The Nuremberg Rallies | The Nazis in Power

“We did not lose the war because our artillery gave out, but because the weapons of our mind didn’t fire”

In September 1934, the Nazis held their sixth annual party conference in the Bavarian city of Nuremberg. The location held a symbolic resonance for the party, being not only the embodiment of an uncorrupted medieval Germany, and the centre of the First Reich, but also a bedrock of anti-Semitism. It was therefore here that Hitler would lay out his terrifying vision for the mighty new empire’s future, promulging the superiority and purity of the Aryan bloodline. The rally was a pageant of ritualised fanaticism, recalling the majesty of Germany’s mythic past and all the heroism of classical antiquity. It was the first of many such extravagant displays, replete with parades of marching workers, bonfires, and swastikas, as the Nazi propaganda machine, under the leadership of the grotesque Joseph Goebbels, tightened its stranglehold over Germany. Through the popularisation of the radio, Nazi youth organisations, cinema, and even the Olympic Games, German minds were being steadily remoulded…

Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the Nazis’ gradual indoctrination of the German people in the build up to the Second World War, and the beginnings of Hitler’s plans for not only the Third Reich, but the entire world.

Twitter:
@TheRestHistory
@holland_tom
@dcsandbrook

Producer: Theo Young-Smith
Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett
Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor

We want to be a peaceloving people but at the same time 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 are 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 so that Tom was very much not a friend of the rest’s history fura and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler on the afternoon of the 8th of September 1934 and 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 nurburg and we ended last time didn’t we with the aftermath of the light of the long lives the apotheosis of the Hitler cult you didn’t want me to to give the game away and to use the words nurburg 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 Newberg rally yeah so so done me that and also you have conveyed the electric magnetism and power of Hitler’s oratory the Charisma spittle Fleck the Diabolical Charisma

Yes because we had a bit of a discussion about whether you should do it in the German accent and I’m glad that you did and also you did it with the hand actions yeah 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 poent of Hitler as a national leader because if we don’t understand that 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 indoctrinate them and in a way this extraordinary Gathering of the Nazi party a couple of months after the night of the Long Knives and and three weeks after the pleite that has seen Hitler become completely Supreme the fura the

Leader of the German people this extraordinary public rally in nurburg so it’s officially it’s a party Congress for the Nazis it’s not the first one they’ve been having uh these congresses right the way from 1923 so the first one’s held in Munich they also had they

Had one in viar um but they they also had a couple in nurur and the last one that they have is in 1929 in nurburg and then they have it again in 1933 so that’s after um they’ve come to power and it’s it’s described as

The Day of Victory and I suppose in a way the nearest equivalent would be the party congresses the party conferences that that we have in Britain or they have you know in most democratic countries but this is designed to be overwhelming in a way that say a a party

Conference with k stama or the comparison with starmus party conferences is is an outlandish one Tom right and the third and fourth congresses in 1927 and 1929 had been held in Newberg the 1933 one had been held in urberg and the 1934 one is as well and the day before the 1933

Congress had opened Hitler had said we’re always going to hold it in nurenberg from now on because nurenberg has an immense kind of symbolic resonance for the Nazis and it’s suggested by one of the most Sinister I mean you know the Nazis are Sinister but one of the most Sinister of all the

Nazis which is Julius Striker who founded dma the the Stormtrooper patron of unity mitford and he’ grown up there and he suggested it to Hitler as a suitable location because it is the embodiment of kind of medieval Germany a Germany that’s been uncorrupted by modernity by um kind of sinister things like modernist

Architecture in the official Nazi paper the Vish Observer an editor 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 inviting a there there’s all kinds of significance historic significance to nurenberg because nurenberg was one of

The most common locations for the old Imperial diets of the kind of Holy Roman Empire yeah absolutely I’ve been to Newberg I’ve seen the Holy Roman Empire’s kind of the regalia and stuff in the Imperial Castle it’s also the city of of kind 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 pograms in nurburg in the 13th and 14th centuries I think it’s its history is interwoven with the Nazi myth of German’s past and someone had before

