Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where every
Speaker 2: week I try to make you feel worse about life,
Speaker 2: even though life makes you feel worse about life every week.
Speaker 2: Why do I do this? Money?
Speaker 3: Uh?
Speaker 2: And also I live to hurt you. You know. That's it.
Speaker 2: That's all that's going on with me. Let's talk about
Speaker 2: what's going on with our guest today, Joe Kassebian. Joe,
Speaker 2: how are you doing?
Speaker 4: Hey, I'm I'm great. I'm ready for pain to be
Speaker 4: inflicted on me and absorb the pain and the suffering
Speaker 4: like a sponge.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yes, feature pain, your delicious pain.
Speaker 3: Say that. But when you're hear what the topic?
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, last time I was on it was like
Speaker 4: four hours of Laventi barrier. What could possibly be worse
Speaker 4: than that?
Speaker 1: Oh, I'm so glad you asked that question.
Speaker 2: It could possibly be worse than Laventi barriers. Stalin's head
Speaker 2: of the Secret police and almost certainly a pedophile on
Speaker 2: an industrial scale. What could be worse than that?
Speaker 3: I'm glad you asked that question.
Speaker 2: Could be worse than that, Sophie, what could be worse
Speaker 2: than that?
Speaker 3: I mean, I know the top, yes.
Speaker 2: But I think I think Joe, I think we've done
Speaker 2: an able job of finding a worse one for you,
Speaker 2: because this week and motherfucking next week, because boy howdy,
Speaker 2: you can't do this guy. In two parts, we are
Speaker 2: talking about mister Holocaust himself, Adolph Eichman. You're welcome, Are
Speaker 2: you fucking Serious's right, baby, mister Holocaust himself. I probably
Speaker 2: shouldn't call him, And.
Speaker 4: I mean it's a good If he had a rig name,
Speaker 4: it would be Holocaust.
Speaker 2: And he, as we'll talk about, he worked most of
Speaker 2: his professional career. He worked very hard to make himself
Speaker 2: the number one name associated with the Holocaust internationally, like
Speaker 2: that was a he was not actually like he his reputation.
Speaker 2: He was very involved, obviously, but his reputation is even
Speaker 2: higher than his actual involvement. And that was due to
Speaker 2: him trying to jink up his career. But I think it's.
Speaker 4: Oh God, to juice up as Holocaust.
Speaker 2: He really was here, really was.
Speaker 1: And And Joe, when Robert told me he was writing
Speaker 1: the scripts, He's like, who should we get as a guest,
Speaker 1: And I was like, Joe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we probably gotta get Joe over this one.
Speaker 4: Joe, Yes, yes, I'm glad I have a brand and
Speaker 4: it's horrible.
Speaker 3: Uh huh uh, well boy, howdy, let's do it.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna say though you had me in the first
Speaker 4: half because he said mister Holocaust himself add off of
Speaker 4: like did he did? He really? Motherfucking really bring me
Speaker 4: on for the Hitler ships episodes.
Speaker 2: We've done so many Hitlers. I know, we've covered we
Speaker 2: gotta you gotta cover Hitler in like little pieces, like
Speaker 2: we'll do two parts on how we fucked you know,
Speaker 2: you gotta cover all the there's so much niche Hitler stuff.
Speaker 2: Although you know, let's let's come back from the cold
Speaker 2: open and I'll talk about the scope of these episodes.
Speaker 2: But we're done with the cold open. You're you're warm
Speaker 2: now very warm, and we're back. We're back. We're all
Speaker 2: lathered up and hot bothered. So these episodes. If you
Speaker 2: know anything about Aikman, and he's like outside of Hitler, Gerbels, Himmler,
Speaker 2: you know, Gering, he's probably the first name, one of
Speaker 2: the one of the few names that like the average
Speaker 2: person who knows anything about the Holocaust, you've heard of Aikman, right,
Speaker 2: A lot of people will have if you haven't. As
Speaker 2: I always say, there's a great movie called Conspiracy about
Speaker 2: the conference where they planned the Holocaust, where Eikman is
Speaker 2: played by Stanley Tucci, and it's perfect performance. He's played
Speaker 2: by Stanley Tucci.
Speaker 3: Chooch can play any part he is.
Speaker 2: And Stanley is incredible as Aikman, Like he really nails it.
Speaker 4: I can see it, I can see he's got a face.
Speaker 3: Is he also hot in the movie?
Speaker 1: Because Stanley Tucci has been hot in every movie he's
Speaker 1: ever been and except the one where he played that pedophile.
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna say. I will say one of the
Speaker 2: critiques the movie you got is that. And I also
Speaker 2: think he does an excellent job. Kenneth Branna plays Reinhardt Heidrich,
Speaker 2: and one of the complaints that, like some Holocaust scholars
Speaker 2: had is that, like he's a very good actor. He
Speaker 2: does a good job, but like he probably shouldn't have
Speaker 2: made Hydrich hot, right, Like maybe.
Speaker 4: That is too sexy.
Speaker 2: I tend to think the movie's just good enough that
Speaker 2: if you've watched the second season of and or the
Speaker 2: first episodes where they're planning that genocide on Gorman are
Speaker 2: themed after that movie, like that movie Conspiracy, seriously, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: had a big influence on it. Tony Gilroy is confirmed it.
Speaker 2: But Eikman, the guy we're talking about today, is not
Speaker 2: the architect of the Holocaust because that that generally goes
Speaker 2: to hydric although obviously he was not the only person
Speaker 2: involved in setting up the architecture, but Heidrich and Eichman
Speaker 2: were both at this meeting, the Vonsee conference, where the
Speaker 2: architecture of the Holocaust was set up. And Eichman's primary job,
Speaker 2: you might call him the trigger man, not because there
Speaker 2: were actually a lot of guys who just shot people, right,
Speaker 2: like the Einsatzgrupa who shot tens of thousands at places.
Speaker 4: Like the World Federal trigger but.
Speaker 2: In terms of like the Nazi state had to build
Speaker 2: a system that was effectively a big gun for genociding people,
Speaker 2: and Eikman was the man who worked. He was the
Speaker 2: guy who his primarily primary thing was like logistics, like
Speaker 2: making sure how we're going to move get all of
Speaker 2: these people out of the communities they're in and move
Speaker 2: them into the different camps.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: He was the guy who managed that system. He was
Speaker 2: the deportation guy, right, that was a big part, and
Speaker 2: he was like overseeing a lot of that system. As
Speaker 2: we'll talk about there's other stuff that he did. But
Speaker 2: if you're making like a top five list of the
Speaker 2: Nazis who were most directly responsible for the genocide of
Speaker 2: European Jewry, Aikman is going to make the list every
Speaker 2: single time, right, Like he's that central to what happened
Speaker 2: and kind of the biggest. Probably, I don't know, pop
Speaker 2: culture is probably the wrong way to talk about Hannah
Speaker 2: Rintz writing in twenty twenty five, but it was at
Speaker 2: one point popular culture, right, Like, because this guy goes
Speaker 2: on trial, he gets caught by the Masad, and he
Speaker 2: goes on trial. In the sixties, and Hannah A Rent,
Speaker 2: who's a famous philosopher and scholar of totalitarianism, writes a
Speaker 2: book called Aikman in Jerusalem, right, which is very much
Speaker 2: worth reading today, although very flawed, right, And it's very
Speaker 2: flawed in part. And one of the things that gets
Speaker 2: a lot of criticism for today is that as she
Speaker 2: is describing Aikman on trial, a Rent coins a term
Speaker 2: called the banality of evil to describe the man that
Speaker 2: she sees in Israeli captivity, because he's just kind of
Speaker 2: this late middle aged balding dude and he's mostly talking
Speaker 2: about like, look, I was just following orders, you know,
Speaker 2: I was just doing what I was told to do.
Speaker 2: I was one cog and a bigger machine. I didn't
Speaker 2: actually kill anyone directly. That was like the bulk of
Speaker 2: his legal defense. And I don't think the banality of
Speaker 2: evil is a useless term. I think it does describe
Speaker 2: a lot of people who were involved in administrative levels
Speaker 2: of the Holocaust. Right. There are individuals whose job is
Speaker 2: pretty banal, and who were themselves pretty banal and played
Speaker 2: an important role in the killing machine. Eikman is not
Speaker 2: a good example of that. He was not banal at all.
Speaker 2: He is like a super villain in terms of his
Speaker 2: actual personality and how he talked about what he did.
Speaker 2: This is not a that was his defense in court.
Speaker 2: The reality of Iikman was not a boring middle manager, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, Like she saw Iikman like out of power.
