Part Three: Adolf Eichmann: Mr. Holocaust Himself - Behind the Bastards

Summary5 min read

Podcast Summary: Behind the Bastards – Part Three: Adolf Eichmann: Mr. Holocaust Himself

Episode Information:

Title: Behind the Bastards
Host/Author: Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
Description: Behind the Bastards delves into the lives of history’s most notorious figures, unveiling the bizarre and often horrifying realities behind their actions.
Episode: Part Three: Adolf Eichmann: Mr. Holocaust Himself
Release Date: July 8, 2025

Introduction

In the third installment of Behind the Bastards, hosts Robert Evans and Cody Johnston explore the chilling legacy of Adolf Eichmann, a key architect of the Holocaust. Joined by guest Joe Kasabian, the episode examines Eichmann’s pivotal role in the Nazi regime’s systematic genocide of Jews during World War II.

Eichmann’s Ascendancy and Role in the Holocaust

The episode picks up from where the previous part left off, detailing Eichmann’s early involvement in the SS security division and his rise to become the "czar of the Jews" for Nazi Germany.

Key Discussions:

Logistical Challenges: As the war intensified, the Nazis faced overwhelming numbers of Jews captured across Europe without effective means of deportation or extermination.
Wannsee Conference Preparation: Eichmann was instrumental in organizing and facilitating the Wannsee Conference in early 1942, where plans for the "Final Solution" were formalized.

Notable Quote:

"Eichmann's watching all that and he's taking notes and he's fig out how do you actually kill a lot of like a shitload of people..."
— Robert Evans [04:15]

Intentionalists vs. Functionalists Debate

The hosts delve into the historiographical debate regarding the origins of the Holocaust, contrasting the intentionalist view (Hitler’s direct orders) with the functionalist perspective (systemic evolution within the Nazi state).

Key Points:

Premeditation Evidence: Eichmann’s early statements and writings, including his 1922 interview and Mein Kampf, indicate a clear intent to annihilate Jews.
Structural Influences: While Eichmann didn’t personally devise extermination plans, his role in policy implementation and coordination was crucial.

Notable Quote:

"Hitler premeditated on the slaughter of European Jewry... Eichmann was part of the process of authoring a lot of things."
— Robert Evans [12:02]

Operation Spring Wind and French Collaboration

The episode highlights Eichmann’s collaboration with French officials in orchestrating mass deportations of Jews from Vichy France.

Key Topics:

Operation Spring Wind: A coordinated effort involving the French police to arrest and deport approximately 13,000 Parisian Jews.
Louis Darquier de Pellepoix: A Vichy collaborator who played a significant role in facilitating the deportations under Eichmann’s guidance.

Notable Quote:

"Operation Spring Wind was the brainchild of a French Vichy collaborator... and he also suggested the mass arrest of stateless Jews."
— Robert Evans [43:12]

Eichmann’s Influence and Interactions with Other Nazi Officials

Eichmann’s network within the SS and SD, including his relationships with figures like Reinhard Heydrich and Otto Globocnik, underscored his significant influence in the Nazi hierarchy.

Key Discussions:

Power Dynamics: Despite not being at the top of the hierarchy, Eichmann effectively reported directly to Heinrich Himmler, bypassing intermediaries.
Bragging and Reputation: Eichmann’s tendency to boast about his role in the Holocaust increased his standing among Nazi officials, exacerbating his megalomania.

Notable Quote:

"I am a bloodhound. I’ll set the mills of Auschwitz grinding and blood for goods."
— Adolf Eichmann [67:17]

The Final Phase: Hungary and the Swift Annihilation

As the war turned against Germany, Eichmann intensified his efforts to exterminate Hungarian Jews, leading to one of the most rapid and horrific phases of the Holocaust.

Key Points:

German Occupation of Hungary: In 1944, after Admiral Horthy attempted to negotiate a separate peace, German forces occupied Hungary, unleashing Eichmann’s extermination plans.
Mass Deportations: Between May and June 1944, over 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz, resulting in the murder of nearly 600,000 individuals, including 2,000 children.
Raoul Wallenberg’s Resistance: Swedish diplomat Wallenberg intervened by providing forged documents and sanctuary to Jews in Budapest, disrupting Eichmann’s plans.

Notable Quote:

"The removal of Horthy three months later opened up new possibilities when Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg openly offered sanctuary to Jews in Budapest."
— Robert Evans [58:49]

Eichmann’s Legacy and Final Days

In the waning months of the Nazi regime, Eichmann's desperation and megalomania peaked as he attempted to consolidate his legacy even as the Third Reich crumbled.

Key Discussions:

Public Image: Eichmann cultivated an image of indispensability by taking credit for broader genocidal actions, distancing himself from direct orders.
Final Actions: As Soviet forces advanced, Eichmann continued orchestrating deportations, refusing to acknowledge the impending defeat of Nazi Germany.

Notable Quote:

"Adolf Eichmann was the man who masterminded this. This is on him more than any other single person."
— Robert Evans [70:22]

Conclusion

Behind the Bastards paints a comprehensive and harrowing portrait of Adolf Eichmann, revealing how his bureaucratic efficiency and ruthless determination made him a central figure in the Holocaust. Through meticulous coordination and unwavering commitment to Nazi ideology, Eichmann exemplified the mechanized evil that enabled one of history’s greatest atrocities.

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

Robert Evans [04:15]:

"Eichmann's watching all that and he's taking notes and he's fig out how do you actually kill a lot of like a shitload of people..."
Robert Evans [12:02]:

"Hitler premeditated on the slaughter of European Jewry... Eichmann was part of the process of authoring a lot of things."
Robert Evans [43:12]:

"Operation Spring Wind was the brainchild of a French Vichy collaborator... and he also suggested the mass arrest of stateless Jews."
Adolf Eichmann [67:17]:

"I am a bloodhound. I’ll set the mills of Auschwitz grinding and blood for goods."
Robert Evans [58:49]:

"The removal of Horthy three months later opened up new possibilities when Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg openly offered sanctuary to Jews in Budapest."
Robert Evans [70:22]:

"Adolf Eichmann was the man who masterminded this. This is on him more than any other single person."

Note: This summary focuses solely on the content discussing Adolf Eichmann and excludes advertisements, unrelated segments, and non-content sections to provide a coherent and comprehensive overview of the episode.

