Speaker 1: Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast
Speaker 1: about the very worst people in all of history, and
Speaker 1: ladies and gentle them's we've got a real motherfucker of
Speaker 1: a motherfucker for you this week. And to talk about
Speaker 1: one of the most interesting sons of bitches we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about on this series, I have one of
Speaker 1: the most interesting guests that we've had on this show,
Speaker 1: Adam Conover. Adam, Welcome to the program. Don't you hardly
Speaker 1: need introduction, but obviously you were the host of Adam
Speaker 1: Ruins Everything, and you've done I mean, you've been in
Speaker 1: a ton of stuff since you were in BoJack Horseman.
Speaker 1: You serve on the board of the WGA, and you
Speaker 1: have a podcast now right.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I do a show called Factually on YouTube and
Speaker 2: wherever you get your podcasts. And I also do video
Speaker 2: monologues which don't really have a title, but it's sort
Speaker 2: of the current evolution of what people know me for doing,
Speaker 2: doing topical comedy about the world around, mostly about fascism.
Speaker 2: I'm doing a lot of weekly.
Speaker 3: Video a lot of that these days.
Speaker 2: About creeping fascism and what we can do about it.
Speaker 2: And yeah, yeah, trying to try to be a little
Speaker 2: green shoot in the ashes of the entertainment industry and
Speaker 2: you know, doing stuff online now having a great time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: It's it's interesting to be You and I both came
Speaker 1: out of because you came out of college humor, where
Speaker 1: you did a lot of your early work. I came
Speaker 1: out of Cracked. So we're kind of like cousins in
Speaker 1: digital media terms. Definitely, both of them started out doing like, yeah,
Speaker 1: pop culture commentary, and now it's it's just all fascism.
Speaker 3: It's just a facism.
Speaker 2: Remember when there used to be websites, and yeah, on
Speaker 2: the websites you could do comedy about various things history
Speaker 2: or pop culture or just like you know, something about
Speaker 2: dating college chicks, and people would check on that. You'd
Speaker 2: get some money. And now you got to go on
Speaker 2: Elon Musk's platform and talk about how a judge was arrested.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, Or you go on to Facebook and you
Speaker 1: see a crudely AI generated image a soldier with no
Speaker 1: arms and a face that just isn't quite right that says,
Speaker 1: nobody will share this image like it's great. I love
Speaker 1: what's happened to media? This is so much better than
Speaker 1: my friends having healthcare.
Speaker 2: No one will share this image is the funniest trope
Speaker 2: of viral Facebook boomer content.
Speaker 1: I love it, I love it. I love it so good.
Speaker 1: So this is actually slightly relevant to the person we're
Speaker 1: talking about today because our bastard this week is he's
Speaker 1: the man who ruined science in a lot of ways,
Speaker 1: and he's also one of the major figures who helped
Speaker 1: make media what it is. He was Rupert Murdoch's nemesis
Speaker 1: for years. And the primary reason you're going to know
Speaker 1: this guy, and I think everyone listening is going to
Speaker 1: know this guy, is he is the father of Gilan Maxwell.
Speaker 1: We're talking this week about Robert Max.
Speaker 3: Well, do you know anything about Robert Maxwell.
Speaker 2: I know nothing about Robert Maxwell.
Speaker 1: This guy is so fucking weird. So part one of
Speaker 1: this is going to basically be like inglorious bastards because
Speaker 1: the first twenty something years of his life he is
Speaker 1: a character from a Quentin Tarantino movie, Like he is
Speaker 1: a righteous avenger fighting Nazis, and then he turns into
Speaker 1: like a business monster who destroys the industry of scientific
Speaker 1: publishing for quick profit. It's such like a weird heel
Speaker 1: turn story.
Speaker 2: I was wondering how he was going to destroy science,
Speaker 2: and destroying scientific publishing is how you would view it.
Speaker 2: And that has been done. I know this has been done,
Speaker 2: and so I know I'm interested to hear about the
Speaker 2: bastard who did it.
Speaker 1: Well, at first, he's going to be pretty sympathetic, although
Speaker 1: he's also going to commit a lot of war crimes,
Speaker 1: so it's going to be a mix of things happening here.
Speaker 1: But yeah, this is Gilan Maxwell's dad. She's obviously was
Speaker 1: Jeffrey Epstein like right hand woman, was the only one
Speaker 1: to get convicted for his crimes because of obvious reasons.
Speaker 1: And yeah, we're gonna be talking about her dad because
Speaker 1: he's just so much more fucking interesting than her. People
Speaker 1: would always refer to when you would, like when I
Speaker 1: would read about, you know, what they had done, that
Speaker 1: she was an heiress, and I had assumed she came
Speaker 1: from like older family money.
Speaker 3: She is not.
Speaker 1: The fortune just goes back to her dad like he is,
Speaker 1: as he actually was a self made billionaire.
Speaker 3: And I say that because he.
Speaker 1: Grew up deeply impoverished on like the Ukrainian step in
Speaker 1: an incredibly poor Jewish village. In like the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: so like not one of these guys, not like an
Speaker 1: Elon Musk story. There's no Emerald minds in his background, right,
Speaker 1: this this guy comes from nothing and like all people
Speaker 1: who would grow into because he is kind of a
Speaker 1: con man. Robert Maxwell. That is not the name he
Speaker 1: was born under, which you probably guessed when I said
Speaker 1: he grew up in a steppe village in the Ukrainian steps, right,
Speaker 1: not the most Ukrainian name ever. He was born Abraham
Speaker 1: leeb Hawk on June tenth, nineteen twenty three, in a
Speaker 1: village called Slatinsky Doli and most modern and I just
Speaker 1: said he was born in Ukraine. That's where his hometown
Speaker 1: is located today. But when Abraham was born, it was
Speaker 1: part of Czechoslovakia, right, because all of those borders move
Speaker 1: around quite a bit in the first half of the
Speaker 1: twentieth century, He wouldn't have grown up really identifying as Czech,
Speaker 1: partly because being Czech was like a thing that had
Speaker 1: just really started, you know, in that period, like Czechoslovakia
Speaker 1: was a new country after World War One. He would
Speaker 1: have identified and most of the people around him as Ruthenians,
Speaker 1: which is kind of this isolated eastern portion of what
Speaker 1: is then Czechoslovakia where his family grows up. Now, again,
Speaker 1: Abraham's family was Jewish and the village that they came from,
Speaker 1: Slatinsky Doli, was noteworthy because it's like it was close
Speaker 1: to where all the pagrams were happening, but it was
Speaker 1: the place that usually was relatively safe. Its entire history
Speaker 1: and its population. There's almost like sedimentary layers of different
Speaker 1: pagrams that occur over the course of the couple of
Speaker 1: centuries before this, where like you'll get a new wave
Speaker 1: of people moving to the village because everyone else in
Speaker 1: the area they came from got massacred by the Cossacks
Speaker 1: or whatever. Right, Like, that's the story of the village
Speaker 1: that he grows up in. So you know, this is
Speaker 1: again not a guy who comes from money. One of
Speaker 1: my sources for this episode is a biography on Maxwell
Speaker 1: by Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, and here's how it
Speaker 1: summarizes this village. It was a place where Jews were
Speaker 1: allowed to sell their goods to their Christian neighbors. Some
Speaker 1: even had licenses to offer alcohol that were permitted to
Speaker 1: educate their children in the Judaic faith. And wear their
Speaker 1: traditional dress and speak their own language, haunted by their
Speaker 1: own cruel past. There was hardly a family in the
Speaker 1: village that had not lost relatives to the Pagrams. They
Speaker 1: lived frugal lives within the sanctity of their faith. That
Speaker 1: says a lot right there. That Like a key part
Speaker 1: of this is like some of the residents are even
Speaker 1: allowed to say alcohol, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're allowed to. These people are allowed to wear
Speaker 2: shoes and speak to one another, and they can walk
Speaker 2: down the streets.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, we let these Jews sell to Christians. Can
Speaker 3: you believe it? How progressive? Not exactly easy living?
