Part One: Bruno Bettelheim: The Worst Psycho-therapist

Summary

Behind the Bastards: Part One – Bruno Bettelheim: The Worst Psycho-therapist

Hosted by Robert Evans, Behind the Bastards delves deep into the lives of some of history's most notorious figures. In this episode, Robert Evans sits down with Alison Raskin to explore the tumultuous and controversial life of Bruno Bettelheim, a figure both revered and reviled in the field of psychology.

---

Introduction

Robert Evans opens the episode by welcoming Alison Raskin, a writer, director, comedian, and mental health advocate, to discuss Bruno Bettelheim. Alison briefly shares her background, including her authorship and upcoming projects, setting the stage for an in-depth exploration of Bettelheim's life and legacy.

Early Life and Family Background

[04:03] Robert Evans: “He would later claim, because he, like, makes a lot of statements about his background, again, almost none of which are true, that his paternal grandfather had been an orphan who had been raised and educated as a rabbi...”

Bettelheim hailed from a wealthy Austro-Hungarian Jewish family involved in the lumber business. His upbringing was marked by conflicting narratives about his relationship with his parents. While Bettelheim portrayed his mother as cold and distant, others described her as loving and attentive. This discrepancy raises questions about Bettelheim's reliability as a narrator of his own childhood.

[07:25] Alison Raskin: “It's very cool.”

Robert delves into the origins of the Bettelheim surname, tracing it back to a Slovakian nobleman’s altercation in the 1700s. Bruno's father, Anton, expanded the family fortune through a successful lumber business established in 1907, ensuring the family's continued wealth despite wartime hardships.

Education and Early Career

Bettelheim received a strict education, attending one of Vienna's finest schools. Despite experiencing antisemitic bullying, he excelled academically. During World War I, while many Austrian boys faced the horrors of the front lines, Bruno remained in school, a decision influenced by his family's wealth and status.

[13:08] Robert Evans: “My mom was too nice to me.”

Bettelheim's relationship with his parents was complex. His father's permissiveness contrasted with the stereotypical sternness of Germanic fathers of the era. This dynamic may have influenced Bettelheim’s later theories on authority and personality.

Life During WWII

As political tensions rose in Austria with the rise of the Nazi movement, Bettelheim focused on completing his education. In 1933, Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany led to increased Nazi activities in Austria, exacerbating antisemitism and instability.

[17:23] Alison Raskin: “He was asking for it.”

Bettelheim chose to stay and manage his family's business amidst the chaos, prioritizing financial stability over personal safety—a decision that would significantly impact his future. In 1938, following the Anschluss (Nazi annexation of Austria), Bettelheim was arrested and sent to Dachau, one of the first concentration camps established by the Nazis.

[45:38] Alison Raskin: “Isn't a death sentence.”

During his imprisonment at Dachau and later Buchenwald, Bettelheim observed camp life, though his accounts have been heavily criticized for their inaccuracies and biased interpretations. He survived these camps, largely due to what he later attributed to luck and favorable treatment, though survivors and historical evidence suggest otherwise.

Post-war Career and Academic Work

After his release in 1945, facilitated by his wife and a wealthy benefactor, Bettelheim migrated to the United States. Settling in Illinois, he secured an academic position at Rockford College.

[50:42] Robert Evans: “Yes. It is titled Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations. And it is a work of titanic influence.”

In 1943, Bettelheim published his seminal work, Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations, which became influential in shaping post-war military and psychological strategies. Dwight D. Eisenhower reportedly deemed it required reading for U.S. military officials in Europe.

Controversies and Criticisms

Bettelheim's post-war contributions are marred by significant ethical and methodological issues.

[56:27] Alison Raskin: “Anti Semitism will do a number on you.”

Bettelheim argued that the traumatic experiences in concentration camps were due to inherent weaknesses in Jewish character rather than the brutality of the Nazi regime. He suggested that Jewish prisoners were more prone to psychological regression, eventually adopting Nazi values to survive. This victim-blaming stance has been widely criticized for perpetuating harmful stereotypes and absolving the perpetrators of their atrocities.

[58:46] Robert Evans: “He is the primary source for the movie Sophie's Choice.”

His flawed analyses influenced popular culture, notably serving as a primary source for the film Sophie's Choice. However, Bettelheim's accounts inaccurately portrayed the concentration camp experience, omitting instances of prisoner resistance and other critical aspects of camp dynamics. Scholars like Richard Pollak and Griffin Epstein have pointed out these discrepancies, highlighting Bettelheim's tendency to manipulate his experiences to fit a predetermined psychoanalytic framework.

[62:17] Alison Raskin: “He's a very unethical, unreliable guy.”

Bettelheim also propagated the idea of "total institutions" as a means to reform children with behavioral issues, drawing parallels to concentration camps. This concept is fundamentally flawed and ethically reprehensible, as it suggests using oppressive methods to shape individual behavior.

Conclusion

Bruno Bettelheim's legacy is a complex tapestry of psychological theory intertwined with personal biases and questionable ethical practices. While he made significant contributions to the field of psychology, his work is overshadowed by his problematic interpretations of traumatic experiences and his perpetuation of harmful stereotypes.

[68:52] Robert Evans: “And that is the tactic he is going to take...”

In the next episode, Evans and Raskin plan to explore how Bettelheim continued to influence child psychiatry in the United States, further unraveling the legacy of one of the most controversial figures in the history of psychology.

---

Notable Quotes:

• Alison Raskin [07:25]: "It's very cool."

• Robert Evans [13:08]: "My mom was too nice to me."

• Alison Raskin [17:23]: "He was asking for it."

• Robert Evans [50:42]: "Yes. It is titled Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations. And it is a work of titanic influence."

• Alison Raskin [56:31]: "Oh, Bruno, you got fucked up, buddy. No. Yikes."

• Alison Raskin [62:21]: "He's a very unethical, unreliable guy."

---

This detailed exploration highlights the multifaceted and often troubling aspects of Bruno Bettelheim’s life and work, offering listeners a comprehensive understanding of why he remains a contentious figure in psychological history.

Transcript

[Robert Evans]

Call Zone Media. Oh, my gosh. Welcome back to behind the Bastards. I'm Robert Evans and I am again alone without my producer, Sophie Lichterman. Today she is recovering from a health thingamajig and we all wish her the best. She will be back soon. But you know who's not back soon? Because they're here today. Alison Raskin. Allison, welcome to the show.

[Alison Raskin]

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, thank you for being on. You and I are gonna have a long conversation about a very weird dude today. But before we get into that, we should talk a little bit about you. You are a writer, director, a comedian. You are the co author of the book I Hate Everyone but yout, which was a New York Times bestseller. Yeah. Is there anything else you want to kind of plug up at the top here?

[Alison Raskin]

Oh, yes. That feels like an outdated bio. A little bit. I do a lot of different stuff these days. I primarily promote myself as a writer still and then relationship coach and mental health advocate. I've had two nonfiction books come out about the intersection of mental health and relationships. Then I have a rom com novel coming out in April called Save the Date, which is loosely based off of a multiverse version of my own broken engagement. So a fictionalized version of what could.

[Robert Evans]

Have happened afterwards, well, that is very appropriate that you work in mental health because the guy we're talking about today is one of the worst things that ever happened to the mental health field in the entire.

[Alison Raskin]

He's respected as such.

[Robert Evans]

He is really bad at that.

[Nancy Grace]

Need the latest crime news fast. Whether it's the latest developments in a high profile case or urgent alerts about missing persons, Crime Alert Hourly Update delivers the news you need to know as it happens.

I'm Nancy Grace, and with our team of investigative reporters and experts, we bring you the top crime headlines you need to know every hour on the hour.

Listen to Crime Alert Hourly Update on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Maria Tremarke]

Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast. I'm Maria Tremarke.

[Holly Fry]

And I'm Holly Fry. Together, we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime.

[Maria Tremarke]

Each season, we explore a new theme. From poisoners to art thieves, we uncover.

[Holly Fry]

The secrets of history's most interesting figures, from legal injustices to body snatching.

[Maria Tremarke]

And tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in cocktails and mocktails inspired by each story.

[Holly Fry]

Listen to criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your.

