Behind the Bastards - Part Two: How Nice, Normal People Made The Holocaust Possible
Aired: 2020-10-15
Duration: 01:16:30


=== Why We Drive Different (15:04) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  I actually drop better when I'm high.
[00:00:06]  It heightens my senses, calms me down.
[00:00:10]  If anything, I'm more careful.
[00:00:12]  Honestly, it just helps me focus.
[00:00:16]  That's probably what the driver who killed a four-year-old told himself.
[00:00:19]  And now he's in prison.
[00:00:21]  You see, no matter what you tell yourself, if you feel different, you drive different.
[00:00:27]  So if you're high, just don't drive.
[00:00:31]  Brought to you by Nitza and the Ad Council.
[00:00:34]  Today's Financial Literacy Month.
[00:00:36]  We are talking about the one investment most people ignore.
[00:00:38]  Building a business around the life you actually want.
[00:00:41]  It was just us making happen whatever he said was going to happen and then it happened.
[00:00:46]  On those amigos, entrepreneurs like Amira Kasam and Joe Hoff get real about money, taking risk, and while your dream might be the smartest move.
[00:00:54]  At the end of my life, what am I really going to care about?
[00:00:56]  And the conclusion I came to is what I did to make the world a better place in whatever way.
[00:01:00]  Listen to those amigos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:01:04]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
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[00:01:18]  The entire season two is now available to bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[00:01:24]  I'm an alcohol.
[00:01:26]  Without this progress, listen to Ceno's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:01:35]  On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Paul Show are geniuses.
[00:01:40]  We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand.
[00:01:47]  Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
[00:01:50]  Yes.
[00:01:51]  Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[00:01:53]  I actually, I thought it was.
[00:01:54]  I got that wrong.
[00:01:55]  But hey, no one's perfect.
[00:01:57]  We're pretty close, though.
[00:01:58]  Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:02:07]  Okay.
[00:02:08]  Welcome back to the podcast that this is, which is not the podcast that this isn't.
[00:02:14]  Which is to say that this is behind the bastards.
[00:02:17]  Yo, fam, what was that?
[00:02:19]  Come on.
[00:02:19]  Come on.
[00:02:20]  I was being very specific, Sophie.
[00:02:22]  For the love of God, we talk about the worst people in all of history, okay?
[00:02:25]  That's what we do.
[00:02:26]  That's our milieu, is the worst people, bad ones.
[00:02:29]  Yes, and when sometimes those bad people, there's dead babies, we always have this wonderful lady on.
[00:02:37]  Sophia Alexandria is here today to talk with us about some dead babies.
[00:02:42]  Woo!
[00:02:42]  Robert, what did I say?
[00:02:45]  I said, stop only inviting me to dead baby things.
[00:02:49]  Can you break it up with some adult murder every once in a while?
[00:02:53]  I'd be like, I mean, yeah, there was some adult murder in the last one.
[00:02:56]  Come on.
[00:02:57]  Remember, that doesn't count if part two is baby murder.
[00:03:01]  That negates part one.
[00:03:04]  I don't know that it does.
[00:03:06]  I think it just makes for more murdered people.
[00:03:09]  I think that we do one baby murder episode.
[00:03:12]  We do one other people murder episode.
[00:03:14]  And that is a healthy balance for our relationship.
[00:03:18]  You know what?
[00:03:19]  I respect that and I accept it.
[00:03:22]  Okay.
[00:03:22]  All right.
[00:03:23]  Well, good.
[00:03:23]  See, this is why communication is so critical.
[00:03:26]  I'm hugging you through the Zoom.
[00:03:28]  Yeah.
[00:03:29]  Thank you so much, Sophie.
[00:03:30]  I'm hugging you.
[00:03:31]  I love to talk.
[00:03:32]  Yeah.
[00:03:33]  Aww.
[00:03:34]  Yes.
[00:03:36]  Well, thanks for having me.
[00:03:38]  You're welcome.
[00:03:39]  You're welcome.
[00:03:41]  So this is part two of our episode, you know, about Nazis and stuff, right?
[00:03:45]  Did you want to actually introduce me, you fool?
[00:03:48]  Okay, I did.
[00:03:50]  I said you're Sophia Alexandria, who we talk about.
[00:03:52]  Well, you're also a comedian in a podcast.
[00:03:54]  That's not my name.
[00:03:55]  First of all, we need to pronounce her last name right.
[00:03:57]  Sophia Alexandria.
[00:03:59]  Nope.
[00:03:59]  Nope.
[00:04:00]  What?
[00:04:01]  Alexandra.
[00:04:02]  Sorry.
[00:04:03]  Jesus Christ.
[00:04:04]  How many fucking people are you?
[00:04:06]  What a fucking.
[00:04:06]  I was thinking about princesses.
[00:04:09]  I have literally spent hundreds of hours.
[00:04:14]  I know.
[00:04:14]  I was thinking of princesses.
[00:04:16]  I too think of royalty when I think of Sophia, but I know how to pronounce her last name.
[00:04:21]  Yes.
[00:04:22]  You're so good at making him look like shit.
[00:04:25]  I'm in a feet.
[00:04:26]  We're hanging through about you.
[00:04:28]  This is an episode about Nazis, and I'm looking worse than the Nazis right now.
[00:04:32]  I wouldn't go.
[00:04:36]  Not after this episode, I'm not.
[00:04:37]  Jesus, what with all the baby killing?
[00:04:39]  All right, let's cue it.
[00:04:43]  Come on.
[00:04:44]  All right.
[00:04:45]  So, you know, one of the nice things, Sophia, about studying the old Nazis as opposed to studying today's fascists is that we do know how things ended with the old ones, right?
[00:04:59]  Like, you know, they don't win in the end.
[00:05:03]  And we're all, we don't know that about our fascists, right?
[00:05:06]  We're all still living through this, and there's a pretty good chance they'll wind up taking home the trophy, you know?
[00:05:15]  They don't believe in us.
[00:05:16]  Yeah, I do believe in us, but it's certainly the game is not, the game has not ended.
[00:05:23]  The game is certainly still afoot.
[00:05:25]  Yeah, and I think we all have to get used to the idea.
[00:05:28]  Like one of the frustrating things, I think there's this like, especially if you have friends and family members who kind of went went Trump and have been getting increasingly at least far right, if not explicitly fashy over the last few years, is that like you want some sort of emotional closure where they're like, ah, I fucked up.
[00:05:46]  I was wrong.
[00:05:47]  Like I made a bad call.
[00:05:49]  That's never going to happen.
[00:05:50]  It's never going to happen.
[00:05:53]  And one of the things that I think is most interesting about Meyer's book, They Thought They Were Free, is that he talks to former Nazis about that.
[00:06:02]  And these guys are, you would think if anyone can be like, oh, yeah, that was the wrong horse to back.
[00:06:07]  It would be guys living in Germany in like 1946.
[00:06:10]  But like, no, like they, they don't, like, even those people weren't like, oh, you know what?
[00:06:16]  This was a bad call.
[00:06:17]  My kids are dead and my house got burned down in a bombing raid.
[00:06:21]  Probably voted for the wrong guy.
[00:06:22]  That's not what I wanted.
[00:06:24]  I'm sure there were some unfortunate mistakes, but overall, it's been a pretty good couple years.
[00:06:30]  That's exactly what they said.
[00:06:33]  No.
[00:06:36]  It's amazing.
[00:06:37]  These guys, these little Nazis, and again, these are not the guys who got rich under Nazism.
[00:06:41]  These are not the Venti Nazis.
[00:06:44]  These are just merely tall Nazis.
[00:06:47]  Yeah, tall, which again, in Starbucks and Nazi terminology means short.
[00:06:52]  Exactly.
[00:06:53]  So, yeah, it's fascinating.
[00:06:57]  Rather than turning against Hitler, these little Nazis, the guys that Meyer befriended, they looked back on the Nazi time in power as like a golden age, and they blamed the Führer's failures on everyone but him.
[00:07:09]  Only one of Meyer's 10 friends was actually willing to condemn large aspects of the Nazi system.
[00:07:14]  As for the others, quote, the other nine decent, hardworking, ordinarily intelligent and honest men did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil.
[00:07:23]  They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil.
[00:07:26]  And they do not know it now.
[00:07:28]  None of them ever knew or knows now Nazism as we knew it and know it.
[00:07:32]  And they lived under it, served it, and indeed made it.
[00:07:35]  These nine ordinary Germans knew it absolutely otherwise, and they still know it otherwise.
[00:07:40]  If our view of national socialism is a little simple, so is theirs.
[00:07:43]  An autocracy?
[00:07:44]  Yes, of course an autocracy, as in the fabled days of the golden time, our parents knew.
[00:07:49]  But a tyranny, as you Americans use the term, nonsense.