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Transcript534 lines

[00:03]
Robert Evans
Media. Welcome back to behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. We are talking about Adolf Eichmann this week and last week. Last week, we got through his childhood and his early rise through the sd, which is the SS security division, to become the, in his words, czar of the Jews for Nazi Germany. And today with, with our guest Joe Kasabian, we're talking about what happens to Eichmann as the war moves towards its final phase. How you doing, Joe? You excited to hear about this guy? You think he's gonna finally break good in this last two parts?
[00:46]
Joe Kasabian
I gotta say, I'm not super optimistic that he's gonna have a redemption arc. I dressed up for this episode because I was surprised last time, so now I'm just wearing a shirt that says all pain.
[01:00]
Robert Evans
Yeah, I'm treating this like people were treating, like, the second half of Andor, where they were hoping their favorite, like, monster imperial characters were like, oh, this guy's gonna totally turn out good at the end.
[01:11]
Cody Johnston
Right? Yeah.
[01:12]
Robert Evans
This is our moment. Like that for Eichmann.
[01:15]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah. Most Nazis are not, in fact, the one from the Pianist.
[01:18]
Robert Evans
No, no.
[01:23]
Garrison Keillor
This is an iHeart podcast. Maybe you've heard that Stonewall was a riot where queer people fought back against police, or that it's the reason pride is celebrated this time.
[01:36]
Cody Johnston
It was one of the most liberating things that I have ever done.
[01:40]
Garrison Keillor
Legend says Marsha P. Johnson threw the very first brick, started banging on the.
[01:45]
Unknown
Door of the Stonewall like one.
[01:46]
Cody Johnston
Boom.
[01:47]
Garrison Keillor
This week on Afterlives, we'll separate the truth from the myth in the life of Marcia P. Johnson. Listen to afterlives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts from.
[02:00]
Unknown
Iheart podcast. Before social media, before cable news, there was Alan Berg.
[02:06]
Joe Kasabian
He was the first and the original shock Chuck.
[02:09]
Unknown
That scratchy, irreverent kind of way of talking to people and telling them that.
[02:14]
Robert Evans
You'Re an idiot, and I'm going to.
[02:15]
Cody Johnston
Hang up on you.
[02:16]
Unknown
This is Live Wire, the loud life and shocking murder of Alan Berg.
[02:20]
Robert Evans
And he pointed to the Denver phone book and said, well, there are probably 2 million suspects.
[02:25]
Unknown
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[02:30]
Joe Kasabian
Did it occur to you that he charmed you in any way? Yes, it did, but he was a charming man. It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story, because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.
[02:46]
Robert Evans
I often ask myself now, did I know the true Rian at all?
[02:52]
Joe Kasabian
Listen to hot agent of chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
[03:01]
Unknown
How could a beautiful young first grade teacher be stabbed 20 times, including in the b. Allegedly die of suicide? Yes, that was the medical examiner's official ruling. After a closed door meeting, he first named it a homicide. Why? What happened to Ellen Greenberg? A huge American miscarriage of justice. For an in depth look at the facts, see what happened to Ellen on Amazon all day. Proceeds to the national center for Missing and Exploited Children.
[03:43]
Robert Evans
Where we left off in part two. He had gone on a fact finding mission to Eastern Europe in the fairly early stages of Operation Barbarossa, where the first parts of what we now know as the actual killing stage of the Holocaust began, which was a mix of, you know, gas vans showing up outside of various villages and Einsatzgruppen units just doing mass shootings. Well, Eichmann's watching all that and he's taking notes and he's fig out how do you actually kill a lot of like a shitload of people? Like, like more people, like as many more people than would have died in a war a generation or two ago. We've got to like figure out how to get rid of while we're fighting a war. How do we do that? Right, and all of this is preparation for a big old meeting they're going to have called the Wannsee conference in early 1942. So that's where we are right now. And yeah, that's, that's what we're, we're hurtling towards at the moment. And the, the problem the Nazis are dealing with as the war in the east starts to turn against them is they've got a logistical hurdle on their hands. They have captured way more Jews than they know how to handle and they have no real process for dealing with them. If you think back to the numbers we were talking about in the first parts of this series, they're dealing with a couple of hundred thousand people at a time as they take over Austria, as they take over Czechoslovakia, and then more when they take over Poland. But now that they've captured this huge chunk of what had been the Soviet Union, they got millions of people on their hands, right? And these earlier decisions that had to make about what should we do, do we deport these people, do we find a place for them? The decision quickly moves towards like, all we can do is annihilate them.
[05:20]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[05:21]
Robert Evans
But we have a limit in our war material and a limit in how many soldiers we can have actually kill.
[05:27]
Joe Kasabian
People and that the mentioned, like how many people are willing to drive insane.
[05:32]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[05:33]
Joe Kasabian
And drink themselves to death by turning them into executioners.
[05:37]
Robert Evans
That's a major problem for the SS at this stage. So many of the sources that you'll find on Eichmann will point out that he never really wrote policy.
[05:47]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[05:48]
Robert Evans
He was just an implementation guy. And this is accurate technically in some ways, but I don't think it is in a way that matters.
[05:55]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[05:55]
Robert Evans
Eichmann does.
[05:56]
Joe Kasabian
Eichmann wasn't a policy wonk, was he?
[05:58]
Robert Evans
Yeah, he really kind of was. Right. He's not the author of a bunch of stuff, but he's part of the process of authoring a lot of things. And he does help create policies, particularly like where the treatment of people with partial Jewish ancestry is concerned. Concerned. And he's got this foundational role in how the Nazi state interacts with captured Jewish communities and deports them.
[06:19]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[06:19]
Robert Evans
And he's not literally writing out policies all the time, but he is effectively making policy in all but name. Now, that said, he doesn't give the order to start the Holocaust, right? That's obviously not his call. That happens way above his head. Which begs the question, then, who does?
[06:35]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[06:36]
Robert Evans
You would expect in an organization as hierarchical as the Nazis, there's someone we can trace to. Like, and this is the moment the order was given, right? We don't actually. We don't directly have that.
[06:47]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[06:47]
Robert Evans
We know Eichmann helps organize and facilitate the Von say conference where it's planned. And this is on orders of his boss, Reinhard Heydrich. And Heydrich takes his orders, you know, from Himmler and from Hitler. But we don't have any record of Himmler or Hitler saying, okay, it's time to do the Holocaust now.
[07:02]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[07:02]
Robert Evans
Because that's just not the way any of this works, right?
[07:06]
Joe Kasabian
And man, man, has that led to a lot of problems. And then Holocaust denial and Hitler rehabilitation and fucking name it.
[07:14]
Cody Johnston
Yeah.
[07:15]
Robert Evans
We have no evidence of Hitler saying, we've got to do this. And that kind of feeds into, at the time, a lot of people in Nazi Germany who were often annoyed or even horrified by aspects of the regime, by things the SS and the SD did, right? Would be like, well, but Hitler clearly doesn't know about this, right? Like, he can't have any idea this is going on. And this is something Hitler, you know, this is the smart way to play shit as a totalitarian dictator. You don't want your name attached to everything the regime is doing, especially shit that's not gonna work.
[07:44]
Cody Johnston
Out.
[07:44]
Robert Evans
Or that's more exp. You need plausible deniability.
[07:48]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[07:49]
Robert Evans
Even if you're Hitler.
[07:50]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah. Not every tyrant or dictator is gonna have a camp called, like, the Hitler Camp for Undesirables.
[07:56]
Cody Johnston
Right. Right.
[07:57]
Robert Evans
That's just bad business. And the Nazi regime, again, there's this attitude, and this really is something that causes people who even aren't trying to do Nazi apologia to do apologia for regular people under the Nazi system. There's this errant idea that, like, well, normal people had no choice but to go along with what the regime. It was so dangerous, any degree of resistance would have gotten you killed, would have gotten your family wiped out. At no point in the history of the Nazi regime was that true.
[08:26]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[08:26]
Robert Evans
There were no. No. No members of the Nazi state and, like, were ever executed or punished for just refusing to take part in the Holocaust.
[08:35]
Cody Johnston
Right. No.
[08:36]
Robert Evans
Most of them were given an out. Yes. And people could take it.
[08:40]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[08:41]
Joe Kasabian
Like the Nazi reserve police battalions had to volunteer.
[08:45]
Robert Evans
Yes, exactly.
[08:46]
Joe Kasabian
To do the Holocaust by bullets. And they overwhelmingly volunteered.
[08:50]
Robert Evans
Yeah. And people who said no didn't have their families killed or themselves killed.
[08:55]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[08:55]
Joe Kasabian
They didn't even get demoted. They just got moved somewhere else.
[08:58]
Robert Evans
So much choice was involved in being part of the worst aspects of the regime. And there was, in fact, internal criticism inside Nazi Germany, and the regime even buckled under that criticism at times. When word of the T4 euthanasia program broke out, which was basically the gassing of. Of, you know, disabled people by the Nazi state, there was backlash among German civilians, and that backlash was significant enough that it made Hitler number one. They backed away publicly on the program, and it made Hitler wary in the future of putting further policies of mass murder in writing. And I want to quote from an article by Kevin Sweeney in the journal Constructing the past here. Between 1940 and 1941, the German People's negative reaction became increasingly vocal and vehement, culminating in Hitler being openly jeered by a crowd watching mentally challenged patriots being loaded onto a train at a rail station in hof, Bavaria, in 1941. Ultimately, this negative public reaction to the T4 program and Hitler's sanctioning of it, bolstered by denunciations from Catholic and Protestant church leaders, forced Hitler to publicly cancel the program in August of 1941, though it continued in secret until 1945. So again, people yelled at Hitler over this, and he backed down.
[10:10]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[10:10]
Robert Evans
Like, that's such a critical part of the story of how this regime works.
[10:15]
Joe Kasabian
Do you also think, like, this is something that is Batted around a bit in my field of research, where it's just like, this is the one that was taking average Germans family members away as well.
[10:26]
Robert Evans
Yes.
[10:27]
Joe Kasabian
Everybody was connected to it.
[10:30]
Robert Evans
Yes. And there was. There were other times where that happened.
[10:32]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[10:32]
Robert Evans
There was a moment where they started deporting people who had, like, one Jewish relative but weren't, like, religiously Jewish and were married into, you know, gentile German families. There were protests, and they had to publicly back off of that because Germans were like, well, but these guys aren't really Jewish.
[10:46]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[10:46]
Robert Evans
What are you doing here? You know?
[10:48]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah.
[10:49]
Robert Evans
Like, moments like that happened, and the state was always conscious of how far they were pushing people.
[10:55]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[10:56]
