World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 7 May 2026Early in World War II, German U-boats came dangerously close to starving Britain into submission. The Type VII submarine — especially the VIIC — became the backbone of the Kriegsmarine‘s Atlantic campaign, sinking thousands of Allied ships and threatening to win the Battle of the Atlantic.
But despite its devastating effectiveness, the U-boat war ultimately failed — and not just because of Allied countermeasures.
In this documentary, Spartacus Olsson breaks down how Adolf Hitler’s strategic miscalculations, competing naval doctrines, and direct interference undermined Germany’s most effective naval weapon. From the clandestine development of submarines after the Treaty of Versailles, through Admiral Karl Dönitz’s vision of a tonnage war, to the catastrophic losses of German submariners, this episode examines how Nazi rearmament translated into wartime reality — and failure.
Featuring detailed analysis of Type VII design, production, deployment, and combat performance, this video reveals how industrial limitations, political priorities, and technological shifts turned a war-winning weapon into a death trap.
This standalone episode complements the Death of Democracy series by showing what Hitler actually did with Germany’s rearmament- and why it fell short.
May 8, 2026
How Hitler Wasted Germany’s Deadliest Weapon – Nazi Rearmament 01 – U-Boat Type VIIC
May 3, 2026
How to Declare a Live Person Legally Dead – Death of Democracy 14 – Q2 1936
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 2 May 2026In Q2 1936, Adolf Hitler consolidated power after the Rhineland gamble, tightening the machinery of dictatorship while projecting strength abroad. As Hermann Göring took control of Germany’s economic lifelines and Heinrich Himmler centralized the police, the regime accelerated its transformation into a fully integrated police state.
Behind Olympic pageantry and propaganda triumphs like Max Schmeling’s victory, the Nazi system deepened repression. Courts enforced the Nuremberg Laws with chilling logic, reducing Jewish citizens to a state of “civil death”, while Joseph Goebbels expanded total control over media and public discourse.
At the same time, Germany’s economy bent further toward war, with dwindling foreign reserves and rising dependence on autarky. Yet domestically, resistance remained minimal as propaganda, fear, and perceived stability drove growing public support.
Globally, the quarter exposed the weakness of the League of Nations during Italy’s conquest of Abyssinia, saw Léon Blum’s rise in France, and witnessed the outbreak of the Arab Revolt in Palestine — signs of a world drifting toward instability.
This episode examines how dictatorship consolidates not just through terror, but through law, economics, and consent — and why, by mid-1936, meaningful resistance inside Germany had largely vanished.
May 2, 2026
Cancelled chancellor?
The German Chancellor’s future looks unhappy, and eugyppius notes that even the lapdog mainstream media outlets who praised him last year are now publishing calls for his ouster:
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, 5 May 2025.
Photo by Sandro Halank for Wikimedia Commons.
Merz has always been just some loser. He’s a third-rate talentless politician and in this much like his predecessor, Olaf Scholz. Both are mere caricatures, what happens when you mimeograph overmuch the last century’s tired political styles. These kinds of chancellors will continue to exist only so long as they can be sold to the geezers of the Federal Republic’s care homes by the amateurish marketing campaigns of a complicit state media as the incarnation of far-sighted competence and (more importantly) bourgeois respectability.
Early in 2025, Merz had the chance to seize a measure of power for himself and make facts. He could have forged a deal with Alternative für Deutschland on the most important questions, established a minority government and set about force-marching the obese German state through necessary reforms. It might’ve torn his party apart, he might’ve failed, there would’ve been a huge fight, but whatever happened nobody would ever forget Chancellor Merz. Instead, the Pigeon Chancellor let a lot of deranged Antifa street protesters and screeching women with parareligious concerns about atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations dissuade him from the only reasonable path. Instead of making history, he chose to spend the first year of his chancellorship making the Social Democrats fat and happy at the expense of the nation. Most don’t even hate Merz, because hate like love has to be be earned. He inspires nothing more than mildly scornful indifference.
