Behind the Bastards - Hitler: Y.A. Fiction Fan Girl

Episode Date: May 22, 2018

 Who was Karl May? And why was Hitler so obsessed with him? In Episode 4, Robert is joined by Laci Mosley (@DivaLaci on IG) and they discuss Karl May's young adult novels which were the 19th century German equivalent of 'Harry Potter,' and how they influenced Hitler.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you have a favorite book or series of books when you were a young adult, like a teenager? Oh, like a teenager. I was about to say Junie B. Jones. Ooh, that's embarrassing. I don't want to say the horrible set of books that I read. No, it's okay. I used to read those horrible Twilight books in high school. That's fine. That little kiddie porn. No, that's bad. I'm not going to say that. Like little raunchy books for horny teenagers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Twilight. Did they have any impact on you growing up? Like your attitudes about the world? Did you like come into adulthood, like expecting certain things about the world as a result of the Twilight books? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, mostly I just didn't expect men to be trash, you know? I thought I was going to find me a nice little porcelain dude to, you know, love on me and wait for me to be a virgin forever. I don't know. Yeah, but then I realized the world is like tender and Instagram.

Yeah, that's like the secret terror behind children's literature is that it has such an impact on little kids' minds because the stuff that you don't have any sense of credibility when you're growing up, you don't know to like, like, I don't know. Yeah, things are face value. Let me take things at face value. Yeah, so the stuff that we read as kids has a big impact on us and we grow up believing certain things as a result of it and then, you know, we encounter reality. Absolutely. But yeah, it leaves an impact. Young adult literature changes young adults in meaningful ways. Have you ever wondered what a guy like Hitler was reading when he was 12?

Oh, no. Well, I haven't. That's what we're going to talk about today. Karl Friedrich May was born in Ernsthal Saxony in 1842. Now, at that point, Saxony was a kingdom in the southern part of the German Confederation. This was far enough in the past that Germans hadn't really locked down the concept of Germany yet. It's like pre-German Germany. Karl was the fifth of 14 kids. Nine of his brothers and sisters died before the age of 18.

14 kids? Yeah. And his mom just kept trying. Well, you got to get a solid five or six out, right? Yeah, so they can do work for you, right? You got to really double and triple down. Damn, that's a lot of births. Yeah, she must have been so relieved when the fifth kid hit 18 and she was like, all right, I'm fucking done.

She's pregnant for like 16 years. Yeah, that's like 20 years of solid pregnancy. Yeah, that's like the run of Seinfeld in a half but half of kids. But just babies, yeah. What a nightmare. So yeah, when Karl was 12, he started making money at something called a Skittle Alley. Skittle Alley? Skittle Alley.

I looked it up. Was it sexual? No, you would expect, right? Yeah, anything with an alley, somebody's, you know. Like, oh, Skittle Alley, you don't want to go down there. Forget it, Jake, it's Skittle Alley. Like, yeah, it sounds terrible. It's a term for a bowling alley and I think he was basically a bowling hustler.

Like a pool shark before bowling? Yeah, at age 12. Okay. 1840s Germany, you know, that's what people were doing. So you were pretty much a man at age 14, like an adult man at 14 back then. So that was the age at which you could choose to leave school and work in a factory or go to school for job training. Karl decided to go to teacher school and made through about two years

before he was expelled for stealing six candles. I guess, well, there's no lights, huh? There's no electricity, so candles are probably. It's like stealing six light bulbs. Yeah. Yeah. Which I do all the time. I haven't been fired.

I still toilet paper, everything's for grabs at work. It does seem pretty petty, like six candles. But he appealed and he was allowed to continue his education in a different city. He graduated in 1860 and he was immediately accused by his roommate of stealing a watch in jail for six weeks. Yo, he was shady. Yeah, he couldn't stop. We're seeing a pattern emerge.

Yeah. So six weeks he spends in jail and when he gets out, his teacher's license is revoked so he can never teach. It's wise. Yeah. Yeah, maybe not the worst decision Germany ever made. Although maybe considering what comes next, maybe the worst decision. Yeah, probably actually, now we think about it.

So Carl May next opted for the career that came naturally to him, shameless theft. Here's a quote from somebody writing about Carl at the time. He had stolen everything from billiard balls and gold watches to baby carriages and horses. Had cheated peasants and little storekeepers by presenting himself as a famous physician or the agent of an insurance company. When he pretended to be a doctor for the purpose of swindling people, his chosen nickname was Dr. Holy. Dr. Holy.

Dr. Holy. If that isn't a scammer name, if I've ever heard one, look, I can appreciate a good scam, you know, people who are dedicated to Tom Fulery, you know, I'm with it. And Tom Fulery is the word that immediately comes to mind when you hear, I'm Dr. Holy, step right up, see what's underneath these cards. Dr. Holy is doing mammograms today. Oh no. Yeah, that's a dark direction for it.

One of his doctor scams involved showing up at a fancy hotel in a new town dressed as a doctor and getting a room on credit because he was a doctor who wouldn't trust a doctor. What? And then when he was in the fancy room, he would order fur coats and gold and silver things also on credit. You can order fur coats. Yeah, on credit. He's a doctor in a nice hotel.

He's not going to skip out on the bill. So he would skip out on the bill in the middle of the night and take all the fine stuff he'd gotten and pawn it. That is crazy. Yeah, he got away with that for months and months and months. His favorite con involved pretending to be a police officer going door to door and saying he was investigating counterfeit currency. So he would ask people for their 10 Thaler notes, which is like a hundred-ish dollars

now, maybe more. Yeah, that's a lot of money they don't have checked. Give me your big bills. I'm going to make sure they're not counterfeit. And then they would always be counterfeit and he would confiscate them. So he would just go door to door taking people's money. Why would anyone fall for this? Even if the money is counterfeit, I would still hold on to it.

