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Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway. Take some time to take care of yourself and your family this fall. Shop in-store or online and stock up on items from your favorite self-care and baby care brands. Now, through November 5th, get great savings on self-care items like Dove Antiperspirant. Depend
Now, now, she will have order in this court order.
Broski Nation, we've got some things to address today and whether you like it or not, I am a student of history and I love history and I love learning about history and whether you like it or not, I've got a load of laundry going as well. So if you hear that, that's what's going on in the background.
Guys, I've been back on my bullshit. I've been way, way, just fist deep into World War II lore, you know, because it was World War I at first. I had a real vested interest in the English sort of...
The English presence in World War I. And when I was in the UK and I went to the Imperial War Museum and I went to Churchill's war rooms, oh, that was fucking cool. That was cool, okay? But you guys don't want to hear about that. I'm here to talk to you today more so about...
Everything I've, it's tea time. It's war tea time, okay? Because I'm not here to retell history to you. I want to give you the interesting facts that I have learned recently that are sort of off the beaten path. They're not really brought up. They're going to be included more so in like, you know, top 20 things you didn't know about World War II, number one, like that sort of shit, okay? That's what I'm going to give you here today.
But before we launch into that, some housekeeping things for us today, Broski Nation. We've got, first and foremost, I want to announce to you there's a new YouTube channel. We are launching a new YouTube channel! Clap it up. Clap it up. I want to hear some claps. Take your hands off the fucking wheel. I want to hear some claps.
We're launching a new YouTube channel for Royal Court. Okay? Lot of back end stuff going on here. I am happy to announce the launch of the Royal Court YouTube channel. Go ahead and find it. There is a new episode this week
very special guest so go subscribe to that and uh every royal court episode from now on will be posted on there and we're gonna try to get them up as we get them you know what i mean because we were trying to do this weird thing before where it was like once a month but if we don't have a backlog then we can't so now it's like go there and i'm gonna let you know every time there's a new one okay now that what else oh i have a big fucking zit i have a big fucking zit on my mouth
That's the second major update, got a big fucking goiter right here on my lip that's just grow- it's growing in strength and power by the day. Okay? There is a town of little- little creatures living under my skin, just "Yes, master, yes, master." And they're toiling away. They're working. It's finally getting hot here, and I like to keep my house on about 68 degrees! But today, it's really just not working. Okay.
Like I said, order, order in this court. Everybody be seated here. The show, the program's about to begin. Order, order. Okay. So here's what I really want to talk to you guys about. Well, actually, let me... No, I'm going to launch into this and then at the end, I'll get into what I missed from last week. Okay. Did I just bite my tongue? Yeah, I did. How do you bite your own tongue? Fucking ow. Okay.
I have started watching Band of Brothers, okay? And if, can I just say something also? If you guys are like, oh, I don't want to hear about history, fucking grow up. Grow up. Maybe you might learn something. Open your ears and open your eyes and shut your little lips and you might learn something, okay? Because I'm not, like I said, this is my approach. If I was going to be a professor,
Of anything. It would probably be language, okay? I would probably, once I'm at a level of fluency of Spanish that lends itself to, you know, having a really niche interest in the language, which I do have, but I've been kind of lax in my studies recently. I'm finally back into doing my lessons with, you know, Maddy's Mundo, my professor, of course.
At a much later stage in my life, after I've traveled the world a bit more, learned a lot more history, and just have all around more wisdom and more life experience, I would love to actually get my master's and then my doctorate in the Spanish language. And a specific sort of area would be phonetics, like Spanish phonetics. I would really love to do that. So putting on that cap for a second...
of every day we live on this planet is an opportunity to learn and to grow as humans and to be more culturally aware and culturally informed. So if I were to be a professor of anything, specifically it would be Spanish, but of anything, I think the mark of a great instructor, of a great teacher, is you make what you're saying into a story, you make it compelling, and you tell it as if
You know, it's the next episode of a TV show. You have to approach history in that way because it was lived day by day by the people who, you know, survived it. And if you tell it in that sort of suspenseful narrative way, I think that that is really what I enjoy as a student is that.
Being able to put yourself into the storyline and imagine how would I have reacted? How would I have, you know, what would me and my family would have, what would we have done? And so I think that that's the true tell of a great teacher is how do you keep your audience engaged? How do you keep them on the edge of their seat? Like, and what happened next? What happened next? Because you'll remember it better that way as well.
