Part One: How Heinrich Himmler Went From Nerdy Boy To Master of the SS

Summary

Behind the Bastards: How Heinrich Himmler Went From Nerdy Boy To Master of the SS (Part One)

Podcast: Behind the Bastards
Host: Robert Evans
Guest: Jason Petty (Prop, host of Hood Politics)
Date: September 2, 2025
Episode Theme:
An in-depth exploration of Heinrich Himmler's transformation from a nerdy, privileged but awkward Bavarian boy into the architect of the SS—the fearsome Nazi order responsible for some of the most horrific crimes in history. This episode traces Himmler's early life, family background, education, and the peculiar factors that shaped his psyche and ambitions.

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Main Theme & Purpose

The hosts set out to go "behind the bastard"—exploring the childhood, family, and cultural background of Heinrich Himmler—specifically focusing on his upbringing, psychological profile, family dynamics, and the unique social mobility that positioned him to rise to the upper echelons of Nazi power. Rather than repeating details of the Holocaust already covered in past episodes about the SS implementation figures, this episode dives into how Himmler was formed and why he became the unique figure he was within the Nazi regime.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Focus on Himmler, Why Now?

• The discussion begins with the context: current political moments make a return to the story of high-profile Nazis especially relevant ([02:14]).
• Himmler, while not as famous as Hitler, shaped many of the organization's darkest aspects. While the SS existed before him, it's Himmler who truly defined and expanded it ([08:54]).
• The hosts promise less focus on the operational details of the Holocaust and more on how Himmler became who he was ([13:15]).

“Heinrich Himmler is the guy who, he didn't create the SS ... but he's almost from the jump the leader of the SS ... and he makes it into what it is ... wanted them to be a knightly order ... to create a new aristocracy.”
— Robert Evans ([08:54])

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2. Family Background and Social Climbing

• Himmler's family rose from peasantry to upper-middle-class within two generations. His grandfather was a civil servant, and his father, Gebhard, was a schoolteacher who became a royal tutor ([15:55], [20:41]).
• Family's “nepo baby” strategies: careful marriages, leveraging royal connections, and investment in their children’s education ([11:20], [25:54], [32:11]).

“The Himmlers are really good social climbers ... that's primarily how Heinrich gets where he is—good instincts for who to meet, who can help him.”
— Robert Evans ([25:54])

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3. Parental Influence and Early Home Life

• Gebhard, Himmler's father, is described as strict but loving—pedantic, obsessed with education, not abusive, but attentive and pressured his sons to succeed ([35:33], [38:01]).
• A “tiger mom” style father: pushing education, enforcing daily homework, but caring compared to the era's norms ([37:05]).
• Mother was stricter on Catholicism; father pressured her to ease up ([61:50]).

“He’s very involved and he doesn't seem to be emotionally unavailable...but he is constant, he is pressured from the beginning to succeed.“
— Robert Evans ([38:01])

• The family embraced respectability politics, including limiting who their children could befriend ([38:56]).

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4. Childhood Illness and Sibling Dynamics

• Himmler was a sickly, middle child—often unwell, which gained him attention ([39:39]).
• His older brother was more academically successful and musically talented. Family dynamics included competition and possible insecurity ([42:35], [68:33]).

“He never outdoes his brother in school ... there is this competitiveness between the brothers and that is something that motivates him.”
— Robert Evans ([68:43])

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5. Early Nerdom, German Nationalism, and Occult Fascination

• Childhood stories focused on heroic ancestors, Germanic myth, and medieval knights ([44:20], [54:54]).
• Family were “dweebs”—stamp collectors, amateur archaeologists, obsessed with German history ([50:21]).
• Himmler's early imagination was rooted in national myth-making, and his later obsession with the occult can be traced directly to his father's influence ([49:16], [54:54]).

“He would have been into D&D in a different period ... the kind of guy who would threaten to murder people over fan fiction.”
— Robert Evans ([05:03])

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6. Education and Psychological Evaluations

• Gebhard enforced diary-keeping and stenography; Himmler’s diaries are a unique surviving source detailing his upbringing ([53:16]).
• Later psychoanalysts looked for signs of evil in these diaries, often stretching the evidence. Modern scholarship suggests Himmler’s childhood was relatively normal for his class and era ([55:04], [57:04]).
• Diaries show little early signs of antisemitism; as a youth, his prejudices were more anti-French, typical for the period ([59:21], [61:37]).

“His diary is like—most of it is not, ‘Here are my thoughts and feelings ...’ it’s very, very just nuts and bolts.”
— Robert Evans ([57:04])

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7. Religious and Cultural Upbringing

• Strong Catholic upbringing due to his mother; prayers in front of an ivory Christ statue ([61:50]).
• Obsession with Germanic myths and sagas, rather than the cowboy stories typical for his peers ([64:39]).

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8. The Outbreak of World War I and Adolescent Perspective

• Himmler’s coming of age coincided with WWI: family on vacation as war breaks out ([70:57]).
• His diary reflects the sudden normalcy-to-crisis of European families; minutes between playing and mobilization ([73:53]).
• Provides a vivid and modern feeling of how major historical rupture felt to a privileged youth.

“Monday: Woke up at X hour. Ate this for breakfast. Went to school ... played in the garden...then I hear Germany declared war ... playing in the garden...‘Planes and spies. We are packing up right away.’”
— Robert Evans, reading from Himmler’s diary ([74:17])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• The "Scotty Pippen of Nazis" Metaphor:

  “He's the Scotty Pippen of Nazis ... if Hitler’s Jordan, he’s Pippen. Obviously Hermann Göring is Shaq...”
  — Robert Evans ([02:56])

• On Historical Analysis:

  “The ability to understand that ‘four’ comes from ‘two plus two’ is probably one of the most frustrating things that is happening ... in our political dialog right now.”
  — Prop ([12:32])

• On Nerds and Power:

  "The power and danger of a really smart nerd that ain’t afraid of you ... can become either the leader we all needed or Heinrich Himmler."
  — Prop ([14:43])

• On Bullying and Culture:

  “There is a role in culture that bullies are supposed to play ... a family of dweebs, collecting stamps.”
  — Prop ([50:21])

• On Historical Diary Analysis:

  “Every analysis that tries to look into his childhood from this standpoint that I've read is bad … this is bad medical science and it's bad historiography.”
  — Robert Evans ([55:04])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:54 – Prop introduced, podcast banter
• 02:56 – Framing Himmler as "Scotty Pippen of Nazis"; discussing the Nazi command as basketball/metaphor riff
• 08:54 – Explaining SS evolution, Himmler’s aspirations for a new aristocracy
• 15:55 – Himmler’s family background, upward mobility
• 25:54 – Strategy of social climbing and leveraging connections
• 35:33 – Father’s parenting style and focus on education
• 39:39 – Heinrich’s sickly childhood and sibling rivalry
• 44:20 – Childhood stories/myths, impact on Himmler’s imagination
• 53:16 – Diary-keeping, its historic uniqueness
• 55:04 – Critique of psychoanalysis of Himmler’s childhood
• 61:37 – Testimony of early classmate, lack of early antisemitism
• 70:57 – World War I breaks out, Himmler’s diary during crisis
• 73:53 – Modern parallels to war and crisis as experienced by youth

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Original Language & Tone

Throughout the episode, both Evans and Prop use a mix of humor, cultural references (from hip hop to WWII analogies to “tiger mom”/“nepo baby” language), and contemporary comparisons to make the history feel immediate. The tone is often irreverent but careful when discussing the gravity of Nazi atrocities, drawing clear lines between banter and analysis.

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Conclusion

This episode provides an immersive look at the making of one of history’s greatest villains—not by focusing on his crimes, but by painting a deeply detailed picture of his nerdy, ambitious, and surprisingly privileged youth. Listeners come away understanding not just Himmler’s biography, but how mundane family ambition, cultural myth, and the anxieties of an emerging nation could feed into the making of a monster.

Next episode will continue through Himmler's adolescence and the beginnings of his political life.

