February 4, 2025 • 55 mins
As World War II drew to a close, multiple Nazi officials saw the writing on the wall: Germany would lose the war, and members of the Nazi party would have to answer for their crimes -- if, that is, they were caught. In a desperate bid to avoid justice, various factions of the SS and other Nazi officials created secret international escape routes called ratlines. Just how big was the operation? Tune in to learn more about the mysterious organization called ODESSA, and why it remains a subject of intrigue and controversy in the modern day.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow conspiracy realist. Have you ever been on the losing
side of a war? Yeah, this one's for the war criminals.
Have you ever needed a GTFO really quickly?
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Yeah? Have you?
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Please write to us. But by the way, this is
seriously we hope that's never happened to you. We hope
that you are not a war criminal. This episode, I
think stands out to both of us because it combines history,
it combines conspiracy, It combines crime not just on a
(00:38):
local but on an international scale. And in short, Matt,
we're talking about something called Odessa.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Yeah, we're going to get into it through the rat lines.
We're gonna find our way through paper clip. It's kind
of like paper clip. You'll remember that one. Do search
for that. If you don't remember it, let's just dive
in and see where we get to.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
A production of.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Nolan.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
They call me Ben. We are joined today with our
super producer role brillianty. Most importantly, you are you, You
are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want
you to know. Quick question at the top of the show.
Have you all ever had to make an escape? It
could be an escape from a party don't want to
(01:50):
be at, or a family function, an escape from a
social obligation, and escape from a country.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
I unsuccessfully participated in an escape room. Did not get
out in the lot time? Oh no, it was quite
a letdown. Did you get tortured?
Speaker 5 (02:03):
No?
Speaker 4 (02:03):
I blame one particular team member who shall go nameless,
who had the confidence of a general and the intelligence
of something much less than a general.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
And to be clear, I've heard this story and you
are not talking about yourself. No, okay, it's a different
what about you met?
Speaker 2 (02:20):
I was once at an extended in law's house far
away and one of the persons there was acting as
a bit of a bully, and then it escalated and
escalated throughout the course of an evening, and you perhaps,
(02:43):
and I packed up the things that I had unpacked
with my wife and we got the heck out of there.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Good. Yeah, good forget those people.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
It wasn't that crazy in hindsight, but it was certainly
uncomfortable in the moment.
Speaker 4 (02:58):
So, yeah, Ben, you're's talking getting kicked out of countries.
Have you ever had to make a mad, crazy getaway.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Yes, I've had several close calls over my time. Got
it one in Germany, two in Guatemala, one in Canada. Yeah,
a number once where I get to say, I had
to get out of a town in Guatemala after dark.
(03:24):
It was it was in the it was in the jungle.
It was strange. I was essentially racing to catch the
last charter bus that would pass through that area of
the of the country before dawn, so the next one
would come at dawn. But I was not in a
place where you would have want to stay overnight.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Gotcha using those diplomatic privileges wink.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
No, Well sure, sure, anyway, I made it here, right,
That's all that matters.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
There we go.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Today's episode does have something common thematically with this series
of escapes. We're talking about whether an escape room, whether
a weird living situation, whether you are whether you are
racing the darkness or the dawn. Today we are exploring
a strange secret story. It's one that begins, we say,
(04:21):
right around the close of World War two. But that's
not entirely accurate. This story begins before the end of
the actual war. It just the rubber hits the road
at the end. Wait war, what war are we talking about?
Here are the facts.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
That's why it's the Great War, the one that is
taught to children across the world. No matter where you
grow up, you will learn about this because it was
such an important few I mean really didn't even last
that long, but it was one of the most important
things that ever occurred in the history of humanity.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
It was the whole world and war with itself.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Yeah, for each other the second time, it's right, yeah,
And it took place from nineteen thirty nine to nineteen
forty five. World War two, of course, is what we're
speaking of. If you didn't get it through those means.
But here's the thing. I mean, that timeline isn't perfect, right,
because there are machinations that occur prior to that. There
are there's a lot of cleaning up essentially that occurs afterwards.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Well, there's a lot of setting up to socioeconomic positions
that are changed or in an unsustainable way. In the thirties, also,
there are a lot of banks evolved I'm going to
say it. I know it's a different episode, but it
would be naive to pretend that was not the case.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Certainly, and at least one major religious organization.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Yes, at least one. We know today that the opponents
in the war were collectively primarily referred to as the
Axis Powers and the Allied Powers. This is still the
deadliest conflict in recorded history, Matt. I like what you
pointed out about how that timeline actually seems thirty nine
(06:02):
to forty five, especially when the news just broke this
year this month. Actually that we're recording, they are US
soldiers in Afghanistan who were born after the current US
conflict in that part of the world began. There are
people who have grown up only knowing that war.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Yeah, or at least as the major defining war in
their lifetime or in their world. Right. Yeah, that is
that's very odd.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
It's still not the deadliest war and recorded history. That
dubious honor goes to World War Two. As you said, Matt,
most children learn about this war at some point in school.
Exactly what we learn depends on where we are raised.
We did an earlier episode on an episode or a
video I cannot remember on the insidious ways that textbooks
(06:54):
guide the reasoning of children, like if you read if
you read a textbook about World War two that's published
by a textbook company in Japan, it's going to be
very different from a book about World War two for
children that's published in Russia, or in China, or of
course in the US. But regardless of their disagreements, all
(07:17):
these textbooks agree on one central point, including the German textbooks,
mind you, and that is this The Nazi Party of
Germany were the bad guys. They were the ones every
textbook will tell you seeking global dominance, responsible for genocide,
human experimentation, all these other atrocities, a seemingly unending list
(07:39):
of war crimes. Nazi officials foresaw the close of the
war and the fall of the Axis powers before it
actually happened. They could see the writing on the wall,
you know what I mean.
Speaker 4 (07:50):
Yeah, they knew that they got caught, they would have
to answer for these crimes and be tried.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
You know, as you kind of listed off a few
of those things there have been These aren't things that
are you're going to get a lenient sentence for. They
were aware that the whole world essentially would be holding
them accountable for these things, and they would be either
in jail or put in front of a firing squad
or hanged if the end would come either very swiftly
(08:17):
or it would be an elongated process for perhaps decades.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
Yeah, the human species is not perfect. But what, thankfully,
one thing billions of people can agree on is that
if you try to kill billions of other people, something
bad should happen to you. Yes, you know, so go us,
go team.
Speaker 4 (08:38):
So understandably, these folks looked to plan their escape.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Yeah, anyway they possibly could get out of the countries
where they were, because we're not just talking about Nazis
in Germany. There were people in countries, you know, across
that area in Europe, and again if you looked at Japan,
people were trying to escape justice.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Yeah, yeah, and Italian fascists, members of that aspect of
the Axis powers.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Well, even on some of the Allied powers. There were
numerous Soviet higher echelon soldiers and military personnel that were
trying to get out because they feared what would occur
after the war. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
Yeah, can you imagine after the close of the war,
Nazi officials who were captured were tried in court during
a series of military tribunals known as the Nuremberg Trials.
The Nuremberg Trials are incredibly important for human history. They're
often depicted in works of fiction and films and so on,
(09:46):
and they set some crucial precedents. The first tribunal began
on November twentieth, nineteen forty five, and it was aiming
to try twenty four prominent members of Germany's Nazi parties.
These people were tried in absentia because they had not
been apprehended.
Speaker 4 (10:05):
There is that, Like, what an awkward proceeding that must
have been.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
It's weird. People are really people are into it. I
think they had to set the precedent. And then also
if they find the person guilty in absentia, the law
still apply. So anytime that person is found, who knows,
maybe the sentence can be carried out immediately. Probably not
something that medieval, but similar who.
Speaker 4 (10:30):
Do they yell at and shame in the room though?
Is they're like a proxy person that stands in for
the absent party.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
I don't know, because even when that one pope dragged
the carcass of his predecessor out and had a trial
for the dead guy. They at least needed that prop
you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Well, yeah, in any court, at least within the US,
if you don't have somebody to stand trial, then there
is no trial. So but in this it really is.
It was just a matter of needing to state, essentially,
this person is guilty of these things. It is known
now throughout the world that this guy did this.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
And these were the big fish of the party, not
all of them, but many of them were the drivers,
the builders, the architects of the horrible socioeconomic engine that
Germany had created, you know, the heads of economic policy,
military of course, the people who were in charge of
(11:30):
the concentration camps. The surviving members of the party worked
ardently to avoid justice. And it's interesting that today we're
talking about escape because the stakes were so high that
some people who could not well, I guess the best
way to say it is, some people found only one
route for physical escape, and they took it without hesitation.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
And of course you're talking about both Joseph Gerbels as
well as Adolf Hitler. And if you want to learn
more about these guys, they chose to take their own lives.
We did an episode called What happened to Hitler a
little while ago, and gosh, I think it's twenty seventeen maybe,
but you can learn about all of the theories surrounding
(12:15):
Hitler's death. Whether he actually.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Died then he's probably dead now either way.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Yes, but listen to that episode if you want to
learn more about that.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Figure out what people found, what people learned about the skull.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
And then you had folks like Heinrich Mueller who just
kind of vanished like Kaiser Susday style.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
So what happened? Where did they go? We'll tell you
after a word from our sponsors. Here's where it gets crazy.
So this was a rumor, This was a whisper for
a long time. What happened to these Nazi says? You said,
(12:57):
nol What happened to these ones who disappeared? Iserse style.
Over the decades since World War Two, declassified files have
proven the Nazis had an ongoing conspiracy, or it's better
to say, a nest of conspiracies, this cavalcade of secret
plans created to evade the consequences of their actions. This
(13:19):
is not well technically speaking, this is not a conspiracy
theory because it's not a theory. It really actually happened.
It is a genuine conspiracy.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
And it's really multi like you said, multiple conspiracies, multiple groups,
and multiple plans, and a lot of them were successful.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
Yeah, and there's overlap and some worked better than others. Right,
And to a degree, this conspiracy, this let's call it
an uber conspiracy since we're using German. Right, This uber
conspiracy or medic conspiracy remains unsolved. It all goes back
to something called ratlines. What is a rat line, you
(13:57):
may ask.