I feel like in the 1860s, you could get away with just about everything. Right, because there's no way to verify anything. Yeah, and nobody's got the internet. Nobody reads books. They're like, well, he said he was a cop and he's got a blue shirt. Imagine being a Nigerian prince in the 1850s. I mean, clean up. Yeah, although you would have to wait a long time for letters to get to different places.

That's true. That's true. It was a long con. Probably die of the typhoid in the meantime. But yeah, his capers did eventually catch up with him. He was arrested by the police and then escaped. And for months, he evaded law enforcement by hiding in the woods. 500 people searching for him at one point and he was just hiding in the woods.

Hiding in the woods. He finally got caught because he almost starved to death. So he was not good at living in the woods, just hiding. Okay. And he spent four more years in jail. Even back then, German jails were nicer than American jails today. Carl was allowed access to a vast library and he read constantly. He also started writing fiction.

His favorite books were adventurous stories about America by writers like James Fenimore Cooper, who wrote The Last of the Mohicans. He also loved to read Travel Guides, who was let out in 1869 and jailed again in 1870 for doing the exact same thing he's done his entire life. So jail made him like better and made him smarter. Gradually, not immediately, because he gets out after that and he immediately gets caught again doing something dumb. Yeah, it feels like a Winona Ryder situation. He's just getting high, still in pool balls. He's waiting for his stranger things to strike at it. Which it comes, boy.

He's still shoplifting from Target. In 1876, that feels like a low blow. I'm sorry, Winona. You're great. You are great, but that was funny, girl. Yeah. In 1876, having spent most of the last 16 years as a con man or in jail, Carl May returns to his hometown and tells everyone that he's spent all that time adventuring around the world. Wow.

And this being the 1870s, no one has any way to check his books. And he read all these books. So he's filled with all these. The knowledge. Oh, he's such a great scammer, man. He's wheeling and dealing right now. He starts writing travel books and articles from magazines and eventually starts writing novels. In 1893, he published the first novel in what would become known as the Winotao series.

These books would become the 19th century German equivalent of Harry Potter. Wow. I read the first of these books. I almost don't know how to start when it comes to conveying how weird these are. First off, credit where it's due. They're very racist, but they're less racist than you'd expect from a German in the 1800s. So racism wasn't the main motif that the book gets following. Definitely not the main motif.

It was more like the wallpaper. It's like seasoning for the book. Yeah, seasoning. Every now and then a slur. And it's like the noble Native American sort of racism where you don't know anything about them, but you're putting them on a pedestal as opposed to the old Western films where they're all monsters or whatever. Like Tom Sawyer-y racism? Yeah, Tom Sawyer-y racism. Yeah, like in-word gem racism?

Cool. Yeah, yeah. So it's not as bad a racism as you'd expect from a German in this period of time, but it's really bad. Okay. It's really bad. But not distracting from the plot, like you can still enjoy the book. The plot is nonsense. Okay.

So Karl May is not a great writer in my opinion, but what do I know? His character in the book is known as Karl for the first page. Karl is a young German kid who spent hundreds of hours reading about America, and he travels to the Old West to make his fortune. Three pages in, Karl gets into an argument and knocks out a man with a single punch. Everyone around him nicknames him Old Shatterhand, and that is the name he's known by for the rest of the books. Old Shatterhand. Old Shatterhand. Because that's how Karl thought people gave names, nicknames in the Old West, to 18-year-olds.

He's all those Germans now, so they're probably still Germans like Old Shatterhand? Old Shatterhand. Old Shatterhand. Yeah. Old Best Shatterhand. That's what they call me, uh, Fully Mayweather in Germany. See, he's earned that, though. True.

Yeah, this guy, Karl, has not. No, because he's just a liar. So, yeah, Old Shatterhand is like the Mary Sue of all Mary Sues. He can beat up any guy with one punch. On his second day in the Wild West, he charges into a herd of monstrous buffalo on his horse. Okay. And in this book, because Karl May doesn't know anything about buffalo, buffalo are... Huge.

Huge and, like, violent monsters. Yeah, very strong. Peaceful animals that you are so easy to hunt that we killed all of them. Yeah. Because they're not aggressive. So, he kills two of the buffalo. With his bear hands? No, with a gun, but the next day he gets into a knife fight with a grizzly bear and kills

it with a knife without getting hurt. And also, Karl May authoritatively insists that bears cannot climb. Okay. That's definitely wrong. Yeah, that's really wrong. That's like what they're best at. Oh, God, how many uneducated little kids are there just thinking bears can climb? I suspect a lot of German kids died to bears as a result of these books.

So, yeah, over the course of 30 Samad books, Old Shatterhand... Oh, sorry, yeah. Right after killing the grizzly bear, Old Shatterhand meets his Indian friend and, by the end of the book, blood brother, Winnitao, who is the prince of the Apaches. Okay. That's actually a legit-sounding Indian name. I thought it was going to be something like... No, the names are not...

He does a better job on the names than you'd expect. Okay. Yeah, the names are not offensive. Not like Angry Wind or some crazy Americanized Indian name. Okay, cool. No, he really did some research on the names. Nothing else about the Apaches or their life or religion, but the names are reasonably believable.

So, yeah, Old Shatterhand and Winnitao go on all sorts of crazy adventures for 30 books. Old Shatterhand becomes a chief of the Apaches because they need him as a white guy to teach them... Yeah, he's got to teach him about how to be good people. What's a book without a white guy? Yeah, what's a book without a white guy teaching not white guys how to do stuff? You know, as you do. So, yeah, that's the kind of book we're talking about here.

Okay, it sounds like it would have been made into a movie, like, currently. It's made into, like, 30. Yeah, so that's where we're getting to. First off, when Winnitao dies in the last of these books, the last thing he does is convert to Christianity. Oh! Yeah, because, of course. You know, gotta do that.

Gotta get with Jesus. That's what we call in art. White Jesus. Yeah, white Jesus. Specifically. Almost certainly German Jesus. German blue-eyed Jesus. Yes.

German blue-eyed blonde-haired Jesus. I call on him often, you know. Tax stuff. Things where you need white Jesus. Yeah, white Jesus is so good at taxes. Getting pulled over. I'm like, please, white Jesus, specifically you. Come down.

