Part Two: A Tale of Revenge

Robert is joined again by Margaret Killjoy for part two of our annual Christmas non-bastard episode to continue to discuss Nakam, a terrorist group made up of Holocaust survivors who sought vengeance against the Nazis.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
So make sure the episode starts about six minutes back.
This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast by Robert Evans
about Robert Evans, the bastard who just went yeah. I
was like, I really, I don't so many noises today.
I didn't know what was happening and just leave. This

(00:28):
podcast is an engine and the fuel is you being
frustrated with me. We are going to be the first
human beings on fucking Mars. Is what we're gonna do? What?
What has happened? Just we're starting? Are you we announcing
the competitor to SpaceX that you started? Yeah, SpaceX is

(00:50):
is going to get their asses kicked by frustrated sof
X be frustrated. So FAC's gonna be a frustrated sofa. A. Well,
I don't like the x X greets me out. I
thought it was space x Y and it was a
reference to nice. There's a lot of things that could

(01:11):
be a reference to um Margaret, Yes, what do you
what do you do? What do you what? What do
you do? At the start of this podcast, what do
you do? What do you where? To justify my existence?
That's right, because everyone has to. That's harder. I write
stuff I write fiction. So far, I write a podcast

(01:33):
called Cool People Stuff. So far it's cool. And what
else do I do? I hang out with my dog. Um,
he's becoming a reasonable creature. He's about fourteen or fifty. Yeah,
way way more handleable. And I live alone on a
mountain in West Virginia. And I watched the world crumble

(01:55):
as I install solar panels and run another podcast about
prep pain called Live like the World is Dying. That
does sound nice? That does sound nice, Margaret. You know
who didn't live on the top of a mountain is Abakovner.
He lived in Vilna, which was a rough place to
live in the period of time that we're talking about. Yeah, yeah,

(02:16):
he beat the odds. Uh, that's the depressing way of
saying he has already beaten the odds because nearly everyone
he knows has been exterminated by the Nazis. UM. As
we start part two, so Covener has just issued what
we become known as the Ponari Manifesto UM, and it
electrifies the room. There's also, and this is not his fault,

(02:39):
one of the one of the problems that exists within
kind of the way in which some people talk about
the Holocaust, is there's this attitude that there's this errant
belief that Jews went to the death camps um kind
of passively, like sheep to the slaughter, right like that,
And and that some of that comes from he says,
let us not go like sheep to the slaughter, and

(03:00):
there were some like mistranslations that like make it seem
like he's saying people were going like sheep, sheep to
the slaughter. None of this, even if you're looking at
the stories of people who were killed in the camps,
it was very rarely passive, even to the extent that
like people were trying to like take care of their
families and keep their their children from panning. Like none

(03:20):
of this was like passive. People were dealing with a
nightmare in the best way that they had available, and
there was, in fact a lot of resistance, which we're
going to talk about. And this is a story I'm
aware of, like one pop culture touchdown from this. I
get into arguments periodically online with people about you know,
armed self defense, and one of the things that keep
that some folks will bring up is that like, um, well,

(03:43):
none of it, you know, none of it would have
helped Jews during the Holocaust. Uh. And the reality is
that having guns did help quite a few Jews during
the Holocaust. There was a tremendous history of partisan resistance
and if you would like to see a reasonably good
movie about that, starring Daniel Craig, uh, you can watch
the movie to Fiance, which is about the Bielski Atriad,
which was a group of eventually a couple of thousand. Um.

(04:05):
Centered around these brothers who I think we're basically gangsters
prior to the war, which is why they had access
to some of the some weapons. Um. I'm not on that,
but I believe that's the story with them. But it's
about this group who took to the woods of Poland
after the German invasion and eventually we're able to protect
several thousand people and fight as partisans. There was a

(04:26):
significant number of partisans, and Kovner and his his members
of the hot zmer Hats are are going to become
some of those partisans. And one of the things that
I get really frustrated when people talk about that kind
of stuff too, is that, Um. The first thing, again,
the only one I've done a lot of research about
is the war saw ghetto uprising and the main task
in front of people, the dangerous immediate task was literally

(04:48):
just getting small arms. Yeah, um small arms. People are
like explosives manufacturing. Yeah, anyway, people, I don't know anyway. Yeah,
it's it's I don't know. I get really mad at
the way people talk about a lot of the stuff.
Yeah yeah. And I think one of the things, because
we're again Kauvner ends on a problematic note, shall we say,

(05:10):
but one of the things he's right about is that, like, look,
now we know what's happening. Nobody's coming to save us.
We have to find a way to kill as many
of these Nazi sons of bitches as we possibly can,
which is the a great thing to do. Um Again,
A none is smuggling hand grenades into the ghetto so
that they can murder Schermans like this is where, this

(05:31):
is where the line is now. Um So Connor the
ponary Manifesto electrifies because he delivers this first to just
kind of a room full of Youth Movement members that
he reads it to during a meeting that they were holding.
Because it was during New Year's celebrations, it was easy
to kind of disguise the fact that people were gathering.
But it spreads very quickly through Jewish Europe and it

(05:52):
ignites a rapid change in the kind of conversations being
held underground and ghettos across the Greater German Reich. No
longer was the discussion about hiding and avoiding German wrath.
Talks started to turn towards the concept of resistance and reprisal.
In ninety two, Covener helped to found the FPO or
United Partisans Organization. This was a pan ideological because again,

(06:18):
even after the Nazis took over a lot of these
different because you've got your Communists, some of them were
like insurrectionary, some of whom are Zionists, and you've got
your Socialists, and you've got your kind of more centrist
dream and right wing folks who are Zionist, and you've got,
you know again, people who aren't Zionists but who were
like left wing activists. All these different youth organizations that
are constantly fighting each other. And Kulviner is like, look,

(06:41):
we can't do that right now. Later it's going to
take everything we have just to not get wiped out. Um,
so let's all like basically in his pitch is basically like,
nearly all of us are dead already, what what do
politics matter? It's time to kill these fucking Nazis. And
basically at this point, basically everyone's like, yeah, you know
that that actually makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Um,

(07:04):
So the FPO gets formed of Wagner's one of the
people starting this. There's a number of of of or
of of leaders and stuff in the little in the
area of Lithuania that are doing this. Um. The guy
who gets elected to lead the or they hold a vote,
because there's about three hundred of them. They hold a vote,
and the guy who gets elected to lead is a
very cool dude called Yitzak Wittenberg, and he is a
communist um and they they split the organization up into

(07:29):
these five man cells, and several five man groups make
up a platoon, and then the platoons are split into
two battalions, and Kavner is commanding one of these battalions.
He calls his men the Avengers, and they set out
soon to the work of yeah, yeah, to the work
of stealing more guns and explosives in order to prepare
for a broader armed insurrection of the ghetto. The FBO

(07:51):
makes contacts with Soviet partisans in the woods, and they
work alongside the Polish communist underground. These are just like
Polish communists, who aren't you wish um to launch a
series of daring attacks on German military targets. And I'm
going to quote now from a Latt Gordon Levett Levitan quote.
The Villanet ghetto fighters blew up a German military train,
smuggled in arms, sabotage German military equipment, and set up

(08:13):
an a legal printing press outside the ghetto, and established
ties to the Soviet resistance in the city in the forests.
They also sent emissaries to the Warsaw and Bellish Dot
ghettos to warn the inhabitants about the mass killing of
Jews and the occupied Soviet Union and to incite resistance.
And they do like a meaningful amount of damage. They
destroy I think a few dozen trains, they kill like

