Part Three: Adolf Eichmann: Mr. Holocaust Himself

In Part 3, the Reich has invaded Russia and Eichmann is on a fact finding mission that will determine the course of the Holocaust.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards of podcasts
about the very worst people in all of history. We
are talking about Adolph Eichman this week and last week.
Last week we got through his childhood and his early
rise through the SD, which is the ss' Security Division,

(00:25):
to become the in his words, czar of the Jews
for Nazi Germany. And today, with our guest Joe Kasabian,
we're talking about what happens to Iikman as the war
moves towards its final phase.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
How you doing, Joe?

Speaker 1 (00:40):
Excited to hear about this guy. I think he's gonna
finally break good in this last two parts.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
I gotta say I'm not super optimistic that he's gonna
have a redemption arc. I dressed up for this episode
because I I was surprised last time, so now I'm
just wearing a shirt. This has all pain.

Speaker 1 (00:59):
Yeah, I'm treating this like people were treating like the
second half of and Or, where they were hoping their
favorite like Monster Imperial characters, like oh, this guy's going
to totally turn out good at the end, right, Yeah,
this is our moment like that for Iikman.

Speaker 2 (01:14):
Yeah, most Nazis are not in fact, the one from
the Pianist No No.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
Where we left off in part two, he had gone
on a fact finding mission to eastern Europe, and the
fairly early stages of Operation Barbarossa were the first parts
of what we now know as the actual killing stage
of the Holocaust began, which was a mix of you know,
gas bands showing up outside of various villages and Eindset's
group and units just doing mass shootings. Well, Iikman's watching

(01:47):
all that, and he's taking notes, and he's figuring out,
how do you actually kill a lot of like a
shitload of people, like more people, like as many more
people than would have died in a war a generation
or two ago. We've got to like figure out to
get rid of while we're fighting a war.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
How do we do that? Right?

Speaker 1 (02:04):
And all of this is preparation for a big old
meeting they're going to have called the Vonse Conference in
early nineteen forty two. So that's where we are right now,
And yeah, that's what we're hurtling towards at the moment.
And the problem the Nazis are dealing with as the
war in the East starts to turn against them is
they've got a logistical hurdle on their hands. They have

(02:25):
captured way more Jews than they know how to handle,
and they have no real process for dealing with them.
If you think back to the numbers we were talking
about in the first parts of this series, they're dealing
with a couple one hundred thousand people at a time.
As you know, they take over Austria, as they take
over Czechoslovakia, and then you know more when they take
over Poland. But now they've captured this huge chunk of

(02:48):
what had been the Soviet Union. They got millions of
people on their hands, right, and these earlier decisions they
had to make about what should we do? Do we
deport these people? Do we find a place for them?
The decision moves towards like all we can do is
annihilate them, right, But we we have a limit in
our war material and a limit in how many soldiers

(03:08):
we can have actually kill people.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
And not to mention, like how many people are willing
to drive insane, right and drink themselves to death by
turning them into executioners.

Speaker 1 (03:20):
That's a major problem for the SS at this stage.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
Right.

Speaker 1 (03:24):
So many of the sources that you'll find on Eichmann
will point out that he never really wrote policy, right,
he was just an implementation guy. And this is accurate
technically in some ways, but I don't think it is
in a way that matters, right.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
I think policy wonk.

Speaker 1 (03:41):
Yeah, he really kind of was right. He's not the
author of a bunch of stuff, but he's like, he's
part of the process of authoring a lot of things.
And he does help create policies, particularly like where the
treatment of people with partial Jewish as history is concerned.
And he's got this foundational role in how the Nazi
state interacts with captured Jewish communities and deports them.

Speaker 2 (04:02):
Right.

Speaker 1 (04:02):
And that's he's not literally writing out policies all the time,
but he is effectively making policy in all but name. Now,
that said, he doesn't give the order to start the Holocaust, right,
that's obviously not his call. That happens way above his head,
which begs the question, then who does right you would
expect in an organization as hierarchical as the Nazis, there's

(04:23):
someone we could trace to like and this is the
moment the order was given. Right, We don't actually, we
don't directly have that, right. We know Eichmann helps organize
and facilitate the von Se conference where it's planned, and
this is on orders of his boss, Reinhardt Heidrich, and
Heydrich takes his orders, you know, from Himmler and from Hitler.
But we don't have any record of Himmler or Hitler saying, Okay,

(04:43):
it's time to do the Holocaust now, right, because that's
just not the way any of this works, right.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
And man man has that led to a lot of
problems and then Holocaust denial and Hitler rehabilitation and right,
you fucking name it.

Speaker 1 (04:56):
Yeah, we have no evidence of Hitler saying we've got
to do that, and that kind of feeds into at
the time, a lot of people in Nazi Germany who
were often annoyed or even horrified by aspects of the regime,
by things the s S and the SD did, right,
would be like, well, but Hitler clearly doesn't know about this, right,
like he's got he can't have any idea this is
going on, and this is something Hitler, you know, this

(05:19):
is the smart way to play shit. As a totalitarian dictator,
you don't want your name attached to everything the regime
is doing, especially shit that's not going to work out
or that's more experimental. You need plausible deniability, right, even
if you're Hitler.

Speaker 2 (05:32):
Yeah, not every tyrant or dictator is going to have
a camp called like the Hitler Camp for undesirables.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
Right, right, that's that's just bad business. And the Nazi
regime again, there's this attitude and this really is something
that causes people who even aren't trying to do Nazi
apologia to do apologia for regular people under the Nazi system,
there's this errand idea that like, well, normal people had
no choice but to go along with what the regime

(06:00):
has doing. It was so dangerous. Any degree of resistance
would have gotten you killed, would have gotten your family
wiped out. At no point in the history of the
Nazi regime was that true.

Speaker 2 (06:08):
Right.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
There were no no, no members of the Nazi state
and like were ever executed or punished for just refusing
to take part in the Holocaust.

Speaker 2 (06:18):
Right, Most of them were out, yes, and people could
take it, right, Like the Nazi reserve police battalions had
to volunteer, yes, to do the Holocaust by bullets, and
they overwhelmingly volunteered.

Speaker 1 (06:33):
Yeah, And people who said no didn't have their families
killed or themselves killed.

Speaker 2 (06:38):
Right, they didn't even get demoted, they just got moved
somewhere else.

Speaker 1 (06:41):
So much choice was involved and being part of the
worst aspects of the regime, and there was in fact
internal criticism inside Nazi Germany, and the regime even buckled
under that criticism at times. When word of the T
four euthanasia program broke out, which was basically the gassing
of you know, to say, people by the Nazi state,

(07:01):
there was backlash among German civilians, and that backlash was
significant enough that it made Hitler number one. They backed
away publicly on the program, and it made Hitler wary
in the future of putting further policies of mass murder.
In writing, and I want to quote from an article
by Kevin Sweeney in the journal Constructing the Past. Here,
between nineteen forty and nineteen forty one, the German people's

(07:23):
negative reaction became increasingly vocal and vehement, culminating in Hitler
being openly jeered by a crowd watching mentally challenged patients
being loaded onto a trade at a rail station in Hoff,
Bavaria in nineteen forty one. Ultimately, this negative public reaction
to the T four program in Hitler's sanctioning of it,
bolstered by denunciations from Catholic and Protestant church leaders, forced
Hitler to publicly cancel the program in August of nineteen

(07:45):
forty one, though it continued in secret until nineteen forty five.
So again people yelled at Hitler over this and he
backed down, right, Like, that's such a critical part of
the story of how this regime worked.

Speaker 2 (07:58):
Do you also think this is something that is batted
around a bit in my field of research, where it's
just like, this is the one that was taking average
Germans family members away as well. Yes, everybody was connected
to it.

Speaker 1 (08:12):
Yes, And there were other times where that happened, Right.
There was a moment where they started deporting people who
had like one Jewish relative but weren't like religiously Jewish
and were married into you know, gentile German families. They
were protests, and they had to publicly back off of
that because Germans were like, well, but these guys aren't
really Jewish, right, what are you doing here?

Speaker 3 (08:30):
You know?

