Ep. 37- The Nazis and Christianity with Richard Steigmann-Gall

What was the relationship between Christianity?  Could one be both a Nazi and a Christian?  What was the relationship between religious antisemitism and other forms of Jew hatred?  On today’s episode, I talked with Richard Steigmann-Gall about these difficult but important questions.  

Richard Steigmann-Gall is an associate professor of history at Kent State University.

Steigmann-Gall, Richard. The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945(2009)

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

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:00.879)
Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Holocaust history podcast. I'm your host, Waidman Born. And today we're talking about a really fascinating issue, which is the connections and disconnections between Nazism and Christianity. I think a lot of us, you know, have preconceived notions probably about the compatibility or incompatibility between these two ideologies.

And today I have an excellent guest, Richard Steig-Mengall, who has written a book about this, to come here and talk to us a little bit about the ways in which Christianity and Nazism fit on each other and the extent to which Nazis were Christians, and also to explain what the heck was going on with those weird pagan Nazis. Richard, thanks for coming on.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (00:51.222)
Thanks very much for having me, Waipman.

Waitman Beorn (00:53.241)
So can you start by telling us little bit, as always, how did you get into this topic as a scholarly research project?

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:01.514)
Yeah, no, it's a great question. And as we historians always say about ourselves, when we do our history, we're really trying to discover something about ourselves, ultimately. And in my case, it sort of was about my dad, funnily enough. He was a refugee of Nazi Germany, and he was born of a Gentile father and a Jewish mother.

And very appreciantly, they left Germany in 1933 already when my dad was only two years old. And he had a very dramatic story to tell about his wartime experiences, first in Luxembourg, then in England, then after World War II, moving to the United States and then Canada. And through all that, I was fascinated by his own theories, I'll say, about Nazism as he lived through it and experienced it.

And so his own recollections really spurred my interest. He was very, I think, haunted by a youth of experiencing antisemitism and tried to understand it as best he could given his youth when he was being tormented by it. And so this question of antisemitism was very

keenly part of his life. And it left a huge residue intellectually and of course even more so emotionally for him. And so I got interested in that and started to explore it as a college student and ask questions of a very strong narrative that at least in those days was very midstream that challenged the question

that Nazism must have been anti-Christian, that Hitler was an atheist or sought to destroy Christianity. And this was particularly an interesting tension given that there was a whole emerging scholarship which was finally scrutinizing this question of the sort of prehistory of Nazi antisemitism as revealed in Christian forms of antisemitism, right?

Richard Steigmann-Gall (03:22.036)
So scholars that you and I are familiar with, maybe some of your viewers or listeners are, like Uriel Tal and Saul Friedländer, who wanted to interrogate the longue durée of antisemitism, this apoccal prejudice, which then seems to culminate in Auschwitz, even as then other scholars said, well, no, that had to be a departure.

from prior forms of antisemitism. So this question of continuity or break, it seemed to me that at a particular moment in the scholarship on the history of Jew hatred, a stake was being made, a claim was being staked, I guess, about the continuity end of that argument. And so that struck me as dissonant with an understanding of Nazis as somehow an inherently anti-Christian movement. So I sought to...

Waitman Beorn (03:57.999)
you

Richard Steigmann-Gall (04:19.98)
reconcile what struck me as an analytical dissonance by examining what the Nazis themselves had to say about such a connection or more broadly, what they felt about Christianity as a movement that arose in a majority Christian country, at least nominally, right, looking at church membership. It struck me as a...

as a whole in the historiography on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust that nobody wanted to fill. And so I made a gambit to fill it.

Waitman Beorn (04:57.711)
It is interesting because like one of the things that I'm now thinking that I'm kind of guilty of doing this, because I teach a class here, on the history of anti-Semitism and it goes from the dawn of time until present. And I kind of think I make, I make the error of sort of suggesting that I present to them that they're basically, you know, several kinds of anti-Semitism. have religious anti-Semitism, economic anti-Semitism, Christian or political anti-Semitism, then racial anti-Semitism.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (05:27.722)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (05:28.227)
And I feel like that I, I may be presenting sort of the false dichotomy that like religious anti-Semitism is kind of like the kinder gentler anti-Semitism. And it's not nearly as bad as, as racial anti-Semitism, which it's on some sense it is that is true because you, you, you can't get better in a sense from racial anti-Semitism in the way that you sort of can from the religious side of things. But I think after reading what you've written and

beginning already with this conversation, seems like actually one might make the argument that because of the way that Christianity meshes with Nazi ideology, it isn't sort of this kind of gentler, you know, kind of civil and archaic form of anti-Semitism.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (06:15.37)
Right, I mean, I think there's a way in which we conceive of these different strands of Jew hatred as sort of parallel varieties that don't intersect, right? So the religious, racial, economic, social, political, and these are all somehow autonomously pointing in the same direction. My own...

Waitman Beorn (06:28.067)
Right.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (06:40.746)
view is that I think really religious antisemitism is perhaps more usefully thought of as the trunk on a tree with many branches and that these other varieties then branch out from that trunk. So of course the question is one of the sanctity of baptism, right? A lot of people who look at racial antisemitism will say, no, no, if you believe a Jew is still a Jew, even after they convert to Christianity,

then you are defying the logic of baptism and you've exited the arena of Christian antisemitism into something that stands opposed to the Christianity because you're defying the doctrine of baptism. Against that, I think we can take a look, not just hypothetically, but historically about the very origins of racial antisemitism, so-called, as originating in among

other places, most especially the era of Inquisitions, where we see, especially in the case of Spain, a newly Christianized or re-Christianized country saying, okay, in the glory of Christ, we must all now become Christian. If you're Jewish or you're Muslim, you have a choice to make, you either convert or you leave. And as many scholars of the Spanish Inquisition have pointed to, ironically,

the invitation was too widely accepted, too many Jews said, okay, we'll convert in ways that then had the Christian Catholic Inquisitionists saying, wait a minute, that was too easy. We're not sure these people really mean it. So then they created new categories, right? The Converso, the Marano, people who were designated by a Catholic polity to be

Waitman Beorn (08:28.367)
All right.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (08:40.03)
falsely Christian, right? So they created a goalpost and too many proverbial footballs were going through it, right? So they had to change the goalpost. And so it's within a Christian framework of doubting the authenticity of the conversion that you see the origins of the key to racial antisemitism, as your audience of course would know.

is immutability, right? The unchangeability of the Jew is the core ingredient. Now, whether that gets overlaid with biologistic language borrowed from social Darwinism in the 19th century or something else, it's this question of immutability. And it's within a Christian framework that we see an inculcation of the idea that the Jew is immutable. So this is all by way of saying, look,

if the Nazis said we don't care about your baptism, that's not proof that they're anti-Christian.

Waitman Beorn (09:42.911)
Right, because there are historical precedents, or antecedents, I suppose.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (09:46.122)
Right, and their own utterances, more interestingly, this is where I then, okay, let's see what the archives reveal. And the Nazis themselves were making this argument that a Jew remains a Jew because in their diabolical deviousness, this religious trope of the demonic Jew, right, they are shapeshifters, right? And so you get this medieval depiction of the Jew as a supermenace.

who can never be trusted. So of course then, if they convert, even the Christian who says, okay, I guess you're one of me now, right, has this sort of, not just residue of skepticism, but actual doubt.

Waitman Beorn (10:28.249)
Yeah, I mean, and we'll probably come back to this, but, I always point out to students that, you know, one of the sort of awful ironies of the Nazi state is that they, you know, they claim this sort of genetic characteristic of being Jewish. But obviously, because there's no genetic test for being Jewish, the only way they really can tell is religious.

observance and a history thereof. Right. So there's already kind of that irony. But before we get there, I want to go back a little bit to sort of if you can lay out for us just kind of because obviously you have a particular argument here. How have people begun or how did scholars begin thinking about this topic? When did they start asking these questions about the relationships between Christianity and Nazism?

and then bring us up to sort of where you come in.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (11:27.84)
Yeah, so I mean, there was a scholar since deceased named John Conway, who in 1968 wrote sort of the big book, what he titled the Nazi Persecution of the Churches. And that was the end all, right? That opened and closed the debate on Nazi attitudes towards Christianity by claiming to

unveil a very systematic Nazi ambition that once we're in power, we're going to destroy Christianity. Once the Jewish problem, quote unquote, has been solved, then we will hit the even bigger question of the Christian problem. So he, in my considered opinion, very tendentiously found the evidence that would support this theory.

including using the notoriously unreliable Hermann Rauschning, who, as you may recall from my discussion of this particular source in my book, has been long ago dispensed with as an unreliable narrator, right? But the ways in which scholars after World War II relied upon him to confirm a theory was very...

Waitman Beorn (12:53.911)
and can you refer to our listeners to explain really quickly who he was and

Richard Steigmann-Gall (12:57.888)
Yeah, so Hermann Rauschening was somebody who alleged he leaves Nazi Germany in the late 30s, I think ends up becoming a farmer in a prairie state. I'm sorry, Waitman, the answer is there. I'm just forgetting which one. Yeah, I was gonna say Nebraska intuitively, and maybe that's in fact where he went. I mean, didn't Otto Strasser end up in...

