Part One: The Young, Evil God of Death: Reinhard Heydrich

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This meeting is being recorded. We're starting, by the way, Chris,
just start this with the sound of this meeting is
being recorded. I want to hear all of this, this
cinema veritation. I want everyone to hear me opening my
morning been a drill and popping piece before we get started,
and waving around a knife to open the bin and

(00:22):
drill somehow, Jesus Christ, it's a little knife. Who's at
this point? Both podcasts? Now, you started off with this
one with a knife and the last one with a gun.
So he's a gun. I mean, there's a gun right
right behind me. I'm just I'm excited for the next one,
the next one. Just just keep upping the anti Yeah,

(00:43):
I mean I think I'm gonna order my my young
Ward Garrison just found out how to order one of
those bolow wraps, which are the things the cops shoot
at you now that like wrap around your body and
stop you from moving. So I think I'm gonna get
one of those, Oh my god, that it's like, uh,
it just it like wraps around you like in cartoons,
like yeah, look in cartoons, yea yes, And the cops

(01:08):
are gonna find out how to kill somebody with it soon,
but I want just to funk around with. Yeah, they've
already made them lethal and like attached like little knives
at the end of them. There's already kind of little knives. Actually.
On the of course, there is is um for people
who don't know behind the Bastards podcast Bad People Um.

(01:29):
I woke up feeling like shit. As I was just saying,
last night, I had a friend come over and then
leave it like two thirty in the morning. And I
had a choice. Once my friend left. Was I going
to go to bed or was I going to buy
a bunch of drugs and get funked up until four
thirty or five in the morning and then stumble into
consciousness to do this podcast hungover. And I chose sobriety,

(01:50):
and I went to bed sober, and I woke exactly
as late as I would have if I gotten sucked up,
but I feel exactly as bad. And the lesson is
always do drugs, yes, Just say yes, Just say say
yes to drugs. You know. It's like that that movie
Yes Man, Yes exactly exactly, the movie Yes Man, which
contains all of life's lessons in it. Yeah, it really,

(02:14):
it's a great movie about Lessons And was that one
of the Jim Carrey movies or not. I actually, to
be honest with you, I I've never actually seen it,
but I remember thinking about the plot and going, uh,
what if someone offers some heroin? And uh, that's the
movie I wanted a heroin? Really, Yeah, if someone's offering

(02:36):
it's just rude. Does they know? I mean, I've turned
it down when it's been offered an injectable form. But
there was this one time in rural India where a
guy had a bunch of black tar and his finger
and was offering licks and I absolutely took a lick. Um, Yeah,
who's not going to take a lick of a stranger
in the desert? Like, well, I gotta say yes to this. Yeah,

(03:00):
that what's up? How do you feel about the Holocaust?
All anti anti? That makes sense, That's that's really the
only call with the Holocaust? Yeah, not a fan. Have
you heard of a fellow a dude, a chapurino by
the name of ran heard hydrick Reinhard hydrick Y. I

(03:24):
don't believe I have. I mean, in a way, it's
like one of those German names where I'm like, if
you just said it out loud I proposed nothing, I'd
be like, oh, that's that famous Nazi. But yeah, I
mean yes, yes, he is a famous Nazi, and you're right.
If not, I think people hearing that would be like
he probably did some like Nazi ship back in the
n Yeah, judging by the context of the podcast, lawn

(03:48):
and that very German sounding name. But no, I don't
think I've heard of him. Well he's not just he
is a Nazi, but he's also the Nazi. So you're
on behind. In the Bastards, we pretty much exclusively discussed
the worst people in history, and they're horrible crimes. Monsters
are business. So you, Sophie, and you Matt, and also

(04:09):
our regular listeners will know what it means when I
tell you this might be the worst person we ever cover.
Great right and hard. Heydrick is the man who is
the architect of the Holocaust. He's the man who there
were a lot of people who wanted to do a Holocaust.
He is the guy who figured out the nuts and

(04:31):
bolts of it. That's who we're talking about today. He
was the most passionate about Holocaust thing and he figured
it absolutely he and he he found that was the
niche he chose within the Nazi system um and he
he made that be his thing and then eleven million
people died. Yeah, he's he's pretty bad, dude. I mean

(04:55):
I'm anti him. Yeah, like sound anti him. So to
give you a little bit of context for this guy
before we go into his life story, he was a
Nazi for eleven years, and in that time he earned
these nicknames, the Hangman, the Butcher of Pradu, the Blonde Beast,
Himmler's Evil Genius, the young evil God of Death, and

(05:19):
Adolf Hitler himself. Adolf Hitler's nickname for Heydrick was the
man with the Iron Heart. That okay, So first of all,
some of those are like not gonna lie, pretty cool
sound nicknames, which is like the worst thing about Nazis

(05:42):
is their absolute commitment to just style and like you know,
whether it was how they dressed or like the what
they named ship. You're just like, fuck, that's a cool name.
I A solid half of those would be really good EPs,
like if he was a hipp artists like fucking you
see you see a dude's face, and the young evil

(06:03):
God of Death on an album coming You're like, well,
funk I gotta check this ship out. I've literally, I've
definitely downloaded half of those nicknames on Napster in the nineties,
you know, listened to the Man with the Iron Heart
fucking um. But he was not. He was a real
piece of shit. Yeah. So Dr Werner Best, who was

(06:25):
a horrible Nazi and was Hydrick's deputy for many years,
called Reinhard Hydrick the most demonic personality in the Nazi
leadership and said that he was driven by an inhumanity
which took no account of those he mowed down. And again,
this is a Nazi saying this. It's like, this is
Hitler calling him the man with the Iron Heart. And yeah,

(06:45):
it's not just like a Nazi saying it. It's like
they have Hitler to compare this person too, on alive
Hitler because right there, this guy looks bad. Even Hitler's like, damn, dude,
it down a little bit, Yeah, man, peel it back
on me. Yeah, said that to him. No, that's not

(07:06):
how Hitler worked. Um. Now, and I should note that
because of all of the Nazis who say horrible things
about Hydrick, one thing we should know it at this start.
And we'll note a couple more times in the episode.
Is that the Nazis who talked about Hydrick after the
war were Nazis who survived and thus had a vested
interest in trying to downplay their own complicity and elevate Hydricks. Right,
So we do need to keep that in mind. But still,

(07:30):
the fact that not just after the war, during and
before the war, other Nazis consistently recognized Hydrick as a
terrifying and vile monster says a lot about the man.
It's it's honestly, it's impressive in the most disgusting way
that he is. Uh. I mean the fact that you're
calling him like the worst Nazi and Hitler and Hitler's

(07:54):
there and I'm just like funk Man and like, also,
you know, shame on me for having ever ever heard
of him, you know, was you know, was he in
that movie Conspiracy? Did someone play? Oh, yeah, you've seen Conspiracy. Yes,
he is the main Nazi in Conspiracy. Oh he's that
blonde guy guy that Kenneth Brana. Yeah, he's played by

(08:16):
Kenneth Brana in Conspiracy, which is a very good movie,
I think, a very good movie about the the Vanse Conference. Yeah. No,
I love him. I love him. Yeah, that's Reinehard Hydrick. Um. Yeah,
And here's the thing about him. When you set him
up like that, one expects Hydrick to be almost a
force of supernatural evil, like a fucking Wolfenstein Nazi, right,

(08:37):
like fucking summoning demons and ship. The reality is that
every single person listening to this knows at least one
person with a personality similar to Reinhard Hydrick's. The most
terrifying thing about this guy is that he was not
a super anti Semitic dude from the start. He was
not a super committed Nazi from the start. His evil

(08:57):
grew from the most mundane seed possible. He wanted to
be a big man, that's all. That's all. This is
not a guy. It's not like Hitler, Hitler. This is
a dude who has like fucking demonic dreams from a
very early age, these dreams of of of conquest and
violence against his enemies. He follows a decades long plan
to achieve them. That's not right. Hard Hydric Hydrick is

(09:21):
a guy who wants to be important and respected and
that and he was like planned the Holocaust, right, he
was like all right, well, what's like, what's trending right now,
what's the everyone's going to be into, Oh, hating the Jews.
I could do that, and then he just pivots the
hating Jews. Yeah yeah, And it's a little what we're

(09:43):
about to talk about it right now, So let's get
into it. Reinhart Tristan Eugen Hydric was born on March seven,
nineteen o four, in the city of Halla in Prussia.
His name was picked by his father, Bruno Hydric, who
was a composer and an opera singer of modest success
and notoriety. Bruno's first opera was Amen, which debuted in

(10:03):
eighteen nine to significant critical acclaim. The central conflict in
the opera is between Thomas, a peasant leader who represents
the rise of social democracy in Germany. Thomas is the
bad guy um and the hero is Reinhard, a nobleman.
A heroic nobleman of fine breeding and traditional aristocratic German values.

