The Nazi Mind with Laurence Rees

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1:12Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk to some of the brightest minds about everything surrounding the written word. That's everything. That's from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Before we dive in, make sure to follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to leave a review. Good or bad, I want to hear from you. I want to hear whether you're enjoying it or where we can improve. And I can take the hits. So let me know. If you don't like something, say it straight. Now let's get into it.

1:56Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us today is Lawrence Rees. He's an award-winning historian. He's written a couple of great books. One was on the charisma of Adolf Hitler. That's how I first met you, sirs, through that book. And then my good friend, Alistair Campbell, handed me a book a few months back before it was published here in the United States, Lawrence. The title of the book is The Nazi Mind, 12 Warnings from History. And I have to tell you, sir, I read the book in two days. I found it to be incredibly fascinating, eerie, eerie in terms of how things go down and can go down in a population.

2:38It's an honor to have you on, sir. Your work on this topic, I think, is up there with William Shire and obviously the rise and fall of the Third Reich. But let's talk about the Nazi mind. What made you want to write that book now? And I know you've written about Hitler before. Well, I've been, as you know, I've been working in this area as a documentary filmmaker and also as a writer for over 30 years now. And the great privilege I had because of the period in which I was interested in this was that I got to meet a large number of people who lived through the war, not just people who suffered in Nazism, but Nazi perpetrators, former Nazi perpetrators as well.

3:25And the reason that I wanted to come to this book was because I was increasingly thinking that people feel that history isn't relevant. I live here in Britain, in a country which is historically illiterate because most people give up the study of all history at the age of 13 or 14. And I think there's a sense with young people, especially, that history doesn't have any value to them. So I've always thought this history's got value in a particular way. And so I wanted to try and write a book to demonstrate that. I've got the book open here on my desk. I'm going to read some of the table of contents.

4:11Okay. You ready, sir? I'm ready. Okay. Spreading conspiracy theories, using us against them, leading as a hero, conniving with the elite, attacking human rights, valuing enemies, escalating racism. I mean, there's more, stoking fear. So I took a snapshot out of your table of contents. I put it up on the social media sites and it didn't go over too well for me with the MAGA peoples. I'm just wondering what happened there, sir? Where's the connection? Is there a connection? Well, as you know, if you read the book, I mean, I'm very careful in it to try and draw these warnings from it. But what I don't do is say, oh, this applies to Trump or this applies to Erdogan or this applies to South Korea.

5:04And I don't do that for two reasons. I don't do that. One, because it's incredibly presumptuous of me. I mean, I've spent all this time trying to understand this history. How dare I come along and say, I mean, my goodness, you know better than anybody if you're talking about Trump. How can I possibly say anything of value in terms of this is how this works specifically in this environment? I mean, it would be wrong but secondly and more almost more importantly is what i found is that if people read a work like this they make their own connections in their own mind as you did so they make their own connections they go hey you know that that reminds me of this or that and so the book's been published in in all over the world in in from france in croatia and i don't know, all over.

5:50And in each territory, I've had people email saying, yeah, you know, this reminds me of this or that in a way that I couldn't possibly have written in. So you've read it, and you've made the connection with all of those different things as to what's happening in your country. And that's the valid connection, because it came through you and your own knowledge. So I want to test a few theories on you, and then we're going to get into the book. But I feel that we had an America First movement. We had a specter and a rise of fascism. We're going to go into whether people can call Trump a fascist or not.

6:30I do a podcast pretty popular in your country called The Rest is Politics US. And my co-host, Katty Kay, if I use the word fascist and Trump in the same sentence, she hits the James Bond ejection seat on me. And I'm left somewhere in the countryside. She believes that that's a bridge too far. Dominic Sandbrook, the historian, believes it's a bridge too far. We'll get there in a second. Raise the rudders. Raise the sails. Raise the sails. Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over. Roger. Wait, is that an enterprise sails solution? Reach sails professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title, and more.

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7:51Make the best idea win! On brand with Jimmy Fallon. Series premiere Tuesday on NBC. But in my country, we had the first America First movement. Roosevelt was a cunning politician. He put it down. And we never had any real invasion. We had 9-11 years later. but we're talking about in the war where we were dealing with fascist dictatorships, the US was never invaded, result of which we have no wartime memory of this. And I guess the question I'm asking, explain the petri dish of a population that could be susceptible to this type of behavior. Because it's a Nazi mind, sir, but your book really, something i thought about was it's a nazi hive mind i mean you can't just have one nazi you've got to have a whole collection of them to make something happen yeah and it's a book about being human i don't believe for a second that um that only germans could do this in that particular time it's about being it's about what human it's about what human beings are capable of doing in certain specific situations and i think that you can point to the specific situations around this history that I think are, as I say, are warnings.