He’d got all this of course was Vagner one of his great operas is set in nurenberg the Me singer and Hitler is all is all over that and so the Nazis when they choose nurenberg as their base you know they are identifying themselves very very deliberately with all this and

With the past and in the 1934 rally they have a showroom in which they’re making this absolutely explicit so they have um Martin Luther he’d written a a notoriously anti-semitic pamphlet on the Jews and their lies and they have a copy of this on display and they also of

Course you mentioned that nurburg is the center for the first Reich the original Reich the first Empire they have a copy of charlamagne’s orb and scepter and Crown and this really really matters the fact that the Nazis are aligning themselves with the first right and also of course with the second right the

Right of the Kaiser so all these kind of 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 kind of 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 um and so this is the context for an a famous pronouncement that Hitler makes actually in his his first speech at the 1934

Rally when looking back to what Rome had been wanting a permanent revolution in a kind of drown trotskyite sense Hitler says no we’re not going to have that there will not be another revolution in Germany and then he makes this kind of resonant symbolic phrase in the next

1,000 years oh the Thousand Year Reich so this is where the whole idea of a Thousand-Year re coming Third Reich that will last for a thousand years and the the 1934 Congress is called the party day of unity so there’s an emphasis on the fact that you know all the upheavals

All the Bloodshed that had characterized the previous months these are now over and this in turn enables it also to serve as the party day of power because with Unity comes power and 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 of well of kind of urgency of clamor of aggression because this is how they are going to infuse and Inspire and excite the German people yeah so when you said the revolution’s been brought to a close because they have killed ER

Room 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 so the sense of disorder they want to lose the disorder but they want to maintain keep the drama the energy I guess yes the the sense of drama and excitement

And the nurenberg rallies are the kind of climax of a whole series of festivals that the Nazis have begun instituting really to try and replace the the old Christian and also the kind of socialist Festival so you have have a festival on the 30th of January which is the day

That the Nazis sees power 20th of April Hitler’s birthday summer solstice which is kind of enshrined as a great Pagan ceremony all this kind of thing um but the nurenberg rally is seen as the climax of the year it’s seen as the official way it’s phrased is that it’s a

Consumation of the marriage between the party and the people know it’s it’s couched in very symbolic very religious kind of language and Hitler is I mean he loves a a kind of atavistic pagan ritual so at the nurenberg rally you have this kind of weird thing where he consecrates

New party Colors by touching them with one hand and with his other one he clasps the cloth of the blut far which was the blood Banner which had allegedly been drenched in the gore of of Nazi Martyrs in the Munich pch in 1923 so you can imagine the kind of the

Varian cords striking up and all that kind of stuff and how much of this Tom is um orchestrated by Gobles because geres of course has a PHD in kind of theater studies or something doesn’t he Gobles is all over this but Hitler is as well because Hitler is a frustrated

Artist Geral also and so they have this huge stage on which they can parade these incredible well I mean literally vgan dramas well I was about to say you mentioned Vagner I mean Hitler’s great great hobby when he was a young man was going to see Vagner operas with these

Very sort of lavish you famously the ring cycle when people stage in it’s very over the top so he must be drawing on that to some degree but also of course they have huge casts you know venerian operas require enormous numbers of people but Hitler now you know he can

Command everyone in the Nazi party so as well as all the speeches and the exhibitions that they have at at the rally they also have stupid ifying parades so there are about 700,000 people who are taking part who are participating in this they have a parade of workers they they kind of 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 and even foreign observers are impressed by this uh they have a parade of Storm Troopers you know the these are now tamed and so their aggression and their sense of

Purpose they’ve now again been being yolked to uh The Chariot of the fura of the leader and they have a great rally of party aaric so gitters uh party District leaders and and party members and this is you talked about the kind of the deliberate staging of rallies that

