Part One: Alfred Hugenberg: The Elon Musk of Weimar Germany

do I? Why do I taught you when you're just trying to trying to help make me, make me a successful person? What's wrong with me?

of him. He said that he's stepping back. It's all like all of that, but it's going to be an interesting history of like a German piece of shit that like doesn't sound all that much like Elon. And then he's going to get in power and it's like, oh wow, these guys was he was Elon? Just like cripping off this fucker's notes, it's the same story. It's so funny.

why Austria is on you know. Anyway, So the fact that Germany becomes a thing is largely the work of a fella named Otto von Bismarck, who orchestrated a series of wars, treaties, and alliances that culminated in the defeat of Napoleon, the Thirds France and the rise of the Prussian Kaiser as the emperor of all Germanic peoples, or at least like is like Austria, Hungary is still separate

most of the Germanic peoples. In those heady early days of Imperial Germany, people get very excited about the idea of Germany. Right, It's like fucking pokemon when it starts off, right, You folks can't get enough of Germany there?

And this is the assertion that Prussians and Bavarians and Saxons and you know, Hanover Hanoverians or whatever shouldn't see themselves as different peoples and certainly not as different nations, but as one united German people who have a manifest destiny to spread not just in Europe but across a grand colonial empire that ought to because Germans are a great people, and they deserve what the British have, Right, there's a lot of there's a lot of this, like

they're very insecure, the Germans in this period of time, right, and so there's a lot of why don't we have a lot of stuff the British. The British have so much stuff, any stuff?

very recently. Right, the Prussian Yunker class, which is kind of like their nobility, has a bunch of ancestral privileges, right that they maintain even once Germany becomes a thing, and they're not eager to give those up, right, They're like, what you mean you mean I have to give up my power over those uncouth Bavarians.

They kind of get like the shit their attitude and everyone's attitude is they get kind of like the shitty pieces of Africa, Like Namibia a lovely place, but it's like not, it's like a desert, right, it's not at the time seen as like, well, it doesn't have that much stuff for us to exploit compared to like what we want to be exploiting. And they're looking at the British who own like fucking a third, like a shitload of Africa, and like what the fuck, guys, And so

this is what's all. This is all what's going on as Alfred Hugenberg has his childhood now, unlike Elon because you know we've made that comparison, he is not born into wealth or into really much privilege at all. Some people will say his upbring was upbringing was comfortable. That's not wildly untrue by the standards of the time, but we would not see this as a comfortable upbringing, and in fact it's kind of close to Hitler's childhood. Alfred's

dad is like a civil servant. He's a guy who works in the administrative state, and he dies when Hugenberg is very young, and Alfred is the only son in the family, which is also like Hitler, and the Hitler comparisons keep right on hitlering because both young men also spend their adolescent years aware of the fact that their mom,

since their dad is gone, is incredibly financially strained. Right, they have this pension, but none of the pensions are enough to take care of a family, and so they're like, they're there, it's a tremendously difficult time. And he can't not have been aware of the fact that they were poor now, right. So there are some other similarities between Hitler and Hugenberg. Both young men were moved to create art and their early years. Hitler becomes an obsessive devotee

of the opera and has ambitions as a painter. Meanwhile, Hugenberg is a really talented creative writer, with what biographer John Leopold described as quote a flair for literary expression. And you know, if your kid who's good at writing, that can be a great way to express yourself and to work through some of your trauma and stuff. Alfred does not do any of that, sure, which is actually

a real difference. Because Hitler throws himself a whole hog into being an artist, he kind of sucks at He's not any good but like yeah, yeah.

so Hugenberg chooses. What's kind of interesting to me is that Hugenberg doesn't just sort of like fail to explore his potential as an artist. He purposefully forces himself not to write, right, not to make art, because he just like that's silly, and that's like artists are poor, and I am not going to be poor. So thereby I am going to make I'm going to stop myself from exploring this thing that I'm good at in order to study the things that will make me good as a businessman.

