Part One: Adolf Eichmann: Mr. Holocaust Himself

Summary

Behind the Bastards: Part One – Adolf Eichmann: Mr. Holocaust Himself

Behind the Bastards, a compelling podcast produced by Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts, delves deep into the lives of history's most notorious figures. In the episode titled "Part One: Adolf Eichmann: Mr. Holocaust Himself," host Robert Evans engages in a thought-provoking discussion with guest Joe Kasabian to unravel the complexities surrounding Adolf Eichmann, a key architect of the Holocaust.

---

Introduction

The episode opens with a candid and humorous exchange between Robert Evans and Joe Kasabian, setting the tone for an unflinching exploration of Adolf Eichmann's life. Robert introduces Eichmann not just as a bureaucrat but as "Mr. Holocaust himself," emphasizing his pivotal role in orchestrating the genocide of millions.

Robert Evans (00:40): "Mr. Holocaust himself... he worked very hard to make himself the number one name associated with the Holocaust internationally."

---

Eichmann's Role in the Holocaust

Robert Evans dismantles the notion of Eichmann as a mere cog in the Nazi machinery, arguing that his reputation often surpasses his actual involvement. Eichmann was primarily responsible for the logistics of the Holocaust, managing the deportation of Jews to extermination camps.

Robert Evans (06:00): "If you're making like a top five list of the Nazis who were most directly responsible for the genocide of European Jewry, Eichmann is gonna make the list every single time."

The discussion highlights Eichmann's trial in the 1960s, which brought Heinrich Himmler's orchestrated genocide into the global spotlight. The philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the term "the banality of evil" based on Eichmann's demeanor during the trial, portraying him as an ordinary bureaucrat who claimed he was merely following orders.

Robert Evans (08:30): "Arendt coins a term called the banality of evil to describe the man that she sees in Israeli captivity."

However, Evans challenges the adequacy of this term for Eichmann, suggesting that his actions and personality exhibited more than mere banality.

Robert Evans (09:46): "Eichmann is not a good example of that. He was not banal at all. He is like a super villain in terms of his actual personality and how he talked about what he did."

---

Debunking Common Myths

The conversation critically examines popular biographical accounts of Eichmann, which often mirror the stereotypical narratives constructed around Adolf Hitler. Early biographies painted Eichmann as a victim of bullying and a troubled youth, a portrayal that Evans and Kasabian deem largely inaccurate.

Joe Kasabian (14:17): "He was living in a men's home. That cannot explain why he did what he did."

Robert Evans (15:43): "It's an easy thing. Easy biography to accept... But for Eichmann, unfortunately, it's also hogwash."

They reference Bettina Stangneth's Eichmann Before Jerusalem, which seeks to debunk these myths by presenting a more nuanced and less victimized Eichmann. Contrary to earlier accounts, evidence suggests that Eichmann was not ostracized or constantly bullied, and he maintained friendships with Jewish peers during his youth.

Robert Evans (12:43): "There’s room for debate as to what he would have given as his name during different points in his life."

---

The Banality of Evil Revisited

While acknowledging the usefulness of Arendt's concept in describing systemic evil, Evans argues that Eichmann's personal disposition was far from banal. Instead, Eichmann exhibited traits of a calculated and ideologically driven individual.

Robert Evans (10:07): "He is a dude with a social life. He’s a dude who’s reasonably good with women... He has options to be happy outside of joining the Nazi Party."

This perspective shifts the focus from Eichmann's supposed mediocrity to his active and intentional participation in genocidal planning, challenging listeners to reconsider the depths of individual culpability within oppressive systems.

---

Eichmann's Family and Background

The episode delves into Eichmann's upbringing in Linz, Austria, highlighting his family's evangelical Calvinist Protestant beliefs, which were in the minority in the predominantly Catholic town. This environment fostered a sense of German nationalism that later influenced both Hitler and Eichmann.

Robert Evans (23:21): "Schonerer is a massive influence on Hitler... These guys are destroying Jewish newspapers, they're getting into fights in the street and they're like a Pan German nationalist group."

Eichmann's familial connections, including his marriage into a Jewish family, complicate the narrative of his unwavering anti-Semitism. Despite these ties, Eichmann chose to immerse himself in far-right nationalist organizations, indicating a conscious alignment with Nazi ideologies over personal relationships.

Robert Evans (34:13): "This is not a guy who's destined to the kind of antisemitism that he is going to adopt in adulthood. It's a choice he makes."

---

Path to the Nazi Party

Eichmann's professional journey portrays him as an opportunistic individual seeking advancement within the evolving political landscape of Austria and Germany. His early career in logistics, managing fuel deliveries and establishing gas stations, provided him with the skills essential for his later role in the Holocaust.

Robert Evans (56:29): "So his first big boy job is hydraulic fracking... His training for how to make the Holocaust trains run is setting up gas stations and fuel delivery."

Eichmann's strategic alignment with the Nazi Party in the early 1930s was driven by his foresight into the party's impending rise to power, positioning himself to gain prominence and influence within the impending regime.

Robert Evans (65:24): "He's like, this is a new organization. I can push myself in there and find a place where you can sort of make it your own."

This calculated approach underscores Eichmann's role not just as a perpetrator but as a skilled administrator and strategist within the Nazi hierarchy.

---

Conclusion

Behind the Bastards presents Adolf Eichmann as a complex figure whose life contradicts the simplistic narratives often propagated about Nazi officials. Through in-depth analysis and critical examination of biographical sources, Robert Evans and Joe Kasabian challenge listeners to reassess their understanding of Eichmann's motivations and actions. The episode sets the stage for a continued exploration of Eichmann's transformation from a seemingly ordinary individual to one of history's most infamous villains in Part Two: Adolf Eichmann: The Architect of Murder.

Robert Evans (70:00): "Someone needs to give that kid a swirly immediately. I do wonder, would we have been better off if Eichmann did get the shit bullied out of him when he was a child?"

---

Behind the Bastards effectively combines historical analysis with engaging dialogue, offering listeners a nuanced perspective on Adolf Eichmann's life and his instrumental role in one of history's darkest chapters.

Transcript

[Sophie]

Call Zone Media.

[Robert Evans]

Welcome back to behind the Bastards, a podcast where every week I try to make you feel worse about life, even though life makes you feel worse about life every week. Why do I do this? Money. And also I live to hurt you. You know, that's it. That's all that's going on with me. Let's talk about what's going on with our guest today, Joe Kasabian. Joe, how are you doing?

[Joe Kasabian]

Hey, I'm great. I'm ready for pain to be inflicted on me and absorb the pain and the suffering like a sponge.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, yes, yes. Let me eat your pain. Your delicious pain.

[Sophie]

You say that, but when you hear what the topic is.

[Joe Kasabian]

Oh yeah, last time I was on it was like four hours of Lavrenti Beria. What could possibly be worse than that?

[Sophie]

Oh, I'm so glad you asked that question.

[Robert Evans]

What could possibly be worse than Lavrenti Baria style, Stalin's head of the secret police, and almost certainly a pedophile on an industrial scale. What could be worse than that?

[Sophie]

I'm so glad you asked that question.

[Robert Evans]

What could be worse than that? Sofie, what could be worse than that?

[Sophie]

I mean, I know the topic, but.

[Robert Evans]

I think, Joe, I think we've done an able job of finding a worse one for you.

[Sophie]

You're welcome.

[Robert Evans]

Because this week and motherfucking next week, because boy howdy, you can't do this guy in two parts. We are talking about Mr. Holocaust himself, Adolph Eichmann.

[Sophie]

You're welcome.

[Joe Kasabian]

Are you fucking serious?

[Robert Evans]

That's right, baby.

[Joe Kasabian]

Fuck me.

[Robert Evans]

Mr. Holocaust himself. I probably shouldn't call him.

[Joe Kasabian]

I mean, it's a good. If he had a ring name, it would be Holocaust.

[Robert Evans]

And he, as we'll talk about, he worked most of his professional career. He worked very hard to make himself the number one name associated with the Holocaust internationally. Like that was a. He was not actually like, he. His reputation, he was very involved, obviously, but his reputation is even higher than his actual involvement. And that was due to him trying to jink up his career. But I think it's fair.

[Joe Kasabian]

God, he was trying to juice up his Holocaust.

[Robert Evans]

He really was. He really was.

[Sophie]

And Joe, when Robert told me he was writing the scripts, he's like, who should we get as a guest? And I was like, Joe.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we probably got to get Joe in for this one.

[Joe Kasabian]

Yes, yes, I'm glad I have a brand and it's horrible.

[Robert Evans]

Uh huh.

[Sophie]

Uh, well, boy howdy, let's do it.

[Joe Kasabian]

I'm gonna say though, you had me in the first half cause you said Mr. Holocaust himself. Adolph. I'm like, did he, did he really? This motherfucker really bring me on for the Hitler episodes.

[Robert Evans]

We've done so many Hitlers.

[Joe Kasabian]

I know.

