When Ashes Cried with Historian Alan Winter

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Join Mark Lainhart, the Intuitive Prospector, on a journey into
creativity and transformation. Each episode, Mark and his guests explore
the intersection of science and spirituality to uncover ways to
live a more inspired life. Together, we'll navigate both the
seen and unseen realms to spark joy and personal growth.

(00:36):
This is a community where you are empowered to discover
the diamond with him. Mark is an award winning psychic medium,
decorated veteran, and teacher based in Seattle. Using his intuitive gifts,
he guides the curious on profound soul adventures. Now Here
is your host, Mark Lainhart, the Intuitive Prospector.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
All right, Hello, prospecting friends, and welcome to another episode
of Inspired Living. I'm your host, Mark Laineheart, the Intuitive Prospector,
and I'm so thrilled to have you back and tuning
in as I guide you and fellow prospectors of what
I like to call soul adventures filled with creativity, curiosity, education, encouragement, inspiration, mindfulness, motivation, manifestations, visions,

(01:26):
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Today we're going to be focused on a little history,
which I think is interesting given the times. But I
always like to say that you are both the inspiration
and the inspired, So listen braceless journey together, Let's inspire others,
and let's make every moment count before we expire, and
I hope that you'll enjoy this next episode of Inspired Living.
So our guest today is Alan Winters. He's coming to

(03:56):
the show for the first time and tryan to theere
we Go. He's a novelist, he's a historian, he's an academic,
and he likes to bring the past into urgent conversations
with the present moment, which I found fascinating. So when
my team scheduled Alan, I'm such a huge World War

(04:17):
two history buff, traveled the world to some of the locations,
and so when I was shown these books that Alan
has written, wanted to have him come on and share
this with the Inspired Living community. So just a little
bit about Alan's journey and his work. He is a
accomplished like you said, he's an accomplished novelist, he's a historian,
and he's an acapandemic who brings the past into urgent

(04:39):
conversation with the president. He is a graduate of Rutgers
with honors in history, with advanced degrees from NYU and Columbia.
He has authored seven novels, including collaborations with formal federal
judge Herbert J.

Speaker 3 (04:51):
Stern.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
His screenplay Polly earned recognition at the Austin Film Festival,
while Savior's Day was named a Kirkus Best Book Selection.
Alongside his literary career, Alan has published over twenty scientific
articles and served on the faculty of Long Island University.
He is known for blending deep historical research with compelling storytelling,

(05:17):
and he writes stories that both educate and challenges readers
to confront uncomfortable truth And what better way to come
on Inspired Living and have these conversations. If you want
to learn about Alan, you can go to Alan Winter
dot com and Alan, welcome to Inspired Living for the
first time. It's a pleasure to meet you. Thanks for
coming on. And we're gonna do a little history today.
So this is I haven't done a history show in

(05:38):
a couple of seasons, so I'm excited to talk about
these books. You've written several books, but today we're going
to be spent specifically talking about your new book. So
welcome to the show.

Speaker 3 (05:49):
Well, thank you, Mark. It's a pleasure and honor to
be here, and I'm looking forward to this.

Speaker 2 (05:54):
Yeah, So just share with us a little bit of
your background. I hopefully I covered most of it in
the bio. If I missed something, you.

Speaker 3 (06:05):
Did cover it the way I've presented it, But I'm
going to share something that I don't share with anybody normally,
and that this is a complete curve ball. So I
don't want to start your program with a complete curve ball,
but I hope you're So here's the pitch. I've had
two careers, and I've had two careers that have followed

(06:25):
each other in parallel. I didn't end one and start another.
Where you might hear someone was a lawyer, than a banker,
than something else. I was a paradonist, so I went
to dental school. I went to dental school. I'm a surgeon,
and at the same time that I was a surgeon,
I was the editor of a dental journal. I wrote

(06:46):
The Scientist, that's where the scientific papers come in from.
But I had a passion for history. I was nominated
for Woodrow Wilson Fellowship when I was in college, but
I wanted to go to dental school, so I turned
that down, and so I actually ended up doing both things.
That they're both my passions. You know, the road to

(07:07):
those are, you know, pitted with a lot of different
barriers and things, but I made it. And so what's
happened is I found that I developed a passion for
creative writing. Later. I never wanted to be a novelist,
but I did. And then I found that I could
bring my history in as you were so aptly described,

(07:30):
and teach lessons. So my books all teach things. That's
the goal of it. I don't just write for the
sake of writing. That sort of sums it up a
little bit. And everything is built on facts that are
very little known or not known, and then I expand
on that. And what happens when you do the deep research,
which is what I enjoy, You find more facts that

(07:53):
people don't know, and you string them together and all
of a sudden you've got a compelling story. So that's
how these books were created.

Speaker 2 (08:01):
Yeah, and congratulations on being recognized for your work too.
And a lot of times when I talk with guests
for the first time, they do have two lives. A
former life myself included before long before I did the
work I do today and podcasting and writing, I had
a former life in the US Coast Guard and federal
service for almost twenty five years. So now doing completely

(08:24):
opposite stuff of what I was doing. But tell us
about this, so this is the third in a trilogy
of books that you have written, which your sixth novel.
But let's talk about the books that actually tied to
World War Two and that storytelling. Like I said, I'm
a huge history buff. I've actually gone to France and
stood on the beaches of Normandy. I've gone through the

(08:47):
Winston Churchill Bunker, you know, So I've actually I don't
know what the fascination of World War two is. But
when my team said that we're going to have you on,
I was like, hey, this is very very interesting, but
you would tie it to today's storytelling and some of
the So tell us a little bit about how you
put this trilogy together based on a soldier from World
War two kind of back or maybe going back to

(09:08):
the first two before we cover the third book.