Speaker 4: It is old man's sweater pacing around, because there's famously
Speaker 4: a video of him pacing back and forth and Israeli
Speaker 4: prison cell on the stand like, yeah, of course he
Speaker 4: looked like the local accountant dork. Yes, yes, of course
Speaker 4: he looked like that. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And and it's one of those things I don't think
Speaker 2: it's a useless concept. It's just misapplied to Iikman, she
Speaker 2: does get We'll talk about it. She gets a lot
Speaker 2: right in this. We'll be quoting from it some in
Speaker 2: the last episode. And it's one of those things. I
Speaker 2: don't reject the term the banality of evil. I just
Speaker 2: think it often is it's less aptly applied to individuals,
Speaker 2: often in part because those individuals are not so banal
Speaker 2: as they may seem from the outside. But I think
Speaker 2: there's a real banality of evil in like the systems
Speaker 2: that we allow to exist and that we live inside
Speaker 2: that can be turned into instruments of mass violence or
Speaker 2: slaughter because we collectively make the poor choice to hand
Speaker 2: over more of our responsibility for our security to elected
Speaker 2: officials and government institutions that are neither accountable nor interested
Speaker 2: in our health. Right, Like, you could use the term
Speaker 2: banality of evil for the twenty years that voters spent
Speaker 2: continuing to fund DHS and to expand ICE right, or
Speaker 2: to the work of editors at hundreds of publications deciding
Speaker 2: to greenlight more stories about migrant crime because hey, that
Speaker 2: does well on Facebook and traffic is money. Right, The
Speaker 2: banality of evil is the Sulzberger family who owns The
Speaker 2: New York Times, ignoring the Holocaust because Eastern European Jews
Speaker 2: from rural areas aren't, in their words, worth caring about. Right.
Speaker 2: The banality of evil is all of us like hearing
Speaker 2: about shit like this and being like, oh, man, that's
Speaker 2: fucked up, But like, I gotta make the mortgage, so
Speaker 2: I guess I'm going to walk right past the atrocity,
Speaker 2: keep going right. This can't be on me to fix,
Speaker 2: can it?
Speaker 4: Right? Yeah, the concept of banality of evil is not
Speaker 4: like if you see a guy and you've heard of
Speaker 4: a guy Eikman, for example, he's not the definition of
Speaker 4: the banality of evil. Yeah, that makes him management.
Speaker 2: No, he is again a super villain, like you stick
Speaker 2: this motherfucker in a Bond movie going on some of
Speaker 2: the rants he goes on and he fits perfectly. So
Speaker 2: A big source for my episodes is a book by
Speaker 2: German philosopher and author Bettina Stegneth, who wrote a wonderful
Speaker 2: book called Eichman Before Jerusalem, and in this book number one,
Speaker 2: she's trying to kind of break some of the myths
Speaker 2: that came up as a result of a Renz piece.
Speaker 2: But she also highlights, opening this book, how relatively little
Speaker 2: we know about him. In this passage, we cannot speak
Speaker 2: of the systematic extermination of millions of men, women, and
Speaker 2: children without mentioning his name, And yet people are no
Speaker 2: longer even sure what his first name was, Carl Adolph Otto.
Speaker 2: It's the simplest of questions, yet it can still surprise us,
Speaker 2: long after we thought we'd established who he was, because
Speaker 2: he you know, he has a couple of names, and
Speaker 2: he goes by a few in his life, and there's
Speaker 2: kind of this open debate is like what was he
Speaker 2: actually called as like a general rule by people that
Speaker 2: he knew.
Speaker 4: He's had a symbol to go out, you like, prince.
Speaker 2: Yeah, prince right, yeah, we get his call him that
Speaker 2: he was born Otto Adolph Eichman on March nineteenth, nineteen
Speaker 2: oh six, in Solingen, Germany. But Bettina's point is that
Speaker 2: depending on who you ask and what you read, there's
Speaker 2: room for debate as to what he would have given
Speaker 2: as his name during different points in his life. Right,
Speaker 2: his first biographers were people like British journalist Comber Clark,
Speaker 2: who in nineteen sixty tried to chronicle Eikman's early life
Speaker 2: and came up with a sort of tale of woe
Speaker 2: you might expect from a great historic victim, right, And
Speaker 2: this is partly what you get when a journalist tries
Speaker 2: to do a biography, right as he's like.
Speaker 4: Looking for that why what shit? Ye yeah, it's one
Speaker 4: of my biggest pet peeame not what we do a
Speaker 4: journalist trip into writing a biography or writing in depth
Speaker 4: history like not.
Speaker 2: Our place, not our place. In Comer's telling Comber Clark's telling,
Speaker 2: Eikman's mother died before he was five years old. His
Speaker 2: mother had to move back to Austria from once they
Speaker 2: hailed when he was young, but his father had to
Speaker 2: go back to Germany after this to escape the sorrow
Speaker 2: of being trapped with memories of his late wife, and
Speaker 2: so his boy was raised largely by his aunts. David Csarini,
Speaker 2: who's a better Aikman biographer, summarizes the rest of Clark's
Speaker 2: version of events. According to Clark, Eikman was repeatedly mistaken
Speaker 2: for a Jew at school and beaten up, which left
Speaker 2: him with a lasting antipathy towards Jewish people. Against this background,
Speaker 2: it was natural that he should join the Nazi party
Speaker 2: after hearing Hitler speak, and this is all nonsense. None
Speaker 2: of that's true, right.
Speaker 4: If that happened, I really wish you would have learned
Speaker 4: the opposite lesson of that, which is racism. That's just
Speaker 4: that we all just must look the same, Like this
Speaker 4: racism thing is stupid.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe if I can get mistaken for these people, Jesus,
Speaker 2: this racism thing must be both. Right. This is almost
Speaker 2: certainly not what happened. Cessarini, who is the author of Aikman,
Speaker 2: His Life and Crimes, describes similar cavalcades of bullshit from
Speaker 2: a generation of lazy ahistorical pop bios of this guy.
Speaker 2: Quote Quentin Reynolds, another British pressman, declared that Eichman was
Speaker 2: left motherless and introverted. His family was so poor that
Speaker 2: there was never enough food on the table. Young Adolph
Speaker 2: turned into a problem child and suffered even more once
Speaker 2: his father remarried a harsh, domineering woman. As a young man,
Speaker 2: he was unsuccessful and friendless, not least because he looked Jewish.
Speaker 2: He failed in job after job and walked the streets
Speaker 2: of Lynz with the unemployed.
Speaker 4: That sounds more accurate.
Speaker 2: It's not, but it sounds like it should be right
Speaker 2: because it fits, it fits the Hitler profile. I think
Speaker 2: that's why they did this, is that like, well that's
Speaker 2: kind of I mean, Hitler was mostly in Austria by
Speaker 2: the time he was like living homeless.
Speaker 4: Right, he was living in a men's home.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he was in Vienna by that point. But otherwise, like, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's kind of Hitler's life, right, Like his dad dies early,
Speaker 2: doesn't have a lot of friends, he fails a job
Speaker 2: after job, right, Hitler didn't get mistaken for big Jewish often.
Speaker 2: But like you know, the rest of that's pretty simple.
Speaker 4: No, just inbread.
Speaker 2: The pieces fit together, right, dead mom, dad, not around,
Speaker 2: economic anxiety, bullying, that gives him a convenient reason to
Speaker 2: hate Jews.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: It's an easy, easy thing, easy biography to accept for Eikman. Unfortunately,
Speaker 2: it's also hogwash. It's like if you were to do
Speaker 2: a biography of some modern day homophobic bigot and say, like, well,
Speaker 2: he got called gay or the f slur a bunch
Speaker 2: on the playground as a kid, right, so that's why
Speaker 2: he did such monstrous things as an adult. And if
Speaker 2: you're like someone three hundred years in the future and
Speaker 2: you read that, you might be like, oh, I guess yeah,
Speaker 2: that makes sense. But if you were to talk to
Speaker 2: like either of us, like they could bring us forward
Speaker 2: into the future and be like, so is this why
Speaker 2: this guy did it? We could be like everybody get
Speaker 2: called those things on the playground man.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like that's just like a universe then that was.
Speaker 2: Like living in the late nineties, early two thousands. Man
Speaker 2: like that cannot explain why he did what he did.
Speaker 4: I'm also a bit worried because it's like, oh, you know,
Speaker 4: he failed at all these jobs, you know, shitty home life.
Speaker 4: I'm like, okay, so he is at seventeen, he's going
Speaker 4: to list in the army, and that is me.
Speaker 1: Ye.
Speaker 4: A lot of guys, a lot of guys.
Speaker 2: Who don't go on to commit hate crimes and war crimes.
Speaker 2: So maybe, like I don't.
Speaker 4: Know, got beat up for thinking of a different race
Speaker 4: than I am. That is just me.