[Robert Evans]

Podcasts to have A murder as gruesome as Jade Beasley's doesn't happen very often.

[Lauren Bright Pacheco]

Down here in Marion, Illinois. An 11 year old girl brutally stabbed to death. Her father's longtime live in girlfriend maintaining innocence but charged with her murder.

[Alison Raskin]

I am confident that Julie Beverly is guilty.

[Robert Evans]

They've never found a weapon. Never made sense. Still doesn't make sense. She found out she was pregnant in jail. The person who did it is still out there.

[Lauren Bright Pacheco]

Listen to Murder on Songbird road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

It was big news. I mean, white girl gets murdered, found in a cemetery. Big, big news.

[Nancy Grace]

A long investigation stalls until someone changes their story.

[Robert Evans]

I like saw one thing that happened.

[Nancy Grace]

An arrest, trial and conviction soon follow.

[Robert Evans]

He did not kill her.

[Nancy Grace]

There's no way is the real killer rightly behind bars or, or still walking free. Did you kill her? Listen to the real Killer, Season 3 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

We are talking about a fellow named Bruno Bettelheim. Have you heard of Bruno Bettelheim?

[Alison Raskin]

No, I don't. I actually do have a master's in psychology, but he did not, did not come up along that journey.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he was, he would have described himself as, and was usually described as an expert in child psychiatry and treatment of autism. Now. Oh, no, here's the thing. Number one, absolutely not in any like, legitimate way an expert in child psychiatry and also not at all an expert in the treatment of autism. His primary thing was to declare kids to have autism and then treat them in a way that we would just describe as hitting them primarily. That's, that's the way this guy worked. There's a lot more to him than that. Even he was a very, very strange man. It's kind of important that you not at the outset that when we talk about again, the kids that he was working with were described as having autism and schizophrenia. Today, most of them we would just describe as kids with like mild behavioral problems, like twitching a little bit in class or something, or not being good at doing math. Right. These were not terms that meant the same thing that they do today. Because diagnostic criteria in the early 1900s was just not what it is now.

[Alison Raskin]

There's just a history of misdiagnosing children and also a lot of racism when it comes to misdiagnosing children.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, and a lot of racism in the Bruno Bettelheim story.

[Alison Raskin]

I'm sure there is.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Both as a victim and as a perpetrator. Because Bruno came. He's an Austrian, like most of the really fascinating, like, early 20th century mental health professionals and his family. He came from this, like, wealthy subset of the Austro Hungarian Jewish population that's like, his family comes from money and comes from money within, like, the Austro Hungarian Empire's Jewish population, which is like a whole separate subset of, like, the Imperial population. He would later claim, because he, like, makes a lot of statements about his background, again, almost none of which are true, that his paternal grandfather had been an orphan who had been raised and educated as a rabbi. And, like, he got the attention of the Baron Rothschild, who made him a tutor to his heirs. And he was so good at teaching kids that they gave him command of the family bank. And he, like, made the family fortune doing that. Definitely not true. Almost certainly is not what happened. That said, the actual real story of his family name is a lot cooler. And I don't know why he tells this bullshit story about, like, him being a banker. Because the name Bettelheim came from sometime in the 1700s. This Slovakian nobleman named Count Bethlehem fell for the wife of a Jewish citizen and tried to kidnap her on his horse. And her husband charged in and beat the count in hand to hand combat. And given, like, the racial politics at the time, this was a ballsy move, right, for this guy to come in and just, like, wail on a major member of the nobility. And so he got the nickname Bethlehem from the guy he beat up, Judah, which is like, you know, Jewish. Right. And that was, like, where the name Bettelheim came from. A few decades later, the Habsburgs decreed everyone had to have a last name, and so that became Bettelheim. For reasons I'm not, that don't entirely make sense to me, but it's a pretty cool origin story.

[Alison Raskin]

It's very cool.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Beating the hell out of account. Beat it. Like a guy on horseback, too, which is like, you got to really have.

[Alison Raskin]

Sounds like a tall Jew. It's exciting in and of itself, Guy.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Alison Raskin]

I should disclaim here that I am Jewish.

[Robert Evans]

So that's where probably where the name Bettelheim comes, like, any sort of. This is a mid-1700s family last name origin story. Maybe none of this is true. Right. We'll never really know. Whatever the case, Bruno's father and grandfather kind of make their fortune trading wood. That's where the family money comes from. Right. They, like, own forests that they plant and chop down. And they're in just kind of like the wood products business, you know, and they do very well as a Result of that, the Bruno's dad, Anton, starts a lumber business in 1907 with another guy and Anton and Paula Bettelheim, Bruno's parents. They first have a daughter, Margaret, in 1899, and then on August 28, 1903, they welcome Bruno into the world. By this point, Anton's lumber business was doing very well, and the family was probably maybe not in the top 1%, because, like, this is an empire and they're not in the nobility, but, like, that's super far from the top 1%. Right. They're very wealthy, as is customary for the rich in this period of time. Brito's mother refused to nurse him. He suckled from a professional wet nurse for the first three years of his life, and later wrote that his mom was too much the Victorian lady to do it herself. This is, again, super normal at the time, although it also seems to have kind of messed with Bruno because he's never cool with his mom and he will later project a lot of his issues with her onto mothers in general.

[Alison Raskin]

Yes. That is also a common theme in early psychology.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, exactly. Especially for Austrians.

[Alison Raskin]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Maybe a whole deal going on there. Yeah. Now, again, it's kind of. He's going to later talk a lot about his mother being cold and, like, not a very kindly person. But in other writings from, like, while he's a young man, he'll describe her as loving and attentive. And again, he's a guy who makes up a lot of stories about the past. So I don't know if he actually had. His mom was actually cold to him when he was a kid, or if something happened later that made him kind of retroactively decide that. But it's very different from how, like, other people who knew them when he was a little kid described their relationship too. We'll never know. Like most boys in the late Victorian era, he had several brushes with death. He has this classic thing where he eats poison berries. Oh, no. And this doctor just gives him a shitload of coffee to fix it. I think the idea is that, like, we just need to have him pee all of this out. Right. Old time immemorial.

[Alison Raskin]

So wait, so other people thought that his mother was loving their accounts. Was that okay?

[Robert Evans]

Got it, got it. Yes. And he will describe at varying points, very different kinds of relationships with his mom. Like, as a young man, he writes that quote, while he was sick, my mother sat at my bedside sponging my feverish body and changing the cold compresses to give me relief. In moments like these, I learned to understand and appreciate that a mother makes all the difference in the world when one is in need, in great pain, deeply worried, or even desperate. Now, this is noteworthy, the fact that he has these kind of two different attitudes about his mom, because as his biographer Richard Pollock notes, no prominent psychotherapist of his time was as antagonistic to mothers. And that is saying something.

[Alison Raskin]

Yes, truly. Wow. He's beating out Freud.

[Robert Evans]

He's beating Freud in the issues with mom game. Yes. Yeah, that's. That's like dunking on Jordan. So, again, there's not really a clear explanation forthcoming as to this. Bruno does recall later being raised as an older boy by his aunt as much as his mother, and often hiding at her place to avoid his sister Margaret, who he described as a busybody. This is all pretty normal kid stuff, you know. At any rate, the overwhelming recollections of people, of the people who knew Bruno and his family, was that his parents were doting and involved. And if anything, his mother may have smothered him a bit. His father, Anton, was a peculiar man for the era. Germanic fathers are known as being stern and strict, often, like, well past what we would describe as abusive. What's weird about Anton is that, like, even today, we would call him kind of a permissive dad. Like, we would say today, like, this guy could have maybe could have stood to be a little bit more like, strict with his kids, which is very rare for an Austrian father. One anecdote Bruno later gave was that he got in trouble for cursing in front of his mother, and she, like, went to it. She was like, anton, your son just, you know, cursed in front of me and her father. His father became upset, not that Bruno had cursed, but that he now had to punish his son. And he even asks Bruno, do I really have to punish you to get you to stop cursing in front of your mother? Which, you know, the norm would have been probably to smack him, right? Like, just based on sort of the standards of the time. Bruno's education is fairly strict, but that's normal for his social class and the era. He attends the finest school in Vienna, and he was an excellent student, one of five out of 54 in his year to be noted as. As having been excellent. He spent the war years, World War I, that is, in school, which is another mark of his good luck. You know, he's born in this sweet spot where he doesn't have to go die on the Italian border or in Serbia or in Russia, all of which were like beloved pastimes of Austrian teenage boys. In these years.

