May 6, 2025 • 58 mins
You know his daughter as Jeffrey Epstein's right hand woman. Robert tells guest Adam Conover about Ghislaine Maxwell's dad, Robert Maxwell. He started his life on a Nazi murder quest and ended it by killing science as a field of endeavor and raiding millions from his company pension plan.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast
about the very worst people in all of history, and
ladies and gentle them's we've got a real motherfucker of
a motherfucker for you this week. And to talk about
one of the most interesting sons of bitches we're going
to talk about on this series, I have one of
(00:23):
the most interesting guests that we've had on this show,
Adam Conover. Adam, Welcome to the program. Don't you hardly
need introduction, but obviously you were the host of Adam
Ruins Everything, and you've done I mean, you've been in
a ton of stuff since you were in BoJack Horseman.
You serve on the board of the WGA, and you
have a podcast now right.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Yeah. I do a show called Factually on YouTube and
wherever you get your podcasts. And I also do video
monologues which don't really have a title, but it's sort
of the current evolution of what people know me for doing,
doing topical comedy about the world around, mostly about fascism.
I'm doing a lot of weekly.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Video a lot of that these days.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
About creeping fascism and what we can do about it.
And yeah, yeah, trying to try to be a little
green shoot in the ashes of the entertainment industry and
you know, doing stuff online now having a great time.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Yeah, it's it's a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
It's it's interesting to be You and I both came
out of because you came out of college humor, where
you did a lot of your early work. I came
out of Cracked. So we're kind of like cousins in
digital media terms. Definitely, both of them started out doing like, yeah,
pop culture commentary, and now it's it's just all fascism.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
It's just a facism.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Remember when there used to be websites, and yeah, on
the websites you could do comedy about various things history
or pop culture or just like you know, something about
dating college chicks, and people would check on that. You'd
get some money. And now you got to go on
(01:55):
Elon Musk's platform and talk about how a judge was arrested.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Yes, yes, Or you go on to Facebook and you
see a crudely AI generated image a soldier with no
arms and a face that just isn't quite right that says,
nobody will share this image like it's great. I love
what's happened to media? This is so much better than
my friends having healthcare.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
No one will share this image is the funniest trope
of viral Facebook boomer content.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
I love it, I love it. I love it so good.
So this is actually slightly relevant to the person we're
talking about today because our bastard this week is he's
the man who ruined science in a lot of ways,
and he's also one of the major figures who helped
make media what it is. He was Rupert Murdoch's nemesis
(02:47):
for years. And the primary reason you're going to know
this guy, and I think everyone listening is going to
know this guy, is he is the father of Gilan Maxwell.
We're talking this week about Robert Max.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Well, do you know anything about Robert Maxwell.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
I know nothing about Robert Maxwell.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
This guy is so fucking weird. So part one of
this is going to basically be like inglorious bastards because
the first twenty something years of his life he is
a character from a Quentin Tarantino movie, Like he is
a righteous avenger fighting Nazis, and then he turns into
like a business monster who destroys the industry of scientific
publishing for quick profit. It's such like a weird heel
(03:34):
turn story.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
I was wondering how he was going to destroy science,
and destroying scientific publishing is how you would view it.
And that has been done. I know this has been done,
and so I know I'm interested to hear about the
bastard who did it.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Well, at first, he's going to be pretty sympathetic, although
he's also going to commit a lot of war crimes,
so it's going to be a mix of things happening here.
But yeah, this is Gilan Maxwell's dad. She's obviously was
Jeffrey Epstein like right hand woman, was the only one
to get convicted for his crimes because of obvious reasons.
(04:08):
And yeah, we're gonna be talking about her dad because
he's just so much more fucking interesting than her. People
would always refer to when you would, like when I
would read about, you know, what they had done, that
she was an heiress, and I had assumed she came
from like older family money.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
She is not.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
The fortune just goes back to her dad like he is,
as he actually was a self made billionaire.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
And I say that because he.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
Grew up deeply impoverished on like the Ukrainian step in
an incredibly poor Jewish village. In like the nineteen twenties,
so like not one of these guys, not like an
Elon Musk story. There's no Emerald minds in his background, right,
this this guy comes from nothing and like all people
who would grow into because he is kind of a
con man. Robert Maxwell. That is not the name he
(04:52):
was born under, which you probably guessed when I said
he grew up in a steppe village in the Ukrainian steps, right,
not the most Ukrainian name ever. He was born Abraham
leeb Hawk on June tenth, nineteen twenty three, in a
village called Slatinsky Doli and most modern and I just
said he was born in Ukraine. That's where his hometown
(05:14):
is located today. But when Abraham was born, it was
part of Czechoslovakia, right, because all of those borders move
around quite a bit in the first half of the
twentieth century, He wouldn't have grown up really identifying as Czech,
partly because being Czech was like a thing that had
just really started, you know, in that period, like Czechoslovakia
was a new country after World War One. He would
(05:36):
have identified and most of the people around him as Ruthenians,
which is kind of this isolated eastern portion of what
is then Czechoslovakia where his family grows up. Now, again,
Abraham's family was Jewish and the village that they came from,
Slatinsky Doli, was noteworthy because it's like it was close
to where all the pagrams were happening, but it was
(05:56):
the place that usually was relatively safe. Its entire history
and its population. There's almost like sedimentary layers of different
pagrams that occur over the course of the couple of
centuries before this, where like you'll get a new wave
of people moving to the village because everyone else in
the area they came from got massacred by the Cossacks
(06:17):
or whatever. Right, Like, that's the story of the village
that he grows up in. So you know, this is
again not a guy who comes from money. One of
my sources for this episode is a biography on Maxwell
by Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, and here's how it
summarizes this village. It was a place where Jews were
allowed to sell their goods to their Christian neighbors. Some
(06:38):
even had licenses to offer alcohol that were permitted to
educate their children in the Judaic faith. And wear their
traditional dress and speak their own language, haunted by their
own cruel past. There was hardly a family in the
village that had not lost relatives to the Pagrams. They
lived frugal lives within the sanctity of their faith. That
says a lot right there. That Like a key part
of this is like some of the residents are even
(06:59):
allowed to say alcohol, you know.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Yeah, they're allowed to. These people are allowed to wear
shoes and speak to one another, and they can walk
down the streets.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
Yes, yes, we let these Jews sell to Christians. Can
you believe it? How progressive? Not exactly easy living?
Speaker 1 (07:17):
No, no, again, this guy comes from about as rough
a background as you get, and we're talking the life
he's born into. These are peasants in nineteen twenty three,
But their daily life if you had pulled someone from
the same area in the sixteen hundreds into this village
in the twenties, it would have mostly been familiar to them, right. Wow,
(07:37):
Like that, that's kind of how behind the rest of
the world and how isolated that they are now within
kind of Czechoslovakia. Abraham and his family are double pariahs
because they're Jewish and they're Ruthenian and ruth again the
kind of like regional racism that existed within Eastern Europe
at this time. Ruthenians were seen as like backwards and
(07:57):
almost less human by a lot of the rest of
the country. A travel guide to the region published by
the Czech government in like nineteen twenty praise the fresh
air and the wildlife in the area, but warned visitors
of the quote rather unintelligent Ruthenians, whose expression is almost
blank stare who sit in the marketplace side by side,
gazing at the distance, seldom speaking a word or moving
(08:20):
a muscle.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
This is their own government travel.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
Yes, yes, this is I mean, visit Ruthenia where the
people aren't people.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Yeah, that makes sense. You know, if I was doing
a travel guide to La that's how I describe Santa Monica.
So you know, they said people just staring off into
the distance, you know.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Yeah, yeah, there's a product of all of the weed
shops on Venice. But so Robert Maxwell rarely talked about
his early childhood. And again this guy grows into a
consummate liar, and so what he did say is seldom reliable.
But there are some things we can infer based on
family lore, just our knowledge of the time. His family
(09:02):
last name Hach was not their original last name. That's
not really like again, this is not like a Germanic area.
These people are in like what's modern Ukraine. The whole
reason they have that last name is one day, back
when the Austro Hungarian Empire is in charge of the village,
a government official comes to town to do a census
in this Jewish village, but he doesn't speak Hebrew or Yiddish,
(09:22):
and so he's asking everyone what's your last name? And
Maxwell's ancestor I think it's his grandfather at the time.
This official can't spell their original last name, so he
just writes down Hawk and calls it a day because
he speaks German. So he's like, yeah, fuck it, close enough,
that's what you're called now.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
In German, hawk means high right.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
Yeah, that sounds right. I don't I'm not good at German.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Why why would he just what is just a funny
name to choose a common name?
Speaker 1 (09:55):
I think he was probably making up a lot of
last names that day, just talking to all of these
people who speak like Yiddish. Primarily You're like, fuck it,
I'm just gonna start writing stuff like I don't give
a fuck like the Austro Hungarian Empire great at governance.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
So uh.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
In nineteen nineteen, after the war, Slatinsky Doli, that's the
village stops being part of the Austro Hungarian Empire and
becomes part of Czechoslovakia, and the family last name ceases
to exist again because yet another At this point, a
Czech government official who speaks Czech shows up in village
and does another census and he's like, OK, that's not
a proper Czech name, and so he gives them a
(10:30):
new last name, Ludvik.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
This just keeps happening.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
That's the prerogative empire, right town, new names.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
For new names for everybody.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
Yeah, you're Steve and you're a Bilbo. Oh man them out.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
I'm gonna be honest, if I had that job, that
would be one of the perks.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
Now I don't like I don't really like Mike.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
You know what, I'm gonna go to this, We have
a lord of the rings and give you an orc's name.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Just make it fun.
Speaker 4 (11:03):
And in modern times, that person's relative now misspells people's
names at coffee shops.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Yeah, the modern equivalent of these government officials is a
Starbucks barista.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
That's great. The Starbucks barista should be able to go
into a town and give everybody the names they think
you should have. Yeah, yeah, what if they were in
charge of the names.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Yeah, we need to deputize them as judges. Give Starbucks
baristus the force of law. So Abraham's father, Mehl, was
known as Mehl the Tall because he's like the only
tall man in town. These people are not well fed,
but for whatever reason, Mehl comes out. He's like a
brick shit, he's like six foot five and yeah, so
for like that's tall today these people are all starving
(11:45):
to death.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
He's a giant.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
And famously so his job, he's like a small time trader.
So his job, he walks from town to town with
like goods like pelts or whatever, deer skins, and like
trades or sells them. And that's kind of how his
family gets by. And the thing everyone knew about him
was that normally people who have this job travel in
groups in like caravans, because there's brigands. This is a
(12:07):
period of time where there's brigands. But he's like twice
everyone else's size, So he just walks alone with a stick.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
I love a brigand they're much better than bandits, you know. Yeah,
bandits are like level one. Brigands are level three. You
gotta be a little stronger. They've got studded leather armor.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Exactly, exactly, yes, exactly. I'm glad we both remember our
third edition D and D source books. So Abraham's mother, Hannah,
or she's also called Chunka, which I think is just
Hannah's just sort of like the gramatization of her Hebrew name,
I'm guessing, is what's going on there. As best as
(12:44):
I can tell. The unusual thing that you hear about
her is that she was learned and intelligent, and people
did not describe women in villages like this that way
very often. Right, given the nature of the time, we got.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
A family with a tall guy and a learning woman.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Right, that's his parents.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
These people must have been ruling the town.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
Not really, they were like fairly prominent citizens in this
town where no one has any money. Yeah, And her
kind of defining trait that people would remember later is
that she would like scavenge newspapers from everyone else in
town because she just was so interested in reading. She's
going to be when they're when for the very first
time there's a Democratic Socialist party that starts up, and
(13:28):
someone comes to this town that had been ruled by
an emperor, you know in her childhood, and it's like, hey,
there's politics now, and here's there's this party. She's like, yes,
democratic socialist is exactly what I am. Right, she kind
of sounds rad okay.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
So she's like a college educated leftist who's like reading
Fucou and annoying everybody at the at the DSA meeting.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Yeah, yeah, she she's that, except for obviously there's no college.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
She's just able to read. Yeah, she's the equivalent in
the same way that it sits. And a half foot
tall man is an eight foot tall man. Someone who
has read page a four of the newspaper is like
has high falutint knowledge.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
There's one description of her I found that described her
as an exception in the village because she read books.
She was almost an intellectual.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
Ah, she sees spot run. This woman is so full
of herself. She's basically got a bachelor's right now.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Maxwell would later say regularly that his mother was a
committed Zionist. This is not impossible given the time. It's
also he becomes that later in life, and we don't
really we have no direct quotations of anything that she said.
And this is the thing he starts saying in the eighties,
So who knows, but it would not have been like
wildly out of like step with what a lot of
(14:47):
folks in that situation believed at the time, given the
realities of life in Eastern Europe for poor Jewish families.
Thanks to his mother, Maxwell grew up aware of the
injustices that suffused his early life. Thomas and Dylan that
she was quote a woman who was outspoken about the
injustices of their life just because there were Jews. The
images of her which would survive would come much later
(15:07):
from Maxwell. He described her as intelligent and well informed,
different from other local women. She was passionate about the
need to improve the masses for greater social justice. And
again this is stuff he says decades later. Some of
this is probably like myth making, especially the factor he's like,
none of the other local women cared about this, Well,
maybe they did. Maybe you just are kind of want
your mom to seem like she was the only one,
(15:29):
because it, you know, burnishes your own story. Yeah, we'll
never know, but Hannah and Mehel had the standard number
of kids for that period of time, which is a shitload.
