Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. In the years leading up to World War II, Hitler and the Nazi Party had one main objective, to brainwash the German people into the Nazi way of thinking.
The Nazi Party was aimed at oppression. It was aimed at conquering. No matter what your role in life, you were part of this enormous war machine. This would be achieved using innovative methods and the latest technology. They were being fed Nazi propaganda through a fire hose. The Nazis were relentless in promoting their warped worldview.
The rapturous tens of thousands in the crowd hailed Hitler almost as kind of a religious figure. Even vacations were repurposed for state-sponsored indoctrination. This is what the Nazis were creating, an entire city for German workers to go on holiday under Nazi control. How far did Hitler go to corrupt the German population?
And how successful were his schemes in transforming a nation into a finely tuned war machine? On the peaceful island of Rügen is the largest surviving monument to Hitler's brainwashing project. This island sits 130 miles north of Berlin, off Germany's Baltic coast. These sandy beaches have long been a popular vacation spot.
Historian Nick Jackson is an expert on this location and what Hitler planned to do with it. It was and is today one of the more expensive domestic holiday resorts. For the last couple hundred years, it's been northern Germany's premier holiday destination. But this idyllic island hides a much darker past. Years before the outbreak of war and soon after seizing power,
The Nazis exploited this coast's popularity for their own twisted ends. Here they built a giant vacation compound that would come to be known as the Colossus of Prora. So Prora is this absolutely enormous complex that covers almost three miles in length, which is still, you know, one of the single largest building complexes of the modern age.
Hitler himself absolutely loved architecture and he really liked for things to be built on a gigantic scale because this suited his aims for global domination. At Prora there would have been cafes, a cinema, bowling alleys, two swimming pools including a heated one with a wave machine. There are many things people know about the Nazi party but one thing they probably don't know is that for a short while before the Second World War it was the largest travel and tour operator in the world.
This huge building was designed to hold 20,000 people, but the guests here would not have had much time for relaxation, because when it came to the Nazi party, there was always an ulterior motive.
The main thrust of the building is we are allowing you to have an enjoyable holiday. That makes you keen on the regime and it also relaxes you because you're going to be expected to work on behalf of your country and certainly work on behalf of producing a country that is capable of fulfilling Hitler's military dreams of dominating Europe. You're going to be expected to die for that idea.
It would have been wall-to-wall Nazi indoctrination, one way or another. Whether it was actual speeches given to them, or the songs they sang, or the music they listened to, everything was geared to heightening the sense of Nazism.
By controlling their holidays, the Nazi Party was able to keep an eye on and keep control over ordinary citizens. There were spies within these camps, and if they picked up on anyone speaking ill of Hitler or of the Nazi Party, then they would be turned in, and there would be grave, if not deadly, consequences for those people.
Prora was one of five gigantic coastal brainwashing complexes planned by the Nazis. But indoctrination was not the only purpose this site's designers had in mind.
Possibly at the insistence of Hitler himself, nearly all mid-30s Nazi buildings are designed for two purposes. One is theatrical performances and rewards for the German people. But on the other hand, given that war is always planned in Hitler's future, the size of these rooms and the design of the building was also partially conceived for it to function as it did as a military hospital.
Prora sits crumbling today, a decaying testament to the Nazis' mass brainwashing program. In the German capital of Berlin, evidence of the Nazis' indoctrination program is harder to find. But in the vibrant suburb of Wedding, one man knows exactly how serious the Nazis were about training the German population for war because his family paid the price for dissent firsthand.
Tommy Spree has managed the anti-war museum for almost 40 years. This is the worldwide first museum that was ever founded against violence, against war. Founded by my grandfather, Ernst Friedrich.
Ernst Friedrich was a conscientious objector in the First World War. And after the war, he gets involved in all sorts of political movements, including most famously pacifism. And he wanted to show how disastrous this First World War was. And people in Germany thought a war like that would never happen again. This world war would be the war to end all wars.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, it took only four weeks till the private army of Hitler called the Brownshirts stormed the museum and they changed this house of peace into a torturing chamber.