Speaker 2: Now, in Eikman's case, there's even less reason to believe
Speaker 2: his anti Semitism resulted from bullying, because there's simply no
Speaker 2: real evidence that he was bullied about this or accused
Speaker 2: of being Jewish, you know, in any way that impacted
Speaker 2: his development. Likewise, the claims that poverty and desperation drove
Speaker 2: him to fascism are baseless. And again I think this
Speaker 2: is like a mainstream Hitler discourse thing right, Like it
Speaker 2: sounds kind of like Hitler's backstory, So that makes it
Speaker 2: seem like, oh, of course, this is where fascists come from.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: It's more comforting than being like, no, a, fascists come
Speaker 2: from the s in place, like the guy who runs
Speaker 2: the local fucking credit union came from right, like they
Speaker 2: just come from the world. I'm going to read another
Speaker 2: quote from Cessarini's book, and I want you to think
Speaker 2: about how easily you could do a find and replace
Speaker 2: on this paragraph and make it sound like modern reporting
Speaker 2: on some American neo Nazi mass shooter quote. The NBC
Speaker 2: correspondent John Donovan concluded, on the basis of interviews with
Speaker 2: eikman schoolmates, that he was a lonely and distant fellow.
Speaker 2: He was a fragile, underfed youth, and an obviously unhappy one,
Speaker 2: a misfit. According to Donovan, Eikman represented the classic pattern
Speaker 2: of disturbed, introverted personality which so often produced the Larvae fanaticism.
Speaker 2: His father, a struggling and underpaid manager of a failing
Speaker 2: electrical company simply could not provide for his abundant family,
Speaker 2: and more often than not, there was insufficient food on
Speaker 2: the table. The boy grew to manhood with a grudge
Speaker 2: and drifted around in a world without hope until he
Speaker 2: traded a threadbare suit for a splendid essay uniform. And
Speaker 2: again not true. I'm bringing this up to talk like
Speaker 2: how how similar a lot of these very fake backstories
Speaker 2: are and what they say about what we want to
Speaker 2: believe about a guy named Iikman, Right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we always want to believe these people come from
Speaker 4: like disadvantaged backgrounds or tortured family homes, or we're bullied.
Speaker 4: I mean, I know we're about the same age, Robert,
Speaker 4: and what we're we always told growing about the Columbine shooters, right, oh, yeah,
Speaker 4: Like these people always need to be victims of some
Speaker 4: kind of lashing out. They can't be cold and calculated
Speaker 4: and ideologically driven, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And there's this Yeah it's tough too, because like
Speaker 2: there's this belief that is very common on the left
Speaker 2: and I think is not a bad guiding light that like, well,
Speaker 2: you should seek to improve people's conditions because that makes
Speaker 2: the world better and guys like Iikman point out that
Speaker 2: like that, yeah, you should, but that's not enough to
Speaker 2: avoid the birth of an Aikman Because what's kind of
Speaker 2: scariest about this guy's backstory is that if you grew
Speaker 2: up in the suburbs like ten fifteen years ago or
Speaker 2: like you know today, a lot of his background's kind
Speaker 2: of sound similar to you, right, like in some ways
Speaker 2: that are like weirdly direct. So his birth town, Solingen,
Speaker 2: was an industrial town in the Rhineland, and his father
Speaker 2: was a modern German Man with a modern German job.
Speaker 2: He worked as a clerk for a company that supplied
Speaker 2: parts to power plants. His name was Adolf Karl Eichmann,
Speaker 2: and he was a strict disciplinarian, but not in a
Speaker 2: way that would have been weird to his son or
Speaker 2: anyone else. This was very normal for the time. Our
Speaker 2: Eikman would recall in his own autobiography, I acknowledged my
Speaker 2: father as the absolute authority. The earliest recollection that he
Speaker 2: gives us of his education is of a kindergarten teacher
Speaker 2: with an illustrated book of Bible stories which showed Moses
Speaker 2: having demonic horns. Now Eikman gave this recollection when he
Speaker 2: was on trial for genocide, So he may have been
Speaker 2: trying to defray his culpability by making a point about
Speaker 2: the deep roots of anti Semitism and his culture. That said,
Speaker 2: as I've noted before, you can today find churches in
Speaker 2: Germany and elsewhere in Europe with what's called a judensau
Speaker 2: depicted on the outside, which is a sculptural depiction of
Speaker 2: a pig suckling Jewish babies. These are like medieval churches,
Speaker 2: but they're around today and there were more of them
Speaker 2: back then. So like the idea that he would have
Speaker 2: encountered this in Sunday School. Not weird, right, pretty racist
Speaker 2: at all? Culture, not at all weird. Germany was a
Speaker 2: deeply anti Semitic place. And I also liked the idea
Speaker 2: of like, maybe we shouldn't take the guy on trial
Speaker 2: for Jesse on trial, yeah, for killing for the Holocaust
Speaker 2: to face value.
Speaker 4: Yes, maybe the concept of innocent until proven guilty needs
Speaker 4: to be ignored on this one.
Speaker 2: Perhaps there were a lot of fascinating like Jewish prudential
Speaker 2: arguments about at the Nuremberg trials, And obviously this isn't
Speaker 2: a part of that. This was a different thing, but like,
Speaker 2: and part of it was like number one, well, technically
Speaker 2: everything these guys did was legal in their country, so
Speaker 2: like what law are we trying them under kind of
Speaker 2: expos facto? And number two like well we know, like
Speaker 2: we know Herman Gearing doesn't have an offense against being
Speaker 2: Herman Gearing.
Speaker 4: Right, it's the first legal precedent of fuck that. Yeah,
Speaker 4: we've all come together and our our our six or
Speaker 4: eight judge brains have decided full yeah, all his life
Speaker 4: in my weird dress with my wig.
Speaker 2: Oh man. I did watch the fucking Mandela movie with
Speaker 2: starring Idris Elba as Mandela, and it was like it
Speaker 2: was fine, but the opening of it is like early
Speaker 2: South African courts where everybody's wearing the wigs, even like yeah,
Speaker 2: the black lawyers, and it's like, oh man, this is
Speaker 2: did that really? I guess that must that must have
Speaker 2: really been how everyone dressed in those courts. See, it's weird.
Speaker 2: I guess it's a holdover.
Speaker 4: I love that there's still places that do it, like
Speaker 4: this is ridiculous. I don't care if you're passing me,
Speaker 4: like I could be sitting in front of you, I'm
Speaker 4: sings cuffed together and you're like I sent you to
Speaker 4: death of like bro not you bring up the real judge?
Speaker 2: Yeah whatever, Adolph Karl, his dad moves back to Linz
Speaker 2: to take a job managing a local power company, and
Speaker 2: his wife and kids follow that a year later. They
Speaker 2: were Evangelical Calvinist Protestants, which made them as much a
Speaker 2: minority in the small Austrian town of Linz as the
Speaker 2: Jewish citizens. Right, Jewish people are like seventeen percent of
Speaker 2: the population, Evangelical Protestants are like nineteen percent. Linz is
Speaker 2: predominantly Catholic, and while Catholics believe that good works can
Speaker 2: win someone a place in heaven, Calvinists are as close
Speaker 2: to the opposite of Catholics as you get in Christianity.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: The idea is there's an elect few that make it
Speaker 2: to heaven and those roles are fixed.
Speaker 4: Right. Yeah, it's very Dutch coded.
Speaker 2: It's very Dutch coded. But there's there's no real evidence
Speaker 2: that this difference caused Karl a much trouble. His family
Speaker 2: overall seems to have blended in. His dad was a
Speaker 2: German nationalist, and as a Protestant as well, he would
Speaker 2: have been drawn to George Rider von Schener's Pan German movement.
Speaker 2: This was a foundational pillar of the right in Austria
Speaker 2: and also a prelude to Nazism's conflict with the Catholic Church,
Speaker 2: because the Pan German movement is a heavily evangelical Protestant movement. Right,
Speaker 2: that's where like the core of the membership comes from.
Speaker 2: And I want to read you a summary of Schoener's
Speaker 2: life and career written for Amsterdam University Press, which notes
Speaker 2: that his politics were quote founded on antagonism towards Slav's,
Speaker 2: Jews and Catholicism. This culminated in his establishment of the
Speaker 2: Pan German Party in eighteen seventy nine and the subsequent
Speaker 2: away from Rome movement seeking mass conversion of Austrian Catholics
Speaker 2: to Lutheranism, echoing Bismarck's culture comp in Germany. Schooner became
Speaker 2: notorious for his pioneering use of physical and verbal violence.
Speaker 2: In eighteen eighty eight, he was imprisoned, losing his title
Speaker 2: and temporarily all parliamentary privileges, after ransacking the offices of
Speaker 2: a Jewish owned newspaper. In eighteen ninety eight, the orchestrated
Speaker 2: mob protests that expedited the dismissal of the Austrian Prime Minister,
Speaker 2: Count Bedini, one year after Schener's own re election to
Speaker 2: the reix Rot. This was in protest against Badini's language
Speaker 2: ordinances obliging civil servants in Austrian Bohemia to speak Czech
Speaker 2: excluding germanifhones, and it helped his party reach a high
Speaker 2: water mark of twenty one delegates in nineteen oh one.
Speaker 2: Schoenerer helped create an entirely new political form and climate,
Speaker 2: described as being in a new key sharper, violent, demagogic,
Speaker 2: and Schoenerer is a massive because again Hitler grows up
Speaker 2: in Lenz. Schoenerer is a huge influence on Hitler right.
