Trudy Gold
Munich: Hitler’s City?
Summary
At the end of WWI Adolf Hitler returned embittered, not to his homeland Austria, but to Munich. The city was in the grip of revolution and chaos. This session explores the political, social and economic forces as extremism took hold.
Trudy Gold
Trudy Gold was the CEO of the London Jewish Cultural Centre and a founding member of the British delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Throughout her career she taught modern Jewish history at schools, universities, and to adult groups and ran seminars on Holocaust education in the UK, Eastern Europe, and China. She also led Jewish educational tours all over the world. Trudy was the educational director of the student resources “Understanding the Holocaust” and “Holocaust Explained” and the author of The Timechart History of Jewish Civilization.
They are articulate, they are internationalists. They’ve broken away from their own tradition. They are outsiders. They see the world and they want to change it. And they are working-class movements. So they are better educated than the majority of the people who follow them.
He was Catholic to start with. But when we look at Hitler in a lot of detail, you are going to find out that very early on he broke away from religion. Hitler was a pagan. And I hope I’m not insulting any pagans, but he did not believe in … He was the dark messiah to Germany. That’s what he wanted to be. To be a furor is far more than to be a leader. He believed in all the Aryan theories of master race, and he was the man chosen by destiny to lead Germany to Valhalla. Look, in the end it was wasn’t it? He was obsessed with Wagner. He once said, “If you want to understand national socialism, listen to Wagner.”
All you have to do, Arlene, is to look at, and we will be showing you some, the Kirsch Foundation enabled me to make a film on the life of Adolf Hitler, and I’ll be showing it in a couple of weeks. Look, what gives people charisma? It’s very, very difficult. What I suggest you do, you look at footage, and you examine the faces of the crowd. Women are looking at him almost as though he is, you know, he’s a pop idol. It’s extraordinary. He had it, whatever it was. He was a theatrical, he learnt theatre, unfortunately from a Jew, and I’ll be talking about that next week.