Behind the Bastards - Part One: Josef Mengele & The Nazi Doctors
Aired: 2023-04-11
Duration: 01:15:36


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=== Behind the Scenes of Business (15:36) ===

[00:01:29]  So let's cut the crap, okay?
[00:01:31]  Follow the Amy and TJ podcast, a one-stop news and pop culture shop to get you caught up and on with your day.
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[00:01:54]  Woo!
[00:01:57]  What's Joseph my nope?
[00:02:03]  All right, gumming in hot.
[00:02:05]  Yeah.
[00:02:07]  What's Joseph my nope?
[00:02:09]  Take two.
[00:02:10]  Take two.
[00:02:12]  Everybody, this is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the worst people in all of history.
[00:02:16]  And let's just rip off that band-aid.
[00:02:18]  We're talking about Joseph Mengela for the next four episodes.
[00:02:21]  Oh, fuck.
[00:02:23]  Yeah, the working title of the doc is just Joseph Mengele.
[00:02:28]  Jesus Christ.
[00:02:29]  Oh, yeah.
[00:02:31]  So stoked to be here.
[00:02:34]  Yeah.
[00:02:34]  How are you doing, Matt?
[00:02:35]  I'm doing good.
[00:02:36]  You know, I've been stoked to come back on the show.
[00:02:41]  And I've had this bit, you know, ready to go for a while.
[00:02:44]  Oh, yeah.
[00:02:45]  Before I knew we were going to talk about Joseph Mengele, I switched the soundboard and it's all Jar Jar Binks.
[00:02:53]  He's great.
[00:02:55]  And I now am realizing the Jar Jar soundboard is not going to work for this particular episode.
[00:03:02]  Well, you know, a lot of people will say, this is actually an argument historians will make all the time that I, oh no.
[00:03:10]  I love it personally.
[00:03:12]  A lot of historians will argue that Mengelo was the Jar Jar Binks of the Nazi regime.
[00:03:19]  In that, he was an embarrassing and kind of sad character who nonetheless had an almost forest gump-like availability around many of the most significant moments in the history of the Third Reich.
[00:03:31]  Yeah, he was just around inventing smiley face t-shirts and seeing what will happen if twins put together.
[00:03:41]  He also, he was also briefly friends with Qui-Gon Jin, but that's a separate, separate matter, separate matter, separate matter.
[00:03:48]  Very, very bad.
[00:03:50]  So this is, I'm probably not going to do much Jar Jar this episode.
[00:03:54]  Just based on subject matter alone.
[00:03:56]  Oh, boy.
[00:03:58]  Yeah.
[00:03:59]  But for the record, I'm enjoying.
[00:04:01]  Yeah.
[00:04:02]  Good, good.
[00:04:02]  Look, there's a lot we can say about the wisdom of that particular decision.
[00:04:06]  But what I respect is that you made a choice, Matt.
[00:04:09]  A lot of people in this life, you know, never have the courage to choose, and you did.
[00:04:13]  So thank you.
[00:04:14]  Yeah, unfortunately.
[00:04:16]  I'm someone who I like to commit to a bit.
[00:04:19]  You know, subject matter be damned.
[00:04:21]  I'm like, you know, even if people don't so much enjoy Jar Jar coming in out of an episode with an evil Nazi doctor, it's like, hey, at least he's committed, right?
[00:04:32]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:04:33]  He being mean.
[00:04:34]  Exactly.
[00:04:34]  Not Mangala.
[00:04:36]  Yeah.
[00:04:36]  Well, he was committed too.
[00:04:39]  You got to give that to the man.
[00:04:40]  So we have, you know, we have to start like that.
[00:04:48]  What if we just pull the ripcord and go like, let's talk about, I don't know, fucking something fun.
[00:04:53]  Cats.
[00:04:54]  Yeah.
[00:04:55]  So, no, we're not going to do that.
[00:04:56]  We're going to talk.
[00:04:56]  Although Joseph Mengela did.
[00:04:58]  I don't know how many cats or cats as in James Cordon in a bad costume.
[00:05:02]  That's a bastard we should talk about.
[00:05:04]  That is a bastard we should talk about.
[00:05:05]  Joseph Mengele also liked cats.
[00:05:07]  So there you go.
[00:05:09]  Yeah, he had a few.
[00:05:10]  So here's the thing.
[00:05:12]  You know, we do a history podcast here where we talk about the worst people ever.
[00:05:18]  And we have a lot of different subjects.
[00:05:20]  And because, you know, we've been doing this for so long, we'll, we'll alternate between, oh, this week we're talking about a dictator.
[00:05:26]  This week we're just talking about a fascist who was pretty good at chess or we're making fun of Ben Shapiro's book.
[00:05:31]  And whenever we do those kind of like less intense episodes, we get a message for, we get messages from people being like, how dare you cover this guy who's not as bad when you haven't done this other worst guy yet.
[00:05:44]  Oh, wow.
[00:05:44]  And it used to be, it used to be the person that we would get most often for that was Kissinger, right?
[00:05:50]  People would be like, how dare you talk about, I don't know, so-and-so when you haven't talked, Jordan Peterson, when you haven't done Kissinger.
[00:05:56]  It's like, well, Jordan Peterson was a little more fun than Kissinger.
[00:06:01]  Since we've done the Kissinger episodes, now it's Joseph Mengela.
[00:06:06]  And all I have to say to the people who have been messaging me about him is be careful what you wish for shitbirds because here he fucking is.
[00:06:14]  Use of shitbirds, by the way.
[00:06:16]  Oh, one of my favorite words.
[00:06:18]  That was synergistic to you know, can I do my plug up top just in case people are like mangela?
[00:06:23]  Absolutely.
[00:06:24]  This is the time to do the plug, yeah.
[00:06:26]  Okay.
[00:06:28]  So it's, I have a wire and sopranos rewatch podcast.
[00:06:33]  It's called Pod Yourself a Gun.
[00:06:36]  That's that's what you look for on the iTunes store.
[00:06:39]  You guys have lots of reviews, like so many reviews.
[00:06:42]  I feel like people listen to your podcast.
[00:06:44]  So I'm going to say, hey, you don't even have to listen to Pod Yourself a Gun.
[00:06:47]  Just give us five stars in review and, you know, and a Jar Jar quote, and I'll be happy, dog.
[00:06:53]  Yeah, review bomb them.
[00:06:55]  Yeah, positively, please.
[00:06:56]  Yeah.
[00:06:57]  If there's other wire podcasts, sabotage them, cut their brake lines.
[00:07:01]  You know, go out there and do good.
[00:07:04]  Yes.
[00:07:05]  Matt, first off, I want to ask, what do you know about Joseph Mengela?
[00:07:10]  Like, if a caveman got thought out of ice and wanted you to explain the Holocaust to him, how would you explain who Joseph Mengele was?
[00:07:18]  All of my knowledge of Joseph Mengela comes from the Slayer song Angel of Death, which doesn't tell you much.
[00:07:28]  But it's that.
[00:07:30]  And I saw an info, like one of those like infographic, you know, like Kurtzkazite.
[00:07:37]  It's like a YouTube channel that has like, what if, you know, an asteroid hit the earth and it's like a scientific.
[00:07:43]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:07:44]  So some weird like off-brand channel tried to do the same thing with Mangala.
[00:07:49]  No.
[00:07:50]  And it's terrible.
[00:07:51]  Like, because the person who's like narrating it is still trying to do like a happy, engaging voice.
[00:07:56]  And you can't really do that.
[00:07:58]  Yeah.
[00:07:58]  When you're talking about sewing twins together.
[00:08:02]  So I know that he did that.
[00:08:04]  I know that he was, I know how it ends.
[00:08:09]  I know that he's, I know he's bad and I know he was evil doctor.
[00:08:16]  Also, the video ends with sound off in the comments if you agree with Dr. Mengele's experiments.
[00:08:25]  And I was like, that's not.
[00:08:26]  Wait, what?
[00:08:26]  For serious?
[00:08:27]  That's how it ends.
[00:08:28]  Yeah, that's how it ends.
[00:08:29]  And I was like, no, that's a mistake.
[00:08:30]  That is weird, weird shit.
[00:08:34]  That's unhinged.
[00:08:35]  No, that's unhinged.
[00:08:38]  It's interesting that you bring up, because you've brought up a couple of times, the sewing twins together stuff.
[00:08:42]  There's a lot of stories about Mengele.
[00:08:44]  First off, your basic contention, he was an evil doctor.
[00:08:47]  Absolutely accurate.
[00:08:49]  Obviously, this is behind the bastards.
[00:08:50]  We're covering him.
[00:08:52]  A lot of the stories about stuff Mengele did at Auschwitz are not entirely accurate in that they are things that happened, but they're not necessarily things that Mengele did.
[00:09:05]  And we're going to talk about that.
[00:09:06]  The actual, the, the story of Mengele that has kind of emerged as more robust historiography has come out is a lot worse, I think, than the stories that were coming out in the 70s, the boys from Brazil era sort of like depiction of him.
[00:09:22]  I think it's worse than you know, but it's also different in some important ways.
[00:09:27]  So I do want to let people know up top, this is going to be maybe not the series you're expecting.
[00:09:33]  We're going to spend all this week, actually, talking about, as much as we talk about Mengele's early life, we're going to be talking about the birth of the Nazi racial science medical community because you cannot extricate Mengele's acts from that larger medical apparatus.
[00:09:50]  So without further ado, Joseph Rudolph, the red-nose Mengele, why did I do that?
[00:09:58]  Was born on March 16th, 1911 in a little.
[00:10:02]  I mean, I like that you were just like, hey, you know what?
[00:10:06]  Why not?
[00:10:08]  Christmas?
[00:10:08]  Yeah.
[00:10:09]  He's a March baby.
[00:10:10]  He's not that far off.
[00:10:12]  And you were like, he got what the piece is saying.
[00:10:15]  Okay, I'm sorry.
[00:10:15]  Go ahead.
[00:10:16]  Good God.
[00:10:20]  The ADL is preparing to firebomb us both out of our homes.
[00:10:25]  I just, up top, I am Jewish and I also get constantly brigaded by Nazis online.
[00:10:34]  And up top, I did not ask you to put in the Jar Jar Binks soundbox.
[00:10:38]  No, he didn't.
[00:10:39]  That was a peer you.
[00:10:41]  I did make the Rudolph the Red Nose.
[00:10:42]  I don't know why.
[00:10:43]  Anyway, he was born in a little town called Gunzberg on March 16th, 1911 in southern Germany.
[00:10:50]  His father, Carl Mengele, was an engineer who designed farming equipment and owned a small manufacturing firm that produced it.
[00:10:58]  If you are particularly in Europe and in Latin America, if you like hang out on farms, you will see equipment often that says Mengele on it.
[00:11:07]  Yeah.
[00:11:07]  Yeah, no, there's still a thing.
[00:11:10]  You know, at least they were pretty recently.
[00:11:13]  It definitely had an impact on the Brown.
[00:11:15]  I mean, I'm not going to say you have to respect them for continuing the name.
[00:11:19]  It's like if Hitler had a cousin who made calculators and in like 1946, he was like, look, man, I was like, fuck that guy, but I'm not changing the name.
[00:11:29]  It's the TI-88.
[00:11:31]  The TI Hail.
[00:11:36]  So Carl started his small manufacturing firm repairing farm equipment.
[00:11:41]  He had a little business partner for a while.
[00:11:42]  They had a foundry where they would produce, you know, tool pieces, but the foundry burnt down.
[00:11:47]  And it might have been a little bit sketchy.
[00:11:50]  I don't know.
[00:11:50]  This happens to Carl like two or three times.
[00:11:52]  Like his factory will burn down and he'll get a bunch of insurance money and make a better factory.
[00:11:57]  But also, this is night, like the early 1900s.
[00:12:02]  So, I'm not surprised that a bunch of German foundries are burning down.
[00:12:06]  Yeah, shit burned down a lot back in those days.
[00:12:08]  Yeah, they didn't have fire extinguishers.
[00:12:10]  They didn't believe in wind.
[00:12:11]  You know, it was a different time.
[00:12:13]  So, at the time that Joseph was born, Carl employed seven workers and was probably what you'd call upper middle class, starting to verge on wealthy.
[00:12:22]  Joseph's mother was the formidably named Wahlberga Mengele.
[00:12:27]  And with a name like that, you know, you're talking about a tough customer.
[00:12:30]  Yeah, Walberga.
[00:12:32]  Strong on plow for sure.
[00:12:33]  Oh, for sure.
[00:12:34]  Now, she was three years older than her husband and from a well-off family in Gunzberg.
[00:12:41]  And as a result of being rich and very, very angry, she had kind of no fucks to give.
[00:12:47]  Decades later, Joseph would describe his father as good-natured and soft-hearted, but his mother as determined and forceful.
[00:12:54]  And, you know, periodically, she would have to come in and like work the factory when her husband wasn't there or whatever.
[00:13:00]  And like biographers will note, like, all of his employees were fucking terrified of her.
[00:13:06]  I don't think this has any bearing on the man Mengela becomes, but it's fun context.
[00:13:10]  So, Carl and Walberga's firstborn baby had died a couple of days after being born.
[00:13:16]  And so, when Joseph came out, I think a year or so later and was healthy, he was celebrated by his whole family.
[00:13:22]  In writings years later, Joseph would describe his early childhood as a secure, full home surrounded by extended family and hired help who all nourished and obsessed over him.
[00:13:32]  During the first three years of his life, he was joined by two younger brothers, Carl and Alois.
[00:13:38]  You know, whenever you come on the show and you talk about like Nazis, I'm always waiting for like more of the like at-home like trauma, like, you know, early childhood trauma to like explain stuff.
[00:13:51]  And I think consistently, that's almost never been the case.
[00:13:55]  Yeah.
[00:13:55]  And that just buns me out more than anything.
[00:13:58]  Yeah.
[00:13:59]  It's interesting.
[00:13:59]  We just did Coco Chanel, who came from like a nightmare background, maybe like the most difficult childhood of any person we've ever talked about on this show.
[00:14:08]  And we were talking during that about like, how often is it with these monsters that they have like some horrible, horrible childhood versus, you know, not.
[00:14:16]  And honestly, I think the worst of them tend to grow up in reasonably secure homes.
[00:14:21]  You know, Hitler, Hitler's dad was kind of a dick, although I don't think exceptionally for the age.
[00:14:27]  They were very poor, though.
[00:14:28]  His mom was sick, but she loved him.
[00:14:29]  Like he grew up with like love and a family who cared about him.
[00:14:34]  That's just not a not, that doesn't seem to have much of a protective effect from being one of history's greatest monsters.
[00:14:40]  A lot of loving homes produce war criminals.
[00:14:43]  I'm just trying to figure out how to raise my daughter.
[00:14:46]  Yeah.
[00:14:47]  You know, whatever I need to do to make her not do race science, I'll do it.
[00:14:52]  And if it means being more strict, I guess I'll have to do it.
[00:14:56]  I don't know, dog.
[00:14:58]  I mean, the answer is, I think nobody knows.
[00:15:01]  Nobody knows how to not make war criminals, which is why we have so many of them.
[00:15:04]  Yeah, that makes sense.
[00:15:05]  I don't, maybe like if she ever considers doing a war criminal, like get one of those like little spray bottles and like right in the nose, like a cat.
[00:15:13]  Like, no.
[00:15:14]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:15:15]  Don't do that.
[00:15:16]  No, no ethnic cleansing.
[00:15:18]  Spray her as she's trying to measure a skull.
[00:15:22]  No, no, no.
[00:15:24]  So Joseph's family was conservative and Catholic.
[00:15:27]  So that may be a bit of a red flag, though.
[00:15:29]  Norman Stone, who's an Oxford professor who analyzed Joseph's memoirs on his own life later, has claimed that, quote, respect rather than affection seems to have ruled the household.
[00:15:40]  And Gerald Posner, who wrote an early positive and detailed biography of Mengela, seems to embrace this view of Mengela's early life, that like the family was secure but not warm.
[00:15:51]  He wrote, the relationship between his parents did not improve the emotional austerity of the Mengele home.
[00:15:57]  They were known as a quarrelsome pair.
[00:15:58]  Joseph wrote bitterly of his father as a cold figure and of his mother as not much better at loving, although he came to admire her energy and decisive nature.
[00:16:06]  For the early parts of his life, a nanny called Monica fulfilled the dominant maternal role, coaxing and at times intimidating Joseph into holding fast the Catholic faith.
[00:16:15]  For his parental legacy, at last, Mengele was grateful.
[00:16:17]  In his autobiography, he wrote, One could feel flattered that the family tradition going back generations was continued with the name of the father of Christ, Joseph.
[00:16:26]  And this is, you know, it's weird because that seems to be like him saying, well, it was kind of a cold relationship.
[00:16:32]  It wasn't very loving.
[00:16:34]  Some of Mengele's own writings contradict that.
[00:16:36]  And David Marwell, who wrote a better biography of Mengele, I think, than Posner, tempers this attitude because he really does emphasize he has a big family.
[00:16:44]  He seems to be very much wanted as a kid.
[00:16:48]  He has a lot of resources poured into him.
[00:16:50]  Obviously, no childhood is perfect.
[00:16:52]  The fact that he's deeply cared for and that his parents could be distant and stern can both coexist.
[00:16:57]  Yeah, they're fucking German.
[00:16:58]  Yeah, they're German, right?
[00:17:01]  This sounds like default German parents.
[00:17:03]  Yeah.
[00:17:04]  Yeah.
[00:17:04]  Take on the trash.

