Category: Fact Checking

In the first two years of WWII, the German armed forces – or Wehrmacht- and especially the Army – or ‘Heer’- stunned the world with an unprecedented string of victories against several otherwise prominent nations that it boggles the mind one small nation could so easily conquer, let alone so rapidly. From September 1939 to December 1941, German troops occupied Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia and Greece.

They also ejected the British Expeditionary Force from continental Europe, sank countless Allied convoys in the Atlantic, and, alongside Italy and other Axis powers, collected further victories in Northern Africa and the Soviet Union.

So what made the Wehrmacht so effective against so many other nation’s armies that on the surface should have been able to repel them? It is tempting to reply with a single, all-encompassing answer: It was because German soldiers were indoctrinated fanatics! It was down to superior German technology! The Germans won because they got as high as Stukas on meth! And another favourite go-to-answer for keyboard generals: Because Blitzkrieg Tactics!!!

But as you’ll no doubt guess from the length of this piece, contrary to popular belief, it’s not really so simple as that and there was a lot more that went into it.

To briefly address the first of the often put forth answers, the use of methamphetamine was introduced amongst both Axis and Allied soldiers, as a means to combat fatigue and to heighten morale. However, German officers realised early on that the negative side effects of the drug far outweighed its benefits and discouraged its use. Moving onto ‘Blitzkrieg’, or ‘Lighting War’, this has been described alternatively as strategy, a tactical mindset or a doctrine. But in reality, the German military despised the term, which was used by press and propaganda to describe the effects of a successful combined arms offensive.

Now, to be fair, the German approach to combined arms operations – although never described as ‘Blitzkrieg’ – played an important role in securing military successes – but they were not the single deciding factor.

To the surprise of absolutely no one – I hope – once again, the early victories of the III Reich were a combination of several factors, many of which had been at play since the early 1920s.

So let’s dive into it, shall we?

To begin with, let’s discuss Interwar Rearmament

At the end of WWI, the victorious Entente imposed a substantial disarmament on the Weimar Republic, the successor State to the 2nd German Reich. Article 160 of the Treaty of Versailles limited the Reichswehr to a land army of 100,000 soldiers with no General Staff, no airforce, no tanks and a small navy.

In essence, Germany was allowed to maintain a military devoted exclusively to preserving order within its territory and patrolling the borders. These restrictions were to be enforced by the Inter Allied Military Control Commission, which maintained a presence in Germany until 1927.

With such a heavy disadvantage, how could Germany rebuild its forces and become such a military threat in the 1930s? Well, the truth is that the Weimar Republic circumvented these limitations from the early 1920s.

First of all, they kept their General Staff, although it was rebranded as ‘Truppenamt’, or ‘Troop Office’. As early as May 1923, this office drafted secret plans to mobilise an army larger than the Versailles-imposed restrictions.

A document captured at the end of WWII showed that these early plans envisaged two options: the creation of a force of either 18 or 35 infantry divisions.

While the chance to equip the second option was admittedly slim, the Reichswehr appeared confident they could outfit the first option. Considering a division strength of at least 14,000 men, the Reichswehr packed enough guns and ammo to field an army of 252,000 troops, more than double than the size permitted by the Versailles Treaty.

In fact, the German government had access to large secret stashes of weapons, either maintained in secret from the WWI arsenals, or imported illegally. Moreover, throughout the 1920s large numbers of men underwent unauthorised military training by joining one of dozens of paramilitary units, politically motivated militias or sporting associations. Notable examples include the SA, the ‘Brown Shirts’ employed by the Nazi Party. Or their communist equivalent, the Red Front Fighters’ League.

In 1926, the mobilisation plan was toned down to 16 divisions. But in 1932, War Minister General von Schleicher created a new plan, designed to fully equip 21 divisions by 1938.

In 1933, when Adolf Hitler became first Chancellor, and then Fuehrer, he ordered to accelerate Schleicher’s mobilisation plans. These were carried out in secret, in the span of 18 months. However, these troops were badly equipped and poorly trained.

Two years later, in March of 1935, Hitler further ordered for the standing army to be ramped up to 36 divisions. To compensate for the additional efforts, German military expenditure doubled in the 1933 to 1935 period, from 3 to 6% of gross national product. This rate of expenditure would continue to grow, reaching 23% in 1939 and peaking at an astounding 61% in 1943.

Now, we have mentioned that the Troop Office could rely on a pool of men who had already received basic training – albeit privately – from their political party of choice. And these men could surely hold their own in a fistfight, or when handling small arms such as rifles and machine guns. But how about developing competence with tanks, aeroplanes and submarines? That was a no-no according to the Inter Allied Commission.

But the Troop Office had an answer to that. Going back a bit, in February of 1919, Weimar authorities arrested a Russian national, Karl Radek, due to his involvement in the Spartacist Revolution, a communist uprising. Thanks to his contacts with Germany’s military attaché to Moscow, Radek avoided a harsh prison sentence. He was even able to hold a political salon in August of 1919, in which he first suggested a political and military collaboration between the Weimar Republic and Soviet Russia. The idea was further expanded following the Russian defeat in the Russo-Polish war of 1920, its main driver being German General Hans von Seeckt.

And so it was that in early 1921, the Troop Office established ‘Special Group R’, devoted to collaboration with Russia. Germany was to offer financial and technical aid to build Russia’s armament industry. In exchange, Berlin would receive artillery ammunition – which it was forbidden from manufacturing by the Versailles Treaty.

The two powers concluded an economic treaty on April the 16th 1922, the Treaty of Rapallo, which was rumoured to contain secret military clauses. This was just unsubstantiated rumour but it captured the cloak-and-dagger nature of the military negotiations, conducted mostly behind the back of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In any event, from February to August of 1923, the Chief of the Toop Office, General Otto Hasse, conducted secret talks with Moscow, in which the two parties discussed a defensive alliance against Poland and its ally, France. The most tangible outcome of the talks was the establishment of a Special Group R detachment in Moscow: the ‘Zentral Moskau’ or ‘Z. Mo.’ for short.

In 1924, the Z. Mo. founded three secret schools to test and train troops on weapons systems forbidden by Versailles. These were located in Lipetsk, Kazan and Saratov. And were dedicated to aircraft, tanks, and gas warfare respectively. These secret plans however did not escape the watchful eye of French and Polish intelligence, and news leaked to Britain.

In December of 1926 The Manchester Guardian blew open the affair, embarrassing the Weimar government. But even officials initially opposed to the dealings with Russia begrudgingly admitted to the importance of this friendship in rebuilding the German military.

What followed was a token reaction from the Weimar government to reassure the world that they were all about peaceful coexistence. First, they discontinued the import of Soviet ordnance by early 1927 … BUT we should probably also mention military industrial cooperation resumed the following year…

As for the three schools, they were handed over to private enterprises – which continued to train off-duty German officers as private individuals. In other words: it was totally fine for a reserve officer to catch a train to Kazan and play around with tanks for a couple of weeks.

The schools founded by the Zentral Moskau continued their operations until 1933, providing a solid base for the future development of German combined armour and aircraft tactics. With the rise to power of the Nazi Party, however, the ideological gap between Germany and the Soviet Union became too large, and the training stations were closed by September 1933.

A similar scheme had been put in place to develop the submarine capabilities of the Kriegsmarine [Kreegs Mari-nay], or Navy. In this one, in 1922, a consortium of three German shipyards founded a new company headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands. This company’s innocent-sounding name was ‘Engineering Office for Ship-building’, or IVS in its German acronym. The not-so-innocent purpose of the IVS was to build and test U-Boats in Dutch shipyards.

Three years later, in 1925, the Naval Ministry poured funds into IVS when Turkey placed an order for two U-Boats. These vessels needed to be tested, so Navy officers Admiral Spindler and Corvette Captain Canaris created a ‘Training Office’ within the ministry.

Worthy of note: Canaris would later rise to the rank of Admiral, and become the head of the Abwehr, Nazy Germany’s military intelligence service. In that capacity, Canaris actually undermined Hitler’s plans for conquest and for the extermination of ‘undesirables’ via sending secret military plans to the Allies and actively protecting certain Jews from arrest – but more on all this in a bit, and how the Allies really messed up with regards to all of this.

Back to the mid-1920s now. Spindler assigned two retired Naval officers to set up a U-boat training school in conjunction with the Turkish Navy. This was the start of another secret training program, albeit less developed than the schemes founded by the Zentral Moskau. Specifically, in 1927, Spindler established a Torpedo and Radio school in Flensburg, northern Germany, where 24 young officers received theoretical lectures delivered mostly via films shot during WWI.

By now you should have noticed a recurring theme emerging: a massive amount of training

A thorough preparation of fighting personnel had always been a staple of first Prussian, then German military life. When the Nazi Party assumed power this became even more important, and something they were extremely successful at. As American military analysts Trevor Dupuy and Martin Van Creveld in a study of both Allied and German troops facing each other after the D-Day landings of June the 6th 1944 noted, “On a man for man basis, German ground soldiers consistently inflicted casualties at about a 50 percent higher rate than they incurred from the opposing British and American troops under all circumstances. This was true when they were attacking and when they were defending, when they had a local numerical superiority and when, as was usually the case, they were outnumbered, when they had air superiority and when they did not, when they won and when they lost.”

Another analyst, W. Victor Madej, writing for the Journal of Political and mIlitary Sociology in 1978, noted how Allied propaganda and popular culture had perpetuated the idea that German early military success and later perseverance could be traced back to fanaticism, fuelled by propaganda and indoctrination. This idea was itself rooted in the belief that totalitarian states could somehow instil their forces with an almost supernaturally high morale and willingness to fight. But Madej quoted a study conducted by Edward Shills and Morris Janowitz of the Allied Psychological Warfare Division, which revealed that German troops’ morale and willingness to fight had little to do with political belief, and mostly derived from group cohesion at small-unit level. Madej partially accepted this view, but preferred another conclusion: the Wehrmacht’s effectiveness derived, very simply, from military professionalism and the ‘proper use of weaponry’.

In other words: German soldiers were extremely effective soldiers not so much from fanaticism, but because they were extremely well trained.

You may remember that Hitler’s government doubled military expenditure from 1933 to 1935. That is when intensive troop training really kicked in. But the arms budget did not yet allow the German coffers to equip all units with the best and latest military technology. Hitler’s General Staff therefore decided to concentrate their efforts on a small number of selected units, which would be used as a spearhead for offensive operations.

So now let’s take a look at these training regimens.

Rank-and-file soldiers, usually conscripts, were initially subjected to 16 weeks of basic drills, consisting of physical fitness and fire and manoeuvre techniques. These were followed by further three months of schooling in armour, artillery or other specialised branches.

Training from sunrise until dark, recruits underwent lengthy forced marches, live fire exercises and conditioning exercises, which caused high rates of injuries and exhaustion. Soldiers also became familiar with the grooming and handling of horses. This was an absolute necessity: despite the propagandist image of a Heer speeding through Europe atop trucks, tanks and motorcycles, the reality was that less than 20% of German infantry was actually motorised at the time!

Further, career soldiers who had previously served in the Weimar Republic’s Reichswehr, or foot soldiers with potential, were selected to join the noncommissioned officer ranks, the backbone of the Heer. In this case, candidates completed four months of basic instruction, followed by six months of specialisation.

As you might expect, training for commissioned officers was even lengthier and more intense. Candidates first had to go through the same courses as a noncommissioned officer, totalling 10 months. Then, they were assigned to an already serving unit for a period of 7 months. During this period, they developed affiliation and cohesion with existing units and honed their leadership skills. Finally, candidates completed three months of advanced specialisation with an infantry, armour, artillery or support branch.

Throughout the training, would-be officers learned how to lead from the front. A concept which heightened morale and stressed the importance of independent tactical decisions, provided they served a pre-assigned operational goal. This approach proved incredibly effective, as officers learned how to exploit enemy weaknesses on the spot and take often brilliant initiatives. The flipside was the high death rate amongst leadership ranks: in the first three years of WWII, more than 16,000 German officers died in action.

Moving on to the service branches, their training was likewise top notch. Candidate pilots joining the German air force, the Luftwaffe, first completed a six months spell of basic drills. They then spent two months studying general aeronautical topics, before moving to flying school. The first step was to learn how to pilot light aircraft, a course which included aerodynamics, engineering, navigation, meteorology and communications.

Upon completion, candidates learned how to fly heavier, high-performance craft, which awarded them a ‘B flying licence’. Next, trainees split into two separate specialty courses: one for single-engined fighters and dive-bombers; and one for twin-engined fighters, bombers and reconnaissance craft. By the time a fighter or dive-bomber pilot had completed his course, he would have received about 13 months of training, totaling 150 to 200 flying hours. While a bomber or reconnaissance pilot had undergone 20 months in school, with 220 to 270 flying hours.

The longest training period, however, was the one reserved for Naval officers. Recruits started their tenure with 10 weeks of basic drilling, followed by three months at sea. Only those selected by instructing officers were given the rank of Cadet, and allowed to move to the next stage: 10 more months of life at sea, serving as an ordinary sailor.

After another examination, cadets were promoted to Midshipman. And only then, they got access to Naval Officer school, which lasted two years. And it didn’t end there! Graduates were given a non commissioned rank, Warrant Officer, and were finally promoted to Officer only upon selection by their ship’s commander.

So, that covers the manpower and the extensive training the soldiers spearheading the initial attack had previously received.

But soldiers, sailors and pilots needed the kit, which required Hitler to ramp up German Rearmament Programs

On this one, besides what’s already been discussed, in 1933, German military aircraft production totalled to a nice, round figure: 0. But by 1934, it had risen to 840 units. The following year, production more than doubled, and continued to expand, at an average of 2,654 per year. By 1939, German industries had produced a total of 15,927 single- and twin-engined planes, of which approximately 2,000 were operational at the start of the war.

The production of tanks and self-propelled guns followed a similar curve, soaring from 0 to a total of 3,502 in 1939, of which 2,200 units were fully operational.

As for the Kriegsmarine, in 1933 they could boast only five capital ships and 22 destroyers. By 1939, this fleet had been expanded to 53 surface vessels and 63 U-boats. This rearmament, by the way, was a violation of the Anglo-German naval agreements of 1935 and 1937, which limited the German fleet total tonnage to 35% of that of the Royal Navy.

Clearly, developing such an arsenal required tons of cash. Yet the German economy had been badly hit, first by the aftermath of the Great War, then hyperinflation in the 1920s and finally by the Great Depression. So, how on Earth could the Nazis afford such an ambitious rearmament programme? Well, they couldn’t. Yet they did. So what’s going on here?

Well, they had to thank their Finance Minister and former President of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schlacht [Sh – lackt]. He created a dummy corporation, the Metallurgical Research Institution, which issued bills of exchange, known as ‘MeFo bills’. The government then used these MeFos – which were essentially IOUs – to pay military and heavy industry contractors, thus funding rearmament projects. Contractors could exchange the MeFos against regular currency after a period of 90 days. But most firms were happy to hold on to them, as they carried an interest rate of 4%, higher than other trade bills at the time. And even if they did want to cash them in, Schlacht continuously extended the maturation period, which eventually peaked at five years.

We could describe the MeFo system using a quote from the Nuremeberg trials: “A swindling venture on a national scale that has no precedent.”

Nonetheless, it did the trick. From 1934 to 1938, the Nazis funded their rearmament with 12 billion Reichsmarks worth of MeFo bills or, adjusting for inflation, about 104 billion dollars in 2023.

Schlacht further motivated private contractors to invest in military production by capping taxation on their dividends, as well as freezing the wages of their workers. All in all, these measures stimulated the German economy and reduced unemployment to virtually zero. Military contractors were very happy to maximise their profits. German workers were very happy, too, to have a job – at least initially.

They were all less pleased in the late 1930s, when they realised all salary increases and promotions had been put on hold. And any dissent was preemptively quelled by laws prohibiting industrial action and reallocation to forced labour details. Of course, the long-term effect of this was a reduction in productivity of factory workers, which would lead to drops in efficiency and quality in the latter half of the war.

But in any event, in addition to issuing ‘Monopoly money’ to pay for ‘Risk tanks’, the Nazi government had another source of funding at their disposal: the re-occupation of demilitarised German territories and the Annexation of Bordering Countries.

As per the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, the German regions of the Saarland and Rhineland, bordering France and Benelux had been demilitarised. In addition to that, Saarland was also subject to French formal administration.

In January 1935, a referendum returned the Saar to Germany. A great win for the economy, as the area was rich in coal, vital for the arms industry.

Next, on March the 7th, 1936, 20,000 troops moved into the Rhineland, in flagrant violation of Versailles. Not only did this area make for the perfect staging ground for an offensive into the BeNeLux countries and France, but it was also rich in coal and iron.

This action also served as a test to gauge the resolve of Britain and France against German resurgence. The Western allies, enacting a policy of appeasement, did nothing.

Emboldened by this lack of resolve, HItler continued to absorb territories in 1938 and 1939. Notably, on March the 13th, 1938 the Anschluss took place: the annexation of Austria. It may have involved some forceful coercion on the part of Austrian Nazis, sure. But Berlin had seized an entire country without the Wehrmacht firing a single shot, which made for a fantastic return on investment for the rearmament effort. Germany had, in fact, now gained control of iron ore mines on the Ennstal Alps, as well as Austria’s cash reserves, equivalent to 782 million Reichsmarks.

The next victim of what was essentially a large-scale home invasion was Czechoslovakia. With the pretext of protecting German-speaking minorities, the Nazis successfully annexed the border Sudetenland region in October 1938. This is of course a very complex affair, known as the Munich crisis. What matters to us today is that Britain and France essentially allowed the occupation of the Sudetenland by Germany, despite Czechoslovakia’s pleas, in order to avoid a war.

Notably here, the annexation of Czech territories allowed Germany to seize control of the Skoda mechanical works, and their supply networks. Skoda is known today as a manufacturer of reasonably priced cars for suburban families. Back then, it was known as a leading manufacturer of tanks! The acquisition of Skoda allowed the Army to accelerate their armour programs, increasing the quantity and quality of tank production.

