Scots professor behind new Nazi film warns Hitler can still hypnotise

As a child, she survived by hiding for years from the Nazis. As an adult, she’s been a consistent voice warning against the rising tide of far-right extremism.

So it was crucial for Professor Thomas Weber that she give her seal of approval to the film he’s spent years working on: Goebbels And The Führer. The movie, a warning about how easy it is for ordinary people to be seduced by extremism, is about to be released in Germany to a storm of controversy before it screens around the world.

Weber, originally from Germany, is one of Scotland’s most respected historians, and one of the world’s leading authorities on Adolf Hitler. He was part of the three-man team behind the movie, and acted as historical consultant, alongside the writer-director and the producer.

Professor Thomas Weber

He insisted that the film’s account of the relationship between Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, be intercut with testimony from survivors of the Holocaust to show what happens when voters succumb to dictators. Charlotte Knobloch was one of those survivors.

“Once we decided we’d include survivors, we were a little apprehensive,” Weber explains. He and writer-director Joachim Lang wondered how survivors would respond to their request to take part, and if they did whether they’d be happy with the final cut.

Knobloch and all the other survivors who were asked agreed to appear. They were then given a private screening. Once the film ended, Weber explains, Knobloch “didn’t say anything for several minutes”. The team were “really nervous”. But they shouldn’t have been. The survivors were fully onside. Knobloch “got up and she just hugged [Lang], and thanked him for the film”.

Knobloch, Weber says, believes the time has come for the world to focus on “the perpetrators” of the Holocaust, not just the victims, in order to protect democracy in the 21st century. If we don’t understand the power of demagogues, we cannot protect ourselves, Weber adds. Knobloch told the team: “If your film had been made 10 years ago, we wouldn’t have such a problem with the AfD today.”

AfD is the far-right German party making serious gains across the nation.

Power

Weber left Germany in 1996 to study at Oxford. He taught at Harvard and Glasgow, and is now professor of history and international affairs at Aberdeen, as well as founding director of the university’s Centre for Global Security and Governance. A visiting fellow at Stanford University, he is renowned internationally for two books, Hitler’s First War and Becoming Hitler: The Making Of A Nazi.

His work has reshaped how the world understands Hitler, and how he rose to power as a genocidal dictator. Weber investigated how Hitler “invented a semi-fictional past for himself for political gain”, particularly his time during the First World War. Rather than “the whole Nazi story of Hitler being the epitome of the Unknown Soldier”, he was – in the eyes of the men who served with him in the trenches – “a rear-echelon motherf****r”.

Adolf Hitler

Next year, Weber begins teaching a specialised course at Aberdeen University examining Hitler’s “politicisation and radicalisation, and what his time in power can teach us about the nature of politics today”.

Publicity for the film is mounting in Germany. Initially, the film was to be called Führer und Verführer – which translates as Führer and Seducer. However, the title was switched to reflect how the film charts the relationship between Goebbels and Hitler from 1938 to their deaths in the bunker in 1945. “It’s really about the mechanisms of demagoguery, manipulation and disinformation,” Weber explains.

“We wanted to show what drove Hitler and Goebbels but also how they drove others and how others felt driven by them, to get to the heart of the interaction between the people and political leaders.”

There has been “great reluctance” in Germany, says Weber, to focus on Hitler and other Nazi leaders like Goebbels. That reluctance is based partly on fear of glamourisation, but also the worry that by looking too closely at Hitler “it takes responsibility away from ordinary Germans”.

This cultural hesitancy in Germany to confront Hitler’s power over voters, Weber says, stems from events after the Second World War. “In the late 1940s and 50s, a lot of Germans said ‘it was just Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler, nothing to do with us’.”

Some worry that “if you stress the importance of Hitler, if you say Goebbels and Hitler were talented manipulators, political seducers, then the German population just becomes a victim, they’ve just been seduced”. It lets the people off the hook.

While Weber appreciates that such fears are based on “ethically right reasons”, it has also meant that “things went so far that people have become reluctant in Germany to take Hitler and other top Nazis seriously”.