Speaker 4 (13:57):
Well, today the very escape networks, tunnels infrastructure used for
this purpose by the Nazis and fascists at the close
of the war are all collectively referred to as ratlines,
and they were essentially plans for individuals and groups to
vanish themselves, disappear themselves, leaving Germany for safe havens like
(14:19):
South America and also the.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
US shout out to Operation paper Clip.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Yeah. But yes, they also went other places, right, Yeah,
like Switzerland. Yeah. And there are even a couple of
rumors of areas in the Middle East where people were
secreted away to write Syria. Yeah. But just to jump
back to paper Clip again, we've done an episode on this.
This was the specifically the United States version of a
rat line to get Nazi scientists generally scientists, but there
(14:49):
are a few other characters in there to the United
States for our own gain, because the mines behind some
of the terrible things that occurred were or I don't
know how else better to put this there, they were
some innovative people that were doing things that were complicated,
(15:12):
and the United States saw strategic advantage to using those
minds for their own advantage.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
That is just it's absolutely it's it's absolutely brutal and
ruthless and machiavelian and true Nazi scientists are the reason
that human beings ended up on the Moon if you
think about it, And they're one of the reasons, right
because Operation paper Clip focused on taking thousands of German
(15:38):
scientists and engineers, particularly Werner von Braun.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Right, Yeah, that's the big name, right, who.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Had done so much work on V two rockets. If
you think about it, that that expertise that the US
took does lead maybe not directly, but does lead to
the rocket technology that the US later used is to
send people into space.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
In the least, it helped tremendously.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
At the very least, and I know it can be
seen as somewhat of a hot take to again say
the Nazis helped the US land people on the moon.
It sounds weird when you, you know, boil it down to
one sentence maybe former Nazis. Yeah, you know what, that's
way more diplomatic former Nazis.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
But again, I feel weird even saying that. It feels
like I'm downplaying it.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Well, we know that some members, especially in the scientific community,
some members of the Nazi Party were maybe members in
name because of internal political pressure, and they had to
do it to they say they had to do it
to survive. We also will never know the true story.
Speaker 6 (16:47):
Ben.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
You read a really great quote on a recent episode
of Ridiculous History where you said, nobody really cares about
anyone's motivation for being a Nazi. Whether you did it
on purpose or you know, were kind of strong armed
into it, You're still called a Nazi at the end
of the day. There's no like form or Nazi are
like Nazi and name only really right.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Well, the things you did, the physical acts, the ideas
that you created that you know, brought into this world
were for a means that was nefarious and did terrible
things to other people. Do you where there was a
rocket that was being shot to blow up soldiers from
you know, some other land.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Whether it's a punch card machine.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Yeah, like IBM, yeah, wow, Fanta, No, I'm just kidding this.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
I mean, this is an excellent point. Right. So the
reason Operation paper Clip happens without going into the full
episode we have on it that you can hear whenever
you wish available wherever you get your favorite shows. The
primary reason Operation paper Clip exists is because the US
boffins and eggheads and military leaders do a cost benefit analysis.
(17:59):
And before the end of World War Two, the beginnings
of the Cold War are already it's nascent, it's kicking
into gear, and the Soviet side and the US and
the West are already planning on how to become the
global hedgemon. Right, So Operation paper Clip was this cost
(18:20):
benefit analysis where US scientists and what did I say,
boffins and eggheads and military leaders, they know that these
these ideological orphans, right, these brilliant evil people because again
like Noel said, they are Nazis, knew that they would
(18:42):
be hunted around the world. But more importantly, the US
knew that if they did not spirit these folks away,
the Soviet machine would get them, and the Soviet government
did apprehend German scientists. I think the US only got
around sixteen hundred or so.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
But yeah, just sixteen hundred, yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
Right, just sixteen hundred of those top men. To quote
Indiana Jones, right, doesn't he say that the ender Raiders
of the Lost art things. Yeah, so we're going I'm
going a little in the weeds on Operation paper Clip.
It's just very important for everyone living in the US
(19:26):
to know that when you hear about ratlines, when you
hear about countries like Argentina help Brazil, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
when you hear about these countries helping war criminals disappear,
we have to realize this is very much a glass house.
Our country did the same thing, you know what I mean,
and did it with even less of a clandestine attitude,
(19:51):
more of an official stance. But okay, so what is
a rat line. Let's say, now, we're not going to
pick on super producer Lull because it's his first day
with this. So let's just pick someone no one can
hate and say they're a Nazi. Okay, So what if
like Tom Hanks is you know, he got caught up
(20:13):
he's a Nazi and he needs to escape Germany. It's
the fall of World War two. What kind of ratline
would he use? What would he? How would he? How
does it work?
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Well? So, there are several routes that could be taken,
like as far as locations that people are secreted through,
but we kind of have to talk about the functionality
of it. Right. The first thing you need to do
to get past a border, right, if you're going to
do that, is to have a false identity. And generally
that's how these things began, where you would have someone
(20:46):
somewhere that could get you false papers and prove that
you're someone else as you're leaving, and as you are
attempting to leave somewhere like Germany or Austria or wherever
you're heading out of, you would generally end up heading
from Germany to Spain and then eventually over to Argentina.
(21:07):
That's one way, or one of the major ways. The
other major way is from Germany to Italy Genoa in particular,
and also that's going through Rome. And by the way,
when you're going through Rome, you know who's helping out,
can you guess?
Speaker 5 (21:22):
No?
Speaker 2 (21:23):
The Old Vatican, because again that is an arm that
reaches very far and it has way too many fingers.
You'd think it only had five fingers, but that arm
just has like seventy five fingers.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
You know, I'm not gonna I am not a theologian.
I would say it does seem somewhat off brand, somewhat
un christ like to assist mass murders and to assist
war criminals.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
But yeah, there's a deeper connection there with the Vatican
and a lot of the happenings of World War Two
that we were probably not going to fully get into today,
but you can look that up if you wish. But anyway,
they would also end up somewhere in South America. That
that line that goes through Italy.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
And there's the four rat lines that depended on the
help of the Vatican of the Catholic Church. South America
makes sense, right because there is so much Catholic presence there.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
As well as the lack of extradition treaties in a
lot of those places.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
And I do want to say, I do want to say,
when we're saying the Vatican or we're saying the Catholic Church,
we're not talking about people who actually just practice Catholicism. No, no, no,
we're talking more about the political machine, yes, rather than
the spiritual idea. We do have etymology of ratline. It's
a nautical term which I did not know because it's
(22:52):
ratline sounds like something snarky that maybe someone in Western
intelligence made up.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
May I guess what it is? Yes, before it and
then tell me if I'm WRONGY go for it. I
always in my mind it's the small pathways that you'd
have to get down on all fours essentially within a
ship or something to access some of the other parts
of the ship that, like the that are inaccessible.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
I I like, okay, I like where your heads at this.
The original rat line was a sort of last resort passage.
It was a It was a rope, these small lengths
of cord that ran between the big ropes, the proper
(23:37):
ropes that fixed the top of a mast to the
sides of a vessel. So rat lines you could use
them because they were horizontal as these kind of makeshift ladders.
So if you absolutely had to get someone up the mast,
they would crawl up this rat line. And there's a
(23:59):
terrible image here, so they crawl up right, these these
makeshift little rope ladders. Scampering up the rat line was
something that desperate sailors would do when the ship was sinking,
and so the last thing to go under the surface
of the water is the mast, and so as the
(24:21):
water's rising, they're running up the rat line.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Okay, checks out, makes sense.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
And that's the people who missed out on the lifeboats.
So that's that's interesting though, because in that etymology, there
may be a deeper a deeper puzzle, right, certainly, and
we'll get to that just we'll get to that just
a second. But these roots that you're describing, the they
(24:51):
start independently, right. The thing is, there's not a great conspiracy.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Yeah, you'll have you'll have basically a leader in one
area that that generally has access to getting those kinds
of identity papers that we were kind of briefly mentioning
up up at the top there. If you can find
one person like that who has a few other associates
and then you can link up with that group, that
then becomes essentially a cell right of network, because then
(25:19):
those are popping up everywhere. But it doesn't necessarily mean
that that network is fully connected or communicating with each other.
You just have to find your node.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Yeah. Yeah, like a lot of a lot of dirty
things that state actors and governments do tend to be
less an official decision of the government as a whole
and more like a faction of people or community, a
wheel within the wheel. Right. So, according to historian Michael Fayer,
there were two alternate routes the ones you described at,
(25:51):
and they developed independently, but they eventually merged, likely as
the actors in these roots learned about one another and
they were able to help and assist each other. And
for years after the war, the concept of these escape routes,
these ratlines were, as we said earlier, rumors, whispers, They
were not officially confirmed. And you can see why because
(26:12):
at the close of World War Two, when US soldiers
have died, it would be terrible and very it would
be political suicide for members of the US government to say, Okay,
we won the war. We're doing our best to bring
justice to people, except for the scientists. You guys, there's
(26:37):
one dude who's just great at rockets, and we have
to have them. We're sorry that your children have died,
but we really want to get to the moon. You
can't say that stuff. You know what I mean said, well, yeah,
but I'm not not the president after World War Two.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
It's not a great when you said it. It's not
very authoritative, guys, hear us out listen here, Wow, let's
take a beat.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
That's I mean, it's true though, if you think about
like who could who on earth would go public with that?
So of course this was considered a wild tinfoil hat conspiracy,
you know what I mean? And people who if someone
told you in the nineteen sixties, hey, I think the
US government is abducting scientists, right, or I think that
(27:29):
the Pope is abducting Nazis and helping them live a
new life in Argentina. Then if someone told you that,
you probably think, wow, this guy is on LSD. And
I've never never see some one tripping like that's the.
