Part One: Julius Streicher: The Other Hitler

Robert sits down with Jake Hanrahan to talk about trailblazing Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher, the man who might have been Fuhrer if a few things had broken differently.

(2 Part Series)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Oh boy, welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where
I just played a trick on Sophie. I'm Robert Evans.
This is a show about the worst people in all
of history and uh, and to help us talk about
one of the worst people in all of history, one
of my favorite Did it happen, Sophie? Did it happen?

(00:22):
Did you catch my cunning roosts?

Speaker 2 (00:24):
I asked you the script and it says, ha ha ha, Sophie,
this was a trick.

Speaker 1 (00:29):
Uh, your fake documents. It's not the real script.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
I know, I know.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
It was such a shitty thing to do. And that
laugh on the line was Jake Hanrahan, Jake you are
I'm doing good. I'm doing any buddy, how are you
doing this week?

Speaker 3 (00:46):
Yeah? Good, I'm good. I'm good.

Speaker 4 (00:48):
I'm moving forward with looking into dead Russians.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
You've taken on the fun job for yourself this year
of looking into the mysterious accidental deaths and suicides of
a bunch of Russian oligarchs for your hit podcast Sad Oligarch.

Speaker 3 (01:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:10):
Mine, and it's it's been really eye open and actually
like it's it's a lot of work, but it's very
I mean the coincidence is being stretched to its absolute.

Speaker 3 (01:21):
Limit on what's happening here. Put it that way.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Yeah, it's it's a super impressive podcast. Really happy to
have it on the network. You also, Jake, run an
outfit called Popular Front, which does both a regular podcast
on conflict all around the world and also has a
you put out a print journal. I think I'll call
it a journal because that sounds that sounds I mean.

Speaker 4 (01:43):
Yeah, magazine, Yeah, yeah, I'm moving forward, and documentaries as well.

Speaker 3 (01:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
So in other words, Jake, you are kind of a
good version of the bad guy that we're going to
talk about today, because the guy we're talking about today
is like the evilist example of like a dude who
you could technically call a journalist he ran a newspaper
or a journal or whatever, which was the podcast of

(02:11):
the of the nineteen thirties and forties. What do you
know about a fella named Julius Striker?

Speaker 3 (02:18):
Nothing?

Speaker 1 (02:18):
Actually, okay, okay, very good. So Striker was, I mean
the kind of the surface level thing that he was,
and sort of the most prominent thing that he was
was the dude who ran a newspaper in Weimar, Germany
called Der Sturmer. So he was like the guy who
published the primary anti semitic newspaper of like the pre

(02:40):
Nazi in the Nazi era. He was the only dude
we executed at Nuremberg who hadn't actually had a government
position in the Nazi Party. In other words, when they
killed Striker after the war, they acknowledged like, well, this
guy wasn't you know, he wasn't a military leader, he
wasn't in the government. He didn't like help start a war,

(03:02):
he didn't like command troops, he didn't run a death camp.
But we're going to hang him because the propaganda he
made was an integral part of the Holocaust.

Speaker 4 (03:12):
He should have studied science and he could have been
sent to America.

Speaker 1 (03:18):
Yeah, if he known how to build a bomb.

Speaker 3 (03:20):
He missed Piper Clip with profession, you know.

Speaker 1 (03:23):
I mean, one of the things about Striker is that
he kind of did He was kind of like that
level of evil genius in that he figured out a
way to utilize the news media as a weapon in
a way that a lot of people today still do.
Like people are hurting folks right now using a lot

(03:44):
of the tactics that Striker pioneered.

Speaker 3 (03:46):
But he's also smart why did he die though?

Speaker 1 (03:48):
You know, yeah, I mean python, the accumulated head injuries
that he got in street fights in the nineteen thirties
might have blunted him by the end. You know, some
of that cte, which I think is an underdiscussed part
of a lot of the old Nazis right. You can't
you can only have like so many beer bottles broken
over your head before you start to yeah, yeah he was,

(04:11):
I mean he was. He was like just kind of
involved in because he was a big speaker during the
Weimar era, right, and so you were a big Nazi speaker,
you get into a shitload of bar fights. But one
of the things that's interesting about Striker is that, like,
so this is this is getting a little bit outside
a topic. But if you like spending the time engaging
with the actual historiography of the like the quote unquote

(04:34):
Holy Land or the the what you know, the lifetime
of the person who uh has come down to us
as Jesus Christ, you'll find out that, like there were
sort of a bunch of Messianic figures like in that
part of the world in that period of time, people
claiming to be like Messiah's people claiming to be, you know,
holy Man. And basically the guy that like, you know,

(04:57):
the you get a lot of stories about in the
Bible is like one of a number of dudes who theoretically,
if you're not a believer in Christianity, right, if you
don't believe that guy's the son of God, theoretically there
were probably other dudes that like maybe could have been
the focus of a big religion if shit had broken
a little bit differently, right, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (05:14):
John the Baptist is worshiped by as I forget the
name now, but there's a like specific religion in the
Middle East. Most of them actually don't live in the
Middle East now as they were persecuted, but yeah, they
for them, John the Baptist was there Jesus, if.

Speaker 3 (05:29):
You know what I mean.

Speaker 1 (05:30):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so Striker is in addition to
being this very influential propagandist, he's kind of that guy
for Hitler, as in, if a couple of things had
broke differently, he could have been the like fearer of
the fascist party that rose to power. Like, he had
a lot of similarities, and there was a period of
time where they were kind of seen as rivals for

(05:50):
like the guy who's going to become the center of
the of the the far right movement in Bymar, Germany.
So he's a really interesting dude for a number of there. So, yeah,
that's who we're talking about this week. Julius Striker aka
Jules So. Julius was born February twelfth, eighteen eighty five,

(06:12):
in a little bitty country town named Fleinhausen, about fifteen
miles west of the town of Augsburg in Bavaria. Now
Bavaria is kind of like sometimes I hear people say,
it's like the Texas of Germany. Right, it's traditionally the
conservative chunk of Germany. It's quite large. It's also like
heavily Catholic as opposed to kind of the more Protestant

(06:34):
parts of the country. And his family's Catholic. His dad
is the town school master in this little bitty town,
and his dad is, like a lot of folks in
Bavaria at the time, a big believer in having as
many babies with his wife as she is capable of surviving.
So Julius is his ninth kid, which is that's a

(06:54):
lot a lot of kids to have.

Speaker 3 (06:57):
That's a hell little kids. Yeah, back Denvi was like,
just keep going.

Speaker 1 (07:01):
Yeah, you gotta like, you gotta make him out. Three
of them are going to make it to fifteen, you know,
and then then you can die at the right old
age of thirty eight. Yeah. So the Strikers were a conservative,
traditional family in a pretty conservative and traditional part of Germany.
Julius had been born and you could call it he
was basically born during Germany's kinsinera, right, like Germany is

(07:23):
like fifteen years old when he turns fifth or when
he's born, and his family's pretty excited to be a
part of this new country. So everybody's like, yeah, Germany,
great idea. This is only gonna only gonna end. Well,
his mom is kind of a homemaker at the time,
while his dad is again a school teacher, and he's
as a very young kid again a lot like Hitler.

(07:44):
He's a mama's boy. He actually calls his mother the
fortress of my childhood, so, you know, very much, very
much tied to his mom, very much.

Speaker 2 (07:54):
Word, Okay, I'm sorry, I love my mom.

Speaker 1 (07:56):
That's the way weird fortress.

Speaker 4 (08:00):
Yeah, my sweet mother, Like no, she was the fortress,
like she was the verdun of my childhood.

Speaker 2 (08:09):
That's like, my mom's my favorite person.

Speaker 3 (08:11):
No, yeah, she's a fortress.

Speaker 1 (08:15):
Yeah she's Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, Hitler's kind of
the same way, where like the h if you listen
to like folks who knew the family at the time,
or like the doctor who took care of her when
she had cancer, he was like, I've never seen anybody
who was like so into his mom as this guy.
You know, not that it's bad to be a mama's boy,
but an interesting detail for me, this fellas.

Speaker 3 (08:36):
Good to fuck your mom, like, you.

Speaker 1 (08:38):
Know, yeah, there's a little bit of like that emotionally
going on, right, Yeah, yeah, a little odd. So in short,
his early life is characterized by this kind of both
this comforting sort of feeling of a very stable like family,
but also this very comforting feeling of like the weight
of all of this tradition you know that that exists

(08:58):
in the area he lives in. But despite this, while
his family's Catholic, while Bavaria's Catholic, he's never super into
Catholicism as a religion, but he is very culturally Catholic,
and one of the things that he gets out of
his cultural Catholicism is a pretty rough attitude towards Jewish people,

(09:19):
not not not great relations between the Catholic Church and
Judaism in this period at time, Not that he would
have known any Jewish people growing up right, Julius would
have only occasionally even met other like Christians who had
spent time interacting with Jewish citizens of the Reich. There
were a significant amount of German Jews in like cities.

(09:39):
You know, you would if you grew up in a city,
you certainly were going to like meet and interact with
with Jewish Germans. But he's out in the countryside and
basically everybody's you know, Catholic where he is. You know,
you got a couple of Protestants, Like that's kind of
a big deal running into Protestants for his folks, let alone, Like.

