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Speaker 1: So make sure the episode starts about six minutes back.

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Speaker 1: This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast by Robert Evans

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Speaker 1: about Robert Evans, the bastard who just went yeah. I

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Speaker 1: was like, I really, I don't so many noises today.

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Speaker 1: I didn't know what was happening and just leave. This

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Speaker 1: podcast is an engine and the fuel is you being

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Speaker 1: frustrated with me. We are going to be the first

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Speaker 1: human beings on fucking Mars. Is what we're gonna do? What?

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Speaker 1: What has happened? Just we're starting? Are you we announcing

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Speaker 1: the competitor to SpaceX that you started? Yeah, SpaceX is

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Speaker 1: is going to get their asses kicked by frustrated sof

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Speaker 1: X be frustrated. So FAC's gonna be a frustrated sofa. A. Well,

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Speaker 1: I don't like the x X greets me out. I

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Speaker 1: thought it was space x Y and it was a

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Speaker 1: reference to nice. There's a lot of things that could

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Speaker 1: be a reference to um Margaret, Yes, what do you

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Speaker 1: what do you do? What do you what? What do

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Speaker 1: you do? At the start of this podcast, what do

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Speaker 1: you do? What do you where? To justify my existence?

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Speaker 1: That's right, because everyone has to. That's harder. I write

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Speaker 1: stuff I write fiction. So far, I write a podcast

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Speaker 1: called Cool People Stuff. So far it's cool. And what

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Speaker 1: else do I do? I hang out with my dog. Um,

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Speaker 1: he's becoming a reasonable creature. He's about fourteen or fifty. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: way way more handleable. And I live alone on a

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Speaker 1: mountain in West Virginia. And I watched the world crumble

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Speaker 1: as I install solar panels and run another podcast about

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Speaker 1: prep pain called Live like the World is Dying. That

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Speaker 1: does sound nice? That does sound nice, Margaret. You know

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Speaker 1: who didn't live on the top of a mountain is Abakovner.

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Speaker 1: He lived in Vilna, which was a rough place to

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Speaker 1: live in the period of time that we're talking about. Yeah, yeah,

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Speaker 1: he beat the odds. Uh, that's the depressing way of

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Speaker 1: saying he has already beaten the odds because nearly everyone

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Speaker 1: he knows has been exterminated by the Nazis. UM. As

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Speaker 1: we start part two, so Covener has just issued what

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Speaker 1: we become known as the Ponari Manifesto UM, and it

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Speaker 1: electrifies the room. There's also, and this is not his fault,

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Speaker 1: one of the one of the problems that exists within

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Speaker 1: kind of the way in which some people talk about

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Speaker 1: the Holocaust, is there's this attitude that there's this errant

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Speaker 1: belief that Jews went to the death camps um kind

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Speaker 1: of passively, like sheep to the slaughter, right like that,

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Speaker 1: And and that some of that comes from he says,

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Speaker 1: let us not go like sheep to the slaughter, and

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Speaker 1: there were some like mistranslations that like make it seem

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Speaker 1: like he's saying people were going like sheep, sheep to

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Speaker 1: the slaughter. None of this, even if you're looking at

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Speaker 1: the stories of people who were killed in the camps,

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Speaker 1: it was very rarely passive, even to the extent that

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Speaker 1: like people were trying to like take care of their

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Speaker 1: families and keep their their children from panning. Like none

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Speaker 1: of this was like passive. People were dealing with a

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Speaker 1: nightmare in the best way that they had available, and

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Speaker 1: there was, in fact a lot of resistance, which we're

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Speaker 1: going to talk about. And this is a story I'm

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Speaker 1: aware of, like one pop culture touchdown from this. I

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Speaker 1: get into arguments periodically online with people about you know,

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Speaker 1: armed self defense, and one of the things that keep

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Speaker 1: that some folks will bring up is that like, um, well,

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Speaker 1: none of it, you know, none of it would have

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Speaker 1: helped Jews during the Holocaust. Uh. And the reality is

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Speaker 1: that having guns did help quite a few Jews during

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Speaker 1: the Holocaust. There was a tremendous history of partisan resistance

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Speaker 1: and if you would like to see a reasonably good

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Speaker 1: movie about that, starring Daniel Craig, uh, you can watch

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Speaker 1: the movie to Fiance, which is about the Bielski Atriad,

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Speaker 1: which was a group of eventually a couple of thousand. Um.

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Speaker 1: Centered around these brothers who I think we're basically gangsters

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Speaker 1: prior to the war, which is why they had access

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Speaker 1: to some of the some weapons. Um. I'm not on that,

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Speaker 1: but I believe that's the story with them. But it's

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Speaker 1: about this group who took to the woods of Poland

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Speaker 1: after the German invasion and eventually we're able to protect

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Speaker 1: several thousand people and fight as partisans. There was a

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Speaker 1: significant number of partisans, and Kovner and his his members

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Speaker 1: of the hot zmer Hats are are going to become

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Speaker 1: some of those partisans. And one of the things that

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Speaker 1: I get really frustrated when people talk about that kind

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Speaker 1: of stuff too, is that, Um. The first thing, again,

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Speaker 1: the only one I've done a lot of research about

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Speaker 1: is the war saw ghetto uprising and the main task

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Speaker 1: in front of people, the dangerous immediate task was literally

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Speaker 1: just getting small arms. Yeah, um small arms. People are

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Speaker 1: like explosives manufacturing. Yeah, anyway, people, I don't know anyway. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: it's it's I don't know. I get really mad at

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Speaker 1: the way people talk about a lot of the stuff.

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Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. And I think one of the things, because

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Speaker 1: we're again Kauvner ends on a problematic note, shall we say,

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Speaker 1: but one of the things he's right about is that, like, look,

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Speaker 1: now we know what's happening. Nobody's coming to save us.

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Speaker 1: We have to find a way to kill as many

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Speaker 1: of these Nazi sons of bitches as we possibly can,

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Speaker 1: which is the a great thing to do. Um Again,

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Speaker 1: A none is smuggling hand grenades into the ghetto so

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Speaker 1: that they can murder Schermans like this is where, this

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Speaker 1: is where the line is now. Um So Connor the

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Speaker 1: ponary Manifesto electrifies because he delivers this first to just

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Speaker 1: kind of a room full of Youth Movement members that

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Speaker 1: he reads it to during a meeting that they were holding.

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Speaker 1: Because it was during New Year's celebrations, it was easy

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Speaker 1: to kind of disguise the fact that people were gathering.

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Speaker 1: But it spreads very quickly through Jewish Europe and it

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Speaker 1: ignites a rapid change in the kind of conversations being

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Speaker 1: held underground and ghettos across the Greater German Reich. No

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Speaker 1: longer was the discussion about hiding and avoiding German wrath.

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Speaker 1: Talks started to turn towards the concept of resistance and reprisal.

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Speaker 1: In ninety two, Covener helped to found the FPO or

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Speaker 1: United Partisans Organization. This was a pan ideological because again,

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Speaker 1: even after the Nazis took over a lot of these

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Speaker 1: different because you've got your Communists, some of them were

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Speaker 1: like insurrectionary, some of whom are Zionists, and you've got

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Speaker 1: your Socialists, and you've got your kind of more centrist

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Speaker 1: dream and right wing folks who are Zionist, and you've got,

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Speaker 1: you know again, people who aren't Zionists but who were

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Speaker 1: like left wing activists. All these different youth organizations that

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Speaker 1: are constantly fighting each other. And Kulviner is like, look,

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Speaker 1: we can't do that right now. Later it's going to

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Speaker 1: take everything we have just to not get wiped out. Um,

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Speaker 1: so let's all like basically in his pitch is basically like,

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Speaker 1: nearly all of us are dead already, what what do

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Speaker 1: politics matter? It's time to kill these fucking Nazis. And

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Speaker 1: basically at this point, basically everyone's like, yeah, you know

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Speaker 1: that that actually makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Um,

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Speaker 1: So the FPO gets formed of Wagner's one of the

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Speaker 1: people starting this. There's a number of of of or

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Speaker 1: of of leaders and stuff in the little in the

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Speaker 1: area of Lithuania that are doing this. Um. The guy

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Speaker 1: who gets elected to lead the or they hold a vote,

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Speaker 1: because there's about three hundred of them. They hold a vote,

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Speaker 1: and the guy who gets elected to lead is a

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Speaker 1: very cool dude called Yitzak Wittenberg, and he is a

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Speaker 1: communist um and they they split the organization up into

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Speaker 1: these five man cells, and several five man groups make

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Speaker 1: up a platoon, and then the platoons are split into

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Speaker 1: two battalions, and Kavner is commanding one of these battalions.

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Speaker 1: He calls his men the Avengers, and they set out

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Speaker 1: soon to the work of yeah, yeah, to the work

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Speaker 1: of stealing more guns and explosives in order to prepare

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Speaker 1: for a broader armed insurrection of the ghetto. The FBO

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Speaker 1: makes contacts with Soviet partisans in the woods, and they

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Speaker 1: work alongside the Polish communist underground. These are just like

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Speaker 1: Polish communists, who aren't you wish um to launch a

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Speaker 1: series of daring attacks on German military targets. And I'm

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Speaker 1: going to quote now from a Latt Gordon Levett Levitan quote.

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Speaker 1: The Villanet ghetto fighters blew up a German military train,

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Speaker 1: smuggled in arms, sabotage German military equipment, and set up

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Speaker 1: an a legal printing press outside the ghetto, and established

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Speaker 1: ties to the Soviet resistance in the city in the forests.

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Speaker 1: They also sent emissaries to the Warsaw and Bellish Dot

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Speaker 1: ghettos to warn the inhabitants about the mass killing of

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Speaker 1: Jews and the occupied Soviet Union and to incite resistance.

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Speaker 1: And they do like a meaningful amount of damage. They

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Speaker 1: destroy I think a few dozen trains, they kill like

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Speaker 1: seventy one Germans, they rescue a couple of hundred um

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Speaker 1: like a Jewish people who are at you know, going

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Speaker 1: to be eradicated and whatnot. Um Like, they do quite

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Speaker 1: a bit of damage, and they focus mostly a lot

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Speaker 1: like the anarchists in like Russia, right now, are focusing

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Speaker 1: on blowing up trains, on blowing on destroying trains and

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Speaker 1: derailing trains right to to stop the flow of war

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Speaker 1: material and harm the Nazi war effort and also harm

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Speaker 1: their effort to like deport and murder more Jews. Um. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: By nineteen forty three, the Germans have grown weary enough

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Speaker 1: of the FPO that they launched a major crackdown and

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Speaker 1: eventually succeeded in capturing several officers of Vilma's non Jewish

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Speaker 1: communist underground. From these men, they learned that Wittenberg was

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Speaker 1: the elected head of the Jewish resistance. They surrounded the

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Speaker 1: Vilna Ghetto and promised to destroy it all and kill

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Speaker 1: all twenty thousand people inside unless Wittenberg was turned over

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Speaker 1: to them. And this is this is a fascinating story,

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Speaker 1: because Wittenberg gets captured at one point and they carry

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Speaker 1: out a prison break and they free him. But then

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Speaker 1: the Germans are like, we're just gonna kill everybody if

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Speaker 1: we don't get this guy. So in an act of

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Speaker 1: almost unfathomable courage, Wittenberg hands himself over to the Nazis

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Speaker 1: and then commit suicide and German custody to save everybody else,

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Speaker 1: and control of the organization now hands is handed over

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Speaker 1: to Kauvner when the Nazis destroyed the ghetto anyway. Later

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Speaker 1: that year, Kavner and his surviving men flee into the

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Speaker 1: woods around Vilna, where they liaise with Soviet At Partisans

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Speaker 1: and carry out even more insurgent attacks against the Germans.

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Speaker 1: By July of nineteen forty four, the German military is

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Speaker 1: collapsing in the east and Kaufner takes part in the

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Speaker 1: liberation of Vilna with other partisans. It was a pyric

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Speaker 1: victory at best. More than forty thousand Jews had been killed.

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Speaker 1: The ghetto was basically nothing but ashes and bones, as

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Speaker 1: this quote from the Book to Calm makes clear. The

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Speaker 1: visitors returned stunned and tends from the blunt reality but

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Speaker 1: speaking wide scale slaughter into gigantic round pits, and from

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Speaker 1: the beastual brutality of those who had aimed deadly gunfire

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Speaker 1: face to face at living creatures. Evidence of that brutality

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Speaker 1: was still visible. Scattered bodies remain that had not yet

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Speaker 1: received proper burial, and the visitors knew very well who

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Speaker 1: had been killed there at the edge of the pits.

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Speaker 1: Their parents and all of their neighbors, acquaintances, well to

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Speaker 1: do in proletarian, pious, assimilated and baptized, communal leaders, synagogue functionaries,

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Speaker 1: peddlers and drawers of water, communists and Zionists, intellectuals, artists,

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Speaker 1: and village idiots. Some four thousand babies, all of them,

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Speaker 1: as writer amos Oz described the individualish community. When the

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Speaker 1: visit was over, Kaufner composed a detailed questionnaire and the

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Speaker 1: survivors who had begun to gather filled it out. The

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Speaker 1: copies were collected with a view to preparing for future trials, punishment,

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Speaker 1: and vengeance. Now Kauvnor gets no time to like, what's that. Oh,

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Speaker 1: it's just I mean one, I just have to sit

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Speaker 1: on that, right. But one of the things that it

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Speaker 1: occurs to me, I mean I remember a friend of

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Speaker 1: mine describing to continue Margaret's crime school. Um, sometimes it's

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Speaker 1: safer at the front. Not like the front in terms

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Speaker 1: of like a war, right, but like you know, sometimes

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Speaker 1: being up where the conflict is happening is safer, like literally,

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Speaker 1: And I I'm not trying to tell people what they

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Speaker 1: should have done retroactively, just interesting to me that it's like,

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Speaker 1: I mean, it sounds like the reason that the Partisans

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Speaker 1: survived is that they were partisans and they were used

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Speaker 1: to moving in and out to the woods. Yeah, and

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Speaker 1: they escape. A lot of them get out through the

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Speaker 1: sewers and stuff like. Yeah, they barely make it out

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Speaker 1: in a lot of cases. Yeah, and I'm sure a

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Speaker 1: ton of them don't. I'm not trying to be like, oh,

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Speaker 1: it's easy, everyone should just go do that, you know,

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Speaker 1: but yeah, anyway, yep, uh it is. It is, um

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Speaker 1: pretty pretty fucked up, Margaret y um so uh. Kavner

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Speaker 1: was soon obliged to leave Vilma with his avengers. He

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Speaker 1: doesn't really have any time to like, nobody has time

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Speaker 1: to process this, right, um, like they might not want to.

