September 4, 2025 • 68 mins
Robert takes us up to Heinrich Himmler's adolescence and frustrating wait through the war years, which leads him into the world of far-right politics and eventually the welcoming arms of the Nazi party itself.
LIVE SHOW ALERT:
We are doing a new Behind the Bastards Live show! In the Alberta Rose Theatre, Portland, September 25th at 8pm! All performer proceeds go to support the Portland Defense Fund.
Tickets: https://albertarosetheatre.com/event/behind-the-bastards-live/alberta-rose-theatre/portland-oregon/
Sources:
Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945) | American Experience | Official Site | PBS
THE CAREER OF HEINRICH HIMMLER_0001.pdf
Longerich, Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life (p. 13). OUP Oxford. Kindle
The Unsuccessful Adolescence of Heinrich Himmler on JSTOR
An Architect of Terror: Heinrich Himmler and the Holocaust | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans
An Architect of Terror: Heinrich Himmler and the Holocaust | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans
"In Memory of the Girl in the Red Coat:" Heinrich Himmler’s Annotated Volumes of Mein Kampf
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/himmlers-bridal-bootcamp-school-nazi-brides.html
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Hey everybody, Robert here and Behind the Bastards.
It's doing its first live show and quite some time
at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland, Oregon, on Thursday,
September twenty fifth, at eight pm. All performer proceeds will
go to the Portland Defense Fund, which helps people who
have absolutely no money and are going to be relying
(00:22):
on public defense get bailed out and get outside of
court help while they're waiting to go on trial. So
please help support the Portland Defense Fund. Google Alberta Rose
Theater t h E A t r E Behind the
Bastards Live. If you just google Alberta Ros Theater Behind
the Bastards, it'll take you to the live show. There's
(00:43):
an etix dot com. If you get etix dot com
Behind the Bastards Life, you should be able to find
it as well. Again, all performer proceeds will benefit the
Portland Defense Fund. You can also go to at Defense
Fund PDX on Venmo or type donor box Defense fundpd
X to donate directly to the Portland Defense Fund. It's
a five oh one c please help them out and
(01:05):
again Behind the Bastards Live the Alberta Rose Theater, September
twenty fifth, twenty twenty five, at eight pm. I'll see
you there. I'm actually excited for the Nuremberg movie. I
don't know, it looks like maybe they kind of didn't
have the budget to make it as good as they
could have. But Russell Crowe is really good casting for
Herman Garring.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Oh love Russell Crowe.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
I like, well, I like him as an actor, but
he's also like Herman Garring is this guy who was
a young man, he's a fighter race, he's super fit
and like together in like a handsome celebrity, and then
as he gets older, like he puts on a lot
of weight and has problems with addiction, and like, yeah,
Russell Crowe is a really good guy to pick to
play Garing late in life.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
Right, Robert Robert Anderson?
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Hello Anderson, how are you doing?
Speaker 4 (01:54):
And I also have a Russell crow story, but that's
probably you for another it's not as it's not as
good as the Bill Gates story or the Doug Wilson
story or the Doug Wolson story.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
It's not as good as both of those.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
For a second there, I was just thinking about, like
and then you just start telling me the plot of
the movie. The nice guys like, oh no, no, that's
that's based on my actual life with Russell Crow. It
wasn't in the seventies, but yeah, no, that's that's about me.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
It would be so funny.
Speaker 4 (02:22):
Here's Marrow. Yeah, I ran into Russell Crow. This so
these people came into our neighborhood and said we needed
to I'm going to try to break into three hundred.
But I couldn't remember the rest of it. But anyway,
that would have been if I could have pulled off
the three hundred one, that had been great.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Well, speaking of three hundred that way, Really, at least
three hundred guys die in World War One, and that's
where we are at the start of this episode. World
War One has began before noon.
Speaker 4 (02:54):
At least three hundred yeople die in World War One
before noon on the first time.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
It's like a bad thirty seconds during the fucking Battle
of the Frontiers. Yes, so Heinrik Kimler, you know, starts
when he's on vacation as a kid. He's taking notes,
he's writing in his diary. Over the first few weeks
as things are spinning up to a full blown war,
(03:21):
and we get this fascinating. One of the things that
his diary entries provide us with is this really fascinating
window into the state of imperial German propaganda at this time.
One of his early diary entries, you know, before the
outbreak or like right after the outbreak of you know,
once the German army gets into the fray and like
everybody's actually fighting, he just writes English army beaten and
(03:43):
then goes on to add I'm as happy at these
victories as the English and French are, no doubt annoyed
at them, and the annoyance will be considerable. Falk and
I would really it's one of his friends, would really
like to fight right now ourselves. It's clear that the
good old Germans and they're loyal allies, the Austrians are
not afraid of a world full of enemies. Wow, this
is a snare.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
In the first couple of weeks of the war, things
are going really well for Germany. They take Belgium, they're
pushing towards Paris. Most of you know the English army.
This is remembered differently in Great Britain as like how
well they fought and even though there's very few of them.
They inflicted hideous casualties on the Germans. But also what
happens is the English army as it has existed at
the start of the war is almost wiped out, right,
(04:24):
like their standing army almost doesn't exist very very soon
into the war, which is why you know they have
to do this general draft and stuff. And so from
the perspective of the Germans, sure you know they were
good soldiers, but like we wiped them out. Basically there's
not that many English soldiers left anymore, and like the
French are being pushed back. So he is just absolutely
(04:46):
from the beginning of it is like, ah, we're unstoppable.
And this I think this is particularly I don't want
to do too much of like again what a lot
of people do when they're looking at his diary and
like working backwards from where he ended up and being like, ah,
clear sign of the monster he'd become. But there is
something useful in that last sentence where he's like the Germans,
(05:07):
the good old Germans and their loyal allies, the Austrians
are not afraid of a world full of enemies, right,
the idea that like it's you know, we can stand
alone against the world the fact that as a kid
he feels that way. Yeah, that's a sentence man, right,
it's it's relevant to who he becomes. Yeah, that says
a lot, yes, yes, and that yeah, he's not alone.
(05:30):
This is specifically what the Kaiser's propaganda is trying to inculcate.
But part of why everyone in the Nazi high command
is willing to make a lot of the calls and
willing to back hit learn a lot of the calls
that lead them to being at war and the war
with the world, is that they had been raised in
this propaganda where it's like, yes, it's Germany against the world,
and we can take them right, and honestly, they almost
(05:52):
do in World War One, you know, to be fair.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
So it's also worth noting that a few weeks later,
at the end of August, once his family had returned
home from vacation and he'd had more time to talk
with his neighbors and his peers about what they thought
of the war, he writes this quote. Generally speaking, there
is no particular enthusiasm in Lower Bavaria among the people
at home. When the mobilization was announced in the old town,
(06:16):
everyone apparently started blubbing crying. I would have expected that
least of all of the lower Bavarians. They are usually
so ready for a fight. A wounded soldier says the same. Often,
really dreadful and stupid rumors go round, all invented by people,
and that's interesting where he's like, Wow, all my neighbors
are cowards. They're scared and sad that we're going to war.
(06:36):
They don't think it's awesome. And a wounded soldier who
came back from the front said that the war is
a bad thing.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
What a dick.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
These people are idiots. Yeah, they're inventing rumors. This guy
who got machine gunned and all of his friends died
is inventing rumors that the war's going to be bad.
Speaker 4 (06:52):
See this is again, hearsay, yeah, like this is Yeah,
y'all watch too many movies because like I feel like
I feel like one of the most miserable feelings is
like a wet sock, yes, right, like so like so
a wet sock that you can't do anything about, but
(07:12):
it's also inside of your boot and it's going to
kill you.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (07:17):
The sock is so wet and so moist that you're
probably gonna lose your foot because it's infected like like
that type of like I'm not even talking about the
bullets and the machines. I'm talking about the food rations
have maggots and mice in them. Yeah, and just my
friends are dead and all my friends are dead, you know,
(07:39):
the food I ate to survive to get here to
talk to you.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
I ate it off of my dead buddy.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's I think a lot when
I'm reading about like Heinrich hearing from this wounded veteran
and being like, what a coward? How dary not want
to fight? It brings to mind just something from the
early stages of the Iraq War. There was a a
sergeant who was a Nicaraguan lawful permanent resident who joins
the United States Army Camillo Maya, who is deployed to
(08:09):
Iraq very early in the war, in like two thousand
and four, and when he returns home after six months
on a two week furlough, he refuses to go back
and he's like, I'm a consciences objector.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
The war is wrong.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
We shouldn't be here. You guys don't understand how bad
it is and how bad it's going to go. Like
we need to stop this now, and he gets like
put in prison for it for a year and stuff.
And I'm thinking about, like, as a kid, the things
that I heard about him from my family and from
the news about what a coward this man was, and
it's like, this man was in fucking combat. He fought
for this country, and he came out he was like, guys,
(08:42):
this is a bad thing. It's bad. It's going to
go bad. We're not gonna win. It's gonna kill a
lot of people. We should stop. And yeah, I mean,
I can really understand Heinrich's reaction because as a kid,
that's how I felt about this guy, because I was
fucking propagandized too, you know. Yeah, all of us get
past it. He never does, Yeah, totally so. And it's
(09:03):
one of the things that's interesting here is that like
he's talking to these locals who are like sad that
the war is happening, and the fact that you know,
a month before he writes this entry about how stupid
they are, and ah, they're listening to all these dumb
rumors all invented by people. A month ago. You were
talking about how the British army has been defeated and
the French are fleeing and Germany's and now things have
(09:24):
bogged down and hundreds of thousands of Germans are already dead,
and you don't realize like maybe you were wrong, like
maybe everyone was lying to you about how easy this
was gonna be. Like you don't get that yet. But
he's a kid. You know, kids are dumb, and he's
no smarter than any other dumb propagandized kid in the
history of the world. So when a trainload of wounded
(09:47):
French soldiers arrived in town, Himmler wrote about them. This
is interesting to me. He does write about these wounded
foreign soldiers despite how he felt about the French, with compassion.
He's actually like he's angry that there are some locals
who were angry that the prisoners are being taken care
of and fed, and he's like, no, like they're prisoners.
They fought honorably, like like that's not bad, which is
(10:09):
interesting now that said, several days later, he hears news
about ninety thousand Russian POW's and he writes in his
diary that Russians quote multiply like Vermin, so you also
get flashes of the guy he's got to become right.
I think that's interesting. There's an element of, well, this
was not a guy who was incapable of compassion as
(10:29):
a kid. And also, yeah, he's already he's at fourteen.
He's talking about Russians like their fucking rats. So yeah, yeah, okay,
I can see, I can see both. You weren't maybe
destined to be Heinrich Kimler, but there were always the
pieces of that in me too.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
Yeah. In his Freudian analysis of Himmler's diaries, Peter Lowenberg
writes two American historians, Werner t Angris and Bradley F. Smith,
have collaborated in studying Himmler's early years. They found that
there were two distinct Timblers, an early normal one and
a later psychopath. The early Himler was quote to all appearances,
a normal human being. It is the right bewildering to
(11:07):
discover how genuinely kind, considerate, and at times downright compassionate
he was as a youth. And I don't know that
I would agree Himmler was a psychopath as an adult,
in part because that a psychopath isn't capable of empathy,
and he clearly is. He goes to the camps as
an adult he's nauseated, he like vomits because of what
(11:28):
he's seeing at the camps that he is running. He
is I think this, and I don't say this to
be like he's not as bad as these guys think.
I think it's worse. You also can't care about people
and do terrible things. That's not as bad as being
capable of empathy and choosing to do those things.
Speaker 4 (11:48):
Yeah, looking at it and going not it just sucks. Yeah,
this just sucks. Is super evil anyway, oh.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Fucking like yeah, no, oh fuck, this is awful. Obviously
we got to do it. This makes it more honorable
that we're willing to push through our not to kill
these people.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
What are you gonna do? Yeah?
Speaker 4 (12:02):
Right nah, I am like, man, the just I think
both of our shows have made this point so many
times that like you wanna otherise the monster right like
and call them a monster, that there's something that is
foreign or far from us with they have this weird
brainworm in their soul that makes them something separate than us.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
It's like, no, no, yeah, there a us.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
And I think that's kind of what I really want
to emphasize here is I don't think and you know
this is arguable, but this is my argument. I don't
think he was destined to be the genocide guy. I
think he made choices. And I also think that there's obviously,
like you know, nature, just his environment also helps push
(12:49):
him to this. His people around him, his family, push
him to this. But I don't think that Heinrich Kimbler.
If you take this guy and you put him in
a different time, are you surround with better people in
the same place, he might have wound up being a
very different person.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Right.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
I don't think this is a guy who could only
ever have been a monster. I think he's a guy
who chooses to do monstrous things, and I think that's important.
Speaker 4 (13:11):
Yes, rather than being born nineteen hundred, he's born two thousand.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Right, he could have been a different guy. You know,
better parents, a better environment, So it could have been
a totally different person. So World War One was an
accelerating agent for the worst parts of his personality. War
does not tend to make people better. Like many German boys,
he became obsessed with the idea of serving, and particularly
he wants to be in combat. He wants to be
(13:36):
infantry now, he wants to be an officer. He doesn't
want to be a grunt, right. He wants to be
like because he sees that as in part he's owed
that kind of position, right. His family's upper middle class.
He knows the prince, he's supposed to be an officer.
Speaker 4 (13:52):
Right now.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
By nineteen fifteen, at fifteen, he's getting close to adulthood.
He's not far from when he'll be able to join
and fight, and he writes about being like overwhelmed. He
can barely stand it that he's not out there yet, right,
Like this is driving him crazy, that he's still too
young to fight and he's gonna miss it. He's still worried,
even in nineteen fifteen, when it's become clear, oh, this
(14:15):
is bad, gonna he still can't get how angry he
is not being able to fight yet. And part of
it he's also very insecure. His health problems continue, and
he's really worried that like, he might not be able
to serve at the front because of his health, and
so he starts taking actions. He gets obsessively into fitness
to try, and he gets into weightlifting like he's a again.
(14:37):
There's a you could see that the modern day version
of Himler would have fallen for a lot of these
like far right, like Joe Rogan, fucking steroid grifters, fitness guys.
He would have been really into that, Lowenberg writes. Quote
on the eve of his fifteenth birthday, he wrote, I
work out with dumbbells every day now to get more strength.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Yeah, you do.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
But as adolescence developed, his perception of strength became an
inner one. Strength to him was a function of inner control,
of self discipline over his emotions. Now, as a Freudian,
Lowenburg describes this as a fundamentally anal retentive method of
building strength. Okay man. He quotes a later diary entry
by twenty year old Himler, where Himler Heinrich promises to
(15:19):
seize quote like iron, the bit of self control in
my mouth. He means bit like a horse's right, and
then extends this Lowenburg does to a claim that Himler
must have been obsessed with a desire to masturbate, and
all of his obsession with fitness and with self control
is as a result of his constant battle with himself
to stop himself from coming. I don't think there's any
(15:41):
evidence of this, is that Fudians are obsessed with coming, right.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
Yeah, now, where'd you get that? Like, just where where
did that?
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Yeah he is, this is a Catholic boy. I am
sure he's got a self complex about your sexual urges
and the fact that it's called a said, I'm sure
that this does influence me as it as like most
kids in this era, right, I just do I think
that you're he's There's there's some reaching here going on, right.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
I feel like, what's what's more?
Speaker 4 (16:12):
I mean, obviously, like even the practice of doing what
I'm about to say, we're against doing it. But I'm like,
but what seems to be again right in front of us,
was what they said about the boy in high school,
like he is he didn't he is a late glow up, Like.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
He's like late grow up. He's anxious about his fitness,
about being scrawny and weak.
Speaker 4 (16:31):
Yeah you know he's like I said, like he's a
six at best.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 4 (16:35):
So that's already happening, and it's like, dude, nah, let
me put some let me walk up a little bit.
I'm bigger now, I bet you you know what I'm saying.
