Speaker 1: Oh, Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the drivetime radio podcast
Speaker 1: that gets you to your work rocking with are all
Speaker 1: our old friends Hitler and Ryan hard Heidrick all the boys.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, Hitler and his friends, Hitler and his friends. Wow.
Speaker 1: So everybody, this is Robert Evans with my with my
Speaker 1: guests for today this week Matt leeb has Matt has
Speaker 1: one of those boxes that radio DJs have that's makes
Speaker 1: sounds on demand. And I'm gonna tell you right now,
Speaker 1: this is going to be a nightmare for all of you.
Speaker 1: I'm very excited. It's the only way you can actually
Speaker 1: inject levity into Nazi atrocities is occasional air horn a horn,
Speaker 1: you know, and then some cool, funky beats. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: a couple of a couple of pops. Yeah, Oh my god,
Speaker 1: it's a few stings in there. Man. Honest. I've always
Speaker 1: said Behind the Bastards needs to be more like a
Speaker 1: Morning Zoo Fia exactly. Yeah. We could. We we could
Speaker 1: get like a deep fake of l Ron Hubbard to
Speaker 1: like come in and be against every now and again
Speaker 1: and talk about how to kidnap his baby the best.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Boner and the Nord Tell you today we're
Speaker 1: talking about Ryan hard Hydra more like ryanrd Hydra. Ye. Sorry,
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry. We've really, really all the goodwill that
Speaker 1: we've built up for years of carefully doing this podcast
Speaker 1: shattered in a second, gone because of my new equipment. Dude,
Speaker 1: this this came with it. I don't understand. I don't
Speaker 1: need it. It just was like, oh, here's a pad
Speaker 1: for sounds. And I was like when you hear about
Speaker 1: like people's who being introduced to the global economy having
Speaker 1: not ever been brought in before, and suddenly like Coca
Speaker 1: Cola comes to them like that at no point of
Speaker 1: their ancestors ever processed that amount of sugar. It causes
Speaker 1: serious health problems. That's what's happening to me. With access
Speaker 1: to this device that you now, I am going to
Speaker 1: destroy myself and my show. Um yes, I am someone liberated,
Speaker 1: liberated from a work camp who gets a Hershey bar
Speaker 1: and exactly it's just too much. Oh boy, So times
Speaker 1: we should probably start this episode by talking about what
Speaker 1: it means to be a hunter or a poacher right
Speaker 1: in Nazi Germany. What Because it's not as simple as
Speaker 1: you'd think, right. Poaching is a serious crime, a lot
Speaker 1: of the laws that people are getting arrested under date
Speaker 1: back to the days when the Kaiser and other nobles
Speaker 1: are like the only people who are allowed to hunt,
Speaker 1: or at least allowed to hunt in certain areas and right,
Speaker 1: because you've got like a king and you've got dukes,
Speaker 1: and it's like, well, these are the nice deer and
Speaker 1: only they may hunt them. And you know, or in
Speaker 1: this woods, all of the game belonged to this noble thing.
Speaker 1: It was like I thought it was weird. I was
Speaker 1: like poachers. It was it a legal, it's certain game.
Speaker 1: It always is, right because you don't want number one,
Speaker 1: the Nazis, it must be said, we're kind of ahead
Speaker 1: of the curve when it came to like attitudes towards
Speaker 1: animal welfs environmental preservation. So there is some some of
Speaker 1: this is that like they have laws because it's like, what,
Speaker 1: we don't want to do damage to this ecosystem. But
Speaker 1: paradoxes of Nazism is like when Hitler is like, I'm
Speaker 1: a vegetarian, like I dislike harming of animals. So some
Speaker 1: of it does come from just the fact that Hitler
Speaker 1: is kind of a guy who likes animals, and some
Speaker 1: of it comes from a lot of it. Most of
Speaker 1: it comes from just like there have always been these
Speaker 1: laws because in all of Europe it's been heavily restricted
Speaker 1: who gets to hunt. Why this is a bigger subject.
Speaker 1: But hunting is like it's a thing in Europe in
Speaker 1: a way it's not in the United States because among
Speaker 1: other things, a lot of stuff like who gets to
Speaker 1: have weapons is wrapped up and who gets to go hunting,
Speaker 1: and like a lot of different kind of game. Number One,
Speaker 1: because of how much longer there's been sort of settled
Speaker 1: societies in Europe. Uh and they were never because there
Speaker 1: is bad at environmental regulation, as white people tend to be,
Speaker 1: They wiped out a lot of like the big game species,
Speaker 1: so there was kind of a need anyway, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of rules here. So Number one, poaching is something
Speaker 1: that it is easy to be a poacher, and that
Speaker 1: what you can hunt and win is heavily regulated. But
Speaker 1: but the other thing that's going on here is that
Speaker 1: even though poaching has punished severely and Hitler himself hates
Speaker 1: the idea of hunting for meat, hunters have a deep
Speaker 1: like almost religious, spiritual sort of place in German folklore. Right,
Speaker 1: the concept of a hunter is something that is is venerated.
Speaker 1: Think about like at least a couple of times in
Speaker 1: those fucking handling Grettelass stories where like the guy who
Speaker 1: comes and saves the days, some like hunter who's just
Speaker 1: like through the woods, right, Like it's a thing, you know, um,
Speaker 1: And it's a thing in part because like Germans have
Speaker 1: a lot of German history is like rap and German
Speaker 1: like pride is wrapped up and you know they're they're
Speaker 1: early history when they were fighting the Romans, and like
Speaker 1: they're these kind of woods people who are live in
Speaker 1: the dark forest their national folk hero myths, and yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of them are like exactly. So a lot
Speaker 1: of Nazi propaganda is focused on people need to return
Speaker 1: to nature, need to get back to the woods, they
Speaker 1: need to hike into camp, and of course they need
Speaker 1: to hunt. Right. That is, as much as Hitler doesn't
Speaker 1: like it, a lot of Nazis and a lot of
Speaker 1: Nazi propaganda still does venerate hunters. We're not liking it.
Speaker 1: And then it's like, don't kill for meat. If you're
Speaker 1: gonna kill, kill. This job has been making such moral
Speaker 1: compromises unbelievable. Stagg right near where I guess Jews. It
Speaker 1: was horrible, can't you believe it? Put his head up
Speaker 1: once all. So we we see shades of this in
Speaker 1: modern right wing propaganda, right like every if you're gonna
Speaker 1: be like a right wing ship head trumpy political candidate,
Speaker 1: you're gonna pose with a gun shooting something. Right. Some
Speaker 1: of those guys are actual hunters. Neo Nazi. Fucking Paul
Speaker 1: Neilon is a hunter and a scary asshole um. But
Speaker 1: a lot of them are just like Dr Oz where
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, put me with a shotgun next to
Speaker 1: some ducks, like people need to see that I'm a
Speaker 1: real man, um. And it's a bit like that with
Speaker 1: the Nazis. You definitely have some degree to which this
Speaker 1: is like showy. But some of the Nazi high command
Speaker 1: are big hunting nerds. I think it's Gearing. Gearing is
Speaker 1: huge into hunting, and I believe Himler is as well.
Speaker 1: Was either Himler or Gerbel's I actually forgot the double check,
Speaker 1: but one of the two of the other big guys
Speaker 1: was was also a big hunting nerd, and they have
Speaker 1: like very nice hunting lodges. Gearing builds this palace for
Speaker 1: himself named after his dead wife, Karen Hall. That's just
Speaker 1: for him to go shoot things while the war is
Speaker 1: going badly. Um, sell me a dog. There are a
Speaker 1: lot of like there. There is Nazis are kind of
Speaker 1: as much as Hitler doesn't like attributing some sort of
Speaker 1: magical skill to the idea of being a hunter and poachers,
Speaker 1: even though it's illegal, poachers are seen as generally the
Speaker 1: very best hunters, right because not only are they tracking
Speaker 1: and killing animals, but they're doing it while avoiding the law. Right,
Speaker 1: So you have to be pretty good at hunting to
Speaker 1: be a successful being hunted exactly, so that that there
Speaker 1: is like a respect. Even as much as the Nazis
Speaker 1: are big law and order guys, there's a respect for
Speaker 1: what it means to be a poacher. So it's it's
Speaker 1: both this, like, these guys are criminals and thus we
Speaker 1: don't want to associate too closely with them, and also
Speaker 1: these guys have some sort of primal skill that we've venerate, right. Um,
Speaker 1: So when the Nazis decide that they're going to form
Speaker 1: a military unit of cotton sentenced poachers, they think they're
Speaker 1: making like this is obviously is a is a considered
Speaker 1: military decision. It does make sense, right, if you were
Speaker 1: planning a counter insurgent campaign, this might be a thing
Speaker 1: you would do because it does make sense. But they're
Speaker 1: also doing something a little bit more esoteric. The mystical
Speaker 1: qualities attributed to hunters by German mythology include an understanding
Speaker 1: of the wild as something powerful, spiritual, and valuable, but
Speaker 1: by necessity controlled. And there's there's this idea that some
Speaker 1: men are wild men, and poachers are among them. Dura
Speaker 1: Wanger is a wild man. And you can't let these
Speaker 1: people run freely in your society because like they'll suck
Speaker 1: it up there too. They bring too much chaos. But
Speaker 1: they also they're manly, they're powerful, and they're necessary in
Speaker 1: some places. So there's a there's a place for wildness,
Speaker 1: there's a place where it's necessary. And as the Nazis
Speaker 1: gear up to ethnically cleansed Poland and the East, one
Speaker 1: of the things that is like makes immediate sense to
Speaker 1: these guys. It's like, well, this is where, this is
Speaker 1: a place where wildness is needed, right, this is exactly
Speaker 1: we need some fucking lunatics out here. Um, And yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote again from Christian Ingrau quote the image
Speaker 1: of the hunter, like that of his different quarry, corresponds,
Speaker 1: according to bertrand Hell, to your European imagination of black blood,
Speaker 1: which defines the exact distance from the wild to these societies,
Speaker 1: and by a discourse interpreting hunter's behavior, inserts them in
Speaker 1: social organization and integrates therein the savagery and violence of
Speaker 1: that image. Now black blood meaning like these people have
Speaker 1: animal blood in exactly, Yeah, there's something inherently wild about
Speaker 1: them that we have to harness. Right, And if you
Speaker 1: want to read Christians book, which I do recommend, he
Speaker 1: goes into a lot of detail about what this means
Speaker 1: kind of the esoteric history. I don't understand all of this.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell you that right now. I am not
Speaker 1: an expert on European folklore, and this is an academic text.
Speaker 1: Christian is a little bit wonkier than I entirely get.
