Speaker 1: What's being recorded by this meetings. I'm Robert Evans, hosted
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards. Zoom, if you're not aware, has recently
Speaker 1: added in a horrible voice that tells you when the
Speaker 1: meetings being recorded, and it's very traumatizing. But also because
Speaker 1: trauma has broken my brain, I am now in love
Speaker 1: with the zoom recording lady. We're going to be married.
Speaker 1: She sounds hot. I'm not. She sounds fine as hell, right,
Speaker 1: she sounds really good. First of all, I love a
Speaker 1: lady who understands consent. Absolutely. You gotta enthusiastic communications, baby, Yes,
Speaker 1: that's what gets me on, even though she really is
Speaker 1: just saying it's happening whether you like it or not.
Speaker 1: But she gives me actually even consent at all. You
Speaker 1: could argue that, like, well you can press you can
Speaker 1: press the leave meeting button, which I mean that I'm
Speaker 1: tented every time. Every time I see it, I'm like,
Speaker 1: I could leave right now, as if any other time
Speaker 1: I couldn't. But you know, it's nice. It's nice to
Speaker 1: have someone tell you when they're recording you. You know,
Speaker 1: that's us the law, I think, yeah, I mean that's
Speaker 1: probably that's why it's the law. Every state, Like where
Speaker 1: I live, I don't need to tell people if I
Speaker 1: record them. It's you know, states are either one party
Speaker 1: consent or two party state. It's basically so like either
Speaker 1: just the person recording like needs to know, or everyone does.
Speaker 1: Um So, Matt Leeb what's us? Comedian funny guy, podcaster
Speaker 1: guy who podcasts podcast called Yeah, yeah you do. You
Speaker 1: get him in you you drop it into the p
Speaker 1: zones straight away. And this is of course behind the Bastards.
Speaker 1: This is part two of our podcast series about Ryan
Speaker 1: Heart Heydrick maybe the worst of the Nazis um which
Speaker 1: is saying a lot quite a resume line, like in
Speaker 1: your Hell resume set, like what did you do? I'm
Speaker 1: the guy Hitler thought was extra I love the Hell
Speaker 1: entrance interview where you're sitting with the devil and he
Speaker 1: was like, uh, You've got some pretty impressive, you know,
Speaker 1: things that you've done in your life. I see here
Speaker 1: you were vale victorian at Nazi you know, yes, graduated
Speaker 1: Nazi come loudly and uh fucking you know, yeah, you
Speaker 1: got the job burning health for eternity. Uh yeah, what
Speaker 1: an amazing piece of shit. Um So, Matt, you know,
Speaker 1: one of the problems with this episode, Like, right, this
Speaker 1: is the thing we talked. We just did the Dullest
Speaker 1: Brothers episodes. Right, We did a three partner and there
Speaker 1: was like four hours of talking and let out a
Speaker 1: lot you know, um, and it was a lot of
Speaker 1: like we mostly left out the stuff that was was shitty,
Speaker 1: but kind of either you know, like the Kennedy assassination
Speaker 1: stuff where I can't really say one way or the
Speaker 1: other what their role was, or stuff like we didn't
Speaker 1: go to detail at in k Ultra because we're gonna
Speaker 1: do it eventually. We preferred, though, to talk about like
Speaker 1: the you know, the coups and the genocides that extended
Speaker 1: from them, so that we weren't leaving out the biggest
Speaker 1: crimes against humanity that they've committed as part of this
Speaker 1: as the head of the you know, the head and
Speaker 1: then of the CIA and the head of the State
Speaker 1: Department with Reinhard Heydrich in order to make time, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of crimes against humanity that we're just leaving
Speaker 1: out or wallpre because it's like I can't talk about
Speaker 1: all of the epoco crimes against like human nature and
Speaker 1: civilization that this guy did. That's how many crimes against
Speaker 1: humanity he was responsible for. His bio is too big.
Speaker 1: You know, you can't read his entire bio. You've gotta
Speaker 1: you gotta, really fucking you gotta find all of the
Speaker 1: ones that you're like this this will work. You gotta
Speaker 1: you gotta like you've gotta rank them, which is hard
Speaker 1: to do in terms of crimes. So if you're I mean,
Speaker 1: there's there's going to be numerous people listening to this
Speaker 1: podcast asked whose family members were exterminated as a result
Speaker 1: of something Reinhard Heydrich did, and if we left out
Speaker 1: the particular crime against humanity he committed against your ancestors,
Speaker 1: I do apologize. There's too many of them. Yeah, we can't,
Speaker 1: can't go into every single one, which is it just
Speaker 1: goes to show how much of a piece of ship
Speaker 1: this guy was. Really tremendous asshole. Um bad dude, bad,
Speaker 1: really bad dude. So we left off Hitler had just
Speaker 1: kind of taken power, you know, um N three was
Speaker 1: the year that Hitler kind of got his not quite
Speaker 1: ultimate power. Yet you know, there's still he's the Chancellor,
Speaker 1: there's still Hindenburg in there. He hasn't quite taken everything.
Speaker 1: But this is the year during which he he consolidates
Speaker 1: and and and gets total power. Um and it's a process.
Speaker 1: The Nazis don't just get elected and become in charge.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of resistance to them at the start,
Speaker 1: including a lot of people, a lot of conservatives who
Speaker 1: are like, well, we're compromising by letting Hitler be in power,
Speaker 1: but he's not going to get total power, Like, we're
Speaker 1: still going to have all these different checks that against them.
Speaker 1: So the first thing the Nazis have to do is
Speaker 1: destroy any chance of their being checks against them, and
Speaker 1: they do this by taking over all of Germany's police
Speaker 1: agencies um and this was again there's resistance to this
Speaker 1: in Bavaria and a number of other German states. Elements
Speaker 1: of the police resist Nazi control and they're all unsuccessful.
Speaker 1: Right at the end of the day, most cops just
Speaker 1: go along with it, and none of the cops who
Speaker 1: don't go along with it remain cops. Um now uh.
Speaker 1: In April of nineteen thirty three, Heinrich Himmler is appointed
Speaker 1: commander of the Bavarian political police. So there's like criminal police,
Speaker 1: there's there's order police, right which you're kind of like
Speaker 1: your traffic cops. Basically cops you're like, you're drunk in
Speaker 1: the street, and there's political police whose job is to like,
Speaker 1: are you seditious? Are you going to carry out treason
Speaker 1: and ship And they've existed before during the Republic, but
Speaker 1: under the Nazis, the political police are going to be
Speaker 1: by far the biggest and most powerful police, because that's
Speaker 1: the Nazis are most concerned with right um and Heinrich
Speaker 1: Himler but comes ahead of the Bavarias, which is one
Speaker 1: state's political police. He makes Reinhard Hydrick the police commissioner.
Speaker 1: So Himmler is the big picture guy. Ryan Hart is
Speaker 1: going to be running the day to day behind the scenes.
Speaker 1: The Nazis when they, you know, first start taking over
Speaker 1: these agencies, they have themselves a party, and because it's
Speaker 1: a Nazi party, that means they're beating and torturing and
Speaker 1: murdering people that they've had problems with for a while
Speaker 1: but hadn't controlled the cops. Uh Reinhard's wife later wrote,
Speaker 1: quote I had to laugh so hard when she found
Speaker 1: out that Hydrick had been made the police commissioner. Quote.
Speaker 1: Reinhard said he felt great satisfaction that the same people
Speaker 1: who have been locking up the essay and the SS
Speaker 1: just half a year ago, who beat them down with
Speaker 1: rubber truncheon's could now no longer straighten their backs for
Speaker 1: all the bowing they did. It's correct now, Yeah, it's cool,
Speaker 1: it's good ship. Now that he was in charge of
Speaker 1: the political police, Hydrick's job was to arrest every communist
Speaker 1: and social democratic enemy of the Nazi Party and have
Speaker 1: them tortured and beaten. More than two people were locked
Speaker 1: up in the first couple of days. Every one of
Speaker 1: them was beaten badly. Now at this stage, Jews were
Speaker 1: not the Nazi Party's chief priority. Um, so again they're
Speaker 1: rounding up mostly political enemies, mostly leftist. Some of those
Speaker 1: people in Jewish, and they do go after like there's
Speaker 1: especially there's random violence against Jews. But the party is
Speaker 1: not focusing on fucking with Jewish people right now because
Speaker 1: they they still aren't in solid power. The left could
Speaker 1: take things back at this point, so that's going to
Speaker 1: be their focus right. Um. That said, there is a
Speaker 1: lot of violence against Jewish people, and Hydric gleefully related
Speaker 1: to his wife the story of a Jewish man that
Speaker 1: s S officers brought into headquarters. Quote they made short
Speaker 1: work of him. They beat him with dog whips, pulled
Speaker 1: off his shoes and socks, and then he had to
Speaker 1: walk home barefoot in the company of s s men.
Speaker 1: That will give you an idea of how they do things.
Speaker 1: Many Jesuits and Jews have fled from here. No one
Speaker 1: is dead, no one has been seriously injured. But fear fear,
Speaker 1: I tell you, that's really the goal. And this is
Speaker 1: one of the things there was not from the beginning.
Speaker 1: This is and this is debated. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: argument as to whether or not from the beginning there
Speaker 1: was a concerted Nazi plan to um to exterminate the Jews. Um.
Speaker 1: I think there was a concerted willingness to to to
Speaker 1: kill the Jews. I think there was a lot of
Speaker 1: joking and talking about it. I think there were plenty
Speaker 1: of people who didn't have an issue with it, but
Speaker 1: they weren't planning to do it necessarily from the beginning.
Speaker 1: There's strong evidence that it's something that kind of evolved
Speaker 1: over time, and particularly in this period. That's not I
Speaker 1: think one of the important things is that it was
Speaker 1: not necessarily inevitable that the Holocaust would go the way
Speaker 1: that it did. It was inevitable that they were going
Speaker 1: to be Jewish people beaten, that there was gonna be
Speaker 1: some sort of apartheid state, probably not necessarily inevitable that
Speaker 1: what happened was going to happen. Right, That's why part
Speaker 1: of the story, that's the final part of the final solution,
Speaker 1: that's what that's kind of you know, it was it
Speaker 1: was the logical conclusion of the ideology. You know, it
Speaker 1: wasn't uh, it was talked about and joked about and
Speaker 1: you know kind of considered something that people used rhetorically
Speaker 1: as a rhetorical divice, but people didn't actually think this
Speaker 1: is something they would ever try to pull off, like
Speaker 1: not because it just seemed just h not only like irrational,
Speaker 1: but like I mean just logistically not possible. But boy
Speaker 1: where they are wrong. Yeah, they And it's it's one
Speaker 1: of those things it's important to bring up the phrase
Speaker 1: final solution because people don't think about what that actually
Speaker 1: means enough. The Jewish question. Germans didn't invent that phrase, right,
Speaker 1: That's something being asked i'll throughout Europe, and the question
Speaker 1: is like, well, these people aren't like us, but they
Speaker 1: live in our societies. What did we do with them? Right?
Speaker 1: And a lot of that's you know that we've talked
Speaker 1: you see the protocols of the Elder's Zion episode, the
Speaker 1: fact it's the final solution, because the Nazis try a
Speaker 1: couple of other solutions. Yeah, the final one is genocide,
Speaker 1: and that's the important part of the story. I think
Speaker 1: now proportionally more political enemies were arrested in Bavaria under
Speaker 1: Hydrick than in any of the other German states. By
Speaker 1: April ten, ten tho people had been taken into custody
Speaker 1: by as s D. And again it's not just the
Speaker 1: s D. They're using cops as well, right, Um, there's cops,
Speaker 1: and also like they're just kind of like deputizing a
Speaker 1: bunch of Nazis in the s S to act as
Speaker 1: cops so that they can take in people. Um. There
Speaker 1: were protests against these mass arrests, and these protests are
Speaker 1: violently dispatched by the German police. One lawyer, Michael Siegel,
Speaker 1: lodged a complaint to Hydrick against the arrest of a
Speaker 1: Jewish client. Hydrick had him beaten by s S auxiliary
Speaker 1: policeman and then forced march through the city carrying a
Speaker 1: sign that said I will never again complain about the
Speaker 1: police man fucking a and that honestly, it's just like
Speaker 1: especially where we are now, Hydri says, blue lives matter
Speaker 1: straight up. Yeah, straight up as like blue lives matter.
Speaker 1: This is like the fucking the thin the thin blue
Speaker 1: rich you know, yeah, the thin blue Reich. Thank you
Speaker 1: for that. Yeah, it really is. It's God, this fucking
Speaker 1: someone just printing out all your tweets and making you
Speaker 1: walk around barefoot. Yeah. Now, up to this point, Yanhard's
Speaker 1: achievements amount to little more than being a good liar
Speaker 1: and knowing how to do very basic thug shit. But
Speaker 1: it was during this period that he would really distinguish
Speaker 1: himself as an innovator by helping to develop a new
Speaker 1: tool for repression. So German law, when the Nazis came
Speaker 1: to power, provided for something called Shultzhoft, or protective custody.
Speaker 1: This gave police the power, under certain circumstances, to detain
Speaker 1: a person without judicial review, so without a warrant, without
Speaker 1: it charges, to essentially arrest someone to take them into custody.
Speaker 1: And I think the original idea was to allow the
Speaker 1: police to take somebody to custody who might present a
Speaker 1: danger to themselves. Who might be in danger, who was
Speaker 1: in a situation, and it was in a situation where
Speaker 1: they couldn't get a ruling for the course at the
Speaker 1: same time. Right, the problem with giving the police any
Speaker 1: powers like this, even if the goal is maybe to
Speaker 1: protect people, is that once that power exists, fascists will
Speaker 1: find a way to use it, which is the same
Speaker 1: problem we're we're having and will continue to have with
Speaker 1: our police now. In nineteen thirty three, Hydrick and his
Speaker 1: colleagues redefined protective custody in a way that allowed his
Speaker 1: s D and policeman to detain any citizen for any
Speaker 1: reason without involving the courts. This is the start of
Speaker 1: the development of the concentration camp system. This is the
Speaker 1: legal underpinning of why they're able to exist, of how
Speaker 1: they're justified under the law. From this point forward, no
Speaker 1: court cases or warrants were necessary for the police to
Speaker 1: take in someone who was defined by the Nazis as
Speaker 1: quote an enemy of the Reich. Now, all these arrestees
Speaker 1: had to be put somewhere in the existing state prison
Speaker 1: and jail facilities were hardly built to accommodate such numbers.
Speaker 1: In March of nineteen thirty three, an abandoned munitions factory
Speaker 1: was converted into a concentration camp. This was not the
Speaker 1: first under the Nazis. There were prior to this what
Speaker 1: we're called wild Concentration camps are basically just like we're
Speaker 1: gonna appropriate a facility to stick people were arresting, right,
Speaker 1: But they get and and Hydrick is not the only
Speaker 1: person who's a major driver of this. They get this
Speaker 1: abandoned me asitions factory, they put walls around it, they
Speaker 1: turned it into a concentration camp. Now you want to
Speaker 1: guess with the town this factory is in. It's called
Speaker 1: oh god, guess what the town called summer village. You
Speaker 1: might have heard of called oh doc Yeah, that was yeah,
Speaker 1: this is doc How. Yeah. So the facility is quickly
Speaker 1: put in the hands of the s S. Hydrick is
Speaker 1: not in charge of doc Ou, but he's in charge
Speaker 1: of who goes to Dachau and when they're released. Right,
Speaker 1: that's important. There's a separation of powers here. But he's
Speaker 1: a big part of the dock house system because it's
Speaker 1: he who gets to shoes who who gets sent there.