Speaker 3 (09:58):
Why why did he hate Jews if he didn't annoyny.

Speaker 1 (10:01):
Well, because he's raised on stories about them and largely
like really negative propaganda. So the church in his hometown,
and this is the case with hundreds of churches across
Europe had stained glass reliefs of what's called the Judensao
j U d E N s A U. You can
you can look up pictures of this. If you'd like,

(10:21):
and the Judensao is a pig nursing Jewish babies, right,
Like that's it's like this it's a racist kind of
like cartoon or whatever, but this is like literally like
carved into churches. There were also would have been a
relative regular talk about what was called the Blood Passover,
which is this medieval era conspiracy theory that existed up

(10:43):
until it still exists in some areas that claims that
like rabbis have to murder Christian children to get their
blood to make matza, and that's like like fucked up
and wild and stuff. But these were really common. Again,
this stuff is literally like in there's stained glass reliefs
of some of these stories. You know, this is a

(11:03):
thing that goes back a very long time. And some
of these myths about Jewish people, these like conspiracy theories
about rabbis and the like, would have been taught to
him both kind of as a part of his Catholic upbringing,
but also by adults who kind of these were not
just literal beliefs, they were also things that adults would

(11:24):
kind of embellish for kids as like a form of entertainment.
So it's kind of this mix of the two things,
but it all contributes to this kind of general miasma
of bigotry that is culturally the norm. And this is
not just in Germany. Right, if you're in France around
the same time, you're kid in Belgian Scandinavia, Kidden, most

(11:44):
parts of the UK during this period of time, you're
getting pieces of this. You know, there's differences culturally kind
of depending on where you are and what your dominant
religion is. But like this is a big part of why,
you know, when when the Nazis take over in France,
like one of the logistic problems they have is like
so many people handing in Jewish neighbors and relatives because

(12:06):
you know, this kind of bigotry is just it's very
I mean, this is like, yeah, it's already there, and
this is you know, it's one of those things where
as much as we're talking about how much bigotry this
kid and everyone else in this part of rural Bavaria
is ingesting, this is also simultaneously a period in which

(12:27):
Jewish people are making great strides towards equality in Germany.
Prussia had made Jewish people's citizens for the first time,
albeit kind of second class citizens. In eighteen twelve as
a part of the Napoleonic Wars, which is only you know,
like sixty or so years before Strikers born seventy years
full civic equality had been granted in eighteen forty eight

(12:50):
in Prussia, although most states in what became Germany a
little after that still had some restrictions on Jewish people
doing things like joining the military until eighteen sixty. And
you know, eighteen seventy is when we have the Franco
Prussian War, which is what gives us the birth of
like Germany as a traditional state. So like right before

(13:11):
the Franco Prussian War, Jews get the right to serve
in the German military. And then when that war ends
and Germany is established as an independent nation for the
first time, one of the things that happens when Germany
is born is that Jewish people are given full rights
as subjects of the Kaiser. So it's you've got again
in this period, you're both you both have this very

(13:34):
medieval bigotry is still super common, but also you've got
this very like progressive movement towards recognizing Jewish people as
the same as anyone else in the country. So both
of the stuff's happened at the same time his first
Julius's first direct memory of Jewish Germans came when he
was about five years old. His mom ordered fabric from

(13:56):
a shop owned by a Jewish shopkeeper in a town
near by. The fabric did not meet her expectations for
whatever region, and because she'd spent so much money on it,
she got angry. She started crying, and Julius, you know
who's again about five during this period, recalls, probably from
the adults around him, hearing that this betrayal of getting

(14:17):
bad fabric was just like a jew. And in Randall
Bitework's biography of Striker, he notes the village priest, in
his regular periods of religious instruction in the school, explained
how the Jews had fought Christ bitterly, finally crucifying him.
This was my first inkling that the nature of Jews
was peculiar. Striker later wrote, So this is kind of,

(14:37):
you know, it's this again. You've got like this, your
preacher talking about how Jewish people are responsible for the
death of Christ, and your mom complaining that like they
screwed you out of you know, the proper cloth. It's
just kind of this all encompassing thing. So in this period,
age fourteen is kind of the start of your adulthood.
That's when a young man is going to start working

(14:58):
and apprenticing to learn a trade. Julius actually finished his
primary school at thirteen and started attending a teacher training
program where he's like learning how to become a school
teacher as a as a thirteen year old, which is wild.

Speaker 3 (15:12):
Yeah, that's crazy. Imagine going to school tea.

Speaker 1 (15:17):
Yeah, yeah, you're like eight's he's thirteen. He's like, I
can't even imagine the things he's seen that kids are hard.

Speaker 3 (15:24):
Fourteen telling me, shit, I'm alone anything. Yeah, it's funny.

Speaker 1 (15:31):
So he's one of like and you know, it says
something probably about his dad that of the nine kids
in the family, five of them following their dad's footsteps
as teachers, which is not like uncommon. Right, Like, at
that point in time, you're a coal miner, right, You're
living in somewhere in the south of England and your
dad's a coal miner, You're probably going to grow up
to be a coal miner.

Speaker 3 (15:49):
You know.

Speaker 1 (15:49):
It's kind of the same thing with Striker's family and
being a teacher. He's a he does Okay, he like
passes everything, but he's he's got kind of mediocre grades,
and he's starts working as a substitute teacher in nineteen
oh four, having been an indifferent teaching student. Now, the
Bavarian school system at this point is partly run by

(16:10):
the Catholic Church, so in villages, the local priest was
like the administrator of the school, like he would check
in to see like what the teachers doing, what they're
teaching kids, whether it's acceptable, and Julius, while he's kind
of very culturally Catholic, doesn't particularly believe and is kind
of oppositional defiant, right, Like he's just reflexively angry at

(16:34):
anyone who's telling him how to do things. So he
starts getting into a bunch of fights with the local
priest as he's starting his career as a teacher. Kind
Of a lot of this starts when he decides he
wants to change the starting time for Sunday school classes,
which is, you know, a part of the school teacher's job,
and the local priest gets really angry and it gets
him in trouble with his bosses all that stuff. So

(16:56):
in nineteen oh seven, his kind of reflexive need to
sort of, I don't know, resist authority causes problems for
him again because he he has to do his year
of compulsory military service, which all german Men have to
do in this period of time. Kind of when you're
a young adult you have to at some point you
have some flexibilities to win, but you have to go
spend a year working as a soldier so that when

(17:18):
it's time to do a World War one they can
call everybody up and have them go, you know, do
a World War one. And he's terrible at this. Like
his leaders, his officers notice that he like can't be controlled. Basically,
he winds up going to jail for several days because
like a guy in the lunch Tint makes fun of him,

(17:39):
and he just beats the absolute piss out of this dude.
So his superiors are like, this is not a guy,
like because he's a school teacher. They were considering, you know,
sending him to officer school. But they're like, wow, this guy.
We can't have this guy do anything, right, He's just
not like a reliable soldier. So nineteen oh yeah, loose
cannon kind of an asshole, right, He's just kind of

(18:00):
a giant dick. So nineteen oh eight he goes back
to teaching, and then the next year he gets in
trouble when a priest visits his class and says something
that Julius disagrees with. So Striker kind of like they
have this big confrontation, maybe it's kind of gets close
to blows and he forces the priest to leave, which
gets him in trouble with the church again, and he's

(18:21):
like pushed out of that town and eventually like comes
to find a teaching position in the biggest city near him,
which is Nuremberg. This is a good thing for him
because like he doesn't really like the Catholic Church. He's
pissed at how much of a role they have in
teaching people. And in Nuremberg there's a lot of Protestants

(18:41):
and also you know, a growing number of people who
aren't particularly religious at all, who are like why are
schools run by the Catholic Church? Like this maybe shouldn't
be the way that we do things and are in
our new modern Germany that's supposed to have some degree
of pluralism in it, like why are they in charge
of this? And so he gets along really well with

(19:03):
his boss in Nuremberg, he starts to like find some success,
you know, teaching in Nuremberg. You know, it's this kind
of interesting place in the early nineteen hundreds, it had
been like majority Protestant up until the turn of the century,
and that a bunch of Catholics had moved in along
with eight thousand or so Jewish Germans. And it's one

(19:24):
of those things I just talked about how racist his
upbringing was, But at this period of time in his life,
there's no evidence from any of his writings at the
time that he had any particular negative interactions with any
of his fellow citizens who were Jewish, that he had
any particular issue. In fact, he seems to have kind
of been a progressive leftist early on when he moves

(19:46):
in for the time what you'd call that. When he
moves to Nuremberg, he sort of was interested in the
Social Democratic Party, but at that time the government forbade
state employees from being Social Democrats, so he joined the
Democrat Party, which was kind of like the center slightly
liberal option at the time, right, and the Democratic Party's

(20:08):
primary goal was to end clerical supervision in the schools, right,
like their big campaign sort of like issue was like,
maybe we don't have priests running all of our schools.
So Striker was, you know, into this. He joins and
at some of these early meetings he's doing, he starts
like speaking up and eventually like actually giving speeches, and

(20:29):
it's kind of one of those things he doesn't have
as a teacher. He's got some experience being up in
front of an audience, but the first time he gets
up in front of an audience at a party meeting
and starts like you know, teaching, kind of going on
a little bit of a rant about why he doesn't
like priests being in charge in the schools. He's kind
of electrifying. Like people, all of the people running this
party are like, this guy's actually really good at this,

(20:53):
and so they're like, hey, Julius, what if we had you?
But what if we hired you in basically as like
a regular speaker. So you know, when we have party meetings,
when we're doing like vote drives and stuff to bring
in more folks to raise money, we can just have
you get up on stage and start, you know, doing
your thing. And so that's how he starts. That's like
kind of the birth of this guy's political experience is

(21:16):
he's just kind of like has this natural gift. And
in this period, you got to remember, people don't have
radios really, you know, I think they exist, but not
a lot of folks really are are listening to the radio.
There's certainly no television. One of the primary methods of
entertainment is just like at night, you hear like, oh,
this party's doing a thing and they've got some guys

(21:37):
given speeches, and it's kind of like it's almost like
go into a comedy show or something or going to
a concert, right, you know.

