Part Two: Adolf Eichmann: Mr. Holocaust Himself

Robert tells Joe about Eichmann's entrance to the Nazi Party and his time as a concentration camp intern during the start of the Third Reich.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Ah, I don't know why it's behind the bastards. We're
back is part two. Adolf Ikeman, you know, the Ikeman. Uh?

Speaker 3 (00:15):
Oh uh, maybe he's uh, he's the Ike from Mike
and Ikes.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
That's rights the man. Yeah, Mike and Ikes, Mike Madonna
and Adolf Ikeman together at last in a candy.

Speaker 3 (00:30):
Oh no, not Mike Madonna. I heard he was a
nice guy.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Well, I know nothing about him. He was the only
Mic I could famous Mike I could come up with
on a short order. Anyway, how you doing, Joe, I'm good.
Any big changes in life in the last like ten minutes.

Speaker 3 (00:50):
No, I got up, walked around a bit, Uh, came back.
Turns out Adolf ike would still piece of shit.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
Yes, he has not become less of one.

Speaker 3 (01:00):
Yeah, invented candy while I was gone.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
Yeah, well, yes, the candy stuff is new. A lot
of a lot of researchers aren't aware of that yet,
because it's a lie.

Speaker 3 (01:10):
You have the forbid knowledge.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
Yeah, you know, Nazism is based on the big lie,
which you know. It's very funny to me. I get
it more if you're German, right, because the German Imperial
Army at the start of World War One almost certainly
the best army in the world and really comes within
a hair's breath of pulling it off right like they

(01:35):
came pretty It's not like World War Two, where it's like,
well past a very certain point, this was fucked like
they were. They were in the fight right up until
the last year there, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:45):
But if you're Austrian, it's just like you.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
Were fucked from the jump.

Speaker 3 (01:49):
Come on, man, this is why they only had to
become German nationalists, who was like, yeah, we did, we tried,
our thing didn't work out. It turns out we don't
deserve it.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
We immediately got pantsed by both the Russians and the
Serbians because the Hungarians were just like you think Germany
strapped to a corpse. Boy, we're gonna go limp as fuck.

Speaker 3 (02:10):
I'm gonna go hang out this place called Asanzo for
a very long time.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
Let's be worse than the Italians at twentieth century war.
It's not easy. So anyway, it's always funny to me that, like, yeah,
so many Austrians got hung up on the big lives, Like, guys,
you didn't need anyone else to explain your defeat and
did the Germans really, But there's just a little bit
more to it, with the.

Speaker 3 (02:35):
Germans still starting a political party that's just anti Austrian
while I'm also Austrian. Because it's like, we don't deserve it,
we don't deserve it.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
It made more sense for them to get really pissed
at the Hungarians.

Speaker 3 (02:49):
Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
So by mid nineteen thirty two, Pikeman has joined the
Nazi Party. He starts reading their newspapers before he officially
becomes a member. He gets kind of involved in like
the fan fiction expanded Nazi Universe before he takes the
plunge itself. His favorite paper is Volkashobeobacter, which is the

(03:16):
official Nazi Party newspaper edited by Alfred Rosenberg, Friend of
the Pod. He's not a friend of the pod.

Speaker 3 (03:23):
He was friendship with Alfred Rosenberg over.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
Yea, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're not going to have
him on the show anymore. It was a mistake in
the first place to bring him on. I just wanted
to know his opinions on idiomine.

Speaker 3 (03:36):
They were bad.

Speaker 2 (03:37):
Oh we didn't run that episode for a reason.

Speaker 3 (03:39):
This is why you lost your Spotify deal.

Speaker 2 (03:42):
Yeah. Anyway, Cesserine reports that he was drawn in at
first by these lurid stories that were printed in Nazi
papers of these grand street battles between the brown Shirts
and the SS and communists and other anti fascists in Berlin, right,
because that was a major part of Nazi propaganda in
kind of the early thirties, is these like heroic street

(04:04):
battles that are winning us the country. And you get
the sense, and Iikman never writes this, but you get
the sense that he wants, like a lot of young
men do some play in that martial glory, right, he
wants to feel like he's got a part in it, right.

Speaker 3 (04:19):
Even if he didn't before. I imagine he got that
kind of beaten into a skull by the Junior Veterans.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
Association, right, like you really need to be in a
fight to be a man.

Speaker 3 (04:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
Now, what's interesting is he'd taken no real part in
the urban combat that had existed between right and left
in Austria up to this point, right, for last five
or six years, there's been a ton of it. He
had plenty of opportunities to get involved in like these
kind of street fights, and he had chosen not to.

Speaker 3 (04:47):
He saw him a choice.

Speaker 2 (04:48):
I must say, yeah, which is, you know, shows some judgment,
but he clearly is like feeling it by this point, right,
like the fact that he's spent all this time in
his social life and his career instead of becoming a
hero to fascists. So what finally tips him over the
edge into joining? While the answer seems to be simple ego,
The Austrian Nazi Party had been founded by a war

(05:10):
veteran named Alfred Proksch, who was close friends to a
guy named Bolek, who himself was the gaulier or leader
of the Linz Nazi Party. Boleck was friends with Eichman's dad,
which again goes to his politics.

Speaker 3 (05:23):
Right, Oh my god, this keeps coming back to his dad.
He is such a Nepo baby. He is the Nazi
Nepo baby of all Nazi Nepo babies. Right.

Speaker 2 (05:33):
So another family friend and colleague of his father was
the father of Ernst Chelton Brunner. And if you know
your Nazi war criminals, Calton Brunner is a big one.
He will go on to be an Austrian SS member
who becomes director of the Reich Security Main Office the RSS. Right,
Like it's the organization that fucking Heidrich is running for

(05:54):
a while, right. Calton Brunner is a major member of
the SS, but at this point he's a young member
of the SS, which is itself a fairly new organization
and it's just starting trying to like spread in Austria
because Hitler's already got the Anschluss planned here. Right, So,
the younger Eichmann and Calton Brunner had known each other
for most of their lives. And when Eikman shows up

(06:16):
at this Nazi party meeting, Ernst embraces him and addresses
him using the familiar do form of greeting, which is
a German way of basically talking to somebody like their
a close friend or a member of the family. Right,
A lot of hierarchy of where you actually stood in
the Nazi state had less to do sometimes with your
actual rank and more to do with like, can you

(06:37):
call Hitler do right? Can you like use this intimate
form of greeting with the fearor if so? Or can
you use this intriment form of greeting with Himmler, you know,
or with Gerring or whatever, right with somebody who's part
of the high command if so you've got clout right,
maybe more than someone who technically outranks you.

Speaker 3 (06:54):
And of course after do you have to finish it
with the formal host.

Speaker 2 (06:57):
Right right, right? Yes, as rams it reminds us all,
so I commit. I don't know if it's a good
one either. I don't know German. I just know every
book about Hitler talks about the people who are allowed
to call him that. Right, it was a big deal.
Eikman would later recall that he was kind of drawn

(07:17):
in to the Nazi Party and to the SS as
much by anything by how good Carlton Brunner's uniform looks.
He's like, damn, those SS uniforms are slick, right, I
want to look like that.

