we need to teach the 1930s properly so that people know the Reichstag Fire was exactly this stupid
i will die on the hill that the original Nazis were just as silly as our modern versions. Hitler based his plans for the invasion of Russia partly on cowboy novels written by a con-man.
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Didn't the word "Nazi" come from basically the German equivalent of the name "Cletus" too?
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Hell, they didn't even develop nukes cause I shit you not, their reason was "It was Jewish in nature". Dude, they literally could've created the first powerful weapon in history, but their bigotry got in the way!
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thinking of this again
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The only reason the country didn't fall apart sooner was cuz it was fueled by slave labor and stolen property. If there wasn't a war to let them seize more they would have collapsed under their own incompetence. And the only reason they got as far as they did was simply because no one stopped them
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Did you know that a parody of the Karl May movies was one of the most successful 21st century German language movies?
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Yeah. I started watching old NAZI cinematic propaganda films earlier this year. I was keen to see how clever they were. They weren’t. At all.
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if you could only recommend one book on this, what would it be?
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In my heart I know if Hitler got his hands on generative AI he'd be feeding the same prompts into it and "creating" the same "art" you see the current year model of Nazis pushing all over social media.
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As a Dutch person I'm pretty sure my dad read those novels as a kid. It was a real trip hearing you talk about those in the context in which you did.
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If you haven't seen footage from the Party Congress the year before the one in Triumph of the Will it is a treat.
Nazis bumping into each other all over the place. They hadn't got the choreography down yet.
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Man, those Shatterhands episodes were some sweet sweet stuff.
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And don’t forget about Rudolf Hess going rogue, parachuting onto a random Scottish farm, and asking the farmer to take him to the Duke of Hamilton. Grandiose, unhinged, and spectacularly ineffectual.
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I refuse to ascribe competency to a government whose leader didn't read into anything in depth because generalities let him rant better, whose leadership consisted of vague plans given to a staff of crabs in a bucket fighting for his amusement.
And somehow the modern version got even dumber.
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I mean, Mein Kampf and Nazi ideology is the most deranged 4chan conspiracy thread imaginable, and yet it actually became the unquestionable ruling bible of a global superpower for 15 years and literally destroyed the world
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The thing about believing you're the chosen ones is that you don't really evaluate the possibility you might be wrong. Fundamentally, Supremacy, Fascism, and Nationalism require you to tear down criticism, legitimate or otherwise, and become high on your own bullshit. Also, Hess was even weirder.
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That was what blew me away when I started reading contemporaneous accounts, rather than How The War Happened histories. The degree of “jesus, these dipshits” that hung over so much.
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Der Sturmer was the newspaper of choice for Nazis and was really goofy and crass too. It was essentially MAD magazine with really stupid comics mixed with unhinged police blotter entries about Jewish people. Why did people need to know that a Jewish man got in a car accident somewhere in Germany?
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My dad said the Germans were better at losing.
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@bobchipman.bsky.social did a fantastic video of how "silly" Hitler and th Third Reich were despite their historical image. youtu.be/bmFVnt4yusU?...
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they didn't have social media to make it as abundantly clear that they are absolute fucking dweebs
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Swap "cowboy novels" for "tacticool gear catalogs/80s action films" and yeah that tracks with the current crop.
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Karl May was a con man?
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Ole shatter hands!!
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I don’t know if this makes me feel better or worse lol
But now I know
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Yes. This is my understanding, too. The elites scoffed and laughed at them--in some cases, all the way to the gas chambers....
Our Nazis are vulgar boobs, too, but they're just as dangerous.
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This is 1000% true, the Nazis were so ridiculous—they spent huge amounts of money keeping psychics & occultists on retainer, and as the Allies cracked codes & invented sonar to sink Nazi ships, Nazis competed by having psychics swing pendulums over maps to choose targets (they were not successful)
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I've been saying for years that Naziism and the Third Reich would be funny if they were just fiction.
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I’ve been saying this since 2016. Hitler was probably a stupid narcissist too. Mein Kampf probably ghostwritten by Tony Schwartz
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this really isn't comforting!
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Heinrich Himmler thought he was a reincarnated Prince from the year 1000
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You can't be a frothing at the mouth racist without being a huge dumb ass. The two go hand in hand
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They absolutely were. The main difference is the originals spent a few years in the most horrific warfare conditions in history. But other than that, fucking loons.
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Drugs. Don't forget the drugs.
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There's the Steve Pieczenick connection 🤔
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I have seen & heard this exact observation made about "The Death of Stalin" by folks who would have reason to know
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"The nazis were ridiculous and incompetent" was a fun history fact that stopped being fun about June 2016
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Once you've replaced everyone with Yes Men and decided that skin color is THE MOST IMPORTANT and those poor people secretly control the world, you let in flat earth and "let's invade Russia in winter". Every time
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History teachers need to run Jojo Rabbit for their classes and go, "yeah, it's exaggerating stuff, but not as much as you'd think."