Speaker 4 (21:44):
Just when you give you a house and listen to
them or yeah, pook about stuff that sounds pretty interesting.

Speaker 1 (21:48):
Yeah, there's usually beer. You know, I think from what
I've heard, like the cost of attending, because these are
fundraisers for parties too, is usually about the cost of
a pint of beer, so it's not that pricey. Working
class people and afford it. Sometimes there's free food, there's
you know, uh, you know, it's just like it's kind
of how you go and spend your nights. It's a
big cultural thing, right, And he just kind of feels

(22:11):
as he starts giving these speeches and this is sort
of where you get the problematic elements he the way
he interprets, you know, it is like you you do
something you've never done before, and you have kind of
a knack for it, and you feel like, oh, wow,
maybe this is a thing I should like work more on.
That's kind of speaking for him, But instead of just
being like, yeah, I've got a knack for this, he

(22:32):
decides that there's this inner voice guiding him, right, Like
there's this uh yeah, almost spiritual presence inside him that
he feels as like teaching him how to how to
speak to these crowds. And you know, the other problematic
aspect of this is that like he just kind of
like reflexively. One of the ways he tries to get

(22:53):
the audience on his side is by like going on
rants about Jewish people. And he does. He you know,
he's made just like some side jokes. It's not really
the focus of anything, but he notices that, like the
Jewish people in the audience aren't laughing when he's making
racist jokes. Yeah, funny that, And you know, one of
the folks that he's like working with in this party

(23:16):
kind of pulls him aside after one of his speeches
and says, and this is how Striker related it. Later, Striker,
let me give you some advice. I work in a
Jewish firm. I've learned to be silent at times when
my German heart gladly would have spoken, And often I
speak when I would rather be silent. The Jews are
few in number, but great in the economic and political
power they have achieved, and their power is dangerous. You,

(23:37):
my dear Striker, are still young and cocky, and don't
mince words. I'll but never forget what I'm telling you.
The Jews have great power, and that power is dangerous,
very dangerous. Now you might note that this was again,
this is something he relates this speech, you know, decades later,
when he's a powerful Nazi, this almost certainly didn't happen.

(23:58):
Part of how we can tell that is like, at
no point does anyone stop him from having a career
as like a speaker and a racist. You know, there
doesn't seem to be any sort of like pushback that
he actually encounters here. So that's more interesting because that's
how he chooses to like kind of frame his uh,
his upbringing. Later.

Speaker 4 (24:18):
Yeah, I mean, Germany was hardly like a place where
you couldn't be outspokenly anti semi back then.

Speaker 1 (24:26):
The Kaiser was right, Yeah, like, yeah, I don't think
nobody's getting like canceled in uh in nineteen ten Germany
for being a little bit racist, you know.

Speaker 3 (24:38):
Yeah, yeah, it was a free for all, you know.

Speaker 1 (24:40):
Yeah, yeah, you're you're good, You're you're you're fine doing that. Uh.
It's like a stand up comedy in the nineteen nineties,
you know, like there's no rules, you can go be
Andrew Dice Clay anyway. So the next year, our boy
Jewels got married to a woman who had the I've

(25:00):
never heard this first name before, Kunigund. Yeah, no, I
haven't heard it before. Interesting name. And her dad she
comes from. He kind of marries up right, like her
dad's upper middle class. He's like a business owner, whereas
his dad's kind of like a teacher, which teachers don't
make a lot of money then or now. And they,
you know, are going want to get to work making babies,

(25:25):
you know, creating more Germans. But before they can, a
historic event occurs that would drastically increase the need for
additional German babies, World War One. So that kind of
gets in the way. He's kind of on the way
up in his life, right, his career as a teachers
doing good. He's just gotten married. And then, like a
lot of young men his age, this is a pretty

(25:46):
universal experience, the war interrupts things. And this is actually
one of the areas in which he's really different from Hitler, right,
because he's doing really well and then the war hits
and he's got to like disrupt his life to go
fight in it. Hitler's a fucking disaster, and then World
War One kind of saves him, right, It gives him
something to like, uh, focus his life around. Yeah, he's

(26:08):
a shit painter. He's making these terrible little postcards in Munich,
and then he gets to go, uh do something that
he has an aptitude for. But that is also like,
you know, Julius, this is more of a disruption for him.
But Julius also is one of these guys who finds
out he's kind of got a knack for this. He's
one of these fellas you hear about people like this.

(26:29):
Sometimes there's this difference between garrison soldiers and combat soldiers, right.
A garrison soldier is like a guy who can handle
the politics and the sort of like the bullshit that
you have to eat when you're just like a regular
soldier at peacetime on base and you've got to deal
with like, you know, kind of warming your way through

(26:49):
the hierarchy and sort of like making shit work within
the kind of bureaucratic organization that is an army, Right,
But when it comes time to act actually like shoot
people in a trench, you know, and fight. Different folks
are good at that, who in a lot of cases
wouldn't be very good at just like sitting at a
base at peacetime and dealing with the bureaucracy of the army.

(27:12):
And Striker is one of those guys, right. He's terrible
in peacetime as a soldier. His officers like can't get
him to do anything properly, But as soon as he
starts getting into gunfights, he's really good at it. And
he loves combat. He is a frontline trooper, and he's
one of these guys who war seems to like activate
something within him. He not only like after his baptism

(27:36):
of fire. He's not one of these guys who is
considers him self traumatized by war. He's not one of
these guys who finds the trenches to be a bad place,
and in fact, he starts volunteering for more combat duty.
He's like, as soon as he gets a taste of fighting,
he's like, I want more of this shit, Like put
me in coach, I'm ready to go. So he does

(27:57):
well enough that in nineteen fifteen he gets made an
officer candidate. You know, in peacetime they're like, this guy
cannot be given any kind of responsibility, and then at
war they're like, actually, this guy's exactly the guy, the
dude we need. Yeah, he has no instinct for self preservation.
So in nineteen sixteen Romania declares for the Allies. Everyone's

(28:21):
kind of expecting, you know, in World War there's this
stalemate at the trenches, and then Romania, who's kind of
like stuck in Germany's flank if you look on a map,
is like, we're going with the Allies, and there's this
big hope on behalf of the Allies that'll it'll cause
a breakthrough, you know, in this this Steymide situation. It
does not do that, because the Germans take this really

(28:42):
tiny chunk of their army and just absolutely pants the
Roman Romanian military, like within a couple of weeks they've
conquered the country, and Striker is a part of the
German Army that gets sort of diverted from the Western
Front to go take over Romania, which gives him his
first taste of like comprehensive victory. Right, this is a
really good moment for the German army. Part of why

(29:05):
this sort of like we got stabbed in the back
lost cos myth is going to start up later is
because a lot of these soldiers they have this victory
in Romania and then this victory on the Eastern Front
against Russia, and it doesn't feel to them like they
could have possibly lost the war later, Right, we were
just winning everywhere? What happened? Yeah, so you know, Jake

(29:28):
in a lot of ways are conquering Romania was signing
the advertisers who support this podcast. They're exactly yeah, it's
exactly the same. We are the conquering German Imperial Army
marching into Bucharest to try and take its oil fields.

(29:51):
But with I don't know, a food box company or something. Anyway,
here's the ads deal with it. Ah, We're back Jake.
So nineteen sixteen, he goes into Romania, has a great win,
and in general, his army career is going good. During

(30:12):
the war. He has one issue, which is that in
nineteen sixteen, he assaults an army medic based on some
stuff he'll do later. I think it might have been
because the guy was trying to vaccinate him and he
didn't want that to happen. He's going to publish a
bunch of vaccine related conspiracy theories later when he gets
his newspaper. We don't know entirely why he like fights

(30:34):
with this medic, but I think there's a decent chance
it's related to that. It's just kind of the only
recurrent conflict that he has with medical personnel in his life.
But other than that, his service record is really good.
By nineteen eighteen, he's back in France. You know, there's
one last attempt by the Germans to break through the
enemy lines doesn't quite work out for him. Kaiser abdicates,

(30:56):
the German militaries demobilized. World War One is over. This
should have been a good time, because you know, it
seemed like a bad thing. But as a guy who
loved the war, Striker does not take this really well.
And again his perspective is we won every battle. We
were in you know, when when they declare the armistice,
I'm still standing on French soil. How could we lose everything?

