The History Channel original podcast.
History This Week, May 9th, 1942.
I'm Ben Dickstein.
Berlin is Joseph Goebbels' personal playground.
Goebbels is Adolf Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, the man in charge of strengthening Nazi ideology throughout the Third Reich.
But Goebbels has another role, the Gauleiter, the governor of Berlin.
So Joseph Goebbels is chief propagandist and leader of the capital city.
He looms large here.
His works are everywhere.
Posters, movies, radio broadcasts, German classrooms, all reinforcing his message.
German blood must remain pure, and the other races must be eliminated.
And to do this, the Nazi empire must vanquish its enemies, the British. the Soviets, the Jews.
Today, May 9th, Goebbels unveils the newest creation from his propaganda laboratory.
He brings it to the Lustgarten, a sprawling urban park in the center of Berlin.
It's a city unto itself, a city of tents propped up across the park in a sprawling exhibition which Goebbels calls the Soviet Paradise.
The space is illuminated with blood-red light bulbs.
Room after room shows how the Soviets live and behave, according to Goebbels.
Inside of one tent Goebbels has an entire block from a real Soviet village ripped up and brought to Berlin.
He uses it to drive home his point.
The Soviets live like animals.
The buildings are intentionally put in a state of disrepair and he installs mannequins of Russian children dressed in rags.
The exhibit write-ups claim these children had no names, didn't know their ages and survive only by stealing.
In another room, Goebbels has built a mock Soviet torture chamber.
There's another mannequin lying face down on the tile.
The exhibit claims he was a German shot by the Soviet secret police and lining the walls throughout this whole thing.
Anti-Semitic propaganda.
It was the Jews, after all.
Goebbels makes sure to say that are pulling the levers in the Soviet Union.
All of this pain and suffering in Russia is their fault.
Just look at these photographs of Soviet labor camps.
Just look how the Jews are starving these German prisoners.
They look half dead.
Look with your own eyes.
Except, in reality, these aren't photos of German prisoners in Russia.
They're of Jewish prisoners held by the Germans at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, a 45-minute drive away.
When Goebbels wants to show how Russia tortures its prisoners, he uses his own.
And for Joseph Goebbels, the Soviet Paradise is a success.
1.3 million people come to see it across six weeks.
He advertises the show with posters all over the city.
They show a starving child, a bombed out home.
But if you look closely, in the corner of some of these Soviet Paradise posters, you might see a sticker placed by an underground group, a group resisting the Nazis.
It reads Today living in the Nazi capital under a master of propaganda.
How do Berlin's people experience World War II?
And when the tide starts to turn, how does this great imperial city collapse?
Well, Berlin was a little bit like New York or London or any big metropolitan city.
This is Ian Baruma, author and professor of human rights and journalism at Bard College.
He explains that Berlin, like those other cities, receives some anti-cosmopolitan bias.
There's always been a prejudice against the big city as the sort of Den of iniquity and vice and decadence, with mixed populations and materialism and so on.
While the U.S. had the Roaring Twenties, Berlin had what was called the Golden Twenties.
Theater, dance, cabarets.
It's everything they hate.
Hitler and the Nazis aren't exactly fans.
So the Nazis never liked Berlin.
In the late 1920s, Berlin experiences a sharp economic decline.
It's one of the main reasons Hitler is able to rise to power a city and a country in dire financial straits.
But at the beginning of the Nazi Party's ascendance, Berlin still has its culture kind of in a strange spot, a cosmopolitan city that's also becoming this seat of fascist power.
And it's in Berlin in 1933 that Hitler makes his first big move, the Reichstag fire.
The Reichstag was set on fire by... supposedly by a young Dutch communist.
That's the story that Hitler tells.
That a communist burned down the Reichstag, the German parliament building.
Was it really this person?
Could one person have even done this alone?
We don't know.
Hitler could have orchestrated the fire himself.