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Speaker 1: They are immediately on with the with the advancing Red

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Speaker 1: Army right and are are continuing to act as insurgents,

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Speaker 1: basically kind of ahead of the main advance, harassing Nazi

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Speaker 1: forces as they retreat. And while he's doing this, he

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Speaker 1: repeated repeatedly lobbies with the Soviets to establish a partisan

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Speaker 1: regiment of Jewish Hullo cost survivors to carry out acts

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Speaker 1: of sabotage in Germany, to like sneak into Germany and

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Speaker 1: start blowing up German in history. Um, the Soviets don't

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Speaker 1: entirely trust him or other Jewish youth movement veterans since

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Speaker 1: they're all Zionists, and this does not happen. And then

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Speaker 1: also Kaufner is breaking Soviet law in this period because

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Speaker 1: while he is fighting and while he's advancing, he is

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Speaker 1: he's this kind of guy who is he's just an

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Speaker 1: expert organizer. So while they're doing this, he is building

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Speaker 1: an underground railroad to smuggle Jews from the fires of

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Speaker 1: the Holocaust over to the British mandate in Palestine. He's

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Speaker 1: like building an organization to do this as he is

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Speaker 1: running an insurgent war. Um, he's a he's very good

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Speaker 1: at organ Obviously he's not the only one doing this,

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Speaker 1: but he's a major, major figure in it. His experience

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Speaker 1: building and maintaining connections between a far flung network of

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Speaker 1: insurgents made him kind of the perfect man for this. UM.

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Speaker 1: And again it's worth remembering that during this period, getting

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Speaker 1: Jews out of Poland and into Palestine was often the

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Speaker 1: only way to keep them alive. Pogroms and massacres of

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Speaker 1: Jews continued even as the Nazis retreated. We're gonna talk

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Speaker 1: about that more later, and established another clandestine organization as

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Speaker 1: he traveled across Europe, Blue was called Brickhaw and it's

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Speaker 1: again it's this underground railroad type sort of situation. As

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Speaker 1: he makes connections with survivors across Europe's Jewish communities, he

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Speaker 1: starts to come face to face with survivors of the

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Speaker 1: Nazi death camps. He and his and again, these guys,

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Speaker 1: these guys aren't going to camps. Right in Lithuanian Villa,

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Speaker 1: there's not like a big there being shot in the

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Speaker 1: fucking woods. That's how that's how the Holocaust starts. Um.

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Speaker 1: So they're finding out about the death camps as they are,

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Speaker 1: as they're moving west and meeting people who had been there.

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Speaker 1: And then later in nine four he and his Avengers

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Speaker 1: helped to liberate mashd Neck and they see their first

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Speaker 1: concentration camp. Now mash Neck was located in a suburb

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Speaker 1: of Lubland, Poland, and somewhere around three hundred and sixty

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Speaker 1: thousand people were massacred there. So Kavner comes from Vilna

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Speaker 1: where forty to sixty thousand Jews are killed, and this

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Speaker 1: just this is like already broke at him. Right, this

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Speaker 1: has like turned him into this kind of force for vengeance.

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Speaker 1: And then he realizes that like Vilma is a blip

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Speaker 1: on the radar, and the total number of people who

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Speaker 1: are being killed, and he starts to realize the scale

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Speaker 1: of the Holocaust, right, the like the truly Titanic scale

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Speaker 1: of the killings that have been carried out. Coming face

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Speaker 1: to face with Mashenet convinced Kaufner that simple military victory

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Speaker 1: against the Germans was no longer sufficient. Images of a

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Speaker 1: death camp were stuck in his mind. Now he had

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Speaker 1: spent years obsessed with the destruction of the Villa neg Ghetto,

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Speaker 1: his home and then he'd come face to face with

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Speaker 1: a massacre six times greater than the entire Jewish population

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Speaker 1: of his home town. And even as the war ended

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Speaker 1: in German defeat, stories of more massacres poured in. Some

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Speaker 1: of these were stories of the greatest death camps like Auschwitz,

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Speaker 1: but others were stories of massacres of Jews committed by

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Speaker 1: forces who were not Nazis. And I'm gonna quote again

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Speaker 1: from the book to Calm When Jews returned in July

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Speaker 1: nineteen forty four to Kiev and hoped to reoccupy their houses.

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Speaker 1: They discovered Ukrainian squatters who refused to vacate. The Ukrainians

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Speaker 1: started throwing Jews from moving train cars and beating random Jews.

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Speaker 1: The feeling was of an impending program. There was no

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Speaker 1: one to turn to with an alert. In July of

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Speaker 1: nineteen forty four, upon the liberation of Lithuania, Jews who

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Speaker 1: returned to their homes from the forests and hideouts, attempting

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Speaker 1: to find relatives and perhaps a small fraction of their properties,

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Speaker 1: were murdered on their doorsteps by neighbors and local Lithuanian

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Speaker 1: gangs who hidden the forests and elsewhere in order to

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Speaker 1: not be conscripted by the Germans. In the pockets of

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Speaker 1: five Jews who had survived the Holocaust but were then

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Speaker 1: murdered in the Lithuanian town of a Ks, a note

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Speaker 1: was found in Polish saying this will be the fate

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Speaker 1: of all the Jews left alive. So this doesn't put

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Speaker 1: Kavnor and his men into his men and women. By

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Speaker 1: the way, there's a pretty I think it might even

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Speaker 1: be a pretty even split of men and women in

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Speaker 1: his In his insurgent organization UM it is like they're

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Speaker 1: kind of out of their minds at this point, right,

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Speaker 1: not only you have to like because the Holocaust is

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Speaker 1: still happening, because now it's because yeah, and this is

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Speaker 1: again if you have ever had PTSD, what that means.

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Speaker 1: I'm not trying to I'm not again, I have had it.

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Speaker 1: I'm not I've had I've had a couple of of

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Speaker 1: PTSD breaks. I Am not trying to be um uh me,

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Speaker 1: I don't mean this in a negative way. You're crazy, right,

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Speaker 1: Like that's what you're You're kind of out of your

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Speaker 1: mind for a while. That's part of the problem. And

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Speaker 1: these people are dealing with not only like the most

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Speaker 1: PTSD I can fucking imagine. Um, but now they realize

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Speaker 1: that like it's not over. The massacre is continuing, and

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Speaker 1: all of this is happening like while they are continuing

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Speaker 1: to fight a war. And so between the grief of

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Speaker 1: losing all of their loved ones and friends and the

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Speaker 1: trauma of years of underground fighting, deadly partisan combat, these

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Speaker 1: people are in what you might call a particular state

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Speaker 1: of mind. The most obvious consequence is of this is

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Speaker 1: an obsession with vengeance, which the end of the war

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Speaker 1: does not slack, and as the war kind of comes

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Speaker 1: to an end, a lot of these Jewish partisan's people

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Speaker 1: who are friends and affiliated with them, with with kaufner

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Speaker 1: Um members of different Zionist youth groups in Poland, they

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Speaker 1: start to carry out attacks in areas that have already

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Speaker 1: been liberated, places where the war has come to an end.

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Speaker 1: And I'm gonna read a quote from the book to

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Speaker 1: calm here. Naza GROUPA, a group of Zionist youth members

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Speaker 1: from beds in Poland, aimed to exact vengeance in Germany,

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Speaker 1: and Mill Brigg, later a hero in Israel's War of

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Speaker 1: Well in the Arab Israeli War, recounted, Uh we have

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Speaker 1: She uses the term Israel's War of independence like you

340
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Speaker 1: can whatever. We had nothing to lose. We wanted only revenge.

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Speaker 1: Young men and women burning with venge for vengeance, with

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Speaker 1: nothing in their world but a mighty urge to kill

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Speaker 1: Germans and to destroy whoever was collaborating with Germans. Some

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Speaker 1: members of Naza GROUPA, who had volunteered for the Red Army,

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Speaker 1: succeeded in acts of vengeance, but not as much as

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Speaker 1: they had wished, not as Jews, not as representatives of

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Speaker 1: the entire Jewish nation against the higher German nation. One

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Speaker 1: of them, Manos d'amont, visited Auschwitz as soon as the

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Speaker 1: war ended, and he saw this command written on one

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Speaker 1: of the walls of the torture chambers. Jews take vengeance.

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Speaker 1: These words guided his future. He and Alex Gatman, a

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Speaker 1: fellow member of the group, headed a squad in Austria

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Speaker 1: that executed those who had been found guilty. Most of

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Speaker 1: the members felt as if they were judges without robes,

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Speaker 1: judges of a special kind, who together delivered and immediately

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Speaker 1: carried out their sentences. They bound and gagged suspects, held

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Speaker 1: a few minutes of trial proceedings for each, and read

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Speaker 1: an indictment. They prosecuted murderers who had been active in

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Speaker 1: the ghettos and concentration camps, those who had killed with

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Speaker 1: their own hands and could be reliably identified, in the

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Speaker 1: group's opinion by at least two witnesses. No troop, no

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Speaker 1: courte of true justice in the world, would have handed

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Speaker 1: down a different verdict if he confessed on his own

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Speaker 1: without being interrogated, said Damont. These killers were mostly, but

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Speaker 1: not always s S troops. The group then killed the suspect,

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Speaker 1: For example, four young men who had been freed from

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Speaker 1: the Lansburg Offering concentration camp near Munich, stole British jeeps

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Speaker 1: and drove to a neighboring town, whe they mounted a

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Speaker 1: pegram of their own for four or five hours, punching

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Speaker 1: and beating. Soldiers of the Jewish Brigade who arrived at

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Speaker 1: the scene stood there stunned. They couldn't agree with this

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Speaker 1: and sent us away. We broke everything around, We broke windows,

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Speaker 1: We hit children and old people too. The hatred inside

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Speaker 1: of us was terrible, a heavy burden of rage. It

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Speaker 1: is difficult to determine how many such incidents occurred, with

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Speaker 1: survivors taking action either independently or with a few comrades.

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Speaker 1: So again there's like this stuff is happening as the

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Speaker 1: war ends. There's like guys busting, like stealing British military

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Speaker 1: ship and just driving into German towns and just beating

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Speaker 1: the ship out of everybody they encounter, which like I

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Speaker 1: get it, man, Like, yeah, it's like it's not good,

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00:20:40,359 --> 00:20:44,080
Speaker 1: it's not, but it's justice. But it's inevitable to have

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Speaker 1: the inevitable consequence of what the Nazis did, Right, I

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00:20:48,920 --> 00:20:51,159
Speaker 1: feel like there's a difference between justice and consequences that

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00:20:51,200 --> 00:20:53,480
Speaker 1: doesn't get talked about enough for it's just like, I

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00:20:53,480 --> 00:20:56,080
Speaker 1: don't know, like you do a bunch of bad ship

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00:20:56,560 --> 00:20:58,680
Speaker 1: and some other bad ship's going to happen and it's

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00:20:58,680 --> 00:21:04,200
Speaker 1: not justified inherently like that kid who got beat didn't

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00:21:04,240 --> 00:21:09,400
Speaker 1: do anything, you know, and like it's not good. It's

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00:21:09,440 --> 00:21:15,720
Speaker 1: a it's just a thing. It's just it is that. Yeah, yeah,

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Speaker 1: if you're going to say, and I think it is, like,

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Speaker 1: it's bad. It's bad if like children are getting beaten

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Speaker 1: in the street, because even if the children believed the

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Speaker 1: fun up things their parents told them, they're they're not

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Speaker 1: responsible for it. But also the bad thing that's being

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Speaker 1: done here, I would say, even though it's being committed

397
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Speaker 1: by these like Jewish concentration camp survivors, the evil is

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Speaker 1: still on the Nazis. They're responsible for those kids getting

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Speaker 1: beaten in the street. Right, It's not the fault of

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00:21:41,800 --> 00:21:45,200
Speaker 1: the people who lost everything and are like what these

401
00:21:45,200 --> 00:21:46,760
Speaker 1: people just get to go on living their lives. No,

402
00:21:46,800 --> 00:21:49,600
Speaker 1: we're gonna start hitting them with a fucking bat Like yeah,

403
00:21:49,720 --> 00:21:52,479
Speaker 1: that's uh, you know, it's not it's not It's not

404
00:21:52,520 --> 00:21:55,560
Speaker 1: on them, is what I will say, um, like like

405
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Speaker 1: just like those kids can't be responsible. Nobody who's just

406
00:21:58,600 --> 00:22:01,439
Speaker 1: gotten out of a concentration amp can be responsible for

407
00:22:01,480 --> 00:22:07,200
Speaker 1: their actions in this case like that. Yeah, that's yeah, God,

408
00:22:07,280 --> 00:22:11,199
Speaker 1: that's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, it's a it's a kite like

409
00:22:11,280 --> 00:22:14,080
Speaker 1: if if if if. If you are a person who

410
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Speaker 1: believes that like temporary insanity can render one less complicit

411
00:22:19,960 --> 00:22:22,639
Speaker 1: in an act of violence, you have to say it

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Speaker 1: applies here, like, I can't imagine a better example of that, Um,

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Speaker 1: but you know what I can imagine, Margaret, What can

414
00:22:30,520 --> 00:22:34,159
Speaker 1: you imagine? A beautiful world, A perfect world, Margaret, A

415
00:22:34,280 --> 00:22:37,720
Speaker 1: shining city upon a hill where people can purchase the

416
00:22:37,720 --> 00:22:41,680
Speaker 1: products and services that support this podcast, A whole city,

417
00:22:42,119 --> 00:22:47,399
Speaker 1: A whole city, Margaret, of just gold and podcasts. That's right,

418
00:22:47,600 --> 00:22:50,880
Speaker 1: most advertisers, we're gonna build it together. We're gonna make

419
00:22:50,920 --> 00:22:54,120
Speaker 1: it real. Is one. I'm so excited to be part

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00:22:54,160 --> 00:23:03,400
Speaker 1: of my Ah, we're back. We've just built a shining

421
00:23:03,400 --> 00:23:06,040
Speaker 1: city upon a hill. It's great. You can get like

422
00:23:06,160 --> 00:23:10,439
Speaker 1: five different kinds of mattresses there. Um. Back to the story.

423
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Speaker 1: So Covenor in his mates, along with a lot of

424
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Speaker 1: other Holocaust drivers, are kind of spiraling as the war

425
00:23:17,520 --> 00:23:20,880
Speaker 1: comes to an end, and once the fighting actually stops

426
00:23:20,920 --> 00:23:24,440
Speaker 1: for them, everything gets worse. Right as bad as their

427
00:23:24,480 --> 00:23:27,840
Speaker 1: mind state had been previously, they at least had had

428
00:23:27,920 --> 00:23:32,320
Speaker 1: fighting to focus on. Um Once the fightings, once there's

429
00:23:32,359 --> 00:23:35,280
Speaker 1: no fighting for them to do, like, they have nothing

430
00:23:35,280 --> 00:23:37,960
Speaker 1: but their thoughts, right, and that is not a good

431
00:23:37,960 --> 00:23:43,480
Speaker 1: place to be in. UM. Yeah, So, while you know,

432
00:23:43,600 --> 00:23:45,879
Speaker 1: they're kind of trying to cope with the end of

433
00:23:45,920 --> 00:23:49,040
Speaker 1: their part in the war, the Allies are arresting a

434
00:23:49,040 --> 00:23:51,880
Speaker 1: bunch of German officers. They are starting to carry out

435
00:23:52,359 --> 00:23:57,800
Speaker 1: like the the justice part of the of the victory UM.

436
00:23:57,840 --> 00:24:01,480
Speaker 1: But it's it quickly becomes clear to Abatkovner that the

437
00:24:01,520 --> 00:24:04,800
Speaker 1: Allies aren't really interested in ensuring anything that he would

438
00:24:04,800 --> 00:24:09,200
Speaker 1: consider to be justice. So in April of nineteen forty five,

439
00:24:09,400 --> 00:24:12,560
Speaker 1: mere weeks before Hitler's suicide, Abbot Kavner met with a

440
00:24:12,640 --> 00:24:15,400
Speaker 1: number of his partisans and a group of Auschwitz survivors

441
00:24:15,400 --> 00:24:18,760
Speaker 1: in a flat near the recently liberated city of Lublin, Poland.