Speaker 3 (31:20):
Right?

Speaker 1 (31:21):
How could that be the And you know a lot
of German soldiers are going to feel yeah, way, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (31:26):
It's kind of what led well set the groundwork for
World War Two, right, yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:31):
And I don't know, Jake, this is something I think
about a lot, like the like my gut, just as
a person who doesn't like to see people die in
war is like, well, yeah.

Speaker 3 (31:42):
You're so soft.

Speaker 1 (31:44):
Exactly. Yeah, get more like Striker, Get more like Striker. Well,
I feel like, you know, if someone had come to
me in World War One had been like you should
we do like an armistice with the Germans, yeah, I'd
be like, yeah, whatever, it stops the killing. This is
fucking awful. But because of that, the like there's the
and because like Ludendorf and Hindenberg, who are the generals

(32:05):
in charge, are able to like they don't want to admit,
yeah we lost the British and the French and the
Americans and you know and whatnot. They fought us to
the point where like we were about to break and
we had this we had to give up, otherwise the
entire army would have shattered, you know, which would have
been a calamity for us. They can't admit that, so
they're like, no, the government stabbed us in the back.

(32:27):
We were about to win and then they took it
from us. And so does that mean like the ethical
thing would have been like no, no, no, we're not
negotiating this. We're gonna fight you guys until you break
and surrender unconditionally, like, which is like what that is
the that is like a moral question that the leaders
of the Allied countries take with them into World War Two,

(32:48):
which is why part of why it's such a fucking
ugly fight and so much like there's this understanding then
that like, well now maybe we have to just break
the fuckers. I don't know, like what moral lesson to
take out of that.

Speaker 3 (33:02):
Yeah, it's just like total brutality.

Speaker 1 (33:04):
Right, Yeah, is that like the justified thing to do?
Like morally does it save more lives in the long run?
So I'm gonna guess most people are broadly familiar with,
like you know what goes down next? In Germany, there's
this immediate wave of like failed rebellions and pushes on
the left and right. There's like a number of points

(33:24):
in which like some right wing or some left wing
group will try to take over a city or a
whole region of the country. And you know when this happens,
when this is like communists or other kinds of leftists
to try to like overthrow and establish their own sort
of governments and parts of Germany, the kind of forming

(33:46):
state winds up relying a lot on sort of ad
hoc groups of right wing military veterans who form militia
units and go in and just start killing people, right Like,
That's that's how some of these things get put down,
And so you start to get this sort of culture
of we've got these right wing veterans groups, you know,

(34:06):
with guns, who are here to like fight the left.
You know, it really starts as soon as the war ends.
And obviously alongside this you've got the economy collapsing, prices
for everything skyrocketing, and this is all put on the
new democratic government of vymar who has to spend several
years trying to wrestle Germany into being a vaguely functional state.

(34:28):
It's a hard gig being a democratic politician in vymar In,
like nineteen nineteen one of the worst jobs anybody could
ever get, right, like just trying to trying to make
Germany work in this period of time. It's a real bummer.

Speaker 4 (34:43):
Yeah, it's a really interesting period though you don't hear
oh yeah, enough about like the run up, do you
know what I mean? And it's really interesting time. I
mean yeah, like very very early doors chaos.

Speaker 1 (34:56):
Yeah, and you have to like have some respect for
the kind of moral courage, and a lot of them
get assassinated. Of these early Weimar politicians who are like
trying to make a because the Czar or not Czar,
the Kaiser as soon as you know, he loses flees,
he winds up and fucking Belgium, I think, and these
generals basically start pretending like, oh, we didn't lose the war.

(35:18):
It was like and you're you as some like you know,
elected Social Democratic leader because the Socdems sort of like
are the first big party in power in Viimar. You're
like trying to deal with the consequences of all of
these like shitty Kaiser dudes, like the Kaiser and his
generals who had just kind of ruined the country and

(35:39):
then bounced. So I don't know, yeah, it's there's something
honorable about trying to do that, but it doesn't work,
you know. Uh, that is the broad story. So Julius
at this point he had been kind of maybe a
little bit on the liberal side of things. You know,
he was certainly not a leftists, but kind of like

(36:01):
flirting with some center left ideas before World War One.
But by the time he gets back from the front,
he is very much into right wing politics.

Speaker 3 (36:10):
You know.

Speaker 1 (36:12):
A lot of that is there's this this feeling of
like the brotherhood of the trenches, and the right is
really successful at sort of talking to these veterans, at
telling them that like they were betrayed and they were
betrayed by these social democrats. And so, you know, he
takes up work as a teacher again, but he also
joins a local anti Semitic political organization. It's kind of

(36:34):
like a militia that is blaming a lot of Germany's
post war problems on the Jews. That's called the Protective
and Defensive Society. It sounds better in German. Yeah, tons
of every town's got a bunch of them. Now, Striker
is still kind of you would say, probably like naive

(36:57):
enough that he anti Semitic politics are very new to him,
so he's initially kind of just a spectator. He'll show
up at these speeches or at these political events. He'll
listen to speeches by people, and like the folks who
are speaking at events for the Protective and Defensive Society
and other kind of anti Semitic political organizations are often

(37:18):
quoting from and recommending very specific books right and to Striker,
the most influential of these books, the ones that he
like buys a copy of and reads and becomes enthralled by,
is called Handbook of the Jewish Question, and it's by
a fellow named Theodore Fritch. Now Old Theo was a journalist.
A lot of the early German anti Semites are journalists, right,

(37:41):
who in the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds work
for newspapers or published books that are like quote unquote investigations,
you know, into various racist conspiracies. An Old Theo he's
kind of active at the end of the eighteen hundreds,
you know. And he's basically he's like one generation or
so earlier than Julie, and he's Prussian. He'd been a
farmer's kid in the nineteenth century. He's one of these guys,

(38:04):
like he has seven brothers and sisters, and four of
them die before they get to adulthood. He winds up
working in a machine shop as kind of Germany transitions
to an industrial economy, and in his late twenties he
saved up enough money that he like he founds a
publishing firm and they start by making technical manuals, and
then as soon as they make enough money selling like

(38:26):
technical manuals to companies, he starts putting out a newsletter
called Anti Semitic Correspondence. Some great titles in this episode,
just like racism Letters again, Yeah, quite a title, right there, Frinch, Yeah, yeah,
but they were very much of the show not tell

(38:47):
you know, sort of Arabat then.

Speaker 5 (38:49):
Yeah, that was more subtle than that, yeah, right, like, yes,
they hadn't figured out how to like put a shine
on it yet, right.

Speaker 3 (39:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:01):
But Fritch is you know, he's a groundbreaking racist, right,
He's with his first generation of like political anti Semites.
He loves Friedrich Nietzsche and he actually, once he starts
putting out his Anti Semitic Correspondence magazine, he sends Nietzsche
copies every time he puts out a new edition, and
Nietzsche not a fan of this shit.

Speaker 3 (39:22):
Y Like, for for.

Speaker 1 (39:25):
Months he's just like these letters, like what the fuck?
Why am I getting this? Did I sign up for
this when I was drunk or some ship, Like, I'm
not paying for this.

Speaker 4 (39:33):
SAMI has been like misunderstood by basically everyone ever mine,
Like every group can just be like, yeah, it's ycha.

Speaker 3 (39:41):
No.

Speaker 1 (39:43):
Like the shortcut to knowing someone is not talking properly
about Nietzsche is them saying like I find Nietzsche really inspiring.

Speaker 3 (39:50):
Yeah right, they're doing it wrong. I hope that.

Speaker 1 (39:54):
Yeah. And it's it's very funny because Nietzsche eventually gets
so frustrated at getting all of these fucking letters that
he responds and he he kind of being Friedrich Nietzsche.
He responds in this kind of caddy way where he's like,
thank you for giving me a glance at the muddle
of principles that lie at the heart of this strange movement.
Please never send me another fucking letter. I will hurt

(40:14):
you if you do, like like threatens him basically, like
it's nice to see how weird you people are. Stop
fucking talking to me too. Yeah, yeah, that's the right,
Like he's pretty unequivocal, like fucking stay away from me.

Speaker 3 (40:29):
Yeah, he actually, like he wrote quite a lot.