Waitman Beorn (13:12.117)
make sense there's a bus there's a bunch of wins nebraska so you know

Richard Steigmann-Gall (13:22.506)
like Nova Scotia after World War II or something like that. So these, these Blutem-Boden sort of destinations in their own minds. So, but he was, he was a high ranking Nazi in the Free State of Danzig, right? During a period leading up to the, before the start of World War II, claimed to be one of Hitler's intimates, right? Part of his Camarilla. And then,

did a sort of reveal, right? Once he fled Nazi Germany, he published this tell-all about the destructive nihilism of Nazism as he saw it, in which he larded on these alleged conversations he had with Hitler, where Hitler says, I'm going to destroy Christianity. It's the first chance I get, right, even before 1933. I mean, the question of Hitler's attitudes to the churches

near the second half of the Third Reich is an important one because certain officials within the Christian churches begin to say, hey, we were having some issues with this or that, Herr Reichskanzler. And of course he, as we know, doesn't abide a loyal opposition wherever it may stem from, right? Whether it's his generals or clergy or bureaucrats in the interior ministry.

So the ways in which he, what he says about religion early on in the Nazi movement and in the first years of the regime versus his tirades, right, near the end of his life, I think that qualitative distinction needs to be kept in mind. So having said that, Hamann Rauschning writes this tell-all that is made for American consumption, right? It's in English. And for generations after World War II,

It wasn't just this guy, John Conway, who wrote this one book that I mentioned in 1968, but it was a whole sort of genre. I think it's actually a question as to whether this might be considered part of the Stundenull mythology, a Germany, know, arising like, you know, after a complete reboot. And the idea that Hitler was an aberration in the German past.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (15:50.12)
synchronized very nicely, neatly, with this idea that he was anti-Christian, right? How German could he really have been if he hated Christianity as much as Hermann Rauschning is telling us he did? So that was a moral salve for a country which was very keen to integrate itself with the West during the Cold War and seem as normal as possible, as quickly as possible, right? So I think that the Conway book

as a piece of scholarship is itself a cultural artifact of a period for many decades after 1945 of trying to make Hitler as aberrational in German history as possible, right? So that a hastening of integration with the West could occur. And so I think the ways in which Americans resonated very strongly with this idea that Hitler must have been atheistic to be so terrible a man, right?

as a deeply Christian society ourselves, in the United States we were very receptive to this idea that Hitler must have been atheistic or anti-Christian or, you know, somebody who commits genocide like that has to have no relationship to the message of the the Prince of Peace. So the ways in which this fed a narrative that Americans very much wanted to hear, I think then got displayed in the scholarship, right? The scholarship of, you know, the churches under Hitler.

would very much reiterate this kind of narrative. And it was something of a cottage industry, right? So my attempt, I guess, I understood that I was going to try to shift the frame of reference through which we see that relationship. And I want to say it's been now, gosh, over 20 years since that book came out. It's just going to come out in Polish in the next year or so.

So it's still showing a bit of resonance, right? It's still got a bit of traction. I think the reception has been interesting. think people are beginning to actually mainstream opinion about this question is beginning to shift.

Waitman Beorn (18:04.379)
I does seem like, know, mean, Hitler is the sort of lightning rod example, but you know, this idea that he's weird, right? And there all these things, you know, he has one testicle and like, he's a vegetarian and like, you know, all of these things that do kind of sit in this attempt to other him. it makes me sound like I'm like worried that Hitler's being bullied. not, like, you know, I mean, to make him such a

Richard Steigmann-Gall (18:29.196)
You

Waitman Beorn (18:33.199)
such a strange and aberrant creature that sets him apart, which is something that I see, and you probably have as well, in a lot of, at least in some of the scholarship, or not scholarship, but certainly public, mean, Goldhagen is an example of this, but also public perception of like the Nazis were all these psychotic, sadistic killers who like to drink blood and stuff. And it's just not true. mean, these are normal.

But like 99 % of them are normal human beings, you know, and, sure Hitler is weird, but he's not like this alien that descended, you know, in 1933 and took over Germany. it's interesting to see that the, well, he might be, I mean, you know, it's, it's unclear. It's, know, at this, at this point. but you know, it, it is, it is, you know, it is interesting to think about Christianity as another.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (19:13.174)
Whitman, are you saying he's not hiding out in Antarctica? I mean, I thought he was hiding out. The jury's out on that one.

Waitman Beorn (19:28.623)
another way of doing that because you know, does, it does set this whole debate in a much different sense because it makes it, it ups the stakes for, for, know, America and a lot, not just, suppose, not just America, for Christians, because if they, if they don't accept that, that Hitler and the Nazis were these weirdo, you know, pagan worshipers, then they have to confront what you're confronting in the book, which is

Christianity is not or was not or some version of Christianity was not fundamentally incompatible with the Nazi state.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (20:06.764)
and the Holocaust, right? So yeah, there's this moral, public morality mandate that we must denormalize Nazism so that the very thought of it sort of elicits an allergic reaction, right? Which I understand the necessity. And if I were a Sunday school teacher,

Waitman Beorn (20:08.271)
and the Holocaust, right?

Richard Steigmann-Gall (20:33.94)
you know, teaching a bunch of preteens about right and wrong, I would see the utility of framing Nazism as an evil.

and against the will of a god who these children are still formulating their ideas on. So that's an impulse that speaks to a very different set of necessities and agendas. As a professional historian, I have an obligation to unpack some of the narratives that we use to prop up a nominal

Christian ethos. So the need for us to move beyond that, I think, was overdue. When I wrote and published my work, I thought, OK, we have to do a reset here because this just doesn't empirically, it doesn't hold water.

And secondly, in ways that are now happening really interestingly, I find even in American historiography, right, about the role of certain Christian institutions and ideologies in white supremacy in this country, right, the ways in which now evangelical Christianity so central to the Trump demographic is being scrutinized.

in ways that it should have been all along, right? And many people were actually doing it all along, but the crisis of Trumpism sort of brought to the surface a lot of tension. And so, and of course, this question of normalization is right in middle of this, right? As you well know, Wakeman, when certain of us...

Richard Steigmann-Gall (22:24.028)
make the case that Trumpism is fascism, what is oftentimes heard, no no, Trumpism isn't fascism, he's American.

So do you see the dissonance, right? If I'm telling you that I think something is. Yeah, you know, Hitler, as as Robert Paxton so eloquently put it in his great book, right, from 2004, Anatomy of Fascism.

Waitman Beorn (22:38.307)
These are not incompatible things.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (22:49.056)
Hitler didn't appear exotic to his audience. Mussolini didn't appear exotic to his audience. They were made of national stuff, right? So an American fascist isn't going to walk around with, you know, looking like they came off of a boat from somewhere. I mean, you do have the German-American blunt, which scholars have no problem saying, okay, yeah, that's fascism because it's not really American, quote unquote, right? So the American-ness of Trump,

is not somehow challenged by also calling him a fascist. There's this way in which certain scholars, as you've seen, make it an either or. They're creating a false dichotomy, which misses the point entirely. So by the same token then, Waitman, to call Hitler a Christian is not to normalize him. It's to interrogate this role that a widely regarded beneficent force in Western society, history, and culture needs to be.

unpacked and re-examined.

Waitman Beorn (23:46.407)
And ultimately, I think it's also helpful in the sense that, you know, Hitler and all the Nazis are a product of the society in which they grew up, right? And Christianity, whether you are observant or secular, is a sort of common element of Western societies. I mean, I think about myself, you know, like I...

Richard Steigmann-Gall (23:57.238)
thing. Yeah.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (24:03.212)
you

Waitman Beorn (24:15.597)
I'm, you know, I'm mildly observant, I suppose, you know, but I'm very thankful for my private Episcopal school education because it taught me amongst anything else. I am, I am fluent in, you know, Christian thought and language so that I, you know, I can understand things that are sort of taken as a given, you know, for our society, whether you, whether you believe or not. I mean, there are things that I think

There's so much that people know about Christianity just by almost osmosis because you grow up in this environment. mean, even non-Christians would have a knowledge of Christianity because of the thing. And so why wouldn't Hitler and all the other people at least be starting from that same sort of similar foundation? Because when Hitler was 10, he wasn't the Fuhrer. He was just a 10-year-old kid imbibing all of that from society.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (24:51.681)
Right.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (25:09.12)
Right. Right.

Well, now, see, that's an interesting approach that sometimes my intellectual adversaries will make. Stalin had a religious background. Others who will embrace an anti-Christian politics were in a similar way, as you say, of raised in this sort of ecosystem where nominal Christian values were sort of floating in the ether, right, the cultural.

and political ether. And there, of course, with the case of Stalin, you have an explicit sort of politics which is articulated in opposition to organized religion. So one could argue, of course, that yes, and I think most scholars concede this point pretty readily. Hitler was raised nominally Catholic. And there was this particular priest when he was 10 who he liked. But then he

must have undergone some sort of transformation that made him hate Christianity. And again, it's sources like Rauschening that would seem to confirm this. And I mean, it's interesting to see the occasional scholar, even reputable scholar, right? Still citing Rauschening as though he were a reliable source. But to get back to my point, when you look at the actual utterances of the Nazis, and I don't just mean in front of an audience.

where somebody could easily enough explain away Nazi utterances as a function of propaganda, Mendacity, public mendacity, but behind closed doors as well, right? Where it's just them in the room. Once the curtain comes down, in other words, on Nazi performance, what are they saying to each other behind that curtain? You see that they're actually saying, yeah, no, we're fighting atheistic Bolshevism, right? Where would the...

