The Strange History of Nazi Germany: Propaganda, Pseudoscience & Secret Projects Part 1

0:00 Speaker 1: Welcome back, my dear listeners to the Strange History podcast,

0:03 Speaker 1: where we take humanity's darkest mistakes, put them under a microscope,

0:08 Speaker 1: and whisper gently seriously. This Happened Today begins a two

0:14 Speaker 1: part journey into the unsettlingly bizarre world of Nazi Germany

0:19 Speaker 1: in the nineteen forties, where science fiction, ideology, pseudoscience, and

0:25 Speaker 1: straight up delusion collided in ways that would make a

0:28 Speaker 1: raccoon holding an electrical cable look responsible. A small disclaimer,

0:33 Speaker 1: I struggled a bit with putting the funny fake ads

0:36 Speaker 1: in this one. It didn't seem appropriate to add anything

0:39 Speaker 1: funny to a horrifying point in our history. But if

0:43 Speaker 1: history has taught me anything, comedy is built from pain sometimes,

0:47 Speaker 1: and people need to laugh when things are tough, so

0:50 Speaker 1: I stuck with my usual format. This is the part

0:53 Speaker 1: where I remind you Nazis equals bad. You'd think that

0:57 Speaker 1: doesn't need saying, but here we are in a century

1:00 Speaker 1: where some people need history explained slowly with crayons, as

1:04 Speaker 1: socialism seems to be on the rise.

1:07 Speaker 2: Hitler the vegetarian animal lover, except not really.

1:13 Speaker 1: Nazi propaganda painted Hitler as a morally pure gentle animal

1:17 Speaker 1: respecting vegetarian genius. Gebels even wrote in his diary about Hitler,

1:22 Speaker 1: extolling the moral superiority of not eating meat but privately.

1:27 Speaker 1: Witness accounts contradict it. Hermann Rauschning, who dined with Hitler,

1:32 Speaker 1: recalled dishes like squab, Bavarian sausage and liver dumplings on

1:36 Speaker 1: his plate, the opposite of plant based righteousness. Meanwhile, millions

1:41 Speaker 1: of innocent people were systematically murdered under his orders, a

1:46 Speaker 1: grotesque irony historians still point out today.

1:50 Speaker 3: Tired of confusing ethics, try moral compass. The app that

1:54 Speaker 3: reminds you you can't be compassionate because you pet a

1:58 Speaker 3: dog once while causing global suffering now available with a

2:02 Speaker 3: Hitler filter. The one worldview were owning a German shepherd

2:06 Speaker 3: equals being a philosopher king.

2:09 Speaker 2: Nazi animal protection laws yes before human rights.

2:15 Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty three, the Nazis passed an extensive set

2:18 Speaker 1: of animal cruelty restrictions. They limited hunting, regulated animal testing,

2:24 Speaker 1: and even discussed banning boiling lobsters alive. These laws weren't

2:28 Speaker 1: compassion they were political. Theater Kosher and halal slaughter methods

2:33 Speaker 1: were banned immediately, not for animal welfare, but to target

2:38 Speaker 1: Jewish and Muslim communities under the guise of ethics, hypocrisy, score.

2:44 Speaker 2: Infinity, environmentalism meets war crimes.

2:49 Speaker 1: Top Nazis, particularly Himmler, promoted conservation, forest protection, and nature

2:55 Speaker 1: as part of the ideal German soul. They restricted certain

2:59 Speaker 1: law ugging protected natural spaces and idealized rural purity. Meanwhile,

3:06 Speaker 1: Behrmacht troops burned entire villages, bombed cities, and destroyed ecosystems

3:11 Speaker 1: from Poland to the Caucasus. It's like lighting your house

3:15 Speaker 1: on fire while lecturing strangers about reusable grocery bags.

3:20 Speaker 2: The Laban's Born program the SS baby breeding system.

3:25 Speaker 1: Starting in nineteen thirty five and expanding into the nineteen forties,

3:29 Speaker 1: labans Born was created as a network of maternity homes

3:32 Speaker 1: where approved women could give birth anonymously to racially ideal babies.

3:38 Speaker 1: Some came willingly, many others were stolen. In occupied Poland,

3:43 Speaker 1: Norway and parts of Yugoslavia, Blonde, blue eyed children were

3:47 Speaker 1: forcibly taken from families, renamed and raised as German after

3:52 Speaker 1: the war. Many children didn't know who they were or

3:56 Speaker 1: that their identities had been erased. One Norwegians survivor later said,

4:02 Speaker 1: I grew up thinking the Nazis loved me. Then I

4:05 Speaker 1: learned who they were. That is nightmare level psychological damage.

4:09 Speaker 2: The kidnapped children of occupied Europe.

4:13 Speaker 1: SS Racial Inspectors, Yes, that was a real job title,

4:17 Speaker 1: assess children like livestock if they fit the racial template.

4:21 Speaker 1: They were taken. Thousands vanished into German orphanages and SS

4:26 Speaker 1: family homes. Records were destroyed as Germany collapsed, leaving many

4:31 Speaker 1: permanently lost to history.