Right huh yeah, okay.

political economy in his secondary education. He is very well in school, very bright guy, and he has from the beginning a flair for money, which would have been noticed by his instructors from the jump. They also would have noticed his skill as a writer, but not for long because he again he decides to quote unquote suppress his skill in order to focus on his career. He talks about it as like I made a choice to smother the artistic side of me so that I could make

more money. Now Alfred makes a couple of friends, but he has no real hobbies outside of his business ambitions. And if he had anything we might term a pastime, it was thinking about the way that the state and the economy worked and how they ought to work. Right very early age, he's thinking about why do the economics of the time function this way? And like, how can I changed them to function in what I would term

is like better. So his first while he's in college effectively he gets you know, he does his dissertation right, which is his first book length publication like these are effectively books, and his first dissertation is titled Internal Colonization in Northwest Germany, which he fitishes at the University of Strasbourg in eighteen ninety one. In his book on Hugenberg, John Leopold writes, quote, the young doctoral candidate analyzed and detail the role of the state in fostering economic growth.

This volume depicted three themes which always undergird Hugenberg's political views. First, the state would have to assist the farmer and totally abandon a las ai ferre approach to agriculture. Second, the farmer would have to act as an entrepreneur and form a capitalist bulwark against Marxism. And third, Germany would have to expand its empire. So a couple of things are going on here when we talk about internal colonization Germany right now, the imperial Germany includes a bunch of Poland

right now. If you're thinking, think back to your maps

of Europe. Poland's Poles, not Germans. These are within the boundaries of the German state, a colonized people, and Germany is sending German farmers into this occupied Polish territory to try to Germanify it right, Like that's very much what's going on, and Hugenberg's writing about that, but he's also writing about like there's not really enough Poland for us, like maybe we could get some more, I don't know, but also we need to be taking more of Africa

because we need to continue like kind of shotgunning these farmers out, and we can't just sort of let the market take care of them because then they might not succeed, Like it's part of this. He's not really talking all that much in racial terms, although he is a racist, but he's very much the conclusions he comes to are identical to the ones Hitler is going to come to thinking through racial terms, which is interesting.

Western Front. But all of Germany is, and the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds obsessed with us, like with westward expansion, right.

as Native Americans in Germany. That happened, This happens to day. No, yes, it's a whole thing. It's a massive deal.

about Africa right now. While I said earlier that Alfred was not a man with hobbies or a social life. He does nothing but work. I mean he's getting a doctorate, which you do kind of have to be that way to get a doctorate for a little while at least, right if any of my friends who got doctor it's

there anything to go by. But he does have one extracurricular activity he starts to engage in around this time, the same year he published his dissertation, eighteen ninety one, he helps to co found a political club, the German General League. Now you won't find a lot written about this incarnation of the organization, but historian Barry Jackish describes it as a political pressure group critical of the German

government's foreign and domestic policy decisions. Now that's a definition so vague it could refer to an organization of any ideology. So I should further say, the specific ideological launching point of this group that Hugenberg starts with a bunch of other guys is the idea of PA Germanism that I

discussed at the opening of the episode. Jackish continues, the Pan Germans were an openly expansionist organization that called for German colonies and spheres of influence throughout the world, and the creation of a strong navy to reinforce Germany's newly gained status abroad. In domestic politics, the League supported an

authoritarian monarchy and opposed the growth of parliamentary democracy. The League also sought to combat what it regarded as the pernicious influence of a myriad of un German elements, particularly Slavs, often Catholics, and ultimately Jews. So these are not Nazis because those don't exist yet, But you're seeing the Nazi in this group, right, Like it's it's not so much of a leap from this to the Nazis, right for sure, Yeah, strung notes of Nazis, right, yeah, yeah, this is like

a Sega dreamcast. Isn't a PlayStation two, but.

got a lot of other shit on his mind. Wait, you have a question, Sure, what does this guy look like?

four to eighteen ninety nine. This gives him a degree of influence in the German States. Attempts to reform some

land use policies that were essentially holdovers from the medieval era. Right, they've got these kind of medieval policies on, like the aristocracy owning land that slow down colonizing it because a lot of land is just meant to be like where that where this did duke or whatever hunts And that's great if you're a duke, and it's actually probably pretty good from like a wildlife conservation aspect, but it's really bad from a farming you know. And Germany's whole thing

is we don't have enough food. We can't make enough food to not die on our owns, right and this is constantly on our minds. So again Posen is like it's an eternal colony within Germany. Most of the population's Polish, but there's this small number of German farmers whose expansion was desired by the government. However, said expansion is stemied by the fact that many Polish people already had claim

to the land. Hugenberg suggested ways to uproot them, but ultimately quit his job when the government refused to revise its inadequate policy towards the Poles. And again that inadequate policy is you're letting them live in their own homes, right like that, that's the issue that he has with Poland. You know what I just saw, just like because.