Speaker 3 (09:10):
So this is really what happened, and I think it's
important to know the beginning of this. I had already
published four novels when a dear friend and patient came
to me, Herb Stern, as you mentioned earlier. And Herb
came to me and said, let's write a book together
about Adolf Hitler. And I looked at him. Goes back
about eight nine years ago. I said, Herb, what could

(09:32):
we possibly say that it's different that hasn't been said.
There has to be a million books written on Adolf
Hitler in the Nazis, And in his inevitable way, said
you'd be surprised. Let's have dinner. So we had dinner.
We happened to live close to each other in New Jersey,
and so we had dinner, and he said, here's what
I'm going to start with. The first thing, did you
know that Adolf Hitler was in a mental institution at

(09:53):
the end of World War One? I said, I was
a history major, but no, I really didn't know that
well he was. So that was the hook that got
me going to have a dinner. Then we started to
explore this, and the deeper we explored this, we began
to look at the history books that described the beginning
of the Nazi Party, how Hitler formed it, how events

(10:16):
led up to when he became chancellor. And what we
found was history book after history book after history book
tended to omit or just they ignored the facts where
they said they didn't exist, and they basically censored it.
So really, what Herb and I'd found when we started

(10:38):
this project was that historians, by and large, and this
is a big generalization because you'll find exceptions to what
I'm about to say, but by and large censored what
they were writing about edel Off Hilder. They censored how
he came to power, and they distorted how the Germans

(10:59):
handled all of the nineteen thirties going into the forties,
which is what the books span. And we can amplify
that as we go forward and talk. But we really
got our hackles up quite honestly, in that if these
are noted historians, these were knighted historians from England and

(11:20):
pulled user prize winners and said, really, they didn't read
the original stuff, and we hired translators, We went to
the original archives and we began to piece together what
we feel were the true facts of how really World
War two A started and be how it could have
been averted.

Speaker 2 (11:43):
Yeah, and you know, as a student of history myself,
I come across this a lot for the fact that
I read something and then start to do that deeper
research like you're talking about, and then I realized, well,
history wasn't actually accurate or wasn't telling me the whole truth.
So you know, they always say history is written by
those that win the war, right, And I don't remember

(12:05):
said it might be okay. I get a lot of
quotes in my brain and then I throw them out,
but I can't always remember exactly, so paraphraser, you know,
I always tell that inspired listening, uh audience to go,
you know, check my work, you know, look it up
or whatever. But it's you know, I've as I've gotten older,
I've realized a lot of our history that we've been

(12:26):
told is actually not accurate. So thank you for bringing
it up. And I always tell people, you know, if
you're interested in a topic or a subject, go do
your research and get it from you know, many different perspectives,
not just from one. We have, you know, technology day
with the internet, we have information Reddit, our fingertips that
can go pretty much anywhere in the world. But there
is yeah, there is a lot of things that just

(12:48):
aren't accurately reflected. And we actually have a pretty dark history,
even here in America, you know, with our you know,
our foundations and you know, so it doesn't surprise me.
And I did know that Adolf Hitler was in a
mental institute, you know, after World War One. He was
just I believe it was a private World War One
and came back home and really started this movement. A

(13:08):
lot of people don't realize even during the thirties when
he was coming to power through the National Whizzy Party.
Today he had a ninety percent approval rating and you
look back at that and you're like, how can somebody
that so had did so much damage and so much
evil could have such an approval rating in Journey? And
those are things that are just not mentioned from a
historical standpoint, you know, So it's it's it's interesting. You know,

(13:33):
Napoleon had talked about history as a set of lies
agreed upon, right, So thank you for pointing out and
doing this research on this book. So kind of just
backtracking for the for those that are that are tuning
into the live TV format or catch this on the
encore on the podcast format. This third book is the

(13:54):
trilogy that began with Wolf and then The Sins of
the Fathers. And it's been a decade in the and
now we're talking about your new book, When Ashes Cry.
Tell me in the listing audience about the title When
Ashes Cried. I thought it was a pretty interesting title,
just kind of.

Speaker 3 (14:13):
When Ashes Cried is sort of the summation of the
whole story of the character, and we should go back
to that character at a minute and explain why he's important.
But the title itself came. I like titles that put
words together that normally don't go together. You know, blackboard
jungle as an example, would be one Armies in the Night,

(14:36):
things like that. But you know, there's a cynicism, and
I have to admit it this way. It's not necessarily
a book written with hope and an uplifting thing if
you're talking about the coming of the Holocaust and what
happened during World War Two, And what I was able
to do was really think long and hard about anti Semitism,

(15:02):
about the victims of the war as it occurred, and
did we learn anything from it? Did we learn? And
then you look, if you jump to what happened in
October seventh and twenty twenty three in Gaza and Israel
and whatever happened there, you know, without getting into the
politics of it, it certainly wasn't that far fetched from

(15:27):
what the Nazis were doing in terms of murdering and
what happened. And we can talk about the causes of
that because in essence that was one of the things
that I learned from Herb Stern in terms of connecting dots.
And it's very important to understand that. But the bottom
line is, have we actually learned any lessons? And when
Ashes cried? If things got so bad metaphorically that ashes

(15:50):
can cry, then what is man learned? And I think
that's where the title came from.