Transcript

[A]

Call zone media oh wow what time is it oh my gosh it's bastards thirty it's actually one seventeen in the afternoon better known as my eight am i am robert evans and i'm not good at getting up early but you probably are i imagine you're listening to this podcast on your way to work at the medical factory or at the whatever else job you do i don't remember any other jobs but doctor the medical factory yeah where doctors work sophie come on you know that i'm gonna start telling my brother he works at the medical factory see how that goes speaking of doctors our guest today has a phd in performing i don't that was supposed to like rhyme something better than it didn't it didn't whatever prop.

[B]

Jason petty what's up man look baptized baptized in the funk you know what i'm saying i got a phd in being me h me whatever that means.

[A]

That'S so much better than the one i did bars wow yeah that was much better than how i did it prop you are the host of a show called hood politics which you can find the listener on this exact podcast.

[B]

Network absolutely yeah i had the privilege of being the first offspring that's right that's right of the network you feel.

[A]

Me independent and we acquire you're the instagram to our facebook basically i am.

[B]

The reels to i am the stories.

[A]

To your vine that's right that's right ooh boy we probably shouldn't compare ourselves to vine that's not gonna go well no prop how are you feeling today.

[B]

You good i'm feeling some i mean feeling the same low level existential dread everybody else is feel before before you.

[A]

Got on robert i did warn him i was like it's a biggie it's a biggie oh yeah oh yeah yeah.

[B]

But i feel like i'm about to like i'm about to you about to.

[A]

Ruin my day i feel like i'm about to ruin several of your days because this is going to take us a couple of weeks to go through prop we are you know i try to vary the bastards and vary the level of bastardry to keep things interesting you know for the widest variety of people but i got a list in my head the heavy hitters you know big guys a lot of big folks folks and it was like oh you haven't done juan peron yet you know you haven't done marcos yet you haven't done mao yet and today we're going back to the nazi well for reasons that should be obvious to people who watch the news that's extra relevant right now yes and it's time for us to hit one of the big ones today and this week and next week we're doing heinrich himmler oh shit yeah.

[B]

Baby there we go the scottie pippen of nazis the scottie pippen of nazi.

[A]

Ism right yeah yeah yeah he's not you know yeah hitler's the jordan he's the scottie pippen obviously herman goering is shaq you know everyone knows joe dumars.

[C]

Shaq taking strays dang shaq i was.

[B]

Like rick fox maybe gehring is like.

[A]

Fox great a great callback he's not the worst of them so i guess that's that's nicer to shaq than calling scottie pippen the himler basketball god damn.

[B]

It the murphy lee fucking lloyd banks yeah who's the who's the other second guy quavo like you know what i'm saying the fucking offset of we're beyond.

[A]

My basketball knowledge now oh we're we're not even in basketball anymore we went to music there himler himmler's if we want to put it into political terms himmler's the dick cheney of nazism right do you know who quavo is jose yeah cuervo yeah we've been a cuervo for years i wish yeah we're going to need some for these no i have no idea who cuevo is we're.

[B]

Talking the migos yeah we're talking raekwon and ghostface to method man right now.

[A]

Dude okay no i know i know ghostface and method man yeah well the method man of nazism is probably not heinrich himmler i'm not sure who no no no maybe yeah that's a i.

[B]

Mean meph is like you know that's the leader or is it rza nah let's go with meth anyway let's go smith this is old head stuff like.

[A]

Yeah i guess yeah hitler's the method man of nazism although you know rza i think it was rza who did the soundtrack to ghost dog which i don't think hitler could have done no if hitler is rza rza is like they're so dumb so dumb i love.

[B]

It rza's actually a genius and gza the genius is actually a doctor like he's an actual phd but anyway well.

[A]

Heinrich himmler was none of these things at all what he was is a man who believed himself the reincarnation of an old germanic prince who died around the year one thousand he's the biggest nerd of the nazis this is and in fact one of the books i have on this hitler's master of the dark arts which is about heinrich himmler and the occult and we'll be talking a lot about that through these episodes basically describes himmler and his kind of fellow travelers the one who are really into this german occult stuff that's gonna be part of these stories as like they would have been into dd in a different period of time they would've been the really toxic nerds right like the guys who are threaten to murder people over fan fiction about lord of the rings or something like that's the.

[B]

The guy that's gonna argue that the little ariel should be white cause she on the bottom of the ocean yes.

[A]

Yes that dude yes okay word he would have been writing so many fucking letters to disney and marvel about like worst reboot ever yeah yeah himmler is the that est guy of the nazi.

[B]

High command the that ist guy okay and then you put him in charge.

[A]

Here we go yeah yeah.

[C]

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Be sure to use condoms and other healthy sex practices ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention options and visit findoutaboutprep dot com to learn more sponsored by gilead so if we were in a country where kids hadn't all been left behind since you know i was in high school i would be like this is a guy who doesn't need introduction but obviously he does need introduction this being the united states heinrich himmler is the guy who he didn't create the ss like it exists and has a couple leaders before him but he's almost from the jump the leader of the ss it has very little history before him and he makes it into what it is and the ss the schutzstaffel initially starts as hitler's bodyguard and several units of hitler's bodyguard it's kind of the elite within the nazi party and it turns into a state within a state the ss is handling a significant amount of they're kind of like the fbi cia there's a division of the ss the sd that is that for the nazi state and they are also running all of the concentration camps right like the death's head units that have the famed the skull and crossbones thing that the ss is famed for those are the guys who are running the camps those are the concentration camp guards they're manning the death camps they also there are ss combat units the waffen ss which means the weapons ss there's like well over a million people in the ss at the height it is the elite of the party and these are the guys who are doing the bulk of the war crimes not that the wehrmacht doesn't but like the ss is the war crimes organization yeah and himmler created them kind of he wanted them to be a knightly order right he was very much inspired by the medieval some of these medieval orders like the knights templar and his goal was to create a new aristocracy using the ss which is why and to a big part they're the guys doing the very worst of the holocaust and we have spent a lot of time talking about other ss men who are the implementation guys for the holocaust right we've talked about reinhard heydrich we've talked about eichmann we've talked about the einsitzgruppe and several of the people in that who are the units actually doing the the direct shooting tens of thousands of jews to death in the east and so in these episodes one thing that people might find a little weird we're not going to not talk about that but we're not going to go into most of we're not going to spend very much detail talking about the death camp stage of the system that the ss is a part of because we have covered implementation guys and these are people himmler hires heydrich himmler is talking to and giving orders to eichmann right so we're mostly going to cover himmler up until the point that like the war gets going and the ss is running and the camps are running to talk about how he got to where he did and how he he built the system that winds up doing the holocaust we'll spend less time on the holocaust just because we have covered the implementation guys right and and i also.

[B]

Think i also think this is like like this is the service that is needed at this moment because we all understand there's been movies about find out right there ain't been movies about fuck around yes you know and fuck around is clearly where we're at and anybody who understands that find out comes after fuck around is going guys hey hey this is fuck around i think they're.

[A]

Fucking around i think they're fucking around.

[B]

We'Re fucking around yeah like the flag don't get redder yeah you know what i mean so i feel like like and like you said the child left behind thing is just like the ability to to understand that four comes from two plus two is probably one of the most frustrating things that is happening i think in our political dialog right now like you you like you want like you want a one to one you want this to be you want as neat as possible you know and then people hide in that like for example like people talk about like well ice is like the gustavo and it's like well okay in vibe like it's got gestapo vibe it's more like the secret police but there's really no one.