Like I go to this war, I put some weight on,
like everybody, you know, my lungs. I don't be running
like everybody else. You feel me like, let him, it's
it's a normal boy. I'll show them glow up moment
(16:56):
you feel me. That like to me is like again,
so far I know that the tide is going to
completely turn, but I feel like so far AUTI is relatable.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
Yeah, you know that's yeah. I think that's a yeah,
a really important point. And again, I'm sure he's got
some weird atitudes about masturbation that can't It's not nothing,
but it's just Lowenberg describes as like this is probably
is more important to him even than like preparing his
body for war. And no, I think his obsession with
physical fitness and his he might have you might even
(17:26):
say body dysmorphia. He's very unhappy with his body. I
think that's focused on his worries about not being able
to fight, not being fit to be a soldier like
he's supposed to be and like his older brother is
going to be. In September of nineteen fifteen, his parents
and his older brother, Gebbard, go to a field hospital
for wounded or at at least a hospital for wounded soldiers.
With their parents go like, you know, thank these soldiers
(17:49):
who have gotten maimed on the Western Front, and Heinrich
is really envious that he doesn't get to go, like
he's like, ah, man, I wish I should have been there.
Geppard turns seventeen and he gets to join the military
reserve or lensterm. Heinrich claimed quote, if only I were
old enough, I'd be out there like a shot. But
he's not, and he has to content himself with joining
(18:10):
the Cadet Corps, which is the Imperial German version of ROTC. Right,
this is like, you're not quite ready to join. You're
going to be an officer. We're going to prepare you
for that. He starts in autumn and he and his
peers they spend some time, they go out. There's like
a week there's like summer camp basically that they do.
And you know, I think it's a thing where once
or twice a week they'll meet up and they get
(18:30):
some training. I think they do some shooting. Most of
what they're doing is probably marching, right, But it's kind
of trying to prepare you so that you need less
training when you're old enough to go fight. Right. He's enthusiastic.
He really likes wearing a uniform. He really enjoys being
involved in this, but again, his health issues keep cropping
up and he starts to he develops. He has this
(18:51):
severe stomach pain that he talks about. I think he
has IBS, probably IBSD, if I just had to guess
by what he's described, we don't know. But I think
he's got huh, crones. It might it might be. I
don't think it's not. I don't think it's serious. It
might be crones, but it doesn't seem quite serious enough
for that, because he would have been basically entirely unmedicated,
(19:14):
and I think unmedicated crones would have been more debilitating
to him pain. I think this is likelier. But I'm
not a doctor. But he's got some sort of weird
stomach gastro intestinal issue that will plague him his whole life.
This is always a problem for him. Well, I mean,
he's Heinrich Keimler, So I guess I'm glad he suffered
in the long run, but he hasn't done anything bad yet.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
I was like, stomach problems, that's a bummer, not for him, Yeah,
he kind of deserved it.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Long Rich's biography suggests that his obsessive weightlifting is more
of a response to these embarrassing health problems than an
example of a broader need for control because he can't
stop from masturbating. I think that's probably likelier than what
Louenburg theorizes. In late nineteen sixteen, Heinrich's godfather, the Prince,
is killed in ans in Romania at age thirty two.
(20:03):
This is a calamity for the Himmler family and Heinrich
in particular. They don't entirely lose their access to the
royal family because like they know his mom and so
they have some ability to still make use of that relationship.
But the Prince being dead, is it really damages their connections? Right?
They are much less tied in to royal now and
(20:26):
the social benefits that would have come from it. For Heinrich.
Speaker 4 (20:29):
Yeah, you're his plus one, man, like you can't like
you just lost You're the plus one, so now you
not on the list, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (20:35):
You're the plus one. And then he got fucking murked.
But I think it's I think he probably died from shrapnel.
I forget exactly. Maybe I'm wrong, but he gets killed
on the fucking front right in May of nineteen seventeen,
Heinrich's brother Gebard joins an infantry regiment and starts his
training to become an infantry officer. Now, Heinrich is now
old enough to serve, right, because you know, his brother's
(20:57):
seventeen in like nineteen fifteen, Hinrich a couple years younger.
He's like seventeen now, you know, this is the second
to the last year of the war. He is old
enough that he could. If he were a regular German,
he probably would have gotten an infantry and been out
there pretty quickly. But his parents, again, he doesn't want
to serve as an enlisted man, and his parents beg
the mother of his dead godfather, you know, the yeah,
(21:19):
I don't. He's the queen. I forget exactly what the
term is, but she's the prince's mom. She's somewhere in
the royalty the queen yeah, yeah, queen aunt or some
shit like that, to help them get a position in
an elite infantry regiment. And she does write a letter
to one of these like elite regiments, being like, please
accept this young boy. But they're like, look, we're like
serious ass soldiers, like and like. At this point, the
(21:43):
German military the elite units are really good. They're protos.
These are like the storm troopers, the trench fighters. These
are the guys who we are very careful with them
because you can't replace these dudes, right, it takes time
for someone to build up the kind of skill and
fighting Like we we don't just take We're not going
to take this sickly weak kid and like put him
(22:04):
in a unit where he's going to be asked to
leap into a trench with a knife in one hand
at a pistol in the other and kill men in
hand to hand combat. He's not ready for that.
Speaker 4 (22:15):
Yeah, somebody's mom writes a letter to the seals, like.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Right, like, yeah, he can't lift a forty pound weight,
but please take him into the Navy seal He's a
good boy, he's his dad taught my dead son.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
So Heinrich leaves school that year. He has not graduated.
This isn't really it's dropping out, but not really because
kind of everyone who is seventeen is doing this either
to go directly into the military or in Heinrich's case,
he doesn't want to be conscripted and as an enlisted man,
and so he leaves school. So he can get into
the reserve and try to secure himself a position as
(22:50):
an officer candidate. He wants to go to officer candidate
school and handle all that This will let him choose
a better assignment with at least a more prestigious unit
than like some ground pound or someone even worse, someone
in like the back rank who's never going to see combat,
who's going to be doing like signals or whatever. To
make a long story short, Gebhard Senior, his father keeps
(23:11):
using his connections and eventually is able to secure Heinrich
at posting with a reserve battalion that is like the
reserve battalion for a pretty good regiment. So these are
the guys. When that good regiment loses men in combat,
the reserve battalion sinsman over to fill them back up, right,
So it's the kind of thing. Well there, Eventually you'll
get a front line position theoretically. So Heinrich goes off
(23:33):
to train and he's now in the military. He's doing
military training to learn to be an officer, and he
starts writing home and signing his letters as Milaise Heinrich.
Melaise is Latin for soldier, so he's signing his letters.
Is Heinrich the soldier?
Speaker 2 (23:48):
Now?
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Okay, long Rich writes quote, the brand new warrior expressed
his manliness, amongst other things, by taking up smoking. In
contrast to this masculine pose, his almost daily letters to
his parents in fact reveal the con siderable difficulties he
had an adjusting to the world of the military. Heinrich
was homesick. He complained about the poor accommodation and wretched food,
though on most evenings he could supplant this by going
(24:09):
to pubs. Oh my, he's not really ready for what war?
Speaker 4 (24:14):
And all when all Shapiro on us been Shapiro on
us pretending like you like cigars.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Yeah, and you're still going out to the pub and
getting pub food, Like you're not doing that bad. Like
if you think this is bad, what do you see
what your brother is gonna do? Because yeah, like during war, yeah,
you going out to the pubs? Okay, yeah, yeah, got it.
In the spring of nineteen eighteen, his older brother Gebhard
goes to the Western Front and he winds up being
part of this last massive offensive the Kaiserschlock I think
it's called of the German Army in World War One,
(24:42):
and he experiences heavy combat. His unit loses a lot
of guys. He is fighting face to face, tooth and
nail in the trenches like as bad as it gets
shit like Gebhart is a blooded soldier. By the end
of this Heinrich in comparison spends his time complaining about
the food and begging his parents for care packages. He
receives seven care packages in his first five weeks away,
(25:05):
but this is not enough, and he writes petulantly home
in one letter, dearest parents, today again I have got
nothing from you. That's mean, what the okay? Such a baby?
There's a fucking way your brother is like ankle deep
in blood. He is wading through blood, fucking up to
his knees probably, and storms of bullets and shrapnel. He's
(25:26):
killing men in a hand to He's watching the light
drain from their eyes. And you're like, it's seven care
packages and weeks you don't love me anymore?
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Mom? Not just say you give it a gluten.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Free Come on, you fucking baby. Like Jesus, a million
Germans starved to death during this period of time. And
you're like, Mummy, my care packages.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
But you stand some goldfish. It ain't got no golfish yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
And it's and geb Hard becomes a Nazi too. He's
not a sympathetic figure, right, but like it is this
like discrepancy between his older brother really smart, very good
in school, fucking bleeding with his brothers, watching all of
his friends get massacred in this like nightmare apocalypse battle,
and Heinrich's like, Mommy, you're not writing home enough, you know.
(26:15):
He sends one letter back to his parents that reads,
dear mother, thank you so much for your news, which
I did not get. It's so horrid of you not
to write again. Oh, this is a day or two
of letters. And he writes something like thank you for
the letter that I didn't get. What a dick the
lady that would your journals?
Speaker 4 (26:33):
Okay, yeah, now now now you want to talk about
her huh because she ain't write you no letter?
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Okay, now I'm good.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
And it's like, okay, at this point, he's a prick,
yeah right.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
Like it's you can say that we're starting to see
the turn.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
Yeah, this kid's a dick.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
Yeah you wore one and what you thought it was? Huh? Yeah,
you know what I'm saying, Like you don't get your
little snacks. You don't get you a little.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
To You're not he's not even getting shot at.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
And you're not you're not even at war.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
So he eventually gets posted to take a course on
machine gun uses he's to be Basically, if he'd finished training,
it would have been like an officer in a machine
gun unit right on September fifteenth of nineteen eighteen. He
does not wind up. It's interesting to me that he
doesn't wind up sent to the front, right, because Germany
does not have guys. They are they've been bled white
(27:19):
by this point. A seventeen year old boy even at
this point, I don't care if he's sickly. He's just
there for ten minutes until he takes a fucking bullet
to the law, right, like we just need bodies. And
so it's interesting that he doesn't just get sent to
the front. He's had enough training. Guys go up there
with less. There's a couple of expotential explanations. One is
that even this late in the war, the German military
(27:41):
still does try to make sure that their officers have
a good base of training when they're sent to the front.
And so maybe it's just that because he's becoming an officer.
They don't want to rush that, but they do for
a lot of guys, and long Wrerich suggests, and this
is something he can't there's not really hard evidence for this,
but I think it's a reasonable suggestion that it might
have been because his superior see kind of what we've
(28:03):
seen in these letters home that he's immature, and like
they're like, this guy shouldn't be commanding men in battle. Like,
like he help Germany, I can tell you that much.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
He a little boy, yeah, Like he's like he's a kid.
He's a kid.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Yeah, And we're willing to send kids to die, but
we don't maybe maybe we don't want them leading men
to die. Right, he's just not right. If he's going
to be an officer, let's keep him away. Un del
he grows up a little bit.
Speaker 4 (28:27):
You're gonna kill a lot of other people, right, being childish,
or these men are gonna turn on you because you're
a child.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Yeah, they're gonna frag your ass, whatever the case. He
is still in the reserves and still training when Germany
signs the armistice, so Heinrich Himler never gets the baptism
of fire that he's so dearly desired. And his brother Gebert,
on the other hand, does the soldier thing as much
as you can, right, He gets an iron Cross for valor.
He gets basically like somewhat equivalents like a medal of
(28:55):
honor somewhere between, like a bronze or silver star and
a medal of honor, you know, because there's diferent kinds
of iron Cross. I don't know exactly, but it's like
a it's a very prestigious Hitler gets, right, So he
came home and it's a big deal that he gets
this and he manages he doesn't get seriously injured over there,
which is amazing given the kind of combat that he's in.
He's a lucky guy. And the fact that his brother,
(29:17):
who's always been better than him is now a war
hero and a Heinrich misses out entirely. He will never
get over this. This will color the rest of his life.
His insecurity over this is something that is present for
the rest of his days. And you know what else
was present for all of Heinrich Kimler's.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
Life, Oh my god, Capitalism.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
Well yeah, yeah, I mean sorta, yeah. It was around
as a factor in Germany. In this period, but also
products advertisements. Yeah, and we're back and we're talking about
Heinrich Himmler post the big dub dub uno. So Germany's lost.
(30:01):
Heinrich is very much going to fall for the stabbed
in the back myth, right.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
And part because of surprise, surprise.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
And he's angry both at the Jews and Social Democrats,
who of course ended the war, which is not the
military ended the war because they knew that the army
would have collapsed if they'd kept fighting, right, And they
blame it on the people who actually take over after
and negotiate the peace, which is the largely Social Democratic
government of Weimar at the start of Weimar. And you
(30:28):
know the I mean particularly one of the negotiators who
helps ensure the peace, who is a real hero, is
a Jewish man, right, Matthias Erzberger I think was his name,
who gets assassinated as a result.
Speaker 4 (30:43):
Yeah, now here's a good tie to his pass of
him being like all my having, like he said earlier,
like all minds like Germany, you know, collecting enemies like
will stand alone.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
It's all good, you know what I mean? You have
at it? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4 (30:58):
First of all, had that work out, but you had
a attitude to where you just like youinforce you against us,
you a hater like I don't care. You know what
I'm saying. We would have never lost because we don't
give up. We don't mind having enemies, you know what
I mean. The only way we would have lost was because,
like you said, somebody had established in the back.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
You feel me, right, and that's the it's not And
for Heinrich it's not only did we get stabbed in
the back in Germany was robbed. If it's great victory,
I was robbed if my chance to be a hero,
yeah a real.
Speaker 4 (31:22):
Almost personifies it like I was right, Yeah, dang, so
that's big.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
Once the war is over, Heinrich attempted to remain with
the military, but the old Imperial Army is replaced as
a result of the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles
with the Reichs there, right, that's the post war army,
and it's limited to one hundred thousand men and they're
not allowed to have like an air force. I don't
think they're allowed much in the way of artillery. They're
very much because people are like, yeah, Germany, you got
(31:47):
to kind of out of pocket. We got to really
keep a lit on yo asses. Right. Yeah, this is
going to prove to be a bad idea for a
lot of reasons. The terms of the treaty I don't
need to get into that. People are broadly familiar. The
terms of the treaty play into why things happen with
Germany the way they do. But one of the things
this is going to mean is that, like, Heinrich wants
a military career, right, uh, and he's not gonna get
(32:11):
one because the only people who get to stay in
the military, it's a tiny fraction of the deployed military,
and those jobs are gonna go to guys who actually
saw shit, right and who are valuable for some reason.
I have connections, and he's just not gonna have Heinrich's
gonna try, But like, why the fuck would we give
you a job of the tiny number of people who
get to keep military jobs, why would you get it? Yeah,
(32:32):
Hitler doesn't. And Hitler was actually a decorated combat soldier, right,
They won't let him in.
Speaker 4 (32:36):
And that's great for me to hear, because it's like,
like it's like Hitler, I feel like he's like it's
privilege ain't the word per se.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
But yeah, yeah, but he is.
Speaker 4 (32:48):
But it's just like it's supposed to work out for me. Yeah,
like you know what I'm saying, So like why is
this not working out either? Is like had to have
added to the like pistol.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
And that is That's a huge part of why Himmler
is the way that he is and why he gets
drawn into Nazism right is And this is a big
This is a major factor. And almost everyone who winds
up kind of especially these a lot of these higher
up members of the Nazi Party, the people who are
running the SS. We've talked about this with like Heinrich
(33:23):
and with Eichman. These guys are people who could come
from the middle class and upper middle class and I
was promised more. I'm supposed to be doing better. And
they're not never doing bad, they're never really suffering compared
to how other people are, but they're furious because I
was supposed I was promised more. I'm owed more. Yeah,
(33:43):
it's a massive factor in all of these guys, and
it's a massive thing for Himler. So he is able
to he returns to school under a special program instituted
by the Post war government to allow young men who
had dropped out basically because they were either being drafted
or they were trying to avolunteer and thus had missed
out on finishing their education to get there. It's kind
(34:05):
of a mix between like a GED and a high
school diploma to allow them to go back and finish
it right. And actually the class that Heinrich is in
is taught by his father, Gebard Longrich says Gebbard didn't
show favoritism to his son. Is actually pretty consistent of
descriptions of him. He wouldn't have really done that. So
anyway he gets his German GED. I think it's called
(34:26):
an abbatur or something like that. The first few months
after the war are rife with socialist uprisings and attempt
to take and a whole different German cities by leftists,
which are cracked down on brutally by a mix of police,
the military and free corps right, which are these groups
of free corps, these groups of demobilized veterans who are
murderous thugs used by the new Weimar government to maintain control.