And I, you know, we've all had horrible instructors who are just there to collect a paycheck and move on. And even worse, maybe they're being paid to be a teacher or an instructor, and then they just make you read the fucking PowerPoint. I lived through that in college and in high school. You just get there and they're just reading words on a screen. You're not teaching me anything. You know, what is the benefit of having a real life person, a quote unquote expert in this field who is qualified and trained to teach the youth how
this topic, and you're going to sit up there and read off of a PowerPoint to me? I can fucking do that. And so I think that the real impactful professors that I've had in my life have made me care about the topic at hand the way that they care about it. So that's kind of the approach that I want to take with you today, okay, is I care about this because I find it very interesting, very interesting.
And it's also the sort of underbelly of a more common, commonly discussed topic, which obviously World War II, very, okay, everyone knows about World War II, but these are facts where I'm like, oh, damn, okay? All that to say, I started watching this show called Band of Brothers. This is an old TV show. It's from like 2001. And the young gentleman in it, I don't even care.
Because guess what? It's not about that. But is it important to bring up? No. But am I going to bring it up anyway? Yeah. Because they're attractive. And it's like famous actors of today who are like 24 in this series. They're so young and they play young servicemen, which a tight fade and a uniform. I'm locked into that.
Anyway, I watched Dunkirk with Stanley when he was here is what sparked this. I was like, you know, I've never seen Dunkirk. I watched Oppenheimer in theaters like two or three times because I kept going with people because I really enjoyed it. I obviously love Cillian Murphy and it's a star studded cast, but I never gave much thought to any of the subject matter that Oppenheimer is about. I didn't know that there was a race for, you know, who was going to come out with the A-bomb first and, and,
how imperative it was that we beat the Germans to it, that sort of thing. So obviously watched Oppenheimer when it came out. We were talking about in the vein of Christopher Nolan films because I'm not really a film girl, okay? I'm watching Iron Man 2 and I'm watching Shrek. That's kind of what I'm locked into, right?
And Stanley was like, you've never seen Dunkirk? And I was like, no, I haven't, which is shocking because for all the Harry girls out there, hello, I never saw Dunkirk. But I've seen everything I needed to see about the movie from the Harry Styles Stan perspective. Like I've seen all the GIFs, I've seen all the whatever. And I finally watched it and Stanley was like, oh, Harry's not even in the movie that much. Fucking liar, he's in it a lot. He's one of the main fucking storylines. Anyway, really enjoyed it.
And I also appreciate, and I'll get into all this here in a second, like the sort of specifics, but when it comes to telling stories of World War II, you know, telling the story of whether it be a town, whether it be an individual, whether it be a specific event from the timeline of World War II, the leaders, the government officials, whatever,
What I appreciate about Dunkirk, which I think Christopher Nolan's talked about this ad nauseum, of course, for the whole idea behind the film, is that Dunkirk, by all means, was sort of a failure. And if you're not, let me sort of paint the picture.
This is in France. Okay, we're in northern France. Okay, so this happened between May 26th and June 4th of 1940. Basically, what's happened here is the German troops have pinned the Allied troops in northern France. They are completely blocked off. They're pushed to the beach, and they're literally sequestering on the beach awaiting help. They have no air support. The Germans are pushing in from the land, and they're stuck there. It's Allied forces. It's English, French,
maybe some American and French. And they're stuck there, just sitting ducks, waiting. And as they're waiting to be picked up by these boats that are being bombed as they're coming into shore, so they're watching their help sink, is German air raids. It's literally a dire situation.
Dunkirk is this story of what could be and is considered a military failure where they ended up having to be evacuated and the evacuations were few and far in between. Churchill asked for like 30 to 40,000 troops to be evacuated. There were 400,000 on the beach and the ships are coming in. And as they're being loaded and leaving the French beach, they're being bombed and
And sinking. And so now all those soldiers are having to swim back to shore. The injured, there's dead. I mean, just awful.
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civilian vessels, just English citizens, just English people who happen to live on the coast, you know, because England and France are extremely close, taking their own personal civilian boats and sailing to Dunkirk and picking up the soldiers and taking them back to safety, you know, quote unquote safety to England.
