis are promoting their message that the Olympics have been a brilliant success. That actually it's been claimed that it has a interplanetary impact.

Interplanetary, Tom.

Interplanetary, because it's been claimed that the The first television broadcast that was able to reach out beyond our atmosphere and out into outer space was the speech by Hitler with which he introduces the Olympic Games. That'd be nice for aliens out there wondering what planet Earth is all about.Depressing thought.Yeah. However, there is a problem, which is that Olympia is broadcast on the 20th of April 1938, which is Hitler's 47th birthday.That's the premiere.That's the premiere. By By the time it is premiered, any notion that Nazi Germany is not virulently anti-Semitic and is not dangerously militaristic is basically gone. That message actually falls on very soily ground because since 1936, a lot has changed in terms of Germany's international position. Dominic, I think it would not be an exaggeration to say that the storm clouds of war are gathering the Ring over Europe. Would you be prepared to go that far?

I think we do love a storm cloud of war, and the rest is history, Tom. We always have. These are the storm clouds to end all storm clouds. It's a veritable tempest, a hurricane is coming for Europe.

Right.

Well, thank you, Tom. That was not merely a fantastic tour d'horizons. It was a veritable tour d'orizons. And next week, we'll be digging more closely, weren't we, into the Nazis and their foreign policy, because we'll be doing an episode about Hitler, his vision war and his plans for war. And then we'll be doing an episode specifically looking at Hitler and the Conquest of Austria, the Anschluss. Tom, Restless History Club members will be able to listen to those episodes right now, won't they?

They absolutely will. You know the routine, restlesshistory. Com. You can sign up there. But if you don't want to do that, it doesn't matter. You can wait till next week. We'll still get to hear them. Thanks very much for listening and bye-bye. Bye-bye.