Heinrich Himmler's transformation from a WWI diarist to SS master began after his 1919 military dismissal and failed farming stint under the pseudonym "Heinrich Agricola." Confinement fueled an obsession with right-wing Volkish propaganda, Norse mysticism, and Guido von List's occult runes, while dueling fraternities and anti-Semitic readings radicalized him further. His resentment over his brother Gebhard's combat success and health issues drove him toward the "Volksgemeinschaft," illustrating how personal failure and exclusionary ideologies can merge to create historical atrocities. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Behind The Bastards Live Show00:02:06
Coolzone Media.
Hey, everybody, Robert here.
And Behind the Bastards, it's doing its first live show in quite some time at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland, Oregon on Thursday, September 25th at 8 p.m.
All performer proceeds will go to the Portland Defense Fund, which helps people who have absolutely no money and are going to be relying on public defense get bailed out and get, you know, outside of court help while they're waiting to go on trial.
So please help support the Portland Defense Fund.
Google Alberta Rose Theater, T-H-E-A-T-R-E, Behind the Bastards Live.
If you just Google Alberta Rose Theater, Behind the Bastards, it'll take you to the live show.
There's an eTix.com.
If you go to eTix.com, Behind the Bastards Live, you should be able to find it as well.
Again, all performer proceeds will benefit the Portland Defense Fund.
You can also go to at Defense Fund PDX on Venmo or type donor box, Defense Fund PDX, to donate directly to the Portland Defense Fund.
It's a 501c.
Please help them out.
And again, Behind the Bastards Live, the Alberta Rose Theater, September 25th, 2025 at 8 p.m.
I'll see you there.
I'm actually excited for the Nuremberg movie.
I don't know.
It looks like maybe they kind of didn't have the budget to make it as good as they could have, but Russell Crowe is really good casting for Herman Gohing.
You love Russell Crowe.
Well, I like him as an actor, but he's also like Herman Gohing is this guy who's a young man.
He's a fighter ace.
He's super fit and like together and like a handsome celebrity.
And then as he gets older, like he puts on a lot of weight and has problems with addiction.
And like, yeah, Russell Crowe is a really good guy to pick to play Goering late in life, right?
Robert, Robert.
What?
Say hi to Anderson.
Hello, Anderson.
How are you doing?
What up, Andy?
Andy, what's up?
She's the goat.
I also have a Russell Crowe story, but that's probably for another two.
It's not as good as the Bill Gates story.
Oh, I love it.
Or the Doug Wilson story.
I love it.
Or the Doug Wilson story.
Russell Crowe And Herman Göring00:03:23
It's not as good as both of those.
For a second there, I was just thinking about like, and then you just start telling me the plot of the movie, The Nice Guys.
Like, oh, no, no, that's based on my actual life with Russell Crowe.
It wasn't in the 70s, but yeah, no, that's about me.
That'd be so funny.
You're using Ryan Gosling's character.
I ran into Russell Crow.
Yeah, I ran into Russell Crowe.
So these people came into our neighborhood and said we needed to.
I was going to try to break into 300, but I couldn't remember the rest of it.
But anyway, that would have been, if I could have pulled off the 300 one, that'd have been great.
Well, speaking of 300, that guy really.
At least 300 guys die in World War I, and that's where we are at the start of this episode.
World War I has began before noon.
At least 300 people die in World War II before noon on the first day.
Yeah, that's like a bad 30 seconds during the fucking Battle of the Frontiers.
Yes.
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Heinrich Himmler Fitness Obsession00:14:57
So, Heinrich Himmler, you know, starts when he's on vacation as a kid.
He's taking notes.
He's writing in his diary over the first few weeks as things are spinning up to a full-blown war.
And we get this fascinating, one of the things that his diary entries provide us with is this really fascinating window into the state of Imperial German propaganda at this time.
One of his early diary entries, you know, before the outbreak or like right after the outbreak of, you know, once the German army gets into the fray and like everybody's actually fighting, he just writes, English army beaten, and then goes on to add, I'm as happy at these victories as the English and French are no doubt annoyed at them, and the annoyance will be considerable.
Falk and I would really, it's one of his friends, would really like to fight right now ourselves.
It's clear that the good old Germans and their loyal allies, the Austrians, are not afraid of a world full of enemies.
Wow.
This is a snapshot, Chief.
Yeah, in the first couple of weeks of the war, things are going really well for Germany.
They take Belgium.
They're pushing towards Paris.
Most of, you know, the English army, this is remembered differently in Great Britain as like how well they fought.
And even though there's very few of them, they inflicted hideous casualties on the Germans.
But also what happens is the English army as it existed at the start of the war is almost wiped out, right?
Like their standing army almost doesn't exist very, very soon into the war, which is why, you know, they have to do this general draft and stuff.
And so from the perspective of the Germans, sure, you know, they were good soldiers, but like we wiped them out, basically.
There's not that many English soldiers left anymore.
And like the French are being pushed back.
So he is just absolutely from the beginning of it is like, ah, we're unstoppable.
And this, I think this is particularly, I don't want to do too much of like, again, what a lot of people do when they're looking at his diary and like working backwards from where he ended up and being like, ah, clear sign of the monster he'd become.
But there is something useful in that last sentence where he's like, the Germans, the good old Germans and their loyal allies, the Austrians, are not afraid of a world full of enemies, right?
This idea that like it's, you know, we can stand alone against the world.
The fact that as a kid, he feels that way.
Yeah, that's a sentence, man.
Right.
It's, it's relevant to who he becomes.
Yeah, that's, yeah, that says a lot.
Yes, yes.
And that's afraid of haters.
He's not alone.
This is specifically what the Kaiser's propaganda is trying to inculcate.
But part of why everyone in the Nazi high command is willing to make a lot of the calls and willing to back Hitler and a lot of the calls that lead them to being at war with the world is that they had been raised in this propaganda where it's like, yes, it's Germany against the world and we can take them, right?
And obviously they almost do in World War I, you know, to be fair.
Yeah.
So it's also worth noting that a few weeks later at the end of August, once his family had returned home from vacation and he'd had more time to talk with his like neighbors and his peers about what they thought of the war, he writes this, quote, generally speaking, there is no particular enthusiasm in lower Bavaria among the people at home.
When the mobilization was announced in the old town, everyone apparently started blubbing, crying.
I would have expected that, least of all of the lower Bavarians.
They are usually so ready for a fight.
A wounded soldier says the same.
Often really dreadful and stupid rumors go round, all invented by people.
And that's interesting where he's like, wow, all my neighbors are cowards.
They're scared and sad that we're going to war.
They don't think it's awesome.
And a wounded soldier who came back from the front said that the war is a bad thing.
What a dick.
These people are idiots.
Yeah.
They're inventing rumors.
This guy who got machine gunned and all of his friends died is inventing rumors that the war is going to be bad.
See, this is again hearsay.
Yeah.
Like, this is, yeah, y'all watch too many movies.
Cause like, I feel like I feel like one of the most miserable feelings is like a wet sock.
Yes.
Yes.
Right.
Like, so like, so a wet sock that you can't do anything about.
Yeah.
But it's also inside of your boot and it's going to kill you.
Yeah.
The sock is so wet and so moist that you're probably going to lose your foot because it's infected.
Like that type of like, I'm not even talking about the bullets and the machines.
I'm talking about the food rations have maggots and mice in them.
Yeah.
And all my friends are dead.
Yeah.
And all my friends are dead.
Yeah.
You know the food I ate to survive to get here to talk to you?
I ate it off of my dead buddy.
Yeah.
And it's, I think a lot when I'm reading about like Heinrich hearing from this wounded veteran and being like, what a coward.
How dare he not want to fight?