And it's a really beautiful story of humanity, of loss, of, you know, re-strategizing and what could have been an all-out massacre. And so I appreciate the storytelling from that perspective of these soldiers were going home feeling like they failed, feeling almost like survivor's guilt. You know, I got out.
But as these air raids would come over the beach, it was just a waiting game. This person you were just talking to, you know, are they going to get blown up? Are they going to get shot? Are they going to... Are you going to be one of the lucky ones that makes it onto the boat? So obviously Dunkirk is so good. It's a great movie and I enjoyed it. But yeah, what a scary feeling of you get back home and you feel like a failure and you're arriving home and the English public is calling you a hero and you're like, I'm not a hero. You know, like the...
Kids that died overseas are a hero, are heroes. So it's just very like, wow, what an interesting perspective to tell the story from. Yeah, so I really enjoyed it. So that sort of kicked me off on this thing of like, okay, now I'm in this war mindset. Y'all remember way back when, when I was really just hyper fixated on World War I?
Well, we're back. We're right back here. So now, in that vein, started watching Band of Brothers, which is heralded as one of these really important, well-done, honoring World War II TV shows. And I think it's only one season and it's 10 episodes, but the episodes are long. And each episode starts out with...
real World War II veterans opening up the tone of the episode, of sort of what the episode's gonna be about. And all the characters in the show are based on, are portrayals of real commanders and captains and privates and lieutenants, whatever, and the U.S. paratroopers. They're U.S. paratroopers, which means they jumped out of planes. Okay, so, been watching Band of Brothers.
very, very beautiful men, very beautiful men in this show. Can't feel the need to go ahead and tell you that right now. If you're interested in the aesthetics of that sort of thing, beautiful men to look at. Now, before I get into what I want to teach y'all about today, I want to show you a cool thing I found when we were in London. Me and Katie were in London about two, three, four weeks ago.
We went to Portobello Road Market, which is this cute little outdoor market. I know it's very touristy. Whatever, dude. I found some really cool shit there. And I want to show you all these things I bought. Number one, we stumbled across this girl who has this
This tent set up that was all cigarette cards. And I'm thinking, what the fuck is a cigarette card? I'm like, they're selling cigs over there. No, it's cigarette cards. And it's completely set up all these different ones. And I go, what are these? And she explains it to us. And she included this whole thing on the back.
That says, cigarette cards were originally used as stiffeners in soft packs of cigarettes from the 1880s onwards. The concept developed into issuing them in series of 25 and 50, covering themes that would appeal to men. For example, military, sport, transport, and for women, flowers and costume. The idea being to encourage them to collect the full set.
The advent of war in 1939 stopped production and the impetus was lost, although the hobby remained popular. In recent times, there's been a resurgence of interest now for their decorative qualities, leading to the reissue of favorite subjects. Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway. Now through November 5th, earn four times rewards points when you buy items from your favorite brands. Shop for items like Pampers, Swaddlers, Diapers.
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federally insured by NCOA. To receive any advertised product, you must become a member of PenFed Credit Union. Okay, so that is what a cigarette card is. And they're hard. They're like card stock. And they would basically be in the...
cartons of cigarettes that sometimes I believe they'd be part of war rations for the soldiers and it would keep the pack stiff so if it got wet if it whatever you know the cigarettes wouldn't bend and so these are them I don't these aren't like from the war but they're from wartime these are from 1938 uh right here and she's got it displayed on the back what
The explanation is for each of them. And I got this one right here. If you can, if you can zoom in on that, if you want to show that, that is a world war one and world war two military aircraft. That's what this is going to be. Okay.
From 1938. I just think that's so fucking cool. This is so cool. And we came across this and I was like, these are really from the 30s? And she was like, yeah. And I said, where do you get these? She was like, we trade them. It's literally, it's a very lucrative sort of trade she was telling us about. I said, that's crazy. So one of these, I mean, what does it say up front? Will's Cigarettes. Will's is Cigarettes.
We got a submarine, supermarine Spitfire fighter right here. And it says, although no exact performance figures can be quoted for the sub-supermarine Spitfire single-seat fighter, which is in production and will shortly go into service in the RAF, it is definitely the fastest fighting airplane in the world. The Spitfire is a low-wing cantilever monoplane. And it goes into the sort of whatever. But this is, it's from wartime. How fucking neat is that?
