Ep. 3: The Fourth Reich with Gavriel Rosenfeld

How do you write the history of something that never happened?  What were the chances of Nazis creating a Fourth Reich?  And what do our fears of a Nazi resurgence tell us about the past and present.

In this wide-ranging conversation with Gavriel Rosenfeld, we talk about the history of the Fourth Reich, both as a rhetorical device but also as a very real political reality that former Nazis tried to engineer.  We also discuss the challenges postwar Germany faced in coming to terms with the very real Third Reich.  We also look at the uses and abuses of the Nazi past in the context of the rise of the modern political far-right.

Gavriel Rosenfeld is President of the Center for Jewish History in New York City and Professor of History at Fairfield University.  He can be found on Twitter @gavrieldrosenfe

His book is The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present.

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman (00:00.864)
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust Citri podcast. I'm your host, Waipman Born. And today we have a really interesting guest, Gov Rosenfeld, who has written about the Fourth Reich and this fictional feared resurgence of the Nazis. But I think you might think you know what that is, but I suspect that by the time we get done with this conversation, you'll have a completely different appreciation. So Gov, welcome to the podcast.

Um, yeah, tell us a little about yourself. First of all, what do you do? Where are you from? What are you, what are you working on?

gavriel rosenfeld (00:30.498)
Thanks, Wayman.

gavriel rosenfeld (00:36.702)
Sure, well, I'm sitting in New York City right now at the Center for Jewish History, where I'm the president as of last September, 2022. I'm currently on leave from my main position as a professor of history at Fairfield University up in Connecticut. I'll be here at the Center for Jewish History at least until the end of 2025. We are the largest archive of Jewish sources in the world, certainly outside of the state of Israel, which has the National Library of Israel.

which is a large library, but smaller archive. And I could get into a lot more detail on all the amazing sources that we have dating back to the middle ages, but there's basically six linear miles worth of documents here in the Midtown Manhattan, right off of Union Square. And so I'm doing a bunch of different things with regard to fellowship program development, fundraising, programming.

Waitman (01:18.805)
Wow.

gavriel rosenfeld (01:31.15)
And it's basically public history at its best. So I'm at your disposal to talk about the Nazis from a public history perspective and a podcasting perspective.

Waitman (01:41.636)
Yeah. And unfortunately, this is a thing that, um, as, as you write in the book, it doesn't really go away. Um, how did you, how did you get into it? Cause you know, I don't know, I don't want to spoil, but you know, um, well, got a little bit of feedback there. Um, how did, how did you come to write a book about something that never happened?

gavriel rosenfeld (02:05.878)
Right, so obviously as a historian of Nazi Germany, I, like yourself, have always been talking about and been interested in the Third Reich, but it's impossible in researching this Reich not to be aware of the previous two Reichs that preceded Nazi Germany, the First and Second Reichs, which we don't have to get into the details of, but at the same time, since I've done a lot of

research about the memory of Nazism in the sphere of popular culture. I came across a bunch of pulpy works of fiction and schlocky films that thematized the Fourth Reich. And I'd always sort of just viewed that as a signifier of the fear of a Nazi resurgence at some point in the distant future. And that wasn't really anything I thought of with great urgency. But

Really over the last 10, 15 years, I started to notice in the mass media and online spaces, how the term forthright was being weaponized and politicized the various people to attack their opponents. So whether it was, for example, after the 2008 financial crisis, activists in Greece who were protesting Angela Merkel's austerity policies in the EU and were attacking Germany as a forthright, or whether it was...

activists on the political left after President Trump was elected in 2016, who feared that his administration would inaugurate a fourth Reich in America, or Vladimir Putin attacking Ukraine as a place that's fostering a fourth Reich. It seemed that the history of the term itself maybe needed a little bit more analysis. And so a combination of just interest in the possible resurgence of any...

Nazi movement and this moniker, the slogan that you see bandied about in so many different ways, inspired me to just try and historicize it by tracing its roots back to the early 20th century and as we'll probably make clear in the conversation, it has a very unusual and interesting history. So this book, The Fourth Reich, basically traces its evolution over time from the 20s and 30s up to the present.

Waitman (04:24.22)
Yeah. And before we even get to that, can we go back a little even further than that? Because you bring up some things, you know, that certainly I wasn't aware of in terms of sort of the Christian origins of the third kingdom, I suppose. Right. Where does this come from? And then how does it play into German history?

bringing us up to sort of the third right or the actual third right.

gavriel rosenfeld (04:51.722)
Yeah.

gavriel rosenfeld (04:54.998)
So there's a lot of detail that the first chapter of the book gets into. I'll try and just gloss the larger points. But the question of any Reich, which, of course, literally means empire or realm, does have Christian origins in the Middle Ages. And this idea of a first Reich, a second Reich, and a third Reich, even before we get into the questions of the German polity dating back to the Holy Roman Empire,

It has a lot to do with the Christian idea of the Trinity, you know, the Father, Son, and the Spirit. And there was an Italian, I don't remember if he was a Franciscan or Benedictine monk in the Middle Ages who sort of came up with this tripartite definition of earthly and spiritual empires that had numbers associated with them. And that later became sort of interspersed with conversations.

about in the Hebrew Bible the four earthly kingdoms of the Assyrians and Babylonians and Romans and so forth. And while, you know, it would probably take a much longer conversation to tease out how they evolved over time, suffice it to say that during the Nazi years in the 1920s when the Third Reich was first conceived, not by the Nazis themselves,

or I should say the 1920s when the Nazis were getting off the ground as a party, there were already people like Arthur Moeller Vandenbroek who were conceiving of some utopian German future where the shortcomings of the second Kaiserreich, the Wilhelmine Empire, would be overcome and a great new sort of synthesis of German political, social, and economic harmony would ensue. That became...

one of the things that Hitler and the Nazis took on after 1930, as they were becoming increasingly viable political party, they used it as a slogan to try and inspire some of their voting base to see the Nazi party is not just representing, you know, or offering a solution to the bread and butter concerns of Germans in the Great Depression, but something more meta-historical and salvific, if you will, millenarian even.

gavriel rosenfeld (07:16.206)
And so it became something that galvanized a lot of people at the time. Had that set of origins, but I don't know if you want to get yet into how the Fourth, right, emerged from a very different political wing of the spectrum around the same time.

