Part One: Alfred Hugenberg: The Elon Musk of Weimar Germany

Robert sits down with Amanda Montell to talk about Alfred Hugenberg, a German industrialist who made Hitler's rise to power possible for some very familiar reasons. Sources: The Pan German League by Barry Jackisch https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/hitler-oligarchs-hugenberg-nazi/681584/ The Fateful Alliance by Hermann Beck https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/modern-world-history-1918-to-1980/weimar-germany/ https://corporatecitizen.in/issue3/corporate-history-mercedes-was-hitler%E2%80%99s-idea.html https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-75512-5_1 https://www.topfundsoehne.de/ts/en/site/history/index.html https://archive.org/details/alfredhugenbergr0000leop/page/11/mode/1up See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Robert Evans?

  Hey everybody, Robert here. We had a little mic error for the first couple of minutes of the episode. My audio is gonna sound a little shitty for literally like three or four minutes, then it'll be back to normal. Apologies. Uh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where I am eternally frustrating my business partner and, and the only person who truly cares about me, Sophie Lichterman. Sophie, why do I do the things that I do? Why do I, why do I taunt you when you're just trying to, trying to help make me a, make me a successful person? What's wrong with me?

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Uh, you like to self sabotage.

• 0:42Robert Evans?

  I love self sabotaging. Oh my god.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  You do, you do. And like, I recognize that. So when you do it, I, I still, I still help anyways, because I'm rooting for you.

• 0:52Robert Evans?

  So sweet of you. Speaking of self sabotaging, you know who doesn't self sabotage?

• 0:59Speaker 01

  God, I hope not.

• 0:59Robert Evans?

  They were a very successful person. Our wonderful guest today, Amanda Montell, author of the book Cultish, which I've cited on this show.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  We've all read, yeah, we've all read the book. If you haven't, what are you doing?

• 1:13Robert Evans?

  It definitely influenced Zizzi and stuff. It's influenced a lot of my work. Amanda, thank you so much for being here.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Hey, it's a joy and a pleasure. And you know, so many of my Sounds Like a Cult listeners are obsessed with your show. That's how I learned about it, from them. So I'm stoked.

• 1:29Robert Evans?

  We love cults over here. You know, it's hard, it's one of those things where it's both, just objectively, cult leaders have the highest odds of any group of bad people of being incredibly entertaining, right?

• 1:44Speaker 01

  I know, I know. Especially when your definition of cult leader is as loose as mine, loosey goosey. Uh, yeah, endless, endless entertainment. I was thinking also, like, as soon as people stop exploiting others, our podcasting careers are just gonna tank.

• 2:02Robert Evans?

  Well, I mean, the good news is I do have several generations of people. Several hundred generations of people being shitty to each other to get through.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Oh, so true. No, your, your career stability is like on luck.

• 2:17Robert Evans?

  We haven't even done Nixon yet.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Oh my God. No, you have, you're, you're basically a tenured professor in the program of bastard studies.

• 2:29Robert Evans?

  I just realized I sent Sophie the wrong script because I was up until 6 a.m. But she's got the right one now and so do I.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Wow, Robert, Jesus Christ.

• 2:37Robert Evans?

  What could be better to do today when we have Amanda Montell on than an episode that's not really about a cult? Except for everything. I mean, I guess if you want to call the Nazis a cult, it's a little bit about a cult, but he wasn't even really a Nazi.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  For sure. Oh, okay.

• 2:54Robert Evans?

  He was just, he was actually kind of usually like when you're talking about like a German who was like prominent in the early 30s. And you say like, he wasn't a Nazi. You're saying it to be like, because he was like some sort of hero, right? Or, you know, someone who was trying to do the right thing, you know, in, in the middle of this dark period. The guy we're talking about today is a man named Alfred Hugenberg, and he wasn't a Nazi in a way that makes him kind of worse than the Nazis.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Holy shit. Oh, my God. I'm pumped. Okay. I said this at the beginning before we started recording, but like, please don't apologize that we're not doing a co-leader. As you can imagine, I'm like kind of sick of it. But I, I'm, I'm on a World War II kick. I don't, I mean, actually, it's been an extended kick. It's been an extended kick. So I'm, is it appropriate to say like, I'm pumped to talk about this Hugenberg fellow?

• 3:49Robert Evans?

  We love the big dub dub do's. And this is, Hugenberg is number one, one of the key guys in making the Nazi regime happen. Although again, he's not a Nazi and he hates them. He hates them because most Nazis are kind of poor for most of the period of time. And he is a rich dude. This is Alfred Hugenberg, it would be fair to call him the Elon Musk of Weimar Germany.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  That's the first thing. That's the first thing that came to mind. That is the first thing that came to fucking mind. Because like Elon, you know, he's playing ball, but he, you know that he just disdains the shit. No, he thinks they're pitiful. He thinks they're like small potatoes. I allegedly, in my opinion. I don't know. I don't know what's going on in that noggin of his. Thank God. But that's the first thing that came to mind.

• 4:44Robert Evans?

  No one ever has. So, uh, I guess let's just get into this. Uh, cause this, it's one of those things. When it comes to his early life, not a super Elon early life. When it comes to his role in the Nazi regime, it's almost beat for beat, exactly what Elon has done, right to the point where like Elon is now, it looks like getting edged out of Doge. There's a number of reports that Trump is kinda tired of him. He said that he's stepping back. It's all like, all of that, but it's gonna be an interesting history of like a German piece of shit that like, doesn't sound all that much like Elon. And then he's going to get in power and it's like, oh wow. These guys, was he, was Elon just like ripping off this fucker's notes? It's the same story. It's so funny.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Oh my God, I'm so excited. Again, I'm not sure if that's the right adjective, but like, on the edge of my seat, on the tips of my toes.

• 5:40Robert Evans?

  I get, I get giddy when I get a new Hitler book in the mail. So I get it.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Oh, good. Okay.

• 5:47Robert Evans?

  Is that a problem? Sure.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  I feel, I feel really free. I feel really safe.

• 5:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this is a safe place for, for us. Uh, probably shouldn't say Hitler stands, uh, but.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Oh my God, I just love.

• 6:02Robert Evans?

  Third Reich knowers.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just, I, any, anytime someone can pull off saying the words giddy and Hitler in one sentence, I'm like, we are cut from the same cloth, my friend.

• 6:13Robert Evans?

  Hitler usually wasn't even giddy talking about Hitler. Didn't like being around himself.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  No, that's why he needed the crowds.

• 6:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. And this is, yeah, so we'll get into it.

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• 6:30Robert Evans?

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• 7:31Robert Evans?

  Alfred Ernst Christian Alexander Hugenberg was born on June 19th, 1865, in the city of Hannover, which five years or so later would become the city of Hannover, Germany. So, again, he predates Germany by about five years. These are still just a bunch of states with Austria being general, or with Prussia being the dominant one.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Prussia. I was gonna say Prussia, and I was like, if that's wrong, I'm gonna sound so dumb, but it's all giving Prussian era.

• 8:01Robert Evans?

  It's the goddamn Prussians, and the goddamn Prussians, like, as a general rule are, they just pants Austria, not far from the time that he's born, right? Which is why Austria is on, you know, anyway. So, the fact that Germany becomes a thing is largely the work of a fellow named Otto von Bismarck, who orchestrated a series of wars, treaties, and alliances that culminated in the defeat of Napoleon III's France and the rise of the Prussian Kaiser as the emperor of all Germanic peoples, or at least like, because like Austria-Hungary is still separate, most of the Germanic peoples. In those heady early days of Imperial Germany, people get very excited about the idea of Germany, right?

• 8:45Robert Evans?

  It's like fucking Pokemon when it starts off, right? You can, folks can't get enough of Germany.

• 8:52Robert Evans?

  There.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  What are they trying to catch?

• 8:55Robert Evans?

