Pod Insights Fin vs History What You Do In Your Own Home Is All Of My Business | East Germany & The Stasi About this episode Introducing the stasi, the original love bombers.
The GDR (Part One)
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Chapters:
00:00 - The Original Rose Garden
04:48 - Just In Case
10:01 - They’re In The Dust
13:01 - Aspirational Dad
17:14 - Genocide Takes Admin
19:36 - Not My Department
23:40 - Stop Comparing Yourself
25:58 - America Is The Enemy
28:07 - Very Very German
32:04 - Nazi Paedophile Informants
35:45 - The Wall Of Smells
43:43 - Gay Nightclubs
49:15 - OG Lovebombing
53:40 - A Wall Is Built
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Transcript 11,934 words · 8 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
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0:57 Speaker 03 Welcome back to FinVest History. Joining me is Horatio Gould. I've been watching your sleep.
1:02 Speaker 04 And today, we're talking about East Germany. The worst Germany ever got.
1:08 Speaker 03 For sure. I mean, I love this topic. It feels like-
1:10 Speaker 04 Glorious topic.
1:11 Speaker 03 It feels like a counterfactual, but it happened. Do you know what I mean?
1:15 Speaker 04 Yes.
1:16 Speaker 03 It does feel like just a weird glitch.
1:18 Speaker 04 Yeah, you're right.
1:20 Speaker 03 It's hot, like a third of Germany becomes communist for about 50 years. What if? It's sort of like it never happened. And it was like, imagine if the Nazis immediately became communist. That would never happen.
1:32 Speaker 04 It would never happen.
1:33 Speaker 03 But it did.
1:34 Speaker 04 I would feel betrayed if that happened.
1:35 Speaker 03 But it did.
1:36 Speaker 04 It did happen.
1:37 Speaker 03 Also, what's interesting about the GDR is the GDR, as much as it's a weird kind of aberration in many ways, it outlasted Nazi Germany, length of time, the Weimar Republic, and the German Empire.
1:49 Speaker 04 What are you saying?
1:49 Speaker 03 I'm just saying that weirdly, and it's outlasted the current iteration of Germany thus far.
1:55 Speaker 04 Are you saying this is what Germany's meant to be?
1:57 Speaker 03 I'm just saying, as a distinct historical period, it's longer than any other iteration of Germany.
2:02 Speaker 04 Well, I find that disgusting, because the problem with when Germany separates into two,
2:07 Speaker 03 Sure.
2:07 Speaker 04 my issue is that this is, we're going in a backwards direction. This is the, this is the opposite of Anschluss.
2:13 Speaker 03 Yeah, okay.
2:14 Speaker 04 We had, we had it.
2:15 Speaker 03 Yeah.
2:16 Speaker 04 Germany and Austria was together.
2:17 Speaker 03 Right.
2:18 Speaker 04 And now not only are Austria separate.
2:19 Speaker 03 Yes.
2:20 Speaker 04 Germany are split up. What's happening, guys? Stick, stay as one.
2:24 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm.
2:24 Speaker 04 You're all one piggy porky people.
2:26 Speaker 03 But, you know, sometimes, you know, if you're in a fight in a relationship, what you need is space to appreciate each other.
2:33 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
2:33 Speaker 03 So maybe this was a good bit of space to understand that they really do need to, you know, be, become one.
2:38 Speaker 04 Well, we, yes, and I take issue with the name German reunification. Because Austria is still independent.
2:48 Speaker 03 Yeah.
2:48 Speaker 04 And until Austria is reunited.
2:50 Speaker 03 Of course.
2:51 Speaker 04 I see this as a split country.
2:52 Speaker 03 Tear down that wall.
2:53 Speaker 04 Tear down. Yeah, I call Austria East Germany. Now.
2:58 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
2:59 Speaker 04 Bit of context, World War II ends and Yalta, the big three.
3:05 Speaker 03 Yeah.
3:05 Speaker 04 Uh, and they are big. Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, uh, they're always sitting down because Roosevelt won't fucking stand up for once.
3:13 Speaker 03 Yeah.
3:13 Speaker 04 Um.
3:14 Speaker 03 Not even for the National Anthem.
3:15 Speaker 04 I mean, it's an absolute disgrace. Can you stop taking the knee the entire time, please?
3:20 Speaker 03 He's a Black Lives Matter guy.
3:22 Speaker 04 He's an extremist. What did it, was it polio he had?
3:25 Speaker 03 I don't know.
3:26 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, who's ever had polio?
3:28 Speaker 03 It was long Covid.
3:29 Speaker 04 Oh, I see. Right, yeah. Roosevelt was sat there at Yalta in his sunflower lanyard, uh, whining.
3:36 Speaker 03 Uh, Roosevelt's favourite meal was fried chicken smothered in white gravy. That make, that reads, that makes sense.
3:43 Speaker 04 So they meet up at Yalta in February 45 and they decide that they're, that after the war, which is very presumptuous, I mean, the war's still going on.
3:50 Speaker 03 Yeah.
3:50 Speaker 04 Uh, that they're going to split Germany into.
3:52 Speaker 03 It was presumptuous.
3:53 Speaker 04 It is, I mean.
3:53 Speaker 03 I think Hitler's in that photo, that would have really riled me up.
3:57 Speaker 04 Can you have the decency to, to wait? Or at least, you know?
4:01 Speaker 03 Can you just pretend that you think I might win this?
4:03 Speaker 04 I might win, I still might win. You know, it's the Battle of the Bulge.
4:05 Speaker 03 Yeah.
4:06 Speaker 04 Now, uh, so they decide they're going to split up Germany into these different zones of influence.
4:10 Speaker 03 Yeah. Stalin was quite charming during this, right?
4:13 Speaker 04 Charmed Stalin.
4:14 Speaker 03 It was quite, um, this is very much Coalition the Rose Garden, Nick Clegg, David Cameron.
4:19 Speaker 04 This is the original Rose Garden, is Yalta.
4:22 Speaker 03 It feels like there's an excitement, there's the air of possibilities.
4:25 Speaker 04 One of them's walking off, who's Jake walking off?
4:28 Speaker 03 I think.
4:28 Speaker 04 Well, it's not Roosevelt.
4:29 Speaker 03 I think it's Roosevelt's crawling off.
4:33 Speaker 03 Come back!
4:34 Speaker 04 And Stalin's like, "Come back!", and he's like, "I can't get up!". Well, actually, well, I watched, I was saying, I was watching the World War Two with Tom Hanks. And there is a moment where Roosevelt and Churchill meet for the first time in the war on a ship in the Atlantic.
4:49 Speaker 03 Yes.
4:50 Speaker 04 And Roosevelt really wants to stand up. And you see this footage of him, just basically, like me and the icebreaker, the kids, just holding on to the side of a ship. And his legs just do not work at all.
4:59 Speaker 03 Well, yeah.
5:00 Speaker 04 And he's like.
5:01 Speaker 03 But did he not know that? Like, oh, so he, so.
5:04 Speaker 04 Well, he could stand up, is what I'm saying.
5:05 Speaker 03 Right, right, right.
5:06 Speaker 04 He could stand up.
5:06 Speaker 03 Yeah.
5:07 Speaker 04 Uh, and he did stand up in 1940.
5:09 Speaker 03 But Americans, lazy.
5:11 Speaker 04 Bum bag, sippy cup. Advisor. So they, they just, yeah, they all get on, I mean, Roosevelt wants fresh lemons for his martini, so Stalin brings an entire lemon tree in.
5:23 Speaker 03 That's a touch of class.
5:24 Speaker 04 I mean, Stalin.
5:27 Speaker 04 Stalin, you're charming me.
5:28 Speaker 03 You're charming me.
5:29 Speaker 04 You're charming me.
5:31 Speaker 04 This is probably the high point of, uh, American-Russian relations.
5:34 Speaker 03 For sure.
5:34 Speaker 04 You'd say.
5:35 Speaker 03 Definitely.
5:36 Speaker 04 I mean, since.
5:37 Speaker 03 Well, hold on, at one big wit, the big three drank 45 toasts to one another. So they're just high-fiving for days.
5:42 Speaker 04 Yeah, and it's, it's February.
5:44 Speaker 03 Endless high-fiving.
5:44 Speaker 04 You've not yet crossed the Rhine.
5:46 Speaker 03 Yeah.
5:47 Speaker 04 Can you have some?
5:47 Speaker 03 Because Potsdam didn't have this sort of vibes to it, did it?
5:49 Speaker 04 No, Potsdam was right, let's get down to it.
5:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, because it's power vacuum, it's opened up. Well, I'll tell you what this is, this is the fucking train on the way to Stagdo, isn't it?
5:58 Speaker 04 You're right. And Potsdam's the train home.
6:03 Speaker 03 Because now we need to divvy up, the splitwise is coming out.
6:05 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they weren't.
6:09 Speaker 03 The big three weren't at Potsdam, but Atley was and Truman was. So it was still the big three leaders.
6:15 Speaker 04 You went on the stag do.
6:16 Speaker 03 Yeah, I went to Butlins, Bockner Regis.
6:17 Speaker 04 You went to Butlins, Bockner Regis, not a slur.
6:21 Speaker 04 Not the euphemism.
6:22 Speaker 03 Have you put it in the sentence, if it was a slur?
6:24 Speaker 04 You know, you know what they buy him, he loves to spend time in Butlins, Bockner Regis.
6:29 Speaker 04 Yeah, and I've always said the best thing about a stag do is the train ride there.
6:32 Speaker 03 I couldn't agree more.
6:33 Speaker 04 It does, on the graph of enjoyment, it peaks as you get off the train and then it just.
6:37 Speaker 03 Electric, sitting on there, you're on a pub hurtling through the country. Like, that's what's amazing about it, is that you're sat in a pub with blokes drinking pints is already pretty electric. When you all face each other and phones away and you're just drinking pints, but if you're also hurtling to a bigger pub, basically.
6:56 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, it's awesome, awesome.
6:59 Speaker 03 No, it's not the Potsnan, it's the Potsdam conference.
7:02 Speaker 04 Yeah, sorry, that wasn't, that's not footage.
7:05 Speaker 03 Atley, Truman and Stalin were not.
7:10 Speaker 04 In the ruins of Nazi Germany, they're all turner backs.
