Part Two: The Parenting Gurus of Nazi Germany

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
What's cold My opening This is Behind the Bastards, a
podcast that has now introduced slightly differently. We are going
to talk about a little bit of history me and
Margaret Killjoy, and then we're gonna throw back to the
start of the episode. Margaret, what do you know about Prussia?
How do you feel about Prussia?

Speaker 3 (00:24):
I couldn't put it on a map because it doesn't
currently exist. It's one of those things that became Germany. Right, yes,
it is the center of the things that became Germany. Okay, wait,
and in Bavaria is like the southern part.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Bavaria is the southern part and the Bavarians and the Prussians.
Most people would now just be like, well, they're all Germans.
But for a very long time that would get you shot.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
You know.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
It was very serious and even up until like when
the Franco Prussian War started, there were a lot of
debates about like these you had these different army corps
that would have divisions of Prussians and divisions of Bavarians,
and the fact that we're fighting well side by side
was the huge deal. Like that's what welded Germany into being.
There was a lot of Prussians were like, well, Bavarians
won't stand under fire, you know, there was a lot

(01:09):
of debate about that, and the Prussians where it's funny,
You're like, I couldn't point it out on a map. Today,
I would guess Prussia is most often reference to when
people misspell Russia. But like for most of the last
couple of hundred years, it was a really big deal.
And in fact, at the end of World War Two,
one of the major Allied goals was like, we have
to put a fucking end to Prussia finally, like we

(01:31):
have to end this concept of Prussian militarism because it's
been it's been such a plague in Europe and we don't.

Speaker 3 (01:39):
Again, the Bavarians are the good Germans and definitely not Germans, definitely,
definitely not.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
But what I am saying is that what we now
just describe as like German right is what people used
to call Prussian right. It's all been kind of subsumed.
But like the Prussians.

Speaker 3 (01:57):
Were and this is kind of who invaded like right
around the time of the Paris Commune, like eighteen seventy
one kind of era.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
Yes, yes, this is exactly that. That's what it's called
the Franco Prussian War because the Prussians are kind of
like the leading light in this confederation of German states
that becomes Germany as a result of the Franco Prussian War.

Speaker 3 (02:16):
And really like invading France, they tried like three times,
and to be fair, like once a generation they.

Speaker 2 (02:22):
Started out being invaded by France. Like when the Franco
Prussian War starts, if you read their justifications for like
why they were doing what they were doing, it's all
like they keep invading us. We have to stop the
French menace and the British like there's widespread everyone is
sympathetic to the Prussians and the other German states because
they're like, yeah, someone got to be done about France,

(02:43):
Like you can't let them keep bosting everybody around.

Speaker 3 (02:46):
Right, Yeah, it's the nineteenth Century're supposed to do that
to other continents now, yes.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yes, which the French are doing. But they especially like
under Napoleon the Third, he's like Fuson, He fucks around
in Italy a bunch and like eventually he goes too far.
The Prussians have this reputation for being like the great
warrior people of their age. They are the Spartans of Europe,
which the Spartans also are, but from a lot log brico. Yeah,
Prussianism forms the core of what we come to know

(03:12):
as Germany, and well, the Prussian nobility are often targeted
by the Nazis. These guys, these junkers is what they're called.
Wind up. A lot of them get killed by the Nazis.
It's because they hate Hitler. But not because he's Hitler,
but because he's like poor, right. They hate Hitler for
class reasons. He's like a corporal who should have known
his place, and he's trying to run the country. That's

(03:32):
why these junkers hate Hitler. You know, it's not like
all of the horrible crimes. It's well, but look at
the of course this war is doomed. We have a
corporal leading it, you know.

Speaker 3 (03:41):
Yeah, you couldn't even make He tried to make living
selling paintings. Instead of being born to money.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
Absolutely not. I was born to hold a needle rifle.
Prussian nationalism and militarism are a huge factor in the
upbringing of the kids who grew up to fight for
and lead Germany and World War Two. So again it's
one of those things, like Schreber, did he cause the Nazis?
Is he just like one of you know, a number
of people who had similarly authoritarian ideas. And Prussianism is

(04:11):
both an opponent of the Nazis when the Nazis are
actually in place, like a lot of Prussians or opponents
of the Nazis, and it's also foundational to what we
recognize as Nazism. A lot of these attitudes that Prussianism
inculcates and broader in all of these German territories. And
one of the things about Prussianism is that it is
an extremely patriarchal system. Right, you have your king, you know,

(04:35):
this comes to be the Kaiser. He is the absolute
ruler of the country. You know, it doesn't fully work
out that way, but that's the idea. And likewise, the
father is the absolute ruler of the household. You know, yeah,
like that's how it is supposed to work. A lot
of these ideas are descended from how Romans did things
right in ancient Rome, the patriarch of the family, your dad,

(04:58):
as long as he was alive, you were legally child,
he could It's not a thing that often happened, but
he could execute you your whole life. He had that freedom,
that was a legal thing in Roman society. I didn't
know that it kept going. I assumed that his ability
to kill everyone he's related to stopped when those people
turned eighteen. No, absolutely not. You think Rome would be

(05:19):
that way.

Speaker 3 (05:19):
No, Rome, brutal.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
Rome never stopped at the point they should have stopped.
That's what made them Rome. Ah. Welcome to Behind the Bastards,
a podcast with Margaret Killjoy about why the Germans be
like they do. Margaret host of cool people who did

(05:43):
cool stuff.

Speaker 3 (05:43):
So good, Robert, thank you, thank you.

Speaker 2 (05:47):
We're talking about Prussianism just at the start of this episode. Again,
this is an episode about a mom fluencer, the Nazi
mom fluencer. But I do kind of feel like if
we're talking about all these ideas about like how kids
should be raised, that factor in the Nazis and that,
you know, in the post Nazi era, if we don't
say anything about Prussianism, we've kind of fucked up. So
I felt like we had to a little bit and

(06:08):
to give you an idea of like how patriarchal this
was not in the way that the patriarchy gets talked
about today. It's not that people mean a different thing,
but they aren't talking about the exact same thing, right,
They're talking about all these embedded attitudes of like masculine
superiority and whatnot in pop culture, in the structure of
our government and the structure of our society, and all

(06:30):
of the ways in which that's harmful to both women
and men. When I say that Prussian society was patriarchal,
I'll give you an example. I interviewed a Prussian, elderly
Prussian man once. His grandfather was one of these Prussian
yunkers who was murdered by the Nazis, and he grew
up in the early nineteen hundreds and told me that
at family breakfasts, their regular ritual was everyone would gather

(06:52):
around the table and watch his father eat a single egg,
the only egg that their family could afford that day. Right,
everyone had to watch him eat it.

Speaker 3 (07:01):
Right.

Speaker 2 (07:01):
This was like, in a way, kind of this expression
of these ideas that like, hey, you have the kaiser
is the absolute center and head of this nation, and
the father is the absolute despot of his family. Right,
And this is a version of this. After the Kaiser
goes away and you have these chaotic Weimar years where
things are very progressive and men A lot of the

(07:22):
men who become Nazis feel emasculated, right, And part of
why they feel emasculated is that it is chaotic. Jobs
are not as reliable, it's harder to provide for your family.
Then the promise the Nazis make is that, well, we
will bring back a world in which you, as the man,
can be the absolute dictator of your home if you
follow our furor as the absolute dictator of this nation.

(07:43):
That is one of the very alluring promises of Nazism.

Speaker 3 (07:46):
I don't like the how naturally this relates to the
things that are happening now and the way that the
far right is talking about feeling emasculated by Nope, no,
I don't like that. Could you change history a little
bit so that the Nazis are a little more different
than a modern American right wing so I feel a
little safer.

Speaker 2 (08:04):
You see. I think that is the mistake people often
make when they talk about figures like Schreber, who we
just talked about and the lady who were talking about today,
is they focused too much on them in order to
talk about how the Germans were different, to allow the Nazis,
and I do think it's important to talk about stuff
like this, to be like, well, yeah, this is part
of the appeal. Is this this shit that is both

(08:26):
very Prussian but also very all the time everywhere.

Speaker 3 (08:30):
You know, no one wants to be a tradwife anymore.
Why can't we just have more tradwives? Why aren't people
having more children? Let's just bring back America being great,
It'll be great.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good. So it's kind of ironic
due to the fact that, like you know, the Nazis
are such a patriarchal movement that they are kind of
so obsessed with these ideas of traditional gender roles that
the most influential expert on child wearing of the Nazi
era was the walking embodiment of female empowerment in that age.