Geral and Hitler are both incredibly alert to this this is staged so that Hitler is able to address them as the sun sets and it’s timed so that his closing remarks coincide with the onset of night the sun has set and as he gives the last words of his address they light

Bonfires along the horizon and great search lights you know that they start kind of sweeping the sky so that it it gives the illusion that standing in a kind of an incredibly austere and colossal greek temple fashioned out of light so the impact is absolutely visually overwhelming and I think that

For those who attend it you kind of feel dissolved in into into the totality of everyone who’s taking part I mean you’ll dissolve basically into the totality of the vul the the idea of the German people which is also a kind of German bloodline this is what it’s all designed

To conjure all distinctions raised as he said in that opening speech you know no class distinctions you’re just all part of this great Collective regimented Mass but a but a regimented mass that is being encouraged to feel at a kind of fever pitch of excitement of fanaticism so under the

Nazis the word fanaticism comes 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 and nurenberg is the visualization I guess the dramatization of this kind of new speak what all world

Would call new speak the the recalibration of language in the cause of the totalitarian state and even for foreign observers are kind of overwhelmed and impressed by it so there there’s an American journalist isn’t there William shyra oh yes who who writes a lot about it and he’s there and

So he witnessed the parade of the guys with their shovels I mean I can’t imagine anything less interesting than watching load of guys with shovels walking past but he’s I mean he’s all over it long Columns of barechested men standing perfectly at detention then breaking into chants of ideological slogans and exhibiting extraordinary

Skill in Goose stepping all to the spontaneous cheers of the spectators so Shir I mean despite himself is impressed by this he talks about Hitler as a messiah people looking at Hitler like a messiah and he talks about the being caught up in the mobs of people

Screaming and all that kind of thing and I mean it’s one of the most amazing descriptions actually of a Newburg rally you’ll ever read the Ecstasy and the intensity of his description well it’s kind of like a a rock concert or something exactly exactly because because you know in due course that is

Is what the the parade grounds will come to hold but Tom do you know what I watched a clip last night and I saw the screaming crowds it was kind of digitally restored so it looked less like 1940s footage or 1930 footage n exactly the 1960s black and white

Footage and I thought people at the time in Beatle Mania did say you know cons cultural conservatives it’s like the Newberg rallies but there sheer ecstasy the people sobbing yeah with excitement I mean you don’t you definitely didn’t see that when Stanley Baldwin addressed the conservative party in the 198 no but

Again it it’s proof of how the Nazis kind of Forge a path that people even after the war will follow so organizers of rock festivals uh rallies whatever they are using the techniques that the Nazis are experimenting with and 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 you know nurburg you know it’s one tiny corner of Germany how do you propagate it across the entire Reich and the answer essentially is to send across

That sense of kind of ritualized ecstasy to try and propagate it across every city every V every town every village in Germany so that’s why for instance swastikas are everywhere I mean this is the kind of the default visional signifier for Nazi Germany isn’t it and

The swaser in 1934 is one of two flags so you also have the kind of traditional Imperial German flag but um in the following year so the 1935 Newburg rally Hitler announces that the swastika alone is going to be the German flag and it has to be saluted and Sher

In his account of the 34 rally describes how he has to keep kind of ducking into side streets and so on because he knows that if he doesn’t salute the flag the sa will beat him up and the salute that people are doing is the raised arm what

They regard as a Roman style salute that they’ve inher have they inherited that from musolini is that right yeah they have so it’s described by historian Richard grunberger who wrote a brilliant book a social history of the Third Reich and he describes it as being one of the most potent forms of totalitarian

Conditioning conceiv able because everybody has to do it and so it becomes you know I’m thinking you do it’s like kind of shaking hands or or or whatever there isn’t a law saying that you have to salute it that’s SW toer or whatever but basically if you don’t yeah an

Unwritten law but you you you you’ll get beaten although gromer does point out um 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 H Hitler because it could be associated with bad

News is that right yeah so to kind of Scrooge you know kicking people out he wouldn’t have had to say it so that’s that’s one way I think in which you do it this the swas the H Hitler salutes it just becomes kind of unthinking custom