That's when you want white Jesus. Yes, I believe Winnitao did the right thing. Yeah. So these ridiculous books about the American West wound up being the most popular book series in Germany for young boys. To this day, Karl May is the second most widely read author in all of Germany. He's only beaten by Martin Luther who wrote the German translation of the Bible. Wow.

So yeah, he's ridiculously popular. And when he is at the height of his fame and wealth and, like, the biggest author in Germany, Karl May reveals to everyone in Germany that his stories are all true. What? He was old Shatterhand the whole time. It's like if J.K. Rowling declared Harry Potter real and then insisted she was Harry Potter and also she'd never been to England in her life. Yo, Karl couldn't resist a scam.

He was like, these books are too popular. Hold on, wait a minute. It's me. I'm old Shatterhand. He's like, how can I get more mileage out of this? It's ridiculous because you're already a millionaire best-selling writer. You don't need this. You don't need this.

You don't need this scam. He's like, look, I just lived to scam, OK? That's why he's stealing pool balls and shit. He's like, I just need it. And he killed off Winnitao, so Winnitao can't talk about. No, everyone's dead and they're not going. No one's going to go to America to fact check this. So Karl May committed to the bit.

He dressed like the stereotypical idea of an American frontiersman and his house was decorated with Native American memorabilia and old West guns. Karl himself was rarely photographed with less than six handguns on his person. You can find his pictures if you just Google Karl May and look, I'm just going to show you one. So on the front of his body alone, you can see three handguns and a knife. So where did he, first of all, if you run, all these guns are going to fall out. This man literally has guns on top of guns, resting on guns and ropes.

What the hell? I think it's a bear tooth necklace. Yes. Oh God. Oh. But you know what? He got the jacket right though. No, it's a solid look.

Yeah. It's a solid look. The jacket is lit. Yeah. No, no. He's not bad at accessorizing. No. He just, I don't think knows.

So there was no internet in those days, obviously. Everybody believed him and one of the people who believed him the most was an adorable little tyke named Adolf Hitler. As an adult, non-adorable dictator, Hitler was outspoken about the debt he owed to Karl May. He got May's work regularly and we know this because, starting in 1941, his table talk was all recorded by a member of the Nazi party. Here's one quote.

I've just been reading a very fine article on Karl May. I found it delightful. It would be nice if his work were republished. I owe him my first notions of geography and the fact that he opened my eyes on the world. Wow. Yeah. A scammer opened the eyes to another scammer. Yeah.

Yeah. Here's another quote. I used to read him by candlelight or by moonlight with the help of a huge magnifying glass. I was carried away by it and I went on to devour at once the other books by the same author. The immediate result was a falling off in my school reports. So I mean, that's Hitler saying basically I did bad in school because I was reading this guy's books way too late in the night. Consumed.

Yeah. Consumed. Which I guess you're really bored back then. Yeah. Like growing up in the late 1800s in Germany, in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. Yeah. You know, gathering weeds for your soup.

Weeds and potato soup. Yeah. I think that was like, if you read about Hitler's childhood, like it was just the opera or being sick and almost dead at bed for him. So I guess like, you know, terrible Wild West books are, yeah. Right after this, we're going to get into more about how Karl May's ridiculous Wild West novels influenced the war in Russia, the invasion of Poland and the entire course of World War Two.

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Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and we're talking about Hitler's favorite young adult fiction author, Carl Friedrich May. A man who lied about everything, made millions of dollars and influenced the young growing mind of Adolf Hitler to a shocking degree. So we're about to get into how Hitler based aspects of his military strategies in World War II off of the Wild West books written by a con man who had never been there.

Who had never even left Germany. In 1933, right after Hitler had been made chancellor of Germany, Hitler spent his first summer in the Berghof, which was his mountain supervillain fortress layer thing. At one point while he was up there, a guy named Egon came to visit him. I'm fairly certain it's not the Ghostbuster, but I'm not 100% sure about that. So Egon later gave an interview about meeting Hitler during that time and he recalled being in Hitler's office and seeing a bookcase and wondering like any of us what Hitler reads in his free time and quote, surprisingly, the majority of the books were the Wild West

novels of Carl May as an adult, as an adult, as the chancellor of Germany. And in fact, Hitler apparently reread all 60 some odd of Carl May's books between 1933 and 1934. He gave a collection of all of May's books to his nephew as a present and Hitler was given a very nice collection of May's books by Hermann Gehring as a gift at one point. Are you serious? It's Hitler's mind. He's old Hitler hands.

Yeah. It's like if Donald Trump grew up reading, I don't know, yeah, Harry Potter, like you were saying earlier, and then just never stopped reading it as an adult was like, you know, we got to base our economic policy on Harry Potter has a room full of gold. Why don't we try that? We literally do that though. So he is a grown ass man. He is in charge of Germany and he is obsessively rereading the Wild West books of a dead con

man. In 1939, when Hitler's armies were preparing to invade Poland, a Nazi plane crashed a neutral Belgium carrying two officers with copies of the invasion plans. So not great. Not a great start to an invasion. No, no, no, no. They did manage to destroy the plans in time, but the German military wasn't 100% certain that nothing had gotten out.

And so they reconfigured their forces just in case and it was kind of a clusterfuck. Like they didn't do well at improvising. The plane crashed, it's just pages of Carl's book. It's just copies of when it's out. You know, it's actually, it's scary how close to the truth that is. Hitler grew frustrated at how bad his generals were at planning a surprise invasion. He fired several of them and blamed their incompetence on the fact that while they'd all read their Clowswitz, none of them had read enough Carl May.

Oh no. I'm going to do some unpacking here. So Carl von Clowswitz is like right up there with Sun Tzu in the pantheon of the best military minds in history. Wow. He fought against Napoleon and helped beat Napoleon. He invented the term fog of war and he wrote a book titled On War that is required reading in every military academy on earth pretty much to this day.