Hitler absolutely hated pacifists. In 1928, he referred to a nasty pacifist sewage, which he claimed was poisoning the German people. Hitler's rise to power was essentially violent. He had no time for pacifism, and those who resisted the drive to war were more than likely going to end up in a concentration camp.
People who were political prisoners of the Nazis at this time were often subjected to gruesome torture and horrific treatment. But Friedrich, being the remarkable man that he was, after he's released, he actually manages to flee Germany and he goes on to fight for the French resistance in the Second World War. The Anti-War Museum, founded by Ernst Friedrich and now operated by his grandson, is filled with examples of Nazi propaganda. This is an original air raid shelter.
Everyone had his or her own kitchen chair, and you had to sit on that chair. It was controlled. The Germans have always been very good in controlling. The Nazi air raid construction program started in the mid-1930s and easily outstripped similar Allied projects.
You have to remember that this was a totalitarian state, that the Nazis controlled all the communications tools. And so they were able to brainwash the German people into believing that war was not only inevitable, but the German people were superior and would undoubtedly win. Of course, brainwashing took place because of course they wanted German boys to join the German army.
And if people in Germany had read Hitler's book Mein Kampf, My Battle, they then would have realized that Hitler meant war and that Hitler wanted to overrun, well, the whole of Europe. People like Hitler, people who want wars, they always lie to their own society. But Hitler's extreme worldview and the strategies he used to promote it would prove so successful
that even the war-weary people of Germany would willingly join his cause in the most bloody conflict the world has ever seen. In the lead up to World War II, Hitler was doggedly focused on preparing the German people to go to war. He needed a master manipulator to spread the Nazi message and oversee the propaganda machine, and he had just the man for the job.
Power in Nazi Germany to a large extent depended on closeness to the Führer. Joseph Goebbels was very close to Hitler, which meant that his Ministry of Propaganda was one of the most powerful organizations in Nazi Germany. Everything that you saw and heard in Germany was filtered through Goebbels. When Hitler seized power in 1933, he installed Goebbels as head of the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.
His headquarters were in lavish offices in central Berlin. So this was, in essence, the nerve center of the Nazi regime. Everything from this building was designed with a purpose to influence and manipulate the German people into viewing the world through the ideological lens of the Nazi regime.
Goebbels served essentially as Hitler's chief PR officer, and his job was largely to bring the German people along with the Nazi party. And he marshaled all the resources of popular media available to him. The methods Goebbels used included both traditional and emerging media.
The Nazis weren't a political party in the traditional sense. They were a cult, it was a movement, and in order to garner the levels of support they needed, they had to engage in mass levels of propaganda, effectively. And they did that by employing technology and constant messaging. So they used the radio ceaselessly and very, very meticulously
After shortly taking office, it was important to Goebbels that they create an affordable radio for all Germans to have access to. And this is where we get the concept of the Volksamfinger, the people's radio. It was to cost no more than 35 Reichsmarks, and some 70% of German households had access or had a radio in their homes. But of course, this had a very sinister side as well.
Not only was Goebbels in control of the newspapers and the films, but by having access to people's homes, he was able to indoctrinate the German people really 24 hours a day. The propaganda ministry grew steadily from 350 employees in 1933 to 2,000 employees by 1939, with a budget of close to $1 billion in today's money.
But Goebbels and his propaganda ministry was only one pillar of the great Nazi brainwashing machine. The party sought to control every aspect of people's leisure time through a program known as Kraft durch Freude, or strength through joy.
It ran from 1933 to 1939. It was their leisure wing, if you like, but they used it as a propaganda tool because whilst entertaining people in the library, in concerts, in theatres, on holidays, they were dripping Nazi ideology all the time. The ultimate goal was to try and create a racial people's community in which regional and class divisions would be destroyed in pursuit of national aims, which for Hitler included war.