Speaker 2 (15:58):
Yeah, and you're right, as time goes on, right, the
younger generations don't necessarily tie into the past or past
wars or you know, how how they got to where
they're at today and the freedoms they enjoy. Right, So
we're seeing a lot of that in current real time,
in our current human consciousness. And you know, it's always

(16:19):
a reminder. You know, we always talk about never again,
but yet here we have ripple effects. And you know,
I thought, I think it was twenty Mark twenty that
talked about that history doesn't actually repeat itself the exact
same way, but it does have a rhyme and rhythm.
And what I see today going on reminds me a
lot of you know, the nineteen late nineteen twenties, early

(16:39):
thirties in Germany that you know, eventually in thirty six
led to the start of World War Two with the
invasion of Poland. So a lot of people forget about history,
and we're due to repeat it if we don't remember history.
So that's why I was excited to have you on
the show today, Alan and talk about this. So let's
give a little back story because I have a little
bit about this amnesic German soldier Frederick Richard, whose story

(17:04):
begins in Wall and then continues on with the trilogy
Sins of Our Fathers, and then today's show we're talking
about when Ashes cried.

Speaker 3 (17:12):
Right, all right, So what herban I did, and let
me explain if I can a little bit about her,
because it's important to understand it directed where these books
were going. You know, I was a novelist and he
is a lawyer. He was involved in the Malcolm X's assassination.
He was the prosecutor from the Jersey that literally put

(17:33):
the mafia away in the Jersey or most of them.
And he's got a stellar career and had written a
number of books that he was made Judge of Berlin
in nineteen seventy nine through the State Department in a
hijacking a case, so he was intimately involved with German
law in German history. That's another story, but that was
called judgment in Berlin. And what Herban and I did

(17:56):
was we started to connect the dots, which were you know,
if Hitler as you're aware that he was in a
mental institution, but most people weren't. What other things weren't there?
How are we going to tell this story from a
vantage point of the German point of view, Not that
we are championing the German point of view, but we

(18:18):
wanted clarity. So we invented a amnesic soldier from World
War One. He was near a bomb exploding. All kinds
of harm came to, you know, injuries, and he was
put back together and patched together. We had him by
a famous plastic surgeon, but he lost his memory. So

(18:39):
because he lost his memory, we had this unique character
that was sent to a mental word, the same one
that Hitler was in, in the bed next to Hitler,
helping Hitler who was blind, who couldn't see, That was
his claim. He was not organically blind, but psychologically blind,
but he still couldn't see. So the site came back.

(19:01):
That in and of itself is a story, and they
became friends. They became friends. Friedrich's memory never came back,
so he is looking at as the World War One ends,
where to go, what to do when he ends up
going to Munich to be with his friend because he
doesn't have a family, he has no memory of anything.

(19:24):
But he's also not anti Semitic. He has no values,
he has no moral compass that's good or bad. And
he becomes the eyes and ears of the reader. He
becomes history as we uncovered it as accurately as we
uncovered it from the inside looking out, And that gave

(19:45):
us a window that most books don't have with any
topic realistically, but it allowed us not to be biased
as much as humanly possible, and to show the German
point of view. And as an example, you mentioned yourself
a few minutes ago about Hitler's ratings and how favorable

(20:08):
they were. Well, you have to have a picture of
Germany in the nineteen twenties when they ended the war.
The average German lived on eleven hundred calories a day
during World War One, eleven hundred calories. They didn't have
enough food. This is a hungry country. They weren't allowed

(20:28):
parts for their farm, implements for their machinery, and factories,
they had embargos for everything, and all of a sudden,
you get this guy Hitler coming along. And we can
talk if you want about how he got involved with
the political party in the first place. But he comes
along and he's got his people beginning to have soup

(20:49):
kitchens and provide food and provide money for people who
were indigent, and he begins to pull up by the
bootstraps little figuratively, the German people to the point where
by the middle of the nineteen thirties they are the
only country that gets out of the Great Depression. And

(21:09):
he got his people fed, he brought this. Now I'm
not saying this as a German file, a German a file,
if you could say it that way. But what I'm
saying is that he did such positive things, as you indicated,
that he was beloved for the good that he did,
and then the things that might view as bad or
not desirable, people look the other way. And that's really

(21:33):
part of the books, the tipping points for all of that.
So that's Friedrich Friederich becomes the important character who tells
the whole story.

Speaker 2 (21:44):
Yeah, that's and just just for the audience, you know,
pre great Richard is a fictional character, but you did
a good job of weaving him in through real historical,
historical events alongside real historical figures. When you became a writer,
and we'll forgive you for going directors because they're now

(22:05):
a rival of my University of Washington, now that we're
in the same division, right, did you realize that you
would start to weave fictional characters into historical real historical
figures or real historical you know, storytelling, you know, because
you know, why is fiction necessary to tell this story?