7:14 Speaker 04 Yeah, no, the Potsnan conference. Potsdam is just north of Berlin, I think, it's in the Omviron's of Berlin. And they decided to split Germany into four zones of influence. USSR will take East Germany, the US will take the South, Britain will take the North West, the industrial heart. I mean, why have we not kept North West Germany, is my issue.
7:34 Speaker 03 So we had that for four years, did we?
7:36 Speaker 04 Four precious years, yeah.
7:37 Speaker 03 We never talk about the fact we had a quarter of Germany.
7:39 Speaker 04 Well, they never say that British troops are still actually stationed in Germany.
7:43 Speaker 03 So, in a way.
7:44 Speaker 04 Because they might kick off again, you never know.
7:47 Speaker 03 Just in case. So, I mean, this map that we're looking at right now, this would be, this is Hitler's worst nightmare, right?
7:53 Speaker 04 Yeah.
7:53 Speaker 03 Just seeing this, this is like.
7:55 Speaker 04 He'd be spinning in his grave if he saw this, but.
7:58 Speaker 03 No, he's spinning in Brazil with fucking.
8:00 Speaker 04 Sorry, yeah, he's.
8:01 Speaker 03 He's tossing and turning and rears the Genaro.
8:03 Speaker 04 He's tangering in Brazil, but what he would have loved, and I found this very funny, is that, so in, so the GDR, the Eastern. Public doesn't start until, is it officially declared in forty nine?
8:15 Speaker 03 Forty nine, yeah.
8:15 Speaker 04 But in those four years before, where the, you know, the tensions are ratcheting up between the kind of allied bloc, which is Germany, France and America.
8:24 Speaker 03 France are lucky to get a deal.
8:25 Speaker 04 They initially, they weren't allowed any.
8:27 Speaker 03 Yeah.
8:28 Speaker 04 And then they, oh please, oh please, oh please, oh monsieur.
8:32 Speaker 03 Well, I guess if you say it like that.
8:33 Speaker 04 Fucking hell.
8:34 Speaker 03 Yeah.
8:34 Speaker 04 And look at the map, they get a tiny sliver because you did fuck all, you collaborated, you should get fuck all.
8:39 Speaker 03 Completely. And also they, they did better post-war than we did. So we just played our hand terribly.
8:44 Speaker 04 I mean, yeah.
8:45 Speaker 03 We gave the French way too.
8:46 Speaker 04 The Ruhr, we have the industrial heartland.
8:48 Speaker 03 We should have got reparations from France for collaborating.
8:51 Speaker 04 Yes.
8:52 Speaker 03 They should have rebuilt fucking, why were we so polite and chummy with them?
8:55 Speaker 04 Oh, it's awful. Anyway.
8:57 Speaker 03 Who's the real enemy?
8:58 Speaker 04 What, France.
9:01 Speaker 04 From the people who brought you Finn versus History comes a brand new podcast with Paddy Young.
9:05 Speaker 05 Hello.
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9:06 Speaker 05 It's called Paddy Will Help.
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9:16 Speaker 04 Sure.
9:16 Speaker 03 Maybe. We'll see. It's quite busy doing this.
9:18 Speaker 04 Yeah, we are quite busy. We'll see. But it launches this Wednesday and who's your first guest?
9:22 Speaker 05 Sam Campbell.
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9:24 Speaker 03 One of the best of all time.
9:25 Speaker 04 One of the biggest. He's also got a Patreon that's already live and you can check out the pilot episodes. There's like four or five episodes where we're working out what the show was. It's exactly what we did for this.
9:33 Speaker 03 Yes.
9:34 Speaker 04 Existing Finn versus History patrons get a massive discount on Paddy Will Help. New episodes are live every Wednesday, patron exclusive on Fridays and send him your problems.
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10:26 Speaker 04 Yeah, iconic t-shirts. If found, please return to the pub, all that stuff. They're good men, they're innocent men. If you want to send Paddy your problems, search Paddy Will Help or go to the link in the show description to submit whatever filthy shameful problems you have.
10:37 Speaker 05 And can I just say, fellas, thank you for the opportunity.
10:40 Speaker 03 Of course.
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10:42 Speaker 03 Don't let, don't let us down.
10:43 Speaker 04 Yeah.
10:46 Speaker 00 Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
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11:30 Speaker 04 Berlin is also split into these zones, which was obviously becomes the sort of crux point of the Cold War. But fascinating, in those four years, right? Now, bear in mind that all the concentration camps are either in Poland or
11:41 Speaker 03 They're Eastwood, right?
11:42 Speaker 04 East Germany. They are all immediately re-appropriated
11:48 Speaker 03 To Nazis.
11:48 Speaker 04 As Soviet camps.
11:50 Speaker 03 For Nazis.
11:52 Speaker 04 Some for Nazis, some for liberals, some for anyone they don't like. And 50,000 people
11:57 Speaker 03 There's a Liptar concentration camp.
11:58 Speaker 04 There is a Liptar concentration camp.
12:03 Speaker 04 Right? 50,000 people after Nuremberg die in concentration camps in Germany.
12:09 Speaker 03 That's cra-
12:10 Speaker 04 Isn't that crazy?
12:10 Speaker 03 No one talks about that, 50,000.
12:12 Speaker 04 Right? So, and they, but they're not, and I was having this, I was researching this yesterday and Gemini AI was very keen to make out they were not exterminated, they died of neglect. And I said, and I said, well, I know how I'd rather die.
12:28 Speaker 03 What? I don't know.
12:29 Speaker 04 Exterminators.
12:29 Speaker 03 All right. Well, because you got your
12:32 Speaker 04 Well, there's intent there.
12:33 Speaker 03 Yes, yeah.
12:34 Speaker 04 You know?
12:34 Speaker 03 So it was just like when you-
12:35 Speaker 04 Just left alone to rot.
12:37 Speaker 03 What did they, is it like on Sims where you, you fast forward and kill someone without-
12:41 Speaker 04 Yeah, and so there's loads of, loads of Liptars going, oh, I've got to die. Pissing themselves.
12:51 Speaker 03 So they put them in the pool and took away the ladder, basically.
12:54 Speaker 04 Then, this is amazing, a survivor recollects the guards would tell them there wouldn't be water coming out of the showers, but gas, only for them to be greeted by warm water.
13:02 Speaker 03 Which is cricket if they're Nazis, I feel. I think that is fair play.
13:05 Speaker 04 Yes.
13:06 Speaker 03 But if you're a libtard, I think that's, that's pretty.
13:09 Speaker 04 Actually, it's even funnier if you're a libtard, to be honest. That's fucking hilarious. You're James O'Brien, and you're like, yeah, watch out, there's gas in there. No, as I've said before, I would, if I was a guard.
13:21 Speaker 03 So quite smug, the guards at this.
13:24 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:26 Speaker 04 If I was a guard in 1947, Auschwitz, I'd be like, watch out, there's gas coming out of the showers. Then I'd do a fart and close the door.
13:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's good.
13:35 Speaker 04 That's what I'd do. That's what I'd do. Because, you know, you want to have.
13:37 Speaker 03 Dutch oven.
13:38 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly. Dutch oven them. Because, you know, if we lighten the place up a bit, it's been a pretty grim five years for Auschwitz.
13:46 Speaker 03 Well, it's gallows humour, isn't it?
13:47 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:48 Speaker 03 You know?
13:49 Speaker 04 We've got rid of the gallows now, so it's just humour. It's just good humour. Yeah, anyway, and there is a fascinating link.
13:55 Speaker 03 So Germany's a fucking, because we don't, post-war, in the 40s, Germany, it's a complete fucking mess, right?
14:00 Speaker 04 Yes.
14:01 Speaker 03 It's completely obliterated. The industry's collapsed. No one knows what's going on. So this five years.
14:07 Speaker 04 They're in the fucking dust.
14:08 Speaker 03 You don't really hear much. There's no music that's coming out in 48, 40, like it's.
14:12 Speaker 04 There's no music? There's barely food?
14:14 Speaker 03 Do you know, like, there's not, culturally, nothing seems to happen post, in the last four years. It's just all trying to.
14:20 Speaker 04 It's getting to the 50s.
14:21 Speaker 03 What the fuck happened?
14:22 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
14:22 Speaker 03 It's sat on the end of your bed with a sock in your hand, staring into the middle distance.
14:25 Speaker 04 Yeah.
14:25 Speaker 03 Like, for five years, what the fuck just happened?
14:28 Speaker 04 Yeah. East Germany, from the off, is, Stalin basically doesn't really want it.
14:35 Speaker 03 No.
14:36 Speaker 04 He, he uses it essentially as reparations for the war. So he extracts billions of dollars of like, he think he takes whole factories, just wholesale back into.
14:44 Speaker 03 Because he doesn't want it to be part of the USSR because he wants a buffer. He doesn't want, he doesn't want his border to be with the West.
14:50 Speaker 04 No.
14:51 Speaker 03 So he just wants a buffer state.
14:52 Speaker 04 Yeah, a neutral zone, basically.
14:53 Speaker 03 Yeah, exactly.
14:53 Speaker 04 A DMZ, I suppose. And so he just takes, he takes wholesale factories into the U S A. A third of East Germany's industrial plants are extracted in the first two years. About $10 billion worth of agricultural and industrial products. So from the off, their economy is fucked.
15:10 Speaker 03 Yeah, the G D R is quite interesting because it's the most successful communist country of any communist country. Like the most effectively run.
15:16 Speaker 04 Yes.
15:17 Speaker 03 And also it was, it's the worst part of Germany and it got fucked the most by having its resources torn from it. So it's quite like an interesting model.
15:30 Speaker 04 Social experiment.
15:31 Speaker 03 Yeah, exactly. And also in many ways, you know, communist communism is German.
15:37 Speaker 04 You're right.
15:37 Speaker 03 If you, the, the perfect country to do communism is Germany. Like Russia, it didn't make sense. The Russian spirit is not communist in my, it's this romantic.
15:46 Speaker 04 It's nihilist.
15:46 Speaker 03 It's not romantic, nihilistic, but the Germans that order the processing of people, there is that part of the German spirit is quite communist.
15:55 Speaker 04 Well, this is what's fascinating about these, these sort of the early years, right? So the tensions, tensions pretty much start straight away. Communists under Weimar and Hitler, they had been persecuted.
16:07 Speaker 03 Yeah.