[A]

To one more like the ss right gustavo is a secret police but like yeah what they're trying to do with ice is a lot more like yes the ss i mean but again none of this crafts directly there are some things you can compare to the sa the brown shirts and like i don't wanna we'll talk some about that as we go on but this is important because number one we're gonna be talking a lot more than we usually do about heinrich's early life and childhood because there's so much on him there's a tremendous amount of detail one of the things we'll talk about one of the things that's unique about himmler of all of the nazis is we have almost his entire life in diaries from the time he was a little kid like he kept notes on most of his life we have most of his daily life up to a certain point which is very weird and very rare with a historical figure like this and so i want to try and i mean the show is behind the bastards right and a lot of these guys there's just not enough information on their childhood to really get that far behind but with himmler we will and we're gonna spend a lot of time talking about how he came to believe some of these weird mystical beliefs that he believed and how they influenced because the ss is largely formed based on his occult beliefs like a lot of how he organizes it and what he wants it to be is based on these esoteric things he believes about race and reincarnation and so we'll be talking about all of that in these episodes but i should just dive in you know yeah.

[B]

See i think too like it's something i've kind of been trying to think about like how to put into words for some upcoming episodes for hood politics is like the the actual like power and danger of a really smart like nerd that ain't afraid of you right like there is like that combo is dangerous whether it's they create a death cult like you finna talk about or you turn into like a nipsey hussle yeah like nipsey is nipsey like some of the stories from his childhood was like when he wanted to first start recording he just made a computer out of like scraps he found at a junkyard like he built the first computer that he was when he was a little boy you know i'm saying you got it you got to you got a rolling sixty crib talking about like assets and liabilities and investing is you know i'm saying so like somebody who's a nerd but is like i'm not afraid of jail yeah you know what i'm saying can become either the leader we all needed or heydrich himmler yeah.

[A]

And himmler yes and as we'll talk about himmler's he doesn't have quite the courage to be he doesn't wanna get arrested okay yeah but he also he idolizes the guys who do right he really wants to be them so we're getting ahead of ourselves let's just dive into this man's life heinrich luitpold himmler was born on october seventh nineteen hundred in munich germany his family are generally described as middle class in most kind of short summaries of his upbringing this undersells their level of comfort by a bit we might be more accurate to say that his parents came from something had started out more working class but had worked their way up to like the upper middle class by the time he's born they are more comfortable than most middle class people right they're taking vacations through most of world war one right and that you have to be doing pretty well if you're able to still afford that in germany in like nineteen sixteen right sheesh his father was gebhard himmler and he was the son of a civil servant in the bavarian government now this is the early eighteen hundreds when gebert is born and that's before the unification of germany johann himmler heinrich's grandfather his gebhardt's dad was the son of peasants from ansbach who trained him as a weaver so heinrich's dad grows up being like taught to be like a peasant who's like weaving stuff but he manages to this is as modernity is really kicking in around germany and he manages to elevate himself up out of the peasantry by getting a job he joins the military first and he's in the military he travels around a couple of places in the military i think there's a period of time which he's almost kind of working as like a a soldier for hire and eventually back in germany he gets a job as a police officer and he works his way up to sergeant they use a different word for the term sergeant in germany but that's what he is he's like a upper middle level kind of local police officer so by the time gebhart heinrich's dad is born in eighteen sixty five germany is five years away from becoming a country and johan is retired you know when his kid is born but he's still working for the local government he's one of these guys he retires with a pension from his police job and then he gets a job basically in like the city council almost that kind of thing so he's like a fairly important man in town right okay and fairly so the family is connected yeah this is this is heinrich's grandfather grandfather right so this is johan okay so johan dies when gebhard is seven which is normal for german kids of this area era and this socioeconomic group if your dad manages to make it up to be like a fairly you know middle or high level local government functionary he probably has kids later than a lot a lot of other guys he's probably pretty old and a lot of this is kind of what happens to hitler too right like his dad is much older than his wife his dad is a mid level functionary and dies when he's very young so as soon as johan dies his wife heinrich's grandmother raises gebhard switches him from protestant to catholic we don't really know why this is very weird it doesn't happen a lot the opposite is more common in germany cause germany's a more protestant kind lutherans come.

[B]

From germany yeah martin luther is german.

[A]

Yeah so the opposite switch is kind of weird and we don't really fully know why but heinrich himmler's biography peter longrich seems to suggest that her motivation may have partly been the idea that being catholic would be better for her son's future career because where they are in munich more of the local government was catholic and so maybe it would help you know if he was catholic the reality of that's kind of unclear but gebhardt grows up to be a schoolteacher and it's a mark of how different germany is in this place and time to where we are now that that's a big step up the ladder of social mobility like a teacher's a good job right especially compared to like you know what his family their families had been doing previously so he gets a job at a grammar school as a teacher initially but he's so good at the work he's a very good teacher most people seem to agree there's some argument about this but he's successful at least enough so that after four years as a teacher he gets kind of scouted for like the majors of being a teacher which is being a private tutor for a member of the royal family yeah that's what i was.

[B]

Gonna say yeah you get a little comfy job you're not just at the public school teaching the riff raff you.

[A]

Get to go there yeah yeah he still teaches the riff raff but he is also now private tutor for a prince of the bavarian royal family which is like a big deal right cause among other things you've got one on one connection with someone who is going to be very powerful and influential so this is a job not only does it pay pretty well but it connects you to the royal family now at this period of time we're in imperial germany they're ruled by a kaiser and people miss this a lot just because we don't talk a lot about how imperial germany worked even under the kaiser prior to world war one germany is not just a state in the way that we conceive of a state it's basically like i think it's like four kingdoms that are lashed together and they're all nominally under the rule of the kaiser who is the prussian king but each kingdom has a technically like the militaries are all independent right yeah when war comes around they all have to like they're all unified like it's written in basically to the constitution or whatever that's what they call it but like when there's war everybody's under one central command but outside of war like the bavarian and the prussian military these are separate entities they have separate leaders they have separate uniforms when world war one starts i think there's something like two hundred and fifteen different official german military uniforms like it's nuts.

[B]

I do sometimes mourn and even finding it within myself just us living in the era where we're in where we just honestly cannot imagine like our brains can't fathom other ways to organize governments you know what i mean like that that like well they're not all what will government's not not even the right word you know what i'm saying like it's you feel me i'm saying so it's like it's hard to imagine them saying well yeah this is all prussia where it's like well i thought it was bavaria this.

[A]

Is pretty no no it is like they're all part of the same state but also these are very different things.

[B]

Yeah and it's not like a state like as in california it's like as in a nation but it's not like a nation because there's no such thing.

[A]

As nations yet they're starting to become this is like this is while the modern idea of the nation state is being worked out right like that's where this is all happening and yeah so it is a big deal you know when i say his connection to the royal family is to the bavarian royal family so he's not connected to like the kaiser's people but his official charge the kid he's teaching starting as when this kid's like a teenager is prince heinrich of wittelsbach and he is the son of the prince regent of bavaria the prince regent is the prince who's going to become the king and prince heydrich is not going to become i mean he could theoretically but a lot of people would have to die right he's not close to the throne but he's still a prince right so it's still a big deal and you know gebhard is the son of a cop who was himself the son of a peasant and so the fact that in two generations they've gone from we're peasants were weavers or whatever to i am teaching a prince is a huge upgrade for the family circumstances they have moved a lot there's a lot of upward mobility for the himmler family and the fact that one of the ways this benefits him is that shortly after becoming a private tutor to the prince he gets a permanent job basically he gets the equivalent of tenure teaching at a prestigious private grammar school so he goes from teaching at a normal school to teaching at a really nice school because he's i think basically the royal family is like hey you should take this guy you should hire this guy because we don't want the guy tutoring the prince to be working at like a normal school right like he deserves a better position so they start making good money and it's not just about that they're making you know upper middle class money now but they have connections now he can i think it's the kind of thing where you don't want to ask too much but if you ask for a favor you can probably get it and a word in someone's ear from a member of the royal family of bavaria can move things for you so now that he's established he's got this prestigious job he's got these connections it took him a while to get to this point but now it's time for him to get married and as i said he's going to get married later than is normal four people here he falls for or at least decides to marry i don't know how in love they were a woman named anna maria heiter and this is heinrich himmler's mother anna's father was a successful local businessman he had died years earlier but she brings a sizable dowry to the marriage right enough that they might have been able to live off the dowry right that's how come i don't know if i'd say that they're rich but they are upper middle class that's a.