[00:07:52]  When I asked Herr Wetekind, the baker, why he had believed in national socialism, he said, because it promised to solve the unemployment problem.
[00:07:59]  And it did, but I never imagined what it would lead to.
[00:08:02]  Nobody did.
[00:08:03]  I thought I had struck pay dirt.
[00:08:04]  And I said, what do you mean?
[00:08:06]  What it would lead to?
[00:08:07]  War, he said.
[00:08:08]  Nobody ever imagined that it would lead to war.
[00:08:11]  And that's interesting.
[00:08:12]  When they talk about what it led to, they're not talking about the Holocaust.
[00:08:15]  They're not talking about the deportations.
[00:08:16]  They're not talking about the murder of the Roma.
[00:08:19]  They're not talking about the murder of Hitler's political enemies.
[00:08:22]  They're talking about the thing that fucked them up personally.
[00:08:26]  That's what they didn't realize it would lead to.
[00:08:28]  But you know what?
[00:08:29]  That Baker has the kind of vibes where he would not bake a cake for a gay couple.
[00:08:34]  Definitely not.
[00:08:35]  And hearing, reading that quote reminds me of the perennially relevant tweet by Adrian Bott.
[00:08:41]  I never thought leopards would eat my face, sobs woman who voted for the leopards eating people's faces party.
[00:08:52]  But like, it also reminds me of a Simpsons line.
[00:08:56]  Sure, Nazis have made some mistakes in the past, but that's why pencils have erasers.
[00:09:06]  Yeah, it's, it's, it's very funny.
[00:09:10]  I think, though, if we actually want to understand what happened in Nazi Germany and understand our own times better as a result, we do have to understand that like when these little Nazis say they had no way of knowing that Hitler was going to lead Germany into a war, they're not lying.
[00:09:24]  It seems like, obviously, how could you not know Hitler wanted war?
[00:09:29]  But a lot of his early appeal to the little Nazis was the fact that he was a wounded war veteran and that he'd been a private, right?
[00:09:36]  That he'd been a very low-ranking war veteran.
[00:09:38]  And one of the things he would say is that like, hey, of course I don't want war.
[00:09:40]  I know better than anybody how bad war is.
[00:09:43]  I've been in the middle of one.
[00:09:44]  Why would I want something like that?
[00:09:46]  Like that was, that was one of the lines that he took.
[00:09:49]  Now, it was transparent nonsense and it was obvious to people at the time who really who were intelligent, who paid attention.
[00:09:56]  Like, for example, have you heard that Hitler was a Nobel Prize nominee?
[00:10:02]  That's like a thing people talk about, right?
[00:10:04]  That's pretty well known, isn't it?
[00:10:06]  Are you, I'm sorry, I don't know if it was rhetorical or no, no, he was.
[00:10:09]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:10:11]  That's a thing that gets brought up from time to time that he was nominated for the Nobel Prize.
[00:10:15]  I thought you were doing a thing where you're like, so we all know this, right?
[00:10:20]  And then I was waiting for you to say, and then you were just waiting for me to say something.
[00:10:24]  And I was like, did you know that?
[00:10:25]  I'm not on the same page.
[00:10:27]  I thought that was, yeah.
[00:10:28]  I don't think that it's something that people talk about as much as him being a vegetarian or whatever.
[00:10:33]  Yeah.
[00:10:33]  Or maybe not.
[00:10:34]  I read a lot of Hitler, so I'm probably off on what's common knowledge.
[00:10:39]  Sure, you're a big Hitler head.
[00:10:41]  We all know this.
[00:10:41]  Yeah.
[00:10:42]  He was Hitler Stan.
[00:10:43]  Yeah.
[00:10:44]  He was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, but the nomination was a joke.
[00:10:47]  It was a satire by a Swedish anti-fascist politician who was like being like, it's absurd because this guy clearly wants to pull the world into war.
[00:10:56]  So obviously, like a lot of people, anyone who paid attention and who was modestly intelligent knew what Hitler was going to do.
[00:11:03]  I'm not saying that like it was hidden in any real way, but it was hidden to these little Nazis, not because like Hitler obscured it particularly well, but because the only media they paid attention to was essentially like either completely idiotic or complete propaganda.
[00:11:21]  They lived in a media bubble, right?
[00:11:24]  And that we see that today.
[00:11:26]  As Meyer wrote, quote, remember, none of these nine Germans had ever traveled abroad.
[00:11:30]  None of them had ever known or talked with a foreigner or read the foreign press.
[00:11:34]  None ever wanted to listen to the foreign radio when it was legal to do so.
[00:11:38]  None, except oddly enough, the policemen, listened to it when it was illegal.
[00:11:42]  They were as uninterested in the outside world as their contemporaries in France or America.
[00:11:46]  And you know, Meyer gets it, right?
[00:11:49]  You can see reading this book, he doesn't talk a lot about American fascism, but you can see in the way he writes the book, like he knew we were vulnerable to.
[00:11:58]  Like, because these people are everywhere.
[00:12:01]  Yeah.
[00:12:02]  I don't know.
[00:12:02]  How are you feeling, Sophia?
[00:12:04]  Just, you know, real positive, waiting for the babies to get here.
[00:12:07]  Yeah, we're just waiting for the league too.
[00:12:09]  Come on.
[00:12:10]  Yeah, and then to leave immediately and to leave a pair of shoes behind.
[00:12:14]  A pair of baby shoes, comma, never worn.
[00:12:18]  Yeah, baby shoes.
[00:12:19]  I'll see myself out.
[00:12:20]  Yeah.
[00:12:21]  So that's a stupid joke.
[00:12:23]  I've always said you're the Hemingway of this podcast, mainly because of the amount of time you spend shirtless firing a shotgun.
[00:12:30]  I mean, people gotta get a load of these titties, I always say.
[00:12:36]  Sony Hemingway.
[00:12:37]  15.
[00:12:40]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:12:42]  That's the jacket quote for Hills Like White Elephants.
[00:12:44]  People gotta get a look at these titties.
[00:12:46]  That is simple.
[00:12:47]  So that is also the tagline for my titties.
[00:12:52]  A lot of similarities.
[00:12:53]  You also spent a period of time in Havana, if I'm not mistaken.
[00:12:57]  My titties are there right now.
[00:13:01]  So, yeah.
[00:13:04]  Meyer points out that for his Nazi friends who lived in small towns and away from where a lot of the violence the Nazis did occurred, like the negative things the Nazis did, the negative press about them was drowned out by things like the Strength Through Joy program, which enabled working Germans to visit places like Norway and Spain at very little cost.
[00:13:23]  These little Nazis and those like them were concerned with the economy.
[00:13:27]  And again, that meant not starving in those days.
[00:13:29]  And a lot of that appeared to get better under Hitler.
[00:13:31]  Some of this was illusory, and a great deal of it was driven by what's called Aryanization, which is the process of stealing Jewish businesses and property and giving them to Germans or to Aryan Germans.
[00:13:43]  But Meyer's friends felt.
[00:13:44]  Aryanization is like a really clean name for that.
[00:13:47]  Yeah.
[00:13:48]  It is.
[00:13:48]  And there's a very good movie about it all called that was made in the Soviet Union in like the 60s called The Shop on Main Street that's about like one like Russian peasant in an occupied village who is given this old Jewish woman's, I think it's like a, it sells like buttons and sewing equipment shop.
[00:14:08]  And she and he become friends.
[00:14:09]  And it's, it's, it's, it's a very, it's an interesting movie because like all of the people acting in it were like peasants on the Russian steppes when the Germans invaded and they lived in villages that the Nazis took over and then like turned like a lot of them turned in their their own Jews.
[00:14:24]  So like the actors aren't like just acting.
[00:14:27]  They're like remembering.
[00:14:28]  It's a fascinating film.
[00:14:29]  I really recommend it.
[00:14:30]  I'm going to see it.
[00:14:32]  Yeah.
[00:14:32]  It's a it's a very, very good movie and a very, I mean, very dark movie because it's about Russia in World War II.
[00:14:39]  I was going to say, what do you mean?
[00:14:40]  Yeah.
[00:14:41]  It's kind of sounded like a lighthearted romp to me.
[00:14:44]  Yeah.
[00:14:45]  Compared to talk about love actually in part one.
[00:14:49]  And you knew a name of an actor.
[00:14:51]  I was like, love actually?
[00:14:53]  Of course, Hugh Grant.
[00:14:54]  Yeah.
[00:14:54]  I was just impressed by your disposition.
[00:14:56]  But is Hugh Grant?
[00:14:58]  Yeah.
[00:14:58]  Is he what?
[00:14:59]  Yeah, he's in it.
[00:15:00]  He plays the prime minister of England or something, right?
[00:15:02]  He's the sketchy politician.
[00:15:04]  Yeah.