  Other Germans, right? Like, that's the goal. We gotta get all the Germans. We gotta catamari all of the Germans into this thing. And that'll probably end well. Putting all the Germans in one box seems like it'll not lead to a series of world wars. So there's this kind of academic theory that's being promulgated, you know, around this time. And obviously, it's been promulgated before the formation of Germany, but it really gets supercharged afterwards. And it's called Pan-Germanism. And this is the assertion that Prussians and Bavarians and Saxons and, you know, Hanoverians or whatever, shouldn't see themselves as different peoples, and certainly not as different nations, but as one united German people who have a manifest

• 9:39Robert Evans?

  destiny to spread, not just in Europe, but across a grand colonial empire, that ought to, because Germans are a great people and they deserve what the British have, right? There's a lot of, there's a lot of this, like, they're very insecure, the Germans in this period of time, right? And so there's a lot of, why don't we have a lot of stuff? Look at the British. The British have so much stuff. Why don't we have any of the stuff? Come on, guys.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Here's a cult, here's a cult parallel. A cult leader is often someone with a little chip on their shoulder. He's like, hey, hey now.

• 10:13Robert Evans?

  That is, that's every Kaiser, to be honest. And it's certainly Otto von Bismarck. So they start, they start being like, how are we gonna, how are we going to create a space for us Germans that's worthy of the name? Now, these kind of nascent ideas, even though they're starting to gain traction, they're not even initially, they're not universally popular, and not even within Germany, because, among other things, these different German states have been fighting each other up until very recently, right? The Prussian Junker class, which is kind of like their nobility, has a bunch of ancestral privileges, right?

• 10:52Robert Evans?

  That they maintain even once Germany becomes a thing and they're not eager to give those up, right? They're like, what, you mean, you mean I have to give up my power over this uncouth Bavarians? No! Uh, and the idea that-

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Not everybody, so not everybody's down to be panned, is what I'm gathering.

• 11:09Robert Evans?

  No, not everybody. This is, this is like, there's a lot of conflict over this. Now, the idea that Germany should expand colonially, largely in Africa, is less objectionable. People are very into this, but they're also not great at it, right? They kind of get like, the shit, their attitude and everyone's attitudes, they get kind of like the shitty pieces of Africa, like Namibia, a lovely place, but it's like not, it's like a desert, right? It's not at the time seen as like, well, it doesn't have that much stuff for us to exploit compared to like, what we want to be exploiting. And they're looking at the British who own like, fucking a third, like a shitload of Africa and like, what the fuck, guys? And so this is what's all, this is all what's going on, as Alfred Hugenberg has his childhood.

• 11:54Robert Evans?

  Now, unlike Elon, because I, you know, we've made that comparison, he is not born into wealth, or into really much privilege at all. Some people will say his upbringing was comfortable. That's not wildly untrue by the standards of the time, but you would, we would not see this as a comfortable upbringing. And in fact, it's kind of close to Hitler's childhood. Alfred's dad is like a civil servant, he's a guy who works in the administrative state, and he dies when Hugenberg is very young. And Alfred is the only son in the family, which is also like Hitler. And the Hitler comparisons keep right on Hitler-ing, because both young men also spend

• 12:36Robert Evans?

  their adolescent years aware of the fact that their mom, since their dad is gone, is incredibly financially strained, right? They have this pension, but none of the pensions are enough to take care of a family, and so they're like, they're in, they're in, it's a tremendously difficult time, and he can't not have been aware of the fact that they were poor now, right? So there are some other similarities between Hitler and Hugenberg. Both young men were moved to create art in their early years. Hitler becomes an obsessive devotee of the opera and has ambitions as a painter. Meanwhile, Hugenberg is a really talented creative writer, with what biographer John Leopold described as, quote, "a flair for literary expression."

• 13:17Robert Evans?

  And, you know, if you're a kid who's good at writing, that can be a great way to express yourself and to work through some of your, your trauma and stuff. Alfred does not do any of that.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 13:30Robert Evans?

  Which is actually a real difference because Hitler throws himself whole hog into being an artist. He kind of sucks at it. Like, he's not any, he's not any good, but like, tries.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's definitely giving like George W. Bush's painting endeavor.

• 13:46Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  It's like, I don't know. Although the, the order of operations was flipped. W entered painting after his political tenure. Maybe Hitler should have done that. I don't know.

• 13:57Robert Evans?

  I gotta say Hitler better painter than George W. Bush.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Oh, okay, that's something.

• 14:02Robert Evans?

  Let's, let's create, Bush, you know, there's a degree of where like, okay, you're trying to like creatively represent how you feel about the people you're painting. Hitler was just sort of like, look at that building. What a great building.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  No, they were like really mid landscapes. A hundred percent. He had no point of view, at least in painting.

• 14:20Robert Evans?

  Exactly, exactly. Um, which probably says, anyway, people have, people have tried to psychoanalyze that shit for years. What's interesting to me about Hugenberg is that he has, and he'll write some books later, but he has like a literary skill. Like, he could have been, you know, a fiction writer or something like that.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Okay, L. Ron Hubbard.

• 14:37Robert Evans?

  Well, hey, I didn't say he could be anywhere as good as L. R. H., you know?

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, okay, sorry. Sorry, jumping to conclusions.

• 14:44Robert Evans?

  The man who could put a 50,000 word novel out in just seven hours of taking reds, uh, just popping pills like you. I mean, we don't have the technology for someone to be as on amphetamines as L. Ron Hubbard was back then, right?

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so true.

• 15:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's, it really is like, uh, quite a special time and place.

• 15:07Robert Evans?

  So, Hugenberg chooses, uh, what's kind of interesting to me is that Hugenberg doesn't just sort of like fail to explore his potential as an artist. He purposefully forces himself not to write, right? Not to make art because he just like, that's silly and that's like artists are poor and I am not going to be poor. So thereby I am going to make, I'm going to stop myself from exploring this thing that I'm good at in order to study the things that will make me good as a businessman, right? Yeah.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Okay, very self-flagellating, interesting.

• 15:44Robert Evans?

  Yes. Well, he, yeah, he very much is this like, I, this is not an appropriate thing for a man who wants to be rich to do. So even though this is what I want to do, I will stop myself from doing it.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Oh, no, oh, no.

• 15:58Robert Evans?

  He is going to be rich. That's his like goal from the start. And he's going to, he's going to make generational wealth, right? Like, he wants his, he wants his kids to help to part own the Reich. So he initially follows in his father's path. He studies the law and political economy in his secondary education. He does very well in school, very bright guy. And he is, he has from the beginning, a flair for money, which would have been noticed by his instructors from the jump. They also would have noticed his skill as a writer, but not for long, because he, again, he decides to quote unquote suppress his skill in order to focus on his career. Like, he talks about it as like, I made a choice to smother the artistic side of me so that I could make more money. Now Alfred makes a couple of friends,

• 16:43Robert Evans?

  but he has no real hobbies outside of his business ambitions. And if he had anything we might term a pastime, it was thinking about the way that the state and the economy worked and how they ought to work, right? Very early age, he's thinking about, why do the economics of the time function this way? And like, how can I change them to function in what I would term as like better? So his first, while he's in college effectively, he gets, you know, he, he does his like dissertation, right? Which is his first book-length publication. Like, these are effectively books. And his first dissertation is titled Internal Colonization in Northwest Germany, which he fetishes at the University of Strasbourg in 1891.

• 17:27Robert Evans?

  In his book on Hugenberg, John Leopold writes, quote, "The young doctoral candidate analyzed in detail the role of the state in fostering economic growth. This volume depicted three themes which always undergird Hugenberg's political views. First, the state would have to assist the farmer and totally abandon a laissez-faire approach to agriculture. Second, the farmer would have to act as an entrepreneur and form a capitalist bulwark against Marxism. And third, Germany would have to expand its empire." So a couple of things are going on here. When we talk about internal colonization, Germany, right now, the Imperial Germany includes a bunch of Poland, right?

• 18:07Robert Evans?

  Now, if you, if you're thinking, think back to your maps of Europe, Polans, Poles, not Germans. These are, within the boundaries of the German state, a colonized people. And Germany is sending German farmers into this occupied Poland, Polish territory, to try to Germanify it, right? Like, that's, that's very much what's going on. And Hugenberg's writing about that, but he's also writing about, like, there's not really enough Poland for us. Like, maybe we could get some more, I don't know. But also, we need to be taking more of Africa, because we need to continue, like, kind of shotgunning these farmers out. And we can't just sort of let the market take care of them, because

• 18:47Robert Evans?

  then they might not succeed. Like, it's part of this, he's not really talking all that much in racial terms, although he is a racist, but he's very much, the conclusions he comes to are identical to the ones Hitler is going to come to, thinking through racial terms, which is interesting to me.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 19:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, do you think, do you, I actually wasn't aware that Germany was sort of like jealous of Britain's colonization efforts?