Speaker 1: No, no, again, this guy comes from about as rough
Speaker 1: a background as you get, and we're talking the life
Speaker 1: he's born into. These are peasants in nineteen twenty three,
Speaker 1: But their daily life if you had pulled someone from
Speaker 1: the same area in the sixteen hundreds into this village
Speaker 1: in the twenties, it would have mostly been familiar to them, right. Wow,
Speaker 1: Like that, that's kind of how behind the rest of
Speaker 1: the world and how isolated that they are now within
Speaker 1: kind of Czechoslovakia. Abraham and his family are double pariahs
Speaker 1: because they're Jewish and they're Ruthenian and ruth again the
Speaker 1: kind of like regional racism that existed within Eastern Europe
Speaker 1: at this time. Ruthenians were seen as like backwards and
Speaker 1: almost less human by a lot of the rest of
Speaker 1: the country. A travel guide to the region published by
Speaker 1: the Czech government in like nineteen twenty praise the fresh
Speaker 1: air and the wildlife in the area, but warned visitors
Speaker 1: of the quote rather unintelligent Ruthenians, whose expression is almost
Speaker 1: blank stare who sit in the marketplace side by side,
Speaker 1: gazing at the distance, seldom speaking a word or moving
Speaker 1: a muscle.
Speaker 2: This is their own government travel.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, this is I mean, visit Ruthenia where the
Speaker 1: people aren't people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense. You know, if I was doing
Speaker 2: a travel guide to La that's how I describe Santa Monica.
Speaker 2: So you know, they said people just staring off into
Speaker 2: the distance, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, there's a product of all of the weed
Speaker 1: shops on Venice. But so Robert Maxwell rarely talked about
Speaker 1: his early childhood. And again this guy grows into a
Speaker 1: consummate liar, and so what he did say is seldom reliable.
Speaker 1: But there are some things we can infer based on
Speaker 1: family lore, just our knowledge of the time. His family
Speaker 1: last name Hach was not their original last name. That's
Speaker 1: not really like again, this is not like a Germanic area.
Speaker 1: These people are in like what's modern Ukraine. The whole
Speaker 1: reason they have that last name is one day, back
Speaker 1: when the Austro Hungarian Empire is in charge of the village,
Speaker 1: a government official comes to town to do a census
Speaker 1: in this Jewish village, but he doesn't speak Hebrew or Yiddish,
Speaker 1: and so he's asking everyone what's your last name? And
Speaker 1: Maxwell's ancestor I think it's his grandfather at the time.
Speaker 1: This official can't spell their original last name, so he
Speaker 1: just writes down Hawk and calls it a day because
Speaker 1: he speaks German. So he's like, yeah, fuck it, close enough,
Speaker 1: that's what you're called now.
Speaker 2: In German, hawk means high right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that sounds right. I don't I'm not good at German.
Speaker 2: Why why would he just what is just a funny
Speaker 2: name to choose a common name?
Speaker 1: I think he was probably making up a lot of
Speaker 1: last names that day, just talking to all of these
Speaker 1: people who speak like Yiddish. Primarily You're like, fuck it,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna start writing stuff like I don't give
Speaker 1: a fuck like the Austro Hungarian Empire great at governance.
Speaker 3: So uh.
Speaker 1: In nineteen nineteen, after the war, Slatinsky Doli, that's the
Speaker 1: village stops being part of the Austro Hungarian Empire and
Speaker 1: becomes part of Czechoslovakia, and the family last name ceases
Speaker 1: to exist again because yet another At this point, a
Speaker 1: Czech government official who speaks Czech shows up in village
Speaker 1: and does another census and he's like, OK, that's not
Speaker 1: a proper Czech name, and so he gives them a
Speaker 1: new last name, Ludvik.
Speaker 3: This just keeps happening.
Speaker 2: That's the prerogative empire, right town, new names.
Speaker 3: For new names for everybody.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're Steve and you're a Bilbo. Oh man them out.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be honest, if I had that job, that
Speaker 1: would be one of the perks.
Speaker 3: Now I don't like I don't really like Mike.
Speaker 1: You know what, I'm gonna go to this, We have
Speaker 1: a lord of the rings and give you an orc's name.
Speaker 3: Just make it fun.
Speaker 4: And in modern times, that person's relative now misspells people's
Speaker 4: names at coffee shops.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the modern equivalent of these government officials is a
Speaker 1: Starbucks barista.
Speaker 2: That's great. The Starbucks barista should be able to go
Speaker 2: into a town and give everybody the names they think
Speaker 2: you should have. Yeah, yeah, what if they were in
Speaker 2: charge of the names.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we need to deputize them as judges. Give Starbucks
Speaker 1: baristus the force of law. So Abraham's father, Mehl, was
Speaker 1: known as Mehl the Tall because he's like the only
Speaker 1: tall man in town. These people are not well fed,
Speaker 1: but for whatever reason, Mehl comes out. He's like a
Speaker 1: brick shit, he's like six foot five and yeah, so
Speaker 1: for like that's tall today these people are all starving
Speaker 1: to death.
Speaker 3: He's a giant.
Speaker 1: And famously so his job, he's like a small time trader.
Speaker 1: So his job, he walks from town to town with
Speaker 1: like goods like pelts or whatever, deer skins, and like
Speaker 1: trades or sells them. And that's kind of how his
Speaker 1: family gets by. And the thing everyone knew about him
Speaker 1: was that normally people who have this job travel in
Speaker 1: groups in like caravans, because there's brigands. This is a
Speaker 1: period of time where there's brigands. But he's like twice
Speaker 1: everyone else's size, So he just walks alone with a stick.
Speaker 2: I love a brigand they're much better than bandits, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: bandits are like level one. Brigands are level three. You
Speaker 2: gotta be a little stronger. They've got studded leather armor.
Speaker 1: Exactly, exactly, yes, exactly. I'm glad we both remember our
Speaker 1: third edition D and D source books. So Abraham's mother, Hannah,
Speaker 1: or she's also called Chunka, which I think is just
Speaker 1: Hannah's just sort of like the gramatization of her Hebrew name,
Speaker 1: I'm guessing, is what's going on there. As best as
Speaker 1: I can tell. The unusual thing that you hear about
Speaker 1: her is that she was learned and intelligent, and people
Speaker 1: did not describe women in villages like this that way
Speaker 1: very often. Right, given the nature of the time, we got.
Speaker 2: A family with a tall guy and a learning woman.
Speaker 3: Right, that's his parents.
Speaker 2: These people must have been ruling the town.
Speaker 1: Not really, they were like fairly prominent citizens in this
Speaker 1: town where no one has any money. Yeah, And her
Speaker 1: kind of defining trait that people would remember later is
Speaker 1: that she would like scavenge newspapers from everyone else in
Speaker 1: town because she just was so interested in reading. She's
Speaker 1: going to be when they're when for the very first
Speaker 1: time there's a Democratic Socialist party that starts up, and
Speaker 1: someone comes to this town that had been ruled by
Speaker 1: an emperor, you know in her childhood, and it's like, hey,
Speaker 1: there's politics now, and here's there's this party. She's like, yes,
Speaker 1: democratic socialist is exactly what I am. Right, she kind
Speaker 1: of sounds rad okay.
Speaker 2: So she's like a college educated leftist who's like reading
Speaker 2: Fucou and annoying everybody at the at the DSA meeting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, she she's that, except for obviously there's no college.
Speaker 2: She's just able to read. Yeah, she's the equivalent in
Speaker 2: the same way that it sits. And a half foot
Speaker 2: tall man is an eight foot tall man. Someone who
Speaker 2: has read page a four of the newspaper is like
Speaker 2: has high falutint knowledge.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: There's one description of her I found that described her
Speaker 1: as an exception in the village because she read books.
Speaker 1: She was almost an intellectual.
Speaker 2: Ah, she sees spot run. This woman is so full
Speaker 2: of herself. She's basically got a bachelor's right now.
Speaker 1: Maxwell would later say regularly that his mother was a
Speaker 1: committed Zionist. This is not impossible given the time. It's
Speaker 1: also he becomes that later in life, and we don't
Speaker 1: really we have no direct quotations of anything that she said.
Speaker 1: And this is the thing he starts saying in the eighties,
Speaker 1: So who knows, but it would not have been like
Speaker 1: wildly out of like step with what a lot of
Speaker 1: folks in that situation believed at the time, given the
Speaker 1: realities of life in Eastern Europe for poor Jewish families.
Speaker 1: Thanks to his mother, Maxwell grew up aware of the
Speaker 1: injustices that suffused his early life. Thomas and Dylan that
Speaker 1: she was quote a woman who was outspoken about the
Speaker 1: injustices of their life just because there were Jews. The
Speaker 1: images of her which would survive would come much later
Speaker 1: from Maxwell. He described her as intelligent and well informed,
Speaker 1: different from other local women. She was passionate about the
Speaker 1: need to improve the masses for greater social justice. And
Speaker 1: again this is stuff he says decades later. Some of
Speaker 1: this is probably like myth making, especially the factor he's like,
Speaker 1: none of the other local women cared about this, Well,
Speaker 1: maybe they did. Maybe you just are kind of want
Speaker 1: your mom to seem like she was the only one,
Speaker 1: because it, you know, burnishes your own story. Yeah, we'll
Speaker 1: never know, but Hannah and Mehel had the standard number
Speaker 1: of kids for that period of time, which is a shitload.