Speaker 4 (27:43):
Plot of a movie that exists, like a scientists are disappearing.
They're all being spirited away to a secret underground lab
to do evil research under duress.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Yeah, it sounds like Watchmen. It sounds like a whole
bunch of different things.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Yeah, the odessify there you go, similar to right, because
even today, like even today, now that this stuff is confirmed,
there are historians and researchers, not necessarily fringe historians nor
fringe researchers who believe that there's still something nefarious, that
(28:18):
there is still more we need to learn about this.
And one of the largest controversies in the story of
Nazi ratlines is something called Odessa. What is that you ask,
We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor.
Speaker 4 (28:40):
So according to author Nazi hunter and Holocaust survivor Simon Wisenthal,
Odessa or the Organization de Ermaligan SS ange Hourigan, was
founded in nineteen forty six, one year after the close
of the war. Odessa Odessa is the US code name
(29:03):
for the operation, and according to Guy Walter, as a historian,
US intelligence first became aware of this term when members
of the SS and thekzy Bensheim auerbach In tournament camp
used it in conversation while attempting to gain special favors
or privileges from the Red Cross.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
So they would be The way this story goes is
that these SS members would be trying to maybe get
in communication with someone outside of where they were being held,
you know, get maybe some cash, may maybe even try
to see if they could get in touch with someone
who could get them a passport, and from what we
(29:46):
could tell, the conversation something like could you send this
letter to my friend blah blah blah, and then say no, sorry,
I can't can't send letters and they go, oh, but
it's care of vote DESA exactly. So the first mention
of it from the Allied side shows up in this
(30:08):
memo from American intelligence and that's on July third, nineteen
forty six. So what was ODESSA like? What we know
that these smaller roots or these these more discreete organizations
and ratlines, we already know that they exist. What's the
(30:28):
difference with Simon Weisenthal's Odessa?
Speaker 2 (30:32):
So this author Weisenthal, he believed that Odessa was this
big organization. I would kind of liken it to something
like al Qaeda similar to that, like it's one big
thing that was functioning together, right, and it was mostly
made up of veterans of the SS. And not only
(30:53):
were these did this group Odessa, not only did they
get them out of Germany initially with passports like we
were talking about, but they would also assist these people
in setting up new lives in new countries such as
Argentina or Brazil or wherever they were going to end
up in South America, a couple of times in the
Middle East in places like Syria. But there is one
(31:15):
major issue with this. Not everybody believes the same thing
that Wisenthal.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
Believes, right, That's the thing. Multiple other historians say Odessa
as as he has described, never actually existed. Again, That's
that's strange. No one is denying that the rat lines
really did exist. And yes, everyone knows that some Nazi
officials did successfully use these roots to escape, as well
(31:43):
as some members of fascist parties and so on. But
there's a complication to this narrative. Years before Simon Weisenthal
of Issathal went public with his claims about Odessa, the
government of Austria had already been investigating the idea. It's
sort of it's it's like, if you're familiar with James Bond,
(32:04):
the World's Worst Superspy, it's sort of like the concept
of specter. Remember this uh specter in the Bond films,
is this global evil organization.
Speaker 4 (32:17):
Every spy franchise as one, yeah and gets smart. I
think it was chaos And all of them are acronyms
that nobody remembers that.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
They stand for. But they're generally like this quasi governmental
private organization, right that the aunctions outside of any government or.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
Yeah, and just has like a way cooler name than
an actual government entity would ever have. It's like Scorpio, Chaos.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Spect the Octo Quad, the Octo Quad.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
I would, yeah, I would join the Octo Quad.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
But why is it octo because the symbol is like
a weird eight and four together.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
Take a roun. No, it's it's four octas.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
It's a quad of octas. Okay, okay, so it's it's
twenty four.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
Excuse me, send us your design for octo quad and
teach us how to do math. So that's but it's true.
Like so the argument then is that Odessa is a
real life version of this evil super spy Bond esque thing.
(33:23):
And also Simon Weisenthal. In the fall of World War Two,
he did not get along with West German military intelligence.
They butted heads all the time. That doesn't mean that
his claims are untrue, and it doesn't, you know. All
it means is that there's a wrinkle here, and it
(33:44):
could people claiming that Odessa is not real could be
seeking to discredit the Weisenthal Weisenthal organization. Or it could
also mean maybe.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
In his.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
In his search to find these aped war criminals, that
Bisenthal started drawing connections in his own head where none existed,
you know what I.
Speaker 4 (34:07):
Mean absolutely, I mean we all know that that's some
of what gives conspiracy theory circles a bad rap. Sometimes
it's easy to do foregone conclusions or sort of work
backwards and like sort of have a preconceived notion of
what something is when it maybe isn't actually that at all.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
Yeah, and again, the thing is, so he was definitely
right about the smuggling operations, the rat lines. Yeah, and
we found proven ones, right.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
Yeah, we did. We found a whole bunch of proved ones.
And I just want to add on to what you're
saying there, Guys, it feels like, and this is complete
speculation on my part, that if Odessa really was a
thing and it was kept you know, secret enough to
where we are still in twenty nineteen, you know, postulating
(34:55):
whether or not it could be real, it feels like
it could have had ad integration somehow with one or
more intelligence communities or agencies throughout the world. And what
intrigues me is that the CIA was involved in several
of these, you know, secreting away of Nazis along with
(35:17):
paper clip, you know what was occurring with paper clip,
but in other instances as well, to get essentially s
S officials and high level targets to then flip them
and become informants, not only to find other SS you know, escapees,
but also to inform them on strategy and other things.
(35:38):
Very tricky. So it's we're gonna, We're gonna continue down
here because we know several of these names, people that
escaped and people who were involved in things like this.
But it just does make me feel like if Odessa
was real, perhaps there was a higher involvement with some
other powerful intelligence agency.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Right, some sort of institution capable of not only moving
people across the world, but also cleaning up after themselves
such that they could they could sweep up the trace. Right.
We also, okay, we have to say it. We already
(36:24):
mentioned this, but we have to say it. The Vatican
did it. That's the institution that has the power and
the reach to move people across I'm not being an
anti papist or whatever, and I'm not saying anything bad
about the spiritual beliefs of anybody who ascribes to Christianity
or Catholicism. But the machine, the machine that runs that
(36:50):
organization on an earthly level, is more than capable of
creating these sort of I know it sounds very Dan Brown, right,
but they're more than capable of enacting this sort of
this sort of process, and in a very real way,
(37:10):
the Catholic Church at this time was, you know, hand
in hand with the ostensible governing powers of some developing countries, right,
and in some cases not all, not all. And again
it's very it's very easy, I think, to connect dots
where none exists. But it is true that in some
(37:32):
cases the Catholic Church had so much influence over a
country or parts of a country, that it was effectively
the government.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
Yeah wow, Okay, well, I don't even know to say
following that, I just want to let you soapbox for
a while.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
Because I'm sorry, thanks for coming to my ted talk.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Well, no, because Wend we've found this to be true.
I mean, if you look at somebody like, uh, Dragonov,
I don't know how to precisely pronounce the name there,
but this is a person who would get false identity
papers like we were kind of mentioning before he would
get them from the let's see this an unidentified person,
(38:15):
an American who was serving at the Eligibility office of
the International Refugee Organization in Rome. Okay, so you've got
a person working with an office in Rome to get
some papers, right. That only apparently that only happened for
a short time because things fell through with all of that.
(38:37):
But then he ended up working with another organization, the
National Catholic Welfare Organization, and as well as the Italian
police in the Italian Foreign Office, and that was again
to obtain false documentation for Nazis that were attempting to escape.
He would get false exit and entry visas for at
(38:58):
least three South American countries, the Argentina that we talked about, Bolivia,
even Chili and again and a lot of times. It's
not known precisely how these documents are obtained, but it
is known that there were just bribes that were going
on with maybe an individual diplomat or somebody who could
(39:18):
have access to those. And it's not necessarily known the
full let's say, compliance of any of these larger organizations
that I've mentioned up here, but someone at a higher
level or a high enough level to actually create and
get these documents. Was involved because you say these weren't
counterfeit documents.
Speaker 4 (39:37):
These were official documents.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Yes, and with names with brand new names.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Right, Yeah, that's the thing. It's it's like, at what
point is something of forgery, you know, and at what
point is it real? So, because we're an audio podcast, Matt,
you just held your hands the kind of the old
six in one hand, hal, yeah, and another it's true.
And we have to also remember if we're being if
we're being completely objective, we have to remember in this situation,
(40:05):
with an organization the size of the Vatican or the
Catholic Church, it is laughably unlikely that everyone knew this
was happening. Again, these are factions, right this Dragonovic in
what Croatia, right in the Nazi puppet state of Croatia
at the time.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
It's a Krunslav. Sorry I didn't say that.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
Earlier, Oh first name, Yes, yeah, And we also have
to note that the Red Cross was another institution not
near as big nor as powerful as a Catholic Church,
but they also effectively helped war criminals escape.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
In the did I did I mention that Dragonovic was
a Catholic priest, He was yet I don't. I don't
think Yeah, I am so sorry. I totally bury the
lead there. That was the whole point. It was it
was a priest doing all of that work, obtaining all
of these papers. Yeah, sorry, Croatian Roman priest.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
Yes, yeah, yeah he was, Yeah, Kronos Draganovic. He was
working in Croatia and was assisting Croatian fascists like sympathizers
to the Nazi Party. Members of the Nazi Party working
in Croatia, which at that point was a vassal of
(41:21):
larger Germany. The Red Cross, though, the big question with
them is whether they whether they aided in embedded war
criminals on purpose or just through the sheer, the sheer
weight of incompetence, the sheer inertia of ineptitude, because they
were overwhelmed with refugees. How easy is it if you're one,
(41:47):
even as many as fifteen people, How easy is it
for you to slip through with hundreds of thousands? And
you know, imagine your job is every day, eight hours
a day, you sit at the at the front of
a never ending line. People hand you papers. It may
or may not speak a language you understand. You have
(42:09):
three to five seconds to look at the paper and
stamp it. I'm spitballing here.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
I know, no, this is I totally see this working,
especially if you're talking about between nineteen forty five nineteen
forty eight. Maybe if you show up to a refugee
servicing area like that or processing location and you don't
have official papers with you because whatever the excuses they
(42:35):
you know where my country's literally at war. I don't
have my papers with me. I'm trying to escape, right,
How how do you prove the identity of somebody?