Speaker 3 (07:29):
You know. He felt for the fucking dumbest.

Speaker 2 (07:32):
This so many so many guys did.

Speaker 3 (07:36):
Yeah, I know.

Speaker 2 (07:37):
He was impressed by the rapid growth of the Nazis,
their ascendance in Germany, how well they marched, and how
good their branding was. Then Calton Brenner told him you
you belong to us, and Eikman decided, yes, yes he did. Now.
At first he was a bit of an oddity at
party gatherings. Unemployment is soaring in Austria right now, and
most of the far right street fighters right are either

(07:59):
out of work or working irregularly. Aikman's first impression on
his colleagues is that he has money, right, He can
afford to buy beer and bread for everybody, and a
lot of them can't, right, So that's kind of and
again that makes some sort of an oddity in this
organization in this period, is that like, he's mister money
bags to them.

Speaker 3 (08:18):
So is he a guy that gets invited to the
party because he brings beer.

Speaker 2 (08:22):
That's both nepotism and that he has money for beer,
and one has to assume cigarettes.

Speaker 3 (08:27):
Okay, we've all invited that guy to the party before.

Speaker 2 (08:30):
Right, right, Yes. In early nineteen thirty three, Aikman was
laid off from his job as a result of the
economic downtterm. Now, this seems to have been an amicable split.
He was on the chopping block because he was unmarried,
and they fired unmarried people before people who were married
and thus had families to support, and his severance was
generous for the time. Now, the fact that the person

(08:51):
who lays him off as his Jewish boss makes it
tempting to be like, oh, is like that an inciting incident,
But he just doesn't write about this as if he's angry.
His writing about it is like, yeah, you know, I
knew like this was happening everywhere. I knew it was
going to happen eventually. I had already started looking for
new options, and they gave me good separence. Right. He
just doesn't doesn't really describe himself as being particularly put

(09:12):
off by.

Speaker 3 (09:13):
This, and it doesn't seem to be that thing that
everybody's looking for. No, it's obvious that that his anti
semitism is coming while he's already in the SS.

Speaker 2 (09:23):
Right, he's not quite in it yet, but he is.
He's heading up towards the SS. Right, he's in the
Nazi Party and he clearly aspires to the SS. So
he's getting more anti semitic. It's just it's careerism. I
think that that inspires him to get more anti Semitic,
rather than like something happening outside of that, which people
seem to constantly want.

Speaker 3 (09:44):
Yeah, he's chilling with his bros who are in the SS.
He's going to be anti semitic eventually, yes, or lie
about it or pretending this friend's in good and getting
fucking job because he just lost his.

Speaker 2 (09:56):
Yeah, and honestly, to a certain point, doesn't matter if
you're like pretending to be anti Semitic in the SS
or really anti semitic.

Speaker 3 (10:03):
Right, just like, oh I said that slur ironically, Yeah
he did.

Speaker 2 (10:06):
No, No, you didn't. You're literally in the SS cabot.
So the party is kind of his social safety net
and it's also his backup plan when he loses his job.
He goes to Calton Brenner and he's like, look, I
need work now, can I get some help? And Calton
Brenner pulls some strings and gets Iikman taken in by
the SS. Now, Austria bans the Nazi Party not long

(10:29):
after this, and so some of the people who had
been high ranking leave and go to Germany right to
participate because the Nazis are now in power in Germany.
So these guys like leave Austria to help run the
German government and run the SS in Germany. Calton Brynner
is one of them, and he takes Eichman with him. Right,
So Eichman kind of flees Austria when the Nazis are

(10:51):
banned with Calton Brunner and gets a job in the SS.

Speaker 3 (10:55):
He goes through a weird Nazi birthright.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
Yeah right, he's doing a Nazi birthright thing, and he
goes through months of military training and indoctrination and then
further training on how to run and operate a concentration camp. Now,
at this point, the concentration camps are not what they
will be. A lot of them at the point at
which he comes over are what you'd call wild concentration camps,
which are we've got this old school or police building.

(11:19):
We've got a bunch of political prisoners, communists and whatnot
that we're going to torture some of them, will kill.
Let's just throw them in there and have guards like,
fuck them up a bunch, right. Gradually the system gets
more formalized. But at this point, obviously Jews are a
lot of the people being taken in, but also just
a lot of like communists, a lot of political enemies,
social democrats, people who are enemies of the regime are

(11:42):
being put in camps.

Speaker 3 (11:43):
No, it wasn't all say, Also wasn't unheard of for
people to get released from the camps at this period
of time.

Speaker 2 (11:47):
I know, no, most people do. These are not death
camps yet, right, you get like paroles, like people die
at them, but they're not death camps.

Speaker 3 (11:55):
You know.

Speaker 2 (11:56):
The goal of these camps is not to kill you.
The goal is primarily to scare people.

Speaker 3 (12:00):
Right.

Speaker 2 (12:02):
By nineteen thirty four he was working under Camp Commander
Theodore Iike at Dachau. This involved a transfer to the SD,
which is the SS Security Service, which at the start
of the Reich is a small organization, but it's powerful
and feared now. Eikman gets in too late to participate
in the Night of Long Knives, but he benefits from
the fact that the SD had been the sharpest of

(12:24):
those knives, so it's kind of extra. People are extra
scared of it, and it has an extra degree of
prestige because of how it performed during that period. Right
in the space of less than two years, he goes
from being a mid level manager at an oil company
on his way to unemployment to a member of the
most feared security agency in the German world. His boss

(12:45):
like the guy once he kind of gets moved to
the SD. His direct superior is former Bastards POD alumni
Reinhard Heydrich and Eikman. Before Jerusalem, Bettina Stangneth writes, this
was a big step up in the world. Eichmann felt
he had established himself a fact in his to marry
and start a family, which within the SS was also
a good career move. He married Vera Leebel, a woman

(13:06):
from a lot in Bohemia, four years his junior. She
and her two brothers, who worked for the Gestapo would
come to profit from her husband's social climbing. And this
is a big part of how shit works, right, This
is like a gangster regime, a lot of the benefit.
Eikman doesn't have money, right, He's still not. He's not
like risk connections, but he can get married and convince

(13:27):
them because he's got connections which will help your family out.

Speaker 3 (13:29):
Right.

Speaker 2 (13:30):
So like, yeah, if you I don't have enough as
much money as you might want from a suitor, but
I can help my brothers in law get contracts and stuff.

Speaker 3 (13:38):
Right, I could. I could be a Nazi job program
for your shity brothers.

Speaker 2 (13:42):
Right, right, for your fail brothers. Yeah, that's exactly how
a lot of the stuff works in this period.

Speaker 3 (13:47):
Yeah, of course. I mean his dad has gotten almost
every job he's ever had, and now he's Calton Brunner
hanging out with him. He's set. He's in the worst
way possible, but he's set.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
He's a made man with a Nazism.

