Speaker 1: What's cracking my peppers. This is Robert Evans bringing away
Speaker 1: classic introduction to the podcast Behind the Bastards, where we
Speaker 1: tell you everything you don't know about the worst people
Speaker 1: in all of history. Now, I've decided to do this
Speaker 1: blast from the past introduction because this week lads and ladies,
Speaker 1: them's and fims, him bows and us. But whatever. Anyway,
Speaker 1: we're doing a classic Behind the Bastards episode. We're getting
Speaker 1: back to our roots. We're we're doing it, doing it
Speaker 1: old school style, and we're talking about a Nazi. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Matt Lee our guest for today. Matt, you're a podcaster, uh,
Speaker 1: the host of the podcast Hood Yourself a Gun, which
Speaker 1: show the Sopranos, and obviously, Matt as a comedian, you
Speaker 1: understand that there's nothing more toxic than getting political. But
Speaker 1: I want to ask you to just kind of riskly
Speaker 1: delve into those waters and and and and answer me
Speaker 1: this question. The Nazis are we like are we like warm? Cold? Lukewarm?
Speaker 1: Where what do you land on the Nazis? Honestly, bro
Speaker 1: jury is still out on the Nazis. I think people
Speaker 1: are starting to just like think, like, hey, maybe they
Speaker 1: had some ideas a lot of people are starting to
Speaker 1: think that way. Man. They're like, wait, wait, maybe some
Speaker 1: of that stuff about the Jews Connor Rings true. Um
Speaker 1: j K, I'm anti ant anti anti Nazis. Maybe Amtley,
Speaker 1: How would you like to learn about the worst Nazi? Oh? Man,
Speaker 1: I thought I've Every time I come on, I feel
Speaker 1: like I've learned about the worst Nazi. And I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: we're done with the Holly Coast. This is when we
Speaker 1: talk about the Nazis, and we talked about the Holocaust. Obviously,
Speaker 1: there's a couple of different categories of worst. There's the
Speaker 1: guys who are actually like out in the field doing
Speaker 1: war crimes with our actual bodies against the people's actual bodies.
Speaker 1: And there's the guys who are like organizing it, doing
Speaker 1: the paper pushing that made it possible. There's the propagandists
Speaker 1: who got everyone riled up. I tend to find those
Speaker 1: latter two categories more interesting, right, because there's always just
Speaker 1: like thugg thuggish pieces of ship who will hurt people. Um.
Speaker 1: The guy we're talking about today is kind of both
Speaker 1: straddles both those lines. And as a spoiler, this is
Speaker 1: a guy who got written up by the SS for
Speaker 1: violence during the Siege of Warsaw. That is that is
Speaker 1: the level of level of Nazi we're talking the s
Speaker 1: s was like, this guy's making us look bad. This
Speaker 1: guy is really the Jews right now? Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I hate the Jews, but holy shit, she calms the
Speaker 1: fun down. Wow. Yeah, we get it. We get it's
Speaker 1: the Jews are bad. Just we're killing these people. But
Speaker 1: good lord, I understand you want to do a dollar now,
Speaker 1: but there's a process. Okay, we're trying to do it
Speaker 1: step by step. My god, mind, god mind, got Uh.
Speaker 1: There's nothing like making fun of a German accent. Um.
Speaker 1: It is good. You never have to ask for permission
Speaker 1: to know you're officially I think for the next thousand
Speaker 1: of the thousand years, Uh, everyone can just do a
Speaker 1: German accent and make fun of them and for their
Speaker 1: history whenever you disagree with them on some random thing.
Speaker 1: That is the punishment instead of a thousand year Reich
Speaker 1: for a thousand years, we all get to be a
Speaker 1: little racist gets German people. But it's okay, they're going
Speaker 1: to complain a thousand year accent right where he's like,
Speaker 1: I'm German. Look at Mr Crimes. Yeah, I like to
Speaker 1: climes and mountains. I don't like Jews, but I lost
Speaker 1: the whole war where look at my leader host and
Speaker 1: in my decision to invade Russia is out vinta cults. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I plan out for his in my hat. Look at me.
Speaker 1: I don't know what. Do they have feathers in their hats?
Speaker 1: I feel like at some point, yeah, feathers and that
Speaker 1: idle this flower whatever. Anyway, So we're talking about Oscar
Speaker 1: Durrell Wanger today. That's his name. Ridiculous name, ridiculous name, um,
Speaker 1: but also quite possibly the worst personal history of bloodshed
Speaker 1: that I've heard about a Nazi having. Um. He is
Speaker 1: a real, a staggering piece of shit, said Oscar Durrell Wanger.
Speaker 1: Durrell Wanger, ridiculous name. We call him. Oscar is a
Speaker 1: grouch because he's so grouchy. He's a very grumpy man.
Speaker 1: He's a he's a thug and and just a gross thug.
Speaker 1: But he's also an, unlike most of the thugs, a
Speaker 1: key part of like the organizing machinery of genocide. He
Speaker 1: didn't just take live's hand to hand. He helped orchestrate
Speaker 1: mass killings um and and made sort of paula see
Speaker 1: for Nazi field units doing genocide that was adopted on
Speaker 1: a pretty wide scale. But before we talk about him,
Speaker 1: we got to get into one of my favorite topics,
Speaker 1: Matt Leeb hitlerology. Yes, oh yeah, So a lot of
Speaker 1: people study Hitler, a lot of a lot of Hitler
Speaker 1: stands out there. Um, and there's a I'm a big
Speaker 1: hitler ologistlogist too. Yeah. I've decided that I would not
Speaker 1: go back in time to kill him. Uh really yeah,
Speaker 1: because if you think about it by now, like Hitler
Speaker 1: has got to be a fucking expert at killing time travelers, right,
Speaker 1: that is a good point, because that's all he does
Speaker 1: all day. So every time traveler who's gone back in
Speaker 1: time has died at the hands of Hitler because we
Speaker 1: still know who he is. Yeah. I feel like it's
Speaker 1: a trick to get the Jews to accidentally holocaust themselves
Speaker 1: by like inventing time travel and then dying at the
Speaker 1: hands of Adolf Hitler. Like he has a here's a
Speaker 1: little room that they all go to and his actual
Speaker 1: secret plan. See I had I actually have an idea
Speaker 1: for a TV show. I shouldn't be sharing this with
Speaker 1: the open Internet, But scientists go back in time, and
Speaker 1: they reverse the polarity of Hitler's brain and they make
Speaker 1: him reverse Hitler. And then after that it's a matchmaking show,
Speaker 1: and he's just trying to get Jewish couples to get
Speaker 1: together and have babies to like undo all of his crimes.
Speaker 1: Like a Hitler yenta, like a Hitler love boat. Yeah, right, exactly,
Speaker 1: match makeup, make me I love that. Yeah, probably will
Speaker 1: be the Yeah. Probably shouldn't. Shouldn't say that on the
Speaker 1: open Internet, but I did so amongst people who are
Speaker 1: like Hitler nerds, which nobody who does this professionally calls themselves.
Speaker 1: But I called her that. Um. There's a big debate
Speaker 1: as to whether or not Hitler was what some academics
Speaker 1: call a weak dictator. Now, this term, when it gets
Speaker 1: kind of like translated, particularly academics, is sort of un
Speaker 1: It gets people kind of interpreted the wrong way when
Speaker 1: the people who are the academics who are calling him
Speaker 1: a weak dictator are not arguing that he wasn't influential
Speaker 1: or central to Nazi crimes. Instead, it's more of a
Speaker 1: debate about the way in which he exercised influence and
Speaker 1: the way in which the the actual structural ways in
Speaker 1: which he contributed to the Holocaust. Right, there's a debate
Speaker 1: about and and basically, so one side of this they're
Speaker 1: called intentionalists, and intentionalist historians argue that Hitler was quote
Speaker 1: master in the Third Reich, essentially a micro manager who
Speaker 1: exercised tremendous direct control and gave specific orders that are
Speaker 1: behind many of the regime's crimes. Now, the other side
Speaker 1: of this debate, they're called generally either structuralists or functionalists, right,
Speaker 1: and these historians think that the structure of the Nazi
Speaker 1: Party and the Nazi state actually hamstrung Hitler from exercising
Speaker 1: direct power, and thus his influence in things like the
Speaker 1: Holocaust was more a result of his rhetoric and the
Speaker 1: culture that he helped build and helped have take over
Speaker 1: Germany rather than actual specific minute orders that he issued. Right. Interesting, Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so like the George W. Bush theory where everyone's right,
Speaker 1: he's not really were criminal because he's too stupid. It
Speaker 1: was Cheney who's the real war criminal. And I'm like,
Speaker 1: why not? Both yeah, And I do want to say
Speaker 1: most of the people who are making the argument that
Speaker 1: like he was a weak dictator are not trying to
Speaker 1: mitigate his crimes. They're just trying to understand specifically, how
Speaker 1: did the Holocaust occur and how did the Nazi Party
Speaker 1: do the crimes that it did? Right, was Hitler? Was
Speaker 1: Hitler sitting there being like and you go killed and
Speaker 1: you go or was it more that like, well, he
Speaker 1: he puts these people in power, and he builds this
Speaker 1: system where all of these guys are kind of competing
Speaker 1: to be the worst Nazi to rise in this party.
Speaker 1: And it was that sort of thing, right, So it's
Speaker 1: not I don't think most of them are not trying
Speaker 1: to mitigate his crimes. They're more just trying to be
Speaker 1: specific about And I'm not taking, by the way, a
Speaker 1: side here as to who is still calling I'm Hitler lovers,
Speaker 1: So the Hitler lovers Hitler. Yeah, some of these guys
Speaker 1: are Jewish, so he probably shouldn't. Well, you're trying to
Speaker 1: some it's complicated because some of them are Holocaust deniers. Um,
Speaker 1: It's it's messy Hitler. When you when you really get
Speaker 1: deep into Hitler studies, it gets kind of messy. And
Speaker 1: part of one of the reasons why there's a debate,
Speaker 1: Right if you look at a guy like Putin nobody's
Speaker 1: going to argue that Putin is not a strong dictator
Speaker 1: and that he exercises direct personal control over what his
Speaker 1: regime does. Right. We know right now that he's like
Speaker 1: giving field orders to his commanders in Ukraine directly, which
Speaker 1: is like that strong dictator stuff, right, and then is
Speaker 1: certainly something Hitler did from a military standpoint. No one
Speaker 1: really argues that he wasn't a strong dictator as regards
Speaker 1: his control of the military machine. In terms of the
Speaker 1: the architecture of genocide, you know, how do we how
Speaker 1: do we categorize him? Um? And And part of the
Speaker 1: reason why there's this debate is that Hitler knew that
Speaker 1: he was committing a genocide um and was pretty careful
Speaker 1: about not having ship written down right, Like he he's
Speaker 1: the stringer Bell of this where he's like the fucking
Speaker 1: take no, it's yeah, motherfuck, are you taking notes on
Speaker 1: a cuminal conspiracy? Although there are a lot of notes
Speaker 1: on his criminal conspiracy, He's just kind of coy about stuff.