Speaker 1 (42:44):
So the Red Cross had previously mentioned this that they said, yes,
some Nazi war criminals or Axis criminals had escaped through
the refugee process. But oddly enough, when I went back
to look at the page on the Red Cross website
where they mentioned it, it's been pulled. Yeah, maybe it's
(43:07):
just an olderlink. I'm sure. I'm sure we can find
the source out there. But they that's their argument, is
that the system was overwhelmed. No one was doing anything
on purpose, but their process was supposed to have the
equivalent of a background check from the Allied military. But
(43:29):
it was pretty it was pretty cursory, and they often
in the Red Cross relied on references from the Vatican
that could easily be duped up or fixed. And these
travel papers that people would get they were called ten
one hundreds or one zero dot one hundred, and they
(43:51):
were very easy to get because when you're trying to
process millions venicson people who have had their lives destroyed,
you know, you want to make the process as quick
as possible.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
Right, Yeah, and you have to, I mean for safety,
for health reasons. You can't just leave people in limbo
like that.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
So with Dragonovic, he is functioning as an agent in
this chaotic time. He had what'd you say he had?
He had set up travel to three different South American.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Yeah, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile.
Speaker 1 (44:30):
So we know that he had some kind of pull
what did they call it on the wire suction maybe
it was, Yeah, I think it was in the.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
A lot of suction.
Speaker 1 (44:40):
Yeah, they had some kind of you know, juice or
whatever Dragonovic did. And this rat line was abandoned or
disbanded would be a better word than what the fifties.
Speaker 4 (44:53):
Yeah, it was disbanded in nineteen fifty one and equated
some sources, it was because they were just done with it.
They'd gotten everyone out that they wanted to get out,
they were able to shut it.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
Down, so they succeeded essentially.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:03):
Yeah, and this leads us to this leads us to
one of the great mysteries of World War Two, one
of the real and genuine conspiracies. What happened to the
ones that got away? You can find a plethora of ideas.
I'm using that word correctly. Yep, you can find a
(45:24):
plethora of ideas about this, but some are more plausible
than others. In the Dragonovic case, we know that he
assisted Klaus Barbie in escaping. This person has never been caught.
Speaker 2 (45:40):
Yeah, Klaus ended up getting to Bolivia, at least that's
what's believed. It's also believe that the United States ended
up helping him get there along with Dragonovic. Was Barbie
was actually captured in eighty three and then we found
out that he died in nineteen ninety one. Uh and
(46:01):
we found out because he was in prison in France.
Speaker 1 (46:05):
There we go. Yeah, So some of these people just
got away for a time.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
Oh a lot. That's a That is the one of
the main stories of a lot of these guys. They
end up getting identified much later in life. Several of
them end up in trial for you know, in various
ways they end up in trial because they end up
in a prison somewhere else, or they get used for
a time as in Oh, who, which which guy is this?
Let me jump back over here. I believe it's ALOI Brunner. Yes,
(46:35):
I think Eloy Brunner. He is a guy who ended
up in Syria and he was actually assisting the prior
to Bashar al Assade, Bashar's father. He was assisting that
regime in military tactics, allegedly in developing something called the
German chair, which was a torture device that would break
(46:58):
someone's back when they were when it was a applied
to them. He was like essentially century modern furniture. No,
you know, I mean real torture. This guy was developing
real torture while in Syria, and he was living a
fairly comfortable life early on when he got there. I
think it's sometime in the fifties when he ended up
(47:18):
in Syria, and he he's described as a card in
the hand of a regime. Right, So, like we were
talking about with the United States seeing strategic power and
having these scientists, this guy was seen as a military
strategist or a at least someone who could help them
with their means to or in their ways to achieve
(47:42):
greater power.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
Right under the name George Fisher. Yes, he helped. He
helped organize the this is let's see, it's important, but
it's weird to explain. He helped organize the compartmentalization of
the intelligences, and I think he trained some of the
regime's top intelligence people. The big thing he was teaching
(48:06):
them was that if you truly want to be in charge,
you compartmentalized information. You don't want your left hand knowing
what your right hand is doing because one day you
may have to clap them against one another.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
Essentially, yeah, and only you and a very small group
of people will know.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
Anyway, here's this chair I made. It breaks people's backs.
Speaker 2 (48:25):
Yeah, it's really messed up and it's a crazy story.
You can read more about it at the Irish Times
dot com. That's where we found an article called Nazi
war criminal reportedly died in a Syrian dungeon. And again
the name is A L.
Speaker 1 (48:37):
O I.
Speaker 2 (48:38):
S B R U N N E R.
Speaker 1 (48:40):
And then there are others such as Adolph Eichmann, Joseph Mengele.
There's one in particular one a touch on. This guy's
name is or was Heinrich Mueller is the last chief
of the Gestapo. His fate after World War Two. According
to the Jewish Virtual Libraries account, Mueller got away or
(49:04):
was thought to have gotten away for decades and decades.
They thought he had just slipped the net, and no
one could find him after multiple investigations. However, the official
story is that in October twenty thirteen, evidence surface that
he had been buried in a mass grave in Berlin
at the close of the war in forty five. However,
(49:30):
that's this research still remains for some people a little
I don't know, arguable, Like just like we've talked about
with deaths of I hate to say it, the deaths
of other historically notable, infamous or famous people. The story
doesn't die when the person does. Like there are people
(49:52):
alive now who think Elvis Presley is somehow alive. And
Elvis Presley was a celebrity and a musician who did
briefly work with US law enforcement or attempt to.
Speaker 5 (50:03):
But he was well being Asian man exactly talking and
but but these are war criminals, and we will never
know the fate of some of them.
Speaker 1 (50:17):
That's why for decades, and that's why for decades after
the war, you know, since before many of us were
born listening today, there were people who just hunted these
folks down. And the list doesn't stop there. We have
a lot of like allegedly or is believed tos or
is suspected tos in these people's stories. We know, we
(50:41):
know stories of Nazis where you can follow the line
maybe to an extradition country, right, and then they disappear
and there's a few years later a report of like
an elderly an elderly German retiree expiring quietly in a
(51:02):
small town.
Speaker 2 (51:03):
And then somess found in the attic or something. But
there are also a lot of these people who end
up in a tribunal or a court when they are
in their eighties because they get found out living in
America somewhere, or living in France even sometimes, or in Argentina, Belivia,
wherever it's gonna be. There's so many story of this,
stories about this and of people going through this and
(51:27):
finally seeing justice because they're I mean, it's alleged like
somewhere between, I don't know, the exact number, and we
can't really ever know the exact number, but thousands of
SS and German soldiers military made it out alive. We
just don't know exactly how many that is. I've seen
(51:47):
it alleged up to ten thousand, I think perhaps even more,
just through the alleged Odessa program exactly.
Speaker 1 (51:56):
And there we have to leave it at this point. Still,
it's twenty nineteen, and people will tell you Odessa was
or was not real, right, we have to ask ourselves
about the degree of sophistication, the degree of collaboration that
these rat lines employed. While they may have not been
(52:18):
members of some elaborate global secret society, those clandestine escape
routes were real, and more often than some would like
to admit, these routes were also successful. Is this something
that could happen in twenty nineteen, in these our modern days.
(52:38):
It could. It would have to be different, though, because
surveillance technology has just evolved, right.
Speaker 2 (52:44):
It would have to be more of a low level
human trafficking kind of situation, I think, where you're not
actually going to use real papers. Well maybe that's not true,
Maybe that's maybe that's not true at all.
Speaker 1 (52:58):
So there's an interesting. There's an interesting dilemma here because
although there have been so many technological breakthroughs that allow
people to be closely observed, more closely than ever before
at any point in history, the control of those technologies
is also increasingly in the hand of a smaller and
(53:19):
smaller and smaller subset of human individuals and institutions. So
it's like there's more water coming out of the faucet,
but there are fewer people capable of turning the knobs.
And what that means is that if this is entirely hypothetical,
I'm not describing a real thing. What that means in
(53:40):
theory is that if our super producer Lull needed to
disappear for some reason and had the assistance of Uncle
Sam in doing so, then the Alphabet agencies could simply
erase his digital footprint. It's it's fascinating. It's something we
(54:02):
don't really have an answer for. Again, that's entirely speculative,
but it is possible.
Speaker 2 (54:07):
Agreed, And I I don't want to talk about Nazis
anymore today? Can we? Can we stop talking about Nazis?
Speaker 1 (54:14):
Yes, I'm right there with you.
Speaker 2 (54:17):
Do you want to talk about Nazis?
Speaker 6 (54:19):
No?
Speaker 2 (54:19):
No, I mean you do you want to talk about Nazis.
Speaker 4 (54:23):
But you do tune into our nude podcast, Nazi Talk, Yes,
coming out soon on the iHeart Radio podcast.
Speaker 1 (54:29):
Did you call it our nude podcast?
Speaker 2 (54:30):
That's what I heard too.
Speaker 1 (54:31):
Yes, you do it in the nude Yes, and that's
our classic episode for this evening. We can't wait to
hear your thoughts. That's right. Let us know what you think.
Speaker 2 (54:42):
You can reach.
Speaker 4 (54:42):
You to the handle Conspiracy Stuff where we exist on
Facebook X and YouTube on Instagram and TikTok or Conspiracy
Stuff Show.
Speaker 2 (54:50):
If you want to call us dial one eight three
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You've got three minutes. Give yourself a cool nickname and
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then can fit in that voicemail. Why not instead send
us a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 6 (55:07):
We are the entities that read every single piece of
correspondence we receive.