=== Forgetting the Monuments (12:39) ===

[00:15:05]  Oh, he's the one that like makes an insane number of like body-shaming fat jokes during it.
[00:15:11]  Oh, does he?
[00:15:12]  I don't remember a word.
[00:15:13]  The whole movie is so fucked up, but the only thing I remember is that Liam Neeson is in it.
[00:15:18]  Following.
[00:15:19]  She is?
[00:15:20]  Yeah.
[00:15:20]  Woman that's a supermodel, but not a supermodel.
[00:15:24]  Like, she's not supposed to be a supermodel, but she is.
[00:15:27]  And the joke, he just keeps talking about how, oh, like the only person I'd marry is Claudia Schiffer or whatever the fuck.
[00:15:36]  And then this Claudia Schiffer shows up.
[00:15:38]  You know what?
[00:15:39]  It doesn't matter.
[00:15:40]  That's not a good retelling of the movie, but it's partially true.
[00:15:44]  But you know what ties that back into our episode?
[00:15:48]  How are you going to do this?
[00:15:49]  I was so impressed.
[00:15:50]  Well, you were just telling me that Liam Neeson is in love actually because of when love actually was made.
[00:15:56]  We're talking about, we're talking about, what's that Holocaust movie with the red dress?
[00:16:01]  Schindler's list.
[00:16:03]  Era Liam Neeson.
[00:16:04]  Bam.
[00:16:05]  Back.
[00:16:06]  We're back to World War II.
[00:16:08]  Six degrees of Hitler.
[00:16:10]  Oh, yeah.
[00:16:11]  Well, that's amazing.
[00:16:12]  Son of a bitch.
[00:16:14]  I know.
[00:16:15]  You know, I'm only three degrees away from him.
[00:16:19]  I mean, like, like genetically or?
[00:16:21]  No, no, no, just in terms of like direct handshakes.
[00:16:25]  Okay.
[00:16:26]  Yeah, I shook hands.
[00:16:28]  I shook hands with a guy who at age eight, like the Nazis came to power, and he was a member of the Hitler Youth.
[00:16:33]  And they did a lot of meet and greet gathering stuff with Nazi high brass.
[00:16:37]  And he shook Hermann Goering's hand.
[00:16:40]  And obviously Hermann Goering.
[00:16:41]  So by obviously by Nazi and transitive property, you have shaken Hitler's hand.
[00:16:47]  I basically shook Hitler's hand.
[00:16:49]  Yeah.
[00:16:49]  That's what we're talking about.
[00:16:51]  Yeah.
[00:16:51]  The thing that's crazier about it to me is that that dude's grandpa had fought with a sword on horseback as a cavalryman.
[00:16:59]  And like that it's that recently that people were doing that.
[00:17:02]  Like, yeah, this dude fought in the 1871 with like a fucking sword on horseback.
[00:17:06]  And I like shook hands with his grandson.
[00:17:09]  And as advanced as we are, we're that close to like people stabbing each other while riding horses.
[00:17:14]  That's so crazy.
[00:17:15]  It's wild, right?
[00:17:16]  Is that when you got into machetes?
[00:17:18]  No, I've always been into machetes.
[00:17:20]  Okay.
[00:17:21]  So, yeah, yeah.
[00:17:24]  Sorry.
[00:17:25]  We got off on a little bit of a tangent here.
[00:17:29]  But kind of what we're talking about.
[00:17:30]  Okay, most of this is for you, but a little bit of this is for me, okay?
[00:17:34]  Okay.
[00:17:36]  It can't be just Hitler, Hitler, Hitler 100% of the time.
[00:17:40]  Give me 2% of Hitler-related adjacent Hitler adjacent.
[00:17:45]  And yeah, we're talking about a lot of Hitler-adjacent little Nazis here.
[00:17:50]  And these folks were able to kind of get on board because they were distracted by a lot of the benefits of Nazis.
[00:17:56]  And they didn't see, they didn't go looking for the ugly stuff, even though they knew some of it was there, because the stuff that was positive was like way more in their faces.
[00:18:05]  And that's really all they cared about.
[00:18:07]  And that's why, even though the Nazis never had an electoral majority, almost every German got on board with Nazism, even if they didn't join the party during the years in which Hitler was succeeding, right?
[00:18:20]  Because people back a winner.
[00:18:22]  And that's what gets it.
[00:18:23]  That's what scares me most about imagining the United States sliding into fascism.
[00:18:26]  And it's not the midnight raids, the abduction and execution of dissidents, the slow clampdown on resistance.
[00:18:32]  It's the idea that most Americans, that like people I know and am friendly with, would find ways to pretend none of it was happening while like people I love and maybe me are disappearing and being murdered.
[00:18:43]  That's the scariest thing about it, right?
[00:18:45]  Like that is so much more frightening than imagining, than thinking about the actual fascists doing the killing.
[00:18:51]  It's like the people that I've hung out and played video games with, like turning away while it happened.
[00:19:00]  Anyway, I'm going to read another quote from Meyer's book that's exactly on this topic.
[00:19:04]  None of the horrors impinged upon the day-to-day lives of my 10 friends or was ever called to their attention.
[00:19:09]  There was some sort of trouble on the streets as one or another of my friends was passing by on a couple of occasions, but the police dispersed the crowd and there was nothing in the local paper.
[00:19:19]  You and I leave some sort of trouble on the streets to the police.
[00:19:23]  So did my friends.
[00:19:25]  And it's the police who are disappearing the Jews in this period, right?
[00:19:28]  That's what's happening along with all the political dissidents.
[00:19:31]  And Meyer actually presented his friends with an article from their local newspaper from back in 1938 about a group of local Jews who were taken into protective custody by the police.
[00:19:42]  And Meyer writes, none of them, including the teacher, the anti-Nazi teacher, remembered ever having seen it or anything like it.
[00:19:50]  And maybe they're lying.
[00:19:52]  Maybe that's just our brains are that good at when we really hate reality, closing it out, if we're able to escape it, if we're safe enough to escape reality.
[00:20:04]  I don't know.
[00:20:05]  I mean, people's memories of events are so unreliable.
[00:20:10]  Incredibly so.
[00:20:11]  In general, much less when you like really want to forget that you were a Nazi.
[00:20:17]  Yeah.
[00:20:18]  Yeah.
[00:20:19]  Or just don't want to remember that you knew what being a Nazi.
[00:20:23]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:20:23]  Exactly.
[00:20:26]  Now, the cold hard reality is that most of the Germans who lived in the Third Reich knew what was being done to the Jews.
[00:20:32]  Not every detail, for sure, but like they knew enough, right?
[00:20:35]  The gas chambers, the death camps weren't tremendously widely known, but the fact that the Jews were being disappeared and that something terrible was happening, everyone was aware.
[00:20:46]  This has not been kind of historical consensus for long.
[00:20:50]  In 2001, Professor Robert Galatali, who we quoted from earlier, conducted a massive survey of German mainstream media, newspapers and magazines from 1933 on.
[00:21:00]  And he started down this path of research when he was looking through old German papers and he found a report of a woman who had been sent to the Gestapo for looking Jewish and having sex with a neighbor.
[00:21:10]  Now, at the time, and this is like the late 1990s when he came across this article, conventional academic wisdom held that the majority of Nazi atrocities had happened without the knowledge of most Germans.
[00:21:21]  Galadley noted, for decades my generation had been told that so much of the terror had been carried out in complete secrecy.
[00:21:27]  So coming upon that report openly in a major German newspaper made him wonder if this was true.
[00:21:33]  And so he decided to look into the matter in the way that academics do, very, very, in a very like methodical way.
[00:21:40]  And I'm going to quote now from a Guardian write-up on the study he conducted as a result of this.
[00:21:45]  His media troll with a research assistant found that as early as 1933, local papers reported the killing of 12 prisoners by guards at Dachau, the first to be set up as a model concentration camp initially for communists.
[00:21:58]  On May 23rd, the Dachauer Zeitung, which is the Dachau newspaper, said that the camp was Germany's most famous place and brought new hope to the Dachau business world, which obviously there's a town also next to the camp.
[00:22:11]  By 1934, the main and widely read Nazi-owned paper, Volkesche Beobachter, was reporting on a widening of policy to other political criminals, including Jews accused of race defilement.
[00:22:22]  By 1936, communist prisoners were no longer mentioned.
[00:22:26]  In a photo essay in the SS paper, Das Schwarzkorp, the Dark Corps, emphasized the camps as places for people for race defilers, rapists, sexual degenerates, and habitual criminals.
[00:22:39]  That's interesting to me that that's how the Nazis spun the concentration camps first.
[00:22:43]  Not as a place for Jews in specific, but as a place for race defilers, rapists, sexual degenerates, and habitual criminals.
[00:22:51]  And that process continued through the years of the regime's short life.
[00:22:54]  In 1937, Heinrich Himmler made public announcements that still more camps would be needed for those with hydrocephalus, cross-eyed, deformed half-Jews, and a whole series of racially inferior types.
[00:23:06]  In 1938, after Kristallnacht, Goebbels made a widely purported public announcement that the final answer to the Jewish problem would occur via government decree.
[00:23:16]  So far from being unaware of the Holocaust, the little Germans were well informed about a lot what was going on.
[00:23:22]  They knew their government was looking to a final answer to the Jewish question, and they knew what that meant, more or less.
[00:23:29]  So, yeah.
[00:23:32]  Not only were the Nazi atrocities well known as they occurred, but the desire of little Nazis to pretend ignorance at the crimes they were enabling was also really obvious to outside and inside observers at the time.
[00:23:43]  There's a quote that I think is really useful from Peter Vierek, who was a German-American scholar, and he wrote this in 1940.
[00:23:50]  Well publicized among Germans, already before Hitler came to power and during a period when he still depended on their consent rather than coercion were the many actual deeds of butchery.
[00:24:01]  Someday the same Germans, now cheering Hitler strutton to Paris, will say to their American friends and to their brave German anti-Nazi friends, we did not know what went on.
[00:24:10]  We did not know.
[00:24:12]  And when that day of no-nothing comes, there will be laughter in hell.
[00:24:18]  And there's a lot to say about the forgetting that happened after the war.
[00:24:22]  And some of it was because we wanted the Germans as allies against the communists.
[00:24:25]  The U.S. government was very much willing to let people forget.
[00:24:29]  And it was not a unified thing.
[00:24:30]  Like one of the things Eisenhower did that I think was really laudable was force Germans who lived near the concentration camps to tour them where there were like still corpses lying out and stuff like that.
[00:24:41]  But for the most part, this was allowed to be the mainstream belief.
[00:24:46]  You go find old documentaries about the Holocaust and stuff.
[00:24:49]  Like this was a very widespread belief that most Germans hadn't known because it was politically dangerous in the period when those same Germans were still running Germany to admit that they'd known and that they'd at least let it happen.
[00:25:07]  And that's, I mean, it's a real bummer.
[00:25:19]  Yeah, it also makes me think of like the fact that there's so many reminders of what happened in Germany and like all these monuments and stuff and how that's really important also for reckoning with something that is like a big historical event that most people would like to forget.
[00:25:43]  Yeah.
[00:25:43]  Their country was a part of.
[00:25:45]  Yeah, they actually put a lot of, if you go to any of like the any of the concentration camps that are actually in Germany, like in order to be a guide at one of those places, like there's a certain level of education you have to have.
[00:25:57]  And the people there are extremely knowledgeable about the Holocaust.
[00:26:02]  And it's something that the German government does now put a lot of importance in.
[00:26:07]  Because you have to, people want to forget that when people want to forget, it's not just they don't want to remember a bad episode from history.
[00:26:17]  They want to forget that they might do that, right?
[00:26:20]  They probably wouldn't be Nazis, but they would let the Nazis do what the Nazis did.
[00:26:26]  And nobody wants to remember that.
[00:26:28]  Nobody wants to think about that.
[00:26:30]  But it also just makes you think about how much wilder it is that people fight for Confederate monuments here because they're the opposite of those kind of monuments that you are trying to remember the people that were for something horrible and not the people that fought against them.
[00:26:56]  So it would be like if you went to Nazi Germany and all of the monuments instead of being to like the Germans being Nazis, we're like, let's not, this is so we don't forget that there were Nazis.
[00:27:08]  Here's Heinrich Himmler's statue.
[00:27:14]  Oh, it's right next to, you know, Hitler in Hitler's garden.
[00:27:17]  It's just like, that's, I mean, and that's something that has been taken for granted in America for so long that like, yeah, Confederate monuments, of course.
[00:27:30]  And on that side, it's time for an ad break so that we can all take some deep breaths off Mike.