Speaker 1: But what I do stand understand is that he's saying
Speaker 1: the Nazis venerate wildness. Thus, is there a term you
Speaker 1: will hear a lot in speeches that, like Hitler and
Speaker 1: Himmler and Gering make is hardness. Right, We want to
Speaker 1: make young men hard so that they can do the
Speaker 1: things that are you need to be done in the East,
Speaker 1: and it is it is very funny. We can make
Speaker 1: all the dip chokes we want. Um, this is you
Speaker 1: can see this as part of the evidence for the
Speaker 1: intentionalist sort of thing. Actually, it kind of does fit either,
Speaker 1: because what you're seeing here is that when you're when
Speaker 1: you're specifically saying we need to make the new generation
Speaker 1: of men tough and not care about hurting people and
Speaker 1: able to kind of go wild because we're about to
Speaker 1: take over a space that we need them to go
Speaker 1: wild in in order to detain it. Right, Um, that
Speaker 1: is preparation for a genocide. Now not in the sense
Speaker 1: that I think is easy to recognize in court papers,
Speaker 1: but like that's part of it, right, the the deliberate
Speaker 1: inculcation of these virtues of hardness and wildness and young
Speaker 1: men and the Reich is part of why the genocide happens.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's a it's as necessary as stockpiling the munitions,
Speaker 1: right because most people can't just go shoot thirty thod
Speaker 1: folks in a day, right, Yeah, like even most assholts
Speaker 1: can't do. Take your biggest American dips it and he's
Speaker 1: not getting those numbers. No. Um, so the reason darl
Speaker 1: Wanger and these poachers are being formed into an anti
Speaker 1: partisan unit. In addition to the stuff that just makes
Speaker 1: sense militarily, there's an understanding by the Nazi brass that
Speaker 1: these guys are going to be good at harnessing the
Speaker 1: savagery of the wild to get civilian populations, and that
Speaker 1: maybe a little bit of that wildness will rub off
Speaker 1: on the other soldiers, and that's kind of what they think,
Speaker 1: they know they're going to need. It's so it's the
Speaker 1: insane thing about it, too, is that is number one,
Speaker 1: they don't have black blood or whatever. The fuck. These
Speaker 1: guys are literally just sociopaths. These guys they're finding the
Speaker 1: most monstrous fucking like I mean, this would be equivalent
Speaker 1: to like guys drinking four local and people going those
Speaker 1: guys are wild, man, those guys really animal blood. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean just yeah, just the biggest assholes in the world.
Speaker 1: And they're just attributing some sort of like I don't know,
Speaker 1: fucking spiritual animalistic sucking. None of what I'm saying or
Speaker 1: what Christian to saying, is that like that this is
Speaker 1: a lot a completely logical thing. It's just of course
Speaker 1: there's folklore roots because the German the Nazis are big
Speaker 1: into that sort of stuff that go deeper than just
Speaker 1: like we need some poachers, right, There is a lot
Speaker 1: going on here and it is it is meaningful to
Speaker 1: understand that. Again, in Grau's book goes into more detail.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to claim to entirely understand the arguments
Speaker 1: that he's making there beyond what I have related to you,
Speaker 1: because it is more complex than that. But you can
Speaker 1: read that on your own if you're real into fucking
Speaker 1: European folklore and hunting. Um. So this takes us back
Speaker 1: to the discourse though that opened the episode about intentionalists
Speaker 1: versus functionalists. Durrowanger and his men are about to kill
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of civilians, mostly women and children, in
Speaker 1: the most brutal way is conceivable. Most of these specific
Speaker 1: killings are not ordered by Hitler or by anyone else
Speaker 1: in high command directly. Rather, durl Wanger's unit is formed
Speaker 1: with the understanding that he and his men will interpret
Speaker 1: their job, which is anti partisan activity, to include just
Speaker 1: killing everybody in certain areas, right, and not only that,
Speaker 1: but that they will develop techniques to do that that
Speaker 1: will be replicable by the rest of the German military.
Speaker 1: So obviously there are specific direct orders behind a number
Speaker 1: of their massacres, but usually said orders are less specific
Speaker 1: than you'd imagine. And this is not just a thing
Speaker 1: the Germans did when they were committing war crimes. This
Speaker 1: is part of their battle theory. There's a thing they
Speaker 1: have developed in at the end of World War One
Speaker 1: called Alph Truck's tactic, which venerates individual initiative and leaves
Speaker 1: solutions to problems open to field commanders. Right, German soldiers
Speaker 1: up through World War Two are much less hampered by
Speaker 1: like they're much less the command exactly. It's more lest
Speaker 1: like no, no, you're in charge of this unit of guys.
Speaker 1: We need you here by this stage. However you do,
Speaker 1: that's up to you. I'm not going to micro manage you.
Speaker 1: And that's part of how like you get stories about
Speaker 1: like Rammel being like a hundred miles ahead of the
Speaker 1: rest of the army and whatnot, because there this is
Speaker 1: like a thing that the German military specifically tries to
Speaker 1: inculcate and its soldiers. And so even though there's not
Speaker 1: like a direct hitler doesn't send out a memo saying like, hey,
Speaker 1: have Oscar Darrow Wanger ethnically cleans large parts of Poland
Speaker 1: and Belarus. He is directly orchestrating those massacres by he
Speaker 1: and Himler and stuff, by putting this unit together and
Speaker 1: putting it in the places that it's being put right
Speaker 1: and being like, you know, hey, just if you feel entrepreneurial,
Speaker 1: go for it. It's pretty much. It's weird that the
Speaker 1: Third Reich was kind of like militarily run like a startup,
Speaker 1: which is like, pretty well, yeah, you know, yeah, everybody,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of hats. There's a real startup. Yes, well,
Speaker 1: there's plenty of snacks and also guns in the kitchen
Speaker 1: to kill. We have black massashes at every Thursday, all
Speaker 1: the headphones you could ever want. Yeah, it is. It
Speaker 1: is a bit like that. So Nazi Germany invades September
Speaker 1: nineteen nine Poland. Um, this works pretty well for them. Uh.
Speaker 1: They fairly rapidly achieve conquest of Poland alongside the Red Army,
Speaker 1: who are on board for the conquest of Poland. At
Speaker 1: this everybody wants some Poland right to a few centuries
Speaker 1: now where people are just like, hey, let's get Poland.
Speaker 1: Every time a war happens. Yeah, I mean outside of
Speaker 1: the Nazi stuff. Man, if you come to me and
Speaker 1: you're like, hey, Robert, I think we gotta I think
Speaker 1: I got an idea we could take some Poland, I'll
Speaker 1: be like, I'll hear you out, you know, I'll hear
Speaker 1: everyone wants a piece of little bit of Polis. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Not trying to go wild on it. Um. The Nazis
Speaker 1: kind of go wild on it a little bit, so
Speaker 1: they militarily this goes pretty well for them, but they
Speaker 1: start to deal very quickly with the problem that their
Speaker 1: forces are conquering more people and coming into possession of
Speaker 1: more Jews than they had entirely been ready to handle.
Speaker 1: So they've got partisans. There are partisans fighting, although it's
Speaker 1: not at its high pitch yet, right because everyone in
Speaker 1: Poland is still sort of dealing with the shock of
Speaker 1: being invaded. Yeah, very it's it's it's come, it's come
Speaker 1: along quickly. So the need to fight partisans at this
Speaker 1: period is less important than they need to reduce the
Speaker 1: number of human beings living in like the areas the
Speaker 1: Germans are trying to take over and turn into Greater Germany.
Speaker 1: So Darrel Langer gets sent with his men to Oriannenburg
Speaker 1: in May of nineteen forty just a couple of months,
Speaker 1: like not more than a couple of months, but not
Speaker 1: all of that long after the invasion, and his job
Speaker 1: is to train the first few dozen poachers in his
Speaker 1: special unit. His men are kept in an isolated barracks,
Speaker 1: less their wildness and criminal nature infect the other soldiers.
Speaker 1: The specific branch of the German military they were attached
Speaker 1: to would later become the Waffen s S, which is
Speaker 1: the military arm of Heinrich Hmler's fun club for racists.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote now from the s S Darrel
Speaker 1: Wanger Brigade by Ingrau quote. The two months of training
Speaker 1: they were given must have been limited to the rudiments
Speaker 1: of military discipline and a summary physical training, something close
Speaker 1: to the Prussian drill, but hardly going for they're considering
Speaker 1: how soon they were sent into action. This training was
Speaker 1: selective enough that in the end only fifty five of
Speaker 1: the eighty poachers were accepted in the commando. The others
Speaker 1: were returned progressively to their detention centers without penalty. It
Speaker 1: was purely a question of physical inceptibility. The order requesting
Speaker 1: their reintegration in prison, specified that no disciplinary measures were involved.
Speaker 1: And that's interesting to me that like you get this, like, well,
Speaker 1: we don't want them to feel bad, right, we don't like,
Speaker 1: we don't like be dicks to them. If they can't look,
Speaker 1: you just couldn't cut it, you know, the feeling. Don't
Speaker 1: hurt their feelings as they are carrying out one of
Speaker 1: the greatest blood bats in history. Well, we wouldn't want
Speaker 1: to be like unfair to these guys. Look, they're serving
Speaker 1: their time. You know, they volunteered. It's okay, just them
Speaker 1: not making the cut into the like varsity killing Jews team.
Speaker 1: Hitler sits down next to one of these guys. Look, buddy,
Speaker 1: it's nothing against It's all right exactly exactly got cut
Speaker 1: from his high school jew killing team too, and Jesus Christ,
Speaker 1: oh boy. So in September of nineteen forty, the men
Speaker 1: of S. S. Durawanger, which is like what the unit
Speaker 1: gets called, right, this is just kind of the naming
Speaker 1: scheme at the Germans used are sent to an area
Speaker 1: in Poland called Lublin. This town held an important place
Speaker 1: in Nazi race theory. One of their propagandists had in
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties described it as quote a bottomless well
Speaker 1: from which Jews flow to all corners of the globe,
Speaker 1: the source of the rebirth of world jewry. So certain
Speaker 1: Nazis are like, this is where the Jews come from. There, Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the well where the Jews are sprouted and
Speaker 1: then just get shot into different countries all over the world.
Speaker 1: Now look, it's called Lubland, Lublin, Lublin. Now look, I
Speaker 1: know everything the Jews mountain, oh man. Given everything that's
Speaker 1: going on in Palestine these days, the question of like
Speaker 1: what is a Jewish homeland made is a thorny one.
