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Hitler

MAGA Has Found a New Model

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 02 › german-election-right-party › 681797

LAST MONTH, upwards of 1 million people flooded the streets of Germany to express their opposition to the right-wing political party Alternative für Deutschland, or Alternative for Germany. In Berlin, more than 100,000 people gathered on the Bundestag lawn under a banner reading Defend democracy: Together against the right.

The message Germans were sending was clear, Paul Hockenos, a Berlin-based journalist, wrote in Foreign Policy: “The AfD’s stripe of right-wing radicalism is out of place in democratic Germany.” But not, apparently, in democratic America.

In January, Elon Musk, one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisers, appeared via video at a campaign event in Halle on behalf of the AfD, urging those in attendance not to be ashamed of its nation’s history.

[Graeme Wood: Germany’s anti-extremist firewall is collapsing]

“It’s good to be proud of German culture and German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,” Musk said. Then, in an obvious reference to the Nazi era, Musk said there is “frankly too much of a focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.”

“I think you really are the best hope for Germany,” Musk told the 4,000 AfD supporters. Musk also published an op-ed in Welt am Sonntag, urging Germans to vote for the AfD. The paper’s Opinion editor resigned in protest.

But that was just the start of the Trump administration’s embrace of the AfD. Last week, Vice President J. D. Vance gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference that the German media called a “campaign gift” to the AfD prior to the German elections tomorrow.

In an extraordinary act of intervention into the internal affairs of an ally, Vance essentially urged the next German government to include the AfD, which has so far been treated as a pariah party, in the governing coalition. The Trump administration wants to destroy the firewall that has been built around the AfD. It’s worth understanding why it was erected in the first place.

GERMANY’S DOMESTIC INTELLIGENCE AGENCY has classified part of the AfD, founded in 2013, as extremist, warning that it is a “danger to democracy.” (In 2017, the AfD became the first far-right party to enter the German Parliament since World War II.)

Much of the attention has focused on Björn Höcke, a history teacher who heads a faction of the AfD, known as “The Wing” (Der Flügel ), in the state of Thuringia. Höcke has “used metaphors reminiscent of Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist,” The New York Times reported, “saying that Germans need to be wolves rather than sheep.” He has talked about racial suicide and “cultural Bolshevism.” At a 2017 rally in Dresden, Höcke called on Germans to make a “180 degree” turn in the way they viewed their history. He has said that Germans were “the only people in the world to plant a monument of shame in the heart of their capital,” referring to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. Höcke wants to revive the word Lebensraum—a term used by the Nazis that means “living space.” And he seems offended that Adolf Hitler has been described as “absolutely evil.” (“The world has—man has—shades of gray,” Höcke said when asked about Hitler. “Even the worst severe criminal perhaps has something good, something worth loving, but he is still a severe criminal.”)

[Read: Elon has appointed himself king of the world]

Matthias Quent, a sociologist and the founding director of the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society in Jena, whose work focuses on the analysis of the far right and radicalization, has called Höcke’s ideology “pre-fascist.” “His book reads like a 21st-century Mein Kampf,” Quent told the Times. And Höcke is hardly alone. Alexander Gauland, an AfD leader in Parliament, described the Nazi era as “a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.”

The AfD, which has most of its support in the formerly Communist eastern part of Germany, was defined at its outset by opposition to the common European currency; within a couple of years, it has become pro-Russian and embraced xenophobia, and it now defines itself as committed to preserving German identity and nationalism. It has ties to neo-Nazi activists and the extremist Identitarian Movement, including discussing a “re-migration” plan which, according to Hockenos, would “forcibly repatriate millions of people.”

The AfD is headed by Alice Weidel, whom Vance met with last week and who is ideologically close to Höcke (Weidel has said she would put Höcke in her cabinet if she were to become chancellor). Many people judge the AfD to be the most right-wing party in Europe. And now, in advance of tomorrow’s parliamentary elections, the AfD is polling second, with one in five voters still undecided.

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S embrace of the AfD is the latest example of it casting its lot with right-wing European movements. It not only wants to destroy the transatlantic alliance; it is supporting parties that are extreme and enemies of classical liberalism. But there’s an additional twist in what we’re witnessing.

[Read: The end of the postwar world]

For Vance and Musk to go so far out of their way to support not just any rising radical movement, but this particular party, in this particular country, with its deep historical experiences with fascism, is quite telling. They are not just “trolling the libs”; they are giving their public backing to a movement that represents the core convictions of MAGA world. They see in the AfD an undiluted version of MAGA. What we’re witnessing from Trump & Company, as alarming as it is now, is only a way station.

And before you know it, virtually everyone in the Republican Party will be on board. Trump always changes them; they never change him. The AfD’s approach to politics—nihilism with a touch of Nazi sympathizing—is the model.

However the AfD does in the German elections tomorrow, it has already won the hearts and minds of the most powerful men in America.

‘Herr Hitler, Do You Really Believe Me Capable of Such a Dirty Trick?’

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 02 › nazi-germany-loyalty › 681782

This story seems to be about:

Anyone with an interest in the history of political vengeance should pay a visit to the rare-book room at the Library of Congress and request the bound volume with the call number DD244.R6. Compiled by Hitler’s chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, Dreissig Novemberköpfe, or Thirty November Heads, is the future chancellor’s political hit list as of 1927: The book profiles government officials, legislators, judges, lawyers, journalists, academics, and one popular satirist targeted by Rosenberg for “poisoning the life essence” of the German people with democratic processes and ideas.

The title is a mendacious nod both to November 1918, the month associated with the founding of the Weimar Republic—“November Republic,” “November Criminals,” “November Traitors”—and to the 1789 French Revolution, when heads rolled from guillotines into the hands of the people.

While Thirty November Heads is perhaps the most public catalog of Hitler’s political enemies, the more sinister one was the list of communists, social democrats, and people within the Nazis’ own ranks that was being secretly  compiled  by Hitler’s Sicherheitsdienst, or “SD.” Established in 1931, this “Security Service” was run by Reinhard Heydrich, the ambitious, 20-something assistant to Heinrich Himmler, chief of the Schutzstaffel, or SS. Working out of a spare, upper-floor office in the Nazi Party’s Munich headquarters, Heydrich assiduously collected the names of—and compromising information on—potential Nazi targets on thousands of index cards, a shadow operation within the dark realm of Himmler’s black-uniformed SS protection squads.

[Timothy W. Ryback: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days]

Following the Reichstag elections, on March 5, 1933, which came on the heels of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on January 30, the Nazis seized control of state and local government with a deluge of 200,000 brown-uniformed storm troopers. Local authorities were thrown out of their offices. Swastika banners were hoisted over town halls. Citizens attempting to remove these unauthorized symbols were assailed. Some were sent to concentration camps.

In the southern state of Bavaria, two of Hitler’s closest associates, Adolf Wagner and Hans Frank, were installed as state interior minister and state minister of justice, respectively. Himmler was appointed the new chief of the Bavarian state police, known as the “Green Police” because of the color of their uniforms, while retaining his position as head of the SS. Joseph Hartinger, a Bavarian state prosecutor, immediately recognized the conflict of interest. “Himmler had authority over the SS as well as the state police,” Hartinger observed, “and thus had to be obeyed whenever he gave personal orders relating to police measures in concentration camps.”

Himmler suspended Green Police authority over the recently established network of detention facilities, transforming them into black sites in the justice system, a hellish world beyond the reach of accountability or judicial recourse. Himmler also placed his assistant Heydrich in charge of Department IV, the intelligence service of the Bavarian state police. Heydrich now had access to thousands of classified police files, including the reports of police informants who had infiltrated the Nazi Party’s ranks. For people such as Herbert Hunglinger and Sebastian Nefzger, this was a catastrophe.

Hunglinger was a 53-year-old retired police major who had joined the Nazi Party in 1920, according him the honorific Alter Kämpfer, “Old Warrior,” bestowed on those who had joined the movement in the earliest years, before National Socialism had become politically fashionable. Hunglinger helped establish the Führerschule, a special school for training party leaders, and was said to have possessed the personal trust of the Führer. But recognizing the threat Hitler posed, Hunglinger was all the while feeding intelligence to Bavarian authorities. When his cover was blown, Hunglinger was subjected to brutal interrogation. He confessed his role as a police informant and was dispatched to Dachau, along with five other moles ferreted out by Heydrich via his examination of the Department IV police files.

In Dachau, Hunglinger was placed in Barrack X, a series of single concrete cells, where he was lashed and beaten at regular intervals by SS guards. The pain was such that he begged for a revolver to shoot himself. “We don’t have revolvers,” Hunglinger was told, according to postwar testimony. “Besides, you’re not worth the bullet.” In a “charitable” gesture, he was handed a leather belt and told to hang himself. When guards discovered that Hunglinger was still alive the next day, he was given a particularly severe beating. “That should do it,” an SS guard observed. The next day Hunglinger was found dead, hanged by the neck.

Sebastian Nefzger, another police informant who had infiltrated the Nazi Party, was found dead in his cell with his wrists slit. An autopsy revealed that the 33-year-old salesman, with a wife and child, had in fact “died from asphyxiation, resulting from strangulation and beating.” The flesh on his back had been flayed to the bone.

Loyalty was the sine qua non of service to Hitler and his movement. SS men swore blood allegiance to their Führer: “Treue ist mein Eid,” “Loyalty is my oath.” Treue was reciprocated with Treue, betrayal with unspeakable savagery. The pervasiveness of this blood credo throughout the National Socialist hierarchy, including among Hitler’s closest associates, is evidenced by an inscription in Hitler’s copy of November Heads now held at the Library of Congress. “To Adolf Hitler in loyal subservience!” reads the handwritten dedication.

The author of that dedication was Gregor Strasser, who—in addition to being co-owner of Kampf Verlag, the publishing house that had brought out Thirty November Heads—was in the early 1930s considered equal to Hitler by many in the Nazi Party and superior to him by some. Karl Lüdecke was a Hitler disciple who knew Strasser well. “Within Nazidom, Gregor Strasser was, next to Hitler, the most powerful man and the most effective speaker,” Lüdecke recalled. According to Lüdecke, Strasser was also the most articulate and ardent voice of “the socialist wing” of the Nazi movement, “strong-willed, independent, creative, with a mind of his own—ambitious, but unwilling to sell his soul for the sake of advancement.” Hitler was the fanatical nationalist. Strasser was the committed socialist. Together, the two men lent credence to the National Socialist Party name.

[Read: What Germany says about far-right politics]

Strasser possessed a pragmatism that Hitler lacked. “The visionary genius of this man is singular,” Strasser said of Hitler. “But what good is genius that is not anchored in reality, whose brilliant ideas cannot be implemented in the real world.” Implementation became Strasser’s job. The two men had met in the summer of 1921, and across the next decade Strasser assumed growing control over the party’s evolution. It was Strasser who managed the surge in party membership from 27,000 in 1925 to 800,000 by 1931. He quadrupled the number of party chapters, from 71 to more than 270, and, most important, restructured party administration to align with voting precincts, helping drive the Nazis’ stunning electoral successes in the early ’30s. As evidence that he considered himself the chancellor’s peer, Strasser never addressed Hitler as Mein Führer, only Herr Hitler.

Hitler and Strasser divided Germany into respective political realms. Hitler commanded the south. Strasser, along with his younger brother, Otto, oversaw the north. Hermann Rauschning was a prominent Nazi in the port city of Danzig. “Hitler’s nature was incomprehensible to the North German,” Rauschning observed. North Germans preferred a man like Strasser, who was “practical, clearer headed” and “quick to act without bombast and bathos, with a sound peasant’s judgment.” When Hitler visited the Ruhr industrial region, he was annoyed by the predominance of Strasser posters.

The left-wing weekly journal Die Weltbühne took the measure of both men: “It doesn’t require much prophetic skill to be of the opinion that in the not-too-distant future Strasser will press his lord and master Hitler into a corner and take the reins of the party.” Within senior party ranks, Strasser was commonly known as “Gregor the Great.”

Despite his near-equal position within the party, Strasser placed loyalty to Hitler above all else. Rosenberg recalled that Strasser invariably ended his speeches with the declaration “I fought as a Hitler man, and I will go to my grave as a Hitler man.” But when Hitler clashed with Otto Strasser over the direction of the National Socialist movement, Gregor was forced to choose between Hitler and his brother. One day in the spring of 1928, while Gregor was away, Hitler appeared in the Strasser brothers’ Berlin office and threatened to dispatch 10 storm troopers to pull Otto into line. Otto drew a revolver from his desk. “I have eight shots, Herr Hitler,” he said. “That means eight fewer storm troopers.” Hitler stormed out of the office. But Gregor would side with Hitler over his brother. “Thank God we did not lose Strasser,” Hitler said at the time. “Loyal subservience”—treue Gefolgschaft—indeed.