Richard Steigmann-Gall (27:01.728)
the Judeo-Bolshevik threat, quote unquote, for them is framed in religious, explicitly Christian terms. So there are some of the paganists, right, like we were talking about. Obviously, Himmler, Alfred Rosenberg, a few other notable Nazis are part of this cohort. But against them actually stand a cohort of other Nazis.

who I describe as positive Christians in my book because that's a phrase that the Nazis used quite extensively to describe their own attitude. And so I label them positive Christians and they are far more numerous than the so-called paganists in the Nazi leadership.

Waitman Beorn (27:48.143)
And so can talk us through some of this, know, some of these people that are sort of, because I do think that there is a popular conception that, Nazis, you know, certainly the true believer fanatics are, are atheistic. but that, that, that, that seems to be, you know, thrown into doubt, right? That, that there, that there were plenty of them that were, you know, church going, you know, Sunday school attending.

an actual legitimate legitimately sort of Christians.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (28:24.074)
Right. mean, in as much as anyone can gauge the... Right. I mean, there may have been popes who have been atheist and will never know because they didn't write it down, right? So we just have to take their utterances at face. If there are popes, they're probably believing in Jesus as the son of God. So, yeah, the... I mean, when you look at the Camarilla around Hitler...

Waitman Beorn (28:26.861)
I mean, we can't tell for sure, but I mean, you know, the best we can do.

Yeah, right.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (28:50.156)
the most notable of these positive Christians was the number two man in the Third Reich, Hermann Göring, who very consistently demonstrated not what you would call today a Bible thumping religiosity, I wouldn't say that, you know, wasn't the Pat Robertson of the party, but he was a squarely Lutheran identifying person.

whether you gauge that by his marriage to his second wife in the Dom, the Bellenodom, the Lutheran cathedral on Museum Island, attended by Hitler and officiated by the Reich Bischof, Ludwig Müller, the national bishop, the Lutheran national bishop who was appointed after the Third Reich came into being.

There are all sorts of ways in which you can gauge this, not least when it came to these chorals within Nazism. mean, it's interesting how often people suppose that Nazism, that Nazis all spoke on the same page, right? That they were somehow all in agreement on all the issues when in fact we know when you peel away the...

layers of public facing unity, the Nazis quarreled with each other on a lot of things. Not to say that therefore that was going to help Nazism's victims, it clearly didn't, but there was a lot of argument within Nazism on a variety of issues.

foreign policy, occupation policy in the east, Rosenberg's east ministry suggesting that maybe Ukrainians should be treated more kindly than Erich Koch was willing to countenance, this kind of thing. So on religious matters as well, there was disagreement and dissension. so Goering stands very much opposed to Rosenberg and what you see

Richard Steigmann-Gall (30:49.744)
when you go to more reliable sources than Helmand Rauschening is him calling out Rosenberg in private ways, even mocking. So one of the things that Nazi pagans attempted to do was create a pagan wedding, right? And going publicly, not just behind closed doors, but even publicly said, I'm sorry, this is ridiculous.

And this was reported on by a press which by that point was Nazified whether it was the actual official Nazi newspaper or a more local paper, right? Not that the press was Nazified within a year if at most. So, know, in a country with no freedom of press, Goering's anti-paganist views, right, were widely known.

There were other personalities as well. More perhaps controversially, I look in my book at Goebbels and discover as somebody who was actually raised Catholic.

a tension in him, which was not unusual among nominally Catholic Nazis to be fiercely anti-clerical regarding the Catholic Church, but still holding on very firmly to a Jesus that they could salvage from the wreckage of their own anti-clericalism. Hitler himself could be quite anti-clerical about the Catholic Church, even while insisting, no, no, don't you tell me that Jesus was a Jew, he was an Aryan.

Waitman Beorn (32:18.369)
And this will, this is of course the, this is of course the, the recognition of the Catholic church as a political power in a certain sense too, right? That, mean, in a way that I suppose that the confessing church and the German Protestant churches are, less of sort of these, these domineering institutions. And so that maybe people like Goebbels, you know, could maintain their Christianity.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (32:27.915)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (32:48.087)
while recognizing that as an institution, the Catholic Church is something that needs to be kept in check or fought.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (32:56.084)
And Hitler himself in Mein Kampf refers to Protestantism as the quote, more natural religion of the German. It's an interesting autobiographical reflection on how as somebody born in the Habsburg Empire and a fierce German nationalist, right, within this empire, multinational empire, he noticed how certain individuals,

German speakers in the Austrian Empire like von Schönerer, right, decided that to display their German nationalist sentiment, they should actually convert to Protestantism in this officially or very strongly Catholic Empire, right, which the Pope himself.

at least, you know, while the Habsburg Empire was still around, viewed the Habsburg Empire as sort of his greatest ally in European diplomacy. So if I'm a nationalist in the Austrian Empire at this period, I will convert to Protestantism. This goes as well for Czech nationalists, many of whom decided that as a symptom of their commitment to their own nationhood and dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, they should become Protestant. So...

Waitman Beorn (34:12.047)
I think you mentioned in the book that, you know, that there were things that sort of took place on the anniversary of Martin Luther, right? That, mean, like, so this guy is like this weird German, German nationalist hero in the eyes of the Nazis, right? Because he created this religion and this religion is risen up to challenge the most powerful religions in the world, Christianity, in Christianity, i.e. Catholicism. So therefore he sort of gets a buy into

Richard Steigmann-Gall (34:26.272)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (34:40.163)
the pantheon of sort of German nationalist heroes.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (34:43.02)
and the 450th anniversary of his birth falls right in 1933. So the Nazis try to make this some sort of propitious, you know, Providence has spoken. So a huge amount of celebrations are taking place under the aegis of a Nazi regime in cooperation with

the Protestant establishment, right? Churches, Protestant churches, whether at the different state levels or this ultimately unsuccessful attempt to create a national Protestant church, right, under Nazism. There's a lot of cooperation, should we say, in which Luther, yeah, is cast as the first nationalist of the Nazis know very well.

about the notorious anti-Semitic tract of Luther on the quote, on the Jews and their lies, unquote, and make a lot of use of it through the years in ways that.

Waitman Beorn (35:42.817)
And clearly they are then also eliding all of the pre on the Jews and their lies stuff, know, where Luther thinks that the Jews will be happy to convert once they realize everything. So he learns Hebrew and thinks they're great up until the point that they decide that they don't want to, you know, that it doesn't matter what you do with Catholicism because we don't want to be Christian anyway. And then he gets mad and he turns anti-Semitic, you know.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (36:06.336)
Right, Yeah, and that's another moment, right? The question that we talked about a minute ago about immutability and connecting it, for instance, to the Spanish Inquisition, a studious historian might say, what does Spanish history have to do with Nazi Germany? Okay, fine, let's look at Luther's own writings, right? And as you point out, Waitman, he loves the Jews in the hopes that they will display their gratitude by no longer being Jewish.

Waitman Beorn (36:35.278)
Right.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (36:35.788)
thank you Martin for giving us a chance to escape our identity is his presumed What is he presumes their reaction will be when instead most you say hey, you know what? That's great. Thank you We love your love and we're gonna stay who we are because we like who we are then yeah Luther's like what I thought they promised that they were going to be grateful and and escape their own Jewishness How dare they how dare they hate Jesus for this right and then his invective

is incredibly violent, Like, murderously violent. And this isn't just an angry tweet that he then deletes, right? This is a trap that he gets published. He edits it, he sleeps on it, know, wakes up the next day. You this idea that Luther was a hothead only gets us so far. know, if he didn't want to publish it, he had all the opportunity in the world to say, you know what, I'm just going to delete that tweet.

Waitman Beorn (37:14.21)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (37:29.891)
Right. I mean, especially in a time period where like, you know, we're talking about printing presses and it's not like things sort of happen overnight. So, I mean, I think it's really interesting and it speaks in some sense to the question of, you know, how did Nazis, and again, Nazis is an imprecise term because, you know, your neighbor next door might very well have a different

Richard Steigmann-Gall (37:36.076)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (37:59.095)
relationship with Nazi ideology as a political movement than Rosenberg or Barton Borman or these kinds of people. because one of the arguments I see somewhat in your work a little bit is engaging in tangentially with sort of the slightly with the intentional as functional as kind of debate in a certain sense, right? In the sense of like you're kind of adding a little bit, you're adding a couple of weights onto the ideology scale.

I would argue a little bit, right, which is fine. And I'm curious then how do we square that, you know, if people are believing Christians.