Speaker 1: But I think everyone can agree it's not Ublin. It's definitely,
Speaker 1: it's definitely not Lublin. Yeah, we don't. We're not always
Speaker 1: just like, hey, did you take your your yearly birthright
Speaker 1: trips back to Lublin next year in Lublin. So the
Speaker 1: surrounding terrain is swampy uh in the area, and so
Speaker 1: it was considered to be Lublin's got a large Jewish population,
Speaker 1: But it's also considered a great idea. They're going to
Speaker 1: take all of the Jewish people from the surrounding area
Speaker 1: and they're going to force them into the swamps around Poland,
Speaker 1: where they're going to create concentration camps um. And they
Speaker 1: think this is a great idea because since it's a swamp,
Speaker 1: swamps are bad for you. As a general rule, people
Speaker 1: aren't supposed to live in swamps, and the Nazis are
Speaker 1: specifically saying that, like, if we make them all live
Speaker 1: in this swamp and like shitty camps, it will quote
Speaker 1: cause their considerable decimation. This is a free way to
Speaker 1: have the environment kill a lot of them, and we
Speaker 1: don't know they're trying to biological warfare in a sense. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So we have very little specific detail on what the
Speaker 1: men of the Dura Wanger unit did in these first
Speaker 1: eighteen months, but we do know the broad strokes, which
Speaker 1: is that they helped to set up and guard the
Speaker 1: Belzac and mag the Neck death camps. This was accomplished
Speaker 1: in stages, which included destruction of synagogues and Talmudic academies
Speaker 1: in Lublin, as the people there were rounded up and
Speaker 1: forced behind barbed wire. One German soldier later described, quote,
Speaker 1: we threw the huge Talmudic library out of the building
Speaker 1: and carried the books to the marketplace, where we set
Speaker 1: fire to them. The fire lasted twenty hours. The Lublin
Speaker 1: Jews assembled around and wept bitterly, almost silencing us with
Speaker 1: their cries. We summon the military band, and with joyful shouts,
Speaker 1: the soldiers drowned out the sounds of Jewish cries. Jesus
Speaker 1: fucking pretty bad, pretty fucking bad. This is uh sorry,
Speaker 1: I just needed something. Yeah, a little bit of airhorn
Speaker 1: there to help out airhorns. I mean, I hate to
Speaker 1: say it, Matt, but that is kind of what the
Speaker 1: Nazi we just read from dead Yeah, yeah, exactly like
Speaker 1: I drowned out to cries with my cool horn. This
Speaker 1: is bleak, Yes, this is very Why are they crying
Speaker 1: so much? Bring out the air horn? Boot? All right? Okay,
Speaker 1: they know if they know about speaking of bomba clat.
Speaker 1: You know who's fucking just hella into reggae. All of
Speaker 1: the sponsors of this podcast, Sylvie and I. Look, when
Speaker 1: or or the CIA or whoever comes out and says
Speaker 1: they want to do an ad in our show, we
Speaker 1: have one question, and it's are you fucking down? Are
Speaker 1: you a rude boy? You goddamn right. We're back so
Speaker 1: in between helping to carry out actions, like the one
Speaker 1: we just read from the Horrible Genocide story and march
Speaker 1: intends of thousands of people to the site of their
Speaker 1: eventual extermination. The Durrowanger unit got the chance to show
Speaker 1: off their special skills encounter sniper missions and in rounding
Speaker 1: up escaped Polish officers spotted in the area. After the war.
Speaker 1: The s s officer Burger, who's the guy who gets
Speaker 1: Durrowinger this job, claimed they spent most of their time
Speaker 1: in combat with early stages of the Polish resistance. This
Speaker 1: is probably a lie, As with that stuff I said
Speaker 1: about counter sniper missions. Ingrou doesn't think they're doing any fighting.
Speaker 1: Ingrow thinks they are purely Number one, rounding up Jewish
Speaker 1: civilians and like burn burning their ship, beating them with
Speaker 1: rifle buds, forcing them into camps, and number two stealing
Speaker 1: ship right like, that's actually what they're doing at this stage.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote from his book now. Post war
Speaker 1: testimony doesn't mention antipartisan activity. Another very credible indicator of
Speaker 1: the total absence of danger is the fact that the
Speaker 1: units suffered no losses. The men almost never mentioned tracking
Speaker 1: partisans in the fullest of the demarcation zone. All, however,
Speaker 1: say that the unit spent the majority of its time
Speaker 1: on the most ordinary surveillance work. Policing the civilian populations
Speaker 1: and fighting the black market seem to have been the
Speaker 1: group's main activities. Unit reports speak regularly if the spoils
Speaker 1: seized by the men supporting the local police force, money,
Speaker 1: consumer goods, valuables, and a lot of this. It's we
Speaker 1: don't exactly know, but there's a lot of reports of like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we busted this Jewish community center and they had all
Speaker 1: of this coffee and meat and stuff, and maybe they
Speaker 1: just found where different members of the Jewish community were
Speaker 1: like storing their nice stuff, or maybe they were robbing
Speaker 1: everyone blind and claiming it was the Jews. They could
Speaker 1: take some of that. And this is the thing, by
Speaker 1: the way, happens across the s S. Right. There are
Speaker 1: actually major discipline problems at the death camps of like
Speaker 1: stuff being stolen from Jews by individual members of the
Speaker 1: s S. Because that stuff is being stolen for the Reich,
Speaker 1: and there's like disciplining over it. People get like transferred
Speaker 1: to the East to go die for it. It's like
Speaker 1: a whole thing. These guys are like pioneers in the
Speaker 1: SS stealing everything that isn't nailed down, right, Um, I
Speaker 1: mean the perk of this kind of fucked up job
Speaker 1: where you're just like, oh, we get to we get
Speaker 1: to go in there first and kill quote partisans, which
Speaker 1: are just civilians who have no idea how the hell
Speaker 1: you've got in their community center. Yeah, and then fucking
Speaker 1: stealing everything inside. Yeah, and we gotta you know, we
Speaker 1: give a bunch of it to the government. But like,
Speaker 1: some of that's gonna find Some of those cigarettes are
Speaker 1: winding up in my pockets, some of that meats winding
Speaker 1: up on my table, you know. That's that's what they do. Um.
Speaker 1: And obviously everything the Nazis are doing is gangster activity.
Speaker 1: What I said earlier in the first episode, these are
Speaker 1: webs of different gangsters, right. So like the fact that
Speaker 1: these guys are stealing the s S doesn't hate it
Speaker 1: because they're stealing it. Hated because no, that's supposed to
Speaker 1: go somewhere else, Right, That's that's going up the chain.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't consider it stealing from the you know, civilians,
Speaker 1: and consider it stealing from them. You know, they're like, hey, hey,
Speaker 1: all that stolen ship is ours mother, fucking yeah. Herman
Speaker 1: Garring needs that coffee exactly, Martin market meat, Martin Borman
Speaker 1: needs to purshuto. You gotta sit now. You don't get
Speaker 1: to keep that poachers go hunt something um so the
Speaker 1: entire yeah again. The thievery of the darrel Wanger Brigade
Speaker 1: eventually grows to be too much for the occupation authorities.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote from a right up by Nicola
Speaker 1: Bodanovic in War History Online here. Various reports stated that
Speaker 1: during this period, rape, murder, extortion, beatings, and other crime
Speaker 1: methods were employed by the members of the Special durl
Speaker 1: Wanger Unit. The police chief of the Lublin Ghetto, Friedrich
Speaker 1: Wilhelm Krueger, was so appalled by the conduct of throat
Speaker 1: cutting Madman that he appealed several times for them to
Speaker 1: be stopped. Instead, he was transferred to Belarus, So were
Speaker 1: the durrell Wangers after their work in Poland was done again,
Speaker 1: like the guy the Nazis make head cop in the ghetto,
Speaker 1: which is not a good man, right, you don't put
Speaker 1: a nice guy in that Job's flatten and say a
Speaker 1: cab It's all, but also some are even more kiss
Speaker 1: Maybe the yeah the most cab of all of the calves.
Speaker 1: And this guy's like, these guys are rapists. These guys
Speaker 1: are really bad. I know, I am preparing to exturminate
Speaker 1: all of these people, but like, we gotta we gotta
Speaker 1: get these these cowboys out of Poland's yeah, these guys
Speaker 1: are just kind of going overboard. Yeah. Um. So it
Speaker 1: was in Poland that the Darrowenger Brigade first proved itself
Speaker 1: in actual anti partisan or sorry, it's in Belarus. Um
Speaker 1: so they get they get sent to Belarus, and it's
Speaker 1: there that the Darrowanger Brigade UM proves itself and its
Speaker 1: first actual anti partisan combat. They do well, they're good
Speaker 1: at this, Like it was actually militarily a decent idea
Speaker 1: to like throw these guys together. And Oscar is immediately like, well,
Speaker 1: this is a small commando unit. You've see what we
Speaker 1: can do. Give me another couple of hundred men and
Speaker 1: give us some guns and let's get some armored vehicles.
Speaker 1: And they get them. And he does this a couple
Speaker 1: of times. The Nazis keep reinforcing this unit with more
Speaker 1: and more guys. Eventually it hits brigade strength. During this period,
Speaker 1: um and which is like eight or nine hundred men
Speaker 1: and their first engagements are pretty standard. But then during
Speaker 1: one of these actions, a squad of their soldiers is
Speaker 1: ambushed by partisans in the road and several are killed.
Speaker 1: In reprisal, they burned down a partisan camp in the village,
Speaker 1: and it's mostly uninhabited at this point because everybody's running away.
Speaker 1: But they burn a village to the ground, and this
Speaker 1: is going to be the first of a lot of
Speaker 1: villages that they were on the ground. From July to
Speaker 1: August of nineteen forty two, they carry out a massive
Speaker 1: anti partisan operation and you have to read between the
Speaker 1: lines here to find the war crime, but it's pretty
Speaker 1: clear when you go through the numbers. By the operations end,
Speaker 1: hundred and eighty one partisans had been killed, but only
Speaker 1: four hundred and twenty two weapons had been seized, only
Speaker 1: twenty seven German soldiers have been killed. One might interpret
Speaker 1: from this that they're just rounding up villages and killing everybody.
Speaker 1: And yeah, they're doing the thing that the l a
Speaker 1: p d does, right, just like keep a gun in
Speaker 1: the boot of the car to toss it a guy.
Speaker 1: You know. This would prove to be a general trend
Speaker 1: for the unit and I'm gonna quote from Ingrou's book again.
Speaker 1: During these operations, according to Christian Garlas calculations, six to
Speaker 1: ten men were killed for every weapon recovered and confiscated.
Speaker 1: He concludes that only fifteen percent of those killed were
Speaker 1: real members of armed resistance movements against the Germans. The victims,
Speaker 1: thus were primarily peasants and fugitives, notably Jews escaped from
Speaker 1: the ghettos. More significant still is the amount of food
Speaker 1: among the spoils collected by the anti partisan units. Potatoes, grain,
Speaker 1: and cattle appear regularly in the reports of the operations,
Speaker 1: transforming them, especially after the winter of nineteen to forty three,
Speaker 1: into murderous predatory raids against the local peasantry. The balance
Speaker 1: sheet of operations swamp fever, which is what they call this,
Speaker 1: sums up the situation perfectly. The Germans, by their own admission,
Speaker 1: had killed only four hundred and eighty nine bandits in
Speaker 1: over a month of operation. They had, however, eliminated eight thousand,
Speaker 1: three hundred and fifty Jews from the Borano Witsitch ghetto,
Speaker 1: as well as twelve hundred and seventy four suspects and
Speaker 1: evacuated and seventeen other individuals by evacuated, we must understand
Speaker 1: deported for labor within the Reich. These were persons fit
Speaker 1: for labor found in the villages, while the executed suspects
Speaker 1: were either escapees killed in the forest or those unfit
Speaker 1: for labor from the same villages, women, children, and the aged.
Speaker 1: So they are going through large swaths of territory, they
Speaker 1: are rounding everybody up, they're sending the men to Germany
Speaker 1: to labor, and they're killing the women, children and old people.
