Part Four: Adolf Eichmann: Mr. Holocaust Himself

Summary

Title: Behind the Bastards
Episode: Part Four: Adolf Eichmann: Mr. Holocaust Himself
Release Date: July 10, 2025
Host/Author: Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts

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Introduction

In the fourth installment of "Behind the Bastards," hosts Robert Evans and Joe Kasabian delve deep into the life and actions of Adolf Eichmann, a key architect of the Holocaust. This episode, titled "Adolf Eichmann: Mr. Holocaust Himself," examines Eichmann's role within the Nazi regime, his manipulative tactics, post-war escape to Argentina, and the subsequent trial that cemented his infamy.

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Eichmann's Ascendancy and Manipulative Tactics

The conversation begins with an overview of Eichmann's position within the Nazi hierarchy and his reputation among colleagues.

Robert Evans [00:39]: "Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Jewish desk for genocide at the SD, established himself as the czar of the Jews by taking credit for acts of genocide he either didn't orchestrate or played a minor role in."

Eichmann's tendency to boast about his contributions led to friction with his peers, eventually isolating him as the war turned against Germany.

Joe Kasabian [01:29]: "Eichmann showing up at the Nazi table to see if everybody could, like, show off their ranks of war crimes to find out he's the only one still doing it."

The hosts highlight Eichmann's lack of self-preservation, which initially made him predictable but ultimately did not prevent him from devising an escape plan.

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Wartime Actions and the Final Extermination Campaign

The discussion transitions to Eichmann's involvement in the final months of World War II, focusing on his role in the extermination efforts.

Robert Evans [04:41]: "In the final two years of the war, SS perpetrators, particularly the crew of men around Eichmann, would go through a rapid process of flipping from wanting the Holocaust to be on their CVs to wanting to hide their involvement."

Eichmann played a significant role in the gassing of Ravensbruck concentration camp and the management of prominent Jews held in Theresienstadt, a so-called "show camp" intended to mislead the international community about the atrocities being committed.

Joe Kasabian [10:15]: "If memory serves me correctly, it was the one that they set up to bring the Red Cross to."

The hosts discuss how Eichmann orchestrated Red Cross visits to maintain the facade of humane treatment, despite the horrific conditions and ongoing exterminations.

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Defiance and Isolation Among Colleagues

As the war neared its end, Eichmann found himself increasingly isolated as his colleagues distanced themselves to avoid association.

Robert Evans [07:26]: "Even though the canteen in Eichmann's office building was one of the few that had to remain untouched by air raids, he became a sort of ghost as colleagues refused to associate with him anymore."

This isolation underscored the acknowledgment among his peers of his substantial role in the Holocaust, leading to his further alienation within the Nazi ranks.

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Eichmann's Escape and Life in Argentina

Following Germany's defeat, Eichmann successfully evaded capture by assuming the identity of Otto Ekman and later Otto Henninger. His meticulous planning and use of forged documents facilitated his escape to Argentina in 1950 with the help of Catholic Cardinal Alois Hudal and local Nazi sympathizers.

Robert Evans [32:19]: "Eichmann's escape was facilitated by forged documents provided by Cardinal Hudal and connections within the Nazi diaspora in Argentina."

In Argentina, Eichmann lived a relatively normal life, managing a rabbit farm and integrating into the community of former Nazis. Despite his efforts to maintain a low profile, his legacy as a primary architect of the Holocaust followed him.

Joe Kasabian [47:15]: "Ricardo Clement lives a bucolic life in Argentina, but those who knew him saw through his facade."

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The Quest for Justice and the Nuremberg Trials

The episode explores the post-war efforts to bring Eichmann to justice. Fritz Bauer, a West German prosecutor, played a pivotal role in locating Eichmann, eventually leading to his capture by the Mossad in 1960.

Robert Evans [61:34]: "Bauer's determination, despite opposition and widespread Nazi sympathies within the German government, was crucial in bringing Eichmann to trial."

Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem became a landmark event, not only for its legal significance but also for its symbolic importance in Jewish history and Israeli nationalism.

Robert Evans [65:42]: "The trial was orchestrated by David Ben Gurion to highlight the Holocaust's atrocities and reinforce Israeli identity."

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Hannah Arendt's Critique and Legacy of the Trial

A significant portion of the episode critiques Hannah Arendt's portrayal of Eichmann in her book "Eichmann in Jerusalem." Arendt's characterization of Eichmann as a "banal" bureaucrat drew controversy and debate, particularly regarding her analysis of Jewish passive resistance during the Holocaust.

Robert Evans [72:04]: "Arendt criticizes the Israeli narrative for blaming victims for their own suffering, a perspective that overlooks the systemic brutality of the Nazis."

The hosts argue that while Arendt's work offers valuable insights, it also inadvertently perpetuates harmful myths about victim behavior during genocides.

Joe Kasabian [73:08]: "Every genocide story gets told with similar victim-blaming narratives, and this episode of Eichmann's trial continues that problematic trend."

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Conclusion: Eichmann's Execution and Lasting Impact

Adolf Eichmann was found guilty of crimes against humanity and was executed by hanging on June 1, 1962. The hosts reflect on his unrepentant stance until the end and the broader implications of his trial on international justice and collective memory.

Robert Evans [76:36]: "Eichmann died refusing to admit his wrongdoing, leaving behind a legacy that continues to shape our understanding of the Holocaust."

The episode concludes by emphasizing the importance of confronting and understanding the complexities of historical atrocities to prevent their recurrence.

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Notable Quotes

• Robert Evans [00:39]: "Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Jewish desk for genocide at the SD, established himself as the czar of the Jews by taking credit for acts of genocide he either didn't orchestrate or played a minor role in."

• Joe Kasabian [01:29]: "Eichmann showing up at the Nazi table to see if everybody could, like, show off their ranks of war crimes to find out he's the only one still doing it."

• Robert Evans [07:26]: "Even though the canteen in Eichmann's office building was one of the few that had to remain untouched by air raids, he became a sort of ghost as colleagues refused to associate with him anymore."

• Joe Kasabian [10:15]: "If memory serves me correctly, it was the one that they set up to bring the Red Cross to."

• Robert Evans [32:19]: "Eichmann's escape was facilitated by forged documents provided by Cardinal Hudal and connections within the Nazi diaspora in Argentina."

• Robert Evans [65:42]: "The trial was orchestrated by David Ben Gurion to highlight the Holocaust's atrocities and reinforce Israeli identity."

• Joe Kasabian [73:08]: "Every genocide story gets told with similar victim-blaming narratives, and this episode of Eichmann's trial continues that problematic trend."

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Final Thoughts

This episode of "Behind the Bastards" provides a comprehensive examination of Adolf Eichmann's life, his pivotal role in the Holocaust, his cunning escape, and the complex legacy of his trial. Through engaging dialogue and critical analysis, Robert Evans and Joe Kasabian shed light on the enduring shadows cast by one of history's most notorious figures.

Transcript

[Robert Evans]

Call Zone Media. Oh, my goodness gracious. Jiminy Christmas. It's behind the Bastards, a podcast about Adolf Eichmann. For the last two weeks. Mr. Holocaust himself, as I shouldn't have titled these episodes what's Wrong with Me? Whatever is wrong with me, we don't have enough time for that. Yeah, whatever's wrong with Me, it's not what's wrong with our guest for today, Joe Kasabian, who. Who actually is a very similar kind of person in some ways. But anyway, Joe, welcome to the show.

[Joe Kasabian]

Hello.

[Robert Evans]

What is wrong with us? Why do we do this? Not enough time.

[Joe Kasabian]

I don't know.

[Robert Evans]

All I know is that we're talking about friend of the pod, Adolf Eichmann, who is, you know, the head of the Jewish desk for genocide at the sd. At this point, he is, prior to. In the previous episodes, established himself as the czar of the Jews, partly by taking credit for a lot of acts of genocide that he actually didn't orchestrate or that he had a smaller part in. You know, he's been kind of pissing off a lot of his colleagues prior to this point by lying about what he's done and taking credit for shit they've done. And now we're at the point in the war where things are bad enough that everyone's like, oh, yeah, that shit I did. Eichmann definitely did it. This was absolutely him, right? And they're going from being like, throwing his name around to get shit done to being like, oh, Eichmann. I hardly know him.

[Joe Kasabian]

You know, Eichmann showing up at the Nazi table to see if everybody could, like, show off their ranks of war crimes to find out he's the only one still doing it.

[Robert Evans]

Like, yeah. Aw, fuck. Oh, yeah. It's all on you, huh, buddy?

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah, I would have done that, too, because I know he would have taken credit for it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Joe Kasabian]

He's like, look, man, you've been stealing my content for years now. You can have it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Heinrich Himmler's like, hey, you want my coat and my name documents? Yeah, buddy.