Everyone who was not a complete idiot knew that Merz’s mad coalition with the Social Democrats could never work. Yet the man has been lionised in the international press and even in centre-right domestic papers like the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as a serious reformer. These people told us Merz would rebuild the Bundeswehr, reduce insane social spending, impose fiscal discipline, solve the migroid problem and restore economic growth. Even if the leftoid half of the German establishment press didn’t embrace all these myths, they nevertheless worked hard to make Merz seem presentable, serious and viable. He was worth a shot, he would do his best, and after the crazy Scholz years Germany was back on solid footing.
Now, in the the space of about two weeks, the entire myth of Chancellor Merz has collapsed. Major papers that used to defend his government and praise his prospects are suddenly saying it’s over. They’re writing front-page editorials in the spirit of stuff I was posting here over a year ago. Merz appears at town-hall meetings where he gets asked how he’s made life better in Germany and before he can answer the audience just laughs at his stupid ass. His coalition partners say he’s doing a terrible job. Back-benchers from his own party are calling his political strategy a failure to his face and leaking it afterwards to the press so everyone knows what they said.
Still worse, people from the Chancellery are talking to the tabloids. They’re explaining that Merz’s government has been hanging by a thread since at least last December; that his party thinks he’s a pushover whom the SPD constantly manipulates; that often Merz just absorbs the opinions of whatever person he last talked to and so his handlers have to limit his contacts to keep him from going off-message in insane ways; that Merz is now almost totally isolated, having burned through most of his close confidants; and that nobody has any solutions or ideas and increasingly everybody doubts that the Chancellor has the talents to save himself.
April 26, 2026
How to Stage (and Win) an International Crisis – Death of Democracy 13 – Q1 1936
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 25 Apr 2026In early 1936, Adolf Hitler took one of the greatest risks of his rule — sending German troops into the demilitarized Rhineland in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact. It was a gamble that could have triggered immediate war. Instead, it became a turning point that transformed Hitler from a powerful dictator into a figure many Germans saw as a national savior.
In this episode of Death of Democracy, we examine how the re-militarization of the Rhineland, combined with the propaganda spectacle of the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, helped cement Hitler’s popularity at home while exposing the paralysis of Britain and France abroad. Through contemporary voices like William L. Shirer and Victor Klemperer, we explore the uneasy mix of fear, relief, and growing enthusiasm among ordinary Germans — alongside the continued escalation of repression against Jews and political opponents.
This quarter reveals a crucial dynamic: how foreign policy success, propaganda, and public sentiment fused to elevate Hitler into something approaching a political messiah — while simultaneously closing the space for resistance.
History is not inevitable — but moments like this show how easily it can be shaped.
April 25, 2026
QotD: Goethe, the lost German master
This was the atmosphere in which I discovered Germany. It was a minor act of defiance to choose German instead of Latin for O-level, but with hindsight I was extremely fortunate to have the choice. There were two German teachers in my grammar school of just 600 pupils. Today, even the best state schools seldom offer the subject; not one of our four children has had the opportunity that I had to study German language and, especially, literature up to the high standard that was then expected at A-level.
Today, the texts are almost all recent and appear to be chosen partly with the film of the book in mind. In particular, Goethe has disappeared from the syllabus, presumably because the language is considered too archaic. Yet I recall the immense pleasure and satisfaction of mastering a Goethe play — Egmont. The story of the dashing Dutchman and his martial defiance of the sinister Duke of Alba, the courage of his beloved, Klärchen, who fantasises in song about how wonderful it would be to be a man and fight the Spaniards — “ein Glück sondergleichen ein Mannsbild zu sein“. Somehow I even obtained an LP of Beethoven’s incidental music for Egmont: seldom heard apart from the overture, but brilliantly evoking the grandeur of the drama.
Like Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, Goethe belongs not just to German literature, but to world literature, Weltliteratur — a term he coined. I am told that even in German Gymnasien, Goethe is little studied now. He is certainly a rare bird in English schools — or even universities. It is tragic that educated people, including students of literature, so seldom encounter the greatest of Germans even in translation. We might get on better with Germany if we did.
Daniel Johnson, “How I discovered Germany”, The Critic, 2020-08-02.