Speaker 1: That's the bulk of the anti part as an operation
Speaker 1: they're doing here, and they are part of and they're
Speaker 1: not the first part of the early stages of the
Speaker 1: Final Solution, right, which is camouflaged as anti part As
Speaker 1: an activity, the s s tactic here that Durrowinger does
Speaker 1: pioneer because they're also dealing with because again the very
Speaker 1: like the first stages of what the Einsetz group and
Speaker 1: are doing is just massacring communities of people who had
Speaker 1: lived in cities. Um. There is an actual partisan movement
Speaker 1: here right. There are Red Army partizans and stuff fighting
Speaker 1: against the Nazis. And the tactic durrow Wanger develops in
Speaker 1: these areas is to create what they call death zones.
Speaker 1: These are not just zones that they're emptying of Jews,
Speaker 1: but of all of their population. Now SS durrowingger are
Speaker 1: not the only union involved in this, not by a
Speaker 1: long shot, but they are the guys figuring out how
Speaker 1: to depopulate large rural areas for the German military. Right,
Speaker 1: that is a question that is a like, how are
Speaker 1: we going to do this? What is the best way
Speaker 1: to do this that is the most efficient exactly the
Speaker 1: less uh least amount of emotional damage to our our people.
Speaker 1: And that is a different We're not talking about like
Speaker 1: morally different, but that is a different thing tactically from
Speaker 1: like we've taken this city and now we're going to
Speaker 1: round up the Jews and shoot them and worry or whatever. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: it's a different thing. It requires different tactics. UM General
Speaker 1: von Gottberg, who's the guy who authors the original death
Speaker 1: zone orders and is in direct command of durrow Wanger
Speaker 1: and his men, praises Durrowanger for his visionary leadership and
Speaker 1: proposes that he be than a medal after his men
Speaker 1: kill fifteen thousand people in fifteen months of operations, pausing
Speaker 1: only ninety two of their own. Now, the Nazis are
Speaker 1: dealing with a serious insurgency in Belarus at this point,
Speaker 1: and as you'd expect, Dr Wanger is kind of seen
Speaker 1: as their best bet in solving it. One internal report
Speaker 1: on his activities read quote traffic with Vilnius itself is
Speaker 1: more and more obstructed by acts of terrorism, minds, et cetera.
Speaker 1: To this may be added the erroneous psychological treatment of
Speaker 1: the population by units on police operations. Here the name
Speaker 1: Durrol Wanger plays a particularly significant role for this man
Speaker 1: in the war of annihilation. He wages piteously against an
Speaker 1: unarmed population, deliberately refuses to consider political necessities. His methods,
Speaker 1: worthy of the Thirty Years War, make a lie of
Speaker 1: the civil administration's assurances of their wish to work together
Speaker 1: with the Belarusian people. When women and children are shot
Speaker 1: in mass or burned alive, there is no longer a
Speaker 1: semblance of human of humane conduct of war. The number
Speaker 1: of villages burned during sweep operations ex needs that of
Speaker 1: those burned by the Bolsheviks. God damn, Yeah, that is
Speaker 1: that is a Nazi being, Like these guys are out
Speaker 1: of control again, this is this is a guy who
Speaker 1: is like into this already. He's like no, Like, hey,
Speaker 1: I believe in this subjugation of loves this usually, but
Speaker 1: some people are doing a little too much. It is
Speaker 1: fucking wild. Yeah it is. And again like I'm not
Speaker 1: going into too much detailor we will later and some
Speaker 1: of these things, but like they're not just massacring people,
Speaker 1: Like no, don't just shoot the women who are not
Speaker 1: fit for labor, they rape them, right, Like, that's that's
Speaker 1: who these guys are. That's what this guy was before
Speaker 1: the war start, right, Like, this is not this is
Speaker 1: torture as well as execution. They are not doing the
Speaker 1: most efficient thing, which generally the EINSTS GROUPA at least
Speaker 1: earlier on, are just trying to efficiently massacre people with guns. Right,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a degree of creative sadism to the
Speaker 1: way that Darrowinger behaves. That is, it's not certainly not unique.
Speaker 1: You can find a lot of other Nazi units that
Speaker 1: do it, but he is. He is noteworthy for his
Speaker 1: dedication to it. I think he's the Steve Jobs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Oscar Darrowinger gets out on the stage. Actually that's that's
Speaker 1: literally the parts. So here's Oscar Drwinger in a turtleneck.
Speaker 1: Mine Fields a problem since the beginning of modern warfare.
Speaker 1: You have a piece of terrain that your enemy doesn't
Speaker 1: allow your soldiers to cross because they filled it with
Speaker 1: hidden bombs. Here at Nazi Co, we figured out a
Speaker 1: solution to mine fields, which is to gather up all
Speaker 1: of the women and children in the area and just
Speaker 1: walk them through it until there's no mines. And then
Speaker 1: and here's here's what's insanely great. Right, here's the thing
Speaker 1: that's really cool. We shoot them all the survivors. He's
Speaker 1: a visionary. He as as far as I could tell,
Speaker 1: like the guy who invents this as a cohesive tactic. Right,
Speaker 1: I'm sure there's places where you can find people doing this.
Speaker 1: Durrell Wanger is the guy who, like, right, basically rights
Speaker 1: up a guide to the German military of like, here's
Speaker 1: how you do this. You get all of the you
Speaker 1: round these the men up from these nearby villages, and
Speaker 1: you make them walk. You keep them shoulder with a
Speaker 1: part because that's the right length, and you have them
Speaker 1: this is the way in which you use civilians to
Speaker 1: clear land mines um and then you shoot them all
Speaker 1: to death. And he's squid gaming. He's doing a proto
Speaker 1: squid game. Yeah, and it works really well. And in fact,
Speaker 1: s S and Wehrmacht units across the Eastern Front are
Speaker 1: advised to adopt durroll Wingers tactics when they encounter minefields
Speaker 1: because he's like it works pretty well. Um yeah, he's
Speaker 1: the Steve Jobs of genocide. So durroll Wanger was also
Speaker 1: praised for his ability to save on the expenditure of
Speaker 1: munitions during massacres. One way he did this was instead
Speaker 1: of look, you've got five people right from these two
Speaker 1: or three villages, you could shoot them all and then
Speaker 1: you're out five bullets and those aren't or you just
Speaker 1: forced them all into barns and you light the barns
Speaker 1: on fire. And the exactly he really is like a startup.
Speaker 1: Found he really is a start up guys. We're gonna
Speaker 1: disrupt ethnic cleansing, exactly exactly. It's just killed different you
Speaker 1: know him. The exhumation report of the Soviet Investigating Commission mentions,
Speaker 1: besides the number of villages and the number killed in each,
Speaker 1: that neither cartridges nor projectiles were found, and it concluded
Speaker 1: that the two thousand victims had been burned alive in Barnes,
Speaker 1: a witness to the massacres, Alexander Mironov, saw a man
Speaker 1: laughing through a fourteen year old child into a bonfire Jesus.
Speaker 1: So again, they're not just doing this like coldly because
Speaker 1: it's efficient. They're like, they're having fun with this is
Speaker 1: their king, this is their thing, that's what they live for.
Speaker 1: This is I mean, you know, these fools were in
Speaker 1: prison before for being poachers and now they're sing yeah.
Speaker 1: And they're also, it has to be said, all on
Speaker 1: meth amphetamine, right, Yeah, it's not written about because it's
Speaker 1: not generally like discussed all that much, but like this
Speaker 1: is the period in which an awful lot of the
Speaker 1: German Army is on fucking meth. So they're they're drunk
Speaker 1: and on speed and this is like how they're having fun.
Speaker 1: So I never with meth, you know, I was like,
Speaker 1: I was strictly opiate. So I was like, I don't
Speaker 1: want to funk with meth for the same reason I
Speaker 1: do not want to drive a VW bug yea Nazi
Speaker 1: OPI It's just make you like the least offensive of
Speaker 1: the Nazi hike Herman Garring, you know, and look, if
Speaker 1: you have to pick one Nazi leader if I had. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So by this point, the Dura Wanger Brigade has been
Speaker 1: expanded well beyond poachers. Its ranks now included disgraced s
Speaker 1: S soldiers on penal release, as well as Russian and
Speaker 1: Ukrainian auxiliaries. Right, they don't have that many poachers, you know,
Speaker 1: there's not There's only some any. This eventually gets to
Speaker 1: be like two thousand people. So like if you're in
Speaker 1: the s S and in some cases in the Rmacht
Speaker 1: and you get like in trouble because you commit a
Speaker 1: series of crimes, they just send you here, right. Um.
Speaker 1: They also when they meet fascists who are like Russian
Speaker 1: and Ukrainian, they're like, hey, you guys wanna be in
Speaker 1: the SS kind of and those guys are like, well,
Speaker 1: we really don't have much of a choice. And also
Speaker 1: a lot of us are pieces of ships, so yes,
Speaker 1: and again it is a mix of people who are
Speaker 1: just fascists who live there, and also people who are like,
Speaker 1: oh you've got food and I get a gun, well
Speaker 1: I'll kill whoever whatever. You don't understand how bleak life
Speaker 1: is in Western Russia in nineteen I'll do anything. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it sucks. Now, yeah, I will join your stupid club.
Speaker 1: Watch the movie Come and See in twenties years under.
Speaker 1: By the way, Come and See is literally about this.
Speaker 1: It's about it's set in Belarus. It is it is
Speaker 1: these Nazis, specifically, it's about Dr Langer, and it's about
Speaker 1: from the perspective of the Belarusians, those fucking guys much um.
Speaker 1: And it is a harrowing film. Um. The only I
Speaker 1: refused to watch Nazi films. The only one I've seen
Speaker 1: is um uh, an American tale about the Little Jewish Mouse.
Speaker 1: That's the only one I'll watched. Darryl Langer is the cat.
Speaker 1: I believe there was a Nazi. Definitely, he's multiple cats. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's he's a couple of them. Um. Now, Come and
Speaker 1: See is a movie that was made during the Soviet
Speaker 1: Union and is is like probably the most like visually
Speaker 1: upsetting film ever made. Um, it's it's it would be
Speaker 1: hard to beat. It's the closest you can get to
Speaker 1: actually living through like some of these experience. It's it
Speaker 1: is fucking gnarly and it's about this. Like if you've
Speaker 1: seen Come and See and are still like haunted by
Speaker 1: some of those images, it's literally about this period and
Speaker 1: these guys is as good as that Georgia Merrow movie
Speaker 1: about motorcycles that you keep talking about. Nothing is as
Speaker 1: good as Night Writers. Um, if the cast of Night
Speaker 1: Writers had been around, they would have put a stop
Speaker 1: to this. You think Ed Harris with a sword in
Speaker 1: a motorcycle is letting the ship go on the movie.
Speaker 1: I mean, in the first scenes of the movie, they
Speaker 1: beat up a Nazi like's just shaking her head, like
Speaker 1: not again, shaking her head because now two weeks in
Speaker 1: a row where he cannot bring it up. This is
Speaker 1: the rest of your life. Now, I'm never not talking
Speaker 1: about unfortunately, I know, but but that's not true because
Speaker 1: you go through phases that would go through phases. I
Speaker 1: should talk about that a little bit later. Um, we should.
Speaker 1: We should discuss the child hunting island that we shouldn't
Speaker 1: be talking about anymore. We'll get to that in a minute.