[B]

That'S a score man yes i gotta tell you if there's if there's any if there's any incredibly toxic things from the past yeah that i wish existed it's like oh yeah yeah already in love like i already love this woman she's already choosing to marry me and i'm like wait but also money what.

[A]

Wait hold up yeah i mean it was mostly downsized but yes it would have been nice just getting money when you get married yeah obviously there's a lot that's toxic about this for a lot of people but not for the himmlers you know and part of what this shows you is and this is something that heinrich's kind of runs in the blood or whatever the himmlers are really good social climbers that's primarily how heinrich gets the way he has good instincts for this is someone i need to meet and be friends with and they're going to like help me get a leg up and then this next person is who i need to meet and be friends with and that'll help me get this is something his dad is clearly really good at the level to which his dad climbs and his grandfather had climbed show that there's just a degree to which himmlers are really good at social climbing you know they've just got whatever that thing is so heinrich himmler is born as i said in nineteen hundred he is the second child and the second son of the marriage they'll ultimately have three sons it's a mark of how well the himmlers are doing that when heinrich is born gebhard asks his student prince heinrich if he'll be who's like sixteen at this point if he'll be heinrich's godfather i'm actually kind of surprised he's a middle child yeah he is a middle child that actually to me has an influence on the guy he becomes and prince heinrich agrees again which says that like they have a really good relationship that's kind of a big ask from like a prince like as like hey will you be my kid's godfather but he.

[B]

Says yes yeah you gotta really like this fool like i met like multi prince is like wait i'm sorry what's your name again what's your name again.

[A]

You'Re the help are you serious but he's wait which one are you yeah they must have had a good thing how many people have asked you to be the godfather prop i feel like you're a lot of people's godfather i've.

[B]

Been asked many times yeah oh i'm.

[A]

Godfather to like six kids i don't even know the kids yeah i just godfather i'm a godfather for hire baby.

[B]

You just send them money on their birthday man they come over it's like here's twenty bucks kid no there's only like there's two kids that i'm like actually active one of which lives on our street so i'm like okay well i'm her godfather she lives next door.

[A]

You'Re really getting into the godfathering yeah you're a good choice yeah i think so you're a good choice obviously it comes natural to me being a robert evans there's nothing more natural than being.

[B]

A godfather you are the godfather uh.

[A]

Huh that's right baby speaking of the producer robert evans you know what he liked cocaine maybe that's who sponsored this show jesus christ this is an ad by betterhelp who do you go to when you've got a problem in your life that you need to solve group chat full of friends your family or do you just overshare with strangers on the bus all of that can be helpful but it's also helpful sometimes to go to a clinically trained and credentialed therapist and if you think that's something you need in your life betterhelp has been helping people find a therapist for over ten years betterhelp counselors meet localized standards for counselor vetting and care delivery betterhelp is high trust certified and complies with gdpr standards they do the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals a short questionnaire helps identify your needs and their ten plus years of experience and industry leading match fulfillment rate means they often get it right the first time but if you aren't happy with your match you can switch to a different counselor at any time with no additional charge as the largest online therapy provider in the world betterhelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise so find the one with better help our listeners get ten percent off their first month at betterhelp dot com behind that's betterhelp dot com behind.

[D]

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[C]

Millions of people have turned to claude the ai assistant from anthropic because it just feels different where other ai's often sound a little robotic claude has been designed with special research that informs its character meaning that claude just gets it when it comes to empathy and emotional intelligence that's why claude has become the if you know you know choice for dating advice career coaching gathering your thoughts for those important life decisions and more give claude a try for free at clawd dot com that's c dash l dash a dash u dash dash e dot com and let us know how you feel the difference this is kate max from post run high with kate max back to school season isn't just about pencils and planners it's about resetting your rhythm for me that means simplifying my skincare primally pure soothing mist and serum are my go to's post run and post chaos they calm my skin without the hormone disrupting junk female founded clean and rooted in real wellness go to www dot p r i m a l l y p u r e dot com use code run and get fifteen off this is your seasonal reset.

[A]

We'Re back i i hope it was cocaine did that.

[B]

Blow your mind exactly all right all.

[A]

Right with the dad joke hey man i'm a god dad yeah that's right we get to make that means you get to make twice as many fucking.

[B]

Dad jokes god level you feel me.

[A]

Yeah god level dad jokes yup that's awful so as he comes into the world the heinrich himmler who would build the ss into one of the deadliest organizations in human history is from the beginning a nepo baby his parents put a lot of work and they wait until their thirties to get married in part because they want to you know gebhrt especially doesn't want to have kids until he can make sure there'll be nepo babies because he is a climber and the whole plan that gebert and anna maria have is that the family money that his mom brought in that's like their cushion is going to pay for a childhood for their kids of prestigious schools and particularly for heinrich for whatever reason it seems like they are setting heinrich up more than anyone else for success because he's the one who has the prince as the godfather and they'll use the money to pay for him to get a really good education and then the connections they've got with the royal family they'll use to get him a lucrative job as an adult and that will help the himmler family ascend further towards the upper class right okay that like we made it to the upper middle class heinrich is going to take us up to the fucking aristocracy almost you know like that's the plan now depending on who you ask you'll get different opinions on gebert himmler as a father a nineteen seventy one article i found for the american historical review by pete loewenberg describes him as quote a pedantic and conscientious man ernst homfstangle who is an early friend of hitler and an upper class german an aristocrat who attended classes taught by gebert at the private school described him later as quote a terrible snob favoring the young titled members of his class and bearing down contemptuously on the commoners and i could see that it makes a lot of sense hearing other things about the guy although it's also worth noting that hanfstangl gives this account of geppard after he's fled germany and sat down with the oss to gossip about heinrich himmler the first profile that the oss which becomes the cia gives about himmler ernst is a major source as he is for a lot of these guys cause he knew them all and then he had to flee and that's not perfectly trustworthy this guy who was hitler's friend and a big nazi until you know things went too far yeah it's one of those things i don't there's a lot of negative stories about like yeah gebhard was an asshole he was like a bad teacher he was a that aren't entirely accurate because a lot of the first generation of historians work backwards from like well himmler was obviously terrible so everything about his upbringing must have sucked right yeah yeah and maybe that's not totally accurate and his most recent or one of his most recent biographers who's a major his book is a big source for these episodes peter longrich takes a more reserved tone towards gebert and he depicts him as actually a pretty good father for the time period quote and this is from his biography of himmler as a father he exercised his authority not through being unapproachable or through overbearing strictness but rather through patient efforts with his son they were subject to a system of rules and prohibitions while their father monitored their obedience precisely and at times pedantically his strictness was designed to have a lasting effect and seems to have been altogether compatible with kindness love and affection so dude.

[B]

I think there's something here i think there's which probably will play out later which you'll probably correct me about but like i think there's something to the fact that like okay this guy is not royal heinrich's dad yeah but he was around royalty so i feel like he probably was able to see just what is he's a teacher so he's like i wasn't poor i ain't get out get it out the mud but like you're you're around probably very privileged people and you like i definitely don't want my son to turn into this but also i want to award him the types of like value like he's a teacher so it's like the types of like sort of like hard work value you know trustworthiness like you know i'm saying you marry into this like pretty rather wealthy family you got no reason to be a hard ass you know what i'm saying like because hey dude like it's like your needs are met like we got a good job you know what i'm saying like and i i really think that like that i wonder if that plays into him being like yeah like our needs are met i don't have to like i'm not you know in a gulag somewhere like which i know i could be you feel me so i'm like i would much rather be like man let me spend some time with my kids you know what i'm saying like i have been awarded this gift you know what i mean of being able to spend time with my kids because i see what happens when you don't you know what i'm saying yeah so i could imagine like that actually playing a role as to be like yeah he probably was a good dad you know.

