CZM Rewind: Gay Resistance to the Nazis

In this rewind episode, Margaret tells the story of gay artists and street gangs that fought the Nazis.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
Hello, it's Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. You're a
weekly reminder that where there's bad things, there's people doing
good things. And this week, okay, it's a rerun. You
probably figured that out because it's in the title. We
might have called it a rewind, but you know, we're
going to run one that we've already run before. But
I'm sort of excited to run this particular rerun because

(00:26):
it's one of the first episodes that we did, and
for some weird reason, it's on my mind. It's an
episode about gay resistance to fascism. Hello, and welcome to
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, the podcast about all
the rebels and weirdos and revolutionaries who fought against all

(00:47):
the warship that the world has to offer. I'm your host,
Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today is Sharen, who is
a director and artist, a poet, a general jack of
all trades, and as the co host of the podcast
Ethnically Ambiguous. How are you doing today, Shreen.

Speaker 3 (01:00):
I'm doing Hi sharene. I have a podcast that I've
done so many of these, and every intro I've ever
done is so awkward. It's me.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
I'm sure that's actually something that I really appreciate about
podcast as it makes me feel like I'm doing Okay.

Speaker 3 (01:19):
Yeah, I also exist. That's what I exist to reassure,
to reassure everybody. But if I can do what you
could do, it probably better.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
We've also got our producer Sophie listening on like the
voice of God or maybe like one of the three
norns weaving the fate of the rest of us mortals.

Speaker 4 (01:38):
How are you doing today, Sophie, that's my favorite intro
you've done. I'm great, you know, surviving kind of cited
for this script.

Speaker 3 (01:48):
It's a good one.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
Thanks thanks cutting some threads, but.

Speaker 3 (01:53):
It's a great image. And Sophie is like that, like
that was great. Okay.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
So I figured today we should do something like really lighthearted,
easy breezy and talk about Nazis. I figure no one ever,
no one ever talks about these guys, right, Like, when
was the last time anyone talked about Nazis? So we
figured we should talk about but more specifically, I want
to talk about how during the early twentieth century there

(02:20):
was this like queer accepting culture that was blooming all
across Europe, which the Nazis tried to crush. But it
turns out the it didn't. It didn't actually work out
that way. In the end, the Nazis actually spoil our alert,
get crushed, and they took out a lot of queer
people along the way. But a lot of queer people
fucked up the Nazis too. So that's what we're going

(02:43):
to talk about today.

Speaker 3 (02:44):
I like that. I like a good like I don't know, revenge.

Speaker 2 (02:49):
Yeah, yeah, no, this is good. I think you might
like some of this story. Then obviously not all this story, unfortunately. Okay,
So I don't know if you knew this, but there's
actually not one way to be gay. Every different Yeah no,
I was shocked to learn this as well.

Speaker 3 (03:07):
One straightway to be gay. Thank you for laughing so much.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yeah, Like, every culture has had different conceptions of homosexuality
and transness and all of these different things. And like
to be clear, like, guys have been fucking guys since
the beginning of time, girls have been fucking girls, and
wherever there's been gender, there's been people transgressing gender roles.
But since Western civilization is like trying it's so I
almost feel like guilty focusing on this particular conception of

(03:39):
gayness and how we develop to our current Western conception
of gayness. But since Western civilization is trying its hardest
to be like the one single culture over the entire world,
I feel like it's worth knowing its history of queerness,
or at least some of it. And kind of oddly,
a lot of the history we have about gayness in

(04:00):
our culture doesn't come from like the ladies who liked scissoring,
but instead the priests and the governments that tried to
stop us from doing that instead. So I want to
start with this book of monsters. Hell, yeah, yeah, lever Monsterum,
this is this. It's a series of three volumes that

(04:20):
was written in Old English around the turn of the
eighth century, and it's got like cyclopses and centaurs and
shit in it. But it's not just like a collection
in alphabetical order. It was written in kind of a
specific like they picked who to put first and who
to put at the end. And the third book yeah,
exactly exactly. It's a monster playlist that this guy's writing

(04:40):
to try and impress someone, probably, which makes it perfect actually,
because the very first monster in the very first book
of Monsters in English is a trans woman or possibly
an intersex person. Those concepts were very blurry all throughout history, right,
And so, to quote Libramonth's Storm from a translation by

(05:03):
Andy Orchard, indeed, I bear witness at the beginning of
the work that I have known a person of both
sexes who, although they appeared more masculine than feminine from
their face and chest, and were thought male by those
who did not know yet, loved feminine occupations and deceived
the ignorant among men in the manner of a whore.

(05:23):
But this is said to have happened often amongst the
human race.

Speaker 3 (05:27):
Oh so is the person writing this pretending they're not
human or no? No, I think it's just like just
the way the old English works. It sounds yeah, strange.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
Okay, yeah, basically, so the very first monster in all
of English history is a fucking it's me. So that rules.
But I kind of.

Speaker 3 (05:48):
Projecting they're they're projecting if that's the very first playlist
or song in the playlist they chose, Hey, look inwards.

Speaker 2 (05:57):
That's a that's a very good point. And the same
book also describes it specifically, quotes like Ethiopians also as monsters,
and it's not exactly a tome. I would like to
see live on in the modern world in any appreciable degree.
But okay, so fast forward a couple hundred years and

(06:19):
in the tenth century, the Church of England, they were
passing around these manuals of recommended penance for sinners based
on their different sins or whatever, right, and one of
the passages refers to a third gender of person, which
is the baid ling or maybe badling. I don't actually
know how to pronounce Old English. I'm going to go
with badling. And we know that they meant it as

(06:42):
a third sex because the specific rule is that any
man who quote has sex with a bad ling or
with another male or with a beast ought to fast
for ten years in penance. Well, and so this is
probably again the same concept. This is a concept of
someone who is either intersect or trends and it's and

(07:04):
it's related to all these other effeminate words that they
had at the time, or words for effeminate men that
they had at the time, including battle and baden or baden.
There's a lot of arguments people like to argue about
the shit endlessly on the Internet. I don't know if
you've met the internet, but it likes to argue about
shit like this. There's a chance that the word bad

(07:26):
comes from this wow, which I will also happily take.
I'm like totally down to be the origin of monsters
and bad.

Speaker 3 (07:34):
I mean, that's badass. I don't even mean that as
a pun, but I think that's really cool.

Speaker 2 (07:39):
Yeah, and different people have tried to like reclaim these
words in different ways to various degrees. But okay, fast
forward even more and you've got two important pieces of
legislation whose bigotry has echoed throughout the world thanks to colonialism.
The Holy Roman Empire, which stretched from northern Italy up

(07:59):
to modern day Germany. In fifteen thirty two, it passed
something called the I don't know pronounced loud, evenough I
took three years of it, Constitutio criminalis Carolina. And one
of the laws in this set of laws is when
a human commits fornication with a beast, a man with
a man, a woman with a woman, they have also

(08:20):
forfeited life, and they should be, according to the common custom,
banished by fire from life into death.

Speaker 3 (08:27):
Jesus.

Speaker 2 (08:28):
Yeah, So they weren't like huge fans of homosexuality.

Speaker 3 (08:33):
Not really. It seems like they just kind of hate us.

Speaker 2 (08:37):
Yeah. Yeah, the very next year. It must have been
like sweeping the Europe at the time, because the very
next year, Henry the Eighth of England, in fifteen thirty three,
he passed the Buggery Act, which made anal sex and
beastiality punishable by death, and.

Speaker 3 (08:56):
Just so disgusting to me that those are always couple together,
like yeah, and I say this as someone that used
to have a friend like five years ago that was
arguing that point, and I'm not hur friend anymore, but like,
I could not believe someone my age would be able
to still have any any thought about that, and it

(09:17):
blew my mind. So I'm very I just hate That's
just it is beyond upsetting and discussing to me.

Speaker 2 (09:22):
I just yeah, whatever, like yeah, no, I agree.

Speaker 3 (09:28):
No, It's like I don't know, it just makes it
really mad that humans are like that. But also like, okay,
I studied our history in college, and the Roman Empire
or whatever the shit. A lot of their artworks involve
all genders everywhere, and their gods are intersects and all
this stuff, So it's just so ironic to me that

(09:49):
they're also burning people alive.

Speaker 2 (09:52):
I honestly, like the best I can figure out, and
I'm not sure, but the best I can figure out
from like all this research I'm doing for this episode
is that like, not only have It's not like everyone
was just like hiding in the closet and afraid of
the witch hunters the whole time. It seems like it
like cycled people would be like, oh, being gay rules
and the people are like, yeah, it does rule, and
then I would just have like a whole culture of
people being like this rules, and then someone would get

(10:14):
into a moral panic and then murder us all and
drive the rest of us back into the closet, which
is a really cool pattern that we are hopefully not
in the middle of right now.

Speaker 3 (10:27):
Well that makes me very nervous the way you said that.

Speaker 2 (10:31):
But we'll keep going with this story not thinking about
that at all. Okay, All right, So, so England's laws
get exported all over the world because they are fucking
colonialss scum, and the Holy Roman Empire's law becomes Prussian law,
which becomes German law, and then becomes Nazi law and
then actually stays the law after the Nazis go away too.

(10:54):
But we'll get to that. So the Nazis didn't invent
the prosecution of gay people, the persecution of gay people,
They just turn it up to eleven. In contrast, at
all during all this time, France, when they did their
whole revolution thing in seventeen ninety one, they legalized homosexuality.