Speaker 1: Abraham was the third of nine, two of whom died
Speaker 1: in infancy from something only described at the time as
Speaker 1: a bad cold. You know, it's just what happened with kids.
Speaker 1: One of Maxwell's earliest experiences would have been watching his
Speaker 1: parents bury their kids, and that's a pretty normal life
Speaker 1: experience for people back then. Starvation would have been a
Speaker 1: regular thing, like not to death, but they would have
Speaker 1: gone hungry regularly throughout the year. That was pretty normal
Speaker 1: for people in this time, in this village. When he
Speaker 1: was still a baby and still named Abraham, his mom
Speaker 1: and dad had to register him with the Czech authorities,
Speaker 1: who advised them it would be better for everybody. They're like,
Speaker 1: you want to call him Abraham. Look, lady, I don't
Speaker 1: know if you got the news, but we're Czechoslovakia now
Speaker 1: and Abraham is not a Czech name. And let me
Speaker 1: give you some advice. People here are pretty racist. Your
Speaker 1: kid might have an easier time in the days ahead
Speaker 1: if you give him an undisputably check name. And like,
Speaker 1: this sounds pretty bad. It's also maybe what saves his life,
Speaker 1: because very soon it's going to be really good to
Speaker 1: be an Eastern European Jew who has a name that
Speaker 1: does not sound Jewish, right, And his parents take this
Speaker 1: guy's advice and they change his name from Abraham to
Speaker 1: Jon Abraham Ludvik, which would be changed yet again later
Speaker 1: in his life to Jan Ludwick Himan Binyamin Hawk. But yeah,
Speaker 1: he goes through a lot of different names.
Speaker 3: This guy the.
Speaker 2: Least Jewish name you could possibly the most Germanic.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yan, we'll call him Yon. That seems safe.
Speaker 1: Yan is the name you want to be giving at
Speaker 1: check points and the not too distant future here. So
Speaker 1: the first job that the future Robert Maxwell had would
Speaker 1: have been helping his family with the annual harvest, which
Speaker 1: he would have done from infancy on up. A highlight
Speaker 1: of the year. This is described in every book about
Speaker 1: it I've read, was the hay harvest. And it was
Speaker 1: a highlight because their beds were just like cloth stuffed
Speaker 1: with hay. And by the time you do the harvest,
Speaker 1: the hay is like matted, and it's riddled with lice
Speaker 1: and moldy. And so the day when you get to
Speaker 1: replace the gross old hay with fresh new hay. Is like,
Speaker 1: that's the best day of the year.
Speaker 2: The best day of the year.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the highlight of year year.
Speaker 4: Hey day, the amount of life. I'm like itchy thinking
Speaker 4: about it.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean everyone's got a lot of lice.
Speaker 1: It's basically a medieval village.
Speaker 2: Most of the time. Though. Harvest time is nice because
Speaker 2: you get a good meal because that's when the food
Speaker 2: comes in right and you get But like the idea
Speaker 2: that harvest is the best day of the year because
Speaker 2: you get a slightly better bed to get to it.
Speaker 1: For an idea of where we've gone in a hundred years,
Speaker 1: we've gone from my most exciting time of the year
Speaker 1: is the hey harvest to yeah, once a year, I
Speaker 1: get a new phone. Although none of these people again
Speaker 1: have to know Twitter. So who's better off?
Speaker 2: Do you think like we do with phones? Any of
Speaker 2: them were going like, you know what, I can wait
Speaker 2: one more year before I have a refilled my bed.
Speaker 2: I'll yeah, I'm going to really hold out for a
Speaker 2: nextra year.
Speaker 1: Nanna, I hear bed five has all this spyware on it.
Speaker 1: I don't really want to get into that. By age five,
Speaker 1: Yan had proven himself an advanced student, which in his
Speaker 1: world meant that he was learning to read and to
Speaker 1: memorize prayers. By ten, he was a better writer than
Speaker 1: his father. Although Mehel the Strong was not renowned for
Speaker 1: his brain, he was quick enough that the town rabbi
Speaker 1: recalled decades later his analytical ability and uncanny aptitude for
Speaker 1: learning and retaining what he was taught. He could become
Speaker 1: a rabbi. And at that time and place, if you're
Speaker 1: saying this kid could be a rabbi, that is the
Speaker 1: same as like today being like you could be a physicist, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: Like that is the highest intellectual achievement for people in
Speaker 1: this strata, right, kids aren't really like it's not likely
Speaker 1: that kids are just going to go to college to
Speaker 1: learn things, you know, not in this far off the
Speaker 1: beaten path. So Yan grows up large. Robert Maxwell is
Speaker 1: a big man. He's going to be like six foot
Speaker 1: something too.
Speaker 2: He loved by the way that his name at this
Speaker 2: point has been changed seventy four or five times and
Speaker 2: it has not gotten any closer to being Robert Maxwell.
Speaker 2: This is where we know it's going to end.
Speaker 3: We have at least four more name changes before we
Speaker 3: get there.
Speaker 1: By the way, the amount of ground this guy's name
Speaker 1: covers nuts he's good at soccer because again he's twice
Speaker 1: the size.
Speaker 3: Of everybody else.
Speaker 1: And I did look it up the local kids in
Speaker 1: this town, when I say they, and obviously they called
Speaker 1: it football.
Speaker 3: But that's just wrong.
Speaker 2: We know that, right, we're in North America. We use
Speaker 2: our word.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we use our word. The ball that they had
Speaker 3: was rags bound in Cowhid.
Speaker 2: It's just like, look, there's nothing better than Eastern European
Speaker 2: ball sports, Okay, right, Yeah, I really remember there was
Speaker 2: a point in my life and this is a little
Speaker 2: bit of a digression, but I do love to think
Speaker 2: about this. Yeah, when the first Borat movie came out,
Speaker 2: the people of Kazakhstan were like, this movie is really
Speaker 2: mean to us. It really portrays us in an unflattering light.
Speaker 2: We're not that backwards. And then somebody was like, yeah,
Speaker 2: but don't you guys have a sport where the ball
Speaker 2: is a decapitated goat's head. Yeah, but that's awesome, And
Speaker 2: they were like, yeah, you know, yeah, no, it's true,
Speaker 2: it's awesome.
Speaker 3: Like it rules.
Speaker 2: You gotta embrace it, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a Afghanistan has a sport like that called
Speaker 1: burs kashi, and it's like the deadliest sport in the world.
Speaker 1: People are like beheading each each other on horseback with
Speaker 1: their fucking sticks as they go after this animal head.
Speaker 1: I would love to watch it.
Speaker 3: Plate.
Speaker 2: That's great. Why are we fucking around watching arsenal when
Speaker 2: we could be watching goat and ball sports? A rag
Speaker 2: bundled with leather? Great? Yeah good?
Speaker 3: Yeah right.
Speaker 1: So the Thomas and Dylan biography, I get a couple
Speaker 1: of different accounts of whether or not Mehl the Strong
Speaker 1: was a good dad. One of the books I read
Speaker 1: described him is like pretty gentle. This is not an
Speaker 1: account that is repeated by Maxwell's most recent and probably
Speaker 1: most rigorous biography, Fall by John Preston, which alleges that
Speaker 1: Mehel beat his son in public on a regular basis,
Speaker 1: quote often so hard that he broke the skin. On
Speaker 1: one occasion, the young Maxwell threw up in the street,
Speaker 1: grabbing him by the hair. His father rubbed his face
Speaker 1: in his vomit while passers by looked on. So by
Speaker 1: this account, at least, his dad is abusive. By again,
Speaker 1: like nineteen twenties rural village in Czechoslovakia standards, so rough
Speaker 1: upbringing in a lot of ways. He was born left handed,
Speaker 1: his teachers forced him to write with his right hand,
Speaker 1: and he was like everyone in town would yell at
Speaker 1: him if they saw him using his left so he
Speaker 1: just like stops being a lefty. Also very common at
Speaker 1: the time. You can't have those left handers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm a lefty and our people suffered under the
Speaker 2: yoke of forced rightyism for a long time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, We're finally free. Yeah, I actually did.
Speaker 1: My first grade teacher tried to stop me from being
Speaker 1: left handed.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, in rural Oklahoma.