It brings to mind just something from the early stages of the Iraq war.
There was a sergeant who was a Nicaraguan lawful permanent resident who joins the United States Army, Camilo Mea, who is deployed to Iraq very early in the war in like 2004.
And when he returns home after six months on a two-week furlough, he refuses to go back.
And he's like, I'm a conscientious objector.
The war is wrong.
We shouldn't be here.
You guys don't understand how bad it is and how bad it's going to go.
Like we need to stop this now.
And he gets like put in prison for it for a year and stuff.
And I'm thinking about like as a kid, the things that I heard about him from my family and from the news about what a coward this man was.
And it's like, this man was in fucking combat.
He fought for this country.
And he came back and I was like, guys, this is a bad thing.
It's bad.
It's going to go bad.
We're not going to win.
It's going to kill a lot of people.
We should stop.
And yeah, I mean, I can really understand Heinrich's reaction because as a kid, that's how I felt about this guy because I was fucking propagandized too, you know?
Yeah.
Some of us get past it.
Heinrich never does.
Yeah, totally.
So, and it's one of the things that's interesting here is that like he's talking to these locals who are like sad that the war is happening.
And the fact that, you know, a month before he writes this entry about how stupid they are and that, ah, they're listening to all these dumb rumors all invented by people.
A month ago, you were talking about how the British army's been defeated and the French are fleeing and Germany's.
And now things have bogged down and hundreds of thousands of Germans are already dead.
And you don't realize, like, maybe you were wrong.
Like, maybe everyone was lying to you about how easy this was gonna be.
Like, you don't get that yet.
But he's a kid, you know, kids are dumb, and he's no smarter than any other dumb propagandized kid in the history of the world.
Um, so, uh, when a train load of wounded French soldiers arrived in town, Himmler wrote about them.
This is interesting to me.
He does write about these wounded foreign soldiers, despite how he felt about the French with compassion.
He's actually like, he's angry that there are some locals who are like angry that the prisoners are being taken care of and fed.
And he's like, no, like they're prisoners.
They fought honorably.
Like, we did, like, that's not bad, which is interesting.
Now, that said, several days later, he hears news about 90,000 Russian POWs, and he writes in his diary that Russians, quote, multiply like vermin.
So you also get flashes of the guy he's got to become, right?
I think that's interesting.
There's an element of, well, this was not a guy who was incapable of compassion as a kid.
And also, yeah, he's already at 14.
He's talking about Russians like they're fucking rats.
So, yeah, okay.
I can see, I can see both.
You weren't maybe destined to be Heinrich Himmler, but there were always the pieces of that in you, too.
Yes.
Yeah.
In his Freudian analysis of Himmler's diaries, Peter Loewenberg writes: Two American historians, Werner T. Angriss and Bradley F. Smith, have collaborated in studying Himmler's early years.
They found that there were two distinct Himmlers, an early normal one and a later psychopath.
The early Himmler was, quote, to all appearances, a normal human being.
It is, they write, bewildering to discover how genuinely kind, considerate, and at times, downright compassionate he was as a youth.
And I don't know that I would agree Himmler was a psychopath as an adult, uh, in part because that a psychopath isn't capable of empathy, and he clearly is.
He goes to the camps as an adult, he's nauseated, he like vomits because of what he's seeing at the camps that he is running.
He is, I think, this, and I don't say this to be like he's not as bad as these guys think.
I think it's worse if you're like, if you can't care about people and do terrible things, that's not as bad as being capable of empathy and choosing to do those things.
100%, yeah, as looking at it and going, nah, this shit sucks.
Yeah, yeah, this sucks.
This is super evil.
Anyway, oh, fuck.
So you're doing the wrong thing.
Like, yeah, no, oh, fuck, this is awful.
Obviously, we got to do it.
This makes it more honorable that we're willing to push through our nausea to kill these people.
What are you going to do?
Yeah.
Right.
Nah.
Yeah.
I am like, man, the just, I think both of our shows have made this point so many times that, like, you want to otherize the monster.
Right.
That, like, and call them a monster, that there's something that is foreign or far from us, what they have this weird brain worm in their soul that makes them something separate than us.
It's like, no, no, yeah, they're us.
And I, I, I think that's kind of what I really want to emphasize here: I don't think, and you know, this is arguable, but this is my argument.
I don't think he was destined to be the genocide guy.
I think he made choices.
And I also think that there's obviously like you know, nature, the just his environment also helps push him to this.
His people around him, his family push him to this.
But I don't think that Heinrich Himmler, if you take this guy and you put him in a different time or you surround with better people in the same place, he might have wound up being a very different person, right?
I don't think this is a guy who was could only ever have been a monster.
I think he's a guy who chooses to do monstrous things.
And I think that's important.
Yes, rather than being born 1900, he's born 2000.
Right.
He could have been a different guy, you know, better parents, a better environment.
He could have been a totally different person.
Yeah.
So World War One was an accelerating agent for the worst parts of his personality.
War does not tend to make people better.
Like many German boys, he became obsessed with the idea of serving, and particularly he wants to be in combat.
He wants to be infantry.
Now, he wants to be an officer.
He doesn't want to be a grunt, right?
He wants to be like, because he sees that as in part, he's owed that kind of position, right?
He does his family's upper middle class.
He knows the prince.
He's supposed to be an officer, right?
Now, by 1915, at 15, he's getting close to adulthood.
He's not far from when he'll be able to join and fight.
And he writes about being like overwhelmed.
He can barely stand it that he's not out there yet, right?
Like this is driving him crazy that he's still too young to fight and he's going to miss it.
He's still worried.
Even in 1915, when it's been become clear, oh, this is bad.
He still can't for how angry he is at not being able to fight yet.
And part of it, he's also very insecure.
His health problems continue and he's really worried that like he might not be able to serve at the front because of his health.
And so he starts taking actions.
He gets obsessively into fitness to try and he gets into weightlifting.
Like he's a again, there's a you can see that the modern day version of Himmler would have fallen for a lot of these like far-right like Joe Rogan fucking steroid grifters fitness guys.
He would have been really into that.
Loewenberg writes, quote, on the eve of his 15th birthday, he wrote, I work out with dumbbells every day now to get more strength.
Yeah, you do.
But as adolescence developed, his perception of strength became an inner one.
Strength to him was a function of inner control, of self-discipline over his emotions.
Now, as a Freudian, Loewenberg describes this as a fundamentally anal retentive method of building strength.
Okay, man.
He quotes a later diary entry by 20-year-old Himmler, where Himmler Heinrich promises to seize, quote, like iron the bit of self-control in my mouth.
He means bit like a horse's beat.
Yeah, yeah.
And then extends this, Loewenberg does, to a claim that Himmler must have been obsessed with a desire to masturbate.
And all of his obsession with fitness and with self-control is as a result of his constant battle with himself to stop himself from coming.
I don't think there's any evidence of this.
Like, where is Freudians are obsessed with coming, right?
Yeah.
Now, where'd you get that?
Like, just where?
Where did that go?
Yeah.
He is, this is a Catholic boy.
I am sure he's got a self-complex about sexual urges and the fact that it's called his, I'm sure that this does influence him as it does like most kids in this era, right?
I just don't, I think that you're, he's, there's, there's some reaching here going on, right?
I feel like what's what's more, I mean, obviously, like even the practice of doing what I'm about to say, we're against doing it.
But I'm like, but what seems to be, again, right in front of us was what they said about the boy in high school.
Like he's, he did it.
He is a late glow up.
Like he's a late grow up.
He's anxious about his fitness, about being scrawny and weak.
Yeah.
You know, he's like I said, like he's a six at best.
You know what I'm saying?
So that's already happening.
