Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, I am Robert Evans, and this is Behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you
Speaker 1: don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
Speaker 1: With me today is Lacy Mosley, comedian, writer, podcaster. Hello
Speaker 1: and uh Lacy. Did you have a favorite book or
Speaker 1: series of books when you were a young adult, like
Speaker 1: a teenager? Oh, like a teenager, I was about Jones.
Speaker 1: Um oh, that's embarrassing. I don't want to say the
Speaker 1: horrible set of books that I read. No, it's okay.
Speaker 1: I used to read those horrible Twilight books. Okay, in
Speaker 1: high school. That's fine. That little kitty Kitty poor, I know,
Speaker 1: that's bad. I'm not gonna say, like like little raunchy
Speaker 1: books for horny teenager. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Twilight. Did you
Speaker 1: have any impact on you growing up, like your attitudes
Speaker 1: about the world. Did you like come into adulthood like
Speaker 1: expecting certain things about the world Twilight? Yeah? Mostly, I
Speaker 1: just didn't expect men to be trash, you know. I
Speaker 1: thought I was going find me a nice little porcelain
Speaker 1: du to, you know, love on me and wait for
Speaker 1: me to be a virgin forever. I don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but then I realized the world is like tender and Instagram. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's like the that's like the secret terror behind children's
Speaker 1: literature is that it it has such an impact on
Speaker 1: little kids minds because this stuff that you don't have
Speaker 1: any sense of credibility when you're growing up, you don't
Speaker 1: know to like like I don't. Yeah, things are face value,
Speaker 1: like you take things at face value? Yeah, ab solutely.
Speaker 1: The stuff that we read is kids has a big
Speaker 1: impact on us, and we grow up believing certain things
Speaker 1: as a result of it, and then you know, we
Speaker 1: we encounter reality absolutely. Um, but yeah, it leaves an impact.
Speaker 1: Young adult literature changes young adults in meaningful ways. Have
Speaker 1: you ever wondered what a guy like Hitler was reading
Speaker 1: when he was twelve? Oh? No, well I haven't. That's
Speaker 1: what we're going to talk about today. Carl Friedrich May
Speaker 1: was born in Ernstall, Saxony in eighteen forty two. Now,
Speaker 1: at that point, Saxony was a kingdom in the southern
Speaker 1: part of the German Confederation. This was far enough in
Speaker 1: the past that Germans hadn't really locked down the incept
Speaker 1: of Germany yet it's like pre German Germany. Uh. Carl
Speaker 1: was the fifth of fourteen kids. Nine of his brothers
Speaker 1: and sisters died before the age of eighteen kids, and
Speaker 1: his mom just kept trying, Well, you gotta get you
Speaker 1: gotta get a solid like five or six out right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so they can do work for you, right, you gotta
Speaker 1: really double and triple down. You know, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of births. Yeah. She must have been so relieved when
Speaker 1: like the fifth kid hit eighteen and she was like,
Speaker 1: all right, I'm duck, she's pregnant for like sixteen years.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's that's like, yeah, that's the like twenty years
Speaker 1: of solid pregnancy. Yeah, that's like the run of Seinfeld
Speaker 1: and a half but half but just baby. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: a nightmare. Um. So yeah, when when Carl was twelve
Speaker 1: he started making money, it's something called a skittle alley.
Speaker 1: Skittle alley. I looked it up and that's in sexual
Speaker 1: No you would expect, right, like a skittle alley. You
Speaker 1: don't want to go down there. Forget a jake at
Speaker 1: skittle alley, like, uh, it sounds terrible. It's a term
Speaker 1: for a bowling alley. And I think he was basically
Speaker 1: a bowling hustler, um like a pool shark. But yeah,
Speaker 1: at age twelve um eighteen forties Germany. You know that's
Speaker 1: what people were doing. Um so you were pretty much
Speaker 1: a man at age fourteen, like an adult man at
Speaker 1: fourteen back then. So that was the age at which
Speaker 1: you could choose to leave school and work in a
Speaker 1: factory or go to school for your job training. Um.
Speaker 1: Karl decided to go to teacher school and made through
Speaker 1: about two years before he was expelled for stealing six candles.
Speaker 1: I guess, well, there's no lights on, there's no electricity.
Speaker 1: Some candles are probably like stealing six light bowls. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: which which I do all the time. I haven't been fired.
Speaker 1: Toilet pay for everything is for grabs at work. It
Speaker 1: does seem pretty petty, like six candles, um so. But
Speaker 1: he appealed, uh and he was allowed to continue his
Speaker 1: education in a different city. He graduated in eighteen sixty
Speaker 1: and he was immediately accused by his roommate of stealing
Speaker 1: a watch in jail for six he was shady. He
Speaker 1: couldn't stop because we're seeing it had her name, yea.
Speaker 1: So six weeks he spends in jail, and when he
Speaker 1: gets out, his teacher's license is revoked. So we can
Speaker 1: never teach. Yeah, yeah, maybe maybe not the worst decision
Speaker 1: Germany ever made, although maybe, considering what comes next, maybe
Speaker 1: the worst decision. Probably actually, now we think about it.
Speaker 1: So Carl may next opted for the career that came
Speaker 1: naturally to him, shameless theft. Here's a quote from somebody
Speaker 1: writing about Carl. At the time, he had stolen everything
Speaker 1: from billiard balls and gold watches to baby carriages and horses,
Speaker 1: had cheated peasants and little storekeepers by presenting himself as
Speaker 1: a famous physician or the agent of an insurance company.
Speaker 1: When he pretended to be a doctor for the purpose
Speaker 1: of swindling people, his chosen nickname was doctor Holy, Doctor Holy,
Speaker 1: Doctor Holy. If that isn't the scammer name if I've
Speaker 1: ever heard one. Look, I can appreciate a good scam.
Speaker 1: You know people who are dedicated to tom foolery. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm with it, And tom foolery is the word that
Speaker 1: immediately comes to mind when you hear I'm doctor Holy.
Speaker 1: Step right up, See what's un anything cards? He's doing
Speaker 1: mamograms today? Oh yeah, that's a d um. One of
Speaker 1: his doctor scams involved going showing up at a fancy
Speaker 1: hotel in a new town, dressed as a doctor and
Speaker 1: getting a room on credit because he's a doctor. Who
Speaker 1: wouldn't trust a doctor. And then when he was in
Speaker 1: the fancy room, he would order fur coats and gold
Speaker 1: and silver things, also on credit, because yeah, on credit,
Speaker 1: he's a doctor in a nice hotel. He's not going
Speaker 1: to skip out on the bill. So he would skip
Speaker 1: out on the bill in the middle of the night
Speaker 1: and take all the fine stuff he'd gotten upon it.
Speaker 1: That is crazy. Yeah, he got away with that for
Speaker 1: months and months and months. His favorite con involved pretending
Speaker 1: to be a police officer, going door to door and
Speaker 1: saying he was investigating counterfeit currency. So he would ask
Speaker 1: people for their their ten sailor notes, which is like
Speaker 1: like like a hundred ish dollars now, abe more like
Speaker 1: it's hard to do a lot of check. Give me
Speaker 1: your big bills. I'm gonna make sure they're not counterfeit,
Speaker 1: and then they would always be counterfeit and he would
Speaker 1: confiscate them. So he would just go door to You're
Speaker 1: taking people's money. Why would anyone fall for this even
Speaker 1: if the money is counterfeit. I was to hold onto
Speaker 1: I feel like in the eighteen like sixties, you could
Speaker 1: get away with just about everything because there's no way
Speaker 1: to verifying. Nobody's got the internet, nobody reads books like
Speaker 1: they're like. Well, he said he was a cop, and
Speaker 1: he's got a blue shirt. Imagine being a Nigerian prince
Speaker 1: in the eighteen fifties, I mean clean up. Yeah, although
Speaker 1: you would have to wait a long time for letters
Speaker 1: to get two different places, that's true, that's tel And
Speaker 1: it was a long con probably die of the typhoid
Speaker 1: in the meantime. But yeah, his capers did eventually catch
Speaker 1: up with him. He was arrested by the police, uh
Speaker 1: and then escaped and for months he evaded law enforcement
Speaker 1: by hiding in the woods. People searching for him at
Speaker 1: one point, and he was just hiding in the woods.