April 22, 2026
“Finally authorities gave up and decided to let Timmy the Whaletard die in peace”
The German media has been breathlessly covering the story of a wandering whale who seems to delight in getting stranded on sandbanks along the northern coast of Germany in the Baltic Sea:
Timmy
Photo from eugyppius
Timmy is the name the German press have given to a confused humpback whale who got himself caught in a fishing net off the coast of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in early March.
Authorities cut Timmy free in the hopes that he would swim back to the Atlantic like a good whale, but instead he continued to poop around off the German Baltic coast where he does not belong, finally stranding himself on a sandbar near Niendorf like a complete fucking retard.1 An intensive rescue ensued – breathlessly livestreamed by the German press and regrettably also live-tweeted by myself. Ultimately the effort succeeded and Timmy swam free, only to strand himself again, and again, and again, and still again.
Finally authorities gave up and decided to let Timmy the Whaletard die in peace, but soon a whole raft of philanthropists and “whale whisperers” (this is literally what the press called one of them) descended on the problem and the drama of Timmy continues to this moment. The latest subplot unfolded yesterday, as our whale saviours prepared a complex scheme to lift Timmy via air cushions onto a tarp, tie him to pontoons and tug him around Denmark back into the North Atlantic. Alas, a rising tide loosened the hapless Timmy from his sandbar and he swam free, escaping this indignity at least and leaving all the whale-whispering shitheads with nothing to do but give more pointless media interviews. For two hours children across the Federal Republic jubilated as Timmy lurked aimlessly in shallow coastal waters, until of course he beached himself again, provoking a whole new narrative epicycle.
The case of Timmy the Retard Whale is oddly captivating. Most obviously it illustrates the naiveté and neotenous emotional incontinence of Germans today, many of whom have countered the pervasive secularisation of society with an exaggerated and childish faith in the overarching sacrality of the natural world and its creatures. The media have constructed a perverse Disney plot out of the endless ups and downs of Timmy’s plight: Now the whale is free! Now he is dying! Now he must be rescued! Now he is free again! Now he is stranded! Now there is hope! Now he is dying! Not only children but plenty of adults have lost themselves in this transparently repetitive drama. At one point a gaggle of dumb women even protested to demand that authorities do more to save our unsaveable humpback – who is of course merely one of perhaps 100,000 humpbacks across the world, the vast majority of whom will die in complete obscurity with nary a news article.
In my more delirious moments I wonder if Timmy is not also an omen from on high, a metaphor from the heavens to illustrate for us the ridiculous, circular farce that Germany has become.
- He was named Timmy for Timmendorfer Strand, where he beached himself for the first time. My efforts to christen him Horst have not caught on. I know the good Timmy is probably disoriented due to illness or injury and not actually retarded but this is how I have chosen to maintain emotional distance from the fate of this particular incorrigible mammal, who is beyond all human capacity to rescue but unfortunately not beyond all of my sympathies.
Walther’s Forgotten SMG: The MPK (and MPL)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 Dec 2025Walther began developing a modern stamped sheet metal SMG in the late 1950s, and it entered production in 1963. It was an open-bolt, simple blowback gun available in a short (MPK; 6.75″ barrel) and long (MPL; 10.25″ barrel) version. It was cheap and simple, but well thought out with a number of quite good features.
The standard design was just safe/full, but a semiautomatic selector position was available if desired by the client. An excellent safety sear prevented the bolt from bouncing open and firing, and the charging handle was both non-reciprocating and capable of also serving as a forward assist if needed. The sights were a bit too clever for Walther’s own good, with a 75m notch and a 150m aperture, both of which were not really great.
Faced with competition from contemporaries like the Uzi and MP5, the Walther never really became massively popular. It did get enough small and medium sized contracts (German police, South African police, Mexican Navy, Portuguese Navy, US Delta Force, etc) to remain in production until 1985 though. Overall a solid and reliable gun even if it failed to really stand out from the other options on the market.