Abraham was the third of nine, two of whom died
in infancy from something only described at the time as
a bad cold. You know, it's just what happened with kids.
One of Maxwell's earliest experiences would have been watching his
(15:51):
parents bury their kids, and that's a pretty normal life
experience for people back then. Starvation would have been a
regular thing, like not to death, but they would have
gone hungry regularly throughout the year. That was pretty normal
for people in this time, in this village. When he
was still a baby and still named Abraham, his mom
and dad had to register him with the Czech authorities,
(16:12):
who advised them it would be better for everybody. They're like,
you want to call him Abraham. Look, lady, I don't
know if you got the news, but we're Czechoslovakia now
and Abraham is not a Czech name. And let me
give you some advice. People here are pretty racist. Your
kid might have an easier time in the days ahead
if you give him an undisputably check name. And like,
(16:33):
this sounds pretty bad. It's also maybe what saves his life,
because very soon it's going to be really good to
be an Eastern European Jew who has a name that
does not sound Jewish, right, And his parents take this
guy's advice and they change his name from Abraham to
Jon Abraham Ludvik, which would be changed yet again later
(16:53):
in his life to Jan Ludwick Himan Binyamin Hawk. But yeah,
he goes through a lot of different names.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
This guy the.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Least Jewish name you could possibly the most Germanic.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Yeah, Yan, we'll call him Yon. That seems safe.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
Yan is the name you want to be giving at
check points and the not too distant future here. So
the first job that the future Robert Maxwell had would
have been helping his family with the annual harvest, which
he would have done from infancy on up. A highlight
of the year. This is described in every book about
it I've read, was the hay harvest. And it was
a highlight because their beds were just like cloth stuffed
(17:29):
with hay. And by the time you do the harvest,
the hay is like matted, and it's riddled with lice
and moldy. And so the day when you get to
replace the gross old hay with fresh new hay. Is like,
that's the best day of the year.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
The best day of the year.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
Yeah, that's the highlight of year year.
Speaker 4 (17:47):
Hey day, the amount of life. I'm like itchy thinking
about it.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
Oh yeah, I mean everyone's got a lot of lice.
It's basically a medieval village.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Most of the time. Though. Harvest time is nice because
you get a good meal because that's when the food
comes in right and you get But like the idea
that harvest is the best day of the year because
you get a slightly better bed to get to it.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
For an idea of where we've gone in a hundred years,
we've gone from my most exciting time of the year
is the hey harvest to yeah, once a year, I
get a new phone. Although none of these people again
have to know Twitter. So who's better off?
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Do you think like we do with phones? Any of
them were going like, you know what, I can wait
one more year before I have a refilled my bed.
I'll yeah, I'm going to really hold out for a
nextra year.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Nanna, I hear bed five has all this spyware on it.
I don't really want to get into that. By age five,
Yan had proven himself an advanced student, which in his
world meant that he was learning to read and to
memorize prayers. By ten, he was a better writer than
his father. Although Mehel the Strong was not renowned for
(18:57):
his brain, he was quick enough that the town rabbi
recalled decades later his analytical ability and uncanny aptitude for
learning and retaining what he was taught. He could become
a rabbi. And at that time and place, if you're
saying this kid could be a rabbi, that is the
same as like today being like you could be a physicist, right, yeah,
Like that is the highest intellectual achievement for people in
(19:18):
this strata, right, kids aren't really like it's not likely
that kids are just going to go to college to
learn things, you know, not in this far off the
beaten path. So Yan grows up large. Robert Maxwell is
a big man. He's going to be like six foot
something too.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
He loved by the way that his name at this
point has been changed seventy four or five times and
it has not gotten any closer to being Robert Maxwell.
This is where we know it's going to end.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
We have at least four more name changes before we
get there.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
By the way, the amount of ground this guy's name
covers nuts he's good at soccer because again he's twice
the size.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
Of everybody else.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
And I did look it up the local kids in
this town, when I say they, and obviously they called
it football.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
But that's just wrong.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
We know that, right, we're in North America. We use
our word.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
Yeah, we use our word. The ball that they had
was rags bound in Cowhid.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
It's just like, look, there's nothing better than Eastern European
ball sports, Okay, right, Yeah, I really remember there was
a point in my life and this is a little
bit of a digression, but I do love to think
about this. Yeah, when the first Borat movie came out,
the people of Kazakhstan were like, this movie is really
mean to us. It really portrays us in an unflattering light.
(20:37):
We're not that backwards. And then somebody was like, yeah,
but don't you guys have a sport where the ball
is a decapitated goat's head. Yeah, but that's awesome, And
they were like, yeah, you know, yeah, no, it's true,
it's awesome.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
Like it rules.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
You gotta embrace it, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Yeah, there's a Afghanistan has a sport like that called
burs kashi, and it's like the deadliest sport in the world.
People are like beheading each each other on horseback with
their fucking sticks as they go after this animal head.
I would love to watch it.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
Plate.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
That's great. Why are we fucking around watching arsenal when
we could be watching goat and ball sports? A rag
bundled with leather? Great? Yeah good?
Speaker 3 (21:16):
Yeah right.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
So the Thomas and Dylan biography, I get a couple
of different accounts of whether or not Mehl the Strong
was a good dad. One of the books I read
described him is like pretty gentle. This is not an
account that is repeated by Maxwell's most recent and probably
most rigorous biography, Fall by John Preston, which alleges that
Mehel beat his son in public on a regular basis,
(21:39):
quote often so hard that he broke the skin. On
one occasion, the young Maxwell threw up in the street,
grabbing him by the hair. His father rubbed his face
in his vomit while passers by looked on. So by
this account, at least, his dad is abusive. By again,
like nineteen twenties rural village in Czechoslovakia standards, so rough
upbringing in a lot of ways. He was born left handed,
(22:02):
his teachers forced him to write with his right hand,
and he was like everyone in town would yell at
him if they saw him using his left so he
just like stops being a lefty. Also very common at
the time. You can't have those left handers.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Yeah, I'm a lefty and our people suffered under the
yoke of forced rightyism for a long time.
Speaker 3 (22:21):
Yeah, exactly, We're finally free. Yeah, I actually did.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
My first grade teacher tried to stop me from being
left handed.
Speaker 3 (22:30):
Yeah yeah, yeah, in rural Oklahoma.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Holy shit, Yeah, it was. This was it was honestly,
as a as a white man in America. It was
the first time that I ever felt myself as part
of a formerly persecuted by right lefties, Like I was
literally told the child. You know, lefties really used to
be treated poorly, and we've come a long way. Yeah, yes,
thank you to my to my ancestors.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
To our brave left handed forefathers. Yeah, to Ned Flanders
with the left torreum making a place for us.
Speaker 4 (23:00):
I'm so sorry that you had to deal with tricky scissors,
so so brave guys.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Whenever you get like RFK being like, why are autism
rates skyrocketing? Have you looked at a graph of how
many more left handed people there are?
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Now?
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Do you think there's something environmental there? Or we're just
not hitting kids for using their hand?
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Literally, it's the best argument for why is they're more
gay people and everything. I mean, people admit this argument
over and over again. But yeah, like, once you aren't
slapping people around with being something, they're a little more
willing to say that's what they are on a survey, right,
exactly pretty obvious.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
So at eleven, the no longer left handed Yahan goes
to a yeshiva and because again he's he's most of
these kids are not getting sent away to Bratislava, to
the city to go to a yeshiva. He's smart enough that,
like the rabbi basically pulls some strengths to make sure
that he gets a chance at this. And so he's
he's kind of like in training to potentially be a rabbi,
(23:52):
and he's good, he's like really good academically, but he
hates it. He doesn't like reading rabbinical literature, and he
grows really bored with formal schooling, and he starts like
cutting rabbi school to sell jewelry on the street, like
to be like a small time like a merchant, because
this guy just has business brain, right, Like, you put
this man in any time and place and he is
(24:13):
going to find a hustle. That's just the kind of
man Yan is. Right, in March of nineteen thirty nine,
when he is fifteen, the Nazis invade Czechoslovakia. Now, the
fact that Yan's family is in Ruthenia winds up being
beneficial to them because when the Nazis take Czechoslovakia, Hungary
is allied with the Nazi state, and Hitler kind of
gives them this chunk of Czechoslovakia Ruthenia because Hungary had
(24:37):
been claiming it for it's this whole thing. It's one
of these border regions that everybody claims, right. So Hungary
winds up annexing where his family lives. And the Hungarian
government is not anti Nazi, right obviously, but it is
a safer place initially to be then the Reich, you know,
like not a high bar, right, but there's a little
bit of protection there for a short period of time,
(24:59):
and I emphasis on the short because it's not gonna last.
The fact that Yan's mom had given him a check
name pays off because he immediately and this is one
of the things that's interesting about this guy, he's very perceptive.
As soon as this happens, there are a lot of
people who are like kind of baring their heads in
the sand, trying to be like, I don't know how
bad it'll be. Yan immediately is like, all right, I'm
(25:19):
going to join the underground and start fighting the Nazis.
That's obviously what has to happen at this point, right,
So he drops out of the Yeshiva, He shaves his
side locks because he doesn't want to look as Jewish,
and he flees. He goes into the underground. He knows
he can't go back to the village where he'd been
born to stay with his family, and he later claimed
the Hungarians were taking over that part of Czechoslovakia, and
(25:42):
I said to my parents, I'm leaving because I want
to go and fight. They didn't want me to go,
but I went anyway.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
So far this story is just kind of rips. He
sounds awesome, Yes he does.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
He is awesome up to this point, right, and there's
a little bit of doubt about like did he actually
immediately try to join the resistance or did he fall
into it, because like, at a certain point you don't
have any other options. But at a he's he is
fighting the Nazis at a very early point, right. And
here's what writer Robert Philpott sums up about what Maxwell
would later claim of his own wartime experiences. The teenager
(26:15):
joined the anti Nazi resistance, but was captured, accused of spying,
and sentenced to death. Maxwell later claimed that he had
managed to escape relatively easily after overpowering a one armed
guard while being transported to a court appearance hiding under
a bridge.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
Don't have the guard be one armed?
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Yeah, yeah, there's your first mistake.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
Two armed guards.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Come on, guard only has one arm. You think I
can overpower him?
Speaker 3 (26:41):
I think I could probably take this guy.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Yeah, I just got to push him hiding under a bridge,
He recounted on one later retelling he was aided by
a Gypsy lady who freedom of his handcuffs.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
This is that's how he phrases it. Now again.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
John Preston, his biographer, lays out that large portion of
this story have to have been made up after the fact,
right quote. Intriguing though the story is, it does beg
a number of questions. However stretched the Hungarian prison service
may have been at the time, it seems odd that
they couldn't wrestle up a single two armed guard to
take him to court and early.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
All right, see see we're seeing the holes as you.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
See in the holes, there's a couple of them.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Yeah, little convenient to have the one armed.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
Guard right right.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
In earlier versions of the story, Maxwell didn't say anything
about hitting the guard with his manacles he claimed to
have used to stick, Nor did he say anything about
the mysterious lady who helped him. Why hadn't he thought
of her worth mentioning before? Had she simply slipped his mind?
Then there's the question of what was she doing under
the bridge in the first place. Did she live there
or just conveniently happened to be passing with the lock pick?
(27:46):
And what's weird about this is that we have a
lot of guys who lie to make themselves sound cooler.
Yet the core of this is true. He is sentenced
to death and escapes. That's cool. You don't have to
lie about like a lady under a bridge, you picking
your locks or fighting on what. I don't get why
he does this.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Yeah, that doesn't make you sound cool. No, this makes
the story sound more fake.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
But yeah, more fake and racist.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Yeah, so I don't know why he does this. Again,
he will repeatedly lie about his wartime experience, and what
we can confirm is one of the coolest stories I've
ever heard out of World War two. Like, it's nuts
that he like feels the need to lie about this.
It's like if Oscar Schindler added another thirty people to
the list of folks that he saved you didn't exist's like, what,
(28:31):
but why would you do that? Like speaking of I
don't know what I'm speaking of. Here's some fucking ads.
We're back so again, his real story is one of
the most intense World War II stories I've ever heard.
(28:52):
He's sentenced to die, he escapes the Hungarian authorities, he
goes into the underground. He spends months on the run,
being from Belgrade to Beirute to Marseillese. So he takes
like a boat to Marseille and he lands in Marseille
while Germany is invading France, and so while the Germans
are busting through the Maginot Line. He enlists in the
(29:14):
French Foreign Legion in an all chech unit because he's like,
I'm gonna I want to fight. I want to fight
right now. You guys are fighting the Nazis. I'll fucking
help now. Unfortunately, it's kind of a bad time to
join the Foreign Legion in France because the French Army
is not going to last very long in France, right.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
Yeah, I don't think they didn't. They didn't win those
particular battles, did they.
Speaker 3 (29:38):
It not super well, those engagements don't go for them. No.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Now, this Czech all check unit he joins is like
a lot of other Czech basically people who flee Czechoslovakia
when the Nazis takeover into France and are like, yeah,
I'll fucking fight to liberate my country. Right, So he
joins this unit, which has like ten thousand people in it.
But by the time he's like trained up and equipped,
the French are fully collapsing and he winds up routed
with large portions of the French and British forces and
(30:05):
he is one of the guys who gets evacuated as
part of the Dunkirk landings like Robert Maxwell is there
at Dunkirk, and by the time he's there, this ten
thousand man unit just has four thousand people left in it.
