The Strange History of Nazi Germany: The Weird, Dark & Unbelievable Truth Part 2

0:00 Speaker 1: Welcome back, dear listeners to the Strange History Podcast, where

0:04 Speaker 1: we examine history's worst decisions and quietly hope we never

0:08 Speaker 1: repeat them, although sometimes I'm not convinced. Last episode we

0:13 Speaker 1: explored vegetarian propaganda, stolen babies, occult archaeology, and a concrete bunker.

0:19 Speaker 1: So thick modern engineers went, yeah, that's permanent. Now today

0:25 Speaker 1: we finish our descent, and yes, it gets weirder.

0:29 Speaker 2: The looting of libraries not just art.

0:34 Speaker 1: While Nazi art smuggling gets the headlines, the regime also

0:38 Speaker 1: systematically looted books, millions of them. Entire archives from universities, synagogues,

0:45 Speaker 1: and private collectors were cataloged, boxed, and sent to storage depots,

0:50 Speaker 1: many underground. One such cash discovered in Poland after the

0:55 Speaker 1: war held manuscripts from Jewish scholars who never returned. A

0:59 Speaker 1: librarian who helped to recover them later said, we opened

1:02 Speaker 1: crates full of knowledge but empty of authors. Sometimes history

1:07 Speaker 1: breaks your heart in one sentence.

1:10 Speaker 2: Forced labor built the secret war machine.

1:14 Speaker 1: Those massive underground factories, the tunnels meant to house weapons, bunkers, headquarters.

1:21 Speaker 1: None were built by volunteers, prisoners from concentration camps and

1:26 Speaker 1: kidnapped civilians from occupied countries were forced to dig them

1:30 Speaker 1: under brutal supervision. Survivors later recalled days without food, water

1:36 Speaker 1: ration to a cup, and guards beating them if they slowed.

1:40 Speaker 1: Many tunnels achieved only one finished feature mass Graves.

1:45 Speaker 3: Tonight's episode is sponsored by Build a Bunker. The subscription

1:49 Speaker 3: box for aspiring dictators. Each month get exciting items like

1:54 Speaker 3: a shovel made of questionable ethics, a handbook titled maybe

1:59 Speaker 3: Just Stop, a one year pass to your local government

2:02 Speaker 3: run grocery store bread Quarters, where the motto is yes

2:06 Speaker 3: we have bananas, but limit is one, and a sticker

2:08 Speaker 3: that says authoritarianism. It's not a phase. Build responsibly or don't.

2:14 Speaker 3: History will judge you.

2:16 Speaker 2: Micromanaging the nation down to hairstyles.

2:21 Speaker 1: The Nazi obsession with purity was so extreme officials attempted

2:25 Speaker 1: to regulate fashion, modernist women's clothing, suspicious jazz inspired fashion,

2:32 Speaker 1: degenerate makeup acceptable if subtle and airy and friendly. One

2:39 Speaker 1: propaganda article infamously declared a German woman does not paint

2:44 Speaker 1: her lips red like a foreign temptress. Somewhere Joseph Gerbels

2:48 Speaker 1: definitely believed lipstick caused jazz.

2:51 Speaker 2: The Holocaust run like a paperwork department.

2:55 Speaker 1: One of the most disturbing realities. Genocide required astonishing office organization,

3:02 Speaker 1: railway schedules, chemical requisition forms, billing invoices for Zyklon B,

3:08 Speaker 1: meeting minutes titled final solution logistics, all horrifyingly routine. Adolf Eichmann,

3:16 Speaker 1: an architect of the Holocaust, once testified I did not murder.

3:21 Speaker 1: I merely managed transports, which is like saying I didn't

3:25 Speaker 1: crash the car. I just cut the brake lines and

3:28 Speaker 1: aimed it downhill.

3:29 Speaker 2: Measuring faces to calculate race.

3:33 Speaker 1: Thousands of photos exist of people from Europe, Africa, and

3:37 Speaker 1: Asia forced to stand while ss anthropologists measured their faces

3:41 Speaker 1: with calipers and drawn charts. They believed skull shape determined intellect, morality,

3:47 Speaker 1: and race destiny. Spoiler, it does not. This wasn't science.

3:53 Speaker 1: It was cosplay anthropology with the confidence of a man

3:56 Speaker 1: who thinks reading half a Wikipedia page makes him in life.

4:01 Speaker 2: Radios required independent thinking not included.

4:06 Speaker 1: The Volkshemfeger People's receiver was a cheap, mass manufactured radio

4:12 Speaker 1: designed so everyone could hear Nazi broadcasts. Its tuning range

4:16 Speaker 1: was intentionally limited to prevent access to foreign stations. Listening

4:21 Speaker 1: to BBC broadcasts became a crime punishable by imprisonment. One

4:27 Speaker 1: elderly German recalled, we knew something was wrong when every

4:30 Speaker 1: station said the same thing and none of it matched reality.