Waitman (07:28.924)
Well, well, I think this is, yeah, I think this is a transition to that, right? Because one of the things that I mentioned this on Twitter that I, you know, one of the great things about doing this podcast is that I learn stuff, right? Because certainly I don't, I am, none of us know everything. Um, but I didn't know that Hitler had actually sort of outlawed the use of the phrase. The third, right. Because of the fourth right being used essentially initially.

gavriel rosenfeld (07:42.132)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman (07:58.236)
as a criticism in some way. I mean, maybe that's the transition, right? Of where does, where does that, that the fourth right actually in some ways is a originates as a positive thing.

gavriel rosenfeld (08:02.966)
Yeah.

gavriel rosenfeld (08:09.938)
Exactly. So today the people who would use the term Fourth Reich are either neo-Nazis who use it as a term of aspiration, or it's anti-fascist types, anti-Nazis who want to at least claim that the people who they're advocating on behalf of are advocating on behalf of, you know, progressive liberal democratic values, and they're opposed to any wannabe fascists who they would say are, you know, promoting a right-wing agenda that would be

to potentially culminate in a fourth Reich. So today, the fourth Reich is very much associated with the far right, but in the 1930s, it goes without saying that when Hitler finally established his third Reich, a lot of the anti-Nazi opponents of Hitler, whether they were members of the Social Democratic Party who went into exile, or whether they were German Jewish refugees who fled to the upper west side of Manhattan, Morningside Heights, they came up with the idea.

that once the Third Reich could be toppled, or at least be gotten rid of one way or the other, that Germany could recover its liberal democratic heritage and become a Fourth Reich. In other words, the Fourth Reich had a progressive set of associations surrounding it, and there were plenty of people, even Thomas and Heinrich Mann, who were sort of loosely referred to in their American exile as the sort of presidents in exile of the Fourth Reich.

And from the Nazi perspective, I mean, I have plenty of quotations from leading Nazi Galelite-ers and so forth who made it clear that the Fourth Reich was a treasonous phrase, and they used all their efforts to try and stamp it out. And in the late 1930s, if I'm not mistaken, after the Anschluss of Austria and then after the Sudeten Crisis, Hitler takes the phrase Third Reich, as you correctly pointed out, out of circulation.

It's not exactly clear why, but some argue that at this point in time as he's gearing up for war and as he wants the German people to understand that the future for them is going to be about military conquest and securing of a larger empire, he really preferred the phrase, the Grossgeermannisches Reich, the greater German Empire, as something, as an alternative to the Third Reich, because the Third Reich really was already established in 1933.

gavriel rosenfeld (10:29.674)
really from Hitler's perspective, that phrase had done its job and what have you done for me lately, it's not really going to galvanize people to move forward into a new phase of conquest. So he basically sent the phrase packing and you see it disappear from that point on.

Waitman (10:49.512)
Yeah, I mean, that to me already was really interesting, but also is a nice transition into this discussion of what happens after. But maybe, you know, before we get into sort of attempts to recreate the Third Reich, you know, this seems to be something that at least some Nazis were already interested in.

when they saw the writing on the wall or at least towards the end of the actual third Reich. Um, when they, you know, so how did, how do we transition from sort of, you know, the, the fourth Reich as, um, aspirational sort of liberal improvement or, you know, better improvement over the Nazis to we're losing the third Reich and now let's plan for, you know, actually, cause one of the things,

One of the tensions that goes through your discussion is this one of, you know, how much of the Fourth Reich, the idea of a Fourth Reich is a rhetorical flourish and how much of it is an actual plan, you know, of political essentially recon, reconquest or something like this. And so, yeah.

gavriel rosenfeld (12:03.818)
Right, so you put your finger on it. So part of the book deals with what I would just call discourse history and tracing the origins of a concept and the changing uses of a concept. But there's also a there there. I will, I do insist throughout the book that it's also an effort to analyze the fantasies and plots and potentially even coup attempts of

who I would call unrepentant Nazis. Today we're always on the prowl trying to find out where the neo-Nazis are. And it's perhaps an open question when we make that transition after 1945 in history from the ex-Nazis and the unrepentant Nazis to the neo-Nazis because there's a generational shift that probably requires one to go through before you're a neo anything. But suffice it to say that

You know, after 1945 when Germany was devastated and under allied occupation for four years, it's not the case that everyone just sort of knuckled under and accepted allied rule. There were people who wanted to engage in what the Iraqi resistance did after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. They wanted to engage in an insurgency. They wanted to engage in sniper attacks, IED sort of actions and whatnot.

And I do talk about in the early chapters how there were a bunch of different movements and conspiracies by unrepentant Nazis to return to power. And some of those actors were, in fact, inspired by the idea of creating a fourth Reich.

And by the same token, a lot of the military government officials in Britain and the United States and countless journalists in Anglo-American media were frequently using the term forthright to warn their audiences that there were still Nazis on the scene and it had to be dealt with very severely if the project of rebuilding Germany into a Western liberal style democracy was going to succeed.

Waitman (14:06.952)
Yeah, I'm just going to pause. I think there's some kind of feedback from the mic. It sounds like that. I don't know if you're clicking on something or. OK, it's OK. It's just like the fiddle. If you're fiddling or something. It's OK. I'm going to mark this. And I will. Because I don't do. Keep your hands at the desk.

gavriel rosenfeld (14:16.326)
Oh, I was clicking on something. It was it was pants. Yeah, I'll stop that.

gavriel rosenfeld (14:27.138)
Sure. I'll keep my hands visible, officer. Yes.

Waitman (14:33.372)
No, it's totally fine. I don't do a lot of editing, but I'll go back and edit this out. Um, but just because it's, you know, um, but anyway, no, but, um, so now we're. Uh, back in again. Um, so, but was so Borman, right? Um, Martin Borman, um, Hitler sort of an executive assistant, um, was actually, was he responsible for some plans for actually, if I remember correctly from the book, that there were, there, right. The idea of the werewolves, right. That there, there's this.

gavriel rosenfeld (14:37.398)
Sure. Totally got it.

Waitman (15:02.804)
There actually is a plan to, and this is, I think, where you, where you bring up that it sort of merges from continuing resistance, i.e. you know, transitioning World War II into an insurgency. And then as time goes on, then it becomes sort of this, the more sleeper agent-y kind of approach to it.

gavriel rosenfeld (15:25.022)
Yeah, in the last months of World War II, in this, you know, late winter, there was a whole effort by the SS to create a domestic insurgency led by teenagers, essentially, people in the Hitler Youth, some SS members, some representatives of the Wehrmacht to just engage in partisan attacks against Allied

as a way to do what irregular German troops did during the Napoleonic invasions in the early 1800s and so forth during the Thirty Years War as well. So they hearken back to earlier precedents in German history. But the thought was we need to make life, you know, hell for Allied soldiers once German territory is actually seized. And the hope was of course that the Allied forces would eventually tire of all the

sniper attacks and acts of sabotage and they would just leave. This was taken so seriously by people like Dwight Eisenhower that the whole myth of the Alpine readout, you know, in southern Bavaria, in the Alpine region there were fears that there would be hundreds of thousands of soldiers in, you know, salt mines and all kinds of other fortresses. And if I understand it correctly, in the march towards Berlin, some American troops peeled off.

to make sure that part of Bavaria was secured. And the werewolf myth kind of hovered over all of this. It's not the case that there weren't any werewolf forces or attacks, in fact there were, but they mostly claimed German victims. So that, for example, in the last weeks of the war, when Hitler in March of 45 issued his Nero order to just basically lay waste to all Germany's infrastructure.

