Part Two: The Evilest Football Player of All Time

Robert explains how Alexandre Villaplane ruined his football career committing crimes, badly, and then started a new career as a mass murderer for the SS.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Oh goodness, it's Behind the Bastards, the podcast that you've
been listening to, because this is part two of our
episodes on Alexander VI Laplan. And if you're listening to
part two, you've listened to the show before, this isn't
your first time, like otherwise, why would you be listening
to it this way? To answer that question, our guest
Dana Schwartz, Dana.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
I'm just listening to part two is like a challenge
to be like, maybe I'll just figure it out on
the way.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
Yeah, they're like Second Acting a podcast.

Speaker 4 (00:34):
Yeah, it's gen Z.

Speaker 3 (00:37):
It's the new trend that gen Z's love. They call
it second Acting.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
That's right, that's right. And another thing that the gen
zs love is your podcast Noble Blood and your podcast Hoax.
You know, with an exclamation point, you know you would
have plug plug them right before we get in.

Speaker 4 (00:55):
Yes, please.

Speaker 3 (00:57):
Noble Blood is a scripted podcast about historical royals and
the usually murderous shenanigans. Again too, and Hoax is a
Story is a podcast about stories about historical hoaxes.

Speaker 4 (01:10):
And they're both really fun.

Speaker 3 (01:11):
Listen to Hoax because it's brand new, it could use
new listeners to rate, review, subscribe all the above.

Speaker 4 (01:18):
I think you'll like it. I have a great time
making it.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
Yes, definitely check that out. You will enjoy it, and
you'll also enjoy the continuing shenanigans of Alexander Villaplan. So
at this point, you know, we kind of ended last
episode when he wins a France cap, which is some

(01:40):
sort of football and by football we mean soccer for
my mostly American listener base Award against in a game
against Belgium in nineteen twenty six, he becomes the captain
of his team in nime and yeah, he's just on
top of the world in the late twenties. In nineteen
twenty nine, vi Laplan is recruited by the Racing Club

(02:01):
de Paris, which is striving to become the premier French
football club in an era in which the whole concept
of the sport is still kind of new. Right, football
is still getting its legs is a big thing. So
it's kind of an open question who's going to be
like the French, you know, a team, right, and you
know the Racing Club of Paris wants to be that

(02:22):
a team, and Vi Laplan is the best ballheader He's
one of the best passers. You gotta have him, right,
So the new club president makes signing vi Laplan a
priority again. At this point, he's still an amateur and
is working for free in the strictest legal sense of
the word. But he's been handed so many jobs and
businesses at this point that he is a wealthy man.

(02:45):
He is very comfortable, and he has no real job
outside of soccer, so he gets to spend all of
his free time that he's not playing out at bars
and nightclubs doing those you know, if you've seen Moulin Rouge,
he's doing shit like that. He's going to these fans
live theater, evince and burlesque shows. He's gambling uncontrollably at racetracks. Right.

(03:06):
He has everything he needs to be set up for life,
but he absolutely has no control of himself outside of
the field, right, Like he is just he's one of
these guys. He's burning money as fast as he can
spend it, just lighting it on fire at the racetrack.

Speaker 5 (03:20):
Right.

Speaker 2 (03:22):
And he's also while he's still in his early twenties,
the fact that he spends all of his free time
partying and drinking. You can get away with it because
your body is very forgiving. That's not going to be
the case forever. Right, So he makes his first contacts
with organized crime during this period of time when he's
in his early twenties and his star is ascendant because

(03:42):
he's repeatedly getting into debt with different shady Underworld characters
to continue his gambling habit. Now, initially this isn't a problem, right,
Nobody in the Underworld is going to like break his leg.
For one thing, they care about how the team performs,
and for another thing, they know he'll keep making money.
The whole country needs is like, you're not gonna break him, right,

(04:03):
and also you know that as long as he's playing
soccer at this level, he'll be good for it eventually,
even if it takes him a while. Like the money's
coming in. So you want to kind of keep this
big with this whale like on the hook, right, People
don't fish for whales with hooks. It's a harpoon. But
that doesn't sound as good. So in nineteen thirty, just

(04:25):
three years after moving to Paris, I think his team
wins its way to the very first World Cup, right,
So he's with this Club de Paris and they win
admission to the first, very first football World Cup. Right,
this is again the kind of the birthdays of the sport,
and the first World Cup is going to be held
in Montevideo, Uruguay. Right now, the Algerian as he was

(04:48):
known sometimes in the sports press, is going to be
the team captain, leading France before the entire world at
this first World Cup. Right, this is, you know, the
inaugural FIFA World Cup of Actually I'm not sure if
it's FIFA even at this point, but this is what
becomes the FIFA World Cup.

Speaker 5 (05:04):
Right.

Speaker 2 (05:05):
So this is held in nineteen thirty and Villaplan is
the head of France's team. He's considered the best midfielder
in the country at this point, in one of the
best passers. His team wins their first game against Mexico
at the World Cup, and at this point this is
the most significant event in the history of French football,
because there's not a lot of French football history, right,

(05:27):
but he leads them to a victory at the World Cup.
That's a huge deal. There's photos of vi Laplan at
the time that show this. He is just exultant, right,
he is the star at the peak of his abilities.
He's gleeful. You can just see it on his face.
He tells interviewers on the day, this is the most
beautiful day of my life. Right, so this is his

(05:48):
peak moment, you know, and things are only going to
get worse from here. Unfortunately for him and for a
lot of other people, everything after this first World Cup
game is downhill now, because the World Cup isn't a
normal god fearing sporting event like the Super Bowl or
whatever it is we do for hockey. The Cup itself
is actually a bunch of different games, right, It's not

(06:09):
just like one thing, you know. And so after defeating
Mexico VI, Laplan leads his team into two more matches,
which they lose both games, I think one to zero,
which is close in football terms, and they're forced out
of their running. So, you know, France, they win one
game at the World Cup, but it's not his chief moment,

(06:29):
is still not even like that great, right a performance,
which is kind of a bummer. So his team returns
back to Paris and like they've technically been defeated, but
also this is literally the first ever World Cup, so
people are still really psyched that they won a game, right.
The whole football playing world is there and France did
okay is kind of the way they're feeling, and so

(06:50):
like this is like this is like a big moment
for them. Alexander returns home a national hero. Unfortunately he's
also coming back to Europe up in like nineteen thirty one.
Things aren't looking great for European politics at that point.