(34:49):
These guys are far right. The Vymar government isn't. But
the Vymar government cares more about stopping the left from
succeeding in this kind of like because they're trying to
do basically the Russian Revolution two Electric Boogloo and Buyomar's like, well,
if we got to have these proto Nazis murder a
bunch of people, as long as it stops that from happening, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
(35:10):
So Heinrich gets political fairly quickly. He gets involved first
with a center right political party, like it's not the
far right, but that's kind of his initial more or
less an analog to like a main line Republican party. Initially,
and at the end of nineteen nineteen he joins a
Free Corps unit. He is deployed to them, if you
(35:33):
can call it that, on a couple of occasions, which is,
you know, there's unrest or whatever, and the Free Corps
move out. He does some marching around, he does some
writing in a car with some guys with guns, but
he does not engage in any A lot of Frei
Corps are doing fighting. There's heavy fighting and killing. He
is not involved in any of that. He does not
see any serious action, I think in general, because even
(35:55):
as messy as these Free Corps units are they're organized
and run by people who actually fought and they're like, yeah, this,
we should keep this kid away from anything serious.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Look at them. Look at them, dude. You know you
don't really want to smoke.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
Yeah, I don't want him behind it. I don't want
him watching my back. You know. Yeah, he doesn't know
what the fuck he's doing.
Speaker 4 (36:10):
You ain't really with the shits, You just want to
wear the uniform. I do think it's also important to remember,
like and again, it's hard in our American imagination to
understand first of all multiple forms of government, but the
type of transition. I feel like this is the first time,
at least in our age era, where we've seen a
(36:33):
government totally like lose their marbles, Like we've never seen it,
Like like our government's lost as marbles, you know what
I'm saying. And like, but at this time, like you said,
like during Weimart, during the Weimar Republic, I'm like, women
can vote, Like there's these just these like progressive not progressive,
(36:54):
but they're these like progressions in culture. Like they're they're
funding the arts, they're funding some science, and motherfucker's.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
Is pissed off, you know, Like and that's.
Speaker 4 (37:05):
Sort of like like, okay, guys, like think about this
for a second, like these like these are maybe I'm
having a modern maybe I'm modern pilled, but I'm like,
it's such an interesting moment, and how the clap back
from that was so strong, Like it's just I don't know,
it's just.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
A weird time where I was like, brother.
Speaker 4 (37:27):
Like like this the world like this just the time
Einstein's from right, Like you're getting like government endowments to
understand science, you know what I'm saying, Like this, that's
I thought that was good.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Yeah anyway, yep, yep, yep. So uh yeah, Heinrich. You know,
he's in the Free Court. Part of why he's joins
this unit is it's he's kind of trying to stay
in the military after demobilization. He's hoping you can make connections,
but it doesn't work out, and he gets he's out
of the middle. He's cashiered out. By the summer of
nineteen nineteen. He begins to work as a laborer on
(38:05):
a farm. So he's like, you know, he's working on
a farm, but he doesn't own it. But he gets
entranced by rural life and he starts sending letters back
to his parents signed Heinrich Agricola, which is Latin for
Heinrich the farmer. However, that's agriculture, agricola. You can see
where it comes from. However, the ruthless pace of life
(38:26):
on a farm disagrees with his fragile constitution. Again, he's
going to be like a lot of modern far right guys.
He will idolize homesteading and the small farmer and like,
this is the life. We need a new nobility formed
out of, like you know, the rural peasantry. But he's
never able to really do it because he's he's sickly,
and he doesn't like working hard outside. By September of
(38:49):
that year, illness had forced him to pause his career.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
Again.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
This is a kid who thought he was ready for
the fucking trenches and you can't handle farming for like
more than two months. Three months, He goes to his
family die doctor who diagnoses him with an enlarged heart
and prescribes him a one year break to study and
regain his health. Now, obviously an enlarged heart is a
serious health issue. I don't think he actually has one,
because there's not really evidence from the rest of his
(39:12):
life that he has one. I think this is just doctors.
You know, they're not like but they're not like doing
a scan to see his heart's big. Yeah, I don't know.
I'm gonna take more cocaine, you know. So anyway, what's
interesting here is that and this is fascinating to me.
Heinrich gets like basically told, hey, go chill out for
(39:33):
a while, you know, maybe go to school, but don't
do any hard outdoor labor. So he's like, he's laid
up sick for a year, unable to work, and he
starts reading obsessively. And what he starts reading obsessively, for
the most part, is right wing vulcansh propaganda. So the
Volcush movement is a syndant in Germany in this period.
And the literal translation of the word vulcan is just
(39:55):
like folk or people like it's the people, right, that
the volkswagon is the people's car, right. The actual meaning though,
of the word vulk in German doesn't graft directly to
any term that we have in the English. In a
nineteen sixty four book on German ideology in the twentieth century,
Moss explained George Moss explained volk is a much more
comprehensive term than people. To German thinkers, ever since the
(40:17):
birth of German Romanticism in the late eighteenth century, volks
signified the union of a group of people with a
transcendental essence. Right, there's this added to this idea the
Nazis will popularize of like the Volkska mind shaft, which
is like the people's racial community.
Speaker 4 (40:33):
That kind of sounds like that sounds like, well like
hip hop when we say like the culture, right, Like
it kind of sounds like like what we would say
about Drake, Like you know, he's not like us, Like
you're not a part of the culture like that.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
Yeah's what's important. Obviously, I don't think that's not like
an inherently problematic. The culture, like referring to it that
way is a problematic. But the fact that you bring
up the exclusion of people, Yes, there's always a degree
of exclusion.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
Yeah, there's an in group out group.
Speaker 1 (40:59):
Yeah we're talking about is like this is like a subculture, right,
this is a subculture that's particularly relevant to like this
you know, artistic movement. It's one thing he is talking
about the Vulcans. These are the people who deserve to
have rights and who are German? And the Vulcan excludes
a lot of the people who live in Germany. Right,
He's not just talking about He's talking about specific kinds
(41:20):
of people, right. And the Volcoush movement is emphasizing specific
kinds of Germans who deserve to have rights and who
need to breed in order to expand their numbers. Right.
And this is where this is, like the root of
Nazi racial ideology is the Volcish movement, you know. And
the Volcush movement is obsessed with exclusion. You know, it
(41:42):
is defined not by who lives within the boundaries of
a nation, but who the right wing things ought to
be included in this racial community. In his book Hitler's
Master of the Dark Arts a history of Hitler's interest
in the occult, author Bill Yen describes the Volcish movement
as part of the counter culture in Germany, and he
argues that it's modern analog would be the nineteen eighties
New Age movement. Right, that this is very similar to like,
(42:06):
you know that this all this interest that starts popping
up in yoga and Eastern mysticism, Buddhism, Hinduism and all
that stuff. In the eighties in like the US is
very similar to what's happening and what the Vocalus movement
is a part of this broader interest in mysticism and
alternative religion.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
In the twins in alternative history.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
Right, including a big thing that is big in Germany
in this period. Buddhism is big in Germany, right, not
a super accurate take on Buddhism, but like course their
attitude of it as well as people get obsessed in
a lot of the West with like ancient Egyptian occult
ceremonies and religion, and like the Eda's right, these kind
(42:47):
of Norse sagas that are like part of this, like
religious the prosatas like that is big too, and so
like Norse mythology and religion, you know, worship of deities
like Wotan, right, starts to become big, and it's all
tied into the Vocus movement is a part of it.
It's related to all of this stuff.
Speaker 4 (43:07):
Well, that definitely wasn't the comparison I was making. Yeah,
as far as like the culture, what I would trying
to say is like the term is not a literal
translation and that the edges are more like foggy or cloudy,
but like we know.
Speaker 2 (43:20):
What we mean when we say it, you know what
I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Yeah, but it is I think it is very relevant
to compare it to and to compare it to like
the modern day the UFO movement and stuff. All these
things feed into QAnon that have fed into the far right.
The fact this happened before, right, Yeah, Like.
Speaker 4 (43:38):
Yeah, there's like this weird like thing to where it's
like you get into something that like it's kind of
like exciting to you whatever. You meet a lot of
cool folk air quotes. Cool, but at some point you
have to look at the back of the line and
be like, oh wait, they're in our line too, Like
this is this wait, this will if I get further
(43:58):
into the concentric circle, it's gonna turn in.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
It is like you and you have to consider that.
So that's yeah.
Speaker 4 (44:05):
So like even if you were just like look like
like to your point, it's like, you know, especially at
the New Age movement or stuff like that, or just like, look, dude,
i think it's better to eat food that was grown
by human hands and has seeds because a seedless watermelon
does not exist in nature. I'm saying, so if you're
(44:26):
just like, Okay, I get it. I'm gonna eat things
with seeds, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, But also
that means I need to eat drink raw milk, and
also that means I need to.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
Know I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
You're like, well, there's actually like a lot of health
stuff tied into it, a lot of like, you know,
natural food shit is tied into it, vegetarianism. I mean,
Hitler's a vegetarian. But part of what's relevant here is
that these are a lot of people who are not
initially into far right politics, but they are willing to
question the mainstream, willing to question you know, scientific orthodoxy
(44:56):
and cultural orthodoxy. And if you start down that road,
you can go in a number of directions, but you're
going to encounter other things that are questioning that orthodoxy,
including weird far right shit, and then the other aspect
of it. A lot of this, a lot of this,
especially more esoteric occult beliefs, where like people are embracing
getting into magic and getting into these different alternate religions.
(45:20):
There's an attitude of them to like, because I'm different
and special, and so if you were saying, yes, you're
special because you're part of this people's racial community, and
you have like mythical mystic powers actually that are tied
to like the ancient, like deep magic woven into our
people's blood. Well, maybe you go from being into ancient
Egyptian you know, mysticism too far. Rights, that's what I'm saying.
(45:44):
It's like you already special. Ye, I have powers. Right,
you can get someone convinced that they're part of the ubermensch.
Speaker 3 (45:52):
You know.
Speaker 2 (45:52):
Man, that's crazy, Like it's crazy.
Speaker 4 (45:54):
I wonder what it would be like to experience that
today moment in culture that must be Thankfully.
Speaker 1 (46:00):
We'll never know, prop Ye. So along these more esoteric
beliefs comes a growing interest in the mythical past of
the German people. And Himler's always been drawn to this stuff.
And it's a little like as a kid nerd at
you're a nerd and into this stuff that's like more
fringe and you get bullied for and then it becomes
mainstream as an adult and so suddenly like everybody is
into this stuff that I've always liked. He joins a
(46:23):
group called the Artaman League, which sets its goal as
liberating urban workers and turning them back into peasant Farmers.
Once he gets sick, Himler starts really reading into this stuff.
And there's I tie this a lot to the radicalization
journey a lot of Americans go through during the COVID lockdown,
where maybe they're sick, maybe they're not, but they're locked
away from everybody else. They're not going out, and they're
(46:44):
just kind of obsessively falling down these YouTube rabbit holes
and like these different like forum message board rabbit holes,
getting more and more into this weird, like esoteric stuff
about like vaccines and natural medicine or you know, raise theory.
That's what's happening to Himler. He's dealing with his own
versions of that, and he he reads more widely at first,
(47:07):
before he really zeros in entirely on the Vulcar stuff.
He reads the volumes of Ossian, which are a fraud
created by a Scottish guy that was claimed to be
like ancient Celtic poetry. He devours pamphlets attacking the Freemasons,
particularly won by Friedrich Witchell. Yen writes. Witchell claimed that,
among other things, Freemasonry was strongly influenced by the Jews,
(47:27):
was aiming for world revolution, was overwhelmingly to blame for
the World War. Himmler agreed and commented a book that
sheds light on everything and tells us who we have
to fight first. Here's where it starts. Here's where he
gets in.
Speaker 2 (47:40):
He is where we start evolving the pokemon.
Speaker 4 (47:43):
There's like these it's a very probably not an experience
of most of our fan base here. But when like
me coming from like sort of hip hop circles, but
like the indie underground, you know, coming out of the
like conscious movement, like the you know, the most depths
to qualities where like you're gonna stand on there and
wrap about quasars and pyramids for most of the cipher
(48:07):
and be into telekinesis.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
You know what I'm saying, Like.
Speaker 4 (48:11):
Like you're so open minded, your closed minded, Like a
lot of times you be at these these moments and
we're and we're building, you know what I mean, Like
it's like the language of like the gods and the
earths to five percenters.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
I think you may have done like some stuff on him.
Speaker 4 (48:25):
Anyway, but yeah, so a lot of times it's like
this is my community because this is where the real
hip hop is. But then when you saw start somebody
start saying something that you're like, my brother in Christ,
you made that up, that history, didn't That is not history, right,
but it's but it's a story that it is in
(48:49):
response to the suppressing of the narrative of like our
African ancestry, Like you're you're you're suppressing the the in
modern culture and just in modern American history, like the
role of the African and its descendant is not ever acknowledged,
you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (49:10):
So when someone comes in and.
Speaker 4 (49:11):
Says, well, know, well a black man was doing this,
and a black man was doing this, and it's like,
I'm like, bro, like I love being black just as
much as the rest of us, but you made that.
Speaker 2 (49:21):
Shit up, like that's not what happened, Like that's not so.
Speaker 4 (49:25):
But if you start pushing back like that, they looking
at you like, oh, a nigga, you would sellout you
believe in a white man's story, you.
Speaker 2 (49:31):
Know what I'm saying.
Speaker 4 (49:31):
So so so it's almost like I like, I don't
even know how to say to you. This is not
liberating us, Like I know what you what you think
you do it you think, like you said, creating this
ubermansh if you will like our black version of it.
Speaker 2 (49:46):
Like again, a black man is God.
Speaker 4 (49:47):
We descended the kings, and I'm like some of our
ancestors was peasants, my.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
G Like some of us are raised just raised ghosts.
Speaker 4 (49:56):
And that's okay, you see what I'm saying, because goats
feed the war world, so like it's okay, I'm not
an Egyptian, I'm not an ancient.
Speaker 2 (50:04):
I don't come from that, Okay, Yeah, and that's fine.
Speaker 1 (50:08):
It's just like obsession with like, no, my ancestors were
this thing that I think is cool, that represents like
a tenth of a percent of the people. And it's
like everyone has ancestors who were kings. Everyone has ancestors
who were warriors, and everyone's got a lot more ancestors
who were fucking dirt farmers or whatever.
Speaker 4 (50:30):
Right, vast majority of human history from when we went
from Homo erectus to Homo sapien was boring as shit.
Speaker 1 (50:39):
Most of your ancestors, like everyone else, there's people who
are just trying to get by.
Speaker 4 (50:44):
Yes, yeah, who who never traveled four miles away from
where they was born right and raised and raised them kids.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
Yeah, and that's great. Yeah, And Himmler. Himmler is instead
getting obsessed with, you know, ah, the night these nightly
orders that are are Miami's like Germanic, these you know,
these knights who were these great warriors who you know,
fought back the Muslim tides and or you know before
that beat the Romans, like and these are our ancestors,
these great you know, heroic Germanic superman. You know. That's
(51:16):
that's what he's read. And he's also reading about he
gets into you know, anti Semitism through these theories about
like the Freemasons and stuff. Now, an interesting historic curiosity
is during this period when he's laid up and he's
reading obsessively, he also reads the first eight volumes of
a magazine titled pro Palestine. Now this has nothing to
do with the term in its modern sense. This is
(51:36):
a Zionist publication that's made by the German Committee for
the Promotion of Jewish Settlement in Palestine. He does not leave. Unfortunately,
there's no record of his opinion of this. But it's
not a lot of guys we talked about. This is Eichmann.