But subservience did not mean permanent blindness. In 1932, when the party radicals—Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, Ernst Röhm—pressed Hitler on a “rule or ruin” strategy, Strasser spoke his mind to Hitler, urging accommodation and restraint. When the Nazis took a beating at the polls in the November 6, 1932, Reichstag election, shedding 2 million votes and 40 Reichstag seats, the party was thrown into crisis. “The Führer had misplayed his cards” was the line circulating among senior Nazi Party ranks. The game was up. Karl Lüdecke recalled that Hitler, “with his own chances diving towards zero, was rushing feverishly with his aides from place to place, fighting desperately to fend off a complete Nazi collapse.”

Strasser calmly took matters in hand. He told Hitler that the time had come for accommodation. The party should enter into a coalition with Berlin’s ultimate power broker, Kurt von Schleicher, who was a confidant of German President Paul von Hindenburg. Hitler waffled, then dug in. “Strasser argued that Schleicher had to be tolerated,” Goebbels reported to his diary. ”The Führer clashed as fiercely with him as I have ever seen.”

Hitler was furious when he learned that Strasser had met with Schleicher to explore potential cooperation. He accused Strasser of betrayal. Strasser was reportedly dumbfounded. “Herr Hitler, do you really believe me capable of such a dirty trick?” Strasser asked.

“Yes,” Hitler replied.

Strasser was “deeply wounded” by Hitler’s accusation. Hans Frank met with Strasser shortly afterward. Frank knew Strasser to be one of the most “confident and pragmatic men” he had ever met. But he found Strasser completely undone, despairing that Hitler was now in the clutches of the party radicals. “Frank, this is horrific,” Strasser said. “Göring is a brutal egotist who could care less about Germany, Goebbels is a club-footed devil, Röhm is a pig. These are the Führer’s guards.” Strasser resigned his party posts, as well as his Reichstag seat, but retained his party membership, ostensibly so as not to damage the already faltering political movement he had helped build.

Strasser departed Berlin for a six-week vacation in Italy. Goering and Goebbels, as Lüdecke later recalled, “struck while the iron was hot.” By the end of January 1933, Hitler was chancellor, Göring was a cabinet minister and the chief of police of Prussia, and Goebbels would soon be minister of propaganda. Strasser withdrew from political life, devoting himself to his business interests.

[Timothy W. Ryback: The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler]

Hitler spoke of bringing Strasser back into the party, but no one took him seriously. Hitler had always seen Strasser as a threat and seemed to be relieved to have him out of the way. Some thought Hitler’s talk of reengaging with Strasser was tactical, to keep Ernst Röhm, who had succeeded Strasser as the second-most-powerful man in the party, off-guard. In the early summer of 1934, when Hitler feared a possible coup by Röhn and his army of storm troopers, Hitler decided to resolve any doubts about who held absolute authority.

On Saturday, June 30, he flew to Munich and dispatched Himmler and SS men on a blood purge of senior storm-trooper ranks—a killing spree code-named Operation Hummingbird. Röhm was taken into custody, handed a pistol, and told to shoot himself. “If I am to be killed,” he said, “let Adolf do it himself.” Röhm was shot dead on the spot. Dozens of senior Röhm associates were summarily executed.

That same day, the SS paid a visit to the Berlin residence of Kurt von Schleicher, who had preceded Hitler as chancellor. When he opened the door, he was asked whether he was von Schleicher. “Yes, I am General von Schleicher,” he said, and was shot dead on the spot. Schleicher’s wife, hearing the gunfire, rushed into the foyer and was gunned down as well. Another former chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, also received a knock on the door of a Berlin address where he was thought to be residing, while, in fact, he had already fled the country.

That same afternoon, Gregor Strasser was having lunch with his family at his home in Berlin. At 1:30 p.m., five Gestapo officers entered the house and informed Strasser that he was suspected of “treasonous activities” and that his office in Munich was to be searched. This must have come as a surprise to Strasser. On February 1 of that year, Strasser had been awarded the Golden Party Pin, one of the Nazi Party’s highest honors, inscribed with Strasser’s founding-membership rank, Number 9. Upon arrival at his office, Strasser was handed over to a waiting SS detachment. There are conflicting accounts of what happened next, but the most credible has him being placed in a cell at the Gestapo headquarters in the Prince Albrecht Palace, where on Reinhard Heydrich’s orders he was shot—in the neck rather than the head, to prolong the agony. He bled to death on the concrete floor over the course of an hour.

During those same hours, Strasser’s private attorney was shot in his office after refusing to surrender documents “concerning Strasser’s conflict with Hitler,” and Strasser’s former chief of staff was also shot from behind outside his Munich apartment. Strasser’s right-hand man, the Nazi military officer Paul Schulz, was seized and taken for a ride by the Gestapo before being thrown out on the road with the words “Now run, you swine!” Schulz was shot five times and left for dead, but he miraculously survived. (After dragging himself down the road, he was found by a passing car and eventually escaped to Switzerland.) In all, the Night of the Long Knives officially claimed 84 victims, but the actual number was probably much higher.

By June, all but one of Rosenberg’s 30 November heads were either dead, imprisoned, or living in exile. The first November head to go down, before Rosenberg even published his book, was Walther Rathenau, the Weimar-era foreign minister who insisted that Germany respect the “war guilt clause” in the Treaty of Versailles and adhere to the onerous war-reparation payments. In Thirty November Heads, Rosenberg observes that this “racial Jew and liberal esthete” received his just desserts when he was assassinated, in June 1922, by right-wing extremists. Another November head, Matthias Erzberger, who helped negotiate the November 11, 1918, armistice that ended the First World War, was also assassinated by a far-right group before Rosenberg’s book was published. Including Rathenau and Erzberger in the book was Rosenberg’s not-so-subtle way of nodding to the fate that awaited the remaining 28.

A few others had by 1934 already died of old age or natural causes. These included Friedrich Ebert, the first president of the Weimar Republic, and Gustav Stresemann, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who, according to Rosenberg, had as “chancellor of capitulation” and “foreign minister of subservience politics” helped subjugate all of Europe to the “reign of Jewish high finance.” Others, like the Social Democratic Party’s leader, Otto Wels, and the popular satirist Kurt Tucholsky (Hitler “has a mustache like Chaplin though hardly as funny”), had fled into exile before dying—Wels to France, where he succumbed to a heart attack, and Tucholsky to Sweden, where he committed suicide. On August 23, 1933, Robert Weismann, “a Jew and a Jurist,” was one of the first 33 Germans to be “denationalized,” their citizenship legally stripped, and deported as an undesirable alien. By 1934, most of the other remaining November heads were in concentration camps.   

[Graeme Wood: Germany’s anti-extremist firewall is collapsing]

The lone member of Rosenberg’s list to still be alive and free in Germany as of June 1934 was November head No. 18, Hjalmar Schacht. Schacht was, according to Rosenberg, a central banker who learned the “dark arts” of high finance from Jewish bankers—“Goldschmidts, Mendelssohns, Wassermanns”—and brought ruin to the German economy with inflationary practices while pocketing for himself an annual, inflation-proof salary of “250,000 Goldmarks.” But while Schacht was, according to Rosenberg’s book, a “criminal abuser of the German people and the “father of the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the German people,” he would emerge six years later as one of Hitler’s most important facilitators, introducing him to financiers, hosting election fundraisers, and urging President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor. For these efforts, Hitler rewarded him with a cabinet post and the presidency of the Third Reich’s central bank.

Yet Schacht soon found himself dismayed by the government in which he was now complicit. “How could you ever take upon yourself the responsibility of determining the fate of human beings without any judicial proceedings?” Schacht asked Hitler after the Night of the Long Knives. “No matter what the circumstances, you should have allowed the trials to take place, even if they had only been summary trials.” Schacht continued to quarrel with Hitler, and in 1938 went so far as to publicly rebuke him for what happened to Jews on Kristallnacht. Eventually, like the other surviving November heads, Schacht would find himself dispatched to a series of concentration camps, ending up at Dachau. Hitler reciprocated Treue with Treue. Until he didn’t.

After the bloody 1934 purge, Hitler gave a speech justifying his actions. “If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this,” he said. “In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people.” Hitler was as explicit as he was unapologetic. “I gave the order to shoot the ringleaders in this treason,” he said, before going on to dismiss the killing of others, such as Strasser and Schleicher, as collateral damage. “I further gave the order to cauterize down to the raw flesh the ulcers of this poisoning of the wells in our domestic life,” Hitler continued. “Let the nation know that its existence—which depends on its internal order and security—cannot be threatened with impunity by anyone! And let it be known for all time to come that if anyone raises his hand to strike the State, then certain death is his lot.”

Jordan Bardella drops out of conservative US event after speaker gives Hitler salute

Euronews

www.euronews.com › 2025 › 02 › 21 › jordan-bardella-drops-out-of-conservative-us-event-after-speaker-gives-hitler-salute

Jordan Bardella, leader of France's National Rally, cancelled his appearance at CPAC after Steve Bannon made an apparent Nazi salute during his speech.

Germany’s Anti-Extremist Firewall Is Collapsing

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 02 › afd-cdu-germany-election › 681776

This story seems to be about:

Last week in Munich, Vice President J. D. Vance scolded European dignitaries for their failure to address popular discontent. They had ignored what Vance called the most “urgent” issue of our time: the relentless flow of non-Europeans into Europe. Without naming it, Vance was defending a far-right political party called Alternative for Germany (AfD), best-known for its commitment to deporting as many immigrants as the country’s airports can process. Vance said he “happen[s] to agree” with voters worried about “out-of-control migration.” But he was aghast at the idea that governments would try to silence their citizens, whatever their views. “There is no room for firewalls,” he said. “You either uphold the principle of democracy or you do not.”

Germany’s establishment leaders have long accepted a different binary: Either you put up a “firewall” (Brandmauer) against far-right extremists, or you risk losing your democracy to literal Nazis. Accordingly, when the AfD won a plurality in last year’s state-level elections in Thuringia, the other parties cried “Nazi” and stitched together a coalition to keep the AfD out of the government. But this arrangement—even when you win, you lose—has infuriated AfD supporters, and at the party meetings I attended recently, they were in a storm-the-Bastille mood, eager to take down an old regime that they, like Vance, believe is stealing democracy from them in the guise of saving it.  

This may be the year the firewall collapses. The AfD is now polling at about 22 percent nationally and seems destined for a strong showing in Sunday’s federal parliamentary election. No other party will deign to form a coalition with it. But if the AfD performs well enough, it will be impossible to exclude altogether from decision making.

Earlier this year, I donned a flame-retardant suit and pole-vaulted over the Brandmauer into Thuringia. Like other AfD strongholds, Thuringia was part of the old East Germany, and like much of the East, it remains economically depressed. It has lost more than a fifth of its population since unification. Historically, it is a German cultural center, the home of Goethe and Schiller and Bach—Land of poets and thinkers, the banner at the state’s largest railway station announced—and, in 1929, it was the first part of Germany to vote for the Nazis.

On January 28, I attended an AfD rally in Ichstedt, a town of about 600. I would describe the place for you, but the event began at 7 p.m., which, on a moonless German winter night, in an empty countryside, meant that I may as well have traveled from the train station blindfolded. No businesses were open, and the roads were almost without streetlights. My taxi driver told me that since car factories and copper and potash mines had closed in the area, jobs were few. He asked me whether anyone had ever told me I looked like Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the most enthusiastic AfD supporter outside Germany. (I said I was not Musk and hoped to convince him by leaving a miserly tip.)

I was the last to arrive. The rally took place in a humble, rectangular community center, of the sort one might find in a small and dwindling American town. The men and women in the hall also matched the Middle American phenotypes familiar to me from my childhood in Minnesota—the heavyset men in late middle age; the younger men in caps and grimy hoodies; the women with frizzy hair, matching the men beer for beer. I bought a lager, and they invited me to sit at one of the long tables. My coaster was AfD-branded, with a play on a German adage: “Whoever dishonors the farmer, doesn’t deserve the beer.” I searched the room for anyone who looked likely to have non-German ancestry, and only when I caught my own reflection in the bottom of my glass did I see one.

[Read: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days]

A theme of the evening, rather than the need to vote for the AfD—the votes of all present were assured—was the need to proclaim one’s support proudly, so Germany knew that this movement could not be ignored or outlawed. “I became a member of the AfD in 2016,” Daniel Haseloff, a party candidate, told the crowd. “Then it was normal to vote for the AfD in secret—to come to the party meetings in the dark and say, I hope no one sees me.” Now, he said, it was time to “declare support at work, among family members, and say, Yes, I stand for the AfD; I stand for deportation, for Fortress Europe, for our great homeland, for our great culture, and for Björn Höcke.”

