Josef Mengele and the Nazi Doctors expose the banality of evil, debunking the "mad scientist" myth to reveal a career-driven academic seeking tenure through Auschwitz experiments on twins and Noma victims. While Mengele evaded justice in South America, dying alone in Brazil, survivors like Dr. Miklos Nyiszli risked death to warn families and rebel against crematoria. Ultimately, the episode argues that true horror lies not in fictional monsters but in ordinary individuals committing atrocities for personal advancement, a mindset echoed by unpunished colleagues influencing modern racial science ideologies today. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Roald Dahl Spy Secrets00:03:49
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Hello, gorgeous.
It's Lala Kent, host of Untraditional Ilala.
My days of filling up cups at sir may be over, but I'm still loving life in the valley.
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Welcome to Behind the Bastards, where we talk about atrocities, talking about sad things.
Ah, what an incredible introduction.
Sophie, I need to get one of those.
Can we put one on order?
Yeah, we're putting one on order.
You know, they're not that expensive and they make the sad stuff hurt less.
Yeah, I think I should get one of those.
And that's how I should just read every episode.
I could just sing all of these stories.
Yeah, it's like you could, it's you can learn and also you can cope at the same time, which is nice.
You can lope.
Yeah.
Don't we all want to lope?
Sophie's eyes and her words say no, but my desire to have one of those things says yes.
Your face is saying no, but your mouth is also saying no.
Both are saying no.
All right.
Oh, God.
Oh, what an exciting episode we have for today.
A lot of fun drama.
There's going to be a car chase.
Matt's going to finish his taxes.
Yeah, yeah.
You get back to those taxes and I'll start talking about Joey Mengs again.
Yeah, because you know, I'm going to, I'm, once again, I did this the first episode.
I'm doing this the last episode.
I'm opening with a plug, motherfuckers.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Plug out.
This is the thing.
I mostly talk about the wire and or, you know, TV shows in general.
I, we did, uh, it's pot yourself a gun is the name of the podcast.
Pot yourself a gun.
Give us five stars in a review and listen to us talk about the wire.
We just finished season two, which was on the docks.
And, you know, that was definitely a polarizing season, but that was my favorite season.
Yeah, I think it's important.
It shows a lot of the under-discussed side of how the drug trade works.
Exactly.
And it also, you know, it talks about Polish people and, you know, how many of them.
Mengele's Twin Research00:15:28
History's greatest monsters.
Yes, absolutely.
Glad we're talking about this.
Right.
You know, it talks about how many of them it takes to screw in a light bulb.
Yeah.
Ooh, a lot.
A lot.
Yeah, a shocking number.
A shocking number.
And on the next one, speaking of behind the bastards.
The Polish people.
Wow.
All of them.
That is especially inappropriate given that we are talking about Auschwitz.
Yes.
But people who want to cancel you for that are going to have to get in line behind all the other things.
I mean, seriously, at this point, the Jar Jar sound bites alone.
I mean, you know, very rude.
And I understand why you wouldn't be busting, but you know what?
Still, Misa Bustin.
Thank you.
Thank you for that gentle landing back into Mengele territory.
So, Joseph Mengele.
He gets portrayed a lot in kind of popular media.
You know, if you watch stuff like The Boys from Brazil or whatever, he's like this Nazi mad scientist.
He's obsessed with creating new Aryan people or hit clones of Hitler, all this kind of like Marvel ass shit.
Right.
It's a Dr. Wolfenstein type guy.
And that's very much how Mengele, almost immediately after the war, how Mengele gets contextualized, up until David Marwell's book, Unmasking the Angel of Death.
And Marwell points out, Mengele, what he's doing, like his research is not him just being a crazy asshole or him wanting to hurt people.
He's not doing anything out of pure maliciousness.
What he's doing is carrying out experiments for on behalf of other scientists who are more highly regarded than him in order to like pursue ends that they could not pursue without the sheer quantity of bodies that Auschwitz provided them with.
He was planning to use the research that he did at the camp as the basis for his habilitation schrift, which is the German word for a postdoctoral thesis, which was kind of if you want to be a professional academic, and that was his dream to be a respected scientist, that's a thing you have to do first.
He is not the only scientist at a death camp who is in this, who isn't doctor at a death camp, who's in this boat of like, I've got my MD.
I want to be an academic scientist when the war ends.
So I'm going to do research here and I'm going to help people who are more respected than I am do research here so that I can grease palms and get my way into basically they're all like gunning for fucking getting the equivalent of a tenure, you know?
Like that's that's the kind of thing he's looking for here.
And he's hoping that like if I help people out here, you know.
I'm just trying to get job stability, guys.
Come on.
That is what he's doing.
It's very, very competitive.
So if I have to do a little bit of murder, a little bit of torture, it's part of it.
Yeah, you can't even get into a postgraduate program here without both a 1600 on your SATs and two years at a death camp.
Yeah, it's very important.
You have to get very, very high on your death camp SATs.
And I'm sorry.
Hey, don't blame me for having the grind set mindset.
Specifically, the meat grinder set minder set.
It's actually more fucked up than that because one of Mengele's colleagues at Auschwitz, Dr. Hans Delmott, is also working on doing his postdoctoral thesis, but he's not doing it on his own.
He saves a Jewish inmate physician who he enslaves and makes him help him with his dissertation.
Like, that's literally what these guys are doing: they're enslaving better doctors so that they can get help getting their fucking dissertations.
Insane.
Just completely insane.
See, makes you not as worried about chat GPT cheating on tests, right?
Yeah, that's not even that bad compared to that.
This is why fucking, you know, people are like, oh, but it's positive stereotypes.
Well, sometimes those can be used against you.
All right.
Yeah.
I know a lot of bad Jewish doctors, okay?
So fucking don't enslave the good ones, please.
Yeah, don't ensla- well, yeah.
So like his fellow Nazi doctors, Joseph deliberately cultivated a stable of gifted slave doctors, men and women, to help him carry out research and prepare human body parts for transfer to institutions in Germany, like the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.