(08:59):
Her name was Joanna Horror born Joanna barsh on October third,
nineteen hundred in Bodenbach. Joanna's life began when doctor Schreber
was the most influential name in German scientific child rearing practices.
Her work would owe a great deal to the foundations
that he established. Like most stories of people born in
nineteen hundred, reading about Joanna's life and family reminds us

(09:21):
that dying in a World war was often preferable to
living in Europe back then. Her mother this is so
fucked up. Her mother is Czech, which is like the
family shame because not only is her mother not properly German,
but she's born at Joanna's born out of wedlock, right,
so she is ostracized and isolated from her community. As
a little girl, Joanna still bore the stigma of this

(09:44):
terrible shame and recalled later to her daughter that when
her mom came out to her father as pregnant, her
father beat her nearly to death, like this is the
culture of the time, right, this is it is not
weird that this happens to her. Her father's parents died
when he was ten years old, so on the upside,
there was no one to beat him when he has

(10:05):
a kid out of weblock. The downside is that he
has to leave high school as soon as he gets
her mom pregnant to raise his new child, and he
is isolated from the rest of his family as a
result of the shame that this causes. His granddaughter, Joanna's
daughter later claimed in his apprenticeship he had to carry
heavy loads and got a hump. He and my grandmother

(10:26):
ran a stationary shop. Because of his disability and poor education,
my grandfather felt like an underdog, developed strong anti semitism
and fled to alcohol. So Joanna's father passed his anti
semitism and his alcoholism onto her, which is not abnormal.
What is abnormal is that he also passed on his
obsessive feeling that he should have done better in his life.

(10:47):
And this is where this guy is kind of like,
he's not you expect. Okay, You've got this story about
a woman who becomes very accomplished and powerful. Her dad
is angry that he doesn't succeed as much as he
feels like he should. He becomes an alcoholic. He's like
a drunk and by our standards, abusive, But at the
same time he is also The way his abuse manifest
is he pushes Joanna to excel. He wants her to

(11:10):
achieve the things that he couldn't, which is so different
from how you expect this story to go. Yeah, although
since you've told me about Schreber, it kind of makes sense,
you know. Yeah, Oh, I have a hunchback, so that's
why I'm gonna strap a two by four year back
for his entire life, right right, And in this case,
he's like, I never got to be anything because I

(11:31):
had to, you know, be the man of the family
from such a young age. But by God, you're going
to make something of yourself now. Some of his obsession
with this comes down to the fact that her brother
and her brother's two years older than her, dies horrifically
of meningitis when Joanna is eight. Joanna never really writes
about her older brother's death, and when she does, she

(11:52):
describes it clinically, without mourning or signs of pain. She
claims his death inspired her to study medicine, but in
a way that sort of suggests she was more fascinated
by the symptoms of his illness than motivated by a
wish to have saved him, which is very very much
the person she is. She is not a oh, if
only I could have saved my beloved brother. She is
a oh the way that he's dying is very interesting.

(12:15):
I need to study this more. She's a creepy kid.

Speaker 3 (12:19):
Yeah, yeah, I don't want to know what happens in
the neighborhood cats when she lives there.

Speaker 2 (12:23):
You know, she might have been torturing some cats. Well,
never know, but it like, given the path this late
and what her kids say about her, I'm going to
say forty percent chance she was torturing some animals. Okay,
not bad, not a low odd So losing a sibling
or a child was not an uncommon experience in Germany
during this period. At the start of the twentieth century,

(12:45):
Germany had one of the highest infant mortality rates in Europe.
This is why under the Kaiser it developed the first
European national institution dedicated to lowering infant mortality. As a result,
so one of the things that's happening during especially in
the Weimar period, it starts under the Kaiser. But during Weimar,
this attitude of like scientists are meddling in the way
we're treating we're raising our children kind of becomes chronic

(13:08):
along the right. And the reason is that, like and
again this isn't a progressive thing. It starts under the Kaiser,
but it's because German kids die all the time.

Speaker 3 (13:16):
They're like, we have a problem, we have to fix it.
Let's apply the scientific method. But it's the early twentieth century,
so the scientific method has more to do with like
Frankenstein and doctor Jack almoster Hyde than.

Speaker 2 (13:27):
Like, yeah, it's both a mix of a lot of
what the scientists are saying isn't right, and when it is,
it pisses off these people who have these contra ideas
of like how you should treat children that are pretty brutal.
And that's going to be part of what gives Joanna
a career is the fact that there are people angry
at all these doctors meddling and parents.

Speaker 3 (13:45):
Oh my god, So she is like, oh, she's like
anti vax fucking yes.

Speaker 1 (13:50):
Cool.

Speaker 2 (13:50):
Well I don't think she's literally it. She is a doctor.

Speaker 3 (13:53):
She's equivalent of the modern anti vax if like, yeah, yes.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
Now, Joanna's own mother. She's very close to her father.
Her mother is absent most of her childhood, and she
will describe later that being deprived of her mother's love
devastates her. Quote nothing could comfort me. She clung to
her father, even though he was a wreck an alcoholic
who drowned his sorrow at bars. He dragged her to
and from Her earliest memories involved walking with quote my

(14:18):
swaying father, who smelled of beer and held me by
the hand as I walked through the Bodenbox streets. My
shame was limitless. But while she expresses shame at her father,
Alois barsh he also pushed his daughter to lean into
her ambitions, which were basically unique in her area and time.
She wanted to be a doctor. Now there were women
doctors at this point, obviously in many countries, but they

(14:41):
were not common. And the boarding school that she gets
into to prepare her for medical school is an all
boys school. Her father this is like such a mix
of inspiring and fucked up. Her father picks this all
boys school for her because it's the best school he
can find that doesn't allow Jews. The so you've got like, oh,

(15:02):
what a piece of shit. But then he goes to
the school and is like, you won't admit girls, wait
till you meet my daughter. And he introduces Joanna to
the director of the school, who like has a brief
conversation with her and says, we'll try it, We'll take her,
you know, Like he's so, I like it's this. It's
such a weird mix of like the most like feminist

(15:22):
story of fatherhood from nineteen sixteen Germany with also like
in the school Camdem and he choosing it.

Speaker 3 (15:29):
This is such a like I mean, this is the
classic bastard set up? Is that? Like? I almost because
this could be the origin story of a Mari of
a lice. Yes, you know, like against the odds and
her and even that her like father like cared even
though he was an embarrassing failure of a drum.

Speaker 2 (15:48):
That this was a complicated man. He you know, he
dealt with all these challenges, but he focused so much
on her. But which is and all of that's true?
He was also a raging anti Semite. Yeah, and so
she becomes a Nazi. Yeah, So the first challenge that
she faces is that. And again this goes into like
the hero narrative here. Prior to joining this boarding school,

(16:11):
because she was a girl, she had not been given
any formal mathematics training. So when she starts school she
has to make up for six years of lost time,
and her first year at boarding school, she develops a
habit of waking up at four am every morning just
to study in order to like make it through this curriculum.
She's excellent at this. She is very smart. She does
very well in school. She graduates in nineteen twenty, right

(16:33):
after World War One ends, and she is the only
girl at this school schlosh Bieberstein.

Speaker 1 (16:38):
Right.

Speaker 2 (16:39):
Her performance is good enough that she is admitted to
the University of Heidelberg and eventually to Gotingen and Munich
as well, and she becomes a pulmonologist. She's a lung doctor.

Speaker 3 (16:48):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (16:49):
She receives a license to practice medicine in nineteen twenty six,
and again not unique, but very rare and very rare
that she goes about it in this way. Two years earlier,
she had met her first husband, Helmut Wis, a pharmaceutical
researcher who they It's kind of unclear exactly what happened.
One story, I think, the story Joanna gave is that

(17:09):
he cheated on her and had a child out of wedlock.
It's not fully clear to me what goes down, but
she divorces him. Right now, she is already she's not
a member of the Nazi Party at this point. By
nineteen twenty nine, she is very much into Nazi type shit.
And there's a lot of the far right at this
point in twenty nine is bigger and broader than just Nazis.

(17:33):
There's all sorts of groups that are eventually the way
that like Bavarians and Prussians get folded into all being German,
we fold them into Nazis. Now she is into a
lot of extreme right wing stuff, some of which a
lot of which gets folded into the Nazis at the time.
But you might find that surprising, mixed with the fact
that she gets a divorce, that she is the because

(17:53):
we have this idea of Nazis as basically more extreme
versions of religious conservatives right the ones that we deal
with today, and they hate the idea of a woman
being able to divorce her husband. That is not an
accurate depiction of the Nazis. The Nazis embraced conservatives, they
eventually co opted conservative parties and the political power that

(18:14):
that gave them, But the Nazis were radicals. Their goal
was to radically remake society, and the leadership of the
Nazis loved the concept of divorce. Heinrich Himmler encouraged divorced
and wanted it to be easy for both men and
women because letting people split up from partners they disliked
would encourage them to raise big families. Right, they support

(18:37):
divorce because they think it enables more love matches that
will lead to a lot of kids. The Nazis are
not anti sex. They are anti homosexuality, for darn sure
of particularly male homosexuality. They're a little softer on lesbians,
the Nazis, but the Nazi and again, yeah, eventually, because
there are a lot of homosexual Nazis in this early

(18:58):
period that we're talking about. But the Nazis are one
of the conflicts they have with the Christian Conservatives that
they co opt is the Nazis are very pro sex,
and not just pro having families, but pro like the
female orgasm as a concept, Like there is Nazi writing
on that, and like the SS digest Again, people, this

(19:19):
very rarely gets delved into because it's really uncomfortable to
look at. But the Nazis are radicals, right, and that
means they are for reimagining every aspect of society.