So like this is a chaotic and hideous time, Like
he experiences some shit right this unit. Once they get
over to the United Kingdom, the unit is reformed and
(30:27):
retrained and the idea is that they will at one
point take part in the liberation of their homeland. Now
Maxwell is still going by Yon at this point, and
even though all of these guys are like fighting the
Nazis together, they're still super racist against him because they're
very anti Semitic. They're not like Nazis, but they're super
anti Semitic.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
We wait, how do they know? This man is Jewish?
His name is Jana Home and he cut off his things.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
You know, I think he may have made the mistake,
I guess of admitting to his war comrades thinking that, like,
you're fighting the Nazis, you're probably not racist.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
No bad call, yes, common mistake.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
Common mistake. So he decides like, well, fuck these racist checks,
I'm going to join the British Army. And so he
actually like joins this like it's effectively.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
A trash unit. In the British Army for the foreign.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
Volunteers that nobody trusts. The thing about this is like
there's a bunch of German doctors who fled the Nazis
because they are like, I'm not a Nazi. I'm going
to go to whoever will fight them, please, like i
am a German who wants to fight these people. And
the British are like, oh no, we can't trust Germans.
But they also a lot of the Germans who were
in the UK at this point, they're literally putting in
(31:40):
a camp, like there is a concentration camp in Germany
for or in Britain for German citizens, because that they
don't trust. But doctors are valuable, so they put them
in this unit where they're like, we'll find something for
you to do, but we don't want to like trust you, right,
And so that's where they put Yan because as a Czech,
he's basically a German in their eyes.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
And as he's a man who's read a book, he's
basically a doctor.
Speaker 3 (32:03):
He's essentially a doctor.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Yes, And in true British fashion, they mostly have these
guys doing backbreaking manual labor.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
He's like busting stones.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
For a while basically, but this does shockingly this experience
like convinced ns of you know what, I want to
be British. That's the nationality for me. I love these people.
At least they're fighting the Nazis, right.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
I like how in these early days of nationalism you
can kind of just like pick and choose and like
wander around beside your nation in a way that they
don't really what you do today. You just join armies
and like fuck.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
It, I'll be British. I tried be in French. No, no, no,
the Brits are for me. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
So he learns English in six weeks, and this is
some kind of exaggeration, but he is. He does speaking
like eleven languages, so he really does have like a
faculty for this. And he he bases his accent off
of Winston Churchill because he talks for his whole life
with a British accent that he patterns off of Winston Churchill.
And he will claim I started imitating his accent before
(33:07):
I understood English, because I could just tell what he
was saying even when I didn't speak the language, because
of the way he said it.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
What have you?
Speaker 3 (33:15):
Like?
Speaker 2 (33:15):
Ran into a Czech guy who talked exactly like Donald Trump,
Like that's got to exist, Like, how did people not
it would be one of the most famous voices in
the country.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
Yeah, I used to know.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
I knew an Afghan guy who had been an interpreter,
you know, for the US military in Afghanistan, who had
grown up in a refugee camp in Pakistan and taught
himself English by repeatedly rewatching Rambo with subtitles, and he
sounded so cool.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
He was like the coolest talking motherfucker I've ever heard.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Maxwell proved himself an excellent mimic, and most casual observers
would only have noticed his foreign origins by his use
of idiosyncratic and frankly wrong mix ups of colloquial English
phrases like you can't change toads in midstream.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
I actually kind of love.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
You can't change toads in midstream.
Speaker 3 (34:14):
Yeah, you can't try.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
It, adam, I've never done it.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Once, right, Yeah, exactly. Nobody has to go with his
new accent. Jan picked a name for it, and this
proves that, like he's pretty good at languages, but he
not hasn't immediately picked up everything because the the proper
British name that he picks for himself to blend in
is Ivan du Marier.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
Name name number four?
Speaker 3 (34:41):
Yeah, yeah, and just like what's a British name? Ivan?
That's it?
Speaker 4 (34:46):
How did he come up with this shit?
Speaker 1 (34:48):
Well, he came up with the last name because his
favorite brand of cigarettes were Du Mariar's.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
But this is also Douglas Adam's joke about Ford Prefects,
right right, yes, naming yourself after a brand.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
He literally does that. People love these cigarettes, so they'll
like me. Unfortunately, this was like the even worse than
being German, because if there's one thing that British hated
more than the Germans at any point in time, it's
the French, even.
Speaker 3 (35:13):
During World War Two.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
So people just treat him worse because he now sounds
like he's got a French name.
Speaker 4 (35:22):
So he's gonna change his name again.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
Scene, right, He's.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
Going to change his name so many times, Sophie, we're
not even We're like sixty percent of the way through
the name changes.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
So so far, this entire story is just this guy
going from country to country and doing a terrible job
of baking a different ethnicity in every place.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
It's so funny. Ivan, really.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
His fortunes finally changed when he began an affair with
an elderly, wealthy widower and this lady's British and she
happens to know a brigadier general and she convinces him
to do her a favor. Ivan du Marier is transferred
to a real fighting unit, so he goes from this
like unit. But we're kind of keeping the guys. We
don't trust this lady pulls some strings and it says
(36:06):
a lot Maxwell repeatedly. His only goal is to get
to grips, to get into hand to hand combat with
the German army. That is what he wants, right. Everything
he's doing is to orchestrate. I want to shoot Nazis.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
Yes, nice.
Speaker 4 (36:18):
He's literally a teared t you're so right with the
Tarantino character, and.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
By god, he finally does it. So he gets in.
He is close to the tip of the spear. He
lands at Normandy a couple weeks after the initial landing
and engages almost immediately in a hard close quarters fighting.
At Normandy, he is promoted very quickly to lance corporal
and then made sergeant in charge of a sniper unit
where he got his first experience leading in combat, and
(36:43):
he does very well in this and in fact, after
this first big battle that he is like leading the
sniper unit in, he's recommended for an immediate battlefield promotion
to lieutenant. Now it's worth really leaning into what this
means because privates and sergeants are in CEOs and lieutenants
are officers. These are two different career tracks in the military.
You don't just jump from one to the other unless
(37:05):
everyone else is dying and you're really good at your job,
right Like, that's why Ivan gets this promotion to lieutenant
because like every all the officers are getting shot and
he's not.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
But this is like a very unusual level up.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
Yes, like he's very good as a soldier, right Like,
That's what this says is that he's like an excellent
fighter and an excellent combat leader. That said, his subordinates
didn't like him all the time. One of his adjutants
told a reporter in the sixties he had a smooth,
silky way about him, a big fellow, very dark, a
bit of a mystery, which just makes him sound cooler
at this point. So again, it's forty four, he's fighting
(37:43):
his way across France. He has no idea what's happened
to his family, right, But he's hearing the stories of
what are happening to Jews in Nazi occupied Eastern Europe, right,
so he has to know like it's probably not good.
And his whole motivation is, I want to fight my
way back to my home village to rescue my family, right,
I'm going to kill every Nazi in between me and
(38:04):
my mom and dad.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
And as a result, he.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
Is filled with the kind of rage that you would
expect from a man in this situation, so he does
stuff that you're not supposed to do, like he would
rob every killed and capture German soldier of all of
their money.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
You're not really again.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Supposed to do this, But also they're Nazis, so I
don't feel that bad about this. His comrades did kind
of think he was a dick, because they noted he
kept all of the cash for himself and handed out
the change to his men, So a little bit of
a dick move there. One of his first real distinguishing
(38:39):
moments was his successful infiltration of an occupied village by
dressing up as a Nazi officer. Again, you're not supposed
to dress in a enemy uniform. That's like against the
rules of war. But Maxwell was like, well, let me
get a lot closer, and so I was able to
figure out how to kill him a lot better fuck it,
and nobody punishes him for this.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
This is the most Tarantinos thing yet.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
Yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
And as a result, because this is so successful, he's
like reconnaissance. He's so good at this, the military is like, hey,
you might have a future in like spy.
Speaker 3 (39:10):
Shit, we got to give you a new name. So
they start calling him Leslie Smith. That thing could come
up with.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
They start calling him Leslie Smith, Leslie Smith. This is
the British Army.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
This is the British Army. He's issued in name.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Leslie is like a British name. From that time, you're Leslie.
Speaker 3 (39:36):
Now here's a rifle.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
Well yeah, I thought he's a chief. He's a chief.
His goal of being British.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
He doesn't sound British.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
You're like, no, no, no, no, you're British now.
Speaker 3 (39:50):
Leslie Leslie Smith.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
Within days after becoming Leslie, he distinguished himself in the
brutal fighting to cross the Orne River, and his courage
was celebrated in a Canadian radio broadcast which identified him
as Leslie de Marier, a name he had never gone by.
All this confusion and Maxwell's clear ability to navigate it
marked him out to his superiors. To someone is like, again,
this guy might make a good spook. He clearly has
(40:15):
no issue going under a bunch of different names.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
This guy has. This guy has hundreds of names, and
it's everyone's confused all the time. Yes, but he's navigating
it with a plum.
Speaker 3 (40:25):
Yeah, make him a spy and I think I think
it's time for another one. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
Yeah, they do give him another one at this point.
So he has issued a new name, Private Jones, and
he's sent to Paris. Has just been recaptured, and the
Allies are worried that there might be a Communist uprising
in Paris after beating the Nazis out of it, so
they send him there and he's like he sometimes he'll
dresses a British officer, sometimes he dresses a French. He's
(40:51):
wearing all these different uniforms and fake identities to try
to like figure out if there's an uprising planned, and
like there wasn't. Nothing really happens here, but he seems
to have had a lot of fun. Basically, he's getting
to like play dress up and get drunk in Paris
in the middle of like his war experiences, which is
a nice.
Speaker 4 (41:08):
Little break, and he finally has a cool name.
Speaker 3 (41:11):
And he's finally got a cool name, Private Jones.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
I love that.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
Near the end of nineteen forty four, he is commissioned
as an officer officially, and since he's now an officer
and a gentleman in a prestigious regiment, he decides to
pick what will be his final name for himself.
Speaker 3 (41:28):
What's about you got a Private Jones?
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Private?
Speaker 1 (41:31):
He gets rid of Private Jones because a friend of
his who's a Scottish officer, is like, you should call
yourself Robert Maxwell. And that's the name he picks is
Robert Maxwell. Wow.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
How many total names did he go through on the way?
Speaker 3 (41:44):
It's like ten, right, Like, get so many fucking names?
Speaker 2 (41:47):
You just went through four in the last ninety seconds.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Yeah, it's so many names that after he changes his
name to Robert Maxwell, his banker sends him an angry
letter being like, if you change your name one more
fucking we're dropping you like this, this had better be
your last name.
Speaker 3 (42:04):
I think that's valid, oh man, but we are this.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
He has finally landed on his ultimate name, so you
know that's that's good for him?
Speaker 2 (42:13):
Is this is Is this his Wikipedia name? Because that's
your most important name that you have.
Speaker 3 (42:17):
Yes, this is his Wikipedia name?
Speaker 2 (42:19):
Kay?
Speaker 3 (42:20):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (42:21):
Uh speaking of Wikipedia, I'm not really speaking of Wikipedia.
Speaker 3 (42:26):
Go buy something, here's ads. We're back.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
So while Bobby Max is in which is what I'm
gonna call him, is in Paris, he meets this French lady,
Elizabeth Minard, and she goes by Betty. I think because
she's gonna wind up living in the UK and that
just works better for everybody.
Speaker 4 (42:49):
I was gonna say, I thought it was because you
were going to say that she heard he likes people
with different name changes.
Speaker 3 (42:54):
He likes people to change their names. Really into it.
She's like, She's like, yeah, I like what you like.
Speaker 4 (42:59):
I'm Betty Hi.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
She describes herself as almost passing out when she sees
how hot he is. That is something everyone of He
He is described a little later than this by like
the Check Secret Service as looking like a handsomer Clark Gable,
Like that's that's how good looking this man is. Oh yeah, No,
Betty is like I almost passed out when I saw
(43:23):
him for the first time he was so fucking hot.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
I'm sorry. This is just like he's like a character
from like a self insert character from a novel where
it's just he's the he's so tall and handsome, and
everyone loves him when they see him, and they're con
giving him promotions and new names. You know. It's like
I just read the Book of the New Sun last year.
(43:47):
It's like that character like just describing how awesome he is.
Speaker 3 (43:51):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 4 (43:53):
I just looked him up and I have questions.
Speaker 1 (43:55):
He does not grow into like him as a mature
adult is not a particularly handsome man. But this is
what Betty says, like she writes a book and she
describes him as this hot and again the check Secret
Service says he looks like Clark Gable And why would
they lie about it?
Speaker 3 (44:10):
Right, Like they don't have a vested interest in making
this guy sound hot.
Speaker 1 (44:14):
He gets just enough time off while waiting to continue
fighting the nazis that he's able to court Betty and
propose to her. And during this proposal process, he makes
the kind of bold and impossible promises that men make
to women in such times. In this case, the promise is,
I'm going to win a Military Cross, right, basically that's
the British Medal of Honor, and he's like, I'm going
to win one of these for you, Betty, right, and
(44:36):
then when I get out of the army, I'm going
to get rich and I'm going to become the Prime
Minister and we're going to be happy forever. And he
does not fulfill all of these promises, but he does
fulfill the first like half of them. So like immediately
after promising Betty he's going to go win a military
Cross for her, Like, he just goes and does that
within weeks, actually within days of them getting married. In
(44:59):
nineteen forty five, he wins the Military Cross for heroism
in the face of the enemy. And the actual story
is fucking nuts. So on January twenty ninth, nineteen forty five,
his battalion captures a town called Parlow, but they get
counterattacked by Germans and rubber boats who had crossed this
river in the middle of the night, and the Germans
assault the houses that Maxwell and his unit are billeted in,
(45:20):
and so just in the middle of the night, suddenly
there's Germans throwing grenades into the rooms that they're in
and just emptying their machine guns into these houses at
random at close quarters. It is like the most chaotic
and disorienting combat situation that it's possible to be in. Right,
Like you talk to anyone who has been in heavy combat,
being surprised in a night attack like in urban fighting
(45:40):
is like, it's just the worst situation you can be in.