=== Joseph Mengele's German Roots (15:08) ===

[00:17:05]  You know, and it's like, that's how you say I love you in a way.
[00:17:09]  Yeah.
[00:17:09]  Yeah.
[00:17:10]  Screaming at the I remember I talked, I brought that, bring this guy up.
[00:17:14]  One of the Nazis that I've one of the old school Nazis, former Nazis that I talked to, you know, earlier in my life was a guy who'd been in the Hitler youth as a kid.
[00:17:23]  War ended when he was 14.
[00:17:25]  And he would talk about like his family life.
[00:17:27]  And one of the stories he would tell is that, like, and he's, he framed this as a pretty common kind of thing: you know, the father in Prussian culture in particular was like the dictator of the family.
[00:17:38]  This was actually a big aspect of kind of the way the Nazis talked about how the state should work.
[00:17:41]  The father is the dictator of the family, and the father follows the Führer in a way that's very much like that, right?
[00:17:47]  Right.
[00:17:47]  The house is the fatherland.
[00:17:48]  I get it.
[00:17:49]  Yeah.
[00:17:50]  And so he was like, well, a couple of times a week when we would have an egg, because eggs were hard to come by, we would all sit around the table and watch as my father ate the entire egg.
[00:17:58]  And that was like a thing we did as a family.
[00:18:03]  It's fucking get together.
[00:18:06]  You're going to watch me eat the hard-boiled egg alone.
[00:18:12]  Tell me, imagine.
[00:18:14]  Imagine this egg is the frontier of Poland.
[00:18:20]  And we must crack it from the West.
[00:18:24]  Jesus.
[00:18:25]  I love dogging your family like that.
[00:18:28]  Just like watch me eat the egg.
[00:18:30]  You got to watch me eat this egg.
[00:18:31]  You got to learn respect.
[00:18:32]  You know, one day you'll be the father eating the egg.
[00:18:36]  Not sharing eggs with your family.
[00:18:38]  Incredible stuff.
[00:18:40]  You want some of this egg?
[00:18:41]  Are you kidding?
[00:18:41]  In Biden's America?
[00:18:45]  We are coming back around to the age of eggs and short supply.
[00:18:51]  So the same year that Joseph was born, Carl bought his first Bins automobile.
[00:18:56]  He was well respected as a boss due to the fact that he was willing to get his hands dirty.
[00:19:00]  He put in long hours.
[00:19:01]  He seems to have been like a reasonably easygoing guy.
[00:19:04]  So I think his workers generally liked him.
[00:19:07]  In 1914, when Carl was just or when Joseph was just three, a disastrous sandwich run ended with a Habsburg and shortly dying, and shortly thereafter, a war that destroyed much of Western Europe.
[00:19:19]  Carl's workforce had ballooned to about 30 men by this point, but the war takes Carl away from his child in business, and he spends the next two years serving at the front.
[00:19:27]  Joseph's mother had to take over for her husband, but that actually did not go badly for the family.
[00:19:34]  World War I is terrible for everyone else in Germany, but the Mengelas, the Mengelas kind of do great because under her leadership, their firm gets awarded a bunch of government contracts.
[00:19:44]  They're making military vehicles and carts and shit for the army.
[00:19:48]  Carl returns after two years at the front because the firm has gotten so much bigger that the government's like, we need you running your company rather than fighting.
[00:19:59]  Over the course of the war years, the Mengele family business triples in size and becomes one of the largest employers in the city of Gunzberg.
[00:20:07]  So everyone else spends World War I starving and desperate, but the Mengelas get rich.
[00:20:15]  So that's good.
[00:20:16]  He ate.
[00:20:17]  Oh, he's having three, four eggs a week sometimes, Matt.
[00:20:21]  Making all the goons of Gunzberg watch him.
[00:20:25]  When the fighting stopped, Carl led a seamless pivot for his company back to the production of farming equipment.
[00:20:31]  And by the early 1920s, it was the third largest threshing company in Germany.
[00:20:36]  And if you know Germans, they love to thresh, big threshold.
[00:20:40]  They thresh thistles.
[00:20:42]  They're thistle thresholders.
[00:20:43]  They love this.
[00:20:43]  Thistle thresholds, absolutely.
[00:20:45]  So Mengele was now Gunzberg's largest employer, and Joseph's family was the first family in a growing city.
[00:20:51]  Of course, the 20s were good for more than just threshing.
[00:20:54]  They also yielded a bumper crop of fascists.
[00:20:57]  Carl was not quite a fascist early on, but he was a wealthy conservative.
[00:21:04]  And so he was not very far from the fascists either.
[00:21:07]  He was fashioned, maybe.
[00:21:09]  Yeah, he was fashion curious, you know.
[00:21:12]  And I'm going to quote now from Marwell's Unmasking the Angel of Death.
[00:21:17]  Mengele's father was, at least at some point, a member of the German National People's Party.
[00:21:22]  He was not then a supporter of the Nazi Party, as suggested by some who cite his having made one of his factory buildings available to Hitler for a campaign event in October 32.
[00:21:31]  In fact, Carl first joined the Nazi Party in May of 1933, only after it gained power, in connection with his own bid for a seat on the city council, which had eluded his prior attempts in 1924 and 1929.
[00:21:42]  According to historian Zednek Zofka, Carl Mengele's political aspirations were less ideological than grounded in his desire to influence the local business climate.
[00:21:51]  And the local Gunzberg Nazi Party officials accused him of purchasing his seat through a generous contribution.
[00:21:56]  So he is not an ideological Nazi.
[00:21:59]  He's like, I want to have Hitler speak at my factory because it will help me get a tax break later on.
[00:22:06]  Like I can work my way to the city council.
[00:22:09]  No, yeah.
[00:22:10]  It is kind of insane to me to like go Nazi just to be like the president of the Chamber of Commerce.
[00:22:18]  You know what I mean?
[00:22:19]  I mean, that's like 20% of the Nazi party.
[00:22:23]  Yeah.
[00:22:23]  Like it's the city.
[00:22:24]  And it's the 20% who had all the money.
[00:22:26]  Yeah.
[00:22:27]  Yeah.
[00:22:28]  I don't know.
[00:22:28]  We could say something about the way various business associations and special economic districts are kind of like reservoirs for fascism in the modern American context.
[00:22:39]  These are the people pushing to put a lot of homeless folks in camps and stuff.
[00:22:43]  And how a lot of Carl Mengelas are still out there.
[00:22:47]  So that's good stuff.
[00:22:48]  Anyway, good to know.
[00:22:50]  Yeah.
[00:22:52]  The Nazis.
[00:22:53]  The Nazis get electoral power in Weimar, thanks in large part to the fact that people like Carl are there to help fund them.
[00:23:00]  And also people like Carl, these upright businessmen who are not like wild-eyed Nazi mystics, right?
[00:23:05]  They're not shouting all the crazy shit.
[00:23:07]  So normal conservatives are like, well, Carl's now with the Nazis.
[00:23:11]  So I guess maybe they're okay.
[00:23:12]  You know, he's a, yeah.
[00:23:14]  Look at all the eggs he eats.
[00:23:16]  Yeah.
[00:23:16]  So, you know, he's, this guy's got money.
[00:23:19]  He's eating all the eggs.
[00:23:20]  Maybe there's something.
[00:23:22]  Maybe this Hitler guy is going to take us some good places.
[00:23:26]  So for his part, Joseph's affluence allowed him to avoid all of the traumas of the era he was raised in.
[00:23:33]  You know, the Weimar years are a tumultuous period for most Germans.
[00:23:36]  He is not ever starving.
[00:23:38]  His family is not ever dealing with like inflation hits them too, but it's not causing them to be unable to pay for things that they need.
[00:23:46]  Yeah, like eggs.
[00:23:47]  And so he has a happy childhood.
[00:23:49]  His family tends to recall him as a sunny and fun-loving child.
[00:23:53]  He liked to ride horses.
[00:23:54]  His favorite way to help out the family business was to pull company transports away from the railroad on his draft horse.
[00:24:02]  Very early, he's doing railroad shit, which is unfortunate.
[00:24:07]  Yeah.
[00:24:08]  He was just like, you know, I don't know what it is about trains, but I just feel dramatism.
[00:24:15]  Yeah.
[00:24:16]  So, Matt, this is going to be a bleak story, but I have some good news for you.
[00:24:20]  I have some really good news for you.
[00:24:22]  What is it?
[00:24:23]  This is going to make everything a lot easier for us because is it ether?
[00:24:27]  No, it's a nickname.
[00:24:29]  Joseph Mengele has a nickname.
[00:24:32]  And his nickname is Beppo, which is Italian for Giuseppe or Joseph.
[00:24:39]  And also is why the Buka de Beppo chain of Italian restaurants, which is part of a proud fascist culinary tradition, is named that.