Speaker 3 (19:29):
I think that it like really shows that because fascism
doesn't come out of the traditional conservative right, it comes
out of people with similar values to that who are
looking at the strategies and the concepts of the left
and are like, how do we apply that to right
the right wing and nationalism instead?

Speaker 2 (19:47):
You know, yeah, and that is this again, this comes
from like there's this this this attitude which is not
morally wrong. Where're like, at a certain point, everyone just
fighting under that flag was a Nazi. But if you
look at like a conservative Catholic who voted for the
Nazis because he thought it was the best alternative to
the Communists as the same as Heinrich Himmler, you're going

(20:07):
to miss a lot of who Himmler was and what
he believed because he had a lot of disagreements with
that Gatholic you know, right. Yeah, And so again, when
we're talking about this period in the late twenties, the
Nazis are kind of more fit. In the early thirties,
the Nazis are more famous for wanting to abolish specific
sexual taboos than being obsessed with them. Herbert Marcuse, a

(20:27):
critic of the Nazis who wound up working for the OSS,
listed his complaints against the Nazi ideology this way. Quote
the deliberate herding of boys and girls in the training camps,
the license granted to the racial elite, the facilitation of
marriage and divorce, the sanctioning of illegitimate children. So you
can see part of why this appeals to her. She
grows up with the shame of being an illegitimate child,

(20:49):
and a big thing that guys like Himler and Hitler
say is that there is no such If you are aryan,
you're legitimate. It doesn't matter if your parents weren't married,
it doesn't matter if your dad was fucking around on
a bunch of people. As long as you're Bloe Boodline
is good, that's all we care about. It matters. Yeah,
exactly exactly.

Speaker 3 (21:07):
Which is Schreber's ideas applied to the nation instead of
the home. The like corrective force comes from not just Schreber.
But yeah, yeah, you know, a lot, a lot of
this is coming together, right. Yeah, again, we're picking two people.
I hope, I'm I'm repeatedly reinforcing the trends that lead
to this are larger than those two people. Yeah, they're
not even dominos in the chain, because there's like it's

(21:28):
not a single chain. It's like a field of dominoes. Yeah,
they're like individual dominoes, and a two dimensional not one
dimensional domino. That's a totally useful metaphor anyway, I like it.

Speaker 2 (21:40):
In nineteen thirty eight, the Nazis actually introduced new divorce
legislation that make it legal for the first time in
Germany to break up based on the grounds of emotional incompatibility.
That is, that is a thing the Nazis introduced into
German law. You can get divorced if you don't like
each other anymore. In the book Sex after Fascism, which
is an amazing book very well worth reading, Dagmar Herzog

(22:02):
writes other grounds for divorce could be found in failure
to engage in sexual intercourse and thereby fulfill one's marital duties,
and the use of contraception, and in childlessness. While early
on in the Third Reich, the Nazi mouthpiece Folcusho Beobacter
had announced explicitly that Nazism opposed divorce, while invoking the
popular phrase marriages are made in heaven. By nineteen thirty nine,

(22:23):
in the same paper was publishing articles that not only
sought to help women accept the new divorce regulations, but
glorified divorce and remarriage as an appropriate means of following
the inner law of one's life and nature. And so again,
you can find plenty of Nazis being like divorce is horrible,
just like you can find Nazis saying contraceptions horrible. You
can also find them like a lot of embracing these

(22:46):
kind of conservative attitudes towards sex is done when they
need the conservatives. And then these more radical attitudes that
are that are argued towards expanding the size of the
VULK get to come out in the late thirties where
they're like, no, no, no, people should be able to
split up. And also if your husband has a bunch
of mistresses, mistresses, you should maybe be fine with that

(23:06):
as long as he's having kids with them. And right, like,
and it'll be the job to support these kids. We
have homes for single mothers where like you can come
if you get knocked up by some ss man, and
the state will help you raise your children. You know,
when Matters is misntimizing gun kids. Now we need so
many more kids now that there's machine guns. It's you
thought it was easy to kill kids in nineteen hundred,

(23:28):
It is so easy to kill kids in the forties. Yeah,
we're gonna need a lot of your children very quickly. Yeah.
So yeah, and I think this gets it like a
mistake people will still make about modern fascists. You get
some story about like Roger Stone, how he's really a
swinger who does like drugs pretending to be this Christian
conservative or like Trump is the opposite of the person
he's evangelical followers claim to support. And you get a

(23:52):
lot of liberals and even leftists who will like point
out these elements of what they see as hypocrisy as
as if it's a weakness, when it's really evidence of
a strength, which is that fascists are great at making
temporary alliances to gain power and lying about what they
believe to gain power, and their supporters, who are like
believe different things than them, and a lot of cases

(24:13):
are much more religiously conservative, are willing to work with
them to kill the people they hate. Yeah, it's it's
it's very frustrating to me when people look at that
as like, but they're not you know, they shouldn't support
this man. It's like, well, that's not looking because yeah,
that's that's all it's about, is power, you know.

Speaker 3 (24:34):
But this, like, sometimes I have a certain amount of
respect for someone who's my ideological foe as long who
is ideologically consistent. I'm not going to find that in
the in the far right.

Speaker 2 (24:46):
No, no, no, like no, because that's not the kind
of people that they are. Yeah, in Weimar, Germany, the
Nazis made hay out of stories of drugs and homosexual
debauchery in Berlin as part of their campaign to get
middle of the road Protestants and Catholics to pick them
over these scary atheist communists and socialists who are you know,
in reality also fighting each other as often as anybody else.

(25:07):
Once the Nazis were in power, these same Christians were
often frustrated by the fact that Nazism was not very
compatible with Christianity, and in fact, if you're looking at
guys like Himmler, sought to kind of destroy Christianity as
it existed, but by then it was too late in
Joanna's case though. Now back to back to our lady Joanna,
her first husband maybe cheats on her, maybe she just

(25:28):
doesn't get along with them. Either way, they get a divorce.
And it is interesting if her husband cheated on her
and got a friend of hers pregnant, which is what
she told her kids. That is behavior the Nazis encouraged. Right,
wives are kind of advised to ignore, especially like wives
in the SS. A lot of writings in the SS
magazine kind of resemble fascist swinger culture where they're talking

(25:51):
about like it's really weird to read now, but anyway,
her divorce is both evidence that like, she is not
fully bought in on all of the things the Nazis
are going to argue for, but also there's a lot
of opportunity for a woman like her in the Nazi Party, because,
for one thing, they don't believe that there's any shame
in being born out of wedlock, and for another thing,

(26:13):
they don't believe that there's any shame in being a divorcee. Right, yeah,
like that does not lock you out of anything in
the Nazi social hierarchy. In nineteen thirty two, she got
married for the second time, to a pulmonary specialist named
Otto Herrr. Their daughter later described the union as one
of great love for her father and a welcome anchor
for Joanna. They had their first twins the next year,

(26:34):
nineteen thirty three, when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Having
served as a full physician for less than ten years,
Joanna had to find like, basically she has to quit
her job as a doctor because work while having twins
is not possible. So she quits her job, and this
kind of fills her with frustration. She has been such
a drifven person her entire life. She can't just switch

(26:57):
off to caring for kids, right and doing nothing else.
She is too ambitious and more to the point, she's
a terrible mother. Right, she has just lost a TikTok. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
She's one of those people who she can't continue what
she had been doing when she has kids. But she's
also not going to raise them and what we would
recognize as raising your kids. So she has a lot

(27:20):
of time for a side hustle. Yeah, and that side
hustle is she starts putting together like articles on how
to raise kids the National Socialist way. She starts your
career as a writer, publishing articles for the Nazi Party newspaper,
the Vulksurebeobacter. These were successful enough that she approached a publisher,
Julius LeMans, to write a full book on child rearing.

(27:41):
They accepted even though she had no pediatric training and
that their grounds are basically, well, she's a mom, right,
that's all she should need to be able to write
a book. This is This is literally what the publisher
wrote later. The fortunate circumstance that this physician was also
a wife and young mother who had not simply gained
her experiences as a physician, but with her own children
that gave her books qualities which others did not have.

Speaker 3 (28:04):
I mean, this would be true right now if you
were like, I have a PhD and a child, they'd
be like, of course you can write a book. You're
also a little correct political party.