=== Leslie Proves Her Point (03:17) ===

[00:27:44]  I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
[00:27:50]  It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[00:27:57]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[00:28:07]  If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pitches, it's like, what?
[00:28:12]  Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
[00:28:15]  They believe everything, but at first it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
[00:28:19]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[00:28:23]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
[00:28:27]  And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
[00:28:29]  They cannot feed their kids.
[00:28:30]  They do not have homes.
[00:28:31]  Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
[00:28:35]  Listen to Eating Wall Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:28:43]  When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
[00:28:52]  Here at the Nick Dick and Pole Show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
[00:28:57]  What Koogler did that I think was so unique, he's the writer director.
[00:29:01]  Who do you think he is?
[00:29:02]  I don't know.
[00:29:04]  You meet the like the president?
[00:29:06]  You think it's the president?
[00:29:07]  You think Canada has a president?
[00:29:08]  You think China has a president?
[00:29:10]  Leslie proves that.
[00:29:13]  God, I love that thing.
[00:29:14]  I use it all the time.
[00:29:16]  I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
[00:29:20]  It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
[00:29:23]  Yep.
[00:29:24]  It was a good one.
[00:29:25]  I like that saying.
[00:29:25]  It is an actual Polish saying.
[00:29:28]  It is an actual Polish saying.
[00:29:29]  A better version of Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes.
[00:29:32]  Yes.
[00:29:32]  Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[00:29:35]  I actually, I thought it was.
[00:29:36]  I got that wrong.
[00:29:37]  Listen to the Nick Dick and Pole Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:29:44]  Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
[00:29:53]  Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
[00:29:59]  I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
[00:30:04]  This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate Mike Milken, take-to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
[00:30:14]  If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
[00:30:23]  Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
[00:30:28]  Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top.
[00:30:38]  Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:30:46]  If you're watching the latest season of the Real House Wise of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down.
[00:30:52]  Marcia accusing Kelly of sleeping with a married man.
[00:30:55]  They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew.
[00:30:58]  Pinky has financial issues.
[00:31:00]  I like the bougie style of Housewives Show.