9:06They're not lessons in the sense like a science book's a lesson, this is proved here. History can't work that way. But I think they're warnings like if you go to the doctor and you're smoking 100 cigarettes a day, he's going to say it's not a good idea. And you can say, well, my granddad lived to be 98 smoking. And he can say, yeah, he's the lucky one. So it's a warning in that sense. But I think that what you've got to see is that someone like Hitler comes out of crisis. They only get 2.6 % of the vote in 1928, and yet five years later, he's Chancellor of Germany at the head of the biggest party.

9:45What happens in between? Well, primarily what happens in between isn't just the Wall Street crash and the terrible depression. It's the failure of democracy to deal with the problems that, quote, ordinary people, unquote, feel they've got. And so that's, I think, a key warning that you can see as to the kind of way that a figure like that can come through. It's the failure of democracy, perceived failure to deal with a problem or problems that many, many, many people feel. And I think you can point to that. But right across the board, often it's because they've stoked fear about this dichotomy of them and us.

10:24And talking, which I did for the first time with this book, to neuroscientists and psychologists, is the power within us to immediately try and separate people into them and us is one of the reasons human beings evolved, because we're immediately suspicious in particular situations of, well, what's that? Who's that? And we categorize instantly. and so the sense that there's a crisis and not just a crisis, failure of democracy, and it's not your fault. The message from these type of leaders is don't worry, you didn't get into this. It's these people over here. It's this conspiracy or it's this group of easily identified people that's causing you all your problems.

11:13So I think you can begin to see kind of how those sorts of messages can actually bring someone to the fore. Yeah. I mean, it's troublesome because the democracy is cumbersome. Not to use a cliche on you, sir, but we know what Churchill said, it's the worst form of government until you look at the other governments. But there's something that happens where people feel that they need a strong person to come in and flex. They need a person to clear the field for them. And usually it's a person, as you describe in the book, that is able to create that division, able to create that scapegoat stereotype, if you will.

11:54I guess the one thing that blew me away, and it always haunts me, is the very ordinary people. Very ordinary people can take to this. It's not sadists. It's not fascists. It's not masochists. It's a group of ordinary people that are frustrated with their lives, or they feel left out of something or they feel some type of economic desperation. And so they're like, okay, let's wreck it. Let's wreck everything. Well, I think that, yeah, I mean, that's the other really fascinating thing that I don't think people realize about this, that in 1932, just a few months before Hitler comes to power, there's an election in Germany.

12:35And a majority of people in voting for either the communists or the Nazis, that's a majority of Germans in voting for either of those two, knowingly vote for political parties that are openly committed to destroying democracy. So if you just think of it, get your mind around that, this is a cultured nation at the heart of Europe, and a majority of people know that they're voting to not have the right to vote again. So that's not something I always remember when they talk about democracy building in the Middle East or whatever, you think, oh, well, once it happens, we put democracy, there it is.

13:13My God, democracy is fragile. And so what can happen with that is something else, which is really troubling, which is both those parties were violent, the communists and the Nazis. So you find that many people who despise and are frightened of violence, these kind of ordinary people as you categorize them, they're going to vote for a violent party in the Nazis, And they're going to vote for that violent party because they think that the best way of overcoming violence is to have this violent party deal with the other one and sort it out. So actually, there's a paradox that they're voting for a party committed to violence, and yet they're completely against violence.

13:58I don't know. It's almost like a self-inflicted wound. And you can see it out. People forget this about Roosevelt, but he lived in Germany in his teenage and early and late adolescent years and read German. And so he heard the speeches from Hitler in German. I think you actually point that out in your last book. And so he knew the trouble that was coming. And so how do you get this? Where is the warning sign? Obviously, you could read your book, of course, and you can get it and say, okay, there's the warning sign those are the 12 chapters of what people do to get themselves in this situation but where where's the light that goes on school on the i think that the the if i look back over the whole of everything meeting all these people who suffered or who perpetrated or whatever that the as they say at the very end the overwhelming feeling i have is that that people do not understand they don't they they don't understand how inherently fragile pretty much everything around them is, that the huge tendency for people is to be complacent.

15:05And we're complacent about our own health. Most of us, we're complacent about our relationships. We're complacent about everything around us. But crucially, we're complacent about the institutions around us. We think that you see these big buildings like the parliament building or the capital building. I mean, I visited America a year before the kind of insurrection. And, you know, we were taken around the Capitol and, you know, there's Washington on the ceiling. And, you know, and you think this is this is a solid. And I remember looking at the going around and seeing, you know, one of the original copies of the Bill of Rights, the Constitution.