Speaker 3 (11:10):
And that's pretty incredible. I didn't know that.

Speaker 2 (11:14):
No, I didn't either, honestly. And then I hate that
I'm about to say something positive about a Napoleon. But
then when he went around and conquered Europe, he brought
the French law with him and eradicated anti gay laws everywhere.
He went.

Speaker 3 (11:31):
Wow, that short king, I know, cherene hey, that is right,
that's pretty freaking cool.

Speaker 2 (11:43):
Yeah. And so it's like, so Prussia becomes Germany by
bringing in Bavaria and some other regions, and Bavaria actually
had legalized homosexuality, but Prussia did not. So in eighteen
seventy one, when Prussia becomes Germany, the whole kind suddenly
as an anti gay law again. And it's a law
called paragraph one seventy five, and it was the law

(12:07):
in Germany from fucking eighteen seventy one until do you
want to guess what decade they got rid of paragraph
eighteen seventy one.

Speaker 3 (12:16):
What they did, I don't know. I'm genuinely going to say,
like nineteen sixty or something.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
No, no, no, nineteen ninety four. It's gonna say, I.

Speaker 3 (12:26):
Was gonna say, you were alive.

Speaker 2 (12:27):
You were alive.

Speaker 3 (12:28):
Oh my god, I just thought, like after fucking. I
don't know, Nato one. Maybe they were like in a
good mood. And no, Okay, the sixties suck that I
think about it, but that is that is very unfortunate
and sad, unselling.

Speaker 2 (12:46):
And they did, like they actually they did reform the
laws in the late sixties and early seventies and like,
and I think what they did. I don't have the
notes in front of me, but I think what they
ended up doing was making it so that there was
just a higher age of consent for gayness than for
straightness or whatever. So like straight kids were allowed to
fuck at fourteen, but gay kids weren't allowed to fuck

(13:08):
until they're twenty one or something, which is like progress,
but in the weirdest, most horrible way, you know. Yeah,
So this this law, paragraph one seventy five is on
natural fornication, whether between persons of the male sex or
humans with beasts is punished with imprisonment, with the further

(13:28):
punishment of prompt loss of civil rights. Wow and okay,
so like most of these laws are just about men,
right the Holy Roman Empire one managed to include lesbians
as well, but so Germany, they actually tried to extend
it to include lesbians a couple times, but they couldn't
reach consensus on exactly like how women would go about

(13:50):
fucking each other and so like exactly what would be illegal.

Speaker 3 (13:54):
And that's so funny. It's like straight guys making lesbian
port or something, you know what I mean. They're just like,
is this what they do? Put that in?

Speaker 2 (14:03):
Yeah, totally. I just like to imagine that there's like
this room full of dudes in like powdered wigs or
maybe like hats with spikes on them, and they're like
trying to mimic exactly what they thought. Maybe like one
of them puts their fingers with some scissors by accident
or something, you know. So, and in England in nineteen
twenty one, they tried to expand the law to women

(14:23):
as well, the English law, but they they got afraid
that if they did it might give women ideas. So
the earl of I don't I pronounced English names.

Speaker 5 (14:35):
I mean like women can't have ideas though, Margaret, like
that's so dangerous.

Speaker 2 (14:40):
Yeah, well, I mean this actually ties into my I mean, like,
I think the reason that men hate lesbians is that
they realized that if women can enjoy each other, then
the men have no purpose y And I actually think
this is why they even hate trans women especially or
also is because because they could hold on to like

(15:01):
well at least the human race wouldn't continue. And you're like, yeah, sorry,
we're gonna fuck that one up for you too.

Speaker 3 (15:09):
Well, no, I think you're correct. That is why.

Speaker 2 (15:13):
So okay, so the earl of desert, I'm just gonna
call them desert dessert. I don't know a fucking the desert.
I think desert. Okay, they colonize like half the fucking world.
They can get their names wrong. Yeah, exactly how many
people does one suppose really are so vile, so unbalanced,
so neurotic, so decadent as to do this. You may

(15:34):
say there are a number of them, Bodo, be like,
at most an extremely small minority, and you're going to
tell the whole world that there is such an offense
to bring it to the notice of women who have
never heard of it, never thought of it, never dreamed
of it. I think that is a very great mischief.

Speaker 3 (15:50):
I love that. I love the performance was great, But
I was just thinking about it, like annihilating the human race,
or not annihilated, but slowly killing us off. That would
be have you seen us? Have you seen this planet?
Like that's the way to save the world. Lesbians and
trades women.

Speaker 2 (16:09):
Yeah, the man that wrote the men that wrote that,
uh just.

Speaker 3 (16:18):
Probably so gay.

Speaker 2 (16:19):
Yeah, yeah, I mean that's the other thing we're gonna
like there's a lot of different conceptions that come up
about like, you know, whether sexuality is in it or
whether it's like socially contagious and like.

Speaker 3 (16:31):
Hmmm, oh so that wasn't even part of the question yet.
It was more just like the act.

Speaker 2 (16:36):
Oh yeah, yeah, no, I was saying that later in
the script we're going to talk about oh sorry, oh sorry,
no no, h yeah no. No. So they didn't they
didn't expand the law to include women because they couldn't,
you know, they didn't want to give any women ideas.
But okay, despite the fact that there's all these anti
gay laws on the books nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties,
Germany was like fucking unbelievably gay through and through wing,

(17:00):
right wing center gay people everywhere, and of course a
lot of these people were fighting for their rights, which
brings us to the Institute for Sexual Research. From nineteen
nineteen to nineteen thirty three, there was a place in
Berlin called the Institute for Sexual Research, which was opened
by three Jewish sexologists. The most famous of these is
a guy named Magnus Hirschfeld. And this place, I don't

(17:25):
know as far as I get to have fucking ruled right.
Twenty thousand people visited every year from around the world.
There was this Museum of Sex, there was a massive
research archive. They offered consulting on matters of sex to
gay and straight people, Like if you were confused about
your sexuality, you could just like show up at the
Institute and someone would set you straight or gay.

Speaker 3 (17:47):
I wish I had that now.

Speaker 5 (17:49):
I know.

Speaker 3 (17:50):
That's so ahead of its time.

Speaker 4 (17:51):
I know.

Speaker 2 (17:53):
And they did endless scientific research and homosexuality. Some of
it seems like really weird today, Like at one point
they spent a while trying to and this is all voluntary,
but they tried to transplant testicles from straight men into
gay men to see if it would cure the gay
men of their gay Oh well, but they and again
this wasn't a forced conversion therapy. This was like people

(18:14):
being like I want to do this or whatever. Yeah,
but they they kind of dropped anything like conversion therapy
pretty quickly, and then they moved apparently all their focus
to helping people navigate homophobic society rather than you know,
trying to fucking cure them or whatever. They they coined
the words both transvestite and transsexual. I know, transvestite isn't

(18:36):
in vogue now, but like it actually was a word
that meant a lot to me, as some when I
was younger before identified it as transgender because I prefer
women's close. Yeah exactly.

Speaker 3 (18:45):
Words change and they evolved in their meaning. And yeah,
I had no idea that's where they were coined from.
That's what an amazing little institute.

Speaker 2 (18:53):
Oh yeah, no, this place is just like there's so
much cool shit. They pioneered this idea. I mean, I'm
sure other people came up with this idea too, but
they pioneered this idea as like a scientific thing that
if you just let trans people exist, and you let
us like go through society the way that we know
we belong in society, that we're happier and society is

(19:13):
happier and we don't like kill ourselves as much because,
like you know, homophobic society is drive an awful lot
of people to hurt themselves.

Speaker 3 (19:22):
And the government here is then they're like, no, we
have to keep them miserable or else you need us.
We have to keep them scared and miserable and sad.
That's actually the truth.

Speaker 2 (19:30):
Yeah, I genuinely believe that they're like, I'm miserable, so
you have to be misible, you know, exactly, Okay. And
they also they performed probably the first gender confirmation surgery
in history, or at least the one that's like known
about in Western records or whatever. I have a feeling
some people tried and did this a long time ago too.
But this woman named Dora Richter in nineteen thirty was

(19:55):
the first person to in our understanding, to undergo full
like gender confirmation surgery. And she actually worked at the institute.
She was a maid. Basically it was one of the
only places in Germany where trans people could get jobs.
But I honestly I don't know how well they were treated.
It sounded like they all got kind of shit jobs,
like this woman was a maid and Hirschfeld was like

(20:18):
traveling around staying in luxury hotels and show.

Speaker 3 (20:21):
It's always a negative side. I'm sure, yeah, everybody.

Speaker 2 (20:24):
Yeah. And they also tied were tied in with the
first Western pro homosexual advocacy group in history, which was
the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which was founded in eighteen ninety seven,
and they treated homosexuality as gender. So this gets into
the there's a lot of different conceptions about gayness arguing
at the time, and the institute's theory was that homosexuality

(20:45):
and gender exist in the body and are essentially determined
at birth, rather than being conscious choices, which led them
down to some strange paths. They presented this idea that
homosexuals were sort of a third sex, halfway between men
and women, which implied that like all lesbians are a
bit masculine and all gay men are like a bit feminine.
They did, however, separate out trans people from all of

(21:07):
this to not be exactly the same as gay people,
so it was like progress and they got away with
a lot of this gayness because even a one seventy five.
Paragraph one seventy five was technically a law in the books.
The local government basically told the police like, now, I
don't enforce this because the local government was like far
more progressive.