=== The Little Nazis Behind It (15:41) ===

[00:31:02]  Now I think it looks like it's going to be interesting.
[00:31:04]  On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Rail House Wise franchise, the drama, the alliances, and the tea.
[00:31:17]  Everybody's talking about.
[00:31:18]  As an executive producer in reality television, I'm not just watching it.
[00:31:22]  I understand the game.
[00:31:24]  As somebody who creates shows, I'll even say this.
[00:31:27]  At the end of the day, when people are at home, they want entertainment.
[00:31:32]  To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:31:44]  Woo.
[00:31:46]  I like it when we can be more playful, Robert.
[00:31:49]  Say, welcome back.
[00:31:52]  I say, woo, everything's fine in the world.
[00:31:58]  So, yeah, so I think it's interesting, and I think it's important to note because there's very little nuance in our education of the concentration camps, that they started as a place to put criminals, right?
[00:32:11]  Sexual deviants, you know, child molesters, right?
[00:32:15]  That's what the Nazis, that's not who they were putting there, but that's how the Nazis justified it.
[00:32:21]  And you can look at things like who QAnon suggests going after and whatnot and see some lines there.
[00:32:28]  But also, like, what a crazy coincidence that like all the people that are the murderers and the rapists and whatever are Jewish and gay and Roma and communist and political dissidents.
[00:32:44]  That's such a wild coincidence.
[00:32:46]  Yeah, but it is like you see shades of that in our own fascists, this idea that like everybody who is opposed, who is actively opposed to the regime is a criminal, you know?
[00:32:57]  And they're not just criminals because they're breaking laws and their protests, but they all have like, they have to be like part of some pedophile cabal.
[00:33:04]  They're doing like they're all like it's it's this it's in the reason they do that, right?
[00:33:11]  The reason they do that is because it stops normal people from caring.
[00:33:14]  Because normal people don't give a shit if a criminal gets murdered by the cops because that's supposed to happen.
[00:33:20]  You know, normal people care when someone they see as a good person gets hurt.
[00:33:27]  They don't care about criminals because there's a lot that's fucked up in our society.
[00:33:34]  But the Nazis were taking advantage of that same thing too.
[00:33:36]  You know, you don't say we're cracking down on political dissidents.
[00:33:40]  It's we're arresting criminals.
[00:33:42]  And then everybody's fine with it.
[00:33:44]  Yeah.
[00:33:45]  I'm going to read a quote from a book called Backing Hitler by Robert Galatali, who we were just talking about.
[00:33:51]  It's a very good book.
[00:33:53]  And it talks about sort of how the images that the Nazi regime put out to justify the people they were locking away.
[00:34:03]  The social reception of the images that were projected no doubt varied enormously.
[00:34:07]  At one end of the scale, these published accounts had a terrorizing or deterrent effect on potential opponents of Nazism and those who were officially stigmatized.
[00:34:14]  Certainly, many people in the country would have seen through the propaganda.
[00:34:17]  However, for good citizens who wanted to return to an idolized version of German law and order, these images helped to ease the appearance of even the terroristic sides of Hitler's regime.
[00:34:27]  They could read in the press that those who suffered at the hands of the new system were other people, communists and various social outsiders and the Jews.
[00:34:35]  Good citizens were invited to see the camps as educative institutions and as a corrective and a warning to those described as social rabble.
[00:34:44]  That is, men and women who were habitual criminals, the chronically unemployed, beggars, alcoholics, homosexuals, and repeat sex offenders.
[00:34:55]  Totally different now.
[00:34:58]  I'm out of science.
[00:35:00]  It's like Robert says something and then I'm just like...
[00:35:06]  Also, one thing about Robert and I's chemistry that's not really Robert and my chemistry that's not really popping off over long, what is this?
[00:35:18]  Zoom calls.
[00:35:19]  We're on Zoom now.
[00:35:21]  Yeah, thank you.
[00:35:22]  I feel like you pause for me to say something when I have nothing to say and I'm just defeated by the content.
[00:35:30]  And then when I do have something to say, you're like, I'm in the middle of my thoughts.
[00:35:34]  And I'm like, you're right.
[00:35:35]  You're right.
[00:35:36]  My thing was stupid.
[00:35:37]  And that's what's happening.
[00:35:39]  Podcasting.
[00:35:41]  Yay.
[00:35:45]  You know, maybe delete that.
[00:35:46]  They don't need to know how the sausage is made.
[00:35:48]  No, I like it.
[00:35:49]  Stop saying that.
[00:35:52]  Yeah.
[00:35:53]  So, Jesus, what a time to be alive.
[00:35:58]  So I could go through and link excerpts from articles that kind of make that point about like Trump talking about violent criminals and like, you know, camps at the border and all the Christo-fascist paranoia about trans people using bathrooms, which when they talk about the Nazis arresting sex criminals, that's who they were arresting.
[00:36:15]  It's not rapists.
[00:36:16]  It was people who had sex they thought was criminal.
[00:36:20]  Yeah, or we could talk about QAnon's obsession with mythical child sex traffickers, but like we've all been through the same news cycles.
[00:36:27]  I'm sure you see the parallels.
[00:36:30]  And a read-through of Professor Galatali's book, which I do recommend, reveals several of them.
[00:36:34]  Quote, Urich Herbert recently suggested that during the Nazi years, there was a growing lack of moral concern in German society for human rights and the protection of minorities, which grew rapidly during the years of the dictatorship and which led to a profound moral brutalization in Germany.
[00:36:52]  That's familiar, right?
[00:36:53]  Growing lack of concern for human rights and protection of minorities in a society, leading to brutalization.
[00:37:01]  Yeah, Galatali himself uses the term desensitization to refer to the impact that the Nazis' years-long drumbeat of like news articles about the people they were arresting and sending away and killing, the impact that had on people.
[00:37:15]  Desensitization.
[00:37:16]  Again, we're experiencing a version of that ourselves with all of the hundreds of thousands of deaths from COVID-19, with the violence in the streets, with like these, these constant drumbeat of police murders.
[00:37:29]  And just, you know, not even from like stories about death, but just like the sheer amount of horrible things happening.
[00:37:34]  It just numbs you after a while.
[00:37:37]  That was going on then, too.
[00:37:40]  Another thing we don't talk about enough.
[00:37:45]  So while we're talking about desensitization and genocide, we should probably talk a little bit about some of the little Nazis who wound up as cogs in the machine of death that actually made the Holocaust happen.
[00:37:55]  This is the dead baby section, Sophia.
[00:37:58]  Finally.
[00:37:59]  Yeah, thank you.
[00:38:00]  I'm going to earn my keep here.
[00:38:02]  Jesus.
[00:38:03]  I had a fucking prologue in this, some bitch.
[00:38:05]  So I want to quote now from an article in Der Spiegel titled Everyday Murder: Nazi Atrocities Committed by Ordinary People.
[00:38:14]  Quote: Perpetrators included both committed Nazis and people who had nothing to do with the Nazis.
[00:38:20]  The murderers and their assistants included Catholics and Protestants, the old and the young, people with double doctorates and poorly educated members of the working class.
[00:38:28]  And the percentage of psychopaths was not higher than the average in society as a whole.
[00:38:34]  One thing you have to accept if you really want to understand the Holocaust is that most of the people involved were what we would describe as mentally healthy.
[00:38:41]  They were not people who could have been diagnosed with any sort of mental illness.
[00:38:46]  Which again, like this is why I push back whenever people talk about the Nazis as being crazy or Hitler as being crazy.
[00:38:52]  Like, no, these were rational people taking rational action that happened to be the worst thing you can imagine.
[00:38:59]  And that's so much scarier.
[00:39:02]  In the early 1990s.
[00:39:04]  Also, didn't they put mentally ill people in the camps?
[00:39:08]  That's the first people that they executed in a lot of them.
[00:39:11]  Yeah, that's the biggest, then most horrible irony to call people that were just like willingly being agents of fascism.
[00:39:21]  Yeah, comparing them to people that are actually mentally ill.
[00:39:26]  It's very, it is.
[00:39:27]  It's sick and it's wrong because it ignores it completely ignores what was actually going down.
[00:39:34]  And that's that's very important.
[00:39:35]  Like the very first, you know, the gas chambers, before the gas chambers, they were actually using like trucks that they would hook up carbon monoxide gas to and pump into the trucks and they'd fill them with people.
[00:39:46]  And the people they experimented on first, the first people the Nazis killed with any kind of poison gas were mentally handicapped folks.
[00:39:54]  Yep.
[00:39:55]  That's how it started.
[00:39:57]  I think it was the T4 euthanasia program.
[00:39:59]  I may be getting things a little bit wrong there.
[00:40:01]  But yeah.
[00:40:01]  So in the early 1990s, a large group of researchers and historians began the long plotting work of digging through mountains of the Third Reich's surviving records.
[00:40:09]  And their goal was to put together for the first time, and again, this is right around the time that they're starting to understand that, like, actually, most Germans were complicit to some degree.
[00:40:18]  So they're starting to understand this, and they're trying to put together a comprehensive list of actual active perpetrators in the Holocaust for the first time.
[00:40:26]  Not just the leadership, but everyone who pulled a trigger or the equivalent.
[00:40:32]  The people who loaded Jewish folks in the train cars, the people who manned gas chambers, everybody.
[00:40:36]  And at present, the number of active participants that they have listed, these are all individual people, include more than 200,000 Germans and another 200,000 Ukrainians, Estonians, Lithuanians, and members of other occupied countries, including Frenchmen.
[00:40:52]  Now, one of the little Germans who pulled a lot of triggers was Walter Matner.
[00:40:57]  And Walter was a police secretary from Vienna who had been just kind of a functionary in the Viennese police and then joined the SS when the war started and became an administrative officer.
[00:41:08]  And we have a lot of his letters to his wife back at home.
[00:41:12]  And from those, we learn quite a bit about the man.
[00:41:14]  And I'm going to have a link to just like a sheet that has all of his letters home on it because it's very compelling stuff.
[00:41:20]  On September 22nd, 1941, right after his first entry into the conquered territories of the Soviet Union after the invasion started, he wrote, If I were not already a national socialist, the first day of my wartime deployment would have turned me into one through and through.
[00:41:35]  Now, not that long after, on the 29th of September, about a week later, he wrote a letter in which he assured his wife that he and his fellow men of the SS were not committing war crimes against the Jews of Eastern Europe.
[00:41:46]  He insisted, At the most, we arrange things, i.e., everything is taken away from the Jews.
[00:41:53]  But just a few days later, like three or four days later, on October 2nd, 1941, he wrote this: This is again a letter to his wife.
[00:42:03]  I should have already turned in.
[00:42:05]  It's already 9 p.m. and I volunteered for a special operation tomorrow.
[00:42:09]  Reveli is at 4:30 a.m. and we're moving off at 5:30 a.m.
[00:42:13]  Tomorrow, I'll also have the first opportunity to use my pistol.
[00:42:17]  I'm taking 28 rounds with me.
[00:42:19]  Probably won't be enough, but another comrade will lend me his pistol or carbine.
[00:42:24]  I don't even know if I'm being permitted to tell you this, but that the Jews are our misfortune.
[00:42:28]  That's something you've known for a long time.
[00:42:30]  And it's something we saw again and again on our journey to Warsaw and onto here.
[00:42:34]  Just how many comrades are already resting in the cool earth.
[00:42:37]  And this is how many young men are sleeping, single and married, the prime of our German nation, to protect our home from the monsters we have gotten to know here.
[00:42:44]  It is simply dreadful to have to look at these Asiatic hordes.
[00:42:48]  What we Europeans feel when seeing this, you can understand bitterness that takes a hold of me, and which everyone here feels when thinking of our home and our great fateful struggle, which we have to wrestle through here for our people.
[00:42:59]  What are 1,200 Jews who are too many in yet another city and have to be bumped off, as the saying goes?
[00:43:05]  It is only the just punishment for all the suffering they have inflicted and continue to inflict on us Germans.
[00:43:11]  Until I arrive home, I shall tell you nice things, but enough for today.
[00:43:15]  Otherwise, you'll believe that I'm bloodthirsty.
[00:43:18]  Wow.
[00:43:20]  On October 7th, Walter and his comrades traveled to a village named Mogliov in Belarus.
[00:43:27]  There they gathered up 2,273 Jewish people.
[00:43:31]  They stripped them of everything but the clothes on their backs, lined them up beside an open pit, and shot every single one of them to death at close range.
[00:43:38]  Walter Matner, mild-mannered police secretary, wrote this home to his wife.
[00:43:43]  For the first truckload, my hand trembled slightly when shooting, but one gets used to it.
[00:43:48]  By the time the 10th truck arrived, I was already aiming steadily and fired surely at the many women, children, and infants.
[00:43:54]  Bear in mind that I also have two babies at home, to whom these hordes would do the same, if not 10 times worse.
[00:44:00]  The death we gave them was a nice short death compared to the hellish torture meted out to thousands upon thousands in the dungeons of the GPU.
[00:44:07]  Infants flew in a wide arc through the air, and we blew them away while still in flight before they then fell into the pit and the water.
[00:44:14]  Let's get rid of this brood which has plunged the whole of Europe into war and is still mongering in America until it drags them into the war as well.
[00:44:21]  Hitler's words are coming true, what he once said before the war began.
[00:44:24]  If Jewry believes it'll be able to incite a war in Europe again, it won't be the Jews who will triumph, but it will herald the end of Jewry in Europe.
[00:44:31]  Mogliev has now lost a number with three zeros, but that's of no consequence here.
[00:44:36]  I'm already looking forward to it.
[00:44:37]  And many here are saying that when we return home, it's the turn of our local Jews.
[00:44:42]  This is probably a cool time to mention that my grandma's family was shot to death by the Nazis.
[00:44:49]  So bringing back some real fond memories.
[00:44:53]  Yeah.
[00:44:53]  Yeah, these are the people who do that.
[00:44:56]  And it happened to a tremendous degree.
[00:45:02]  The guys who did this for the most part were groups called the Einsitzgruppen, which was like, it means special task unit.
[00:45:08]  And it was a lot of SS, like it was like the folks that they recruited for this, a lot of them had been local police officers before.
[00:45:17]  And these were folks who were willing, who they this was kind of the first attempt at carrying out a genocide en masse, and they did it with gunfire.
[00:45:24]  And they realized very quickly that this was not a great, yeah, it was not efficient.
[00:45:30]  And we'll talk about that a little bit later.
[00:45:33]  But reading about Matner's crimes in particular brought to mind a passage from Meyer's book that I find rather striking.
[00:45:39]  And I'm going to read that passage now.
[00:45:42]  The German language, like every other, has some glorious epithets, untranslatable.
[00:45:47]  And Wilgewerdney Spiceberger is one of them.
[00:45:51]  It means, very roughly, little men gone wild.
[00:45:57]  I think about that a lot when I think about us.
[00:46:00]  When I think about some of the things I've seen in the streets.
[00:46:04]  Little men gone wild.
[00:46:06]  That's some powerful shit.
[00:46:08]  Yeah.
[00:46:09]  So as it turned out, Matner, obviously, former police officer killing people in Belarus for the Third Reich and his fellow police back home in Germany were hard at work on that same task.
[00:46:21]  And they thought they were free.
[00:46:22]  Meyer notes that his friend, the sensitive politician Hoffmeister, quote, did his duty in 1938 when he was ordered to arrest Jews for being Jews.
[00:46:31]  One of those he arrested, the Taylor Morowitz, and this guy survived the war, calls him a decent man, which I have trouble getting into that guy's head, too.