[Robert Evans]

We've covered. We gotta. You gotta cover Hitler in like little pieces. Like we'll do two parts on how we fucked. You know, you gotta cover all the. There's so much niche Hitler stuff. Although, you know, as let's come back from the Cold Open and I'll talk about the scope of these episodes. But we're done with the Cold Open. You're warm now.

[Joe Kasabian]

Very warm.

[Robert Evans]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Ad]

Sonesta Travel Pass is the most rewarding way to travel. Sign [e-mail] for instant savings, bonus points and perks like early check in and late checkout, room upgrades and free stays. Choose from 1100 hotels across 13 brands and unlock their best rates when you book with Sonesta Travel Pass here today, Rome tomorrow. Join [e-mail] that's Sonesta.com terms and conditions apply.

[Robert Evans]

Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest. Life comes at you fast, which is why it's important to find some time to relax a little. You time. Enter Chumba Casino with no download required. You can jump on anytime, anywhere for the chance to redeem some serious prizes. So treat yourself with Chumba Casino and play over 100 online casino style games, all for free. Go to Chumbacasino.com to collect your free welcome bonus. Sponsored by Chumba Casino.

[Joe Kasabian]

No purchase necessary. VGW Group Void where prohibited by law. 21/members and conditions apply.

[JLo]

You're a hustler. You get things done, but you don't always do things for yourself. With JLO Beauty, it takes just a few minutes a day to look like facials are a regular part of your routine. JLo Beauty's Fresh and Flawless skincare kit includes six skincare products that work as hard as you do. They'll hustle to brighten, firm and hydrate your complexion morning and night. This skincare kit is a one and done solution that is clinically proven to visibly tighten and lift for instant and long lasting results. Cleanse, treat, moisturize, protect. The fresh and flawless skincare kit does it all. See why the kit's a Bestseller today? Visit jlobeauty.com Deluxe and get an extra 25% off your first shipment plus free gifts with code Deluxe. If you're not satisfied, return the bottles within 60 days for your money back. See the website for details. That's JLo Beauty.com Deluxe to get that JLo Glow.

[Robert Evans]

High key.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast. You better listen.

[Joe Kasabian]

Speaking of tanning, I was sunning my nether regions because I read that you're.

[Robert Evans]

Supposed to, like, get sun not only.

[Joe Kasabian]

In your mouth, but also in your other orifices.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Wait, are you talking about you put your hole into the sun?

[Joe Kasabian]

I did.

[Ryan Seacrest]

That's crazy.

[Joe Kasabian]

Downward dog mooning the sun.

[Ryan Seacrest]

I was gonna say.

[Robert Evans]

Is it chee its cheeks open all the way wide?

[Ryan Seacrest]

Is the cheeks open?

[Joe Kasabian]

Uh huh.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Who's holding them? Enough of that nonsense. Now listen to High key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

And we're back. We're back. We're all lathered up and hot bothered. So these episodes, if you know anything about Eichmann and he's like, outside of Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, you know, Goering, he's probably the first name, one of the few names that like the average person who knows anything about the Holocaust. You've heard of Eichmann, right? A lot of people will have if you haven't. As I always say. There's a great movie called Conspiracy about the conference where they planned the Holocaust where Eichmann is played by Stanley Tucci. And it's perfect performance.

[Joe Kasabian]

Oh, my God, perfect. Is he really played by Stanley?

[Robert Evans]

He's played by Stanley Tucci.

[Sophie]

Tucci can play anything, any part of that.

[Robert Evans]

And Stan Lee is incredible as Eichmann. Like, he really nails it.

[Joe Kasabian]

I can see it. I can see he's got a face.

[Sophie]

Is he also hot in the movie? Because Stanley Tucci's been hot in every movie he's ever been in, except the one where he played that pedophile.

[Robert Evans]

I'm not gonna say. I will say. One of the critiques the movie got is that. And I also think he does an excellent job. Kenneth Branagh plays Reinhard Heydrich. And one of the complaints that some Holocaust scholars had is that he's a very good actor, he does a good job. But he probably shouldn't have made Heydrich hot, right?

[Joe Kasabian]

Maybe that was a mistake, that Heydrich is too sexy.

[Robert Evans]

I tend to think the movie's just good enough. If you've watched the second season of Andor the first episodes where they're planning that genocide on Gorman are themed after that movie, like that movie Conspiracy.

[Joe Kasabian]

Seriously?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Had a big influence on it. Tony Gilroy's confirmed it. But Eichmann, the guy we're talking about today, is not the architect of the Holocaust, because that that generally goes to Heydrich, although obviously he was not the only person involved in setting up the architecture. But Heydrich and Eichmann were both at this meeting, the Wannsee Conference, where the architecture of the Holocaust was set up. And Eichmann's primary job, you might call him the trigger man. Not in, because there were actually a lot of guys who just shot people, right? Like the Einsatzgruppe who shot tens of thousands at places like that were literal triggermen in terms of like, the Nazi state had to build a system that was effectively a big gu for genociding people. And Eichmann was the man who worked. He was the guy who. His primary thing was, like, logistics, like making sure how we're going to move, get all of these people out of the communities they're in and move them into the different camps, right? He was the guy who managed that system. He was the deportation guy, right? That was a big. And he was like, overseeing a lot of that system. As we'll talk about, there's other stuff that he did, but if you're making like a top five list of the Nazis who were most directly responsible for the genocide of European Jewry, Eichmann is gonna make the list every single time, right? Like, he's that central to what happened and kind of the biggest. Probably. I don't know, pop culture is probably the wrong way to talk about Hannah Arendt's writing in 2025, but it was at one point popular culture, right? Because this guy goes on trial, he gets caught by the Mossad, and he goes on trial in the 60s. And Hannah Arendt, who's a famous philosopher and scholar of totalitarianism, writes a book called Eichmann in Jerusalem, right? Which is very much worth reading today. Although very flawed, right? And it's very flawed in part. And one of the things that gets a lot of criticism for today is that as she is describing Eichmann on trial, Arendt coins a term called the banality of evil to describe the man that she sees in Israeli captivity. Because he's just kind of this late, middle aged, balding dude, and he's mostly talking about, like, look, I was just following orders, you know, I was just doing what I was told to do. I was one cog and a bigger machine. I didn't actually kill anyone directly. That was like the bulk of his legal defense. And I think. I don't think the banality of evil is a useless term. I think it does describe a lot of people who were involved in administrative levels of The Holocaust. Right. There are individuals whose job is pretty banal and who were themselves pretty banal and played an important role in the killing machine. Eichmann is not a good example of that. He was not banal at all. He is like a super villain in terms of his actual personality and how he talked about what he did. This is not a. That was his defense in court. The reality of Eichmann was not a boring middle manager. Right.

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah, yeah. Like, she saw. She saw Eichmann, like, out of power in his old man's sweater, pacing around. Cause there's famously a video of him pacing back and forth in an Israeli prison cell on the stand. Like, of course he looked like the local accountant dork. Yes, yes, of course he looked like that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And it's one of those things. I don't think it's a useless concept. It's just misapplied to Eichmann. She does get. We'll talk about. She gets a lot in this. We'll be quoting from it some in the last episode. And it's one of those things. I don't reject the term the banality of evil. I just think it often is. It's less aptly applied to individuals, often in part because those individuals are not so banal as they may seem from the outside. But I think there's a real banality of evil in the systems that we allow to exist and that we live inside that can be turned into instruments of mass violence or slaughter because we collectively make the poor choice to hand over more of our responsibility for our security to elected officials and government institutions that are neither accountable nor interested in our health. Right. Like, you could use the term banality of evil for the 20 years that voters spent continuing to fund DHS and to expand ICE. Right. Or to the work of editors at hundreds of publications deciding to greenlight more stories about migrant crime because, hey, that does well on Facebook and traffic is money. Right. The banality of evil is the Sulzberger family who owns the New York Times ignoring the Holocaust because Eastern European Jews from rural areas aren't, in their words, world worth caring about. Right. The banality of evil is all of us, like, hearing about shit like this and being like, oh, man, that's fucked up. But, like, I gotta. I gotta make the mortgage. So I guess I'm gonna walk right past this atrocity and keep going. Right? This can't be on me to fix, can it? Right?

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah. The concept of banality of evil is not like, if you see a guy and you've Heard of a guy, Eichmann, for example. He's not the definition of the banality of evil.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Joe Kasabian]

That makes him management.

[Robert Evans]

No, he's management. He is, again, a super villain, like you stick this motherfucker in a Bond movie. Going on some of the rants, he goes on, and he fits perfectly. So a big source for my episodes is a book by German philosopher and author Bettina Stangneth, who wrote a wonderful book called Eichmann Before Jerusalem. And in this book, number one, she's trying to kind of break some of the myths that came up as a result of Arendt's piece. But she also highlights, opening this book how relatively little we know about him. In this passage, we cannot speak of the systematic extermination of millions of men, women and children without mentioning his name. And yet people are no longer even sure what his first name was. Carl Adolf Otto. It's the simplest of questions. Yet it can still surprise us long after we thought we'd established who he was, because he, you know, he has a couple of names and he goes by a few in his life. And there's kind of this open debate as to, like, what. What was he actually called? As, like, a general rule by people that he knew he just had a.