But either way, now, Hitler explains, this is an emergency situation and he needs emergency powers.
That was the spur or the excuse that the Nazis needed to take total control.
The rise of Hitler and the Nazis continues throughout the 1930s.
All the things you associate with this regime anti-Semitic laws, concentration camps, annexing countries, Kristallnacht are all orchestrated from his seat of power in Berlin.
By the middle of 1939, Hitler has his eyes on Poland.
He has his minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, riling up the people at home, inundating them with anti-Polish content that they're inferior specimens, vermin.
At the same time, Hitler amasses a million and a half German soldiers on the Polish border.
Now, he just needs an excuse to let them loose.
What follows is a secret military operation.
Codename, Grandmother Died.
On August 31st 1939, German agents dressed as Polish soldiers attack German targets right near the border.
A radio station, a customs post And there were bodies found in German uniforms and the bodies actually belonged to concentration camp victims that were put there.
So you have Germans dressed as Polish soldiers, and the bodies belong to victims of the Holocaust.
Today, at a minimum, we'd call this a false flag operation.
For Hitler, it goes exactly as planned.
Poland has attacked Germany.
We will now retaliate.
And it was an entirely false flag operation.
And that was the beginning of World War Two.
The next day, he declares war on Poland.
And that night in Berlin, Hitler makes a speech.
Since a lot of damage had been done to the Reichstag, that was no longer used.
And so they had to use the opera house.
The Berlin police put up barricades.
Hitler's expecting a huge crowd.
But the opera house has plenty of empty seats.
Despite Goebbels' advance propaganda, Berliners don't show up en masse.
There was very little enthusiasm.
People still had memories of World War I, which were very painful, and most Germans were not at all keen on another war.
Nevertheless, Hitler delivers a screaming, sweaty speech.
This night, for the first time, Polish soldiers fired on our territory.
Since 5.45am, we have been returning the fire.
And from now on, bombs will be met by bombs.
The first thing that a totalitarian government does is destroy the idea of truth.
The truth is what the regime says it is.
So staging the reasons for an attack to go to war with a country was entirely in character.
So you could get a mob out into the streets to say, you know, we have to take our revenge on these terrible and wicked immoral Poles who are out for German blood.
Over the next two weeks, Goebbels ramps up the rhetoric.
Loudspeakers across the city broadcast the evils that these Polish people and the Jews, don't forget have committed against the German people.
A lot of the antisemitic propaganda that you know.
The Jews are out to destroy us and destroy our culture, undermine our morals.
They want to take over the world.
On September 13th, less than two weeks after Hitler's speech, Nazi police arrest hundreds of Polish people in Berlin, mostly Jews.
The first victims were these Polish Jews, some of whom were born as Polish Jews but had lived in Germany for many years.
Their children may not even have spoken Polish, but they were targeted.
They're brought to a train station to be sent to a concentration camp.
An angry mob awaits them.
And when they arrive at the camp, another mob awaits.
And we're met by these local people who wanted to lynch them, basically.
The prisoners are pelted with stones, nails, pieces of wood.
When they arrive at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the guards spit on their Torah scrolls, yank them by their beards and force them to run in ill-fitting shoes until their feet bleed.
In the eyes of Goebbels, it's a success.
The great danger of extremist politics, especially when they go to war, is that they're very good at turning conflict into an existential conflict.
It's either them or us.
Gerbils, a failed playwright who walked with a limp, was one of Hitler's earliest supporters.
After meeting him back in the 20s, Goebbels wrote in his diary he is a genius, the natural creative instrument of a fate determined by God.
I am deeply moved.
And now, a decade and a half later, Goebbels is tasked with making the German people just as fanatical.
He knew exactly what he was doing.
He knew how he was manipulating public opinion.
Goebbels remember, is not just minister of propaganda, but also Gauleiter of Berlin, the city's governor.
In September, he bans public dancing.
He wants to eliminate any entertainment he deems impure.
In this case, jazz.