Before the war, twin studies had been hard to carry out, but during Mengele's time at Auschwitz, more than 750,000 people passed through its doors, which is a lot of twins, alongside people with all manner of disabilities he wanted samples from.
At one point, he came across a hunchback and his son who had a club foot.
Mengele was immediately fascinated by both men and he sent them off to Dr. Miklos, whose office was the dissecting room by the number one crematorium.
Here's Miklos.
Father and son, their faces wan from their miserable years in the Liesmannstraat ghetto, were filled with forebodings.
They looked at me questioningly.
I took them across the courtyard, which at this hour of the day was filled with sunlight.
On our way to the dissecting room, I reassured them with a few well-chosen words.
Luckily, there were no corpses on the dissecting table.
It would have indeed been a horrible sight for them to come upon.
To spare them, I decided not to conduct the examination in the austere dissecting room, which reeked with the odor of formaldehyde, but in the pleasant, well-lighted study hall.
From our conversation, I learned that the father had been a respected citizen of Litzmannstad, a wholesaler in cloth.
During the years of peace between the wars, he had often taken his son with him on his business trips to Vienna to have him examined and treated by the most famous specialists.
I first examined the father in detail, omitting nothing.
The deviation of his spinal column was the result of retarded rickets.
In spite of a most thorough examination, I discovered no symptom of any other illness.
I tried to console him by telling him that he would probably be sent to a work camp.
But he was not.
Both father and son are shot on Mengele's orders, and Miklos is forced to autopsy them while they are still warm.
After that, yeah.
Yeah, it gets bleaker.
Late in the afternoon.
Yeah, it does.
It does.
It does get worse.
That's it gets a lot worse.
Late in the afternoon, having already sent at least 10,000 men to their death, Dr. Mengele arrived.
He listened attentively to my report concerning both the in vivo and post-mortem observations made on the two victims.
These bodies must not be cremated, he said.
They must be prepared and their skeletons sent to the Anthropological Museum in Berlin.
What systems do you know for the preparation of skeletons?
And there are a couple of ways to prepare a skeleton when a living thing dies.
The ultimate solution Miklos picked was basically to boil the dead bodies until the meat could be removed.
He had to sit and wait by the casks bubbling over a fire while they cooked.
At one point, a group of Polish prisoners found them and starving mistook them for stew.
And they had to be stopped.
Yeah, I mean, it's like, it's nightmarish.
It's ghastly.
I don't know what to tell you.
Like, I feel like it's not enough to say he had people killed and sent their body parts to universities.
Like, I don't think that gets at...
If you want the story of Joseph Mengele, it's important to have the texture of like, this is what's being done.
Like, yeah, I don't know.
I don't know how else to tell the story stuff, but no, it's a fucking nightmare.
Doing my taxes.
Doing my taxes.
Yeah, do it.
Getting those deductions in.
What is this?
Now, there was some actual scientific research done at Auschwitz and done under Mengele.
The best example of this would be a study into a rare illness called Noma.
David Marwell recounts in a chilling passage how he first became aware of this research.
In the mid-1980s, he was going through a historical collection in a German town called Bad Erlsen when he came across a form signed by Dr. Mengele requesting that histological sections be made from a medical specimen sent to the SS laboratory on June 29th, 1944.
The specimen was almost certainly prepared by our friend Miklos.
Quote, it indicated that the specimen being sent to the laboratory was the head of a 12-year-old boy.
At the time, I was unaware of any conceivable reason why such a specimen would be of interest to Joseph Mengele.
And this document only reinforced my notion of him as a wildly sadistic, grotesque monster.
But Marwell dug into precisely why the sample had been made.
Now, it did not challenge the opinion that Mengele is a monster, but it did make it clear that there was nothing wild or sadistic about why he was doing this.
Noma is a rare disease.
It's been with us for thousands of years and is sometimes called the grazer.
In fact, Noma is derived from the Greek word nemo, which means to graze or devour.
When human beings are forced to live in close quarters with poor sanitation and little nutrition, they get these ulcers in their mouth.
And left untreated, these ulcers grow and will eventually devour the cheek and lip and basically the entire head.
These necrotic lesions expose bone and teeth and are fatal.
One Czech inmate doctor later testified, whole chunks of flesh would come off the affected areas.
The lower jaw was also affected.
I never saw such severe cases of gangrene of the cheek.
And these are the samples, these are the heads, the heads of people with this disease, are what Mengele is preserving and sending off to educational institutions in the Reich.
Mengela was excited by the outbreak of NOMA because it provided him with an opportunity to send his colleagues samples of this extremely rare disease.
That's where the sadistic part comes in, the part where he is excited about the outbreak.
Yeah, that's like, and I mean, it gets, it's so fucked up.
Like, so he, he does, they do attempt to treat this, and they do.
He assigns a prominent pediatrician who had been arrested by the Nazis to like manage the research of how to treat this.
And this guy named Epstein, this doctor, he and Mengele experiment with a number of treatments for NOMA, from medications to diets.
Some of what Mengele did is basically like he's alleged to have taken fluid from the ulcers of NOMA sufferers and injected it into healthy inmates to try to study how it spreads, which is a horrible, horrible crime.
But he is, you can see he's not like doing this for no reason.
He's doing this because he's trying to get a dissertation, basically.
He wants to write.
Like it's not, it's not, it's not like random madness, you know, that's driving this.
He's not actually doing what I think, like you've been saying, like the popular culture would have you believe that it is just a guy who's just like, what if I, you know, fucking make an eight-armed person just to make something horrible and grotesque, just to prove my evil.
And in this case, it's just like, what if a sociopath also was into experiments?
Yeah.
And what if, and the thing, like the important thing is that, like, the reason he's excited is partly because he knows that other doctors are interested in this.
And so he's able to provide them with things that they need that will improve their opinion of him and his standing in the medical establishment.
Yeah, so part of why he's excited is he says more opportunities for fucking career advancements.
Yeah, he's a career guy, right?
Yeah.
Oh, this would be great for my LinkedIn page.
Eat a dick.