Speaker 3 (21:26):
That's something at least, But I.

Speaker 2 (21:28):
Mean, it's also interesting this guy, Magnet Hirschfeld wasn't out
as gay. He was very very clearly gay, but he
wasn't out and lived with his partner and was active
in the gay scene. And I don't love everything that
this guy did. For one thing, as part of the
coalition to abolish paragraph one seventy five, the law that

(21:49):
they advocated instead would have legalized homosexual prostitution, and he
was and Magnus was like, no, no, no, no, take
that part out. Not because he hated sex work, but
because he it would be like too controversial. It would
like fuck, you know, and I don't know, sex workers
get thrown under the bus fucking constantly, and and it
also kind of throws on working class gay folks under

(22:12):
the bus more right, if you do that, yeah, exactly.
And he was also super fucking assimilationist. I'm not trying
to like rag on this guy, but I feel like
you gotta understand him.

Speaker 3 (22:21):
You know, if you had stopped like three minutes ago,
I like he started institution whatever, Like that's great, but
this is an example of like, don't meet your heroes, right, yeah, totally.
I would have just kept him as like this heroic
figure if you just stop there. Yeah, it's good to
note everything.

Speaker 4 (22:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:39):
So at one point he was like when he was
trying to convince everyone that that gays were cool, he
would like bring cops to gay bars and to be like, look,
we're just like everyone else. And like, I like to
imagine being in that bar and trying to be like, okay,
we're what, We're like everyone else?

Speaker 1 (22:55):
All right?

Speaker 2 (22:55):
Yeah yeah, yeah, totally everyone put on everyone else. Yeah,
totally quick stop fucking in public. And he also okay,
so they weren't the only game in town either. There
was this anarchist named Adolph Brand who started the world's
first gay magazine. Again, whenever I say like the world's
first or whatever, I want to like really heavily disclose that,

(23:17):
like all of these history books are going to call
it the first whatever and they mean the Western world
and you know whatever, So fucking cool. These started this
gay magazine in the fucking nineteenth Century in eighteen ninety six,
and the name of the magazine translates to the Unique.
And he was really fucking out, Like he kept getting
arrested for being gay and they would be like, are

(23:39):
you gay, and he'd be like, fucking im gay, fuck
you and he but he also and I don't love
this guy either. I'm going to get to that. But
he didn't fuck around with this, like gayness is effeminate
thing to him. Male homosexuality was like the epitome of masculinity,
often bordering on or falling into outright misogyny, right because
it's like men who only need men, and which we've

(24:02):
all run across, you know, I.

Speaker 3 (24:05):
Mean both yeah, with women and with men. I would
say that.

Speaker 2 (24:07):
Happens totally, totally. And then the activism that came out
of his circle was called the Path Over Corpses and
which is really metal but not actually very cool. And
what they did is they outed high profile gay men
wait often often leading to those people to kill themselves.

(24:30):
And they just didn't care. And that's why I was
called the Path Over Corpses.

Speaker 3 (24:33):
They cancel culture, culture, cancel culture. We don't even need
Twitter anymore. Yeah, well that is well that's one way
to go about it, but like not, that's not a
great way.

Speaker 2 (24:47):
Yeah, and I usually root for the anarchists and anything,
but like I actually not this time, okay. And then
there's this this third conception that I think was floating
around a bit the way extern world, but actually, as
far as I can tell in my limited reading, was
far more common in like Southwest Asia Northern Africa, which
was this and gay men from the West would go

(25:09):
visit Southwest Asia to go be a bit more free
for a while. And it was this conception that sexuality
and gender weren't things that you are, but instead there
are things that you do interesting and and all of
those are going to come up through the different characters
that we're going to get to. So it's part of
where I'm trying to.

Speaker 3 (25:25):
Lay the scene very interesting.

Speaker 2 (25:28):
But you know what else is wholesome besides sexuality is
I've decided that the show will only be sponsored by
incredibly wholesome things, the most wholesome things we can think of,
And so today, so be can we just be sponsored
by tapwater? Like the concept of tapwater?

Speaker 5 (25:43):
I mean, but what about the potatoes?

Speaker 2 (25:48):
That's true, I do really like potatoes. Okay, tap water
and potatoes, two things.

Speaker 5 (25:52):
That are very I mean that seems fair. We do
need more than one sponsor. Yeah, I'm okay with that.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
Kicked the potato, Yeah, okay, So we're sponsored by those
things and then maybe these other things and we'll be
right back. Okay, and we are back. And of all
of these different, you know, types of things that are happening,
it seems like Hirschfeld on the Institute had the longest

(26:21):
and most widespread impact on the Western world, and the
Nazis didn't like that at all. It turns out, do
you know that famous photo of Nazis burning books or
like if you imagine Nazis burning books.

Speaker 3 (26:34):
Yeah, the image popped in my head.

Speaker 1 (26:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:36):
Yeah, so and everyone's like, oh, look, the Nazis are bad.
They burn books. And what usually goes on said is
that the books they were burning was the research library
of the Institute of Sexual Research in these photos.

Speaker 3 (26:48):
Wow, why don't I mentioned that they should? They should
at least mention that in a caption.

Speaker 5 (26:54):
Somewhere, what the huge pile of books on fire? Yeah,
then just Nazis naziing Yeah, well, I.

Speaker 3 (27:03):
Mean, definitely gonna help that they were Jewish either.

Speaker 2 (27:05):
Right, Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (27:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:08):
Honestly, I think the reason it isn't mentioned is because
I think that most of polite Western society was secretly
fucking glad that all those fucking books got burned and
like you know, were erased from history in a lot
of different ways. And the Nazis liked erasing us more
actively than the sort of like liberal democracies. But they
like try and fucking too.

Speaker 3 (27:30):
It's dark but true, and unfortunately.

Speaker 2 (27:33):
Yeah, on May sixth, nineteen thirty three, the Nazis showed
up and they burned like twenty thousand books, destroying endless
amounts of research into homosexuality, transsexuality, cross dressing, everything. Joseph Goebbels,
I don't know I pronounced Goble's name, which I should,
because he's like one of the famous people in history.
He's the chief propagandist of the Nazis, and he gives

(27:53):
a speech to forty thousand people during this fucking book burning.
And Dora Richter, the first trans woman to undergo gender
confirmation surgery, probably was killed in this attack. It's possible
that she was arrested and died in prison shortly after.
There are a couple rumors that people that don't have
as much evidence to back them up, that she like

(28:15):
got out, and I like to think she got out,
but she probably didn't. Meanwhile, Magnus Hirschfeld, he sees the
writing on the wall, like before all this happens, and
so he's off on a world tour basically trying to
figure out where the fuck to get his gay Jewish
ass to because he's like, this is not going to
fucking work. I can't stay where there's Nazis. But he

(28:36):
didn't destroy his own records and lists of names before
he left. So the Nazis got those, and those are
like the one things they didn't burn was the list
of like all the fucking gay people in Germany, not clearly,
not all of them, you know. But yeah, but that's
uh shit.

Speaker 3 (28:56):
I can't wait to hear what happens next.

Speaker 2 (28:58):
Yeah, I mean, okay, So the Nazis get those, they
use them in a campaign to eradicate the homosexual blight.
Because the Nazis minus the gay Nazis I'll talk about
in a second or later. They they churedd and see
homosexuality as like something inherent and natural. They saw it
as a plague that needed to be destroyed, let it
infest everything or whatever. So Magnus Hirschfeld, he never comes

(29:21):
back to Germany. He goes into exile in France, and
he dies of a heart attack on his sixty seventh
birthday on May fourteenth, nineteen thirty five. Ad off Brand
the anarchist to pathover corpses guys. He was super brave
before the Nazis, and then when the Nazis come over,
he retires from activism, marries a woman to try and
like play straight, and then he just like shut the

(29:43):
fuck up and tried to survive the war, and he
didn't because an Allied bomb fell on his house in
Berlin in nineteen forty five. Died at the age of seventy.
The Nazis then expanded paragraph one seventy five, like substantially,
it used to be gay men can't fuck, but then
it became gay men can't try to excite the sexuality
of other men.

Speaker 3 (30:04):
And so that's where the plague like mentality comes in,
like yeah, you know, like if I get if this
gig even comes near me, like yeah, maybe, oh yeah,
I keep thinking about dick.

Speaker 2 (30:19):
Yeah, many people do. It's a natural thought. Okay, So
like something like one hundred thousand men who are accused
of homosexuality are arrested, and a lot of them are
like this is often like a It's a really easy
way to blackmail people. It's very similar to like witch hunting.
You know, like you're mad at someone, just say he

(30:39):
came on to you, and you can get someone arrested.
So one hundred thousand men are arrested, half of those
did prison time. Ten thousand of them or so everyone
argues about numbers were sent to concentration camps where they
were forced to wear the inverted pink triangle badges, which
is where the pink triangles a symbol comes from. In

(31:01):
the camps, at least by everything I read, they were
treated socially like kind of the worst. It was like
them and Jews at the bottom of everything. And then
gay Jews had to wear like an inverted it was
both a pink triangle and a yellow star of David
over the top of each other, and they had it
the worst. I read really gnarly accounts of what they suffered,
and I'm not going to tell you about it.

