Reich

He killed himself in 1925.

Yet the macro-historical frame that the First and Second Reichs had high marks in German civilization and that the social democratic Weimar Republic stood in the way of a third iteration was appropriated by the National Socialists all the same, to give credence to their racial and millenarian political project.

It was an abstraction that conveniently imbued the past with direction and destiny.

It was partly because of the Nazis that philosopher Karl Popper claimed that any attempt at discovering the rhythms, patterns, or trends that underlie history's evolution is a dead end, at least if these were mistaken forelaws.

So pull on your lederhosen and whip out some wieterschnitzel to munch on as we dive into how Hitler managed to pull all of this off and the rather tragic aftermath when the Austrians who didn't really support the Nazi regime finally woke up to what had happened.

To begin with, for those not familiar with 1930s Central European history, the term Anschluss refers to the military occupation and later formal annexation of the Republic of Austria into Germany's Third Reich under Adolf Hitler, himself originally an Austrian national.

German troops crossed the border with Austria on March 12, 1938, and by March 15, Hitler was addressing a large, cheering crowd of locals at Vienna's Heroes Square.

Thus, Anschluss represented the first formal invasion of a sovereign nation conducted by the Nazi regime.

The government remained in the hands of the Fatherland Front under the leadership of Kurt von Schusnig.

The new chancellor continued to remain under Mussolini's protection, keeping local Nazis at bay and in general striving to secure Austria's independence.

This would prove increasingly difficult as a Third Reich geared up their rearmament plans and pursued an aggressive foreign policy.

The 1934 events had been a close call, which made it clear to Schusnig that he needed Rome's backing to remain free of Berlin's influence.

And his solution to that fracture wasn't diplomacy or economic policy.

He was driven by a twisted, abnormal will to power, obsessed with building a thousand-year Nazi Reich.

The ultimate delusion of grandeur.

Exactly.

And Nuremberg wasn't just another city, right? It was the psychological epicenter of the Nazi machine.

Precisely.

If Berlin operated as the bureaucratic brain of the Third Reich, Nuremberg was its spiritual beating heart.

Hitler had constructed vast, intimidating parade grounds there designed to hold hundreds of thousands of screaming, hypnotized spectators.

So the second phase of the Secret Space Program and the breakaway civilization is explicitly revealed in this film in one of the most, most clear ways I could think of.

The Reich-style plan of a genetically modified utopia where an Earth cleansed through a kind of Skynet chemtrail biowarfare attack prepares the way for a new genesis.

We think of, uh, Dr. Farrell's previous talk on the buildup of the satellite spy networks at last year's space conference.

This, again, mirrors the plot of Diamonds Are Forever, except that now it extends into space.

Interestingly, this was just before the July 20 plot that, you know, where Hitler got blown up and survived, of course.

But he said, "The Reich's leadership be shot even without the benefit of a drum-head court-martial on grounds that the German people must be made to feel a sense of personal responsibility." That's a very peculiar thing for a military man to say, okay? And I believe, again, um, Eisenhower certainly wasn't a milk toast, but I, I, I think he basically, he basically left political decisions and analyses to what he viewed as, you know, to who he viewed as, you know, kind of a, kind of the men most qualified to render those decisions.

And, um, despite Eisenhower's surname and, [coughs] and distant heritage, I, I, you know, he was a northern military officer.

I think he was naive about the kind of reality of, of, uh, ethno-sectarian politics that caused the European war in the first place.

And that's one of the things that substantiated this was a near total control of information and the ability to shape public opinion that theretofore was unprecedented.

You know, particularly now with just the advent of, you know, uh, almost every home having access to radio.

But, you know, the, uh, the advent of visual media, which was exploited to great effect by all major combatant powers, you know, the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, the UK, Japan, and the United States.

So what I'm getting at is that the world situation of 1945 was very, very different.