Sparta and the Nazis
The Ancients
History Hit
4.7 • 4.5K Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2022
⏱️ 43 minutes
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Summary
Ancient Sparta was co-opted by the Nazis as a supposed model civilisation for the Third Reich’s twisted racial and martial ideologies.
German children were taught that the Spartans had originally been an ‘Aryan’ tribe, and that they should aspire to Laconian ideals such as endurance, discipline and military self-sacrifice. Yet modern evidence suggests the Ancient Greek city-state may not have been so militaristic after all.
In this episode, Tristan is joined by Dr Helen Roche from Durham University to find out more about this ‘Spartan paradigm’ and how it was exploited by the Nazi regime.
Tickets to Tristan's talk 'London in the Roman World' with Professor Dominic Perring on July 4 are available here: https://shop.historyhit.com/product/london-in-the-roman-world/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's the Entrance on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes your host and in today's |
| 0:14.4 | podcast where we're talking all about the legacy of ancient Sparta. But we're |
| 0:18.8 | focusing in on one particular case. We're going to the 20th century to the |
| 0:24.0 | infamous case of the use of Sparta by the third Reich by Nazi Germany. How |
| 0:30.1 | Sparta was wrongly used by the people in this regime to suit their own |
| 0:34.8 | agendas. We're going to be focusing in on the use of ancient Sparta by the elite |
| 0:40.4 | schools of Nazi Germany, the NAPALAS. We're also going to be looking at the use of |
| 0:45.0 | Sparta by certain figures high up in the Nazi regime from the likes of Joseph |
| 0:50.0 | Gerbels to the historian Helmut Berv to Adolf Hitler himself. And we're also |
| 0:55.7 | going to be looking at how Sparta and the Bastard Thymopoli in particular |
| 0:59.8 | was used by the Nazis during the battle of Starlingrad. Now this was a really |
| 1:05.8 | enlightening topic and it's an important topic to discuss. How ancient events |
| 1:11.2 | and ancient cities can be misused by other people later in history. This is a great |
| 1:18.8 | example of that and to highlight this I was delighted to get on the podcast Dr |
| 1:23.2 | Helen Roch from the University of Durham. Helen she's done a lot of work around the use of |
| 1:28.7 | ancient Sparta in Nazi Germany and by Germans during the preceding 20th century too. |
| 1:34.5 | It was wonderful to get on the podcast for this episode and I really do hope you |
| 1:38.0 | enjoy. So without further ado to talk all about Sparta and the Nazis here's Helen. |
| 1:43.3 | Helen it seems as if ancient Spalossa was used as a powerful infamous tool |
| 1:51.6 | where in many aspects of the Nazi stelekt. Yeah I think that's fair to say there were many |
| 1:56.4 | leading figures in the Nazi regime who saw Sparta as some kind of paradigm, some kind of |
| 2:02.8 | model that Germany could learn from and this was partially influenced by racial ideologies as I |
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