That Christmas in 1939, Goebbels discourages what he calls Christmas sentimentality on the radio.
Goebbels often in his diaries goes on about how he wants to do away with all this Christmas nonsense.
And you know people have to toughen up.
There's a broader ideological issue at play here, too.
The Nazis do not like Christianity.
In some ways it was a pagan movement and that they wanted to substitute traditional organized religion with a belief in the Nazi ideology and in Hitler as a kind of sacred figure.
You can hear all about that in the episode we did on the Nazis and their mysticism.
We'll put that in the show notes.
In A Silent Night, the famous...
Christmas Carol was changed to a Nazi version of Silent Night, where Hitler is the one who people have to pray to.
However, in Berlin, people adapt, at least the right people.
The regular German, if As long as they were not Jewish, of course.
Life was still continuing fairly normally.
You could still go to the theater, the movie houses.
Life was okay.
In fact, if anything in this period, Goebbels wants Berliners to be out and about.
He's organizing concerts, producing movies and plays with Nazi messaging.
He was very keen that people should be entertained.
That made it easier for people to look away when you could see things that were very much not OK, like people being dragged from their homes to concentration camps.
It's now July 6th, 1940.
At three in the afternoon, Hitler's armored train pulls into Berlin.
The crowds, hundreds of thousands of Germans, have been building for hours.
Over the last few days, Goebbels has been priming them for this moment.
The Nazis have just conquered France.
They've seen the photographs of Hitler in Paris at the Opera House, posing in front of the Eiffel Tower.
And just days later, When the man emerges on the train platform in Berlin, the people erupt.
Goebbels has meticulously planned every step of the show.
So-called Hitler maidens cover the streets in flower petals, allowing the Führer's Mercedes limousine to silently glide down the parade route.
Goebbels writes in his diary, the jubilation of a people united in joy is indescribable.
And remember many Germans, especially in Berlin originally, weren't that enthusiastic about the war.
Well, it seems like a contradiction that people were very muted and worried when the war began, but there they are, hundreds of thousands cheering Hitler after the fall of France.
Now, almost a year in, that attitude has changed.
Yes, Goebbels' propaganda has played its part, but that post-World War I anxiety is actually fueling this celebration.
People really did not like war, and they were constantly hoping that it would speedily end.
And when France fell so quickly, the feeling was now, this victory will mean that the war is going to end.
The French have surrendered.
So has Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark made sense that Great Britain would be the next to fall.
The end of the war and victory for Germany seem like they're on the horizon.
The French are knocked out.
The British don't have the power to do anything much, and they probably won't.
The war is over, and Hitler is a hero because he achieved total victory.
That was probably the feeling of a lot of those people. a feeling that quickly dissipated.
In this podcast I'm going to have people on to tell unusual and sometimes far-fetched stories about their families.
I've heard my whole life that she invented the margarita.
And then we're going to investigate those stories and find out how much of it is true.
He gets a patent one month before the Wright brothers.
Oh my God.
Please follow and listen to Family Lore, an Odyssey podcast available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your shows.
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In the months following Hitler's victory parade in Berlin, things do not go as planned for the Nazis.
Great Britain, which they expected to fold quickly, does not fold.
The RAF fights off the German Luftwaffe, and Hitler abandons his plans to invade England.
In fact, the Allies start bombing German cities, including Berlin.
The first bombs fall in earnest in August of 1940.
Civilians are killed.
And Hitler is enraged.
He publicly vows to wipe out British cities.
Goebbels, meanwhile, is busy.
As Hitler looks east and prepares to invade the Soviet Union, Goebbels spreads the news that, in fact, Germany is about to sign a peace treaty with the Soviets.
This is a lie to hide Hitler's true intentions.
And when Hitler does invade Russia in June of 1941, Berliners are anxious.
This is not the kind of war they envisioned after Hitler's conquering parade a year before.