[00:24:47]  They're named in his honor.
[00:24:48]  You can look it up.
[00:24:49]  Buka de Beppo.
[00:24:50]  Yeah, I love a mangela.
[00:24:52]  Well, Buka de Beppo literally means Beppo's hole, which is referring to Joseph Mengele's throat because he loved pasta so much.
[00:25:00]  Look it up.
[00:25:00]  Look it up.
[00:25:01]  Yeah.
[00:25:02]  I believe it.
[00:25:02]  I believe it.
[00:25:03]  Yeah.
[00:25:04]  He was a throat coat, you know, proto-throat coat.
[00:25:07]  Buka de Beppo, when you're here, you're a Nazi.
[00:25:11]  A lot of people don't know this.
[00:25:13]  Every thousand dollars you spend at Buka de Beppo restaurants buys a sea mine to blow up a transport taking migrants from the north coast of Africa to Italy.
[00:25:22]  That's the Buka de Beppo guarantee.
[00:25:24]  Yeah.
[00:25:26]  So if we did we succeed in getting that big Beppo sponsorship yet?
[00:25:31]  For some reason, I haven't heard back.
[00:25:34]  Well, maybe Olive Garden will take us on.
[00:25:37]  I mean, you gotta keep trying for Buka de Beppo.
[00:25:41]  I mean, they have such big plates of pasta.
[00:25:44]  You know what I mean?
[00:25:46]  Massive plates of pasta.
[00:25:48]  Pasta.
[00:25:49]  But do it in front of the jewel.
[00:25:54]  So Beppo was a gifted student.
[00:25:56]  He was never quite top of his class, which is also a thing you see with a lot of these like Nazi functionaries where they do okay in school, but they're never quite the best.
[00:26:05]  That's one of the things Nazism offers people who feel like they should have.
[00:26:09]  Yeah, I feel I did okay, but I feel like I should have done better based on the fact that I'm white.
[00:26:14]  Ah, the Nazis will make me feel special.
[00:26:17]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:26:19]  Yeah.
[00:26:19]  Are you the student?
[00:26:21]  Do people think you're, I don't know, second tier?
[00:26:25]  Yeah.
[00:26:25]  Joins the Nazis and we'll convince you that no, you deserve to be in the first tier.
[00:26:31]  Yeah, we'll give you a chance to conduct the invasion of Russia.
[00:26:36]  And yeah, you deserve to get better grades.
[00:26:39]  So he was a, he likes music.
[00:26:42]  One of the things he does when he's a little kid is he writes a fairy tale to put on for the benefit of a local orphanage.
[00:26:48]  Yeah, he's going to have a lot of stories that involve orphanages over the next few years.
[00:26:52]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:26:53]  Some less nice than others.
[00:26:54]  Mostly, yeah, a couple.
[00:26:56]  So he was as community-oriented as was pretty normal for a German kid from his class in those days.
[00:27:01]  He joins the Red Cross as a volunteer.
[00:27:03]  He's in the Gross Deutsche Jugenbund, which is a Boy Scouts analog that was pretty fascist.
[00:27:10]  He eventually becomes the leader of his town's Jugenbund chapter, which consisted of 60 boys and 30 girls.
[00:27:17]  So, hey, you know, they're at least mixed gender.
[00:27:19]  That's good.
[00:27:19]  Yeah, look at that.
[00:27:20]  Yeah.
[00:27:21]  You know, good for you, Jugenbund.
[00:27:23]  Yeah, maybe they'll be all right.
[00:27:25]  Yeah.
[00:27:26]  End of pod.
[00:27:27]  So Joseph would later reminisce over one of the solstice celebrations that he organized for the Jugenbund.
[00:27:33]  And oh boy, Matt.
[00:27:34]  Quote: We were proud of our big solstice fire, which blazed into the heavens on a ridge opposite the hometown, announcing that a small group of boys and girls today celebrated the solstice with fervent thoughts and desires in their hearts to awaken and arouse the people of their homeland to the holy struggle of liberation from the shackles of the nefarious Versailles Treaty.
[00:27:54]  The flames should liberate us and illuminate our way.
[00:27:56]  They should warm us with the love of our great people and of its high culture.
[00:28:00]  And they should incinerate all discord among us Germans.
[00:28:05]  Now, look, I brought punch.
[00:28:07]  Why is he speaking like this?
[00:28:10]  We were going to make smalls, but now things have gotten dark.
[00:28:14]  I thought this was a bonfire.
[00:28:15]  Why is this guy talking about destruction like this?
[00:28:20]  So, yeah, I should note that the Jugenbund did not accept Jews because, as Joseph would explain later in his diary, the quote, characteristic qualities of the German people could not be expressed if there was alien incrustation allowed to flourish.
[00:28:36]  Yeah, they can't say the K-word.
[00:28:39]  That's literally just like, oh, here's a Jews palm.
[00:28:42]  All of a sudden, we can't tell our killer jokes.
[00:28:45]  Yeah.
[00:28:45]  Now, you could look at this and say, like, ah, obviously he was going to grow into a Nazi.
[00:28:50]  But historians will note that, like, this is pretty normal German anti-Semitism.
[00:28:55]  Like, this is pretty normal for the people who don't become Nazis.
[00:28:58]  Like, the fact that this is a part of his upbringing.
[00:29:01]  Obviously, it influences the Nazi he becomes, but we shouldn't pretend like he was being directed into fascism.
[00:29:08]  It was more that, like, this was like all over the fucking place.
[00:29:11]  People were racist as hell.
[00:29:13]  Right.
[00:29:13]  Yeah.
[00:29:13]  You can't just look at it.
[00:29:16]  It was just part of the norm.
[00:29:18]  It was the norm.
[00:29:18]  Everyone was.
[00:29:19]  There's communists who have this childhood, right?
[00:29:22]  In this period.
[00:29:22]  People who grow up to be communists, who have experiences like this.
[00:29:25]  It's not uncommon.
[00:29:27]  Obviously, those people often did a much better job of getting past it.
[00:29:30]  But like, he has a pretty normal upbringing, racism-wise.
[00:29:36]  I hate the Jews the normal amount.
[00:29:38]  The normal amount of time.
[00:29:39]  That's actually.
[00:29:40]  That's all I ask from people.
[00:29:42]  Just hate Jews the normal amount.
[00:29:43]  Yeah.
[00:29:44]  You know, that's fine.
[00:29:47]  I can live with the normal amount.
[00:29:49]  Well, yeah, maybe put a pen in that one, Matt.
[00:29:51]  Yeah, maybe not to live.
[00:29:52]  That's my friends.
[00:29:54]  So, given that this was the very early 1900s, Joseph's young life also had its requisite brushes with death.
[00:30:00]  When he was six, Beppo fell into a rain barrel and very nearly drowned.
[00:30:06]  Comrade anti-fascist rain barrel tried.
[00:30:09]  It tried?
[00:30:11]  How do you fall into a rain barrel, Beppo?
[00:30:15]  Absolutely.
[00:30:16]  Just a flag with a rain barrel that says, I tried.
[00:30:22]  Oh, I love these fascist rainbows.
[00:30:25]  It did its best.
[00:30:26]  It did more than us, you know?
[00:30:28]  It did more to try to stop Mangola.
[00:30:30]  And this rain barrel incident's going to linger with him for a while because he gets a case of a hundred new nickname.
[00:30:39]  So he winds up sick after this, and kind of like a long series of illnesses leads him to getting osteomyelitis, which is a bone marrow inflammation.
[00:30:49]  Yeah, and so he's going to be after this rain barrel incident and like some incidents that come after it, he's going to be like a really sick kid.
[00:30:58]  All told, though, he's on what you might call the precocious gifted kid track in school.
[00:31:03]  He earns really good grades in primary school, kind of average grade in his secondary school because he's absent so often because he's sick, he gets kidney infections, all this kind of barrel because of the barrel.
[00:31:16]  And anyway, all of the health problems leads to his family sitting down and being like, well, we wanted him to run the company, but he's kind of like always dying.
[00:31:27]  So maybe we give his little brother the company and he can just figure his own shit out if he ever stops dying.
[00:31:33]  That's the decision his very German family makes.
[00:31:37]  And so Alois is groomed to lead the family firm.
[00:31:40]  And Joseph, as he nears graduation, is forced to find something new to do with his life.
[00:31:45]  And he doesn't write about this in detail.
[00:31:47]  He seems to have been kind of ashamed of this.
[00:31:48]  I think this really fucked him up.
[00:31:50]  And to be honest, it fucked a lot of us up because we would all prefer Joseph Mengola, farming machine manufacturer.
[00:31:57]  Seriously, dude, I mean, one of the greatest mistakes ever is not just giving him control of the company.
[00:32:03]  Yeah.
[00:32:03]  He invented some nice combination funds.
[00:32:05]  Yeah, he'd have made tractors or shit, you know?
[00:32:08]  Yeah.
[00:32:09]  Would have been fine.
[00:32:11]  It threshes and it plants at the same time.