Carl May on the other hand was a con man who pretended to be a doctor to steal fur coats. I guess they didn't read enough Carl May. No you're reading too much of that expert. Was Hitler like a cult of one? I mean, yeah. It sounds like Carl May was like his leader. It sounds like Hitler was to Carl May, what everyone else in Germany was to Hitler. Everyone's worshiping Hitler and Hitler's like, no, this guy.

Maybe this is how it works. If you're going to start a cult, you got to have something to follow yourself. You can't get too deep in your own shit. No, you got to get deep into somebody else's shit. Keep yourself a little straight and narrow. So read Carl May about it was a tactic Hitler would use for the duration of his warlord career. When the war in Russia turned against Germany and the Wehrmacht was bogged down fighting

Soviet insurgents, one of Hitler's solutions was to send 300,000 copies of Carl May's novels to his officers. So I learned all that before I read my first Carl May novel. And so while I was reading, I kept an eye open for just any brilliant strategic insights in case I ever find myself like Chancellor of Germany, you know, you might as well be prepared or whatever. So I got one insight about Midway through the book when old Shatterhand and his coworkers are out on a prairie surveying for a railroad that's going to be built.

They meet the chief of the Apaches out there and he gets really angry at them for basically helping the railroad steal his people's land. And so he gives them an option, you guys either leave tonight or I'm going to come with my army and I'm going to kill all you guys. So of course they're not going to leave and not build a railroad. They came to steal shit. What do you mean? They're white guys in the 1870s.

They're building a railroad. Now, leave. Stop. Not murder you. No. That's not going to happen. Not rape your women. No, no, no.

Come on. But, you know, this is a problem because there's like a dozen of them and like an army of Apaches. So, you know, they've got to come up with some brilliant strategy to defeat this Apache army. So I'm like, I'm like waiting here. Like what was it that's so impressed Hitler? And it turns out that the key in this case to beating the Apaches was that one of old

Shatterhand's friends was friends with the chief of another Indian tribe who happened to be nearby and had an even bigger army. Wow. And so they just use that to, yeah. The Indians really loved old Shatterhand. Just some of them. They were like, fuck our land, fuck, we're going to help this white man out. So they call this, they call their, they call them the homies.

Yeah. Yeah. And so they win because they've just got this extra army that's bigger than the other army. So Hitler's like, all right, got it, got it. We have another army. This is what we need to do. Cool, cool.

We need to have another army, guys. What? Well, reading to this brings to mind the real story of army detachment Steiner. This was a real military unit, well, sort of real military unit that Hitler threw together near the end of the war in April 1945 as the Russians were advancing into Berlin. On paper, it was a mighty force. In reality, it was made up of units that had been decimated and many cases had no weapons and often did not exist at all.

Hitler was convinced that this fake army was going to throw back the Russians when its commander refused to attack because it would have killed his men who had no weapons and were mostly teenagers. Hitler went into a rage and killed himself eight days later. So Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect and munitions master and whatnot, after the war wrote that Hitler basically treated Carl May like the literary equivalent of comfort food after a bad day of losing the Second World War. Quote, Hitler was wont to say that he had always been deeply impressed by the tactical

finesse and circumspection that Carl May conferred upon his character Winnetau, and he would add during his reading hours at night when faced by seemingly hopeless situations, he would still reach for those stories. They gave him courage like works of philosophy for others or the Bible for elderly people. Wow. That's what I think. It really is like if you're president, you're like, give me my Harry Potter book. Oh, Harry.

These are my Bible. What should I do now? Tell me how to open the Chamber of Secrets in my heart. How do I be Voldemort? Only it's a whole real-ass war that's happening. It's the Russians. It's the Russians. Voldemort, the Russians.

I can see similarities. This man, wow. Yeah. I get it though. Hitler was a scammer. His whole life was scams. He was literally trying to kill a grace of people that he belonged to. That was more of a myth.

There's a myth that Hitler was actually a Jewish guy. Really? That's a myth? It's one of those things. It's impossible to get completely definitive evidence, but when you go back to the genealogy that exists, it doesn't seem like it adds up. Yeah, it was the perfect amount of irony for me. It would have been great irony.

It is true that his family's original last name was Schickelgruber, and he only is named Hitler because his- Shatterhands. He was going to be ate off Shatterhands. It's all Shatterhands. They were like, nah, bro, it's not ringing. It doesn't ring. Yeah, no. He does have a ridiculous backstory, which I'm sure we'll get to one of these days,

but that part isn't part of it. He was a scammer in almost every other way a man could be a scammer though. He had a fake army that he tried to make go to war. He scammed himself on that one. That was a Hitler double scam there. Hitler was a complicated dude, and I don't want to be claiming here that everything that he did was based on Karl May, but it's hard to look at, say, the invasion to invade Russia and not see a couple of Karl May's intellectual fingerprints.

This will start with the concept of Liebensraum, which is a German word that means living space. It's one of the Hitler vocab words that a lot of people probably remember from high school. And the idea is basically that the German people needed more space. We're this great up-and-coming nation. We need more space for farmland so we can grow, and the only place to get it is... Taking it. Yeah, taking it from Poland, Ukraine, Russia, France, everybody.

And Hitler, when he would talk about this before the invasion, very much couched it in terms of the American frontier. He believed in social Darwinism. Some cultures were stronger than others, and strong cultures deserve to take the land of weak cultures. This idea is in full display in Karl May's work. The Native Americans are portrayed as a doomed but noble people. It's taken for granted that their struggle is destined to failure and that it's perfectly

normal for white people to move right on in and take their land. I love that you call something doomed because you're the one who's damning it. Like, look, we gonna kill them so they gonna be killed. So it's not bad that we gonna kill them because we're killing them. Like, what kind of logic is that? It's clearly a doomed struggle. Look at how good we are at murdering them. Yeah.

We came to kill them. So it's not our fault when they did. No. Some things are just inevitable. Yeah. Like all this murder we're doing. But that's how you have to think as a scammer. That's how you get away with lying with people and call yourself Dr. Holy.

