World War 1 has begun, and Robert walks Amanda through how Alfred Hugenberg bought up the German media to make the case the the war should go on for ever, and then how he backed the Nazi party and ushered Hitler into power when that didn't go well for some reason. Sources: The Pan German League by Barry Jackisch https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/hitler-oligarchs-hugenberg-nazi/681584/ The Fateful Alliance by Hermann Beck https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/modern-world-history-1918-to-1980/weimar-germany/ https://corporatecitizen.in/issue3/corporate-history-mercedes-was-hitler%E2%80%99s-idea.html https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-75512-5_1 https://www.topfundsoehne.de/ts/en/site/history/index.html https://archive.org/details/alfredhugenbergr0000leop/page/11/mode/1up See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: Who was Alfred Hugenberg and what role did he play in World War I?
Oh, boy, howdy. We're back, having a good time, and everything's good. We're podcasting about Alfred Hugenberg, a great asshole who, at this point in time, has helped make World War I a reality, which, you know, I hope to one day make World War I a reality, so...
You are. You're keeping its memory alive right now.
Every day. Every day. As soon as this call finishes, Amanda Montel, our great guest and the author of Cultish, as soon as we finish this recording, I'm going to get back on the phone with Emmanuel Macron over in France and try to sell him some new machine guns, you know? Then I'm going to tell the Germans, do you know what Macron's doing? Holy shit.
What that moment, that moment when you become your podcast.
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What's the one thing everyone agreed on in 1913 and today? Too many young people in Europe. You know, we're going to knock that problem out right away. Just make a new Western front. Exactly. Exactly. You know, it's good for the economy. It's terrible. It destroys the whole thing.
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And he was just staring at me.
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Chapter 2: How did Alfred Hugenberg's investments influence German colonial ambitions in Africa?
We are at the point at which World War I is underway. Millions of boys are dying in an industrial form of slaughter, heretofore unknown to the human race. And as Germany feeds its future into a steel maw of British and French bullets, Alfred Hugenberg has an idea. Now, the job he's working at this point is pretty close to what we'd call a hedge fund manager today, right?
Not in terms of the way he's moving his money, but in the fact that he is the guy who other rich people give their cash to, and he tells them what to do with it in order to make the most of it, right? And he's always been very bullish on German expansion. That's kind of his whole deal. Like, what if we had more Germany?
And he's always felt like Germany deserved a bigger piece of the pie that was Africa. And at this point, World War I... Arguably, Germany's best military commander of the entire war is in Africa, like a very actually like innovative insurgent kind of commander running a truly ingenious insurgent campaign. And after the initial first few weeks of heavy advances through Belgium and eastern France,
Everything gets bogged down for the German army in the West. And so Africa is going to be one of those places that Germans can look to for like the kind of glorious martial stories of military cunning and courage that, you know, make good propaganda because like and then another boy died in the mud. Not great stories, you know, not super, not super inspiring. Right. So true.
So Hugenberg is like, naturally, when we Germans win this war, we're going to need to expand our African possessions. And for an idea of what it would have looked like had Hugenberg got his wishes, we don't have to look back much further than like the period that we're in right now, 1914.
In fact, we just have to go back to January of 1904, which is when the Herero people of modern day Namibia, led by a chief named Samuel Maharero, launched a rebellion against their German colonizers, right? So Germany already has Namibia. Hugenberg is looking at... Because he wants to take basically British African possessions and make them German, right?
And what had happened 10 years before this in Namibia was the Herero had rebelled. They'd killed about 120-something German settlers. And the Germans had responded by bringing the armed might of – they have the most powerful army on the planet at the time – to bear against these guys who don't have an army. They just have some men who are warriors, right?
So it's not like a military with like an industrial state. Right behind it. And this does not go well for the Herero. And the actual fighting, the battle is won quite quickly because the Germans have artillery. And as a general rule, if one side has artillery and the other side has not that, the side with artillery wins. This is one of the fun rules of warfare that's been generally true.
German soldiers pursue the fleeing civilians after they kind of break the fighting forces. They continue to pursue because like the Herero flee. They try to get the fuck out of Namibia, right? Sure. And these colonial soldiers pursue these fleeing civilians into the desert and massacre thousands of them, a mix of just shooting them to death en masse and poisoning their well.
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Chapter 3: What was the nature of the Herero genocide and Germany's colonial brutality?
Still, though, Germany's attitude seems especially belligerent. Were there other nations that had newly embraced nationalism around this time that aspired to the level of colonization and brutality that Germany was executing? Sure.
A great example would be Japan, who is starting to colonize right around. I mean, in World War I, they take a bunch of German possessions. This is a big part of Japanese colonial expansion. And they're going to be hideously genocidal everywhere the Empire of Japan spreads to. And obviously, the British have been doing colonizing a lot longer.
But one of the first big acts of British colonialism was to kill, by some counts, tens of millions of people in Bengal through a famine that was largely the result of business choices made by a British corporation. So the fact that Germans get a colony in Namibia and almost immediately do a genocide, this is very much the norm, right? Okay, this is like a playbook. Shit. Yeah.