Speaker 1 (08:31):
Yeah, Like, moments like that happened, and the state was
always conscious of how far they were pushing people, right,
which meant that the state could be pushed now because
of all of this, there's not a clear order to like, Okay,
Hitler signed this paper saying kill everybody, right, and this
has led even within it. And again, these are none
of these people are what you'd call denialists. But there

(08:53):
was a debate for a very long time, like half
a century between historians who specialized in the Holocaust between
what are generally called intentionalists and functionalists. And the intentionalists
argue that Hitler personally instigated the final solution. The functionalists
argued that it arose naturally as a result of the
structure of the Third Reich. Now this debate is mostly done.

(09:15):
We don't really this is like I think people will
talk about in terms of the history of how we
looked at this. There's not much argument here anymore. A
preponderance of evidence that exists today proves that Hitler that
basically aspects of both of these are very true.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
Right, Yeah, I was actually going to point that out.
There's more, there's a third camp, which I generally fall into, yeah,
which is like Hitler ordered it. However, a lot of
it arose from the structure. It was not the state. Yeah,
both of the did it would have happened.

Speaker 1 (09:45):
Yeah, Hitler premeditated on the slaughter of European jewelry. And
also the functionalists have some very good points. One piece
of evidence for the intentionalists that often get cited that
is important when we talk about Hitler's premeditation is an
interview Hitler gave in nineteen twenty to a journalist where
he said, once I really am in power, my first
and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews,

(10:05):
as soon as they.

Speaker 2 (10:06):
Have the power to do so.

Speaker 1 (10:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
Yeah, And he's like, I.

Speaker 1 (10:09):
Will have the gallows built in rows and the Jews
will be hanged indiscriminately until all of Germany has been
completely cleansed of Jews. That's pretty hard. That's like not
you know, we can state that is pretty clear evidence
of intent, right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:21):
And mine Komf also kind of really lays it out there.

Speaker 1 (10:25):
Yeah, Yeah, there's not a lot, there's there's a it's
hard to argue he didn't say regularly what he planned
to do, right.

Speaker 2 (10:32):
It's what he's known for, it's his bit.

Speaker 1 (10:35):
It's his whole thing. And obviously the fact that he
said all this doesn't mean Hitler wrote out the plan
for Auschwitz or ever. Like, he's not the guy. He
didn't tell everyone, Okay, we're gonna do an Auschwitz and
here's how it's gonna work. Right, He was like, we
got to kill these guys. Figure it out. I'm Hitler,
I got Hitler stuff to do, right, Like, there's a
lot of a lot of tasks on my hand. You
guys locked down how we're going to handle this, right,

(10:58):
And there were always other possibility up until you know,
things start to turn for them in the East. It's
not a guarantee that mass slaughter is the only thing
that we've done for all of these captured people. I
think there was a point in which something like the
Madagascar plan, if that itself was never really feasible, could
have been done for some amount of people, right.

Speaker 2 (11:16):
But at a.

Speaker 1 (11:17):
Certain point, the only thing they were going to do
was was genocide. And Hitler had repeatedly countenanced that and
urged that throughout his career. In nineteen thirty nine, he
told the Czech Ford and Minister, we are going to
destroy the Jews. They are not going to get away
with what they did. On November ninth, nineteen eighteen, the
Day of Reckoning has come. Eichmann himself would later claim
under interrogation that Reinhard Heidrich had told him about plans

(11:40):
for the Holocaust as early as August nineteen forty one.
And this is Heydrich talking to an interrogator. The war
with the Soviet Union began in June nineteen forty one.
I believe it was two months later that Heydrich sent
for me. I reported he began with a little speech,
and then the fearer has ordered physical extermination of the Jews.
Then Heydrich said, go and see ss ober group and

(12:00):
fuer otto Globotschnik. The fur has already given him instructions.
And you know that doesn't mean that's exactly what happened,
because Eichman lies under interrogation. But there's a good amount
of evidence to suggest that's pretty much what happened. Right,
we haven't talked. We'll talk about Globoschnik one of these days.
He's a really interesting Nazi, And from what we know

(12:20):
of Hydrich and of him, this is pretty feasible, right,
that something like this is basically what went down. There's
a lot of outside kind of evidence that this is
pretty close to what happened.

Speaker 2 (12:29):
Those ideas definitely would have flowed through hydrich.

Speaker 1 (12:32):
Yes yes, through hydric and probably through globotschnik too, in
a similar way to how it's described here. And Bettina
Stangneth basically argues that Eichman was given the job of
planning the vonse conference, nothing to coordinate all the different
government branches. He'd played a role in the genocide because
he'd made himself the Reich's gopher in anything related to
the Jewish question. He's just the guy you reach for

(12:53):
when you're like, well, we need someone to pull all
of these things we've been doing together and plan the
execution of the Holocaust. You've got Eikman, right. You already
know he knows how to do this kind of shit,
so you pull for him. Stengneth writes when others were
at a loss, he was the man they called on.
For example, a professor at Strasburg University was adamant he
wanted the schools of Jewish Bolshevik commissars to add to

(13:15):
a collection of skeletons, despite the fact that they were
still alive. And Eikman's the guy who gets pulled in
to do that. He's just already been the kind of
we need someone to handle this unpleasant implementation that's going
to involve killing a lot of people, right, Well, iikmans,
who does that?

Speaker 2 (13:29):
You know? Of course that's a collection that existed at
a German univers That's a German university's collection, right, I
mean recently a German university I forget which one, maybe
it was Salzburg discovered Oh we still have all these
boxes of human skulls right from the Herrero and Nama
jediside just like oops, oops, yeah, oops skulls.

Speaker 1 (13:51):
Look, you don't want to go too deep into the
into the archive section of any German or British university
or any American university than a certain age.

Speaker 2 (14:01):
Honestly, I should, I should point out due to my
family's land deeds. Or Turkish university, yeah, or Turkish universites.

Speaker 1 (14:08):
Very few old universities do you want. And honestly, the
Vatican sub basements, we don't really want to get into
those too deep either.

Speaker 2 (14:15):
Those stay locked. Yeah, those.

Speaker 1 (14:18):
Us, Yeah, there's some there's some fucking first Indiana Jones movie.
Shit if you go deep enough in that. So as
the death camps spun up to full operation in the
years following Von Say Eichmann was set to the task
of organizing the registration, collection, and eventual deportation or evacuation
of captive Jewish populations to the camps. By this point,

(14:41):
he was highly placed enough and the job was big
enough that he often sent out trusted subordinates to handle
the on the groundwork for him, involving himself directly if
he felt their progress was too slow, and acting as
a wrecking ball whenever his people encountered resistance from local
government officials. And this resistance is usually not we have
a moral issue with what's happening. Sometimes it's actually later
in the war it's a mix of that, or they're

(15:02):
just worried that they'll get blamed for it because they
could see where things are coming. But a lot of
the times it's more, well, we need supplies for other things,
right Like, we have issues that are a bigger priority
to us in the general government of Poland or whatever
than the annihilation of these people, And why are we
focusing on this? And Eichman will come in and say,
fuck off, this is the priority, right Like. That's kind

(15:24):
of part of his job, and one of his personal
obsessions is ensuring that no individual Jews are exempted from
the final solution. This is more of an issue than
you might expect. It was often said that every Nazi
had their good Jew, or even recognized a handful of
good Jews that ought to be spared. And in fact
this extends to Hitler, as I bring up on this

(15:46):
show every now and then, he interviewed personally to save
his childhood doctor, a Jewish man who he viewed as
a decent person.

Speaker 2 (15:52):
Right, and his personal driver, Emil Maurice.

Speaker 1 (15:55):
Yeah right, there were guys, right and ladies right that
every even a lot of the worst of the Nazis had,
they would be like, well, this, this person should be spared.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
Eichmann.

Speaker 1 (16:05):
One of the things that makes him noteworthy is he
doesn't have these people, right, and he actually sees it
as his personal job to make sure none of the
like every even the worst of the ss are soft
towards a Jew here and there. I have to make
sure those people don't escape the drag net as much
as possible.

Speaker 2 (16:21):
Right, that's supposed to be more evil than the most
evil men.