Höcke, the leader of the Thuringian branch, is a major figure in the AfD’s far-right wing, and one of the main reasons the party’s opponents suspect they’re dealing with real Nazis. In a 2017 speech, Höcke wondered aloud if Germany’s self-flagellation over the Holocaust might not have reached a point of negative returns. Germany, he said, “needed to make a 180-degree change in its commemoration policy.” Before entering politics, Höcke was a teacher of history, not of geometry, so the “180 degree” line left unclear whether he meant that Germany should stop agonizing over its fascist past, or come around to celebrating it. Members of the current government are already discussing banning the AfD, and the group’s supporters at the rally told me they view a strong showing in the election as the only means of survival, because the greater the following, the more awkward a ban will be to implement.

The AfD started in 2013 as an anti–European Union party, full of Germans cranky about having their hard-earned taxes go to bail out lazy Mediterranean countries. A decade on, at the Ichstedt meeting, AfD supporters were still furious that EU membership had added another encrustation of bureaucracy and taxation to an already massive state. But the issue that dominates the party’s platform is immigration, and the chant that animated the Ichstedt crowd most was “Abschieben, abschieben, abschieben”: “Deport, deport, deport!” Germany has seen net migration of more than 5 million people since 2014. More than 1 million of the new arrivals are Syrian and Afghan, and in 2023, the number of people seeking asylum jumped by 50 percent. The AfD has pledged “remigration”—deporting or encouraging the departure of as many of these newcomers as possible, as well as encouraging Germans who have left to come home.  

Party leaders say they wish to make Germany safe again; to end “climate madness” and attempts to rely on solar and wind energy, in their dark and not-always-windy country; and to keep welfare benefits out of the grabbing hands of foreigners and in the hands of Germans. They have also learned to be indignant, along with Vance, about the state of German free expression and democracy, and say that “direct democracy,” rather than democracy filtered through the establishment-party system, will remedy the AfD’s exclusion from power.

Supporters during the AfD general-election-campaign launch, in Halle,. Germany is holding a national election on Sunday. (Krisztian Bocsi / Bloomberg / Getty)​

Sometimes these concerns cross-pollinate with the old hostility toward the EU and its bureaucracy. A speaker at the rally compared the onerous paperwork that the German state demands from its citizens with the light burden it places on asylum seekers. Citizens are denied state services for checking the wrong box, he said, but asylum seekers can show up with no documents, and the state will provide someone to fill out the forms for them and cut them every break. If Germany had to be paperwork hell, then newcomers should be subjected to the same tortures.

[Read: The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler]

Ichstedt is so sedate that I had trouble imagining any crime there at all. The urban disorder of nearby cities, however, was vivid in the speakers’ and attendees’ minds. It seemed to have inspired equally vivid reverie of how migrants might be rounded up and sent home. Haseloff pledged that the airport in Thuringia’s main city of Erfurt, which has steadily lost passenger business over the past 20 years, would be revitalized through the construction of “deportation prisons” in the surrounding industrial zone. “Under an AfD government in Thuringia, several planes a day will take off to the home of immigrants. By doing so, we will set an example for the whole of Germany. We will make Thuringia an undesirable destination for social migrants.”

Once the Ichstedt rally ended, everyone got up to go home, and a few were already at the door when someone onstage suggested that they close with a few verses of the German national anthem. Everyone stood and sang, solemnly. Germany has had the same anthem since the Weimar Republic, and many decades ago, it was shorn of Nazi-redolent verses such as “Deutschland über alles.” But after two hours’ worth of talk of “the great German homeland” and Kultur, how could one not hear those ominous excised lines echoing distantly?

That echo was unfair to those present. Although the rally attendees definitely wanted to get rid of foreigners, they used no slurs; they did not vilify Islam; they did not use overtly racist language or tropes of extermination; and they seemed sincerely wounded by the accusations that they were fascists. Nevertheless, some rhetoric, when uttered in German, unavoidably sounds odious. The German language is a prison, and anyone who speaks it is trapped by associations that other languages have escaped. “God bless America and the American people” is boilerplate, but “Gott mit uns” (“God is with us”) is a Nazi slogan, and when I hear a German talking about “das Deutsche Volk” (“the German people”), I wonder if he is reaching for his Luger.

One has to ask: If I were running a far-right party plagued with accusations of sympathy for the Third Reich, would I adopt slogans that encouraged that impression, or that discouraged it? The AfD does the former. Its leader is Alice Weidel, and at rallies one often hears chants of “Alice für Deutschland”—which literally means “Alice for Germany” but sounds just like “Alles für Deutschland,” a Nazi-storm-trooper motto. Some of the party’s other leaders, such as Höcke, keep stumbling into statements that sound at best neutral about the legacy of Nazism. Höcke has warned that if Germans are not appeased, their native “Teutonic fervor” will erupt violently; he once wrote that his country will have to “lose” the part of its population that is “too weak or unwilling to resist the advancing Africanization, Orientalization and Islamization” of German society. (He later said that he meant only that those who denigrate Germany, call it a “shit” or “mongrel” country, or wish for it to be firebombed would have to go.) In the state Parliament in Erfurt last month, Mario Voigt, the leader of the current government in Thuringia, which has shut out the AfD, stared down Höcke and called his party a “Führer cult.” Höcke reacted to this speech by raising his hands in mock alarm.

On numerous occasions, the party has embraced vicious and personal campaign tactics. This year, the AfD leafleted immigrant-heavy communities in Karlsruhe with fake one-way economy-class tickets dated for election day. The passenger name was “illegal immigrant”; the destination: “safe country of origin.” “It’s nice at home too,” the tickets said, with assurances that “citizens will not be deported,” though the wording implied that all who could be legally deported should be. One after another, individuals welcomed by the party have been found to have nasty episodes in their past—harassment of Jews, minimizing statements about Hitler.

[Read: What Germany says about far-right politics]

Complicating matters is the fact that Weidel, the actual Führer (or Führerin) of the AfD, is hardly Third Reich–compliant. She can speak in fiery tones about immigration: “On the first day in government, we will seal off the German borders,” she promised a crowd earlier this month, adding, “No one will be able to come in.” But she is also curious about the world outside Germany for reasons unrelated to conquering it; she speaks Chinese and lived in China for six years. And although she has Aryan skin and hair, she is married to a woman of Sri Lankan origin, with whom she is raising two sons. In her speeches, she stresses that Germany must comply fully with refugee law—but she adds that “asylum is temporary and ends when the reason for fleeing no longer applies.” Her opponents accuse her party of an unseemly interest in concepts like “the German people” (with all that phrase’s Nazi baggage). But Weidel herself seems most passionate when defending the elimination of carbon taxes and the return of the internal combustion engine.

Even the party’s detractors acknowledge that most AfD supporters are not personally racist, and that many have been drawn to the AfD because of their displeasure with botched or bizarre economic policies. Weidel is adept at drawing conversations toward policies that many Germans, whatever they think about immigration, can agree were foolish, and should have been recognized as such at the time. The establishment parties, after all, were in charge when Germany shifted away from nuclear power, toward wind energy and natural gas piped in from Russia—essentially volunteering itself as a hostage in case Russia ever became an enemy of Europe. (The AfD, like the Trump administration, is very friendly toward Russia, and wishes to reopen pipelines from there to diversify energy supply and lower prices.)

Weidel can dwell on these boneheaded policies in part because almost every German keen on mass deportation is already planning to vote for her, and those in the center are up for grabs. That said, the AfD knows that crime and immigration are winning issues. When I interviewed Stefan Möller, an AfD politician and a deputy to Höcke, he was filled with sensible commentary about the failed economic policies of previous governments. But his eyes really lit up when I turned to immigration, because the AfD has simply dominated all public discussion of its downsides. “Almost every day, we’re seeing reports of knife attacks, of children being hunted down in schools,” Möller told me. “We are expected to prevent things like the knife attack in Aschaffenburg, or the attack in Magdeburg, or the rampant crime. These are not acceptable. And the answer, for society and for our voters, is a consistent policy.”

By now it is impossible to ignore the crime rates of recent immigrants to Germany. In 2023, about 41 percent of crimes were thought to have been committed by foreigners. The anecdotes match the data: Several high-profile cases of bizarre public violence, such as the stabbing of random children, have involved foreigners. At a rally I attended in the town of Sonneberg, a politician named Oliver Kirchner referred to Germany as “the world’s mental hospital,” for its willingness to accept criminally insane foreigners.

Möller told me he lives on the outskirts of Erfurt, and is therefore spared having to deal daily with the crime-ridden area around the train station and main square. He told me a story about children from his suburb who went downtown for ice cream. “They made a mistake on the way home,” he said. “Instead of walking along the tramway, where it’s busy, they went on Tromsdorf Street.” There, he said, they were beset and mugged by a gang of teenage immigrants. Then he invited me to become prey myself. “Go there, and you will see what I mean,” he said. “That is where they find their victims.”

Möller must have underestimated how cheaply The Atlantic houses its reporters when on assignment, because I needed no invitation: I had already booked a hotel near the train station, at the end of Tromsdorf Street. Like almost all railway hubs in Germany nowadays, this one had Syrians and other immigrants standing idly at all hours, talking in Arabic and Afghan languages. Because I was jet-lagged, I would walk Tromsdorf Street late at night, always returning to my room unstabbed. The area seemed not so much crime-ridden as eerily vacant, my footsteps echoing in the shadows like Joseph Cotten’s in Vienna in The Third Man. The shops—many of them Middle Eastern markets—closed after dark. Once or twice I fell into step with a few young guys and wondered if I had hit the jackpot and found a gang. But I am a grown man, not a woman or a tween with an ice-cream cone, so even if they were evaluating me for a mugging, they probably thought better of it. Once, two of them got closer, and I heard them talking in Arabic about going into a pool hall.

[Read: Elon has appointed himself king of the world]

Standing idly is not a crime; neither is speaking a foreign language. By American urban standards, the street was extremely safe. But Möller’s anxiety stems from a predictable form of culture shock, when a very old country changes very fast. Anyone who thought ordinary Germans could cope with this shock, and even welcome it, was deluded. Those streets had been emptying out for some time as the region’s economy flagged and its population declined, and for years they had been even more silent than they are today. No one predicted that when the silence was broken, the voices to break it would be Syrian.

This surprise, unthinkable just a decade ago, has led to grotesque calumnies against vulnerable people, as well as policy proposals that are both clumsy and inhumane. But even Möller, who works directly with one of the AfD’s most incendiary politicians, would when pressed acknowledge that the ideal German future would not look like the distant, romanticized German past, of lederhosen and beer and Wagner.

I asked Möller when he thought Germany went wrong—what year he would go back to, in his Flux Capacitor–equipped Audi, to reboot his country and avert the problems he wanted to solve. He said that he disapproved of Germany’s immigration policy going back as far as he could remember—but 2000, roughly, when Germany’s borders disintegrated and its currency vanished, was when everything started falling apart. I told him that I had started coming to Germany around that time, and even then it had seemed that immigrants were integrating into German society. And it hadn’t seemed so bad to have foreigners there, doing jobs that Germans were losing interest in.

Möller mostly agreed, and noted that the AfD itself had changed its maximalist position on immigration—deport them all—to a more targeted agenda of removing welfare-claiming layabouts, unskilled laborers, and criminals. “Today even our own voters expect us to differentiate,” Möller told me, between violent criminals and “migrants who integrated very well, who are now German citizens, who do not cause any problems.” He said that “no AfD voter expects the AfD—not even in Thuringia—to deport doctors, engineers, or some mailman from Ghana.”

Bjӧrn Hӧcke, the leader of the Thuringian AfD branch, raises his hands at a campaign event in Thuringia. (Michael Reichel / picture-alliance / dpa / AP)

The true collapse happened in 2015, Möller believes, when Syrian and Afghan refugees began arriving in huge numbers. He said any cardiologists or engineers among the legal newcomers should be welcome to stay. But the suggestion that such migrants might come, he told me, is for now “awfully theoretical.” The 2015 wave of migration, he said, had flooded the country with “social migrants,” those who came to enjoy free money from a welfare state, including Syrians and Afghans poorly equipped to integrate into an economy no longer dependent on labor performed by illiterate peasants. “The people we need for [skilled] jobs are not coming,” he told me. “The Indian engineer is not coming, because the Indian engineer will go to a place where he earns more money, where he pays less taxes, where his children are taught in decent schools, and where it is safe to go into town in the evening. He won’t stay in Erfurt.”