Like, look, if I don't show up and take their money, somebody else will. Yeah. So it should be me. Someone's gonna wind up with that money, either them or someone else or me. So it might as well be me. So it might as well be me. There's a quote from one of the characters in the novel Winnetow, who is a white guy who becomes a member of the Apache tribe and lives with them for years and years and years. Oh gosh.

So this is supposedly a guy who's sympathetic to their cause. Right. The red race has been cruelly outraged and robbed, but as a white man, I know the Indian must disappear. And here's a Hitler quote from October, 1941, a few months into Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia. See why a German who eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the idea that the soil that produces this bread has been won by the sword. When we eat wheat from Canada, we don't think about the despoiled Indians. Wow. Yeah.

The way to alleviate your guilt. Like, they had all the tactics like, look, okay, yeah, we murdered them. But if we didn't murder them, we would have murdered them. So they would have been dead. Canada did it too. And also Canada, remember? Eat that bread. Yeah.

Are we any worse than Canada? Yes, but not by enough. Here's another quote. The struggle we are waging against the Soviet partisans resembles very much the struggle in North America against the red Indians. Victory will go to the strong and strength is on our side. Yeah. So Carl May isn't the only Old West influence that Hitler draws from. Like, you know, reading those novels as a kid sparked sort of a fascination in him with just sort of the whole American frontier.

And he studied everything that we did during that period of time. And in 1939, Hitler forced 90,000 Polish Jews onto a reservation ghetto in direct imitation of a strategy Kit Carson pursued with the Navajos. So a lot of Hitler's interest in the Old West was based on real history, but that obsession with real history was sparked by Hitler's own admission by Carl May's Old West novels. Fake history. Yeah. Did he ever realize that it was fake? Did Hitler think that these stories were true? Because remember, Carl came out and was like, this is me.

Yeah. I think Hitler went to his grave believing Carl May had never told a lie. Wow. Because the actual Carl May was a pacifist. You know. I mean, Carl May didn't kill anybody. He just stole from everybody. He was just stealing candles left and right.

He kept the peace, but he would also steal your billion balls and your baby carriage. Yeah. If only Hitler had jumped out of the stealing billiard balls part of Carl May's legacy. We'd all be fine with Hitler then. Right. He was just a silver-tongued devil stealing pool balls. Shut up to people's houses and checking their money. I need to check your dollars.

Oh, Hitler. Oh, Hitler. Got away again. Yeah. He would literally be a chaplain figure then. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

As the war went on, Hitler and his regime's propaganda grew increasingly obsessed with what they called wonderwaffa or miracle weapons. The V2 rocket was one example of these, which is those big rockets they would just shoot over to England. Some of them would hit people. Most of them would hit nothing, but it scared the shit out of people because it's like... Something from the sky. Yeah. Missiles hadn't existed. It's basically like an angel falling on your house.

So yeah, you can make a case that Hitler's love of super weapons and his faith in the ability of these wonder weapons to win the war started with Carl May. See, old Shatterhand and Winnetow were often heavily outnumbered on the plains by bandits or hostile Indian tribes or groups of evil criminals or whatever, but they always came out on top. One reason for this is that they had weapons that were, by 1870 standards, wacko space guns. Like what? Like a slingshot? No.

Old Shatterhand had a repeating rifle that he claimed, and again, he said this was a real gun that he'd really used. He said it could fire 100 rounds a minute and was effective at more than 1,500 yards away. Now, for comparison, in 1865, like five years before these books are set, a good soldier, like a vet, is putting out three or four bullets a minute from 200 yards away. So Carl claims he's got a rifle. AR-15. Yeah, Carl claims he's got an AR-15 out there on the plains that he's just, and he can carry 1,728 bullets because they're very tiny but very deadly. And it's a really specific number. It is.

I don't know why. That's like an odd one to pick. Because when you lie, usually you get heavy on the specifics. Yeah, I picture him like putting in thousands of, no, no, no, Carl, you got to be specific here. Yeah, yeah. No one's going to believe that. What sounds believable? 1,728.

There we go. And when Hitler was a kid, in the time before World War I, there were regular rumors in Germany, stoked by Carl May himself, that he was going to give his special secret rifle to the Kaiser so it could be used by the German army. Wow. So May, as a kid was saying, like, it's okay, I know we're surrounded as Germany and we've got all these enemies, but I got this super space gun and I'm going to give it to the king. And it's going to be all right. We're going to win this war with my space gun.

He could not quit lying. No. He already had money, he had fame, and he was like, what else can I get? A political influence with a fake ass space gun. He's like a guy who wins the lottery and then is like, I'm going to spend all this lotto money on more lottery tickets. That's the smart fucking play. Listen, this is really, like, empowering my life. You know what I mean?

The next time I have an opportunity to lie to somebody or to fraud people, like, I would take it. Because if I don't, somebody else will. Somebody else will. And who knows, the frauds that you commit might wind up inspiring the next Hitler, which is what everybody wants. Everyone. Yeah. Now, we've got some more of those commercials, capitalism ditties to sing. Good times.

So we're going to get into that next. After that, we're going to get back into how Karl May's ridiculous novels influenced Hitler's ideas of what America was going to do during the World War II. And also how Karl May's ridiculous con story actually ended. So all of that after some ads. I interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing.

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Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back, so last we were talking about Carl May, the con man who wrote a bunch of Wild West novels based on nothing that inspired Hitler and his plans to invade Poland and Russia. And now we're going to talk about how Carl May shaped Hitler's ideas about America. So, obviously, Carl May's novels by Hitler's own admission were the first time he really read anything about America. They opened his eyes to geography. May's novels, America is a land dominated by German immigrants. Almost every white person in the story with a speaking role in these novels is a German transplant. In the first book, Old Shatterhand, a German heads west and meets his mentor, who also happens to be a German. And they stumble upon an old man who's been living with Apaches for years and also happens to be German.