16:08 Speaker 04 And so many of them flee into exile. A man called Walter Ubrich.
16:13 Speaker 03 Yes.
16:14 Speaker 04 Uh, who is the architect of the G D R. He manages to survive both. He'd been born in 1893 in Leipzig, East Germany. And after a bout of diphtheria as a teenager, his voice was left permanently squeaking.
16:26 Speaker 03 Hello, hello.
16:29 Speaker 04 So he was five foot five.
16:30 Speaker 03 Right.
16:30 Speaker 04 Uh, he was never going to be a kind of cult of personality guy, but he ends up being the architect of the G D R.
16:36 Speaker 03 It's another Tom Wamsgang sort of situation where he becomes one of the only two leaders of the G D R. Over their long history, it's only really two guys who ever do it. So he's a huge, the, maybe the biggest figure in the whole of this history. He seems to just kind of, when they're picking who's going to be leader, there's so few people left. Because they've had to de-nazified the whole place. The communists were already purged when the Nazis are in power.
17:00 Speaker 04 Yes.
17:00 Speaker 03 That's to be pro Soviet communists who's left, who haven't been purged by Stalin.
17:05 Speaker 04 Yeah, because he went to Moscow and then loads of German communists get purged by Stalin.
17:09 Speaker 03 Yeah, because he hates Germans.
17:10 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly.
17:11 Speaker 03 Yeah.
17:12 Speaker 04 So he ends up as the last man standing and he's the most senior person who survives all the purges.
17:17 Speaker 03 Kind of Claudius similar as well. It's just sort of the, the kind of.
17:21 Speaker 04 Only a quarter of German exiles in the Soviet Union survived at all.
17:24 Speaker 03 Yeah.
17:24 Speaker 04 So eventually he gets sent by Stalin to the Spanish Civil War.
17:28 Speaker 03 Yeah, so it's not really like a, it's not a way to find, it's not a meritocracy when it's last man standing, is it?
17:33 Speaker 04 No, it's not.
17:34 Speaker 03 Yeah.
17:34 Speaker 04 So he ends up in Moscow, Ubrich in thirty seven, and he survives the purges. And then in forty six, Stalin basically, or maybe it's earlier than that, he sends.
17:44 Speaker 03 He's a puppet for Stalin.
17:46 Speaker 04 He sends Ubrich and goes, well, you're the, you're the one guy left.
17:49 Speaker 03 Yeah.
17:49 Speaker 04 You go back to East Germany, the Soviet sector. The Ubrich Group, which sounds like a very brutally impenetrable synth band.
17:58 Speaker 03 Yeah, sounds like the kind of music Stuart Lee listens to.
18:00 Speaker 04 Yes, and then writes a two hour show about, what do you mean you didn't get it? Help me out, Stuart. So people say that he was cold and ruthless. This is how lacking in human warmth he was. When he goes into exile in the thirties, he abandons his wife and daughter. When he returns in forty five, he doesn't contact either of them. Just divorced, they get divorced in forty nine.
18:21 Speaker 03 German communist, like that's a double, double.
18:24 Speaker 04 That is aspirational, dad.
18:26 Speaker 03 Yeah.
18:27 Speaker 04 I'm going, I'm back. Not gonna look you up. Not gonna look you up. So he's a Stalinist and when he comes back, he, they end up forming this German Republic, this GDR, the German Democratic Republic in forty nine. And then, that then starts this amazing propaganda war between East Germany and West Germany about who are the more Nazi, who's the true heir of the Nazi legacy.
18:55 Speaker 03 Yeah.
18:55 Speaker 04 And because the Germans are like, the GDR are like, we're anti fascist, we're communist, so we're cleaning up. So even though they've got the camps and they're shoving, I mean, they are shoving some Nazis in there.
19:06 Speaker 03 Yeah.
19:07 Speaker 04 But they're also employing Nazis that are actually like quite useful, but keeping it quiet. Whereas West Germany under, I don't know if it was Willy Brandt or the one before, West Germany, they go, guys.
19:20 Speaker 04 You know, people in glass houses, we've all, we've all had a mad time. If we're gonna get rid of all the Nazis.
19:26 Speaker 03 They blare it.
19:27 Speaker 04 They blare it like, oh shit.
19:28 Speaker 03 They get around the negotiating table.
19:29 Speaker 04 Guys, we all for this.
19:30 Speaker 03 They Good Friday it.
19:31 Speaker 04 Yeah, the original Good Friday agreement.
19:33 Speaker 03 Yeah.
19:34 Speaker 04 Because they're basically like, if we throw all these guys out, you're getting rid of the, I mean, these guys are very good at paperwork.
19:39 Speaker 03 Yeah.
19:39 Speaker 04 At processing, you know? What are the transferable skills that the Nazi state have that aren't racist?
19:47 Speaker 03 Yeah.
19:48 Speaker 04 You know, genocide takes a lot of admin. Okay, and if you're gonna throw that baby out with the bathwater.
19:55 Speaker 03 It shows you can wake up early, it shows you could, you know.
19:58 Speaker 04 Organise.
19:58 Speaker 03 Schedule, yeah.
19:59 Speaker 04 Scheduling, these are all things that currently.
20:02 Speaker 03 With the German people.
20:03 Speaker 04 The British government can't do.
20:04 Speaker 03 You could, you can view the Nazis as unethical, sure, that's your politics, don't wanna get political.
20:09 Speaker 04 Let's not get bogged down in the ethics of it.
20:10 Speaker 03 Yeah, but the, the German spirit, you just need to point them in the right direction.
20:14 Speaker 04 They're a toddler.
20:15 Speaker 03 Clearly, the Germans could sort of do any system very effectively.
20:19 Speaker 04 Yeah.
20:20 Speaker 03 The most effective communists, the most effective fascists.
20:22 Speaker 04 Yes.
20:22 Speaker 03 And in many ways, been arguably the most effective capitalists.
20:25 Speaker 04 In some ways.
20:26 Speaker 03 In some ways, it's just where do you point that, that, that wind up toy?
20:30 Speaker 04 Totally.
20:31 Speaker 03 So forget about, yeah, fine, they'll point in the wrong direction, whatever. Pick them up and turn them in a different direction.
20:35 Speaker 04 It was our fault that we didn't turn them around for 12 years. That way.
20:40 Speaker 04 You can do that with toddlers.
20:41 Speaker 03 Yeah.
20:41 Speaker 04 Toddlers just, they just walk, you just pick them up, turn them around, they'll just go the other way. It's actually very, very easy.
20:46 Speaker 03 With the Italians, they're asleep on a chair and you're just changing the direction the chair's facing.
20:51 Speaker 04 Yes.
20:51 Speaker 03 Doesn't change anything, they're just asleep.
20:53 Speaker 04 No.
20:53 Speaker 03 Italian communists, Italian fascists, they're both fundamentally on a chair, facing different directions.
20:59 Speaker 04 They're Italian.
21:01 Speaker 04 It doesn't matter what the word after Italian is, they're Italian.
21:03 Speaker 03 Yeah.
21:04 Speaker 04 Now, in March 48, the West German Republic is declared, that's when Britain, France and US ally all their Western zones.
21:11 Speaker 03 Yeah.
21:12 Speaker 04 And so the GDR is formally founded on the 7th of October, October 7th, 1949. Shall we place 1949?
21:19 Speaker 03 Hmm, okay.
21:19 Speaker 04 I'd say, uh, this is.
21:22 Speaker 03 So is this, is this
21:26 Speaker 03 before Britain gets, just before Britain gets the nuclear weapon? Or did we do it, I think.
21:33 Speaker 04 I'd say, sorry, I'd say it's, it's before, it's after hot sauce is invented.
21:38 Speaker 03 Right.
21:39 Speaker 04 And it's before Hillary Clinton says she's got hot sauce in her bag.
21:43 Speaker 03 Yes, which gets used against her, even though, speaking to people who know her, apparently she does truly love hot sauce, because people saw it as a way of her trying to get the black vote.
21:53 Speaker 04 Yes.
21:54 Speaker 03 But it's actually.
21:55 Speaker 04 What I'm meant to do, I really like, I really like hot sauce, I have it in my bag.
21:58 Speaker 03 Yeah.
21:58 Speaker 04 Um, but it's probably the most.
22:00 Speaker 03 Seven thousand B.C.
22:02 Speaker 04 Okay, I didn't realise, okay, the Aztecs invented it in seven thousand B.C.
22:06 Speaker 03 I was going very, I was about to try and get a very close one.
22:08 Speaker 04 Please, please, no.
22:10 Speaker 03 You just busted it wide open.
22:11 Speaker 04 It's because I was reminded yesterday.
22:12 Speaker 03 Seven thousand year birth.
22:13 Speaker 04 I assumed it was invented in the nineteenth century, hot sauce. But I'm thinking as a Westerner, of course, the Aztecs got there, um, ten thousand years ago.
22:22 Speaker 03 Okay, maybe, okay.
22:23 Speaker 04 Okay, no, you're right. So we acquired nuclear weapons in fifty-two.
22:26 Speaker 03 Yes, before that, uh, and I guess it's after.
22:30 Speaker 04 Japan acquired them for a second.
22:32 Speaker 03 Yes.
22:36 Speaker 04 There was, there was a millisecond where Japan had nuclear weapons before they exploded.
22:40 Speaker 03 Well, it was in Japan, there was a nuclear weapon in Japan, I guess.
22:43 Speaker 04 Yes, exactly. It was in airspace and they went, oh, we have nuclear weapons, oh no.
22:48 Speaker 03 If someone had caught it and it hadn't been a drop, then they'd have one.
22:53 Speaker 04 They'd have one. So that's all you had to do, by the way, Japan.
22:56 Speaker 03 Yeah, hold your, you know, you've got to hold your hands together, pull into your chest.
23:00 Speaker 04 Yeah.
23:00 Speaker 03 The technique.
23:01 Speaker 04 Is it the worst drop catcher of all time? I mean, it's coming out the sky fast, but is it the worst, is it the worst drop catcher of all time, Japan? Um, catches win matches. Anyway, so, uh, now, forty-nine, GDR is formed, and it is recognised immediately as so, by socialist countries and the Arab Bloc.
23:21 Speaker 03 Yeah.