And it's like, dude, nah, let me put some, let me bulk up a little bit.
I'm bigger now.
I bet you, you know what I'm saying?
Like I go to this war, I put some weight on like everybody, you know, my lungs, I don't be running like everybody else.
You feel me?
Like let him, it's a normal boy, I'll show them glow up moment.
You feel me?
That like to me is like, again, so far, I know that the tide is going to completely turn, but I feel like so far, all this is relatable.
Yeah.
You know, that's, yeah, I, I, I think that's a, yeah, a really important point.
And again, I'm sure he's got some weird attitudes about masturbation.
That game's not nothing, but it's just Lowenberg describes it as like this is probably is more important to him even than like preparing his body for war.
And no, I think his obsession with physical fitness and his, he might have, you might even say body dysmorphia.
He's very unhappy with his body.
I think that's focused on his worries about not being able to fight, not being fit to be a soldier like he's supposed to be and like his older brother is going to be.
In September of 1915, his parents and his older brother Gebhard go to a field hospital for wounded, or it's at least a hospital for wounded soldiers with their parents to go, like, you know, thank these soldiers who have gotten maimed on the Western Front.
And Heinrich is really envious that he doesn't get to go.
Like, he's like, oh man, I wish I should have been there.
Gebhard turns 17 and he gets to join the military reserve or Landsturm.
Heinrich claimed, quote, if only I were old enough, I'd be out there like a shot.
Gebhard Joins Military Reserve00:11:42
But he's not.
And he has to content himself with joining the Cadet Corps, which is the Imperial German version of ROTC, right?
This is like, you're not quite ready to join.
You're going to be an officer.
We're going to prepare you for that.
He starts in autumn and he and his peers spend some time.
They go out.
There's like a week, there's like summer camp basically that they do.
And, you know, I think it's a thing where once or twice a week they'll meet up and they get some training.
I think they do some shooting.
Most of what they're doing is probably marching, right?
But it's kind of trying to prepare you so that you need less training when you're old enough to go fight, right?
He's enthusiastic.
He really likes wearing a uniform.
He really enjoys being involved in this.
But again, his health issues keep cropping up and he starts, he develops, he has this severe stomach pain that he talks about.
I think he has IBS, probably IBSD.
If I just had to guess by what he's describing, we don't know.
But I think he's got Crohn's.
It might be.
I don't think it's not.
I don't think it's serious.
It might be Crohn's.
But it doesn't seem quite serious enough for that because he would have been basically entirely unmedicated.
And I think unmedicated Crohn's would have been more debilitating to him.
So painful.
I think this is likelier, but I'm not a doctor, but he's got some sort of weird stomach, gastrointestinal issue that will plague him his whole life.
This is always a problem for him.
Well, I mean, he's Heinrich Himmler, so I guess I'm glad he suffered in the long run, but he hasn't done anything bad yet.
I was like, stomach problems.
That's a bummer.
Not for him.
Yeah.
He kind of deserved it.
Longrich's biography suggests that his obsessive weightlifting is more of a response to these embarrassing health problems than an example of a broader need for control because he can't stop from masturbating.
I think that's probably likelier than what Loewenberg theorizes.
In late 1916, Heinrich's godfather, the prince, is killed in action in Romania at age 32.
This is a calamity for the Himmler family and Heinrich in particular.
They don't entirely lose their access to the royal family because they know his mom.
And so they have some ability to still make use of that relationship.
But the prince being dead really damages their connections, right?
They are much less tied in to royalty now and the social benefits that would have come from it for Heinrich.
Yeah, you're his plus one, man.
Like you can't, like, you just lost.
You're the plus one.
So now you're not on the list.
You know what I mean?
You're the plus one.
And then he got fucking murked by, I think it's, I think he probably died from shrapnel.
I forget exactly.
Maybe I'm wrong, but he gets killed on the fucking front, right?
Yeah.
In May of 1917, Heinrich's brother Gebhard joins an infantry regiment and starts his training to become an infantry officer.
Now, Heinrich is now old enough to serve, right?
Because, you know, his brother's 17 in like 1915.
Heinrich's a couple of years younger.
He's like 17 now.
You know, this is the second to the last year of the war.
He is old enough that he could, if he were a regular German, he probably would have gone into infantry and been out there pretty quickly.
But his parents, again, he doesn't want to serve as an enlisted man.
And his parents beg the mother of his dead godfather, you know, the yeah.
I don't think she's the queen.
I forget exactly what the term is, but she's the prince's mom.
She's somewhere in the royalty.
The queen aunt.
Yeah, yeah, queen aunt or some shit like that to help them get a position in an elite infantry regiment.
And she does write a letter to one of these like elite regiments being like, please accept this young boy.
But they're like, look, we're like serious ass soldiers.
Like, and we like at this point, the German military, the elite units are really good.
They're proto.
These are like the stormtroopers, the trench fighters.
These are the guys who we are very careful with them because you can't replace these dudes, right?
It takes time for someone to build up the kind of skill in fighting.
Like, we don't just take, we're not going to take this sickly, weak kid and like put him in a unit where he's going to be asked to leap into a trench with a knife in one hand and a pistol in the other and kill men in hand-to-hand combat.
He's not ready for that.
Najee.
Like, yeah, somebody's mom writes a letter to the SEALs.
Right.
Like, yeah, he can't lift a 40-pound weight, but please take him into the Navy SEAL.
He's a good boy.
He's a good boy.
His dad taught my dead son.
Yeah.
So Heinrich leaves school that year.
He has not graduated.
This isn't really, it's dropping out, but not really, because kind of everyone who is 17 is doing this, either to go directly into the military or in Heinrich's case, he doesn't want to be conscripted as an enlisted man.
And so he leaves school so he can get into the reserve and try to secure himself a position as an officer candidate.
He wants to go to officer candidate school and handle all that.
This will let him choose a better assignment with at least a more prestigious unit than like some ground pounder or someone even worse, someone in like the back rank who's never going to see combat, who's going to be doing like signals or whatever.
To make a long story short, Gebhard Sr., his father, keeps using his connections and eventually is able to secure Heinrich a posting with a reserve battalion that is like the reserve battalion for a pretty good regiment.
So these are the guys when that good regiment loses men in combat.
The reserve battalion sends men over to fill them back up, right?
So it's the kind of thing where eventually you'll get, you know, a frontline position theoretically.
So Heinrich goes off to train and he's now in the military.
He's doing military training to learn to be an officer.
And he starts writing home and signing his letters as Miles Heinrich.
Miles is Latin for soldier.
So he's signing his letters as Heinrich the soldier now.
Okay.
Longrich writes, quote, the brand new warrior expressed his manliness, amongst other things, by taking up smoking.
In contrast to this masculine pose, his almost daily letters to his parents, in fact, reveal the considerable difficulties he had in adjusting to the world of the military.
Heinrich was homesick.
He complained about the poor accommodation and wretched food, though on most evenings he could supplant this by going to pubs.
Oh my God.
So he's not really ready for what war is going to be.
When all Shapiro on us, Ben Shapiro on us, pretending like you like cigars.
Yeah.
And you're still going out to the pub and getting pub food.
Like, you're not doing that bad.
Like, if you think this is bad, what do you see what your brother's going to do?
Yeah, like during war.
Yeah.
You going out to the pubs?
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Got it.
In the spring of 1918, his older brother Gebhard goes to the Western Front and he winds up being part of this last massive offensive, the Kaiserschlacht, I think it's called, of the German army in World War I.
And he experiences heavy combat.
His unit loses a lot of guys.
He is fighting face-to-face, tooth and nail in the trenches.
Ugly, like as bad as it gets shit.
Like Gebhard is a blooded soldier by the end of this.