Robert Evans
Which meant that the state could be pushed. Now, because of all of this, there's not a clear order to like, okay, Hitler signed this paper saying, kill everybody.
[11:05]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[11:06]
Robert Evans
And this has led even within. And again, these are. None of these people are what you'd call denialists. But there was a debate for a very long time, like half a century between historians who specialized in the Holocaust between what are generally called intentionalists and functionalists. And the intentionalists argued that Hitler personally instigated the Final Solution. The functionalists argued that it arose naturally as a result of the structure of the Third Reich. Now, this debate is mostly done. We don't really. This is like, I think people will talk about. In terms of the history of how we looked at this. There's not much argument here anymore. A preponderance of evidence that exists today proves that Hitler. That basically aspects of both of these are very true.
[11:46]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[11:47]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah, I was actually going to point that out. There's more. There's a third camp, which I generally fall into, which is like, Hitler ordered it. However, a lot of it arose from.
[11:57]
Robert Evans
The structure of the Nazi state. Yeah.
[12:00]
Joe Kasabian
Even if it didn't, it would have happened.
[12:02]
Robert Evans
Yeah. Hitler premeditated on the slaughter of European jewelry. And also, the functionalists have some very good points. One piece of evidence for the intentionalists that often get cited that is important when we talk about Hitler's premeditation is an interview Hitler gave in 1922 to a journalist where he said, once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews as soon as they have the power to do so. Yeah. Yeah. And he's like, I will have the gallows built in rows and the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately until all of Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews. That's pretty hard. That's like, not. You Know, we can state that as pretty clear evidence of intent.
[12:38]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[12:38]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah. And Mein Kampf also kind of really lays it out there.
[12:42]
Robert Evans
Yeah, yeah. There's not a lot. There's a. It's hard to argue. He didn't say regularly what he planned to do.
[12:49]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[12:50]
Joe Kasabian
It's what he's known for. It's his bit.
[12:52]
Robert Evans
It's his whole thing. And obviously the fact that he said all this doesn't mean Hitler wrote out the plan for Auschwitz or ever. Like, he's not the guy. He didn't tell everyone, okay, we're gonna do an Auschwitz, and here's how it's gonna work. Right. He was like, we gotta kill these guys. Figure it out. I'm Hitler. I got Hitler stuff to do.
[13:09]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[13:09]
Robert Evans
Like, there's a lot of. Lot of tasks on my hand. You guys lock down how we're gonna handle this.
[13:14]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[13:15]
Robert Evans
And there were always other possibilities up until things start to turn for them in the East. It's not a guarantee that mass slaughter is the only thing that will be done for all of these captured people. I think there was a point at which something like the Madagascar plan, if that itself was never really feasible, could have been done for some amount of people.
[13:32]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[13:33]
Robert Evans
But at a certain point, the only thing they were going to do was genocide. And Hitler had repeatedly countenanced that and urged that throughout his career. In 1939, he told the Czech foreign minister, we are going to destroy the Jews. They are not going to get away with what they did. On November 9, 1918, the day of reckoning has come. Eichmann himself would later claim under interrogation that Reinhard Heydrich had told him about plans for the Holocaust as early as August 1941. And this is Heydrich talking to an interrogator. The war with the Soviet Union began in June 1941. I believe it was two months later that Heydrich sent for me. I reported he began with a little speech, and then, the Fuhrer has ordered physical extermination of the Jews. Then Heydrich said, go and see SS Obergruppenfuhrer Otto Globocnik. The Fuhrer has already given him instructions. And, you know, that doesn't mean that's exactly what happened, because Eichmann lies under interrogation. But there's a good amount of evidence to suggest that's pretty much what happened.
[14:32]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[14:33]
Robert Evans
We haven't talked. We'll talk about Globochnik one of these days. He's a really interesting Nazi. And from what we know of Heydrich and of him this is pretty feasible, right, that something like this is basically what went down. There's a lot of outside kind of evidence that this is pretty close to what happened.
[14:47]
Joe Kasabian
Those ideas definitely would have flowed through Heydrich.
[14:49]
Robert Evans
Yes, yes, through Heydrich and probably through Globocnik, too, in a similar way to how it's described here. And Bettina Stangneth basically argues that Eichmann was given the job of planning the Wannsee Conference, helping to coordinate all the different government branches who'd played a role in the genocide because he'd made himself the Reich's gopher in anything related to the Jewish. He's just the guy you reach for when you're like, well, we need someone to pull all of these things we've been doing together and plan the execution of the Holocaust. You've got Eichmann, right? You already know he knows how to do this kind of shit, so you pull for him. Stengneth writes, when others were at a loss, he was the man they called on. For example, a professor at Strasbourg University was adamant. He wanted the skulls of Jewish Bolshevik commissars to add to a collection of skeletons, despite the fact that they were still alive. And Eichmann's the guy who gets pulled in to do that. He's just already been the kind of, we need someone to handle this unpleasant implementation that's going to involve killing a lot of people. Right, well, Eichmann's. Who does that, you know, of course.
[15:47]
Joe Kasabian
That'S a collection that existed at a German university.
[15:50]
Robert Evans
That's a German university's collection, right?
[15:53]
Joe Kasabian
I mean, recently a German university, I forget which one. Maybe it was Salzburg discovered. Oh, we still have all these boxes of human skulls, right? From the Herero and Nama genocide just laying around. Oops.
[16:06]
Robert Evans
Oops?
[16:06]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah, don't oops all skull.
[16:08]
Robert Evans
Look, you don't want to go too deep into the. Into the archive section of any German or British university or any American university older than a certain age.
[16:18]
Joe Kasabian
Honestly, I should point out, due to my family's land deeds, or Turkish universities.
[16:24]
Robert Evans
Or Turkish universities, very few old universities do you want. And honestly, the Vatican sub basements, we don't really want to get into those too deep either.
[16:32]
Joe Kasabian
No, those should stay long. Yeah, those should stay locked for the good of all of us.
[16:36]
Robert Evans
Yeah, there's some. There's some fucking first Indiana Jones movie shit if you go deep enough in that. So as the death camps spun up to full operation in the years following Von say, Eichmann was set to the task of organizing the registration Collection and eventual deportation or evacuation of captive Jewish populations to the camps. By this point, he was highly placed enough and the job was big enough that he often sent out trusted subordinates to handle the on the ground workforce. Him involving himself directly if he felt their progress was too slow, and acting as a wrecking ball whenever his people encountered resistance from local government officials. And this resistance is usually not. We have a moral issue with what's happening sometimes, especially later in the war. It's a mix of that or they're just worried that they'll get blamed for it because they could see where things are coming. But a lot of the times it's more, well, we need supplies for other things, right? Like, we have issues that are a bigger priority to us and the general government of Poland or whatever than the annihilation of these people. And why are we focusing on this? And Eichmann will come in and say, fuck off. We. This is the priority.
[17:40]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[17:40]
Robert Evans
Like, that's kind of part of his job. And one of his personal obsessions is ensuring that no individual Jews are exempted from the Final Solution. This is more of an issue than you might expect. It was often said that every Nazi had their good Jew or even recognized, a handful of good Jews that ought to be spared. And in fact, this extends to Hitler, as I bring up on this show every now and then, he interviewed personally to save his childhood doctor, a Jewish man who he viewed as a decent person.
[18:10]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[18:10]
Joe Kasabian
And his personal driver, Emile Maurice.
[18:12]
Robert Evans
Yeah, right. There were guys, right? And ladies, right? That every. Even a lot of the worst of the Nazis had. They would be like, well, this person should be spared Eichmann. One of the things that makes him noteworthy is he doesn't have these people, right? And he actually sees it as his personal job to make sure none of the, like, every. Even the worst of the SS are soft towards a Jew here and there. I have to make sure those people don't escape the dragnet as much as possible, Right.
[18:39]
Joe Kasabian
He has to be more evil than the most evil men on earth.
[18:42]
Robert Evans
Hitler. Yeah. That's part of his job here. I've got to be harder even than the boss.
[18:47]
Joe Kasabian
You know, Hitler's. You know, he's too soft.
[18:49]
Robert Evans
He could be soft on this issue, right?
[18:51]
Joe Kasabian
Pick up the slack, you know, Hitler real soft on the Jewish issue.
[18:55]
Robert Evans
Yeah, yeah. At least softer than he's willing to be. And this is a thing that comes down from Heydrich, too. Heydrich's very much similar in this attitude.
[19:02]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[19:03]
Robert Evans
So. And again, it's kind of when we Talk about his complicity. He doesn't order any of this, but his job is to make sure it's as total a victory for the Nazis as he can manage. And while his role here is important, we shouldn't neglect to highlight other major figures behind the Final Solution, including Eichmann's childhood friend Ernst Kaltenbrunner, as well as Heinrich Mueller, Theodor Dannecker, Dieter Weslinski, Franz Novak, and a bunch of other young men in Hitler's SS and sd. And it's really worth emphasizing young. A lot of the people doing this are that the Holocaust is committed primarily from an implementation stage by very young, ambitious men. An article for the National World War II Museum by Dr. Jason Dawsey, notes of Eichmann's peers, quote, none of them had reached the age of 35 when World War II ended. They exhibited a terrifying combination of attention to detail and steadfast commitment to the core ideas of Nazism. Reinhard Heydrich himself, Eichmann's boss, was 38 when he was killed by Czech partisans In June of 1942, just a few months after the Wannsee conference. We've already covered Heydrich in other episodes, and there's not enough time in all, in these ones to discuss all of Eichmann's subordinates and colleagues, the guys at his level. But we should talk about one of his men in order to kind of tell the story of several others.
[20:21]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[20:21]
Robert Evans
Because I don't want it to look like. I never want it to be like a great man thing where Eichmann. Eichmann's the only one kind of at this level of importance. There are other guys who are at similar levels, and one of them is his subordinate, Theodore Dannecker.
[20:32]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[20:33]
Robert Evans
And we'll talk a little bit about Dannecker, both because he's a monster worth knowing and because his story tells us something important about how Eichmann operated. Dannecker was born in March of 1913 in Tubingen, Southwest Germany. His father was a member of the comfortable middle class, as a lot of these guys are, and was a businessman until he died in 1918 fighting for the Kaiser. Theodore was raised by his mom, and he grows up, number one, angry about the war, believing in the stabbed in the back myth like all of these guys do. And other than that, he's kind of mediocre, Right. His family was used to being more comfortable than they are after the war. He wants to do better. He feels like he's owed it. But he's not very good at anything like Eichmann. He's a mediocre student.