Let’s stop for a moment to focus on a character we already met, Navy officer Wilhelm Canaris. By 1938, he was already head of the military intelligence service, the Abwehr, with the rank of Admiral. Despite his position, Admiral Canaris secretly despised the Nazis, and was concerned about the increasingly bellicose plans of the Party leadership. Canaris and his deputy, Colonel Hans Oster, however, knew that not everybody in the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht – or OKW – was aligned to Hitler’s plans of conquest. It was no secret that the Fuehrer intended to expand in the East, and that would entail going to war with France and Britain – a daunting prospect for a professional, rationally-minded officer.

Thus, as the Munich crisis unfolded, Hans Oster and his agents desperately attempted to communicate with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, advising to oppose the land grab in the Sudetenland. Oster’s message essentially was: if Hitler fails, his Generals will turn against him. If he succeeds, they will continue to go along with him!

Unfortunately Chamberlain ignored the advice, preferring to stick to his policy of appeasement. It wouldn’t be the last time that the West would ignore Oster’s warnings.

In any event, as it turns out, the border regions of Czechoslovakia were not enough for Hitler. Following a gradual dissolution of the country, and the independence of Slovakia, German troops took control of Bohemia and Moravia in March of 1939. Once again, the move was economically motivated: the aggressive rearmament plan had already exhausted Germany and Austria’s currency reserves, and Prague’s central bank’s gold stashes made for a much needed cash injection.

Now, to recap, we have covered how the Weimar Republic first, and then the III Reich, gradually rebuilt Germany’s military, funded the entire process and expanded their reach both to the West and to the East.

It’s time to consider how Hitler and the OKW intended to use their forces.

In other words, let’s talk strategy, operations, tactics and doctrine.

In Germany’s case, Hitler’s strategic endgame was to expand his Reich’s territory into Eastern Europe, thus conquering Lebensraum – or ‘vital space’ – for the German people.

Now, due to its central position on the European landmass, Germany was always at deadly risk of having to wage a war on two fronts. And, according to Gerhard Gross, writing for the Journal of Military and Strategic Studies in 2011, the key to avoid such occurrence rested in the Heer’s excellent operational capabilities. More precisely: the General Staff prepared for a war of manoeuvre, in which highly-mobile, well-trained units would conduct combined arms offensives against clearly established main points of effort. By using speed, surprise and initiative, officers were encouraged to envelop and neutralise enemy forces on Germany’s borders, thus preventing their build-up.

Such a way of war had already been theorised since the 19th Century by German General Helmut Moltke. This approach, dubbed ‘strategy of annihilation’, comprised three phases: rapid mobilisation, deployment, and ‘total’ or decisive battle in which the enemy armies were forced to surrender.

The realities of WWI, in which defensive weapons and tactics outperformed offensive ones, nullified any attempt to enact a successful ‘strategy of annihilation’. But advances in tank technology brought Moltke’s ideas back onto the table.

During the mid-1930s, Colonel and later General Heinz Guderian theorised the use of concentrated armoured units, up to division level, to conduct his version of ‘annihilation’, which he called Bewegungskrieg, or ‘War of Movement’ – the doctrine which later was dubbed ‘Blitzkrieg’.

But Guderian’s ‘War of Movement’ was not exclusive to Germany. Just as an example, Soviet military theorists Georgii Isserson and Mikhail Tukhachevsky had developed a similar concept – ‘Deep Battle’ – since the mid-1920s, and formalised it in a 1936 Red Army regulation manual.

When the Spanish Civil War erupted in the same year, the Soviet Union deployed substantial tank detachments in support of the republican government against Francisco Franco’s nationalist insurgence. The Soviets, however, failed to successfully conduct ‘Deep Battle’ on this occasion, which convinced Red Army commanders – and military observers worldwide – that tanks were best deployed as infantry support vehicles, divided piecemeal across standard, non-armoured divisions.

As a result, when WWII erupted in September 1939, the German land army was the only one to field substantial armoured units, able to act as a steel-clad spearhead against forces which were numerically superior, but tactically inferior.

So, that covers the land army. How about the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine?

The more innovative contribution of the Luftwaffe during the early months of the war was its use as ‘artillery from the sky’, in a support function to advanced armoured and mechanised infantry units. This meant that fighters and dive-bombers such as the legendary Stukas would be used to target enemy formations from the sky, weakening their defences, their resolve and their morale, allowing for their pals on the ground to punch through the frontline.

The Kriegsmarine is perhaps the least celebrated of the three services of the Wehrmacht, and yet its commander Admiral Erich Raeder possessed a sharp, strategic mind. As of 1937, he foresaw that a land war in Europe would sooner or later set Germany on a collision course with Britain – which meant squaring off with the Royal Navy, the best and largest in the World.

Raeder devised a rearmament programme, Plan Zebra, which would almost quadruple the size of Germany’s Navy and bring it almost on par with the British. But this plan required nine years for completion, and Hitler wasn’t particularly known for his patience.

Raeder, therefore, had to maximise the strategic impact of his relatively small forces. To do this, he relegated some of his largest capital ships, such as the battleship Admiral Tirpitz to the role of ‘fleet in being’. This indicates when one or more naval units are kept in port most of the time. But due to its sheer presence, a ‘fleet in being’ requires the enemy to invest precious time and resources in managing its threat potential.

Smaller vessels, from the category of ‘pocket battleship’ down to torpedo boats and U-boats were then used in a commerce raiding capacity. The main aim of the Kriegsmarine was therefore not to wrest control of the seas from the Royal Navy, but to target merchant convoys to Britain and Allied forces in general, thus placing the economy under chokehold.

As Raeder put it: “The task of naval warfare in extra-territorial waters is war on merchant shipping. Combat action even against inferior naval forces is not an aim in itself, and is therefore not to be sought.”

And now …

Let’s Put All the Pieces Into Practice

On the 1st of September 1939, the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. On the 3rd, Britain and France declared war on Germany – and WWII was on.

Despite a heroic resistance, the Polish Army capitulated on the 6th of October. Much of the victory can be ascribed to use of armoured divisions against defenders who could field only light tankettes. But the Reich also had to thank their unlikely ally, the Soviet Union. As per the clauses of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23rd, 1939, the Red Army invaded Poland from the East on September the 17th.

Poland’s Western Allies, too, did their part in securing this early success. After promising Warsaw that they would attack Germany, the French Army conducted an inconclusive offensive into the Saarland, which achieved little gain before returning to base. We have an entire video dedicated to this almost forgotten invasion, Could the Allies Really Have Crushed Germany Right at the Start of WWII? If you’re interested in learning more on this.

But in any event, the next invasions took place on the 9th of April, 1940, targeting Denmark and Norway. Gaining control of Norway was essential to secure imports of iron ore from Sweden, and gaining control of Denmark was essential to secure Norway. The small and ill-equipped Danish army capitulated in a single day, whilst Norway resisted until June the 10th. In this case, the mountainous terrain of the Scandinavian country did not make for an ideal tank playground, but the Wehrmacht conducted effective amphibious and airborne assaults to neutralise stiff Norwegian resistance.

Once again, the German forces received a great deal of help from the Western Allies. Anglo-French forces had planned to mine the waters of major Norwegian ports on April the 5th, before landing in Norway. But the plan was postponed, allowing for the Wehrmacht to rock up, invited by local collaborationist Vidkun Quisling.

In later stages of the campaign, Allied forces did conduct landings in Norway to oppose Hitler’s progress, but they were generally ill-equipped for mountain warfare and were subject to strafing attacks from the Luftwaffe.

While hostilities in Norway were still raging, on May the 10th the Wehrmacht launched its largest attack to date, against Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg and France.

Now, it turns out, this campaign could have been stopped in its tracks from the get go.

This brings us back to Hans Oster, right-hand man to head of military intelligence Admiral Canaris. Oster was dead set on preventing Hitler’s rabid dreams of hegemony. In 1939, Oster had become a close friend of Major Gijsbertus Sas, the Dutch military attaché in Berlin. Oster informed him in advance of the German plans to invade France and the BeNeLux countries, initially slated for November 1939.

Sas relayed the intelligence to his superior General Reijnders, who unfortunately did not take it seriously, adamant that Germany would never violate Dutch neutrality! We know that the November invasion was postponed until May 1940. But had Oster been taken more seriously, the Western powers could have been better prepared to stop the Wehrmacht’s next, and most successful, exploit.

This campaign was a masterful example of the principles of ‘strategy of annihilation’ and Bewegungskrieg. The German Army Group C maintained static positions in front of France’s main defensive barrier, the Maginot Line. But this was just a ruse to deter the French Army from redeploying forces away from the Line. Meanwhile, Army Group B advanced into the Netherlands, facing the Allied armies. But this was just a ruse again to distract the Allies from the real threat- General von Rundstedt’s Army Group A, a large force of 44 divisions, 7 of them entirely armoured.

As per an audacious plan conceived by General Guderian, Army Group A was to push through the hilly Ardennes forest in Belgium. This area was considered impenetrable to tanks and had been left largely unprotected by the Allies. As a result, Army Group A cut through weak defences, pouring into Northern France and surrounding the bulk of the Allied armies in the Low Countries from the rear.

When German armoured units met with their French counterparts, the latter proved to be superior in terms of training and weaponry. But Allied tanks were dispersed in an infantry support function, and could not oppose the spearhead of Guderian’s concentrated armour. Once again, German military innovation had received a great helping hand from yet more mistakes of allied leadership.

The British Expeditionary Force – alongside other allied troops – escaped total destruction at Dunkerque, but the French government capitulated on the 22nd of June.

From here, for several months, the Heer was mostly busy with occupation duties. The Luftwaffe attempted unsuccessfully to establish air superiority against the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain, so it was time for the Kriegsmarine to shine.

Admiral Raeder’s U-boats scored notable hits on the Royal Navy, as early as September 17th and October 14th, 1939, by sinking the aircraft carrier Courageous and the battleship Royal Oak. But the sub’s main target was merchant shipping: by the end of 1939, 110 cargoes had gone to the bottom.

And in the period from January to October 1940, the Kreigsmarine enjoyed a success streak remembered as ‘The Happy Time’, in which U-boats and surface vessels sank or seized more than 2.1 million tons worth of Allied merchant shipping in the Atlantic and the North Sea.

Hitler’s land forces resumed offensive operations in April of 1941, this time targeting the Balkan region. Their dual objectives were the occupation of Greece and Yugoslavia.

The former nation had successfully repelled a poorly planned Italian attack, launched on October the 28th, 1940. The strenuous Greek resistance had attracted British forces in the area and inspired Bulgaria and Yugoslavia to resist Hitler’s courtship to join the Axis.

Both countries, alongside Hungary and Slovakia, eventually joined Berlin and Rome. But on March the 27th, 1941, a military coup overthrew the regency of Prince Paul of Yugoslavia and reverted to a policy of neutrality.

On April 6th, the Heer and the Luftwaffe attacked Yugoslavia and Greece from their bases in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Five days later, 15 Italian divisions also attacked Northern Yugoslavia, and by the 17th Belgrad capitulated. The brave Greek defenders, already worn out by a victorious yet costly campaign against Italy, resisted until the 22nd.

Commonwealth and local units still resisted on Crete, until the Germans launched a daring airborne assault on the 20th of May. Despite suffering heavy casualties, the Germans eventually triumphed on the 31st.

That said, while mostly defeated in Europe, British and Commonwealth troops enjoyed success in North Africa. Overruling the objections of General Graziani, Italian commander in Libya, Mussolini ordered an attack against British-held Egypt back in June 1940. Marred by poor supplies and equipment, the Italian offensive was first defeated by the desert, then by General Wavell and O’Connor in December. By early February 1941, they could have seized Libya’s capital, Tripoli. But the relocation of British forces to Greece stalled the counter-offensive, allowing for the arrival of German reinforcements: the Afrika Korps, under legendary General Erwin Rommel. The ‘Desert Fox’ effectively led the Italo-German troops into retaking the lost Libyan territory in March and April.

The allied-held city of Tobruk, however, resisted strenuously, preventing a push into Egypt. Moreover, Rommel’s supply lines were now overstretched and he was forced to halt his advance in June of 1941.

The 22nd day of that month marked the beginning of the Wehrmacht’s largest operation to date: Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Once again, Axis forces steamrolled their enemies. And once again, a large chunk of that success can be attributed to the failings of Hitler’s adversaries and the well trained German forces. In this case, Josef Stalin believed that the Germans would abide by the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact, and ignored mounting intelligence of Axis buildup on the Soviet borders.

Moreover, once again showing a large part of Germany’s initial success had a lot to do with mistakes on the other side, the communist dictator had shot himself in the foot some five years prior.

You see, from August 1936 to March 1938, Stalin unleashed the Great Purge, to eliminate his political rivals. This purge decimated the officer corps of the Red Army, as the secret police arrested or executed an astounding 178 Generals.

Amongst them was Marshal Tukhachevsky, the leading expert on the effective use of armoured units according to ‘Deep Battle’ principles. The few surviving Generals avoided any association with the executed Marshal, relegating ‘Deep Battle’ into oblivion.

This doctrine was partially resurrected by Minister of Defence Marshal Timoshenko in late 1940, with the creation of 29 mechanised infantry corps by early 1941. These corps fielded a total of 24,000 tanks, against some 3,000 on the Axis side. Unfortunately, the corps commanders lacked the necessary training and experience to lead them effectively. As a result, most of these units were destroyed in the first weeks of Barbarossa.

And so it was that the Heer and the Luftwaffe reached the gates of Moscow by December 1941. But the tide was about to turn. The period of unmatched victories would soon be over.

But to summarise, the impressive war record of the Wehrmacht from September 1939 to December 1941 stemmed from a variety of factors. The German military had been building up their forces, arsenal and capabilities since the 1920s, even before the Nazis took power. Then, throughout the 1930s, Hitler and his acolytes further prepared for war by incurring massive debts, as well as acquiring new territories and their resources without needing to resort to open war per se. All the while, they were also heavily training the troops that would spearhead the initial attacks.

When hostilities did start, the OKW – Oberkommando Wehrmacht – deployed in the frontline the best trained, best equipped, armoured, mechanised and motorised units. This allowed the Germans to effectively execute the well-established Prussian offensive doctrine, in a period in which every major power still played on the defensive.

Such an advantage gave the Wehrmacht the opportunity to concentrate on one adversary at a time, defeating them in detail. This resulted in short, individual campaigns against weaker or unprepared adversaries, which did not place unsustainable strain on the industrial and logistics complex of the Reich. On the contrary, the rapidly occupied territories provided the German economy with further cash, supplies and forced labour to help snowball efforts on the war front.

Last but not least, German forces benefitted from an enormous advantage: allied strategic incompetence, deafness to sound intelligence, and in some cases inferior trained troops and officers.

But everything changed after December 1941.

The German military doctrine and war economy were well-suited for the conduct of quick campaigns and occupation of enemy countries close to its boundaries. But this characteristic, which gave Germany the initial edge, was one of the causes of its downfall.

As of early 1942, Germany was still facing a yet undefeated Britain. The stubborn Soviets had halted the advance of Barbarossa at the gates of Moscow. And the US had just entered the fray. Which meant that the III Reich was facing three adversaries with insurmountable geographic advantages, sustainable economies, and strategic defensive depth – three characteristics which are the perfect antidote to ‘strategy of annihilation’ and Bewegungskrieg. Had Hitler been wiser at this stage of the game, he may well have been able to switch tactics and fortify and make deals to keep at least part of what Germany had won. But, as we covered in a recent video on our sister channel Highlight History, as the war progressed, the Fuhrer was progressively more and more not in his right mind. And, indeed, is unlikely to have survived many years past the war even if he’d not taken his own life or been captured, owing to some rather interesting things little discussed today. For more on all this, go check out our recent video on Highlight History: How Hitler’s Flatulence Defeated Nazi Germany

Expand for References

On September 15, 1935, the Reichstag or parliament of the German Third Reich passed the infamous Nuremberg Laws. Comprising the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and the Reich Citizenship Law, these edicts forbade intermarriage or premarital sex between Aryans and non-Aryans – namely Jews and Roma – categorized people according to ancestry, and denied full citizenship to those who did not meet the proscribed standards for racial purity. As part of this effort to create a unified race-based Volksgemeinschaft or “people’s community,” the Nazi government ran countless propaganda campaigns aimed at illustrating the ideal Aryan citizen. Early that same year, the family magazine Sonne ins Haus or “Sunshine in the Home” held a photo contest to find the “perfect Aryan child.” On January 24, the magazine splashed the winner across its front cover: a beautiful round-cheeked, wide-eyed six-month-old girl. Over the following few years, this photograph was widely circulated around the Reich, appearing in other publications and on postcards. Four years later in late 1939, shortly after Germany’s invasion of Poland, the Sunday edition of the daily newspaper Berliner Tagesblatt ran a photograph of the “ideal German soldier”: a handsome 20-year-old man standing 5’ 11” with sandy blonde hair and piercing blue eyes. This image too was widely reprinted, being used in recruiting posters and other propaganda material. Now at this point you’ve probably guessed where this is going. Little did the Nazi propagandists know, but these two symbols of Aryan racial purity were actually anything but. This is the unlikely story of Hessy Levinsons and Werner Goldberg, Hitler’s Jewish poster children.

Our story begins with Jacob and Pauline Levinsons, a German Ashkenazi Jewish couple from Latvia. Both classically-trained singers, shortly after marrying in 1928 the Levinsons moved to Berlin to advance their careers. Jacob accepted a position singing baritone at a local opera house, adopting the stage name Yasha Lenssen to conceal his Jewish ancestry. Nonetheless, his employers soon found out, and he was promptly fired. Despite rising antisemitism and Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the couple remained in Berlin, living in a cramped one-room apartment, and on May 17, 1934 Pauline gave birth to a beautiful baby girl named Hessy. Six months later, as an adult Hessy later recounted:

“My mother took me to a photographer. One of the best in Berlin! And he did — he made a very beautiful picture — which my parents thought was very beautiful.”