(10:23):
Reinhard is murdered by Thomas at the end of the play,
and since Thomas is a devious cripple, he has to
stab Reinhard in the back to kill him. The fact
that Bruno Hyadrick named his son after the protagonist of
this opera is telling, as is the fact that the
plot of this eight opera very much mirrors the right
wing reaction to Germany's defeat in World War One. It's

(10:45):
the stabbed in the back myth right like this exactly so.
And also it's like, uh, I mean props to having
commitment to just hating like the peasant class. And yeah,
for sure, just like in any other like context, like
when is like the noble lord you know, is the

(11:06):
hero of this, I would say it's it's not because
there's I think an element in this guy's work of
actually like deifying the peasant class. But the peasant class
when they know their place, right, this is like a
hatred of the peasants who wants, you know, to not
be ground under the feet of the lord's right exactly exactly.
People just you know, opera singing about getting the boot

(11:27):
off their neck and then Lord's being like, na, bro,
stay stay there. Bruno is a monarchist. Um. He's not
a fascist. He's a he's a monarchist um. He would
have been a fascist if if that had really been
coming up in his time. But he was, you know,
just a big supporter and didn't like the idea that
there would be any kind of democracy, and Germany was
prior to World War One, there were large democratic elements, right,

(11:48):
the Kaiser is not as absolute and autocrat as, for example,
the Tzar. So most of the sources I've come across
online about Reinhard tend to fall into the same traps
when describing his childhood because he was such a monster
as an adult, they seem to have a need to
sow the seeds of that evil and with a particularly
vicious upbringing, the claim that like, oh there was there

(12:09):
was something in his background that made it clear he
was going to do this, and I'm gonna they're trying
to yeah exactly, Yeah, they want to make a bunch
of Dalmatians push his mom off the roof of something.
You know, it's one of the silliest things. Like I
thought that was like somebody like fucking with me, as
opposed to that being in an actual movie. Oh, it's

(12:31):
very real, very real. YEP. I want to quote in
order to give you an idea of how his background
is usually kind of summarized. When you like read you
google Ryan Hard, Hydro can read an article about him.
Here's a quote from an article from War history online
about him. His father, Bruno, was a non religious singer
and composer who was kept out of the upper echelons
of German society due to a humble background and a persistent,

(12:53):
though false rumor that he was Jewish. Ryan Hard's mother,
Elizabeth Krantz, was a practicing Catholic from a rich musical
family in Dresden. As Reinhard grew up, both his father
and his classmates incocated him with a virulent anti Semitism.
He was a loner who tried to prove his superiority
through his studies and through sports. This is largely wrong,
or at least incomplete. Um. It is true that there

(13:14):
were rumors that Bruno had Jewish ancestry. These were false
uh and while they were a semi regular annoyance for Bruno,
they had no impact on his success. So Reinhard's dad
grew up destitute due to the fact that Bruno's father
had died early um And Bruno was actually a pretty
incredible guy. He was, like as a child, the breadwinner
for his entire family, and he had to teach his

(13:34):
younger siblings um and despite their desperate financial decision as
a young adult, he made the decision to strike out
and have a career as a professional musician, which was
not a common thing to be able to do at
that point in time. Was very unlikely that he would
succeed at this, but he did with no money, no
family money, and no family connections, which speaks to his
talent and dedication. The idea that the Hydric family was

(13:56):
kept out of the upper echelons of German society is
entirely false. Reinhard's mother, Elizabeth, came from a very wealthy family,
and the fact that they were willing to marry her
off to Bruno speaks to how successful in respected he was.
He was a local celebrity and a significant one because
his son became a monster. There's a trend among people
writing about the Hydricks to dismiss Bruno was like a

(14:16):
second rate musician and composer and be like, well he
was never very successful and you know, maybe that came
off on his kid and this like fresh They love
this origin story. They love the origin story of like
failed artist goes Nazi and you know or like you
know is progeny goes Nazi or failed artist who everyone
said it had like low key Jewish ancestry. They always

(14:37):
had that too, because I've heard that with Hitler. I
mean it is, I mean it's a thing both for
there's rumors both for Hitler and for Hydrick, and for
Hydrock is a more significant thing. But it's not. It's
not a thing that like stops his his dad from
doing anything, for sure. And it's no I think it's either. Yeah,
I think it's just a slur that people used to
do on the playgrounds back in the day. Everyone like, yeah,

(14:57):
he's a secret Jew. You know, everyone at one point
got called a secret Jew back in though it's not uncommon.
And the more important thing to note is that, like Bruno,
Hydrick was not a second rate musician composer. He was
extremely well respected in his time. He was even invited
to join the Hall of Freemason Lodge, which he duly did,
which means if you're being invited to join the Freemason's,

(15:20):
you're in the upper crust. And they like late a
tender's early nine. Yeah, they had very strict guidelines for
they would let in to be a mason. Yeah. And
it also is not true, does not seem to be
true that Hydric was a loner who tried to prove
his superiority through studies and sports, at least not to
any extent that was unusual at the time. It was
mostly raised by his mother and governess, while his father

(15:42):
devoted his life to work, and this was very common
for the time. It would not have raised eyes as
an upbringing. People just hate the idea of people who
commit evil acts being in any way ordinary. They need
to have some extraordinary origin story so that you can
feel better about the fact that you know, whatever your

(16:04):
horrible beliefs are, you're like, well, at least I would
never go as far as that person. They need to
be evil and unredeemable from the beginning. So, for example,
Hitler can't have been a guy who, as a young
man near destitute when he got his inheritance from his mother,
handed all of that money to his sister because she
was a young mother in a truly selfless gesture of love.

(16:24):
Because Hitler can't have done a selfless gesture of love,
because it's much more frightening if he did. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's like, oh ship, that means anyone could be a Hitler.
I don't like that. I don't like that one. Yeah yeah, Now, um,
the so Bruno was so successful that not only like
I mean his his his kind of his his playwriting

(16:46):
or opera writing kind of career eventually did level off.
There was a point at which he stopped, you know,
they stopped doing as well. But he also started a
music school, a conservatory, which was extremely successful, and the
family gets fucking rich off of this conservatory. So again,
not exactly frustrated ambitions here. He's successful as a musician
can be in this period, Yeah, kind of crushing. It

(17:08):
seems like everything should be going fine for them and
no one should turn Nazi. And as the oldest son
in the family, Reinhard was expected to inherit his father's
music school um and as a result, most of his
early childhood was devoted to preparing him for this task.
Reinhard received constant, rigorous musical training from early childhood on
before he started primary school at age six in nineteen ten.

(17:29):
He knew musical notation and he could play the piano.
He do it. Ye honestly, if you if you've ever
been a kid taking piano lessons, after a while, you
just started like, I'm going to commit atrocity. Oh yeah,
I hate this. I mean, I'll tell you, honestly, most
of why I carry a gun is that if I

(17:49):
ever see a piano, I'm just gonna dump the mag
into that fucking THINGO piano in this house can't stand yeah.
Um yeah. And but like the fact is actually like
you could hear this back and be like, oh, maybe
he Um, he didn't like being pressured in music. He
fucking loves music. Um. He loves music his whole life.

(18:09):
He's very good. Uh. He starts violin lessons at age six.
For everything we know, he seems to have been extremely
enthusiastic about that path in life. His mother, Elizabeth, was
raised Catholic. Um. And I think that like the family
kind of went with her family religion, and this did
make her and later Reinhard members of a minority. In Germany,
Catholics were about thirty six percent of the German population.

(18:31):
This is a Protestant country, right, Martin Luther, the guy
who makes Protestant doesn't be a thing as a German.
Germany as a Protestant nation. Catholics are a large minority,
but their minority, um, And this was like kind of
the time that Reinhardt is being raised and his family
is very Catholic, like he's an altar boy as a kid.
And this was a period of time in which a
lot of Catholics in Germany were starting to assert themselves

(18:51):
as Germans first and Catholic second, because there were a
lot of conspiracy theories and like bigotry against Catholics, right that, oh,
you're loyal to the pope, not to the Kaiser, and
this is the thing fucking JFK has to deal with.
But like in like the sixties and ship I saw
someone do that with Biden recently, just like what the

(19:12):
fund is wrong? Like we bring the popes aren't even
loyal to popes anymore. There's like two living popes right
now hanging out. Nobody keeps seeing that. Yeah, so yeah,
this is like so this is like a thing that's
happening in Germany at the time. And the Hydricks bucked
this trind like right, I'm not I don't think they
were like saying that we're loyal to the pope over Germany.
But they extremely pious. They were consistent mass attendees, and

(19:36):
there were legiosity stands out particularly with contrasted with the
fact that the early nineteen hundreds in Germany is a
time of rapidly increasing secularism. Church attendance rates were dropping
dramatically during this period, and the fall was most notable
among Protestants, but it was significant for Catholics too. We'd
be speculating to say what impact this had on young Hydrick,
but it is worth noting also that percent of his

(19:59):
city was protest it so he grew up in a
devoted religious minority, and that's kind of worth noting. Now.
One of the most significant things about Reinhard as a
child is that he was weak and sickly. And I'm
going to quote from the book Hitler's Hangman by Robert
Gerwath here quote as a child of slender and relatively
small stature, with a weak constitution and a susceptibility to illness,

(20:20):
Reinhard was encouraged by his parents to take up every
kind of physical exercise from an early age, swimming, running, football, sailing,
horse riding, and fencing. Hydrick's lifelong passion for sport began here.
The family summer vacations were usually spent on the picturesque
coast of the Baltic Sea and the swinky seaside town
of Swinemunda on the island of dum. For the Hydric children,