Speaker 3 (13:59):
Yes, he went to the local trade school on concentration camps.
He's everything you're looking for. Yeah, yeah, he's perfect.

Speaker 2 (14:05):
So one of the things he likes most about the
SD is that you don't have to wear your uniform
every day. Right, you can like wear normal clothes when
you're in the SD because you're like the FBI of
the Nazis, right, and you don't have to. Also, you
don't have to do any of the pointless drills and
marching that like a lot of guys in the SS do.
There's less of the paramilitarism, which is boring. Right, it

(14:26):
kind of makes life achure.

Speaker 3 (14:28):
And it also is the military makes everything that can
make you sick of walking.

Speaker 2 (14:33):
Yeah, and this is like your fake racism military. And
Reikman gets to skip the bullshit, right, And he gets
to skip the bullshit in a way that makes him
feel special. Right, I get to skip the bullshit because
I'm like smarter and more valuable than the other guys. Right,
And like his ego, he so much of why he
becomes so dedicated to the Nazis. Is that Nazism feeds

(14:53):
his ego and his belief that he's special, that the
world had not really tailored to earlier in his life.

Speaker 3 (15:00):
And unfortunately it seems to like a lot of these guys.
Of course, it's careerism. But like he was good at it,
he is going to be unfortunately good at it. Yes, yeah, unfortunately,
he's very good at it. He's got a good brain
for logistics. Tragically. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:16):
After April of nineteen thirty five, SS members were officially
forbidden from having personal contact with Jews. This was waived
for the SD because the nature of their workman that
they were always on duty. Iikman decided to rebrand himself
as an expert on Jews and Judaism, and he starts
going undercover to Jewish civil organizations and making connections to

(15:37):
different community leaders, and he pretends to be a liberal, right,
so he'll show up at Jewish gatherings. Remember this is
early in the Third Reich. These communities have not been
completely disrupted or uprooted yet, and they're trying to figure
out how do we protect ourselves from this government that's
getting increasingly hostile towards us and Iikman starts showing up
and being like, hey, man, fucked up what those Nazis
are doing. I'm really curious about your faith. Would you

(15:59):
like tell me some stuff about how things work? Right? Yeah,
and he was. He would occasionally he would be open
about being in the SS, but a lot of Jewish
community leaders would still talk to him because they were like, well,
it's useful. He's a man in the SS. We can reach, right,
he seems like a decent enough guy. We can convince
him that we're people, and maybe he'll provide us with

(16:21):
some protection. Right, we can convince him of our humanity.
He goes so far as to briefly take Hebrew classes
from a Jewish teacher, despite being officially forbidden on two
different occasions from doing so. And this is something it's
going to be. It's exaggerated because he will exaggerate it.

(16:42):
He's never a fluent speaker of Hebrew. Right. He picks
up a couple of phrases that he can use and whatnot,
and he likes to drop them. He likes to drop
Hebrew phrases and like SS meetings and stuff to show
everyone how knowledgeable he is about the Jews. That he's
the expert. Right.

Speaker 3 (16:58):
What's really funny is I think most people, well at
the time, would speak Yiddish and not Hebrew anyway.

Speaker 2 (17:02):
Well, he also he also picks up right, he takes
Hebrew classes, but he does pick he picks up little
bits of both. This year there's a the movie Conspiracy,
He kind of the Aikman in that claims to have
learned a lot more Hebrew than he really did. But
that's also what real Aikman did to his colleagues, because
none of them are able to be like, you don't
really speak Hebrew, right, because they don't know they're Nazis.

Speaker 3 (17:25):
You know, right, I don't know the first thing about
it because it's yeah, and he can make himself seem
like more of a a strategic thinkers, like no, I
know my enemy and such, I know my enemy.

Speaker 2 (17:36):
You know, he's doing his son Soux shit.

Speaker 3 (17:38):
Yeah, And you see that kind of shit all the
time when people are reframing these guys and making them
seem like evil geniuses and not just like again a
nepo idiot who was really good at logistics.

Speaker 2 (17:50):
The genius here is not that he was so well
informed about Judaism and like Gain such a deep it
was that he knew all I have to do. If
I take a if I can get like a dozen
words and phrases down, and I can read passages from
a couple pieces of rabbinical literature. Everyone else knows so
little about these people, then I will be the most
knowledgeable guy about Jews in the SS. And that's probably

(18:13):
a really good path to career advancement. No one's ever
gonna call me on this shit, and I can make
a place for myself in this organization.

Speaker 3 (18:20):
Right, He's literally the world of the blind, the man
with what eyes cake, but he is what eye for Hebrew? Yeah, right.

Speaker 2 (18:27):
Stangnet's book goes on to describe the extent of his studies. Later,
Eichmann would speak of a course of study that took
three years. He didn't mention that his superiors occasionally had
to reprimand him for disorganization and tardiness. It would be
easy to mistake his lifestyle for that of a scientifically
inclined a steat with some crude political views, except that
between coffeehouse chats, memos, lectures, and evening conferences with his colleagues,

(18:49):
he was meticulously keeping denunciation files and writing anti Semitic propaganda,
making arrests and carrying out joint interrogations with the Gestapo. Now,
there were occasions rumors within the SS because of the
way he talks, because of what he's doing, that Eikman
is either sympathetic towards Jews and there even there's there's
a long series of myths that he has Jewish ancestry,

(19:11):
that he's like born Jewish, that he's born in a
Jewish part of the world, right, Like, yeah, there are
myths about that within the SS, but that also gets overstated,
Like he dealt with a little bit of shit, probably,
but the overwhelming reaction of his colleagues seemed to have
been respect for his knowledge. By nineteen thirty six, Adolf
Eichman was widely considered the SD's chief expert on Judaism.

(19:34):
His mentor in the SD, ed Leervon Mildenstein, had become
fascinated with Zionism and started to consider if immigration to
Palestine was a possible solution to Germany. He's Jewish question, right,
could we ship all these people to Palestine? Right and
have that let us get rid of them?

Speaker 3 (19:50):
Right? It reminds me of the Madagascar Plan as well.

Speaker 2 (19:53):
We're about to talk about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So Eikman,
you know, he's one of these guys where there's a
lot of unscientific thinking and a lot of just like
propaganda around the Jews that is just made out of
fantasies because they're just at a certain point when they're
rising to power, just throwing out as many lies as

(20:14):
possible to scare people. But Reinhardt Heidrich and the SD
is like, no, no, no, we need a scientific approach
to race, and we need to have a real understanding
of what's going on here. And as a result, Heidrich
is going to kind of pick out Eikman and be
like this, this guy is someone we need to bring
further into the fold. Per an article on BBC's website

(20:36):
titled Adolf Eichman The Mind of a war Criminal. Quote.
While rabble rousers like Joseph Gebbels railed against the Jews
and called forever harsher but directionless measures against them, the
SD quietly promoted Jewish immigration. To this end, Eikman contacted
Zionist invoys and may even made a visit to Palestine
in nineteen thirty seven. Now again, Eikman is going to

(20:56):
make a lot of tea out of the fact that
he's been to Palestine. This is a total nothing burger.
Iikman makes it to the border of the British mandate
in Palestine and the British authorities are like, are you literally,
Adolf Iikeman, get the fuck out of here? What do
you think you're doing? We know who you are. Get
out of.

