Reinhard Heydrich evolved from a Bavarian police commissioner arresting 20,000 leftists to the architect of the Holocaust, translating Hitler's ideology into systematic persecution via the Nuremberg Laws and the Dachau model. He orchestrated the Night of Long Knives, managed the confiscation of Jewish assets during the Anschluss, and directed Einsatzgruppen to exterminate Polish intelligentsia before proposing the "Final Solution" at the 1942 Wannsee Conference. Despite his chaotic personal life and eventual assassination by Czech partisans in 1942, Heydrich's ruthless efficiency engineered the machinery that killed millions, cementing his legacy as the most brutal executor of Nazi genocide. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:46
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That's what gets me on.
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Even though she really is just saying it's happening, whether you like it or not, but she gives you not actually even consent at all.
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Every time I see it, I'm like, I could leave right now, as if any other time I couldn't.
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It's, you know, states are either one-party consent or two-party consent states, basically.
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What's up?
Comedian.
Yeah.
Funny guy.
Podcaster.
Guy who has a Sopranos podcast called Potter Yourself a Good.
You know my blog almost early, dude.
Yeah.
Yeah, you do.
You get him in.
You drop it into the P zone straight away.
And this is, of course, Behind the Bastards.
Oh, yeah.
This is part two of our podcast series about Reinhard Heydrich, maybe the worst of the Nazis, which is quite a resume line.
Yeah.
Great.
Gets it in your hell resume set.
Like, what did you do?
I'm the guy Hitler thought was extra.
Oh, I love the hell entrance interview where you're sitting with the devil and he's like, you've got some pretty impressive, you know, things that you've done in your life.
I see here you were valedictorian at Nazi.
Yes.
Graduated Nazi come loudly.
And fucking, you know, yeah, you got the job.
You just burn in hell for eternity.
Oh, yeah.
What an amazing piece of shit.
So, Matt, you know, one of the problems with this episode, like, right, this is the thing.
We talked, we just did the Dulles Brothers episodes, right?
We did a three-parter on that.
It was like four hours of fucking talking and we left out a lot, you know?
Yeah.
And it was a lot of like, we mostly left out the stuff that was shitty, but kind of either, you know, like the Kennedy assassination stuff where I can't really say one way or the other what their role was or stuff like we didn't go into detail on MK Ultra because we're going to do it eventually.
We preferred, though, to talk about like the, you know, the coups and the genocides that descended from them so that we weren't leaving out the biggest crimes against humanity that they'd committed as part of this, as the head of the, you know, the head and then of the CIA and the head of the State Department.
Right.
With Reinhard Heydrich, in order to make time, there's a lot of crimes against humanity that we're just leaving out or wallpaper.
Cause it's like, I can't talk about all of the epochal crimes against like human nature and civilization that this guy did.
That's how many crimes against humanity he was responsible for.
His bio is too big.
You can't read his entire bio.
You got to really fucking find all of the ones that you're like, this will work.
You got to rank them, which is hard to do in terms of crimes.
So if you're, I mean, there's going to be numerous people listening to this podcast whose family members were exterminated as a result of something Reinhard Heydrich did.
And if we left out the particular crime against humanity he committed against your ancestors, I do apologize.
There's too many of them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We can't go into every single one, which is just goes to show how much of a piece of shit this guy was.
Really tremendous asshole.
Bad dude.
Bad.
Really bad dude.
So we left off.
Hitler had just kind of taken power.
1933 was the year that Hitler kind of got his not quite ultimate power yet.
You know, there's still, he's the chancellor.
There's still Hindenburg in there.
He hasn't quite taken everything, but this is the year during which he consolidates and gets total power.
And it's a process.
The Nazis don't just get elected and become in charge.
There's a lot of resistance to them at the start, including a lot of people, a lot of conservatives who are like, well, we're compromising by letting Hitler be in power, but he's not going to get total power.
Like we're still going to have all these different checks against them.
So the first thing the Nazis have to do is destroy any chance of there being checks against them.
And they do this by taking over all of Germany's police agencies.
And this was, again, there's resistance to this in Bavaria and in a number of other German states.
Elements of the police resist Nazi control and they're all unsuccessful, right?
At the end of the day, most cops just go along with it and none of the cops who don't go along with it remain cops.
Now, in April of 1933, Heinrich Himmler is appointed commander of the Bavarian political police.
So there's like criminal police.
There's order police, right?
Which are kind of like your traffic cops, basically.
Cops, you're like, ah, you're drunk in the street.
There's political police whose job is to, like, are you seditious?
Are you going to carry out treason and shit?
And they'd existed before during the Weimar Republic, but under the Nazis, the political police are going to be by far the biggest and most powerful police because that's what the Nazis are most concerned with, right?
Yeah.
And Heinrich Himmler becomes head of Bavarias, which is one state's political police.
He makes Reinhard Heydrich the police commissioner.
So Himmler is the big picture guy.
Reinhardt is going to be running the day-to-day.
Yeah, the behind the scenes guy.
Yeah.
The Nazis, when they, you know, first start taking over these agencies, they have themselves a party.
And because it's a Nazi party, that means they're beating and torturing and murdering people that they'd had problems with for a while, but hadn't controlled the cops.
Yeah.
Reinhard's wife later wrote, quote, I had to laugh so hard when she found out that Heydrich had been made the police commissioner.
Quote, Reinhardt said he felt great satisfaction that the same people who had been locking up the SA and the SS just half a year ago, who beat them down with rubber truncheons, could now no longer straighten their backs for all the bowing they did.
Jesus Christ.
Now, yeah, it's cool.
It's good shit.
Now that he was in charge of the political police, Heydrich's job was to arrest every communist and social democratic enemy of the Nazi party and have them tortured and beaten.
More than 200 people were locked up in the first couple of days.
Every one of them was beaten badly.
Now, at this stage, Jews were not the Nazi Party's chief priority.
So again, they're rounding up mostly political enemies, mostly leftists.
Some of those people are Jewish, and they do go after, like, there's especially there's random violence against Jews, but the party is not focusing on fucking with Jewish people right now because they still aren't in solid power.
The left could take things back at this point.
So that's going to be their focus, right?
That said, there is a lot of violence against Jewish people.
And Heydrich gleefully related to his wife the story of a Jewish man that SS officers brought into headquarters.
Quote, they made short work of him.
They beat him with dog whips, pulled off his shoes and socks, and then he had to walk home barefoot in the company of SS men.
That will give you an idea of how they do things.
Many Jesuits and Jews have fled from here.
No one is dead.
No one has been seriously injured, but fear, fear, I tell you.
So that's really the goal.
And this is one of the things there was not from the beginning, and this is debated.
There's a lot of argument as to whether or not from the beginning there was a concerted Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews.
I think there was a concerted willingness to kill the Jews.
I think there was a lot of joking and talking about it.
I think there were plenty of people who didn't have an issue with it, but they weren't planning to do it necessarily from the beginning.
There's strong evidence that it's something that kind of evolved over time.
And particularly in this period, that's not, I think one of the important things is that it was not necessarily inevitable that the Holocaust would go the way that it did.
It was inevitable that there were going to be Jewish people beaten, that there was going to be some sort of apartheid state, probably.
Not necessarily inevitable that what happened was going to happen.
Right.
That's why that's the final part of the final solution.
That's what that's kind of, you know, it was, it was the logical conclusion of the ideology.
You know, it wasn't, it was talked about and joked about and, you know, kind of considered something that people used rhetorically as a rhetorical device, but people didn't actually think this is something they would ever try to pull off.
Like not, because it just seemed just not only like irrational, but like, I mean, just logistically not possible.
But boy, were they wrong?
Yeah, they, and it's, it's one of those things.
It's important you bring up the phrase final solution because people don't think about what that actually means enough.
Yeah.
The Jewish question, Germans didn't invent that phrase, right?
That's something being asked all throughout Europe.
And the question is like, well, these people aren't like us, but they live in our societies.
What do we do with them?
Right.
And a lot of that's, you know, we've talked, you see the protocols of the elders of Zion episode.
The fact it's the final solution because the Nazis try a couple of other solutions.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The final one is genocide.
And that's an important part of the story, I think.
Now, proportionally, more political enemies were arrested in Bavaria under Heydrich than in any of the other German states.
By April 10th, 10,000 people had been taken into custody by his SD.
And again, it's not just the SD.
They're using cops as well, right?
There's cops and also like they're just kind of like deputizing a bunch of Nazis in the SS to act as cops so that they can take in people.
There were protests against these mass arrests, and these protests are violently dispatched by the German police.
One lawyer, Michael Siegel, lodged a complaint to Heydrich against the arrest of a Jewish client.
Heydrich had him beaten by SS auxiliary policemen and then forced marched through the city carrying a sign that said, I will never again complain about the police.
Man, fucking A.
And that honestly, it's just like, especially where we are now in America.
Reinhard Heydrich says blue lives matter.
Like straight up.
Yeah.
Fucking straight up is like blue lives matter.
This is like the fucking the thin the thin blue Reich, you know?
Yeah, the thin blue Reich.
Thank you for that.
Yeah, it really is.
It's uh oh God.
Just fucking someone just printing out all your tweets and making you walk around barefoot.
Yeah.
Now up to this point, Reinhard's achievements amount to little more than being a good liar and knowing how to do very basic thug shit.
But it was during this period that he would really distinguish himself as an innovator by helping to develop a new tool for repression.
So German law, when the Nazis came to power, provided for something called Schutzhoft or protective custody.
This gave police the power under certain circumstances to detain a person without judicial review.
So without a warrant, without charges, to essentially arrest someone, to take them into custody.
And I think the original idea was to allow the police to take someone into custody who might present a danger to themselves, who might be in danger, who was in a situation.
And it was in a situation where they couldn't get a ruling for the courts at the same time, right?
Right.
The problem with giving the police any powers like this, even if the goal is maybe to protect people, is that once that power exists, fascists will find a way to use it, which is the same problem we're having and will continue to have with our police.
Now, in 1933, Heydrich and his colleagues redefined protective custody in a way that allowed his SD and policemen to detain any citizen for any reason without involving the courts.
This is the start of the development of the concentration camp system.
This is the legal underpinning of why they're able to exist, of how they're justified under the law.
From this point forward, no court cases or warrants were necessary for the police to take in someone who was defined by the Nazis as, quote, an enemy of the Reich.
Now, all these arrestees had to be put somewhere, and the existing state prison and jail facilities were hardly built to accommodate such numbers.
In March of 1933, an abandoned munitions factory was converted into a concentration camp.
This was not the first under the Nazis.
There were prior to this, what were called wild concentration camps.
They're basically just like, we're going to appropriate a facility to stick people we're arresting, right?
But they, they get, and Heydrich is not the only person, but he's a major driver of this.
They, they get this abandoned munitions factory, they put walls around it, they turn it into a concentration camp.
Now, you want to guess what the town this factory is in is called?
Oh, God.
Guess what the town?
It's called summer village, you might have heard of.
Called Dachau.
Oh, Dachau.
Yeah, that was.
Yeah, this is Dachau.
Yeah.
So the facility is quickly put in the hands of the SS.
Heydrich is not in charge of Dachau, but he's in charge of who goes to Dachau and when they're released, right?
That's important.
There's a separation of powers here, but he's a big part of the Dachau system because it's he who gets to choose who gets sent there, you know?
Dachau is you, everyone knows the name Dachau.
There's a shiver down the human spine when you say it.
It was a horrible place.
Prisoners were relatively regularly beaten to death.
13 people were killed in one month in 1933, and a lot more would follow.
By early 1934, Reinhardt's police had arrested more than 16,000 people.
Most of these people were beaten, arrested, and released, and given a warning.
Basically, you were arresting these people, you beat the shit out of them, and you say, Hey, stay the fuck out of politics from now.
Right?
Yeah.
More than 2,000, though, the people who were like seen as the real threats, were interned in Dachau.
Now, it's important to note that the Nazis and Himmler in particular, again, we're big about separation of responsibilities.
So the guy who actually runs Dachau is a fellow named Theodore Ike.
And we're going to talk about him for just a little bit because, like Heydrich, Ike was a former military man who had been dismissed very quickly for bad behavior.
So he'd been disgraced because of like fucked up shit he did in the military, kicked out of the military.