Indeed, Jacob and Pauline loved the picture so much that they framed it and displayed it prominently on the family piano. Then, a few days later, something strange happened: the woman who cleaned the Levinsons’s apartment claimed to have seen Hessy’s baby picture on a magazine cover. At first the Levinsons refused to believe her; after all, they argued, many babies look alike. But the cleaning lady was adamant, and soon returned with a copy of Sonne ins Haus – with Hessy’s baby picture plastered across the cover. The Levinsons were shocked – and frightened. Pauline immediately confronted the photographer, Hans Ballin, who, Hessy later recounted:

“…closed the doors, closed the curtains, and took her to a back room.

““What is this?” [My mother asked]. “‘How did this happen?’”

“I will tell you the following,” [the photographer said]. “‘I was asked to submit my 10 best pictures for a beauty contest run by the Nazis. So were 10 other outstanding photographers in Germany. So 10 photographers submitted their 10 best pictures. And I sent in your baby’s picture.’”

“But you knew that this is a Jewish child,” [my mother exclaimed].

“Yes,” [said the photographer]. “I wanted to allow myself the pleasure of this joke. And you see, I was right. Of all the babies, they picked this baby as the perfect Aryan.’”

It was one of the most successful jokes in the history of political protest. Soon Hessy Levinsons’s adorable, secretly Jewish face – personally selected by none other than Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels – was everywhere, appearing in shop windows, in product advertisements, and on postcards. Hessy’s aunt in Memel, East Prussia – now Klaipeda, Lithuania – even went to buy a card for her first birthday, only to discover her niece’s face all over the store.

“My aunt didn’t say another word, but she bought the postcard which my parents carried with them throughout the years.”

But while the Nazis never discovered that they had been tricked, the ubiquitous photograph put its subject in grave danger. To prevent the government from discovering that their “Aryan” poster child was actually Jewish, the Levinsons kept their daughter hidden away in their apartment:

“I could no longer play in the park. And I couldn’t go to the zoo, my favourite place.”

But despite these measures there were still close calls. On one occasion, a friend of the family was visiting the apartment of a German woman when she noticed Hessy’s photo on the wall. Accidentally, she blurted out “But that is Hessy Levinsons!” The woman reacted angrily to this Jewish name, pulling the picture off the wall before pausing and stating: “Oh, never mind. She is too cute. I’ll hang it back.”

But Berlin was quickly becoming too dangerous for Jewish families like the Levinsons, and in 1936, Jacob – now working for an import-export firm – was arrested by the Gestapo on trumped-up tax charges. Though he was soon released, he and Pauline decided it was no longer safe in Germany and briefly moved the family back to Latvia before resettling in Paris in 1938. During their stay, Hessy developed an ear infection and the family found a Jewish doctor who could make a house call. During the doctor’s visit, Pauline told him the story of Hessy’s baby picture. The doctor informed the Levinsons that more and more French citizens were being influenced by Nazi propaganda, and that publishing the story might be a good way of making the Nazis look foolish. Jacob refused outright, to which the doctor responded: “You know Mr. Levinsons, you have no reason to be fearful. You are not in Germany anymore.” But he was soon to be proven wrong, for two years later the Nazis invaded France. As the Gestapo began rounding up Parisian Jews, the Levinsons fled Nice in the Vichy-administered “Zone Libre” of southern France. There, they struggled to obtain exit visas. While they received a U.S. visa in 1941, they were unable to leave before it expired nor to obtain an extension. Then, in 1942, Jacob managed to obtain Cuban visas by bribing an official at the consulate with a silver cigarette case. He booked train tickets to take the family from Marseille to Lisbon in neutral Portugal, from where they would sail to Havana.

But as the family waited in Marseille, another crisis suddenly appeared. Gerta, a young Jewish nurse the family had hired to care for the children, had been denied a visa and was stuck in Nice. Fearing that Gerta would be rounded up and sent to a concentration camp, Jacob Levinsons left his family in Marseille and travelled to Nice by train. To avoid being searched by the Vichy authorities, he remained in the dining car, ordering food and drinks until he was nearly sick. But it worked: at every checkpoint, the Vichy officers walked straight through the dining car without disturbing the diners. France, everyone…

Once in Nice, Jacob returned to the Cuban consulate and attempted to bribe the same official and obtain another visa for Gerta. But the official refused, explaining that he was already in too much trouble. Jacob stood his ground, vowing to remain in the consulate until he obtained the visa. At the end of the day, the exasperated official threatened to call the police before finally relenting and informing Jacob:

“You know, there is an old law in the books in Cuba that says a man can immigrate with all his possessions, including his slaves. Would you say this woman is your slave?”

Jacob nodded, and the official handed him another visa.

A few weeks later the Levinsons safely reached Cuba. They were among the lucky ones; by the end of the war most of Hessy’s extended family in Latvia had been rounded up and murdered by the Nazis.

The Levisons remained in Cuba until 1949 before relocating once more to New York City. As Hessy later stated:

“My strongest memory from childhood was running away. My father told me once that when there would be a Jewish state there would be no more running away.”
But the Levinsons never moved to the newly-created Israel. Instead, a now teenaged Hessy attended Julia Richman High School and developed a passion for chemistry, earning an undergraduate degree at Barnard College in 1955 and a master’s degree at Columbia University. While at Columbia, she met her future husband, mathematics professor Earl Taft. Meanwhile, Jacob Levinsons returned to Cuba to run a business, which unfortunately failed following the rise of Fidel Castro. But he remained undeterred, declaring to his daughter: “I have survived Hitler; I will survive Castro.”

After marrying in 1959, Hessy and Earl Taft moved to New Jersey, where they taught at Rutgers University. Unfortunately, Hessy was soon forced to quit to raise the couple’s children.

“A research career for women wasn’t compatible with raising kids in those days. It’s amazing how much easier it is now.”

However, she later accepted a position at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, where she administered Advanced Placement chemistry tests, before moving back to New York in 2000 and joining the faculty of St. John’s University, where she taught chemistry until retiring in 2016. The story of her brief career as a Nazi poster child remained largely unknown until 2014, when she visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem and donated copies of her infamous baby pictures. In interviews she stated:

“I can laugh about it now, but if the Nazis had known who I really was, I wouldn’t be alive…I feel a sense of revenge, good revenge.”

And despite the danger he put her in, when asked what she would say to Hans Ballin, the photographer who took her famous picture, Hessy replied:

“I would tell him, good for you for having the courage.”

The early life of Werner Goldberg, Hitler’s other secretly Jewish poster child, was equally fraught. Born on October 3, 1919 in Königsberg, East Prussia – today Kaliningrad, Russia – Goldberg was initially unaware of his Jewish heritage, he and his brother Martin – born the following year – having been baptized in the Grünewald Lutheran Church. Indeed, his father Albert, a civil servant and combat veteran of the First World War, had left the Jewish community and been baptized as a Lutheran in order to assimilate and marry a Christian. But this conversion failed to protect him from persecution by the Nazis, who viewed Jewishness more as a matter of race than religious practice. Following Hitler’s rise to power, Albert Goldberg was expelled from his position per the 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which forbade Jews from holding public positions.

Two years later, the Nuremberg Laws established a racial hierarchy based on ancestry. Anyone with four German or “Aryan” grandparents was considered Deutschblütiger or “German-blooded” and was granted full citizenship rights. Those who were 1/4 to 1/2 Jewish – that is, having 1-2 Jewish grandparents, were considered Mischling – literally “mixed race” but having the more pejorative meaning of “half-breed” or “Mongrel”. This classification was further divided into two sub-categories: Mischling zweiten Grades or “Mongrel second degree” for those with 1 Jewish grandparent and Mischling ersten Grades or “Mongrel first degree” for those with two. While neither category was considered to fully belong to the Aryan race, both were eligible for full Reich citizenship. Finally, those with 3 or 4 Jewish grandparents were considered Jude or fully Jewish and while considered subjects of the Reich, were denied full rights as citizens. Later amendments to the Nuremberg Laws further clarified the rules regarding Mischlinge. For example, after September 15, a Mischling who actively practiced the Jewish religion or was married to a Jew was considered a full Jew – as were their children. Further, children born to mixed-race marriages officiated after September 17, 1935 were considered fully Jewish, as were mixed-race children born out of wedlock after July 31, 1936.

As a Mischling first degree, young Werner Goldberg was mercilessly bullied as a child, while his maternal uncle joined the Nazi Party and refused to be seen with the rest of the family. In 1935 at the age of 16, Goldberg dropped out of school to work as an apprentice at Schneller und Schmeider, a clothing company with a mixed workforce of Jews, non-Jews, and Mischling. Starting in early 1938, he served a compulsory six-month term with the Reichsarbeitsdienst or Reich Labour Service – an organization formed to provide work for young Germans and indoctrinate them into Nazi ideology – before being drafted into the Army on December 1. Goldberg participated in the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, serving alongside his childhood friend Gerhard Wolf. Wolf later became a high-ranking officer in the SS and may have helped protect Goldberg and his father from state persecution. Shortly after the invasion, the image of the 20-year-old Goldberg – who, despite his Jewish ancestry sported the ideal Aryan features of blond hair and blue eyes – appeared in the newspaper Berliner Tagesblatt with the caption “The Ideal German Soldier.” The photograph was widely reprinted, appearing on recruiting posters and other propaganda material.

Meanwhile, Goldberg’s father Albert was in dire straits. Already in poor health, his ration cards had been cut by the authorities, who were now threatening to deport him east to a forced-labour camp. Outraged that a Great War veteran should be treated in this manner, Werner appealed to his commander, who passed his request up the chain of command. Eventually, Goldberg’s situation came to the attention of General Erich von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt, commander of the Potsdam garrison, who, after meeting with the young soldier, promoted him and sent him to the proper authorities to “arrange things as they should be for a German soldier.” Thanks to General von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt’s intervention, Albert Goldberg was spared deportation – at least for the time being.

Unfortunately, unlike in the case of Hessy Levinsons, this time around it did not take the Nazis long to discover their poster child’s Jewish ancestry, and Werner Goldberg’s photograph was quickly pulled from circulation. In June 1940, following the German invasion of France, Werner Goldberg was expelled from the Army under Adolf Hitler’s April 8 decree that all Mischling first degree be discharged from the armed forces – and for more on Hitler’s epically vindictive handling of the French surrender, please check out our previous video Yet Another of Hitler’s Ultimate Dick Moves.

Following his discharge, Goldberg returned to his former workplace, now renamed Feodor Schmeider to eliminate the Jewish surname Schneller. He quickly rose through the ranks of the company, handling uniform supply contracts for the armed forces, and later attended the Reich Committee for Labour Studies or RAFA school, where he was one of only four in a class of 80 students to pass the final examinations. He then served as a RAFA lecturer and even published articles on the textile industry in the trade journal Textilwoche.

But all was not well for the Goldbergs. In December 1942 Albert’s health further deteriorated and he was admitted to Berlin’s Bavaria Hospital. Shortly thereafter, the Gestapo raided the hospital and moved the elder Goldberg to Jewish hospital which had been converted into a transit camp for prisoners bound for the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. On Christmas Eve, Werner bravely snuck into the hospital to rescue his father, correctly assuming that the guards would be drunk, absent, or otherwise distracted. But in early 1943 Albert was arrested once again and held at Rosenstraße 2–4, a former Jewish welfare office, along with some 1,800 so-called “privileged Jews” previously exempt from deportation – mainly the Jewish husbands of gentile wives. But while he and the other detainees awaited deportation, one of the most extraordinary events in the history of the Third Reich took place. Hundreds of citizens – including the wives of the imprisoned men and other family members like Werner Goldberg – gathered in front of Rosenstraße 2–4, demanding “Give us our husbands back!” Despite squads of SS soldiers threatening to shoot the protesters on sight, the crowd held their ground, only briefly dispersing during an RAF bombing raid. As one of the protesters, Elsa Holzer, later recalled:

“We expected that our husbands would return home and that they wouldn’t be sent to the camps. We acted from the heart, and look what happened. If you had to calculate whether you would do any good by protesting, you wouldn’t have gone. But we acted from the heart. We wanted to show that we weren’t willing to let them go. What one is capable of doing when there is danger can never be repeated. I’m not a fighter by nature. Only when I have to be. I did what was given me to do. When my husband need my protection, I protected him … And there was always a flood of people there. It wasn’t organized or instigated. Everyone was simply there. Exactly like me. That’s what is so wonderful about it.”
Incredibly – especially in light of how the Nazis usually dealt with dissent – the Rosenstraße protests were successful, and on March 6, 1943, Reich Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels, acting as Gauleiter or regional leader of Berlin, ordered the 1,800 men interned at Rosenstraße 2–4 released, writing that:
“I will commission the security police not to continue the Jewish evacuations in a systematic manner during such a critical time [the recent defeat at Stalingrad]. We want to rather spare that for ourselves until after a few weeks; then we can carry it out that much more thoroughly.”
Through a combination of guile, forged documents, and plain good luck, Albert and Werner Goldberg managed to survive the war – the only members of their immediate family to do so. But Werner Goldberg was far from the only German soldier to be caught in the strange, contradictory web of Nazi race politics. Indeed, an estimated 150,000 Mischlinge served in the German armed forces during the Second World War – many with distinction. These included Arno Spitz, a Fallschirmjäger or paratroop officer who was awarded three Iron Crosses for bravery; Luftwaffe General Helmuth Wilberg, Kriegsmarine or Navy Commander Paul Ascher, 1st Staff Officer aboard the battleship Bismarck; and Major Ernst Bloch, an Abwehr or military intelligence operative who in 1939, carried out the daring rescue of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson – AKA the Lubavitcher Rebbe – the leader of the Jewish Chabad-Lubavitch movement (but that is an unlikely story for another video). But perhaps the most high-profile mischling in the German military was Luftwaffe Generalfeldmarschall Erhard Milch, State Secretary of the Reich Ministry of Aviation. Milch’s father Anton was indeed Jewish, though according to Jewish orthodoxy or halakha this would not have made Erhard Jewish as that status is passed down through the maternal line. Nonetheless, Milch’s parentage made him a mischling according to the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which should have led to his expulsion from the military following Hitler’s April 8, 1940 decree. But as was often the case, the Nazis were more than willing to bend the rules for high-profile figures. In 1935, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, halted a Gestapo investigation into Milch’s ancestry a Deutschblütigkeitserklärung or German Blood Certificate officially declaring the Field Marshall to be a full-blooded Aryan. The certificate was backed up by an affidavit from Milch’s mother, Clara Vetter, claiming that his true father was not Anton Milch but rather Clara’s uncle, Karl Brauer. This convenient fabrication clearly illustrates how Nazi ideology placed race-mixing above all other social concerns, for it would have meant that Clara Vetter had committed not only adultery but also incest.

Blood Certificates were handed out to all manner of individuals whenever the authorities found it convenient to circumvent the Nuremberg Laws. For instance, in 1937, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and a major leader of the Palestinian nationalist movement, fled Palestine and settled first in Fascist Italy and then Nazi Germany, allying with the Axis Powers in their opposition to British rule in the Middle East and the establishment of a Jewish state. In order to square the ideological circle of an Arab allying with the race-obsessed Third Reich, Adolf Hitler issued al-Husseini with a Blood Certificate, explaining that the Mufti’s blue eyes proved he was descended from European Crusaders. Right…

In other cases, however, the race of fighting men was simply ignored. For instance, in Eastern Europe, the Waffen SS recruited large units of foreign volunteers – including decidedly non-Aryan Cossacks, Turks, and Bosnian Muslims – using them mainly for anti-partisan operations. But not all soldiers were so fortunate, for despite the crumbling strategic situation and severe manpower shortages, near the end of the war Nazi ideology increasingly began to trump military logic, and thousands of mischlinge and other “non-Aryans” were expelled from the German armed forces, with many being declared fully Jewish and deported to labour and death camps. Caught between two worlds, the mischlinge were one of many manifestations of the deep contradictions which lay at the heart of the Nazi state.

After the war, Werner Goldberg entered politics, joining the Christian Democratic Union of Germany and serving from 1959 to 1979 in the Abgeordnetenhaus or state parliament of West Berlin. In the course of his career, he was a strong advocate for German reunification, democracy, and improved Jewish-Christian relations. Prior to his death in Berlin on September 28, 2004, at the age of 84, Goldberg reflected to historian Bryan Mark Rigg on his wartime experiences:

“The Third Reich taught me more than anything, NEVER, EVER, RUN after those who don’t want you. I, and many German Jews and Mischlinge, wanted to stay in Germany and live in this land we had grown to love. It was hard for us to understand that the Deutschland of Hitler had rejected us and did not want us. Most of us did not accept that. Listen to me, in your life, whether it be a girl, a friend, an organization, if they don’t want you, don’t run after them. Find those who accept you for who you are and be with those you like your company. When you ask me, “what is the essence of life or the secret of life?” this is it, my boy.”

Expand for References

Claim:

The Lego Group added barium sulfate to Lego bricks so they would show up on X-rays if swallowed.

Rating:

Context

A spokesperson for the Lego Group confirmed via email that “LEGO® bricks do not, and never have, contained any materials (either intentionally or not) to make them visible in an X-ray.”

A rumor has circulated online since at least April 2020 that the Lego Group added barium sulfide, a chemical compound that shows up well in X-rays, to Lego bricks as a safety precaution in case children swallow them.

The claim spread on social media platforms such as Facebook (archived) and Reddit (archived). One Instagram post (archived) explained more about what led to the alleged addition of the compound and the effect the change supposedly had. The caption read, in part:

In 2013, LEGO quietly made a change that saved children’s lives. They added barium sulfate to every brick. A heavy white mineral used in medical imaging. Parents barely noticed. But doctors? They knew exactly what it meant. Before this, when kids swallowed LEGO pieces, X-rays couldn’t detect them. Plastic is invisible to radiology… Since then, pediatric hospitals report faster surgeries and lower complication rates. Radiologists can now identify swallowed bricks in seconds. 

While it is true that barium sulfate shows up well in X-ray imaging, there was no evidence the Lego Group ever considered adding the compound to its products. A spokesperson for the Lego Group confirmed via email that “LEGO® bricks do not, and never have, contained any materials (either intentionally or not) to make them visible in an X-ray.” As such, we have rated the claim as false.