This pattern continues for dozens of books. Almost every new person that they meet who doesn't suck is a German who just moved to America. Oh, gosh, was Hitler's overall goal, like he's just going to keep spreading until he gets spread into America? Well, he thought America was doomed by its diversity, but he also thought America had a chance to survive because there was a huge German population in America. So, if he could get those Germans in charge of America and just push everyone else into the sea, then America had a real bright future ahead of it. Which is why the Nazi government expended a lot of money establishing the German-American Bund, which was a Nazi organization in America in the 1930s that attracted tens of thousands of members. They drew 20,000 people at one point to Madison Square Garden. Up in the Pacific Palisades, there is a house that's currently a graffiti sanctuary that was bought as a resort for the Nazi elite in the Palisades.

The Nazi elite? Yeah, there's Hitler's house. You can go hike in it if you live in LA, and it's actually a lovely hike. Oh, I bet it's beautiful. Yeah, it is, and the whole building is like a graffiti sanctuary now, so there's some really cool graffiti artwork. Wait, like people are doing like anti-Nazi graffiti, or it's like beautiful Nazi graffiti? No, it's not Nazi graffiti. At least I haven't seen any Swastikas, but it's just nice graffiti. Yeah, because lately the Nazis don't have that swag that they used to, they were in polos and new balances. At least back then they had, you know, cute outfits, nice villas. Yeah, I'll say this for the Nazis, they knew how to make a leather jacket.

Quality stitching. Quality stitching. I mean, Hugo Boss. Right, honestly, if I could just remove the Swastikas. Well, I mean, you can go buy Hugo Boss today. Oh, that's very true. Oh, man. Yeah, Hugo Boss made all the SS uniforms. Damn. Yeah, that's how that got started. And we still buy Hugo Boss? I have a great purse from them. I mean, we still buy Mercedes.

We sure do, German engineer. Yeah, they made tanks and now they make pretty good cars. You know what? I'm going to put that in the bowels of my memory because I like Mercedes. Yeah, well, I mean, they weren't bad tanks. So yeah, the Fuhrer never wanted a war with the United States and believed that the U.S. could be brought around to supporting Nazi ideals. And part of this belief started with the fact that he got his conception of America through Carl May novels as a nation that was dominated by sober, good-hearted German punchmasters. And it may seem silly to think that these ridiculous trash books would have formed the basis of the Fuhrer's feelings on America, but other Europeans at the time also took May seriously as an expert on American culture.

That is wild. I found this quote from a French newspaper reviewer condemning American values because of what Carl fucking May wrote about them. The man who had never been there. Who had never left Germany. The traveler, Carl May, assures us that no single point in his story is invention or exaggeration. American morals, no matter what certain admirers of that young civilization may say, are generally inferior to ours. They sometimes lower themselves to abject savagery, especially when it comes to the ugly practices of personal revenge. The writer describes the American version of Christianity as relayed by Carl May as mutilated.

He concludes that the thirst for both gold and revenge are two of the most terrible passions of the Yankee. So you can see why Hitler might have thought America would be on board with Nazism. Yeah. And also, I mean, French guy's conception isn't 100% off. Right? I mean, these are some solid guesses. This is starting to make me think that when the Bible was first written, it was supposed to be like some fun fiction. And then they came out like Carl May, like, it's all true.

In fact, it's me. Oh, this is taken off? No, no, this is all real. It's me. Jesus. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I think the first guy to draw a direct connection between Carl May and Hitler was Klaus Mann, who was the son of Thomas Mann, a famous German author. Klaus Mann wrote in an article in 1940 called Carl May Hitler's literary mentor, where he made basically all the allegations I've just made minus the Russia stuff because Hitler hadn't invaded Russia yet.

But Klaus wrote, the third Reich is Carl May's ultimate triumph, the ghastly realization of his dreams. It is according to ethical and aesthetic standards indistinguishable from his that the Austrian house painter, Hitler, nourished in his youth by old shatterhand is now attempting to rebuild the world. So Mann actually blamed Carl May for not just Hitler, but the fact that all of Germany bent to Hitler's madness. Quote, they are hopelessly estranged from both reality and art, sacrificing all civilization and common sense on the altar of a brutish heroism, but stubbornly loyal, whether consciously or not, to the foul substitute for poetry and culture represented by Carl May. It's like a mental escape too. Yeah. So you're broke as fuck. And then somebody comes along and tells you that you can take over the world. And then there's all these books that are basically saying German people everywhere just like.

Yeah, it fills this whole nation's mind with images of this huge amount of territory. If you can just take it from the savage people who own it. And all it takes is a strong right hook and a magic rifle. Yeah, this is literally what Trump has done to middle America. Yo, I wonder what book Trump is reading. What's his Carl May? I mean. Dr. Seuss.

Does he read? Cat in the head. There's a lot of pictures in that. Yeah. You don't have to read as much. Cat in the head. I'm going to get those green eggs in that damn ham. We're all we know.

That's really what's happening. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. So it is worth noting in fairness to Carl May that a lot of non-Hitler Germans also professed a deep and abiding love for Carl May. Einstein.

Albert Einstein was a huge Carl May fan, although he did not credit May with his breakthroughs on relativity. He needs to give Carl some credit. Yeah. I used to wear the same shirts every day, right? Didn't that come from Carl? I thought he wore six guns. I thought he wore six guns every day.

Einstein was always strapped. That's a classic Einstein fact. Pack and heat every day. Nobody was about to steal those theories from him, okay? Yeah. I also want to point out May espoused a number of anti-Hitler views in his novel. Not, he wasn't like against Hitler because Hitler was like a child at the time, but like he, there's like a point in one of the books where a guy makes fun of a hunchback

dude and Carl May is like, it's shitty to make fun of people who have a disability, which is not a Hitler point. No, he wanted to kill them. Yeah. Hitler murdered people with, yeah. Yeah. So May wasn't in lockstep with the Nazis and it may seem a little weird that Hitler would idolize someone who wrote things that contradicted his own beliefs.