Speaker 1: You know what actually weird about forty minutes, Matt, What
Speaker 1: you ever made a joke that went too far? Never? Never? Okay,
Speaker 1: that's good. Well, here behind the bastards we have some
Speaker 1: running jokes. You know, everybody remembers the Doritos era fondly
Speaker 1: ray theon knife missiles, all that good stuff. Lately, I've
Speaker 1: really been enjoying a series of running jokes about having
Speaker 1: an island where rich people hunt children for sport right
Speaker 1: at good time. With those jokes very funny, I assumed
Speaker 1: absurd enough that nobody would take them seriously. That's one
Speaker 1: of the requirements now incorrect Number one's because we show
Speaker 1: the name. And half of why we bleeped the name
Speaker 1: was because we didn't want to alienate, you know, someone
Speaker 1: who might be a sponsor someday. I think the cats
Speaker 1: are that bag, but half of it was also it
Speaker 1: just was kind of funny. This led to a lot
Speaker 1: of people being like, is Robert serious? Is have a
Speaker 1: child hunting island? Is this real? And it was a
Speaker 1: constant thing um And normally I thought it was kind
Speaker 1: of funny, and generally people would get on the subred
Speaker 1: and be like, hey, what's going on, and other people
Speaker 1: would correct them, and I was like, Okay, that's fine. Recently,
Speaker 1: more than one member of the team have gotten messages
Speaker 1: from people who are taking it very seriously, and one
Speaker 1: person was distraught and being like, I feel like this
Speaker 1: is real and you're not like it's not a joke,
Speaker 1: and and you like and the amount of Reddit threads
Speaker 1: is deeply and this is the Reddit threads, but those
Speaker 1: are funny. There were there were some people I think
Speaker 1: who are maybe like having a tough time issue and
Speaker 1: took it, took it really serious. And if you are listening,
Speaker 1: please I am not joking that that was that was
Speaker 1: a gag. That was for yucksing not to have a
Speaker 1: child hunting island. Please do not. You are not joking
Speaker 1: about the fact that you are joking. I get that.
Speaker 1: That's confusing. There is no child hunting island. We will
Speaker 1: not be doing that joke anymore. But you know what
Speaker 1: we will be doing, Matt what throwing two ads? We're back,
Speaker 1: I hope everybody again, very seriously, there's no child hunting island,
Speaker 1: um associated with specifically, Oh, Matt, I wanna, I wanna
Speaker 1: do a yes and to that, but that's what got
Speaker 1: us in this situation, so I have to stop. Um.
Speaker 1: So by this point in the war, right and we're
Speaker 1: talking like nineteen forty three ish, late nineteen forty three
Speaker 1: pretty much, UM, the Dura Winger Brigade has been expanded
Speaker 1: to there's these disgrace soldiers, these these auxiliaries, and they're
Speaker 1: kind of mostly used as a result, they avoid direct
Speaker 1: combat a lot because, among other things, well, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of Russians in this unit. We probably shouldn't have
Speaker 1: them fighting the Red Army. That might not go great.
Speaker 1: We don't know we can trust these guys. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and one of these Russians later reported on his time
Speaker 1: with the Dura Winger unit. Quote. During these actions, the
Speaker 1: peaceful inhabitants of towns, villages, and hamlets were shot, burned, alive,
Speaker 1: hanged houses, schools, hospitals, clubs, churches, and other public buildings
Speaker 1: were burned. If my memory is correct, more than a
Speaker 1: hundred inhabited areas were destroyed together with their inhabitants. Now, Oscar,
Speaker 1: it must be noted because they are fighting in actual,
Speaker 1: actual insurgence during pieces of this is kind of one
Speaker 1: of the reasons that these guys, these criminals and rapists like,
Speaker 1: are very loyal to him, weirdly loyal, is that he's
Speaker 1: always the first guy into combat. Um, he gets wounded
Speaker 1: multiple times during this he I mean, he already has
Speaker 1: half an arm. Yeah, he does not give a shit
Speaker 1: about right, He trying to hes trying to die like
Speaker 1: he's the only thing Oscar Durrell Wanger cares about less
Speaker 1: than age of consent laws is getting shot, right, It'll
Speaker 1: just make me come harder. Oh boy. This earned him
Speaker 1: the adoration of his men um and he also they
Speaker 1: appreciated his openness to their suggestions on how to proceed
Speaker 1: with the war. The pattern of new tactics of cruelty
Speaker 1: originating within the unit and then spreading out to the
Speaker 1: German military in the East continued. In addition to barn burning,
Speaker 1: which gets adopted on a wider basis by the Germans,
Speaker 1: Durrell Winger experimented with letting packs of starving dogs feed
Speaker 1: on the corpses of murdered women and children. Like trade
Speaker 1: up Ramsey Bolton, He's trying to figure out the most
Speaker 1: fucked up ways to like like destroying not just people's lives,
Speaker 1: with their minds too. And some of this is like again,
Speaker 1: there's a bad and illegal, but like, if you have insurgents,
Speaker 1: killing everyone in the area where they are is like
Speaker 1: a tactic for fighting them, right because there's no one
Speaker 1: to fight you. Um, a lot of this, like the
Speaker 1: feasting dogs on corpses, there's no reason for this beyond
Speaker 1: he's number one, he wants to like scare people, and
Speaker 1: number two he's a monster. Um And for Oscar experimentation,
Speaker 1: it's especially in like forty three, it goes beyond stuff
Speaker 1: that is helpful to just like stuff a fucked up
Speaker 1: dude does because there's no one to stop him. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote now from a Bond University thesis paper by
Speaker 1: Harris Goldworthy. Quote he made so called scientific experiments which
Speaker 1: involved stripping the victims of their clothes. Then they the
Speaker 1: victims were given an injection of Stryck nine. Darro Wanger
Speaker 1: looked on, smoked a cigarette, as did his friends, and
Speaker 1: they saw how these girls were dying. Immediately after that,
Speaker 1: the corpses were cut into small pieces, mixed with horsemeat
Speaker 1: and boiled into soap. Fucking A, there's like no reason
Speaker 1: for this. He's just he's just being a piece of ship.
Speaker 1: Like he's just he's just trying to it's just a
Speaker 1: new It's like you know, I mean, I'm not trying
Speaker 1: to minimize it, but it's like, you know, it's like
Speaker 1: when you know you need to stop with the porn
Speaker 1: hub because you're just like, what's next? Piss porn and
Speaker 1: then you're like, am I really going to be a
Speaker 1: piss porn guy? And he's the kind of guy who
Speaker 1: was like, yes, yeah, he is the kind of guy
Speaker 1: who goes straight to piss porn. Yeah, he starts off
Speaker 1: because a piss pigo. Okay. The primary causes of death
Speaker 1: for Darrel Winger's men during this age of the war
Speaker 1: because again most of well they are again, there are
Speaker 1: some they are getting into some firefights, some of which
Speaker 1: are nearly most of what they're doing is just massacring,
Speaker 1: and as a result, the vast majority of men who
Speaker 1: die in his units um either get shot by their
Speaker 1: own friends because everybody's drunk um, or they die in
Speaker 1: like car accidents because again everybody's drong. Everybody's drunk. That
Speaker 1: is the primary cause of death is they're wasted in
Speaker 1: between massacres and they die somehow. So the larger SS
Speaker 1: keeps an eager eye on their progress and on kind
Speaker 1: of some of the things they're experimenting with, even though
Speaker 1: they they're not. They don't like them, right, because these
Speaker 1: guys are gross. Everybody knows it, Like nobody wants to
Speaker 1: be these guys other than these guys. But I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote from a write up in Heinrich Himler A Life Here,
Speaker 1: Dara Wanger's leadership of the Saunder Commando was characterized by
Speaker 1: continued alcohol abuse, looting, sadistic atrocities, rape, and murder, and
Speaker 1: his mentor Burger tolerated this behavior, as did Himler, who
Speaker 1: so urgently needed men such as the Saunder Come and
Speaker 1: Darrow Anger in his fight against sub humanity. It was
Speaker 1: important to the Reich's Fearer, however, that the detachments within
Speaker 1: the Saunder Commando did not belong to the s S,
Speaker 1: but merely served it. It was not until nineteen that
Speaker 1: Darrow Anger succeeded in incorporating his unit, which accepted criminals
Speaker 1: of every hue and so was growing unstoppably into the
Speaker 1: s S as the thirty six Grenadier Division. So that
Speaker 1: guy is not with us, Okay, yeah, like he's with us,
Speaker 1: but he's not really, he's like a volunteer. Like we
Speaker 1: let him wear as a uniform and stuff. But that
Speaker 1: all that weird ships, that's not us. That's not some
Speaker 1: of that's us. A little bit of it is us,
Speaker 1: a tiny, tiny bit, but mostly it's that I don't
Speaker 1: know about that these guys are funked up? Should someone
Speaker 1: call hr I mean it is one of the one
Speaker 1: of the stories that people will tell about Himler. That is,
Speaker 1: people take different things out of it. But he is
Speaker 1: a period at which he visits one of the death camps.
Speaker 1: I think it might have been Auschwitz, and he like
Speaker 1: passes out when he's like watching the ship right, And
Speaker 1: some people take it as like, oh, he was, like
Speaker 1: what a weak man, he couldn't handle it. That's not
Speaker 1: how his guys would have interpreted it, because most of
Speaker 1: them are not like even mostly people committing the genocide
Speaker 1: are not like eager to physically do it. They see
Speaker 1: it as like this is a nasty, terrible job and
Speaker 1: we're taking this burden upon And that's how they talk
Speaker 1: about it to themselves. That's what hardness means. It doesn't
Speaker 1: mean like violent sadism. That's not what it's supposed to mean.
Speaker 1: It means you're cold enough that like you understand this
Speaker 1: has to be done, and like that he would pass out.
Speaker 1: That just actually means that he's he's a decent man
Speaker 1: who just has to do this terrible task to protect
Speaker 1: the right. Good guy. What a good guy like I
Speaker 1: hope all of his men cradled the cradled them in
Speaker 1: their arms and just like it's okay, please stop crying.
Speaker 1: And that's part of why, part of why the s
Speaker 1: S and why guys like Himmler, even though they need
Speaker 1: the dr Wanger Brigade, find them so off putting and disgusting,
Speaker 1: is that like they're taking full ownership of the kind
Speaker 1: of things that these guys are making happen, but don't
Speaker 1: want to don't want to have as a part of them,
Speaker 1: Right Benrick Himler doesn't want to have like rape, burning
Speaker 1: a village to death on his soul. He wants it done,
Speaker 1: he needs it done, He'll make sure it gets done,
Speaker 1: but he doesn't. That's not a part of his conception
Speaker 1: of who he is, right, Yeah, and these guys, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm more than just death camps. Yea. I am also
Speaker 1: a man who likes to dress like a medieval knight.
Speaker 1: In my last dress like a night. I like to
Speaker 1: you know, go to renfairs. I feel like the problem
Speaker 1: with cancel cultures these days is you are reduced to
Speaker 1: the worst thing you've ever done. For example, me killing
Speaker 1: all of the Jews, Yeah I did that, a big deal, Okay.