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4:39 Speaker 3: your results won't be confiscated by Heinrich Himler, now offering

4:43 Speaker 3: new features like are you adoptable by the SS spoiler.

4:48 Speaker 3: If the answer is yes, run.

4:51 Speaker 2: The Wunderwaffen Wonder weapons that would win the war. Allegedly.

4:57 Speaker 1: Near the end of the war, Nazi leadership BE came

5:00 Speaker 1: obsessed with apocalyptic superweapons. They built the V one flying

5:05 Speaker 1: bomb V two ballistic missile jet powered aircraft like the

5:09 Speaker 1: ME two six to two. They hoped technology could reverse defeat,

5:14 Speaker 1: like switching to hard mode and hoping a cheek code

5:17 Speaker 1: exists German civilians became convinced there was a secret ultimate weapon,

5:22 Speaker 1: something enormous, something that would turn the tide spoiler. It

5:26 Speaker 1: did not.

5:28 Speaker 2: Flack towers, concrete fortresses too strong to demolish.

5:34 Speaker 1: To counter Allied bombing, massive anti aircraft citadels called Flakturma

5:39 Speaker 1: were built in Berlin, Vienna, and Hamburg. Their walls were

5:43 Speaker 1: up to eleven feet thick. Some still stand because modern

5:47 Speaker 1: nations went, yeah, dynamite, won't touch that, Just put a

5:52 Speaker 1: skate park next to it. Historically haunting, architecturally.

5:56 Speaker 2: Stubborn, project reci underground me structures with no known purpose.

6:03 Speaker 1: Deep in the owl mountains of modern Poland lies the

6:06 Speaker 1: unfinished Rheze complex, networks of tunnels carved into mountain side rock.

6:11 Speaker 1: No one truly knows what it was meant to be bunker, factory, fearer, headquarters,

6:17 Speaker 1: final boss layer. Forced laborers dug these tunnels. Thousands died

6:23 Speaker 1: building something that was never finished and never used. Haunting

6:27 Speaker 1: doesn't begin to describe it.

6:29 Speaker 2: Occultism, fake archaeology, and mystical racial pseudoscience.

6:36 Speaker 1: Himmler, head of the SS, believed in Atlantis, magic ruins

6:41 Speaker 1: and an ancient super civilization of Aryans. Who ruled the world.

6:45 Speaker 1: He sent an SS expedition to Tibet in nineteen thirty

6:48 Speaker 1: eight searching for Aryan origins picture. This trained mountain climbers, anthropologists,

6:55 Speaker 1: and soldiers, traveling thousands of miles at government expense to

6:59 Speaker 1: measure skulls and take photos of monks because their boss

7:02 Speaker 1: believed ancient Germans invented civilization, taxpayer funded nonsense before it

7:08 Speaker 1: was cool.

7:09 Speaker 2: Hitler youth scouting artillery duty.

7:13 Speaker 1: The Hitler youth began like boy scouts, with propaganda, camping

7:18 Speaker 1: uniforms slogans. By nineteen forty three they were being deployed

7:23 Speaker 1: as anti aircraft crews and later frontline defenders. Some fought

7:29 Speaker 1: in the Battle of Berlin children facing Soviet tanks with rifles,

7:33 Speaker 1: grenades and ideological delusion. A Soviet officer later said they

7:38 Speaker 1: were just boys, but they fought like men who believed

7:42 Speaker 1: nothing else existed. History is rarely comforting.

7:46 Speaker 3: Tonight's next sponsor Tanks versus Teenagers, the board game where

7:51 Speaker 3: poor strategic planning meets doomed political ideology. Ages twelve plus

7:57 Speaker 3: difficulty level impossible, playtime fortunately short.

8:02 Speaker 2: The Autobon Propaganda and Infrastructure.

8:07 Speaker 1: The Autobond was showcased as Hitler's brilliant achievement, proof Nazism

8:12 Speaker 1: brought progress. Truth planning started during the Weimar Republic. Nazis

8:18 Speaker 1: just slapped their label on it, added ceremonies, and made

8:21 Speaker 1: everyone clap. To this day, huge chunks remain in use,

8:26 Speaker 1: a monument to engineering and egos.

8:29 Speaker 2: Degenerate art banned publicly hoarded privately.

8:34 Speaker 1: The Nazis held an exhibition mocking modern art Picasso, Klee, Kandinsky,

8:40 Speaker 1: labeling them dangerous. Yet many high ranking Nazis stole or

8:45 Speaker 1: collected the same art secretly because they thought it might

8:47 Speaker 1: be valuable. So the moral stance was this art is terrible,

8:52 Speaker 1: but also priceless. Give it to me. So that was

8:56 Speaker 1: part one. If you're emotionally hydrated, morally centered, and still interested,

9:02 Speaker 1: join us for part two, where things get darker, stranger,

9:06 Speaker 1: and yes, even more absurd. Because if history teaches us

9:10 Speaker 1: anything it's this. When ideology meets pseudoscience, humanity gets weird.

9:16 Speaker 1: Don't forget to subscribe. You wouldn't want to miss a

9:19 Speaker 1: second of all this weirdness.