Speaker 1: He finally got caught because he almost starved to death,
Speaker 1: so he was not good at living in the woods,
Speaker 1: just hiding. Um. And he spent four more years in jail.
Speaker 1: Even back then, German jails were nicer than American jails today.
Speaker 1: I was allowed access to a vasked library and he
Speaker 1: read constantly. He also started writing fiction. His favorite books
Speaker 1: were adventurous stories about America by writers like James Finnimore
Speaker 1: Cooper who wrote the Last of the Mohicans. He also
Speaker 1: loved to read travel guides who has led out in
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty nine and jailed again in eighteen seventy for
Speaker 1: doing the exact same thing he's done his entire life.
Speaker 1: So jail made him like better and made him smarter gradually,
Speaker 1: not immediately, because he gets out after that and he
Speaker 1: immediately gets caught again doing something dumb. Yeah, it's feels
Speaker 1: like a writer. He's been getting high. He's waiting for
Speaker 1: his stranger things strive with it. Yeah, which it comes
Speaker 1: shop looking from target. Um, in eighteen seventy six. That
Speaker 1: feels like a low blow. I'm sorry, you're great, You
Speaker 1: are great, But that was plenty girl. In eighteen seventy six,
Speaker 1: having spent most of the last sixteen years as a
Speaker 1: con man or in jail, Karl May returns to his
Speaker 1: hometown and tells everyone that he's spent all that time
Speaker 1: adventuring around the world. Um, and this being the eighteen seventies,
Speaker 1: no one has any way to check us. And he
Speaker 1: read all these books. He's filled with all the knowledge. Oh,
Speaker 1: he's such a great scammer. He's he's he's wheeling and
Speaker 1: delon right now. He starts writing travel books and articles
Speaker 1: for magazines, and eventually starts writing novels. In eighteen ninety three,
Speaker 1: he published the first novel in what would become known
Speaker 1: as the winn Aitao series. Uh. These books would become
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century German equivalent of Harry Potter. I read
Speaker 1: the first of these books. I almost don't know how
Speaker 1: to start when it comes to conveying how weird these are. Um,
Speaker 1: first off, credit where it's due. They're very racist, but
Speaker 1: they're less racist than you'd expect from a German in
Speaker 1: the eighteen hundreds. Like, so racism wasn't the main motif
Speaker 1: that the book is definitely not the main motif is
Speaker 1: more like like like the wallpaper. It's like seasoning for
Speaker 1: the book, like every now and then, but it's and
Speaker 1: it's like the noble, the noble Native Americans sort of
Speaker 1: racism where you don't know anything about them, but like
Speaker 1: you're putting them on a pedestal as opposed to the
Speaker 1: you know, like old Western films where like they're all
Speaker 1: monsters or whatever, like Tom Sawyer race Tom Sawyer racial
Speaker 1: inward Gym racism. Yeah, yeah, so it's not as bad
Speaker 1: a racism as you'd expect from a German in this
Speaker 1: period of time. But it's it's really bad. Um, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's really bad, but not distracting from the plot,
Speaker 1: like you can still enjoy the plots nonsense. Um. So,
Speaker 1: Karl may is not a great writer in my opinion,
Speaker 1: but what do I know? Um? His His character in
Speaker 1: the book is known as Carl for the first page, Um,
Speaker 1: Carl is a young German kid who spent hundreds of
Speaker 1: hours reading about America, and he travels to the Old
Speaker 1: West to make his fortune. Three pages in, Carl gets
Speaker 1: into an argument and knocks out a man with a
Speaker 1: single punch. Everyone around him nicknames him Old shatter Hand,
Speaker 1: and that is the name he's known by for the
Speaker 1: rest of the books, Old shutter Hand, because that's how
Speaker 1: Carl thought people gave names nicknames in the Old West.
Speaker 1: Year old. He's all those Germans now, so they're probably
Speaker 1: still Germans like old. That's what they call me Floyd
Speaker 1: may Weather in Germany. See he's earned that though. True. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this guy Karl has not Yeah no, because because he's
Speaker 1: just a liar. Um. So yeah, Old shatter Hand is
Speaker 1: like the Mary Sue of all Mary sues he can
Speaker 1: beat up any guy with one punch. On his second
Speaker 1: day in the wild West, he charges into a herd
Speaker 1: of monstrous buffalo on his horse. And in this book,
Speaker 1: because Karl May doesn't know anything about buffalo, buffalo are huge,
Speaker 1: huge and like violent monsters, peaceful animals that you are
Speaker 1: so easy to hunt, that we killed all of them
Speaker 1: because they're not aggressive. Um so, he he kills two
Speaker 1: of the buffalo bare hands, no with a gun. But
Speaker 1: the next day he gets into a knife fight with
Speaker 1: a grizzly bear and kills it with a knife without
Speaker 1: getting hurt. H And also Karl May authority haatively insists
Speaker 1: that bears cannot climb. Okay, that's definitely wrong. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: really wrong. That's like what they're best at. Oh god,
Speaker 1: how many uneducated little kids are there just thinking bears
Speaker 1: can suspect a lot of German kids died to bears
Speaker 1: as a result of these books. Um so yeah. Over
Speaker 1: the course of thirty some odd books, Old shatter Hand
Speaker 1: oh sorry yeah. Um Right after killing that grizzly bear,
Speaker 1: Old shatter Hand meets his Indian friend and by the
Speaker 1: end of the book blood Brother win a too, who
Speaker 1: was the Prince of the Apaches. Okay, that's actually a
Speaker 1: legit sounding Indian name. I thought it was gonna be
Speaker 1: something like. You know, the names are not He does
Speaker 1: a better job on the names than you'd expect. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the names are not offensive, not like angry Wind, like
Speaker 1: some crazy americanized Indian name. Okay, he really did some
Speaker 1: research on on the names. Uh nothing else about the
Speaker 1: Apachees or their life or religion, but the names are
Speaker 1: reasonably believable. Um So Yeah, Old shatter Hand and win
Speaker 1: a tougo on all sorts of crazy adventures for thirty books.
Speaker 1: Old shatter Hand becomes a chief of the Apaches because
Speaker 1: they need him. He's got to teach him about how
Speaker 1: to be good people. What's a book without a white guy.
Speaker 1: What's a book without a white guy teaching not white
Speaker 1: guys how to do stuff, you know as you do.
Speaker 1: Um so, yeah, that's that's that's the kind of that's
Speaker 1: the kind of book we're talking about here. Okay. It
Speaker 1: sounds like it would have been made into a movie
Speaker 1: like currently made into like thirty Um. Yeah, so that's
Speaker 1: where we're getting to. Um. First off, when when a
Speaker 1: tow dies in the last of these books, The last
Speaker 1: thing he does is convert to Christianity. Oh yeah, because
Speaker 1: you know I got to do that. I get with Jesus. Jesus. Yeah,
Speaker 1: white Jesus. But if you're almost certainly Germans blue eye Jesus,
Speaker 1: German blue white, blonde haired Jesus. I call on him
Speaker 1: often tax stuff. I think's where you need white Jesus. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's white. Jesus is so good at Texas getting pulled over.
Speaker 1: I'm like, please, white Jesus specifically, you come down. That's
Speaker 1: w yes. I believe when it's out, did the right thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Um So, these ridiculous books about the American West wound
Speaker 1: up being the most popular book series in Germany for
Speaker 1: young boys. Uh. To this day, Karl May is the
Speaker 1: second most widely read author in all of Germany. He's
Speaker 1: only beaten by Martin Luther, who wrote the German translation
Speaker 1: of the Bible. Um. So, yeah, he's he's ridiculously popular. Uh.
