663. Who Was Helmuth Hubener?

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Hi, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of The Way the World Works. So today I want to talk about one of our courageous heroes, somebody who's really stood out for doing something that, you know, I'd like to pretend that I was brave enough to do or that I would be brave enough to do, but you never know what you would do in those positions, in those situations. So let's get into it.

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This one's particularly exciting too, because it's probably older than some of our listeners. He was 17 when he died, but that's still pretty young, and I think it's really inspiring to see that young people can change the world and can stand up and defy authoritarian power. I'm doing all these leads up to the story, lead up to the story, and I'm not saying his name, so let's get right into it.

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As we're telling the story, as I'm telling the story, I want you to be thinking in your head, would you be brave enough to do this? And there's no right or wrong answer, but I'm just, you know, I like for us to think about these things and to think what we would do in these positions. So let's jump right into it. So there was a boy in Germany, his name was Helmut Hübner, and it's a German name and I'm probably saying it wrong in many ways, but I think that's right.

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I googled and watched a YouTube video on how to pronounce it just to make sure that I didn't do it wrong. But let's jump right into the story. So he was just a little boy when the Nazis started rising to power.

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He was probably about eight, which is probably about the age of some of our listeners. You know, throughout a lot of these stories, when you hear about dictators rising to power and creating horrible things, it's not something that happens right away. You hear a lot about this frog in hot water analogy, and that is that if you put a boiling pot of water on your stove and you drop a frog in it, what's he going to do? He is going to jump right out of there.

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I know this is a weird analogy, but I didn't make it up. But if you put a frog in regular water, room temperature water, and you slowly, slowly turn up the heat until it's boiling, he's not going to know what's happening and he's going to die. So that is something I like to keep in mind when we think, like, how could these leaders have risen to power if they were so awful? Well, it's usually not that they did everything terrible all at once.

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It was very incremental. It was step by step, and it was little bits where people didn't really notice that things were super bad until they were super bad, right? Or sometimes, because governments like to engage in propaganda, and propaganda is when they try to sell ideas falsely or sometimes just flat out lie and try to make you believe they're doing something or not doing something. It's like marketing, but for evil.

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And there is propaganda for good. Everything actually, every marketing tactic is propaganda, but propaganda specifically is political marketing. And a lot of times it is dishonest, which surprise, surprise, most politicians are also dishonest.

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So it kind of makes sense. So Helmut was just a little boy when this was happening. And one of his biggest first things that he was sad about was that when Hitler came to power in Germany, he outlawed Boy Scouts.

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And Helmut had been a Boy Scout, and it was something his church did also. So he was really active in that. He loved that.

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And then all of a sudden, Hitler says, no more. You actually have to join Hitler Youth instead, which was the Nazi version of the Boy Scouts. There was life skills taught, and there was a program for girls as well.

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But it was more, it was like, here's how to be a good man and work hard, but also you have to pledge your allegiance, which I guess has nuanced terms, but you have to pledge your life and everything you do to the state, to this Nazi party. And so that was really scary. And then in the 1930s, there was something called Kristallnacht, and that's the German word for it.

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And what that means is the night of broken glass is what that translates to in English. So what was that? Well, it was horrible. So as all these horrible Nazis were coming to power, and there's a lot of really hateful things being said about Jewish people, the Nazis and those who were their followers, they decided that they were going to have a night where they basically broke windows, hence broken glass, and destroyed property and broke into the stores that were owned by Jewish people, and their synagogues, their churches, and they were going to cause destruction.

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And, you know, we'd light things on fire and break glass and break things. So it was it was a night of chaos and destruction targeted against Jewish people in Germany. And, you know, I want to be careful when I say this, because the reason I don't want to say, oh, the Germans did this against the Jewish people, as I think one really important thing to remember is that the Jewish people living in Germany were also Germans.

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So it's neighbor against neighbor. It's not like, oh, there was some new group of people that moved into Germany, and then there was some like disputes against them. No, that's not what happened.

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And these are neighbors turning against neighbors because these Jewish people considered themselves to be German. So that adds a whole other complex layer to the situation, which I think sometimes we forget about. And for, gosh, two years, I think it was during my my undergrad and college before I jumped out or dropped out, which you guys know about, because I wrote about it a little bit in a book with with Connor, skip college.

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But I studied Nazi propaganda and roots of the Holocaust. And I did that because it was so evil what happened. And I wanted to really understand how it could happen.

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And I wanted to understand how governments use propaganda. And that was a really big segue in for me to become somebody who's so liberty minded, because I saw like, oh, my goodness, governments can be so bad. So OK, so this is happening.

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And at this point, he said he's he's heartbroken, right? And a lot of his family are heartbroken. And some people in his church are heartbroken. But he's also seeing some people start to agree with the Nazis, which is frightening.