• 19:18Robert Evans?

  Oh, and hugely jealous of Britain, and hugely jealous of the US. Hitler's, Hitler is obsessed his whole life with, like, why didn't this happen to us? Yeah, oh yeah.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Whoa. Okay, okay. That's key context, because if a whole nation, fledgling nation, whatever, a nation that's trying to build itself, has, you know, a, like, popular kid in school to, to look up to and feel jealous of, that can create, that can create, to use the school analogy, some kind of like incel inferiority complex type behavior, which is what I'm getting here.

• 19:55Robert Evans?

  This is exactly what's happening to all of Germany.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:59Robert Evans?

  And for an idea of like how bad this is, we've talked about this on the show. Hitler grows up obsessed with the cowboy novels of a, of a guy named Carl May. Sorry. Carl May is like the J.K. Rowling of his day. He is a children's book author.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  Oh, yikes.

• 20:13Robert Evans?

  Who writes these books about like his experiences in the American West, fighting alongside Indians. And they're all lies. Uh, like he's a con man, but Hitler is, Hitler is so, is obsessed with this. He like mails copies of them to his generals on the Western Front. But all of Germany is in the late 1800s and early 1900s obsessed with US like, like with, with westward expansion, right?

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Rugged, masculine expansionism, manifest destiny. Yeah.

• 20:41Robert Evans?

  But also this, there's this feeling like, well, America is obviously destined to be a great nation. God has just given them this empty continent with no people on it that they get to take. They're jealous. And Hugenberg, that, this is such a foundational aspect of German.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:57Robert Evans?

  Like the German character that like to this day, there are festivals to this guy in Germany and like people will do the equivalent of like US RIN fairs where they're dressing up as Native Americans in Germany. That happened, this happens today. No, yeah. It's a whole thing. It's a massive deal.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Wait, I can't, I can't, I can't get over the irony of like us through the United States, celebrating the European Renaissance and Europe celebrating like some fictionalized and surely very problematic and fucked up vision of the early days in the US. It's truly, the grass is always greener.

• 21:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the grass is always greener on the other side of the imperialism.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 21:41Robert Evans?

  So Hugenberg, Hugenberg is not, you know, as obsessed with cowboys as Hitler, but he's very much obsessed with this idea of expansion. And he, he sees, he sees it as a matter of survival for the German race. And he writes that Germany will only quote, "gain power and significance by taking it from others." And when he says others, he's talking a little bit about Europeans, but he's mostly thinking about Africa, right? Now, while I said earlier that Alfred was not a man with hot Or a social life. He does nothing but work. I mean, he's getting a doctorate, which you do kind of have to be that way to get a doctorate for a little while at least, right? If any of my friends who've got doctorates or anything to go by.

• 22:22Robert Evans?

  But he does have one extracurricular activity he starts to engage in around this time. The same year he published his dissertation, 1891, he helps to co-found a political club, the German General League. Now, you won't find a lot written about this incarnation of the organization, but historian Barry Jackisch describes it as "a political pressure group critical of the German government's foreign and domestic policy decisions." Now, that's a definition so vague, it could refer to an organization of any ideology. So I should, I should further say the specific ideological launching point of this group that Hugenberg starts with a bunch of other guys is the idea of Pan-Germanism that I discussed at the opening of the episode.

• 23:06Robert Evans?

  Jackisch continues, "The Pan-Germans were an openly expansionist organization that called for German colonies and spheres of influence throughout the world and the creation of a strong navy to reinforce Germany's newly gained status abroad. In domestic politics, the League supported an authoritarian monarchy and opposed the growth of parliamentary democracy. The League also sought to combat what it regarded as the pernicious influence of a myriad of un-German elements, particularly Slavs, often Catholics, and ultimately Jews." So, these are not Nazis, because those don't exist yet, but you're seeing the Nazi in this group, right? Like, it's, it's not so much of a leap from this to the Nazis, right? For sure. Strong notes of Nazis.

• 23:50Robert Evans?

  Strong notes of Nazis, right? Yeah. Yeah, this is like a Sega Dreamcast isn't a PlayStation 2, but like, oh, I can see what people were like, working towards, right? For sure.

• 24:03Robert Evans?

  This is the Sega Dreamcast of National Socialism. That's what we can say. So, uh, and also they are playing Crazy Taxi, so a lot of direct elements to the Sega Dreamcast. I'm gonna guess nobody gets my Sega Dreamcast jokes, but whatever.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  I was, I was nodding and I wanted to understand. I really, I, I, it's like my, my partner will talk about video games sometimes. That is a video game, right?

• 24:26Robert Evans?

  Uh, it was, it was a video game system. It just didn't, it didn't, it didn't make it. It didn't make it.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 24:32Robert Evans?

  It came out around the, the N64 and the Playstation and it did not last.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm, I'm sorry to hear that. Um, anyway.

• 24:41Robert Evans?

  We all are. We all are. We all are. It's a tragedy that rins at me to this day, like the, like the death of my grandfather.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  So sorry.

• 24:48Robert Evans?

  So Alfred is a founding member of this group, but he's not like the singular driving force behind it. When I say founding, there's like a bunch of guys who get together to make this thing. Um, and it kinda, it's gonna pretty quickly take a backseat for him because he's, his career gets started and he's just got a lot of other shit on his mind.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Wait, I have a question.

• 25:06Robert Evans?

  Sure.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  What, what does this guy look like?

• 25:09Robert Evans?

  Uh, well, you can pull him up in a, yeah, I mean, I'll have Sophie pull up a picture of him. Obviously, most of them are gonna be when he's older, cause people didn't have as many photos of them when they were super young.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. 1865?

• 25:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well, he's born in 60, this is, we're now in like the 1880s, something like that.

• 25:28Speaker 04

  You're talking about Alfred?

• 25:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Uh, boy, Alfie.

• 25:33Speaker 04

  You're gonna, it's, I-

• 25:34Robert Evans?

  It's like, this is like the 1880s right now.

• 25:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, but-

• 25:37Speaker 01

  I mean, in fairness, all these things look the same, so I guess nevermind.

• 25:41Speaker 04

  No, no, no, no, no. The picture's worth looking at, in my opinion. The picture's worth looking at.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  I just, I, like, forgive me, I just, I need a visual here.

• 25:50Robert Evans?

  The picture's worth a thousand words and most of them are going to be, wow, that is a German ass man.

• 25:56Speaker 04

  The, the hair is fun. The, the, uh-

• 26:01Robert Evans?

  The mustache is fun.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Okay, I'll describe it.

• 26:04Robert Evans?

  There we go. Yeah, there's Alfie H.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Oh my god. Okay, so he looks like, he looks like dudes in, in, on my side of town in Los Angeles, Loki.

• 26:18Robert Evans?

  He's got that like Bismarck style mustache.

• 26:22Speaker 04

  It's the way that I know exactly what neighborhood you live in.

• 26:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, let's not dox me, but um, you know, this is what I'll say. This is what I'll say. His um, his, his, his mustache is shaped like Squidward from SpongeBob's legs.

• 26:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yes, that's exactly it, yes.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  And it's white, and his glasses are-

• 26:45Robert Evans?

  Perfectly round.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  They're Harry Potter glasses, honestly.

• 26:48Robert Evans?

  He's got, he's got Squidward legs as a musta- Squidward's legs as a mustache, like perfectly round uh, Harry Potter glasses. And his haircut, if you've seen the movie Falling Down, he's got like an old man high and tight. Like, it's a, it's a remarkable combination of things. And like, by this point, and this is a picture of him when he's older, you had money for a barber, you were one of the richest men on the planet. What is go- although-

• 27:14Speaker 04

  No, this was super on purpose.

• 27:15Robert Evans?

  That does really, that does get us back to the Elon Musk comparisons, because it's like, wow, neither of you motherfuckers know how to get a haircut. Jesus Christ. I say that looking the way I do today, but Jesus Christ.

• 27:27Speaker 04

  You look, you look great, Robert.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Although, similar to Elon and Alfie, the hairline, the hairline is impressive, I mean, obviously Elon was certainly helped.

• 27:38Robert Evans?

