World War Two
Published 30 May 2026By March 1937, Nazi Germany had renewed dictatorship, buried Versailles, and turned rearmament into a corruption machine.
Berlin, March 31, 1937. Adolf Hitler’s regime appears stronger than ever. The Enabling Act is extended for another four years, the civil service is bound more tightly to Hitler personally, and Germany formally rescinds its signature from the war-guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty.
But behind the speeches about honor, work, and national revival, another transformation is underway.
In the first quarter of 1937, Nazi Germany moves deeper into an economy built around rearmament, Party patronage, racial exclusion, corporate privilege, and theft. The new German Corporation Law weakens ordinary shareholder control and strengthens management boards. Industrial giants profit from military preparation. Jewish property becomes a field of extortion and enrichment. Hitler himself grows wealthy through book royalties, image rights, hidden payments, and political slush funds.At the same time, the regime tightens control over public life. Civil servants are required to serve the Nazi state without reservation. Journalists, professors, doctors, artists, and Jewish Germans are pushed out of public and professional life. Concentration camp roundups expand beyond political opponents. And on Palm Sunday, Pope Pius XI’s Mit brennender Sorge is read from Catholic pulpits across Germany, openly challenging Nazi ideology.
This episode looks at Germany in the first quarter of 1937: a moment when dictatorship no longer needs to look revolutionary. It looks administrative, profitable, respectable — and permanent. This is the story of how power, profit, propaganda, and fear helped turn a modern state into a robber regime preparing for war.
0:00 Berlin, March 31, 1937
0:47 A World in Crisis
01:10 Germany Extends the Legal Shell of Dictatorship
01:23 Civil Servants Bound to Hitler
01:51 Hitler Rejects the Versailles War-Guilt Clause
02:21 The Enabling Act Is Renewed
02:48 Göring in Rome, Reassurances in Warsaw
03:44 The New Corporation Law
04:00 The Catholic Church Challenges Nazi Ideology
05:08 Police Roundups and Expanding Concentration Camps
05:46 Press, Education, Medicine, and Culture Under Control
08:20 The Nazi Economy: Private Profit, State Power
09:41 Aryanization and Organized Theft
10:20 Rearmament, Industry, and Oligarch Profits
12:21 How Hitler Personally Got Rich
14:55 The Party Mood: Confidence at the Top
15:22 German Public Sentiment and Victor Klemperer
16:20 Analysis: How Results Become Consent
17:06 Conclusion: The Quiet Theft of Democracy
18:27 Never Forget / Support TimeGhost
May 31, 2026
How the Nazis Got Rich Preparing Germany for War – Death of Democracy 17 – Q1 1937
May 24, 2026
How to Indoctrinate a Generation – Death of Democracy 16 – Q4 1936
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 23 May 2026How did Nazi Germany seize control of its youth by the end of 1936? In this episode, Spartacus traces the Hitler Youth Law, the Four-Year Plan, Winterhilfswerk, the Anti-Comintern Pact, Goebbels’ attack on criticism, and the tightening exclusion of German Jews.
Berlin, December 31, 1936. The Nazi regime did not need another single dramatic coup. It connected the household, the factory, the school, the street collection, the newspaper, and the foreign threat into one system of mobilization.
This episode covers how the Law on the Hitler Youth declared all German youth organized within the Hitler Youth; how the Four-Year Plan redirected recovery toward rearmament and autarky; how charity became mandated patriotic ritual through Winterhilfswerk; how anti-Bolshevik propaganda linked Spain, Japan, Italy, and Germany; and how Jewish Germans were pushed further into isolation through administrative humiliation and police control.
This is an educational historical documentary condemning Nazism, antisemitism, dictatorship, racial exclusion, and political indoctrination.
May 20, 2026
LMG-25: The Swiss Toggle-Locked Light Machine Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 29 Dec 2025The LMG-25 was designed by Adolph Furrer at Waffenfabrik Bern in the 1920s. Furrer was a devoted fan of the toggle locking system, and also designed a toggle-locked submachine gun that Switzerland (unwisely) adopted in 1941. The LMG-25 was first produced in 1924, adopted in 1925, and remained in production until 1946 with a total of 23,045 standard models and 1,742 optics-equipped fortress models made.