Speaker 1: So there's I just want to say shout out to
Speaker 1: you for bringing a stringer Bell reference with because we're
Speaker 1: always looking for it. We're now covering the wire pot
Speaker 1: yourself the wire is the new show. So if you
Speaker 1: like Stringer Bell references and you're behind the bastards, sorry,
Speaker 1: I had to plug. I have a baby coming. I
Speaker 1: need to plug. So Hitler, I mean, yeah, again, quite
Speaker 1: careful about There's not like a piece of paper where
Speaker 1: Hitler says, hey, guys, I want you to start doing
Speaker 1: death camp ship right, Hey guys, turn Auschwitz into a
Speaker 1: factory for murder. Right. We don't have like Hitler's signing
Speaker 1: that piece of paper. Obviously, again the spoilers. He knew
Speaker 1: about all of it. He was very involved in all
Speaker 1: of it. But he's not like sitting down and being
Speaker 1: like and everybody make sure to note that I Hitler
Speaker 1: told you to do this, because it's a it's a
Speaker 1: pretty serious crime. He's committing, yes, and he knows it,
Speaker 1: and and it's it's the funk up thing is it's
Speaker 1: like the foundation of I think a lot of Holocaust
Speaker 1: denialism is the fact that they were so secretive about
Speaker 1: the entire project. So you you know, to this day
Speaker 1: there are people who are falling for Hitler's fucking bullshit,
Speaker 1: and and there is there's a whole strain of people
Speaker 1: who are not quite Holocaust deniers who will say, yeah,
Speaker 1: the Holocaust happened and it was bad. They'll also say
Speaker 1: stuff like it wasn't as bad as the bombing of
Speaker 1: German cities. There wasn't bad, questions, it was all nonsense.
Speaker 1: But then they'll be like, but Hitler didn't direct it, right, like,
Speaker 1: we have no evidence. This was just things like this
Speaker 1: is these are like things that there's weird Nazis out there, right,
Speaker 1: it's anyway. So the the actual phrase wicked weak dictator
Speaker 1: comes from a historian named Hans Momson, who argued alongside
Speaker 1: other historians that the Fewer was actually a weaker leader
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways than previous German rulers. Right
Speaker 1: in terms of the way he exercised power. He has
Speaker 1: less direct power than a guy like the Kaiser did. Right.
Speaker 1: That's he's no kids, and and what he's saying is
Speaker 1: that he's not again, Momson, as far as I know,
Speaker 1: is not trying to deny the Holocaust. What he's saying
Speaker 1: is that the way the Nazi state was constructed is
Speaker 1: all of these guys who are basically gangsters come in,
Speaker 1: they destroy a lot of the existing German bureaucracy and
Speaker 1: they replace it with the nest of like a this
Speaker 1: web basically of of conflicting criminal gangs that are all
Speaker 1: fighting each other and sometimes killing each other, and that
Speaker 1: makes it hard for Hitler to direct aspects of state
Speaker 1: personally in a way other autocrats are able to do.
Speaker 1: This was not done to the military, which is part
Speaker 1: of why Hitler was able to like exercise so much
Speaker 1: direct control of the military is a lot of the
Speaker 1: old structure of the Imperial Military was still in place.
Speaker 1: Um Now, this line of reasoning is again it's not
Speaker 1: what Moms is saying is not inherently unreasonable. That said,
Speaker 1: it's also probably worth noting that it is unsettlingly similar
Speaker 1: to justifications that German citizens at the time, like during
Speaker 1: the Third Reich, made for how bad Nazi officials were.
Speaker 1: Because Hitler by thirty eight is very popular, but the
Speaker 1: Nazis are bad at governing and a bunch of ship
Speaker 1: keeps going wrong that they were supposed to have fixed.
Speaker 1: So there's this attitude among citizens in the right that like,
Speaker 1: Hitler is great, he doesn't know about how fucked up
Speaker 1: some of these guys are. Right, he's too trusting, he's
Speaker 1: too gentle natured. Hitler he would never expect people to
Speaker 1: do crimes. That's the thing about Hitler is that he
Speaker 1: was always a very tolerant guy. You know, he's just
Speaker 1: very nice, very sweet, non confrontational. I think that's a
Speaker 1: big thing about Hitler, the man who anti fascists with
Speaker 1: a whip and bar fights. I'm a bit of an introvert.
Speaker 1: I don't like confrontation, don't like direct conflict. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: just kind of want everyone to be cool and friends. Um,
Speaker 1: it's yeah again. And this is so part of what's
Speaker 1: gnarlis that this is an important debate to have if
Speaker 1: you're trying to understand what happened during the Third Reich,
Speaker 1: because it's it's not there's nothing wrong with saying well,
Speaker 1: because of the structure of the Nazi Party and how
Speaker 1: like criminal and incompetent a lot of these guys were,
Speaker 1: Hitler was not able to exercise the kind of direct
Speaker 1: control in domestic policies that some people expected, and as
Speaker 1: a result, a lot of the early things, a lot
Speaker 1: of things that were done by the Nazi state were
Speaker 1: things that were just sort of like done by guys
Speaker 1: that he trusted to do stuff, and so he wasn't direct,
Speaker 1: which is not saying he's not ultimately responsible because like
Speaker 1: if I were to hire someone on the cool Zone
Speaker 1: media and I were to say, like, you have a
Speaker 1: fifty thou dollar budget for that can only be spent
Speaker 1: on bullets, but I'm not going to tell you what
Speaker 1: to do with them, and then that person goes and
Speaker 1: commits crimes, I'm responsible to some extent, right, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it'd be weird if you were just like, hey,
Speaker 1: come join my podcasting company and I'll give you fifty bullets. Yeah,
Speaker 1: no microphones. Here's a list of people I dislike, Right,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't be saying go kill these people, but it
Speaker 1: wouldn't be my fault, right, Like, yes, um, I think
Speaker 1: in that case. Again, one of the conflicts here is
Speaker 1: that a number of people who are proponents of the
Speaker 1: weak dictator hypothesis are fucking fascists, including a guy named
Speaker 1: David Irving. Irving was at one point a semi respected
Speaker 1: scholar of German history. Kurt Vonnegutt quotes him in uh
Speaker 1: in a slaughter House five because one of the things
Speaker 1: Irving did is he he would write about how bad
Speaker 1: the Allied bombing campaigns were, and he seems to have
Speaker 1: exaggerated the death count substantially, but they weren't pretty bad.
Speaker 1: So there was a time in which a guy like Vonnegutt,
Speaker 1: definitely not a Nazi, would be like, oh, yeah, I
Speaker 1: was at Dresden. I know it was bad. I I
Speaker 1: this guy is saying the numbers are even worse than
Speaker 1: I knew. That seems credible to me, and so Irving
Speaker 1: as as at one point semi respected, and then kind
Speaker 1: of turns into like it now he is a hard
Speaker 1: core Holocaust and I are right, and I guess he
Speaker 1: probably was at the time, but it wasn't immediately obvious.
Speaker 1: So you you do run into people like Vonnegut who
Speaker 1: like sited Irving fifty something years sixty years ago or
Speaker 1: whatever before he was a Nazi, and then it kind
Speaker 1: of comes out and it's kind of tarnished Vonneget a
Speaker 1: little bit, even though it really shouldn't have. It was
Speaker 1: not It's not unreasonable for a guy who's sitting in
Speaker 1: Dressden during the fire bombing to well, that was pretty bad.
Speaker 1: The problem is, you know, Kurt Vonnegut didn't have um
Speaker 1: retweet stone equal endorsements on exactly. That would have solved
Speaker 1: the proud, would have solved the people like no, no,
Speaker 1: no, no no, no, he's cool. He's just he's not involved
Speaker 1: with the whole Holocaust and iing thing, but he does
Speaker 1: think that Dresden was pretty pretty bad bombing. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: as is whenever you've got like a case where someone
Speaker 1: like me who's not a historian is saying, here's these
Speaker 1: camps in this like massive historical debate, the reality is
Speaker 1: near rely always that actual credible experts kind of like
Speaker 1: wind up more in the middle than anything else. That said,
Speaker 1: it's probably fair to say that the intentionalist interpretation of
Speaker 1: things um is more spected among serious academics. And it's
Speaker 1: like Klaus Hildebrand will sum up that argument by saying
Speaker 1: that national socialism was basically Hitlerrism, right, And there's a
Speaker 1: lot to back up the fact that there was nothing
Speaker 1: to this ideology and there's nothing to this government beyond
Speaker 1: this kind of central focus on Hitler as a person,
Speaker 1: just straight and the fact that all resistance pretty much
Speaker 1: collapses when Hitler shoots himself is not uncompelling evidence that right, like,
Speaker 1: you can make a strong case here very uh kill
Speaker 1: the night King, energy and everyone else dissolves. But that said,
Speaker 1: it's also worth noting that like you know, we're not
Speaker 1: done with Nazism today, and like a lot of a
Speaker 1: lot of fascists today are base have based their own
Speaker 1: ideologies heavily on nationalist socialist principles. Millions of assholes all
Speaker 1: over the world are drawn to aspects of the political
Speaker 1: philosophy that animated the Nazis, even if they're not waiving
Speaker 1: an actual swastika themselves, Um, they're usually they're just wearing
Speaker 1: a blue Lives Matter. Yeah, that, and you can see
Speaker 1: that as evidencely like, well, maybe the functionalists have a point, right, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know it was not just hitler Ism, there was
Speaker 1: something more to it. Now. The story of the man
Speaker 1: that we're going to discuss today kind of lies at
Speaker 1: the heart of this debate because Hitler is a factor.
Speaker 1: And you can say in the same way that when
Speaker 1: I hire that guy and give him thousands and thousands
Speaker 1: of bullets, I am responsible for what he does with them.
Speaker 1: Hitler is responsible to some extent for every murder that
Speaker 1: this guy is going to commit, but his direct fingerprints
Speaker 1: aren't really on any of it. Right. Hitler never says, hey, Oscar,
Speaker 1: I want you to go do some real fucked up ship. Um,
Speaker 1: but also ready to put in work. Oscar Hitler absolutely
Speaker 1: said send that guy Oscar out to do the worst
Speaker 1: things anyone's ever done. Right, He's a real go getter,
Speaker 1: he's got that entrepreneurial spirit. And this is all. There's
Speaker 1: a second debate that's kind of broader than the Hitler debate,
Speaker 1: which is are the physical culprits of the Holocaust willing executioners?
Speaker 1: Like did the Germans just raise up a narration of
Speaker 1: real assholes who are willing to do horrible things? Or
Speaker 1: were they ordinary Germans? And it just turns out that
Speaker 1: normal people are a pretty malleable when it comes to
Speaker 1: war crimes. And again, the actual truth here is always
Speaker 1: going to be from credible people. Well, it's kind of both,
Speaker 1: and it kind of depends on which group of them
Speaker 1: you're talking about one period of it, right, Um, anyway,
Speaker 1: that's all just interesting context, I think for sort of
Speaker 1: the philosophical debates that are going on behind all of
Speaker 1: the war crimes were about to talk about, because I
Speaker 1: don't just want to be like, yeah, it sounds like
Speaker 1: the twenty minute preface where it's like, we do not
Speaker 1: say that Hitler wasn't responsible for what we're just saying
Speaker 1: there were some people who went above and beyond the
Speaker 1: call of yeah exactly, and and and also just like
Speaker 1: when you're trying to understand how genocides occur, it's important
Speaker 1: to understand that it's like structurally, a number of overlapping
Speaker 1: factors usually come together, right. Um, Anyway, I just wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about that. You can read a lot more
Speaker 1: about this. We'll have sources wherever we put sources, I'm
Speaker 1: sure at some point. Um, but there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of books about people write entire books
Speaker 1: arguing over this. Um. I am not again trying not
Speaker 1: to come down on either side because basically, with the
Speaker 1: exception of that Holocaust, and I are most of the
Speaker 1: people involved in the debate on both sides no more
Speaker 1: about this than I do so. Oscar Darrel Wanger was
Speaker 1: born on September eight in Wurzburg, Swabia, Swabia, which is
Speaker 1: a ridiculous name for a place in southern Germany because
Speaker 1: they all came from really just ridiculous sounding places. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they come from fucking Swabia. And then they hear there's
Speaker 1: a city called crack Ow, which is a dope name
Speaker 1: from like, well, we gotta fucking take that ship. Warsaw.