(20:40):
this was surely the most exciting time of the year.
They spent their holiday sight seeing, taking walks, and enjoying
boat excursions in Days on the Beach. I'm so pissed
because these guys they have really great Instagram lives and
and I just crushed it on the Graham the Hydricks. Yeah, dude,
there would they would be. They'd have a fucking TLC

(21:01):
show about them. There was. God, it's just pisces me
off man, Like, why are these the people who do
Holocaust thing? It's just man, Yeah, evil evil, evil, fucking
like entitled rich kids who you know, fucking I don't
blame the Jews for no goddamn reason. Yeah, we'll get

(21:22):
into why so. Yeah, and again, it is worth knowing
that at this point in his early childhood, pre World
War One, this is a kid who by all accounts
like he's got some health problems, but he seems to
be having a good upbringing. There's like no reports of
him picking apart flies or torturing animals. There's none of
the stuff we have for Hitler either. These stories about
him going on these bizarre, unhinged rants are threatening suicide

(21:44):
and murder. His family was successful, he was gifted, um,
and when he grew older, it was decided that he
would go to secondary school. Now, only about ten percent
of boys got to do this. At the time, most
adolescents went kind of right into like learning a trade
after primary school. The school that about ten percent of
boys like actually went to secondary school, the school that
Reinhardt's parents picked for him was also unique. It was

(22:06):
called the Reform Gymnasium, and it was a new sort
of institution in Germany that was focused on the scientific
optimism at the time. And unlike about nine of German
schools in this period, secondary schools are religious schools, either
Catholic or Protestant. I assume there's some Jewish ones in there, um,
But this is the Reform Gymnasium is a religious so
he doesn't have a strong like when he starts getting

(22:28):
his education, there's no religious bent to the education in
his second justice, so he had like a secular Yeah,
secular schooling, yeah, which is rare for the time. Yeah. Gymnasium. Yeah,
it's all one word in German. I don't know. Yeah,
it just sounds bad. Yeah, that means the word gymnasium
a lot back. I don't know, Sophie, I don't know.

(22:51):
They were wrong about everything. It was the old times.
It just made up the word gymnasium and applied it
to anything. It's a great word of him. Medium just
sounds like a Pilates class where you get bullied. I'm
pretty sure there was a gymnasium in my reform temple
growing up, but I don't believe that was a reformed gymnasium.
So separate things. So Reinhard thrived at school. At secondary school,

(23:19):
his grades were particularly good in math and science, and
his first ambition was to become a chemist. He also
did well in languages, and he fell in love with reading.
He developed a special fondness for detective and spy novels. Now,
most of these novels that he loved as a kid
had their origins in the United States, are great Britain.
He he loved Nat Pinkerton novels, which were written by
the fucking Pinkerton guy. Yeah, he also loved Sherlock Holmes

(23:43):
and he would be a lifelong devotee of the detective
novel genre. When Reinhard was ten years old, world War
One did its thing. Uh. He was a member of
Germany's most awkward generation, and as a result, the generation
that produced some of the very worst Nazis so Ryan
hard like Heinrich Heimbler was too young to go to
the Runt and fight as a soldier, but old enough
that he was fully conscious of the war and fully

(24:04):
conscious of all this propaganda idolizing the front generation. So
it's extremely kind of like spends his adolescence hoping to
get to fight, but he never does because you know,
it doesn't want to Ungo great for Germany. Yeah, they
lose that one and then they lose their their precious Kaiser.
They do lose their precious Kaiser. He goes off the

(24:26):
fucking the Netherlands to chop wood. Fucking weirdo. Um. Yeah,
and the this war was a like you know, as
far as I can tell, none of the Hydricks or
their close relatives died fighting in World War One. I mean,
I'm sure they had some relatives who died, but I
haven't run across it, so it must not have been
anyone who was super close to the family. But it
was a disaster for the family. Um. The war brought

(24:47):
blockades from the British, which caused rationing and an economic
collapse that cut the feet out from under Bruno's music conservatory.
Now you can say the Hydricks were still lucky within
kind of the majority of the German population. Like a
million Germans starf to death as a result of the
British blockade. None of the Hydrick starve, but they don't
get to enjoy the kind of foods they had before

(25:09):
the war. They're definitely hungrier. Like for an example of
how bad this is, nationwide, um, bread rationing starts in
nineteen fifteen. Meat rationing starts at nineteen sixteen, and by
nineteen sixteen, so the pre war average daily diet of
a German citizen had been twenty five calories, it's about
twelve hundred by nineteen sixteen. UM. So they suffer like

(25:30):
everyone else. And well, they're wealthy enough to avoid starving
to death. The war chips away at the family income
and erodes their fortune. Uh, their vacations become a lot
less fancy. Um. Now they're still on vacation, they're still
doing vacations. They still live in a mansion, but they're
not They don't have the stay in a flat inside

(25:53):
the city. But it's only a forty five minute drive.
It's a beautiful drive, cipport, Why are you complaining? So
the worst thing that happened to them, and this must
have been a miserable time. But from what we can
tell kind of Ryan Hard does not seem to have

(26:14):
suffered unduly during the wars, particularly compared to most people.
And in fact, the worst thing to happen to the
Hydric family during World War One, um was not the
fact that was not any of the dying like this
happens in nineteen sixteen, which is also a year in
which the German Army throws a million lives into the
meat grinder at Fordune. Here the Hydrick family's tragedy is

(26:35):
that they're obsessed with this upcoming release of a new
addition of Hugo Rieman's Music Lexicon, which is the most
popular German encyclopedia of music and musicians. And they were
really excited because Bruno Hydrick was supposed to show up
in the volume. He was going to get his own
little entry in this music Lexicon, and he does. But
here's the great tragedy for the Hydris. They missed him

(26:55):
as a Jewish composer. Ah, oh yeah, that really kisses
him off. God damn dude, that is And it seems
to have been that like a former student of Bruno's
that he had a falling out with got hired by
this and like inserted the like to funk with him,
like no, like knew it wasn't true, just wanted to,

(27:16):
like exactly, It's like you said, it's a playground, insult
doesn't like him, works for the company and sticks it
in the incite, does brink. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's
like finding out that fucking Ashton Kutcher accidentally did the Holocaust.
You know. It's just like I was just sucking with
him and now he can punk them. Oh man, that sucks.

(27:40):
So Bruno sues the Encyclopedia for libel and he wins
the case and they fixed the encyclopedia. But rumors about
the family's Jewish ancestry grow more frequent after this, and
Reinhard's schoolmates begin to tease him and his younger brother.
Now that quote I read earlier in a lot of
summaries of hydrox upbringing will note that his family was
extremely anti Semitic, and this is something that seems like

(28:01):
it would have to be undeniable given his future. But
his biographer Robert Gerwath argues that there's no evidence of
this um, which is not to say that they weren't
anti Semitic, But that's not the question. The question is
were they anti Semitic in any way that kind of
exceeded the background level of anti Semitism in Truman Catholic
Protestant culture. Yeah, yeah, probably not. I'm gonna quote from
Robert Gerwath here. Throughout the war years, the Hydrick's placed

(28:24):
a great deal of importance on denying these rumors, threatening
those who repeated them with libel actions. Yet their own
personal relations with the Jewish citizens of Halla, who numbered
no more than four hundred and nineteen ten, were quite normal,
and there is no evidence to suggest that Bruno Hydrick's
attitude towards the Jews was hostile. On the contrary, Jews
sent their sons and daughters to Hydrick's conservatory. Bruno rented
out the seller of the school as a storage space

(28:46):
to a local Jewish salesman, and his eldest son, Reinhardt,
became friends with the son of the cantor of the
Hall of Jewish Community, Abraham Lichtenstein. Reynard has a Jewish
friend as a kid, the family is willing to sell
and like do business with them. They're not. They're not
particularly hateful to their Jewish citizens, right, and Jewish people
to them, aren't some like weird foreign abstraction, you know,

(29:10):
they're not. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they know them. They know Jews.
They they've talked to Jews, their friends with Jews, they
work with them. Uh yeah, it's more the reason they
react so I let do these rumors is that it's again,
it's a very racist society. The rumors are bad for business,
it's bad for the family honor. Like that's the reaction.
They're not unwilling, like they don't treat Jewish people like

(29:33):
there's some alien culture. They just but they also they're
a part of this very racist culture and they don't
want to have the consequences of being seen as Jewish. Right, Yeah,
that they're like not that there's anything wrong with that.
I don't think they're even saying that. Like, again, we're
not trying to whitewash it either. But it's not like
they're not like they're not like laser targeted on being racist.
Like they're pretty normal and perhaps even for the standards

(29:57):
of the time, a little bit more enlightened than a
lot of their fell neighbors, like you know who also
isn't more anti semitic than the background level of the culture, Sophie,
I think probably that's not a good idea. No oh boy, uh, Sophie,

(30:21):
can you play me out like an air Horner three? No,
I'm just gonna say, hopefully it's a Volkswagen AD, because
if it's a Volkswagen AD, then it is a bit
more anti semitic than the background level. Ah, we're back

(30:43):
and we're thinking about what a completely unproblematic and positive
brand Volkswagen is. Volkswagen the cars that never did anything evil,
perfectly good car. Everything it's associated with, norm and fun
Folkswagen starting in nineteen forty six, a cool and fun

(31:05):
brand folks Volkswagon, remember the bug that was nice and
had flowers on wagon. I don't think too much about
the meaning of the word volk oh. I love that
they totally just uh they KFC their name. Yeah, where