(22:26):
I guess is what I'm wondering about.

Speaker 3 (22:28):
The Well, there's there's actually two questions there. They're not
the same question. The first one is yes, I not
only wanted to My goal was to teach, as I
said earlier, and so I wove real people, real events.
Our books are so accurate that there were comments and

(22:49):
Wolf and Sins of the Father that they could have
been used as textbooks in both high school and college.
They're appropriate for both of them. But their fiction because
we have a protagonist too fiction. So why did we
do that? Well, here's the real answer. If you look
at the world of publishing and the economics of publishing,

(23:09):
you have to be have certain credentials. Herb is a lawyer,
and I'm a dentist, and I don't have a PhD
in history. I have a bachelor's in history, but I
don't have a so my doctorate, if you will, is dentistry.
And so because of that, that does not give us
the verisimilitude or the reality that the publishers want for

(23:32):
an author of this topic. And we don't have the
legitimacy that they want to promote a book because we
don't have the credentials. So it's all about our credentials.
We had the credentials to write a historical novel, of course,
so we had no choice but to do it this way.
We would have liked to have done it as nonfiction,

(23:52):
but the publisher just sort of smacked us down and said, no,
it's not going to happen. So that's sadly what happened.
But I'm proud of it because these books hold up
and I've had friends I can't believe this. I looked
at this, I looked at that, I googled this. Everything
is accurate in these books except them A character who
tells the story character.

Speaker 2 (24:14):
Yeah, And I thought it was just a brilliant way
to weave that into history, and kind of maybe it's
a good way to reinvest and get interest to the
younger generations, right, Like I said, a lot of these
younger generations behind us don't have any you know, connection
to D Day or World War two or the dropping
of the atomic bomb on Japan. It's just, you know,
it's it's eighty some years ago, and they just don't

(24:35):
have And so you know, these books, I think, could
you know, give some interesting insight and recall that that history.
So one of the things that I loved what you said, Alan,
you said, quote, I was meant to study history. I
love learning about the past to understand the present. I
love talking what might be seemingly desperate facts and weaving
them into tales about the human spirit. This passion enables

(24:58):
me to craft meaningful stories that, by turns engage, teach
and entertained readers while jumping off today's headlines. End quote.
And I you know, when I read that, I was like,
that's a lot of what I do. I have this
show for that exact reason, you know, just I think,
you know, history is a great teacher for all of us.
And you know, I love learning you know about the past,

(25:19):
and that's a big reason I wanted to have you
on the show to talk about this. So for people
listening or watching the show, where's some places that besides
you know, Alan Winter's Winter dot com. Where else can
they go start to get these books audio? Are their
audiobooks or physical books? Digital books to give that format?

Speaker 3 (25:36):
Okay, we all said all of the books are are softback.
Both Wolf and when Ashs cried our hardback as well.
They're all ebooks. They're on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, fifty
million or whatever it's called. Wherever you get books. These
books are available audio. I think the only audio is

(25:58):
Sins of the Fathers in terms of audio, So people
have to read them, is what its.

Speaker 4 (26:04):
To Well, you know, that's that's interesting you say that
because we're also you know, studies are showing that people
are reading less right more people are now starting to
move to the audio formats and listening to storytelling and
not reading as much as the younger generations.

Speaker 2 (26:22):
I still do a lot of reading myself, but you know,
maybe one day you have somebody famous to do a
voiceover for some of your books. Somebody thinks it.

Speaker 3 (26:33):
Would be nice, but you know, so go ahead. I'm sorry.
I was going to say something that I have the
thing with audio. To me, if someone says I read
your book, I listened to it while I was driving,
that's not reading the book. And to me, audio which
is perfectly fine for entertainment and what someone is doing.

(26:54):
That's like putting all your food in a blender and
drinking it and I had a great meal. No, you
had a drink. And it's the same ingredients. Reading a
book and looking at the rhythm, listen to the cadences,
looking at the lyrical you know, tone of if you will,
absorbing the words and going back and look at them
again and see how it's structured. That that's reading that

(27:18):
you know, to me, that's reading. So it's not quite
the same. They're both entertainment. I will not take it
away from them, but it's not quite the same. It
really is.

Speaker 2 (27:29):
Yeah, No, I listened to a book or I read
a book and it just, you know, time speeding up.
So I like that concept of putting it in a
blender and getting it quicker, because that's a lot of
the younger generations too, always on the move, and science
is actually teaching us that time is actually speeding up.
So it's very interesting. So we're gonna go. We're gonna
cut to our first commercial, or first and only commercial,
and when we can. When we come back, we're going
to pick up this conversation with our guest today, Alan Winter,

(27:51):
with his new Well series of books. We're talking about
a whole bunch of books. But he's a novelist, he's
a storian, he's academic, he's very as a dentist. He's
got a lot of education behind him. But stick around.
We're going to continue this journey, in this conversation down
the historical path with mister Allen Winter, our guest today
here on Inspired Living and as Martin Luther King Jr.
Reminds us, we are not makers of history. We are

(28:15):
made by history. Stick around, you won't want to miss
the second part of the show.

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inside each other's mine.

Speaker 8 (30:36):
Welcome all in my shoes, walcome Mill in my shoes.
Well before you abuse, criticize, and accues, welcome Mile in my.