For people but the other way in which you do it is that you invest in overt propaganda so famously one way in which specifically the 1934 neurenberg rally is propagated around Germany and the world is that Hitler commissions a film yes to be made about it and the person he commissions

Is an actress who who has kind of developed to become a director called Lenny reenal and there is great Mutual admiration between the two of them so Hitler has been following her career with great interest so she’d been a dancer but there’s this whole kind of

Weird craze for uh German films in the 20s um featuring skiing and Mountain slopes and Lenny reny is blonde so Hitler will call her the embodiment of German Womanhood and she ends up directing this film called the blue light in which she plays kind of noble peasant girl and there weird uh lighting

Effects and Alpine snows and braids and you know all that kind of thing and he absolutely loves it and she likewise adores him so she had first heard him speak in 1932 and in her diary she describes it in kind of rapturous kind of mystical terms she’s kind of blown away so she

Does see him as a kind a messiah I I think she does I mean it’s very controversial because of course she survives the war and the question of um her role how embroiled she is in Nazi ideology is very controversial but I think it’s pretty clear that she is a

True Believer and she produces this film Triumph of the will which is kind of absolutely classic work of narzi propaganda and a true reflection of what the Newberg rallies is all about because you watch it and you feel yeah this is simultaneously marching armies and torches and Greek columns rising up you

Know with with beams of light so it feels simultaneously very very activistic and very very futuristic and I guess the sequence that most potently and notoriously expresses that is the opening it begins with Hitler’s plane flying over steeply banked clouds and you hear the Drone of it going and he

You know he’s kind of like Odin who flew through the skies at the head of great hunt but of course he is also at The Cutting Edge of Technology he was the first politician to to use planes to go around you know when he was campaigning when he was electioneer 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 you know 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 and actually there’s another scene at the end of the film Tom you can see it on YouTube it’s Hitler flanked by himler from the SS and luta who was the new guy in charge of the sa after Ern the room

And they’re walk through the serid ranks of the Storm Troopers to pay homage I think they’re placing wreaths at a first world war memorial and that scene is the scene at the end of the first Star Wars film yeah when Han luk and chewy go to

Get their medals you know the Star Wars scene is deliberately modeled on Triumph of the will and even though Triumph of the will is a Nazi film that’s a a brilliant reflection of its astonishing impact I mean it is an amazing film because reeny is a brilliantly Innovative director so she’d been very

Innovative in the Blue Mountain kind of all kinds of strange lighting techniques and with this you know she she has the all the resources of the state given to her her crew is 120 people strong Striker puts a house at their disposal and they are allowed to dress the camera

Cameramen up in kind of workers outfits or sa uniforms or whatever so that they can be part of the the parades and get kind of closeup shots there and Hitler and the Nazi leadership absolutely love it and it’s kind of Hitler’s personal baby you know he adores films famously

He he Lov King Kong uh he L Lauren Hardy he loved you know Mickey Mouse I mean he loved every kind of film yeah as Stalin liked films actually why wouldn’t they like films films are great but also films are new and exciting and yeah you know captivating to somebody in the

1930s yeah and so Hitler recognizes that film is a perfect way to win people over to national socialism and so actually I mean he says that without talking pictures and without radio as well there can be no Triumph of national socialism and so right from the beginning the

Nazis had understood the importance of seas in control of of the cinema industry and anything that is capable of propagating their message so this is how gerbal comes to get the power that he does because barely a week after the election the federal election in March 1933 Hitler sets up a Reich minist

Public Enlightenment and propaganda and propaganda which at this point is a kind of value neutral word it it doesn’t have the negative connotations that it has for us and Gobles is put in charge of it and you know we mentioned in the previous episode Geral is brilliant at

This I mean he has a malign 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 you know 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 film making in the Third Reich with the with the sole exception actually of of Lenny Reen Styles films because those are Hitler’s babies and he he has challenges because basically a lot of the directing and acting Talent