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[Robert Evans]

So in the final two years of the war, SS perpetrators, particularly the crew of men around Eichmann, would go through a rapid process of flipping from wanting the Holocaust to be on their CVs to wanting to hide their involvement. And this was often done by pinning their own actions on Eichmann, who is their most famous co worker in the field of genocide. He's the Alan Smithy or whatever that fake director Name that you put on a movie if you don't want your name on it. He's the Alan Smithy of genocide, where you're like, yeah, let's just say he did it. The Allies consciously sought to spook top Nazis in the final years of the war. And it's very fair to critique the Allies, to critique Roosevelt, to critique even Eisenhower of not doing enough to put a stop to the Holocaust. Cause they don't. They absolutely don't. Choices were made not to bomb railroads. And they knew what was happening. They had reports. This is on them. Right. It's part of why Eisenhower acts so strongly to document what had happened afterwards is he feels bad. He knows he could have done more. Right. They all do.

[Joe Kasabian]

And they, they straight up refused to bomb Auschwitz when there was an agent inside. I'm probably mispronouncing his name of Vitold Polecki.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Joe Kasabian]

Like beg them to bomb it.

[Robert Evans]

It is like, look, we would all rather die. Stop it now. Right?

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah, that was the, that was the, like the, the underground take inside the camps. Like, we would rather all fucking die.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, please blow this place up with us in it if it sucks.

[Joe Kasabian]

And they just said no.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, and they said no. One thing the Allies do do that does save some lives, right, Is they start broadcasting the names of SS mass murderers on illegal radio stations that are broadcasting into occupied territory, saying, we know who you are and if you cut the shit off right now, you might have a chance of surviving post war ye old doxing. Right? Some number of guys are like, yeah, I'm gonna pull back a little bit. Right? And that does save some number of lives. Not nearly enough, but it's a thing that they're doing, right. And this is partly why people start pulling back and letting Eichmann take more credit and trying to. Cause they're like, oh, I heard my name on the radio. That's not good. Have you heard how f the Russians are advancing?

[Joe Kasabian]

Shit, I am already running west.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Expunging the evidence of their own complicity and putting it on Eichmann was made easier by the fact that the self proclaimed czar of the Jews seemed to have no overt sense of self preservation or desire to deny his role. Even once it became clear that this was gonna be bad for him, he must have noticed the rapid change among his colleagues. Bettina Stangneth writes that in the last year of the war, his friends stopped meeting him for lunch. Quote, even though, and I love this part, even though the canteen in Eichmann's office building was one of the few who have to have remained untouched by the air raids, right? He's the only guy in the working kitchen and we won't go to lunch with him. That's how bad his position is. Sad.

[Joe Kasabian]

Eichmann sitting alone at lunch.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Does no one know that my kitchen is still working?

[Joe Kasabian]

You guys want to trade? My mom only pac, VP and J. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And they are all starving and they're like, nah, but I'm not going to eat there, bro. Like, you don't want to be seen next to that motherfucker, right?

[Joe Kasabian]

Fuck that. I'm boiling my boots. This sucks.

[Robert Evans]

He is so toxic. People will give up the guarantee of a full belly to avoid being seen next to him. He would later complain about the whiplash of being dumped so unceremoniously by the whole SS elite and complain that a few years earlier people couldn't do enough to invite me to ministers meetings or to unofficial meetings, private dinners and such like. But once the Russians broke through in Poland, he became a sort of ghost, right? He's like, man, a year ago, two years ago, I was at every dinner. No one even wants to eat at my place anymore.

[Joe Kasabian]

We used to be cool, man. What happened?

[Robert Evans]

What happened, right? For his part, while Eichmann didn't seek to erase his own record, he did later claim that he spent the last months of the war engaged just in simple logistics tasks. Right? Oh, I wasn't doing any more genocide at this point. I was trying to make sure enough food made it into Berlin for the defenders, right? That my office had enough defenses for the fighting, right? Like I wasn't involved in anything horrible, right? Just normal war stuff. This is a lie. By the end of 44, even the most deluded SS officials knew their goose was cooked. And also they had no more goose to eat. A decision was made.

[Joe Kasabian]

And no more goose to step.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, there's no more gooses to step or to eat. A decision was made that even if the war against the Allies was going to be lost, they still had to win the war against the Jews. Therefore, the killing would continue right up until the last possible minute. Even if. And they make the choice. Trains with critical war materiel are diverted from propping up the front line to the task of sending Jews to death camps. They choose the high command. Hitler and the military breast choose the Holocaust over delaying the Russians.

[Joe Kasabian]

Outstanding. Well done, boys.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Heinrich Himmler personally approved such actions. And he had one on one meetings with Eichmann to ensure that Eichmann was properly briefed and supported to Manage this task. While Hitler retreated to his bunker and travel within the Reich grew increasingly dangerous, Eichmann spent the last months of the war on the move constantly. Stengneth writes, Eichmann was involved in the very last extermination campaign, the gassing of Ravensbruck concentration camp. On January 26, 1945, Otto Moles, notorious special commando, was sent to the camp with its gas vans, and gas chambers were also erected there. One of his duties, Eichmann's duties, was to gather up famous Jews and turned in different lower security camps. Some prominent intellectuals and celebrities had been kept in comparatively survivable accommodations in places like Theresienstadt. Theresienstadt is like the nice concentration camp. And as we'll say, I don't mean it was a nice place. I mean it was the best of the camps to be in. Right.

[Joe Kasabian]

If memory serves me correctly, it was the one that they set up to bring the Red Cross to.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, that's what we're about to talk about. That's Eichmann's job. Right. And this is. Theresienstadt is comparatively nice because, as you said, it's meant to be a show camp that you can display to the death camps. No, these are just camps for, like, political. You know, we've got to have. Everyone has some of these. Right? And that's true.

[Joe Kasabian]

It's just a labor camp for undesirables.

[Robert Evans]

England has concentration camps for Germans. Right. They're not death camps. They're just concert. And there's a difference between the two, Right. You're just concentrating people in a concentration camp and that's. The Germans are like. No, our camp is just like what the English have for Germans. Right. These are people who are politically unreliable. But we're not killing them. No. Right.

[Joe Kasabian]

We would never do that.

[Robert Evans]

This is why if you're a Jew who's internationally famous and gets caught, obviously a good number of those people do get killed. But a lot of them are put into Reasonstadt for a while because, well, people are gonna want to know what's happened to this guy. And if we can show him him or her into Reasonstadt, Right. It'll keep the international community from thinking things are as bad as they are. Right?

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah. And we can handle them later.

[Robert Evans]

And, yeah, we will handle. And again, a lot of these people do get killed. They're just kept there for a while. Right. And these same prominent Jews that it was hoped to might provide leverage for men like Himmler. Right. Once the war gets late enough, like. Well, now we don't want to kill these guys, but, like, if we've got these famous Jews that we've kept kind of in the fridge, right, they're preserved, we can maybe trade them to let guys like Himmler escape, right? You know, we'll trade them to the Allies post war to keep our own asses safe.

[Joe Kasabian]

So. Oh, man, I don't think there's anybody famous enough for that to work.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, not by the end of this shit.

[Joe Kasabian]

Nope.

[Robert Evans]

Eichmann's job then, is to both ensure some of these people are safe, and also you have to convince them to keep their mouth shut about the murders they'd witness. For example, after that last gassing at Ravensbruck, Eichmann transfers several women from Ravensbruck to Theresienstadt in February of 1945. And he meets with them personally to basically be like, hey, y' all are gonna live. The Red Cross is going to come here soon. What did you see at Ravensbrook? Right? You didn't see any genocide, did you?

[Joe Kasabian]

And let me remind you, this is a pinky swear.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. This is a pinky swear, right? You wouldn't break a pinky swear to Eichmann, would you? One of these women, Charlotte Salzberger, required Eichmann questioning her in a very polite manner about the extermination. His fame was such that even with that, he doesn't introduce himself as Adolf Eichmann, but he's famous enough that she guesses who he is, right? She later says, quote, we knew who Eichmann was, even in Holland. We knew he was a man who used a lot of Yiddish and Hebrew expressions. And there was also a rumor that he spoke Hebrew and was born in Sirona. This was very clear from the way he spoke, right? Cause there are rumors that he's basically Jewish, and that's why he knows all this stuff.

[Joe Kasabian]

Ah, yeah, right, right. He's had those rumors for a while now.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. He spent some time asking them inconsequential details about their lives. Be like, what were you up to? You know, how are you? Like, try to be friendly, right? He tries to be good cop before he pivots to the bad cop part of his routine.

[Joe Kasabian]

Quote, how was your weekend?

[Robert Evans]

How was your weekend?

[Joe Kasabian]

You know, death. Camping.

[Robert Evans]

This is a nice place, right? We got you some chocolate last week, right? Everything's been good, huh? After this, he pivots to the bad cop part of his routine. He told us we now had the right to go to the Theresienstadt ghetto. But if we said anything about our experiences in Ravensbrook or About anything we knew then. You will. This was the phrase he used. Be going up the chimney.

[Joe Kasabian]

Oof. God.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he's still our Eichmann, you know. Within days of this, Eichmann himself was in Theresienstadt to prepare for what would be the last visit by the International Committee of the Red Cross. So again, Eichmann is the guy who is show managing these Red Cross visits.

[Joe Kasabian]

At the camp while being internationally famous for murdering millions of people.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, it's already known that he's doing a lot of this. Now, as I noted before, this was the Nice concentration camp. Nazi propaganda describes Theresienstadt as being located in a spa town where elderly juice could retire. Right.