442
00:24:18,800 --> 00:24:22,640
Speaker 1: This is right after they've liberated that deathcamp. Mashed Neck Kauvner,

443
00:24:22,760 --> 00:24:26,000
Speaker 1: the man who had first warned Jewish Europe about Germany's

444
00:24:26,040 --> 00:24:29,920
Speaker 1: plans to kill them all delivered another address. He warned

445
00:24:29,960 --> 00:24:32,960
Speaker 1: them first that the Holocaust was not over and that

446
00:24:33,160 --> 00:24:36,159
Speaker 1: some terrible form of terrible vengeance against the Germans was

447
00:24:36,280 --> 00:24:38,639
Speaker 1: necessary as an act of self defense. Part of what

448
00:24:38,680 --> 00:24:43,080
Speaker 1: he's saying here is, look, the Poles are still killing us,

449
00:24:43,119 --> 00:24:45,720
Speaker 1: The Ukrainians are still killing us, the Lithuanians are still

450
00:24:45,800 --> 00:24:48,440
Speaker 1: killing us. The Nazis are gone, but they're still killing us.

451
00:24:48,840 --> 00:24:51,000
Speaker 1: And it's because they think they can get away with

452
00:24:51,000 --> 00:24:53,560
Speaker 1: it because the Germans did. And so we have to

453
00:24:53,600 --> 00:24:55,840
Speaker 1: carry out an act of vengeance against the Germans so

454
00:24:55,920 --> 00:25:01,240
Speaker 1: people stopped killing us. Interesting, he tells them the act

455
00:25:01,280 --> 00:25:04,520
Speaker 1: should be shocking. The Germans should know that after Auschwitz

456
00:25:04,560 --> 00:25:08,080
Speaker 1: there can be no return to normality. And this is

457
00:25:08,320 --> 00:25:12,040
Speaker 1: their versions of this idea. There's there's one famous survivor

458
00:25:12,040 --> 00:25:14,960
Speaker 1: and academic who I think the exact line is poetry

459
00:25:14,960 --> 00:25:19,119
Speaker 1: after Auschwitz is obscene, right, that like the severity of

460
00:25:19,119 --> 00:25:21,960
Speaker 1: this crime has rendered like the human attempt to create

461
00:25:22,080 --> 00:25:26,160
Speaker 1: art and obscenity. Um, there's a variety, and Kagner's attitude

462
00:25:26,200 --> 00:25:30,240
Speaker 1: is that like they can't do this and just continue

463
00:25:30,280 --> 00:25:35,600
Speaker 1: to be a country. Um, Like it's this kind of like, yeah,

464
00:25:35,840 --> 00:25:38,760
Speaker 1: it's like it's hard to argue with that with the man, right,

465
00:25:40,160 --> 00:25:43,680
Speaker 1: um So. Survivors at the meeting recalled that, as usual,

466
00:25:43,760 --> 00:25:47,840
Speaker 1: Kafner's eloquence was hypnotizing. One person who was there described

467
00:25:47,880 --> 00:25:50,840
Speaker 1: their mind state listening to him this way, those who

468
00:25:50,920 --> 00:25:53,119
Speaker 1: came away from the smoke stacks of the crematory and

469
00:25:53,119 --> 00:25:56,160
Speaker 1: know what they want. We want tanks demolishing city streets.

470
00:25:56,400 --> 00:25:59,960
Speaker 1: Rebuilding comes later. Our job now is destruction. Who dare

471
00:26:00,080 --> 00:26:02,960
Speaker 1: is deny it to us? We are Frankenstein's We who

472
00:26:03,000 --> 00:26:05,280
Speaker 1: came away from the ruins will show the world. We

473
00:26:05,320 --> 00:26:07,679
Speaker 1: will snatch up the name Jew in every language, and

474
00:26:07,760 --> 00:26:10,720
Speaker 1: uplifted words of vengeance will light our way. For as

475
00:26:10,760 --> 00:26:13,000
Speaker 1: long as one member of this nation remains. We shall

476
00:26:13,000 --> 00:26:21,199
Speaker 1: not rest. Now this Yeah, that's sketchy. Yeah, this is

477
00:26:21,560 --> 00:26:24,760
Speaker 1: this is some unsettling ship that we're delving into. And

478
00:26:24,800 --> 00:26:28,919
Speaker 1: this is like, no one should be calling themselves Germans

479
00:26:28,920 --> 00:26:31,159
Speaker 1: because we've destroyed the state of Germany. Or does that

480
00:26:31,200 --> 00:26:35,280
Speaker 1: mean like literally every German citizen must die. Let's let's

481
00:26:35,359 --> 00:26:38,280
Speaker 1: let's let's let's talk about that in a little bit, Margaret, Okay,

482
00:26:38,480 --> 00:26:41,399
Speaker 1: what you should know is that on a religious name. Note,

483
00:26:41,520 --> 00:26:45,359
Speaker 1: the idea of vengeance is not something that is permitted

484
00:26:45,520 --> 00:26:48,480
Speaker 1: in the Jewish faith and Talmudic law. And the Talment

485
00:26:48,600 --> 00:26:50,399
Speaker 1: is you've got like the Torah, right, which is the

486
00:26:50,920 --> 00:26:53,560
Speaker 1: Old Testament. Effectively, the Talment is like I think like

487
00:26:53,640 --> 00:26:57,920
Speaker 1: eight hundred years of basically commentary from different religious scholars

488
00:26:57,920 --> 00:27:02,000
Speaker 1: on the Torah. Yeah, um. And in Talmudic law, personal

489
00:27:02,080 --> 00:27:06,000
Speaker 1: vengeance is forbidden, right, like vengeance's mind saith the Lord.

490
00:27:06,040 --> 00:27:08,720
Speaker 1: I mean, like vengeance is something God can do. God

491
00:27:08,800 --> 00:27:11,880
Speaker 1: can take revenge you should not take because it's bad

492
00:27:11,960 --> 00:27:15,359
Speaker 1: for you, right, It's like bad, like it is bad

493
00:27:15,400 --> 00:27:18,760
Speaker 1: for people to obsess over revenge. Yeah, And it doesn't

494
00:27:19,000 --> 00:27:21,359
Speaker 1: it doesn't fit within my context of like and this

495
00:27:21,440 --> 00:27:24,840
Speaker 1: is like I'm not like sitting on my my my

496
00:27:25,240 --> 00:27:29,000
Speaker 1: rolling chair in my studio at home in West Virginia

497
00:27:29,080 --> 00:27:32,760
Speaker 1: and like trying to cast judgment. But like one of

498
00:27:32,800 --> 00:27:35,840
Speaker 1: my favorite anarchist assassins whose name I suddenly forget, I

499
00:27:35,840 --> 00:27:39,520
Speaker 1: think it's Kurt Wilkins um his quote after he killed

500
00:27:39,560 --> 00:27:42,840
Speaker 1: someone who had killed fifteen hundred anarchists and indigenous people

501
00:27:43,320 --> 00:27:48,920
Speaker 1: um uh in South America. He his quote was, vengeance

502
00:27:48,960 --> 00:27:52,000
Speaker 1: is unbecoming of an anarchist um. Even though he had

503
00:27:52,000 --> 00:27:54,199
Speaker 1: just done a vengeance, he saw it as this like

504
00:27:54,320 --> 00:27:59,879
Speaker 1: problem solving, right, But the concept a vengeance is like

505
00:28:00,119 --> 00:28:05,560
Speaker 1: not problem solving, it's problem perpetuating most of the time.

506
00:28:05,960 --> 00:28:11,440
Speaker 1: And so it's like not inherently just but that that's said,

507
00:28:11,520 --> 00:28:14,119
Speaker 1: and so that that map says, I don't know, I'm

508
00:28:14,200 --> 00:28:16,879
Speaker 1: just mapping talmaic law to to that as well. I

509
00:28:16,880 --> 00:28:19,600
Speaker 1: guess it's like this idea that ye, vengeance is not

510
00:28:19,720 --> 00:28:23,800
Speaker 1: to know that like good, but it's big understandable, it's

511
00:28:23,840 --> 00:28:26,280
Speaker 1: not good, and it is within kind of the strictures

512
00:28:26,320 --> 00:28:28,600
Speaker 1: of the Jewish religion. It is something that specifically you're

513
00:28:28,680 --> 00:28:32,080
Speaker 1: not supposed to seek as a person. Kavner and his

514
00:28:32,160 --> 00:28:35,280
Speaker 1: fellow survivors, though again these guys were not most of

515
00:28:35,320 --> 00:28:37,160
Speaker 1: them many of them. Some of these guys had been

516
00:28:37,160 --> 00:28:39,160
Speaker 1: like religious Scienists, some of them had not been Zienis,

517
00:28:39,160 --> 00:28:40,520
Speaker 1: some of them been most a lot of them have

518
00:28:40,520 --> 00:28:43,000
Speaker 1: been Communist because Covenor is more on the left. These

519
00:28:43,040 --> 00:28:45,360
Speaker 1: guys are secular and it's and even the ones who

520
00:28:45,400 --> 00:28:47,840
Speaker 1: had been religious before the war, and again this is

521
00:28:47,840 --> 00:28:50,560
Speaker 1: pretty common. By the end of the Holocaust, they don't

522
00:28:50,560 --> 00:28:55,680
Speaker 1: believe anymore. That's also not universal, but fairly common. Um,

523
00:28:55,720 --> 00:28:58,120
Speaker 1: So they're not they don't really care that they're not

524
00:28:58,160 --> 00:29:02,400
Speaker 1: supposed to seek vengeance. Right. Um. One of them credits

525
00:29:02,440 --> 00:29:05,960
Speaker 1: this to the power driven into us by Hitler. Right.

526
00:29:06,040 --> 00:29:07,880
Speaker 1: That's one of the lions that you hear from one

527
00:29:07,880 --> 00:29:10,440
Speaker 1: of these guys in this meeting is that like Hitler

528
00:29:10,520 --> 00:29:13,360
Speaker 1: has like driven into us the power to commit vengeance

529
00:29:13,440 --> 00:29:16,160
Speaker 1: by by the crimes that he committed against our people.

530
00:29:16,880 --> 00:29:19,600
Speaker 1: As the meeting war On, Kavner laid out his plans

531
00:29:19,600 --> 00:29:24,160
Speaker 1: for a quote unique operation of organized vengeance. Jews, including

532
00:29:24,200 --> 00:29:27,160
Speaker 1: Kavner and his men, had already carried out numerous assassinations

533
00:29:27,160 --> 00:29:30,320
Speaker 1: of German leaders and collaborators, but this was not enough.

534
00:29:30,720 --> 00:29:33,320
Speaker 1: The Holocaust was not purely an act of the Nazi

535
00:29:33,400 --> 00:29:37,280
Speaker 1: military or a bunch of party functionaries. The normal people

536
00:29:37,320 --> 00:29:40,880
Speaker 1: of Germany had cheered the slaughter on. They had demanded it.

537
00:29:41,480 --> 00:29:44,560
Speaker 1: Bit by bit, Kovner talked himself and the other survivors

538
00:29:44,560 --> 00:29:48,120
Speaker 1: into a new idea. He described described it as quote

539
00:29:48,480 --> 00:29:50,640
Speaker 1: to pay the Germans back in a way that only

540
00:29:50,680 --> 00:29:54,200
Speaker 1: the survivors of such a massacre can an idea which

541
00:29:54,240 --> 00:29:56,400
Speaker 1: the man on the omnibus to use a figure of

542
00:29:56,400 --> 00:29:59,360
Speaker 1: speech could only consider deranged. But I will not claim

543
00:29:59,400 --> 00:30:01,560
Speaker 1: that our thinking was far from deranged in those days.

544
00:30:01,800 --> 00:30:05,400
Speaker 1: Maybe worse than deranged. A terrifying idea made hooly from

545
00:30:05,440 --> 00:30:08,240
Speaker 1: despair and carrying a sort of suicide within it, a

546
00:30:08,320 --> 00:30:11,600
Speaker 1: mental inferno, an eye for an eye, in other words,

547
00:30:12,040 --> 00:30:22,720
Speaker 1: wiping out six million Germans. Yeah, goddamn it. So that's

548
00:30:22,760 --> 00:30:26,320
Speaker 1: the that's the plan that they land on, is we're

549
00:30:26,360 --> 00:30:29,440
Speaker 1: going to kill six million of them, one for one,

550
00:30:30,160 --> 00:30:35,160
Speaker 1: you know, or close to it. Yeah, that's that's bad.

551
00:30:35,400 --> 00:30:38,440
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna go that is that is bad. Beyond

552
00:30:38,560 --> 00:30:44,800
Speaker 1: record as saying that that's bad. Individuals can be culpable

553
00:30:44,840 --> 00:30:47,920
Speaker 1: of crimes, but people are not culpable of croubs by

554
00:30:49,000 --> 00:30:52,760
Speaker 1: where they live. They are not. And I will say,

555
00:30:52,840 --> 00:30:57,680
Speaker 1: obviously it's bad to plan to kill six million civilians.

556
00:30:58,520 --> 00:31:00,280
Speaker 1: I don't think we need to be labor that point.

557
00:31:00,320 --> 00:31:04,160
Speaker 1: But you also it is not illogical. Yeah no, no,

558
00:31:04,280 --> 00:31:07,360
Speaker 1: it's it's where standing, where they are, because and there,

559
00:31:07,560 --> 00:31:09,280
Speaker 1: and I think the way that they would have defended

560
00:31:09,280 --> 00:31:11,520
Speaker 1: it then, because Kavner later that quote comes from him later,

561
00:31:11,560 --> 00:31:13,920
Speaker 1: he's like, yeah, we were deranged. We were crazy, right.

562
00:31:15,600 --> 00:31:20,320
Speaker 1: But um, having that attitude, then you're looking at the

563
00:31:20,360 --> 00:31:24,160
Speaker 1: slaughter continuing and you're looking at like, he's not wrong.

564
00:31:24,840 --> 00:31:29,920
Speaker 1: Regular Germans are complicit in the Holocaust. Every single person

565
00:31:30,000 --> 00:31:33,280
Speaker 1: who stayed in and was a part of that nation

566
00:31:33,440 --> 00:31:36,760
Speaker 1: at war has a degree of complicity in the Holocaust

567
00:31:36,880 --> 00:31:45,680
Speaker 1: that is undeniable as a historical fact um. But the

568
00:31:46,080 --> 00:31:49,680
Speaker 1: and and so his his his attitude is if they

569
00:31:49,720 --> 00:31:52,880
Speaker 1: get away with it, other people will keep trying, and

570
00:31:52,920 --> 00:31:56,080
Speaker 1: maybe they'll try again. The only way to make it

571
00:31:56,120 --> 00:31:59,440
Speaker 1: clear that you can't do this right, that you can't

572
00:31:59,640 --> 00:32:02,320
Speaker 1: do with that, you can't do genocide as a nation

573
00:32:02,760 --> 00:32:05,440
Speaker 1: is if a nation is wiped out for doing it right.

