The lighter side of Nazis

Back when I was working for HBO, I was invited to a spiffy lunch thrown somewhere in Century City. This was in the early days of them producing their own movies—long before The Sopranos and Six Feet Under.

The one thing about that event that’s stuck to me ever since was that they’d brought in some consultant to tell us what sells and what doesn’t. And Nazis sell. Basically he said that if your movie or TV show has “Hitler” or “Nazi” in the title, your audience increases by 15%.

So, I’ve been contributing to that statistic in recent weeks, watching Nazis: Evolution of Evil on (oh, I can’t even bring myself to name the channel. Go look it up if you care).

This is clearly a UK production—all the talking heads are Brits, although the voice-over narration is American. I really only watched the first installment because, hello: Nazis, but I got kind of hooked when Professor Frank McDonough of Liverpool’s John Moores University started in on the German Workers Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei).

That was the organization that German authorities paid Adolf Hitler to infiltrate and rat on. The group he eventually co-opted and turned into the Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei.

Here’s how McDonough described (in his unrepentant Scouse accent) the DAP at the time Hitler joined: “They were basically two blokes and a ferret.”

I think I’m in love.