08/31/2026
DER FÜHER AND COMRADE STALIN: HI**ER AND STALIN, 1929-1939
Date/Time: Tuesday, September 1, 8, 15 at 10am
Presenter: David Hartman
These three sessions in this ongoing series will address Germany’s Adolf Hi**er and the Soviet Union’s Josef Stalin in the decade between their ascension to ultimate power and the onset of the cataclysmic war between them. On Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin was part of an informal leadership coalition that included his fellow Communists Lev Kamenev and Gregori Zinoviev, while Lenin’s closest peer in the Bolshevik takeover of Russia, Leon Trotsky, was expelled from the Communist Party and sent into exile. By 1929, Stalin had almost unilateral control of the reins of power in the Soviet Union. He instituted a massive purge known as “The Great Terror” against other leading Communists (notably his erstwhile allies Kamenev and Zinoviev), seized privately-owned farmlands and mandated policies which led to the mass starvation in Ukraine known as “the Holodomor,” purged the Army of its most senior leadership, brutally suppressed all public dissent, and incited Communist movements and uprisings throughout the world, notably in Europe and China. In August, 1939, Stalin approved a secret Soviet pact with N**i Germany known as the “Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty,” intended to divide Poland and other eastern European nations between them. When World War II commenced in September, 1939, Hi**er and Stalin were effectively allies, an arrangement that endured until Hi**er launched a massive surprise attack on the Soviet Union in June, 1941. In April, 1932, 84-year-old Paul von Hindenburg was re-elected President of the German Republic (known more familiarly as “the Weimar Republic”), while Adolf Hi**er finished second in the vote tally. Though short of a majority, Hi**er’s German National Socialist Party—the “N**is”—became the leading party in the Reichstag (the German equivalent of Congress). Under the Weimar Republic’s Constitution, an elected President served as Head of State and the military, while an appointed Chancellor served as head of government. Under political pressure (and against his better judgment), the increasingly senile Hindenburg appointed Hi**er Chancellor on January 30, 1933. Hi**er earned Hindenburg’s respect by purging (and murdering) his long-time ally, Ernst Rohm, the head of the N**i militia known as the SA, or “Brownshirts.” Hi**er earned even more of Hindenburg’s respect after the Reichstag building (the German equivalent of a House of Congress), was set on fire, ostensibly by a Communist, on February 27, 1933. At Hi**er’s urging, the Reichstag passed what became known as “the Enabling Act” on March 23, 1933, which granted Chancellor Hi**er and his government authority to issue decrees independent of the President and the Reichstag. The Enabling Act became the basis of Hi**er’s rise to full power. In July, 1933, the National Socialist Party was decreed the only legal political party in Germany. On Hindenburg’s death in August, 1934, the Act enabled Hi**er to assume the duties of both President and Chancellor. Hi**er chose to be addressed henceforth as Der Führer, “the Leader,” as he had been known while head of the N**i Party. Henceforth, even the German Army made its oath of allegiance not to a constitution, but to Hi**er alone. Thus was the Third Reich birthed. We will address Hi**er’s actions in the 1930’s, which included the vicious suppression of Jews and other ethnic minorities, as well as the astonishing reconstruction that occurred in Germany that decade. We will look at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the making of the Volkswagen (“the People’s Car”) in 1937, the 1938 annexation of Austria (Hi**er’s country of birth), known as “the Anschluss,” and the Munich Pact with Great Britain and France that same year, which conceded Germany’s seizure of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. We will also look at the onset of World War II in September, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, and Great Britain and France declared war. We will also look at burgeoning neo-N**i movements in other countries in the 1930’s, and focus on some of the public figures, like the popular radio priest Father Charles Coughlin and carmaker Henry Ford in the United States, who were adamantly anti-Semitic and implicitly pro-Hi**er. On a date yet to be determined, we will also watch the landmark documentary, Triumph of the Will, by the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, about the 1935 Nuremberg Rally. That same day, as a palate cleanser, we will also watch the 1940 comedy short You Nazty Spy by your instructor’s favorite comedians, The Three Stooges, all of whom were Jewish. It is noteworthy as the first Hollywood production to openly mock Adolf Hi**er (as well as this then-allies Mussolini and Stalin), preceding Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator by a matter of months.