(08:35):
seventy one Germans, they rescue a couple of hundred um
like a Jewish people who are at you know, going
to be eradicated and whatnot. Um Like, they do quite
a bit of damage, and they focus mostly a lot
like the anarchists in like Russia, right now, are focusing
on blowing up trains, on blowing on destroying trains and
derailing trains right to to stop the flow of war

(08:57):
material and harm the Nazi war effort and also harm
their effort to like deport and murder more Jews. Um. Yeah.
By nineteen forty three, the Germans have grown weary enough
of the FPO that they launched a major crackdown and
eventually succeeded in capturing several officers of Vilma's non Jewish
communist underground. From these men, they learned that Wittenberg was

(09:18):
the elected head of the Jewish resistance. They surrounded the
Vilna Ghetto and promised to destroy it all and kill
all twenty thousand people inside unless Wittenberg was turned over
to them. And this is this is a fascinating story,
because Wittenberg gets captured at one point and they carry
out a prison break and they free him. But then
the Germans are like, we're just gonna kill everybody if
we don't get this guy. So in an act of

(09:38):
almost unfathomable courage, Wittenberg hands himself over to the Nazis
and then commit suicide and German custody to save everybody else,
and control of the organization now hands is handed over
to Kauvner when the Nazis destroyed the ghetto anyway. Later
that year, Kavner and his surviving men flee into the
woods around Vilna, where they liaise with Soviet At Partisans

(10:00):
and carry out even more insurgent attacks against the Germans.
By July of nineteen forty four, the German military is
collapsing in the east and Kaufner takes part in the
liberation of Vilna with other partisans. It was a pyric
victory at best. More than forty thousand Jews had been killed.
The ghetto was basically nothing but ashes and bones, as
this quote from the Book to Calm makes clear. The

(10:23):
visitors returned stunned and tends from the blunt reality but
speaking wide scale slaughter into gigantic round pits, and from
the beastual brutality of those who had aimed deadly gunfire
face to face at living creatures. Evidence of that brutality
was still visible. Scattered bodies remain that had not yet
received proper burial, and the visitors knew very well who
had been killed there at the edge of the pits.

(10:43):
Their parents and all of their neighbors, acquaintances, well to
do in proletarian, pious, assimilated and baptized, communal leaders, synagogue functionaries,
peddlers and drawers of water, communists and Zionists, intellectuals, artists,
and village idiots. Some four thousand babies, all of them,
as writer amos Oz described the individualish community. When the

(11:03):
visit was over, Kaufner composed a detailed questionnaire and the
survivors who had begun to gather filled it out. The
copies were collected with a view to preparing for future trials, punishment,
and vengeance. Now Kauvnor gets no time to like, what's that. Oh,
it's just I mean one, I just have to sit
on that, right. But one of the things that it

(11:25):
occurs to me, I mean I remember a friend of
mine describing to continue Margaret's crime school. Um, sometimes it's
safer at the front. Not like the front in terms
of like a war, right, but like you know, sometimes
being up where the conflict is happening is safer, like literally,

(11:47):
And I I'm not trying to tell people what they
should have done retroactively, just interesting to me that it's like,
I mean, it sounds like the reason that the Partisans
survived is that they were partisans and they were used
to moving in and out to the woods. Yeah, and
they escape. A lot of them get out through the
sewers and stuff like. Yeah, they barely make it out

(12:09):
in a lot of cases. Yeah, and I'm sure a
ton of them don't. I'm not trying to be like, oh,
it's easy, everyone should just go do that, you know,
but yeah, anyway, yep, uh it is. It is, um
pretty pretty fucked up, Margaret y um so uh. Kavner

(12:30):
was soon obliged to leave Vilma with his avengers. He
doesn't really have any time to like, nobody has time
to process this, right, um, like they might not want to.
They are immediately on with the with the advancing Red
Army right and are are continuing to act as insurgents,
basically kind of ahead of the main advance, harassing Nazi

(12:51):
forces as they retreat. And while he's doing this, he
repeated repeatedly lobbies with the Soviets to establish a partisan
regiment of Jewish Hullo cost survivors to carry out acts
of sabotage in Germany, to like sneak into Germany and
start blowing up German in history. Um, the Soviets don't
entirely trust him or other Jewish youth movement veterans since

(13:11):
they're all Zionists, and this does not happen. And then
also Kaufner is breaking Soviet law in this period because
while he is fighting and while he's advancing, he is
he's this kind of guy who is he's just an
expert organizer. So while they're doing this, he is building
an underground railroad to smuggle Jews from the fires of
the Holocaust over to the British mandate in Palestine. He's

(13:34):
like building an organization to do this as he is
running an insurgent war. Um, he's a he's very good
at organ Obviously he's not the only one doing this,
but he's a major, major figure in it. His experience
building and maintaining connections between a far flung network of
insurgents made him kind of the perfect man for this. UM.
And again it's worth remembering that during this period, getting

(13:54):
Jews out of Poland and into Palestine was often the
only way to keep them alive. Pogroms and massacres of
Jews continued even as the Nazis retreated. We're gonna talk
about that more later, and established another clandestine organization as
he traveled across Europe, Blue was called Brickhaw and it's
again it's this underground railroad type sort of situation. As

(14:15):
he makes connections with survivors across Europe's Jewish communities, he
starts to come face to face with survivors of the
Nazi death camps. He and his and again, these guys,
these guys aren't going to camps. Right in Lithuanian Villa,
there's not like a big there being shot in the
fucking woods. That's how that's how the Holocaust starts. Um.
So they're finding out about the death camps as they are,

(14:36):
as they're moving west and meeting people who had been there.
And then later in nine four he and his Avengers
helped to liberate mashd Neck and they see their first
concentration camp. Now mash Neck was located in a suburb
of Lubland, Poland, and somewhere around three hundred and sixty
thousand people were massacred there. So Kavner comes from Vilna
where forty to sixty thousand Jews are killed, and this

(14:57):
just this is like already broke at him. Right, this
has like turned him into this kind of force for vengeance.
And then he realizes that like Vilma is a blip
on the radar, and the total number of people who
are being killed, and he starts to realize the scale
of the Holocaust, right, the like the truly Titanic scale
of the killings that have been carried out. Coming face

(15:20):
to face with Mashenet convinced Kaufner that simple military victory
against the Germans was no longer sufficient. Images of a
death camp were stuck in his mind. Now he had
spent years obsessed with the destruction of the Villa neg Ghetto,
his home and then he'd come face to face with
a massacre six times greater than the entire Jewish population
of his home town. And even as the war ended

(15:40):
in German defeat, stories of more massacres poured in. Some
of these were stories of the greatest death camps like Auschwitz,
but others were stories of massacres of Jews committed by
forces who were not Nazis. And I'm gonna quote again
from the book to Calm When Jews returned in July
nineteen forty four to Kiev and hoped to reoccupy their houses.
They discovered Ukrainian squatters who refused to vacate. The Ukrainians

(16:03):
started throwing Jews from moving train cars and beating random Jews.
The feeling was of an impending program. There was no
one to turn to with an alert. In July of
nineteen forty four, upon the liberation of Lithuania, Jews who
returned to their homes from the forests and hideouts, attempting
to find relatives and perhaps a small fraction of their properties,
were murdered on their doorsteps by neighbors and local Lithuanian
gangs who hidden the forests and elsewhere in order to