=== Financial Education Mindset Shifts (03:02) ===

[00:32:14]  The only combination machine you need.
[00:32:18]  Speaking of combination machines, you know, Mengola Machine Works makes an incredible range of domestic plows, of threshing machines, of mowers.
[00:32:30]  You know, why don't we have our sponsors at Mangola just kind of cut in here and throw an ad.
[00:32:35]  They got a promo code for you.
[00:32:36]  So if you want 20% off of Mengele products, just enter promo code not that Mangola.
[00:32:45]  Wow.
[00:32:49]  Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
[00:32:58]  Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
[00:33:05]  I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
[00:33:09]  This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate, Mike Milken, Take To Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
[00:33:20]  If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
[00:33:28]  Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer Lisa Coffey.
[00:33:33]  Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top.
[00:33:43]  Listen to Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:33:51]  If you're watching the latest season of the Real House Wives of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down.
[00:33:57]  Torsha accusing Kelly of sleeping with a married man.
[00:34:00]  They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew.
[00:34:03]  Pinky has financial issues.
[00:34:05]  I like the bougie style of Housewives Show.
[00:34:08]  I think it looks like it's going to be interesting.
[00:34:10]  On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real Housewives franchise, the drama, the alliances, and a T. Everybody's talking about as an executive producer in reality television.
[00:34:26]  I'm not just watching it, I understand the game.
[00:34:29]  As somebody who creates shows, I'll even say this: at the end of the day, when people are at home, they want entertainment.
[00:34:37]  To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:34:46]  On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[00:34:56]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[00:35:03]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
[00:35:12]  Financial education is not always about like, I'm gonna get rich.