15:44And you're looking at that and I'm thinking this is the great statement of the Enlightenment. I mean, you know, this is the beacon here. Extraordinary. I mean, extraordinary thing to have achieved there. And I could not have dreamed that you'd see people storming that building. Couldn't have dreamt it in a million years. And yet I'm the one who's going around bleating about, oh, everything's so fragile. You know? So it's like kind of, I mean, it's a terrifying situation, I think, because people don't fully understand that. So I think the thing is, is to be aware of the tiny things when it happens.

16:29It's a bit like, you know, what was it? The mayor of New York who dealt with graffiti because it's the first sign, graffiti or broken windows. And I think it's like that, but with politics. Once you see all these things beginning to happen in politics, you scream and shout about it. And you're not complacent about it because Hitler gets 2.6 % of the vote in 1928. I've seen reports, Prussian secret police reports, dismissing him as a joke. Yeah, no, what a joke. No chance. And yet, look what happens. so that's the the if there's one fundamental thing that cuts through it all it's that yeah i mean so you're you're sparking so many things uh in my head i guess the uh the real the real thing i'm feeling is some level of sadness because i think and again i said i mentioned you're taking this but i subscribe to the great man or great woman theory of victory people can move things if they're in the right seat.

17:31And he understood this. The reason I find your book so fascinating is I've been with Trump, worked with Trump. There are good parts of him. There are bad parts of him. He is human, but there's a collection of activity that's happening around him that are the building blocks of this foundational fascism, if you will. Now, I'm not going to call it fascism because you're a Brit and Cady will take my head off, but there's levels of authoritarianism creeping in. And what blew me away about your book is that it's human, sir. It happened. I'm not here condemning it as much as I am here observing it. And then the question I have for you, because I do believe in the single man theory of history or single woman, what type of leader can combat this?

18:22What type of leader has the skill set? One of Roosevelt's ambassador said, you know, he had the cunning of a dictator, but he was on the side of the angels. He believed in that democracy. He believed in those parchments that you were visiting. So I'm just, for this new project I'm doing, I've just been reading again the whole way in which he dealt with the British from 1939 through to Pearl Harbor. And it's incredibly interesting because I don't think there's been almost a more skilled politician than him in terms of how he operated. It's quite extraordinary because he keeps kind of vaguely leading Churchill on about whether he's coming into the war in 1940 or not or back.

19:06And the whole way he manages this is quite extraordinary. And I think that the key thing is there was some quote where he said, I remember something like, you've got to be careful because it's a terrible thing to turn around as a leader and see that people aren't following you. And he was completely aware of that, that actually he needs to take people with him. So he's got an end goal over here, and then he's doing his best to manipulate public opinion so that he closes the gap between the goal and where public opinion is like that. But what he never does is say, that's my goal, come to me. He's always just moving along like that.

19:51And I think that's the crucial thing that you, you know, to go back to, I think one of the key reasons Hitler gets to power, which is that there's things that the people want that ordinary politics aren't delivering and democracy isn't delivering. That's the situation above all you've got to make sure you don't have. So if you are a kind of politician in a liberal democracy, you can't go around with policies that actually are aspirational out here. And you've got a mass of people back here who simply aren't with you. Because if you do that, there'll be this disconnect. And somebody back here, another pseudo Hitler, somebody back here is going to lead them.

20:35And you're stuck out in the future. I'm stuck out here. It's so brilliant. And I'm going to tell you a quick story, which I think you'll enjoy. This is from H.W. Brands' book, A Traitor to His Class. And it's about the 1940 election. And so there he is. He gets wheeled into the radio area of the White House where the microphone is and all the radio tubes. And he's going to broadcast. And it's a little bit of a campaign speech prior to the election, a few days before the election. And he just says, I want to remind my fellow Americans that in this hour of peril and this time of war, we're not going to war.

21:11And then they click off all the radio dials and tubes, and they wheel him back into his study. And James Roosevelt is there, his son, and he's shaking a gin martini in his wheelchair with a cigarette. He said, wow, I just told a really big lie to the American people. And James says, what do you mean, dad? He said, I had to do it. He said, I know we're going to war, but they're not ready. And they're going to go, if Wilkie beats me, they're going to go to war anyway. But I want to be the guy that leads them through this war because I love these. I love the American people. I'm going to help them lead them through the war to victory with minimal casualties.

21:51Right. This is this whole idea about Lend-Lease and so forth. So, yeah, so this, yeah, this is a brilliant part of where I think we need to find our leadership today. And I mean, in fact, I can tell you just what I for the series I did about and book I did called World War II Behind Closed Doors, which is all about Roosevelt, Stalin, and the dealings with the allies and so on. I talked to Robert Dalek, the great professor, big academic expert, and he was the consultant on the series. And I was having real problems trying to work out. It's very hard with Roosevelt because often he is saying things that are simply, they're not right.