He had actually been arrested in the Weimar years and sent to a psychiatric asylum because he had illegal explosives that he was planning to do something fucked up with.
He's like a McVeigh kind of guy you get there.
Yeah, yeah.
So he does well under the Nazis and they give him, they put him in charge of Dachau.
And part of why I'm bringing Ike's story up is because he and Heydrich have a similar background.
These are guys who had nothing before Nazism, who had disgraced themselves, and Nazism gave them a second chance.
And they really saw it, not just in ideological terms, but this is my only chance to matter.
Right.
Because the Nazi regime was fiercely competitive.
And because competing within that crew often meant being the hardest and most violent, Heydrich and Ike would both compete to see who could be the most brutal.
And that's a big part of why Dachau becomes so horrible.
Heydrich's guys are competing to see how many people they can arrest, how brutally they can crack down on dissent, how frightening they can be.
Ike is competing with his to make his concentration camp the most horrifying place he possibly can.
None of them are getting necessarily for most of the stuff, they're not getting orders from above.
Heydrich's Second Chance00:10:55
They're interpreting things that their superiors are saying in passing and seeing what can I do to please them.
And that leads them to be as extreme as possible.
God, it's just like, it just like spawned from this like fucking petty egoistic competition about who could be a bigger piece of shit.
It's like exactly.
You know, it's like fucking John Lennon writing Strawberry Fields and Paul McCartney writing, you know, Penny Lane, but like the dark side of that.
You know, it's like they both made themselves better at what they did, but at murder.
But it, but, but at murder.
Yes.
You could call Reinhard Heydrich, Theodore Ike, Heinrich Himmler, the Beatles of genocide.
That's what I'm trying to do is tie the Beatles into Nazism.
Can we get a t-shirt that's like the cover of Abbey Road, but with the Nazis walking across the street?
Can we, you think that's going to go over well?
Yeah, I think that'll be a really useful merch.
All right.
I'm going to make it on my own.
Yeah.
I mean, conceptually, I get it, but probably not something that I would walk around with.
Yeah.
It's not a joke people passing on the street would get necessary.
Yeah.
You know, I still, I still get, I still get strange looks when I wear the maybe leaders are a bad idea merch.
Well, I like that.
That's great though.
I'm not rushmore, but with all the worst bastards ever.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
I could see how that's hard.
Yeah, that could be a lot of fun.
Hard sell can be misinterpreted.
Fun to wear to family events, though.
You bring the shirt.
Yeah, you bring it to family events and you mostly just keep it inside.
I have a shirt, an entire t-shirt that's just a giant close-up of a butthole.
And I don't wear it outside, you know, but I enjoy that I have it.
Yeah.
I have a t-shirt from the band Millions of Dead Cops, which I only wear when I'm not driving anywhere.
Yeah, because you do not want to get pulled over in that shirt.
I mean, my behind-the-police shirt is strictly for the Helms.
Yeah.
All of your merch are just shirts no one wears.
Don't wear these if you might be pulled over in the please.
So, again, it's important to understand kind of the way these guys are kind of independently trying to top each other.
And that's how a lot of these, that's how a lot of the worst crimes of the Nazi regime are committed.
And I'm going to quote from Robert Gervoth again.
Heydrich's actions cannot simply be understood as those of a bloodthirsty sadist playing a preconceived role in building a totalitarian police state.
Since joining the SS in 1931, he had immersed himself in a political milieu which thrived on the notion of being locked in a life and death struggle.
Winning that struggle required decisive action against enemies in respect of whom even the most unimaginable cruelty was justified.
As his future deputy, Werner Best observed, Heydrich tended to project his own proclivity towards intrigues and violence onto his real or imagined enemies.
Finally, free to move against an ideological enemy who had supposedly enjoyed the upper hand until 1933, he considered terror a justifiable weapon.
In fact, the only adequate weapon against such evil.
We could talk about QAnon here.
We could talk about the modern Republican Party, the way that framing your enemies as like demonic, like inherently destructive, omnicile foes justifies any kind of terror you can dream of.
Both away from it.
Inhuman and also the perception that they are just constantly on top, even in moments in which you are literally on top.
Yeah.
So if you happen to get, you have to murder them as soon as you get the chance because they're always winning otherwise.
Right.
Because they're just trying to be in the playing field.
Yeah.
Because they would murder me if they had the chance to do it.
And it's like, well, they've been had the chance to do it.
They never did.
They actually didn't.
Yeah, yeah.
You notice you're still alive and they never did that.
But yeah.
No, I never noticed that.
Anyway, so while Heydrich used terror as a weapon, he also spent a lot of his time in this period and throughout actually his early career as a Nazi, as much as he is arresting dissidents, having them tortured, having them sent to concentration camps, as much as he does that, he threatens his subordinates with punishment for illegally beating or killing detainees.
This was not out of any kind of humanitarian desire.
This is out of the fact that he wants to be seen.
He wants the system he is running to be seen as orderly and lawful.
He does not want the majority of the German population to be frightened of the Nazis because at this point, they're still trying to win public support.
And all these guys who will be fine with, if you say, I've put a criminal in a concentration camp, they're like, fine.
If they see a dude getting beaten in the street, that's disorder.
That's nasty.
They don't like that.
They want every death to be at least have some semblance of justification in the eyes of people who aren't there, who don't know the reasons why, and who are just going to take the story, the general story that the fucking, that the perpetrators are going to be.
It's like a lot of Republicans were horrified by the George Floyd video.
But at the same time, as long as they don't see a video of it, they're just like, oh, well, he might have had a gun.
They don't care.
All they need to know is like, oh, a cop shot a dangerous man.
I don't care about that.
You see the reality of it and it horrifies you.
That's the thing Heydrich, he's very savvy.
He knows, I don't want random street violence.
I don't want pogroms.
I want orderly, state-sanctioned legal repression and murder.
That's Heydrich's fucking bag, baby.
Yeah.
So one of Heydrich's most prominent victims in this period was the Nobel laureate and critic of the Nazis, Thomas Mann.
Now, Mann had the fortune to be out on a reading tour of Europe when the Nazis took power, and he had been a vociferous critic of the Nazis, very public.
He's a very famous intellectual.
He'd been attacking them for years, and he's out of Germany when they take power.
And he is a smart guy, so he's like, I'm not going back home.
Right.
Seems like this isn't going to be good for me.
I'm going to hang out elsewhere and wait this shit out.
I'm going to just chill for a minute on this whole going back to Germany thing.
Just kind of see what happened.
Yeah, I think I'm going to let this play out a little bit before I go back.
And while he was away, Heydrich's police raided Mann's home and took his cars, bank accounts, and private possessions.
He eventually succeeded in having Thomas Mann stripped of his German citizenship.
By 1934, Himmler and Heydrich had created a remarkably effective terror regime in Bavaria.
Their superiors noted their success and noted that Bavaria, Nazi control, is more complete.
Their elimination of political enemies had been more effectively carried out than anywhere else in the new Reich.
And so in April of 1934, Heydrich is given control of the Prussian Gestapo as well.
And we're not going to talk about, the Gestapo doesn't exist before the Nazis.
The Gestapo is kind of like unifying these Nazi intelligence apparatuses with the state political police, and that becomes the Gestapo.
That's more Goering's bag, but Heydrich is kind of from the beginning in control of a lot of it, in control of the practical details of what it does, at least.
And so he's given control of the Prussian Gestapo in 1934.
This puts thousands of secret police in multiple states under his hands.
So now he's basically in charge of repression in Bavaria and in Prussia.
It also means that he's now officially a big man in the Nazi party.
And this would give him meaningful input during the next critical stage of Nazi development.
Now, if you'll remember, Ernst Röhm and his brown shirts had been a major locus of Nazi power in the early years.
These guys are Hitler's street fighters, his gangsters.
And Rome is a military veteran.
He's a very tough man.
He's good at organizing street fighters.
He's also a revolutionary.
Rome isn't satisfied when Hitler takes power.
For one thing, he doesn't want to rebuild the German military.
He wants to replace the military with his SA.
And he's not someone who's ever going to be satisfied with what the Nazi state became because he's just a lot more radical than that.
And once you're in power, a guy like Rome is a liability.
Big ass threat.
Yeah, because he keeps doing the street terror and random violence and shit.
And at this point, the Nazis are trying to play nice with the conservatives.
They want the center-right, the middle-class majority of Germany, to like see like, oh, these Nazi guys are safe and normal, and we can have a stable society under them.
So they got to get rid of fucking Rome.
And I'm going to quote from a write-up by Bleeker Street Media here.
While still fiercely loyal to Hitler, Rome's vision for Nazi Party future was increasingly at odds with Hitler's.
For Heydrich and Himmler, there was a more pragmatic problem with the SA.
Although the two men ran the SD and the Gestapo, these organizations were officially under the domain of the SA in Rome.
To secure their independence, Himmler and Heydrich conspired with Hermann Gohring to create a case against Rome.
On June 24th, 1934, Heydrich presented a dossier of fabricated evidence to Hitler that detailed a treasonous plot in which the French were paying Rome 12 million marks to overthrow the Reich.
Based on Heydrich's trumped-up report, Hitler authorized a surprise attack against the SA to take place on June 30th.
Heydrich's men swooped in, arresting Rome with 80, along with 85 of his top officers, many of whom were intentionally shot to death in the process.
When the smoke cleared, the SA had been dissolved.
Between 150 and 200 people, including Rome, had been murdered.
And Heydrich and Himmler were now free to run the SD and Gestapo as they saw fit.
This is the night of long knives.
Heydrich is the big man orchestrating this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You got to love a foreign plot.
That's just classic.
That's a classic tactic.
Just, you know, he's fucking, I heard him talking to a Portuguese guy about taking over.
So time to murder all of them.
It's really, it's smart.
It always works.
Yep.
Yeah.
Yep.
Now, so after the Night of Long Knives, the big thing that this does is it removes the SS finally from underneath the SA's shadow.
And because of this, the SA is able to grow to become the preeminent terror organization within the Nazi state.
Now, while Heydrich's career was soaring, his income began to increase commensurately as well.
He benefited from a number of loans from wealthy members of the Nazi party, which he was not expected to repay.
He's basically just being given money.
It's graft, you know?
So he's able to build a mansion and a summer home and a hunting lodge.
And despite his new wealth, he could not be arsed to take care of his family.
His parents were destitute still and they begged him for loans.
Despite the fact that he'd begged them for a loan two and a half years earlier, he turns them down and doesn't give them a fucking dime.
Damn.
Yeah.
He's cold as ice.
He's cold as ice.
His sister repeatedly tells him their parents are going to starve if he doesn't help.
Nazi Party Graft00:03:27
And eventually he's able to give, he gives his mom like a little bit of money, but he requires her to take care of his kids in order to get it.
Like he's just fucking completely makes her work.
Yeah, he's just such a piece of shit.
Yeah.
It's called a welfare to work program.
Okay, mom.
And obviously we're talking about one of the worst dudes in history, being a dick to his family kind of pales.
But I think it's useful because it provides some context just because of like, this guy wasn't even nice to the people he loved.
He wasn't even nice to his mom.
Like, he's just a real bad person.
Yeah, yeah.
It just, it adds color to it because you're just like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
He hates the Jews.
He's going to kill all the communists.
Blah, But his own mother, fucking A. Robert.
Robert, you know who will be nice to all of our moms.
Nice.
The products and services that support this podcast?
I mean, one would hope.
Except for Raytheon, because you know who likes to show up at weddings is moms.
And you know what Raytheon likes to do to weddings.
Here's some ads.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
If you play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Warden.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
Goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be right.
It wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Stat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
Knife Missile Logic00:05:00
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired in the City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back and we're talking about the Raytheon bit that I've been doing for like a year and change now.
Yeah.
Probably our longest running bit.
And I try to, like, we've had a number of running bits on the show that I try to recycle because I don't want shit to get old.
You know, like we don't do the Dorito stuff anymore.
We don't go throwing bagels anymore.
I missed it.
We may, I mean, when we can go in person again, we'll have a redux of throwing shit around the studio because it is fun, but you don't want things to get too old.
I can't stop with Raytheon.
I can't quit them because they're just.
They just give us material.