=== Linnaeus and Human Subspecies (14:54) ===

[00:35:16]  That's great.
[00:35:17]  It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
[00:35:27]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[00:35:33]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iTeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:35:46]  Ah, we're back.
[00:35:49]  So, good stuff.
[00:35:51]  So, as he's kind of nearing graduation and trying to figure out what he's going to do with his life now that the thing he'd prepared for as a child was not a possibility for him anymore, Joseph thought back often to his favorite high school teacher, Uri, a gifted educator who, to the detriment of all mankind, succeeded in sparking in Joseph a lifelong love of the sciences.
[00:36:13]  Again, never teach children.
[00:36:15]  It's a horrible idea.
[00:36:17]  This is why I'm against women in STEM.
[00:36:21]  Because I don't want them to become mangelas.
[00:36:25]  It's that simple.
[00:36:26]  Is that it?
[00:36:27]  Is that it?
[00:36:27]  Excellent.
[00:36:29]  And men in STEM.
[00:36:30]  And men in STEM.
[00:36:31]  No one in science.
[00:36:33]  No.
[00:36:34]  This is why we need to put more lead in the gasoline.
[00:36:37]  Yeah.
[00:36:38]  Make it impossible for people to do science and will solve all of our problems.
[00:36:43]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:36:45]  Yeah.
[00:36:45]  You know, we'll just have plagues every now and then.
[00:36:47]  But a plague's nobody's fault, you know?
[00:36:49]  Yeah, that's God.
[00:36:50]  Yeah, that's God.
[00:36:50]  That's God.
[00:36:51]  Let's get the numbers out.
[00:36:53]  He's probably angry at us because we didn't pray enough for rain or something, you know?
[00:36:57]  Who knows?
[00:36:57]  Maybe we got to, oh, no, yep, now we're sacrificing people again.
[00:37:00]  It all comes back to child sacrifice one way or the other.
[00:37:04]  So Yuri teaches him to love science, which would prove to be a horrible mistake.
[00:37:08]  And as he ends the near, nears the end of his primary school days, which the Germans call gymnasium, Joseph's favorite subjects are all hard science.
[00:37:17]  He especially loved zoology and biology.
[00:37:20]  But his favorite course of study was the budding new discipline of anthropology.
[00:37:25]  Oh boy.
[00:37:27]  Yeah.
[00:37:28]  I'm going to quote now from David Marwell's Mengele.
[00:37:31]  In April 1930, he passed his abattoir, the high school exams, with a promising but unexceptional grade.
[00:37:37]  His father had counseled him that what counted was what one achieved, not what one set out to achieve.
[00:37:43]  Initially, Joseph considered becoming a dentist since he was convinced it would be very profitable.
[00:37:47]  There was not even one dentist in my native town.
[00:37:50]  But after discussions with his school friend, Julius Deisbach, a young Mengela decided dentistry was too specialized.
[00:37:56]  He opted instead for medicine with an emphasis on anthropology and human genetics, so I could study the whole range of medicine.
[00:38:04]  Thus, Joseph, yeah.
[00:38:06]  Yeah, that's good.
[00:38:07]  Yeah, don't go specific.
[00:38:09]  You don't want to be a specialist.
[00:38:10]  You want to get real broad.
[00:38:11]  In fact, you want to get so broad that you're just taking wild guesses based on.
[00:38:16]  Yeah, you want to convince yourself that you have a much deeper understanding than you do because you skimmed a couple of textbooks about like history and race and ear shape.
[00:38:30]  That's going to be good for you.
[00:38:32]  So part of why he's drawn to this so much is that no one in his family had done anything like this.
[00:38:37]  There weren't any PhDs in his family.
[00:38:39]  There weren't any scientists in his family.
[00:38:40]  He brags to his friend Diesbach, my family will be very impressed when I become the very first Mengela scientist.
[00:38:47]  Yes, people will remember the name Dr. Mengela.
[00:38:50]  He's not wrong.
[00:38:52]  There is a bunch of shit he writes when he's young about how I want people to remember my name and mission accomplished, Joseph.
[00:38:58]  You did it, buddy.
[00:39:00]  Good shit.
[00:39:01]  So this is where we're going to have to have the first of a couple of detours because you can't tell the story of Joey Mengs properly without telling the story of anthropological sciences in the late 1800s and early 1900s and how they became wedded to nationalist politics in the post-war German state.
[00:39:20]  The origins of race science, as Mengela came to know it, actually start back in like the 1700s.
[00:39:26]  One of the earliest developments in what would become Mengele's Field happened in 1727 when the Earl of Boulonvillier attempted to make a scientific argument that the French nobility were descended from a superior race of long-headed Nordics.
[00:39:41]  The French peasantry, he argued, were just descended from the Gauls that Caesar had beaten.
[00:39:45]  And thus the rule of the French royal family was enshrined in immutable biological law.
[00:39:50]  Dude, wait, hold on.
[00:39:52]  Are you trying to tell me that science was just used in order to justify royal nobility and kings' rules?
[00:40:03]  Yeah.
[00:40:04]  Yeah.
[00:40:04]  It's kind of like the root of a lot of genetic science, in addition to the stuff that was like, I want to see if we can crossbreed peas, which is, you know, groundbreaking work, was also like, oh, maybe this will allow us to find another reason why we should never, never not be in charge.
[00:40:21]  Well, you got to take the good with the bad.
[00:40:23]  Yeah.
[00:40:24]  That's really the history of genetics in a nutshell.
[00:40:27]  Yeah, you got to take a good with the bad.
[00:40:29]  I mean, you know, you got to share genocides here and there, but also seedless watermelon.
[00:40:33]  Also, seedless watermelons.
[00:40:35]  Exactly.
[00:40:36]  Look, you get some seedless watermelons.
[00:40:38]  You get, you know, hundreds of thousands of people being burnt to a crisp in Auschwitz.
[00:40:45]  Who's to say?
[00:40:46]  You know, who's to say?
[00:40:47]  And if you've, you know, if you think and dwell on that and you feel bad, smoke some Sensimelia, dude.
[00:40:52]  Seedless weed, bro.
[00:40:54]  Seedless weed.
[00:40:55]  Also bred using the great science of Galton.
[00:40:59]  Or Lynnette, yeah, whatever.
[00:41:01]  I think it was Galton who did that shit.
[00:41:03]  So his argument, the Earl of Boulonvillier or whatever, did not spread that far beyond France, but the work of early naturalists would provide a shot in the arm for future rich assholes looking to make similar arguments to justify subjugation.
[00:41:17]  One of the first scientists in this field, who's not a bastard, was the father of modern taxonomy and binomial nomenclature, Carolus Linnaeus, who you probably heard about in middle school or high school.
[00:41:27]  Carolus, obviously, not a Nazi.
[00:41:30]  He saw, and in fact, there's some really progressive attitudes towards what he thought about the world.
[00:41:34]  He saw humanity as another species in the animal kingdom, which, given the way Christians talked about animals in this period of time, was a pretty noteworthy belief.
[00:41:43]  Linnaeus noted that there were many subspecies of other mammals, like dogs and cats.
[00:41:47]  You know, you've got wolves and you've got coyotes and you've got all these different animals.
[00:41:51]  I don't know if he used that specific example, but that kind of stuff.
[00:41:54]  And he was like, well, you should probably categorize humans the same way, which, given the era of science he's in, is not a bad thing, but it's going to cause some problems later because he divides the human race into four subspecies, European, American, Asiatic, and African.
[00:42:12]  I don't think Carolus means much by it, but it's going to become a problem.
[00:42:16]  Yeah, I mean, you know, he tried his best, but I got to say that classification was a bit careless.
[00:42:23]  Oh, oh, sorry.
[00:42:25]  Wow.
[00:42:27]  Incredible.
[00:42:28]  Because he sounds like.
[00:42:30]  All right.
[00:42:30]  Move on.
[00:42:31]  No, you know what?
[00:42:32]  That's a t-shirt right there.
[00:42:34]  Yeah, we'll figure it out.
[00:42:35]  All of that.
[00:42:36]  Put it all in a shirt.
[00:42:37]  So Linnaeus is a Swede, and one of his most influential colleagues is a Dutch man, the anatomy professor Petrus Camper.
[00:42:44]  Camper spent way too much time.
[00:42:46]  And Linnaeus, again, groundbreaking scientist.
[00:42:50]  Camper is a little sillier because one of the things this guy does is he spends a shitload of time looking at old statues like that the Greeks had made and being like, God, why are these people so hot?
[00:43:04]  This must be evidence that they are like the master race and we're all like brute like descendants of them whose blood has been dirtied by race mixing is kind of the mindset of like so many tools.
[00:43:18]  It's all it's yeah, exactly.
[00:43:19]  All of these like traditional vibes Twitter accounts are like, look at this statue.
[00:43:24]  Why don't we look like this anymore?
[00:43:26]  They're like, look how hard the statue is.
[00:43:28]  And guess what?
[00:43:29]  That's a normal penis size.
[00:43:33]  It's very funny because, like, a thousand years from now, after you know, the nuclear war or the mushroom plague or whatever gets us, some scientist is going to find old copies of Us magazine and start doing a racial taxonomy.
[00:43:47]  There's four subspecies.
[00:43:49]  There's the Beyoncé, there's the Pascal, there's the Cruz, and there's the like, yeah, no, seriously, they're just going to be like, there were no flaws anywhere in their skin.
[00:44:02]  Sometimes they had no belly button, which may have been an airbrush mistake.
[00:44:07]  I'm just imagining like year 4,000 Nazis marching half-naked under a banner of Post Malone.
[00:44:17]  Just looking at a bunch of fucking like old vines and old TikTok filters.
[00:44:23]  And just being like, you know, the master race of the time sometimes had this, they had dog ears, and when they would open their mouth, a tongue would roll out.
[00:44:32]  Yeah.
[00:44:32]  And they would have the butterflies around the eyes.
[00:44:35]  So future eyes mixing has destroyed us.
[00:44:38]  Future Catholic stained glass release instead of like having the halos above their head, they're just all yasified.
[00:44:50]  Yassified Jesus.
[00:44:52]  It was 1795 that we first get the term Caucasian, coined by Johann Blumenbach, who was, of course, a German.
[00:45:02]  Blumenbach used the term to, quote, describe the variety of mankind that originated on the southern slopes of Mount Caucasus along Europe's eastern border.
[00:45:12]  He described Caucasians as the original race and the most beautiful.
[00:45:16]  Now, here we go.
[00:45:18]  Here we go.
[00:45:19]  Yep, we're off to the races now, man.
[00:45:22]  Let's do it.
[00:45:22]  None of this can be separated from the Atlantic slave trade, which is starting to roar at the time, or from the ongoing genocides in the Americas, both of which cry out for a scientific, rational explanation that lets Enlightenment Europeans feel good about the crimes against humanity they're committing, right?
[00:45:40]  It would be one thing to be like, I don't know, man, look back at the Romans, look back at like fucking Han Chai, look at people forever.
[00:45:46]  We always are murdering and raping and enslaving each other.
[00:45:48]  We're just like that.
[00:45:49]  But Europeans don't want to do that.
[00:45:50]  They want to be like...
[00:45:51]  No, but we're liberals.
[00:45:52]  Yeah, we want there's a scientific reason we should be doing this.
[00:45:57]  We read philosophy and we understand, you know, how precious the human soul is.
[00:46:03]  Yeah.
[00:46:04]  But I think science says those guys are not humans.
[00:46:06]  They'll get a kill.
[00:46:07]  Oh, damn.
[00:46:08]  Yeah, it's really easier for someone else to make my drinks for me.
[00:46:11]  So I'm going to write a lot of books.
[00:46:14]  Exactly, dude, dude.
[00:46:16]  That's why you got a PhD is just to justify exploiting every person's colour.
[00:46:22]  This is like fully half of genetic science.
[00:46:25]  Yes.
[00:46:27]  So in the 1800s, a generation of scientists arose that took the start Blumenbach and Camper and Linnaeus had made and extended their conclusions much further.
[00:46:36]  Samuel Morton theorized in the mid-1800s that intelligence was linked to brain size, declaring that white people had larger skulls and were thus superior.
[00:46:48]  Yeah, this is he's like, this is like one of the one of the precursors to phrenology for sure.
[00:46:53]  Morton's work is quoted and shared extensively by journalists and teachers in the era, and it becomes accepted as settled science by a lot of white people.
[00:47:02]  Now, there was disagreement even in this period by principled men of science like Friedrich Tiedemann, who was also a German.
[00:47:09]  To be fair, like the Germans are on both sides of this, fighting against it as well.
[00:47:13]  And Tiedemann, using the very best scientific methods of the day, tries to replicate Morton's research about like, you know, well, obviously white people have the biggest brains, and he can't repeat it.
[00:47:23]  Repeatability is a cornerstone of the scientific method.
[00:47:26]  The whole thing.
[00:47:27]  It's a big part of it.
[00:47:28]  Yeah.
[00:47:29]  And he can't do it.
[00:47:30]  So he's like, I'm going to quote actually from a write-up in Facing History that kind of summarizes this.
[00:47:35]  He also found no evidence for the racial hierarchy, a kind of racial ladder on which Caucasians always stood at the top and Africans at the bottom that Morton had claimed to uncover.
[00:47:44]  Tiedemann's work did not attract much attention.
[00:47:46]  It was largely ignored or dismissed as unscientific.
[00:47:50]  But I don't think we should.
[00:47:51]  I think, like, as much shit as we're going to rightfully give the German scientific establishment this episode, we should note there are always guys like Tiedemann being like, fuck this shit.
[00:48:02]  What are you talking about?
[00:48:03]  You people are like idiots.
[00:48:04]  Like, not true and very stupid.
[00:48:06]  Not right.
[00:48:07]  Yeah.
[00:48:08]  And he's not.
[00:48:08]  It's not the whole idea of like, you know, on its face, it is just the dumbest, funniest thing that these guys are scientists and they're going, oh, the bigger brain make more smart.
[00:48:21]  And I'm just like, what the fuck are you?
[00:48:23]  Like, it's like the same reason that people, you know, green like movies like The Meg, where they're like, what if shark, big?
[00:48:31]  Bigger shark, better shark.
[00:48:33]  It's like very stupid.
[00:48:35]  You got to be kind of, you got to, you got to be kind of a dumb guy to like be like, yeah, big brain.
[00:48:41]  Yeah.
[00:48:41]  A lot of it's just like, you know, the under like this kind of belief that I think a lot of people, particularly people who are kind of inherently conservative, have that like it's uncomfortable thinking that there might be other equally valid ways to live that are also require an equal but different level of development and scientific understanding.
[00:49:01]  One of my favorite examples of this, there's a great story.
[00:49:03]  There's this place in, God, it's somewhere in the Amazon.
[00:49:06]  I forget exactly which modern day country it's in, but it's generally known to anthropologists and archaeologists as the lost city of Z.
[00:49:13]  That like there were in like the late 1800s, I think early 1900s, a bunch of these, you know, exploration age Western scientists are always trying to find because I think there's supposed to be gold there or some shit.
[00:49:25]  And one of the guys who's who's looking for it the most does like three trips there and every one of them goes the same way.
[00:49:31]  He enters the Amazon with like 100 men and like six of them come out a year and a half later and everyone else has died horribly.
[00:49:38]  And on like his third trip in there, they're all starving.
[00:49:40]  They're on the edge of death.
[00:49:41]  They're sick.
[00:49:42]  And they finally run into a group of natives who are like willing to talk with them.
[00:49:46]  And the natives are like, you guys look like shit.
[00:49:50]  What's going on?
[00:49:50]  And they're like, this jungle is a green desert.
[00:49:53]  There's no food at all.
[00:49:55]  And they like break a like this.
[00:49:57]  They grab this plant and break it in half and like toss it in a pond and a bunch of fish float up to the top because the plant was full of a neurotoxin that they knew you just dump this in the water, stuns the fish, then you just grab them.
[00:50:08]  They're like, look, there's all sorts of food around here.