Strength Through Joy was a program engineered to make the average German person love the Nazi Party and feel loved by it. You did not take a holiday without the Nazi state having its BVI trained on you. And to such an extent, everybody had to take the holidays through this organization. It became the biggest travel agency in the world. In addition to the vacations people were to enjoy at Prora,
The Strength Through Joy organization offered other leisure activities too. Strength Through Joy wasn't just land-based holiday resorts. It actually began with the concept of giving people cruises, something that still has an idea of glamour about it today.
Hitler and his cronies had grown up in the golden age of steam liners like the Titanic and the Lusitania. For them, this was the ultimate glamour of travel and transport. And so they wanted a Nazi cruise ship. And originally they were going to call it the Adolf Hitler. It was vast, it was beautiful, it was modern, it was sleek. In the end, it was named the Wilhelm Gustloff after a dead Swiss KDF leader.
But this was to be the Nazis' flagship of luxury travel. The crown jewel of the strength through joy movement, this ship was 684 feet long and could carry almost 2,000 passengers and crew. But life on board would have been tightly controlled. So the day would start around 6:30 in the morning where they'd be woken up by a trumpet which would signal that it's time to have exercise on deck.
They'd have breakfast at around 7:30, then they would sing Nazi songs. People would be allowed to choose what sort of daily entertainment they wanted to do, and often this involved day trips to locations which always suited Nazi foreign policy, so places like Italy, which was allied with Nazi Germany.
And there was always a sort of sinister purpose behind these trips because ultimately they were designed to make people think about racial differences and to emphasise racial difference between Germans and the places that they were visiting. You're stuck in the middle of the sea, you're bombarded with Hitlerite propaganda and if you tried to swim to shore, you'd have probably ended up in a Gestapo cell.
The Nazi regime used the Strength Through Joy organization to enter every corner of German public and private life. But as Hitler's desire for war was close to becoming a reality, Nazi propaganda would extend its reach outside of Germany for the first time. The Nazi Party's quest to fully indoctrinate the nation of Germany was unceasing as they prepared the people to fight and die for Hitler's ideals.
In addition to taking over the airwaves, newspapers, and even vacations, the Nazis also tried to insert their warped worldview into high culture. On the outskirts of Berlin, one structure that was key to this effort still stands. This huge amphitheater is the largest surviving example of a Nazi-approved meeting place, or "Tingplatz".
By 1936, when this venue opened, Joseph Goebbels' propaganda ministry controlled everything: what you hear on the radio, what you see in the cinema, what you see in a place, a tingplatz like this. Now known as the Waldbühne, or "forest stage," this venue was used in Nazi Germany for plays and operas, which were performed in front of 20,000 people. Its design is based on a classical Greek theater,
because the golden age of ancient Greece and Rome played an important part in the Third Reich's propaganda. Nazi art and sculpture was working in the service of the state. The German public were being bombarded with images of Aryan perfection. So sculptures that show the perfect physical form, posters that show idealized visions of Germany's position as the great nation.
The Nazis controlled how these theaters were built and also what was performed on stage. The Nazis exercised complete control over the theater and this could be quite surreal and unpleasant at times. So for example, they admired Shakespeare, but not all his plays. So for example, Othello, because it had a black protagonist, was banned. But The Merchant of Venice, where they could take the character of Shylock and turn him into this
The Waldbühne opened in 1936 as one of the venues for the Olympic Games, which were held in Berlin. These games remain in public consciousness as the event that saw African-American Jesse Owens triumph in the face of Hitler's overt racism.
What is not remembered is how aggressively the Nazi Party used the Olympics as a propaganda opportunity so the Third Reich could be seen in a good light by the rest of the world. Hitler at first didn't appreciate the propaganda potential of the Olympics. It really took Goebbels to point that out to him, but it was a way of
proving the muscular superiority of the Aryan race. It was a way of also putting Germany very much at the center of Europe with the torch, the Olympic torch, finding its way through all these countries to Berlin. Berlin as the new Olympia. Berlin had been awarded the Olympics in 1931, two years before Hitler became Chancellor. As the truth about Hitler and his Nazi party slowly began to surface,
Enthusiasm for the Berlin Games waned. There were rumors of a boycott. Hitler's festival of propaganda nearly blew up in his face. Hitler would back down as a result of that pressure because Hitler is propaganda. His entire persona, having staked his own personality and success and the regime that followed him on the Olympics, could not afford to have the Olympics taken away.