Heinrich, in comparison, spends his time complaining about the food and begging his parents for care packages.
He receives seven care packages in his first five weeks away, but this is not enough.
And he writes petulantly home in one letter, dearest parents, today again I have got nothing from you.
That's mean.
What the?
Okay.
Such a baby.
There's a fucking way.
Your brother is like ankle deep in blood.
He is wading through blood, fucking up to his knees, probably, and storms of bullets and shrapnel.
He's killing men in a hand to hand.
He's watching the light drain from their eyes.
And you're like, I only got seven care packages in five weeks.
You guys don't love me anymore, mom?
I just hear you give it gluten-free.
Come on, you fucking baby.
Like, Jesus.
A million Germans starve to death during this period of time.
And you're like, mommy, my care packages.
But you gonna send some goldfish?
They ain't got no goldfish.
Yeah.
And it's, and Gebhardt becomes a Nazi too.
He's not a sympathetic figure, right?
But like, it is this, like, discrepancy between his older brother, really smart, very good in school, fucking bleeding with his brothers, watching all of his friends get massacred in this like nightmare apocalypse battle.
And Heinrich's like, mommy, you're not writing home enough.
You know, he sends one letter back to his parents that reads, dear mother, thank you so much for your news, which I did not get.
It's so horrid of you not to write again.
Oh, yeah.
He misses a day or two of letters.
And he writes home being like, thank you for the letter that I didn't get.
What a dick.
The lady that wasn't in none of your journals.
Okay.
Yeah.
Now, now, now you want to talk about her, huh?
Because she ain't write you no letter.
Okay.
Now I'm good.
And it's like, okay, at this point, he's a prick.
Yeah, right?
Like, we can say that.
We're starting to see the churn.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This kid's a dick.
Yeah, your war wasn't what you thought it was, huh?
Yeah.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, you don't get your little snacks.
You don't get your little tucky thing.
He's not even getting shot at.
And you're not even at war.
So he eventually gets posted to take a course on machine gun use.
To be basically, if he'd finished training, he would have been like an officer in a machine gun unit, you know, right?
On September 15th of 1918.
He does not wind up.
It's interesting to me that he doesn't wind up sent to the front, right?
Because Germany does not have guys.
They are, they've been blood white by this point.
A 17-year-old boy, even at this point, I don't care if he's sickly.
He's just there for 10 minutes until he takes a fucking bullet to the lung, right?
Yeah, basically.
Like, we just need bodies.
And so it's interesting that he doesn't just get sent to the front.
He's had enough training.
Guys go up there with less.
There's a couple of potential explanations.
One is that even this late in the war, the German military still does try to make sure that their officers have a good base of training when they're sent to the front.
And so maybe it's just that because he's becoming an officer, they don't want to rush that.
But they do for a lot of guys.
And Longrich suggests, and this is something he can't, there's not really hard evidence for this, but I think it's a reasonable suggestion that it might have been because his superiors see kind of what we've seen in these letters home, that he's immature.
And like, they're like, this guy shouldn't be commanding men in battle.
Like, you know, like he's going to help Germany.
I can tell you that much.
He a little boy.
Like, he's like, he's a kid.
He's a kid.
Yeah.
And we're willing to send kids to die, but we don't maybe, maybe we don't want them leading men to die, right?
He's just not ready.
If he's going to be an officer, let's keep him away until he grows up a little bit.
You're going to kill a lot of other people.
Right.
Being childish.
Or these men going to turn on you because you're a child.
Yeah.
They're going to frag your ass.
Whatever the case, he is still in the reserves and still training when Germany signs the armistice.
So Heinrich Himmler never gets the baptism of fire that he so dearly desired.
And his brother Gebert, on the other hand, does the soldier thing as much as you can, right?
He gets an iron cross for valor.
He gets basically like somewhat equivalent to like a medal of honor, somewhere between like a bronze or a silver star and a medal of honor, you know, because there's different kinds of iron cross.
I don't know exactly, but it's like a, it's a very prestigious Hitler gets one of those.
He came home and got fraud.
It's a big deal that he gets this.
And he manages, he doesn't get seriously injured over there, which is amazing given the kind of combat that he's in.
He's a lucky guy.
And the fact that his brother, who's always been better than him, is now a war hero and Heinrich misses out entirely, he will never get over this.
This will color the rest of his life.
His insecurity over this is something that is present for the rest of his days.
And you know what else was present for all of Heinrich Himmler's life?
Oh my God.
Capitalism.
Well, yeah, yeah, I mean, sorta.
Yeah.
It was invented by this.
Yeah, it was around as a factor in Jeremy in this period, but also products, advertisements.
Yeah.
Capitalism In Heinrich's Life00:03:22
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Weimar Government Political Struggle00:15:16
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And we're back and we're talking about Heinrich Himmler post-the big dub-w Uno.
So Germany's lost.
Heinrich is very much going to fall for the stabbed in the back myth, right?
In part because.
Surprise, surprise.
And he's angry both at the Jews and social democrats who ended the war, which is not the military ended the war because they knew that the army would have collapsed if they'd kept fighting, right?
Yeah.
And they blame it on the people who actually take over after and negotiate the peace, which is the largely social democratic government of Weimar at the start of Weimar.
And, you know, the, I mean, particularly one of the negotiators who helps ensure the peace, who's a real hero, is a Jewish man, right?
Yeah.
Matthias Erzberger, I think was his name.
Yeah.
Who gets assassinated as a result?
Yeah.
Now, here's a good tie to his past of him being like, I don't mind having, like he said earlier, like, I don't mind like Germany, you know, collecting enemies.
Like, we'll stand alone.
It's all good.
You know what I mean?
You have yeah, yeah, exactly.
First of all, how'd that work out?
But you had an attitude to where you just like, you ain't forced you against us.
You a hater.
Like, I don't care.
You know what I'm saying?
We would have never lost because we don't give up.
We don't mind having enemies.
You know what I mean?
The only way we would have lost was because, like you said, somebody had to stab us in the back.
You feel me?
Right.
And that's the, it's not, and for Heinrich, it's not only did we get stabbed in the back and Germany was robbed of its great victory.
I was robbed of my chance to be a hero.
Yeah.
Be a real man.
He almost personifies it.
Like I was robbed.
Yeah.
So that's big.
Once the war is over, Heinrich attempted to remain with the military, but the old Imperial Army is replaced as a result of the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles with the Reichswehr, right?
That's the post-war army, and it's limited to 100,000 men.
And they're not allowed to have like an air force.
I don't think they're allowed much in the way of artillery.
They're very much, because people are like, yeah, Germany, you got it kind of out of pocket.
We got to really keep a lid on yo asses, right?
Yeah.
This is going to prove to be a bad idea for a lot of reasons.
The terms of the treaty.
I don't need to get into that.
People are broadly familiar.
The terms of the treaty play into why things happen within Germany the way they do.
But one of the things this is going to mean is that like Heinrich wants a military career, right?
And he's not going to get one because the only people who get to stay in the military, it's a tiny fraction of the deployed military.
And those jobs are going to go to guys who actually saw shit, right?
Yes.
And who are valuable for some reason, who have connections?
And he's just not going to have Heinrich's going to try, but like, why the fuck would we give you a job of the tiny number of people who get to keep military jobs?
Why would you get it?
Yeah.
Hitler doesn't.
And Hitler was actually a decorated combat soldier, right?
They won't let him in.
That's great for me to hear because it's like, like, it's like Himler, I feel like he's like, it's privilege ain't the word per se, but yeah.
But he is, but it's just like, it's supposed to work out for me.
Yeah.
Like, you know what I'm saying?
So like, why is this not working out either?
Is like had to have add to the like pissed offedness, you know?