A lot of anti-Nazi villagers and townspeople decided to countermand those orders and resist them and some Nazi officials throughout the country ended up using werewolf forces to quell that quote unquote defeatism. And there are some notorious massacres that take place in the last phase of the war where werewolf soldiers are implicated. And then after the war, there certainly were scattered acts of sabotage, but in the Western

gavriel rosenfeld (17:48.758)
you see that this prospect of German resistance was very, very hyped, at least for the first couple months after the conflict ended. And then the fears of the Western allies shift over to other resistance elements and potential coup attempts, which I also talk about in other parts of the book.

Waitman (18:11.232)
Yeah. And I want to talk about those because I mean, certainly one of the things I didn't realize even, I always sort of had bought into that same sort of myth. And you talk about how even historians have kind of contributed to this by suggesting essentially with the benefit of hindsight saying, look, none of these things had any chance of success. But actually, there are some very real attempts at doing this. But before I get to that, I want to...

I want to ask you to highlight something that I thought was really insightful about this idea, which is the effect that having a divided Germany had on the motivations for this kind of insurgent resistance. Because you make a really interesting point about what might have happened had the Soviet Union occupied all of Germany or vice versa.

had the Western allies occupied all of Germany, and how had either of those things happened, we might actually have had a much more dangerous and widespread insurgency.

gavriel rosenfeld (19:14.686)
Yeah, no, it's an interesting silver lining in terms of the from the Cold War, I guess you'd say. So the argument I made is that having read a lot of really interesting research, like by Perry Bittescom and others, Volker Koop, about the actual werewolf phenomenon, it became pretty clear to me as they documented that the most severe and radical violence

perpetrated by werewolf forces were in the East, was in the East. And that makes sense because there's a lot of ethnic cleansing of German populations at the end of the war. There was much more violence by Red Army forces against the German civilian population. And, you know, in response, the reprisals of werewolf forces and German troops more broadly in that area were much more severe.

I argued that if the Soviet Union had occupied all of Germany, you would have probably had the same kind of werewolf violence because Soviet retribution would have been much more egregious. We're all familiar, of course, with the mass rapes and the looting and massacres and so forth. Ironically, though, what I argue is that because the entire western part of Germany was occupied by the correspondingly milder forces of the British, French, and the U.S.,

that most werewolf forces who would have been tempted to rebel actually realized they had it pretty easy because comparatively speaking, you would have much rather as a German, as an ex-Wehrmacht soldier or an SS man, you'd much prefer living under Western allied rule than under Soviet rule. And in fact, it's well known that many German soldiers fled from the East to the West for the comparative safety of the Western occupation zones.

So in a way, it's sort of the famous good cop, bad cop analogy. The very brutal treatment of Germans in the Eastern zone led, I think, any potential insurgents in the West to sort of figure to themselves, what's the point? We're much better off here. And so the actual violence that ended up appearing in the West was correspondingly mild. And by the same token, if the United States and Western allies had occupied all of Germany,

gavriel rosenfeld (21:38.858)
all the way to the Oder River, probably you would have seen the same thing, because then potential rebels wouldn't have known how much worse it could have been under Soviet rule, and they might have just rebelled against Allied rule. So in a way, it was the split between the punitive Soviets and the comparatively mild Western Allies that may have nipped some of this in the bud.

Waitman (22:01.832)
Yeah. So what are the... Can you tell us some of these plots, right? Because I thought they're really interesting, you know, of people actually... This wasn't rhetorical. These were ex-Nazis. You know, some of them... And one of the streams that runs through the book, but also this idea in general that I think is worth considering and one that I found really interesting, of course, is just how many Nazis. Many of whom were...

quite high level, were able to just kind of reenter society, you know, in variety of ways. And in fact, one of the things that was a bit surprising to me, you know, was the very early allowance of far-right parties, political parties, even in a West Germany that was clearly cognizant of these things and was not sort of supportive of them.

gavriel rosenfeld (22:57.294)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman (23:00.992)
Um, but you know, we, we often look at, you know, Holocaust and I'll in Germany, right. Which is it, which is, um, illegal, right. And sometimes people say, well, like, you know, that's, that's kind of heavy handed. And I, and, but yet even early on. We are, they're allowing these far right parties to at least exist. I mean, they're not being, as you point out, they're not being incredibly successful electorally, but they're also not being outright outlawed either.

gavriel rosenfeld (23:28.234)
Yeah, no, I think it's an excellent point. I mean, one of the larger arguments of the book is that because post-war Germany ended up being a success story, it's tempting for historians to basically say there were never any bumps in the road and the, you know, erfolgsgeschichte, the success story of post-war Germany in terms of political stability and economic prosperity was all sort of baked in from the beginning and there were no moments when things could have gone otherwise. I say it's the exact opposite. There were plenty of moments, especially...

in the very, very vulnerable years of 1945 to, I would say, really, 57, certainly to 53, where there were possibilities for Germany's experiment democracy to go off the rails. Keep in mind that while today the German Supreme Court can ban political parties, that wasn't actually done until, for the first time, 1952, when the Socialist Right Party was banned, and then in 56, when the KPD was banned.

And the reason why that wasn't done until the early 50s is that the Supreme Court hadn't actually been empowered to do that until late in the game. Just by the same token, you know, we can't Germans can't say things in public or show certain Nazi symbols in public because it would be seen as Volkswehrherzungen, you know, hate speech. That law only came into being in the 1960s after the infamous swastika wave of 1959, 1960s. So a lot of.

what we today credit as Germany's militant democracy took place against the backdrop of ongoing fears of a Nazi resurgence, so that's certainly worth keeping in mind. But it also led me to basically make sense of a lot of stuff I was seeing in the primary source press coverage of events that I'd never ever heard of before. So when I think of two famous coup attempts from 19, well, between 1945 and 1947 really,

that were crushed by Allied forces. One was known as Operation Nursery, which crushed a coup attempt by the Hitler Youth veterans, led by Arthur Oxman, who was a Balder von Schiroch successor, who took charge of the Hitler Youth, I think, in 1940, and was actually in the bunker with Hitler and Bormann till the bitter end. He slunk off to southern Germany.