Another related rumor circulating the internet held that the Lego Group decided not to add barium sulfate to its bricks after finding it made the plastic brittle. This also was false.

Are Lego bricks health hazards?

An article, “Lego Asthma,” published in the peer-reviewed New England Journal of Medicine, highlighted the case of a young boy who swallowed a Lego piece. Researchers tested how similar pieces showed up in an X-ray, and found that they “were radiolucent,” meaning the rays passed through them. This conclusion was consistent with findings in other studies. In one case, researchers were able to identify a Lego piece in X-ray imaging thanks to a “distinctive row of radiolucent air densities” even when the piece wasn’t directly visible. 

Although people should avoid swallowing Legos, such objects don’t pose much risk once in the digestive tract, so they aren’t much of a threat beyond a choking hazard. In the aforementioned cases where Legos were causing health issues, the majority of them were not immediately life-threatening and could be completely solved through removal.

The spokesperson for the Lego Group emphasized that product safety is of the utmost importance to the company. It complies to standards like “age grading, warnings that the products are not suitable for children under 3 when small parts are included, what materials can and can’t be used, not having sharp edges or points, and much more.”

For further reading, Snopes investigated the claim that an X-ray authentically showed hundreds of bubble-tea pearls inside a teenage girl’s stomach.

Claim:

The popular holiday tune “Jingle Bells” was not written as a Christmas song.

Rating:

“Jingle Bells” is a staple of the Christmas season, but did its creator write it for the holiday? According to a claim that has circulated online for years, the song originally had no connection to Christmas.

In 2025, for example, one Facebook post (archived) began, “Most people know Jingle Bells as a classic Christmas carol, but it wasn’t written for Christmas at all.”

(X user @ThatEricAlper)

It’s true that “Jingle Bells” songwriter James Pierpont did not have Christmas in mind when he penned the tune — which does not mention the holiday in its lyrics — in the 1850s. However, widespread claims that Pierpont wrote the song in honor of Thanksgiving or for a Sunday school choir are not grounded in concrete evidence, as we noted when we first looked into the claim in 2014.

Since then, a different explanation backed up by demonstrable primary sources has emerged. In 2017, a theater historian identified an archival document showing that the song’s first performance was in fact part of an 1857 minstrel show in Boston. In the 19th and early-20th centuries, minstrel theater was a type of popular entertainment based on stereotyped depictions of Black Americans that featured white actors in blackface.

The discovery, published in the peer-reviewed journal Theatre Survey, was the work of Kyna Hamill, who received a Ph.D. in theater history from Tufts University and now works at Boston University.

In short, Hamill found a playbill in the Harvard Theater Collection at Harvard University’s Houghton Library showing that the first attested performance of “One Horse Open Sleigh” — the original title of the song, which Pierpont renamed “Jingle Bells” in 1859 — took place on Sept. 15, 1857, at Ordway Hall, a prominent minstrel theater in Boston. The singer who performed it was Johnny Pell, a minstrel actor notable enough to have his own posthumous entry in the 1911 directory “Monarchs of Minstrelsy.”

Further evidence that the song Pell performed was the same one we now know as “Jingle Bells” can be found on the cover of the song’s original 1857 sheet music, which Pierpont dedicated to the venue’s owner, John P. Ordway.

(Library of Congress)

The song, Hamill realized in the course of her research, was just one of many similar songs about sleigh rides written for northern minstrel performances in the 1840s and 1850s — some of which were more overtly racist than the song now known as “Jingle Bells.” As Hamill wrote in her Theatre Survey article, such songs commonly featured “tintinnabulation [a bell-like ringing or tinkling sound], fast sleighs, pretty girls, an upset, and an imperative to sing about the whole event.”

Hamill began looking into the history of “Jingle Bells” in 2015, several years after she first began volunteering at the Medford Historical Society & Museum in Medford, Massachusetts, where Pierpont spent much of his life and where a local building bears a historical plaque identifying it as the birthplace of “Jingle Bells.”

Around the holidays every year, Hamill said over email, the historical society received a flood of calls and emails from Medford residents and visitors asking for information about the song’s history. Eventually, Hamill became so curious about the discrepancies between the song’s various origin stories that she began to conduct her own archival research.

‘Jingle Bells’ Myths

As for the popular origin stories about the song, they appear to have circulated in the form of unsubstantiated claims repeated in newspaper articles and books for decades before the advent of social media.

The claim that Pierpont wrote the song for a Sunday school concert appeared in various articles and books starting in the 1970s, without reference to any evidence.

The Thanksgiving claim appears to have begun to circulate by the mid-1980s, when a question about the origin of “Jingle Bells” included in a syndicated Christmas-themed quiz published in numerous different papers had the answer: “‘Jingle Bells’ was written for Thanksgiving by James Pierpont in 1857.” There is no demonstrable evidence to support the claim that the song ever had anything to do with Thanksgiving — which was not a federal holiday until 1863, although some states, including Massachusetts, did celebrate it before then.

As for the location where Pierpont wrote the song, Hamill told BU Today that she believes it was neither Medford nor Savannah, Georgia — the other city that has laid claim to being the song’s birthplace. Instead, based on the timing of the first performance, Hamill said she suspects Pierpont wrote the song in the Boston boardinghouse where he lived just before he moved to Savannah in the fall of 1857.

The Medford claim, Hamill believes, was largely based on a Boston Globe article published in 1946, nearly a century after Pierpont wrote the song. The paper’s only source for the claim that “Jingle Bells” originated in the building that now bears the plaque identifying it as the song’s birthplace was a grandniece of a woman who once lived in the building — hardly an eyewitness account.

Ultimately, out of all of the various origin stories for “Jingle Bells,” the only one grounded in actual primary sources dating to Pierpont’s lifetime is the one Hamill pieced together through her research.

In other words, the best available evidence for the song’s first performance shows that Pierpont originally wrote “Jingle Bells” as a minstrel song satirizing Black participation in a common northern winter activity — not as a Christmas song, but also not as a Thanksgiving song or for a Sunday school choir’s concert.

We’ve previously investigated claims related to other classic holiday songs, including the assertion that “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” is an example of the Mandela effect and the rumor that “Baby It’s Cold Outside” is about date rape.

Sources

“All the old paintings on the tombs
They do the sand dance, don’t you know?
If they walk too quick (oh way oh)
They’re falling down like a domino

Slide your feet up the street, bend your back
Shift your arm then you pull it back
Life is hard you know (oh way oh)
So strike a pose on a Cadillac”

These quirky lines are, of course, from the hit 1986 song “Walk Like an Egyptian” by American pop-rock band The Bangles. But even without these detailed instructions, if someone says “Walk Like an Egyptian”, chances are you know the exact pose they are referring to: torso forward, head sideways, one foot behind the other, arms bent into a Z-shape. Bonus points for shuffling forward while rocking your arms back and forth, accompanied by that stereotypically “Egyptian” melody variously known as “The Arabian Riff” or “Snake Charmer Song”. Over the years, this bizarre pose and gait have become inextricably linked with Ancient Egypt, appearing in countless cartoons, illustrations, films, and other pieces of popular media. But did the Ancient Egyptians actually walk like this – and if so, why? The answer, it may not surprise you to hear, is no, but like all myths and stereotypes this one does contain a small kernel of truth – in this case, the peculiarly stylized manner in which Ancient Egyptians art depicted the human form. So why did they do this?

Nowadays, we are used to art – even highly abstracted art – hewing to a certain kind of realism. We expect objects to look roughly as they would in real life, following the rules of perspective: only certain sides are visible, closer objects are larger than more distant objects, etc. However, this kind of realistic representation is a fairly recent development in art, with the use of a mathematically-accurate perspective dating to the early 15th Century. Prior to this, artists – particularly those creating religious artwork – often had different priorities and followed different artistic rules. For example, size was often used to convey the relative importance of subjects within a work rather than their physical relation to one another. In early Christian depictions of biblical scenes like the Nativity or the Last Supper, for example, the figure of Jesus – both as a baby and an adult – often dwarfs those around him. This convention was also used by the Ancient Egyptians, along with a long list of other, culturally specific rules.

It is important to point out that artists in Ancient Egypt filled a very different role than they do today, producing works not as a means of individual self-expression but for religious or political purposes.
Images painted or carved onto the walls of Ancient Egyptian tombs, temples, and palaces served a wide variety of practical functions, such as glorifying the pharaoh, praising the gods, or guiding the spirit of the deceased to the afterlife. The Egyptians believed that the written word and visual images could perform magic, and that the correct execution of such works was vital to obtaining the desired effect. For example, drawings or sculptures of food left in tombs were supposed to magically become real in order to nourish the deceased in the afterlife. Artisans were thus seen not as creative and expressive individuals, but rather highly-skilled craftsmen or copyists tasked with carrying out the instructions of the creator god Ptah, who had already laid out the conventions of ritual artwork in exacting detail. These conventions included how to write down hieroglyphics, what specific colours to use for certain subjects, and how to represent the human form. Ancient Egyptian artisans prioritized narrative clarity and ideal forms over absolute realism, and thus depicted human figures with their chest facing outward toward the viewer and their head, legs, and arms in profile. The extremities were also depicted identically, with figures having two left or two right hands or feet. While physically awkward, such poses allowed all the most important features of the body to be simultaneously represented in their most immediately recognizable forms- something that would be impossible in a more realistic rendering. Objects in scenes were also not layered atop one another but rather placed beside each other in linear, horizontal fields known as “registers”. Layering and non-horizontal compositions were very rare, and typically only used to convey chaotic scenes like battles. Thus, in their minimalism, formality, and linearity, Egyptian 2-dimensional art has much in common with modern comic strips: both seek to convey a particular scene or narrative as clearly and unambiguously as possible.

3-dimensional Egyptian statuary also followed a strict set of conventions. Male figures were typically depicted in a peculiar rigid striding pose with the head gazing forward, the arms pointing stiffly downward, and the left foot forward. This pose was intended to convey strength, vitality, intelligence, and will, while the left foot was favoured as it lay on the same side of the body as the heart – the seat of the soul and the most important organ in Egyptian mythology. Women, by contrast, were typically depicted with their feet together, conveying their more passive and supportive role in Egyptian society. When sculpted seated or lying down, people are typically either with their hands resting on their legs or with one or both arms crossed over their chests. Pharaohs depicted in this manner typically hold in their hands the shepherd’s crook and the flail, the traditional royal symbols which represent, respectively, the pharaoh’s leadership of his people and the fertility of the land guaranteed by his divine rule. The crossed-arms posture is especially common in funerary art, while mummies were often posed with their arms in this position. This was intended to echo the traditional depiction of Osiris, god of the underworld. Interestingly, this posture may have been inspired by the so-called Lazarus Sign, a common – and totally not creepy at all to witness- phenomenon whereby a brain-dead person will reflexively raise their arms and cross them over their chest.

Despite being subject to a whole canon of rules and conventions, sculptural depictions of Ancient Egyptian people tended to be more realistic than painted ones, with more accurate anatomical details and individually-recognizable features. The reason for this was also religious in nature. The Ancient Egyptians believed that in order to cross over to the afterlife, a person’s “effective spirit” or akh required a vessel to inhabit. Typically this role was filled by the deceased’s body itself, which is why the Ancient Egyptians preserved bodies via the process of mummification. But in case something happened to their body, the deceased were often provided with a realistic-looking statue of themselves which their akh could immediately recognize and inhabit.

But while the conventions of Egyptian artwork remained remarkably unchanged for thousands of years, this doesn’t mean there was no innovation or evolution. One of the greatest periods of artistic innovation took place during the reign of the pharaoh Amenhotep IV, better known as Akhenaten. Breaking radically from tradition, Akhenaten abandoned the old Egyptian pantheon of gods and established a monotheistic religion centred around a sun god known as the Aten. In 1346 B.C.E, he also moved the capital city from Thebes to a site in southern Egypt now known as Tell el-Amarna; hence his reign is typically known as the Amarna Period. Along with the change in religion, artwork during the Amarna Period experienced a dramatic shift in style. The rigid, formalist style of the past gave way to a more organic, naturalistic style, with male figures being given more feminine features such as longer heads and faces; fuller lips; and larger hips, stomachs, and breasts. Arms, legs, feet, and hands were rendered in greater detail, with figures depicted with both right and left hands and feet. The type and composition of images also changed radically. Figures were shown participating in a wider variety of dynamic activities, while the pharaoh and his family were depicted in more naturalistic and intimate domestic scenes rather than rigid power poses. However, despite these innovations, much of the old formalism still remained, with figures still being depicted in the same awkward, chest-forward style as before. And sadly, this flourishing of creativity was not to last. Following his death in 1336 B.C.E, Akhenaten was declared a heretic and the old Egyptian pantheon quickly restored – and with it, the old formal style of ritual art. By the time Akhenaten’s successor, Tutankhamun, took the throne in 1332 B.C.E, nearly all traces of the Amarna style had disappeared.

Yet despite the wide variety of scenes and activities depicted in Ancient Egyptian art – from religious rituals to beer brewing to sports and warfare – one pose is conspicuously absent: the stereotypical, Z-shaped “Egyptian Walk”. So where, then, did this pose come from? Unfortunately, the answer has been lost to history, though as the earliest depictions of this pose or dance come from the early 20th Century, it likely originated during one of the many “Egyptomania” crazes that swept the Western world during this period. Indeed, it is around this time that the familiar “Arabian Riff” or “Snake Charmer Song” that stereotypically accompanies the “Egyptian Walk” first came to prominence, the tune being used to accompany a wildly popular belly dancing act during the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. The tune went on to become a popular hit, being re-published under various titles including “The Streets of Cairo”, “The Hoochie-Coochie Dance,” and “The Southern Part of France.” But the tune did not originate at the fair, having appeared in the “Arabian Song” in French composer Jean-Baptiste Arban’s 1864 Complete Conservatory Method for Trumpet. But just where the tune originated prior to this is also a mystery, with most music historians believing it was adapted from a traditional Algerian melody called Kardoutja. Whatever the case, just like the idea that Vikings wore horned helmets originated with the production designer for one of Wagner’s operas, it is more than likely that the “Egyptian Dance” was the fanciful, orientalist creation of some early 20th Century choreographer.

As for where the Bangles came about their quirky 1986 hit, the story goes that songwriter Liam Sternberg was sailing across the English Channel when the ferry encountered rough water. Struggling to keep their balance, his fellow passengers jerked their arms and legs out in awkward poses that reminded Sternberg of Ancient Egyptian paintings. After scribbling down the words “Walk Like an Egyptian” in his notebook, in 1984 Sternberg composed the rest of the song and recorded a demo with Marti Jones on vocals and percussion performed on kitchen utensils. After being offered to – and rejected by – Toni Basil of “Mickey” fame, the demo caught the attention of producer David Kahne, who convinced the Bangles to record it and include it on their 1986 album Different Light. And the rest, as they say, is history.

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Ah, fast-food- greasy cow muscle mush topped with melted coagulated milk, diced bodies of allium cepa, and the blood of tomatoes, all wedged between the ground up yeast enhanced carcases of wheat plantlife and served with a side of the fried corpses of tubers. Or for the king of them all- the delectable breasts of the noble Gallus domesticus, battered and fried with 11 herbs and spices and dipped in your favorite artery clogging congealed liquid. In all, humanity asserting dominance over all life forms on Earth as we convert the relics of their hopes and dreams and evolutionary paths to our feces- because we can.

And there is nothing they can do about it…

But while today when we think of fast-food we tend to think of the likes of McDonald’s, KFC, or whatever the hell the crazy bastards at Taco Bell are coming up with this week- mixing and matching their same set of ingredients in new and exciting ways that make us all just say- shut up and get in my food hole-…. it turns out humans have been creating fast food joints for almost as long as we’ve had food holes.

So who actually invented the Fast Food Restaurant as we know it today, and how did the concept evolve through today from its earliest days when three cavemen Ugh, Rog, and Gary started selling mammoth on a stick at their oxen back establishment, until one day Gary showed Rog’s mate his giant club, after which he ooga’d her booga and the whole venture fell apart, not just putting an end to URG’s, but also setting humanity back at least a thousand years on inventing the greatest thing we’ve ever come up with- KFC…

Fucking Gary man. Ruins everything.

…Well, put on a bib, unbutton your trousers, and let’s dive into the fascinating history of Fast Food restaurants, and the forgotten establishment that helped birth the modern chains we have today.

To begin with, before we embark on our quest to trace the origins of fast food, we need to define exactly what we mean by this term. The simplest definition we can rely upon comes from the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary: ‘Cheap, often hot food that is prepared and served quickly in a restaurant.’

From this perspective, quick meals served at a restaurant are certainly not a modern phenomenon. Since the dawn of civilization, people have been busy, and/or living in less than ideal accommodation, and generally lacking time. Thus, facilities designed to serve a hot meal quickly have been staples for seemingly as long as humans have been humaning.

One of the very first such establishments – at least the oldest we know of – may have been located in the Mesopotamian settlement of Godin Tepe, currently an archaeological site in the mountains of western Iran. The location was studied throughout the 1960s and 1970s by the team of T. Cuyler Young Jr, from Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. Among the ruins, the archaeologists were intrigued by a mud-brick structure, dating back to 3200 BC, made of several small buildings surrounding a central courtyard. One of them had two large windows, and inside researchers found bowls, food remains and almost 1,800 clay bullets – used as sling ammunition for hunting or warfare.

Cuyler Young first posited that these large windows acted as a storefront of sorts for an eatery at Godin Tepe. Patrons filing outside the building could grab some quick food to go before getting back to their Mesopotamian business. According to archaeologist Hilary Gopnik, the menu offered by this ancient take out restaurant may have included goat or sheep roast, lentils, beer and wine. While those bowls found inside the building probably stored rations of grain.

But what of those sling bullets? According to researcher Virginia Badler, University of Toronto, their presence suggests that the main patrons of the joint might have been soldiers, patrolling the trade routes in the area.

Of course, it may be that the building with the two windows was not actually a restaurant, but rather the equivalent of an army supply centre. Or something else altogether, as the lack of documental evidence does not allow to formulate a definite verdict.