Speaker 4 (07:06):
In nineteen thirty one, everything yeah.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
Not a good time. You know, the stock market, they're
not good really for much of anywhere in the world.
But the stock markets crashed in nineteen twenty nine in
New York, and things moved a little slower back then, right,
So like the Europe, France doesn't feel the repercussions as
immediately as like they would today. But by the time
the team is on their way back from Uruguay, the

(07:31):
global economy is in what might be politely turned a
state of cascade and collapse. The end of World War
One had brought this economic boom, particularly to the victorious
Western Powers, but that was now proved to have been
a bubble. Right, This like period of post war prosperity
comes to an end very rapidly. In his book The
King of Nazi Paris, Christopher Authen writes France held out

(07:54):
until nineteen thirty one, but then started to struggle. On
street benches and at metro entrances, groups of exhaust and
starving young men would be trying not to die, wrote
Breton journalist Morvon Lebesque. I don't know how many never
came round. I can only say what I saw in
the room, madame. One day I saw a child drop
a suite which someone trod on, and the manned behind
bent down and picked it up, wiped it and ate it.

(08:16):
Oh that's a succinct description of how bad shit is.

Speaker 4 (08:21):
Bro That makes me sad.

Speaker 2 (08:22):
Yeah, and they're not. I don't think they're eating it
just because they're jonesing for sugar. They're just like, oh calories. Fuck. Yeah,
this is my only opportunity, This is my only way
to avoid dying.

Speaker 4 (08:33):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (08:34):
Yeah, it's it's great stuff. So Alexander is at first
insulated from the broader calamity by his wealth. For the
next two years, he continues to be a star player
as money kind of trickles in right like he's he's
gonna be one of the later people to suffer. But
part of the problem is that his salary is not
from football. Right, if his salary just been from literally

(08:57):
a traditional working salary, he might have done better. But
his salary is like these fake businesses that he's been given,
these turnkey businesses, and like fake jobs, and like the
nightclub that he owns does a lot worse once the
economy collapses, right, So this hits him more than it
might hit like a professional footballer today, and problems are

(09:18):
compared in nineteen thirty two. Things get even more complex
because French football turns professional, right, so France, you know,
players are not being paid directly for their work, which
like initially helps vi laplan right, like the fact that
they're actually allowed to like take the money. He quits
his position at RC Paris to sign on to a

(09:38):
new team which is fighting to make a place for
itself in the sports world Olympic, the Antibe. But the
new club doesn't have money to pay him what he's worth, right,
So he gets this new this is he should have
been doing better once it transitions to professional, but he
takes a lower paid job with this this club in
Antibue because he's a to have an ownership stake in it, right,

(10:02):
and he thinks this club might have the chance to
be the big French club. They might be bigger than
RC Paris. And if I get it on the ground
floor and I own part of the club, it'll be
worth a lot more money in the long run. Right,
So that's his attempt, or that's at least on paper,
what he's trying to do. But what's also going on
here is that he is in the middle of a
massive sports betting scheme, right, like he And part of

(10:25):
why he wants ownership of this is that he and
his friends are going to like basically start rigging matches
and throwing games and whatnot in order to make a
lot of money on sports gambling. Right, And he seems
to be the We don't entirely know, but it's most
of the historic of the historians I've read suggests that
he was the mastermind of this. Like he is the

(10:47):
guy strong arming everyone, He is the guy with the
connections to the underworld.

Speaker 4 (10:52):
And so he gets there this is allowed, right, This is.

Speaker 2 (10:55):
Just like no, no, no, no, no no. This is
totally illegal, yes, massively illegal. So he convinces several of
his comrades from RC Paris to join as well. And
the thought of this is that like yeah, this is
a struggling small team. If we bring some ringers in,
we can put money on games and make a fortune. Right,

(11:16):
And for a while this seems to be working, and
the club's first season goes surprisingly well. But vie Laplan
isn't just sort of like fixing matches. He's also using
his money and the money of others to bribe opposing
teams to throw matches. Right, So it's not just we've
got these ringers and they don't know how good we are.
It's like I am. We are paying people or ordering
our own people to throw games in order to which

(11:38):
is that's the really illegal part. So they get caught
during this first season, they don't even make it a
full season, they get caught fixing games and it causes
a huge scandal, per right up in the Guardian quote.
At that time, the championship was divided into Southern and
Northern sections, with the winners of each playing off for
the title of champions and Team won the Southern section

(11:59):
and then be sc Five's legs in the decider, only
for it to emerge that the match had been fixed,
and team were stripped of their title and the team's
manager banned. Although it was widely believed he was a scapegoat.
VI Laplan and two teammates with whom he had previously
played were suspected of being the real plotters. All three
players were soon let go. Right, So the team manager

(12:20):
gets banned forever. He gets shit canned with two of
his colleagues, but they're not banned from the sport. I
think because he's you know that the kind of shine
off of leading the team in the World Cup is
still on him a little bit. So he's he's generally
agreed to have been the mastermind of this scheme, but
he doesn't pay the as much of a price as

(12:41):
the team manager does. He's still a top player after this,
and so after antigue collapses, like this club collapses, he
gets pulled in by NIS's team, right. And however, by
this point in the early nineteen thirties, Vi Laplan is
no longer in his prime. He's getting older. He's basically
taking his calories are nothing but hard liquor, right with

(13:03):
like brothels for dessert. You know, like he's not eating food,
he's eating liquor and brothels, and he's engaging in yeah, brothels,
like that's his entire diet, and he's also gambling uncontrollably
and burning all of his money that he's not really sleeping.
It has an impact on his ability on the court,
you know. So his next few years as a as