It is chambered for the standard 7.5x55mm Swiss cartridge with a 30-round side-mounted magazine (interchangeable with the later Stgw 57 magazine, incidentally). It is an effective design, if expensive to produce, and served Switzerland well for several decades.
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May 17, 2026
Why Didn’t Germans Resist Hitler? – Death of Democracy
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 16 May 2026Why didn’t Germans resist Hitler? Were they all Nazis, or were they terrorized into silence by the Gestapo?
The truth is more unsettling. The Nazi regime ruled through a combination of targeted terror, social atomization, propaganda, popular support, opportunism, and broad accommodation. This episode examines why mass resistance never emerged — and why millions of ordinary Germans accepted, enabled, or benefited from the Third Reich.
00:00 Why didn’t Germans resist Hitler?
00:33 The myth of the all-powerful Gestapo
01:36 Targeted terror and selective repression
02:39 The Nazi seizure of power
03:09 Gleichschaltung and the destruction of civil society
03:38 Inner emigration and private conformity
04:16 Why early Nazi successes mattered
04:33 Unemployment, rearmament, and national pride
05:39 Versailles, trauma, and German victimhood
06:22 Identity, propaganda, and belonging
07:25 Volksgemeinschaft and the “Hitler Myth”
08:54 Kristallnacht and the failure of collective action
10:40 What the numbers suggest
11:47 Postwar surveys and lingering Nazi support
13:31 Terror, consent, and accommodation
15:07 Did this absolve ordinary Germans?
16:16 Democracy, responsibility, and Never Forget
May 11, 2026
Were the Nazis socialists?
If you’re ever bored and want to kick off an argument online, you can take either side of this statement and watch the signal-to-noise ratio drop precipitously. The NSDAP, the Nazis, began as one of the many, many groups of angry young Germans in the days after the end of the First World War. The full name of the party — the National Socialist German Worker’s Party — indicates who the original party founders thought would be the engine of their political rise. They were explicitly anti-communist, as the spectre of the Russian Revolution terrified many Germans, but German socialism was still within the Overton Window of political debate.
Lots of arguments about this one.
Many people assume Nazis could not have been socialists, despite all the time and energy they devoted to jumping up and down screaming “We are socialists!”, because they were “right-wing” and socialism is supposed to be “left-wing”.
Except “right-wing” and “left-wing” don’t have rigid definitions outside the context of the French revolution. In any other context, they’re just a metaphor.
So why did the NATIONAL Socialist German Workers’ Party and the INTERNATIONAL Marxist-Leninist Socialist Workers’ Movement hate each other so much?
It’s pretty obvious when you look at the names.
National.
International.
To Nazis, the race and culture of a people are everything. They are what the state is supposed to represent. Ein Volk, as they would say. The purpose of Nazi socialism is to control capital assets, subordinating them to the will and welfare of the ethnostate.
But Marxist-Leninists seek to abolish all ethnostates. They are a globalist movement, seeking to place all capital assets under the control of a universal proletariat in theory, which is in practice represented by one world government.
Thus, Nazis sought to use socialist policies for the welfare of the German people and Marxist-Leninists seek to abolish “German” as a meaningful distinction, along with all other cultures.
The antipathy between Nazis and communists was a sectarian struggle within socialism. Same methods, but different sacred groups.
Since the defeat of National Socialism by International Socialism in WW2, all modern socialism is pretty much of the international variety.
This does, however, suggest that there is a contrast between National Capitalism and International Capitalism as well.
Which is the source of the current sectarian struggle between elements of the American right wing.
Update, 12 May: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
May 3, 2026
QotD: Communism, nationalism and literature
“Literature as we know it”, Orwell wrote in “Inside the Whale”, “is an individual thing, demanding mental honesty and a minimum of censorship”. It’s the “product of the free mind, of the autonomous individual”. This is why Orwell argued that “a writer does well to keep out of politics. For any writer who accepts or partially accepts the discipline of a political party is sooner or later faced with the alternative: toe the line, or shut up.”
