WEBVTT - Part One: Adolf Eichmann: Mr. Holocaust Himself 0:00:01.800 --> 0:00:04.480 Also media. 0:00:04.680 --> 0:00:08.440 Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where every 0:00:08.440 --> 0:00:10.920 week I try to make you feel worse about life, 0:00:10.960 --> 0:00:14.680 even though life makes you feel worse about life every week. 0:00:14.920 --> 0:00:17.079 Why do I do this? Money? 0:00:17.520 --> 0:00:17.640 Uh? 0:00:17.960 --> 0:00:20.880 And also I live to hurt you. You know. That's it. 0:00:21.040 --> 0:00:24.160 That's all that's going on with me. Let's talk about 0:00:24.160 --> 0:00:28.480 what's going on with our guest today, Joe Kassebian. Joe, 0:00:28.680 --> 0:00:29.240 how are you doing? 0:00:29.920 --> 0:00:32.879 Hey, I'm I'm great. I'm ready for pain to be 0:00:32.960 --> 0:00:36.600 inflicted on me and absorb the pain and the suffering 0:00:36.760 --> 0:00:37.640 like a sponge. 0:00:37.840 --> 0:00:40.480 Yes, yes, yes, feature pain, your delicious pain. 0:00:40.720 --> 0:00:43.040 Say that. But when you're hear what the topic? 0:00:43.720 --> 0:00:45.760 Oh yeah, last time I was on it was like 0:00:45.840 --> 0:00:49.280 four hours of Laventi barrier. What could possibly be worse 0:00:49.320 --> 0:00:49.559 than that? 0:00:49.800 --> 0:00:52.000 Oh, I'm so glad you asked that question. 0:00:52.159 --> 0:00:56.840 It could possibly be worse than Laventi barriers. Stalin's head 0:00:57.000 --> 0:01:01.120 of the Secret police and almost certainly a pedophile on 0:01:01.160 --> 0:01:03.920 an industrial scale. What could be worse than that? 0:01:04.000 --> 0:01:05.360 I'm glad you asked that question. 0:01:05.440 --> 0:01:08.600 Could be worse than that, Sophie, what could be worse 0:01:08.640 --> 0:01:09.000 than that? 0:01:09.080 --> 0:01:12.120 I mean, I know the top, yes. 0:01:11.440 --> 0:01:14.640 But I think I think Joe, I think we've done 0:01:14.680 --> 0:01:17.080 an able job of finding a worse one for you, 0:01:17.480 --> 0:01:21.240 because this week and motherfucking next week, because boy howdy, 0:01:21.319 --> 0:01:23.440 you can't do this guy. In two parts, we are 0:01:23.480 --> 0:01:28.200 talking about mister Holocaust himself, Adolph Eichman. You're welcome, Are 0:01:28.200 --> 0:01:35.959 you fucking Serious's right, baby, mister Holocaust himself. I probably 0:01:36.000 --> 0:01:37.520 shouldn't call him, And. 0:01:38.080 --> 0:01:40.800 I mean it's a good If he had a rig name, 0:01:40.920 --> 0:01:42.039 it would be Holocaust. 0:01:42.040 --> 0:01:44.240 And he, as we'll talk about, he worked most of 0:01:44.280 --> 0:01:47.760 his professional career. He worked very hard to make himself 0:01:47.800 --> 0:01:50.840 the number one name associated with the Holocaust internationally, like 0:01:50.880 --> 0:01:55.200 that was a he was not actually like he his reputation. 0:01:55.440 --> 0:01:58.200 He was very involved, obviously, but his reputation is even 0:01:58.280 --> 0:02:01.440 higher than his actual involvement. And that was due to 0:02:01.520 --> 0:02:04.919 him trying to jink up his career. But I think it's. 0:02:04.800 --> 0:02:07.320 Oh God, to juice up as Holocaust. 0:02:07.400 --> 0:02:09.080 He really was here, really was. 0:02:09.200 --> 0:02:11.320 And And Joe, when Robert told me he was writing 0:02:11.320 --> 0:02:13.040 the scripts, He's like, who should we get as a guest, 0:02:13.080 --> 0:02:14.280 And I was like, Joe. 0:02:14.160 --> 0:02:16.040 Yeah, we probably gotta get Joe over this one. 0:02:16.200 --> 0:02:19.400 Joe, Yes, yes, I'm glad I have a brand and 0:02:19.440 --> 0:02:20.200 it's horrible. 0:02:20.480 --> 0:02:24.720 Uh huh uh, well boy, howdy, let's do it. 0:02:24.840 --> 0:02:26.760 I'm gonna say though you had me in the first 0:02:26.760 --> 0:02:30.040 half because he said mister Holocaust himself add off of 0:02:30.160 --> 0:02:32.400 like did he did? He really? Motherfucking really bring me 0:02:32.400 --> 0:02:34.360 on for the Hitler ships episodes. 