Speaker 1: What a cool name. And we're over here with Stuttgart.
Speaker 1: Goddamnita is a name for a city, and I gotta
Speaker 1: be honest. Moscow pretty cool fucking name for a like
Speaker 1: Stalin grad don't like Stalin pretty dope name like. And
Speaker 1: one of you guys got see his munichue skin Flagging's
Speaker 1: just gotten come ons like vomiting towns filled with vomiting.
Speaker 1: That's why they did it. That's why. Yeah, that's why
Speaker 1: they're bad. The secret to Hitler's madness is he grew
Speaker 1: up in a fucking shitty little town with a stupid name.
Speaker 1: Matt's here for this episode. Well, you know, I just
Speaker 1: I like to keep it silly when talking Holocaust. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you gotta, you gotta keep it light right, Yeah, fucking
Speaker 1: brown now I'm in. Was the name of his fucking birthplace?
Speaker 1: What stupid? Anyway, Um, Matt, you know what's not stupid?
Speaker 1: What the products and services that support this podcast? Nine?
Speaker 1: We're back. So we just talked about how Oscar Durrell
Speaker 1: Wanger born eighteen, his family moves from the stupid named
Speaker 1: town to a slightly less stupid named town, Stuttgart Germany
Speaker 1: and nineteen hundred, which is where my mom was born
Speaker 1: quite a bit laer Um. Yes uh. She told us
Speaker 1: later later in life, was like, yeah, you actually could
Speaker 1: have gotten German citizenship, And we were like, what the funk?
Speaker 1: Why didn't she do? What the hell? I could have
Speaker 1: to fucking passports? You know what kind of ship I
Speaker 1: could get up to. I could have had healthcare? Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: So he moves to Stuttgart nineteen hundred when he's five,
Speaker 1: and then to the city of Esslingen in nineteen o
Speaker 1: five when he's ten. His family are probably you would
Speaker 1: probably say they're solidly middle class, right uh. Durrell Wanger
Speaker 1: would later write that his parents were quote neither poor
Speaker 1: nor wealthy, and describe his father as calm, intelligent, and frugal.
Speaker 1: He describes their familial relations as peaceful. Now, when you're
Speaker 1: talking about a guy who does all the horrible things
Speaker 1: that he does, and this guy is like, like the
Speaker 1: number of just I don't want to say this like flippantly,
Speaker 1: but like the number of people that he personally raped
Speaker 1: could fill like a large town, Like like like, really
Speaker 1: bad guy. You expect something horrific in his childhood. I
Speaker 1: think most people do because of probably because of unreason,
Speaker 1: and it's one of those things we don't have much detail. Right.
Speaker 1: His youth occurs in the middle of like you know,
Speaker 1: he he's born in a period where there's not a
Speaker 1: tremendous amount of record keeping, where it is not abnormal
Speaker 1: to hit kids. But he doesn't talk about there being
Speaker 1: any abuse in his childhood. I think there might be
Speaker 1: a belief among people that like, well, there probably wasn't.
Speaker 1: He just didn't see it as as normal. But it's
Speaker 1: also entirely possible this guy just had a pretty good childhood.
Speaker 1: It's it's interesting. Yeah, you really never know. I do
Speaker 1: feel like, you know, nowadays, we are always trying to
Speaker 1: understand the cycles of violence, especially sexual violence, and you
Speaker 1: know how that can kind of like, uh be hereditary,
Speaker 1: like generation after generation. You know, one person gets sexually
Speaker 1: abused as a child, and then as an adult they
Speaker 1: become a perpetrator. Um. But I'm perfectly willing to believe
Speaker 1: that some people are just ship are born monsters and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, hey, it's then I'm not sure that's what's Well,
Speaker 1: we'll talk about this guy's backstory because it's interesting. Um,
Speaker 1: but I did want to look into like, well, how
Speaker 1: common is child abuse in like Germany and at the
Speaker 1: class level that he grew up in, because I wanted
Speaker 1: to see, like, is there maybe something more there? And
Speaker 1: it kind of his youth actually occurs in the midst
Speaker 1: of this massive debate across the nation of Germany as
Speaker 1: to whether or not you should hit kids, like this
Speaker 1: is an actual serious debate, and it's it's obviously a
Speaker 1: good one to have, right if the norm was hitting
Speaker 1: kids for a while, and this is not a German thing, right,
Speaker 1: the norm has always been hitting kids, and most cultures, right,
Speaker 1: most cultures, by by number of people, smack the ship
Speaker 1: out of kids every now and again. Right, So again
Speaker 1: not good. But Germany is actually having a debate and
Speaker 1: we're we are still having this debate, so they're ahead
Speaker 1: of us about like should you do this at all? Now?
Speaker 1: Willhell mind? Germany? Which is you know, Germany, the the
Speaker 1: only Germany that exists prior to the Weimar Republic, because
Speaker 1: it's not an old country, had long embraced a concept
Speaker 1: that had existed in the region for a while called
Speaker 1: jesus Zuktigung sprect, which means to rear by hitting, and
Speaker 1: it was generally interpreted as referring to the use of
Speaker 1: physical compulsion to ensure proper behavior and maintain order. Right now,
Speaker 1: this is both like this is how you raise little
Speaker 1: kids and also like you're in the military, this is
Speaker 1: how you trained soldiers. Right You're you're on a work
Speaker 1: floor in a factory, like, yeah, guy foxed up, you
Speaker 1: hit him, right, Like this is that that's that was
Speaker 1: a pretty common thing. But in the late eighteen hundreds
Speaker 1: and early nineteen hundreds, and it's important to note, Germany
Speaker 1: is like the medical superpower of the world in this
Speaker 1: period up like when World War One hits, Germany has
Speaker 1: probably the best doctors and the best medical hospitals on
Speaker 1: the planet. Germany is where you fucking go if you
Speaker 1: want like a fancy as medical education. They're the best
Speaker 1: at it. So and this includes like psychiatry right obviously,
Speaker 1: like Freud and Ship like they are on the cutting
Speaker 1: edge of this very early, like the kind of what
Speaker 1: will become developmental and child psychology and stuff. And in
Speaker 1: the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, there's all
Speaker 1: these debates and these like journal argues arguing about these
Speaker 1: cases that journalists will write about of child abuse in
Speaker 1: schools of like teachers beating the ship out of students,
Speaker 1: and whether or not this is a good idea. I think.
Speaker 1: There's an article in the Journal for Central European History
Speaker 1: by Sace Elder that summarizes a nineteen oh three case
Speaker 1: from Bavaria. Quote, a young male tutor, Andreas Dippold, had
Speaker 1: beaten his young charges so badly that one succumbed to
Speaker 1: his mistreatment. So this teacher in nineteen o three, and
Speaker 1: this is when when Oscar is eight beats a student
Speaker 1: to death, and it goes very viral. It enrages the
Speaker 1: entire country, and it seized upon. Part of why it
Speaker 1: pisses people off as there's an activist named Elizabeth Vaughan Ertzon,
Speaker 1: and whenever there's a Vaughn in a German name, it
Speaker 1: means she's a member of the nobility, right, So that's
Speaker 1: part of why she's able to be an activist. She's
Speaker 1: independently wealthy. And Elizabeth bond arts and founds the Society
Speaker 1: for the Protection of Children from Mistreatment and Exploitation, which
Speaker 1: is an organ again nineteen oh three, and um, you know,
Speaker 1: basically goes to war over this, and I'm gonna quote
Speaker 1: again from that same paper the case demonstrated. Von Ertsen
Speaker 1: wrote that while torture had been abolished for adults, it
Speaker 1: was still widely practiced on children. One of the chief
Speaker 1: causes of child abuse, according to von Ertson, was the
Speaker 1: claim to so called zuktigung sprect the right to use
Speaker 1: corporal punishment. Because of the defenselessness of children, it has
Speaker 1: become customary to exercise on them the right to use
Speaker 1: corporal punishment, even where it does not exist. She wrote.
Speaker 1: A host of people, including tutors, governesses, and babysitters, claim
Speaker 1: the right, but how far the right to corporal punishment
Speaker 1: is transferable is entirely an open question. Curiously, von Urson
Speaker 1: asserted that there was both an objectively existing right to
Speaker 1: use corporal punishment and that there was no consensus on
Speaker 1: where that right lay. Again, she's not saying that you
Speaker 1: should never slap a kid or never spank a kid.
Speaker 1: She's saying we're doing it too much, and they used
Speaker 1: to be to a debate about who is allowed to
Speaker 1: do this right um, which is again pretty advanced for
Speaker 1: his it's time. But also she is still saying that, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: sometimes you're gonna hit kids, of course everybody occasionally, which,
Speaker 1: again to be clear on the podcast, stance always bad
Speaker 1: and don't this is a good thing, right with it
Speaker 1: within the context of like every adult should be able
Speaker 1: to beat the ship out of kids whenever they want,
Speaker 1: a woman being like, hey, that's fucked up. We need
Speaker 1: to have a serious societal conversation about who and when
Speaker 1: it's okay to like smack a kid. That's a that's
Speaker 1: a positive move, it's a step in the right direction.
Speaker 1: We're not We're not having that discussion in the US.
Speaker 1: I don't think I think people are just like, yeah,
Speaker 1: be a kid who gives a ship right there, kids
Speaker 1: a factory. I'm fine, which I just said earlier, But
Speaker 1: I am fine. No, don't beat your kids, yeah, and
Speaker 1: says Elder writes quote. Many popular and some scholarly depictions
Speaker 1: of German child rearing in the Wilhelmine period assumed that
Speaker 1: methods were particularly harsh and brutal. Yet there is ample
Speaker 1: reason to doubt the stereotype of the harsh, brutal parent
Speaker 1: more ready to strike a child than embrace it. School
Speaker 1: discipline and other national contexts raises doubts about the extent
Speaker 1: to which German practices were exceptionally violent. Moreover, investigations of
Speaker 1: parenting advice literature have suggested that while their were concerns
Speaker 1: about the inadequacy of soft mothers to adequately raise strong
Speaker 1: manly sons, the mother of the controlled child associated with
Speaker 1: the authoritarian personality and the rise of Nazism and merged
Speaker 1: in the advice literature only during World War One. Advice
Speaker 1: literature remained rather heterogeneous in its prescriptions for the training, correction,
Speaker 1: and care of children. As Caroline kay notes, prominent reformers
Speaker 1: such as Ellen kay, Adel Schreiber and Friedrich Wilhelm Forster
Speaker 1: argued strenuously against corporate polished as detrimental to the development
Speaker 1: of the self restrained, self determined individual. This diversity of views,
Speaker 1: and especially the influence of the pedagogical reform movement, suggests
Speaker 1: that normative ideas about the purpose of corporal punishment, the
Speaker 1: interests it served, and the source of the legal right
Speaker 1: to use it were highly contested in Wilhelm mind society
Speaker 1: and German legal cultures. So again, really common want to
Speaker 1: look for evidence of brutality in the upbringing of a
Speaker 1: brutal person, and especially to kind of blame the horrors
Speaker 1: of the Nazis on the way kids were raised. But
Speaker 1: this guy, it's entirely possible that his parents never hit him.