Speaker 9 (30:50):
Shoes, and welcome back to inspired living.

Speaker 2 (31:02):
Our guest today is Alan Winter. He is an accomplished novelist.
He is a historian an academic who brings the past
into urgent conversations with the present. Welcome back, Alan, and
thanks for being a guest on today's show. As we
go down memory Lane or history, if you will, I
want to open up the second half of the show

(31:23):
a quote from late great John F. Kennedy, who says
this quote, history is a relentless master. It has no present,
only the past. Rushing into the future. To try to
hold fast is to be swept aside. End quote. And
I feel like with everything going on in today's society
and forgetting about our past, which you may end up

(31:44):
repeating because we didn't learn from our past these books,
what do you feel has been the most transformative? For
writing these books and connecting with the outside world on
this fictional character, but being told through actual events through
World War two and the rise of Hitler to you know,
do what he did is history, you know, tells us well.

Speaker 3 (32:05):
I think there's two major points I can bring out,
and then the problem is I could talk about this
for hours, you know. The first point is that in
writing these books and doing this research, and honestly, I'm
with these books almost every day, I'm writing a fourth book.
I actually finished the fourth one, which is not part
of a trilogy obviously, but it's it's a spin off

(32:28):
of this as well. I have become very skeptical of
history books as they're so posed without further checking everything,
and it got very upsetting to me, you know, having
been you know, a history major in loving it. As
an example, following the footnote from one book, it's quoted

(32:49):
in another historians book and it was a mistake, and
that mistake was then quoted again and again and then again.
They don't bother to do their research. A lot of them.
Now I'm making generalities. Someone could say, well, that's not true.
This one it accurately. But the bottom line is it
taught me to not take anything on surface value. And
that goes for news, It goes for news broadcast, it

(33:10):
goes for announcements by the government. I don't care who's
in office. There has nothing to do with part of
your politics per se. It's I became a skeptic when
I really wasn't one to begin with. So in that regard,
it made a difference for me going forward, and the
books will teach that because we then have a side
to that in Wolf. And by the way, Wolf was

(33:34):
a nickname that Adolf Hitler used for himself when he
was dating women and signed one of his paintings Wolf.
It comes from his name Adiwolf. Yeah, it comes from Adamwolf.
And we have online it's called Notes on Wolf one
hundred and fifteen pages of research. We put all our

(33:54):
research out there. So that's another website, Notes on Wolf
one hundred fifteen pages. There's about forty pages and Sins
of the Father. All of our research notes are there
to explain where this is coming from, not just it's
off the top of our heads. Because you could think
fiction is not truthful. The other thing that is important

(34:16):
that we found is that what the historians did say
about the German people, and what I heard as a
young boy growing up was my father would never buy
a Mercedes Benz don't buy a German car, and we're Jewish,
So you know, I began to hear all of these tropes,
if you will, and fair's fair? In other words, is

(34:36):
that accurate? Is that true? I mean, did the German
people as a people, as a population support what the
Nazis were doing? And you find out through our books
and our research that Sins of the Fathers is about
a coup that was supposed to take place in September
of nineteen thirty eight. It was they sent by the

(34:57):
German military. The German military leaders did not want Hitler
to advance. So this is sugarcoated by a lot of
the historians at different levels of how they handle this.
But at the end of the day, they formed the resistance.
They sent emissaries to FDR, they sent them to Chamberlain,
they sent them to Sweden, to Switzerland and to the

(35:19):
Ladier in France, all of which saying please, we just
want one thing, get on the radio and make a
statement to Hitler. This is in nineteen thirty seven, thirty eight,
if you're going to go into Czechoslovakia, there's going to
be warm. And the basis for that is that Czechs
had a non aggression pack with France that if they

(35:42):
were attacked, France would come to the eight of the Czechs,
and the same was with pull him by the way,
and then England would then back up France because they
were allies and so all they wanted and the real
one that they wanted was Chamberlain. So they lobbied him.
They wanted him to help, and he wouldn't do it.
His ambassador to Berlin said, don't do it. We don't

(36:05):
know who these people are. But he actually loved Hitler,
he loved the Nazis. This is the British ambassador to
Berlin in the thirties, Neville Henderson. So the bottom line,
without getting into a whole long story, is Chamberlain turns
them away. He doesn't meet with him. Churchill does, but
he has no power in nineteen thirty eight and they decide,

(36:26):
all right, we're going to pull the coup anyway. September
twenty eighth is the day we're gonna have the coup.
We're gonna overthrow Hitler. If that happened, there wouldn't have
been World War Two. And what does Chamberlain do in
September He flies to Munich and you have the appeasement
in the Munich Accord. He knew, he knew that the
resistors were going to overthrow their government. He knew it,

(36:48):
and he took the wind out of the sales because
he allegedly then averted a war appeasement with that famous
waving the paper saying peace in our time, a piece
for our time. We learned out of all this research
is you got to dig into the facts. We read
original history books that were written right after World War

(37:09):
Two in the fifties, the sixties, people that interviewed people
who were still alive. Those books are completely different than
the books that are coming out in the last thirty
forty years. And when you go to those sources, that's
where you get the truths. And we learned all of
that and put it all in as best we could

(37:30):
to get this message that I'm sharing now in our books.
And it's there, It's there to be had.