0:02:34.520 --> 0:02:38.040 We've done so many Hitlers. I know, we've covered we 0:02:38.040 --> 0:02:40.640 gotta you gotta cover Hitler in like little pieces, like 0:02:40.680 --> 0:02:42.680 we'll do two parts on how we fucked you know, 0:02:42.760 --> 0:02:45.920 you gotta cover all the there's so much niche Hitler stuff. 0:02:46.240 --> 0:02:49.160 Although you know, let's let's come back from the cold 0:02:49.160 --> 0:02:51.200 open and I'll talk about the scope of these episodes. 0:02:51.240 --> 0:02:54.040 But we're done with the cold open. You're you're warm 0:02:54.120 --> 0:03:02.800 now very warm, and we're back. We're back. We're all 0:03:02.880 --> 0:03:07.680 lathered up and hot bothered. So these episodes. If you 0:03:07.800 --> 0:03:13.480 know anything about Aikman, and he's like outside of Hitler, Gerbels, Himmler, 0:03:13.880 --> 0:03:17.520 you know, Gering, he's probably the first name, one of 0:03:17.560 --> 0:03:20.200 the one of the few names that like the average 0:03:20.240 --> 0:03:23.240 person who knows anything about the Holocaust, you've heard of Aikman, right, 0:03:23.760 --> 0:03:26.480 A lot of people will have if you haven't. As 0:03:26.520 --> 0:03:29.520 I always say, there's a great movie called Conspiracy about 0:03:29.520 --> 0:03:32.000 the conference where they planned the Holocaust, where Eikman is 0:03:32.000 --> 0:03:39.040 played by Stanley Tucci, and it's perfect performance. He's played 0:03:39.040 --> 0:03:40.240 by Stanley Tucci. 0:03:40.400 --> 0:03:43.160 Chooch can play any part he is. 0:03:43.200 --> 0:03:47.360 And Stanley is incredible as Aikman, Like he really nails it. 0:03:47.600 --> 0:03:49.960 I can see it, I can see he's got a face. 0:03:50.120 --> 0:03:51.640 Is he also hot in the movie? 0:03:51.640 --> 0:03:54.240 Because Stanley Tucci has been hot in every movie he's 0:03:54.480 --> 0:03:57.240 ever been and except the one where he played that pedophile. 0:03:57.480 --> 0:03:59.400 I'm not gonna say. I will say one of the 0:03:59.440 --> 0:04:02.000 critiques the movie you got is that. And I also 0:04:02.040 --> 0:04:05.200 think he does an excellent job. Kenneth Branna plays Reinhardt Heidrich, 0:04:05.600 --> 0:04:08.600 and one of the complaints that, like some Holocaust scholars 0:04:08.600 --> 0:04:10.400 had is that, like he's a very good actor. He 0:04:10.400 --> 0:04:11.920 does a good job, but like he probably shouldn't have 0:04:11.960 --> 0:04:17.240 made Hydrich hot, right, Like maybe. 0:04:16.400 --> 0:04:18.240 That is too sexy. 0:04:18.680 --> 0:04:20.680 I tend to think the movie's just good enough that 0:04:20.760 --> 0:04:23.080 if you've watched the second season of and or the 0:04:23.160 --> 0:04:26.440 first episodes where they're planning that genocide on Gorman are 0:04:26.520 --> 0:04:31.080 themed after that movie, like that movie Conspiracy, seriously, yeah, yeah, 0:04:31.120 --> 0:04:33.560 had a big influence on it. Tony Gilroy is confirmed it. 0:04:33.600 --> 0:04:37.120 But Eikman, the guy we're talking about today, is not 0:04:37.760 --> 0:04:41.520 the architect of the Holocaust because that that generally goes 0:04:41.560 --> 0:04:44.279 to hydric although obviously he was not the only person 0:04:44.279 --> 0:04:47.240 involved in setting up the architecture, but Heidrich and Eichman 0:04:47.279 --> 0:04:49.200 were both at this meeting, the Vonsee conference, where the 0:04:49.320 --> 0:04:53.080 architecture of the Holocaust was set up. And Eichman's primary job, 0:04:53.440 --> 0:04:55.800 you might call him the trigger man, not because there 0:04:55.800 --> 0:04:57.760 were actually a lot of guys who just shot people, right, 0:04:57.839 --> 0:05:00.839 like the Einsatzgrupa who shot tens of thousands at places. 