(13:27):
a footballer are notably less impressive than the previous ones
had been. He misses regular training sessions because he's hungover, right,
He'll just be absent when he's supposed to be practicing
with the team because he's you know, or in a
lot of cases, he's still drunk from the night before.
Sometimes he's even still drinking. A lot of times, it's
a combination of all three. When he makes it to practice,

(13:49):
he's often still kind of wasted and just not able
to function. And he makes it, you know, when he
is well enough to actually play in games, and he's not,
you know, spacing out of that he's noted by sports
writers for seeming to be out of shape and barely
able to focus on the game itself. And after a
few seasons, Nice lets him go, right, They're like, you're

(14:12):
not really worth paying and now we actually have to
pay you, right, And this marks the first time when
he get shit canned by Nice. This is the first
time that he leaves a team without choosing to do
so to get better pay somewhere else, right, so that's
kind of noteworthy. This is functionally the end of his
career in football, although he continues. He goes to another team,

(14:35):
a second division team in Bordeaux, who are kind of
willing to take this guy because they're not as good
a team, so you know, he's still an upgrade for them,
but they only really like the Bordeaux only condescends to
hire him because they're being managed by his former mentor,
that Scotsman Gibson. And even in this situation where his

(14:55):
mentor is running the team and he's got an end,
he can only last three months before he gets fired
for refusing to turn up to training sessions and games. Right,
he just won't do the job.

Speaker 4 (15:05):
He sounds like a fun time.

Speaker 2 (15:07):
Yeah, he's fucking great, Like you had it all man,
Like you could have easily kept going for at least
a few more years. But yeah, he's just not able
to sober up to like make the game. You know
who else can't sober up to do their jobs? Sponsors
of this podcast, Yeah, welcome back to Behind the Bastards,

(15:36):
a podcast about football. The soccer of sports. So by
the mid nineteen thirties, be Leaplon's career in pro football
is over and he transitions, i have to say, very seamlessly,
to what has become his true passion. You know, he's
over football. He's getting into a new line of work,

(15:56):
gambling badly. He is now a professional gambler, and he
sucks at it, right, He's a horrible at this job,
and he can't stop getting caught from doing He's doing
like really high stakes bad gambling. Like it's not enough
to like lose at the horse tracks or like, you know,
lose money playing fucking blackjack or whatever. He's constantly getting

(16:17):
in trouble for trying to fix different sporting events, which
is like the one way as a rich guy to
get in trouble for gambling outside of just losing your money,
you know. So in nineteen thirty five, he gets caught
fixing horse races both in Paris and Cote Desure, and
before you know, his charm and his fame as a

(16:38):
beloved sports hero had been enough that when he got
caught doing shit like this, like the last time, he
avoided the most serious trouble. Right, because he's beloved it
and he's charming. He's not that anymore. He is a
washed up, alcoholic, degenerate gambler who is no longer good
at football. So he gets sent to prison after this

(16:58):
time in nineteen thirty five, and he does some time, right,
not a lot of time, but you know enough that
it's been made clear you do not enjoy the same
kind of benefit of the doubt that had previously accompanied
you in your sporting career and your life. So this
is not the last time he's going to be locked
up for gambling related crimes. It's going to happen to

(17:20):
him periodically over the next few years before World War two,
and he spends the remainder of the pre war years
cheating on his several wives. He has a couple of divorces,
I think three during this period of time, and it's
always because he's cheating constantly, and he becomes it. He
does some more time in jail, he gets caught, you know,
doing other gambling crimes. It becomes a figure of minimal

(17:40):
note in the world of Parisian organized crime. Right, he's
kind of in part due to his debts. He's like working.
I think he's basically being muscle sometimes for some of
these like gangsters and whatnot, because he owes them and
he doesn't really have any other skills. But he's fit
or you know, he's in better shape than most people. Right,

(18:01):
so we could beat somewhat up. Maybe. So war clouds
start to gather above Western Europe, and Alexander shows no
interest whatsoever, either in joining the fascist or in fighting
them to protect his home country. Right again, because he
doesn't consider France's home country. This is part of why.
Also because he's Algerian, he's I think he does. I

(18:21):
think he has citizenship technically, but he still doesn't consider
himself French in the way that like people born on
the mainland do. And he's also because he's Algerian, he's
got this kind of inroads because a lot of the
organized crime world are people who are on the margins, right,
They're people who don't benefit from citizenship. They're people who
you know, are are in a more marginal place, and

(18:42):
so they wind up kind of associating with organized crime
because they don't they're never benefit from like a legal
position in society. And you know, because of his stardom
he had and he had that opportunity but he still
identifies more with that side of things, which is part
of why this kind of is the direction he takes.
So it becomes clear when Germany and the USSR invade Poland,

(19:07):
it becomes clear that France and Germany are going to
have them a war, and France starts, you know, hoovering
up all of the young men they can because they're like, well,
we got to throw some boys that the Germans again,
we might have another couple of years of that, and
Alexander wants no part of this. His biographer Luke Breand writes,
alex would have liked to stay away from the march

(19:27):
towards war that was leading Europe to disaster. He was
easily satisfied with this life of gambling women and petty trafficking,
but it was impossible to escape from. June nineteen thirty nine,
France began recalling its reservists. VI Laplan was one of
them and joined the four hundred and sixteenth Pioneer Regiment,
based in the Jura, far from any possible front. This
unit was primarily intended to accompany the movement of the

(19:48):
combatant regiments by digging trenches for them and setting up cantonments,
no machine guns or tanks here. The men's only weapons
are shovels, picks, and a few vague libel rifles. Right,
so he gets he gets called up. He's not with
a combat unit. They're like combat engineers basically, and he's
not even going to really do that, right. France's war

(20:10):
with the Germans winds up being brief, or at least
the kind of much like again, this is a mirror
of what happens in Algeria. The war on the ground
is very brief. Obviously, France puts up more of a
you know, more of a military fight than Algeria does.
Like the casualties that Germany suffers, pretty significant casualties, which
we often kind of gloss over, like this is not

(20:32):
a total cake walk for them, but it is over
very quickly, right, And it's going to be a situation
like in Algeria where the actual sort of open conflict
is over shortly and then we transition to this more
this insurgent warfare which lasts a lot longer.