And that is, that's a huge part of why Himmler is the way that he is and why he gets drawn into Nazism, right?
And this is a big, this is a major factor in almost everyone who winds up kind of, especially these, a lot of these higher up members of the Nazi party, the people who are running the SS.
We've talked about this with like Heinrich and with Eichmann.
These guys are people who could come from the middle class and upper middle class.
And I was promised more.
I'm supposed to be doing better.
And they're not never doing bad.
They're never really suffering compared to how other people are.
But they're furious because I was supposed to, I was promised more.
I'm owed more.
It's a massive factor in all of these guys.
And it's a massive thing for Himmler.
So he is able to, he returns to school under a special program instituted by the post-war government to allow young men who had dropped out basically because they were either being drafted or they were trying to volunteer and thus had missed out on finishing their education to get their, it's kind of a mix between like a GED and a high school diploma to allow them to go back and finish it.
Right.
And actually the class that Heinrich is in is taught by his father, Gebhard.
Longrich says Gebbhard didn't show favoritism to his son.
This is actually pretty consistent of descriptions of him.
He wouldn't have really done that.
So anyway, he gets his German GED.
I think it's called an abatur or something like that.
The first few months after the war are rife with socialist uprisings and attempt to take and hold different German cities by leftists, which are cracked down on brutally by a mix of police, the military, and Freikorps, right?
Which are these groups of Free Corps, these groups of demobilized veterans who are murderous thugs used by the new Weimar government to maintain control.
These guys are far right.
The Weimar government isn't, but the Weimar government cares more about stopping the left from succeeding in this kind of like, because they're trying to do basically the Russian Revolution to electric boogoo.
And Weimar's like, well, if we got to have these proto-Nazis murder a bunch of people, as long as it stops that from happening, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So Heinrich gets political fairly quickly.
He gets involved first with a center-right political party.
Like it's not the far right, but that's kind of his initial, more or less an analog to like a mainline Republican party initially.
And at the end of 1919, he joins a Free Corps unit.
He is deployed to them, if you can call it that, on a couple of occasions, which is, you know, there's unrest or whatever, and the Freikorps move out.
He does some marching around.
He does some riding in a car with some guys with guns, but he does not engage in any a lot of Freikorps are doing fighting.
There's heavy fighting and killing.
He is not involved in any of that.
He does not see any serious action.
I think in general, because even as messy as these Freikorps units are, they're organized and run by people who actually fought.
And they're like, yeah, this, we should keep this kid away from anything serious.
Look at him.
Look at him.
You don't really want the smoke.
I don't want him behind.
I don't want him watching my back.
He doesn't know what the fuck he's doing.
You ain't really with the shits.
You just want to wear the uniform.
I do think it's also important to remember, like, and again, it's hard in our American imagination to understand, first of all, multiple forms of government, but the type of transition.
I feel like this is the first time, at least in our age era, where we've seen a government totally like lose their marbles.
Like we've never seen it.
Like our government's lost its marbles.
You know what I'm saying?
And like, but at this time, like you said, like during Weimar, during the Weimar Republic, I'm like, women can vote.
Like there's these just these like progressive, not progressive, but they're these like progressions in culture.
Like they're, they're funding the arts, they're funding science, and motherfuckers is pissed off, you know, like that sort of like, like, okay, guys, like, think about this for a second.
Like these, like these are, maybe I'm having a modern, maybe I'm modern pilled, but I'm like, it's such an interesting moment and how the clapback from that was so strong.
Like, it's just, I don't know, it's just a weird time where I was like, brother, like, like, this the world, like, this, this is the time Einstein's from, right?
Like, you're getting, like, government endowments to understand science.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, this, that's, I thought that was good.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Yep, yep, yep.
So, uh, yeah, Heinrich, you know, he's in the Free Corps.
Part of why he joins this unit is it's, he's kind of trying to stay in the military after demobilization.
He's hoping he can make connections, but it doesn't work out.
And he gets, he's out of the military.
He's cashiered out by the summer of 1919.
He begins to work as a laborer on a farm.
So he's like, you know, he's working on a farm, but he doesn't own it.
But he gets entranced by rural life and he starts sending letters back to his parents signed Heinrich Agricola, which is Latin for Heinrich the farmer.
However, that's agriculture, agricola.
You can see where it comes from.
However, the ruthless pace of life on a farm disagrees with his fragile constitution.
Again, he's going to be like a lot of modern far-right guys.
He will idolize homesteading and the small farmer and like, this is the life we need a new nobility formed out of like, you know, the rural peasantry.
But he's never able to really do it because he's sickly and he doesn't like working hard outside.
By September of that year, illness had forced him to pause his career.
Again, this is a kid who thought he was ready for the fucking trenches and you can't handle farming for like more than two months, three months.
He goes to his family doctor who diagnoses him with an enlarged heart and prescribes him a one-year break to study and regain his health.
Now, obviously, an enlarged heart is a serious health issue.
I don't think he actually has one because there's not really evidence from the rest of his life that he has one.
I think this is just doctors, you know, they're not like, but they're not like doing a scan to see his heart's big.
Yeah, try that.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I'm going to take more cocaine, you know?
So anyway, what's interesting here is that, and this is fascinating to me, Heinrich gets like basically told, hey, go chill out for a while, you know, maybe go to school, but don't do any hard outdoor labor.
So he's like, he's, he's laid up sick for a year, unable to work, and he starts reading obsessively.
And what he starts reading obsessively for the most part is right-wing Volkish propaganda.
So the Volkish movement is ascendant in Germany in this period.
And the literal translation of the word Volk is just like folk or people, like it's the people, right?
The Volkswagen is the people's car.
The actual meaning, though, of the word Volk in German doesn't graph directly to any term that we have in English.
In a 1964 book on German ideology in the 20th century, Maas explained, George Maas explained, Volk is a much more comprehensive term than people to German thinkers ever since the birth of German Romanticism in the late 18th century.
Volks signify the union of a group of people with a transcendental essence, right?
There's this attitude, this idea the Nazis will popularize of like the Volksgemeinschaft, which is like the people's racial community.
That kind of sounds like, that sounds like in hip-hop when we say like the culture.
Right.
It kind of sounds like what we would say about Drake, like, you know, he's not like us.
Like, you're not a part of the culture.
Like that.
Yeah.
What's what's important, obviously, I don't think that's not like an inherently problematic the culture, like referring to it that way isn't problematic.
But the fact that you bring up the exclusion of people.
Yes, exactly.
There's always a degree of exclusion.
Yeah, there's an in-group, out-group.
Yeah.
We're talking about it's like this is like a subculture, right?
This is a subculture that's particularly relevant to like this, you know, our artistic movement.
That's one thing.
He's talking about the Volk as these are the people who deserve to have rights and who are actually Germans.
And the Volk excludes a lot of the people who live in Germany, right?
He's not just talking about, he's talking about specific kinds of people, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And the Volkish movement is emphasizing specific kinds of Germans who deserve to have rights and who need to breed in order to expand their numbers, right?
And this is where this is like the root of Nazi racial ideology is the Volkish movement, you know?
And the Volkish movement is obsessed with exclusion.
You know, it is, it is defined not by who lives within the boundaries of a nation, but who the right-wing thinks ought to be included in this racial community.
In his book, Hitler's Master of the Dark Arts, A History of Himmler's Interest in the Occult, author Bill Yen describes the Volkish movement as part of the counterculture in Germany.
And he argues that its best modern analog would be the 1980s New Age movement, right?
That this is very similar to like, you know, that the this all this interest that starts popping up in yoga and Eastern mysticism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and all that stuff in the 80s in like the US is very similar to what's happening.