Speaker 2 (28:12):
Absolutely, it would only be easier to be this lady today.
And that's why there's like a million of her, one
of whom just pled guilty to child abuse. Right That
is kind of why I started this episode with that story.
But you know who never repleat Wow, shit, Margaret, how's
some ads sound? Do that sound good to you? I

(28:34):
love that about child abuse.

Speaker 3 (28:35):
I think it's so excited every time I get an
opportunity to learn about a new product or service.

Speaker 2 (28:41):
Absolutely, that's where I am. Baby, we're back.

Speaker 3 (28:50):
So now that we're back, if you just you're just
here for the ads, just press forward a bunch of
times until you get to the bumper music and then
you can hear the ads.

Speaker 2 (28:59):
If you listen to the for like the four minutes
of ads in every single episode. That's what you do
in every week yeah, because I mean the number of
people who listen to that has to be one person
who's like, ah, well they get through these fucking history stories,
so I can hear an ad Yeah, I want to
know about Chumba. Goddamnit.

Speaker 3 (29:17):
That was the one that was in my mind too.

Speaker 2 (29:22):
So she's been some time first year or so that
she's got kids writing articles for this, you know, the
big Nazi party paper about child rearing, and then she decides,
and this is always a bad idea to write a book.
It's a particularly bad idea in her case because the
book that she decided to write wasn't a really good

(29:42):
work of fiction like your book The Sapling Cage Mark.
It was a real stinker of a tone with the
snoozeworthy title The German Mother and her First Child. Oh shit,
was that the title of the sequel? Because you might need.

Speaker 3 (29:55):
To change No, No, it's okay, yeah, no, I because
you didn't say in the original German and my sequel
is going to be in German.

Speaker 2 (30:02):
Yeah, yeah, all German. Yes, you're using chatchypet for that entirely.

Speaker 3 (30:05):
It's gonna yeah, totally. This is this is the equivalent
of spreading a rumor that someone has murdered someone, as
if you spread rumors that I use arpeicial intelligence for
fiction for German.

Speaker 2 (30:17):
Yeah, no, just to translate it, just.

Speaker 3 (30:19):
To translate it totally. Yeah, only my German works are easily.

Speaker 2 (30:25):
Joanna was essentially a career woman who had been forced
to curtail her career to raise kids. Her conclusion as
a result of this was that children, This is what
her book is about. Children are distractions. They are petty
irritants and even tyrants that need to have their will
broken so that they can be molded to more conveniently
fit into society. And one, you know, it's this lady

(30:47):
is so Shrebber is such a complex figure and you
have to like have it. She is just the worst
person who ever lived.

Speaker 3 (30:54):
She just shouldn't have had children. She didn't want them,
she shouldn't have It's fine. Abortions, well no, not well,
actually the Nazis were pro abortion for certain people.

Speaker 2 (31:04):
Yes, they sure were very pro for certain people. You
can't box them in simply there.

Speaker 3 (31:10):
No, you can put them in the Nazi box. You
Nazis were pro abortion. Someone would think for five minutes
and be like, not for white people, you know, I.

Speaker 2 (31:20):
Do just to go back to an earlier thing. I
do support looking at Nazis as two boxes. Nazis of
convenience because you wanted something at Nazis because being a
Nazi was your Again, the hip like Himmler is the
perfect example of the Nazis because Nazism, right, Yeah, Himmler
had a bunch of really weird specific shit he believed,

(31:41):
you know, as opposed to like again some of some
of these like religious conservatives who didn't agree with a
lot of these other weird Nazi idea. Yeah, I think
that's kind of worth it. And Joanna is a Himmler Nazi.
She is a weird specific, fucking Nazi. And in one
chapter of her books she urges quote the child is
to be fed bait and dry it off. Apart from that,
left completely alone. This is here talking about like the

(32:05):
contact you should have with your child as a as
a parent. You feed them, you bathe them, you dry
them off. You never touch them. Otherwise, they do not
have physical contact with the adults in their life other
than that. This process of total physical separation from their
parents was to begin immediately after birth, as soon as
the umbilical cord was cut. She recommended that infants be

(32:26):
left isolated for the first twenty four hours after birth,
locked alone in a room. Oh my god, it's like
the most you see again with Schreber, you see like, oh,
this guy was dealing with struggling with some of these compulsions,
and he's trying to solve these real problems. With Joanna,
you're like, oh, you just hated kids.

Speaker 3 (32:46):
Yeah, you just hatred of a marginalized group. Only your
marginalized group is children.

Speaker 2 (32:52):
Yeah, your own children are marginalized, which is kind of
the Nazi story writ large in a lot of ways.

Speaker 3 (32:58):
Totally, the greatest mess has got a lot of white
Germans killed.

Speaker 2 (33:03):
Yes, yes, more than almost anyone. The greatest mistake, in
Joanna's eyes, that a parent could make would be to
pay any attention at all to their children's tears. If
you react to a baby when it cries, quote, the
child will quickly understand that all he needs to do
is cry in order to attract a sympathetic soul and
become the object of caring. Within a short time, he
will demand this service as a right, leave you no

(33:25):
peace until he is carried again, cradled, or stroked, And
with that, a tiny but implacable house tyrant is formed.

Speaker 3 (33:34):
I really I want to to write a children's book
called The Tiny Implacable House Tyrants. But it's a pro
the two year old.

Speaker 2 (33:42):
You know, yeah, you see where the there's a kernel
of truth here every parent that sometimes the little kid
is like, oh my god, they've turned into a little tyrant. Right,
And like very young children, younger than you would expect,
learn how to like fake cry to get attention. Right,
they're learning because they need attention. Is this is you

(34:03):
can call it manipulation. That's literally what it is. It's
not abnormal or a sign that a child is unhealthy.
It's a sign that they are learning how to communicate
and what it means to be a person. And like
decent parents understand that, Like, well, if you're if your
kid is fate crying for attention, you don't want to
give them the same attention that they get when they
are actually crying. But you don't just ignore them or

(34:26):
lock them alone in a room, because that's child abuse, right,
I think.

Speaker 3 (34:32):
Adults they don't in front of people.

Speaker 2 (34:35):
Yeah, you can nicely say, like I know that that's
not real. You didn't really hit yourself, you like fell
down and stop yourself from hitting yourself. And now you're
fate crying and like I can see that that's fake. Like,
come on, let's go do something else. Right, You don't
lock them alone in a room and never touch them
for eighteen years. You know, there there are a wide variety.

(34:55):
I'll say this, I think there's a variety of ways
to deal with this behavior from children. None of them
how Joanna teaches people how to do this.

Speaker 3 (35:02):
It's yeah, totally, because it's like, very rarely is lock
anyone into a room by themselves, right for more than
like fifteen minutes a solution to anything.

Speaker 2 (35:12):
Yeah, yeah, Like I lock myself in a room sometimes
away from people. But yeah, that's that's a matter of
personal choice. Ye. Yes, I have been described in such
a way. Sigrid Chamberlain, who analyzed Herr's book and detail
in a book of her own, summarized Joanna's attitude towards

(35:34):
child rearing this way. So from the first minute of life,
everything was done to encourage the inability to have a relationship.
Everything that promoted relationships was forbidden because the main goal
was not to let the relationship between the mother or
parents and the child arise. In the first place. This
is also the purpose of Harror's demands not to spend
any time together except for feeding, changing diapers, getting dressed,

(35:54):
in bathing. For this, however, exact periods of time were given.
Bottle feeding should never take longer than ten minutes, breastfeeding
no longer than twenty minutes. If the child strolls or dottles,
feeding or breastfeeding should be stopped. There is no food
again until the next scheduled meal. If the child is
hungry by then, firstly, it serves him well, and secondly,
he learns that he will have to hurry up next time.

(36:18):
That's such a bad way to be a parrot. I
probably don't need to say. Keep in mind, this lady's
a Nazi, right, It's not hard to but I should
emphasize her book also includes a great deal of what
you might call social Darwinian child wearing philosophy. Adults are
put him in the trenches and see if they survive
mustard gas. Yeah, yes, see if they're immune to the

(36:40):
machine guns yet, if we bred that into him yet?
No yet, next generation, keep them coming. Eventually we'll build
the German that's immune to Russian bullets.

Speaker 3 (36:50):
I can feel it.

Speaker 2 (36:51):
We're close. Yeah. So in one of the ways in
which this manifested is that adults Joanna encourages like parents
and adults around children to point out anytime a child
makes a mistake or exhibits a weakness in an area.
If they like exhibit that they're weak or flawed in
an area, you point it out in front of everyone,
and you mock it in public every time. It happens.

(37:13):
Every time. Yeah, every parent should be a gym teacher.
That is the Joanna Harrr method. That is how the
Nazi society works. Yeah. The primary job Herro describes the
primary job of a good teacher as being to make
fun of kids, basically for being wrong about things, not
to teach them, but to make them shamed of their ignorance.