=== Police as Tools of the State (08:23) ===

[00:46:43]  But it's a shade of genocide that we don't see enough.
[00:46:48]  I think that is important to tell people about.
[00:46:51]  Yeah, definitely.
[00:46:54]  One of the most bitter and fucked up realities of the Holocaust is that a lot of the killing was done by folks who would otherwise be described as decent men, people who were good husbands and good fathers and friendly, positive members of their community.
[00:47:08]  Nice people, people who would have smiled at you as you passed them on the street when they were old men, and people who also played an active role in the extermination of millions.
[00:47:17]  People like, for example, Major Trapp of Reserve Police Battalion 101.
[00:47:22]  And I'm going to quote from The Guardian to tell you about Major Trapp.
[00:47:26]  According to witness testimony, Major Trapp was in tears when he ordered the shooting of 1,500 women, children, and elderly Jews near Warsaw, all the while saying, an order is an order.
[00:47:36]  In July 1942, his men drove the victims out of their homes, loaded them into trucks, and took them to a remote clearing to be executed.
[00:47:43]  They shot them in the head or in the back of the neck.
[00:47:45]  And in the evening, the soldiers' uniforms were covered with bone fragments, brain matter, and bloodstains.
[00:47:50]  And that's like that's, I think, almost a more useful picture of what it means to commit genocide is this man weeping and going through with it anyway because it's an order.
[00:48:09]  That's just so fucking frightening to me.
[00:48:12]  I think anytime you justify anything with it's an order, it's a frightening thing because it just completely takes away like the humanity of a decision all the way.
[00:48:30]  Yeah, and it's why we decided at Nuremberg that like being under orders was not an excuse to commit genocide because it's not, but it is precisely because of that of that guy.
[00:48:42]  Yep.
[00:48:44]  Now, you may have noticed that a lot of the folks we're talking about in this segment about people who actually committed genocide by pulling triggers themselves, a lot of those people were cops.
[00:48:54]  Yeah, strange.
[00:48:56]  Weird.
[00:48:58]  Wonder what the connection is there, huh?
[00:49:00]  Yeah.
[00:49:01]  Yeah, the Nazi state was adept at using regular police to round up Jews and other undesirables.
[00:49:05]  And overwhelmingly, German police officers who were not members of the Nazi party previously agreed to do this work without complaint.
[00:49:13]  Timothy Snyder, a Holocaust scholar and one of the world's great experts on fascism, one of your must-reads if you want to understand what happened, notes in his book, Black Earth, that regular police were a key resource for the Nazis.
[00:49:27]  Quote, after its triumph in the Night of Long Knives, the SS implemented Hitler's fourth innovation, the hybridization of institutions.
[00:49:36]  Crime was redefined, racial and state organizations were merged, and cadres were rotated back and forth.
[00:49:42]  In 1935, in a significant reform, Himmler explicitly redefined the SS and the police apparatus as a single organ of racial protection.
[00:49:51]  Himmler, who served a racial movement rather than a traditional state, personally directed both the SS and the German police from 1936.
[00:49:58]  The investigative service of the SS proposed a new definition of political crime.
[00:50:03]  It was not crime against the state.
[00:50:04]  The state had validity only insofar as it represented the race.
[00:50:08]  Since politics was nothing but biology, political crime was a crime against the German race.
[00:50:13]  Now, later on in that same book, Snyder continues: The Einstatzgruppen were also hybrid organizations, mixing SS members and others.
[00:50:21]  The police forces themselves were hybridized from within, as police officers were recruited to the SS, while SS officers were assigned to the police.
[00:50:29]  The secret state police, the detectives of the criminal police, and even the regular uniformed order police were to become Himmler's racial warriors.
[00:50:37]  And police are tools of the state.
[00:50:41]  They are.
[00:50:43]  They are.
[00:50:44]  And if we're talking about hybridization of the police with, shall we say, federal forces, can we?
[00:50:51]  I even say armored vehicles or I don't know.
[00:50:54]  Yeah, or deputized cops who get federal arresting powers.
[00:50:59]  Or what's been happening with ICE for the last four years?
[00:51:02]  I'm going to quote from a ProPublica article here.
[00:51:05]  In the year after President Trump took office, state and local police officers across Pennsylvania swept carloads of Hispanic immigrants into ICE's net.
[00:51:12]  In the process, they helped the agency's regional field office office tally more than at more at-large arrests of undocumented immigrants without criminal convictions than any of the 23 other field offices in the country.
[00:51:23]  These are immigrants picked up in communities, not at local jails and prisons.
[00:51:27]  Last year, five states-New York, California, Illinois, Oregon, and Washington-limited how police can question immigrants about their legal status or hold them for ICE without a warrant.
[00:51:36]  Separately, more than 400 counties restricted their engagement with ICE enforcement, according to a national survey.
[00:51:42]  On the other hand, 59 local agencies in 17 states have partnerships with ICE to train and deputize their officers to enforce immigration laws.
[00:51:50]  Hybridization, baby.
[00:51:54]  So wrong and evil.
[00:51:57]  Yeah.
[00:51:58]  And it makes you wonder how many major traps exist on our police forces today.
[00:52:02]  Men who might be friendly and polite, but who would stand there with tears in their eyes and shoot dissidents if that's what they were supposed to do.
[00:52:10]  Popular history likes to focus on outrageous villains like you know Hitler.
[00:52:14]  But I think these guys are more important to study.
[00:52:21]  These otherwise decent, normal people who completely fail the thing that turns out to be the greatest moral test of their lives.
[00:52:29]  ICE agents, anyone who's running any of the detention facilities or abusing children in those facilities, any of those things.
[00:52:39]  But also, in a way, all of us who live with it, everyone who's able to live with it, you know?
[00:52:48]  That brings me back to the littlest of the little Nazis.
[00:52:51]  These guys, these men and women who lived in quiet small towns and villages and suburbs.
[00:52:56]  And most of these people were people of conscience.
[00:53:00]  They didn't vote for Hitler when they had a chance to vote for Hitler.
[00:53:05]  And, you know, to the extent that they were aware of what was going on, a lot of them probably wondered, what can I do?
[00:53:10]  How can I keep this from happening?
[00:53:13]  And part of why they let it happen, part of why they sat back while their camps were killing people, were sterilizing people, is because they were just overwhelmed by daily life.
[00:53:24]  Like if you read these people's interviews, that's a thing you'll hear a lot is that there was just so much going on, right?
[00:53:29]  There was so much happening in the world and so many different like things occurring.
[00:53:33]  I didn't know what to do and I was just exhausted all the time.
[00:53:37]  It's a great excuse, isn't it?
[00:53:39]  Like, yeah, there's a there's so in his book, Meyer talks to one of his German colleagues, and this isn't one of the friends that he was studying because those guys were all members of the Nazi party.
[00:53:49]  This man was not a Nazi, but he was a German who lived in Germany when the Nazis were in power.
[00:53:53]  He was a linguistics expert and an academic who was obsessed with the study of middle-high German.
[00:53:58]  So he had his field of study that he loved and was tried to kind of pour himself into while the Nazis rose to power.
[00:54:04]  He told Meyer, What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret, to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security.
[00:54:31]  So eerie.
[00:54:32]  Yeah.
[00:54:33]  And we've talked a lot about Trump and this, but that's not Trump.
[00:54:36]  That's Obama.
[00:54:37]  That's W. Bush.
[00:54:39]  That's Bill Clinton.
[00:54:41]  That's Bush Sr.
[00:54:42]  That's an increasing thing that's been happening in America under all of the good presidents that have led us to this point is the habituation of people to being governed by surprise.
[00:54:52]  You know?
[00:54:53]  Yeah.
[00:54:54]  Yeah.
[00:54:55]  Speaking of being governed by surprise, I'm going to tell you to take an ad break right now.
[00:55:02]  Surprise, bitch, goods and services.