For something much more definitive, we need not look further than the Roman Empire. Because, of course… it’s always the Romans … Mainly because they were good at writing stuff down and conquering the world so we know a lot about them.

In any event, archaeological evidence at Pompeii, Herculaneum and Ostia has revealed how cities in the Roman Empire were replete with eateries, called popinae, or thermopolia, where ordinary citizens could grab a quick, hot bite on the go, or a cup of mulled wine. These restaurants specialised in simple fare such as sausages, offal, whitebait, pulses, baked cheese, boiled or roast meat, and hot tarts. The specialties were arranged in earthenware jars, themselves embedded into long counters, or bars. These counters were usually street-facing, so that the aroma of freshly cooked food would entice patrons to order their meal.

Some of the more sophisticated venues, such as the thermopolium in the Regio V area of Pompeii, were adorned with colourful frescoes, to further grab the attention of passers-by. Which was essential, considering the amount of competition given that a single, short street in Pompeii could have as many as a dozen popinae.

The Regio V business, owned by one Nicias [Nicky As] was adorned with artwork depicting both ingredients and scenes from mythology. Which may sound like an odd combination … But if you think about it, the marketing material of modern fast food chains also combines food imagery with celebrity endorsements, or tie-ins with popular culture franchises – arguably the mythology of our time!

And just like modern restaurants, Pompeian eateries were not immune from scathing customer reviews: a graffiti scrawled on the Regio V popina accused Nicias of being a ‘Shameless Sh*tter’

Poor old Nicias may have not deserved the insult, considering his frescoed thermopolium looked fancier than the average. Most thermopolia, in fact, had no seating facilities, and most patrons took home their orders. While nowadays a take away dinner may be something of a treat for a lazy night, for most citizens of the Empire it was a necessity. While the wealthy elites dined in their fancy homes, catered by their slaves, your average Caius lived in a cramped tenement apartment, with no facilities to preserve, store, let alone cook enough food for the family!

For this reason, Roman writers associated popinae and thermopolia with the lower levels of society, depicting them as the haunts of the most disreputable sorts.

Those crazy poor people and their desire to eat. Just sickening.

For example, poet Horace, in the first century BC, dismissed them as ‘greasy’ establishments, frequented by shady types who indulged in gambling and drinking, as well as frequenting sex workers, which I think we can all agree should be brought back as a staple of fast-food establishments….

Some decades later, his colleague Juvenal provided a more precise picture of the typical clientele, which consisted of murderers, thieves, executioners, coffin-makers, and fugitive slaves.

If we jump to the other side of the Atlantic, the earliest possible description of fast food on American soil comes from Bernardino de Sahagún. This Spanish missionary and ethnographer moved to Mexico in 1529, and compiled a 12-volume work on the history and civilisation of the Aztecs. Such an extensive account could not leave out a mention of Aztec cuisine, and in particular a vivid description of local culinary stalls and their specialties: tamales and tortillas, cooked at a fast rate and in large quantities, to be consumed on the go.

Some of the tamale variants offered by the Aztec cooks sound truly mouthwatering, as the corn dough packets were filled with turkey, fish, rabbit, eggs, beans, or squash, and then seasoned with a sauce made of tomatoes, chillies and squash seeds.

Other options may appeal only to the most adventurous taste buds, such as the prickly pear, frog, gopher and axolotl tamales.

Sahagún’s account does not mention numbers, but he gives a vivid impression of the incredible quantity of food stalls, of which many were not really up to scratch:

‘The bad food seller [is] he who sells filthy tamales, discoloured tamales–broken, tasteless, quite tasteless, inedible, frightening, deceiving; tamales made of chaff, swollen tamales, spoiled tamales, foul tamales–sticky, gummy; old tamales, cold tamales– dirty and sour, very sour, exceedingly sour, stinking.’

The quality of 16th Century Mesoamerican fast food clearly fluctuated wildly from one stall to the other. Each vendor had their own recipe, their own fillings, and some of them clearly did not know what they were doing. In other words: it lacked standardisation.

Which takes us to a more modern definition of fast food. It is not only about preparing, serving and consuming food quickly. In the words of Professor Angelika Eppe, University of Bielefeld [Bielefeld = Bee Lay Feld], Germany:

‘The term “modern fast food” also promises a potential replication of ingredients, appearance, quantity, consistency, amount and, most importantly, of taste and touch. In this specific sense, “fast food” is synonymous with completely standardised foods and drinks.’

And that’s the key concept: standardisation. A standardisation of the eating experience that can be obtained only by formalising all aspects of food preparation and consumption: from a rigidly controlled supply chain, to cooking methods akin to a factory assembly line. Those formalised practices can then be replicated across a number of premises, featuring the same menus and décors.

The concept of a chain, or franchise, is inextricably linked to the history of American fast food. And an oft’ forgotten landmark date in that history is March 21, 1921: the opening of the first White Castle restaurant. This venue is sometimes referred to as the first fast food restaurant, and White Castle as the first, all-American, fast food chain. However, while White Castle was essential in the evolution of the fast food industry – and we’ll return to it – it was not the OG modern fast food franchise.

That honour belongs to another restaurant, whose origins are 100% European, though it was for a time very popular in the United States: the Automat!

But let’s proceed in order. According to Prof Eppe, in her incredibly succinctly titled paper ‘The “Automat”. A History of Technological Transfer and the Process of Global Standardization in Modern Fast Food around 1900’, the need for fast food emerged in industrialised metropolises worldwide at the end of the 19th Century.

As the urban labour market exploded, a new social group emerged: labourers and clerks who had to endure long commutes, long work hours, and had little time to eat. Combined with industrialization and improvements in supply chains, such as better preservation methods making it easier to pack, ship and store huge quantities of food, the modern fast-food restaurant was an idea whose time had almost come. But this was not enough: innovation behind the scenes had to be met by innovative front-of-house practices …

Since the mid-1840s, technological advancement in the retail sector began to see automatic, coin-operated vending machines emerge. Early models were developed by perfume makers in the US, Britain, and France, with Parisian Philippe Leoni being at the forefront of automated fragrance sales.

In the 1870s, British engineer Parceval Everitt expanded the concept of vending machines to confectionery, and his sweet-supplying contraptions became all the rage! German chocolate maker Ludwig Stollwerck took notice during a business trip to England, and convinced his business partner brothers to invest in vending machines to sell their products. The Stollwercks thus partnered with inventor Max Sielaff [See Laugh] to develop a new range of automated dispensers for their bonbons.

The idea was for the machines to distribute chocolate samples as a marketing stunt. But the German public loved them so much that within a few years most of Stollwerck’s candy was sold through the ‘mute vendors’, as they were known back then.

What does this have to do with fast-food restaurants?

In 1895, Stollwerck and Stielaff founded a new company, devoted exclusively to automated sales of food items. This was the German Automat Company, or DAG. [Deutsche Automaten Gesellschaft]

In the same year, Sielaff had a momentous meeting with Philippe Leoni, the Parisian perfume maker. Following the success of his perfume vending machines, Leoni had diversified his business into beverages, creating the ‘Bar Automatique’, in which patrons could buy soft drinks, milk, even alcohol, from coin-operated tellers. The venue was advertised as such:

‘Visitors enter our Bar just as they would a shopping arcade, but without being observed or approached by anyone.’

In other words, the key selling point of the ‘Automatique’ was that patrons could avoid scrutiny, and, in general, human contact. A notion I think we can all get behind. There are literally people out there when you step out of your door…. Some of them even try to interact with you. Gross.

Inspired by Leoni’s success, Sielaff pitched an idea to the Stollwerck brothers: why limit ourselves to chocolates, or drinks? How about creating an entire array of vending machines, where patrons could get a full, hot meal for a few coins? The business partners agreed, and by 1896 Sielaff was able to present his ‘automatic buffet’ at the Berlin trade exhibition.

It was a huge success, prompting the DAG directors to create a new company, Automat Gmbh, and to set up the first ever entirely automated restaurant: the Automat!

The naming department did not get a bonus for creativity that year, but I guess it did what it said on the tin …

The first Automat opened in Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse [Freed rick strass-ay] and presented itself as a series of vending machines, side by side, fronted by a continuous counter. Initially, machines dispensed only cold sandwiches, but very soon the restaurant started offering hot dishes, too. Each dish was placed behind a window, which would open after inserting a coin.

The interior was rather striking, all marble and mirrors. Not only was this décor rather luxurious, but it was also easy to clean, which appeared to be Sielaff’s main concern. Urban residents at the time were starting to take stock of the health risks associated with poor food preparation, and thus appreciated restaurants which projected an image of cleanliness.

Sielaff and the Stollwercks initially marketed their Automat as the ideal restaurant for single, self-reliant, business-like men, who wanted to grab some decent grub without the torture of interacting with human beings. But Berliners did not appreciate this pitch, and the restaurant took off only when it started targeting tourists and middle class couples on shopping expeditions, still a staple of fast-food customers.

Their ads featured key words such as

‘Up-to-date!’

‘Casual’

‘Quick and good’

And

‘No tipping!’

Which is all strikingly similar to my college girlfriend’s tinder profile description…

In any event, the success was immediate, and the Automat Gmbh team opened several new locations in Berlin.

But their core business model was not to create a restaurant franchise, let alone directly manage their chain. Sielaff and the Super Chocolate Bros were more interested in manufacturing the vending machines, which would then be sold as fully integrated, automated restaurants. Their clients would then install them into their own premises throughout Germany, and use them as they saw fit.

In other words: dozens of restaurants used the Automat Gmbh vending machines, but only a limited number of Berliner venues were operated directly by the company. Therefore, the Automat restaurants were far from being a truly national chain, but it seems that at least the Berliner locations applied a certain degree of standardisation.

At the start of the new century, Automat Gmbh expanded its business by selling automated restaurants to clients in Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Sweden, Switzerland and South Africa.

But the region where their vending machines were most badly needed was the American East Coast. Its fast growing cities were home to an ever expanding army of clerks and employees, in need of a quick lunch or snack. This demand was initially met by the mushrooming cafeterias, also known as ‘quick lunch rooms’.

According to food historian Harvey Levenstein, the first such cafeteria was a Swedish-run establishment, set up in Chicago in the 1880s. The owners first positioned their venue as a ‘smorgasbord’, or sandwich buffet, which also served hot coffee. But as they were looking for a fancier sounding name, they combined the Spanish word for coffee, ‘café’, with the suffix ‘-teria’.

Business partners Joseph Horn and John Hardart, of Horn & Hardart Baking Co., operated a successful cafeteria in Philadelphia, but were looking for ways to increase efficiency and meet growing demand. During a business trip to Berlin, Horn was deeply impressed by the Automat, and thus contacted Sielaff and the Stollwercks to order a fully equipped restaurant.

The price tag came at 37,000 marks, which, according to Bundesbank estimates, equate to $309,125 in 2024 money. Unfortunately, the first ever automatic restaurant to sail for the US, was lost in a shipwreck off the Irish coast! Luckily for Horn & Hardart, Sielaff was a true customer service legend: not only he immediately dispatched a second set of vending machines, but he travelled to Philadelphia, to directly oversee their installation free of charge!

The first Automat on US soil thus opened on June 9, 1902, and it was advertised as a

‘New Idea Lunch Room’

The launch campaign claimed that, as a patron

‘You absolutely help yourself, no waiting or delay, you see what you want and get it immediately.’

By the end of 1902, another automatic restaurant had opened in New York. This was not owned by Horn & Hardart, though, but by one August Weil, another client of the Automat company in Germany. Weil’s Automat attracted some good business on Broadway, which may have prompted the two entrepreneurs from ‘Philly’ to expand to the Big Apple.

Very soon, the Horn & Hardart coin-op cafeterias dominated the New York market, especially in Manhattan. While their machines were still provided by the Automat Gmbh, the premises and furnishings took on a distinctive American feel: with their Art Nouveau touches, they were still luxurious compared to modern fast food chains, but were definitely simpler and more practical. The lunch rooms were larger than their German counterparts, and the table layout encouraged strangers to sit together and engage in *dry heaving* casual chit chat.

By 1910, the ‘H&H’ automated eateries were so popular that they were celebrated as an all-American invention, steeped in the country’s tradition of democracy and stealing other nation’s ideas and calling it their own. A Washington Post article from March 29 claimed that

‘The automat was born in New York … It was exported to Germany, and there it has flourished like a green bay tree. It appears that the Germans have an idea that Americans never eat except the food and drink be served by a slot machine … The crowning glory of the quick lunch room as an American institution is its democracy. The Wall Street banker and the Wall Street newsboy regularly eat . . . at the same place. With all its faults, the quick lunch room is an American institution of which we ought not to be ashamed.’

The Automat experience may have broken down class barriers amongst patrons, but according to Prof Epple:

‘This kind of democracy did not include everybody. On the contrary, the economic success of the Automat in New York and Philadelphia relied on the exclusion of black people and immigrants, who could be perfectly “trapped behind the Automat”. It was their miserably paid labour that made food in the Automat so cheap’

Early marketing material and imagery also suggests that Automats were staffed by African American cooks and cleaners, who received low wages and worked long hours.
We can glean some hints of Automat working conditions from a September 15, 1917 article, published by Philadelphia’s Evening Public Ledger:

‘In order to give their men better working conditions, several of the all-night restaurants operated … by the Horn and Hardart Baking Company will be closed during the early hours of the morning. After six months of exhaustive study of working conditions, the officials of the company have decided to put their men on an eight-hour shift instead of the old twelve-hour schedule. No reduction in wages will accompany the shortening of the working day’

Which sounds great: shorter hours, same pay! Although the article specified that the new labour regulations applied to five out of six restaurants in Philadelphia, but there was no mention of the New York venues.

In the Big Apple, Horn and Hardart proved to be far ahead of their time in another department: electric vehicles. An advert published by the New York Edison Company in May 1918 boasts how the restaurateurs had bought nine electric trucks from them! Of course, before Henry Ford ruined everything by making automobiles affordable to the plebians of the world, helping them feel like they deserved nice things in life, electric cars and their wealthy owners were king of the road, as it should be…

OK, but how did a New York Automat work exactly? As a patron, you would walk in, and take a look at the dishes displayed behind the vending machines’ windows. You would then insert the right amount of nickels into a slot and turn a knob to open the window. Food was served hot or cold, on rather refined dishware and crockery. Once you had removed your dish of choice, kitchen workers would replace it with a new serving. Service was thus immediate, and patrons did not have to endure lengthy queues or eye contact with another human.

Behind the scenes, kitchen staff operated by following highly standardised practices. According to author Nicolas Bromell, in his paper The Automat: Preparing the Way for Fast Food, recipes and instructions were rigorously compiled into extremely detailed training manuals:

‘The corporation imposed regulations on how big the square of bacon on top of the beans should be (one-by-one inch), exactly how long to cook it, how much to serve, when to turn over the slice of bacon. Automat manuals told managers not only how to prepare food, but also how to position it on a plate’

Preparations were frequently sampled by ruthless ‘central commissaries’ employed by Horn & Hardart, who had no qualms in harshly suppressing any deviation from corporate dogma. According to one kitchen employee: ‘We sent back 500, a thousand, gallons of soup because an ingredient was missing. Not because it was bad—an ingredient was missing!’

The aim was to reassure loyal customers that all dishes tasted exactly the same, all the time, across the entire restaurant chain.

So, to recap, the Horn & Hardart Automats were a restaurant chain, offering food for fast consumption, prepared according to rigid standards. These elements would make them the first, modern fast food chain in America, but the company would fail to replicate their incredible success beyond the confines of New York. Quoting from Bromell again:

‘The changes Horn & Hardart initiated may have eventually spread nation-wide, but the cafeterias relied on the transportation system and demographics of New York City to keep this new format profitable’

In essence, in order for their business model to work, Horn & Hardart heavily relied on Manhattan’s high density of office buildings and subway stations, which ensured a constant footfall of hungry patrons.

It would take another restaurant chain to solve these problems and truly introduce the world to the idea of a widely geographically spread restaurant with consistent food and service regardless of where you are- see our surprisingly fascinating video- From 0 to 1000 to 0- What Ever Happened to Howard Johnson’s?

But going back to Horn & Hardart, nonetheless, the company enjoyed an enormous volume of revenue and kept growing. By 1952, Horn & Hardart operated 171 restaurants across Philadelphia and New York. Not all of them were Automats, but this figure made them at the time one of the largest restaurant chains in the world.

By the end of the decade, however, the chain was haemorrhaging customers: the culprit was not competitors, but a shift in American lifestyle. Tens of thousands of urban residents started moving to suburbs, and soon also corporate headquarters moved away from Manhattan, the Automats’ chief hunting ground.

In the 1960s, Horn & Hardart tried to differentiate their business by opening traditional suburban restaurants, selling frozen meals, and even marketing their own brand of coffee – which can still be bought today.

The original Automat chain is now largely forgotten, and definitely not immediately associated with the concept of ‘modern fast food chain’. Other names might spring to mind: economic giants such as McDonald’s or Burger King, whose rise to culinary stardom was propelled by a food item as American as the bald eagle: the hamburger.

But neither of those chains can boast the claim of having been the original hamburger staple fast food restaurant.

That honour arguably belongs to White Castle, which can also be credited with introducing many innovations which are now part and parcel with modern fast food restaurants. But before we get to them, it is worth exploring the origins of the ‘king of sandwiches’- the humble hamburger…

We can trace its first steps back to Germany, again, where local cooks had been preparing a tasty, flattened meatball of ground beef since the 17th century, known as frikadelle. German sailors, many of whom travelled out of Hamburg, popularised the frikadelle in the port of New York City sometime in the 19th Century, where it was presumably re-christened as ‘Hamburg steak’.

The first mention of a ‘hamburg steak’, recorded by the Library of Congress’s collection of historic newspapers, comes from an 1872 article in the Evening star. The unnamed journalist sings the praises of Thorpe’s, a restaurant located 14 miles outside of San Francisco:

‘As for the Hamburg steak, that is a long way beyond my powers of description … the memories of its juicy tenderness and delicious flavour will long live to tickle the palate and awaken pleasant associations’

Of note: the author does not bother to describe what a ‘hamburg steak’ is, implying that, as of 1872, the readers were already well acquainted with the dish. Another interesting point: the paper was published in Washington D.C., but it was about a restaurant in California, implying that the hamburger was already an established staple from coast to coast!