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But to him, it's something he really believed is that he was very religious. He believed that we were all children of God. That was his belief.

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And because we were all children of God, we all deserved, you know, love and respect. You didn't have to like everybody, but you had to respect them, especially as we know their right to life, liberty and property. That's something we value here.

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But it really disturbed him that that wasn't happening. And it really disturbed him that there were so many people, even people he considered men of God and and, you know, who went to church with that were starting to be very hateful against people who, despite their differences, were also children of God. So this is going on.

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And, you know, it's a it's like I said, the incremental thing, like the Nazis are slowly gaining power. Things are getting worse and worse. And because of propaganda, a lot of the Germans did not actually know the full extent of what was going on.

And it's easy for us to look at what happened during the Holocaust and during the era of the Third Reich, as they call it. It's easy for us to look back and say, how dare the German people not stand up? And that is true to an extent, because we're going to see here that Helmut did stand up. But one thing that I want us to remember is because government propaganda was honestly very, very good.

And what I mean by good is it was sneaky and it was I don't like saying creative because I don't want to give a credit, but it was very genius. But there are evil geniuses, too. And so a lot of people were really falling for for what was happening and for what they were being told, even though it was not true.

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So all this to say a lot of the people in Germany did not understand the extent of what was happening. A lot of them did not know about concentration camps either. And because of the propaganda, they were told like, oh, people are saying this is a big deal.

It's not. We're just, you know, putting Jewish people in their own neighborhood. But it's a great neighborhood and they love it.

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We're actually having like kid programs and they were just lying. So this is what a lot of people in Germany are thinking at the time. So Helmut is now 16 and it's about 1941.

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And he got his first apprenticeship and it was at the Hamburg Social Authority is what it was called. And he met a friend at his job as Gerhard was his name, such a German name. And it was a it was this friend of his Gerhard who showed him shortwave radio like resistance radio shows.

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So what is shortwave? So back back in the day when you didn't have, you know, Spotify and all these things to listen to to broadcast on, you had different radio waves. So there was shortwave radio, which is exactly as it sounds. The radio waves were shorter and those were used for emergency broadcast.

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They were used internationally. So you could pick up like like other, you know, other countries. So that that's a shortwave.

It was a very specific kind of wave in a specific kind of radio. And there was resistance broadcast. So you actually see this.

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And if you're fans, if you have ever read Harry Potter or seen those movies, there's like the resistance when Voldemort rises. That's like obviously it's not shortwave radio because they're wizards. But same kind of concept is probably taken from from this era also.

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But so these shows were people were like having their own little radio shows like podcasts, but it was live and they were telling people the truth. They were saying you're being lied to. And this was risky.

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Now, back then, today, it's so easy for people to just trace where a podcast is being recorded and having the cops or the Gestapo in this case show up at your house. It was harder for them to trace you back then, but you would still be in so much trouble if you got caught listening, not just recording these. I mean, if you were caught recording them, you would most certainly be put to death.

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But even listening to them could get you in a lot of trouble, possibly death, too. You didn't really know. But so Helmut and his friend Gerhard, they start listening to these.

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And, you know, Helmut is really it's reinforcing what he already felt in his heart, which was that this was really evil and that there was more to the story. And he can't just keep it to himself. And he says, you know what? People need to know what's going on because they don't know what's going on.

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So as the radio shows are going on, he starts taking notes and he actually starts typing up the notes on his church's typewriter. I don't know if the church ever knew about this, but he starts typing up these notes on the on the typewriter. And he and a couple of friends, they start passing out leaflets like these little pamphlets on the street telling people what's going on.

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Now, this was incredibly risky. And I think this is one really cool thing about being young, is I think you have a lower threshold for or higher threshold for risk tolerance. You're you're willing to do things that are a little more risky because you're young and you're rebellious.

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And in this case, it was something so brave. And so what what they would do is they would type up these notes and they would put them in their pocket and then they would walk down the street and just be like, boop, boop, boop, and pull out their pocket and just like drop it on the sidewalk and people would pick it up and they would they would read it. And their hope was that they would find out what was really going on.

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You know, they didn't realize what was happening to people who were arrested. They didn't realize all these things. And so really, really brave on his part.

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I think sometimes we think that being brave means not being scared, but I think it is being scared and doing something anyway because, you know, the outcome is more important than than your fear. And I think that's probably how Helmut felt, because there were scary things happening. I mean, there were stories he had heard from friends of their friends doing something and and being pulled, you know, from their beds in the middle of the night by the Gestapo and then never returning home.

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So this was absolutely scary. Right. You have to understand there was this climate, this this environment of just fear all the time.

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But Helmut thought to himself, you know what? I can't just sit by when all these things are going on. We have to resist this horrible thing that is happening. So they are doing this for a while.