Speaker 1: Because that was a lot of German families, and a
Speaker 1: lot of German families lined up on the no, this
Speaker 1: is not okay. There was a vigorous debate and a
Speaker 1: substantial number of people were like, it's bad to hit kids.
Speaker 1: I'm just like amazed that baby books have been around
Speaker 1: for that long. Yeah, well yeah, I thought that was
Speaker 1: because like I'm I'm mid reading like three baby books
Speaker 1: right now, and I'm like, how can what just anyone
Speaker 1: who has a baby you can write a baby book?
Speaker 1: What are we doing here? One is just like if
Speaker 1: they cry, let him cry, And I'm like, this is
Speaker 1: get a book deal. Yeah. My suspicion is that, like
Speaker 1: baby books back then started like the ninety day points.
Speaker 1: So it's like, okay, so this one didn't die right through.
Speaker 1: It is old enough to count. Now it's time to
Speaker 1: start thinking about investing resources at it. So you're having
Speaker 1: a life child, you have a living child, rat elections,
Speaker 1: What to expect when you're expecting a baby to live? Yeah,
Speaker 1: the most popular child we ring book in Billhell mind
Speaker 1: Germany so this fund didn't diet kicking and screaming hong.
Speaker 1: Um so yeah, again, I just wanted to note that
Speaker 1: kind of because we don't know much about his childhood,
Speaker 1: it's worth noting he does not report any abuse, and
Speaker 1: he's born into a society that's probably the most proved
Speaker 1: aggressive place, at least in the Western world in terms
Speaker 1: of like the argument that you shouldn't hit kids. Um
Speaker 1: so yeah. Anyway, if we are looking for hit hints
Speaker 1: from his youth, that might have some sort of predictive
Speaker 1: bearing on his future behavior, right, that might like pressage
Speaker 1: some of the crimes he commits. We'd do better to
Speaker 1: cast our eyes up then, towards the town of Words
Speaker 1: words in jeez, we're Sesnia again. This is a Polish town.
Speaker 1: It's part of Poland today, where Sesnia it's w r
Speaker 1: z E s n i A. It's part of Poland today,
Speaker 1: but at this time it's part of Germany. Right, because Germans,
Speaker 1: the Prussians in particular, occupy a big chunk of what
Speaker 1: is today Poland in this period, they don't lose it.
Speaker 1: To World War One. The occupiers, like most occupiers, did
Speaker 1: not like the idea of a people they had conquered
Speaker 1: speaking a language that wasn't their's right. So the Germans
Speaker 1: are like, well, we got all these kids, and uh,
Speaker 1: I don't think it's a great idea for them to
Speaker 1: learn Polish because we don't really want Polish people in
Speaker 1: Germany right like we were. We want to get rid
Speaker 1: of that, you know. Um. So one day in nineteen
Speaker 1: o two, Johann Schultzen, who's a teacher and a Prussian
Speaker 1: teacher in word Zesnia, decides to take action. And I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote from a write up in the First News,
Speaker 1: a Polish news website. The peoples were crammed into a
Speaker 1: classroom on the first floor, where they were giving a
Speaker 1: final chance to repeat a religious song in German by heart.
Speaker 1: Those who did so were released home. The rest were
Speaker 1: held back to receive the flogging of their lives. Each
Speaker 1: child was individually frog marched to a chamber on the
Speaker 1: ground floor set aside for administering the punishment. The children
Speaker 1: were giving four to eight stinging strokes from a birch cane.
Speaker 1: The boys were flogged on their backsides, the girls on
Speaker 1: their open palms. This was not just an ordinary case
Speaker 1: of disciplining children through corporal punishment. Which was common at
Speaker 1: the time. Each furious strike was intended to communicate the message,
Speaker 1: this is Prussia, we are in charge, you polls will
Speaker 1: do as we say. One girl passed out from the pain.
Speaker 1: Others were not able to hold their books in their
Speaker 1: swollen hands. So that's pretty bad. Yeah, that I guess.
Speaker 1: I guess it was a necessity to have, you know,
Speaker 1: organizations being like stopped being your kids because there was
Speaker 1: literally flogging rooms the basements of schools. You for sure
Speaker 1: needed people who were like being like, we have to
Speaker 1: stop flogging the children. Perhaps you know what wild idea, guys,
Speaker 1: what if we try to be a no flogging society.
Speaker 1: I don't know that anyone needs to be flogged. Yes,
Speaker 1: no flog zone. We might we might be able to
Speaker 1: get by, okay without floggings. Yeah, I think we could arrive. Problem.
Speaker 1: So this leads to the adults around them, the adults
Speaker 1: in town and stuff, like their parents are like, what
Speaker 1: in the fucking Christ are you doing to our kids?
Speaker 1: This is nuts? And again, all of these people probably
Speaker 1: slap their kids, bank their kids, right, that's normal at
Speaker 1: the time. This is like a step beyond that, you know,
Speaker 1: So they engage in a strike that eventually and it's
Speaker 1: it's supported by the adults, but the strike spreads through
Speaker 1: and isn't to some extent organized by children and eventually
Speaker 1: comes to more than fifty thousand Polish children who like kids. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the kids go on strike and like so they will
Speaker 1: all at the same day's refused to answer questions from
Speaker 1: their teachers. Like I think they still go to school,
Speaker 1: but they just won't do anything. They're um and you know,
Speaker 1: there's protests. There's what you might call a riot where
Speaker 1: a bunch of the adults start throwing stones at Prussian teachers.
Speaker 1: Because again, the teachers are the occupiers here. These are
Speaker 1: not like people are sympathetic inherently to teachers for good reasons.
Speaker 1: These teachers are Prussians who are like running schools in
Speaker 1: a military fashion and occupied territory. Right, So again, throwing
Speaker 1: rocks at them probably fine. Like I'm just gonna say it,
Speaker 1: probably fine. I think in general, throwing rocks at all
Speaker 1: occupiers is what you should do. I'm usually on the
Speaker 1: side of the people throwing rocks at the occupiers. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: German police showed up and they put a bunch of
Speaker 1: striking children on trial, which is when the story blew
Speaker 1: up into an international issue. Uh, and this is this
Speaker 1: there's like massive articles in the New York Times and
Speaker 1: like like major international newspapers cover this because again, this
Speaker 1: is a lot of fucking kids and child strike is
Speaker 1: a pretty good story, right, yeah, that's awesome. Um yeah.
Speaker 1: Twenty people are eventually convicted and one parent is sentenced
Speaker 1: to two and a half years in prison. The Germans
Speaker 1: even sentence a photographer to forty days in prison for
Speaker 1: distributing photos of people connected to the case. And again,
Speaker 1: this is a massive story. There's no way that Oscar
Speaker 1: Darrel Wanger, who's you know, a kid at the time,
Speaker 1: would have missed hearing about this, right, Uh, this is
Speaker 1: like a big deal all throughout Imperial Germany. And in fact,
Speaker 1: based on kind of his age, it's a good good
Speaker 1: chance this is one of the first news stories he
Speaker 1: hears about as like a kid, like one of his
Speaker 1: earliest memories might be hearing about this. But I mean,
Speaker 1: but it feels like he is his family, yes, and
Speaker 1: just being against the strike. Well it's because I'm sure
Speaker 1: and again he's an Imperial Germany. He's reading the New
Speaker 1: York Times coverage, He's reading like those those ungrateful poems
Speaker 1: are attacking teachers. They threw rocks at teachers trying to
Speaker 1: teach them to read German. Right, Like, that's more or
Speaker 1: less how it would have come down to him. Um,
Speaker 1: so he makes his way through school, um, obtaining the
Speaker 1: German equivalent of like high school degree. It's called a
Speaker 1: baccalaureate in the source I found. But I think this
Speaker 1: is just like a high school degree. None of it,
Speaker 1: none of like schooling in this period maps exactly to
Speaker 1: our our modern ideas. Right. Um, they didn't have common
Speaker 1: core math, or they didn't have common Yeah, they had beatings. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Christian Ingrau, who is the author of a book about
Speaker 1: Darrel Langer and his unit, makes a point to note
Speaker 1: that his education quote did not include the humanities. Right,
Speaker 1: so this guy is not being and this is not
Speaker 1: actually not super common. For again, Germany is one of
Speaker 1: the centers of learning for the world, center of art,
Speaker 1: center of culture. This is like the fact that he
Speaker 1: his spe ific education is kind of entirely focused on
Speaker 1: like industry and business and getting him ready to like
Speaker 1: run a factory does not include humanities is kind of noteworthy. Um.
Speaker 1: After graduating, he endures further education with the goal of
Speaker 1: entering the private sector. Again, he's basically training up to
Speaker 1: be like a mid level functionary helping industrial Germany be industrial, right,
Speaker 1: trying to be rockets and ships. Yeah, So before he
Speaker 1: can finish any of this, before he can get his
Speaker 1: college degree, uh, he, like all German men, has to
Speaker 1: do a year of service for the Kaiser in the military. Right.
Speaker 1: This is like there's a universal draft. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like what Ukraine was starting a version of this before
Speaker 1: the war, right, where like everybody goes and they do
Speaker 1: a little bit of time, right. Um. And this is
Speaker 1: so that when the big war comes that everyone knows
Speaker 1: it's going to come, we have a bunch of guys
Speaker 1: we can call up and we don't need to train them, right,
Speaker 1: maybe we do a refresher for a week, but they
Speaker 1: know how to hold a gun, they know what in march,
Speaker 1: they know how to do all the things soldiers have
Speaker 1: to do. Um. So a lot of young men waited
Speaker 1: for the draft, right because it's it's the kind of
Speaker 1: thing where like eventually your number comes up. So a
Speaker 1: lot of guys try to get in as much of
Speaker 1: their you know, early adulthood as they could before they
Speaker 1: had to do it. Oscar volunteers, he joins on his
Speaker 1: own um. He spends a year marching and training for again.
Speaker 1: Everyone assumes the next war is inevitable. Right. Germany had
Speaker 1: come to existence during a war that started in eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy with France that had lasted less than a year,
Speaker 1: and it was pretty bloody. A lot of people die.
Speaker 1: It's not like a like a nice war. This is
Speaker 1: like where we get Germany. Everyone knows, like, well, we
Speaker 1: got unfinished beef with France. Right, they're going to start
Speaker 1: some ship at some point, right, you know, Germany and
Speaker 1: France or Prussian and France Austrian history. Right, you're not friendly,
Speaker 1: you know, you're you're looking at these two guys who
Speaker 1: every fifty years get into a giant fight, and they're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I bet they're gonna have another one at some point
Speaker 1: right now, because it's been about fifty years the Revolution.
Speaker 1: They got Napoleon, they got another Napoleon, they got a
Speaker 1: king again. Yeah, now they don't have a king because
Speaker 1: that last word didn't go great. So he was probably
Speaker 1: it's probably best to assume that like Oscar was eager
Speaker 1: for that war to start, a lot of German men were,
Speaker 1: and his assumption was that it was going to be
Speaker 1: you get called up along with everybody else. Germany's you know,
Speaker 1: field army marches out first and then the reserves come
Speaker 1: in quit behind them. You campaigned for a couple of months,
Speaker 1: maybe a year, and there's like a couple of big
Speaker 1: set pace battles, right, that's what they're thing. Not like
Speaker 1: we're gonna be stuck in trenches for years, but like
Speaker 1: three or four real decisive, giant fights that will be ugly,
Speaker 1: but then it will be done, and one way or
Speaker 1: the other will happen, right, and that's on either side
Speaker 1: of exhaustion. One guy will get stabbed. That was war
Speaker 1: back then, you know. Well it was a little earlier
Speaker 1: than that when the German Scott. But they it was
Speaker 1: not expected to be that bad, right, Yeah, they didn't
Speaker 1: know how bad it is. Not like one was like, hey,
Speaker 1: this is as fun as I remember. So these machine
Speaker 1: guns really, Raissa, boy, these muskets kill a lot of people.