Speaker 3 (31:21):
Thank you for that, Thank you so much. My imagination
is enough.

Speaker 2 (31:24):
Yes, yeah, and about forty percent of them survive, so
sixty percent of them die and there's no law on
the books against lesbianism. But the Nazis didn't like gay
women any better, and so what they did is they
basically found excuses to send as many of them as
possible to the camps, non aryan ones in particular, and
then aryan ones would get forced to have babies, which

(31:49):
again we will leave there, and those who resisted were
arrested on imaginary charges, like two women were arrested for
disrupting their workplace by sleeping with women from work.

Speaker 3 (32:01):
Interesting.

Speaker 2 (32:02):
So Nazis didn't like gay people, but fortunately for history,
a lot of gay people didn't like Nazis either, and
they decided to do something about it, which brings us
to one of the best places in LGBT history, Amsterdam.
I fucking love Amsterdam.

Speaker 3 (32:19):
I still got to go there. I want to go there.
Let's go one of my top places I want to visit.

Speaker 2 (32:23):
It's yeah, I remember, like sitting on a triangle memorial
is like a dock into one of the canals. It's
like a triangle memorial. When I was like a baby,
barely even knew I was queer like traveling squatter staying there.

Speaker 3 (32:41):
Well, it must have been powerful, I can imagine. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:45):
Okay, So one of the most iconic acts of gay
resistance to the Nazis is in Amsterdam after the occupation.
It's a story that we'ves together some of my favorite
people I've learned run across in history, at least judging
by their actions. I actually don't know much about them
as people, but you know, like they did fucking cool shit.
And we're going to start with Willem Aaron Deis. He

(33:06):
was born in eighteen ninety five in Amsterdam into a
theater family. His parents were costume designers. Originally they support
he's an artist, right, and he supported him in his art,
of his writing and painting. But then he came out
when he was seventeen is gay, and they kicked him
out of the house. Homosexuality was legal in the Netherlands,
but you know, no one liked it. I mean lots

(33:26):
of people liked it, but you know, society like frown
upon it. So he develops his art. He starts taking
on commercial art jobs. He paints ads, stamps, that kind
of shit. He did some like tapestries and coats of
arms for some cities, at least one of which is
still around. He did a mural for the Rotterdam town hall.
And you can look up his art. Actually it's really good.
Anyone listening you should look it up because well because

(33:48):
I think y'all should get tattoos of it, because the
fucking rules. But it's like more designery than fine art,
and which I think is cool and so. And some
of his art is on display at the Met and
at Reich's Museum in Amsterdam. But he wasn't really well
known at the time. To be real, this is he's
a commercial artist, not some like Yeah, I mean everyone

(34:09):
every most not every most artists are not really well
known or famous until after they pass. Yeah, totally. And
if you want to be a famous artist, you should
do stuff like Willem goes on to do. That's my
recommendation to you.

Speaker 3 (34:23):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (34:23):
So he spends years of his life partnered with a
man named Jan Tison, and he supports the two of
them barely on his art and from on the royalties.
From a biography he writes about a painter named Matthias
Maris who had fought in the Paris Commune. But Williem
is dirt poor, largely unknown. He shifts to novels in
nineteen thirty five and he publishes novels with the names

(34:44):
like The Owl House, The Tragedy of the Dream, and
then this is my favorite because it's the most Dutch
gay title I've ever heard of my life, and I
love it. In the blossoming winter radish, Oh my gosh,
perfect no notes, I know, notes, I know, I want
to read it. And the Nazis takeover in nineteen forty
and they start off kind of trying to be nice

(35:05):
to some of the Dutch people, clearly not all of
the Dutch people, but homosexuality been legal in the Netherlands
for more than a century, and so Williem is one
of the first people to go off and join the
Dutch Resistance, which was actually more non violent in character
than elsewhere in Europe, but they weren't slouchers. By the
autumn of nineteen forty four, the resistance was hiding or

(35:27):
had hidden three hundred thousand people, and somewhere between sixty
to two hundred thousand people were doing that hiding, and
over a million people were actively letting all of that
happen just by like knowing their neighbor as hiding somebody
and not fucking saying anything about it.

Speaker 3 (35:41):
Yeah, like allies yea actually yeaheah, that's a big number.
I wasn't expecting that high a number where. That's pretty incredible.

Speaker 2 (35:48):
Yeah, and like gives me a little bit of hope
whenever I want to drag hope out of this kind
of thing. Oh, that's the point of this podcast, right.
There's over one thousand, one hundred separate resistance newspapers which
reach a readership of over one hundred thousand people during
the occupation. But William's partner can't handle all the heat

(36:08):
in Amsterdam, and he fucks off and moves back to
a small small town somewhere else, and Willem stays in
Amsterdam and he keeps going. In nineteen forty two, he
starts an underground newspaper called Brandaris be Brief, which means
letter of Insignia. In nineteen forty three, emerges with another
paper called I'm just going to say. The English translations

(36:29):
called The Free Artist, which was edited by a man
named Garrett von Dervin, who's another one of today's heroes. Actually,
but I believe tragically heterosexual.

Speaker 3 (36:39):
Oh god, no, one's perfect.

Speaker 2 (36:42):
Exactly exactly, and he doesn't get as much screen time
in the story. So I want to tell you a
little bit about our man Garrett, who's I could be
mispronouncing his name. I'm actually I'm actually sorry Dutch listeners,
but I can pronounce the name Schwort, which is going
to come a little later anyway. Okay, So he starts
off his career as a mechanical engineer, but he really

(37:03):
just wants to be a sculptor. And then one day
before the Nazi invasion, and shit, he's standing on the
shore when a fully loaded oil tanker catches fire. So
he the crew flees and gets away, but he dives
into the water, swims out to the ship, extinguishes the
fire in the engine room. Whoa, I know, Yeah, he's
just like this guy on the shore is like, oh shit,

(37:23):
a fire. I'm gonna go put it out.

Speaker 3 (37:25):
It's like it's like Keanu Reeves helping what's her face
when someone's car breaks down, Like, yeah, goes and helps
that person. And then but no one had, no one
has evidence of this, and that just that guy just
did it. Yeah, he didn't need paparazzi to capture it.

Speaker 2 (37:41):
Yeah, totally, totally a good person. Yeah, and so one
of those. So the sailors, they're so grateful that they
buy him a ticket to Amsterdam and pay for a
year's tuition for him to go to art school or
like an allowance for him to become a sculptor, because
that's what he wants to do, is he wants to
become a sculptor. So he does. He becomes a sculptor

(38:02):
because he's performed this heroic deed. Wow, and his shit
is really good, like looking at photos of it and stuff.
A lot of it's still around. But after the invasion,
and I believe he's of Aryan ancestry, but I'm not sure.
And they ask him to sign a paper saying sign
this paper to say you are of Aryan ancestry, and
he's like, no, fuck, no, I'm not gonna do that

(38:24):
because he's a good person. So instead he goes underground.
He starts a newspaper, and most importantly to our story,
he starts forging IDs for Jews and other people who
are hiding from the Nazis. So Willem joins Vandrvine's crew
and it's made up of like artists and dancers, and
poets and shit. A lot of them are openly gang
and they just start cranking out fake IDs just all

(38:45):
over the fucking place. They made more than eighty thousand
fake IDs. And because everyone over the age of fifteen
was required by the Nazis to carry an ID, and
Jewish names were like Jewish ones remarked with a big
jay on them, the counterfeiters called their services personals Proof Central,
and they sold the IDs, but at a sliding scale.

(39:06):
So basically, if you're rich, you'd pay a lot of money,
and then if you're poor you would pay no money.
Love that, yeah, yeah, how they financed the whole thing,
you know, and.

Speaker 3 (39:16):
How the world should be to be honest.

Speaker 2 (39:18):
Yeah, totally okay. And so then there's a problem. They're
making all these IDs, but there there's records on everyone
in being stored in a storehouse, so curious Nazis and collaborators,
which I guess you could just call them Nazis, honestly,
that's the word for Nazi collaborator, I think, yes, yes,
So they just go and go and double check the

(39:38):
IDs against the records stored in the warehouse and then
bust people later. And so but the Dutch Resistance had
people everywhere, including in these records keeping storehouses or whatever,
and so they're working as fast as they can to
falsify documents. I think they're basically saying, like, okay, we
did this, following ID change the records, and they're like okay,
and they go and change the records. But it's not
fast enough. And by the start of nineteen four three

(40:00):
they all get this sense that like, really bad shit
is coming and so they like need to step this up.
So they come up with a plan and okay. So
the problem is that there's a bunch of records, right,
and the records are stored in a building, right, But
but buildings are notoriously vulnerable to explosions, and like the

(40:21):
game of paper rock scissors, you know, dynamite or the
kryptonite of buildings. One might say, I like when Sophie
laughs at my scripted jokes.

Speaker 3 (40:33):
Hey, a lot from Sophie is so hurting. I get it.

Speaker 4 (40:36):
I agree it was funny, and writing said, what can
I say?

Speaker 2 (40:45):
So okay, So a lot of this crew are Pacifists,
not all of them, we'll get to that later, but
some of them were so not only so they devise
a plan to not only destroy hundreds of thousands of
Nazi records and blow up a building, but to do
it without killing or seriously injuring anyone, Which is my
argument is that these people invented the heist movie.