574
00:32:05,520 --> 00:32:08,640
Speaker 1: That's his that's his attitude, And that is the attitude

575
00:32:09,280 --> 00:32:14,680
Speaker 1: of a genocide survivor. And it is um, I will

576
00:32:15,520 --> 00:32:20,520
Speaker 1: I'll say this. Um. This is another thing where there's

577
00:32:20,520 --> 00:32:23,200
Speaker 1: this conversation we have about history, and it's usually by

578
00:32:23,240 --> 00:32:25,520
Speaker 1: like the worst people in the world, where they're like, well,

579
00:32:25,560 --> 00:32:27,680
Speaker 1: you have to judge people by the standards of the time,

580
00:32:27,720 --> 00:32:29,840
Speaker 1: and they usually mean that by it wasn't bad to

581
00:32:29,880 --> 00:32:33,719
Speaker 1: own slaves right right, Um, which it was, and there

582
00:32:33,720 --> 00:32:34,960
Speaker 1: were a lot of people the time we knew it

583
00:32:35,000 --> 00:32:38,000
Speaker 1: was bad where I actually think it's that's an interesting

584
00:32:38,000 --> 00:32:41,560
Speaker 1: conversation to have his situations like this, because I cannot

585
00:32:41,720 --> 00:32:45,320
Speaker 1: personally find it an in me to morally judge a

586
00:32:45,440 --> 00:32:49,480
Speaker 1: person in Kaufner's position for wanting to kill six million Germans.

587
00:32:50,040 --> 00:32:54,360
Speaker 1: It's wrong, but I can't judge it, right because who

588
00:32:54,440 --> 00:32:56,800
Speaker 1: wouldn't think that way? Right? In this time? It kind

589
00:32:56,800 --> 00:32:58,920
Speaker 1: of probably depends on how far along in these plans

590
00:32:58,920 --> 00:33:03,200
Speaker 1: he gets to be honest, like, yeah, god, that's such

591
00:33:03,240 --> 00:33:05,840
Speaker 1: an interesting question of caup ability, right, because okay, in

592
00:33:05,880 --> 00:33:09,360
Speaker 1: the immediate aftermath, right, you're like, you know, the sort

593
00:33:09,360 --> 00:33:13,120
Speaker 1: of temporary insanity as a way of understanding culpability makes

594
00:33:13,160 --> 00:33:19,600
Speaker 1: a lot of sense. Um, And but then like sitting

595
00:33:19,680 --> 00:33:25,800
Speaker 1: down and and planning something like, I don't know, it's

596
00:33:25,880 --> 00:33:30,200
Speaker 1: interesting to me. This is not me trying to like

597
00:33:30,240 --> 00:33:32,880
Speaker 1: sit and be like, well, I would have done it different.

598
00:33:32,920 --> 00:33:35,280
Speaker 1: I don't know what I would have done. Of course,

599
00:33:35,680 --> 00:33:37,840
Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell you right now. I suspect had I

600
00:33:37,880 --> 00:33:40,240
Speaker 1: been in his position, I would have agreed with his

601
00:33:40,320 --> 00:33:43,520
Speaker 1: thinking and supported it. Yeah, Like I'm not that's not good.

602
00:33:43,560 --> 00:33:46,160
Speaker 1: I'm not proud of that. I just like, yeah, man,

603
00:33:46,520 --> 00:33:49,200
Speaker 1: if everyone I loved went up in a fucking smoke

604
00:33:49,320 --> 00:33:51,880
Speaker 1: stack and all these people just got to keep having

605
00:33:51,880 --> 00:33:56,320
Speaker 1: a country, I would probably support some terrible things. No, totally.

606
00:33:56,320 --> 00:34:00,160
Speaker 1: And it's it's so interesting too, because it's it's when

607
00:34:00,160 --> 00:34:05,080
Speaker 1: you're blaming the nation of Germany and and it's people

608
00:34:05,200 --> 00:34:08,640
Speaker 1: as constitute it. It's sort of this interestingly like fundamentally

609
00:34:08,719 --> 00:34:13,359
Speaker 1: nationalist kind of idea that like, the people are their nation, right,

610
00:34:13,560 --> 00:34:15,799
Speaker 1: and that's but and that is the attitude that the

611
00:34:15,880 --> 00:34:22,040
Speaker 1: Germans had applied to that's yeah, yeah, And so part

612
00:34:22,040 --> 00:34:24,719
Speaker 1: of what they're saying is like, all right, motherfucker's turnabout

613
00:34:24,800 --> 00:34:28,600
Speaker 1: is fair goddamn play right, And it's the like, okay,

614
00:34:28,640 --> 00:34:32,920
Speaker 1: you killed you killed my husband, so now I'm going

615
00:34:32,960 --> 00:34:36,279
Speaker 1: to kill your husband as like not this is this

616
00:34:36,360 --> 00:34:38,920
Speaker 1: is like you kill my husband, I kill you. That's legit.

617
00:34:39,560 --> 00:34:43,680
Speaker 1: But again whatever, talking about what it also leads to,

618
00:34:43,880 --> 00:34:46,200
Speaker 1: probably you know, this is why in Rojava, and we

619
00:34:46,200 --> 00:34:48,239
Speaker 1: talked about this a lot in the Women's War podcast,

620
00:34:48,480 --> 00:34:50,800
Speaker 1: so much of the justice system that they have built

621
00:34:50,880 --> 00:34:54,680
Speaker 1: is based around ending reprisals, is based around someone killed someone.

622
00:34:54,880 --> 00:34:57,160
Speaker 1: We have to bring the families together and get the

623
00:34:57,200 --> 00:34:59,600
Speaker 1: families of the victims to agree to a situation by

624
00:34:59,640 --> 00:35:03,440
Speaker 1: which the punishment on the person who committed the murder

625
00:35:03,480 --> 00:35:05,880
Speaker 1: is severe, but the families are not locked into a

626
00:35:05,920 --> 00:35:09,359
Speaker 1: cycle of vengeance, because that that's what's been destroying us,

627
00:35:09,360 --> 00:35:11,120
Speaker 1: and it will destroy us if we let it right,

628
00:35:12,280 --> 00:35:14,920
Speaker 1: and they're right to do that. And this is like, again,

629
00:35:15,120 --> 00:35:20,799
Speaker 1: killing six million Germans is insane. Um, It's just it's

630
00:35:20,800 --> 00:35:23,800
Speaker 1: an insanity that I cannot more like, there's no moral

631
00:35:23,920 --> 00:35:26,560
Speaker 1: judgment here when I say that, right, they these these are,

632
00:35:26,600 --> 00:35:29,440
Speaker 1: as Coffner said, they are deranged, and they are embarking

633
00:35:29,440 --> 00:35:31,160
Speaker 1: on a deranged plan, and so to the extent that

634
00:35:31,200 --> 00:35:34,280
Speaker 1: what they're doing is evil. Here, I again I placed

635
00:35:34,360 --> 00:35:38,719
Speaker 1: this evil at the Nazis feet. Coffner just wanted to

636
00:35:38,760 --> 00:35:41,360
Speaker 1: be a poet farmer. Right, you don't want to be

637
00:35:41,440 --> 00:35:47,319
Speaker 1: doing this, you know. Um, so you know again, if

638
00:35:47,360 --> 00:35:51,080
Speaker 1: you're I think the basic level, like the basic moral

639
00:35:51,160 --> 00:35:55,200
Speaker 1: question here is illustrated well as as most moral questions are.

640
00:35:55,440 --> 00:36:00,280
Speaker 1: In the movie Rambo First Blood. Right, they drew first Blood?

641
00:36:00,480 --> 00:36:05,160
Speaker 1: You know, I haven't seen that so long. It's it's

642
00:36:05,200 --> 00:36:11,840
Speaker 1: pretty base. And I remember that I remember liking it. Um, Yeah, Okay, Okay,

643
00:36:11,880 --> 00:36:14,040
Speaker 1: so so, so how far along do they get in

644
00:36:14,080 --> 00:36:17,440
Speaker 1: this terrible plan? Because I'm I'm really to find out

645
00:36:17,440 --> 00:36:21,279
Speaker 1: how he I'm curious because he obviously later was like

646
00:36:22,280 --> 00:36:25,480
Speaker 1: just kidding. That wasn't the best plan, not entirely, Margaret.

647
00:36:25,480 --> 00:36:27,919
Speaker 1: We will talk about that more too, but yeah, it's time.

648
00:36:28,000 --> 00:36:30,000
Speaker 1: It's time to move on. So before we get into

649
00:36:30,080 --> 00:36:32,080
Speaker 1: what he does and how he tries, I do want

650
00:36:32,080 --> 00:36:35,600
Speaker 1: to make the point that he is completely right when

651
00:36:35,640 --> 00:36:39,239
Speaker 1: he says that the Allied justice was not sufficient, and

652
00:36:39,280 --> 00:36:41,560
Speaker 1: to make make it clear how insufficient it was, I

653
00:36:41,600 --> 00:36:43,000
Speaker 1: want to read a quote from an article in the

654
00:36:43,040 --> 00:36:46,920
Speaker 1: Guardian by Jonathan Friedland. After the war, a light officials

655
00:36:46,960 --> 00:36:50,160
Speaker 1: identified thirteen point two million men in Western Germany alone,

656
00:36:50,239 --> 00:36:53,040
Speaker 1: is eligible for automatic arrest because they had been deemed

657
00:36:53,080 --> 00:36:55,719
Speaker 1: part of the Nazi apparatus. Fewer than three and a

658
00:36:55,760 --> 00:36:58,080
Speaker 1: half million of these were charged, and of those, two

659
00:36:58,120 --> 00:37:00,759
Speaker 1: and a half million were released without trial. That left

660
00:37:00,760 --> 00:37:02,920
Speaker 1: about a million people, and most of them faced no

661
00:37:03,000 --> 00:37:05,839
Speaker 1: greater sanction than a finer confiscation of property that they

662
00:37:05,840 --> 00:37:09,080
Speaker 1: had looted, a temporary restriction on future employment, or a

663
00:37:09,080 --> 00:37:12,560
Speaker 1: brief band from seeking public office. By nineteen forty nine,

664
00:37:12,600 --> 00:37:15,680
Speaker 1: four years after the war, only three hundred Nazis were

665
00:37:15,680 --> 00:37:19,000
Speaker 1: in prison. From an original one to list of thirteen million,

666
00:37:19,360 --> 00:37:23,240
Speaker 1: just three hundred paid anything like a serious price, because

667
00:37:23,280 --> 00:37:25,480
Speaker 1: it would have never been a never ending task, says

668
00:37:25,560 --> 00:37:29,560
Speaker 1: David Cessarini, a research professor at Royal Holloway University of

669
00:37:29,600 --> 00:37:32,320
Speaker 1: London and a leading authority on the Holocaust. He cites

670
00:37:32,360 --> 00:37:34,800
Speaker 1: the British attempt to convict those responsible for the killing

671
00:37:34,800 --> 00:37:37,400
Speaker 1: at Belsen. The trial took nine months and left the

672
00:37:37,440 --> 00:37:40,080
Speaker 1: British exhausted. That was just one camp, and there were

673
00:37:40,120 --> 00:37:42,560
Speaker 1: what seventy camps with hundreds of people at each one,

674
00:37:42,760 --> 00:37:44,799
Speaker 1: to say nothing of the Gestapo officers and the men

675
00:37:44,880 --> 00:37:47,719
Speaker 1: of the Einsetz group. And pursuing all those responsible for

676
00:37:47,760 --> 00:37:49,840
Speaker 1: the slaughter of the Jews would have been trying thousands

677
00:37:49,880 --> 00:37:52,200
Speaker 1: upon thousands of people, and it would have ended in

678
00:37:52,239 --> 00:37:55,760
Speaker 1: the jailing of almost the entire adult male population of Germany.

679
00:37:56,120 --> 00:37:59,160
Speaker 1: The Allies put their hands up in despair. And what

680
00:37:59,200 --> 00:38:01,239
Speaker 1: I will say is, yeah, maybe we should have jailed

681
00:38:01,239 --> 00:38:04,439
Speaker 1: the entire adult population in Germany, right like maybe maybe

682
00:38:04,480 --> 00:38:10,520
Speaker 1: maybe something certainly more than three hundred, right um? And

683
00:38:10,840 --> 00:38:15,239
Speaker 1: and again six just murdering six people indiscriminately is not

684
00:38:15,640 --> 00:38:19,000
Speaker 1: certainly not the right answer. But I don't know. If

685
00:38:19,040 --> 00:38:22,000
Speaker 1: you're going to say what should have happened, I tend

686
00:38:22,080 --> 00:38:24,960
Speaker 1: to consistently line up with a funckload more of those

687
00:38:24,960 --> 00:38:27,120
Speaker 1: people should have been killed. Yeah, But if they were

688
00:38:27,120 --> 00:38:29,120
Speaker 1: going around being like, sorry, you were in the Nazi army,

689
00:38:29,160 --> 00:38:31,040
Speaker 1: I don't care that you're a private You're dead now

690
00:38:31,400 --> 00:38:34,279
Speaker 1: because I yeah, I think that's just we're going consequences

691
00:38:34,320 --> 00:38:37,640
Speaker 1: of a decision you made. We make permanent decisions every day. Yeah,

692
00:38:37,680 --> 00:38:39,520
Speaker 1: and if your permanent decision you made as you join

693
00:38:39,560 --> 00:38:43,719
Speaker 1: the Nazi military, people fled, people, people tried to sabotage

694
00:38:43,719 --> 00:38:46,200
Speaker 1: the Nazi military. There's even motherfucker's like there there are

695
00:38:46,200 --> 00:38:48,400
Speaker 1: a couple of cases of like doctors who joined the

696
00:38:48,560 --> 00:38:51,759
Speaker 1: s s under duress and then saved people in the

697
00:38:51,800 --> 00:38:54,960
Speaker 1: camps who were like rescued from trials because Jews that

698
00:38:54,960 --> 00:38:57,160
Speaker 1: they'd save came forward like no, no, this guy was like,

699
00:38:57,239 --> 00:39:01,160
Speaker 1: actually people did, and if you did, I think the

700
00:39:01,239 --> 00:39:05,080
Speaker 1: thing too. Here's what I'll put out. Take a leaf

701
00:39:05,120 --> 00:39:07,920
Speaker 1: out of the Romans book, and of that five million

702
00:39:08,120 --> 00:39:12,480
Speaker 1: kill one in ten see, and I do love a

703
00:39:12,520 --> 00:39:16,400
Speaker 1: good decimation, but I think that my issue with this,

704
00:39:16,640 --> 00:39:22,400
Speaker 1: I actually would rather that, um, these the Holocaust survivors

705
00:39:22,440 --> 00:39:24,480
Speaker 1: who are not part of a who have their own

706
00:39:24,480 --> 00:39:29,560
Speaker 1: militia go and kill a huge chunk of people who

707
00:39:29,680 --> 00:39:33,759
Speaker 1: were part of the Nazi party rather than a system

708
00:39:33,800 --> 00:39:38,080
Speaker 1: an apparatus that like tries and like condemns people to death.