[Joe Kasabian]

This is a spa.

[Robert Evans]

Basically, we're sending him to a fucking spa. You're calling us genocide? Come on.

[Joe Kasabian]

Everybody's gonna leave there with their hair all redone and like, you know, veneers in.

[Robert Evans]

It's the shit you saw with Abrego Garcia, where they gave him, like, water and a glass with salt under him to be like, he's drinking margaritas in El Salvador. Come on.

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So some famous Jewish internees are kept there, but the camp is also used as a transit camp for Czech Jews on their way to the killing centers. So this is not a nice place by any objective standards. In 1942 alone, so many people were dying due to starvation and disease at Theresienstadt that the Nazis built a crematorium capable of handling 200 bodies a day, roughly. And again, this is the nice concentration camp. 33,000 Jews die in Theresienstadt itself. And this is the nice place. Yeah, I just. I can't exaggerate how bad all of this is, even accounting for this. The living conditions there are still better than everywhere else because Eichmann and his. They don't want it nice all of the time, but you've gotta be able to clean it up enough that at a moment's notice, you can take the authorities there. Right. So it can't get too bad.

[Joe Kasabian]

I mean, the bar is so low in all of the other camps. It doesn't have to be good at Karrisienstadt other than like, well, they ate today.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. If we get the corpses outta here, it looks okay, right?

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

In early 1945, his main concern was that rumors of the death camps had percolated widely within the community of Jews being held there. And Eichmann did not want those rumors getting to anyone at the Red Cross. And you can't make some of this shit up. You want to guess what day they pick for this Red Cross Visit to Theresienstadt, April 1. April, you are literally right. Yes.

[Joe Kasabian]

I mean, oh, no.

[Robert Evans]

April Fool's Day, 1945 is when Eichmann personally meets Red Cross representative Hans Dinant and announces himself to be, quote, the direct agent of the Reichsfuhrer ss. For all Jewish questions. They literally pick April Fool's Day, right?

[Joe Kasabian]

It's so fucked. This is the. This is my least favorite thing I've ever been right about. Thank you, Robert.

[Robert Evans]

So as soon as Eichmann meets with this guy, he gives a kind of rambling diatribe about his theories are the Jewish question and his now ended plan. He's like, yeah, we're going to make a reservation for these guys. You know, like America did with the Native Americans. We're not going to kill him.

[Joe Kasabian]

Have you guys ever heard of Oklahoma? We're going to do that, right?

[Robert Evans]

Obviously, the United States killed a lot. We did a genocide. Several of them against Native. I'm not saying we didn't.

[Joe Kasabian]

Well, we didn't, did we?

[Robert Evans]

But the average European wouldn't call what we did a genocide in this stage. In part because the ward doesn't exist yet, right?

[Joe Kasabian]

To be fair, the average American today says it's not a genocide.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this is the way they're trying to be like, no, what we're doing is no worse than what the Americans did. Right? That's all that we're trying to do here. And what's weird though, is that Eichmann also tells this guy, you know, Himmler supports the humane treatment of Jews in Nazi custody. And I don't entirely agree with my boss here, but I'm following orders, right? So I'm keeping things nice, too. Which is such a weird line for him to write, being like, actually, Himmler wants the Jews to be treated well. And I think he's kind of crazy, but, you know, that's what I'm doing anyway. It's such a weird line.

[Joe Kasabian]

Imagine being told this as a Red Cross worker by a man wearing a skull and crossbones on his hat.

[Robert Evans]

Skull and crossbones. By literally Adolf Eichmann. You're just like rolling your eyes so fucking hard now. So I bring this up to point out there's very little sign at all that the czar of the Jews has any plans to flee from justice before the fall of the regime. And this is one time where we have to give Eichmann credit for being a lot smarter than his colleagues, because this is part of his tactic, right? He's not dumb. He's not actually, it seems like, wow. He's either so committed that he's ready to die, he's just trying to kill as many guys as possible, or he's really stupid for not trying to get his name off of stuff and to get out. What he's doing is actually smarter than all of his colleagues. He knows you're idiots for thinking you can escape this. Anyone at my level is a fool for thinking that you can get away. I'm going to hide by pretending to be the guy that I've been pretending to be up until the last minute here, so that no one, none of my colleagues, expect that I am setting up secret plans to get out. Right. But he is, the whole time where he's doing this, he is making plans. He's getting fake identities printed. He's using, like, SS. The SS has a print printing press for fake IDs. He's getting multiple fake IDs. He's making an exit plan with his wife and with his dad to hide out in the countryside under a new name, like in the last stages of the war. He'd started laying the groundwork for his escape months earlier when he lied to close colleague Dieter Weslinski, who's a member of the SD and who would later try to sell Eichmann out to the Allies. Eichmann knows. Well, Waslinski's a worm. He's gonna sell me out the instant he can. So he tells Wislinski, you know, I actually cut ties with my dad and my family years ago. They don't believe in all this Nazi stuff as much as I do. So I'm not even in touch with them anymore. Now, the reality is Eichmann's father is a committed fascist, right? And Eichmann's still close to his dad. But by doing this, Wuslinski will tell the Allies. Oh, no, he wasn't really in contact with his family. Right. Which is who he's gonna be relying on. Eichmann would also. So there's this guy, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who is an Arab nationalist and a Muslim leader with guns. Deep Nazi sympathies. And he spends a lot of World War II hiding out in the Third Reich. And he is super on board the genocide. Eichmann lies a lot and pretends that he and the Mufti are really close. They have nothing more than, like, a passing connection. Right. They're not actually that tight, which isn't. I'm not saying that to say that the Mufti Isn't. The Mufti is a monster, right?

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah. Seems like a real piece of shit.

[Robert Evans]

He and Eichmann don't know each other well, but Eichmann pretends they're close friends. And at the end of the war, he's telling Wisilinski and his other colleagues, I'm gonna flee to the Middle East. The Mufti's got my back. I'm gonna hide out somewhere like Syria. Right? Which some guys in the SS do. And so when Wislinski starts being questioned by the Allies, he's like, oh, no, his family wouldn't hide him. They hated him. He's got some connection with the Mufti. He's fleeing for the Middle East, Right. You gotta start looking for him there, or trying to make his way there. Right. So Eichmann has ceded a false story for his plans for the escape with his colleagues in the ss, knowing they're all going to rat on him. He wants them ratting and he wants them giving up the wrong info.

[Joe Kasabian]

Of course he knows that they're pieces of shit. They're in the ss.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he works with these assholes. He knows how much they suck.

[Joe Kasabian]

You guys stopped eating lunch with me. You're all fake friends anyway.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he knows they're fake friends. And you don't want to give it to a guy like Eichmann, but he's really smart here. He knows, like, this is very, very intelligent and it's going to work extraordinarily well.

[Joe Kasabian]

Game recognized game. He knows what kind of pieces of shit the SS is full of. He's one of them.

[Robert Evans]

He's one of them. He's the worst of them, right?

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Through all of this, he vocally expounds upon his commitment to the Nazi cause and the genocide he's orchestrating. So no one will expect that he's planning to flee or that he's been lying to them. He takes to posing with guys like Himmler in pictures, carrying his service revolver. He hadn't really needed to wear a gun. He starts wearing it, being like, I'm an old fighter. I'm gonna go down shooting, you know, when this ends, I'm gonna die on the field, you know, in the last minute that I can. Still loyal to the cause. In his last meeting with his subordinates in Berlin, he told them, if it has to be, I will gladly jump into my grave in the knowledge that 5 million enemies of the Reich have already died like animals. Right. He's really telling them, I'm happy to die because I killed 5 million people, you know, so I can go out with my conscience clear now. This is a lie. He was committed to killing those people. But he doesn't want to die. He's going to do whatever he can to escape. So April 1 is when the Red Cross visits Theresienstadt. Hitler dies at the very end of April, the same month that had begun with that show tour. Peace and an end to the war in Europe is not far behind. By the point that Hitler kills himself, Eichmann has already disappeared into the mass of Nazi war prisoners under a new name. He just bounces one day, destroys his old info, picks up one of these fake IDs and starts living under a new name, Adolf Karl Barth. Now, his last order that he had gotten as Eichmann was given by his childhood friend Kaltenbruner. And Kaltenbruner had told him, you're going to go and carry on this guerrilla struggle in the Alps, right? We're going to keep on fighting, you know, in the mountains. We'll hold out till the last. And Eichmann's like, yeah, totally, absolutely. And then he just leaves one day, shows up in new clothes and like, gets taken prisoner, right? As like a low ranking enlisted member of the ss. So he gets put in a POW camp with all of these thousands and thousands of other low ranking SS guys. And while he's in the camp, he actually transitions and destroys that old ID and takes on yet another new id. And there's a couple of reasons for this, but he starts going by, he had been pretending to be Karl Barth, who's this enlisted member of the ss, and he upgrades himself to an officer, to Untersturmfuhrer Otto Ekman. Now the logic of this was both, first off, Barth, pretty far off from Eichmann. If somebody recognizes me and calls out Eichmann, I could be like Ekman. Ekman. No, no, I'm Ekman. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Ekman, that's me. Right? It's smart, right? It's close enough that it won't draw suspicion if he like responds to the name Eichmann or something. And the other reason that he upgrades from being enlisted to a low ranking officer in the SS is that as an officer he doesn't have to do labor on a daily basis.