Speaker 1: So Daryl Wanger is nearing the end of his year
Speaker 1: of service when the Archduke of Austria Hungary gets gets
Speaker 1: got in World War One starts. Christian Ingrow writes, quote
Speaker 1: Oscar Darrel Wanger's war began on August two in a
Speaker 1: machine gun company of the hundred and twenty third Regiment
Speaker 1: of Grenadiers who were heading to France from Oom by
Speaker 1: way of Belgium. In the confusion of general mobilization, troops
Speaker 1: that had already had their basic training were considered as
Speaker 1: part of the Reich's standing army. Thus they were the
Speaker 1: spearhead of the Schliefen Plan, and Darrel Winger was thrust
Speaker 1: into the battle at a time when losses were their
Speaker 1: most nightmarish. So in the whole history of human beings
Speaker 1: fighting wars, this is like upper five percent of the
Speaker 1: worst things any soldiers in all of time experience, right
Speaker 1: like fucking World War One early days. Ship units get
Speaker 1: like literally battalions, thousands of men getting wiped out almost
Speaker 1: to the man um just absolute fucking night air ship.
Speaker 1: And I think some additional detail is necessary here to
Speaker 1: really drive home the kind of experience Oscar has, because
Speaker 1: we're trying to figure out, like what makes him such
Speaker 1: a piece of ship. Maybe he was from the beginning,
Speaker 1: some people just come out that way or whatever, but
Speaker 1: he is at this point, comfortable, middle class kid, good
Speaker 1: family peaceful family, as far as he says, goes to
Speaker 1: college on a pretty good life path, and then this happens.
Speaker 1: And in order to kind of contextualize his experience, I'm
Speaker 1: going to read a firsthand account from a British soldier,
Speaker 1: a young officer named Harold McMillan, who later becomes Prime
Speaker 1: Minister um and who there's a good chance he's feed
Speaker 1: away from Oscar at points right. There's no way to
Speaker 1: know um. But it's easier, a little easier to find
Speaker 1: British firsthand accounts than German ones of this period, So
Speaker 1: that that's what we're reading. But I think this is
Speaker 1: more or less accurate to the kind of stuff that
Speaker 1: Oscar would have been seeing at this point. Perhaps the
Speaker 1: most extraordinary thing about the modern battlefield is the desolation
Speaker 1: and emptiness of it all. Nothing is to be seen
Speaker 1: of war or soldiers. Only the split and shattered trees
Speaker 1: and the burst of an occasional shell reveal anything of
Speaker 1: the truth. One can look for miles and see no
Speaker 1: human being. But in those miles of country lurk like
Speaker 1: moles or rats. It seems thousands, even hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of men planning against each other, perpetually, some new device
Speaker 1: of death, never showing themselves, they launched at each other
Speaker 1: bullet bomb, aerial torpedo, and shell. And somewhere too are
Speaker 1: the little cylinders of gas, waiting only for the moment
Speaker 1: to spit forth their nauseous and destroying fumes. And yet
Speaker 1: the landscape shows nothing of this, nothing but a few
Speaker 1: shattered trees and three or four thin lines of earth
Speaker 1: and sandbags. These, in the ruins of towns and villages
Speaker 1: are the only signs of war anywhere. The glamor of
Speaker 1: red coats, the martial tunes of fife and drum, the
Speaker 1: aids to camp scurrying hither and thither on, splendid chargers,
Speaker 1: lances glittering, and swords flashing. How different the old wars
Speaker 1: must have been. The thrill of battle comes now only
Speaker 1: once or twice in a year. We need not so
Speaker 1: much the gallantry of our fathers. We need and in
Speaker 1: our army at any rate, I think you will find
Speaker 1: it that indomitable and patient determination like this is, This is,
Speaker 1: this is most of this war is sitting waiting to
Speaker 1: get killed randomly, And then a couple of times a
Speaker 1: year you and all of your friends get mowed down
Speaker 1: by machine guns, right Like, That's what Durrol Wanger's war is.
Speaker 1: Most of it is getting trench foot and being like
Speaker 1: I'm gonna die from this and you know, fucking watching
Speaker 1: watching like unimaginable horror because this is also at a
Speaker 1: time there's not cool movies about crazy sci fi horror ship.
Speaker 1: You know, this is like, this is unimaginable to most
Speaker 1: of these people. Yeah, this is like you know there
Speaker 1: there's uh we could tell. Token was pretty adamant that
Speaker 1: his books weren't about anything that had actually happened. But
Speaker 1: like Token fights in a battle where thousands of men
Speaker 1: drowned in the mud get like sucked down by their
Speaker 1: boots and are suffocated while their friends watch. And then
Speaker 1: he like writes the chapter in his book about a
Speaker 1: marsh filled with corpses that you can see right like
Speaker 1: that that's the kind and durl Winger he's right there.
Speaker 1: He's in the middle of this. His job is he
Speaker 1: is a machine gunner, so he is number one. He
Speaker 1: might have killed hundreds of people, like potentially thousands. Some
Speaker 1: of these guys literally individual dudes shoot thousands of people
Speaker 1: to death over the course of the war. Um, there's
Speaker 1: no way to know how many people he killed, and
Speaker 1: at some point he would have if he ever was counting,
Speaker 1: would have stopped right um. And probably also basically everyone
Speaker 1: he starts the war knowing dies right that, those early
Speaker 1: nineteen fourteen soldiers not a high survival rate. No, No,
Speaker 1: there were imagining a war that you know from back
Speaker 1: in the day where there was like a drummer kid. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he is as a machine gunner. Number one, he's valuable.
Speaker 1: Number two, he is exposed and isolated. And number three
Speaker 1: he is constantly targeted by artillery and snipers. So this
Speaker 1: is like, this is really bad bad war, bad war experience. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of trauma there, I could say, a little
Speaker 1: PTSD problem a little a little bit and maybe a
Speaker 1: little bit of PTSD just a little bit. Yeah, in
Speaker 1: his first three months of combat, he's wounded badly enough
Speaker 1: in his foot that he's sent away from most of
Speaker 1: a year to heal. Right, like whatever the injury is,
Speaker 1: it's fucking gnarly. He comes back the next year and
Speaker 1: in September of nineteen fifteen he gets wounded in the
Speaker 1: arm by a bayonet. So whatever happens, he is fighting
Speaker 1: hand to hand with people and get stabbed nearly to death. Um.
Speaker 1: And again that's the everyone who fought, and it agrees
Speaker 1: the very worst combat in World War One was hand
Speaker 1: to hand trench combat. Um. Just a fucking nightmare. So
Speaker 1: he gets wounded badly enough. This is a very rare wound.
Speaker 1: Christian in Ground notes that only about one percent of
Speaker 1: injured German soldiers have a similar injury. And that's because
Speaker 1: nearly a hundred percent of men who gets seriously wounded
Speaker 1: by a bayonet or a sword in close combat die
Speaker 1: because everything is ship and mud around you. It's getting
Speaker 1: jammed into your wound. You're probably going to bleed out
Speaker 1: like you you have better shot at a like per
Speaker 1: injury basis with like a gunshot wound than gett fucking
Speaker 1: stabbed in hand to hand combat. And do they even
Speaker 1: have They didn't have antibiotics back then, right, so they
Speaker 1: don't know. They're kind of starting to figure them out
Speaker 1: in this period. But no, these guys are not getting
Speaker 1: antibiotics administered. UM. So he it is bad enough, he
Speaker 1: can never move his arm right again, and he gets
Speaker 1: raided by the military as fort disabled. Um. He severely
Speaker 1: heard enough that he probably could have ended his service
Speaker 1: there if he had pressed the matter, but he wanted
Speaker 1: to fight, and so in night he stays in the military.
Speaker 1: In September of nineteen sixteen, he gets promoted to be
Speaker 1: an n c O and he's moved to be a
Speaker 1: machine gun trainer. Right, So he could have stuck at
Speaker 1: this job training people and like not getting in direct combat,
Speaker 1: but he repeatedly demanded to be sent back to the front,
Speaker 1: and in April of nineteen seventeen, he's back in combat,
Speaker 1: despite the fact that his arm and rister permanently injured. Um,
Speaker 1: he serves well. He's particularly good now that he's commanding
Speaker 1: small groups of soldiers in combined arms using a mix
Speaker 1: of mortars which you call pocket artillery, so short range artillery,
Speaker 1: machine and maneuvering infantry and like these are a couple
Speaker 1: of hundred people engagements, right, he's very good at that.
Speaker 1: He's very good at. And this is the Germans in
Speaker 1: this period are inventing what we now know is just
Speaker 1: like standard combat tactics for small units. Right, all of
Speaker 1: that's being figured out by the Germans. Everyone else is
Speaker 1: a few years behind. And so he is one of
Speaker 1: the first guys to be commanding troops in gunfights in
Speaker 1: what we would consider today to be a pretty modern way. Right, Um,
Speaker 1: so that's interesting to me. You know what else is
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Speaker 1: I hope you all have your hot dogs and you're
Speaker 1: ready to down your gullet. See how the sausage gets
Speaker 1: made if the sausage is a war criminal. So Daryl Wanger,
Speaker 1: as an enlisted man, gets promoted to lieutenant, which is
Speaker 1: not common in most wars. Right. Enlisted in officers are
Speaker 1: very different and they're different. Like normally, to be an officer,
Speaker 1: you like go to school, you like get a degree.
Speaker 1: You are in the German military. You're generally someone who
Speaker 1: comes from a high social status. You get a Vaughan
Speaker 1: in your name. Maybe, Um, pretty rare for a guy
Speaker 1: who's just like starts as a private to become a
Speaker 1: lieutenant through combat. And the reason this happens is that
Speaker 1: like everybody's dead, and this is a thing that happened
Speaker 1: a lot more back in the day. Like my grandpa
Speaker 1: was there for the like very you know, he was
Speaker 1: in World War Two as well, but when the Korean
Speaker 1: War started, he was in Korea and he was a
Speaker 1: sergeant and by the time the war ended, he was
Speaker 1: a major. Um, which does not happen often. It's just like,
Speaker 1: you know, because everybody's dying, right, Like, that's why this happens. Um,
Speaker 1: he becomes he sent over to the Eastern Front where
Speaker 1: he becomes a company commander, and this is probably saves
Speaker 1: his life because things go really well for Germany in
Speaker 1: the East. Actually they win a war against Russia and
Speaker 1: then a war against I think it's Romania. Um, like
Speaker 1: they beat both of them while they're kind of at
Speaker 1: this stalemate in the Western Front. We don't know a
Speaker 1: ton of his specific experiences on the aust Front, but
Speaker 1: Christian Ingrow writes, quote, if there were ever a library
Speaker 1: for the ethnic fear of the enemy. During the Great War,
Speaker 1: it was the Eastern Front. Over and over, soldiers letters
Speaker 1: spoke of the dirtiness, the inferiority, the primitive nature of
Speaker 1: the population, and this observation reinforced a social Darwinism and
Speaker 1: an essentialist view of the Eastern populations. Dura Wanger stayed
Speaker 1: in Russia until November nineteen eighteen. Is a company leader
Speaker 1: and lieutenant, so he's probably number one. Comes into this
Speaker 1: pretty racist because most Germans are towards people in this
Speaker 1: region and that probably gets reinforced by being the occupier here, right,
Speaker 1: and when when the war ends and Germany does not win,
Speaker 1: there's all these rebellions, right, all these left wing rebellions
Speaker 1: across the Reich. And also like it's kind of a
Speaker 1: disaster and no one had really expected, particularly in the East.