So that the Nazis occupy a bunch of these buildings
in this town, and Maxwell's commanding officer, Major DJ Watson,
orders a counter attack, and Watson and his men, as
soon as they try to counterattack to retake these buildings
get shot the fuck up and they have to pull
back and withdraw. And I'm going to quote from John
(46:03):
Preston's book Fall Here describing what happens next. Withdrawing his men,
Watson witnessed a remarkable sight. As he wrote in his
official account, mister Maxwell, also a platoon commander, sallied out
of the darkness. Maxwell had repeatedly asked to be allowed
to lead another attempt on the houses. At first, Watson
had refused his entreaties, but when it became clear that
the men inside were sure to be killed unless there
(46:25):
was another rescue attempt, he changed his mind. The officer.
Maxwell then led two of his sections across bullets, swept
ground with great dash and determination, and succeeded in contacting
the platoon who had been holding out in some buildings.
Showing no regard for his own safety, he led his
sections in the difficult job of clearing the enemy out
of the buildings, inflicting many casualties on them and causing
the remainder to withdraw.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
And the fact that Maxwell lives through this is like
a fucking mus So. When they get to this surrounded
British platoon, he thinks that they're Germans, that like the
Brits in this building are Germans, because again it's super chaotic,
and so he shouts upstairs in German like come down
and surrender, and the British soldiers upstairs hear a German
shouting and start shooting. They go yes, you fucker, and
(47:08):
open fire and they miss him by inches. Cannot exaggerate
how dangerous this is. But what is funny is that
Maxwell feels the need to exaggerate this. And again, you
don't need to lie about this story. There's documentation from
your CEO of what you did. You win a medal
for it, but he would later lie and claim that
his commanding officer had ordered him not to attack and
(47:30):
threatened to court martial him, which is just like not true.
Like his CEO nominates him for the award. Did He's
not saying like, I'm gonna punish you for doing this,
but Maxwell just decides later. Now the story doesn't pop
without the court martial line. I gotta throw that in there.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
Yeah, I didn't even though nobody wanted me to do it. Yeah,
they wanted me to do it so little that they
gave me an award for doing it right.
Speaker 1 (47:55):
And again, you heroically rescued an entire platoon by like
fighting Nazis and close quarters hand to hand combat. You
don't need to pretend like, yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
Yeah, just take that win man, take.
Speaker 3 (48:09):
The w Yeah.
Speaker 1 (48:10):
So I'd said earlier he and Betty were already married.
Sorry that was incorrect. They were engaged at this point
when he wins this award. So he comes back, He
gets a week or two of leave, and they get
married in March of nineteen forty five, and he writes
her a letter laying out his expectations for the relationship.
Don't nag don't criticize unduly, give honest appreciation, pay little attentions,
be courteous. Have the utmost confidence in yourself and in
(48:33):
your partner. You know he's a fortyes guy, sure, not
super weird.
Speaker 4 (48:41):
Don't nag.
Speaker 3 (48:43):
Don't nag Number one.
Speaker 2 (48:45):
The end is nice. Have the utmost confidence. That's good.
Speaker 3 (48:48):
Yeah, that part's nice. Yeah. Have confidence in yourself, confident.
Don't nag me, but don't fucking nag me.
Speaker 2 (48:53):
Don't use any of my fifteen old names.
Speaker 3 (48:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (48:59):
So the month and this again. Within days of marrying Betty,
he gets the knowledge that his mom and sister were
executed by the Nazis as hostages.
Speaker 3 (49:10):
Right Jesus.
Speaker 1 (49:11):
And he finds out later they die at Auschwitz, right like,
that's what happens to most of his family. Most of
his family is incinerated at Auschwitz, like nearly his entire
immediate and extended family. But he knows about his mom
and sister at this point in the spring of nineteen
forty five, and again, his animating goal as a soldier
this whole war had been to fight his way back
to his hometown and save his family, and the sudden
(49:32):
knowledge that he had failed irrevocably in this goal, obviously,
through no fault of his own, broke something inside of him.
In her own memoir, his wife Betty later wrote, he
was convinced that had he stayed home, he could have
saved the life of his parents and younger siblings. Nothing
he achieved in life wouldever compensate for what he had
not been able to accomplish the rescue of his family,
(49:52):
which is like the tragic He's going to turn into
a real piece of shit, obviously, but like, yeah, to
have that hanging over you, and again you literally couldn't
have done more to try to save.
Speaker 2 (50:02):
Them, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (50:05):
So, in addition to his mom and sister, his father, grandfather,
and all but two of his remaining seven siblings are
massacred at Auschwitz. Maxwell had always been aggressive towards the enemy, right,
This is a guy who does not fear being shot.
But in the wake of this he steps things up
again to like a Tarantino level and to a war
(50:26):
crimes level. A week after his wedding, he's back in
action during an attack on two German villages, and in
this attack, Lieutenant Maxwell alone, acting alone, kills fifteen ss
men and takes fourteen prisoners. In other words, he single
handedly kills or captures an entire platoon of the German
Army's best Wow, it's fucking nuts.
Speaker 2 (50:48):
Yeah, how do you do that?
Speaker 1 (50:51):
I believe it's this one of these situations where he
gets them at a bad angle and.
Speaker 3 (50:55):
He's got a machine gun.
Speaker 1 (50:56):
Okay, yeah, Now there are some allegations that maybe they
were sodering and he massacres them. That's unclear, but he
does do that later in this instance. I think it's
kind of unclear what actually happened. But he increasingly starts
killing prisoners, right like, in addition to killing guys in
the heat of combat. And he actually writes about this
(51:17):
in a letter to his wife, as you can well imagine,
I am not taking any prisoners, and whatever home my
men occupy before I leave it, I order it destroyed.
And those are both war crimes. You're not supposed to
do either of those things. And in the days and
weeks that follow that letter, Maxwell.
Speaker 3 (51:34):
Is as good as his word.
Speaker 1 (51:36):
This quote from an article in The Independent describes an
incident that occurred two weeks after his wedding. His platoon
was involved in mopping up resistance from the German defenders.
On a second of April, Maxwell ordered his men to
fire mortars at a German village. He wrote to Betty.
A few minutes later, I saw them running out of
the houses and we started firing at each other. I
got two of them, and I ordered the mortars to
shell the village for a few minutes. It proved a
(51:57):
very effective tactic that led to the surrender the remaining
Germans and inspired Maxwell to try it once more as
he moved towards a nearby town. So I sent one
of the Germans to fetch the mayor of the town.
He told his wife. In half an hour's time, he
turned up and I told him he had to go
tell the Germans to surrender and hang the white flag,
otherwise the town will be destroyed. One hour later he
came back saying that the soldiers will surrender and the
(52:18):
white flag was put up. So we marched off. But
as soon as we marched off, a German tank open
fire on us. Luckily he missed, so I shot the
mayor and withdrew and like because this tank fires at him,
he blows the mayor's brains out, and that is again
a war crime. This is an unarmed civilian who was
not in any position to be giving.
Speaker 3 (52:36):
Orders to that tank.
Speaker 2 (52:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (52:38):
One of Maxwell's comrades would later claim that he executed
multiple German civilians. That he doesn't just shoot the mayor,
he starts shooting several civilians when this tank fires at them,
and Maxwell himself would both brag and express regret at
committing several war crimes later in his life. In one
interview with journalist Mark Maloy, he discussed an assault on
a fortified farmhouse. I got up close to the farm
(53:00):
door and shouted in German, come out with your hands up.
You're completely surrounded. They came out, and I shot them
all with my submachine gun. I thought my boys would
be pleased, but all they said was that's not fair, sir.
Those lads had surrendered. Maxwell expressed incomprehension to Maloy over
the reaction of his comrades. Can you understand such an attitude?
And wow, like, yeah, war crimes are bad. I understand though,
(53:24):
the discrepancy of like these guys who they don't like
the Nazis. They're fighting them, but they didn't suffer from
them right outside of that fighting, and so they're like
they surrendered there's rules. Maxwell's like, they're Nazis, there's no rules.
Why wouldn't I kill every one of them?
Speaker 2 (53:39):
I mean, his whole family has been murdered, right, you
can understand the psychology, they'll get it, yes, yeah, how many?
Can I just ask? How many languages does this man speak?
By the way, he grew up speaking Hebrew Yiddish.
Speaker 3 (53:50):
Yeah, he grew up speaking Hebrew Yiddish, and I assume
he would have learned Czech. He also grows up.
Speaker 1 (53:55):
He speaks German by this point, and he probably grew
up speaking it, and he speaks English, right, I believe
he also speaks French at this point.
Speaker 3 (54:02):
Incredible, quite a polyglot.
Speaker 1 (54:04):
Yeah, And there's there's a couple of different So in
that one with Malloy, he's obviously like can you imagine
being angry at killing Nazis? But there's another moment. His
sons will talk about where they're watching, like a World
War two movie, and he comes in and he like sees,
you know, these young German soldiers on the screen, and
he's like, oh, you know when I was, when I
was a young man, I killed boys as old as
(54:25):
you my sons are today, And like I feel haunted
by it. I wish I hadn't killed so many of
them right when I didn't have to. Wow, So I
don't see it as that is really inconsistent, right that, Like,
he feels differently about all these massacres as he gets older.
That said, he commits a lot of war crimes, but
he's not punished for them, right, No, one's really inclined
(54:45):
to punish a kid whose family is wiped out in
the Holocaust for again, mostly massacring the SS, although he
does kill some civilians too, which isn't good. But yeah,
very you get it, right, Like.
Speaker 2 (55:00):
Yeah, well, he's not coming off like a you know, bloodthirsty,
you know guy who joined the army because he just
wanted to murder people. He's blinded by grief and rage
and right, and it's war and people go nuts, like, yes,
that's how he's coming off.
Speaker 1 (55:15):
Yeah, he's coming off is like he wants to save
his family, he finds out he can't, and he just
starts killing them in response. He sees his responsible and like, yeah, bro,
like I get it, you know, hard to blame him
for all of this, although again, definitely war crimes. So
the war ends and his military career continues to blossom.
In nineteen forty six, he is twenty three years old
(55:36):
and stationed, impartitioned and occupied Berlin, working as an intelligence officer,
and he proves to have an immediate faculty for the
skills required in that role. He's an exceptional liar. He
speaks basically every language, and he's not really scared of anything.
And it's here that he would make the connections that
would turn him from the Quentin Tarantino character. He's been
this episode to the father of one of the most
(55:57):
abusive industries in the world today. That's all coming in
part two. Adam, how we feeling.
Speaker 2 (56:02):
I'm feeling great so far? I love this guy. I
don't understand.
Speaker 3 (56:06):
It's hard not to like him.
Speaker 2 (56:07):
I don't understand why your show's uh called behind the Bastard.
So far, all he's done is uh go on a
Nazi killing spree, which we just discussed the ambiguous morals
of how you know. So, I'm a little confused about
the format of the show, but I guess I'll find
on the next part.
Speaker 1 (56:23):
Yeah, it is, it is. This is a real whiplash episode.
I don't know that we've ever had one for the
whole first episode. It's like this guy fucking owns you're
on like a Nazi death quest through Europe. Like that's
fucking sick.
Speaker 2 (56:40):
Yeah, I mean he again, he feels like the hero
of like a pulp novel.
Speaker 3 (56:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (56:46):
Yeah, you know, I have expected to be attacked by
a dinosaur and wrestle in a submission. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (56:51):
And I guess if you if you want to imagine it,
you can. You can see this Part two is like
right after Inglorious Bastards ends, you know, they're carving a
swastika in that guy's forehead and then like Brad Pitt
goes and gets a job in finance and destroys the world.
A good story I think we need.
Speaker 2 (57:08):
Honestly, I want more sequels that are that. I want
to see the people turn into bad people or disappoint
or not you know.
Speaker 1 (57:17):
Yeah, John McClain grows up in campaigns against the rights
of incarcerated people to have access to library race or
something like that after Diehard exactly.
Speaker 2 (57:27):
And I want to see the sequel to the rom
com where the people fall in love and then they
get married, and then I want the sequel to them
ten years later, not fucking each other and being resentful
and cheating on each other, like that's God. Yeah, show us,
show us real people breaking down.
Speaker 1 (57:42):
Right, The Star Wars reboot should have been Luke Skywalker
turning into like an anti Ewok rights activist. Just all right, Adam,
Where can people find you?
Speaker 2 (57:55):
People can find me? I do a podcast called Factually.
I also have a YouTube channel where that podcast is,
and I do monologues and things like that about the
horrible state of the world. And I have a stand
up special called Unmedicated. This out on Dropouts on the
TV platform drop Out.
Speaker 3 (58:10):
Oh hell yeah, I drop I'll love drop Out.
Speaker 1 (58:12):
Yeah, well, check out Adam everywhere you can find them.
Check out drop Out also to see Adam and just
separately because it's great, And check out Fighting Nazis, you know,
because there's a lot of that that needs doing.
Speaker 3 (58:27):
Anyway, the episode's done.