Speaker 2 (37:37):
Yeah, and I love it, And yeah, because it would
be if that was thirty eight, then it'd be just
a few years later that you would actually enter the
war with you know, Pearl Harbor and or not just
not just with Germany, but the Pacific War with Japan.
But you know, out of that horrible time frame where
you know, millions and millions of people died, it also

(37:58):
gave us NATO. It gave us Article five. Right, you
go attack one, you attack all kind of you know,
to today, which I think is important for today's current
society to understand that, you know, it's important to have
allies because it keeps us now out of another you know,
hopefully we don't have a World War three because of
that Article five and you know the presence of natal

(38:19):
but you know, you never know, right, but at least
some good came out of that horrible situation. And in
the in the books you talk about, you know, one
of the recurrent themes in the trilogy is that evil
rarely arrives all at once, it advances incrementally. And why
it's important to show these through these talking points about

(38:40):
how small compromises that at that time, and there was
a lot of compromises at that time, uh, you know,
can lead to larger injustices like the genocide that we
you know, eventually learned after the war, after the Allies
you know, you know, started to win in Berlin and
take back the country. But as far as you know,

(39:01):
in differences can be dangerous as well. And I think
those are good reminders for this generation, you know, to
reflect back again the past can really be a great
teacher for for all of us. And I and I,
like I said, I was, I was it was fun
to look through these books and be like, oh, this
is a very interesting way to make history come alive,

(39:23):
but give some insight to Again. I'm just more focused
on the younger generations because they don't seem to have
really an insight or passion. For not everybody, but a
lot of them don't have a real insight or interest
in history. And I think that's a little scary because
we can, you know, we are you know, we can
redo or repeat things that we should have learned from
when we said never again after World War Two. But

(39:44):
you also talk about, you know, democracies are more fragile
than we can imagine. And I was curious if we
wanted just to talk about those three points, about how
small compromises can lead to larger and different injustices. In
differences can be dangerous, and democracies are more fragile. Democracy
is a test. We forget about that too. It's a
way of life here in the United States. But I

(40:05):
was just having a conversation with a colleague. I don't
know if it's the United States of America or because
we're so big. People, you know, almost equit us like
Europe now because we can go to a different state.
We don't need a passport to go there. But it's
a completely different way of looking at, you know, life.
You know, I can go three states over and it's
a completely different way of looking a life, just like
it is in Europe. So I'm not sure the United
States is still the United States of America because we're

(40:27):
so big. But talk to the audience real quick about
those three important points. I think that's what you really
bring through in the books is talking about recurring themes
of evil.

Speaker 3 (40:37):
Absolutely well, but you know they don't start off as evil,
that's the whole point. They start off as a change
in your personal freedoms, your rights. And if you go
to the Nazis, let's talk about that specifically, and then
we can broaden it a little bit, but you know
what happened? In other words, how did the German peace

(41:00):
who were probably the most intelligent, most sophisticated, most cultured
people in all of Europe at that time, how did
they allow their freedoms to be taken away from them?
It is systematic, step by step, way to the point
where all of a sudden they turned around and they
were gone. You know, how did that happen? And what

(41:22):
are the tipping points that we should be aware of
right now? See if I can't make that into a
cohesive foot So you know, Hitler is appointed. First of all,
there's no myth. He was never elected chancellor. He was
appointed chancellor. That's the way the German government worked. The
president was elected by the people. It was von Hindenberg,
who was a war hero from World War One, he

(41:44):
appoints the chancellor. And he did it because he felt
the Nazis that they looked at him as a buffhone.
They thought Hitler was as a joke. He looked funny
with that little mustache and all the goose step in
and all the arm signs, the signal, et cetera. And
they thought they would get rid of Why do they
think they'd get rid of him, Well, but they had

(42:05):
fifteen from nineteen eighteen to nineteen thirty three, they had
fifteen chancellors and thirteen cabinets, so they had sixty this
is important to understand, sixty six zero political parties. So
they had to just like in England would be they
would have to get a coalition to gather to get

(42:27):
a majority of anything, and every time they didn't do it,
they'd have to get another chancellor who would then try
and cobble together another coalition. And that's why they had
so many chancellors. And so they figured, let's make Hitler
a chancellor. He won't last very long, and we'll get
rid of these Nazis because they had gotten more election
of more votes in nineteen twenty eight. They ran again

(42:49):
in thirty two and lost votes maybe thirty seven percent
at that point, that's all the Nazis got, and they figured,
let's get rid of this guy. Well, that's where they
made a mistake. Okay, that's an error in judgment. So
they make Hitler appoint him chancellor. He serves as the
pleasure of the president, and what happens within thirty days
is the Reichstag fire. Someone burns the parliament down. It

(43:13):
happens to be a young Dutch Communists, but there had
been talked that there would be a fire, possibly at
the Reichstag, possibly someplace else to get a worker's revolt
around the world. Remember, you had the Bolsheviks in nineteen seventeen,
you had Communism is starting to raise his head, and
the West is very afraid of the Bolsheviks. Why because

(43:38):
it's going to give all of their wealth to the commoners.
They're going to disperse their estates, their wealth. And that's
what happened in Russia in nineteen seventeen. And the more
they wanted to the Russians wanted to look westward, the
more the West wanted to say, hey, you stay there.
So one of the things and jumping ahead just as
a thought. One of the things could have been maybe