A lot of anti Semites from this era go through
this period of thinking like, well, maybe this is how
we get rid of them, right, Yeah, that's that's probably
(51:57):
why he's into it.
Speaker 2 (51:58):
I don't know. I mean, Palstin's got cool guys.
Speaker 1 (52:00):
Like if we can get them over there, you know, they're.
Speaker 2 (52:02):
Not like you just go there. We did that.
Speaker 4 (52:04):
We're here with the slaves, Like, why don't you go
to Liberia? Yeah, you feel me, just go back to Angola.
Everything's fine, just go back to Africa.
Speaker 1 (52:10):
And that's what this suggests is he's thinking more and
more about the US and how to get rid of
them right already from a very young age, he's like
nineteen at this point. In October of nineteen nineteen, he
registers with the Technical University in Munich to study agriculture.
Here he made it a priority to seek membership in
the first fraternity that would take him, and he wounds
up as a NEPO baby getting into his dad's fraternity.
(52:32):
Now in Germany, during this period, Fratz looked a little
different than they do now. They were focused on a
lot more on fencing and dueling clubs than anything else.
And prior to the war, every young man who's like
of a certain class, if you're like the officer class,
you want to get in one of these dueling clubs
and get a scar on your face. The whole point
(52:54):
is for somebody to get to hit you in the
face to earn a dueling scar. Like you're not really
like you're not really a man of a certain level
in society. You don't have one. And a Himmler is
bad enough with a sword that it takes him three
years to have enough duels to earn his scar. Yen
Right's potential opponents found Himler a demeaning competitor because he
(53:16):
was so small and so frail, and that his stomach
troubles make it difficult for him to drink heavily. Now
that's one account, and there's some evidence behind it. Long
Rich gives a little bit more moderated account of Himmler.
You know, in his frat years he writes that he
did at least witness multiple duels and wrote, at least
it strengthens the nerves and you learn how to take
(53:38):
being wounded. He also wrote about drinking. This is him
describing in his Diarrhea night out drinking. It was very jolly.
I drank eight glasses of wine at twelve thirty. We
went home on the train. Most of us were tipsy,
so it was very funny. I got a few of
the brothers back to their digs and bed at two am,
so like he's able to party Somewhat's that's not super
(53:59):
intense drinks.
Speaker 2 (54:00):
You know, it was very jolly.
Speaker 1 (54:04):
It was very Yes.
Speaker 4 (54:06):
I was like, this is yeah, first of all eight
drinks and you a German man, bro, don't brag on that,
homie that now if there's anything about your yo jeans,
like you should have been able to hail more liquid
than that.
Speaker 2 (54:18):
But I will say like it like it kind of
right now, kind of.
Speaker 4 (54:21):
Sound like the like the guy every time you talk
to him, like, I'm so sore from the gym.
Speaker 2 (54:26):
I was lifting it so oh man, I can't sit down, like, man,
shut the fuck up.
Speaker 4 (54:30):
Yeah, like you have to have your Oh you see
his broccoli ears because I was rolling, man, I was
rolling last night. Yeah, okay, bro all okay.
Speaker 3 (54:39):
His dating profile would be such a nightmare.
Speaker 2 (54:42):
Oh my god, he's holding a fish. Is he holding
a fish in his dating profile?
Speaker 1 (54:46):
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, definitely holding like some crops that he
pulled out of the ground before going home because this
tummy was hurt. Yeah, he's doing he's doing something or yeah,
he's got his tiny little scar that he's got to
show off.
Speaker 2 (54:58):
Oh man, sorry, I got it in battle.
Speaker 1 (55:00):
Yeah now yeah, it's it's simply fencing, and you're all
trying to get scars. Like everybody is just kind of
cutting each other's face so that you can show off.
Yeah yeah, Now you know who never shows off because
they earned all of their scars the honorable way in
hold to hand combat. Killing people in bar fights, Sophie absolutely, Sophie.
(55:26):
Oh yeah, a lot of a lot of cities you
can't go back to. Just like our sponsors for this podcast,
we're back. Ah blue Apron.
Speaker 3 (55:44):
Uh why killed a man in a bar fight?
Speaker 1 (55:49):
You're probably right. So anyway, so we're talking about Heinrich Himler.
He's in college now, he's getting his degree in like
agricultural sciences. Uh. He gets into r O T. C
Based in college because he lets him wear a uniform.
He gets to march around. He writes in his diary
that he enjoys being able to still feel like a soldier.
(56:10):
In one entrance, he notes another day in uniform as
one of his chief pleasures. It's what I enjoy wearing most. Like, Okay,
he really just desperately wants to feel like a soldier,
you know, even though that has passed him by such
a tryhard yes, Heinrich starts getting involved in political activism
(56:30):
for the far right. His first big protest campaign because
he's a member of some of these like right wing
groups on campus. Is a German count I think is
Count arco Valley assassinates a leftist right he kills somebody
in it's like a political murder, and the count gets
sentenced to death for murdering a guy, and this becomes
(56:53):
a cause celeb of the German right. This is kind
of their equivalent of like the protests against the January sixth,
people facing any consequences for the crimes, and they get
so angry. Heinrich is marching in the street. There's protests,
you know, the Frei Corps are like showing up armed
in these gatherings to be like, you know, you're gonna
have to deal with us if you try to kill
this man. There's even talk within the military of either
(57:16):
using having the army go in and bust him out,
or even doing a push against the government if they're
to kill this guy. And the liberal government caves like
they always do to fascists. Himmlar rights after because they
and they commute his sentence to like basically your life
in prison. We're not going to execute him. And when
the government caves Himler writes in his diary, however pleased
(57:37):
we were, we were equally sorry that the business passed
off so uneventfully. Oh well, there will be another time.
And he also writes about like, ah, they're not willing,
they're scared of us, right, And that's the problem. That's
why you can't, like showing mercy these people is a mistake,
you know, Like if you do that, they will take
advantage of it every single time. It just it just
(57:58):
inspires them to push further. It doesn't save you any violence.
Things get much worse because they don't go through with
punishing this man. Near the end of nineteen nineteen, Himmler
gets caught up in a debate within his Dueling club,
you know, this fraternity. There's an argument as to like,
can we admit Jews right and not religious Jewish people right,
(58:20):
Not people who are of the Jewish faith, but people
who have Jewish ancestry but are Christian or at least
like you know, they're not you know, practicing members of
the faith. And this is a serious debate at the time.
Within this the strata of people, and the Catholic Church
takes a stance that Jews who converted to Christianity ought
to be treated like anyone else. Obviously, it's fine to
(58:42):
exclude practicing Jews, right, they're not full citizens. You can
be shitty to them, but all that should matter is
what they're doing now, right. They're basically the Catholic yours
is saying there there's not an ethnic difference between someone
who has Jewish ancestry and a normal German, Right, we
don't care about that. And the Church takes this stance
because Catholicism is a minority faith in Germany, right, so
(59:05):
they do see a degree of threat to themselves. Is like, well,
if these people like, we're not that much safer, right ye,
if the Protestants decide to start talking with us, so
we should probably draw a line here. Himmler is really
uncomfortable with this minimal degree of liberalism from the Church,
and he had been fairly strong as a Catholic, but
he writes in his diary, I think I'm heading for
conflict with my religion because he believes a Jew is
(59:27):
a Jew no matter what, it doesn't matter if they've converted.
It's about the blood, right, That's what Himmler thinks. Now.
It's worth noting that while he grows steadily more anti
Semitic as he ages, he still expresses as a young
man some mixed thoughts on the matter, and in part
he also he's a fan and he's super attracted to
(59:48):
this Jewish cabaret singer he met inga barco in a bar.
He writes really positively about her, right, so he's you know,
he's again, this is a guy. None of these people
are perfectly consistent, right. And this is also a time
period he is starting to express interest in women around
his age at this point in time. This is really
(01:00:09):
when we see in his diary him writing about girls
a lot. And it's kind of you get some in
cell vibes from this dude. Yeah. He pinds that one woman, Luisa,
who he had a crush on, was really nice, but
not nice in the way that he wanted, right, as in,
she's she's nice to me, she's friendly, but she doesn't
want to fuck me. Right.
Speaker 2 (01:00:31):
That is hilarious. I'm a loser.
Speaker 1 (01:00:34):
This is funny, He writes home to his brother. This
is so gross. If sweet young things knew how they
worried us, they would, no doubt try not to. This
girl knew how sad I was that she doesn't want
to fuck me, she'd surely want to fuck me. Right,
that's a little sweat problem. Sweet little Things, maybe don't
call him sweet little things. She's fucking weirdot, fucking crazy,
(01:00:56):
sweet little thing, sweet thing?
Speaker 4 (01:00:59):
My uncle, man, what's up, Cleatus? I'm saying you sad
like somebody named Cleophus Jenkins.
Speaker 2 (01:01:04):
What's up, sweet thing?
Speaker 1 (01:01:05):
All right? Calm down, heiin Rich Hembler, four jets, Turbo
or another.
Speaker 4 (01:01:11):
I was actually thinking I didn't want to bring this
up because I ain't want to sound like a douchebag myself.
Speaker 2 (01:01:15):
But I was just like, he hasn't talked about girls
in his diary. Yeah he doesn't.
Speaker 1 (01:01:20):
He's a late humor. It's possible he's not it. It's
not until he's in his late twenties that he actually
like that. He's a virgin until his late twenties. Not.
I'm not trying to like talk shit on that. I
don't get No, it is what it is, but yeah,
that's likely what's going on here. In another instance, he
bonds with a girl named Maria, and he does there's
this kind of positive thing where he's like, I'm so
overjoyed that I finally have a sister, right, which is
(01:01:41):
a nice and positive way to cute like a female friendship.
Speaker 3 (01:01:43):
He's only got brothers away from him.
Speaker 1 (01:01:47):
Well, yeah, because he is. He actually just wants to
fuck her, right, He's not safe. She's got a boyfriend.
Speaker 4 (01:01:53):
Maria, Maria, you remind him of a West Side story, Yeah,
growing up Bennis Harlem.
Speaker 1 (01:02:02):
So she's got a boyfriend, and he writes of her boyfriend,
I believe he doesn't understand her, his golden girl, and
he tries to, like he tries to flirt with her
and like basically take her from him by offering her
a ride on his motorcycle.
Speaker 4 (01:02:18):
But she's like, hey, listen, listen listening.
Speaker 1 (01:02:22):
To get on your motorcycle.
Speaker 4 (01:02:23):
Heinrich Himmler, Listen, It's okay to be sloppy seconds because
first place always messes up.
Speaker 1 (01:02:30):
There, you get that, Yeah, that's how That's how he's
looking at this, right, But like I'm gonna slide in here,
but uh no, no, you're not sweet thing. Her boyfriend's
not treating her right. I do so much better, you know.
Speaker 4 (01:02:42):
Yeah, So she call you when you when your boyfriend
a girl, come on over.
Speaker 1 (01:02:46):
You can stay.
Speaker 4 (01:02:48):
I'll come get you on my motorcycle. You could stay
on my couch. If he trip it, you come on
over here.
Speaker 1 (01:02:53):
Like, I don't even think she's calling him. I think
she's like nice, polite to him. And he's like, she
must really be in love with me, if only this
tyrant where to let her go, you know, just.
Speaker 2 (01:03:03):
Just basic human decency. Yeah, Like she just can't be regular.
You just can't be regular like that.
Speaker 1 (01:03:12):
Yeah. And Heinrich's diaries, the other thing that he writes
about a lot at regarding women is like this like
white night shit, right, there's tons of stories about that.
And this is from Lowenberg's article quote. He witnesses a
conflict between a girl and her father of the girl's
desire for private dance classes. He describes the father as
unyielding and stiff necked, like a tyrant. According to his
(01:03:33):
own account, Himler interposed himself and helped the young lady
a great deal. The poor little girl wept tears. I
truly pitied her, But she had no idea how pretty
she was in her tears.
Speaker 2 (01:03:44):
Okay, oh my god, really pretty.
Speaker 1 (01:03:47):
Like maybe he pays for this girl's dance classes. Yeah,
Lowenburg writes of Himmler's frequent rescue fantasies. He writes fantasies
about like I could save this girl she's with this brute.
If you know, if I did this and this, then
like she'd know that I'm really who she's meant for.
Speaker 4 (01:04:05):
Yeah, that's all that medieval stuff he was reading as
a kid.
Speaker 1 (01:04:09):
Yeh know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (01:04:10):
That's all that you're trying to live out that fantasy.
Speaker 1 (01:04:12):
Yeah. In one instance, he meets a waitress that he
has a crush on, and he writes paragraphs about his
fear that like, oh, waitresses always fallen to disrepute. You know,
she's doomed to a life of you know, sin and vice,
because that's the only thing that a waitress can be.
And if I only were rich, if I had money,
I'd give her enough money to marry a nice man
(01:04:34):
so she quote would not have to sink and be
lost wells areas. Oh yeah, he's a crea.
Speaker 2 (01:04:41):
Fucklah, I'd pick you, I take you, and.
Speaker 1 (01:04:47):
Dude, that's the word for word. His diary entry. So
uh Himmler finishes his diploma in August of nineteen twenty two.
Now at this point he has continued reading into German
Volcish mysticism, and he's become acquainted with a man named
Guido carl Anton Liszt who Weed didn't. Yeah, Guido has
never good news. Shockingly not Italian. He had died in
(01:05:11):
nineteen nineteen, so he's been died pretty recently. But during
his life he had been the godfather of popular Volcish theory.
He was one of these guys who portrays himself as
something between an archaeologist and a wizard. And one of
his major contributions he creates this runic alphabet which he
said had been used by the ancient arians, and he
uncovers the system not by like real archaeology, but by
(01:05:34):
ghost archaeology. He channels dead spirits and they teach him
about the past and he writes books about it.
Speaker 4 (01:05:40):
Oh wait, wait wait wait hold, So he learns this
by channeling ghosts.
Speaker 2 (01:05:49):
That's your boy, that's that boy, that's your boy. Irich.
Speaker 1 (01:05:51):
Okay, that's Heinrich's gonna love that. And not just Heinrich.
This guy is the grandfather of Volcush theory. Like this
guy is if you're to what becomes Nazism, this guy
is like above Hitler in the line of descent to
what becomes Nazism because his ideas feed directly into Hitler's.
Hitler is also influenced, not even just directly by List,
(01:06:13):
but by the guy's that List is influenced by or
it influences. Right, List is like and he looks just
like you'd imagine. So he's gonna show you a picture
of this.
Speaker 2 (01:06:22):
Please show me his sister of this exactly, exactly ancestors.
Speaker 1 (01:06:26):
Of course, look at this, Look at this, Look at
this wizard looking dude.
Speaker 2 (01:06:30):
Of course, he's talking to the ghost.
Speaker 1 (01:06:32):
He's got like a gandolf beard and a fucking it's
almost like a pork pie hat. Like I don't even
know what you'd call that weird bereat thing on his head,
but like, yeah, like a fucking wizard looking motherfucker. Look
at him. Look at this perfect He's perfect.
Speaker 2 (01:06:48):
Yeah, I love it. He's perfect.
Speaker 1 (01:06:49):
We're gonna talk a lot more about Guido von list
H and a lot more about the birth of the
Volcush movement and all of these weird occult figures who
are going to have a huge influence on Heinrich as
well as continue Heinrich's life. In Part three, Lucky you motherfuckers. Anyway,
prop Plugs.
Speaker 2 (01:07:10):
Plugs hood politics with prop Man.
Speaker 4 (01:07:13):
Were cooking over here too, trying to, you know, keep
putting everybody on. That's going on. I released some poetry,
I got some music out. We have a show on
Fridays now called tap in Little short ten minute Shooter.
And also the Terrorforms back. I'll say it again, Terrorform COVID.
Speaker 2 (01:07:35):
Hopefully by the.
Speaker 4 (01:07:36):
Time y'all hear this, the website will be up. But
like the coffee's here, Hell yeah, so excited about it?
All right, I'll bring some. I'll bring some when I
go up there for the thing that you have not
talked about yet on recording excellent, Yes.