The first recorded mention of a ‘Hamburger sandwich’ instead, can be traced back to an 1889 article by the Walla Walla Union, in Washington State. This implies that between 1872 and 1889 an unknown cook, probably the owner of a lunch wagon, market stall, or county fair booth, had the brilliant idea of stuffing two slices of bread with America’s favourite meatball.

This dating lends credence to the claims of two possible contenders to the title of Father of the Hamburger.

The first candidate is Charlie Nagreen, from Seymour, Wisconsin, now home of the Hamburger Hall of Fame. According to locals, the 15-year-old Charlie sold his first hamburger in 1885, whilst manning a Hamburg steak stand at the Outagamie County Fair. He realised attendees had trouble eating the meatballs while walking around the Fair’s exhibits, and thus Charlie had the simple and brilliant idea of smashing the Hamburg steaks between two slices of bread.
But the good people of Akron, Ohio, might beg to disagree. The local Akron Beacon Journal, writing in 1951, attributed the honour of the invention to Frank and Charles Menchen. While at a County Fair in 1885, the two brothers ran out of their lead ingredient, ground sausage, and replaced it with ground beef instead. The new sandwich was an instant hit, and the brothers named it after the town hosting the Fair: Hamburg, New York!

Other origin stories place the laurels of triumph upon the heads of German cook Otto Krause, Danish immigrant Louis Lassen, or Texan Fletcher “Uncle Fletch” Davis. But these stories claim the first ‘burgers were grilled in 1891, 1900 and 1904, respectively.

Whoever truly first invented it, some 30 years after its descent from culinary heavens, the hamburger crossed paths with restaurateur Walter Anderson, of Wichita, Kansas. In early 1916, he perfected a method of preparing tasty hamburgers, by smashing the beef patty with a spatula, seasoning it with shredded onions, and then placing both halves of a bun onto the meat, to pick up its flavour.

On October 16, 1916, Anderson bought a street car, fitted it with a counter and three stools, and started selling his tasty, squared, perfectly grilled hamburgers. They were nicknamed ‘sliders’ and sold at the price of 5 cents, or 80 cents in today’s value. Patrons were encouraged to take home several sliders at the time, with the slogan

‘Buy ‘Em By the Sack!’

Anderson’s business was doing great. By 1920 he was able to open two more stands, and picked up a business partner along the way: Edgar Waldo “Billy” Ingram, a realtor and insurance salesman. Billy chose the name of their new company, a brand which stood for purity and strength: White Castle. And on March 21, 1921, Walter and Billy opened the first fixed White Castle location, in Wichita.

Already from the get-go, Anderson and Ingram devised what would become the next leap forward in the evolutionary development of American fast food. The Horn & Hardart Automats had introduced the concept of standardised menus across a number of similar, immediately recognised locations. Their kitchens, however, still operated according to traditional practices and cooking methods.

It was White Castle which helped pioneer that defining feature of fast food chains: a carefully designed and systematised cooking process, akin to a factory assembly line. This process had obvious benefits: first, it allowed for staff to make the best possible use of every available square inch of space within their cramped kitchen; second, it made it possible for them to quickly cook and serve high volumes of food to meet increasing demand. Third, it helped make it so the cooks didn’t need any real extensive training.

The White Castle founders had another intuition: making their kitchen visible to patrons. You see, in 1906 author Upton Sinclair had published his novel The Jungle, which had exposed the bad practices of the meat packing industry. Since then, the American public had grown suspicious of preparations involving ground meat. But an open kitchen would reassure patrons about the cleanliness of White Castle employees!

This had another unintended consequence: it revealed to the public the highly efficient burger assembly line devised by Anderson and Ingram. And according to journalist Adam Chandler, the patrons loved it!

‘There was a real assembly-line fervor that was raging across America. White Castle adopted this model … [They] had these efficiencies built into it that really spoke to the fascinations of the era.

The success of White Castle was immediate, spawning copycat restaurants as early as 1922, such as Royal Castle in Miami, or White Tower in Milwaukee. Some of these early imitators were successful in their own right, but could not keep up with Anderson’s and Ingram’s fervent creativity and constant introduction of innovative features.

Such as the custom-made buns, baked to White Castle’s specifications, and perfectly tailored to the size and shape of their square hamburger patties. Or the introduction of specially lined cardboard boxes, which kept the sandwiches warm, and prevented them from getting soggy.

Next, in 1931 as the aforementioned Howard Johnson’s was beginning their own insane rise in parallel, again see our video From 0 to 1000 to 0- What Happened to Howard Johnson’s, Anderson and Ingram were also perfecting the efficiency of their supply chain by introducing frozen beef patties. These could be shipped securely by a central supplier to any White Castle location in the US, ensuring consistency of size and taste.

By 1933, Anderson and Ingram directly controlled 125 White Castle restaurants across 16 different cities. At this stage, Walter Anderson developed a strong interest in the growing sector of aviation, and thus decided to sell his share of the company to Ingram for $340,000 – almost $8.3 million in today’s value.

Now the sole helmsman, in 1934 Ingram introduced a concept adopted by later fast food chains: controlling the supply chain by acquiring or straight-out setting up partner companies. In this specific case, Ingram created a new business called Porcelain Steel Buildings Company, dedicated to manufacturing kitchen equipment, front-of-house furnishings, and even portable buildings made with steel and porcelain panels.

In other words: White Castle was in direct control of building their own, well, White Castles!

Incidentally, during WWII, the Porcelain Steel Buildings Company was drafted into the war effort, and contracted by the Department of Defence to build amphibious vehicles for the military.

But in any event, the White Castle chain continued to grow after the war, becoming the first chain to sell one billion burgers by 1961. The company today includes some 345 locations, all based in the US, and all still controlled directly by White Castle, which has remained a family-run business for four generations, with Lisa Ingram being the latest CEO.

While White Castle is generally acknowledged as the first modern fast food chain, this mantle is sometimes attributed to another business, A&W Restaurants. The adventure of A&W started on June 20, 1919, when Roy W. Allen opened his root beer stand in Lodi, California. In 1922, Allen partnered with a former employee called Frank Wright, to open additional vending points.

The two combined their initials, thus coining the brand A&W. In 1923 they opened their first restaurant in Sacramento, California, dishing out frosted mugs of ice cold root beer to wash down sandwiches, peanuts, popcorn and other snacks. Hamburgers were added to the menu at a later stage.

So, just by comparing those dates, it is evident how the White Castle duo, Anderson and Ingram, got to market earlier than Allen and Wright. As early as 1921, White Castle was already a chain, as Anderson and Ingram already managed one restaurant and three stands.

What A&W Restaurants can claim, however, is being the first chain to have become a fast-food franchise, a key ingredient of most modern fast food companies.

In other words, they sold to individuals the authorization to market their branded, easily recognisable and trusted food and drinks.

It was a win-win: as early as 1925, Allen and Wright sold their franchise rights for a sweet upfront fee; franchisees, taking advantage from a growing brand recognition, would easily attract patrons without the hassle of figuring out a winning menu or the right marketing strategy.

To further attract franchisees, A&W promised that they could earn up to a restaurants’ average yearly income in just six months.

In 1927, two of the early franchisees were J. Willard and Alice Marriott, who opened the first A&W in Washington, D.C. After opening two more successful venues, in 1957 Willard and Alice founded what would become their primary business: Marriott Hotels!

Decades later, the A&W chain became notable also for the introduction of what was, on paper, a fantastic idea …

According to the chain’s official website:

‘In the 1980s, then-owner A. Alfred Taubman launched the “Third is the Word” campaign to promote A&W’s new third-pound burgers and compete with another brand’s smaller quarter-pound burger.’

The company aggressively marketed a hamburger weighing one-third of a pound, or 150 grams, for the same price as the competitor’s smaller patty, at a quarter of a pound, or 113 grams. But, as Taubman’s recollected:

‘Despite our best efforts, including first-rate TV and radio promotional spots, they just weren’t selling’

It was a no-brainer: more meat for the same price. But why were they still losing to competitors? After extensive market research, Taubman found the answer:

‘The majority of participants incorrectly believed one-third of a pound was actually smaller than a quarter of a pound’

Thus, the general public’s lack of understanding of fractions tanked the idea. Despite A&W still being a beloved chain to many Americans, it would never achieve the same popularity as their quarter-pounder competitor. Which was, of course, McDonald’s!

An overview of fast food history cannot avoid mentioning the ‘Golden Arches’. But as we already released several videos about the origins and legends of McDonald’s, we will only cover some basics here. If you want much, much more in the hilarity of all of it, see our video: What’s So Special About McDonald’s Fries?

But for a brief outline here, brothers Maurice and Dick McDonald, also known as ‘Mac’ and ‘Dick’ moved from New Hampshire to California in 1928, seeking employment in the booming film industry. After a brief stint at Columbia Movie Studios, the brothers purchased a theatre in Glendale, Los Angeles County.

They got their first taste of the restaurant industry via their dad, who sadly was not named Ronald, but, instead, Patrick. Senior McDonald started a hamburger and hot-dog stand called “The Airdome” in 1937 in Monrovia California and, in so doing, indirectly changed the fast-food world forever. After gaining some experience and money with this, his sons then branched out on their own, making a classic drive-in style barbeque restaurant in San Bernardino that did quite well.

Eventually they got to thinking how they could improve the restaurant, with the pair noting they were particularly inspired by Henry Ford’s assembly line process. Thus, they began brainstorming how to streamline several aspects of their restaurant system to be vastly more efficient in pretty much every possible way a restaurant can be, including creating an assembly line process of food preparation and getting rid of waiters. In all of this, helping to significantly decrease prices and time from order to getting your food, and throwing their own contributions into the birth to the more modern incarnation of the fast-food restaurant experience we all know today. And so it was that after shutting down their restaurant for a few months to re-tool and train their staff in 1948, they launched this version of their establishment and what they called their “Speedee Service System”, with one of their staple products being their salted, phallic shaped potato innards.

While today using french fries as a staple product in a restaurant geared toward serving customers more or less immediately upon order is par for the course, at the time it was not given that french fries are actually a pretty labor and time intensive creation from start to finish- needing at minimum to peel the potatoes, dice them appropriately, rinse off excess starch, then dry them, and then after all that, finally, spend some time frying them up. And heaven forbid they get cold, as cold fries are generally not awesome. Or god help you if you slice and dice them too early, as they also have a tendency to discolor rapidly if you do so. Further, at this point, all of this was more or less done by hand on site. As such, many similar burger places of the era who were trying to focus on speed would go with the French Fries’ rather attractive cousin, the potato chip.

But, as noted, the McDonald’s brothers wanted to go with French Fries instead. So just how did they come up with their iconic fry and who all was involved? Well, go watch our video What’s So Special About McDonald’s Fries after you’re done with this one for more.

But going back to the general tale, during the process of all this, Mac and Dick had also removed all amenities which encouraged patrons to hang around their joint without buying much food, if any: the jukebox, for example, had to go! Next, they scaled down their menu to the items which represented the vast majority of all sales: burgers, coffee, sodas, pie and potato chips. After another round of careful review, the latter two were replaced by milkshakes and the aforementioned french fries respectively.

Another important change was the introduction of the Self-Service System. Previously, patrons could wait in their cars as ‘carhops’ collected their orders and brought them their food. Now, customers had to walk to the counter, collect their burgers and fries in paper wrappers, and take their food home, as the restaurant had very few seats available.

Finally, as noted, the McD brothers took a leaf from the White Castle rulebook and perfected the assembly line in the kitchen. Each member of their 12-person crew had one specialised job, which they had to perform to perfection, in order to achieve the perfect union of quality and quantity: a replicable taste which did not disappoint, produced in huge numbers.

By 1952, the McDonald’s at San Bernardino was already attracting the attention of other entrepreneurs, which would learn from the lessons of Mac and Dick. One of them was Keith Cramer, who later co-founded Insta Burger King in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1953. He would later drop the ‘Insta’, and continue running his chain as ‘Burger King’.

In 1952, the McDonald brothers adopted the franchising practices pioneered by A&W and Howard Johnson’s, with three licensed locations opening by 1953. But the McDonald’s brand really started taking over the nation only when Mac and Dick partnered with milkshake machine salesman Ray Kroc.

On March 2, 1955, Kroc founded McDonald’s Systems, Inc, to sell franchise rights. Or rather, award them, as he had developed a new system: instead of paying an upfront fee, now franchisees were to devolve 0.5% of their gross sales to Mac, Dick, and Kroc.

The trio soon partnered with a new buddy, Harry Sonneborn, who would introduce another innovation to deal with franchises. McDonald’s Systems would invest their funds into buying commercial real estate in promising locations, and then rent the venues to their franchisees.

If the newly opened McDonald’s was profitable, it would attract footfall and in general help drive the economy of the area, thus increasing the value of the real estate. The parent company would then collect rent, in addition to their 0.5%.

If the new franchisees did a poor job, or failed to honour their agreements, the company would evict them, find another tenant, or sell the venue – again, for a profit.

So, whatever the prospects of a newly opened McDonald’s restaurant, the company was bound to make big bucks out of it. And a primary source of revenue was not fast food, but real estate!

Indeed, in modern times, McDonald’s makes about 1/3 of their revenue from their franchises on real estate, all once causing Ray Kroc to quip he wasn’t in the hamburger business, but rather “My business is real estate.”

The success of this system ensured the spectacular growth of McDonald’s – and later of its imitators – throughout the US, and worldwide.

As a consequence, new companies and businesses sprung up, to ensure that growing chains would be supplied with the necessary ingredients, kitchen equipment, packaging, furniture, even toys to accompany their kid-friendly menus, the latter a concept famously pioneered by the aforementioned Howard Johnson’s. Again, see our video: From 0 to 1000 to 0- What Ever Happened to Howard Johnson’s?

To recap, McDonald’s were not the first business to disseminate fast food nation-wide. They did not invent the concept of standardised food across their restaurants, nor the practice of assembly-line cooking, nor the restaurant franchising model. And were actually quite late to the game in quite a lot of these things. But by perfecting innovations already introduced by Horn & Hardart, White Castle, Howard Johnson’s, and A&W, they were able to shape the economy of fast food as we know it today. Though, as illustrated, humans have been taking advantage of fast-food seemingly as long as we have been humaning. But it took modern industrial food production and distribution, and a handful of pioneers to take this all to the next level in the delicious artery clogging establishments we know and love today.

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In the early morning hours of June 13, 1944, the residents of East London were awoken by an unusual sound: a loud, high-pitched chugging like a motorcycle with a broken muffler. Looking up, they saw a small aircraft skimming over the rooftops at tremendous speed, a tongue of flame trailing from its tail. Moments later, the aircraft plunged to the ground in Bethnal Green, and a massive explosion shook the ground. The blast shattered windows, crumbled brick walls, and blew the Great Eastern Railway bridge over Grove road in half. When the smoke and dust settled, 6 people lay dead and 30 severely injured. Over the following days rescue crews combed the rubble for the remains of the crashed aircraft and its crew. They found none, because there were none. London had just come under attack by a new kind of weapon: an unmanned, jet-powered flying bomb. The Germans called it V-1, the British the “buzz bomb” or “doodlebug.” Over the following year, thousands of V-1s would rain down on London and other cities, killing and injuring many thousands in turn, and forcing the British to turn to increasingly desperate measures to stem the tide – including one of the boldest and most badass tactics in the history of aerial warfare. This is the story of how one of Nazi Germany’s most effective “wonder weapons” was finally defeated.

The V-1 was the brainchild of Fritz Gusslau and Robert Lusser, engineers at the Berlin-based Argus Motoren company. During the 1930s, Argus perfected a new type of propulsion system known as the pulse-jet, originally invented by engineer Paul Schmidt. Among the simplest forms of jet propulsion, a pulse-jet consists of a tapered metal tube with spring-loaded shutter valves at one end, a fuel injector, and a spark plug for ignition. When the fuel is injected and ignited, the increase in pressure causes the shutter valves to close, forcing the combustion gases to exit out the rear of the engine. The resulting partial vacuum then causes the shutter valves to open, letting in fresh air which mixes with the fuel and ignites, starting the cycle anew. This cycle, which repeats around 500 times per minute, produces the pulse-jet’s distinctive buzzing or chugging sound. Once the engine is started, the spark plug is no longer needed, as the acoustics of the tube maintain a stable flame front that ignites the fuel-air mixture during every cycle. While loud and inefficient, the pulse-jet had the advantage of being extremely cheap and easy to build – perfect for disposable unmanned aircraft. At first Gusslau and Lusser proposed a remote-controlled target drone for training anti-aircraft gunners, but this eventually changed to an autonomous cruise missile armed with a high-explosive warhead. With its regular manned bomber force severely depleted, the German Luftwaffe was desperate for a new means of attacking the British Isles, and so on June 19, 1942, the flying bomb project was approved. Production of the engine was awarded to Argus, the fuselage to the Fieseler aircraft company, and the guidance system to the Askania company. Though designated in-house as the Fieseler Fi.103, to conceal its true purpose from the Allies the weapon was officially dubbed the Flakzeilgerät-76 or “anti-aircraft aiming device.” Throughout its service it was also known by various codenames such as kirschstein or “cherry pit” and maikäfer or “May bug.” But it was Hans Schwartz Van Berkl, a journalist for the Nazi newspaper Das Reich, who would bestow the missile with its most infamous name: Vergeltungswaffe-1 or “vengeance weapon one”.