[Alison Raskin]

And he's just like, my mom's too nice.

[Robert Evans]

My mom was too nice to me.

[Alison Raskin]

My dad let me get away with stuff.

[Robert Evans]

Just daydreaming about charging a machine gun nest. No, he's not a super militant kid. But he does get very lucky. Right now the war years are difficult even for the rich. Bruno is better off than most of the populace. He's never. He and his family are never in danger of starving to death. But they do go hungry. Everybody does. Right. With the variant, with the exception of like the top of the royal family, everybody in Austria is going hungry at least a little bit during the war years. It's just a terrible time, right? This, the war is bad for his family fortunes. Huge tracts of their Bettelheim land get lit like burnt down by artillery bombardment right at the start of hostilities. But his family doesn't lose everything. And Anton seems to have been an unusually tenacious and brilliant businessman. By the time the war ended and the Habsburg Empire with it, the Bettelheim's were still comfortably wealthy. Right. Which is. Takes a lot that's not easy to maintain in this period of time. So it says a lot about Anton.

[Alison Raskin]

This guy seems great. The dad seems awesome.

[Robert Evans]

He seems like a pretty good dad for the era. About as good as you could hope for. Bruno's schooling was mixed as a. Again, he is not going to. He's going to an integrated school, which in itself in Austria is a pretty new thing that like you would have Jewish and Christian boys at the same school. There were some like you have religious education as part of your normal schooling. Obviously the small number of Jewish kids have a rabbi. Most of the other boys are being talked to by like members of the Catholic clergy. Cause it's a majority Catholic country. Bruno would later describe most of his fellow classmates as anti Semitic bastards, which is almost certainly accurate.

[Alison Raskin]

That will give him Austria in the 19 on the money.

[Robert Evans]

Probably kinds of racism that you would need like a NASA calculator to rate today. He recalled often the case of a classmate who he had considered a friend and walked to school with daily, who out of nowhere one morning punched him in the face in revenge for the crucifixion of Christ. So that kind of racism. Yeah, your best friend just hits you one day because of something that happened 2,000 years ago.

[Alison Raskin]

But it does like bring up this thing that I think is happening now where like these kids, kids will just be friends with kids, but then they go home and their parents tell them things and then suddenly they're acting out and they're deciding this is someone who needs to be punched in the face.

[Robert Evans]

I guess I need to be a huge asshole now. Okay.

[Alison Raskin]

He learned. Learned that somewhere that day before.

[Robert Evans]

Right? Yeah. That kid didn't come up with the idea on his own. It was a parent or, like, probably a member of the Catholic clergy who was talking shit one day. Now, this was the tip of the iceberg in terms of the racism that Bruno endured as a kid. He would later say, quote, there were the boys who extorted money, who beat us if we handed it over because we were dirty cowards, and who beat us if we didn't, because we were miserly Jews. So you really can't win, you know? One of the key moments of Bruno's education came when he and several other boys attacked one of their schoolteachers. Again, very different era. Who he described later as a simpering fool who spoke with the voice of a eunuch. Right. In other words, he and a bunch of his other students beat the hell out of a schoolteacher because he was effeminate, you know? In the creation of Dr. B, a biography by Richard Polak, Pollock writes, so weak and inadequate was this schoolmaster that one day Bruno egged on several of his classmates, and together they bodily removed the offending instructor from the room. Bettelheim recalled that he immediately began to tremble as he contemplated the consequences of this rash act. And indeed, the next day, the school's authoritarian director castigated the class and especially Bruno as the leader in this unprecedented and nefarious deed. But the. But the director did not, as the troublemaker feared, expel him. On the contrary, at the end of the scolding, his demeanor suddenly softened, and in a quiet voice, he said, of course, I know that if Dr. X had behaved as I expect all masters of this institution to behave, nothing like this could have happen. So again, he, like, beats up a teacher. He, like, leads a mob to force a teacher violently out of the classroom. And the director's like, well, yeah, but he shouldn't have been such a girl about it.

[Alison Raskin]

Yeah, he was asking for it.

[Robert Evans]

He was asking for it.

[Alison Raskin]

And then we wonder, like, oh, how did this guy then go on to perpetuate harm for decades?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, why was this guy a problem later in life? Well, and it's also, why did Austria get involved in so much fucked up shit? You know, it really, like, the fact that this is the country that is going to produce Hitler and that just does the things it does in World War I. It's like, oh, yeah, everybody Was like, this is a culture that's kind of out of its mind in a lot of ways. You know, I can't relate to living.

[Alison Raskin]

In one of those.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, no, no, no. Thank God we figured, fixed all of our mental health issues. Finally, human beings are healthy. I haven't read the news in about eight years, but I think it's going well. So more than two thirds of a century later, Bruno would recall this incident as key in his development as an educator, because it was the first time a figure of authority at his school had witnessed bad behavior, and in his eyes, sought to understand its root cause rather than just punishing it outright. So what he takes from this is my headmaster punished me because he does get punished, but he, like, sought to understand why I had acted out. And this is like a revelation to him that you wouldn't just hit a kid for not doing what you wanted a kid to do. You would try to understand what was the child thinking when it behaved. When they behaved badly. Right.

[Alison Raskin]

And then you hit him, and then.

[Robert Evans]

You hit him, and then you hit him. Now, the fact that Bruno just chose to describe the teacher he disliked as sounding like a eunuch holds a little more meaning than you might guess as an adult. Bruno reserved special disgust for the authority figures of his childhood who acted in ways he considered effeminate. And his kind and retiring father was one of these. In an excellent paper on Bettelheim for Disability Studies Quarterly, Griffin Epstein seems to tie this behavior to Bruno's insecurity over anti Semitism. There was a strong heteropatriarchal thrust to the stigmatization of Jews. According to Boyarin, Jews were understood to defy Western European gender and sexual norms. Jewish men were seen as effeminate sissies, unfit for labor, while Jewish women, when they appeared discursively at all, were read as phallic monsters. Jews were perceived broadly as deviant, perverse, and inbred sexual aberrations. So Bruno is really, really sensitive about the idea of men not behaving in a masculine way because of the racism that he encounters. Right. And this is further complicated by the fact that his dad catches syphilis in 1907. So this, this idea and another anti Semites will often, like, link syphilis to Judaism in this period. Like, it is a common aspect of, like, racial politics. Hitler does it a lot. And so the fact that Bruno's dad, as kind as he is, catches this very shameful disease is a big part of why Bruno is going to be the way he is as an adult. And it's like this kind of shame that is at the core of his personality as a kid. Now, the likely reason Anton catches syphilis is that his wife goes away one weekend and he sleeps with a sex worker. Right. That's generally how this thing happened. This was apparently the only time he did it, although obviously we can't know that. But the indiscretion has a shattering impact on the family. His wife doesn't sleep with him for the last 20 years of their marriage. And she doesn't because she would get sick and die if she did. Right. Like, this is an uncurable fatal illness in addition to being a stigmatized illness. So we're.

[Alison Raskin]

He lived for 20 years with syphilis.

[Robert Evans]

You do you often. It takes about 20, 15 to 20 years to hit, like, the tertiary stages. Like, that's not. It can. It can go differently. But, like, one of the frightening things about syphilis is that you, after the quote, unquote, indiscretion, as it would be, you know, you. So you have a break in your. And you. And you, you know, have an unrecommended liaison. You don't know for years if you got sick from it. Right. And that's part of why this is such a massive thing in Austrian culture and all European culture in this period is that, like, the entire. All the men in the society are, like, constantly scared of getting syphilis. Right. And so are their wives. Because if your husband is sleeping around and he catches it, you'll get it.

[Alison Raskin]

You know, one of the movies that shaped me so much as a kid was this movie called She's Too Young on Lifetime.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, God.

[Alison Raskin]

That was about a syphilis outbreak at a high school.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, my God.