gavriel rosenfeld (25:54.954)
after 1945, but was merely biding his time, waiting to become the next Fuhrer, hoping to infiltrate allied military government agencies by bringing his Hitler Youth officers, getting them involved in infiltration activities so that they could sort of rig the system, if you will, of allied rule until they would take off and then they would have positions of power and influence. Fortunately, a lot of the...

military government agencies where these Hitler youth types had made their presence in were also filled with spies. So they got basically exposed to British military government officials and some American military government officials. In early 1946, there was a huge arrest wave where over a thousand people were arrested with some shots fired between Allied and German forces. And then for

several weeks, there were just blazing headlines in the American and British press, you know, Nazi coup attempt squelched. And I thought to myself, well, I've never heard of Operation Nursery. I've never heard of Arthur Oxman. I never heard that there was a plot to create a fourth Reich, as a recent author wrote in chronicling the Oxman effort. But that wasn't even the only one. Operation Selection Board about a year later also

crushed a coup attempt of former SS officers, Wehrmacht forces and some other Nazi Gauleiters to infiltrate also allied forces and to try and convince them to consider rearming Germany as a neutral power at a time when the Cold War hadn't yet brought Germany to the Western Alliance. That had to be.

suppressed as well. And so what you really see, and I sort of zoom out in the section of the book where I talk about these, to point out that in the very vulnerable years 45, 46, 47, the German people were in such desperate circumstances that they were a ready audience for extremism. Remember that the average calorie intake of Germans was under a thousand calories a day.

gavriel rosenfeld (28:17.142)
Allied military government policy hadn't yet switched over to a reconstructionist approach. It was still very punitive. There was tremendous resentment about denazification. And all of that was leading some Germans, desperate as they were, to contemplate alternatives to liberal democracy. And yeah, you do see support for right-wing parties, which yes, in fact, are legal at this point in time. And fortunately, for at least a good four-year period.

Allied military officials were the backstop that were able to make sure that German democracy didn't get sabotaged from within

Waitman (28:56.984)
And one of the things that I think is so important, and this is one of those, you know, historians at home, you know, young historians, students at home, you know, the role and the importance that you give to counterfactuals, I think is really just an interesting aside as well that goes into this, right? Which is, you know, that it's important to recognize, you know, people at the time didn't know that there wouldn't be a mass.

gavriel rosenfeld (29:14.934)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman (29:25.144)
that Nazis weren't behind every door trying to reconstitute the Third Reich or had infiltrated everything. And you can imagine, it seems obvious, but it took you to write it. Where, yeah, if you're in Nazi Germany, if you're in Germany, post-war in 46, 47, and you uncover a plot by a bunch of former Nazis to literally take over Germany, of course you're going to be writing headlines and stories about how

know, frightening this is because here we are, you know, essentially at that point, right, the third time in a century worrying about a sort of aggressive resurgent Germany. So it makes sense that these plots would be taken seriously more than it makes sense now looking back that they're being poo-pooed by scholars today, right?

gavriel rosenfeld (30:04.188)
Mm-hmm.

gavriel rosenfeld (30:17.834)
Yeah, no, that's the retroactive justification phenomenon that we see so often, or what we call hindsight bias. Just because nothing was ever decisively torpedoed in Germany's post-war democratization doesn't mean that there weren't serious attempts to do that. And so I always like to quote Hugh Trevor Oper's comment that history is not what happened, it's what happened in the context of what might have happened. And so to be able to always juxtapose

the outcome of history with other possible forking paths of development that history could have followed had only one or two variables been different. I think that's always a useful thing to keep in mind. And honestly the whole history of Western historiography is full of people mulling over the what-ifs of everything from the Peloponnesian War to the Persian Wars and I'm writing a big

book right now kind of actually documenting the history of what if thinking among historians since Herodotus and Thucydides all the way up to the present, which, you know, is a kind of a tall order, but there's plenty of what ifs to be charted and identified in the documentary record. But I tried to apply it in this book to, you know, make sense of the fears of people at the time, because any history of the fourth rite is the history of fears. And we know in our present day political.

Waitman (31:32.315)
Yeah.

gavriel rosenfeld (31:42.062)
climate of, you know, since 2015 and the rise of Trump and MAGAism that sometimes fears are hyperbolic and sometimes fears are justified. And, you know, there is this famous idea called the overreaction paradox where if you know, you look back on history and you see how everybody, you know, cried wolf and lost their minds and we say that because nothing ever happened. Well, we don't know if nothing ever happened because

We did lose our minds and overreacted because, you know, what's, you know, better safe than sorry is usually the motto that people use to kind of explain that.

Waitman (32:19.668)
Well, this is also the, I mean, to take it in a completely different direction, but just for, this is also the prevention of genocide problem, which is how do we, because often in order to prevent genocide, you have to intervene in somebody else's internal political affairs. And so how do you prove after the fact that was justified if in fact genocide hasn't occurred because you prevented it in the first place, right? But I mean, with the-

gavriel rosenfeld (32:44.033)
Mm-hmm.

gavriel rosenfeld (32:49.386)
Absolutely.

Waitman (32:50.392)
With the Trump thing, I think is really interesting because we're in this moment, and we'll get back to the history in a minute, but we're in this moment where a lot of people, and a lot of smart people, and a lot of smart, serious people are saying, look, we are in a danger zone, at least in the United States, when it comes to democracy and fascism and extremism and a rise in the popularity of those latter two ideas.

Um, you know, to the extent that some people are saying, you know, they're asked, literally asking the question, was this what it was like to be living in like 1920s or late twenties, early thirties, Germany, you know, like, are we, are we the toad, are we the frog in the, in the, you know, boiling water slowly, you know, and will we look back on it as you, as you point out just now, like, are we going to look back on it and be like, Oh, well, that was ridiculous. Or, or 50 years from now, somebody write back, look back and say, you know, this was the moment that.

gavriel rosenfeld (33:30.903)
Yeah.