Has fled Germany so Marina dayri would be the the kind of the famous example Peter law Fritz Lang all of these have gone and also of course there is a risk that you shove too much propaganda down people’s throats so to begin with the films are very overtly propagandistic and people don’t

Like it and Geral is smart enough to realize this that it’s much easier to kind of you know a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down that you smuggle in the messages and they do that quite effectively and the Nazi film industry isn’t full of kind of

Stormtroopers Triumph of the will is an exception most of it is actually kind of Escapist schlock designed to keep people happy but kind of you know Nazi messages are waven in through it and he have the same policy with radio which is really fundamental to how the Nazis aim to kind

Of brainwash the German people where again to begin with when the nais sees power there’s lots of elevated you know lots of Vagner lots of bethoven and again they kind of realize they don’t people don’t really want that and this matters because radio enables Hitler to address people directly

And so the requirement for that is that everyone basically has to have access to to a radio and so they do this in two ways Geral deliberately commissions very cheap very accessible radio sets so there’s one uh the vul Sim fanga or people’s receiver which went on sale in

The summer of 1933 so right at the beginning of the Nazi period in power and this has been compared in its impact to the iPod you know it’s it’s that seismic it enables pretty much everyone to have access to to radios and this is a policy that will be continued

Throughout the 30s and so a few years later another even cheaper radio um goes on the market and 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 cafes in the

Stairwells of apartment blocks so that’s very kind of 1984 very you know wion Smith hearing big brother shout out that’s where Orwell is getting it from and 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 Geral is absolutely upfront about why this should be so so he 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 we will place the radio in the surface 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 grey all right Tom after the break why don’t you tell us about a couple of other aspects of the Nazi regime so I was thinking women would be an interesting topic because we haven’t really talked much about women and maybe

Sport because I know as an elite Sportsman yourself you would enjoy talking about sports I would enjoy that and I think I think more generally the totalitarianism means that no aspect of life is left alone so you know film radio whatever uh the streets are dominated by Nazism then the home also

And so Nazi policies for right you know for women for children um crucially important as a as as for the process of brainwashing brilliant okay so in the second half we will move from the parade grounds Into the Heart of the German home we’ll see you 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 so that was foe of the rest his History Adolf Hitler again and he was speaking at the Newberg rally in 1934 on the 8th of September and he was speaking to the frown shaft 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 is men though a lot of our female listeners May disagree but so Hitler is very much a believer in the kind of gender divisions isn’t he

Tom he’s not a feminist I think it would be fair to say I mean none of the none of the Nazi leaders are feminists there’s a primary on Nazi ideology it’s published in 1933 and it states quite explicitly that the German Resurrection is a male event so just because just

Because activities of the Nazi state are seen as being the field of of the masculine this doesn’t mean that the Nazis see the dimension of the feminine as being separate from them they absolutely reserve the right to poke their noses into that as well and 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 is the role of women to bring up children and so therefore women need to be shaped in an

Appropriately Nazi way so that they can bring up good little Nazis so this is the kind of thinking you know there there can be be no private space there can be no purely domestic space everything must be naied a German’s home is not his castle I think it’s fair to

Say and although on occasion the Nazis will say as when say Hitler is speaking to women’s organizations at Newberg rally we’re doing this for your own good we we think that you shouldn’t have any political responsibility because that’s better for you you know we’re doing it

For you it’s about being kind aren’t we kind actually it it reflects a kind of Dogma which it’s a Dogma that sees the Sexes as being unequal in a way that the Aryans and Jews are seen as being unequal the Nazis feel they are following the science you might say oh

Right Cy and so like anti-Semitism their anti-feminism is absolutely framed in kind of pseudoscientific terms so Geral who is a great one for the ladies I think it’s fair to say he’s not not the best looking example of Aran manhood he’s an absolutely inveterate womanizer and he has this extraordinary