[21:18]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[21:18]
Robert Evans
He makes no real impact on his professors and there's no signs that he's going to go on to have a really significant career. He's just kind of mid.
[21:27]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[21:27]
Robert Evans
These are all very young, very mid guys who are given their only chance to be excellent is with the Nazi party. Man.
[21:36]
Joe Kasabian
That is unfortunate. We need some kind of jobs program for dudes who are solidly mid.
[21:44]
Robert Evans
It's this thing I come up with, guys like Ben Shapiro, all of these dudes in the right wing media who try to make it into Hollywood and can't because they're mediocre. We need like a fake Hollywood where we like, we give these guys fake fans and let them pretend like they've got a tv. This is what we can use AI for. Just generate their shitty scripts.
[22:03]
Joe Kasabian
Robert, this already exists. It's the Hallmark Channel.
[22:06]
Robert Evans
It's the Hallmark channel. Thank God. We'd be in so much worse shape if it weren't for the Hallmark Channel.
[22:12]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah, like Ben Shapiro could be cranking out or like the Danikers of today or Big Balls who works at doge could just be. Just be cranking out the world's worst Christmas movies year round for a Hallmark.
[22:24]
Robert Evans
Yeah. And we use AI to give them a bunch of fake fans so they feel like they're really making it. And yeah, I mean, on a serious level, it is important you understand people. Always a lot of people get this wrong when they act like, oh well, the Nazis were this. They came out of the middle class or they came out of like the poor and the working class. These people who had endured privation and that was, you know, there were these real legitimate fear and anger of this group of people who were really suffering that fed into Nazis. Some of those guys existed and part of this Hitler was that kind of guy. Hitler really did suffer. He had a terrible early life.
[22:58]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[22:58]
Joe Kasabian
He had a shitty fucking life, dog shit.
[23:01]
Robert Evans
That's very few Nazis.
[23:03]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[23:04]
Joe Kasabian
Unfortunately, that shitty life did not kill him.
[23:07]
Robert Evans
No.
[23:08]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah, Hitler was that guy. But like his inner circle, the people that surround him absolutely weren't. There's like a lot of these guys were young, like you said, and a lot of them were mid.
[23:16]
Robert Evans
Fucking Goering was like, like famous and kind of well off.
[23:19]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[23:19]
Robert Evans
Like a lot of guys were like that.
[23:21]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah, A lot of these dudes are doctors.
[23:24]
Robert Evans
Yes, doctors, lawyers, you know, PhDs, fucking engineers, lawyers.
[23:30]
Joe Kasabian
He surrounded himself by Germany's elite.
[23:33]
Robert Evans
Eichmann comes from oil and gas. Like his dad was comfortable from oil and gas. Money.
[23:38]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[23:38]
Robert Evans
Dannecker comes from like a comfortable middle class, business owning background.
[23:42]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[23:43]
Robert Evans
These are not guys who are poor, but they are guys who are not doing as well as they think they ought to be doing. And they blame that on whoever's convenient, which turns out to be the Jews and the communists.
[23:52]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[23:53]
Robert Evans
So that's Danica.
[23:54]
Joe Kasabian
They would own a, like they would own like a Mitsubishi dealership today.
[23:57]
Cody Johnston
Right? Right.
[23:59]
Robert Evans
Not a great Mitsubishi dealership, but like.
[24:01]
Joe Kasabian
They'Re able to go to an education dealership. It's not a great.
[24:03]
Robert Evans
But none of them are great.
[24:04]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[24:05]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah, like they don't own a Ford. They don't own like a Chevy dealership. They, they're like, we have to look family, we have to settle for selling, I don't know, Evo Lancers or fucking whatever.
[24:15]
Robert Evans
Yeah. Their spokesman is like a fucking amateur baseball star. Like, it's just not that good. So speaking of amateur baseball, don't watch amateur baseball. Listen to the rest of this podcast. Or watch amateur baseball while listening to this podcast. No, absolutely. Don't do that. You'll turn into a fascist.
[24:38]
Joe Kasabian
Now these ads from Mitsubishi.
[24:45]
Robert Evans
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[25:52]
Unknown
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[26:51]
Garrison Keillor
Maybe you've heard that Stonewall was a riot where queer people fought back against police. Or that it's the reason pride is celebrated this time of year.
[27:00]
Cody Johnston
It was one of the most liberating.
[27:02]
Robert Evans
Things that I have ever done.
[27:04]
Garrison Keillor
But did you know that before it went down in history, the Stonewall was a queer hangout run by the mafia.
[27:11]
Robert Evans
The voguing at Stonewall was unbelievable.
[27:14]
Garrison Keillor
In the summer of 1969, it became the site that set off the modern movement for LGBTQ riots.
[27:21]
Unknown
Started banging on the door of the.
[27:23]
Robert Evans
Stonewall like one boom, boom, boom, boom.
[27:27]
Garrison Keillor
Legend says Marsha P. Johnson, a mother in the fight for trans rights, threw the very first brick.
[27:33]
Robert Evans
She was really like scrubbed out of that history.
[27:36]
Garrison Keillor
This week on Afterlives, we'll separate the truth from the myth in the life of Marsha P. Johnson. Listen to afterlives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts from.
[27:49]
Unknown
Iheart podcasts. Before social media, before the Internet, before cable news, there was Alan Berg.
[27:56]
Robert Evans
You dig what I do. You have a need. Unfortunately, you have no sense of humor. That's why you can't ever enjoy this show. And that's why you're a loser.
[28:04]
Joe Kasabian
He was the first and the original shock shot.
[28:07]
Unknown
That scratchy, irreverent kind of way of talking to people.
[28:11]
Robert Evans
You're as dumb as the rest.
[28:12]
Cody Johnston
That's.
[28:12]
Robert Evans
I can't take anyone. I don't agree with you all the time. I don't want you to. I. I hope that you pick me up.
[28:17]
Joe Kasabian
His voice changed media.
[28:19]
Unknown
His death shocked the nation.
[28:21]
And it makes me so angry that.
[28:23]
Robert Evans
He got himself killed because he had a big mouth. KOA morning talk show host Alan Berg reportedly was shot and killed tonight in downtown Denver. He pointed to the Denver phone book and said, well, There are probably 2 million suspects. This guy aggravated everybody.
[28:37]
Unknown
From iheart podcasts, this is Live Wire, the Loud Life and Shocking Murder Murder of Alan Berg. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[28:52]
Robert Evans
We're back. So Theodore Daniker comes up kind of mid at everything. When he's a young adult, he starts working as a textile dealer. And he drag like Eichmann, he goes to a trade school because his grades aren't good enough for him to do anything else.
[29:04]
Joe Kasabian
Right.
[29:04]
Robert Evans
And he feels pulled to far right politics from a young age. Like Eichmann, for a similar motivation, the Nazi party offers him a chance to remake himself in a new regime that he wouldn't have able to earn a place of similar kind of importance in the Weimar Republic. In 1932, he joins the Nazi Party at age 19. At age 21 in 1934, Dannecker joins the SS. Initially serving in the VT, or the SS Dispositional Corps. These were essentially political soldiers at the direct command of Adolf Hitler, except in times of war, in which case they'd be integrated into the, into the army. This is the unit that eventually becomes the Waffen ss, right? It isn't that yet, but he's, he's in the proto Waffen ss. That's Danik. Like Eichmann, Dannecker's first real job for the regime is helping to guard an early concentration camp. In his case, it's Columbia House in Berlin. Now, this was the only official SS camp in Berlin, and it was built out of an empty prison in 1933. And like most wild concentration camps, which is kind of what the first camps are called, where they're like, we've got this empty government building or school or whatever, we'll just throw some political prisoners there, we'll torture them, right? Columbia House is noteworthy for being where lawyer Hans Litton dies.
[30:17]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[30:18]
Robert Evans
We've talked about him in the past. He's the guy who puts Hitler on trial. So it's, it's that kind of place. And it is. Columbia House has been described by one historian and camp survivor as an agony house and the site of, quote, perhaps the ghastliest atrocities imaginable. It acted as an SS testing ground for promising young officers. As historian Reinhard Burbeck noted, quote, this was not just a place where people were terrorized and tortured, but a school of torture. The people who had been coming after Columbia later turned to commanders of other concentration camps at Buchenwald, at Sachsenhausen, at Majdanek, and Auschwitz. So once you had gone through concentration camp, Columbia, apparently this was the perverse career step in order to stay in the SS and become a commander elsewhere.
[31:00]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[31:00]
Joe Kasabian
Oh God. It was a concentration camp trade school.
[31:03]
Robert Evans
Yes. And this is also important. We talk about how this is. This is like less on the intentionalist side of things. Right. And more on the other side of things where you're like, well, they started building this system where you would train people up, up in how a concentration campus to work. And once you've committed the kind of crimes you're committing at Columbia House, you don't go back. You only do worse and worse stuff. And you don't always have to be ordered to do that worse stuff.
[31:26]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[31:26]
Robert Evans
You are naturally, when you get put in charge somewhere, going to be even more extreme than you were at Columbia House. Because that's just how this kind of thing works, right?
[31:34]
Joe Kasabian
Your humanity is sanded away. Even if the people who started off as like prison guards say what you will about them and their ethics and morality, by the time they leave this place, they're just dead eyed psychos.
[31:48]
Robert Evans
There's nothing left of humanity in them.
[31:50]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[31:50]
Robert Evans
And that's important too. No one necessarily orders that I want you to do 20% worse than Columbia House. You just are that person by this point.
[31:58]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[31:58]
Robert Evans
And so that happens naturally.
[32:00]
Joe Kasabian
And nobody's tracking fingernail metrics, right?
[32:03]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[32:03]
Robert Evans
Yeah. It's like, how many fingernails did you pull out this week?
[32:05]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[32:06]
Robert Evans
You don't have to do that anymore. So eventually Dannecker gets transferred over to the SS security office or the SD where Eichmann works. And he winds up working under eichmann at the Department Jewish affairs in 1937. That same year, he writes a report urging the complete removal of Jews from political life in the Reich in order to bring Germany's Jewish question closer to its final solution. In this paper, he attacks the Gestapo for being too mild in their application to force and insufficiently committed to antisemitism. So like Eichmann, he's this guy where he's like, wow, the Gestapo really soft on the Jews. We gotta get these people under control.
[32:43]
Joe Kasabian
You know, I'm really sick of our local Gestapo being so soft and cuddly. The woke Gestapo, these DEI policies have ruined the Gestapo.
[32:52]
Robert Evans
He is that guy though, right? And that's, you know, that's why he's the kind of guy who becomes eichmann's, you know, second, effectively.
[32:59]
Joe Kasabian
Fuck.
[33:00]
Robert Evans
In 1938, after the Anschluss, Daniker goes with Eichmann to Vienna to help expel thousands of Jews from their homes and confiscate their possessions for the state. And he brings this new expertise with him to Poland. He goes to Paris in 1940 after the German victory, and he helps oversee the French police in their roundup of the Jewish population of Paris. Now, it's not widely known or discussed that some of the most important early perpetrators of the Holocaust were local police all over Europe. And these are not German police.