He creates a series of land co ops that allow so he goes into business independently, and he starts going to these different groups of farmers who are trying to colonize to what this territory that is like the center of modern Poland, and he starts putting them in together and making co ops, right, And the purpose of this is because each of these independently these small German farmers have no economic power and so kind of keep getting

fucked over. And he forms them into co ops so that they can basically collectively set prices and bargain for better prices, right, like the very modern thing you know that he's doing here, And it works like this makes all of these farms much more successful, and it helps stimulate the growth of like more independent like more German settlers,

like farming in this area. The project is successful enough that in nineteen oh four he gets hired back to the civil service in a significantly better position, right, Special Advisor for Economic Development to the East. So he's just kind of like a guy stuck in the cogs of the machine. He bounces. He has this incredibly successful co op thing for all these farmers, and it does well enough that now he's the special advisor for all economic development in the East.

you know. They're the aristocracy does that every where they can, And so Hugenberg doesn't want things to work that way. He wants this land to be freed up, if it's not being farmed, for more farmers to buy it. Now, like all conservative Germans, and Alfred is very conservative. His interest is in autarchy, right. He wants the state to be able to produce all of its own necessities. You know, we just had the tariffs come down yesterday. It's kind

of the same idea, right. Conservatives never quite get over this, what if we didn't need anyone else? And it's like, I don't know, man, do you like coume quats because that's kind of critical that shays.

Being a practical guy, he came up with what seemed like a simple solution, and he published a book about his work with the farming co ops, im Posen, and how similar tactics could be used to encourage the rapid accumulation and deployment of capital to properly settle the East. Alfred insisted that the state's role in all of this was not to stick with the traditional younger view of property and instead to use its power to encourage competition.

He wanted them to pass laws to confiscate large unproductive estates and resettle them with small farmers who would form co ops. I won't give Hugginberg credit for a lot, but this probably would have worked. And I based this on the fact that basically one hundred percent of the time shit like this got tried and peasants were given access to large areas of raw land to split up and manage in common, productivity increased, and it especially increased over the old way of quote letting some rich guy

use it as a private park. Right, It's just more effective in a farm in terms of yield. However, the rich guys that Hugenberg wants to dispossess are the rich guys, right. These are the people running things because the Prussians are kind of the most powerful group within Imperial Germany, and they don't like that Hugenberg wants to take their shit. I'm going to quote from Leopold's book here. Confronted with strong opposition from youngers and others opposed to this proposal,

state officials hesitated in their advocacy of this legislation. Hugenberg scorned their pedantic political conscience and again left the civil service. So he's like, fuck you guys, I'm going home. You know, I'm gonna go do my own thing now. I tried working through the government. It's useless. Word, yes, you know, it's not useless. You know what should be the government, the products and services that support this podcast. They should run the country.

waste his energy being disappointed. So he right away gets a job on the board of directors for a bank and Frankfort that serves several mining concerns, and not just mining, but companies like generally in the metal business, so suppliers and producers of raw materials. And his job, his role here is reorganizing and rearranging things to enhance the profitability

of everyone in this industry. Right Basically, all of the owners of these different minds and sort of like mineral concerns and whatnot are all putting a chunk of their money in like a common pile to be used in Hugenberg is managing it. He's an early hedge fund manager. Right, wait, you know it's not that bad, so, but that's what he's doing.