Speaker 3 (41:09):
Yeah, that's funny, and this is aihaha laughing. No, I'm kidding,
to be honest. To be honest, it takes a lot
for me to laugh out loud, Like when I'm watching
comedy or whatever, I'm usually just silent and I feel
like a piece of shit. But I find things funny.
I just don't react.

Speaker 2 (41:25):
It's fine, it's fine, I say, Okay, so do you
thought that was funny? So it's This is not a
small plot. In the end, fifteen people get arrested for it,
and there's so many more people involved than that. But
to tell it like a heist movie, I'm going to
start with the action. On March twenty seventh, nineteen forty three,
Aron Deaeis and a whole crew of other people. They

(41:47):
dress up as like army captains and shit police captains. Actually,
I think they march over to the record storehouse and
they're like hey, they say to the guards, because the
guards are on. You know, they're like, something's up. We're
gonna be really careful. And so they show and they're like, hey,
we think that there's people trying to blow up this building,
so we're here to sweep the building and check for explosives.

Speaker 3 (42:09):
Well I love this. I love this.

Speaker 2 (42:11):
Where's this movie? And so the guards believe them and
let them in, and then medical students who are with
them pull out syringes full of sedatives and inject the guards,
rendering them unconscious. They drag them over to the zoo
next door, because this building's next to the zoo, and
just like leave them unconscious in the zoo.

Speaker 3 (42:33):
Okay, zoo twist, not expecting that last thing, if I
were going to say, was zoo. It's incredible. I love
that addition to their plan. Yeah, they could have just
left them there, but they put them in a zoo right, No.

Speaker 2 (42:43):
Exactly because they didn't want to hurt anybody. Yeah, So
they pull all the records they can find. They pile
them up in the center of the room. They pour
benzene on them as an accelerant, They place bombs, They
grab all the blank IDs and all the money that
they can find, and they get the fuck out and
the building goes.

Speaker 3 (43:01):
Boom Successful Heights movie.

Speaker 2 (43:03):
Yeah it wasn't, so it wasn't completely destroyed, but the
building is soon on fire. So the fire department comes
and they show up kind of late, and then they
kind of take their sweet time putting out the fire.
And then when the fire is out, they just keep
pouring water on the building, just keep going because because
they're trying to destroy all the records, because the fire

(43:25):
department got tipped off saying hey, hey, can you help
us destroy us building?

Speaker 3 (43:30):
You can always count okay the fire department. Yeah, you
can always count on them. Like you know, there's cops, yes,
and there's firemen, and there's always a good guy. And yeah,
it comes from history obviously.

Speaker 2 (43:41):
The way that my dad put it once is that
no one becomes a firefighter because they enjoy having power
over other people.

Speaker 3 (43:48):
Dam I love that. I've never heard it in those words,
but yes, ye, yes, and opposite for cops.

Speaker 2 (43:55):
Yeah, exactly. So in the end, they destroyed about eight
hundred thousand directs on people, which and it gets painted
as this failure because that was only about fifteen percent
of the total that were stored in the building. But
they also they make it out with six hundred blank
IDs and fifty thousand guilders, and I could not, for
the life of me figure out how much fifty thousand

(44:15):
guilders is in today's money and US dollars. I tried,
I promise, I tried someone I'm gonna say it's a lot. Yeah,
it's more money than I currently have. I'm willing to bet,
and yeah, it's like okay. So sometimes like history is like,
oh and they kind of failed. I'm like, okay, they
didn't like single handedly save everyone in Amsterdam all at once,
but they fucking destroyed eight hundred thousand records and like

(44:38):
saved thousands of lives.

Speaker 3 (44:40):
You know, they put guards in zoos.

Speaker 4 (44:42):
I what.

Speaker 3 (44:44):
I would say, it's mostly a success. I mean, obviously
not like stupendously.

Speaker 2 (44:49):
I don't know, but yeah, okay, So there was a
trader in their midst, and unfortunately for the heist movie
and for them and for us, we don't actually we
actually don't know who the trader was, fucking Judas. Yeah,
and they get sold out and one by one the
conspirators get arrested. Willem. When he's arrested, they grab his

(45:10):
journal and use it to catch a bunch more of
the people, and like, just I'm really not trying to
shame anybody, but if you're going to blow up a
Nazi warehouse, you should burn all the evidence at your
earliest convenience. So yeah, exactly, and okay, so fifteen of
them are rounded up. Willem rondeus. His defense in court
is basically like I did literally all of it. Blame

(45:32):
it all on me, no one else had anything to
do with it. And it's not the first time that
doing research for this podcast, I've run across people using
this defense in court because it's it's a cool thing
that cool people sometimes do, and it it saves two
of his co defendants' lives. Two of the medical students
are like just given like fifteen years in prison or whatever,

(45:52):
which fortunately means they're given a couple of years in
prison and then you know, the Allies liberate the Netlands.
But he didn't save everyone. Along with twelve others, he
was marched out to the dunes and executed. His last
communication was through his lawyer, who was also a badass.
I would talk about her in a little bit, and
he said to her, and this gets translated a thousand

(46:12):
different ways and every retelling of it. But he said
to her basically, never let them say that homosexuals are cowards.

Speaker 3 (46:20):
Wow, yeah that is beautiful.

Speaker 2 (46:23):
Yeah, what a life.

Speaker 3 (46:24):
What a good guy? I know that is. I like
this show.

Speaker 2 (46:29):
Thanks, I do too, And he the thing I I mean,
like I was, like I cried so many times when
I was like researching this episode because I mean, this
guy just wanted to fucking like paint and write novels
and like fuck his boyfriend and then instead Nazis took
over his fucking country and he did what he fucking
had to do, and like.

Speaker 3 (46:49):
And the other guy that's like a sculptor. Yeah, it's
you're not allowed to express yourself creativity or like as
an artist, you're like you're forced into activism almost because
to survive, if that makes sense totally, but you're by
default totally. But yeah, it's wow. I'm glad to know
about these people.

Speaker 2 (47:11):
I'm gonna tell you about more of them.

Speaker 3 (47:13):
Yay, more cool people that do cool things.

Speaker 2 (47:16):
Okay, I'm gonna tell you about his boyfriend next, not
the one who like fucked off because shit got too hot,
but the one that he dated later and was dating
during it. All his name was shored Baker and yeah, yeah,
totally because one of my best friends in Amsterdam is
name is shored and I actually am still not saying
it correctly, but you know, yeah, everyone named Short knows.

(47:41):
Hopefully my friend Short is listening to this and forgives me. Okay, so, uh,
he's a tailor, not my friend. My friend's a a
pizza shop, but this guy is a is a tailor
and Short bocker. He sewed the counterpeit fit police uniforms
that they all wore into the office. And because he
was William's part partner, the defense tried a strategy of

(48:01):
like basically be like go easy on him. He only
did it because he was in love with Willem. And
then Short was like, oh fuck no, like no, I
fucking did it, and I would fucking do it again,
Like fuck.

Speaker 3 (48:11):
That wow, I love so again not cowards. Yeah, but
that's like, you know what, that's amazing. He could have
just saved his ass.

Speaker 2 (48:18):
I know, and then instead and this is the gayest
part of all, in the part that I fucking love.
Right before he dies, he's offered one last request and
I see what you say. It is that choking up
he asks for his pretty pink shirt, and so he
puts on his pretty pink shirt. And that's a pretty
pink shirt is a translation. It's a machine translation, I

(48:39):
you know. But but he asked for his pretty pink shirt.
He gets marched out to the dunes and he gets
executed alongside his lover. And it was his shirt, his
pink shirt, that helped people identify the bodies of all
the people who got executed.

Speaker 3 (48:54):
That's my eyes are kind of water and that is
so sweet and sad, you know.

Speaker 2 (49:00):
And then his brother and his uncle kept fighting and
they also died later in the resistance. But then you
got someone who survives. Frieda Belafonte who's a part Jewish
lesbian cellist and conductor. And she's the first woman in
the world to serve as the permanent conductor for a
professional orchestra. But that comes later because she survives. And

(49:22):
it's not very often that you get to say the
lesbian survives in a story like this. You know, she
was this promising cellist, she won a conducting competition against
entirely men, and then Nazis takeover, and as someone whose
father but not mother was Jewish, she was allowed to
apply for a special dispensation to keep working professionally under

(49:45):
the Nazi regime, at least at the start. But she
was like, no, fuck you, I'm not going to fucking
do that. And so she puts down her music career,
puts it on hold, and she goes underground and starts
forging fake id's. And after the bombing, she goes underground again,
and she dresses as a man, as she often did
to avoid detection or for whatever reason that she felt
like dressing like man, probably being part of an expert

(50:08):
fake ID ring helps when you're trying to go underground,
you know.

Speaker 3 (50:12):
Yeah, I would imagine that's a good asset to have. Yeah,
I was just thinking like how all these badass people
they consciously like every opportunity that was presented to them
as like you can save yourself, like you can have
an easier life. Yeah, if you just like kind of.

Speaker 2 (50:31):
What's the word, Like, uh, I know, I can't think
of the word either, but if you just roll over
and just go along solid.