Speaker 4 (20:49):
Right.

Speaker 2 (20:49):
And I do think it's really interesting how these things
mirror each other and how you know, the side that
vi Laplan is going to find himself on in this case.
So Paris falls to the Nazis in June of nineteen forty,
and vie Laplan happily ends his service in a defeated military.
He might have been happy to return to his life
of debauchery, you know, to return to the women and

(21:10):
the gambling and the petty crime, if a better opportunity
hadn't presented itself, and it very quickly does. So the
Nazis are occupying Paris herself at this point, right, And
so you've got all these foreign officers, these Germans and Austrians,
who I mean, they're all technically Germans for our purposes,
but they're new to France and they don't know the

(21:33):
lay of the land. But number one, they're corrupt as hell.
Like the Nazi regime is a gangster regime. Especially all
of these SS guys who are in country are just
gangsters by mindset, in a lot of cases by background.
And also they're just like military officers who are occupying
any country in any point in history. They want luxuries

(21:54):
that they're not supposed to have, that they're not being
provided by their government, and that are hard to come
by in wartime. Right, respectable French citizens number one, often
don't have access to this stuff either because they're respectable
French citizens. So when the nice stuff is harder to
come by because there's a war on, they don't have it.
So the people who have access to the luxuries and

(22:15):
who are willing to sell them to the occupiers are
the criminals, right, And it's these members of the underworld
who in their attitude. Again, a lot of these people
are not French citizens. They're living in France, but they're
you know, in a lot of cases, Algerians are members
of like other you know, immigrant populations. They've never had
a legal status or their legal status has been questionable,

(22:37):
and they're also working in a criminal enterprise. So their
attitude is like, look, does it matter if we're breaking
the law under the French Republic or the German right,
Like whatever, we're we're criminals either way, Who gives a shit?
You know. So they have this very and you know,
to an extent, especially if you're an Algerian, why would
you immediately assume the Nazis or any worse than the

(22:57):
French Republic given what they've done to your people, Right,
it just doesn't make a lot of sense that you'd
be particularly pissed at the Nazis in nineteen forty. Right,
So a lot of these black market guys, these smugglers
and whatnot, are only too happy to serve whoever's got
cash on hand. And I want to quote from an
article in the Blizzard. Quote as soon as the armistice

(23:19):
was signed on June nineteen forty, Vi Laplan tried his
hand at racketeering in blackmail, his preferred targets being black
marketeers and Jews. He was immediately arrested for handling hot goods, however,
and it was in jail that he was approached by
Henry Lafont, one of the most reviled figures of the
collaboration to many, a psychopath, a sadist, but first and
foremost an opportunist, to convince the occupier that he was

(23:41):
someone they could do business with by leading them to
the destruction of a whole Belgian resistance network. And so
Vi Lapland is immediately like, okay, the Nazis are in charge. Oh,
I can really fuck over like Jewish French people, right,
Like nobody's going to come after me, right, and nobody's
going to be paying attention to my petty crimes. But
he's really bad at petty crime, and so he's still mad.

(24:01):
He gets in trouble in Nazi Paris for like scamming
Jewish people, like that's hard, you have to be bad
as a scammer.

Speaker 4 (24:11):
Oh god.

Speaker 2 (24:13):
So he gets fucking locked up. And there's this this
mafia figure, Henry Lafont, right, who had been an organized
crime figure who once the Germans take over, he basically
uses his connections to help them destroy this resistance network
in Belgium, and the SS is like, hey, you're useful.
Could you put together a team of like locals who

(24:35):
we can rely on to do stuff like what you
just did to this Belgian network, right, Like, we're having
some trouble with the French resistance. Can you get us
some local criminals who know the lay of the land
and can help us dismantle these developing resistance networks? And
Lafont is like, of course I can, baby, Like I'm
a piece of shit. I am so down for this job, right.

(24:58):
Henri Lafont is described by the Guardian as an illiterate
orphan turned rampant ne'er do well, which is just a
charming do well.

Speaker 4 (25:10):
Does he do well?

Speaker 2 (25:11):
Ne ne ne and it's it's a funny to describe
a guy who winds up working for the s S
to dismantle resistant networks as a ne'er do well. We're
a little beyond ne'er doing well.

Speaker 4 (25:23):
Right.

Speaker 2 (25:25):
He is as shady a character as they come. And
Lafont rubs a lot of people the he you know,
he has a mixed relationship with these different Germans, right,
because a lot of the German military guys who are
responsible for the occupation of Paris are Prussians, right. They're
these old Prussian military, you know, a lot of cases
members of the nobility. They have these these very old

(25:48):
fashioned attitudes about the right way and the wrong way
to do things, and about honor, and they don't like
all of the criminals that they're associating with to try
to win this developing insurgent war. But and you've got
the SS, who are basically gangster, like the Nazis or
a gangster regime, and the SS are basically gangsters themselves.
And the SS is really down to work with these guys, right,

(26:10):
because they're you know, we're all the same kind of
asshole more or less. So the SS sees potential in
a man like Lafont, a man with no loyalties towards
anything but himself, and the promise of a payday and
a deep well of knowledge about how things are done,
you know, in the underground. And the SS gives Lafont
a choice. Work for us and help us round up

(26:31):
Jews and crack down on the growing resistance, and you
get a place in the new order. And Lafont is
like fucking hell yeah, I want to quote from Doyle's book.
The more Lafont's influence grew, the more he recruited. He
toured the Parisian prisons, arranging the release of old associates
and anyone who could help consolidate his powerful place in
the perverted new social order. Pierre Bonnie Wants, the most

(26:53):
famous police officer in France before being disgraced and chilled
for corruption, became his right hand man. At some point
they hooked up with Vi la Plan, who's assorted activities
now included gold smuggling. The gang set up their headquarters
at ninety three Rue Lauriston, probably the most infamous address
in Parisian history, the home of the gang that became
known as the French Gestapo. Right wow, So Lafont partners

(27:17):
with this corrupt French police officer who got fired by
the Republic, and then you know, the Nazis bring back
and they start hooking up with Villa Plan, right, and
initially he's their driver, he's like their chauffeur, but obviously
driver for these guys, you're doing bodyguard work, you're acting
as muscle, right, and their goal is to make money.
These guys are with the SS. They are going to

(27:39):
be wearing SS uniforms. They're not ideologically in love with Hitler.
I doubt they've read Mindkompf. They're anti Semitic, but like
the normal kind of French anti semitic, where they're like, oh,
we can fuck with these people now, I always hate it.
Let's rob them, you know, I never liked them. We
can take their stuff now, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (27:57):
See what side their bread is buttered on? Right? More
like cynical the Nazism.