(44:00):
Chamberlain and the French. They wanted Hitler in place as
a buffer to Stalin as they went forward later on,
and they figured he would be the barrier to prevent
the Russians coming until the war started. But that's another story.
So what happens is the reichsta Fire occurs, they get
the ice that fire Decree, which then gets rid of

(44:21):
habeas corpus. You cannot have free assembly anymore, it cannot
have freedom of the press anymore. And this is in
February and March of nineteen thirty three. They then passed
they said, well, wait a second, let's get rid of
the communists, because the Communists did it. They end up
finding out that it wasn't the German Communists at all,
had nothing to do with anything. But by that time

(44:42):
they passed the Enabling Act and the kicked all of
the Communists out of the Reich's Dag. This is important,
and this is what allowed Hitler to go forward because
when they got rid of the Communists and the Ricestag,
it changed the numbers he needed for a plurality of
a vote. He still had to have an alliance with
a Catholic center party, but at the end of the

(45:04):
day he needed one or two alliances, he didn't need
fifty eight of them. And that allowed them to then
suspend basically the rights that no longer from thirty four
or thirty three March of thirty three could no longer
make laws. So just think of our own congress. If
there was a point that they said, our congress could

(45:26):
no longer make laws. They would be there, but they
would do anything. And the cabinet, in terms of the Nazis,
the cabinet made all the laws, and the cabinet just
rubber stamp whatever Hitler wanted. So that was an abrogation
of the rights of the people. All right, you begin
to adjust and you live. So one of the lessons here,

(45:49):
going back to the question, is the German people began
to adjust. Now who were they arresting everybody who's against it? Well,
it becomes the socialists, it becomes the communists, then it
becomes the Jehovah's witnesses because they don't believe in and

(46:10):
saluting and making pledges of allegiance to anybody. It becomes
not the Jews. The Jews had nothing to do with
this at this time. They were not against them, unless
it was a Jewish liberal editor of a newspaper, or
if it was a homosexual because all the home sexuals
were against the law, or the Gypsies were against the law.
And so this had nothing to do with the Jews

(46:33):
in the early years whatsoever. And the tipping point would
be what happened to the German people at that point
in thirty three, thirty four, thirty five, the racial laws
come in the Nuremberg Racial Laws, and it's just for
the Jews. So one of the great quotes of all time,
and you know you quoting really good ones mark is
by Martinniemar. Martin Imohler was the head of the Confessing Church.

(46:59):
So one of the things Hitler did immediately was basically
he didn't ban religion, but he banned the organized organized
congregating of religions. And he wanted to create a Nazi
Evangelical Protestant church. So he wanted a Nazi church, and
he drove all of the other churches underground and they

(47:22):
formed a sub rass, if you will, Confessing Church, that's
what it was called, and the head of that was
Martin Niemour. A more common name would be Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
They just made a documentary on Netflix, you can see that.
And these were four thousand ministers and pastors who got

(47:44):
together and kept religion going underground, if you will, in Germany.
But what Nimour said, and this is a pertinent to
what we're discussing, he said, when they came to the
you know, the Unionists, I wasn't a union, so I
didn't say anything. And when they came for the socialists,

(48:04):
I wasn't a socialist, so I didn't say anything. And
when they came from me, there was no one left
to speak up for me. And that's the whole point,
because one of the things is that if you don't
speak up, if you don't lobby and whatever makes someone
comfortable to lobby when they see injustice, when they see

(48:27):
people being mistreated, however that is and whoever it may be,
then you are helping the aggressor. And Desmond Tutu was
the one who actually said to say nothing is to
help the aggressor. And that is one of the key
stories of our trilogy are the people who didn't say,
but what who did say? Who did say and what

(48:48):
amazed me when we started this project were the German military,
the generals. They all spoke up and so there was
a very important meeting on November fifth. And this is
a little side story, but I think it's important to
understand because it's happened in the last few years to US,

(49:09):
US meaning America. In November fifth of nineteen thirty seven,
it's four years into the Nazi regime, the embargos from
World War One are still carried out. They still can't
get farm equipment replacements or parts, the same for industrial
machinery and the army. Now Hitler has rejuvenated the Lutwaf

(49:35):
against the Treaty of Versailles. He wasn't supposed to do it.
No one said a word. He gets the Air Force going,
he starts conscription all over again. Wasn't allowed to do that.
He did it. They had one hundred thousand people in
the army based on the Versi Treaty. That's all they
could have. Ninety five thousand soldiers, five thousand officers. He
starts conscription, but they don't have enough or steel, robber,

(50:01):
anything that they needed to make weaponry. They just didn't
have it. So there's an infighting with the generals in
the Army, of the Navy, the Air Force. They meet
with Hitler in November fifth, nineteen thirty seven, and they say, look,
you have to help divide up the raw materials. We
can't do what you want. We can't build in the airplanes,

(50:21):
the submarines, etc. And Hitler says, that's not what this
meeting's about. And this is key to the whole thing.
He said, that's not what this meeting's about. We're going
to have a policy called Libistrom. Libistrom is expansion, and
we are going to expand eastward, not west where France
and Belgium and Netherlands and England are in Scandinavia. We're