[A]

Yeah and i think he was he's also you know we used to the phrase that a few years ago is that a book about like tiger moms right which is this term you get for like a lot of like asian immigrant mothers who are like that super like into their kids education and very hands on to try to ensure their success that's how you might look at gebbert right yeah so he's very involved and he doesn't seem to be emotionally unavailable like for the time but he also is he's obsessed with his kids education and with their success right that is his business you know and so there is to the degree that that's kind of like it can be a toxic thing that's also present here but it's not toxic he's not the kind he's not hitting his kids we don't really have any reports and i've read a couple from the old to the new biographies of himmler none really seem to suggest that he was like abused in that way but he is constant he is pressured from the beginning to succeed right to do really well in school right i could really see that.

[B]

Because that's to be somebody yeah that's your ticket it's like you're not born you're not born a prince you know what i mean and like this how you gonna do this you're not born a prince and i don't want you breaking up rocks yeah so like let's.

[A]

Do this yeah and it's one of those things where you know a lot of these sources will kind of try to depict his father as being like oh he was this really boring pedantic man who was like super shitty to anyone who wasn't rich and i don't think that doesn't clash necessarily with the and he was also very attentive and in a lot of ways a good dad like i think he the evidence does suggest he was very much a star fucker like if you were not of a good family if you didn't come from money i get it he and anna will police who their kids are allowed to hang out with to make sure that they're helping basically like oh this kid's gotta be at our level or above otherwise you can't hang out with them so there is that.

[B]

Degree of toxicity running from the slums.

[A]

Man right yeah where it's like you are going to be somebody and i am going to make goddamn sure of it you know yeah but also it's not like the kind of thing where his dad is like mentally abusing him or like hitting him or like fucking with his brain his dad is just bound and determined to make him a.

[B]

Success yeah it sounds like some like respectability politics where it's just like you know you know for us it was like hey you know keep your hair nice don't be wearing hoodies like you know speak clearly you know don't be don't be using auto don't be using slang like you know just don't hang with them like exactly you won't like make these people respect you now i.

[A]

Get it yeah so in february of nineteen oh three when he's like a little kid three heinrich falls seriously ill for the first time this has something to do with his lungs his older brother is also sick a bunch the family i just think isn't super it's not clear what's wrong it's always said as like a lung problem i think it might be asthma like he may have just had asthma it's not perfectly clear to me but that would make sense the ailment is severe enough that his mother takes him and his siblings to the alps for a few months as a cure right like that's what you do you get them up in the mountains that your doctor literally prescribed go be in the mountains with these.

[B]

Kids i was like it's also at this time nineteen oh three right so like what the fuck is asthma like.

[A]

What is that they don't know what.

[B]

The fuck they're doing we just figured out germs like a month ago you.

[A]

Know what i'm saying yeah and everyone doesn't believe it we're still fighting to get the doctors washing their hands you.

[B]

Know what i'm saying yeah reusing smocks.

[A]

Yeah so heinrich recovers unfortunately but moving to them and moving to the mountains doesn't you know cure him obviously but like they think anyway he winds up coming back but he's always a sickly kid and he has regular bouts of illness that will periodically whenever he gets really sick his parents focus on him again and he's the middle kid right so once he has a younger brother there's a kind longrich sort of suggests and i like longrich as a biographer but he doesn't really provide evidence for this i think it's just one of those things where he's like well it makes sense maybe as the middle kid he savored the fact that when he was sick he got all this attention but he doesn't really provide us much of the way of evidence on this so this may just be kind of him inferring when heinrich starts school in nineteen oh six the so you know three years later he's still ill enough that he misses one hundred and fifty days out of his first year of classes due to a variety everything he gets measles he gets the mumps he gets pneumonia several times and his older brother had had a similar experience with school but still gets really good grades better than heinrich in fact and longrich suggests that the fact that his brother does better than him at school is something that frustrates heinrich i don't the evidence of this there's not like direct evidence but there's some reasons to believe that he is very competitive with gebbert and kind of has some insecurity over the fact that he never outdoes his brother in school one of my secondary sources for these episodes is a very old biographer of himmler just titled himmler by willie frischauer and longrich doesn't love frischauer's book because it's one of it's basically the first big biography of himmler and so it's outdated i think it's written in the fifties and that is true i wouldn't use this as like the prime source because it is so old and historiography has moved beyond here but it's from the first generation of books on himmler right i was gonna.

[B]

Say like it's closer to when it.

[A]

Happened it's closer to when it happened and i think one of the reasons why i do find it worth reading is that it sets up you see in fischauer's book where a lot of both misconceptions and myths about himmler start because this is the first like big history and i think it is valu for that for understanding where some of these ideas come from and one thing that is interesting as outdated as frischauer's book is it's one of the only books of that first generation that kind of describes the himmler family life the same way longrich does because other people writing about himmler in that period really tried to emphasize the toxicity and the fact that himmler grows up with this overbearing father and he's this like kind of psychopathic kid who has these you know and frischauer's account of it really does jibe with longriches in the fact that like no his upbringing was reasonably good for the era frischauer emphasizes the fact that gebhard was a huge nerd for german history and like into archeology and that this has an impact on heinrich quote as a little boy heinrich himmler sat on his father's knee almost every evening ear glued to the lips from which tales of wonderful adventure flow in a rhythmic studied language hero of the tales invariably was grandfather johann conrad himmler soldier of fortune who had hitched his star to any army that would have him a rugged nineteenth century warrior who had burst the narrow confines of his time and branched out into the wide world grandfather's most glorious campaign had been fought in greece he marched in the shadow of the acropolis he had seen thebes in the pass of thermopylae and brought back to his own humble environment a breath of adventurers in greatness.

[B]

Hmm see to me i feel like there's like just for when you're just trying to understand a person an era a moment there's like you like you said like a lot of this a lot of maybe this particular book is outdated but i do think just as a it is you know what i'm saying but i do think as a practice like there's pros and cons to that like but the pro is to understand they're writing in a time and era and it's like like this is actually telling me what you thought was important in nineteen fifty to point out you know what i'm saying like this is how you thought about this you feel me and like and that and that keys that keys in that keys into us like you know the the the you know the somehow or another the edward sharp in magnetic zeros like video resurface where it was like yo this song is trash like you know what i'm saying like people actually going i never actually and then we're thinking you know obviously us who was there it was like it was a vibe you know what i'm saying like yeah it was a vibe it sat in a time of other just that was just the vibe you know what i'm saying like it's like yeah like the thought never crossed my mind to think about these lyrics you know or that they're from las feliz which is like your first.

[A]

You'Re from griffith park surprising exactly sharp hate coming out here yeah.

[B]

I was like what by the griffith observatory guys like yeah but anyway and.

[A]

Yeah that's the kind of you don't see this story repeated in a lot of the modern historiography which i think this is kind of important to talk about this because and this gets more in the books about heinrich and the occult and none of the i think the best of them is himmler or master of the dark arts but it's not a great work of history certainly not compared to longrich's book in part because all of the books that focus on himmler on the occult need to it's the same problem that blitz has with hitler and drugs where there's a lot of really good work and really useful original research done that i think the bigger biographies could stand to have more of but because you're focusing on the occult thing you make it a bigger deal than it really was right but i think this is important and it gets left out of a lot of the more modern accounts and it seems to be based on as far as i can tell frischauer one of his major sources he talks to gebhard himmler the junior heinrich's older brother is also named gebhard and that's who's telling him about their childhood and about how they're raised and gebhard isn't an unproblematic source right because he's heinrich's brother but i don't really see much reason to doubt the basics of this right there's some reason to doubt was himmler's grandfather did his life really go that way but the fact that heinrich was raised with stories of his grandfather being this great warrior and their ancestry being important and german history being important and this kind of medieval these medieval stories of knights and kingdoms one of the things that obsess as a kid they traveled to this medieval town that still got its old walls and heinrich is obsessed with these wal he has a big imagination and it's always focused on almost these kind of like the german equivalent of the arthurian myths right like that's what as a kid he is a huge again he'd be playing d and d you know if it were today he loves magic and he loves knights and this very much historically inaccurate but common picture of what medieval germany was like right and i think the fact that his dad is sitting them down and telling them these fanciful stories of like his own father and of old germany that's probably where this starts and gebhard also senior he's an amateur archaeologist right he probably spent some time even digging for old artifacts he collects coins and he collects like some old weapons whatever he can get his hands on which is a hip hobby at the time right nationalism is a fairly new concept in the early nineteen hundreds and it's sexy and a big part of german nationalism because germany is very new the country had only come into being a couple of decades earlier there's a lot of focus in like official propaganda and it just becomes popular for archaeologists to find evidence of like the germanic tribes our ancestors and we're gonna pretend that they were a lot more united and that german identity was more of a thing for them than it really was you know when the romans talk about the germans they're not talking about the germans as we know them some of the tribes that they fought with are ancestors to modern germans but some of them were like belgians or whatnot and they just all got kind of lumped together because the romans aren't you.