This was a persistent theme among AfD supporters and politicians: that Germany had become a shithole country, not fit for an engineer from Delhi, and it needed to become worse for newcomers to be livable for anyone. Donald Trump’s first inaugural speech was about “American carnage,” and now the AfD described an equally awful Germany. It is a weird sensation to go to Germany—the center of what Donald Rumsfeld called “Old Europe,” where I once stayed near a corner bakery old enough to have served Martin Luther—and find that it feels like America’s political younger sibling.

[From the March 1932 issue: Hitler and Hitlerism: a man of destiny]

But the longer history of the AfD is distinctively German, and the result of 50 years of politics perhaps too sedate for its own good. Germany, having been responsible for an eventful half century, decided to forswear eventfulness for the next half century. It was instead governed by a familiar species of cautious, credentialed bureaucrat: never younger than late middle age; usually addressed as Herr Doktor or Frau Doktor; always white, of course. Except for Angela Merkel, one would be forgiven for failing to match faces to names—and to some extent that interchangeability was a relief, considering the last time a German leader was immediately identifiable by face and mustache. The watchful conservatism was exemplified by the campaign slogan of Konrad Adenauer, leader of Germany’s center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU): “Keine Experimente!” The center-left party, the Social Democratic Party, was similarly conservative: no experiments, no funny business.

This status quo, bland as a Bavarian dumpling, faced challengers from the extreme left and right. The radical left produced violent factions—Baader Meinhof, Red Army—whose members ended up hunted and imprisoned. The radical right in Germany posed a more complicated problem. West Germany was plagued with accusations of having incompletely de-Nazified. Many politicians and business leaders had fought in the war, and a don’t-mention-the-war attitude prevailed among those of social grace—if the war was mentioned, the mention should sound disgusted, and anyone who spoke of it in any other way, including in neutral terms, faced shunning and worse. Neo-Nazi parties in Germany felt the full force of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (the Verfassungsschutz, the German equivalent of the FBI), and were shut down.

Those on the far right who wriggled out of being banned confronted instead a disciplined, broad, organized political punishment: the “firewall” that Vance finds so objectionable. Their parties, up to now, have been treated as unhygienic, so that even if the far right and the center agree on something, the center refuses to court the far right’s vote and instead treats it as untouchable. The task of tending the firewall’s flame was judged so important that the parties of the center increased their cooperation with the Green Party and the old East German Left. On immigration, the CDU quietly adopted the view of the left, that Germany’s future would be as a land of immigrants and that anyone who suggested that this vision was undesirable was probably a racist. During Merkel’s long tenure as chancellor, from 2005 to 2021, her party—while nominally center-right—came to embrace certain elements of the far left. This included, fatefully, the welcoming of millions of undocumented immigrants from Syria, Afghanistan, and other countries beset by war or poverty. Merkel’s line, in the face of this extraordinary situation, was “Wir schaffen das”: “We’ll manage it.”

AfD supporters gather for an election-campaign meeting in eastern Germany on August 14, 2024. (Michaela Stache / AFP / Getty)

Hans-Georg Maassen, who was Merkel’s head of domestic intelligence during this period and who was responsible for immigration law before that, has since been ejected from the CDU and started his own party, the Values Union, in part over his criticism of Merkel’s de facto open-borders policy. “For her, immigration policy was ideological,” he told me. “To let in millions of new people, without discussion: This is against the law.” The CDU, by taking this step, had become indistinguishable from the parties to its left, such as the Greens, who openly favored transforming Germany into an internationalist-left society. “People noticed,” Maassen told me. “If you vote for the Greens, you get a Green immigration policy. If you vote for the [Social Democratic Party], you get a Green immigration policy. And for the CDU, that gets you a Green immigration policy too.” That left an opening for the AfD. And as soon as Germans decided that immigration was the issue, the AfD was ready to win big for having consistently opposed it.

This history explains why the AfD directs its most bitter invective not at the immigrants, not at the leftists, but at the center-right. AfD leaders say the CDU caved to the left instead of turning back as many “social migrants” as the law allows. The process of telling refugees apart from non-refugees is extremely difficult, with dire consequences for those refugees wrongly flagged as non-refugees. Faced with that problem, Germany tried—I wrote about it for this magazine in 2018—but not, according to the AfD, hard enough.

In Ichstedt, Daniel Haseloff cautioned against being satisfied with anything but dismantling the CDU. “The CDU is our main opponent—not just here but in all of Germany,” he said. He did not even bother mentioning the left. “We will only be fully successful when the CDU in its current form no longer exists,” he told the crowd. “Trump has shown us how it’s done.” Only after the establishment Republicans were demolished, he said, was there “room for Trump, for Elon Musk.” (Some people looked my way.)

The man most likely to win this week’s election and become the new chancellor is Friedrich Merz, of the CDU. He has tried to court AfD voters and push through immigration legislation that the left viewed as too friendly to the AfD. This, Haseloff said, was a trick. The CDU just wants to peel off AfD votes—and when it does, it will do what governments have done before, and shut the party down. “Merz wants to see the party banned after the federal election,” Haseloff said. “That means he doesn’t see us as partners tomorrow; he sees us as opponents.”

It’s funny, then, that the biggest demonstrations in Germany that week were against the CDU—not by AfD supporters, but by their enemies on the left, who thought Merz had extinguished the firewall and given in to Nazis. I attended a protest outside CDU headquarters in Berlin the day after I left Thuringia, and felt as if I had traveled through time, from a small town decades ago, with its farmers and factory workers, to a gathering of modern university students in a cosmopolitan city. Demonstrators had spiky hair and sustained themselves with takeaway containers of kebabs, rather than beer and sausage. The youth of the protesters was salted and peppered with middle-aged and older people, the sorts of folks one sees at cultural events in the Bay Area or Vermont.

[Read: How Hitler’s enablers undid democracy in Germany]

They told me that by treating AfD voters and politicians as potential friends, rather than as pariahs, the CDU had welcomed racists back into the Reichstag. “We stand together against all right-wing extremism, regardless of whether it comes from the AfD or from the CDU,” a young woman with a bullhorn told the crowd. She said the CDU had never been a friend of immigrants, and now, by reaching out to the AfD, it had shown how false its friendship had always been. No one should trust them again, and demonstrators—the people—were the only ones standing between Germany and a return to racism. She led a chant: “Wir sind die Brandmauer”: “We are the firewall.”

Most noteworthy, at this protest outside the CDU, was that none of these people were members of the center-right, objecting to their party’s change in policy. They were all members of the left fringe of a broad coalition, hectoring members of the coalition’s center-right into maintaining an immigrant-friendly policy that the left flank had insisted on, and that the rest of the coalition had accepted with reservations. At the AfD meeting I had attended the night before, the message was: Don’t trust the CDU, even when it does what you want. Tonight the message was, Don’t trust the CDU, even though it did what you wanted for almost 10 years.

To some extent, this bind is just what happens in coalition politics: Being in the center means getting pinched by parties from both sides, but also having the chance to work with those parties and steal their voters with both hands. For much of Germany’s postwar history, however, coalition politics have not played out in the manner of most parliamentary democracies, because the center and left parties have conspired to treat the far right as radioactive. Here again one would expect Germans, of all people, to understand the dynamics of walls: that if you build them up, the pressure mounts on one side, and when the wall crashes down, the equilibration can be dramatic. Even as sensible a rule as Don’t be nice to Nazis cannot repeal this dynamic of hydrostatic pressure. The far right can be suppressed only so long, but that just means a reckoning postponed rather than avoided.

By sequestering the AfD on the right, the CDU kept itself free from the contagion of the party’s most odious members. It also lost its only chance to lure the non-odious AfD members to its side, and to explain how a Germany with a generous—but not infinitely generous—policy toward beleaguered foreigners could remain prosperous, safe, and German. I found Stefan Möller much more reasonable when I could press him, and get him to exempt his Ghanaian postman from deportation. In this way he is like most people: pricklier when left alone, and more reasonable when reasoned with.

Maassen, the former Merkel colleague, had been a CDU candidate in Thuringia before he started his own party. He told me how his attempts to stand for election on the CDU line eventually became untenable, because voters came to think of the CDU as a party of scolds, and of thought-police in a new guise. He noted that people there knew, because they had lived through one-party rule in the East, what a stifled politics felt like. “In East Germany, if they were an opponent of the regime, they had to look to the left, to the right, if they were in a restaurant and talking politics, in case somebody had big ears. Nowadays they have the same feeling if they are members of the AfD.” But if you complained about this stiflement in East Germany, your punishment could be severe. Now the problems are lesser, although still real: losing your job, your freedom to associate with other far rightists. The deeper issue, he said, was the AfD members’ sense of betrayal by a system that they had been told was open. “The AfD supporters say, This is not democratic.”

Picking the Perfect Episode of TV

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 02 › picking-the-perfect-episode-of-tv › 681614

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The following contains spoilers for some of the episodes mentioned.

Recently, I tasked seven Atlantic writers and editors with selecting a perfect episode of TV. What emerged was a list that spans genres, generations, and cultural sensibilities. Their recommendations, which include the Veep episode “C**tgate” and a SpongeBob episode that examines “the empty promise of the good life,” are proof that identifying good TV is, at its core, a gut instinct. A perfect episode must find a way to burrow itself in the viewer’s mind, ready to be recalled in today’s crowded field of television.

When I posed the same challenge to The Daily’s readers earlier this week, I was met with enthusiasm and exasperation. “This is an impossible question,” Eden wrote back. “It’s like asking for the perfect song, the perfect movie, or the perfect book.” That being said, “I can think of five off the top of my head!”

Eden’s list includes “Forks” from The Bear, “Through the Looking Glass” from Lost, “The Suitcase” from Mad Men, and “Long, Long Time” from The Last of Us. And that doesn’t even cover “Friday Night Lights, or The Wire, or Insecure, or Derry Girls, or The Sopranos, or The Wonder Years, or My Brilliant Friend, or Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Eden added. I can sympathize—the breadth of options is dizzying.

Maybe some criteria would help. Our culture writer Sophie Gilbert wrote that “the thing I love most is when a television series tells a complete story in miniature—a stand-alone short that puts a particular dynamic or relationship or cast member front and center.” Radio Atlantic’s podcast host, Hanna Rosin, argued that, “unlike a perfect movie, a perfect episode of television does not need to surprise you or make you cry. It just needs to move your beloved or loathed characters through the formula in an especially excellent way.” And Suzanne, 59, offered her own formula: “The script must be: (1) tense or funny; (2) warm and loving to the viewers, performers, and crew; and (3) move the overall story forward.”

Of course, the benchmarks for what makes an episode perfect are as subjective and varied as viewers’ selections. But a thorough analysis of The Daily’s reader responses has uncovered some patterns. At least five people named a West Wing episode: Two readers nominated “Two Cathedrals,” which shows “the effects of death on time,” wrote David, from Chicago; L. Hawkins, 70, recommends “Noel,” adding that viewers should “listen for the sirens as the episode fades out.”

“Long, Long Time” from The Last of Us was mentioned by both Eden and Bob—it offers “a lesson that love may find you at any time, any place, and under the most unexpected circumstances,” Bob wrote. Two readers agreed with Atlantic film critic David Sims, who insisted in our recent roundup that “the richest cache [of perfect episodes] to search is the ‘case of the week’ entries of The X-Files.” Lisa, 47, wrote that she was thrilled to see “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” in our list (she also recommends the series finale of Derry Girls).

Other readers highlighted examples of good comedy. In only 22 minutes, “Remedial Chaos Theory” from Community “tells seven different stories, with each timeline building on the last,” E.F., 46, wrote. “The Ski Lodge” from Frasier stands out to Bruce, 52, who said that the episode is “riddled with quotable laugh-out-loud lines.” And L.M., 61, laughed until she cried watching a loopy Steve Martin in Only Murders in the Building’s “Open and Shut.”

For some, a perfect episode tells a story that reverberates throughout their life. Sharon, from California, wrote about an episode she remembers watching on Hallmark Hall of Fame, which follows a grief-stricken child who reads a story about magical silver shoes. To his astonishment, he finds skates that look identical, which he puts on to go skating in hopes of bringing back his dead parent. “As life went on and I became the mother of a child who lost his father in childhood, I’ve recalled the episode more than once,” Sharon wrote. “Now, at 80 years old, it still breaks my heart.”