The film does not take away the responsibility that lies with ordinary Germans for their actions during the 1930s and 40s. Rather, it adds this important moral and political point: “If you want to understand how an extremist mindset is translated into political action, into wars of aggression, you surely need to understand the role leaders play, and how they use the extremist views prevalent in a population, amplify them, and channel them in a particular direction which makes dictatorship and war possible.”

By failing to focus on the “push-me, pull-you” relationship between extremist political leaders and the general population, Weber fears that Germany risks not seeing “the pattern” of how democracies fall, in an age when democracy in the West is increasingly at risk. Understanding that “pattern” is a crucial way to inoculate a society against extremism.

Adolf Hitler

Shunned

So, this is a movie with a big philosophical, social and political agenda. Yet it was pretty much shunned by the German state. Due to its focus on Hitler, German film boards “refused to fund” the movie, Weber explains. It even had to be shot in Slovakia.

Germany has too narrow a view of the Nazi past, Weber feels. By understandably wanting to reinforce the notion of the collective guilt among ordinary Germans, “the unintended consequence was to take Hitler, Goebbels and other top dogs almost out of the equation”.

Weber refers to a recent conference in Germany on “Hitler and Weimar”. “The organisers felt prompted to say ‘one thing needs to be absolutely clear and that’s there shouldn’t be too much focus on Hitler’.” He also points to an exhibition in Berlin called “Hitler: How could it happen?”. Weber says it has had more than two million visitors since 2017, and is among the top 10 museums in Berlin, “but it’s an entirely private initiative that didn’t receive any public funding, and normally in Germany even private initiatives in the arts are heavily dependent on public funding”.

Both illustrate “the reluctance in German society” to confront the power that Hitler had over the nation’s people, and why he was able to exercise that power.

“Certainly the Third Reich,” says Weber, “wouldn’t have been possible without the actions of the leaders. The leaders are products of their radicalised societies, but at the same time channel that extremism into political action. Without leaders, you have disgruntlement, you don’t have democratic breakdown.”

To understand why Germany fell for an extremist like Hitler, we also need to look at where other nations resisted demagogues and retained their democracies. In interwar Europe, Weber explains, “in about 60% of countries democracy collapsed, and in about 40% it survived”.

In eastern Europe, democracy was all but extinguished in the interwar period. Czechoslovakia, Weber says, “was the only country to the east of the Rhine and south of the Alps where democracy did survive in the interwar years”, until Germany invaded. Democracy in Spain also collapsed.

France, Belgium and the Netherlands all saw democracy teeter precariously, but survive, again until Germany invaded.

Why was there such difference in the rate of democratic survival in European states? The answer is the role of political leaders. Some fought hard to save democracy and won, others failed in the face of extremist rivals.

“That’s why it’s important to look at people like Hitler,” says Weber, “and more broadly at all leaders. It’s leadership which explains why, in some societies, that are very similar, democracy breaks down and not in others. Just looking at ordinary people alone won’t help you understand.”

Weber fears that by failing to put Hitler fully in the spotlight we risk “normalising” him, not just in Germany, but “across Europe, the West and probably worldwide, particularly among young people”. Recently, Weber says, the German president warned that “he’s worried about a time where German students might see Hitler again as a great man”.

Dictator Adolf Hitler leaving the Siemens works, after making his final speech prior to the German election. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images).

Social media

WEBER argues that “this is precisely what’s happening through social media, particularly TikTok”.

Hitler is being reduced to a “meme” on social media. “You’ve just endless flooding of Pepe the Frog [a far-right meme] dressed as Hitler, or people lip-synching Goebbels’s speeches.”

For young people “not properly introduced to Hitler” – who don’t fully understand what he did and how he did it – the Nazi leader “can become initially a comical figure, then a normal figure and then maybe a cool figure”.

Weber says that is “the context” in which we need to see recent polling showing that “teenagers and people in their lower 20s are at the moment in most Western countries politically the most radical”. Many young voters have suddenly shifted from left to the far right.

If German art – like film – or the education system “doesn’t dare touch Hitler”, then the young won’t be “exposed” to the truth about how his regime wooed voters. “The only thing they’re exposed to is [social media] channels in which Hitler is normalised or even glorified.”

That’s why the filmmakers will be pushing the movie on TikTok – to speak directly to the young people at risk of being radicalised through ignorance.