Speaker 4 (58:32):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the
Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday
and Friday, subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash
(58:53):
At Behind the Bastards
Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast
about the very worst people in all of history, and
ladies and gentle them's we've got a real motherfucker of
a motherfucker for you this week. And to talk about
one of the most interesting sons of bitches we're going
to talk about on this series, I have one of
(00:23):
the most interesting guests that we've had on this show,
Adam Conover. Adam, Welcome to the program. Don't you hardly
need introduction, but obviously you were the host of Adam
Ruins Everything, and you've done I mean, you've been in
a ton of stuff since you were in BoJack Horseman.
You serve on the board of the WGA, and you
have a podcast now right.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Yeah. I do a show called Factually on YouTube and
wherever you get your podcasts. And I also do video
monologues which don't really have a title, but it's sort
of the current evolution of what people know me for doing,
doing topical comedy about the world around, mostly about fascism.
I'm doing a lot of weekly.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Video a lot of that these days.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
About creeping fascism and what we can do about it.
And yeah, yeah, trying to try to be a little
green shoot in the ashes of the entertainment industry and
you know, doing stuff online now having a great time.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Yeah, it's it's a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
It's it's interesting to be You and I both came
out of because you came out of college humor, where
you did a lot of your early work. I came
out of Cracked. So we're kind of like cousins in
digital media terms. Definitely, both of them started out doing like, yeah,
pop culture commentary, and now it's it's just all fascism.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
It's just a facism.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Remember when there used to be websites, and yeah, on
the websites you could do comedy about various things history
or pop culture or just like you know, something about
dating college chicks, and people would check on that. You'd
get some money. And now you got to go on
(01:55):
Elon Musk's platform and talk about how a judge was arrested.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Yes, yes, Or you go on to Facebook and you
see a crudely AI generated image a soldier with no
arms and a face that just isn't quite right that says,
nobody will share this image like it's great. I love
what's happened to media? This is so much better than
my friends having healthcare.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
No one will share this image is the funniest trope
of viral Facebook boomer content.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
I love it, I love it. I love it so good.
So this is actually slightly relevant to the person we're
talking about today because our bastard this week is he's
the man who ruined science in a lot of ways,
and he's also one of the major figures who helped
make media what it is. He was Rupert Murdoch's nemesis
(02:47):
for years. And the primary reason you're going to know
this guy, and I think everyone listening is going to
know this guy, is he is the father of Gilan Maxwell.
We're talking this week about Robert Max.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Well, do you know anything about Robert Maxwell.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
I know nothing about Robert Maxwell.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
This guy is so fucking weird. So part one of
this is going to basically be like inglorious bastards because
the first twenty something years of his life he is
a character from a Quentin Tarantino movie, Like he is
a righteous avenger fighting Nazis, and then he turns into
like a business monster who destroys the industry of scientific
publishing for quick profit. It's such like a weird heel
(03:34):
turn story.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
I was wondering how he was going to destroy science,
and destroying scientific publishing is how you would view it.
And that has been done. I know this has been done,
and so I know I'm interested to hear about the
bastard who did it.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Well, at first, he's going to be pretty sympathetic, although
he's also going to commit a lot of war crimes,
so it's going to be a mix of things happening here.
But yeah, this is Gilan Maxwell's dad. She's obviously was
Jeffrey Epstein like right hand woman, was the only one
to get convicted for his crimes because of obvious reasons.
(04:08):
And yeah, we're gonna be talking about her dad because
he's just so much more fucking interesting than her. People
would always refer to when you would, like when I
would read about, you know, what they had done, that
she was an heiress, and I had assumed she came
from like older family money.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
She is not.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
The fortune just goes back to her dad like he is,
as he actually was a self made billionaire.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
And I say that because he.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
Grew up deeply impoverished on like the Ukrainian step in
an incredibly poor Jewish village. In like the nineteen twenties,
so like not one of these guys, not like an
Elon Musk story. There's no Emerald minds in his background, right,
this this guy comes from nothing and like all people
who would grow into because he is kind of a
con man. Robert Maxwell. That is not the name he
(04:52):
was born under, which you probably guessed when I said
he grew up in a steppe village in the Ukrainian steps, right,
not the most Ukrainian name ever. He was born Abraham
leeb Hawk on June tenth, nineteen twenty three, in a
village called Slatinsky Doli and most modern and I just
said he was born in Ukraine. That's where his hometown
(05:14):
is located today. But when Abraham was born, it was
part of Czechoslovakia, right, because all of those borders move
around quite a bit in the first half of the
twentieth century, He wouldn't have grown up really identifying as Czech,
partly because being Czech was like a thing that had
just really started, you know, in that period, like Czechoslovakia
was a new country after World War One. He would
(05:36):
have identified and most of the people around him as Ruthenians,
which is kind of this isolated eastern portion of what
is then Czechoslovakia where his family grows up. Now, again,
Abraham's family was Jewish and the village that they came from,
Slatinsky Doli, was noteworthy because it's like it was close
to where all the pagrams were happening, but it was
(05:56):
the place that usually was relatively safe. Its entire history
and its population. There's almost like sedimentary layers of different
pagrams that occur over the course of the couple of
centuries before this, where like you'll get a new wave
of people moving to the village because everyone else in
the area they came from got massacred by the Cossacks
(06:17):
or whatever. Right, Like, that's the story of the village
that he grows up in. So you know, this is
again not a guy who comes from money. One of
my sources for this episode is a biography on Maxwell
by Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, and here's how it
summarizes this village. It was a place where Jews were
allowed to sell their goods to their Christian neighbors. Some
(06:38):
even had licenses to offer alcohol that were permitted to
educate their children in the Judaic faith. And wear their
traditional dress and speak their own language, haunted by their
own cruel past. There was hardly a family in the
village that had not lost relatives to the Pagrams. They
lived frugal lives within the sanctity of their faith. That
says a lot right there. That Like a key part
of this is like some of the residents are even
(06:59):
allowed to say alcohol, you know.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Yeah, they're allowed to. These people are allowed to wear
shoes and speak to one another, and they can walk
down the streets.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
Yes, yes, we let these Jews sell to Christians. Can
you believe it? How progressive? Not exactly easy living?
Speaker 1 (07:17):
No, no, again, this guy comes from about as rough
a background as you get, and we're talking the life
he's born into. These are peasants in nineteen twenty three,
But their daily life if you had pulled someone from
the same area in the sixteen hundreds into this village
in the twenties, it would have mostly been familiar to them, right. Wow,
(07:37):
Like that, that's kind of how behind the rest of
the world and how isolated that they are now within
kind of Czechoslovakia. Abraham and his family are double pariahs
because they're Jewish and they're Ruthenian and ruth again the
kind of like regional racism that existed within Eastern Europe
at this time. Ruthenians were seen as like backwards and
(07:57):
almost less human by a lot of the rest of
the country. A travel guide to the region published by
the Czech government in like nineteen twenty praise the fresh
air and the wildlife in the area, but warned visitors
of the quote rather unintelligent Ruthenians, whose expression is almost
blank stare who sit in the marketplace side by side,
gazing at the distance, seldom speaking a word or moving
(08:20):
a muscle.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
This is their own government travel.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
Yes, yes, this is I mean, visit Ruthenia where the
people aren't people.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Yeah, that makes sense. You know, if I was doing
a travel guide to La that's how I describe Santa Monica.
So you know, they said people just staring off into
the distance, you know.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Yeah, yeah, there's a product of all of the weed
shops on Venice. But so Robert Maxwell rarely talked about
his early childhood. And again this guy grows into a
consummate liar, and so what he did say is seldom reliable.
But there are some things we can infer based on
family lore, just our knowledge of the time. His family
(09:02):
last name Hach was not their original last name. That's
not really like again, this is not like a Germanic area.
These people are in like what's modern Ukraine. The whole
reason they have that last name is one day, back
when the Austro Hungarian Empire is in charge of the village,
a government official comes to town to do a census
in this Jewish village, but he doesn't speak Hebrew or Yiddish,
(09:22):
and so he's asking everyone what's your last name? And
Maxwell's ancestor I think it's his grandfather at the time.
This official can't spell their original last name, so he
just writes down Hawk and calls it a day because
he speaks German. So he's like, yeah, fuck it, close enough,
that's what you're called now.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
In German, hawk means high right.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
Yeah, that sounds right. I don't I'm not good at German.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Why why would he just what is just a funny
name to choose a common name?
Speaker 1 (09:55):
I think he was probably making up a lot of
last names that day, just talking to all of these
people who speak like Yiddish. Primarily You're like, fuck it,
I'm just gonna start writing stuff like I don't give
a fuck like the Austro Hungarian Empire great at governance.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
So uh.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
In nineteen nineteen, after the war, Slatinsky Doli, that's the
village stops being part of the Austro Hungarian Empire and
becomes part of Czechoslovakia, and the family last name ceases
to exist again because yet another At this point, a
Czech government official who speaks Czech shows up in village
and does another census and he's like, OK, that's not
a proper Czech name, and so he gives them a
(10:30):
new last name, Ludvik.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
This just keeps happening.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
That's the prerogative empire, right town, new names.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
For new names for everybody.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
Yeah, you're Steve and you're a Bilbo. Oh man them out.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
I'm gonna be honest, if I had that job, that
would be one of the perks.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
Now I don't like I don't really like Mike.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
You know what, I'm gonna go to this, We have
a lord of the rings and give you an orc's name.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Just make it fun.
Speaker 4 (11:03):
And in modern times, that person's relative now misspells people's
names at coffee shops.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Yeah, the modern equivalent of these government officials is a
Starbucks barista.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
That's great. The Starbucks barista should be able to go
into a town and give everybody the names they think
you should have. Yeah, yeah, what if they were in
charge of the names.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Yeah, we need to deputize them as judges. Give Starbucks
baristus the force of law. So Abraham's father, Mehl, was
known as Mehl the Tall because he's like the only
tall man in town. These people are not well fed,
but for whatever reason, Mehl comes out. He's like a
brick shit, he's like six foot five and yeah, so
for like that's tall today these people are all starving
(11:45):
to death.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
He's a giant.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
And famously so his job, he's like a small time trader.
So his job, he walks from town to town with
like goods like pelts or whatever, deer skins, and like
trades or sells them. And that's kind of how his
family gets by. And the thing everyone knew about him
was that normally people who have this job travel in
groups in like caravans, because there's brigands. This is a
(12:07):
period of time where there's brigands. But he's like twice
everyone else's size, So he just walks alone with a stick.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
I love a brigand they're much better than bandits, you know. Yeah,
bandits are like level one. Brigands are level three. You
gotta be a little stronger. They've got studded leather armor.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Exactly, exactly, yes, exactly. I'm glad we both remember our
third edition D and D source books. So Abraham's mother, Hannah,
or she's also called Chunka, which I think is just
Hannah's just sort of like the gramatization of her Hebrew name,
I'm guessing, is what's going on there. As best as
(12:44):
I can tell. The unusual thing that you hear about
her is that she was learned and intelligent, and people
did not describe women in villages like this that way
very often. Right, given the nature of the time, we got.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
A family with a tall guy and a learning woman.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Right, that's his parents.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
These people must have been ruling the town.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
Not really, they were like fairly prominent citizens in this
town where no one has any money. Yeah, And her
kind of defining trait that people would remember later is
that she would like scavenge newspapers from everyone else in
town because she just was so interested in reading. She's
going to be when they're when for the very first
time there's a Democratic Socialist party that starts up, and
(13:28):
someone comes to this town that had been ruled by
an emperor, you know in her childhood, and it's like, hey,
there's politics now, and here's there's this party. She's like, yes,
democratic socialist is exactly what I am. Right, she kind
of sounds rad okay.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
So she's like a college educated leftist who's like reading
Fucou and annoying everybody at the at the DSA meeting.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Yeah, yeah, she she's that, except for obviously there's no college.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
She's just able to read. Yeah, she's the equivalent in
the same way that it sits. And a half foot
tall man is an eight foot tall man. Someone who
has read page a four of the newspaper is like
has high falutint knowledge.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
There's one description of her I found that described her
as an exception in the village because she read books.
She was almost an intellectual.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
Ah, she sees spot run. This woman is so full
of herself. She's basically got a bachelor's right now.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Maxwell would later say regularly that his mother was a
committed Zionist. This is not impossible given the time. It's
also he becomes that later in life, and we don't
really we have no direct quotations of anything that she said.
And this is the thing he starts saying in the eighties,
So who knows, but it would not have been like
wildly out of like step with what a lot of
(14:47):
folks in that situation believed at the time, given the
realities of life in Eastern Europe for poor Jewish families.
Thanks to his mother, Maxwell grew up aware of the
injustices that suffused his early life. Thomas and Dylan that
she was quote a woman who was outspoken about the
injustices of their life just because there were Jews. The
images of her which would survive would come much later
(15:07):
from Maxwell. He described her as intelligent and well informed,
different from other local women. She was passionate about the
need to improve the masses for greater social justice. And
again this is stuff he says decades later. Some of
this is probably like myth making, especially the factor he's like,
none of the other local women cared about this, Well,
maybe they did. Maybe you just are kind of want
your mom to seem like she was the only one,
(15:29):
because it, you know, burnishes your own story. Yeah, we'll
never know, but Hannah and Mehel had the standard number
of kids for that period of time, which is a shitload.
Abraham was the third of nine, two of whom died
in infancy from something only described at the time as
a bad cold. You know, it's just what happened with kids.