Is it, it, would you say that it's a case of the old religious anti-Semitism that when they say, well, yep, that this was what happens to Jews and they deserve it. or, or do they have to perform mental gymnastics to, to do what they do it. And I mentioned this because we had, another scholar on earlier, whose work sort of blew my mind. did a Marie Munsch juristic who wrote a book about,

sort of the limits of moral disgust. And what was so amazing in that book was she really went against this idea that, you know, about cognitive dissonance and all these things that the deep down perpetrators had to overcome some, you know, human instinct to not be awful. And that therefore whenever we see in killers, you know, sort of the psychosomatic relation or reactions that that is in some sense

our instinctual subconscious saying what you're doing is wrong and we want you to stop. And I bring that up because I think sometimes maybe Christianity is used in that way as well, that they had to overcome their Christianity to become perpetrators, whatever we want the perpetrator label to include. And so I'm curious if you would argue that actually, they don't have to overcome their Christianity. It's not a break to what they're doing.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (40:07.232)
Yeah. No, I mean, the answer is no, they don't have to overcome their Christianity. That doesn't mean that Christianity fates somebody to a genocidal outcome then, right? It's not that the more Christian I am measurably, the more inclined I was to endorse Holocaust or genocide as my solution to the proverbial Jewish question. It's that

Christianity was not a barrier, right, and in fact was utilized discursively, right, it was in the discourse as to why this needed to happen. Christianity, I mean, you know, love thy neighbor, you know, all the humanistic values that we associate today with Christianity, can they reside comfortably with the idea that, well, okay, that person isn't my neighbor, so I can go ahead and do what I want to them?

So I think when you, the predicate, right, the ontological basis of the good Christian in acting humanly in society is a more recent innovation in human affairs. mean, when you look at...

The idea that God wants that which is good, right? This idea of a contemporary understanding of God is sort of a Santa Claus who is beneficent and maybe even a little jolly. This is a recent innovation, right, that I think is in fact a departure from an original Christian ontology which suggested that no, God doesn't want that which is good. Something is good because God wants it, right?

If God wants the flood that will erase the human race minus a dude in his ark with his immediate family, that's good. So now you could argue from a theological point of view, okay, but that's God's job, not my job as a human being to fulfill his will.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (42:14.282)
We're getting more into the weeds than of how it is that throughout history, Christians have been motivated by their creed to act in certain ways in human society. I mean, another debate that I think we could address by way of comparison is a recent one.

And again, it concerns the history of the Americas, not just US history, you know, and South America together, is the papal doctrine of discovery, right, which we've rediscovered as scholars of religion and violence that gave Spanish and Portuguese at first the full authority to vanquish First Nations people in the name of Jesus. That's also now

something that we pay attention to as historians that opened the door to immense violence even after Europeans understood how it was that they perhaps were at first unintentionally committing genocide through cell biology, Once we, I'm saying, you once the Europeans figured out.

how it is that they were killing off First Nations people, genociding them. Well, they continued to do so. It's not like they said, oops, sorry about the plague germs that I accidentally sneezed on you. They didn't express any contrition. These were people who were meant to disappear. That was part of the great progress of the Christian West, that the heathen,

The pagan who was discovered in the New World was to disappear from the face of the Earth.

Waitman Beorn (44:01.839)
Well, and there too you have, you do have now that I'm reflecting on it, you do have this sort of er, racialization argument, even though it's not, it predates, you know, Darwin and sort of the rise of modern genetics, but there is inherent an idea of, of subhuman, you know, or, or, you know, lack of genetic value, even in these early periods when it's not necessarily expressed.

that way, right? I mean, I think there's a lot of scholarship that I'm not certainly not read up on about sort of the antecedents to modern scientific racism that exists before we understand the building blocks of so-called race or genetic difference. But I mean, there is that, right? That people just inherently observe and draw conclusions about people's value as

Richard Steigmann-Gall (44:31.116)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (44:56.591)
creatures on the earth. And this is seen in that instance as well.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (45:00.62)
Yeah, so I like your point, Waichman, about the emphasis that a lot of modern scholars, scholars of Nazism and those who want to critique modernity, the 20th century as a century of genocides, right, will point to the role of science, eugenics, know, racial anthropology, these kind of things. And it's really valuable work, but I think the

The thing that is worth keeping in mind is that there's a discourse of scientism that these historical actors sort of appropriate for themselves. And I think there's a way in which almost consciously the perpetrators kind of will admit to themselves behind closed doors, well, is this really necessary for us to then continue to do what we're doing? So just by way of an example.

Cirology, right? Cirologists in the Third Reich were instructed by the government, hey, find the Jewish blood type, would you? Please go ahead and find the, you know, we've got A, we've got O, there must be a J somewhere. Go ahead and find, please, please discover the blood type that can only be associated with Jews. And of course, the Nazis are rooting around for scientific.

sort of post facto justifications, right, that that's scientize and make objective their cultural prejudices as as you can already Presume right? Cirologists come back and say hey we Sorry, we didn't find it Did that stop the nazis? Did the nazi say well, okay, I guess there's no jewish blood after all in a literal scientific sense Maybe we should rethink our jew hatred. All right, maybe we made a mistake here

Did that happen? No. So I know I'm engaging in faux indignation with you, but the point is this, when you say that without eugenics, the Nazis wouldn't have done what they had done, right? It's eugenics, it's modern scientific racism. I can, there must've been something different about the 20th century for Auschwitz to have occurred, right? This is the commonly expressed.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (47:21.814)
question, right? Well, if it was about Christianity, why did Auschwitz take so long, right? If you're really going to blame, if you're really going to arrest the Nazi anti-Semitism at the feet of Christianity, then explain why didn't Auschwitz happen sooner? I mean, there are all sorts of ways to answer that, right? mean, the means to commit genocide is a very modern one, right? That's, mean, that's just a technical explanation.

And of course there was genocide before the 20th century, even if it didn't take the form of mechanized industrialized process of factory death. But more to the point, I think there's this presumption then that Christianity itself somehow remains static, right? That through the centuries, Christianity is some unmoving monolith that never interacts with its society, right? It shapes society in my view. I take my...

you know, philosophy of religion from Max Weber, right, I see religion as formative. But that doesn't mean that religion then doesn't change as it transforms societies, it also then gets transformed itself. So, you know, I mean, when you look at the question, for instance, just by way of an example of what I'm talking about, one point that an apologist scholar will often make about Nazism is that while they want to get rid of the Old Testament, or

They come up with this perversity that Jesus was an Aryan. He's the king of the Jews. What are you talking about? Clearly the Nazis must be anti-Christian, right? Says the apologist. Well, I mean, look at Adolf von Harnack, one of the most eminent Protestant theologians in the 20th century, be it Germany or anywhere else, who was writing long before anybody heard about the Nazis that German Protestantism should...

maybe filter out the Old Testament. Other scholars who were associates of von Harnack were talking about, you know, in anthropological language, like Houston's Dore Chamberlain, about how, you know, Jesus must have come from this part of Galilee where the tribe was different and he wasn't in fact Jewish, you know.

Waitman Beorn (49:35.245)
Well, and you see this, you see this today, even with, you know, the sort of cultural depictions of Jesus. And he always looks like this, you know, California surfer guy, you know, with like the blonde hair and stuff and a nice tan. But, you know, obviously, you know, historical Jesus would have looked like a, you know, a native of that part of the world, you know, and they would have looked, you know, stereotypically Jewish, Palestinian, whatever. mean, like, you know, that that part of the world. Right. And so like, that's that's a place where you can sort of see this artifact.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (49:43.741)
Hahaha

Richard Steigmann-Gall (49:54.593)
Yeah, nice.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (50:00.01)
Right? Love and time.

Waitman Beorn (50:05.131)
living on even if it's not being made explicit. know, the children's Bible and the Sunday school pamphlet that has, know, again, Jesus is like, you know, surfer guy, you know, is it? Right example. Exactly.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (50:15.638)
Blonde and blue-eyed, right? Whenever, so when I lecture in my Holocaust history classes on, you know, why the Jews, right, right at the beginning of the class, at the beginning of the semester, you know, with a tactile sense of sensitivity, I try to introduce my students to this question of the longue durée of Christian antisemitism culminating in Nazism and not breaking with Nazism.

And one thing I show them is the, is it the National Basilica? I believe it's the National Basilica in Washington, DC. the, pardon me, in the nave above, you see a Jesus who is completely Arian, blonde, blue-eyed. He's been working out, right, in the weight room. He's, he's cut, right? He's toned. He's muscular.

muscular Christianity, right? This is another phenomenon that long predates Nazism, that advocates that, you know, Christianity must be, you know, a strong faith. So, I mean, the history of American sport is an example of this obsession with muscular Christianity. So there are all sorts of ways in which in the age of modernity, a Christian

who feels assailed by the violence of the French Revolution, the guillotine, ending the life of a king anointed by God to sit on the throne, the arrival of a liberalism which dissolves the relationship between church and state, at least intends to.

and then the arrival of a socialism that proclaims that religion is the quote, opiate of the people. So if I'm a committed Christian, not just in the sense of a personal relationship with God, but the role of my religion in the public square, right? I see these political innovations quite possibly as a threat to my, not just my identity, but my politics, right?

Richard Steigmann-Gall (52:34.356)
So the larger question I think that we can ask, which other scholars have done, like David Kurtzer at Brown University, is the relationship between religion and fascism, right? Mussolini's relationship with the pope, the fascist state in Italy inventing the Vatican City, right? So that there can be a modus vivendi such that it's only after that, under Mussolini, where you see now in...