And they're all English. Okay, so that's one I got. And then this is the other one. Now this one is cool. This one's from 1939 and it's Hollywood Starlets. Okay, so they're film stars. It's part of the film stars beauty line. This one in the middle right here is Marlene Dietrich, which was a famous fan favorite of servicemen. And yeah, on the back, this is from 1939. How cool is that, y'all?
So I got this: "A series of real photographs now being issued with these cigarettes. Carreras Limited. Arcadia Works London, England." Just real, real neat. So I'm gonna frame these and, uh... I don't know! I don't know, okay? And I also got this thing from that market that says, uh... It's a little plaque and it says, "England expects that every man will do his duty."
in the war effort, which is enlist in the draft. I also got this gold thing here, which I haven't really talked about. It says bullshit corner. That's staying right there, okay? Because you've entered the bullshit corner. Anyway, yeah, those are my finds from the market. Now let's get into the tea that I wanted to tell y'all, which it's not, this is like tea on World War II. What are you talking about? Okay, so basically...
To set the scene. I just want to share this experience because I told you I went to the war rooms, Churchill's war rooms in London. Fucking crazy. And then when I was in Chicago a few years ago, we went to, I forget which museum it is. It's one of those like not science and something museums, like natural science museum. And in this museum, nuts, it's going to give me like scary chills thinking about it.
There is a real German U-boat that was captured. A U-boat is a type of submarine. And these were so scary, deadly, and caused a lot of damage. One was captured, I believe by American forces, drug all the way back to, I think, the continental U.S. And then eventually, you know, restored and whatever. Now it sits in this museum in Chicago.
And it was an exhibit completely built around it. And they walk you through it and sort of paint what life would have been like on this U-boat and what happened when it was captured and how much intelligence was gained by the American military when they captured it. You can go inside of it. A Nazi U-boat, you can go inside of it and it is chilling.
On the wall next to it, they have like one of the original Nazi flags. It was on. It's just chilling. It's like I don't you read about this shit in history books and you hear about it. But like being there looking at it, it was it was like a chilling isn't even the right word. It's like, oh, this is evil. It is pure evil. And I've never laid my eyes on pure evil like that before. And so we went through and got a little tour.
And of course, I had to ask, is it haunted? Because these people who work in the museums, I'm sure they hear shit. And she was like, oh, yeah, for sure. The girl who gave us the tour, she was like, oh, for sure. I've had children who have been with, you know, their families or whatever, who take them to the museum, claim that they see things. They're like, who's that man on the top of the boat? And then everyone's like, what man? And it's little kids being like, who's that man? What?
So, of course, it's on it. Of course, it has horrible, horrible negative energy attached to it. But, yeah, just very, very interesting. So, in that vein of just chilling evil sort of things, I was watching this documentary recently about...
the sort of hidden secret life of Hitler. And because we obviously know his hypocrisy knows no bounds. And he was truly one of the, one of, if not the most evil man to ever live. He portrayed himself as the pinnacle of mental and physical strength and health. But there was a completely opposite, true hypocrisy
history that was untold which was uh he was a tweaker he was a fucking tweaker he was reliant on so many different i think falsely prescribed injections and pills and tonics pills and potions that like sort of kept him ticking he had high blood pressure he had high cholesterol he had a i think a heart attack if not had a heart attack then he was um
He had heart condition. All these things. Also, not even to mention the fact that the whole like Aryan shit. He wasn't even he wasn't even German. First of all, he was Austrian and he was a brunette and he didn't have blue eyes. Well, all this just just, you know, this documentary basically was talking about how many different things he was on. And here's the biggest tea of all that you bitches don't know is that Hitler was off the gas station dick pill. It was prescribed dick pills.
He had IBS. Hitler was shitting. He was pooping himself. It was characterized as aggressive flatulence. That's rad! How are you gonna be hateful, fat, old, and you're farting? And you're farting blood? Cringe! How are you gonna be one of the most evil men alive and then also have diarrhea? Just, what the fuck? This doc was insane. This documentary I watched, it was like all of these ailments that plagued him.
We were so close to Hitler being a, he could have been an Elvis. He could have shit himself to death. Maybe that's what happened. We'll never know. Hitler, if you shit yourself to death, that wouldn't have been torture enough. Okay, so that was one of the first ones is that his health and mental health was rapidly deteriorating to the point where he like shook into his 50s, obviously before fucking killed himself. He was rapidly declining, which is just like,
I found very interesting. Okay, second thing that I kind of wanted to Google with y'all is Hitler had counterfeit money printed for the Great British Pound, like for British currency. Counterfeit money because he attempted to like destroy the economy of Britain.