Speaker 2 (28:03):
Yes, yes, their pre existing biases are compatible with Nazism
because they are racist against Jewish people. But that's not
like the primary motivation, right, The primary motivation is out
there's money in this shit, right, And so you know
they start tracking down you know, Jewish refugees and people
who have like gone into the underground to try to

(28:24):
avoid the SS dragnet that's growing in this period. So
they're tracking down Jews for the SS, they're tracking down
resistance fighters and helping to bust resistance cells. They're helping
in general for the SS to police the enemies of
the Reich and from their headquarters in ninety three Rule Rista,
they are torturing hundreds of people, right, They're not, they

(28:45):
are they're murdering people. There's a lot of like executions
and whatnot, but there's also just a lot of you know,
pulling out of fingernat just yeah, torture, torture, right, like
it's it's gnarly shit. So better known as the Carlink,
the French Gestapo saw the new Order as an opportunity
for personal wealth and power. VI Laplan had known Lorent

(29:08):
because for years they'd both kind of been involved in
similar aspects of the underworld together. And as I said,
he's brought in as a chauffeur for higher ranking criminals
who made a place for themselves in the Carlink at first,
but he exhibits the same kind of work, ethic and
skill at social manipulation that had previously served him so
well in football, Right, this is the kind of thing

(29:28):
he'd gotten sort of burnt out on football, but now
he's got a chance to be in the SS. It's
like his career gets a second lease on life, right, like, ah,
this is what I wanted to be doing the whole time.
Perfect for me. So in short order, Dean Kane joining Ice, right, right,
he's a he's Dean Kane joining Ice where he's like, ah,
you know, my Superman years are behind me, but my

(29:52):
Aryan Superman years may not be behind me. Even though
I am out, my uber Men cheers are still ahead
of me. Right, And again, this is a kind of thing.
There's a lot of misconceptions people have about the way Nazisms,
white supremacy and like racial supremacy worked, where we say, like, well,

(30:13):
they're Nazis, they're obviously white supremacists. That doesn't mean that
they were white supremacists in a way that translates totally
directly to the way a lot of white supremacists are
are racist today. Right, Nazi racism is a little different
from a lot like og Nazi racism is a lot
different from even like the way the KKK was racist,
because this is not straight up white supremacy in the area,

(30:36):
like being white is not what matters most.

Speaker 1 (30:38):
Right.

Speaker 2 (30:38):
For one thing, their whole attitude is that being Aryan
and kind of bringing back through breeding. You know, we've
got the kind of the Norwegians, the Nordic peoples, and
the Germans are closest to this Aryan race, right, and
so we want to through eugenics and whatnot and through
careful like breeding of our population, recreate this Aryan race.

(31:00):
But we're working towards it. So that's a difference from
just well, we're white and we're superior to everybody, right,
there's a difference there, and there's other differences in that
there's there's this belief in kind of a global hierarchy
of races that is more fluid than you get with
kind of a lot of modern white supremacists. For one thing,
the Germans are working with the Japanese right, and Hitler's attitude.

(31:21):
Hitler's goal is not I want Germany to rule the
entire world. It's Germany is going to be in control
of Europe, you know, stretching basically almost into into China,
right all across the Russian steps and there will be
spheres of influence right in Japan will control this other
sphere of influence, right. And it's not that they don't
consider themselves superior to the Japanese, but it's not quite

(31:43):
as simplistic as a lot of racism is today. And
so as a result, there is room within this Nazi
movement for people who are not white and who are
not Christian. And one of the examples of this is
as the SS. As Lafont's you know, starts working for
the SS. In collaboration with the SS, he creates a

(32:03):
unit called the BNA, which roughly translates to the North
African Brigade, and this is made up of I think
fifty to one hundred Algerian French residents that the SS
decides they can trust to crack down on the French resistance.
And a lot of these guys, obviously, vie Laplan is
a European Algerian or European descented Algerian, but a lot

(32:25):
of these BNA guys are Arab and they're Muslim, right,
And part of why the SS decides they're trustworthy is
that because of all of the shit that France had
done to Algeria and the genocide that basically had been
carried out in you know over the decades, right with
around two million people killed, including a mass amount of starvation.

(32:48):
Because of that, the SS is very astutely like, well,
these people aren't loyal to France. They're certainly not loyal
to the regular French population. We can use them, right,
And so Hitler had started in the early forties, right
when Germany takes over France, funding an Arabic language French
newspaper which was geared towards recruiting and radicalizing Muslims who

(33:08):
had immigrated to France from colonized nations, and the paper
described Hitler as almost a Mahdi like figure. The Mahdi
is this, I mean, it's both this figure and kind
of Islamic theology. But also there had been a guy
in North Africa called the Mahdi who had led this
rebellion against the British right. And Hitler is describing himself

(33:30):
in these propaganda papers to the Arab population of France
as this messianic figure who is bent on Hitler's goal
is to free colonized people from the shackles of their
Western oppressors and put an end to colonialism and communism.

Speaker 4 (33:43):
Right.