Speaker 4 (40:31):
I think maybe in I forget what maybe the early
part before he wrote like quite extensively on like really
being against anti Semitism. It's I remember reading about it,
and a lot of people will have to be like, well,
Hitler liked him. It's like, yeah, Hitler like dogs, dogs
are still good. Yeah, you know what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 (40:47):
Yeah, yeah, it's it's kind of like, I don't know,
like we could. I think the Nietzsche of the modern
day is like, let let let's say Warhammer, right. A
lot of Nazis into it, a lot of the people
who write exactly but it's so cool. Yeah, but it's fine. Yeah.
So Fritch wrote Handbook of the Jewish Question, this book
that our buddy Julius is going to fall in love

(41:09):
with in eighteen ninety three, which is, you know, if
you're talking about the Holocaust, you hear the term the
Jewish Question an awful lot. That word is in use
way before the Nazis come to power, right, and Handbook
of the Jewish Question is you would call it like
a groundbreaking work of racism for its era. Fritch is
going to say a lot of things in this book

(41:29):
that become the cornerstone of Nazi politics. He demands a
return to what he calls traditional peasant values. He rails
against urbanization. He talks a lot about the superiority of
the Aryan race. And you know, he also one of
the things that's interesting about the handbook, there's ways in
which it kind of reminds me of like certain things

(41:51):
on the Internet today, and that it's a it's a
living document. So he doesn't just put out this book
and like this is the book. It's done. Every like year,
he'll add more to it. He'll update it when things happen,
right like as shit happens in the world that he
thinks plays into these conspiracies, He'll do an update of
the book. I want to quote from a write up
by Martin Kitchen in the Journal of Anti Semitism Studies

(42:13):
describing this book. At the time, sundry financial crises from
the Berlin Stock Exchange collapse in eighteen seventy three to
the Great Depression were blamed on Jewish manipulation. Germany's defeat
in the First World War and the subsequent peace agreements
were seen as the result of a Franco Jewish conspiracy.
Germany is presented as the sole stronghold against a world
Jewish conspiracy, thereby combining radical anti Semitism with a virulent nationalism, which,

(42:38):
for all its threadbare scholarship and muddled thinking, was to
provide the foundations of national socialist racial studies. So that's good.

Speaker 4 (42:49):
It's interesting to all that, like all of this shit
was not just I mean, obviously, but it wasn't just
this brainchild of Hitler and his goons. Now, it was like, yeah,
very prevalent from very many different groups.

Speaker 1 (43:02):
Yeah, I mean, And that's how you get as far
as we can tell, Hitler's radicalization, like him getting too
because he becomes keyed into anti Semitic politics before he
gets like kind of explicitly into like actually like right
wing political stuff. He's brought into that through racism. And

(43:23):
probably the thing that pills him is these basically pieces
of books like like Handbook on the Jewish Question, get
like mimiographed and hand it out on the street, as
like zines in pre World War One, you know, Germany,
it really is a lot like like modern zine culture
right where you just kind of have. You've got some

(43:43):
like weirdos who get really into you know, racism or whatever.
It's not always racism, sometimes it's cool shit, but they
like they'll take clips from books that they like and
they want other people to read, and they'll they'll sort
of like copy and paste that sort of stuff into
pamphlets handed out on the street. And Hitler, who's basically
he's a hobo right for a decent chunk of time

(44:05):
before World War One, he's like homeless on the streets
of Vienna. He'll just pick up these pamphlets that people
like toss out when they're out like drinking or stuff.
You know, they'll hand him out at meetings and then
he'll like pick them up in the trash, and because
he's like a doesn't have a whole lot else to do,
he'll like read them, and then when he falls in
love with them, he'll like read them out to folks
at these homeless hostels that he's staying at a bunch

(44:26):
of times.

Speaker 4 (44:27):
Well imagine you know, you're homeless and you sat in
the shelter there with your pennies and Hitler comes in like.

Speaker 1 (44:34):
Hey, guys, I have enough problems without a Hitler.

Speaker 4 (44:40):
Right, Like, the reason you're here it's not because of this,
it's because oh my god, yeah it doesn't sound good.
But I mean my point was that, like sometimes you
see people be like, oh well it was it was
just Hitler's charisma that brought people through. I mean, I
think Hiller's charisma really helped push people toency. But these

(45:00):
ideas were very much there, right.

Speaker 1 (45:02):
Yeah, And that's that's one of the things where like,
obviously the fact that Hitler is Hitler, that he has
the skills and the talents that he has as a
plays a role in everything. But like Germany, yeah, exactly,
and Striker is kind of in the same position Hitler
is at this point where like they are both nineteen nineteen,
nineteen twenty, starting to give kind of like speeches, get

(45:25):
into politics, and they're both like showing an aptitude for
riling people up, for building movements kind of around themselves.
But yeah, I'm getting ahead of myself. So Julius falls
in love with this racist book and it's one of
this This seems to have been the book that kind
of from this point on, he's not just sort of
a casual normal anti Semite. He's like a dedicated one

(45:46):
political anti Semitism becomes sort of the center of his worldview.
So now that he's been sort of pilled, you might say,
he returns to public speaking. He starts showing up first.
And this is what's interesting to me. He doesn't start
this new stage of his speaking career by like finding
a party and then going to like speak at their rallies,
kind of working his way up from inside a political

(46:08):
party as a speaker. He starts showing up at left
wing political rallies and heckling the speakers there and getting
into arguments with them in public. Right, And this is
what kind of makes him famous in Nuremberg, Right, Yeah,
this is not an unfamiliar tactic today. Right, Like he's
a troll, you know, he's very consciously using that as
a tactic in order to build a reputation for himself.

(46:30):
Julius is not only a fun speaker, but he's going
to like show up wherever, you know, these different leftist
parties are speaking, and he's going to like hassle their speakers,
he's going to argue with them. So maybe you show
up just to watch Julius like make fun of this guy,
just to watch him get into scraps. You know, a
lot of times he'll start, it'll start as an argument
between him and this guy, and then there will be
a big because these are at bars, there will be

(46:50):
a big bar brawl, right, so it's like kind of
a fun night. Hey, let's you know, Julius is going
to be heckling this guy down at the whatever bar.
Let's all show up, you know, we'll we'll cheer I'm on,
and then we'll get into a scrap with the social
Democrats or the communists or whatever.

Speaker 3 (47:04):
You know.

Speaker 4 (47:05):
That's kind of well, for every group that does that,
there's going to be a couple that go, actually, this
guy's onto something exactly.

Speaker 3 (47:14):
Shit.

Speaker 1 (47:14):
Yeah, yeah too, because like again, people, this is not
a period in which things have solidified. There's a lot
of folks who go from communists to fascist or fascist
to communist during this sort of period of time because
they all kind of feel, well, what we're doing, like
the government isn't working right, but I don't know what,
you know, I'm on board with I can be convinced.

(47:36):
And you know, Julius by being this really kind of
charismatic guy who's just sort of like making fun of
speakers who are less apt than he is at commanding
a room. He's building a following for himself, and he's
building support for his kind of politics in Nuremberg, so yeah,
that's cool. He becomes basically a local celebrity doing this,

(47:58):
and he's like, you know, he's a trigger the Libs
kind of guy. That's how he starts out. Starts out,
and he decides at a certain point once he's sort
of become this guy that people people will show up
at other political party events just to see Julius. When
he feels like he's got enough of a following, he announces,
he puts out like flyers and stuff that he's going

(48:19):
to be giving a dedicated speech himself. And at this
speech that he does thousands, by the way, two to
four thousand something like that, people show up just to
see him give this speech, he announces that he's become
a converted political anti Semite. This causes a bunch of
right wing political parties to start vuying for his membership

(48:39):
because he's a free agent. Right This is kind of
like you've I don't know, I don't know about baseball
to draw a baseball comparison here, but you can you
can do it at home. He's this like he's really good.
He's and everybody is kind of like, if we can
get Julius, you know, that might be the thing that
makes our party go national. You know, we get this
guy on our team. Yeah, he's the live wire. Yeah
he's still he's the straw that stirs the drink. Yeah exactly. Yeah,

(49:05):
he's the he's the he's the fucking messy of racism.

Speaker 3 (49:08):
Right.

Speaker 1 (49:11):
So, of all these parties kind of vying for his membership,
the one he picks is the German Socialist Party, which,
despite its name, the German Socialist Party is a conservative party,
and they're they're into what are called Volcish, which is
like folk yeah, values, right, and most the DSP is
not anti Semitism is not a core plank of the

(49:32):
German Socialist Party, but most members are anti Semitic, and
so while the party doesn't have a platform on the
Jewish question, Striker feels like, well, I can get that added, right,
this is a place where I can grow. I can
kind of remake this party in my image in some ways.
So he helps them run a cast of candidates in
that year's election. They don't do very well. They get
basically zero votes nationally and only like one percent to Nuremberg.

(49:56):
But Striker kind of crucially doesn't give up. He's sort
of analyzes accurately what the weakness of the DSP is
and he decides that it's that they do not have
a dedicated propaganda arm. And in the Vimar era, the
only way to make a propaganda arm is to establish
a newspaper. And I want to talk a little bit
about what a newspaper is in this period of time,

(50:18):
because today you hear a newspaper, you think like, oh,
it's a publication that tells you either locally or nationally
or internationally the news, like what's going on, and you
know you're gonna get some columns on culture and stuff.
When we think about newspapers in vymar Germany, it's probably
better to see them as like social media, right, Like

(50:38):
a newspaper is more like for a political party especially,
it's more like how today if you're running a political
party or political advocacy group, your your organization is going
to have They're going to have a YouTube channel maybe
where they have some creators put out videos. They're going
to have like a Twitter account. That is kind of
how newspapers work in Vimar and I you know, one

(51:00):
of the things that kind of highlights this is that
when Julius gets more famous, multiple left wing groups will
start newspapers. Just then the whole purpose of the newspaper
is updating folks on Julius Striker and attacking him right,
sort of in the same way that like you'll have
a Twitter account that's just like tracking what this one
group of right wingers are doing, or this like one

(51:20):
political folk that people don't like, you know, it'll be
dedicated to them. You know, You've got a whole account
that's just people covering Trump's legal you know, woes on
Twitter or whatever. That's the time to how newspapers work.