Speaker 1 (55:12):
Be aware, yet not afraid.
Speaker 6 (55:14):
Sometimes the void writes back conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (55:37):
Stuff they Don't want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Fellow conspiracy realist. Have you ever been on the losing
side of a war? Yeah, this one's for the war criminals.
Have you ever needed a GTFO really quickly?
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Yeah? Have you?
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Please write to us. But by the way, this is
seriously we hope that's never happened to you. We hope
that you are not a war criminal. This episode, I
think stands out to both of us because it combines history,
it combines conspiracy, It combines crime not just on a
(00:38):
local but on an international scale. And in short, Matt,
we're talking about something called Odessa.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Yeah, we're going to get into it through the rat lines.
We're gonna find our way through paper clip. It's kind
of like paper clip. You'll remember that one. Do search
for that. If you don't remember it, let's just dive
in and see where we get to.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
A production of.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Nolan.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
They call me Ben. We are joined today with our
super producer role brillianty. Most importantly, you are you, You
are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want
you to know. Quick question at the top of the show.
Have you all ever had to make an escape? It
could be an escape from a party don't want to
(01:50):
be at, or a family function, an escape from a
social obligation, and escape from a country.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
I unsuccessfully participated in an escape room. Did not get
out in the lot time? Oh no, it was quite
a letdown. Did you get tortured?
Speaker 5 (02:03):
No?
Speaker 4 (02:03):
I blame one particular team member who shall go nameless,
who had the confidence of a general and the intelligence
of something much less than a general.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
And to be clear, I've heard this story and you
are not talking about yourself. No, okay, it's a different
what about you met?
Speaker 2 (02:20):
I was once at an extended in law's house far
away and one of the persons there was acting as
a bit of a bully, and then it escalated and
escalated throughout the course of an evening, and you perhaps,
(02:43):
and I packed up the things that I had unpacked
with my wife and we got the heck out of there.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Good. Yeah, good forget those people.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
It wasn't that crazy in hindsight, but it was certainly
uncomfortable in the moment.
Speaker 4 (02:58):
So, yeah, Ben, you're's talking getting kicked out of countries.
Have you ever had to make a mad, crazy getaway.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Yes, I've had several close calls over my time. Got
it one in Germany, two in Guatemala, one in Canada. Yeah,
a number once where I get to say, I had
to get out of a town in Guatemala after dark.
(03:24):
It was it was in the it was in the jungle.
It was strange. I was essentially racing to catch the
last charter bus that would pass through that area of
the of the country before dawn, so the next one
would come at dawn. But I was not in a
place where you would have want to stay overnight.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Gotcha using those diplomatic privileges wink.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
No, Well sure, sure, anyway, I made it here, right,
That's all that matters.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
There we go.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Today's episode does have something common thematically with this series
of escapes. We're talking about whether an escape room, whether
a weird living situation, whether you are whether you are
racing the darkness or the dawn. Today we are exploring
a strange secret story. It's one that begins, we say,
(04:21):
right around the close of World War two. But that's
not entirely accurate. This story begins before the end of
the actual war. It just the rubber hits the road
at the end. Wait war, what war are we talking about?
Here are the facts.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
That's why it's the Great War, the one that is
taught to children across the world. No matter where you
grow up, you will learn about this because it was
such an important few I mean really didn't even last
that long, but it was one of the most important
things that ever occurred in the history of humanity.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
It was the whole world and war with itself.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Yeah, for each other the second time, it's right, yeah,
And it took place from nineteen thirty nine to nineteen
forty five. World War two, of course, is what we're
speaking of. If you didn't get it through those means.
But here's the thing. I mean, that timeline isn't perfect, right,
because there are machinations that occur prior to that. There
are there's a lot of cleaning up essentially that occurs afterwards.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Well, there's a lot of setting up to socioeconomic positions
that are changed or in an unsustainable way. In the thirties, also,
there are a lot of banks evolved I'm going to
say it. I know it's a different episode, but it
would be naive to pretend that was not the case.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Certainly, and at least one major religious organization.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Yes, at least one. We know today that the opponents
in the war were collectively primarily referred to as the
Axis Powers and the Allied Powers. This is still the
deadliest conflict in recorded history, Matt. I like what you
pointed out about how that timeline actually seems thirty nine
(06:02):
to forty five, especially when the news just broke this
year this month. Actually that we're recording, they are US
soldiers in Afghanistan who were born after the current US
conflict in that part of the world began. There are
people who have grown up only knowing that war.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Yeah, or at least as the major defining war in
their lifetime or in their world. Right. Yeah, that is
that's very odd.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
It's still not the deadliest war and recorded history. That
dubious honor goes to World War Two. As you said, Matt,
most children learn about this war at some point in school.
Exactly what we learn depends on where we are raised.
We did an earlier episode on an episode or a
video I cannot remember on the insidious ways that textbooks
(06:54):
guide the reasoning of children, like if you read if
you read a textbook about World War two that's published
by a textbook company in Japan, it's going to be
very different from a book about World War two for
children that's published in Russia, or in China, or of
course in the US. But regardless of their disagreements, all
(07:17):
these textbooks agree on one central point, including the German textbooks,
mind you, and that is this The Nazi Party of
Germany were the bad guys. They were the ones every
textbook will tell you seeking global dominance, responsible for genocide,
human experimentation, all these other atrocities, a seemingly unending list
(07:39):
of war crimes. Nazi officials foresaw the close of the
war and the fall of the Axis powers before it
actually happened. They could see the writing on the wall,
you know what I mean.
Speaker 4 (07:50):
Yeah, they knew that they got caught, they would have
to answer for these crimes and be tried.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
You know, as you kind of listed off a few
of those things there have been These aren't things that
are you're going to get a lenient sentence for. They
were aware that the whole world essentially would be holding
them accountable for these things, and they would be either
in jail or put in front of a firing squad
or hanged if the end would come either very swiftly
(08:17):
or it would be an elongated process for perhaps decades.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
Yeah, the human species is not perfect. But what, thankfully,
one thing billions of people can agree on is that
if you try to kill billions of other people, something
bad should happen to you. Yes, you know, so go us,
go team.
Speaker 4 (08:38):
So understandably, these folks looked to plan their escape.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Yeah, anyway they possibly could get out of the countries
where they were, because we're not just talking about Nazis
in Germany. There were people in countries, you know, across
that area in Europe, and again if you looked at Japan,
people were trying to escape justice.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Yeah, yeah, and Italian fascists, members of that aspect of
the Axis powers.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Well, even on some of the Allied powers. There were
numerous Soviet higher echelon soldiers and military personnel that were
trying to get out because they feared what would occur
after the war. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
Yeah, can you imagine after the close of the war,
Nazi officials who were captured were tried in court during
a series of military tribunals known as the Nuremberg Trials.
The Nuremberg Trials are incredibly important for human history. They're
often depicted in works of fiction and films and so on,
(09:46):
and they set some crucial precedents. The first tribunal began
on November twentieth, nineteen forty five, and it was aiming
to try twenty four prominent members of Germany's Nazi parties.
These people were tried in absentia because they had not
been apprehended.
Speaker 4 (10:05):
There is that, Like, what an awkward proceeding that must
have been.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
It's weird. People are really people are into it. I
think they had to set the precedent. And then also
if they find the person guilty in absentia, the law
still apply. So anytime that person is found, who knows,
maybe the sentence can be carried out immediately. Probably not
something that medieval, but similar who.
Speaker 4 (10:30):
Do they yell at and shame in the room though?
Is they're like a proxy person that stands in for
the absent party.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
I don't know, because even when that one pope dragged
the carcass of his predecessor out and had a trial
for the dead guy. They at least needed that prop
you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Well, yeah, in any court, at least within the US,
if you don't have somebody to stand trial, then there
is no trial. So but in this it really is.
It was just a matter of needing to state, essentially,
this person is guilty of these things. It is known
now throughout the world that this guy did this.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
And these were the big fish of the party, not
all of them, but many of them were the drivers,
the builders, the architects of the horrible socioeconomic engine that
Germany had created, you know, the heads of economic policy,
military of course, the people who were in charge of
(11:30):
the concentration camps. The surviving members of the party worked
ardently to avoid justice. And it's interesting that today we're
talking about escape because the stakes were so high that
some people who could not well, I guess the best
way to say it is, some people found only one
route for physical escape, and they took it without hesitation.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
And of course you're talking about both Joseph Gerbels as
well as Adolf Hitler. And if you want to learn
more about these guys, they chose to take their own lives.
We did an episode called What happened to Hitler a
little while ago, and gosh, I think it's twenty seventeen maybe,
but you can learn about all of the theories surrounding
(12:15):
Hitler's death. Whether he actually.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Died then he's probably dead now either way.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
Yes, but listen to that episode if you want to
learn more about that.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Figure out what people found, what people learned about the skull.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
And then you had folks like Heinrich Mueller who just
kind of vanished like Kaiser Susday style.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
So what happened? Where did they go? We'll tell you
after a word from our sponsors. Here's where it gets crazy.
So this was a rumor, This was a whisper for
a long time. What happened to these Nazi says? You said,
(12:57):
nol What happened to these ones who disappeared? Iserse style.
Over the decades since World War Two, declassified files have
proven the Nazis had an ongoing conspiracy, or it's better
to say, a nest of conspiracies, this cavalcade of secret
plans created to evade the consequences of their actions. This
(13:19):
is not well technically speaking, this is not a conspiracy
theory because it's not a theory. It really actually happened.
It is a genuine conspiracy.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
And it's really multi like you said, multiple conspiracies, multiple groups,
and multiple plans, and a lot of them were successful.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
Yeah, and there's overlap and some worked better than others. Right,
And to a degree, this conspiracy, this let's call it
an uber conspiracy since we're using German. Right, This uber
conspiracy or medic conspiracy remains unsolved. It all goes back
to something called ratlines. What is a rat line, you
(13:57):
may ask.