run by a prosperous Jewish family. The Mertens now Huggenberg is a raging anti Semite, as is the German General League, which he's still a member of, which by this point has changed its name to the much catchier Pan German League, and they'd only doubled down on the anti Semitism since then. But this doesn't seem to stop him from being willing to work for this rich family. The Mertens. Now the League at this point, it's not a mass organization, nor does it want to be one. It's got maybe a

few thousand members at this point. It's going to top out at thirty eight thousand people, which is very small for one of these. Again, by the time by the Nazia, there's going to eventually be a couple million Brown Shirts, right, So this is not a huge organization, but members of them are professional people, often with a lot of money and influence. So the Pan German League is hugely influential culturally. It punches above its weight class, right because the members

of it are guys like Hugenberg. They're social climbers, or they're already rich and influential. Now, I quoted from that historian Barry Jackish a little earlier, and those quotes were from a book he wrote on the Pan German League titled The Pan German League and Radical Nationalist Politics in inter War Germany, which is a very accurate title, but not very clickable. You know, seven things you didn't know

about German National. There's a lot of better ways to title it, Barry, I'm just saying, sorry.

it on this show. The things that graph exactly to shit that's been happening in the US when we talk about the fall of Vymar and the rise of German fascism, because there are a lot of similarities, but there's a lot of differences too, which is I think are important emphasized now because I think some people get like, oh my god, we've done all these other things that are similar to Vymar, We're destined to do this. We're not right. It can go different for us. And part of why

it's because like it is a very different culture. We're not Germany at any point.

are equally important to emphasize. And Jonestown was unprecedented and since unreplicated thing, and Jim Jones read Nietzsche and Donald Trump.

these different Germanic states that you're all Germans. There's a storyman of telling a little bit that I think will make some of this make a little bit more sense.

Now we'll leave out now talk about well how accurate that is a depiction of what's happening in the United States right now, But seeing things that simplistically misses some very important aspects of how Nazism got going in Germany. Because Nazism is a radical political movement. Nazis don't like conservatives. In fact, they kill a lot of them, right that they don't target them the way they do the left

in any way. But they are not a conservative movement and they don't see themselves as conservatives, and they're not really very keen on capitalists either, although a lot of capitalists eventually do support them out of self interest. I'm saying this because Hugenberg is never a Nazi in the ideological sense of the word. He is a monarchist and

he is a social and economic conservative. And the Pandramanic League, while there's things in it you can see as like, oh, I see how Nazism arrived from this, it's more that the soil is the same, right, and so the plants have some similar characteristics that are coming up. The Pan German League is not going after the Nazis are initially going after like the poor and downtrodden, right, those are Hitler's like earliest recruits and like veterans, disaffected veterans. That's

not who the Pan Germanic League is going after. It is laser targeted at the group of people that Leopold identifies as Buildung and Besitz. And there's another term for that group, and that term is Buildung's burgertam right, and that is crudely we might say the upper middle class,

it means literally the cultivated bourgeoisie. In his book The Fateful Alliance, historian Hermann Beck writes Germany owed its reputation and scholarship, administration, and technical expertise to this numerically small but socially influential, university trained elite. The buildungs Burgertum was a uniquely German phenomena on that originated as a distinct social class in the second half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And these are the people who are

who run things. They're not the people who are in charge of things, right, that's generally the nobility. They are the people who are being delegated the task of actually making shit happen, right, because they have the educations. And this is a class that in the earliest period, including the where we're up to the eighteen nineties, is a progressive and liberal class. That's going to change. They're going to become extremely conservative in the nineteen hundreds, but they're

not initially. And in fact, the first man to posit what we would consider a modern view of what homosexuality is, and the first gay man to come out publicly is a member of the Buildings Burger TomEE in eighteen sixty seven, the first modern like guy both too, and when I say a modern understanding of homosexuality, this guy, Karl Ulrichs comes to a conclusion that like, oh, homosexuality logically is something I'm born as. Right, this isn't a choice. It was viewed as both a choice and as like a

deviant thing. Right, Carl convinces himself like, no, no, no, this is like a natural thing. And as a result, we are a discriminated underclass and the laws need to change.