(31:27):
they were like w Yeah, if BMW can exist, that
fucking b W can. Folk just means people literally, just people.
Nothing more can be read into the meaning of the
word vulcan never mean anything, but this perfectly normal word people.
It's a it's a lot of I think if there's

(31:53):
any excuse for kind of bigoted German accents, it's this episode.
Yeah yeah, yeah, so I feel like the German people
love when an American does. There's there's a couple of
different groups around the world that you can always make
fun of. Americans are one of them, obviously, Russians are another. Uh,

(32:13):
and then there's the Germans and the Italians. Oh in
the British, the Italians for sure. Oh yeah, the Italians.
I mean, that's my My entire Sopranos podcast is just
you know, two dudes doing real bad Italian accents. So
you know, if you like that, check it out. Someone's
the legacy of imperialism. Like, the only downside you faces

(32:35):
an imperial country is it's it's it's fine to make
fun of your accents and hand gestures forever. Yeah yeah, yeah.
You lose one thing, big lose one thing. We're gonna
We're gonna make fun of your fucking pizzas, We're gonna
make fun of your accent. Feel of it. So when
the war ended, Ryan Hard was fifteen, which was more

(32:57):
or less a young adult by the standards of his time,
he's like fourteen and it ends, but like fifteen when
kind of like it starts to everything because there's like
you know, it's it's not a super clean end um. Now,
German defeat was followed by a wave of protests in
a number of left wing revolutions in Germany, and this
seems to be what really politicized Hydrich for the first time.
He joined the German Nationalist People's Party, which was an

(33:19):
anti democratic monarchist organization, in nineteen nineteen, and in February
of that year, a group of miners and Halla proclaimed
a general strike against the Reich government. This was met
by an anti communist counter strike. Businesses in Halla closed
to the nie striker's food, doctors, teachers, and other civil
servants refused to work. And this was again they were

(33:39):
striking against the strike. So this is the right wing strike,
and there's a right wing strike against the left wing strike.
I love that. Like a left wing strike is when
the workers get together and decide to make demands upon
uh their employers, and a right wing strike is when uh,
the cabal of rich people who can roll everything decided

(34:01):
to starve the people. Yeah, and you can see who
has the power there, you know, yeah, it's the it's
the starving workers. The left wing mob cancel culture came
for the exactly so damn and they're trying to cancel
Germany just because a World War one. Uh So, the

(34:23):
strike grew despite the counter strike, three quarters of the
minds across Germany eventually closed, and in a Halla alone,
fifty thou workers gathered to demand the resignation of the
Reich government. The Defense Minister ordered a free Corps unit,
which is like free Corps are. It's like the oath keepers.
They're veterans, but like scarier because like the oath keepers,
they all they claim their veterans like of them either

(34:46):
didn't do anything in the military at all or were
like a guy whose job was to like sign for
the bullets that real soldiers used. Fran Corps guys are
like these guys have just gotten off of the front
where their job was to beat people to death in
a trench with a wooden club. Like they're scary people.
I look that the oath keepers are, like half of
them are just stealing valor. It's like that's incredible, But

(35:10):
these free corp dudes are are some of the most
terrifying men who have ever lived, and that if its
Minister of Germany orders a Free Corps unit into the
city to smash the strike, the whole situation ends in
a bloody invasion, with several days of insurgent combat in
the city. Artillery was used to blast out leftists hiding
and buildings. In total, twenty nine people were killed in

(35:32):
sixty seven were wounded. And ship like this is not
just happened. This is happening all over Germany. There's a
bunch of different like attempts to take over cities and
larger chunks of the government, and like fights between right
and left. Um and by comparison to other cities, the
rebellion in Paula is not like one of the most
noted ones um Reinhard Hydrick was distinctly on the fringes

(35:53):
of this developing history. He joined a voluntary civil defense
force which was established by the Free Corps after they
killed all the leftists, in order to maintain order uh
in case the left tried something again. And he's unlikely
to have done anything meaningful. Odds are his joining was
more or less a symbolic gesture, a way of asserting
his manhood after missing out on the excitement of a
real war. Now that's nineteen nineteen, nineteen twenty. There's another

(36:17):
quasi rebellion in Holland. This one is a push by
a far right German Nationalist Party, and this too was defeated.
It's defeat brought about another left wing attempt to take power. Right,
this is a collapsing fucking empire here, right, So you
have all these political sides who had been kind of
pushed down in terms of their ability to funk with
each other by sort of the Kaisers, you know, in charge.

(36:39):
The Kaiser goes, everything collapses, and they just there's a
couple of years where they're just kind of murdering each
other in the streets. And yeah, obviously like and so
it's just such a strange impulse to like try to
defend your fucking phantom limb of monarch, you know where
you're just like that's gone, dude, time to time to

(37:01):
move on and bounce. He's living in a mansion now, alright, bad,
he's gone yourself to death and he never missed a meal.
Why are you such a fucking good liquor. It's like
imagine licking a phantom limb. You know what I mean,
It's like that's insane, Like the fucking boot is gone
and you're still licking it. Yeah, it's it's pretty great.

(37:23):
So there's you know, a series of street battles um
and Hydrick remains in the civil defensive forces in nineteen
twenty UM, but there's no evidence that he fought during
any of this. He had by this time developed what
one friend called quote an extremely volcus attitude towards politics,
and this means that he thought this is like the
the proto fascist strain of ideology in Germany. Volcans thought

(37:47):
in this basically, to sum it up, Volcus thinkers thought
that the health of the Vulcan or the German people
generally the Aryan German people right, took precedence over any
other concerns, including petty morality. Obviously, there's a lot of
racism anti Semitism wrapped up in this um again see
see the Volkswagen for more. Um So, Hydrick later claimed

(38:10):
that during this time he joined several of the racist
and pro Aryan societies that sprang up in Hollam and
all across Germany during this period. This was probably a
lie that he told later to burnish his Nazi credentials.
There's no evidence that he joined any of these anti
Semitic societies in nineteen twenty UM. And the fact is
that Reinhard Hydrick, while he was definitely kind of on

(38:31):
the right wing side of thing, does not seem to
have been primarily motivated by politics during this period. In fact,
his his larger aspirations seemed to have been a belief
in himself and a desire to be respected. What is
important about the politics of the period in terms of
Ryanard is that he came of age in an era
in which increasingly people who were very political were expressing

(38:53):
their willingness and displaying their willingness to do a violence
against their political enemies. That was increasingly common when he's
a young man, and that's really the biggest impulse impact
this has on him at the time. Yeah, trying to
trying to prove themselves in the eyes of their sociopathic,
psychopathic peers and just being willing traumatized peers. Right. One

(39:14):
of the reasons Germany is there's so much murdering it
over politics in this period is that, like, if you've
some of these guys have literally seen tens of thousands
of people die and their eyes they've stepped over the
corpses of their schoolmates, blested apart by artillery. Yeah, they
just don't have any fox to give right, like to
not murder somebody. If you've been through that, what we

(39:37):
mean do you You spend like twenty four hours that
were done and you're gonna be like, oh, people dying,
is that's normal? Ship? I could I could do that
all day. Yeah, it just doesn't mean the same thing.
And by the time Reinhard was eighteen, the German economy
was entering a period of hyper inflation that entirely wiped
out the savings of the middle class. In the upper

(39:57):
middle class by this point, the Hydrick fan only was
in this category. They had been very wealthy, they had
had a mansion. They lose their mansion at some point,
they lose their money. The conservatory doesn't quite close for
a while, but it's barely hanging on there and it's
reduced to begging for government funds to stay open. This
much must have liked rankled Ryan Hard Like he's again.

(40:17):
He grows up with money, he grows up proud of
his family, and the fact that his family business collapses
because again he loves music. It seems like that's the
thing he actually would have. Number One. Everyone seems to
grey he was a very good violin player. He was
a very talented musician. But the fact that his family
business collapse is the fact that there's no money in
teaching music or even really playing it in this period,

(40:39):
convinces him to pick a different career from his father.
In In nineteen twenty two, he joins the navy. Uh yes, yeah,
that's good idea. Yeah, ki, yeah, just try to avoid
any state armed forces at all. Fucking yeah yeah. Now,

(41:00):
Reinhard had spent most of his life up to this
point living under the Kaiser and willelm the second had
been absolutely obsessed with the Navy. Again, wille Helm is
like he sees himself in a lot of ways as
a British Man, and he is he's like, he's like
a grandson of Queen Victoria. Um. Kaiser Wilhelm is an
admiral in the British Navy. Um like um, and he's

(41:21):
he he's very obsessed with the Navy. He has this
kind of unhinged needy as but this love of British
culture and this kind of unhinged need to to beat
the British and prior one of the things that leads
to World War One. One of the factors is that
he's obsessed with building up the German Navy to a
point that it threatens the British Navy. And this is
part of like why tensions escalate. Um. But the impact

(41:43):
of this for a kid like Ryan Hard growing up
as a child during this period is that there's a
ton of propaganda about how fucking cool it is to
be in the So this these giant ships. You can
hang out with all these dudes. You could listen to
music and rock and roll, which hasn't been venged yet.
You could eat all sorts of chocolates on the sea.