[33:28]
Joe Kasabian
Oh, boy, were they large.
[33:29]
Robert Evans
These are French police.
[33:31]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[33:31]
Robert Evans
Some of whom had been part of French far right parties.
[33:34]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[33:34]
Joe Kasabian
And Dutch police. Don't forget my local police.
[33:38]
Robert Evans
And Dutch police. Right, but they're local cops, and most of them hadn't been super involved in the far right. You know, they were cops before anything else. And like basically 100% of cops in basically every society, their identity as police matters more to them than the morality of whatever actions they are asked to take.
[33:57]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[33:58]
Robert Evans
So you can find arguments that French police help to shield. And this is true. There are individual French police who help to shield and hide hundreds of Jews from the Nazis.
[34:07]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[34:07]
Robert Evans
There are individual French cops who act heroically to protect people targeted by the ss. But modern historiography has made it very clear, clear and I would say unarguable, that as an institution, French law enforcement was overwhelmingly a willing tool of the Nazi genocide. And later they were. Yeah, yeah, there's just no, no real argument against that. In late 2018, historian Laurent Jolie published the State against the Jews, which compiled previously unknown documents about French police and government collaboration and the rounding up of tens of thousands of Jews. Per an article in France 24, quote, Jolie told AFP that Paris police had one of the most sophisticated systems in the world to classify foreign. Some 125,000 Jews were recorded in a roll based on the census the Nazis demanded in 1941, which Jolie has said curiously remained unknown until my research, because it got buried.
[34:58]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[34:58]
Joe Kasabian
Of course it did.
[35:00]
Robert Evans
In Vichy France, the authorities were so eager to curry favor with their new Nazi masters that they began rounding up and handing over Jews without being asked. Per Jolie, the Germans were not asking for the Jews who lived in the Vichy controlled part of France to be handed to them. Vichy was always trying to demonstrate its goodwill towards the Germans. In other words, the French police in Vichy France create a problem for the Nazis because they're handing over more Jews than the Nazis can process. And they're like, guys, Jesus, like, we're the Nazis, but come on, come down here.
[35:29]
Joe Kasabian
I mean, that. That reminds me of early on in the Holocaust when the Gestapo put out, effectively, it was like a hotline to regular Germans to rat out people who were hiding Jews or people they, they thought were Jews. And so many people were ratting out their neighbors that the Gestapo had to kindly ask them to fucking stop because they couldn't handle it all.
[35:50]
Cody Johnston
God.
[35:50]
Robert Evans
And now, thankfully, there's no SS analog in the US today that would put out a request for regular Americans to report their neighbors for, you know, sequestering undocumented foreigners.
[36:01]
Cody Johnston
Right, yeah.
[36:02]
Robert Evans
Weird how that's always what it is.
[36:03]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[36:03]
Robert Evans
Weird how that's what it is in Paris.
[36:05]
Joe Kasabian
You know, remember folks, tyranny doesn't work without the assistance of your friendly neighbors.
[36:10]
Robert Evans
Yeah. And yeah, the cops and local government officials. And yeah, there's the guy who lives next to. To you.
[36:15]
Joe Kasabian
Yep.
[36:15]
Robert Evans
Dan Ecker's job in Paris was to push French authorities to arrest and deport ever greater numbers of Jews, both foreign refugees who'd fled other areas the Nazis had advanced on or native French people. Some were told that these deportees would be taken to a new Jewish state being established by the Nazis, essentially a variation of the reservation plan. Although this was known to be false by anyone with half a brain. There had been ample reporting before the German invasion about the early stages of the KZ or concentration camps system. The first major arrest and deportation of French Jews in World War II was the green Ticket Roundup. Eichmann and Danneker both helped to organize this scheme by which almost 7,000 foreign born Jews living in France were sent a summons by mail ordering them to visit a local immigration office for a review of their visas. Anyone who showed up, as around 3,700 men did, was arrested and deported immediately. Now again, you'd never see anything like this whereby people who are attempting to maintain their legal status, even though they're foreign born, people who have immigrated, would be asked to show up at the immigration office and then arrested as soon as they show up trying to comply with the law. That would never happen here.
[37:21]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[37:21]
Joe Kasabian
You know, thankfully not. I can't think of any. Anything that's happening.
[37:25]
Robert Evans
Totally.
[37:26]
Joe Kasabian
Or before. Yeah, yeah.
[37:28]
Robert Evans
It would be like really, really wrong of me to just suggest that the Department of Homeland Security is the American SS based on something like this, because they've never done anything like this.
[37:36]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[37:36]
Robert Evans
You know, ICE hasn't.
[37:37]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[37:37]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah. And ICE is certainly not the Gestapo. They would never do things that are Gestapo esque.
[37:43]
Robert Evans
No, they're not the Department of Jewish Affairs. Right. There's no similarity between These organizations. Right, exactly. Because we haven't started death camps yet, just like the Nazis had in 1940.
[37:53]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[37:54]
Joe Kasabian
I feel like, Robert, we can really trust a guy who wears a mask and snatches people into an unmarked van.
[38:00]
Robert Evans
Yes. If I'm remembering properly from my Disney movies as a kid, the Child Catcher is a good guy. Right. Oh, man. So despite this success and the success of Operation Green Ticket, France lags behind the arbitrary deportation quota that Eichmann's office had set for them. It was Dannecker's office to motivate French authorities. Eichmann came to consider Dannecker almost as his right arm, someone he could drop into a new territory and trust to centralize the system by which Jews were rounded up and deported and leave it in such a way that whoever followed would be able to continue operating the system with ease because it runs on its own. Its own right. That's a huge part of it. You leave as little up to chance as possible. You leave as little up to the mercy of individual members of the government as possible, all of whom are soft to some groups of people you want to get rid of. That's why you build a system that has no softness left inside it.
[38:50]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[38:50]
Robert Evans
That write up for the national World War II museum notes. Danacker was a completely modern form of perpetrator, really unknown before the 20th century. The deportation specialist, Right.
[39:02]
Joe Kasabian
Oh, he's Tom Holman.
[39:03]
Robert Evans
He's Tom Holman.
[39:04]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[39:05]
Robert Evans
This is how modern genocide is done. The primary perpetrators are not the guys who just shoot a bunch of people.
[39:11]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[39:12]
Robert Evans
They're the deportation specialists. That's who does a modern genocide, is a deportation specialist.
[39:17]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[39:18]
Joe Kasabian
Not to keep linking these two things together, but one of the things that sticks out to me is in the book Ordinary Men, one of the things that sticks out is the German reserve police officers were just normal guys, guys who took this job because they wanted a pension and benefits. And then again, they were voluntarily doing this. They were told multiple times they could back out whenever they wanted, but they're there pulling the trigger.
[39:44]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
[39:45]
Joe Kasabian
And then you got this fucking guy.
[39:47]
Robert Evans
And there's this argument, you get it around ordinary men too, about like. Well, it's wrong to look at these as, like, the banality of evil, because these guys weren't banal. The things they did weren't banal. The kinds of crimes they committed. But that's the point, is that that kind of hideous mask off nightmare evil is lurking behind your neighbor's eyes if he gets the opportunity, if it'll benefit him enough.
[40:09]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[40:09]
Robert Evans
If it'll get him that Mitsubishi dealership, you never know quite. Just like you never know what motherfucking guy who seems kind of lame and boring right now could be a hero when actually called upon to shelter people from Erger. I'm thinking about that judge husband and wife cop couple in New Mexico who were like, destroying evidence to protect these undocumented friends of theirs who are now being tried, where it's like, you would never guess that these people would have been heroes in a time like this, but God damn it, you can't look at them anyway else, right? And in the same manner, some guy who you would never guess is anything but the dude who lives next to you could become an absolute monster if he was given the opportunity, if it would advance him personally enough. And you don't know until the chips are down who's going to be what.
[40:50]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[40:51]
Robert Evans
There's hints sometimes, sometimes, but you can't know perfectly cool stuff.
[40:57]
Joe Kasabian
Just to be safe. I say if you've ever seen them shooting a video in the cab of their pickup truck at that upward angle.
[41:05]
Robert Evans
Probably on the bad side of things.
[41:06]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah. You need to stay the fuck away from that.
[41:09]
Cody Johnston
Yeah, right.
[41:09]
Robert Evans
Man, Daniker would have loved filming himself drunk in his car, ranting about movies.
[41:14]
Joe Kasabian
God, they would love that. So much yelling like, my wife left me so.
[41:20]
Robert Evans
Historian Robert Gerwath describes Daniker as one of the, quote, young, educated, self confident and ideologically committed men Heydrich actively courted for the Jewish desk. These men would develop the actual methodology by which Hitler's dream of a Jew free Europe might be made a reality. To continue with another quote from that article, Dannecker utilized an array of weapons, the pin, the telephone, and the typewriter. Besides researching and working behind a desk, Danneker negotiated, cajoled and berated officials, coordinated with the Reich Transportation Ministry to secure rolling stock, and worked with the sssd, Gestapo and German armed forces to ensure the efficient and orderly removal of massive numbers of Jewish men, women and children. In the spring of 1942, Dannecker visited the camp at Auschwitz Birkenau. This was the same month that it transferred from being primarily a labor camp to being a straight up death camp. And Dannecker is one of the very first people to see Auschwitz in full operation. He reports back to his boss about it, and he immediately sets to work feeding a group of 1100 French Jews into the factory of death. This annihilation acts as a proof of concept, right? This is, is the Death Star test firing of Auschwitz, right? Where you're like, yep, okay, we can. We can get rid of people at the speed we need to. Here, Daniker reports back to Eichmann about how Auschwitz is working. And Eichmann could not have been happier. So he and Danneker spend several weeks planning a more ambitious operation to wipe out a substantial chunk of the French Jewish population. They call this Operation Spring Wind. It had been initially scheduled for July 14, but that was Bastille Day, and the French collaborators insisted it would be bad form to commit genocide on a holiday. So the operation is ultimately executed by Frit. Right, we'll do this, but not on Bastille Day, right? We can't do a Holocaust on Bastille Day.
[43:03]
Joe Kasabian
That's like the most fucking French way, obviously. Like. No, you don't understand. We have the day off work.
[43:08]
Robert Evans
Yeah, everyone's got the day off work. Look, we'll do a Holocaust, but not on our day off, right?