This makes a little more sense when you understand what I'm calling the Adolf Hitler theory of how to read as laid out in Mein Kampf. Hitler stated, reading is no end in itself, but a means to an end. And to explain that, he said, a man who possesses the art of correct reading will, in studying any book, magazine, or pamphlet, instinctively and immediately perceive everything which, in his opinion, is worth permanently remembering. So basically, yeah. Like cherry pick.

Yeah. Like just pick and choose what you want. Choose your own adventure. Yeah. Yeah, he's saying the right way to read is to pull everything that reinforces your existing opinions out of a book and ignore the rest, which is. How a lot of people read. Yeah, it's kind of a shockingly accurate prediction of how content works on the internet.

Yes. So Hitler had our number with that. And religion. Like everything. And religion. Because, you know, Bible thumbers love to pull up those quotes that are like anti-gay, but then they love to forget about parts that are just like, you know, you could still sell your daughter and buy, like all the shit that's just like, oh.

Yeah. The time Jesus beat up all those bankers, they're like, no, no, no. He loves capitalism. He's a big fan. No, he loves it. No. 10% flat. He would have loved that.

Oh, the only time he got violent was when he beat up a bunch of money lenders. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Doesn't confirm our bias. Damn, Hitler said some real truth, though. That was, he was on the money with that one. Yeah. I mean, that's not how you should read, but it's how people do read. Right.

Yeah. And I also wonder if he was reading it from the perspective of like conquering people and manipulating them. If he was also reading that, because like that's what a lot of these books, like they managed to convince other Indians to beat up other Indians. Yeah. Yeah. And the Indians are like surprisingly okay with a lot of what's happened.

You're like, yeah, fans. Yeah. No, we got you, white guys. Oh, yeah. If there's anybody. It's cool. We're doomed. Yeah.

So the last question of this podcast is what did happen to Karl May in the end? And that's a story worth telling too. As I said, he got rich and wealthy and started to claim that he himself was old Shatterhand. He bought a big fancy mansion, which he nicknamed Villa Shatterhand. He's really likes that name. It was so bad. And he's like, I'm going to put it everywhere. It's the coolest thing anybody ever thought of.

Villa sounds classy. They're going to put Shatterhand on the end. He filled it with exotic replicas that he claimed were from his travels, but in reality, they came from a furniture dealer in Dresden. He also had replicas of his character's famous guns built in Dresden. And I got to show you a picture of his guns. What about that AR-15? This one is the AR-15 supposedly, but divert your eyes there to the bedazzled hunting

rifle. That is a bedazzled double barrel bear hunting rifle. This is God. He is fucking rhinestone that motherfucker up. Yo, I mean, it's cute though. Yeah. He had taste. He was like, he was giving us a little.

He was like a rapper. He really gives me the feeling of like, you know, I'm going to wear the shiniest shit on me. That's like if Lil Wayne started like bedazzling his gun. Yeah. Yeah. It is in that. I got to give respect to that because if I ever get rich, I'm definitely bedazzling

all my guns. Oh, you know, how else do people know you're rich? No. And you, you wear that coat and you, yeah, you, you, it's like a 90 degrees out. He's just sweating, sweat pouring out his ankles. We're criticizing Carl May for the Nazi stuff, but not for the fashion stuff. No. He knows how to purport a lifestyle that they are definitely not living.

It is him. It's Carl May. Like if they had Cribs back then, like, you know, Villa Shatterhand would have been lit. This is the skin of a bear. I totally killed. Yeah. He literally just walked. It says Macy's on the tag.

Yeah. That was the bear's name. He's like, I got these from some Indians, um, uh, crazy foot and, uh, and, uh, Birdman. Birdman. His name was Birdman. Yeah. Yeah. He's like, oh, this shit looks like it came from Dresden.

Oh no. No. No. So wait, does the guy in Dresden know all his secrets? Does he know that? He must have. Right? Like there has to, maybe he was just getting so many gun orders that he was like, if I

tell this money train ends. Oh, listen, I keep all the secrets. Yeah. Yeah. You can trust a gunsmith. You bedazzles rifles. I'd have a store of exact replicas of everything in Carl May's house just like, no, no, no. He got it from America.

Yeah. No, those are the guns he used to fight a bunch of frontier wars on his own. Yeah. Um, so by age 56, Carl May was at the height of his fame and influence. He claimed to speak more than 40 languages and to understand more than 1200. Wow. Yeah. So he's, it's like that lady who was doing fake sign language, like Carl May is out here

doing translation. Yeah. Yo, 56 though, he lived hell along. 56 is hell along. Back in the day, I beat all his sims down. He did live long on the curve that his brothers and sisters set. Yeah. Um, so he, no, he didn't die at that point though.

This is the height of his fame. He was so popular that during one speech in Munich, firefighters had to be dispatched to disperse a crowd of his fans. Wow. That's like some beetle shit. He claimed that he had only two great missions left in life. A visit back to see the Apaches, a trip to see the shake of the Hadadan Arabs, which he also read a bunch of books set in the Middle East that he also claimed was based about

him, where he does the same stuff, but in the Middle East. So his last two goals in life are two fake things. Yeah. His last two goals in life are more lies. I just haven't told quite enough lies. Like, damn, like you couldn't give us one real thing. He's like, no, like lies are his achievements. Obviously.

He's like, last week I got a fraud out some people in the Middle East. The hundreds of millions of books I've sold are nice, but it's my lies that keep me warm at night. You gotta be passionate about something, okay? So in 1899, he came under a storm of criticism. A collection of his very early works was republished against his will, and these writings were semi-pornographic. Oh.

I have not been able to find them, which is a tragedy. Damn. He has some erotica? Yeah. He was apparently writing erotica or semi-erotica early in his career. I pulled out my bedazzle good. He sued for defamation of character. But this began a surge of interest in Carl May's actual documented past.