Italian school classrooms the crucifix that before the Lateran Accords was not to be seen, right? This is so ubiquitous in Italian society we presume it must have always been there, right, for since the beginning of the state.

Waitman Beorn (53:16.399)
Right. And now, of course, we have certain politicians who want to put the Ten Commandments up in classrooms in United States. We'll talk about that in a minute. But I think one of the things that I think is interesting to think about, we touched on a little bit, is the Nazi plan for Christianity. Because I think you touched on one of these sort of conventional pieces of conventional wisdom and one that I've again, I've probably been guilty of disseminating.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (53:26.208)
think they will, yes.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (53:34.998)
Hmm.

Waitman Beorn (53:46.371)
You know, which is this idea that, you know, Hitler, Hitler is, is, you know, anti-Christian. He thinks that the Christianity is a Jewish, is a Jewish sort of trap to get people to be nice to each other and weakening society. And he wants ultimately to get rid of Christianity, but he realizes that, he can't do it immediately because it would upset too many people. so he can't, it might not be helpful during the war, but then after the war.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (54:00.959)
you

Waitman Beorn (54:16.771)
there's this idea that he will get rid of Christianity and that all may be nonsense. So I mean, like what is the, what is the Nazi sort of plan? guess the Nazi does not necessarily equal Hitler, but you know, if, Hitler wins, if the world, if the Nazis are successful, what do, what do they envision as the sort of end state, relationship with Christianity? Because I think you see some interesting things that we haven't talked a lot about the German Christian church yet.

which is like another attempt to kind of square the circle, sort of the most hackneyed I think, where it's like taking out hallelujah and hosanna and amen and Jesus, know, it's just like, you know, completely dicing the Bible in sort of, you know, very hackneyed ways. But what are the Nazis planning to do and how do we know what they're planning to do? Or do we know what they're planning to do?

Richard Steigmann-Gall (55:06.976)
Right, I mean, it's hard to separate wheat from chaff because of course a lot of what we presumably know about Hitler's plans, you know, after we win the war, as Hitler keeps insisting will happen, are based on these, you know, tishkishprachia, right? The table talk, allegedly composed with complete dispassion by Martin Bormann, right? One of Hitler's most powerful satraps and...

a neophyte from the point of view of other Nazis who had been doing it a lot longer than he. So there's this interesting book, Waitman, called Hitler's Christianity that just came out by a guy named Mikhail Milson. And he actually takes a lot of effort to deconstruct the Bormann annotated Tiske Scheffe as reliable source, claiming, for instance, that when Hitler

said anything positive about Christianity, Borman would tend to sort of, you know, edit it out and Borman presumed that, you Hitler must have been not just anti-clerical, but in fact despising of Christianity entirely. So even if even if Hitler did utter such invective at three in the morning in the bunker, right, as his world is crashing down around him,

We're not quite sure really if that is a programmatic statement of his intended policy or him venting like he would vent against his favorite general, his best field marshal. One week would be his greatest traitor the next week. So the volatility, I think, means that we should take such declarations with a severe...

several grains of salt. So I guess the point I'm making is this, we have actually no evidence that Hitler was working towards dissolution of the churches. It's useful to keep in mind that he retained his nominal membership in the Catholic Church right up until his death, paid his church taxes right up until his death. Certain of his entourage as paganists, so-called, underwent this process called Kirchen Austritt, right, the leaving of the church, which they had already done before World War II started.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (57:23.798)
But he didn't demand that of his Camarilla. Goering didn't do this. Goebbels didn't do this. These men have their children baptized. So when you look at what Hitler is surrounding himself with, this I think already makes us question this narrative about Hitler somehow going after Christianity once he's quote, done with the Jews unquote.

What you can argue somewhat more plausibly is that given what he felt was the pushback from the Catholic Church, know, here's about von Gallen, of course, protesting euthanasia publicly from the pulpit in Munster, right, after the war has begun. And the Nazis are livid about this challenge. Half of them say, let's hang the man. And the other half say, are you insane? We're going to lose the whole region.

if we touch this hero, this local hero of Munster. So they leave the man alone, even as they then continue the euthanasia program in greater secrecy, the so-called euthanasia program. So the Nazis are very tactile when it comes to popular opinion. For a totalitarian dictatorship, they're incredibly concerned with what the popularity or not of what they're doing. So

That already, I think, gives us serious reasons to doubt that the Nazis were going to somehow eradicate the churches after World War II. They would have certainly, among some of them, wanted to seek a disestablishment and create an anti-clerical separation of church and state, perhaps. And a lot of scholars who we both know argue that the place to see this is the Vortigaum, right, that part of the expanded

Großreich Deutschland, where the Nazis have basically what amounts to a slave colony in the occupied Poland, right? They want to repopulate it, repopulate it with Volksdeutsche. And this Warteland or Reichsgau, Reichsgau Warteland or Wartegau is the place where you see the Nazi sort of satraps creating an ecosystem where Germans

Richard Steigmann-Gall (59:47.552)
can go to churches if they want to, but there's no official relationship or the relationship between church and state officially starts to, you see an institutional separation. Of course, Poles living in this area are denuded of their national identity. So Polish churches are not being encouraged. They're actually being actively discouraged. That's not the Nazis being anti-Christian though. That's the Nazis being anti-Polish, right?

Waitman Beorn (01:00:13.667)
Right.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:00:14.39)
They're Polish priests, yes, but they're also killing Polish poets and professors and politicians because they're Polish.

Waitman Beorn (01:00:24.503)
Yeah, I mean, I think that's interesting too, this idea of, know, I mean, that gets to the whole different conversation. I had Professor Kurtzer on to talk about the church, you know, and the fact that the Catholic church doesn't speak up even when the Nazis are killing Catholic priests is a different thing. But it sounds like in a certain sense that the...

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:00:37.484)
Hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:00:50.413)
the relationships between the various denominations are also, are also important here because again, the Catholic church with its, you know, extra national sort of organization represents a threat to Germany, Nazi Germany in a way that local Protestantism, which is already sort of, I think in some ways decentralized and, and less sort of hierarchical.

certainly doesn't owe its allegiance to anybody outside of Germany. It doesn't. And so that changes sort of the calculus there.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:01:21.536)
Right, right.

It's called in church history circles, it's called Erastianism, right? This idea that the church should have a much tighter relationship to the state, maybe even allow the state to be above it, right? This is oftentimes associated with a certain Lutheran understanding of a relationship to secular power. In contrast then to Catholicism, which, I mean, there's a long history, right, in Germany, the Kulturkampf.

not least of hostility to Catholicism as an alternative form of allegiance, right? If I'm a Catholic in 1871 and I'm being told that, you know, I must not love the new Kaiser as much as my Lutheran neighbor does because I've also got a Pope, then you see, right, how this shakes out in an ultra-nationalist regime.

like Nazi Germany. Now the irony there again is that so many of the leaders of the Nazi movement are nominally Catholic. Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, right? And so a lot of people then wonder, well, what does this mean about the relationship between Nazi Germany and the Catholic Church? And I think that is important, but sort of misses a deeper connection that exists.

Waitman Beorn (01:02:47.065)
Well, I ultimately, what you're talking about, think, and this applies to Catholics as much as it does anybody else, is that the fundamental argument that's being made here is that the elements of Christian ideology, like the religious piece of it, is not incompatible with Nazism. And while the theology of Catholicism is different from Protestantism, the overarching

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:03:05.889)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (01:03:16.431)
religious Christian-ness of it is not. It's essentially the same for the intense purposes of antisemitism, in terms of justifying antisemitism and that kind of stuff. And then everything else beyond that is the JFK can't be president because he'll be listening to the pope. It's that kind of anti-Catholicism, not so much, we're really up in arms about transubstantiation and this kind of thing. And I think that is...

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:03:19.274)
Right.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:03:33.257)
exactly.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:03:40.682)
Right, right.

Waitman Beorn (01:03:45.379)
That is the distinction, right? That you can't hide behind the fact that the Nazis go after the Catholic Church in a different way than they got to the Protestants as some kind of evidence of a hatred of Christianity. It's just their recognition that Catholicism is bit of a threat in a way that Protestantism isn't.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:04:01.75)
And they don't go after the Protestant churches. I mean, yes, you have this confessing church with Niemöller and Bonhoeffer as sort of the heroes of this confessing church. I don't know if you've seen the new Bonhoeffer movie. I'm staying away from it with a 10th of all. Yeah. The family of Bonhoeffer have themselves announced this movie, right? Not least because it's based on this book by this Christian nationalist Manga theologian Metaxas, I believe is his name. So yeah, but.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:12.975)
I have not.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:27.375)
Great.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:04:31.532)
the Nazis go after individuals in the confessing church who articulate an opposition to the regime as they would if you were a chemist or a physician. So the ways in which the confessing church after World War II create this mythology that they were a resistance organization is completely inaccurate.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:44.45)
Right.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:04:57.344)
What is true is that they have theological disputes within the Protestant establishment with the so-called Deutsche Christen, the German Christians who are incredibly committed to Nazism versus a confessing church that want to preserve not least the sanctity of baptism. So this idea really comes down to the handful.

among 18,000 Protestant pastors in Germany, there are a handful who have Jewish origins. And according to the Nuremberg laws, would be considered Semitic, right? And so there's a dispute within the Protestant establishment between those who want to embrace the Aryan paragraph and those who want to reject it. I mean, a lot of these Niemöller...