There's an evil company whose former executive runs the defense department who has like orchestrated a series of who's who's like largely responsible for instigating and continuing to fund violence in a number of international countries in order to like make profit for themselves.
And their name is Raytheon.
They're called Raytheon like fucking hell.
Just amazing.
Just like a classic super villain name.
And I also, you know, I love any like evil corporation social media account during any month in which there's supposed to be like, you know, sort of like an ethnic pride or like gay pride.
And they're just woke Raytheon.
Raytheon, we love trans people.
We're Raytheon.
So Raytheon is asking all of our customers to be better.
Yeah.
Not themselves.
I love it when IBM does shit like that because they literally built the punch card system that trains the Jews that Heydrich used in order to orchestrate the Holocaust.
Thanks, IBM.
Surely Raytheon will never be a part of anything like that.
No, certainly.
They wouldn't let their missile guidance technology be used to massacre, I don't know, dissidents against the U.S. government or against like a U.S.-backed regime in a foreign country.
That would never be the Raytheon.
Not Raytheon.
No.
Not Raytheon.
They support all AAPI people, as you can tell by last month's tweet.
Thanks for that, Raytheon.
Oh, God.
People keep like telling me that they found out that the knife missile, the R9X, exists and they thought it was a joke I was making at first.
Like you can't joke about the funniest thing about the knife missile, too, is it's they built this missile that is just filled with knives so that they can kill people who are like, they can kill a single target without killing the people around them, right?
Because a knife missile, less collateral damage than an excuse.
I guess.
It's legitimately the fucked up thing about the knife missile, it's the best idea anyone's had in the war on terror in 20 years.
Which doesn't mean it's not awful, but it's the only good idea they ever had.
It was like, oh, hey, we could actually kill less people with a knife missile.
Yeah, right.
And it was invented by a middle schooler in the 90s who liked new metal.
You know, it's like the most new metal idea.
This is my band.
Knife missile.
Defining the Jewish Enemy00:15:43
Oh, man.
Fucking Raytheon.
Anyway, when compared, yeah, so throughout the rest of the early and mid-1930s, Reinhard Heydrich embarked on a project to take control of all political intelligence gathering agencies in Germany.
And I'm not going to go into extreme detail about all the politicking and Nazi infighting here.
The book Hitler's Hangman is, I think it's a very good biography, very readable biography, goes into a lot of detail about this.
What's important is how he directed the increasingly powerful intelligence apparatus he came to control.
Now, early on, the Nazis had had real enemies.
You know, communists and social democrats were trying to stop the Nazis, right?
They were trying to make a different kind of government.
They were legitimately enemies of the Nazis.
By 1935, Reinhard, largely Reinhard, but he and his colleagues have wiped out the communist underground.
There is no more political opposition to the regime that has any kind of meaningful power.
Those guys have all been killed, put in concentration camps, or frightened outside of political activism.
This presented a problem because the Reich Interior Minister, a guy named Wilhelm Frick, who is a conservative more than really a Nazi, he doesn't really want a totalitarian state, right?
He wants a right-wing dominated state where the left is illegal, but he doesn't want like, he doesn't want to live in what Nazi Germany becomes.
And he's on paper Himmler's boss.
And now that the regime has wiped out the left, he's like, well, we should probably get rid of these extrajudicial powers we gave the SS to allow them to wipe out the left.
Otherwise, this could get bad.
We don't want this to get weird.
Yeah, we don't want this to get bad.
Yeah.
Oh, frick, giant piece of shit.
So Frick, there's a fight between him and Himmler and Heydrich.
And Frick loses this fight in June of 1936 when Hitler formally appoints Himmler head of all German police.
And I'm going to quote from the book Hitler's Hangman here.
The victory of the SS in the power struggle with the Reich Interior Ministry was primarily the result of Hitler's decision to favor a more open-ended definition of Nazism's enemies, a definition which Heydrich had crucially contributed to and which went far beyond the persecution of the political opposition that is typical of all dictatorships.
In late 1934, Himmler and Heydrich came to the conclusion that the justification of a permanent police state required a carefully elaborated scenario, portraying an all-pervasive and subtly camouflaged network of enemies who made necessary and extensive and sophisticated security system to detect, expose, and defeat them.
In 1935, in a series of articles for the SS journal Das Schwarzkorp and republished in 1936 as The Transformations of Our Struggle, Heydrich publicly defined such threats and the means to combat them, indicating the need for a momentous reorientation of the Gestapo's activities.
His central argument was that even after the successful elimination of the KPD and the SPD, the Communists and the Social Democrats, the enemies of the German people were by no means defeated.
After achieving the immediate goal of Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January 1933, many Germans wrongly assumed that Nazi rule was now permanently secured.
Heydrich insisted that the battle was by no means over.
Instead, the struggle against Germany's enemies now faced its most difficult and ultimately its decisive phase, which would require, quote, years of bitter struggle in order to repulse and destroy the enemy once and for all.
According to Heydrich, the driving forces of the enemy always remained the same: world Jewry, world Freemasonry, and political priests who abused the freedom of religious expression and spirituality of large portions of the population for political reasons.
First of all, I love that this is just like the foreign plot is now coming from inside the house.
Yeah.
It could be anyone, specifically the Jews and the Freemasons and the Jesuits.
Yeah, and the Jesuits, yes.
Which, and the fucking weren't these guys Freemasons?
Wasn't he a Freemason?
His dad was.
His dad was.
Yeah.
No wonder he's that's this is why he's letting his dad starve.
He's like, he's damned.
I'm part of the plot.
I think he believes only parts of what he's saying.
No, of course.
Yeah.
Now, this is where we get into, because again, he's saying this because it justifies his power, right?
Right.
This is one of the most important things you have to understand about the Nazis.
First off, even when Hitler came to power, it was not a foregone conclusion that Nazi Germany would become the kind of totalitarian state that it did or that the Holocaust would happen.
We can argue over whether or not Hitler had a grand scheme or a desire to do that from the beginning, but it was not foregone that he would have the power, even once he was in charge, because once he became the chancellor, there are still a lot of people in the government, people in the military who could overthrow him, who could kick him out, and who didn't agree with most of what he was saying.
And the evidence we have shows that Hitler did not pursue genocide in an organized and cohesive manner from the beginning of his time in power.
The pivot from left-wingers as enemies to Jews and other internal enemies, which was orchestrated by Heydrich and justified by him in his public columns, was a key part of why the Holocaust came to pass.
And while Reinhardt was surely an anti-Semite by this period, he did this for fundamentally careerist reasons.
If the Reich's new enemies were elusive racial and religious enemies, the police were clearly ill-equipped to handle such a threat.
He was able to increase his personal power and his personal clout by pitching the SS, his SS, as the ideological shock troops, which is what he called them, of Nazism.
Oh, man.
So it's just like, you know, it's completely void of any ideology beyond your own personal power.
Not void, because I think he probably tells himself and believes elements of what he's saying, but the ideology is secondary to the desire for power.
Yeah, it's secondary to it.
It's like, you know, because you can take any German off the street in this period and they have, you know, a cultural fucking anti-Semitism, right?
Yeah.
But like this guy is actively organizing a mass genocide because he wants a better title and he wants more people to work under him.
I mean, just like, this is like, this is the logical conclusion of anyone in like the PMC class.
It's like, I want to be the biggest, baddest middle manager of all time.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
Pretty.
And it's kind of Heydrich.
Yeah.
He's a genocidal PMC.
Yeah.
Now, Reinhardt saw Freemasonry and communism, in fact, and also the political church, right?
Which is the Catholic church here.
You said Jesuits earlier.
That's a big part of he goes after the Catholics.
He does have to be very careful going after the Catholics because a lot of Germans are Catholics.
And he is too.
And I mean, yeah, he is too.
So he, one of the ways he frames this is that like Freemasons, communists, these political clerics are agents of Judaism.
So Judaism is just one of a couple of internal enemies, but it's the one that's behind the others generally.
And in fact, all social justice movements, and they do frame this as like they call it social justice movements, are part of a scheme to weaken Germany by the Jews.
In order to combat this scheme, Heydrich and his men would need, quote, utter hardness.
He acknowledged that the cruelty his men would have to display in order to do what was necessary would be difficult for them, saying at one meeting, quote, it is almost too difficult for an individual, but we must be hard as granite or else our Führer's work will be in vain.
Much later, people will be grateful for what we have taken upon us.
Oh, God.
It's just like, we all have to just stick together, just a bunch of men, hard as a rock.
Hard as a rock.
Just hard dudes.
Just hard dudes, just fucking, oh, I'm talking veiny and hard.
That's what we have to be in order to accomplish this.
Heydrich was a major reason why the German police operated throughout the Reich in a permanent state of emergency.
That's his, a big part his doing.
He's the guy who suggests this at least.
He's like, we have extra powers because of a state of emergency.
If the state of emergency is over because you've purged all of your political enemies, you lose those powers.
So he's like, no, no, no, no, because of all the Jews and the Freeman, there's still an emergency.
So we need these powers still.
They never leave this state of emergency.
Yeah.
Now, to help develop new plans to deal with this new threat, he brings experts into the SS.
One of these experts, his Jewish expert, is a guy you might have heard of named Adolf Eichmann.
Now, later on in the 60s, when he goes to trial and is eventually executed by the state of Israel, Mahana Arendt will famously write of Eichmann that he embodied the banality of evil because he's a middle manager type guy.
He's this dude who looks like someone you might see in line at the fucking elementary school, picking his kid up in a minivan.
And he's a big, he's like Heydrich in that he's a he's an implementation guy, you know?
He's not the guy out there giving the speeches.
He doesn't get anybody, like he doesn't, he doesn't fire up the masses.
But in a meeting when you've got like multiple different government agencies, Heydrich and Eichmann are the guys who are capable of wrangling everyone together.
They're like whips in the Senate, right?
They whip votes, they whip support together, and they organize and figure out how to carry out plans of action.
Adolf Eichmann is hired to the SS as his Jewish expert.
And his experience for being a Jewish expert is that he speaks a little Yiddish.
Not at that point.
Oh, no.
Okay.
He eventually does learn some Yiddish.
He had been a salesman and he liked crime books.
He liked detective novels.
He liked the same books that Heydrich did.
That's why he gets the job.
You're the Jew expert.
You like the same books and you used to go to that deli all the time?
You know a thing or two.
You ate locks once, get it.
You've had a kosher dill?
Get over here.
Tell us about them.
What are they like?
The articles Heydrich wrote about the internal Jewish threat played a direct role in bringing on what scholars called the second anti-Semitic wave in Nazi Germany, which began in 1935 with mass spontaneous violence against Jewish people and businesses.
Heydrich hated this because it was bad for the economy and for the sense of order.
He knew that the German middle-class center-right families did not like seeing that shit.
The Nuremberg laws then were a response to street anti-Semitism.
The Nuremberg laws existed to stop people from beating and murdering Jews in the street and destroying their businesses because that shit is bad for business.
Right.
They were like, no, Listen, we're going to do this through the state.
We're going to have to do the state put their metaphorical boot on their neck.
Yes.
We need to oppress the Jews with law, not with random street violence.
Exactly, exactly.
And we need to know, you know, what constitutes a Jew.
We need to know how much blood you need to have, you know, how many times, you know, you've been to the theater.
You know, we need to know all this stuff first before we can categorize you.
Exactly.
And that's a big part of the Nuremberg laws.
We're not going to go into nearly enough detail.
I mean, there's whole books written just about the Nuremberg laws.
There's this process of determining what a Jew is.
Because this is, and this is a big misconception.
The Jews are not targeted by the Nazi state for their religion.
No.
They are targeted for their ethnicity.
If you're someone who had a Jewish mom and you're a hardcore Protestant or a Catholic, you're a Jew to Reinhard Heydrich.
If you're an atheist and you marry a fucking bohemian woman who's a Catholic, you're a Jew to Reinhard Heydrich.
It didn't even matter if it was within Jewish law, like if you had a Jewish father, but not a Jewish mother.
Like, you know, that's not halalically Jewish.
And it depends.
Because like under the Nuremberg laws, I think this guy wouldn't be a Jew.
Right, right, right.
He changed.
Yeah, he liked the Nuremberg laws, but he thought they didn't go far enough.