709
00:39:38,160 --> 00:39:41,319
Speaker 1: It's like and it's a weird anti death penalty thing

710
00:39:41,400 --> 00:39:43,520
Speaker 1: for me. That is like gets back into this idea

711
00:39:43,560 --> 00:39:49,200
Speaker 1: that like, I don't trust the systemization of murder right,

712
00:39:49,760 --> 00:39:54,200
Speaker 1: and so in the any system that could have killed

713
00:39:54,239 --> 00:39:59,400
Speaker 1: all of the Nazi soldiers later would absolutely do even

714
00:39:59,440 --> 00:40:03,480
Speaker 1: worse then these other people who are dreaming of revenge.

715
00:40:03,880 --> 00:40:06,880
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe that's why, you know, maybe maybe a cool

716
00:40:06,960 --> 00:40:10,960
Speaker 1: thing to have done. I say cool in a inappropriate sense.

717
00:40:11,000 --> 00:40:13,120
Speaker 1: But you you take these groups who by the way,

718
00:40:13,120 --> 00:40:16,080
Speaker 1: these folks like Kauvner and like the folks I read

719
00:40:16,080 --> 00:40:18,920
Speaker 1: a quote about earlier, these different Jewish armed organizations, they

720
00:40:19,000 --> 00:40:22,360
Speaker 1: kill somewhere around fifteen hundred Nazis after the war something,

721
00:40:22,360 --> 00:40:26,000
Speaker 1: and maybe you just say, hey, guys, you have a

722
00:40:26,120 --> 00:40:29,799
Speaker 1: license to do whatever you want in bringing people to

723
00:40:29,920 --> 00:40:33,640
Speaker 1: justice for a two year period or something. Um, yeah,

724
00:40:33,760 --> 00:40:38,560
Speaker 1: free travel throughout Europe. You know, you you take this on. UM,

725
00:40:38,680 --> 00:40:41,000
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know certainly. What we can

726
00:40:41,040 --> 00:40:43,960
Speaker 1: all agree on is what was done was woefully insufficient.

727
00:40:44,000 --> 00:40:46,000
Speaker 1: And it's probably part of why there have been so

728
00:40:46,040 --> 00:40:48,719
Speaker 1: many genocide since because one of the things that World

729
00:40:48,760 --> 00:40:52,000
Speaker 1: War two proved is that actually, you can wipe out

730
00:40:52,160 --> 00:40:54,200
Speaker 1: a people and kind of get away with it. Yeah.

731
00:40:54,200 --> 00:40:55,640
Speaker 1: The only thing you can't do is be a private

732
00:40:55,680 --> 00:40:59,000
Speaker 1: invading Russia. Yes, oh no, you will not get away

733
00:40:59,000 --> 00:41:03,640
Speaker 1: with that. Um So, in July of ninety six, Polish

734
00:41:03,680 --> 00:41:07,120
Speaker 1: residents of Kilcy murdered forty two Jews who had returned

735
00:41:07,120 --> 00:41:10,320
Speaker 1: from Nazi camps to their homes. This sparked a mass

736
00:41:10,360 --> 00:41:13,240
Speaker 1: exodus of survivors from Poland. Prior to the massacre, around

737
00:41:13,239 --> 00:41:15,400
Speaker 1: a thousand Jews per month had been immigrating from Poland

738
00:41:15,440 --> 00:41:18,440
Speaker 1: to the month after Kilsey, twenty thousand fled. It was

739
00:41:18,480 --> 00:41:21,319
Speaker 1: thirty thousand a month after that. Um And as best

740
00:41:21,360 --> 00:41:23,880
Speaker 1: as anyone can tell, around two thousand Jewes were massacred

741
00:41:23,920 --> 00:41:28,480
Speaker 1: post war by Polish civilians and similar killings. And another

742
00:41:28,480 --> 00:41:30,200
Speaker 1: one of the questions you can have after this is,

743
00:41:30,239 --> 00:41:34,279
Speaker 1: like all this ship that happened in Palestine after this,

744
00:41:34,800 --> 00:41:37,040
Speaker 1: How much of it would have happened if people had

745
00:41:37,040 --> 00:41:39,080
Speaker 1: felt like they didn't have to flee their homes in

746
00:41:39,160 --> 00:41:42,960
Speaker 1: order to not die. Um. There's a question to be

747
00:41:42,960 --> 00:41:46,880
Speaker 1: added there too. Um. So Kavner and his comrades saw

748
00:41:47,440 --> 00:41:52,080
Speaker 1: have decided, we're gonna kill six million Germans. Um. And

749
00:41:52,120 --> 00:41:54,960
Speaker 1: they name their new organization, which was about fifty or

750
00:41:55,040 --> 00:41:57,640
Speaker 1: sixty people. This is not a huge group. They name

751
00:41:57,680 --> 00:42:01,680
Speaker 1: it inn com, which is the Hebrew word revenge. Now,

752
00:42:01,840 --> 00:42:03,840
Speaker 1: there was a lot going on in the Jewish underground

753
00:42:03,920 --> 00:42:06,120
Speaker 1: just after the war, and Kaufner was an integral part

754
00:42:06,160 --> 00:42:08,640
Speaker 1: of a number of different organizations that were dedicated to

755
00:42:08,719 --> 00:42:12,320
Speaker 1: smuggling survivors out to Palestine and providing people with emotional

756
00:42:12,360 --> 00:42:16,279
Speaker 1: and financial support through building a European Survivors network. So

757
00:42:16,320 --> 00:42:19,600
Speaker 1: people getting out from these different areas, fleeing places that

758
00:42:19,680 --> 00:42:22,600
Speaker 1: still weren't safe, would immediately be be met face to

759
00:42:22,640 --> 00:42:25,600
Speaker 1: face with another Holocaust survivor, so that like the person

760
00:42:25,640 --> 00:42:27,520
Speaker 1: who was helping them with like know what they had

761
00:42:27,560 --> 00:42:32,000
Speaker 1: been through. Um. So he has access to a potentially

762
00:42:32,040 --> 00:42:34,400
Speaker 1: limitless number of volunteers. And by the way, one of

763
00:42:34,400 --> 00:42:37,120
Speaker 1: the points you kind of encounter reading the Kammas. While

764
00:42:37,120 --> 00:42:39,640
Speaker 1: they don't tell a lot of other people about their plans,

765
00:42:40,480 --> 00:42:42,960
Speaker 1: many of the folks that they are working with would

766
00:42:42,960 --> 00:42:46,279
Speaker 1: have agreed with this um and again because they've all

767
00:42:46,360 --> 00:42:50,160
Speaker 1: just survived the Hall, I guess um not hard to

768
00:42:50,200 --> 00:42:53,279
Speaker 1: see why, but he is. These are And one of

769
00:42:53,320 --> 00:42:56,400
Speaker 1: the things about this is like having gone through what

770
00:42:56,480 --> 00:42:58,920
Speaker 1: they've gone through in the war, the fifty or sixty

771
00:42:58,960 --> 00:43:03,799
Speaker 1: people that he's picked are like perfect insurrectionaries. They are

772
00:43:04,200 --> 00:43:06,960
Speaker 1: None of them will talk, none of them will break

773
00:43:07,120 --> 00:43:10,520
Speaker 1: under any kind of torture or question. These are the

774
00:43:10,560 --> 00:43:14,239
Speaker 1: best underground like you, you could not find a more

775
00:43:14,360 --> 00:43:18,279
Speaker 1: capable group of underground fighters than the people in the Calm.

776
00:43:18,320 --> 00:43:21,239
Speaker 1: And he specifically, he hand picks the people in this organization.

777
00:43:21,760 --> 00:43:25,279
Speaker 1: He will only we use the term Holocaust survivor very broadly, right,

778
00:43:25,600 --> 00:43:27,719
Speaker 1: and it applies to people who, like, you know, they

779
00:43:27,800 --> 00:43:30,160
Speaker 1: got beat up in the street by Nazis in nineteen

780
00:43:30,280 --> 00:43:32,120
Speaker 1: thirty three and then they fled the country. Right, that's

781
00:43:32,120 --> 00:43:34,600
Speaker 1: a Holocaust survivor, right, And I wouldn't I wouldn't take that.

782
00:43:35,000 --> 00:43:37,799
Speaker 1: Or somebody who you know gets out in forty and

783
00:43:37,880 --> 00:43:40,000
Speaker 1: manages to like flee into France and then get to

784
00:43:40,040 --> 00:43:42,200
Speaker 1: England or something right ahead of the that's a Holocaust

785
00:43:42,239 --> 00:43:45,239
Speaker 1: survivor somebody who hides out in another person's house for

786
00:43:45,239 --> 00:43:47,839
Speaker 1: the whole war, pretends to be a gentile. Those are

787
00:43:47,840 --> 00:43:50,719
Speaker 1: Holocaust survivors. But they are not the same kind of

788
00:43:50,760 --> 00:43:53,640
Speaker 1: Holocaust survivors as somebody who sees his home burnt to

789
00:43:53,680 --> 00:43:55,840
Speaker 1: the ground and fights in the woods for three years,

790
00:43:55,920 --> 00:44:00,400
Speaker 1: or somebody who is interned at Auschwitz and watches, you know,

791
00:44:01,320 --> 00:44:05,440
Speaker 1: a million people die around them. There is a difference, right,

792
00:44:05,680 --> 00:44:09,560
Speaker 1: And Kaufner will only accept into the calm people who

793
00:44:09,560 --> 00:44:12,759
Speaker 1: have been in the deaf camps, people who have been partisans,

794
00:44:12,800 --> 00:44:15,800
Speaker 1: and not just even that, they have to have taken

795
00:44:15,840 --> 00:44:19,560
Speaker 1: a form of individual personal sabotage against the Nazi state

796
00:44:19,880 --> 00:44:27,200
Speaker 1: while in that situation. So these are these are tough people, Um,

797
00:44:27,400 --> 00:44:30,480
Speaker 1: these are These are some very frightening motherfucker's. And Kafner

798
00:44:30,600 --> 00:44:33,239
Speaker 1: is so respected and the desired for vengeance is so

799
00:44:33,280 --> 00:44:36,239
Speaker 1: overwhelming that a lot of the partisans he picked when

800
00:44:36,239 --> 00:44:38,600
Speaker 1: they picks, when they learn about the plan, are almost

801
00:44:38,680 --> 00:44:43,000
Speaker 1: delirious with joy. Kaufner gathers his handpicked partisans with him

802
00:44:43,040 --> 00:44:45,680
Speaker 1: in a flat in Budapest, where they all live communally

803
00:44:45,719 --> 00:44:48,440
Speaker 1: as they're carrying out the early stages of this operation,

804
00:44:49,160 --> 00:44:52,120
Speaker 1: and by late nine he and his top lieutenants had

805
00:44:52,120 --> 00:44:55,879
Speaker 1: picked out two plans, Plan A and Plan B. Plan

806
00:44:55,960 --> 00:44:58,600
Speaker 1: A is to acquire poison and send it through the

807
00:44:58,600 --> 00:45:02,000
Speaker 1: water supply and nerum in Munich and discriminately killing the

808
00:45:02,040 --> 00:45:06,960
Speaker 1: populace of both cities. Mira Verbon Schavletsky, a member of NAKAM,

809
00:45:07,239 --> 00:45:09,800
Speaker 1: told Dina Parat later that she was in seventh heaven

810
00:45:09,840 --> 00:45:13,919
Speaker 1: when Kavner revealed the plan. Another member, Zela Rosenberg, said,

811
00:45:13,960 --> 00:45:19,080
Speaker 1: Kaufner's words shouted inside me in an insane tail spin. Um,

812
00:45:19,600 --> 00:45:24,719
Speaker 1: they are on board, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah um. I'm

813
00:45:24,719 --> 00:45:27,399
Speaker 1: gonna quote next from a report from Herrot's on on

814
00:45:27,840 --> 00:45:31,799
Speaker 1: how Plan A goes. Joseph Harmett was chosen to be

815
00:45:31,840 --> 00:45:33,920
Speaker 1: in charge of the activity in Nuremberg, one of the

816
00:45:33,920 --> 00:45:36,480
Speaker 1: symbols of the Nazi regime. I was grateful to be

817
00:45:36,560 --> 00:45:38,600
Speaker 1: chosen for this job, he said before his death in

818
00:45:38,640 --> 00:45:42,319
Speaker 1: two thousand seventeen. Working under him was Wilick Shannar, who

819
00:45:42,360 --> 00:45:45,480
Speaker 1: was hired to work in Nuremberg center for distilling drinking water.

820
00:45:45,920 --> 00:45:48,240
Speaker 1: Parat discovered that he was able to obtain the plans

821
00:45:48,280 --> 00:45:50,360
Speaker 1: of the water system and in the end even gained

822
00:45:50,360 --> 00:45:53,160
Speaker 1: control of the main valve. While the group members were

823
00:45:53,160 --> 00:45:55,640
Speaker 1: preparing to carry out the mission, Kauvner was supposed to

824
00:45:55,680 --> 00:45:58,399
Speaker 1: provide them with the poison, but he lingered too long

825
00:45:58,520 --> 00:46:01,640
Speaker 1: during his visit to Palestine. Only in December nineteen forty

826
00:46:01,680 --> 00:46:04,080
Speaker 1: five did he return to Europe disguised as a soldier

827
00:46:04,120 --> 00:46:07,680
Speaker 1: returning from leave. According to his testimony, before boarding the ship,

828
00:46:07,760 --> 00:46:10,960
Speaker 1: friends in the Haganah, the pre state military force, provided

829
00:46:11,000 --> 00:46:14,960
Speaker 1: him with poison packaged in tubes of toothpaste and shaving cream. However,

830
00:46:15,040 --> 00:46:17,120
Speaker 1: on his way back he was detained by the British

831
00:46:17,160 --> 00:46:20,279
Speaker 1: on the deck after his forged papers aroused suspicion. The

832
00:46:20,320 --> 00:46:23,520
Speaker 1: poison which he was holding was tossed into the sea.

833
00:46:24,040 --> 00:46:26,480
Speaker 1: So Number one, there's a lot of debate about whether

834
00:46:26,520 --> 00:46:29,080
Speaker 1: or not the Haganah tipped off the British, right that like,

835
00:46:29,440 --> 00:46:31,440
Speaker 1: some of them handed over the poison, and then when

836
00:46:31,440 --> 00:46:35,040
Speaker 1: others found out, they were like this probably should let

837
00:46:35,120 --> 00:46:39,000
Speaker 1: this go down, yea um. But he the poison winds

838
00:46:39,040 --> 00:46:42,040
Speaker 1: up in the ocean, and it is impossible to say

839
00:46:42,120 --> 00:46:44,400
Speaker 1: how many people might have been killed if Kafnor had

840
00:46:44,440 --> 00:46:48,560
Speaker 1: gotten the poison to Europe. Um. They have control over

841
00:46:48,600 --> 00:46:52,640
Speaker 1: the main water valve in Nuremberg, right, it's it's six

842
00:46:52,680 --> 00:46:55,359
Speaker 1: million is probably not a realistic estimate, but they could

843
00:46:55,400 --> 00:46:57,680
Speaker 1: have killed tens of thousands, I mean potentially, when you

844
00:46:57,719 --> 00:46:59,799
Speaker 1: consider how chaotic things were at the end of the war,

845
00:47:00,160 --> 00:47:03,680
Speaker 1: the lack of basic medical infrastructure, the lack of functioning hospitals.