Related:

Eight perfect episodes of TV The 13 best TV shows of 2024

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler The last days of American orange juice America’s “marriage material” shortage

The Week Ahead

Captain America: Brave New World, a Marvel action movie starring Anthony Mackie and Harrison Ford (in theaters Friday) Season 3 of Yellowjackets, a thriller series about a girls’ soccer team whose plane crash-lands in the wilderness (premieres on Paramount+ Friday) Beartooth, a novel by Callan Wink about two brothers near Yellowstone who agree to commit a heist to settle their debts (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic

ADHD’s Sobering Life-Expectancy Numbers

By Yasmin Tayag

When I was unexpectedly diagnosed with ADHD last year, it turned my entire identity upside down. At 37, I’d tamed my restlessness and fiery temper, my obsessive reorganization of my mental to-do list, and my tendency to write and rewrite the same sentence for hours. Being this way was exhausting, but that was just who I was, or so I thought. My diagnosis reframed these quirks as symptoms of illness—importantly, ones that could be managed. Treatment corralled my racing thoughts in a way that I’d never before experienced.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

10 indie films you should watch for in 2025 A horror movie that already gave away its twist How the economists took over the NBA Music’s new generation is here. The modern voice of war writing

Catch Up on The Atlantic

The government’s computing experts say they are terrified. Nobody wants Gaz-a-Lago. Trump’s assault on USAID makes Project 2025 look like child’s play, Russell Berman writes. How Trump lost his trade war

Photo Album

Naga sadhus, or Hindu holy men, arrive in Prayagraj, India. (ANI / Rahul Singh / Reuters)

Take a look at these photos of Maha Kumbh Mela, a religious festival in India that’s also the largest gathering in the world.

P.S.

I realize it’d be a bit unfair to make everybody else share their perfect episode without naming mine: the series finale of Fleabag. There are many good things I can point out about this episode—Claire’s mad dash to happiness, Fleabag’s final confession, the Alabama Shakes song that plays over the show’s last moments. But above all else, it moved me, reminding me that love can outlast the person who prompted it.

— Stephanie

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The Ultrarich Weren’t Always This Selfish

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › international › archive › 2025 › 02 › the-ultrarich-werent-always-this-selfish › 681599

This story seems to be about:

In the early 1500s, an unknown wealthy patron is said to have commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to produce the Salvator Mundi, a striking ecclesiastical masterpiece in which Jesus is shown blessing humanity with his right hand while holding an orb representing the Earth in his left. The patron’s identity has been lost to history, and whether da Vinci actually painted it is still debated among scholars, but such commissions were common during the medieval and Renaissance periods: Medici-like benefactors, uncomfortable with the potential sinfulness of their extravagant wealth, sought to offset their guilt and enhance their prestige by sponsoring magnificent works of art and architecture for the public to enjoy.

Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi changed hands countless times through the ensuing centuries. Mistaken as a comparatively commonplace artwork, it was owned by a 17th-century heir to the Scottish crown who was later beheaded, passed to the illegitimate son of an 18th-century duke, and then languished in obscurity for more than a century. An unknown buyer acquired the painting at auction for £45, or about $1,300 today, and it ended up in Houston. The painting later passed to Basil Clovis Hendry Sr., who ran a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, sheet-metal company. Then, in 2005, on suspicion that there was more to the painting than met the untrained eye, an art consortium bought the painting for just over $1,000. Years of restoration, cleaning, research, and speculation yielded a shocking announcement: The painting was Da Vinci’s lost Salvator Mundi.

What happened to the tableau after that is a good illustration of just how little today’s superrich resemble the public-spirited patrons of the past. Yves Bouvier, an art dealer who is currently accused of evading $800 million in taxes, bought the work for $83 million, then sold it the following day for nearly $50 million more to Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian oligarch and superyacht enthusiast who, according to the leaked Panama Papers, set up a shell company to hide artwork assets from his ex-wife during divorce proceedings. Finally, in a 2017 auction at Christie’s, Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman used a little-known proxy to purchase the Salvator Mundi for $450.3 million, the highest price paid for a single artwork in history.

In 2021, The Wall Street Journal broke the news that the priceless painting had been kept on private display aboard bin Salman’s superyacht, Serene, a 439-foot-long, half-billion-dollar boat that had recently run aground in a navigational accident. A fragile, irreplaceable object of significance to the shared cultural history of all humanity was being kept in a hot, humid environment for the private enjoyment of one royal billionaire and his ultrarich guests. (In another room, Serene was also equipped with state-of-the-art snow machines that could produce four-inch-deep flurries on demand.)

The journey of one painting charts a profound shift in modern societies. The role of the ultra-wealthy has morphed from one of shared social responsibility and patronage to the freewheeling celebration of selfish opulence. Rather than investing in their society—say, by giving alms to the poor, or funding Caravaggios and cathedrals—many of today’s plutocrats use their wealth to escape to private islands, private Beyoncé concerts, and, above all, extremely private superyachts. One top Miami-based “yacht consultant” has dubbed itself Medici Yachts. The namesake recalls public patronage and social responsibility, but the consultant’s motto is more fitting for an era of indulgent billionaires: “Let us manage your boat. For you is only to smile and make memories.”

In 1908, the English writer G. K. Chesterton observed that “the poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.”

Chesterton’s observation was astute for the modern era, but for much of Western history, it was only half true. In his 2023 book, As Gods Among Men, the economic historian Guido Alfani chronicles the role of the ultra-wealthy from antiquity to the era of cryptocurrency. The superrich have always wielded inordinate economic and social power and, as such, have plenty of historical ills to answer for. But the affluent of many past periods also invested in the shared betterment of society, understanding that doing so helped justify the existence of wealth inequality. Today’s ultrarich, by Alfani’s telling, are uniquely selfish, and by abdicating the philanthropic role, they are “fuelling resentment and leaving their place in society uncertain.”

The social contract that imposed certain civic responsibilities on the rich emerged after the Black Death decimated nearly half the population of medieval Europe. The dominant Christian theology of the Middle Ages held that wealth was inherently sinful in a world where most people toiled in terrible poverty. But as the continent recovered from the plague, a new, pragmatic arrangement emerged. The surviving wealthy would be expected to use their wealth to provide public goods. This echoed the norms of antiquity; the historian Paul Veyne has noted that in ancient Rome, for example, the belief was widespread that any defects in civic life directly reflected on the virtues of the city’s elite.

[Read: Cancel billionaires]

The barons of medieval society would serve two important functions, Alfani recounts: “making the city splendid in everybody’s interest by means of their ‘magnificence’ and acting as private reserves of financial resources into which the community could tap in times of crisis by means of taxation or of extraordinary contributions.” In other words, wealth inequality was tolerated because it provided a useful social function. The wealthy were expected to spend lavish sums on transforming cities by building shared public spaces. They were also meant to come to the rescue with their largesse in the case of a public crisis or calamity. Cosimo de’ Medici did precisely that, saving Florence from bankruptcy in 1434.

Benefactors did not necessarily serve these functions out of uncomplicated generosity. From their “magnificence” they could expect personal glory, political favor, and perhaps a pathway to eternal salvation. The savvy used patronage to expand, not drain, their wealth. Some patrons participated in history’s great crimes, from the Crusades to the slave trade. Nonetheless, as Alfani convincingly argues, even the most self-interested and amoral among them often wound up doing some good.

The 15th-century archbishop of Florence called this norm the “public theology of magnificence.” But it also required enforcement. When the rich refused to fulfill their social obligations, governments imposed taxes, extraordinary war levies, or, in the case of 16th- and 17th-century Spain, mandatory loans (called secuestros). The wealthy were not allowed to simply hoard their wealth, park it in an offshore haven, and escape catastrophe by sailing away from a collapsing society on a superyacht.

Even in Gilded Age America, with all its injustices, and where the pursuit of wealth was hardly condemned as sin, society’s richest members were expected to use their riches to benefit the public in times of crisis. J. P. Morgan bailed the United States out in 1907, acting as a banker of last resort. A decade later, the U.S. government pressed financiers and tycoons to invest in Liberty Bonds for World War I, a bad bet that worsened their financial positions considerably. During World War II, the top American marginal tax rate reached an eye-popping 94 percent.

Over time, however, the norms eroded. An ethos of what historians call “munificence,” a belief that the rich should be generous, but only if they wish, replaced the theology of obligatory magnificence. This subtle difference had profound implications: Patronage and public benefit were no longer assumed to be duties, but bonuses that wealthy individuals could provide out of the goodness of their hearts. The coronavirus pandemic ushered in even more grotesque inequality. Elon Musk’s net worth surpassed $400 billion. The world’s economies ground to a halt, and public coffers were crushed with debt, but superyacht sales surged by 46 percent. The public, especially the poor, suffered; the rich, like those of G. K. Chesterton’s caricature, escaped.

During the early coronavirus lockdowns, the billionaire media mogul David Geffen hunkered down on his 454-foot-long superyacht, Rising Sun, which included a private basketball court and wine cellar among its 82 rooms. He posted a stunning photo of a Caribbean sunset to Instagram at the height of the pandemic, with the caption “Isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus. I hope everybody is staying safe.”

[Read: A yacht owner’s worst nightmare]

What people spend their money on, beyond hard-nosed investments, sends a social signal. For example, the drivers of Priuses and Cybertrucks are sending rather different signals, as their visible purchases likely reflect different underlying behaviors and beliefs. At the extremes, the wealthy may go to great lengths to display their affluence. For example, in potlatch ceremonies among Indigenous communities of the Pacific Northwest, individuals showcase their riches by engaging in the ritualized destruction of expensive objects.

In The Patron’s Payoff, Jonathan K. Nelson and Richard J. Zeckhauser argue that historical patronage was a form of pragmatic signaling, conveying virtues such as religious devotion and civic duty. But it also provided benefits to the wealthy, who became part of an elite club and were able to use their patronage for personal glory and social advancement. Today the signaling of wealth has shifted from public-facing duties to efforts to provoke private envy.

When the Saudi crown prince pays half a billion dollars for an invaluable artwork and then displays it for ultrarich elites on his private superyacht, he is engaging in a form of signaling, but not one aimed at the public. Instead, the “haves” and “have yachts” play a status game only for the benefit of the rich themselves. Cathedrals were beautifying public icons that often served the poor; yachts are designed to hide their splendors from the prying eyes of the riffraff. One of the great wealthy villains of modernity, Martin Shkreli, didn’t just buy a coveted piece of cultural heritage—the notorious Wu-Tang Clan album—for his own private consumption. He said he would destroy it, potlatch-style. This kind of signaling is a far cry from the one that centered on civic virtue and religious devotion.

The U.S. government has facilitated the ultrarich in their abdication of social responsibility. For example, Charles B. Johnson—the former CEO of Franklin Templeton Investments, a Republican megadonor, and a part owner of the San Francisco Giants—purchased the opulent Carolands chateau, a 46,000-square-foot Gilded Age estate with 98 rooms. According to a ProPublica investigation, Johnson received a $38 million tax break because he pledged to turn Carolands into a museum open to the public 40 hours a week. He didn’t keep that promise—Carolands allows small tours only on Wednesdays at 1 p.m.—but he got the tax break all the same.

Some among the American ultrarich openly deride philanthropy as an ineffective use of money. The tech mogul Marc Andreessen has argued that charitable giving is less useful than investing in tech companies, because “technological innovation in a market system is inherently philanthropic.” (One in 12 people globally lives in extreme poverty, defined as earning less than $2.15 a day; it’s hard to imagine how they have benefited more from Ning, Andreessen’s social-media platform, than they would from, say, food and medicine.) The billionaires Larry Page and Peter Thiel have expressed similar views. Thiel concentrates his philanthropy on what he designates to be breakthrough technology. He has donated to the Seasteading Institute, which says it is “reimagining civilization with floating communities” and “significant political autonomy”—as though the superyachts and offshore tax havens aren’t enough. Why not live offshore, bobbing in a libertarian commune free from burdensome social obligations, such as taxes?

[Read: Space billionaires, please read the room]

Some billionaires have maintained the notion of magnificence by pouring money into solutions to social problems, such as treatments for malaria or children’s hospitals. The Gates Foundation, for example, has made tremendous progress against scourges of public health. But by and large, the notion that wealthy individuals will marshal their resources to alleviate social crises has come to seem quaint in today’s world. In 2008, President Barack Obama proposed that the income of private-equity-fund managers be treated as ordinary personal income rather than capital gains—and ran afoul of the billionaire Stephen Schwarzman, who later compared the president’s proposed tax-policy changes to “when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

Evading social responsibility, even during crises, carries risks for the ultrawealthy. Their opulence compared with the standard of living of their co-citizens becomes harder to justify, and widespread resentment, seemingly inevitable. Some appear to understand that such inequality is unsustainable, but that hasn’t inspired them to become keepers of social wealth for times of shared crisis. Rather, if society collapses, billionaires may just escape onto the waves. A select few are making their contingency plans in rocket ships—as though no longer seeking favor with God but hoping to abscond to the heavens just the same.

What Does the Department of Education Actually Do?