Speaker 1: So you've got all these skeleton units in the East
Speaker 1: that like, by the way, your country's government's dissolved and
Speaker 1: you've rusted the war, go turn yourself into whatever people
Speaker 1: are nearby, right like, and a lot of German soldiers
Speaker 1: are like, well know, yeah, I'm not going to do that.
Speaker 1: And also I thought we were winning, you know, these
Speaker 1: guys are are all, you know, the great stabbing, the stabbing,
Speaker 1: the back theory type of well, yeah, because from there
Speaker 1: we fucking beat these guys to beat the French couldn't
Speaker 1: do it. Yeah, they got fucking Bolsheviks there because, um So,
Speaker 1: Nicholas dura Winger is one of the guy who's like, no,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna turn myself into the fucking Romanian government, right, Like,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna do that. So he like grabs a
Speaker 1: bunch of and he makes it clear, like because again
Speaker 1: everything is kind of chaotic, everything's falling apart. He's basically
Speaker 1: just like yells to all of the Germans and earshot like, hey,
Speaker 1: I'm a comedy commander and I'm gonna get everybody out
Speaker 1: of here. Like, if you want to get the funk
Speaker 1: out of here and don't want to wind up in
Speaker 1: a prison camp, follow me. Um So, he gets like
Speaker 1: a shipload of people together and he leads them successfully
Speaker 1: home to Germany. One of the men he saved later wrote, quote,
Speaker 1: it is rare for an officer to be honored as
Speaker 1: our comrade. Durrel Winger was this after his successful return,
Speaker 1: a return that the soldiers owed to him alone. He
Speaker 1: kept six hundred men from being interned as so many
Speaker 1: were before and after US. So, among other things, Durrell
Speaker 1: Winger will always be a guy that like his dudes
Speaker 1: fucking love him, and part of it is because like
Speaker 1: he will throw down for them. He's not. He's not
Speaker 1: one of these guys who's like standing in the back
Speaker 1: waiting to see how things happen. He gets injured repeatedly
Speaker 1: because he's he. You have to say this about the
Speaker 1: man not afraid of getting shot. Yeah, he's into it.
Speaker 1: In fact, he's into it. In fact it might be
Speaker 1: a kick. Yeah, it is unsettling, actually so. By the
Speaker 1: terms of the Versailles Treaty, Germany is forbidden from fielding
Speaker 1: an army larger than a hundred thousand men. Given the
Speaker 1: disastrous poverty that hits the country post defeat, these slots
Speaker 1: are pretty coveted by the militarized veterans, right, It's a
Speaker 1: it's a cushy gig. Adolf Hitler is one of the
Speaker 1: few lucky events who gets a job post war, and
Speaker 1: Durrel Wanger is another. But while Hitler is used by
Speaker 1: the Reich's fair that's the new German military. They have
Speaker 1: him infiltrating, right, wing groups, which is badly Yeah, that
Speaker 1: don't work out so much. But really, maybe the worst
Speaker 1: single mistake anyone ever made was being like, hey, Hitler,
Speaker 1: see what those guys are up to. You gotta do
Speaker 1: an episode on that guy, the guy who was like,
Speaker 1: you know you have good spy and yeah, Hitler, guy,
Speaker 1: don't keep an eye on these National Socialists for us,
Speaker 1: and whatever you do, don't join them or don't join them,
Speaker 1: don't join them at all. Don't boy, imagine that guy
Speaker 1: in like nineteen forty five is like every building around
Speaker 1: him is leveled by Allied bombers. Ship that didn't go out. Boy,
Speaker 1: I don't want to tell anybody what I did. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have some regrets, Yeah, yeah, I mean a couple
Speaker 1: of mistakes in the past, one big one. Um. So
Speaker 1: Daryl Wanger also stays on it's not hard to see
Speaker 1: why right, why he's got He's got like one of
Speaker 1: the best records anybody has from World War One in
Speaker 1: terms of like a combat soldier. Um, And so they
Speaker 1: put him to the task of violently suppressing left wing uprisings. UM.
Speaker 1: He fights a longside and often in units of the
Speaker 1: Free Corps, and the Free Corps are kind of like
Speaker 1: they're a little like the Oath Keepers and three per centers,
Speaker 1: and that they are groups of veterans that have been
Speaker 1: demilitarized who are taking up arms to defend the country
Speaker 1: quote unquote against socialists. Right. One of the things that
Speaker 1: there's a couple of things that make them very different
Speaker 1: from those groups that we have in the United States,
Speaker 1: even though both try to overthrow the government. One is
Speaker 1: that the Free Corps are all made up of guys
Speaker 1: who have actually done nightmare things, right, Like, they're not
Speaker 1: They're not like dudes who like, did four years in
Speaker 1: Korea and then like lie about their deployment history. For
Speaker 1: they're like guys who guys who's like friends, teeth got
Speaker 1: embedded in their skin after their heads were blown apart.
Speaker 1: These are guys who would you know by tactical sunglasses
Speaker 1: on TV. These men are dead inside and killing makes
Speaker 1: them feel nothing. The other thing is that these guys
Speaker 1: are being integrated by the military, right because the military
Speaker 1: is like, a hundred thousand men is not enough to
Speaker 1: do anything. So we have these hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 1: veterans who like, if we throw them a little bit
Speaker 1: of cash, if we leave the other way, when they
Speaker 1: acquire guns, we can bring them in and we can
Speaker 1: use them when we need them to like maintain order
Speaker 1: and suppress things. Right. So, and this is very illegal
Speaker 1: under like the terms of the treaty they've signed, but
Speaker 1: also pretty again nothing gets done for a number of reasons,
Speaker 1: including the fact that, like a lot of people are like, well,
Speaker 1: what are we gonna do? Fight him again? So, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's he's with these guys, he's with these Free Corps units.
Speaker 1: But he's kind of he's in the Reich's fair and
Speaker 1: basically his job because he's commanding a unit they whenever
Speaker 1: there because there's all these communist insurrectionary strikes, right, and
Speaker 1: he's in his particularly areas, he's in his Wartenberg, and
Speaker 1: whenever the communists will like take over part of a
Speaker 1: town or like do it a big strike, he and
Speaker 1: his guys will like drive through town on an armored
Speaker 1: train and fire machine guns at them. Um. So that's
Speaker 1: that's his gig now, to be well, nice job, you
Speaker 1: can get it, um now. To be fair. Number one,
Speaker 1: a lot of these communists also veterans, now, decent number
Speaker 1: of them are guys who didn't fight because they were
Speaker 1: like making bullets and stuff. Right, because factory workers were
Speaker 1: are very easy to turn into communists. It turns out, um,
Speaker 1: but a lot of them are veterans and they're not
Speaker 1: always unarmed. In March of night, communists with guns take
Speaker 1: over the city of Sangerhausen as part of a broader
Speaker 1: German uprising. It's this attempt at like a mass uh
Speaker 1: like general strike Comma revolution um. And Max Holes, who
Speaker 1: who commands He's the guy in charge of the of
Speaker 1: the of the communists, has his Max Holes. H O
Speaker 1: E l z Um Max Holes. I'm gonna put Max
Speaker 1: Holes in your exactly how many guys, fucking dude, Max
Speaker 1: Holes must have done this. The guy got shot at thousands.
Speaker 1: Why do you insist on giving people maximum holes? So
Speaker 1: my name, Max Holes has his men. It pretty sounds
Speaker 1: pretty cool. They're robbing all of the rich people in
Speaker 1: town to fund this wider uprising. Um. They destroy the
Speaker 1: telegraph service, which I think is probably to like limit
Speaker 1: the government's ability to communicate. And then they kidnap all
Speaker 1: of the wealthiest people in town with an eye towards
Speaker 1: ransoming them to fund the revolution. But then Darawanger drive
Speaker 1: through town again. He's got an armored train, his men
Speaker 1: are generally better trained and definitely better equipped, and they
Speaker 1: beat the copy They forced the communists out of town.
Speaker 1: They actually kind of get the worst of the actual combat.
Speaker 1: Thirteen people die, seven of whom are Durroll Wanger's men,
Speaker 1: three of whom are insurgents, and three of whom are civilians. Um.
Speaker 1: Durro Winger uses explosives to level significant parts of the city,
Speaker 1: which is a big part of why Holes and his
Speaker 1: guy's bounce because they're like, so this guy is just
Speaker 1: like blowing up all of town in order. We're not
Speaker 1: really ready for this. Um yeah, this is a strategy
Speaker 1: I had not considered, and I consider many holes really
Speaker 1: big hole. I'm not ready for this. Yeah. Um. So
Speaker 1: Durroll Langer's response the way he obviously he wins, which
Speaker 1: the government's happy with, but also he has blown up
Speaker 1: a significant portion of the town, which does not endear
Speaker 1: him to the townspeople, who were like, well, these guys
Speaker 1: were robbing rich folks, but they didn't blow up downtown.
Speaker 1: So I don't know, I don't know if I'm like
Speaker 1: really on ward with either of you. Um yeah. One
Speaker 1: seems worse significantly. The Weimar government later decides that some
Speaker 1: of his actions have been extreme, right, he keeps getting
Speaker 1: like slaps on the wrist and even gets jailed a
Speaker 1: couple of times. But he's also he's really good at
Speaker 1: putting down insurrections, right, Like he's great at it. So
Speaker 1: they're not going to like actually punish him. Damn that sucks.
Speaker 1: It's just like ever since those those children's you know,
Speaker 1: how to strike, He's like, I will make it my
Speaker 1: life's work to destroy any kind of solidarity between He's
Speaker 1: really just always been defending those teachers who got hit
Speaker 1: with rocks. Yeah, exactly, you forgot to give us homework.
Speaker 1: That's like his whole thing. He's that kid military is
Speaker 1: off and on in the military, right, Like he's i
Speaker 1: think always drawing a salary, but he's like trying to
Speaker 1: do other stuff. And he just like will regularly to
Speaker 1: be like, hey, we need you to go shoot people
Speaker 1: from a train again, and off he'll go to go
Speaker 1: shoot people from a train. And it kind of in
Speaker 1: between suppressing these uprisings because there's a bunch in this
Speaker 1: eighteen eighteen one, like a lot of fucking ships going
Speaker 1: down in Germany, pretty wild history. He gets arrested twice
Speaker 1: and sentenced to prison for two short sentences, both times
Speaker 1: for illegally concealing weapons. Now, we don't have great detail
Speaker 1: on this, but it probably because of the way it's written.