Waitman (33:49.416)
America took this turn and then we had this long struggle to pull ourselves out of it.

gavriel rosenfeld (33:54.486)
Yeah, no, that's the crucial thing about pivotal moments, points of divergence in history. We are at one of those inflection points where things could easily go in a certain direction. And if we, you know, again, I'll put my political biases very upfront, you know, if as I hope, Joe Biden is reelected and the Democrats retain control over at least the presidency and we avert this, you know, clear threat, whatever one wants to call it, you know, people may end up

finding this outcome as confirmation of American exceptionalism that at a time of global right-wing resurgence, we resisted this effort and it was clear testament to our democratic bona fides that trace all the way back to 1776, etc., etc. On the other hand, we could easily point out, as I think you and I would probably agree, that this idea that America has always

gavriel rosenfeld (34:54.61)
We've never had any fascist tendencies is totally bunk, which is why, you know, Rachel Maddow's new book, Prequel, and her podcast, Ultra, are so popular because everyone wants to see, well, what are the origins of our present day right-wing, you know, movements? And so we can always find sources in the past for things going on in the present. But from my perspective, I wrote this book partly to not have that hindsight bias being decisive, but to see what people were saying in the moment.

when the future was still unknown. Because that's sort of the exact moment we're in now where we don't know what the future holds. And so if we can learn from the best practices of the past and how people in a period of uncertainty and instability acted, maybe we can see the justifiability of being safe rather than sorry. And if we end up using more inflammatory rhetoric, maybe there is a price to be paid for some of that. I think we both know that.

you know, endless calls about fascism that never arrive can lead people to become desensitized. On the other hand, if there really are fascists out there who are intending ill will to our political system, then maybe we ought to know what the Germans did to protect their political system in the 40s and 50s.

Waitman (36:10.984)
And this is one of the points that you make in the book, which is that in some ways I'm using hysteria in air quotes here, but, and that's cause I'm talking about with the hindsight bias, but you make the argument that essentially what we now look upon as sort of hysteria about calling out the fourth Reich and the fact that the fourth right then becomes kind of a caricatured cartoonish idea paradoxically may have been exactly what you're talking about.

because people were hypersensitive to it, that's why it was never able to sort of get a foothold, right? But to bring it back to the history a little bit, one of the, and I'm not sure if you mentioned, I think this is the quote, I think Adenara said something like, in the post-war period, we could have had justice or democracy, but not both. When it comes to confronting Nazi war criminals,

gavriel rosenfeld (36:47.595)
Yeah.

gavriel rosenfeld (37:02.114)
Right.

Waitman (37:08.976)
And you talk about that in the book as well. And they affected that has on essentially the Germany is what we'll call.

unsatisfying approach to prosecuting Nazis. You know, what is the role that has in either sort of allowing or preventing an actual resurgence of the fourth Reich and, or rather, how does that, how does the fact that there are Nazis left around perhaps perpetuate the fear of the fourth Reich?

gavriel rosenfeld (37:44.938)
I mean, it's a huge question. It's again one of the master narratives of post-war German memory studies, this idea associated with Herrmann-Luba that the only way Germany could have democratized after World War II is by repressing the reality of Nazism, integrating all the former perpetrators into the post-war system, and basically forgetting. In other words, amnesia was the price paid for democracy. The premise being, and again, it's a counterfactual, if the German...

Democrats who wanted to rebuild Germany as a democracy had decided to take all eight million Nazi party members from 1933 or 39 and hold them accountable for their crimes and prevent them from getting jobs as school teachers and judges and milkmen or whatever Those people would have so much resentment towards the post war Democrat Democratic order They would have you know worked to undermine it and so, you know forgetting their past Giving them a slap on the wrist

making sure they had a job. And so by 1957, 58, 59, Germany has 0% unemployment and all the ex-Nazis are doing well, you know, that's morally problematic, but it's good for the sake of the Western Alliance and democracy in Europe. Now, in the short term, I don't think there's much argument that that, you know, was the right decision. People like Jeffrey Herf have long argued that there were alternatives.

to that policy of amnesia and democratization, you could have maybe had your cake and eaten it too. You could have had democratization with a better carrying out of justice. And I argue in the book that there is a case to be made that a lot of the people who were integrated into the post-war political system, whether in the German equivalent of the FBI or in the police forces or whatever, they could have been a liability.

had Germany not had the economic success and stability that it did in the 1950s? Because one's political loyalty to any system is usually dependent on your social and economic well-being. And had there been, for example, no economic boom in Germany because of the Korean War, or if Germany's reparations payments to the Western allies from World War I hadn't been forgiven to a certain degree, in other words, if Germany had much

gavriel rosenfeld (40:06.814)
more of a tenuous economic situation. And remember in the early 50s, unemployment rate was still 14%. Having tons and tons of ex-Nazis in the judiciary and the civil service, that could have become toxic. Fortunately, it never came to anything because the overall structure of Adenauer's administration was stable enough. But you take it again to the present. If you think about the people who could be in a future Trump administration.

You know, you could have a lot of tremendous instability if you have, you know, a recession in the U.S. and that, by the way, would have easily been the case, you know, in the four years from 2016 to 2020. I mean, some of the people who have...

Waitman (40:53.364)
Well, and there would, and there would have been, um, there's also a macro micro element here too, I think it's certainly in the, in the German context, right? Where, you know, the fact that Adenauer doesn't.

I think some people would say essentially tear the country apart in coming to terms with the past, right? By some kind of massively punitive and invasive attempt at essentially, at this point, we're talking about a judicial reckoning. Because he doesn't do that, he buys this macro arc towards democracy.

gavriel rosenfeld (41:14.2)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman (41:35.488)
But at the expense of the actual literal justice for Holocaust victims, you know, of exactly having the fact that, I mean, I remember reading, I think it was in Rebecca Bittman's book about the, um, the Auschwitz trial, where, um, you know, they, they busted it on, on a guy's house. They were investigating, um, and he was in the police and on his desk, on his kitchen table, he had all the case files.

from the case against him, along with the, you know, the witnesses and their addresses. I mean, like, so, you know, the, there, this, this compromise is very much a, it's, it's a compromise that was not without its own victims because the, the victim of the Adenauer compromise in this sense is all of the Nazis who lived long and fruitful lives, who had, who were legitimate, you know, actual, actual criminals that had actually done, you know, horrible things, which is.

gavriel rosenfeld (42:05.503)
Mm-hmm.

gavriel rosenfeld (42:31.874)
Yeah, no, for sure. And it highlights the fact, moreover, that Germany's democracy, in terms of its international reputation, took a hit because of the constant press coverage of ex-Nazis in Adenauer's cabinet, like Hans Glöckner, endless talk in the Western, especially British and American press, about renazification, endless opportunities for the East German government to expose West Germany as non-reliable. So until the, you know,

Waitman (42:32.928)
You know.

gavriel rosenfeld (43:00.238)
transition of power from I guess it was Libby Gerhard to Billy Brandt or from Kiesinger to Brandt in 69 only with the first peaceful handover of power from the CDU to the SPD did Only then did Western observers start to warm up to the idea that Germany's democracy was actually mature And even until reunification as we both know in 1990 There were still plenty of people who viewed Germany's on probation because of the closet Nazis or the Nazi legacy