Waitman Beorn (01:05:34.221)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:45.741)
And ultimately that sort of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic kind of, you levels of like, you know, of resistance and like you're, resisting something that's ultimately irrelevant to the, the unfolding of the Holocaust, right?

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:05:49.782)
Right, right.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:05:59.476)
And Benjamin Simon has this new biography of Niemöller, which is going to supplant all previous works about Niemöller, where he looks at Niemöller's priors, as we say these days, right, is where he comes from, severely nationalist upbringing and politics. He's embracing Nazism at first. He has issues then later on, which, great to his credit, he reveals that he departs from...

all the vast majority of German Protestant opinion, right, when it comes to the question of Nazifying the Protestant church, but he's an anti-Semite. This guy doesn't, you know, I mean, the great poem of his, right, first they came for the communists and I didn't do anything, right. I mean, this is an anti-Semite who's writing this and he's trying to edit his own culpability after World War II in ways

Waitman Beorn (01:06:44.13)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (01:06:55.919)
Right.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:06:56.778)
the American occupation forces are all too willing to believe.

Waitman Beorn (01:07:00.717)
Yeah. I mean, and, and okay. So I have to shift gears here because like, can't, I can't let you go until we talk about just for a second about the, the pagan people, because on the one hand, they're just so funny. but on the other hand, you know, this is something that I think has a lot of purchase in the, the sort of public sphere of like, you know, the Nazi occult and like the Bevelsburg castle with like the circles of candles and, you know, craziness.

and my favorite story, which I won't tell in detail, but the story of, you know, when Himmler was going after Henry the Fowler's bones, because he thought that he was descendant of Himmler, of Henry the Fowler. then his archaeologists like found essentially what turned out to be a woman and said that it was the bones of Henry the Fowler and Goebbels is on his diary writing about, there goes Himmler again, being a weirdo. but you know, what is, what is all, what is going on there? I mean, is it.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:07:52.929)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:07:58.209)
Is it is it an anti-christian thing or is it kind of a Viking, you know, Teutonic kind of or what's going on there? What is that? What is that? What is up with weird Nazi pagans?

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:08:12.716)
what's going on in 1930s or in 2024.

Waitman Beorn (01:08:16.151)
Well, first of all, in the thirties, right? I guess with with the Nazis. mean, and are there are there various strands of this? know, how does that work?

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:08:18.26)
Okay. Yeah, I mean,

Yeah, I'm not trying to say that there weren't pagans in the movement, right? Or that, you know, didn't become incredibly important in the Nazi state, right? Not least Himmler. mean, immensely powerful man. He surmounts Goebbels, or Goering at the end, right? So, but Himmler doesn't become powerful because of his paganism. It's quite...

Waitman Beorn (01:08:34.329)
Sure, sure.

Waitman Beorn (01:08:45.849)
No, no.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:08:46.794)
demonstrably in spite of it. So where does this come from? I mean, I think it comes from a tendency among certain Germans to suppose, German nationalists to suppose that my anti-clericalism vis-a-vis the Catholic establishment, which Himmler grows up in, right? We know Himmler's biography in 1923. He's actually still pretty self-identifying as a Catholic.

He begins to break away, gets into esotericism, presumes that it's somehow a purer form of nationalism. And I think for the Catholic, for the nominally German Catholic, paganism constitutes a viable substitute religion in ways that for the typical Nazi Protestant,

is not really there, right? For the nominal Protestant at least, nevermind the pious Protestant in Nazi Germany, in the Nazi movement, pardon me, we don't see this tension. The only really well-known paganist in the Nazi movement who's Protestant is Rosenberg.

And he's quite singular in this regard. All the other most notorious of these paganists tend to be Catholic. So the ways in which, if I'm a Catholic Christian growing up in this period, I don't think of, I think of God and Jesus, I think of the Catholic upbringing I had. And the ways in which as a nationalist, I then start to break away from that.

I think then lead a lot of these pagans to then embrace the idea of, we should just exit Christianity altogether. Interestingly, there are demonstrations that I explore in the book. I couldn't find more empiricism to elaborate on the story more than I did, but there are demonstrations that even people like Himmler actually demonstrate an esteem, let's put it that way at least, for Luther.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:11:02.118)
as a national hero, right? So there's a communication, it's very brief and I couldn't trace it back maybe, you know, in the intervening decades, more has been unveiled, but there's this interesting memo where Himmler says he would like to leave some of his papers with the Luther archive, and I believe that that, Wittenberg. So it's an interesting flirtation with Protestantism, specifically Lutheranism.

He doesn't at any point convert to Lutheranism, of course, but the ways in which the Nazis, even paganists, display this ambivalence. Heimler is utterly convinced that Jesus was an Aryan. If I'm really anti-Christian, if I really despise the religion to its core, why would I save Jesus from his Jewishness? Why would I do that? Why is that important to me?

Waitman Beorn (01:11:53.913)
Yeah.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:11:57.47)
So at the very least, I would say that these pagans in proclaiming their separation sort of remind you of the rebellious teenagers. I have nothing more to do with my parents. No, I couldn't be further apart from them. I couldn't be more unlike them. You can't be more unlike my parents than I am. Right. So these profuse proclamations of my apostasy, right, from this childhood faith, I think reveal

that in fact the apostasy is quite incomplete.

Waitman Beorn (01:12:29.815)
And is there is there also a sort of.

I mean, I don't know the answer to this because I'm not an expert, but it certainly seems that the paganism stuff is very much an SS thing. is there an element of this where, know, once again, Himmler gets to create his own thing, you know, like it's the Waffen SS, it's the control over the final solution. It's carving out the own space that is then owned by the SS.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:12:59.734)
So the question becomes, his interest in paganism a function of his interest in sort of creating his own little empire or big empire? Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting proposition, right? Can we understand his interest in this esoterica in functionalist as opposed to culturalist terms? Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:05.133)
Yeah. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:16.327)
Or maybe both. mean, you know, maybe he likes he thinks paganism is is the right answer, but he also wants to exert institutional control over it in sort of a weird paradoxical way. I mean, because, know, you have the whole Vevelsberg thing. It seems like a lot of these sort of spaces are spaces that are controlled and dictated or at least and are frequented by SS. And so like there's a kind of a weird like we're we are the the

the banner bearers for this.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:13:47.564)
Right. An interesting, perhaps, approaching an answer to your question is Hitler's estimation before the Macht der Greifung, right before the seizure of power in 1933, which wasn't a seizure, really. In one of these sources that I deemed reliable and therefore used, Hitler relates the SS to Catholicism and the SA to Protestantism. He actually says, now, whether this is true or not,

is irrelevant. What matters is that Hitler seems to think it was true that the SS draws Catholics, whereas the SA in his view draws Protestants. And then he tries to explain this in terms of Catholic attitudes towards the state versus Protestant attitudes towards the spirit. And he works in binaries in ways that seem for you and I kind of wooly and half baked.

But it's interesting because it reflects on cultural mores of the day, right? Protestants assumed themselves to be a more spirited people and presumed that Catholics were more sort of obedient, right? And there's a way in which Hitler himself, as somebody who was raised Catholic, expresses the idea that the SS draws Catholics because the SS demands obedience.

in ways that the essay doesn't because, well, they're hotheads and they break windows and the SS, they're efficient and refined. So, yeah, so the ways in which categories get tossed around, right, in these ways might come towards an answer to your question, but what is in it for Himmler to become pagan? That's, yeah, I have to...

Waitman Beorn (01:15:15.599)
Right, yeah.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:15:32.574)
reflect further on that question. I think the idea for them is perhaps to some degree about out raging, you know, bourgeois morality. I don't want to lean on Freudian psychoanalysis as somehow a stopgap that explains things when my Weberian frame of reference fails. I'm just going to use Freudian like a filler, but there might be a way, seriously, in which

Waitman Beorn (01:15:56.505)
Right.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:16:02.102)
you know, when you learn about Himmler's psychology, right, and Hajdös, his psychology, right, the sort of parental resentment that they spend a lot of their lives struggling with, right, familial resentment, you wonder after a while whether perhaps this was an outlet for them in that.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:18.969)
Well, and there's something that I'll draw a line under this, but after this, I mean, there's something interesting to think about also as this sort of this, this community of transgression of transgressiveness, right? Like Thomas Kuhn writes about, you know, in the sense of like a camaraderie built around committing in Thomas Kuhn's case crimes and violence, but also, you know, a way for the SS to control the organization by providing another way to sort of separate them.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:16:29.686)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:49.241)
from the mainstream. A cult is again, maybe too sympathetic, but the way that cults remove people from their previous lives and the things that they were connected with before, paganism is sort of another peeling a layer of the onion off of that. I mean, obviously not all SS men and certainly probably most SS men were not pagans. They weren't like crazy people were doing.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:17:13.141)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (01:17:16.717)
seances in in Devilsburg, but there is sort of, I think maybe it's interesting to think about part of that as sort of Himmler's, Himmler's schtick, because of course he went off half half baked in lots of different directions.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:17:29.612)
Right, so mean maybe this is Himmler trying furtively to rebel against what today would be called normie culture, while himself being incredibly normie, by the way. I mean he writes in his diary early in New New Year's life about the delightful little goodie he had for dessert. I this was a deeply normie guy.

