Winnetou

“He starts writing travel books and articles for magazines and eventually starts writing novels. In 1893, he published the first novel in what would become known as the Winnetou series. Uh these books would become the 19th century German equivalent of Harry Potter. I read the first of these books.”

“Um right after killing that grizzly bear, Old Shatterhand meets his Indian friend and by the end of the book, blood brother, Winnetou, who is the prince of the Apaches.”

“Um first off, when Winnetou dies in the last of these books, uh the last thing he does is convert to Christianity.”

“I've just been reading a very fine article on Karl May. I found it delightful. It would be nice if his work were republished. I owe him my first notions of geography and the fact that he opened my eyes on the world.”

“So read Karl May about it was a tactic Hitler would use for the duration of his warlord career. When the war in Russia turned against Germany and the Wehrmacht was bogged down fighting Soviet insurgents, one of Hitler's solutions was to send 300,000 copies of Karl May's novels to his officers.”

“So Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect and and munitions master and whatnot, after the war wrote that Hitler basically treated Karl May like the literary equivalent of comfort food after a bad day of losing the Second World War.”

“Um and Hitler, when he would talk about this before the invasions, very much couched it in terms of the American frontier. Uh he believed in social Darwinism. Some cultures were stronger than others and strong cultures deserve to take the land of weak cultures. Uh this idea is in full display in Karl May's work.”

“Um [snorts] here's a quote from one of the characters in the novel Winnetou, who is a white guy who becomes a member of the Apache tribe and lives with them for years and years and years. This is supposedly a guy who's sympathetic to their cause.”

“So, Karl May isn't the only Old West influence that that Hitler Hitler draws from. Like, you know, reading those novels as a kid sparked sort of a fascination in him with just sort of the whole American frontier.”

“Uh you can make a case that Hitler's love of super weapons and his faith in the ability of these wonder weapons to uh to win the war started with Karl May. See, Old Shatterhand and Winnetou were often heavily outnumbered on the plains by bandits or hostile Indian tribes”

“But like he there's like a point in one of the books where a guy makes fun of a of a hunchback dude, and Karl May is like, "It's shitty to make fun of people who have a disabilities."”

“He claimed that he had only two great missions left in life. A visit back to see the Apaches trip to see the shake of the Hadad and Arabs. Which he also read a bunch of books set in the Middle East that he also claimed was based about him where he does the same stuff but in the Middle”

“So Karl May died in 1912 but his ridiculous books lived on. In the 1960s they were made into a series of Euro Westerns that are credited with saving West Germany's film industry. There's still a Karl May festival in Germany every year that draws tens of thousands of fans.”

“This is what I will say like if you're passionate about something like and obviously Karl May was passionate about lying to people and fraud. Like it didn't even matter what he was lying about like and he but he dedicated his whole life to just being a liar.”