Speaker 1 (16:24):
Hitler, Yeah, that's part of his job here. I've got
to be harder even than the boss. You know, Hitler's
you know he's too soft. He could be soft on
this issue, take up the slack. Yeah, you know, Hitler
real soft of the Jewish issue. Yeah, yeah, at least
softer than he's willing to be. And this is a
thing that comes down from Hydrich to Heydrick's very much
similar in this attitude, right, So, and again it's kind

(16:48):
of when we talk about his complicity. He doesn't order
any of this, but his job is to make sure
it's as total a victory for the Nazis as he
can manage. And while his role here is important, we
shouldn't neglect a highlight other major figures behind the final solution,
including Aikman's childhood friend Ernst Kaltenbrunner, as well as Heinrich Mueller,
Theodore Daniker, Dieter Weslinsky, Franz Novak, and a bunch of

(17:10):
other young men in Hitler's SSNSD. And it's really worth
emphasizing how young a lot of the people doing this are.
That the Holocaust is committed primarily from an implementation stage
by very young, ambitious men. An article for the National
World War II Museum by doctor Jason Dawesy notes of
Eikman's peers quote. None of them had reached the age

(17:32):
of thirty five when World War two ended. They exhibited
a terrifying combination of attention to detail and steadfast commitment
to the core ideas of Nazism. Reynhard Heidrich himself, Eikman's boss,
was thirty eight when he was killed by Czech partisans
in June of nineteen forty two, just a few months
after the Vonse Conference. We've already covered Hydrich in other episodes,

(17:52):
and there's not enough time in these ones to discuss
all of Eikman's subordinates and colleagues, the guys at his level.
But we should talk about one of his men in
order to kind of tell the story of several others, right,
because I don't want it to look like I never
wanted to be like a great man thing where Eikman's
the only one kind of at this level of importance.
There are other guys who are at similar levels, and
one of them is his subordinate, Theodore Daniker. Right, And

(18:16):
we'll talk a little bit about Daneker, both because he's
a monster worth knowing and because his story tells us
something important about how Eikman operated. Daniker was born in
March of nineteen thirteen in Tubingen, southwest Germany. His father
was a member of the comfortable middle class, as a
lot of these guys are, and was a businessman until
he died in nineteen eighteen fighting for the Kaiser. Theodore

(18:37):
was raised by his mom and he grows up number
one angry about the war, believing in the stabbed in
the back myth like all of these guys do. And
other than that, he's kind of mediocre, right. His family
was used to being more comfortable than they are after
the war. He wants to do better. He feels like
he's owed it, but he's not very good at anything,

(18:58):
like eichmansocre student, right, he makes no real impact on
his professors, and there's no signs that he's going to
go on to have a really significant career. He's just
kind of mid. Right. These are all very young, very
mid guys who are given in their only chance to
be excellent is with the Nazi Party.

Speaker 2 (19:18):
Man, that is unfortunate. We need some kind of jobs
program for dudes who are solidly mid.

Speaker 1 (19:27):
It's this thing I come up with with, like guys
like Ben Shapiro, like all of these dudes in the
right wing media who try to make it in the
Hollywood and can't because they're mediocre. We need like a
fake Hollywood where we like, we give these guys fake
fans and let them pretend like they've got a TV.
This is what we can use AI for, just generate
their shitty scripts.

Speaker 2 (19:46):
Robert, this already exists. It's the Hallmark Channel. It's the
Hallmark Channel. Thank god.

Speaker 1 (19:51):
We'd be in so much worse shape if it weren't
for the Hallmark Channel.

Speaker 2 (19:54):
Yeah, like Ben Shapiro could be cranking out or like
the Dannekers of today, big balls who works at Dose. Yeah, Yeah,
to just be just be cranking out the world's worst
Christmas movies year round for a Hallmark.

Speaker 1 (20:07):
Yeah, and we use AI to give a bunch of
fake fans so they feel like they're really making it.
And yeah, I mean on a serious level, it is important,
you understand. People always a lot of people get this
wrong when they act like, oh, well, the Nazis were this.
They came out of the middle class, or they came
out of like the poor in the working class, these
people who had endured privation and that was you know,

(20:27):
there's there were these real legitimate you know fear and
anger of this this group of people who were really
suffering that fed into Nazism. Some of those guys existed
and part of this guy Hitler was that kind of guy.
Hitler really did suffer. He had a terrible early life, right.

Speaker 2 (20:41):
He had a shitty fucking life. Dog shit, that's very
few Nazis, right. Unfortunately, that shitty life did not kill him. Yeah,
Hitler was that guy. But like his inner circle, his
the people at surroundam absolutely. Word, there's like, now, a
lot of these guys were young, like you said, and
a lot of them were mid.

Speaker 1 (20:59):
Fucking Gary was like famous and kind of well off, right,
Like a lot of guys were like that.

Speaker 2 (21:04):
Yeah, a lot of these dudes are doctors, yes, doctors, lawyers,
you know, PhDs, Yeah, fucking engineers, lawyers. He's surrounded himself
by Germany's elite.

Speaker 1 (21:15):
Eichmann comes from oil and gas, like his dad was
comfortable from oil and.

Speaker 2 (21:20):
Gas money, right.

Speaker 1 (21:21):
Daniker comes from like a comfortable, middle class business owning background.

Speaker 2 (21:25):
Right.

Speaker 1 (21:26):
These are not guys who are poor, but they are
guys who are not doing as well as they think
they ought to be doing. And they blame that on
whoever's convenient, which turns out to be the Jews and
the communists, right, So that's Danni.

Speaker 2 (21:37):
They would own a like they would own like a
Mitchibhi dealership today, right right, not a great MITSUBC dealership,
but like.

Speaker 1 (21:44):
An education dealership, but not a great great right, Like.

Speaker 2 (21:49):
They don't own a Ford. They don't own like a
Chevy dealership. They're like, we have to look family, we
have to settle for selling. I don't know, evil lancers
or fucking whatever.

Speaker 1 (21:58):
Yeah, they're they're spokesman is like a fucking amateur baseball star.
Like it's just not that good. So speaking of amateur baseball,
don't watch amateur baseball listen to the rest of this podcast.

Speaker 3 (22:13):
Or watch amateur baseball while listening to this podcast.

Speaker 2 (22:16):
No, absolutely don't do that. You'll turn into a fascist.
Now these ads from Mitchubishi.

Speaker 1 (22:31):
We're back. So Theodore Danaker comes up kind of mitted everything.
When he's a young adult, he starts working as a
textile dealer, and like Eikman, he goes to a trade
school because his grades aren't good enough for him to
do anything else, and he feels pulled to far right
politics from a young age, like Eikman for a similar motivation.
The Nazi Party offers him a chance to remake himself

(22:51):
in a new regime that he wouldn't have been able
to earn a place of similar kind of importance in
the wat Weimar Republic. In nineteen thirty two, he joins
the Nazi Party at age nineteen. At age twenty one,
in nineteen thirty four, Daniker joins the SS, initially serving
in the VT or the SS dispositional Corps. These were
essentially political soldiers at the direct command of Adolf Hitler,

(23:14):
except in times of war, in which case they'd be
integrated into the army. This is the unit that eventually
becomes the waffen SS. Right, it isn't that yet, but
he's in the proto WAFFENSS. That's Daniker. Like Eichman, Daniker's
first real job for the regime is helping to guard
an early concentration camp. In his case, it's Columbia House

(23:34):
in Berlin. Now, this was the only official SS camp
in Berlin, and it was built out of an empty
prison in nineteen thirty three, and like most wild concentration camps,
which is kind of what the first camps are called,
where They're like, we've got this empty government building or
school or whatever. We'll just throw some political prisoners in there.
We'll torture them.

Speaker 2 (23:52):
Right. Columbia House is noteworthy for being where lawyer Hans
Litten dies. Right.