Speaker 4 (51:33):
Yeah, it's actually a really good way of putting it.
One I've never really thought about before. I read a
while ago like history of like newspaper news media, and yeah,
it was it's ironic now that like everyone has a
you know, slight political leaning or a strong political leaning
or whatever. It's ironic that like, yeah, it's kind of

(51:54):
not really changed in that respect. Yeah, what I'm saying,
obviously it's different now, but it started like that and
it's almost come full Sirkuena with all this chaos that
we're seeing.

Speaker 1 (52:04):
Yeah, it's it's fascinating in that huh. Yeah, and there
are you know. I'm actually just going to quote from
a write up by the US Holocaust Museum on the
state of the news media in Weimar, Germany. Over forty
seven hundred daily and weekly newspapers were published annually in Germany,
more newspapers than in any other industrialized nation, with a
total circulation of twenty five million. Although Berlin was the

(52:25):
press capital, small town presses dominated newspapers circulation. Eighty one
percent of all German newspapers are locally owned. And when
we talk about these these local newspapers, that's what we're
talking about is shit like these little papers where it's
like I'm going to make a newspaper I don't like
this guy. I'm going to make a newspaper dedicated to
this guy I hate, you know, Like it's that kind
of shit a lot of the time. So basically, while

(52:48):
the most famous papers are newspapers that are like you know,
traditional newspapers or magazines or whatever, the majority of papers,
by number are just like some weirdo with a very
specific acts to grind in some cases, this again means like, yeah,
Striker's going to do this right, Like this is what
he decides his party's missing. So he establishes his first newspaper.

(53:09):
It's called Deutsche Socialist, you know, German Socialists, because that's
the name of the party. And he had been kind
of he used their funding to start this newspaper, and
they wanted a traditional political party paper. But Julius immediately
goes in his own direction. And I'm going to quote
from his biographer Randall bite Work here. His goal was
to provide short articles in simple language that explained to

(53:31):
a popular audience the intricacies of politics and economics. As
he reported to the August nineteen twenty dsp National Meeting, gentlemen,
let us not forget that we want to speak primarily
to the workers. Brevity is the seasoning. The contents must
have a popular style. His lead article in newspaper's first
issue is a good example of his early writing. Addressed
to communists and socialists, It began by saluting them as brothers. Yes,

(53:55):
you are brothers, German mothers boor you wan German soil
the same German blas blood flows in our veins. We
and you have nothing to lose but everything to gain.
We have the same desire to escape our present misery
as fast as possible. We want the same solutions. We
too want our part of German soil, a small lot
with a small garden, just like so many others of

(54:15):
our race. It is the right of being born a German,
and we want to be free of the yousurious yoke
of big money. Later in the article, Striker turned to
the Jews. Do you really think the Rothschilds, Mendelssohns, black Rotors,
war Burgs and Cones worry about your poverty. As long
as the blood brothers of the Mendelssohns and the blike
Rotors and the Cones are your leaders, As long as

(54:37):
your party officials are Jewish lackeys, you will be no
threat to the big money men. As long as you
yourself do not lead the way, and as long as
the black shadow of foreign blood is behind you, you
will be betrayed and deceived. The black shadow cares for itself,
not for you. And he's talking about there is like
this idea that the German army had been betrayed right

(54:57):
by Jewish people who are foreigners. They're not really oil
to the state. That's like what he's sort of saying.
The black's the black shadow, you know.

Speaker 4 (55:04):
Yeah, ritick really is not changed, not much. No, if
you think about it, if you if you're talking about
people that are like pedaling.

Speaker 1 (55:12):
Hate, yeah, I guess maybe it never needs to, right,
like maybe yeah, yeah, yeah, it's maybe just like the
same thing when hate's gonna work, it always kind of
works the same way.

Speaker 4 (55:25):
Yeah, And I mean that's as on the nose as
like an out and out modern Danio Nazi.

Speaker 1 (55:31):
I guess it's absolutely Yeah. I obviously they're you know,
following in his footsteps, but uh, you know whose footsteps
we're following in today? The sponsors No, no, no, the
blue apron and and and shit, right, Sophie said, yeah,
who we're getting money from today?

Speaker 2 (55:50):
We're sponsored by HelloFresh. But yeah, close enough.

Speaker 1 (55:58):
We are back, uh, having a good time talking about
Julius Striker. So Striker's paper starts to do pretty well.
It's helping to build a following for the DSP's who's
not a big party at this point. But the leaders
of the party are kind of a little worried by
by this newspaper because for one thing, They're not as

(56:21):
motivated by anti Semitism as Julius is, so they try
to rain him in, right. And as soon as they
try to be like, hey, Julius, you know, maybe maybe
we focus a little bit more on you know, politics
and a little bit less on racism, they learned the
thing that all of these Catholic priests and military officers
had learned a few years earlier, which is that Julius
Striker does not take direction.

Speaker 3 (56:41):
Right.

Speaker 1 (56:42):
You try to tell this guy to do things, and
it just pisses him off. And as soon as they
try to, like, you know, force him to make changes,
they realize that even though he used their money to
start this paper, it's his. It's legally his personal property. Right,
So they actually can't. Right, It's like he started the YouTube,
accare right, Like, yeah, exactly, he's not. He has a

(57:05):
certain kind of cunning, right, Yes. So this becomes more
of a problem as his conspiratorial view of the world
expands to include the Jesuits, who he sees as a
shadowy force running world politics. Again, Nuremberg is a pretty
heavily Catholic town and or I mean, it's not majority
Catholic Bavaria is a lot of Catholics, and Catholics are

(57:28):
kind of like a lot of the core membership of
the DSP, and they start leaving, you know, because Catholics
and Jesuits are, you know, the same thing. And it
pisses them off that he's like accusing these people who
they respect as being in league with this sort of
like grand conspiracy. Some like Catholic members of the DSP

(57:50):
start sending striker letters basically being like, hey, would you
stop like lumping us all in and maybe maybe we
don't focus as much as on racism because I might
not be as to that. And he like, he writes,
this is a very modern thing. He like starts posting
pieces of their letters in a column that he writes
for the newspaper, making the screen. Yeah right, yeah, he's

(58:11):
doing the way it's very modern.

Speaker 3 (58:14):
Yeah that's crazy.

Speaker 1 (58:16):
Yeah, it's wild.

Speaker 3 (58:17):
Right, So what.

Speaker 4 (58:21):
Exactly to do that than like screenshow Like that's bad enough,
But to be like now I'm going to cut.

Speaker 1 (58:27):
This, it's also like you have to admit though, like
that's so far ahead of the time, right, he is
decades ahead of everyone else, an innovator of just being
horrible Yeah, so conflicts he starts. You know, he keeps
getting in a conflict. He's always in conflict with the
organizers of his parties, you know, because he's his loose cannon.

(58:49):
But they also need him because he brings crowds. You know,
he's not just making this newspaper, but when he shows up,
people show up to listen to him speak who probably
wouldn't show up to a party meeting otherwise. So, you know,
the paper grows to a few thousand subscribers, and Julius
is able to keep his newspaper running at a fraction
of the cost that a normal publisher would have required

(59:11):
because he has a secret, which is that he does
not pay for his newspaper to be printed. He will
find a new printer, He'll have them print a couple
of episodes or issues and just be like, yeah, the
money's coming, the money's coming. The just front us this week, right,
then we'll pay you back front us this week. And
then as soon as he hits the point where like
they're not gonna publish any more papers, he bounces without
ever having paid his debts, and he finds a new publisher.

Speaker 3 (59:34):
Wow, things that must have been so easy. Buck in
the diard.

Speaker 1 (59:37):
Yeah there's no internet, right, just.

Speaker 4 (59:40):
Like yeah, I'm gone, Yeah, I'm the wind baby.

Speaker 1 (59:44):
Yeah, what are you going to do?

Speaker 3 (59:45):
Send a horse? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (59:50):
So nineteen twenty one, he's kind of sandwiched between this
conservative party that needs him but is uncomfortable with how
loudly he says the quiet parts, and you know, that's
a tough place to be in. But luckily for him
and unfortunately for everyone else in Europe, the leaders of
the DSP are also sort of desperate to find a
way to make themselves more electorally viable. And because even

(01:00:13):
with Striker's help, they're not succeeding at becoming like a
national movement, they decide to start working with another political
party and the interests of like kind of merging together
and seeing if that can give them sort of the
oomph that they need to go national. And the party
that the German Socialist Party starts talking with about a
merger is a Munich based right wing party called the

(01:00:35):
German Workers Party. Right, so you've got the socialists and
the workers who are looking at merging together to make
us socialist workers a national socialist workers party, right, you
might call it. This is where we get that right.
The Nazi Party, the National Socialist German Workers Party comes

(01:00:55):
out of the German Socialist Party and the German Workers
Party merging together. Right, This is this is the the
Reese's pieces that leads us to the Nazis. So in
May of nineteen twenty one, as sort of the leadership
of these two groups are talking about merging, one member
of the German Workers Party reaches out to Striker directly
and it's like, hey, we got this dude named Hitler.