Comment he says women has the task of being beautiful and bringing children into the world and this is by no means as coarse and oldfashioned as one might think the female bird pin herself for her mate and hatches her eggs for him it’s not a chat up line I would employ

It Tom well it’s also I mean especially not to an ornithologist because of course one would immediately think of the peacock as as a kind of counter to that um and um wter Dar 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 to have the vote to have roles in government he thought that this was at the result of frustration set up by malfunctioning sex glands so so both Geral and dar are following the science um as they see it

So they’re not kind of downgrading women in the way that they downgrade Jews but 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 and

Hitler saw the fact that women in the viar Republic had the vote as being kind of absolutely expressive of everything that made parliamentary democracy corrupt and inefficient sort of feminized flabby they because they they’re part of that kind of we talked about this last time the sort of front generation where the

Idea of kind of male camaraderie is so important to them and presumably there must be an element of them being frankly slightly frightened at women would you say Tom I don’t know I don’t know I mean the thing the thing is the Nazis of again as we have talked

About they are simply amplifying Traditions that are much much more broadly rooted in a lot of thinking deep seated anxieties yeah so the famous slogan that everyone will think of Kinder Kuka kka children the kitchen the church this is not a Nazi slogan it’s a slogan that goes back to the 8090s it’s

Kind of you know second right 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 and when the Nazis kind of introduce natalist policies in other words encouraging

Women to have more children they are doing what other countries are doing as well so the French have been doing this since 1920 they’ve been offering medallions to women who have lots of children and the Nazis in that sense are kind of following the example of democratic France so 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 and the more children you have the less you have to pay back and it ends up being kind of 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 and if you have 10 then you get a gold medal and Hitler is Godfather to your child which means that if it’s a boy the boy then gets called Adolf so

That’s that’s nice go 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 adolina um and you get this kind of cross the cross of honor of the German mother and everyone has to salute you in

The streets and it’s very Spartan you know this is what happened in Spartan is that Spartan women could win glory for themselves by bearing lots of children so in that sense the Nazis are kind of going with the grain of policies that have been current both in viar and in in

Other Democratic countries there is also um as well as the carrot of kind 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 and so if you can get rid of women in the workplace then that boosts employment for men um and again this is a policy that had been current in viar so it’s not completely unknown but it it becomes increasingly coercive so 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 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 so in 1934 the same year that Lenny renal is making Triumph for the will it’s decreed that only 10% of students enrolled in grammar schools which are the kind of the elite schools can be girls so 90% have to be boys in 1937 girls will be banned from grammar

Schools alt together shockingly dominate their band from learning Latin that is shocking to so some are enrolled courses that specialize in languages but others are shunted into a kind of domestic science stream and this is known as the pudding Matrix um and it’s a kind of absolute academic dead end right and so

That you know education is being used to essentially deny girls the education that their mothers had taken for granted so you get the resentment of people like so we did an episode many moons ago about the white rose movement and Sophie schaw yeah and of course somebody like

Sophie schaw would be really chaing you know who’s idealistic who likes reading poetry all that kind of thing and so there must have been a whole generation of bookish girls who were frustrated incredibly frustrated 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 you know in the kind of Jesuit way that to control education is to control the future of the people that you’re educating um and the truth is you know You’ talked about

The relish of students for book burning that students who are taking the lead in book burning the Nazis can look at that can look at the enthusiasm for the Nazi party in the election so um again the episodes that we did last year you gave the extraordinary stat that one in four uh

People who voted for the Nazis in whatever it was 1930 um was a firsttime voter so I think that the Nazis can feel that when they’re imposing their policies on education they’re kind of going with the grain of what young people themselves want I I think actually it’s really important for

People listening to this series who haven’t listened to the rise of the Nazis to 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 torch light parades you love the dynamism the energy the naris

Have a huge appeal to youth this is not really an old men’s party it is a young a young man’s party degree a young woman’s as well because the Nazis do give things for girls as well as boys so what happens in 1933 we talked about