23:22 Speaker 04 West Germany in fifty-five have this thing called the Hausstein Doctrine, which means that no one is allowed to recognise East Germany, I think. Um, or the only recognised countries that don't recognise East Germany, something like that. Anyway, so immediately, uh, it's tense. Uh, in the G, thirty-two percent of public administrators in fifty-four in the GDR are former Nazis. They refuse renumeration requests from Holocaust survivors. Phenomenal.
23:48 Speaker 03 This is interesting.
23:49 Speaker 04 Phenomenal.
23:50 Speaker 03 This is an interesting one, I like, because I do like this, because I guess they have, it's a different management, isn't it?
23:55 Speaker 04 Under new management, that's what they're saying, under Germany, under new management.
23:58 Speaker 03 And people are calling up saying, you owe us the stuff, it's like, well, it wasn't us.
24:01 Speaker 04 Well, not my shift, I wasn't there.
24:05 Speaker 04 You want a guy before this?
24:06 Speaker 03 Yeah.
24:06 Speaker 04 Under new management?
24:07 Speaker 03 Yeah.
24:08 Speaker 04 How many times?
24:08 Speaker 03 To be honest, if you get his number, I'd like some remuneration as well.
24:12 Speaker 04 Yeah.
24:12 Speaker 03 To be honest.
24:12 Speaker 04 Yeah.
24:13 Speaker 03 Because I've still got some stuff to talk about as well.
24:16 Speaker 04 And also, you're talking like a bit of a libtard, and I know exactly where I'm going to send you.
24:21 Speaker 03 Do you want to go back?
24:21 Speaker 04 Yeah. East Germany insists it's not the legal successor to Nazi Germany, so refuses all compensation requests from Holocaust victims.
24:30 Speaker 03 That's a tricky one. That's a tough one.
24:31 Speaker 04 Yeah.
24:32 Speaker 03 So who do we call?
24:32 Speaker 04 But then also, West Germany are like, no, we're not doing that.
24:35 Speaker 03 That's the ultimate, when you call someone and you're speaking to customer service.
24:39 Speaker 04 No, not my department.
24:40 Speaker 03 It was like, who is it there?
24:41 Speaker 04 Oh, who can I speak to? You killed all my family.
24:45 Speaker 03 Killed every single-
24:46 Speaker 04 Well, I didn't. You want to speak to Pauline in West Germany?
24:49 Speaker 03 Put me on hold.
24:50 Speaker 04 Yeah.
24:55 Speaker 04 Hello? Right, I'd like some Holocaust- no, no, you want East Germany. I've just spoken to them! I've just spoken to them!
25:07 Speaker 04 Now, initially, the economy in the GDR is fucked.
25:12 Speaker 03 Okay.
25:13 Speaker 04 It's very bad, because Stalin has not really wanted- he doesn't want it, he just wants it as a buffer zone. And Ulbricht is a committed Stalinist.
25:21 Speaker 03 Yeah.
25:22 Speaker 04 So, do you remember when we did Russian Revolution? Part of the- what is so impenetrable of the Russian Revolution is that everyone's differences of opinion are about how quickly socialism should arrive. So Lenin was like, smash the state, go straight to it, whereas I think-
25:40 Speaker 03 How much foreplay before we bust?
25:41 Speaker 04 Totally. Whereas Trotsky was a sort of like, he's into foreplay. He wanted to at least try second base before you-
25:46 Speaker 03 Yeah, exactly. Some tantric sort of stuff.
25:48 Speaker 04 Before you bump them, basically. Yeah, exactly.
25:52 Speaker 04 Ulbricht is very, very horny and wants to just shove it in.
25:55 Speaker 03 Clothes on.
25:56 Speaker 04 Clothes on, poke it through the fly.
25:58 Speaker 03 The belt is fucking rattling.
25:59 Speaker 04 Get it, get it! So much so that even, I think, even in the USSR, they're like, you need to slow down. Because he's like, he's such a committed Stalinist that in the USSR, he's been in exile, he's been like, oh brilliant, five-year plan, blah, blah, blah. You know, secret police, let's do it all. And it's, it's not working at all. There's no, I mean, Germany's obviously ruined, but there's ration cards last for much longer than any other nation. They're also always comparing themselves to West Germany.
26:32 Speaker 03 Yes, they've got an inferiority complex.
26:34 Speaker 04 From the off.
26:34 Speaker 03 But you've got to stop comparing yourself to others.
26:36 Speaker 04 Yeah, you do.
26:37 Speaker 03 Do you know, there's a problem in life. It's like, focus on what you're doing. That should be enough.
26:41 Speaker 04 We're not, it's, it's a, it's a dance, not a race.
26:44 Speaker 03 We watched a video, a motivational video with Idris Elba saying that success is like swimming, where if you want to-
26:49 Speaker 04 I can't do it.
26:54 Speaker 03 Yeah.
26:55 Speaker 04 I watched that video.
26:56 Speaker 03 Yeah. It was really motivational.
27:02 Speaker 03 So it means top swimmers, you're not meant to look where anyone else is. You're meant to only just focus on your own.
27:06 Speaker 04 Hmm.
27:07 Speaker 03 You just head down.
27:08 Speaker 04 Yeah.
27:09 Speaker 03 So don't compare yourself to others, East Germany.
27:11 Speaker 04 Comparison is the thief of joy, so said Thomas Jefferson.
27:14 Speaker 03 What else did Thomas Jefferson do?
27:15 Speaker 04 Well, he probably said that slaves are the thief of, thief of America.
27:21 Speaker 04 This slave is the thief of my come. He was working, he was workshopping his quotes. This is the other interesting thing about East Germany is that it's, you're right, it's the most successful, in some respects, communist state there's ever been.
27:33 Speaker 03 Yeah.
27:34 Speaker 04 And yet, because it is comparing itself to a capitalist country that started at the exact same time with the exact same level of ruin.
27:41 Speaker 03 Hmm.
27:42 Speaker 04 It will always be remembered as a sort of failure.
27:44 Speaker 03 Yes. Even though I think reading this history, as much as it was very bleak and there's loads of problems, it is kind of, it's quite a remarkable state in some ways, what they managed to achieve.
27:54 Speaker 04 Yeah, it is. Yeah.
27:55 Speaker 03 Under those pressures.
27:58 Speaker 04 The GDR is under this economic pressure because in West Germany, there is the Wirtschaft Wunder, the Economic Miracle. Now, you'll remember from the World Cup series, in the early 50s, West Germany win the World Cup.
28:10 Speaker 03 Yes.
28:10 Speaker 04 It's a booming country.
28:11 Speaker 03 Yeah.
28:12 Speaker 04 They maintained the industrial heartland, the Ruhr, the kind of-
28:15 Speaker 03 They also, they're getting all American aid. And America-
28:17 Speaker 04 Well, this is it.
28:18 Speaker 03 Offer aid to East Germany, but Stalin says you can't take it.
28:20 Speaker 04 Because this is when America are giving the world aid, not aids.
28:23 Speaker 03 Yes.
28:24 Speaker 04 To place this as well.
28:25 Speaker 03 Right.
28:25 Speaker 04 So, America obviously gives the world aids in the 80s.
28:28 Speaker 03 Yeah.
28:29 Speaker 04 And we said, no, no, no, we wanted aid.
28:31 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
28:32 Speaker 04 Um, so the Soviets had refused the Marshall Plan of nineteen forty-eight, which was the Americans basically saying, we're going to rebuild Europe.
28:39 Speaker 03 Well, the Marshall Plan, I get quite bitter about the Marshall Plan.
28:42 Speaker 04 Yeah, no, we got fucked up.
28:43 Speaker 03 We got completely fucked.
28:45 Speaker 04 Yeah, because they put a stipulation in it that we could have it as long as we spent the money on a nuclear weapon.
28:50 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, doing post-war history, the more and more I see America as the enemy, to be honest.
28:55 Speaker 04 Yes.
28:56 Speaker 03 Because they fucked up our development. They did it on purpose because they wanted our colonial assets, right? They wanted a takeover and they, we got, the fact that Germany, Japan, France, they all had these economic booms and we had the fucking seventies. It's because they made us do a nuclear weapon. We paid off our debts to America in the Blair years.
29:13 Speaker 04 Or shocking, absolutely shocking.
29:15 Speaker 03 And they just forgive the Nazis. They said, don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Nah, it's fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Take as much money as you need. And then your best mate.
29:22 Speaker 04 And then they took their scientists.
29:23 Speaker 03 Yeah.
29:24 Speaker 04 They took all the sneaky scientists and invented fucking LSD.
29:27 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's ridiculous.
29:28 Speaker 04 It is all, America is the real villain of the twentieth century.
29:30 Speaker 03 Marshall Plan, fuck, yeah.
29:31 Speaker 04 Fuck you. Anyway, um, so the Soviets, they say, we're not going to have the Marshall Plan.
29:37 Speaker 03 Yeah.
29:37 Speaker 04 Uh, we don't want it, uh, which means they're very quickly just drowning in their economy. There is an uprising on the seventeenth of June.
29:45 Speaker 03 Something I didn't realise is that, and we'll, we'll talk about the wall more in the next episode.
29:49 Speaker 04 Yes, yeah.
29:50 Speaker 03 But it's the, the, the border is open until the sixties, which I didn't really realise. In my head, it went up immediately.
29:57 Speaker 04 No, yeah, yeah.
29:58 Speaker 03 Yeah, but so people are just leaving constantly.
30:01 Speaker 04 Yeah, so there's a big uprising in nineteen fifty-three. A million people are on the streets. Um, Stalin had died a couple of months before.
30:08 Speaker 03 Yeah.
30:08 Speaker 04 Ulbricht has lost his hero. We're going, oh no. And, um, suddenly he had, loses authority. And so there's a huge revolt against the new state. About six percent of the population get involved in these protests, but the Red Army declares a state of emergency and just rolls in the tanks because Ulbricht, all he's got at this point is the USSR as like his sort of guarantor.
30:28 Speaker 03 Daddy.
30:29 Speaker 04 Um. Fifty five people are killed in these protests. Many of the leaders are rounded up. And so as a kind of response to this, they realise that they need to up their internal state security. And they can't rely on the USSR forever. And so they start to really kick on with their State Security Service that had been founded in 1950. That's now known as the Stasi.
30:52 Speaker 03 Probably the most infamous and effective secret police of all time.
30:57 Speaker 04 Yes.
30:57 Speaker 03 And lots of people have tried it in different ways.