(37:37):
Super funny. Harrr describes her teachings as modern and scientific,
and Adolf Hitler himself agreed. He personally recommends her book
to German parents like she is the Hitler approved mom
fluencer of the Third Reich. The op Hitler is. Hitler
is the Oprah of Germany and this period He's got

(37:58):
a lot of oprahsque quality. A captivating narrator look we
can say it. Yeah, and he's rout of cars. He
did give everyone go oh my god, Margaret the greater
Oprah theory of Nazism scanning a lot of traction. And

(38:22):
like Oprah, he's really good at selling books because he
recommends her book to the whole German Reich and it
sells more than one point two million copies, which is
pretty good for now. That's a lot back then. Yeah,
that's like three days of deaths on the Eastern Front,
you know. So if you're wondering how this kind of

(38:43):
parenting might impact a child, so did Klaus Grossman, who
is a he's a modern day researcher. He's actually retired now,
but during the latter half of the twentieth century was
a leading researcher on mother child attachment from the University
at Regensburg. He told Scientific American quote Juanna Herr's view,
it is important to deny caring when a child asks

(39:04):
for it, but each refusal means rejection. Grossman explains. The
only means of communication open to a newborn or facial
expression in gestures. He adds, if no response is forthcoming,
children learn that nothing they try to communicate means anything. Moreover,
infants experience existential fear when they are alone and hungry
and receive no comfort from their attachment figure. In the

(39:25):
worst case, such experiences lead to a form of insecure
attachment that makes it difficult to enter into relationships with
other people in later life. That is not It seems obvious,
but again this is very controversial amongst Nazis.

Speaker 3 (39:39):
That like, it's a it's a self fulfilling freud Yes,
it's like you create people with Freudian style attachment problems
by raising them in this way.

Speaker 2 (39:50):
Yeah, by very purposefully going about this.

Speaker 3 (39:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:53):
Now, I started episode one of this series by referencing
a recently disgraced momfluencer. And while that was kind of
a joke for doctor Schreber comparing him to a mo influencer,
Juanna Horror is literally her generation social media mommy guru.
She even writes a Nazi children's book, mother tell me
about Adolf Hitler. She does christ, It's so fun. The

(40:25):
implacable child. Yeah, the implacable child. Oh tell me about
Adolf Hitler. You shouldn't be surprised to hear that this
is a racist book. Time Magazine. German Time Magazine notes
that in the book quote Jews creep like cats, so
that the dogs strike. The Jew should be chased away.

(40:47):
He is foreign to us, he doesn't concern us, and
always just wanted to harm us. God the book ends
sent us a leader like the world has never seen him.
We want to believe him, trust him, follow him wherever
he leads, now and always. This is again published in
nineteen forty. I have found some pictures of this book
on auction websites, and it mostly looks like a normal

(41:08):
child's book for the era, with black and white illustrations
every couple of pages. But I found a list of
the table of contents that gives you an idea of
the thrust of the story. Chapter one, from the Great War,
How the War ended. From Adolf Hitler's homeland, Adolf Hitler
starts his fight. Adolf Hitler wants to help Germany. How
he was betrayed from Germany's worst time. Adolf Hitler starts

(41:30):
fighting again. Doctor Gerbels fights for Berlin. Adolf Hitler becomes
our furor and reich Chancellor. Adolf Hitler provides working bread.
Adolf Hitler alleviates the misery in Germany. Adolf Hitler creates
the German Wehrmacht. Adolf Hitler continues to build the Third
Reich to shame. The book stops right before the Hitler
story gets good. She's like, right at the cusp of
things getting interesting, Adolf Hitler alone in the bunker. Yeah,

(41:55):
Adolf Hitler with a thirty eight or thirty two. Yeah, yeah,
Adolf Hitler gets all of the German boys raised on
Joanna's books killed outside of Stalingrat.

Speaker 3 (42:09):
Adol Hitler finally learns perspective, and his paintings just kidding,
could never happen.

Speaker 2 (42:14):
Yeah, No, he absolutely doesn't get that shit right.

Speaker 3 (42:17):
One of my favorite things in the world is when
every now and then, some like Nazi on Twitter is like, see, look,
isn't he an amazing painter, And it's just like, no, man,
this isn't the thing that I want to argue about
Hitler about No, but no, the answer is no.

Speaker 2 (42:31):
But like, if he was an eighth grader, I'd say
he's got promise he.

Speaker 3 (42:35):
Could have He could could have become a decent painter
if he'd continued to if he learned perspective. And I
think people.

Speaker 2 (42:42):
Who were like he could have been like a middle
class architect and made houses and probably been okay at something. Yeah,
but that was not what was going to make Hitler happy.
Nothing actually made Hitler happy. He was a pretty fundamentally
unhappy man. But that's a story for several other days
that we've talked about at length.

Speaker 3 (43:03):
No one really talks about Hitler. That's the thing, is, Yeah,
that's the thing. Podcasters never really bring that man up.
They're afraid to. Yeah, they hitting only people who are
brave enough to go on a tangent about Hitler.

Speaker 2 (43:15):
Uh huh, yeah, only this podcast. That's why they call
him Hitler, the man who failed to launch a thousand podcasts.

Speaker 3 (43:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:23):
So anyway, I bet you're wondering believing all these things
that she does and preaching them to other Nazis. What
was Joanna like as a mother? Did she actually abide
by her own teachings? And unfortunately, yes, just for the sake, Yeah,
just for the sake of her daughters. You'd wish she
had been a hypocrite, but she is not. Joanna's diather,

(43:45):
Gertrude would later claim to Time magazine that her mother
strictly abided by the parenting teaching she believed in. This
led Gertrude to be desperate for affection and deeply cut
off from her parents, but physically tough. She later recalled this.
I broke my arm during a bike trip with my
sister in a fall, but we drove on to a
forest spent the day there. Although my arm grew thicker

(44:05):
and thicker, I could only drive back with one hand.
We still went to an ice cream parlor on Leopold Strasa.
The bright madness but typical. I was even proud that
I endured the pain and was tough, And that is
she has. That's horrible. A child should not fight through
the pain of breaking her own arm on a bicycle.

(44:28):
She should go receive medical attention. But this is what
the Nazis wanted. We're going to talk a little bit
more about this later, but she, Gertrude is a little girl.
Is the kind of kid that Joanna and Hitler are
aiming to create. Now that whole interview with Gertrude is translated,
I did like an automatic Google translate, much like we

(44:49):
were joking about earlier, from German into English. So I
noticed that that Gertrude repeatedly referred to Joanna not as
my mother but as the mother, and I was like, Oh,
that's probably some sort of like translation fuck up. But
then later in the interview, the interview was like, you
only refer to your mom as the mother, not as
my mother. That's kind of weird, and Gertrude clarifies that's

(45:11):
how she saw. She was never my mother. She was
the mother, that was her title, but she was not
my mom quoto. She was always the mother. There was distance.
The mother was the highest authority. And that is so
profoundly fucked damn like that is I hope not the daughter.

(45:34):
I hope the mom finds a way to somehow die
in the war. Alas, No, the good news is that
neither of her daughters are Nazis, and in fact both
thoroughly reject their mother.

Speaker 3 (45:45):
They make some hard ass partisans. I gotta say, they
wouldn't have to be able to go all day without
with a broken arm if you're gonna be a partisan.

Speaker 2 (45:53):
Yeah, I mean, Alas, they are too young to have
gotten to do that, but fair enough they become the
moral equivalent as adults, a celebrity in the Third Reich.
The first seven or so years that Hitler's in power
are great for Joanna and her family. They get very wealthy.
She deliberately cultivates a career within the Nazi Party, and
not just as an author and a doctor. From an

(46:14):
article in the Journal of German History quote from nineteen
thirty five until at least nineteen thirty nine, she thus
worked as a regional specialist for racial policies for the
Munich National Socialist Women's League and the Racial Policy Office.
She also worked for the Mother and Child Relief Agency,
an agency set up in nineteen thirty four by the
National Socialist People's Welfare Organization, which had as its aim

(46:35):
to stand by a German mother in physical, spiritual or
emotional need and to help an hereditarily healthy child to
healthy development. So she's doing the worst thing that she
could be doing, which is giving other moms direct advice
and also directing Nazi policy for welfare from mothers. Right,
she is helping the establishment of what are called mutter schools,

(46:56):
which are like the mother's schools. This is German schools
where especially if you're like a single mom. It's not
just single moms, but like you can go to learn
how to be a mother and get help raising your kid, you.

Speaker 3 (47:06):
Know, which is pretty easy. It's just a bunch of
rooms and there's one room per kid, and you throw
the kid in the room and there's nothing to do.