Speaker 1: And when he is at the height of his fame
Speaker 1: and wealth and like the biggest author in Germany, Karl
Speaker 1: May reveals to everyone in Germany that his stories are
Speaker 1: all true. He was old shatter hand the whole time.
Speaker 1: It's like if j. K. Rowling declared Harry Potter real
Speaker 1: and then insisted she was Harry Potter and also she
Speaker 1: had never been to England in her life. Yeah, Karl
Speaker 1: could resistance scams like these books are too popular. Hold,
Speaker 1: oh wait a minute, it's me. I'm Old Shahan. He's like,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get more mallege out of it. It's ridiculous
Speaker 1: because you're you're already a millionaire best selling writer. He's like, look,
Speaker 1: I just lived a scam. Okay, that's why he's stealing
Speaker 1: poolball and he's like, I just need it. And he
Speaker 1: killed off with a No. Everyone's dead and they're not
Speaker 1: gonna No one's gonna go to America to fact check this.
Speaker 1: So Carl May committed to the bit. He dressed like
Speaker 1: the stereotypical idea of an American frontiersman, and his house
Speaker 1: was decorated with Native American memorabilia and Old West guns.
Speaker 1: Carl himself was rarely photographed with less than six handguns
Speaker 1: on his person. You can find his pictures if you
Speaker 1: just google Carl mayon. Look, I'm just gonna show you one.
Speaker 1: So on the front of his body alone, you can
Speaker 1: see three handguns and a knife. So where did he.
Speaker 1: First of all, if you run, all these guns are
Speaker 1: gonna fall out. This man literally has guns on top
Speaker 1: of guns, resting on guns and ropes. What the hell
Speaker 1: I think it's a bare tooth necklace. Yes, oh god, oh,
Speaker 1: but you know he got the jacket right though it's
Speaker 1: got fringe. It's a solid look. It's a solid look. Yeah. No, No,
Speaker 1: he's not. He's not bad at excess arising. He just
Speaker 1: I don't think those way. So there was no Internet
Speaker 1: in those days. Obviously, Um, everybody believed him. Um. And
Speaker 1: one of the people who believed him the most was
Speaker 1: adorable little Tyke named Adolf Hitler as an adult, non
Speaker 1: adorable dictator. Hitler was outspoken about the debt he owed
Speaker 1: to Karl May. He talked about May's work regularly, and
Speaker 1: we know this because, starting in ninety one, his table
Speaker 1: talk was all recorded by a member of the Nazi Party.
Speaker 1: Here's one quote. I've just been reading a very fine
Speaker 1: article on Karl May. I found it delightful. It would
Speaker 1: be nice if his work were republished. I owe him
Speaker 1: my first notions of geography and the fact that he
Speaker 1: opened my eyes on the world. Yeah, a scammer opened
Speaker 1: the eyes to another scammer. Yeah. Yeah. Or here's another quote.
Speaker 1: I used to read him by candlelight or by moonlight,
Speaker 1: with the help of a huge magnifying glass. I was
Speaker 1: carried away by it, and I went on to devour
Speaker 1: at once the other books by the same author. The
Speaker 1: immediate result was a falling off in my school reports.
Speaker 1: Uh so, I mean that's Hitler saying basically I did
Speaker 1: bad in school because I was reading this guy's book
Speaker 1: way too late in at night. Yeah, consumed, which I
Speaker 1: guess you're really bored back then, like growing up in
Speaker 1: the late eighteen hundreds in Germany in the middle of nowhere. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, but you're not, you know, gathering weeds for
Speaker 1: your soup, weeds and potatoes soup. Yeah, I think that
Speaker 1: was That was like if you read about Hitler's childhood,
Speaker 1: like it was just the opera or being sick and
Speaker 1: almost dead in bed for him. So, I guess, like,
Speaker 1: you know, terrible wild West books are. Yeah. Um, right
Speaker 1: after this, we're going to get into more about how
Speaker 1: Karl may is ridiculous wild West novels influenced the War
Speaker 1: in Russia, the invasion of Poland, and the entire course
Speaker 1: of World War Two. But before we get into that,
Speaker 1: we have some commercials and we're gonna do that right now,
Speaker 1: So buckle up. We're back and we're talking about Hitler's
Speaker 1: favorite young adult fiction author, Carl Friedrich May, a man
Speaker 1: who lied about everything, made millions of dollars and influenced
Speaker 1: the young growing mind of Adolf Hitler um to a
Speaker 1: to a shocking degree. So we're about to get into
Speaker 1: how Hitler based aspects of his military strategies in World
Speaker 1: War Two off of the Wild West books, written by
Speaker 1: a con man who had never been there, who had
Speaker 1: never even left Germany. Uh. In nineteen thirty three, right
Speaker 1: after Hitler had been made Chancellor of Germany, Hitler spent
Speaker 1: his first summer in the Berkhoff, which was his his
Speaker 1: mountain supervillain Fortress lair uh. At one point while he
Speaker 1: was up there, a guy named Egan came to visit him.
Speaker 1: I'm fairly certain it's not the Ghostbuster, but I'm not
Speaker 1: sure about that. Uh So. Egan later gave an interview
Speaker 1: about meeting Hitler during that time, and he recalled being
Speaker 1: in Hitler's office and seeing a bookcase and wondering, like
Speaker 1: any of us, what Hitler reads in his free time
Speaker 1: uh and quote. Surprisingly, the majority of the books were
Speaker 1: the Wild West novels of Karl May as an adult.
Speaker 1: As the chancellor of Germany UM and in fact, Hitler
Speaker 1: apparently reread all sixties some odd of Karl May's books
Speaker 1: between nineteen thirty three and nineteen thirty four. Uh. He
Speaker 1: gave a collection of all of May's books to his
Speaker 1: nephew as a present, and Hitler was given a very
Speaker 1: nice collection of May's books by Herman Gerring as a
Speaker 1: gift at one point. Yeah, so this Hitler's mind, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like if Donald Trump grew up reading I don't know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Harry Potter, like you were saying earlier, and then just
Speaker 1: never stopped reading it as adults. It was like, you know,
Speaker 1: we gotta base our economic policy on Harry Potter has
Speaker 1: a room full of gold. Why don't we try it?
Speaker 1: At We literally do that though. So he is a
Speaker 1: grown ass man. He is in charge of Germany, and
Speaker 1: he is obsessively rereading the Wild West books of a
Speaker 1: of a dead con man um. In nineteen thirty nine,
Speaker 1: when Hitler's armies were preparing to invade Poland, a Nazi
Speaker 1: plane crashed in neutral Belgium carrying two officers with copies
Speaker 1: of the invasion plans. So not great, not a great
Speaker 1: start to an invision. Yeah. Uh. They did manage to
Speaker 1: destroy the plans in time, but the German military wasn't
Speaker 1: a certain that nothing had gotten out, and so they
Speaker 1: reconfigured their forces just in case. And it was kind
Speaker 1: of a clusterfuck. Like they didn't do well at improvising.
Speaker 1: Hitler plane cross it's just pages of it's just you know,
Speaker 1: it's actually it's scary how close to the truth that is.
Speaker 1: Hitler grew frustrated at how bad his journals were at
Speaker 1: planning a surprise invasion. He fired several of them and
Speaker 1: blamed their incompetence on the fact that while they had
Speaker 1: all read their Klauswitz, none of them had read enough. Carl, may,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do some unpacking here. So Carl von Klauswitz
Speaker 1: is is like right up there with Sun Sue in
Speaker 1: the pantheon of the best military minds and history. He
Speaker 1: fought against Napoleon and helped beat Napoleon. He invented the
Speaker 1: term fog of war, and he wrote a book titled
Speaker 1: on War that is required reading in every military academy
Speaker 1: on Earth pretty much to this day. Karl May, on
Speaker 1: the other hand, was a con man who pretended to
Speaker 1: be a doctor to steal fur coats. Hell. I guess
Speaker 1: he read enough Call May. No, you're reading too much
Speaker 1: of that. Expert was Hitler and a call like a
Speaker 1: cult of one. He I mean, it sounds like Karl
Speaker 1: May was like his leader. It sounds like Hitler was
Speaker 1: to Karl May what everyone else in Germany was to Hitler,
Speaker 1: like everyone's worshiping Hitler. And Hitler was like, no, this guy.