Speaker 3 (21:15):
Here, like out of fucking hear. Yeah, this is classic
Hydric as well. It's just like he takes all these
street thugs as like, Okay, I like the energy, but
we need to professionalize it to make it palatable for everybody. Right,
we can't. We can't all just be street clubbing racists.

(21:36):
We have to be gentlemen racists and are really stupid
hugo boss uniforms.

Speaker 2 (21:40):
All right, who ears read a book? Just Iikman? Okay,
you're my expert. Promoted and for the rest of his career,
Iikman would constantly talk about like, you know, I've been
to Palestine. I've seen what the Jews are like in
their natural environment, right, Like that's the way he phrases it,
and it's like again, you like got to the border.

Speaker 3 (21:57):
The Nazi Richard Attenborough.

Speaker 2 (21:59):
Right, right, that's what he's trying to be. And again
he has he does nothing over there, right, the British
will not let this fucker in. This is where we
start to see his brilliance for branding. Right. If he
was coming up today, he might have been an ad man, right,
because he's gonna he's going to use this very effectively,
even his failures to kind of blend into this myth

(22:20):
he's creating for himself about himself. His specific recommendation to
the SD after he finishes talking to you know this trip,
and he also has a lot of interviews with a
bunch of different Zionists in Europe, and he makes an
official recommendation that the SD should not promote the creation
of a Jewish state, per that BBC article. Instead, it
should encourage Jewish immigration to backward countries where they would

(22:42):
live in poverty. And his assumption is that like, well,
if we send a bunch of them over to Palestine
and they like when the British leave, they make like
a state, you know, with the Palestinians, that state might
do well, and then there will be like a place
where Jewish people are comfortable. We can only send them
to places that are like completely fucked right, that's his attitude.

Speaker 3 (23:04):
Yeah, that's why the first thing they came up with
was called the Ohio Plan.

Speaker 2 (23:08):
Right right, right, Yes, So immediately after this he's promoted
and sent to Vienna. Austria had just been annexed by Germany,
and as the SD's duty as an expert, Eichman was
put in charge of an operation to convince Austria's Jews
to immigrate. Here he applied his experience from the corporate world,
cutting through red tape and ordering all the different agencies

(23:29):
who had a hand in the immigration process to combine
and operate out of a single physical space to speed
things up. He also does and obviously that works. That's
generally better, especially in this time where you don't have
the internet, if people are just like have to go
down a floor to like get this paperwork stamped by
another organization before this family can leave. Yeah, he also

(23:50):
does his normal thing of and this is a big
part of his logistical work. In this very early stage
of the Holocaust, he is directly interfacing with rabbis and
other representatives of the Jewish community in the different places
he's working, in this case Vienna, right where he will
sit down and say, look, there's all these different groups.
You know, You've got Orthodox folks, You've got folks who
are like these different kind of communities within Vienna. You

(24:13):
all need to form a single organization to represent you
and elect representatives so that I can negotiate with a
representative on behalf of all of you in order to
execute the plans that we're going to be executing to
try to push you guys out. Right, I want a
single umbrella organization, and that organization we will let raise
money from rich Jews to fund the immigration of poor

(24:36):
Jews out of Austria. Right, this is what he's doing
in this period of time.

Speaker 3 (24:40):
And did you guys that form a government that represents
you so I can get rid of you?

Speaker 2 (24:45):
So I can get rid of you, right. We need
you to centralize because I don't want to talk to
fucking forty different people to like actually like work this together. Right,
And despite his antipathy towards Zionism, he starts allowing Zionist
organizations to operate in Austria because he's primarily being judged
on what are the number It's like you know, with
ice right now, it's just how many what can we

(25:05):
get how many numbers can we get on the board?
Is the easiest thing to go after, like law abiding
people who were showing up in court the way they're
supposed to and just arrest them. That's easier, pumps our
numbers up. What Eikman's doing is like, look these Zionist organizations.
I just told everyone, I think it's a bad idea,
but they're getting people out, They've got money, and all
I'm being judged by is how fast Jews are leaving Austria.

(25:27):
Right That's all that matters to me, right now, you know,
right now, that's all that matters to him. In Germany,
Iikman had used charm to try and convince Jewish leaders
to meet with him. If that didn't work, he'd hold
up the SD's bloody reputation as a threat in Austria.
Armed with potent new legal authority, he simply subpoened every
Jewish community leader he wanted to meet. But Tina Stangneth

(25:49):
writes Iikman flaunted his black SS uniform, his writing crop,
and his knowledge of Judaism and Zionism. It Ulfh Boehm,
who had just completed the second volume of the History
of the Zionist movement learned that Eikman was one of
his most avid readers, who knew whole pages of the
first volume from memory. Bom realized that the SS was
going to use the knowledge he had painstakingly gathered as

(26:09):
its access point to the world of Jewish organizations and
as a weapon against the Jews. Eikman then explained what
he expected from the third volume, a lengthy chapter about himself,
Adolf Iikman as a pioneer of Zionism. The fact that
Adolf Bohm couldn't bear the thought and never wrote another
word tells us all we need to know, without even
thinking about what happened next, that this guy.

Speaker 3 (26:30):
The scholar's like, wait, who's reading my boh no, I
imagine doing the convention circuit and then he comes up
to your desk like I retire forever. I'm not signed up.

Speaker 2 (26:41):
I fucked up. I fucked up.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
I think I need to be a cobbler.

Speaker 2 (26:45):
If Aikman's my biggest fan, I made a mistake. I'm sorry.
This was I was not doing the right thing.

Speaker 3 (26:52):
You have chosen poorly in life, and I say that
you need to find a new venture, Like.

Speaker 2 (26:57):
I think we could all agree. If Adolf Eichmann is
your book's biggest fan, get rid of that book. Get
rid of that book.

Speaker 3 (27:04):
It would be like if Plins came to one of
my live shows, like, yeah, show's over. I love your No.

Speaker 2 (27:10):
No, we're hitting the wrong demo. So the guilt and
shame from this caused Boem to have a nervous breakdown,
for which he was institutionalized. As you may be aware,
the Nazis first started experimenting with zyklon B and with
gassing in general. They weren't using zyklon B yet as
part of the T four euthanasia program, which can be
accurately summarized as murdering disabled people. ADOLFH. Bohm was gassed

(27:34):
at the Hartheim euthanasia Center on April fourth, nineteen forty one.
His wife was gassed at Auschwitz in nineteen forty four.
Both of their children escaped to the West. Right a
guy that writes this book, Christ, Now, I've gotten ahead
of myself a little bit here. I just it's bleak stuff.
Speaking of bleak stuff, Ads, we're back. So where we

(28:02):
are in the story. Now the anglos has just happened.
Austria's Germany. Now Eichmann is currently in Vienna, tasked with
getting as many Jews to leave the country as possible.
Cesarini writes, quote, he established an assembly line system whereby
a Jew could end up at the Central Immigration office
with his papers and proceed from desk to desk until
he arrived at the end with a passport and an

(28:22):
exit visa, but stripped of his property cash, and writes,
within a few months the office had emigrated one hundred
and fifty thousand Jews. Now this is seen is a
massive success, not just by his boss Heidrich and the
SD but across the whole Nazi party. He was promoted again,
and after the annexation of Czechoslovakia, was ordered to repeat
his performance in Prague. He does this well, and he

(28:43):
winds up in late nineteen thirty nine, attached to a
major Gestapo office in Berlin and tasked with managing the
immigration of Jews from the entire Reich.