[Joe Kasabian]

I fucking knew it. I knew that was going to happen. I knew he was going to switch himself to be either a Wehrmacht officer or an SS officer, because no labor and better treatment.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And for the record, most of the ss, most of the Einsatzgruppe Even the officers get off essentially scot free after the war.

[Joe Kasabian]

Oh, of course, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I am of the opinion we should have executed every member of the ss.

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah, for sure.

[Robert Evans]

As well as every member of every person in government in the Nazi state. There were so many more people we should have killed that we didn't.

[Joe Kasabian]

If you want to be embraced by something warm and nice, just know that most of the ones that fell into Soviet captivity died horribly.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. And in this case, you do have to give it to the Soviets. Like, the fact that we let so many of these guys off is why this kind of shit keeps happening. Right.

[Joe Kasabian]

99% of SS men got away with little more than a slap on the wrist and a quote, unquote, rehabilitation process.

[Robert Evans]

If there had been another million or two that had been taken out by the Allies after this, because there were that many who directly took part in the Holocaust, they deserved more.

[Joe Kasabian]

More than that.

[Robert Evans]

You could have justified even more. Maybe this wouldn't have kept happening. Right. Maybe there would have been enough of a warning, you know, but we don't. We let most of these guys off.

[Joe Kasabian]

Hey. And, you know, once you. Once you cut in, you know, take away the clean Vermach myth, you got a whole lot of Germans to kill, and you'd see still be all right with it. And I know I would be.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And part of what's so fucked up here is that, like, this shows how soft we are on these guys. The fact that just by being like, no, I'm an SS officer. Well, of course you don't have to labor in the prisoner of war camp as an officer. Why would we make an SS officer work? Yeah, he's not done. He's a gentleman. You can't make him do hard labor.

[Joe Kasabian]

Yep.

[Robert Evans]

So you might expect working something like this out where he's like, shifting identities while in a POW camp to be hard. But it really wasn't. His father outside the camp is able to fetch these forged documents that he'd squirreled away for him and smuggle them to him. And because all of the central records in Breslau had been destroyed at the end of the war, there's not a lot of. No one can find out that this guy wasn't real. Right. Eichmann had made sure that Ekman's birthday was exactly one year later than his. So it's not hard to remember. He doesn't have to, like, keep it in his mind. It's his own birthday. It's just a year later. You're just pretending you're A year younger. In the immediate wake of the war's end, most of the top players in the Nazi party like Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels were dead. Now Hermann Goering is in custody along with a handful of other Reich notables. By far the largest Nazi in the wind at the war's end was Eichmann, who was noted by the Jewish Agency for Palestine as being the highest ranking wanted Nazi as of June 8, 1945. So everyone is very aware, everyone who cares about the Holocaust is very aware that this Eichmann guy is a real big deal and he's in the wind and something needs to be done about it, right. So that is known from the jump.

[Joe Kasabian]

And there was a few Nazis that at the end of the war they did just vanish and people thought they could have done a runner like everyone else, but then they just came like.

[Robert Evans]

I think Alfred Rosenberg is one of those guys. Yeah, yeah.

[Joe Kasabian]

They're like, oh, they're just one of the thousands of people who died in fighting and just namelessly died on the side of the road like a fucking dog.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I may be getting the name wrong. Yeah, there's a lot of, there are some high rank because like, yeah, you were in Berlin at the end and like it's not easy to get out, right. It's pretty dangerous place. Oh man. So you know who didn't escape Berlin at the end of 1945?

[Joe Kasabian]

Mitsubishi.

[Robert Evans]

That is right. They were pretty far away from Berlin. Let's now talk about what else Mitsubishi was doing.

[Joe Kasabian]

Oh God no.

[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

So we're back. Oh, my goodness. Just like Mitsubishi, you know? We're back and we're cleansed of whatever crimes that we were implicated in previously. That's right. All we made was engines. Guys, come on. All IG Farben made was medicine and some other, you know, Zyklon B. A little bit, you know, not all that much.

[Joe Kasabian]

Just a little bit.

[Robert Evans]

Just a little bit.

[Joe Kasabian]

Look, I was all on board with the Mitsubishi rehabilitation till they came out with the Model 731. That's a little too on the nose.

[Robert Evans]

Jesus Christ. Oh, guys. So it had become clear by June 8, 1945 that there are going to be war crimes trials. And the World Jewish Congress asked later that month for Eichmann to be tried as one of the main architects of the hollow Holocaust. Since he was missing, Allied prosecutors had to interrogate his former friends like Wislinski, who sang like a canary and blamed all of his own crimes on Eichmann. Right. He made me do it. I didn't want to be in the ss. This is all Eichmann. What a dick. We all hate him, right?

[Joe Kasabian]

Everybody would agree with me. Everybody hates him. You guys should get him.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, you should get him. I'm basically a victim. He was so mean to me. Like, you don't even know. So while Eichmann is interned as Ekman, there were attempts to catch hiding war criminals within the massive SS prisoners. The Allies know some of the big dudes are in this mass of, like, prisoners that we gotta get. Some of them are hiding as Wehrmacht prisoners, right? He later recalled the days when, quote, Jewish commissions would visit the camp. Quote, we had to line up. They sized Me up? Yes. Seeing if they could spot any mugs they recognized. We had the lineup by company, and there was a commission of maybe 15 of these. And then he uses a slur. They went carefully up and down the rows, staring each of us right in the kisser. Yes, me too. Right in the mug, all smiles. We weren't allowed to speak or we'd have called them all kinds of names. And when they were done, two steps forward and on to the next line, right? And he recalls this later while he's like, in fucking Argentina with a sneering sort of arrogant glee that, like, they had me, they were face to face with me and they couldn't catch me. Ha ha, ha ha. Now this is true that he does get away, that he is like that close to these guys and they miss him. But he's also. He doesn't feel safe, right? He doesn't actually feel like. No, he. This is a very dangerous position for him. Part of why is that? The comradliness. A lot of these guys in the SS know Ekman is in our company. I don't remember there being an Ekman in our company. This guy must. There's something sketchy here, right?

[Joe Kasabian]

I mean, all these guys got captured together. They were probably in units together. They probably didn't know each other all that long due to, you know, all the mass casualties, right? But they were at least familiar with one another. And now this guy comes in as opposite.

[Robert Evans]

We argued about this Ekman guy.

[Joe Kasabian]

Was that guy your commander? He wasn't my commander.

[Robert Evans]

Do you remember Ekman being around? I don't remember. Ekman sounds like Eichmann a lot, you.

[Joe Kasabian]

Know, he looks fucking familiar.

[Robert Evans]

You know, in the war, these guys are all comrades. We're all on the same side, right? And that comradliness between Nazis burns up very quickly after the regime falls and its crimes become impossible to deny. There are enough soldiers in the camp who know that this guy isn't who he says he was, and they don't feel safe there. So Eichmann begins to arrange his escape. I want to be clear that Eichmann's fame, which he had aggressively cultivated, was the only reason that he was in danger here. The Allies did not consider the Holocaust a priority in terms of prosecution. During the Nuremberg trial, only one man was assigned to documenting and charging prisoners over the genocide. Stangneth notes, quote, the prosecution was also cautious about placing too much emphasis on Jewish affairs for fear of being criticized by their own countries. So during Nuremberg, we're like, we don't want to do that much Holocaust prosecuting. Because then our own people might say we're like being too soft on the Jews, that this is all about the Jews to us. And like, there's still a lot of anti Semitism going around here.

[Joe Kasabian]

Just so fucking much.

[Robert Evans]

And this had been part of why Roosevelt doesn't do more prior to and during the war to save Jewish people is consciously. There are people in his administration, they're like, yeah, we didn't want to be seen as. We didn't want this. We were trying to work up. Getting America involved in the war was hard, right? It was super controversial and it would have been bad for our effort to get the US involved if we'd made it look like this was all about the Jews because they're just not popular, right? Yeah.

[Joe Kasabian]

And like, similar to Churchill as well, the Nazis and fascism were wildly popular within the British upper class to include the fucking King all the way up until they got dragged into the war.