Great Britain? And I'm like, I didn't know that. So let's Google that. Operation Bernhard, there was a name for it, was an exercise by Nazi Germany to forge British banknotes. The initial plan was to drop the notes over Britain to bring about a collapse of the British economy during the Second World War. The first phase was run from early 1940 by the, what? Seichelheitdienst. Under the title Unterhammen Andreas.
The unit successfully duplicated the rag paper used by the British, produced near-identical engraving blocks, and deduced the algorithm used to create the alphanumeric serial code on each note. The unit closed in early 1942 after its head fell out of favor with his superior officer, Reinhard Heydrich. What? And they did it at concentration camps. Like, they were...
stamping and printing this counterfeit money using concentration camps to do it. That's nuts. I didn't know. I don't know if it was successful, though. So the guy hid at his home until November 1946 when he handed himself over to the British authorities.
Forging an enemy's currency was not a war crime, so he faced no charges. He was detained until early 1947 when he was handed over to the French. They attempted to persuade him to forge passports for them, but he refused. He was released in November 1948. He underwent a denazification process during which statements were produced from the forger inmates whose lives he had been responsible for saving. What?
Examples of counterfeits from Operation Bernhardt have appeared at auction and have been sold through dealers for a higher face value than the original five pounds. There are also examples of the notes in the Museum of the National Bank of Belgium and the Bank of England Museum. The International Spy Museum holds an example of an Operation Bernhardt printing plate. What's the International Spy Museum? Where is it? It's in D.C.? I want to go here?
it's in dc visitors receive the conclusion to their undercover mission of a debriefing center including a performance debrief that summarizes their top spy skills oh my god i want to do it so bad you get like assigned a mission like a fake mission oh yeah we're doing that we're doing that we're doing that holy shit that's cool okay yeah so that's nuts i didn't know they printed fake money and now apparently it's worth a lot
So the next thing I want to talk about is the concept of the banned art museum by Hitler in Germany. And this was supposed to display how degenerate and rotten these art pieces were and like detest everything that they represented. Meanwhile, there were plenty of museums that offered, you know, Reich approved art.
art that the public could go admire. But of course, when this shit opened, everyone flocked to it because they want to go see the band art. It's the sort of macabre, you know, if it's denounced, if it's not allowed, that makes you want to see it more. So,
This kind of backfired on Hitler because he wanted to use it as a public display of what not to do, but it ended up creating way more viewership, way more viewers and eyeballs on it than if he had never done it at all. Anyway, there's a whole separate discussion here that I think I've briefly mentioned before on an episode of the suppression of art under the Nazi regime.
and how a lot of famous major works of art were stolen and were hid away for his personal gain, his personal enjoyment. And some of them were destroyed. Some of them were, yeah, it was a really strange thing to do in a time of war. And I'm sure you've seen that photo of the bricks
placed in a protective pattern around the statue of David in Florence, Italy. I believe the statue is still in the same place it was during wartime. And they did this to protect it from German bombing from the Blitz. And yeah, those pictures are really interesting of everything that was built around it. And it came out unscathed, so really lucky in that regard. But
Yeah, Hitler had this weird thing of like suppressing what he considered modernist art. What is it specifically?
All modern art was considered degenerate by the National Socialist Party, the Nazis. Expressionism was particularly singled out. In 1937, German museums were purged of modern art by the government, a total of some 15,000 works being removed. And this is from the Tate, the Tate Museum, which is a very famous museum in England. A selection of these was then put on show in Munich in an exhibition titled In Tarte Kunst,
This was carefully staged so as to encourage the public to mock the work. At the same time, an exhibition was held of traditionally painted and sculpted work, which extolled the Nazi party and Hitler's view of the virtues of German life. Kinderküche, roughly family, home, and church. Ironically, this official Nazi art was a mirror image of the socialist realism of the hated communists.
Some of the degenerate art was sold at auction in Switzerland in 1939, and more was disposed of through private dealers. About 5,000 items were secretly burned in Berlin later that year. The Sick Child by Edvard Munch, who everyone knows The Scream by Edvard Munch, is now in the Tate Collection. It was sold at the 1939 auction. Crazy, burning art. Like, I just...