(16:25):
not be conscripted by the Germans. In the pockets of
five Jews who had survived the Holocaust but were then
murdered in the Lithuanian town of a Ks, a note
was found in Polish saying this will be the fate
of all the Jews left alive. So this doesn't put
Kavnor and his men into his men and women. By
the way, there's a pretty I think it might even

(16:46):
be a pretty even split of men and women in
his In his insurgent organization UM it is like they're
kind of out of their minds at this point, right,
not only you have to like because the Holocaust is
still happening, because now it's because yeah, and this is

(17:06):
again if you have ever had PTSD, what that means.
I'm not trying to I'm not again, I have had it.
I'm not I've had I've had a couple of of
PTSD breaks. I Am not trying to be um uh me,
I don't mean this in a negative way. You're crazy, right,
Like that's what you're You're kind of out of your
mind for a while. That's part of the problem. And

(17:28):
these people are dealing with not only like the most
PTSD I can fucking imagine. Um, but now they realize
that like it's not over. The massacre is continuing, and
all of this is happening like while they are continuing
to fight a war. And so between the grief of
losing all of their loved ones and friends and the
trauma of years of underground fighting, deadly partisan combat, these

(17:50):
people are in what you might call a particular state
of mind. The most obvious consequence is of this is
an obsession with vengeance, which the end of the war
does not slack, and as the war kind of comes
to an end, a lot of these Jewish partisan's people
who are friends and affiliated with them, with with kaufner

(18:11):
Um members of different Zionist youth groups in Poland, they
start to carry out attacks in areas that have already
been liberated, places where the war has come to an end.
And I'm gonna read a quote from the book to
calm here. Naza GROUPA, a group of Zionist youth members
from beds in Poland, aimed to exact vengeance in Germany,
and Mill Brigg, later a hero in Israel's War of

(18:32):
Well in the Arab Israeli War, recounted, Uh we have
She uses the term Israel's War of independence like you
can whatever. We had nothing to lose. We wanted only revenge.
Young men and women burning with venge for vengeance, with
nothing in their world but a mighty urge to kill
Germans and to destroy whoever was collaborating with Germans. Some
members of Naza GROUPA, who had volunteered for the Red Army,

(18:52):
succeeded in acts of vengeance, but not as much as
they had wished, not as Jews, not as representatives of
the entire Jewish nation against the higher German nation. One
of them, Manos d'amont, visited Auschwitz as soon as the
war ended, and he saw this command written on one
of the walls of the torture chambers. Jews take vengeance.
These words guided his future. He and Alex Gatman, a

(19:13):
fellow member of the group, headed a squad in Austria
that executed those who had been found guilty. Most of
the members felt as if they were judges without robes,
judges of a special kind, who together delivered and immediately
carried out their sentences. They bound and gagged suspects, held
a few minutes of trial proceedings for each, and read
an indictment. They prosecuted murderers who had been active in
the ghettos and concentration camps, those who had killed with

(19:35):
their own hands and could be reliably identified, in the
group's opinion by at least two witnesses. No troop, no
courte of true justice in the world, would have handed
down a different verdict if he confessed on his own
without being interrogated, said Damont. These killers were mostly, but
not always s S troops. The group then killed the suspect,
For example, four young men who had been freed from
the Lansburg Offering concentration camp near Munich, stole British jeeps

(19:58):
and drove to a neighboring town, whe they mounted a
pegram of their own for four or five hours, punching
and beating. Soldiers of the Jewish Brigade who arrived at
the scene stood there stunned. They couldn't agree with this
and sent us away. We broke everything around, We broke windows,
We hit children and old people too. The hatred inside
of us was terrible, a heavy burden of rage. It
is difficult to determine how many such incidents occurred, with

(20:19):
survivors taking action either independently or with a few comrades.
So again there's like this stuff is happening as the
war ends. There's like guys busting, like stealing British military
ship and just driving into German towns and just beating
the ship out of everybody they encounter, which like I
get it, man, Like, yeah, it's like it's not good,

(20:40):
it's not, but it's justice. But it's inevitable to have
the inevitable consequence of what the Nazis did, Right, I
feel like there's a difference between justice and consequences that
doesn't get talked about enough for it's just like, I
don't know, like you do a bunch of bad ship
and some other bad ship's going to happen and it's
not justified inherently like that kid who got beat didn't

(21:04):
do anything, you know, and like it's not good. It's
a it's just a thing. It's just it is that. Yeah, yeah,
if you're going to say, and I think it is, like,
it's bad. It's bad if like children are getting beaten
in the street, because even if the children believed the
fun up things their parents told them, they're they're not

(21:25):
responsible for it. But also the bad thing that's being
done here, I would say, even though it's being committed
by these like Jewish concentration camp survivors, the evil is
still on the Nazis. They're responsible for those kids getting
beaten in the street. Right, It's not the fault of
the people who lost everything and are like what these
people just get to go on living their lives. No,

(21:46):
we're gonna start hitting them with a fucking bat Like yeah,
that's uh, you know, it's not it's not It's not
on them, is what I will say, um, like like
just like those kids can't be responsible. Nobody who's just
gotten out of a concentration amp can be responsible for
their actions in this case like that. Yeah, that's yeah, God,

(22:07):
that's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, it's a it's a kite like
if if if if. If you are a person who
believes that like temporary insanity can render one less complicit
in an act of violence, you have to say it
applies here, like, I can't imagine a better example of that, Um,

(22:28):
but you know what I can imagine, Margaret, What can
you imagine? A beautiful world, A perfect world, Margaret, A
shining city upon a hill where people can purchase the
products and services that support this podcast, A whole city,
A whole city, Margaret, of just gold and podcasts. That's right,
most advertisers, we're gonna build it together. We're gonna make

(22:50):
it real. Is one. I'm so excited to be part
of my Ah, we're back. We've just built a shining
city upon a hill. It's great. You can get like
five different kinds of mattresses there. Um. Back to the story.
So Covenor in his mates, along with a lot of

(23:14):
other Holocaust drivers, are kind of spiraling as the war
comes to an end, and once the fighting actually stops
for them, everything gets worse. Right as bad as their
mind state had been previously, they at least had had
fighting to focus on. Um Once the fightings, once there's
no fighting for them to do, like, they have nothing

(23:35):
but their thoughts, right, and that is not a good
place to be in. UM. Yeah, So, while you know,
they're kind of trying to cope with the end of
their part in the war, the Allies are arresting a
bunch of German officers. They are starting to carry out
like the the justice part of the of the victory UM.

(23:57):
But it's it quickly becomes clear to Abatkovner that the
Allies aren't really interested in ensuring anything that he would
consider to be justice. So in April of nineteen forty five,
mere weeks before Hitler's suicide, Abbot Kavner met with a
number of his partisans and a group of Auschwitz survivors
in a flat near the recently liberated city of Lublin, Poland.