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2025 › 02 › what-does-the-department-of-education-actually-do › 681597

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Donald Trump really knows how to sell someone on working for him. “I told Linda, ‘Linda, I hope you do a great job at putting yourself out of a job,” he said Tuesday in the Oval Office. That’s Linda McMahon, whom he’s nominated to lead the Department of Education. The president promised that he would abolish the department during the campaign, though doing so would require an act of Congress. But he’s been vague about what that would mean—and one reason might be that many people are a little vague on what the department actually does.

Republicans have been calling for an end to the Department of Education basically since it was established, in 1979. The specific arguments have varied, but they’ve usually boiled down to some version of the idea that education decisions should be made at the local level, rather than by the federal government. As President Ronald Reagan discovered when he tried to axe the department, this is more popular as a talking point than as policy.

Contrary to what some attacks on the department say or imply, it doesn’t determine curricula. Those are set at the state and local levels, though the federal government does sometimes set guidelines or attach strings to funding in exchange for meeting metrics. During the Obama administration, Tea Party activists railed against “Common Core” standards, which they said were federal overreach. In fact, Common Core was neither created nor mandated by the federal government. The Obama years actually saw the federal government step back from control by ending No Child Left Behind, a controversial George W. Bush initiative.

One of the Education Department’s biggest footprints nationally is as a distributor of federal funds. Drawing from its roughly $80 billion budget, it sends billions to state and local school systems every year, especially to poorer districts, via the Title I program, which aims to provide equal education through teacher training, instructional material, and enrichment programs. The department also provides billions in financial aid—both through programs like Pell Grants and, since 2010, by making student loans directly to borrowers—and it runs FAFSA, the widely used mechanism for student financial-aid requests. (Less than 5 percent of the federal budget goes to education.)

The Education Department also enforces rules around civil rights—most notably through Title IX, which prevents discrimination in federally funded education on the basis of sex and has been interpreted to govern issues including equality in athletics programs and how schools handle sexual harassment and sexual violence. President Joe Biden also expanded protections for transgender students by issuing rules through the department banning discrimination “based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics in federally funded education programs.” These powers have made the department a major target for conservatives. (The Trump administration promptly withdrew Biden’s rules.)

Trump’s platform called for the end of the Education Department, but in an interview with Time last year, Trump suggested a “virtual closure.” He was vague about what that would mean. “You’re going to need some people just to make sure they’re teaching English in the schools. Okay, you know English and mathematics, let’s say,” he said. “But we want to move education back to the states.” This doesn’t make clear how he’d manage this enforcement, nor what would happen to federal education spending. Federal funds accounted for about 14 percent of state and local education funding in the 2022 fiscal year, the most recent data available—a lifeline for many districts, and especially crucial in some red states that have supported Trump.

Some of the president’s allies have been more specific about their plans. Project 2025, for example, wants to dismantle the Education Department as well. The document suggests that the government could simply distribute education funding to states to use as they see fit, with no conditions. In practice, that would likely mean red states funneling more money into charter schools, religious education, and other alternatives to public schools. (Project 2025 is skeptical of what it calls “the woke-dominated system of public schools.”) The plan would return student lending to the private sector. But even Project 2025 foresees many of the Education Department’s functions, such as Title IX matters and the Office of Postsecondary Education, being dispersed to other parts of the federal government.

While Trump talks about getting rid of the Education Department, his actions say otherwise. “Trump says he will give power back to the states. But he has also said he is prepared to use executive power to crack down on schools with policies that don’t align with his culture-war agenda,” my colleague Lora Kelley reported in November. Yesterday, Trump issued an executive order banning transgender athletes in women’s sports. To do so, he’s using—you guessed it—the power of the Education Department.

Other conservative priorities, such as shutting down diversity programs, probing and punishing anti-Semitism on campuses, and attacking affirmative action in admissions, are being run through the Education Department. These functions could be shifted elsewhere, including to the Justice Department, but Trump is still actively pursuing them.

And there’s the rub. A president could, in theory, get rid of the Education Department, but most presidents, including Trump, can’t and don’t want to get rid of the things it does. The situation is reminiscent of the federal grant freeze last month. Trump campaigned on cutting spending, and many people cheered. But once his administration tried to do it, swift backlash—including from Republicans in Congress—forced him to retreat. Slashing government spending is a popular idea in the abstract. The problem is that at some point you have to start cutting off the specific programs that people actually like and need.

Related:

Trump wants to have it both ways on education. George Packer: When the culture war comes for the kids

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler Trump’s assault on USAID makes Project 2025 look like child’s play, Russell Berman writes. Gazans don’t need a riviera. They need water. The spies are shown the door.

Today’s News

A federal judge temporarily paused the Trump administration’s deadline for federal workers to accept a deferred resignation buyout. The Justice Department agreed to temporarily restrict Department of Government Efficiency staffers from having access to the Treasury Department’s highly sensitive payment system. In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote that his plan for Gaza would involve Israel turning Gaza over to the United States after the fighting ceases. He added that no U.S. soldiers would be needed.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Parenting in America keeps getting more intensive, Kate Cray writes. The philosophy is hard on parents and children alike. The Weekly Planet: Trump is inheriting an environmental disaster, Zoë Schlanger writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

Don’t Make Small Talk. Think Big Talk.

By Arthur C. Brooks

As a rule, I avoid social and professional dinners. Not because I’m anti-social or don’t like food; quite the opposite. It’s because the conversations are usually lengthy, superficial, and tedious. Recently, however, my wife and I attended a dinner with several other long-married couples that turned out to be the most fascinating get-together we’ve experienced in a long time. The hostess, whom we had met only once before, opened the evening with a few niceties, but then almost immediately posed this question to the couples present: “Have you ever had a major crisis in your marriage?”

Read the full article.

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There is no real-estate solution for Gaza. Democrats wonder where their leaders are.

Culture Break

Illustration by Alex Merto

Examine. The economists have taken over the NBA, Jordan Sargent writes. Business regulations now rule.

Read. Up until 1968, government bureaucrats oversaw British theater. They censored countless works of genius—and left behind an archive of suppression, Thomas Chatterton Williams writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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All the King’s Censors

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › magazine › archive › 2025 › 03 › british-library-theater-censorship-archives › 681437

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Photographs by Chris Hoare

Several stories below the British Library’s Magna Carta room, alongside a rumbling line of the London Underground, is a brightly lit labyrinth of rare and historic items. Past a series of antique rifles chained to a wall, past an intricate system of conveyor belts whisking books to the surface, the library stores an enormous collection of plays, manuscripts, and letters. Last spring, I checked my belongings at security and descended to sift through this archive—a record of correspondence between the producers and directors of British theater and a small team of censors who once worked for the Crown.

For centuries, these strict, dyspeptic, and sometimes unintentionally hilarious bureaucrats read and passed judgment on every public theatrical production in Britain, striking out references to sex, God, and politics, and forcing playwrights to, as one put it, cook their “conceptions to the taste of authority.” They reported to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, which in 1737 became responsible for granting licenses to theaters and approving the texts of plays. “Examiners” made sure that no productions would offend the sovereign, blaspheme the Church, or stir audiences to political radicalism. An 1843 act expanded the department’s powers, calling upon it to block any play that threatened not just the “Public Peace” but “Decorum” and “good Manners.”

Hardly chosen for their artistic sensibilities or knowledge of theatrical history, the men hired by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office were mostly retired military officers from the upper-middle class. From the Victorian era on, they scrutinized plays for references to racial equality and sexuality—particularly homosexuality—vulgar language, and “offensive personalities,” as one guideline put it.

Twentieth-century English theater was, as a result of all this vigilance, “subject to more censorship than in the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I,” wrote the playwright and former theater critic Nicholas de Jongh in his 2000 survey of censorship, Politics, Prudery and Perversions. The censors suppressed or bowdlerized countless works of genius. As I thumbed through every play I could think of from the 1820s to the 1960s (earlier manuscripts, sold as part of an examiner’s private archive, can be seen in the Huntington Library in California), it became clear that the censors only got stricter—and more prudish—over time.

[Read: When the culture wars came for the theater]

“Do not come to me with Ibsen,” warned the examiner E. F. Smyth Pigott, nicely demonstrating the censors’ habitual tone. He had “studied Ibsen’s plays pretty carefully,” and determined that the characters were, to a man, “morally deranged.”

In cardboard boxes stacked on endless rows of metal shelving, string-tie binders hold the original versions of thousands of plays. The text of each is accompanied by a typewritten “Readers’ Report,” most of them several pages long, summarizing the plot and cataloging the work’s flaws as well as any redeeming qualities. That is followed, when available, by typed and handwritten correspondence between the censors and the applicants (usually the play’s hopeful and ingratiating producers).

These reports can at times be as entertaining as the plays themselves. On Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, one examiner wrote: “Omit the business and speeches about flybuttons”; on Sartre’s Huis Clos: “The play illustrates very well the difference between the French and English tastes. I don’t suppose that anyone would bat an eyelid over in Paris, but here we bar Lesbians on the stage”; on Camus’ Caligula: “This is the sort of play for which I have no liking at all”; on Tennessee Williams: “Neuroses grin through everything he writes”; and on Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun: “A good play about negroes in a Chicago slum, written with dignity, power and complete freedom from whimsy. The title is taken from a worthless piece of occasional verse about dreams deferred drying up like a raisin in the sun—or festering and exploding.”

[Ethan Zuckerman: America is no longer the home of the free internet]

These bureaucrats were eager, as one of them wrote, to “lop off a few excrescent boughs” to save the tree. They were anti-Semitic (one successful compromise involved replacing a script’s use of “Fuck the Pope” with “The Pope’s a Jew”) and virulently homophobic. In response to Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer, in 1958, one Lieutenant Colonel Vincent Troubridge noted: “There was a great fuss in New York about the references to cannibalism at the end of this play, but the Lord Chamberlain will find more objectionable the indications that the dead man was a homosexual.”

But the censors could also, occasionally, aspire to the level of pointed and biting literary criticism. “This is a piece of incoherence in the manner of Samuel Beckett,” the report for a 1960 production of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker begins, “though it has not that author’s vein of nihilistic pessimism, and each individual sentence is comprehensible if irrelevant.” One gets the impression that, like the characters from a Bolaño novel, at least some of these men were themselves failed artists and intellectuals, drawn to such authoritarian work from a place of bruised and envious ego.

Indeed, one examiner, Geoffrey Dearmer, considered among the more flexible, had written poetry during the Great War. He reported to the Lord Chamberlain alongside the tyrannical Charles Heriot, who had studied theater at university and worked on a production of Macbeth before moving, still as a young man, into advertising, journalism, and book publishing. He was known, de Jongh wrote, for being “gratuitously abusive.” (Heriot on Edward Bond’s 1965 Saved: “A revolting amateur play … about a bunch of brainless, ape-like yobs,” including a “brainless slut of twenty-three living with her sluttish parents.”) Another examiner, George Alexander Redford, was a bank manager chosen primarily because he was friends with the man he succeeded. When asked about the criteria he used in his decision making, Redford answered, “I have no critical view on plays.” He was “simply bringing to bear an official point of view and keeping up a standard. … There are no principles that can be defined. I follow precedent.”

Chris Hoare for The AtlanticAn examiner’s notes on Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

The director Peter Hall, writing in The Guardian in 2002 about his experiences with the censors, said that the office “was largely staffed by retired naval officers with extraordinarily filthy minds. They were so alert to filth that they often found it when none was intended.” Once, he called to ask why some lines had been cut from a play he was directing:

“We all know what’s going on here, Hall, don’t we?” said the retired naval officer angrily. “It’s up periscopes.” “Up periscopes?” I queried. “Buggery, Hall, buggery!” Actually, it wasn’t.

As comic as these men seem now, they wielded enormous, unexamined power. The correspondence filed alongside the manuscripts reveals the extent to which the pressures of censorship warped manuscripts long before they even arrived on the censors’ desks. Managers and production companies checked scripts and suggested changes in anticipation of scrutiny. In a 1967 letter, a representative of a dramatic society eager to stage Waiting for Godot writes, “On page 81 Estragon says ‘Who farted?’ The director and myself are concerned as to whether, during a public presentation, this might offend the laws of censorship. Awaiting your advice.” Presumably, the answer was affirmative.

Chris Hoare for The AtlanticAn examiner’s report on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

Playwrights also performed their own “pre-pre-censorship”—limiting the scope of their subject matter before and during the writing process. According to the 2004 book The Lord Chamberlain Regrets … A History of British Theatre Censorship, as far back as 1866, the comptroller of the LCO, Spencer Ponsonby-Fane, “explicitly commended examiners for operating this ‘indirect system of censorship’ because it enabled the Office to keep the number of prohibited plays to a minimum and forestall concerns about repression.”