Now, Epstein is a competent physician.
And because he has more test subjects than anyone who has studied NOMA before have ever had, he succeeds in creating a pretty groundbreaking treatment for NOMA, which is like good.
It's good to solve, you know, a disease to find a way to treat it.
But I would hesitate that people credit this as a medical advancement due to death camp experiments, because as Marwell notes, it must be kept in mind that the disease was a product of the camp itself.
Simple measures of sanitation and a modest standard of nutrition were all that would have been necessary to prevent an outbreak.
Epstein might have solved the riddle of the treatment, but no child he cured of this disease survived the camp.
Yeah, so it's, you know, it's solving a problem with an outbreak that you fucking created.
Yeah, yeah, it's it's bombing the village to save it kind of logic.
Right.
Now, this begs the question, though, what kind of twin research did Mengele get up to at Auschwitz and what was its actual purpose?
Gerald Posner, who wrote one of the earlier biographies of Mengele, like most people, imagines his purpose as some nefarious ploy to try and create new Aryans by finding ways to recreate the conditions which cause people to have twins, right?
And this is like the standard line on Mengele for decades is that like, well, he was doing all this twin research because he was trying to find ways to like help Aryans have more twins, right?
Right, right.
And a big reason why this spreads is because of Dr. Miklos.
He's probably the first person to suggest this, and he suggests this because he works directly for Mengele on twins who had been murdered at Auschwitz.
But Mengele did not treat Miklos like an academic equal.
He's not like walking him through why he's doing all of this stuff.
And so Miklos's belief is understandable, but it doesn't reflect the most likely explanation for these experiments.
Marwell points out that if that had been the purpose of Mengele's research, he would have been studying the parents of twins, right?
Because that's at least as important.
If what you're trying to do is make there be more twins.
What he was actually doing with all these twin studies is providing his mentor, Von Verschur, with a steady supply of twins he could run tests on to check all sorts of heredity theories, right?
He is getting letters from different doctors saying, hey, can you conduct this kind of study?
Can you conduct this kind of study?
And then he's conducting them.
He's killing the twins.
He's autopsying them.
And that's why he's doing it, right?
So it's not, he is not, what's important here is he is not the only person morally culpable in the death of these kids.
The other doctors asking all of these motherfuckers, right?
Yeah, exactly.
And von Verschur is like the biggest of them.
And the fact that he has access to all these kids, this kind of what these doctors see as a resource that has never existed before, makes Mengele, who had previously been a middling to low-level figure in German medicine, invaluable to the most respected doctors in the country.
Marwell writes, although twin research was well-funded and promising in its potential to produce meaningful results, its pursuit presented a number of obstacles.
It was an extremely involved undertaking, requiring personnel to carry out the various measurements and record keeping.
A supply of appropriate twin pairs had to be identified, located, and induced to participate.
The entire process required a huge investment of time and money.
In the case of Verschur's own research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, it took more than seven months to distribute 1,200 questionnaires to schools in search of twin subjects.
That effort produced 1,000 possible twin pairs, but resulted in only 40 who were actually examined.
The proposed experiment might be unpleasant, painful, or have side effects.
Beyond the disincentives presented by the inconveniences and unknowns of the process, there were also legal hurdles.
It was forbidden in Germany, even under the Nazis, to intentionally infect a German citizen with a disease, a prohibition that led many scientists to conduct experiments on themselves.
So in a way.
So they were really cutting through the red tape.
Nazi Body Part Trade00:03:12
Exactly, exactly.
And they're doing it because Mengele, he's like a dealer.
He's like a twin dealer to doctors in the Reich.
Like, oh, you got some twin studies you need done.
Like, Joey Mengs, he's got your back.
You know, maybe help him with his dissertation when he gets out of Auschwitz.
I know a guy.
He's kind of a piece of shit, but he's got the twins you need.
So people would send him requests.
He would do the studies.
He'd kill the twins.
Then he'd have Miklos, you know, take off parts of their bodies or whatever, and they would be mailed to different institutes marked urgent war materials.
Now, this was, that's not like, this seems like it's probably just like, oh, it's a convenient way for them to get priority in the packages.
But for soldier scientists like Mengele, this is part of the war effort.
This is the war effort.
This is a whole war for him.
It's a race war.
This is why.
And this is how the broader German Nazi establishment sees it, which is why in the last days of the war, when they are getting their asses handed to them, they're diverting crucial military resources to ensuring the camps can continue to operate because that's a front of the battle for them.
Insane.
Yeah.
I mean, fucking Nazis, man.
Yeah.
Once again, on record, anti-Nazi.
Anti-Nazi.
Good.
Fair.
So back at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, von Berschuer planned to create a department of embryology and a vast collection of human samples and embryos, including fetuses and stillborn infants, removed at the camp and sent to his institute.
Now, God, I do not want to go there.
Like, that's got to be the creepiest fucking instance.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, the building is still in use, right?
They don't call it that anymore.
Did they get rid of their jar room?
Probably.
Yeah, that, I mean, not as quickly as you'd expect.
Really?
A lot of the body parts that are taken out are in use up until like the 80s, 90s.
I mean, there was a story in 2014 on what used, because it's like a college campus and what used to be the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.
Right outside, they find like a bunch of people's bones.
And like, they don't know who's like the government got rid of those very quickly.
Was like, yeah, we don't need to be looking into why these bones are here, whose bones they are.
Let's give those bearings.
Oh, dinosaurs.
Yeah.
Those are dinosaur bones.
Let's move on.
Speaking of moving on, you know what really helps me move on?
What makes you move on?
Is it products and services?
It is products and services.
Products and services that had no role in, say, Auschwitz, which in addition to being a death camp, was not also a manufacturing facility for modern-day corporations like the IG Farben Company, who now makes your aspirin.
Oh, yeah.
They didn't use slave workers who were worked to death ensuring their future profits, which they were allowed to roll into the business after the Holocaust and the end of the Reich.
That didn't happen.
That would be fucked up.
You wouldn't let that happen.
No, these are good products and services.