846
00:47:04,080 --> 00:47:06,120
Speaker 1: It's not unreasonable to think they might have been able

847
00:47:06,160 --> 00:47:08,040
Speaker 1: to kill hundreds of thousands if they had, if they

848
00:47:08,080 --> 00:47:11,160
Speaker 1: had gone and actually been able to try this. But

849
00:47:11,680 --> 00:47:15,120
Speaker 1: they're not able to. Covener spends months in custody and

850
00:47:15,200 --> 00:47:18,880
Speaker 1: kind of afterwards he is a known man to the Allies, um,

851
00:47:18,920 --> 00:47:22,799
Speaker 1: and so he can no longer participate in the COM's plans. Um.

852
00:47:22,800 --> 00:47:25,400
Speaker 1: He eventually settles on a kibbutz in Palestine. What if

853
00:47:25,440 --> 00:47:29,080
Speaker 1: he um, what if he is able to settle into

854
00:47:29,640 --> 00:47:37,640
Speaker 1: quiet life of supporting advertisers. Oh Jesus Christ, that was bleak, Margaret,

855
00:47:38,120 --> 00:47:52,400
Speaker 1: Thanks thanks for this is not my show. Um, here's

856
00:47:52,520 --> 00:48:02,600
Speaker 1: here's some ads. I guess so, Oh, Kauvner is kind

857
00:48:02,600 --> 00:48:05,000
Speaker 1: of out of the picture of Nicom. He doesn't invite

858
00:48:05,360 --> 00:48:07,080
Speaker 1: and you kind of get the feeling that he starts

859
00:48:07,120 --> 00:48:10,759
Speaker 1: to like pull himself out of the tail spin a

860
00:48:10,760 --> 00:48:12,520
Speaker 1: little bit. He invites a bunch of members of the

861
00:48:12,560 --> 00:48:15,960
Speaker 1: group over to his kibbutz Uh. They visit. Some of

862
00:48:16,000 --> 00:48:18,520
Speaker 1: them start to give up at this point, but others

863
00:48:18,640 --> 00:48:21,480
Speaker 1: decided to carry out a Plan B. Do they have

864
00:48:21,520 --> 00:48:24,640
Speaker 1: the Plan B the whole time? Oh? Yes, yes, yes,

865
00:48:24,920 --> 00:48:27,759
Speaker 1: And the Allies the ally and they're working towards Plan

866
00:48:27,800 --> 00:48:29,680
Speaker 1: B at the same time as they're working towards planning

867
00:48:29,840 --> 00:48:33,240
Speaker 1: and always have a backup plan. And this is actually

868
00:48:33,280 --> 00:48:36,880
Speaker 1: cooler um. Indiscriminately poison the water supply of a large

869
00:48:36,920 --> 00:48:39,560
Speaker 1: city is a bad thing to do. This is kind

870
00:48:39,560 --> 00:48:42,600
Speaker 1: of rat So the Allied authorities had in turned former

871
00:48:42,800 --> 00:48:45,240
Speaker 1: s S members at the tension camps outside of Nuremberg

872
00:48:45,239 --> 00:48:48,440
Speaker 1: and Da Kau, one of the Avengers lead key Distal,

873
00:48:48,840 --> 00:48:51,440
Speaker 1: was hired to work at the bakery that's Surbriet supplied

874
00:48:51,440 --> 00:48:54,520
Speaker 1: bread to prisoners and guards at the Nuremberg camp. According

875
00:48:54,520 --> 00:48:57,320
Speaker 1: to Dina parat quote, he first thought to inject poison

876
00:48:57,360 --> 00:48:59,759
Speaker 1: into the bags of flour in the warehouse, later into

877
00:48:59,800 --> 00:49:02,879
Speaker 1: the oh mixers, and finally he reached the conclusion after

878
00:49:02,920 --> 00:49:05,080
Speaker 1: consulting with the group members that the poison should be

879
00:49:05,120 --> 00:49:08,360
Speaker 1: spread on the bottom of the loads. So Distal spends

880
00:49:08,480 --> 00:49:11,160
Speaker 1: months rising through the ranks at the bakery staff until

881
00:49:11,200 --> 00:49:15,360
Speaker 1: he gets yeah, rise like bread, until he's put in

882
00:49:15,440 --> 00:49:17,960
Speaker 1: charge of the bread warehouse, and he learns every aspect

883
00:49:17,960 --> 00:49:20,920
Speaker 1: of the distribution system. This included the fact that German

884
00:49:20,960 --> 00:49:23,880
Speaker 1: captives were given cheap black bread while the American guards

885
00:49:23,920 --> 00:49:26,120
Speaker 1: were given more expensive white bread. This was a big

886
00:49:26,120 --> 00:49:28,840
Speaker 1: break for New Calm. They were willing to mass murder Germans,

887
00:49:28,920 --> 00:49:32,160
Speaker 1: but they like, again, the Americans have just liberated Nazi Germany.

888
00:49:32,400 --> 00:49:35,319
Speaker 1: Don't want to murder those guys. It's like they would

889
00:49:35,520 --> 00:49:39,440
Speaker 1: feel kind of bad about that. Um. Now, I should

890
00:49:39,480 --> 00:49:42,440
Speaker 1: note that there's also some quotes. You'll get some really

891
00:49:42,520 --> 00:49:45,239
Speaker 1: chilling quotes, Like there's one member of the Calm was like,

892
00:49:45,239 --> 00:49:47,640
Speaker 1: if Kafnor had wanted us to murder a Jew for

893
00:49:47,680 --> 00:49:49,440
Speaker 1: some reason to carry out our plans, we would have

894
00:49:49,480 --> 00:49:51,680
Speaker 1: done it, Like we would have done anything. He told us.

895
00:49:52,840 --> 00:49:55,520
Speaker 1: If you're willing to poison intoscriminately a city, you're going

896
00:49:55,560 --> 00:49:58,640
Speaker 1: to kill a lot of Jews. Yeah, yeah, that that

897
00:49:58,760 --> 00:50:03,360
Speaker 1: is also probably well actually, given the realities of the Holocaust,

898
00:50:03,440 --> 00:50:06,399
Speaker 1: probably not at that I don't actually know enough about

899
00:50:06,400 --> 00:50:09,319
Speaker 1: when people started getting back into Germany and started living

900
00:50:09,360 --> 00:50:13,719
Speaker 1: in those cities. Acond Yeah, um, so yeah he is,

901
00:50:14,320 --> 00:50:18,720
Speaker 1: And so this is the plan um they And again

902
00:50:18,760 --> 00:50:21,680
Speaker 1: this shows like what competent, because they have they have

903
00:50:21,760 --> 00:50:24,279
Speaker 1: in the space of a few months, gotten people at

904
00:50:24,360 --> 00:50:27,399
Speaker 1: high levels in the water distribution network, like in like

905
00:50:27,600 --> 00:50:31,719
Speaker 1: managing the waters, like the freshwater system and fucking the

906
00:50:31,760 --> 00:50:35,160
Speaker 1: city of Nuremberg. And they've gotten other people managing like

907
00:50:35,239 --> 00:50:39,040
Speaker 1: the bread distribution at this at like prisoner of war

908
00:50:39,120 --> 00:50:42,839
Speaker 1: camps where huge numbers of s S prisoners are being held. Um.

909
00:50:42,880 --> 00:50:46,840
Speaker 1: And they do this all simultaneously. And Distal and his

910
00:50:46,920 --> 00:50:49,680
Speaker 1: chunk of new Com find another source of poison and

911
00:50:49,680 --> 00:50:52,680
Speaker 1: they smuggle it into the warehouse under a raincoat. Several

912
00:50:52,680 --> 00:50:55,240
Speaker 1: members of to COM succeed in hiding themselves in bread

913
00:50:55,280 --> 00:50:57,839
Speaker 1: baskets where they wait for the night to fall. When

914
00:50:57,840 --> 00:50:59,920
Speaker 1: the other workers had left for the day and locked up,

915
00:51:00,000 --> 00:51:03,440
Speaker 1: they all left hiding and start painting poison using paintbrushes

916
00:51:03,680 --> 00:51:06,719
Speaker 1: over loaves of bread. This was a static work for them.

917
00:51:06,760 --> 00:51:09,200
Speaker 1: And when they've covered three thousand loaves, they paused to

918
00:51:09,280 --> 00:51:12,040
Speaker 1: kiss each other. It's arsenic that they're putting on this bread.

919
00:51:13,239 --> 00:51:15,879
Speaker 1: Two days later, Germans at the camp started to fall sick.

920
00:51:16,080 --> 00:51:19,440
Speaker 1: More than former s S men caught stomach poison and

921
00:51:19,480 --> 00:51:23,440
Speaker 1: it is unclear if any die records aren't great at

922
00:51:23,440 --> 00:51:25,239
Speaker 1: this time. Some reports youll here is that it was

923
00:51:25,280 --> 00:51:28,040
Speaker 1: like close to a thousand, you know, several hundred prisoners

924
00:51:28,040 --> 00:51:31,440
Speaker 1: died eventually as a result of this. Dina Parat claims

925
00:51:31,480 --> 00:51:34,240
Speaker 1: they failed to kill anyone. I don't really know who's

926
00:51:34,320 --> 00:51:37,160
Speaker 1: right here. Dina kind of has a vested interest in

927
00:51:37,239 --> 00:51:39,799
Speaker 1: making it seem like they didn't kill people. Um, I

928
00:51:39,800 --> 00:51:42,680
Speaker 1: don't actually know what went down. Um, but they certainly

929
00:51:42,719 --> 00:51:44,279
Speaker 1: get a lot of s S men sick. And you

930
00:51:44,280 --> 00:51:46,440
Speaker 1: know what, I don't care what happens. I don't care

931
00:51:46,480 --> 00:51:48,560
Speaker 1: at all. And like I don't care at all even

932
00:51:48,560 --> 00:51:51,239
Speaker 1: if they're prisoners. I don't care. Well, I mean especially,

933
00:51:51,640 --> 00:51:53,920
Speaker 1: I think it is beautiful that it is not their prison,

934
00:51:53,920 --> 00:51:57,920
Speaker 1: they're not their guards they're killing them. It's their former victims,

935
00:51:57,440 --> 00:52:02,520
Speaker 1: the victims. That's fine. That's completely phone notes on this one. Yeah,

936
00:52:02,760 --> 00:52:06,319
Speaker 1: except that the poisoning is apparently every time I've read

937
00:52:06,320 --> 00:52:08,680
Speaker 1: about people like trying to do mass poisoning in history,

938
00:52:08,719 --> 00:52:12,279
Speaker 1: it usually fails really terribly all nearly always. Yeah, it's

939
00:52:12,280 --> 00:52:14,919
Speaker 1: actually very hard to do, and it's hard to say,

940
00:52:14,960 --> 00:52:17,319
Speaker 1: like would would the water plan if worked? They had

941
00:52:17,360 --> 00:52:19,040
Speaker 1: a lot of poison it was, it was supposed to

942
00:52:19,080 --> 00:52:21,399
Speaker 1: be a pretty good quality. It's also kind of worth

943
00:52:21,440 --> 00:52:23,560
Speaker 1: noting part of why they choose to poison the water

944
00:52:24,040 --> 00:52:26,600
Speaker 1: is that for hundreds of years in Europe, like every

945
00:52:26,640 --> 00:52:29,160
Speaker 1: time water would go bad in a well or something,

946
00:52:29,200 --> 00:52:31,279
Speaker 1: the juice would get blamed and murdered. And so they

947
00:52:31,280 --> 00:52:33,239
Speaker 1: were kind of being like, we're going to do it

948
00:52:33,320 --> 00:52:35,720
Speaker 1: this time, right, Like that was like part of the thinking,

949
00:52:36,520 --> 00:52:40,480
Speaker 1: um that that that tracks so well to just be

950
00:52:40,560 --> 00:52:44,120
Speaker 1: like you call as monsters for a thousand fucking years,

951
00:52:44,840 --> 00:52:48,600
Speaker 1: moderately a thousand years. Yeah, we'll do it now. Motherfucker's

952
00:52:48,760 --> 00:52:54,120
Speaker 1: I get it. Bad thing to do, but to get it. Um. So,

953
00:52:54,239 --> 00:52:56,400
Speaker 1: the Allies never caught in a calm for the poisoning,

954
00:52:56,440 --> 00:52:59,160
Speaker 1: but when they analyzed the arsenic used they concluded that

955
00:52:59,200 --> 00:53:02,279
Speaker 1: they could have killed about sixty people with it. It

956
00:53:02,400 --> 00:53:04,480
Speaker 1: suspected the reason why this doesn't work that well as

957
00:53:04,480 --> 00:53:06,919
Speaker 1: that they spread it too thin on the bread um.

958
00:53:07,000 --> 00:53:08,959
Speaker 1: And this is something that members of the group would

959
00:53:08,960 --> 00:53:13,120
Speaker 1: regret for the rest of their lives. Um, yeah, I

960
00:53:13,160 --> 00:53:15,480
Speaker 1: get it, guys, I get it. So not long after,

961
00:53:15,560 --> 00:53:18,000
Speaker 1: another group of the common Surgeons, headed by a hero

962
00:53:18,120 --> 00:53:21,160
Speaker 1: of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, attempted to carry out the

963
00:53:21,200 --> 00:53:24,000
Speaker 1: same plan in the Dachau camp. The plan was canceled

964
00:53:24,000 --> 00:53:26,440
Speaker 1: at the last minute for unknown reasons. And it's kind

965
00:53:26,440 --> 00:53:28,720
Speaker 1: of at this point that Nacom starts to fall apart.

966
00:53:29,520 --> 00:53:32,640
Speaker 1: The mania of the wars the derangement, as as Kagnor

967
00:53:32,640 --> 00:53:36,440
Speaker 1: would later claim, has faded, and now people are starting

968
00:53:36,440 --> 00:53:39,359
Speaker 1: to look at the possibility of a future. Right. Um,

969
00:53:39,640 --> 00:53:42,360
Speaker 1: there are a few men who stayed loyal to the mission.