The finalized V-1 design measured 7.5 metres long with a wingspan of 5 metres, the fuselage being built out of heavy rolled sheet steel and the detachable wings from plywood. Its Argus 109-014 pulse jet engine, producing 3.5 kilonewtons of thrust, was mounted on top of the fuselage and gave the V-1 a maximum speed of around 400 mph or 640 km/h – faster than most contemporary propeller-driven fighter aircraft. The engine ran off regular 80-octane aviation gasoline fed from a 640 litre tank in the fuselage, which was pressurized using a spherical tank of compressed nitrogen. The aircraft had no ailerons, while the rudder and elevators were operated by pneumatic servos controlled by a simple autopilot. This consisted of two gyroscopes to control pitch and yaw, a magnetic compass to maintain heading, and an atmospheric pressure sensor to maintain altitude. The range of the weapon was controlled by a simple wind vane device in the nose connected to an odometer, which was set just before launch. After a predetermined number of revolutions, the odometer fired a set of explosive bolts that jammed the elevators downward, sending the missile into a crash dive. As you might expect, this system was highly inaccurate, being easily thrown off by winds aloft, but was accurate enough for use against city-sized targets like London. Also of note, the sudden dive also had the unintended effect of making the fuel slosh to the front of the tank, causing the engine to cut out. Citizens of target cities quickly learned to use this sudden cutoff to their advantage, as it meant they had between 5 and 15 seconds to take cover before the missile impacted the ground and detonated its 850-kilogram high-explosive warhead.

Development of the V-1 took place at Peenemunde, the Luftwaffe’s top-secret research centre on the Baltic coast. Here, on Christmas Eve 1942, the first prototype missile was successfully launched from the island of Usedom. The Argus 109 pulse jet did not produce enough thrust for the V-1 to take off under its own power, so the missile had to be launched using a steam-powered catapult similar to that used on modern aircraft carriers. This consisted of a 49-metre long inclined ramp with a slotted tube running along its length, into which a dumbbell-shaped piston was inserted. A small lug protruded from the top of the piston through the slot in the tube, which was connected to the bottom of the missile. The catapult was then connected to a steam generator which reacted concentrated hydrogen peroxide with potassium permanganate to create a hot, high-pressure mixture of steam and oxygen. This propelled the V-1 from zero to 320 km/h in around one second, after which the missile’s own engine took over.

Yet despite this early start, development of the V-1 dragged on for more than a year, with dozens of missiles being test-launched before the design was perfected. Many of these teething problems were due to poor manufacturing quality, a consequence of German industry crumbling under constant Allied bombardment. Full-scale production of the missile did not begin until April 1944, with the first batch of 1,000 being manufactured at the Volkswagen plant in Fallersleben near Hamburg. Meanwhile, a new unit was formed under the command of Luftwaffe Oberst Max Wachtel to launch the missiles. As with the V-1 itself, the unit was officially designated Flakregiment-155 to disguise its true purpose from the Allies. The regiment arrived in the Pas-de-Calais region of France in early June 1944, but did not receive the equipment needed to launch its missiles until the 12th – nearly a week after Allied forces successfully landed in Normandy. This delay was caused not only by material and logistics shortages, but also political infighting over the nature of the V-1 launch sites. Adolf Hitler, obsessed with monumental fortifications, insisted that the missiles be launched from large, heavily fortified concrete emplacements. Many of his generals, however, saw such installations as too vulnerable to Allied air attack, and argued for smaller, mobile launch sites. Luftwaffe Reichsmarschall Herman Göring struck a compromise, ordering 4 fixed and 96 mobile sites.

In the end, the Generals were proven correct, as Allied aerial reconnaissance photographs immediately revealed the existence of the fixed V-1 sites – easily recognizable by their launch ramps and trio of strange, J-shaped buildings. These structures, used to store the missiles prior to launch, resembled skis turned on their side, and so the launch installations became known as “ski sites.” At first the nature of these sites was a mystery, but when it was realized that all the ramps were aimed directly at London, their purpose became chillingly clear. Earlier, in the summer of 1943, a British aerial photo interpreter named Constance Babington Smith spotted similar launch ramps at the Peenemunde test centre, as well as a small cruciform object 7 metres wide which she correctly interpreted as a flying bomb. In order to halt development of this and other German rocket weapons, in August 1943 the Allies launched Operation Crossbow. The opening act of Crossbow, Operation Hydra, was a night bombing raid against the Peenemunde facility, conducted on the night of the 17th and 18th of August. The raid was largely successful, killing many German scientists and disrupting weapons research for two months. However, many of the bombs also fell on the nearby Trassenheide concentration camp, killing many forced labourers.
In any event, once ski sites began appearing in France in early 1944, both the Royal Air Force and U.S. 8th Air Force launched a concerted bombing campaign to destroy them. However, this simply forced the Germans to abandon the fixed launch sites and switch to simpler “modified sites,” which used prefabricated metal launch ramps and were easier to camouflage in forests or structures like factories and farm yards. By the early morning of June 13, 1944, the Germans were finally ready to unleash their new secret weapon on the British capital. But the opening salvo would be a modest one, for of the 100 launch sites ordered, 65 had been completed – while only 10 had sufficient supplies and spare parts to become operational. Nonetheless, Oberst Wachtel proceeded with Operation Eisbär or “Polar Bear” – the campaign of German revenge for the D-Day landings.

The launch sequence for the V-1 began with the missile being wheeled out of its J-shaped hangar, whereupon its wooden wings were attached, its fuel tank filled, its nitrogen spheres pressurized, and its range vanes set. The missile was then wheeled into a square building built entirely without metal or any other magnetic materials. You see, one of the major problems which had plagued the V-1’s development was its sheet metal skin throwing off the magnetic compass. This was overcome inside the metal-free hangar by beating the missile’s skin with wooden mallets, forcing the fuselage’s magnetic field to align with the direction of the launch ramp. The missile was then mounted on the launch ramp, and connected to the steam generator and launch controls, whereupon the launch crew fled to the safety of a control bunker or a slit trench. Compressed air was used to start the pulse jet, the gyroscopes were spun up, and the steam generator activated, launching the missile up the ramp.

The first V-1 was launched at 3:30 AM on June 13, 1944, quickly followed by 9 more. Of these, 4 crashed shortly after takeoff, 2 plunged into the English Channel, 3 came down in fields in Kent and Surrey, and one reached London, coming down in Bethnal Green. But the pace of the attack quickly accelerated. By the end of the following day, 393 V-1s had been launched. By June 18, that number had risen to 500. While many of the bombs failed to reach their targets, when one did the effects were devastating. The blast from the giant warhead could pulverize brick and concrete, while the momentary vacuum left in its wake created a “double-whammy” effect that could be just as destructive as the initial explosion. On one occasion, the heavy wooden doors of a firehouse were slammed shut by the blast only to be wrenched back open by the vacuum. Londoners soon came to dread the ominous buzzing sound of the “doodlebug” and the cold, robotic way it ploughed towards its target, which British author Evelyn Waugh described as:

“…impersonal as a plague…as though the city were infested with enormous venomous insects.”

To counter this terrifying new threat, the British launched Operation Diver, sending 23,000 personnel and thousands of antiaircraft guns and barrage balloons to the coast of Kent where they could intercept V-1s launched from the Pas de Calais. As luck would have it, British gunners were able to take advantage of a powerful new weapon just then coming into service: the proximity fuze. Essentially a miniaturized radar set mounted in the nose of a shell, the proximity fuze detonated the shell when it came within a certain distance of its target, turning what were previously near-misses into kills. The coastal guns also enjoyed the advantage of a no-fly zone established within their field of fire – allowing them to shoot at anything that moved- and the use of the new American SCR-584 gun-laying radar. This gun screen proved remarkably effective, shooting down 50% of all V-1s launched in the first week of the campaign. By the last week of August, their success rate had risen to 84%.

The task of destroying those V-1s that managed to get through the artillery screen fell to eight fighter squadrons stationed around London. These squadrons were equipped with the powerful Hawker Tempest V and Supermarine Spitfire Mk. IX and XIV fighters, which were just fast enough to catch the speedy doodlebugs. Even so, actually shooting down the flying bombs proved more challenging than expected. Not only were they small and hard to hit, but their thick sheet-metal bodies deflected the standard .303-calibre bullets used in British aircraft machine guns. 20-millimetre cannons had more penetrating power but a lower velocity, forcing pilots to attack from shorter ranges and exposing them to extreme danger if the bomb’s warhead detonated. Wing Commander Roland Beaumont recalled:

“For the first few days it was rather interesting because none of us knew exactly what was going to happen; they were bombs, after all, and they were expected to blow up. We first of all started opening fire on them from about 400 yards, for safety, from astern; they were a tiny target and we used to miss them rather consistently, and so we halved the range to 200 yards. When you fired at that range and the thing exploded in front of you, you were travelling at 400 mph or more and you’d have no time to avoid the explosion, and as soon as you saw it you were in it and you’d go through the centre of the fireball and come out the other side and always come out upside-down. It was some time before we could figure this one out, but you were in fact going through a partial vacuum as you went through the centre of the explosion. In a partial vacuum the torque of this enormous propeller had the effect of twisting the aeroplane over. It was rather extraordinary. The only adverse effects were fire damage to the outside of the aeroplane – the rudder and the elevator of the Tempest were fabric-covered and quite often this used to burn…”

Other pilots were not so lucky, with 5 being killed in V-1 explosions. This included Free French pilot Jean Maridor, who died on August 3, 1944 while trying to stop a V-1 from landing on a military hospital in Kent. The extreme risks posed by shooting at V-1s prompted Wing Commander Beaumont to develop a bold new method for defeating the doodlebug:

“I had used up my ammunition on one V1 and saw another and decided to do something about it. The idea was to get my wingtip close under the wingtip of the V1 but not touching it, then gradually raising my right wing causing the airflow over it to make the V1 bank. This affected the gyro-stabilization of the missile, causing it to go out of control, toppling over and crashing.”

“Wing tipping” would not be the only clever means of defeating the V-1s as we’ll get into shortly, but it nonetheless soon became the standard method for taking them down, though it was not without its own risks. The Spitfire and Tempest, being optimized for lightness and speed, were built of relatively delicate aluminium alloy, meaning many an aircraft returned to base with severely damaged wings following a wrestling match with the much more robust V-1.

Another valuable weapon which had just come into service was the Gloster Meteor, Britain’s first jet-powered fighter. With a top speed of 600 mph, the Meteor was more than a match for the V-1, though its 20-millimetre cannons had an unfortunate habit of jamming. On August 4, 1944, Flying Officer T.D. ‘Dixie’ Dean of No.616 squadron used wing tipping to bring down a V-1 over Tunbridge Wells, scoring the first-ever combat victory for an Allied jet aircraft. By war’s end, No.616 Squadron would shoot down a total of 13 V-1s. The most prolific V-1 ace, however, was Tempest pilot Squadron Leader Joseph Berry of No.501 Squadron, credited with 59-1/2 victories. He was followed in the rankings by Dutch Spitfire pilots Flying Officer R.F. Burgwal and Flight Lieutenant J.L. Plesman with 21 and 12 victories, respectively.

The efficiency of Operation Diver steadily increased until, by late August 1944, hardly any V-1s were getting through the defensive screen. For example, of the 94 bombs launched on August 28, 65 were brought down by guns, 33 by fighter aircraft, and 2 by the belt of barrage balloons encircling London. The Allied air forces also continued their Crossbow bombing campaign against V-1 launch sites and storage depots, greatly reducing the number that could be fired. But of the 3,531 V-1s that actually reached the English coast, the vast majority were defeated not by guns or aircraft but by clever counter-intelligence. Though some V-1s were fitted with radio transmitters so their flights could be tracked, the Germans relied more on secret agents to report where the bombs fell. What the Germans didn’t know, however, was that nearly all their agents in the British Isles had been captured and turned in a massive counter-intelligence operation called Double Cross. Using Double-Cross agents, British Intelligence was able to convince the Germans that most of their V-1s were overshooting their targets. This, in turn, led the Germans to set their ranges too short, causing many V-1s to dive harmlessly into the English Channel. But what ultimately defeated the V-1 were the advancing Allied ground forces on the continent, who in September 1944 overran the launch sites in France and brought the main bombardment campaign to an end.

Undeterred, the Germans switched to launching V-1s from beneath the wings of Heinkel He-111 and He-117 bombers. Around 1,200 of these bombs were launched against Portsmouth and Southhampton and 50 against Manchester, but due to stability problems few actually reached their targets. But as the strength of the Luftwaffe gradually dwindled and more and more airfields were overrun, the V-1 campaign quickly tapered off, with the last bomb to reach England being shot down over Suffolk on March 29, 1945 – barely a week before Nazi Germany surrendered.

By this time, however, England had come under attack by an even more advanced weapon: the V-2 ballistic missile. Fuelled by alcohol and liquid oxygen, the V-2 climbed up to the edge of space before plunging down on its target at twice the speed of sound, making it impossible to hear or see coming or to shoot down. Development of the V-2 actually began long before the V-1, but due to its greater complexity it was not ready for operational use until September 1944 – around the same time the main V-1 campaign came to an end. That said, between September 7, 1944 and March 27, 1945, 3,172 V2s were launched against targets in southern England, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. However, the V-2 was even more inaccurate than the V-1 – a flaw made worse by misinformation on missile impacts spread by the Double Cross System – and even less reliable. Also, its silent, supersonic approach ironically made it less effective as a weapon of terror, lacking the dread factor of the V-1’s distinctive droning sound.

But arguably the V-2’s greatest flaw was its unjustifiably astronomical cost. Each V-1 cost around 5,000 Reichsmarks – equivalent to about $500 USD. Of the 10,500 V-1s launched over the course of the war, 3,531 reached their targets, killing 6,000, wounding 40,000, and causing around $150 million in property damage. This comes out to 0.008 casualties and $28 of damage for every dollar spent on the weapon. Each V-2, by contrast, cost a whopping 100,000 Reichsmarks or $17,000 dollars – the same as a top-of-the-line fighter aircraft – not counting development costs. Yet the 3,172 V2s launched during the war only killed around 5,000 people and wounded 6,500 – a casualties-to-cost ratio nearly 40 times smaller. The human cost of its creation was also atrocious. Around 20,000 concentration camp inmates died in horrific underground factories producing Hitler’s second vengeance weapon, making the V-2 the only weapon in history to kill more people in its manufacture than in combat. Indeed, the V-2 program diverted so many vital resources from the German war effort that American theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson once remarked:

“… those of us who were seriously engaged in the war were very grateful to Wernher von Braun [the director of the V-2 program[. We knew that each V-2 cost as much to produce as a high-performance fighter airplane. We knew that German forces on the fighting fronts were in desperate need of airplanes, and that the V-2 rockets were doing us no military damage. From our point of view, the V-2 program was almost as good as if Hitler had adopted a policy of unilateral disarmament.”

Thus, despite its relative crudeness and its inability to secure victory for the Third Reich, the V-1 was among the most cost-effective Nazi secret weapons of the war, inflicting considerable psychological damage and industrial disruption at a relatively low cost. It was also a weapon ahead of its time, laying the foundation for advanced guided cruise missiles like the BGM-109 Tomahawk still in use today.

Expand for References

“Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Revisions.” Federal Register, 3 Mar. 2025, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/03/03/2025-03360/affirmatively-furthering-fair-housing-revisions.

“Declaring a National Energy Emergency.” The White House, 21 Jan. 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/declaring-a-national-energy-emergency/.

“Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government.” The White House, 21 Jan. 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal-government/.

“Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Enforces Overwhelmingly Popular Demand to Stop Taxpayer Funding of Abortion.” The White House, 25 Jan. 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/01/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-enforces-overwhelmingly-popular-demand-to-stop-taxpayer-funding-of-abortion/.

“Initial Rescissions Of Harmful Executive Orders And Actions.” The White House, 20 Jan. 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/initial-rescissions-of-harmful-executive-orders-and-actions/.

“Justice Department Will Switch Its Focus on Voting and Prioritize Trump’s Elections Order, Memo Says.” AP News, 3 May 2025, https://apnews.com/article/trump-justice-department-voting-rights-elections-fraud-0717d58a10daa11b3957d277a7ca8e0e.

“Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness.” The White House, 28 Jan. 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/prioritizing-military-excellence-and-readiness/.

“Putting America First In International Environmental Agreements.” The White House, 20 Jan. 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/putting-america-first-in-international-environmental-agreements/.

“Restoring Accountability To Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce.” The White House, 21 Jan. 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/restoring-accountability-to-policy-influencing-positions-within-the-federal-workforce/.

Turner, Cory. “Supreme Court Says Trump’s Efforts to Close the Education Department Can Continue.” NPR, 14 July 2025. Education. NPR, https://www.npr.org/2025/07/14/nx-s1-5443564/trump-supreme-court-education-department.

Wrona, Aleksandra. “Is DOGE a Real Agency? Here’s What to Know about the Initiative’s Creation, Legality and Purpose.” Snopes, 3 Apr. 2025, https://www.snopes.com//news/2025/04/03/doge-explainer/.

Claim:

The lyrics of the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas” once said “four colly birds” rather than “four calling birds.”

Rating:

When the Christmas music begins in earnest in late November, it’s easy for it to go in one ear and out the other.

After all, we’ve heard these songs hundreds, if not thousands, of times over the course of our lives and will continue to hear them in perpetuity. We’re so intimately familiar with the melodies, we often don’t consider the origin or historical evolution of a particular tune from the time before recording artists released what are now considered definitive versions. 

But some social media users have suggested a noticeable difference in one popular song in particular — “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” 

A Facebook post (archived) from December 2023, which resurfaced at the onset of the 2025 holiday season, suggested that one of the lyrics, “On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, four calling birds,” actually started out as, “four colly birds.” 

Snopes previously dug into a claim that “The Twelve Days of Christmas” was originally created as a coded reference to important articles of the Christian faith, which we found to be false. 

However, the assertion that the lyrics about four “calling birds” began as “colly birds,” sometimes spelled “collie” or “colley,” was true. 

The available evidence suggested the lyrics were written as “four colly birds” in some older published versions of the Christmas staple. 

“Mirth Without Mischief,” a children’s book first published in the late 18th century with a version on the Internet Archive from 1800, featured the song with the “colly birds” lyrics, as did 1855’s “Notes and Queries: A Medium of Inter-Communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, Etc., Vol. 12,” an 1867 issue of the magazine “The Cliftonian” and a 1916 installment of “Journal of the Folk-Song Society.” 

(“Journal of the Folk-Song Society, Vol. 5, Issue 20” )

(“The Cliftonian, Vol. 1, Issue 1”)

Some 19th-century versions also printed the lyric in question as “canary birds.”  