=== Scientists Arguing Over Exposure (03:31) ===

[00:50:11]  What's wrong with you guys?
[00:50:12]  Have you all just been dying and not knowing this?
[00:50:18]  Oh, yeah.
[00:50:20]  Yeah.
[00:50:21]  I mean, yeah, they had spent all of their time writing books about skull shape, whereas these people had spent their time figuring out how to turn their home into a fucking giant grocery store.
[00:50:33]  I don't know.
[00:50:33]  I know what I find more impressive, but I mean, Europeans do other stuff too, right?
[00:50:39]  They make boats.
[00:50:40]  So those are cool.
[00:50:42]  So that's how we get the movie Master and Commander.
[00:50:45]  So who's to say, right?
[00:50:47]  You know, who's to say?
[00:50:48]  True Mission.
[00:50:49]  Can't discount that.
[00:50:50]  That was a triumph.
[00:50:51]  That was a triumph.
[00:50:52]  That's occurring around this period of time.
[00:50:55]  And also, unfortunately, the scientist on that boat, the doctor guy, probably had some race science books on that boat with him.
[00:51:03]  Like, I'm afraid it's unavoidable.
[00:51:06]  They have all sorts of books.
[00:51:08]  You can't.
[00:51:10]  Yeah, you can't fault them.
[00:51:11]  I don't know.
[00:51:12]  I've only read one of the books that that movie's based on.
[00:51:14]  Good movie, though.
[00:51:15]  So Tiedeman is not the only guy who's pushing back scientifically on the arguments of kind of scientific bigots in his period.
[00:51:23]  Now, to be noteworthy, the guys who are like arguing against some of this early race science, their science is often bad too, right?
[00:51:31]  The fact that they are like see properly that their colleagues are making bad arguments doesn't mean their arguments are scientifically flawless.
[00:51:39]  A good example of this is the seventh president of Princeton, Samuel Smith, who speculated that black people were human beings just like white people, and they were just black because a large freckle had spread over their entire body due to sun exposure.
[00:51:53]  It's close, okay?
[00:51:57]  It's melanin.
[00:51:59]  His heart is in the right place.
[00:52:01]  Yeah, he's, I get where he's, yeah, yeah, he's not almost there.
[00:52:07]  Yeah, he's got pieces of it.
[00:52:09]  So, Dr. Benjamin Rush, meanwhile, argued that all babies are born white and that black skin was the result of mild leprosy.
[00:52:17]  Now, this kind of shows how sloppy the scientific method is because, like, I don't know, you could just look at a baby.
[00:52:25]  Like, that's pretty easy to disprove.
[00:52:26]  You could just look at a baby, but you know, whatever.
[00:52:29]  As a general rule, the scientists arguing that there were perceived, like, so basically, you have kind of two groups here.
[00:52:35]  You have the scientists arguing there is a racial hierarchy and these are different subspecies, right?
[00:52:41]  And you have the scientists arguing that, like, all of the differences that we see are the result of either nurture or environmental exposure, not immutable characteristics.
[00:52:50]  And the ones who are making that argument, even when their science is bad, are at least less likely to espouse racism to justify entrenched power structures.
[00:52:58]  Now, that doesn't mean it doesn't happen because a decent chunk of like the people arguing for slavery in the 1800s are being like, oh, eventually we'll, you know, raise them up to be our equals.
[00:53:07]  It's just we have to keep them enslaved until then.
[00:53:10]  So that is like, all you know, there's a lot of different things being said in this period.
[00:53:18]  Yeah, so there's a lot of cool stuff happening in early race science.
[00:53:21]  One of my favorite guys here is Lord Munbotto, a Scottish philosopher who believed that he's one of these guys who it's all about environmental exposure and like what like nurture and stuff.
[00:53:34]  And his big argument is that like one day we will train chimpanzees to be integrated into society.
[00:53:40]  Like we'll have chimpanzees in parliament.