[Alison Raskin]

It was. Look, it was one of the funniest things I've ever seen. Not that syphilis is funny, but Lifetime's execution of the hit film She's Too Young.

[Robert Evans]

She's Too Young. A Lifetime movie about syphilis at a high school does sound pretty rad, but.

[Alison Raskin]

Also, like, it's funny because at that point you just get a shot, like, it's not the same.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. It's not a big deal now as.

[Alison Raskin]

It was for them, you know.

[Robert Evans]

No. And it's going to be a big deal until 1943. So it is like, well, Bruno is a mature adult in his 30s. By the time it stops being something that people are terrified of. But you know what isn't? Syphilis is the sponsor of this podcast not sponsored by syphilis.

[Alison Raskin]

That was a really good transition.

[Robert Evans]

Thank you. Thank you. A lot of people praise the transitions on this show, not our sponsors. Notably.

[Nancy Grace]

Stay on top of Breaking Crime news with Crime Alert Hourly Update available now.

I'm Nancy Grace. Our team of reporters and experts is dedicated to bringing you the top crime headlines you need to know every hour on the hour. From missing people to trial updates and true crime stories, we bring you the latest real time news and analysis.

Whether it's the latest developments in a high profile case or urgent alerts about missing persons, Crime Alert Hourly Update delivers the news you need to know as it happens.

Stay informed, keep yourself and your family safe with Crime Alert Hourly Update, the only podcast delivering hourly true crime updates.

Subscribe now to Crime Alert Hourly Update and never miss a moment of breaking crime news. Listen to Crime Alert Hourly Update on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Unknown]

Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here?

[Robert Evans]

Ow.

[Unknown]

Go slower. From Blumhouse TV, iHeart podcasts and Ember 20 comes an all new fictional comedy podcast series. Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend. And Santi was gone. I've been spending all my time looking for angels answers about what happened to Santi and what's the way to find a missing person. Sleep with everyone he knew, obviously. Mmm. Pillow talk, the most unwelcome window into the human psyche. Follow our out of his element hero as he engages in a series of ill conceived investigative hookups. Mama always used to say God gave me gumption in place of a gag reflex. And as I was about to learn, no amount of showering can wash your hands of a bad hookup. Now take a big whiff my bruh. Listen to the hookup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Robert Evans]

To have a murder as gruesome as Jade Beasley's doesn't happen very often down.

[Lauren Bright Pacheco]

Here in Marion, Illinois. An 11 year old girl brutally stabbed to death. Her father's longtime live in girlfriend maintaining innocence but charged with her murder.

[Alison Raskin]

I am confident that Julie Beverly is guilty.

[Robert Evans]

This case, the more I learned about it, the more I'm scratching my head something's not right.

[Lauren Bright Pacheco]

I'm Lauren Bright. Pacheco Murder on Songbird Road dives into the conviction of a mother of four who remains behind bars and the investigation that put her there.

[Robert Evans]

I have not seen this level of corruption any anywhere. It's sickening. If you step somebody that many times, you'd have blood splatter. Where's the change of clothes? She found out she was pregnant in jail. She wasn't treated like she was an innocent human being at all, which is just horrific. Nobody has gotten justice yet, and that's what I wish people would understand.

[Lauren Bright Pacheco]

Listen to Murder on Songbird road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Maria Tremarke]

Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast. I'm Maria Tremarke.

[Holly Fry]

And I'm Holly Fry. Together we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime.

[Maria Tremarke]

Each season we explore a new theme. Everything from poisoners and pirates to art thieves and snake oil products and those who made and sold them.

[Holly Fry]

We uncover the stories and secrets of some of history's most compelling criminal figures, including a man who built a submarine as a getaway vehicle. Yep, that's a fact.

[Maria Tremarke]

We also look at what kinds of societal forces were at play at the time of the crime, from legal injustices to the ethics of body snatching, to see what, if anything, might look different through today's perspective.

[Holly Fry]

And be sure to tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in custom made cocktails and mocktails inspired by the stories. There's one for every story we tell.

[Maria Tremarke]

Listen to criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

And we're back. I wonder, like, you could probably rebrand, given, given, like, RFK's position in our society. You could probably rebrand syphilis as a health tonic, right?

[Alison Raskin]

And sort of a way to separate the weak from the wheat from the chaff. Like, who can. Who can maintain syphilis for as long as possible.

[Robert Evans]

That's right. You've got all these, like, Joe Rogan guys who really like taking ayahuasca. Syphilis causes hallucinations. I feel like there's, like, a possibility here to make this work, and it's.

[Alison Raskin]

Sad that that's probably more true than we think it is.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we're like six months out from this. So the fact that Bruno's dad catches syphilis is going to deepen the rift that he has with him. And Bruno will later claim that he had, quote, no suitable masculine figures in his life as a child. In their paper, Griffin Epstein suggests that Bruno saw his father's sickness and Jewishness as a threat to his desire to assimilate to Austrian culture. Bruno is, and this is not an uncommon thing at the time, an assimilationist. Right. Like, he's not particularly religious. He does not feel a strong separate identity as a Jew in Austria. He wants to be seen as Austrian, you know. Yeah.

[Alison Raskin]

Which is understandable given the environment he grew up in. Of course.

[Robert Evans]

Of course. It's the most normal thing in the world, given his childhood. As a teen, Bruno found himself in the Jung wondervogel movement, which is a. It's basically a hiking movement. This whole idea that, you know, what's healthy is moving your body out in nature. Very new and exciting at the time. And so this is like a young. It's a quasi socialist movement. And one of the things that's kind of noteworthy is they do a lot of co ed hiking. Right. So men and women are like moving, exercising outdoors together, you know, so there's both. This degree of, like, this is kind of a cutting edge social. This is like going to raves, you know, was. When I was a kid, when you and I were like 20 something.

[Alison Raskin]

Yeah. This is wild stuff.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, wild stuff. We're gonna go hike. You know, we might all camp together.

[Alison Raskin]

Hey, overnight. That is pretty risque.

[Robert Evans]

That is risque. And it is through this, at age 13, that he first pursues a woman. But he is. This doesn't go well for him. He gets upstaged, in his biographer's words, by an older boy, Otto Finishel, who was a budding psychoanalyst and a few years older than him and was already attending Freud's lectures at the University of Vienna. And obviously this woman that Bruno was interested in. Well, not woman, she's 13, but they're all kids. This kid that he is interested in is attracted to the fact that this older boy is going to college and listening to the great Freud's lectures. And Bruno initially develops a hatred of psychoanalys. He's so jealous of this. This older boy, which Pollock writes was, quote, so great he could not sleep. He's just so angry about psychoanalysis, furious about the idea of Freud.

[Alison Raskin]

Look, I'm not the hugest fan of pure psychoanalysis, but at least it doesn't keep me up at night.

[Robert Evans]

Just wa. I'm so. I'm so pissed. Why aren't they more confused why people are getting therapy just reading Freud's book on cocaine and fuming. So eventually he does settle upon a method for winning the girl's heart. He would study Freud's work obsessively in order to upstage this younger boy. This sparked what would become a lifetime obsession. He changes his mind on psychoanalysis. He does not win this girl's heart. And in fact, she grows exhausted because in order to impress her, he spends a whole weekend talking to her about Freud. And she's like, I'm not interested in Freud anymore. I'm done with it.

[Alison Raskin]

He ruins Freud for her.

[Robert Evans]

He's fucked Freud up for me. Anton Bettelheim dies in April of 1926 from a variety of illnesses and ailments that are all tied to his syphilis. Right? The final stages of syphilis. Literally, like, it's boring holes through your brain like a shipworm in wood. And it causes. Like, it's pretty unpleasant, like, to see. And Bruno would have been confronted directly with the final stages of his father's illness after his dad dies. Forced to take up his father's place running the family lumber business in order to maintain his family's position in society. He is 23 years old. So, you know, he does get, like, a real childhood. He gets some time. But at age 23, he is the head of the family. He doesn't really want to do this job again. He's very interested in psychoanalysis. He is a student at the University of Vienna, focusing on art history at this point. But he takes some business courses. And he understands that, like, I need to keep my mom and my sister in the kind of finery that they have become. Right? Like, my family is used to being rich. I have to maintain style. Maintain. Yes, yes. That's my job, you know. And he does this. He's a very, like, diligent head of the family. He starts courting a young woman named Regina. Bruno is in love with Regina, and Regina kind of tolerates it him, right? She's. She's not super into Bruno. She's only available. She. There's this sexy young artist that she is in love with, and he's like, I'm a sexy young artist. I'm not getting married. It's the 20s. I'm going to probably, like, die of consumption after getting really into heroin, you know.