Speaker 1: You know, um Dackau is you. Everyone knows the name
Speaker 1: doc How. There's a shifver down the human spine when
Speaker 1: you say it. It was a horrible place. Prisoners were
Speaker 1: relatively regularly beaten to death. Thirteen people were killed in
Speaker 1: one month in nineteen thirty three, and a lot more
Speaker 1: would follow. By early nineteen thirty four, Ryan Hard's police
Speaker 1: had arrested more than sixteen thousand people. Most of these
Speaker 1: people were beaten, arrested and released and given a warning
Speaker 1: basically that you were you were arresting these people, you
Speaker 1: beat the ship out of him, and you say, hey,
Speaker 1: stay the funk out of politics. From that right, more
Speaker 1: than two thousand though, the people who were like seeing
Speaker 1: as the real threats were interned in dock out. Now,
Speaker 1: it's important to note that the Nazis and him Learn
Speaker 1: in particular. Again, we're big about separation of responsibilities. So
Speaker 1: the guy who actually runs dock out is a fellow
Speaker 1: named Theodore Ike, and we're gonna talk about him for
Speaker 1: just a little bit because, like Hydrick, Ike was a
Speaker 1: former military man who had been dismissed very quickly for
Speaker 1: bad behavior. Um so he'd been disgraced because of like
Speaker 1: fucked up ship he did in the military, kicked out
Speaker 1: of the military. He had actually been arrested in the
Speaker 1: Weimar years and sent to a psychiatric asylum because he
Speaker 1: had illegal explosives that he was planning to do something
Speaker 1: fucked up with He's like, gonna make a kind of
Speaker 1: guy you get um. So he does well under the
Speaker 1: Nazis and they give him They put him in charge
Speaker 1: of doc Out. And part of why I'm bringing ike
Speaker 1: story up is because he and Hydrick have a similar background.
Speaker 1: These are guys who had nothing before Nazism, who had
Speaker 1: disgraced themselves, and Nazism gave them a second chance, and
Speaker 1: they really saw it, not just in ideological terms, but
Speaker 1: this is my only chance to matter. Because the Nazi
Speaker 1: regime was fiercely competitive, and because competing within that crew
Speaker 1: often meant being the hardest and most violent, Hydrock and
Speaker 1: Ike would both compete to see who could be the
Speaker 1: most brutal, and that's a big part of why doc
Speaker 1: Ou becomes so horrible. Hydrocs guys are competing to see
Speaker 1: how many people they can arrest, um, how brutally they
Speaker 1: can crack down on descent, how frightening they can be.
Speaker 1: Ike is competing with his to make his concentration camp
Speaker 1: the most horrifying place. He possibly can. None of them
Speaker 1: are getting necessarily from most of the stuff. They're not
Speaker 1: getting orders from above. They're interpreting things that their superiors
Speaker 1: are saying and passing and seeing what can I do
Speaker 1: to please them? And that leads them to be as
Speaker 1: extreme as possible. God, it's just like it's just like
Speaker 1: spawned from this like fucking petty egoistic competition about who
Speaker 1: could be a bigger piece of ship. It's like exactly,
Speaker 1: you know, It's like it's like fucking John Lennon writing
Speaker 1: Strawberry Fields and Paul McCartney writing, uh, you know, Penny Lane,
Speaker 1: but like the dark side of that. You know, it's
Speaker 1: like they both made themselves better at what they did,
Speaker 1: but but at murder, but it but but it murder. Yes,
Speaker 1: you could call Ryan Hart Heydrick Theodore I. Kinder came
Speaker 1: the Beatles of genocide. That's what what I'm trying to
Speaker 1: do is tie the Beatles into Nazism. So can you
Speaker 1: get a T shirt that's like the cover of Abbey Road,
Speaker 1: but with the Nazis walking across the street? Can we
Speaker 1: You think it's gonna go over? Well? Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that will be really useful merch. Alright, I'm gonna make
Speaker 1: it on my own. Yeah, I mean conceptually I get it,
Speaker 1: but probably not something that I would walk around. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not a joke people passing on the street. I
Speaker 1: still I still get. I still get strange looks and
Speaker 1: I where the maybe leaders are a bad idea emerge.
Speaker 1: M it's it's not Rushmore but with all the worst
Speaker 1: bastards ever. Like, Okay, I could see how that's hard
Speaker 1: can be misinterpreted family events, though you bring the shirt. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you bring it the family events, and you mostly just
Speaker 1: keep it inside. I have I have a shirt, an
Speaker 1: entire T shirt that's just a giant close up of
Speaker 1: a butthole, and I don't wear it outside, you know,
Speaker 1: but I enjoy that I have it. Yeah, I have.
Speaker 1: I have a T shirt from the band Millions of
Speaker 1: Dead Cops, which I wear when I'm not driving anywhere.
Speaker 1: When I get pulled over in that shirt, I mean
Speaker 1: behind the police shirt is strictly for the house. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all of your merch are just shirts no one wears.
Speaker 1: Don't don't wear these if you might be over please um.
Speaker 1: So again, it's important to understand kind of the way
Speaker 1: this These guys are kind of independent at Lee trying
Speaker 1: to top each other. And that's how a lot of
Speaker 1: these that's how a lot of the worst crimes of
Speaker 1: the Nazi regime are committed. And I'm gonna quote from
Speaker 1: Robert Gervat again. Hydrick's actions cannot simply be understood as
Speaker 1: those of a bloodthirsty sadist playing a preconceived role in
Speaker 1: building a totalitarian police state. Since joining the s s
Speaker 1: and nineteen thirty one, he had immersed himself in a
Speaker 1: political milieu which thrived on the notion of being locked
Speaker 1: in a life and death struggle. Winning that struggle required
Speaker 1: decisive action against enemies in respect of whom even the
Speaker 1: most unimaginable cruelty was justified. As his future deputy vern
Speaker 1: are best observed, Hydrick tended to project his own proclivity
Speaker 1: towards intrigues and violence onto his real or imagined enemies.
Speaker 1: Finally free to move against an ideological enemy who had
Speaker 1: supposedly enjoyed the upper hand until nineteen thirty three, he
Speaker 1: considered terror a justifiable weapon, in fact, the only adequate
Speaker 1: weapon against such evil. We can talk about Q and
Speaker 1: on here we could talk about the modern Republican Party.
Speaker 1: The way that framing your enemies as like demonic, like
Speaker 1: inherently destructive, omniscile foes justifies any kind of terror you
Speaker 1: can dream of, both in human and also uh, the
Speaker 1: perception that they are just constantly on top, even in
Speaker 1: moments in which you are literally on top. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: if you happen to get you have to murder them
Speaker 1: as soon as you get the chance, because you know
Speaker 1: they're they're always winning otherwise because you're trying to be
Speaker 1: in the playing field. Yeah, because they would murder me
Speaker 1: if they were if they if they had the chance
Speaker 1: to do it, then it's like, well they've ben't had
Speaker 1: the chance to do it. They never did, so they
Speaker 1: actually didn't. Uh yeah, yeah you notice here it's still
Speaker 1: alive and they never did that. But yeah they noticed that.
Speaker 1: Um anyway, so uh. While Hydric used terror as a weapon,
Speaker 1: he also spent a lot of his time in this
Speaker 1: period and throughout actually his early career in the as
Speaker 1: a Nazi. As much as he is arresting dissidents, having
Speaker 1: them tortured, having them sent to concentration camps, as much
Speaker 1: as he does that, he threatens his subordinates with punishment
Speaker 1: for illegally beating or killing detainees. Um, this was not
Speaker 1: out of any kind of humanitarian desire. This is out
Speaker 1: of the fact that he wants to be seen. He
Speaker 1: wants the system he is running to be seen as
Speaker 1: orderly and lawful. He does not want the majority of
Speaker 1: the German population to be frightened of the Nazis, because
Speaker 1: at this point they're still trying to win public support.
Speaker 1: And all these guys who will be fine with if
Speaker 1: you say I've put a criminal in a concentration camp,
Speaker 1: they're like, fine, if they see a dude getting beaten
Speaker 1: in the street, that's disorder, that's nasty. They don't like that. Um,
Speaker 1: they want every death to be uh, at least have
Speaker 1: some semblance of justification in the eyes of people who
Speaker 1: aren't there, who don't know the reasons why, and who
Speaker 1: are just going to take the story, the general story
Speaker 1: that the fucking that the perpetrators they're gonna it's It's
Speaker 1: like a lot of Republicans were horrified by the George
Speaker 1: Floyd video, but at the same time, as long as
Speaker 1: they don't see a video of it, they're just like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: he had he might have had a gun, right, They
Speaker 1: don't care. All they need to know is like, oh,
Speaker 1: a cop shot a dangerous man. I don't care about that.
Speaker 1: You see the reality of it, and it horrifies you.
Speaker 1: That's the thing Hydrick. He's very savvy. He knows I
Speaker 1: don't want random street violence. I don't want grams. I
Speaker 1: want orderly, state sanctioned legal repression and murder. That's Hydrick's
Speaker 1: fucking bag, baby, um so. One of Hydrick's most prominent
Speaker 1: victims in this period was the Nobel laureate and critic
Speaker 1: of the Nazis, Thomas Man. Now Man had the fortune
Speaker 1: to be out on a reading tour of Europe when
Speaker 1: the Nazis took power, and he had been a vociferous
Speaker 1: critic of the Nazis, very public. He's a very famous intellectual.
Speaker 1: He'd been attacking them for uh for years. And he's
Speaker 1: out of Germany when they take power, and he is
Speaker 1: a smart guy. So he's like, I'm not going back home.
Speaker 1: It seems like this isn't gonna be good for me.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna hang out elsewhere and wait, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna just chill for a minute on this whole going
Speaker 1: back to Germany thing, just kind of see what happened. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I want to let this play out a
Speaker 1: little bit before I go back Um. And while he
Speaker 1: was away, Hydrick's police rated Mon's home and took his cars,
Speaker 1: bank accounts, and private possessions. He eventually succeeded in having
Speaker 1: Thomas Mann stripped of his German citizenship. By nineteen thirty four,
Speaker 1: Himler and Hydroc had created a remarkably effective terror regime
Speaker 1: in Bavaria. Their superiors noted their success and noted that
Speaker 1: Bavaria Nazi control is more complete. Their elimination of political
Speaker 1: enemies had been more effectively carried out than anywhere else
Speaker 1: in the New Reich. And so in April of nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty four, Hydric has given control of the Prussian Gestapo
Speaker 1: as well. And we're not gonna the Gestapo doesn't exist
Speaker 1: before the Nazis. The Gestapo is kind of like unifying
Speaker 1: these Nazi intelligence apparatus is with the state political police,
Speaker 1: and that becomes the Gestapo. That's more Gering's bag. But
Speaker 1: Hydric is kind of from the beginning in control of
Speaker 1: a lot of it, in control of the practical details
Speaker 1: of what it does at least um. And so he's
Speaker 1: given control of the Prussian Gestapo in ninety four. This
Speaker 1: puts thousands of secret police and multiple states under his hands.
Speaker 1: So now he's basically in charge of repression in Bavaria
Speaker 1: UH and in Prussia UM. It also means that he's
Speaker 1: now officially a big man in the Nazi party and
Speaker 1: this would give him meaningful input during the next critical
Speaker 1: stage stage of Nazi development. Now, if you'll remember, Ernst
Speaker 1: Rome and his brown Shirts had been a major locust
Speaker 1: of Nazi power in the early years. These guys are
Speaker 1: hitler street fighters, his gangsters, and Rome is a military veteran.
Speaker 1: He's a very tough man. He's good at organizing street fighters.
Speaker 1: He's also a revolutionary. Rome isn't satisfied when Hitler takes power.
Speaker 1: For one thing, he doesn't want to rebuild the German military.
Speaker 1: He wants to replace the military with his essay. And
Speaker 1: he's a he's a he's a he's a He's not
Speaker 1: someone who's ever going to be satisfied with what the
Speaker 1: Nazi state became, because he's just a lot more radical
Speaker 1: than that. And once you're in power, a guy like
Speaker 1: Rome is a liability threat. Yeah, because he keeps doing
Speaker 1: the street terror in random islands and ship and at
Speaker 1: this point, the Nazis are trying to play nice with
Speaker 1: the conservatives. They want the center right, the middle class
Speaker 1: majority of Germany to like see like, Oh, these Nazi
Speaker 1: guys are are are safe and normal and we're gonna
Speaker 1: have a stable society under them. Um So they got
Speaker 1: to get rid of fucking Rome. And I'm gonna quote
Speaker 1: from a rite up by Bleaker Street Media here. While
Speaker 1: still fiercely loyal to Hitler, Rome's vision for Nazi Party
Speaker 1: future was increasingly at odds with Hitler's. For Hydrick and Hitler,
Speaker 1: there was a more pragmatic problem with the Essay. Although
Speaker 1: the two men ran the s D in the Gestapo,
Speaker 1: these organizations were officially under the domain of the Essay
Speaker 1: in Rome. To secure their independence, Hitler and Hydric conspired
Speaker 1: with Herman Garring to create a case against Rome. On
Speaker 1: June four, Hydrick presented a dussier, a fabricated evidence to
Speaker 1: Hitler that detailed the trees in this plot in which
Speaker 1: the French were paying Rome twelve million marks to overthrow
Speaker 1: the Reich. Based on Hydrick's trumped up report, Hitler authorized
Speaker 1: a surprise attack against the Essay to take place on
Speaker 1: June thirty, Hydrick's men swooped in, arresting Rome with eight
Speaker 1: along with eighty five of his top officers, many of
Speaker 1: whom we're intentionally shot to death in the process. When
Speaker 1: the smoke cleared, the Essay had been dissolved. Between a
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty and two hundred people, including Rome, had
Speaker 1: been murdered, and Hydrock and Himler were now free to
Speaker 1: run the sd and Gestapo as they saw fit. This
Speaker 1: is the Night of Long Knives. Hydrick is the big
Speaker 1: man orchestrating this. Yeah, you gotta you gotta love a
Speaker 1: foreign plot. That's just classic. That's a classic tactic. Just
Speaker 1: uh you know, he's uh, he's sucking. I heard him
Speaker 1: talking to a Portuguese guy about taking over. So uh
Speaker 1: time the murder all of them. It's really it's it's smart.
Speaker 1: It always works. Yep, yep. Now, um so after the
Speaker 1: Night of Long Knives. The big thing that this does
Speaker 1: is it removes the s S finally from underneath the
Speaker 1: Essay shadow. And because of this, the Essay is able
Speaker 1: to grow to become the preminent terror organization within the
Speaker 1: Nazi state. Now, while Hydrick's career was soaring, his income
Speaker 1: began to increase commence. Really as well, he benefited from
Speaker 1: a number of loans from wealthy members of the Nazi Party,
Speaker 1: which he was not expected to repay. He's basically just
Speaker 1: being given money. It's graft, you know. So he's able
Speaker 1: to build a mansion in a summer home and a
Speaker 1: hunting lodge, and despite his new wealth, he could not
Speaker 1: be ours to take care of his family. His parents
Speaker 1: were destitute still, and they begged him for loans, despite
Speaker 1: the fact that he'd begged them for a loan two
Speaker 1: and a half years earlier. He turns them down and
Speaker 1: doesn't give them a fucking dime. Yeah, it's he's cold
Speaker 1: as ice. His sister repeatedly tells him their parents are
Speaker 1: going to starve if he doesn't help, and eventually he's
Speaker 1: able to give. He gives his mom like a little
Speaker 1: bit of money, but he requires her to take care
Speaker 1: of his kids in order to get it. Like he's
Speaker 1: just like, yeah, he's just such a piece of ship. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's called program, And obviously we're talking about one of
Speaker 1: the worst seas in history. Being addict to his family
Speaker 1: kind of pales, but it's it's useful. It provides some
Speaker 1: con text just because of like this guy wasn't even
Speaker 1: nice to the people he loved. Like he's just a
Speaker 1: real bad person. Yeah, it just it adds color to
Speaker 1: it because you're just like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, he
Speaker 1: hates the Jews, he's going to kill all the communist
Speaker 1: blah blah blah blah blah, but his his own mother.
Speaker 1: Fucking Hey, Robert, Robert, you know who will be nice
Speaker 1: to all of our moms? The products and services that
Speaker 1: support this podcast, I mean one would hope except for
Speaker 1: Raytheon because you know who likes to show up at
Speaker 1: weddings his mom's and you know what Raytheon likes to
Speaker 1: do to weddings. Ah, here's some ads. We're back and
Speaker 1: we're talking about the Raytheon bit that I've been doing
Speaker 1: for like a hearing change now probably our longest running bit,
Speaker 1: and I try to like we've had a number of
Speaker 1: running bits on the show that I try to recycle
Speaker 1: because I don't want to get old. You know, like
Speaker 1: we don't do the dur stuff anymore, we don't go
Speaker 1: through in bagels anymore, and we may I mean when
Speaker 1: when we can go in person again. We'll have a
Speaker 1: redux of throwing ship around the studio. Because it is fun.