(42:05):
You could You're going to have a great time. Here's
a navy. They maybe kills you, kas I don't know if.
We will probably throw you into a vow with no
real with no real you know, objective of us as
in a land crab. But it will be fun. Yeah.
So the November Revolution in that and and so there's

(42:28):
being a navy man becomes complicated after the war because
at the very end of World War One, there's this
thing called the November revolution, which helps into the Kaiser's government,
and it starts with a bunch of sailors in Keel,
which is a board city, refusing the orders of their
superior officers to put the Imperial fleet out to sea
to engage in a last apocalyptic battle with the Royal Navy.

(42:49):
So the whole World War One pretty much Germany has
a navy that is on paper, um, might be able
to beat the Royal Navy. Um, but the Kaiser is
terrified of risking it, right because if you try to
beat that, you might lose, and then you'd lose this
beautiful navy that you're so proud of, So he only
ever lets it have. There's only one in all of
World War One, one full clash between the German and

(43:10):
Royal in British navies, and they both kind of claim victory.
I think you could kind of argue the Germans did
a bit better than the British, but it's really not clear.
But they have this. It's very brutal for both of them.
And so after that they stay in port pretty much
the whole fucking time. Um. And at the end of
the war it becomes clear they're going to lose the
British are going to like try to take all of

(43:30):
the boats from them as part of the surrender agreement,
and the Admiral of the German Navy and the Kaiser,
i think, also kind of just want the Navy to
sail out for one last glorious just to see if
they could beat the Royal Navy, right, and the sailors
are like, well, but the war is lost. Why why
are we going to die for this? If the war
is lost, I'm just doing an experiment. Yeah, it's called

(43:54):
a fucking hail Mary. So they don't do the hail Mary.
Instead the revolt, which is rad um German the enlisted
men of the German Navy for that um. But this
kind of among assholes ruins the reputation of the navy, right,
like if you if you don't suck, this would make
the Navy seem cooler, Like yeah, fuck dying pointlessly for

(44:17):
the Kaiser, the dumbest man in Europe. But this fox
up their reputation to people who are like shitty nationalists.
Now the Navy's reputation is saved after the fact that
after the Treaty of Versailles, when you know the British
is supposed to be given. Basically most of this German
navy that remains German sailor sailors heroically destroy their own

(44:39):
navy at Scapa Flow rather than handed over to Great Britain.
So it's been a complicated period of time for the Navy.
When Reinhardt joins the Navy, it's number one, vastly reduced
from its previous size, and it's it's a complicated thing
to be in now. Reinhard likely joined the Navy because
in his childhood navy men and had a reputation for
being dashing, capable, heroic and sexy. He wanted the respect

(45:01):
that came with being an officer and the steady paycheck
that the military provided, because again, the whole economies fucking collect,
the whole countries in free fall at this point. And
by all accounts, Hydroc did very well in training. He
was even sent to officer training straightaway in nineteen twenty
four after becoming a senior midshipman. Now, after World War Two,
some of the guys who had been Reinhard's comrades during

(45:23):
this period would claim later that he quote had no
friends among the crew. And again they're trying to distance
themselves from the Holocaust guy. So this is pretty consistent
and it's it was probably accurate. And a lot of
the claims made about him in this period um like
it's easy to overextended. Oh he had no friends because
there's something wrong with him, Like from the beginning, people

(45:45):
could tell that he was he was just bad. That's
not the truth. This is a class thing. And his biographer,
Robert gerwaf Um credits the fact that he was a
loner in the navy to his and he was particularly
a loaner when he's before he's an officer in the
period early on in his navy career, and Gerwa says,
this is because he's from an upper middle class educated
background and he's like he's too fancy for the enlisted

(46:08):
navy guys. He spends his time off duty playing the
violin on board, and people make fun of him for this,
like that's why he's a loner. The German Navy, particularly
like you know at the midshipment level, is this hyper
masculine world and hydric is this urbane defeat like a
violin player, Yeah, exactly, violin player. They see him as
a pansy girl, writes quote his musical inclinations repeatedly made

(46:32):
him the target of ridicule during his basic training and keel.
For example, a non commissioned training officer from West Prussia
frequently woke him at night and forced him to play
the to Selly serenade on his serenade on his violin.
Many years later, Hydrock recalled these humiliating incidents when making
condescend in comments regarding the racial inferiority of the West
Prussians with their Polish infested blood. I love esoteric race.

(46:59):
Hate of the day. It's just like, oh, you know
those Westrusians. Else it's just another kind of German. But
you're like, no, they're infested with Polish blood. They got
a little bit of pole and them. You don't want
any of that growth. Like there there are quarters slav Yeah, yeah,

(47:21):
Northern Italy. They're basically Swiss Southern Italy. Those are Libyans,
uh so. Ryan Hard's early years in the Navy included
a number of assassinations of liberal politicians by right wing extremists,
including the murder of Foreign Minister rathanaw By, one of
Heydrick's fellow naval cadets. A guy he goes to the

(47:41):
Navy school with Despite the fact that he was in
close proximity with a right wing terrorists who assassinated a
government minister, Reinhard exhibited no interest in this case. Like, again,
he's not political at this point. He's like, you know,
he doesn't give a shit about this. He just wants respect,
He wants to wear a big boy he's able. Yeah,

(48:02):
he doesn't care about anything else. He's also not very
interested in. Another thing that happens during this period is Germany.
You know, they're unable to pay back their war debts.
They like strike in terms of war debt repayment, and
the French military occupies the Rule which is Germany's industrial heartland.
This is a huge deal for the right wing. This
is like a major This is like fucking Benghazi for them,

(48:22):
right like they they go to they are obsessed with
this fucking deal. Um and Reynard doesn't care about it either,
because again he's just not a political guy. His comrades
in the Navy actually considered him a liberal, and a
lot of them disliked him for that reason. Years later,
his wife Lena would claim that at this stage quote politically,

(48:42):
he was clueless. He regarded all parties, particularly the Nazi Party,
with arrogance, and considered politics itself to be vulgar. In
this connection, he acted very much the snob and regarded
his naval career as the most important thing. The rest
didn't matter. I just I love that he was a
political because it's like it just you know, it proves

(49:03):
to me that like whenever someone gets goes from a
political to immediately radicalized, it's like, nah, you have no ideology,
you have no political beliefs, your your radicalization is absolutely
dependent on just positive reinforcement. So like you know, it's
it's this isn't a deeply held belief that he's had

(49:25):
for years and years. It's totally saw which way the
wind was blowing, and it's pretending to have always been
down for his fucking right wing revolution. Yep, yep. And
it's I mean, well we'll talk about that too in
a bit, because I think there is there is some
more to it. But at this period of time, again,
his his his enlisted navy comrades consider him like a

(49:46):
defeat liberal. Um, he's not super popular among his fellow comrades,
and his unpopularity in among them kind of brings a
resurgence of the rumors that he was Jewish. One fellow
officer could debt later recalled Hidrick was more or less
regarded as a Jew because another crew comrade from Halla
told us that his family was actually called SEUs and
that this was widely known in Halla. This is like,

(50:07):
that's where the rumors come from, that one of his
relatives had a last name that was also a Jewish
last name. Um So Hydric earned the teasing nicknames white
Jew and White Moses. And in order to fight back
against those rumors, Hydrick starts trying to claim that he's
super anti Semitic, and he starts claiming that he'd been
a member of a bunch of anti Semitic organizations before

(50:27):
joining the Navy. Um again probably untrue. He starts lying
about this to counteract the rumors. But also this is
kind of the period in which his his commitment number one.
This is the period in which political anti semitism is
going viral in Germany, and Hydric is kind of along
for the ride, and he's in part inspired by the
fact that it behooves him politically to be as anti

(50:51):
Semitic as possible. Now despite all the difficulties he had
with his crewmates. Reinhard was a solid naval officer. His
career moved steadily upward. The summer of nineteen twenty three,
he was transferred to a cruiser where he met Wilhelm Canaries,
the future head of Nazi Germany's military intelligence agency. Canaris
was impressed by the young officer and became his mentor.