According to Orwell, “As early as 1934 or 1935 it was considered eccentric in literary circles not to be more or less ‘left’, and in another year or two there had grown up a left-wing orthodoxy that made a certain set of opinions absolutely de rigueur on certain subjects”. In other words, many writers became communists, which meant they constantly had to decide whether to toe the line or shut up, depending on the circumstances: “Every time Stalin swaps partners”, Orwell wrote, “‘Marxism’ has to be hammered into a new shape … Every Communist is in fact liable at any moment to have to alter his most fundamental convictions, or leave the party. The unquestionable dogma of Monday may become the damnable heresy of Tuesday, and so on.”
Orwell also explained how communism replaced the patriotic and religious feelings that members of the English intelligentsia believed they had transcended: “All the loyalties and superstitions that the intellect had seemingly banished could come rushing back under the thinnest of disguises. Patriotism, religion, empire, military glory — all in one word, Russia. Father, king, leader, hero, savior — all in one word, Stalin”. Is it any wonder that Orwell, witnessing these endless intellectual and moral contortions, the shameless propaganda, and the constant stream of wartime lies and distortions, was drawn to a writer who didn’t regurgitate any orthodoxies or toe any lines? Miller gave his readers “no sermons, merely the subjective truth”.
Matt Johnson, “George Orwell, Henry Miller, and the ‘Dirty-Handkerchief Side of Life'”, Quillette, 2020-10-05.
April 28, 2026
Echoes of Spain in the 1930s
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Christian Heiens discusses how the Spanish Republic disintegrated in the lead up to the Spanish Civil War:
After the Spanish Right won the 1933 elections, Communists in Asturias launched a revolution, killing thousands before the army was deployed to finally put an end to the chaos.
They did the same thing in Catalonia, and when that too was quelled, they engaged in a low-level terrorist campaign all over the country, planting bombs, sabotaging infrastructure, assassinating newspaper editors and political figures, and staging general strikes all over Spain.
They kept doing this until they finally won the 1936 election, at which point the Left went full mask-off and began unleashing thousands of criminals into the streets, ransacking businesses, dragging conservatives out of their homes to beat them, and going into the countryside to expropriate private property. The entire country descended into a state of near-total anarchy in a matter of months.
The Left spent years agitating for a Marxist revolution in Spain and refused to obey the legal system because they saw the Spanish Republic as a mechanism to achieve Leftism, not as a neutral system intended to uphold democracy, the constitution, or the rule of law.
And thus, any deviation from the march towards Leftism was seen as an illegitimate act of treason and proof of an imminent fascist takeover of the state. As a result, ANY electoral victory by the Right was inherently treated as illegal by the Left, and ANY attempt to actually govern in accordance with Right-wing principles was seen as just cause to engage in violent insurrection.
You cannot have a country like this for long. If one side treats the process as illegitimate unless it produces their desired ideological outcome, they will inevitably win unless they’re physically stopped.
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 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 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 6, 2026
Coolidge “does not deserve credit for winning the 1924 election … it just happened to him”
While I wouldn’t agree with the statement in the title of this post, it has been a common enough reading of the US 1924 presidential election — that it wasn’t an endorsement of Coolidge and his policies but merely a reflection of voters’ overall satisfaction with the economy. The editors of the Coolidge Review would beg to differ:
From the distance of more than a century, a political scientist has taken a fresh look at the 1924 presidential election.
In an article published last year in Presidential Studies Quarterly, Christopher Devine questions the conventional wisdom about how and why the incumbent, Calvin Coolidge, won that election in a landslide. Coolidge had assumed the presidency little more than a year earlier, after the unexpected death of Warren Harding. In 1924’s three-way race, he received more votes than the other two candidates combined and carried thirty-five of the forty-eight states.
As Devine points out, most historians say that a robust economy was by far the biggest reason Coolidge won. Strong economic conditions did work in the president’s favor. But Devine notes that many historians adopt a form of economic “determinism”. In this very common view, Coolidge “does not deserve credit for winning the 1924 election”. Rather, “thanks mostly to the economy, it just happened to him”.
That argument is too simplistic, Devine suggests. He presents both qualitative and quantitative evidence to challenge the standard narrative of the 1924 campaign.