Speaker 1: But um, you don't want things to get too old.
Speaker 1: I can't stand up with Raytheon. I can't quit them
Speaker 1: because they're just they just give us material. There's an
Speaker 1: company whose former executive runs the Defense Department who has
Speaker 1: like orchestrated a series of who's who's like largely responsible
Speaker 1: for instigating and continuing to fund violence in a number
Speaker 1: of international countries in order to like make profit for themselves.
Speaker 1: And their name is Raytheon. They're calling like fucking hell,
Speaker 1: it's like a classic super villain name and the And
Speaker 1: I also, you know, I love any any like evil
Speaker 1: corporation social media account during any month in which they're
Speaker 1: supposed to be like uh you know, sort of like
Speaker 1: an ethnic pride or like a pride, and they're just
Speaker 1: we love trans people. Were Theon is asking all of
Speaker 1: our all of our customers to be better. Yeah, love
Speaker 1: it when IBM does ship like that, because like they
Speaker 1: literally built the punch card system that tricks the Jews
Speaker 1: that used in order to to orchestrate the Holocaust. Thanks IBM.
Speaker 1: Surely Ray Theon will never be a part of anything
Speaker 1: like that. They wouldn't let their missile guidance technology be
Speaker 1: used to massacre. I don't know, dissidence against the US
Speaker 1: government or against like a US backed regime in a
Speaker 1: foreign country. That would never be the race, not ray Theon.
Speaker 1: They support all a A p I people, as you
Speaker 1: can tell by last month tweet thanks for that ray Theon. God.
Speaker 1: People keep like telling me that they found out that
Speaker 1: the knife missile, the rn I n X exists and
Speaker 1: they thought it was a joke. I was making it first, Like,
Speaker 1: you can't joke about the funniest thing about the knife
Speaker 1: missile too, is it's they built this missile that is
Speaker 1: just filled with knives so that they can kill people
Speaker 1: who are like they can kill a single target without
Speaker 1: killing the people around them, right, because a knife missile
Speaker 1: less collateral damage than an I guess it's legitimately the
Speaker 1: fun I think about the knife missile, it's the best
Speaker 1: idea anyone's had in the war on terror in twenty years, like,
Speaker 1: which just means it's not awful, but it's the only
Speaker 1: good idea ever. And I was like, oh, hey, we
Speaker 1: can actually kill less people with a knife missile. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: And it was invented by a middle schooler in the
Speaker 1: nineties who like new metal. You know, it's the most
Speaker 1: new metal idea. This is my band knife missile, oh
Speaker 1: manon anyway, when compared. Yeah, so throughout the rest of
Speaker 1: the early in mid nineteen thirties, Right and Harder Hydro
Speaker 1: embarked in a project to take control of all political
Speaker 1: intelligence gathering agencies in Germany. And I'm not going to
Speaker 1: go into extreme detail about all the politicking and Nazi
Speaker 1: in fighting here. The book Hitler's Hangman is I think
Speaker 1: it's a very good biography, very readable biography. Goes into
Speaker 1: a lot of detail about this um. What's important is
Speaker 1: how he directed the increasingly powerful intelligence ratis he came
Speaker 1: to control. Now, early on, the Nazis had had real enemies,
Speaker 1: you know, communists and social democrats were trying to stop
Speaker 1: the Nazis, right, they were trying to make a different
Speaker 1: kind of government. They were legitimately enemies of the Nazis.
Speaker 1: By five right Hard largely rein Hard, But he and
Speaker 1: his colleagues have wiped out the communist underground. There is
Speaker 1: no more political opposition to the regime that has any
Speaker 1: kind of meaningful power. Those guys have all been killed,
Speaker 1: put in concentration camps or frightened outside of political activision activism.
Speaker 1: This presented a problem because the Reich Interior Minister, a
Speaker 1: guy named phil Helm Frick, who was a conservative more
Speaker 1: than really a Nazi. Um. He doesn't uh, he doesn't
Speaker 1: really want a totalitarian state, right, he wants a right
Speaker 1: wing dominated state where the left is illegal. But he
Speaker 1: doesn't want like, he doesn't want to live in what
Speaker 1: Nazi Germany becomes. UM And he's on paper Himler's boss.
Speaker 1: And now that the regime has wiped out the left,
Speaker 1: he's like, well, we should probably get rid of these
Speaker 1: extra judicial powers we gave the s S to allow
Speaker 1: them to wipe out the left. Otherwise this could get bad.
Speaker 1: We don't want this to get weird. Yeah, well does
Speaker 1: it get bad? Frick giant piece of shit. So Frick.
Speaker 1: There's a fight between him and Uh and Himmler and Hydrick,
Speaker 1: and Frick loses this fight in June of nineteen thirty six,
Speaker 1: when Hitler formally appoints Himmler head of all German police.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote from the book Hitler's Hangman here.
Speaker 1: The victory of the s S and the power struggle
Speaker 1: with the Reich Interior Ministry was primarily the result of
Speaker 1: Hitler's decision to favor a more open ended definition of
Speaker 1: Nazism's enemies, a definition which Hydric had crucially contributed to
Speaker 1: and which went far beyond the persecution of the political
Speaker 1: opposition that is typical of all dictatorships. In late nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty four, Himler and Hydric came to the conclusion that
Speaker 1: the justification of a permanent police state required a carefully
Speaker 1: elaborated scenario portraying an all pervasive and subtly camouflaged network
Speaker 1: of enemies who made necessary and extensive and sophisticated security
Speaker 1: system to detect, expose, and defeat them. In nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: five and a series of articles for the s S
Speaker 1: journal Dash Schwartz Corps and republished in nineteen thirty six
Speaker 1: as the Transformations of Our Struggle, Hydric publicly defined such
Speaker 1: threats and the means to combat them, indicating the need
Speaker 1: for a momentous reorientation of the Gestapo's activities. His central
Speaker 1: argument was that even after the successful elimination of the
Speaker 1: KPD and the SPD, the Communists and the Social Democrats,
Speaker 1: the enemies of the German people were by no means defeated.
Speaker 1: After achieving the immediate goal of Hitler's appointment as chancellor
Speaker 1: in January nineteen thirty three. Many Germans wrongly assumed that
Speaker 1: Nazi rule was now permanently secured. Hydro consisted that the
Speaker 1: battle was by no means over. Instead, the struggle against
Speaker 1: Germany's enemies now faced its most difficult and ultimately its
Speaker 1: decisive phase, which would require quote years of bitter struggle
Speaker 1: in order to repulse and destroy the enemy once and
Speaker 1: for all. According to Hydric, the driving forces of the
Speaker 1: enemy always remained the same world jewry, world freemasonry, and
Speaker 1: political priests who abused the freedom of religious expression and
Speaker 1: spirituality of large portions of the population for political reasons.
Speaker 1: First of all, I love that this is just like
Speaker 1: the foreign plot is now coming from inside the house. Uh.
Speaker 1: It could be anyone specifically, the Jews and the Freemasons
Speaker 1: and the Jesuits. The Jesuits, yes, which uh? And the
Speaker 1: fucking they weren't these guys freemasons. Wasn't he a Freemason?
Speaker 1: His dad was? His dad was? Yeah? No, wonder that
Speaker 1: this is why he's letting his dad starve, Like I
Speaker 1: think he believes only parts of what he's said. Of course,
Speaker 1: now this is where we get into because again he's
Speaker 1: saying this because it justifies his power. Right. This is
Speaker 1: one of the most important things you have to understand
Speaker 1: about the Nazis. First off, even when Hitler came to power,
Speaker 1: it was not a foregone conclusion that Nazi Germany would
Speaker 1: become the kind of tatalitarian state that it did, or
Speaker 1: that the Holocaust would happen. We can argue over whether
Speaker 1: or not Hitler had a grand scheme or a desire
Speaker 1: to do that from the beginning, but it was not
Speaker 1: foregone that he would have the power even once he
Speaker 1: was in charge, because once he became the chancellor, there
Speaker 1: are still a lot of people in the government, people
Speaker 1: in the military, who could overthrow him, who could kick
Speaker 1: him out, and who didn't agree with most of what
Speaker 1: he was saying. Um And the evidence we have shows
Speaker 1: that Hitler did not pursue genocide in an organized and
Speaker 1: cohesive manner from the beginning of his time in power.
Speaker 1: The pivot from left wingers as enemies to Jews and
Speaker 1: other internal enemies, which was orchestrated by Hydrich and justified
Speaker 1: by him in his public columns, was a key part
Speaker 1: of why the Holocaust came to pass, and while Reinhard
Speaker 1: was surely an anti Semite by this period, he did
Speaker 1: this for fundamentally careerist reasons. If the Reich's new enemies
Speaker 1: were elusive racial and religious enemies, the police were clearly
Speaker 1: ill equipped to handle such a threat. He was able
Speaker 1: to increase his personal power and his personal clout by
Speaker 1: pitching the s S his SS as the ideological shock troops,
Speaker 1: which is what he called them of Nazism. Man. So
Speaker 1: it's just like, uh, you know, it's completely void of
Speaker 1: any ideology beyond your own personal power. Void because I
Speaker 1: think he probably tells himself and believes elements of what
Speaker 1: he's saying, But the ideology is secondary to the desire
Speaker 1: from exactly, yeah, it's secondary to it. It's like, you know,
Speaker 1: because you can take any German off the street and
Speaker 1: uh in this period and they have you know, a
Speaker 1: cultural fucking anti Semitism, right, But like this guy is
Speaker 1: actively organizing a mass genocide because he wants a better
Speaker 1: title and he wants more people to work under him.
Speaker 1: I mean just like this is like this is the
Speaker 1: logical conclusion of anyone in like a PMC class. It's like,
Speaker 1: I want to be the biggest baddest middle manager of
Speaker 1: all time. Yes, exactly. Yeah, it's kind of hydra Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's a general side. Yeah. Now, Reinhard saw Freemasonry and
Speaker 1: communism in fact, and also the political church right, which
Speaker 1: is the Catholic church here you said Jesuits earlier. That's
Speaker 1: a big part of he goes after the Catholics. He
Speaker 1: does have to be very careful going after the Catholics
Speaker 1: because a lot of Germans are Catholics. And he and
Speaker 1: I mean yeah, he is too, um so he One
Speaker 1: of the ways he frames is that like Freemason's communists,
Speaker 1: these political clerics are agents of Judaism. So Judaism is
Speaker 1: just one of a couple of internal enemies, but it's
Speaker 1: the one that's behind the others generally, and in fact,
Speaker 1: all social justice movements and they do frightenness is like
Speaker 1: they call it. Social justice movements are part of a
Speaker 1: scheme to weaken Germany by the Jews. In order to
Speaker 1: combat this scheme, Hydrick and his men would need quote
Speaker 1: utter hardness. He acknowledged that the cruelty his men would
Speaker 1: have to display in order to do what was necessary
Speaker 1: would be difficult for them, saying at one meeting quote
Speaker 1: it is almost too difficult for an individual. But we
Speaker 1: must be hard as granite or else our viewer's work
Speaker 1: will be in vain. Much later people will be grateful
Speaker 1: for what we have taken upon us. God, it's just
Speaker 1: like we all have to just stick together, just a
Speaker 1: bunch of men, hard as a rock, hard, a hard dude,
Speaker 1: just hard dudes, just fucking Oh, I'm talking vaining and hard.
Speaker 1: That's what we have to be in order to accomplish this.
Speaker 1: Hidrick was a major reason why the German police operated
Speaker 1: throughout the Reich in a permanent state of emergency. That's
Speaker 1: his a big part his doing. He's the guy who
Speaker 1: suggests this. At least he's like, we have extra powers
Speaker 1: because of a state of emergency. If the state of
Speaker 1: emergency is over, because you've purged all of your political enemies,
Speaker 1: you lose those powers. So he's like, no, no, no no,
Speaker 1: because of all the Jews in the Freeman, there's still
Speaker 1: an immer ergencies, so we need these powers, though they
Speaker 1: never leave this state of emergency. Um now, to help
Speaker 1: develop new plans to deal with this new threat, he
Speaker 1: brings experts into the s S. One of these experts,
Speaker 1: his Jewish expert is a guy you might have heard
Speaker 1: of named Adolph Aikman. Now later on in the sixties,
Speaker 1: when he goes to trial and is eventually executed by
Speaker 1: the State of Israel. Um Hannah rent Will famously right
Speaker 1: of Aikman that he embodied the banality of evil because
Speaker 1: he's he's a middle manager type guy. He's his dude
Speaker 1: who looks like someone you might see in lying at
Speaker 1: the fucking elementary school picking his kid up in a minivan. Um,
Speaker 1: and he's a big He's like Hydrick and that he's
Speaker 1: a he's an implementation guy. You know, he's not the
Speaker 1: guy out they're giving the speeches. He doesn't get anybody like.
Speaker 1: He doesn't he doesn't fire up the masses. But in
Speaker 1: a meeting when you've got like multiple different government agencies,
Speaker 1: Hydrock and Eichmann are the guys who are capable of
Speaker 1: wrangling everyone together. They're like whips in the Senate, right,
Speaker 1: they whip votes, they whip support together, and they organize
Speaker 1: and figure out how to carry out plans of action.
Speaker 1: Adolf Eichman is hired to the s S as his
Speaker 1: Jewish expert, and his experience for being a Jewish expert
Speaker 1: is that Um not not. At that point he eventually
Speaker 1: does learn Sebieish. He had been a salesman um and
Speaker 1: he liked crime books. He liked he liked, he liked
Speaker 1: detective novels. He liked the same books that Hidrick did.
Speaker 1: That's why he gets the job. You're the jew expert.
Speaker 1: You like the same books, and you you used to
Speaker 1: go to that deli all the time. You know what
Speaker 1: locks one skin? You've had aer Dill? Tell us about them?
Speaker 1: What are they like? The articles Hydric wrote about the
Speaker 1: internal Jewish threat played a direct role in bringing on
Speaker 1: what scholars called the second anti Semitic wave in Nazi Germany,
Speaker 1: which began in nineteen thirty five with mass spontaneous violence
Speaker 1: against Jewish people in businesses. Hydrock did this because it
Speaker 1: was bad for the economy and for the sense of order.
Speaker 1: He knew that the German middle class, center right families
Speaker 1: did not like seeing that ship. The Nuremberg laws. Then
Speaker 1: we're a response to street anti semitism. The Nuremberg laws
Speaker 1: existed to stop people from beating and murdering Jews in
Speaker 1: the street and destroying their businesses. Because that ship is
Speaker 1: bad for business. Right, there were like no, no, no, no, no, listen,
Speaker 1: we're gonna do this through the state. We're gonna have
Speaker 1: this state put they're they're metaphorical boot on their neck. Yes,
Speaker 1: we need to oppress the Jews with law, not with
Speaker 1: random street violence, exactly exactly. And we need to know
Speaker 1: you know what constitutes did you? We need to know
Speaker 1: how much blood you need to have, you know how
Speaker 1: many how many times you know you've been to the theater.
Speaker 1: You know, we need to know all this stuff first
Speaker 1: before we can categorize you exactly. And that's a big
Speaker 1: part of the Nuremberg Laws. We're not going to go
Speaker 1: into nearly enough to tail. I mean, there's whole just
Speaker 1: about the Nuremberg Laws, and there's this process of determining
Speaker 1: what a Jew is because this is and this is
Speaker 1: a big misconception. The Jews are not targeted by the
Speaker 1: Nazi state for their religion. They are targeted for their ethnicity.
Speaker 1: If you're a someone who had a Jewish mom and
Speaker 1: you're a hardcore Protestant or a Catholic, you're a Jew.
Speaker 1: To ryanhard Hydrick. If you're an atheist and you marry
Speaker 1: a fucking bohemian woman who's a Catholic, you're a Jew.