And one of his big issues is that, well, this doesn't define enough people as Jewish, right?
There's too many ways for someone with Jewish ancestry to slip into the people's racial community.
And that's a problem for me.
But he sees still, this is a big step forward, right?
The Nuremberg Laws, because now this is the first real legal justification for sustained persecution of the Jews under the Nazi regime.
Now, in 1934, Heydrich had suggested in an internal memo that, quote, the aim of Jewish policies must be the immigration of all Jews.
And he urged that voluntary immigration could be achieved by creating a legal climate so oppressive that Jewish people could no longer stand to stay in the Reich.
To further this end, in 1935, he had the Gestapo start keeping track of all Jewish German residents.
In 1936, he started monitoring their financial transactions to stop them from putting their money in foreign banks.
They had to leave, but he wanted most of their wealth to remain.
Now, Heydrich supported, to an extent, the Zionist movement in Palestine.
And in fact, we have these memos from him where he's saying, like, I want to crack down on any sort of organizations supporting Jewish assimilation into German culture, but we should support the Zionist movement.
And in fact, he actually sends Adolf Eichmann to Palestine in the 30s to talk with a member of the Haganah, which becomes the IDF, to discuss how they could urge further immigration.
And we should go into more detail about this.
There's some wild shit in this meeting, including the fact that This emissary of the Zionist movement tells Eichmann that the German, like, they're having problems with the German Jews who are leaving Germany and coming to Palestine because, number one, they don't plan to stay.
They want to go back to Europe.
And they're, in his words, work shy, which is also what the Nazis describe.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
It's really a lot of interesting history there.
Very interesting internal anti-Semitism amongst the kind of like right-wing class in Israel.
Yeah.
And it doesn't like, again, as soon as the war starts, really, the vast majority of the Zionist movement, like is not just anti-Nazi, is like actively shooting Nazis.
Oh, of course, of course, of course.
But there's, as we talked about in some other episodes, there's a chunk of them that are willing to work with these guys because they both think Jews shouldn't assimilate.
Right.
Yeah.
Now, even the Nazis were not uniform in their attitudes about what should be done to the Jews.
And again, this is actually a thing that there's a lot of debate over because there's large chunks of the Nazi party who want the street violence, who think that the pogroms are the way to go about achieving their ends.
Goebbels is a big chunk of this.
Goebbels supports kind of a colotic melange of boycotts, street violence, and vandalism against Jews.
That's why he and his propaganda arms are trying, are stirring up a lot of this street violence, right?
That's their goal is to get Germans out in the street doing violence and destroying Jewish property.
And there's a big competition between these two wings of the German party, both of which are essentially proposing different answers to the Jewish question.
Goebbels is saying, you know, we beat them and kill them in the street, force, and that'll force, you know, the ones we don't beat and kill to leave.
Heydrich is saying, no, no, no, we use the law to in an orderly way oppress them so that they leave.
Those are two different answers to the Jewish question.
In late 1935, these various sides of the Nazi party kind of came together, decided, like, we can't keep arguing over this.
We have to have a concerted strategy.
Weird Nazi Occultism00:03:57
And they held a big how to racism meeting.
Now, the impetus of this was a massive pogrom in 1935 that did millions of dollars in damage to the German economy.
Because again, when you run through the streets destroying businesses and departments, it's bad for business.
Right, right, right.
Yeah.
These economies don't exist in a vacuum.
Like you're actively hurting the German economy as well when you are doing this.
Yeah.
And so in this meeting is actually called because the German economic minister, a guy named Hjalmar Schacht, who's a friend of the Dulles brothers and also, I think, a friend of the Koch brothers' dad.
He's an anti-Semite, but he's...
I'll just tell you, I am shocked.
He's shocked.
Shocky.
Having fun with names.
That's good.
So he felt that the economic consequences of this were unacceptable.
And so he holds this meeting to be like, we have to figure out a better way to do this.
And Heydrich is very much in agreement with Schacht in this.
And he takes this meeting as an opportunity to try to whip, again, the thing he does best.
He tries to whip everyone in line behind his strategy.
He says during the meeting, quote, the only way to both get the Jews out and avoid violence is a concerted campaign of economic marginalization.
He also suggested a ban on mixed marriage, the prosecution of sexual intercourse between Jews and Aryans, and restrictions of Jewish freedom of movement.
His suggestion in this meeting led directly to the Nuremberg laws, which were formulated that September.
So again, that's why this all happens.
So the Nuremberg laws are the legal basis for all organized Nazi persecution of Jews and are the first concrete step towards the Holocaust.
And Heydrich's performance in that meeting, his ability to wrangle his fellow Nazis towards his desired plan of action, establishes him as the leading Nazi authority on the Jewish question.
Now, the mid-1930s are also the height of the weird Nazi period.
This is the time when the occult wings of the party were at their strongest.
The shit you see in Hellboy, right?
Elements of that were real.
There was a bunch of weird, like, ah, Heinrich Himmler thinking he's the reincarnation of a Danish prince, right?
Hitler's best buddy, who Rudolf, I think it was Rudolf Hess.
Yeah, um, who was like super into the occult and was like doing like seances and shit.
Yeah, this is when they went like doing like full nerd shit, just nerding out on paganism.
And that's not a big factor once the war starts, even right before the war starts.
And in fact, Hess's flight to Europe, because he kind of loses his mind and flies to England to try to get that's like a big part of like because he had been such an advocate of this and because he had so Hitler saw it as like a kind of a betrayal, like that that kind of spells an end to the influence of that.
But there's always a level of it in the SS.
Um, and this is talked about a lot, it's probably overemphasized.
Now, it's fair to say, Heinrich Himmler, Hitler, the other big Nazis didn't trust his Christianity, particularly Catholicism, and they wanted to minimize its influence both in the Reich and in the SS.
To this end, Hitler replaced marriage ceremonies for SS men with the Echwei, which was a new fascist wedding ritual.
He replaced Easter celebrations with Midsummer celebrations, and he brought in a whole host of pagan rituals he claimed were ancient German old-time religion.
Now, this new quasi-faith that Himmler kind of cobbles together for the SS is called Gaut Glaubitkeit.
And it was not popular.
Again, this gets overemphasized.
At its height, about 22% of the SS follows this, whatever you want to call it, religion.
About 54% are Protestant, and the rest are Catholic.
Heydrich is one of the 22% who buys into Himmler's weird neo-pagan Nazi thing.
Although, this is more toadying.
He's trying to impress his boss by doing this.
After the war, Lena Heydrich would claim that she and her husband made fun of Himmler's weird religion in private.
So he's not very committed to this.
It doesn't.
He's doing virtue, virtue signaling to his Nazi overlords.
But you know who won't virtue signal to their Nazi overlords, Matt is it the products and services?
That's that is right.
Toadying to Himmler00:04:27
It is the products and services that support this podcast.
None of them are believers in German pagan SS philosophy.
Yeah, they will never do weird Nazi weddings unless you want them to.
Yeah, I mean, well, okay, let's just roll the ads at this point.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by: rule one: never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, Trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands.
I said, Oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's gonna get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends, trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, And dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, If it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, But there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, Just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Stat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
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10-10 shots fired.
City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
Murder at City Hall00:15:23
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listening to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
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Ah, we're back.
So in 1936, Heydrich launched a systematic torture campaign against the Jehovah's Witnesses.
And the Jehovah's Witnesses, this is important to note in terms of like absolute numbers, not a lot of these guys, not a sizable chunk of the Holocaust, although a lot of them get killed relative to their population.
But the Jehovah's Witnesses are the only group in the Third Reich who was persecuted purely on the basis of their religion.
Right.
And that's because Jehovah's Witnesses refused to swear allegiance to governments, and that makes them enemies of the state under the Nazis.
Heydrich's crackdown would eventually lead 6,000 witnesses being arrested and interned in concentration camps.
Hundreds died in camps who were executed straight away.
I think they wore a purple triangle in the concentration camps.
Now, Heydrich's prosecution of Freemasonry was by comparison a lot less brutal, mainly because Freemasons didn't hold that much power.
And like, none of them are willing to die for their dumb clubs.
So once the Nazis take power, they all just kind of leave.
And he confiscates their stuff and he puts it in a museum.
In subsequent years, he establishes another, a similar museum, which is filled with Jewish artifacts.
And that's kind of his idea is like we need to have these museums to show people the dangers of this ideology and like how, but also how silly it is.
And like, how like that's that's you know, and what do you put in museum but things that no longer exist and are now in the past the most foreshadowing fucking scumbag shit ever.
Yeah, it's good shit.
Um, in 1937, Heydrich had his criminal police launch a massive dragnet operation against what he called habitual criminals and asocials.
Now, these were people who didn't work or didn't work enough or lived on the street or made their living in a less than legal manner.
By the end of 1938, nearly 20,000 asocials were in preventative detention.
These people were also sent to concentration camps, mostly as a scare tactic.
The Reich was in the midst of a labor shortage, and the point of this particular campaign was to force people to work, not to kill them.
Now, all these different crusades in the late 30s taxed the concentration camp system, which had not been well planned from the beginning.
In late 1936 to 37, the SS reorganized the camps, shutting down most of the old ones and building new ones modeled off of Dachau.
From Hitler's Hangman, quote, the Dachau model, designed to regiment the prisoners and dehumanize their relations with the guards, was based on a system of graded punishment for various offenses, which ranged from denial of food to execution.
To dehumanize relations with prisoners, the guards' behavior was regulated to maintain distance and eliminate human contact.
The first of these camps was Sachsenhausen, north of Berlin.
And if you're ever in Berlin, I really recommend taking a tour of Sachsenhausen.
The German government does a very good job of doing, has done a good job of making these places into museums.
And when you get a tour at one of these places, it's not just like some dude who's doing a summer job, some kid.
It's somebody with like a degree.
Like the people who work there, I've talked with a number of them.
I did this tour.
You can have long conversations about Hannah or Rent, about the nature of fascism, about the development.
They're very knowledgeable.
I walked away very impressed.
And we did, the tour I went on was in like the dead of December.
So, you know, you're covered in snow.
It's freezing outside.
And everybody is like, you're bundled up.
It's the German winter, you know?
Right.
Yeah.
And you're walking around.
You're seeing this concentration camp.
You're seeing, I think one of the things that really stuck with me is they had these concrete pits, which are like these square pits, like 10 or 15 feet deep with a grate on top of them that people would be stuck in for days at a time.
And you could look in and you could see the marks where they'd clawed at the concrete.
There were like fingernail marks still in it.
And you would walk around like freezing your ass off, just utterly miserable in this cold.
And you would go inside and the first thing you would see was one of the concentration camp uniforms, which is this threadbare black and white unitard thing.
And it's just like this immediate, like, oh, oh.
Yeah.
Certainly not taking the cold of the German winter into account with the uniform.
Yeah.
Well, or you could argue, taking it very much into account and using it to kill people, you know?
So Heydrich was one of the major drivers and backers of the Dachau model.
And it's worth noting that unlike Heinrich Himmler, Himmler has trouble visiting the concentration camps.
He faints at Auschwitz.
What a bitch.
He does repeatedly.
Here's the thing, though.
He repeatedly visits these camps to see what they're doing.
Heydrich almost never does.
Now, this is probably not because it was too horrifying for him.
In fact, his biographer thinks it was because he wasn't actually in charge of the camp, right?
He decides who goes there and who's released from there.
Once he's inside the camps, he's in somebody else's domain.
And Theodore Eich, who we talked about earlier, the guy who's running the camps, he doesn't like Theodore.
They're both political enemies and they both are competing for Himmler's favor.
And so like, he doesn't want to go to the camps because he's putting himself basically in someone else's territory.
I love it.
He's like, why don't you go to these camps that you built to murder millions and millions of people?
Oh, I don't want to be rude to a co-worker.
Yeah.
Well, I will say at this point, these are not camps to murder people.
Right.
Yeah.
Murder happens, but the German concentration camps at this point, you could argue, no worse than the British concentration camps for the Boers, no worse, certainly no worse than some of the things that the Spanish camps did, no worse than some things that the British themselves had done at this point.
There is a difference.
And the thing is, Heydrich with these concentration camps is stealing an idea from people and it becomes more brutal than what had existed before when they transitioned to the Dachau model.