[Alison Raskin]

Some love stories never die.

[Robert Evans]

Some love stories never die. So Regina settles for Bruno because he's rich, right? She's like, well, he's not this sexy young artist, but he does have a shitload of money. And I guess that's as good as you can do sometimes. And in the late 20s, it kind of is. In near the end of the decade, she gets pregnant, she gets an abortion to avoid marrying Bruno, which should give you an idea of kind of where her head is at at the time, considering how much less common that is, you know.

[Alison Raskin]

Right. And dangerous.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, and much more dangerous.

[Alison Raskin]

Wow, That's a real That's a real sick burn.

[Robert Evans]

That is kind of a burn to Bruno. Right? Like, obviously, I think, like, at the time, he's gonna read it that way, right. Cause he wants a family with this, with this lady. This feeds into a lifetime insecurity Bruno would express over his looks. He made frequent comments about the fact that his mother had called him ugly on the day he was born and that he never got better looking. Which seems unfair to me. Cause I found a picture of him as like a young man from, like, around the period we're talking about, and I'm gonna show it to you. You wouldn't say, like, he's not like a movie star or anything, but he looks, like, fine. He's like a pretty. I would say, like, we'll judge this dead man's looks as a child, but he's like a pretty normal looking guy. Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Alison Raskin]

That's a standard guy.

[Robert Evans]

That's a standard issue Austrian man, you know.

[Alison Raskin]

And you add a bunch of money to his portfolio, he's looking a lot better. He's.

[Robert Evans]

No syphilis, you know, he's doing about as good as you could be doing in that period of time.

[Alison Raskin]

Yeah, this is. People's insecurities can really end up causing a lot of harm.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. And he's super insecure about, like, his hair. And he does kind of. He goes bald after this about his, like, nose and his ears. And he will obsess over this. You know, I'm bringing it up not to shit on him, but because this is, like, an important part of his self image. And his self image is further harmed by the fact that Regina would vomit most of the time when he visited her, which is not super good for your ego. No, that's really just.

[Alison Raskin]

She was just puking.

[Robert Evans]

His presence, she would often get. Yeah, she would often puke at his presence. I think she's got, like, other stuff going on. Okay. She's probably. I think it's. Some of it is that she feels stressed out because she has to make a choice. Right. Like, she knows that. That I've got to make a decision about whether or not to, like, pick this guy. And that's kind of fucking with her. I don't think she's, like, disgusted in him. I think it's literally just anxiety. But it fucks with his head. Like, obviously that's devastating. Eventually, Gina finds herself out of other options and she marries Bruno. Now, she will always describe him as a wonderful friend. She genuinely likes him. She's just not into him, you know, Anyway, they get married in 1930 and during their years, because they are courting for what you would call an abnormally long time, although not within their social. Their social circle are, like, kind of bohemians and artists and intellectuals. So this is not super weird for the people they socialize with. So Gina starts, like, kind of nearly right before they get married, taking therapy from a guy called Richard Sturba and his wife. Wife Edith Sturba, who are a husband and wife psychoanalyst couple that are members of Freud's inner circle. These are famous psychoanalysts right within the psychoanalyst community. These are like, you know, they're big names. Urged on by Edith, Gina convinces her husband to essentially adopt a troubled young girl whose mom had abandoned her. This girl, Patricia, might actually have been someone we would describe as having autism today. That's how she gets described back then. But her. She has a lot of trouble being social and sort of connecting and making eye contact and whatnot with people. Her mom is this wealthy writer, basically, who comes from a wealthy family and is like, I'm not going to spend my time taking care of this troubled girl. I'm going to go be a wealthy, famous person. Hey, you want a kid and you're interested in child development and psychoanalysis. Figure out my kid. Right. That's essentially what happens. Yeah.

[Alison Raskin]

I think a lot of people don't want a kid that deviates from what they expect a kid to be.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Alison Raskin]

And then if that kid is different in any way, it's like, well, this isn't what I signed up for.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Alison Raskin]

Someone else take care of this child.

[Robert Evans]

And I will say, this kid's mom comes through in the clutch later in this story. But at this point, she's like, yeah, would you raise my kid for me? I gotta, like, do stuff. And Regina says, like, yeah, she really wants to do this. By all accounts, she's very loving and does, like, really helps this kid out, is a good. And Bruno is like. Like. Patricia will later remember Bruno fondly. He does not really take any part in raising her, which is interesting because he's later going to be a child development expert, quote, unquote. He is just working and making money. But she recalls him as, like, a nice man. And their household is a pleasant.

[Alison Raskin]

How old was she when she went to live with them?

[Robert Evans]

I think she's like seven or eight, something like that. She's a little girl now. He is working a lot, six days a week, providing for the family. And at this time, as kind of the 20s come to an end and the early 30s start. The Nazi movement is winding its way closer to power in Germany. Now this is not something that is initially of major concern to Bruno or his wife. They are not politically involved. Instead, he becomes obsessed with finishing his college degree so he could start training at the Vienna Psychoanalyst Institute. While he focused on what had become a dream, Austria slipped towards a nightmare in 1933, the same year Hitler came to power in Germany, a Christian socialist politician named Inge Dollfuss suspended parliament in Austria and began ruling by decree as a reaction to economic calamity and political dysfunction in Austria's first Republic. Now Dollfuss again, he's a Christian socialist. This is not a Nazi Nazi party. But he is an autocrat, right? He's ruling by decree. He's cracking down on anyone who was like this. And this provides fuel for the Nazis because it's now been normalized, this autocratic rule. Right. Bettelheim recalled of the chaos at the time they the Nazis released tear gas and department stores to frighten off shoppers, smeared house walls with pro Hitler graffiti, set off firecrackers and petards in many places to cause panic, and eventually started outright bombings. So the Nazis are in a legal party at this point. They are literally a terrorist party in Austria. But Dollfuss is not really a whole lot better. He is more concerned with using the military to crack down on left wing militias, which culminates on him using artillery to shell hundreds of apartment buildings in the capital. He succeeds in destroying the Social Democratic Party and its militia which had been like the most power, the only militant force in the country that could compete with the Nazis. He destroys them so completely that In June of 1934, when 154 Nazis attack government headquarters, there is no organized left wing resistance against them. And Dollfuss is murdered by the Nazis.

[Alison Raskin]

Now this is reminding me of a headline I just read about how the FBI is not going to be focusing on white supremacists, but instead the BLM movement. Antifa.

[Robert Evans]

Of course. Of course.

[Alison Raskin]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

It's all good.

[Alison Raskin]

We learn nothing.

[Robert Evans]

No, no. No one's ever. I mean that's the lesson of history is that no one's ever learned a lesson from history, truly. So Bruno does not react with great concern at first, even though this is a concerning thing. Right. He is very much. He's very good at focusing on just what interests him. He does. He could have afforded to leave. Leave. Right. He's got money. He could have bounced. But doing so would have meant he could have gotten his family Out. But they wouldn't have stayed super rich. Right. You know, it would have cost him too much. And so he opted to continue running his business and working on his degree, which he achieved. In 1938. He gets a PhD in aesthetics, which is, you know, it's an accomplishment. But that's not a degree in psychoanalytics, Right?

[Alison Raskin]

What is aesthetics?

[Robert Evans]

It's like, like art, art history and, you know, that kind of stuff. It's like art related shit. He would later lie and claim his degree had been approved personally by a council of Freud's closest confidants, including his daughter Anna, and then add that Sigmund Freud had wandered into the room and said, oh, you know what? A dude with an aesthetics degree is just what psychoanalytics needs to develop as a science. He's such a bad liar. Like. And then Freud walked into the room and was like, you're exactly what my field needs are.

[Alison Raskin]

You wouldn't believe him, but he was smoking a cigar.