(51:11):
By nineteen twenty four, Hydroc had found his groove. He
excelled as a navy man, and he even begun to
find respect within a certain set of the officer cast.
Many of these men appreciated his artistic talents and noted
that he seemed completely transformed when he would start playing
the violin or discussing music. People will say that his
his violin playing brings folks to tears, like he's supposed
to be very good. Um. In nineteen twenty six, he

(51:34):
was promoted to second naval lieutenant. His roommate reported that
after this he quote developed significantly. His superiors frequently gave
him recognition and good evaluations. He was obliging and showed
that people could rely on him. With every sign of recognition,
his zeal increased, and so did his arrogance. Ambition was
undoubtedly hydric strongest characteristic. He wanted to accomplish something, and
others were supposed to be amazed. Now Hydro began to

(51:59):
dream of one day. Because an admiral in night, he
was promoted to first lieutenant. This brought him more free time,
which he devoted to athletics, music and women. He had
been noted by his colleagues as having a wandering eye.
In nineteen six, when aboard the Schleswig the Schleswig Holstein,
which is a boat with a terrible name. Horrible name,
horrible name, uh, on a journey through Spain and Portugal,

(52:21):
he gained a reputation for sleeping around with absolutely anything
in a skirt. Uh. Women, I'm looking for I'm looking
for a Holstein to I would like a Holstein Fortig
signs of boats. I'm sorry, So not just ladies he
meets in bars, but ladies he meets in brothels. And

(52:43):
there's even one point where there's like a joint naval
social gathering with like the German and British navies, and
he starts really awkwardly, probably drunkenly, heating on a British
officer's wife, and she like turns him down very publicly
in a way that's super embarrassing. So Hidrock had no
issue engaging in sual liaisons with sex workers, but his
real goal was to find a high class woman with

(53:04):
social status that he could show off at fancy parties,
because again, he's an image guy. On December six, nineteen thirty,
he met Linna van Austin at a ball. Now, when
you run into Germans with a Vaughan between their first
and last names, it means they're either a grifter pretending
to be a noble, or they have some sort of
noble heritage. And his father was descended from Danish nobility,

(53:25):
but the von Austin fortunes had fallen since the eighteen sixties,
so they're they're the aristocraty the aristocracy, but they're also broke.
They're broker than the Hydrick family. By the nineteen twenties,
Lena is still upper class though, because again, class isn't
something that has just to do with money. It's about
your breading. So she's high bred but broke um and
she and Hydrick fall for each other. Three days after

(53:47):
their first date, Reinhard Hydrick invites Lena to the theater
and then to a wine bar where he proposes to her.
So he eventually success accepts and to try and understand
why she accepts, I'm going to cite a passage from
the book Nazi Why Lives quote. Lena found him intriguing.
I felt sympathy for this purposeful yet reserved young man,
and agreed to a rendezvous the next day. In her memoirs,

(54:08):
she breathlessly described how Heidrick opened his heart to her
over a series of long walks, a visit to the theater,
and a meal in a restaurant, and then asked her
to marry him during their third evening together. Lena liked
to suggest that their love was written in the stars
and could not be denied. Others have speculated that his
sudden proposal was a necessary prelude to getting her in bed. Um.
Oh that's game, dude, Just like going yea dude, rock dude.

(54:34):
You just you whine him and dine them for three
dates and then you go, hey, would you married you?
Did you fuck me? If we get engaged? Now you will?
Oh man. That's also at a time when I think,
like three dates, if you didn't ask someone to marry
you by then, yeah, you were just being a harlot

(54:54):
if you had not married, Yeah, you're dating is it's
it was a it was a different time, a different time.
You know, it was a different time. Um, but fuck
you on the third date without game, No, Sophie. That's
the way it is. That's true. Can I at least

(55:16):
I'm hoping for dick pillads, whether or not they're dick
pill ads. The one promise we make on this show,
the only promise we make about our sponsors, is that
they all fuck absolutely fuck like these products. Fuck fuck.
Here's another Volkswagen ad. I mean, if you ain't got

(55:37):
laid in the back of a beatle, Like, what are
you doing? What did you do? In twenties? The two
thousand one swagon by v W by v W mixing
We're back good times. So they keep their engagement secret

(56:01):
at first, Um, because Reinhardt has to get the family's approval, right,
you don't like legally, you don't have to, I don't
think in this period. But it's like and it's polite.
And also he's he's comes from a high class family.
Their riches, health, they're not nobles, but they're very wealthy.
They run in high class circles, she's a noble You
want to do things properly. Um. So they get engaged
in secret, but he promises her that he's going to

(56:23):
get her family's approval before Christmas. He just kind of
wants to get all his ducks in a row make
himself look as impressive as possible. Um. He writes her
a letter shortly after their engagement that ends with this
paragraph quote. Being straightforward and upright is the key demand
I have always placed upon myself. It will thus not
be difficult for me to look your father in the eye.
You know. For me, there is nothing worse in people

(56:44):
whom I love than beating around the bush and insincerity.
I don't hesitate to confront mean guys with the same weapons. Now,
of course he was lying, Yeah, I wonder like that's
how it's translated. He was lying to He was not
like about wanting to be married, because they did get married.
He was lying to her about being a sincere and
straightforward man. The truth is that Ryan hard Heydrich was

(57:07):
a habitual liar when it came to sex and pretty
much everything else. He was already involved with another woman.
In fact, he had gotten involved with another woman six
months before he met Lena. We do not know the
precise details of the story, but one of a couple
of different things has to be true. Either he forced
himself slash, you know, raped a woman and then promised
to marry her afterwards to keep her quiet. And you know,

(57:28):
I'm putting the words rape in there, but at the
time you you might not, like, she might not have
described it that way, right, because people talked differently about
at that point where we fucked, and like, consents not
a thing in my culture. But you have to marry
me now, right. That's one possibility. Um. The other possibility
is that he started sleeping with a woman, uh, and

(57:48):
he had to claim that they to get he had
to promise to get engaged to her so that they
could keep sucking. Right, they fucked once and she's like, well, okay,
we gotta get it. You got you can't make me
a dishonest woman, like we have to get married now
because be fucked. One of those two things is true.
Robert Gerwath and I tended he knows more about Reynard
Hidric than I do. His take on this is you'll
hear a couple of different ones. His take is that

(58:09):
Hydrick met this woman six months earlier to another bar
and that this young woman just kind of assumed that
she and Hydrick were engaged because they were fucking. So
maybe he didn't even promise to get engaged, but because
of where things culturally are at the time, Oh we fucked,
we're engaged now, that's what. I don't know what the
case is, whatever the truth, rein Hard did follow through
on his promise to tell Lena's family. Uh, they approved

(58:32):
because he was a young rising naval star with a
semi famous father. Um, so they start printing engagements and
announcements for the local paper to celebrate. And the woman
that he's having sex with on the side sees one
of these engagement announcements. She is not happy about this.
I'm gonna quote from Hitler's Hangman again. Ryan Hard, who
continued to cultivate the relationship even after he had met Lena,

(58:54):
invited her the second woman, to Kiel, where he's stationed,
despite her request for a separate room in a hotel,
and herurage should have spend the night in his living quarters.
Further reproach MO probably occurred on this occasion. In any case,
the young woman saw herself as compromised and reacted to
the receipt of Hydrick's engagement notice with a nervous breakdown.
Now we don't know who this lady was, but we

(59:15):
do know that her father was some kind of prominent
person in Germany because he was directly connected to the
commander in chief of the entire German Navy. Is a
bad family to piss off if you're wanting a Navy career.
So in yeah, in the navy. So Hydrick gets court
martialed over this um, and it's because it's dishonorable behavior, right,

(59:36):
Honor is a big thing. This is like scummy behavior.
You can get in trouble for this. And most sources,
including Girwath, seemed to agree that normally he would have
just gotten kind of a little more than a slap
on the wrist, but it wouldn't have ended or even
derailed his career, right because again it's what it's fucking like.
All of these rich dudes are sleeping around, right, yeah,
they're all doing it. Probably he would have just got

(59:59):
if he if he had as soon as they brought
him and been like, yes, you know, I'm just a man.
I fucked up. Uh, this is my bad. I'm so
sorry among whomot who among us and all the other
dudes have been like, yeah, you know what, we're all
rich navy officers of us are cheating on our wives
and we're cheating on our mistresses. Okay, Like he would

(01:00:19):
have gotten a punishment in order to mollify the father
of this woman, and it would have gone away. But
that's not how it goes because Hydrick cannot take responsibility
for his own actions, so instead he tries to blame
everything on the woman for seducing him. Yeah, and again
you're talking about one of the most patriarchal misogynist cultures

(01:00:41):
in history, Germany and the German Navy in the early
nineteen twenties. His behavior is so gross that it horrifies
all of these admirals, right like you and and that's
difficult in this period going to be two misogynists for
like the admirals of the German Navy. Yeah, and they
saw they saw like thousands of people dying like on

(01:01:04):
the on the Rhine, and they're just like you disgusted me,
but not wow. So his general sliminess is so upsetting
to them that they decide he is not fit to
wear a German uniform and he is discharged from the Navy. Um,
you have to you have to really think in your
head how gross you have to be for all these guys. Again,

(01:01:25):
I can't over emphasize all these guys in the twenties
going like this dude's kind of anti woman. Yeah, I
mean I beat my wife and my girlfriend every day,
but this guy seems to be done. Yeah, I hit
them because I love them. He's just a meani What
the mean? Man? So this fox up all of Ryan

(01:01:46):
hard Hydrick's plans. Oddly enough, his Lena, his fiance, stays
with him. This might sound odd if you don't understand
the fact that and this is a rarity for the show.
Lena van Austin Reinhard Hydrick's wife sucks as much as
he does. Like she's a terrible person. And I don't
say that lightly. Normally I try to have because it's
a hard time. Women don't have a lot of are

(01:02:07):
great and a lot of agency by the society in
this period. She's really bad. She's a really bad person
in the and not just because she stays with like,
not because she stays with her husband during or right
hard during this but for a lot of other reasons.
She sounds independently bad. She's independently shitty. Yeah. In the
book Nazi Wives, James Wiley writes, quote, Beyond the powerful

(01:02:28):
physical attraction between them, Lena and Hydrick shared some key characteristics.
Both were fixed on escaping their backgrounds and forging a
different destiny for themselves. They were stubborn and extremely ambitious.
Each had a cold calculating streak. Neither suffered fools gladly.
Both had an inflated sense of their own worth and
felt that the majority of people were inferior beings. So