0:05:00.520 --> 0:05:02.000 Like the World Federal trigger but. 0:05:02.320 --> 0:05:05.599 In terms of like the Nazi state had to build 0:05:05.720 --> 0:05:09.719 a system that was effectively a big gun for genociding people, 0:05:09.800 --> 0:05:11.719 and Eikman was the man who worked. He was the 0:05:11.720 --> 0:05:15.040 guy who his primarily primary thing was like logistics, like 0:05:15.120 --> 0:05:17.880 making sure how we're going to move get all of 0:05:17.920 --> 0:05:20.520 these people out of the communities they're in and move 0:05:20.560 --> 0:05:21.640 them into the different camps. 0:05:21.720 --> 0:05:21.880 Right. 0:05:22.120 --> 0:05:24.240 He was the guy who managed that system. He was 0:05:24.279 --> 0:05:27.640 the deportation guy, right, that was a big part, and 0:05:27.680 --> 0:05:30.440 he was like overseeing a lot of that system. As 0:05:30.440 --> 0:05:32.719 we'll talk about there's other stuff that he did. But 0:05:32.760 --> 0:05:35.120 if you're making like a top five list of the 0:05:35.240 --> 0:05:38.599 Nazis who were most directly responsible for the genocide of 0:05:38.600 --> 0:05:41.479 European Jewry, Aikman is going to make the list every 0:05:41.520 --> 0:05:45.520 single time, right, Like he's that central to what happened 0:05:46.720 --> 0:05:49.960 and kind of the biggest. Probably, I don't know, pop 0:05:50.000 --> 0:05:51.880 culture is probably the wrong way to talk about Hannah 0:05:51.960 --> 0:05:54.360 Rintz writing in twenty twenty five, but it was at 0:05:54.360 --> 0:05:57.360 one point popular culture, right, Like, because this guy goes 0:05:57.360 --> 0:05:59.600 on trial, he gets caught by the Masad, and he 0:05:59.640 --> 0:06:02.600 goes on trial. In the sixties, and Hannah A Rent, 0:06:02.600 --> 0:06:06.200 who's a famous philosopher and scholar of totalitarianism, writes a 0:06:06.240 --> 0:06:09.920 book called Aikman in Jerusalem, right, which is very much 0:06:09.960 --> 0:06:12.920 worth reading today, although very flawed, right, And it's very 0:06:12.920 --> 0:06:14.799 flawed in part. And one of the things that gets 0:06:14.839 --> 0:06:17.800 a lot of criticism for today is that as she 0:06:17.960 --> 0:06:21.840 is describing Aikman on trial, a Rent coins a term 0:06:21.960 --> 0:06:24.520 called the banality of evil to describe the man that 0:06:24.560 --> 0:06:27.279 she sees in Israeli captivity, because he's just kind of 0:06:27.279 --> 0:06:31.880 this late middle aged balding dude and he's mostly talking 0:06:31.920 --> 0:06:33.839 about like, look, I was just following orders, you know, 0:06:33.880 --> 0:06:35.520 I was just doing what I was told to do. 0:06:35.600 --> 0:06:37.799 I was one cog and a bigger machine. I didn't 0:06:37.800 --> 0:06:40.680 actually kill anyone directly. That was like the bulk of 0:06:40.680 --> 0:06:44.240 his legal defense. And I don't think the banality of 0:06:44.279 --> 0:06:47.360 evil is a useless term. I think it does describe 0:06:47.400 --> 0:06:50.920 a lot of people who were involved in administrative levels 0:06:50.920 --> 0:06:54.240 of the Holocaust. Right. There are individuals whose job is 0:06:54.279 --> 0:06:56.800 pretty banal, and who were themselves pretty banal and played 0:06:56.800 --> 0:07:00.039 an important role in the killing machine. Eikman is not 0:07:00.160 --> 0:07:02.360 a good example of that. He was not banal at all. 0:07:02.720 --> 0:07:04.720 He is like a super villain in terms of his 0:07:04.760 --> 0:07:07.360 actual personality and how he talked about what he did. 0:07:07.560 --> 0:07:10.200 This is not a that was his defense in court. 0:07:10.360 --> 0:07:14.000 The reality of Iikman was not a boring middle manager, right. 0:07:13.880 --> 0:07:18.360 Yeah, yeah, Like she saw Iikman like out of power. 