Speaker 2 (47:13):
Yeah, just lock them alone in a room. Simple, Yeah,
the Nazi method of parenting. Joanna was constantly in demand
as a speaker and a writer, publishing article after article
on the on the parenting methods that young Germans needed
to make their children fit for Hitler's command to be
hard as Krupstahl. This is important to understand again. This

(47:33):
makes her not complaining about her broken armstrong. Hitler's literal
command was I want children who were as hard as
the metal from which we make our guns. When you
refer to Krupstahl, you're not just referring to like industrial steel.
You're specifically referring to the steel we use for cannons.
That's what our children need to be, right, okay, And

(47:54):
that is what Joanna is helping parents create. Speaking of
making your children harder than Crup steel. Margaret Killjoy, do
you know what? This podcast is sponsored by? Gun Steel,
the Tyson Crup company who today makes all of our elevators.
It's fine, don't look into it. Also submarines, it's fine,

(48:15):
don't look into it. I'm pro submarines for rich people.
Now you know what I've come around. Maybe CRUPP could
solve some problems for us, although they might build good
ones and so I actually should stay out of that.
I think they mostly build functional ones for like the
Egyptian Navy. I haven't heard of the Egyptian Navy doing
much with submarines, but they're probably not up to anything

(48:37):
good with them. Most navies aren't with their submarines.

Speaker 3 (48:40):
As a general rule.

Speaker 2 (48:41):
We made the transition at some point from like submarines
are to be to allow nations to interdict shipping and
destroy battleships to submarines contain world ending death weapons. They're
what we used to end all life if we have to.

Speaker 3 (48:56):
That's true. My grandfather was a torpedo, torpedo and submarine
in the South Pacific and World War Two, but I
don't think he had nuclear capability.

Speaker 2 (49:07):
No, no, It's one of my favorite stories is that
like the French, who have nukes, you know, they have
their nuclear subs, Like the British, they always have some
subs out with nukes so that if something happens they
can contribute to ending all life on Earth. And when
COVID hit they had to like not tell anyone aboard
for like the last two months, like the first two
months of the pandemic, they were just locking everyone down

(49:29):
from outside contact because they were like, well, if everyone
loses their minds in here, that maybe their relatives are
dying of the plague above. Like they've got all these nukes.
We got to be really careful with what we tell
these people until they surface.

Speaker 3 (49:42):
Except then you're like, you know, we've cut off communication.
They're like they must be like, we've lost communication with
the whole land. We better nuke Russia.

Speaker 2 (49:48):
I think it's one of those things they regularly are like,
no one's going to talk to you for two months
your submarine. People deal with it.

Speaker 3 (49:55):
Yeah, Okay.

Speaker 2 (49:56):
My guess is that that's just kind of a thing
you get people use. It's like making them hardest.

Speaker 3 (50:00):
Crubstall I think of my grandfather as as hard as Crubstall,
because he would just go and into a coffin, into
a war zone and be like and like one day
he like filled out a little form and went off
to college and then is like the next mission or something,
or maybe two missions later, his his submarine didn't come back. Yeah,
So because they send him to school for engineering and

(50:21):
he didn't die in a call survived.

Speaker 2 (50:23):
God. Yeah. I have a friend who was a sub
pilot during like the Cold War. There's a book called
blind Man's Bluff about the ky but it was like
Soviet and American subs basically playing chicken to try to
force the ether to surface. And so he has all
these stories about like I am standing in a very
crowded room doing math in my head as quickly as possible,
and if I or anyone else fucks up, we might

(50:45):
all die in a crack like and maybe everybody dies,
you know, because.

Speaker 3 (50:50):
By the way, is the best ad transition anyone has
ever done on a podcast.

Speaker 2 (50:55):
Submarines, they're real fucked up folks.

Speaker 4 (50:57):
Yeah, we're back and we're thinking about the concept of
submarines being I mean, when you raise children the way
that Joanna Harror did, it does make it easier to
lock them into a metal death tube.

Speaker 3 (51:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:18):
Look, it'll be over soon. You're in a submarine. It's
not gonna last very long. My granddad was a hobo
before that.

Speaker 3 (51:26):
He wrote freight trains around and stuff like, you know,
it was used to being in a scary metal box.
It was that I popped freight trains and I'm not
getting into a submarine.

Speaker 2 (51:36):
No, it used to be this is my this all
when I write my my Momfluencer book, Margaret, Everything's going
to come down to the fact that it used to
get easier, to be easier to get kids on submarines,
and it's hard now, and that's why our culture's sick.
You can't force kids to die underwater as easily.

Speaker 3 (51:53):
A generation afraid of submarines causes the world to go.

Speaker 2 (51:57):
Soft cowardice, cowardice. We need to all be like the
people in the TV show Sques DSV starring Roy Scheider,
the drunk sheriff from Jaws, as basically Captain Picard been
at a big submarine. It's a good show. That was Dolphin.

Speaker 3 (52:13):
We do need to all be like that.

Speaker 2 (52:15):
There's an episode where William Shatner plays Slowbod on Thelossovic.
It's quite a series. Anyway, back to.

Speaker 3 (52:25):
The Nazira.

Speaker 2 (52:26):
Yeah, So Joanna sees yourself not just as an academic,
but as a racial soldier preparing the future armies of
Germany in a forward to her book on parenting, written
in nineteen forty. It gets another edition at the start
of the war. She wrote, quote, today we are witnessing
a large scale campaign by our government in which the
healthy genome and the racially valuable are defended against everything

(52:50):
sick and declining. She expresses praise against the anti Semitic
Nuremberg laws pleads for the four child marriage in order
to counter the quote huge danger of popular death, which
is how like the German got translated. I don't know
how to better translate that, but I think that means basically,
we're about to be feeding a lot of our boys
to machine guns. You need to make more of them. Oh,

(53:13):
I just think it was like a great replacement type thing.
But yeah, no, no, no, no, like we the Nazis
are about to get rid of a lot of these kids.

Speaker 3 (53:22):
Yeah, okay, okay, yeah, now.

Speaker 2 (53:25):
This is all pretty dark. But there's a darker corollary here,
which is that, since the Reich needed large families to
counter all of the deaths they were about to cause
for their children, kids who refuse to be raised into
obedient Nazis are in the same spectrum as race traders. Right,
this is not just this is how you have to
raise your kid. If your kid is not perfectly obedient,

(53:49):
your kid is a race trader, and they have to
be broken until they fit the mold gutrn Haher's own
sister was disobedient, and this is how she recalls her
mother reacting quote, she wanted to break my sister's will.
When I think of it, I always have in mind
how to break apart a flexible young hazel nut. So
the inns are split in the air.

Speaker 3 (54:14):
The future belongs to me. I'm not saying that song.
Never mind me, no, no, it's not so. The response
within Nazi Germany to Harirr's ideas was massive. Thousands of
mothers even wrote the publisher letters thanking them for the
invaluable service of providing a work of national socialist parenting advice.
Now it's worth acknowledging Joanna is not an iconoclast within

(54:35):
the budding field of child development experts in the United States.
John Watson, the American founder of behavioralism, recommended that parents
not let children sit on their lap and that they
not kiss their children.

Speaker 2 (54:46):
A lot of and he's not the only one. A
lot of prominent parenting influencers, I guess of the time academics,
particularly talking about parenting, did recommend against is, particularly the
level of physical contact between parents and kids that we
know is healthy today, Like we have a deep understanding
of how necessary that is.

Speaker 3 (55:05):
But the kissing your kids thing, when you watch like
old movies and read old books, it's like uncomfortable because
parents like kiss their children sometimes on the mouth, and
that's like not normal, and modern society is this when
that goes away, this.

Speaker 2 (55:19):
Is part like that is some people are pushing against that, right.
This is again the world thennis as complicated as the
world today, a bit smaller because the population was. But
even within German society, these attitudes towards parenting and within
American society, these attitudes towards parenting are not universal. And

(55:39):
I find what Gertrude Horror writes in Time here kind
of valuable and kind of trying to determine. Okay, so
other people were taught. We're talking in similar ways about like, well,
maybe you shouldn't kiss your kids, you shouldn't touch your kids.
As much to what Joanna was saying, what made her
methods of child rearing unique, And this is what her
daughter writes, there is a German peculiarity. In the Nazi era,

(56:02):
these concepts did not remain an expert discourse, but reached
the base the parents, especially through Joanna Harrer's books. They
were so hugely popular because a mother spoke to mothers
in them. Because in Germany the mothers may have been
more receptive to horror as authoritarian determination, because their principles
fit so perfectly with the Nazi ideology that wanted their

(56:22):
youth as hard as krupshtall, and because the Nazis made
their books of standard works in mother schools. So again,
what Gertrude is saying is that sure, you can say
John Watson is saying some similar things in America about
how you shouldn't kiss your kids. There are you know,
British and other in other parts of the West, there
are child development experts that are urging less contact between
parents and kids, but they are doctors and experts. Joanna

(56:45):
was a mother and that is why her work has
much more influence in Germany than some similar ideas have
in other countries, because it's coming from a mom.