Speaker 2: He is like the way his party works is a
Speaker 2: proto Nazi party. These guys are destroying Jewish newspapers, They're
Speaker 2: getting into fights in the street, and there are like
Speaker 2: a Pan German nationalist group right who is seeking to
Speaker 2: destroy any of these religions that have ties Like his
Speaker 2: issue with Catholicism is its ties to Rome Right, which
Speaker 2: is obviously not German.
Speaker 4: Yeah, as a German nationalist that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 4: I like that he he ascends to power because his
Speaker 4: entire thing is a I see, you guys have a
Speaker 4: nationalist movement and it's not doing very well. Have you
Speaker 4: considered violence, have you considered people out have shared street crime?
Speaker 2: Oh shit, this is working great. Yeah, let's keep trying that.
Speaker 4: This is wonderful.
Speaker 2: So Aikman would later recall that his father had been
Speaker 2: essentially a political quote. At home, politics was never discussed.
Speaker 2: My father didn't bother with politics. But that's the kind
Speaker 2: of thing people say when like they don't view whatever
Speaker 2: their family believes as political right. And as a kid,
Speaker 2: Aikman doesn't think German nationalism or pan Germanism is political right.
Speaker 2: It's just correct. It's like how you get there's some
Speaker 2: religious extremists in the US. We'd be like, Christianity isn't
Speaker 2: a religion. It's just the truth, you know, right, Like
Speaker 2: I've heard that's that's a conversation I've had.
Speaker 4: It's like, I mean, and having Christianity in politics is
Speaker 4: neither something to argue for. Are you against? It just
Speaker 4: should be something that exists.
Speaker 2: It's just the truth, right, Yeah, it's just the truth.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: I hate to see yet another father get radicalized by
Speaker 4: using Facebook.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, tragic, Yeah, his dad would have lost
Speaker 2: it to Facebook, so Schoenerer's party would have was the
Speaker 2: first big political party to influence Hitler, and in a
Speaker 2: less direct way, the same would have been true of
Speaker 2: young Eichman. His family did everything a loyal Austro Hungarian
Speaker 2: family ought to do, which for Adolph's mom meant Maria
Speaker 2: popping out a child every single opportunity she had. Little
Speaker 2: Adolph was joined by four siblings, three of whom were boys,
Speaker 2: in the space of about eight years. And in other words,
Speaker 2: Maria popped out a kid once every two years until
Speaker 2: she died in nineteen sixteen, and her death was a
Speaker 2: consequence of both World War One is on at this
Speaker 2: point everyone is starving in Germany and Austria Hungary and
Speaker 2: number two, she's just had not had enough time to
Speaker 2: recuperate between pregnancies, right, so like her body is already
Speaker 2: taxed and then there's not enough food while she's going
Speaker 2: through pregnancy number five in nine years.
Speaker 4: Christ give the woman a weekend off.
Speaker 2: Nope, that not the way they did it. Back then
Speaker 2: she dies it thirty two.
Speaker 3: That was a lot.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this dude couldn't pull out of a driveway.
Speaker 2: Uh, the elder Hadolf Eikman remarried almost instantly. This was
Speaker 2: likely a product of two pragmatic realities. He had no
Speaker 2: desire to raise his own children, and he needed more
Speaker 2: children because that's what you did as a loyal citizen
Speaker 2: of the Empire and a good evangelical Christian right. His
Speaker 2: second wife was also named Maria. Perhaps, oh that's weird.
Speaker 2: Perhaps he had it type, although an Austrian woman named
Speaker 2: Maria not too uncommon.
Speaker 4: I am looking for an Austrian woman named Ria who
Speaker 4: could give births in litters three or four at a
Speaker 4: time would be ideal. It really saves us time and money.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he was like, I'm not learning another name. What
Speaker 3: are you talking about?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Oh no, this is the world's first puppy play enthusiasts, right.
Speaker 3: I feel like I.
Speaker 1: Feel like he just numbered his children and he's like,
Speaker 1: number one, come here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's faster that way. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Why is it always the psychos that want the most
Speaker 4: about of kids have the least about to do with
Speaker 4: parenting them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because the point is to have the kids, not
Speaker 2: to be there with them. So, you know, speaking of
Speaker 2: being with people, I want to be with our advertisers,
Speaker 2: you know, both both physically and financially and we're back,
Speaker 2: all right. So, uh, his second wife, we'll call her
Speaker 2: Maria to her family has money, which helps a lot
Speaker 2: because they're going to have more kids. Also, her family
Speaker 2: is closely tied to She has like a number of
Speaker 2: relatives who had married into wealthy Jewish families in Vienna.
Speaker 2: And obviously by that you should know these are like
Speaker 2: urban sophisticated Jewish sophisticated by the term of the day,
Speaker 2: they're not there. They're trying to just be Germans, right,
Speaker 2: which is a not uncommon thing for people in like
Speaker 2: the upper class who are Jewish in both in Austria
Speaker 2: and in Germany to do to try to kind of
Speaker 2: leave behind the religion and like we're basically secular, we're
Speaker 2: married into Christian families. None of this really saves a
Speaker 2: lot of these people come the Holocaust, but there is
Speaker 2: this attempt to like integrate that, like I'm a German
Speaker 2: before I'm anything else, right, And that's kind of Her
Speaker 2: family is number one, you'd say, probably more open minded
Speaker 2: than a lot because they are willing to marry into
Speaker 2: these families. Although it's also you know this thing of like,
Speaker 2: well they got money, right, so that's that's that over
Speaker 2: you know, overwhelms the fact that they're this race that
Speaker 2: a lot of people don't like.
Speaker 4: Right, they're rich.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that that that that kind of papers over that
Speaker 2: to some people. But it's meaningful in the case of
Speaker 2: Eichmann because you often don't hear this with him. You know,
Speaker 2: every version of this backstory, of his backstory emphasizes cultural
Speaker 2: anti Semitism, which both he was raised with and tries
Speaker 2: to say that he was like a key of being Jewish,
Speaker 2: but it ignores the fact that, like he was exposed
Speaker 2: to positive images and accounts of Jewish people as part
Speaker 2: of German society. His in laws were Jewish, some of them. Right,
Speaker 2: He knew Jewish people growing up, and he would have
Speaker 2: had like a family relationship with him. Right. So this
Speaker 2: is not a guy who was like destined by any
Speaker 2: means to be completely anti Semitic.
Speaker 4: Right, destined by the stars to be a massive piece
Speaker 4: of shit.
Speaker 2: Right, That's just not how it works. This is a choice.
Speaker 2: He makes it a point. Right Now. Obviously, his mother's
Speaker 2: death would have been traumatic for him. It's always traumatic
Speaker 2: for your mom to die when you were a little kid.
Speaker 2: But again, a lot of these stories are like and
Speaker 2: he hated his wicked stepmother, who was cruel to him.
Speaker 2: He never described her that way. He described her as
Speaker 2: a zealous and responsible guardian.
Speaker 4: Like which is like the highest complimented German can pay you.
Speaker 2: Right right, you get the thing. He didn't love her
Speaker 2: like he did his mom, which again isn't weird. But
Speaker 2: he was like, no, she was like respectable. She did
Speaker 2: the job that she was brought into do right, and
Speaker 2: three more children quickly joined the family. He later recalled
Speaker 2: of his family life, there was no disorder. We were
Speaker 2: brought up in a strict way and we had a normal,
Speaker 2: quiet life. He did recall as a child that while
Speaker 2: his stepmother tried to get the family interested in the Bible,
Speaker 2: young Adolf Eichmann was primarily interested in the bits with
Speaker 2: battles and killing, which is not abnormal for young boys.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's more on brand. I would be more worried
Speaker 4: if he was it. He's like, no, I'm actually more
Speaker 4: really into the logistics half of this.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeaha they what kind of food were they
Speaker 2: carter around the desert for forty years? How did they
Speaker 2: make that work? Right?
Speaker 4: Let me see the wagons?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So one of his best friends as a child
Speaker 2: was a Jewish classmate, Misha Seba. Seba's father was a
Speaker 2: pharmacist and his mother owned a salon, and the two
Speaker 2: were close enough that Cserini describes them as regularly staying
Speaker 2: over at each other's houses. So again, this is not
Speaker 2: a guy who's destined to the kind of anti Semitism
Speaker 2: that he is going to adopt in adulthood. It's a
Speaker 2: choice he makes. Seba and Eikman would maintain their friendship
Speaker 2: in fact well into not just adulthood, but Aikman's involvement
Speaker 2: with like far right organizations into the early I think
Speaker 2: like thirty two is when they have their last contact,
Speaker 2: So like that's late, right.