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Karl May's Old Shatterhand novels. I've never read them but apparently there are theme parks, cosplay, etc in Germany.
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That's not only correct, that's praxis
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The Great Dictator was a documentary.
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I'm reading Why I Write and it's interesting to see Orwell talking about Hitler's ideology being spelled out in Mein Kampf, with the context of knowing that it's very poorly-written and is made to sound more coherent in translation (the same way interpreters try to make sense of Trump's ramblings)
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So... Essentially Owen Wilson in Shanghai Knights was one of Hitler's inspirations?
At least it's a little reassuring that evil is frequently very stupid and doesn't generally win for that long...
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I'm not sure that this should make me feel slightly better but it does in a way.
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He also couldn't even speak his own language very well.
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Yeah the Nazis were a bunch of cranks and weirdos, not some elite squad of supermen. Their superpower was the failure of all the institutions that might have stopped them.
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Goebbels literally thought Hitler was a deity.
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They were the weirdest possible combination of grimly competent men and flop-sweaty messy bitch failsons. That's before you even throw in the fact that they were up to their jodhpur-clad balls in pharmaceuticals.
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I think the key difference is that they had a Speer, a Reifenstahl, and a Diebitsch to kind of paper over the fact that they were all junkie freaks trying to one up each other on esoteric bullshit at meth parties. There's nobody in the US to project the illusion of competence.
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yeah but at least they understood aesthetics
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Wonder what was their “Epstein Files” of the time?? Maybe it was all to distract society from his shit paintings. 🤣
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Honestly, they were lucky the war didn't go even worse for them, leadership clearly had no idea what they were doing.
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The problem is they didn't have social media in 1930s and 40s Germany, so we don't have a permanent record of every stupid thing they ever thought was "based". I think if we had millions of wojack comics and cringey TikToks from the OG Nazis, the modern Right never would have gotten off the ground.
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Apparently all they need is enough key people with enough experience and influence to do the batshit crazy things to basically ruin the fucking planet for a generation. Spectacular…..
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The Nazis genuinely believed they had a divine mandate
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Goering would be showing up in a different self-designed uniform at every single photo op.
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Dude, Himmler was the biggest fucking nerd and thought he was reincarnated spirit of a Germanic king.
Decoder ring club having nerds.
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Agree 💯
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Himmler would've been gooning to trad wives and you cannot convince me otherwise.
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You ever seen Hogan’s Heroes them krauts we’re not competent at all, General Burkhalter and Major Hochsteatter kept getting outsmarted
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No, fascism is genuinely absurd childish nonsense, it's true. It always has been. One of the things they hated the most was any time people actually pointed out how utterly ridiculous and goofy all their iconography and ceremony truly was, it pissed them off so much.
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Just looked up an article on Karl May, that cowboy novel author, and the dude basically pulled the federal-wallet-inspector gag in real life!
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this is why i listen to btb and not contrapoints. when your skeets have the same takeaways i got, it's reassuring that unlike other certain popular creators, you understand your own message.
also seriously think about how goofy it is to do a dumb retvrn salute and be like "heil special boy"
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Sorry for this random question Robert, I do listen to BTB & if I missed it, I apologize, but what seemingly enabled the Germans to be like “holy shit we fucked up” after WW2 yet a decent portion of Americans are still not convinced that losing the Civil War was a good thing?
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You are absolutely right
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I mean you would know better'n most, being one of the internet's leading experts in History's Stupid Assholes.
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Calls to mind a scene from Speer’s book where he’s on the run in advance of the Allies and he meets some townsfolk somewhere who aren’t worried because they knew Hitler had a super secret weapon he was about to use since he promised them Germany wouldn’t be conquered.
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history rhymes, and it's not even clever multi-syllable schemes, it's "the cat in the hat met a rat with a bat."
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This is true, but also as a child, the Germans were the bad guys in so many movies I watched with my dad that it feels like they were genuinely competent and not at all embarrassing.
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Well, you'll find letters from people still in the early 30s making fun of him for walking around Munich with a full Indiana Jones outfit (whip included)
Not even a hill to die on if you're talking to historically literate people
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IIRC, they were really into the occult and one of the reason Nostradamus became relevant again was because of the wives of Goering or someone had read his work and though the second anti-Christ, Hister, was clearly Hitler and they were gonna win.
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The Nazis were huge into the occult and were high on meth all the time. There's no way that combination doesn't result in incredible silliness
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May was a better man than many of his fans - a common story. (and yes, also a petty thief and con artist, the latter even after he made it big)
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so many incompetents in world war 2
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It ain't so much the megalomaniacs as the people who empower them.
I see the pattern. It feels generational. But it makes no sense: We have a collective memory of the Civil War and WW2. We know the horrors of fascism and authoritarianism. And yet, we're here again on the bleeding edge.
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Doesn’t make me feel any better about fascists. Knowing this makes it all the more sad tbh.