Speaker 1: I've also read many fine books. Yeah, and so part
Speaker 1: of like why there's part of why these guys get
Speaker 1: reported so much by the SS is less that the
Speaker 1: SS guys who are reporting them are legitimately horrified that
Speaker 1: they're committing war crimes and more like it's not you
Speaker 1: are you are unabashedly gleeful about doing the thing that
Speaker 1: we do, but have to pretend exactly the presense is gone,
Speaker 1: and it's like you're you're making us look bad by yeah,
Speaker 1: you're making us feel bad because we don't want to
Speaker 1: be that guy right when you like and again that
Speaker 1: you can make a case that these are less bad
Speaker 1: people than, for example, guys like the commandant of Auschwitz,
Speaker 1: who was a loving father if I think five kids,
Speaker 1: and you can find pictures of him on his vacations
Speaker 1: and playing with his children by the pool and being
Speaker 1: a wonderful dad while he is running Auschwitz. Rudolf Hess
Speaker 1: I believe was his name. Um, and um, I think
Speaker 1: it's ho s or whatever, like because there's another guy, yeah,
Speaker 1: not that hass, not the other guy. Um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I think you could argue guys like Darrel Winger who
Speaker 1: are just like, yeah, man, I fucking love raping and
Speaker 1: murdering people. This is awesome, This is who I am.
Speaker 1: Baby is a better person than the guy who like
Speaker 1: pretends to be the loving father while he gasses a
Speaker 1: million people. Right, because they know right from wrong. They
Speaker 1: know it's bad, they know they're doing bad. And the
Speaker 1: worst part about these people is they've convinced themselves. Their
Speaker 1: narrative is that they are the victims. That's why they
Speaker 1: have to do this, like how this guy phrases it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they take the entire narrative and throw it in
Speaker 1: the trash when you start gleefully doing it. And then
Speaker 1: what does that say about all of your beliefs and
Speaker 1: all of your crimes? It says that you are basically
Speaker 1: that on the insete. There's no mask with the dar Winger.
Speaker 1: Bring this mask off now. As the war turns against Germany,
Speaker 1: these guys do find themselves thrown into actual combat more
Speaker 1: and more, and the end of ninety three d of
Speaker 1: brings an end to the good times because they don't
Speaker 1: do great in stand up fights. That's not really not really,
Speaker 1: there's not really what they're good at. Um. It also
Speaker 1: brings another change in the composition of the unit, as
Speaker 1: German manpower struggles become more severe Christian and grow White
Speaker 1: writes quote. Starting in July nineteen forty three, the Sounder
Speaker 1: and Height received large contentions of delinquents of a different kind.
Speaker 1: The idea was not new. In early spring March, Himler
Speaker 1: had ordered that Germans of the Reich and all men
Speaker 1: of the class of nineteen o one and later living
Speaker 1: in an irregular situation within the general government who have
Speaker 1: no military training or assignment and who have avoided the
Speaker 1: draft for years arrested in a general government sweep must
Speaker 1: be gathered and assigned to the penal battalions of the
Speaker 1: dure Wanger Unit. Now what that means is he's saying
Speaker 1: all of the men of eligible age who have not
Speaker 1: been serving in the military because there's some sort of
Speaker 1: criminal are going to be sent directly to the dure
Speaker 1: Wanger Unit. And these guys are all they're all born
Speaker 1: between eighteen nine and eighteen one. Most of them have
Speaker 1: been imprisoned as a social individuals or professional criminals. Um,
Speaker 1: that's about half of these new guys are just professional criminals,
Speaker 1: people who had committed burglary, who had stolen purses, um,
Speaker 1: and then often most often for armed robbery, assault, manslaughter,
Speaker 1: murder like like mostly bad. About half of these guys
Speaker 1: are like violent crime guys, right, But there's also a
Speaker 1: bunch of people who get brought into this unit whose
Speaker 1: crimes are being a social. Now, this doesn't include petty criminals,
Speaker 1: but it also means just like homeless people, right, you're
Speaker 1: living on the street, you know you're a social. Unemployed
Speaker 1: people who can't get a job, people who are mentally disabled, right,
Speaker 1: who have some sort of like mental thing that makes
Speaker 1: them unable to like work job, feeble minded right, Um,
Speaker 1: there are some people who the Germans considered to be
Speaker 1: psychopathic but don't have an extensive criminal record. All these
Speaker 1: people get put in there. Now, Beginning in late nineteen
Speaker 1: forty four, with shortages even more severe of manpower, Himler,
Speaker 1: Gottla Burger, and durl Wanger to side to expand the
Speaker 1: number of eligible men for the unit to include not
Speaker 1: just those guys we talked about, but also political prisoners
Speaker 1: who have been held in Nazi concentration camps. And now
Speaker 1: the ranks of this SS units start to swell with
Speaker 1: former anti fascists, mostly communists, who had been locked away
Speaker 1: who had been in concentration camps for years get put
Speaker 1: into the Dura Wanger Unit. Historian Peter Klausch refers to
Speaker 1: the unit during this period as consisting of quote, anti
Speaker 1: fascists in s S uniform. Yeah, it's this is we
Speaker 1: are getting into one of the bleaker parts of the story.
Speaker 1: Now Klausch is overstating the matter. But these guys are
Speaker 1: never the majority of the unit, right. The majority of
Speaker 1: the unit is like violent criminals and stuff um and
Speaker 1: members of other military units who had gotten in trouble,
Speaker 1: generally for rape or something. But a lot of the
Speaker 1: Dura Wanger Unit are like former communists, mens who men
Speaker 1: who had fought Nazis in the streets and been arrested
Speaker 1: for it. Right, And a lot of these guys take
Speaker 1: part in the slaughter of civilians with the Arrowanger Unit.
Speaker 1: This is the only and very specific instance in which
Speaker 1: the right wingers are like Antifa is the real fascist
Speaker 1: is like these this one group of guys. Now, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're the exception that the rule. It is more complicated
Speaker 1: than that, because a lot of these guys they're looking
Speaker 1: at like, well, we don't know what this unit is doing, right,
Speaker 1: Because if you're in a concentrate, you don't know what
Speaker 1: they're doing in. You just know, Oh, I can get
Speaker 1: out and they're gonna give me a gun. I can
Speaker 1: find a way to get away. I can desert and
Speaker 1: join the variety. Right, And about a hundred of these
Speaker 1: guys do, right. They get over there and as soon
Speaker 1: as they can, they desert and they fight for the
Speaker 1: Russian army. Right. Um, And like those guys, fine, that's
Speaker 1: you do whatever you gotta do to get out of concentration.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna judge you. You You don't know what these
Speaker 1: guys are doing. Um, but a significant number of these
Speaker 1: dudes don't leave even when like the war turns against
Speaker 1: them and they're surrounded and being annihilated. They fight to
Speaker 1: death with to the death with their comrades. That's not
Speaker 1: an insignificant number of these anti fascists or ori anti fascists.
Speaker 1: It's like some Stockholm syndrome ship right there. And this
Speaker 1: is all It's hard to say exactly. Some of it's
Speaker 1: probably they just you know, these folks have become their comrades.
Speaker 1: Some of it maybe they just there wasn't a chance
Speaker 1: to get away. It's it's a nasty war, right people.
Speaker 1: Show options are limited and we're already in this is
Speaker 1: pretty complex moral territory. But it gets gnarlier as you're
Speaker 1: surely aware, Matt. Homosexuality is illegal in the Third Reich. However,
Speaker 1: many gay men, particularly soldiers, caught engaging in homosexual sex,
Speaker 1: aren't sent to concentration camps. Instead, these are some of
Speaker 1: the guys who get put in penal battalions. Right, So
Speaker 1: a decent number the whole time this brigade is active,
Speaker 1: A decent number the guys going in a lot. It's
Speaker 1: a mix of like guys who have just committed rape
Speaker 1: and guys who are like having homosexual sex and get caught. Now,
Speaker 1: Hans Peter Clouch says that the hope here was to
Speaker 1: push these men back to the right path via explosion
Speaker 1: about you're straighten them out by making them fight with
Speaker 1: these these real hard customers. Right. Um, they also didn't
Speaker 1: want too They didn't want Germans who were being drafted
Speaker 1: to think that if they just like fucked a dude,
Speaker 1: they'd get out of military service. Right. That was the
Speaker 1: other thing, um, star fucking dudes and it'll just be
Speaker 1: a verse. I want to quote next from a Council
Speaker 1: of Europe paper titled Queer in Europe. During the Second
Speaker 1: World War quote, the Rmacht preferred to retend to retrain
Speaker 1: homosexuals rather than exclude them. Franz Siedler adds that even
Speaker 1: emasculated men were still fit for military service as long
Speaker 1: as they were worthy of serving. It was not desirable
Speaker 1: to dispense emasculated men from their military obligations. From nineteen
Speaker 1: forty four, when Germany was experiencing huge and growing losses
Speaker 1: on the Eastern Front, it was decided to resort to
Speaker 1: the forced incorporation of homosexuals interned in concentration camps. As
Speaker 1: Schlagdenhaufen describes in his contribution, a number of testimonies show
Speaker 1: that this political strategy was seen as a last hope.
Speaker 1: The historian Rainier Hoffschlitt has retraced the career of Heinz F,
Speaker 1: one of the last homosexuals to have been forced into
Speaker 1: the army. On May one, eight days before the capitulation
Speaker 1: of Nazi Germany, he joined the Wehrmacht under duress and
Speaker 1: a lot again, how you want to morally judge the
Speaker 1: men who make the decision to join a unit like
Speaker 1: the Darawanger Brigade, or who are made to join it
Speaker 1: to avoid life in a camp because like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I'm a podcast host. I'm not gonna parce all this
Speaker 1: out for you. But this is a thing that happens, right,
Speaker 1: This is part of the history of World War two,
Speaker 1: and it's fucking art gnarly. There was a fucking by
Speaker 1: the end there it sounds like a rainbow coalition of bastards,
Speaker 1: you know. And they were I'm sorry, they were retraining
Speaker 1: the gay um soldiers like into straightness or into being
Speaker 1: like the strait nous. Right. The idea was that like, well,
Speaker 1: you know what is massacre? Yeah, their conversion therapy was like,
Speaker 1: go massacre this village with Oscar God, do something straight
Speaker 1: like killing innocent people terribly. Yeah, yeah, that's that's basically
Speaker 1: what's happening. In total, the Dura Wanger Brigade spent fifty
Speaker 1: three months in Belarus, during which we know they killed
Speaker 1: at least thirty thousand people, most of whom were women
Speaker 1: and children. During this massacre, they'd expanded from a small
Speaker 1: commando unit to a regiment of roughly two thousand men.
Speaker 1: So that's the death toll so far, right, people, and
Speaker 1: this is like, this is this is a death toll
Speaker 1: of people. This is like in one specific camp because
Speaker 1: like usually here numbers like this, and you started thinking like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is we got a death camp going No, this
Speaker 1: is this is a roving band of bastards who are
Speaker 1: going around doing murder, who have just emptied a big
Speaker 1: chunk of the Belarusian countryside, right like, that's what they're doing.
Speaker 1: And again it might have been significantly more than thirty thousand.
Speaker 1: As the Russian advance began to push the German army westward,
Speaker 1: the durl Wanger Brigade was sent back to Poland. When
Speaker 1: the Polish underground took control of parts of their former capital,
Speaker 1: Nazi Germany redeployed badly needed forces to crush the city.