Waitman (43:28.908)
Well, and still do in a lot of ways. I mean, I remember, I remember in the 2000s, when I think Germany sent Bundeswehr soldiers to Afghanistan or Iraq, one of the two, but it was like the first time that the Germany had sent military forces overseas since World War II. And there, even then there were people that were like, uh, you know, and then of course the, the Bundeswehr didn't help itself by, you know, using the Afrika

on some of its vehicles, but you know, there is this, it's one of those things that on the one hand is sort of unfair because I think we're now at the point where it's fairly certain that we're not going to have a, a Nazi Germany anymore. But you know, it's, it's one of those things that is a, is a testament to kind of the, the phenomenon that you have identified of, you know, this is something that is a fear, right? Um, and one of the things that, yeah, go ahead.

gavriel rosenfeld (43:59.757)
Mm-hmm.

gavriel rosenfeld (44:24.706)
Right, and then it's, no, I was just gonna say, and it raises the interesting question of whether these fears and these accusations about a looming fourth Reich, whether they're being made in good faith or bad faith. Because I think people who don't like Germany's being potentially involved in foreign military zones, probably don't, I'm guessing, think that circa 2024, 1997, or 2006, that...

it's really likely there's going to be a Nazi regime emerging in Germany, but they can still use it as a cudgel, you know, the accusation of a fourth Reich or a new fascist movement to beat Germany over the head with. And that's what I would call like a more instrumentalized, tendentious, maybe bad faith use of a Nazi comparison. Whereas in the early 50s, people were very much sincere about it. And I think there's a lot more

Waitman (44:57.866)
Right.

Waitman (45:08.626)
Yep.

Waitman (45:14.388)
Well, you had you had Wehrmacht generals in the Bundeswehr. I mean, you know, it wasn't and you had even, you know, even before that, you had Patton before he died, saying we really should. What we should really do is turn the Wehrmacht around and point them at the at the Soviet Union and fight alongside them. You know, which is a its own sort of imagined kind of forthright in a way. You know, it's kind of like handing over the keys.

gavriel rosenfeld (45:33.055)
Yeah.

gavriel rosenfeld (45:40.95)
Yeah.

Waitman (45:43.296)
to the guys that were driving the car before, or just this time we're in the passenger seat.

gavriel rosenfeld (45:48.182)
Yeah, and at a certain discursive level, the Fourth Reich is literally no different from the phrase fascism or fascist, because it's an easy way to get attention for your cause, whatever that cause is, and sound the alarm bells for your constituency. So when James Baldwin or the Black Panthers in the late 60s accused Richard Nixon of bringing about a Fourth Reich in America and that there are going to be concentration camps in Philadelphia and New York City for Black radicals.

you know, obviously there's a rhetorical element to that, but I can't say that I don't know whether James Baldwin really thought that fascism was on the horizon in the United States. You get looking back on it, it seems very overblown, but to try and get into the thinking of people in the moment who are using these phrases, and then to trace how they, you know, end up confirming the same pattern of usage over and over and over and over again, I'd start at the beginning of the book by saying, there never was a fourth Reich.

And to this date, there hasn't ever been one, but you still see, you know, over the course of 80, 90 years, people talking about it incessantly. So what does that mean about the concept as such? Is it useful? Is it useless? You know, I think there's some arguments to be made for both.

Waitman (46:59.528)
Well, one of the things that I found really, really interesting, and I mentioned this before we started recording, you know, all the films and books and things that I kind of mentioned in now checking out that you mentioned, the way that the Fourth Reich, the idea of a Fourth Reich is reflected in popular culture. And in my mind, it kind of connects with zombie films in the sense that, you know, zombie films are often about public anxieties.

about unrelated things, but they provide sort of a vehicle for that. Um, can we just talk about some of these, these amazing examples from popular culture about the way in which this imaginary fourth Reich, which in this case is almost always sort of a, a Nazi resurgent version is used.

gavriel rosenfeld (47:31.479)
Mm-hmm.

gavriel rosenfeld (47:52.606)
I mean, the 70s are, I mean, they start in the 60s and 70s. They reach their apex in films like The Boys from Brazil, which was also a novel by Ira Levin, starring Gregory Peck, I think, as Dr. Mengele. You've got Frederick Forsythe's The Odessa File. You've got Robert Ludlund's The Holcroft Covenant. There are all kinds of dastardly, you know, cookie cutter Nazi villains.

Not just, you know, trying to enrich themselves after the war or committing, you know, crimes of passion against individuals. They're literally politically plotting to take over the world. And what I argue in this particular chapter, and there are Mission Impossible episodes, there's comic books, there's all kinds of stuff where you see these tropes just recycled over and over. They did begin seriously in earnest in the early 1960s in response to, not surprisingly, the Eichmann trial.

to the subsequent war crimes trials, the Auschwitz trial, the exposing to the larger audience of people in the West that there were still Nazis in Germany and you know the furor over the flight of Mengele of Bormann, a lot of the Hitler wave of the early 1970s fed into this as well, all the myths of taking a submarine to Argentina and so forth.

People were making bank with this kind of stuff, no question, Hollywood studios, you know, publishing houses and so forth. But what it really did was popularize the phrase, the Fourth Reich, to become just like an iconic phrase among Western audiences. And here we're talking especially about the people that grew up as kids in the 60s and 70s, people who didn't fight in the war as combat veterans or anything like that. They're taking it one level removed.

And they're having all of these images being mediated through, again, Pulp Fiction, Hollywood Cinema, and so forth. But it does create a kind of staying power to this idea of the fourth, right? So much so that when you think about some of the shows that have been streaming online in recent years in the United States, like The Man on the High Castle on Amazon, yeah, or, you know, Watchmen, or The Plot Against America, or.

Waitman (50:05.276)
Right. I was going to mention this one. Yeah.

gavriel rosenfeld (50:14.646)
Hunters starring Al Pacino, which by the way, if any of your listeners are interested in streaming, two seasons of a great schlocky series set in the 1970s in New York City where a bunch of Nazi war criminals who had been brought into the United States through Operation Paperclip, they're plotting a fourth Reich. I mean, there's literally a whole cottage industry of pop culture artifacts promoting these.

sort of the belief in these ideas. And partly, I guess there's a morally upright purpose to it. It's keeping us always vigilant and on guard against the possibility of research and Nazism. But of course, in a climate of Trumpism and MAGAism, there's a lot more plausibility to those plot points, which is why I think we've seen so many of those shows, you know, kind of coming about in recent years with all the predictable political response.

Waitman (51:04.796)
And yeah, I mean, not, not to rub it. I also with the Mennon High Castle, because I was curious about that. I didn't know, you know, what your thoughts were on this one. There's also something voyeuristic about it. Um, you know, imagining, imagining what a world in which the Nazis won. So it's not really a fourth Reich. It's, it's sort of like third Reich extended, right. Or actual third Reich, you know, but.

gavriel rosenfeld (51:29.683)
Exactly.