Speaker 3 (28:52):
He's got great Nazis saber metrics, he really does, right
like that is he's a logistics guy, right like that.
His whole involvement in Zionism is all like well, these
people have like a already have a path to getting
folks out, even though I may not. I personally like
have already expressed why I don't think that's a great idea.
All that I care about is my career and this
will this puts numbers on the board for me. Right,

(29:15):
That's fundamentally who he is now.

Speaker 2 (29:19):
By this point, by the point time after Prague, when
he's in Berlin and he's in charge of emigration out
of the Reich, of all of the Jews in the
Greater German Reich, he has fully become the man who
will ultimately organize the mass murder of about six million Jews. Right,
And Eichman loves being this guy. There is nothing banal
about it. He luxuriates in the power and prestige of

(29:41):
his position, and he describes himself as a member of
the ideological elite in the SS. One Jewish witness who
met him at one of these meetings described and then
Eikman entered like a young god. He was very good
looking at that time, tall, black, shining ugh in Iikman
before Jerusalem staying death continues. His behavior too, was godlike.

(30:03):
He was master of arresting and then releasing people, of
banning institutions and then allowing them to resume. He initiated
and censored a Jewish newspaper, and eventually even got to
decide who could access the Jewish community's bank accounts. And
he's he loves this, right, this power, this I can
I can make your organization legal or illegal with a
snap of my hands. I have control over your community's

(30:25):
bank assets, right, and I get to use that to
make you do whatever I want. Right. I have gone
from being this middle manager to being this guy with like,
I am in charge of the Jewish people in the Reich. Right,
that's his position here.

Speaker 3 (30:40):
He seems to be basking in the globe because the
banning and unbanning thing, to me is is more of
a clue than the bank account thing, because yeah, he's
controlling people that can come together. It's like, never mind
your band, never mind he can come together. I can
just do this all day.

Speaker 2 (30:58):
Yeah, yeah, this is totally within my power. By the
end of the nineteen thirties, he is famous across Central Europe,
not just within the small world of the SD but
among the entire remaining Jewish population in Central Europe. And
Eichman makes damn sure everyone knows he's the shot caller,
even when he isn't He bragged that The Zionist Review,
a German Jewish newspaper, was quote my newspaper because of

(31:22):
how extensively he'd exercised control over its contents.

Speaker 3 (31:25):
That's Nazi stolen valor.

Speaker 2 (31:27):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's Yeah. Jews across the Reich wrote
about him to each other and in letters to relatives
and colleagues on the outside. So this is this is
the like the point at which people start talking about
Eichmann in newspapers and whatnot outside of Germany. And in fact,
he is the first guy directly associated with like implementation

(31:50):
of anti Jewish policies in Germany who gets discussed widely
outside of Europe.

Speaker 3 (31:54):
Right, and somehow he's the guy that becomes the portrait
of banality.

Speaker 2 (32:00):
Yeah, and he's really not a Nazi rock star, yeah, exactly,
he's like a rock star of racism. Right, there's nothing
but all about it. Holocaust scholar Tom Segev pointed out
that while Eichman was not very high ranking on paper,
he is not a top member of the SS. He
answers to Reinhard Heydrich, right, and that's not his only

(32:21):
superior as other people who are his bosses on paper,
but he's answering to Hydrich, who is very high up
in the Nazi higherarchy and favored by Hitler, and Eichman
is the highest ranking member of the SS to sit
directly with Jews and talk to Jewish community leaders, right.
And as a result, this is Segev writing, the Jews

(32:41):
looked upon him and Hitler as the two adolfs who
perpetuated the Holocaust. So part of this is he's really
burnishing his image, and part of it is, you know,
every Jewish survivor obviously hates Hitler, but also they hate
Aikman because a lot of them were face to face
with him, they saw him interacting with their He's the guy.

Speaker 3 (33:00):
Literally the face of their deportation misery right right exactly.
This is very helpful to his career in the immediate term.
It ensured he was taken seriously and that local Jewish leaders,
who still believe there could be some sort of compromise
with the Nazi state would bend over backwards to do
what he said. This makes it easy for him to
hit his quotas, which ensures his continued prestige and the

(33:22):
rise in his career prospects. By the immediate pre war period,
he'd been invited to meetings with Herman Gerring and was
known personally by guys like Joseph Gebbels and Heinrich Himmler
more than rank personal connection to famous figures in German
leadership or what insured one's position in the Reich. And
once once you see Eichmann with the literal reichs Marshal
Herman Gerring, right, the guy who supposed to take over

(33:45):
Hitler dies, right, he starts getting invited to things, right
because you're like, well, fuck, this guy's this guy's in, right,
we'd better if I want to be in i'd better
make sure he's at my parties. And so he starts
getting invited to these high end social functions. In nineteen
three eight, at age thirty two, he's invited to a
film industry ball in Vienna. He takes parts in parades

(34:05):
in annex Czechoslovakia, and when he has ideas for experiments
like creating forced labor camps for Jews in Austria, he's
allowed to divert funds and manpower to attempt them. Now ugh,
he's again, he's he's loving this right, both the flex
of power and the respect that he's giving He's never
the only mind behind implementation, right or execution. There's other

(34:28):
guys in the SD who are interested in labor camps
for their Jewish prisoners. But Eichmann is like the guy
who's helping to pitch this, and he's also making sure
his face is out in front of it because he
thinks it's a good idea. He is better than any
of his comrades at PR And he starts giving himself nicknames,
and his favorite nickname.

Speaker 2 (34:46):
Is the Czar of the Jews.

Speaker 3 (34:48):
Right, Oh my god, we love a guy who nicknames himself.
And the nicknames are always terrible awful, but it shows
you how he views himself, right, and what is satisfying. Yeah,
he's not satisfied in this point that he's eliminating these people.
He's satisfied primarily that they have to bow to him. Right,
that's his first high here, right. Yeah, he probably enjoys

(35:13):
that and the fact that people know that he's doing
it more than the fact that he's doing it, because
again we haven't talked about any of his like hardcore
anti Semitic writings or ideological turn like. This is all
careerism and self promotion. Yeah, for him, he would do
this if they weren't Jewish, he would do this to
some other group.