Some plays made it past the censors only as a result of human error. When I met Kate Dossett, a professor at the University of Leeds who specializes in Black-theater history, she told me that the case of the playwright Una Marson is an example of what “gets hidden in this collection.” Marson’s 1932 play, At What a Price, depicts a young Black woman from the Jamaican countryside who moves to Kingston and takes a job as a stenographer. Her white employer seduces—or, in today’s understanding, sexually harasses—and impregnates her. The drama is a subtle exploration of miscegenation, one of the core taboos that the LCO often clamped down on. But the play was approved because the examiner—confused by the protagonist’s class markers and education—didn’t realize that she was Black.

Chris Hoare for The AtlanticThe script of Una Marson’s At What a Price

“This play is to be produced by the League of Coloured Peoples but it seems to have no particular relation to the objects of that institution except that the scene is in Jamaica and some of the minor characters are coloured and speak a more or less diverting dialect,” the report states. “The main story is presumably about English people and is an old-fashioned artless affair.”

From the beginning, some prominent figures fought against the system of censorship. Henry Brooke’s Gustavus Vasa bears the distinction of having been the first British play banned under the Licensing Act of 1737. The work, ostensibly about the Swedish liberator Gustav I, was interpreted as a thinly veiled attack on Prime Minister Robert Walpole. Responding to the ban in a satirical defense of the censors, Samuel Johnson wrote that the government should go further, and make it a “felony to teach to read without a license from the lord chamberlain.” Only then would citizens be able to rest, in “ignorance and peace,” and the government be safe from “the insults of the poets.”

Universal History Archive / GettyA cartoon from 1874 satirized the Lord Chamberlain’s attempts to clean up the stage.

Henry James, in his day, spoke out in defense of the English playwright, who “has less dignity—thanks to the censor’s arbitrary rights upon his work—than that of any other man of letters in Europe.” So, too, did George Bernard Shaw. “It is a frightful thing to see the greatest thinkers, poets and authors of modern Europe, men like Ibsen,” Shaw wrote, “delivered helplessly into the vulgar hands of such a noodle as this despised and incapable old official.”

By the time the Theatres Act of 1968 abolished the censorship of plays, social attitudes were changing. The influx of workers from Jamaica and other countries in the Commonwealth in the 1950s challenged the stability of racial dynamics; sex between men was decriminalized in England and Wales in 1967; divorce became more common; and the rock-and-roll era destigmatized drugs. For years, theaters had been taking advantage of a loophole: Because the LCO’s jurisdiction applied only to public performances, theaters could charge patrons a nominal membership fee, thereby transforming themselves into private subscription clubs out of the censors’ reach.

It must have gotten lonely, trying to stand so long against the changing times. “I don’t understand this,” Heriot wrote, plaintively, about Hair. The American musical was banned three times for extolling “dirt, anti-establishment views, homosexuality and free love,” but in the end, one gets the impression that the censors just gave up. Alexander Lock, a curator at the library, pointed me to Heriot’s report on the final version of the musical. The pain of defeat in his voice is almost palpable: “A curiously half-hearted attempt to vet the script” had been made, he wrote, but many offenses were left intact.

Hair opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in September 1968. That month, by royal assent, no new plays required approval from the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, which was left to devote its attention to the planning of royal weddings, funerals, and garden parties.

Some may be tempted to dismiss the censors’ legacy as limited to, as a 1967 article in The Times of London had it, “the trivia of indecency.” But the damage was far deeper. The censors, de Jongh wrote, stunted English theater, kept it frivolous and parochial, and prevented it from dealing with “the greatest issues and anguishes of this violent century.” No playwrights addressed “the fascist regimes of the 1930s, the process that led to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the ghastliness perpetrated by Hitler and Stalin, or the tyrannies experienced in China and under other totalitarian leaderships. No wonder. Their plays would have been disallowed. In the 1930s you could not win licences for plays that might offend Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin.” Shakespeare never “had to put up with” censorship so “rigorous and narrow-minded,” Peter Hall wrote. His “richest plays and his finest lines, packed with erotic double meanings, would have been smartly excised by the Lord Chamberlain’s watchdogs.”

[From the January 1930 issue: Edward Weeks on the practice of censorship]

These practices may strike us today as outlandish and anachronistic. Many of us take for granted creative license and the freedom of expression that undergirds it. But the foundation upon which these rights—as we think of them—are situated is far less immutable than we would like to imagine. As recent trends in the United States and elsewhere have shown, advances toward greater tolerance are reversible.

Indeed, many Americans on both the right and the left correctly sense this, even if they do not always understand what genuine censorship looks like. Activists on college campuses have confused the ability to occupy and disrupt physical space for the right to dissent verbally. Meanwhile, Elon Musk warns that “wokeness” will stifle free speech even as he uses the social-media site he owns to manipulate public debate.

Perusing the plays in the Lord Chamberlain’s archive is, among other things, a reminder of what censorship really is: government power applied to speech to either limit or compel it. And it is also a reminder that in the long term, many such attempts backfire. They reveal, as Sir Roly Keating, who was chief executive of the library from 2012 until the beginning of this year, told me, more about the censors’ own “fears, paranoias, obsessions” than they ever succeed in concealing.

Chris Hoare for The AtlanticInside the archive 

There is also the sheer fact of what Keating called “this extraordinary imposition of bureaucracy.” Just as the Stasi archive provides unparalleled insight into the interplay of art and politics in postwar East German society, and the Hoover-era FBI’s copious files on Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, and other Black American luminaries amount to a valuable cultural repository, the Lord Chamberlain’s archive can now be seen as one of the preeminent collections of Black and queer theater in the English-speaking world. It includes not just the plays that were staged, but also those that were rejected, and in some cases multiple drafts of them. These are precisely the kinds of works that, without the backing of institutions that have the resources to protect their own archive, might have been lost to history.

“Theater’s an ephemeral medium,” Keating told me. “Early drafts of plays change all the time; many don’t get published at all.” Among the many ramifications of censorship, I had not adequately considered this one: the degree to which methodical suppression can create the most meticulous collection. It is a deeply satisfying justice—even a form of revenge—that the hapless bureaucrats who endeavored so relentlessly to squelch and block independent thought have instead so painstakingly preserved it for future generations.

Support for this article was provided by the British Library’s Eccles Institute for the Americas & Oceania Phil Davies Fellowship. It appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “All the King’s Censors.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Hitler’s Oligarchs

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 02 › hitler-oligarchs-hugenberg-nazi › 681584

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He was among the richest men in the world. He made his first fortune in heavy industry. He made his second as a media mogul. And in January 1933, in exchange for a political favor, Alfred Hugenberg provided the electoral capital that made possible Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. Before Hugenberg sealed his pact with Hitler, a close associate had warned Hugenberg that this was a deal he would come to regret: “One night you will find yourself running through the ministry gardens in your underwear trying to escape arrest.”

In my recent book, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power, I chronicled the fraught relationship between the tyrant and the titan, but my story ended in January 1933, so I did not detail the subsequent impact on Hugenberg’s fortunes, let alone the catastrophic consequences that lay ahead for other corporate leaders, their companies, and their country.

In the ’20s and early ’30s, the Hitler “brand” was anathema to capitalists and corporate elites. His National Socialist German Worker’s Party was belligerently nationalistisch but also unapologetically sozialistisch—a true Arbeiter Partei, or “working man’s party.” Its 25-point political platform explicitly targeted bankers and financiers, calling for “breaking the bondage of interest,” as well as industrialists who profited from wartime production. Profits were to be confiscated by the state without compensation, and corporate executives charged with treason. Platform Point 13 was explicit: “We demand the nationalization of all existing corporate entities.”

Through the 1920s, businessmen preferred to place their political bets with conservative, centrist, business-friendly politicians, such as those in the Center Party or the Bavarian People’s Party or the right-wing but decidedly pro-business German Nationalists. Out of necessity, then, the National Socialists had to derive most of its financing via storm troopers standing on street corners begging for contributions and from admission fees to Hitler rallies. Among the exceptions to this were socialites—Viktoria von Dirksen, Helene Bechstein, Elsa Bruckmann—who were smitten with Hitler. But the most significant exception was Fritz Thyssen.

Thyssen, heir to one of Germany’s leading industrial fortunes, had been an early financier of the Nazi movement. He first met Hitler in the autumn of 1923 after attending a beer-hall rally. “It was then that I realised his oratorical gifts and his ability to lead the masses,” Thyssen recalled in his 1941 memoir, I Paid Hitler. “What impressed me most, however, was the order that reigned in his meetings, the almost military discipline of his followers.” Thyssen provided the party, by his own estimate, approximately 1 million reichsmarks—more than $5 million today—and also helped finance the acquisition and refurbishment of a Munich palace as the Nazi Party headquarters. Most important, Thyssen arranged for Hitler to speak to his fellow industrialists in Düsseldorf on January 27, 1932.

Hitler sits next to Hermann Göring at the Düsseldorf Industrieclub, while Fritz Thyssen, a wealthy industrialist who was one of Hitler’s early financial backers, speaks at the microphone, January 27, 1932. (Ullstein bild / Getty)

[Read: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days]

“The speech made a deep impression on the assembled industrialists,” Thyssen said, “and in consequence of this a number of large contributions flowed from the resources of heavy industry into the treasuries of the National Socialist party.” This financing, estimated at a still-cautious 2 million marks annually, was channeled through a trusted intermediary: Alfred Hugenberg.

Hugenberg had served as a director of Krupp A.G., the large steelmaker and arms manufacturer, during the Great War, and had subsequently founded the Telegraph Union, a conglomerate of 1,400 associated newspapers intended to provide a conservative bulwark against the liberal, pro-democracy press. Hugenberg also bought controlling shares in the country’s largest movie studio, enabling him to have film and the press work together to advance his right-wing, antidemocratic agenda. A reporter for Vossische Zeitung, a leading centrist daily newspaper, observed that Hugenberg was “the great disseminator of National Socialist ideas to an entire nation through newspapers, books, magazines and films.”

To this end, Hugenberg practiced what he called Katastrophenpolitk, “the politics of catastrophe,” by which he sought to polarize public opinion and the political parties with incendiary news stories, some of them Fabrikationen—entirely fabricated articles intended to cause confusion and outrage. According to one such story, the government was enslaving German teenagers and selling them to its allies in order to service its war debt. Hugenberg calculated that by hollowing out the political center, political consensus would become impossible and the democratic system would collapse. As a right-wing delegate to the Reichstag, Hugenberg proposed a “freedom law” that called for the liberation of the German people from the shackles of democracy and from the onerous provisions of the Versailles Treaty. The law called for the treaty signatories to be tried and hanged for treason, along with government officials involved with implementing the treaty provisions. The French ambassador in Berlin called Hugenberg “one of the most evil geniuses of Germany.”

Though both Hitler and Hugenberg were fiercely anti-Communist, antidemocratic, anti-immigrant, and anti-Semitic, their attempts at political partnership failed spectacularly and repeatedly. The problem lay not in ideological differences but in the similarity of their temperaments and their competing political aspirations. Like Hitler, Hugenberg was inflexible, stubborn, and self-righteous. When challenged, he doubled down. Hugenberg had spoken of a “third Reich” as early as 1919, well before Hitler was a force on the political scene, and he envisioned himself as the future Reichsverweser, or “regent of the Reich.” His followers greeted him with “Heil Hugenberg!” Joseph Goebbels noted that Hitler invariably emerged from his meetings with Hugenberg red-faced and “mad as shit.”

[Read: How Hitler’s enablers undid democracy in Germany]

But by late January 1933, the two men’s fates were inextricably entangled. Hugenberg, who had leveraged his wealth into political power, had become the leader of the German National People’s Party, which had the votes in the Reichstag that Hitler needed to be appointed chancellor. Hitler had the potential to elevate Hugenberg to political power. As one Hitler associate explained the Hitler-Hugenberg dynamic: “Hugenberg had everything but the masses; Hitler had everything but the money.”

After cantankerous negotiation, a deal was reached: Hugenberg would deliver Hitler the chancellorship, in exchange for Hugenberg being given a cabinet post as head of a Superministerium that subsumed the ministries of economics, agriculture, and nutrition. Once in the cabinet, Hugenberg didn’t hesitate to meddle in foreign relations when it suited him. Reinhold Quaatz, a close Hugenberg associate, distilled Hugenberg’s calculus as follows: “Hitler will sit in the saddle but Hugenberg holds the whip.”