Speaker 4 (13:57):
Well, today the very escape networks, tunnels infrastructure used for
this purpose by the Nazis and fascists at the close
of the war are all collectively referred to as ratlines,
and they were essentially plans for individuals and groups to
vanish themselves, disappear themselves, leaving Germany for safe havens like
(14:19):
South America and also the.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
US shout out to Operation paper Clip.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Yeah. But yes, they also went other places, right, Yeah,
like Switzerland. Yeah. And there are even a couple of
rumors of areas in the Middle East where people were
secreted away to write Syria. Yeah. But just to jump
back to paper Clip again, we've done an episode on this.
This was the specifically the United States version of a
rat line to get Nazi scientists generally scientists, but there
(14:49):
are a few other characters in there to the United
States for our own gain, because the mines behind some
of the terrible things that occurred were or I don't
know how else better to put this there, they were
some innovative people that were doing things that were complicated,
(15:12):
and the United States saw strategic advantage to using those
minds for their own advantage.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
That is just it's absolutely it's it's absolutely brutal and
ruthless and machiavelian and true Nazi scientists are the reason
that human beings ended up on the Moon if you
think about it, And they're one of the reasons, right
because Operation paper Clip focused on taking thousands of German
(15:38):
scientists and engineers, particularly Werner von Braun.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Right, Yeah, that's the big name, right, who.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Had done so much work on V two rockets. If
you think about it, that that expertise that the US
took does lead maybe not directly, but does lead to
the rocket technology that the US later used is to
send people into space.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
In the least, it helped tremendously.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
At the very least, and I know it can be
seen as somewhat of a hot take to again say
the Nazis helped the US land people on the moon.
It sounds weird when you, you know, boil it down to
one sentence maybe former Nazis. Yeah, you know what, that's
way more diplomatic former Nazis.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
But again, I feel weird even saying that. It feels
like I'm downplaying it.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Well, we know that some members, especially in the scientific community,
some members of the Nazi Party were maybe members in
name because of internal political pressure, and they had to
do it to they say they had to do it
to survive. We also will never know the true story.
Speaker 6 (16:47):
Ben.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
You read a really great quote on a recent episode
of Ridiculous History where you said, nobody really cares about
anyone's motivation for being a Nazi. Whether you did it
on purpose or you know, were kind of strong armed
into it, You're still called a Nazi at the end
of the day. There's no like form or Nazi are
like Nazi and name only really right.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Well, the things you did, the physical acts, the ideas
that you created that you know, brought into this world
were for a means that was nefarious and did terrible
things to other people. Do you where there was a
rocket that was being shot to blow up soldiers from
you know, some other land.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Whether it's a punch card machine.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Yeah, like IBM, yeah, wow, Fanta, No, I'm just kidding this.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
I mean, this is an excellent point. Right. So the
reason Operation paper Clip happens without going into the full
episode we have on it that you can hear whenever
you wish available wherever you get your favorite shows. The
primary reason Operation paper Clip exists is because the US
boffins and eggheads and military leaders do a cost benefit analysis.
(17:59):
And before the end of World War Two, the beginnings
of the Cold War are already it's nascent, it's kicking
into gear, and the Soviet side and the US and
the West are already planning on how to become the
global hedgemon. Right, So Operation paper Clip was this cost
(18:20):
benefit analysis where US scientists and what did I say,
boffins and eggheads and military leaders, they know that these
these ideological orphans, right, these brilliant evil people because again
like Noel said, they are Nazis, knew that they would
(18:42):
be hunted around the world. But more importantly, the US
knew that if they did not spirit these folks away,
the Soviet machine would get them, and the Soviet government
did apprehend German scientists. I think the US only got
around sixteen hundred or so.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
But yeah, just sixteen hundred, yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
Right, just sixteen hundred of those top men. To quote
Indiana Jones, right, doesn't he say that the ender Raiders
of the Lost art things. Yeah, so we're going I'm
going a little in the weeds on Operation paper Clip.
It's just very important for everyone living in the US
(19:26):
to know that when you hear about ratlines, when you
hear about countries like Argentina help Brazil, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
when you hear about these countries helping war criminals disappear,
we have to realize this is very much a glass house.
Our country did the same thing, you know what I mean,
and did it with even less of a clandestine attitude,
(19:51):
more of an official stance. But okay, so what is
a rat line. Let's say, now, we're not going to
pick on super producer Lull because it's his first day
with this. So let's just pick someone no one can
hate and say they're a Nazi. Okay, So what if
like Tom Hanks is you know, he got caught up
(20:13):
he's a Nazi and he needs to escape Germany. It's
the fall of World War two. What kind of ratline
would he use? What would he? How would he? How
does it work?
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Well? So, there are several routes that could be taken,
like as far as locations that people are secreted through,
but we kind of have to talk about the functionality
of it. Right. The first thing you need to do
to get past a border, right, if you're going to
do that, is to have a false identity. And generally
that's how these things began, where you would have someone
(20:46):
somewhere that could get you false papers and prove that
you're someone else as you're leaving, and as you are
attempting to leave somewhere like Germany or Austria or wherever
you're heading out of, you would generally end up heading
from Germany to Spain and then eventually over to Argentina.
(21:07):
That's one way, or one of the major ways. The
other major way is from Germany to Italy Genoa in particular,
and also that's going through Rome. And by the way,
when you're going through Rome, you know who's helping out,
can you guess?
Speaker 5 (21:22):
No?
Speaker 2 (21:23):
The Old Vatican, because again that is an arm that
reaches very far and it has way too many fingers.
You'd think it only had five fingers, but that arm
just has like seventy five fingers.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
You know, I'm not gonna I am not a theologian.
I would say it does seem somewhat off brand, somewhat
un christ like to assist mass murders and to assist
war criminals.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
But yeah, there's a deeper connection there with the Vatican
and a lot of the happenings of World War Two
that we were probably not going to fully get into today,
but you can look that up if you wish. But anyway,
they would also end up somewhere in South America. That
that line that goes through Italy.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
And there's the four rat lines that depended on the
help of the Vatican of the Catholic Church. South America
makes sense, right because there is so much Catholic presence there.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
As well as the lack of extradition treaties in a
lot of those places.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
And I do want to say, I do want to say,
when we're saying the Vatican or we're saying the Catholic Church,
we're not talking about people who actually just practice Catholicism. No, no, no,
we're talking more about the political machine, yes, rather than
the spiritual idea. We do have etymology of ratline. It's
a nautical term which I did not know because it's
(22:52):
ratline sounds like something snarky that maybe someone in Western
intelligence made up.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
May I guess what it is? Yes, before it and
then tell me if I'm WRONGY go for it. I
always in my mind it's the small pathways that you'd
have to get down on all fours essentially within a
ship or something to access some of the other parts
of the ship that, like the that are inaccessible.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
I I like, okay, I like where your heads at this.
The original rat line was a sort of last resort passage.
It was a It was a rope, these small lengths
of cord that ran between the big ropes, the proper
(23:37):
ropes that fixed the top of a mast to the
sides of a vessel. So rat lines you could use
them because they were horizontal as these kind of makeshift ladders.
So if you absolutely had to get someone up the mast,
they would crawl up this rat line. And there's a
(23:59):
terrible image here, so they crawl up right, these these
makeshift little rope ladders. Scampering up the rat line was
something that desperate sailors would do when the ship was sinking,
and so the last thing to go under the surface
of the water is the mast, and so as the
(24:21):
water's rising, they're running up the rat line.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Okay, checks out, makes sense.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
And that's the people who missed out on the lifeboats.
So that's that's interesting though, because in that etymology, there
may be a deeper a deeper puzzle, right, certainly, and
we'll get to that just we'll get to that just
a second. But these roots that you're describing, the they
(24:51):
start independently, right. The thing is, there's not a great conspiracy.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Yeah, you'll have you'll have basically a leader in one
area that that generally has access to getting those kinds
of identity papers that we were kind of briefly mentioning
up up at the top there. If you can find
one person like that who has a few other associates
and then you can link up with that group, that
then becomes essentially a cell right of network, because then
(25:19):
those are popping up everywhere. But it doesn't necessarily mean
that that network is fully connected or communicating with each other.
You just have to find your node.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
Yeah. Yeah, like a lot of a lot of dirty
things that state actors and governments do tend to be
less an official decision of the government as a whole
and more like a faction of people or community, a
wheel within the wheel. Right. So, according to historian Michael Fayer,
there were two alternate routes the ones you described at,
(25:51):
and they developed independently, but they eventually merged, likely as
the actors in these roots learned about one another and
they were able to help and assist each other. And
for years after the war, the concept of these escape routes,
these ratlines were, as we said earlier, rumors, whispers, They
were not officially confirmed. And you can see why because
(26:12):
at the close of World War Two, when US soldiers
have died, it would be terrible and very it would
be political suicide for members of the US government to say, Okay,
we won the war. We're doing our best to bring
justice to people, except for the scientists. You guys, there's
(26:37):
one dude who's just great at rockets, and we have
to have them. We're sorry that your children have died,
but we really want to get to the moon. You
can't say that stuff. You know what I mean said, well, yeah,
but I'm not not the president after World War Two.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
It's not a great when you said it. It's not
very authoritative, guys, hear us out listen here, Wow, let's
take a beat.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
That's I mean, it's true though, if you think about
like who could who on earth would go public with that?
So of course this was considered a wild tinfoil hat conspiracy,
you know what I mean? And people who if someone
told you in the nineteen sixties, hey, I think the
US government is abducting scientists, right, or I think that
(27:29):
the Pope is abducting Nazis and helping them live a
new life in Argentina. Then if someone told you that,
you probably think, wow, this guy is on LSD. And
I've never never see some one tripping like that's the.
Speaker 4 (27:43):
Plot of a movie that exists, like a scientists are disappearing.
They're all being spirited away to a secret underground lab
to do evil research under duress.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Yeah, it sounds like Watchmen. It sounds like a whole
bunch of different things.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Yeah, the odessify there you go, similar to right, because
even today, like even today, now that this stuff is confirmed,
there are historians and researchers, not necessarily fringe historians nor
fringe researchers who believe that there's still something nefarious, that
(28:18):
there is still more we need to learn about this.