Speaker 1: It's probably not that he was carrying a gun concealed illegally,
Speaker 1: but that he was helping paramilitary Fright Corps units steal
Speaker 1: and concealed machine guns and other like like literally like
Speaker 1: hiding like burying weapons. Right. Yeah, I was gonna say
Speaker 1: it is job is is? I guess the train is
Speaker 1: not inconspicuous. Yeah, they were like, you're allowed to have
Speaker 1: the gun. Train is fine, it's these other guns and awesome, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't be hiding gun. And the reality is like
Speaker 1: with our government, right, you've got these right wing ship
Speaker 1: head militiamen, and there are cops, and there are soldiers
Speaker 1: who are on their side, and there are politicians who
Speaker 1: like them. There's also a lot of people in the
Speaker 1: government and the judicial system who are like, no, you
Speaker 1: can't do that. Here's a slap on the wrist. You know,
Speaker 1: did our job a liberal society? I'm sure that's the
Speaker 1: last we'll hear of Oscar Darrel Wager after he spends
Speaker 1: two months in prison for stealing machine guns from the military,
Speaker 1: dusting off his hands, solving the problem forever. So the
Speaker 1: end of his military career for a little while is
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenty three Munich Beer Hall Putsch Hitler attempts
Speaker 1: to take over the government. Doesn't go very well, and
Speaker 1: Oscar is not part of the Nazi Party at this point,
Speaker 1: but he's in a bunch of different right wing organizations
Speaker 1: that are close to them. And when Hitler does this,
Speaker 1: he attempts to send in the Stuttgart Police's armored vehicles
Speaker 1: to support Hitler's attempt to take power. This does not
Speaker 1: He he doesn't have the power to do this, right, Like,
Speaker 1: he's not in charge of them, So this doesn't work out,
Speaker 1: and he kind of like he gets ship canned for this,
Speaker 1: which is fair, right, I would I would fire somebody
Speaker 1: for this, Yeah, um, or at least have hr kind
Speaker 1: of like do I don't know, suspend him for should
Speaker 1: do something right, you should do there should be some
Speaker 1: sort of process when you attend gun train, for one, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't get to get on that gun train for
Speaker 1: a whole week scared. So by the time he's kind
Speaker 1: of out of the military, he is unemployed. It is
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty three. He's twenty nine years old. He has
Speaker 1: several chronic injuries that trouble him, and he's looking for
Speaker 1: a gig. Now. While this period, everything we've talked about
Speaker 1: with him suppressing all these left wing uprisings is going on,
Speaker 1: Oscar is also going to college. Right, he's basically doing
Speaker 1: his g I bill equivalent shiit uh. He had enrolled
Speaker 1: at a technical university soon after the war, and student
Speaker 1: culture in Germany during this period super right wing right
Speaker 1: universities are filled with veterans who had like we're returning
Speaker 1: from the front. A lot of colleges were basically just
Speaker 1: recruitment grounds for free corps um. At the same time,
Speaker 1: student organizations had been taken by a trend towards the
Speaker 1: Vulcansh movement. So a lot of like student organizations at
Speaker 1: different colleges are explicitly Vulkish. And this is the it's
Speaker 1: a German ethno nationalist movement that eventually kind of leads
Speaker 1: to the Nazi movement. But it's this like, you know,
Speaker 1: there's a German people, it is a specific subset of us,
Speaker 1: and we're better than everyone, right, Like we could get
Speaker 1: into it in more detail, but it's not really necessary.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote from the S. S. Durrowanger Brigade
Speaker 1: by Christian Ingrau quote. He distinguished himself very early by
Speaker 1: his volkish convictions and expressed them with unusual violence. The
Speaker 1: university threatened him with disciplinary proceedings for avowed anti Semitic agitation.
Speaker 1: This fact merely reflects Durrol Wanger's political involvement. Since nineteen nineteen,
Speaker 1: he had been a member of the deutsch volk Shutsund
Speaker 1: trust Bund, one of the most virulent organizations in terms
Speaker 1: of both anti Semitic hatred and of revolutionary nationalist feeling.
Speaker 1: It counted in its trust Bund Baby, And again, we
Speaker 1: don't know if he was like super anti Semitic his
Speaker 1: whole life, if there was a thing, because some guys
Speaker 1: pick it up during the war, right like because easy way,
Speaker 1: you know, we we don't really have that kind of context.
Speaker 1: Could have been something he got at home, could have
Speaker 1: come later. But he's real hardcore racist by this point. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna continue that quote about the trust Bunda. It
Speaker 1: counted in its ranks. Future leaders of Nazi repression such
Speaker 1: as Ryan hard Hydrick and Ryan hard Horn there's our buddy,
Speaker 1: shout out a friend of the pod, Ryan hard Hydrick. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh man, I love getting all the all the boys
Speaker 1: back to Yeah, the gang's really coming together here. Yeah.
Speaker 1: This is like the Avengers of but they're all yeah, yea, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's the Avengers if the Hulk was looked like
Speaker 1: the Hulk, but like more like well, actually, Edward Norton
Speaker 1: played the Hulk too, so yeah, actually, yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: there's a way to work this. You figure it out
Speaker 1: for yourselves, you know, the incredible Yeah, there we go.
Speaker 1: Um yeah. Dr Winger belonged to an beula of parties
Speaker 1: and associations linked by the feeling that Germany was an
Speaker 1: imminent danger of disappearing, diminished as it was by territorial losses,
Speaker 1: the rulings of the Treaty of Versailles, and internal and
Speaker 1: external enemies who, despite the peace treaty, had not disarmed.
Speaker 1: So Darrel Winger's scholastic career was not interrupted either by
Speaker 1: his arrests or by his disciplinary proceedings for racism. Because
Speaker 1: he gets in trouble with the school for being racist.
Speaker 1: He eventually moves to Frankfurt, where he finishes his education
Speaker 1: and winds up with a pH d in political science.
Speaker 1: He is a doctor. He has doctor Oscar Darrell Wanger
Speaker 1: is doctor of a startling number of the worst Nazis
Speaker 1: were doctors and lawyers of some sort of. It's a
Speaker 1: great scene in the movie Conspiracy where like one of
Speaker 1: I think it's Umdlo Globoschnik, but one of like the
Speaker 1: Nazis planning the fucking Holocaust because they're having an argument
Speaker 1: over like legal matters. Is like, raise your hand if
Speaker 1: you're a lawyer, and all of the guys at the
Speaker 1: table race there because yeah, they're all fucking yeah, um,
Speaker 1: some of them are literally doctors of law actually, so yeah,
Speaker 1: he gets his PhD and he becomes an accountant and
Speaker 1: for the next several years he has a successful, if
Speaker 1: boring career in business. Now his his overt political involvement
Speaker 1: in right wing stuff fades after the putch because for
Speaker 1: a while, like the Hitler movements illegal, you know, there's
Speaker 1: there is a bit of a crackdown, um, And if
Speaker 1: Hitler's movement had died out, he might have just wound
Speaker 1: up as like a low key racist businessman, like that's possible,
Speaker 1: But the Nazis don't go away. The band against their
Speaker 1: activism fades and eventually ends, and in the late nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: Dura Wanger gets back into it being involved with the Essay. Right,
Speaker 1: he can't do much in the streets because from nine
Speaker 1: to nineteen thirty one he's made the executive director of
Speaker 1: a textile factory owned by a Jewish family. But he
Speaker 1: embezzls a shipload of money from this Jewish factory and
Speaker 1: he gives it to the Essay so they can buy weapons.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, yeah great, Um so he's he's funneling shipped
Speaker 1: to the Essay until nineteen thirty two when he can
Speaker 1: like rejoin publicly because it's safe. Um so, I do
Speaker 1: love The part of me is just like it would
Speaker 1: be dope to be that Jewish family who owns the
Speaker 1: fucking textile meal and watching this little anti Semitic piece
Speaker 1: of ship not be able to say anything, just the
Speaker 1: it would have been. It would have been cool if
Speaker 1: like that's how things had ended. Yeah yeah, no, right,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah yeah, the rest of the bad. But you know,
Speaker 1: for a second, there it's time. There's some fun moments.
Speaker 1: Probably so Darrow Winger's loyalty and the enthusiastic support of
Speaker 1: guys he'd led into battle who had become Nazis meant
Speaker 1: that once he's publicly in the essay again, he gets
Speaker 1: promoted very quickly. By nineteen thirty three, he's been given
Speaker 1: a cushy job as director of the hell Brawn Employment Agency.
Speaker 1: The economy was once again in the shipter Right. Things
Speaker 1: aren't going great for the German economy, and the fact
Speaker 1: that they can hand out jobs is critical to the
Speaker 1: new Nazi regime. It's part of how they're like consolidating power.
Speaker 1: So the fact that Oscar is running an employment agency
Speaker 1: for the Nazis means that he's in a really trusted
Speaker 1: and important position. Right. He's doling out money, essentially to
Speaker 1: people who are supporting the regime, and he's able to
Speaker 1: because he can hand out cushy gigs. Probably is making
Speaker 1: a good amount of money via bribes, you have to assume. Um.
Speaker 1: So his position is solid enough that he's able to
Speaker 1: fight off embezzlement allegations from his former employer, which are
Speaker 1: definitely true. Um. He gets arrested. So he's arrested twice
Speaker 1: because he gets drunk and does drugs and crashes his
Speaker 1: car into people. Um. But all that all that goes away. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's a he has a hardcore drug addict, probably cocaine.
Speaker 1: People usually aren't specific when they talk about it, but
Speaker 1: that would be my guess, although maybe a few things. Um,
Speaker 1: but I like it because it's white powder ZVI tist
Speaker 1: of drugs. So he's doing great. He's he's handing out jobs,
Speaker 1: he's crashing his car while wasted. Um. If life is
Speaker 1: going well for Dr Oscar Darrel Wanger. But then on
Speaker 1: July twenty two, nineteen thirty four, tragedy strikes Matt because
Speaker 1: he gets caught having sex with a fourteen year old girl.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, oh yeah, um, oh yes, I thought you
Speaker 1: meant tragedy strikes for him. It is a tragedy um too.
Speaker 1: But like yeah, no, I was not referring to him.
Speaker 1: So he had met her while she she was she's
Speaker 1: a volunteer for the Red Cross that he meets in
Speaker 1: his official duties. Um. He will argue when he goes
Speaker 1: to court that she just lied about her age. She
Speaker 1: claims she was violently raped and the medical examination suggests
Speaker 1: violent rape. So I can tell you whose account I trust,
Speaker 1: and it's not the Nazi. Um. Now this is a
Speaker 1: problem for his Nazi employers. Right, they don't. They're not
Speaker 1: like cool with this. Right. Again, these guys are Nazis,
Speaker 1: but most of them have been normal p most of
Speaker 1: their lives. And when you hear that this guy who
Speaker 1: you're like involved with, rapes a child, they're like, well, no,
Speaker 1: we don't want you to be in our organization for
Speaker 1: a while. Yeah, people might think it might not like
Speaker 1: the Nazis. Yeah, you know, we want people to like
Speaker 1: us first. So he gets stripped of his doctoral title,
Speaker 1: he loses his PhD, he gets removed from the essay,
Speaker 1: and he's sent to prison for two years. Um. He
Speaker 1: also gets hizzled punished for embezzling the money that he'd
Speaker 1: sent to the essay. So they just kind of throw
Speaker 1: the book at him. I think this, Yeah, they just
Speaker 1: tacked like, yeah, get him. It might be that this
Speaker 1: girl was also the daughter of a Nazi who like
Speaker 1: had some poll right, and so that's that's part of
Speaker 1: Like Again, if he had done this to someone who
Speaker 1: was you know, marginalized by the Nazi state, probably would
Speaker 1: have been a punishment. But he does pick. He picks
Speaker 1: like an Aryan girl. Um, so that's a big part
Speaker 1: of why he gets in trouble. But he does get
Speaker 1: in trouble. I would say two years is not enough time,
Speaker 1: but it's not nothing. Um. So he gets out of
Speaker 1: is An in nineteen thirties six and he sets to
Speaker 1: work immediately, begging his former bosses for forgiveness. He's like,
Speaker 1: I want my please reinstate my doctorate. I've done all
Speaker 1: this stuff for the movement. Um. He sends so many
Speaker 1: letters directly to Hitler begging for clemency that he gets
Speaker 1: arrested again and sent to a concentration camp. Like they're like,
Speaker 1: you gotta stop bugging Hitler. You know it'll cool you
Speaker 1: all some time. And doctor goddamn letters. Yeah, he gets
Speaker 1: sent to I think it's Doc au for like it
Speaker 1: might have been Saxon Housen for sending Hitler too many
Speaker 1: fucking letters, which is I have to say, there aren't
Speaker 1: a lot of silly reasons to get sent to a
Speaker 1: concentration camp, but that is one. That is the silly reason.