Waitman (51:32.564)
But because we're imagining it, it does kind of fall into this forthright category, right? Because it's a rite that never took place. But I put it in the context of, you know, I often talk with people that are aficionados World War II history. And sometimes you get people saying, well, you know, if only Hitler had done this, if only the Wehrmacht had done this, they would have won World War II. Or, you know, what do you think that...

the, if the Nazis had done this, that or other thing on the Eastern front, could they have won? And my question is always what's behind that question itself, right? Well, why, why do we want to imagine how, how the Nazis could have won? Um, but it seems like Mennon High Castle is, is exactly that, you know, it's, but it's also the Mennon High Castle, I think also

gavriel rosenfeld (52:04.659)
Mm-hmm.

gavriel rosenfeld (52:21.827)
There's a

Waitman (52:25.536)
plays into this red dawn kind of fantasy in America where, you know, we get to be the resistance in a certain sense. Um, you know,

gavriel rosenfeld (52:36.266)
Right, well there is, there's a lot of psychological forces underpinning all counterfactuals. I mean, one of the most basic ones is that when you imagine a nightmare of something that never happened, it's usually to express relief for the way things actually turned out. So, you know, British and American viewers love the premise of the Nazis winning World War II because it allows us to feel gratitude for us having won World War II and reliving the finest hour or, you know, the greatest generation or the good war or all these sort

Waitman (52:50.796)
Mmm.

Waitman (53:00.044)
Mm.

gavriel rosenfeld (53:06.23)
famous ideas. But you pointed out something important just a second ago when you said that it allows us to vicariously imagine being part of the resistance. What you actually notice, and I talked a lot about this in my book, The World Hitler Never Made, is that when you look at how British and American novelists, filmmakers, and so forth have imagined the scenario of a Nazi victory in World War II,

It's usually to express feelings one way or the other about how the American or how the British population would have behaved under occupation. And in the patriotic moments of American and British memory after World War II, of course, every last man and woman was part of the resistance. But in moments of time, say, especially in the 60s, when in Britain, there was a lot of, you know, malaise about the loss of empire. And in America during the Vietnam War, you see a lot of people scratching their heads and say, well, you know what, maybe we would have actually collaborated.

Waitman (53:37.568)
Right.

gavriel rosenfeld (54:01.366)
Maybe we wouldn't have been able to do the right patriotic thing. We would have jumped into bed with the Nazis. We would have killed our own neighbors. And that's a way of offering a more self-critical take on one's own country, one's own history, and you tend to see those self-critical alternate histories emerging in times of national malaise. And I think at the same time, when you see Trumpism emerging in 2015, 16, and then you see the man on the high castle.

routinely showing countless Americans behaving immorally and jumping into bed with the Nazis. That's a way of saying, hey, we have fascism within us ourselves. We shouldn't be complacent and think we're always going to be on the right side of things.

Waitman (54:42.792)
Yeah, I mean, and this is something that you touch on a little bit is the fourth Reich and its universalization, right? So when it, when it ceases to become a specific fear that Germany is going to do it and becomes sort of, well, again, it's this, it's this tension, right? Between the rhetorical and the, the sort of instrumental plan with regards to American neo-Nazism and

gavriel rosenfeld (55:10.658)
Sir.

Waitman (55:11.112)
on the one hand, actual neo-Nazis who are like, let's try to make or return, however you wanna think about it, the United States to a white supremacist state. And then the rhetoric of, that you mentioned, for example, the black power people and some civil rights people who are comparing, you know. And again, I think that there's an important conversation here that we had about, which is also relevant to the modern context of, we didn't need the Nazis to imagine and invent white supremacy.

and invent, you know, sort of fascism in the United States. It can be a foil, it can be a goal or a language, but it's not an import.

gavriel rosenfeld (55:43.958)
Sure.

gavriel rosenfeld (55:52.766)
Yeah, no, I think the thing is that what you referred to correctly as the universalization of the Fourth Reich basically takes place in the 60s when for the first time many people in the West, Britain and America, Canada, North America, wherever, who had been afraid of a Fourth Reich emerging in Germany, 25 years after World War II was over, they had kind of gotten over their immediate fears. And what they instead begin to realize is that because of domestic...

instability in the United States, keep in mind, you know, 68, Martin Luther King and RFK are assassinated, the Vietnam War is going haywire, you've got violence at the Chicago Convention, and you've got people like George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party emerging. You know, there's serious fears that America is now the place we have to worry about more about surging Nazism or far-right extremism than anywhere else. And really from that point on,

You see the Fourth Reich appearing in other contexts. So people who are opposed to apartheid in South Africa were referring to South Africa as the Fourth Reich. When the Greek military junta came into power in the 70s, people used the same thing to, you know, the same phrase to refer to the Greek far right. So what you basically see over time is a term that was originally meant to be a symbol of a progressive Germany that would emerge after the Third Reich.

becomes fixated and associated with the German far right for a whole generation until it becomes so broadly universalized that it can become an all purpose signifier for anything on the far right that anyone doesn't like. Like fascism, like Nazism, like calling someone Hitler. I think the unique thing about the phrase forthright is that it doesn't just call someone a fascist or talk about fascism in the moment. It actually says, here's the end result, the worst case scenario of what might take place if we don't act now.

a forthright, an institutionalized fascist state led by a neo-Hitler of some kind. And so in a way, the forthright is the rhetorical, you know, it's rhetorically one-upping everybody else because it positions that end result as the final threat that we have to be on guard against.

Waitman (58:02.152)
Right. And it's also in some ways a conversation ender. You see this sometimes. I mean, sometimes it's used disingenuously by people who are fascists who sort of say, you know, oh, well, your ultimate response is just call me a Nazi and that's to end the conversation. But on the other hand, you know, sometimes if you call someone a Nazi, then there's no... You can't get better from that. There's nowhere to sort of go from there.

gavriel rosenfeld (58:27.353)
Right, and it's like...

Sure, and unfortunately the right has begun, I mean, it's typically been a left-wing talking point or slogan that's been used to condemn Nixon or to condemn Vietnam War, LBJ, or Donald Trump. But you do now see in an era of right-wing Holocaust inversion where they're attacking COVID vaccine requirements, or they're attacking you know, Obamacare as a sign of a looming Nazi state. You.

see it all the time now, right-wingers saying, under Biden, we've got a fourth Reich in the making. And I would totally accuse those charges of being done in bad faith. Whereas the people who are afraid of Trumpism paving the way to fascism, again, I know I probably sound biased here, but I think there's a lot of plausibility to those claims then from the other end of the spectrum.