=== Habituation to Surprise (04:14) ===

[00:55:06]  Nailed it.
[00:55:07]  Good to know that our comedic timing is still on board.
[00:55:11]  Thanks, Sophie.
[00:55:12]  Me and you are better than ever.
[00:55:14]  Yeah.
[00:55:15]  Rising to the occasion.
[00:55:22]  I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
[00:55:28]  It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[00:55:35]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum-Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[00:55:45]  If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
[00:55:50]  Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
[00:55:53]  They believe everything, but at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
[00:55:57]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[00:56:01]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
[00:56:04]  And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
[00:56:07]  They cannot feed their kids.
[00:56:08]  They do not have homes.
[00:56:09]  Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
[00:56:13]  Listen to Eating Wall Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:56:21]  Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
[00:56:30]  Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
[00:56:37]  I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
[00:56:41]  This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate Mike Milken, take-to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
[00:56:52]  If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
[00:57:00]  Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
[00:57:05]  Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top.
[00:57:15]  Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:57:22]  When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
[00:57:31]  Here, the Nick Dick and Pole Show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
[00:57:36]  What Koogler did that I think was so unique, he's the writer director.
[00:57:40]  Who do you think he is?
[00:57:41]  I don't know.
[00:57:43]  You meet the like the president?
[00:57:45]  You think Canada has a president?
[00:57:47]  You think China has a president?
[00:57:49]  Leslois proves that.
[00:57:52]  God, I love that thing.
[00:57:53]  I use it all the time.
[00:57:55]  I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
[00:57:59]  It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
[00:58:02]  Yep.
[00:58:03]  It's a good one.
[00:58:04]  I like that saying.
[00:58:04]  It's an actual Polish saying.
[00:58:07]  It is an actual Polish.
[00:58:08]  Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
[00:58:11]  Yes.
[00:58:11]  Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[00:58:14]  I actually, I thought it was.
[00:58:15]  I got that wrong.
[00:58:16]  Listen to the Nick Dick and Poll Show on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:58:23]  If you're watching the latest season of the Real House Wives of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down.
[00:58:30]  Marcia accusing Kelly of sleeping with a married man.
[00:58:33]  They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew.
[00:58:36]  Pinky has financial issues.
[00:58:38]  I like the bougie style of Housewives Show.
[00:58:40]  Now I think it looks like it's going to be interesting.
[00:58:42]  On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real Housewives franchise, the drama, the alliances, and a T. Everybody's talking about.
[00:58:56]  As an executive producer in reality television, I'm not just watching it.
[00:59:00]  I understand the game.
[00:59:02]  As somebody who creates shows, I'll even say this.
[00:59:05]  At the end of the day, when people are at home, they want entertainment.
[00:59:10]  To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

=== Taking the Oath Was Not Evil (11:39) ===

[00:59:21]  All right, we're back.
[00:59:23]  So for most ordinary people, the extraordinary degree of trust that they had in Hitler, and there was a tremendous amount of that, especially as he starts to win these victories, as he starts to achieve things that had seemed impossible.
[00:59:35]  You know, the retaking the Sudetenland, rebuilding the German military, conquering fucking France.
[00:59:40]  People had faith in him.
[00:59:42]  And so that was one reason a lot of them were able to ignore the disappearances in the night.
[00:59:48]  But that wasn't a factor for the people who weren't Nazis, the people who never converted.
[00:59:52]  For them, the thing that stopped them from doing more was not just personal fear, it was the exhaustion and burnout they had from living in a society like this.
[01:00:03]  And I'm going to quote again from that linguist.
[01:00:06]  This is him talking to Meyer.
[01:00:07]  You will understand me when I say that my middle high German was my life.
[01:00:10]  It was all I cared about.
[01:00:12]  I was a scholar, a specialist.
[01:00:14]  Then suddenly I was plunged into all the new activity as the university was drawn into the new situation, that new situation being fascism.
[01:00:20]  Meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires.
[01:00:27]  And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, one was expected to, participate that had not been there or had not been important before.
[01:00:36]  It was all rigamarole, of course, but it consumed all one's energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do.
[01:00:43]  You can see how easy it was then not to think about fundamental things.
[01:00:46]  One had no time.
[01:00:49]  Those, Meyer said in response, are the words of my friend the baker.
[01:00:53]  One had no time to think.
[01:00:55]  There was so much going on.
[01:00:56]  Your friend the Baker was right, said my colleague.
[01:00:58]  The dictatorship and the whole process of its coming into being was above all diverting.
[01:01:03]  It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway.
[01:01:08]  I do not speak of your little men, your baker and so on.
[01:01:11]  I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you.
[01:01:14]  Most of us did not want to think about the fundamental things and never had.
[01:01:18]  There was no need to.
[01:01:19]  Nazism gave us some dreadful fundamental things to think about.
[01:01:22]  We were decent people and kept so busy with continuous changes and crises and so fascinated, yes, fascinated by the machinations of the national enemies without and within that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing little by little all around us.
[01:01:39]  Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful.
[01:01:42]  Who wants to think?
[01:01:44]  Wow.
[01:01:45]  Damn.
[01:01:46]  Yeah.
[01:01:48]  That's real.
[01:01:49]  I didn't like that.
[01:01:50]  Yeah.
[01:01:52]  I see myself in this photo and I don't like it.
[01:01:56]  That's how if you really study the Nazis, you should see yourself more and more with everything you learn in them.
[01:02:04]  And if you don't, you're not studying them right.
[01:02:06]  That's what's scary about them.
[01:02:09]  That's what's scary about the Holocaust.
[01:02:12]  They thought they were free is a chilling book, but I don't think there's any competition for the most frightening passage in the whole work.
[01:02:19]  It comes when Meyer sits down, sat down with one of his colleagues, a chemical engineer.
[01:02:24]  And again, this is another non-Nazi.
[01:02:26]  This is more depressing than the one you just read.
[01:02:28]  Oh, yeah.
[01:02:29]  Yes.
[01:02:30]  This is the bleakest thing I may ever have read.
[01:02:33]  So he sits down with this anti-Nazi colleague of his, a chemical engineer who lived through the Reich, and he asks him one day, tell me now, how was the world lost?
[01:02:43]  And this is his colleague's response.
[01:02:46]  The world was lost one day in 1935 here in Germany.
[01:02:51]  It was I who lost it, and I will tell you how.
[01:02:54]  I was employed in a defense plant, a war plant, of course, but they were always called defense plants.
[01:02:59]  That was the year of the national defense law, the law of total conscription.
[01:03:03]  Under the law, I was required to take the oath of fidelity.
[01:03:06]  I said I would not.
[01:03:08]  I opposed it in conscience.
[01:03:09]  I was given 24 hours to think it over.
[01:03:12]  In those 24 hours, I lost the world.
[01:03:16]  Yes, I said, and this is Meyer speaking.
[01:03:19]  You see, his friend responded, refusal would have meant the loss of my job, of course, not prison or anything like that.
[01:03:26]  Later on, the penalty was worse, but this was only 1935.
[01:03:29]  But losing my job would have meant that I could not get another.
[01:03:32]  Wherever I went, I should be asked why I left the job I had, and when I said why, I should certainly have been refused employment.
[01:03:39]  Nobody would hire a Bolshevik.
[01:03:42]  Of course, I was not a Bolshevik, but you understand what I mean.
[01:03:44]  Yes, Meyer said.
[01:03:46]  I tried not to think of myself or my family.
[01:03:48]  We might have gotten out of the country in any case, and I could have got a job in an industry or education somewhere else.
[01:03:54]  What I tried to think of was the people to whom I might be some help later on if things got worse, and as I believe they would.
[01:04:01]  I had a wide friendship in scientific and academic circles, including many Jews and Aryans too, who might be in trouble.
[01:04:07]  If I took the oath and held my job, I might be of help somehow, as things went on.
[01:04:12]  If I refused to take the oath, I would certainly be useless to my friends, even if I remained in the country.
[01:04:16]  I myself would be in their situation.
[01:04:19]  The next day, after thinking it over, I said I would take the oath with the mental reservation that, by the words with which the oath began, I swear by God, I understood that no human being and no government had the right to override my conscience.
[01:04:33]  My mental reservations did not interest the official who administered the oath.
[01:04:36]  He said, Do you take the oath?
[01:04:38]  And I took it.
[01:04:40]  That day the world was lost, and it was I who lost it.
[01:04:44]  Do I understand, Meyer said, that you think you should not have taken the oath?
[01:04:48]  Yes.
[01:04:49]  But, Meyer said, you did save many lives later on.
[01:04:52]  You were of greater use to your friends than you ever dreamed you might be.
[01:04:54]  His friend's apartment was until his arrest and imprisonment in 1943 a hideout for fugitives.
[01:05:00]  This man hid people from the Nazis.
[01:05:02]  For the sake of argument, he said, I will agree that I saved many lives later on, yes.
[01:05:06]  Which you would not have done if you had refused to take the oath in 1935.
[01:05:10]  Yes.
[01:05:11]  Of course I must explain.
[01:05:12]  First of all, there is the problem of the lesser evil.
[01:05:16]  Taking the oath was not so evil as being unable to help my friends later on would have been.
[01:05:20]  But the evil of the oath was certain and immediate, and the helping of my friends was in the future and therefore uncertain.
[01:05:28]  I had to commit a positive evil, there and then, in the hope of a possible good later on.
[01:05:34]  The good outweighed the evil, but the good was only a hope, the evil a fact.
[01:05:39]  There then is my point.
[01:05:41]  If I had refused to take the oath of fidelity, I would have saved all three million, he says three million, he's talking about all of the 11 million people we now know died in the Holocaust.
[01:05:50]  This was before they had a full count.
[01:05:53]  You are joking, Meyer said.
[01:05:54]  No, you don't mean to tell me that your refusal would have overthrown the regime in 1935.
[01:05:59]  No, or that others would have followed your example.
[01:06:02]  No, I don't understand.
[01:06:04]  You are an American, he said again, smiling.
[01:06:06]  I will explain.
[01:06:07]  There I was, in 1935, a perfect example of the kind of person who, with all of his advantages in birth and education and in position, rules or might easily rule in any country.
[01:06:19]  If I had refused to take the oath in 1935, it would have meant that thousands and thousands like me, all over Germany, were refusing to take it.
[01:06:27]  Their refusal would have heartened millions.
[01:06:30]  Thus the regime would have been overthrown, or indeed would never have come to power in the first place.
[01:06:35]  The fact that I was not prepared to resist in 1935 meant that all the thousands, hundreds of thousands, like me in Germany, were also unprepared.
[01:06:44]  And each one of these hundreds of thousands was, like me, a man of great influence, or of great potential influence.
[01:06:50]  Thus, the world was lost.
[01:06:53]  You are serious, Meyer said.
[01:06:54]  Completely, he said.
[01:06:56]  These hundred lives I've saved, or a thousand or ten, as you will, what do they represent?
[01:07:01]  A little something out of the whole terrible evil, when if my faith had been strong enough in 1935, I could have prevented the whole evil.
[01:07:08]  Your faith? Meyer asked.
[01:07:10]  My faith.
[01:07:11]  I did not believe that I could remove mountains.
[01:07:13]  The day I said no, I had faith.
[01:07:16]  In the process of thinking it over in the next 24 hours, my faith failed me.
[01:07:20]  So in the next 10 years, I was able to remove only anthills, not mountains.
[01:07:25]  How might your faith on that first day have been sustained? Meyer asked.
[01:07:28]  I don't know.
[01:07:29]  I don't know, he said.
[01:07:30]  Do you?
[01:07:31]  I am an American, I said.
[01:07:33]  My friend smiled.
[01:07:34]  Therefore, you believe in education.
[01:07:36]  Yes, Meyer said.
[01:07:37]  My education did not help me, and I had a broader and better education than most men have had or ever will have.
[01:07:43]  All it did in the end was enable me to rationalize my failure of faith more easily than I might have done if I had been ignorant.
[01:07:51]  And so it was, I think, among educated men generally in that time in Germany.
[01:07:56]  Their resistance was no greater than other men's.
[01:08:00]  When do you think the day was lost here?
[01:08:05]  I don't know that it has been.
[01:08:08]  But I know that if I just mean in terms of how far that we couldn't have imagined so far that like we didn't know that Trump's presidency would have resulted in all of the things that it did, even though we did know that it would be terrible.
[01:08:35]  So when do you think was the moment that that mass miscalculation happened for the people that were not like active Trump supporters, but that went along and voted for him?
[01:08:47]  I mean, I guess you could say when they cast a ballot.
[01:08:50]  There's an element of which, obviously, the thing that had happened in Germany that this person's talking about has not happened to us yet.
[01:08:57]  There's no regime making us take loyalty of.
[01:08:59]  No, no, no, of course not.
[01:09:00]  But that's not what I'm saying.
[01:09:01]  I'm not saying it's a one-to-one.
[01:09:03]  I'm just saying that as pessimistic as I was, Trump got elected, I couldn't have even imagined that it's been so much worse.
[01:09:15]  So, yeah, so it just makes me wonder at what point people who voted for him while, you know, quote-unquote holding their nose or whatever, at what moment it was lost for them when they decided that, you know what, I'll just fucking vote for him.
[01:09:32]  Yeah, I mean, it's got to be it can't be the emails.
[01:09:39]  Like, what was the straw?
[01:09:42]  I don't know.
[01:09:44]  That's a question I go with all of the time.
[01:09:47]  And some of it is that as it was then, you know, the thing that I think this fellow's talking about that we have not hit yet is the time at which decent people completely surrender to the regime.
[01:10:07]  But it is a thing that will happen if the regime gains enough power because decent people are always scared Of dying.
[01:10:15]  And I think the folks who have crossed the line already were neither decent nor educated.
[01:10:24]  You have to have had a failure of education or decency to have voted for Trump.
[01:10:30]  And it's not the people who vote for him that scare me the most.
[01:10:37]  It's again, the people who didn't vote for him, but if it meant the difference between their lives or not, would let the camps on the border where there's forced ticksterectomies occurring and babies being put in cages, would let those turn into full death camps because the alternative would be their own, not even loss of life, but loss of comfort and prestige.