That is an escalation from what concentration camps had been.
Sure, but they certainly didn't invent it, nor did they invent the race science used to justify it.
What they invent are the death camps.
That is an innovation that Heydrich gets.
Yeah.
And again, that's what this episode is about.
So by the late 1930s, Heydrich is on paper, a member of the upper middle class.
And in reality, he's basically a millionaire.
This happens to all of the big Nazis.
And the way it worked for them is that they would receive allowances from the Gestapo, gifts and loans from prominent men in the Reich.
And his rough income on paper, like what he would legally admit to having, was about seven times what a middle-class German made.
And despite the fact that they're now rolling in cash, have multiple homes, Lina constantly complained that his salary was, quote, barely sufficient to live on.
In 1938, when his salary was increased yet again to eight times the German middle-class income, he cut the salaries of his two domestic servants.
Again, minor compared to the death camps, but it shows you like this guy is comprehensively changed.
I mean, yeah, he's going through a checklist of like fucking bullshit behavior of just banal evil shit, like fucking cutting the income.
And honestly, I love that his wife is like still being like, you know, you don't make enough money.
And he just has to be like, women, am I right?
They're always complaining about not having enough money for the shopping.
Oh my God.
Meingot.
Meing got.
God.
Women be shopping.
So Heydrich and Hitler first met at a birthday reception for the Fuhrer in the early 1930s.
And Hitler was impressed by Heydrich's Aryan looks and impressed by the fact that he and his wife are both kind of like Aryans.
And in fact, when he sees them, he says, what a beautiful couple.
I am most impressed.
I love every reaction to this guy is just like other Germans going, wow, he's very attractive.
Yeah, you're just like, wow, you look like we're supposed to look.
Yeah.
Like, none of us actually look.
Yeah, you look like we should.
This is what she's saying in the propaganda that we look like.
I love, I just want a world filled with Zach Morris's.
No more screeches.
No more screech, just Zach Morris.
Now, despite the fact Hitler is impressed with him from early on, especially kind of just likes the way he looks, Reinhard's never really in Hitler's inner circle.
They're not personally friends, but the Fuhrer increasingly by the late 30s came to trust him and see him as loyal and talented.
And he gives Heydrich increasing responsibility for settling the Jewish question.
Now, in the late 1930s, this is a fun little aside story, but we got to tell it.
This is part of his establishment of the Nazi security state.
In the late 30s, Reinhard becomes aware of a woman named Kitty Schmidt who operated a brothel in Berlin.
Now, as Germany's head cop, his job is technically to arrest her, but he had a better idea.
He had the SS take over the brothel and fill it with wiretaps.
Kitty still ran everything.
He allowed her to allow her to keep running her brothel as long as he could use it.
It's kind of like the Nazi best little whorehouse in Texas.
Yes.
And he's fascist Burt Reynolds.
Oh my God.
What a visual.
Wow, yeah.
So the SS, Kitty, like they basically revamp this brothel, and they do it for a specific reason.
They want to collect intelligence using prostitutes.
Sure.
So they, first off, kind of let go a lot of like the staff they see as lower class and they hire high-class German ladies.
Most of the women working here are like the wives or at least mistresses of wealthy upper-class German men.
They have a recruitment profile for women who work at the brothel, which reads, wanted are women and girls who are intelligent, multilingual, nationalistically minded, and furthermore, man-crazy.
We want the most boy-crazy horny fascist bitches.
That's what we want.
Give me all your horny fascist bitches.
Just like radio commercials.
Are you a horny fascist bitch?
Welcome.
Hi.
I'm Ghislaine Maxwell.
And here at the best.
Oh, man.
So the targets of this information gathering operation were German military officers, a lot of whom weren't Nazis, right?
Most people aren't Nazis, even in the Nazi regime at this point.
Yeah.
So German military officers who might not be loyal to Hitler, but also other Nazis and visiting foreign dignitaries, right?
So Reinhardt and his men would, you know, they would sit down.
They had a meeting with some guy.
You know, maybe they're having a meeting about some security matter.
Maybe they're having a meeting with a foreign ally.
And they would, at the end of the meeting, be like, hey, you know, you're in Berlin for another day or two for this meeting.
Here, here's a special code word.
If you go to this brothel, they'll give you the special menu with this code word.
And the menu did entitle them to this special menu of these like super, you know, from what the Nazis' point of view, high-class prostitutes.
Yeah, yeah.
But the menu, when you came in and told Kitty Schmidt this password, it also told her, Okay, turn on the recording equipment.
Right.
They want to eavesdrop on this guy while he's fucking.
I should have known when the passwords they gave me was honeypot, but I didn't put the pieces together.
So one of the customers of this brothel, it was the son-in-law and foreign minister of fascist Italy who repeatedly insulted Hitler while he was fucking.
While he was fucking.
Hitler's a kid.
I fucking hate that little man.
Oh, I guess he's a talented man.
Hitler can never do this.
He can't fuck this good.
He cannot fuck like me.
Look at the size of my penny.
Hitler has a one ball.
Single meataball.
He has only a one meataball.
And it is not a spicy one.
Oh, boy.
Yeah.
Wow.
So another who didn't give away anything, evidently, when he was there, was SS General Sepp Dietrich, who is a terrifying man.
In some ways, Sepp Dietrich is the founder of the idea of special forces.
Like he's a really legitimately frightening man.
And Sepp Dietrich, when he goes into this brothel, he gets the code word.
He seems to know he's being recorded, but he just wants to fuck.
So he goes in and demands all 20 of them women on the menu and has an all-night orgy with these ladies.
Oh, beautiful.
You know, I mean, I hate this guy on principle, but if you're going to do it, you know, live it up and just keep your mouth shut.
Yeah.
Goebbels was also a frequent customer.
He was said to enjoy lesbian displays.
Another big customer was a major German tank ace who liked to drink toilet water after women used the bathroom.
Yeah.
Classic German Scheiseporn.
Yeah.
Heydrich himself also regularly visited the brothel, although the microphones were turned off for his visits.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, that's wow.
Yep.
I mean, that's an amazing, amazing aside, you know, just like the levels of evil of this person.
They just run the gamut.
He's a real piece of shit.
Real piece of so when Germany annexed Austria, Heydrich's job was to put together a team of SS men to go into the stolen country and arrest political prisoners.
In addition to putting 2,000 people in camps, Heydrich's men launched a targeted operation to confiscate Jewish property.
He announced that anyone caught stealing from Jews, though, during this period, would be punished mercilessly because their wealth was property of the Reich.
So, both we're going to take everything the Jews have, but if random citizens start taking their shit, you're stealing from the government.
Yeah.
Now, there was, of course, a wide gulf between rhetoric and reality.
The kind of men who joined the SS were thugs, and they were never able to help themselves from beating and murdering and robbing, no matter what Heydrich said.
A big part of his job was putting out the PR fires started by his subordinates.
Much of the violence of the Anschluss came from Austrian Nazis, who took the end of their old government as an opportunity to let loose.
They burned and looted businesses.
Jews were forced by crowds to kneel and scrub the streets.
One observer later recalled: The underworld had opened up its gates and set loose its lowest, most disgusting hordes.
The city transformed itself into a nightmarish painting by Hieronymus Bosch.
Demons seemed to have crawled out of filthy eggs and risen from marshy burrows.
The air was constantly filled with a desolate, hysterical shrieking, and people's faces were distorted, some with fear, others with lies, still others with wild, hate-filled triumph.
One star, Yelp review.
Yeah, yeah, one star for the Anschluss.
One star.
Now, when the violence prompted an outcry, and again, an outcry even from some people who were in within the German government, Heydrich blamed the pogrom on disguised communists.
It's the worst.
It's Antifa.
Always.
It's always that.
One Star for Anschluss00:15:15
Oh, man.
He said they were trying to make Germany look bad and create propaganda for her foreign enemies.
After the initial uncontrolled violence, Heydrich's SS was able to push a more orderly terror.
He established a central office in Vienna, which would take and catalog Jewish property at the same time as it produced thousands of exit visas to allow Jewish families to leave the country.
Basically, the idea was that we're taking the property of the rich Jews to pay for the process of immigrating the other ones out of here, getting them exit visas, sending them elsewhere.
Now, this system would become a model used by other Nazi annexations, but it did not go quickly enough for many Germans.
The Anschluss brought 200,000 more Jews into the German Reich, which more than canceled out the 128,000 who had left by the end of 1937.
The most racist Germans were frustrated by this, and Heydrich responded with a crackdown on Polish Jewish immigrants in Germany.
So, one of the problems is they're trying to get these people out as fast as they can.
And they're even to the point where if you're rich, they'll take some of your money.
They'll leave you with some of it because otherwise you're not going to be taken anywhere.
And in general, the big problem they have is, and this is one of the things you do have to point out when you talk about, for example, Jewish immigration to Palestine during this period.
That was one of the only places they could go.
That was the number one place that Jewish refugees were able to go.
Everywhere was close to them.
Yeah, everywhere else.
Yeah.
No, the United States would not take any Jewish refugees.
We let boats full of Jewish refugees drown in the ocean because we wouldn't let them onto our shores.
So, and this is a problem for the Nazis, right?
Because they're trying to get these people out, but it's difficult to get there.
They're not taken.
And the places that are taking them are places like Czechoslovakia, which then the Germans take, or places like Poland, which they want.
The Polish state is as racist almost as the German state.
So the Polish state, these Jews who had fled Poland because there were pogroms in the early 1900s into Germany and had become German residents, get kicked out and forced into Poland, who denies their citizenship.
So they're like, it's a whole fucking mess.
No, it's earth in the 30s.
Real bad place.
Real bad place for the Jews.
Nobody wanted him.
And yeah, it's not fun for us.
And in 1938, one of the families who gets caught up in this, Heydrich is pushing the Polish refugees out of Germany.
Poland doesn't want to take them.
One of the families who gets fucked over in this are the Greenspans, G-R-Y-N-S-Z-P-A-N-S, but I think it's pronounced Greenspan or something like that.
Their son Herschel lived in Paris, and he was outraged by his family's suffering, by the fact that they'd gotten kicked out of Germany after barely building a life there.
And, you know, this, he kind of goes mad with grief.
And because everything seems fucked up, nothing seems, nothing, the Nazis aren't facing any consequences for their actions.
The international community isn't doing shit to stop it.
He can't think of anything better to do than to get a gun and go shoot a Nazi politician living in Paris.
A guy who worked in the Nazi state.
Can you blame him?
No, of course not.
He did nothing wrong.
Herschel Greenspan did nothing wrong.
Nothing wrong.
That's the shirt.
Yeah.
He shoots this guy, Ernst von Roth, and von Roth eventually dies of his injuries.
And I'm going to quote from a write-up in Bleecker Street Media here about what came next.
Three days later, Heydrich sent out a memo with the subject line, measures against the Jews tonight, a communication that directed the police to maintain a hands-off policy to the spontaneous national riots that Joseph Goebbels and he had orchestrated.
All night long, Jewish businesses were destroyed, homes vandalized or destroyed, and families rounded up and arrested, if not killed.
In London, the Times calculated the damage.
Quote, no foreign propagandist bent on blacketing Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of black guardly assaults on defenseless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday.
More than a thousand synagogues and 7,000 Jewish businesses had been attacked.
More than 90 people had been murdered, and 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps.
To add insult to injury, the Jewish people whose property had been destroyed were charged by the state with its cleanup.
This is the night of broken glass.
This is Kristallnacht.
And Heydrich's not the only one behind it, but he's one of the organizing forces behind Kristallnacht.
And maybe that seems a little bit odd considering his attitude towards street violence, but just wait for what comes next.
There's a reason why this is not the worst thing in the world for him.
No, yeah, yeah, yeah.
He's slowly becoming more and more okay with this.
Well, it's even more subtle than that.
It's even shittier than that.
So the night of broken glass, a lot of people don't know this, was a disaster for the Nazis and seen by Hitler and Goering in particular as a horrible idea because it brings them all this really bad international PR.
It makes them a pariah in the international community.
And it fucks the economy.
It does millions and millions of dollars of damage to the economy.
It sets back their five-year plan.
It's a real big problem for a lot of Nazis.
And because they're so unhappy about what has happened during the night of broken glass, they have a second big meeting of all the Nazis to be like, guys, we got to get on the same page about this.
