Germany's Descent and the Rise of National Socialism | 5min snip from Undeceptions with John Dickson

Speaker 1
But also, there's something called the guilt clause, where they've been forced to take responsibility for the entirety of the First World War. So they're also feeling shamed by the allies around them.
Speaker 2
In the Treaty of Versailles, Germany lost about 13% of its land and 10% of its population. And the loss of land meant that Germany lost half of its iron production and a large proportion of coal production. The German army was limited to just 100,000 soldiers, with a navy of just 15,000 sailors. The financial reparations were 132 billion gold marks. That's over 500 billion US dollars today. The final payment was only made in 2010, which is incredible. They're
Speaker 1
also in a period of massive economic decline. The Great Depression is happening over in the States and with huge implications for Europe as well. So they're in a massively low position. So what we get is the rise of national socialism. Hitler appears on the scene at this most incredible moment. And he comes, you know, most famously with his anti-Semitic message. But in some respects, national socialism is built on a kind of romanticism. It's a message of hope, of restoration, of redemption, of fulfillment. You know, the early images that we're finding of Nazi propaganda are really of young people standing in a field in their P.E. whites doing jumping jacks, sort of getting back to nature and the revitalization of the German spirit. And this is just an astonishing message for a people without hope. And so, so many people just lap this up. One of Hitler's early confidants, Ernst
Speaker 2
Hanfstengel, wrote that Hitler, quote, was not so much a distiller as a bartender of genius. He took all the ingredients the German tradition offered him and mixed them through his private alchemy into a cocktail they wanted to
Speaker 1
drink. So if we're thinking about some of the philosophical, we've got people like Hegel. Hegel's philosophy is rooted in this idea of the progression of history until its fulfillment. Even though Hegel was German, his great hero was Napoleon, because he saw in Napoleon this incredible person who was driving history forward into the unification of history, but also the unification of the nations. And so from those Hegelian ideas, I think National Socialism, Hitler gains this idea of Germany as being the nation that's going to do that. But we also find it with influence of people like Nietzsche and the idea of-
Speaker 2
Yeah, you often hear that Nietzsche is in the background of some of Hitler's thought. This is true. It's not just a cliche. Academics,
Speaker 1
true to form, will debate as to quite how significant these different characters are. But we're kind of talking about a milieu. We're talking about a whole context, all of it sort of weaving together this kind of tapestry. So Hitler has some pretty choice things to say about the Jews. He also has a very strong thing about going beyond good and evil, about giving up the resentment of the slave classes to regain a nobility to ethics, which really-
Speaker 2
That sounds like nature. Oh
Speaker 1
yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no, it's pretty scary to read in many respects. But if you're the sort of person who reads that and goes, yes, that's me, I'm the ubermensch, I come from this class of nobility that really should be driving everything forward, we see that coming into the Nazi regime with its profound rejection of weakness. We often forget their treatment of the disabled, who were being dispatched much earlier than the final solution with the Holocaust and the
Speaker 2
Jews. Yes, and of course, Nietzsche, I mean, explicitly in something like the Antichrist, said that this is one of the problems with Christianity. It preserves what nature intended to remove. Yeah, absolutely. Christian compassion sort of preserves the disabled and the weak and so on. But nature wants to get rid of that to allow a revitalization of nature. Yeah,
Speaker 1
absolutely. I mean, he's not a social Darwinianist per se, but it's very much those kinds of ideas. Can
Speaker 2
you describe what Christianity in Germany was like in this period?
Speaker 1
Well, so the one further character to bring into this mix, actually, before we move on, is Luther. Because unfortunately, Luther does play a certain role. Again, academics will debate as to how much role he plays in here. He has, again, some really anti-Semitic stuff rooted in his theology. I
Speaker 2
apologize to any listeners with Jewish heritage, but here's an excerpt from Luther's 1543 tract, The Jews and Their Lies.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Undeceptions with John Dickson

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