Speaker 1 (23:56):
We've talked about him in the past. He's the guy
who puts Hitler on trial. So it's that kind of place,
and it is. Columbia House has been described by one
historian and camp survivor as an agony house and the
side of quote perhaps the ghastliest atrocities imaginable. It acted
as an SS testing ground for promising young officers. As
historian Reinhard Burbeck noted, quote, this was not just a

(24:19):
place where people were terrorized and tortured, but a school
of torture. The people who had been commanders after Columbia
later turned to commanders of other concentration camps at Bukenwald,
at Saxonhausen, at Majdenek, and Auschwitz. So once you had
gone through concentration camp Columbia, apparently this was the perverse
career step in order to stay in the SS and
become a commander elsewhere.

Speaker 2 (24:38):
Right, oh god, it was a concentration camp trade school yes,
And this is also important.

Speaker 1 (24:43):
We talk about how this is like less on the
intentionalist side of things, right, and more on the other
side of things, where you're like, well, they started building
this system where you would train people up in how
a concentration camp is to work. And once you've committed
the kind of crimes you're committing at Columbia House, you
don't go back. You only do worse and worse stuff,
and you don't always have to be ordered to do

(25:04):
that worse stuff.

Speaker 2 (25:05):
Right.

Speaker 1 (25:05):
You are, naturally, when you get put in charge somewhere,
going to be even more extreme than you were at
Columbia House, because that's just how this kind of thing works, right.

Speaker 2 (25:13):
Your humanity is sanded away. Even if even if the
people who started off as like, you know, prison guards
say what you will about them and their ethics and morality,
by the time they leave this place they're just dead
eyed psychos.

Speaker 1 (25:26):
There's nothing left of humanity in them. Right, And that's
important too. No one necessarily orders that I want you
to do twenty percent worse than Columbia House. You just
are that person by this point, right, And so that
happens naturally.

Speaker 2 (25:38):
Nobody's tracking fingernail metrics.

Speaker 1 (25:41):
Right, right, Yeah, it's like how many fingernails did you
pull out this week?

Speaker 2 (25:44):
Right?

Speaker 1 (25:44):
You don't have to do that anymore. So eventually Daniker
gets transferred over to the SS Security Office or the
SD where Eikman works, and he winds up working under
Eichman at the Department of Jewish Affairs in nineteen thirty seven.
That same year, he writes the report urging the complete
removal of Jews from political life and the Reich in
order to bring Germany's Jewish question closer to its final solution.

(26:06):
In this paper, he attacks the Gestapo for being too
mild in their application of force and insufficiently committed to
anti Semitism. So like, he's this guy where he's like, wow,
the Gestapo really soft on the Jews. Got we gotta,
we gotta get these people under control.

Speaker 2 (26:21):
You know, I'm really sick of our local Gestapo being
so soft and gunnly, the woke Gestapo. These de I
policies have ruined the Gestapo.

Speaker 1 (26:31):
He is that guy, though, right, And that's you know,
that's why he's the kind of guy who becomes Aikman's
you know, second effectively fuck. In nineteen thirty eight, after
the anschlus Daniker goes with Iikman to Vienna to help
expel thousands of Jews from their homes and confiscate their
possessions for the state, and he brings this new expertise
with him to Poland. He goes to Paris in nineteen

(26:51):
forty after the German victory and he helps oversee the
French police in their roundup of the Jewish population of Paris.
Now it's not widely known or discussed that some of
the most important early perpetrators of the Holocaust were local police.

Speaker 2 (27:04):
All over Europe. And these are not German police. These
are by and large these.

Speaker 1 (27:08):
Are French police, right, some of whom had been part
of French far right parties right.

Speaker 2 (27:13):
And Dutch police. Don't forget my local.

Speaker 1 (27:16):
Police police, right, But they're local cops, and most of
them hadn't been super involved in the far right, you know.
They were cops before anything else. And like basically one
hundred percent of cops and basically every society, their identity
as police matters more to them than the morality of
whatever actions they are asked to take. Right, So you

(27:37):
can find arguments that French police helped to shield and
this is true. There are individual French police who helped
to shield and hide hundreds of Jews from the Nazis. Right,
there are individual French cops who act heroically to protect
people targeted by the SS. But modern historiography has made
it very clear, and I would say unarguable that as
an institution, French law enforcement was overwhelmingly a willing tool

(27:59):
of the Nazi genocide in late Yeah. Yeah, there's just
no real argument against that. In late twenty eighteen, historian
Laurent Joli published The State against the Jews, which compiled
previously unknown documents about French police and government collaboration and
the rounding up of tens of thousands of Jews. Per
an article in France twenty four quote, Jolie told AFP

(28:20):
that Paris police had one of the most sophisticated systems
in the world to classify foreigners. Some one hundred and
twenty five thousand Jews were recorded in a role based
on the census the Nazis demanded in nineteen forty one,
which Jolie has said curiously remained unknown until my research
because it got buried, right, of course it did. In
VC France, the authorities were so eager to curry favor

(28:42):
with their new Nazi masters that they began rounding up
and handing over Jews without being asked. Per Joli, the
Germans were not asking for the Jews who lived in
the VC controlled part of France to be handed to them.
V she was always trying to demonstrate this goodwill towards
the Germans. In other words, the French police in VC
France create a problem for the Nazis because they're handing
over more Jews than the Nazis can process. And they're like, guys, Jesus, like,

(29:05):
we're the Nazis, but.

Speaker 2 (29:06):
Come on call me out here. I mean, that reminds
me of early on in the Holocaust, when the Gestapo
will put out effectively it was like a hotline to
regular Germans to rat out people who were hiding Jews
or people they thought were Jews. And so many people
were ratting out their neighbors that the Gestapo had to
kindly ask them to fucking stop because they couldn't handle

(29:28):
it all. God.

Speaker 1 (29:29):
And now, thankfully there's no SS analog in the US
today that would put out a request for regular Americans
to report their neighbors, you know, sequestering undocumented foreigners. Right, yeah, weird,
how that's always what it is, right, weird, how that's
what it is in Paris.

Speaker 2 (29:44):
You know, Remember, folks, Tiranny doesn't work without the assistance
of your friendly neighbors.

Speaker 1 (29:49):
Yeah, and yeah, the cops and local government officials and yeah,
there's the guy who lives next to you. Dan Aker's
job in Paris was to push French authorities to arrest
and deport ever greater numbers of Jews, both foreign reds
us whod fled other areas the Nazis had advanced on
or native French people. Some were told that these deportees
would be taken to a new Jewish state being established
by the Nazis, essentially a variation of the Reservation Plan,

(30:12):
although this was known to be false by with half
a brain. There had been ample reporting before the German
invasion about the early stages of the kz Or concentration
camp system. The first major arrest and deportation of French
Jews in World War II was the Green Ticket roundup.
Eikman and Daneker both helped to organize this scheme, by
which almost seven thousand foreign born Jews living in France

(30:34):
were sent a summons by mail ordering them to visit
a local immigration office for review of their visas. Anyone
who showed up, as around thirty seven hundred men did,
was arrested and deported immediately. Now, again, you'd never see
anything like this whereby people who are attempting to maintain
their legal status even though they their foreign born people
who have immigrated would be asked to show up at

(30:54):
the immigration office and then arrested as soon as they
show up trying to comply with the law. That would
never happen here, right, you.

Speaker 2 (31:00):
Know, thankfully not. I can't think of any anything that's
happening totally differently or before.

Speaker 1 (31:06):
Yeah, it would be like, really really wrong of me
to just suggest that the Department of Homeland Security is
the American SS based on something like this, because they've
never done anything like this, right, you know, ICE hasn't, right.

Speaker 2 (31:16):
Yeah, And ICE is certainly not the Gestapo. They would
do things that are Gestapo. S. No, they're not the
Department of Jewish Affairs, right, There's.

Speaker 1 (31:24):
Not no similarity between these organizations, right, right, exactly because
we haven't started death camps yet, just like the Nazis
had it in nineteen forty, right.

Speaker 2 (31:33):
I feel like Robert, we can really trust a guy
who wears a mask and snatches people into an unmarked van.

Speaker 1 (31:39):
Yes, if I'm remembering properly from my Disney movies as
a kid, the child catcher is a good guy.

Speaker 2 (31:47):
Oh Man.