[Robert Evans]

And this is a thing where it's like, in terms of Roosevelt, it is like, you wouldn't want to be in his position where it's like, well, well, the right thing to have done would have been to put the Holocaust first and foremost. But maybe that stops you from being able to get involved as quickly. Maybe it cuts the support you need to try and start to keep getting arms to the uk. This is a hard. I don't think he makes the right option, but it's a. Everyone is so shitty, right? It's such a difficult position to be in where you're like, well, maybe doing the right thing here makes it harder to actually beat these guys. Right? That's how they're thinking now. By the time Nuremberg is happening, it's just cowardice, Right. And lingering anti Semitism on behalf of the Allies. So they're like, we don't want to be seen as being, you know, is this all being about the Jews to us? Right? So Wislinski is the guy who gives most of the testimony about Eichmann that would become a central part of Eichmann's post war mythos as the architect of the Holocaust. As we've stated, this is an exaggeration. Wislinsky makes Eichmann out to be a bigger player than he was because he's trying to protect himself. Wislinski's like, the bigger a deal I make Eichmann, the less likely they are to kill me. And this does not work out for Weslinski. He is extradited to Czechoslovakia and hanged for war crimes in 1948. So it doesn't work, but it does create the myth. It does help really bolster this myth in the public eye. Theodore Dannecker, who had been Eichmann's right hand man, was smarter. He avoided capture like his boss at the end of the war until he was caught by the U.S. army in December of 1945. He committed suicide in a prison camp before he could go on trial.

[Joe Kasabian]

He was almost certainly gonna hang as well.

[Robert Evans]

Oh yeah, yeah, he would. He would have fucking hung. He was just too big, too implicated and too much, you know. Unlike Wislinski, he doesn't trick himself into believing he's got a chance. Eichmann proved remarkably successful as a fugitive, working with a mix of a few former SS colleagues he could trust and their family members. He hid out on a farm in northern Germany while he lived in a rustic college and engaged in a simple peasant life. Working basically as a forester. Right. He's doing like lumber work. What remained of the Third Reich's leadership went on trial. Eichmann's name came up repeatedly in segments of Nuremberg that dealt with the Holocaust. Weslinski blamed his old boss for being abusive and violent and basically was like, he threatened me into doing it.

[Joe Kasabian]

Oh my God. Shut up, you fucking bitch.

[Robert Evans]

Another SS man, I think his first name was Otto Ohlendorf, entered into the record Eichmann's claim that he would leap laughing into the pit of hell because he'd killed 6 million Jews. Right? That's where we get that quote first is Ohlendorf being like, that's how bad Eichmann was. He said this, you guys should go get him.

[Joe Kasabian]

Still not me.

[Robert Evans]

And it's Gehring is really the only member of the Nazi high command who like, like doesn't do what Weslinski does, where he's like trying to throw everyone under the bus. Right? Goering states while he's watching Wislinski on trial. This Wislinski is just a little swine who looks like a big one. Because Eichmann isn't here. Ekman is no longer there either. Three months after escaping the prison camp, Eichmann is registered under a new name, Otto Henninger. He just turned 40. He managed to stay employed working for a lumber company and lived alone. A thing Weslinski told Allied interrogators his boss could never do. Wislinski says anyone who knows Eichman knows he's too cowardly to be alone. So we see how well Eichmann's cultivation of a fake personality has worked to protect him. He really lied to the right guys.

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. It's unfortunate how good he is at this. Yeah.

[Joe Kasabian]

It is impressive that he was able to hide effectively and played sights. And I do wonder if he was only able to get away with this because the people that. I mean, of course he trusted some SS men, but. But the people that knew him as this fake person also kind of knew he was Eichmann.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So By April of 1946, his friend Kaltenbrunner had taken the stand and claimed that Eichmann was the man who carried out the whole extermination operation against the Jews. Now again, Kaltenbruner's his boss. Kaltenbruner brings him into the ss. Right. It's foolish. Yeah. It's all him.

[Joe Kasabian]

He did it all by himself. It was the craziest thing.

[Robert Evans]

He was so fast. Now this was a massive exaggeration, but it's one that sticks. Lying does not, however, save Kaltenbrunner. He's executed in October of 46, but it serves to continue building the Eichmann legend. Rudolf Hess, former commandant at Auschwitz, adds to this legend by crediting Eichmann with helping to decide to use Zyklon B to gas inmates. We never would have come up with that idea without Eichmann. Yeah, I was trying to make a summer camp until he came around.

[Joe Kasabian]

I was just trying to give people veneers.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. The only guy in this fight. I love Joe's obsession with veneers. Veneers.

[Joe Kasabian]

It's a health spa.

[Robert Evans]

Only Julius Stryker, who is the Nazi propagandist, we've covered him on this show and he gets executed for war crimes. He's the only guy here to give an honest account being like, fuck it, I've never even heard of this dude. Eichmann's supposed to be the chief anti Semite. I'm the chief anti Semite and I don't even know his name. Right? He's like offended.

[Joe Kasabian]

Fuck this guy. But there's a certain amount of respect. Like, no. He knows he's going to die no matter what. At least he's not going to lie about it as he goes.

[Robert Evans]

He's committed to being like. He's just angry that Eichmann's getting all of the credit for the Holocaust.

[Joe Kasabian]

I am a piece of shit. Everybody should know about it.

[Robert Evans]

It's so not hard. Why is he getting all the credit for sucking? While the legend of Eichmann takes shape, the real man used his time in semi captivity to start writing his memoir. This is A bold move for a man who knows he's going to be captured and tried at any minute. Or he could be. And it speaks to the fact that Eichmann is still very much a true believer, and he wants still to get credit for his work furthering a great historic cause. He thinks someday the worm will turn again and we'll be seen as heroes. And I have to document how cool I was during the war. Right.

[Joe Kasabian]

Real Stringer Bell moments, though, right? Like, are you taking notes to be able to criminal.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, you're taking notes on a criminal on the Holocaust. So while he's hiding out, he reads voraciously about every news article on the trials, and he documents the Nazi genocide, cutting out mentions of his own name. He's cutting out the articles that mention him and pasting them into, like, a scrapbook. Right. While he's hiding as a forestry guy. Yeah.

[Joe Kasabian]

There's something off putting about him. Scrapbooking.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that he's. Yeah, he's fucking scrapbooking. He follows the growth of his legend and the increasing obsession among different Jewish organizations with finding him and bringing him to justice. Aside from this, though, he lives a normal life. He even attends a coworker's wedding in 1947 where he's photographed in this, like, rural location. And the fact of it is, if he'd stayed there forever, he might have lived the rest of his life in isolation. But he doesn't want to live in isolation. He wants to live with his wife, Vera, and raise his kids, and they're never going to be able to do that in Germany. Vera is under constant surveillance. Right. The Allies are watching her, figuring out he's going to reach out at some point, and then we'll try. We'll catch him. Right. She is claiming at this point that she divorced Eichmann in March of 1945. And she and Eichmann's father tried to report him dead in 1947, claiming that they'd heard that he died fighting in Prague. The Allies don't really buy this, but, you know, that's kind of what they're attempting to do. It's not fully clear when Eichmann makes the decision to flee Europe for Argentina, but we know that he starts the process of getting his paperwork in order in 1948 from pop culture alone. You're probably aware that a lot of Nazis escaped into Argentina after the war, and it's worth discussing why and how. The first reason is that Argentina has a long tradition of hiring German military officers to train their soldiers. This is going on way before World War II. Right. So there's a lot of sympathy for Germany and for fascism in Argentina. Future dictator Juan Peron of Argentina received training in Mussolini Italy while he was a young soldier and was attached to the Italian army from 39 to 40. The Argentine government was formally neutral but deeply sympathetic to Nazi Germany, as was a sizable chunk of the Catholic Church. In 1946, Cardinal Caggiano, the Bishop of Rosario and leader of a far right anti communist Catholic action group, visited Pope Pius vii. David Cesarini writes, quote, cagiano proposed to set up a pontifical commission of assistance that would provide identification papers for displaced persons and refugees in Europe. More precisely, Cagiano wanted to help anti communist fascists, Nazis and their collaborators who are now on the run. So Cagiano goes to the Pope and is like, we have to create a humanitarian commission to help refugees from Europe, you know, get. Get their documentation. And by refugees, he means members of the ss. Right. There's a chunk of the. The Vatican agrees to this plan and becomes a major active player and helping hundreds of SS war criminals escape. Right, that's the. The Vatican is doing this.

[Joe Kasabian]

I mean, at least it's. I can't think of anything else the Vatican's ever done recently. So that's. At least they've seen the way for the Vatican.

[Robert Evans]

Jesus.

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah. Normally they're on the up and up.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Now, and this is key. Adolf Eichmann escapes Europe with the help of a Catholic cardinal who provides him with the documents he needs with the.

[Joe Kasabian]

Permission from the Pope.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. The cardinal is working with at least some degree of permission from the Pope here. Now, to escape, Eichmann also has to enlist the services of a people smuggler and a people smuggler who had the personal approval of Juan Peron. His identity papers were issued by Catholic Bishop Alois Hudal, who had appointed himself protector of persecuted war refugees, a term here that means Nazis who did the Holocaust. It takes two years, but Eichmann makes the journey to Argentina safely in 1950. His family follows a short time after, and they are soon living together, a facsimile of a normal life with a few compromises in light of his notoriety. Vera had to call him Otto, and he had to use a new name yet again, Ricardo Clement. But those who knew him said that he used his real name often enough with old comrades who now made up a sizable community in Argentina. Eichmann described his own life as the.

[Joe Kasabian]

World'S most cursed diaspora.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Nazi diaspora in Argentina. Yeah, yeah. Oh, and he's like, he's going by Eichmann fairly often whenever he's around Germans. It's not super hard to figure out this guy.