Speaker 2 (33:43):
That's how Hitler's is portraying himself to this community, because
he's like, look, I don't care about India. Free India, sure,
free India, right, like, because that'll hurt the British, Right,
that's what I care about. The war with India is
so far outside of my like area of giving a shit.
Of course she can be free. I'm an anti colonialist
hero me ad Al Hitler, right, yeah, beneficial, Yeah, Like

(34:07):
he's just he's fine with this, right, And it's he's
also Hitler is insanely jealous of Great Britain and the
United States, And there's a real there's a degree to
which his his the thing he's angry about is like
kind of fair is the wrong word, but like he's
pissed because like, well, they got to do a genocide,
genocides and steal everyone's land and no one's pissed at them.

(34:29):
Why can't Germany? Why why don't I get to do this?

Speaker 4 (34:32):
Right? Like?

Speaker 2 (34:34):
And that is like a major thing for Hitler. So
the fact that it's it's often gets left out of
our discussions of Nazism, but part of Hitler's propaganda is
to portray himself as you know, this kind of anti
colonial figure to certain groups of people, and in fact,
the BNA, this North African SS group that's going to
be trying to cut down the resistance in France, is

(34:57):
not the only instance in which non white soldiers were
admitted to the SS. Which this is a little bit
of a side story, but it's one of my favorite
weird side stories from the Second World War. There was
a unit in the SS called the Indish or Indian
Legion that was made up entirely of Muslim and Hindu
Indian soldiers in the SS. Hey, everyone, Robert here just

(35:19):
wanted to clarify the Indish Legion was initially started as
part of the Wehrmacht and then it was absorbed by
the Waffen SS later in the war, so it was
ultimately part of the SS, but it started as a
project with the Wehrmacht. That explains the discrepancy and the
quote I read anyway, just wanted to make a note
of that. Per a study by Baijelanti Roy published by

(35:42):
Oxford Academic quote set up jointly by Subhas Chandra Bose,
who is an Indian independence leader and the Wehrmacht. In
nineteen forty one. The Legion composed about thirty five hundred
volunteers from the Indian POWs who belonged to the British
Imperial Army that had fought the Germans in Africa. In
order to integrate the newly formed Legion, the Indian soldiers
needed to be provided proper training by the German military personnel.

(36:03):
An important element of this training was ideological indoctrination into
the Nazi worldview. Several India experts, who were not all
academic specialists on India, were called on to mediate between
the German army and the Indian soldiers, not only as
interpreters but also as propagandists of Nazi ideology, right, and
so to propagandaize this very peculiar unit in the Nazi military.

(36:26):
Urdu and Hindu speaking authors are brought in to write
a magazine edited by Germans called Bybond and the overall
project is a failure, right. They these guys do briefly
see combat in France actually after the Normandy landings, but
they don't they like basically roll over immediately. They see
which way the war is going, like we're not going
to die for the fucking the Third Reich. Are you

(36:48):
kidding me? So this doesn't have much of an impact
on the war, and this has very little. The hope
had been that if Indians over in India see you know, liberated,
you know, Muslim the Hindu soldiers fighting together against the British,
that it'll spark a rebellion in India. Basically, that doesn't
work at all. Right, this is not one of the

(37:10):
more successful Nazi plans. But speaking of successful Nazi nope, uh,
here's a lot of Yeah, probably shouldn't do that. Listen
to some ads. Forget what I just said. We're back.
You've all forgotten that I just compared our sponsors to

(37:31):
the Third Reich. You know, nobody needs to think about
that anymore. We're done, We're good, We're back to Alexander
vi Laplan. So vi laplan is that the BNA is
created this North African unit that's going to be helping
to destroy the resistance. And Vi Laplon is made oberstmfeer
or lieutenant of a unit of around one hundred men.

(37:52):
And it's possible, if not likely, that his status as
a white Frenchman essentially close enough helped him secure this place,
but but it's likely ear that he'd simply done a
good job of making himself useful already. The Guardian rites
of the bna's crimes. In Philipeziza's authoritative nineteen seventy book
on the Lafont and Bonnie Gang, the following story is told.

(38:13):
Following a tip off from a source and the Peris Gestapo,
Alex and three of his men burst into the home
of Jean vive Lenard, accused of harboring a jew. They
ransacked the house. Alex seizes the fifty nine year old
mother of six by the hair. Where is your jew?
He shouts. The lady refuses to answer. Alex picks her
up brutally pushes her into a neighboring farm, hitting her
with his rifle butt on the way, and there he

(38:34):
forces her to watch an appalling scene men from the
BNA torture two peasants in front of her. After being
beaten and set ablaze. The two peasants were machine gunned
from close range. Alex laughs. During his time, some other
men from the BNA had located the jew, Antoine Bachmann.
They bring him to the farm, Alex hits him and
then arrests him He then orders Jean vive Lenard to
give him two hundred thousand francs. So we've broken back.

(39:01):
That's pretty hideous, Like, yeah, that's real, just evil. Yeah,
he is. Effectively, he's that character from Inglorious Bastards. He's
the real version right where there's no charm, there's no
point at which he's like, oh he's evil, but he's
like this like evil genius who's like cruel, but there's

(39:23):
this degree of like you just want to keep watching him, right, No,
this is the real version of that guy, right where
he is just beating a fifty nine year old woman
with a fucking pistol bud. He's having people lit on fire,
and then you just random peasants machine gunned after being
lit on fire. Like this is the real version of
that character, you know. So over the last year or

(39:46):
so of the war which France, or at least the
last year that France spends under German German dominance during
the war, Vi Laplan and his men are responsible for
dozens of executions and turning over countless Jews to the Gestapo.
And he makes a fortune during this period of time.
By some accounts, he becomes as wealthy or wealthier than
he'd ever been during the height of his football career,

(40:07):
because he's taking shitloads of bribes, right, and a lot
of times he's taking bribes, and he's turning these these people,
these Jews, these resistance figures in any way. We'll talk
about the other things that he's getting bribe for in
a sec But he and the BNA become notorious and
they earn a nickname among the resistance. And this nickname
is of course based in the racism that was quite
common even among the Frenchmen fighting the Nazis. They called

(40:30):
them the ss Mohammed. Right again, there's no non racist
side in this conflict.

Speaker 4 (40:39):
Yeah, now this is just flat bat Yeah, this is.