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April 19, 2026
How to Tank the Economy for War – Death of Democracy 12 – Q4 1935
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 18 Apr 2026Nazi Germany in late 1935 was becoming more ruthless, more militarized, and more dangerous. In this episode, Spartacus Olsson reports from Berlin on the final months of 1935, when Hitler’s regime tightened its grip through food shortages, propaganda, rearmament, and the continued implementation of the Nuremberg Laws. As ordinary Germans faced rising prices, scarce meat and butter, and mounting pressure to sacrifice for the Reich, the Nazi state pushed its “guns before butter” economy even further. We examine the “fat gap”, Winter Relief, Eintopfsonntag, and the growing burden placed on German families while resources were diverted to war preparation.
At the same time, the First Supplementary Decree to the Reich Citizenship Law gave the regime a bureaucratic definition of who counted as a Jew, accelerating exclusion, dismissal, and persecution. Courts, police, and the Gestapo increasingly enforced the racist order, while Goebbels’ propaganda machine worked to normalize hardship, suppress criticism, and intensify antisemitism.
Against the backdrop of Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia and the paralysis of the League of Nations, Hitler found new room to maneuver internationally while consolidating dictatorship at home. This episode explores how the Third Reich turned scarcity into discipline, prejudice into law, and national pride into obedience — bringing Germany one step closer to catastrophe.
Never Forget.
April 18, 2026
The First M60 Prototype: FG42 + MG42 = T44
Forgotten Weapons
Published 1 Dec 2025The FG-42 caught the attention of a lot of countries at the end of World War Two. The British and Swiss both used it as the starting point for some developments. The US went one step simpler, and simply cut up a captured FG-42 to make into the T44, the first prototype of what would become the M60 machine gun.
This project was done in 1946 by the Bridge Tool & Die Company, who spent about six months reinforcing an FG42 and adding an MG42 feed system to it to create an unholy hybrid kludge of a gun. It was, however, successful enough to justify continuing the project. Only this one example was made before moving on to much more practical models built from the ground up instead of hacking up captured German guns.
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April 12, 2026
How to Legalize Scapegoating – Death of Democracy 11 – Q3 1935
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 11 Apr 2026
Nuremberg Laws explained: how Nazi Germany turned antisemitic street violence into state policy in 1935. In this episode, Spartacus Olsson reports from Berlin on the third quarter of 1935, when the Kurfürstendamm riots, Goebbels’ propaganda campaigns, and Hitler’s regime culminated in the passage of the Nuremberg Laws.
This historical analysis breaks down how the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor stripped German Jews of civil rights, redefined citizenship around “German blood”, and replaced chaotic mob violence with systematic bureaucratic persecution. The video also explores the role of Joseph Goebbels, the SA, the coming 1936 Berlin Olympics, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, worsening shortages in the Nazi economy, and the collapse of democracy, human rights, and freedom of expression in the Third Reich.
This episode is essential viewing for anyone interested in Nazi Germany, Holocaust history, antisemitism, Nazi propaganda, the rise of fascism, and the origins of World War II. It shows how legal language, public conformity, and state power combined to normalize persecution long before the worst crimes were fully visible.
April 5, 2026
How To Let the People Pay For War – Death of Democracy 10 – Q2 1935
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 4 Apr 2026June 1935: Adolf Hitler reassures the world with promises of peace — while secretly accelerating Germany’s path to war. In this episode of Death of Democracy, we examine how Hitler manipulated international diplomacy and domestic opinion in the second quarter of 1935. From the collapse of the Stresa Front to the signing of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, foreign leaders were drawn into a dangerous illusion. Meanwhile, inside Germany, antisemitic violence escalated, press censorship intensified under Joseph Goebbels, and economic realities worsened under Hjalmar Schacht’s policies.
Drawing on firsthand accounts from William L. Shirer and Victor Klemperer, this episode reveals a society caught between fear, propaganda, and growing dictatorship.
How did Hitler convince both his people and world leaders that he wanted peace – while preparing for war?
Watch to understand how democracies can be misled – and what happens when we fail to act.