[Joe Kasabian]

He's not hiding at all.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, this guy. Ricardo Clement, whose wife calls him Otto and who goes by Eichmann whenever he's drunk. I wonder if he's Adolf Eichmann.

[Joe Kasabian]

Must be a different guy.

[Robert Evans]

Mm. He lives a bucolic life in this period, though he works for a hydroelectric power station for a while, and he leads survey missions deep into the mountains, exploring on horseback and climbing mountains. Mountains. He takes his two young boys with him regularly and teaches them to hike and fish and ride horses while he worked. That job eventually falls apart in the mid-50s, but he gets a better one managing a rabbit farm. Right. There's a little bit of, like, historical symmetry here. Heinrich Himmler, before joining the Nazi party, is a chicken farmer, right?

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And Eichmann, after the war, runs a rabbit farm. Meanwhile, while they're in Argentina, his wife gives birth to two additional sons. He has to build a home with his own hands for his newly expanding family to live in. And they take in two dogs. A German shepherd on a dachshund. In short, he lives the kind of calm, pleasant life that his work had denied millions of European Jews. David Cesarini writes, relations within the family were much as in any other. His sons were good looking and sociable. There was no shortage of girlfriends. Klaus had already been engaged to a local girl in Tucuman and was the first to marry, move out and bring grandchildren into the family. But generational relations were not smooth. Eichmann looked upon his sons as boorish, interested only in trivial pleasures. They, in turn, thought he was authoritarian. Klaus told journalists in 1966, you will not believe how strict he was. Our old man was very strict. You won't believe this, but Adolf Eichmann was kind of a dick as a dad, man.

[Joe Kasabian]

My dad is a real Nazi.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, he's kind of a Nazi, if he gets my drift.

[Joe Kasabian]

My dad, Adolf Eichmann is a real Adolf Eichmann.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he's real Eichmann character. So when Cesarini's book was published in 2004, his understanding was that Eichmann didn't talk politics with his kids and forbade them from bringing anything about the family up outside of the house. This is an exaggeration to say the least. However, even back then, before Stagnant's book, there was documentation of Eichmann writing on the war and his connections to other old Nazis. Cesarini wrote, quote, his marginalia in Works that fell into the hands of investigators indicate that he remained an unrepentant Nazi. For example, he took exception to Gerhard Bolt's the Last Days of the Reich Chancellery because the author took an anti Nazi line. At one point in the book, Eichmann scrawled in the margins with swine like these, the war was bound to be lost. On the end papers, he jotted down his three line credo. It could all be summed up as duty and obedience to orders.

[Joe Kasabian]

Christ.

[Robert Evans]

One good friend post war was the former SS Special Forces commando Otto Skorzeny, who introduced him to a Waffen SS veteran named William Sasson, who'd himself been tried for war crimes in absentia. These men helped to induct Eichmann into a community of unrepentant fascists, and Eichmann leaned into the reputation he'd accrued as the architect of the Holocaust. Among these friends, it was an asset again. Eichmann and other Nazis of the Sassen set felt no need to hide their opinions from the world. Sassen starts editing a far right German language newspaper, Der Weg, which was so fascist that Peron's government eventually suspends it from open publication. Right, like, that's how bad this is when they get heat internationally. And it was Sassen who introduced Eichmann to the only other Nazi emigre at his level of notoriety, Dr. Joseph Mengele. Evidently, the two did not get along. Eichmann's frustrated because Mengele's got family money, so he's still rich while he's hiding. Well, Eichmann, they're like, kind of poor while they're. While they're hiding out in Argentina, they're not like, super comfortable. And he's like, why does Mengele get to have money? You know, I suck just as bad.

[Joe Kasabian]

My family did build tractors.

[Robert Evans]

He also. This is so funny. Mengele. And this is kind of like Mengele's being a dick to Eichmann. He's like, well, you know, if you guys are having trouble with money, I can be your family doctor for free. And Eichmann declines.

[Joe Kasabian]

I've seen your work. I'm not a fan.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I don't think Dr. Mengele's gonna be the family doctor.

[Joe Kasabian]

Oh, Adolf, it seems that your daughter has a bit of a cough. Have you considered injecting bleach into her eyes?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. It's so funny too, that Mengele does that as kind of like a dick move. He's like, well, if you're having trouble with money, I can be the fa. He knows what it means to offer to be the family doctor.

[Joe Kasabian]

He knows nobody wants him to be the family doctor. Yeah, the man just, just smells like corpse.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he knows he's Joseph Mengele. So Sassen had been a military propagandist during the war and he wrote ghost wrote after the war he ghostwrites biographies for several SS veterans. He proposed working with Eichmann to lay out a full history of the Final Solution, one that told the Nazi truth. Sassen meant to minimize the number of people who had been killed and to cleanse Germany of its war guilt over the Holocaust. He also wanted to clear Hitler's name. Eichmann has, let's say, different ambitions. And the result of their interviews was, in Cesarini's words, sometimes blackly comic. And I'm going to quote from Cesarini's book, Eichmann His Life and Crimes here. Eichmann initially welcomed the chance to unburden himself to someone who was both knowledgeable and supposedly sympathetic. I was happy to be able for once to talk about the whole complex matter and to some extent dispose of it. But he discovered that Sassen had a perspective that was not wholly in accord with his own. While he was happy to record that Heydrich had received a Fuhrer order to exterminate the Jews, Sassen questioned whether Hitler was truly responsible and wanted hard evidence for such a directive. At one point, Eichmann expressed incredulity that anyone would expect there to be a written order from Hitler himself protesting that that was not how the Reich worked. Whereas Sassen wanted to diminish the number of Jews deported to the death camps, Eichmann was happy to brag about his achievement. At Sassen's insistence, the dialogue returned again and again to statistical assessments of the numbers killed, with Sassen and Eichmann arguing in opposite directions. The wine consumed during the sessions loosened Eichmann's tongue more than was good for him. His self pity and self aggrandizing equally led to incriminating statements. He regretted his weakness in not being able to overcome the obstacles in the way of eliminating all the Jews. Impervious or uncaring as to what the transports meant in terms of human suffering, he lamented delays and rejoiced in trouble free deportations. We had the same thing in Slovakia, we had the same thing in France, and although it started there, very hopefully we had the same thing in Holland, where the transports did however roll at the beginning, so that one can say it was magnificent. And where subsequently there was one problem after another. He remembered with satisfaction. The times the deportations went well, notably in Hungary. So it's so Sassen's like, but like Hitler wasn't really involved. Do you have any evidence that Hitler ordered it? And Eichmann's like, you don't understand how this fucking works. Like, what the fuck is wrong with you?

[Joe Kasabian]

I don't think that many people died. I would have killed more.

[Robert Evans]

I do like that they raised it like Eichmann couldn't hold his wine. No, no, no, I agree.

[Joe Kasabian]

He was a lightweight and got really moody afterwards.

[Cindy Crawford]

Yeah, he drank wine.

[Robert Evans]

Got a little weird. You know who also gets a little weird whenever they're drinking wine?

[Cindy Crawford]

Mitsubishi.

[Joe Kasabian]

That's right.

[Robert Evans]

Boy, you do not want to get Mitsubishi drunk. They'll start talking about the forties and it doesn't. We'll take your money. Mitsubishi. Please, for the love of God.

[Cindy Crawford]

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[Robert Evans]

Key, a new weekly podcast. You better listen. That's literally the definition of being an Aries moon.

[Joe Kasabian]

Just one little spicy off comment, that's all it takes.

[Robert Evans]

Everyone loves me at the Cancer and then the Aries comes out and they said who the is that? No, you're gonna come for me being an Aries and you have a sag moon. Get out of here. But I'm a Capricorn rising so that honestly balances it out and makes me more likable. Okay, that is your Capricorn talking. Listen to High key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and we just got reached out to by Mitsubishi and this is very good. I think this is gonna be really positive for the whole podcast. They stated, quote, if you continue referencing our name we will bring you into court. So yeah, very excited. Super psychedelic. Uh huh.

[Joe Kasabian]

This and more in Wake Island Drift.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So Eichmann's post war friendships all have one thing in common. His utterly repentant openness about the scale of crimes he'd committed. He told one Dutch Nazi emigre, to be frank with you. Had we killed all of them, the 10.3 million European Jews, I would be happy and say, all right, we managed to destroy an enemy. So you know, he continues to be Eichmann.

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah, he's still a piece of shit.

[Robert Evans]

He's still a fucking Nazi asshole. Oh yeah. Now Ricardo Clement lives with his wife and sons outside of Buenos Aires for almost a decade. As I noted earlier, his boorish sons grew up there and began dating. One of them started seeing a young girl who was also a German emigre, Sylvia Hermann. Now, you might think this would make the two a good match, but there was a problem. Sylvia's family were the other type of European immigre, right? Her father, Lothar, hadn't informed her of this, but he was a Holocaust survivor who had fled Europe after surviving Dachau.

[Joe Kasabian]

Now, oh, this is the world's worst fucking Hallmark movie.