[Joe Kasabian]

Symbol to go off and you're like.

[Robert Evans]

Prince, yeah, Prince, right, yeah. Eichmann. We could just call him that. He was born Otto Adolf Eichmann on March 19, 1906, in Solingen, Germany. But Bettina's point is that depending on who you ask and what you read, there's room for debate as to what he would have given as his name during different points in his life. Right. His first biographers were people like British journalist Comer Clark, who in 1960 tried to chronicle Eichmann's early life and came up with a sort of tale of woe you might expect from a great historic victim. Right. And this is partly what you get when a journalist tries to do a biography, right? As he's, like, looking for the Q hate shit.

[Joe Kasabian]

It's one of my biggest pet peeves.

[Robert Evans]

That's not what we do.

[Joe Kasabian]

A journalist tripped into writing a biography or writing in depth history.

[Robert Evans]

Like, not our place. Not our place. In Comer Clarke's telling, Eichmann's mother died before he was five years old. His mother had to move back to Austria from once they hailed when he was young, but his father had to go back to Germany after this to escape the sorrow of being trapped with memories of his late wife. And so his boy was raised largely by his aunts. David Cesarini, who's a better Eichmann biographer, summarizes the rest of Clark's version of events. According to Clark, Eichmann was repeatedly mistaken for a Jew at school and beaten up, which left him with a lasting antipathy towards Jewish people. Against this background, it was natural that he should join the Nazi party after hearing Hitler speak. And this is all nonsense. None of that's true, right?

[Joe Kasabian]

If that happened, I really wish he would have learned the opposite lesson of that, which is racism. Oh, that's just that we all just must look the same. Like this racism thing is stupid.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, maybe. If I can get mistaken for these people. Jesus, this racism thing must be bullshit, right? This, this is almost certainly not what happened. Cesarini, who is the author of his Life and Crimes, describes similar cavalcades of bullshit from a generation of lazy ahistorical pop bios of this guy. Quentin Reynolds, another British press man, declared that Eichmann was left motherless and introverted. His family was so poor that there was never enough food on the table. Young Adolf turned into a problem child and suffered even more once his father remarried a harsh, domineering woman. As a young man, he was unsuccessful and friendless, not least because he looked Jewish. He failed in job after job and walked the streets of Linz with the unemployed.

[Joe Kasabian]

That sounds more accurate.

[Robert Evans]

It's not, but it sounds like it should be, right? Because it fits, it fits the Hitler profile. I think that's why they did this. Is that like. Well, that's kind of. I mean, Hitler was mostly in Austria by the time he was like living homeless, right?

[Joe Kasabian]

He was living in a men's home.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he was in Vienna by that point. But otherwise like, yeah, that's kind of Hitler's life, right? Like his dad dies early, doesn't have a lot of friends, he fails at job after job, right? Hitler didn't get mistaken for being Jewish often, but like, you know, the rest of that's pretty simple.

[Joe Kasabian]

No, just inbred.

[Robert Evans]

The pieces fit together, right? Dead mom, dad not around, economic anxiety, bullying. That gives him a convenient reason to hate Jews, right?

[Joe Kasabian]

Shitty life.

[Robert Evans]

It's an easy, easy thing. Easy biography to accept. For Eichmann, unfortunately, it's also hogwash. It's like if you were to do a biography of some modern day homophobic bigot and say like, well, he got called gay or the f. Slur a bunch on the playground as a kid, right? So that's why he did such monstrous things as an adult. And if you're like someone 300 years in the future and you read that, you might be like, oh, I guess, yeah, that makes sense. But if you were to talk to, like, either of us, like, if they could bring us forward into the future and be like, so is this why this guy did it? We could be like, no. Everybody got called those things on the playground, man.

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like, that was like a universe called Barian. That was like living in the late 90s, early 2000s, man. Like, that cannot explain why he did what he did.

[Joe Kasabian]

I'm also a bit worried because it's like, oh, you know, he failed at all these jobs, you know, shitty home life. I'm like, okay, so he is, at 17, he's going to enlist in the army. And that is me.

[Robert Evans]

That is me. A lot of guys who don't go on to commit hate crimes and war crimes. So maybe, like, I don't know, got.

[Joe Kasabian]

Beat up for thinking of a different race than I am. That is just me. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Now, in Eichmann's case, there's even less reason to believe his anti Semitism resulted from bullying because there's simply no real evidence that he was bullied about this or accused of being Jewish, you know, in any way that impacted his development. Likewise, the claims that poverty and desperation drove him to fascism are baseless. And again, I think this is like a mainstream Hitler discourse thing, right? Like, it sounds kind of like Hitler's backstory. So that makes it seem like, oh, of course, this is where fascists come from. Right? It's more comforting than being like, no, fascists come from the same place like the guy who runs the local fucking credit union came from, right? Like, they just come from the world. I'm going to read another quote from Cesarini's book, and I want you to think about how easily you could do a find and replace on this paragraph and make it sound like modern reporting on some American neo Nazi mass shooter. Quote. The NBC correspondent John Donovan concluded, on the basis of interviews with Eichmann's schoolmates, that he was a lonely and distant fellow. He was a fragile, underfed youth and an obviously unhappy one, a misfit. According to Donovan, Eichmann represented the classic pattern of disturbed, introverted personality which so often produced the larvae of fanaticism. His father, a struggling and underpaid manager of a failing electrical company, simply could not provide for his abundant family. And more often than not, there was insufficient food on the table. The boy grew to manhood with a grudge and drifted around in a world without hope until he traded a threadbare suit for a splendid SA uniform. And again, not true. I'm bringing this up to talk about, like, how similar a lot of these very fake backstories are and what they say about what we want to believe about a guy named Eichmann. Right?

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah. We always want to believe these people come from, like, disadvantaged backgrounds or tortured family homes or were bullied. I mean, I know we're about the same age, Robert, and what were we always told growing up about the Columbine shooters? You know, ye people always need to be victims of some kind, lashing out. They can't be cold and calculated and ideologically driven, you know?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, and there's this. Yeah, it's tough, too, because, like, there's this belief that is very common on the left and I think is not a bad guiding light that, like, well, you should seek to improve people's conditions because that makes the world better. And guys like Eichmann point out that, like, that. Yeah, you should, but. But that's not enough to avoid the birth of an Eichmann. Because what's going to be scariest about this guy's backstory is that if you grew up in the suburbs, like, 10, 15 years ago or, like, you know, today, a lot of his background's gonna sound similar to you. Right. Like, in some ways that are, like, weirdly direct. So his birth town, Solingen, was a. An industrial town in the Rhineland. And his father was a modern German man with a modern German job. He worked as a clerk for a company that supplied parts to power plants. His name was Adolf Karl Eichmann, and he was a strict disciplinarian, but not in a way that would have been weird to his son or anyone else. This was very normal for the time, our Eichmann would recall. In his own autobiography, I acknowledged my father is the absolute authority. The earliest recollection that he gives us of his education is of a kindergarten teacher with an illustrated book of Bible stories which showed Moses having demonic horns. Now, Eichmann gave this recollection when he was on trial for genocide. So he may have been trying to defray his culpability by making a point about the deep roots of antisemitism in his culture. That said, as I've noted before, you can today find churches in Germany and elsewhere in Europe with what's called a Judencough depicted on the outside, which is a sculptural depiction of a pig suckling Jewish babies. These are like medieval churches, but they're around today, and there were more of them back then. So like the idea that he would have encountered this in Sunday school. Not weird, right? Pretty racist culture.

[Joe Kasabian]

Not at all weird. Germany was a deeply anti Semitic place. And I also like the idea of, like, maybe we shouldn't take the guy on trial for genocide.

[Robert Evans]

Maybe the guy on trial for killing for the Holocaust. At face value, yes.

[Joe Kasabian]

Maybe the concept of innocent until proven guilty needs to be ignored on this one. Perhaps.

[Robert Evans]

I think there were a lot of fascinating jurisprudential arguments about the Nuremberg Trials. And obviously this isn't a part of that. This was a different thing. But, like, we're in part of. It was like, number one, well, technically, everything these guys did was legal in their country. So, like, what law are we trying them under? Kind of ex post facto. And number two, like, well, we know, like, we know Herman Goering doesn't have a defense against being Herman Gehring. Right?

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah. It's the first legal precedent of. Fuck that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Joe Kasabian]

We've all come together and our six or eight judge brains have decided it broke it. Like it we ball.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah.

[Joe Kasabian]

Ball is life. In my weird dress with my wig.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, man. I did watch the fucking Mandela movie with. Starring Idris Elba as Mandela. And it was like, it was fine. But the opening of it is, like, early South African courts where everybody's wearing the wigs, even, like, the black lawyers, and it's like, oh, man, this is. Did that really. I guess that must have really been how everyone dressed in those courts. Seems weird. I guess it's a holdover.