Waitman Beorn (01:17:37.583)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:17:49.743)
Well, this is the guy who, this is the guy who got a doctor's note to excuse him from like his fraternity drinking contest and stuff, you know, because he, he's like, he's not like the tough guy, the toughest guy in the world. so maybe, maybe you, you, you mentioned normie. And so I think, you know, before we went out of time, I think it is, it is worth, you know, I was at a, I was at lessons like sees last month and the, the, the great, the great John Roth, a philosopher of the Holocaust gave a talk and he sort of said that

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:17:55.212)
Right, right. I mean, you know.

Exactly. So he's trying to

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:18:05.973)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:17.987)
You teaching the Holocaust in the time of Trump is an act of protest. And I really liked that sort of formulation. And so I think it, I don't think it's a stretch to talk about essentially what's the now the sort of mainstream term of Christian nationalism or even Christian fascism, which is kind of what we're seeing in the United States. I think, and I've been, we mentioned this before we started recording, you I've been guilty of this as well on Twitter and elsewhere of sort of saying,

You're not a good Christian because a good Christian, you know, would would welcome refugees and would not be homophobic and not be transphobic and not be sexist because that's not what Jesus was. And I stand by that in the sense that I think that's the teachings of Jesus. Right. If you look at who Jesus hangs out with, you know, it's it's prostitutes and lepers and that kind of stuff. But I think it's interesting. You know, I think I'm probably wrong in the sense of saying that that means that you

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:18:56.001)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:19:13.921)
you can't be, you can't, being Christian is incompatible with being a sort of far right extremist. And I think that that's what we're seeing now in United States is that there are lots of people that see absolutely no hypocrisy in saying, you know, I don't think that these people deserve to have the same rights as I do with teachings of, of, except other people that we get from, from Christianity.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:19:32.714)
Right, right.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:19:38.208)
Yeah, well, I mean, it's the notion of sin, right? It's the notion of the virulence of sin, the personal dimension of sin, right? If I, mean, you could ask, we talked, we referenced homosexuality, right? I mean, it's an incredibly mainstream Christian opinion that gays will go to hell. Now, I, a Christian, I might say I love the sinner, but I still hate the sin, right? So this idea that somehow,

Waitman Beorn (01:20:01.561)
Right.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:20:04.812)
Christians can thread this needle of promoting homophobia while loving the gay person. I think that's a, I'm sorry to sound so contrarian here, or not contrarian, but confrontational. I think that's inviolable. You can't tell somebody, you're gonna go to hell, but I love you. That's a you know, that's a psychological syndrome.

And if that's what Christianity has long done, then we need to really take a look at that, right? I mean, there are certain people within the Christian establishment to their credit. There's this one guy who passed away recently, Spong, I think his name was Spong, Spelts. Yes, and he said, well, look at the 10 commandments, they're misogynistic, right? I mean, he was ready to go there, right? The fundamental radical.

Waitman Beorn (01:20:45.209)
yeah, he's kind of an Episcopal apostate. Yeah.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:20:58.376)
reinventing and reimagining of Christianity because look at this stuff that you know, people talk about patriarchy, right? Well, I mean, if you're going to be talking about patriarchy, you better look at where it's most heavily entrenched, right? And where patriarchy finds its its wellspring. And people don't want to go there, right? So I think this question of Trumpism, especially with the second administration coming along,

you're going to see a Trump 2.0, right, which is going to be more streamlined. I think a lot of people are talking in ways that you and I are like, my god, another appointment, Somebody in the FBI who has no business being there, Secretary of Defense.

who shouts kill the Muslims, kill the Muslims, all of these travesties. mean, Trump is pretty clearly looking for travesties as a point of policy. And a lot of us are taking a certain amount of comfort in the hopes that they'll so go after each other because of their raging ides, right? With King Elon, well, maybe he's not King, maybe he's the court jester, right? Trump is the King and the court jester is Elon and you've got this parade of...

of raging ids that are all going to go after each other. Well, mean, know, fascism itself was a similar parade of raging ids and far from, I mean, there were all sorts of disagreements, right? Like we've just been talking about within fascist regimes, there are petty squabbles, there are backstabbings, you know, and people fall from grace.

Waitman Beorn (01:22:41.689)
Well, in a certain sense, see, I think you see some of this, some of the mask slippage that's happened after the election in terms of Christian far right nationalism, right? So you have like all these people now saying, you know, and these are, these are admittedly people on sort of the far right, you know, but the, your body, my choice, you know, and so the mask is slipping a bit from abortion being about the sanctity of life and whether or not, you know, the fetus is a human being.

is much closer to, you know, obey your husband and, and, know, the, the, the Christian, Christian justifications and often Old Testament justifications for, you know, how you treat women, which is a different, a different thing, but I think is, a, a key component of this, of this Christian nationalism, which is about, it's a, it's about sort of

controlling the family and you know, the great replacement is I think wrapped up in this as well that you know, women exist to create more of the right kind of children for you know, yeah.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:23:41.686)
Mm-hmm.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:23:48.436)
Right. And that's biblical. And not just Old Testament, New Testament, right? mean, both books are telling women to obey their husbands. And, you know, the New Testament is not a feminist document. If somebody wants to make that claim, God bless them. But, I mean, it's going to be a pretty thin argument. So, you know, I think there's a way in which people, and you're referencing the Great Replacement,

Waitman Beorn (01:24:02.979)
Right.

You

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:24:14.568)
A lot of this hysteria about a genocide of white people by people who believe this great replacement theory is connected with the fear, religiously rooted fear of Islam. It begins with Obama, as a secret Muslim stole the White House because he wasn't born a US citizen. So the birther mythology is about a phobia, a moral panic that's not just about him being Black.

Waitman Beorn (01:24:35.513)
Right.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:24:43.808)
but also about him not being Christian, right? And this is why they left.

Waitman Beorn (01:24:47.811)
Well, on this thing also, I've really noticed, this conversation with you has sort of helped me to refine it a bit, which is that, you know, there's always this contradiction between freedom of religion or freedom from religion, right? Whereas someone like me, and I think many liberals would say, look, I'm never going to tell you how to practice your religion. You can do whatever you want with it. But it stops at my doorway.

The conversion, the inversion of that is the Christian nationalist piece, is you need to, I mean, I need to be able to have everybody do what I want, what I would do according to my religion. So, you know, I wouldn't have an abortion, though many of them do, but I wouldn't have an abortion so you can't. And, you know, I wouldn't be gay so you can't. so it's, again, conservatism is in many ways sort of this exclusive.

kind of interpretation of the world. Whereas, you liberalism is as long as you're not hurting anybody else, you know, do whatever you want. You know, we're not gonna, we're not gonna sort of tell you what to do. And you see this in the sort of ridiculous culture wars, things like the war on Christmas and you know, why can't we say the pledge of allegiance, which has God in it. And why can't we have the 10 commandments in the classroom, you know, because it, these are not things that really, I think,

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:25:48.204)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:26:14.575)
99 % of people really care about and because they don't really, they don't really have an effect, but it's, it's this vision and I hadn't put it in the context that you just did, but I like this idea of putting it in the context of a great replacement because it's the people are these, these sort of Christian nationalists are overly sensitive that they think everybody is out to get their Christianity, you know, and no one, we don't really care as long as you're not hurting other people. Like you can.

You can have a, you know, you can do whatever you want, but you just, you know, you can't, it's pretty clear in the constitution that what you can't have the government doing it, but otherwise we don't really care. But no one really is going after your Christmas.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:26:54.39)
So, I mean, the funny thing there is, I mean, they're sensitive, all right, but they're also paranoid. I think more deeply they're paranoid and they leap to conspiracy theory to explain how it is that, gosh, more.

non-whites than whites are being born in the United States, all sorts of calamities, demographic hysteria that is to be explained in terms of conspiracy. So I think the real difference though for these Christian nationalists is they retain a, in fact, for most of its political career,

Christianity has been about dominion in the public sphere. The idea of the separation of church and state is a very recent in world historical terms, a very recent departure. And if I'm.

committed to an individualist understanding that I can practice whatever faith I want and keep the public sphere secular, that feels like an American tradition, right? In fact, some sociologists call it the civic religion of America, right? The idea that we're all sort of God-fearing, but how we fear God is up to us, right? Eisenhower was a proponent of this view, right? I don't care what religion you have as long as you have one.

Waitman Beorn (01:28:16.655)
All

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:28:16.876)
in the face of atheistic Soviet menace, right? This was his proposition. I don't care if you're a Christian as long as you're not an atheist. So I think that's shifted though, owing to the contingencies of a post-Cold War America and the sort of reinvention of America, right? It's a country which is becoming more pluralistic ethnically, but also religiously.

public imagination conflating a particular ethnicity with a particular religion is a huge part of this development, I think. Tommy Tuberville complaining about Mexicans coming over the border, but also saying that they're not really Christian. That's-

Waitman Beorn (01:29:01.327)
and they're like, you know, super Catholic, you know, like.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:29:04.211)
Yeah, okay. Well, we've learned that somebody thinks that, know, vile potpourri is still a threat.