Yeah.
I'm never going to take aspirin again.
That's right, baby.
Never.
Advil.
IG Farben Aspirin Link00:04:22
Oh, shit.
Advil.
We're talking about the Bear Company.
Oh, we were.
Yeah, Bayer.
Yeah.
Oh, it is Bayer.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wait, I'm looking up who makes Advil.
Who makes Advil?
Look it up.
Because I think we could get a pretty good, pretty good, pretty good ad out of this.
You know, Advil, we were not involved in the Holocaust.
Advil, we were not involved in the Holocaust.
Yeah, no, it's clear.
Boots UK.
I think we're good.
Yeah.
We had nothing to do with it.
Take some pills.
Your headache will go.
No, it looks like it was invented at least by some British company.
But it's manufactured by Pfizer, is it not?
Sure, but they didn't kill any people.
They didn't, they're not responsible also for hundreds of thousands of deaths, Sophie.
That doesn't seem right.
What I did was make boner pills, and now my dick is hot.
Robert Evans, a big pharma apologist.
I know.
It's fine.
Weird take from you, sir.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budgetista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
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I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I was, hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
There's this badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk come on.
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On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
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I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really started making money.
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If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything.
But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
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Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating Wild Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
We're back and we're talking about all the different big pharma companies that loves them.
They're his favorite.
Huge fan.
Love them.
Survivors Who Talked Best00:12:00
Big, big pharma bro like Martin Shikrelli.
That's right.
So the best known story about Mengela at Auschwitz is probably the one that like the idea that he supposedly sewed two inmates together to try out creating Siamese twins.
That's the angel.
Yeah.
That is a frequent myth.
There's also allegations he tried to, quote, make boys into girls and girls into boys through cross-transfusions and that he connected the urinary tract of a seven-year-old girl to her own colon.
And if you hear these stories, like that's all mad, crazy doctor shit.
Obviously, because the Nazis destroyed a lot of records and Joseph himself is not a reliable source on his activities, we will never know exactly what he did.
But David Marwell points out that a lot of these stories are either false or exaggerations of reality or kind of misattributions of real crimes to Mengele.
And this gets us into a really complicated piece of Holocaust history, which is the Mengele effect.
In the aftermath of World War II, spoilers, Mengele escapes, right?
He gets away in large part because he doesn't get that tattoo on his arm that all the SS guys get.
So when he's being, after he gets, you know, the unit he's with gets captured because he embeds with a Wehrmacht unit, when the Americans are processing them, they don't immediately see, oh, this is a fucking SS guy.
Let's put him in, you know, make sure he's not one of the ones that we're looking for.
So he does get away.
But by that point, Auschwitz had already kind of written itself into the heart and soul of the human race.
And the first inmates to be interviewed talked about the doctors who had so often been the architect of their misery.
Some of the people who survived in best health and thus were in the best position to talk were Mengele's patients because his patients, the twins and stuff that he works with, he took really good care of a lot of the time.
They would enjoy good food and better accommodations until they were killed, right?
And he's not doing that out of the goodness of his heart.
It's because he wants the test subjects that can withstand the testing that he was going to do.
But because of this, some of the people who he hadn't got to when he flees Auschwitz are some of the first people who are able to talk.
And just in general, Mengele's name spreads very quickly as one of the architects of this nightmare that is Auschwitz.
And a curious thing occurs after that, which is that more and more Auschwitz inmates over the years record Mengele experiences than could possibly have known or seen him.
Part of how we know that these are not accurate recollections is that he's often described as tall, blonde, and well-built.
Mengele was 5'8 and dark-haired.
Historian Zdenek Zovka claims that almost all inmates at Auschwitz would later claim to have been selected personally by Mengele when they arrived at the camp, which can't have been possible.
We simply know that many other doctors were doing that job.
Herman Langbein was an Auschwitz survivor and author of the seminal book People in Auschwitz.
He noted that many former inmates not only insisted they'd had direct contact with Mengele, but, and this is really strange, they tended to remember him as being hot.
And I'm like trying not to joke about this, but I'm going to read you a quote from this guy's book.
It's very strange.
Some well-known SS men have been positively idealized after the fact.
Thus, Fanny Effinelon has called Mengele a handsome Siegfried.
And Therese Chisang writes, Mengele is immaculate in his belted uniform, tall, with shiny black boots that bespeak cleanliness, prosperity, and human dignity.
He does not move a muscle.
He is insensitive.
Elie Wiesel mentions that Mengele's characteristic attributes as white gloves, a monocle, and the rest.
Jiri Steiner, a twin used by Mengele in his series of experiments, speaks of his angelic smile.
And Siegfried Vanderberg believes that in a film, Mengele should be portrayed by no less than the famous ladykiller, Ramon Navarro.
Carl Laszlo describes Mengele as a strikingly handsome man who had a fascinating, spellbinding effect even on female prisoners, and continues, Mengele came with a motionless face, and his beautiful, regular, cold features that seemed to be carved out of stone appeared to be the mark of death itself.
In his shiny boots, he walked rhythmically on the camp road.
I saw Mengele almost every day in the office of the SS infirmary, where he was doing routine bureaucratic work, and he struck me as neither particularly attractive nor elegant.
I never saw him wear a monocle.
Now, Langbean, obviously, these guys are all at Auschwitz.
Elie Wiesel is one of the most famous Holocaust survivors there is.
You know, he writes fucking night.
They're not like it, it like again.
There's no, I'm not putting any shade on these people for the fact that their memories of this are kind of fucked up.
And Langbean coins the term the Mengele effect to describe what he calls a form of memory displacement, where real memories of trauma are mutated sometimes into different acts of terror and generally credited not to whichever Nazi had committed them, but to the man who became the most famous symbol of Nazi evil at Auschwitz, Joseph Mengele.
Langbean makes one of the most important observations in Holocaust studies, one that inspired this series when he writes, Those who kept the machinery of murder going in Auschwitz were not devils, they were humans.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's, I don't know, I mean, there is also part of me that's just like, yeah, you know, this is just sounds like years and years of conditioning of my dad being like, marry a doctor.