(01:01:17):
He's kind of uru, right, He's our guy who gives speeches.
He's the guy people really like to follow. And you know,
Hitler's interested in this you know, absorbing thing. But like,
we have some issues with like the folks who are
running our party because Hitler's not This is again Hitler
in this period is kind of in a similar situation
to Julius, where the German Workers Party is not founded

(01:01:40):
by Hitler. Right, He's actually brought in as a spy
by the army, like right after the war. He avoids
getting demobilized and winding up without an income by staying
in the army, and the thing the army has him
do is like spy on right wing political parties in Munich,
and so he shows up at his first German Workers
Party meeting basically to like see if their plan to
overthrow the government, and then he gets angry and he

(01:02:02):
starts like getting into arguments and he gives a speech
and people are like, you're actually really good at talking. Hitler,
And he's similar to Striker in that the dudes who
had founded the German Workers Party start to have issues
with him, where they're like, this guy's trying to make
our party all about himself and like the things that
we got into are kind of getting lost, and he's

(01:02:24):
he's kind of a tyrant, right, And so they're part
of what the German Workers Party is hoping is that
by merging with the German Socialist Party they can kind
of marginalize Hitler, right, they can they can take, you know,
push him off to the side and just use him
for what they think he's good for without letting him
run everything. And the German Socialist Party is hoping to

(01:02:45):
do the same thing with Striker, Right, they're both like
mirrors of each other in this really weird way, right,
And so, yeah, Hitler is not the kind of dude
who's going let this happen right, Like he is, he
has these kind of like honed political instincts, and he sees, well,

(01:03:07):
these dudes are trying to edge me out of control
of the party, right, that's why they want to do this.
So instead of just going ahead with the merger to
the German Socialist Party, he resigns from the German Workers
Party in July of nineteen twenty one. And this is
he resigns it because the DAP and the DSP leadership

(01:03:27):
have worked out an agreement that would give them sort
of power over the fewer in the new merged political party.
And Hitler's like, look, I'll take my followers and my
skill for speaking and I'll go somewhere else. I'll make
a new party, I'll join another party, and like I'll
fucking crush you guys, Like, that's the option. Do you
want to try to like do this without me, or

(01:03:47):
do you want to let me back in and give
me total control? That's the that's the ultimatum he gives them.
And the leaders of the German Workers Party kind of fold.
You know, they're like well as much which we didn't
want him to be in total control. None of us
know how to like get a following without him, like
he's kind of the primary appeal of our party. So

(01:04:10):
they let him back in and they make him the
center of the new German Workers Party, which then merges
with the German Socialist Party. And that is how Adolf
Hitler becomes for the first time. You know Hitler, right,
this is that's where that comes from.

Speaker 3 (01:04:24):
He was like the original influencer basically.

Speaker 1 (01:04:28):
Yeah, yeah, and yeah. So one of Striker's friends, while
this is all going down, sends him a warning letter
being like, hey guys, or hey hey Julius. You know,
Hitler won his power struggle over with the DAP, and
they're about to merge with our party, and our leaders
are doing it because they don't like you. They want

(01:04:49):
a guy who can do what you do, who can
bring in you know, followers and stuff, who can like
give these speeches that attract an audience, and they feel
like backing Hitler will let us force you out of
the party. So Striker, when he hears that just go ahead,
goes ahead and leaves the German Socialist Party. Part of

(01:05:09):
why he does this is because his friend, a guy
named Otto Dickle, has formed a breakaway organization called the
German Working Community, and the idea behind the German Working
Community is it's like supposed to be the u win
of like anti Semitic parties, where that we're supposed to
be this over organization and all the right wing parties
can organize with us to get their anti Semitic policies

(01:05:30):
in order. It's all very messy. Dickle, the guy who
forms this group, is a really fascinating early German fascist.
People don't talk about him a lot anymore, but he's
really interesting. In the nineteen thirties, he's kind of this
like proto libertarian, like from this point where he's sort
of like similar to a lot of the early Nazis,
he's going to become like a lasi faire capitalist. But

(01:05:53):
in nineteen twenty one he's very much in line with
the kind of shit Hitler and Striker are selling. And
he writes this book called Resurgence of the West, which
is interesting in part because it sort of predicts the
war that Hitler is going to unleash a few years
later on continental Europe. And I'm going to quote from
that book now because it's interesting how much Dickle sort

(01:06:14):
of sees coming many a time acquaintances.

Speaker 4 (01:06:18):
I'm sorry, it's what dickus seas.

Speaker 3 (01:06:21):
Come on, man.

Speaker 1 (01:06:28):
No see, I'm so mature that I didn't even I
didn't even notice the come down.

Speaker 3 (01:06:33):
Sorry, sorry to no No.

Speaker 1 (01:06:35):
Many a time acquaintances have told me that I see
the world differently from them. That is true, who sees
it correctly? Men of science, with their mechanistic thinking will
certainly attack me, will carp and criticize. We'll discover some
errors and ridicule me. Let them. But if in the
immediate future, perhaps even before this book is published, events
take place in Russia as I have foretold, If social
ferment begins in France, which is heading for the most

(01:06:56):
uncompromising imperialism, and as I fear in England too, if
the German people, overwhelmed by despair, is gripped by the
irresistible force of national resurgence, then I can only wish
it be men who see his eye. So men who
comprehend the meaning of the World War and of the
contemporary events through their bold action, and can create a
free German people on its own soil. So you know,

(01:07:19):
there's a lot of folks who sort of see where
the winds are blowing or at least are hoping to
help blow the wind in that direction. And Dickle's one
of them. And Dickle, you know, for this this German
anti Semitic sort of un that he's going to create,
he picks as a logo for it, a little thing
you might recognize as the swastika. Now this is not

(01:07:40):
a weird thing. At the time. Knowledge of the swastika
had come to Germany primarily through the work of a
bumbling archaeologist named Heinrich Schleimann, who is the He's the
guy who like finds Troy by sort of destroying most
of the artifacts of Troy because he doesn't realize initially
where he's digging and like what he's churning through to
get to what he thinks is the ruins of Troy.

(01:08:04):
But some of the stuff that he does found find
from Troy is like pottery and shit that's like covered
in swastikas. Right now, swastika is We're not going to
get into the history of the swastika yet, although I
think I'll probably do an episode on that, but like
maybe the oldest thing that people have ever drawn that's
like not a super basic shape. It occurs all over

(01:08:27):
the world. There are swastikas all throughout, like ancient you know, India.
The swastika goes back and I think some of the
oldest ones in Europe are like in Ukraine they found
swastikas that are fifteen thousand years old. The Navajo people
in the American Southwest have been using swastikas for again,
god knows how long, all sorts of different things. Actually,

(01:08:50):
it's interesting. In nineteen forty, when like we start gearing
up for World War two, the Navajo and a couple
of other Indigenous American tribes have a meeting and like
announce that we're giving up the swastika, this like ancient
religious symbol for us as a result of how the
Nazis have polluted it, which is fat That's such like

(01:09:12):
a strange because there's nothing wrong with the swastika inherently, right, Like,
you know, there's nothing like racist about the fact that
the Navajo were like putting this in stuff, you know,
God knows how many thousands of years back.

Speaker 3 (01:09:24):
Right they were like one day.

Speaker 1 (01:09:27):
Yeah, one day, this ship hit in Germany.

Speaker 4 (01:09:30):
But yeah, it's like there's a famous far I can't
remember where it is, but it's before Hitler, and there's
like this a girl's like hockey team like that, you know,
like a young girls they're like ten, and on the
front of all that jump puts, they've got this huge swastika. Yeah,
without context, it's like Jesus Christ, what's that? But yeah,
it was quite Yeah, like you said it was, it

(01:09:51):
was a pretty common symbol.

Speaker 1 (01:09:52):
Yeah, I mean the Girls Club, which is what you're
talking about, is like this large organization for young girls
in the US. There, their magazine, one of the most
popular women's magazines in the United States, is called the Swastika.
Like it's just everywhere you know, up there's all these
wild stories too, of like Americans in kind of the
twenties and thirties when there's all the street fighting between

(01:10:14):
Nazis and communists, like American journalists sparticularly like women journalists
who will like come to Germany to report on the
unrest and they'll have like a swastika ring or a necklace,
and like some communists that they're like you know, talking with,
will be like you might not want to wear that.
You're like, that means a real different thing.

Speaker 3 (01:10:32):
To es now, same thing.

Speaker 1 (01:10:34):
Yeah, it's very awkward, but it's not weird, right that
this dude Dickle adopts the swastika. This is starting to
happen all throughout you know, Germany. It's happened with the
Nazi Party and stuff. I think it actually goes back
a bit further than that too, because I think the
first right wing militants to wear the swastikas are in
nineteen nineteen. One of these early anti communist veterans militias

(01:10:59):
have swastik but that is because it like this is
also interesting in World War One there are there are
US military units and German military units with swastikas, Like
theoretically who might have fought each other both under the
swastika just because it's like a good luck symbol. Weird stuff,
But yeah, the the kind of the the first Nazi

(01:11:22):
or fascist, i should say, thought leader to start using
the swastika was the head of an organization called the
Wotan Lodge. And the Wotan Lodge is this early German
nationalist secret society. It starts before World War One, and
one of the guys who runs it is our friend
Theodore Fritch. Right, Theodore Fritch is a very you know,

(01:11:43):
he's he's he's the kind of fascist nerd that still existed.
That his pseudonym is Thor, Like, that's the name that
Fritch writes on for under for his like Wotan Lodge,
you know, columns and stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:11:55):
Wotan shit has just been cringe from day one there.