[Robert Evans]

Fuck the worst. Meet cute. By this point, Lothar was old and blind as a result of repeated beatings by the Gestapo. As his daughter courted this Eichmann boy, Lothair starts putting things together in his head and is like, oh, fuck, I think this kid might be the son of, like, a major war criminal right now. These are initially just suspicions, and the family moves away from the area not long afterwards. So Lothair doesn't think a lot more about this until 1957, when he comes across news coverage of another Nazi back in Frankfurt. And I'm going to quote from an article by the Museum of Jewish Heritage here, Lothar's realization that Ricardo Clement may in fact be Adolf Eichmann led him to the chief prosecutor of the West German state, Hessen, Fritz Bauer. In order to pursue Eichmann and make a case for investigation, Bauer needed evidence. Bauer, who acted outside his official role as chief prosecutor, was concerned that his colleagues were Nazi sympathizers and would thwart the investigation. At Bauer's request, Lothar went in search of more details regarding Eichmann. Soon enough, Lothar was able to positively identify Eichmann, sending good word back to Bauer. So fucking Lothar is like, well, this German prosecutor has been prosecuting Nazi war criminals. I'll reach out to him and say, I think I know Eichmann. Bauer's like, I can't do this as part of my legal job. There's so many fucking Nazis still in the German state, they'll warn him. If anyone becomes aware in Germany that I'm looking for Eichmann, he'll get warned because again, and I'm surrounded by Nazis.

[Joe Kasabian]

Still, man, the Allies should have killed way more of my co workers.

[Robert Evans]

So many more of these guys. So Bauer is like, basically, once he gets confirmation from this dude in Argentina, Bauer, rather than going through the German government to try to prosecute this guy, he's gonna go directly to the Mossad because he's like, again, I'm surrounded by Nazis. And this is not an uncommon state of affairs. Post war West Germany talked a great game about war guilt and hatred of the regime, but a ton of second and third tier Nazis were by now running the show.

[Joe Kasabian]

Oh fuck. Yeah, they were.

[Robert Evans]

And one of the people responsible for this is a famous anti Nazi, Conrad Eidenhour. And Adenhour had been, he'd been an opponent of the party prior to Hitler's rise to total power and he had been imprisoned several times by the Nazis. But he was like a liberal politician who hated the Nazis but was willing to govern beside them. Right, well, well, well.

[Joe Kasabian]

For this are the consequences of my political ideology.

[Robert Evans]

Right? And the good news is that Adenauer was such a committed anti Nazi that the Allies let him form a government and become West Germany's first chancellor in 1949. The bad news is that because he was such a committed anti Nazi, he was able to personally accept a ton of Nazis into his government and his own reputation acted as a shield for them. Per the Irish Times quote, challenged on this many times by political rivals and foreign critics, Adenauer hit back that one does not have to throw out the dirty water as long as one doesn't have any clean water. Right. Well, everybody who knows how to run the state is so implicated in Nazism, we can't afford to punish them all. Otherwise we won't be able to have a Germany. We gotta have a Germany. Right? Right.

[Joe Kasabian]

Counterpoint. What if we didn't? Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Now, in 1957, Eichmann had actually written an open letter under his own name to Eidenhour. Right? And the letter was negative. He and Sassen both wanted to destroy Conrad's government, but it shows how much impunity he felt by this point that he could write a letter to the fucking Chancellor. Right. And feel like it was not a super dangerous thing. Now, since he couldn't trust his colleagues anymore, but did trust Lothar's snooping, our boy Bauer sent the information about Eichmann back to the Mossad, who had a whole Nazi hunting division at this point and were ready to use it. In May of 1960, they sent 11 agents to Argentina. After weeks of gumshoe work to track Eichmann down and case his home and the pattern of his daily life, they launched an operation to kidnap him and spirit him to Jerusalem. Now there's a whole long story here and I'm really boiling out the details because it's the best known part of Eichmann's life and it's really not super worth into us getting into detail here about it. But the short of it is they capture the fucker and he winds up on trial for his many crimes in Jerusalem. Now the exact form that this Trial takes is the work of David Ben Gurion, who's the Prime Minister of Israel and for whom this was not just a matter of justice, but a matter of personal political pride. Hannah Arendt, in her famous cover coverage of the trial, described Ben Gurion's motivations this way, quote, and this is from Eichmann. In there was the lesson to the non Jewish world. I want to establish before the nations of the world how millions of people, because they happen to be Jew, 1 million babies, because they happen to be Jewish babies, were murdered by the Nazis. That's Ben Gurion's words. Or in the words of Devar, the organ of Ben Gurion's Mapai Party, let the world opinion know this, that not in Nazi Germany alone was responsible for the destruction of 6 million Jews of Europe. Hence again, in Ben Gurion's own words, we want the nations of the world to know and they should be ashamed. The Jews in the Diaspora were to remember how 4000 year old Judaism with its spiritual creations, its ethical strivings, its messianic aspirations had always faced a hostile world. How the Jews had degenerated until they went to their death like sheep. And how only the establishment of a Jewish state had enabled Jews to hit back as Israelis had done in the war of Independence, in the Suez adventure and in the almost daily incidents on Israel's unhappy borders. And if the Jews outside Israel had to be shown the difference between Israeli heroism and Jewish submissive weakness, there was a complimentary lesson for the Israelis. For, quote, the generation of Israelis who have grown up since the Holocaust were in danger of losing their ties with the Jewish people and by implication with their own history. It is necessary that our youth remember what happened to the Jewish peoples. We want them to know the tragic facts of our history. This is Arendt writing that Ben Gurion, he's not just trying. He doesn't just want to see this guy brought to justice because he's a Nazi. He wants to see this guy brought to justice because the story of Eichmann highlights how cowardly the European Jews were that they let themselves be slaughtered and that that's different from the heroic Israelis who are willing to fight. Right. That's part of why Ben Gurion puts this trial on. Right. There is a propaganda angle here.

[Joe Kasabian]

There is a lot of very disgusting language that was used towards European Jews despite the fact that a lot of these guys are descended from them or they're their kids or their neighbors or whatever. Yeah, it's absolutely horrible.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And this is something Arendt is Very critical of Israel and sees a lot of the problems that are going to result in the shit we're seeing today. Very early on. She sees a lot of the horror of like what's done to the Palestinians. She sees a lot of what's coming and she's deeply critical of why this. Not that Eichmann's on trial, she obviously thinks he needs to be, but she's deeply critical about why he's being put on trial and what else is happening here.

[Joe Kasabian]

You've heard of the imperial boomerang. This is the genocidal boomerang.

[Robert Evans]

Right. And there's a lot of good modern criticism of Arendt and of her writing in Eichmann on Jerusalem because. In Jerusalem, because her picture of Eichmann as this banal pencil pushing figure is wrong. He is, I think we've made the case, a pretty outwardly bombastically villainous Nazi.

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah, she fell for his personal portrayal of himself while submitting himself to a Jewish court.

[Robert Evans]

Right. But when it comes to dissecting Israeli policies and the message that this trial was meant to show Arendt is incredibly incisive. And I want to make it clear here, she's not saying that what she, what she lays out in the paragraph uncritically. Right. She's not saying. And it's good that Ben Gurion is doing that. She has deep reservations about what he's doing, doing and about the treatment of Holocaust survivors in Europe. I'm going to quote again from Eichmann in Jerusalem. Equally superfluous was the lesson to the Jews in the Diaspora, who hardly needed a great catastrophe in which a third of their people perished to be convinced of the world's hostility. Not only has their conviction of the eternal and ubiquitous nature of antisemitism been the most potent ideological factor in the Zionist involvement since the Dreyfus affair, it must also have been the cause of the otherwise inexplicable readiness of the German Jewish community to begin to negotiate with Nazi authorities during the early stages of the regime. This conviction produced a fatal inability to distinguish between friend and foe. The German Jews underestimated their enemies because somehow they thought that all gentiles were alike. And yeah, that's such an important point to make too. And this is why, well, we have to point out what Arendt got wrong. You need to keep this in mind, right, that both like, well, this is a lot of what Ben Gurion's doing is totally unnecessary and it's also based on him kind of falling into the same mistake, a different version of the same mistake that a lot of European Jews made early on, which is thinking that all the Gentiles are alike, right? Which leads them to misunderstand their enemies. One thing that really gets lost in casual discussion of Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem is that Israeli authorities also kind of put Holocaust survivors on trial for their timidity. They of course, needed witnesses to call to discuss the details of the killing system Eichmann had helped to implement. Arendt describes, quote, the prosecutor asking witness after witness, why did you not protest? Why did you board the train? 15,000 people were standing there and hundreds of guards facing you. Why didn't you revolt and charge and attack? These guards harped on for all it was worth. But the sad truth of the matter is that the point was ill taken. For no non Jewish group or non Jewish people had behaved differently. Sixteen years ago, while still under the direct impact of the events, a former French inmate of Buchenwald, David Roussette, described in his book the logic that obtained in all concentration camps. Quote, the triumph of the SS demands that the tortured victim allow himself to be led to the noose without protesting, that he renounce and abandon himself to the point of ceasing to affirm his identity. And it is not for nothing, it is not gratuitously out of sheer sadism that the SS men desire his defeat. They know that the system which succeeds in destroying its victims before he mounts the scaffold is incomparably the best for keeping a whole people in slavery, in submission. Nothing is more terrible than these processions of human beings going like dummies to their death. The court received no answer to this cruel and silly question. But one could easily have found an answer had he permitted his imagination to dwell for a few minutes on the fate of those Dutch Jews who in 1941, in the old Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, dared to attack a German security police detachment. Four hundred and thirty Jews were arrested in reprisal, and they were literally tortured to death, being sent first to Buchenwald and then to the Austrian camp of Mathausen. Month after month they died a thousand deaths. And every single one of them would have envied his brethren in Auschwitz had he known about them. There exist many things considerably worse than death. And the SS saw to it that none of them was ever very far from the mind and imagination of their victims. In this respect, perhaps even more significantly than in another, the deliberate attempt in Jerusalem to tell only the Jewish side of the story distorted the truth, even the Jewish truth. And this is such an important Criticism that not only are the victims of Eichmann also on trial in Jerusalem, but that by framing it this way, by being so obsessed with. Well, why didn't they fight more? Why didn't they're. And by being so obsessed with just the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, they're distorting even the story of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. That. That. That's also happening here.