Speaker 1: Maybe this is how it works. If you're going to
Speaker 1: start a cult, you've got to have something to follow yourself.
Speaker 1: You can't get too deep in your own ship. No,
Speaker 1: you got to get deep into somebody else's ship. Keep
Speaker 1: yourself on those straight and narrow Yeah. So read Karl
Speaker 1: May about it was attacked to Hitler would use for
Speaker 1: the duration of his warlord career. When the war in
Speaker 1: Russia turned against Germany and the Rmacht was bogged down
Speaker 1: fighting Soviet and surgeons, one of Hitler's solutions was to
Speaker 1: send three hundred thousand copies of Karl May's novels to
Speaker 1: his officers. So I learned all that before I read
Speaker 1: my first Karl May novel, and so while I was reading,
Speaker 1: I kept an eye open for just any brilliant strategic
Speaker 1: insights in case I ever find myself like Chancellor of Germany.
Speaker 1: You know, you might as well be prepared or whatever. Um.
Speaker 1: So I got one insight about midway through the book,
Speaker 1: when Old shatter Hand and his co workers are out
Speaker 1: on a prairie surveying for a railroad that's going to
Speaker 1: be built. They meet the chief of the Apaches out there,
Speaker 1: and he gets really angry at them for basically helping
Speaker 1: the railroad steal his people's land, and so he gives
Speaker 1: them an option. You either leave tonight or I'm gonna
Speaker 1: come with my army and I'm gonna kill all of
Speaker 1: you guys. So of course they're not going to leave
Speaker 1: and not build a railroad. They're white guys. Stop that murder.
Speaker 1: You know that's not going to happen. But you know
Speaker 1: this is a problem because there's like a dozen of
Speaker 1: them and like an army of Apaches. So you know
Speaker 1: they've got to come up with some brilliant strategy to
Speaker 1: defeat this Apache army. So I'm like, I'm I'm like
Speaker 1: waiting here, like, what was it that so impressed Hitler?
Speaker 1: And it turns out that the key in this case
Speaker 1: to beating the Apaches was that one of Old shatter
Speaker 1: Hands friends was friends with the chief of another Indian
Speaker 1: tribe who happened to be nearby and had an even
Speaker 1: bigger army. And so they just used that. Ye Indians
Speaker 1: really loved Old shatter Hands. Just some of them like,
Speaker 1: funk our land, We're gonna help this white man out.
Speaker 1: So they call this, they call their they call in
Speaker 1: the homies. Yeah. Yeah. And so they win because they've
Speaker 1: just got this extra army that's bigger than the other army.
Speaker 1: So Hitler was like, all right, I gotta gotta have
Speaker 1: another art is what we need to do. We need
Speaker 1: to have another army, guys. What Well, reading to this
Speaker 1: brings to mind the real story of Army Detachment Steiner.
Speaker 1: This was a real military unit, well sort of real
Speaker 1: military unit that Hitler threw together near the end of
Speaker 1: the war in April nineteen forty five, is the Russians
Speaker 1: were advancing into Berlin. On paper, it was a mighty force.
Speaker 1: In reality, it was made up of units that had
Speaker 1: been decimated in many cases had no weapons and often
Speaker 1: did not exist at all. Hitler was convinced that this
Speaker 1: fake army was going to throw back the Russians. When
Speaker 1: its commander refused to attack because it would have killed
Speaker 1: had no weapons and where mostly teenagers, Hitler went into
Speaker 1: a rage and killed himself eight days later. So so
Speaker 1: Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect and and munitions master and
Speaker 1: whatnot after the war, wrote that Hitler basically treated Karl
Speaker 1: May like the literary equivalent of comfort food after a
Speaker 1: bad day of losing the Second World War. Quote Hitler
Speaker 1: was wont to say that he had always been deeply
Speaker 1: impressed by the tactical finesse and circumspection that Karl May
Speaker 1: conferred upon his character Win a Tao, And he would
Speaker 1: add during his reading hours at night, when faced by
Speaker 1: seemingly hopeless situations, he would still reach for those stories.
Speaker 1: They gave him courage, like works of philosophy for others,
Speaker 1: or the Bible for elderly people. That really is like,
Speaker 1: if you're president and you're like, give me my Harry
Speaker 1: Potter book. Oh Harry, these are my Bible? What should
Speaker 1: I do? Now? Tell me how to open the Chamber
Speaker 1: of Secrets in my heart, how do I be Baltimore
Speaker 1: Only it's a whole real ass war that it's the Russians.
Speaker 1: It's the Russians, Baltimore, the Russians. I could see similarities
Speaker 1: this man. Wow, yeah, I get it. Though Hitler was
Speaker 1: a scammer. His whole life was scams. He was literally
Speaker 1: trying to kill a grace of people that he belonged to. Well,
Speaker 1: that was more of a myth. So there's a myth
Speaker 1: that like Hitler, Hitler was actually a Jewish guy. Really
Speaker 1: it's my it's unconfised. So there's it's it's one of
Speaker 1: those things like there's it's impossible to get completely definitive evidence,
Speaker 1: but when you go back to the genealogy that exists,
Speaker 1: it doesn't seem like it adds up, like there's no
Speaker 1: part of the me. It would have been great irony.
Speaker 1: It is true that his family's original last name was
Speaker 1: Schickel Gruber, and he only is named Hitler because his
Speaker 1: shatter hands. He was he was gonna be eight off
Speaker 1: shatter hands. And they were like, nah, bro, that doesn't
Speaker 1: it's not ringing, it doesn't ring. Yeah, No, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's it's he's he does have a ridiculous backstory, which
Speaker 1: I'm sure we'll get to one of these days. Um,
Speaker 1: but that part isn't part of it. He was. He
Speaker 1: was a scammer and in almost every other way a
Speaker 1: man could be a scammer though a fake army. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's he's scammed himself on that one. That was That
Speaker 1: was a Hitler double scam there. Um So, yeah, Hitler
Speaker 1: was a complicated dude. And I don't want to be
Speaker 1: claiming here that, like, you know, everything that he did
Speaker 1: was based on Karl May. But it's hard to look at, say,
Speaker 1: the invasion to invade Russia and not see a couple
Speaker 1: of Karl May's intellectual fingerprints. Um. So this will start
Speaker 1: with the concept of Leban's realm, which is a German
Speaker 1: word that means living space. Uh and it's it's one
Speaker 1: of the Hitler vocab words that a lot of people
Speaker 1: probably remember from high school and his The idea is
Speaker 1: basically that the German people needed more space. You know,
Speaker 1: there were this great up and coming nation. We need
Speaker 1: more space for farmland so we can grow, and the
Speaker 1: only place to get it is taking it, Yeah, taking
Speaker 1: it from Poland, Ukraine, Russia, France. Everybody um and Hitler
Speaker 1: when he would talk about this before the invasions, very
Speaker 1: much couched it in terms of the American frontier. Uh.
Speaker 1: He believed in social Darwinism, some cultures were stronger than others,
Speaker 1: and strong cultures deserve to take the land of weak cultures. Uh.
Speaker 1: This idea is in full display in Karl May's work.
Speaker 1: The Native Americans are portrayed as a doomed but noble people. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's taken for granted that their struggle is destined to
Speaker 1: failure and that it's perfectly normal for white people to
Speaker 1: move right on in and take their land. I love
Speaker 1: what you call something doomed, because you're the one who's
Speaker 1: damning it. Like, look, we all kill them, so they're
Speaker 1: gonna be killed. So it's not bad that we're gonna
Speaker 1: kill him because we kill him them. Like what kind
Speaker 1: of logic is that it's clearly a doomed struggle. Look
Speaker 1: at how good we are and murdering them. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: we came to kill them, so it's not our fault.