Hitler was so eager to show off in front of the international community that he even allowed the Jewish fencer Helena Meyer to compete. She won silver for Nazi Germany, and in another propaganda triumph for Hitler, she performed the Nazi salute. During the 1936 Olympics, Berlin completely changed.
Vicious anti-Semitic slogans that covered not just Berlin but other German towns are deliberately removed. International newspapers that have been banned now suddenly appear to be on sale. Jazz is played again in nightclubs. Over a million people came to Berlin to see or participate in the 1936 Olympics and were treated to the most outrageous spectacle of Nazism imaginable.
The Berlin Olympics was a spectacular international propaganda success for the Nazis. There was comparisons with Imperial Rome and even some black Americans commented on the friendliness of Germans that they encountered.
It was a watershed moment in the normalization of Nazism throughout the world, and particularly in the United States. A New York Times reporter who was sent to cover the games reported on the rapturous tens of thousands in the crowd who really hailed Hitler almost as kind of a religious figure.
Many of those visitors were taken in by this well-organized, friendly Olympics. But that is just the propaganda facade, and behind that it throws shadows of reality. In the forest north of Berlin, at the same time this Olympics was taking place, concentration camp Sachsenhausen was being built. Tens of thousands of people in Nazi Germany had been arrested. Thousands had already been murdered in cold blood. Galvanized by the international propaganda success of the Olympics,
In the next three years, Hitler would take the German people closer and closer to the war he always craved.
Hello, I'm Violet Manners and welcome to Hidden Heritage, the podcast that brings you inside Great Britain's favourite destinations. From the same team that brought you the number one history podcast, Duchess, Hidden Heritage will uncover the fascinating stories behind the UK's brightest, shining hidden gems.
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We will share the untold and unique stories that celebrate UK heritage. From landmarks, architecture, artefacts to myths and legends, Hidden Heritage will highlight a side to British history you have never seen before. I'm your host, Violet Manners, and founder of HeritageX, and I invite you all to join us on this exciting journey. This is Hidden Heritage. You can find Hidden Heritage wherever you listen to your podcasts.
The Nazi Strength Through Joy organization sought to control every aspect of the German people's leisure time, but it also used new technology to give the population skills which could be crucial in the war to come.
One sphere in which the Nazis were genuine pioneers was in realizing that technology was there to be used and could be used to keep them in power and to enhance their war effort. And they deployed technology very successfully in both civilian and military contexts. In Prague, André Braum and his friend André Massoud have restored an antique German car.
Bizarrely, it's one of the oldest existing remnants of the "Strength through Joy" organization. The owner of the car was Paul Linke, a German composer from Berlin, and it was given to him by the Nazi regime. Paul Linke was considered the father of the Berlin opera and was widely admired in 1930s Germany. His music was held in such high regard by the Nazi party
that he was deemed to be worthy of the gift of a strength through joy car, or KDF Wagen. The KDF Wagen was part of this whole effort of the Nazi party to ingratiate themselves with the people, to win them over by providing leisure opportunities they had never had before. And this was just one more way in which they promised to make life better.
The "Karthierwagen", known as the "Strength through Joy" car, was a program introduced by the Nazis to allow the German people access to mobility. The Nazis looked onto the Americans and the Model T Ford with great envy, and Hitler wanted to produce a car which was affordable for your average German. In the early 1930s, only one in 50 Germans owned a car.
Hitler sought to change this and enlisted the Czech-born engineer Ferdinand Porsche to design a car to rival Ford's Model T and mobilize the German people. Hitler came with the idea that a car should be created to be affordable for the masses. Hitler came with the idea, Porsche created it. It was designed actually to carry a family of five, two adults in the front and two or three kids in the back.