Yeah, this is this is not at all like a freak incident. This is not just the Germans, right? This is a product. This is just how colonialism always works. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Is aware of what the Germans are doing in Namibia. This is reported on. And his whole attitude is we need to be doing this to way more of Africa to make room for a bunch of German farmers.
You know, let's let's let's get on it. We've got better guns than these people. Wiping them out will be no problem. So when he talks about needing to expand to Africa, I just I wanted to tell that story because that's what he's talking about. Right.
Now, Africa, things are I wouldn't say they're going well for Germany in the war, but it's one of the areas where they can take a lot of pride because they've got this like very innovative commander doing very innovative things over there. That's a lot sexier than what's happening on the Western Front past a point.
The other big win the Germans had had right at the start of the war was that they had conquered Belgium. Right. Now, this is actually a big part of why they lose the war on a strategic level because Belgium is an independent neutral nation, right? The Germans take Belgium because they need it as a road to get to France because this plan they have says that that's the best way to do these things.
The British are like, if you go through Belgium, maybe we don't have a dog in this fight, but if you go through Belgium, then you're going to be fucking with us, right? And they go through Belgium and the British get involved. Right. So this is it's one of those things where the Germans are very proud to have a Belgium, but also it kind of is a big part of what fucks them over.
But Hugenberg is not really thinking about that at the time. He sees Belgium as an investment opportunity, and he's very glad to have it. He sees the same as Germany has taken a good deal of French territory at this point in Eastern France, which includes this one region of Southeast France that Germany has occupied, is where the French keep a big chunk of their mines.
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Chapter 4: How did Alfred Hugenberg use media ownership to influence public opinion during WWI?
I, it just keeps reminding me of, I mean, obviously we have like cultural lessons and axioms and proverbs that try to convince us to resist those impulses. And the one I always think of is that Edward Abbey quote. That's like growth for growth sake is the ideology of a cancer cell.
Yes. But like, absolutely.
It's so hard to internalize messaging like that.
And again, and that's why there's got to be just actual, like you have to at the kind of collective level make rules to stop that. Because individual people, not that no one can avoid this, because there are people who have strong enough sense of self and moral centers that the option won't get that rich, won't let it happen. But usually this does not happen. Right.
The Hugenberg route where people are like, and again, you have to, again, to go back to the heroin comparison, the amount of money they start making because of the war, like they don't want to give that up, period, right?
It's like Pavlov's dog. It's like if money comes because of war, let's do more war.
Delicious, delicious. I love it all. Yes. So, Hugenberg convinces these guys, the only threat to our future profits is peace, particularly the wrong sort of peace. And if we want to make that impossible, I need you to give me some of your money, and we're going to start buying up newspapers, right? Because... That's how we can stop.
We can kill the peace movement because from the beginning, once this war starts wiping out generations of young men, there's a lot. There's an anti-war movement brewing even within Germany, a pretty sizable one. And they're like, this is all the fault of like Bolshevik propaganda. We need to start buying the newspapers and then we can convince everyone their son's dying is a good idea.
So the four largest of the companies that are in this organization that Hugenberg's heading, the Zeichenverbund, including Krupp, which is still managed by Hugenberg, send representatives to act as spokesmen for the creation of a private association, the Wirtschaftsgesellschaft.
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Chapter 5: What was the economic motivation behind Hugenberg’s propaganda efforts?
I'm Gilbert King. I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott.
I was no longer just telling the story. I was part of it.
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At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
Bone Valley Season 2. Jeremy.
Jeremy, I want to tell you something.
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Chapter 6: How did Hugenberg’s media empire contribute to right-wing nationalism and the rise of the Nazi party?
Exactly, exactly.
Now, Hugenberg's papers aren't just geared towards these people. And in fact, he's got a bunch of papers that are geared towards different segments of the population. But because, number one, he's from this group, they're best at messaging to these people, right? Yeah.
It takes less than two years after the end of the war for this rage and mania that's being drilled into German conservatives via Hugenberg's propaganda to really start to flourish. And one of the conservatives who is influenced by this stuff and is going to have a big impact on things is a fellow traveler of Hugenberg's named Wolfgang Kapp.
Now, Cap, interestingly enough, had been born in New York City because his family fled during the 1848 revolutions. There's this wave of left-wing revolutions all around Europe in 1848. They don't succeed in toppling the German government, but it's scary. Cap's family comes from money, and they leave to be in New York for a while, right? But he moves back. He spends his youthful years in Germany.
and he is kind of sculpted from conception to be a right-wing culture warrior right his family and his wife's family are nationalists they have strong far-right pedigrees and cap grows up to run an agricultural credit union he used his position to argue against debt relief for starving farmers and in world war one full-throatedly endorsed the impossible war aims of hugenberg and his ilk
He was also very bullish on unrestricted submarine warfare. You can't, this guy thinks, you know what will win us World War I is if we just shoot everybody's shipping all the time. Yeah. You know what never pisses off? Again, for example, the United States is killing a bunch of their citizens in boats. They love having their citizens killed in boats. Let's do a lot more of that, right?