(24:18):
This is right after they've liberated that deathcamp. Mashed Neck Kauvner,
the man who had first warned Jewish Europe about Germany's
plans to kill them all delivered another address. He warned
them first that the Holocaust was not over and that
some terrible form of terrible vengeance against the Germans was
necessary as an act of self defense. Part of what
he's saying here is, look, the Poles are still killing us,

(24:43):
The Ukrainians are still killing us, the Lithuanians are still
killing us. The Nazis are gone, but they're still killing us.
And it's because they think they can get away with
it because the Germans did. And so we have to
carry out an act of vengeance against the Germans so
people stopped killing us. Interesting, he tells them the act
should be shocking. The Germans should know that after Auschwitz

(25:04):
there can be no return to normality. And this is
their versions of this idea. There's there's one famous survivor
and academic who I think the exact line is poetry
after Auschwitz is obscene, right, that like the severity of
this crime has rendered like the human attempt to create
art and obscenity. Um, there's a variety, and Kagner's attitude

(25:26):
is that like they can't do this and just continue
to be a country. Um, Like it's this kind of like, yeah,
it's like it's hard to argue with that with the man, right,
um So. Survivors at the meeting recalled that, as usual,
Kafner's eloquence was hypnotizing. One person who was there described

(25:47):
their mind state listening to him this way, those who
came away from the smoke stacks of the crematory and
know what they want. We want tanks demolishing city streets.
Rebuilding comes later. Our job now is destruction. Who dare
is deny it to us? We are Frankenstein's We who
came away from the ruins will show the world. We
will snatch up the name Jew in every language, and
uplifted words of vengeance will light our way. For as

(26:10):
long as one member of this nation remains. We shall
not rest. Now this Yeah, that's sketchy. Yeah, this is
this is some unsettling ship that we're delving into. And
this is like, no one should be calling themselves Germans
because we've destroyed the state of Germany. Or does that

(26:31):
mean like literally every German citizen must die. Let's let's
let's let's let's talk about that in a little bit, Margaret, Okay,
what you should know is that on a religious name. Note,
the idea of vengeance is not something that is permitted
in the Jewish faith and Talmudic law. And the Talment
is you've got like the Torah, right, which is the
Old Testament. Effectively, the Talment is like I think like

(26:53):
eight hundred years of basically commentary from different religious scholars
on the Torah. Yeah, um. And in Talmudic law, personal
vengeance is forbidden, right, like vengeance's mind saith the Lord.
I mean, like vengeance is something God can do. God
can take revenge you should not take because it's bad
for you, right, It's like bad, like it is bad

(27:15):
for people to obsess over revenge. Yeah, And it doesn't
it doesn't fit within my context of like and this
is like I'm not like sitting on my my my
rolling chair in my studio at home in West Virginia
and like trying to cast judgment. But like one of
my favorite anarchist assassins whose name I suddenly forget, I

(27:35):
think it's Kurt Wilkins um his quote after he killed
someone who had killed fifteen hundred anarchists and indigenous people
um uh in South America. He his quote was, vengeance
is unbecoming of an anarchist um. Even though he had
just done a vengeance, he saw it as this like
problem solving, right, But the concept a vengeance is like

(28:00):
not problem solving, it's problem perpetuating most of the time.
And so it's like not inherently just but that that's said,
and so that that map says, I don't know, I'm
just mapping talmaic law to to that as well. I
guess it's like this idea that ye, vengeance is not
to know that like good, but it's big understandable, it's

(28:23):
not good, and it is within kind of the strictures
of the Jewish religion. It is something that specifically you're
not supposed to seek as a person. Kavner and his
fellow survivors, though again these guys were not most of
them many of them. Some of these guys had been
like religious Scienists, some of them had not been Zienis,
some of them been most a lot of them have
been Communist because Covenor is more on the left. These
guys are secular and it's and even the ones who

(28:45):
had been religious before the war, and again this is
pretty common. By the end of the Holocaust, they don't
believe anymore. That's also not universal, but fairly common. Um,
So they're not they don't really care that they're not
supposed to seek vengeance. Right. Um. One of them credits
this to the power driven into us by Hitler. Right.

(29:06):
That's one of the lions that you hear from one
of these guys in this meeting is that like Hitler
has like driven into us the power to commit vengeance
by by the crimes that he committed against our people.
As the meeting war On, Kavner laid out his plans
for a quote unique operation of organized vengeance. Jews, including
Kavner and his men, had already carried out numerous assassinations

(29:27):
of German leaders and collaborators, but this was not enough.
The Holocaust was not purely an act of the Nazi
military or a bunch of party functionaries. The normal people
of Germany had cheered the slaughter on. They had demanded it.
Bit by bit, Kovner talked himself and the other survivors
into a new idea. He described described it as quote

(29:48):
to pay the Germans back in a way that only
the survivors of such a massacre can an idea which
the man on the omnibus to use a figure of
speech could only consider deranged. But I will not claim
that our thinking was far from deranged in those days.
Maybe worse than deranged. A terrifying idea made hooly from
despair and carrying a sort of suicide within it, a
mental inferno, an eye for an eye, in other words,

(30:12):
wiping out six million Germans. Yeah, goddamn it. So that's
the that's the plan that they land on, is we're
going to kill six million of them, one for one,
you know, or close to it. Yeah, that's that's bad.

(30:35):
I'm just gonna go that is that is bad. Beyond
record as saying that that's bad. Individuals can be culpable
of crimes, but people are not culpable of croubs by
where they live. They are not. And I will say,
obviously it's bad to plan to kill six million civilians.

(30:58):
I don't think we need to be labor that point.
But you also it is not illogical. Yeah no, no,
it's it's where standing, where they are, because and there,
and I think the way that they would have defended
it then, because Kavner later that quote comes from him later,
he's like, yeah, we were deranged. We were crazy, right.
But um, having that attitude, then you're looking at the

(31:20):
slaughter continuing and you're looking at like, he's not wrong.
Regular Germans are complicit in the Holocaust. Every single person
who stayed in and was a part of that nation
at war has a degree of complicity in the Holocaust
that is undeniable as a historical fact um. But the

(31:46):
and and so his his his attitude is if they
get away with it, other people will keep trying, and
maybe they'll try again. The only way to make it
clear that you can't do this right, that you can't
do with that, you can't do genocide as a nation
is if a nation is wiped out for doing it right.
That's his that's his attitude, And that is the attitude

(32:09):
of a genocide survivor. And it is um, I will
I'll say this. Um. This is another thing where there's
this conversation we have about history, and it's usually by
like the worst people in the world, where they're like, well,
you have to judge people by the standards of the time,
and they usually mean that by it wasn't bad to

(32:29):
own slaves right right, Um, which it was, and there
were a lot of people the time we knew it
was bad where I actually think it's that's an interesting
conversation to have his situations like this, because I cannot
personally find it an in me to morally judge a
person in Kaufner's position for wanting to kill six million Germans.

(32:50):
It's wrong, but I can't judge it, right because who
wouldn't think that way? Right? In this time? It kind
of probably depends on how far along in these plans
he gets to be honest, like, yeah, god, that's such
an interesting question of caup ability, right, because okay, in
the immediate aftermath, right, you're like, you know, the sort
of temporary insanity as a way of understanding culpability makes

(33:13):
a lot of sense. Um, And but then like sitting
down and and planning something like, I don't know, it's
interesting to me. This is not me trying to like
sit and be like, well, I would have done it different.
I don't know what I would have done. Of course,

(33:35):
I'm gonna tell you right now. I suspect had I
been in his position, I would have agreed with his
thinking and supported it. Yeah, Like I'm not that's not good.
I'm not proud of that. I just like, yeah, man,
if everyone I loved went up in a fucking smoke
stack and all these people just got to keep having
a country, I would probably support some terrible things. No, totally.

