Ben Wilson

And he uses that to crack down on dissent, especially on communists and Marxists.

And then he makes the SA auxiliary policemen.

And he does the same for the SS.

So the SS we haven't talked about.

We talked about the stormtroopers, the SA.

You know, they had started to get out of control.

And so Hitler starts to try to relegate them to, you know, just being an athletic club and not paramilitary forces.

And so later he forms the SS.

who are supposed to be more elite and more of a paramilitary force.

So yeah, within days, street violence against the communists had begun.

And within days, the police and the Nazi party were in fact fusing into a single institution.

Now, at the same time, the big crisis that they're there to solve is this

Horrible economic situation, all this unemployment.

I mean, it's just a completely broken economy, right?

And so there's this guy named Schacht, who is a genuine economic genius, like one of the great economic minds of all time.

He himself was not a national socialist.

He's not a Nazi and had served previous governments.

And he is put in a position of power by Hitler and by his cabinet to form economic policy and get them out of this deep economic lagmire.

And he does this through a brilliant and complex mix of

of currency controls, export and import restrictions, price controls, public works programs.