Speaker 1 (01:07:49):
Well we'll do that. You at home. Go to Google
donor Box Defense Fund PDX fundraiser to help the Portland
Defense Fund, which helps bail out people who have no money. Yeah,
they're great. Please please help them out and help yourself
out by listening to part three. You lucky dogs. All right,
(01:08:10):
that's it for the episodes. This has been behind the
bastards I've Been Robert Evans go to Hell. I Love You.
Speaker 3 (01:08:21):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the
Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
and Friday.
Speaker 1 (01:08:39):
Subscribe to our
Speaker 3 (01:08:40):
Channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind the Bastards
Also media, Hey everybody, Robert here and Behind the Bastards.
It's doing its first live show and quite some time
at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland, Oregon, on Thursday,
September twenty fifth, at eight pm. All performer proceeds will
go to the Portland Defense Fund, which helps people who
have absolutely no money and are going to be relying
(00:22):
on public defense get bailed out and get outside of
court help while they're waiting to go on trial. So
please help support the Portland Defense Fund. Google Alberta Rose
Theater t h E A t r E Behind the
Bastards Live. If you just google Alberta Ros Theater Behind
the Bastards, it'll take you to the live show. There's
(00:43):
an etix dot com. If you get etix dot com
Behind the Bastards Life, you should be able to find
it as well. Again, all performer proceeds will benefit the
Portland Defense Fund. You can also go to at Defense
Fund PDX on Venmo or type donor box Defense fundpd
X to donate directly to the Portland Defense Fund. It's
a five oh one c please help them out and
(01:05):
again Behind the Bastards Live the Alberta Rose Theater, September
twenty fifth, twenty twenty five, at eight pm. I'll see
you there. I'm actually excited for the Nuremberg movie. I
don't know, it looks like maybe they kind of didn't
have the budget to make it as good as they
could have. But Russell Crowe is really good casting for
Herman Garring.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Oh love Russell Crowe.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
I like, well, I like him as an actor, but
he's also like Herman Garring is this guy who was
a young man, he's a fighter race, he's super fit
and like together in like a handsome celebrity, and then
as he gets older, like he puts on a lot
of weight and has problems with addiction, and like, yeah,
Russell Crowe is a really good guy to pick to
play Garing late in life.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
Right, Robert Robert Anderson?
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Hello Anderson, how are you doing?
Speaker 4 (01:54):
And I also have a Russell crow story, but that's
probably you for another it's not as it's not as
good as the Bill Gates story or the Doug Wilson
story or the Doug Wolson story.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
It's not as good as both of those.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
For a second there, I was just thinking about, like
and then you just start telling me the plot of
the movie. The nice guys like, oh no, no, that's
that's based on my actual life with Russell Crow. It
wasn't in the seventies, but yeah, no, that's that's about me.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
It would be so funny.
Speaker 4 (02:22):
Here's Marrow. Yeah, I ran into Russell Crow. This so
these people came into our neighborhood and said we needed
to I'm going to try to break into three hundred.
But I couldn't remember the rest of it. But anyway,
that would have been if I could have pulled off
the three hundred one, that had been great.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Well, speaking of three hundred that way, Really, at least
three hundred guys die in World War One, and that's
where we are at the start of this episode. World
War One has began before noon.
Speaker 4 (02:54):
At least three hundred yeople die in World War One
before noon on the first time.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
It's like a bad thirty seconds during the fucking Battle
of the Frontiers. Yes, so Heinrik Kimler, you know, starts
when he's on vacation as a kid. He's taking notes,
he's writing in his diary. Over the first few weeks
as things are spinning up to a full blown war,
(03:21):
and we get this fascinating. One of the things that
his diary entries provide us with is this really fascinating
window into the state of imperial German propaganda at this time.
One of his early diary entries, you know, before the
outbreak or like right after the outbreak of you know,
once the German army gets into the fray and like
everybody's actually fighting, he just writes English army beaten and
(03:43):
then goes on to add I'm as happy at these
victories as the English and French are, no doubt annoyed
at them, and the annoyance will be considerable. Falk and
I would really it's one of his friends, would really
like to fight right now ourselves. It's clear that the
good old Germans and they're loyal allies, the Austrians are
not afraid of a world full of enemies. Wow, this
is a snare.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
In the first couple of weeks of the war, things
are going really well for Germany. They take Belgium, they're
pushing towards Paris. Most of you know the English army.
This is remembered differently in Great Britain as like how
well they fought and even though there's very few of them.
They inflicted hideous casualties on the Germans. But also what
happens is the English army as it has existed at
the start of the war is almost wiped out, right,
(04:24):
like their standing army almost doesn't exist very very soon
into the war, which is why you know they have
to do this general draft and stuff. And so from
the perspective of the Germans, sure you know they were
good soldiers, but like we wiped them out. Basically there's
not that many English soldiers left anymore, and like the
French are being pushed back. So he is just absolutely
(04:46):
from the beginning of it is like, ah, we're unstoppable.
And this I think this is particularly I don't want
to do too much of like again what a lot
of people do when they're looking at his diary and
like working backwards from where he ended up and being like, ah,
clear sign of the monster he'd become. But there is
something useful in that last sentence where he's like the Germans,
(05:07):
the good old Germans and their loyal allies, the Austrians
are not afraid of a world full of enemies, right,
the idea that like it's you know, we can stand
alone against the world the fact that as a kid
he feels that way. Yeah, that's a sentence man, right,
it's it's relevant to who he becomes. Yeah, that says
a lot, yes, yes, and that yeah, he's not alone.
(05:30):
This is specifically what the Kaiser's propaganda is trying to inculcate.
But part of why everyone in the Nazi high command
is willing to make a lot of the calls and
willing to back hit learn a lot of the calls
that lead them to being at war and the war
with the world, is that they had been raised in
this propaganda where it's like, yes, it's Germany against the world,
and we can take them right, and honestly, they almost
(05:52):
do in World War One, you know, to be fair.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
So it's also worth noting that a few weeks later,
at the end of August, once his family had returned
home from vacation and he'd had more time to talk
with his neighbors and his peers about what they thought
of the war, he writes this quote. Generally speaking, there
is no particular enthusiasm in Lower Bavaria among the people
at home. When the mobilization was announced in the old town,
(06:16):
everyone apparently started blubbing crying. I would have expected that
least of all of the lower Bavarians. They are usually
so ready for a fight. A wounded soldier says the same. Often,
really dreadful and stupid rumors go round, all invented by people,
and that's interesting where he's like, Wow, all my neighbors
are cowards. They're scared and sad that we're going to war.
(06:36):
They don't think it's awesome. And a wounded soldier who
came back from the front said that the war is
a bad thing.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
What a dick.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
These people are idiots. Yeah, they're inventing rumors. This guy
who got machine gunned and all of his friends died
is inventing rumors that the war's going to be bad.
Speaker 4 (06:52):
See this is again, hearsay, yeah, like this is Yeah,
y'all watch too many movies because like I feel like
I feel like one of the most miserable feelings is
like a wet sock, yes, right, like so like so
a wet sock that you can't do anything about, but
(07:12):
it's also inside of your boot and it's going to
kill you.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (07:17):
The sock is so wet and so moist that you're
probably gonna lose your foot because it's infected like like
that type of like I'm not even talking about the
bullets and the machines. I'm talking about the food rations
have maggots and mice in them. Yeah, and just my
friends are dead and all my friends are dead, you know,
(07:39):
the food I ate to survive to get here to
talk to you.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
I ate it off of my dead buddy.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's I think a lot when
I'm reading about like Heinrich hearing from this wounded veteran
and being like, what a coward? How dary not want
to fight? It brings to mind just something from the
early stages of the Iraq War. There was a a
sergeant who was a Nicaraguan lawful permanent resident who joins
the United States Army Camillo Maya, who is deployed to
(08:09):
Iraq very early in the war, in like two thousand
and four, and when he returns home after six months
on a two week furlough, he refuses to go back
and he's like, I'm a consciences objector.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
The war is wrong.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
We shouldn't be here. You guys don't understand how bad
it is and how bad it's going to go. Like
we need to stop this now, and he gets like
put in prison for it for a year and stuff.
And I'm thinking about, like, as a kid, the things
that I heard about him from my family and from
the news about what a coward this man was, and
it's like, this man was in fucking combat. He fought
for this country, and he came out he was like, guys,
(08:42):
this is a bad thing. It's bad. It's going to
go bad. We're not gonna win. It's gonna kill a
lot of people. We should stop. And yeah, I mean,
I can really understand Heinrich's reaction because as a kid,
that's how I felt about this guy, because I was
fucking propagandized too, you know. Yeah, all of us get
past it. He never does, Yeah, totally so. And it's
(09:03):
one of the things that's interesting here is that like
he's talking to these locals who are like sad that
the war is happening, and the fact that you know,
a month before he writes this entry about how stupid
they are, and ah, they're listening to all these dumb
rumors all invented by people. A month ago. You were
talking about how the British army has been defeated and
the French are fleeing and Germany's and now things have
(09:24):
bogged down and hundreds of thousands of Germans are already dead,
and you don't realize like maybe you were wrong, like
maybe everyone was lying to you about how easy this
was gonna be. Like you don't get that yet. But
he's a kid. You know, kids are dumb, and he's
no smarter than any other dumb propagandized kid in the
history of the world. So when a trainload of wounded
(09:47):
French soldiers arrived in town, Himmler wrote about them. This
is interesting to me. He does write about these wounded
foreign soldiers despite how he felt about the French, with compassion.
He's actually like he's angry that there are some locals
who were angry that the prisoners are being taken care
of and fed, and he's like, no, like they're prisoners.
They fought honorably, like like that's not bad, which is
(10:09):
interesting now that said, several days later, he hears news
about ninety thousand Russian POW's and he writes in his
diary that Russians quote multiply like Vermin, so you also
get flashes of the guy he's got to become right.
I think that's interesting. There's an element of, well, this
was not a guy who was incapable of compassion as
(10:29):
a kid. And also, yeah, he's already he's at fourteen.
He's talking about Russians like their fucking rats. So yeah, yeah, okay,
I can see, I can see both. You weren't maybe
destined to be Heinrich Kimler, but there were always the
pieces of that in me too.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
Yeah. In his Freudian analysis of Himmler's diaries, Peter Lowenberg
writes two American historians, Werner t Angris and Bradley F. Smith,
have collaborated in studying Himmler's early years. They found that
there were two distinct Timblers, an early normal one and
a later psychopath. The early Himler was quote to all appearances,
a normal human being. It is the right bewildering to
(11:07):
discover how genuinely kind, considerate, and at times downright compassionate
he was as a youth. And I don't know that
I would agree Himmler was a psychopath as an adult,
in part because that a psychopath isn't capable of empathy,
and he clearly is. He goes to the camps as
an adult he's nauseated, he like vomits because of what
(11:28):
he's seeing at the camps that he is running. He
is I think this, and I don't say this to
be like he's not as bad as these guys think.
I think it's worse. You also can't care about people
and do terrible things. That's not as bad as being
capable of empathy and choosing to do those things.
Speaker 4 (11:48):
Yeah, looking at it and going not it just sucks. Yeah,
this just sucks. Is super evil anyway, oh.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Fucking like yeah, no, oh fuck, this is awful. Obviously
we got to do it. This makes it more honorable
that we're willing to push through our not to kill
these people.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
What are you gonna do? Yeah?
Speaker 4 (12:02):
Right nah, I am like, man, the just I think
both of our shows have made this point so many
times that like you wanna otherise the monster right like
and call them a monster, that there's something that is
foreign or far from us with they have this weird
brainworm in their soul that makes them something separate than us.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
It's like, no, no, yeah, there a us.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
And I think that's kind of what I really want
to emphasize here is I don't think and you know
this is arguable, but this is my argument. I don't
think he was destined to be the genocide guy. I
think he made choices. And I also think that there's obviously,
like you know, nature, just his environment also helps push
(12:49):
him to this. His people around him, his family, push
him to this. But I don't think that Heinrich Kimbler.
If you take this guy and you put him in
a different time, are you surround with better people in
the same place, he might have wound up being a
very different person.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Right.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
I don't think this is a guy who could only
ever have been a monster. I think he's a guy
who chooses to do monstrous things, and I think that's important.
Speaker 4 (13:11):
Yes, rather than being born nineteen hundred, he's born two thousand.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Right, he could have been a different guy. You know,
better parents, a better environment, So it could have been
a totally different person. So World War One was an
accelerating agent for the worst parts of his personality. War
does not tend to make people better. Like many German boys,
he became obsessed with the idea of serving, and particularly
he wants to be in combat. He wants to be
(13:36):
infantry now, he wants to be an officer. He doesn't
want to be a grunt, right. He wants to be
like because he sees that as in part he's owed
that kind of position, right. His family's upper middle class.
He knows the prince, he's supposed to be an officer.
Speaker 4 (13:52):
Right now.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
By nineteen fifteen, at fifteen, he's getting close to adulthood.
He's not far from when he'll be able to join
and fight, and he writes about being like overwhelmed. He
can barely stand it that he's not out there yet, right,
Like this is driving him crazy, that he's still too
young to fight and he's gonna miss it. He's still worried,
even in nineteen fifteen, when it's become clear, oh, this
(14:15):
is bad, gonna he still can't get how angry he
is not being able to fight yet. And part of
it he's also very insecure. His health problems continue, and
he's really worried that like, he might not be able
to serve at the front because of his health, and
so he starts taking actions. He gets obsessively into fitness
to try, and he gets into weightlifting like he's a again.
(14:37):
There's a you could see that the modern day version
of Himler would have fallen for a lot of these
like far right, like Joe Rogan, fucking steroid grifters, fitness guys.
He would have been really into that, Lowenberg writes. Quote
on the eve of his fifteenth birthday, he wrote, I
work out with dumbbells every day now to get more strength.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Yeah, you do.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
But as adolescence developed, his perception of strength became an
inner one. Strength to him was a function of inner control,
of self discipline over his emotions. Now, as a Freudian,
Lowenburg describes this as a fundamentally anal retentive method of
building strength. Okay man. He quotes a later diary entry
by twenty year old Himler, where Himler Heinrich promises to
(15:19):
seize quote like iron, the bit of self control in
my mouth. He means bit like a horse's right, and
then extends this Lowenburg does to a claim that Himler
must have been obsessed with a desire to masturbate, and
all of his obsession with fitness and with self control
is as a result of his constant battle with himself
to stop himself from coming. I don't think there's any
(15:41):
evidence of this, is that Fudians are obsessed with coming, right.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
Yeah, now, where'd you get that? Like, just where where
did that?
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Yeah he is, this is a Catholic boy. I am
sure he's got a self complex about your sexual urges
and the fact that it's called a said, I'm sure
that this does influence me as it as like most
kids in this era, right, I just do I think
that you're he's There's there's some reaching here going on, right.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
I feel like, what's what's more?
Speaker 4 (16:12):
I mean, obviously, like even the practice of doing what
I'm about to say, we're against doing it. But I'm like,
but what seems to be again right in front of us,
was what they said about the boy in high school,
like he is he didn't he is a late glow up, Like.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
He's like late grow up. He's anxious about his fitness,
about being scrawny and weak.
Speaker 4 (16:31):
Yeah you know he's like I said, like he's a
six at best.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 4 (16:35):
So that's already happening, and it's like, dude, nah, let
me put some let me walk up a little bit.
I'm bigger now, I bet you you know what I'm saying.
Like I go to this war, I put some weight on,
like everybody, you know, my lungs. I don't be running
like everybody else. You feel me like, let him, it's
it's a normal boy. I'll show them glow up moment
(16:56):
you feel me. That like to me is like again,
so far I know that the tide is going to
completely turn, but I feel like so far AUTI is relatable.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
Yeah, you know that's yeah. I think that's a yeah,
a really important point. And again, I'm sure he's got
some weird atitudes about masturbation that can't It's not nothing,
but it's just Lowenberg describes as like this is probably
is more important to him even than like preparing his
body for war. And no, I think his obsession with
physical fitness and his he might have you might even
(17:26):
say body dysmorphia. He's very unhappy with his body. I
think that's focused on his worries about not being able
to fight, not being fit to be a soldier like
he's supposed to be and like his older brother is
going to be. In September of nineteen fifteen, his parents
and his older brother, Gebbard, go to a field hospital
for wounded or at at least a hospital for wounded soldiers.