Old Assumptions, New Data
For his empirical analysis, Devine examines “county-level political, economic, and demographic data” alongside county-by-county voting results. Using these data, he tests three common explanations for the election’s outcome:
Did Coolidge win primarily because of the economy? Scraping the data, Devine concludes that the answer is largely yes. And he shows it’s misleading to claim that — as one history textbook put it — Coolidge merely rode “the crest of a wave of economic prosperity for which he was given undeserved credit”. Devine demonstrates that from behind the scenes, Coolidge “took an active role in coordinating campaign messaging” that showcased the administration’s and Republicans’ achievements. For example, Coolidge worked closely with his running mate, Charles Dawes, to keep the famously free-range vice-presidential candidate focused on the economic message. “In the matter of economy and tax reduction”, Dawes declared, “the Federal Government is headed in the right direction”. Moreover, as Devine reports, Dawes argued that the administration’s work to stabilize Europe via the Dawes Plan spared America from “the depths of an inevitable and great depression” while also ensuring that “the whole world enters upon a period of peace and prosperity”.
Did third-party candidate Robert M. La Follette hurt Democratic nominee John W. Davis more than Coolidge? Devine concludes that this effect appeared only in the Great Plains and the Mountain West. It probably wasn’t large enough to change the election’s outcome.
Did internal divisions cost the Democratic Party votes in 1924? The Democrats were so fractured that they needed 103 ballots to choose a nominee at their convention. Devine says it would be hard to imagine that such disarray did not hurt Democrats in the election. Yet he notes that quantitative evidence on the reasons for Democratic losses in 1924 is hard to find because “scientific polling did not exist in the 1920s”.
Seeking an alternative approach, Devine looks at patterns of defection from the Democratic Party by state. He finds that northern states that voted to defeat the anti-Ku-Klux-Klan plank at that year’s Democratic National Convention — in other words, states whose delegations supported the Klan — saw heavier defections in the general election. From that, Devine extrapolates to suggest that Coolidge “benefited from the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan — or, perhaps one might say, Democrats lost ground because of it”.
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 3, 2026
QotD: The Great Purge
Stalin ordered Nikolai Yezhov, who later was head of the NKVD during the purges, to interrogate the two as part of a larger conspiracy involving Trotsky loyalists. Yezhov appealed to their devotion to the Soviet Union. They were, of course, subjected to physical and psychological pressure. Yezhov told Kamenev he had evidence against his son, which could result in his execution. Inevitably, they agreed to participate in what would be the first of many show trials against Stalin’s enemies.
The bargain Zinoviev and Kamenev struck with the Politburo was that they would testify against their comrades in exchange for their lives and their family’s lives. Stalin himself agreed to the deal in person, on behalf of the Politburo. They were tried with fourteen other defendants in the House of the Unions, which still stands today. All sixteen were found guilty of plotting to kill Stalin and other Soviet officials. They were promptly executed in the basement of Lubyanka Prison.
This would be the pattern throughout the Great Purge. Political enemies would be turned against one another through a combination of terror, torture and the promise of forgiveness if they cooperated. The real purpose of forcing friends to denounce friends and family members to denounce other family members was to create an atmosphere in which no one could trust anyone. As Montesquieu noted, the motor that powers every despotic regime is a general fear of the ruler.
The Z Man, “What Comes Next”, The Z Blog, 2020-08-03.
April 2, 2026
m/27PH aka m/37: Finland’s First Standard Sniper Rifle (and it’s really bad)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 14 Nov 2025The m27PH, aka the m/37, was the first standardized Finnish sniper rifle. It was developed as part of the plan to make a whole family of m/27 rifles for the Finnish Army, including cavalry, trainer, and sniper models. The sniper model was delayed because of the structural problems with the m/27 base rifle, and it was not formally adopted until 1937. The rifle used a 2.2x prismatic scope made by Finnish company Physica Oy. The scope was heavy, fragile, and had a very short eye relief.
When first adopted, the rifles had short, slightly bent bolt handled and standard stocks. Once they began to see use in the Winter War (for which they were Finland’s only standardized sniper rifle), experience showed these features to be problems. The bolt handles were largely replaced with much longer Soviet-style sniper bolts, and wooden cheek rests were added to the stocks.
During the Continuation War, m/27PH rifles were still in service, but as they were damaged their scopes were generally used to build new m/39PH sniper rifles instead. Today they are extremely rare rifles.
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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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