Speaker 4: And that's also not uncommon though. No, all of these
Speaker 4: psychos who you know, maybe put the blueprints to the
Speaker 4: Holocaust in place where high ranking members of the Third
Speaker 4: Raich had some kind of hands on shit, Like all
Speaker 4: of them had close personal contacts with Jewish people and
Speaker 4: the mental gymnastics, state workers like, ah, well he's on
Speaker 4: the good ones. It's fine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that is in fact a thing that was
Speaker 2: talked about, like and they cover this in conspiracy at
Speaker 2: the Vonse conference where they're trying to decide like how
Speaker 2: far do we go with this? And finally like, look,
Speaker 2: everyone has their good jew but we just can't build
Speaker 2: that into the plan. We have to try to wipe
Speaker 2: it all out, right, But like, as I'll like Hitler
Speaker 2: even there was one Jewish guy he picked to spirit
Speaker 2: out of Nazi Germany after he took power. His family doctor.
Speaker 4: Right, oh there's here's also his personal driver. Yeah, his
Speaker 4: personal driver was Jewish as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, he like he like all of these
Speaker 2: guys had relationships with Jewish people, right, But you know
Speaker 2: that's just the way racism works, right.
Speaker 4: And no one ever accused him of being smart or
Speaker 4: logical in the racism.
Speaker 2: No, there was a fucking a great Louis Throux documentary
Speaker 2: where he goes to see Tom Metzger, who used to
Speaker 2: lead an organization called White Area of Resistance or War
Speaker 2: that was responsible for the murder of a young immigrant
Speaker 2: named Mlugeta Surah in Portland years back. And you know,
Speaker 2: Metzger is as violent and anti Semiti as possible, and
Speaker 2: during Louie's time with him, he like meets his neighbor
Speaker 2: who's like a Mexican man, and they're like friendly and
Speaker 2: Tom's like no, I mean, like we get along, like
Speaker 2: I like him, Like it doesn't change my overall opinion
Speaker 2: about like different races. And it's just like, yeah, that's
Speaker 2: just how these people are, Like cognitive dissonance does You're
Speaker 2: not immune to it just because you're a bigot, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: So anyway, Seba and Eichman are friends for a while,
Speaker 2: and yeah, another friend of his was Friedrich von Schmidt.
Speaker 2: And this is a friend more that you would expect
Speaker 2: from a guy who grows into what Eikman was. As
Speaker 2: you can tell by the Vaughn. Friedrich is the son
Speaker 2: of a noble family. His dad had been a field
Speaker 2: marshal for the Austro Hungarian Army, which means he was
Speaker 2: terrible at his job. None of them were nobody's worse
Speaker 2: at their job. Yeah, not a single good field marshal
Speaker 2: in that army. And his family was impoverished by the
Speaker 2: time that Eikman met him, right, probably because of the
Speaker 2: heretoforementioned World War One.
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, I'm glad to see at least one family
Speaker 4: got with the deserve poverty.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Cesarini notes that the mere fact that Eichman was
Speaker 2: allowed to play with this kid counters the narrative that
Speaker 2: he was like a desperate loaner on the fringes as
Speaker 2: a kid, because like von Schmidt's family wouldn't have let
Speaker 2: them play their son play with the weird kid, right,
Speaker 2: that's just not the way these groups worked.
Speaker 4: So anything, it's evidence that his family was quite well
Speaker 4: placed in society to be hanging out with us, even
Speaker 4: though they are impoverished. It's that kind of European non
Speaker 4: nobility that's poor, but they still have social standing.
Speaker 2: And they're no, yeah, and they don't. And like the
Speaker 2: Iikman family is not like impoverished. I think they go
Speaker 2: from kind of lower middle class to solidly middle class
Speaker 2: by the time he's like an adult, right, Like this
Speaker 2: is sort of how I And again, middle class terms
Speaker 2: like that are not as useful when we're talking about
Speaker 2: Austro Hungary in the first half of the twentieth century.
Speaker 2: But that's or Austria. But that's kind of like.
Speaker 4: Used horse salesman, right, the used car salesman didn't exist yet. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they drive the they drive the equivalent of a
Speaker 2: Pontiac vibe and horses, which I guess is just a
Speaker 2: horse with no legs you pull mule, put my horse
Speaker 2: up on cinder. We pull the horse with mule is pontiac.
Speaker 4: This is my horse vibe.
Speaker 2: So if we're looking for signs in his childhood of
Speaker 2: the monster he would become, we don't have a lot
Speaker 2: to go on from childhood trauma, because he doesn't seem
Speaker 2: to have had a lot of childhood trauma more than
Speaker 2: probably you and I or most kids. Because he grew
Speaker 2: up in World War One. Right, he's not fighting in it,
Speaker 2: but everyone is starving for a while, right, that's probably
Speaker 2: pretty bad for you. Now, what's interesting to me is that,
Speaker 2: like it is a seminal moment, this war for a
Speaker 2: lot of the Nazi old Guard, whether they fought in.
Speaker 4: It or not.
Speaker 2: But Eikman didn't talk about it much, and we get
Speaker 2: little of his backstory on that. Now, he would have
Speaker 2: been inundated with imperial propaganda and the shortages of the
Speaker 2: war years would have impacted him, but his father seems
Speaker 2: to have maintained a comfortable living for the family in
Speaker 2: spite of the times, and as it was never drafted himself,
Speaker 2: which also suggests that what he was doing was really
Speaker 2: useful during the war, right to not get drafted by
Speaker 2: the end of that fucking thing as a yeah, yeah
Speaker 2: he had.
Speaker 4: He either had really good connections or he did something
Speaker 4: some kind of manufacturing.
Speaker 2: He's working in power, right, yeah, I like that.
Speaker 4: By the end, the Austro Hungarian Empire was scrape big,
Speaker 4: the bottom of the bottom of the barrel. They were
Speaker 4: drafting the horses with no legs.
Speaker 2: Do you have one or more hens? Okay? That's not
Speaker 2: a good Austrian exit.
Speaker 3: But what is that?
Speaker 1: Okay?
Speaker 2: How am I doing it?
Speaker 4: We have paperwork for something called the horse vibe.
Speaker 2: So the war cost to Austria what was left of
Speaker 2: her empire? Right uh? And a third of the German
Speaker 2: speaking population wound up separated into different countries, which really
Speaker 2: pitches off Pan Germanists like Aikman's father. But again, we
Speaker 2: have nothing that shows child Aikman was particularly traumatized at
Speaker 2: the war's outcome, nor is there any particular evidence that
Speaker 2: his dad blamed the Jews. We might do better looking
Speaker 2: at the place and systems he was raised in than
Speaker 2: the specifics of his family life. This is because the
Speaker 2: town he was raised in, Linz, is also the town
Speaker 2: where Hitler had written raised a couple decades earlier, and
Speaker 2: the future Furor was at this point on the Western
Speaker 2: Front during World War One, but he and Aikman went
Speaker 2: to the Sane High School as kids, obviously with some
Speaker 2: time in between them, and they had some of the
Speaker 2: same teachers. Right, Aikman has Hitler's history teacher.
Speaker 4: Who is this guy? This guy history teacher has the
Speaker 4: most cursed alumni minver.
Speaker 2: And he's a piece like he's got some blame for
Speaker 2: what happens.
Speaker 4: Yes to his track record is h is spotless and tragedy.
Speaker 2: And this is why I always tell my friends who
Speaker 2: are teachers, don't teach children things. It never ends well,
Speaker 2: you know, keep their little minds empty. Rights.
Speaker 4: I had a teaching job for years. I'm never gonna
Speaker 4: say it was a good one, but I'm willing to
Speaker 4: bet I did not teach American Hitler. Hitler, Yeah, way
Speaker 4: too busy watching remember the Titans?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, put that on um, sty'll be fine. His history
Speaker 2: teacher was named doctor Leopold poet poet O e like
Speaker 2: poet S. E. H. Both Hitler and Eichman later wrote
Speaker 2: about the impact this man had on their developing minds.
Speaker 2: So it's probably worth looking into him a bit deeper
Speaker 2: in mind comp Hitler wrote this about Poets quote an
Speaker 2: old gentleman kind, but at the same time firm. He
Speaker 2: was able not only to hold our attention by his
Speaker 2: dazzling eloquence, but to carry us away with him. Even today,
Speaker 2: I think back with genuine emotion on this gray haired man, who,
Speaker 2: by the fire of his words sometimes made us forget
Speaker 2: the present, who, as if by magic, transported us into
Speaker 2: times past and out of the millennium mists of time,
Speaker 2: transformed dry historical facts into vivid reality. There we sat,
Speaker 2: often a flame with enthusiasm, sometimes even moved to tears.
Speaker 2: He used our budding national fanaticism as a means of
Speaker 2: educating us, frequently appealing to our sense of national honor.
Speaker 2: This teacher made history of my favorite subject. And indeed,
Speaker 2: though he had no such intention, it was then I
Speaker 2: became a young revolutionary. Not a good teacher.
Speaker 4: No, no, that's not good.
Speaker 2: You fucked up, Leopold.