It’s not just among the young, however, that Hitler is becoming normalised. Nazi ideas are now entering the mainstream, often without us being aware.

Weber explains how Hitler often claimed that the Nazis offered “real democracy”, and spoke of “power coming from the people”. Many populists today claim they are the defenders of democracy, that “they’re returning democracy to the people”.

The “seduction” offered by extremist leaders is the political claim that they can save society. Evidently, where Hitler targeted Jewish people, claiming they undermined the nation, others today target racial or sexual minorities.

Lunatic

NATIONS like Britain and America “reduce Hitler to a raging lunatic”, without understanding the full extent of his ideas and tactics. That means that “when we look for the new Nazis, we also just look for the raging, screaming extremist who wants to kill Jews. We can find them, of course – and we should be worried about these people – but in a way they’re not the biggest problem, the biggest problem are the people who have ideas like Hitler but in whom we don’t recognise Hitler anymore”.

When the next dictator appears, he won’t come in the same shape as Hitler, but he will use the same tricks.

Weber turns to modern-day “illiberal democracies”, nations like Hungary, Turkey and India, where the rule of law, press freedom, judicial independence and rival political parties are all greatly curtailed to retain the leader in power.

“People say ‘well, illiberal democracy is bad, but it’s not what historically the Nazis were doing’. And I say ‘no, that’s precisely what the Nazis were doing’.”

The breakdown of democracy today may be “more gradual, but the drivers behind it, the motivations, are the same”.

The far-right conspiracy theory known as The Great Replacement – that there’s a plot to destroy”‘the white race” through immigration – almost directly parrots the Nazi programme. Weber says that today’s “Aperol Spritz-drinking radical right” isn’t that different from “the radical right of the past”.

Hitler wasn’t solely the frothing lunatic we view him as today. Our image of him comes from “the last 10 seconds” of speeches that were “skilful and lasted two-and-a-half hours”. Sometimes, Weber says, Hitler would whisper, he could even sound charming, “and then at the end, there was the crescendo when he had everyone in his hands. That’s when he would spit and rage, and we think that’s his appeal”. Weber adds: “It’s important we take Hitler seriously and don’t reduce him to a cartoon.” If we do, we’ll expect demagogues who threaten democracy to behave in a cartoonish form, and that won’t happen. Rather we need to focus on the tools used by leaders like Hitler to woo their populations: propaganda and disinformation.

Radicalisation

SO, why does Weber think that so many people are now being drawn to the radical right, especially the young? He says we need to look for “pattern repetition” between now and the interwar years, specifically what he calls “crises perception”.

Like the interwar years, many people now feel they’re living through multiple “existential crises”. Wars, the pandemic, financial ruin have all mounted up to what feels like a “do or die” moment, “that there’s no way out, and political leadership doesn’t have what it takes” to protect us. “It’s at these moments people abandon their previous political convictions and are open to new answers.”

Politicians have also “shot themselves in the foot”, Weber says, by posing as “crisis managers, and saying crises can be prevented”. When a crisis then hits and politicians fail to handle it properly, discontent and disconnect grows.

“This goes a long way to explaining the radicalisation we’ve seen in recent years.” The far right is now a major political force all across Europe and in America.

All it takes for matters to spin out of control is for an extremist leader, once in office, to “use their skills to consolidate power, and erode political institutions, and you’ll quickly see an erosion of democracy”. This is exactly what has taken place in Hungary.

Today’s other great similarity to the 1920s is “technological revolution”. In the 1920s, Weber says, radio burst on the scene, cinema became the dominant art form, and illustrated magazines entered their heyday.

All three were exploited by Nazis propagandists. Hitler carefully cultivated his media image. Today, there’s the internet and social media which flood societies with disinformation, lies and propaganda . It’s a “firehouse of falsehood”, says Weber.

This combination of multiple crises and new technology which lends itself to extremist propaganda is having its most profound effect on young people who feel left behind by a shattered economy. Hitler and Mussolini both ran “parties of the youth”, Weber points out.

The “perception of injustice is at the heart of radicalisation”, he adds, “both in the past and present”. Hitler could exploit the Great Depression. In the Netherlands, the far right found electoral success by using the housing crisis to appeal directly to young people.