According to Merriam-Webster, “colly” was a “chiefly British” dialect with origins in Old English that meant “to blacken with or as if with soot.” 

In William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” a play written in the late 16th century, the character Lysander recites (emphasis ours): 

Or, if there were a sympathy in choice,

War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it,

Making it momentary as a sound,

Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,

Brief as the lightning in the collied night;

That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and Earth,

And ere a man hath power to say “Behold!”

The jaws of darkness do devour it up.

So quick bright things come to confusion.

The context from Shakespeare also showed “colly” to mean black in color. Therefore, “colly birds” is likely a reference to blackbirds in the parlance of the time. 

It was in the 1909 version of the song, arranged by composer Frederic Austin — the version we are most familiar with today — that “calling birds” first appeared in publication, based on the available evidence.

The reason for the change was unknown, but one likely possibility is that the evolution was an instance of a mondegreen, which Merriam-Webster defined as “a word or phrase that results from a mishearing especially of something recited or sung,” that later became accepted as the true lyrics. 

In sum, as the tradition of singing the song spread in the days before audio and video recordings, so too did altered versions of its lyrics until they became so pervasive that they became “official” in published texts.  

“Colly birds” was not the only lyrical evolution within “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” A summary on Wikipedia pointed to other alleged disparities over time, though Snopes did not independently verify these examples. For instance, it listed “maids a-milking” as once being “hares a-running” and “boys a-singing” in previous versions. 

Check out Snopes’ previous reporting for further reading on the complete origin of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” 

Sources

For Christmas enthusiasts with real trees, making sure their evergreens last until the big day and don’t become a dried-up fire hazard is of utmost importance. 

In December 2025, a decades-old claim (archived) recirculated online that said using hot water to hydrate a Christmas tree could keep it looking nice for longer.

One Facebook user wrote:

ENJOY YOUR REAL CHRISTMAS TREE WELL INTO THE NEW YEAR! Before watering your tree, boil the water first, let it stand for 5 minutes and then water the tree! This will keep the sap from getting hard and allow for the water to go up the bark! Cold water clogs openings with the sap and your tree will die much quicker!

The claim also circulated on Instagram (archived) and TikTok (archived).

Snopes could not prove whether this alleged life hack actually works or makes a difference to the appearance of a harvested Christmas tree. In our research, we found credible sources speaking both for and against the use of hot water. Therefore, we leave this claim unrated.

Some experts recommend hot water ‘life hack’

We found several credible sources in our research that said you should pour hot (not boiling) water in the base of your Christmas tree, including the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, the North Carolina Christmas Tree Association (archived), and the Great Swamp Greenhouses garden center (archived).  

The “pro” sources argued that hot water helped increase water uptake by melting built-up sap on the trunk, which in turn helped keep the tree looking nicer for longer.

Fresh cut on base of tree more important 

We also found credible sources saying that the temperature of the water used to hydrate a Christmas tree didn’t affect water uptake.

In 2012, Rick Bates, professor of horticulture at Penn State University, spoke to NPR about the best tips and tricks for Christmas trees, telling the “Talk of the Nation” program that: 

Cold water is fine. What does matter is the fresh cut on the base of the tree. If it’s been, you know, a day or so since that tree has been harvested, putting the fresh cut opens up those pores that are going to draw in the water. And if the water is cold or hot, it doesn’t matter so much as having a fresh cut and no sap covering that base of the trunk. 

Scholars Gary Chastagner and Eric Hinesley supported this statement, writing for the National Christmas Tree Association: “The temperature of the water used to fill the stand is not important and does not affect water uptake.”

Chastagner and Hinesley are both respected academics in the field of Christmas tree research.

Asked via email in December 2024 whether he was still of the opinion that water temperature made no difference to the health of a tree, Hinesley confirmed this, adding: “Gary Chastagner and I never found anything to be better than plain water alone. And there is no need to boil it before use.”

Hinesley further supported Bates’ claim that making a fresh cut off the trunk of the Christmas tree, usually about 1/2 to 1 inch thick, would help water uptake.

In any case, Hinesley said, the most important factor to keeping a harvested Christmas tree looking nice and lasting longer was providing it with ample water, a claim also repeated in previous research: 

When supplied with water, cut Christmas trees generally consume about 1 qt (about 1 L) of water per day per inch (2.54 cm) of stem diameter. Thus, a tree with a 4-in diameter trunk would use about 4 qt (about 4 L) of water per day. The biggest mistake by consumers is using a stand with too little capacity, resulting in trees drying up between waterings. If this happens, the tree might not rehydrate when rewatered. (Hinesley, L. E. and G. A. Chastagner, 2016)

In addition to preserving the tree’s visual appearance, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said that a dry Christmas tree could catch fire in under a minute, posing a safety risk to families and their guests.

In conclusion, the best tree is a hydrated tree — for the longevity of your Christmas spirit and safety alike.

Sources

Claim:

Flocking on a preflocked Christmas tree can pose fatal health risks to pets.

Rating:

Context

While flocking is largely considered nontoxic to pets, animals who ingest large amounts of flocking may experience intestinal obstructions, which can be fatal without appropriate treatment.

For years, concerned pet parents have asked the internet whether the artificial snow on Christmas trees, or “flocking,” can cause harm to their fur babies. 

For example, in 2022, a Facebook user shared that their two cats had died and that they believed it was due to the “white flocking dust that fell off” the Christmas tree. The post generated several news articles, including a story from Yahoo News Australia. 

Since then, posts warning pet owners away from flocked Christmas trees — or asking whether the trees pose a threat — have continued to circulate online. 

The good news is that flocked Christmas trees are not considered a poisoning hazard to pets once dry, according to the ASPCA and Dr. Sara Farmer, a veterinarian with Petco. 

“Flocking material is typically plastic, so the primary risks when ingested by our pets is potential foreign body and GI upset,” Asli Aybar, an ASPCA spokesperson, said via email, after checking with Dr. Tina Wismer, senior director of toxicology at ASPCA Poison Control. 

Foreign bodies, including flocking — if ingested in large amounts — can cause intestinal blockages. Without treatment, an intestinal blockage can cause death, per numerous veterinary hospitals’ webpages. 

For that reason, we have rated this claim true — with the caveat that pretty much anything inorganic that your pet ingests can cause an intestinal blockage.

The ASPCA recommends keeping pets out of the area if applying flocking yourself and ensuring it is thoroughly dry before allowing your pets near it “to avoid problems from accidental exposure such as skin, mucous membrane or gastrointestinal irritation.” 

Posts claim West Point cadets ‘silently revolted’ against Trump, refusing to shake his hand. Here’s what we know

May 29, 2025

The U.S. Military Academy West Point cadet honor code reads, “A Cadet will not lie, cheat, steal …

Read More

Claim:

After the death of political pundit Rush Limbaugh in 2021, director Rob Reiner “attacked” the deceased in a tweet, saying, “Rush Limbaugh is gone. But there is no scarcity of purveyors of disinformation left in his wake. To protect our Democracy we must remain vigilant in calling out their big lies. Starting with climate change.”

Rating:

Context

Reiner did indeed make the remark. Some users also categorized the tweet as an “attack,” a subjective description that reflected wording used by conservative outlet Breitbart when it reported on the post at the time.

In late December 2025, a rumor spread online that Hollywood director Rob Reiner criticized conservative political pundit Rush Limbaugh in a social media post following the radio host’s death in 2021. 

Social media users, particularly on X (archived, archived, archived), called the tweet an “attack” and shared purported screenshots of the post in question. Others on X (archived, archived, archived) attempted to point out that framing Reiner’s post an “attack” was hyperbolic. 

Both sides agreed on the alleged content of Reiner’s message, however, claiming he wrote, “Rush Limbaugh is gone. But there is no scarcity of purveyors of disinformation left in his wake. To protect our Democracy we must remain vigilant in calling out their big lies. Starting with climate change.”

The rumor circulated in the wake of the Dec. 14, 2025, fatal stabbing of Reiner and his wife, Michele, in their Brentwood mansion in Los Angeles. Their son, Nick Reiner, has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder. 

Reiner, a Democratic donor, at times publicly criticized Republican U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration, leading to Trump claiming in a post after the director’s death that the director died of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

The discourse over the perceived callousness of Trump’s statement then resurfaced old posts of the director, including the one in question, in an attempt to show either the alleged moral disparity — or similarity — between Trump’s remarks and the way in which Reiner responded to Limbaugh’s death: 

Let’s not forget how Rob Reiner treated Rush Limbaugh after he died. Make no mistake that if it was reversed Rob would be dancing a little jig over Trump’s grave. He’d probably be throwing a party. pic.twitter.com/xb9OY8HI3u

— RPGPundit❌ (@KasimirUrbanski) December 15, 2025

The tweet shared in the claim was authentic and correctly attributed to Reiner. It can be viewed in an archived link of Reiner’s verified Twitter (now X) account, the text and timestamp of which matches that shared in the claim. Reiner posted the comment on Feb. 18, 2021, one day following the announcement of Limbaugh’s death from lung cancer. Reiner’s X account has since been deleted. 

Categorizing the tweet as an “attack” was subjective, though, and reflected wording used by conservative outlet Breitbart when it reported on the post at the time.

A Breitbart article published on Feb. 18, 2021 — the same day as Reiner’s tweet — featured the headline, “Rob Reiner Attacks Rush Limbaugh as Purveyor of ‘Disinformation’ Day After His Death.” 

The article summarized Reiner’s post by writing, “Rob Reiner launched his social media attack on the late Limbaugh by calling him a liar, warning that other conservative media personalities are trying to deny climate change.”

A look at Reiner’s feed in the days following the post about Limbaugh showed no further mention of Limbaugh, though he did post about climate change again on Feb. 18, 2021. 

That post said, “Since Climate Change doesn’t exist and Texas has an effective self contained energy grid, it’s the perfect time for their elected officials to go on vacation.” 

Reiner appeared to be sarcastically referring to Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz taking a trip to Cancun while his state endured an historic winter storm.

So while users shared an authentic post from Reiner criticizing Limbaugh, it was up for debate whether it could reasonably be considered an “attack.” 

Some users also pointed out how Reiner responded to the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in September 2025.

For instance, during an appearance on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” Reiner said of Kirk, “That should never happen to anybody. I don’t care what your political beliefs are. That’s not acceptable. That’s not a solution to solving problems.” 

Morgan reshared the clip on X (archived) following Trump’s social media post about Reiner’s death. 

Sources

Claim:

A Philadelphia police officer named Derek Mullins attempted an illegal raid on the property of Black federal prosecutor Jasmine Carter.

Rating:

In December 2025, online users shared videos telling the allegedly true story of a Philadelphia police officer named Derek Mullins attempting an illegal raid on the property of Black federal prosecutor Jasmine Carter.

For example, on Dec. 12, a user managing the Bodycam Justice Files YouTube channel posted an advertisement-filled video (archived) titled, “Police Racially Profile Assistant US Attorney at Her Own Door – Career Over, 8 Years Prison.”

The video begins with a brief clip showing apparent police body-camera footage. In the clip, a Black woman standing in her doorway responds to the officer wearing the camera. That officer claims he and his fellow officers obtained a warrant to search her property.

A Snopes reader emailed to ask if the story truly occurred:

A “story” just popped up in my YouTube feed about an alleged interaction between a (heroic?) black female U.S. Attorney in Eastern Pennsylvania and an allegedly corrupt Philadelphia cop named “Derek Mullins” and how this black female US Attorney allegedly got this Mullins guy investigated & fired for lying in warrant applications. Just google for “Derek Mullins” and “Philadelphia Police” and you’ll find a bunch of different Instagram & Facebook repeats of this story. The thing is, that you WON’T find a single reliable news outlet that is reporting on this alleged story! So, I need you/Snopes to find out if the story is bulls***/propaganda or what (please).

In short, this story was fabricated and the brief body-camera clip at the beginning of the video was created with artificial intelligence — as were the video’s narration and scripting. The user creating the video sought to earn YouTube advertising revenue based on emotional, racially charged content.

Snopes contacted the Philadelphia Police Department to obtain official confirmation that the video depicted a completely made-up story. We also asked if the department wished to comment about false stories and AI-generated clips casting their officers in a negative light, and will update this article if we receive further information. The Bodycam Justice Files YouTube channel did not provide any contact details.

Digging into the false story and fake video

The false story originating from the Bodycam Justice Files YouTube channel — subsequently shared by users in other videos on Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived), Threads (archived), TikTok (archived) and YouTube — tells the story of three Philadelphia police officers named Derek (or Derrick) Mullins (or Mullen, or Mullin), Chris Santos and Rebecca Walsh.

In the story, the officers, led by Mullins, attempt to conduct an illegal raid with a “defective warrant” on property owned by 29-year-old Jasmine Carter, a federal prosecutor and assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

At the end of the tale, a court sentences Mullins to eight years in federal prison for his illegal action, officials fire or imprison other officers, courts dismiss 19 cases and the city pays settlements totaling more than $18 million.

Searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo found no news media outlets reporting any such stories about people with the aforementioned names, nor any information about settlements or other court actions.

The Bodycam Justice Files YouTube video ended with dramatic wording similar to the way AI tools generate conclusions to fabricated stories. Other videos hosted on the channel also contained similar themes and displayed signs of AI-generated narration, scripting and video clips.

Scans of the video’s script with AI-detection websites displayed inconsistent results. However, the idea that a user sat down to carefully write a 5,000-plus-word script for the false story — and many, many other made-up stories — did not align with the way AI-for-profit channels typically operate.

At least four YouTube videos told the same story except with other brief AI-generated body-camera clips depicting a completely different-looking Black woman representing Carter. The short duration of the body-camera clip — whether 8, 10, 12 or 15 seconds — provided one clue of the short video’s AI origins. Popular AI tools offering generative-video models usually set maximum durations with the same brief timings.

For further reading, we previously reported about a story documenting the alleged disappearance of a boy named Eric Langford.

After Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were discovered dead in their Los Angeles home on Dec. 14, 2025, posts began circulating on social media that attributed a variety of quotes to the director. Some posts claimed that in July 2024, when asked about the assassination attempt against U.S. President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, Reiner — an outspoken critic of Trump — said, “Too bad he turned his head. Maybe next time they won’t miss.”

Snopes readers wrote in asking us whether the quote was true. We found no evidence suggesting that Reiner had ever said those words.

First, it’s important to note that the purported quote is inflammatory. “Too bad he turned his head. Maybe next time they won’t miss,” is a direct way of wishing for Trump’s death. Given Reiner’s celebrity status, reputable entertainment publications likely would have reported on the quote at the time if Reiner truly said it. Snopes searched Google, Yahoo, Bing and DuckDuckGo for articles documenting the quote. There were none, a large indication the quote was made up.

The social media posts sharing the supposed quote generally used the same image. Because the quote supposedly originated in July 2024 when Reiner was asked about the assassination attempt, images sharing the quote, if legitimate, probably would have been circulating online for a while. However, using Google’s reverse image search suggested that posts about the supposed quote began appearing in December 2025. 

Finally, Snopes also searched archives of Reiner’s now-deleted social media pages searching for the quote. We similarly came up empty.

Snopes also fact-checked a different unfounded quote Reiner supposedly made about the Trump assassination attempt, allegedly saying that he wished the shooter “hadn’t missed.”

Sources

Claim:

On Dec. 18 and 19, 2025, the White House’s live cameras were turned off as U.S. President Donald Trump’s helicopter flew him to a hospital.

Rating:

A rumor circulating online on Dec. 18 and 19, 2025 claimed the White House “live cameras” had been turned off and suggested U.S. President Donald Trump was transported by helicopter to a hospital.

One Facebook post (archived) with the claim read: “So the White House live cameras are turned off and reports are his helicopter headed to the hospital again. Yes Virginia, maybe there is a Santa Claus.”

(Facebook user Reginald Reggie Magpayo)

The rumor spread across social media platforms including Facebook, Threads, Instagram, Bluesky, X and TikTok. The earliest version we found appeared on Threads (archived) around 7 p.m. EST Dec. 18. 

In short, there was no evidence the White House “turned off” its live cameras on Dec. 18 and 19, 2025 because Trump’s helicopter was headed to a hospital. The message on the White House’s “Live News” website was a routine placeholder that appears when no livestream is running and has been used for months. We also found no credible reporting from major news outlets indicating Trump was hospitalized during that period, an event that would have been covered widely. We reached out to the White House, who told us the claim was “fake.” For these reasons, we rated this claim as false.

We have contacted the Secret Service for comment and will update this article if we receive a response.

How the rumor spread

The rumor appears to have been sparked by confusion over the White House’s “Live News” page, which is used for scheduled White House event livestreams rather than a continuous 24/7 camera feed.

On Dec. 19, 2025, the page displayed the message: “Stay tuned – we’ll be live again shortly.” However, that banner was not a breaking alert about an emergency, but rather a placeholder used when there is no active livestream. The Wayback Machine and archive.today tools showed the “Stay tuned” wording was not new and had appeared for months on the page when no livestream was running.

(archive.today)

There was also a legitimate oddity involving “Live News” website around the same time. The Associated Press reported that a YouTube creator’s personal-finance livestream briefly appeared on the White House live page for at least eight minutes on Dec. 18, prompting questions about whether the site had been hacked. The White House told The Associated Press it was “aware and looking into what happened.” 

No evidence of a hospital flight

There was no credible reporting showing Trump was taken by helicopter to a hospital on Dec. 18 or 19, 2025.

Meanwhile, White House channels published material indicating normal activity around those dates, including official items posted to the White House website dated Dec. 18. The White House video library listed recordings from Dec. 18, including “President Trump Signs an Executive Order” and “President Trump Delivers an Address to the Nation,” both recorded at the White House and running more than half an hour each. In addition, news outlets reported Trump was expected to make an announcement at the White House on the afternoon of Dec. 19, which was inconsistent with the rumor he had been secretly hospitalized.

All in all, the “Stay tuned – we’ll be live again shortly” message on the White House’s website was a routine placeholder, and we found no credible evidence Trump was flown to a hospital on Dec 18 or 19, 2025.