[B]

Know we don't know what y' all.

[A]

Are like we don't know where you came from you're here and you're all kind of like have some similarities so you're all the fucking yeah they just.

[B]

Meant y' all up there like that.

[A]

Like yeah exactly but they got hammered into being germany has just been hammered into being by otto von bismarck and so and you know another thing that happens around this time is heinrich schliemann i think was his name finds the ruins of the city of troy well he destroys the ruins of the city of troy digging to something older anyway but he finds where troy probably was and that's a huge deal in europe and it kind of ignites this whole like well there's gotta be other let's find these ancient ruins of german civilization that prove that we're a great and ancient people you know and himmler gets carried away with this gebhard his dad does and heinrich and his older and younger brother both catch this bug right they're germany nerds they also get into stamp collecting gebhardt's a big stamp collector wait oi family o'dwee family of dweebs.

[B]

Collecting stamps yeah see there is a role in culture that bullies are supposed to play do you know what i'm.

[A]

Saying and alas no cause it is one of those if like gebhard was raising heinrich himmler today heinrich would be sitting on his lap as he sends death threats to disney for putting women in star wars like that is the kind of dude that's the kind of family this is speaking of sending death threats to disney don't do that legally please please don't do that don't do that but you know send a death threat to yourself keep yourself on your.

[C]

Toes also don't do that why not.

[A]

It'S not illegal to threaten to kill well it might be actually anyway here's ed's.

[D]

This labor day say goodbye to spills stains and overpriced furniture with washablesofas dot com featuring anabe the only machine washable sofa inside and out where designer quality meets budget friendly pricing sofas start at just six dollars ninety nine cents making it the perfect time to upgrade your space annabe's pet friendly stain resistant and interchangeable slipcovers are made with high performance fabric 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 labor day get up to sixty percent off site wide at washablesofas dot com every order comes with a thirty 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 shop now at washablesofas dot com offers are subject to change and certain restrictions options may apply.

[C]

Millions of people have turned to claude the ai assistant from anthropic because it just feels different where other ai's often sound a little robotic claude has been designed with special research that informs its character meaning that claude just gets it when it comes to empathy and emotional intelligence that's why claude has become the if you know you know choice for dating advice career coaching gathering your thoughts for those important life decisions and more give claude a try for free at clawd dot com that's c dash l dash a dash u dash dash e dot com and let us know how you feel the difference this is kate max from post run high with kate max back to school season isn't just about pencils and planners it's about resetting your rhythm for me that means simplifying my skincare primally pure's soothing mist and serum are my go to's post run and post chaos they calm my skin without the hormone disrupting gel drunk female founded clean and rooted in real wellness go to www dot p r i m a l l y p u r e dot com use code run and get fifteen percent off this is your seasonal reset.

[A]

I'M glenn washington the host of snap judgment from kqed every week we don't just tell stories we drop you inside them real people real voices real moments that split a life in two what do you believe what do you risk what do you want snap judgment new episodes every thursday wherever you get your podcast we're back so when heinrich is a kid his dad one of the like again his dad is very hands on he's making his when his kids he makes them keep up with their schoolwork and whatnot on the weekends he's sitting down with them and they're going over what they went over in class he's super hands on with this and one of the things he makes his kids do as part of his educational plan for them is from a very early age when they're quite little still not a toddler but when they first learn to write he teaches them stenography so that they can write quickly and they write letters to each other but he also makes his kids keep a detailed diary and he checks the diary like this is homework he's giving his kids he's not checking it to like i wanna make sure you're not doing something bad he's checking it to make sure that you are writing well right and it's hey yeah grading your essays yeah longrich writes that gebhard quote encouraged them his sons to use school holidays to consolidate what they had been taught so they're spending their holidays going over their homework and whatnot their schoolwork and he makes them keep these diaries and as a result we have like most of heinrich a lot of his childhood documented from a day to day sometimes on an hourly basis in granular detail yeah now we're back to the.

[B]

Tiger mom stuff you right dog it.

[A]

Is yeah yeah and you won't be surprised to hear that once this fact comes to light post war once people find out first the extent of the holocaust and heinrich's involvement and then that he's got this childhood diary all of these psychoanalysts armchair and official ones are like oh shit i'm gonna make my career analyzing finding the evidence of psychopathy in the diary of young heinrich himmler right this has to be the key to his madness you know it's gotta be in this because obviously you can always tell when someone's a kid if they're gonna grow up to be a monster and this is bad medical science and it's bad historiography working backwards from someone what they did as an adult and trying to be like ah the key must have been in this shit he wrote when he he was seven it's bad and it's always like there's every analysis that tries to look into his childhood from this standpoint that i've read is bad one of them i don't know it's the most detailed there's a lot of nonsense freudian shit in it but there's a paper i read called the unsuccessful adolescence of heinrich himmler written in nineteen seventy one by peter loewenberg i mentioned it earlier he's an american psychoanalyst and a historian who my analysis of him is that as a young man he discovered freud and never looked back and there's a lot of there's a lot that's good in this paper because he does go over all of the diary which is not a thing i am able to do is in detail read everything and there's a lot of interesting stuff you get and it's also married to like and this is evidence of his anal fixation this is evidence of a schizoid personality that's like man none of this is real psych we know this is all nonsense now and you also can't psychoanalyze a child from the this diary that is no his diary is like most of it is not here are my thoughts and feelings that i'm pouring out it is you know monday woke up at x hour ate this for breakfast went to school it's very very just nuts.

[B]

And bolts yeah like you're stretching the term diary here i'm like no this is my daddy's making me write this.

[A]

Right exactly you know what i'm saying.

[B]

So like i'm not gonna put nothing deep about my soul in this it's.

[A]

Homework and there's so i don't include a lot of his analysis of this just because he's going way too far but there are some really good things that he does make a note of right that are worth us quoting and one of this is something that he writes about heinrich's opinion of his mother anna quote little is known about her unlike gebhart himmler she scarcely receives mention in her son's diary and i don't think this is i don't see much evidence that he hated his mom i think it's just he doesn't think about his mom much as a person right like she is not this is it says a lot about his attitude towards women which is consistent for his life he's not all that interested in his mother right or her influence on him.

[B]

Yeah that to me is like if you like if you want to do if you want to do fake science.

[A]

Yeah it like oh yeah you actually.

[B]

Miss what's really there you know what i mean what actually really is interesting because it's not like this is not.

[A]

Like this is useful right it's useful.

[B]

But you so looking for oedipus and.

[A]

Shit and then he goes into like clear evidence of his psychopathy yeah it's like no that's not in there yet.

[B]

But here's what it is showing you you know what i'm saying this is.

[A]

Interesting yes exactly so i'm trying to pull the stuff that is interesting out of this paper without including a lot of the freudian shit that i think is going way too far but so there are again a lot of interesting details in here i'll quote another one heinrich himmler always maintained a high awareness of rank and titles he meticulously referred to the correct title and social status of anyone mentioned in his diary and this is both obviously he's being raised to do this by his father but this is an example of what i said his dad passes down as i'm sure his granddad did to his dad the kind of things you need to do to be a social climber and one of them is always know who people are know who you're talking to yeah exactly know who you're talking to how to refer to them and who it's worth kind of getting in good with and heinrich is going to be good at this and it's i think this is is the start of his how he's accultured to do this right.