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And then one day, Helmut decides to take the plan a little further. And he wants to translate the pamphlets that he's doing into French and get get them, you know, to to even more people. But someone at work who was a Nazi sympathizer saw what Helmut was doing, and they ran to the Gestapo.

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And the Gestapo is like the Nazi police. Right. But they were like like the scare.

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There was like other just kind of patrol officers. But the Gestapo was like they were like that kind of like the KGB in Russia. That's it's on the same level.

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So Helmut is taken by the police and it's devastating. And his parents are absolutely devastated. And as bad as things are, the Nazis actually weren't as hard on, at least at this time, younger people.

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Right. And Helmut, even though he was almost 18, was still was still a kid by by most standards. And so his mother was hoping with all her heart that maybe the Nazis would, you know, give him a slap on the wrist, as they say, that would would say, you know, don't do this again, but but not do anything too severe.

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And unfortunately, she was wrong. And so they drag him in front of a court and, you know, his family and his friends are pleading. They're saying he's such a smart, good kid.

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Look at how intelligent he is. Look at how good he did in school. And the judge says, yeah, I see that.

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But I'm sorry. This is a you know, he turned on on the Nazis. So unfortunately, you have to be put to death.

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And this is a 17 year old. And I mean, I can't even imagine what's going through his head at this time. And this part, I think, is really cool.

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So obviously him and his friends knew they were doing something incredibly dangerous when they set out to do to just hand out these leaflets and spread truth. But they they promised each other that if one of them was caught, they would take all the blame and nobody else would be, you know, sold out to the Gestapo. And that's exactly what Helmut did.

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He held strong to his word and he didn't rat out any of his friends. And so he was able to to save their lives by by taking all the blame, which is just, oh, that's so much for a 17 year old to take on. That's so much for anybody to take on.

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But it's really just it gets to me every time. So the judge declares that he is going to be beheaded, which is, again, is so awful. And Helmut's response to this is just absolutely inspiring.

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He says he stood up and he shouted to the judge. Now I must die, even though I have committed no crime. Now it's my turn.

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But your turn will come. And as I'm reading that, I just got goosebumps, guys. I just got chills because, wow, what a I can't imagine and why I wanted you guys to think during this thing.

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What would you want during this episode? What would you do in this in this position is it gets us thinking and it really gets us in the shoes of the people who are so brave. And I just can't I you know, I don't again, I don't know that I could do it. I wish I like to believe I could.

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But this is so scary. And again, with Helmut being so young, it's a I think he was a little bit easier maybe for him to take these risks because he didn't have a wife or kids, you know, that he had had to provide for who he was going to be abandoning by by being willing to to admit to all this or being willing to take the risk to hand out the leaflets at all. And so it's you know, the youth have a little bit of this advantage of being more rebellious and changing the world in that way, because there is a little bit I don't want to say there's less to lose because your life is so valuable, but you know, there's not other people who are depending on you.

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So he has to wait. I can't remember how long, but it's a little bit in between the the time he is sentenced and the execution, which is just horrible for him. He's being very mistreated.

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And eventually he was beheaded by the Gestapo and he lost his life. And it's it's a beautiful story, even though it is a very sad story, because it reminds us that even in these dark times, there are people willing to stand up no matter what the consequences are. And in this case, the consequences were death.

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And he was, you know, he was OK with it, but he had accepted that that was his fate and that he did the right thing. And we think that maybe we can't change the world and maybe he didn't change the world. But I think he did, because with every act of defiance, you're inspiring somebody else to also stand up and be defiant and just be a little a little bit rebellious and say no to to these dictators and this authoritarian rule.

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So it's it's it's just so incredible. And one really cool opportunity right now is Angel Studios. And that's the people who produce the Tattletwins show also.

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So they just released a movie called Truth and Treason. And this is the the story of Helmet. So that's in theaters right now.

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So you check, check and see if it's playing locally. But this is this is his story. And I've heard just amazing, wonderful things about it.

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So great time to to again. Talk about it as a family and understand the seriousness of it, because it is hard to talk about such really tragic things, but how wonderful it is that in a world full of sometimes bad things, there are people willing to stand up and say, no, I'm going to do what's right. But what is hard? And I think it's just such a great lesson to take from him.

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And also he's his story is featured in the Tattletwins Guide to Courageous Heroes. So pick up this book if you guys don't have it already. There are so many good heroes there.

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I mean, this book is filled with stories just like this. Some of them are not as sad as this one. Some of them have happier endings.

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But of these these great individuals who changed the world with their courage. So pick that up, read it as a family. And we will leave it there for today.

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As always, don't forget to like and subscribe to the podcast. And until next time, I will talk to you later.