Speaker 2: Holy shit, Yeah, it was. This was it was honestly,
Speaker 2: as a as a white man in America. It was
Speaker 2: the first time that I ever felt myself as part
Speaker 2: of a formerly persecuted by right lefties, Like I was
Speaker 2: literally told the child. You know, lefties really used to
Speaker 2: be treated poorly, and we've come a long way. Yeah, yes,
Speaker 2: thank you to my to my ancestors.
Speaker 1: To our brave left handed forefathers. Yeah, to Ned Flanders
Speaker 1: with the left torreum making a place for us.
Speaker 4: I'm so sorry that you had to deal with tricky scissors,
Speaker 4: so so brave guys.
Speaker 1: Whenever you get like RFK being like, why are autism
Speaker 1: rates skyrocketing? Have you looked at a graph of how
Speaker 1: many more left handed people there are?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 1: Do you think there's something environmental there? Or we're just
Speaker 1: not hitting kids for using their hand?
Speaker 2: Literally, it's the best argument for why is they're more
Speaker 2: gay people and everything. I mean, people admit this argument
Speaker 2: over and over again. But yeah, like, once you aren't
Speaker 2: slapping people around with being something, they're a little more
Speaker 2: willing to say that's what they are on a survey, right,
Speaker 2: exactly pretty obvious.
Speaker 1: So at eleven, the no longer left handed Yahan goes
Speaker 1: to a yeshiva and because again he's he's most of
Speaker 1: these kids are not getting sent away to Bratislava, to
Speaker 1: the city to go to a yeshiva. He's smart enough that,
Speaker 1: like the rabbi basically pulls some strengths to make sure
Speaker 1: that he gets a chance at this. And so he's
Speaker 1: he's kind of like in training to potentially be a rabbi,
Speaker 1: and he's good, he's like really good academically, but he
Speaker 1: hates it. He doesn't like reading rabbinical literature, and he
Speaker 1: grows really bored with formal schooling, and he starts like
Speaker 1: cutting rabbi school to sell jewelry on the street, like
Speaker 1: to be like a small time like a merchant, because
Speaker 1: this guy just has business brain, right, Like, you put
Speaker 1: this man in any time and place and he is
Speaker 1: going to find a hustle. That's just the kind of
Speaker 1: man Yan is. Right, in March of nineteen thirty nine,
Speaker 1: when he is fifteen, the Nazis invade Czechoslovakia. Now, the
Speaker 1: fact that Yan's family is in Ruthenia winds up being
Speaker 1: beneficial to them because when the Nazis take Czechoslovakia, Hungary
Speaker 1: is allied with the Nazi state, and Hitler kind of
Speaker 1: gives them this chunk of Czechoslovakia Ruthenia because Hungary had
Speaker 1: been claiming it for it's this whole thing. It's one
Speaker 1: of these border regions that everybody claims, right. So Hungary
Speaker 1: winds up annexing where his family lives. And the Hungarian
Speaker 1: government is not anti Nazi, right obviously, but it is
Speaker 1: a safer place initially to be then the Reich, you know,
Speaker 1: like not a high bar, right, but there's a little
Speaker 1: bit of protection there for a short period of time,
Speaker 1: and I emphasis on the short because it's not gonna last.
Speaker 1: The fact that Yan's mom had given him a check
Speaker 1: name pays off because he immediately and this is one
Speaker 1: of the things that's interesting about this guy, he's very perceptive.
Speaker 1: As soon as this happens, there are a lot of
Speaker 1: people who are like kind of baring their heads in
Speaker 1: the sand, trying to be like, I don't know how
Speaker 1: bad it'll be. Yan immediately is like, all right, I'm
Speaker 1: going to join the underground and start fighting the Nazis.
Speaker 1: That's obviously what has to happen at this point, right,
Speaker 1: So he drops out of the Yeshiva, He shaves his
Speaker 1: side locks because he doesn't want to look as Jewish,
Speaker 1: and he flees. He goes into the underground. He knows
Speaker 1: he can't go back to the village where he'd been
Speaker 1: born to stay with his family, and he later claimed
Speaker 1: the Hungarians were taking over that part of Czechoslovakia, and
Speaker 1: I said to my parents, I'm leaving because I want
Speaker 1: to go and fight. They didn't want me to go,
Speaker 1: but I went anyway.
Speaker 2: So far this story is just kind of rips. He
Speaker 2: sounds awesome, Yes he does.
Speaker 1: He is awesome up to this point, right, and there's
Speaker 1: a little bit of doubt about like did he actually
Speaker 1: immediately try to join the resistance or did he fall
Speaker 1: into it, because like, at a certain point you don't
Speaker 1: have any other options. But at a he's he is
Speaker 1: fighting the Nazis at a very early point, right. And
Speaker 1: here's what writer Robert Philpott sums up about what Maxwell
Speaker 1: would later claim of his own wartime experiences. The teenager
Speaker 1: joined the anti Nazi resistance, but was captured, accused of spying,
Speaker 1: and sentenced to death. Maxwell later claimed that he had
Speaker 1: managed to escape relatively easily after overpowering a one armed
Speaker 1: guard while being transported to a court appearance hiding under
Speaker 1: a bridge.
Speaker 2: Don't have the guard be one armed?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, there's your first mistake.
Speaker 3: Two armed guards.
Speaker 2: Come on, guard only has one arm. You think I
Speaker 2: can overpower him?
Speaker 3: I think I could probably take this guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I just got to push him hiding under a bridge,
Speaker 1: He recounted on one later retelling he was aided by
Speaker 1: a Gypsy lady who freedom of his handcuffs.
Speaker 3: This is that's how he phrases it. Now again.
Speaker 1: John Preston, his biographer, lays out that large portion of
Speaker 1: this story have to have been made up after the fact,
Speaker 1: right quote. Intriguing though the story is, it does beg
Speaker 1: a number of questions. However stretched the Hungarian prison service
Speaker 1: may have been at the time, it seems odd that
Speaker 1: they couldn't wrestle up a single two armed guard to
Speaker 1: take him to court and early.
Speaker 2: All right, see see we're seeing the holes as you.
Speaker 3: See in the holes, there's a couple of them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, little convenient to have the one armed.
Speaker 3: Guard right right.
Speaker 1: In earlier versions of the story, Maxwell didn't say anything
Speaker 1: about hitting the guard with his manacles he claimed to
Speaker 1: have used to stick, Nor did he say anything about
Speaker 1: the mysterious lady who helped him. Why hadn't he thought
Speaker 1: of her worth mentioning before? Had she simply slipped his mind?
Speaker 1: Then there's the question of what was she doing under
Speaker 1: the bridge in the first place. Did she live there
Speaker 1: or just conveniently happened to be passing with the lock pick?
Speaker 1: And what's weird about this is that we have a
Speaker 1: lot of guys who lie to make themselves sound cooler.
Speaker 1: Yet the core of this is true. He is sentenced
Speaker 1: to death and escapes. That's cool. You don't have to
Speaker 1: lie about like a lady under a bridge, you picking
Speaker 1: your locks or fighting on what. I don't get why
Speaker 1: he does this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that doesn't make you sound cool. No, this makes
Speaker 2: the story sound more fake.
Speaker 3: But yeah, more fake and racist.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I don't know why he does this. Again,
Speaker 1: he will repeatedly lie about his wartime experience, and what
Speaker 1: we can confirm is one of the coolest stories I've
Speaker 1: ever heard out of World War two. Like, it's nuts
Speaker 1: that he like feels the need to lie about this.
Speaker 1: It's like if Oscar Schindler added another thirty people to
Speaker 1: the list of folks that he saved you didn't exist's like, what,
Speaker 1: but why would you do that? Like speaking of I
Speaker 1: don't know what I'm speaking of. Here's some fucking ads.
Speaker 1: We're back so again, his real story is one of
Speaker 1: the most intense World War II stories I've ever heard.
Speaker 1: He's sentenced to die, he escapes the Hungarian authorities, he
Speaker 1: goes into the underground. He spends months on the run,
Speaker 1: being from Belgrade to Beirute to Marseillese. So he takes
Speaker 1: like a boat to Marseille and he lands in Marseille
Speaker 1: while Germany is invading France, and so while the Germans
Speaker 1: are busting through the Maginot Line. He enlists in the
Speaker 1: French Foreign Legion in an all chech unit because he's like,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I want to fight. I want to fight
Speaker 1: right now. You guys are fighting the Nazis. I'll fucking
Speaker 1: help now. Unfortunately, it's kind of a bad time to
Speaker 1: join the Foreign Legion in France because the French Army
Speaker 1: is not going to last very long in France, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't think they didn't. They didn't win those
Speaker 2: particular battles, did they.
Speaker 3: It not super well, those engagements don't go for them. No.