0:07:18.960 --> 0:07:22.320 It is old man's sweater pacing around, because there's famously 0:07:22.360 --> 0:07:24.600 a video of him pacing back and forth and Israeli 0:07:24.640 --> 0:07:27.720 prison cell on the stand like, yeah, of course he 0:07:27.840 --> 0:07:33.080 looked like the local accountant dork. Yes, yes, of course 0:07:33.120 --> 0:07:35.160 he looked like that. Yeah. 0:07:35.520 --> 0:07:37.640 And and it's one of those things I don't think 0:07:37.680 --> 0:07:40.400 it's a useless concept. It's just misapplied to Iikman, she 0:07:40.440 --> 0:07:41.920 does get We'll talk about it. She gets a lot 0:07:42.000 --> 0:07:43.640 right in this. We'll be quoting from it some in 0:07:43.640 --> 0:07:48.040 the last episode. And it's one of those things. I 0:07:48.680 --> 0:07:51.480 don't reject the term the banality of evil. I just 0:07:51.520 --> 0:07:55.679 think it often is it's less aptly applied to individuals, 0:07:55.840 --> 0:07:58.560 often in part because those individuals are not so banal 0:07:58.640 --> 0:08:00.880 as they may seem from the outside. But I think 0:08:00.880 --> 0:08:03.320 there's a real banality of evil in like the systems 0:08:03.320 --> 0:08:06.240 that we allow to exist and that we live inside 0:08:06.560 --> 0:08:09.240 that can be turned into instruments of mass violence or 0:08:09.320 --> 0:08:12.320 slaughter because we collectively make the poor choice to hand 0:08:12.320 --> 0:08:15.520 over more of our responsibility for our security to elected 0:08:15.560 --> 0:08:18.960 officials and government institutions that are neither accountable nor interested 0:08:19.000 --> 0:08:21.560 in our health. Right, Like, you could use the term 0:08:21.600 --> 0:08:24.720 banality of evil for the twenty years that voters spent 0:08:24.800 --> 0:08:28.360 continuing to fund DHS and to expand ICE right, or 0:08:28.400 --> 0:08:31.120 to the work of editors at hundreds of publications deciding 0:08:31.120 --> 0:08:33.920 to greenlight more stories about migrant crime because hey, that 0:08:34.000 --> 0:08:36.679 does well on Facebook and traffic is money. Right, The 0:08:36.679 --> 0:08:39.400 banality of evil is the Sulzberger family who owns The 0:08:39.440 --> 0:08:42.280 New York Times, ignoring the Holocaust because Eastern European Jews 0:08:42.280 --> 0:08:45.640 from rural areas aren't, in their words, worth caring about. Right. 0:08:46.120 --> 0:08:48.360 The banality of evil is all of us like hearing 0:08:48.400 --> 0:08:50.760 about shit like this and being like, oh, man, that's 0:08:50.760 --> 0:08:53.120 fucked up, But like, I gotta make the mortgage, so 0:08:53.120 --> 0:08:55.520 I guess I'm going to walk right past the atrocity, 0:08:56.520 --> 0:08:58.720 keep going right. This can't be on me to fix, 0:08:58.800 --> 0:08:59.120 can it? 0:08:59.280 --> 0:09:03.680 Right? Yeah, the concept of banality of evil is not 0:09:03.960 --> 0:09:06.040 like if you see a guy and you've heard of 0:09:06.040 --> 0:09:09.240 a guy Eikman, for example, he's not the definition of 0:09:09.280 --> 0:09:11.640 the banality of evil. Yeah, that makes him management. 0:09:11.880 --> 0:09:15.920 No, he is again a super villain, like you stick 0:09:16.000 --> 0:09:18.480 this motherfucker in a Bond movie going on some of 0:09:18.480 --> 0:09:22.400 the rants he goes on and he fits perfectly. So 0:09:22.800 --> 0:09:25.319 A big source for my episodes is a book by 0:09:25.480 --> 0:09:28.800 German philosopher and author Bettina Stegneth, who wrote a wonderful 0:09:28.800 --> 0:09:32.839 book called Eichman Before Jerusalem, and in this book number one, 0:09:32.840 --> 0:09:34.920 she's trying to kind of break some of the myths 0:09:34.960 --> 0:09:36.839 that came up as a result of a Renz piece. 0:09:37.240 --> 0:09:40.760 But she also highlights, opening this book, how relatively little 0:09:40.800 --> 0:09:44.760 we know about him. In this passage, we cannot speak 0:09:44.800 --> 0:09:47.439 of the systematic extermination of millions of men, women, and 0:09:47.520 --> 0:09:49.920 children without mentioning his name, And yet people are no 0:09:49.960 --> 0:09:53.360 longer even sure what his first name was, Carl Adolph Otto. 0:09:53.679 --> 0:09:56.240 It's the simplest of questions, yet it can still surprise us, 0:09:56.280 --> 0:09:59.800 long after we thought we'd established who he was, because 0:09:59.800 --> 0:10:02.040 he you know, he has a couple of names, and 0:10:02.080 --> 0:10:04.120 he goes by a few in his life, and there's 0:10:04.200 --> 0:10:06.080 kind of this open debate is like what was he 0:10:06.120 --> 0:10:09.000 actually called as like a general rule by people that 0:10:09.120 --> 0:10:09.800 he knew. 0:10:10.120 --> 0:10:12.760 He's had a symbol to go out, you like, prince. 