(33:56):
And it's it's so interesting too, because it's it's when
you're blaming the nation of Germany and and it's people
as constitute it. It's sort of this interestingly like fundamentally
nationalist kind of idea that like, the people are their nation, right,
and that's but and that is the attitude that the
Germans had applied to that's yeah, yeah, And so part

(34:22):
of what they're saying is like, all right, motherfucker's turnabout
is fair goddamn play right, And it's the like, okay,
you killed you killed my husband, so now I'm going
to kill your husband as like not this is this
is like you kill my husband, I kill you. That's legit.
But again whatever, talking about what it also leads to,

(34:43):
probably you know, this is why in Rojava, and we
talked about this a lot in the Women's War podcast,
so much of the justice system that they have built
is based around ending reprisals, is based around someone killed someone.
We have to bring the families together and get the
families of the victims to agree to a situation by
which the punishment on the person who committed the murder
is severe, but the families are not locked into a

(35:05):
cycle of vengeance, because that that's what's been destroying us,
and it will destroy us if we let it right,
and they're right to do that. And this is like, again,
killing six million Germans is insane. Um, It's just it's
an insanity that I cannot more like, there's no moral
judgment here when I say that, right, they these these are,

(35:26):
as Coffner said, they are deranged, and they are embarking
on a deranged plan, and so to the extent that
what they're doing is evil. Here, I again I placed
this evil at the Nazis feet. Coffner just wanted to
be a poet farmer. Right, you don't want to be
doing this, you know. Um, so you know again, if

(35:47):
you're I think the basic level, like the basic moral
question here is illustrated well as as most moral questions are.
In the movie Rambo First Blood. Right, they drew first Blood?
You know, I haven't seen that so long. It's it's
pretty base. And I remember that I remember liking it. Um, Yeah, Okay, Okay,

(36:11):
so so, so how far along do they get in
this terrible plan? Because I'm I'm really to find out
how he I'm curious because he obviously later was like
just kidding. That wasn't the best plan, not entirely, Margaret.
We will talk about that more too, but yeah, it's time.
It's time to move on. So before we get into
what he does and how he tries, I do want

(36:32):
to make the point that he is completely right when
he says that the Allied justice was not sufficient, and
to make make it clear how insufficient it was, I
want to read a quote from an article in the
Guardian by Jonathan Friedland. After the war, a light officials
identified thirteen point two million men in Western Germany alone,
is eligible for automatic arrest because they had been deemed

(36:53):
part of the Nazi apparatus. Fewer than three and a
half million of these were charged, and of those, two
and a half million were released without trial. That left
about a million people, and most of them faced no
greater sanction than a finer confiscation of property that they
had looted, a temporary restriction on future employment, or a
brief band from seeking public office. By nineteen forty nine,
four years after the war, only three hundred Nazis were

(37:15):
in prison. From an original one to list of thirteen million,
just three hundred paid anything like a serious price, because
it would have never been a never ending task, says
David Cessarini, a research professor at Royal Holloway University of
London and a leading authority on the Holocaust. He cites
the British attempt to convict those responsible for the killing
at Belsen. The trial took nine months and left the

(37:37):
British exhausted. That was just one camp, and there were
what seventy camps with hundreds of people at each one,
to say nothing of the Gestapo officers and the men
of the Einsetz group. And pursuing all those responsible for
the slaughter of the Jews would have been trying thousands
upon thousands of people, and it would have ended in
the jailing of almost the entire adult male population of Germany.
The Allies put their hands up in despair. And what

(37:59):
I will say is, yeah, maybe we should have jailed
the entire adult population in Germany, right like maybe maybe
maybe something certainly more than three hundred, right um? And
and again six just murdering six people indiscriminately is not
certainly not the right answer. But I don't know. If
you're going to say what should have happened, I tend

(38:22):
to consistently line up with a funckload more of those
people should have been killed. Yeah, But if they were
going around being like, sorry, you were in the Nazi army,
I don't care that you're a private You're dead now
because I yeah, I think that's just we're going consequences
of a decision you made. We make permanent decisions every day. Yeah,
and if your permanent decision you made as you join
the Nazi military, people fled, people, people tried to sabotage

(38:43):
the Nazi military. There's even motherfucker's like there there are
a couple of cases of like doctors who joined the
s s under duress and then saved people in the
camps who were like rescued from trials because Jews that
they'd save came forward like no, no, this guy was like,
actually people did, and if you did, I think the
thing too. Here's what I'll put out. Take a leaf

(39:05):
out of the Romans book, and of that five million
kill one in ten see, and I do love a
good decimation, but I think that my issue with this,
I actually would rather that, um, these the Holocaust survivors
who are not part of a who have their own
militia go and kill a huge chunk of people who

(39:29):
were part of the Nazi party rather than a system
an apparatus that like tries and like condemns people to death.
It's like and it's a weird anti death penalty thing
for me. That is like gets back into this idea
that like, I don't trust the systemization of murder right,

(39:49):
and so in the any system that could have killed
all of the Nazi soldiers later would absolutely do even
worse then these other people who are dreaming of revenge.
Maybe maybe that's why, you know, maybe maybe a cool
thing to have done. I say cool in a inappropriate sense.

(40:11):
But you you take these groups who by the way,
these folks like Kauvner and like the folks I read
a quote about earlier, these different Jewish armed organizations, they
kill somewhere around fifteen hundred Nazis after the war something,
and maybe you just say, hey, guys, you have a
license to do whatever you want in bringing people to
justice for a two year period or something. Um, yeah,

(40:33):
free travel throughout Europe. You know, you you take this on. UM,
I don't know. I don't know certainly. What we can
all agree on is what was done was woefully insufficient.
And it's probably part of why there have been so
many genocide since because one of the things that World
War two proved is that actually, you can wipe out
a people and kind of get away with it. Yeah.

(40:54):
The only thing you can't do is be a private
invading Russia. Yes, oh no, you will not get away
with that. Um So, in July of ninety six, Polish
residents of Kilcy murdered forty two Jews who had returned
from Nazi camps to their homes. This sparked a mass
exodus of survivors from Poland. Prior to the massacre, around
a thousand Jews per month had been immigrating from Poland

(41:15):
to the month after Kilsey, twenty thousand fled. It was
thirty thousand a month after that. Um And as best
as anyone can tell, around two thousand Jewes were massacred
post war by Polish civilians and similar killings. And another
one of the questions you can have after this is,
like all this ship that happened in Palestine after this,
How much of it would have happened if people had

(41:37):
felt like they didn't have to flee their homes in
order to not die. Um. There's a question to be
added there too. Um. So Kavner and his comrades saw
have decided, we're gonna kill six million Germans. Um. And
they name their new organization, which was about fifty or
sixty people. This is not a huge group. They name

(41:57):
it inn com, which is the Hebrew word revenge. Now,
there was a lot going on in the Jewish underground
just after the war, and Kaufner was an integral part
of a number of different organizations that were dedicated to
smuggling survivors out to Palestine and providing people with emotional
and financial support through building a European Survivors network. So
people getting out from these different areas, fleeing places that

(42:19):
still weren't safe, would immediately be be met face to
face with another Holocaust survivor, so that like the person
who was helping them with like know what they had
been through. Um. So he has access to a potentially
limitless number of volunteers. And by the way, one of
the points you kind of encounter reading the Kammas. While
they don't tell a lot of other people about their plans,

(42:40):
many of the folks that they are working with would
have agreed with this um and again because they've all
just survived the Hall, I guess um not hard to
see why, but he is. These are And one of
the things about this is like having gone through what
they've gone through in the war, the fifty or sixty
people that he's picked are like perfect insurrectionaries. They are

(43:04):
None of them will talk, none of them will break
under any kind of torture or question. These are the
best underground like you, you could not find a more
capable group of underground fighters than the people in the Calm.
And he specifically, he hand picks the people in this organization.
He will only we use the term Holocaust survivor very broadly, right,