  He did not have the ability to have a Turkish man's hair transplanted onto his scalp. Yes, that is not a Turkish man's hair, that's all Hugenberg.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Totally, which is honestly amazing, especially considering that he was such a bad person, you would think that, like, that would have affected his hairline.

• 27:54Robert Evans?

  Some terrible people are graced with an incredible head of hair, like Fabio.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  There is no rhyme or reason.

• 28:00Robert Evans?

  I don't know that Fabio was a bad person, I'm just insulting him for no reason.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, who knows?

• 28:05Robert Evans?

  Who knows? Given his humble beginnings, Hugenberg started his career as an entry level- Civil servant. So he's not, he has no nepotism to benefit from, right? He's not getting like a head start. He's going to get ahead because he's good. He becomes a member, he gets hired for the Prussian Settlement Commission in Pozem, which again is Prussia had conquered this chunk of Poland and they have a commission to help settle it. And he is helping to manage that from 1894 to 1899. This gives him a degree of influence in the German state's attempts to reform some land use policies that were essentially holdovers from the medieval era, right? They've got these kind of medieval policies on like the aristocracy owning land

• 28:46Robert Evans?

  that slow down colonizing it because a lot of land is just meant to be like where the, where the, this duke or whatever hunts. And it's great if you're a duke and it's actually probably pretty good from like a wildlife conservation aspect, but it's really bad from a farming, you know? And Germany's whole thing is we don't have enough food. We can't make enough food to not die on our own's, right? And this is constantly on our minds. So again, Pozem is like a, it's an eternal colony within Germany. Most of the population's Polish, but there's this small number of German farmers whose expansion was desired by the government. However, said expansion is stymied by the fact that many Polish people already had claim to the land. Hugenberg suggested ways to uproot them, but ultimately quit his job

• 29:31Robert Evans?

  when the government refused to revise its inadequate policy towards the Poles. And again, that inadequate policy is you're letting them live in their own homes, right? Like that's, that's the issue that he has with Poland.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  You know what I just thought is like, because the, the, obviously like the use of euphemism within the Nazi regime and their campaigning is well studied and documented. But I, I will never get over it. And if this guy Alfie had his roots in creative writing, I bet he was a master of euphemism. Inadequate policy. Yikes.

• 30:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Now, this is Hugenberg's first foray into entrepreneurship as soon as he quits, you know, this government job because it's not working fast enough. And he immediately reveals himself to have a head for this kind of work. He creates a Series of land co-ops that allow, so he goes into business independently and he starts going to these different groups of farmers who are trying to colonize this, what this territory that is like the center of modern Poland. And he, he starts putting them in together and making co-ops, right? And the purpose of this is because each of these independently, these small German farmers have no economic power and so kind of keep getting fucked over.

• 30:45Robert Evans?

  And he forms them into co-ops so that they can basically collectively set prices and bargain for better prices, right? Like the very modern thing, you know, that he's doing here and it works like this makes all of these farms much more successful. And it helps stimulate the growth of like more independent, like more German settlers, like farming in this area. The project is successful enough that in 1904, he gets hired back to the civil service for, in a significantly better position, right? Special advisor for economic development to the east. So he's just kind of like a guy stuck in the cogs of the machine.

• 31:25Robert Evans?

  He bounces, he has this incredibly successful co-op thing for all these farmers. And it does well enough that now he's the special advisor for all economic development in the east. Now, one other thing that's going on in the east, as I had insinuated earlier, is in Prussia, you've got all these junkers, right? Who are these, they're like the nobility, right? And these guys are also a lot of like the fighting nobility because like Prussians are warriors. That's what you do if you're a Prussian junker. But they also have these vast family estates, often with thousands of acres of land and they're just kind of fucking around on them, right? You know, they're the, the aristocracy does that everywhere they can. And so Hugenberg doesn't want things to work that way.

• 32:09Robert Evans?

  He wants this land to be freed up if it's not being farmed for more farmers to buy it. Now, like all conservative Germans and Alfred is very conservative, his interest is in autarky, right? He wants the state to be able to produce all of its own necessities, you know? We just had the tariffs come down yesterday. It's kind of the same idea. Yeah, right? Conservatives never quite get over this. What if, what if we didn't need anyone else? And it's like, I don't know, man. Do you like kumquats? Cause that's kind of critical that you trade.

• 32:42Robert Evans?

  Do you like computers? Yeah.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Fuck, Jesus.

• 32:47Robert Evans?

  It's more, it's a little more understandable in this period as a German, because they're always aware of like, okay, well, we've got Russia on one side, and they don't always like us. And we got France on the other, and they don't always like us. And then the English control the seas, so we're really easy to starve, you know? It would be great if we could grow enough food to not starve. So, Hugenberg set to work applying his three principles to the problem of all these giant useless estates going unmanaged. Being a practical guy, he came up with what seemed like a simple solution. And he published a book about his work with the farming co-op in Posen, and how similar tactics could be used to encourage the rapid accumulation and deployment of capital to properly settle the East.

• 33:30Robert Evans?

  Alfred insisted that the state's role in all of this was not to stick with the traditional Junker view of property, and instead to use its power to encourage competition. He wanted them to pass laws to confiscate large, unproductive estates and resettle them with small farmers who would form co-ops. I won't give Hugenberg credit for a lot, but this probably would have worked. And I base this on the fact that basically 100% of the time, shit like this got tried and peasants were given access to large areas of raw land to split up and manage in common. Productivity increased, and it especially increased over the old way of, quote, "letting some rich guy use it as a private park", right? It's just more effective in a farm in terms of yield.

• 34:13Robert Evans?

  However, the rich guys that Hugenberg wants to dispossess are the rich guys, right? These are the people running things, because the Prussians are kind of the most powerful group within Imperial Germany. And they don't like that Hugenberg wants to take their shit. I'm gonna quote from Leopold's book here. "Confronted with strong opposition from Junkers and others opposed to this proposal, state officials hesitated in their advocacy of this legislation. Hugenberg scorned their pedantic political conscience, and again left the civil service." So, he's like, "Fuck you guys, I'm going home, you know? I'm gonna go do my own thing now. I tried working through the government, it's useless."

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Word.

• 34:53Robert Evans?

  Yes. You know what's not useless? You know what should be the government? The products and services that support this podcast. They should run the country. Why not? Could they do, could they be worse? Could it be worse? Maybe.

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• 36:12Robert Evans?

  Ah, and we're back. I don't know. I think Chumba Casino would be a good overlord. Seems ethical. Casinos are always nice. We could all smoke indoors, you know? That's how casinos work.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  That is a vibe.

• 36:29Robert Evans?

  That is a vibe. So he bounces, gets out of government again, and his dream is to make East Prussia not a backwater. Right? Like, that's kind of what he wants in this period of time. But he's been, he's been stymied. And Alfred, he's not an introspective soul, nor is he to kind of waste his energy being disappointed. So he, right away, gets a job on the board of directors for a bank in Frankfurt that serves several mining concerns. And I, not just mining, but companies like generally in the metal business. So suppliers and producers are... Of raw materials. And his job, his role here is reorganizing and rearranging things to enhance the profitability of, of everyone in this industry, right?

• 37:13Robert Evans?

  Basically, all of the owners of these different mines and, and sort of like mineral concerns and whatnot are all putting a chunk of their money in like a common pile to be used. And, and Hugenberg is managing it. He's an early hedge fund manager, right?

• 37:28Speaker 01

  Wait.

• 37:29Robert Evans?

  It's not that back then, but that's what he's doing.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  I am so dumbfounded by this guy's disposition. Like, he wanted to be a creative writer. I'm still stuck on that. And then he suppressed it to become someone who's interested. Yeah, in hedge funds, I'm just like, what? How does that? How does that make sense? Like, is he truly like a Renaissance man and so adaptable? Or was he never truly an artist to begin with? And he just kind of like told himself he was suppressing his artistic tendencies, but really he was meant for this.

• 38:03Robert Evans?

  He, he writes several books. I don't know if I'd say he was meant to be a, a creative writer, but I think the thing is more, he, he is utterly obsessed in the way that poor kids sometimes wind up being with, I am not going, I am going to be somebody, right?

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 38:20Robert Evans?

  And this is how you do that.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Ultimate opportunist, however, whatever path will lead me there.

• 38:24Robert Evans?