[Joe Kasabian]

I love that there's still places that do it. Like, this is ridiculous. I don't care if you're passing me. I could be sitting in front of you, hands cuffed together, and you're like, I sentence you to death. I'm like, bro, not you. Bring up the real judge. Give me a real guy.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, whatever. Adolf Karl, his dad moves back to Linz to take a job managing a local power company, and his wife and kids follow about a year later. They were Evangelical Calvinist Protestants, which made them as much a minority in the small Austrian town of Linz as the Jewish citizens. Right. Jewish people are like 17% of the population. Evangelical Protestants are like 19%. Linz is predominantly Catholic. And while Catholics believe that good works can win someone a place in heaven, Calvinists are as close to the opposite of Catholics as you get in Christianity. Right. The idea is there's an elect few that make it to heaven and those roles are fixed. Right?

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah. It's very Dutch coded.

[Robert Evans]

It's very Dutch coded, but there's no real evidence that this difference caused Karl much trouble. His family overall seems to have blended in. His dad was a German nationalist and as a Protestant as well, he would have been drawn to Georg Ritter von Schonerer's Pan German movement. This was a foundational pillar of the right in Austria and also a prelude to Nazism's conflict with the Catholic Church because the, the Pan German movement is a heavily evangelical Protestant movement. Right. That's where like the core of the membership comes from. And I want to read you a summary of Schoner's life and career written for Amsterdam University Press, which notes that his politics were, quote, founded on antagonism towards Slavs, Jews and Catholicism. This culminated in his establishment of the Pan German party in 1879 and the sub and the subsequent Away from Rome movement seeking mass conversion of Austrian Catholics to Lutheranism, echoing Bismarck's Kulturkampf. In Germany, Schonerer became notorious for his pioneering use of physical and verbal violence. In 1888 he was imprisoned, losing his title and temporarily all parliamentary privileges. After ransacking the offices of a Jewish owned newspaper. In 1898, he orchestrated mob protests that expedited the dismissal of the Austrian Prime Minister Count Badini, one year after Schonerer's own reelection to the Reichsrath. This was in protest against Bodini's language ordinances obliging civil servants in Austrian Bohemia to speak Czech, excluding Germany manaphones. And it helped his party reach a high water mark of 21 delegates in 1901. Schoner helped create an entirely new political form and climate, described as being in a new key, sharper, violent, demagogic. And Schonerer is a massive. Because again, Hitler grows up in Linz. Schonerer is a huge influence on Hitler. Right. Like he is like the way his party works is a proto Nazi party. These guys are destroying Jewish newspapers, they're getting into fights in the street and they're like a Pan German nationalist group. Right. Who is seeking to destroy any of these religions that have ties. Like his issue with Catholicism is its ties to Rome. Right. Which is obviously not German.

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah. As a German nationalist it makes a lot of sense. I like that he, he ascends to power because his entire thing is, I see you guys have a nationalist movement and it's not doing very well. Have you considered violence?

[Robert Evans]

Have you considered beating people up?

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah. Considered street crime?

[Robert Evans]

Oh shit, this is working great. Yeah, let's keep trying that.

[Joe Kasabian]

This is wonderful.

[Robert Evans]

So Eichmann would later recall that his father had been essentially apolitical at home, politics was never discussed. My father didn't bother with politics. But that's the kind of thing people say when, like, they don't view whatever their family believes as political. Right. And as a kid, Eichmann doesn't think German nationalism or pan Germanism is political. Right. It's just correct. It's like how you get. There's some religious extremists in the US who be like, Christianity isn't a religion. It's just the truth, you know? Right. Like, I've heard. That's a conversation I've had.

[Joe Kasabian]

It's like, I mean, and having Christianity in politics is neither something to argue for, argue against. It just should be something that exists.

[Robert Evans]

It's just the truth, right? Yeah, it's just the truth. You know, I hate to see yet.

[Joe Kasabian]

Another father get radicalized by using Facebook, you know?

[Robert Evans]

Tragic. Yeah, his dad would have lost it to Facebook. So Schonerer's party was the first big political party to influence Hitler. And in a less direct way, the same would have been true of young Eichmann. His family did everything a loyal Austro Hungarian family ought to do. Which for Adolf's mom meant Maria popping out a child every single opportunity she had. Little Adolf was joined by four siblings, three of whom were boys in the space of about eight years. In other words, Maria popped out a kid once every two years until she died in 1916. And her death was a consequence of both. World War I is on at this point. Everyone is starving in Germany and Austria, Hungary. And number two, she's just had not had enough time to recuperate between pregnancies. Right. So, like, her body is already taxed, and then there's not enough food while she's going through pregnancy number five in nine years.

[Joe Kasabian]

Christ, give the woman a weekend off.

[Robert Evans]

Nope, not the way they did it back then. She dies at 32.

[Sophie]

That was a lot.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Joe Kasabian]

This dude couldn't pull out of a driveway.

[Robert Evans]

The elder Adolf Eichmann remarried almost instantly. This was likely a product of two pragmatic realities. He had no desire to raise his own children, and he needed more children because that's what you did as a loyal citizen of the Empire and a good evangelical Christian. Right. His second wife was also named Maria. Perhaps he had.

[Joe Kasabian]

Oh, that's weird.

[Robert Evans]

Perhaps he had a type of. Although an Austrian woman named Maria, not too uncommon.

[Joe Kasabian]

I am looking for an Austrian woman named Maria who could give births in litters.

[Robert Evans]

Three or four at a time would be ideal.

[Joe Kasabian]

It really saves us time and money.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Sophie]

He was like, I'm not learning another name. What are you talking about?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Joe Kasabian]

Oh, no. This is the world's first puppy play. Enthusiastic, right?

[Sophie]

I feel like. I feel like he just numbered his children and he's like, number one, come here.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. It's faster that way. Yeah.

[Joe Kasabian]

Why is it always the psychos that want the most amount of kids have the least amount to do with parenting?

[Robert Evans]

Because the point is to have the kids, not to be there with them.

[Joe Kasabian]

Fair enough.

[Robert Evans]

So, you know, speaking of being with people, I want to be with our advertisers, you know, both. Both physically and financially.

[Ad]

This July 4th, celebrate freedom from spills, stains and overpriced furniture with Annabe, the only machine washable sofa inside and out where designer quality meets budget friendly pricing. Sofas start at just $699, making it the perfect time to upgrade your space. Annabe's pet friendly, stain resistant and interchangeable slipcovers are made with high performance fabric that that's built for real life. You'll love the cloud like comfort of hypoallergenic high resilience foam that never needs fluffing and a durable steel frame that stands the test of time with modular pieces you can rearrange anytime. It's a sofa that adapts to your Life. Now through July 4th, get up to 60% off site [e-mail] Every order comes with a 30 day satisfaction guarantee. If you're not in love, send it back for a full refund. No return shipping, no restocking fees. Every penny back. Declare independence from dirty outdated furniture. Shop [e-mail] Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply from coast to coast.

Unlock adventure at Red lion hotels by Sonesta, where restful sleep, friendly service and local knowledge await. Whether for business or pleasure. Spend less and make more of every trip. When you sign up for the Sinesta Travel Pass pass, you'll get their best rates instantly. Go to sonesta.com to book your stay and unlock their best rates with Sonesta Travel Pass. Here today, Rome tomorrow. Join [e-mail] Terms and conditions apply.

[Robert Evans]

Honestly, honestly, honestly.

[Ryan Seacrest]

No one wants to think about hiv, but there are things that everyone can do to help prevent it. Things like prep. Prep stands for pre exposure prophylaxis and it means routinely taking prescription medicine before you're exposed to HIV to help reduce your chances of getting it. Prep can be about 99% effective when taken as prescribed. It doesn't protect against other STIs though. So be sure to use condoms and other healthy sex practices. Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention Options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead.

[Ad]

You know, we all have a bunch of credit cards, connections to hotels or airlines or a number of things, and I don't think we realize that those points and miles, they lose value when they collect dust. So think about this. A credit card with rewards that actually grows. Introducing the Gemini Credit Card. And with this credit card, you can earn Bitcoin or one of over 50 other cryptos instantly with no annual fee. So every time you go to the grocery store, you go to the gas station, you go out for a night on the town, you earn instant rewards deposited straight into your account. Plus sign up now for a 200 bitcoin bonus to kickstart your rewards. Go to gemini.comjohn to learn more and start earning today. Terms apply again visit gemini.comjohan now. Terms apply. The Gemini Credit card is issued by Web bank. In order to Qualify for the intro $200 crypto bonus, your application must be approved by June 30, 2025 and spend 3,000 your first 90 days. Terms apply. Some exclusions apply to instant Rewards, in which rewards are deposited when the transaction posts this content is not investment advice and trading. Crypto involves risk. For more details on rates, fees and other Gemini credit card terms, see Rates and fees. Go to gemini.com John G O H N to learn more and start earning today.