30:59 Speaker 04 Also very, very German.
31:00 Speaker 03 Though, yes, incre- yeah, it's just, it's a very deadly mix.
31:03 Speaker 04 Yes.
31:03 Speaker 03 Authoritarian communism blended with a German spirit.
31:06 Speaker 04 With a German sort of perversion.
31:08 Speaker 03 Yes, because I guess, what was the Russian?
31:12 Speaker 04 The NKVD.
31:13 Speaker 03 NKVD. So obviously they had, it was semi based on that as a model.
31:17 Speaker 04 Yeah, because Obricht is taking everything from the Soviet Union.
31:20 Speaker 03 Russian secret police, I guess it's more corrupt. It's more, you know, what's the subtext here? Do you know what I mean? It's like, what can you do for me? There's a lot of that in the Russian spirit, right? With the Germans, it's not really subtext. It's more, I've got 15 pages of documents about his bowel movements.
31:39 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah.
31:39 Speaker 03 It's, the attention to detail is second to none.
31:42 Speaker 04 The data gathering is extraordinary and it's all about very, very.
31:46 Speaker 03 There is no secret police force in Tonga. That is interesting. The Tongans do not have a secret police. Where are you going?
31:53 Speaker 04 They need one. What did you say?
31:55 Speaker 03 Where are you going?
31:57 Speaker 04 What's that?
31:58 Speaker 03 Was that meant to be a secret? Is that what the secret police do? Where are you going?
32:04 Speaker 04 Is that you being a secret police officer?
32:05 Speaker 03 It's him being a Tongan secret police officer.
32:08 Speaker 04 So the Stasi had been founded in 1950 by a man called Eric Milke.
32:13 Speaker 03 Right.
32:14 Speaker 04 Now, he's a fascinating figure, right? So he had fled Germany in 31. He was a kind of communist agitator. He'd killed two policemen in 31 and then fucked off, went to Moscow. Basically learned the Czech NKVD terror tactics, then went to the Spanish Civil War. As like a sort of secret agent to try and stir shit up.
32:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, because I, obviously we all did the rise of the Nazis at school. And that period where the fascists, the communists are fighting in the 30s, it's a lot of. Would they repopulate East Germany's High Command with the people who were involved in all that sort of stuff?
32:49 Speaker 04 But they're also the only people that had survived.
32:51 Speaker 03 Yes.
32:52 Speaker 04 I mean, you look at what they had to survive for like 20 years, they had to survive.
32:55 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's such a rare.
32:56 Speaker 04 Paramilitary clashes in Weimar Germany, you had to survive the Nazi clamping down on the.
33:01 Speaker 03 Stalin's purge.
33:02 Speaker 04 Stalin purges, the Spanish Civil War. Yeah, I mean, so these people, when you're looking at the apparatus of the state as to why it's so paranoid and so all consuming.
33:12 Speaker 03 Yeah, but also anyone with any sort of charisma would have been purged by Stalin.
33:16 Speaker 04 Exactly, exactly.
33:17 Speaker 03 So you're left with the, to be honest, it's a nation of Eichmanns.
33:21 Speaker 04 Yeah.
33:22 Speaker 03 It's led by an Eichmann. They're all Eichmanns.
33:24 Speaker 04 They are all Eichmanns.
33:25 Speaker 03 There's no charismatic leader, really.
33:26 Speaker 04 No, there's no Mengele.
33:28 Speaker 03 Yeah, not even a Goebbels, really.
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34:14 Speaker 04 So, well, this is fascinating. Goebbels and Ulbricht had debated each other in the early, maybe late twenties or early thirties.
34:25 Speaker 03 Peter's a versus Shejek.
34:26 Speaker 04 Yeah, this, I mean, man, how the West has fallen. Thirty-one, Ulbricht and Goebbels appear on the same stage for a planned debate. Ulbricht speaks first and stirs up his supporters with his, and then after his speech, the communists sing the Internationale so loudly that Goebbels can't be heard, so the Nazis just start a fight. That is a real lovely analogy.
34:44 Speaker 03 Completely.
34:45 Speaker 04 For.
34:46 Speaker 03 Fascists, if you're losing an argument, turn it to violence.
34:50 Speaker 04 Fight her, yeah.
34:51 Speaker 03 And communists drown out things, opinions you don't like.
34:55 Speaker 04 Any other opinions.
34:56 Speaker 03 La, bla, bla, bla, bla.
34:57 Speaker 04 Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So yeah, now Milke, he is the man who, he runs the Stasi from 53, I think.
35:06 Speaker 03 Right.
35:07 Speaker 04 Until the very, very end. So it's all him.
35:10 Speaker 03 It's all him, yeah.
35:10 Speaker 04 The entire time.
35:11 Speaker 03 Yeah.
35:12 Speaker 04 So he's the longest serving security chief in Eastern Europe.
35:14 Speaker 03 Yeah.
35:15 Speaker 04 He had said at one point-
35:16 Speaker 03 He's the gossip king.
35:17 Speaker 04 There were six types of people and five of them were hostiles to the state.
35:19 Speaker 03 That's what you want. That's what you want.
35:21 Speaker 04 But my point is, is that, so the people who run the GDR, they are the least charismatic, but also the most paranoid.
35:27 Speaker 03 Yeah.
35:27 Speaker 04 And they are the kind of cockroach survivors.
35:29 Speaker 03 Yes, 100%.
35:30 Speaker 04 Of the sort of, the middle part of 20th century, which is why the GDR is so paranoid, snoopy, like obsessed with other people's lives.
35:42 Speaker 03 But also, I guess the comparison is to sort of the Russian model, but Russia's this huge superpower.
35:49 Speaker 04 Yeah.
35:49 Speaker 03 Whereas the GDR is actually a tiny country that people are not fishing about in the same way. They're sort of a little bit left-
35:56 Speaker 04 18 million people.
35:57 Speaker 03 Yeah, they're more left to their own devices in a way. It's sort of like, you know, those kind of private schools where paedophiles roam because no one's checking on them.
36:04 Speaker 04 Private schools.
36:05 Speaker 03 Private schools, yeah.
36:05 Speaker 04 Yep.
36:06 Speaker 03 But no one's checking on them because it's like, it's just a small private school on the south coast, you know?
36:10 Speaker 04 Yes.
36:10 Speaker 03 Yeah.
36:10 Speaker 04 But then you also, you have paedophile informants.
36:13 Speaker 03 Yes.
36:14 Speaker 04 Which is what the Stasi did.
36:15 Speaker 03 Yes.
36:16 Speaker 04 You have people in the private school-
36:18 Speaker 03 You have Nazi paedophile informants, probably.
36:19 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's a terrific time.
36:23 Speaker 03 It's Paris in the 20s.
36:24 Speaker 04 It's weird, win. You're a Nazi paedophile, win, win. Can I just shake your hand? So at its peak, the Stasi employed 91,000 full-time surveillance officers and then 170,000 informers.
36:37 Speaker 03 Yeah.
36:37 Speaker 04 Who were called IMs, mitarbieters, informal collaborators. So one in six people work for the Stasi. So if you threw a party in the GDR and invited 12 guests, statistically, one of them was an informant.
36:49 Speaker 03 Yeah.
36:49 Speaker 04 This basically means that in East Germany, you can't really do anything.
36:54 Speaker 03 No.
36:55 Speaker 04 Without being found out.
36:57 Speaker 03 Yeah.
36:58 Speaker 04 And there's some amazing stories of the informants. So firstly, what I was saying about this being a very German security service is that they built- They're obsessed with data and Germans being German, they built an archive of smells.
37:15 Speaker 03 Yes.
37:15 Speaker 04 So they have, basically, they take everyone's farts in a jar and they store them in a massive library of smells.
37:23 Speaker 03 Yeah.
37:23 Speaker 04 So that they can-
37:24 Speaker 03 I imagine Charlie's flat's an archive of smells.
37:25 Speaker 04 Yes, it is. The Stasi archive of smells. And they then, so they can train sniffer dogs-
37:30 Speaker 03 Yeah.
37:30 Speaker 04 -to track you down if they decide that they want to get at you.
37:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's pragmatic, it's cold, but it's also perverse simultaneously.
37:38 Speaker 04 Yeah, very German.
37:39 Speaker 03 There's like a logic to it, which is kind of unromantic and cold, but it's still just a bit, there's something a bit-
37:45 Speaker 04 It's hot farts in a jar.
37:46 Speaker 03 Yeah, fundamentally, it's still kinky.
37:48 Speaker 04 How cold and unromantic and detached can you be about collecting-
37:52 Speaker 03 Farts in a jar.
37:53 Speaker 04 An old woman's farts in a jar. You never know, we might need it later.
37:56 Speaker 03 Yes, just in case.
37:58 Speaker 04 Seventy-nine onwards, they built an archive of odor samples, stored in airtight glass jars, and the last known use in Germany was 2007, when the federal prosecutor took odor samples from anti-G8 activists. Fucking hell, they've still got this information.
38:13 Speaker 03 They're still dipping into the wall of smells.
38:16 Speaker 04 The wall of smell, well, is it Brian Eno's Wall of Sound, but it's the wall of smells.
38:22 Speaker 03 Well, I just imagine it's this like big fuzzy wall and you just go, and you have like, you go on a different journey.
38:29 Speaker 04 But yeah, I mean, it's like, all I've always said, the worst thing after a big stinky shit is to try and cover it up with potpourri and air freshener.
38:38 Speaker 03 Hmm.
38:38 Speaker 04 Just let, just let, one smell, please. One smell at a time.
38:42 Speaker 03 Yeah.
38:43 Speaker 04 Anything else is too much.
38:44 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
38:46 Speaker 04 They surveil everyone, they bug her phones, cars, they open letters, they secretly film people. There's an amazing photograph of a Stasi person photographing a CIA person who's photographing him.
38:59 Speaker 03 Yeah, which kind of defines the vibe of the Cold War.
39:02 Speaker 04 Yeah.
39:02 Speaker 03 It's guys standing in front of-
39:03 Speaker 04 Spy central.
39:04 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's just taking photos, scared that you're gonna start World War III.
39:07 Speaker 04 And what's amazing is that we don't, no one really knows, or rather, they didn't really, after the 60s, they don't really do much with all this information. They have this very brutal first phase, the Stasi, where they sort of, they kidnap- People and they put them into this jail.