=== Chimpanzees in Parliament (04:34) ===

[00:53:42]  Like God, I wish he'd been right.
[00:53:45]  Honestly, I like where his brain's going with this.
[00:53:47]  I wish he'd been right.
[00:53:48]  Yeah, because I mean, they do a better job than those clowns in Congress.
[00:53:53]  That's right.
[00:53:54]  I mean, I would vote for any living chimpanzee over almost any living Congress person.
[00:54:01]  You probably don't have to ask the CEO of TikTok if their phones connect to Wi-Fi.
[00:54:07]  No, they're just happy to look at the dancing lights.
[00:54:11]  You know, exactly.
[00:54:13]  They don't care about Wi-Fi.
[00:54:14]  They're chimpanzees.
[00:54:16]  And they're not cowards.
[00:54:17]  And if they really disagree with someone, they will tear them limb from limb.
[00:54:20]  Oh, man.
[00:54:21]  Can you imagine if we had like Congress fights like we had in the 1800s, but with a bunch of chimps?
[00:54:25]  Oh, fucking goal.
[00:54:27]  It would be fucking rule.
[00:54:28]  It would be the number one name.
[00:54:29]  That's all I watch.
[00:54:30]  I would just go into Congress and like toss a bunch of bananas in the middle of the floor.
[00:54:38]  Let's get them fighting.
[00:54:39]  I feel like the chimpanzees wouldn't go.
[00:54:41]  What are you going to do about Finsta?
[00:54:44]  Yeah, right.
[00:54:45]  It's so embarrassing.
[00:54:47]  No, no, it is embarrassing.
[00:54:49]  We would have a lot more land devoted to banana cultivation.
[00:54:53]  I feel like they don't actually eat bananas, and I heard that at some point, but fuck it.
[00:54:58]  Look, whenever we get something like this wrong, it gives some beautiful Redditor a chance to be like, well, actually, my time has come.
[00:55:07]  And God bless you.
[00:55:09]  I just want to make you people happy.
[00:55:10]  So you should do all of these scientists.
[00:55:13]  Now, though, you know, Sophie.
[00:55:15]  Robert.
[00:55:17]  Yes.
[00:55:20]  Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
[00:55:29]  Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
[00:55:36]  I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
[00:55:40]  This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate Mike Milken, Take To Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
[00:55:51]  If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
[00:55:59]  Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
[00:56:04]  Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top.
[00:56:14]  Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:56:22]  On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[00:56:32]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[00:56:38]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
[00:56:48]  Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
[00:56:52]  That's great.
[00:56:53]  It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
[00:57:03]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[00:57:09]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:57:20]  If you're watching the latest season of the Real House Wives of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down.
[00:57:26]  Rusha accusing Kelly of sleeping with a married man.
[00:57:29]  They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew.
[00:57:32]  Pinky has financial issues.
[00:57:34]  I like the bougie style of a housewives show.
[00:57:36]  Now I think it looks like it's going to be interesting.
[00:57:39]  On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real Housewives franchise, the drama, the alliances, and the tea everybody's talking about.
[00:57:52]  As an executive producer in reality television, I'm not just watching it.
[00:57:56]  I understand the game.
[00:57:58]  As somebody who creates shows, I'll even say this.
[00:58:01]  At the end of the day, when people are at home, they want entertainment.
[00:58:06]  To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