(50:47):
going to go east to the Slavic countries and we
are going to take whatever we need. We're going to
start with Austria and then we're going to go into Czechoslovakia.
We're going to take their treasuries, we're going to take
their food, we're going to take their raw materials, and
we're going to we estimate ten twenty million people are

(51:08):
going to die. And when then we're going to start
a war, and we're going to go march on to Russia.
This was said in nineteen thirty seven. It was memorialized
and it's called the Hospeckt Memorandum. H Ossback h huspect
he was an adjudant to Hitler. He took notes afterwards

(51:29):
when Hitler said, don't write anything down. It's online. You
can find it. I think the originals of the L
Library or copy of it is at the L Library.
But what he then said and so at this meeting,
the head of the War Department Blumber Werner von Blumberg,
the head of the Chief of Staff of the Army's
name was Fritch. There was a the head of Foreign State,

(51:54):
Norath constantin Nora. They were all there and said, you
can't do this. You cannot make war these people and
they knew it would be a two front war. So
they said, no, we're not going to do this. So
what did Hitler do very quickly, is he then by
three months later, got rid of every one of the

(52:14):
military leaders that said you shouldn't go to war. We're
going to lose and it's not right. He got rid
of thirteen top generals, he got rid of forty four
junior generals, so that he then had a complacent military
that would just do what he wanted them to do.
And so the changes in administrations, that's something we should

(52:39):
pay attention to, the tipping points. And I'll finish with
one thing, and I know we'll run out of time.
Yesterday in New York there's a congressman who was in
a primary, Dan Goldman, who lost is in the New
York Times, in the New York Papers. He went for
a cup of coffee. They wouldn't serve him because of
his beliefs on Israel. This is in New York City,

(53:00):
which is a Jewish oriented place, they wouldn't serve. From closing,
Is that a tipping point to be concerned? I think
it is. I'm going to stop right there.

Speaker 2 (53:09):
Yeah. And you know, Allan, I think it's always so
much to try to get all this, you know in
an hour, right, there's just so much history and so
much where you could talk about. Love to have you
come back on inspired living and kind of continue the
storytelling and be kind of maybe our residential historian to
you know, put this ripple effect out for this platform
if you're interested, but just for the sake of time,

(53:29):
for the listening audience. Some of the things that did
this book and this trilogy of books and all the
great books that Alan has written up to this point.
You know, you talked about not just about you know,
the rise of Hitler in this fictional character, but you
also talked about the victims and the perpetrators. You talked
about the resistance, you talked about Valkyrie, you talked about

(53:51):
the assassination attempt. Because there was a lot over the
course of his period but some of the main talking
points that I saw from from this book was moral
courage exist even in dark times. Resistance took many forms
across the spectrum, and you know, you talk about how
people who choose compassion and empathy, because I always close
my shows with you know, be kind, carrying and compassionate

(54:13):
to one another, you know, and then just researching the Holocaust,
which is again that's a whole probably could be a
whole nother show of going deep down that research of
you know, on the Holocaust and those that stood up.
But you also talk about your journey about storytelling as
a witness right and education through narrative is very very
important and the danger of forgetting. You bring these up,

(54:36):
and I believe I see a lot of similarities in
our current times with history past, and the danger of
forgetting is very, very dangerous. And I'd love to have
you come back on inspired. Let me reach out to
my team please and continue these conversations, cause I think
it's important to have a historical perspective as well, if
that's something that you're interested in doing. And thank you

(54:56):
so much for being on the show, coming on and
sharing you wisdom and your knowledge and your background I'd
love to speak with you again because I find these
topics very fascinating and very important for our time, especially
through everything that's going on in the world.

Speaker 3 (55:10):
I'd love to do it. I'd be honored to do it,
and I've got a lot more to say, so yeah,
it's important. Thank you, I'd love to do it.

Speaker 2 (55:18):
Yeah, my pleasure, my friend, and again, thank you for
all you're doing. Keep up the inspiration, keep inspiring people,
keep writing, keep storytelling, because there's going to be a
lot of things in our history that we need to
be reminded of. Because I do think it is you know,
the danger of forgetting is very similar to what I
feel like. We're in that tipping point right now. Like
you said, can't even get a cup of coffee in
New York City because of your beliefs, and that's very,

(55:39):
very dangerous. So thank you Alan again. If you want
to learn more about Alan Winter, you can go to
Alan Winter dot com. Just get on the internet, type up.
You can go to all of our social media pages
where we have his bio and all the links to
his books. Make sure to check out these books. Check
out this podcast. We'll have him back on to continue
talking about the historical journey. And so we'll close with

(56:01):
a quote from the favorite famous Abraham Lincoln, which I
think is very important, with malice. Quote, with malice toward none,
with charity for all, with firmness and the right, as
God gives us to see the right, let us strive
on to finish the work we are in and to
bind up the nation's wound. End quote, and that is
by the great Abraham Lincoln. So until our next show,

(56:24):
until our next podcast, until our next connection together, be kind,
be carrying, be compassionate. And whatever you do, and most importantly,
dare to dream, there to explore, dare to live. You'll
discover the diamond within. You'll also discover the many hidden
gems that are all around us. So thank you for
tuning in, too, inspired living, and we'll see you next
time here on Own Times Television.

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