One of Maxwell's earliest experiences would have been watching his
(15:51):
parents bury their kids, and that's a pretty normal life
experience for people back then. Starvation would have been a
regular thing, like not to death, but they would have
gone hungry regularly throughout the year. That was pretty normal
for people in this time, in this village. When he
was still a baby and still named Abraham, his mom
and dad had to register him with the Czech authorities,
(16:12):
who advised them it would be better for everybody. They're like,
you want to call him Abraham. Look, lady, I don't
know if you got the news, but we're Czechoslovakia now
and Abraham is not a Czech name. And let me
give you some advice. People here are pretty racist. Your
kid might have an easier time in the days ahead
if you give him an undisputably check name. And like,
(16:33):
this sounds pretty bad. It's also maybe what saves his life,
because very soon it's going to be really good to
be an Eastern European Jew who has a name that
does not sound Jewish, right, And his parents take this
guy's advice and they change his name from Abraham to
Jon Abraham Ludvik, which would be changed yet again later
(16:53):
in his life to Jan Ludwick Himan Binyamin Hawk. But yeah,
he goes through a lot of different names.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
This guy the.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Least Jewish name you could possibly the most Germanic.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Yeah, Yan, we'll call him Yon. That seems safe.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
Yan is the name you want to be giving at
check points and the not too distant future here. So
the first job that the future Robert Maxwell had would
have been helping his family with the annual harvest, which
he would have done from infancy on up. A highlight
of the year. This is described in every book about
it I've read, was the hay harvest. And it was
a highlight because their beds were just like cloth stuffed
(17:29):
with hay. And by the time you do the harvest,
the hay is like matted, and it's riddled with lice
and moldy. And so the day when you get to
replace the gross old hay with fresh new hay. Is like,
that's the best day of the year.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
The best day of the year.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
Yeah, that's the highlight of year year.
Speaker 4 (17:47):
Hey day, the amount of life. I'm like itchy thinking
about it.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
Oh yeah, I mean everyone's got a lot of lice.
It's basically a medieval village.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Most of the time. Though. Harvest time is nice because
you get a good meal because that's when the food
comes in right and you get But like the idea
that harvest is the best day of the year because
you get a slightly better bed to get to it.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
For an idea of where we've gone in a hundred years,
we've gone from my most exciting time of the year
is the hey harvest to yeah, once a year, I
get a new phone. Although none of these people again
have to know Twitter. So who's better off?
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Do you think like we do with phones? Any of
them were going like, you know what, I can wait
one more year before I have a refilled my bed.
I'll yeah, I'm going to really hold out for a
nextra year.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Nanna, I hear bed five has all this spyware on it.
I don't really want to get into that. By age five,
Yan had proven himself an advanced student, which in his
world meant that he was learning to read and to
memorize prayers. By ten, he was a better writer than
his father. Although Mehel the Strong was not renowned for
(18:57):
his brain, he was quick enough that the town rabbi
recalled decades later his analytical ability and uncanny aptitude for
learning and retaining what he was taught. He could become
a rabbi. And at that time and place, if you're
saying this kid could be a rabbi, that is the
same as like today being like you could be a physicist, right, yeah,
Like that is the highest intellectual achievement for people in
(19:18):
this strata, right, kids aren't really like it's not likely
that kids are just going to go to college to
learn things, you know, not in this far off the
beaten path. So Yan grows up large. Robert Maxwell is
a big man. He's going to be like six foot
something too.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
He loved by the way that his name at this
point has been changed seventy four or five times and
it has not gotten any closer to being Robert Maxwell.
This is where we know it's going to end.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
We have at least four more name changes before we
get there.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
By the way, the amount of ground this guy's name
covers nuts he's good at soccer because again he's twice
the size.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
Of everybody else.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
And I did look it up the local kids in
this town, when I say they, and obviously they called
it football.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
But that's just wrong.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
We know that, right, we're in North America. We use
our word.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
Yeah, we use our word. The ball that they had
was rags bound in Cowhid.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
It's just like, look, there's nothing better than Eastern European
ball sports, Okay, right, Yeah, I really remember there was
a point in my life and this is a little
bit of a digression, but I do love to think
about this. Yeah, when the first Borat movie came out,
the people of Kazakhstan were like, this movie is really
mean to us. It really portrays us in an unflattering light.
(20:37):
We're not that backwards. And then somebody was like, yeah,
but don't you guys have a sport where the ball
is a decapitated goat's head. Yeah, but that's awesome, And
they were like, yeah, you know, yeah, no, it's true,
it's awesome.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
Like it rules.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
You gotta embrace it, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Yeah, there's a Afghanistan has a sport like that called
burs kashi, and it's like the deadliest sport in the world.
People are like beheading each each other on horseback with
their fucking sticks as they go after this animal head.
I would love to watch it.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
Plate.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
That's great. Why are we fucking around watching arsenal when
we could be watching goat and ball sports? A rag
bundled with leather? Great? Yeah good?
Speaker 3 (21:16):
Yeah right.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
So the Thomas and Dylan biography, I get a couple
of different accounts of whether or not Mehl the Strong
was a good dad. One of the books I read
described him is like pretty gentle. This is not an
account that is repeated by Maxwell's most recent and probably
most rigorous biography, Fall by John Preston, which alleges that
Mehel beat his son in public on a regular basis,
(21:39):
quote often so hard that he broke the skin. On
one occasion, the young Maxwell threw up in the street,
grabbing him by the hair. His father rubbed his face
in his vomit while passers by looked on. So by
this account, at least, his dad is abusive. By again,
like nineteen twenties rural village in Czechoslovakia standards, so rough
upbringing in a lot of ways. He was born left handed,
(22:02):
his teachers forced him to write with his right hand,
and he was like everyone in town would yell at
him if they saw him using his left so he
just like stops being a lefty. Also very common at
the time. You can't have those left handers.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Yeah, I'm a lefty and our people suffered under the
yoke of forced rightyism for a long time.
Speaker 3 (22:21):
Yeah, exactly, We're finally free. Yeah, I actually did.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
My first grade teacher tried to stop me from being
left handed.
Speaker 3 (22:30):
Yeah yeah, yeah, in rural Oklahoma.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Holy shit, Yeah, it was. This was it was honestly,
as a as a white man in America. It was
the first time that I ever felt myself as part
of a formerly persecuted by right lefties, Like I was
literally told the child. You know, lefties really used to
be treated poorly, and we've come a long way. Yeah, yes,
thank you to my to my ancestors.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
To our brave left handed forefathers. Yeah, to Ned Flanders
with the left torreum making a place for us.
Speaker 4 (23:00):
I'm so sorry that you had to deal with tricky scissors,
so so brave guys.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Whenever you get like RFK being like, why are autism
rates skyrocketing? Have you looked at a graph of how
many more left handed people there are?
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Now?
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Do you think there's something environmental there? Or we're just
not hitting kids for using their hand?
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Literally, it's the best argument for why is they're more
gay people and everything. I mean, people admit this argument
over and over again. But yeah, like, once you aren't
slapping people around with being something, they're a little more
willing to say that's what they are on a survey, right,
exactly pretty obvious.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
So at eleven, the no longer left handed Yahan goes
to a yeshiva and because again he's he's most of
these kids are not getting sent away to Bratislava, to
the city to go to a yeshiva. He's smart enough that,
like the rabbi basically pulls some strengths to make sure
that he gets a chance at this. And so he's
he's kind of like in training to potentially be a rabbi,
(23:52):
and he's good, he's like really good academically, but he
hates it. He doesn't like reading rabbinical literature, and he
grows really bored with formal schooling, and he starts like
cutting rabbi school to sell jewelry on the street, like
to be like a small time like a merchant, because
this guy just has business brain, right, Like, you put
this man in any time and place and he is
(24:13):
going to find a hustle. That's just the kind of
man Yan is. Right, in March of nineteen thirty nine,
when he is fifteen, the Nazis invade Czechoslovakia. Now, the
fact that Yan's family is in Ruthenia winds up being
beneficial to them because when the Nazis take Czechoslovakia, Hungary
is allied with the Nazi state, and Hitler kind of
gives them this chunk of Czechoslovakia Ruthenia because Hungary had
(24:37):
been claiming it for it's this whole thing. It's one
of these border regions that everybody claims, right. So Hungary
winds up annexing where his family lives. And the Hungarian
government is not anti Nazi, right obviously, but it is
a safer place initially to be then the Reich, you know,
like not a high bar, right, but there's a little
bit of protection there for a short period of time,
(24:59):
and I emphasis on the short because it's not gonna last.
The fact that Yan's mom had given him a check
name pays off because he immediately and this is one
of the things that's interesting about this guy, he's very perceptive.
As soon as this happens, there are a lot of
people who are like kind of baring their heads in
the sand, trying to be like, I don't know how
bad it'll be. Yan immediately is like, all right, I'm
(25:19):
going to join the underground and start fighting the Nazis.
That's obviously what has to happen at this point, right,
So he drops out of the Yeshiva, He shaves his
side locks because he doesn't want to look as Jewish,
and he flees. He goes into the underground. He knows
he can't go back to the village where he'd been
born to stay with his family, and he later claimed
the Hungarians were taking over that part of Czechoslovakia, and
(25:42):
I said to my parents, I'm leaving because I want
to go and fight. They didn't want me to go,
but I went anyway.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
So far this story is just kind of rips. He
sounds awesome, Yes he does.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
He is awesome up to this point, right, and there's
a little bit of doubt about like did he actually
immediately try to join the resistance or did he fall
into it, because like, at a certain point you don't
have any other options. But at a he's he is
fighting the Nazis at a very early point, right. And
here's what writer Robert Philpott sums up about what Maxwell
would later claim of his own wartime experiences. The teenager
(26:15):
joined the anti Nazi resistance, but was captured, accused of spying,
and sentenced to death. Maxwell later claimed that he had
managed to escape relatively easily after overpowering a one armed
guard while being transported to a court appearance hiding under
a bridge.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
Don't have the guard be one armed?
Speaker 1 (26:31):
Yeah, yeah, there's your first mistake.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
Two armed guards.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Come on, guard only has one arm. You think I
can overpower him?
Speaker 3 (26:41):
I think I could probably take this guy.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Yeah, I just got to push him hiding under a bridge,
He recounted on one later retelling he was aided by
a Gypsy lady who freedom of his handcuffs.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
This is that's how he phrases it. Now again.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
John Preston, his biographer, lays out that large portion of
this story have to have been made up after the fact,
right quote. Intriguing though the story is, it does beg
a number of questions. However stretched the Hungarian prison service
may have been at the time, it seems odd that
they couldn't wrestle up a single two armed guard to
take him to court and early.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
All right, see see we're seeing the holes as you.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
See in the holes, there's a couple of them.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Yeah, little convenient to have the one armed.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
Guard right right.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
In earlier versions of the story, Maxwell didn't say anything
about hitting the guard with his manacles he claimed to
have used to stick, Nor did he say anything about
the mysterious lady who helped him. Why hadn't he thought
of her worth mentioning before? Had she simply slipped his mind?
Then there's the question of what was she doing under
the bridge in the first place. Did she live there
or just conveniently happened to be passing with the lock pick?
(27:46):
And what's weird about this is that we have a
lot of guys who lie to make themselves sound cooler.
Yet the core of this is true. He is sentenced
to death and escapes. That's cool. You don't have to
lie about like a lady under a bridge, you picking
your locks or fighting on what. I don't get why
he does this.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Yeah, that doesn't make you sound cool. No, this makes
the story sound more fake.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
But yeah, more fake and racist.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Yeah, so I don't know why he does this. Again,
he will repeatedly lie about his wartime experience, and what
we can confirm is one of the coolest stories I've
ever heard out of World War two. Like, it's nuts
that he like feels the need to lie about this.
It's like if Oscar Schindler added another thirty people to
the list of folks that he saved you didn't exist's like, what,
(28:31):
but why would you do that? Like speaking of I
don't know what I'm speaking of. Here's some fucking ads.
We're back so again, his real story is one of
the most intense World War II stories I've ever heard.
(28:52):
He's sentenced to die, he escapes the Hungarian authorities, he
goes into the underground. He spends months on the run,
being from Belgrade to Beirute to Marseillese. So he takes
like a boat to Marseille and he lands in Marseille
while Germany is invading France, and so while the Germans
are busting through the Maginot Line. He enlists in the
(29:14):
French Foreign Legion in an all chech unit because he's like,
I'm gonna I want to fight. I want to fight
right now. You guys are fighting the Nazis. I'll fucking
help now. Unfortunately, it's kind of a bad time to
join the Foreign Legion in France because the French Army
is not going to last very long in France, right.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
Yeah, I don't think they didn't. They didn't win those
particular battles, did they.
Speaker 3 (29:38):
It not super well, those engagements don't go for them. No.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Now, this Czech all check unit he joins is like
a lot of other Czech basically people who flee Czechoslovakia
when the Nazis takeover into France and are like, yeah,
I'll fucking fight to liberate my country. Right, So he
joins this unit, which has like ten thousand people in it.
But by the time he's like trained up and equipped,
the French are fully collapsing and he winds up routed
with large portions of the French and British forces and
(30:05):
he is one of the guys who gets evacuated as
part of the Dunkirk landings like Robert Maxwell is there
at Dunkirk, and by the time he's there, this ten
thousand man unit just has four thousand people left in it.
So like this is a chaotic and hideous time, Like
he experiences some shit right this unit. Once they get
over to the United Kingdom, the unit is reformed and
(30:27):
retrained and the idea is that they will at one
point take part in the liberation of their homeland. Now
Maxwell is still going by Yon at this point, and
even though all of these guys are like fighting the
Nazis together, they're still super racist against him because they're
very anti Semitic. They're not like Nazis, but they're super
anti Semitic.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
We wait, how do they know? This man is Jewish?