So because there's another that Heydrich helps to instigate and ensure won't be stopped by his police, because there's another mass violent pogrom, that creates enough negative thought towards street violence that there's another meeting.
And what is Heydrich really fucking good at?
Taking control of meetings like this and getting everyone on board with his ideas.
He's a big meeting guy.
Yeah.
So Heydrich uses the opportunity to make the case again that, yeah, of course, street violence is bad.
It's bad for the economy.
It makes people not like us.
It makes us pariahs.
We need to attack Jews through the law in an orderly manner.
So he suggests an expansion of the restrictions that had been put in place, the Nuremberg laws.
For one thing, Jewish people should be restricted from using buses, from going to hospitals, from going to theaters, from visiting public parks and other public places.
He also suggested forcing Jewish citizens to wear a yellow star.
Now, during this, when he suggests this, even Hitler is like, well, that's a bit far.
Yeah.
That's a bit much.
Reinhardt, calm down.
Reinhardt.
You're going to Reinhard in the paint right now.
Going to need you to chillax and be Reinsoft.
Yeah.
This would be done eventually.
But in Reinhardt is the guy who kind of, he's the first big dude to suggest this.
But Reinhard, the thing that he succeeds in doing is he kind of very methodically during this meeting, he lays out how during the occupation of Vienna in 1938, his central office that he established had facilitated the expulsion of at least 50,000 Jews.
So he points out, like, he walks in through, here's how we got, we got 50,000 people in a matter of weeks out of Austria to leave for other countries.
No one else has gotten so many Jews to leave so quickly and so, you know, without so peacefully, without disruption to the state as I have.
And he claims that I can set up offices like this all throughout the Reich.
I can generalize this process and it won't cost us a dime because we'll pay to expel them with funds confiscated from wealthy Jews.
And he does a good enough job of laying this out that by the end of the meeting, everyone agrees to put Heydrich in charge of purging the German Reich of Jews.
He could do racism and balance the budget at the same time.
What a he's able to get, he's able to marshal everyone behind.
He's able to get them on the same page.
You can answer two questions, the Jewish question and who's going to pay for it?
The two questions.
Now, by the end of the meeting, everyone agreed to put Heydrich in charge of purging the German Reich of Jews.
He estimated this would take 10 years.
But for the first time since Hitler took power, the Nazis had a serious, actionable game plan to purge Central Europe of its Jews.
And this brings us back to the question, the core question, one of the core questions of Holocaust studies.
Was the Holocaust planned from the beginning or did it evolve over time out of the circumstances that presented themselves?
The reality of the situation seems to be that Adolf Hitler was an idea man, not a logistics man.
He would give speeches.
He would get excited.
He would talk about the Jews being the eternal foe.
He would talk about needing to purge them, but he didn't come out with policy on his own to do that.
See, Heydrich jobs.
Exactly.
Heydrich and everyone else under Hitler, there was a policy, and this is what they called it in the Nazi state, working towards the Führer.
And what that means is that Hitler doesn't come up with plans.
Hitler doesn't say, this is how we're going to do this.
This is what we're going to do next.
Hitler comes up with ideas.
And it's up to Nazis, if you want to impress Hitler, if you want to make a place for yourself in the party, to figure out what you think Hitler wants you to do and then to do it, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because the Nazi government was so competitive, this process evolved in increasingly extreme directions.
Heydrich's success came from the fact that he was a genius when it came to taking the racist rants of his boss and translating them into action.
His job was turning ideology into policy.
That's what Heydrich does.
Hitler and the others talk flippantly about getting rid of the Jews.
There's a lot of talk in the yellow Nazi press about exterminating the Jews.
Heydrich figures out how to make that shit happen.
Yeah.
He's the Steve Wozniak to Hitler's Steve Jobs.
He's an architect.
Hitler describes his dream house.
Reinhardt figures out where the load-bearing walls need to go.
You know, that's the guy he is.
When Germany next annexed Czechoslovakia, Reinhardt organized special task groups of the SS.
And the German word for special task group is Einsetzgruppen.
Their job was to arrest politically dangerous and undesirable people.
And they arrested between 10 and 20,000 people in a matter of days.
Many were sent to Dachau or other concentration camps.
I think about 7,000 in this period.
Now, when Germany invaded Poland, which is what comes next, and I know we are yada-yada-ying a lot that's going on at the time because he's got his hand in all of it.
When Germany invades Poland, Heydrich expands the ranks of the Einsatzgruppen.
They'd eventually just initially just been like 800 dudes, I think, you know, during the annexation of Czechoslovakia.
There was a lot more.
They're like military units, right?
During the invasion of Poland.
And their task is much more ambitious.
Hitler didn't just want undesirables and political enemies rounded up.
Hitler hated the idea that Poland would be a nation.
The concept of Poland as a country was repellent to Hitler and the Nazis.
And he had just inked a secret deal with Stalin to split Poland up after the invasion.
And he needed to kill any conception of Polish identity and the Poland that he was going to conquer.
He needed to destroy any sense that Polish culture existed, right?
So before the invasion, Hitler tells Heydrich that his job is to organize his Einsetzgruppen to exterminate entire classes of Polish society, specifically the classes that were, in Hitler's words, quote, carriers of Polish nationalism.
And he means carriers as in like carriers of a virus.
Right.
Carriers is of a disease.
Yeah.
That's very much how Hitler frames this.
And that's very much how he talks about the Jews, too.
They're a plague bacillus, is the literal term he uses.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, that's he's he's just trying to he's trying to get rid of any other ideological virus that is Nazism and German nationalism.
Now, before the invasion, Hitler's men created a mass or Heydrich's men, I should say, created a massive index card library of 61,000 people who they would have to arrest and in most cases, execute immediately upon taking over Poland.
From Hitler's Hangman, quote, in mid-August at a conference in Berlin, leading members of the Einsetzgruppen received further oral instructions from Heydrich and Best, instructions which, even by Heydrich's standards, were quote, extraordinarily radical, and which included a quote liquidation order for various circles of the Polish leadership, affecting thousands.
According to post-war trial testimonies of leading task force officers present that day, Heydrich opened the meeting by informing the men of the atrocities being committed against ethnic Germans in Poland, noting that he expected heavy partisan resistance against the German invasion.
It was the responsibility of the Einsatzgruppen to neutralize these threats, particularly those posed by saboteurs, partisans, Jews, and the Polish intelligentsia, in areas conquered by the German army, and to punish individuals who had committed crimes against Poland's ethnic Germans in the preceding weeks.
Although carefully guarded in his language, Heydrich insisted that in carrying out their difficult tasks, quote, everything was allowed.
Free for all.
Yes.
Goddamn Nazi-ass murder, free-for-all.
This is when the real Nazi shit starts.
This is when the Nazis truly distinguish themselves as worse than the other hell regimes that existed in this period.
This is the start of the not just being a dictatorship, not just being, you know, fascist or whatever.
This is the start of them being the fucking Nazis.
Yeah.
We could do a whole series of episodes on German war crimes during the invasion of Poland.
To focus just on one group of Heydrich's men, a single Einsatzgruppe unit near the demarcation line for Soviet Poland was tasked by Heydrich with inducing Jews to flee into Russian territory, right?
We want them to go into what the Russians are going to control so we don't have to deal with them.
They did this by going on a mass killing spree, which included burning down a synagogue filled with Jewish women and children and massacring roughly 500 people in mass shootings.
And one week in September, members of Einstat's group of four killed roughly 1,300 Polish civilians.
Now, while Heydrich's men massacred thousands, he followed behind them and ensured the job was done properly.
He remained concerned about the destruction of valuable property and repeatedly investigated and punished SS men suspected of stealing from Jewish-owned shops while they were burning down synagogues filled with people.
Yeah.
You wouldn't want them to commit any crimes.
You don't want the property crimes.
Yeah.
That's the problem: property crimes.
What is it with right-wingers loving fucking property more than people?
What is it?
You burned down all of the targets.
Vinitos was the economy.
So a truly accurate catalog of just Heydrich's crimes up to this point would go far beyond the time we have to discuss him.
Books have been written about just the conquest of Poland and the crimes in its wake, right?
More books will be written in the future.
I'm afraid we're going to have to yada yada a lot of other crimes against humanity just to move along here.
Now, I'm sure you all know the broad basics of the war from this point on.
Property Crimes Over People00:11:00
The Nazis conquer Poland, they conquer the Netherlands, France, they conquer a bunch of places in Europe.
They bomb this shit out of Britain.
Things are going great for the Nazis.
Heydrich continued to direct his forces to round up Jewish property as well as political enemies.
And his job is in all of these places, arrest political enemies, take Jewish property, catalog all the Jews in the territory.
They're not yet putting them in camps.
They're not yet.
The death camps don't exist yet.
But they're laying the ground for that.
Although that said, even in 1940, it was not a foregone conclusion that there would be death camps because in 1940, Heydrich becomes the head of what is called the Madagascar Plan, which is an ultimately abandoned attempt to take the now millions of Jews and conquered territories and relocate them off the coast of Africa.
This had existed prior to the Nazis.
Racists had been talking about pushing all forcing all the Jews into Madagascar for a while.
And Heydrich, again, I think there's people who will argue, like, oh, he always wanted to do the death camps.
The Madagascar plan was just sort of like a, for show, he puts a lot of effort into trying to plan this out.
He spends a lot of time thinking about how this will work, trying to organize it.
I don't think, I think this was something they thought they might be able to do for a certain point.
And it's important to understand, like, this is a process of getting yourself ready for genocide, right?
Even the genocide committers have to amp themselves up.
It's a series of steps.
It's approach zero to genocide, right?
That never happens.
There's always a ramping up period.
Yeah.
And it's like with these guys, especially, it's like the ethnic cleansing was going too slowly for them.
And they were just ramping up and ramping up all to this end conclusion.
Yes.
Now, during the same time, Heydrich trains as a fighter pilot.
He wants to get in his combat time, right?
He missed a chance to fight in World War I.
So he becomes a fighter pilot.
He flies like 20 combat missions.
He's a gunner, actually.
He's not really a pilot.
He doesn't like work as a pilot.
He's a gunner.
And he flies some missions that are non-combat over England with like a spy plane.
And this is a matter of vanity.
Again, he wants to have done his time as a soldier for the Reich so that he can stand up proud.
And his time as a pilot kind of comes to an end because his plane has a landing accident and he hurts his wrist and he gets an Iron Cross and then goes back to his desk job.
Now, on the domestic front, Heydrich's marriage to his wife is consistently rocky from the late 30s forward, mainly due to the fact that he cheated on her fucking constantly.
He was such a workaholic that she was basically abandoned with her children.
After the war, Lena would admit that there were, quote, always other women in my marriage, and that Reinhard would go after anything in a skirt.
Now, at one point, one of his subordinates, a guy named Schellenberg, started having an affair with Lena, with Reinhard's wife.
Oh, shit.
Now, she denies this.
She claims they never fucked, that she was just kind of playing around with this guy to make her husband jealous because he was cheating on her.
Yeah, Carmella did that with Furio in the Sopranos.
There's a lay, exactly, some Soprano shit.
There's a lot of debate over this.
There's one possibly true story that they were fucking each other, and Heydrich found out about this.
And so he takes Schellenberg out drinking.
And in the middle of this, like, night drinking and talking, in mid-conversation, Heydrich's like, I just poisoned you, by the way.
And I'll give you the antidote if you'll tell me what you've been doing with my wife.
And according to this story, Schellenberg admits that he's been fucking around.
He promises to end the relationship, and Heydrich gives him the antidote.
Oh, he actually did poison him?
That wasn't just.
Well, maybe.
I mean, we can't, I don't know.
You know, I think Schellenberg tells this story.
Also, Schellenberg survives the war and has some vested interest in making Heydrich seem even worse because it makes him seem less bad by comparison, you know?
And also, it's very embarrassing if he was like, I was just, I was kidding.
Of course, I don't have any fucking poison and an anecdote right here.
It could have been a fake anecdote too.
Who knows?
It would make him feel very stupid if he fell for that.
Yeah.
So on June 22nd, 1941, the Nazis commenced their invasion of the USSR.