[Robert Evans]

He was smoking a cigar, yeah. Within days of Bettelheim getting his PhD, the Anschluss begins and Germany annexes Austria. We're kind of yada yada ing a lot of that history. Cause that's a story for another day. But this is a major point at which the life story that Bruno will tell later diverges from reality. Because the claim that he will give years later, once he gets to the US is that as soon as the Nazis annex Austria, he joins the Jewish underground. Right? He becomes an officer in the underground. He stands armed guard at facilities he's afraid the Nazis are going to destroy. He helps to hide some of the first Jews targeted by the Nazis and spirit them away to safety. He describes himself as a significant figure in the underground army and says that after demobilizing his men, he fled to Czechoslovakia, where he was arrested and sent to Dachau. Now he definitely is sent to Dachau, but there's no evidence that he is a part of the resistance. Gina, his wife, told Richard Polak this story was nonsense. That, like, no, we were not like, he was not doing that. That's just not what was going on at the time. And what he was doing was not like, cowardly. He was trying to take care of his family. He urges his wife and daughter to flee ahead of him. And at this point, this is kind of like a selfless gesture. His wife is cheating on him with a married man, and he urges her to leave with that guy and his wife, thinking that they'll have better odds of escaping together at Any rate, Gina and Patsy only escape because Gina's biological mother, a wealthy New York woman. Or not. Sorry, Patricia's biological mother. Right. Like the woman who had kind of abandoned her kid to this couple, is friends with the US Secretary of State, Cordell Holt, and pull strings for them. And to her credit, this woman, I think Angie is her name, really, it puts in a lot of work to rescue them. She's like, these people saved my kid. I have to get them out of Austria. So she redeems herself at my eyes there. She really does put in a lot of effort here.

[Alison Raskin]

People are complicated.

[Robert Evans]

People are complicated. Not a great mom, but a good friend. In 1945, Bruno would later swear an affidavit for the Nuremberg war crimes trial in which he discussed the terms of his arrest and stated that he had not participated in resistance activity. This is part of why we know that, like, this is a story he makes up later. Now, the reality is that he witnessed pretty titanic racial violence in the wake of Nazi annexation. Jews were beaten and murdered in the streets. One of a common thing was that they would be forced to clean gutters on their hands and knees, often with, like, toothbrushes, and then would be beaten by gangs of Nazi thugs. It was a hide hideous time. And Bruno does not leave as soon as he could because he's trying to take care of his mom and his sister, and he's also managing. There's this thing that happens once the Nazis take over. Jewish businesses are demanded to be handed over to Aryans. This is a process called Aryanization. It is not a fair process. You get pennies on the dollar based on what your businesses had been worth. And Bruno is attempting to handle this manner in the most financially advantageous way so that he could get his family out, he can buy their way out of Austria. He does, however, get arrested and sent to Dachau, which is a very normal thing for Jewish men in Austria. Like, during this period of time, a lot of them get sent to the camps. Dachau is the first of the formal camps, right. Right after Hitler takes power in 33. There's what are called wild concentration camps, which are like. Like, we have occupied some government buildings and we're torturing guys there, basically. Right. Dachau is kind of like the first of. We have actually, like, built this camp. And while it is an awful place, I need to, like, emphasize it's not a death camp. Right. Those are not operational yet. Over the course of the Third Reich, about 30,000 of the 206,000 or so inmates At Dachau will perish there. Right. Which is, like, terrible. That's a nightmarish place. But it's not Auschwitz. Right. Those are not operational yet.

[Alison Raskin]

Isn't a death sentence.

[Robert Evans]

No. You probably live. Right. And in fact, prisoners are generally fed enough to survive and are rarely, like, beaten to death. It is closer to a prison camp than you know what is going to come later. That said, the nicest stay at a concentration camp is still among the worst things a person can experience. Bruno and everyone who was sent over with him speaking spends days locked in a train with the heat on full blast and the stifling summer just to fuck with them. They're denied water during the journey. He gets stabbed with a bayonet during the drive. Jewish prisoners are regularly forced to stand at attention once they arrive in the blazing heat for hours at a time. Bruno sees people executed for attempting to escape. When inmates would fail to make their beds properly, they would be strung from a tree by their wrists by SS guards and left there for hours. Like many Austrian Jews, the official reason for Bruno's incarceration was Schutzhaftling Jude, or incarcerated for his own protection. Right. He's locked up to keep him safe. Right. While he was. From us. Okay. From us.

[Alison Raskin]

From just the general propaganda we've been spewing against that you should kill all Jews.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Okay. He is. Now this is again, he's allowed communication with his family. He's able to send letters back and forth. They're able to send him money. He's able to buy food from the commissary. And while this is going on, he's constantly talking with Gina, who is working through her friend through Cordell Hole to try and secure him a visa. So this is the. The whole time this is going on, he is in communication with his family, who are talking with the US State Department trying to get him a visa to get him out. After three months at Dachau, he is transferred to Buchenwald, which is a much worse place. Dachau had had some amenities, sufficient food and, like, it has a weirdly good library. None of that is present at Buchenwald. And the guards are, on the whole, a lot more violent now. Bruno survives in part because he gets an indoor job mending socks, which during the winter stops him from freezing to death as much as everyone else. He gets frostbite that he has to get cut off. Right. Like, so he is still freezing a lot of the time. But he doesn't freeze entirely because he has this very rare indoor job, and we don't really know why. Other inmates at the camp who were friends of his will say that he was somehow protected and that his indoor job was a very, very rare setup. We, again, really have no idea why this is the case. He would later allude to having done things he regretted in order to survive. That is a very normal story. A lot of people did. Other inmates who knew him theorized that one of the capos, or prisoners that were authorized to handle managerial tasks by the SS had a soft spot for it. Him. Another of Bruno's friends said that there was a, quote, very, very nice SS officer who protected Bruno. And you hear about that stuff. That doesn't mean these are good people, but it means that if you were. If you're interned at one of these camps, you're going to note some of these guys I can, like, work with, and some of them are just sadists, you know? So maybe Bruno just kind of has one of these guys, has a soft spot for him. There's different stories. We don't really know what the case was. Bruno credited foremost his luck, but would later give some other stories. What's odd is that Bruno is going to tell some stories that definitely aren't true. Later, he's going to claim that he was targeted over the fact that he wore glasses and was beaten as a result of it. Bruno's fellow inmates who were interviewed. And again, these are guys who were. His friends said that, no, no, no, the guards were, like, less aggro to the guys with glasses. Again, I don't know who's telling the truth here, but there's two different stories, right? And this is not the only time Bruno is going to sort of stretch truths about his time at the camps, which is probably. And we should probably get to why that matters now. So Bruno spends eight months at Buchenwald. So he's in camps for a little less than a year, about 11 months. It's like 10 and a half months, something like that. And he is released due to the relentless pleading of his wife and their wealthy benefactor. He gets a visa. There's also kind of a general amnesty around this time for Jews who are willing to leave the Reich immediately. And so he gets out during this period of time. He makes his way to the United States in short order. He is really eager to retake up his marriage, but the marriage breaks up as soon as he gets to the States, right? Like, they spend a night together, and it becomes clear this is not gonna work out. Obviously, the whole like. Like spending a year in a concentration camp and then your marriage breaking up. Pretty stressful. Like probably one of the worst things I can imagine going through does some long term damage. That's gonna fuck you up a bit. But he gets an academic job with Rockfort College in Illinois. And in 1943 he publishes the earliest influential detailed account of life in a concentration camp. This is like the first influential publication about life in a camp. Right? And it is.

[Alison Raskin]

That's huge.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. It is titled Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations. And it is a work of titanic influence. Dwight D. Eisenhower is so impacted by it that it's made required reading for all US Military government officials in Europe after the war. This is a big like, accomplishment. And that's a problem because he makes some conclusions about what happens to people in concentration camps that are problematic to say the least. And we're gonna get to that. But I think it's probably time we transmit to ADS one last time.

[Nancy Grace]

Stay on top of Breaking Crime News with Crime Alert Hourly Update available now.

I'm Nancy Grace. Our team of reporters and experts is dedicated to bringing you the top crime headlines you need to know every hour on the hour. From missing people to trial updates and true crime stories, we bring you the latest real time news and analysis.