This is, I think I talked about this last week too, of when it comes to destruction of what I consider a collective human, this is going to come out choppy, but like, I hope you understand my meaning here. Like one of the worst things I can imagine is an individual or a small group destroying what belongs to the collective human archive. Do you know what I mean? Like,
When a very old, very famous piece of art is destroyed, I feel a sense of loss that is not even selfishly for me or like my art.
lineage, I feel a sense of loss for humanity in general of when something like, you know, the Notre Dame Cathedral is destroyed or when a very famous work by a very famous artist is destroyed. You can never get that back. And it is the most selfish thing imaginable to
to deny other humans what that is. It is an innately human thing to enjoy and to appreciate and to learn from art and literature and creative works of humans past. It is so selfish. It truly makes me emotional. When you go to a different country or even in America, when you
Anytime the conversation of censorship or burning media, burning books, banning books, banning art, stealing art, destroying art, anything like that is it's just unimaginable to me because.
Without that at our core, what are we as humans? What have we contributed to the world if not art? If the entire human experience cannot be described as art, a performance of art, then what is it? And when we destroy it out of some heated, selfish act...
or out of some political message. The only people that suffer are future generations, because they have less to learn from, and they are doomed even more to repeat the mistakes of our past. It just makes me so emotional, and honestly, learning about, because there are chapters in, I mean, every art history book that we'll touch on,
how detrimental that period of time was in the 40s. Like, the Nazi destruction of communal art. It's horrible. And it is, you know... And something else should be said about how everything today is digitized. Everything is digital. And all of our... Not all, but, like, our art in today's age is in the cloud. And I feel...
justified in saying that I don't particularly understand exactly how the cloud or clouds work. And it's very scary to think that if that crashed or if a server crashed or what this Microsoft blackout that just happened, how fragile it really is when it's all of our memories and it's everything, you know, one could suggest that
That's someone's entire life because we no longer have physical photographs or scrapbooks. These are sort of art forms that have been thrown to the wayside in favor of a digital scrapbook of our lives, you know, a digital archive of our lives. When that goes down, what do we have? And maybe that makes me a very sentimental, you know, physical person that I –
love physical memories and I love concert tickets and I love knickknacks and I love this reminds me of that trip that we took to wherever or here's the playbook from my first ever Broadway show or here's my sister's high school graduation, you know, commencement trip trifold thing. I just, I am very attached to physical things. And so I think that that might, do y'all understand what I'm saying?
It's also a strange thing in the context of, like, hyper-consumerism, where we all just want to shop, shop, shop, and buy, buy, buy, buy. But none of those things have meaning. None of those things have a sentimental value. To have things just because they're trendy or because they were expensive does not endear them to you. It is a wealth status symbol. And...
I think that the wealthiest you could really be is being rich with memories and people who you love and reminders of how much you love those people and the good times that you've had. I think that that is that's a truly wealthy man, a truly wealthy person.
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So anyway, yeah, that shit's crazy. That shit is nutso to me that he had this banned art museum and it was supposed to be teaching the public of what not to do. And it completely backfired because, of course, people want to go see. And I want to know what was in it. What was in the In Tartetic Kunst? The Nazis Inventory of Degenerate Art. I think this is from the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The Victorian Albert holds the only document detailing the full extent of the Nazis' systematic purging of German museums and public collections from 1937.
created at the heart of the Nazi regime by Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda, which is nuts, by the way, which I touched on that a little bit in my art history video that I did on YouTube talking about World War I and how all these countries developed a propaganda department. Go watch that if you haven't. The document records the confiscation of more than 16,000 works of art, which the Nazis deemed degenerate.
A selection of the seized paintings, drawings, and sculptures was shown at the infamous Degenerate Art Exhibition, which opened in Munich in 1937 and subsequently toured across the Reich. The document details the confiscations themselves, and it also sheds light on how the Nazis extracted value from the art they despised. Artworks were sold abroad to raise funds for the regime or were exchanged for objects that did not violate the Nazis' aesthetic sensibilities.
most of the remaining works of art were destroyed in a bonfire held in the courtyard of the Berlin Fire Department, echoing the public burning of books in 1933 that were considered to be incompatible with Nazi values. I can't think of anything scarier. That's fucking terrifying. There's nothing scarier than burning books, than burning the public's access to information. You know, that's also why I'm, I've talked about Chernobyl on here as well. Chernobyl, Chernobyl.