(43:25):
and it applies to people who, like, you know, they
got beat up in the street by Nazis in nineteen
thirty three and then they fled the country. Right, that's
a Holocaust survivor, right, And I wouldn't I wouldn't take that.
Or somebody who you know gets out in forty and
manages to like flee into France and then get to
England or something right ahead of the that's a Holocaust
survivor somebody who hides out in another person's house for
the whole war, pretends to be a gentile. Those are

(43:47):
Holocaust survivors. But they are not the same kind of
Holocaust survivors as somebody who sees his home burnt to
the ground and fights in the woods for three years,
or somebody who is interned at Auschwitz and watches, you know,
a million people die around them. There is a difference, right,
And Kaufner will only accept into the calm people who

(44:09):
have been in the deaf camps, people who have been partisans,
and not just even that, they have to have taken
a form of individual personal sabotage against the Nazi state
while in that situation. So these are these are tough people, Um,
these are These are some very frightening motherfucker's. And Kafner

(44:30):
is so respected and the desired for vengeance is so
overwhelming that a lot of the partisans he picked when
they picks, when they learn about the plan, are almost
delirious with joy. Kaufner gathers his handpicked partisans with him
in a flat in Budapest, where they all live communally
as they're carrying out the early stages of this operation,
and by late nine he and his top lieutenants had

(44:52):
picked out two plans, Plan A and Plan B. Plan
A is to acquire poison and send it through the
water supply and nerum in Munich and discriminately killing the
populace of both cities. Mira Verbon Schavletsky, a member of NAKAM,
told Dina Parat later that she was in seventh heaven
when Kavner revealed the plan. Another member, Zela Rosenberg, said,

(45:13):
Kaufner's words shouted inside me in an insane tail spin. Um,
they are on board, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah um. I'm
gonna quote next from a report from Herrot's on on
how Plan A goes. Joseph Harmett was chosen to be
in charge of the activity in Nuremberg, one of the
symbols of the Nazi regime. I was grateful to be

(45:36):
chosen for this job, he said before his death in
two thousand seventeen. Working under him was Wilick Shannar, who
was hired to work in Nuremberg center for distilling drinking water.
Parat discovered that he was able to obtain the plans
of the water system and in the end even gained
control of the main valve. While the group members were
preparing to carry out the mission, Kauvner was supposed to
provide them with the poison, but he lingered too long

(45:58):
during his visit to Palestine. Only in December nineteen forty
five did he return to Europe disguised as a soldier
returning from leave. According to his testimony, before boarding the ship,
friends in the Haganah, the pre state military force, provided
him with poison packaged in tubes of toothpaste and shaving cream. However,
on his way back he was detained by the British
on the deck after his forged papers aroused suspicion. The

(46:20):
poison which he was holding was tossed into the sea.
So Number one, there's a lot of debate about whether
or not the Haganah tipped off the British, right that like,
some of them handed over the poison, and then when
others found out, they were like this probably should let
this go down, yea um. But he the poison winds
up in the ocean, and it is impossible to say

(46:42):
how many people might have been killed if Kafnor had
gotten the poison to Europe. Um. They have control over
the main water valve in Nuremberg, right, it's it's six
million is probably not a realistic estimate, but they could
have killed tens of thousands, I mean potentially, when you
consider how chaotic things were at the end of the war,
the lack of basic medical infrastructure, the lack of functioning hospitals.

(47:04):
It's not unreasonable to think they might have been able
to kill hundreds of thousands if they had, if they
had gone and actually been able to try this. But
they're not able to. Covener spends months in custody and
kind of afterwards he is a known man to the Allies, um,
and so he can no longer participate in the COM's plans. Um.
He eventually settles on a kibbutz in Palestine. What if

(47:25):
he um, what if he is able to settle into
quiet life of supporting advertisers. Oh Jesus Christ, that was bleak, Margaret,
Thanks thanks for this is not my show. Um, here's

(47:52):
here's some ads. I guess so, Oh, Kauvner is kind
of out of the picture of Nicom. He doesn't invite
and you kind of get the feeling that he starts
to like pull himself out of the tail spin a
little bit. He invites a bunch of members of the

(48:12):
group over to his kibbutz Uh. They visit. Some of
them start to give up at this point, but others
decided to carry out a Plan B. Do they have
the Plan B the whole time? Oh? Yes, yes, yes,
And the Allies the ally and they're working towards Plan
B at the same time as they're working towards planning
and always have a backup plan. And this is actually

(48:33):
cooler um. Indiscriminately poison the water supply of a large
city is a bad thing to do. This is kind
of rat So the Allied authorities had in turned former
s S members at the tension camps outside of Nuremberg
and Da Kau, one of the Avengers lead key Distal,
was hired to work at the bakery that's Surbriet supplied
bread to prisoners and guards at the Nuremberg camp. According

(48:54):
to Dina parat quote, he first thought to inject poison
into the bags of flour in the warehouse, later into
the oh mixers, and finally he reached the conclusion after
consulting with the group members that the poison should be
spread on the bottom of the loads. So Distal spends
months rising through the ranks at the bakery staff until
he gets yeah, rise like bread, until he's put in

(49:15):
charge of the bread warehouse, and he learns every aspect
of the distribution system. This included the fact that German
captives were given cheap black bread while the American guards
were given more expensive white bread. This was a big
break for New Calm. They were willing to mass murder Germans,
but they like, again, the Americans have just liberated Nazi Germany.
Don't want to murder those guys. It's like they would

(49:35):
feel kind of bad about that. Um. Now, I should
note that there's also some quotes. You'll get some really
chilling quotes, Like there's one member of the Calm was like,
if Kafnor had wanted us to murder a Jew for
some reason to carry out our plans, we would have
done it, Like we would have done anything. He told us.
If you're willing to poison intoscriminately a city, you're going

(49:55):
to kill a lot of Jews. Yeah, yeah, that that
is also probably well actually, given the realities of the Holocaust,
probably not at that I don't actually know enough about
when people started getting back into Germany and started living
in those cities. Acond Yeah, um, so yeah he is,
And so this is the plan um they And again

(50:18):
this shows like what competent, because they have they have
in the space of a few months, gotten people at
high levels in the water distribution network, like in like
managing the waters, like the freshwater system and fucking the
city of Nuremberg. And they've gotten other people managing like
the bread distribution at this at like prisoner of war

(50:39):
camps where huge numbers of s S prisoners are being held. Um.
And they do this all simultaneously. And Distal and his
chunk of new Com find another source of poison and
they smuggle it into the warehouse under a raincoat. Several
members of to COM succeed in hiding themselves in bread
baskets where they wait for the night to fall. When
the other workers had left for the day and locked up,

(51:00):
they all left hiding and start painting poison using paintbrushes
over loaves of bread. This was a static work for them.
And when they've covered three thousand loaves, they paused to
kiss each other. It's arsenic that they're putting on this bread.
Two days later, Germans at the camp started to fall sick.
More than former s S men caught stomach poison and
it is unclear if any die records aren't great at

(51:23):
this time. Some reports youll here is that it was
like close to a thousand, you know, several hundred prisoners
died eventually as a result of this. Dina Parat claims
they failed to kill anyone. I don't really know who's
right here. Dina kind of has a vested interest in
making it seem like they didn't kill people. Um, I
don't actually know what went down. Um, but they certainly
get a lot of s S men sick. And you