Speaker 2 (40:42):
Just all pretty ugly. Right. Obviously the resistance is the
right side, but that doesn't mean these guys that number one.
A lot of people who fought in the resistance had
been unapologetic colonialist bigots prior to the German occupation and
continued being after. And just also, war doesn't make anyone
a better person, right, So they had other nicknames. The

(41:03):
non racist members of the resistance would call them the falange,
which is a term that gets used around a lot
of different fascist groups, So like, that's just kind of
calling them what you would call like the Spanish, you know,
the Falanges is like a term, a term that a
lot of different European fascist groups used, so that one's fine.
Some locals also called them lebeco, which is a colonial

(41:25):
slur for non white denizens of French possessions. Author Robert
Pike describes they were a strange looking bunch at best,
dressed in a combination of sheepskin jackets with baggy blue
boiler suits and berets. They wore thick leather belts with
a Waffen SS buckle and were armed with machine guns
and grenades. So weird looking uniforms on these guys. One

(41:45):
of the stranger units in World War Two, the BNA.
They receive combat training from the SS, but these guys
are thugs and gangsters first, right, so they don't. They
avoid direct combat with the resistance whenever possible because they're
not good at that, right, And the resistance is getting
as the war comes to a close in France, increasingly

(42:06):
competent and well armed because more stuff's getting through the
out from the Allies, and as a result the BNA
they're avoiding. They want to avoid fighting directly with the resistance,
which means when the resistance carries out a successful attack,
they're not going in and attacking the resistance. They're just
massacring civilians with the goal of forcing the resistance to
make difficult choices. Right, Basically, we're going to try and

(42:29):
stop them from carrying out attacks because they know that
will massacre villagers when they do. We're not even trying
to fight them, right because will be bad at that.

Speaker 4 (42:38):
Right.

Speaker 2 (42:38):
Yes, this is all awful. I mean, it's the calculus
of war for the resistance, and this is how a
lot of counterinsurgency actually winds up in practice, whether it's
the Nazis or the Americans doing it where you know,
even if you're not supposed to, it's a lot easier
to do reprisals against unarmed civilians. So that's what you do.

(42:59):
Much of this, much of these these like reprisal attacks
again civilian populations, are being done on the orders of
Michael Hambrecht, who is the Gestapo head of Dordon, and
he used the BNA as his dedicated war crimes unit
in support of the eleventh Panzer Division of the Hmacht.
One of the things this does is it. Lets there's
this myth that comes up postwar that like, well, the

(43:19):
SS was bad, but the Verhrmacht was mostly clean, right,
there was like a clean branch of the German army
and there wasn't the verhmachder involved in a lot of
war crimes. And part of how some of these units
avoid more direct things is like, well, the Wehrmacht when
they need to move in to fight a resistance cell,
we'll send the Verhrmacht in. But we have the Algerians
massacring civilians on our behalf, right, because they're doing these

(43:41):
war crimes to try to roll up these networks or
get you know, torture citizens to get them to like
give up the locations of different resistance cells. Right, so
we've we're outsourcing our war crimes right to these, to
these This Algerian unit, the BNA, was so successful at this,
at least in the eye of the occupiers, that they
soon get seconded in addition to this Wehrmacht unit to

(44:05):
the second SS Panzer Division as well. Robert Pike writes
official records are scarce, but those available, as well as
the many eyewitness accounts and reports by the judicial police
tell of pillage, rape, plundering and burning of property, extortion
and profiteering. However, this was just the tip of the iceberg. Arrests, deportations,
or summary murders of civilians and executions of suspects took

(44:25):
place on an almost daily basis as an auxiliary police
force to the Gestapo. Its members held carte blanche to
do as they pleased. They were hardly accountable to anyone.
But the massacres were on a different scale. These were
ordered by the Germans and executed by the Falange. In March,
the town of Brontome was the first to feel the
full force, with twenty five hostages bust In to be

(44:46):
executed in a show of force designed to persuade the
local population to inform on resistance activity. The following day,
and Saint Marie de Shinak, a further twenty five hostages,
mainly Jews, were executed. Both were in retaliation for resistance ambushes.
Many other towns and villages suffered losses of innocent inhabitants
as well as resistant sympathizers Jews or refugees. The events

(45:07):
of eleventh of June nineteen forty four, by which time
it is likely that Alexandre vill Laplan was replaced by
the even more brutal Raimond manang Are, perhaps most striking
of all. On that day, in the town of Musadon,
twenty kilometers west of Paris, had its name etched into
the history of Nazi barbarity. An armored train heading from
Paris to Montpon was attacked by the resistance. Thirteen Germans

(45:28):
were killed in the firefight, and a further ten were
taken prisoner. Consequently, the entire male population of the town
and surrounding hamlets were rounded up and questioned, many tortured.
Michael Hambrecht arrived in the town late in the afternoon
along with thirty members of the Valange. Already visibly drunk.
He had been told to personally select fifty men for execution.
Of those under sixty years of age that had been retained.

(45:48):
He chose forty eight, who were then led to a
nearby alleyway overlooking farmland. Along the way, they passed the
line of men that had just been released. There they
stood in two rows for more than two hours until
they were mowed down by machine guns operated by flo
Lang members, who then finished off survivors with handguns. Later,
the mayor and his adjutant were tortured and killed, while
two other men were killed in the street, taking the
death toll that day to fifty two. All the bodies

(46:10):
were left where they fell. Miraculously, two men survived the massacre.
The town was then pillaged, and there's debate was Viletron
there was he not? Was he just there in the
massacres heading up to this. I've heard sources that say
he was there at Mussadan, some that say he actually
pulled the trigger and shot people directly during that day,
which was not He liked it. He didn't like to
get his hands dirty. But some of the stories at

(46:32):
least say that he did that day. It's a little long.
I don't have perfect evidence on it, but if he
wasn't there in Mussadan, he was there other days where
similar massacres were carried out. We just talked about him
having people lit on fire and machine gunned. But as
the war comes to an end, he's not stupid. He's
aware that the Nazis aren't winning and that VS. France's

(46:54):
days are numbered, and Alexander he's never been a true believer,
so he starts to hedge his bed as soon as
he realizes which way the wind is blowing. So during
this later period of time, while he's carrying out these massacres,
he starts pretending to be a resistance double agent, and
so he'll let captives go if they can pay. He'll
be like, you know, hey, I'm with the resistance, but like, also,

(47:17):
I need some cash, right. Oh god, he's the He's
the worst sort of person. He can't even commit to
pretending to be a double agent. One eyewitness describes him
arriving in a village one day and saying to a
group of prisoners, oh, in what times we live? Ours
is a terrible era, to what harsh extremes I am
reduced me a Frenchman compelled to wear a German uniform.