Sonny and Chernobyl. I've talked about that before of how interesting it is to me the extent to which a government is willing to lie and classify information for so long. We know governments lie. We know government officials lie. We know that we are kept with wool over our eyes and in the dark. But Chernobyl was an example of how severe and how truly terrifying and evil these people have to be.
To want to save face more than save their country. Like, save the people of their country. Like, actually how devastating the effects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster was. And, like, they lied to these people. You'll be able to return home in two weeks. You know, just get on a bus, get out of here, you'll be back in two weeks. Never to return. Never to return. Damn near 50 years later, we'll never, never, we'll probably be inhabitable ever again. Anyway.
exhibiting degeneracy. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Germany's new rulers organized so-called condemnation exhibitions across the right. These would ultimately serve as the blueprint for the 1937 Munich exhibition. The exhibitions, which had titles such as Chamber of Terror, Art in the Service of Subversion,
and degenerate art were united by a common theme. They denounced works of art which were interpreted as an attack against the German people and as symptoms of a cultural decline inextricably associated with liberal democracy. The exhibitions argued that this art had been nurtured by those politicians who had betrayed Germany by signing the Versailles Treaty, which was the peace treaty that ended World War I.
condemning Germans to a life in servitude to outside forces, and who had thereafter promoted utterly destructive social and cultural trends. Many of the artworks displayed in these early exhibitions would later be confiscated in 1937, recorded on the inventory, and displayed in the Munich's exhibition. Such pieces included Otto Dix's anti-war paintings. Yo! Oh, that's crazy!
Otto Dix's anti-war paintings that depicted the gruesome reality of trench warfare and the emotionally and physically crippled veterans it produced. These were denounced as an attack on the honor of the German soldiers and an assault on their heroic memory. What? Now, if y'all haven't seen my YouTube video, I literally kind of teach about this, that Otto Dix was an incredibly important war...
art historian, truly. I mean, he was a record keeper. If you want to think about art, historical art in that sense of it is a record keeping to a certain extent of the time. And if it's not a historically accurate retelling, then it is definitely a sort of screenshot of the emotional impact of the war at that time. So, you know, it's like when we've talked about
things like paintings that are commissioned by Napoleon or commissioned by the king of whatever country, that you can't really trust that to be an accurate portrayal because, of course, it's influenced by the person in power and how they want the moment to be remembered. So always taking these pieces of art with a grain of salt. But with Otto Dick's,
His thing was really portraying the emotion of what it was like to be on the front lines, to be in trench warfare, to have lived and survived this incredibly traumatic world event that he happened to be a part of. Otto Dix, I want to say he was not Otto Dix. Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway was a medic doctor.
He was a medic in Italy? Ernest Hemingway, World War I. Medic? I'm so smart. Hemingway, during the First World War, Ernest Hemingway volunteered to serve in Italy as an ambulance driver with the American Red Cross. In June 1918, while running a mobile canteen dispensing chocolate and cigarettes for soldiers, he was wounded by Austrian mortar fire. Crazy! Crazy.
Anyway, yeah, Otto Dix was incredibly important and his paintings have helped us contextualize and paint a more accurate picture of what that lived experience was like. And I'll show you one of his famous ones. This is one of his most famous. This is called Stormtroopers Advance Under a Gas Attack. Stormtroopers were German soldiers. And like I've talked about here before, biological warfare was becoming more
It was being introduced into the conversation. Mustard gas was a major tactic used in World War I that caused a temporary blindness and oftentimes permanent blindness if exposed to it for too long that would just incapacitate the enemy, you know, the opposing side. And it was the introduction of these gas masks that resembled skulls or these sort of alien terrifying things
faces that are advancing towards you during an already chaotic traumatic environment and uh that must have invoked such horror such horror never having seen it before and um so yeah he portrayed them a lot so the fact that these you know quote quote unquote
accurate portrayals of what it must have felt like having these soldiers advance on you. These sort of works being hung up in a museum to be painted as lies is nuts. It's nuts. Oh my God, this shit interests me so, it is so compelling to me. Like what the fuck?