Speaker 1: Silliest there's dying of tid Like, that's ridiculous, that's why
Speaker 1: you're here. What the funk man? What are you waiting for? Um?
Speaker 1: I really want my doctor at back. You see, I
Speaker 1: have this certificate that was it meant a lot too,
Speaker 1: So I couldn't hear you might he fell out what
Speaker 1: what so? Um, Yeah, he spent some time in a camp.
Speaker 1: When he gets out, he is now thirty nine years old. Um,
Speaker 1: and he is. He kind of doesn't have a whole
Speaker 1: lot of options, right. He can either he can force
Speaker 1: his way back into civilian life and find a job
Speaker 1: that will take a convicted child molester, uh and kind
Speaker 1: of just scraped by on the margins. Or he can
Speaker 1: get ahead again the only way he'd ever known how,
Speaker 1: by being exactly by being the most violent fascist son
Speaker 1: of a bitch he could be. It just happens that
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty six is a pretty good year to be
Speaker 1: that guy. So that is the first year of the
Speaker 1: Spanish Civil War, which is maybe the best time in
Speaker 1: history to be a German combat veteran with zero morals.
Speaker 1: Um so dura Wanger. He's lost most of his connections
Speaker 1: because of the whole molesting a child thing, but he
Speaker 1: still has one friend, a guy named Gottlab Burger that
Speaker 1: he had these they had been war buddies, right. Burger
Speaker 1: had risen to a pretty respectable rank within the New
Speaker 1: s S which is again, the SS is pretty new
Speaker 1: organization at this point, and Burger is fairly well placed
Speaker 1: in it. So Burger puts in a good word for
Speaker 1: his old friend to have Oscar serve with Germany's military
Speaker 1: expedition in Spain. The Condor legion, right, and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote next from a right up in the fifth field
Speaker 1: here here he helped train Spanish cruise in tank warfare.
Speaker 1: After arriving in Spain in April of nineteen thirty seven,
Speaker 1: his commander Oberst Ritter von Tooma of the German Army
Speaker 1: rated his performance in Spain as outstanding. For his superior
Speaker 1: service there, darrow Winger received the Spanish Campaign Medal, the
Speaker 1: Spanish Military Service Cross, and the Spanish Cross and Silver.
Speaker 1: Oscar darrow Winger returned to Germany from Spain in May
Speaker 1: of nineteen thirty nine, and commenting on his past, durrow
Speaker 1: Winger said, at this point, even though I did wrong,
Speaker 1: I never committed a crime. I gotta you gotta love
Speaker 1: someone who's willing to be accountable. Yeah, it's amazing, Like
Speaker 1: what a what a way to refer to molesting a child? Right?
Speaker 1: Show me where in Sevaimo Republic Constitution. It says that
Speaker 1: I can't molest child, so tell me where this is. Basically,
Speaker 1: the deal is that you help us brutally suppress the
Speaker 1: left in this civil war, and we will pretend you
Speaker 1: didn't molest that child, right like that. That is literally
Speaker 1: the deal that the Nazis make um And this is
Speaker 1: like signed off. I believe Himler is one of the
Speaker 1: people who signs off on it. At a pretty high level.
Speaker 1: This is signed off because what he's done is bad
Speaker 1: and he probably this is something we don't have a
Speaker 1: lot of context on, but probably he also did piss
Speaker 1: off people who were influential by doing this. So when
Speaker 1: Dura Wanger returns home, his government is in the final
Speaker 1: stages of planning its invasion of Poland. Now this is
Speaker 1: going to be a different sort of conflict than the
Speaker 1: one that the Reich had faced, a mass war, with
Speaker 1: German troops facing the brunt of enemy engagement, not Spanish
Speaker 1: soldiers who were like just dudes. The fear of every
Speaker 1: general in this kind of a war is rural saboteurs
Speaker 1: or insurgents. Now, the German army has a law long
Speaker 1: and nasty history fighting such men. A lot of the
Speaker 1: war crimes they commit in World War One are dealing
Speaker 1: with these sabbo tours, um, So they've got experience fighting
Speaker 1: these guys, but also a lot of their experiences that
Speaker 1: like it's really hard to capture these guys, and the
Speaker 1: things that make normal soldiers good at being normal soldiers
Speaker 1: tend to make them bad at fighting insurgencies, right, like
Speaker 1: not entirely transferable sets of skills. So in order to
Speaker 1: train people to do that, the Nazi high brass and
Speaker 1: this is decisions being made at like the Hitler level,
Speaker 1: are like, we should probably what if we were to
Speaker 1: make a unit entirely out of criminals, specifically poachers, right,
Speaker 1: guys whose job is to go into the woods, survive
Speaker 1: off the land, hunt and kill things and not get caught. Right,
Speaker 1: And that's not a bad line of thinking, right, Like,
Speaker 1: if you're like, who's gonna be good at hunting down insurgents, well,
Speaker 1: poachers probably actually probably wouldn't be pretty get at that
Speaker 1: job there. Yeah, And then you know, so that the
Speaker 1: idea is we're going to like take men that we
Speaker 1: have in prison for these poaching crimes and we're going
Speaker 1: to turn them into commandos. Now, during his time in Spain,
Speaker 1: Durlanger has redeemed himself in the eyes of the Nazis.
Speaker 1: His convictions get ann oled and he gets his doctorate back.
Speaker 1: They give him back his PhD um. So yeah, I
Speaker 1: got my certific. Yes, I'm going to frame it again.
Speaker 1: So as these Nazi leaders turned to the task of
Speaker 1: like finding a guy, who are gonna who's gonna run
Speaker 1: this this criminal unit, naturally they're like, well, this guy
Speaker 1: actually number one, he's fought insurgents for us in Germany.
Speaker 1: We know he's good at it. He's good at normal
Speaker 1: soldier stuff, and like them, he's a terrible criminal. So yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: They're like, yeah, he's molested a child, he's got a
Speaker 1: severe alcohol and drug problem, but like we're sending him
Speaker 1: to Poland where it's fine for him to do all that, right,
Speaker 1: we don't care who he molests in Poland or how
Speaker 1: fucked up he as well, he does it, get him
Speaker 1: over there. So that is how Oscar Darrel Wanger becomes
Speaker 1: the commandant of what will become known to history as
Speaker 1: the Darrell Wanger Brigade. And that's a story we're gonna
Speaker 1: get into in part Do I am I excited about
Speaker 1: it because this guy's I just I feel that all
Speaker 1: the crimes that you've talked, and there have been a
Speaker 1: lot of, he has committed a significant number, yes, already,
Speaker 1: And now I'm like, oh, now we're gonna let this
Speaker 1: fucking Tasmanian double loose. This is uh, it's gonna get
Speaker 1: bad and depressing. Yeah, this guy is already pretty bad, dude,
Speaker 1: and he's about to get sent to Poland right, Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I want you in the gun train was in the press, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: trade is before he was really that bad. Honestly, the
Speaker 1: wind up was guy had gun training a miss gun
Speaker 1: train in a second. Before we do that, I feel
Speaker 1: like the only proper way to end is, Matt, I
Speaker 1: want you to go to Google, and I want you
Speaker 1: to type in the name Oscar Darrel Winger. I want
Speaker 1: you to see what this motherfucker looks like. So A
Speaker 1: all s K A R D I R L E
Speaker 1: W A n G E R oh my good makeup
Speaker 1: cast this guy as an orc in a fucking Lord
Speaker 1: of the Race show, like he looked or a goblin.
Speaker 1: Probably he looks like a monster. Fucking just I mean like,
Speaker 1: we don't like to attack people for who have done
Speaker 1: actual bad things. For their appearance. But this guy looks
Speaker 1: like a monster. Like you see this motherfucker in the
Speaker 1: street and you're like, well, this is a bad person.
Speaker 1: You could draw this guy just from like just guess,
Speaker 1: and you are correct. This guy is frighteningly evil looking.
Speaker 1: Um dead eyes, yeah, mainly evil looking is the perfect description.
Speaker 1: What a what a monster? Of course he looks exactly
Speaker 1: like this. It's just he's got just that perfectly skeleton
Speaker 1: totally skull face right like, yeah, just a skull and
Speaker 1: receding hairline and just like one of those shitty German
Speaker 1: mustaches where they're like, we're going to make him, but
Speaker 1: he didn't fully commit to it. So there's a little
Speaker 1: bit stick and he kind of is a petal stash,
Speaker 1: right like, he's got that going on a little bit. Anyway,
Speaker 1: he's got the it's originally it's the darling that's the stash.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm not proud of attacking a man for his
Speaker 1: his his appearance, but take a look at this guy
Speaker 1: and tell me we shouldn't be right, Like, just get
Speaker 1: a look at this motherfucker. Just look at him. I
Speaker 1: feel like I understand the you know, the impulse to
Speaker 1: be like don't fat shame. It's not about but this guy.
Speaker 1: This guy looks like the life he's led and the
Speaker 1: life he's led running a gun train in between committing rape. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: exactly anyway, Jeviny, I think you want to plug for us,
Speaker 1: matt Leeb absolutely, Um, So I have um a new podcast,
Speaker 1: uh called pod Yourself The Wire. Before we did a
Speaker 1: Sopranos podcast called pod Yourself an now we're doing the
Speaker 1: Wire and it's a great show. And um, I would
Speaker 1: love for y'all to listen to it. And you know,
Speaker 1: if you're like, no, fuck, I don't want to listen, um,
Speaker 1: just go to the Apple podcast store and give us
Speaker 1: five stars in review anyways and then press play and
Speaker 1: then mute. You don't even have to listen. But if
Speaker 1: you could just do that five stars in review, get
Speaker 1: that for us, because I got a fucking baby. I
Speaker 1: got a baby now, dog Well, yeah, in a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks, matt Leeb has a baby in a up
Speaker 1: a low weeks, So go draw, send us all of
Speaker 1: your art of matt Leeb's baby as Tony soprano, and
Speaker 1: if you want to, you know, you can make our
Speaker 1: baby look like Jimmy McNulty, Oh yeah, man, oh yeah.
Speaker 1: Especially pose it with like a couple of empty bottles,
Speaker 1: like baby size bottles, little Irish wasted Jimmy McNulty, Yeah,
Speaker 1: have it, you know, taken a ship and going she she,
Speaker 1: You know that'll be fun. Little Clay Days, Yeah, do
Speaker 1: it as Clay Davis. Get a little omar baby costume
Speaker 1: with like a double barrelled shotgun and yeah, fucking hell yeah.
Speaker 1: You come at my diapers pressing like something like zigg
Speaker 1: Botka somehow I don't know. Do it do all the
Speaker 1: seasons even to which nobody likes. But it is a
Speaker 1: great season. I like season too. A bunch of polls
Speaker 1: give it. That's one of the strengths of the show.
Speaker 1: But now we're veering into your territory. I'm I'm, I've
Speaker 1: staggered into like the German Army is about to do
Speaker 1: in Poland, staggering into the wire. Yeah, alright over, Bye bye.
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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