Speaker 2 (35:30):
Yeah, and he is writing very anti Semitic papers here,
But I think I think that the benefits to him
personally for going down this road are more a motivation.
Although he does he also makes himself increasingly anti Semitic
as he's doing this too, right, he is getting more
and more racist and more and more hateful.

Speaker 3 (35:49):
Yeah, and I could also see this as kind of
like fitting the part because before he got all these connections,
people were spreading rumors about him having Jewish family members
because he was, you know, having let's say, FaceTime with
Jewish community leaders. So yeah, now he's like, no, I'm
going to do both. And now nobody is going to
be confused about this. And this is not, like, of course,
a good thing. That the fact that he's willing to

(36:12):
do this for bald face careerism is not a better
or worse.

Speaker 2 (36:17):
No, it's not only by the time we get to
the Holocaust there is more than bald face careerism.

Speaker 3 (36:22):
Then.

Speaker 2 (36:23):
Yeah, but I think that's his I think that's what
a lot of this is right now.

Speaker 3 (36:27):
Right.

Speaker 2 (36:28):
He takes a lot of joy whenever he hears his
nicknames repeated in the wild by other people because it
proves that they're spreading, and he sees his name start
to be in constant use in Western newspapers around the world,
particularly like Socialist incliented papers, which are some of the
earliest ones to report on early stages of the Holocaust.

Speaker 3 (36:45):
He must have loved that so much.

Speaker 2 (36:47):
Oh, he fucking loves it. He makes a big show
about being angry at the Jewish press for calling him names,
but he has his staff members comb dozens of newspapers
from different countries looking for mentions of him, and like
clipping them out, and he keeps them in like he
has these little keepsake books for his news coverage.

Speaker 3 (37:05):
God just rapidly coming up with new nicknames, like he's
Chris fucking Jericho.

Speaker 2 (37:10):
That's right, that's right, and these two Like these nicknames,
and all of these the news clippings about him. He
uses them as weapons during his endless meetings with Jewish
community groups. Ben o' khone, a representative for the Jewish
community in Berlin, recalled one such meeting years later. It
began with a forceful attack by Eikman on the representatives

(37:30):
of the German Jews. He had a folder of press
cuttings in front of him for and of course, in
which Iikman was portrayed as a bloodhound who wanted to
kill the Jews. He read us excerpts from the Pariser
Tagblot and asked if this was correct, and it said
the information had had to come from our circles. Who
spoke to Landau from the Ita It must have been
one of you. And it's interesting to me that he's

(37:52):
like he's taking these both to yell at them for
like who's talking to these different newspapers? How could they
possibly know? And also to show them look at how
they're talking about me.

Speaker 3 (38:00):
Right, you need to take me seriously, right, And he
guys aren't going to blink at me when I hit
you with the teen vogue clipping right.

Speaker 2 (38:07):
And bloodhound is a common title that members of the
SS get in this if they're very aggressive at pursuing Jews.
And Eikman, despite what he says in this meeting, is
proud to be called a bloodhound. Right. In Hungary in
nineteen forty four, he would introduce himself in meetings by saying,
do you know who I am? I am a bloodhound, right, like,
that's what he's that's how he's talking about his see.

Speaker 3 (38:29):
Crystal Faltz character.

Speaker 2 (38:31):
Yes, the hero they call me right, yes, yeah. Now,
Eikman was by far the best known of his comrades,
and the fact that he really was deeply complicit shouldn't
obscure the reality that he also exaggerated his involvement and
responsibility for clout. He was not the only guy with
nicknames like this. Once the Nazis invaded Poland with the

(38:51):
ussr Amon Goeth became the head of a concentration camp
in Crackow and earned the nickname Emperor of Crackow. This
put him right up there with Joseph of Weitzel, one
of Iikman's top employees and commandant of a camp in Doppel,
which earned him the nickname the Jews Emperor of Doppel.
Right Christ, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (39:10):
If memory Cesaray is an am on Goth the camp
commander that was so corrup the Nazis fired him.

Speaker 2 (39:17):
Yeah, I believe he was the one that got shit
canned for being so fucking like yes, oh man, So
we don't really know like how often these nicknames are,
you know, things that he came up with himself. How
many of them are things that like people in Europe
came up to describe him because of how major he is,
But he was a lot of the time he created

(39:39):
his own nickname. Right during like, well, he's in Argentina
and hanging out with other escape Nazi friends, he would
brag to them that he had been nicknamed the Jews Pope.
And there's no evidence of this that anyone ever called
This is a nickname he made up for himself, Like,
no one would have called you that, Adolph Eikman.

Speaker 3 (39:58):
Do you hear what they call me in Vienna? They
call me Thunderbird? Right? Is that cool? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (40:03):
He also told friends, the men in my command had
the kind of respect for me that prompted the Jews
to effectively set me on a throne. Right, This is
very important to him that, like he'd be seen as
having been worshiped by these people who were under his thumb. Right,
that's a massive deal for Adolph Eikman. Now, he's often
depicted as a fanatic driven by hatred, but in deep reading,
I see ego as at least as much a driver

(40:26):
of his actions. He certainly hated and his bigotry only
increased alongside his power, but I read a hunger for
power and respect that drowned out other motivations A lot
of the time. Eikman did not rise through the Nazi
hierarchy because he was a fanatic. He became a fanatic
because Nazism offered him an opportunity to be a great man,
one which no other system would have afforded him. Now,

(40:47):
the conquest of half of Poland presents a problem for Iikman.
Prior to the Nazis invading, Jews had made up about
one percent of the population of the Reich, which is
about half a million people out of a population of
sixty seven million. Significant numbers of these folks had immigrated,
and in general the Austrian and Czech Jewish populations were
also comparatively small, right, which had made it easy for

(41:09):
Eikman to put up good numbers using the tactics we've discussed.
Almost three and a half million Jews lived in Poland
prior to World War II. This meant overnight the task
on Aikman's lap increased by an order of magnitude. Per
a BBC article titled Eikman, Mind of a War Criminal,
Eikman explored a fresh option to porting Jews to a
designated Jewish territory. He traveled to Poland to identify an

(41:31):
appropriate location and then ordered that thousands of Czech and
Viennese Jews be rounded up and sent eastward to lay
the basis for this territorial solution. Within a few months, however,
the plan was scrapped Eikman's office lacked the resources for it,
an other SS project sad preference. At the same time,
he was brutally evicting hundreds of thousands of Poles and
Jews to make way for ethnic Germans transplanted from Eastern

(41:51):
Europe into the newly annexed areas of the Reich. As
a temporary measure, the displaced Jews were packed into ghettos,
but where would they go? Eventually, after the fall of France,
I took up a plan emanating from the German Foreign
Office to ship four million European Jews to Madagascar. And
he's not the author of the Madagascar Plan, but he
is for a while kind of its most prominent like adherent, right,

(42:13):
which is this idea that like, we got to get
these people out of Europe, and maybe we could if
they live in Madagascar, that'll be fine, right, it'll be
safer for Yeah, this is.