Speaker 1: Dr Wanger and his men were front and center. Their
Speaker 1: brutality was so intense that it stunned many of the
Speaker 1: soldiers they fought alongside. One of these men was an
Speaker 1: eighteen year old sapper named Shank, temporarily attached to the
Speaker 1: SS for the operation. He later wrote this quote, I
Speaker 1: would now like to describe the assault on the hospital
Speaker 1: as usual. Rushed to the objective grenades, and then after
Speaker 1: they exploded, we went in. I was about to fire,
Speaker 1: but I heard don't shoot from the inside. What do
Speaker 1: I do? I signaled to my comrades twentys away to
Speaker 1: cover me. I ordered the Poles to open the door
Speaker 1: and come out with their hands up. Inside I heard
Speaker 1: snatches of conversation, some in Polish, some in German. The
Speaker 1: door opened slowly and a Red Cross nurse stuck out
Speaker 1: a white flag. My comrades came up and we went
Speaker 1: in bayonets fixed a Polish officer, a doctor in fifteen
Speaker 1: Polish Red Cross nurses surrendered the hospital. The Germans asked
Speaker 1: us not to hurt the Polls. Then the s S arrived.
Speaker 1: They immediately executed all the Polish wounded and attacked the nurses,
Speaker 1: who were soon stripped and raped. We were pushed out
Speaker 1: the other door of the hospital. When we could come
Speaker 1: back that night, the s S had relieved us, there
Speaker 1: was tumult on the execution grounds. Soldiers from all the
Speaker 1: units ss Ukrainians were playing flute and singing, and there
Speaker 1: I saw something so frightening and horrible I can hardly
Speaker 1: describe it. Fifty years later, the s S were pushing
Speaker 1: the nurses, naked their hands on their heads to the gallows.
Speaker 1: They had cut a short tunic for the doctor had
Speaker 1: put a rope around his neck and pushed him towards
Speaker 1: the gallows, where some ten civilians were already hanging. The
Speaker 1: crowd laughed and shouted. Some soldiers were protesting, but they
Speaker 1: were drowned out. I saw we could do nothing, so
Speaker 1: I kept my remarks for our headquarters. Bro. Pretty bad
Speaker 1: war crimes, honestly, dude, At this point, I'm starting to
Speaker 1: think that Nazis were bad. Yeah, that is the unavoidable
Speaker 1: conclusion when you when you try to damn it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: pretty bad, pretty bad guys unit. Yeah, those are the
Speaker 1: guys raping and murdering nurses. J fuck. Shank makes it
Speaker 1: clear that whenever the enemy were actual soldiers with actual guns,
Speaker 1: the indisciplined, sloppy viciousness of the Dura Wanger of Durrah
Speaker 1: Wanger's men was as much a hindrance as a help,
Speaker 1: and like real combat. And here's another excerpt from his
Speaker 1: recollections quote, Then the reinforcements arrived the s s. It
Speaker 1: was the Dura Wanger Penal Battalion. Its soldiers wore no
Speaker 1: marks of rank, they had drunk a lot and weren't sober.
Speaker 1: They immediately attacked the Polish positions. They charged the houses,
Speaker 1: yelling Hurrah. Just in front of the houses, they fell
Speaker 1: under polish fire. They died by dozens, many were wounded.
Speaker 1: They didn't gain a meter of ground. Their leader was frenzied.
Speaker 1: We then advanced together with the s S under tank protection,
Speaker 1: a few meters in front of the buildings. The tank
Speaker 1: was hit and exploded. A soldier's helmet flew into the air.
Speaker 1: So that's that. Part's funny. That parts that's good. What's
Speaker 1: not good is that the polls don't win the wars.
Speaker 1: I getta uprising right uh. And the violence that follows
Speaker 1: is a slaughter almost unparalleled in the history of armed conflict. Today,
Speaker 1: it's known as the Wola massacre. Rather than going to
Speaker 1: detail about every crime against humanity committed by these men,
Speaker 1: I am going to find an accurate summary of their activities.
Speaker 1: I found in an article by Peter Preskar quote the
Speaker 1: Dura Wanger Brigade reeked a vodka and death. They slaughtered
Speaker 1: innocent poles, regardless of age and sex. Dura Wanger, wearing
Speaker 1: a black coat, walked in the rear, screamed orders and
Speaker 1: shot anyone who lagged behind. The Drwinger Brigade and cooperation
Speaker 1: with the equally sadistic Kaminsky militia, massacred forty thousand unarmed men,
Speaker 1: women and children in the Wola district of Warsaw. They
Speaker 1: did all that in less than two weeks. Yeah, drro
Speaker 1: Wanger burned multiple hospitals. Patients Inside the hospital, nurses were whipped,
Speaker 1: gang raped, and hanged naked while popular German music was playing.
Speaker 1: At one point, darro Winger ordered his men to execute
Speaker 1: five hundred young children. He wanted his troops to save
Speaker 1: their bullets, so they did the bulk of their work
Speaker 1: with rifle butts and bayonets. On another occasion, one of
Speaker 1: dara Winger's men took a pretty young woman. He cut
Speaker 1: her blouse open with a bayonet and then raped her. Afterwards,
Speaker 1: he cut her from belly to neck. So we're gonna
Speaker 1: we're gonna leave that be in terms of descriptions of
Speaker 1: Nazi war crimes. But like when I say, these guys
Speaker 1: are like the worst, not like they're the worst of
Speaker 1: Like this is yeah, pretty pretty bad guys. How do
Speaker 1: you do how long you been doing this podcast? Man?
Speaker 1: Like four years? Five ye or something like that? I mean, god,
Speaker 1: damn dude, how do you is your How's how's your head?
Speaker 1: How's your mental head? You know, it's like you you get,
Speaker 1: you get a lot of stories like this you read, honestly,
Speaker 1: the ones that are like, I don't know, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: the thing that I think about when I when I
Speaker 1: read stories like this in terms of like visual things
Speaker 1: is them Because for the reporting that I did, I
Speaker 1: had to watch the christ Church massacre video a number
Speaker 1: of times. God, That's the thing that I think about
Speaker 1: the most when I think about, like, what kind of
Speaker 1: dude does this in in the way in which this
Speaker 1: kind of like yeah, the very specific sadism, the very specific,
Speaker 1: like I mean, just the the evil that veers into
Speaker 1: an illness type of like crimes where you're just like,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't want to obviously, I'm not trying
Speaker 1: to minimize it by saying that this is like, you know,
Speaker 1: obviously some sort of illness, but it just you can't
Speaker 1: you can't otherwise explain this level of sadism. I get
Speaker 1: what you have, guys, and we talked about token last
Speaker 1: episode a little bit. I get why you get guys
Speaker 1: like Tolkien who see pretty terrible things, who view evil
Speaker 1: as something supernatural a certain extent, right, because seeing something
Speaker 1: like this, like it all, there's there's a degree of
Speaker 1: to which it like, I don't know there there's there's
Speaker 1: something there that it is. It is hard. Maybe we're
Speaker 1: programmed to write to write like and maybe it's a
Speaker 1: defensive thing. You don't want to believe that it because
Speaker 1: it is. I think just people are capable of all
Speaker 1: sorts of fucked up shit. Um, but it it does
Speaker 1: feel in the same way that like, if you've ever
Speaker 1: fought a wildfire, it feels like there's some sort of
Speaker 1: intelligence to the wildfire. Um. It feels when you when
Speaker 1: you like read about cruelty like this, you almost it
Speaker 1: is hard not to feel like there's something there, you know,
Speaker 1: when you when you look into it that way. I
Speaker 1: don't know, not that that means there is anything, but
Speaker 1: it's hard not to feel that sometimes. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: you understand how someone could um look at look at
Speaker 1: you know, see these this level of atrocities and it
Speaker 1: works with their reality because their reality is based on
Speaker 1: kind of this like uh, logical emotionally logical foundation and
Speaker 1: framework with narratives, with stories, there's the reason in an
Speaker 1: action and a reaction and then seeing something this sadistic
Speaker 1: and going like this is otherworldly because this doesn't make sense,
Speaker 1: it doesn't. This is who it's that hope you You
Speaker 1: would hope no one could enjoy something like this, and
Speaker 1: you would hope that other people would be like, hey,
Speaker 1: maybe we shouldn't do this, But to see it in
Speaker 1: masses and an up close and personal it's got to be.
Speaker 1: I read about orcs and wizards and ship too, dude.
Speaker 1: I feel like this is why I talk about the
Speaker 1: Sopranos and the Wire because sad it is, it is,
Speaker 1: I mean worth noting that, like there are Nazis who
Speaker 1: try to stop this, like members to give you an
Speaker 1: idea of how bad this guy's Members of the s
Speaker 1: S during the cleansing of the Warsaw ghetto reprimand this
Speaker 1: guy for cruelty that I don't I don't know on
Speaker 1: like the bad guy CV, I don't know what else
Speaker 1: you could put above that, But like the SS in
Speaker 1: Warsaw was like Jesus Christ, this guy is unchanged. So
Speaker 1: he and his unit are reprimanded and they are removed
Speaker 1: to Hungary where they helped to put down the Slovak
Speaker 1: national uprising, and they again kill thousands. Terrible bloodshed. I
Speaker 1: feel like we have not too. I don't want to
Speaker 1: like that, not that that's not also an important story,
Speaker 1: but like I feel like I've read enough stories of
Speaker 1: horrible sure, like you you can, you can get what
Speaker 1: they probably did over more atrocities beyond capability to even
Speaker 1: a man. Yeah, so you know if that happens. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's here that the story of the Dara Wanger
Speaker 1: Brigade starts to come to an end. During an action
Speaker 1: against the Red Army, Oscar gets shot through the chest.
Speaker 1: Now he lives. We're not done yet, of course. Don't worry, though, Matt,
Speaker 1: this is actually gonna be fun. You're gonna like this
Speaker 1: last part. Yeah. So he gets separated from his unit
Speaker 1: because he's hurt pretty bad. Um, And now Oscar is
Speaker 1: not a dumb man, and he's pretty obvious at this point,
Speaker 1: we're not gonna win this thing, right, We're not. We're
Speaker 1: not gonna There's like one battle where like fifteen thousand
Speaker 1: rockets land on his troops positions. He's like, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: we're we're This probably isn't gonna go well for us, boy,
Speaker 1: So he he deserts and he goes into hiding near
Speaker 1: his own own old hometown. Most of his soldiers die fighting,
Speaker 1: some of them get captured, some of them do a
Speaker 1: lot you know, do dessert. Um. So there's cases of
Speaker 1: like anti fascists who deserted and joined the Red Army
Speaker 1: and wind up fighting there anyway. Um. And this is
Speaker 1: a story that does, thankfully have I'm not gonna call
Speaker 1: at a happy ending because this is a nightmare, but
Speaker 1: as close to a happy ending as you are going
Speaker 1: to get in a story about the s S and genocide.
Speaker 1: Because unlike a lot of the guys the Eronsets group
Speaker 1: of a lot of the guys who are like architects
Speaker 1: of the Holocaust to escape, Oscar does not escape. He
Speaker 1: gets captured by the French occupation forces at the end
Speaker 1: of the war and they put him in a jail.