Speaker 1: Now, this Czech all check unit he joins is like
Speaker 1: a lot of other Czech basically people who flee Czechoslovakia
Speaker 1: when the Nazis takeover into France and are like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll fucking fight to liberate my country. Right, So he
Speaker 1: joins this unit, which has like ten thousand people in it.
Speaker 1: But by the time he's like trained up and equipped,
Speaker 1: the French are fully collapsing and he winds up routed
Speaker 1: with large portions of the French and British forces and
Speaker 1: he is one of the guys who gets evacuated as
Speaker 1: part of the Dunkirk landings like Robert Maxwell is there
Speaker 1: at Dunkirk, and by the time he's there, this ten
Speaker 1: thousand man unit just has four thousand people left in it.
Speaker 1: So like this is a chaotic and hideous time, Like
Speaker 1: he experiences some shit right this unit. Once they get
Speaker 1: over to the United Kingdom, the unit is reformed and
Speaker 1: retrained and the idea is that they will at one
Speaker 1: point take part in the liberation of their homeland. Now
Speaker 1: Maxwell is still going by Yon at this point, and
Speaker 1: even though all of these guys are like fighting the
Speaker 1: Nazis together, they're still super racist against him because they're
Speaker 1: very anti Semitic. They're not like Nazis, but they're super
Speaker 1: anti Semitic.
Speaker 2: We wait, how do they know? This man is Jewish?
Speaker 2: His name is Jana Home and he cut off his things.
Speaker 1: You know, I think he may have made the mistake,
Speaker 1: I guess of admitting to his war comrades thinking that, like,
Speaker 1: you're fighting the Nazis, you're probably not racist.
Speaker 2: No bad call, yes, common mistake.
Speaker 1: Common mistake. So he decides like, well, fuck these racist checks,
Speaker 1: I'm going to join the British Army. And so he
Speaker 1: actually like joins this like it's effectively.
Speaker 3: A trash unit. In the British Army for the foreign.
Speaker 1: Volunteers that nobody trusts. The thing about this is like
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of German doctors who fled the Nazis
Speaker 1: because they are like, I'm not a Nazi. I'm going
Speaker 1: to go to whoever will fight them, please, like i
Speaker 1: am a German who wants to fight these people. And
Speaker 1: the British are like, oh no, we can't trust Germans.
Speaker 1: But they also a lot of the Germans who were
Speaker 1: in the UK at this point, they're literally putting in
Speaker 1: a camp, like there is a concentration camp in Germany
Speaker 1: for or in Britain for German citizens, because that they
Speaker 1: don't trust. But doctors are valuable, so they put them
Speaker 1: in this unit where they're like, we'll find something for
Speaker 1: you to do, but we don't want to like trust you, right,
Speaker 1: And so that's where they put Yan because as a Czech,
Speaker 1: he's basically a German in their eyes.
Speaker 2: And as he's a man who's read a book, he's
Speaker 2: basically a doctor.
Speaker 3: He's essentially a doctor.
Speaker 1: Yes, And in true British fashion, they mostly have these
Speaker 1: guys doing backbreaking manual labor.
Speaker 3: He's like busting stones.
Speaker 1: For a while basically, but this does shockingly this experience
Speaker 1: like convinced ns of you know what, I want to
Speaker 1: be British. That's the nationality for me. I love these people.
Speaker 1: At least they're fighting the Nazis, right.
Speaker 2: I like how in these early days of nationalism you
Speaker 2: can kind of just like pick and choose and like
Speaker 2: wander around beside your nation in a way that they
Speaker 2: don't really what you do today. You just join armies
Speaker 2: and like fuck.
Speaker 3: It, I'll be British. I tried be in French. No, no, no,
Speaker 3: the Brits are for me. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So he learns English in six weeks, and this is
Speaker 1: some kind of exaggeration, but he is. He does speaking
Speaker 1: like eleven languages, so he really does have like a
Speaker 1: faculty for this. And he he bases his accent off
Speaker 1: of Winston Churchill because he talks for his whole life
Speaker 1: with a British accent that he patterns off of Winston Churchill.
Speaker 1: And he will claim I started imitating his accent before
Speaker 1: I understood English, because I could just tell what he
Speaker 1: was saying even when I didn't speak the language, because
Speaker 1: of the way he said it.
Speaker 2: What have you?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 2: Ran into a Czech guy who talked exactly like Donald Trump,
Speaker 2: Like that's got to exist, Like, how did people not
Speaker 2: it would be one of the most famous voices in
Speaker 2: the country.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I used to know.
Speaker 1: I knew an Afghan guy who had been an interpreter,
Speaker 1: you know, for the US military in Afghanistan, who had
Speaker 1: grown up in a refugee camp in Pakistan and taught
Speaker 1: himself English by repeatedly rewatching Rambo with subtitles, and he
Speaker 1: sounded so cool.
Speaker 3: He was like the coolest talking motherfucker I've ever heard.
Speaker 1: Maxwell proved himself an excellent mimic, and most casual observers
Speaker 1: would only have noticed his foreign origins by his use
Speaker 1: of idiosyncratic and frankly wrong mix ups of colloquial English
Speaker 1: phrases like you can't change toads in midstream.
Speaker 3: I actually kind of love.
Speaker 2: You can't change toads in midstream.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can't try.
Speaker 2: It, adam, I've never done it.
Speaker 1: Once, right, Yeah, exactly. Nobody has to go with his
Speaker 1: new accent. Jan picked a name for it, and this
Speaker 1: proves that, like he's pretty good at languages, but he
Speaker 1: not hasn't immediately picked up everything because the the proper
Speaker 1: British name that he picks for himself to blend in
Speaker 1: is Ivan du Marier.
Speaker 2: Name name number four?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and just like what's a British name? Ivan?
Speaker 3: That's it?
Speaker 4: How did he come up with this shit?
Speaker 1: Well, he came up with the last name because his
Speaker 1: favorite brand of cigarettes were Du Mariar's.
Speaker 2: But this is also Douglas Adam's joke about Ford Prefects,
Speaker 2: right right, yes, naming yourself after a brand.
Speaker 1: He literally does that. People love these cigarettes, so they'll
Speaker 1: like me. Unfortunately, this was like the even worse than
Speaker 1: being German, because if there's one thing that British hated
Speaker 1: more than the Germans at any point in time, it's
Speaker 1: the French, even.
Speaker 3: During World War Two.
Speaker 1: So people just treat him worse because he now sounds
Speaker 1: like he's got a French name.
Speaker 4: So he's gonna change his name again.
Speaker 3: Scene, right, He's.
Speaker 1: Going to change his name so many times, Sophie, we're
Speaker 1: not even We're like sixty percent of the way through
Speaker 1: the name changes.
Speaker 2: So so far, this entire story is just this guy
Speaker 2: going from country to country and doing a terrible job
Speaker 2: of baking a different ethnicity in every place.
Speaker 3: It's so funny. Ivan, really.
Speaker 1: His fortunes finally changed when he began an affair with
Speaker 1: an elderly, wealthy widower and this lady's British and she
Speaker 1: happens to know a brigadier general and she convinces him
Speaker 1: to do her a favor. Ivan du Marier is transferred
Speaker 1: to a real fighting unit, so he goes from this
Speaker 1: like unit. But we're kind of keeping the guys. We
Speaker 1: don't trust this lady pulls some strings and it says
Speaker 1: a lot Maxwell repeatedly. His only goal is to get
Speaker 1: to grips, to get into hand to hand combat with
Speaker 1: the German army. That is what he wants, right. Everything
Speaker 1: he's doing is to orchestrate. I want to shoot Nazis.
Speaker 2: Yes, nice.
Speaker 4: He's literally a teared t you're so right with the
Speaker 4: Tarantino character, and.
Speaker 1: By god, he finally does it. So he gets in.
Speaker 1: He is close to the tip of the spear. He
Speaker 1: lands at Normandy a couple weeks after the initial landing
Speaker 1: and engages almost immediately in a hard close quarters fighting.
Speaker 1: At Normandy, he is promoted very quickly to lance corporal
Speaker 1: and then made sergeant in charge of a sniper unit
Speaker 1: where he got his first experience leading in combat, and
Speaker 1: he does very well in this and in fact, after
Speaker 1: this first big battle that he is like leading the
Speaker 1: sniper unit in, he's recommended for an immediate battlefield promotion
Speaker 1: to lieutenant. Now it's worth really leaning into what this
Speaker 1: means because privates and sergeants are in CEOs and lieutenants
Speaker 1: are officers. These are two different career tracks in the military.