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April 2, 2026
QotD: Growing up behind the Iron Curtain
Which makes sense if you think about it. When everybody’s snitching on everybody else, shameless is the only way to live. Everybody’s guilty of something, so own it — being, of course, perpetually prepared to snitch anyone and everyone else at a moment’s notice if someone drops the dime on you. Also, if you have to stand in line six hours to maybe get a few potatoes, damn it, you’re gonna get those potatoes. It doesn’t matter if you like potatoes, or have any possible use for potatoes at the present time. You’re going to take every single spud you can get your hands on, plus steal anything that isn’t nailed down, because you never know when you’ll get another chance.
As it turns out, overabundance creates the same conditions. When you’ve been standing in line for six hours with 1,000 of your new best friends just to get some tampons — and you’re a guy, you don’t need tampons, but you can always barter them for something — you’re not going to scruple to do anything and everything to get them. Indeed you want people to know Ivan’s got some tampons, because that’s how the black market works …
… anyway, as I say, we’re not in line for six hours, but we are perpetually at least under the threat of surveillance. And not from the Feds — just as Ivan’s not worried about the KGB, but rather his neighbors, so we don’t have to worry about the Feebs monitoring us. Instead, it’s that Basic College Girl with the iPhone. She’s not filming you, of course, she’s filming herself, but there you are anyway, in the background, doing whatever. Under those conditions — and when everyone’s volunteering the most intimate details of their lives on Fakebook and Twatter — shameless is the only way to live.
In other words, thanks to constant social media “surveillance”, it has gone in the blink of an eye from “It didn’t happen unless someone caught it on film” to “It’s all on film anyway, so fuck it, I’m gonna get mine”. I used to see this all the time in class. Basic College Girls will lie straight to your face, for any reason or no reason. They’ll do it on spec, just to see if you bite. More importantly, they’ll tell you such obvious, easily disproven whoppers that you start wondering if they’re having a schizoid break. You have to know I know you’re lying, right? That Dead Grandma Story is very sad, but you have pictures of yourself all over Twitter drunk at the sorority formal, when you told me you were at Nana’s funeral.
It’s not that they don’t know. It’s that they don’t care. Because somehow I’m the asshole for not believing them, despite the evidence of my own lying eyes.
Severian, “Friday Male Bag”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-03.
March 29, 2026
How Radio Killed Democracy – Death of Democracy 09 – Q1 1935
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 28 Mar 2026Radio did not just spread Nazi propaganda — it helped make dictatorship feel normal.
In How Radio Killed Democracy, we examine how Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels used mass broadcasting to manipulate public opinion in Germany in early 1935. As the Saar plebiscite returned the Saarland to the Reich, the regime turned radio into a political weapon: shaping emotion, manufacturing consent, and helping millions of Germans embrace rearmament, conscription, and the destruction of democracy.
This episode of Death of Democracy follows the decisive first quarter of 1935: the Saar vote, Göring’s admission of [the existence of] the Luftwaffe, Hitler’s open defiance of Versailles, and the growing power of the Gestapo. While Nazi propaganda promised pride, unity, and national revival, civil liberties were collapsing, Jews were being isolated, and Germany was being prepared for war.
How did propaganda become so effective? How did radio help turn fear, resentment, and nationalism into obedience? And how did so many people support a regime that was already dismantling the rule of law?
This is the story of how radio helped kill democracy in Nazi Germany.Never Forget
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March 26, 2026
From conservative, traditionalist Wilhelmine Germany to the unbridled excess of the Weimar Republic
Celina discusses the wrenching social changes Germany went through as the First World War ended, the Kaiser abdicated, and the Versailles terms were imposed on a still-young nation that didn’t think it had been defeated on the battlefield (it had been, decisively, but the truth was not revealed or understood on the home front):
To understand the death of a civilisation, one must first walk through its ruins. The scene is Berlin, sometime in the mid-1920s, beneath the blinding, electric glare of neon and the suffocating, narcotic haze of the Berliner Luft, an atmosphere that locals gleefully described as an amphetamine-like air that made hearts race, pupils dilate, and morals evaporate until dawn.1 In the shadowed, labyrinthine alleys of a shattered empire, the streets of the capital have been entirely surrendered to a bacchanalia of unprecedented depravity. Prostitutes in various stages of undress crowd the cobblestones. They are openly aggressive, their ranks swollen by pregnant mothers, desperate war widows, and adolescents, all selling their flesh for the price of a meal.2 On every street corner, hawkers peddle cocaine, morphine, and opium to passersby, while newsstands prominently display nudist magazines dedicated exclusively to the exhibition of children.3
Push past the heavy, smoke-stained velvet curtains of the subterranean cabarets, and the full, suffocating scope of the abyss reveals itself. Here, glittering shows parade acres of sweaty, perfumed flesh to the applause of an audience intoxicated by a potent mixture of ecstasy, terror, and moral decay. Cross-dressing men perform grotesque pantomimes of traditional womanhood, while tuxedo-clad women mock the remnants of patriarchal authority, puffing cigars and sneering at the ghosts of their fathers.