With their parents go like, you know, thank these soldiers
(17:49):
who have gotten maimed on the Western Front, and Heinrich
is really envious that he doesn't get to go, like
he's like, ah, man, I wish I should have been there.
Geppard turns seventeen and he gets to join the military
reserve or lensterm. Heinrich claimed quote, if only I were
old enough, I'd be out there like a shot. But
he's not, and he has to content himself with joining
(18:10):
the Cadet Corps, which is the Imperial German version of ROTC. Right,
this is like, you're not quite ready to join. You're
going to be an officer. We're going to prepare you
for that. He starts in autumn and he and his
peers they spend some time, they go out. There's like
a week there's like summer camp basically that they do.
And you know, I think it's a thing where once
or twice a week they'll meet up and they get
(18:30):
some training. I think they do some shooting. Most of
what they're doing is probably marching, right, But it's kind
of trying to prepare you so that you need less
training when you're old enough to go fight. Right. He's enthusiastic.
He really likes wearing a uniform. He really enjoys being
involved in this, but again, his health issues keep cropping
up and he starts to he develops. He has this
(18:51):
severe stomach pain that he talks about. I think he
has IBS, probably IBSD, if I just had to guess
by what he's described, we don't know. But I think
he's got huh, crones. It might it might be. I
don't think it's not. I don't think it's serious. It
might be crones, but it doesn't seem quite serious enough
for that, because he would have been basically entirely unmedicated,
(19:14):
and I think unmedicated crones would have been more debilitating
to him pain. I think this is likelier. But I'm
not a doctor. But he's got some sort of weird
stomach gastro intestinal issue that will plague him his whole life.
This is always a problem for him. Well, I mean,
he's Heinrich Keimler, So I guess I'm glad he suffered
in the long run, but he hasn't done anything bad yet.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
I was like, stomach problems, that's a bummer, not for him, Yeah,
he kind of deserved it.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Long Rich's biography suggests that his obsessive weightlifting is more
of a response to these embarrassing health problems than an
example of a broader need for control because he can't
stop from masturbating. I think that's probably likelier than what
Louenburg theorizes. In late nineteen sixteen, Heinrich's godfather, the Prince,
is killed in ans in Romania at age thirty two.
(20:03):
This is a calamity for the Himmler family and Heinrich
in particular. They don't entirely lose their access to the
royal family because like they know his mom and so
they have some ability to still make use of that relationship.
But the Prince being dead, is it really damages their connections? Right?
They are much less tied in to royal now and
(20:26):
the social benefits that would have come from it. For Heinrich.
Speaker 4 (20:29):
Yeah, you're his plus one, man, like you can't like
you just lost You're the plus one, so now you
not on the list, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (20:35):
You're the plus one. And then he got fucking murked.
But I think it's I think he probably died from shrapnel.
I forget exactly. Maybe I'm wrong, but he gets killed
on the fucking front right in May of nineteen seventeen,
Heinrich's brother Gebard joins an infantry regiment and starts his
training to become an infantry officer. Now, Heinrich is now
old enough to serve, right, because you know, his brother's
(20:57):
seventeen in like nineteen fifteen, Hinrich a couple years younger.
He's like seventeen now, you know, this is the second
to the last year of the war. He is old
enough that he could. If he were a regular German,
he probably would have gotten an infantry and been out
there pretty quickly. But his parents, again, he doesn't want
to serve as an enlisted man, and his parents beg
the mother of his dead godfather, you know, the yeah,
(21:19):
I don't. He's the queen. I forget exactly what the
term is, but she's the prince's mom. She's somewhere in
the royalty the queen yeah, yeah, queen aunt or some
shit like that, to help them get a position in
an elite infantry regiment. And she does write a letter
to one of these like elite regiments, being like, please
accept this young boy. But they're like, look, we're like
serious ass soldiers, like and like. At this point, the
(21:43):
German military the elite units are really good. They're protos.
These are like the storm troopers, the trench fighters. These
are the guys who we are very careful with them
because you can't replace these dudes, right, it takes time
for someone to build up the kind of skill and
fighting Like we we don't just take We're not going
to take this sickly weak kid and like put him
(22:04):
in a unit where he's going to be asked to
leap into a trench with a knife in one hand
at a pistol in the other and kill men in
hand to hand combat. He's not ready for that.
Speaker 4 (22:15):
Yeah, somebody's mom writes a letter to the seals, like.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Right, like, yeah, he can't lift a forty pound weight,
but please take him into the Navy seal He's a
good boy, he's his dad taught my dead son.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
So Heinrich leaves school that year. He has not graduated.
This isn't really it's dropping out, but not really because
kind of everyone who is seventeen is doing this either
to go directly into the military or in Heinrich's case,
he doesn't want to be conscripted and as an enlisted man,
and so he leaves school. So he can get into
the reserve and try to secure himself a position as
(22:50):
an officer candidate. He wants to go to officer candidate
school and handle all that This will let him choose
a better assignment with at least a more prestigious unit
than like some ground pound or someone even worse, someone
in like the back rank who's never going to see combat,
who's going to be doing like signals or whatever. To
make a long story short, Gebhard Senior, his father keeps
(23:11):
using his connections and eventually is able to secure Heinrich
at posting with a reserve battalion that is like the
reserve battalion for a pretty good regiment. So these are
the guys. When that good regiment loses men in combat,
the reserve battalion sinsman over to fill them back up, right,
So it's the kind of thing. Well there, Eventually you'll
get a front line position theoretically. So Heinrich goes off
(23:33):
to train and he's now in the military. He's doing
military training to learn to be an officer, and he
starts writing home and signing his letters as Milaise Heinrich.
Melaise is Latin for soldier, so he's signing his letters.
Is Heinrich the soldier?
Speaker 2 (23:48):
Now?
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Okay, long Rich writes quote, the brand new warrior expressed
his manliness, amongst other things, by taking up smoking. In
contrast to this masculine pose, his almost daily letters to
his parents in fact reveal the con siderable difficulties he
had an adjusting to the world of the military. Heinrich
was homesick. He complained about the poor accommodation and wretched food,
though on most evenings he could supplant this by going
(24:09):
to pubs. Oh my, he's not really ready for what war?
Speaker 4 (24:14):
And all when all Shapiro on us been Shapiro on
us pretending like you like cigars.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Yeah, and you're still going out to the pub and
getting pub food, Like you're not doing that bad. Like
if you think this is bad, what do you see
what your brother is gonna do? Because yeah, like during war, yeah,
you going out to the pubs? Okay, yeah, yeah, got it.
In the spring of nineteen eighteen, his older brother Gebhard
goes to the Western Front and he winds up being
part of this last massive offensive the Kaiserschlock I think
it's called of the German Army in World War One,
(24:42):
and he experiences heavy combat. His unit loses a lot
of guys. He is fighting face to face, tooth and
nail in the trenches like as bad as it gets
shit like Gebhart is a blooded soldier. By the end
of this Heinrich in comparison spends his time complaining about
the food and begging his parents for care packages. He
receives seven care packages in his first five weeks away,
(25:05):
but this is not enough, and he writes petulantly home
in one letter, dearest parents, today again I have got
nothing from you. That's mean, what the okay? Such a baby?
There's a fucking way your brother is like ankle deep
in blood. He is wading through blood, fucking up to
his knees probably, and storms of bullets and shrapnel. He's
(25:26):
killing men in a hand to He's watching the light
drain from their eyes. And you're like, it's seven care
packages and weeks you don't love me anymore?
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Mom? Not just say you give it a gluten.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Free Come on, you fucking baby. Like Jesus, a million
Germans starved to death during this period of time. And
you're like, Mummy, my care packages.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
But you stand some goldfish. It ain't got no golfish yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
And it's and geb Hard becomes a Nazi too. He's
not a sympathetic figure, right, but like it is this
like discrepancy between his older brother really smart, very good
in school, fucking bleeding with his brothers, watching all of
his friends get massacred in this like nightmare apocalypse battle,
and Heinrich's like, Mommy, you're not writing home enough, you know.
(26:15):
He sends one letter back to his parents that reads,
dear mother, thank you so much for your news, which
I did not get. It's so horrid of you not
to write again. Oh, this is a day or two
of letters. And he writes something like thank you for
the letter that I didn't get. What a dick the
lady that would your journals?
Speaker 4 (26:33):
Okay, yeah, now now now you want to talk about
her huh because she ain't write you no letter?
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Okay, now I'm good.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
And it's like, okay, at this point, he's a prick,
yeah right.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
Like it's you can say that we're starting to see
the turn.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
Yeah, this kid's a dick.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
Yeah you wore one and what you thought it was? Huh? Yeah,
you know what I'm saying, Like you don't get your
little snacks. You don't get you a little.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
To You're not he's not even getting shot at.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
And you're not you're not even at war.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
So he eventually gets posted to take a course on
machine gun uses he's to be Basically, if he'd finished training,
it would have been like an officer in a machine
gun unit right on September fifteenth of nineteen eighteen. He
does not wind up. It's interesting to me that he
doesn't wind up sent to the front, right, because Germany
does not have guys. They are they've been bled white
(27:19):
by this point. A seventeen year old boy even at
this point, I don't care if he's sickly. He's just
there for ten minutes until he takes a fucking bullet
to the law, right, like we just need bodies. And
so it's interesting that he doesn't just get sent to
the front. He's had enough training. Guys go up there
with less. There's a couple of expotential explanations. One is
that even this late in the war, the German military
(27:41):
still does try to make sure that their officers have
a good base of training when they're sent to the front.
And so maybe it's just that because he's becoming an officer.
They don't want to rush that, but they do for
a lot of guys, and long Wrerich suggests, and this
is something he can't there's not really hard evidence for this,
but I think it's a reasonable suggestion that it might
have been because his superior see kind of what we've
(28:03):
seen in these letters home that he's immature, and like
they're like, this guy shouldn't be commanding men in battle. Like,
like he help Germany, I can tell you that much.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
He a little boy, yeah, Like he's like he's a kid.
He's a kid.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Yeah, And we're willing to send kids to die, but
we don't maybe maybe we don't want them leading men
to die. Right, he's just not right. If he's going
to be an officer, let's keep him away. Un del
he grows up a little bit.
Speaker 4 (28:27):
You're gonna kill a lot of other people, right, being childish,
or these men are gonna turn on you because you're
a child.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Yeah, they're gonna frag your ass, whatever the case. He
is still in the reserves and still training when Germany
signs the armistice, so Heinrich Himler never gets the baptism
of fire that he's so dearly desired. And his brother Gebert,
on the other hand, does the soldier thing as much
as you can, right, He gets an iron Cross for valor.
He gets basically like somewhat equivalents like a medal of
(28:55):
honor somewhere between, like a bronze or silver star and
a medal of honor, you know, because there's diferent kinds
of iron Cross. I don't know exactly, but it's like
a it's a very prestigious Hitler gets, right, So he
came home and it's a big deal that he gets
this and he manages he doesn't get seriously injured over there,
which is amazing given the kind of combat that he's in.
He's a lucky guy. And the fact that his brother,
(29:17):
who's always been better than him is now a war
hero and a Heinrich misses out entirely. He will never
get over this. This will color the rest of his life.
His insecurity over this is something that is present for
the rest of his days. And you know what else
was present for all of Heinrich Kimler's.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
Life, Oh my god, Capitalism.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
Well yeah, yeah, I mean sorta, yeah. It was around
as a factor in Germany. In this period, but also
products advertisements. Yeah, and we're back and we're talking about
Heinrich Himmler post the big dub dub uno. So Germany's lost.
(30:01):
Heinrich is very much going to fall for the stabbed
in the back myth, right.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
And part because of surprise, surprise.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
And he's angry both at the Jews and Social Democrats,
who of course ended the war, which is not the
military ended the war because they knew that the army
would have collapsed if they'd kept fighting, right, And they
blame it on the people who actually take over after
and negotiate the peace, which is the largely Social Democratic
government of Weimar at the start of Weimar. And you
(30:28):
know the I mean particularly one of the negotiators who
helps ensure the peace, who is a real hero, is
a Jewish man, right, Matthias Erzberger I think was his name,
who gets assassinated as a result.
Speaker 4 (30:43):
Yeah, now here's a good tie to his pass of
him being like all my having, like he said earlier,
like all minds like Germany, you know, collecting enemies like
will stand alone.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
It's all good, you know what I mean? You have
at it? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4 (30:58):
First of all, had that work out, but you had
a attitude to where you just like youinforce you against us,
you a hater like I don't care. You know what
I'm saying. We would have never lost because we don't
give up. We don't mind having enemies, you know what
I mean. The only way we would have lost was because,
like you said, somebody had established in the back.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
You feel me, right, and that's the it's not And
for Heinrich it's not only did we get stabbed in
the back in Germany was robbed. If it's great victory,
I was robbed if my chance to be a hero,
yeah a real.
Speaker 4 (31:22):
Almost personifies it like I was right, Yeah, dang, so
that's big.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
Once the war is over, Heinrich attempted to remain with
the military, but the old Imperial Army is replaced as
a result of the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles
with the Reichs there, right, that's the post war army,
and it's limited to one hundred thousand men and they're
not allowed to have like an air force. I don't
think they're allowed much in the way of artillery. They're
very much because people are like, yeah, Germany, you got
(31:47):
to kind of out of pocket. We got to really
keep a lit on yo asses. Right. Yeah, this is
going to prove to be a bad idea for a
lot of reasons. The terms of the treaty I don't
need to get into that. People are broadly familiar. The
terms of the treaty play into why things happen with
Germany the way they do. But one of the things
this is going to mean is that, like, Heinrich wants
a military career, right, uh, and he's not gonna get
(32:11):
one because the only people who get to stay in
the military, it's a tiny fraction of the deployed military,
and those jobs are gonna go to guys who actually
saw shit, right and who are valuable for some reason.
I have connections, and he's just not gonna have Heinrich's
gonna try, But like, why the fuck would we give
you a job of the tiny number of people who
get to keep military jobs, why would you get it? Yeah,
(32:32):
Hitler doesn't. And Hitler was actually a decorated combat soldier, right,
They won't let him in.
Speaker 4 (32:36):
And that's great for me to hear, because it's like,
like it's like Hitler, I feel like he's like it's
privilege ain't the word per se.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
But yeah, yeah, but he is.
Speaker 4 (32:48):
But it's just like it's supposed to work out for me. Yeah,
like you know what I'm saying, So like why is
this not working out either? Is like had to have
added to the like pistol.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
And that is That's a huge part of why Himmler
is the way that he is and why he gets
drawn into Nazism right is And this is a big
This is a major factor. And almost everyone who winds
up kind of especially these a lot of these higher
up members of the Nazi Party, the people who are
running the SS. We've talked about this with like Heinrich
(33:23):
and with Eichman. These guys are people who could come
from the middle class and upper middle class and I
was promised more. I'm supposed to be doing better. And
they're not never doing bad, they're never really suffering compared
to how other people are, but they're furious because I
was supposed I was promised more. I'm owed more. Yeah,
(33:43):
it's a massive factor in all of these guys, and
it's a massive thing for Himler. So he is able
to he returns to school under a special program instituted
by the Post war government to allow young men who
had dropped out basically because they were either being drafted
or they were trying to avolunteer and thus had missed
out on finishing their education to get there. It's kind
(34:05):
of a mix between like a GED and a high
school diploma to allow them to go back and finish
it right. And actually the class that Heinrich is in
is taught by his father, Gebard Longrich says Gebbard didn't
show favoritism to his son. Is actually pretty consistent of
descriptions of him. He wouldn't have really done that. So
anyway he gets his German GED. I think it's called
(34:26):
an abbatur or something like that. The first few months
after the war are rife with socialist uprisings and attempt
to take and a whole different German cities by leftists,
which are cracked down on brutally by a mix of police,
the military and free corps right, which are these groups
of free corps, these groups of demobilized veterans who are
murderous thugs used by the new Weimar government to maintain control.