0:10:12.800 --> 0:10:15.440 Yeah, prince right, yeah, we get his call him that 0:10:16.720 --> 0:10:20.360 he was born Otto Adolph Eichman on March nineteenth, nineteen 0:10:20.400 --> 0:10:23.560 oh six, in Solingen, Germany. But Bettina's point is that 0:10:23.600 --> 0:10:25.360 depending on who you ask and what you read, there's 0:10:25.440 --> 0:10:27.760 room for debate as to what he would have given 0:10:28.000 --> 0:10:30.320 as his name during different points in his life. Right, 0:10:30.840 --> 0:10:34.240 his first biographers were people like British journalist Comber Clark, 0:10:34.280 --> 0:10:37.480 who in nineteen sixty tried to chronicle Eikman's early life 0:10:37.800 --> 0:10:39.760 and came up with a sort of tale of woe 0:10:39.840 --> 0:10:42.640 you might expect from a great historic victim, right, And 0:10:42.679 --> 0:10:44.880 this is partly what you get when a journalist tries 0:10:44.920 --> 0:10:46.800 to do a biography, right as he's like. 0:10:46.800 --> 0:10:52.560 Looking for that why what shit? Ye yeah, it's one 0:10:52.559 --> 0:10:56.839 of my biggest pet peeame not what we do a 0:10:56.920 --> 0:11:00.319 journalist trip into writing a biography or writing in depth 0:11:00.400 --> 0:11:01.720 history like not. 0:11:01.800 --> 0:11:06.840 Our place, not our place. In Comer's telling Comber Clark's telling, 0:11:07.000 --> 0:11:09.839 Eikman's mother died before he was five years old. His 0:11:09.880 --> 0:11:12.160 mother had to move back to Austria from once they 0:11:12.160 --> 0:11:14.400 hailed when he was young, but his father had to 0:11:14.440 --> 0:11:17.400 go back to Germany after this to escape the sorrow 0:11:17.440 --> 0:11:19.920 of being trapped with memories of his late wife, and 0:11:19.960 --> 0:11:23.760 so his boy was raised largely by his aunts. David Csarini, 0:11:23.800 --> 0:11:26.959 who's a better Aikman biographer, summarizes the rest of Clark's 0:11:27.000 --> 0:11:30.520 version of events. According to Clark, Eikman was repeatedly mistaken 0:11:30.640 --> 0:11:32.959 for a Jew at school and beaten up, which left 0:11:33.040 --> 0:11:37.240 him with a lasting antipathy towards Jewish people. Against this background, 0:11:37.320 --> 0:11:39.440 it was natural that he should join the Nazi party 0:11:39.520 --> 0:11:43.200 after hearing Hitler speak, and this is all nonsense. None 0:11:43.240 --> 0:11:44.520 of that's true, right. 0:11:44.840 --> 0:11:46.760 If that happened, I really wish you would have learned 0:11:46.760 --> 0:11:50.880 the opposite lesson of that, which is racism. That's just 0:11:50.920 --> 0:11:53.679 that we all just must look the same, Like this 0:11:53.920 --> 0:11:55.240 racism thing is stupid. 0:11:55.400 --> 0:11:58.640 Yeah, maybe if I can get mistaken for these people, Jesus, 0:11:58.720 --> 0:12:02.559 this racism thing must be both. Right. This is almost 0:12:02.600 --> 0:12:06.560 certainly not what happened. Cessarini, who is the author of Aikman, 0:12:06.679 --> 0:12:10.080 His Life and Crimes, describes similar cavalcades of bullshit from 0:12:10.120 --> 0:12:13.640 a generation of lazy ahistorical pop bios of this guy. 0:12:14.000 --> 0:12:17.559 Quote Quentin Reynolds, another British pressman, declared that Eichman was 0:12:17.640 --> 0:12:20.920 left motherless and introverted. His family was so poor that 0:12:20.960 --> 0:12:23.320 there was never enough food on the table. Young Adolph 0:12:23.400 --> 0:12:26.840 turned into a problem child and suffered even more once 0:12:26.840 --> 0:12:30.319 his father remarried a harsh, domineering woman. As a young man, 0:12:30.360 --> 0:12:33.760 he was unsuccessful and friendless, not least because he looked Jewish. 