This is Operation Barbarossa, the largest war thing that has ever happened in the history of the human race.
Yep.
Just impossible to overstate.
Like every war the U.S. has ever fought would fit into the Eastern Front battle between Germany and Russia with a lot of space left over for dead people.
Now, within this territory, and again, the initial, the Nazis are wildly successful.
They conquer more territory faster than anyone ever has.
And they take hundreds of thousands of military prisoners and they bring in millions of new citizens into their greater German Reich or whatever.
I don't know, citizens is not the right thing to call them.
But in addition to all these people, they get millions of new Jewish residents to add to the several million already brought in by Germany's other conquests.
Now, even Heydrich's well-oiled immigration machine could not handle this many people.
And also because they're conquering everything, where else are the Jews going to go?
So this was, you know, again, no one else is willing to absorb them.
The Nazis keep conquering stuff.
So they have this real problem.
And this problem becomes, and this is where we get to the kind of complicity of the German leadership.
Because again, a lot of people will say, there's nothing that directly connects Hitler to giving the orders for the Holocaust.
Right.
Now, that said, you can see where the orders came from because Hitler and Goering have a conversation right around the time the Germans invade Russia about the Jewish question, about all these Jews they're capturing.
And on July 31st, 1941, Hermann Gohing writes a note to Reinhard Heydrich and orders him to, quote, submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution of the Jewish question.
And Hitler absolutely ordered him to do this.
That's like, or it came about as a result of a conversation.
Hitler definitely wanted the genocide to happen at this point.
The thing on paper we have is you have Goering tells Heydrich to start figuring this shit out.
Use his final solution.
I mean, yes.
Yeah.
And Heydrich, you know, this is again, they still don't jump right to death camps because there's, again, a process of figuring out how this is going to look.
Now, the process of genocide, now that they're committed to genocide, starts with simple extensions of what Heydrich had already done before.
The Einset's group had been enlarged significantly for the invasion of Russia.
And in the wake of the initial invasion, they're killing political enemies, they're killing commissars.
But they're also massacring Jews.
And in fact, they start carrying out mass shootings on a scale never equaled before or since in human history.
These are the biggest mass shootings of civilians probably that there will ever be.
We fucking hope.
We hope, yeah.
The first of these shootings is the Babi Yar massacre, in which 33,771 Jewish civilians were shot to death in a ravine outside of Kiev in two days.
Babi Yar was followed by the Odessa massacre later the same year, in which more than 50,000 Jews were shot to death.
And again, roughly two days.
There were hundreds of other smaller massacres, from a couple of dozen people to thousands of people.
And a lot of the killing is also, it's not just shooting.
Shooting is probably the biggest death toll here, but they're also killing people with mobile gas fans, which they had developed initially to execute the mentally handicapped.
Now, at least one and a half million people and perhaps as many as two million Holocaust victims were killed this way, just being gunned down or gassed in small vans by numbers of people.
Now, this is still too slow for the number of Jews and other undesirables that the Nazis are acquiring in their conquests.
And worse than being slow, it's bad for the men doing it.
The Germans have limited manpower.
They have limited ammunition.
And they find that, you know, Heydrich had called his SS ideological shock troops, right?
He'd made a big deal about how hard we have to be, how willing to do terrible things we have to be in order to save the Reich.
But these guys, the hardest and worst of the Nazis, couldn't handle the mental strain of what they were doing.
Yeah, it was traumatic for them.
Yeah.
Which is insane.
There are stories of them skeet shooting babies by the dozen.
And it destroys these people.
Suicide is rampant.
Alcoholism becomes endemic to the Einstein's group of men.
It creates a problem with morale, a problem with orderliness.
And it's a problem for the Wehrmacht.
The guys not doing the killing are aware of it.
And they have their are we the baddies moments in a lot of cases.
Like, oh boy, you know what?
This doesn't seem good.
I've always imagined killing babies as being a bad guy thing.
Yeah.
But now this is like not a defensive maneuver.
Yeah.
I mean, I guess I get it.
Excuse me.
Ober stembenfiro.
What is the self-defense motive for shooting babies with a shotgun after throwing them in the air?
Can you at least lie to me and say the baby is actually a time bomb robot?
It would make me feel better.
And again, these guys feel bad.
It breaks a lot of them.
It's bad for morale.
Almost none of them stop being Nazis.
Yeah.
They all keep fighting for the Reich, even though they're aware of it.
There's a big myth of the clean Wehrmacht, of the fact that most Nazi soldiers, you know, they fought well and they didn't really know what was going on.
They fucking did.
Yes.
Every one of them at least knew enough.
The numbers alone indicate that like just a huge portion of them had to have been involved directly in these atrocities.
Yes.
And like, yes, obviously, a lot of the Wehrmacht was involved directly in atrocities, more than any other individual military on a per capita basis in the war, other than maybe the Japanese.
But also, they were all aware, broadly speaking, of what was being done in their name.
Right.
And there were some of them who spoke out.
There were some of them who went AWOL, you know?
And good on those.
Yeah.
Very few dudes.
Yeah, thank you, all three of you.
Yeah, not a lot of them, but some of them did.
And yeah, I'll tip my hat to those fellows because of how few fucking did it.
Now, yeah.
So again, this becomes a problem.
It's bad for the SS.
The Madagascar Plan00:03:20
They need a better solution to the final solution.
And on January 20th, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich convenes a third meeting of top Nazi officials from across the Reich.
This meeting was held at a mansion, a mansion that had been confiscated by a Jewish businessman in a suburb of Berlin called Vonse.
You can go to the Vonsey house today.
I've been there.
You can see it.
There's a very good museum there.
The actual house is used in the movie we discussed at the start of this conspiracy, which is basically based directly on the minutes of the meeting they have to plan the final solution.
I'm going to quote from a summary of that meeting in history.com, quote, The agenda was simple and focused, to devise a plan that would render a final solution to the Jewish question in Europe.
Various gruesome proposals were discussed, including mass sterilization and deportation to the island of Madagascar.
Heydrich proposed simply transporting Jews from every corner of Europe to concentration camps in Poland and working them to death.
Objections to this plan included the belief that this was simply too time-consuming.
What about the strong ones who took longer to die?
What about the millions of Jews who were already in Poland?
Although the word extermination was never uttered during the meeting, the implication was clear.
Anyone who survived the egregious conditions of a work camp would be treated accordingly.
Months later, the gas vans in Chelmo, Poland, which were killing a thousand people a day, proved to be the solution they were looking for, the most efficient means of killing large groups of people at a time.
And the rest is unfortunately history.
The Vonsei conference led directly to the creation of death camps, which exterminated some 4 million Jews and 5 million other undesirables.
These were, and still are today, the fastest and most cost-effective method of genocide ever developed.
Reinhard Heydrich gets rightful credit as architect of the Holocaust, but the vast majority of people killed in the death camps died after he died.
He would not live to see what he brought into being.
And I'm going to quote from a write-up by the United States Holocaust Museum here to explain why Heydrich gets taken out of the picture.
After the invasion of the Soviet Union spurred a previously dormant communist resistance movement in Bohemia and Moravia, this is Czechoslovakia, into acts of sabotage, Hitler dismissed Reich protector Konstantin von Neueroth and appointed Heydrich acting Reich Protector in September 1941.
Heydrich first ordered a narrow wave of terror targeting real and perceived leaders of the opposition in Czech lands.
In October and November 1941, Protectorate Special Court sentenced 342 people to death and turned 1,289 over to the Gestapo.
Heydrich also established the Theresenstadt camp ghetto in November under his rule.
14,000 Germans and Austrian Jews and more than 20,000 Czech Jews were deported from Theresenstadt to the Lodz ghetto, to the government general in Poland and to the Reich Kommissariat, Ostland, which is where they were exterminated.
Heydrich as acting Reich Protector then courted Czech industrial workers and farmers whose productive capacity was necessary to the German war effort with wages and benefits packages equivalent to those of their German counterparts.
The result of his policies was a 73% reduction in acts of sabotage within six months.
By spring of 1942, the German authorities could boost of a pacification of the protectorate.
Some have speculated that Heydrich aimed next to assume a newly created top civilian position in occupied northern France and Belgium.
Reinhard Heydrich Dies00:15:25
Uh-oh.
But he never got the chance to do this.
The Allies were well aware of Reinhard Heydrich, and they needed a win, right?
1942, not a great time for the Allies.
There's some early signs that the Nazi shit is going to turn around for them, but they're not winning at that point.
Now, so the British train and equip a two-man team of Czech soldiers because Czech has a government.
Czechoslovakia has a government in exile, right?
They have soldiers who flee the company, the country, and the British government trains two of these guys up and airdrops them into Heydrich's territory.
They ambush him during his daily commute home from work, but one man's machine gun jams, right?
So they try to shoot him.
Their gun jams.
Heydrich, who's driving in an open-topped vehicle very stupidly, sees that their gun has jammed.
And again, think about everything about this guy.
He's desperate to prove himself as a warrior, right?
So his driver wants to drive the fuck away, right?
Get out of there, get his boss to safety.
Heydrich has his driver stop.
He pulls out his handgun and he attempts to attack both assassins.
One of them throws a grenade as he's trying to do his hero shit, and it fucks Reinhard right up.
He gets horribly wounded.
He's evacuated to the hospital.
His wound turns septic and he spends seven days in agony in the hospital, slowly dying.
He is like really the only of the really bad Nazis who gets exactly the death he deserves.
So tight.
His body rotting.
They pull his spleen out of him.
Just seven days of sepsis, bitch.
Yeah.
A horrible death because he was a fucking idiot.
Like, oh, I'm going to fucking shoot these guys when keeping it real goes wrong.
I love it.
Yeah.
It's believed, although not certain, that the reason his wounds got infected and he died was because the upholstery in his car was made out of horse hair and the horse hair gets forced to do his wound by a grenade blast and it gets him, it causes a deadly infection.
Fuck yeah.
Very funny.
Good job, horse.
Yeah.
It was either that or he spends too much time around the, you know, the Germans who are going to the whorehouse who like to eat the doo-doo.
Yeah, he gets VD in his gut wound.
Exactly, dude.
You know, it's one or the other.
Dope.
I love it.
Publicly, the whole Reich mourns.
And actually, his funeral is one of the last really mass public events that the whole Nazi leadership attends because, right, the war doesn't go so well for them after this point.
He's mourned as a hero of Germany.
Privately, though, Hitler thought him a fool for throwing away his life for a chance to look heroic, saying such heroic gestures as driving in an open, unarmored vehicle or walking about the streets unguarded are just damn stupidity, which serves the country not one whit.
Yeah, you shouldn't have done that.
See, me, I'm going to just shoot myself in the head as soon as we're surrounded by the Red Army.
Yeah.
Solid, solid shade, Hitler.
Critical support to Hitler for diving Reinhardt.
He's a queen.
Adolf Hitler.
Why can't he be smart and die cowardly like I did?
Like me, yeah.
After I shoot my dog and poison my wife or die heroically like Joseph Goebbels grenading his children to death like a hero of the Reich.
Yeah.
Why did he do it with a grenade?
I don't know.
It was all he had.
It was just.
How do you kill your children?
When you have so many children, a grenade is just efficient.
I think they actually poison them.
Whatever.
Fuck it.
I need to re-watch Downfall, the documentary.
Yeah, both assassins are caught and executed, and the Nazis carry out a horrific series of reprisal populations.
Actually, the Czech underground in this period had argued strenuously against assassinating Heydrich because they knew it would lead to them being wiped out.
And they are.
They're just annihilated as a result of this, as are a lot of people not even involved in the underground.
The village of Liddis, which was falsely implicated in sheltering the assassins, paid the brunt of the price.
All 199 men in the village are executed.
All 195 women are sent to a concentration camp.
81 children are gassed to death, and the remainder are sent out to other families.
We don't really know.
The surviving women of Liddis go back to the destroyed side of the village and spend the rest of their lives waiting for their children to come home.
And if they ever do.
Oh, it's fucking heartbreaking.
Yeah.
The Czech village of Lazaki was also destroyed because a radio transmitter belonging to partisans was found there.
Across the territory, more than 13,000 people are arrested and roughly 5,000 people are murdered in reprisals for Reinhard's assassination.