Speaker 4: Yeah, at any point you're a teacher, and you get
Speaker 4: noted in your students that manifesto. Manifesto, yeah right, not
Speaker 4: a good vote of confidence.
Speaker 2: So Poet was a German supremacist, although he was also
Speaker 2: a one. He was a weird kind because he was
Speaker 2: super loyal to the Habsburgs, which obviously Hitler does not
Speaker 2: become loyal to the Habsburgs he leaves Austria to join
Speaker 2: the German Army. His exhortations to nationalism influenced both Hitler
Speaker 2: and Eichman, though Eichmann recalled later that while he was
Speaker 2: never very political as a kid, he reflexively leaned towards
Speaker 2: right wing nationalism. This would have kept him well inside
Speaker 2: the mainstream within Linz. For most of his childhood, the
Speaker 2: city government was run by Mayor Carl Burley, who headed
Speaker 2: a coalition of lawyers, teachers, small business owners, and government
Speaker 2: employees who were all bound together by a shared hatred
Speaker 2: of liberals, Jews, and the Catholic clergy.
Speaker 4: And yes, just a normal Republican meeting these days.
Speaker 2: A normal Republican meeting these days. His father went through
Speaker 2: several career changes, Aikman's and significant reversals of fortune while
Speaker 2: he's a kid. The job in Linz had initially seemed
Speaker 2: like a step to the upper middle class, and for
Speaker 2: time it was, but his dad retired early and put
Speaker 2: his savings into a fifty one percent stake in a
Speaker 2: mining company based in Salzburg. Which was experimenting with an
Speaker 2: early form of what we now call hydraulic fracturing. Right,
Speaker 2: like he his family, he has some family money from fracking.
Speaker 2: Adolf Iikman even he's an oil and gas kid.
Speaker 4: Oh so does this make him like ancestrally from North
Speaker 4: Dakota or something? Yeah? Is he Dakota?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's why adolf Iikman High School is located in Bismarck. No,
Speaker 2: I say sorry to our listener in North Dakota, but
Speaker 2: they don't have the internet there.
Speaker 4: Do They explains all the Nazis there.
Speaker 2: To be fair, it's I'm sorry North Dakota. I love you.
Speaker 2: I don't love you, but I've been to you.
Speaker 4: I don't think anybody could be in love with a Dakota. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's hard, more of a friend.
Speaker 2: Like loving a vampire squid. You know, you can appreciate
Speaker 2: some of its characteristics, but.
Speaker 4: A what a vampire squid is a vampire.
Speaker 2: It's a squid that's a vampire today.
Speaker 4: It is what it says on the tin.
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, it's it's what's advertised.
Speaker 3: Your brain is like this today.
Speaker 2: That's a lot of days, Sophie.
Speaker 4: Much like the legs of a vampire squid.
Speaker 3: There we go.
Speaker 2: So this uh, this fifty steak in a fracking company
Speaker 2: in Salzburg. It brings in a living, but it doesn't
Speaker 2: make them rich. Right, you're in it a little too
Speaker 2: early to get loaded from fracking. So Adolph's dad invested
Speaker 2: what was left of his savings and his wife's inheritance
Speaker 2: into a mill in Upper Austria. This was a bad
Speaker 2: choice and the investment went busted quickly. Carl pivoted to
Speaker 2: an investment in a company making locomobiles. I had never
Speaker 2: heard of these. They were they were steam powered cars.
Speaker 4: That rules, I mean you have to you have to
Speaker 4: invent something with your horse as the fucking legs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so he gets into a locomobiles, but it turns
Speaker 2: out this isn't like a real investment. His business partner
Speaker 2: is a con man who hangs himself.
Speaker 4: So well, yeah, you invested in steam powered cars with
Speaker 4: the local Austrian flim flam man.
Speaker 2: You're an oil man. Some biographers would try to make
Speaker 2: hay out of the impact his father's unstable employment and
Speaker 2: financial situation might have had, as with the fact that
Speaker 2: his dad has gone for a period. There's like a
Speaker 2: year where he's working in Germany. Well, Iikman's a kid,
Speaker 2: But Aikman never related this as particularly traumatic, and the
Speaker 2: evidence shows, while again they had financial difficulties, they were
Speaker 2: never in danger of like losing their home or starving.
Speaker 2: If anything, the Aikman's enjoyed unusual stability and financial security
Speaker 2: for people of their class in time. Right. Not that
Speaker 2: they were totally stable, not that they didn't have anxieties,
Speaker 2: but they had it better than a lot of folks. Right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean they're making a killing selling weird steam
Speaker 4: powered cars, saying their neighbors drinking on fire with frakin.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I mean his business partner in the steamcars
Speaker 2: thing killed himself because it would belly up. So I
Speaker 2: don't know about that part.
Speaker 4: But yeah, you're right, it's more of a Shelbyville thing.
Speaker 2: I guess it's a Shelbyville thing. Yeah, but he does
Speaker 2: get he does get tricked by yeah, the fucking music man. So,
Speaker 2: as I noted earlier when I read Ccerinia's biography, the
Speaker 2: big thing I took away was how similar Iikman's childhood
Speaker 2: was to like mine, which is not something that tends
Speaker 2: to happen with books about guys who grew up in
Speaker 2: Austria at the turn of the century. And I find
Speaker 2: this very weird. And I'm just going to quote from
Speaker 2: that book now. Iikman's social life was typical of the
Speaker 2: children and youth of his class, Like every good bourgeoisie child.
Speaker 2: He was taught a musical instrument and he became a
Speaker 2: proficient violinist. His father encouraged him to learn fencing, and
Speaker 2: he took classes in jiu jitsu. He was enrolled in
Speaker 2: the Young Men's Christian Association and went to the club
Speaker 2: every Sunday after attending church with his family. He later
Speaker 2: joined the Wandervogel, a sort of scouting or woodcraft association
Speaker 2: that organized hikes and camps for teenagers. The particular Wandervogel
Speaker 2: group he joined belonged to the Federation of Youth Organizations,
Speaker 2: which was ostensibly apolitical, although the movement had a strong,
Speaker 2: if diverse ideological currents running through it. Eichman's group, named
Speaker 2: after the Griffin Bird, introduced him to older boys who
Speaker 2: were already in the ranks of right wing Austrian militias.
Speaker 2: And just like the whole yeah, he like, he has
Speaker 2: to learn an instrument. Everyone does. He takes fencing classes.
Speaker 2: He takes jiu jitsu like he's doing karate classes. I
Speaker 2: didn't know they were doing that at this point in
Speaker 2: time in Austria.
Speaker 4: I love the idea of like of a Nazi brown
Speaker 4: shirt getting it a street battle. He just falls on
Speaker 4: his ass and starts scooting around to juju Brazilian jiu
Speaker 4: jitsu like.
Speaker 2: A crab on his back. I'm gonna pull guard on
Speaker 2: the under man. It's so funny. It's just it's all, Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's fascinating to me. And yeah, the wander Vogel there
Speaker 2: were like there was like a left wing chunk of them.
Speaker 2: But the group he is in, he doesn't get involved
Speaker 2: in right wing militias, but he now has friends in
Speaker 2: them right, and he will know people kind of the
Speaker 2: rest of his life until he gets directly in the
Speaker 2: far right who are in far right groups.
Speaker 4: Right. This makes sense to me as someone who did
Speaker 4: a lot of jiu jitsu or you never I expect
Speaker 4: that you're gonna end up in the middle of a
Speaker 4: group of right wingers, But the second you walk into
Speaker 4: the jiu jitsu chip.
Speaker 2: Like, oh the vibes are off.
Speaker 4: I guess I'm in a right wig space or.
Speaker 2: Three people with hats that are problems walk in and
Speaker 2: I may not be happy here, speaking of places, I'm
Speaker 2: not happy a world without these products and services. Wow,
Speaker 2: and we're back. So Eiken was an indifferent student, we
Speaker 2: might even say a bad one. His later life would
Speaker 2: show him to be a generally smart guy, or at
Speaker 2: least it possess kinds of intelligence. So the way I
Speaker 2: read this is that he's not motivated by any of
Speaker 2: the school work he's doing, nor is he motivated by
Speaker 2: any of the paths set before him by his education.
Speaker 2: His father takes him out of traditional school in nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty one. He puts him into a vocational program to
Speaker 2: train him as an electrician. Right, so his dad is like,
Speaker 2: you're not doing well in like school school and you
Speaker 2: have to learn how to like do something right. But
Speaker 2: he fails out of vocational school. He ultimately drops out
Speaker 2: without any kind of degree. So he's now failed both
Speaker 2: of the different kinds of schooling tracks in Austria at
Speaker 2: the time. Now, for a young man with fewer means
Speaker 2: behind him, this might have ended with Aikman winding up
Speaker 2: like Hitler, you know, as some of those other biographies
Speaker 2: had claimed. Living on the streets of Vienna, homelesser at
Speaker 2: the edge of it. But unlike Hitler, Aikman's father was
Speaker 2: still alive, and Eikman's dad used his plentiful connections to
Speaker 2: get his job. He owns a mining company, right, and
Speaker 2: he gets his job involved in the fracking company. Right,
Speaker 2: so Adolf Eichman, future foreman of the Holocaust. His first
Speaker 2: like big boy job is hydraulic fracking.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: That's that's a fail sign as a fail son.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: His dad seems to have put him through a number
Speaker 2: of roles at the company, trying him out doing everything
Speaker 2: from squeezing through underground tunnels to running machinery above ground.