0:12:34.040 --> 0:12:36.559 He failed in job after job and walked the streets 0:12:36.559 --> 0:12:38.000 of Lynz with the unemployed. 0:12:38.760 --> 0:12:39.840 That sounds more accurate. 0:12:40.520 --> 0:12:44.040 It's not, but it sounds like it should be right 0:12:44.120 --> 0:12:47.920 because it fits, it fits the Hitler profile. I think 0:12:47.920 --> 0:12:50.120 that's why they did this, is that like, well that's 0:12:50.200 --> 0:12:52.120 kind of I mean, Hitler was mostly in Austria by 0:12:52.160 --> 0:12:55.040 the time he was like living homeless. 0:12:54.640 --> 0:12:56.520 Right, he was living in a men's home. 0:12:56.920 --> 0:13:00.120 Yeah, he was in Vienna by that point. But otherwise, like, yeah, 0:13:00.120 --> 0:13:02.679 that's kind of Hitler's life, right, Like his dad dies early, 0:13:02.800 --> 0:13:04.800 doesn't have a lot of friends, he fails a job 0:13:04.840 --> 0:13:08.319 after job, right, Hitler didn't get mistaken for big Jewish often. 0:13:08.400 --> 0:13:10.480 But like you know, the rest of that's pretty simple. 0:13:10.760 --> 0:13:12.280 No, just inbread. 0:13:14.360 --> 0:13:17.680 The pieces fit together, right, dead mom, dad, not around, 0:13:17.720 --> 0:13:21.240 economic anxiety, bullying, that gives him a convenient reason to 0:13:21.280 --> 0:13:21.880 hate Jews. 0:13:21.960 --> 0:13:22.080 Right. 0:13:22.720 --> 0:13:27.239 It's an easy, easy thing, easy biography to accept for Eikman. Unfortunately, 0:13:27.240 --> 0:13:29.800 it's also hogwash. It's like if you were to do 0:13:29.840 --> 0:13:33.560 a biography of some modern day homophobic bigot and say, like, well, 0:13:33.600 --> 0:13:35.640 he got called gay or the f slur a bunch 0:13:35.720 --> 0:13:38.080 on the playground as a kid, right, so that's why 0:13:38.080 --> 0:13:40.640 he did such monstrous things as an adult. And if 0:13:40.679 --> 0:13:42.560 you're like someone three hundred years in the future and 0:13:42.600 --> 0:13:44.360 you read that, you might be like, oh, I guess yeah, 0:13:44.440 --> 0:13:46.080 that makes sense. But if you were to talk to 0:13:46.160 --> 0:13:49.040 like either of us, like they could bring us forward 0:13:49.040 --> 0:13:50.679 into the future and be like, so is this why 0:13:50.720 --> 0:13:52.199 this guy did it? We could be like everybody get 0:13:52.240 --> 0:13:53.480 called those things on the playground man. 0:13:53.880 --> 0:13:57.640 Yeah, like that's just like a universe then that was. 0:13:57.640 --> 0:13:59.920 Like living in the late nineties, early two thousands. Man 0:14:00.200 --> 0:14:03.000 like that cannot explain why he did what he did. 0:14:03.880 --> 0:14:06.160 I'm also a bit worried because it's like, oh, you know, 0:14:06.240 --> 0:14:09.800 he failed at all these jobs, you know, shitty home life. 0:14:09.800 --> 0:14:13.000 I'm like, okay, so he is at seventeen, he's going 0:14:13.040 --> 0:14:14.880 to list in the army, and that is me. 0:14:15.600 --> 0:14:15.680 Ye. 0:14:15.880 --> 0:14:17.880 A lot of guys, a lot of guys. 0:14:17.920 --> 0:14:20.840 Who don't go on to commit hate crimes and war crimes. 0:14:20.840 --> 0:14:22.040 So maybe, like I don't. 0:14:21.880 --> 0:14:24.520 Know, got beat up for thinking of a different race 0:14:24.560 --> 0:14:26.040 than I am. That is just me. 0:14:27.960 --> 0:14:30.560 Now, in Eikman's case, there's even less reason to believe 0:14:30.600 --> 0:14:33.760 his anti Semitism resulted from bullying, because there's simply no 0:14:33.920 --> 0:14:37.880 real evidence that he was bullied about this or accused 0:14:37.880 --> 0:14:40.440 of being Jewish, you know, in any way that impacted 0:14:40.440 --> 0:14:45.000 his development. Likewise, the claims that poverty and desperation drove 0:14:45.080 --> 0:14:48.120 him to fascism are baseless. And again I think this 0:14:48.200 --> 0:14:50.920 is like a mainstream Hitler discourse thing right, Like it 0:14:51.000 --> 0:14:53.720 sounds kind of like Hitler's backstory, So that makes it 0:14:53.760 --> 0:14:56.680 seem like, oh, of course, this is where fascists come from. 0:14:56.840 --> 0:14:57.040 Right. 