Speaker 1: When they did know that some things are just inevitable,
Speaker 1: like all this murder we're doing. But that's how you
Speaker 1: have to think as a scammer. That's how you get
Speaker 1: away with live with people who call yourself dr holy. Like, Look,
Speaker 1: if I don't show up and take their money, somebody
Speaker 1: else will, so it should be me. Someone's gonna wind
Speaker 1: up with that money, either them or someone else or me,
Speaker 1: so it might as well be. Um. Here's a quote
Speaker 1: from one of the characters in the novel Winitao, who
Speaker 1: is a white guy who becomes a member of the
Speaker 1: Apache tribe and lives with them for years and years
Speaker 1: and years. This is so. This is supposedly a guy
Speaker 1: who's sympathetic to their cause. The Red race has been
Speaker 1: cruelly outraged and robbed. But as a white man, I
Speaker 1: know the Indian must disappear. And here's a Hitler quote
Speaker 1: from October one, a few months into Operation Barbarossa, the
Speaker 1: invasion of Russia. I don't see why a German who
Speaker 1: eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the
Speaker 1: idea that the soil that produces this bread has been
Speaker 1: won by the sword. When we eat wheat from Canada,
Speaker 1: we don't think about the despoiled Indians. Wow. Yeah, The
Speaker 1: way to alleviate your guilt like they had all the
Speaker 1: tech is like look, okay, yeah, we murdered him, but
Speaker 1: if we didn't murder him, we would have murdered him,
Speaker 1: so they would have been dead. Canada did it too,
Speaker 1: and also Canada. Remember are we any worse than Canada? Yes,
Speaker 1: but not by enough. Uh here's another quote. The struggle
Speaker 1: we are waging against the Soviet partisans resembles very much
Speaker 1: the struggle in North America against the Red Indians. Victory
Speaker 1: will go to the strong, and strength is on our side.
Speaker 1: Uh So, Karl May isn't the only Old West influence
Speaker 1: that that Hitler. Hitler draws from, Like you know, reading
Speaker 1: those novels as a kid sparked sort of a fascination
Speaker 1: in him with just sort of the whole American frontier,
Speaker 1: and he studied everything that we did during that period
Speaker 1: of time. And in nineteen thirty nine, Hitler forced ninety
Speaker 1: thousand Polish Jews onto a reservation ghetto in direct imitation
Speaker 1: of a strategy Kit Carson pursued with a Navajos. So
Speaker 1: a lot of Hitler's interest in the Old West was
Speaker 1: based on real history, but that obsession with real history
Speaker 1: was barked by Hitler's own admission by Carl May's Old
Speaker 1: West novels history. Yeah, did he ever realize that it
Speaker 1: was fake? The Hitler think that these stories were true,
Speaker 1: because remember Carl came out was like this is me. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think Hitler went to his grave believing Karl May
Speaker 1: had never told a lie because he because the actual
Speaker 1: Karl May was a pacifist, you know, I mean Karl
Speaker 1: didn't kill anybody. He just stole from He was just
Speaker 1: stealing candles left and right. He kept the piece, but
Speaker 1: he was also steal your billion balls, your baby carrits. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if only Hitler had jumped out of the stealing billiard balls,
Speaker 1: Carl Mays legacy, like, we'd all be fine with Hitler.
Speaker 1: Then it was just a silver tongue devil stealing pool
Speaker 1: balls so that the checking their money. I need to
Speaker 1: check your dollars. Oh Hitler got away again? Yeah he would.
Speaker 1: He would literally be a chaplain figure then absolutely. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: As the war went on, Hitler and his regime propaganda
Speaker 1: grew increasingly obsessed with what they called wonderwaffa or miracle weapons.
Speaker 1: The V two rocket was one example of these, which
Speaker 1: is those those big rockets. They would just shoot over
Speaker 1: to the England and you know some of them would
Speaker 1: hit people. Most of them would hit nothing. But it
Speaker 1: scared the ship out of people because it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: missiles hadn't existed. It's basically like an angel falling on
Speaker 1: your house. Um. So yeah, you can make a case
Speaker 1: that Hitler's love of super weapons and his faith in
Speaker 1: the ability of these wonder weapons to uh to win
Speaker 1: the war started with Karl may See. Old shatter Hand
Speaker 1: in Wintaw were often heavily outnumbered on the planes by
Speaker 1: bandits or hostile Indian tribes or groups of of evil
Speaker 1: criminals or whatever, but they always came out on top.
Speaker 1: One reason for this is that they had weapons that were,
Speaker 1: by eighteen seventy standards, wacko space guns like what like
Speaker 1: a like a like a sling shot. No, Old shatter
Speaker 1: Hand had a repeating rifle that he claimed and again
Speaker 1: he said this was a real gun that he really used.
Speaker 1: He said it could fire a hundred rounds a minute
Speaker 1: and was effective at more than fifteen hundred yards away. Now,
Speaker 1: for comparison, in eighteen sixty five, like five years before
Speaker 1: these books are set, a good soldier like a vet
Speaker 1: is putting out three or four bullets a minute from
Speaker 1: two hundred yards away. So Carl claims he's got a Yeah,
Speaker 1: Carl claims he's got an A R fifteen out there
Speaker 1: on the plans that he's just and he can carry
Speaker 1: seventeen hundred and twenty eight bullets because they're very tiny
Speaker 1: but very deadly. It's a really specific number. I don't
Speaker 1: know why that's like an odd one to pick, because
Speaker 1: you gotta you know, usually you get heavy on the specific. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I picture him like putting it thousands of No, no, no, Carl,
Speaker 1: you gotta be specific here. No one's going to believe
Speaker 1: that sounds belie. Hundred twenty eight. There we go. Um.
Speaker 1: And when Hitler was a kid, in the time before
Speaker 1: World War One, there were regular rumors in Germany, stoked
Speaker 1: by Carl May himself, that he was going to give
Speaker 1: his special secret Eifel to the Kaiser so it could
Speaker 1: be used by the German army. Um. So May as
Speaker 1: a kid was saying like, it's okay, I know we're
Speaker 1: surrounded as Germany and we've got all these enemies, but
Speaker 1: I got this super space gun and I'm gonna give
Speaker 1: it to the King and it's gonna be all right.
Speaker 1: We're gonna win this war with my space. He could
Speaker 1: not quit lying. He had money, he had fame, and
Speaker 1: he was like, what else can I get a political
Speaker 1: influence with a fake ass space. Yeah, he's like a
Speaker 1: guy who wins the lottery and then it's like, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna spend all this lot of money on more lottery tickets.
Speaker 1: That's the smart fucking play Listen, this is really like
Speaker 1: empowering my life, you know what I mean? The next
Speaker 1: time I have opportunity to a lot of somebody or
Speaker 1: defraud people like I would take it because if I don't,
Speaker 1: somebody else will. Somebody else will, and who knows the
Speaker 1: frauds that you commit might might wind up inspiring the
Speaker 1: next Hitler, which what everybody wants everyone. Uh. Now, we
Speaker 1: we've got some some more of those commercials uh capitalism
Speaker 1: ditties to sing. Um, So we're gonna get into that next.
Speaker 1: After that, we're going to get back into how Karl
Speaker 1: May's ridiculous novels influenced Hitler's ideas of what America was
Speaker 1: going to do during the World War Two, and also
Speaker 1: how Karl May's ridiculous con story actually ended. Um. So
Speaker 1: all of that after some ads and we're back. So
Speaker 1: last we were talking about Karl May, the con man
Speaker 1: who wrote a bunch of Wild West novels based on
Speaker 1: nothing that inspired Hitler and his plans to invade Poland
Speaker 1: and Russia. And now we're going to talk about how
Speaker 1: Karl May shaped Hitler's ideas about America. So obviously, Karl
Speaker 1: May's novels, by Hitler's own admission, were the first time
Speaker 1: he really read anything about America. They opened his eyes
Speaker 1: to geography. And in May's novels, America is a land
Speaker 1: dominated by German immigrants. Almost every white person in the
Speaker 1: story with a speaking role in these novels is a
Speaker 1: German transplant. In the first book, Old shatter Hand, a
Speaker 1: German heads west and meets his mentor or who also
Speaker 1: happens to be a German, and they stumble upon an
Speaker 1: old man who's been living with apaches for years and
Speaker 1: also happens to be German. This pattern continues for dozens
Speaker 1: of books, Like almost every new person that they meet
Speaker 1: who doesn't suck is a German who just moved to America.