970
00:53:42,560 --> 00:53:45,000
Speaker 1: After a visit to Kavner and Palestine, a small group

971
00:53:45,040 --> 00:53:48,400
Speaker 1: returned to Europe to try again. Their efforts were constantly

972
00:53:48,440 --> 00:53:51,239
Speaker 1: stymied by the new Federal Republic of Germany, and many

973
00:53:51,280 --> 00:53:53,719
Speaker 1: of them were arrested by After turning to crime to

974
00:53:53,760 --> 00:53:57,600
Speaker 1: finance their efforts. They all eventually immigrated back to Palestine,

975
00:53:57,760 --> 00:54:00,279
Speaker 1: where many turned the rage and hate that they'd to

976
00:54:00,320 --> 00:54:05,040
Speaker 1: spend upon the Germans towards a new enemy. So a

977
00:54:05,080 --> 00:54:07,800
Speaker 1: bunch of the guys who are in the calm become

978
00:54:07,880 --> 00:54:11,880
Speaker 1: senior officers in the Israeli Defense Establishment. One becomes the

979
00:54:11,960 --> 00:54:13,840
Speaker 1: chief of the i d F. At one point, a

980
00:54:13,880 --> 00:54:16,800
Speaker 1: couple one or two become generals. A number of NECOM

981
00:54:16,920 --> 00:54:20,759
Speaker 1: fighters and affiliates and other Jewish militant organizations start the

982
00:54:20,840 --> 00:54:26,240
Speaker 1: massad um. And yeah, a lot of very nasty things

983
00:54:26,400 --> 00:54:29,000
Speaker 1: result from that. They do kill like about fifteen d

984
00:54:29,200 --> 00:54:32,960
Speaker 1: Nazis too, which is is fine, um, but you know,

985
00:54:33,120 --> 00:54:37,120
Speaker 1: the nakba happens. Uh, there's a you know, the establishment

986
00:54:37,480 --> 00:54:40,000
Speaker 1: over time of an apartheid state, the displacement of a

987
00:54:40,080 --> 00:54:43,120
Speaker 1: large number of people. Um, a lot of pretty pretty

988
00:54:43,239 --> 00:54:45,399
Speaker 1: ugly stuff, and a lot of it is done by

989
00:54:45,440 --> 00:54:50,160
Speaker 1: people who had been in this group and these other groups. Now. Covnor,

990
00:54:50,640 --> 00:54:53,359
Speaker 1: because he's tried to poison six million people, has kind

991
00:54:53,360 --> 00:54:56,120
Speaker 1: of ruined any chance of a political career for himself,

992
00:54:56,640 --> 00:54:59,600
Speaker 1: but he remains a prominent and a popular poet and

993
00:54:59,640 --> 00:55:03,560
Speaker 1: INSPI rational war leader. During the nineteen Arab Israeli War,

994
00:55:03,640 --> 00:55:06,279
Speaker 1: he was made a propaganda officer, and he used his

995
00:55:06,280 --> 00:55:08,920
Speaker 1: skillet poetry to try and encourage his soldiers to carry

996
00:55:08,920 --> 00:55:12,080
Speaker 1: out violence without sympathy or guilt. He issued a series

997
00:55:12,120 --> 00:55:14,719
Speaker 1: of battle missives, one of which was published after the

998
00:55:14,760 --> 00:55:18,479
Speaker 1: surrender of an Israeli unit during the Battle of Nit Sonham. Now,

999
00:55:18,520 --> 00:55:21,879
Speaker 1: these Israeli soldiers had been hopelessly outnumbered and cut off

1000
00:55:22,440 --> 00:55:24,680
Speaker 1: by the Egyptians. They're kind of surrounded. They surrendered to

1001
00:55:24,719 --> 00:55:28,520
Speaker 1: the Egyptian army. Kaufner is furious about this. He sees

1002
00:55:28,560 --> 00:55:31,520
Speaker 1: them as traders. He calls them traders, and he publishes

1003
00:55:31,560 --> 00:55:35,200
Speaker 1: a poem titled Failure just days after the fighting, and

1004
00:55:35,200 --> 00:55:37,440
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote now from a study by Michael Arbel,

1005
00:55:38,640 --> 00:55:41,120
Speaker 1: denouncing them for not fighting to their last drop of

1006
00:55:41,120 --> 00:55:43,440
Speaker 1: blood and for not defending every inch of territory with

1007
00:55:43,480 --> 00:55:46,319
Speaker 1: their lives. By failing to do so, Kauvner claimed the

1008
00:55:46,320 --> 00:55:49,279
Speaker 1: surrendering fighters demonstrated to the Egyptian enemy that it was

1009
00:55:49,320 --> 00:55:52,000
Speaker 1: possible to vanquish the defenses of a Jewish settlement within

1010
00:55:52,000 --> 00:55:54,680
Speaker 1: a matter of hours and undermine the conviction essential to

1011
00:55:54,719 --> 00:55:57,239
Speaker 1: the morale of every Israeli fighter that few, that the

1012
00:55:57,239 --> 00:55:59,759
Speaker 1: few are capable of defeating the many. Toward the con

1013
00:56:00,040 --> 00:56:02,840
Speaker 1: lusion of the missive Coauvner vehemently called out, better to

1014
00:56:02,960 --> 00:56:05,239
Speaker 1: fall in the trenches of home than to surrender to

1015
00:56:05,280 --> 00:56:08,240
Speaker 1: a murderous invader. To surrender so long as the body

1016
00:56:08,320 --> 00:56:10,759
Speaker 1: still lives in the last remaining bullet continues to breathe,

1017
00:56:10,760 --> 00:56:14,319
Speaker 1: it's magazine. It's magazine, to a disgrace, to emerge, to

1018
00:56:14,360 --> 00:56:18,680
Speaker 1: the invader's captivity, to a disgrace, and to death. Now

1019
00:56:19,120 --> 00:56:21,759
Speaker 1: this caused outrage at the time because he's calling these

1020
00:56:21,760 --> 00:56:25,279
Speaker 1: soldiers who have like fought and surrendered like cowards, um.

1021
00:56:25,360 --> 00:56:29,200
Speaker 1: And this is compounded in because Kauvner's wrong. He's saying, like,

1022
00:56:29,480 --> 00:56:32,439
Speaker 1: the Egyptians are murderous monsters, how dare you surrender them?

1023
00:56:32,600 --> 00:56:36,160
Speaker 1: And the Egyptians treat these Israeli soldiers as lawful prisoners

1024
00:56:36,160 --> 00:56:39,479
Speaker 1: of war and turn them to their home because it's

1025
00:56:39,480 --> 00:56:45,040
Speaker 1: a war and there's rules, and they return them home afterwards.

1026
00:56:45,080 --> 00:56:49,680
Speaker 1: So these guys don't die. That's because they surrender, which

1027
00:56:49,760 --> 00:56:53,400
Speaker 1: is why it's it's good to respect the rules of war, um,

1028
00:56:53,480 --> 00:56:57,480
Speaker 1: which cared about as soon as he exactly which exactly

1029
00:56:57,480 --> 00:56:59,680
Speaker 1: again we all understand how he came to stop caring

1030
00:56:59,680 --> 00:57:03,200
Speaker 1: about the Every enemy is the Nazis, right, That's not

1031
00:57:03,280 --> 00:57:05,799
Speaker 1: just him, that's a lot of these these people, right,

1032
00:57:05,840 --> 00:57:10,319
Speaker 1: even though like you know, the Egyptians are not the Nazis. Um,

1033
00:57:10,480 --> 00:57:12,719
Speaker 1: not that there's not ugly stuff that happens in these

1034
00:57:12,760 --> 00:57:14,640
Speaker 1: wars that are going to follow, but it's not the

1035
00:57:14,680 --> 00:57:18,760
Speaker 1: same um. And these returning soldiers attack Kafner for calling

1036
00:57:18,800 --> 00:57:21,240
Speaker 1: them treasonists, and a later investigation by the I d

1037
00:57:21,400 --> 00:57:24,640
Speaker 1: F concludes that the soldiers had acted appropriately. Kafner had

1038
00:57:24,680 --> 00:57:28,400
Speaker 1: simply lost all sense of proportion. He remained an influential

1039
00:57:28,440 --> 00:57:30,560
Speaker 1: poet for the rest of his life, though, winning the

1040
00:57:30,640 --> 00:57:33,280
Speaker 1: Israel Prize for Poetry in nineteen seventy and dying in

1041
00:57:33,400 --> 00:57:36,640
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties seven from laryngeal cancer. Because he is just

1042
00:57:38,200 --> 00:57:40,480
Speaker 1: when I tell you this guy was a chain smoker,

1043
00:57:40,680 --> 00:57:42,520
Speaker 1: you have to think about, like what it means to

1044
00:57:42,560 --> 00:57:45,680
Speaker 1: be a Holocaust survivor in a chain smoke. This guy

1045
00:57:45,760 --> 00:57:48,920
Speaker 1: is this guy is consuming cigarettes at like the nation

1046
00:57:49,080 --> 00:57:52,120
Speaker 1: state level. Yeah, I mean a cigarette is a is

1047
00:57:52,160 --> 00:57:57,360
Speaker 1: a symbol of no future, right, Yeah, that is? That

1048
00:57:57,520 --> 00:58:00,360
Speaker 1: is its charm and its poison. Is that there's a

1049
00:58:00,400 --> 00:58:03,440
Speaker 1: symbol of I'm doing something because I don't care what

1050
00:58:03,520 --> 00:58:06,720
Speaker 1: happens to me. Yeah. There may be no people alive

1051
00:58:06,760 --> 00:58:09,520
Speaker 1: who smoke the way this man was capable of smoking.

1052
00:58:10,920 --> 00:58:13,640
Speaker 1: We've lost the capacity for smoking like that in the

1053
00:58:13,720 --> 00:58:19,560
Speaker 1: species um, so other members of nicom. They'll remain alive

1054
00:58:19,600 --> 00:58:21,320
Speaker 1: into the twenty first century, and they don't really no

1055
00:58:21,320 --> 00:58:23,360
Speaker 1: one really talks about what has This is kind of

1056
00:58:23,360 --> 00:58:25,080
Speaker 1: like not very well known at all. I mean, it's

1057
00:58:25,080 --> 00:58:27,080
Speaker 1: still not that well known, but this is really not

1058
00:58:27,160 --> 00:58:29,280
Speaker 1: known at all until kind of the nineteen eighties when

1059
00:58:29,480 --> 00:58:31,400
Speaker 1: some of the when the people who survived start to

1060
00:58:31,400 --> 00:58:33,680
Speaker 1: be like, oh, we're not gonna live forever, we should

1061
00:58:33,680 --> 00:58:36,880
Speaker 1: probably like talk about what happened, right, And so that's

1062
00:58:36,920 --> 00:58:39,800
Speaker 1: the point at which historians and sociologists start to interview

1063
00:58:39,840 --> 00:58:42,400
Speaker 1: them on their about how their feelings on revenge had

1064
00:58:42,440 --> 00:58:45,200
Speaker 1: evolved throughout the decades. And by the way, there's going

1065
00:58:45,240 --> 00:58:47,800
Speaker 1: to be if you start researching this, you may find

1066
00:58:48,040 --> 00:58:49,760
Speaker 1: some of the books you read by some of these

1067
00:58:49,760 --> 00:58:51,680
Speaker 1: survivors there are points that I've laid out of here

1068
00:58:51,720 --> 00:58:54,480
Speaker 1: that they will disagree on. There's several books by survivors.

1069
00:58:54,520 --> 00:58:57,360
Speaker 1: And then Dina Parratt has written two books, and she's

1070
00:58:57,440 --> 00:58:59,640
Speaker 1: kind of the academic who has talked to the most

1071
00:58:59,680 --> 00:59:03,200
Speaker 1: of these guys. There's points of disagreement, there's things we

1072
00:59:03,240 --> 00:59:06,040
Speaker 1: don't know because again, everybody like the Foggle War, everybody's

1073
00:59:06,120 --> 00:59:08,680
Speaker 1: like older like they were kind of crazy at the time.

1074
00:59:09,080 --> 00:59:10,960
Speaker 1: You're not, You're not. There's points that you're not going

1075
00:59:11,040 --> 00:59:13,480
Speaker 1: to get the exact history on because nobody knows it right.

1076
00:59:13,520 --> 00:59:15,960
Speaker 1: There's disagreement from people who were all there. You know,

1077
00:59:16,160 --> 00:59:20,680
Speaker 1: that's just the reality of of historiography. So but there

1078
00:59:20,720 --> 00:59:22,880
Speaker 1: are interviews with a number of these guys, So we

1079
00:59:22,960 --> 00:59:26,480
Speaker 1: have kind of information from historians and sociologists about how

1080
00:59:26,560 --> 00:59:29,160
Speaker 1: these people's feelings on revenge had evolved through the decades,

1081
00:59:29,640 --> 00:59:32,080
Speaker 1: and as far as I can tell, they didn't change

1082
00:59:32,160 --> 00:59:35,160
Speaker 1: their minds. Boulak Benyakov, who led in a calm after

1083
00:59:35,240 --> 00:59:38,080
Speaker 1: ninety seven, said that he could not have looked himself

1084
00:59:38,080 --> 00:59:40,120
Speaker 1: in the mirror if he hadn't tried to get revenge.

1085
00:59:40,600 --> 00:59:43,200
Speaker 1: He still regretted that it had failed. Most of his

1086
00:59:43,280 --> 00:59:46,160
Speaker 1: comrades seemed to agree, feeling that the Germans had deserved

1087
00:59:46,200 --> 00:59:48,520
Speaker 1: it and ruling that they had not succeeded in clear

1088
00:59:48,800 --> 00:59:52,040
Speaker 1: carrying out Plan A. When one survivor was asked how

1089
00:59:52,120 --> 00:59:54,760
Speaker 1: she could possibly have made peace with the mass poisoning

1090
00:59:54,760 --> 00:59:58,240
Speaker 1: of babies, children, and other civilians, she answered, if you

1091
00:59:58,320 --> 01:00:00,400
Speaker 1: had been there with me at the end of the war,

1092
01:00:00,840 --> 01:00:07,280
Speaker 1: you wouldn't talk that way, that's completely possible. Yep again,

1093
01:00:08,680 --> 01:00:13,400
Speaker 1: but no, no, no, it's just like, yeah, you can't

1094
01:00:13,440 --> 01:00:18,440
Speaker 1: expect people like it's obviously not everyone who lived through that.

1095
01:00:18,520 --> 01:00:20,800
Speaker 1: In fact, most people who lived through that didn't feel

1096
01:00:21,040 --> 01:00:24,160
Speaker 1: entirely the same way, but a lot of them did

1097
01:00:24,480 --> 01:00:28,400
Speaker 1: and that's valid. Um, I'm glad they did not succeed

1098
01:00:28,400 --> 01:00:32,400
Speaker 1: in poisoning six million people to death and discriminately, but

1099
01:00:32,520 --> 01:00:36,240
Speaker 1: to get it, and it's it's them. You know. There's

1100
01:00:36,280 --> 01:00:40,360
Speaker 1: a there's a really good song about this whole story

1101
01:00:40,400 --> 01:00:44,400
Speaker 1: by a he's a German Jewish musician. Um. The band

1102
01:00:44,680 --> 01:00:46,960
Speaker 1: is one second. I'm gonna pull this up right now.

1103
01:00:47,360 --> 01:00:49,840
Speaker 1: It's actually how I heard about this story first, and

1104
01:00:49,880 --> 01:00:52,240
Speaker 1: then I wound up reading the books. Um, and it's

1105
01:00:52,240 --> 01:00:55,400
Speaker 1: it's a pretty pretty dope song. It's called Um six

1106
01:00:55,440 --> 01:00:59,680
Speaker 1: Million Germans by Daniel Kahan and the Painted Bird, And

1107
01:00:59,720 --> 01:01:02,040
Speaker 1: there's um there's a couple of lines in there because

1108
01:01:02,080 --> 01:01:03,800
Speaker 1: it kind of ends with him talking about how these

1109
01:01:03,800 --> 01:01:07,160
Speaker 1: guys all became part of the Israeli military establishment, of

1110
01:01:07,200 --> 01:01:09,720
Speaker 1: the of the birth of this apartheid state, of all

1111
01:01:09,720 --> 01:01:11,560
Speaker 1: those violence that gets done in the wake of that,

1112
01:01:11,960 --> 01:01:15,080
Speaker 1: And there's a line he has in their convengence set

1113
01:01:15,320 --> 01:01:17,400
Speaker 1: or one second, le let me pull up clear, because

1114
01:01:17,400 --> 01:01:20,640
Speaker 1: I don't get this wrong. They put aside their rage

1115
01:01:20,640 --> 01:01:23,080
Speaker 1: and hate and work to build a Jewish state with

1116
01:01:23,200 --> 01:01:27,160
Speaker 1: Jewish towns and Jewish farms and Jewish guns and nuclear arms.