Speaker 1: To Ryan Hard Hydrick, it didn't even matter if it
Speaker 1: was within Jewish law, like if you had a Jewish
Speaker 1: father but not a Jewish mother, like you know, that's
Speaker 1: not haloic lee Jewish. But and it depends because like
Speaker 1: the under the Nuremberg laws, I think that guy wouldn't
Speaker 1: be a Jew. He changed, Yeah, he he liked the
Speaker 1: Nuremberg Laws, but he thought they didn't go far enough.
Speaker 1: And his big issues is that, well, this doesn't define
Speaker 1: enough people as Jewish, right, there's too many ways for
Speaker 1: someone with Jewish ancestry to slip into the people's racial community.
Speaker 1: And that's a problem for me. But he sees still
Speaker 1: this is a big step forward, right, the Nuremberg laws,
Speaker 1: because now there's this is the first real legal justification
Speaker 1: for for sustained persecution of the Jews under the Nazi regime. Now,
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty four, Hydroc had suggested in an internal
Speaker 1: memo that quote the aim of Jewish policies must be
Speaker 1: the immigration of all Jews, and he urged that voluntary
Speaker 1: immigration could be achieved by creating a legal climate so
Speaker 1: oppressive that Jewish people could no longer stand to stay
Speaker 1: in the Reich. To further this end. In nineteen thirty five,
Speaker 1: he had the Gestapo start keeping track of all Jewish
Speaker 1: German residents. In nineteen thirty six, he started monitoring their
Speaker 1: financial transactions to stop them from putting their money in
Speaker 1: foreign banks. They had to leave, but he wanted most
Speaker 1: of their wealth to remain. Now. Hydrock supported to an
Speaker 1: extent the Zionist movement in Palestine UM and in fact
Speaker 1: he had we have these memos from him where he's
Speaker 1: saying like, I want to crack down on any sort
Speaker 1: of organizations supporting jew Is assimilation into German culture when
Speaker 1: we should support the Zionist movement UM. And in fact,
Speaker 1: he actually sends Adolf Eichman to Palestine in the thirties
Speaker 1: to talk with a member of the Haganah UM which
Speaker 1: becomes the I d F, to discuss how they could
Speaker 1: further urge further immigration. And this there's we should go
Speaker 1: into more detail about. There's some wild ship at this meeting,
Speaker 1: including the fact that this this UH, this emissary of
Speaker 1: the Zionist movement tells Aikman that the German like they're
Speaker 1: having problems with the German Jews who were leaving Germany
Speaker 1: and coming to Palestine because number one, they don't plan
Speaker 1: to stay. They want to go back to Europe. And there,
Speaker 1: in his words, workshy, which is also what the Nazis described.
Speaker 1: It's it's really a lot of interesting history. They're very
Speaker 1: interesting internal anti Semitism amongst the kind of like right
Speaker 1: wing class in Israel. Yeah, and it it doesn't like again,
Speaker 1: as soon as the war starts with the vast majority
Speaker 1: of the Zionist movement, like is not just anti Nazi
Speaker 1: is like actively shooting Nazis of course, the but there's there's,
Speaker 1: as we talked about in some other episodes, there's a
Speaker 1: chunk of them that are willing to work with these
Speaker 1: guys because they both think Jews shouldn't assimilate. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: even the Nazis were not uniform in their attitudes about
Speaker 1: what should be done to the Jews. And again, this
Speaker 1: is actually a thing that there's a lot of debate
Speaker 1: over because there's large chunks of the Nazi party who
Speaker 1: want the street violence, who think that the programs are
Speaker 1: the way to go about achieving their wins. Gebel's is
Speaker 1: a big chunk of this. Gebel supports kind of a
Speaker 1: calodic melange of Boycott's street violence and vandalism against Jews.
Speaker 1: That's why he and his propaganda arms are trying are
Speaker 1: stirring up a lot of this street violence, right, That's
Speaker 1: their goal is to get Germans out in the street
Speaker 1: doing violence and destroying Jewish property and hi like, there's
Speaker 1: a big competition between these two wings of the of
Speaker 1: the German Party, both of which are essentially proposing different
Speaker 1: answers to the Jewish question. Gebel's is saying, you know,
Speaker 1: we beat them and kill them in the street force
Speaker 1: and that will force you know, the ones we don't
Speaker 1: beat and kill to leave. Hydrick is saying, no, no no, no,
Speaker 1: we is the law to in an orderly way oppressed
Speaker 1: them so that they leave. Those are two different answers
Speaker 1: to the Jewish question. In late nineteen thirty five, these
Speaker 1: various sides of the Nazi Party kind of came together decided, like,
Speaker 1: we can't keep arguing over this, we have to have
Speaker 1: a concerted strategy um and they held a big how
Speaker 1: to racism meeting. Now, the impetus of this was a
Speaker 1: massive program in nineteen thirty five that did millions of
Speaker 1: dollars in damage to the German economy, because again, when
Speaker 1: you run through the streets, destroying businesses and departments. It's
Speaker 1: bad for business, right, Yeah, it's these these economies don't
Speaker 1: exist in a vacuum. Like you're actively hurting the German
Speaker 1: economy as well when you're doing this. Yeah, and so
Speaker 1: in this like this meeting is actually is called because
Speaker 1: the German economic minister a guy named Hilmar Shocked Um
Speaker 1: who's a friend of the Dullest brothers and also I
Speaker 1: think a friend of of the Koch brother's dad. Um.
Speaker 1: He's an anti Simon, but he's I'll just tell you,
Speaker 1: I am Shocked Shocked. That's good. So he felt that
Speaker 1: the economic consequences of this were unacceptable, and so he
Speaker 1: holds this meeting to be like, we have to figure
Speaker 1: out a better way to do this. And Hydrick is
Speaker 1: very much in agreement with Shocked in this, and he
Speaker 1: takes this meeting as an opportunity to try to whip
Speaker 1: again the thing he does best. He tries to whip
Speaker 1: everyone in line behind his strategy. Um. He says during
Speaker 1: the meeting quote the only way to both get the
Speaker 1: Jews out and avoid violence is a concerted campaign of
Speaker 1: economic marginalization Um. He also suggested a ban on mixed marriage,
Speaker 1: the prosecution of sexual intercourse between Jews and Arians, and
Speaker 1: restrictions of Jewish freedom of movement. His suggestion in this
Speaker 1: meeting led directly to the Nuremberg Laws, which were formulated
Speaker 1: that September. So again that's why this all happens. So
Speaker 1: the Nuremberg Laws are the legal basis for all organized
Speaker 1: Nazi persecution of Jews and the first concrete step towards
Speaker 1: the Holocaust. And Hydrick's performance in that meeting, his ability
Speaker 1: to wrangle his fellow Nazis towards his desired plan of action,
Speaker 1: establishes him as the leading Nazi authority on the Jewish question. Now,
Speaker 1: the mid nineteen thirties are also the height of the
Speaker 1: weird Nazi period. This is the time when the occult
Speaker 1: wings of the party where at their strongest. The ship
Speaker 1: you see in Hell Boy, right, elements that were real.
Speaker 1: There was a bunch of weird like Heinrich Kimler thinking
Speaker 1: he's the reincarnation of a Danish prince. Right, Hitler's best
Speaker 1: buddy who Rudolph. I think it was Rudolf hess Um
Speaker 1: who was like super into the occult and was like
Speaker 1: doing like seances and ship. Yeah, this is when they
Speaker 1: went like doing like full nerd ship, just learning out
Speaker 1: on paganism. And that's not a big factor once the
Speaker 1: war starts, even right before the war starts, and in
Speaker 1: fact Hess's flight to Europe because he kind of loses
Speaker 1: his mind and floors to England to try and that's
Speaker 1: like a big part of like because he had been
Speaker 1: such an advocate of this, and because he had so,
Speaker 1: Hitler saw it as like a kind of a betrayal
Speaker 1: like that that kind of spells an into the influence
Speaker 1: of that. But there's always a level of it in
Speaker 1: the s S um and this has talked about a lot.
Speaker 1: It's probably over emphasized now. It's fair to say Heinrich Kimler,
Speaker 1: hit or the other big Nazis didn't trust his Christianity,
Speaker 1: particularly Catholicism, and they wanted to minimize its influence, both
Speaker 1: in the Reich and in the s S. To this end,
Speaker 1: Hitler replaced marriage ceremonies for s S men with the Huy,
Speaker 1: which was a new fascist wedding ritual. He replaced Easter
Speaker 1: celebrations with Midsummer celebrations, and he brought in a whole
Speaker 1: host of pagan rituals. He claimed were ancient German old
Speaker 1: time religion. Now this new quasi faith that Himler kind
Speaker 1: of cobbles together for the s S is called gout
Speaker 1: glaubit Kite and it was not popular. Again, this gets
Speaker 1: over emphasized and its height. About two of the s
Speaker 1: S follows this whatever you want to call it, religion
Speaker 1: about are Protestant and the rest are Catholic. Hydrick is
Speaker 1: one of the who buys into Himler's weird neo pagan
Speaker 1: Nazi thing, although this is more todying. He's trying to
Speaker 1: impress his boss by doing this. After the war, Lena
Speaker 1: Hydric would claim that she and her husband made fun
Speaker 1: of Himler's weird religion in private, so he's not very
Speaker 1: committed to this. It does. He's doing virtue virtue signal
Speaker 1: those Nazi is Nazi overlords. But you know who won't
Speaker 1: virtue signal to their Nazi overlords, Matt is that the
Speaker 1: products and services. That's that is right. It is the
Speaker 1: products and services that support this podcast. None of them
Speaker 1: our believers in German pagan SS philosophy. Yeah, they will
Speaker 1: never do weird Nazi weddings unless you want them to. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean well, Okay, let's just let's just all the
Speaker 1: ads at this point. Ah, we're back. So in nine six,
Speaker 1: Hydric launched a systematic torture campaign against the Jehovah's Witnesses
Speaker 1: and the Jehovah's Witnesses. This is important to note in
Speaker 1: terms of like absolute numbers, not a lot of these guys,
Speaker 1: not a sizeable chunk of the Holocaust, although a lot
Speaker 1: of them get killed relative to their population. But the
Speaker 1: Jehovah's Witnesses are only group in the Third Reich who
Speaker 1: was persecuted purely on the basis of their religion. Um.
Speaker 1: And that's because Jehovah's Witnesses refused to swear allegiance to
Speaker 1: governments um. And that makes them enemies of the state
Speaker 1: under the Nazis. Hydrick's crackdown would eventually lead six thousand
Speaker 1: witnesses being arrested and interned in concentration camps. Hundreds died
Speaker 1: in camps who were executed straight away. I think they
Speaker 1: wore a purple triangle in the concentration camps. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: Hydrick's prosecution of Freemasonry was, by comparison, a lot less brutal,
Speaker 1: mainly because Freemasons didn't hold that much power, and like
Speaker 1: none of them are willing to die for their dumb clubs.
Speaker 1: So once the Nazis take power, they all just kind
Speaker 1: of leave and he confiscates their stuff and he puts
Speaker 1: it in a museum. In subsequent years he establishes another
Speaker 1: similar museum which is filled with Jewish artifacts. And that's
Speaker 1: kind of his idea, is like, we need to have
Speaker 1: these museums to show people the dangers of this ideology
Speaker 1: and like how how but also how silly it is,
Speaker 1: and like how like that's that's the and what do
Speaker 1: you put in museum? But things that no longer exist
Speaker 1: and are now in the past exactly the shadowing fucking
Speaker 1: scumbag shit ever, m it's good ship um. In ninety seven,
Speaker 1: Hydroc had his criminal police launched a massive dragnet operation
Speaker 1: against what he called habitual criminals and A socials. Now,
Speaker 1: these were people who didn't work or didn't work enough,
Speaker 1: or lived on the street, or made their living in
Speaker 1: a less than legal manner. By the end of nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty eight, nearly twenty thousand A socials were in preventative detention.
Speaker 1: These people were also sent to concentration camps, mostly as
Speaker 1: a scare tactic. The Reich was in the midst of
Speaker 1: a labor shortage, and the point of this particular campaign
Speaker 1: was to force people to work, not to kill them. Now,
Speaker 1: all these different crusades in the late thirties tax the
Speaker 1: concentration camp system, which had not been well planned from
Speaker 1: the beginning. In late nineteen six to thirty seven, the
Speaker 1: s S re organized the camps, shutting down most of
Speaker 1: the old ones and building new ones modeled off of
Speaker 1: Dachau from Hitler's Hangman quote. The Dachow model, designed to
Speaker 1: regiment the prisoners and dehumanize their relations with the guards,
Speaker 1: was based on a system of graded punishment for various offenses,
Speaker 1: which ranged from denial of food to execution. To dehumanize
Speaker 1: relationship with prisoners, the guard's behavior was regulated to maintain
Speaker 1: distance and eliminate human contact. The first of these camps
Speaker 1: was Saxonhausen, north of Berlin, and if you're ever in Berlin,
Speaker 1: I really recommend taking a tour of Saxonhausen Um. The
Speaker 1: German government is a very good job of of doing
Speaker 1: has done a good job of making these places into museums.
Speaker 1: And when you get a tour at one of these places.
Speaker 1: It's not just like some dude who's doing a summer job,
Speaker 1: some kid. It's somebody with like a degree like they
Speaker 1: they the people who work there. I've talked with a
Speaker 1: number of them. I did this tour. You can have
Speaker 1: long converse about Hannah Rent, about the nature of fascism,
Speaker 1: about the development. They're very knowledgeable. Um. I walked away
Speaker 1: very impressed, and we did. The tour I went on
Speaker 1: was in like the dead of December, so you know,
Speaker 1: you're covered in snow, it's freezing outside, and everybody is
Speaker 1: like you're bundled up. It's the German winter, you know,
Speaker 1: and you're walking around you're seeing this concentration camp. You're
Speaker 1: seeing that. I think one of the things that really
Speaker 1: stuck with me is they had these concrete pits, which
Speaker 1: are like these square pits like ten or fifteen feet
Speaker 1: deep with a great on top of them that people
Speaker 1: would be stuck in for days at a time, and
Speaker 1: you could look in and you could see the marks
Speaker 1: where they'd clawed at the concrete. Um you're like fingernail
Speaker 1: marks still in it. And you would walk around like
Speaker 1: freezing your ass off, just utterly miserable in this cold,
Speaker 1: and you would go inside and the first thing you
Speaker 1: would see was one of the concentration camp uniforms, which
Speaker 1: is this threadbare black and white unitard thing. And it's
Speaker 1: just like this immediately oh oh yeah, yeah, certainly uh.
Speaker 1: Not taking the cold of the German winter into account
Speaker 1: with the universe well, or you could argue taking it
Speaker 1: very much into account and you to tell people, you know.
Speaker 1: Um So, Hydrick was one of the major drivers and
Speaker 1: backers of the Dacow model, and it's worth noting that,
Speaker 1: unlike him, Heinrich Hemmler, Himler has trouble visiting and the
Speaker 1: concentration camps. He faints at Auschwitz, he does repeatedly. Here's
Speaker 1: the thing, though he repeatedly visits these camps to see
Speaker 1: what they're doing. Um Hydroch almost never does. Now. This
Speaker 1: is probably not because it was too horrifying for him.