So Goebbels doubles down, broadcasting special announcements of German victories, accompanied by Franz Liszt's Russian fanfare.
But the people aren't buying it.
So Goebbels focuses on a different aspect of the Nazi empire, their hatred of Jews.
The war was very much presented as a civilizational war.
There are echoes today in a lot of extremist politics that somehow you know we have to fight for our civilization.
And the Jews were threatening that civilization, according to Goebbels.
He spins a story.
That soldiers who return to Berlin on leave can't stand the sight of Jews in their city.
That the Jews are hoarding food.
That they're the reason that Berlin has run out of strawberries.
And finally, in September of 1941, Goebbels helps convince Hitler to force all Jews above the age of six in Berlin and across Germany to wear yellow stars.
And in Berlin, the reaction among non-Jews is mixed.
Some throw rocks at them.
Others just look away.
The next month, the deportations begin.
Goebbels promises Hitler that he'll liquidate Berlin of its Jews by the end of the year.
It's now April of 1942.
April 19th, to be exact.
The night before Hitler's birthday.
Goebbels has arranged an elaborate performance in the city.
The Berlin Philharmonic, led by one of the world's most famous conductors, Wilhelm Furtwängler.
A great conductor, not a Nazi.
He was never a member of the Nazi party.
But unlike some who felt that they could not stay in Germany in good conscience and continue to play music or write books, He felt he had to stay in Germany, that his art was rooted in the German soil.
He couldn't perform elsewhere.
But again, he's not a Nazi.
He probably had little choice but to conduct.
But that doesn't mean he liked it.
But having decided to stay, well, that's the price he paid.
After the finale Goebbels rushes the stage and makes sure everyone sees him shaking the conductor's hand.
He shook Goebbels' hand when it was offered and quickly sort of turned his back.
But after the war, people felt that was really not quite good enough, rightly or wrongly.
Goebbels makes sure this gets captured on film the non-Nazi conductor shaking the hand of the Minister of Nazi Propaganda and turns that film into propaganda.
And the next month, that Soviet paradise exhibition opens at the Lustgarten in Berlin.
Goebbels is thrilled as 13 million people walk through, taking in these tableaus of Judeo-Bolshevik evil.
The Soviet secret police, torturing people to death and people who are so poor that they were living in holes in the ground, and It was basically a horror show presented to the German public as an example of why it was the duty of Nazi Germany to go to war against these savages.
But this propaganda doesn't go unanswered.
As we mentioned earlier, an anti-fascist organization known as the Rotkapel put stickers on Soviet paradise posters across the city.
The Nazi paradise.
War, hunger, lies, Gestapo.
How much longer?
But another organization takes it even further.
A resistance circle called the Baum Group, led by Jewish communist activist Herbert Baum.
They sneak explosives into the exhibit. and set them off.
Eleven people are injured and they do damage some of the exhibits, but the attack doesn't have its intended impact.
The sad thing about so many acts of resistance is that they have very little immediate effect.
They do very little to bring a regime down.
What they do do is that they lead to terrible repercussions.
The Nazis are humiliated by the Baum Group's sabotage.
They indiscriminately round up 500 Jewish men in Berlin.
The actual members of the Baum Group are sentenced to death and executed at a concentration camp.
Herbert Baum himself is tortured to death.
It's always good to show that a totalitarian power is never total and that there are people who are prepared to stand up to it.
But the immediate effect is very often more bloodshed.
As 1942 rolls into 1943, Germany's fortunes in World War II start to tilt.
Erwin Rommel's Nazi tank corps is driven out of North Africa, and at Stalingrad the Germans suffer up to half a million casualties.
The Soviets capture another 91,000.
By the time that the Soviets defeated the German armies at Stalingrad, it was known that things were no longer going very well.
Hundreds of thousands of Germans had already died in the war.
So you couldn't keep that secret.
For Joseph Goebbels, this is a PR nightmare.
He compensates by accelerating his scapegoating of Germany's Jewish population.