Speaker 2: Iikeman liked work in the tunnels. It was physical and
Speaker 2: dangerous and seems to have been the first labor that
Speaker 2: he found motivating. After some time working at the fracking company,
Speaker 2: he did an apprenticeship at an Austrian electronics company, which
Speaker 2: occupied him for two and a half years until his
Speaker 2: dad convinced him to take a gig as a radio salesman.
Speaker 2: This does not pan out, and ultimately Iikman gravitates towards
Speaker 2: a position he finds advertised in the paper at an
Speaker 2: oil company. His stepmom used a family connection through one
Speaker 2: of her Jewish in laws to get him hired by
Speaker 2: the owner of the company, who was also a Jewish guy.
Speaker 2: Now the executive who interviewed him told him he was
Speaker 2: too young for the job, but said I've been told
Speaker 2: to hire you anyway, so congratulations, like welcome in.
Speaker 4: He probably. I don't know if this guy survives long
Speaker 4: enough to regret this or not, but woo yeah.
Speaker 2: If Ikeman was at all embarrassed or ashamed at the
Speaker 2: nepotism involved in keeping him afloat, he left no record. Instead,
Speaker 2: he seems to have enjoyed the job and the relative
Speaker 2: comfort it afforded him. He bought a motorcycle and devoted
Speaker 2: himself to the work well enough to get promoted. Key
Speaker 2: to his success was that the job involved constant travel,
Speaker 2: which he mostly did via the motorcycle that he bought already.
Speaker 2: Eichman showed a preference for work that allowed him to
Speaker 2: set his own hours and mixed Dex's work with time
Speaker 2: in the field. He spent a lot of time out
Speaker 2: in rural Austria finding spots to build gas stations, and
Speaker 2: he had to handle a lot of logistical hurdles scheduling
Speaker 2: fuel deliveries to make sure that shit got where it
Speaker 2: needed to be at the right time. And he gets
Speaker 2: good at this, right, Like his training for how to
Speaker 2: make the Holocaust trains run is setting up gas stations
Speaker 2: and gas fuel deliveries, right. That is honestly something I
Speaker 2: could see coming. Yeah, it's not so surprising when you
Speaker 2: lay it out like.
Speaker 4: That, a middle management NEPO guy in the oil gas
Speaker 4: fuel to fascism pipeline. I feel like that's a pretty
Speaker 4: well trodden path.
Speaker 2: Now. He was known to work hard, often during the weekend,
Speaker 2: but he was also not someone who led his social
Speaker 2: life atrophy. As Cesarini writes, his social life flourish now
Speaker 2: that he had disposable income, freedom to come and go
Speaker 2: as he pleased on weekday evenings, and a motorcycle with
Speaker 2: which to impress prospective girlfriends at the weekend. He was
Speaker 2: definitely a lot not the lonely Gausch outsider who depicted
Speaker 2: as the typical recruit to Nazism in many of the
Speaker 2: psychological and socio psychological explanations for the movement's growth. His
Speaker 2: prison memoir is filled with gratitude to his father for
Speaker 2: the move to Upper Austria his second homeland, and for
Speaker 2: giving him a glorious, untroubled youth, A keen horseman. He
Speaker 2: spent hours riding in the countryside. He recalled that as
Speaker 2: for all young men, those days offered him love, spring
Speaker 2: and life, motorsports, mountain sports, work, coffeehouses, friends and girlfriends,
Speaker 2: and why not filled the days and years.
Speaker 4: So good for him.
Speaker 2: He's living it up. He's again not at all the
Speaker 2: guy he's described as by a lot of people. He's
Speaker 2: a dude with a social life. He's a dude who's
Speaker 2: reasonably good with women. He's a dude who's has options
Speaker 2: to be happy outside of joining the Nazi Party. Right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, If you didn't know how the story ended, I
Speaker 4: would say, well, I'm sure this guy turns out perfectly
Speaker 4: normal for German of the.
Speaker 2: Era, A normal dude. Yeah. Now, Throughout this period, the
Speaker 2: Nazi Party is arising up in Germany and in Austria.
Speaker 2: The left and right are engaging in open warfare in
Speaker 2: the streets, with the government cracking down hard against the
Speaker 2: social democratic militias. Eikmann is an ignorant of any of this.
Speaker 2: Although he is not initially much of an activist, his
Speaker 2: particular chapter of the Wandervogel movement shares members with some
Speaker 2: of these militias, and this seems to be where he
Speaker 2: starts the years long onboarding process that eventually leads him
Speaker 2: to Nazism. His aristocratic friend von Schmidt convinces him to
Speaker 2: join an anti socialist nationalist association for veterans. Obviously Eichmann
Speaker 2: isn't a veteran, but that's not a problem. He joins
Speaker 2: the young veterans wing of the group, which is I
Speaker 2: guess for non.
Speaker 4: Veterans that a young veterans.
Speaker 2: I think it's love that will be a veteran when
Speaker 2: the war we all know it's gonna come. Well, yeah,
Speaker 2: future veterans.
Speaker 4: I mean a young veteran back then could have just
Speaker 4: been child soldiers as well, because there's plenty of them
Speaker 4: floating around. But I love like Adolf Eichmann, honorary Austrian veteran.
Speaker 2: Honorary Austrian veteran. Yeah, we're gonna throw rocks at you,
Speaker 2: and it's like you're in the tyroll.
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, what a bunch of dirds.
Speaker 2: So this is where he learns to march and shoot
Speaker 2: their leader. And it's so funny to me, how close
Speaker 2: this guy's last name is to Hitler. Their leader is
Speaker 2: Perman von Hiltel. Not quite Hitler, right Hiltel. It's like carsonalization,
Speaker 2: but for fascists, like evolution was always working to produce
Speaker 2: a Hitler. If Hitler, if our Hitler hadn't come off,
Speaker 2: the von Hiltel family would have produced a Hitler given
Speaker 2: enough time, right.
Speaker 4: To shift, Yeah, give it enough time that the chances
Speaker 4: of Hitler approached.
Speaker 2: Their leader, Colonel Hermann von Hildte, was violently anti Semitic
Speaker 2: and described Jewish Marxism as the enemy of Germany. He
Speaker 2: was an outspoken advocate of dispossessing Austrian Jews who owned
Speaker 2: land and stripping them of their citizenship. Von Hiltel railed
Speaker 2: against Jewish immigration into Austria and held regular rallies where
Speaker 2: his loud, violent young followers would encourage their Jewish neighbors
Speaker 2: to leave the country. Now this is the group that
Speaker 2: Eichman starts hanging out in. There is a Nazi party
Speaker 2: in Austria by the late twenties, but Eichman isn't interested
Speaker 2: in it because it's really weak and small. It's like,
Speaker 2: by far the weakest part of what is at that
Speaker 2: point a vibrant far right ecosystem. So he's like the Nazis,
Speaker 2: like those are Germans and they're kind of losers. Like
Speaker 2: there's better far right Austrian groups. Evan Berbuki, a historian
Speaker 2: of Lenz, describes the Nazis in this period as a
Speaker 2: party of outsiders, and Eikman's not an outsider, right, key
Speaker 2: aspect of him. He is never an outsider.
Speaker 3: Party of outsiders.
Speaker 2: Okay, it's the weirdos in the freaks who become Austrian
Speaker 2: Nazis in this period, right, and Iikman is is not.
Speaker 2: You know, he's a normal guy with pretty good connections.
Speaker 2: So he joins a mainstream far right militia that pats Jewish.
Speaker 3: Sorry, not Nazi enough.
Speaker 2: For me, No Nazis'.
Speaker 3: I just think that you should be you know more Nazi.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a little fringe for me, darling. So I don't
Speaker 2: know why I give Iikman that. I'm telling you your
Speaker 2: brain today is I have I've got I've got George
Speaker 2: Lucas disease. I can't help but imagine Germans as sounding
Speaker 2: like British people.
Speaker 4: I mean to be fair.
Speaker 2: Look, it works, it makes sense, right.
Speaker 4: There's a reason why whenever they make like Nazi movies
Speaker 4: and the bad guys actually have speaking lines, they're always
Speaker 4: just played by people British accents. Yeah, there's a reason
Speaker 4: for that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the big exception being Waltz in the Tarantino movie.