  Come hell or high water, I will fucking be somebody, right? That's, that's this dude.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, got it.

• 38:31Robert Evans?

  So his role in this kind of early hedge fund-ish position is to like, yeah, enhance profitability, and he does. He does well enough that he gets hired on next to run a bank, like a whole banking firm. So like a basically a, a network of banks that's run by a prosperous Jewish family, the Mertens. Now, Hugenberg is a raging anti Semite, uh, as is the German General League, which he's still a member of, uh, which by this point has changed its name to the much catchier Pan-German League. And they'd only doubled down on the anti-Semitism since then, but this doesn't seem to stop him from being willing to work for this rich family, the Mertens. Now, the League at this point, it's not a mass organization, nor does it want to be

• 39:13Robert Evans?

  one. It's got maybe a few thousand members at this point. It's going to top out at 38,000 people, which is very small for one of these. Again, by the Nazi era, there's going to eventually be a couple million brown shirts, right? So this is not a huge organization, but members of them are professional people, often with a lot of money and influence. So the Pan-German League is hugely influential culturally. It punches above its weight class, right?

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 39:39Robert Evans?

  Because the members of it are guys like Hugenberg. They're social climbers, or they're already rich and influential. Now, I quoted from that historian Barry Jackisch a little earlier, and those quotes were from a book he wrote on the Pan-German League, titled "The Pan-German League and Radical Nationalist Politics in Interwar Germany", which is a very accurate title, but not very clickable, you know? Seven Things You Didn't Know About German Nationalists. There's a lot of better ways to title it, Barry. I'm just saying. Sorry.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  The BuzzFeed era hadn't hit yet.

• 40:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So here's, it's a very good book. And here's how Barry describes the League's membership. "The Pan-German League drew the vast majority of its members from the social strata identified by the German terms 'Bildung und Besitz,' or the 'property and educated middle class.'" And this is where we get to a very important and very German prerequisite for the rise of the Nazis, one that doesn't get discussed a lot. We love to talk about, and I do it on this show, the things that graph exactly to shit that's been happening in the US when we talk about the fall of Weimar and the rise of German fascism, because there are a lot of similarities. But there's a lot of differences, too, which is, I think, are important to emphasize now, because I think

• 40:50Robert Evans?

  some people get like, "Oh, my God, we've done all these other things that are similar to Weimar. We're destined to do this." We're not.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:57Robert Evans?

  It can go different for us. And part of why is because, like, it is a very different culture. We're not Germany at any point in time, you know?

• 41:06Speaker 01

  Wait, I actually have two questions about that. Well, no, I have a comment and a question. So- Bringing it to cults, people do the same thing, making comparisons between Donald Trump and Jim Jones.

• 41:18Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Including myself, like you. I love, I love to point out rhetorical similarities, the way that they weaponize.

• 41:25Robert Evans?

  And they exist for sure.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Nicknames.

• 41:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  But there are extremely noteworthy differences that are equally important to emphasize. And Jonestown was an unprecedented and since unreplicated thing.

• 41:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  And Jim Jones read Nietzsche and Donald Trump doesn't read anything.

• 41:43Robert Evans?

  One thing, the Jonestown story has a courageous US congressman risking his life for his constituents. That'll never happen again.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  True. No, honestly, that's a great point. But there, there, there was, there was some drama with a plane and that's, that's really happened.

• 42:00Robert Evans?

  There we go. There was a lot of plane drama. Yeah.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  But the, my question related to this somewhat, and this is a really basic question. So maybe this will sound like kindergarten level, but like, I don't really understand and have never really understood how German nationalism among these guys like Hitler and Alfie, how was it so raging? Like, I don't, I don't find that, I mean, I know Trump, but Trump doesn't have American nationalism, I find.

• 42:35Robert Evans?

  For one thing, I mean, Trump definitely uses American nationalism.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  He uses it, yes. But I don't think he feels it in his soul.

• 42:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this is one of those things to an extent you simply can't understand because nationalism is a new idea then, right? The idea of a nation state and the way we conceive of it is fairly new. And also the idea of just like being, being a nat, the idea that like, I'm a Serb and so I should have a Serbia, right? People hadn't always thought that way, right? Like, these are, these are kind of new. And especially the idea, again, they had to really, it took a lot to convince all these different Germanic states that you're all Germans. There, there's a story I'm going to tell in a little bit that I think will make some of this make a little bit more sense.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, that's already helpful cuz like a novelty, when something is brand new, you like don't really know what it means yet cuz you don't have the context and the retrospect. But yeah, sexy, it's exciting. It's like AI stuff now, like in 70 years, we'll look back and be like,

• 43:38Robert Evans?

  nationalism is the AI of the turn of the century. Yes.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 43:41Robert Evans?

  Um, I mean, there's an extent to which like, at least in terms of how excited people are by the idea, that's not totally wrong.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:49Robert Evans?

  Now, when we talk about like, why did Germany go in the direction it did? This is really where the seeds of a lot of the things that, that, you know, culminate in the 30s are being planted. And a lot of leftists like to argue that fascism evolves out of capitalism. You know, the bourgeoisie and especially conservatives in the bourgeoisie inevitably turn fascist once their material interests are threatened. Now, we'll leave out now, talk about how well, how accurate that is a depiction of what's happening in the United States right now, but seeing things that simplistically misses some very important aspects of how Nazism got going in Germany. Because Nazism is a radical political movement. Nazis don't like conservatives. In fact, they kill a lot of them, right?

• 44:34Robert Evans?

  That's not that, they don't target them the way they do the left in any way, but they are not a conservative movement and they don't see themselves as conservatives. Um, and they're not really very keen on capitalists either, although a lot of capitalists eventually do support them out of self-interest. I'm saying this because Hugenberg has never a Nazi in the ideological sense of the word. He is a monarchist and he is a social and economic conservative. And the Pan-Germanic League, while there's things in it you can see as like, oh, I see how Nazism arrived from this, it's more that the soil is the same, right? And so the plants have some similar characteristics that are coming up. The Pan-German League is not going after, the Nazis are initially going after like the poor and downtrodden,

• 45:19Robert Evans?

  right? Those are Hitler's like earliest recruits and like veterans, disaffected veterans. That's not who the Pan-Germanic League is, is going after. It is laser targeted at the group of people that Leopold identifies as Bildung and Besiehts, and there's another term for that group. And that term is Bildungsbergertum, right? And that is crudely, we might say, the upper middle class. It means literally the cultivated bourgeoisie. In his book, The Fateful Alliance, historian Herman Beck writes, "Germany owed its reputation in scholarship, administration, and technical expertise to this numerically small but socially influential university-trained elite. The Bildungsbergertum was an uniquely German phenomenon

• 46:03Robert Evans?

  that originated as a distinct social class in the second half of the 18th and early 19th centuries." And these are the people who are, who run things. They're not the people who are in charge of things, right? That's generally the nobility. They are the people who are being delegated the task of actually making shit happen, right? Because they have the educations. And this is a class that in the earliest period, including where we're up to, the 1890s, is a progressive and liberal class. That's going to change. They're going to become extremely conservative in the 1900s. But they're not initially. And in fact, the first man to posit what we would consider a modern view of what homosexuality is, and the first gay man to come out publicly,

• 46:49Robert Evans?

  is a member of the Bildungsbergertum in 1867. The first modern, like, guy, both two. And when I say a modern understanding of homosexuality, this guy, Karl Ulrichs, comes to a conclusion that like, oh, homosexuality logically is something I'm born as, right? This isn't a choice. It was viewed as both a choice and as like a deviant thing, right? Karl convinces himself like, no, no, no, this is like a natural thing. And as a result, we are a discriminated underclass and the laws need to change. And he comes out in public in 1867 at a town meeting. And so he's like, he's simultaneously like introducing everyone at the meeting to the concept of homosexuality and also saying, and I am one, which is wildly brave.

• 47:33Robert Evans?

  Like he is, this dude rocks. Well, he's a member of the Bildungsbergertum, as is Alfred Hugenberg.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  Okay, cool.

• 47:41Robert Evans?

  In terms of like seeing how this gets, how things shift, nationalism in the late 1800s is a progressive liberal ideology, right?

• 47:51Robert Evans?