[43:12]
Joe Kasabian
If you. If you make all the cops go in and do the genocide on the holiday, they're gonna riot and they're gonna fight the firefighters. Something that happens here.
[43:21]
Robert Evans
We really can't do this. So the operation is ultimately executed by French police. On July 16th and 17th, they break into houses and they rip whole families out of their beds, arresting 13,000 Parisian Jews for deportation. The police insisted in public, facing communications that these people were mostly, quote, foreign and stateless. So they're barely people.
[43:41]
Joe Kasabian
Of course.
[43:42]
Robert Evans
Of course. Of course. Fuck, yeah. Operation Spring Wind was the brainchild of a French Vichy collaborator named Louis D'. Archier. He had fought in World War I and become a radical far right activist in the 30s, actively participating in the 1934 far right riot that was seen by some at the time as an attempted coup d'. Etat. He had become a journalist, largely to write articles, drumming up anti Semitic hate among his fellow Frenchmen. When the Nazis took over, they made him Commissar General for Jewish affairs, affairs basically the Vichy counterpart to Eichmann. Darquier had suggested to denaturalize all Jews who'd acquired French citizenship since 1927. And he also suggested the mass arrest of stateless Jews, largely because it provided a legal coding for the general expulsion of Jews. This worked. Dannecker himself noted that once the shoddy justification was in place, the cops were happy to help the ss. The French police, despite a few considerations of pure form, have only to carry out orders. Borders.
[44:40]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[44:40]
Robert Evans
As long as we make sure.
[44:41]
Joe Kasabian
That's surprising.
[44:42]
Robert Evans
Yeah, that's just how these guys work. That's how cops are.
[44:44]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[44:45]
Joe Kasabian
And that's how cops are and France was wildly anti Semitic.
[44:49]
Robert Evans
Oh, yeah.
[44:50]
Joe Kasabian
For people who don't know, one of my co hosts and producers on my show did he speaks French and did research on, like, French officers magazines in the French military a little bit after this time in Algeria.
[45:06]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
[45:06]
Joe Kasabian
And like, how half of the titles are like, Le Anti Semitism. And like, shit like that. Like, yo, I'm just subscribed to Antisemitism Weekly Quarterly.
[45:16]
Robert Evans
Yeah. By the way, folks, watch the Battle of Algiers. Great movie.
[45:23]
Cody Johnston
Yeah.
[45:24]
Robert Evans
That's all I'll say about it for now. So Daniker's role in France came to an end shortly after Operation Spring Wind, which is better known as the Veldi of Roundup.
[45:33]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[45:33]
Robert Evans
His direct supervisor in the sd, a guy named Helmut Knock, caught Dannecker abusing his authority, by which I mean, he was stealing shit from deported Jews that the SS wanted to steal for Germany.
[45:43]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[45:44]
Robert Evans
And so he was transferred back to Berlin.
[45:46]
Cody Johnston
Right? Yeah.
[45:47]
Robert Evans
It's like, look, you kill these people.
[45:48]
Joe Kasabian
You can't kill them. You can't steal from them.
[45:51]
Robert Evans
Yeah, we're stealing from them. You're stealing from us when you steal too much from them.
[45:55]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[45:56]
Robert Evans
Come on, man.
[45:57]
Joe Kasabian
Jesus.
[45:57]
Robert Evans
Yeah. Now, the system Daniker had built with Eichmann's guidance continued to operate for the remainder of Vichy France's lifespan. Ultimately, some 77,000 French Jews and Jews on French were deported and murdered by the Nazis under the direction of Eichmann and Dannecker and with the enthusiastic aid of French collaborators in law enforcement and the Vichy government. After the war, Charles de Gaulle and the French government that replaced the Vichy regime refused to apologize for the role the police played in these genocidal crimes.
[46:26]
Joe Kasabian
Their argument sounds like de Gaulle, right?
[46:28]
Robert Evans
Yeah, that sounds de Gali.
[46:29]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah.
[46:30]
Robert Evans
Their argument was that Vichy France wasn't the French Republic, and the re established republic shouldn't have to apologize for the crimes of another government. Right now, never mind the fact that.
[46:39]
Joe Kasabian
All those dudes kept their fucking jobs.
[46:41]
Robert Evans
Right. Is it the case that these cops are still cops? A lot of times, yes. But why is that our responsibility? Right.
[46:47]
Joe Kasabian
Slipping off the armband.
[46:48]
Robert Evans
You can't blame law enforcement as a whole for the fact that everyone in it did this, right? Oh, it's cool stuff.
[46:55]
Joe Kasabian
No, you do not understand. I was not throwing a piece of salute. I was just ashing my cigarette very awkwardly, man.
[47:04]
Robert Evans
It was not until 1995 that French President Jacques Chirac finally admitted blame on behalf of French law enforcement and the state.
[47:11]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[47:12]
Joe Kasabian
So, you know, it's so bad that had to be Chiroc that did it, because he's, like, cartoonishly corrupt.
[47:18]
Robert Evans
He's so lame otherwise. Yeah. But he's like, oh, geez, this is. Wow, we really fucked up here.
[47:23]
Joe Kasabian
I will steal from everybody's pension, and I will get France locked solidly into the Afghan war, but I will not cover for Nazi cops.
[47:31]
Robert Evans
Not going to cover for the Nazi cops. I got too much other shit I got to do after Paris. Dannecker doesn't remain in Berlin long. He's sent and he's forgiven for his misdeeds. He's sent to Bulgaria in 1943 to arrange the deportation of some 11,000 foreign Jews to various death camps. He follows the Eichmann playbook in this interfacing with a newly created Bulgarian Commissar for Jewish affairs to arrange the deportations. In just two months, all 11,000 people had been shipped by train to Treblinka or Auschwitz, where nearly half of them died. The dead included some 2,000 children. This deportation. Yeah. I mean, these guys, the level of mass murderer, the least of the SS men in Eichmann's office commit is pretty outrageous.
[48:14]
Joe Kasabian
I mean, I can't imagine a more cursed title that we've spoken other than a Bulgarian Jewish commissar.
[48:21]
Robert Evans
Yeah. Oh, boy.
[48:22]
Joe Kasabian
Like, ugh.
[48:23]
Robert Evans
Your war crimes did.
[48:25]
Joe Kasabian
War crimes.
[48:25]
Robert Evans
Yeah. This deportation met with little local resistance, as the Jews marked for expulsion were mainly from Thrace and Macedonia, and thus not Bulgarian throne citizens. But Danacker's next move was to evacuate nearly 50,000 Bulgarian Jews from Sofia, the capital. This was done, and some 48,000 Jews were stripped of their property and forced into a camp outside the city. However, this sparked resistance because, again, these aren't foreigners.
[48:51]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[48:51]
Robert Evans
These are Bulgarian. You know, Jason Dossey writes, quote, outrage from Dimitar Peshev, the Deputy speaker of the Parliament, clergy from the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and representatives of communities where these Jews resided, pushed King Boris III to intervene. Peshev, who was for to resign his position, still appealed to the honor of Bulgaria, warning that our nation's reputation would be stained forever and its moral and political standing forever compromised if deportations ensued. Boris acquiesced and prevented the removal of Bulgaria's Jewish populace. And we can see this as both. There's legitimate heroism here which saves a lot of lives.
[49:27]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[49:28]
Joe Kasabian
Right, of course.
[49:29]
Robert Evans
But also, any pride in this has to be tempered by the fact that all these guys are only moved to act against the Nazis because now citizens were being deported.
[49:38]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[49:39]
Robert Evans
These Macedonian Jews and whatever, if they get exterminated, no one's gonna speak up, right? But now you're going after Bulgarian Jews and we've gotta say something, right?
[49:47]
Joe Kasabian
Of course. They shouldn't even be here. Like they, you know, they broke the law just crossing the border, Robert.
[49:55]
Robert Evans
I mean, Christ, you can't just break the law, right? That's fucked up.
[49:59]
Joe Kasabian
Look, I wouldn't have voted for Hitler if he was gonna start going after the good ones.
[50:03]
Cody Johnston
Right, right, right.
[50:04]
Robert Evans
These are the good ones, you know.
[50:05]
Joe Kasabian
He was only supposed to go after, you know.
[50:08]
Robert Evans
And had the Nazi regime lasted, Eichmann and his colleagues would have taken another stab at this group that King Boris helps to protect. As it was, things were going pretty badly for the Nazis by the summer of 43, and the work of extermination was taking on an air of dire urgency. By this point, Dannecker's qualities had been recognized outside the sd and Eichmann's protege was sent by the Gestapo chief to Rome, which had just been occupied by the Nazis after Mussolini's over overthrow. Eichmann, by this point was the most prestigious name in the genocide business. His obsessive need to stamp his name on every part of the Holocaust, even in actions at which he had little to no known involvement, ensured him steady promotions and regular direct contact with Himmler. It also got him the attention of the international press. He and his friend Kalten Brunner would brag to each other about their respective war criminal ranks during social events. Eichmann later recalled.
[50:58]
Joe Kasabian
Good God.
[50:59]
Robert Evans
Yeah, that's how they frame it. They're like looking at foreign press and being like, oh man, I'm a higher ranking worker criminal than you now, Calton Bruner. Ha ha ha.
[51:07]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[51:07]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah. What's impressive is I don't really think that there's like a lot of competition because nobody else wanted to put their fucking name on this shit.
[51:13]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[51:13]
Robert Evans
Right. Everyone else is too smart to like stamp their fucking last first and last name on this shit. Eichmann later recalled, quote, I found the war criminals in a press review once. I was number nine and I had a bit of a laugh about it.
[51:25]
Cody Johnston
All right?
[51:27]
Robert Evans
And he will, he'll go back and forth between. I was 14, I was nine, I was number one.
[51:32]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[51:32]
Robert Evans
Depending on who he's talking to after the war.
[51:34]
Joe Kasabian
Oh, bro, you were never number one. Nobody ever thought you were number one. Calm down. You were like, I'll give credit. You were easy top ten. But you were. No one ever considered you number one.
[51:46]
Robert Evans
I'll believe nine. Nine is credible, right? Yeah.
[51:49]
Joe Kasabian
You're making the playoffs Good for you.
[51:51]
Robert Evans
Sure. Yeah. You're in the war crime playoffs.
[51:54]
Cody Johnston
Yeah.
[51:54]
Robert Evans
You and kalten Bruner. In 1944, as the war neared its end, Adolf Eichmann was about to do something that would skyrocket him to the top of that list. List. In November of 1940, Germany had signed the Tripartite Pact with Italy and Japan, officially creating the Axis powers. And they considered it a priority to sign on as many new allies as possible, given how things had gone the last time Germany was isolated in an international war. Hungary's regent was a guy named Admiral Miklos Horthy, and he was offered the honor of becoming the fourth member of the club. But German diplomat Joachim von Ribbentrop tacitly threatened that Romania might be allowed to join first if Hungary dithered. Ultimately, Horthy signed up, and this would prove to be a catastrophic mistake. Horthy, who had served the old empire in World War I, had seen World War II as a chance to regain lost Hungarian territory and make his country great again.
[52:46]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[52:46]
Joe Kasabian
We did so good last time, boys.
[52:48]
Robert Evans
World War I was. I mean, if it could have worked better if we just did a couple of things different, right?
[52:53]
Joe Kasabian
I love that. The Nazis are so fucking stupid, right? They're like, look, it didn't work out for us last time, but what if we allied with Austria, Italy and Hungary again and brought the band back together?
[53:03]
Robert Evans
What if we got the band back together? Yeah. Oh, man. God. Now that you think about it, Italy really is the Pete Best of World War I, right?