And just eventually you start looking at anyone as a doctor is hot.
So that's that's probably what happened.
It's just like, he's a doctor, you say.
I mean, I'm telling you, this is something.
It's a very Jewish trait.
We all want to marry a doctor.
So we see a doctor.
It doesn't matter if it's Oz or Mengele, I guess.
Equally bad, by the way.
Boy, howdy.
So David Marwell elaborates on this.
They didn't get episodes on this podcast.
They did.
They did.
They're both bastards.
You can't talk about one without.
That is true.
That is true.
So David Marwell elaborates on this kind of peculiar aspect of Auschwitz further.
The notion of Mengele as unhinged, driven by demons, and indulging grotesque and sadistic impulses should be replaced by something perhaps even more unsettling.
Mengelo was, in fact, in the scientific vanguard, enjoying the confidence and mentorship of the leaders in his field.
And yeah, that's kind of the most unsettling thing, or at least one of them about this is that experimentation is the norm at Auschwitz.
And Mengele joined many of his colleagues in utilizing patients as experimental resources.
They were able to justify this to themselves, not by saying, you know, fuck these people.
They all have it coming.
Most of them did not talk about it that way.
And most of them were capable of being perfectly like polite and even to some degree sensitive to the patients or to the inmates that they worked with on a daily basis.
Guys like this ideology based on like, well, this is for the greater scientific good of our particular race.
And they found also, aside from that, they found other ways.
A lot of ways they would justify it is like that, well, these people are sick.
They're all going to die anyway.
We might as well learn something from them.
You know, the government's decided they're going to kill all these people.
So what can I do?
I can't do anything, but maybe I can help a few people here and there.
You know, this isn't.
And that's probably the most sickening part of it is the people going, like, you know, these people are all going to die anyway.
And it's like, not if you don't let it happen.
You don't have to do this.
You're part of the machine.
Yeah.
God damn.
Yeah.
They don't seem to take that into account.
So we have some idea of how Joseph rationalized his own behavior because half a lifetime later, when he's on the run, he spends two weeks with his estranged son, Rolf.
And this is when he's an old man.
He's kind of near death.
And Rolf is, Rolf is an interesting character.
He's part of how Posner's biography gets written because he brings Posner after his dad dies.
His dad's Mengele writes a memoir that's like, he writes it like a fiction novel where he gives himself a fake name and like kind of fictionalize, writes it basically, this is the fictional story of a doctor at Auschwitz.
He doesn't, if I did it.
Like he does.
He doesn't know Jay with his fucking memoirs.
But Rolf, you know, Mengele's family supports him for his the entire rest of his life.
They're like, because they're rich.
They're still to this day.
There's the Mengele company is successful.
They're sending him money.
They help him stay on the run.
And Rolf kind of grows up.
He only meets Mengele once when he's a child.
And he's told that Joseph is not his dad, but his uncle, who's like on the run because the allies are unfairly prosecuting him.
But as he grows up, they exchange letters when he becomes an adult.
And Rolf, number one, winds up being left-wing, which like his family is deeply conservative.
They're fucking Nazis.
And so eventually, he's very, he's very conflicted.
He comes to accept, he is, number one, there's less information available, you know, at this period of time.
Like the internet's not a thing, but he comes to accept.
Maybe I don't know exactly what my dad did.
Maybe the Allied stories aren't exactly accurate, but my dad did fucked up shit at Auschwitz and it's indefensible, right?
He comes to that conclusion, which fair enough, good for you, Rolf.
And so he travels to meet his dad in Brazil near kind of the end of his father's life for a two-week period.
And Rolf, you know, again, had educated himself a little on the Holocaust, and Posner talks to him for his book.
And here's what he says about this meeting, where he talks to his dad about what his dad did at Auschwitz.
I proposed that, and this is Ralph, Rolf talking.
I proposed that whatever he or anyone else did or did not do in Auschwitz, I deeply detested it since I regard Auschwitz as one of the most horrible examples of inhumanity and brutality.
He said, I did not understand.
He went there, had to do his duty, to carry out orders.
He said that everybody had to do so in order to survive, the basic instinct of self-preservation.
He said he wasn't able to think about it.
From his point of view, he was not personally responsible for the incidents at the camp.
He said he didn't invent Auschwitz.
It already existed.
He said that he wanted to help people in the camp, but there had been a limit to what he could do.
As far as selections were concerned, he said, the situation was analogous to a field hospital during a time of war.
If 10 wounded soldiers are brought into the hospital in critical condition, the doctor must make almost instantaneous decisions about whom to operate on first.
By choosing one, then necessarily another must die.
My father asked me, when people arrived at the railhead, what was I supposed to do?
People were arriving infected with disease, half dead.
He said it was beyond anyone's imagination to describe the circumstances there.
His job had been to classify only those able to work and those unable to work.
He said he tried to grade as many people as able to work as possible.
What my father was trying to do was persuade me that in this manner, he had saved thousands of people from certain death.
What am I, one man supposed to do, and given so many twins to kill?
You saying in my position, you wouldn't do the same thing.
You wouldn't kill all those twins, those beautiful twins waiting to die.
But I have to learn about them.
What'd you learn?
I don't know, but someone will figure out something I learned.
God.
We figured out how to cure a disease that we caused them.
Exactly.
Fucking hey.
And he's just like, listen, I was just like any regular doctor who has a bunch of slave doctors working for them to do experiments on twins who die.
Classifying Workers vs Death00:03:56
We've all been there.
We've all been there.
Ask anyone who's been to medical school whether or not they would have done the same thing.
I think you'll find.
I'm normal.
I'm going to continue Rolf's quote.
He said that he did not order and was not responsible for gassings.
And he said that twins in the camp owed their lives to him.
He said that he personally had never harmed anyone in his life.
Yeah, I had the slave do that.
Jeez.
Jeez, guys.
It was that SS man who was drinking himself to death.
I, on the other hand, was sober the whole time.
So that's good, right?
You know what is good, though?