Speaker 1: In fact, his biographer thinks it was because he wasn't
Speaker 1: actually in charge of the camp, right he decides who
Speaker 1: goes there and who's released from there. Once he's inside
Speaker 1: the camps, he's in somebody else's domain. And Theodore Ike,
Speaker 1: who we talked about earlier, the guy who's running the camps,
Speaker 1: he doesn't like Theodore Um. They're both political enemies and
Speaker 1: they both are competing for Himler's favor Um, and so
Speaker 1: like he doesn't want to go to the camps because
Speaker 1: he's he's putting himself basically in someone else's territory. I
Speaker 1: love it. It's like, why don't you go to these
Speaker 1: camps that you built to murder millions and millions of people? Oh,
Speaker 1: I don't want to be rude to a coworker. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I will say at this point, these are not camps
Speaker 1: to murder people. Murder happens, but the German concentration camps
Speaker 1: at this point he could argue no worse than the
Speaker 1: British concentration camps for the Bowers, no worse, certainly no
Speaker 1: worse than some of the things that the Spanish camps did,
Speaker 1: No worse the British themselves had done. At this point,
Speaker 1: there's a difference. And the thing is Hydrick, with these
Speaker 1: concentration camps is stealing an idea from people and it
Speaker 1: becomes more brutal than what it existed before. When they
Speaker 1: transition to the Daco model, that is an escalation from
Speaker 1: what concentration camps had been. He certainly didn't invent it,
Speaker 1: nor did they invent the race science used to just
Speaker 1: what they invent are the death camps. That is an
Speaker 1: innovation that Hydric gets. Um. Yeah, well, and again that's
Speaker 1: what this episode is about. So by the late nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: Hydrick is on paper a member of the upper middle
Speaker 1: class and in reality he's basically a millionaire. This happens
Speaker 1: to all of the big Nazis, and the way it
Speaker 1: worked for them is that they would receive allowances from
Speaker 1: the Gestapo, gifts and loans from prominent men and the
Speaker 1: Reich Um and his his rough income on paper like
Speaker 1: what he would legally admit to having was about seven
Speaker 1: times with a middle class German made um, and despite
Speaker 1: the fact that they're now rolling in cash have multiple
Speaker 1: home Lena constantly complained that his salary was quote barely
Speaker 1: sufficient to live on in When his salary was increased
Speaker 1: yet again to eight times a German middle class income,
Speaker 1: he cut the salaries of his two domestic servants, again
Speaker 1: minor compared to the death camps. But it shows you,
Speaker 1: like this guy is comprehensively I mean, yeah, he's going
Speaker 1: through a checklist of like fucking bullshit behavior of just
Speaker 1: but now evil ship, like fucking cutting the income. And
Speaker 1: also I love I love that his his wife is
Speaker 1: like still being like, you know, you don't make enough
Speaker 1: money and he just has to be like the women.
Speaker 1: Am I right? He always complaining about not having enough money.
Speaker 1: Was the shopping Oh my god, my mind got mine,
Speaker 1: got god. So Heidrick and Hitler first met at a
Speaker 1: birthday reception or the fewer in the early nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: and Hitler was impressed by Hydrick's aryan looks and impressed
Speaker 1: by the fact that he and his wife are both
Speaker 1: kind of like arians, and in fact, when he sees them,
Speaker 1: he says, what a beautiful couple. I am most impressed.
Speaker 1: I just I love every reaction to uh, to this
Speaker 1: guy is just like other Germans going, wow, he's very attractive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're just like vow you look like just supposed to look. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like none of us actually look. Yeah you look. This
Speaker 1: is what she's saying into propagandas as we look like
Speaker 1: I love, I just want the world field with Zach
Speaker 1: Morris is normal, screaches, normal, screech just Zach Morris. Now. Um.
Speaker 1: Despite that, Hitler, you know, is impressed with him from
Speaker 1: early on, especially kind of just likes the way he
Speaker 1: looks um. Reynhard is never really in Hitler's inner circle.
Speaker 1: They're not personally friends, but the fewer increasingly by the
Speaker 1: late thirties, cames to trust him and see him as
Speaker 1: loyal and talented, and he gives Hydrick increasing sponsibility for
Speaker 1: settling the Jewish question. Now in the late nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: this is a fun little aside story, we gotta tell it.
Speaker 1: This is part of his establishment of the Nazi security state.
Speaker 1: In the late thirties, Ryanhard becomes aware of a woman
Speaker 1: named Kitty Schmidt who operated a brothel in Berlin now
Speaker 1: is Germany's had a cop. His job is technically to
Speaker 1: arrest her, but he had a better idea. He had
Speaker 1: the s S take over the brothel and fill it
Speaker 1: with wire taps. Kitty still ran everything. He allowed her to,
Speaker 1: allowed her to keep running her brothel as long as
Speaker 1: he could use it. There's kind of it's kind of
Speaker 1: like the Nazi best little horhouse in Texas and his
Speaker 1: fascist Burt Reynolds, My god, what a visual. So yeah,
Speaker 1: So the SS Kitty like they basically re evamped this brothel,
Speaker 1: and they do it for a specific reason. They want
Speaker 1: to collect intelligence using prostitutes. So they first off kind
Speaker 1: of let go a lot of like the staff. They
Speaker 1: see his lower class, and they hire high class German ladies.
Speaker 1: Most of the women working here are like the wives
Speaker 1: or at least mistresses of wealthy, upper class German men.
Speaker 1: We have a recruitment profile for women who work at
Speaker 1: the brothel which reads, quote, wanted our women and girls
Speaker 1: who are intelligent, multi lingual, nationalistically minded, and furthermore, man crazy.
Speaker 1: We want the most boy crazy. We want horny fascist bitches.
Speaker 1: That's give me all your horny fascist pitches, just like
Speaker 1: radio commercials are your horny fascist bit where Hi, I'm
Speaker 1: just laying maxwell. And so the targets of this information
Speaker 1: gathering operation were German military officers. So a lot of
Speaker 1: them weren't Nazis. Right, most people aren't Nazis even in
Speaker 1: the Nazi regime at this point. Um, so German military
Speaker 1: off users who might not be loyal to Hitler, but
Speaker 1: also other Nazis and visiting foreign dignitaries. Right, So Reinhard
Speaker 1: and his men, would you know they would sit down,
Speaker 1: they would a meeting with some guy. You know, maybe
Speaker 1: they're having a meeting about some security matter. Maybe they're
Speaker 1: having a meeting with a foreign ally and they would
Speaker 1: at the end of the meeting be like, hey, you
Speaker 1: know you're in Berlin for another day or two for
Speaker 1: this meeting. Here, here's a special code word. If you
Speaker 1: go to this brothel, they'll give you the special menu
Speaker 1: with this code word. And the menu did entitle them
Speaker 1: to the special menu of these like super you know,
Speaker 1: from what the Nazis point of view, high class prostitutes.
Speaker 1: But the menu when you came in and told Kitty
Speaker 1: Schmidt this password, it also told her, okay, turn on
Speaker 1: the recording equipment. They want to eavesdrop on this guy
Speaker 1: while he's fucking. I should have known when the passwords
Speaker 1: they gave me was honey popped, but I didn't put
Speaker 1: the pieces together. So one of the customers of this brothel,
Speaker 1: it was the son in law and foreign minister of
Speaker 1: Fascist Italy, who repeatedly insulted Hitler while he was fucking.
Speaker 1: Hitler's a chip. I hate a little bad I can
Speaker 1: never do this. He can't fuck this good. He's kind
Speaker 1: of a funk like me. Look at the size of
Speaker 1: my penny. He has a one ball, single meat. The
Speaker 1: ball he has the only nay, I want to meat
Speaker 1: the ball and it's not the spicy one. Oh boy.
Speaker 1: Another who didn't give away anything evidently when he was
Speaker 1: there was s S. General Sep Dietrich, who is a
Speaker 1: terrifying man in some ways. Sep Dietrich is the founder
Speaker 1: of the idea of special forces. Um like, he's a
Speaker 1: really legitimately frightening man. Um and Sept Dietrich when he
Speaker 1: goes into this brothel heet he gets the code word.
Speaker 1: He seems to know he's being recorded, but he just
Speaker 1: wants to fuck. So he goes in and demands all
Speaker 1: twenty of the women on the menu and has an
Speaker 1: all night orgy with these ladies. Beautiful. You know, I mean,
Speaker 1: I hate this guy on principle, but you know, if
Speaker 1: you're gonna do it, you know, live it up and
Speaker 1: just shut yeah. Gebbels was also a frequent customer. He
Speaker 1: was said to enjoy lesbian displays. Another big customer was
Speaker 1: a major German tank ace who liked to drink toilet
Speaker 1: water after women use the bathroom. Um yeah, classic German
Speaker 1: shies upon yeah. Hydric himself also regularly visited the brothel,
Speaker 1: although the microphones were turned off for his visits. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: well yep, I mean, that's an amazing, amazing aside. You know,
Speaker 1: just like the levels of evil of this person, they
Speaker 1: just run the gamut. He's real piece of shit. So
Speaker 1: when Germany annexed Austria, Hydric's job was to put together
Speaker 1: a team of s S men to go into the
Speaker 1: stolen country and arrest political prisoners. In addition to putting
Speaker 1: two thousand people in camps, Hydrick's men launched a targeted
Speaker 1: operation to confiscate Jewish property. He announced that anyone caught
Speaker 1: stealing from Jews though during this period would be punished
Speaker 1: mercilessly because their wealth was property of the Reich. So both,
Speaker 1: we're going to take everything that Jews have, but if
Speaker 1: random citizens start taking their ship, you're stealing from the government. Um. Now.
Speaker 1: There was, of course, a wide gulf between rhetoric and reality.
Speaker 1: The kind of men who joined the s S were thugs,
Speaker 1: and they were never able to help themselves from beating
Speaker 1: and murdering and robbing no matter what Hydric said. A
Speaker 1: big part of his job was putting out the pr
Speaker 1: fires started by his subordinates. Much of the violence of
Speaker 1: the Angelus came from Austrian Nazis who took the end
Speaker 1: of their old government as an opportunity to let loose.
Speaker 1: They burned and looted businesses. Jews were forced by crowds
Speaker 1: to kneel and scrub the streets. One observer later recalled quote,
Speaker 1: the underworld had opened up its gates and set loosed
Speaker 1: its lowest, most disgusting hordes. The city transformed itself into
Speaker 1: a nightmarish painting by Hieronymous Bosch. Demons seemed to have
Speaker 1: crawled out of filthy eggs and risen from marshy burrows.
Speaker 1: The air was constantly filled with a desolate, hysterical shrieking,
Speaker 1: and people's faces were distorted, some with fear, others with lies,
Speaker 1: still others with wild hate filled triumph one star review,
Speaker 1: one star for the Angels Now. When the violence prompted
Speaker 1: an outcry, and again an outcry even from some people
Speaker 1: who were in within the German government, Hydric blamed the
Speaker 1: Pegram on disguised communists. It's the left, it's anti always,
Speaker 1: it's always that oh man. He said. They were trying
Speaker 1: to make Germany look bad and create propaganda for her
Speaker 1: foreign enemies. After the initial uncontrolled violence, Hydrick ss was
Speaker 1: able to push a more orderly terror. He established a
Speaker 1: central office in Vienna which would take in catalog Jewish
Speaker 1: property at the same time as it produced thousands of
Speaker 1: exit visas to allow Jewish families to leave the country.
Speaker 1: And basically the idea was that we're taking the property
Speaker 1: of the rich Jews to a for the process of
Speaker 1: get of of immigrating the other ones out of here,
Speaker 1: getting the exit vas is sending them elsewhere. Now, this
Speaker 1: system would become a model used by other Nazi annexations,
Speaker 1: but it did not go quickly enough for many Germans.
Speaker 1: The Anschluss brought two hundred thousand more Jews into the
Speaker 1: German Reich, which more than canceled out the hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty eight thousand who had left by the end of
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty seven. The most racist Germans were frustrated by this,
Speaker 1: and Hydrock responded with a crackdown on Polish Jewish immigrants
Speaker 1: in Germany. So one of the problems is they're trying
Speaker 1: to get these people out as fast as they can,
Speaker 1: and they're even to the point where if you're rich,
Speaker 1: they take some of your money, they'll leave you with
Speaker 1: some of it, because otherwise you're not going to be
Speaker 1: taken anywhere. Um. And it's in general the biggest problem
Speaker 1: they have is and this is one of the things
Speaker 1: you do have to point out when you talk about,
Speaker 1: for example, Jewish immigration to Palestine during this period, that
Speaker 1: was one of the only places they could go. That
Speaker 1: was the number one place that Jewish refugees were able
Speaker 1: to go. Everywhere was close to them. Everywhere else. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the United States would not take any Jewish. We let
Speaker 1: boats full of Jewish refugees drowned in the ocean because
Speaker 1: we wouldn't let them onto our shore. So and this
Speaker 1: is a problem for the Nazis, right, because they're trying
Speaker 1: to get these people out, but it's difficult. They're not
Speaker 1: taking it. And the places that are taking them are
Speaker 1: places like Czechoslovakia, which then the Germans take more places
Speaker 1: like Poland, which they want, and like the Polish the
Speaker 1: Polish state is as racist almost as the German state.
Speaker 1: So the Polish state, these Jews who had fled Poland
Speaker 1: because there were programs in the early nineteen hundreds into
Speaker 1: Germany and had become German residents, get kicked out and
Speaker 1: forced into Poland, who denies their citizenship. So They're like,
Speaker 1: it's a whole fucking mess. No, it's the Earth. Earth
Speaker 1: in the thirties, real bad place, real bad place for
Speaker 1: the Jews. Nobody wanted him, and uh yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: not fun for us. And in nineteen thirty eight, one
Speaker 1: of the families who gets caught up in this, Hydrick
Speaker 1: is pushing the Polish refugees out of Germany. Um Poland
Speaker 1: doesn't want to take them. One of the family leads
Speaker 1: who gets sucked over in this are the green Spawns
Speaker 1: g r y n s z p a n s
Speaker 1: but I think it's pronounced green Span or something like that.
Speaker 1: Their son, Herschel lived in Paris, and he was outraged
Speaker 1: by his family suffering by the fact that they've gotten
Speaker 1: kicked out of Germany after barely building a life there.
Speaker 1: And you know this, he's kind of goes mad with grief.
Speaker 1: And because everything seems fucked up, nothing seems nothing. The
Speaker 1: Nazis aren't facing any consequences for their actions, the international
Speaker 1: community isn't doing ship to stop it. He can't think
Speaker 1: of anything better to do that to get a gun
Speaker 1: and go shoot a Nazi politician living in Paris, a
Speaker 1: guy who he did nothing wrong. Herschel Greenspan did nothing,
Speaker 1: nothing wrong. Yeah, he shoots this guy Ernst von Roth
Speaker 1: um and and von Roth eventually dies of his injuries.
Speaker 1: And then, to quote from a write up in Bleaker
Speaker 1: Street Media here about what came next. Three days later,
Speaker 1: Hydrick sent out a memo with the subject line measures
Speaker 1: against the US Tonight, a communication that directed the police
Speaker 1: to maintain a hands off policy to the spontaneous national
Speaker 1: riots that Joseph Gebel's and he had orchestrated. All night long.
Speaker 1: Jewish businesses were destroyed, homes vandalized or destroyed, and families
Speaker 1: rounded up and arrested, if not killed. In London at
Speaker 1: the Times calculated the damage quote no foreign propagandists bent
Speaker 1: on blacketting Germany before the world could outdo the tale
Speaker 1: of burnings and beatings of blackguardly assaults on the fenceless
Speaker 1: and innocent people which disgraced that country. Yesterday, more than
Speaker 1: a thousand synagogues and seven thousand Jewish businesses had been attacked,
Speaker 1: more than ninety people had been murdered, and thirty thousand
Speaker 1: Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. To add
Speaker 1: insult to injury, the Jewish people whose property had been
Speaker 1: destroyed were charged by the state with its clean up.
Speaker 1: This is the Night of Broken Glass. This is Christal
Speaker 1: Knocked and Hydrick is not the only one behind it,
Speaker 1: but he's one of the organizing forces behind Christal Knocked.
Speaker 1: And maybe that seems a little bit odd considering his
Speaker 1: attitude towards street violence. But just wait for what comes next.
Speaker 1: There's a reason why this is not the worst thing
Speaker 1: in the world for him. No, yeah, you're slowly becoming
Speaker 1: more and more okay with this. Well, it's even more
Speaker 1: subtle than that. It's even shittier than that. So the
Speaker 1: Night of Broken Glass. A lot of people don't know.
Speaker 1: This was a disaster for the Nazis and seen by
Speaker 1: Hitler and Gering in particular as a horrible idea because
Speaker 1: it brings them all this really bad international pr It
Speaker 1: makes Badya in the international community. Um, and it fucks
Speaker 1: the economy. It does millions and millions of dollars to
Speaker 1: damage the economy. It sets back their five year plan.
Speaker 1: It's a real big problem for a lot of Nazis.