[Robert Evans]

And we're back. All right, so his second wife, we'll call her Maria too. Her family has money, which helps a lot because they're going to have more kids. Also her family is closely tied to she has like a number of relatives who had married into wealthy Jewish families in Vienna. And obviously by that you should know these are like urban sophisticated, Jewish sophisticated by the term of the day. They're trying to just be Germans, right? Which is not an uncommon thing for people in the upper class who are Jewish, both in Austria and in Germany to do to try to kind of leave behind the religion. And we're basically secular, we're married into Christian families. None of this really saves a lot of these people come the Holocaust. But there is this attempt to integrate that I'm a German before I'm anything else. And that's kind of her family is number one, you'd say probably more open minded than a lot because they are willing to marry into these families. Although it's also this thing of like, well, they got money, right? So that overwhelms the fact that they're this race that a lot of people don't like. Right.

[Joe Kasabian]

They're rich.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. That kind of papers over that to some people. But it's meaningful in the case of Eichmann because you often don't hear this with him. You know, every version of this backstory, of his backstory emphasizes cultural antisemitism, which both he was raised with, and tries to say that he was, like, accused of being Jewish, but it ignores the fact that, like, he was exposed to positive images and accounts of Jewish people as part of German society. His in laws were Jewish, some of them. Right. He knew Jewish people growing up and he would have had, like a family relationship with them. Right. So this is not a guy who was, like, destined by any means to be completely anti Semitic. Right.

[Joe Kasabian]

Destined by the stars to be a massive piece of shit.

[Robert Evans]

Right. That's just not how it works. This is a choice he makes at a point right. Now, obviously his mother's death would have been traumatic for him. It's always traumatic for your mom to die when you were a little kid. But again, a lot of these stories are like. And he hated his wicked stepmother who was cruel to him. He never described her that way. He described her as a zealous and responsible guardian, like.

[Joe Kasabian]

Which is like, the highest compliment a German can pay you.

[Robert Evans]

Right, Right. You get the feeling he didn't love her like he did his mom, which again, isn't weird. But he was like, no, she was, like, respectable. She did the job that she was brought in to do. Right. And three more children quickly joined the family. He later recalled of his family life, there was no disorder. We were brought up in a strict way and we had a normal, quiet life. He did recall as a child that while his stepmother tried to get the family interested in the Bible, young Adolf Eichmann was primarily interested in the bits with battles and killing, which is abnormal for young boys.

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah, that's more on brand. I would be more worried if he wasn't. He's like, no, I'm actually more really into the logistics half of this.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do they. How do they. What do they. What kind of food were they carting around the desert for 40 years? How did they make that work?

[Joe Kasabian]

Right, let me see the wagons.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So one of his best friends as a child was a Jewish classmate, Misha Seba. Seba's father was a pharmacist and his mother owned a salon. And the two were close enough that Cesarini describes them as regularly Staying over at each other's houses. So again, this is not a guy who's destined to the kind of antisemitism that he is going to adopt in adulthood. It's a choice he makes. Seba and Eichmann would maintain their friendship in fact well into not just adulthood, but Eichmann's involvement with like far right organizations into the early, I think like 32 is when they have their last contact. So like that's late. Right.

[Joe Kasabian]

And that's also not uncommon though. No, all of these psychos who, you know, maybe put the blueprints of the Holocaust in place were high ranking members of the third Revival Reich had some kind of hands on shit. Like all of them had close personal contacts with Jewish people. And the mental gymnastics they were crowd was like, ah, well, he's one of the good ones, it's fine.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And that is in fact a thing that was talked about like, and they cover this in conspiracy, but at the Vonsei conference where they're trying to decide like, how far do we go with this? And finally like, look, everyone has their good Jew, but we just can't build that into the plan. We have to try to wipe them all out. Right. But like as I'll like Hitler even. There was one Jewish guy he picked to spear it out of Nazi Germany after he took power. His family doctor. Right.

[Joe Kasabian]

Oh, he was also his personal driver. Yeah, his personal driver was Jewish as well.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All these guys had relationships with Jewish people. Right, but you know, that's just the way racism works. Right?

[Joe Kasabian]

Nobody ever accused them of being smart or logical in their racism.

[Robert Evans]

No, there was a fucking. A great Louis Theroux documentary where he goes to see Tom Metzger who used to lead an organization called White Aryan Resistance or War that was responsible for the murder of a young immigrant named Mulaguetta Surah in Portland years back. And you know, Metzger is as vile an anti Semite as possible. And during Louis time with him, he like meets his neighbor who's like a Mexican man and they're like friendly. And Tom's like, no, I mean like we get along. Like I like him. Like it doesn't change my overall opinion about like different races. And it's just like, yeah, that's just how these people are. Like cognitive dissonance. You're not immune to it just because you're a bigot. Right. So anyway, Seba and Eichmann are friends for a while. And yeah, another friend of his was Friedrich von Schmidt. And this is a friend more than you would expect from a guy who grows into what Eichmann was. As you can tell by the Vaughn, Friedrich is the son of a noble family. His dad had been a field marshal for the Austro Hungarian army, which means he was terrible at his job. None of them were good.

[Joe Kasabian]

Nobody's ever been worse at their job.

[Robert Evans]

Not a single good field marshal in that army. And his family was impoverished by the time that Eichmann met him. Right. Probably because of the heretofore mentioned World War I. Right.

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah. I'm glad to see at least one family got what they deserved.

[Robert Evans]

Right. Poverty. Yeah. Cesarini notes that the mere fact that Eichmann was allowed to play with this kid counters the narrative that he was like a desperate loner on the fringes as a kid. Because von Schmidt's family wouldn't have let their son play with the weird kid. Right. That's just not the way these groups worked.

[Joe Kasabian]

If anything, it's evidence that his family was quite well placed in society to be hanging out with us. Even even though they're impoverished. It's that kind of European, not nobility. That's poor. But they still have social standing and they're.

[Robert Evans]

No. Yeah. And they don't. And, like, the Eichmann family is not like, impoverished. I think they go from kind of lower middle class to solidly middle class by the time he's like an adult. Right. Like is sort of how I. And again, middle class terms like that are not as useful when we're talking about Austro Hungary in the first half of the 20th century. But that's. Or Austria, but that's kind of where.

[Joe Kasabian]

A used horse salesman, like, a used car salesman didn't exist yet.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. They drive the equivalent of a Pontiac vibe in horses, which I guess is just a horse with no legs that you pull with a fucking.

[Joe Kasabian]

Put my horse up on cinder blocks.

[Robert Evans]

We pull horse with mule is Pontiac.

[Joe Kasabian]

This is my horse vibe.

[Robert Evans]

So if we're looking for signs in his childhood of the monster he would become, we don't have a lot to go on from childhood trauma. Because he doesn't seem to have had a lot of childhood trauma, more than probably you and I or most kids. Because he grew up in World War I. Right. He's not fighting in it, but everyone is starving for a while. Right. That's probably pretty bad for you. Now, what's interesting to me is that, like, it is a seminal moment, this war, for a lot of the Nazi old guard, whether they fought in it or not. But Eichmann didn't talk about it much and we get little of his backstory on that now. He would have been inundated with imperial propaganda and the shortages of the war years would have impacted him. But his father seems to have maintained a comfortable living for the family in spite of the times, and was never drafted himself. Which also suggests that what he was doing was really useful during the war. Right. To not get drafted by the end of that fucking thing. As a. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Joe Kasabian]

He either had really good connections or he did something, some kind of manufacturing.

[Robert Evans]

Because by the end he's working in power, right?

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah. Like by the end, the Austro Hungarian Empire was scraping the bottom of the bottom of the barrel. They were drafting the horses with no legs.

[Robert Evans]

Do you have one or more hands? Okay, that's not a good Austrian accent.

[Ad]

What was that?

[Robert Evans]

That was. How am I doing it?

[Joe Kasabian]

All right, we have paperwork for something called horse vibe.

[Robert Evans]

So the war cost Austria what was left of her empire. Right. And a third of the German speaking population wound up separated into different countries, which really pisses off pan Germanists like Eichmann's father. But again, we have nothing that shows childe Eichmann was particularly traumatized at the war's outcome. Nor is there any particular evidence that his dad blamed the Jews. We might do better looking at the place and systems he was raised in than the specifics of his family life. This is because the town he was raised in, Linz, is also the town where Hitler had been raised a couple decades earlier. And the future Fuhrer was at this point on the Western front during World War I. But he and Eichmann went to the same high school as kids, obviously with some time in between them. And they had some of the same teachers, right?

[Joe Kasabian]

God, that's weird.

[Robert Evans]

Eichmann has Hitler's history teacher. Who is this guy? This guy.

[Joe Kasabian]

That history teacher has the most cursed alumni meetings ever.

[Robert Evans]

And he's a piece like he's got some blame for what happens.

[Joe Kasabian]

He has to. His fucking track record is spotless in tragedy.

[Robert Evans]

No. And this is why I always tell my friends who are teachers don't teach children things. It never ends well, you know, keep their little minds empty. Right?