What?
What could possibly be good?
Services, you know, both of those things.
Yeah, those are good.
Those are good.
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I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I said, hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is this badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Come on.
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On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
I'm an alcoholic.
And without this program, I'm going to die.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search the Ceno Show, and listen now.
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If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
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If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Ah, we're back.
Enablers of the Camps00:15:28
So we know that Mengele's claims that he didn't directly harm anyone are an obscenity and not just bullshit.
They're laughable if I wasn't crying already.
Yeah.
The crimes that we have already covered that Joseph committed personally are enough to make him one of the worst bastards that has ever been on this show.
And we have just kind of scraped the surface of the shit that this guy got up to.
And while it is possible, some of these are examples of the Mengela effect, all of them were present on the indictment that he received from a West German court.
At one point, he's said to have taken a newborn child of a Russian woman, grabbed it by the head, and thrown it into a pile of corpses to kill it.
At another, he is said to have become so furious when a work gang capo allowed several prisoners selected to die to hide with his men that he shot the capo with his own pistol.
At one point, an old man selected to the gas chamber tried to flee to his son, who was in a work group.
Mengela bashed his brains open with an iron bar, killing him.
At another point, he got angry because a woman gave birth and the selection doctors had failed to warn him she was pregnant.
He threw the newborn baby into a stove.
He is said to have shot a 16-year-old girl who fled onto the roof out of fear of the gas chamber.
Worst of all is the testimony of inmate Anani Silovich Petko, a Russian survivor of Auschwitz.
He was there the day a group of 300 children were brought into the camp, having been separated from their parents.
They were all under five years old.
When Mengela saw the group of children, he complained that it was too hard to gas five-year-old children.
So he selected another strategy.
Quote, and this is from Petko.
After a while, a large group of SS officers arrived on motorcycles, Mengela among them.
They drove into the yard and got off their motorcycles.
Upon arriving, they circled the flames.
It burned horizontally.
We watched to see what would follow.
After a while, the trucks arrived, dump trucks with children inside.
There were 10 of these trucks.
After they had entered the yard, an officer gave an order and the trucks backed up to the fire and they started throwing those children right into the fire, into the pit.
The children started to scream.
Some of them managed to crawl out of the burning pit.
An officer walked around it with sticks and pushed those back in who managed to get out.
Hess and Mengelo were present and were giving orders.
I have three pieces of nicotine gum in my mouth.
Yeah.
That's about the worst thing I've ever read.
I can't imagine anything worse than that.
And that's, you know, Joseph Mengela.
Obviously, I considered doing a whole episode about how he fled from justice.
You know, it is an interesting story.
It's interesting to me.
All of these stories, like, the gist of it basically is that he spends a couple of years on a farm in Germany living low.
He eventually escapes to South America.
He bounces around from like Brazil to Paraguay.
There's a period of time where he's able to live under his own name pretty openly.
And then the Israelis get Eichmann and suddenly he has to go deep underground because after Eichmann, Mengel is like the big prisoner that they haven't caught, you know, or the big war criminal that they haven't caught.
So he, but he's he's successful and he's able to stay hidden basically because a lot of Nazis have real solidarity with him.
Like it's all old Nazis and just South American dudes who like the Nazis and they hide him.
But he's, it's kind of worth noting, all of these sort of fictional depictions of Mengela, there's like all sorts of stories of him as a mad scientist in Latin America trying to remake the master race or whatever.
Right.
That's not at all his life.
He's an old man.
He spends most of his time where he's working, either selling real estate or working as like a contractor for his family company selling like farming equipment.
He lives off-grid for a while with a couple with a family.
And like eventually they split up with him because they have a bunch of Mangola.
Yeah, but it takes like 10 or it takes like a decade or more.
Like he's not.
That's too long.
That's too long to be with Mengela.
That's he.
One of the things that's most disturbing, though, is that like he never does anything terrible while he's on the run that there's any documentation of.
Some people will say he was kind of a dick and as he got older, kind of an unpleasant person.
He would send some letters to his son that they weren't emotionally abusive, but they were kind of like, I wish you'd come and visit.
You know, I don't approve of, you know, you should get a PA.
Big thing, like the biggest thing that he gives his son shit for is that his son became a lawyer, but didn't get a PhD in law.
And he's like, you should become a doctor.
Yeah, follow in your father's footsteps.
You know, the world needs another Dr. Mengele.
The point is, though, that he, there's evil is not a thing.
Mengele is not just some sort of monster who would have, who would have caused horrible harm no matter where he went.
He was a guy who was willing to use unfathomable evil as a tool for personal advancement and the advancement of what he saw as science.
And when that opportunity ended, he was a pretty normal old man.
Right.
And that's, I think, more frightening.
It's way more frightening.
It's one of the reasons why every time I see like a Marvel movie, I think it was like, I don't know, it was like fucking Captain America or something.
And they like insist on showing the Nazis trying to do like time travel or some something where they're like, this electricity makes Frankenstein.
And it's just like, you, you know, in making this super villainy, you're actually undercutting what makes it frightening and what makes it evil because it's, you know, it's, it's the banality of it, you know?
It's a fucking, you know, I don't want to sound cliche and whatnot, but it really is the banality and the bureaucracy and just kind of the efficiency models and the flowcharts.
It's all the fucking office shit that makes it awful.
It's what, you know, it's why I don't, you know, want to work in an office.
Yeah.
It's because it's too close to Nazi stuff.
Yeah.
And that is, you bring up working in an office.
The thing that is most frightening about Joseph Mengele is that every single person listening to this knows somebody with Mengele potential.
Yeah.
They don't, they're not serial killers.
They're like, they are, they are the people who care so much about their own advancement and are able to get themselves so committed to whatever they believe that if they were put in an Auschwitz, they would do all the same things.
I've worked under so many mangelas.
Yeah.
Like a hell of a lot of them in the entertainment industry.
Yeah.
A hell of a lot of the entertainment industry, medical industry, tech industry.
Oh, tons in the tech industry.
There's a lot of mangelas out there.