Speaker 3 (50:39):
Not consolid, but what this is a word that I'm
thinking of. It's not the word, but it's really cool.
But with every opportunity that was presented to them, there's
still like, no, this is who I am. I'm not
a coward. Yeah, it's not even I don't even think
the kind of I would go on record saying like
they didn't even think of it that way, you know
what I mean? Yeah, just they did it because that's

(50:59):
the right thing to do, and they're good people.

Speaker 2 (51:00):
Totally. Yeah, I think that they there was like that
that's not an option, Like why would I Yeah, exactly.
But but what is an option is buying fake id's
from our sponsor fake I d ring dot is it
net or calm, Sophie.

Speaker 5 (51:16):
I think it's yeah, I was gonna say what Sine said,
it's definitely dot org okay, nonprofit.

Speaker 2 (51:22):
Yeah, And so for our next wholesome sponsor is the
concept of fake IDs, as well as whatever other ads
come after I say this and then stop talking.

Speaker 3 (51:32):
Mostly but mostly fake id's.

Speaker 4 (51:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (51:34):
Potato, yeah, and potatoes.

Speaker 2 (51:37):
Here's mets, okay, and we are back so free to
so resistance folks smuggle her first to Belgium to France,
and then she has to get across the Alps into Switzerland,
but it's winter, so she crosses on foot. She crosses
the fucking Alps on foot. In winter.

Speaker 1 (51:58):
Holy shit, that is yeah easy.

Speaker 2 (52:03):
Yeah, it's like not something I'm trying to do. You know.

Speaker 3 (52:05):
No, I already thought she was a badass, like before
the break, but now it's like, oh yeah, confirmed.

Speaker 2 (52:10):
Yeah. So she makes it to Switzerland and she starts
a choir in the refugee camp.

Speaker 3 (52:17):
Of course she does. I do love her.

Speaker 2 (52:19):
And then uh, and then she becomes local to you all.
After the war, she moves to Orange County, California. I
actually don't know ore Orange County is. I think it's Claymore.

Speaker 5 (52:27):
We don't know. Shit, Okay, it's I mean, like technically,
like if you look Anna map, sure, but we don't.

Speaker 3 (52:33):
We don't. We don't.

Speaker 5 (52:34):
Clay Los Angeles does not claim Orange County.

Speaker 3 (52:36):
Okay, maybe maybe back then it was more like, oh
this is all this hot desert, so coal, we're all
the same. But no, at this point, Orange County is
like a red red, very red, very very situation in Anaheim.
Anaheim is part of Orange County and I was born there.

(52:58):
Oh well, shout out to Annie.

Speaker 5 (53:00):
For doing something right.

Speaker 2 (53:01):
Yeah, just me just giving a straine. Literally, all I
know about Orange County is that someone I went to
high school with was an actor on the OC.

Speaker 3 (53:13):
That's that's that's as much as you should know. Honestly, Yeah,
you're good.

Speaker 2 (53:16):
The theme song just went bursting into my head.

Speaker 3 (53:24):
Actually, wait, I know people from Anaheim are going to
be like mad at me for even saying that. So
I had to look it up. Oh no, it is
the second largest city in Orange County. Okay, great because
that's also where Disney is. So I was like, is
it Los Angeles or Orange County? Okay, sorry, anyone out there,
please don't at me.

Speaker 2 (53:42):
Thanks, Okay, Okay, So now everyone knows that I don't
know anything about California. I'm a fucking Appalachian girl.

Speaker 3 (53:50):
It's okay, that's that's, that's what we're here for. Yeah, honestly,
I wish I wish I did not know anything about
this place. I wish I was catapulted into outer space.
I don't want to be here. I don't want to
know anything.

Speaker 2 (54:01):
What Churene said, good to know.

Speaker 1 (54:05):
Thanks.

Speaker 2 (54:07):
Freda wanted to be there, not La but Orange County.
So she goes to Orange County and she starts. She
organized the Philharmonic Orchestra and does it as a nonprofit
and all their concerts are free. To the public, and
she runs the orchestra for about fifteen years, and now
she's the aforementioned first permanent conductor of an orchestra or whatever,
a woman conductor of an orchestra. And then one day,

(54:27):
after like fifteen years, someone's like, and I'm paraphrasing, here
is the making this exact way it goes up whatever,
making this part up, but not the thing that happens,
just the words.

Speaker 3 (54:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:36):
Okay. So one day someone's like, oh shit, we're letting
a woman run an orchestra, and so they start talking
about firing her, right because like whoops, we actually a woman. Yeah,
But then they're going back and forth about it. They're like, ah, yeah,
but she's like really good, like maybe we should let
her keep doing it. And then someone's like wait, wait, wait,
but she's also a lesbian, so she gets fired.

Speaker 3 (54:53):
No God fuck that person.

Speaker 2 (54:56):
Yeah, And I feel like it's like worth pointing out that, like,
you know, like like a lot of World War two
is like the bad guys and then the Soso guys,
you know, right, like it's not like everyone fucking like,
it's not like Britain was like man, we're so and
not it whatever Britain's really anti Semitic too, is what

(55:17):
I'm trying to say. But there's still the like a scale,
you know.

Speaker 3 (55:20):
I agree, it's there is no It's like it's not
black and white thinking. There's no good and evil, like
you know what I mean, Like again what you said earlier.
People that support Nazis are Nazis, you know what I mean,
People that are like even a little bit homophobic or
like whatever. It is, Like it's just like, I don't know, Yeah,
that makes sense. I guess that that's partly black and
white thinking. But I think you know what I mean,

(55:41):
And I'm gonna shut up and let you continue.

Speaker 2 (55:45):
It's black and gray thinking. There's the evil, and then
there's the slightly less evil, and then there's the and
they're still evil, I know. And then the good are
the individuals who are doing this kind of shit, you know, yes, yes,
And so.

Speaker 3 (55:57):
The Keanu Reeves of our race, and I'm.

Speaker 2 (56:03):
Like trying to picture counter Reeves playing her in the movie,
but I know that it's not allowed. Okay anyway, Okay,
So she gets fired and she but she keeps working
with music the rest of her life, and one of
her whole things that she ends up having to do.
Is that the whole story that I'm telling you, this
whole bombing plot. People took the gay angle out of
it in history, Like even though William's last fucking words

(56:26):
were like never let never let them say that homosexuals
are cowards, people were just like, look at these great
resistance fighters and like, never talk about their sexuality. And
so it wasn't until the nineties.

Speaker 3 (56:36):
Like history, history is all made up and made up
by mostly straight white men.

Speaker 2 (56:42):
Yeah, totally trust history books.

Speaker 3 (56:44):
No trust history books.

Speaker 2 (56:47):
Sorry, go ahead, no, no, no, I mean. And so
it's in the nineties when she's able to like tell them, like, no,
the fucking the fact that we are like gay is
fucking part of this and needs to be part of
the legacy. And she dies in nineteen ninety five, but
she's a good fucking run of it. Another guy, Karl Groger,

(57:07):
he was part Jewish, although he'd been baptized Catholic. He'd
been born in Austria. His father was a lawyer, and
his father was like defended the people who later became Nazis.
But young Karl he was a social democrat and he
was a medical student and he gets the fuck to
Amsterdam as soon as he can to get away from
the Nazis. But then the Nazis come after, of course,
and he gets conscripted into the German Army, and then

(57:29):
they quickly figure out that he's part Jewish and kick
him out, so he joins the resistance. He works on
a newspaper called ratten Kreutz or something rat Poison, which
is a fucking punk rock name for a goddamn it
is newspaper.

Speaker 3 (57:40):
Yes, super metal.

Speaker 2 (57:42):
Yeah, And he's I think he's one of the medical
students who sedates the guards, and I think he's the
only one of the medical students who gets executed, but
I'm not one hundreds certain about that. But his last
letter to his parents includes the line, I believe that
with this one action I brought more boon to humanity
than an entire life as a physician would have done.

(58:04):
And he's probably right.

Speaker 3 (58:06):
Yeah, no, I think so too. It's he's I don't know,
it's like, what what will what will shift the thinking
of humanity versus what, you know what I mean, like
totally The fact that he had even like a nudge
of that arrow is so much more helpful than versus
like I don't know. I was gonna say, oh my god,

(58:28):
I was gonna say delivering a baby, but maybe I
should not say that.

Speaker 2 (58:33):
I mean, like, doctors just could do lots and lots
of good stuff. And I'm entirely but he like, but
he definitely saves more literal, just immediate lives just by
fucking burning the eight hundred thousand records, and he like, yeah,
and you're right. He also just shows that people can
stand up for shit, you know. M hm okay, So
then another one. You've got another Willem. Willem Sandberg, and

(58:56):
he's a he was a typographer, which is seems like
a good skill set. We're going to become a counterfeiter.
And he helped plan the whole thing. And then he
actually he goes underground and he survives. He's hidden by
a dentist friend after the bombing, and he keeps up
his typeographic work. He keeps doing his art while he's underground,
and he releases nineteen experimental typeographic pamphlets because he's a

(59:17):
fucking artist while he's on the run. And I kind
of love that too, Like he set aside his art
a little bit. But then he was like, oh, but
now I have all this time to work on my
art because I'm hiding from batsies.

Speaker 3 (59:29):
I got to express myself. I'm an artist.