Doesn't work out very good. Not a great thing for Germany. Yeah. So after the war, Kapp co-founds the German Fatherland Party, or at the end of the war, Kapp is the co-founder of this German Fatherland Party, right? That Hugenberg is backing alongside a guy named Admiral Tirpitz. And it was in this position that Kapp first makes contact with the Pan-German League.
Germany had been entirely overtaken by a socialist revolution in the aftermath of the war. The whole country barely stops from going socialist because the Weimar government that gets put in place after the Kaiser leaves basically like – is a compromise government meant to avoid full civil war.
And they, to a significant extent, make kind of a deal with a lot of these right wing forces, with the military, with the Fry Corps, which are these groups of like veterans who fought against the left. That's kind of all happening in this period in order to like put that down.
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Chapter 7: Who were key political allies of Hugenberg like Paul von Hindenburg and General Ludendorff?
These Freikorps units that develop – these guys aren't yet Nazis because Nazis don't exist yet, but a lot of them will be later. They basically are the inspiration for the brown shirts or the SA. Kapp sees these paramilitaries that formed to crush the left in the immediate post-war period. And he realizes, like, there's a lot of potential here.
We can mobilize these people not just to do violence for us, but as like a voting bloc. Now, the problem is Cap is not good at waiting for his moment. So once he gets he forms this umbrella organization to lump these paramilitaries together and he gets General Ludendorff to agree to join. Right. And then he tries to overthrow the government. Right.
And one thing that's funny is that Ludendorff gets on board with this plan a few years later in 1923, because this is 1920. He's going to do the same thing with Hitler. Ludendorff loves trying to overthrow the Weimar government. He's no good at it, but loves trying.
What a nasty little habit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's his cigarettes. Um, so cap's whole idea here is called the cap putsch. And it's the same basic plan that hit in a lot of ways that Hitler's going to try to execute. Although different logistically, he's really focused on Berlin from the start. He wants to try to take the Capitol and, uh, For our purposes today, I'll just say it doesn't work, right?
And what's relevant to Hugenberg, who's our focus, is that the league is definitely aware that Cap is planning this putsch, and they give him a little bit of quiet support. But as soon as it becomes clear that he's not going to win, the league disavows him and is like, we never supported. Oh, my God. Treason? Absolutely not. Us?
And Ludendorff kind of does the same thing, and they all walk away unscathed. Almost no one is punished for trying to overthrow the government. Cap even is allowed to go into exile in Sweden, right? Nobody wants to piss off the far right by punishing them for trying to overthrow the government and institute a dictatorship. And a lot of these same guys are going to do it again.
Fascinating how that works. So, Hugenberg and his fellow plutocrats, you know, they make the public noises they have to make, you know, that's like, oh, that's how horrible. Why would anyone try that? But Hugenberg is also already trying to figure out how can I overthrow the Weimar government? And he's not a putsch guy. He doesn't want to have a bunch of dudes with guns do it.
He's going to overthrow Weimar democracy through the ballot box, right? That's his plan. Alfred had left Krupp finally in 1918 with a gargantuan fortune and a lot of influence. In 1922, Germany defaulted on her reparations repayments, which led to a cascading series of problems. The French occupy the Ruhr, this industrial heartland.
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Chapter 8: What was the 'stab-in-the-back' myth and how did Hugenberg propagate it after WWI?
He's been at this for a while.
Yeah, I mean, again, cocaine's available over the counter in this period, so it was a lot easier to have energy, I guess. So fair.
I'm just thinking, like, he must be experiencing back pain by now.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, he can't be moving too well, although he's never had to work physically a day in his life, so maybe he's doing okay. Right. He wasn't in the trenches. It's a lot of sitting. Yeah.
It's a lot of sitting, though.
Yeah. True. Now, under Hugenberg, the National People's Party actually shrinks because there's a lot of conservatives who are like conservatives, but they're not super anti-Semitic or even I mean, some of them might have just been actual like Jewish conservatives. And they're not going to stick around as he makes the party much, much worse on that.
And there's also a chunk of conservatives who are like economic conservatives, but like military nationalism. We just had a horrible war. I'm not really down for it. So the party shrinks.
under hugenberg and the folks who leave tend to join either the conservative people's party or the largest like the center party others rejected the monarchist bent and they saw what hugenberg was doing is watered down nationalism so they just went and joined the nazi party who in this point in time consider hugenberg and the conservatives one of their big enemies
Because at their root, the Nazis are a poor workers party in this period. And while they have wealthy elites backing them, the whole capital class has not yet gone in for the Nazis, right? There are some early rich backers of the Nazis, like Hitler's friend, Puzzi, right? That guy, Hans Stengel, who's like a very rich guy who helps bankroll the Nazis early.
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