(47:40):
Have you seen, my brave people? What terrible atrocities these
savages have committed. I cannot be held responsible for them.
I am not their master. They are going to kill you,
but I will try to save you at the risk
of my own life. I've already saved many people, fifty
four to be precise, you will be the fifty fifth
if you give me four hundred thousand francs. He's such bullshit,
it's such a piece of shit.

Speaker 4 (48:01):
It sucks so bad. He sucks so bad, awful.

Speaker 2 (48:05):
Yeah, that's just yeah, that's that's a special kind of evil.
I'm excited.

Speaker 4 (48:10):
I'm excited to hear about how he dies. Yeah, I know,
I didn't know this guy existed and now I meet
him so much.

Speaker 1 (48:16):
So bad.

Speaker 2 (48:17):
Yeah, that's what we do here. So by the end
of summer of nineteen forty four, the jig was well
and truly up. Harris was liberated, with French colonial troops,
including a lot of Africans, being some of the first
soldiers to enter the city. This was a bloody period
of time for those who had suffered under years of
Nazi occupation, beat tortured, and sometimes murdered their fellow citizens

(48:38):
who'd acted as collaborators. Right, there's a lot of ugliness,
some of it understandable, where there's some people who had
done horrible things under the Nazis and they get their
just desserts. And there's also uglier things where like women
who had you know, been dating quote unquote members of
the German military, who knows how often they had a
choice in the matter, Right, they get like their hair

(48:58):
shaved and get beaten in public like, there's a lot
of ugly stuff that happens during this period of time too,
because not everyone who had been a quote unquote collaborator
really had a full choice in the matter, right. But
some of the people who are going to get their
just desserts are the French Gestapo and the you know
from the time that it's you know, they're planning retaking Paris,

(49:20):
the French government in exile, all these people know. We're
not going to leave these folks up to the populace
to take their vengeance on these people. We need to
make a public example on and you know Alexander. He
tries to hold onto his uniform as much as possible.
He attempts to as Paris falls, he attempts to use
his position with the SS to commit one last robbery

(49:40):
to fund his escape into Germany. He tries to scam
a man out of nine hundred dollars, an Armenian man
out of nine hundred dollars in a gold ring, in
return for giving him back valuables that he'd stolen from
this Armenian man. But he gets overtaken by events, and
on August of twenty fourth, nineteen forty four, he gets
caught by a resistance agent with a and a fake

(50:00):
police identity card. VI Laplan is put on trial and
declared to be a con man and a murderer by
a French judge. He pleased desperately that I'd been working
for the resistance all along. No, I was really on
your side. I was a good guy. The all the
time does not work. It avails him nothing. This judge
is like, no, you're a con man and a monster,
and on the day after Christmas nineteen forty four, he

(50:23):
is executed by firing squad along with seven of his colleagues. Yeah,
so we have a happy ending.

Speaker 4 (50:29):
Yeah, it seems like the thing to do to that
sort of person.

Speaker 2 (50:32):
Yeah, yeah, so yeah, that's the story.

Speaker 3 (50:36):
Oh I'm just like, yeah, oh, what a bad person,
What a bad person.

Speaker 2 (50:42):
What an interesting boomerang around from your kind of born
in this mix between colonizer and colonized, at least as
you see it right, where like you know, we might
see more accurately as a colonized, but his attitude on
it is a little more mixed than that. As a
young man, certainly his dad's attitude and certainly influenced in
his willingness this the brutal, the colonial brutality of the

(51:05):
French in Algeria. I think definitely does impact how willing
to like, like what happens, especially with these like North
African units in France, and why they're willing to do
some of the things that they're willing to do, right
because like you know, they've they've seen it before, they've
endured it before.

Speaker 5 (51:24):
Right.

Speaker 2 (51:26):
So yeah, bad, bad times all around.

Speaker 4 (51:29):
Bad times all around.

Speaker 3 (51:31):
I guess see, uh, justice justice one out in the
end sort of.

Speaker 2 (51:35):
He gets killed. You know, that's good. This is one
of our for behind the bastards. This is like as
happy a story as we get. Yeah, yeah, yeah, anyway
you want to plug your pluckables, Yeah.

Speaker 5 (51:49):
Yeah, please listen to Noble Blood as a podcast about
historical royals and hoax a podcast about hoaxes throughout history
that I host of my friend Lizzie Logan.

Speaker 4 (52:02):
You are Nazis, I can promise.

Speaker 2 (52:04):
You we're not. You know that's always not zero, Yeah,
because you know, especially the British royal family, there's a few.

Speaker 4 (52:13):
And also just like Nazis are popping up in.

Speaker 2 (52:16):
History, they tend to do that. It's like the number
one thing Nazis do is pop up. Yeah, they're like
a They're like a bad taco restaurant.

Speaker 4 (52:28):
I want to say this was a delight, This was
an education.

Speaker 2 (52:32):
Yeah, there we go.

Speaker 4 (52:33):
Well, but talking with you is delight.

Speaker 2 (52:35):
Yeah, but talking with you has been a delight to
listen to Noble Blood, listen to hoax exclamation and uh
yeah you know, keep listening to. Behind the Bastards will
be act next week with a guy who may or
may not be a Nazi but definitely sucked. Or maybe
a lady. Sometimes it's a lady, not often, but sometimes.

Speaker 1 (53:01):
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 2 (53:19):
Subscribe to our

Speaker 1 (53:19):
Channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind the Bastards