Speaker 3 (56:56):
Yeah, and just they're like being a popular author thing.
It's just like, yes, screaming popular is then like sells
a lot of books, although that's part of it, but
like literally like populism popular.

Speaker 2 (57:07):
Yes, yes, yes, that is also very important, and it
is important to note that like she is not just,
she is specifically advocating her attitude towards national socialist mothering
right in the post war era. This distinction gets lost
Joanna's book I told you, it's sold one point two
million copies. Half of those are after the Nazis fall.

(57:28):
They like edit the book to cut out some of
the Hitler stuff, and it stays. It continues to be popular, right,
and so it kind of gets it gets sort of
marked down as just being well. She was one of
many authoritarian parenting experts, but Sigrid Chamberlain describes Herror as
not just an authoritarian parenting guru, but a national socialist

(57:49):
parenting guru. And I want to quote now from an
article by Katherina Rowold in the Journal of German History.
At the heart of her analysis of Herr's manuals lies
the contention that this childcare expert promoted ways of caring
for babies that consciously sought to prevent the formation of
secure attachment between mother and child. Chamberlain sees an initial
lack of attachment leading to an inability to form other

(58:11):
attachments later in life as the distinguishing factor of a
national socialist upbringing. Considering herself to have experienced such an upbringing,
Chamberlain is primarily concerned with understanding the psychological repercussions of
this early childhood socialization, even though the Third Reich existed
for only twelve years. She explains this upbringing created particular
damage a million times. Okay, now there's a lot of

(58:34):
debate over this. This is a period of significant historical contention,
Herror's work. How to see it? Is this authoritarian parenting?
Is it national socialist parenting? How should we look at this?
I am sympathetic with how Chamberlain analyzes this, but will
there's disagreement with that substantially. There's debate over like whether
or not you should because there is evidence, particularly that

(58:58):
this lack of attachment in in German culture between mothers
and children goes back further than Joanne, and it definitely does.
You can find evidence of this in Prussia, in Imperial Germany.
There's some even some data on like attachment issues in
different German regions being higher than in other parts of Europe.
And I think it's kind of hard to lock down

(59:19):
how much of this is like, well, Joanna's teachings were
able to get so much more purchase in Nazi Germany
because it was already kind of fertile terrain for them, right,
And that's also part of why Nazism was able to build,
is because these attachment issues make it easier to make
people in the good fascists, and these were more common,
always more common in Germany, you know, starting with kind

(59:40):
of like Prussia. But you know, I think that if
you want to answer the question what kind of children
did Joanna Horror's advice help to create? Specifically, that is
difficult to do because you will be by definition looking
at the generation of Germans born during and right after
the war, which is the kids who are born when

(01:00:02):
her advice on parenting is really popular, and the children
who were born during and after World War Two are
often emotionally stunted and traumatized because of World War Two? Right,
So how do you or at least that's a factor.
So how do you determine how much of it was
her teachings and how much of it was the fact
that they grew up being bombed and dressed in right,
how do you separate those things that actually makes analyzing

(01:00:25):
the impact of Horror's teachings difficult because there's also this war.
It can found.

Speaker 3 (01:00:30):
Something and her own kids are opposed to this ideology
even though they were raised under it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:36):
You know, yes, yes, I think that's one of the
things that's kind of helpful in analyzing like what this does.
But there have been some academics who have tried to
account for, like what was unique about Joanna's teaching methods
and how did it uniquely affect German kids outside of
the damage that was done to all kids who were
involved in World War Two. One of the ways that
this has been accounted for Rowold, in that article for

(01:00:58):
the Journal of German History, compared Herr's child rearing manuals
to popular advice on what was called mother craft in
the UK during the same period. And some of the
logic was that, well, these kids in the UK, a
lot of them get bombed too, you know, they have
these same searing or similar searing experiences. So let's look
at these different parenting gurus and see kind of the

(01:01:20):
different ways in which like kids who were raised and
these methods turned out when we know that they both
had these kind of searing war experiences and the guru
that Rowold compares Herror to that. The her UK counterpart
is a doctor named Frederick Truby King. Like Herr King
was an you know, it was a doctor, but unlike
herr King was a doctor who specialized in children. He's

(01:01:41):
a pediatrician. And one way in which their books differ
is that Truby King advised a scientific approach to motherhood,
utilizing rigorous research done into the causes of infant mortality
and sickness to ensure outcomes for children. Harror counseled obedience
to state services, particularly New Reich departmentsablished to encourage racial health,

(01:02:01):
but she also attacked experts who, during the Weimar years
had told German mothers to do things like drink pasteurized
milk and hug their kids. Right. She was like, these doctors,
they don't know what they're doing. As a mother, you
have instincts, and those instincts are that you want to
be as far away from your kids as possible. Lean
into those instincts. That's literally, She's like, too much bookish

(01:02:23):
knowledge will hurt your kids. You just need to ignore them. Yeah, yeah,
row Old rights of her teachings fathers were mostly absent
in all the manuals. For Harror, it was clear that
mothers ought to be caring for young children. To be
a good mother, a woman needed specific characteristics. She had
to be a dutiful, highly principled woman with common sense
who had a sense of order, regularity, punctuality, and cleanliness.

(01:02:45):
Her manuals concurred with Nazi ideology regarding Aryan women, which
stressed their reproductive role in saw their place in the
domestic sphere. It also emphasized the Nazi importance given to blood,
the central metaphor for a mystical conception of race and inheritance.
According to Herr, it was the blood relationship between the
mother and child that made her the best person to
raise her children. This relationship meant that mothers belonged to

(01:03:06):
their children inseparably faithfully. A mother knew the smallest peculiarities
and could understand her child because it was blood of
her blood. Children. However, despite the blood bond, started to
form an emotional bond with the mother only at the
age of about two and a half. According to Harror,
while mothers were but in the best position to raise
their babies and their young children, these were indifferent as

(01:03:26):
to who looked after them until that age. And this
again fits into a lot of these Nazi teachings about
you don't need to have a family unit. You going
to have a dad fertilize a bunch of women, and
for the first two years, it doesn't even matter who
looks after that kid. You can keep them alone in
a room as long as you feed them and clean
the shit off of them. And then you know, the
mother is their real blood and that's who needs to

(01:03:49):
raise them. The father's going to be off dying. You know. Yeah,
it's cool stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:03:53):
It's interesting because it seems like overall, yeah, and maybe
this is just the conception I came in with it.
It's like we have all of these different ideas about
like nature versus nurture, but I think sometimes it's just neither.
It's just like most of the time, most kids kind
of turn out okay, like despite what happens to them.
Like people should try, right, people should try to raise
their kids good, you know, but like overall, it's like

(01:04:17):
kids are resilient on some level, you know, Like.

Speaker 2 (01:04:23):
Like the whole reason why there's hope in humanity is
that even when you try to raise a whole generation
this way, it doesn't work out the way that you want,
but they there has been they have done some research. Again,
it's hard to isolate the war from the impact on
some of these different child rearing experiments. There's a study
by Ilka Quindo of Frankfurt University on the generation born

(01:04:46):
during the war, and it was initially to study the
long term impacts of bombing raids on child development. But
after these initial sort of interviews, the researchers were like,
these people keep talking about like their family experiences, so
we should probably alter the studies to like interview them
more about how they were raised to as children. And

(01:05:07):
they concluded that a lot of the former kids they
interviewed had a pattern of strong loyalty to their parents
and a refusal to admit any conflicts with them that
was like severe enough to be a relational disorder, which
is huh. Quindo is noticing something similar to what Shatzman
noted about Schreber's son, right, that he cannot see his

(01:05:28):
father's having made a mistake even though his parent did
something very bad to hurt him, right, right, And that's
this whole generation of kids like raised under the bombs
have trouble adequately blaming their like like seeing their parents
in some ways they have like this sense of loyalty
to them that is kind of like noted, it's there's

(01:05:49):
a lot of like I don't want to get too
much into like the psychology here, because it's all pretty
wonky and controversial. Quindau has pointed out that Germany is
the only country in Europe where what happened and to
the children of the war has been so broadly discussed,
even though like destruction and bombings you know, occurred in
a lot of other countries, Like German kids were not

(01:06:09):
by far the ones who suffered the most, but they
have been like the impact of the war on them
has been studied the most. And she's also noted that
psychoanalyst Anna Freud found that children with a healthy attachment
to their parents were less traumatized by things like war
and violence than those with a less solid attachment. Putting
everything together, Quindo concludes from the interviews that she conducted

(01:06:30):
about bombings that basically a lot of German children were
still after the war dealing with deep grieving because they
had had like they had not been prepared by their
upbringing to heal from the experience of war. But maybe
that was Like, the more most direct consequence of Joanna's

(01:06:50):
parenting style is that it raised kids who could not
effectively heal and learn from the violence they experienced in
a way they would have been able to if they'd
had more direct attachment to their parents. And that's going
to be really relevant to what we have to talk
about next week, which is what the generations after the
war start to believe about child rearing.