The New York Times expressed astonishment that Hugenberg, an “arch-capitalist” who stood “in strongest discord with economic doctrines of the Nazi movement,” was suddenly in charge of the country’s finances. Hitler’s “socialist mask” had fallen, the Communist daily Red Banner proclaimed, arguing that “Hugenberg is in charge, not Hitler!” The weekly journal Die Weltbühne dubbed the new government “Hitler, Hugenberg & Co.”

As self-proclaimed “economic dictator,” Hugenberg kept pace with Hitler in outraging political opponents and much of the public. He purged ministries. He dismantled workers’ rights. He lowered the wages of his own employees by 10 percent. “The real battle against unemployment lies singularly and alone in reestablishing profitability in economic life,” one of Hugenberg’s newspapers editorialized, arguing that the goal of economic policy should be to rescue “the professions, and those most negatively affected: the merchant middle class.” Hugenberg declared a temporary moratorium on foreclosures, canceled debts, and placed tariffs on several widely produced agricultural goods, violating trade agreements and inflating the cost of living. “It just won’t do,” Hitler objected in one cabinet meeting, “that the financial burdens of these rescue measures fall only on the poorest.” Let them suffer awhile, Hugenberg argued. “Then it will be possible to even out the hardships.” The economy fell into chaos. The press dubbed Hugenberg the Konfusionsrat —the “consultant of confusion.”

Hugenberg didn’t care about bad press. He was accustomed to being one of the most unpopular personalities in the country. Vorwärts, the socialist newspaper, depicted him as a puffed-up frog with spectacles. Hitler called him a Wauwau, or “woof woof.” Even his close associates referred to him as “the Hamster.” But Hugenberg lived by the golden rule: He who had the gold ruled. Earlier, when disagreements had arisen over the rightward turn of the German National Party, Hugenberg simply expelled the dissenters and financed the party’s entire budget from his own resources. Hitler could aspire to be dictator of the Third Reich, but Hugenberg was already dictator of the economy.

In late June 1933, while Hitler was trying to assuage international concerns about the long-term intentions of his government, Hugenberg appeared in London at an international conference on economic development. To the surprise of everyone, including the other German-delegation members present, Hugenberg laid out an ambitious plan for economic growth through territorial expansion. “The first step would consist of Germany reclaiming its colonies in Africa,” Hugenberg explained. “The second would be that the ‘people without space’”—Volk ohne Raum—“would open areas in which our productive race would create living space.” The announcement made headlines around the world. “Reich Asks for Return of African Lands at London Parley,” read one New York Times headline. Below that, a subhead continued: “Also seeks other territory, presumably in Europe.”

[From the March 1932 issue: Hitler and Hitlerism: a man of destiny]

Konstantin von Neurath, Hitler’s foreign minister, tried to walk back the Hugenberg statement, asserting that Hugenberg had expressed only a personal opinion, not government policy. Hugenberg dug in his heels, retorting that, as economic minister, when he said something, he was speaking for the entire government. Foreign policy was just an extension of economic policy. Confusion and embarrassment followed.

Back in Berlin, Neurath insisted in a cabinet meeting that “a single member cannot simply overlook the objections of the others” and that Hugenberg “either did not understand these objections, which were naturally clothed in polite form, or he did not want to understand them.” Hitler sought to mediate, saying that “what had already happened was no longer of any interest.” But Hugenberg wouldn’t back down: He wanted the issue resolved and on his terms. “It was a matter between Hitler and me as to who was going to seize the initiative,” Hugenberg later admitted. Hitler prevailed. On June 29, 1933, Hugenberg resigned his minister post.

By then Hitler no longer needed either Hugenberg’s corporate contacts or his Reichstag delegates. The bankers and industrialists who had once shunned the crass, divisive, right-wing extremist had gradually come to embrace him as a bulwark against the pro-union Social Democrats and the virulently anti-capitalist Communists. Six months earlier, three weeks before Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, the banker Kurt Baron von Schröder had met with Hitler at Schröder’s villa in a fashionable quarter of Cologne. The arrangements were cloak-and-dagger: Hitler made an unscheduled, early-morning exit from a train in Bonn, entered a hotel, ate a quick breakfast, then departed in a waiting car with curtained rear windows to be driven to the Schröder villa while a decoy vehicle drove in the opposite direction. Hitler walked out of the meeting with a 30 million reichsmark credit line that saved his political movement from bankruptcy.

Once Hitler was in power, there was no longer need for secrecy or subterfuge. On Monday, February 20, 1933, Hermann Göring, one of two Nazis ministers in the Hitler cabinet and the president of the Reichstag, hosted a fundraiser at his official residence for the Nazi Party in advance of upcoming elections. The event was presided over by Hjalmar Schacht, a respected banker and co-founder of a centrist political party who saw Hitler as the best bet against left-wing political forces and had lobbied President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor.

Among the two dozen industrialists, bankers, and businessmen in attendance, the most prominent was Gustav Krupp von Bohlen, known as “the cannon king” for his armament production. “I was astonished,” Schacht recalled, “because I knew that this same Krupp von Bohlen had refused an invitation from Fritz Thyssen to attend an event with the Rhine-Westfalen industrialists four weeks earlier.”

Gustav Krupp von Bohlen (at left) and Adolf Hitler during a visit to the Krupp Factory in Essen. Krupp, another wealthy Hitler backer, supplied armaments to the Third Reich. (DPA Picture Alliance / Alamy)

Perhaps equally surprising was the presence at this fundraiser of four directors from the board of the giant chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate I.G. Farben, which had to that point been staunchly pro-democracy, pro–Weimar Republic, and anti–National Socialist. (The Nazis derided the company, which employed many Jewish scientists, as “an international capitalist Jewish company.”)

Hitler himself stunned party attendees by showing up as the unannounced guest of honor. Clad in a suit and tie rather than a brown storm trooper’s uniform, Hitler addressed the assembled corporate elite, warning of the dangers of communism and trumpeting his appointment as chancellor as a “great victory” that he saw as a mandate for radical change. He outlined his plans to restore the power of the military, assert totalitarian control over the country, destroy the parliamentary system, and crush all political opponents by force. “Private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy,” Hitler told them.

[Jeffrey Goldberg: Trump: ‘I need the kind of generals that Hitler had’]

After Hitler departed, Schacht spoke of the need for additional campaign financing in advance of the upcoming elections. Hermann Göring added that the election, scheduled for March 5, “will surely be the last one for the next 10 years, probably even for the next 100 years.” By day’s end, the fundraiser had generated 3 million reichsmarks, the equivalent of $15 million today.

The following three weeks delivered a series of blows to the Weimar Republic that resulted in its demise: the arson attack on the Reichstag on February 27, which saw the very symbol of parliamentarian democracy consumed in flame; the March 5 elections from which the Nazis emerged with a mandate for Hitler’s reforms; and the passing of an “enabling law,” on March 23, that established Hitler as unchallenged dictator. In a letter to Hitler, Gustav Krupp wrote, “The turn of political events is in line with the wishes which I myself and the board of directors have cherished for a long time.”

German corporations, large and small, helped retool the Weimar Republic as the Third Reich. Ferdinand Porsche designed the Volkswagen, a “car for the people.” Mercedes-Benz provided Hitler and his chief lieutenants with bulletproof sedans. Hugo Boss designed the black uniforms for the SS. Krupp supplied armaments. Miele produced munitions. Allianz provided insurance for concentration camps. J.A. Topf & Sons manufactured crematoria ovens. A dismayed executive at Deutsche Bank, which was involved in the expropriation of Jewish businesses, sent a letter to the chairman of his supervisory board: “I fear we are embarking on an explicit, well- planned path toward the annihilation of all Jews in Germany.”

For the industrialists who helped finance and supply the Hitler government, an unexpected return on their investment was slave labor. By the early 1940s, the electronics giant Siemens AG was employing more than 80,000 slave laborers. (An official Siemens history explains that although the head of the firm, Carl Friedrich von Siemens, was “a staunch advocate of democracy” who “detested the Nazi dictatorship,” he was also “responsible for ensuring the company’s well-being and continued existence.”)

By October 1942, I.G. Farben and its subsidiaries were using slave laborers in 23 locations. The life expectancy of inmates at an I.G. Farben facility at Auschwitz was less than four months; more than 25,000 people lost their lives on the construction site alone. As corporate practices adapted to evolving political realities, the company aligned its wide technological and human resources with government priorities. Jews were purged from the corporate ranks. The I.G. Farben pharmaceutical division, Bayer, supported Nazi medical experiments. A postwar affidavit alleges that Bayer paid 170 reichsmarks for 150 female Auschwitz prisoners. “The transport of 150 women arrived in good condition,” the affidavit reads. “However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments,” and “we would kindly request that you send us another group of women to the same number and at the same price.” Although recent investigations have questioned the veracity of this particular affidavit, Bayer’s involvement in medical experimentation on Auschwitz inmates is undisputed.

The I.G. Farben company Degussa owned a chemical subsidiary that produced a cyanide-based pesticide known as Zyklon B, used primarily for fumigating ships, warehouses, and trains—and, after 1942, as a homicidal agent at Nazi extermination facilities. Company logs confirm the delivery of an estimated 56 tons of Zyklon B from 1942 to 1944; more than 23.8 tons were sent to Auschwitz, where it served as the primary instrument of death for the more than 1 million Jewish people murdered there.

In August 1947, 24 senior I.G. Farben managers were placed on trial for their role in Nazi aggression and atrocity. In his opening statement before the court, the prosecutor Telford Taylor said of these executives, “They were the magicians who made the fantasies of Mein Kampf come true. They were the guardians of the military and state secrets.” The 15,638 pages of courtroom testimony, along with the 6,384 documents submitted as evidence—purchase orders, internal memos, board minutes—indicated that these Farben executives knew the exact number of airplane and truck ties, the running feet of tank tread, the amount of explosives, as well as the precise number of canisters of Zyklon B gas delivered to Auschwitz. The defense attorney for the chairman of I.G. Farben’s supervisory board argued that his client was “no robber, no plunderer, no slave dealer,” but rather just a 60-year-old senior executive doing what senior executives were paid to do—run the company with an eye to the bottom line. If he collaborated with the government, it was out of “a feeling of personal responsibility to the company.” Twenty-three I.G. Farben directors were eventually charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity; 13 of them were convicted and sentenced to prison.

[From the February 1937 Issue: Hitler looks eastward]

At the International War Crimes Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1945, Gustav Krupp was indicted as a major war criminal alongside the likes of Göring and Hans Frank, but he was too ill to stand trial. Instead, his son was tried in 1947, in The United States of America v. Alfried Krupp, et al. The indictment charged the younger Krupp, alongside 11 Krupp corporate directors, with crimes against humanity and war crimes, for participating in “the murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, and use for slave labor of civilians.” Alfried Krupp reportedly never expressed remorse, at one point telling a war-crimes trial observer, “We Krupps never cared much about political ideas. We only wanted a system that worked well and allowed us to work unhindered. Politics is not our business.”

As for Alfred Hugenberg? Unlike other early private-sector Hitler enablers such as Fritz Thyssen and Hjalmar Schacht—both of whom ended up in concentration camps after crossing Hitler—Hugenberg got off lightly. Hugenberg withdrew to his sprawling estate, Rohbraken, in the former feudal province of Lippe, where he lived as the local regent while his business empire was gradually whittled away.

The German Nationalist Party was disbanded as soon as Hugenberg stepped down from his cabinet post in June 1933. In December of that year, the Telegraph Union was taken over by the ministry of propaganda and absorbed into a newly created entity, the German News Office. In 1943, Hugenberg’s publishing house, Scherl Verlag, was acquired by the Nazi publisher, Eher Verlag. By war’s end, the defrocked cabinet minister and disenfranchised media mogul was diminished and dissipated but still defiant.

On September 28, 1946, Hugenberg was arrested by the British military police. He was detained for five months, and his assets were frozen. After a formal hearing, Hugenberg was deemed to be a “lesser evildoer”—officially, a “Mitläufer,” the lowest order of complicity in the Nazi regime—on the grounds that he had left his cabinet post in the first months of the Hitler regime and had never been a member of the Nazi Party. With undiminished temerity, Hugenberg balked at even that lesser charge. Having been stripped of most of his business empire, Hugenberg saw himself as a victim of, not a participant in, the Nazi regime. He appealed the hearing’s determination and won. He was declared “untainted,” which allowed him to lay claim to his frozen assets. Unrepentant to his dying day, Hugenberg refused to publicly countenance any suggestion of guilt or responsibility for Hitler’s excesses.

On the morning of Tuesday, January 31, 1933, less than 24 hours after enabling Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, Hugenberg reportedly spoke with Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, a fellow conservative and the mayor of Leipzig. “I’ve just committed the greatest stupidity of my life,” Hugenberg allegedly told Goerdeler. “I have allied myself with the greatest demagogue in the history of the world.”