Speaker 2 (59:30):
Yeah. And he designs the plaque for all of his
dead friends that hangs on the building where the attack happened,
and he goes on to direct one of the more
important museums in Amsterdam, the Stedlick, where he constantly runs
into trouble for trying to present art that involves sexuality,
because Nazis aren't the only shitty prudes around. Then there's

(59:54):
a Rudy Bloomgarten who's a very non pacifist Jewish resistance member.
Before the bombing, he tried to assassinate a high up
Nazi collaborator. After the bombing, when they came to arrest him,
he shot the arresting officer and got the fuck away.
He was caught later in a nearby city. He didn't
survive the war, but like fuck it. He blew up

(01:00:16):
a Nazi warehouse and shot a Nazi And I don't
what more can anyone ask?

Speaker 3 (01:00:19):
Yeah, like, yes, thank you for that. You gave us
a good life.

Speaker 2 (01:00:24):
Yeah, okay. Another non pacifist was Johann Brauer, and almost
everyone else is like artists and students and shit, right,
But Johann was a bank robber at least in it
and more than that. So he's a bank robber in
the twenties. And then he murders a guy who's blackmailing
him about the bank robbery. And then he goes to
prison from murdering the guy who's blackmailing about the bank robbery,

(01:00:46):
and then he gets out, and then he gets his
PhD in like Spanish mysticism, and he converts to Catholicism,
and then he fights in the Spanish Civil War on
the Republican side, which is like, not what most Catholics
are doing. Most Catholics are specifically on the fascist side
of that one. And then he comes back from the
Spanish Civil War and becomes a professor and the Nazis
to come take over the country. They fire him because

(01:01:07):
they figure out I was a murderer and he probably
shouldn't be teaching kids, which I actually think he should
be teaching kids, because yeah, so he blew up let
himself be blackmailed. Come on, yeah, come on, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:01:18):
That's a well rounded guy. Yeah you could teach Janny can.

Speaker 2 (01:01:21):
K Yeah exactly. And so he blows up their records,
and I think he gets executed. I wish I want
to find out more about this guy because he fucking.

Speaker 3 (01:01:28):
Yeah, he sounds really fascinating.

Speaker 2 (01:01:30):
I know I want to be friends with him. He's
a complete wingnut who always throws down when you need
when you need it. You know, Yes, I love that,
love it, Okay, I love the con Yeah, I love
a good scam. Yeah, totally. Uh. The guy who helped
them figure out where to place the explosives was name
Martianist Knight niehoff Nihoff. He was a World War One
vet who fought against the German invasion as part of

(01:01:52):
a regiment of bicycle infantry. I was not aware that
bicycle infantry was a thing until I read about this man.

Speaker 3 (01:02:01):
But yeah, me either. The more you say it, the
more I'm like, can I am I imagining just like
an army of bicyclist, Yes, in their little spiedo outfits.
That's that's what I imagine, a bicyclist little like what
is my skin tight?

Speaker 1 (01:02:13):
You know what?

Speaker 2 (01:02:13):
I I like the Maine the brand, Yeah, no, I yeah, yeah,
not like you know whatever, Serene. No, as much as
a man in uniform was very handsome. I think a
man spiedo is more handsome. So I'm fully okay with
the great thank you this version of Yeah. And so
he's like the explosives guy for him. Uh he he
looks up the he gets the blueprints of the building

(01:02:36):
from an architect who's one of them, and he suggests, Okay,
here's where you should place the bombs. And he wasn't caught.
I don't think he actually went on the actual raid.
We just told them where to place the bombs. And
after the war they had a hunger winter, which is
never a good time when you're when your country is
a hunger winter where twenty thousand Dutch people starve to
death or froze to death.

Speaker 3 (01:02:57):
Because I never heard that term before.

Speaker 2 (01:02:59):
Yeah, I I hadn't even heard about the hunger winner
until reading about this guy.

Speaker 3 (01:03:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:03:04):
And then he because war has all kinds of unintended
consequences or intended consequences I guess sometimes. And so he
hangs out at his house and hands out all of
his food to kids until his supplies are exhausted and
he survives, and he's mostly remembered first poetry. So I
like that the speedo wearing explosive sky from the heist movie.

(01:03:26):
I'm talking about these like real people as that they're
whatever anyway they are.

Speaker 3 (01:03:31):
I mean, no, he's a poet, and as I mean,
a good heist movie is like there are real heists
in the world, you just call it a heist, you
know what I mean. But in a heist movie, yeah,
there are a bunch of different characters with a bunch
of different like backgrounds of qualifications. So this just makes
sense to me. There's a poet, there's a bank robber. Yeah,
there's a sculpture, there's a part you know what I mean.

Speaker 2 (01:03:50):
I can keep going totally.

Speaker 3 (01:03:52):
It's well rounded.

Speaker 2 (01:03:53):
Yeah, Okay, another guy was named Cease Honig and after
the bombing, he just like goes back to school, his
medical school, like nothing happened. But then he just gets
arrested while he's taking his medical exam and he he's
one of the people who gets saved by Willem by
his admission, and he goes to a concentration company. He's

(01:04:13):
freed when the Netherlands is liberated. And then you got
your noble, because you need a random noble in all
of this too, right, So Edward Samuel Adrian van Mussen,
Broke Brooke, mouse chen Broke.

Speaker 1 (01:04:29):
He was.

Speaker 2 (01:04:29):
He was basically nobility. He also didn't like the Nazis,
and so he fights against the German invasion and then
the Dutch army capitulates and you know, the Netherlence gives up.
So he and his friend drive off to join the
British Army and then he joins and fights with the
British Army as far as France before he's captured by
the Germans. He escapes the Germans, he makes his way

(01:04:50):
back to Amsterdam. He joins the resistance, helps blow up
the records. Then he goes into hiding, but he was
tracked down, arrested and executed and he's spent three months
in prison with his arms chained above his head in
a cell. And his father was also sentenced to five
was sens to five years in prison because he had
sent a postcard to his kid that was like good

(01:05:12):
luck and it was probably good luck blowing up the Nazis, but.

Speaker 3 (01:05:19):
Sad.

Speaker 2 (01:05:20):
Yeah, okay, then you have a double agent cop because
you needed a double agent cope. Cornelia the only good
kind of cop. I would say that I agree, Cornelia
is russ He's supposed to be policing the Jewish quarter,
but instead he's actively helping Jews escape, including at least
in one case, hiding them in his house. And he's

(01:05:41):
the one who steals the police the two police uniforms
that he then gives to short in order to have
them copied. And he also after the attack, he's passing
along all the police information about how they're trying to
catch everyone. But unfortunately, because he's passing along those documents,
when one of the people is caught, they find the documents,

(01:06:01):
they trace it back to him, and he's executed alongside
his comrades.

Speaker 3 (01:06:07):
Every time you introduced someone like I'm just so curious
where it's gonna end up, like and then they were
executed or and then they.

Speaker 2 (01:06:13):
Got it, you know what I mean, Like it's totally.

Speaker 3 (01:06:17):
Good. Another good another good person.

Speaker 2 (01:06:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:06:20):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:06:20):
Henry Hobart Halbard Stott. He arranged the explosive heist in
the first places. They needed to steal the explosives to
blow up the other place, right, and so one of
his relatives was a cop, and he gets the relative
cop double agent to sneak out the explosives to him,
which he then used personally on some like railway lines
to to fuck up with the just fuck up the Germans.
But then he he gives bombs to the the bombing

(01:06:44):
plot and he gets executed for them. And then there's
Garrett Vondervine who I was talking about earlier, the Sculptor.
Before the bombing, he actually wants set fire the Sculptor.

Speaker 3 (01:06:56):
This is the guy with the ship. Yes, right, I've
been curious about this guy.

Speaker 2 (01:06:59):
Yeah, yeah, okay, So before the bombing, he actually set
fire to an employment office for the same purpose, but
he didn't do a very good job of it, so
it didn't really do much damage. Then he had the
more successful bombing, right, and then he goes on underground.
He stays on the run for two years and get
it gets increasingly desperate. At one point, he and two
others carry out another raid that scores them like ten

(01:07:21):
thousand blank IDs instead of like the six hundred they
grabbed the time before. But more and more of his
friends are winding up in prison and so he can't
have that right, so he tries to raid the prison
to set them free. Six times. Six times he tries,
and six times he fails. Like he just won't fucking
quit attacking the prison. And then the last time he

(01:07:42):
attacks the prison is on May one, nineteen forty four.
He and twenty eight others were let in by a
friendly guard but they I know, but they get attacked
by a guard dog and oh no, and Vondervine shoots
the dog, oh, which everyone hears and fight breaks out.
Vondervine gets shot in the back and paralyzed from the

(01:08:04):
waist down and somehow still escapes, Like maybe he's carried
away by a comrade. That's like the more likely thing,
but I don't know. This guy just like doesn't know
how to fucking quit, So it's like kind of easy
to imagine him just like crawling away, yes, exactly, And
a friendly doctor treats him and they are all caught
a couple of weeks later, and he was tried and executed.

Speaker 3 (01:08:25):
Another The ending is always the one that was like,
where's it gonna go?

Speaker 4 (01:08:29):
I know?

Speaker 2 (01:08:29):
Okay, one more one more?

Speaker 3 (01:08:31):
No no, no, no, I I love.