This is that anything that is not Nazi stamped gets dissolved any kind of public organization so Boy Scouts Girl Guides all those things get abolished and so essentially there are now only Nazi youth organizations that you can join and for boys there the Hitler Youth and for girls the German league of

Maidens and these are basically kind of militarized versions of the Boy Scouts of the Girl Guides and Sophie schaw loves it didn’t she I mean she she really adored it um yeah kind of going out comrad ship all that kind of thing but I think it’s also true

To say that over the course of the 30s certainly the Hitler Youth becomes increasingly brutal and Hitler in 1935 at the Newberg rally I mean 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 so he he he says this 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 the child and will end with the old fighter so for a child’s entire life they will be essentially

Just a cog in the great Machinery of the state and what this means in practice for boys who are joining the Hitler Youth is that there is Relentless ideological indoctrination um taught to adore Hitler as a kind of God they have military discipline instilled into them

Far more than they would ever have done in the Boy Scouts uh there’s a lot of hazing that goes on both in in the Hitler Youth and the the league of Maidens so um boys will be uh to go on very brutal kind of forced uh marches in

Kind of very skimpy clothes in the winter so again that’s very very kind of Spartan um subjected to very very brutal punishments kind of lots of cold showers all the works and and the girls also I mean so so teenage girl the Nazis don’t approve of uh makeup they don’t approve

Of perms if you have a perm your hair is likely to be shaved off to be fair I don’t really approve perm St right but would you um say you had a daughter and wasn’t wearing you know the kind of the Gretchen kind of wreath of braids that

Was seen as being uh appropriate to to a young German Maiden um would you approve of it being ceremoniously shaved off yeah 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 kind of

Well the children have being prepared for war yeah they’re being turned into future Military Officers as a as a weak and flabby middle class sort of professional I would just be utterly brutalized by my ruthless Hitler Youth honed League of Maidens honed children I imagine Michael

Burley in his his great Third Reich he talks about parents their children became strangers contemptuous 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 so I wouldn’t want that

You wouldn’t want that at all and I think think that that reflect a contempt for bookishness that comes from Hitler himself so Hitler had been a failure at school hadn’t he he’d been a kind of a Dropout and he sees over obsession with book learning as not conducive to the

Forging of a master race he’s all about well he says the breeding of absolutely healthy bodies which isn’t to say that the Nazis don’t reform education they do uh and again interestingly with this you kind of 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 as a body by and large they’re quite in favor of it um I think because they’re from that middle class Millar that the Nazis had always appealed to yeah you know lower middle class there’s a particular kind of

Sinister idealism I mean to many teachers anyway Tom but to the to to teachers in 1930s Germany in particular and so there is absolutely a sense that children need to be ideologically shaped that they need to be conditioned by by the controlling ideology that the state is decreeing they should embibe and so

At the primary school level they get rid of all the kind of Biff and Chip type reading books I’m afraid to say Dominic frowning at this and they bring in loads of stories about uh German soldiers driving their beets into Russians and stirring stories of hit Hitler’s Youth

And things like that um they get rid of religion so religious studies get phased out and in their place they use German history essentially to inculcate moral lessons KY thank goodness something like that would never happen today Tom people using history branch of theology right and uh also something that would never

Happen today in maths so again to quote Richard grinberg in his social history of the Third Reich while mathematics teaching were remain 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

Trajectories fighter to bomber ratios and budget deficits acing from the Democratic pampering of hereditarily diseased families Cy so you’re getting math questions that uh that condition you see maths and also in biology there’s nothing about sex because don’t talk about that although um Hitler youth leaders are instructed in the the

Dreadful consequences of homosexuality well they want you to have a lot of sex to have within marriage to have all these children but they don’t want you to talk about that’s that’s kind of and also um they uh pupils in biology are trained to measure skulls and classify

Them according to racial types so again nothing like that ever goes on today in our leading museums thank goodness so you know so 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 yeah 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 kind of a podcast done by clearly two people who didn’t like PE weedy bookish types