  In part because of what it means about sort of how pre-existing elites needed to not have the kind of power that they used to have. And Karl Ulrichs is a national, a German nationalist, you know, previous to the existence of Germany. And normally people see it and they're like, okay, well, that's right wing. No, no, no. He is a German nationalist because the state, the German state he is in, homosexual sex, sodomy is legal. But in Prussia, it's illegal. And Prussia is pushing to dominate all these other states. And so Ulrichs becomes a German nationalist because he's like, then we, we other Germans will be strong enough to force the Prussians to stop being bigoted against gay people.

• 48:34Robert Evans?

  So when we talk about German nationalism, this is not always like a right-wing regressive ideology. There's a, and in Hugenberg's earliest days, there's a lot of very progressive aspects to it.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  It is utterly fascinating that like, living through present political times, we think like, oh, you know, this label that describes this particular group of thinkers, that, that correlation will be perennial. Like that will always mean that. But, you know, it's like, no, but no, it can flip so fast.

• 49:10Robert Evans?

  Shit changes. Yeah. The Republican Party used to be a very different thing, right?

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 49:14Robert Evans?

  1865 or so. So from the beginning, this, this uniquely German class, the Bildungsbürgertrum, was characterized by a close relationship to the state, since its strongest component came from the upper echelons of state bureaucracies in various German states. In addition to like, the people who are kind of like, running the government, there's also a lot of professors, university professors are generally of this class, as well as a lot of prominent lawyers, right? And the origins of this entire social class actually trace back to a guy named Wilhelm von Humboldt. Humboldt was an education reformer in the early 1800s, who remakes the whole Prussian education system.

• 49:57Robert Evans?

  And he is a big believer in the power of the individual to reach their full potential. Or bildung for through education, right? Among other innovations, he codifies the idea of a national school system for kind of the first time in the West that starts with primary school and then secondary school and then university education. Everyone adopts this. Our, the foundations of our education system, such as it is, are traced directly back to Humboldt and his reform of the Prussian system, right?

• 50:25Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 50:25Robert Evans?

  Um, he is basically the father of the concept of universal mandatory education, which is paid for by the state. Um, and it's, you know, it's one of those, there's a lot of modern day criticisms of the Prussian system. People will argue it's, it only exists to provide soldiers, right? And so the school is just trying to make you into a good soldier for capitalism. And like, that's not a hundred percent wrong. These were Prussians. So that was a big part of why they wanted to educate people so they'd be useful for the state. But Humboldt's also a very progressive guy for his time. And it would not be fair to categorize him as like some sort of like weirdo fascist, you know, because that's just not what's going on at this point in time. He was not trying to make students into little robots. His goal was to, uh, was a citizenry who was capable of reasoning,

• 51:08Robert Evans?

  thinking outside of the box and actively learning, so as to better serve the state. But he wasn't trying to like lock people into a little box. And his reforms worked well enough that by the time Alfred Hugenberg is getting his start, Germany has the best universities on the planet. And it is universally agreed, the best doctors and scientists are German, right? And it's because they start having a modern university system between everyone else. In the early 1900s, Germany is the font of learning in, in the West and very much is seen as that way, especially in the medical realm. Um, and this is, this is, that's a huge part, this class that Hugenberg is a part of, the Bildungsbergertum, they, these are, they're characterized by their belief that education makes people

• 51:53Robert Evans?

  better. And because we're educated, we're better, right?

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Better like, like morally better?

• 51:59Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, yes. Very much that way, too. Yes. So you can see where the problems start to arise, right?

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:06Robert Evans?

  There's this good thing of like, they're like, we need to have an expansive and well-funded education system. Great. And also, we're better than the rest of you.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're like more valid, valuable humans.

• 52:18Robert Evans?

  That's probably gonna go in a bad direction. So as you're starting to see, there's some danger in having a class like this, right? And what starts with a well-deserved sense of accomplishment in their own system morphs into this overall sense of superiority, right? If the world is copying the German education system, which it is, doesn't it make sense that Germans should rule more of the world, right? That's really a lot of how the thinking, as this progressive liberal class becomes more conservative, that's part of what they're thinking. Now, yeah. So, you know, that's, that's gonna be a problem. It's this kind of thing that like, by the end of the 1870s, they've stopped really being as liberal. And by the 1890s, they're

• 53:03Robert Evans?

  advocates of imperialism and they are aggressive nationalists. It's no longer Ulrich's very reasonably progressive nationalism. It is a, what if we just took everything kind of nationalism, right?

• 53:14Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 53:15Robert Evans?

  So by early 1909, Hugenberg has made a name for himself as a great businessman and financier and an innovative thinker in the field of imperialism. He gets scouted by the son of one of our old bastards, a guy named Gustav Krupp. And Gustav is the inheritor of the Krupp Weapons Dynasty. These are the guys who had made Germany possible because Germany comes into being in 1870 when they beat the French in a war. And they beat the French because Napoleon III is still using brass cannons that are basically identical to the ones the first Napoleon had used. And Friedrich Krupp, his people figured out how to make modern steel artillery that is just so much better at killing men.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. Wait, was that guy, was he, was he an art collector?

• 54:02Robert Evans?

  Krupp? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, they were a very rich family. So, yeah, they bought a lot of art.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  I think I went to an art exhibit in Zurich that was exhibiting his-

• 54:14Robert Evans?

  You probably did.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  -art collection and like, trying to reckon with how those pieces were acquired. It was really interesting.

• 54:22Robert Evans?

  The Krupp's, I mean, they're like Bezos level of wealthy for the time, right? Because they are selling the whole world guns, right? Make the best ones. Now, Krupp is a member of the aristocracy, right? But he's looking for, he has an understanding of like his limitations financially. And so he's scouting for a man of, quote, really superior intelligence to become the new chairman of the board of directors for Krupp. And Hugenberg, he immediately recognizes as a genius and he gives him the job, right? So Hugenberg is kind of the CEO of Krupp Arms, of the biggest gun company in the world, right? That's ever existed up to this point.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 55:05Robert Evans?

  He is going to be the guy running a lot of, technically, he's primarily doing the financial decisions for Krupp, so he's not designing guns. But he is like the head man at Krupp for the decade up, leading up to World War I, right?

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 55:21Robert Evans?

  And what's, what Krupp is doing in this period is pushing the Kaiser to build the machine of death that is the German mobilization schedule, right? And part of what they're doing is Krupp is going around and they're, they're going to one country and being like, hey, we'll sell you these guns. You really got to modernize. Your guns are a generation or two behind your neighbor and like, they're getting armed, so why don't you get armed? And then once they arm that country, they'll go to another and be like, hey, your neighbor just bought a bunch of new, you really got to get some new guns, right? And this keeps, this keeps ratcheting everybody's like anxiety up. Yeah.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  It's just like, I just sold your neighbor a stack of bibles.

• 55:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah. But this worked so well, and Hugenberg is, you know, on the finance side of things, that like dividends expand from eighteen, eight to 14% from 1909 to 1913. Like, that's, and that's a big deal. Krupp is making so much fucking money. And because Alfred is running shit, he becomes spectacularly wealthy in the balance.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 56:21Robert Evans?

  Think guy, think hundreds of millions of dollars by the standards of his time, right? That's, that's probably, that's about where he is in terms of like our modern concept of things. He's not like a billionaire yet, but hundreds of millions. Now, despite the fact that he is making Gustav Krupp so much fucking money, the Krupps are again aristocracy. And Hugenberg, despite his wealth, is just a burger, right? He's, he's not like a, he's a common man. You know, he comes from like the nicer part of the common class, but Gustav doesn't really, he's not gonna hang with him, right? As biographer Leopold writes, "Though everyone was impressed with his extraordinary intelligence and obvious ability, there is no indication that Hugenberg, during his ten-year stay at Krups, ever developed

• 57:05Robert Evans?

  anything more than a formal relationship with his employer. The patrician aloofness of the securely established Krups contrasted sharply with the dogged determination to succeed, which characterized Hugenberg. Indeed, Hugenberg seemed temperate."

• 57:17Speaker 01

  Oh, he was a bad hang.

• 57:18Robert Evans?