39:23 Speaker 03 And then they're just collecting data.
39:24 Speaker 04 Just collecting data.
39:25 Speaker 03 Yeah.
39:26 Speaker 04 So when this, when there's amazing stories that come out, when they open the archives in 91.
39:31 Speaker 03 Cause they, there's more written in, by the Stasi than the whole of German literature.
39:36 Speaker 04 Yeah.
39:36 Speaker 03 There's more words.
39:37 Speaker 04 From like the Middle Ages to World War Two.
39:39 Speaker 03 Yeah.
39:40 Speaker 04 There's an amazing story of a woman called Vera Langsfeld, who's a German politician. And she discovered in 1992 that her husband of 11 years. Had the entire time been informing on her and had been telling the Stasi like what her psychological weaknesses were. What she was like in bed when she was on her period.
40:01 Speaker 03 Yeah.
40:02 Speaker 04 Just complete, like complete documentation.
40:04 Speaker 03 Yeah.
40:05 Speaker 04 She then divorces him straight away and he goes, well, I'm actually a Jew, so I support the GDR because I think it's a response to Auschwitz.
40:12 Speaker 03 Right.
40:13 Speaker 04 Which then, you know.
40:15 Speaker 03 It's just the Kevin Spacey, I'm gay defence.
40:17 Speaker 04 I mean, it's an impenetrable defence because what she meant to go.
40:19 Speaker 03 Yeah.
40:19 Speaker 04 I'm gay, actually.
40:20 Speaker 03 Fuck, fuck.
40:24 Speaker 04 I don't understand that culture.
40:25 Speaker 03 Yeah.
40:25 Speaker 04 You know? It is, it's different.
40:28 Speaker 03 Yeah.
40:28 Speaker 04 It is different.
40:29 Speaker 03 Yeah.
40:29 Speaker 04 You know, men harass women putting a hand on the knee. You're sucking off strangers in public toilets. I don't understand the rules.
40:34 Speaker 03 I don't know if that's a good or bad thing.
40:36 Speaker 04 What, yeah, what, what, help me, I'm blind.
40:40 Speaker 04 You know, the, the rules are different. It's a different game.
40:42 Speaker 03 Does it count if I'm blind?
40:44 Speaker 04 Maybe. I'm blind and gay.
40:46 Speaker 03 Yeah.
40:46 Speaker 04 That's the only better Kevin Spacey defence.
40:47 Speaker 03 Yeah.
40:48 Speaker 04 I'm blind. Oh, right, fine. You're just trying to shake their hand.
40:52 Speaker 04 This is also fascinating. The Stasi youth, right? So bear in mind, they put a lot of Hitler youth, boys and girls into concentration camps for being Hitler youth, which is a bit, you know, they're teenagers.
41:04 Speaker 03 It's kids.
41:04 Speaker 04 We all think weird things when we're 15, right? They then start the Stasi youth, not the Stasi youth, they start the GDR youth. And they have a salute, right? That's a slightly too close.
41:14 Speaker 03 I see.
41:16 Speaker 04 So it's, it's this.
41:18 Speaker 03 Yeah.
41:19 Speaker 04 So it's basically a Hitler salute that's been bent at 45 degrees.
41:21 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's.
41:22 Speaker 04 It's it's close.
41:24 Speaker 03 This is why it's a counterfactual. It's weird. It's it's AI. What if the what if the Germans became communists, but it actually all happened?
41:31 Speaker 04 Yes, it's it's image.
41:33 Speaker 03 And also, if you lived through, if you're like a 90 year old woman in the 80s, what you've lived, you've lived through the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany and communist Germany.
41:43 Speaker 04 Yeah.
41:43 Speaker 03 And then reunification, if you lived to like 91, 92.
41:46 Speaker 04 But they're not they're not living to see Austria become in part of it again, so.
41:49 Speaker 03 Hopefully we will.
41:50 Speaker 04 Hope I hope so.
41:51 Speaker 03 Yeah.
41:52 Speaker 04 So, yeah, they have this salute, which is just it's sort of like a right angle Hitler salute. And it's just a bit, it's a bit close.
41:57 Speaker 03 Yeah.
41:57 Speaker 04 For comfort. But this is again, this is fascinating because the East Germans are like, we're communists. So we're not fascists. And then in West Germany, that's where they start saying, well, actually, you're totalitarian.
42:07 Speaker 03 Definitely.
42:08 Speaker 04 And that's the shared language. So they try and move it away from fascism to fascism, communism, you're all the same. It's about totalitarianism and authoritarianism.
42:17 Speaker 03 Because.
42:17 Speaker 04 That argument starts in the sort of 70s.
42:19 Speaker 03 Because East Germany, in a way, is more anti-Nazi than West Germany, but it has more of the same fixtures of Nazi regime than West Germany.
42:27 Speaker 04 Well, there's more people working in.
42:29 Speaker 03 It's Gestapo, Stasi.
42:31 Speaker 04 Yeah. West Germany is fascinating because they they basically just go la, la, la, la, nothing happened.
42:36 Speaker 03 Yeah.
42:37 Speaker 04 Just give everyone the jobs, ignore it, otherwise we'll never get anywhere. And then when the next generation comes in at the end of the 60s, there's this German word, I can't remember what it's called, it's mad, mad long, basically means reckoning with your past.
42:49 Speaker 03 Right.
42:49 Speaker 04 And there's a Fritz Bauer, who's the the attorney from the Eichmann series, who's he he's done a series of trials off the back of the Eichmann trial in the 60s. That is called the Gangenheizbewegung.
43:05 Speaker 04 They that's when suddenly the new generation are like, well, hang on, what did you do in the war?
43:10 Speaker 03 Right.
43:10 Speaker 04 And then so the 70s, Willy Brand, who is the Chancellor of West Germany, he falls to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto memorial in Poland. And that's like a huge moment.
43:22 Speaker 03 What did he do?
43:23 Speaker 04 Well, he no, he was the the Prime Minister of West Germany.
43:26 Speaker 03 Wait, so what? Why is he him falling to his knees?
43:29 Speaker 04 It's basically as a way of saying sorry, because.
43:31 Speaker 03 Charlie just.
43:32 Speaker 04 No, he's not sucking off the Warsaw Ghetto.
43:36 Speaker 03 He's trying to make his reparations.
43:37 Speaker 04 It would not be the same thing if he got down to his knees and just.
43:42 Speaker 03 It's the least I could do.
43:44 Speaker 04 I didn't know what to do. What do you say? So I just got my knees and started sucking it off.
43:52 Speaker 04 No, he's so until.
43:54 Speaker 03 But what's he feeling emotionally overcome about, about the fact that he didn't denazify as much as he should have?
43:59 Speaker 04 It's more that the, the culture shifts. So from a period of like, let's, let's park this.
44:05 Speaker 03 Yeah.
44:05 Speaker 04 That's the photo, iconic photo in Germany, right?
44:07 Speaker 03 But it's been edited out of that.
44:08 Speaker 04 He's a guy with his dick out in his mouth. Yeah, very good.
44:13 Speaker 04 The war so.
44:16 Speaker 04 What this exposes, Eichmann exposes the sort of cold bureaucracy of the Holocaust.
44:21 Speaker 03 Yeah.
44:21 Speaker 04 And actually everyone's understanding of the Holocaust comes from that trial. And then in Germany, they have this sort of series of trials by Fritz Bauer.
44:27 Speaker 03 Is this post Eichmann?
44:28 Speaker 04 Yeah, in the 63.
44:29 Speaker 03 Is it response to Eichmann?
44:30 Speaker 04 Yeah.
44:31 Speaker 03 Yeah.
44:32 Speaker 04 And I think it's called the, is it called the Saxony Camp Trials? Anyway, they then.
44:37 Speaker 03 They thems.
44:37 Speaker 04 They thems. Germany has to reckon with the Holocaust culturally. Because there's a new generation of people who are learning about it from the Eichmann trial, who are going, well, hang on, you, they're doing the maths here. They're going, well, you're 50. What were you, you were 30 in the 40. What the fuck were you doing?
44:51 Speaker 03 That's what we're doing now. We'd looked up Tuchel's fucking granddad. We're, you know, we're still doing it now.
44:56 Speaker 04 It never ends. That's the word, but this word for gang and heights, perveterate, whatever, it never ends. I E. Always find out who's related to a Nazi.
45:04 Speaker 03 Yeah.
45:04 Speaker 04 Right. Well, it's one thing the Stasi are very, uh, uh, this is very interesting. They, how they infiltrate the gay scene in East Germany.
45:13 Speaker 03 Yeah.
45:13 Speaker 04 Is very interesting.
45:15 Speaker 03 This is the thing, because they, they view all of this kind of counterculture as deeply threatening and they're very uptight and conservative. But they're also unbelievably nosey.
45:23 Speaker 04 Yes.
45:23 Speaker 03 So they're very like, it's, it's not that conservative thing. It's like, I don't even want to hear about it. It's like, it's disgusting. It's a threat, but what are you guys doing?
45:30 Speaker 04 What you do in your own home is fucking my business. That's what it is.
45:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's.
45:35 Speaker 04 Whatever you do in your own home, I want to fucking know about it.
45:37 Speaker 03 I want to know about it.
45:37 Speaker 04 I want you to tell me.
45:38 Speaker 03 It is.
45:39 Speaker 04 I want to film it.
45:39 Speaker 03 It's you and Berghain, basically.
45:42 Speaker 04 What are you doing over there? Can I, can I come and watch?
45:44 Speaker 03 That's fucking disgusting. Don't stop, don't stop it.
45:46 Speaker 04 It's fascinating, isn't it? The socially conservative curtain twitcher.
45:50 Speaker 03 Yeah.
45:50 Speaker 04 Astonishing combination.
45:52 Speaker 03 Yeah.
45:52 Speaker 04 That's absolutely disgusting. Can I film it and just keep it in a library and can I, can I take your farts in a jar? So what they did to the gay scene, there was, so there was something called the Homosexual Interest Group in Berlin.
46:05 Speaker 04 Right, which gets set up. And then the Stasi immediately like, fuck, we've got to know about this because they're always think that their main enemy is subversive elements.
46:13 Speaker 03 Well, because the whole regime is so insecure.
46:16 Speaker 04 To be gay is to be subversive.
46:17 Speaker 03 Yes.