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah. I had a teaching job for years. I'm never gonna say it was a good one, but I'm willing to bet I did not teach American. Hitler. Hitler, yeah. Way too busy watching. Remember the Titans, right?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Just put that on a bunch, they'll be fine. His history teacher was named Dr. Leopold Poetsch. Poetsch. P O ET like poet. S C H. Both Hitler and Eichmann later wrote about the impact this man had on their developing minds. So it's probably worth looking into him a bit deeper. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote this about an old gentleman, kind, but at the same time firm. He was able not only to hold our attention by his dazzling eloquence, but to carry us away with him. Him. Even today, I think back with genuine emotion on this gray haired man who by the fire of his words sometimes made us forget the present, who, as if by magic, transported us into times past and out of the millennium mists of time transformed dry historical facts into vivid reality. There we sat, often aflame with enthusiasm, sometimes even moved to tears. He used our budding national fanaticism as a means of educating us, frequently appealing to our sense of national honor. This teacher made history my favorite subject. And indeed, though he had no such intention, it was then I became a young revolutionary. Not a good teacher.

[Joe Kasabian]

No. No, that's not good.

[Robert Evans]

You fucked up, Leopold.

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah. At any point you're a teacher and you get noted in your students manifesto. Manifesto, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Joe Kasabian]

Not a good vote of confidence.

[Robert Evans]

Mm. Mm. So Poetsch was a German supremacist, Although he was also one. He was a weird kind because he was super loyal to the Habsburgs, which obviously Hitler does not become loyal to the Habsburgs. He leaves Austria to join the German army. His exhortations to nationalism influenced both Hitler and Eichmann, though Eichmann recalled later that while he was never very political as a kid, he reflexively leaned towards right wing nationalism. This would have kept him well inside the mainstream, within lens for most of his childhood. The city government was run by mayor Carl Berle, who headed a coalition of lawyers, teachers, small business owners, and government employees who were all bound together by a shared hatred of liberals, Jews and the Catholic clergy.

[Joe Kasabian]

All right. And yeah, it's just a normal Republican meeting these days.

[Robert Evans]

Just a normal Republican meeting these days. His father went through several career changes, Eichmann's and significant reversals of fortune. While he's a kid, the job in Linn's had initially seemed like a step to the upper middle class, and for a time it was. But his dad retired early and put his savings into a 51% stake in a mining company based in Salzburg, which was experimenting with an early form of what we now call hydraulic fracturing. Right. Like his family, he has some family money from fracking. Adolf Eichmann, he's an oil and gas kid.

[Joe Kasabian]

Oh. So does this make him like, ancestrally from North Dakota or something? Is he Dakotan?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's why Adolf Eichmann High School is located in Bismarck. I'd say sorry to our listener in North Dakota, but they don't have the Internet there, do they?

[Joe Kasabian]

Explains all the Nazis there, to be fair.

[Robert Evans]

I'm sorry, North Dakota. I love you. I don't love you, but I've been to you.

[Joe Kasabian]

I don't think anybody could be in love with a Dakota.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's more of a friend. It's like loving a vampire squid. You know, you can appreciate some of its characteristics, but.

[Joe Kasabian]

A what?

[Robert Evans]

A vampire squid.

[Joe Kasabian]

What the fuck is a vampire squid?

[Robert Evans]

It's a squid. That's a vampire. Come on.

[Sophie]

The way your brain's working today, it.

[Joe Kasabian]

Is what it says on the tin.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. No, it's what's advertised.

[Sophie]

Your brain is like this today. Ba ba, ba ba.

[Robert Evans]

That's a lot of days, Sophie.

[Joe Kasabian]

Much like the legs of a vampire squid.

[Sophie]

There we go.

[Robert Evans]

So this, this 51% stake in a fracking company in Salzburg, it brings in a living, but it doesn't make them rich. Right. You're in it a little too early to get loaded from fracking. So Adolf's dad invested what was left of his savings and his wife's inheritance into a mill in Upper Austria. This was a bad choice and the investment went bust. Quickly, Carl pivoted to an investment in a company making locomobiles. I had never heard of these. They were.

[Joe Kasabian]

The fuck is a locomobile?

[Robert Evans]

They were steam powered cars.

[Joe Kasabian]

That rules. I mean, you have to, you have to invent something when your horse has no fucking legs.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So he gets into locomobiles. But it turns out this isn't like a real investment. His business partner is a con man who hangs himself. South. South.

[Joe Kasabian]

Well, yeah. You invested in steam powered cars with the local Austrian flim flam man.

[Robert Evans]

And you're an oil man. Some biographers would try to make hay out of the impact his father's unstable employment and financial situation might have had. As with the fact that his dad is gone for a period, there's like a year where he's working in Germany. Well, Eichmann's a kid. But Eichmann never related this as particularly traumatic. And the evidence shows while again, they had financial difficult, they were never in danger of like losing their home or starving. If anything, the Eichmanns enjoyed unusual stability and financial security for people of their class and time. Right. Not that they were totally stable, not that they didn't have anxieties, but they had it better than a lot of folks, right?

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah, I mean, they're making a killing selling weird steam powered cars, setting their neighbors drinking water on fire with fracking.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, well, I mean, his business partner in the steam cars thing killed himself because it went belly up. So I don't know about that part.

[Joe Kasabian]

But yeah, yeah, you're right. It's more of a Shelbyville thing.

[Robert Evans]

I guess it's a Shelbyville thing. Yeah. But he does get. He does get tricked by. Yeah, the fucking music man. So as I noted earlier when I read Cesareani's biography, the big thing I took away was how similar Eichmann's childhood was to like mine. Which is not something that tends to happen with books about guys who grew up in Austria at the turn of the century. And I find this very weird. And I'm just going to quote from that book now. Eichmann's social life was typical of the children and youth of his class. Like every good bourgeoisie child, he was taught a musical instrument and he became a proficient violinist. His father encouraged him to learn fencing and he took classes in jiu jitsu. He was enrolled in the Young Men's Christian association and went to the club every Sunday. After attending church with his family, he later joined the Wandervogel, a sort of scouting or woodcraft association that organized hikes and camps for teenagers. The particular Wandervogel group he joined belonged to the Federation of Youth Organizations, which was ostensibly apolitical, although the movement had a strong, if diverse ideological currents. Running through. Eichmann's group, named after the griffin bird, introduced him to older boys who were already in the ranks of right wing Austrian militias. And just like the whole. Yeah, he, like he has to learn an instrument. Everyone does. He takes fencing classes. He takes jiu jitsu. Like he's doing karate classes. I didn't know they were doing that at this point in time in Austria.

[Joe Kasabian]

I love the idea of like a Nazi brown shirt getting in a street battle and he just falls on his ass and starts scooting around trying to do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, like a crab on his back.

[Joe Kasabian]

I'm gonna P Guard of the undermen.

[Robert Evans]

Oh man, it's so funny. It's just, it's all. Yeah, that's fascinating to me. And yeah, the Wandervogel there was like a left wing chunk of them. But the group he is in, he doesn't get involved in right wing militias, but he now has friends in them. Right. And he will know people kind of the rest of his life until he gets directly in the far right who are in far right groups. Right.

[Joe Kasabian]

This makes sense to me as someone who did a lot of jiu jitsu where you never expect that you're going to end up in the middle of a group of right wingers. But the second you walk into a jiu jitsu gym like oh, huh.

[Robert Evans]

The vibes are off.

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah, I guess I'm in a right wing space, aren't I?

[Robert Evans]

Oh God, I saw three people with hats that are problems walk in. I may not be happy here. Speaking of places I'm not happy. A world without these products and services. Wow.

[Ad]

This July 4th celebrate freedom from spills, stains and overpriced furniture with Anabe, the only machine washable sofa inside and out where designer quality meets budget friendly pricing. Sofas start at just $699, making it the perfect time to upgrade your space. Anna Bay's Pet Friendly Stain resistant and interchangeable slipcovers are made with high performance fabric that's built for real life. You'll love the cloud like comfort, comfort of hypoallergenic high resilience foam that never needs fluffing and a durable steel frame that stands the test of time with modular pieces you can rearrange anytime. It's a sofa that adapts to your Life. Now through July 4th, get up to 60% off site [e-mail] Every order comes with a 30 day satisfaction guarantee. If you're not in love, send it back for a full refund. No return shipping, no restocking fees, every penny. Declare independence from dirty outdated furniture. Shop [e-mail] Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Find home wherever you roam at Sinesta Es and Simply Suites. Stretch out and enjoy home like amenities for however long you need and when you're a Sinesta Travel Pass member, staying at Sinesta Es and Simply Suites means earning points toward free free nights, upgrades and more. Go to sonesta.com and book your stay and unlock their best rates with Sonesta Travel Pass. Here today, Rome tomorrow. Join [e-mail] Terms and conditions apply.

[Robert Evans]

Honestly, honestly, honestly.

[Ryan Seacrest]

No one wants to think about hiv, but there are things that everyone can do to help prevent it. Things like prep. PREP stands for Pre Exposure Prophylaxis and it means routinely taking prescription medicine before you're exposed to HIV to help reduce your chances of getting getting it. Prep can be about 99 effective when taken as prescribed. It doesn't protect against other STIs though, so be sure to use condoms and other healthy sex practices. Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention Options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead Are you interested in.