Speaker 2 (01:08:34):
Only wrote one more. That's okay. So so even their
fucking lawyer is cool loo oh okay the woman yeah lawyer, yep, okay,
So lao Mazarell, I'm listening. Yeah no, no, no, totally. I

(01:08:54):
think you are. Solo is down for the struggle before
were the Nazis, during the Nazis, and after the Nazis.
She represents immigrants and refugees and queers and Romani folks.
Before the Nazi invasion, she tried and failed to get
the Dutch government and the synagogues to destroy all their
records about who's Jewish. Basically, she's like, this shit's gonna happen.

(01:09:16):
Have you seen Germany? You should get rid of your lists.
And they're like, nah, we like lists, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:09:21):
And then it happens and she's like seen, yeah, I
told you yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:09:26):
And her smart lady I know her, her Jewish husband
goes on the run with her her kids, who are
so because her kids are part Jewish or whatever, get
in trouble too, and they actually survived the war too,
and she frees people like legally when she can and
illegally when she passed to. One time she like literally
jumps on a train to drag Jewish kids off of them,

(01:09:48):
basically being like, you can't kill them. They're like under
my legal protection or whatever. Well another Kanu I know, wow, yeah,
my god, I love these people. And she was originally
gonna go with everyone the night of the bombing and
helped do the bombing, but in the end she decided
not to go because she was too short to realistically
pass as a cop. So as soon as I read this,

(01:10:10):
I like messaged my lawyer friend and was like, I
found you in history and uh. And then after, you know,
after the Nazi thing is over or whatever, she becomes
In addition to fighting for all these other things, she
also becomes an anti census activist because she's like, I've
seen what happens when governments keep lists of people.

Speaker 3 (01:10:32):
Mm hmm, you know what, Yes, yes, I've always you know,
the census always throws me the wrong way. I don't
understand it. This woman, she knows what's up.

Speaker 5 (01:10:43):
They also never seem to do it right in America.

Speaker 3 (01:10:45):
Yeah, no, what's the who's whatever? But I do like
that because she was the one that Willem I hope
that's his name though he told her that just don't
let anyone say gays aren't counts, right, yeah, or homosexual
to or whatever the word. Yeah. So if because she
was the one the only person that was told that,

(01:11:08):
she probably is the one that kind of like wrote
the like or helped write what happened in the history
and stuff, right, I thought that's what I would assume.

Speaker 2 (01:11:15):
I think, so yeah, she also that makes go ahead.

Speaker 3 (01:11:19):
No, I just was gonna say, that makes her really
cool to me.

Speaker 2 (01:11:22):
Yeah, like in nineteen forty six, I just didn't even
make it into my script. But like in nineteen forty six,
she forms or helps form one of the like main
gay rights organizations, and just like she's like, yeah, okay,
like I think she's probably also straight too. I don't know.
Whatever she's marrying as kids, it doesn't make her straight,
but you know, she's just like I'm gonna fucking absolutely

(01:11:44):
get involved in LGBT shit as soon as this happens
a true ally Yeah yeah, like in an actual sense
of the word, like allies and like the two of
us are invading a country together, you know, like mm hmmmm, yeah, no, totally.
I like her. I like all these people.

Speaker 3 (01:12:02):
I like all these people. This is you know, before
I hopped on having the best day, you know what
I mean. But you know, I'm pleasantly surprised these people are.
So I want to look up all these people when
we're done with this, and just this gives me. I mean,
I'm a very cynical person and I don't have faith
in humanity. I think we are terrible, and I unfortunately

(01:12:27):
think the bad out weighs the good because bad usually wins.
But this kind of stuff really gives me hope that
like actual good people will keep doing good things, you know,
and there's a reason like jumping in the ocean and
helping a ship not be on fire, like you know
what I mean, there's always going to be that I

(01:12:49):
don't know what I'm saying, but always a point. Yes,
there's always a point in every podcast where I start
to philosophize. So this is the point when.

Speaker 2 (01:12:58):
This is great time, I'm here for it.

Speaker 3 (01:13:01):
Okay, great, but no, I think I think, especially in
the culture that we are in now, which I don't like,
how there's like you're being observed at all times. There's
cameras everywhere or like you, and when you're not being observed,
you want to be the observer and like record something
or take a photo or there's all these outside forces

(01:13:23):
that influence your actions. Unfortunately, even subconsciously. I think that happens,
whether it's like posting something or you want to share,
especially as artists if you want to share something, there's
going to be a reaction, and you have to be
aligned to even feel relevant and all this stuff. So
I think if we just dial all that back and like,
I don't know, doing good things just to do them

(01:13:48):
versus like like I hate when celebrities are like I
fit the homeless today, Just like, go be the homeless,
you know what I mean, go donate money. You don't
have to fucking tell us about it, you know what
I mean. If they're actually good, they would just do
it and not say a word.

Speaker 5 (01:13:59):
Yeah about how would they get how would they get
compliments on the Twitter?

Speaker 3 (01:14:05):
And that that just proves it's performative, you know what
I mean. But maybe one day the good might I
weigh it bad, But the current trajectory, I don't know, man, Yeah,
I don't know. It's uh, I don't know. We'll see
what happens. But I like this kind of show to

(01:14:26):
give me hope.

Speaker 2 (01:14:27):
I'm I'm glad. Uh Yeah, I don't know. I I
One of the things I like about how all of
them are artists and stuff is that they're not doing
it for clout, you know, Yeah, They're just doing it
because they're like, well, I'm an artist, but I also
gotta I gotta do this ship now, like exactly, Like, yeah,
some of them you got to use their skill sets,
like the typographer or whatever. But the cellist isn't like

(01:14:48):
I'm playing cello for the revolution. The cellist is like,
I guess I'm fucking making fake id's now, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:14:53):
Yeah, these are very talented people in their own right. Yeah,
because they're notable in whatever they're doing. Yeah, not that
it matters to be notable, but you know what I mean.

Speaker 4 (01:15:02):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:15:03):
And then okay, so the this whole plot I've been
calling it like the Amsterdam plot and all my notes,
it doesn't have a cool name in history that I've
been able to have been able to find, Like even
the group of them, they don't get called, like, I
don't know, the cool gay artists who blew up Nazis
or whatever, blew up Nazis to warehouses. They just get
called the Garrett Vondervene group because there was a straight

(01:15:25):
guy there who like helps run some of it. I
don't know, do you have any do you have any
name ideas for them? Like what do we call the
you know, the gay bombers of Amsterdam or you know,
not to put you on the spot. Well very literally, I.

Speaker 3 (01:15:40):
Mean this is this is so the first thing I
thought it was bad. It's not good. I thought of
glam squad.

Speaker 2 (01:15:47):
Okay, just on.

Speaker 3 (01:15:51):
The g G train, you know what I mean. I
was on that. I was on that word. I think
squad can be a badass edition, but I also think
it's like predictable, and maybe it should just be some
random word like I don't know the I'm trying to combine,
like just find a word that's like bombers, but.

Speaker 2 (01:16:12):
Like a version of that, like bomb squad.

Speaker 3 (01:16:15):
That's not what I want.

Speaker 2 (01:16:18):
Well that's what they did, though. They showed up and
they're like, hey, we're the bomb Squad. We're here to
check for bombs.

Speaker 3 (01:16:23):
That's pretty great. Actually, they're the original. They're the very
first bomb squad that you should ever know.

Speaker 2 (01:16:28):
Yeah, exactly what they are.

Speaker 3 (01:16:29):
They're the OG bomb Squad. That's what they are, the
OG bombs.

Speaker 2 (01:16:33):
God, I'm glad we came up.

Speaker 3 (01:16:34):
That's not the greatest, not the greatest, but I will
finish the right.

Speaker 2 (01:16:38):
So that's so that's it for today. When we come
back on Wednesday, we're gonna keep talking about this stuff.
We're gonna talk. We're gonna move back over to Germany,
and we're gonna learn more about cool gaze who did
cool gay stuff like fight Nazis.

Speaker 3 (01:16:50):
Hey, thanks for having me?

Speaker 2 (01:16:52):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:16:52):
Thanks?

Speaker 5 (01:16:52):
You have any uh plugs fresh shoeshoe?

Speaker 3 (01:16:55):
Oh? Yeah? That again about being observed and you need
to say relevant. If you want to follow me on
the internet, you're allowed to. I'm on Twitter at Shiro
Hero six sixty six and on Instagram it's just Shiro
Hero And if you want to know anything about me,
you can just Google me and find it there. It's fine.
I feel very jaded at this point. I have a podcast,

(01:17:19):
I have a poetry book. It's all the internet somewhere.
I don't know find it. Yeah, if you really care,
you would dig for the information.

Speaker 5 (01:17:26):
Any any plugs for you at the moment.

Speaker 2 (01:17:29):
Uh? Well, I still like plugging my new podcast, Cool
People Who Did Cool Stuff that you often listen.

Speaker 5 (01:17:34):
I like you plugging that too, Yeah, I just don't
know where they can listen to it.

Speaker 2 (01:17:38):
No, I'm not sure either. I think you actually can't
find podcasts anywhere. Yeah, but legally yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:17:45):
Totally so hard to find or if.

Speaker 2 (01:17:47):
You're willing to go underground to the to find it.
Everywhere you listen to podcasts, you can do that.

Speaker 3 (01:17:57):
Yay, good show.

Speaker 2 (01:18:00):
See you all Wednesday.

Speaker 1 (01:18:07):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts

Speaker 2 (01:18:18):
Or wherever you get your podcasts.