[B]

I was gonna say now that is useful is somebody who understand yeah who's in a room and who i need to impress who i don't need to impress like that tells us something and.

[A]

You get a lot people talk a lot about like okay like kids who come from poor families versus kids who come from rich families what are the different like you know rich parents raise kids in a way that make them understand money better and how to keep it better because the parents know how to do that yeah and this is kind of the same sort right like the fact that heinrich is being accultured to do this is evidence of how his dad is preparing him to be the kind of social climber that's able to get as far as he did in the nazi party now another interesting fact from this diary is that we see in it very little evidence of antisemitism right which is not to say he is anti semitic as a little kid his family is anti semitic but in a normal way for german gentiles of the time right there's not evidence as a little kid in the way that there is with like hitler that he is really obsessed with this stuff right that we don't really see and this comports what's in his diary just because we always want secondary sources one of the people who talked about heinrich after you know when the war started was a german who had fled to the united states to escape the nazi regime named hallgarden and hallgarden like figure realizes as an adult when the nazis rise to power that heinrich himmler had been in school with him like they were classmates they went through years of school together and so he gives us some interesting details on himmler from someone and obviously not an unbiased source but from someone who is observing him as a young kid he describes his appearance as a child of hardly average height who was unusually pale and physically very awkward with haircut fairly short and even then a pair of gold rimmed glasses on his slightly pointed nose and who was seen with a quote half embarrassed half malicious smile on his face now longrich continues to write in his biography of himmler quote according to hallgarden himmler had been a model pupil liked by all the teachers amongst the boys he had been regarded as a swat and been only moderately popular hallgarden had a particularly clear memory of the unhappy figure himmler cut much to the amusement of his fellows in gymnastics hatred of the jews hallgarden went on to say was not something himmler was at all associated with at the time on the other hand he said he remembered heinrich's radically anti french outlook and so i think.

[B]

He was just like yeah he was just like a six he's he's a.

[A]

Nerdy kid he looks he's like a weird look he's not like a handsome kid and he's not phys he's awkward he does bad in gym you know kids make fun of him for that.

[B]

But yeah yeah he's the guy that like yeah totally like your teacher who i was won for a while where you're just like wait does kids in my class like you just like you just miss him you know what i mean because it's like he's that i mean he turns in his homework but.

[A]

He'S not right he does good but not that good he's at the top of the class in the upper twenty percent probably but not enough that like he's super stands out but like the teachers like him because he doesn't cause problems and the other kids make fun of him because he's kind of a he's kind of physically he's a dude he's a dwee look at a picture of heinrich himmler i'm not trying to be like body shaming the reichsfuhrer of the ss but like he's a nerdy looking guy he's just a little dweeb yeah he doesn't look like an aryan superman right and this is relevant cause it's going to have a lot of influence on how he why the ss works the way it does and how he tries to present himself but it does i think holgarten's recollections along with the diary make a very solid case heinrich is not particularly anti semitic as a kid and being anti french matters a lot more to him as a kid than being anti semitic right and the fact that you've got this guy who doesn't like him who isn't biased being like yeah i didn't see much evidence that he was super racist against the jews as a kid that's probably the case right yeah he ain't like the french though he fucking hates the french oh my god fuck you frenchie he's inventing slurs for the french what a dork now thanks to his father's obsessive involvement in their education the himmler boys do very well in school heinrich is not the standout of the family though his grades are good but they're never as good as his older brother's and he never makes it to the very top of the class he doesn't stand out heinrich's mother pushes the boys to be observant catholics and is so insistent on this that gebhard actually has to force his wife to ease up on them with the he's like you're going way too hard on the catholicism stuff we don't need to be slow down k you know they go to church every sunday they're diligent about it but like like she wants them to be she's way more into it than he is one of my favorite weird details from the frischauer biography which is that very older much older biography is that as a kid heinrich said his prayers in front of quote an ivory statue of christ cut from one big elephant's tooth just a sign of the era that that's a thing they've got cool i guess all right yeah frischauer claims that by age ten heinrich could quote reel off the dates of famous battles the saga of the nibelungs were his bedtime stories the wars of the middle ages fuel for his imagination and this is what heinrich's into while the other the normal thing for boys to be obsessed with is stories of native americans fighting like the us cavalry right that is like we talk about this hitler's hugely into cowboy novels right this german con man named karl may that is the big that's the harry potter of its day it's the major thing that kids are into it's their fucking dragon ball z or whatever if your kid who grew up when i did heinrich is different in that he is a nerd for you know this wagner operas the ring of the nibelungens which is kind of a precursor to the lord of the rings the lord of the rings takes a lot from that saga and from like you know stories of the crusades and these other battles and wars in the middle ages this is what he's obsessed with right dude.

[B]

This also reminds me of like as you're talking like just how recent this is yes like this isn't this is pretty this kind of just happened yeah.

[A]

No for another example of how recent it is as like an adolescent i think from the time he's probably around like ten or eleven to like his you know maybe preteen or teenage years he regularly attends jujitsu classes he's into jujitsu as a kid right because this is an upper middle class kid and upper middle class western kids have been going to karate for forever it's not literally karate we get it we get it shut up it's fine no we get it batt yeah frischauer also claims quote for many months the boy tortured himself with attempts to learn the piano but his father soon realized that the awkward fingers would not follow the command of his overeager mind most boys are relieved when their parents agree to liberate them from the attention of their music teachers to heinrich himmler it was a sad day when he was told that his hopeless endeavors had come to an end for years afterwards he would see sit silently and listen to his elder brother extracting heavenly tunes from the self same piano which had defied him on sundays he'd accompanied his brother to the church where to his envy he was playing the organ for the congregation this.

[B]

Is i'm sorry this is two positive points in the dad bucket here again just to have this a lot of daddies ain't got that self awareness to be like son son you're not gonna.

[A]

Make it as a piano player stop.

[B]

Stop stop you don't have to keep son you don't have to keep playing this that's not your thing look you write the stories you into the novels i'm not judging you about it you a great student son but this piano just leave that to your brother yeah leave that to leave you doing jiu.

[A]

Jitsu he's better than you he's better.

[B]

Look son be good at what you good at you do the jujitsu son you are an amazing student and i love you stop hitting them keys son.

[A]

Yeah yeah you're not this isn't gonna.

[B]

Work for you baby boy and look i don't need you to do don't do this for me son like go find something you good at if only.

[A]

Someone had the same conversation with ringo starr yes yeah that's coming in hot with some ringo slander one of the many similarities between ringo and heinrich himmler.

[B]

Sheesh sorry or ringo trying to get bars off in the you didn't do anything right songs like let that yeah what would ringo do wrong i just yes and you and then was like.

[A]

Wait i'm a pete best stan okay so now again longrich cautions frischauer's biography as a source and this is again not just because it's outdated but because we're talking about like this passage really plays up that he is super jealous of his brother his brother's much better than him at this and the source for this primarily is heinrich's older brother gebhardt after heinrich's death talking about like i was so good at the piano and he was he never got over the fact that i wasn't as good he could never be as good as me right maybe there's a degree to which gebhardt's but if that's the case if gebhardt is lying about this and either i mean heinrich did try to play the piano definitely and wound up it didn't work out but if he's lying about heinrich always being super jealous of his skill that's just as interesting an insight into the himmler family dynamics either way if the story's true or if it's a lie gebbert's telling it's evidence that there's a lot of kind of competition and insecurity between the brothers.

[B]

Right or yeah or just how he felt about it like i feel like my little brother's jealous of me like that as you said that's i mean normal you know what i'm saying normal.