Speaker 1 (01:11:58):
Oh yeah, from the fucking jump right, and you know,
speaking of how crins they are. The thing that the
Wotanists do is they dress up like knights and vikings,
they wear like horned helmets, they carry out these candlelit ceremonies.
Well they're where they'll like march in the shape of
a swastika, and a lot of like Nazi rituals get
based on this stuff. Because after World War One, the

(01:12:19):
Wotan Lodge gets renamed to the Tulas Society. Right, these
are the bad guys from hell Boy, you know if
you've seen the hell Boy movie. Yeah yeah, and a
lot of these guys become some of the first Nazis.

Speaker 3 (01:12:32):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:12:33):
So in nineteen eighteen, control of the Tullas Society passes
from Fritch to a dude named Baron Rudolph von Sebatandorf. Now,
first off, that's his like fascist and name, Baron Rudolph
bon sabatandor Von.

Speaker 3 (01:12:48):
Like, wo, was he born like Rhodesia.

Speaker 1 (01:12:50):
Yeah, like that's a guy. Indiana Jones punches. That is
like a stereotypical Nazi name, Like, yeah, well it's it's
part of why it's stereotypical, is that is not at
all his real name. So oh right, yeah, that's like
yeah Vaughan. Obviously he's calling himself a baron. Vaughn is
like a signifier in Old Germany that you're a noble. Right,

(01:13:14):
The actual guy who calls himself Baron Vaughan Sebotandorf is
not a noble of any kind. He was born Adam Glower.
He's the uh right, which is.

Speaker 3 (01:13:23):
I barely would go with the Vaughan name then Marcelfa.

Speaker 1 (01:13:25):
Yeah, that's a much cooler name. Yeah, And rather than
being a baron, he is the son of a train engineer.
He's got kind of this weird life. As a young adult,
he like moves to Turkey, he becomes an Ottoman citizen,
and like, when he becomes an Ottoman citizen, he like
lies and tells them that my name is Baron Heinrich Subotandorf,

(01:13:46):
and the Turks are like, yeah, I guess if you
want to. So he he fights for the Ottomans in
the First Balkan War and then he returns to Germany
to become a wizard and a fascist. And he is
like he's in a like I said, he's a wizard,
he's an ocultist. You know, he's into this. Yeah, he's
like a he's like an ocult guy. He's doing like
magical rituals. And he's also like a Nazi racist. You know,

(01:14:09):
there's a few of these guys. That's a big thing
for the Tulist society. So yeah, he's like pretend noble
who makes himself into like an occult figure on the far.

Speaker 4 (01:14:20):
Right' it's funny like Viking stuff. If you're a Viking
and you're actually doing that, like the Viking ship like
they did. Yeah, and you look like a Viking, you're
coolest fuck right. Any time after that that you dress
like a Viking, it's like the cringiest thing.

Speaker 3 (01:14:36):
It's weird. It's one or the other, you know what.

Speaker 1 (01:14:38):
Yah, there is no like, there's no like medium speed
for those, there's no middle of the road king.

Speaker 3 (01:14:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:14:47):
Yeah, they are the coolest dude ever or they need
to be tossed into the ocean.

Speaker 4 (01:14:51):
Yeah, not that, like you know, pillage and mud of
the Vikings did was cool, but they look cool, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:14:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:14:57):
I think can be cool and still bad. It's like pirates.
Pirates are cool. Didn't always do good stuff, but always cool.

Speaker 4 (01:15:06):
Yeah yeah, yeah, I mean Vincent from Biker Mice. Oh
yeah yeahh bad but cool. Bad but cool.

Speaker 3 (01:15:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:15:18):
So in the In a book called The Swastika Symbol
Beyond Redemption, author and historian Stephen Heller writes that Subatandorf,
as the new leader of the Tula Society, quote pledged
his loyalty to Germany, the swastika and destruction of the enemy.
In one of his speeches, he introduced an additional symbolic
icon to the language of Volkish occultism, the r Run,

(01:15:40):
which signifies Aryan primal fire, the son and the Eagle.
And the eagle, he announced, is the symbol of the Aryans.
In order to depict the eagle's capacity for self immolation
by fire, it is colored red. From today on, our
symbol is the red eagle, which warns us that we
must die in order to live. So Subotandorf also the

(01:16:01):
other thing that he brings in that you're going to
recognize is this very particular kind of like straight armed
salute called the Zighil, which is going to become the
primary Nazi salute. And he is also Subotanorf, is the
guy the primary idea that is noteworthy that he comes
up with. It's called the feurer Prinzip, which is the
leader principle or leader cult, which is the idea that

(01:16:22):
if we are going to have a successful right wing party,
anti democratic party in this country, it needs to be
bound to a single leader almost like a religion, right,
like a messiah, you know. And the thing Subotanorf phrases it,
calls it a messiah. He's like, we are waiting for
We on the German right are waiting for our messiah.

(01:16:44):
So all of these folks. Part of why these parties
they don't like Striker, they don't really like Hitler the leadership,
but they can't get rid of them, right, is because
there's this building sense all throughout the twenties in German
right wing politics that we're waiting, we're looking to see
which of these guys is going to become the messiah

(01:17:04):
right and by early nineteen twenty one, if you're trying
to figure out who is our fewer, Right, the two
guys who are primarily going to be on your radar
are Adolf Hitler and Julius Striker. And when you know,
the DAP sort of yields to Hitler and agrees to
give him, you know, control over the party. They're saying,
we think Hitler's the guy who's going to win. And

(01:17:26):
when Dickle forms the German working Community and brings in
his friend Julia Striker, he's kind of betting that Striker
might be the guy to fill this role. Dicklan Streiko,
Dickolan Striker, Yeah, little Dick, Dick Striker.

Speaker 3 (01:17:40):
Yeah, that's great.

Speaker 4 (01:17:41):
I don't know, it's not like a good yeah, detective
Dick Streiko.

Speaker 1 (01:17:46):
Yeah, there you go. So, yeah, that's where we are
as Part one closes out. Jake, how you doing? How
you feeling about this whole tale?

Speaker 4 (01:17:55):
I mean, it's super interesting considering how long ago this was,
how many direct kind of similarities there are to the
modern day file press.

Speaker 3 (01:18:06):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:18:08):
Yeah, I think that's part of why the thing that
keeps coming to me is I like read this stuff
is like, oh, I guess everything that's happened with social
media isn't really surprising, like this all happened with like
newspapers and shit back in the day. It's it's the
same as it ever was in a lot of ways.

Speaker 4 (01:18:22):
Honestly, I've never actually thought of it like that. When
you said that, it's so true. It's like almost like
the original purpose of the newspapers was how social media
is mostly used now, let's be honest.

Speaker 1 (01:18:35):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, the idea, like we think of
a newspaper kind of as this like edifice that provides
information about the world to people. But the thing that
newspapers primarily did early on was both like a tool
for people to get out, you know, disinformation, but also
just like a wave for folks to bitch at each other, right, Like,

(01:18:55):
like it's the same thing that Twitter is, you know,
that was a big part of tweet.

Speaker 3 (01:18:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:19:01):
Yeah, So Jake, you got anything to plug?

Speaker 4 (01:19:04):
Yeah, man, Hopefully people that listen this, I think they'll
be interested in a new project that we got going
are sad Oligarch. It's an investigative podcast series about the
fact that a dozen rich Russians have died in the
last nine months. Many of them died in suspicious circumstances.

(01:19:27):
Many of them have direct links to the Kremlin. Essentially,
we're trying to answer the question who is killing rich Russians?
And each episode is kind of it's like, you know,
it's true crime, but the way that I would do it.
And it's a lot of research, a lot of actual
you know, investigative journalism, not drama, you know, not Netflix

(01:19:49):
drama type stuff. So I think people really like it.
It's doing really well, which I'm glad about. And it's
it's very it's revealing, i think, to how internal Russia
actually operates at this stage. You know, it says a
lot more than just about the murders.

Speaker 1 (01:20:06):
Yeah, it's an excellent podcast. Check it out, listen to
Sad olig Ark. Check out popular Front.

Speaker 3 (01:20:14):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:20:16):
Please do also check out my platform. You go to
Popularfront dot CC. You'll see all of our links everywhere.
Just search popular Front anywhere and you'll find what we do. Brossroots,
conflict reporting, documentaries, podcast articles, everything.

Speaker 1 (01:20:31):
Yeah, nobody does it better. Thanks for having me, Yeah,
thanks for being on. You can subscribe to Cooler Zone
Media folks if you want to listen to this show
or all of our other shows without ads, including Sad oligark.
So go to cooler Zone Media. Pay us a couple
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free of the advertising industrial complex, which we love and

(01:20:54):
are grateful. Boy Goodbye.

Speaker 2 (01:21:03):
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