And one of the largest controversies in the story of
Nazi ratlines is something called Odessa. What is that you ask,
We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor.
Speaker 4 (28:40):
So according to author Nazi hunter and Holocaust survivor Simon Wisenthal,
Odessa or the Organization de Ermaligan SS ange Hourigan, was
founded in nineteen forty six, one year after the close
of the war. Odessa Odessa is the US code name
(29:03):
for the operation, and according to Guy Walter, as a historian,
US intelligence first became aware of this term when members
of the SS and thekzy Bensheim auerbach In tournament camp
used it in conversation while attempting to gain special favors
or privileges from the Red Cross.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
So they would be The way this story goes is
that these SS members would be trying to maybe get
in communication with someone outside of where they were being held,
you know, get maybe some cash, may maybe even try
to see if they could get in touch with someone
who could get them a passport, and from what we
(29:46):
could tell, the conversation something like could you send this
letter to my friend blah blah blah, and then say no, sorry,
I can't can't send letters and they go, oh, but
it's care of vote DESA exactly. So the first mention
of it from the Allied side shows up in this
(30:08):
memo from American intelligence and that's on July third, nineteen
forty six. So what was ODESSA like? What we know
that these smaller roots or these these more discreete organizations
and ratlines, we already know that they exist. What's the
(30:28):
difference with Simon Weisenthal's Odessa?
Speaker 2 (30:32):
So this author Weisenthal, he believed that Odessa was this
big organization. I would kind of liken it to something
like al Qaeda similar to that, like it's one big
thing that was functioning together, right, and it was mostly
made up of veterans of the SS. And not only
(30:53):
were these did this group Odessa, not only did they
get them out of Germany initially with passports like we
were talking about, but they would also assist these people
in setting up new lives in new countries such as
Argentina or Brazil or wherever they were going to end
up in South America, a couple of times in the
Middle East in places like Syria. But there is one
(31:15):
major issue with this. Not everybody believes the same thing
that Wisenthal.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
Believes, right, That's the thing. Multiple other historians say Odessa
as as he has described, never actually existed. Again, That's
that's strange. No one is denying that the rat lines
really did exist. And yes, everyone knows that some Nazi
officials did successfully use these roots to escape, as well
(31:43):
as some members of fascist parties and so on. But
there's a complication to this narrative. Years before Simon Weisenthal
of Issathal went public with his claims about Odessa, the
government of Austria had already been investigating the idea. It's
sort of it's it's like, if you're familiar with James Bond,
(32:04):
the World's Worst Superspy, it's sort of like the concept
of specter. Remember this uh specter in the Bond films,
is this global evil organization.
Speaker 4 (32:17):
Every spy franchise as one, yeah and gets smart. I
think it was chaos And all of them are acronyms
that nobody remembers that.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
They stand for. But they're generally like this quasi governmental
private organization, right that the aunctions outside of any government or.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
Yeah, and just has like a way cooler name than
an actual government entity would ever have. It's like Scorpio, Chaos.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Spect the Octo Quad, the Octo Quad.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
I would, yeah, I would join the Octo Quad.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
But why is it octo because the symbol is like
a weird eight and four together.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
Take a roun. No, it's it's four octas.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
It's a quad of octas. Okay, okay, so it's it's
twenty four.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
Excuse me, send us your design for octo quad and
teach us how to do math. So that's but it's true.
Like so the argument then is that Odessa is a
real life version of this evil super spy Bond esque thing.
(33:23):
And also Simon Weisenthal. In the fall of World War Two,
he did not get along with West German military intelligence.
They butted heads all the time. That doesn't mean that
his claims are untrue, and it doesn't, you know. All
it means is that there's a wrinkle here, and it
(33:44):
could people claiming that Odessa is not real could be
seeking to discredit the Weisenthal Weisenthal organization. Or it could
also mean maybe.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
In his.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
In his search to find these aped war criminals, that
Bisenthal started drawing connections in his own head where none existed,
you know what I.
Speaker 4 (34:07):
Mean absolutely, I mean we all know that that's some
of what gives conspiracy theory circles a bad rap. Sometimes
it's easy to do foregone conclusions or sort of work
backwards and like sort of have a preconceived notion of
what something is when it maybe isn't actually that at all.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
Yeah, and again, the thing is, so he was definitely
right about the smuggling operations, the rat lines. Yeah, and
we found proven ones, right.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
Yeah, we did. We found a whole bunch of proved ones.
And I just want to add on to what you're
saying there, Guys, it feels like, and this is complete
speculation on my part, that if Odessa really was a
thing and it was kept you know, secret enough to
where we are still in twenty nineteen, you know, postulating
(34:55):
whether or not it could be real, it feels like
it could have had ad integration somehow with one or
more intelligence communities or agencies throughout the world. And what
intrigues me is that the CIA was involved in several
of these, you know, secreting away of Nazis along with
(35:17):
paper clip, you know what was occurring with paper clip,
but in other instances as well, to get essentially s
S officials and high level targets to then flip them
and become informants, not only to find other SS you know, escapees,
but also to inform them on strategy and other things.
(35:38):
Very tricky. So it's we're gonna, We're gonna continue down
here because we know several of these names, people that
escaped and people who were involved in things like this.
But it just does make me feel like if Odessa
was real, perhaps there was a higher involvement with some
other powerful intelligence agency.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Right, some sort of institution capable of not only moving
people across the world, but also cleaning up after themselves
such that they could they could sweep up the trace. Right.
We also, okay, we have to say it. We already
(36:24):
mentioned this, but we have to say it. The Vatican
did it. That's the institution that has the power and
the reach to move people across I'm not being an
anti papist or whatever, and I'm not saying anything bad
about the spiritual beliefs of anybody who ascribes to Christianity
or Catholicism. But the machine, the machine that runs that
(36:50):
organization on an earthly level, is more than capable of
creating these sort of I know it sounds very Dan Brown, right,
but they're more than capable of enacting this sort of
this sort of process, and in a very real way,
(37:10):
the Catholic Church at this time was, you know, hand
in hand with the ostensible governing powers of some developing countries, right,
and in some cases not all, not all. And again
it's very it's very easy, I think, to connect dots
where none exists. But it is true that in some
(37:32):
cases the Catholic Church had so much influence over a
country or parts of a country, that it was effectively
the government.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
Yeah wow, Okay, well, I don't even know to say
following that, I just want to let you soapbox for
a while.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
Because I'm sorry, thanks for coming to my ted talk.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Well, no, because Wend we've found this to be true.
I mean, if you look at somebody like, uh, Dragonov,
I don't know how to precisely pronounce the name there,
but this is a person who would get false identity
papers like we were kind of mentioning before he would
get them from the let's see this an unidentified person,
(38:15):
an American who was serving at the Eligibility office of
the International Refugee Organization in Rome. Okay, so you've got
a person working with an office in Rome to get
some papers, right. That only apparently that only happened for
a short time because things fell through with all of that.
(38:37):
But then he ended up working with another organization, the
National Catholic Welfare Organization, and as well as the Italian
police in the Italian Foreign Office, and that was again
to obtain false documentation for Nazis that were attempting to escape.
He would get false exit and entry visas for at
(38:58):
least three South American countries, the Argentina that we talked about, Bolivia,
even Chili and again and a lot of times. It's
not known precisely how these documents are obtained, but it
is known that there were just bribes that were going
on with maybe an individual diplomat or somebody who could
(39:18):
have access to those. And it's not necessarily known the
full let's say, compliance of any of these larger organizations
that I've mentioned up here, but someone at a higher
level or a high enough level to actually create and
get these documents. Was involved because you say these weren't
counterfeit documents.
Speaker 4 (39:37):
These were official documents.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Yes, and with names with brand new names.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Right, Yeah, that's the thing. It's it's like, at what
point is something of forgery, you know, and at what
point is it real? So, because we're an audio podcast, Matt,
you just held your hands the kind of the old
six in one hand, hal, yeah, and another it's true.
And we have to also remember if we're being if
we're being completely objective, we have to remember in this situation,
(40:05):
with an organization the size of the Vatican or the
Catholic Church, it is laughably unlikely that everyone knew this
was happening. Again, these are factions, right this Dragonovic in
what Croatia, right in the Nazi puppet state of Croatia
at the time.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
It's a Krunslav. Sorry I didn't say that.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
Earlier, Oh first name, Yes, yeah, And we also have
to note that the Red Cross was another institution not
near as big nor as powerful as a Catholic Church,
but they also effectively helped war criminals escape.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
In the did I did I mention that Dragonovic was
a Catholic priest, He was yet I don't. I don't
think Yeah, I am so sorry. I totally bury the
lead there. That was the whole point. It was it
was a priest doing all of that work, obtaining all
of these papers. Yeah, sorry, Croatian Roman priest.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
Yes, yeah, yeah he was, Yeah, Kronos Draganovic. He was
working in Croatia and was assisting Croatian fascists like sympathizers
to the Nazi Party. Members of the Nazi Party working
in Croatia, which at that point was a vassal of
(41:21):
larger Germany. The Red Cross, though, the big question with
them is whether they whether they aided in embedded war
criminals on purpose or just through the sheer, the sheer
weight of incompetence, the sheer inertia of ineptitude, because they
were overwhelmed with refugees. How easy is it if you're one,
(41:47):
even as many as fifteen people, How easy is it
for you to slip through with hundreds of thousands? And
you know, imagine your job is every day, eight hours
a day, you sit at the at the front of
a never ending line. People hand you papers. It may
or may not speak a language you understand. You have
(42:09):
three to five seconds to look at the paper and
stamp it. I'm spitballing here.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
I know, no, this is I totally see this working,
especially if you're talking about between nineteen forty five nineteen
forty eight. Maybe if you show up to a refugee
servicing area like that or processing location and you don't
have official papers with you because whatever the excuses they
(42:35):
you know where my country's literally at war. I don't
have my papers with me. I'm trying to escape, right,
How how do you prove the identity of somebody?