[A]

But it suggests something about the family and about heinrich right that there is this competitiveness between the brothers and that is something that motivates him is his desire to compete and prove himself against his older brother yeah frischauer's book also goes into detail about the himmler family's obsession with their ancestors describes a shrine in the family apartment that himmler later named the aasenzimmer or ancestors room he tries to get basically every family and certainly in the ss to have an ancestor's room this is a thing later heinrich makes a big deal about longrich doesn't really talk about it in his biography and i think it's because he later makes this into a shrine thing i don't think this is a shrine for his parents i think that's himmler kind of working backwards and trying to say like oh my father established this practice that we should bring to the reich of having an ancestor shrine the literal description of it is like it's some pictures of like their grandfather and some things he'd owned and some things they've been sent over the years mementos from family members it's a memento cupboard.

[B]

Right i was gonna say i live in you know i live in east la there's ofrendas everywhere you know you have your altars it's like it's not.

[A]

Like an alter alter no no and himmler gets super into the occult and will make this into and i think himmler is exaggerating what this was this is just like a pretty normal thing for avs to have so by nineteen fourteen which is when the world war one is gonna break out heinrich is a promising teenage boy he's thirteen fourteen years old this year he's doing well in school and he's just a couple years away from entering the working world if he had been a poor kid he would be functionally an adult working at this point in time right and the plan is when he in a couple of years two or three more years when he's ready he'll use the influence of his godfather to secure him a place in a really good school and that'll help him secure a really good job and he'll elevate the family right unfortunately for everyone world events are going to conspire to stop this future from coming into existence when archduke franz ferdinand was gunned down in sarajevo by a crazed bernard montgomery sanders heinrich himmler was on vacation with his family on the austrian border look sophie the truth has to get out you know someone.

[B]

Has to stop him listen time travel has existed for a long time and i'm telling you bernard sanders has got around you know what i'm saying he's.

[A]

Gotten around you know yeah he was.

[B]

Actually even the group that signed franz.

[A]

Ferdinand the band as well the band.

[B]

Yeah they started he signed a band.

[A]

Every time there's a franz ferdinand in history bernie sanders is involved it's really bernie did he stab caesar you can't prove he didn't so he must have both of you so the initial events cause heinrich's on vacation with his family when the archduke gets assassinated and the chain of events that leads inevitably to war start off he responds to this initial outbreak as just another and the beginning of the war as just kind of another part of the day his july twenty ninth diary entry reads gebhard's birthday outbreak and this is his brother outbreak of war between austria and serbia excursion to lake waging i mean he's.

[B]

Nineteen so let's give him that birthday.

[A]

Austria and serbia go to war we go to the lake you know yeah.

[B]

Yeah and i imagine like yeah like that war for him is as far away as like you know what i'm.

[A]

Saying like it's initially like he doesn't know what it's going to be be right yeah and longrich especially because austria and serbia like the balkans they're always shit's always going down there right you.

[B]

Don'T even know like what yeah what is like you don't know what they are what is austria hungary like where's.

[A]

Where'S the line at obviously he know but he knows but this is a little for him it's like it's like you hearing like oh you know israel is exchanging missiles with hamas that's what i'm trying to say prior to october seventh right now obviously things are much like everything's been escalated significantly you know with the genocide and whatnot going on but like five or six years ago you heard oh there's another exchange of missiles right yeah totally i was at.

[B]

This i was at this event one time way up in the mountains in utah right yeah the event with just these like people like fuck off money and like years ago this was years ago and then there was this do you remember at what was happening with the kurds at the syrian border like maybe about like you know five six years ago maybe seven years ago i.

[A]

Would have been there almost seven years.

[B]

Ago yeah yeah you was actually there now think about it right so i was talking about it and like i said i'm at this event with these very wealthy people and this lady who was clearly like clearly from the region you know what i mean like so we're talking about the situation and she was like wait what are you talking about i don't think i heard of that and in my head i'm judging her like man see this is what happens man you know what i'm saying you get wealthy she goes oh no you don't understand i'm from beirut yeah i was like oh oh she was like i'm born and raised in bay i went like you're like your school bus was blown out like the windows were blown out cause martyr hit it yesterday you know what i'm saying so i'm like oh nevermind i apologize carry on joke's on me yeah yeah and.

[A]

That'S kind of like this is yeah it's another oh these countries that like this place where there's always a conflict there's a conflict however he goes back kind of later because i think probably within hours maybe a couple of days it becomes clear that this is more severe and he goes back to his initial entry and he erases some stuff and he underlines the announcement of the outbreak of war later in red and he writes the sentence proclamation of a state of war once germany declares war so he goes back to his notes once it becomes clear this is more severe and he writes he lists out the things that are happening as they're happening quote number one germany mobilizes the second army corps even the landsturm which is like their national guard type units number two played in the garden in the morning afternoon as well seven thirty germany declares war on russia three attacks on the french and russian borders planes and spies we are packing up right away so you get this this is what's so interesting you get this idea of like starts out we're playing in the garden in the morning and the afternoon and then i hear that like germany's decoration declared war and then like there's fighting on the borders already there's planes there's reports of spies we're packing up we're leaving we're ending our vacation early things have gotten bad very quickly you get that there's something about that.

[B]

That'S yeah that's so modern that's like so close like you know i live and not even an eight minute drive from the alameda courthouse where the ice these people that have been tamed by ice are like i can like i hear when like the smoke like i can hear them yeah i mean and it's like you're so i'm going oh made coffee drop soul off at school oh heard some martyrs heard some bombs go off you know what i'm saying oh there's some helicopters you know what i'm saying and it's like i should go pick up my daughter like you.

[A]

Know like like maybe i'm gonna go grab her yeah let me go pick.

[B]

Let me go pick her up you feel me like and then it's like you drop her off and then me and my wife are like we going to march yeah we're going to march so then we leave to go to you know what i mean so just like that's that reality of like or yeah like you're scrolling through your feed and yeah there's a there's a mass starvation on purpose happening and then the next one is some sort of joke about you know edward sharp you know what i'm saying is the next thing you're looking at it's just something so real about him saying yeah like yeah.

[A]

It'S super interesting you very rarely get that and this is the only member of the nazi high command that we have this kind of granular detail on like you get there's pieces of like there's that famous picture of like hitler in berlin when the kaiser declares war you can see him in the crowd like you can literally find hitler it's a thing he wrote about and like that's really interesting for heinrich we've got almost like a minute to minute list of like what's happening to him as a kid as the war breaks out that's so interesting it's part of why these episodes there's gonna be so many of them we'll try to keep it to two weeks but there might be more than than four episodes in those two weeks because we've got to close this episode out now prop we're over an hour so you know you got any pluggables to plug down at the.

[B]

End dear yeah dude hood politics with prop man we've been really trying to step our game up over here tell them about the tap in so we do a friday tap in which are like you know ten minute things that are yeah just like little extra thoughts you know what i mean some of them are you know a little little more about me we're i'm releasing a poetry album about like the end of the world so we're going to be talking about a lot of that on the tap in and yeah man we've been doing that terraform's back the cold brew's back it's not online yet but it's back finally praise be praise be praise bab finally dog man i learned.

[A]

A lot of business lessons listen yeah.

[B]

Yeah so the cold brew i need.

[A]

It i need the energy and also folks we are currently raising money for the portland bail fund if you google donor box one word defense fund pdx fundraiser you can find the fundraiser yeah that would help a lot if you want to donate money to the bail fund they help bail out primarily homeless people who you know it helps them get out it helps them fight their case you're a lot less likely to go to prison if you're you're out on bail as opposed to locked up they do not they bail out anyone with the exception of like domestic abuse claims right so it's a good fundraiser they could use your help donor box defense fund pdx fundraiser just google that it'll take you right to it thank you all so much go to hell i love you behind the bastards is.

[C]

A production of cool zone media for.

[A]

More from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iheartradio app apple podcasts.

[D]

Or wherever you get your podcasts behind.

[C]

The bastards is now available on youtube.

[A]

New episodes every wednesday and friday subscribe to our channel youtube dot com behindthebastards.

[D]

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On why is this taking so long this thing is ancient still using yesterday's.

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