Cabaret
For the modern, liberal apologists of the era, this explosion of libertinism is often retroactively celebrated as a vibrant, avant-garde renaissance, a brief, shining moment of progressive emancipation before the darkness of fascism fell. It is romanticised in our modern cinema and theatre as a glorious rebellion against the stuffy confines of tradition. But to the ordinary, rooted citizens of the German nation, the truth was far darker and far more evident.
The normalisation of perversion was not an expression of human flourishing, it was an aggressive, deliberate assault on the family, faith, nation, and the natural order itself. It was the deliberate dismantling of the moral architecture that had sustained European civilisation for a millennium. This was not liberation. This was civilisational suicide and the German people knew it.
Left: Valeska Gert, Dance in Orange, Munich (1918). Right: Olga Desmond performing the ‘Sword Dance’ (1908). Photo by Otto Skowranek.
The Shattered Fatherland: Versailles and the Death of Order
The tragedy of the Weimar Republic cannot be understood without first grasping the significant psychological and spiritual trauma that birthed it. Before 1914, Wilhelmine Germany was a society defined by structure, piety, and an organic connection to history. It was a nation grounded in Christian sexual ethics, where the family was revered as the inviolable bedrock of the state, and where duty, honour, and natural law governed public life.4 Men were expected to be providers and protectors; women were the venerated guardians of the hearth and the moral educators of the next generation.5
The cataclysm of the First World War shattered this world completely. The defeat of the German Empire brought not only physical devastation, millions of young men fed to the meat grinder of the trenches, but an unprecedented spiritual crisis. The humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles, specifically the “War Guilt Clause” and the crippling imposition of 130 billion marks in war reparations, stripped the nation of its dignity and its sovereignty.6 The collapse of the monarchy left a gaping void where the Fatherland had once stood, and the pervasive Dolchstoßlegende, the widely held belief that the military was stabbed in the back by domestic traitors, socialists, and cultural subversives festered in the national consciousness.7
- https://www.salon.com/2000/11/22/weimar/
- Ibid
- Ibid
- https://verso.uidaho.edu/view/pdfCoverPage?instCode=01ALLIANCE_UID&filePid=13308274540001851&download=true
- Ibid
- https://theoldshelter.com/weimar-republic-and-the-rise-of-anti-semitism/
- https://verso.uidaho.edu/view/pdfCoverPage?instCode=01ALLIANCE_UID&filePid=13308274540001851&download=true
March 22, 2026
How To Indoctrinate the Children – Death of Democracy 08 – Q4 1934
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 21 Mar 2026In this episode of Death of Democracy, we examine Germany in the final quarter of 1934, as Adolf Hitler tightens his grip on power after Hindenburg’s death and prepares the Reich for the next stage of Nazi rule. Behind a façade of order, the regime accelerates secret rearmament, deepens propaganda and youth indoctrination, pushes Jews further out of public life, and turns universities, schools, and culture into instruments of ideological control.
This documentary explores Nazi Germany in late 1934 through the looming Saar plebiscite, the growth of the Hitler myth, rising public frustration with local Nazi officials, and the regime’s deeper preparation for dictatorship, expansion, and war. If you are interested in Hitler, Nazi propaganda, rearmament, antisemitism, the Saar vote, and the collapse of democracy in Germany, this episode provides the critical context.
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