1117
01:01:27,960 --> 01:01:31,040
Speaker 1: Now conventions put upon the shelf be taken out later

1118
01:01:31,120 --> 01:01:33,760
Speaker 1: on someone else. Be careful how you read this tale,

1119
01:01:34,080 --> 01:01:37,560
Speaker 1: lest your own prejudice prevail. Look around the world today

1120
01:01:37,680 --> 01:01:40,720
Speaker 1: and consider the role that vengeance plays for history has

1121
01:01:40,760 --> 01:01:43,760
Speaker 1: its unpaid debts, and is it better if we forget?

1122
01:01:44,800 --> 01:01:47,720
Speaker 1: I like that it ends with a question. You know, yep,

1123
01:01:48,360 --> 01:01:55,360
Speaker 1: it's a good song. I mean, it's like it's so

1124
01:01:55,400 --> 01:01:57,600
Speaker 1: hard because if you come with almost any other story,

1125
01:01:57,640 --> 01:02:00,520
Speaker 1: it would be so easy for me to be like, well,

1126
01:02:00,560 --> 01:02:02,920
Speaker 1: here's how I feel about vengeance, and here's how I

1127
01:02:02,960 --> 01:02:08,160
Speaker 1: feel about justice. And you know, um, and you look

1128
01:02:08,160 --> 01:02:11,640
Speaker 1: at this and you're just like, yes, it's fucking messy.

1129
01:02:12,640 --> 01:02:18,600
Speaker 1: Ship is fucking messy. Um. This is not, you know,

1130
01:02:19,760 --> 01:02:23,120
Speaker 1: as uplifting, maybe as some of our other Christmas episodes.

1131
01:02:23,880 --> 01:02:27,720
Speaker 1: I I would not feel confident calling these people bastards

1132
01:02:27,760 --> 01:02:30,120
Speaker 1: because I think to some extent the things they have

1133
01:02:31,080 --> 01:02:33,920
Speaker 1: lived through make it impossible for me to fully morally

1134
01:02:34,000 --> 01:02:37,440
Speaker 1: judge them, even for the bad things that they've done. Um.

1135
01:02:37,480 --> 01:02:40,160
Speaker 1: That's where I am. You're allowed to feel however you

1136
01:02:40,160 --> 01:02:43,960
Speaker 1: want to feel about this stuff, but you know it's

1137
01:02:43,960 --> 01:02:49,440
Speaker 1: worth thinking about. Um. I will say when we're talking

1138
01:02:49,440 --> 01:02:52,200
Speaker 1: about things that the Nazis have done that are evil,

1139
01:02:52,560 --> 01:02:55,160
Speaker 1: obviously all of the killings, all of the millions and

1140
01:02:55,200 --> 01:02:57,480
Speaker 1: millions and tens of millions of deaths are the worst.

1141
01:02:58,200 --> 01:03:00,960
Speaker 1: But one little crime of the basis, I will say

1142
01:03:01,040 --> 01:03:03,240
Speaker 1: is the fact that, as I was researching this, I

1143
01:03:03,320 --> 01:03:05,720
Speaker 1: had a literal moment where I thought, well, ship would

1144
01:03:05,720 --> 01:03:07,960
Speaker 1: the world have been better if they've done it? If

1145
01:03:08,000 --> 01:03:11,800
Speaker 1: they'd killed six million? And that was the lesson everyone

1146
01:03:11,840 --> 01:03:14,120
Speaker 1: else who thought about genocide for the rest of history

1147
01:03:14,160 --> 01:03:18,120
Speaker 1: took out from it. Right. Yeah, And the answer is no,

1148
01:03:18,600 --> 01:03:21,760
Speaker 1: by the way. But the fact that I and I'm

1149
01:03:21,800 --> 01:03:24,000
Speaker 1: going to guess most of you are going to spend

1150
01:03:24,120 --> 01:03:27,520
Speaker 1: some time actually thinking about that is another crime we

1151
01:03:27,560 --> 01:03:30,880
Speaker 1: should lay at the Nazis. Fee No, that's such a

1152
01:03:30,920 --> 01:03:33,000
Speaker 1: fucking good point. I had a moment where I was like, well,

1153
01:03:33,000 --> 01:03:34,600
Speaker 1: what would have happened if they've done that? And it's like,

1154
01:03:34,640 --> 01:03:38,800
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter because spreading the idea that killing millions

1155
01:03:38,800 --> 01:03:41,680
Speaker 1: of people and discriminately can ever possibly there's ever a

1156
01:03:41,760 --> 01:03:45,439
Speaker 1: good way to do. And it's interesting because if it's

1157
01:03:45,440 --> 01:03:49,440
Speaker 1: like if they had dismant whatever is a million hypotheticals,

1158
01:03:49,440 --> 01:03:53,600
Speaker 1: but the idea that Germany should cease to exist, which

1159
01:03:53,600 --> 01:03:57,560
Speaker 1: I also don't whatever whatever, I don't think any countries,

1160
01:03:57,640 --> 01:04:01,440
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly, yeah, but like you know, if like Germany

1161
01:04:01,520 --> 01:04:06,040
Speaker 1: does so bad that it doesn't get to exist anymore, Um,

1162
01:04:06,520 --> 01:04:09,840
Speaker 1: it's so, and then it I would love to know more,

1163
01:04:09,920 --> 01:04:12,200
Speaker 1: you know, because it's like, as far as I understand

1164
01:04:12,560 --> 01:04:15,360
Speaker 1: has explained to me by an Italian friend, the Italian

1165
01:04:16,040 --> 01:04:19,080
Speaker 1: fascist system like stayed kind of intact and just changed

1166
01:04:19,120 --> 01:04:21,400
Speaker 1: its name in a lot of ways, or at least

1167
01:04:21,400 --> 01:04:25,560
Speaker 1: a lot of the individual functionaries continued and like I

1168
01:04:25,880 --> 01:04:30,240
Speaker 1: don't know, and versus Germany that seemed to like Germany

1169
01:04:30,280 --> 01:04:35,000
Speaker 1: presents itself as having had a national reckoning. Well, I mean,

1170
01:04:35,080 --> 01:04:38,440
Speaker 1: certainly I will say of the Axis powers, they have

1171
01:04:38,560 --> 01:04:41,680
Speaker 1: done the best job of that that that is probably

1172
01:04:41,760 --> 01:04:44,320
Speaker 1: very fair to say. You do get these weird moments.

1173
01:04:44,320 --> 01:04:47,240
Speaker 1: I was visiting Sachsenhausen, which is it's not a death camp,

1174
01:04:47,240 --> 01:04:49,200
Speaker 1: but it's a concentration camp, so obviously a lot of

1175
01:04:49,200 --> 01:04:51,520
Speaker 1: people died there that its main goal was not killing.

1176
01:04:51,560 --> 01:04:54,600
Speaker 1: That had started as a place for political prisoners, and

1177
01:04:55,320 --> 01:04:58,240
Speaker 1: UH continued that way under the Nazis. Uh. It's a

1178
01:04:58,320 --> 01:05:00,920
Speaker 1: it's a very bleak place, although it is the museum

1179
01:05:00,960 --> 01:05:02,840
Speaker 1: that the Germans have set up there is very very good.

1180
01:05:02,840 --> 01:05:04,840
Speaker 1: If you are ever near Berlin, you have a chance

1181
01:05:04,880 --> 01:05:06,600
Speaker 1: to see Saxon House, and I think you kind of

1182
01:05:06,600 --> 01:05:09,240
Speaker 1: owe it to yourself to see it. UM. I went

1183
01:05:09,320 --> 01:05:11,160
Speaker 1: during the dead of winter, so it was snowy, and

1184
01:05:11,200 --> 01:05:13,080
Speaker 1: there was this moment where you're like walking through it. You're,

1185
01:05:13,360 --> 01:05:15,360
Speaker 1: you know, we're all bundled up in three layers and

1186
01:05:15,360 --> 01:05:17,800
Speaker 1: it's just frigid, and then you walk in to one

1187
01:05:17,800 --> 01:05:20,160
Speaker 1: of the indoor areas and the first thing you see

1188
01:05:20,240 --> 01:05:22,720
Speaker 1: is one of the uniforms, the winter uniforms that the

1189
01:05:22,760 --> 01:05:26,880
Speaker 1: inmates wore, and it's very affecting. UM. But as we're

1190
01:05:26,920 --> 01:05:29,520
Speaker 1: like coming into it, we have this great tourist guide

1191
01:05:29,520 --> 01:05:31,840
Speaker 1: who's this brit who has been living in Germany for

1192
01:05:31,840 --> 01:05:34,040
Speaker 1: like thirty forty years, and he's he's walking us through

1193
01:05:34,080 --> 01:05:36,160
Speaker 1: and he points out this building outside of kind of

1194
01:05:36,160 --> 01:05:38,760
Speaker 1: the museum area, and he's like, back when the camp

1195
01:05:38,800 --> 01:05:41,520
Speaker 1: was active, that's actually the administrative building. That's where like

1196
01:05:41,560 --> 01:05:43,960
Speaker 1: they did all of the sort of administrative tasks for it.

1197
01:05:43,960 --> 01:05:45,640
Speaker 1: And I was like, well, what is it now and

1198
01:05:45,720 --> 01:05:47,640
Speaker 1: he said, oh, well, it's like a training facility for

1199
01:05:47,680 --> 01:05:56,320
Speaker 1: the Berlin police, right right. Um, So you know there's

1200
01:05:56,720 --> 01:05:59,720
Speaker 1: you know, critiques I might have, but but yeah, I

1201
01:05:59,760 --> 01:06:02,240
Speaker 1: mean generally speaking, yes, the Germans have done, of the

1202
01:06:02,280 --> 01:06:05,760
Speaker 1: access powers, the best job of of reckoning with those crimes,

1203
01:06:05,760 --> 01:06:07,240
Speaker 1: and I think probably it also would be fair to

1204
01:06:07,280 --> 01:06:09,240
Speaker 1: say a better job of reckoning those crimes than like

1205
01:06:09,280 --> 01:06:14,080
Speaker 1: the United States has done with slavery. Um. But also

1206
01:06:14,280 --> 01:06:16,680
Speaker 1: like there are repeated we just we just had another

1207
01:06:16,720 --> 01:06:19,160
Speaker 1: group of like right wing Germans arrested for trying to

1208
01:06:19,240 --> 01:06:21,760
Speaker 1: overthrow the government and store of the Reichstag. So you know,

1209
01:06:21,800 --> 01:06:24,919
Speaker 1: there's there's there's issues to right, I mean like there's

1210
01:06:25,040 --> 01:06:28,840
Speaker 1: there's Nazis everywhere. Now like that's another there are Nazis everywhere.

1211
01:06:28,880 --> 01:06:30,560
Speaker 1: I will say, I am not convinced. I don't think

1212
01:06:30,720 --> 01:06:32,360
Speaker 1: I think it's probably fair to say there's not like

1213
01:06:32,400 --> 01:06:35,120
Speaker 1: more Nazis as a percentage of the population in Germany

1214
01:06:35,120 --> 01:06:39,040
Speaker 1: now than a number of other places. So, UM, I

1215
01:06:39,040 --> 01:06:41,160
Speaker 1: don't know. I don't know. Like, this is not a

1216
01:06:41,200 --> 01:06:43,160
Speaker 1: thing where I can say and here's the moral lesson

1217
01:06:43,240 --> 01:06:45,120
Speaker 1: to take out of this story. This is just some

1218
01:06:45,240 --> 01:06:48,400
Speaker 1: stuff that happened that you you, I think you should

1219
01:06:48,400 --> 01:06:56,480
Speaker 1: think about. Uh. Yep, they're a good episode anyway for Christmas,

1220
01:06:56,880 --> 01:07:08,400
Speaker 1: Happy holidays? Uh uh fuck great, great, Yeah, we're going

1221
01:07:08,480 --> 01:07:15,480
Speaker 1: to well if you like lighthearted violence, god damnit. Um.

1222
01:07:15,520 --> 01:07:18,840
Speaker 1: I have a book coming out called Escape from Insul Island,

1223
01:07:19,400 --> 01:07:22,280
Speaker 1: which asks the very important question of what if all

1224
01:07:22,320 --> 01:07:23,800
Speaker 1: of the men who felt like they were owed a

1225
01:07:23,800 --> 01:07:26,680
Speaker 1: woman by the government got tricked into moving to an

1226
01:07:26,720 --> 01:07:31,680
Speaker 1: island where they were stuck. Uh. And it's coming out

1227
01:07:31,720 --> 01:07:34,400
Speaker 1: on February one. You can pre order it. You can

1228
01:07:34,400 --> 01:07:37,320
Speaker 1: get it through the publishers Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness,

1229
01:07:38,000 --> 01:07:39,960
Speaker 1: or if you're listening to this in the future, you

1230
01:07:40,000 --> 01:07:42,640
Speaker 1: can get it wherever books are sold. And I have

1231
01:07:42,680 --> 01:07:45,760
Speaker 1: a podcast called Cool People Did Cool Stuff. And I

1232
01:07:45,800 --> 01:07:47,959
Speaker 1: have another podcast called Lived Like the World Is Dying,

1233
01:07:47,960 --> 01:07:52,680
Speaker 1: which is about community and individual preparedness. That's what I

1234
01:07:52,760 --> 01:07:57,760
Speaker 1: have to plug, Sophie, do you have anything to plug? Ah?

1235
01:07:58,080 --> 01:08:01,160
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastard's doing a live as f sketch fest

1236
01:08:01,840 --> 01:08:07,640
Speaker 1: in January on the Yeah Good podcast at cool Zone

1237
01:08:07,640 --> 01:08:10,920
Speaker 1: Media and All the Things. Yeah, if you'll find an

1238
01:08:10,960 --> 01:08:12,920
Speaker 1: even more fucked up story to talk about in a

1239
01:08:13,000 --> 01:08:14,919
Speaker 1: room full of people where you all have to stare

1240
01:08:14,960 --> 01:08:18,839
Speaker 1: at each other and think about the ethics of violent

1241
01:08:18,880 --> 01:08:24,880
Speaker 1: responses to genocide. No, no, it'll probably be about some

1242
01:08:24,920 --> 01:08:28,080
Speaker 1: guy you sold children poison or whatever. Really fine, it'll

1243
01:08:28,120 --> 01:08:36,040
Speaker 1: be funny. Yeah, Well, here we go. Happy Happy Christmas. Bah. Yeah,

1244
01:08:36,080 --> 01:08:38,599
Speaker 1: talk to talk about in a calm to your family

1245
01:08:38,640 --> 01:08:46,400
Speaker 1: at the dinner table this year during the holiday. Behind

1246
01:08:46,400 --> 01:08:49,200
Speaker 1: the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For

1247
01:08:49,320 --> 01:08:52,080
Speaker 1: more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone

1248
01:08:52,120 --> 01:08:54,960
Speaker 1: media dot com, or check us out on the I

1249
01:08:55,040 --> 01:08:58,360
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.