So May panicked, tried to cover his tracks. He had the original plates of those photographs of him in costume thrown into the Danube because like the pictures had been edited and he didn't want people to see that they'd clearly been taken in a photo studio. So he started the little Bow Wow challenge. Yeah. Yeah. His doctorate was found out as fake.

Oh, he'd also spent years pretending to be a doctor. Right. He was Dr. Holy. Well, no, he pretended to be a doctor again. No. After he was a famous author, he also lied about being a doctor. He went back to being a doctor, you're already a famous author. Well, but Dr. Shatterhand is a pretty sick name.

Dr. Shatterhand, Lord Jesus. So I love this guy. During the course of the lawsuit against the people who published his porn, his criminal record was uncovered. No. And worst of all, it was discovered that he'd never actually been to America. Damn. Michael May published an autobiography in 1910 to try and rehabilitate his image and

defend himself. Among other things, he claimed that his famous candle theft, you remember the six candles he stole, he claimed that that was so he could give his sister wax scraps as a Christmas present. Okay. Well, I know they was eating rock soup, so I know wax scraps might actually be nice. Here's your wax scraps. Also, that's still not a good excuse.

You stole six candles so you could give your sister a terrible gift, not even the whole candle. You're not even going to give her the candle directly. She doesn't want candles. She wants scraps. Okay. Okay, fam. That was not.

Is she dying? You should at least say she was dying. Just make a better lie, Carl May. He's such a liar. He's such a constant liar. But all the controversy did prompt the elderly Carl May and his wife to visit the United States. They made it as far west as Buffalo, New York.

Wow. Uh-huh. So, Carl May died in 1912, but his ridiculous books lived on. In the 1960s, they were made into a series of Euro-Westerns that are credited with saving West Germany's film industry. There's still a Carl May Festival in Germany every year that draws tens of thousands of fans. Thanks to his books and the fascination for Native American culture they ignited, Germany

has a thriving Native American cosplay and festival industry to this day. So, I, in one of my previous jobs, I interviewed a guy who was a Native American and a professor, and his whole job is like busting people who falsely claim to be Native Americans to like sell products and stuff. And one of the things he pointed out is that some of the world's best living speakers of languages like the Sioux language are Germans who learned it so that they can cosplay better in these gigantic festivals. You are kidding me.

It's a, you can find these insane pictures online of these German Native American festivals where, and it's all white guys and ladies dressing up in costume and like not bad costume. Like a lot of these people, like some of them like authentically like hand-chipped their own stone axes and stuff, like they're really into it hard for. So, they're not using Carl May's descriptions? They're not, no, no, no. Those were all lies. Because everything Carl May wrote was a lie.

No, they've gotten better since then. Oh my gosh. We'll put some of the pictures up on the site and in social media. There's some great ones of the movies where they cast just the most ridiculous looking man to be old Shatterhand. He's just like throwing gigantic rocks. Just throwing cardboard rocks at people. Yeah, you owe it to yourself to look at these.

They're insane. It looks a little bit like a Star Trek episode set in the old West, like that level of production value. So yeah, thank you Carl May. Yeah, I'm really proud of him. This is what I will say, if you're passionate about something, and obviously Carl May was passionate about lying to people and fraud, it didn't even matter what he was lying about. But he dedicated his whole life to just being a liar, and I can't knock somebody out.

Lying was his passion. You have to respect that much consistency. If someone just tells a few petty lies to get out of problems, that's not respectable. But if you lie your entire life, even after you no longer need to, for no reason other than the art of being a liar, you could always count on Carl May not telling you the truth. Whatever he was going to do, it was going to be not just a lie, but the boldest lie. Very fantastical. It's not even going to sound real.

Because most liars who might have been like, oh, I traveled to America as a young man, and I met this guy, and he told me his stories, and that's what these books are based on. But Carl May is like, no, I'm him. I'm the punch master who can't be beaten. But it wasn't. He never wanted to be him until he blew up, but then he was like, wait a minute. It was me the whole time. I gotta say, people talk about how JK Rowling has kind of gone a little bit wacky in her

fame and all the new stuff she releases about her characters and whatnot and her social media presence, but she's got nothing on Carl May's game. No, because she never is like, I am Harry Potter. I am Harry Potter, and this shit's all real. I used to run through the platform. Y'all ain't never ran through the platform before. Just give it a shot. Oh, God.

Everyone's dead. Oh, man. Carl May, you know, big ups. I wish that I had known him back in the day. Yeah. Also, I kind of wish that I had lived in that time. Think about now how hard you have to work to scam people. Back then, you could really just say anything.

Yeah, no one's googling you. You just go to the town over, and it's like a new planet, like, I'm a doctor. They're probably not even that far apart, so it's like, it's like probably five miles away. The communication. You think that guy's really a doctor? I don't know, man. He was born 10 miles away.

There's no way we can check up on him. There's no way. There's no backtracking. We just gotta believe him. Look, he got the outfit on. He got coats. Look at that coat. Yeah.

Who has a white coat and isn't a doctor? She's got a bag with a medicine sign on it. Yeah, that's all you needed. It was an imagination. Man, millennials would have done great in that time period. We have such great imaginations. Maybe it'll come back. Maybe this whole internet thing will collapse, and it'll be like a whole world of Carl Mays.

That's my dream. That's everyone's dream now. Yeah. All right. Well, that's our podcast for today. Lacey, you got anything you want to plug? Drop in here. Sure.

You can follow me on Instagram if I ever get my phone back at Diva Lacey, my Instagram stories are basically Carl May. It's just me recreating fantastical frauds. Yeah. I actually frauded my way into All-Star Weekend this year without a ticket. Oh, nice. Yeah. I was reading some Carl May books.

I was like, this is my destiny. Yeah. So thank you so much, Carl. You've changed my life forever. All right. Thank you, Lacey. I'm Robert Evans. Remember to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

You can also find us on social media, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, at BastardsPod. And you can find us on the World Wide Web at BehindTheBastards.com. That's all for this week. See ya. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside this hearse was like a lot of goods. But our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass, and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space, with no country to bring him down.

With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.