Speaker 2: We're like, oh, yet they actually have a German guy
Speaker 2: doing Nazi stuff. In nineteen thirty, Iikman gets engaged to
Speaker 2: a cops daughter. The relationship is not going to work out,
Speaker 2: weirdly enough, because she doesn't like Nazis right. She's like
Speaker 2: this cops daughter very, which doesn't mean she's not far
Speaker 2: right or racist, it just means they like another party
Speaker 2: and the Nazis are kind of weirdos. One day, Iikman
Speaker 2: is over at her family apartment in nineteen thirty one,
Speaker 2: which sit in their apartment sits above a bar that
Speaker 2: Nazis would gather in regularly throughout the week, and Eikman
Speaker 2: later claimed in our circle and like he's talking about
Speaker 2: their friend group, it was the done thing to say
Speaker 2: that the NSDAP consisted of idiots and no hopers, and
Speaker 2: his fiance made the statement a statement to that effect
Speaker 2: when she saw a troop of brown Shirts marching down
Speaker 2: the street Iikman got angry and snapped back. These idiots
Speaker 2: have order and discipline, and they march well. He ended
Speaker 2: the engagement shortly thereafter. Really good at marching.
Speaker 4: I can't do it. They too good.
Speaker 2: They're so good at walking. Goddamn, don't you understand how
Speaker 2: important walking is. By nineteen thirty two, the Australian economy
Speaker 2: is in the tank and Eichmann doesn't lose his job
Speaker 2: right away, but he can see the writing on the
Speaker 2: wall right that like his company is going to have
Speaker 2: to get rid of him. He may have ultimately joined
Speaker 2: the Nazi Party as much as anything because he saw
Speaker 2: a future there in the potential for paying work, right,
Speaker 2: not initially that he is such an ideological Nazi, because
Speaker 2: he's still not at this point. He's a German nationalist.
Speaker 2: He's increasingly racist, but he could have gone a couple
Speaker 2: of ways. But he's like, look, the Nazis, they're starting
Speaker 2: to They're no longer a fringe group in Austria by
Speaker 2: like thirty one thirty two, right, they're starting to get
Speaker 2: more normal. And if you know anything, like my career
Speaker 2: is based on a version of this, If you want
Speaker 2: to move ahead really quickly, you find a thing, an
Speaker 2: organization that's fairly new and growing rapidly, and you just
Speaker 2: kind of stick yourself in there and find like a
Speaker 2: place where you can sort of make it your own, right,
Speaker 2: And that's what he's gonna do with the Nazi parties,
Speaker 2: Like this is a new organization, I can push my way. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's it's this is the way everything works, screening me. No, no, no,
Speaker 2: this is this is the way before that. I'm talking about,
Speaker 2: like my early Like you find a company that's just
Speaker 2: started and they're desperate for people, and you just start deciding,
Speaker 2: my job's going to be this, My job's going to
Speaker 2: be that, And it's it offers opportunity that doesn't exist
Speaker 2: in like the Austrian state, right.
Speaker 4: And I mean this is definitely a guy that's a
Speaker 4: very very comfortable job hopping whenever he's an opportunity, Like
Speaker 4: he doesn't have a career. He's like, I'm an oil man,
Speaker 4: I'm also electrician. Doing this for a little bit, I'll
Speaker 4: guess I'll be a non.
Speaker 2: Oil man again. Well, and he's also he sees number one,
Speaker 2: the corporate economy is not going to be good for
Speaker 2: a while. The depression is starting and the Austrian government
Speaker 2: is a really ossified so that you don't move quickly
Speaker 2: in that the Nazis they're starting to take power and germony.
Speaker 2: By this point, the writing is on the wall there
Speaker 2: and he's like, well, maybe they'll take power in Austria.
Speaker 2: I think this is going to happen. And the sooner
Speaker 2: I get in, the better my chances of getting a
Speaker 2: really good job in the new state. Right because this
Speaker 2: is still a small organization, I can make myself a
Speaker 2: big part of it, and when it takes over, I'll
Speaker 2: be really well positioned, right makes it's just a smart
Speaker 2: way to look at, like any kind of like organization,
Speaker 2: right Like, if you're looking to jump ahead in your career,
Speaker 2: find a place where they don't really have anything solidified yet.
Speaker 2: You know, that's just that's just kind of always how
Speaker 2: big organizations work. By the end of thirty one, the
Speaker 2: Austrian Nazis had started getting their shit together, just as
Speaker 2: the dominant far right militia of the area, the Heimware,
Speaker 2: starts falling apart. Right Eikman finally joins the party in
Speaker 2: the spring of nineteen thirty two, after the Nazis sweep
Speaker 2: a bunch of local elections in Vienna and Salzburg, right,
Speaker 2: and we should see this again, is he knows where
Speaker 2: the wind is blowing, right, Like he's aware of what's
Speaker 2: about to happen, and he's positioning himself for kind of
Speaker 2: the next big part of his life, which we will
Speaker 2: be discussing in part two. Oh boy, I uh, how
Speaker 2: we feeling about Iikman?
Speaker 4: Weird? I don't. I don't know how to put it. Like, honestly,
Speaker 4: Iikman is a guy which you know, obviously we we
Speaker 4: know a little bit about him just from the background,
Speaker 4: knowing about the Holocaust, but the fact that he seems
Speaker 4: so normal is off putting, because even the normal Nazi
Speaker 4: guys there's something truly strange about them. He is very
Speaker 4: normal up until you know we're about to get to
Speaker 4: in the Nazis take over Austria. He's still not even
Speaker 4: really ideologically driven other than what could be considered mainstream
Speaker 4: politics at the time.
Speaker 2: Yeah no, and that's like, yeah, that that's kind of
Speaker 2: the thing about him, that's really and it's you can
Speaker 2: see a bit of this with Hydrick too, where well
Speaker 2: you're and even with Mengola where it's like, yeah, the
Speaker 2: big motivation is your career is this movement has allowed
Speaker 2: you to leap frog ahead at a much younger age
Speaker 2: to a high position than you would have ever gotten
Speaker 2: in the old German state or the old Austrian state. Right,
Speaker 2: that just wouldn't have happen. And look if you look
Speaker 2: at like I'm just looking right now, this twenty two
Speaker 2: year old kid that was appointed to DHS to lead
Speaker 2: terrorism prevention. Right, it's the same thing going on right now.
Speaker 2: There's opportunities, oh my shit, like this for very young
Speaker 2: people who aren't good or great at anything, and who
Speaker 2: wouldn't have risen up in the traditional system. But things
Speaker 2: have been disrupted and they're primarily good at not causing
Speaker 2: problems for the people above them, right, yeah, and yeah,
Speaker 2: you can make you can make a place for yourself that.
Speaker 4: Way auto move fast and break break.
Speaker 2: Yeah, bigs, it's.
Speaker 3: A great picture. It's a great picture.
Speaker 4: Though it's a horrible picture.
Speaker 3: It's so scary.
Speaker 4: Someone needs to give that kid of early immediately. I
Speaker 4: do wonder would we have been better off if Iikman
Speaker 4: did get the shit bullied out of him when he
Speaker 4: was a child? Like, is this a proper application of bullying?
Speaker 2: There's only one way to find out Joe, you and me,
Speaker 2: we got to get in a time machine and we
Speaker 2: got to beat the shit at a little kid. Iikman,
Speaker 2: I mean, put that fucker in traction like Austrey and
Speaker 2: like a whole body, like a big old machine, like
Speaker 2: fucking rusted metal. Nailed his body until he gets better.
Speaker 2: That's what we're doing.
Speaker 4: Me and you need to need to knock back a
Speaker 4: couple of pine skin, go back in time and beat
Speaker 4: the shit out of this child, just.
Speaker 2: Wail on his ass. Absolutely, yep, call, this is it.
Speaker 2: This is what we're doing. All right, everybody, if you
Speaker 2: have access to a time machine, let Joe and I know.
Speaker 2: I promise that's all we'll do. We're not going to
Speaker 2: do any sports betting. Absolutely not going to do a
Speaker 2: lot of sports betting with it. We would never do
Speaker 2: primarily sports instead of saving lives. You know, we're not
Speaker 2: going back to two thousand and one to bet on
Speaker 2: the World Series. Yeah, not me. Well, well, obviously we'll
Speaker 2: stop nine to eleven, of course.
Speaker 4: Yeah, definitely. I promise that I will only go back
Speaker 4: in time to beat up children.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm. That's right.
Speaker 4: That's how I'll stop nine to eleven. I'll go back
Speaker 4: further in time, I'll beat up on the children.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm gonna travel back to Saudi Arabia when Been
Speaker 2: Lotten's like seven and just kick the shit out of
Speaker 2: that kit until he's pissing blood. That's what we're doing exactly.
Speaker 2: This will fix all these problems.
Speaker 4: The only way that will stop it is time traveling
Speaker 4: child abuse.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the way to do it. Been Lodden waits
Speaker 2: another five years, and his big attack is ramming a
Speaker 2: plan into a podcasting studio. Good stuff. Okay, well we
Speaker 2: should probably stop now. We're back in part two for
Speaker 2: more genocide. Bye everybody.
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