4:35 Speaker 1: Propaganda works best when it becomes the only soundtrack public health,

4:40 Speaker 1: but only for approved people. Nazi health messaging sometimes looked

4:45 Speaker 1: progressive anti smoking campaigns, exercise programs, public sanitation, but beneath

4:52 Speaker 1: the surface eugenics, people with disabilities, mental illness, or epilepsy

4:58 Speaker 1: became targets of sterilization or murder, disguised as mercy. One

5:05 Speaker 1: nurse involved in the euthanasia program later confessed, we were

5:09 Speaker 1: told it was medical progress, but it felt like killing hope.

5:14 Speaker 3: This episode is brought to you by Spin That Science,

5:16 Speaker 3: the pr firm that turns pseudoscience into policy. Need to

5:20 Speaker 3: justify cruelty, want to make racism sound like lab work.

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5:29 Speaker 2: Last Germania, the gigantic fantasy capital.

5:34 Speaker 1: Hitler plan to redesign Berlin into Germania, a monumental capital

5:38 Speaker 1: with structures so large they would eclipse Rome and Paris.

5:42 Speaker 1: The centerpiece a domed great hall, capable of holding one

5:47 Speaker 1: hundred eighty thousand people, so large that architects calculated the

5:52 Speaker 1: building would form its own weather system, including indoor fog

5:56 Speaker 1: from human breath. Nothing says functional God governance like designing

6:01 Speaker 1: a building that reigns on itself.

6:04 Speaker 2: Die Gloca the Nazi time machine myth or miracle.

6:09 Speaker 1: After the war, rumors spread of a top secret device

6:12 Speaker 1: called die Gloca. The bell allegedly anti gravity propulsion, time

6:18 Speaker 1: distortions a glow like liquid mercury. Scientists vanished. No evidence

6:24 Speaker 1: supports the story, but conspiracy theorists insist it was the

6:28 Speaker 1: lost key to Nazi UFO technology, because if there's one

6:32 Speaker 1: thing humans do well, it's assuming history's villains were smarter

6:35 Speaker 1: than they actually were.

6:37 Speaker 2: The ban the slaughter house after the war idea.

6:41 Speaker 1: Gribbels recorded a conversation where Hitler envisioned a future Germany

6:45 Speaker 1: where slaughterhouses were abolished and people ate plant based diets. Meanwhile,

6:50 Speaker 1: the regime was building gas chambers. Ethics not even once.

6:56 Speaker 2: Futuristic propaganda in a ruined nation.

7:00 Speaker 1: As the war collapsed, propaganda showed jet fighters, rocket weapons,

7:06 Speaker 1: concept art of sleek post war cities, all while German

7:10 Speaker 1: civilians starved and cities burned. It was the World War

7:14 Speaker 1: II equivalent of photoshopping abs onto your Instagram profile while

7:19 Speaker 1: living in a basement eating crackers.

7:22 Speaker 2: Nazi eugenics expanded beyond borders.

7:26 Speaker 1: In occupied countries. Doctors enforced rules determining who could marry, reproduce,

7:32 Speaker 1: or undergo forced sterilization. Paperwork could decide fate approved equals

7:38 Speaker 1: citizen denied equals deportation or death. Medical authority was weaponized.

7:44 Speaker 1: Loving dogs, hating humans, Hitler adored his dog, Blondie. Himmler

7:50 Speaker 1: wrote poems about animals, goring criminalized cruelty to pets, and

7:55 Speaker 1: yet mass murder continued daily. The strangest, most chilling contradiction.

8:01 Speaker 1: They knew empathy existed and chose where to turn it off.

8:06 Speaker 3: This episode is also brought to you by History Rewind,

8:10 Speaker 3: the only time travel service that does not take you

8:12 Speaker 3: to Nazi Germany. That's right. While other time travel agencies say,

8:17 Speaker 3: let's visit the nineteen forties, it'll be educational, History Rewind says, no,

8:23 Speaker 3: thank you, We've seen enough documentaries. With History Rewind, you

8:28 Speaker 3: can choose the Renaissance, but only the fancy parts, not

8:32 Speaker 3: the plague ancient Egypt, no manual labor the nineteen twenties.

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8:51 Speaker 3: guide who gently slaps your hand when you try to

8:54 Speaker 3: fix history. History Rewind because if we're time travel we'd

9:01 Speaker 3: rather drink wine with Cleopatra than argue with fascists.

9:05 Speaker 1: So ends our two part journey into Nazi Germany's bizarre, contradictory,

9:09 Speaker 1: and terrifying world. If there's one lesson here, it's this

9:14 Speaker 1: evil doesn't always look chaotic. Sometimes it wears a uniform,

9:19 Speaker 1: files paperwork, and believes it is logical. So please, my

9:23 Speaker 1: dear listeners, pay attention to your present. History only repeats

9:27 Speaker 1: when we stop paying attention. Thank you for listening, and

9:32 Speaker 1: thank you for staying curious, skeptical and kind. Subscribe. Tell

9:37 Speaker 1: your friends show us some love with a kind review,

9:40 Speaker 1: History would approve. Let's work hard not to forget lest

9:44 Speaker 1: we repeat it