Oops all mangelas.
That's like the new Facebook logo.
Oops all mangelas.
Oops all mangelas.
It's just like literally people who are just like, you know, oh, it's too bad that's not, you know, that it's illegal to do experiments on humans.
It's like, wait, is that the only reason you wouldn't do it?
Yeah.
Is that why it's you get this also when people will talk about like, I mean, the Nazis were fucked up, but people, we did learn a lot from those.
No, we didn't.
No, we didn't.
No, we fucking didn't.
There was, there were, there is one experiment the Nazis carried out on prisoners that taught us anything like really meaningful.
And it was about like how the body responds to hyperthermia and stuff.
And like a bunch of nonsense, a huge amount of nonsense.
Like it's, we will talk a little bit about the other doctors because this is also a podcast about them.
But I do want to give, I don't know, it's weird to call this a hopeful story, but I want to talk about how our friend Miklos gets out of Auschwitz and specifically how he saves his family, his wife and his daughter.
It's not going to start as a happy story, but it does end as happily as an Auschwitz story can end.
Sure.
Once when I was dissecting the body of a fairly old man, I discovered some very beautiful gallstones in the bladder.
Knowing that Dr. Mengela was an ardent collector of such items, I washed the stones, dried them, and then arranged them in a large necked flask, stoppered with a glass cork.
I stuck a label on the flask, giving the person's name, the kind of stones they were, and their pathological characteristics.
During his visit the next day, I gave them to Dr. Mengele.
He admired the beautiful crystals.
Turning the flask round and round, he looked at the gallstones and then, turning abruptly to me, asked if I knew the ballad of the warrior Wallenstein.
His question was completely out of keeping with the surroundings, but I answered, I know the story of the warrior Wallenstein, but not the ballad.
Whereupon, smiling, he began to recite, he says some German, which translates into English, in the Wallenstein family, there are more gallstones than precious stones.
My superior recited several stanzas of that comic ballad.
He was in such a good mood that I decided to ask a great favor of him, that he let me go look for my wife and child.
Only after I had uttered the request did I realize how daring it was, but it was already too late.
He looked at me with astonishment.
You're married and have a child?
Yes, Captain.
I'm married and have a 15-year-old daughter, I told him, my voice breaking with emotion.
Do you think they are still here? He asked.
Yes, Captain, because at our arrival three months ago, you selected them and sent them to the right-hand column.
They have since been sent to another camp, he said.
Suddenly, I thought of the crematorium smoke.
Perhaps they had been dispatched with that smoke to some celestial camp.
Dr. Mengele, who was seated, his head bent forward, seemed lost in thought.
I remained standing behind him.
I'm going to give you a pass to go look for them, but he said, and placing a forefinger on his lips, he looked at me menacingly.
I understand, Captain, and thank you.
So that's Mengele gives him a pass, and he finds his wife and his daughter who are alive.
And he, because of the position he occupies, realizes that their camp is like a day or two away from being liquidated.
And so he warns them and he gets them to basically tells them how they can transfer to a work gang that's being moved to a separate location, which is not a clear survival thing, right?
But it's like, look, if you get moved to this work gang, maybe you die there, but it's at least more days than you'll have here because they're going to kill everyone in this block.
And they get out and they are, you know, Miklos survives the end of the war.
He winds up on like what is supposed to be a death march with the SS guards as they flee.
But he like, it's fucking, this guy's story is fucking miraculous.
He makes it and he kind of like after everything is over, winds up kind of stumbling back to his empty house and like sits down there and is just like, I don't know what to do with my life anymore.
Like I'm never going to be a doctor again.
I refuse to conduct another autopsy or anything like that.
So he's just like alone in this house.
And then like a couple of days later, his wife and his daughter show up.
Oh, wonderful.
Yeah.
They show up.
They survived.
They live.
Yes.
Yes.
Like I said, this is like...
I'm sorry, I'm busting over that.
That's the best.
That is literally the best possible of the outcomes.
Yeah.
It's, yeah.
I mean, there's there's there's so much more to like say.
One thing that is probably worth noting is that the Sonder commando that Miklos is with, the guys that he's kind of, he's, have been selected with him.
He like lives in the barracks with them.
They drink together.
They wind up getting guns smuggled to them by partisans and carrying out a rebellion.
And their entire goal in this rebellion inside the camp is that one of them escape so that people, someone can tell the world about what happened there.
Wow.
And they don't succeed in this.
None of the Sonder Commando who rebel survive.
They get massacred, but they succeed in destroying one of the crematoria ovens as they die, which significantly limits the ability of Auschwitz to kill and dispose of people.
Nice.
Saving God knows how many lives.
So that's cool.
It sucks because it's just like, you know, that is an incredible act of heroism.
And it's just like so many of those stories I feel like I've not been introduced to.
So many of the stories, like the majority of them are just these awful fucking, you know, it's it's it's so much more common to tell stories of um suffering than stories of resistance.
Right.
But, you know, there are numerous stories, especially in like the Polish territories, yeah, of Jewish people and other victims who gain access to guns.
They either had them before or they sometimes make them or they steal them from Nazis and they fight back.
And that is that is a part of the Holocaust too.
And because they fight back, you know, even in each of these incidents, you know, maybe only a few people get saved.
The descendants of those people who were saved through acts of resistance number today in the hundreds of thousands.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, that's a big deal.
Dr. Mengela obviously is hounded for the rest of his natural life until he dies drowning off the coast of or at a lake in Brazil.
But he's like, he's.
He drowned to death?
Oh, yeah.
He drowns like a little fucking asshole.
Yeah.
Dope.
Way to drown, you loser.
That's great.
That's how he died.
Yeah, he fucking drowns.
That's fucking cool.
That is cool.
Yeah, I mean, it's not the most painful way he could have gone.
I would have preferred like hit by a car that has like a big spiky front end that just impales him in the dick and he's dragged for like 30 miles.
Yeah.
He could have died, but at least it wasn't like, oh, he peacefully died in his sleep.
No, he fucking died.