By February of 1943, Goebbels starts deporting the last of Berlin's Jews.
He's behind his original schedule, but he still makes it happen.
Goebbels is also forced to reimagine the Nazis' propaganda.
The idea of victory is replaced with concepts like perseverance, endurance, and sacrifice.
This culminates on February 18th, 1943.
Just after Germany's surrender at Stalingrad, Goebbels assembles a crowd of 14000 loyalists at Berlin's Sportpalast, an indoor arena.
Goebbels himself delivers the keynote speech, what Ian Buruma characterizes as the peak of Berlin's mass hysteria.
Germany was already in a fairly desperate situation, and that's when all pretense to normality were abandoned.
Goebbels calls for the elimination of Judaism.
He asks the crowd if they're willing to sacrifice everything for their Fuhrer.
And in the most infamous moment, he asks, Do you want total war?
When Goebbels called for total war, that's what he meant that everything had to be sacrificed for what was presented as Germany's inevitable final victory.
For all this talk of total war in the Nazi capital, Hitler barely steps foot in Berlin in 1943.
He may have sensed public sentiment turning against him.
But for the people of Berlin, this idea of total war brings significant changes.
Goebbels shuts down schools so that teenagers can man anti-aircraft guns.
Women as old as 45 are conscripted into factory work.
Many children are sent to the countryside.
And yet, somehow, Ian Buruma says, Berliners, the ones that remain, adapt.
Any of those who are left in the city make the best of their circumstances.
I mean, people are people, and they always hope things will end.
They hope things will get better.
And you could pretend things were okay until the city was being bombed to smithereens.
It's April 20th, 1944.
Hitler's birthday.
It's been two years since Joseph Goebbels put on that concert, making the conductor Furtwängler shake his hand on stage.
Berlin looks very different now.
The Allies have been bombing the city for a long time, and the pace has picked up.
Since the end of 1943, a quarter of the city center has been turned into a wasteland.
The sport palace, where Goebbels delivered his total war speech, destroyed.
Power, water, telephone service, all go in and out.
Even the Berlin Zoo is bombed, and rumors are spreading that escaped crocodiles are roaming the city's sewers.
Nobody could hide the fact that the city was half destroyed and that things were not going well.
And yet, today, Goebbels tries salvaging Hitler's birthday.
He puts up banners that read, The Fuhrer orders we follow.
Our walls broke, but our hearts didn't.
In one part of the city, Hitler's portrait is placed in a bomb crater meant to serve as inspiration.
Swastika flag stuck on the top of ruins and that kind of thing.
So it was all very half-hearted by that stage.
A German journalist writes, Berlin looks like an old whore in bad makeup trying to look young.
As the Allies make progress, Goebbels puts even more restrictive measures in place, even affecting his precious live theater.
There was no more room for frivolous entertainment, and even actors had to be mobilized.
Goebbels also ramps up his war on speech in the city on what he called defeatism, the slightest talk that Germany might lose the war.
So there was a task force to sort of go into cafes and restaurants and public places and listen to what people were saying.
And if people sounded defeatist, they could be arrested and even killed.
In January 1945, Hitler arrives back in Berlin and descends into his underground bunker.
He lives there for the rest of his life.
And the bombs keep falling.
Ian Baruma writes about a civilian shelter built under the Anhalter train station.
It's designed to hold 3000 people, but up to 12000 hide inside, many of them mothers and their children.
A young, a teenage woman was looking for a mother and her baby, who I think had been neighbours and got lost in the melee of people trying to find shelter.
And she finally tracked her down in this sort of makeshift hospital underground in a bomb shelter.
It's a horror show.
Doctors operate underground in unsanitized conditions without anesthetics.
There's blood everywhere.
And when this young woman finally finds the mother and her baby, they had both already died.
A doctor hands her the baby. and said, look, this is a hospital, not a cemetery.
Above ground, chain dogs roam the streets.