And that's more or less the end of the story of Reinhard Heydrich, a real piece of shit.
Oh, man.
I got to say, you're right.
He is a bastard.
He really sucks.
He's so bad.
He is not a good guy.
Not chill.
In fact, he is sketch.
And I do not appreciate him.
If you're making a short list of like guys for the, that you're nominating for the title of like worst person in history.
Yeah.
He's got to be in the running, right?
Yeah, he's a final priest.
Yeah.
He is not top five.
He's definitely top 10.
Like he's up there with Hitler because again, without a guy like Reinhardt, I don't know that Hitler is at least able to carry out the Holocaust in the same way.
Yeah.
Because you need the implementation, man.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You need the guy who's able to engineer the whole thing.
You know, you got to get someone to execute it.
Hitler's the peanut butter.
Heydrich is the jelly.
Exactly.
The underlying centuries of anti-Semitism are the white bread, and you need all of it to make your Holocaust PBJ.
Yeah.
This is why I'm allergic to peanut butter.
Yes.
It's because I'm Jewish.
All Jews are allergic to peanut butter, right?
Yes.
Yes.
The most anti-Semitic sandwich is, of course, the PB and J. We've all been saying that for years.
Oh, man.
That is, yeah, he's a bad dude.
And I don't like him.
Not like that.
And I think that's the point of this podcast is to find more people who I'm like, I don't like him.
Because I like most people.
But not that guy.
That guy.
Fuck him.
Oh, man.
I'm just glad he's...
Because Reinhardt Heydrich, it's rad that he died in horrible pain.
Yeah, seven days of sepsis is he's literally the one Nazi who gets what he deserves.
Yeah.
Like a horrific, lingering death caused that.
And he's, you know, he's thinking the whole time, shit, if I just driven away, I'd have avoided all of this agony.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm glad he got to think about his death as he was.
He really did.
Like, fuck you, Reinhard Heydrich, you piece of fucking trash.
I'm glad your death was horrible.
It is okay to luxuriate in the nightmarish agony of the architect of the fucking Holocaust.
There should be a seven-day celebration all over the world.
We should celebrate the day he got shot by those Czech partisans.
Yes.
Reinhard Heydrich started dying today.
We should have seven days of gifts and dances.
Sepsis.
We think of painful sepsis.
Everyone fucking just like marching in the streets.
Oh, that'd be great.
He is the closest to the pure embodiment of human evil.
I think it's like he's like a Leopold of Belgium.
He's that kind of monster.
Which are the worst to me.
I think in a lot of ways he's worse than a guy like Hitler.
Because again, Hitler, if there had been resistance to Hitler, if there had been a solid block of conservatives who were like, we're going to have Hitler be in power, but we're not going to let him do this and this, and we're going to organize the military.
We're going to make sure, which was a thing that was happening.
There was a chance that that would happen.
Hitler could have been a quasi-dictator for five or 10, 15 years, and then quit, like, which happened in other countries, right?
Which happened, he could have been like Franco.
That was not necessarily impossible.
If there was the way it goes, usually.
He was a pragmatist.
He would have preferred that to being forced out of power or assassinated if that had been like that.
That was not an impossible thing from the beginning.
Reinhard Heydrich is, I don't know.
He might be worse.
He might be worse than Big H, you know.
Wow.
Dude, well, you know, and at the end of the day, he got what he always wanted, which was a really big gold star on his report card.
You know, he got to be bigger than Hitler.
That's all he ever wanted.
I mean, I mean, not, you know, in a way that most people know.
No, obviously, there's no point, really.
It's stupid to be like, well, who was a worse person?
Like, they're all like, it doesn't, it doesn't matter.
They're all at such a level of human evil.
Right.
Trying to parse out differences between them is silly.
But he is, I, what I should, the way I should frame it is not that like, oh, I think he's worse than Hitler.
He is the Nazi I find most personally offensive.
Yeah.
And frightening.
He's the one who's scariest to me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Especially because like if you now, I've, I haven't seen a picture of him yet.
And so this whole time I'm looking up.
I'm looking.
I'm picturing, yeah, blonde Kenneth Brana.
And it's like part of what's pissing me off about him mostly is just this like this fucking Zach Morris looking motherfucker committing the worst atrocities and executing atrocities, going above and beyond beyond Hitler even to like execute these mass, you know, this mass genocide, the Holocaust.
And just, yeah, I just like, I, this is why I hate hot people, you know, anyone who's attractive, yeah, I wouldn't call him hot.
He's definitely not as good looking as Kenneth Branaugh, but he is the most like Aryan looking of the Nazi leadership for sure.
Yeah.
Um, now I'm just gonna send you.
Oh, yeah, I'm looking him up right now.
Oh, you're gonna look him up.
Yeah, I was just gonna send you that in the chat.
Yeah, no, he's he's not, you're right, he's not that hot, but he's not hot, but he is, he is like, he's blonde-haired, blue-eyed.
He's got, you know, prominent jawline.
He's tall.
He's in very good shape.
He's an athlete.
You know, he's the most Nazi-looking motherfucker I think I've ever seen.
Yeah, he really is the most Nazi looking of the high-up Nazis, right?
You look at Goebbels, you look at Goering, you look at fucking Hess, you look at Hitler, you look at Himmler.
Reinhardt's the one who looks like they say an Aryan shit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He's the one.
He's the one that they all draw when they're trying to be like, this is my perfect man.
Okay.
He's he's a superman.
He's very tall, blonde, blue eyes, very sharp cheekbones.
He's got the naked mole rat face.
He's got naked mole rat.
He plays the violin.
Yeah.
And I'm not saying, obviously, like Kenneth Branagh, one of the criticisms, actually, the first time I watched Conspiracy, so I dropped out of college, obviously, because fuck that.
But the last two years or so was in college, most of my classes and the thing that I was thinking I might get when I thought I might get a degree was UTD offered like a Holocaust studies program.
And there was a series of classes on Holocaust in remembrance that I took, which is where I watched Conspiracy.
And like one of the criticisms that people have of that movie, it's a very good and I think very accurate depiction of how the Von Say conference was handled, right?
Sure.
Does a very good job of laying out the way these people talked, the way they execute, and the way that you see the way the thing we talk about repeatedly in this episode, the way Heydrich orchestrates, gets people on board, the way he whips support between different agencies to make them do what he wants.
You see that in the movie.
I think they do a good job of it.
They make him hot.
Which, you know, Kenneth Branagh is a very good actor, and I think he very ably plays YouTube the evil.
But also, you cast Kenneth Branagh.
He can't not be hot.
He's Kenneth Branagh.
He's hot.
He's fucking hot as hell.
But people criticized it because they're like, why are you going to make him such a hot?
I think that's a fair casting, though, especially given the fact that this was one of the reasons that he rose up so high.
Yeah, it is.
I think there's an argument to be made that, like, well, Nazis saw him as good looking because he looked like a Nazi.
Yeah, he was like a, you know, front-facing Nazi guy, someone you could like point to and go, this is, this is what we look like.
In Hollywood, people are always better looking.
So you got to have the Naziest looking guy in the Hollywood movie be extra.
And Kenneth Branah looks like a fucking Hollywood Nazi.
And yeah, I think it was good casting, is my argument.
It's a controversial movie again from people who are Holocaust nerds, which is a horrible way to describe it.
No, but there are Holocaust nerds out there.
There are Holocaust.
Yeah.
And I am on the side of, I think it's, and it's a movie I show people when we went to Saxonhausen.
It was me and a group, my partner at the time, and like some Australian kids that we met while just like chilling out and getting wasted in Berlin together.
We all went together and we watched Conspiracy afterwards.
Yeah.
It's a good movie to watch to, yeah, I recommend it to people again.
You know, there's some controversies around it.
No, it's very good.
It's very good.
And it's also, and this is not so much a historical note.
It's a great example of a movie that can be compelling and only be in two or three different settings.
Yeah.
Like most of it takes place in a meeting.
And a meeting and they never leave the grounds of this fucking house.
No, they don't.
Yeah.
There's like a scene in the bathroom.
There's a scene in the hall and most of it is in this meeting room and it's very compelling.
And also it shows the, I think the banality of evil is like a perfect, you know, like that's that's what especially Eichmann's portrayal by, I think, Stanley Tucci, who is just oh, yes.
Oh, he's so good in that.
I forgot it is Stanley Tucci who plays Eichmann in that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he's like, you know, he's basically doing notes.
He's taking notes.
He's taking notes.
And the fact that he's taking notes enables the slaughter of 11 million people, right?
Like his notes are a key aspect of the machinery of death.
Yeah.
Which is what the case was, right?
That is Eichmann.
That is who he was.
And there's this, there's a wonderful scene in the movie where they're all quibbling because a lot of people, and this was a real problem.
Again, we talked about how there's different chunks of the Nazis.
They have different arguments.
Some of the guys who had written the Nuremberg laws are angry because Heydrich is basically throwing out the restrictions on the Nuremberg laws because he doesn't think they go far enough.
And they're arguing about like, this isn't legal.
You're going outside the bounds of the law.
And there's a moment where Heydrich, I think it is, asks, raise your hand if you're a lawyer.
And everyone in the room raises their hands, which almost all of these guys were fucking lawyers.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's like, I remember that specifically when we were talking about the Nuremberg laws and like Kenneth Branagh's, you know, changing of them.
I'm just going to call Reinhardt Heydrich.
Hey, Kenneth Branagh.
Throwing Out Nuremberg Laws00:05:57
Yeah.
No, it's like, you know, kind of like just going, hey, let's stop quibbling over how much blood.
If you have any blood, like he went one drop roll, and that always stuck out to me as like kind of like, you know, that in the end was like, yeah, this is about ethnicity.
Let's stop pretending this is about religion.
Let's stop pretending this is about Christ in any fashion.
Like this is about DNA, racial makeup, and just a totally fake race pseudoscience.
Yeah.
Anyways, you know, got any pluggables to plug?
No time to plug your pluggables, like discussing the machinery that was built in order to enable the fastest mass extermination of an ethnic group in history.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, I always like to plug my podcasts about the Sopranos right after talking about the Holocaust.
Yeah.
Think about those rooms filled with human hair and empty shoes.
And check out this podcast.
Check out this great podcast in which we re-watch Sopranos and talk about it with wonderful guests.
It's called Pod Yourself a Gun.
And season five is about to start.
Right now we're through one through four.
So check it out wherever you get your podcast.
And the Fratcast, which is the same type of podcast, same hosts, but we talk about movies instead.
So check that out and follow me at Matt Lieb Jokes on Instagram and at Matt Lieb on Twitter.
Yep.
Check him out.
You can check out.
I have a novel.
It's being launched as a podcast, three chapters a week after the revolution.
You can also find the text.
Every week we'll upload a new E-pub and there will be in-browser readable versions of the text too for free.
No ads at After the Revolution, or sorry, at ATRBook.com.
So, you know, think about the most monstrous act of soulless evil ever committed and then check out Pod Yourself a Gun and read my book.
Please.
Please do those things.
Yeah.
And we hope you've enjoyed this horrible, horrible person.
Yeah, this real great trash monster.
Yeah.
Don't like it.
Yeah.
Hey, everybody.
Initially, I was going to plug the GoFundMe for the sequel to my book, After the Revolution, which you can find at ATRBook.com.
But here in the Pacific Northwest, we're having an unprecedented heat wave and it's causing disastrous conditions, life-threatening conditions for a lot of houseless people, a lot of people without air conditioning, particularly in the city of Salem.
Activists everywhere have been kind of gathering to try and mitigate, set up cooling stations, hand out cold drinks, do things to help people get their temperature down.
I want to try and raise funds for the Free Fridge of Salem, which are doing cooling stations in the capital of Oregon, Salem.
So if you go to Venmo at Free Fridge Salem, that's Venmo at FreeFridge Salem and send them a couple of bucks.
They could really use it.
Local government has destroyed a number, like police particularly have destroyed a number of water and cooling stations they've set out.
It's, you know, we're not going to be in triple-digit heats for the next couple of days after I'm recording this on Monday, but it's still going to be very hot.
People still need this.
So please, Venmo at FreeFridge Salem if you have the wherewithal and the financial resources to do.
So one more time, the Venmo is at Free Fridge Salem.
Thanks.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones' Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.