[Ad]

Investing in Bitcoin and not sure how to get started? Well, with the Gemini Credit card, a card that I've been using now for a couple months, you can dip your toes in the bitcoin world world without even trying. You just spend like you normally do. I go to the gas station, I use it. I go to the grocery store, I use it. I take my wife out, I use it and I instantly earn up to 4% back in Bitcoin or one of the over 50 other cryptos straight to your account. You can choose. There's no annual fee and the Gemini credit card is a no brainer. I love it. I use it all the time and right now you can grab grab a 200 bitcoin intro bonus. So just go to gemini.comjohn to learn more and start earning today. Terms apply. Again. You go to gemini.com john and start building your Bitcoin stash now. Terms apply. The Gemini credit card is issued by Web bank and in order to Qualify for the Intro 200 crypto bonus, your application must be applied approved by June 30, 2025 and spend 3,000 in your first 90 days. Terms apply. Some exclusions apply to Insta Rewards, in which rewards are deposited when the transaction posts this content is not investment advice. In trading Crypto involves risk. For more details on rates, fees and other Gemini credit card terms, see Rates and fees. Go to gemini.comjohn to learn more and start earning today.

[Robert Evans]

And we're back. So Eichmann was an indifferent student. We might even say a bad one. His later life would show him to be a generally smart guy, or at least to possess kinds of intelligence. So the way I read this is that he's not motivated by any of the schoolwork he's doing, nor is he motivated by any of the paths set before him by his education. His father takes him out of traditional school in 1921 and puts him into a vocational program to train him as an electrician. Right? So his dad is like, you're not doing well in like school school and you have to learn how to like do something right. But he fails at a vocational school. He ultimately drops out without any kind of degree. So he's now failed both of the different kinds of schooling tracks in Austria at the time. Now, for a young man with fewer means behind him, this might have ended with Eichmann winding up like Hitler. You know as some of those other biographies had claimed, living on the streets of Vienna, homeless are at the edge of it. But unlike Hitler, Eichmann's father was still alive. And Eichmann's dad used his plentiful connections to get his job. He owns a mining company, right. And he gets his job involved in the fracking company, Right? So Adolf Eichmann, future foreman of the Holocaust. His first, like, big boy job is hydraulic fracking, right?

[Joe Kasabian]

As a fail son.

[Robert Evans]

As a fail son, yeah. His dad seems to have put him through a number of roles at the company, trying him out, doing everything from squeezing through underground tunnels to running machinery above ground. Eichmann liked work in the tunnels. It was physical and dangerous and seems to have been the first labor that he found motivating. After some time working at the fracking company, he did an apprenticeship at an Austrian electronics company which occupied him for two and a half years until his dad convinced him to take a gig as a radio salesman. This does not pan out and ultimately Eichmann gravitates towards a position he finds advertised in the paper at an oil company. His stepmom used a family connection through one of her Jewish in laws to get him hired by the owner of the company, who was also a Jewish guy. Now, the executive who interviewed him told him he was too young for the job, but said, I've been told to hire you anyway, so congratulations. Like, welcome in.

[Joe Kasabian]

He probably. I don't know if this guy survives long enough to regret this or not, but yeah.

[Robert Evans]

If Eichmann was at all embarrassed or ashamed at the nepotism involved in keeping him afloat, he left no record of it. Instead, he seems to have enjoyed the job and the relative comfort it afforded him. He bought a motorcycle and devoted himself to the work, well enough to get promoted. Key to his success was that the job involved constant travel, which he mostly did via the motorcycle that he bought. Already Eichmann showed a preference for work that allowed him to set his own hours and mix desk work with time in the field. He spent a lot of time out in rural Austria finding spots to build gas stations. And he had to handle a lot of logistical hurdles, scheduling fuel deliveries to make sure that shit got where it needed to be at the right time. And he gets good at this, right? Like his training for how to make the Holocaust trains run is setting up gas stations and gas fuel delivery deliveries. Right?

[Joe Kasabian]

That is honestly something I could see coming.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's not so surprising when you lay it out like that.

[Joe Kasabian]

A middle management nepo guy in the oil gas fuel to fascism pipeline.

[Robert Evans]

I feel like that's a pretty well trodden path now. He was known to work hard, often during the weekend. But he was also not someone who let his social life atrophy. As Cesareani ran rights, his social life flourished now that he had disposable income, freedom to come and go as he pleased on weekday evenings and a motorcycle with which to impress prospective girlfriends at the weekend. He was definitely not the lonely, gauche outsider depicted as the typical recruit to Nazism in many of the psychological and socio psychological explanations for the movement's growth. His prison memoir is filled with gratitude to his father for the move to Upper Austria, his second homeland, and for giving him a glorious untroubled youth. A keen horseman, he spent hours riding in the countryside. He recalled that as for all young men, those days offered him love, spring and life, motorsports, mountain sports, work, coffee houses, friends and girlfriends and why not? Filled the days and years. So good for him. He's living, he's living it up again. Not at all the guy he's described as by a lot of people. He's a dude with a social life. He's a dude who's reasonably good with women. He's a dude who's. Who has options to be happy outside of joining the Nazi Party. Right?

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah. If we didn't know how the story ended, I would say, well, I'm sure this guy turns out perfectly normal for German of the era.

[Robert Evans]

A normal dude. Yeah. Now throughout this period, the Nazi party is arising up in Germany and in Austria the left and right are engaging in open warfare in the streets with the government cracking down hard against the social democratic militias. Eichmann isn't ignorant of any of this. Although he is not initially much of an activist. His particular chapter of the Wander Vogel movement shares members with some of these militias. And this seems to be where he starts the years long onboarding process that eventually leads him to Nazism. His aristocratic friend Von Schmidt convinces him to join an anti socialist nationalist association for veterans. Obviously Eichmann isn't a veteran, but that's not a problem. He joins the young veterans wing of the group, which is I guess for non veterans young veterans.

[Joe Kasabian]

I think it's.

[Robert Evans]

You'll be a veteran when the war we all know is going to come. Well, yeah, future veterans.

[Joe Kasabian]

I mean a young veteran back then could have just been child soldiers as well because there's plenty of them floating around. But I love that he's like Adolf Eichmann, honorary Austrian veteran.

[Robert Evans]

Honorary Austrian veteran. Yeah. We're going to throw rocks at you and it's like you're in the tyrell, right?

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah. What a fucking loser. What a bunch of nerds.

[Robert Evans]

So this is where he learns to march and shoot. Their leader. And it's so funny to me how close this guy's last name is to Hitler. Their leader is Herman von Hiltle. Not quite Hitler. Right. Hiltl. It's like Carsonalization but for fascists. Like, evolution was always working to produce a Hitler. If our Hitler hadn't come up, the von Hiltle family would have produced a Hitler. Given enough time. Right. The name would have just started to shift. Yeah.

[Joe Kasabian]

Give it enough time that the chances of Hitler approach.

[Robert Evans]

1. Their leader, Colonel Hermann von Hiltel, was violently anti Semitic and described Jewish Marxism as the enemy of Germany. He was an outspoken advocate of dispossessing Austrian Jews who owned land and stripping them of their citizenship. Von Hiltel railed against Jewish immigration into Austria and held regular rallies where his loud, violent young followers. Followers would encourage their Jewish neighbors to leave the country. Now this is the group that Eichmann starts hanging out in. There is a Nazi party in Austria by the late 20s, but Eichmann isn't interested in it because it's really weak and small. It's like by far the weakest part of what is at that point, a vibrant far right ecosystem. So he's like the Nazis, those are Germans, and they're kind of losers. Like, there's better far right Austrian groups. Evan Burr Buche, a historian of Linz, describes the Nazis in this period as a party of outsiders. And Eichmann's not an outsider. Right. Key aspect of him. He is never an outsider party of outsiders.

[Sophie]

Okay?

[Robert Evans]

It's the weirdos and the freaks who become Austrian Nazis in this period. Right. And Eichmann is not, you know, he's a normal guy with pretty good connections. So he joins a mainstream far right militia that hates Jewish people.

[Sophie]

Right, Sorry. Not Nazi enough for me.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, the Nazis.

[Sophie]

He's like, I just think that you should be, you know, more Nazi.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, a little fringe for me, darling. So. I don't know why I gave Eichmann that.

[Sophie]

I'm telling you, your brain today is really fine.

[Robert Evans]

I've got George Lucas disease. I can't help but imagine Germans as sounding like British people.

[Joe Kasabian]

I mean, to be fair.

[Robert Evans]

Look, it works. It makes sense, right?

[Joe Kasabian]

There's a reason why whenever they make, like, Nazi movies and the. The bad guys actually have speaking lines, they're always just played by people with British Accents.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Joe Kasabian]

There's a reason for that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. The big exception being Waltz in the Tarantino movie. We're like, oh, shit. They actually have a German guy doing Nazi stuff. In 1930, Eichmann gets engaged to a cop's daughter. The relationship is not going to work out, weirdly enough, because she doesn't like Nazis. Right? She's like this cop's daughter. Very. Which doesn't mean she's not far right or racist. It just means. Means they like another party. And the Nazis are kind of weirdos. One day, Eichmann is over at her family apartment in 1931, which sit in their apartment, sits above a bar that Nazis would gather in regularly throughout the week. And Eichmann later claimed, in our circle. And like, he's talking about their friend group, it was the done thing to say that the NSDAP consisted of idiots and no hopers. And his fiance made the statement, a statement to that effect. When she saw a troop of brown shirts marching down the street, street. Eichmann got angry and snapped back. These idiots have order and discipline and they march well. He ended the engagement shortly thereafter. They're really good at marching.