That's also why I studied communication in school, because the extent of persuasion and propaganda and being a skilled orator and just humans' ability to influence other humans is so scary to me.
And to bring it back to a very personal basis, it's why I really, really struggle with having an audience sometimes because I don't think that I'm any more deserving of any one person where I should have the ear of this many people, you know, and that people should give a shit what I have to say because I know how powerful that is. And it's terrifying to think that I could use it incorrectly or that I ever have used it incorrectly. It's just such an interesting thing
topic to study of the ways that historically it's been used for good and it's been used for evil, just pure evil. So.
Okay, this is from the Victoria and Albert website as well. Another tactic, which would also be employed in the 1937 exhibition, was to juxtapose this degenerate art with pieces which did not violate the Nazis' aesthetic sensibilities. These were artworks from a time before the cultural rot was said to have set in, or which was composed by artists seen to have resisted its poisonous temptations.
Some of these works would feature in the German art exhibition, which took place only a short walk away from this art exhibition, inviting visitors to compare the best and worst the art world had to offer. Nuts. Also in this context, feel the need to say that Hitler was a failed art student. Like he wasn't, right? He like dropped out of art school or he wasn't allowed into the art school that he wanted to be in in Austria. So this probably, I mean, there's, it's little man syndrome of just,
You, because someone determined that, someone came to the conclusion that you were not good enough, you now, in your position of authority, get to determine which art is real and not real, which art is considered good and bad, and you get the final say on that. Like, it's just a claim for, just nuts. This whole shit is nuts. The ego of man knoweth no bounds, but it will always knoweth a fall. Wow. Okay. Okay.
So that's kind of going to do it for me in the sort of like historical hyper fixation thing right now. I'm going to keep watching Band of Brothers because it's real good so far. Very sad. Obviously, any war retelling of a war story is very sad because you see the camaraderie and then you see the camaraderie be ripped away by just instant and tragic death. And I also it's interesting now to watch these sort of things and enjoy it, but also be like, oh, this is American military propaganda. Yeah.
It's hard. I will say, though, when it comes to World War II stuff, it's hard not to be kind of patriotic because I'm like, damn, we really showed up and showed out in that context, of course. And that goes with. OK, anyway, my songs of the week are I'm Back on Northern Attitude by Noah Kahn and Hosea. That one, it's just going to do it for me every time. I do love that one. It's going to do it for me every time.
Um, we're also doing Apple by Charlie, of course. Apple by Charlie XCX, of course. And I love, my favorite is 365. Okay, that's going to be my go-to every time. That's going to get the party started. Apple is great. Everyone's going to do the dance, but 365, that's going to do it for me every time. Bumpin' that. Bumpin' that. Okay, happy Brat Summer to all who celebrate. And my third song is going to be Mystery Train by Elvis.
I'm back on my Elvis kick. Back on the Elvis kick just a little bit. One of his songs came on shelf the other day and I was like, damn, Mystery Train is such a good song. So go check that out if you have not. Like I said, new Royal Court channel. So go subscribe to that. Also subscribe to this channel if you're watching this on YouTube. And if you're not, go check us out on YouTube. We've got videos up.
New episodes of Broski Report every Tuesday. I promise next week probably won't be as history focused, but Lord knows, okay? What else? Go get your merch if you'd like merch for the Broski Report, broski.shop. Go get you a Moo Moo. I've got my, this is not a broski.shop, of course, but this is my beautiful cat Moo Moo. My beautiful Halloween black cat Moo Moo. And I think that'll do it for me, guys. Thanks so much for listening to me yap.
I'm just getting here off the Premier Protein and the Red Bull X ice water combination, and I just sort of just start yapping. And I really appreciate anyone who listens to these to completion. It means a lot to me. So I love y'all. Thank y'all. And seriously, I'll see you next week. Okay, bye-bye.
Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway. Take some time to take care of yourself and your family this fall. Shop in-store or online and stock up on items from your favorite self-care and baby care brands. Now, through November 5th, get great savings on self-care items like Dove Antiperspirant. Depend
underwear for men colgate toothpaste and poise pads and for the little ones stock up on huggies snug and dry diapers and huggies little movers diapers offer ends november 5th promotions may vary restrictions apply visit safeway.com for more details life is full of adventures do you take this man to be your husband i do welcome home we did it he has your eyes he's perfect
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