The KDF-Wagen would cost 990 Reichsmarks, equivalent to 31 weeks' pay for the average German worker in 1936. To buy one, workers had to join a special "Strength through Joy" savings program. However, the concept of a car for everyone was not unique to the Nazis.
Before Hitler was in power and the early years of Nazi rule, there were all sorts of different people and companies and designs working on a variation of what was called a people's car.
What was then Czechoslovakia launched a car called the Tatra 97 in 1934. And if you look at the designs and the actual car itself, it looks very suspiciously like the KDF Wagen. And I think it's almost certain that the Germans basically stole the idea from the Czechs.
What the KDF wagon had done in terms of people's concept and understanding was to really get the idea going that people should be in machines. And this actually translated well into a war context because people were thinking of transport as a mechanized modern thing, which of course was absolutely integral to the idea of Blitzkrieg. Blitzkrieg, translated as "lightning war,"
would become the German military doctrine of using fast mechanized force to punch through enemy lines. But to be successful on land, Blitzkrieg also needed support from the skies. This led to the creation of a project which would be ambitious even today, let alone by 1930s standards.
The Nazis loved this idea of branding everything "the people's." So you had the people's cars, people's radios, people's fridges, even people's gas masks. Incredibly, they even tried to develop a people's airplane, a kind of light aircraft that people could aspire to own. This program was known as the Volksflugzeug. Again, Hitler took his inspiration for this scheme from Henry Ford.
The Ford Flivver had set the standard for mass-produced affordable personal aircraft. It's hard to see how this could have worked. I mean, it sounds like a recipe for disaster having millions of people owning light aircraft. But possibly what the Nazis were trying to do was to train the future fighter pilots that they were going to need in a wartime scenario. Even though the Volksflugzeug was popular, they were too expensive to be within the reach of the average German citizen.
So the Nazi top brass prioritized military designs instead, abandoning the people's plane. With Europe on the verge of war, the German population would be forced to come to terms with the difference between the Nazi Party's promises and what it actually delivered. Hitler and the Nazi Party sought to control the German people in a variety of underhanded ways from the first moment they seized power in 1933.
But when the war was officially declared in 1939, the German people began to realize that many of the "Straint Through Joy" projects were little more than propaganda in disguise. The Nazis made all sorts of promises about how things would be better once the war was won, and the KDF Wagen was one of these promises. The KDF Wagen would never reach the millions of families it had been designed to benefit.
The KDF Wagen was a bit of a disaster for the Nazis because you had 300,000 German workers set up savings plans to try and pay for their car, only to find that none of them were rolling off the production line. There were about 200 that were made before the Second World War started, and then production was basically switched to wartime mode.
Factories set up to build the KDFwagen were immediately repurposed to produce the German Army's Jeep equivalent, the Kubelwagen. Like the KDFwagen project, the partially completed Colossus of Prora was abandoned. By the end of 1940-41, it was clear that this building would never be finished. And it was used, as was originally conceived, as a military hospital.
But the original purpose of the building, three miles of happy holiday home for the strength through joy movement, that dream just evaporated as the building just lay unfinished. Parts of the Colossus of Prora still lie abandoned, exposed to the elements, a testament to the hubris of the Nazi brainwashing operation. By 1944, as the tide of the war started to turn against Germany,
the true face of the Nazi regime was exposed. The forest, next to the purported bastion of culture, the Waldbühne in Berlin, became a place of barbarity. So just outside the Waldbühne itself, during the Nazi period, military courts would condemn in total over the 12 years some 30,000 people to be executed.
But most vividly and most tragically is that at the end of the war, hundreds were brought here and shot in this valley as deserters. "I am too cowardly," say the signs around these dead people's necks. "I am too cowardly to defend the fatherland and its women and children." The Nazis built the Waldbrunner to be a place of culture, and it's actually quite fitting because that ultimately is what Nazi culture was all about: violence and human suffering.