Speaker 3 (01:07:11):
Bet it'll be good because this is the show about.

Speaker 2 (01:07:15):
The show about good stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:07:17):
Flowers in the cracks of the pavement is the name
of this show.

Speaker 2 (01:07:22):
It's good stuff. So again, as I said, like Herr's
book Shorten of some of its worst Nazi dialogue gets
re released after the war and remains a bestseller, and
that's going to be a meaningful part of the story
we tell next week, right, her work kind of helps
prepare a generation of Germans to accept some truly unacceptable things,
or at least makes it more difficult for the war

(01:07:43):
generation to heal. The fact that a lot of kids
are raised according to Joanna's principles is going to have
echoes that go on long after the war. But before
we get to that, I want to end this week
by concluding Joanna's story. As a prominent Nazi with membership
in several party organizations as well as the NSDAP, Joanna

(01:08:03):
was someone who had good reason to fear Allied victory.
And in fact, when the Americans come and like she's
afraid of getting arrested. Leads to the only instance in
Gertrude's childhood where she recalls her mom being physically affectionate
to her and oh, it's so much worse than you
might guess. Quote. Only once in my memory did she

(01:08:24):
hold me in her arms. That was in the war.
During the evacuation, I must have been two years old.
Our father had stayed in Munich with my mother's parents.
He had not been drafted because he was a lung
specialist in Upper Bavaria. We children were evacuated with the
mother in the Hague and Upper Bavaria in an Inn.
When the Americans approached, my mother should talk to them
because she spoke German very well. And then she hugged

(01:08:45):
me because she knew that the Americans were fond of
children's That's the only instance of physical affection I know
Americans like kids, So I'm going to pretend to like
my kids to get better treatment right on time. This
girl's mom holds her.

Speaker 3 (01:09:01):
Oh my god, I was hoping. She just suddenly volunteer
for the inventory, and they created an all women's unit
and they all.

Speaker 2 (01:09:07):
Got no kill. It's not nearly that nice. It is
kind of nice that her attitude is like Americans, the
people who like children. I know it speaks well of us. Yeah, well,
they don't hate their kids. I'd better pretend to like mine.

Speaker 3 (01:09:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:09:23):
Joanna does get interned after the war, as is her husband,
and he is so desperate by the trauma of the
war's ending, of defeat, of being interned, of the loss
of his own hopes for the future, that he commits suicide.
He like flings himself into a river, and Joanna hates
him for it. Shit talks her husband to her daughters
for the rest of their lives for his weakness. Her

(01:09:46):
like her mother's strongest recollection of her mom and dad,
as her mother repeatedly calling her father a coward because
he's afraid to get arrested by the Allies. Such a
piece of shit. Well, Joanna would write summaries of her
own life in the future for professional purposes, she would
spend the rest of her life basically leaving out the
years from nineteen thirty two to forty five. Gertrude did

(01:10:09):
not learn anything about the Nazi period until age fourteen.
And this is amazing. She's in high school and they're
like having a debate in history class, and Gertrude speaks
up in the debate and I don't know what she said,
but her history teacher snaps at her, given what your
mom did, maybe you should keep your mouth shut during
this time, which is damn Even with this experience, Gertrude

(01:10:34):
is never able to talk to her mom about Nazism.
She just says it would have been impossible to talk
to her about this, and I don't think she's wrong.
Gertrude does say my mom was an unrepentant Nazi until
the end. Her sister Anne concurred with this view, telling
an interviewer. Until her death, no one could talk to
her about the Third Reich. All children had to suffer
from the mother's cold feeling while problems within the family

(01:10:56):
were solved with violence. Joanna was not allowed to practice
medicine under the new federal Republic, but she worked in
health departments in Germany until retiring in nineteen sixty five.

Speaker 3 (01:11:06):
The only rather she was a doctor than a bureaucrat.

Speaker 2 (01:11:09):
God, yes, at least a pull monologist. You assume there's
only so much damage a lovely doctor can do. The
only evidence that she suffered at all from her convictions
was the fact that she grew increasingly addicted to alcohol
and pills at some point as she aged, eventually forcing
her daughters to care for her, and Gertrude describes at

(01:11:31):
some point her the mother grows frail and broken enough
that Gertrude starts seeing her as my mother, And this
happened shortly before Joanna dies on April thirtieth, nineteen eighty eight.
She like becomes weak and pitiful enough that Gertrude is
able to view her not as this figure of the mother,
but as my mom.

Speaker 3 (01:11:50):
WHOA, there's so much going on there, I know, and
I'm like going through my own Like I try not
to be like a vengeance girl, but like, yeah, I'm
struggling with some empathy here.

Speaker 2 (01:12:04):
Yeah, there's no empathy to have for Joanna, like for Gertrude. Sure,
for Gertrude n no, my god, like what across to
bear this lady being your mom? Yeah, but no Joanna.

Speaker 1 (01:12:16):
Who do you think would have survived in a room Joanna?
Or the mother god lady that turned silver?

Speaker 2 (01:12:24):
Oh no, Joanna. Joanna would fucking cut that lady.

Speaker 3 (01:12:29):
Oh, I just figure how you're talking about. I assume
you're talking about some weird mythical goddess that was silver
of those people.

Speaker 1 (01:12:37):
Yeah, yeah, where her like cult members kept her dead
body for so many days, so many days.

Speaker 2 (01:12:48):
Yeah, that lady was like very different attitude Joanna. Joanna
could have been a cult leader, but she would have
been like the hitting kind of cult leader.

Speaker 3 (01:12:56):
She would have loved scientology.

Speaker 2 (01:12:59):
Yeah, she would have been. She would have fit in
there very well. That that would have That would have
offered her a place as well. She she could have
been disappearing people for l Ron Hubbard if she'd been
born in a slightly different period, actually around the same
period of time. It just shows in different things.

Speaker 1 (01:13:12):
I think that a right time, wrong place.

Speaker 3 (01:13:17):
I don't know that she could have I think she
was I think she only could haveditioned it out. I
don't think she could have broken her arm and kept camping.

Speaker 2 (01:13:23):
Yeah, You're probably right about that because like her dad
is ultimately like she has such a supportive parrot figure,
which is her it's not her mom. She like that
probably explains some of her feeling that mothers shouldn't be
connected to their kids. But like everything she has is
kind of rooted in the fact that her dad is
willing to stand up for her as a kid. Yeah,

(01:13:45):
which is interesting. Yeah. Anyway, well we're going to talk
about the aftershocks of these two people and like what
what the generation raised under Joanna's tactics and you know,
the generation right after that one, the during the war
and the immediately post war children of Germany. Some of

(01:14:05):
the things some of them come to believe about how
you should raise kids as a response to the Nazi
era and a response to people like Joanna and spoilers, Margaret,
it's not very good either. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:14:17):
No, you've already explained that this was the fun week.
This is the fun week, This is the good week.
Next week, baby, it's pedophiles all the way down. Yeah,
not even a good band.

Speaker 2 (01:14:33):
It's not a bit. That's just an accurate description of
next week's episodes. There is no joke there. I'm just
laughing because it was I had to write twelve thousand
words about that and it was not pleasant. I wrote
them while I was in the ICU with my dad
and it was, you know, still a notably unpleasant part

(01:14:54):
of that experience.

Speaker 3 (01:14:56):
It was an interesting because, like, the work that you
do with Behind the Bastards is like explo some of
the bad things that humans are capable of, and I
think it's very useful. But then the format of the
show is that you also have to like we have
to keep it entertaining, right, gotta have some bits. Yeah,
I wonder how you can pull this off. Next week
on En the Me, I.

Speaker 2 (01:15:13):
Was going to open an episode with variations of my
what's exing, my whys, and the word pedophiles. But there's
no way to do that, and that'll be okay. There's
absolutely no way.

Speaker 3 (01:15:22):
To killing pedophiles.

Speaker 2 (01:15:24):
My sure, what's killing but people? And my pedophiles is
probably a bad ITEA. I don't, I don't.

Speaker 3 (01:15:30):
I don't allow that.

Speaker 1 (01:15:32):
Thank you so much.

Speaker 3 (01:15:34):
Well, what you'll get to hear what we come up with.

Speaker 2 (01:15:37):
Yeah, I'm gonna be spending a week figuring out to
introduce next week's episodes.

Speaker 1 (01:15:42):
My me, but we record them tomorrow, so really, you
only have twenty four hours.

Speaker 2 (01:15:47):
All right, fuck fuck fuck.

Speaker 1 (01:15:53):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Or more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
zone media dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part Two: The Parenting Gurus of Nazi Germany