22:27I mean, in 1942, he tells Molotov that essentially we're going to come into the war with D-Day that year. And Marshall's there going, no, no, no, no. And he's just going, no, we're going to manage it. And so I'm going to, I said to Professor Darlick, just how do you make sense of this? And he said, Lawrence, you're overcomplicating. Just imagine you've got a voice in your head 99 % of the time saying, how will this play with the American people? Right. Amen. Amen. So take away. Warning. I sort of feel like the book gives us some very real warning. So let's say that you were advising a leader. Let's say I gave you a few minutes with a political leader and the leader came to you and said, Lawrence, I'm worried.

23:18There's a specter of authoritarianism creeping into all these societies now, whether it's Orban, if it's Erdogan, if it's some weird things going on in the west uh what would you what would you say to me how would you advise me well i'd essentially say number one what i was saying before which is that what is the big thing that they're focusing on that people the majority of people large numbers of people want that politics isn't delivering and how can we address that amen and can we address that in a way that isn't what's going through them and us, isn't going through conspiracy theories, isn't going through kind of deal breaking.

24:04But how do we actually do what Roosevelt, as you rightly say, did, which is start first and foremost with where public opinion is now and move it, move it, move it, move it as gradually as we can to where we need to be. Because the problem is that, that if especially in a crisis, and this is where a lot of these things come out, and they can be fake crises because lots of a kind of would-be autocratic leader is going to manufacture the crisis. Hitler was always full of this. He always was saying either or in his rhetoric. Either we deal with the Jewish threat or we're exterminated, either this or that.

24:47So the incredible emotional heightening of fear. I mean, I discovered a quote in a speech Hitler gave, which I hadn't come across, I don't know as well known enough, in 1926, where he was talking to people in private, in a private meeting. And he said, you've got to understand, hate is the only stable emotion. Hate is the only stable emotion. And I think that's what, if you see a common thread through a lot of these things. So Hitler, what did Hitler say that to? He was at a private members meeting in Hamburg in 1926, I believe. Incredible. Sir, I could talk to you for hours, but we at Goal Hanger, we limit these things to about 30 minutes because otherwise people don't listen.

25:34They have short attention. So I've got five words, phrases. At the end of each one of these podcasts, my producer and I pick out a couple of things. and I want you to give a sentence if you don't mind on each. Okay, you ready? Sure. I'll try it. A history. What we can learn from the past. Yeah. Yeah. And we need to learn more of it, right? I think we both realize there's a vacuum, which is one of the reasons why I'm inspired. Well, if you live only your own life, you're immensely impoverished because there's been a load of people done it before and they were human too. Right. Amen. Okay. WWII, World War II.

26:13of the single most bloody and important struggle in the history of the world. But led to an era of peace and prosperity. Well, only for the West. You tell that to the Poles and they're not going to believe you. Okay. All right. Well, my egocentrism creeping in. You're right. If you're a Pole, at the end of the war, you swap one dictator for another one and you weren't free until 1989-90. All right. It took 40 years of the policy. Well said. Yeah, I have to check myself on that. Hitler. Oh, one of the most extraordinary and unspeakable and appalling leaders the world's ever seen. Nazi, or as Churchill would say, Nazi.

27:02Remember, he didn't like to pronounce the word. Now, one of, if not the most repulsive ideologies in the history of the world. Okay. Well, the Nazi mind, sir. The Nazi mind. Well, the Nazi mind, I would say, is an aspect of the human mind and one that we need to study to understand how it can happen in order to try and think how it doesn't happen again. Although aspects of it obviously are happening again. well i mean this was a an amazing interview for me i so look forward to this interview i love i loved your book i loved your book about the charisma of hitler because it's a reminder that he was human sir we have a tendency now 80 years later to demonize him and because you know i read that book a few years back and i was like okay uh this man is brilliant because he's reminding us that Hitler was a human being.

28:00He's not a bibbuck. He's not a golem. He's not a demon. He was on earth with us. He had his grievances. He was cunning. He had a deep voice. He had a voice for oratory. It wasn't just the yelling and screaming that we see in some of these propaganda movies. There was a thought process behind him that gravitated people to him. And so I applaud you for that as well. And thank you so much for joining us today on Open Book. The title of the book is The Nazi Mind, 12 Warnings from History. And that table of contents has gotten me in trouble here in the United States, Lawrence Rees. But I appreciate you writing it the way you did.

28:47And thank you for sharing your time today. I appreciate it. It's been a privilege. I am Anthony Scaramucci, and that was Open Book. Thank you so much for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends and make sure you hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. While you're there, please leave us a rating or review. If you want to connect with me or chat more about the discussions, it's at Scaramucci on X or Instagram. I'd love to hear from you. I'll see you back here next week.

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