Speaker 1 (31:48):
So despite this success and the success of Operation Green Ticket,
France lags behind the arbitrary deportation quota that Eikman's office
had set for them. It was Daniker's office to motivate
French authorities. Eichmann came to consider Daniker almost as his
right arm, someone he could drop into a new territory
and trust to centralize the system by which Jews were
rounded up and deported and leave it in such a

(32:09):
way that whoever followed would be able to continue operating
the system with these because it runs on its own right.
That's a huge part of it. You leave as little
up to chance as possible, You leave as little up
to the mercy of individual members of the government as possible,
all of whom are soft to some groups of people
you want to get rid of. That's why you build
a system that has no softness left inside it. Right
that right up for the National World War Two Museum

(32:32):
notes Danniker was a completely modern form of perpetrator, really
unknown before the twentieth century. The deportation specialist.

Speaker 2 (32:40):
Right, Oh, he's Tom Holman.

Speaker 1 (32:42):
He's Tom Holman. Right, this is how modern genocide is done.
The primary perpetrators are not the guys who just shoot
a bunch of people, right, they're the deportation specialists. That's
who does a modern genocide. Is a deportation specialist.

Speaker 2 (32:56):
Right. Not to keep linking these two things together, but
when like, one of the things that sticks out to
me is in the book Ordinary Men, Yeah, one of
the things that sticks out is the gerbid Reserve police
officers were just normal guys who took this job because
they they wanted a pension and benefits. And then again,

(33:16):
they were voluntarily doing this that they were told multiple
times they could back out whenever they wanted, but they're
there pulling the trigger. Yeah, And then you got this
fucking guy.

Speaker 1 (33:25):
And there's this this argument you get it around ordinary
men too, about like, well, it's wrong to look at
these as like the banality of evil, because these guys
weren't banal. The things they did weren't banal, the kinds
of crimes they committed, No But that's that's the point,
is that that kind of hideous, mask off nightmare evil
is lurking behind your neighbor's eyes. If he gets the opportunity,

(33:46):
if it'll benefit him enough, right, if it'll get him
that Mitsubishi dealership. You never know, quite just like you
never know which what motherfucking guy who like seems kind
of lame and boring right now could be a hero
when actually called upon to shelter people from RZI. I'm
thinking about that judge husband and wife cop couple in
New Mexico who were like destroying evidence to protect these

(34:08):
undocumented friends of theirs who are now being tried. Where
it's like you would never guess that these people would
have been a heroes in a time like this, but
goddamn it, you can't look at them anyway else. Right,
And in the same manner, some guy who would you
would never guess is anything but the dude who lives
next to you could become an absolute monster if he
was given the opportunity, if it would advance him personally enough.
And you don't know until the chips are down, who's

(34:28):
going to be what? Right, There's hints sometimes, but you
can't know perfectly cool stuff.

Speaker 2 (34:35):
Just to be safe, I say, if you've ever seen
them shooting a video in the cab of their pickup
truck at that upward angle, probably on the bad side
of things, Yeah, you just stay the funk away from there, right.
Man Danaker would have loved filming himself drunk in his
car ranting about movies. God, they would love that so much. Yeah, yelly,
like my wife left me.

Speaker 3 (34:59):
So.

Speaker 1 (34:59):
Historian Robert Gerwath describes Daniker as one of the quote young, educated,
self confident, and ideologically committed men Heydrich actively courted for
the Jewish desk. These men would develop the actual methodology
by which Hitler's dream of a jew free Europe might
be made a reality. To continue with another quote from
that article, Daniker utilized in an array of weapons, the pen,
the telephone, and the typewriter. Besides researching and working behind

(35:21):
a desk, Daniker negotiated, cajoled and berated officials, coordinated with
the Reich Transportation Ministry to secure rolling stock, and worked
at the SSSD, Gestapo and German armed forces to ensure
the efficient and orderly removal of massive numbers of Jewish men, women,
and children in the spring of nineteen forty two, Daniker
visited the camp at Auschwitz Berkanau. This was the same

(35:42):
month that it transferred from being primarily a labor camp
to being a straight up death camp, and Daniker is
one of the very first people to see Auschwitz in
full operation. He reports back to his boss about it
and he immediately sets to work feeding a group of
eleven hundred French Jews into the factory of death. This
annihilation acts as a proof of concept. Right, this is
the desth star test firing of Auschwitz, right where you're like, yep, okay,

(36:04):
we can, we can get rid of people at the
speed we need to. Here, Daniker reports back to Iikman
about how Auschwitz is working, and Iikman could not have
been happier. So he and Daniker spend several weeks planning
a more ambitious operation to wipe out a substantial chunk
of the French Jewish population. They call this Operation spring Wind.
It had been initially scheduled for July fourteenth, but that

(36:26):
was the Steel Day, and the French collaborators insisted it
would be bad form to commit genocide on a holiday,
So the operation is ultimately executed by friend right, we'll
do this, but not on but still day. Right, we
can't do a holocaust on b Steel Day.

Speaker 2 (36:41):
That's like the most fucking French way of like, no,
you don't understand.

Speaker 1 (36:45):
We have the steel work, everyone's got the day off work. Look,
we'll do a holocaust, but not on our day off.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
Right. If you if you make all the cops go
in and do the genocide on the holiday, they're gonna
riot and they're gonna rights. It's something that happens here.
They can't do this.

Speaker 1 (37:01):
So the operation is ultimately executed by French police in
July sixteenth and seventeenth. They break into houses and they
rip whole families out of their beds, arresting thirteen thousand
Parisian Jews for deportation. The police insisted in public facing
communications that these people were mostly quote foreign and stateless,
so they're verrely people. Course of course, of course, suck yeah.

(37:24):
Operation spring Wind was the brainchild of a French VCH
collaborator named Luis d'arkier. He had fought in World War
One and become a radical far right activist in the thirties,
actively participating in the nineteen thirty four far right riot
that was seen by some at the time as an
attempted coup deetas he had become a journalist largely to
write articles drumming up anti Semitic hate among his fellow Frenchmen.

(37:46):
When the Nazis took over, they made him Commissar General
for Jewish Affairs, basically the vch counterpart to Eikman. D'arkier
had suggested to denaturalize all Jews who'd acquired French citizenship
since nineteen twenty seven, and he also suggested the mass
arrest of stateless Jews, largely because it provided a legal
coding for the general expulsion of Jews. This worked. Danniker

(38:08):
himself noted that once this shoddy justification was in place,
the cops were happy to help the SS. The French police,
despite a few considerations of pure form, have only to
carry out orders, right as long as it's like surprising, Yeah,
that's just how these guys work.

Speaker 2 (38:22):
That's how cops are, right, and that's how cops are
and France was wildly anti Semitic. Yeah, for people who
don't know. One of my co hosts and producers on
my show did he speaks French and did research on
like French Officers magazines in the French military a little
bit after this time in Algeria. Yeah, and like half

(38:46):
half of the titles are like Lee anti Semitism, Yeah,
like shit like that, Like yeah, you know, oh, I'm
just subscribed to Anti Semitism Weekly. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:57):
But by the way, folks watched The Battle of Algiers.
Great movie. Yeah, that's all I'll say about it for now.
So Daniker's role in France came to an end shortly
after Operation spring Wind, which is better known as the
veldiev roundup Right, his direct supervisor in the SD, a
guy named Helmut Knockin, caught Daniker abusing his authority, by

(39:17):
which I mean he was stealing shit from deported Jews
that the SS wanted to steal for Germany, right, and
so he was transferred back to Berlin. Right, Like, look,
but steal from them, Yeah, we're stealing from them. You're
stealing from us when you steal too much from them, right.

Speaker 2 (39:34):
Come on, man, Jesus. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:37):
Now, the system Daniker had built with Aikman's guidance continued
to operate for the remainder of v France's lifespan. Ultimately
some seventy seven thousand French Jews and Jews on French
soil were deported and murdered by the Nazis under the
direction of Aikman and Daniker and with the enthusiastic aid
of French collaborators in law enforcement and the VC government.
After the war, Charles de Gaulle and the French government

(39:58):
that replaced the VC regime refused to apologize for the
role the police played in these genocidal crimes. Their argument,
all right, Their argument was that VCH France wasn't the
French Republic, and the re established republic shouldn't have to
apologize for the crimes of another government, right now.