Whether it's the latest developments in a high profile case or urgent alerts about missing persons, Crime Alert Hourly Update delivers the news you need to know as it happens.

Stay informed, Keep yourself and your family safe with Crime Alert Hourly Update, the only podcast delivering hourly true crime updates.

Subscribe now to Crime Alert Hourly Update and never miss a moment of breaking crime news. Listen to Crime Alert Hourly Update on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Unknown]

Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here?

[Robert Evans]

Ow.

[Unknown]

Go slower. From Blumhouse TV, iHeart podcasts and Ember 20 comes an all new fictional comedy podcast series. Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend and Santi was gone. I've been spending all my time looking for answers about what happened to Santi and what's the way to find a missing person. Sleep with everyone he knew, obviously. Hmm. Pillow talk. The most unwelcome window into the human psyche. Follow our out of his element hero as he engages in a series of ill conceived investigative hookups. Mama always used to say God gave me gumption in place of a gag reflex. And as I was about to learn, no amount of showering can wash your hands of a bad hookup. Now take a big whiff my bruh. Listen to the hook on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Robert Evans]

To have a murder as gruesome as Jay Beasley's doesn't happen very often down.

[Lauren Bright Pacheco]

Here in Marion, Illinois. An 11 year old girl brutally stabbed to death. Her father's longtime live in girlfriend maintaining innocence but charged with her murder.

[Alison Raskin]

I am confident that Julie Beverly is guilty.

[Robert Evans]

This case, the more I learned about it, the more I'm scratching my head. Something's not right.

[Lauren Bright Pacheco]

I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco Murder on Songbird Road dives into the conviction of a mother of four who remains behind bars and the investigation that put her there.

[Robert Evans]

I have not seen this level of corruption anywhere. It's sickening. If you step somebody that many times, you'd have blood splatter was the changed clothes. She found out she was pregnant. In jail, she wasn't treated like she was an innocent human being at all.

[Alison Raskin]

Which is just horrific.

[Robert Evans]

Nobody has gotten justice yet and that's what I wish people would understand.

[Lauren Bright Pacheco]

Listen to Murder on Songbird road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Maria Tremarke]

Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast. I'm Maria Tremarke.

[Holly Fry]

And I'm Holly Fry. Together we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime.

[Maria Tremarke]

Each season we explore a new theme, everything from poisoners and pirates to art thieves and snake oil products and those who made and sold them.

[Holly Fry]

We uncover the stories and secrets of some of history's most compelling criminal figures. Including a man who built a submarine as a getaway vehicle. Yep, that's a fact.

[Maria Tremarke]

We also look at what kinds of societal forces were at play at the time of the crime, from legal injustices to the ethics of body snatching, to see what, if anything, might look different through today's perspective.

[Holly Fry]

And be sure to tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in custom made cocktails and mocktails inspired by the stories. There's one for every story we tell.

[Maria Tremarke]

Listen to criminalia on the iHeartRadio app app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

So we're back. Bruno has become probably the first academic to establish himself as an expert on the concentration camp system from the inside. And this is an issue because, number one, Bruno doesn't know much about the overall system and he's going to fib about some of what he sees. And I want to quote from that article by Griffin Epstein. Again, he attributed the Success of camp tactics and traumatizing Jews not to Nazi torture, but to inherent Jewish weakness. Bettelheim claimed that Jewish prisoners were more likely than others to regress under oppression to types of behavior characteristic of infancy or early youth because of failings of the Jewish character. He claimed that concentration camps disintegrated the personality of the prisoner. In the final stage of disintegration, Jews would actually become Nazis, changing their personalities so as to accept the various values of the sacred. Yes. Problematic. Problematic.

[Alison Raskin]

Anti Semitism will do a number on you.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, Bruno, you got fucked up, buddy. No. Yikes. No yikes. Now, he would later claim, and this is what's really problematic to me, is that he was the unique inmate who was able to objectively analyze what was happening in the camp. No one else could do it. They didn't have the strength of mind. Right. Only I had the psychoanalytic Viktor Frankl didn't know what he was fucking doing.

[Alison Raskin]

He was saving other people's lives. But, you know, he was really a wuss.

[Robert Evans]

His. He is interned with. And his friends at Buchenwald and at Dachau are psychoanalysts, prominent ones. Like, he's there with them, right? And they survive, you know. Polak continues. Quote, he wrote that he asked hundreds of German Jewish prisoners why they had not left Germany rather than submit to the degradation inflicted upon them by the Nazi Nazis. Then he asked more than a hundred older political prisoners if they would reveal the horrors of camp life if they were freed and managed to reach safe territory. And that and collecting data for his psychological observations. He came into personal contact with at least 1500 prisoners in the two camps. He was able to interact with so many inmates, he said, because he worked in at least 20 different labor details and slept in five different barracks. Given his sock mending assignment, the first claim seems unlikely. The second is untrue. Prisoners were required to write their block numbers on their correspondence. And Bettelheim marked all his letters from Dachau Block 22 and from Buchenwald, Block 17. So again, he makes this claim about. I was at all of these different locations. And so I talked to. And that's why there's. That's why there's academic rigor. Because I talked to a representative sample and we just know that he didn't. Right, because we. He. We know where he marks his letters from.

[Alison Raskin]

When do people start to get skeptical about what he had said?

[Robert Evans]

It really a lot of the Jewish community is immediately skeptical. Like, people get pissed at this because he's blaming them. Right? But it's like kind of modern Holocaust scholarship really starts to come after. And we'll talk about this some. On part two in, I think the 70s is when that becomes much more common. But this is this essay and Bruno, because Bruno writes other things about the Holocaust, he is the primary source for the movie Sophie's Choice.

[Alison Raskin]

Really?

[Robert Evans]

Yes, yes. And one of the things that's really problematic about that is Sophie's Choice is about a death camp. And Bruno doesn't know anything about the death camps. And he's very much generalizing his experience in this period of time about it to a later period of time in a way that transmits a lot of inaccuracies down, you know, as a result.

[Alison Raskin]

Because I've never seen Sophie's Choice. Is it worth it?

[Robert Evans]

I don't know how to answer that question. It's not. My. I think the Holocaust movie that I find, like, most intellectually interesting is this old Soviet era one called the Shop on Main street that is about a village that gets taken by the Nazis and the Aryanization process. But I don't know, like, that's such a. Yeah.

[Alison Raskin]

I feel like I prefer to get my examination of fascism through sci fi.

[Robert Evans]

There you go.

[Alison Raskin]

It's too upsetting to watch a thing that is actually about the Holocaust.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Alison Raskin]

Whereas, like, the. The lessons and the morals and, like, the psychological dilemmas and stuff. I'd rather, like, see through the frame of, like, aliens, the Cardassians.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. It's much easier to digest the Nazis through Cardassia. Yeah. So very little complaint is made initially about the time that all of these sources go unnamed. He'll just say, oh, believe me. Because all these guys said, right. I'm not going to tell you who they were. Even though, again, there's a lot of other people who survive. And his analysis of how camp inmates react to their situations. One of the things people will point out is that rather than comporting with other accounts from inside the camps, his analysis of how people behave and why comports with Freudian psychiatry. Right. Like. And that's worth noting in a critical article about Bettelheim for Psychohistory Review, Paul Rosen writes, it is still memorable and shocking how Bettelheim, in his 1943 article, thought that a prisoner had reached the final stage of adjustment to the camp situation when he had changed his personality so as to accept as his own the values of the Gestapo. In 1936, Anna Freud, in a book written while her father was alive and in the spirit of the work of his disciples, Sandor Forensky, described the defense of identifying with the aggressor. And Bettelheim was giving concrete illustrations of this unconscious, self defeating process. So the allegation is because he is massaging his experiences so that they fit this psychoanalytic framework. Right. That he has already accepted as valid and that he wants to be respected in. Right.