46:18 Speaker 04 Okay, in this day and age. And interestingly, East Germany, they legalize or decriminalize homosexuality earlier than West Germany. And but what they do with that, when they say, oh, you're all allowed to be gay, they then fucking blackmail that they infiltrate all the dogging hotspots in East Germany. And then black catch people blackmail them saying, you have to work for us now because otherwise we'll tell everyone that you're gay.
46:44 Speaker 03 Yeah.
46:44 Speaker 04 Right. They even open gay nightclubs in the eighties.
46:49 Speaker 03 What Stasi run gay nightclubs?
46:50 Speaker 04 State sponsored gay clubs.
46:52 Speaker 03 Unbelievable.
46:53 Speaker 04 And then they're, but they're filled with cameras and they're, they're bugging it.
46:55 Speaker 03 Yeah, so good.
46:55 Speaker 04 So basically, they think that it's getting out of hand because if you're basically, their logic goes that if you're gay in a society that doesn't accept that, then you're inherently sneaky and good at spying.
47:06 Speaker 03 Yeah.
47:06 Speaker 04 So we should use that for the state, but also you might, you're not to be trusted.
47:10 Speaker 03 It's a nation of glory holes, but the glory hole, on the other end, it can be someone spying on you.
47:15 Speaker 04 A nation of glory holes.
47:15 Speaker 03 It is. Because there's people with holes who are spying on you.
47:19 Speaker 04 Well, you don't get that out of you.
47:20 Speaker 03 Yeah.
47:21 Speaker 04 Exactly.
47:21 Speaker 03 They're either sticking knobs through there or they're, they're surveilling you.
47:24 Speaker 04 They are, they are, totally are. Now, let's just go through some of their methods because what, what, they had this tactic. Basically, after the Berlin Wall goes up, they're kind of brutal first phase of the Stasi starts to ease off. Because they're always aware of looking bad in the West.
47:42 Speaker 03 Yes.
47:42 Speaker 04 Because they're always comparing themselves to the West.
47:44 Speaker 03 Yeah.
47:44 Speaker 04 They don't want to look bad. So they start, they move away from being the more physical torture methods and they move towards this thing called zezetzung.
47:52 Speaker 03 Yeah, they get onto chick shit, basically.
47:54 Speaker 04 This is chick gaslighting on a, on a state.
47:58 Speaker 03 Yeah, they move away from like blokey stuff.
48:00 Speaker 04 To, yeah, girl shit. Yeah. They move from nonfiction to fiction. So this is psychological pressure. This is teenage girl stuff. Okay? Zezetzung translates as decomposition or disruption.
48:13 Speaker 03 Yeah.
48:14 Speaker 04 It attacks your mental stability.
48:16 Speaker 03 Yeah.
48:16 Speaker 04 Your self-confidence, your reputation, your family life.
48:19 Speaker 03 Yeah.
48:19 Speaker 04 A person's ability to continue. Yeah, it is. And you can't win. Because they will just constantly think you're crazy, you're losing your mind. And then if that doesn't work, they'll call you a paedophile.
48:30 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
48:31 Speaker 04 He raped me. Right, brilliant. Well, I'm gay. Doesn't work.
48:35 Speaker 03 Doesn't work.
48:36 Speaker 04 Kevin Spacey defence. That's the only thing you've got.
48:38 Speaker 03 That's all you've got.
48:39 Speaker 04 So Jürgen Fuchs, who's one of the best known victims, described it as an assault on the human soul. This is where the Stasi would sneak into your house and they would just change all the clocks to be wrong by like two hours. They'd move some furniture, they'd change the brand of tea.
48:54 Speaker 03 Make your life uncanny and weird.
48:56 Speaker 04 And you walk in and be like, hmm.
48:57 Speaker 03 It's the first third of a horror film.
48:59 Speaker 04 Yeah.
48:59 Speaker 03 Where everything's just a bit off.
49:01 Speaker 04 But the entire time.
49:02 Speaker 03 Yeah.
49:02 Speaker 04 They changed the brand of tea that you drank to make you think you were going mad.
49:05 Speaker 03 Yeah.
49:06 Speaker 04 But they also leave traces.
49:08 Speaker 03 I'd piss in their pants or like, I'd just shit in their pants.
49:13 Speaker 04 What, in their drawers?
49:14 Speaker 03 Yeah, so where they'd put them on and be like, I shat myself.
49:18 Speaker 04 What, I shat myself and then I didn't clean the pants?
49:20 Speaker 03 Or just leave skid marks in every pair of pants.
49:23 Speaker 04 I think that's a bit better, I think.
49:24 Speaker 03 Yeah.
49:25 Speaker 04 Shit in someone's pants. Because in the drawer.
49:29 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
49:30 Speaker 04 But I don't remember myself. I don't remember.
49:32 Speaker 03 I tell you what, you go through someone's washing and you leave a skid mark in every pair of their pants.
49:36 Speaker 04 Yeah.
49:36 Speaker 03 And they just start thinking.
49:38 Speaker 04 Or you change all their pants to female pants. So they're like, what? Do I like wearing it?
49:47 Speaker 04 Victims would then sound paranoid when they're trying to explain what's going on.
49:50 Speaker 03 Yeah.
49:50 Speaker 04 And so this is what's amazing about.
49:51 Speaker 03 It's an horror film when you're like trying to explain to the police that you think, and then they don't believe you.
49:57 Speaker 04 Yeah.
49:57 Speaker 03 It's the exact same thing. Make a good horror film actually.
50:00 Speaker 04 They were trying to trap people. They engineer situations to steer people into criminal acts. Bear in mind that one in six people in the state are like collaborating with the state. That's because the state have compromat on them.
50:13 Speaker 03 Yeah.
50:14 Speaker 04 So they're getting husbands to spy on wives. When the archives open, it is amazing the amount of divorces that spike because people realise that their husbands have just been basically gossiping.
50:26 Speaker 03 Yep.
50:26 Speaker 04 On everything. The case of Vera Langsfeld, that politician I mentioned earlier. She would always get worried about the Stasi. Taking her kids.
50:35 Speaker 03 Yeah.
50:35 Speaker 04 So then her husband told them that and said that she's particularly vulnerable to that when she's on the third day of her period. And then they they they jail her for being a protester in the eighties or something. And then they wait till the third day of a period, then say, oh, we're going to take your kids if you don't tell us what you're planning.
50:51 Speaker 03 It's creepy though.
50:52 Speaker 04 She, yeah, and then she only finds out five years later that her husband. Yeah, they are period tracking.
50:57 Speaker 03 It's really odd.
50:57 Speaker 04 That's none of your business.
50:58 Speaker 03 Yeah.
51:00 Speaker 04 So they use these things called Romeo agents, right? Which is where they would send men, not Romeo Beckham, they would send men to try and seduce low level female administrative staff.
51:15 Speaker 03 Yeah.
51:15 Speaker 04 With, but with esteem issues.
51:18 Speaker 03 Which rarely happens that way around. You normally send in the women, but.
51:22 Speaker 04 But these brave men.
51:23 Speaker 03 Two hands up.
51:24 Speaker 07 Should we enact it?
51:24 Speaker 03 No.
51:25 Speaker 04 No. So Romeo agents were trained in psychology and etiquette. And they prioritized active listening.
51:35 Speaker 03 Yeah.
51:35 Speaker 04 Patience and attentiveness.
51:37 Speaker 03 Love bombing.
51:38 Speaker 04 Love, yeah, love, state love bombing.
51:40 Speaker 03 Yeah.
51:40 Speaker 04 There's a story of a woman who was working as like a secretary in the American Embassy in East Germany, in Berlin, maybe, in the Soviet sector, and the guy starts love bombing her and then they get married. And then she's giving him gifts. And then she finds out 10 years later that he's already got a wife and family and all the gifts she's been giving him, he's just giving it to her. I mean, it's astonishing the level of like infiltration.
52:07 Speaker 03 You couldn't trust anything.
52:08 Speaker 04 No.
52:08 Speaker 03 Yeah.
52:09 Speaker 04 And that would make you go mad. They think that people have, there's a, there's a name for a former PTSD that only East Germans have. Because they, their idea of reality was completely compromised.
52:22 Speaker 04 They think there's about 300,000 to half a million victims of the SARS. Some people think that they caused cancers and physical illnesses. What is it, Charlie?
52:28 Speaker 07 How important do you think trust is in kind of romantic relationships?
52:32 Speaker 04 Well, I think this level of mistrust is, yeah.
52:36 Speaker 03 It's damaging, I'd say.
52:36 Speaker 04 Damaging, I'd say.
52:37 Speaker 07 Is it, it's all sexy or is it just kind of fucked?
52:40 Speaker 04 Is it sexy? The, the idea that.
52:42 Speaker 07 This is such a mess.
52:44 Speaker 04 I don't think it, I think the problem is that you find anything sexy. Because you can always say, this is a mess, isn't it?
52:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, you're like, your wife of 10 years, uh, never loved you.
52:55 Speaker 04 Yeah.
52:55 Speaker 03 And what's the start?
52:56 Speaker 04 Oh, this is such a turn on.
52:58 Speaker 07 Who even are you?
53:01 Speaker 04 Nothing's real, let's fuck. I think you just say that with anything, don't you?
53:04 Speaker 07 Maybe, yeah.
53:04 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think you're just horny.
53:06 Speaker 03 I mean, this also explains, yeah, explains why Germany is the way it is now.
53:09 Speaker 04 Totally.
53:10 Speaker 03 It's just so scrambled, this is such a mess. Let's put a rubber fist up my arse.
53:16 Speaker 04 Yes, Charlie.
53:16 Speaker 07 Did I tell you about, um, on Field, do you know Field?
53:19 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, the Kinky, Kinky App, yeah.
53:21 Speaker 07 I, um, was trying to be kind of, I would try and be non-threatening on there. So I said I was bisexual, which I kind of am, but it was more of a phase at this point. And I, um, put my thing on men as well as women and, and, um, 95 out of 96 of them were men.
53:37 Speaker 07 But I don't want to just go to the pub and like chat about a bon law. I might kiss your knob if, uh, you know, we're on pills and it's, and it's dark, but I'm not, I'm not going pub with you.
53:46 Speaker 03 So that's on the Kenji scale of like, quite gay, very gay, super gay. You're only at the gay level where if you're in a vest in a nightclub on, on MDMA, you might do it. But you're not gay enough that you could talk about FIFA with a, with a guy and still get a rap on.