Speaker 1: You don't just jump from one to the other unless
Speaker 1: everyone else is dying and you're really good at your job,
Speaker 1: right Like, that's why Ivan gets this promotion to lieutenant
Speaker 1: because like every all the officers are getting shot and
Speaker 1: he's not.
Speaker 2: But this is like a very unusual level up.
Speaker 1: Yes, like he's very good as a soldier, right Like,
Speaker 1: That's what this says is that he's like an excellent
Speaker 1: fighter and an excellent combat leader. That said, his subordinates
Speaker 1: didn't like him all the time. One of his adjutants
Speaker 1: told a reporter in the sixties he had a smooth,
Speaker 1: silky way about him, a big fellow, very dark, a
Speaker 1: bit of a mystery, which just makes him sound cooler
Speaker 1: at this point. So again, it's forty four, he's fighting
Speaker 1: his way across France. He has no idea what's happened
Speaker 1: to his family, right, But he's hearing the stories of
Speaker 1: what are happening to Jews in Nazi occupied Eastern Europe, right,
Speaker 1: so he has to know like it's probably not good.
Speaker 1: And his whole motivation is, I want to fight my
Speaker 1: way back to my home village to rescue my family, right,
Speaker 1: I'm going to kill every Nazi in between me and
Speaker 1: my mom and dad.
Speaker 3: And as a result, he.
Speaker 1: Is filled with the kind of rage that you would
Speaker 1: expect from a man in this situation, so he does
Speaker 1: stuff that you're not supposed to do, like he would
Speaker 1: rob every killed and capture German soldier of all of
Speaker 1: their money.
Speaker 3: You're not really again.
Speaker 1: Supposed to do this, But also they're Nazis, so I
Speaker 1: don't feel that bad about this. His comrades did kind
Speaker 1: of think he was a dick, because they noted he
Speaker 1: kept all of the cash for himself and handed out
Speaker 1: the change to his men, So a little bit of
Speaker 1: a dick move there. One of his first real distinguishing
Speaker 1: moments was his successful infiltration of an occupied village by
Speaker 1: dressing up as a Nazi officer. Again, you're not supposed
Speaker 1: to dress in a enemy uniform. That's like against the
Speaker 1: rules of war. But Maxwell was like, well, let me
Speaker 1: get a lot closer, and so I was able to
Speaker 1: figure out how to kill him a lot better fuck it,
Speaker 1: and nobody punishes him for this.
Speaker 2: This is the most Tarantinos thing yet.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 1: And as a result, because this is so successful, he's
Speaker 1: like reconnaissance. He's so good at this, the military is like, hey,
Speaker 1: you might have a future in like spy.
Speaker 3: Shit, we got to give you a new name. So
Speaker 3: they start calling him Leslie Smith. That thing could come
Speaker 3: up with.
Speaker 2: They start calling him Leslie Smith, Leslie Smith. This is
Speaker 2: the British Army.
Speaker 3: This is the British Army. He's issued in name.
Speaker 2: Leslie is like a British name. From that time, you're Leslie.
Speaker 3: Now here's a rifle.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, I thought he's a chief. He's a chief.
Speaker 2: His goal of being British.
Speaker 3: He doesn't sound British.
Speaker 2: You're like, no, no, no, no, you're British now.
Speaker 3: Leslie Leslie Smith.
Speaker 1: Within days after becoming Leslie, he distinguished himself in the
Speaker 1: brutal fighting to cross the Orne River, and his courage
Speaker 1: was celebrated in a Canadian radio broadcast which identified him
Speaker 1: as Leslie de Marier, a name he had never gone by.
Speaker 1: All this confusion and Maxwell's clear ability to navigate it
Speaker 1: marked him out to his superiors. To someone is like, again,
Speaker 1: this guy might make a good spook. He clearly has
Speaker 1: no issue going under a bunch of different names.
Speaker 2: This guy has. This guy has hundreds of names, and
Speaker 2: it's everyone's confused all the time. Yes, but he's navigating
Speaker 2: it with a plum.
Speaker 3: Yeah, make him a spy and I think I think
Speaker 3: it's time for another one. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they do give him another one at this point.
Speaker 1: So he has issued a new name, Private Jones, and
Speaker 1: he's sent to Paris. Has just been recaptured, and the
Speaker 1: Allies are worried that there might be a Communist uprising
Speaker 1: in Paris after beating the Nazis out of it, so
Speaker 1: they send him there and he's like he sometimes he'll
Speaker 1: dresses a British officer, sometimes he dresses a French. He's
Speaker 1: wearing all these different uniforms and fake identities to try
Speaker 1: to like figure out if there's an uprising planned, and
Speaker 1: like there wasn't. Nothing really happens here, but he seems
Speaker 1: to have had a lot of fun. Basically, he's getting
Speaker 1: to like play dress up and get drunk in Paris
Speaker 1: in the middle of like his war experiences, which is
Speaker 1: a nice.
Speaker 4: Little break, and he finally has a cool name.
Speaker 3: And he's finally got a cool name, Private Jones.
Speaker 2: I love that.
Speaker 1: Near the end of nineteen forty four, he is commissioned
Speaker 1: as an officer officially, and since he's now an officer
Speaker 1: and a gentleman in a prestigious regiment, he decides to
Speaker 1: pick what will be his final name for himself.
Speaker 3: What's about you got a Private Jones?
Speaker 2: Private?
Speaker 1: He gets rid of Private Jones because a friend of
Speaker 1: his who's a Scottish officer, is like, you should call
Speaker 1: yourself Robert Maxwell. And that's the name he picks is
Speaker 1: Robert Maxwell. Wow.
Speaker 2: How many total names did he go through on the way?
Speaker 3: It's like ten, right, Like, get so many fucking names?
Speaker 2: You just went through four in the last ninety seconds.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's so many names that after he changes his
Speaker 1: name to Robert Maxwell, his banker sends him an angry
Speaker 1: letter being like, if you change your name one more
Speaker 1: fucking we're dropping you like this, this had better be
Speaker 1: your last name.
Speaker 3: I think that's valid, oh man, but we are this.
Speaker 1: He has finally landed on his ultimate name, so you
Speaker 1: know that's that's good for him?
Speaker 2: Is this is Is this his Wikipedia name? Because that's
Speaker 2: your most important name that you have.
Speaker 3: Yes, this is his Wikipedia name?
Speaker 2: Kay?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Uh speaking of Wikipedia, I'm not really speaking of Wikipedia.
Speaker 3: Go buy something, here's ads. We're back.
Speaker 1: So while Bobby Max is in which is what I'm
Speaker 1: gonna call him, is in Paris, he meets this French lady,
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Minard, and she goes by Betty. I think because
Speaker 1: she's gonna wind up living in the UK and that
Speaker 1: just works better for everybody.
Speaker 4: I was gonna say, I thought it was because you
Speaker 4: were going to say that she heard he likes people
Speaker 4: with different name changes.
Speaker 3: He likes people to change their names. Really into it.
Speaker 3: She's like, She's like, yeah, I like what you like.
Speaker 4: I'm Betty Hi.
Speaker 1: She describes herself as almost passing out when she sees
Speaker 1: how hot he is. That is something everyone of He
Speaker 1: He is described a little later than this by like
Speaker 1: the Check Secret Service as looking like a handsomer Clark Gable,
Speaker 1: Like that's that's how good looking this man is. Oh yeah, No,
Speaker 1: Betty is like I almost passed out when I saw
Speaker 1: him for the first time he was so fucking hot.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry. This is just like he's like a character
Speaker 2: from like a self insert character from a novel where
Speaker 2: it's just he's the he's so tall and handsome, and
Speaker 2: everyone loves him when they see him, and they're con
Speaker 2: giving him promotions and new names. You know. It's like
Speaker 2: I just read the Book of the New Sun last year.
Speaker 2: It's like that character like just describing how awesome he is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 4: I just looked him up and I have questions.
Speaker 1: He does not grow into like him as a mature
Speaker 1: adult is not a particularly handsome man. But this is
Speaker 1: what Betty says, like she writes a book and she
Speaker 1: describes him as this hot and again the check Secret
Speaker 1: Service says he looks like Clark Gable And why would
Speaker 1: they lie about it?
Speaker 3: Right, Like they don't have a vested interest in making
Speaker 3: this guy sound hot.