Speaker 3 (42:23):
Why those movies were dangerous. They give people ideas.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
Yeah, yeah, you think different things about Madagascar, includ the
fact that there's already a plenty of people.

Speaker 3 (42:31):
There, a lot of people, yeah, famously.

Speaker 2 (42:34):
Yeah. Now this is also the Madagascar Plan because this
doesn't really happen, It never gets close to happening. But
it's evidence that the Holocaust was not necessarily a given
from the jump. As we'll talk about, you can find
quotes from Hitler and other top Nazis going back to
the twenties that can be seen as preludes to the Holocaust,
but it wasn't a settled plan until the early forties.

Speaker 3 (42:56):
Yeah, and there's something of an unfair amount of weight
that gets put on the Madagascar plan. Like, no, obviously,
of course with Holocaust, the diers, like the ones that
acknowledge that the camps exist, that but the people died
from like disease or whatever is the track that they take,
Like there is these detailed plans in place to send
all these people the Madagascar. Yeah, rather than it was

(43:18):
drawings on a drunk person's napkin.

Speaker 2 (43:20):
They talked about a lot of shit right, that they
didn't come close to doing right exactly. And Iikman, you know,
the reason he gets involved is not that he is
a major believer in this. It's that any new idea
that comes through his office he tries to stick himself
to because, like, you know, if it fails, he's not
the guy who instituted it, but if it succeeds, his

(43:40):
name's attached to it.

Speaker 3 (43:42):
Right, Yeah, yeah, it's good for him either way. He
doesn't lose anything, He only has things to gain. Right.

Speaker 2 (43:48):
In nineteen thirty nine, after the invasion of Poland, Iikman
briefly championed a plan to remove Jewish people from newly
conquered and absorbed territory to a reservation guarded by the
Nazis near Lublin. Thousands of people were forcibly transferred to
what became a ghetto before the plan was abandoned in
the spring of nineteen forty. And this is they were
very much looking at what the US government had done

(44:09):
to Native Americans, and we're like, well, maybe we can
do something like that with the Jews, right, maybe we
like we find a chunk of land that's like our
Oklahoma that we don't really want, and we put them
all there and we just kind of like keep them
locked there. Right, that's the basic idea. And it's evidence
of you know again, how much of all of this
is based off of them looking at the United States

(44:31):
and being like, well, shit, this seems to be working
for them, right, Yeah, speaking of things that work for
us advertising.

Speaker 3 (44:40):
Wow, Yeah, this ad brought to you by the Oklahoma
Tourism Board.

Speaker 2 (44:45):
Yeah, that's right, Oklahoma, the lubland of America. Yes, sorry
to both Lovelin and to Oklahoma. So as the Second
World War gets a movin and Germany blazes through France
and then starts tearing through big old chunks of western Russia,

(45:08):
the fevered egos of men like Iikmen, who now feel
like masters of the universe, gave a way to ever
more sweeping eliminationist concepts. In September of nineteen forty one,
Iikman lobbied successfully to extend the definition of a Jew
to include half Jews. Right. He had loud conflicts with
those among the party who argued that people with just
one Jewish grandparents shouldn't count, or that Jews who converted

(45:30):
to Christianity weren't Jewish. And Iikman is on the no, no, no,
it's all about the blood. Any drop of it is
somebody we got to get rid of, right.

Speaker 3 (45:39):
Once again, taking it from the United States and the
one drop.

Speaker 2 (45:43):
The one drop rule. Right now, he moves from city
to city, orchestrating the expulsion of one local Jewish population
after the other. From Sizeken and Posen, he forces tens
of thousands of people into ghettos far from home. The
horror of forced resettlement earns him even more media attention,
and uses it in meetings with Jewish leaders in other
cities to say, hey, if you don't make sure your

(46:04):
people leave when I tell them to leave and we
meet our immigration quotas, I can do to you what
I did in Posen. Right, you read the news, right,
that was all me, baby, Right, you got to do
what I You know you don't want that here. By
this point in forty one, the international press is increasingly
reporting on the violence and mass killing that had often
followed such resettlement campaigns. Eikman's not always involved in these

(46:27):
mass killings, and in these reasons, he's not doing all
the resettlement. He's not the only guy doing this. Right,
there are a lot of war crimes being committed in
forty one, and he's not central to most of them.
He's not running the Einset scrupin.

Speaker 3 (46:39):
Right on the Eastern Front, right, He's just the one
that seems to be really comfortable putting his face on it, exactly.

Speaker 2 (46:44):
And so he gets credit for a lot of massacres
in the foreign media that he was not involved with.
And sometimes this was done out of pure habit right
where they would be like, oh, and Eikman must have
ordered this, because he's the guy everyone knows is doing
stuff like this, right, And at the time, Eikman is
proud to take the credit, right, He's like, yeah, absolutely,
I'll take the blame for that share stolen valor. Once again,

(47:07):
he's stealing valor from even worse Nazis. Although yeah, maybe that.

Speaker 3 (47:11):
I'm stealing valor from Nazis so you can get a
discount at Nazi Chilis, right.

Speaker 2 (47:16):
Yes, he's putting fake Nazi medals on is in the uniform.

Speaker 3 (47:20):
Now.

Speaker 2 (47:20):
He is so proud of his reputation that when Heinrich
Himler announced an exhibition celebrating the mass resettlement campaign titled
The Great Homecoming, which was essentially meant to be a
big pr announcement for the opening of the Holocaust. Himmler
plans it with the goal of burnishing his own image
right Himler's plan is like, I want to be seen
as the guy who was responsible for this. But Aikman's like, hey, boss,

(47:42):
I should get like like a room in this big
thing for like the stuff I've been doing, right, Like
you know I did good, didn't I shouldn't I get
like a whole room. That's just about what Iikman did
to help with this resettlement campaign, and Himmler eventually agrees
that he'll get a special haul in the exhibit to
share his achievement to the masses. Stengneth writes, the main

(48:03):
welfare office for ethnic Germans objected, preferring to leave this
section out for fear of a negative public reaction. Pictures
of happy new settlers were one thing, numbers and images
of people who had been expelled were another. But Eichman's
pressure was for nothing. The exhibition was postponed until June
nineteen forty one, and having viewed it, Himmler canceled it
at the last minute, putting off the experts who had

(48:24):
provided the content until March nineteen forty two. The exhibition
never took place, in part because the success that was
hoped for was never achieved.

Speaker 3 (48:32):
Yeah, he didn't learn his lesson from Hydrake, like, yeah,
you don't show people the shit that you're doing.

Speaker 2 (48:38):
No, no, no, Iikeman's all in, Yeah, I want my
name in a whole room, and Himmler like sees the
plans for this bragging about the early Holocaust party and
is like, I don't know, man, I don't think I
want that shit out. I don't think I want my
name attached to this. Actually, but you made head.

Speaker 3 (48:54):
You made Himmler uncomfortable, right right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:57):
The only other thing that did that was Literalitz.