In the bitter January of 1945, as Russian troops entered German territory, one of the greatest disasters of modern times was to take place. It would occur on the flagship of the Strength Through Joy program, the Wilhelm Gustloff.
East Prussia was the first part of Germany to fall under the Soviet invasion, and the population there was in a state of panic. They were dying to get out because they knew that a very angry Soviet army was coming with vengeance on its mind. The Wilhelm Gustloff, whose glamour was used to brainwash citizens prior to the war, was now drafted into service as an emergency transport ship.
If we fast forward to 1945, in the town today of Gdansk, or then Danzig, the Wilhelm Gutzloff was evacuating troops, he was evacuating members of building operations, he was evacuating thousands of civilians away from the ever encroaching Red Army as they were heading towards Berlin.
It's difficult to say just how many people were on board the Wilhelm Gustloff, but one estimate puts it at about 10,500 people, and of these people around 9,000 were civilians. But there were also military personnel on board and Nazi party officials, which made the ship a military target. The ship's peacetime capacity was limited to 2,000 crew and passengers. This dangerously overloaded ship departed amid freezing conditions.
The Wilhelm Gustloff had to set sail with an inadequate escort due to shortages during the war and this got even worse during the journey because of the freezing cold weather, equipment was malfunctioning and some of the boats which were supposed to be escorting it had to turn back.
The Wilhelm Gustloff received a message which said that it was on a collision course with a minesweeper and the captains had a disagreement about whether they should switch the lights on to try and avoid collision. In the end, they did switch the lights on and this got them spotted by a Soviet submarine and ultimately sealed the fate of the ship. The Soviet submarine S-13 stalked the ship for two hours. In the dead of night, the submarine fired all of its torpedoes.
The Wilhelm Gustloff was struck by three torpedoes fired from a Soviet submarine. The first two killed many people instantly, but the third torpedo knocked out the engine room, which basically knocked the lights out on the ship, plunging it into darkness. It would have been absolutely horrific. There were screams, there was people panicking, people were even trampled to death. The Gustloff sank in under an hour, in temperatures well below freezing.
It's estimated that about 9,600 people died in that incident. Easily the worst maritime disaster in history. And when you consider the cruel irony that this was intended to be a pleasure cruiser, this was intended to be somewhere where German workers could come to relax under the Third Reich, and it ended up being a vessel of death. It's extraordinary that this story
is so little known because so many people died. It was the great maritime disaster in history, but nobody really wanted to know. Nobody wanted to think of the Nazis as human or as suffering. Nobody cared about Nazi suffering. The sinking of this floating palace of propaganda, overloaded with terrified civilians, is a sad testament to the madness of the Nazi regime.
But fortunately, this was a regime that was soundly defeated, both on the battlefield and in the consciousness of the German people.
One thing the world has to be grateful for is the fact that although it seemed as if an entire population had been brainwashed, denazification happened rather quickly. The Nazis relied on an unprecedented level of propaganda, and they developed a very sophisticated way for rolling it out.
But the problem with propaganda is that it's not true, and eventually people see through it. I personally see what the Nazi Party accomplished in those six years leading up to the outbreak of war
as an absolutely chilling cautionary tale for all of us faced with populist messaging and government in the modern world. Be careful what you wish for and think about what underlies promises that a government makes in an effort to win over support for its policies. It's terrifyingly easy for an evil, maniacal leader to
exert mass manipulation over an entire population. And I think we've seen it elsewhere throughout history, and unfortunately probably will continue to. Germany has had over 70 years to come to terms with these dark and painful times. But what is to become of the largest relic of the Nazi regime? There has been support for demolishing it, but instead,
the Colossus of Prora is being renovated into modern housing units. A reuse of the building looking forward to the future is an interesting expression of how Germany deals with the darkest part of its history. The building is now being repurposed, perhaps even fulfilling its function as a holiday venue, and is now turned round, if you like, and these new apartments look not just onto the Baltic Sea but into the 21st century.