  He's a bad hang. Indeed, Hugenberg seemed typical of that class of general directors, which George Bernard described as "being driven by an inferiority complex, because they know they are dependent, and in the final analysis are as disposable as any other employee. Lack of security made such a director continually harder and more uncompromising than the owner himself. Possibly as a psychological compensation, Hugenberg in these years emphasized the inflexibility, stubbornness, and self-righteousness, which would characterize his political career." So, he knows, "You don't need me. You can throw me away if I stop making you money." And that drives him to be the son of a bitch, of the sons of bitches in business in this period.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  Oh my god. He just, you know, this is, maybe this is gonna sound like a fucked up thing to say, but like, maybe he needed more love, you know? Like, did his parents...

• 58:15Speaker 01

  You know, who?

• 58:15Robert Evans?

  His dad, well, his dad dies right away. No, I mean, maybe later. Not a big personal life guy, you know?

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that is poisonous.

• 58:25Robert Evans?

  You know?

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's just this fucking lonely, bitter.

• 58:31Robert Evans?

  Scrooge is played by Michael Caine.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Striving motherfucker. Yes, yikes. He just, you know, he needed one of those really, really intensive, like, parent-child therapy sessions where, like, you know, a teenage boy is, like, forced to sit on his mom's lap and make eye contact with her for, like, two hours.

• 58:50Robert Evans?

  Well, you know, the downside is, they do have psychotherapy by then, but if he had gone to it at this point, he would have just been given a shitload of cocaine by Freud. Like, which is, this guy's a finance bro, that is not gonna make shit better.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no. He needs, he, he, he should have fast-forwarded to the ketamine, ketamine times.

• 59:09Robert Evans?

  Right, right, that would have, that would have fixed him. Our ketamine billionaires are in such good health.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, wait, whoa. Do you think, do you think that Alfie was on coke?

• 59:20Robert Evans?

  I, I mean, it's, it was, he probably took it at some point just because it was in a lot of medications, like, a lot of patent medications. There's a bunch of different shit you would be given for, like, a flu that might have had some coke or some heroin in it, right? Like, so it's.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  So maybe that is a parallel, again, between him and Elon. There is, they could be both medicated wrong.

• 59:37Robert Evans?

  They could be both medicated, no way to know.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  No way to know.

• 59:41Robert Evans?

  Alfred is very insecure because of his position, and he takes this insecurity out on his workers, by which I mean crup workers. He despised socialism, and he found himself violently opposed to anything that smelled slightly of democracy, by which I mean unions. Alfred talked a lot about wanting to make unions obsolete. He's basically, he's one of these guys who's like, well, I'm just going to treat our employees so well, they'll, they'll become members of the petite bourgeoisie. I'm gonna give them stock in the company. Then why would they want to be unions? They'll be shareholders, right? And they'll be able to buy their own homes. And what he's suggesting here, this is what happens in the US post-war to create the most prosperous society in history. So, like, within the capitalist milieu, that's, this is an idea that does work.

• 1:00:25Robert Evans?

  It's going to work in the US not long after this. But Hugenberg is just bullshitting. He has no interest in doing any of this. As Leopold notes, quote, "Working and living conditions did not change much during Hugenberg's tenure."

• 1:00:39Robert Evans?

  He ultimately did find himself forced to work with what he called "yellow unions", which are trade unions that aren't allowed to strike, right? So he'll work with these guys because they don't actually have any teeth. But as a rule, he found even that kind of union disgusting. And he starts pushing internal propaganda within Krupp that depicted management and employees, in Leopold's words, quote, "not antithetical classes, but common producers of shared wealth", you know? You and Krupp, the plutocrat who owns all of this money by pushing everyone towards World War I, you're really the same, you know? That's like, that's the propaganda. He's not good at propaganda at this stage.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 1:01:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And again, the wealth's not actually being shared. And this is something Alfred and his fellow industrialists would acknowledge cheerfully. They don't think you should share wealth. They are social Darwinists. They believe the poor and working class can only be trusted with a certain amount of money, and if they have any more than that, they'll fritter it away on harmful nonsense because they're just not smart enough to reinvest it into the German arms industry, right? Which is obviously what a smart man does with his money.

• 1:01:49Robert Evans?

  By 1912, Hugenberg was one of the most prominent men in the entire Reich. He was awarded the Red Order of the Eagle by the Kaiser. Now, this is one of dozens of made-up awards that the Kaiser would give different Germans over the years in order to like, because you know, you need to have a bunch of fake awards to hand each other so everybody can wear a uniform that looks fancy.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and it's worth noting-

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  It's the NXIVM sash-

• 1:02:14Robert Evans?

  It's the NXIVM sash, yes.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  Of Germany at this time, yes.

• 1:02:18Robert Evans?

  And Alfred's Red Order Medal is Third Class with a Bow. I don't know what that means. Leopold writes-

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  That sounds dumb.

• 1:02:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah. "At the ceremonies, the chairman of the board delivered a masterful speech criticizing the attempt to use universal male suffrage as a means of imposing class rule on the Reich. He insisted that neither voting nor legislation would advance the workers, but only a very much richer, very much greater, and very much more powerful Germany would be continued to ensure continued benefits for the industrial proletariat." And so in the speech, he's saying, "The only thing that can make the poor, the working class, more comfortable is if we steal everything from the rest of the world." That's your only hope, guys.

• 1:03:01Speaker 04

  Damn.

• 1:03:02Robert Evans?

  Cool stuff. Speaking of stealing everything from the rest of the world, Sophie, can we, uh, should we show them our sponsors?

• 1:03:09Speaker 04

  I don't think we're stealing things from the rest of the world, but we can.

• 1:03:13Robert Evans?

  You never know. I steal shit sometimes, Sophie. Like cable.

• 1:03:17Speaker 04

  Allegedly, allegedly.

• 1:03:18Robert Evans?

  Allegedly. Allegedly. Allegedly.

• 1:03:23Speaker 05

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• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  We're back.

• 1:04:27Robert Evans?

  We sure as hell are, yes. Um, so now, as I said, during this whole period, one thing that's going on is this cycle where Krupp will send their arms merchants abroad and say, "Hey, your neighbor just bought all these great cannons," or, you know, "this machine gun, and they're thinking of using it, so why don't you get some more guns?" And one of the things this cycle of upgrades does, it's great for Krupp's bottom line and, and other weapons manufacturers, they're all taking part in this. This is not just Krupp Germany, he's not just responsible for the preconditions of World War I, obviously. But one thing that this cycle, that these arms manufacturers are all responsible for means is that every European leader is constantly thinking, "Okay, right now, we've got better artillery than the French." But their machine guns are a little better, and in two years, they're gonna have new artillery, so maybe we need to go to war now? If we're gonna have a chance of beating them, right?

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:05:13Robert Evans?

  Like, everyone's always thinking this way, right?

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  How is this, like, manufactured escalation legal? Like, this sounds-

• 1:05:19Robert Evans?

  Because these people own the government, or run the government, to a big extent. Yeah, like, and-

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  Oh, it's so fucked up.

• 1:05:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's great. So Hugenberg profits from this process. And he may have been more directly involved than even just, like, running the finances and benefiting it, because he winds up involved in a huge scandal right in late 1912 to early 1913. He is implicated significantly in what's called the Kornwalzer affair. Now, I'm gonna quote from an article by Lothar Berchert from the 1988 German yearbook on business history to describe the Kornswaller affair. "A Krupp employee was found guilty of bribing army and navy officers. This proved not only to the German, but also to the foreign skeptics, that they were right to believe that the company would stop at nothing in pursuit of its interests.

• 1:06:08Robert Evans?

  In 1905, George Bernard Shaw had already, in his play Mr. Major Barbara, not been sparing with his insinuations. In 1913, even the serious American journal, The Iron Age, wrote, following the facts revealed during the Kornwalzer affair, that Krupp was obviously recently prepared to go to any lengths to agitate a war. Even before the First World War had really started, H.G. Wells had already decided who was the real culprit. And the center of this disaster, which had finally become a world catastrophe, is Kruppism, the dirty, violent trade with the tools of death. It was shortly afterwards that the often-repeated, but never-conclusively-proved allegation arose that the then-company boss, Gustav Krupp, wie Bollend und Halbach, had been informed by the Kaiser months in advance of the imminent war.

• 1:06:53Robert Evans?