Speaker 1: And I guess who's running that jail. Oh fuck, I
Speaker 1: don't know. Former members of the Polish resistance. So guys
Speaker 1: who have been fighting his guys in Warsaw exactly. And
Speaker 1: those guys are like what we got who? Oh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's not he is not making it to trial, Like, no,
Speaker 1: this guy is not seeing the courtroom. We're we're gonna
Speaker 1: handle Yeah, We're gonna take care of this. So we
Speaker 1: have an account of what happens next from another Nazi,
Speaker 1: who's Darrel Wanger's cellmate, right, and here's what he writes.
Speaker 1: Quote in front of the cell door, there was French soldier,
Speaker 1: a garden a red kepi. Never Nevertheless, when I was arrested,
Speaker 1: I did not see the frenchman, but rather armed and
Speaker 1: uniformed poles. On the next day came a sixteen year
Speaker 1: old Jew from Ebber's Bach Solgout County County, where he lived,
Speaker 1: and they let him punch us in the face, which
Speaker 1: he did under the which he did under the supervision
Speaker 1: of the polls until he got tired. Now I'm gonna
Speaker 1: be like, if we're being totally honest, this is legally
Speaker 1: a war crime, I'm also fine with it. I'm completely
Speaker 1: fine with it. This is one of them look the
Speaker 1: other way. Yeah, let's let's let this boy whose family
Speaker 1: was massacred hit these Nazis as much as he fucking wants.
Speaker 1: I love it. Punch in the face is just a
Speaker 1: great It's a great way to start this. It's just like,
Speaker 1: all right, first we're gonna have the sixteen year old
Speaker 1: punch you in the face. Let him he until he's
Speaker 1: all tucker it out. Let him work some stuff out right,
Speaker 1: He's got some demon slid him exercise. I'm here quote,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna continue now. We returned to the cell with
Speaker 1: her face is completely shattered. I myself had been beaten
Speaker 1: on the same day by the polls, and only because
Speaker 1: I forgot refused to shout three times, I am a
Speaker 1: German pig. Durrell Wanger and Munch, who's another Nazi, were
Speaker 1: pulled out of the cell into the corridor every night
Speaker 1: and brutally beaten. I heard blows and terrible screams. In daylight,
Speaker 1: I would see bleeding open wounds on the faces of
Speaker 1: munctioned Darrell Wanger, and their entire bodies were covered with
Speaker 1: bleeding welts. Munchen Darrell Wanger were taken from their cells
Speaker 1: separately three times on the night of fourth to fifth
Speaker 1: June and beaten in the corridor. After they returned to
Speaker 1: their cell for the third time, they could no longer
Speaker 1: speak or stand. After a short time, the guards came
Speaker 1: to the cell again and ordered them to get up
Speaker 1: and follow them. Neither Munch nor Durrell Wanger could lift themselves.
Speaker 1: Then the guards began to strike them with rifle butts
Speaker 1: in their heads so that their heads turned into indiscernible
Speaker 1: bloody pulp. Then they started kicking them in the stomachs.
Speaker 1: After that, the guards left both of them lying in
Speaker 1: the cell unconscious. I am surprised that, according to the
Speaker 1: registration of death performed by the French commandant, Durro Wanger
Speaker 1: had died only on the seventh of June nine. So
Speaker 1: you don't get this often with Nazi war criminals. But yeah,
Speaker 1: that's about the right way for that to end. Oh,
Speaker 1: that's wonderful. That is just like the Catharsis, because yes,
Speaker 1: you do not get this often. It's always like they
Speaker 1: go to fucking you know, they go to Argentina and
Speaker 1: hide out and then they gotta be fucking like found
Speaker 1: this is they killed themselves like a bunch of bitches.
Speaker 1: And you know, we don't get that, like, you know,
Speaker 1: getting just beat to death. Victims of his crime spend
Speaker 1: days beating him to death and miserably in a cell.
Speaker 1: It's about I don't know again, not justice, not even legal,
Speaker 1: but like what do you want? You know, like what
Speaker 1: what what what do you want from these people other
Speaker 1: than to do that to him and I love that
Speaker 1: they whipped out all the classics. You know, they were
Speaker 1: just like the sadistic classics, the punching, the kicking, the
Speaker 1: pistol whipping. You know, it must have hurt, like double
Speaker 1: knowing at like while he's being beaten to death, He's like,
Speaker 1: they're not even innovating new ways of doing this. They're
Speaker 1: not even building some sort of elaborate Roob Goldberg machine
Speaker 1: which kicks me in the nuts till I bleed to death.
Speaker 1: It's like, no, dude, we're just gonna fucking go. I'm
Speaker 1: on you right now. Yeah, we're just gonna yeah, the
Speaker 1: old stuff. So the old stuff. That's the story of
Speaker 1: Oscar Durrel Wanger. Um, Wow, boy, howdy what a piece
Speaker 1: of ship. There we go. Yeah. I don't like them.
Speaker 1: It is thoroughly nice to like, you know, have one
Speaker 1: where they actually you know, beat beat one where they
Speaker 1: get there. Yeah, I would say, statistically speaking, a lot
Speaker 1: of the times it's and they died at the ripe
Speaker 1: old age of way too long. Yea, they died comfortably
Speaker 1: in their bed. This is and I can imagine a
Speaker 1: heart woman is like those Polish guys are like, wait,
Speaker 1: that's sucking Oscar Durroll Winger. Yea, you know there's that.
Speaker 1: There's that kid came into town the other day. A
Speaker 1: whole family got wiped out by Darrell Wingers. Bring him
Speaker 1: in here, Yeah yeah, bring him in here. What a
Speaker 1: gift we're gonna We're gonna help him move past this.
Speaker 1: Oh man, I love it. That is like that, that
Speaker 1: is what that for that kid must have been. Just
Speaker 1: it's like, I mean, I don't but I hope it helped, right, Like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know that that makes it any better, but
Speaker 1: I can build a narrative in my head in which
Speaker 1: that does feel better for me to hear that, So
Speaker 1: I would. I certainly don't know if it helped that kid,
Speaker 1: but I can't imagine it hurt. No, you're not you.
Speaker 1: You are not turned into a worse person because you
Speaker 1: punch Oscar Darroll Wanger while he's in prison. I don't
Speaker 1: believe that. No, No, that is he's doing God's work right,
Speaker 1: He's doing right there for him. Yeah, they got it
Speaker 1: at the end there, the story really came together. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I wish it had started with him being beaten to
Speaker 1: death of some but all of these guys, you know,
Speaker 1: starting with them being beat to death. You know, it
Speaker 1: makes you kind of a little bit go like, no,
Speaker 1: the Germans should have kept hitting their children. You know,
Speaker 1: it was all that, you know, the progressive lady being like,
Speaker 1: we shouldn't do that. Well, look where that leaded. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, I will say that the point that that
Speaker 1: paper is making that we didn't maybe get new enough
Speaker 1: to tail is that like the way in which Dura
Speaker 1: Wanger's generation was raised kind of hinged on that when
Speaker 1: the not the generation the Nazis raise up that are
Speaker 1: like the young soldiers are trained, are like it is
Speaker 1: about hardness and physical discipline. I don't know that, like
Speaker 1: wh who actually knows right that guy Shank who was
Speaker 1: eighteen years old is raised under that system and clearly
Speaker 1: is like, well this is obviously wrong and evil, and
Speaker 1: I am on the wrong side. And I realized that
Speaker 1: now as a as a boy um, whereas Darrow Wanger
Speaker 1: grows up in a more progressive age and is like
Speaker 1: the worst person I magine. So I don't know what
Speaker 1: to take it about that we don't have the problems,
Speaker 1: We don't actually have enough to tail about his childhood
Speaker 1: to like make more conclusions about what was going on
Speaker 1: and whether they impacted it or if he was just
Speaker 1: just an asshole. Yeah, it sounds like an asshole. Um,
Speaker 1: sounds like I mean, I'm just gonna be help. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That's the thing about World War One. It really it didn't.
Speaker 1: It didn't make him better. I think we can conclude that.
Speaker 1: But to be fair to the rest of the veterans
Speaker 1: of World War One, uh, they didn't do the same ship.
Speaker 1: Gerald Tolken wrote about Hobbits afterwards. About Hobbits, he was
Speaker 1: just like, what if there's these cute little Irish kids
Speaker 1: and all they do is, you know, smoke weed and
Speaker 1: find rings of power? Yeah, same war, same battlefields. One
Speaker 1: guy winds up doing the worst things I've ever read about,
Speaker 1: And the other guy is like, what if there were
Speaker 1: little people who like to eat for breakfast? That seems nice.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna write about one fighting a dragon. Yeah. What
Speaker 1: if they were elves and they're all hot? Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: like a reason, they're just the hottest people. And there's
Speaker 1: also the dwarves and they're funny, like yeah, good for
Speaker 1: Tolkien man. Yeah yeah, anyway, Really, that's what the that's
Speaker 1: the message here is Jero Tolkien was pretty good at
Speaker 1: processing trauma. Exactly. He was very good at processing it.
Speaker 1: And I think we can all safely say that he
Speaker 1: would not give a fuck that Amazon cast Black Elves like,
Speaker 1: I don't think he would care. He would hate the show,
Speaker 1: but not for that reason, right right, right, You would
Speaker 1: hate the show for a thousand other reasons, thousand, a
Speaker 1: thousand of reasons you would never understand in your entire
Speaker 1: ready every one of his books, some of them would
Speaker 1: be like, well, what are you going on about? John Um? Anyway,
Speaker 1: the episodes over, you want to plug your I do
Speaker 1: I do. If you've stuck around this long, then you
Speaker 1: must be excited for a plug. I do a wonderful
Speaker 1: the wire rewatch podcast called pod Yourself The Wire Um.
Speaker 1: You should listen to it, and you should give us
Speaker 1: five stars in review. I just want that. I just
Speaker 1: want this one to have all the reviews. I don't
Speaker 1: even care that if anyone listens to it. But it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, when I go into the Apple podcast store,
Speaker 1: I see like people they got like four thousand reviews
Speaker 1: and you know five thousand, and I'm like, I want
Speaker 1: to be one of those podcasts. So do that for us,
Speaker 1: and then also listen to it. Review Bomb and listen
Speaker 1: to Matt's podcast. You can say anything in the review
Speaker 1: as long as it's five stars. You can be like, oh, Matt,
Speaker 1: it's a great podcast. Although he keeps talking about feet
Speaker 1: feel free mentioned feet, I don't care, just five stars
Speaker 1: we love them. Well, you can check that out. You
Speaker 1: can read my book After the Revolution. Just type it
Speaker 1: in with a k press or just type it into
Speaker 1: like whatever book buying website you use. You will find
Speaker 1: it and can get any book or a physical copy.
Speaker 1: And you know, as you go out into the world
Speaker 1: after this harrowing week, be the sixteen year old punching
Speaker 1: a Nazi in the face that you have them around
Speaker 1: the world, right, Hell yeah, dude, fuck yeah. Behind the
Speaker 1: Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
Speaker 1: from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media
Speaker 1: dot com, or check us out on the I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.