His name is Jana Home and he cut off his things.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
You know, I think he may have made the mistake,
I guess of admitting to his war comrades thinking that, like,
you're fighting the Nazis, you're probably not racist.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
No bad call, yes, common mistake.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
Common mistake. So he decides like, well, fuck these racist checks,
I'm going to join the British Army. And so he
actually like joins this like it's effectively.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
A trash unit. In the British Army for the foreign.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
Volunteers that nobody trusts. The thing about this is like
there's a bunch of German doctors who fled the Nazis
because they are like, I'm not a Nazi. I'm going
to go to whoever will fight them, please, like i
am a German who wants to fight these people. And
the British are like, oh no, we can't trust Germans.
But they also a lot of the Germans who were
in the UK at this point, they're literally putting in
(31:40):
a camp, like there is a concentration camp in Germany
for or in Britain for German citizens, because that they
don't trust. But doctors are valuable, so they put them
in this unit where they're like, we'll find something for
you to do, but we don't want to like trust you, right,
And so that's where they put Yan because as a Czech,
he's basically a German in their eyes.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
And as he's a man who's read a book, he's
basically a doctor.
Speaker 3 (32:03):
He's essentially a doctor.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Yes, And in true British fashion, they mostly have these
guys doing backbreaking manual labor.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
He's like busting stones.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
For a while basically, but this does shockingly this experience
like convinced ns of you know what, I want to
be British. That's the nationality for me. I love these people.
At least they're fighting the Nazis, right.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
I like how in these early days of nationalism you
can kind of just like pick and choose and like
wander around beside your nation in a way that they
don't really what you do today. You just join armies
and like fuck.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
It, I'll be British. I tried be in French. No, no, no,
the Brits are for me. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
So he learns English in six weeks, and this is
some kind of exaggeration, but he is. He does speaking
like eleven languages, so he really does have like a
faculty for this. And he he bases his accent off
of Winston Churchill because he talks for his whole life
with a British accent that he patterns off of Winston Churchill.
And he will claim I started imitating his accent before
(33:07):
I understood English, because I could just tell what he
was saying even when I didn't speak the language, because
of the way he said it.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
What have you?
Speaker 3 (33:15):
Like?
Speaker 2 (33:15):
Ran into a Czech guy who talked exactly like Donald Trump,
Like that's got to exist, Like, how did people not
it would be one of the most famous voices in
the country.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
Yeah, I used to know.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
I knew an Afghan guy who had been an interpreter,
you know, for the US military in Afghanistan, who had
grown up in a refugee camp in Pakistan and taught
himself English by repeatedly rewatching Rambo with subtitles, and he
sounded so cool.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
He was like the coolest talking motherfucker I've ever heard.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Maxwell proved himself an excellent mimic, and most casual observers
would only have noticed his foreign origins by his use
of idiosyncratic and frankly wrong mix ups of colloquial English
phrases like you can't change toads in midstream.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
I actually kind of love.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
You can't change toads in midstream.
Speaker 3 (34:14):
Yeah, you can't try.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
It, adam, I've never done it.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Once, right, Yeah, exactly. Nobody has to go with his
new accent. Jan picked a name for it, and this
proves that, like he's pretty good at languages, but he
not hasn't immediately picked up everything because the the proper
British name that he picks for himself to blend in
is Ivan du Marier.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
Name name number four?
Speaker 3 (34:41):
Yeah, yeah, and just like what's a British name? Ivan?
That's it?
Speaker 4 (34:46):
How did he come up with this shit?
Speaker 1 (34:48):
Well, he came up with the last name because his
favorite brand of cigarettes were Du Mariar's.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
But this is also Douglas Adam's joke about Ford Prefects,
right right, yes, naming yourself after a brand.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
He literally does that. People love these cigarettes, so they'll
like me. Unfortunately, this was like the even worse than
being German, because if there's one thing that British hated
more than the Germans at any point in time, it's
the French, even.
Speaker 3 (35:13):
During World War Two.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
So people just treat him worse because he now sounds
like he's got a French name.
Speaker 4 (35:22):
So he's gonna change his name again.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
Scene, right, He's.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
Going to change his name so many times, Sophie, we're
not even We're like sixty percent of the way through
the name changes.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
So so far, this entire story is just this guy
going from country to country and doing a terrible job
of baking a different ethnicity in every place.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
It's so funny. Ivan, really.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
His fortunes finally changed when he began an affair with
an elderly, wealthy widower and this lady's British and she
happens to know a brigadier general and she convinces him
to do her a favor. Ivan du Marier is transferred
to a real fighting unit, so he goes from this
like unit. But we're kind of keeping the guys. We
don't trust this lady pulls some strings and it says
(36:06):
a lot Maxwell repeatedly. His only goal is to get
to grips, to get into hand to hand combat with
the German army. That is what he wants, right. Everything
he's doing is to orchestrate. I want to shoot Nazis.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
Yes, nice.
Speaker 4 (36:18):
He's literally a teared t you're so right with the
Tarantino character, and.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
By god, he finally does it. So he gets in.
He is close to the tip of the spear. He
lands at Normandy a couple weeks after the initial landing
and engages almost immediately in a hard close quarters fighting.
At Normandy, he is promoted very quickly to lance corporal
and then made sergeant in charge of a sniper unit
where he got his first experience leading in combat, and
(36:43):
he does very well in this and in fact, after
this first big battle that he is like leading the
sniper unit in, he's recommended for an immediate battlefield promotion
to lieutenant. Now it's worth really leaning into what this
means because privates and sergeants are in CEOs and lieutenants
are officers. These are two different career tracks in the military.
You don't just jump from one to the other unless
(37:05):
everyone else is dying and you're really good at your job,
right Like, that's why Ivan gets this promotion to lieutenant
because like every all the officers are getting shot and
he's not.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
But this is like a very unusual level up.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
Yes, like he's very good as a soldier, right Like,
That's what this says is that he's like an excellent
fighter and an excellent combat leader. That said, his subordinates
didn't like him all the time. One of his adjutants
told a reporter in the sixties he had a smooth,
silky way about him, a big fellow, very dark, a
bit of a mystery, which just makes him sound cooler
at this point. So again, it's forty four, he's fighting
(37:43):
his way across France. He has no idea what's happened
to his family, right, But he's hearing the stories of
what are happening to Jews in Nazi occupied Eastern Europe, right,
so he has to know like it's probably not good.
And his whole motivation is, I want to fight my
way back to my home village to rescue my family, right,
I'm going to kill every Nazi in between me and
(38:04):
my mom and dad.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
And as a result, he.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
Is filled with the kind of rage that you would
expect from a man in this situation, so he does
stuff that you're not supposed to do, like he would
rob every killed and capture German soldier of all of
their money.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
You're not really again.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Supposed to do this, But also they're Nazis, so I
don't feel that bad about this. His comrades did kind
of think he was a dick, because they noted he
kept all of the cash for himself and handed out
the change to his men, So a little bit of
a dick move there. One of his first real distinguishing
(38:39):
moments was his successful infiltration of an occupied village by
dressing up as a Nazi officer. Again, you're not supposed
to dress in a enemy uniform. That's like against the
rules of war. But Maxwell was like, well, let me
get a lot closer, and so I was able to
figure out how to kill him a lot better fuck it,
and nobody punishes him for this.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
This is the most Tarantinos thing yet.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
Yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
And as a result, because this is so successful, he's
like reconnaissance. He's so good at this, the military is like, hey,
you might have a future in like spy.
Speaker 3 (39:10):
Shit, we got to give you a new name. So
they start calling him Leslie Smith. That thing could come
up with.
Speaker 2 (39:22):
They start calling him Leslie Smith, Leslie Smith. This is
the British Army.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
This is the British Army. He's issued in name.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Leslie is like a British name. From that time, you're Leslie.
Speaker 3 (39:36):
Now here's a rifle.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
Well yeah, I thought he's a chief. He's a chief.
His goal of being British.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
He doesn't sound British.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
You're like, no, no, no, no, you're British now.
Speaker 3 (39:50):
Leslie Leslie Smith.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
Within days after becoming Leslie, he distinguished himself in the
brutal fighting to cross the Orne River, and his courage
was celebrated in a Canadian radio broadcast which identified him
as Leslie de Marier, a name he had never gone by.
All this confusion and Maxwell's clear ability to navigate it
marked him out to his superiors. To someone is like, again,
this guy might make a good spook. He clearly has
(40:15):
no issue going under a bunch of different names.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
This guy has. This guy has hundreds of names, and
it's everyone's confused all the time. Yes, but he's navigating
it with a plum.
Speaker 3 (40:25):
Yeah, make him a spy and I think I think
it's time for another one. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
Yeah, they do give him another one at this point.
So he has issued a new name, Private Jones, and
he's sent to Paris. Has just been recaptured, and the
Allies are worried that there might be a Communist uprising
in Paris after beating the Nazis out of it, so
they send him there and he's like he sometimes he'll
dresses a British officer, sometimes he dresses a French. He's
(40:51):
wearing all these different uniforms and fake identities to try
to like figure out if there's an uprising planned, and
like there wasn't. Nothing really happens here, but he seems
to have had a lot of fun. Basically, he's getting
to like play dress up and get drunk in Paris
in the middle of like his war experiences, which is
a nice.
Speaker 4 (41:08):
Little break, and he finally has a cool name.
Speaker 3 (41:11):
And he's finally got a cool name, Private Jones.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
I love that.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
Near the end of nineteen forty four, he is commissioned
as an officer officially, and since he's now an officer
and a gentleman in a prestigious regiment, he decides to
pick what will be his final name for himself.
Speaker 3 (41:28):
What's about you got a Private Jones?
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Private?
Speaker 1 (41:31):
He gets rid of Private Jones because a friend of
his who's a Scottish officer, is like, you should call
yourself Robert Maxwell. And that's the name he picks is
Robert Maxwell. Wow.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
How many total names did he go through on the way?
Speaker 3 (41:44):
It's like ten, right, Like, get so many fucking names?
Speaker 2 (41:47):
You just went through four in the last ninety seconds.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Yeah, it's so many names that after he changes his
name to Robert Maxwell, his banker sends him an angry
letter being like, if you change your name one more
fucking we're dropping you like this, this had better be
your last name.
Speaker 3 (42:04):
I think that's valid, oh man, but we are this.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
He has finally landed on his ultimate name, so you
know that's that's good for him?
Speaker 2 (42:13):
Is this is Is this his Wikipedia name? Because that's
your most important name that you have.
Speaker 3 (42:17):
Yes, this is his Wikipedia name?
Speaker 2 (42:19):
Kay?
Speaker 3 (42:20):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (42:21):
Uh speaking of Wikipedia, I'm not really speaking of Wikipedia.
Speaker 3 (42:26):
Go buy something, here's ads. We're back.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
So while Bobby Max is in which is what I'm
gonna call him, is in Paris, he meets this French lady,
Elizabeth Minard, and she goes by Betty. I think because
she's gonna wind up living in the UK and that
just works better for everybody.
Speaker 4 (42:49):
I was gonna say, I thought it was because you
were going to say that she heard he likes people
with different name changes.
Speaker 3 (42:54):
He likes people to change their names. Really into it.
She's like, She's like, yeah, I like what you like.
Speaker 4 (42:59):
I'm Betty Hi.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
She describes herself as almost passing out when she sees
how hot he is. That is something everyone of He
He is described a little later than this by like
the Check Secret Service as looking like a handsomer Clark Gable,
Like that's that's how good looking this man is. Oh yeah, No,
Betty is like I almost passed out when I saw
(43:23):
him for the first time he was so fucking hot.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
I'm sorry. This is just like he's like a character
from like a self insert character from a novel where
it's just he's the he's so tall and handsome, and
everyone loves him when they see him, and they're con
giving him promotions and new names. You know. It's like
I just read the Book of the New Sun last year.
(43:47):
It's like that character like just describing how awesome he is.
Speaker 3 (43:51):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 4 (43:53):
I just looked him up and I have questions.
Speaker 1 (43:55):
He does not grow into like him as a mature
adult is not a particularly handsome man. But this is
what Betty says, like she writes a book and she
describes him as this hot and again the check Secret
Service says he looks like Clark Gable And why would
they lie about it?
Speaker 3 (44:10):
Right, Like they don't have a vested interest in making
this guy sound hot.
Speaker 1 (44:14):
He gets just enough time off while waiting to continue
fighting the nazis that he's able to court Betty and
propose to her. And during this proposal process, he makes
the kind of bold and impossible promises that men make
to women in such times. In this case, the promise is,
I'm going to win a Military Cross, right, basically that's
the British Medal of Honor, and he's like, I'm going
to win one of these for you, Betty, right, and
(44:36):
then when I get out of the army, I'm going
to get rich and I'm going to become the Prime
Minister and we're going to be happy forever. And he
does not fulfill all of these promises, but he does
fulfill the first like half of them. So like immediately
after promising Betty he's going to go win a military
Cross for her, Like, he just goes and does that
within weeks, actually within days of them getting married. In
(44:59):
nineteen forty five, he wins the Military Cross for heroism
in the face of the enemy. And the actual story
is fucking nuts. So on January twenty ninth, nineteen forty five,
his battalion captures a town called Parlow, but they get
counterattacked by Germans and rubber boats who had crossed this
river in the middle of the night, and the Germans
assault the houses that Maxwell and his unit are billeted in,
(45:20):
and so just in the middle of the night, suddenly
there's Germans throwing grenades into the rooms that they're in
and just emptying their machine guns into these houses at
random at close quarters. It is like the most chaotic
and disorienting combat situation that it's possible to be in. Right,
Like you talk to anyone who has been in heavy combat,
being surprised in a night attack like in urban fighting
(45:40):
is like, it's just the worst situation you can be in.