=== Racial Hygiene and Eugenics (14:40) ===

[00:58:17]  We're back.
[00:58:19]  Oh, sorry.
[00:58:20]  I was waiting for a speaking of bananas or something.
[00:58:24]  So there's a lot of scientists in this period, the kind of anti-race science guys who believe that all of the differences between men and women and between different races that they believed existed would be reduced by social reform and legislation.
[00:58:38]  And you can see kind of evidence of this in the French Revolution, these ideas of liberty, egality, and fraternity, the fact that it comes with like increased civil rights to Jewish people in the French Empire.
[00:58:48]  These are all results of that intellectual tradition.
[00:58:51]  But progressive ideals like this always have their limits.
[00:58:54]  And again, slave owners would use versions of this argument to justify aspects of what they were doing.
[00:59:00]  Once slavery falls in the United States, there's kind of a panic among a lot of people that race mixing is going to occur and thus would disastrously water down the potential of the species.
[00:59:10]  Racial hygiene became a common topic of discussion among medical professionals in the late 1800s.
[00:59:16]  And the two countries most associated with this movement are the United States and Germany.
[00:59:21]  Wow, that's so shocking.
[00:59:22]  Oh my God.
[00:59:24]  Yeah, it is.
[00:59:25]  And I thought, yeah, not my America.
[00:59:29]  That's not my America, guys.
[00:59:31]  My America is in my head, and it's made up of all of the things of my morals.
[00:59:37]  My America doesn't have stock rooms full of skulls of people that came from somewhere.
[00:59:44]  Nope, not in my America.
[00:59:46]  It's a land of milk and honey.
[00:59:48]  You know, we'll talk.
[00:59:49]  We have talked about race science in the United States a number of times, but right now we're getting back to Germany.
[00:59:54]  So the Kaiser's Germany had started to invest in research on racial heredity a few years prior to World War I. Actually, the year before Joseph Mengele is born, the Reich Health Office puts together a file on Rossenhygien, which actually sounds more racist than race hygiene.
[01:00:12]  Yeah.
[01:00:13]  It's much worse than the German.
[01:00:16]  Rossen hygiene.
[01:00:18]  So it included studies on population control and papers on racial differences between Germans and Jews.
[01:00:26]  Now, the Kaiser Reich, very racist, this is evidence of that.
[01:00:30]  But when the war comes, all of this kind of talk of differences, it doesn't go away, but it fades a lot because the Germans are suddenly like, you know, who dies exactly the same in front of a machine gun?
[01:00:41]  Jews and Germans.
[01:00:42]  And we need a lot more of both if we're going to get rid of all these Allied bullets.
[01:00:47]  Both have opposable thumbs and a little index finger that go pew pew, the Jews and the Germans.
[01:00:53]  Yeah, we can all do it.
[01:00:54]  Let's table the race thing for a second.
[01:00:57]  For a little bit.
[01:00:58]  Figure out how to, you know, take over Europe.
[01:01:01]  I mean, kind of famously, Hitler gets awarded his Iron Cross in part due to the intervention of his officer, who's a Jewish man.
[01:01:10]  Like, this is a...
[01:01:12]  The Kaiser Reich, a lot of this stuff still exists.
[01:01:15]  It's budding, it's building, but it's also not like the same as it's going to be.
[01:01:21]  So as a result, it's during the Weimar years that things really take a leap forward.
[01:01:27]  In 1920, the Prussian Interior Council creates a council on racial hygiene to discuss how to grow the German population and halt illegal abortion.
[01:01:35]  While such work always had support from the right, initially at least, there is significant interest among scientists across the ideological spectrum.
[01:01:43]  And to make that point, I'm going to quote now from Robert Proctor's book, Racial Hygiene, Medicine Under the Nazis.
[01:01:49]  Many racial hygienicists supported a kind of state socialism, whereby a strong central government would direct social policy towards programs to improve the race.
[01:01:58]  The Society for Racial Hygiene allied itself with a number of groups advocating social reform.
[01:02:03]  Conversely, many of those today remembered as progressives were attracted by the movement to improve the health of the race.
[01:02:10]  Alfred Grotjohn, for example, today considered the father of German social medicine and one of the leading architects of Weimar Germany's progressive health reforms, saw racial hygiene as a legitimate concern of medicine.
[01:02:21]  He was one of those who defended the use of the term eugenics rather than racial hygiene in order to avoid confusion with racist notions of the political anthropological variety.
[01:02:31]  According to Grotjan, racial hygiene would provide long-range preventative medicine for the germplasm of humanity that would complement both traditional curative medical care and concerns for the human physical and social environment provided by public health and social medicine.
[01:02:46]  Racial hygiene, along with social hygiene and personal hygiene, was simply one element in a larger, more comprehensive program of human health care.
[01:02:53]  Grotjan's views earned him the respect of more devout racial hygienicists.
[01:02:57]  He was one of the few social hygienicists in the Weimar Republic willing to advocate compulsory sterilization.
[01:03:03]  He also advocated for increased powers to commit upwards of a million defective asocials to psychiatric institutions.
[01:03:10]  After 1933, German theorists or Nazi racial theorists were able to turn to Grotjan as an example of a socialist who supported strong measures in the field of racial hygiene.
[01:03:20]  So this is a thing that doesn't get talked about enough.
[01:03:23]  That is the father of the German welfare state in a lot of ways, Grotjan, and at least in the healthcare portion of it.
[01:03:29]  He is a social democrat and he is in favor of committing a million a social people involuntarily to institutions and sterilizing en masse people he'd abused as defective.
[01:03:43]  You know, the same thing as brushing your teeth.
[01:03:45]  Yeah, it's the same.
[01:03:46]  It's the same as any kind of hygiene.
[01:03:47]  It's like taking a shower, you know?
[01:03:49]  Yeah.
[01:03:49]  So you take a shower and then you, you know, you round up people.
[01:03:53]  Yeah, you start putting them in buses, camps, trains.
[01:03:56]  And a lot of it's worth it, we taught when we talk about race science, because of what happens and because of all of the worst crimes are in fact committed by the Nazis when the right is in power, we do tend to ignore the fact that eugenics and race science in Germany are popular everywhere, including with communists.
[01:04:13]  The idea of a planned genetic future is something that German communists are going to embrace as well for at least a period of time.
[01:04:20]  And it's not just in Germany.
[01:04:21]  The Germans can't help themselves.
[01:04:22]  No.
[01:04:23]  Well, it's not just the Germans either.
[01:04:24]  In 1925, there's a Soviet leading eugenics journal that publishes translations of German articles on racial hygiene with positive remarks.
[01:04:33]  And partly as a result of this, Weimar Germany and the Soviet Union establish a joint institute for racial biology in Moscow between 1931 and 1938.
[01:04:43]  There's overlap there with the Nazi years.
[01:04:45]  There's a period of time.
[01:04:46]  I'm making a point that, you know, there's some sort of racial element for white people where they love race science.
[01:04:53]  I don't know how to work that into my worldview.
[01:04:55]  And it's interesting.
[01:04:56]  I mean, this is part of, there's a bigger story here, which is like during the 30s, because both are kind of pariah nations, the Soviet Union and Weimar in the Nazi Germany actually have a lot going on together.
[01:05:08]  Their military is trained together.
[01:05:10]  They do all sorts of like have all sorts of like, I mean, this is part of what kind of lays some of the bones for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
[01:05:17]  But race science is not absent from the Soviet Union in this period.
[01:05:22]  Many people know that the Third Reich's genocidal efforts began with the T4 euthanasia program, in which people who were physically handicapped or seen as feeble-minded were put to death in traveling gas vans.
[01:05:33]  Less is known that in 1928, it was socialist Dr. Ranier Fetcher who carried out some of the first sterilizations in German history.
[01:05:41]  He is doing eugenic sterilizations on his own without any permission.
[01:05:46]  He's like breaking the law to do this, and he's like a socialist activist.
[01:05:50]  Now, the point here is not that socialists and Nazis had the same attitude towards eugenics.
[01:05:55]  It's just that eugenics beliefs were popular even among socialists and communists.
[01:06:00]  Obviously, the Nazis are the ones who use these ideas to massacre 12 million people in the service of race science.
[01:06:07]  I'm bringing this up because you have to note that when you're talking about the origins of these ideas that are accelerated by the Nazis and adopted by them, they are not controversial among a lot of scientists, even scientists who find fascism abhorrent.
[01:06:21]  There's a lot of anti-fascist scientists who nonetheless believe the Nazis are not entirely wrong about race science.
[01:06:28]  That's the period that we're in.
[01:06:30]  So probably the most significant development in the early history of German race science is the establishment of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics.
[01:06:42]  Very well.
[01:06:42]  Far as we know today, Kaiser Permanente.
[01:06:45]  Kaiser Permanente.
[01:06:47]  Yeah.
[01:06:47]  Yeah, that's what Kaiser Permanente stands for, the permanent Kaiser.
[01:06:51]  Actually, if they are responsible for your health care, you are legally a servant of the Kaiser.
[01:06:56]  That's how it works.
[01:06:57]  That's my insurance.
[01:06:59]  Yeah, the Kaiser, by the way, now is an AI-generated creature because that AI is really able to...
[01:07:05]  I was going to do a handful of hands.
[01:07:06]  I was going to do a hand joke, but you know what?
[01:07:08]  That's not appropriate.
[01:07:11]  So, that Kaiser Wilhelm Institute gets started in 1927, also in Prussia, which is kind of the stronghold of militarist conservatism in Germany.
[01:07:21]  Support for the institute came from the very top of the Weimar state, though, including the president of the State Health Office and its chief medical statistician, Emil Rossell, who argued in favor of preventing marriage of the mentally ill to healthy Germans.
[01:07:34]  This did not occur in a vacuum.
[01:07:36]  Rossell noted that England, Sweden, the United States, and Norway all had similar institutes doing similar things.
[01:07:42]  When the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute opened its doors, Eugene Fischer was appointed director.
[01:07:47]  He was a nationalist Catholic, but not a Nazi early on.
[01:07:51]  And in fact, a lot of his early research is kind of contra to the conclusions the Nazis are making.
[01:07:57]  One of the things he'll argue is that hybridization leads to better health in European races.
[01:08:02]  Like he does a bunch of studies about, oh, actually, when you're like, when you've got Germans and, you know, Slavs and English and we're all breeding, everything turns out better.
[01:08:10]  That's one of the things this guy argues.
[01:08:13]  He's kind of an interesting guy.
[01:08:15]  One of the things he notes is that, like, where it has remained the most pure, the Nordic race has brought forth no great cultural achievements, which is very much not a Nazi attitude.
[01:08:24]  Yeah.
[01:08:25]  I love it.
[01:08:26]  Yeah.
[01:08:27]  And that said, he's going to, once the Nazis take power, he's going to stop saying this shit and start pushing hardcore Nazi dogma.
[01:08:35]  And he's going to bring in a lot of scientists who are just straight up Nazis.
[01:08:39]  And the most influential of these is a guy named Otmar von Verschur, who is a war veteran and a member of the right-wing Freikorps paramilitary.
[01:08:47]  He is also a scientist studying genetics and race who is particularly fascinated with twins.
[01:08:54]  Oh boy.
[01:08:55]  Bum bum bomb.
[01:08:57]  Oh my god.
[01:08:59]  Yeah, no, that's not.
[01:09:00]  Look, there's very rarely does it end well when people are fascinated with twins.
[01:09:04]  Oh, yeah, one way or the other, a lot of fucked up shit comes from that.
[01:09:08]  Yeah, whether it's Nazi experiments or being weirdly attracted to those beer commercials.
[01:09:15]  Exactly.
[01:09:16]  Yeah, or the Doublemint ones.
[01:09:17]  So why do people want to fuck twins?
[01:09:21]  It's incest is going on.
[01:09:23]  So I'm not into it.
[01:09:25]  I'm on record.
[01:09:26]  Wow.
[01:09:27]  That's another t-shirt.
[01:09:28]  Yeah.
[01:09:29]  Yeah.
[01:09:29]  Just a picture of your face.
[01:09:31]  I'm not into twins.
[01:09:32]  I'm not into twins.
[01:09:34]  Gross.
[01:09:34]  Matt L. That's incest.
[01:09:36]  Matt Lee, a statue of you breaking a packet of Double Mint gum in half.
[01:09:41]  I'm a big red guy.
[01:09:43]  Now, Big Red's, that's an anti-fascist.
[01:09:46]  It really is.
[01:09:47]  Big Red is literally Stalin's gum of choice.
[01:09:50]  Now, the anarchist gum is, of course, Big League Chu.
[01:09:53]  That's right.
[01:09:54]  Yeah.
[01:09:57]  Look it up.
[01:09:57]  Look it up.
[01:09:58]  So after Hitler takes power, Fischer, you know, starts going hardcore into the Nazi stuff.
[01:10:03]  He praises the Nazis as the first political movement to recognize that culture is the product of, quote, the qualities of the race that has given rise to and carried on that culture.
[01:10:13]  Fischer draws a line between the Marxists and men of natural science and national socialism when he says the Marxist socialist view concerns itself with the single individual.
[01:10:24]  We national socialists, in contrast, concern ourselves with the family.
[01:10:29]  Now we go.
[01:10:31]  There's a Margaret Thatcher quote that always makes me think about, which is, there's no such thing as society.
[01:10:37]  There are men and women and there are families.
[01:10:40]  But there's probably nothing to that.
[01:10:41]  Probably nothing to that.
[01:10:43]  There's always a really relevant Margaret Thatcher quote when talking about Nazi stuff.
[01:10:49]  There really is.
[01:10:50]  But that's a subject for another day.
[01:10:52]  Let us return to our buddy, Jojo Mingipoo.
[01:10:56]  Jojo Mengimeng.
[01:10:58]  Yeah.
[01:11:00]  Jojo the Mengele.
[01:11:02]  So the Nazis are not in power when he joins Munich University as a student in philosophy and the medical schools.
[01:11:09]  But he's like doing an anthropology, medical kind of thing where he's getting like his PhD and his MD kind of at the same time.
[01:11:15]  It's easier to get both back then.
[01:11:17]  So while the Nazis are not yet in power, race science is humming right along.
[01:11:20]  When Joseph starts school, the Nazis are the second largest party in the Reichstag.
[01:11:25]  He would later write about his early impressions of the National Socialist Party.
[01:11:30]  I was not then old enough to vote.
[01:11:32]  My political leanings were then, I think, for reasons of family tradition, national conservative.
[01:11:37]  I had not joined any political organization, though indeed I was strongly attracted by the program and the whole organization of the National Socialists.
[01:11:44]  But for the time being, I remained an unorganized private person.
[01:11:48]  But in the long run, it was impossible to stand aside in these politically stirring times.
[01:11:52]  Should our fatherland not succumb to the Marxist-Bolshevist attack, this simple political concept finally became the decisive factor in my life.
[01:12:01]  So, yeah, it all always starts with an obsession with anti-communism with these guys.
[01:12:07]  It really does.
[01:12:08]  That is always the root.
[01:12:09]  And of course, communism is Jewish in their eyes.
[01:12:12]  So one thing leads to another.
[01:12:16]  Oh, wow.
[01:12:17]  Wow.
[01:12:17]  Good God.
[01:12:18]  How rude indeed, Jar Jar.
[01:12:20]  How rude indeed.
[01:12:22]  Yes, Jar Jar, some people gonna die.
[01:12:25]  Good God.
[01:12:29]  Matt, any pluggables to plug?
[01:12:32]  Oh, you know, same stuff.
[01:12:34]  You know, if you like the Sopranos or The Wire and you want to, you know, re-watch it or just listen to guys, you know, talk about it, pod yourself a gun.
[01:12:42]  It is the world's only The Wire and, you know, Sopranos podcast.
[01:12:50]  Yeah, so I plug that.
[01:12:52]  And, you know, I'll be all right.
[01:12:57]  This is going to be a fun one.

=== Excited Pet Child Net (02:38) ===

[01:12:58]  I'm very excited.
[01:12:59]  You know, I'm very excited for what's coming.
[01:13:02]  And I'm going to just pet my child for a little bit.
[01:13:06]  Yeah, I'm going to pet a child too.
[01:13:09]  I'll go find one.
[01:13:10]  It's not hard.
[01:13:11]  Yeah.
[01:13:11]  I don't know.
[01:13:12]  That wording is really good for you, buddy.
[01:13:14]  No, Sophie, I got a net.
[01:13:15]  It's fine.
[01:13:17]  All right.
[01:13:17]  Well, that's going to do it for us here at Behind the Bastards.
[01:13:22]  Until next time, you know, there is a next time after that comment.
[01:13:28]  Phishing net works just as well on kids.
[01:13:32]  Anyway.
[01:13:33]  Repeating it really helps.
[01:13:35]  It always does.
[01:13:36]  God bless you all.
[01:13:39]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
[01:13:42]  For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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