And he comes out in public in eighteen sixty seven at a town meeting, and so he's like he's simultaneously like introducing everyone at the meeting to the concept of homosexuality and also saying, and I am one, which is wildly brave, Like he is this jam rocks Well, he's a member of the Buildings Burgertum, as is Alha Shugenberg and okay, cool in terms of like seeing how this

gets how things shift. Nationalism in the late eighteen hundreds is a progressive liberal ideology right in part because of what it means about sort of how pre existing elites needed to not have the kind of power that they used to have. And Carl Ulrichs is a national German nationalist, you know, previous to the existence of Germany. And normally

people see that they're like, okay, well that's right wing. No, no, no, he is a German nationalist because the state, the German state he is in, homosexual sex sodomy is legal, but in Prussia it's illegal, and Prussia is pushing to dominate all these other states. And so Rix becomes a German nationalist because he's like, then we we other Germans will be strong enough to force the Prussians to stop being

big ated against gay people. So when we talk about German nationalism, this is not always like a right wing, regressive ideology. There's a and in Hugenberg's earliest days there's a lot of very progressive aspects to it.

a lot of prominent lawyers. Right. And the origins of this entire social class actually traced back to a guy named Wilhelm von Humboldt. Humboldt was an educational reformer in the early eighteen hundreds who remakes the whole Prussian education system and he is a big believer in the power of the individual to reach their full potential or buildung

through education. Right, among other innovations, he codifies the idea of a national school system for kind of the first time in the West that starts with primary school and then secondary school and then university education. Everyone adopts this. The foundations of our education system, such as it is, are traced directly back to Humboldt and his reform of

the Prussian system. Right. He is basically the father of the concept of universal mandatory education, which is paid for by the state, and it's one of those there's a lot of modern day criticisms of the Prussian system. People will argue it only exists to provide soldiers, right, and so the schools just trying to make you into a good soldier for capitalism, and like, there's not one hundred

percent wrong. These were Prussians, so that was a big part of why they wanted to educate people so they'd be useful for the state. But Humbold's also a very progressive guy for his time, and it would not be fair to categorize him as like some sort of like weirdo fascist, you know, because that's just not what's going on at this point in time. He was not trying

to make students into little robots. His goal was to was his citizenry who was capable of reasoning, thinking outside of the box, and actively learning so is to better serve the state. But he wasn't trying to like lock

people into a little box. And his reforms work well enough that by the time Alfred Hugenberg is getting his start, Germany has the best universities on the planet, and it is universally agreed the best doctors in scientists are German, right, And it's because they start having a modern university system between everyone else in the early nineteen hundreds. Germany is the font of learning in the West, and very much is seen as that way, especially in the medical realm.

And this is that's a huge part of this class that Hugenberg is a part of the buildings burgertomy. These are they're characterized by their belief that education makes people better. And because we're educated, we're better.

progressive liberal class becomes more conservative. That's part of what they're thinking now. Yeah, so you know that's going to be a problem. It's this kind of thing that like, by the end of the eighteen seventies they've stopped really being as liberal, and by the eighteen nineties their advocates of imperialism and they are aggressive nationalists. It's no longer oh Rick's very reasonably progressive nationalism. It is a what if we just took everything kind of nationalism? Right?

had made Germany possible. Because Germany comes into being in eighteen seventy when they beat the French in a war, and they beat the French because Napoleon the Third is still using brass cannons that are basically identical to the ones the first Napoleon had used, and Friedrich Krupp his people figured out how to make modern steel artillery that is just so much better at killing men.

a genius and he gives him the job. Right, So Hugenberg is kind of the CEO of Krupp Arms, of the biggest gun company in the world right ever existed up to this point and for more. He is going to be the guy running a lot of Technically, he's primarily doing the financial decisions for krup so he's not designing guns. But he is like the headman at Krupp for the decade up to leading up to World War One, right,

Oh my god. And what's what Krupp is doing in this period is pushing the Kaiser to build the machine of death that is the German mobilization schedule, right. And part of what they're doing is Crupp is going around and they're they're going to one country and being like, hey, we'll sell you these guns. You rarely got to modernize. Your guns are a generation or two behind your neighbor, and like they're getting armed, so why don't you get armed?