Waitman (59:20.076)
No, of course. I mean, and one of the things that's that I've noticed as well, and I'm sure you have too, is that there's a very bizarre.

inversion. And then the COVID is a good example of this, though, though I think COVID is interesting because you had people on both extreme ends of the political spectrum using the Nazi term for the same purposes, right, of the government basically making me do something that I didn't like. And that was really interesting. But you also have, you know, the use of the Jewish star, for example. And, you know, I'm a

gavriel rosenfeld (59:46.72)
Mm-hmm.

gavriel rosenfeld (59:56.333)
Right?

Waitman (59:57.972)
My, my, my vaccine badge is the same thing as the Jewish star, you know, and, or, you know, the government making me register my guns is what the Nazis did to take away, you know, the Jews, right, to resist these kinds of rhetorical things where oftentimes it's the, it's the people who are the essentially the victimizers that are imagining themselves to be the victims, which of course has a longer history going all the way back to the actual Nazis.

themselves doing this kind of thing. Um, but it's a really interesting. Sort of.

gavriel rosenfeld (01:00:26.422)
Yeah.

Waitman (01:00:34.24)
mental gymnastics that takes place of the far, I mean, it's very weird to hear the far right. Essentially proposing policies that are in some ways analogous to policies that the Nazis would have agreed with and then call other people Nazis as an insult. It's kind of a weird, it's a weird paradox there.

gavriel rosenfeld (01:01:00.33)
No, absolutely.

Waitman (01:01:02.192)
Um, yeah, it's, I highly recommend everyone really, um, take a look at this book. Um, there's a lot, there's a lot more to it than we covered today, but it also makes us think about a lot of really important things, um, about how, how these fears, um, both justified and, you know, perhaps not justified as, as it, you know, turns out in some instances, um, you know, lead us to thinking about.

how people at the time were experiencing these things. Because I think one of the things that, that certainly our conversation today is highlighted and the book too is this idea of, you know, we don't know whether or not we're at the, a pivotal moment in history, right? I mean, cause it's almost always hindsight in the sense of looking back, oh, that was a pivotal moment in history, but, you know, very rarely are we at least certain that we're living in one. And we can only act

gavriel rosenfeld (01:01:59.606)
Yeah, we don't.

Waitman (01:02:00.84)
We can only act with our best judgment at the time, which I think, I think actually going all the way back to Adenauer, that's a really great example of this, you know, like you have a guy who had to make a decision because he didn't, he didn't live in a, in an ideal theoretical world. He lived in a world where he had to make a decision, a political decision about how we, how do we approach this? And he made one, because he made one in the time that he was in based on the knowledge that he had.

doesn't mean that we can't look back on it and say that was a good, bad, or, or middling decision, but we have to make decisions at the time that we're, that we're in.

gavriel rosenfeld (01:02:38.87)
Yeah, and we can only judge those decisions once we know the end of the story. And the problem is we're living at a time right now where we don't know what the end of our story is going to be on any number of fronts, the Middle East war, climate change, you know, whether there'll be another January 6, you name it. I mean, we're really, and that it's, you know, some people refer to our poly crisis and so forth, but on just so many narrative fronts, we're uncertain. So I feel like it's all hands on deck.

Waitman (01:02:43.058)
Yeah.

gavriel rosenfeld (01:03:06.09)
politically to be sure that we're, you know, aware of the stakes of all these different issues and we can, you know, do what we can in, you know, a liberal democratic setting to have our concerns be registered.

Waitman (01:03:17.588)
And of course, in the background of all of this, which is a conversation for a whole another podcast, you know, is the value of a comparative historical approach, you know, and the value of what I would call reasonable and rational comparisons between fascism and Nazism and conservatism.

Waitman (01:03:47.464)
You know, there are things that are, that can be similar. And as long as one is approaching this in sort of a rational, reasonable perspective, you know, the comparative is something that helps us judge this moment, you know, and we can say, you know, there have been moments like this in the past that are very similar in these series of factors. And, you know, that can hopefully help us to

to make the right decisions, right? Without getting too much into it.

gavriel rosenfeld (01:04:18.346)
Yeah, we can draw our own comparisons. We can make them as educated historians, and hopefully the general public will find them plausible. And we can also call out the irresponsible comparisons made by partisans on whatever wing of the spectrum. Because, you know, one of the...

byproducts of Holocaust education, literacies, everyone thinks they know what happened in that era and feel entitled to make comparisons no matter how far fetched they are. So that's, you know, whatever, the opposite of the silver lining, I guess, of greater historical literacy.

Waitman (01:04:47.232)
Exactly. Yeah, that's the burden, right? That comes with the greater historical literacy. And so before I let you go, I always like to put our guests who are always knowledgeable about the Holocaust on the spot by asking them, what is one book that you would recommend about the Holocaust as useful or one that has been particularly impactful for you with the understandable

gavriel rosenfeld (01:04:52.811)
Yeah.

Waitman (01:05:15.956)
There is no one book and you know, this, your answer may change on any given day of the week, but on this day of the week today, uh, Gav, what do you, what do you think?

gavriel rosenfeld (01:05:24.594)
Yeah. Well, I guess one book that I would throw out, which is an unconventional, because I was going to say I, you know, saw Freelanders, two volume, Magnum Opus on the Holocaust was a book that I worked on as a research assistant for him, sentimental, you know, feelings about helping him in the early 90s gathered sources for that. It would be easy for me to say that but

And maybe a bit more of an outside the box book is Jeffrey Gerach, who's a professor at, history professor at Ushiva University. He wrote a book called The Holocaust Averted. And it's a counterfactual reflection on if the Holocaust hadn't happened, how would American Jewish and European Jewish history have been different?

So it is an exercise in counterfactual history. I think it came out in 2015 or so. It's super interesting. And it's a way of approaching the topic from a sort of reverse perspective of what might've happened, but didn't. And usually as I quoted to Trevor Roper earlier, by seeing what could have happened, it will help you get a clear understanding of what actually did. So the Holocaust diverted.

Waitman (01:06:35.424)
Great, it was Holocaust averted. Gav, thanks so much for coming on the show notes. We'll have a link to the Fourth Reich, the specter of Nazism from World War II to the present. Gav, where can people find you on Twitter, social media?

gavriel rosenfeld (01:06:52.042)
Yep, I'm on Twitter. I'm on, yeah. Do I have to look up my handle? I don't even know what it is. Okay. Yeah, you can just go on gavrierosenfeld.com. That's my homepage with all the journalistic stuff.

Waitman (01:07:00.272)
No, no, I'll put it in there as well. Yeah, if you don't know it, that's totally fine. Again.

gavriel rosenfeld (01:07:14.946)
Yeah. Quick.

Waitman (01:07:15.892)
Well, thank you so much for, for being on the podcast. Really appreciate it. Okay. Bye bye.

gavriel rosenfeld (01:07:19.81)
Thanks so much, David.