[Joe Kasabian]

It's something that continues to happen with, unfortunately, Israeli history of the. The downplaying of the other victims and even other genocides as well, in order to tell their own crafted version of it, of. Of going like sheep to the slaughter is a famous quote.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Joe Kasabian]

And was even used as a rallying cry by. I believe his name was Abner Kovner.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Yeah. Kovner. Yes.

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah. To launch attacks against surviving SS men and even attempt to poison an entire city in Germany.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yes. We've talked about the part of a group called Nakam.

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was like the rallying cries, like, we did not go like sheeps to the slaughter.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. And they. They did. And there were so many other examples of resistance. Right. But the point that Arendt is making is both that, like, you can't imagine the position these people were in and what had been done to them already, and also, like, the degree of, like, critiquing them for this. They acted like everyone else. And we know this because every other group that was targeted by the Nazis that was put into this system, they more or less all behaved similarly. Right. Of course, this is not just a problem with Jewish people in Europe. This was just something. This was a result of the sheer amount of violence. Violence that was deployed and what it does to people.

[Joe Kasabian]

It happens with every genocide. And this story gets told with every genocide. I. I am Armenian and Armenians tell the same thing that, like, they. They put their own history through the same. Like, well, why did they. Why did they just walk off like that and do as they were told? They're like, how stupid are you?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Joe Kasabian]

How fucking dare you?

[Robert Evans]

It's this desire both to avoid what you see as the shame that they didn't fight back more, and also this belief to think that, well, I would never be in that position.

[Joe Kasabian]

I'm built different.

[Robert Evans]

I'd fight back. And I can see it, because now that I'm on the side, now that I'm part of a country that has a military that's capable of fighting, we're fighting. We would never just give up. And it's this desire to believe that you were now safe from this horrible thing. And this desire to believe also that it's this deeply insidious attitude that people who suffer something that badly, even if they're your people, they must have done something wrong.

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah, exactly.

[Robert Evans]

They didn't fight hard enough. Right. There's something that they could have done that I would do if I was in their situation. Right.

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah, Everybody. Oh, that couldn't happen to me. I would do this. I assure you it will.

[Robert Evans]

That would be me. Yeah, it fucking will. And I think Arendt's work is so valuable in part because she brings this criticism up that is very hard to talk about this. It's very hard to be critical of, like, especially in public, of how Israel handled the Eichmann and what they did. And the story of Israeli treatment of Holocaust survivors is much deeper than just this. And it's difficult for a lot of people to be critical about it. Cause it's hard to not seem like you're saying something. And like, Arendt is a Holocaust survivor. She is smuggled out of Europe. Right. Like she is. And she is the one making these criticisms of Israel during the trial. Right. As she's reporting for, I think, the fucking New Yorker. You know, it's very important. And her and Eichmann in Jerusalem, for all of its flaws, is still very important to read for these reasons. Now, I find stuff like this much more interesting than Eichmann's actual performance on trial. In short, his defense counsel tries to use the argument that Hans Globke had drafted the Nuremberg racial laws in 1930, and thus Eichmann had only been following orders. Eichmann himself sought to inhabit the image of a timid middle manager. We'd handled some logistics, sure, he'd helped send Jews to camps, he was making the trains run, but he wasn't putting people in gas chambers. He testified, personally, I had nothing to do with killing Jews. I've never killed a Jew, and I've never ordered anyone to kill a Jew. The German government, for their part, when he brings part of what Germany's doing, when. When Eichmann brings up Globke to try to be like, no, this was the guy responsible. Germany tries to hush that up, right? And they're like, really pushing internationally, like, we gotta keep this shit quiet. Because Globka at this point is the senior most civil servant in West Germany working under Conrad Eidenhour. Right?

[Joe Kasabian]

There it is. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

The guy who drafted the Nuremberg racial laws is working for the government again. He's the senior most civil servant in West Germany under Aiden Hour. So obviously, the outcome of this trial is never really in doubt. Now, there are some very valuable things that happen during the trial and that get out. And it's very valuable that a lot of Eichmann's victims are allowed to talk about what happened to them, are allowed to put that on the historic record. I'm not claiming that, like, this is all a failure or bad. A lot of good does come of his trial. Right. That is also a part of the story, and it's an important part of the story. And the fact that a lot of victims of the Holocaust get to go in front of a perpetrator and lay out what he did to them is good. There are also horrifying moments. Right. One of the worst moments of the trial is a former Auschwitz inmate is shown a camp uniform while he's on trial and he has a stroke in the courtroom.

[Joe Kasabian]

Oh, Jesus.

[Robert Evans]

Like, it's fucking nightmarish, right? And in this case, they are trying to do, like, the right thing, where it's like, we need this on the record. But, like, of course, that's what happens sometimes, right? Like, it's just. It's horrible. Like, there's no easy way to handle all this stuff. On December 11th and 12th in 1961, the court declared Adolf Eichmann guilty of crimes against the Jewish people and humanity as a whole. He was sentenced to death by hanging and executed on June 1, 1962. He died unrepentant. And that's the Eichmann story.

[Joe Kasabian]

It's not surprising. He. He went screaming to hell, refusing to admit that he was wrong.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. No, that's scary.

[Joe Kasabian]

Yep. Well, good, I guess.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Joe Kasabian]

Glad it ended that way, rather than going out the Mengele way, which I. Dying of a drowning heart attack while swimming. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Oh, man.

[Joe Kasabian]

Anyway, though, admittedly, I feel like drowning would be a lot worse. So who's to say?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, who's to say? I mean, I don't know. My grandma nearly drowned to death and always had said it was a pretty pleasant way to go. Like, you feel really warm and nice at the end. I don't know. I've never drowned.

[Joe Kasabian]

Do we know if Israel did it right and he didn't strangle to death? I feel like that's something that an Israeli prison guard would fuck up on purpose.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't think he. Like, it wasn't like. Because that happens to a lot of the Nuremberg guys. Like, the hangman, like, purposefully fucks up.

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah. That hangman ruled.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. We've done episodes on him as, like, a pretty cool guy.

[Joe Kasabian]

Just a drunk guy who wanted to strangle a lot of Nazis that accidentally kind of ripped their heads off.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he was the right man for the job. Yeah. He is executed by hanging. I don't think he was particularly fucked up. It should have been.

[Joe Kasabian]

That's unfortunate.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, do it the slow way. Like, oh, no, we built it too low, Israel.

[Joe Kasabian]

You can't fuck up the one thing we want you to fuck up.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Really screw over this hanging. Yeah. Anyway, well. Well, if you ever get a chance to hang a Nazi, be bad at it.

[Joe Kasabian]

Exactly.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Joe Kasabian]

The only way to be good at that job is by fucking it up harder than you fucked up anything you fucked up before you need to get drunk.

[Robert Evans]

You've got to really practice to be incompetent at this.

[Joe Kasabian]

There you go. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. All right, everybody. Listen to. Listen to Joe's podcast. Listen to Joe's podcast. Yeah.

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah. If you want to know more about. Actually weird that this is everything you bring up keeps coming back to a series that we've done, but we did a series on Otto Skorzeni. He's a psycho.

[Robert Evans]

He's a psycho.

[Joe Kasabian]

So you can listen to. You could listen to that series that we did or one of the other 300 or so episodes we've done over the last 70 years. You'll find something you like called Lions Led by Donkeys. Listen to it. We have a Patreon. Check it out.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, check out their Patreon. And yeah, go do something. Happy now? Have fun. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.

[Cindy Crawford]

For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit.

[Robert Evans]

Our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or.

[Cindy Crawford]

Wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube.

[Robert Evans]

New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube.com behindthebaster.

[Cindy Crawford]

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[Joe Kasabian]

A treasure trove of bananas has been stolen and it's up to Donkey Kong and his buddy Pauline to get them back. This unlikely duo is going on a world smashing adventure using DK's destructive abilities to explore an underground world and the.

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Donkey Kong Bonanza available July 17 rated.

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