And what the Volkish movement is a part of this broader interest in mysticism and alternative religion in the 20s and alternative history, right?
Including a big thing that is big in Germany in this period, Buddhism is big in Germany, right?
Not a super accurate take on Buddhism, but like their attitude of it, as well as people get obsessed in a lot of the West with like ancient Egyptian occult ceremonies and religion and like the Eddas, right?
These kind of Norse sagas that are like part of this like religious, the pros Eddas, like that is big too.
And so like Norse mythology and religion, you know, worship of deities like Wotan, right?
It starts to become big.
And it's all tied into the Volkish movement is a part of it.
It's related to all of this stuff.
Well, that definitely wasn't the comparison I was making.
Yeah.
As far as like the culture, what I was trying to say is like the term is not a literal translation and that the edges are more like foggy or cloudy, but like we know what we mean when we say it.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
Yeah.
But it is, I think it is very relevant to compare it to and to compare it to like the modern day, the UFO movement and stuff.
All these things that feed into QAnon that have fed into the far right.
The fact this happened before, right?
Yeah.
Like, yeah, there's like this weird like thing to where it's like you get into something that like is kind of like exciting to you, whatever.
You meet a lot of cool folk, air quotes, cool, but at some point you have to look at the back of the line and be like, oh, wait, they're in our line too.
Like this is this, wait, this will, if I get further into this concentric circle, it's going to turn into this.
Like you, and you have to consider that.
So like that's, yeah.
So like, even if you were just like, look, like, like to your point, it's like, you know, especially like the new age movement or stuff like that, or just like, look, dude, I think it's better to eat food that was grown by human hands and has seeds because a seedless watermelon does not exist in nature.
You know what I'm saying?
So if you're just like, sure, okay, I get it.
I'm going to eat things with seeds.
You know what I'm saying?
Ancestors And New Age Mysticism00:09:43
Yeah.
But also that means I need to drink raw milk.
And also that means I need, you know what I'm saying?
They're like, wait, There's actually like a lot of health stuff tied into it.
A lot of like, you know, natural food shit is tied into it.
Vegetarianism, even Hitler's a vegetarian.
But part of what's relevant here is that these are a lot of people who are not initially into far-right politics, but they are willing to question the mainstream, willing to question, you know, scientific orthodoxy and cultural orthodoxy.
And if you start down that road, you can go in a number of directions, but you're going to encounter other things that are questioning that orthodoxy, including weird far-right shit.
And then the other aspect of it, a lot of this, a lot of this, especially more esoteric occult beliefs where like people are embracing getting into magic and getting into these different alternate religions.
There's an attitude of them to like, because I'm different and special.
And so if you were saying, yes, you're special because you're part of this people's racial community and you have like mythical mystic powers, actually, that are tied to like the ancient like deep magic woven into our people's blood.
Well, maybe you go from being into ancient Egyptian, you know, mysticism to far-right.
That's what I'm saying.
Yeah, it's like you're all red at the back of your line.
Special.
Maybe I have powers, right?
You can get someone convinced that they're part of the Übermensch, you know?
Man, that's crazy.
Like, it's crazy.
I wonder what it would be like to experience that today.
That's a moment in culture.
That must be.
Thankfully, we'll never know, prop.
Yeah.
So along these more esoteric beliefs comes a growing interest in the mythical past of the German people.
And Himmler's always been drawn to this stuff.
And it's a little like as a kid, nerdy, you're a nerd and into this stuff that's like more fringe and you get bullied for.
And then it becomes mainstream as an adult.
And so suddenly like everybody's into this stuff that I've always liked.
He joins a group called the Arteman League, which sets its goal as liberating urban workers and turning them back into peasant farmers.
Once he gets sick, Himmler starts really reading into this stuff.
And there's, I tie this a lot to the radicalization journey a lot of Americans go through during the COVID lockdown, where maybe they're sick, maybe they're not, but they're locked away from everybody else.
They're not going out and they're just kind of obsessively falling down these YouTube rabbit holes and like these different like forum message board rabbit holes, getting more and more into this weird, like esoteric stuff about like vaccines and natural medicine or, you know, race theory.
That's what's happening to Himmler.
He's dealing with his own versions of that.
And he reads more widely at first before he really zeroes in entirely on the Volkish stuff.
He reads the volumes of Aussian, which are a fraud created by a Scottish guy that was claimed to be like ancient Celtic poetry.
He devours pamphlets attacking the Freemasons, particularly one by Friedrich Witchel.
Jen writes, Witchel claimed that, among other things, Freemasonry was strongly influenced by the Jews, was aiming for world revolution, and was overwhelmingly to blame for the world war.
Himmler agreed and commented, a book that sheds light on everything and tells us who we have to fight first.
So here's where it starts.
Here's where he gets into it.
Here's where we start evolving the Pokemon.
There's like these, it's a very probably not an experience of most of our fan base here, but like when like me coming from like sort of hip-hop circles, but like the indie underground, you know, coming out of the like conscious movement, like the, you know, the most deafs, the qualities, where like you're going to stand on there and rap about quasars and pyramids for most of the cipher and be into telekinesis, you know what I'm saying?
Like it like, you're so open-minded, you're closed-minded.
Like a lot of times you be at these, these moments and we're, and we're building, you know what I mean?
Like that's like the language of like the gods and the earths, the five percenters.
I think you may have done like some stuff on him.
Anyway.
But yeah, so a lot of times it's like, this is my community because this is where the real hip-hop is.
But then when you saw it start, somebody starts saying something that you're like, my brother in Christ, you made that up.
That history didn't, that is not history, right?
But it's, but it's a story that it is in response to the suppressing of the narrative of like our African ancestry.
Like you're suppressing the, in modern culture and just in modern American history, like the role of the African and its descendant is not ever acknowledged.
You know what I'm saying?
So when someone comes in and says, well, no, well, the black man was doing this and the black man was doing this.
And it's like, I'm like, bro, like, I love being black just as much as the rest of us, but you made that shit up.
Like, that's not what happened.
Like, that's not.
So, but if you start pushing back like that, they looking at you like, oh, nigga, you a sellout.
You believe in a white man's story.
You know what I'm saying?
So, so, so it's almost like, I, like, I don't even know how to say to you, this is not liberating us.
Like, I know what you, what you think you doing.
You think you, like you said, creating this ubermensch, if you will, like our black version of it.
Like, again, a black man is God.
We descended to kings.
And I'm like, some of our ancestors was peasants, my G. Like, some of us raised, just raised goats.
And that's okay.
You understand what I'm saying?
Because goats feed the world.
So, like, it's okay.
I'm not an Egyptian.
I'm not an ancient.
I don't come from that.
Okay.
Yeah.
And that's fine.
It's this like obsession with like, no, my ancestors were this thing that I think is cool that represents like a tenth of a percent of the people.
And it's like everyone has ancestors who were kings.
Everyone has ancestors who were warriors.
And everyone's got a lot more ancestors who were fucking dirt farmers or chicken berries or whatever.
The vast majority of human history from when we went from Homo erectus to Homo sapien was boring as shit.
Most of your ancestors, like everyone else, is people who were just trying to get by.
Yes.
Yeah.
Who never traveled four miles away from where they was born, right?
And raised and raised some more kids.
Yeah.
And that's great.
Yeah.
And Himmler is instead getting obsessed with, you know, ah, these knightly orders that are my, he's like Germanic, these, you know, these knights who were these great warriors who, you know, fought back the Muslim tides and, or, you know, before that beat the Romans, like, and these are our ancestors, these great, you know, heroic Germanic supermen, you know?
Yeah.
That's, that's what he's reading.
And he's also reading about, he gets into, you know, anti-Semitism through these theories about like the Freemasons and stuff.