Speaker 1: And because they're so unhappy about what has happened during
Speaker 1: the Night of Broken Glass, they have a second big
Speaker 1: meeting of all the Nazis to be like, guys, we
Speaker 1: gotta get on the same page about this. So because
Speaker 1: there's another that Hydric helps to instigate and ensure won't
Speaker 1: be stopped by his police, because there's another mass violent
Speaker 1: pagrah that creates enough negative thought towards street violence that
Speaker 1: there's another meeting. And what is Hydrick really fucking good
Speaker 1: at taken control of meetings like this and getting everyone
Speaker 1: on board with his ideas. He's a big meeting guy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So Hydric uses the opportunity to make the case again
Speaker 1: that yeah, of course street violence is bad. It's bad
Speaker 1: for the economy and makes people not like us. It
Speaker 1: makes us pariah's. We need to attack Jews through the
Speaker 1: law in an orderly manner. So he suggests an expansion
Speaker 1: of the restrictions that have been put in place at
Speaker 1: the Nuremberg Laws. For one thing, Jewish people should be
Speaker 1: restricted from using buses, from going to hospitals, from going
Speaker 1: to theaters, from visiting public parks and other public places.
Speaker 1: He also suggested forcing Jewish citizens to wear a yellow star.
Speaker 1: Now during this when he suggests this, even Hitler is like, well,
Speaker 1: that's a bit far Yeah, that's that much. Ran Hard
Speaker 1: calmed down. You're going to you're going to Ryan Hord
Speaker 1: in the paint right now, going to need you to
Speaker 1: chill act be Ryan saw like, yeah, this would be
Speaker 1: done eventually. But in Reinhard is the guy who kind
Speaker 1: of he's the first big dude to suggest this. Um.
Speaker 1: But Reinhard, the thing that he had that he succeeds
Speaker 1: in doing is he kind of very methodically. During this meeting,
Speaker 1: he lays out, um, how during the occupation of Vienna
Speaker 1: in his central office that he established had facilitated the
Speaker 1: expulsion of at least fifty thousand Jews. So he points out,
Speaker 1: like he walks them through, here's how we got We
Speaker 1: got fifty people in a in a matter of weeks
Speaker 1: out of out of Austria to leave for other countries. Um.
Speaker 1: No one else has gotten so many Jews to leave
Speaker 1: so quickly, and so you know, without so peacefully, without
Speaker 1: disruption to the state as I have. Um. And he
Speaker 1: claims that I can, I can set up offices like
Speaker 1: this all throughout the Reich. I can generalize this process
Speaker 1: and it won't cost us a dime because we'll pay
Speaker 1: to expel them with funds confiscated from wealthy Jews. And
Speaker 1: he does a good enough job of laying this out
Speaker 1: that by the end of the meeting, everyone agrees to
Speaker 1: put Hydroc in charge of purging the German Reich of Jews,
Speaker 1: do racism and balance the budget at the same time.
Speaker 1: Whatever exactly exactly he's able to get, he's able to
Speaker 1: marshal everyone behind. He's able to get them on the
Speaker 1: same page. You can answer to questions, the Jewish question
Speaker 1: and who's gonna pay for it? Questions. Now, by the
Speaker 1: end of the meeting, everyone agreed to put Hydroc in
Speaker 1: charge of purging the German Reich of Jews. He estimated
Speaker 1: this would take ten years. But for the first time
Speaker 1: since Hitler took power, the Nazis had a serious, actionable
Speaker 1: game plan to purge Central Europe of its Jews. And
Speaker 1: this brings us back to the question, the core question,
Speaker 1: one of the core questions of Holocaust studies was the
Speaker 1: Holocaust planned from the beginning or did it evolve over
Speaker 1: time out of the circumstances that that you know, presented themselves.
Speaker 1: The real any of the situation seems to be that
Speaker 1: Adolf Hitler was an idea man, not a logistics man.
Speaker 1: He would give speeches, he would get excited, he would
Speaker 1: talk about the Jews being the eternal foe. He would
Speaker 1: talk about needing to purge them. But he didn't come
Speaker 1: out with policy on his own to do that. See
Speaker 1: Hydrick job exactly. Hydrick and everyone else under Hitler, there
Speaker 1: was a policy and this is what they called it
Speaker 1: in the Nazi state, working towards the fewer. And what
Speaker 1: that means is that Hitler doesn't come up with plans
Speaker 1: and there doesn't say this is how we're gonna do,
Speaker 1: this is what we're gonna do next. Hitler comes up
Speaker 1: with ideas, and it's up to Nazis if you want
Speaker 1: to impress Hitler, if you want to make a place
Speaker 1: for yourself in the party, to figure out what you
Speaker 1: think Hitler wants you to do, and then to do
Speaker 1: it right. Because the Nazi government was so competitive, this
Speaker 1: process evolved in increasingly extreme directions. Hydrick success came from
Speaker 1: the fact that he was a genius when it came
Speaker 1: to taking the racist rants of his boss and translating
Speaker 1: them into action. His job was turning ideology into policy.
Speaker 1: That's what Hydrick does. Hitler and the others talk flippantly
Speaker 1: about getting rid of the Jews. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: talk in the yellow Nazi press about exterminating the Jews.
Speaker 1: Hydrick figures out how to make that ship happen. He's
Speaker 1: the Steve, wasn't Hitler Steve. He's an architect. Hitler describes
Speaker 1: his dream house. Ryan Hard figures out where the load
Speaker 1: bearing walls need to go. You know, that's the guy
Speaker 1: he is. When Germany next annexed Czechoslovakia, Reinhard organized special
Speaker 1: task groups of the s S and the German word
Speaker 1: for special task group is ininseets grouping. Their job was
Speaker 1: to arrest politically dangerous and undesirable people, and they arrested
Speaker 1: between ten and twenty people in a matter of days.
Speaker 1: Many were sent to Dachau or other concentration camps. I
Speaker 1: think about seven thousand in this period. Now, when Germany
Speaker 1: invaded Poland, which is what comes next, and I know
Speaker 1: we are YadA, YadA, ng at that's going on at
Speaker 1: the time, because he's he's got his hand and all
Speaker 1: of it. When Germany invades Poland, Hydric expands the ranks
Speaker 1: of the Einsetz Group and they eventually just initially just
Speaker 1: been like a like eight hundred dudes. I think, you know,
Speaker 1: during the annexation of Czechoslovakia, there was a lot more
Speaker 1: They're like, they're like military units right during the invasion
Speaker 1: of Poland, and their task is much more ambitious. Hitler
Speaker 1: didn't just one undesirable and political enemies rounded up. Hitler
Speaker 1: hated the idea that Poland would be a nation. The
Speaker 1: concept of Poland as a country was repellent to Hitler
Speaker 1: in the Nazis, and he had just inked a secret
Speaker 1: deal with Stalin to split Poland up after the invasion,
Speaker 1: and he needed to kill any conception of Polish identity
Speaker 1: and the Poland that he was going to conquer. He
Speaker 1: needed to destroy any any sense that Polish culture existed. Right,
Speaker 1: So before the invasion, Hitler tells Hydrick that his job
Speaker 1: is to organize his Innsets group and to exterminate entire
Speaker 1: classes of Polish societies, specifically the classes that were, in
Speaker 1: Hitler's words, quote carriers of Polish nationalism. And he means
Speaker 1: carriers isn't like carriers of a virus. Carriers is of
Speaker 1: a disease. That's very much how Hitler frames this, and
Speaker 1: that's very much how he talks about the Jews to
Speaker 1: they're a plague. Bacillus is the literal term he uses. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know that's he's uh, he's just trying
Speaker 1: to he's trying to get rid of any other ideological
Speaker 1: virus and German nationalism. Now, before the invasion, Hitler's men
Speaker 1: created a mass or Hydrick's men, I should say, created
Speaker 1: a massive index card library of sixty one thousand people
Speaker 1: who they would have to arrest and in most cases
Speaker 1: execute immediately upon taking over Poland from Hitler's Hangman quote.
Speaker 1: In mid August, at a conference in Berlin, leading members
Speaker 1: of the Einsets Group and received further oral instructions from
Speaker 1: Hydric and Best, instructions which even by Hydric standards were
Speaker 1: quote extraordinarily radical, and which included a quote liquidation order
Speaker 1: for various circles of the Polish leadership, affecting thousands. According
Speaker 1: to post war trial testimonies of leading Task Force officers
Speaker 1: present that day, Hydroc opened the meeting by conforming the
Speaker 1: men of the atrocities being committed against ethnic Germans in
Speaker 1: Poland's noting that he expected heavy partisan resistance against the
Speaker 1: German invasion. It was the responsibility of the Einsetz group
Speaker 1: and to neutralize these threats, particularly those posed by saboteurs,
Speaker 1: partisans Jews in the Polish intelligencia, an area is conquered
Speaker 1: by the German army and to punish individuals who had
Speaker 1: committed crimes against Poland's ethnic Germans in the preceding weeks.
Speaker 1: Although carefully guarded in his language, Hydroc consisted that in
Speaker 1: carrying out their difficult tasks, quote everything was allowed free
Speaker 1: for all. Is goddamn Nazias murder, free for all. This
Speaker 1: is when the real Nazi ship starts. This is when
Speaker 1: the Nazis truly distinguished themselves as worse than the other
Speaker 1: hell regimes that existed in this period. This is the
Speaker 1: start of the not just being a dictatorship, not just
Speaker 1: being you know, fascist or whatever. This is the start
Speaker 1: of them being the fucking Nazis. We could do a
Speaker 1: whole series of episodes on German war crimes during the
Speaker 1: invasion of Poland, um to focus just on one group
Speaker 1: of Hydrick's men. A single Ironsets group, a unit near
Speaker 1: the demarcation line for Soviet Poland, was tasked by Hydrick
Speaker 1: with inducing Jews to flee into Russian territory. Right, we
Speaker 1: want them to go into what the Russians are going
Speaker 1: to control so we don't have to deal with them.
Speaker 1: They did this by going on a mass killing spree
Speaker 1: which included burning down a synagogue filled with Jewish women
Speaker 1: and children and massacring roughly five hundred people in mass shootings,
Speaker 1: and one week in September, members of Ironsetz group of
Speaker 1: four killed roughly dred Polish civilians. Now, while Hydrick's men
Speaker 1: massacred thousands, he followed behind them and ensured the job
Speaker 1: was done properly. He remained concerned about destruction of valuable
Speaker 1: property and repeatedly investigated and punished s means suspected of
Speaker 1: stealing from Jewish own shops while they were burning down
Speaker 1: synagogues filled with people. Yeah, you wouldn't want them to
Speaker 1: commit any crimes because you don't want the property crimes.
Speaker 1: That's the problem is property, with the right wingers loving
Speaker 1: fucking property more than people. Is it you burnt down?
Speaker 1: All of the targets was the economy? M So a
Speaker 1: truly accurate catalog of just hydricks crimes up to this
Speaker 1: point would go far beyond the time we have to
Speaker 1: discuss him. Books have been written about just the conquest
Speaker 1: of Poland and the crimes in its wake. Right, more
Speaker 1: books will be written in the future. I'm afraid we're
Speaker 1: going to have to YadA YadA a lot of other
Speaker 1: crimes against humanity. Just to move along here now, I'm
Speaker 1: sure you all know the broad basics of the war.
Speaker 1: From this point on. The Nazis conquered Poland, they conquered
Speaker 1: the Netherlands, France, they conquer a bunch of places in Europe.
Speaker 1: They bombed the ship out of Britain. Things are going
Speaker 1: great for the Nazis. Hydrick continued to direct his forces
Speaker 1: to end up Jewish property as well as political enemies.
Speaker 1: And his job is in all of these places, arrest
Speaker 1: political enemies, take Jewish property, catalog all the Jews and
Speaker 1: the territory. They're not yet putting them in camps. They're
Speaker 1: not yet. The death camps don't exist yet, um, but
Speaker 1: they're there. They're they're laying the ground for that. Although
Speaker 1: that said, even in nineteen forty, it was not a
Speaker 1: foregone conclusion that there would be death camps. Because in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty Hydric becomes the head of what is called
Speaker 1: the Madagascar Plan, which is an ultimately abandoned attempt to
Speaker 1: take the now millions of Jews and conquered territories and
Speaker 1: relocate them off the coast of Africa. This had existed
Speaker 1: prior to the Nazis. Racists had been talking about pushing
Speaker 1: forcing all the Jews in the Madagascar for a while.
Speaker 1: And Hydric again, I think there's people who will argue like, oh,
Speaker 1: he always wanted to do the death camps. The Madagascar
Speaker 1: plan was just sort of like am for show. He
Speaker 1: puts a lot of effort into trying to plan this out.
Speaker 1: He spends a lot of time thinking how this will work,
Speaker 1: trying to organize it. I don't think I think this
Speaker 1: was something they thought they might be able to do
Speaker 1: for a certain point. And it's important to understand, like
Speaker 1: this is a process of gen getting yourself ready for genocide, right,
Speaker 1: even the genocide committers have to amp themselves up. It's
Speaker 1: it's it's a series of steps. It's zero to genocide, right,
Speaker 1: That never happens. There's always a ramping up period. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's like with these guys especially, it's like the
Speaker 1: ethnic cleansing was going too slowly for them, and they
Speaker 1: were just ramping up and ramping up all to this
Speaker 1: end conclusion. Yes. Um. Now, during the same time, Hydrock
Speaker 1: trains as a fighter pilot. He wants to get in
Speaker 1: his combat time, right. He missed a chance to fight
Speaker 1: in World War One. Um, So he becomes a fighter pilot.
Speaker 1: He flies like twenty combat missions. He's a gunner. Actually,
Speaker 1: he's not really a pilot. He doesn't like work as
Speaker 1: a pilot. He's a gunner. Um. And he flies some
Speaker 1: missions that are non combat over England with like a
Speaker 1: spy plane. Um. And this is a matter of vanity again.
Speaker 1: He wants to he wants to have done his time
Speaker 1: as a soldier for the Reich so that he can
Speaker 1: stand up proud. And his time as a pilot kind
Speaker 1: of comes to an end because his plane has a
Speaker 1: landing accident and he hurts his wrist and he gets
Speaker 1: an iron cross and then goes back to his desk job. Um. Now.
Speaker 1: On the domestic front, hydris marriage to his wife is
Speaker 1: consistently rocky from the late thirties forward, mainly due to
Speaker 1: the fact that he cheated on her fucking constantly. It
Speaker 1: was such a workaholic that she was basically abandoned with
Speaker 1: her children. After the war, Lena would admit that there
Speaker 1: were quote always other women in my marriage, and that
Speaker 1: Reinhard would go after anything in a skirt. Now, at
Speaker 1: one point one of his subordinates, a guy named Shellenberg,
Speaker 1: started having an affair with Lena, with Reinhardt's wife. Now,
Speaker 1: she denies that. She claims they never fucked, that she
Speaker 1: was just kind of playing around with this guy to
Speaker 1: make her has been jealous because he was cheating on
Speaker 1: her with Furio. There's a lay exactly some soprano ship
Speaker 1: a bay over this. There's one possibly true story that
Speaker 1: they were fucking each other. And Hydrock found out about this,
Speaker 1: and so he takes Shellenberg out drinking and in the
Speaker 1: middle of this like night drinking and talking. In mid conversation,
Speaker 1: Hydric's like, I just poisoned you, by the way, and
Speaker 1: I'll give you the antidote if you'll tell me what
Speaker 1: you've been doing with my wife. Um. And according to
Speaker 1: this story, Shellenberg admits that he's been sucking around. He
Speaker 1: promises to end the relationship, and Hydric gives him the antidote. Umh,
Speaker 1: we actually did poison him. That wasn't just maybe, I mean,
Speaker 1: we can't. I I don't know, you know, I think
Speaker 1: Shellenberg tells this story. Also, Shellenberg survives the war and
Speaker 1: has sevested interest in making hydroc seem even first because
Speaker 1: he's trying because it makes him seem less bad by comparison,
Speaker 1: you know. And also it's very embarrassing if he was
Speaker 1: like I was just I was kidding. Of course, I
Speaker 1: don't have any fucking poison and an antidote, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then that would have been a fake antidote to
Speaker 1: who knows. It would make him feel very stupid if
Speaker 1: he fell for that. Yeah. So on June tw Nazis
Speaker 1: commenced their invasion of the uss Are. This is Operation Barbarossa,
Speaker 1: the largest war thing that has ever happened in the
Speaker 1: history of the human race. Um. Just impossible to overstate,
Speaker 1: Like every war the US has ever fought would fit
Speaker 1: into the Eastern Front battle between Germany and Russia, with
Speaker 1: a lot of space left over for dead people. Um.