Speaker 3 (49:01):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (49:02):
So the other reason this gets canceled is that by
March of nineteen forty two, the Wehrmacht has gone through
its first winter on the Eastern Front, and it's become
obvious to any intelligent Nazis that this is not going
to be a quicker, easy war right now. I don't
think they're all aware that defeat is a foregone conclusion,
although they probably should have. But a fear starts to

(49:23):
set in that both allides the desire to brag about
what's being done, and introduces a growing sense of desperation
to solve the Jewish questions sooner than later. In early
nineteen forty one, Himmler had given orders to deport all
remaining Berlin and Viennese Jews at the end of the war,
which was expected imminently. By October, it was clear that
this would not be the case, and the growing desperation

(49:45):
of the Eastern Front acted as a justification for more
extreme acts of violence. As revenge, a new deportation campaign
was executed in Berlin by the SD. A Swedish newspaper
at the time, described the campaign began on the night
of October si seventeenth. People were pulled from their beds
by the SS in order to get dressed and pack
a suitcase. Then they were immediately taken away, their apartment

(50:07):
sealed and everything in them confiscated. Those who had been
arrested were taken to railroad freight depots and ruined synagogues
and transported east on October nineteenth. They were all old
men between fifty and eighty, women and children. They will
be used for useful work in the East, which means
drying out the Rokeitino marshes, the work will be done
during the Russian winter by old men, women and children,

(50:27):
and the clothes in which they were arrested. There can
now be no doubt that this campaign is premeditated mass murder.
The campaign leader is SS Group and Feuer Aikman, and
we see in this from the switchpaper a great example
of the half accurate reporting. Right, the broad strokes of
the deportation are correct. Aikman is involved in it, but

(50:48):
he's not running it. He's not the campaign leader of
the program. And he's also not a group in fewer
right that ranked roughly equivalents to lieutenant general, and he
never reaches that high. So Stenge suspects that he gets
given this rank by the press because they can't imagine
someone they've heard about so much as anything but like
a central spoke to the Nazi party, right, Like he's.

Speaker 3 (51:11):
Well connected, hanger on.

Speaker 2 (51:12):
Yeah, and I think his I think his actual rank
is close to like a major captive, but like that's
just not high enough. We gotta bump it up, right,
otherwise he's not going to seem as central as we've
decided he is.

Speaker 3 (51:23):
I think it also owes to a lot of modern
misunderstandings of how the Nazi government and the infrastructure worked.
Where everyone likes to say that or believe rather that
it all function a certain kind of way because you know,
Germans are just very efficient, and you know, it was
a militarist culture so had to be run this way.

(51:43):
Blah blah blah blah. No, it was just a bunch
of weird connected barnacles. Ranks were involved, but they're mostly
just window dressing for people wearing incredibly overdone uniforms. Right,
but it really didn't matter.

Speaker 2 (51:58):
Yeah, yeah, what matters most is your connection, like who
you know, right, yeah, yeah, which is you know the
case with all authoritarian organizations like this.

Speaker 1 (52:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:09):
Now, alongside the German invasion of Russia, the Indsets group
and had started carrying out the first mass killings of
Jews of what would come to be known as the Holocaust.
Eichmann has nothing to do with organizing this part of it.
But it becomes rapidly clear that just shooting millions of
people is not practical. Right, there's a number. First off,
bullets are going to be a problem for Germany, right,

(52:30):
Like they don't have enough of anything, let alone bullets.
Second problem, this kind of destroys your elite troops, which
is what they're using. Like they're using guys who are
like would be usable as fighters and shooting babies all day,
even for guys who suck as much as the Insets
group it does. It just kind of ruins human beings right,
Like they're not able to handle it for a long Yeah,

(52:52):
they all start killing each other. Drinking, Yeah, yeah, drinking
is a major problem. And so they start experimenting with
other ways. And one place they start experimenting is with
the use of gas fans at a place called Helm
And in that summer of like nineteen forty two, Iikman
travels to the east to or of nineteen forty one, sorry,

(53:12):
in the summer forty one, Iikman travels to the East
to observe the process these first gas fans in use.
He spends that summer and the later part of the
year and what becomes a fact finding mission for the
Vonse Conference in early nineteen forty two, which is the
meeting where the Nazis are going to lay out their
plan for the final solution. So Heidrich basically has him
being like, hey, the East is our laboratory for killing Jews.

(53:33):
I want you to talk to the folks doing the shooting,
go see some of these gas fans and how they work,
and come back to us with information on the best
way to kill a lot of people at scale, because
we're going to start next year ramping up the actual
extermination of all of these Jews that we've gotten hold
of in the parts of Europe we've conquered.

Speaker 3 (53:53):
He puts them in charge of the Holocaust soft launch.

Speaker 2 (53:56):
Right, right, Yeah, And he's largely he's like fact finding, right,
so that we can we need to know how quickly
can you guess people, how much does it take? What
are the best kinds of guess what we need to
know to start constructing these camps?

Speaker 3 (54:08):
Right.

Speaker 2 (54:08):
Iikman is going to be a big part of getting
that information right. And again you see both he's not
what he claims. He's not leading this. Iikman didn't make
the call to do a holocaust, but he's the guy
who's respected intellectually as an expert, and when it becomes
clear we're going to do a holocaust, they go to
him and are like, hey, it off, we got a
job for you. We get a guy for that, need
you to gather some info you're good at that, right,

(54:30):
You're good at gathering information. Come help us with this.

Speaker 3 (54:33):
Everybody's sitting around the office. We need to build how
many camps? I got a guy for that.

Speaker 2 (54:39):
Give me my camp guy, Yeah, give me my camp guy.
Bring an old ike.

Speaker 3 (54:43):
Yeah, we sent him to concentration camp, night school. He
should know how to do this.

Speaker 2 (54:48):
He's probably good at this by now. And yeah, well
we'll talk about that and more in part three. Joe,
how are you feeling?

Speaker 3 (54:58):
Just wonderful? Robert, Yeah, absolutely wonderful. I set myself up
for failure for this one because I came to this
Like last time I was on here, we talked about
Lorenzi Berrier for four hours. What could you do? That's
worse than that? And you've showed me, You've showed me
real good.

Speaker 2 (55:13):
Yep, yep.

Speaker 3 (55:15):
I've been hoisted by my own petard.

Speaker 2 (55:17):
We all love our patards. Are we allowed to say
petard anymore? I don't know. You can't say the hard
p you can't say the art fe It just sounds wrong. Great,
all right, everybody, this has been behind the Bastards a podcast. Joe,

(55:39):
do you have anything you want to plug?

Speaker 3 (55:42):
Yeah? I am the host of the lines of My
Donkey's podcast. We talked about history, military history, genocide, you know, fun,
lighthearted stuff like that. If you want to hear more
about the Eastern Front in winter, we talked about the
Battle of Stalingrad for I believe five hours, so you
can go listen to that series and we do all
sorts of stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (56:03):
Fantastic, excellent, All right, well, everybody, Bye bye.

Speaker 1 (56:14):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
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Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
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(56:35):
at Behind the Bastards