(34:49):
These guys are far right. The Vymar government isn't. But
the Vymar government cares more about stopping the left from
succeeding in this kind of like because they're trying to
do basically the Russian Revolution two Electric Boogloo and Buyomar's like, well,
if we got to have these proto Nazis murder a
bunch of people, as long as it stops that from happening, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
(35:10):
So Heinrich gets political fairly quickly. He gets involved first
with a center right political party, like it's not the
far right, but that's kind of his initial more or
less an analog to like a main line Republican party. Initially,
and at the end of nineteen nineteen he joins a
Free Corps unit. He is deployed to them, if you
(35:33):
can call it that, on a couple of occasions, which is,
you know, there's unrest or whatever, and the Free Corps
move out. He does some marching around, he does some
writing in a car with some guys with guns, but
he does not engage in any A lot of Frei
Corps are doing fighting. There's heavy fighting and killing. He
is not involved in any of that. He does not
see any serious action, I think in general, because even
(35:55):
as messy as these Free Corps units are they're organized
and run by people who actually fought and they're like, yeah, this,
we should keep this kid away from anything serious.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Look at them. Look at them, dude. You know you
don't really want to smoke.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
Yeah, I don't want him behind it. I don't want
him watching my back. You know. Yeah, he doesn't know
what the fuck he's doing.
Speaker 4 (36:10):
You ain't really with the shits, You just want to
wear the uniform. I do think it's also important to remember,
like and again, it's hard in our American imagination to
understand first of all multiple forms of government, but the
type of transition. I feel like this is the first time,
at least in our age era, where we've seen a
(36:33):
government totally like lose their marbles, Like we've never seen it,
Like like our government's lost as marbles, you know what
I'm saying. And like, but at this time, like you said,
like during Weimart, during the Weimar Republic, I'm like, women
can vote, Like there's these just these like progressive not progressive,
(36:54):
but they're these like progressions in culture. Like they're they're
funding the arts, they're funding some science, and motherfucker's.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
Is pissed off, you know, Like and that's.
Speaker 4 (37:05):
Sort of like like, okay, guys, like think about this
for a second, like these like these are maybe I'm
having a modern maybe I'm modern pilled, but I'm like,
it's such an interesting moment, and how the clap back
from that was so strong, Like it's just I don't know,
it's just.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
A weird time where I was like, brother.
Speaker 4 (37:27):
Like like this the world like this just the time
Einstein's from right, Like you're getting like government endowments to
understand science, you know what I'm saying, Like this, that's
I thought that was good.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Yeah anyway, yep, yep, yep. So uh yeah, Heinrich. You know,
he's in the Free Court. Part of why he's joins
this unit is it's he's kind of trying to stay
in the military after demobilization. He's hoping you can make connections,
but it doesn't work out, and he gets he's out
of the middle. He's cashiered out. By the summer of
nineteen nineteen. He begins to work as a laborer on
(38:05):
a farm. So he's like, you know, he's working on
a farm, but he doesn't own it. But he gets
entranced by rural life and he starts sending letters back
to his parents signed Heinrich Agricola, which is Latin for
Heinrich the farmer. However, that's agriculture, agricola. You can see
where it comes from. However, the ruthless pace of life
(38:26):
on a farm disagrees with his fragile constitution. Again, he's
going to be like a lot of modern far right guys.
He will idolize homesteading and the small farmer and like,
this is the life. We need a new nobility formed
out of, like you know, the rural peasantry. But he's
never able to really do it because he's he's sickly,
and he doesn't like working hard outside. By September of
(38:49):
that year, illness had forced him to pause his career.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
Again.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
This is a kid who thought he was ready for
the fucking trenches and you can't handle farming for like
more than two months. Three months, He goes to his
family die doctor who diagnoses him with an enlarged heart
and prescribes him a one year break to study and
regain his health. Now, obviously an enlarged heart is a
serious health issue. I don't think he actually has one,
because there's not really evidence from the rest of his
(39:12):
life that he has one. I think this is just doctors.
You know, they're not like but they're not like doing
a scan to see his heart's big. Yeah, I don't know.
I'm gonna take more cocaine, you know. So anyway, what's
interesting here is that and this is fascinating to me.
Heinrich gets like basically told, hey, go chill out for
(39:33):
a while, you know, maybe go to school, but don't
do any hard outdoor labor. So he's like, he's laid
up sick for a year, unable to work, and he
starts reading obsessively. And what he starts reading obsessively, for
the most part, is right wing vulcansh propaganda. So the
Volcush movement is a syndant in Germany in this period.
And the literal translation of the word vulcan is just
(39:55):
like folk or people like it's the people, right, that
the volkswagon is the people's car, right. The actual meaning though,
of the word vulk in German doesn't graft directly to
any term that we have in the English. In a
nineteen sixty four book on German ideology in the twentieth century,
Moss explained George Moss explained volk is a much more
comprehensive term than people. To German thinkers, ever since the
(40:17):
birth of German Romanticism in the late eighteenth century, volks
signified the union of a group of people with a
transcendental essence. Right, there's this added to this idea the
Nazis will popularize of like the Volkska mind shaft, which
is like the people's racial community.
Speaker 4 (40:33):
That kind of sounds like that sounds like, well like
hip hop when we say like the culture, right, Like
it kind of sounds like like what we would say
about Drake, Like you know, he's not like us, Like
you're not a part of the culture like that.
Speaker 1 (40:46):
Yeah's what's important. Obviously, I don't think that's not like
an inherently problematic. The culture, like referring to it that
way is a problematic. But the fact that you bring
up the exclusion of people, Yes, there's always a degree
of exclusion.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
Yeah, there's an in group out group.
Speaker 1 (40:59):
Yeah we're talking about is like this is like a subculture, right,
this is a subculture that's particularly relevant to like this
you know, artistic movement. It's one thing he is talking
about the Vulcans. These are the people who deserve to
have rights and who are German? And the Vulcan excludes
a lot of the people who live in Germany. Right,
He's not just talking about He's talking about specific kinds
(41:20):
of people, right. And the Volcoush movement is emphasizing specific
kinds of Germans who deserve to have rights and who
need to breed in order to expand their numbers. Right.
And this is where this is, like the root of
Nazi racial ideology is the Volcish movement, you know. And
the Volcush movement is obsessed with exclusion. You know, it
(41:42):
is defined not by who lives within the boundaries of
a nation, but who the right wing things ought to
be included in this racial community. In his book Hitler's
Master of the Dark Arts a history of Hitler's interest
in the occult, author Bill Yen describes the Volcish movement
as part of the counter culture in Germany, and he
argues that it's modern analog would be the nineteen eighties
New Age movement. Right, that this is very similar to like,
(42:06):
you know that this all this interest that starts popping
up in yoga and Eastern mysticism, Buddhism, Hinduism and all
that stuff. In the eighties in like the US is
very similar to what's happening and what the Vocalus movement
is a part of this broader interest in mysticism and
alternative religion.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
In the twins in alternative history.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
Right, including a big thing that is big in Germany
in this period. Buddhism is big in Germany, right, not
a super accurate take on Buddhism, but like course their
attitude of it as well as people get obsessed in
a lot of the West with like ancient Egyptian occult
ceremonies and religion, and like the Eda's right, these kind
(42:47):
of Norse sagas that are like part of this, like
religious the prosatas like that is big too, and so
like Norse mythology and religion, you know, worship of deities
like Wotan, right, starts to become big, and it's all
tied into the Vocus movement is a part of it.
It's related to all of this stuff.
Speaker 4 (43:07):
Well, that definitely wasn't the comparison I was making. Yeah,
as far as like the culture, what I would trying
to say is like the term is not a literal
translation and that the edges are more like foggy or cloudy,
but like we know.
Speaker 2 (43:20):
What we mean when we say it, you know what
I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Yeah, but it is I think it is very relevant
to compare it to and to compare it to like
the modern day the UFO movement and stuff. All these
things feed into QAnon that have fed into the far right.
The fact this happened before, right, Yeah, Like.
Speaker 4 (43:38):
Yeah, there's like this weird like thing to where it's
like you get into something that like it's kind of
like exciting to you whatever. You meet a lot of
cool folk air quotes. Cool, but at some point you
have to look at the back of the line and
be like, oh wait, they're in our line too, Like
this is this wait, this will if I get further
(43:58):
into the concentric circle, it's gonna turn in.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
It is like you and you have to consider that.
So that's yeah.
Speaker 4 (44:05):
So like even if you were just like look like
like to your point, it's like, you know, especially at
the New Age movement or stuff like that, or just like, look, dude,
i think it's better to eat food that was grown
by human hands and has seeds because a seedless watermelon
does not exist in nature. I'm saying, so if you're
(44:26):
just like, Okay, I get it. I'm gonna eat things
with seeds, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, But also
that means I need to eat drink raw milk, and
also that means I need to.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
Know I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
You're like, well, there's actually like a lot of health
stuff tied into it, a lot of like, you know,
natural food shit is tied into it, vegetarianism. I mean,
Hitler's a vegetarian. But part of what's relevant here is
that these are a lot of people who are not
initially into far right politics, but they are willing to
question the mainstream, willing to question you know, scientific orthodoxy
(44:56):
and cultural orthodoxy. And if you start down that road,
you can go in a number of directions, but you're
going to encounter other things that are questioning that orthodoxy,
including weird far right shit, and then the other aspect
of it. A lot of this, a lot of this,
especially more esoteric occult beliefs, where like people are embracing
getting into magic and getting into these different alternate religions.
(45:20):
There's an attitude of them to like, because I'm different
and special, and so if you were saying, yes, you're
special because you're part of this people's racial community, and
you have like mythical mystic powers actually that are tied
to like the ancient, like deep magic woven into our
people's blood. Well, maybe you go from being into ancient
Egyptian you know, mysticism too far. Rights, that's what I'm saying.
(45:44):
It's like you already special. Ye, I have powers. Right,
you can get someone convinced that they're part of the ubermensch.
Speaker 3 (45:52):
You know.
Speaker 2 (45:52):
Man, that's crazy, Like it's crazy.
Speaker 4 (45:54):
I wonder what it would be like to experience that
today moment in culture that must be Thankfully.
Speaker 1 (46:00):
We'll never know, prop Ye. So along these more esoteric
beliefs comes a growing interest in the mythical past of
the German people. And Himler's always been drawn to this stuff.
And it's a little like as a kid nerd at
you're a nerd and into this stuff that's like more
fringe and you get bullied for and then it becomes
mainstream as an adult and so suddenly like everybody is
into this stuff that I've always liked. He joins a
(46:23):
group called the Artaman League, which sets its goal as
liberating urban workers and turning them back into peasant Farmers.
Once he gets sick, Himler starts really reading into this stuff.
And there's I tie this a lot to the radicalization
journey a lot of Americans go through during the COVID lockdown,
where maybe they're sick, maybe they're not, but they're locked
away from everybody else. They're not going out, and they're
(46:44):
just kind of obsessively falling down these YouTube rabbit holes
and like these different like forum message board rabbit holes,
getting more and more into this weird, like esoteric stuff
about like vaccines and natural medicine or you know, raise theory.
That's what's happening to Himler. He's dealing with his own
versions of that, and he he reads more widely at first,
(47:07):
before he really zeros in entirely on the Vulcar stuff.
He reads the volumes of Ossian, which are a fraud
created by a Scottish guy that was claimed to be
like ancient Celtic poetry. He devours pamphlets attacking the Freemasons,
particularly won by Friedrich Witchell. Yen writes. Witchell claimed that,
among other things, Freemasonry was strongly influenced by the Jews,
(47:27):
was aiming for world revolution, was overwhelmingly to blame for
the World War. Himmler agreed and commented a book that
sheds light on everything and tells us who we have
to fight first. Here's where it starts. Here's where he
gets in.
Speaker 2 (47:40):
He is where we start evolving the pokemon.
Speaker 4 (47:43):
There's like these it's a very probably not an experience
of most of our fan base here. But when like
me coming from like sort of hip hop circles, but
like the indie underground, you know, coming out of the
like conscious movement, like the you know, the most depths
to qualities where like you're gonna stand on there and
wrap about quasars and pyramids for most of the cipher
(48:07):
and be into telekinesis.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
You know what I'm saying, Like.
Speaker 4 (48:11):
Like you're so open minded, your closed minded, Like a
lot of times you be at these these moments and
we're and we're building, you know what I mean, Like
it's like the language of like the gods and the
earths to five percenters.
Speaker 2 (48:23):
I think you may have done like some stuff on him.
Speaker 4 (48:25):
Anyway, but yeah, so a lot of times it's like
this is my community because this is where the real
hip hop is. But then when you saw start somebody
start saying something that you're like, my brother in Christ,
you made that up, that history, didn't That is not history, right,
but it's but it's a story that it is in
(48:49):
response to the suppressing of the narrative of like our
African ancestry, Like you're you're you're suppressing the the in
modern culture and just in modern American history, like the
role of the African and its descendant is not ever acknowledged,
you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (49:10):
So when someone comes in and.
Speaker 4 (49:11):
Says, well, know, well a black man was doing this,
and a black man was doing this, and it's like,
I'm like, bro, like I love being black just as
much as the rest of us, but you made that.
Speaker 2 (49:21):
Shit up, like that's not what happened, Like that's not so.
Speaker 4 (49:25):
But if you start pushing back like that, they looking
at you like, oh, a nigga, you would sellout you
believe in a white man's story, you.
Speaker 2 (49:31):
Know what I'm saying.
Speaker 4 (49:31):
So so so it's almost like I like, I don't
even know how to say to you. This is not
liberating us, Like I know what you what you think
you do it you think, like you said, creating this
ubermansh if you will like our black version of it.
Speaker 2 (49:46):
Like again, a black man is God.
Speaker 4 (49:47):
We descended the kings, and I'm like some of our
ancestors was peasants, my.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
G Like some of us are raised just raised ghosts.
Speaker 4 (49:56):
And that's okay, you see what I'm saying, because goats
feed the war world, so like it's okay, I'm not
an Egyptian, I'm not an ancient.
Speaker 2 (50:04):
I don't come from that, Okay, Yeah, and that's fine.
Speaker 1 (50:08):
It's just like obsession with like, no, my ancestors were
this thing that I think is cool, that represents like
a tenth of a percent of the people. And it's
like everyone has ancestors who were kings. Everyone has ancestors
who were warriors, and everyone's got a lot more ancestors
who were fucking dirt farmers or whatever.
Speaker 4 (50:30):
Right, vast majority of human history from when we went
from Homo erectus to Homo sapien was boring as shit.
Speaker 1 (50:39):
Most of your ancestors, like everyone else, there's people who
are just trying to get by.
Speaker 4 (50:44):
Yes, yeah, who who never traveled four miles away from
where they was born right and raised and raised them kids.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
Yeah, and that's great. Yeah, And Himmler. Himmler is instead
getting obsessed with, you know, ah, the night these nightly
orders that are are Miami's like Germanic, these you know,
these knights who were these great warriors who you know,
fought back the Muslim tides and or you know before
that beat the Romans, like and these are our ancestors,
these great you know, heroic Germanic superman. You know. That's
(51:16):
that's what he's read. And he's also reading about he
gets into you know, anti Semitism through these theories about
like the Freemasons and stuff. Now, an interesting historic curiosity
is during this period when he's laid up and he's
reading obsessively, he also reads the first eight volumes of
a magazine titled pro Palestine. Now this has nothing to
do with the term in its modern sense. This is
(51:36):
a Zionist publication that's made by the German Committee for
the Promotion of Jewish Settlement in Palestine. He does not leave. Unfortunately,
there's no record of his opinion of this. But it's
not a lot of guys we talked about. This is Eichmann.
A lot of anti Semites from this era go through
this period of thinking like, well, maybe this is how
we get rid of them, right, Yeah, that's that's probably
(51:57):
why he's into it.
Speaker 2 (51:58):
I don't know. I mean, Palstin's got cool guys.
Speaker 1 (52:00):
Like if we can get them over there, you know, they're.
Speaker 2 (52:02):
Not like you just go there. We did that.
Speaker 4 (52:04):
We're here with the slaves, Like, why don't you go
to Liberia? Yeah, you feel me, just go back to Angola.
Everything's fine, just go back to Africa.