Speaker 1: Now within this territory. Uh. And again the initial that
Speaker 1: the Nazis are wildly successful. They conquer more territory faster
Speaker 1: than anyone ever has, and they take hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of military prisoners, and they bring in millions of new
Speaker 1: citizens into their their greater German Reich or whatever, I
Speaker 1: don't know, citizens is not the right thing to call them.
Speaker 1: There's but in addition to all these people, they get
Speaker 1: millions of new Jewish residents, to add to the several
Speaker 1: million already brought in by Germany's other conquests. Now, even
Speaker 1: hydricks well oiled immigration machine could not handle this many people.
Speaker 1: And also, because they're conquering everything, where else are the
Speaker 1: Jews gonna go? You know? Um? So this was you
Speaker 1: know again, no one else is willing to absorb them,
Speaker 1: the Nazis ki conquering stuff that they have this real problem, um,
Speaker 1: And this problem becomes and this is where we get
Speaker 1: to the kind of complicity of the German leadership. Because
Speaker 1: again a lot of people will say, there's nothing that
Speaker 1: directly connects Hitler to giving the orders for the Holocaust.
Speaker 1: Right now, that said, you can see where the orders
Speaker 1: came from. Because Hitler and Guring have a conversation right
Speaker 1: around the time the Germans invade Russia about the Jewish question,
Speaker 1: about all these Jews they're capturing, And in July thirty one,
Speaker 1: Herman Gerring writes a note to Reinhard Heydrich and orders
Speaker 1: him to quote submit to me as soon as possible
Speaker 1: a general plan of the administrative, material and financial measures
Speaker 1: necessary for carrying out the desired final solution of the
Speaker 1: Jewish question. And Hitler absolutely ordered him to do this.
Speaker 1: That's like or it came about as a result of
Speaker 1: the conversation. Hitler definitely wanted the genocide to happen at
Speaker 1: this point. Um. The thing on paper we have is
Speaker 1: you have Gearing tells Hydric to start figuring this ship out. Yes,
Speaker 1: and Hydric his you know this is again they still
Speaker 1: don't jump right to death camps Um, because there's again
Speaker 1: a process of figuring out how this is gonna look. Now,
Speaker 1: the process of genocide, now that they're committed to genocide,
Speaker 1: starts with simple extensions of what Hydric had already done before.
Speaker 1: The Einsts group had been enlarged significantly for the invasion
Speaker 1: of Russia, and in the wake of the inasial and
Speaker 1: initial invasion, they're killing political enemies, they're killing commissars Um,
Speaker 1: but they're also they start massacring Jews, and in fact
Speaker 1: they start carrying out mass shootings on a scale never
Speaker 1: equaled before or since in human history. These are the
Speaker 1: biggest mass shootings of civilians probably that there will ever
Speaker 1: be we we fucking hope. The first of these shootings
Speaker 1: is the Bobby Yard massacre, in which thirty three thousand,
Speaker 1: seven hundred and seventy one Jewish civilians were shot to
Speaker 1: death and ravine outside of Kiev in two days. Bobby
Speaker 1: Are was followed by the Odessa massacre later the same year,
Speaker 1: in which more than fifty thousand Jews were shot to
Speaker 1: death and again roughly two days. There were hundreds of
Speaker 1: other smaller massacres, from a couple of dozen people to
Speaker 1: a thousands of people, and a lot of the killing
Speaker 1: is also it's not just shooting. Shooting is probably the
Speaker 1: biggest death toll here, but they are also killing people
Speaker 1: with mobile gas fans, which they had developed initially to
Speaker 1: execute the mentally handicapped. Now at least one and a
Speaker 1: half million people and perhaps as many as two million
Speaker 1: Holocaust victims were killed this way, just being gunned down
Speaker 1: or gassed in small vans um by numbers of people. Now,
Speaker 1: this is still too slow for the number of Jews
Speaker 1: that there and other undesirables that the Nazis are acquiring
Speaker 1: in their conquests, and worse than being slow, it's bad
Speaker 1: for the men doing it. The Germans have limited manpower,
Speaker 1: they have limited ammunition, um and they find that. You know,
Speaker 1: Hydra had called his as ideological shock troops, right, he'd
Speaker 1: made a big deal about how hard we have to be,
Speaker 1: how willing to do terrible things we have to be
Speaker 1: in order to save the Reich. But these guys, the
Speaker 1: hardest and worst of the Nazis, couldn't handle the mental
Speaker 1: strain of what they were doing. They're traumatic for them,
Speaker 1: which is they are. There are stories of them skeet
Speaker 1: shooting babies by the dozen, and it it destroys these people.
Speaker 1: The suicide is rampant alcoholism becomes endemic to the einsets
Speaker 1: group of men. It creates a problem with morale, a
Speaker 1: problem with orderliness, and it's a problem for the r mocked.
Speaker 1: The guys not doing the killing are aware of it,
Speaker 1: and they have there are we the baddies moments in
Speaker 1: a lot of cases like oh boy, you know what,
Speaker 1: this doesn't seem good. I've always like imagined killing babies
Speaker 1: is being a bad guy thing. Yeah, but it sounds
Speaker 1: like not a defensive maneuver. Yeah, I mean, I guess
Speaker 1: I get it. Excuse me, all, but Stumban fura, what
Speaker 1: is the self defense motive for shooting babies with a
Speaker 1: shotgun after throwing them in the air, And you at
Speaker 1: least lie to me and says the baby is actually
Speaker 1: a time bomb robot. It would make me feel better.
Speaker 1: And again, these guys feel bad. It breaks a lot
Speaker 1: of them. It's bad from a raw Almost none of
Speaker 1: them stopped being Nazis. Yeah, they all keep fighting for
Speaker 1: the Reich, even though they're aware of it. There's a
Speaker 1: big myth of the clean r marckt of the fact
Speaker 1: that most Nazi soldiers, you know, they fought well and
Speaker 1: they didn't really know what was going on. They fucking did.
Speaker 1: Every one of them at least new enough to the
Speaker 1: numbers alone indicate that, like just a huge portion of
Speaker 1: them had to have been involved directly in these atrocities. Yes, um,
Speaker 1: And like, yes, obviously a lot of the Vermacht was
Speaker 1: involved directly in atrocities, more than any other individual military
Speaker 1: on a per capita basis in the war, other than
Speaker 1: maybe the Japanese UM. But also they were all aware,
Speaker 1: broadly speaking of what was being done in their name, um.
Speaker 1: And there were some of them who spoke out. There
Speaker 1: were some of them whom who went a wall you know. Um,
Speaker 1: and good good on those very few dudes. Yeah, thank you,
Speaker 1: all three of you. Yeah, not a lot of them,
Speaker 1: but some of them did. And and yeah I'll tip
Speaker 1: my hat to those fellows because of how few fucking
Speaker 1: did it. Now. Yeah, Um, so again this becomes a problem.
Speaker 1: It's bad for the s s. They need a better
Speaker 1: solution to the final solution. And on January nineteen forty two,
Speaker 1: Ryanhard Hydrick convenes a third meeting of top Nazi officials
Speaker 1: from across the Reich. This meeting was held at a mansion,
Speaker 1: a mansion that had been confiscated by a Jewish businessman
Speaker 1: in a suburb of Berlin called von Say. Um, you
Speaker 1: can go to the Vance House today. I've I've been there. Um,
Speaker 1: you can see if there's a very good museum there.
Speaker 1: The actual houses used in the movie we discussed at
Speaker 1: the start of this conspiracy, which is basically based directly
Speaker 1: on the minutes of the meeting. They have to plan
Speaker 1: the final solution. Um. I'm going to quote from a
Speaker 1: summary of that meeting in history dot com. Quote. The
Speaker 1: agenda was simple and focused to devise a plan that
Speaker 1: would render a final solution to the Jewish question in Europe,
Speaker 1: Various gruesome proposals were discussed, including mass sterilization and deportation
Speaker 1: to the island of Madagascar. Hydrick proposed simply transporting Jews
Speaker 1: from every corner of Europe to concentration camps in Poland
Speaker 1: and working them to death. Objections to this plan included
Speaker 1: the belief that this was simply too time consuming. What
Speaker 1: about the strong ones who took longer to die, What
Speaker 1: about the millions of Jews who were already in Poland.
Speaker 1: Although the word extermination was never uttered during the meeting,
Speaker 1: the implication was clear. Anyone who survived the egregious conditions
Speaker 1: of a work camp would be treated accordingly. Months later,
Speaker 1: the gas vans in Helmo, Poland, which were killing a
Speaker 1: thousand people a day, proved to be the solution. They
Speaker 1: were looking for the most efficient means of killing large
Speaker 1: groups of people at a time, and the rest is
Speaker 1: unfortunately history. The Vans conference led directly to the creation
Speaker 1: of death camps, which exterminated some four million Jews and
Speaker 1: five million other undesirables. These were, and still are today,
Speaker 1: the fastest and most cost effective method of genocide ever developed.
Speaker 1: Reinhard Hydric gets rightful credit as architect of the Holocaust,
Speaker 1: but the vast majority of people killed in the death
Speaker 1: camps died after he died. He would not live to
Speaker 1: see what he brought into being. And I'm gonna quote
Speaker 1: from a write up by the United States Holocaust Museum
Speaker 1: here to explain why Hydric gets taken out of the picture.
Speaker 1: After the invasion of the Soviet Union spurred a previously
Speaker 1: dormant communist resistance move meant in Bohemia and Moravia Czechoslovakia
Speaker 1: into acts of sabotage, Hitler dismissed reich Protector Constantine von
Speaker 1: Neuroth and An appointed Hydric acting Reich Protector in September
Speaker 1: nineteen forty one. Hydric first ordered a narrow wave of
Speaker 1: terror targeting real and perceived leaders of the opposition in
Speaker 1: Czech Lands. In October and November nineteen forty one, Protector
Speaker 1: at Special Courts sinence three hundred and forty two people
Speaker 1: to death and turned twelve hundred and eighty nine over
Speaker 1: to the Gestapo. Hydric also established the Teresan Stack Camp
Speaker 1: ghetto in November. Under his rule, fourteen thousand Germans and
Speaker 1: Austrian Jews and more than twenty thousand check Jews were
Speaker 1: deported from Theresan stat to the Lord's Ghetto, to the
Speaker 1: Government General in Poland into the Reich Commissary at Austland,
Speaker 1: which is where they were exterminated. Hydric Is, acting Reich Protector,
Speaker 1: then corded Czech industrial workers and farmers whose productive capacity
Speaker 1: was necessary to the German war effort, with wages and
Speaker 1: benefits packages equivalent to those of their German counterparts. The
Speaker 1: result of his policies was a seventy three percent reduction
Speaker 1: and acts of sabotage within six months. By spring of
Speaker 1: nineteen forty two, German authorities could boost of a pacification
Speaker 1: of the Protectorate. Some have speculated that Hydric aim next
Speaker 1: to assume a newly created top civilian position and occupied
Speaker 1: northern France and Belgium, but he never got the chance
Speaker 1: to do this. The Allies were well aware of Reinhard
Speaker 1: hydrick Um and they needed a win, right two not
Speaker 1: a great time for the Allies. There's some early signs
Speaker 1: that the Nazi ship is going to turn around for them,
Speaker 1: but they're not winning at that point um now. The
Speaker 1: so the British train and equip a two man cheam
Speaker 1: of team of Check soldiers because Check has a government
Speaker 1: Czecho Slovakia has a government in exile, right, they have
Speaker 1: soldiers who flee the company in the country, and the
Speaker 1: British government trains two of these guys up and air
Speaker 1: drops them into Hydrick's territory. They ambush him during his
Speaker 1: daily commute home from work, but one man's machine gun jams, right,
Speaker 1: so they try to shoot him. Their gun jams Hydrick,
Speaker 1: who's driving in an open topped vehicle very stupidly Um
Speaker 1: sees that their gun has jammed, and again, think about
Speaker 1: everything about this guy. He's desperate to prove himself as
Speaker 1: a warrior, right, so his driver wants to drive the
Speaker 1: funk away right, get out of there, get his boss
Speaker 1: to safety. Hidrick has his driver stop. He pulls out
Speaker 1: his handgun and he attempts to attack both assassins. One
Speaker 1: of them throws a grenade as he's trying to do
Speaker 1: his hero ship and it fucks reinhard right up. He
Speaker 1: gets horribly wounded. He's a vacuated hospital. Um. His wound
Speaker 1: turns septic and he spent seven days in in the hospital,
Speaker 1: slowly ding like really the only of the really bad
Speaker 1: Nazis who gets exactly the death he deserves, his body rotting,
Speaker 1: they pull his spleen out of him, like yeah, all
Speaker 1: death because he was a fucking idiot, and like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna fucking shoot these guys when keeping it real
Speaker 1: goes wrong. Yeah. It's believed, although not certain, that the
Speaker 1: reason his wounds got infected and he died was because
Speaker 1: the upholstery in his his car was made out of horsehair,
Speaker 1: and the horse hair gets forced to do his wound
Speaker 1: by a grenade blast and it gets him. It causes
Speaker 1: a deadly infection. Very funny. Yeah, it was either that
Speaker 1: or he spend too much time around the you know
Speaker 1: the Germans who are going to the horhouse who like
Speaker 1: to eat the doodoo v D and his gut wound exactly, dude,
Speaker 1: you know it's one of the other I love it. Publicly,
Speaker 1: the whole Reich mourns, and actually his funeral is one
Speaker 1: of the last really mass public events that the whole
Speaker 1: Nazi leadership attends because right the war doesn't go so
Speaker 1: well for them after this point, he's mourned as a
Speaker 1: hero of Germany. Privately, though Hitler thought him a fool
Speaker 1: for throwing away his life for a chance to look heroic,
Speaker 1: saying such heroic gestures as driving in an open unarmored
Speaker 1: vehicle or walking about the streets unguarded are just damn
Speaker 1: stupidity which serves the country. Not one wit you shouldn't
Speaker 1: have done. See me, I'm going to just shoot myself
Speaker 1: in the head as soon as we're surrounded by the
Speaker 1: Red Army. Yeah, solid, solid shade Hitler, cradical support to Hitler,
Speaker 1: for Queen Hitler. Why why can't he be smart and
Speaker 1: die cowardly like I like me after I shoot my
Speaker 1: dog and poison my wife, or die heroically like Joseph,
Speaker 1: like Joseph Gerbel's grenading his children to death like a
Speaker 1: hero of the Reich. Why did he do it with
Speaker 1: the grenade? I don't know. It was all he had.
Speaker 1: It was just like you kill your children now, Yes,
Speaker 1: when you have so many children, a grenade is just efficient.
Speaker 1: I think they actually poison them. Whatever fuck it I needed? Well,
Speaker 1: we watched Downfall, the documentary, So yeah, both assassins are
Speaker 1: caught and executed, and the Nazis carry out a horrific
Speaker 1: series of reprisal prop populations. Actually, the check underground in
Speaker 1: this period and argued strenuously against assassinating Hydric because they
Speaker 1: knew it would lead to them being wiped out. And
Speaker 1: they are. They're just annihilated as a result of this,
Speaker 1: as are a lot of people not even involved in
Speaker 1: the underground. The village of Lettuce, which was falsely implicated
Speaker 1: in sheltering the assassins, paid the brunt of the price.