(51:44):
know what, I don't care what happens. I don't care
at all. And like I don't care at all even
if they're prisoners. I don't care. Well, I mean especially,
I think it is beautiful that it is not their prison,
they're not their guards they're killing them. It's their former victims,
the victims. That's fine. That's completely phone notes on this one. Yeah,
except that the poisoning is apparently every time I've read

(52:06):
about people like trying to do mass poisoning in history,
it usually fails really terribly all nearly always. Yeah, it's
actually very hard to do, and it's hard to say,
like would would the water plan if worked? They had
a lot of poison it was, it was supposed to
be a pretty good quality. It's also kind of worth
noting part of why they choose to poison the water
is that for hundreds of years in Europe, like every

(52:26):
time water would go bad in a well or something,
the juice would get blamed and murdered. And so they
were kind of being like, we're going to do it
this time, right, Like that was like part of the thinking,
um that that that tracks so well to just be
like you call as monsters for a thousand fucking years,
moderately a thousand years. Yeah, we'll do it now. Motherfucker's

(52:48):
I get it. Bad thing to do, but to get it. Um. So,
the Allies never caught in a calm for the poisoning,
but when they analyzed the arsenic used they concluded that
they could have killed about sixty people with it. It
suspected the reason why this doesn't work that well as
that they spread it too thin on the bread um.
And this is something that members of the group would

(53:08):
regret for the rest of their lives. Um, yeah, I
get it, guys, I get it. So not long after,
another group of the common Surgeons, headed by a hero
of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, attempted to carry out the
same plan in the Dachau camp. The plan was canceled
at the last minute for unknown reasons. And it's kind
of at this point that Nacom starts to fall apart.

(53:29):
The mania of the wars the derangement, as as Kagnor
would later claim, has faded, and now people are starting
to look at the possibility of a future. Right. Um,
there are a few men who stayed loyal to the mission.
After a visit to Kavner and Palestine, a small group
returned to Europe to try again. Their efforts were constantly
stymied by the new Federal Republic of Germany, and many

(53:51):
of them were arrested by After turning to crime to
finance their efforts. They all eventually immigrated back to Palestine,
where many turned the rage and hate that they'd to
spend upon the Germans towards a new enemy. So a
bunch of the guys who are in the calm become
senior officers in the Israeli Defense Establishment. One becomes the

(54:11):
chief of the i d F. At one point, a
couple one or two become generals. A number of NECOM
fighters and affiliates and other Jewish militant organizations start the
massad um. And yeah, a lot of very nasty things
result from that. They do kill like about fifteen d
Nazis too, which is is fine, um, but you know,

(54:33):
the nakba happens. Uh, there's a you know, the establishment
over time of an apartheid state, the displacement of a
large number of people. Um, a lot of pretty pretty
ugly stuff, and a lot of it is done by
people who had been in this group and these other groups. Now. Covnor,
because he's tried to poison six million people, has kind

(54:53):
of ruined any chance of a political career for himself,
but he remains a prominent and a popular poet and
INSPI rational war leader. During the nineteen Arab Israeli War,
he was made a propaganda officer, and he used his
skillet poetry to try and encourage his soldiers to carry
out violence without sympathy or guilt. He issued a series
of battle missives, one of which was published after the

(55:14):
surrender of an Israeli unit during the Battle of Nit Sonham. Now,
these Israeli soldiers had been hopelessly outnumbered and cut off
by the Egyptians. They're kind of surrounded. They surrendered to
the Egyptian army. Kaufner is furious about this. He sees
them as traders. He calls them traders, and he publishes
a poem titled Failure just days after the fighting, and

(55:35):
I'm gonna quote now from a study by Michael Arbel,
denouncing them for not fighting to their last drop of
blood and for not defending every inch of territory with
their lives. By failing to do so, Kauvner claimed the
surrendering fighters demonstrated to the Egyptian enemy that it was
possible to vanquish the defenses of a Jewish settlement within
a matter of hours and undermine the conviction essential to
the morale of every Israeli fighter that few, that the

(55:57):
few are capable of defeating the many. Toward the con
lusion of the missive Coauvner vehemently called out, better to
fall in the trenches of home than to surrender to
a murderous invader. To surrender so long as the body
still lives in the last remaining bullet continues to breathe,
it's magazine. It's magazine, to a disgrace, to emerge, to
the invader's captivity, to a disgrace, and to death. Now

(56:19):
this caused outrage at the time because he's calling these
soldiers who have like fought and surrendered like cowards, um.
And this is compounded in because Kauvner's wrong. He's saying, like,
the Egyptians are murderous monsters, how dare you surrender them?
And the Egyptians treat these Israeli soldiers as lawful prisoners
of war and turn them to their home because it's

(56:39):
a war and there's rules, and they return them home afterwards.
So these guys don't die. That's because they surrender, which
is why it's it's good to respect the rules of war, um,
which cared about as soon as he exactly which exactly
again we all understand how he came to stop caring

(56:59):
about the Every enemy is the Nazis, right, That's not
just him, that's a lot of these these people, right,
even though like you know, the Egyptians are not the Nazis. Um,
not that there's not ugly stuff that happens in these
wars that are going to follow, but it's not the
same um. And these returning soldiers attack Kafner for calling
them treasonists, and a later investigation by the I d

(57:21):
F concludes that the soldiers had acted appropriately. Kafner had
simply lost all sense of proportion. He remained an influential
poet for the rest of his life, though, winning the
Israel Prize for Poetry in nineteen seventy and dying in
nineteen eighties seven from laryngeal cancer. Because he is just
when I tell you this guy was a chain smoker,
you have to think about, like what it means to

(57:42):
be a Holocaust survivor in a chain smoke. This guy
is this guy is consuming cigarettes at like the nation
state level. Yeah, I mean a cigarette is a is
a symbol of no future, right, Yeah, that is? That
is its charm and its poison. Is that there's a
symbol of I'm doing something because I don't care what

(58:03):
happens to me. Yeah. There may be no people alive
who smoke the way this man was capable of smoking.
We've lost the capacity for smoking like that in the
species um, so other members of nicom. They'll remain alive
into the twenty first century, and they don't really no
one really talks about what has This is kind of
like not very well known at all. I mean, it's

(58:25):
still not that well known, but this is really not
known at all until kind of the nineteen eighties when
some of the when the people who survived start to
be like, oh, we're not gonna live forever, we should
probably like talk about what happened, right, And so that's
the point at which historians and sociologists start to interview
them on their about how their feelings on revenge had
evolved throughout the decades. And by the way, there's going

(58:45):
to be if you start researching this, you may find
some of the books you read by some of these
survivors there are points that I've laid out of here
that they will disagree on. There's several books by survivors.
And then Dina Parratt has written two books, and she's
kind of the academic who has talked to the most
of these guys. There's points of disagreement, there's things we
don't know because again, everybody like the Foggle War, everybody's

(59:06):
like older like they were kind of crazy at the time.
You're not, You're not. There's points that you're not going
to get the exact history on because nobody knows it right.
There's disagreement from people who were all there. You know,
that's just the reality of of historiography. So but there
are interviews with a number of these guys, So we
have kind of information from historians and sociologists about how

(59:26):
these people's feelings on revenge had evolved through the decades,
and as far as I can tell, they didn't change
their minds. Boulak Benyakov, who led in a calm after
ninety seven, said that he could not have looked himself
in the mirror if he hadn't tried to get revenge.
He still regretted that it had failed. Most of his
comrades seemed to agree, feeling that the Germans had deserved
it and ruling that they had not succeeded in clear