  And Alfred is directly implicated in this bribery of army and naval officers, as like, because he's the manager of this guy. And it's too much to say that we don't know, again, we don't really know if the Kaiser was literally warned months in advance of the imminent war, because I don't actually think it was planned that way, but that's the rumor going around, right? And it's definitely true that Hugenberg is aware of how tensions are ratcheting up and is using that as a way, he is taking advantage of this, to make money in a way that makes World War I more likely, right? He is impl-

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:28Robert Evans?

  He has some of the war guilt, right? Because of the position that he has. Again- There's plenty of war guilt to go around. The French aren't blameless. The British aren't even blameless and fucking the Russians, sure as shit, aren't blameless. But he's one of the, he's one of a small number of men who is directly implicated in creating the conditions of World War I, right?

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  The bastard.

• 1:07:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Given his age and wealth, there's no chance Hugenberg, or too many of the people he cared about, because he doesn't care about a lot of people, were going to have to fight and die in this war. In fact, he was very pro the idea of having a World War I. He's gotten back into the Pan-Germanic League at this point, and the League is doing everything they can do to encourage Germany to go to war with its neighbors. If you're, if you're old enough to remember the biggest cheerleaders for the war in Iraq, that's, that's what these guys are doing, right? They're coming up with justifications for like, why we have to go liberate Eastern France, right? They'll welcome us as liberators. Belgium is na-

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  Wow, sweet.

• 1:08:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  Did you just imply that because Alfie, like, had no friends and no loved ones and no family members, and thus no one to lose in a war, he's just like, "Yeah, fucking go off."

• 1:08:42Robert Evans?

  He's got nothing to gain from a war. Yeah.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  Or nothing to lose.

• 1:08:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well, nothing to lose. You're right. Sorry, I fucked up.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it sounds like the, right, he is, ultimately, he's doing life wrong, but-

• 1:08:56Robert Evans?

  He's doing life very wrong.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:59Robert Evans?

  And to make things worse, you know, he's cajoling European powers to arm each other, both in his job as an arms dealer and through this social club that he's helping to run. And then in 1912, something terrible happens. It's the same year of the Kornvollser affair. The social democrats win big in that year's German elections. And Germany is a parliamentary monarchy, right? They have a parliament. The Kaiser is often described as an absolute ruler, and he has, he can overrule most things, right? But there is a parliament, and they, they don't have zero power, and the social democrats win big that year, which scares the shit out of Alfred and people like him, right? So he starts

• 1:09:40Robert Evans?

  talking to other rich reactionary nationalists, and he tries to sell them on an idea he's had, which is he wants to create a cartel of the producing classes. In other words, he wants to get all of the rich business owners together and form a union of rich guys. To collectively bargain in their own interests, right? He sees what union is.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  A gold union, not a yellow, a gold.

• 1:10:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, a gold union, yes, exactly. And this is a thing, he's not alone in thinking this. A lot of magnates in the Ruhr, and the Ruhr is Germany's industrial heartland. It's where the guns get made, right? And a lot of the guys who run and own the mines and the companies making raw materials and the companies turning those raw materials into, you know, weapons and other stuff, they're all thinking along the same lines. And so in 1913, he is hired to chair the board of directors for an organization that pools money from mine and factory owners in the area for profit. And part of the goal here, he's not just like investing it, he is spending it to benefit them. Part of the idea is, you will spend a chunk of our money, we all give like 1% or whatever, right?

• 1:10:44Robert Evans?

  And that money accumulates and you spend it to influence the culture, right? To put out news and stuff and propaganda that's positive for us. Hugenberg is going to be running that project, right? Because these guys, these industrial magnates, have, the billionaires of their day, have come to the conclusion that if we can just change the news stories poor people read, poor people will stop trying to get our money, you know?

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, wow, okay, so when you said that he wasn't good at propaganda yet.

• 1:11:15Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, yet. And well, also, this is a very Musk thing, right? Like, we're coming to the he buys Twitter part, right? So again, Hugenberg is not a skilled propagandist in terms of, he doesn't make propaganda, nor does he like write it, he's not drawing it or anything like that, but he sees the need for propaganda and he's good at hiring people who are good at stuff. So in 1914, he uses a bunch of this pooled corporate money to form a holding company called Ausland GmbH. A month later, that company forms a subsidiary named Ausland Anzigen. Leopold explains what happened next, which will sound very familiar to those of you who know anything about the Daily Wire. Ausland Anzigen was established to study foreign publications and to coordinate the

• 1:11:59Robert Evans?

  advertising of heavy industrial firms interested in exports. So he's sending out people to study foreign media propaganda and bring back advice so that they can create news outlets that will represent the interests of the rich, right? That's, that's what he's doing. Now, this is initially just an advertising thing, right? Like, the idea is, and that way we'll make better ad propaganda. But the study of foreign ads expands to a general study of foreign propaganda. And this kind of conclusion starts to develop that, like, you know, what ads? That's not the best way to propagandize people. Journalism is the best way to propagandize people. News articles are the best way to propagandize people, right?

• 1:12:42Robert Evans?

  SpanCon. That doesn't look like SpanCon. Yes. And so they're working, this is what they start working on when, in August of 1914, the shooting starts on the Western Front. And we will talk about that, what happens later, and how Alfred Hugenberg finally gets in bed with the Nazis in part two. How are you feeling, Amanda?

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  I feel amazing.

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  I feel really glad that I don't...

• 1:13:09Robert Evans?

  That's a normal way to feel when you talk about Alfred Hugenberg. Yes.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  Well, I'm, I'm just...

• 1:13:15Robert Evans?

  America's sweetheart.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I, well, kind of, because I, I feel, whenever I hear stories like this, I feel like, oh, wow, I'm not the worst person in history.

• 1:13:27Robert Evans?

  No, no, no. You're, you're a better person than Alfred Hugenberg. A low bar.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  That's huge.

• 1:13:34Robert Evans?

  Russell Brand might be a better person than Alfred Hugenberg, and he just got charged with some pretty serious crimes.

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Ooh, that's a fun game.

• 1:13:45Robert Evans?

  But you know what?

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  Who's, who's a worse person?

• 1:13:48Robert Evans?

  I'll say this: very few historians blame Russell Brand for the outbreak of World War I. Almost never, you know? Almost, almost never.

• 1:13:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:58Robert Evans?

  Honestly, would be super impressive if he'd managed that somehow.

• 1:14:02Speaker 01

  I would love to talk to a historian who's, like, open to discussing a working theory that Russell Brand had something to do with war, with any of...

• 1:14:11Robert Evans?

  A photo of him in the background in Sarajevo as the Archduke drives past. Oh, my God!

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, Russell Brand, he does have sort of a time traveler's styling to him.

• 1:14:26Robert Evans?

  It is one of those...

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  It looks like he could have been from any era.

• 1:14:28Robert Evans?

  There's some guys like Matt Damon. You put Matt Damon in like a historical movie from 120 years ago. I'm sorry, Matt Damon has, as people have said, Matt Damon has a face that knows what a smartphone is, right? Like you just can't, you can't.

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's so true.

• 1:14:41Robert Evans?

  But yeah, Russell Brand, if I saw him in a picture from like 1848, I'd be like, no, that's good, that he might belong there. Yeah.

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, that's so funny.

• 1:14:50Robert Evans?

  Probably committing sex crimes there, but he might belong there.

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  For sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, he belongs there as much as anywhere, which might be nowhere. But do you ever see people IRL in, in 2025, you're like, whoa, you do, you have a face that looks like an old sepia toned, like faded print from the late 19th century? Because I do sometimes.

• 1:15:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, I get that a lot, actually.

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  You get it yourself. You're like, every time I look in the mirror.

• 1:15:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah. All right. Well, Amanda, you got any pluggables before we roll out of part one?

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  Yes. If, if people like hearing about cults in, in a cheeky tone, or, or really just cult-like organizations from the modern day zeitgeist, and, and, and want to participate in determining whether or not they are real cults, they can listen to, to my podcast, Sounds Like a Cult, about the modern day cults we all follow from Disney adults to Elon Musk. So, um, yeah, and we have an episode coming out with you about Mark Zuckerberg, so that's going to be exciting. Um, yeah. And then, uh, Cultish, my book Cultish is, is, is coming out in paperback in June.

• 1:16:00Robert Evans?

  Excellent. Well, check out Cultish, check out everything Amanda is involved with, and check out part two, coming in like a day.

• 1:16:09Speaker 04

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

• 1:16:37Speaker 05

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