Speaker 2 (40:17):
Never mind, all those dudes kept their fucking job, right.
Isn't the case that these cops are still cops? A
lot of times? Yes? But why is that our responsibility? Right?
Slipping off the armband.

Speaker 1 (40:27):
You can't blame law enforcement as a whole for the
fact that everyone in it did this, right, Oh, it's
cool stuff.

Speaker 2 (40:33):
So you do not understand, I was not throwing a
pizza of salute. I was just ashing my cigarettes very awkwardly.
Oh man.

Speaker 1 (40:43):
It was not until nineteen ninety five that French President
Jacques Scharack finally admitted blame on behalf of French law
enforcement and the state.

Speaker 2 (40:50):
Right, so you know, it's so bad that had to
be Sharrock that did it, because he's like cartoonishly corrupt.

Speaker 1 (40:57):
He's otherwise. Yeah, but he's like a jeez, this is wow,
we really fucked up here.

Speaker 2 (41:02):
I will steal from everybody's pension and I will get
France locked soldly into the Afghan War, but I will
not cover for Nazi cops.

Speaker 1 (41:10):
I'm not going to cover for the Nazi cops. I
got too much other shit I gotta do after Paris.
Daniker doesn't remain in Berlin long. He sent and he's
forgiven for his misdeeds.

Speaker 2 (41:20):
He's sent to.

Speaker 1 (41:20):
Bulgaria in nineteen forty three to arrange the deportation of
some eleven thousand and four Jews to farious death camps.
He follows the Eichman playbook in this interfacing with a
newly created Bulgarian Commissar for Jewish Affairs to arrange the deportations.
In just two months, all eleven thousand people had been
shipped by train to Trablinka or Auschwitz, where nearly half
of them died. The dead included some two thousand children. Yeah,

(41:45):
I mean these guys the level of mass murderer the
least of the ss men in Iikman's office commit is
pretty outrageous.

Speaker 2 (41:53):
I mean, I can't imagine a more cursed title that
we've spoken other than a Bulgarian Jewish commissar.

Speaker 1 (42:00):
So yeah, oh boy, like, oh your war crimes did
war crimes?

Speaker 2 (42:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (42:06):
This deportation met with little local resistance, as the Jews
marked for expulsion were mainly from Thrace and Macedonia and
thus not Bulgarian citizens. But Daniker's next move was to
evacuate nearly fifty thousand Bulgarian Jews from Sophia, the capital.
This was done and some forty eight thousand Jews were
stripped of their property and forced into a camp outside
the city. However, this sparked resistance because again, these aren't foreigners, right,

(42:30):
these are Bulgarian, you know. Jason Dossi writes, quote outrage
from Dimatarbashev, the deputy speaker of the parliament, clergy from
the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, and representatives of communities where these
Jews resided pushed King Boris the Third to intervene Bashev,
who was forced to resign his position, still appealed to
the honor of Bulgaria, wanting that our nation's reputation would

(42:50):
be stained forever and its moral and political standing forever
compromised if deportations ensued. Boris acquiesced and prevented the removal
of Bulgaria's Jewish populace. And we can see this as
both there's legitimate heroism here which saves a lot of lives, right, right,
of course, but also any pride in this has to
be tempered by the fact that all these guys are

(43:12):
only moved to act against the Nazis because now citizens
were being deported, right, these Macedonian Jews and whatever, it's
if they get exterminated, no one's going to speak up, right,
But now you're going after Bulgarian Jews, and we've got
to say something, right.

Speaker 2 (43:26):
Of course, they shouldn't even be here. They're like they
you know, they broke the law just crossing them.

Speaker 1 (43:33):
I mean, Christ, you can't just break the law, right,
that's fucked up.

Speaker 2 (43:37):
Look, I wouldn't have voted for Hitler if he was
gonna start going after the good ones, right right, right,
these are the good ones. You know. He was only
supposed to go after the criminals.

Speaker 1 (43:46):
You know, and had the Nazi regime lasted, Iichman and
his colleagues would have taken another stab at this group
that King Boris helps to protect. As it was, things
were going pretty badly for the Nazis by the summer
of forty three, and the work of extermination was taking
on an air of dire urgency. By this point, Danniker's
qualities had been recognized outside the SD and Eichman's protege

(44:06):
was sent by the Gestapo chief to Rome, which had
just been occupied by the Nazis after Mussolini's overthrow. Eichman
by this point was the most prestigious name in the
genocide business. His obsessive need to stamp his name on
every part of the Holocaust, even in actions at which
he had little to know known involvement, insured him steady
promotions and regular direct contact with Himmler. It also got

(44:27):
him the attention of the international press. He and his
friend Calton Brunner would brag to each other about their
respective war criminal ranks during social events. Iichman later recalled, Yeah,
that's how they frame it. They're like looking at for
impressed and be like, ah, man, I'm a higher ranking
war criminal than you now, Calton Brunner.

Speaker 2 (44:45):
Ha ha, Right. You know what's impressive is that I don't
really think that there's like a lot of competition because
nobody else wanted to put their fucking name on it.

Speaker 1 (44:51):
Right, everyone else is too smart to like stamp their
fucking last, first and last name on this shit. Eichman
later recalled quote I found the war criminals in a
press review once. I was number nine, and I had
a bit of a laugh about it, all right, and
he will, he'll go back and forth between I was fourteen,
I was nine, I was number one, right, depending on
who he's talking to.

Speaker 2 (45:12):
After that, Oh, bro, you were never number one. Called
down you were like, I'll give credit, you were easy
top ten. But you know, whatever considered you number one,
I'll believe nine nine is credible. Right, Yeah, you're making
the playoffs. Good for you? Sure, Yeah, you're in the
war crime playoffs. Yeah, you and Calton Brunner.

Speaker 1 (45:34):
In nineteen forty four, as the war neared its end,
Adolf Eichmann was about to do something that would skyrocket
him to the top of that list. In November of
nineteen forty Germany had signed the Tripartite Pact with Italy
and Japan, officially creating the Axis Powers, and they considered
it a priority to sign on as many new allies
as possible, given out things had gone the last time

(45:55):
Germany was isolated in an international war. Hungary's regent was
a guy named Admiral Niklos Horthy, and he was offered
the honor of becoming the fourth member of the club,
but German diplomat Joaquem von Ribbentrop tacitly threatened that Romania
might be allowed to join first if Hungary dithered. Ultimately,
Horthy signed up, and this would prove to be a
catastrophic mistake. Horthy, who had served the Old Empire in

(46:18):
World War One, had seen World War Two as a
chance to regain lost Hungarian territory and make his country
great again.

Speaker 2 (46:24):
Right, we did some good last time, boys War one?

Speaker 1 (46:28):
Was I mean, if it could have worked better if
we just did a couple of things different, right?

Speaker 2 (46:32):
I love that the Nazis are so fucking stupid, righty, Like, Look,
it didn't work out for us last night, but what
if we allied with brought what I've got the band
back together? Yeah? Oh, man.

Speaker 1 (46:47):
God, you know now as you think about it, Italy
really is the Pete Best of World War One, right.

Speaker 2 (46:53):
Or reverse Pete Best. I guess I don't know the
Patrick Stump of World War one.

Speaker 1 (47:01):
Hungarian troops. This seemed to work at first right. World
War two initially is go is kind of working like
Orthy at hope. Hungarian troops get to invade the Balkans
alongside the Wehrmacht, and by the spring of nineteen forty one,
Hungary was nearly tripled the size of where it had
stood in nineteen thirty eight. Then came Operation Barbarossa and
the invasion of the USSR. Hungry again sins troops, but
this time there's no swift victory. Within months, thirty percent

(47:24):
of the Hungarian army is killed or wounded too badly
to fight.

Speaker 2 (47:28):
As tradition demands when Hungry goes to war.

Speaker 1 (47:31):
And by the way, if you're looking, if you're thinking
from like a military planning standpoint, if you have lost
thirty percent of your forces killed or injured, you no
longer have an effective army. It sounds like seventy percent
is a lot. It's not enough. You've lost too much
of your command and control too much. You have to
reorganize at that point before you can continue fighting effectively.