Speaker 1: So it's like, oh gosh, was he? It was Hitler's
Speaker 1: like overall goal, like he's just gonna keep spreading until
Speaker 1: he gets bread into America. Well, he thought he thought
Speaker 1: America was doomed by its diversity, but he also thought
Speaker 1: America had a chance to survive because there was a
Speaker 1: huge German population in America. So if if he could
Speaker 1: get those Germans in charge of America and just you know,
Speaker 1: push everyone else into the sea, then America had a
Speaker 1: real bright future ahead of it, which is why the
Speaker 1: Nazi government expended a lot of money establishing the German
Speaker 1: American Bund, which was a Nazi organization in America in
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties that attracted tens of thousands of members.
Speaker 1: They drew twenty thousand people at one point to Madison
Speaker 1: Square Garden up in the Pacific Palisades, there is a
Speaker 1: house that's currently a graffiti sanctuary that was bought as
Speaker 1: a resort for the Nazi elite um in the Palisades.
Speaker 1: The Nazi elite. Yeah, yeah, there's Hitler's house. You can
Speaker 1: go hike in it if you live in l A.
Speaker 1: And it's actually it's a lovely hike. I bet it's beautiful.
Speaker 1: It is in the whole building is like a graffiti sanctuary. Now,
Speaker 1: so there's some really cool graffiti artwork. Wait, like people
Speaker 1: are doing like anti Nazi graffiti or it's like beautiful
Speaker 1: Trafiti Like it's no, it's not Nazi graffiti at least
Speaker 1: I haven't seen any swastikas. But it's just it's just
Speaker 1: nice graffiti. Yeah, because lately the Nazis don't had that
Speaker 1: swag that they used to. They were polos and new balances.
Speaker 1: At least back then they had you know, que altfits,
Speaker 1: nice villas. Yeah, I'll say this for the Nazis, they
Speaker 1: knew how to make a leather jacket, quality stitch, quality stitching.
Speaker 1: I mean Hugo Boss, right, honestly, if I could just
Speaker 1: remove the SWASTI well, I mean you can go buy
Speaker 1: Hugo Boss today. Oh that's very true. Oh man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Hugo Boss made all the s S uniforms. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's how that got started. And we still buy Hugo
Speaker 1: Boss have a great I mean we still buy Mercedes.
Speaker 1: Were German engineer, Yeah, yeah, they made tanks and now
Speaker 1: they make pretty good cars. You know what, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: put them in the bowels of my memory because I
Speaker 1: like Mercedes. Yeah. Well, I mean they weren't bad tanks,
Speaker 1: so yeah, the fewer never wanted a war with the
Speaker 1: United States and believed that the U s could be
Speaker 1: brought around to supporting Nazi ideals. Uh And part of
Speaker 1: this belief started with the fact that he got his
Speaker 1: conception of America through Karl may novels as a nation
Speaker 1: that was dominated by sober, goodhearted German punch masters. Um.
Speaker 1: And it may seem silly to think that these ridiculous
Speaker 1: trash books would have formed the basis of the furious
Speaker 1: feelings in America, but other Europeans at the time also
Speaker 1: took May seriously as an expert on American culture. I
Speaker 1: found this quote from a French newspaper reviewer condemning American
Speaker 1: values because of what Carl fucking May wrote about them.
Speaker 1: The man who had never been, who had never left Germany,
Speaker 1: the traveler Karl May assures us that no single point
Speaker 1: in his story is invention or exaggeration. American morals, no
Speaker 1: matter what certain admirers of that young civilization may say,
Speaker 1: are generally inferior to ours. They sometimes lower themselves to
Speaker 1: abject savagery, especially when it comes to the ugly practices
Speaker 1: of personal revenge. The writer describes the American version of
Speaker 1: Christianity as relayed by Karl May as mutilated. He concludes
Speaker 1: that the thirst for both gold and revenge are two
Speaker 1: of the most terrible passions of the Yankee. So you
Speaker 1: can see why Hitler might have thought America would be
Speaker 1: on board with Nazism. Um yeah, and also, I mean,
Speaker 1: French guy's conception isn't a d percent off, right? I mean,
Speaker 1: as some solid guesses, this is starting to make me
Speaker 1: think that when the Bible was first written, it was
Speaker 1: supposed to be like some fun fiction came out like
Speaker 1: it's all true. In fact, it's me. Oh, this is
Speaker 1: taken off. No, no, this is all real me jeez usa.
Speaker 1: Um so yeah, I I think the first guy to
Speaker 1: draw a direct connection between Karl May and Hitler was Klausmann,
Speaker 1: who was the son of Thomas Man, a famous German author.
Speaker 1: Klaussmann wrote in an article in nineteen forty called Karl
Speaker 1: May Hitler's Literary Mentor, where he made basically all the
Speaker 1: allegations I've just made, minus the Russia stuff because Hitler
Speaker 1: had invaded Russiette. Um. But but klauss wrote, the Third
Speaker 1: Reich is Karl May's ultimate triumph, the ghastly realization of
Speaker 1: his dreams. It is, according to ethical and aesthetic standards
Speaker 1: indistinguishable from his that the Austrian house painter Hitler, nourished
Speaker 1: in his youth by old shatter hand, is now attempting
Speaker 1: to rebuild the world. So Man actually blamed Karl May
Speaker 1: for not just Hitler, but the fact that all of
Speaker 1: Germany been to Hitler's madness. Quote. They're hopelessly estranged from
Speaker 1: both reality and art, sacrificing all civilization and common sense
Speaker 1: on the altar of a brutish heroism, but stubbornly loyal,
Speaker 1: whether consciously or not, to the foul substitute for poetry
Speaker 1: and culture represented by Karl May. It's like a it's
Speaker 1: like a mental escape too. So you're broke as fun,
Speaker 1: and then somebody comes along and tells you that you
Speaker 1: can take over the world. And then there's all these
Speaker 1: books that are basically saying German people everywhere just like Yeah.
Speaker 1: It fills this whole nation's mind with like images of
Speaker 1: this this huge amount of territory if you can just
Speaker 1: take it from the savage people who own it. And
Speaker 1: all it takes is a strong right hook and a
Speaker 1: magic rifle. Yeah, and literally what Trump has done to
Speaker 1: Middle America. Yo, I wonder what book Trump is reading.
Speaker 1: What's his Carl May? I mean Dr Seuss? Does he
Speaker 1: read Cat and Had? There's a lot of pictures in that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not to read. I'm gonna get those green eggs
Speaker 1: in that. Damn ham All. We know that's really what's happening. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, okay, yeah. So it is worth noting, in
Speaker 1: fairness to Carl May, that a lot of non Hitler
Speaker 1: Germans also professed to deepen abiding love for Carl May. Einstein.
Speaker 1: Einstein was a huge Carl May fan, although he did
Speaker 1: not credit May with his breakthroughs on relativity. Um, he
Speaker 1: needs to give Carl some credit. Yeah. I used to
Speaker 1: wear the same sharts every day, right, didn't that come
Speaker 1: from Carl? Six guns? Six guns every day? Einstein was
Speaker 1: always strapped. That's a classic Einstein fact. Pack and heat.
Speaker 1: Everybody was to steal those theories from him. Okay, yeah.