When a population feels that the burdens caused by various crises “aren’t shared equally” there’s a boost to radicalisation. “As long as there’s a sense that we’re all in this together, that there’s solidarity, it’s surprising how resilient societies can be.”

But the moment there’s a sense that “some people aren’t pulling their weight, or exploiting the moment, that’s when radicalisation sets in”. Weber adds: “It correlates to the loss of hope in the future.”

 

Elites

THAT’S why so-called “elites”, migrants and other minorities make easy scapegoats. Perceived injustice around housing has become a “real bread-and-butter issue”, says Weber, among the young in Scotland as well as other European nations.

Weber explains that even a “middle-class professor” like him struggles with housing costs. Academics in Aberdeen are being forced out of the city due to property prices. “You can see why people have this injustice perception which leads to radicalisation.”

Today, people have also lost the ability and skills to verify reliable news sources. Disinformation on social media by anonymous bloggers is often given as much merit as a report by the BBC. “They don’t have the tools to figure out for themselves which information is right and wrong.”

In the UK, 71% of 16 to 24-year-olds access their news via social media. Often, they are “inundated with a mixture of absolute nonsense, conflicting news, and deliberate disinformation which isn’t even supposed to convince – where the whole point is just to throw people off”.

Given this catalogue of fears, you can see why Weber was so committed to his role as historic adviser on Goebbels And The Führer. It wasn’t a matter of simply advising on whether actors were wearing the right uniforms. His role was to ensure the film captured precisely the effect of propaganda on a society in crisis.

There hasn’t been a serious film about Hitler for 20 years, since the movie Downfall, says Weber. One of his principle duties was making sure viewers didn’t find themselves identifying with the protagonist. There has been a shift in dramas lately where “negative protagonists” appeal to viewers, like House Of Cards. That couldn’t be allowed to happen in this film. “That’s why we decided to include the testimony of Holocaust survivors,” he explains. “You immediately see the consequences of what the propaganda did.”

However, all Germany’s public film boards were unsupportive and “said ‘no way, we can’t do a film where Hitler is the main protagonist’, for all the reasons I’ve already described”, adding: “The film was close to being abandoned.” Slovakia stepped in, however – a nation which ironically has fallen under a populist government since the movie wrapped. “Slovakia was still a liberal government then. It’s interesting that a country at the receiving end of Hitler’s crimes wanted the film made, unlike Germany.” Slovakia also provided financial support and help with locations.

The team behind the new movie

Future

SO, how safe is Western democracy today? “I don’t think democracy is safe at all,” Weber replies. “We’re seeing the erosion of democracy. That’s why it’s so important to understand that even in the interwar years, democracy didn’t die overnight, even in Germany it was a gradual process. Today, it’s even more gradual, a sliding away. It’s small incremental steps, like a pond drying from the outside. The fish on the inside are still swimming around, but they don’t realise the fish on the outside are dead. It’s a slow death. You only realise it’s gone when it’s gone.”

He is especially worried by those who are voting for populist parties believing they are “saving democracy” when, in fact, “they’re killing it”. Western democracies can survive “if we keep a cool head”. More financial equality and better internet regulation would be a start. Populists have fallen in Poland, and are struggling in Turkey, so the tide can be turned, Weber adds.

Are we heading for another world war? “I certainly think we’re in a world war of disinformation,” Weber says, “and we’re probably living in a new Cold War.” He believes that for now the risk of a “new, hot, world war is relatively small, but I’m not saying it’s non-existent”.

It all depends on Ukraine. If Russia wins, then China will be “emboldened” and could invade Taiwan in the face of a West depleted of weapons through its support for Kyiv. That could spiral into global conflict. So the war in Ukraine must not “end victoriously for the Russians”.

Of greater threat right now is the inability to govern the world. The post-1945 world order is no longer working. “The question then is: what comes instead?”, Weber adds. His greatest fear would be a return to the pre-1914 world, “where everyone feels insecure and doesn’t share common principles and values. That can escalate quite quickly”.

Perhaps the best hope is that we go back to the Europe of 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars where the victors “despite their differences still had a common sense of responsibility that they needed to contain war and had a minimal agreement on how to govern the world”. He adds: “Is that the world I’d prefer? No, absolutely not. I prefer a liberal world. But it’s better than the alternative.”