Yeah.
Now, an interesting historic curiosity is during this period when he's laid up and he's reading obsessively, he also reads the first eight volumes of a magazine titled Pro-Palestine.
Now, this has nothing to do with the term in its modern sense.
This is a Zionist publication that's made by the German Committee for the Promotion of Jewish Settlement in Palestine.
He does not leave.
Unfortunately, there's no record of his opinion of this, but it's not a lot of guys, we talk about this with Eichmann, a lot of anti-Semites from this era go through this period of thinking like, well, maybe this is how we get rid of them, right?
Yeah, that's why I kind of giggled.
That's probably why he's into it.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, Palestine's kind of cool, guys.
Like, what about if we can get them over there?
You know, they're not.
Why don't you just go there?
We did that.
We're here with the slaves.
Like, why don't you go to Liberia?
You feel me?
Just go back to Angola.
Everything's fine.
Just go back to Africa.
And that's what this suggests is.
He's thinking more and more about the Jews and how to get rid of them, right?
Already from a very young age.
He's like 19 at this point.
In October of 1919, he registers with the Technical University in Munich to study agriculture.
Here he made it a priority to seek membership in the first fraternity that would take him.
And he wounds up as a Nepo baby getting into his dad's fraternity.
Now, in Germany during this period, frats looked a little different than they do now.
They were focused on a lot more on fencing and dueling clubs than anything else.
And prior to the war, every young man who's like of a certain class, if you're like the officer class, you want to get in one of these dueling clubs and get a scar on your face.
The whole point is for someone to get to hit you in the face and to earn a dueling scar.
Like you're not really like, you're not really a man of a certain level in society.
You don't have one.
And a Himmler is bad enough with a sword that it takes him three years to have enough duels to earn his scar.
Yin writes, potential opponents found Himmler a demeaning competitor because he was so small and so frail and that his stomach troubles make it difficult for him to drink heavily.
Now, that's one account, and there's some evidence behind it.
Longrich gives a little bit more moderate account of Himmler.
You know, in his frat years, he writes that he did at least witness multiple duels and wrote, at least it strengthens the nerves and you learn how to take being wounded.
He also wrote about drinking.
This is him describing in his diary a night out drinking.
It was very jolly.
I drank eight glasses of wine.
At 12.30, we went home on the train.
Most of us were tipsy, so it was very funny.
I got a few of the brothers back to their digs in bed at 2 a.m.
So like, he's able to party somewhat.
He's not, that's not super intense.
Eight drinks, you know, in bed by 2 a.m.
He's very jolly.
It was very jolly.
Yes.
I was like, this is, yeah, first of all, eight drinks and you a German man.
Bro, don't brag on that, homie.
Come on, you know how, if there's anything about your jeans, right?
Heinrich's Diary Drinking Night00:05:17
Yeah.
Like, you should have been able to hail more liquor than that.
But I will say, like, it, like, it kind of right now kind of sound like the, like, the guy, every time you talk to him, like, oh, I'm so sorry from the gym.
I was lifting.
And so, oh, man, I can't sit down.
I'm like, man, shut the fuck up, dog.
Yeah.
Like, you have to have your, oh, you see his broccoli ears because I was rolling, man.
I was rolling last night.
Yeah.
Like, okay, bro.
All right.
Okay.
His dating profile would be such a nightmare.
Oh, my God.
He's holding a fish.
Is he holding a fish in his dating profile?
Oh, God.
Yeah.
Definitely.
Or holding like some crops that he pulled out of the ground before going home because his tummy was hurt.
Yeah.
He's doing something.
Yeah.
He's got his tiny little scar that he's got to show off.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
Sorry.
I got it in battle.
Yeah.
That's fencing, bro.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's simply fencing.
And you're all trying to get scars.
Like everybody is just kind of cutting each other's face so that you can show off.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So dumb.
Now, you know who never shows off because they earned all of their scars the honorable way in hand-to-hand combat, killing people in bar fights.
Yeah.
Sophie, absolutely.
Allegedly.
Sophie, whoop your ass.
Oh, yeah.
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Understanding Heinrich's Relationships00:11:27
Ah, blue apron.
Why?
Killed a man in a bar.
Don't bring that back.
Don't bring that back.
You're probably right.
Someone will.
Anyway.
So we're talking about Heinrich Himmler.
He's in college now.
He's getting his degree in like agricultural sciences.
He gets into ROTC basically in college because he lets him wear a uniform.
He gets to march around.
He writes in his diary that he enjoys being able to still feel like a soldier.
In one entrance, he notes another day in uniform as one of his chief pleasures.
It's what I enjoy wearing most.
Like, okay, man, like he really just desperately wants to feel like a soldier, you know, even though that has passed him by.
Such a tryhard.
Yes.
Heinrich starts getting involved in political activism for the far right.
His first big protest campaign, because he's a member of some of these like right-wing groups on campus, is a German count, I think it's Count Arco Valley, assassinates a leftist, right?
Kills somebody.
It's like a political murder.
And the count gets sentenced to death for murdering a guy.
And this becomes a cause celeb of the German right.
This is kind of their equivalent of like the protests against the January 6th people facing any consequences for their crimes.
And they get so angry.
Heinrich is marching in the street.
There's protests.
You know, the Freikorps are like showing up armed in these gatherings to be like, you know, you're going to have to deal with us if you try to kill this man.
There's even talk within the military of either using having the army go in and bust him out or even doing a putsch against the government if they're to kill this guy.
And the liberal government caves like they always do to fascists.
Himmler writes after, because they and they commute his sentence to like basically life in prison.
We're not going to execute him.
And when the government caves, Himmler writes in his diary, however pleased we were, we were equally sorry that the business passed off so uneventfully.
Oh well, there will be another time.
And he also writes about like, ah, they're not willing.
They're scared of us.
Right.
And that's the problem.
That's why you can't like showing mercy to these people is a mistake, you know?
Like if you do that, they will take advantage of it every single time.
Yadi.
It just inspires them to push further.
It doesn't save you any violence.
Things get much worse because they don't go through with punishing this man.
Near the end of 1919, Himmler gets caught up in a debate within his dueling club, you know, this fraternity.
There's an argument as to like, can we admit Jews, right?
And not religious Jewish people, right?
Not people who are of the Jewish faith, but people who have Jewish ancestry, but are Christian or at least like, you know, they're not, you know, practicing members of the faith.
And this is a serious debate at the time within this, the strata of people.
And the Catholic Church takes a stance that Jews who converted to Christianity ought to be treated like anyone else.
Obviously, it's fine to exclude practicing Jews, right?
They're not full citizens.
You can be shitty to them.
But all that should matter is what they're doing now, right?
Basically, the Catholic Church is saying there's not an ethnic difference between someone who has Jewish ancestry and a normal German, right?
We don't care about that.
And the church takes this stance because Catholicism is a minority faith in Germany, right?
So they do see a degree of threat to themselves.
It's like, well, if these people, like, we're not that much safer, right?
If the Protestants decide to start fucking with us.
So we should probably draw a line here.
Himmler is really uncomfortable with this minimal degree of liberalism from the church.
And he had been fairly strong as a Catholic, but he writes in his diary, I think I'm heading for conflict with my religion because he believes a Jew is a Jew no matter what.
It doesn't matter if they've converted.
It's about the blood, right?
That's how what Himmler thinks.
Now, it's worth noting that while he grows steadily more anti-Semitic as he ages, he still expresses as a young man some mixed thoughts on the matter.
And in part, he's a fan and he's super attracted to this Jewish cabaret singer he met, Inga Barko, in a bar.
It's awesome.
He writes really positively about her, right?
So he's, you know, he's again, this is a guy, none of these people are perfectly consistent, right?