0:14:57.640 --> 0:14:59.640 It's more comforting than being like, no, a, fascists come 0:14:59.640 --> 0:15:01.440 from the s in place, like the guy who runs 0:15:01.440 --> 0:15:05.520 the local fucking credit union came from right, like they 0:15:05.600 --> 0:15:09.560 just come from the world. I'm going to read another 0:15:09.640 --> 0:15:12.520 quote from Cessarini's book, and I want you to think 0:15:12.560 --> 0:15:14.760 about how easily you could do a find and replace 0:15:14.760 --> 0:15:17.240 on this paragraph and make it sound like modern reporting 0:15:17.320 --> 0:15:21.720 on some American neo Nazi mass shooter quote. The NBC 0:15:21.840 --> 0:15:24.840 correspondent John Donovan concluded, on the basis of interviews with 0:15:24.880 --> 0:15:27.800 eikman schoolmates, that he was a lonely and distant fellow. 0:15:27.880 --> 0:15:31.440 He was a fragile, underfed youth, and an obviously unhappy one, 0:15:31.520 --> 0:15:35.080 a misfit. According to Donovan, Eikman represented the classic pattern 0:15:35.120 --> 0:15:39.160 of disturbed, introverted personality which so often produced the Larvae fanaticism. 0:15:39.480 --> 0:15:42.120 His father, a struggling and underpaid manager of a failing 0:15:42.120 --> 0:15:45.440 electrical company simply could not provide for his abundant family, 0:15:45.480 --> 0:15:47.520 and more often than not, there was insufficient food on 0:15:47.560 --> 0:15:49.920 the table. The boy grew to manhood with a grudge 0:15:49.960 --> 0:15:52.440 and drifted around in a world without hope until he 0:15:52.480 --> 0:15:56.720 traded a threadbare suit for a splendid essay uniform. And 0:15:56.760 --> 0:16:00.360 again not true. I'm bringing this up to talk like 0:16:00.400 --> 0:16:04.479 how how similar a lot of these very fake backstories 0:16:04.520 --> 0:16:06.040 are and what they say about what we want to 0:16:06.080 --> 0:16:08.240 believe about a guy named Iikman, Right. 0:16:08.320 --> 0:16:11.040 Yeah, we always want to believe these people come from 0:16:11.080 --> 0:16:16.040 like disadvantaged backgrounds or tortured family homes, or we're bullied. 0:16:16.640 --> 0:16:18.880 I mean, I know we're about the same age, Robert, 0:16:18.880 --> 0:16:22.960 and what we're we always told growing about the Columbine shooters, right, oh, yeah, 0:16:23.160 --> 0:16:25.440 Like these people always need to be victims of some 0:16:25.520 --> 0:16:29.640 kind of lashing out. They can't be cold and calculated 0:16:29.800 --> 0:16:31.960 and ideologically driven, you know. 0:16:32.040 --> 0:16:35.320 Yeah, And there's this Yeah it's tough too, because like 0:16:35.360 --> 0:16:38.120 there's this belief that is very common on the left 0:16:38.160 --> 0:16:41.040 and I think is not a bad guiding light that like, well, 0:16:41.280 --> 0:16:44.400 you should seek to improve people's conditions because that makes 0:16:44.400 --> 0:16:47.600 the world better and guys like Iikman point out that 0:16:47.720 --> 0:16:51.120 like that, yeah, you should, but that's not enough to 0:16:51.240 --> 0:16:54.240 avoid the birth of an Aikman Because what's kind of 0:16:54.440 --> 0:16:56.640 scariest about this guy's backstory is that if you grew 0:16:56.720 --> 0:16:59.760 up in the suburbs like ten fifteen years ago or 0:16:59.800 --> 0:17:02.960 like you know today, a lot of his background's kind 0:17:02.960 --> 0:17:05.480 of sound similar to you, right, like in some ways 0:17:05.480 --> 0:17:10.159 that are like weirdly direct. So his birth town, Solingen, 0:17:10.400 --> 