Speaker 1: He gets just enough time off while waiting to continue
Speaker 1: fighting the nazis that he's able to court Betty and
Speaker 1: propose to her. And during this proposal process, he makes
Speaker 1: the kind of bold and impossible promises that men make
Speaker 1: to women in such times. In this case, the promise is,
Speaker 1: I'm going to win a Military Cross, right, basically that's
Speaker 1: the British Medal of Honor, and he's like, I'm going
Speaker 1: to win one of these for you, Betty, right, and
Speaker 1: then when I get out of the army, I'm going
Speaker 1: to get rich and I'm going to become the Prime
Speaker 1: Minister and we're going to be happy forever. And he
Speaker 1: does not fulfill all of these promises, but he does
Speaker 1: fulfill the first like half of them. So like immediately
Speaker 1: after promising Betty he's going to go win a military
Speaker 1: Cross for her, Like, he just goes and does that
Speaker 1: within weeks, actually within days of them getting married. In
Speaker 1: nineteen forty five, he wins the Military Cross for heroism
Speaker 1: in the face of the enemy. And the actual story
Speaker 1: is fucking nuts. So on January twenty ninth, nineteen forty five,
Speaker 1: his battalion captures a town called Parlow, but they get
Speaker 1: counterattacked by Germans and rubber boats who had crossed this
Speaker 1: river in the middle of the night, and the Germans
Speaker 1: assault the houses that Maxwell and his unit are billeted in,
Speaker 1: and so just in the middle of the night, suddenly
Speaker 1: there's Germans throwing grenades into the rooms that they're in
Speaker 1: and just emptying their machine guns into these houses at
Speaker 1: random at close quarters. It is like the most chaotic
Speaker 1: and disorienting combat situation that it's possible to be in. Right,
Speaker 1: Like you talk to anyone who has been in heavy combat,
Speaker 1: being surprised in a night attack like in urban fighting
Speaker 1: is like, it's just the worst situation you can be in.
Speaker 1: So that the Nazis occupy a bunch of these buildings
Speaker 1: in this town, and Maxwell's commanding officer, Major DJ Watson,
Speaker 1: orders a counter attack, and Watson and his men, as
Speaker 1: soon as they try to counterattack to retake these buildings
Speaker 1: get shot the fuck up and they have to pull
Speaker 1: back and withdraw. And I'm going to quote from John
Speaker 1: Preston's book Fall Here describing what happens next. Withdrawing his men,
Speaker 1: Watson witnessed a remarkable sight. As he wrote in his
Speaker 1: official account, mister Maxwell, also a platoon commander, sallied out
Speaker 1: of the darkness. Maxwell had repeatedly asked to be allowed
Speaker 1: to lead another attempt on the houses. At first, Watson
Speaker 1: had refused his entreaties, but when it became clear that
Speaker 1: the men inside were sure to be killed unless there
Speaker 1: was another rescue attempt, he changed his mind. The officer.
Speaker 1: Maxwell then led two of his sections across bullets, swept
Speaker 1: ground with great dash and determination, and succeeded in contacting
Speaker 1: the platoon who had been holding out in some buildings.
Speaker 1: Showing no regard for his own safety, he led his
Speaker 1: sections in the difficult job of clearing the enemy out
Speaker 1: of the buildings, inflicting many casualties on them and causing
Speaker 1: the remainder to withdraw.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: And the fact that Maxwell lives through this is like
Speaker 1: a fucking mus So. When they get to this surrounded
Speaker 1: British platoon, he thinks that they're Germans, that like the
Speaker 1: Brits in this building are Germans, because again it's super chaotic,
Speaker 1: and so he shouts upstairs in German like come down
Speaker 1: and surrender, and the British soldiers upstairs hear a German
Speaker 1: shouting and start shooting. They go yes, you fucker, and
Speaker 1: open fire and they miss him by inches. Cannot exaggerate
Speaker 1: how dangerous this is. But what is funny is that
Speaker 1: Maxwell feels the need to exaggerate this. And again, you
Speaker 1: don't need to lie about this story. There's documentation from
Speaker 1: your CEO of what you did. You win a medal
Speaker 1: for it, but he would later lie and claim that
Speaker 1: his commanding officer had ordered him not to attack and
Speaker 1: threatened to court martial him, which is just like not true.
Speaker 1: Like his CEO nominates him for the award. Did He's
Speaker 1: not saying like, I'm gonna punish you for doing this,
Speaker 1: but Maxwell just decides later. Now the story doesn't pop
Speaker 1: without the court martial line. I gotta throw that in there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I didn't even though nobody wanted me to do it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they wanted me to do it so little that they
Speaker 2: gave me an award for doing it right.
Speaker 1: And again, you heroically rescued an entire platoon by like
Speaker 1: fighting Nazis and close quarters hand to hand combat. You
Speaker 1: don't need to pretend like, yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just take that win man, take.
Speaker 3: The w Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I'd said earlier he and Betty were already married.
Speaker 1: Sorry that was incorrect. They were engaged at this point
Speaker 1: when he wins this award. So he comes back, He
Speaker 1: gets a week or two of leave, and they get
Speaker 1: married in March of nineteen forty five, and he writes
Speaker 1: her a letter laying out his expectations for the relationship.
Speaker 1: Don't nag don't criticize unduly, give honest appreciation, pay little attentions,
Speaker 1: be courteous. Have the utmost confidence in yourself and in
Speaker 1: your partner. You know he's a fortyes guy, sure, not
Speaker 1: super weird.
Speaker 4: Don't nag.
Speaker 3: Don't nag Number one.
Speaker 2: The end is nice. Have the utmost confidence. That's good.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that part's nice. Yeah. Have confidence in yourself, confident.
Speaker 3: Don't nag me, but don't fucking nag me.
Speaker 2: Don't use any of my fifteen old names.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the month and this again. Within days of marrying Betty,
Speaker 1: he gets the knowledge that his mom and sister were
Speaker 1: executed by the Nazis as hostages.
Speaker 3: Right Jesus.
Speaker 1: And he finds out later they die at Auschwitz, right like,
Speaker 1: that's what happens to most of his family. Most of
Speaker 1: his family is incinerated at Auschwitz, like nearly his entire
Speaker 1: immediate and extended family. But he knows about his mom
Speaker 1: and sister at this point in the spring of nineteen
Speaker 1: forty five, and again, his animating goal as a soldier
Speaker 1: this whole war had been to fight his way back
Speaker 1: to his hometown and save his family, and the sudden
Speaker 1: knowledge that he had failed irrevocably in this goal, obviously,
Speaker 1: through no fault of his own, broke something inside of him.
Speaker 1: In her own memoir, his wife Betty later wrote, he
Speaker 1: was convinced that had he stayed home, he could have
Speaker 1: saved the life of his parents and younger siblings. Nothing
Speaker 1: he achieved in life wouldever compensate for what he had
Speaker 1: not been able to accomplish the rescue of his family,
Speaker 1: which is like the tragic He's going to turn into
Speaker 1: a real piece of shit, obviously, but like, yeah, to
Speaker 1: have that hanging over you, and again you literally couldn't
Speaker 1: have done more to try to save.
Speaker 2: Them, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: So, in addition to his mom and sister, his father, grandfather,
Speaker 1: and all but two of his remaining seven siblings are
Speaker 1: massacred at Auschwitz. Maxwell had always been aggressive towards the enemy, right,
Speaker 1: This is a guy who does not fear being shot.
Speaker 1: But in the wake of this he steps things up
Speaker 1: again to like a Tarantino level and to a war
Speaker 1: crimes level. A week after his wedding, he's back in
Speaker 1: action during an attack on two German villages, and in
Speaker 1: this attack, Lieutenant Maxwell alone, acting alone, kills fifteen ss
Speaker 1: men and takes fourteen prisoners. In other words, he single
Speaker 1: handedly kills or captures an entire platoon of the German
Speaker 1: Army's best Wow, it's fucking nuts.
Speaker 2: Yeah, how do you do that?
Speaker 1: I believe it's this one of these situations where he
Speaker 1: gets them at a bad angle and.
Speaker 3: He's got a machine gun.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, Now there are some allegations that maybe they
Speaker 1: were sodering and he massacres them. That's unclear, but he
Speaker 1: does do that later in this instance. I think it's
Speaker 1: kind of unclear what actually happened. But he increasingly starts
Speaker 1: killing prisoners, right like, in addition to killing guys in
Speaker 1: the heat of combat. And he actually writes about this
Speaker 1: in a letter to his wife, as you can well imagine,
Speaker 1: I am not taking any prisoners, and whatever home my
Speaker 1: men occupy before I leave it, I order it destroyed.
Speaker 1: And those are both war crimes. You're not supposed to
Speaker 1: do either of those things. And in the days and
Speaker 1: weeks that follow that letter, Maxwell.
Speaker 3: Is as good as his word.