So that the Nazis occupy a bunch of these buildings
in this town, and Maxwell's commanding officer, Major DJ Watson,
orders a counter attack, and Watson and his men, as
soon as they try to counterattack to retake these buildings
get shot the fuck up and they have to pull
back and withdraw. And I'm going to quote from John
(46:03):
Preston's book Fall Here describing what happens next. Withdrawing his men,
Watson witnessed a remarkable sight. As he wrote in his
official account, mister Maxwell, also a platoon commander, sallied out
of the darkness. Maxwell had repeatedly asked to be allowed
to lead another attempt on the houses. At first, Watson
had refused his entreaties, but when it became clear that
the men inside were sure to be killed unless there
(46:25):
was another rescue attempt, he changed his mind. The officer.
Maxwell then led two of his sections across bullets, swept
ground with great dash and determination, and succeeded in contacting
the platoon who had been holding out in some buildings.
Showing no regard for his own safety, he led his
sections in the difficult job of clearing the enemy out
of the buildings, inflicting many casualties on them and causing
the remainder to withdraw.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
And the fact that Maxwell lives through this is like
a fucking mus So. When they get to this surrounded
British platoon, he thinks that they're Germans, that like the
Brits in this building are Germans, because again it's super chaotic,
and so he shouts upstairs in German like come down
and surrender, and the British soldiers upstairs hear a German
shouting and start shooting. They go yes, you fucker, and
(47:08):
open fire and they miss him by inches. Cannot exaggerate
how dangerous this is. But what is funny is that
Maxwell feels the need to exaggerate this. And again, you
don't need to lie about this story. There's documentation from
your CEO of what you did. You win a medal
for it, but he would later lie and claim that
his commanding officer had ordered him not to attack and
(47:30):
threatened to court martial him, which is just like not true.
Like his CEO nominates him for the award. Did He's
not saying like, I'm gonna punish you for doing this,
but Maxwell just decides later. Now the story doesn't pop
without the court martial line. I gotta throw that in there.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
Yeah, I didn't even though nobody wanted me to do it. Yeah,
they wanted me to do it so little that they
gave me an award for doing it right.
Speaker 1 (47:55):
And again, you heroically rescued an entire platoon by like
fighting Nazis and close quarters hand to hand combat. You
don't need to pretend like, yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
Yeah, just take that win man, take.
Speaker 3 (48:09):
The w Yeah.
Speaker 1 (48:10):
So I'd said earlier he and Betty were already married.
Sorry that was incorrect. They were engaged at this point
when he wins this award. So he comes back, He
gets a week or two of leave, and they get
married in March of nineteen forty five, and he writes
her a letter laying out his expectations for the relationship.
Don't nag don't criticize unduly, give honest appreciation, pay little attentions,
be courteous. Have the utmost confidence in yourself and in
(48:33):
your partner. You know he's a fortyes guy, sure, not
super weird.
Speaker 4 (48:41):
Don't nag.
Speaker 3 (48:43):
Don't nag Number one.
Speaker 2 (48:45):
The end is nice. Have the utmost confidence. That's good.
Speaker 3 (48:48):
Yeah, that part's nice. Yeah. Have confidence in yourself, confident.
Don't nag me, but don't fucking nag me.
Speaker 2 (48:53):
Don't use any of my fifteen old names.
Speaker 3 (48:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (48:59):
So the month and this again. Within days of marrying Betty,
he gets the knowledge that his mom and sister were
executed by the Nazis as hostages.
Speaker 3 (49:10):
Right Jesus.
Speaker 1 (49:11):
And he finds out later they die at Auschwitz, right like,
that's what happens to most of his family. Most of
his family is incinerated at Auschwitz, like nearly his entire
immediate and extended family. But he knows about his mom
and sister at this point in the spring of nineteen
forty five, and again, his animating goal as a soldier
this whole war had been to fight his way back
to his hometown and save his family, and the sudden
(49:32):
knowledge that he had failed irrevocably in this goal, obviously,
through no fault of his own, broke something inside of him.
In her own memoir, his wife Betty later wrote, he
was convinced that had he stayed home, he could have
saved the life of his parents and younger siblings. Nothing
he achieved in life wouldever compensate for what he had
not been able to accomplish the rescue of his family,
(49:52):
which is like the tragic He's going to turn into
a real piece of shit, obviously, but like, yeah, to
have that hanging over you, and again you literally couldn't
have done more to try to save.
Speaker 2 (50:02):
Them, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (50:05):
So, in addition to his mom and sister, his father, grandfather,
and all but two of his remaining seven siblings are
massacred at Auschwitz. Maxwell had always been aggressive towards the enemy, right,
This is a guy who does not fear being shot.
But in the wake of this he steps things up
again to like a Tarantino level and to a war
(50:26):
crimes level. A week after his wedding, he's back in
action during an attack on two German villages, and in
this attack, Lieutenant Maxwell alone, acting alone, kills fifteen ss
men and takes fourteen prisoners. In other words, he single
handedly kills or captures an entire platoon of the German
Army's best Wow, it's fucking nuts.
Speaker 2 (50:48):
Yeah, how do you do that?
Speaker 1 (50:51):
I believe it's this one of these situations where he
gets them at a bad angle and.
Speaker 3 (50:55):
He's got a machine gun.
Speaker 1 (50:56):
Okay, yeah, Now there are some allegations that maybe they
were sodering and he massacres them. That's unclear, but he
does do that later in this instance. I think it's
kind of unclear what actually happened. But he increasingly starts
killing prisoners, right like, in addition to killing guys in
the heat of combat. And he actually writes about this
(51:17):
in a letter to his wife, as you can well imagine,
I am not taking any prisoners, and whatever home my
men occupy before I leave it, I order it destroyed.
And those are both war crimes. You're not supposed to
do either of those things. And in the days and
weeks that follow that letter, Maxwell.
Speaker 3 (51:34):
Is as good as his word.
Speaker 1 (51:36):
This quote from an article in The Independent describes an
incident that occurred two weeks after his wedding. His platoon
was involved in mopping up resistance from the German defenders.
On a second of April, Maxwell ordered his men to
fire mortars at a German village. He wrote to Betty.
A few minutes later, I saw them running out of
the houses and we started firing at each other. I
got two of them, and I ordered the mortars to
shell the village for a few minutes. It proved a
(51:57):
very effective tactic that led to the surrender the remaining
Germans and inspired Maxwell to try it once more as
he moved towards a nearby town. So I sent one
of the Germans to fetch the mayor of the town.
He told his wife. In half an hour's time, he
turned up and I told him he had to go
tell the Germans to surrender and hang the white flag,
otherwise the town will be destroyed. One hour later he
came back saying that the soldiers will surrender and the
(52:18):
white flag was put up. So we marched off. But
as soon as we marched off, a German tank open
fire on us. Luckily he missed, so I shot the
mayor and withdrew and like because this tank fires at him,
he blows the mayor's brains out, and that is again
a war crime. This is an unarmed civilian who was
not in any position to be giving.
Speaker 3 (52:36):
Orders to that tank.
Speaker 2 (52:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (52:38):
One of Maxwell's comrades would later claim that he executed
multiple German civilians. That he doesn't just shoot the mayor,
he starts shooting several civilians when this tank fires at them,
and Maxwell himself would both brag and express regret at
committing several war crimes later in his life. In one
interview with journalist Mark Maloy, he discussed an assault on
a fortified farmhouse. I got up close to the farm
(53:00):
door and shouted in German, come out with your hands up.
You're completely surrounded. They came out, and I shot them
all with my submachine gun. I thought my boys would
be pleased, but all they said was that's not fair, sir.
Those lads had surrendered. Maxwell expressed incomprehension to Maloy over
the reaction of his comrades. Can you understand such an attitude?
And wow, like, yeah, war crimes are bad. I understand though,
(53:24):
the discrepancy of like these guys who they don't like
the Nazis. They're fighting them, but they didn't suffer from
them right outside of that fighting, and so they're like
they surrendered there's rules. Maxwell's like, they're Nazis, there's no rules.
Why wouldn't I kill every one of them?
Speaker 2 (53:39):
I mean, his whole family has been murdered, right, you
can understand the psychology, they'll get it, yes, yeah, how many?
Can I just ask? How many languages does this man speak?
By the way, he grew up speaking Hebrew Yiddish.
Speaker 3 (53:50):
Yeah, he grew up speaking Hebrew Yiddish, and I assume
he would have learned Czech. He also grows up.
Speaker 1 (53:55):
He speaks German by this point, and he probably grew
up speaking it, and he speaks English, right, I believe
he also speaks French at this point.
Speaker 3 (54:02):
Incredible, quite a polyglot.
Speaker 1 (54:04):
Yeah, And there's there's a couple of different So in
that one with Malloy, he's obviously like can you imagine
being angry at killing Nazis? But there's another moment. His
sons will talk about where they're watching, like a World
War two movie, and he comes in and he like sees,
you know, these young German soldiers on the screen, and
he's like, oh, you know when I was, when I
was a young man, I killed boys as old as
(54:25):
you my sons are today, And like I feel haunted
by it. I wish I hadn't killed so many of
them right when I didn't have to. Wow, So I
don't see it as that is really inconsistent, right that, Like,
he feels differently about all these massacres as he gets older.
That said, he commits a lot of war crimes, but
he's not punished for them, right, No, one's really inclined
(54:45):
to punish a kid whose family is wiped out in
the Holocaust for again, mostly massacring the SS, although he
does kill some civilians too, which isn't good. But yeah,
very you get it, right, Like.
Speaker 2 (55:00):
Yeah, well, he's not coming off like a you know, bloodthirsty,
you know guy who joined the army because he just
wanted to murder people. He's blinded by grief and rage
and right, and it's war and people go nuts, like, yes,
that's how he's coming off.
Speaker 1 (55:15):
Yeah, he's coming off is like he wants to save
his family, he finds out he can't, and he just
starts killing them in response. He sees his responsible and like, yeah, bro,
like I get it, you know, hard to blame him
for all of this, although again, definitely war crimes. So
the war ends and his military career continues to blossom.
In nineteen forty six, he is twenty three years old
(55:36):
and stationed, impartitioned and occupied Berlin, working as an intelligence officer,
and he proves to have an immediate faculty for the
skills required in that role. He's an exceptional liar. He
speaks basically every language, and he's not really scared of anything.
And it's here that he would make the connections that
would turn him from the Quentin Tarantino character. He's been
this episode to the father of one of the most
(55:57):
abusive industries in the world today. That's all coming in
part two. Adam, how we feeling.
Speaker 2 (56:02):
I'm feeling great so far? I love this guy. I
don't understand.
Speaker 3 (56:06):
It's hard not to like him.
Speaker 2 (56:07):
I don't understand why your show's uh called behind the Bastard.
So far, all he's done is uh go on a
Nazi killing spree, which we just discussed the ambiguous morals
of how you know. So, I'm a little confused about
the format of the show, but I guess I'll find
on the next part.
Speaker 1 (56:23):
Yeah, it is, it is. This is a real whiplash episode.
I don't know that we've ever had one for the
whole first episode. It's like this guy fucking owns you're
on like a Nazi death quest through Europe. Like that's
fucking sick.
Speaker 2 (56:40):
Yeah, I mean he again, he feels like the hero
of like a pulp novel.
Speaker 3 (56:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (56:46):
Yeah, you know, I have expected to be attacked by
a dinosaur and wrestle in a submission. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (56:51):
And I guess if you if you want to imagine it,
you can. You can see this Part two is like
right after Inglorious Bastards ends, you know, they're carving a
swastika in that guy's forehead and then like Brad Pitt
goes and gets a job in finance and destroys the world.
A good story I think we need.
Speaker 2 (57:08):
Honestly, I want more sequels that are that. I want
to see the people turn into bad people or disappoint
or not you know.
Speaker 1 (57:17):
Yeah, John McClain grows up in campaigns against the rights
of incarcerated people to have access to library race or
something like that after Diehard exactly.
Speaker 2 (57:27):
And I want to see the sequel to the rom
com where the people fall in love and then they
get married, and then I want the sequel to them
ten years later, not fucking each other and being resentful
and cheating on each other, like that's God. Yeah, show us,
show us real people breaking down.
Speaker 1 (57:42):
Right, The Star Wars reboot should have been Luke Skywalker
turning into like an anti Ewok rights activist. Just all right, Adam,
Where can people find you?
Speaker 2 (57:55):
People can find me? I do a podcast called Factually.
I also have a YouTube channel where that podcast is,
and I do monologues and things like that about the
horrible state of the world. And I have a stand
up special called Unmedicated. This out on Dropouts on the
TV platform drop Out.
Speaker 3 (58:10):
Oh hell yeah, I drop I'll love drop Out.
Speaker 1 (58:12):
Yeah, well, check out Adam everywhere you can find them.
Check out drop Out also to see Adam and just
separately because it's great, And check out Fighting Nazis, you know,
because there's a lot of that that needs doing.
Speaker 3 (58:27):
Anyway, the episode's done.
Speaker 4 (58:32):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the
Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday
and Friday, subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash
(58:53):
At Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.