Who would not have been very Vish and uh this is the age of the PE teacher so never in history of PE teachers except perhaps in Sparta have PE teachers had more of control so they kind of basically they are running the schools and there’s even a proposal that that

They should all become Deputy head teachers by by default terrible idea and so this idea German youth should be made spy fit healthy that a premium should be set on on physical activity this is the context in which Germany is awarded the Olympic Games 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 and Rome Hitler had initially been quite skeptical of it because he disliked the fact that uh it was organized by the international Olympic Committee because he didn’t like the idea of you know an international

Organization poking its nose into the Affairs of the Reich and also he kind of despised sport for its own sake he despise the kind of the English Corinthian ideal so the games are about world peace aren’t they and Brotherhood and all I mean obviously often they’re

Not but there’s a sort of there is a sort of Wet Side to the Olympic Games that he would have no time for at all and I think also as an athlete you’re only concerned with breaking records rather than subordinating yourself to the the entirety of a team he sees that

Also as kind of ideologically dubious he’s not interested in sport but he absolutely recognizes and gbls of course also recognizes that it’s a chance to showcase the Reich to Showcase German physical press and do on a world stage what the Nazis have been doing for the past three years in

Nurburg and Hitler had actually in 1933 he had expressed that nurenberg would he Compares it to the Olympic Games he hopes that nurenberg will become the Olympic Games of Germany and even though nurenberg is a kind of you know the classically German City that’s why they hold it there Hitler is

Fascinated by ancient Greece he absolutely Associates it with the kind of the primordial origins of aryanism he sees the ancient Greeks as being Aryan 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 oh Lenny re of course but just before we get into Lenny Reen I mean 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 diates arrive at the Olympics and it is actually for Hitler internationally a colossal propaganda success it is yeah it’s it could not lots of people come

And they say you know the N is maybe not everyone’s cup of tea but Germany is very clean and there’s no disorder and and actually I didn’t see any anti-Semitism at all and they they handle all that very ruthlessly and cleverly and so that’s why Lenny Rey film Olympia is the perfect illustration

Of that um with Triumph of the will it’s one of the very few cultural Apaches of Nazi culture and it’s it’s brilliantly done and 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 and

Reeny has this kind of brilliant opening where she sent a a a camera crew to Greece and they film the Acropolis they film the Temple of Zeus at Olympia at lots of Greek staty which is all you know there’s no nonsense about painting them they’re all very very very white

And then they have it has this famous shot where they shoot the statue of the discobolos the the guy who’s holding the discus and it turns into a real figure who then unfurls himself and hurls The discus and there’s then a succession of nudes so very homoerotic male nudes and

Then female nudes and Lenny reeny actually so these were not shot in Greece they were shot in a on a beach in the Baltic because reeny felt that the footage he got from Greece needed spicing up and so there’s all kinds of nud nudity going on and one of them is

Actually uh Lena reeny herself so there’s a shot of a woman on a beach and she’s got her arms extended to the heavens and uh that that’s Lenny herself and 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 does I mean 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 kit son who is from Korea although he’s he’s racing under the flag of Imperial Japan which is conquer Kore career 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 the impact of the the the games as a whole is that it gives a kind of sanitized take on the Nazi regime 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 premere that’s the premiere and so by the time it is premiered any notion that Nazi Germany is not violently anti-semitic and is not dangerously militaristic is basically gone and so that message actually falls on very soily ground because um since 1936 a lot has changed in terms of

Germany’s International position and Dominic I think it would not be an exaggeration to say that the storm clouds of War are gathering over Europe would you be prepared to go that far I think we do love a storm cloud of War on the rest his history we always have and

These are the storm clouds to end all storm clouds it’s a veritable Tempest a hurricane it’s coming for for Europe um thank you Tom that was a that was a a torizon and a t Force thank you very it was um like that it was a panoramic social

And cultural history and I hope the listeners enjoyed it as much as I did so on that note we will see you on Monday for um the storm clouds of War thank you very much Tom and goodbye goodbye