[Joe Kasabian]

I can't. They walk too good.

[Robert Evans]

They're so good at walking. God damn it. Don't you understand how important walking is? By 1932, the Australian economy is in the tank and Eichmann doesn't lose his job right away. But he can see the writing on the wall, right? That, like, his company is going to have to get rid of him. He may have ultimately joined the Naz Party as much as anything because he saw a future there and the potential for paying work. Right? Not initially that he is such an ideological Nazi, because he's still not at this point. He's a German nationalist. He's increasingly racist, but he could have gone a couple of ways. But he's like, look, the Nazis, they're starting to. They're no longer a fringe group in Austria by like 31, 32. Right. They're starting to get more normal. And if you know anything, like, my career is based on a version of this. If you want to move ahead really quickly, you find a thing, an organization that's fairly new and growing rapidly. And you just kind of stick yourself in there and find a place where you can sort of make it your own. Right? And that's what he's gonna do with the Nazi Party. He's like, this is a new organization. I can push my way. I'm sorry. Yeah, this is the way everything works.

[Sophie]

Just compare us Creating Cool Zone Media.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, no. This is way before that. I'm talking about like My Earth. Like, you find a company that's just started and they're desperate for people and you just start deciding my job's gonna be this, my job's gonna be that. And it offers opportunity that doesn't exist in like the Austrian state. Right.

[Joe Kasabian]

I mean, this is definitely a guy that's very, very comfortable job hopping. Whenever he sees an opportunity, like he doesn't have a career, he's like, I'm an oil man, right. I'm also electrician. I worked as a clerk for a little bit. I guess I'll be a Nazi.

[Robert Evans]

And he's also, he sees, number one, the corporate economy is not gonna be good for a while. The depression is starting and the Austrian government is a really ossified. You don't move quickly in that. The Nazis, they're starting to take power in Germany by this point. The writing is on the wall there. And he's like, well, maybe they'll take power in Austria. I think this is going to happen. And the sooner I get in, the better my chances of getting a really good gear job in the new state. Right. Because this is still a small organization, I can make myself a big part of it and when it takes over, I'll be really well positioned. Right. Makes sense. It's just a smart way to look at like any kind of like organization. Right. Like if, if you're, if you're looking to jump ahead in your career, find a place where they don't really have anything solidified yet. You know, that's just, that's just kind of always how big organizations were work. By the end of 31, the Austrian Nazis had started getting their shit together just as the dominant far right militia of the area, the Heimwehr, starts falling apart. Right. Eichmann finally joins the party in the spring of 1932 after the Nazis sweep a bunch of local elections in Vienna and Salzburg. Right. And we should see this again. As he knows where the wind is blowing, Right. He's aware of what's about to happen and he's positioning himself for kind of the next big part of his life, which we will be discussing in part two.

[Joe Kasabian]

Oh, boy.

[Robert Evans]

How we feeling about Eichmann?

[Joe Kasabian]

Weird. I don't know how to put it honestly. Eichmann is a guy which obviously we know a little bit about him just from the background of knowing about the Holocaust. But the fact that he seems so normal is off putting because even the normal Nazi guys there's something truly strange about them. He is very normal up until, you know, we're about to get to when the Nazis take over Austria. He's still not even really ideologically driven other than what could be considered mainstream politics at the time.

[Robert Evans]

Right. Yeah. No, and that's like. Yeah, that's kind of the thing about him. That's really. And you can see a bit of this with Heydrich too, where, where. Well, you're. And even with Mengele where it's like, yeah, your biggest motivation is your career is this movement has allowed you to leapfrog ahead at a much younger age to a high position than you would have ever gotten in the old German state or the old Austrian state. Right. That just wouldn't have. And look, if you look at, like I'm just looking right now at how this 22 year old kid that was appointed to DHS to lead terrorism prevention, right? It's the same thing going on right now. There's opportunities, oh my God. Like this for very young people who aren't good or great at anything and who wouldn't have risen up in the traditional system. But things have been disruptive and they're primarily good at not causing problems for the people above them. Right?

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And yeah, you can make a place for yourself that way.

[Joe Kasabian]

Auto move fast and break things.

[Sophie]

It's a great picture. It's a great picture though.

[Joe Kasabian]

It's a horrible picture. The kid is terrible.

[Robert Evans]

It's so scary.

[Joe Kasabian]

Someone needs to give that kid a swirly immediately. I do wonder, would we have been better off if Eichmann did get the shit bullied out of him when he was a child? Is this a proper application of bullying?

[Robert Evans]

There's only one way to find out, Joe. You and me, we gotta get in a time machine and we gotta beat the shit out of little kid Eichmann. And I mean, put that fucker in trap. Like Austrian. Like a whole body. Like a big old machine. Like fucking rusted metal nailed to his body until he gets better. That's what we're doing.

[Joe Kasabian]

Me and you need to knock back a couple of pine skin, go back in time and beat the shit out of this child.

[Robert Evans]

Just wail on his ass. Absolutely. Yep.

[Sophie]

Good call.

[Robert Evans]

This is it. This is what we're doing. All right, everybody, if you have access to a time machine, let Joe and I know. I promise that's all we'll do. We're not gonna do any sports betting. Absolutely not gonna do a lot of sports betting with it. We would never do primarily sports betting instead of Saving lives. You know, that's right. We're not going back to 2001 to bet on the World Series.

[Joe Kasabian]

Not me.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, not me. Well, Obviously we'll stop 9 11. Of course.

[Joe Kasabian]

Yeah, definitely. I promise that I will only go back in time to beat up children.

[Robert Evans]

That's right.

[Joe Kasabian]

That's how I'll stop 9 11. I'll go back further in time. I'll beat up other children.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I'm gonna travel back to Saudi Arabia when Bin Laden's like seven and just kick the shit out of that kid until he's pissing blood. That's what we're doing.

[Joe Kasabian]

Exactly.

[Robert Evans]

This'll fix all these problems.

[Joe Kasabian]

The only way that will stop it is time traveling. Child abuse.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's the way to do it. Bin Laden waits another five years and his big attack is ramming a plane into a podcast. Good stuff. Okay, well, we should probably stop now. We'll be back in part two for more genocide. Bye, everybody.

[Sophie]

Behind the Basterds is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, YouTube.com behindthebastards.

[Ad]

This podcast is supported by BetterHelp, offering.

[Robert Evans]

Licensed therapists you can connect with via video phone or chat. Here's BetterHelp head of clinical operations, Hesiu Jo, discussing who can benefit from therapy.

[JLo]

I think a lot of people think that you're supposed to be going to therapy once you're, like, having panic attacks every day. But before you get to that point, I think once you start even noticing that, you feel a little bit off and you can't maintain this harmony that you once had in relationships, that could be a sign that maybe you want to go talk to somebody. There's always a benefit in talking to someone because we can all benefit from improved insight about ourselves and who we are and how we behave with other people. So if you're human, that's like a good indicator that you could benefit from talking to somebody.

[Robert Evans]

Find out if therapy is right for you. Visit betterhelp.com today. That's better. H L P dot com.

[I]

You're great at protecting your own personal information. You probably even use things like two factor authentication, strong passwords, and a vpn. But as much as you try to be in control of how your information is protected, there are lots of places that also have it and they might not be as careful as you are are. That's why Lifelock monitors millions of data points every second for identity threats. If your identity is stolen, a LifeLock US based restoration specialist will help solve identity theft issues on your behalf, guaranteed or your money back. Plus, all LifeLock plans are backed by the million dollar protection package, meaning LifeLock will reimburse you up to the limits of your plan if you lose money due to identity theft. You might not be able to control how others handle your personal information, but you can help protect it with LifeLock. Save up to 40% your first year. Call 1-800-LIFELOCK and use promo code IHEART or go to lifelock.com iheart for 40% off.

[Ad]

Terms apply from coast to coast. Unlock adventure at Red Lion Hotels by Sonesta, where restful sleep, friendly service and local knowledge await. Whether for business or pleasure. Spend less and make more more of every trip. When you sign up for the Sinesta Travel Pass, you'll get their best rates instantly. Go to sinesta.com to book your stay and unlock their best rates with Sinesta Travel Pass Here today, Rome tomorrow. Join [e-mail] Terms and conditions apply.

[Ryan Seacrest]

Honestly, Honestly, Honestly, no one wants to think about hiv, but there are things that everyone can do to help prevent it. Things like prep. PREP stands for Pre Exposure Prophylaxis, and it means routinely taking place prescription medicine before you're exposed to HIV to help reduce your chances of getting it. Prep can be about 99% effective when taken as prescribed. It doesn't protect against other STIs, though, so be sure to use condoms and other healthy sex practices. Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention Options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead, this is an iHeart podcast.