Speaker 1: I also want to point out May espoused a number
Speaker 1: of of anti Hitler views in his novel Not he
Speaker 1: wasn't like against Hitler because Hitler was like a child
Speaker 1: at the time, but like he There's like a point
Speaker 1: in one of the books where a guy makes fun
Speaker 1: of a of a hunchback dude, and Karl May is like,
Speaker 1: it's shitty to make fun of people who have disabilities,
Speaker 1: which is not a Hitler. Hitler murdered people with with Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so um May wasn't in lockstep with the Nazis. And
Speaker 1: it may seem a little weird that Hitler would idolize
Speaker 1: someone who wrote things that contradicted his own beliefs. This
Speaker 1: makes a little more sense when you understand what I'm
Speaker 1: calling the Adolf Hitler theory of how to read us
Speaker 1: laid out in mind comp hit They're stated reading is
Speaker 1: no end in itself, but a means to an end.
Speaker 1: And to explain that, he said, a man who possesses
Speaker 1: possesses the art of correct reading, will, in studying any book, magazine,
Speaker 1: or pamphlet instinctively and immediately perceive everything which, in his opinion,
Speaker 1: is worth permanently remembering. So basically, cherry pick, pick and
Speaker 1: choose what you want, choose your own adventure. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: he's saying the right way to read is to pull
Speaker 1: everything that reinforces your existing opinions out of a book
Speaker 1: and ignore the rest um, which is how a lot
Speaker 1: of people read. Yeah, it's kind of a shockingly accurate
Speaker 1: prediction of how content works on the internet. Um, so
Speaker 1: Hitler had our number with that, And and religion like everything,
Speaker 1: because you know, Bible thumbers love to pull up those
Speaker 1: quotes that are like anti gay, but then they love
Speaker 1: to forget about parts that are just like you know,
Speaker 1: you could still sell your daughter and like all this
Speaker 1: that's just like oh, yeah, the time Jesus beat up
Speaker 1: all those bankers, Like no, no, no, he loves capitalism.
Speaker 1: He's a big fan. No, he loves it. In for
Speaker 1: said flat he would have loved that. Oh the only
Speaker 1: time he got violent was when he beat up a
Speaker 1: bunch of money lenders. No, no, it doesn't confirm our bias.
Speaker 1: Damn Hitler said some real truth though, that was he
Speaker 1: was he was on the money with that one. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean that's not how you should read, but it's
Speaker 1: how people do read. Yeah. And I also wonder if
Speaker 1: he was reading it from the perspective of like conquering
Speaker 1: people and manipulating them. If he was also reading that,
Speaker 1: because like that's what a lot of these books like.
Speaker 1: They managed to convince other Indians to beat up other
Speaker 1: Indians Like yeah, and the Indians are like surprisingly okay,
Speaker 1: with a lot of what's happening? Yeah no, we got
Speaker 1: you white guys. Yeah. Um. So the last question of
Speaker 1: this podcast is what did happen to Karl May in
Speaker 1: the end? Uh? And that's a story worth telling to.
Speaker 1: As I said, he got rich and wealthy and started
Speaker 1: to claim that he himself his old shatter Hand. He
Speaker 1: bought a big, fancy mansion, which he nicknamed Villa shatter Hand.
Speaker 1: It's really it was so bad, and he's like, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna put it every the coolest thing anybody ever thought of.
Speaker 1: Villa sounds classic. I'm gonna put shatter Hand on the end.
Speaker 1: He filled it with exotic replicas that he claimed were
Speaker 1: from his travels, but in reality they came from a
Speaker 1: furniture dealer in Dresden. He also had replicas of his
Speaker 1: character's famous guns built in Dresden, and I gotta show
Speaker 1: you a picture of his guns. Um, what about this?
Speaker 1: This one is the A R fifteen supposedly, but divert
Speaker 1: your eyes there to the bedazzled hunting rifle. That is
Speaker 1: a bedazzled double barreled bear hunting room. Fucking Ryan stoned
Speaker 1: that motherfucker up, yo, I mean it's cute though, yeah, yeah, tastes.
Speaker 1: He was like he was giving us a little he
Speaker 1: was like a rapper. He really gives me the feeling
Speaker 1: of like, you know, I'm gonna wear the shiniest ship
Speaker 1: on me. That's like a little Wayne so like bedazzling
Speaker 1: his Yeah, yeah, it is in that. I gotta give
Speaker 1: respect to that, because if I ever get rich, I'm
Speaker 1: definitely bedazzling all my Oh you know, how do people
Speaker 1: know you're inch no and you you wear that coat
Speaker 1: and you yeah, you It's like a knight did agrees out.
Speaker 1: He's the sweating. He's sweat pouring out his ankles. We're
Speaker 1: criticizing Karl May for the Nazi stuff, but not for
Speaker 1: the fashion stuff. If anyone knows how to purport a
Speaker 1: lifestyle that they are definitely not living. It is like
Speaker 1: if they had cribs back then, like you know, Villa
Speaker 1: shatterhand would have been lit. This is the skin of
Speaker 1: a bear I totally killed. Yeah literally, Macy's on the tag.
Speaker 1: Yeah that was the bear's name. He's like, I got
Speaker 1: these from some Indian's um crazy foot and and a birdman.
Speaker 1: Birdman his name was yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's in
Speaker 1: my book. He's like, all this ship looks like it
Speaker 1: came from dressden. Oh no, no, no, so wait does
Speaker 1: a guy in dressing all his secrets? You know that
Speaker 1: he must have, right, like there has Maybe he was
Speaker 1: just getting so many gun orders that he was like,
Speaker 1: if I tell this money train in. Oh listen, I
Speaker 1: keep all the secrets. Yeah, yeah, you can trust a
Speaker 1: gun smith, but dazzles rifles. I have a store of
Speaker 1: exact because of everything in Karl Bay's house. Just like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: he got it from America. No, those are the guns
Speaker 1: he used to fight a bunch of Frontier wars. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Um so. By age fifty six, Karl May was at
Speaker 1: the height of his fame and influence. He claimed to
Speaker 1: speak more than forty languages and to understand more than
Speaker 1: twelve hundred. So he's like that lady who was doing
Speaker 1: fake sign language, like doing translations. Yeah, fifty six though
Speaker 1: he lived hell along fifty six is hell along he
Speaker 1: was back in the day. I mean all the six
Speaker 1: is that like he did live long on the curve
Speaker 1: that his brothers and sisters set. Um, so he he
Speaker 1: didn't die at that point though, this is the height
Speaker 1: of his fame. Um. He was so popular that during
Speaker 1: one speech in Munich, firefighters had to be dispatched to
Speaker 1: disperse the crowd of his fans. That's like some beatleshit um.
Speaker 1: He claimed that he had only two great missions left
Speaker 1: in life. A visit back to see the Apaches, trip
Speaker 1: to see the Shake of the Haddaden Arabs, which he
Speaker 1: also read. A bunch of books set in the Middle
Speaker 1: East that he also claimed was based about him, where
Speaker 1: he does the same stuff, but in the Middle East.
Speaker 1: So his last two goals in life are two fake things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's two goals in life. More lies. I just haven't
Speaker 1: told quite enough lies. Like damn, like you couldn't give
Speaker 1: us one real thing? He's like, no, like lines are
Speaker 1: his achievements. Obviously, He's like, last week, I'm gonna fraud
Speaker 1: out some people in the hundreds of millions of books
Speaker 1: I've sold er nice, But it's my lies that keep
Speaker 1: me warm at night. Maybe gotta be passionate about something, okay.
Speaker 1: So in eight he came under a storm of criticism.