[53:13]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah.
[53:14]
Robert Evans
Or reverse Pete Best, I guess. I don't know.
[53:17]
Joe Kasabian
The Patrick Stumpf of World War I.
[53:22]
Robert Evans
Hungarian troops. This seemed to work at first, right? World War II initially is kind of working like Horthy had hoped. Hungarian troops get to invade the Balkans alongside the Wehrmacht. And by the spring of 1940, Hungary was nearly tripled the size of where it had stood in 1938. Then came Operation Barbarossa and the invasion of the USSR. Hungary again sends troops, but this time there's no swift victory. Within months, 30% of the Hungarian army is killed or wounded too badly to.
[53:49]
Joe Kasabian
Fight, as tradition demands when Hungary goes to war.
[53:52]
Robert Evans
And by the way, if you're looking, if you're thinking from like a military planning standpoint, if you have lost 30% of your forces killed or injured, you no longer have an effective army. It sounds like 70% is a lot. It's not enough. You've lost too much of your command and control. Too much. You have to reorganize at that point before you can continue fighting effectively.
[54:11]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah. From a military historian's perspective, I must say, it is not good. If you're planning a war at home today, don't lose 30% of your forces in a year and a half.
[54:20]
Robert Evans
Yeah, it's a catastrophe. In early 1943, the entire Hungarian Second army was smashed trying to anchor the German northern flank during the Battle of Stalin Stalingrad. Only 20% of the army survives the retreat home intact.
[54:34]
Joe Kasabian
Hey, at least they have something in common with Romanians now, right?
[54:37]
Robert Evans
Right, Right. Yeah. Hungary and Romania wiping out 80% of their army.
[54:42]
Joe Kasabian
Hey, fellas, you want to meet up outside of Stalingrad and die?
[54:46]
Robert Evans
Stalingrad. That's a nice name. I think things are gonna go well for us there.
[54:49]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah.
[54:50]
Robert Evans
So Horthy, at this point, showing that he's smarter than Hitler, complains the war is lost right after Stalingrad. Horthy's like, well, fuck, there's literally no way we can pull a victory out out of this one. And Hitler, for his part, complains that Hungarian soldiers had doomed the Wehrmacht, which is not really correct. You know, the Wehrmacht is not true.
[55:08]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah, that is. That is not true. Over on my show, Lines up by Donkeys, we talked about Stalingrad for about six hours.
[55:15]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
[55:17]
Joe Kasabian
Look, I'm not saying Hungary would have won the battle, but they certainly didn't lose them. The battle.
[55:20]
Robert Evans
No, no. Things were fucked by the point at which, you know, they get into action in this way.
[55:26]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[55:27]
Robert Evans
If you're. For one thing, if your entire battle plan comes down to the Hungarian. Hungarian army holding in the field, you have fucked up. Right.
[55:36]
Joe Kasabian
Mein Fuhrer, the army has been turned to goulash.
[55:42]
Robert Evans
So Horthy had never been a good guy. I think we've made that clear. But he's not personally genocidal towards the Jews of his nation.
[55:50]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[55:50]
Robert Evans
He doesn't. Left to his own devices, he had no desire to wipe out the whole Jewish population of Hungary. And so for most of World War II, Hungarian Jews were found fairly safe.
[56:00]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[56:01]
Robert Evans
For most of the war. This is the best place in kind of broader. The kind of broader Nazi and Nazi Allied territory. One of the better places to be. But Hitler now demanded that Horthy kill or put his Jews into camps. Horthy refused. He has no issue. Like, they seize Jewish property to fund the war effort. He's fine with that. But he doesn't want. Cause he sees the writing on the wall. He's like, I don't want to be involved in a war crime of this scale right now. Cause we're not Gonna win. There's gonna be a butcher's bill to pay. As the Russians advanced, he and other Hungarian leaders tried to make a separate peace with the Allies. Hitler finds out and he orders German troops to conquer the country in March of 1944, which they do easily because the Hungarians are very bad at having an army. Right. Even the 1944 Wehrmacht can take them.
[56:48]
Joe Kasabian
Hungarians military tradition. All right. They will lose every war they go in, but they'll be God damned if they commit a genocide. Be on the side of genociders.
[56:59]
Robert Evans
Yes, sure, sure. But we're not that active. Activate it.
[57:02]
Joe Kasabian
We have our standards here in Hungary.
[57:04]
Robert Evans
Yeah, which is we'll sit by and let it happen, Right?
[57:07]
Joe Kasabian
That's right.
[57:08]
Robert Evans
Now Horthy is kept on as a puppet leader for a time. And as soon as Hungary was under the German occupation, Hitler orders the Jewish population wiped out. This is no mean task. There were somewhere between 700,000 and over 800,000 Jews in Hungarian territory. Sometimes you'll hear around a million. Eichmann is sent over to supervise the work of an Einsatzkommando especially assembled for this task. Dannaker and other colleagues in the SD are there as well and they handle a lot of the ground actions while Eichmann coordinates this massive effort. What followed was one of the swiftest and bloodiest mass killings in human history. Per Dr. Dawsey's article. What happened in Hungary in the late spring and early summer of 1944 overwhelms our fragile capacities to imagine it was simply a frenzy of killing. In May and June of 1944, 437,000 Hungarian Jews were transported to Auschwitz Birkenau and 397,000 were plunged into Birke gas chambers. Their fate exhibited just how desperate the Nazi regime was to finish the annihilation of European Jews. Even as its hopes of winning the war disintegrated under increasing pressure, Horthy finally halted the deportations in July, temporarily sparing most of Budapest's Jewish populace. Eichmann and Dannecker bided their time. The removal of Horthy three months later opened up new possibilities when Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg openly offered sanctuary to Jews in Budapest. As Soviet troops neared the capital city, the enraged Eichmann turned to Dannecker to raid the city safe houses established by Wallenberg. Now, first off that term frenzy of killing is the thing to remember when you're thinking about what did Eichmann do? What did Dannaker do? They Eichmann is the man who masterminds this. This is on him more than any other single person.
[58:49]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[58:50]
Joe Kasabian
And it's. And it's telling how important he is in the hierarchy in general, and how much everybody relies on them when they're like, we have this insurmountable killing goal in mind. We have to bring in our experts.
[59:02]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
[59:02]
Joe Kasabian
And it's him and his.
[59:05]
Robert Evans
Yeah. And it's Eichmann arrayed against Wallenberg.
[59:08]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[59:08]
Robert Evans
In trying to. Wallenberg is trying to save this Jewish population, and Eichmann is trying to annihilate it. And we've done a reverse basht. It's a Christmas episode on Wallenberg. He's one of the great heroes our species ever produced. In the war's waning days, he was Eichmann's nemesis, granting fake Swedish documents to every Jew he could find. You're a Swedish citizen, you're a Swedish resident, you got a green card. They can't kill you. You're a Swedish, right?
[59:30]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah. The hand reaches out, your hand for the paperwork. And just smashing meatballs in every single fucking. One heard your meatball go north.
[59:41]
Robert Evans
They can't deport you with a meatball in your hand. Oh, my God.
[59:44]
Joe Kasabian
It's your official Swedish paperwork.
[59:46]
Robert Evans
These are not. There's nothing legal and legitimate. Only Wallenberg's charisma is backing these documents up. But he is so good at what he's doing that a lot of SS men back off. Because he's like, look, if you're seen violating the whole law here, I'll make sure you get your due when the war is over.
[60:02]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[60:03]
Robert Evans
And they're so fucking scared of him that he saves, by some accounts, 100,000 people. There's a lot of debate about these numbers, but it's in the tens of thousands, at the very least, personally.
[60:12]
Joe Kasabian
And these men know the war is fucked at this point.
[60:16]
Robert Evans
No one has illusions at this point, right?
[60:18]
Joe Kasabian
Everybody's Foley. And I have like, look, the guy with the meatballs is telling me he's good. He's fucking good. Fuck it.
[60:24]
Robert Evans
Yeah, fuck it. I don't want any more of his.
[60:27]
Joe Kasabian
The guy with the meat.
[60:28]
Robert Evans
Meatballs. So Eichmann calls Raul the Jew dog Wallenberg and threatens to have Raoul and all other friends of Jews assassinated. Someone subsequently blows up Wallenberg's car, and he only narrowly escapes. In her book Eichmann Before Jerusalem, Bettina Stangneth describes Adolf Eichmann in this period as almost mad, with a mix of desperation and megalomania. He could feel the walls closing in. But just as crucially as he feels the window closing, he feels that he might be losing out on his chance to achieve the only goal that matters to him at this st winning the war against European Jewry. And this is important, you understand, the Nazis don't see this all as one war. The war against the Jews. Even though the war against the rest of Europe may be unwinnable now, the war against the Jews of Europe is still winnable.
[61:14]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[61:14]
Robert Evans
We have to pull something out of this. Speaking of, have we done our second ad break yet? Sovie no. Here it is.
[61:28]
Unknown
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[62:28]
Garrison Keillor
Maybe you've heard that Stonewall was a riot where queer people fought back against police. Or that it's the reason pride is celebrated this time of year.
[62:37]
Cody Johnston
It was one of the most liberating.
[62:39]
Robert Evans
Things that I have ever done.
[62:40]
Garrison Keillor
But did you know that before it went down in history, the Stonewall was a queer hangout run by the mafia.
[62:47]
Robert Evans
The voguing at Stonewall was unbelievable.
[62:51]
Garrison Keillor
In the summer of 1969, it became the site that set off the modern movement for LGBTQ rights.
[62:58]
Unknown
Start banging on the door of the Stonewall like one.
[63:01]
Cody Johnston
Boom, boom, boom.
[63:03]
Garrison Keillor
Legend says Marsha P. Johnson, a mother in the fight for trans rights, threw the very first brick.
[63:10]
Robert Evans
She was really like scrubbed out of the that history.
[63:13]
Garrison Keillor
This week on Afterlives, we'll separate the truth from the myth in the life of Marsha P. Johnson. Listen to afterlives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts from.
[63:26]
Unknown
Iheart Podcasts before social media, before the Internet, before cable news, there was Alan Berg.
[63:33]
Robert Evans
You dig what I do. You have a need. Unfortunately, you have no sense of humor.
[63:37]
Cody Johnston
That's why you Can't.
[63:38]
Robert Evans
You can't ever enjoy this show, and that's why you're a loser.
[63:41]
Joe Kasabian
He was the first and the original shock jock.
[63:44]
Unknown
That scratchy, irreverent kind of way of talking to people.
[63:48]
Robert Evans
You're as dumb as the rest.
[63:49]
Cody Johnston
That's.
[63:49]
Robert Evans
I can't take anyone. I don't agree with you all the time. I don't want you to. I hope that you pick me apart.
[63:54]
Unknown
His voice changed media. His death shocked the nation.
[63:57]
And it makes me so angry that.
[64:00]
Robert Evans
He got himself killed because he had a big mouth. KOA morning talk show host Alan Berg reportedly was shot and killed tonight in downtown Denver. He pointed to the Denver phone book and said, well, There are probably 2 million suspects. This guy aggravated everybody.
[64:14]
Unknown
From iheart podcasts, this is Live Wire, the loud life and shocking murder of Alan Berg. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[64:28]
Joe Kasabian
Jan Marcec was a model of German corporate success.
[64:32]
Robert Evans
It seemed so damn similar.
[64:35]
Joe Kasabian
Also, it turned out a fraudster.
[64:38]
Robert Evans
Where does the money come from?
[64:40]
Joe Kasabian
That was something that I always was questioning myself. But what if I told you that was the least interesting thing about him? His secret office was less than 500.