(59:48):
carrying out Plan A. When one survivor was asked how
she could possibly have made peace with the mass poisoning
of babies, children, and other civilians, she answered, if you
had been there with me at the end of the war,
you wouldn't talk that way, that's completely possible. Yep again,
but no, no, no, it's just like, yeah, you can't

(01:00:13):
expect people like it's obviously not everyone who lived through that.
In fact, most people who lived through that didn't feel
entirely the same way, but a lot of them did
and that's valid. Um, I'm glad they did not succeed
in poisoning six million people to death and discriminately, but
to get it, and it's it's them. You know. There's

(01:00:36):
a there's a really good song about this whole story
by a he's a German Jewish musician. Um. The band
is one second. I'm gonna pull this up right now.
It's actually how I heard about this story first, and
then I wound up reading the books. Um, and it's
it's a pretty pretty dope song. It's called Um six
Million Germans by Daniel Kahan and the Painted Bird, And

(01:00:59):
there's um there's a couple of lines in there because
it kind of ends with him talking about how these
guys all became part of the Israeli military establishment, of
the of the birth of this apartheid state, of all
those violence that gets done in the wake of that,
And there's a line he has in their convengence set
or one second, le let me pull up clear, because
I don't get this wrong. They put aside their rage

(01:01:20):
and hate and work to build a Jewish state with
Jewish towns and Jewish farms and Jewish guns and nuclear arms.
Now conventions put upon the shelf be taken out later
on someone else. Be careful how you read this tale,
lest your own prejudice prevail. Look around the world today
and consider the role that vengeance plays for history has

(01:01:40):
its unpaid debts, and is it better if we forget?
I like that it ends with a question. You know, yep,
it's a good song. I mean, it's like it's so
hard because if you come with almost any other story,
it would be so easy for me to be like, well,
here's how I feel about vengeance, and here's how I

(01:02:02):
feel about justice. And you know, um, and you look
at this and you're just like, yes, it's fucking messy.
Ship is fucking messy. Um. This is not, you know,
as uplifting, maybe as some of our other Christmas episodes.

(01:02:23):
I I would not feel confident calling these people bastards
because I think to some extent the things they have
lived through make it impossible for me to fully morally
judge them, even for the bad things that they've done. Um.
That's where I am. You're allowed to feel however you
want to feel about this stuff, but you know it's

(01:02:43):
worth thinking about. Um. I will say when we're talking
about things that the Nazis have done that are evil,
obviously all of the killings, all of the millions and
millions and tens of millions of deaths are the worst.
But one little crime of the basis, I will say
is the fact that, as I was researching this, I
had a literal moment where I thought, well, ship would

(01:03:05):
the world have been better if they've done it? If
they'd killed six million? And that was the lesson everyone
else who thought about genocide for the rest of history
took out from it. Right. Yeah, And the answer is no,
by the way. But the fact that I and I'm
going to guess most of you are going to spend
some time actually thinking about that is another crime we

(01:03:27):
should lay at the Nazis. Fee No, that's such a
fucking good point. I had a moment where I was like, well,
what would have happened if they've done that? And it's like,
it doesn't matter because spreading the idea that killing millions
of people and discriminately can ever possibly there's ever a
good way to do. And it's interesting because if it's
like if they had dismant whatever is a million hypotheticals,

(01:03:49):
but the idea that Germany should cease to exist, which
I also don't whatever whatever, I don't think any countries,
Yeah exactly, yeah, but like you know, if like Germany
does so bad that it doesn't get to exist anymore, Um,
it's so, and then it I would love to know more,

(01:04:09):
you know, because it's like, as far as I understand
has explained to me by an Italian friend, the Italian
fascist system like stayed kind of intact and just changed
its name in a lot of ways, or at least
a lot of the individual functionaries continued and like I
don't know, and versus Germany that seemed to like Germany

(01:04:30):
presents itself as having had a national reckoning. Well, I mean,
certainly I will say of the Axis powers, they have
done the best job of that that that is probably
very fair to say. You do get these weird moments.
I was visiting Sachsenhausen, which is it's not a death camp,
but it's a concentration camp, so obviously a lot of
people died there that its main goal was not killing.

(01:04:51):
That had started as a place for political prisoners, and
UH continued that way under the Nazis. Uh. It's a
it's a very bleak place, although it is the museum
that the Germans have set up there is very very good.
If you are ever near Berlin, you have a chance
to see Saxon House, and I think you kind of
owe it to yourself to see it. UM. I went
during the dead of winter, so it was snowy, and
there was this moment where you're like walking through it. You're,

(01:05:13):
you know, we're all bundled up in three layers and
it's just frigid, and then you walk in to one
of the indoor areas and the first thing you see
is one of the uniforms, the winter uniforms that the
inmates wore, and it's very affecting. UM. But as we're
like coming into it, we have this great tourist guide
who's this brit who has been living in Germany for
like thirty forty years, and he's he's walking us through

(01:05:34):
and he points out this building outside of kind of
the museum area, and he's like, back when the camp
was active, that's actually the administrative building. That's where like
they did all of the sort of administrative tasks for it.
And I was like, well, what is it now and
he said, oh, well, it's like a training facility for
the Berlin police, right right. Um, So you know there's

(01:05:56):
you know, critiques I might have, but but yeah, I
mean generally speaking, yes, the Germans have done, of the
access powers, the best job of of reckoning with those crimes,
and I think probably it also would be fair to
say a better job of reckoning those crimes than like
the United States has done with slavery. Um. But also
like there are repeated we just we just had another
group of like right wing Germans arrested for trying to

(01:06:19):
overthrow the government and store of the Reichstag. So you know,
there's there's there's issues to right, I mean like there's
there's Nazis everywhere. Now like that's another there are Nazis everywhere.
I will say, I am not convinced. I don't think
I think it's probably fair to say there's not like
more Nazis as a percentage of the population in Germany
now than a number of other places. So, UM, I
don't know. I don't know. Like, this is not a

(01:06:41):
thing where I can say and here's the moral lesson
to take out of this story. This is just some
stuff that happened that you you, I think you should
think about. Uh. Yep, they're a good episode anyway for Christmas,
Happy holidays? Uh uh fuck great, great, Yeah, we're going

(01:07:08):
to well if you like lighthearted violence, god damnit. Um.
I have a book coming out called Escape from Insul Island,
which asks the very important question of what if all
of the men who felt like they were owed a
woman by the government got tricked into moving to an
island where they were stuck. Uh. And it's coming out

(01:07:31):
on February one. You can pre order it. You can
get it through the publishers Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness,
or if you're listening to this in the future, you
can get it wherever books are sold. And I have
a podcast called Cool People Did Cool Stuff. And I
have another podcast called Lived Like the World Is Dying,
which is about community and individual preparedness. That's what I

(01:07:52):
have to plug, Sophie, do you have anything to plug? Ah?
Behind the Bastard's doing a live as f sketch fest
in January on the Yeah Good podcast at cool Zone
Media and All the Things. Yeah, if you'll find an
even more fucked up story to talk about in a

(01:08:13):
room full of people where you all have to stare
at each other and think about the ethics of violent
responses to genocide. No, no, it'll probably be about some
guy you sold children poison or whatever. Really fine, it'll
be funny. Yeah, Well, here we go. Happy Happy Christmas. Bah. Yeah,

(01:08:36):
talk to talk about in a calm to your family
at the dinner table this year during the holiday. Behind
the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone
media dot com, or check us out on the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.