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The History Channel original podcast, History This Week, May 9th, 1942. Berlin is Joseph Gerbal's personal playground. Gerbles is Adolf Hitler's minister of propaganda, the man in charge of strengthening Nazi ideology throughout the Third Reich. But Gerbles has another role, the Gowiter, the governor of Berlin. So, Joseph Gerbles 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, Gerbles unveils the newest creation from his propaganda laboratory. He brings it to the Loose Garden, 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 Gerbles 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 Gerbles, inside of one tent, Gerbles 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 writeups claim these children had no names, didn't know their ages, and survive only by stealing. In another room, Gerbles 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, Gerbles 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 Saxonhausen concentration camp, a 45minute drive away. When Gerbles wants to show how Russia tortures its prisoners, he uses his own. And for Joseph Gerbles, The Soviet Paradise is a success. 1.3 million people come to see it across 6 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, "The Nazi
paradise, war, hunger, lies, Gestapo. How much longer?" 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-cossmopolitan 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 US had the roaring 20s, Berlin had what was called the golden
20s. Theater, dance, cabarets. Is there anything they hate? Hitler and the Nazis aren't exactly fans. So, the Nazis never like 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. It's 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 Reichdog fire. The rice stark was set on fire by um supposedly um by a young Dutch communist. That's the story that Hitler tells that a communist burned down the Reichdog,
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 crystal 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 Gerbles, riing 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. Code name Grandmother died. On August 31st, 1939, German agents dressed as Polish soldiers attacked German targets right near the border, a radio station, a customs post. And there were bodies found in German uniforms. And the bodies actually belong 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 um it was an entirely false flag operation. And that was the beginning of World War II. The next day, he declares war on Poland. And that night in Berlin, Hitler makes a speech. Since a lot of damage to be done to the Reich 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 Gerbal's advanced propaganda, Berliners don't show up on mass.
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 5:45 a.m., 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, Gerbles 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 anti-semitic 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 2 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 um local people who um wanted to lynch them. Basically, the prisoners are pelted with stones, nails, pieces of wood. When they arrive at Saxonhausen concentration camp, the guards spit on their tourist scrolls, yank them by their beards, and force them to run in ill-fitting shoes until their feet bleed.
In the eyes of Gerbles, it's a success. The great danger of extremist politics, uh, 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. Gerbles, a failed playwright who walked with a limp, was one of Hitler's earliest supporters. After meeting him back in the 20s, Gerbles 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, Gerbles 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. Gerbles, remember, is not just Minister of Propaganda, but also Gowiter 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, Gerbles discourages what he calls Christmas sentimentality on the radio. Gerbles often in his diaries goes on about how 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. You know, 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, Gerbles 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 okay, like people being dragged from their homes and to concentration camps.
It's now July 6th, 1940. At 3:00 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, Gerbles 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. Gerbles has meticulously planned every step of the show. So-called Hitler maidens cover the streets in flower petals, allowing the Furer's Mercedes limousine to silently glide down the parade route. Gerbles 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's 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, Gerbles's propaganda has played its part. But that postWorld 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 he's this victory will mean that the war is going to end.
The French have surrendered. So as 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 as a hero because he um achieved total victory. That was probably the feeling of a lot of those people. Uh a feeling that um uh quickly dissipated. There's a familiar kind of story, one where someone does everything right and still hits a wall. In history, that might come from bureaucracy. Today, it might be the health care system. If
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does not fold. The RAF fights off the German Luftwafa, 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 in rage. He publicly vows to wipe out British cities. Gerbles, meanwhile, is busy. As Hitler looks east and prepares to invade the Soviet Union, Gerbal 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 Gerbles doubles down,
broadcasting special announcements of German victories accompanied by Fran List's Russian fanfare. But the people aren't buying it. So Gerbles 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 Gerbles. 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, Gerbles 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. Gerbles 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. Gerbles has arranged an elaborate performance in the city, the Berlin Philarmonic led by one of the world's most famous conductors, Wilhelm Fertangler. 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 had 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, Gerbles rushes the stage and makes sure everyone sees him shaking the conductor's hand. He shook Gerbles's 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.
Gerbles make 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 Loose Garden in Berlin. Gerbles is thrilled as 1.3 million people walk through taking in these tableau 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 a 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
Ro Capel put stickers on Soviet Paradise posters across the city. The Nazi Paradise. War, hunger, lies, Gustapo. How much longer? But another organization takes it even further. A resistance circle called the Bound Group led by Jewish communist activist Herbert Bal. They sneak explosives into the exhibit and set them off. 11 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 is that they lead to terrible repercussions.
The Nazis are humiliated by the bound group's sabotage. They indiscriminately round up 500 Jewish men in Berlin. The actual members of the BAM group are sentenced to death and executed at a concentration camp. Herbert Bam 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. Irwin Raml's Nazi tank corps is driven out of North Africa. And at Stalenrad, 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 Gerbles, this is a PR nightmare. He compensates by accelerating his scapegoating of Germany's Jewish population. By February of 1943, Gerbal starts deporting the last of Berlin's Jews. He's behind his original schedule, but he still makes it happen. Gerbles 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 Stalenrad, Gerbles assembles a crowd of 14,000 loyalists at Berlin's Sport Palace, an indoor arena. Gerbles himself delivers the keynote speech, what Ian Baruma characterizes as the peak of Berlin's mass hysteria. Germany was already in a fairly desperate situation and that's when all pretents to normality were abandoned. Gerbles calls for the elimination of Judaism. He asks the crowd if they're willing to sacrifice everything for their furer. And in the most infamous moment, he asks to do you want total war? When Gerbles called for total war, that's what he
meant. That everything had to be sacrificed for what was presented as German'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. Gerble 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 Baruma says Berliners, the ones that remain adapt.
Many 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 smithetheriness. It's April 20th, 1944, Hitler's birthday. It's been 2 years since Joseph Gerbles put on that concert, making the conductor, Fert Bangler, 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 Gerbles 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, Gerbles tries salvaging Hitler's birthday. He puts up banners that read, "The furer 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. Um, so it was all very half-hearted by that stage.
A German journalist writes, "Berlin looks like an old in bad makeup trying to look young. As the allies make progress, Gerbles 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. Gerbles 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 were sounded defeist 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 3,000 people, but up to 12,000 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 neighbors and got lost in the in the mala of people trying to find shelter and she finally tracked her down in this sort of makeshift uh 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 lamposts. The Soviets move into the city on April 21st. They take the fighting to the streets, blocktoblock, 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 were 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, Ava Braun.
The next day, Joseph Gerbles 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 Gibbles and his family, I doubt if people thought about it very much at all. By the end of the war, it's estimated that onethird of the homes and streets in Berlin have been destroyed. Between deaths and evacuations, just over half of the city's four million people remain in the city.
The Japanese cities were ruined to the same extent. But yeah, Berlin was pretty much gone. There's so much rubble, as much as 75 million cub m, 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. There are um 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 Baruma, 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.
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 historyweekodcast.com and follow us on Instagram at history this week podcast. If you have any thoughts or questions, any at all, send us an email at [email protected]. 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, historyweekodcast.com. This episode was a solo effort produced and sound designed by me, Ben Dixon. I'm also the executive producer for Backpocket Studios and our executive producers from the History Channel are Eli Ler and Liv Fiddler. Don't forget to follow, rate, and review History This Week wherever you get your podcasts and we'll see you next week.