Speaker 2 (47:50):
Yeah. From a military historian's perspective, I must say it
is not good if you're planning a war at home today.
Don't lose thirty percent of your forces at a year
and a half.

Speaker 1 (47:59):
Yeah, it's a catastrophe. In early nineteen forty three, the
entire Hungarian second Army was smashed trying to anchor the
German northern flank during the Battle of Stalingrad. Only twenty
percent of the army survives the retreat home intact.

Speaker 2 (48:13):
Hey, at least there's something in common with Romanians now, right, right, right?

Speaker 1 (48:16):
Yeah, from Hungary in Romania wiping out eighty percent of
their army.

Speaker 2 (48:21):
Hey, fellas, you want to meet up inside of Stalogrid
and die Stalograd. That's a nice name. I think things
are gonna go well for us there. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:29):
So Horthy at this point, showing that he's smarter than Hitler,
complains the war is lost right after Stalingrad. Horthy's like, well, fuck,
there's literally no way we can pull a victory out
of this one. And Hitler, for his part, complains that
Hungarian soldiers had doomed the Wehrmacht, which is not really correct, you.

Speaker 2 (48:45):
Know, not true. Yeah, that is that is not true.
Over on my show Lines of by Donkeys, we talked
about Stalingrad for about six hours. Yeah. Look, I'm not
saying Hungary would have won the battle, but they certainly
didn't lose them the battle.

Speaker 1 (49:00):
Things were fucked by the point at which you know
they can get into action in this way. Right, if you're,
for one thing, if your entire battle plan comes down
to the Hungarian army holding in the field, you have
fucked up.

Speaker 2 (49:14):
Right, mind feure the army has been churned to Gulash.

Speaker 1 (49:21):
So Horthy had never been a good guy. I think
we've made that clear. But he's not personally genocidal towards
the Jews of his nation, right.

Speaker 2 (49:29):
He doesn't.

Speaker 1 (49:30):
Left to his own devices, he had no desire to
wipe out the whole Jewish population of Hungary, and so
for most of World War two, Hungarian Jews were fairly safe. Right,
for most of the war, this is the best place
and kind of broader, the kind of broader Nazi and
that's the Allied territory, one of the better places to be.
But Hitler now demanded that Horthy kill or put his

(49:50):
Jews into camps. Horthy refused. He has no issue. Like
they seize Jewish property to fund the war effort. He's
fine with that, but he doesn't want because he sees
the writing on the wall. I don't want to be
involved in a war crime of this scale right now,
because we're not gonna win. There's going to be a
butcher's bill to pay. As the Russians advanced, he and
other Hungarian leaders tried to make a separate peace with

(50:12):
the Allies. Hitler finds out, and he orders German troops
to conquer the country in March of nineteen forty four,
which they do easily because the Hungarians are very bad
at having an army, right, even Thermacht can take them.

Speaker 2 (50:26):
Hungarian's military tradition. All right, they will lose every war
they go in, but they'll be goddamn just thinking of it.
A genocide. Be on the side of jenociders, yes, sure, sure,
but we're not that active at it. We have our
standards here in Hungary, yeah.

Speaker 1 (50:43):
Which is, will sit by and let it happen, right,
that's right now. Orthy is kept on as a puppet
leader for a time and as soon as Hungary was
under the German occupation Hitler orders, the Jewish population wiped out.
This is no mean task. There were somewhere between seven
hundred thousand and over eight eight hundred thousand Jews in
Hungarian territory. Sometimes you'll hear around a million. Eikman is

(51:04):
sent over to supervise the work of an Einst's commando
especially assembled for the task. Daniker and other colleagues in
the SD or there as well, and they handle a
lot of the ground actions while Eichman coordinates this massive effort.
What followed was one of the swiftest and bloodiest mass
killings in human history. Per doctor Darsy's article, what happened
in Hungary in the late spring and early summer of

(51:26):
nineteen forty four overwhelms our fragile capacities to imagine. It
was simply a frenzy of killing. In May and June
of nineteen forty four, four hundred and thirty seven thousand
Hungarian Jews were transported to Auschwitz Berkanal, and three hundred
and ninety seven thousand were plunged into Berkeenhow's gas chambers.
Their fate exhibited just how desperate, the Nazi regime was
to finish the annihilation of European Jews, even as its

(51:48):
hopes of winning the war disintegrated. Under increasing pressure, Horthy
finally halted the deportations in July, temporarily sparing most of
Budapest's Jewish populace. Eikman and Daniker bided their time. The
removal of Fourthy three months later opened up new possibilities.
When Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg openly offered sanctuary to Jeose
in Budapest as Soviet troops near the capital city, the

(52:10):
enraged Aikman turned to Daniker to raid the safe houses
established by Wallenberg. Now, first off, that term frenzy of
killing is the thing to remember when you're thinking about
what did Iikman do? What the Daniker do? They Aikman
is the man who masterminds this. This is on him
more than any other single person, right.

Speaker 2 (52:28):
And it's telling how important he is in the hierarchy
in general and how much everybody relies on them when
they're like, we have this insurmountable killing goal in mind,
we have to bring in our experts. Yeah, and it's
him and his boy Yeah, and it's Aikman arrayed against
Wallenberg right in trying to Wallenberg is trying to save

(52:49):
this Jewish population and Eikmen is trying to annihilate it.
And we've done a reverse bash. It's a Christmas episode
on Wallenberg. He's one of the.

Speaker 1 (52:55):
Great heroes our species ever produced. In the war's waning days,
he was Aikman nemesis, granting fake Swedish documents to every
Jew he could find. You're a Swedish citizen, you're a
Swedish resident, you got a green card.

Speaker 2 (53:07):
They can't kill you. You're a Swede. Right the hand
reaches out your hand for the paperwork and just smashing
meatballs in every single fucking one nor they can't support
you with a meatball in your hand. Oh my god,
sure official Swedish paperwork.

Speaker 1 (53:25):
These are not. There's nothing legal in legitimate. Only Wallenberg's
charisma is backing these documents up. But he is so
good at what he's doing that a lot of ss
men back off because he's like, look, if you're seen
violating the law here all make sure you get your
due when the war is over, right, And they're so
fucking scared of him that he saves by some accounts
one hundred thousand people. There's a lot of debate about

(53:47):
these numbers, but it's in the tens of thousands at
the very least personally.

Speaker 2 (53:51):
And these men know the war is fucked at this point.
No one, no one has illusions at this point, right,
everybody's fully an eye have Like, look, the guy at
the meat balls is telling me he's good, He's fucking good.

Speaker 1 (54:02):
Fucking yeah, fuck it. I don't want anymore of his
guy with the meat ball. So Eikman calls Raoul the
jew Dog Wallenberg and threatens to have Raoul and all
other friends of Jews assassinated. Someone subsequently blows up Wallenberg's
car and he only narrowly escapes. In her book Iikman
Before Jerusalem, but Tina Stangneth describes Adolf Eikman in this

(54:25):
period as almost mad, with a mix of desperation and megalomania.
He could feel the walls closing in, but just as
crucially as he feels the window closing, he feels that
he might be losing out on his chance to achieve
the only goal that matters to him at this stage,
winning the war against European Jewry. And this is important
you understand, the Nazis don't see this all as one war,

(54:46):
the war against the Jews. Even though the war against
the rest of Europe may be unwinnable, now the war
against the Jews of Europe is still winnable. Right, we
have to pull something.

Speaker 2 (54:54):
Out of this.

Speaker 1 (54:57):
Speaking of have we done our second advert?

Speaker 2 (55:00):
Soovie, no, here it is. We're back boy.

Speaker 1 (55:10):
Our sponsors really love being thrown to ads right after
we talk about Aikman.

Speaker 2 (55:15):
Wanting to win the war against European Jewry. Well, hopefully
the ad wasn't for like IBM or something.

Speaker 1 (55:20):
Yeah, Critical Partners and the Nazi war against European Jews.

Speaker 2 (55:25):
Yeah, this ad brought to you by Hugo boss.