These are packs of German military police, looking for anyone avoiding military service.
Boys as young as 14, men as old as 70.
Anybody who could be accused, any male who was not actively fighting, would be strung up on lampposts.
The Soviets move into the city on April 21st.
They take the fighting to the streets, block to block, hand to hand combat against the last stragglers of Hitler's army.
125,000 Berliners die in this final battle.
Walking around the city in April of 1945, you see bodies victims of the chain dogs suspended in the streets.
You'd smell fire, sewage.
You'd see buildings split in half, broken glass everywhere.
When the bombs are falling and Berliners move into their shelters, you'd think the city was abandoned.
A scene of complete devastation, of corpses and dead horses and bomb craters and so on.
There's no question of that.
On April 30th, Hitler commits suicide, killing himself and his wife, Eva Braun.
The next day, Joseph Goebbels poisons his six children with cyanide and he and his wife take their lives shortly after.
In Berlin, their deaths barely register.
I think at that stage things were so dire for most people, sheltering in bunkers with hardly any food, sick and terrified.
The fact that Hitler had committed suicide, or Goebbels and his family.
I doubt if people thought about it very much at all.
By the end of the war, it's estimated that one third of the homes and streets in Berlin have been destroyed.
Between deaths and evacuations, just over half of the city's 4 million people remain in the city.
The Japanese cities were ruined to the same extent, but Berlin was pretty much gone.
There's so much rubble, as much as 75 million cubic meters, that it's too much to move.
Much of it gets turned into artificial hills, which remain in the city today.
They haven't done anything to hide the darkest history.
The former Gestapo headquarters.
It's a museum where signs in the center of Berlin with all the names of the Nazi concentration camps and death camps.
There are constant exhibitions about the subject.
There are brass markers in front of houses where Jews were deported with the names of the families who were taken away.
So a lot of effort has been made to remind people of the horrors of the past.
Berlin is the seat of Hitler's fascist regime.
It's the site of horrible atrocities, and many Berliners participate in that.
But there are also regular citizens victimized by Hitler's ambitions.
They may have not supported him or his actions, yet it's their homes that get destroyed.
And, according to Ian Buruma, this fact is what he takes away from the story.
Countries often bomb civilian populations in war.
It's unfortunately a common tactic, even now.
The idea is that if you bomb civilian populations sufficiently, they will be so demoralized that they'll turn against their leaders.
Well, it never happened.
And it didn't happen in Vietnam.
It didn't happen in Japan.
It didn't happen in Iraq.
It doesn't work that way.
First of all, people don't like being bombed.
So it's not hard to imagine that they don't exactly welcome the country that's bombing them.
It might not make them like their own leaders either, But what it does do, Buruma says, is bring everyday citizens together a resilient, maybe even desperate, strain of civic pride.
It seems to happen everywhere where this tactic or this strategy has been attempted.
There is a kind of collective bloody-mindedness that you get.
When you're exposed to that kind of violence, it makes people stick together and adapt and show how resilient they are.
And that's what happened in Berlin.
Stay tuned for part two of this story next week, when we take a look at what happens to Berlin in the years following this devastating war.
History This Week is a Backpocket Studios production in partnership with the History Channel.
To stay updated on all things History This Week, sign up at historythisweekpodcastcom and follow us on Instagram at historythisweekpodcast.
If you have any thoughts or questions, any at all, send us an email at historythisweekathistory.com.
Special thanks to our guest, Ian Baruma, professor of human rights and journalism at Bard College and author of Stay Alive.
Berlin 1939 to 1945.
You can find his book and all the books we've used putting the season together on our website historythisweekpodcastcom.
This episode was a solo effort produced and sound designed by me, Ben Dickstein.
I'm also the executive producer for Back Pocket Studios, and our executive producers from the History Channel are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fidler.
Don't forget to follow, rate, and review History This Week wherever you get your podcasts.
And we'll see you next week.