(01:02:49):
real power couple of being trashed, just sitting around in
the living room going, I fucking hate the Italians. You
should know you know who. I don't like the Prussians.
Just the whole vest of Prussia is just gross Polish. Yeah,

(01:03:10):
sounds get married is just love. They're both like looking
like they're like at a museum touching a phrenological like
like one of those heads with bumps tell you like
and like the hands meat in the middle of the
semoy seminar or whatever. People both about to measure the

(01:03:33):
same skull and not hands met. So you've surely heard
the phrase behind every man as a great woman. And
unfortunately this is also true of history's greatest monsters. And
Lena not been the sort of woman she was, we
might not have had a Reinhard Hydrick, because he might
have killed himself after getting discharged from the navy. And

(01:03:53):
I'm going to quote again from from Wiley's book, Uh
Fucking Nazi Wives. On thirty April nineteen thirty one, he
was dismissed from the navy. Lena said that he was
so shattered by the verdict that he had a total breakdown,
locking himself in his room for days on end, smashing
furniture and weeping uncontrollably, and she had to piece him
back together again. Where they're true or not, And it's

(01:04:15):
hard to imagine the man Hitler called iron Heart behaving
like a hysterical child. The most startling thing about the
whole incident is Lena's unswerving loyalty. Under the circumstances, nobody
would have blamed her if she'd called off the engagement.
She was only nineteen, so this was hardly her last
chance at happiness. Clearly, Lena was convinced that with her guidance,
Hydroco could still rise to the top. I can fix him.

(01:04:36):
I can fix him. I can. I can make him
powerful and that will make me famous. I can make
him so much worse. Yeah. Now, the Vaughan Austin family
rescinded their approval for the marriage after Hydric got fired.
This was not like necessarily a moral thing, was a
pragmatic thing. The family is broke and they needed to
know that Hydric was going to have money before they
would accept this. Lena seems to have considered it her

(01:04:59):
duty to make sure her husband to be got the
chance to be as great as she knew he could be.
She was convinced his chance would come through the National
Socialist German Workers Party. While Hydrick was fairly a political
in nineteen thirty when they met, Lena was already a
dedicated Nazi. She had first attended a party rally the
year before, where she'd swooned over the sexy, black uniformed

(01:05:19):
men of Hitler's new bodyguard unit, the s s or
should have Stoffle now. When she met Hydrick, her only
disappointment with him came from the fact that he had
never even heard of Hitler's mind comp In fact, he
mocked Nazi leaders regularly. Calling Hitler a Bohemian corporal and
Gebel's a cripple. Again, he's racist against the Nazi leadership.

(01:05:40):
Hitler's an Austrian. That piece of ship and basically swabs
and this guy's got funny legs like a cripple. Like
first off, so was the Kaiser, Yeah right, yeah, your
beloved enough. They kept that pretty under wrapped so that

(01:06:01):
Lena's brother was a committed Nazi, a member of nineteen
twenty nine since nineteen nine of the Essay or the Stormtroopers.
He was one of the first hundred thousand Nazis. Her
whole family is embarrassed and impoverished. Aristocrats appreciated the Nazi
message of German rebirth. Lena particularly appreciated their racism. Decades
after the war. In the nineteen seventies, she admitted to

(01:06:23):
interviewers that as a teenager, she'd come to view Polish
refugees who entered Germany and nineteen eighteen has quote intruders
and unwelcome guests. Their presence provoked her so much that
she had to hate them. Yeah, it made her hate
them by not looking like her. Yeah, She compared seeing
refugees who had fled to Germany to avoid massacre as

(01:06:44):
a forced marriage. They're raping me with their presence, basically
is what she says. Like, that's again, she's trash. She's
really bad, and I'm sorry. She is trashed and she
is canceled. She is driving factor in Hydros developing anti
simmit isn't because it really hits warp speed. Once he
meets Lena, I think she kind of drives his racism

(01:07:05):
and a lot of way she drives him towards the
Nazi Party, and so Lena advised her Bow to join
the Nazis and offer his services to the s A. Again,
the Essay are the brown Shirts. These are the street
fighting Nazis, and at this point they have about a
hundred and fifty thousand members. They're kind of creating a
parallel military to the German military the Reiks Fair and
as a result, they're actively recruiting former military officers whose

(01:07:27):
experience could help the Essays leader a fellow named Ernst
Rome turned the organization into a real military. Now it's
important to note that the Nazis are not Hydris only
path to avoid destitution. This is not his only choice.
After the Navy, he gets offered a cushy, well paying
job teaching sailing that would have paid him more all
honestly than he had made in the Navy, but he
wouldn't have had respect. Sailing. Teachers don't get uniforms, they

(01:07:50):
don't get ranks, right, Nazis those who can't do teach,
you know. And he's just like, I'm not gonna I'm
not gonna go down that road. Uh. No one gets
less respect than a teacher. I love that. That's just
universal concept. Yeah. Yeah, And nothing's worse than being a teacher.
I'm going to join the Nazi party, yeah, exactly. Now. Meanwhile,

(01:08:11):
the Nazis, cognizant of Reinhard's experience as an officer, offered
him an elevated position within their organization, one on the
staff of a little dude you might have heard of
named Heinrich Hmmler. Now, at the time, Himler had newly
been put in charge of the S S and the
s S again. S S stands basically for bodyguard. It's
like protection squad, I think is the literal translation. These are.

(01:08:32):
They start just as a small group of the most
loyal and also most like an aryan looking Nazis to
guard Hitler's body, right, they've become a state within a state,
there's eventually like a millionaire. So of these guys um
at the time, there's very few s S men. They're
subordinate to the Essay, so they're not independent. But Himler's
in charge of them, and he has a dream to

(01:08:54):
supplant the Essay, to make them the biggest thing in
being a Nazi. Now. His first step to doing the
was to increase the party's capacity to carry out counter
espionage because both anti fascists and the German police are
infiltrating the Nazis and the Essay at this point. Um,
So Himmler his first vision is like, Okay, what are
we bad at? We're bad at rooting out spies. So

(01:09:16):
that's one of the things I'm gonna have the s
S do. I'm gonna build a capacity for counter espionage
into it. And he needs a guy to lead this
because he doesn't know anything about counter espionage. And the
friend of Reinhardt Hydrick's family, who in of Lena's family,
who basically comes to the Nazi and say, hey, I
know this officer who wants to join if you'll offer
him a cooshy job, he claims that Hydric is an

(01:09:36):
ex naval intelligence officer. This is not true. It's it's
came out as a result of kind of like a miscommunication.
He was in like signals intelligence, but he doesn't know
anything about espionage. But Hydrick gets the interview anyway. He
immediately impressed Himler, who saw in his his new SS
Like Himler wants the s s to be the racial
elite of the Nazi party, and so from the beginning

(01:09:57):
there were strict requirements for genealogy. They would reject mainly
on appearance if you have like an inferior body. Which
it's funny because if you look at Hinrich Hembler, he
looks like an extra from Trek E's Yeah. Meanwhile, right
Heart Hydrick, though, Like it makes sense that Himler falls
in love with this dude. Hydrick is tall, he's over
six feet, he's athletic, he's in very good shape. He's

(01:10:17):
blonde haired and blue eyed. Right um he gets played
by Kenneth Braunay by played ably by Kenneth Brandon. Yeah
very well. Yeah, so it's clear that I love that
the whole Nazi leadership are just the most fugle fucking
gules you've ever seen, and all of their propaganda is
just like, we are the most beautiful people on earth.

(01:10:39):
We have blonde hair, and we never bulge, we never
get fat, and you just look at like Martin Borman
and you're just like what the fuck? Yeah, fucking Jankie
asked Martin Borman hit here with his with his screwed
up and testines, shifting himself constantly like most Garing horribly
addicted to heroin, because the most sickly flawed, disgusting people

(01:11:04):
just being like, you know what a hot Yeah, I
mean it's not like, look, hey, we're all we all
have ibs and drug ads problems. We just don't pretend
not to a fake racial hierarchy that murders of other
people who basically, yeah, I know I know what my

(01:11:24):
my features look like, you know, and I say, rather
than being like, no I have a small nose, I'm like, no,
big noses are sexy. This is this is what I
look like. So anyway, Himmler loves Hydrick because he's he's
a fucking sexy ass, blonde hair, blued eye dude. Um
and yeah, so uh Himler's thrilled with his appearance, of course,

(01:11:48):
but that didn't necessarily mean he was going to get
the job because Himler's hiring for a specific technical task.
He wants someone to build a counter espionage agency. Um
Hydrick has new experience in this, and to explain how
he gets the job any way, I'm gonna quote again
from Hitler's Hangman. Undeterred by the realization that the applicant
in front of him lacked any previous qualification for espionage work,
Himmler asked Hydrick to sketch out an organizational plan for

(01:12:10):
an SS intelligence agency and gave him twenty minutes to
complete the task. Without any previous experience in the field
of espionage, Hydric resorted to the minimal knowledge he gained
from years of reading cheap crime fiction and spy novels,
and wrapped his suggestions for a future s S intelligence
service and suitably military phraseology. His minimal knowledge of espionage
appears to have surpassed that of Himmler. The Reich leader.