=== Failure of Decency and Education (04:54) ===

[01:11:01]  Like that's the thing, that's the thing.
[01:11:06]  Like the lesson that this guy's trying to get across to people is that it is not the fascists decision to let the fascists win.
[01:11:19]  They don't make the final call.
[01:11:22]  We do.
[01:11:23]  They only win if we consent to their victory, as millions of decent people consented to the victory of the Nazis.
[01:11:33]  Mic drop.
[01:11:35]  Yeah.
[01:11:37]  You want to plug your pluggables?
[01:11:39]  Fucking fuck yourself.
[01:11:43]  Sorry, I was, I'm on the edge of tears, so I'm trying to.
[01:11:46]  Oh, I know.
[01:11:47]  I know.
[01:11:47]  I feel that.
[01:11:49]  I felt that energy this whole time.
[01:11:51]  I was on the verge of tears earlier.
[01:11:54]  You know, it's the kind of life we're living, my man.
[01:11:57]  Yep.
[01:11:57]  Cool times.
[01:11:59]  So, you know, guys, fuck it out.
[01:12:02]  Yeah.
[01:12:03]  I'm just, I really don't want to do this.
[01:12:06]  Hit us up on the Gram.
[01:12:12]  If you want to not kill yourself, I guess maybe listen to my comedy album, Father's Day, available wherever you listen to things.
[01:12:23]  Can I just say that when I press shuffle on my music library and it's you and you come up like after like a really somber song, it's so great.
[01:12:37]  It's just you being just your radiant self and it just like makes my day every day.
[01:12:44]  It's so lovely.
[01:12:45]  Thank you, Sophie.
[01:12:46]  If you guys want to find my podcasts that are not about dead babies, we're learning some of great transitions from Robert.
[01:12:59]  You can catch me talking about 90 Day Fiancé on 420 Day Fiancé with Miles Gray from the Daily Zay Geist and Private Parts Unknown, my podcast with Courtney Kosak about love and sex.
[01:13:11]  Yeah.
[01:13:12]  And, you know, let's fight fascism real quick.
[01:13:17]  Yeah, real quick.
[01:13:18]  Just for a second.
[01:13:19]  Just a second.
[01:13:20]  Just as a treat.
[01:13:21]  A couple of minutes.
[01:13:22]  Yeah.
[01:13:27]  Podcasts.
[01:13:28]  Happy Trump COVID day.
[01:13:32]  No comment.
[01:13:34]  Not a single comment was given.
[01:13:40]  Oh, good stuff.
[01:13:42]  That's the podcast.
[01:13:44]  That is the damn thing.
[01:13:45]  Sorry, it was so depressing.
[01:13:47]  Yeah, damn.
[01:13:48]  Thanks, I guess.
[01:13:52]  All right.
[01:13:53]  Well, sorry, Sophia.
[01:14:00]  I actually drop better when I'm high.
[01:14:02]  It heightens my senses, calms me down.
[01:14:05]  If anything, I'm more careful.
[01:14:08]  Honestly, it just helps me focus.
[01:14:11]  That's probably what the driver who killed a four-year-old told himself.
[01:14:15]  And now he's in prison.
[01:14:17]  You see, no matter what you tell yourself, if you feel different, you drive different.
[01:14:23]  So if you're high, just don't drive.
[01:14:26]  Brought to you by Nitza and the Ad Council.
[01:14:29]  This Financial Literacy Month, we are talking about the one investment most people ignore, building a business around the life you actually want.
[01:14:37]  It was just us making happen whatever he said was going to happen and then it happened.
[01:14:41]  On those amigos, entrepreneurs like Amira Kazam and Joe Hoff get real about money, taking risks, and while your dream might be the smartest move.
[01:14:49]  At the end of my life, what am I really going to care about?
[01:14:51]  And the conclusion I came to is what I did to make the world a better place in whatever way.
[01:14:55]  Listen to those amigos on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:15:00]  Now, everybody over here?
[01:15:01]  Oh, it's one of my other favorite places.
[01:15:03]  The Twilight Gazebo.
[01:15:05]  Sunset Gardens.
[01:15:07]  Twilight Gazebo.
[01:15:10]  What's next?
[01:15:11]  Dead Man's Grove?
[01:15:12]  Mom, could you please try to be a little bit positive about this?
[01:15:17]  From Kenya Barris, the visionary creator of Blackish, comes Big Age, an Audible original about finding your way in life's next chapter.
[01:15:26]  This audio comedy series follows a retired couple's reluctant relocation to Sunset Gardens, a flirting senior community that is anything but relaxing.
[01:15:36]  Starring comedy legends Jennifer Lewis, Cedric the Entertainer, and Nicy Nash Betts.
[01:15:41]  Through its blend of outrageous comedy, Pea Party Anyone, and touching revelations, Big Age explores what it means to grow older without growing old at heart.
[01:15:50]  Go to audible.com/slash big age series to start listening today.

=== Growing Older Without Growing Old (00:33) ===

[01:15:56]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[01:16:03]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[01:16:10]  The entire season two is now available to bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[01:16:16]  I'm an alcoholic.
[01:16:18]  Without this probe, I'm a guide.
[01:16:20]  Listen to Ceno's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:16:26]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:16:28]  Guaranteed human.