Speaker 1 (52:10):
And that's what this suggests is he's thinking more and
more about the US and how to get rid of
them right already from a very young age, he's like
nineteen at this point. In October of nineteen nineteen, he
registers with the Technical University in Munich to study agriculture.
Here he made it a priority to seek membership in
the first fraternity that would take him, and he wounds
up as a NEPO baby getting into his dad's fraternity.
(52:32):
Now in Germany, during this period, Fratz looked a little
different than they do now. They were focused on a
lot more on fencing and dueling clubs than anything else.
And prior to the war, every young man who's like
of a certain class, if you're like the officer class,
you want to get in one of these dueling clubs
and get a scar on your face. The whole point
(52:54):
is for somebody to get to hit you in the
face to earn a dueling scar. Like you're not really
like you're not really a man of a certain level
in society. You don't have one. And a Himmler is
bad enough with a sword that it takes him three
years to have enough duels to earn his scar. Yen
Right's potential opponents found Himler a demeaning competitor because he
(53:16):
was so small and so frail, and that his stomach
troubles make it difficult for him to drink heavily. Now
that's one account, and there's some evidence behind it. Long
Rich gives a little bit more moderated account of Himmler.
You know, in his frat years he writes that he
did at least witness multiple duels and wrote, at least
it strengthens the nerves and you learn how to take
(53:38):
being wounded. He also wrote about drinking. This is him
describing in his Diarrhea night out drinking. It was very jolly.
I drank eight glasses of wine at twelve thirty. We
went home on the train. Most of us were tipsy,
so it was very funny. I got a few of
the brothers back to their digs and bed at two am,
so like he's able to party Somewhat's that's not super
(53:59):
intense drinks.
Speaker 2 (54:00):
You know, it was very jolly.
Speaker 1 (54:04):
It was very Yes.
Speaker 4 (54:06):
I was like, this is yeah, first of all eight
drinks and you a German man, bro, don't brag on that,
homie that now if there's anything about your yo jeans,
like you should have been able to hail more liquid
than that.
Speaker 2 (54:18):
But I will say like it like it kind of
right now, kind of.
Speaker 4 (54:21):
Sound like the like the guy every time you talk
to him, like, I'm so sore from the gym.
Speaker 2 (54:26):
I was lifting it so oh man, I can't sit down, like, man,
shut the fuck up.
Speaker 4 (54:30):
Yeah, like you have to have your Oh you see
his broccoli ears because I was rolling, man, I was
rolling last night. Yeah, okay, bro all okay.
Speaker 3 (54:39):
His dating profile would be such a nightmare.
Speaker 2 (54:42):
Oh my god, he's holding a fish. Is he holding
a fish in his dating profile?
Speaker 1 (54:46):
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, definitely holding like some crops that he
pulled out of the ground before going home because this
tummy was hurt. Yeah, he's doing he's doing something or yeah,
he's got his tiny little scar that he's got to
show off.
Speaker 2 (54:58):
Oh man, sorry, I got it in battle.
Speaker 1 (55:00):
Yeah now yeah, it's it's simply fencing, and you're all
trying to get scars. Like everybody is just kind of
cutting each other's face so that you can show off.
Yeah yeah, Now you know who never shows off because
they earned all of their scars the honorable way in
hold to hand combat. Killing people in bar fights, Sophie absolutely, Sophie.
(55:26):
Oh yeah, a lot of a lot of cities you
can't go back to. Just like our sponsors for this podcast,
we're back. Ah blue Apron.
Speaker 3 (55:44):
Uh why killed a man in a bar fight?
Speaker 1 (55:49):
You're probably right. So anyway, so we're talking about Heinrich Himler.
He's in college now, he's getting his degree in like
agricultural sciences. Uh. He gets into r O T. C
Based in college because he lets him wear a uniform.
He gets to march around. He writes in his diary
that he enjoys being able to still feel like a soldier.
(56:10):
In one entrance, he notes another day in uniform as
one of his chief pleasures. It's what I enjoy wearing most. Like, Okay,
he really just desperately wants to feel like a soldier,
you know, even though that has passed him by such
a tryhard yes, Heinrich starts getting involved in political activism
(56:30):
for the far right. His first big protest campaign because
he's a member of some of these like right wing
groups on campus. Is a German count I think is
Count arco Valley assassinates a leftist right he kills somebody
in it's like a political murder, and the count gets
sentenced to death for murdering a guy, and this becomes
(56:53):
a cause celeb of the German right. This is kind
of their equivalent of like the protests against the January sixth,
people facing any consequences for the crimes, and they get
so angry. Heinrich is marching in the street. There's protests,
you know, the Frei Corps are like showing up armed
in these gatherings to be like, you know, you're gonna
have to deal with us if you try to kill
this man. There's even talk within the military of either
(57:16):
using having the army go in and bust him out,
or even doing a push against the government if they're
to kill this guy. And the liberal government caves like
they always do to fascists. Himmlar rights after because they
and they commute his sentence to like basically your life
in prison. We're not going to execute him. And when
the government caves Himler writes in his diary, however pleased
(57:37):
we were, we were equally sorry that the business passed
off so uneventfully. Oh well, there will be another time.
And he also writes about like, ah, they're not willing,
they're scared of us, right, And that's the problem. That's
why you can't, like showing mercy these people is a mistake,
you know, Like if you do that, they will take
advantage of it every single time. It just it just
(57:58):
inspires them to push further. It doesn't save you any violence.
Things get much worse because they don't go through with
punishing this man. Near the end of nineteen nineteen, Himmler
gets caught up in a debate within his Dueling club,
you know, this fraternity. There's an argument as to like,
can we admit Jews right and not religious Jewish people right,
(58:20):
Not people who are of the Jewish faith, but people
who have Jewish ancestry but are Christian or at least
like you know, they're not you know, practicing members of
the faith. And this is a serious debate at the time.
Within this the strata of people, and the Catholic Church
takes a stance that Jews who converted to Christianity ought
to be treated like anyone else. Obviously, it's fine to
(58:42):
exclude practicing Jews, right, they're not full citizens. You can
be shitty to them, but all that should matter is
what they're doing now, right. They're basically the Catholic yours
is saying there there's not an ethnic difference between someone
who has Jewish ancestry and a normal German, Right, we
don't care about that. And the Church takes this stance
because Catholicism is a minority faith in Germany, right, so
(59:05):
they do see a degree of threat to themselves. Is like, well,
if these people like, we're not that much safer, right ye,
if the Protestants decide to start talking with us, so
we should probably draw a line here. Himmler is really
uncomfortable with this minimal degree of liberalism from the Church,
and he had been fairly strong as a Catholic, but
he writes in his diary, I think I'm heading for
conflict with my religion because he believes a Jew is
(59:27):
a Jew no matter what, it doesn't matter if they've converted.
It's about the blood, right, That's what Himmler thinks. Now.
It's worth noting that while he grows steadily more anti
Semitic as he ages, he still expresses as a young
man some mixed thoughts on the matter, and in part
he also he's a fan and he's super attracted to
(59:48):
this Jewish cabaret singer he met inga barco in a bar.
He writes really positively about her, right, so he's you know,
he's again, this is a guy. None of these people
are perfectly consistent, right. And this is also a time
period he is starting to express interest in women around
his age at this point in time. This is really
(01:00:09):
when we see in his diary him writing about girls
a lot. And it's kind of you get some in
cell vibes from this dude. Yeah. He pinds that one woman, Luisa,
who he had a crush on, was really nice, but
not nice in the way that he wanted, right, as in,
she's she's nice to me, she's friendly, but she doesn't
want to fuck me. Right.
Speaker 2 (01:00:31):
That is hilarious. I'm a loser.
Speaker 1 (01:00:34):
This is funny, He writes home to his brother. This
is so gross. If sweet young things knew how they
worried us, they would, no doubt try not to. This
girl knew how sad I was that she doesn't want
to fuck me, she'd surely want to fuck me. Right,
that's a little sweat problem. Sweet little Things, maybe don't
call him sweet little things. She's fucking weirdot, fucking crazy,
(01:00:56):
sweet little thing, sweet thing?
Speaker 4 (01:00:59):
My uncle, man, what's up, Cleatus? I'm saying you sad
like somebody named Cleophus Jenkins.
Speaker 2 (01:01:04):
What's up, sweet thing?
Speaker 1 (01:01:05):
All right? Calm down, heiin Rich Hembler, four jets, Turbo
or another.
Speaker 4 (01:01:11):
I was actually thinking I didn't want to bring this
up because I ain't want to sound like a douchebag myself.
Speaker 2 (01:01:15):
But I was just like, he hasn't talked about girls
in his diary. Yeah he doesn't.
Speaker 1 (01:01:20):
He's a late humor. It's possible he's not it. It's
not until he's in his late twenties that he actually
like that. He's a virgin until his late twenties. Not.
I'm not trying to like talk shit on that. I
don't get No, it is what it is, but yeah,
that's likely what's going on here. In another instance, he
bonds with a girl named Maria, and he does there's
this kind of positive thing where he's like, I'm so
overjoyed that I finally have a sister, right, which is
(01:01:41):
a nice and positive way to cute like a female friendship.
Speaker 3 (01:01:43):
He's only got brothers away from him.
Speaker 1 (01:01:47):
Well, yeah, because he is. He actually just wants to
fuck her, right, He's not safe. She's got a boyfriend.
Speaker 4 (01:01:53):
Maria, Maria, you remind him of a West Side story, Yeah,
growing up Bennis Harlem.
Speaker 1 (01:02:02):
So she's got a boyfriend, and he writes of her boyfriend,
I believe he doesn't understand her, his golden girl, and
he tries to, like he tries to flirt with her
and like basically take her from him by offering her
a ride on his motorcycle.
Speaker 4 (01:02:18):
But she's like, hey, listen, listen listening.
Speaker 1 (01:02:22):
To get on your motorcycle.
Speaker 4 (01:02:23):
Heinrich Himmler, Listen, It's okay to be sloppy seconds because
first place always messes up.
Speaker 1 (01:02:30):
There, you get that, Yeah, that's how That's how he's
looking at this, right, But like I'm gonna slide in here,
but uh no, no, you're not sweet thing. Her boyfriend's
not treating her right. I do so much better, you know.
Speaker 4 (01:02:42):
Yeah, So she call you when you when your boyfriend
a girl, come on over.
Speaker 1 (01:02:46):
You can stay.
Speaker 4 (01:02:48):
I'll come get you on my motorcycle. You could stay
on my couch. If he trip it, you come on
over here.
Speaker 1 (01:02:53):
Like, I don't even think she's calling him. I think
she's like nice, polite to him. And he's like, she
must really be in love with me, if only this
tyrant where to let her go, you know, just.
Speaker 2 (01:03:03):
Just basic human decency. Yeah, Like she just can't be regular.
You just can't be regular like that.
Speaker 1 (01:03:12):
Yeah. And Heinrich's diaries, the other thing that he writes
about a lot at regarding women is like this like
white night shit, right, there's tons of stories about that.
And this is from Lowenberg's article quote. He witnesses a
conflict between a girl and her father of the girl's
desire for private dance classes. He describes the father as
unyielding and stiff necked, like a tyrant. According to his
(01:03:33):
own account, Himler interposed himself and helped the young lady
a great deal. The poor little girl wept tears. I
truly pitied her, But she had no idea how pretty
she was in her tears.
Speaker 2 (01:03:44):
Okay, oh my god, really pretty.
Speaker 1 (01:03:47):
Like maybe he pays for this girl's dance classes. Yeah,
Lowenburg writes of Himmler's frequent rescue fantasies. He writes fantasies
about like I could save this girl she's with this brute.
If you know, if I did this and this, then
like she'd know that I'm really who she's meant for.
Speaker 4 (01:04:05):
Yeah, that's all that medieval stuff he was reading as
a kid.
Speaker 1 (01:04:09):
Yeh know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (01:04:10):
That's all that you're trying to live out that fantasy.
Speaker 1 (01:04:12):
Yeah. In one instance, he meets a waitress that he
has a crush on, and he writes paragraphs about his
fear that like, oh, waitresses always fallen to disrepute. You know,
she's doomed to a life of you know, sin and vice,
because that's the only thing that a waitress can be.
And if I only were rich, if I had money,
I'd give her enough money to marry a nice man
(01:04:34):
so she quote would not have to sink and be
lost wells areas. Oh yeah, he's a crea.
Speaker 2 (01:04:41):
Fucklah, I'd pick you, I take you, and.
Speaker 1 (01:04:47):
Dude, that's the word for word. His diary entry. So
uh Himmler finishes his diploma in August of nineteen twenty two.
Now at this point he has continued reading into German
Volcish mysticism, and he's become acquainted with a man named
Guido carl Anton Liszt who Weed didn't. Yeah, Guido has
never good news. Shockingly not Italian. He had died in
(01:05:11):
nineteen nineteen, so he's been died pretty recently. But during
his life he had been the godfather of popular Volcish theory.
He was one of these guys who portrays himself as
something between an archaeologist and a wizard. And one of
his major contributions he creates this runic alphabet which he
said had been used by the ancient arians, and he
uncovers the system not by like real archaeology, but by
(01:05:34):
ghost archaeology. He channels dead spirits and they teach him
about the past and he writes books about it.
Speaker 4 (01:05:40):
Oh wait, wait wait wait hold, So he learns this
by channeling ghosts.
Speaker 2 (01:05:49):
That's your boy, that's that boy, that's your boy. Irich.
Speaker 1 (01:05:51):
Okay, that's Heinrich's gonna love that. And not just Heinrich.
This guy is the grandfather of Volcush theory. Like this
guy is if you're to what becomes Nazism, this guy
is like above Hitler in the line of descent to
what becomes Nazism because his ideas feed directly into Hitler's.
Hitler is also influenced, not even just directly by List,
(01:06:13):
but by the guy's that List is influenced by or
it influences. Right, List is like and he looks just
like you'd imagine. So he's gonna show you a picture
of this.
Speaker 2 (01:06:22):
Please show me his sister of this exactly, exactly ancestors.
Speaker 1 (01:06:26):
Of course, look at this, Look at this, Look at
this wizard looking dude.
Speaker 2 (01:06:30):
Of course, he's talking to the ghost.
Speaker 1 (01:06:32):
He's got like a gandolf beard and a fucking it's
almost like a pork pie hat. Like I don't even
know what you'd call that weird bereat thing on his head,
but like, yeah, like a fucking wizard looking motherfucker. Look
at him. Look at this perfect He's perfect.
Speaker 2 (01:06:48):
Yeah, I love it. He's perfect.
Speaker 1 (01:06:49):
We're gonna talk a lot more about Guido von list
H and a lot more about the birth of the
Volcush movement and all of these weird occult figures who
are going to have a huge influence on Heinrich as
well as continue Heinrich's life. In Part three, Lucky you motherfuckers. Anyway,
prop Plugs.
Speaker 2 (01:07:10):
Plugs hood politics with prop Man.
Speaker 4 (01:07:13):
Were cooking over here too, trying to, you know, keep
putting everybody on. That's going on. I released some poetry,
I got some music out. We have a show on
Fridays now called tap in Little short ten minute Shooter.
And also the Terrorforms back. I'll say it again, Terrorform COVID.
Speaker 2 (01:07:35):
Hopefully by the.
Speaker 4 (01:07:36):
Time y'all hear this, the website will be up. But
like the coffee's here, Hell yeah, so excited about it?
All right, I'll bring some. I'll bring some when I
go up there for the thing that you have not
talked about yet on recording excellent, Yes.
Speaker 1 (01:07:49):
Well we'll do that. You at home. Go to Google
donor Box Defense Fund PDX fundraiser to help the Portland
Defense Fund, which helps bail out people who have no money. Yeah,
they're great. Please please help them out and help yourself
out by listening to part three. You lucky dogs. All right,
(01:08:10):
that's it for the episodes. This has been behind the
bastards I've Been Robert Evans go to Hell. I Love You.
Speaker 3 (01:08:21):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the
Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
and Friday.
Speaker 1 (01:08:39):
Subscribe to our
Speaker 3 (01:08:40):
Channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind the Bastards
Behind the Bastards News
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