(01:12:33):
SS was impressed and hired him in preference to a
second applicant, a former police captain. Oh my god, it's okay,
let's a pros and cons. Pro he's a police captain.
Con He's not as hot and he hasn't read every
Sherlock Holmes. So we're going with Mr Hydrick Shaw saying

(01:12:53):
if he need to be doing more heroin as you're
saying more heroin, and you're saying we need like an
little fat man who will also help us out in
BOT I love it. Oh. The horrible historic already here
is that in in picking Hydric over this police captain,
he actually made an excellent decision for a dumb reason.

(01:13:13):
But this police captain turned out to also be an
undercover cop trying to infiltrate the s Sally makes the
best of the two decisions just for the dumbest possible reason. Damn.
And it's funny. We talked about this in one of
our very first Behind the Bastards episodes. Like the influence
that like shitty fiction has on the Nazis there is
hugely influenced by like a con man and cowboy novelist

(01:13:38):
who wrote writes like these, these like fantasy cowboy novels
about like you know, Native Americans and boys and shit. Yeah,
And it's funny because like Hydric gets hired to basically
run the s S Secret Police because of his knowledge
of these these fantasy detective novels during World War Two,

(01:13:59):
during the the Russian War, when like things are going
badly for the Nazis, Hitler sends hundreds of copies of
these hitty cowboy novels too his generals on the Eastern
Front because he's certain that they're filled with like strategic insights,
Like I can't overestimate the degree to which these guys
are just a bunch of fucking nerds, the nerdiest fucking fools. God,

(01:14:20):
just like fucking really, Like, Okay, I have read every
Tom Clancy, and I think I can run counter terrorism.
I'm certain that, like when our fascist takes over and
invades I don't know, fucking China and the war goes badly,
they're going to start like mailing copies of R. A.
Salvator novels to their generals. Uh fucking hell, so God

(01:14:49):
damn it. Um yeah, anyway, Um Hydrick gets hired by
Himmler and his starting salaries and a lot of money,
but when combined with the money he was still receiving
from the Navy after getting fired, Um Hydrick was now
making a modest income enough to support he and his
wife to be. Now Hydric seems to have had something
of an instinct for party politics. He's good at this job.

(01:15:10):
He's good at the politicking part of this job. We
can debate how good he is at counter espionage, but
he's good at making a place for himself in an
organization and consistently expanding that place. He recognizes Himler early
on as a guy he should tie himself to, and
he sets about mimicking every opinion and deeply held believe
his boss expresses. He also dives into proving himself as

(01:15:31):
a Nazi. Now. The best way to do this in
the early nineteen thirties is to get into a bunch
of street fights with communists and social Democrats. During the
run up to the nineteen thirty one Hamburg elections, the
Nazis sent small motorized s S units around to assault
left wing party gatherings, and they were in cars they
could disappear before the cops would arrive. Hydric leads one
of these squads. He's good at this job, and his

(01:15:51):
shock troop actually gets a reputation of being particularly brutal.
Hamburg communists start calling him the Blonde Beast, so he's
he's This is how he really proves himself to the
other Nazis, you've gotta crack some fucking skulls in this period. Now,
Reinhard also knows that one of the best ways to
make yourself valuable in a new organization is to find
something that's not doing but it needs to do, and

(01:16:13):
then create that thing. For the s S. This is
the I'm not even gonna try the Security Service hereafter,
referred to as the s D. This is the s
S intelligence branch that Himler had been wanting to make
for a while. Hydric jumps on the task and it
starts off at the beginning. Hydrick is the only man
in the SD. The organization is just him and eventually
this will this will be tens of thousands of guys.

(01:16:34):
So like, that's kind of the how he grows this,
like himself alone in a room to the head of
security basically for all of Nazi Germany. Um. Now, again,
he's it's a pretty humble position at the time in reality,
but the fact that he's the head of something makes
him sound impressive enough that he's able to write to
lean his parents and ask for their blessing to go
forward with the wedding, and eventually they say yes. Hydrick

(01:16:57):
also impressed his new Nazi colleagues. His first big task
was to convince his superiors to give him the funding
to put together a group of s S men who
could unmask spies within the organization. This strike force would
be able to act quickly to get rid of threats.
He had an effect, created the first Nazi secret Police,
a fact that was discovered by a local newspaper which
described it as a fascist checa, which is like, that's

(01:17:19):
the Soviet secret police. Um. Yeah. Now the article named
Hydric as the brains of the operation. So he's he
starts to be known for what he's doing. Yeah, Yeah,
he's getting ink spelled about it. He's getting which means
maybe he's not actually all that great at the secret part,
but being in a party. At the end of nineteen one,

(01:17:39):
he had more than fifty officers in his SD. The
von Austin family finally gives him their approval and in
December of that year he and Lena are wed. Now
at the time they got hitched, the s s of
the essay were briefly illegal as the result of a
temporary crackdown by one of the Weimar governments. Like last
independent ish kind of leaders before Hitler's rise. Despite this,

(01:17:59):
the High Drick's wedding was conducted in uniform. Here's how
Lena described her husband's wedding in a letter to a
family member. The essay and s s dressed in white
shirts and black trousers, formed a guard of honor all
the way to the cemetery gate. The pastor was also
on our side and gave us a luther quotation as
a wedding motto. And though this world, with devil's filled
should threatened to undo us, we will not fear, for

(01:18:20):
God hath willed his truth to triumph through us. As
we marched out of the church, the organist played the
Horst Vessel song as we left the cemetery. Following the wedding,
several guards of honor were arrested by the police. So
that's the Hydrick wedding. Very Nazi wedding, Very Nazi. I mean,
you've got everything. You've got people dressed up all all
goth and ship, You've got a fucking uh it's they

(01:18:42):
got married at a church with a cemetery in it.
I mean these guys were really going for it, like
fucking style wise. Ye as a reward for his hard
work and for getting married him, they were promoted Reinhard
Hydrick to S. S. Storm Bunfeuder or Major, was just
seven days after his last promotion. The happy couple moved

(01:19:04):
in together, but they did not spend much time enjoying themselves.
Hydrick was a workaholic, constantly at his desk were out
in the street fighting for the party. His work ethic
only somewhat compensated for the fact that he had no
experience doing the kind of job that he'd gotten for himself.
Robert Gerwath writes the need for reforms to Hydric. Still
highly amateurist spy network in Germany became a parent in
February nineteen thirty two when the SD suddenly found itself

(01:19:26):
in a crisis, prompted by the arrest of one of
Hydrick's agents, who had tried to gather secret military information
from Navy command in wilhelms Chavin. And although the police
investigation did not reveal Hydrick's involvement in the case, he
nevertheless recognized the need to restructure his intelligence service in
order to avoid further embarrassment, and he he restructures it
in a way that seems to be fairly effective. By

(01:19:46):
June of nineteen thirty two, Hydrick's s D was the
best intelligence gathering operation in the Nazi Party. It's competition,
which had been the Essay Intelligence Division, is actually shut
down because his SS and his SD makes it unnecessar
Arry Hydrick gets promoted yet again, this time to colonel
and now he has eight full time employees. Um. You know,

(01:20:07):
things kind of go up and down for the Nazis
in this period. There's some dark times in late nineteen
thirty two when they get kind of beamed in an election,
But by this point Hitler was adjacent to power, and
you know, they he orchestrates his way into power by
nineteen thirty three, and he and his comrades succeed in
seize and control of the Weimar government through a trail
of factory that we detail in our non Nazi Bastards
Behind Hitler episode Reinhard. Hydrick was not a major player

(01:20:29):
in the Nazi seizure of power. By the time Hitler
wound up in control, he had established himself as the
chief of the Nazi Secret Police. Now that had been
an inter party secret police, but now the party was
the government and Reinhard Hydrick was about to find himself
in near total control of the German police. We're gonna
talk about that and what came after in part two,

(01:20:49):
but you know we're going to talk about right now
what you're plugables, plugs, plugs, plugs. Oh man, I got
so much to Polly. Well, if you love uh talking
about uh real bad Nazis, Uh, you're also gonna love
this HBO series of Sopranos. And if you you love

(01:21:11):
the Sopranos, check out Pot Yourself a Gun. That's a
podcast that me and Vince Mancini do. Uh, it's like
a Sopranos rewatch podcast. We also do a movie podcast
called The Fraud Cast f R O T C A
s T. Check that out. That's about not the Sopranos,
about movies and stuff. Yeah and yeah, follow me on
Instagram at Matt Leave Jokes at Matt Leave Jokes. All right, well,

(01:21:36):
friendos and enemies, enemies, Um, A lot of enemies listen
to this pod. A lot of enemies listen to this podcast.
Shout out to Reinhard Hydrick, fan of the pod, fan
of the pods from hell on his zooon, I love
you so evil. He has a zoom. Yeah great, the

(01:22:02):
level of evil that we can't even father. Hitler's there
on like an iPod original being like technology. It runs
on Linux. Yeah, I love this. Hitler as a Microsoft chauvinist.

(01:22:25):
Yeah yeah. That's the big split in the Nazi party
in Hell. It's between like the Microsoft and then like
the Strasser rights who go for Linux. Right, you got
a diamond joke. It only holds twelve songs and that's
all you need. Anything more? Is Vanity best MP three
play on the market. Alright, Well that's the end of

(01:22:49):
the episode. We'll be back on Thursday to just a
lot of genocide coming on Thursday. Very fun, all right, bam.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: The Young, Evil God of Death: Reinhard Heydrich