Speaker 1 (55:28):
Ah Man be a boss like Aikman. Yeah, so the
Nazi state was in chaos at this point. Eikman doesn't
report kind of he's not technically on like an ORG chart.
He's not directly reporting to Himler, but he basically is
reporting to Himler. He's got regular meetings with the man,
and so even though there's guys between him and Himmler

(55:49):
on the ORG chart, Iikman outranks everyone above him except
for Himmler because he's regularly talking to Himmler, and so
whenever there's a disagreement, he can bring Himler in, right,
And that's kind of how the Nazi state works more
than like officially, here's who's reporting to who. It's like, well,
but this guy can bring in Himmler, or this guy
can bring in Gerring. Right, this guy could bring in
Hitler directly, so he's effectively in charge.

Speaker 2 (56:13):
It's a whole power structure of his constant name dropping.

Speaker 1 (56:16):
Yes, fuck horrible, absolutely, that's how it works now. Iikman,
as a show of how fucking important he is, he
has access, in this late stage of the war to
a private aircraft that he can travel around what remains
of the crumbling Reich end That means he's a big man.
And when he really wanted to impress another Nazi, Eikman
would claim to have personal control over the gas chambers

(56:37):
at Auschwitz. Right, I'm the guy running the gas chambers.
That's his brag. Iikman's colleagues later recalled some of Iikman's
most outrageous boasts, and these are all direct quotes from Iikman.
I am a bloodhound. I'll set the mills of Auschwitz
grinding and blood for goods. This was This is a
reference to a promise that Iikman made. This in Hungary,
aid in exchange for Jews. Right, that's the blood for

(56:59):
goods program. You give us, Jews will give you the
aid that you need to continue holding on.

Speaker 2 (57:04):
H Oh, God, that's like the most evil FOREI and
aid package you've ever heard.

Speaker 1 (57:09):
Huff yeah, blood for Jews. His favorite line was simply,
I'll inform Himmler, and his darkest boast was I'll do
away with all the Jewish filth of Budapest. In the
last months of nineteen forty four, Ikman makes constant trips
back and forth from Budapest to Auschwitz, dealing with Commandant
Hess personally to ensure the smooth operation of the chief
genocide machine. In the Nazi Toolkit, Stangneth writes, he seemed

(57:33):
to be everywhere and nowhere at once. Iikman talked so
much and for so long that the people around him,
ignorant of what was really going on, believed he might
actually have been involved in the overthrow of Hungarian Reich
administrator Miklos Horthy. Weslinsky claimed that in Hungary, Iikman boasted
that he and Otto Globoschnik were behind the whole idea
of exterminating the Jews. Eichman inflated his murderous lifetime achievement

(57:54):
to crazy proportions and believe there was certain to be
a monument erected to me in Budapest. He threatened his
victims the prospect that after final victory, Hitler would make
him world Commissar of the Jews. These are the things
that Eichman is bragging about. And you can see this
as maybe he's lost his mind a little bit at
the end of the Reich, or you can see this

(58:14):
as he knows where things are going, but he knows
that these are the boasts that will give him just
enough flex to accomplish his mission. Right, That's what matters
to him at this stage.

Speaker 2 (58:24):
And I am curious, Like, he's not a dumb person,
so he probably has to know that the war is lost.
He sure does, But I am curious if he thought
a lost war in their mind also include a complete
loss of Nazi Germany itself, or if this is going
to be more like a World War One situation where
Germany just continues to exist. You know.

Speaker 1 (58:46):
Yeah, it's debatable at the point of which he knows
even keeping that is not on the table anymore. Yeah,
But he, as we'll talk about in part four, he'll
start he's starting to make plans in forty four for
what he's going to do after the war, right, I
think it really is. It just is his personal response.
He feels personally a duty to kill as many of
these people as he can, even though the war is over.

(59:08):
That that's what's important to him morally, right, And it
was his job, and it's his job, right, and he's
going to do it.

Speaker 2 (59:15):
He's always been a dead eyed careerist, and if everybody
else is failing, I bet he probably thinks the way
to continue to stick out and feel great is to
be successful when everything else is failing. Will I won't fail,
you know? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (59:30):
So Eikman is a master still at this late stage
of shaping cloud and the perception of cloud into a
weapon to get what he wants. In the case of Hungary,
this allows him to oversee the slaughter of at least
four hundred and thirty seven, four hundred and two men,
women and children in a matter of months. That is
the number the Nazis officially document, so the real number
is higher than that. Credible estimates of the number of

(59:51):
people Aikman is responsible for organizing to kill in a
matter of again months range up to almost six hundred
thousand out of a pre war population of seven hundred
to eight hundred thousand. Jesus, this is the most complete
and fastest extermination of a Jewish population in Europe during
the war. Fucking christ Horst Grel, the adviser on Jewish

(01:00:12):
affairs for the Budapest Embassy, later claimed that during this time,
Aikman bragged the enemy had promoted him to war criminal
number one, and he's not super exaggerating at this stage, right.
He would then repeat a German saying that translates to
many enemies much honor. The more people are talking about
me as a monster, the more honor I have for
what I've done. Eikman was so good at what he

(01:00:34):
did that other ss men begin using his name in
the same way he used Himmler's. When Kurt Becker, one
of Eikman's professional rivals, got stalled in negotiations over the
expropriation of Jewish property, he threatened to get Aikman involved.
After the war, Eichman himself would brag every department was
trying to squeeze everything possible out of the Jews, to
winkle it out by threatening them with the big bad Aikman.

Speaker 2 (01:00:57):
He must have fucking loved that.

Speaker 1 (01:00:59):
He does, but he also he's smart enough to know
we're not gonna win. And so now this reputation, the
fact that I'm getting accredited for crimes I hadn't committed,
which is happening because I wanted that, right.

Speaker 2 (01:01:12):
And I used to take credit for them.

Speaker 1 (01:01:14):
Yeah, yeah, that's a problem now right now that like,
you know, we're not gonna win.

Speaker 2 (01:01:19):
The fact that you're getting blamed for shit you didn't
even do is an issue, right, Well, well, well if
it isn't the consequences of my ass.

Speaker 1 (01:01:28):
Right right, by early forty five, he knows these days
are numbered, and everyone including Iikman, increasingly knows that. Right.
This is part of why colleagues like Becker are eager
to use his name. It's not just that it gets
shit done, but it allows them to divert their own
responsibility for genocide onto Iikman.

Speaker 2 (01:01:43):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:01:43):
Oh yeah, Iikeman's the guy making this happen. It's all Hikman,
not me.

Speaker 2 (01:01:49):
I mean, it's the difference between swinging from the end
of a rope or doing like five years in prison
and then being a government job in West Germany. Yeah, man,
oh boy, Holocaust was off.

Speaker 1 (01:02:00):
You know, we were all it's like that scene in
a hot Rod where his friend's stolen the TV and
he's like, boy, riots are so terrible. You just got
to get out as fast as you can. Right, Everyone's like, wow,
the Holocaust awful. Can you believe what that Iikman guy
made me do?

Speaker 2 (01:02:14):
Fucked up? Incredible.

Speaker 1 (01:02:18):
So, in the last months of the Reich, as it
becomes clear to everyone what's happening, Eikman's going to become
a pariah within the sd right, people are like, oh,
I don't want to be associated with this motherfucker any
more directly than I have to. And we'll talk about
that and how he gets himself out of this for
a shocking length of time in part four. But first, Joe,
let's talk about how you're gonna get yourself out of

(01:02:39):
this podcast by plugging your pluggables.

Speaker 2 (01:02:44):
I am the host of the Lions of My Donkey's podcast.
We talk about military history and history of genocides, war crimes,
other uplifting things like that. So if you want to
hear more about Stalingrad. We did hours upon hours about
that or other genocides like Rwanda, or the Armenian genocide
or her Aeronama genocide, things of that nature. All we've
talked about that as well, So come listen to it,

(01:03:05):
and it will not improve your mood.

Speaker 1 (01:03:07):
I'm sorry, yeah, speaking of things that won't improve your mood.
The next episode of this podcast coming out Thursday.

Speaker 3 (01:03:18):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
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
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(01:03:39):
at Behind the Bastards