No, he does drown while on vacation.
Oh, that's good.
That's great.
Him drowning is good.
Drowning is, you know, I'll take it.
It's panic before death.
It's at least scared.
That's good.
And he's in bad health for years.
He's very lonely.
He has a crush on this like child that he has as his housekeeper, but he can't marry her.
Yeah, he's a gross piece of shit.
Fuck him.
The other doctors, though, who had enabled his work and been his colleagues and benefited from the research he did were not punished.
Dr. Julius Hallervond was a respected neuropathologist and head of the histopathology department at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.
He received hundreds of brains taken from euthanasia victims.
And he also killed many children at the Brandenburg Gordon Clinic where he worked and later removed their brains.
He described these specimens to a colleague as wonderful material, feeble-minded, malformations, and early infantile disease.
After the war, he had a neurological research position at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin.
At the Brain Research Institute in Frankfurt, Hallervoorden's specimens, including brains from the euthanasia program, were used by doctors until 1990 when they were finally buried.
We had a happy ending.
We had him down in sad.
He couldn't fuck a child.
Then you're like, if I care, there's some people who got away with it.
Yeah, because most of the people who enabled Mengela pretty much all did.
There's Dr. Fritz Lenz, who was a medically trained geneticist.
Fritz Lenz Genetics00:03:56
After 1933, he was.
There's a section called in your notes.
Bum out Matt even more.
In case Matt gets happy at end, give him more sad.
Yeah, yeah.
Get a little bit extra sad.
He was the head of the Department of Racial Hygiene at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and was one of the architects of the Holocaust.
From 1946 to 1957, he was the director of the Institute for Human Genetics at the University of Göttingen.
He continued to publish until the 1970s.
And of course, our friend Otmar von Verschuer, as head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, obviously, he was responsible for a whole bunch of fucked up shit.
Post-war, he was interned by the Allies in 1946.
In 1951, he accepted a position at the University of Münster, where he established one of West Germany's largest genetic research centers.
Vershuer retired in 1965 and died in 1969.
I stopped listening after you said Dr. Douchebag drowned.
Yeah.
This is the most depressing epilogue ever.
Yeah.
He just freeze frames of all of the people.
It's not great.
They all survived forever.
I was like, I'm going to get into the drowning part.
Yeah.
I bet he shit himself when he was drowning, too.
We can all hope so.
Poop and drink.
He probably drank some of the shitwater.
I hope so.
That sounds good.
And he probably vomited when he drank the shitwater and then he ended up drinking more of the vomit shit water and he did it forever till he died.
Yeah.
Wow.
I mean, let's all hope.
Let's all hope and pray.
We're all hoping this and we're praying this.
Let's not think too much about the fact that a great deal of these race scientists continued working into the 70s and that a significant number of professional genetics researchers are not only influenced of their work, but still believe in aspects of racial science, which is still influential in genetic research to this day.
Hold on.
There's a fucked up history of how much of this shit is still talked about.
You can look at the fucking bell curve guy as an example, right?
Yeah, Charles Murray.
This is still a problem.
And part of why it's a problem is that when the war ended, all of these doctors who had spent their time at institutes, but who had been directly responsible for this kind of shit weren't rounded up and shot in the back of the head.
Yeah.
Which is what we should have done.
Easily, it just, they were right there.
You had guns.
You had so many guns.
You were literally the allies.
You could have gotten rid of them.
Yeah.
This is, you know, fucking, this is why I don't trust white allies.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
They should have just shot him, but instead now we have the bell curve guy.
And that's garbage, seriously.
But you know what?
We also.
Oh, sorry.
No, I was just going to say it's just crazy how much of race science still exists today and just like how there's it's just considered like part of like normal conservative thought.
You know, it's just because it always has been.
It always has been, but it's just like so deeply ingrained in the ideology that it's like to lose the race science part of it is to lose like what holds it together.
It's like the glue.
And so that's why, you know, whenever someone is like, well, you know, I'm a fiscal conservative, as if it like makes them somehow like, well, I'm not a racist conservative.
And I'm like, yeah, your whole point of view is poison.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Part of identifying as a fiscal conservative means that you're okay caucusing with the conservatives who are, you know, the other kind.
Right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah.
It's like, you're just, you're cool with a little bit of race science.
Well, not me.
No, no, not me personally.
Behind The Bastards Plug00:03:23
But I'll gladly just shepherd them into power and whatever will be will be.
Yeah.
Kesa Ross and Nazi.
I don't know.
You want to plug anything, Matt?
Absolutely.
There's a you see, Philip Morris also makes nicotine gum products, and I want to plug those right now.
Oh, hell yeah.
Thank you, Philip Morris.
You're trying to quit smoking, but you don't want to stop giving money to the people who got you addicted.
Nicorette gum.
It comes in four milligram and two milligram.
But you can eat two of them.
Yeah.
I also want to plug my The Wire podcast slash Sopranos podcast.
Pod yourself a gun.
Yeah.
Fucking listen to it.
You know, give us a review.
Fucking be our friend.
Um, and uh, you know, it's a lot of fun, it's a good podcast.
Uh, you will enjoy it if uh you enjoy me.
I hope you do because I love you guys out there.
I want to pivot off that and note that we now have a Behind the Bastards branded nicotine gum.
You know, big league chew, it's just 50% big league chew and 50 actual tobacco chew.
Oh, I love it, perfect.
Yeah, bigger league chew.
It's bigger league chew.
Yeah, it's big league chew for adults.
Exactly.
Yeah, it's gonna get stuff for oral cancer.
You get that Nick Rush and a sugar rush.
It's great, it's perfect.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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You know, the famous author Roll Dahl.
He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
But did you know he was a spy?
Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
All episodes are out now.
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
What?
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, I was a spy.
Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, gorgeous.
It's Lala Kent, host of Untraditionally Lala.
My days of filling up cups at sir may be over, but I'm still loving life in the valley.
Life on the other side of the hill is giving grown-up vibes, but over here on my podcast, Untraditionally Lala, I'm still that Lala you either love or love to hate.