Speaker 1: All one d ninety nine men in the village are executed,
Speaker 1: women are sent to a concentration camp. Eighty one children
Speaker 1: are gassed to death, and the remainder are sent out
Speaker 1: to other families. We don't really know. The surviving women
Speaker 1: of Lettuce go back to the destroyed side of the
Speaker 1: village and it's been the rest of their lives waiting
Speaker 1: for their children to come home. And I never do. Um. Oh,
Speaker 1: it's it's fucking heartbreaking. Um. The check village of Lezaki
Speaker 1: was also destroyed because the radio transmitter belonging to Partisans
Speaker 1: was found there. Across the territory, more than thirteen thousand
Speaker 1: people are arrested and roughly five thousand people are murdered
Speaker 1: in reprisals for Reinhard's assassination. Um. And that's more or
Speaker 1: less the end of the story of Reinhard hydric A
Speaker 1: be a piece of ship. Oh man, So I gotta say,
Speaker 1: you're right. He is a bastard. He really sucks. He's
Speaker 1: so bad. He is not a good guy, not chill.
Speaker 1: In fact, he is sketch. And I do not appreciate it.
Speaker 1: If you're making a short list of like guys for
Speaker 1: the that you're nominating for the title of like worst
Speaker 1: person in history, he's got to be in the running.
Speaker 1: Yeah he's Yeah, he's not top five, he's definitely top ten.
Speaker 1: Like he's up there with Hitler, because again, without a
Speaker 1: guy like Reinhard, I don't know that Hitler is at
Speaker 1: least able to carry out the Holocaust in the same way,
Speaker 1: because you need the implementation man. Yeah, yeah, you need
Speaker 1: the guy who's able to engineer the whole thing. You know,
Speaker 1: you gotta get someone to execute it. And there's the
Speaker 1: peanut butter. Heydrick is the jelly exactly. The other lying
Speaker 1: centuries of anti Semitism are the white bread, and he
Speaker 1: needs all of it to make your Holocaust peb and j. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is why I'm allergic to peanut butter. Yes, because
Speaker 1: I'm Jewish. All Jews a peanut butter right, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: the most anti Semitic sandwich is of course the P
Speaker 1: and J. We've all been saying that for years. Oh man,
Speaker 1: that is uh, yeah, he's he's a bad dude, and
Speaker 1: uh and I don't like him. And I think that's
Speaker 1: the point of this podcast is to find more people
Speaker 1: who I'm like. I don't like him, you know, because
Speaker 1: I like most people, but not that guy. That guy,
Speaker 1: I'm just glad that Hardy. It's rad that he died
Speaker 1: in horrible pain, seventy days sepsis. He's he's literally the
Speaker 1: one Nazi who gets what he deserves. Terrific lingering death
Speaker 1: caused that. And then and he's you know, he's thinking
Speaker 1: the whole time. Shit, if I just drove it, driven away,
Speaker 1: i'd have I'd have avoided all of this agony. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm glad he got to think about his death as
Speaker 1: he really did. Like, fuck you reinhard Hydric, you piece
Speaker 1: of fucking trash. I'm glad your death was horrible. It
Speaker 1: is okay to luxuriate in the nightmarish agony of the
Speaker 1: architect of the fucking Holocaust. There should be a seven
Speaker 1: day celebration all over the world. We should celebrate the
Speaker 1: day he got shot by this check part of a
Speaker 1: Ryan Hard Hydrick started dying today, we should have seven
Speaker 1: days of gifts and dances. We think painful sepsis is
Speaker 1: everyone fucking just like marking in the streets. He is
Speaker 1: the closest to the pure embodiment of human evil. I
Speaker 1: think it's it's like he's he's like Leopold of Belgium.
Speaker 1: He's that kind of monster which are the worst to me.
Speaker 1: I think in a lot of ways, he's worse than
Speaker 1: a guy like Hitler. Um because again Hitler, if there
Speaker 1: had been resistance to Hitler, if there had been a
Speaker 1: solid block of conservatives who are like, we're gonna have
Speaker 1: Hitler be empowered, but we're not going to let him
Speaker 1: do this in this and we're gonna organ as the military,
Speaker 1: We're going to make sure which was a thing that
Speaker 1: was happening, there was a chance that that would happen.
Speaker 1: Hitler could have been a quasi dictator for five or ten,
Speaker 1: fifteen years, and then like which happened in other countries,
Speaker 1: right which happened, he could have been like Franco. That
Speaker 1: was not necessarily impossible. If there's the way he was
Speaker 1: a pragmatist. He would have preferred that to being forced
Speaker 1: out of power or assassinated. If that had been like that,
Speaker 1: that was not an impossible thing. From the beginning, Ryan
Speaker 1: hard Heydrick is Um, I don't know, he's he He
Speaker 1: might be worse. He might be worse than Big Age,
Speaker 1: you know what, dude, Well, you know, and at the
Speaker 1: end of the day, he got what he always wanted,
Speaker 1: which was a really big gold star on his report card.
Speaker 1: You know, he got he got to be bigger than Hitler's.
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean not, you know, in a way
Speaker 1: that most people know you there's no point. Really, it's
Speaker 1: stupid to be like, well, who was a worse person?
Speaker 1: Like they're all like, it doesn't doesn't matter, they're all
Speaker 1: a's such a level of human evil. Trying to parse
Speaker 1: out differences between them is is silly. Um. But but
Speaker 1: he is I what I should the way I should
Speaker 1: frame is not that like, oh, I think he's worse
Speaker 1: than Hitler. He is the Nazi I find most personally offensive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and frightening. He's the one who's scariest to me, especially
Speaker 1: because like if you now, I haven't seen a picture
Speaker 1: of him yet and so this whole time, I'm just looking,
Speaker 1: I'm picturing yeah, blonde ken brauna, and it's like part
Speaker 1: of what's pissing me off about him mostly is just
Speaker 1: this like this fucking Zack Morris looking motherfucker committing the
Speaker 1: worst atrocities and executing atrocities, going above and beyond beyond
Speaker 1: Hitler even to like execute these mass you know, this
Speaker 1: mass genocide, the Holocaust and U and just yeah, just
Speaker 1: like I this is why I hate hot people, you know,
Speaker 1: anyone who's attractive. Yeah, I wouldn't call him. He's definitely
Speaker 1: not as good looking as Kenneth Branda, but he is
Speaker 1: the most like Aryan looking of the Nazi leadership for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I'm looking him up right now. You're gonna
Speaker 1: look him up. I was just gonna send you that
Speaker 1: in the chat. Yeah, No, he's he's not. You're right,
Speaker 1: he's not that hot, but he's not hot, but he is.
Speaker 1: He is, Like, he's blonde haired, blue eyed, he's got
Speaker 1: and he's tall, he's in very good shape. He's an athlete.
Speaker 1: You know, he's the most Nazi looking motherfucker I think
Speaker 1: I've ever seen. He really is the most Nazi looking
Speaker 1: of the of the of the high up nazis, right, Girbels.
Speaker 1: You look at gering Um, you look at fucking um Hess,
Speaker 1: you look at um Hitler, you look at Himler. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Ryan Hard is the one who looks like they say,
Speaker 1: an arian. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's the one. He's the
Speaker 1: one that they all draw when they're trying to be like,
Speaker 1: this is my perfect man. Okay, he's just superman. He's
Speaker 1: very tall, blonde, blue eyes, very sharp cheekbones, he's got
Speaker 1: naked more yeah yeah, yeah, and I'm not so obviously
Speaker 1: like Kenneth Brannah. One of the criticisms. Actually, the first
Speaker 1: time I watched Conspiracy, so I dropped out of college
Speaker 1: obviously because fun that. But the last two years or
Speaker 1: so I was in college most of my classes and
Speaker 1: the thing that I was thinking I might get when
Speaker 1: I thought I might get a degree was UTD offered
Speaker 1: like a Holocaust studies program, and there's a series of
Speaker 1: classes on Holocaust and remembrance that I took, which is
Speaker 1: where I watched Conspiracy. And like one of the criticisms
Speaker 1: that people have of that movie, it's a very good
Speaker 1: and I think very accurate depiction of how the Vance
Speaker 1: conference was handled right. It does a very good job
Speaker 1: of laying out the way these people talked, the way
Speaker 1: they actually in the way that you see the way
Speaker 1: the thing we talked about repeatedly in this episode, the
Speaker 1: way Hydrick orchestrates gets people on board, the way he
Speaker 1: whips support between different agencies to make them do what
Speaker 1: he wants. You see that in the movie. I think
Speaker 1: they do a good job of it. Um, they make
Speaker 1: him hot, which you know, Kenneth Brann is a very
Speaker 1: good actor, and I think he very ably plays at
Speaker 1: the evil but also you cast Kenneth Branna, he can't
Speaker 1: not be hot. He's Kenneth Branna. He's he's hot. He's
Speaker 1: fucking hot as hell. Um. But people criticize it because
Speaker 1: they're like, why are you going to make him to
Speaker 1: make him hot? Which I think that's a fair casting though,
Speaker 1: especially given the fact that, like this was one of
Speaker 1: the reasons that he rose up so high. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: it is, it is. I think there's an argument to
Speaker 1: him made that, like, well, Nazis saw him as good
Speaker 1: looking because he looked like a Nazi. Yeah, he was
Speaker 1: like a you know, front facing Nazi guy, someone you
Speaker 1: could like point to and go this is this is
Speaker 1: what we look like. In Hollywood. People are always better looking,
Speaker 1: So you've got to have the Nazist looking guy in
Speaker 1: the Hollywood movie be extra and Kenneth Branna looks like
Speaker 1: a fucking Hollywood Nazi. And yeah, I think it was good.
Speaker 1: Casting is my my fame. It's a controversial movie again
Speaker 1: from people who are Holocaust nerds, which is a horrible
Speaker 1: way to describe it. But no, but there are Holocaust
Speaker 1: nerds out there are Holocaust Yeah, and I am on
Speaker 1: the side of I think it's and it's a movie
Speaker 1: I show people when we went to Saxonhausen. Um, it
Speaker 1: was me and a group my my, my partner at
Speaker 1: the time and like some Australian kids that we met
Speaker 1: while just like chilling out and getting wasted in Berlin together.
Speaker 1: We all went together and we watched Conspiracy afterwards. Um
Speaker 1: it's a good movie to watch too. Um. Uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's I I recommend it to people again.
Speaker 1: You know, there's some controversies around it. It's very good.
Speaker 1: It's very good, and it's also uh and this is
Speaker 1: not so much a historical note. Uh, it's a great
Speaker 1: example of a movie uh that can be compelling and
Speaker 1: only be in two or three different settings. Like most
Speaker 1: of it takes place in a meeting and a meeting,
Speaker 1: and they ever leave the grounds of this fucking house.
Speaker 1: No they don't. Yeah, there's like a scene in the bathroom,
Speaker 1: there's a scene in the hall, and most of it
Speaker 1: is in this meeting room. And it's very compelling. And
Speaker 1: also it shows the I think the banality of evil
Speaker 1: is like a perfect you know, like that's that's what
Speaker 1: especially Aikman's portrayal by I think that Stanley Tucci, who
Speaker 1: was just like, yes, oh, he's so good in this
Speaker 1: Stanley Tucci, who plays Aikman in that Yeah. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: and he's like, uh, you know, he's basically doing notes,
Speaker 1: he's taking it out, he's taking notes, and the fact
Speaker 1: that he's taking notes enables the slaughter of eleven million people, right,
Speaker 1: Like his notes are a key aspect of the machinery
Speaker 1: of death. Um, which is what the case was, right,
Speaker 1: that's that's that is Aikman, that is who he was. UM.
Speaker 1: And there's this um there's a wonderful scene in the
Speaker 1: movie where they're all quibbly because a lot of people
Speaker 1: this was a real problem. Again, we talked about her.
Speaker 1: There's different chunks of the Nazis. They have different arguments. Uh.
Speaker 1: Some of the guys who had written the Nuremberg Laws
Speaker 1: are angry because Hydric is basically throwing out the restrictions
Speaker 1: on the Nuremberg Laws because he doesn't think they go
Speaker 1: far enough. And they're arguing about like this isn't legal,
Speaker 1: you're going outside the downs of the law. And there's
Speaker 1: a moment where Hydrick, I think its asks raise your
Speaker 1: hand if you're a lawyer, and everyone in the room
Speaker 1: raises their hands, which are almost all of these guys
Speaker 1: were fucking lawyers. Yeah, it's yeah, and and you know
Speaker 1: it's like I remember that specifically when we were talking
Speaker 1: about the Nuremberg Laws and like Kenneth Braun as you know,
Speaker 1: changing of them. I'm just gonna call uh Reinhardt Hydrick
Speaker 1: Branda boy. Uh No. It's like, you know, kind of
Speaker 1: like just going, hey, let's stop quibbling over how much
Speaker 1: blood if you have any blood, like he went one
Speaker 1: drop rule and that that always stuck out to me
Speaker 1: is like kind of like uh you know that that
Speaker 1: in the end was like, yeah, this is about ethnicity.
Speaker 1: Let's stop pretending this is about religion. Let's stop pretending
Speaker 1: this is about Christ in any fashion, like this is
Speaker 1: about d n A racial makeup and and just it's
Speaker 1: totally fake race pseudo science. Yeah, anyways, you know again
Speaker 1: he pluggables to plug. No time to plug your plug doubles,
Speaker 1: like discussing the machinery that was built in order to
Speaker 1: enable the fastest mass extermination of an ethnic group in history. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know. I always like to plug my podcasts about
Speaker 1: the Sopranos right after talking about the Holocaust. Think about
Speaker 1: those rooms filled with human hair and empty shoes. And
Speaker 1: check out this podcast. Check out this great podcast in
Speaker 1: which we rewatch Sopranos and talk about it with wonderful guests. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's called Pod Yourself a Gun. Uh, and season five
Speaker 1: is about to start right now. We're through one through four,
Speaker 1: so check it out wherever you get. You know, your
Speaker 1: podcast and the Fraud Cast, uh, which is the same
Speaker 1: type of podcast, same host, but we talk about movies instead.
Speaker 1: So check that out and follow me at Matt leave
Speaker 1: Jokes on Instagram and at Matt Leeb on Twitter. Yep,
Speaker 1: check him out. You can check out I have a novel.
Speaker 1: It's being launched as a podcast three chapters a week
Speaker 1: after the Revolution. You can also find the text. Every
Speaker 1: week will upload a new e pub and there will
Speaker 1: be in browser readable versions of the text too, for free,
Speaker 1: you know ads at After the Revolution or sorry at
Speaker 1: a t r book dot com. So you know, think
Speaker 1: about the most monstrous act of soulless evil ever committed,
Speaker 1: and then check out pod, yourself a gun and read
Speaker 1: my book. Please please do those things. Yeah, and we
Speaker 1: hope you've enjoyed this horrible, horrible person, this real great
Speaker 1: crash monster. Yeah, hey everybody. Initially I was going to
Speaker 1: plug the go fund made for the sequel to my book,
Speaker 1: UM After the Revolution, which you can find at a
Speaker 1: t R book dot com. But um, here in the
Speaker 1: Pacific Northwest, we're having an unprecedented heat wave and it's
Speaker 1: causing disastrous conditions, life threatening conditions for a lot of
Speaker 1: houseless people, a lot of people without air conditioning. UM,
Speaker 1: particularly in the city of Salem. UM activists everywhere have
Speaker 1: been kind of gathering to try and um mitigate, set
Speaker 1: up cooling stations, hand out cold drinks, to do things
Speaker 1: to help people get their temperature down. UM. I want
Speaker 1: to try and raise funds for the Free Fridge of Salem, UM,
Speaker 1: which are doing cooling stations in the capital of Oregon, Salem.
Speaker 1: So if you go to venmo At Free Fridge Salem,
Speaker 1: that's venmo At Free Fridge Salem and send them a
Speaker 1: couple of bucks, they could really use it. Um. Local
Speaker 1: government has destroyed a number like police particularly have destroyed
Speaker 1: a number of water and cooling stations they've set out.
Speaker 1: Um it's you know, we're not going to be in
Speaker 1: triple digit heats for the next couple of days after
Speaker 1: I'm recording this on Monday, but it's still going to
Speaker 1: be very hot. People still need this, So please venmo
Speaker 1: At Free Fridge Salem if you have the wherewithal and
Speaker 1: the financial resources to do so. One more time, the
Speaker 1: venemo is at Free Fridge Salem. Thanks h