0:17:13.320 was an industrial town in the Rhineland, and his father 0:17:13.440 --> 0:17:16.000 was a modern German Man with a modern German job. 0:17:16.280 --> 0:17:18.320 He worked as a clerk for a company that supplied 0:17:18.320 --> 0:17:21.840 parts to power plants. His name was Adolf Karl Eichmann, 0:17:21.920 --> 0:17:24.159 and he was a strict disciplinarian, but not in a 0:17:24.160 --> 0:17:26.399 way that would have been weird to his son or 0:17:26.440 --> 0:17:30.080 anyone else. This was very normal for the time. Our 0:17:30.160 --> 0:17:33.359 Eikman would recall in his own autobiography, I acknowledged my 0:17:33.480 --> 0:17:37.720 father as the absolute authority. The earliest recollection that he 0:17:37.760 --> 0:17:40.480 gives us of his education is of a kindergarten teacher 0:17:40.520 --> 0:17:43.480 with an illustrated book of Bible stories which showed Moses 0:17:43.520 --> 0:17:47.800 having demonic horns. Now Eikman gave this recollection when he 0:17:47.920 --> 0:17:50.800 was on trial for genocide, So he may have been 0:17:50.880 --> 0:17:53.480 trying to defray his culpability by making a point about 0:17:53.480 --> 0:17:56.480 the deep roots of anti Semitism and his culture. That said, 0:17:56.480 --> 0:18:00.239 as I've noted before, you can today find churches in 0:18:00.280 --> 0:18:03.520 Germany and elsewhere in Europe with what's called a judensau 0:18:03.680 --> 0:18:06.760 depicted on the outside, which is a sculptural depiction of 0:18:06.800 --> 0:18:11.400 a pig suckling Jewish babies. These are like medieval churches, 0:18:11.400 --> 0:18:13.520 but they're around today and there were more of them 0:18:13.520 --> 0:18:15.359 back then. So like the idea that he would have 0:18:15.480 --> 0:18:19.280 encountered this in Sunday School. Not weird, right, pretty racist 0:18:19.400 --> 0:18:22.560 at all? Culture, not at all weird. Germany was a 0:18:22.600 --> 0:18:26.119 deeply anti Semitic place. And I also liked the idea 0:18:26.119 --> 0:18:30.440 of like, maybe we shouldn't take the guy on trial 0:18:30.480 --> 0:18:34.440 for Jesse on trial, yeah, for killing for the Holocaust 0:18:34.440 --> 0:18:35.240 to face value. 0:18:35.400 --> 0:18:41.040 Yes, maybe the concept of innocent until proven guilty needs 0:18:41.040 --> 0:18:42.160 to be ignored on this one. 0:18:42.200 --> 0:18:46.000 Perhaps there were a lot of fascinating like Jewish prudential 0:18:46.119 --> 0:18:49.480 arguments about at the Nuremberg trials, And obviously this isn't 0:18:49.480 --> 0:18:51.320 a part of that. This was a different thing, but like, 0:18:52.080 --> 0:18:54.240 and part of it was like number one, well, technically 0:18:54.240 --> 0:18:56.960 everything these guys did was legal in their country, so 0:18:57.119 --> 0:18:59.600 like what law are we trying them under kind of 0:18:59.600 --> 0:19:02.800 expos facto? And number two like well we know, like 0:19:02.880 --> 0:19:06.320 we know Herman Gearing doesn't have an offense against being 0:19:06.359 --> 0:19:07.159 Herman Gearing. 0:19:07.359 --> 0:19:13.360 Right, it's the first legal precedent of fuck that. Yeah, 0:19:13.680 --> 0:19:17.000 we've all come together and our our our six or 0:19:17.000 --> 0:19:24.040 eight judge brains have decided full yeah, all his life 0:19:24.400 --> 0:19:26.680 in my weird dress with my wig. 0:19:28.880 --> 0:19:33.359 Oh man. I did watch the fucking Mandela movie with 0:19:33.520 --> 0:19:37.720 starring Idris Elba as Mandela, and it was like it 0:19:37.800 --> 0:19:39.800 was fine, but the opening of it is like early 0:19:39.880 --> 0:19:43.120 South African courts where everybody's wearing the wigs, even like yeah, 0:19:43.200 --> 0:19:45.159 the black lawyers, and it's like, oh man, this is 0:19:45.440 --> 0:19:47.600 did that really? I guess that must that must have 0:19:47.680 --> 0:19:51.960 really been how everyone dressed in those courts. See, it's weird. 0:19:52.240 --> 0:19:53.440