And then once they arm that country, they'll go to another and be like, hey, your neighbor just bought a bunch of You really got to get some new guns, right, And this keeps everybody's anxiety.

is running shit, he becomes spectacularly wealthy. And the balance guy, I think hundreds of millions of dollars by the standards of his time, right, that's that's probably that's about where he is in terms of like our modern concept of things. He's not like a billionaire yet, but hundreds of millions now, despite the fact that he is making Gustav Krupp so much fucking money, the Krupts are again aristocracy, and Hugenberg, despite his wealth, is just a burger, right, He's he's

not like a he's a common man, you know. He comes from like the nicer part of the common class. But Gustav doesn't really mean money. He's not going to hang with him, right, As biographer Leopold writes, though everyone was impressed with his extraordinary intelligence and obvious ability, there is no indication that Hugenberg during his ten years stay at Krups ever developed anything more than a formal relationship

with his employer. The patrician aloofness of the securely established Crups contrasted sharply with a dogged determination to succeed which characterized Hugenberg. Indeed, Hugenberg seemed temple bad hang. He's a bad hang. Indeed, Hugenberg seemed typical of that class of general directors which George Bernard described as being driven by an inferiority complex because they know they are dependent and in the final analysis, are as disposable as any other employee.

Lack of security made such a director continually harder and more uncompromising than the owner himself, Possibly as a psychological compensation, Hugenberg in these years emphasized the inflexibility, stubbornness, and self righteousness which would characterize his political career. So he knows you don't need me, you can throw me away if I stop making you money, and that drives him to be the son of a bitchiest of the sons of bitches in business in this period.

they'll become members of the petite bourgeoisie. I'm going to give them stock in the company. Then why would they want to be unions. They'll be shareholders, right, and they'll be able to buy their own homes. And what he's suggesting here, this is what happens in the US post war to create the most prosperous society in history. So like within the capitalists new US, this is an idea that does work. It's going to work in the US not long after this. But Hugenberg is just bullshitting. He

has no interest in doing any of this. As Leopold notes, quote, working and living conditions did not change much during Hugenberg's tenure. He ultimately did find himself forced to work with what he called yellow unions, which are trade unions that aren't allowed to strike. Right, So he'll work with these guys

because they don't actually have any teeth. But as a rule, he found even that kind of union disgusting, and he starts pushing internal propaganda within Krupp that depicted management and employees, in Leopold's words, quote, not antithetical classes, but common producers of shared wealth. You know, you and Krupp, the plutocrat who owns all of this money. By pushing everyone towards World War one, you're really the same, you know. That's like,

that's the propaganda. He's not good at propaganda at this stage, now, got it. Yeah, And again, the wealth's not actually being shared. And this is something Alfred and his fellow industrialists would acknowledge cheerfully. They don't think you should share wealth. They

are social Darwinists. They believe the poor and working class can only be trusted with a certain amount of money, and if they have any more than that, they'll fritter it away on harmful nonsense because they're just not smart enough to reinvest it into the German arms industry, right, which is obviously what a smart man does with his money. By nineteen twelve, Hugenberg was one of the most prominent men in the entire Reich. He was awarded the Red

Order of the Eagle by the Kaiser. Now, this is one of dozens of made up awards that the Kaiser would give different German over the years in order to like because you know, you need to have a bunch of fake awards to hand each other. So everybody can wear a uniform that looks fancy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and it's worth it.

continued benefits for the industrial proletariat. And so in the speech he's saying, the only thing that can make the poor the working class more comfortable is if we steal everything from the rest of the world. That's your only hope. Guys, dam stuff. Speaking of stealing everything from the rest of the world, Sophie, can we should we show them our sponsors.

other weapons manufacturers. They're all taking part in this. This

is not just crupt Germany. It's not just responsible for the preconditions of World War One, obviously, But one thing that this cycle that these arms manufacturers all responsible for means is that every European leader is constantly thinking, Okay, right now, we've got better artillery in French, but their machine guns are a little better, and in two years they're going to have new artillery, so maybe we need to go to war now if we're gonna have a

chance of beating them, right, Like, everyone's always thinking.