Waitman Beorn (01:29:09.721)
I think another thing that I is interesting, you know, when I reflect on my childhood and, you know, me as a teenager and the things that, you know, that I grew up, you know, I grew up probably decently homophobic, you know, and that was accepted when I was a kid, you know, like, mean, like, you know, like the slurs and all that kind of stuff were accepted. was total, you know, had you, had you

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:29:15.788)
Yeah.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:29:26.891)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:29:37.497)
come up with the idea or mention the idea of someone being trans, you know, in my school in the 1980s, I mean, it would have been, it would have been horrible. You know, it would have been awful for everybody for that person. You know, they would have had a terrible existence. Whereas my daughter now just, it's, it's not an, it's a complete non-issue. It's it's it's, it's zero, it's zero issue. And that's fantastic. And that's the way it should be. Cause I had to outgrow and, and overcome a lot of really awful things in that sense. yeah, you know, and

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:29:55.2)
Yeah. Yeah.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:30:02.826)
Yes, as we all did. mean, you're right, there's a normative culture which accepted things that today would be unacceptable.

Waitman Beorn (01:30:08.823)
Absolutely. now it's like, you know, it's just a non-issue and that's great. But I also think that's where we get the, they're indoctrinating your kids in school and we need to have school choice. You can have religious schools. It's for some of these, again, for the extremists, not all Christians, but for some of these extremist Christian nationalists, they also are reading, hey, we're losing people because we also know that people are becoming increasingly secular. But we also know that a lot of this has to do less with

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:30:33.036)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (01:30:35.747)
the ideology of religion and more with the organization of religion. And so they are feeling this paranoia also comes from we're losing the youth because the youth are okay with people being gay and okay people being trans and okay with, you know, people from different countries and different religions, which is just a sort of, and you know, I'm as probably as cynical as you, but there is a sort of Wiggish arc in that sense of like, you know, the fact that

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:30:39.295)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman Beorn (01:31:04.339)
you know, my child is growing up as a fundamentally more tolerant person, you know, than I did. And again, you know, maybe that's partially because of her upbringing and partially due to the society she's growing up in, but you know, it is a positive arc. But it's one that the sort of Christian nationalists who tend to be these far-right conservatives fear because it's conflicting with their other values.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:31:11.338)
Hmm. Yeah.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:31:19.797)
It is.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:31:28.332)
But it's also turning people who I think were once liberal, but church-going, church-going liberals, think are becoming rarer and rarer. I think a lot of people who would describe themselves as church-going liberals, if they've retained their church-going ways, they've dropped the liberalism because they see these transformations in society as a threat to a culture that is, in their view, a Christian one. Right?

when you, especially when this is conjoined with the rise of secularity, right? In the United States, we've seen these Pew research results that show that the growth, the biggest growing demographic religiously are the so-called nuns, right? Who tick the box, none, N-O-N-E, when asked what their religious affiliation is. And this gives rise to the idea that the nuns, right, are on the rise.

Waitman Beorn (01:32:18.052)
Right.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:32:19.596)
I mean, America is now 60 % self identifying as Christian. I mean, when Bill Clinton was president, it was over 80. So there's a severe drop off in terms of religious identity or Christian identity in particular, that seems to at least correlate if not be caused by the or not causing these transformations in gender identity. You know, gender fluidity, especially I think gender issues have really I mean,

my Senator Sherrod Brown, know, a stalwart member of the white working class who could win senatorial elections in my state, even as my state voted Trump, he would still be elected Senator. He lost, admittedly by a hair.

And I was here to see the commercials against him. These were all about trans athletes, you know, performing on women's teams. And this is, these, you know, these ad men knew how to strike a chord, right? They knew where to hit.

Waitman Beorn (01:33:26.073)
with the ultimate tiniest, tiniest of issues because, you know, A, sports aren't important. Sorry, not sorry. But also like the percentage of trans athletes is just like so tiny that it's the ultimate sort of, you know, war on Christmas kind of concocted cultural crisis because, know, moral panic because, you know, 99 % of American high schoolers will probably go through their lives without

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:33:32.684)
You get no complaints from me.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:33:47.584)
Moral panic, moral panic.

Waitman Beorn (01:33:55.471)
experiencing this or or or and certainly they'll go through their lives without if they're athletes without sort of worrying about being beaten by you know a trans athlete it just you know not going to happen.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:33:57.1)
Right.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:34:05.612)
But wasn't Nazi Germany in 1933 just 1 % Jewish, right? I mean, when my students learned that there was only 1 % of the population in Germany that were Jewish and Hitler's so driven by his oral, I'll say it, his own moral panic about the Jews, 1 % of the population, wow. With a hatred like that, that drives every action he takes.

they presume that Jews must have been 20 % of the population.

Waitman Beorn (01:34:34.159)
Well, that's the thing that there's the, there's the, and we should, we should wrapped up cause we've gone a while, but I mean, it has been really fascinating conversation. There's also the piece of the fact that, that, and I think that there are some parallels between the anti-trans stuff and anti homophobic stuff. Whereas on the one hand, you know, the far right extremist will view those people as degenerate, subhuman, worthless, less than, cetera. But on the other hand, they represent like an existential threat to

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:34:52.364)
Thank

Waitman Beorn (01:35:03.999)
everything that we hold dear. so therefore they're in some ways like uber powerful at the same time. And so there really are these parallels in terms of the rhetoric and the concoction of an enemy between a lot of these issues that are, you know, present as the United States. And of course, let's not forget that anti-Semitism is also still a thing that's part of this with the globalists and everything else. mean, it's not the anti-Semitism has been replaced by transphobic, homophobic, anti-immigrant, xenophobic stuff. It's just

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:35:26.955)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:35:34.433)
It's all part and parcel of, of, of this new sort of thing, all of which to, to draw a nice bow on this conversation, all of which is not incompatible for many Christians or self professing Christians with their Christian beliefs. You know, that they don't sit there and say, well, you know, Jesus, Jesus, you know, hung out with lepers and prostitutes. So like, should, I should care about poor people and sex workers or whatever, you know, like that they just don't draw that.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:35:50.708)
Exactly. that's the.

Waitman Beorn (01:36:03.331)
They just don't make that connection.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:36:05.568)
mean, liberals do, right? You and I might be inclined to view Jesus as some sort of, or hippie who, you know, just like Andrew Lloyd Webber depicts him is chill with everybody. But that's one iteration, right? If Jesus is a floating signifier, can mean anything to anybody. That doesn't mean that there aren't still trajectories and traditions. And I think for the liberal, even the liberal churchgoer who,

Waitman Beorn (01:36:22.265)
Mm-hmm.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:36:33.92)
perceives Jesus to be some sort of original hippie dude, there's another version of Jesus which is judging and condemning and brings a sword, right?

Waitman Beorn (01:36:46.595)
Yep. There's the Jesus that's tossing the moneylenders out of the temple and stuff, you know, and he's sort of a Billy bad-ass. So thank you so much, Richard, for coming on. I want to end with our question that I normally ask, which is what is one book on the Holocaust that has been particularly useful in either your interest or just in general that you can share? And then I'll put this on the webpage.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:36:50.049)
Right.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:36:53.548)
Exactly.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:37:13.472)
Yeah, actually, it's, you remember how Ian Kershaw used to do these regularly updated big sort of historiographical map on the Nazi dictatorship, right? It came out in like a fourth edition even when he stopped doing it. I really like these sort of master historiographers who give us a huge sort of...

school, right, thousands of books and to digest those and distill and give us an understanding of where the debate currently resides. The person who's doing that for Holocaust historiography is Dan Stone. And he's got a book called Histories of the Holocaust. And I think that's so what Ian Kershaw used to do just for Nazi German historiography.

Dan Stone is doing for Holocaust historiography. I really, especially for the novice, right, for the either the advanced undergrad or the informed lay person or, you know, more advanced graduate level audience, histories of the Holocaust, I think, is a really great way for because there's so much out there and there's so many debates of varying levels of sort of meta or, you know, sort of

micro or meta level of debate, right? A lot of trees and a lot of forests. And I like the way he takes this huge literature and tries to make sense of it. So history is the whole.

Waitman Beorn (01:38:47.919)
And that's a good shout also for our listeners, because I know a lot of you all are not Holocaust scholars, and that's absolutely fine, maybe even preferable. But it is possible for you to get a sense of the trend so that when you're reading, you can say, I can kind of see how this person falls into this area or that area of thinking about the Holocaust. So that's a really good shout. Once again, everybody, thank you so much for listening. This is officially our longest episode, which is great.

I'm happy to do it. was really fantastic and interesting conversation. So if you're, again, I know enjoying is the wrong word, but if you are finding the podcast interesting, meaningful, useful, please give us a like, give us a subscribe, give us a comment that helps with every little bit helps. And once again, Richard, thank you so much for coming on. really appreciate it.

Richard Steigmann-Gall (01:39:41.216)
Waitman, thanks for having me. I was very happy to talk as long as we did.