Speaker 1: A collection of his very early works was republished against
Speaker 1: his will, and these writings were semi pornographic. I have
Speaker 1: not been able to find them, which is a tragedy. Damn,
Speaker 1: he has some erotica. Yeah, he was apparently writing erotica
Speaker 1: or semi erotica early in his career. He sued for
Speaker 1: defamation of character. Um, but this began a surge of
Speaker 1: interest in Karl May's actual documented past. Uh So, May
Speaker 1: panicked tried to cover his tracks. He had the original
Speaker 1: plates of those photographs that of him in costume thrown
Speaker 1: into the Danube because like the pictures had been edited
Speaker 1: and he didn't want people to see that they'd clearly
Speaker 1: been taken in a photo studio. So he started a
Speaker 1: little bow out. Yeah yeah, his doctor It was found
Speaker 1: out as fake. Uh oh. He'd also spent years pretending
Speaker 1: to be a doctor. Why he was He pretended to
Speaker 1: be a doctor again after he was a famous author.
Speaker 1: He also lied about being a doctor. You already his author? Well,
Speaker 1: but doctor shatter Hand is a pretty sick name. Hand Lord, Jesus,
Speaker 1: I love this guy. During the course of the lawsuit
Speaker 1: against the people who published his porn, his criminal record
Speaker 1: was uncovered, and worst of all, it was discovered that
Speaker 1: he'd never actually been to America. D Carl May published
Speaker 1: an autobiography in nineteen ten to try and rehabilitate his
Speaker 1: image and defend himself. Among other things, he claimed that
Speaker 1: his famous candle theft, Remember the six candles. He claimed
Speaker 1: that that was so he could give his sister wax
Speaker 1: scraps as a Christmas present. Okay, well, I know it
Speaker 1: was eating rock SUPs, so I know wax scraps might
Speaker 1: actually be nice. Here's your wax scraps. Also, that's still
Speaker 1: not a good excuse. He stall six candles so you
Speaker 1: could give your sister a terrible gift, not even the
Speaker 1: whole king candle. She's done. She doesn't want candle, she
Speaker 1: wants scraps. Okay, okay, bam, that was not she dying.
Speaker 1: You should at least say she was dying. Just make
Speaker 1: a better lie. Carl May, he's admire He's such a
Speaker 1: constant liar um. But all the controversy did prompt the
Speaker 1: elderly Karl May and his wife to visit the United States.
Speaker 1: They made it as far west as Buffalo, New York.
Speaker 1: So Karl May died in nineteen twelve, but his ridiculous
Speaker 1: books lived on. In the nineteen sixties, they were made
Speaker 1: into a series of euro Westerns that are credited with
Speaker 1: saving West Germany's film industry. There's still a Karl May
Speaker 1: festival in Germany every year that draws tens of thousands
Speaker 1: of fans. Thanks to his books and the fascination for
Speaker 1: Native American culture they ignited, Germany has a thriving Native
Speaker 1: American cause play and festival industry to this day. So I,
Speaker 1: in one of my previous jobs, interviewed a guy who
Speaker 1: was a Native American and a professor, and his whole
Speaker 1: job is like busting people who falsely claimed to be
Speaker 1: Native Americans to like sell products and stuff. And one
Speaker 1: of the things he pointed out is that some of
Speaker 1: the world's best living speakers of languages like the Sioux
Speaker 1: language are Germans who learned it so that they can
Speaker 1: cause play better in these gigantic festivals. Because no, it's
Speaker 1: a you can find these insane pictures online of these
Speaker 1: German Native American festivals where and it's all white guys
Speaker 1: and and ladies dressing up in costume and like not
Speaker 1: bad costume. Like a lot of these people, like some
Speaker 1: of them like authentically like hand chip their own stone
Speaker 1: axes and stuff, like they're really into it. Are they're
Speaker 1: not using Karl No, because everything Carl May wrote was alive.
Speaker 1: Now they've gotten better since then. Um, we'll put some
Speaker 1: of the pictures up on on the site and in
Speaker 1: social media. There's some great ones of the movies where
Speaker 1: they cast just the most ridiculous looking man to be
Speaker 1: old shatter hands. It's just like throwing Yeah, you owe
Speaker 1: it to yourself to look at these. It's it's it
Speaker 1: looks a little bit like a Star Trek episode set
Speaker 1: in the Old West, like that level of production value. Um,
Speaker 1: so yeah, thank you Karl May. Yeah, I'm really proud
Speaker 1: of him. This is why we will say, like, if
Speaker 1: passionate about something like and obviously Karl May was passionate
Speaker 1: about lying to people and fraud, like it didn't even
Speaker 1: matter what he was lying about, like and he but
Speaker 1: he dedicate his whole life to just being a liar.
Speaker 1: And I can't I can't knock somebody lying was his passion.
Speaker 1: You have to respect that much consistency. Like if someone
Speaker 1: just tells a few petty lies to get out of problems,
Speaker 1: that's not respectable. But if you lie your entire life,
Speaker 1: even after you no longer need to, for no reason
Speaker 1: other than the art of telling you whatever he was
Speaker 1: going to do it was going to be not just
Speaker 1: a lie, but like the boldest lie, like very fantastical.
Speaker 1: It's not even gonna sound real because like most liars
Speaker 1: who might might have been like, oh, I traveled to
Speaker 1: America as a young man, and I met this guy
Speaker 1: and he told me his stories and that's what these
Speaker 1: books are based on. But like Karla is like, no,
Speaker 1: I'm him, I'm the punch master who can't be beaten.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't. He never wanted to be him until
Speaker 1: he blew up and then he was like, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: it was me the whole time. I gotta say, like
Speaker 1: people talk about how J. K Rowling has kind of
Speaker 1: gone a little bit a little bit wacky and in
Speaker 1: her fame and like all the new stuff she releases
Speaker 1: about her characters and whatnot in her social media presence,
Speaker 1: but like she's got nothing on Carl May's game, No,
Speaker 1: because she never is like I am Harry, I am
Speaker 1: Harry Potter and this ship's all real. I used to
Speaker 1: run through the platform. Y'all never read the platform before.
Speaker 1: Just give it a shot. God, and everyone's dead. Oh man,
Speaker 1: Carl May you know big ups. I wish that I
Speaker 1: had known him back in the day. Like also, I
Speaker 1: kind of wish that I had lived in that time,
Speaker 1: like when like think about now how hard you have
Speaker 1: to work to scam people. Like back then you could
Speaker 1: really just say anything. Yeah, no one's googling you. You
Speaker 1: just go to the town over and it's like a
Speaker 1: new planet. Like I'm a doctor. They're probably not even
Speaker 1: that far apart. It's like it's like probably five miles away.
Speaker 1: You think that guy is really a doctor, I don't
Speaker 1: know a man he was born ten miles away. There's
Speaker 1: no way we can check up there, there's no backtracking.
Speaker 1: We just go like, he got the outfit all he
Speaker 1: got that coat. Who has a white coat and isn't
Speaker 1: a doctor? He's got a bag with a medicine sign
Speaker 1: on it. Yeah, that's all you needed was an imagination. Man,
Speaker 1: Millennials would have done great in that time period. We
Speaker 1: have such great imagination. But maybe it'll come back. Maybe
Speaker 1: this whole internet thing will collapse and it'll be like
Speaker 1: a whole world of Carl Mays. That's my dream, that's
Speaker 1: everyone's dream. Now. Yeah, alright, well that's our podcast for today. Lacy,
Speaker 1: you got anything you wanna you wanna plug drop in here? Oh, sure.
Speaker 1: You can follow me on Instagram if I ever get
Speaker 1: my phone back at a Diva Lacey d v l
Speaker 1: A c. My Instagram stars are basically Karl May. It's
Speaker 1: just me creating fantastical frauds. Actually fried my way into
Speaker 1: All Star Weekends this year without a ticket. Oh nice.
Speaker 1: I was reading some Karl mad books. I was like
Speaker 1: how I was like, this is my destiny. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: thank you so much, Carl. You've changed my life forever.
Speaker 1: All right, thank you Lazy. I'm Robert Evans. Please remember
Speaker 1: to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can
Speaker 1: also find us on social media Twitter, Instagram, Facebook at
Speaker 1: Bastard's Pod, and you can find us on the worldwide
Speaker 1: Web at behind the Bastards dot com. That's all for
Speaker 1: this week, uh sia