54:02 Speaker 07 I'm not chatting about FIFA with you.
54:03 Speaker 04 But that's, it's fascinating how when, when homosexuality and traditional masculinity intersect. In that you, you want to be gay in a very hyper masculine way.
54:13 Speaker 07 Yeah.
54:13 Speaker 04 In that I want to be like wearing a string vest, busting fags, doing pills. Yeah, yeah.
54:20 Speaker 03 Don't say that, that's incredibly offensive.
54:24 Speaker 04 No, I didn't mean busting fags in the, in the 50th sense.
54:30 Speaker 04 The starsy were busting fags, it must be said. No, I mean, you want to be, you want to be smoking cigarettes, being basically Ray Winstone, they go, yeah, I'll fucking suck you off. As if like the height of aggression, in aggressive way. You don't want to be canoodling a guy in a big sweater in autumn, talking about the colours.
54:48 Speaker 03 But I guess the point you're trying to make though, is that like, the kind of real like blokiness of like a, you don't, you don't want a straight guy to talk about, who, who knows about, you know, the Aston Villa, Aston Villa top scorers of the 2012 season. Like that was a massive turn off.
55:03 Speaker 07 That does not, yeah, that does not turn me on.
55:04 Speaker 04 No.
55:05 Speaker 07 I want like kind of a little, a little schmoly sort of guy.
55:08 Speaker 03 Schmoly?
55:08 Speaker 04 What's that?
55:11 Speaker 07 Don't know, just something like less, I don't want like Trevor, I want Schmull, not Trevor.
55:14 Speaker 04 Schmull?
55:15 Speaker 03 Who's Schmull?
55:16 Speaker 04 Fucking Schmull?
55:19 Speaker 03 Is he a small German man? I don't know.
55:21 Speaker 04 Do you know someone called Schmull?
55:24 Speaker 07 Yeah.
55:24 Speaker 04 Right, okay. Do you fancy?
55:27 Speaker 03 I mean, this happened on, I don't know if it was on the other podcast, but we were talking about like male crushes and we're talking about celebrities, right? Charlie brought up a guy he saw on Instagram with like 2000 followers who lives down the couple of streets away.
55:40 Speaker 04 You have mentioned this before, yeah.
55:42 Speaker 03 And it was the whole, it's a guy who probably could easily be listening to this, who's just like a guy who you're basically.
55:47 Speaker 04 Is he called Schmull?
55:48 Speaker 07 No, he's called Liam.
55:49 Speaker 04 Right, okay. Anyway, the Stasi infiltrate the gay scene, and to be honest, you can see how easy it is there.
55:55 Speaker 03 Yeah.
55:55 Speaker 04 The amount of information we just got out, Charlie.
55:59 Speaker 03 They're gossips, they're gossips.
56:00 Speaker 04 So basically, Zazetting meant that they would break people down to such the degree that when they were questioned by the Stasi, or rather, they would have no option but to just go along with it.
56:12 Speaker 03 Yeah, and they show this quite well in Lives of Others.
56:14 Speaker 04 Which we'll be talking about on the Patreon this week, yeah.
56:16 Speaker 03 It's just endurance interviewing until they get the answer they need.
56:19 Speaker 04 Yeah, so there's something about how they'd keep them awake.
56:22 Speaker 03 Yeah.
56:22 Speaker 04 Or rather, they'd wake them up at one in the morning and then keep them awake till five, and then they'd have an hour's sleep, and then they'd turn all the lights on, go, you have to be up now. So they'd have these nighttime interrogations. They'd also just call you a paedophile.
56:35 Speaker 03 Yeah.
56:35 Speaker 04 Which I think is quite route one as a state security, that's my kind of state security. None of this spying, just like, oh, he's a nonce.
56:41 Speaker 03 You're a paedophile.
56:42 Speaker 04 You're a paedophile. Brilliant.
56:44 Speaker 03 Who are you here to meet? You, you.
56:46 Speaker 04 You met me, ma, got you. Yeah, the Stasi is, ends up being the most comprehensive state security system probably ever invented.
56:56 Speaker 03 Yeah, because it's got the highest proportion of the population ever to be involved.
56:59 Speaker 04 Yeah, something like the, in Nazi Germany, it was one out of every.
57:04 Speaker 03 Like 40 or something.
57:05 Speaker 04 Forty.
57:06 Speaker 03 Yeah.
57:07 Speaker 04 East Germany is becoming a brutal police state with a struggling economy, run by a man with a high pitched voice. And as you said earlier, people are leaving a lot because the borders are just open. Now, obviously, Berlin had been separated into four zones.
57:25 Speaker 03 Which is what's weird about Berlin is, is Berlin, West Berlin the capital of West Germany?
57:29 Speaker 04 No, that's Bonn.
57:30 Speaker 03 Okay, but yeah, because it's, I don't know what it would be like living in West Berlin because it's deep in the heart of East Germany.
57:35 Speaker 04 It's an island in the middle of a sea of East Germany, presumably you're allowed to travel out of West Berlin.
57:41 Speaker 03 And there's a wall around a motor, there's a motorway that goes from West Germany to East Germany, to East Berlin, West Berlin, and they just have a wall along that hole.
57:50 Speaker 04 Yeah.
57:50 Speaker 03 So just like an autobahn, basically, that takes you there. It's weird. I like, what's the, would you want to, is it popping off in West Berlin? But you're right in the heart, you're not connected to anything.
57:59 Speaker 04 Well, what's interesting is that some of the theatre zones in East Berlin, so a lot of people would go for a night out in the East, and also they'd have so much money to spend in the East.
58:08 Speaker 03 Yeah.
58:08 Speaker 04 Because they're making bank in the West.
58:10 Speaker 03 Yes.
58:10 Speaker 04 So they could have a fucking amazing, cheap night in the East.
58:12 Speaker 03 But there's not much of choice. What are you going to do?
58:15 Speaker 04 No, there's the state, there's the state play.
58:17 Speaker 03 Yeah, there's what, the state play.
58:19 Speaker 04 There's Dear England.
58:19 Speaker 03 It's the state beer, it's the state, it's all house wine.
58:22 Speaker 04 Yes, it is, yeah.
58:23 Speaker 03 It's hard to splash out, really. Everything is house, basically.
58:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, it is. The tension had erupted in the Berlin airlift of 1948, I think, which is where, so that's when Stalin cuts off Berlin from the Marshall Plan. Stalin blockades Berlin in 48 to 49 by trying to force out Western powers by cutting off the land access.
58:48 Speaker 03 Yeah.
58:48 Speaker 04 But then the Allies supply the city by air, humiliating the Kremlin and ensuring that West Berlin will stay in Allied hands.
58:57 Speaker 03 Right.
58:58 Speaker 04 But it's a poorer city. So, East Germany, people are just leaving East Berlin to go to West Berlin, and then presumably from there, they can then leave to the West Germany.
59:09 Speaker 03 Yeah.
59:09 Speaker 04 So between 49 and 61, around two point.
59:12 Speaker 03 It's the most porous border of the Cold War, basically.
59:14 Speaker 04 So between 49 and 61, nearly 3 million people leave East Germany for the West, so about six.
59:19 Speaker 03 Yeah.
59:20 Speaker 04 And the most practical route is through Berlin.
59:22 Speaker 03 Yeah.
59:23 Speaker 04 And these are young people, professional, educated, and so this westward brain drain and the mounting economic crisis means that Ulbricht has got to do something.
59:31 Speaker 03 Hmm.
59:31 Speaker 04 So, on the 1st of August 61, he bluntly lays out the crisis to Khrushchev, who's now in charge. And Khrushchev fears that if they collapse, then it would destabilise the rest of the Soviet Bloc.
59:45 Speaker 03 Yeah.
59:45 Speaker 04 So they initiate. What has become known as Operation Rose.
59:50 Speaker 03 Yeah.
59:50 Speaker 04 And overnight.
59:51 Speaker 03 Very German.
59:52 Speaker 04 On 13th of August 61. A wall is built.
59:56 Speaker 03 Yeah.
59:57 Speaker 04 Around the eastern sectors of Berlin.
59:59 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:00:00 Speaker 04 And we will deal with the history of the Berlin Wall and the rest of the GDR in our next episode. But why have you said that?
1:00:06 Speaker 07 Sorry.
1:00:10 Speaker 04 That's always my line.
1:00:11 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:00:11 Speaker 04 When has that ever been your line?
1:00:12 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:00:13 Speaker 04 All right. Do you want to plug? Do you want to plug? You know, you do the end.
1:00:15 Speaker 07 Uh, yeah, well, I've actually got a podcast. Uh, and if you want to hear my side of the story.
1:00:19 Speaker 03 No, no, no, no, not, don't do a plug for your podcast.
1:00:20 Speaker 07 Andrew and Charlie Investigate.
1:00:21 Speaker 04 Plug for this podcast.
1:00:22 Speaker 07 Every Thursday, uh, 7am.
1:00:23 Speaker 04 Plug for this podcast.
1:00:24 Speaker 07 It's a rival podcast and if you want to hear my side of the story.
1:00:26 Speaker 03 Rival.
1:00:26 Speaker 04 Why have you said that? You're, you're the producer of this podcast. You're producing a rival podcast.
1:00:30 Speaker 03 If you're gonna plug, which you shouldn't be plugging another podcast, don't say it's a rival podcast.
1:00:33 Speaker 07 It's a competitive podcast.
1:00:34 Speaker 04 Check out the rest of history as well. Those are great guys.
1:00:36 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:00:38 Speaker 04 That's all in on the Patreon, part two, along with our bonus episode, The Lives of Others, a great film. Three pounds a month, all it costs. Um, and it's an absolute hoard now.
1:00:46 Speaker 03 What's the lives of others, even if you don't watch the episode? But it, it captures all of this.
1:00:50 Speaker 04 Interestingly, one in six of our members of our Patreon are informing, uh, for have a word.
1:00:55 Speaker 03 Are they?
1:00:56 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:00:58 Speaker 04 So anyway, uh, that's on the Patreon, but if not, we will see you on Thursday for the story of the Berlin Wall and our continuing epic on the GDR. Goodbye.
1:01:06 Speaker 03 Goodbye.
1:01:25 Speaker 00 Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
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