Speaker 1 (42:44):
So the Red Cross had previously mentioned this that they said, yes,
some Nazi war criminals or Axis criminals had escaped through
the refugee process. But oddly enough, when I went back
to look at the page on the Red Cross website
where they mentioned it, it's been pulled. Yeah, maybe it's
(43:07):
just an olderlink. I'm sure. I'm sure we can find
the source out there. But they that's their argument, is
that the system was overwhelmed. No one was doing anything
on purpose, but their process was supposed to have the
equivalent of a background check from the Allied military. But
(43:29):
it was pretty it was pretty cursory, and they often
in the Red Cross relied on references from the Vatican
that could easily be duped up or fixed. And these
travel papers that people would get they were called ten
one hundreds or one zero dot one hundred, and they
(43:51):
were very easy to get because when you're trying to
process millions venicson people who have had their lives destroyed,
you know, you want to make the process as quick
as possible.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
Right, Yeah, and you have to, I mean for safety,
for health reasons. You can't just leave people in limbo
like that.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
So with Dragonovic, he is functioning as an agent in
this chaotic time. He had what'd you say he had?
He had set up travel to three different South American.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Yeah, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile.
Speaker 1 (44:30):
So we know that he had some kind of pull
what did they call it on the wire suction maybe
it was, Yeah, I think it was in the.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
A lot of suction.
Speaker 1 (44:40):
Yeah, they had some kind of you know, juice or
whatever Dragonovic did. And this rat line was abandoned or
disbanded would be a better word than what the fifties.
Speaker 4 (44:53):
Yeah, it was disbanded in nineteen fifty one and equated
some sources, it was because they were just done with it.
They'd gotten everyone out that they wanted to get out,
they were able to shut it.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
Down, so they succeeded essentially.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:03):
Yeah, and this leads us to this leads us to
one of the great mysteries of World War Two, one
of the real and genuine conspiracies. What happened to the
ones that got away? You can find a plethora of ideas.
I'm using that word correctly. Yep, you can find a
(45:24):
plethora of ideas about this, but some are more plausible
than others. In the Dragonovic case, we know that he
assisted Klaus Barbie in escaping. This person has never been caught.
Speaker 2 (45:40):
Yeah, Klaus ended up getting to Bolivia, at least that's
what's believed. It's also believe that the United States ended
up helping him get there along with Dragonovic. Was Barbie
was actually captured in eighty three and then we found
out that he died in nineteen ninety one. Uh and
(46:01):
we found out because he was in prison in France.
Speaker 1 (46:05):
There we go. Yeah, So some of these people just
got away for a time.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
Oh a lot. That's a That is the one of
the main stories of a lot of these guys. They
end up getting identified much later in life. Several of
them end up in trial for you know, in various
ways they end up in trial because they end up
in a prison somewhere else, or they get used for
a time as in Oh, who, which which guy is this?
Let me jump back over here. I believe it's ALOI Brunner. Yes,
(46:35):
I think Eloy Brunner. He is a guy who ended
up in Syria and he was actually assisting the prior
to Bashar al Assade, Bashar's father. He was assisting that
regime in military tactics, allegedly in developing something called the
German chair, which was a torture device that would break
(46:58):
someone's back when they were when it was a applied
to them. He was like essentially century modern furniture. No,
you know, I mean real torture. This guy was developing
real torture while in Syria, and he was living a
fairly comfortable life early on when he got there. I
think it's sometime in the fifties when he ended up
(47:18):
in Syria, and he he's described as a card in
the hand of a regime. Right, So, like we were
talking about with the United States seeing strategic power and
having these scientists, this guy was seen as a military
strategist or a at least someone who could help them
with their means to or in their ways to achieve
(47:42):
greater power.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
Right under the name George Fisher. Yes, he helped. He
helped organize the this is let's see, it's important, but
it's weird to explain. He helped organize the compartmentalization of
the intelligences, and I think he trained some of the
regime's top intelligence people. The big thing he was teaching
(48:06):
them was that if you truly want to be in charge,
you compartmentalized information. You don't want your left hand knowing
what your right hand is doing because one day you
may have to clap them against one another.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
Essentially, yeah, and only you and a very small group
of people will know.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
Anyway, here's this chair I made. It breaks people's backs.
Speaker 2 (48:25):
Yeah, it's really messed up and it's a crazy story.
You can read more about it at the Irish Times
dot com. That's where we found an article called Nazi
war criminal reportedly died in a Syrian dungeon. And again
the name is A L.
Speaker 1 (48:37):
O I.
Speaker 2 (48:38):
S B R U N N E R.
Speaker 1 (48:40):
And then there are others such as Adolph Eichmann, Joseph Mengele.
There's one in particular one a touch on. This guy's
name is or was Heinrich Mueller is the last chief
of the Gestapo. His fate after World War Two. According
to the Jewish Virtual Libraries account, Mueller got away or
(49:04):
was thought to have gotten away for decades and decades.
They thought he had just slipped the net, and no
one could find him after multiple investigations. However, the official
story is that in October twenty thirteen, evidence surface that
he had been buried in a mass grave in Berlin
at the close of the war in forty five. However,
(49:30):
that's this research still remains for some people a little
I don't know, arguable, Like just like we've talked about
with deaths of I hate to say it, the deaths
of other historically notable, infamous or famous people. The story
doesn't die when the person does. Like there are people
(49:52):
alive now who think Elvis Presley is somehow alive. And
Elvis Presley was a celebrity and a musician who did
briefly work with US law enforcement or attempt to.
Speaker 5 (50:03):
But he was well being Asian man exactly talking and
but but these are war criminals, and we will never
know the fate of some of them.
Speaker 1 (50:17):
That's why for decades, and that's why for decades after
the war, you know, since before many of us were
born listening today, there were people who just hunted these
folks down. And the list doesn't stop there. We have
a lot of like allegedly or is believed tos or
is suspected tos in these people's stories. We know, we
(50:41):
know stories of Nazis where you can follow the line
maybe to an extradition country, right, and then they disappear
and there's a few years later a report of like
an elderly an elderly German retiree expiring quietly in a
(51:02):
small town.
Speaker 2 (51:03):
And then somess found in the attic or something. But
there are also a lot of these people who end
up in a tribunal or a court when they are
in their eighties because they get found out living in
America somewhere, or living in France even sometimes, or in Argentina, Belivia,
wherever it's gonna be. There's so many story of this,
stories about this and of people going through this and
(51:27):
finally seeing justice because they're I mean, it's alleged like
somewhere between, I don't know, the exact number, and we
can't really ever know the exact number, but thousands of
SS and German soldiers military made it out alive. We
just don't know exactly how many that is. I've seen
(51:47):
it alleged up to ten thousand, I think perhaps even more,
just through the alleged Odessa program exactly.
Speaker 1 (51:56):
And there we have to leave it at this point. Still,
it's twenty nineteen, and people will tell you Odessa was
or was not real, right, we have to ask ourselves
about the degree of sophistication, the degree of collaboration that
these rat lines employed. While they may have not been
(52:18):
members of some elaborate global secret society, those clandestine escape
routes were real, and more often than some would like
to admit, these routes were also successful. Is this something
that could happen in twenty nineteen, in these our modern days.
(52:38):
It could. It would have to be different, though, because
surveillance technology has just evolved, right.
Speaker 2 (52:44):
It would have to be more of a low level
human trafficking kind of situation, I think, where you're not
actually going to use real papers. Well maybe that's not true,
Maybe that's maybe that's not true at all.
Speaker 1 (52:58):
So there's an interesting. There's an interesting dilemma here because
although there have been so many technological breakthroughs that allow
people to be closely observed, more closely than ever before
at any point in history, the control of those technologies
is also increasingly in the hand of a smaller and
(53:19):
smaller and smaller subset of human individuals and institutions. So
it's like there's more water coming out of the faucet,
but there are fewer people capable of turning the knobs.
And what that means is that if this is entirely hypothetical,
I'm not describing a real thing. What that means in
(53:40):
theory is that if our super producer Lull needed to
disappear for some reason and had the assistance of Uncle
Sam in doing so, then the Alphabet agencies could simply
erase his digital footprint. It's it's fascinating. It's something we
(54:02):
don't really have an answer for. Again, that's entirely speculative,
but it is possible.
Speaker 2 (54:07):
Agreed, And I I don't want to talk about Nazis
anymore today? Can we? Can we stop talking about Nazis?
Speaker 1 (54:14):
Yes, I'm right there with you.
Speaker 2 (54:17):
Do you want to talk about Nazis?
Speaker 6 (54:19):
No?
Speaker 2 (54:19):
No, I mean you do you want to talk about Nazis.
Speaker 4 (54:23):
But you do tune into our nude podcast, Nazi Talk, Yes,
coming out soon on the iHeart Radio podcast.
Speaker 1 (54:29):
Did you call it our nude podcast?
Speaker 2 (54:30):
That's what I heard too.
Speaker 1 (54:31):
Yes, you do it in the nude Yes, and that's
our classic episode for this evening. We can't wait to
hear your thoughts. That's right. Let us know what you think.
Speaker 2 (54:42):
You can reach.
Speaker 4 (54:42):
You to the handle Conspiracy Stuff where we exist on
Facebook X and YouTube on Instagram and TikTok or Conspiracy
Stuff Show.
Speaker 2 (54:50):
If you want to call us dial one eight three
three st d w y t K. That's our voicemail system.
You've got three minutes. Give yourself a cool nickname and
let us know if we can use your name and
message on the air. If you got more to say,
then can fit in that voicemail. Why not instead send
us a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 6 (55:07):
We are the entities that read every single piece of
correspondence we receive.
Speaker 1 (55:12):
Be aware, yet not afraid.
Speaker 6 (55:14):
Sometimes the void writes back conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (55:37):
Stuff they Don't want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio visit the iHeartRadio app,
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