And this is also a time period he is starting to express interest in women around his age at this point in time.
This is really when we see in his diary him writing about girls a lot.
And it's kind of, you get some incel vibes from this dude.
Yeah.
He pines that one woman, Luisa, who he had a crush on, was really nice, but not nice in the way that he wanted, right?
As in she's, she's nice to me, she's friendly, but she doesn't want to fuck me, right?
That is hilarious.
I'm a loser.
This is funny.
He writes home to his brother.
This is so gross.
If sweet young things knew how they worried us, they would no doubt try not to.
Oh, this girl knew how sad I was that she doesn't want to fuck me.
She'd surely want to fuck me, right?
That's the problem.
Sweet little things.
Maybe don't call them sweet little things.
You fucking weirdo.
Fucking creep.
Sweet little thing.
What's up, sweet thing?
I'm like, you somebody, uncle, man.
What's up, Cletus?
What's your sound like somebody named Cleophys Jenkins?
What's up, sweet thing?
All right, calm down, Heinrich Himmler.
Yeah.
Cool your jets, Turbo.
I was actually thinking, I didn't want to bring this up because I ain't want to sound like a douchebag myself, but I was just like, he hadn't talked about girls in his diary yet.
He doesn't.
He's a late boomer.
It's possible he's not.
It's not until he's in his late 20s that he actually, like, that he's a virgin until his late 20s.
Now, I'm not trying to like talk shit on that.
I don't get that.
No, it is what it is.
That's fine.
But that's likely what's going on here.
In another instance, he bonds with a girl named Maria.
And he does.
There's this kind of positive thing where he's like, I'm so overjoyed that I finally have a sister, right?
Which is a nice, a positive way to look at like a female friendship.
He's only got brothers.
Oh, get away from him.
Well, yeah, because he is, he actually just wants to fuck her, right?
He's not safe.
She's got a boyfriend.
Maria, Maria.
You remind him of a West Side story.
Yeah.
Growing up in Spanish Harlem.
You're so dumb.
She's got a boyfriend, and he writes of her boyfriend.
I believe he doesn't understand her.
His golden girl.
And he tries to like, he tries to flirt with her and like basically take her from him by offering her a ride on his motorcycle.
But she's like, I don't think so.
Hey, listen, listen, listen.
I want to get on your motorcycle, Heinrich Himmler.
Listen, it's okay to be sloppy seconds because first place always messes up.
There you go.
Yeah, that's how he's looking at this, right?
That like, I'm going to slide in here, but no, no, you're not.
Sweet thing.
Her boyfriend's not treating her right.
I'd do so much better, you know?
Yeah, so she called you when your boyfriend made.
Hey, no, girl, come on over.
You can stay over here.
I'll come get you on my motorcycle.
You could stay on my couch if he's tripping.
You come on over here.
Like, I don't even think she's calling him.
I think she's like nice, polite to him.
And he's like, she must really be in love with me if only this tyrant were to let her go.
You know?
She's just basic human decency.
Yeah.
Like, with dudes like this, you just can't be regular.
Yeah.
You just can't be regular with dudes like this.
Yeah.
And Heinrich's diaries, the other thing that he writes about a lot regarding women is like this like white knight shit, right?
Tons of stories about that.
And this is from Lowenberg's article.
Quote, he witnesses a conflict between a girl and her father over the girl's desire for private dance classes.
He describes the father as unyielding and stiff-necked, like a tyrant.
According to his own account, Himmler interposed himself and helped the young lady a great deal.
The poor little girl wept tears.
I truly pitied her, but she had no idea how pretty she was in her tears.
Okay.
Oh my God.
You're really pretty when you cry.
Like, maybe he pays for this girl's dance classes.
Maybe she smile more.
Yeah.
Lowenberg writes of Himmler's frequent rescue fantasies.
He writes fantasies about like, I could save this girl.
She's with this brute.
If you know, if I did this and this, then like she'd know that I'm really who she's meant for.
Yeah.
That's all that medieval stuff he was reading as a kid.
You know what I'm saying?
That's all that.
You're trying to live out that fantasy.
Yeah.
In one instance, he meets a waitress that he has a crush on and he writes paragraphs about his fear.
They're like, oh, waitresses always fall into disrepute.
You know, she's doomed to a life of, you know, sin and vice because that's the only thing that a waitress can be.
Oh, I can't.
If I only were rich, if I had money, I'd give her enough money to marry a nice man so she, quote, would not have to sink and be lost.
Well, he's a creep.
He's a creep.
Oh, yeah.
He's a creep.
If I could fly, I'd pick you up.
I'd take you into night.
That's the word for word, his diary entry.
So, uh, Himmler finishes his diploma in August of 1922.
Now, at this point, he has continued reading into German Volkish mysticism, and he's become acquainted with a man named Guido Carl Anton List, who yeah, Guido has never good news, shockingly not Italian.
Uh, he had died in 1919, so he's he's been died pretty recently.
But during his life, he had been the godfather of popular Volkish theory.
He was one of these guys who portrays himself as something between an archaeologist and a wizard.
And one of his major contributions, he creates this runic alphabet, which he said had been used by the ancient Aryans.
And he uncovers this system not by like real archaeology, but by ghost archaeology.
He channels dead spirits and they teach him about the past and he writes books about it.
Hold up, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold up.
So he learns this by channeling ghosts.
That's your boy.
That's his boy.
That's your boy Heinrich.
Okay, that's Heinrich's gonna love.
And not just Heinrich.
This guy is the grandfather of Volkish theory.
Like, this guy is doing the line of descent to what becomes Nazism.
This guy is like above Hitler in the line of descent to what becomes Nazism because his ideas feed directly into Hitler's.
Hitler is also influenced, not even just directly by List, but by the guys that List is influenced by or influences, right?
List is like, and he looks just like you'd imagine.
Sophie's going to show you a picture of this.
Please show me a sister of this.
Exactly as you exactly.
Shout out to Ancestors.
Of course.
Look at this.
Look at this.
Look at this wizard-looking dude.
Of course, he's talking to the ghost.
He's got like a Gandalf beard and a fucking, it's almost like a pork pie hat.
Like, I don't even know what you'd call that weird beret thing on his head, but like, yeah, like a fucking wizard-looking motherfucker.
Look at him.
Look at this man.
Oh, my God.
He's perfect.
He's perfect.
Yeah.
I love it.
He's perfect.
We're going to talk a lot more about Guido von List and a lot more about the birth of the Volkish movement and all of these weird occult figures who are going to have a huge influence on Heinrich Himmler, as well as continue Heinrich's life in part three.
Lucky you motherfuckers.
Anyway, prop.
Behind The Bastards Finale00:03:58
Plugs.
Plugs.
Hood politics with prop, man.
We're cooking over here too.
Trying to, you know, keep putting everybody on.
That's going on.
I released some poetry.
I got some music out.
We have a show on Fridays now called Tap In a little short 10-minute shooter.
And also the Terraform's back.
I'll say it again.
Terraform COVID.
Hopefully, by the time y'all hear this, the website will be up.
But like, the coffee's here.
Hell yeah.
So excited about it.
All right.
I'll bring some when I go up there for the thing that you have not talked about yet on recording.
Excellent.
Yes.
Well, we'll do that.
You at home, go to Google Donor Box Defense Fund PDX fundraiser to help the Portland Defense Fund, which helps bail out people who have no money.
Yeah, they're great.
Please, please help them out.
And help yourself out by listening to part three, you lucky dogs.
All right, that's it for the episodes.
This has been Behind the Bastards.
I've been Robert Evans.
Go to hell.
I love you.
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This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum-Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
There's an economic component to community thriving.
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Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
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.
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?
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.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
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