A Krup employee was found guilty of bribing army and Navy officers. This proved not only to the German but also to the foreign skeptics that they were right to believe that the company would stop at nothing in pursuit of its interests. In nineteen oh five, George Bernard Shaw had already, in his play Missed Major Barbara, not been

sparing with his insinuations. In nineteen thirteen, even the serious American journal The Iron Age wrote, following the facts revealed during the cornwallser affair, that Krupp was obviously recently prepared to go to any links to agitate a war, even before the First World War had really started. HG. Wells had already decided who was the real culprit in the center of this disaster, which had finally become a world catastrophe. Is Kruppism the dirty, violent trade with the tools of death.

It was shortly afterwards that the often repeated but never conclusively proved allegation arose that the then company boss, Gustav Kropp Vi Boland Unhalbach had been informed by the Kaiser months in advance of the imminent war, and Alfred is directly implicated in this bribery of army and naval officers as like, because he's the manager of this guy, and

it's too much to say that we don't know. Again, we don't really know if the Kaiser was literally warned months in advance of the imminent war, because I don't actually think it was planned that way. But that's the rumor going around, right, And it's definitely true that Huggenberg is aware of how tensions are ratcheting up and is using that as a way he is taking advantage of this to make money in a way that makes World

War one more likely. Right, he is implied he has some of the war guilt, right, because of the position that he has. Again, there's plenty of war guilt to go around. The French aren't blameless, the British aren't even blameless,

and fucking the Russian sure is shit aren't blameless. But he's one of the He's one of a small number of men who is directly implicated and creating the conditions of World War One, Right, now, yeah, given his agent wealth, there's no chance Hugenberg or too many of the people he cared about, because he doesn't care about a lot of people, we're going to have to fight and die in this war. In fact, he was very pro the

idea of having a World War one. He's gotten back into the Pan Germanic League at this point, and the league is doing everything they can do to encourage Germany to go to war with its neighbors. If you're you know, if you're old enough to remember the biggest cheerleaders for the war in Iraq, that's that's what these guys are doing, right. They're coming up with justifications for like, why we have to go liberate eastern France. Right, they'll welcome us as liberators Belgian Is naturally.

parliament parliamentary monarchy, right, they have a parliament. The Kaisers I'm described as an absolute ruler and he has he can overrule most things, right, but there is a parliament and they don't have zero power. And the Social Democrats win big that year, which scares the shit out of Alfred and people like him. Right, So he starts talking to other rich reactionary nationalists and he tries to sell them on an idea he's had, which is he wants

to create a cartel of the producing classes. In other words, he wants to get all of the rich business owners together and form a union of rich guys to collectively bargain in their own interests. Right, he sees what union is now, Yeah, oh yeah, gold union, Yes, exactly. And this is a thing He's not alone in thinking this. A lot of magnates in the Ruh and the Rure

is Germany's industrial heartland. It's where the guns get made, right, And a lot of the guys who run and own the minds and the companies making raw materials and the companies turning those raw materials into weapons and other stuff, they're all thinking along the same lines. And so in nineteen thirteen he is hired to chair the board of directors for an organization that pools money from mine and

factory owners in the area for profit. And part of the goal here, he's not just like investing it, he is spending it to benefit them. Part of the idea is you will spend a chunk of our money we all give like one percent or whatever, right, and that money accumulates and you spend it to influence the culture, right to put out news and stuff in propaganda that's

positive for us. Hugenberg is going to be running that project, right because these guys, these industrial magnates, have the billionaires of their day, have come to the conclusion that if we can just change the news stories poor people read, poor people will stop trying to get our money.

that company forms a subsidiary named Ousland Azigen. Leopold explains what happened next, which will sound very familiar to those of you who know anything about the Daily Wire. Ouceland Azigen was established to study foreign publications and to coordinate the advertising of heavy industrial firms interested in exports. So he's sending out people to study foreign media propaganda and bring back advice so that they can create news outlets

that will represent the interests of the rich. Right, that's what he's doing. Now, this is initially just an advertising thing, right, Like the idea is and we'll make that way, will make better ad propaganda. But the study of foreign ads expands to a general study of foreign propaganda, and this kind of conclusion starts to develop that, like, you know what, ads, that's not the best way to propagandize people. Journalism is

the best way to propagandize people. News articles are the best way to propagandize people.