[Alison Raskin]

People look for evidence to support the ideas they already believe.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, yes. And one of the real issues here is that, you know, it's not the case that no one in the camps reacted this way. Right. There were prisoners who attempted to ingratiate themselves with the ss, who, you know, who did stuff like what Bruno described. That is a thing that happens. You can find cases like that in all of the camps. But he. One of the things he'll claim is that, like, there isn't prisoner resistance and there's a ton of prisoner resistance. Prisoners are constantly acting to sabotage the camps, to sabotage the SS guards. That is a thing that happens at every camp. It's a thing that happens at Buchenwald while he's there. Right. He knows that there's prisoner resistance and he, he erases that from his story because it doesn't comport with psychoanalytically what he experience, what he thinks he should be reporting on there. Right.

[Alison Raskin]

He's a very unethical, unreliable guy.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, yes, yes. In ways that are parasitic.

[Alison Raskin]

There's like not enough other voices to be able for people to be able to recognize that as quickly as you would have hoped they would be able to.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. And he's also going to. He does a lot of victim blaming. He will repeatedly criticize Jews for taking acts that provoke antisemites. In a 1947 work, he described antisemitism as being caused in part by the failure of Jewish people to see anti Semites as individuals and to understand them. One scholar, Peter Bloss, Dr. Peter Bloss, has stated many Jews were offended because he felt that to some degree the Jews provoked the actions of the Nazis. So he is criticized again at the time. But a lot of folks like Eisenhower, who certainly aren't plugged into like the community of Jewish survivors are like, this sounds right to me.

[Alison Raskin]

You know, Yeah, I am misunderstood.

[Robert Evans]

The issue here isn't that Bruno has no right to a different opinion about these things. Right. Every inmate has a different experience and everyone reacts. And I'm not even blaming if prisoners attempt to befriend SS guards to survive. I'm certainly not blaming anybody for doing that. You do whatever the fuck you have to do to get it through that experience, and that's gonna include a lot of ugly things, you know, and also.

[Alison Raskin]

Acting like you support them is different than what's maybe going on internally.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Yes. I am strongly of the opinion that when it comes to what people do in the camps, we certainly can't judge anyone who was in that position. That said, I think we can judge the stuff that Bruno does afterwards. Right. And he's going to give a lot of contradictory stories, enough that we can't really say in every instance what happened. But we could safely say he twisted his experiences later in recollection to make points that he wanted to make. And again, this is going to have a big influence on early Holocaust scholarship. The film Sophie's Choice is heavily based upon his recollections of camp life. And much of his writing on the matter seems to exist not to reveal truths about the Holocaust, but to separate himself as an individual from the mass of Jews who suffered and were annihilated. Bruno even admitted later that the main problem for him during his time incarcerated was to safeguard his ego in such a way that by, if any, good luck, he should regain liberty. He would be approximately the same person he was when deprived of liberty.

[Alison Raskin]

I wonder, though, also, that he knew that people were working on the outside to get him out.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, yes.

[Alison Raskin]

That probably really impacted how he viewed himself in the camp because he was like, no one else has this. Into the American government trying to get them a visa. Like, I am special. I do deserve to be freed in this way that other people don't. Because that's been sort of his M.O. his whole life is like, you know, to view himself as better than those. That other people assimilate him or view him as being like, yeah, and I.

[Robert Evans]

Think that's a really good, like, this need for him to feel special and better even than, like, his fellow inmates. Colors how he writes about this in a very interesting way.

[Alison Raskin]

And it allowed him to keep that belief because there was an element that he was special and different. Different because he had these people working for him. So it wasn't completely unfounded.

[Robert Evans]

And that's another reason why also it's so problematic that. Because obviously his experiences. This is a portion of the Holocaust that's super important to understand the period of time when he's in these camps. That's a part of the concentration camp story. But the experience of this guy who, number one, has a good chance of surviving, knows that from the outset pretty much, and has people working for him on the outside, as opposed to Hungarian Jews in 1944. Right. Who. There's no one coming. Right. Like, we have fallen off the edge of the planet. You can't. His. His experience is as different from that person's as a regular person not in a camps is from his. Bruno's experience. Right. Like, these are just.

[Alison Raskin]

You're not forced to face the same thing. You're not forced to face the same, like, level of despair and. And certain death and abandonment. And, you know, you can avoid this stuff that I think makes you different in your brain that just fundamentally changes who you are. He was able to avoid that.

[Robert Evans]

And he's gonna come to one other very weird conclusion, because one of the results of this is he becomes obsessed with the idea of the total institution, which. The concentration camp is a total institution. Right. One that completely dominates your life. Right. While you're in it. And he starts to wonder, obviously, the Nazis created a total institution to destroy people. What if you did the same thing for. What if you made a good concentration camp?

[Alison Raskin]

Oh, God.

[Robert Evans]

And this is going to be his chief motivation as a child development expert. That's a leap. I don't know that I'd go there. Seems kind of problematic, Buddy. I don't know, Matt.

[Alison Raskin]

That's a bad colt. But I could have a good Colt.

[Robert Evans]

What if I did a good one? Well, that sucked, but I think I can fix it. Okay, that is the end of part one. How are you feeling, Allison?

[Alison Raskin]

I feel like I know where we're going and I'm. And I'm terrified.

[Robert Evans]

Well, yeah. It's next episode we will be Bruno in the United States and we will be talking about how he redefines the care of children with autism. And again, he is not treating kids with autism almost exclusively. Not I. I mean, presumably some of them are children with autism, but most of them are just rich kids that he is abusing. He's abusing all of the kids. Let's be clear about that.

[Alison Raskin]

And I think it's also. I would urge people to look into RFK's wellness farms that he has been speaking about. And there is an instinct that remains throughout history that. That we could just shake certain things out of certain people. And it is incredibly harmful and false.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And that is absolutely, like, the tactic he is going to take is that, like, if you. Because that's his attitude about the total institution. I saw how concentration camps altered the personalities of the people interned there. You can alter a child who is acting in a way that you see as problematic by creating a total institution to run to form them. Right. And that's his attitude towards what he calls autism, what he calls schizophrenia. We can cure all of these by changing, by creating a total institution, you know, so that's problematic. All right, Allison, do you want to plug anything right at the end here for where people can find you?

[Alison Raskin]

Yes, you can order my new rom com novel, Save the anywhere books are sold. And you can also follow my substack Emotional Support lady for weekly writings about all things mental health. And I'm also available as a relationship coach, seeing individuals and couples.

[Robert Evans]

All right, awesome. Well, Alison, thank you so much. We will be back on Thursday. Until then, everybody try not to do this. 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.

[Alison Raskin]

On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube.com behindthebastards.

[Nancy Grace]

Need the latest crime news fast. Whether it's the latest developments in a high profile case or urgent alerts about missing persons, Crime Alert Hourly Update delivers the news you need to know as it happens.

I'm Nancy Grace and with our team of investigative reporters and experts, we bring you the top crime headlines you need to know every hour on the hour.

Listen to Crime Alert Hourly Update on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Maria Tremarke]

Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast. I'm Maria Trimorka.

[Holly Fry]

And I'm Holly Fry. Together we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime.

[Maria Tremarke]

Each season we explore a new theme. From poisoners to art thieves, we uncover.

[Holly Fry]

The secrets of history's most interesting figures. From legal injustices to body snatching.

[Maria Tremarke]

And tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in cocktails and mocktails inspired by each story.

[Holly Fry]

Listen to criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

To have a murder as gruesome as Jade Beasley's doesn't happen very often down.

[Lauren Bright Pacheco]

Here in Marion, Illinois. An 11 year old girl brutally stabbed to death. Her father's longtime live in girlfriend maintaining innocence but charged with her murder.

[Alison Raskin]

I am confident that Julie Beverly is guilty.

[Robert Evans]

They've never found a weapon. Never made sense. Still doesn't make sense. She. She found out she was pregnant in jail. The person who did it is still out there.

[Lauren Bright Pacheco]

Listen to Murder on Songbird road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

It was big news. I mean, white girl gets murdered, found in a cemetery. Big, big news.

[Nancy Grace]

A long investigation stalls until someone changes their story.

[Robert Evans]

I, like, saw something that happened.

[Nancy Grace]

An arrest, trial and conviction soon follow.

[Robert Evans]

He did not kill her.

[Nancy Grace]

There's no way is the Real Killer rightly behind bars or still walking free. Did you kill her? Listen to the real Killer, Season 3 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.