Speaker 1: This quote from an article in The Independent describes an
Speaker 1: incident that occurred two weeks after his wedding. His platoon
Speaker 1: was involved in mopping up resistance from the German defenders.
Speaker 1: On a second of April, Maxwell ordered his men to
Speaker 1: fire mortars at a German village. He wrote to Betty.
Speaker 1: A few minutes later, I saw them running out of
Speaker 1: the houses and we started firing at each other. I
Speaker 1: got two of them, and I ordered the mortars to
Speaker 1: shell the village for a few minutes. It proved a
Speaker 1: very effective tactic that led to the surrender the remaining
Speaker 1: Germans and inspired Maxwell to try it once more as
Speaker 1: he moved towards a nearby town. So I sent one
Speaker 1: of the Germans to fetch the mayor of the town.
Speaker 1: He told his wife. In half an hour's time, he
Speaker 1: turned up and I told him he had to go
Speaker 1: tell the Germans to surrender and hang the white flag,
Speaker 1: otherwise the town will be destroyed. One hour later he
Speaker 1: came back saying that the soldiers will surrender and the
Speaker 1: white flag was put up. So we marched off. But
Speaker 1: as soon as we marched off, a German tank open
Speaker 1: fire on us. Luckily he missed, so I shot the
Speaker 1: mayor and withdrew and like because this tank fires at him,
Speaker 1: he blows the mayor's brains out, and that is again
Speaker 1: a war crime. This is an unarmed civilian who was
Speaker 1: not in any position to be giving.
Speaker 3: Orders to that tank.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: One of Maxwell's comrades would later claim that he executed
Speaker 1: multiple German civilians. That he doesn't just shoot the mayor,
Speaker 1: he starts shooting several civilians when this tank fires at them,
Speaker 1: and Maxwell himself would both brag and express regret at
Speaker 1: committing several war crimes later in his life. In one
Speaker 1: interview with journalist Mark Maloy, he discussed an assault on
Speaker 1: a fortified farmhouse. I got up close to the farm
Speaker 1: door and shouted in German, come out with your hands up.
Speaker 1: You're completely surrounded. They came out, and I shot them
Speaker 1: all with my submachine gun. I thought my boys would
Speaker 1: be pleased, but all they said was that's not fair, sir.
Speaker 1: Those lads had surrendered. Maxwell expressed incomprehension to Maloy over
Speaker 1: the reaction of his comrades. Can you understand such an attitude?
Speaker 1: And wow, like, yeah, war crimes are bad. I understand though,
Speaker 1: the discrepancy of like these guys who they don't like
Speaker 1: the Nazis. They're fighting them, but they didn't suffer from
Speaker 1: them right outside of that fighting, and so they're like
Speaker 1: they surrendered there's rules. Maxwell's like, they're Nazis, there's no rules.
Speaker 1: Why wouldn't I kill every one of them?
Speaker 2: I mean, his whole family has been murdered, right, you
Speaker 2: can understand the psychology, they'll get it, yes, yeah, how many?
Speaker 2: Can I just ask? How many languages does this man speak?
Speaker 2: By the way, he grew up speaking Hebrew Yiddish.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he grew up speaking Hebrew Yiddish, and I assume
Speaker 3: he would have learned Czech. He also grows up.
Speaker 1: He speaks German by this point, and he probably grew
Speaker 1: up speaking it, and he speaks English, right, I believe
Speaker 1: he also speaks French at this point.
Speaker 3: Incredible, quite a polyglot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And there's there's a couple of different So in
Speaker 1: that one with Malloy, he's obviously like can you imagine
Speaker 1: being angry at killing Nazis? But there's another moment. His
Speaker 1: sons will talk about where they're watching, like a World
Speaker 1: War two movie, and he comes in and he like sees,
Speaker 1: you know, these young German soldiers on the screen, and
Speaker 1: he's like, oh, you know when I was, when I
Speaker 1: was a young man, I killed boys as old as
Speaker 1: you my sons are today, And like I feel haunted
Speaker 1: by it. I wish I hadn't killed so many of
Speaker 1: them right when I didn't have to. Wow, So I
Speaker 1: don't see it as that is really inconsistent, right that, Like,
Speaker 1: he feels differently about all these massacres as he gets older.
Speaker 1: That said, he commits a lot of war crimes, but
Speaker 1: he's not punished for them, right, No, one's really inclined
Speaker 1: to punish a kid whose family is wiped out in
Speaker 1: the Holocaust for again, mostly massacring the SS, although he
Speaker 1: does kill some civilians too, which isn't good. But yeah,
Speaker 1: very you get it, right, Like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, he's not coming off like a you know, bloodthirsty,
Speaker 2: you know guy who joined the army because he just
Speaker 2: wanted to murder people. He's blinded by grief and rage
Speaker 2: and right, and it's war and people go nuts, like, yes,
Speaker 2: that's how he's coming off.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's coming off is like he wants to save
Speaker 1: his family, he finds out he can't, and he just
Speaker 1: starts killing them in response. He sees his responsible and like, yeah, bro,
Speaker 1: like I get it, you know, hard to blame him
Speaker 1: for all of this, although again, definitely war crimes. So
Speaker 1: the war ends and his military career continues to blossom.
Speaker 1: In nineteen forty six, he is twenty three years old
Speaker 1: and stationed, impartitioned and occupied Berlin, working as an intelligence officer,
Speaker 1: and he proves to have an immediate faculty for the
Speaker 1: skills required in that role. He's an exceptional liar. He
Speaker 1: speaks basically every language, and he's not really scared of anything.
Speaker 1: And it's here that he would make the connections that
Speaker 1: would turn him from the Quentin Tarantino character. He's been
Speaker 1: this episode to the father of one of the most
Speaker 1: abusive industries in the world today. That's all coming in
Speaker 1: part two. Adam, how we feeling.
Speaker 2: I'm feeling great so far? I love this guy. I
Speaker 2: don't understand.
Speaker 3: It's hard not to like him.
Speaker 2: I don't understand why your show's uh called behind the Bastard.
Speaker 2: So far, all he's done is uh go on a
Speaker 2: Nazi killing spree, which we just discussed the ambiguous morals
Speaker 2: of how you know. So, I'm a little confused about
Speaker 2: the format of the show, but I guess I'll find
Speaker 2: on the next part.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is, it is. This is a real whiplash episode.
Speaker 1: I don't know that we've ever had one for the
Speaker 1: whole first episode. It's like this guy fucking owns you're
Speaker 1: on like a Nazi death quest through Europe. Like that's
Speaker 1: fucking sick.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean he again, he feels like the hero
Speaker 2: of like a pulp novel.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I have expected to be attacked by
Speaker 2: a dinosaur and wrestle in a submission. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I guess if you if you want to imagine it,
Speaker 1: you can. You can see this Part two is like
Speaker 1: right after Inglorious Bastards ends, you know, they're carving a
Speaker 1: swastika in that guy's forehead and then like Brad Pitt
Speaker 1: goes and gets a job in finance and destroys the world.
Speaker 1: A good story I think we need.
Speaker 2: Honestly, I want more sequels that are that. I want
Speaker 2: to see the people turn into bad people or disappoint
Speaker 2: or not you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, John McClain grows up in campaigns against the rights
Speaker 1: of incarcerated people to have access to library race or
Speaker 1: something like that after Diehard exactly.
Speaker 2: And I want to see the sequel to the rom
Speaker 2: com where the people fall in love and then they
Speaker 2: get married, and then I want the sequel to them
Speaker 2: ten years later, not fucking each other and being resentful
Speaker 2: and cheating on each other, like that's God. Yeah, show us,
Speaker 2: show us real people breaking down.
Speaker 1: Right, The Star Wars reboot should have been Luke Skywalker
Speaker 1: turning into like an anti Ewok rights activist. Just all right, Adam,
Speaker 1: Where can people find you?
Speaker 2: People can find me? I do a podcast called Factually.
Speaker 2: I also have a YouTube channel where that podcast is,
Speaker 2: and I do monologues and things like that about the
Speaker 2: horrible state of the world. And I have a stand
Speaker 2: up special called Unmedicated. This out on Dropouts on the
Speaker 2: TV platform drop Out.
Speaker 3: Oh hell yeah, I drop I'll love drop Out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, check out Adam everywhere you can find them.
Speaker 1: Check out drop Out also to see Adam and just
Speaker 1: separately because it's great, And check out Fighting Nazis, you know,
Speaker 1: because there's a lot of that that needs doing.
Speaker 3: Anyway, the episode's done.
Speaker 4: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 4: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 4: Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 4: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the
Speaker 4: Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday
Speaker 4: and Friday, subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash
Speaker 4: At Behind the Bastards