[64:49]
Robert Evans
Meters down the road. I often ask myself now, did I know the true Rian at all? Certain things in my life since then have gone terribly wrong.
[64:59]
Cody Johnston
I don't know if they followed me to my home.
[65:02]
Joe Kasabian
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story because this ties together the Cold War with the new one. Listen to Hot agent of chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[65:29]
Robert Evans
We're back. Boy, our sponsors really love being thrown to ads. Right after we talk about Eichmann wanting to win the war against European Jewry.
[65:37]
Joe Kasabian
Well, hopefully the ad wasn't for, like, IBM or something.
[65:40]
Robert Evans
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Critical partners in the Nazi war against European Jews.
[65:45]
Cody Johnston
Yeah.
[65:45]
Joe Kasabian
This ad brought to you by Hugo Boss.
[65:47]
Robert Evans
Oh, man. Be a boss like Eichmann. Ew. Yeah, ew. So the Nazi state was in chaos at this point. Eichmann doesn't report kind of. He's not technically on, like, an org chart. He's not directly reporting to Himmler, but he basically is reporting to Himmler. He's got regular meetings with the man. And so even though there's guys between him and Himmler on the org chart, Eichmann outranks everyone above him except for Himmler because he's regularly talking to Himmler. And so whenever there's a disagreement, he can bring Himmler in.
[66:20]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[66:20]
Robert Evans
And that's kind of how the Nazi state works. More than like officially. Here's who's reporting to who. It's like, well, but this guy can bring. Or this guy can bring in Goering, right? This guy could bring in Hitler directly. So he's effectively in charge.
[66:33]
Joe Kasabian
It's a whole power structure of just constant name dropping.
[66:36]
Robert Evans
Yes, fucking horrible. Absolutely. That's how it works. Now Eichmann, as a show of how fucking important he is, he has access in this late stage of the war to a private aircraft that he can travel around what remains of the crumbling Reich in. That means he's a big man. And when he really wanted to impress another Nazi, Eichmann would claim to have personal control over the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Right. I'm the guy running the gas chambers. That's his brag. Eichmann's colleagues later recalled some of Eichmann's most outrageous boasts. And these are all direct quotes from Eichmann. I am a bloodhound. I'll set the mills of Auschwitz grinding and blood for goods. This is a reference to a promise that Eichmann made to send Hungary aid in exchange for Jews.
[67:17]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[67:18]
Robert Evans
That's the blood for goods program. You give us Jews, we'll give you the aid that you need to continue holding on.
[67:24]
Joe Kasabian
Oh, God, that's. That's like the most evil foreign aid package I've ever heard of.
[67:29]
Robert Evans
Yeah, blood for juice. His favorite line was simply, I'll inform Himmler. And his darkest boast was, I'll do away with all the Jewish filth of Budapest. In the last months of 1944, Eichmann makes constant trips back and forth from Budapest to Auschwitz, dealing with Commandant Hess personally to ensure the smooth operation of the chief genocide machine in the Nazi toolkit style. Stagnant writes, he seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at once. Eichmann talked so much and for so long that the people around him, ignorant of what was really going on, believed he might actually have been involved in the overthrow of Hungarian Reich Administrator Miklos Horthy. Wislinski claimed that in Hungary, Eichmann boasted that he and Otto Globocnik were behind the whole idea of exterminating the Jews. Eichmann inflated his murderous lifetime achievement to crazy proportions and believed there was certain to be a monument erected to me in Budapest. He threatened his victims with the prospect that after final victory, Hitler would make him world Commissar of the Jews. These are the things that Eichmann is bragging about. And you can see this as maybe he's lost his mind a little bit at the end of the Reich or you can see this as he knows where things are going. But he knows that these are the boasts that will give him just enough flex to accomplish his mission.
[68:41]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[68:42]
Robert Evans
That's what matters to him at this stage.
[68:44]
Joe Kasabian
And I am curious like he's not a dumb person so he probably has to know that the war is lost.
[68:51]
Robert Evans
He sure does.
[68:52]
Joe Kasabian
But I am curious if he thought a lost war in their mind also include a complete loss of Nazi Germany itself or if this is going to be more like a World War I situation where Germany just continues to exist, you know.
[69:06]
Robert Evans
Yeah. It's debatable at the point at which he knows even keeping that is not on the table anymore.
[69:11]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah.
[69:12]
Robert Evans
But he as we'll talk about in part four, he'll start, he's starting to make plans in 44 for what he's going to do after the war.
[69:18]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[69:18]
Robert Evans
I think it really, it just is his personal response. He feels personally a duty to kill as many of these people as he can even though the war is over. That that's what's important to him morally.
[69:30]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[69:31]
Joe Kasabian
And it was his job.
[69:32]
Cody Johnston
Yeah.
[69:33]
Robert Evans
And it's his job.
[69:33]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[69:34]
Robert Evans
And he's gonna do it.
[69:35]
Joe Kasabian
He's always been a dead eyed careerist. And if everybody else is failing, I bet he probably thinks the way to continue to stick out and feel great is to be successful when everything else is failing.
[69:47]
Robert Evans
I will. I won't fail. You know.
[69:49]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah.
[69:50]
Robert Evans
So Eichmann is a master still at this late stage of shaping clout and the perception of clout into a weapon to get what he wants. In the case of Hungary, this allows him to oversee the slaughter of at least 437,402 men, women and children in a matter of months. That is the number the Nazis officially document. So the real number is higher than that. Credible estimates of the number of people Eichmann is responsible for organizing to kill in a of matter of again months range up to almost 600,000 out of a pre war population of 700 to 800,000.
[70:21]
Joe Kasabian
Jesus.
[70:22]
Robert Evans
This is the most complete and fastest extermination of a Jewish population in Europe during the war.
[70:28]
Joe Kasabian
Fucking Christ.
[70:30]
Robert Evans
Horst Grell, the advisor on Jewish affairs for the Budapest Embassy later claimed that during this time Eichmann bragged the enemy had promoted him to war criminal number one. And he's not super exaggerating at this stage.
[70:42]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[70:42]
Robert Evans
He would then repeat a German saying that translates. Translates to many enemies much honor the More people are talking about me as a monster. The more honor I have for what I've done. Eichmann was so good at what he did that other SS men began using his name in the same way he used Himmler's. When Kurt Becker, one of Eichmann's professional rivals, got stalled in negotiations over the expropriation of Jewish property, he threatened to get Eichmann involved. After the war, Eichmann himself would brag every department was trying to squeeze everything possible out of the Jews to winkle it out by threatening them with the big bad Eichmann.
[71:16]
Joe Kasabian
He must have fucking loved that.
[71:19]
Robert Evans
He does. But he also. He's smart enough to know we're not gonna win. And so now this reputation, the fact that I'm getting accredited for crimes I hadn't committed, which is happening because I wanted that right, and I used to.
[71:32]
Joe Kasabian
Take credit for them.
[71:33]
Robert Evans
Yeah, that's a problem now, Right? Now that you know we're not gonna win, the fact that you're getting blamed for shit you didn't even do is an issue.
[71:43]
Cody Johnston
Right.
[71:44]
Joe Kasabian
Well, well, well. If it isn't the consequences of my actions.
[71:47]
Cody Johnston
Right, right, right.
[71:49]
Robert Evans
By early 45, he knows these days are numbered. And everyone, including Eichmann, increasingly knows that.
[71:54]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[71:54]
Robert Evans
This is part of why colleagues like Becker are eager to use his name. It's not just that it gets shit done, but it allows them to divert their own responsibility for genocide onto Eichmann.
[72:03]
Cody Johnston
Right?
[72:03]
Robert Evans
Oh, yeah. Eichmann's the guy making this happen. It's all Eichmann, not me.
[72:09]
Joe Kasabian
I mean, it's the difference between swinging from the end of a rope or doing. And then getting a government job in West Germany.
[72:16]
Robert Evans
Yeah, man. Oh, boy. Holocaust was awful. You know, we were all. It's like that scene in a hot rod where his friend's stolen the tv and he's like, boy, riots are so terrible. You just gotta get out as fast as you can, right? Everyone's like, oh, the Holocaust. Awful. Can you believe what that Eichmann guy made me do? Fucked up.
[72:34]
Joe Kasabian
Incredible.
[72:37]
Robert Evans
So in the last months of the Reich, as it becomes clear to everyone what's happening, Eichmann's gonna become a pariah within the sd, right? People are like, oh, I don't wanna be associated with this motherfucker any more directly than I have to. And we'll talk about that and how he gets himself out of this for a shocking length of time in Part four. But first, Joe, let's talk about how you are gonna get yourself out of this podcast. By plugging your pluggables.
[73:03]
Joe Kasabian
I am the host of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. We talk about military history and history of genocides, war crimes, other uplifting things like that. So if you wan Stalingrad, we did hours upon hours about that. Or other genocides like Rwanda or the Armenian genocide or the Herrera Nama genocide, things of that nature. We've all, we've talked about that as well. So come listen to it and it will not improve your mood. I'm sorry.
[73:28]
Robert Evans
Yeah, speaking of things that won't improve your mood, the next episode of this podcast coming out Thursday, behind the Bastards is a production of Cool's. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube.com behindthebastards maybe.
[74:03]
Garrison Keillor
You'Ve heard that Stonewall was a riot where queer people fought back against police. Or that it's the reason pride has celebrated this time of year.
[74:11]
Cody Johnston
It was one of the most liberating things that I have ever done.
[74:15]
Garrison Keillor
Legend says Marsha P. Johnson threw the very first brick, started banging on the.
[74:20]
Unknown
Door of the Stonewall like one.
[74:22]
Cody Johnston
Boom.
[74:22]
Garrison Keillor
This week on Afterlives, we'll separate the truth from the myth in the life of Marsha P. Johnson. Listen to afterlives on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts from.
[74:36]
Unknown
Iheart Podcast. Before social media, before cable news, there was Alan Berg.
[74:41]
Joe Kasabian
He was the and the original Shock Chuck.
[74:44]
Unknown
That scratchy, irreverent kind of way of talking to people and telling them that.
[74:49]
Robert Evans
You'Re an idiot and I'm gonna hang up on you.
[74:51]
Unknown
This is Live Wire, the loud life and shocking murder of Alan Berg.
[74:55]
Robert Evans
And he pointed to the Denver phone book and said, well, there are probably 2 million suspects.
[75:00]
Unknown
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
[75:06]
Joe Kasabian
Did it occur to you that he charmed you in a anyway? Yes, it did.
[75:12]
Robert Evans
But he was a charming man.
[75:14]
Joe Kasabian
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story because this ties together the cold war with the new one.
[75:21]
Robert Evans
I often ask myself now, did I know the true Yan at all?
[75:28]
Joe Kasabian
Listen to Hot Money, agent of chaos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast podcasts.
[75:36]
Unknown
How could a beautiful young first grade teacher be stabbed 20 times, including in the bat, allegedly die of suicide? Yes, that was the medical examiner's official ruling. After a closed door meeting, he first named it a homicide. Why? What happened to Ellen Greenberg? A huge American miscarriage of justice. For an in depth look at the facts, see what happened to Ellen on Amazon. All proceeds to the national center for Missing and Exploited Children.
[76:15]
Robert Evans
This is an iHeart podcast.