Behind the Bastards - Let's Talk About Thalidomide

Episode Date: August 31, 2021

Robert is joined by Francesca Fiorentini to discuss the Nazis who poisoned everyone’s babies. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. To welcome bastards behind people bad about talk, Evans, Robert, host, hello. Ah, boy, Sophie, I forgot the order words go into in sentences briefly. That was wonderful. I think people will get the gist of it.

I think all you need is to present the proper words and the order doesn't really matter. This is like a do-it-yourself podcast. I just throw the words at you. You line them up, right? Why do you think Yoda is so popular? That's exactly what I was going for, Sophie, is Yoda. And like Yoda, I also train child soldiers. I know, I've met Garrison.

Well, their little hands can reach into the hard to reach places of a rifle, which makes it a lot easier for them to do maintenance. Look, this isn't a podcast about why child soldiers are such a good idea. This is a podcast about the worst people in all of history. And today, my guess is Francesca, if you're into it, did I get it right? Francesca, I was on your show, which has both a pod and a video component. Yes, and I apologize for that. I like forced you to turn on your camera. But yeah, Robert crushed it.

It was rough, you know, actually seeing your face. I don't know if people are ready for just how like Disney Prince handsome you are. That's a very nice way to say perpetually hungover. So thank you for that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. In a punk rock, like Disney Prince, but punk rock. Yeah, that was the Bituation Room podcast. Everyone should check that out.

And Robert was great. It was rad. It was a great podcast. I had a lot of fun on it. And today we're going to be Bituationing about, well, something else. I want to keep, I want to actually keep the exact topic of today's podcast a secret until the big reveal, because it's going to be, it's going to be a good time. You're so scared.

Francesca, how do you feel about babies? I feel like I've been asking that a lot. I don't know. I don't like where this is going already. All right. All right. Let me ask an easier question. How do you feel about Nazis?

Oh, bad. There you go. Nazis are bad. Bad, bad. Nazi doctors. Oh, you know, just cutting edge, maybe a little too much so. Yeah. Definitely too much cutting.

That's fair to say about Nazi doctors. Oh, no. This is a fun one, because we're talking about Nazi doctors, but the most of what we're talking about occurs in like the 1960s. So, you're going to have a good time with this one. You're going to have a really good time with this one. I feel like they never suffered the full consequences of their crimes against humanity. We're able to scatter throughout the world and keep on genociding slowly.

That is a big aspect of what we're talking about here. Now, I mean, I guess you and most of our listeners are broadly familiar with the story of a doctor named Joseph Mengele, who was maybe the worst doctor there's ever been. He was the chief physician at Birkenau, which was a sub-camp of Auschwitz. And Mengele carried out selections, which meant it was one of his jobs. He was one of a number of doctors who would determine who would go on to do labor at the camp and who would be killed immediately. And he liked doing selections because he also got to pick out people who he thought would

be most useful for the medical experiments that he was carrying out. And that mostly meant picking out twins. He had a whole thing for twins. It is weird. We will talk about Mengele one of these days. This is like a grim singled out. Remember that show? No, Jesus.

No. Is that about twins? I mean, in some instances, they did throw twins on there. It was more of a dating game, which I know that Auschwitz was not about. No. Unfortunately, if they had just sort of reconfigured it to be about life and love and not death, maybe they could have had something there. I mean, the horrible thing is that if you look at pictures of Dr. Mengele from the Holocaust era,

he does not look like you would expect. He absolutely does not look like, you know, some of the Nazis have that strong war criminal vibe to them. Sure. And Mengele looks like aggressively normal to the point where it's actually deeply unsettling. I do stand-up comedy, so I'm surrounded by very sweet-faced boys who are like, wait, you showed your junk to whom? Yeah.

Exactly. Mengele would have killed in the LA stand-up scene. By which I mean, he would have murdered you. Yeah. That like swoop-back hair situation. Yeah. You wouldn't call him as Dr. Death. Although maybe you would, because it's always the aggressively normal-looking guys.

So Mengele is particularly famous because the experiments he conducted on twins were so garishly vile. He would amputate like one twin's limb or infect one twin with the disease to see if it would transfer to the other in some way. At one point, he killed 14 twins in a single night by injecting their hearts with chloroform. He would also inject dye into the eye color of one twin to see if it would change the color in the other twin's eyes, just like Eli Roth style batshit nonsense. Like people talk about like, well, you'll hear sometimes from people who have not studied

the Holocaust enough like, well, you know, it was horrible, but they did get some like useful medical data out of it. It was like, no, it was almost all nonsense. Like it was just people doing like, like completely bug fuck pointless shit. Yeah. It's deputizing like a 13 year old kid with just all the hormones, like just like trying to hook up a rat to a balloon and seeing how high it goes. And then.

Yeah. It was like all the kids who someone should have come to them when they were 11 years old and like, like torturing cats and instead you give them like complete control over the life and death of thousands at a work camp. It was pretty bad is what I'm saying about the Holocaust. That's awful. And I know you've had Matt Leibon, who is my boyfriend, and he is actually a fraternal twin.

And so I wish he was on his talk a little bit about this, but as he says on stage in a joke, you know, he cannot feel his twin sister's orgasms. So no, you can't feel you might, you might, yeah, you're sensitive to your twin, but you can't feel their pain. Yeah. And you could have asked them that as opposed to injecting dye into their eyes to see if that did something. My God.

Like. Yeah. And the babies are crying. Yeah. That's what babies do. Also, they're in prison. Yeah. Yeah.

You've taken them from their parents, Mengele. This isn't really useful data. So Mengele deserves his infamy, obviously. He's the most famous of the Nazi doctors, but there were actually a shitload of doctors necessary to keep the third Reich's machinery of death humming along. For one thing, under like the rules the Nazis established for the concentration camps, well for the death camps, only doctors could actually deploy Zyklon B into the gas chambers. Every time gas was deployed into a chamber, it was done by a physician.

That was like one of the rules that they stuck to very diligently. A great number of doctors were also involved in the Holocaust through pharmaceutical giant IG Farben, who are the people who make aspirin. They've turned into, I mean, one of the things they've turned into now is Bayer. And one of the doctors who worked at IG Farben was a fellow named Otto Ambrose. Now, Dr. Ambrose had risen through the ranks of the company during the early Nazi years. And from 1940 to 41, he headed up their search for a site to put in new synthetic rubber and fuel plants.

They settled on a Polish town named Oswikiem, which became the site for Auschwitz. Oswikiem, I guess, is the Polish version of the name Auschwitz. So IG Farben liked Auschwitz as a site because the SS was already building a camp there. And the SS agreed to give them slave labor to help run their chemical plants. Construction started in 41. Otto Ambrose helped oversee this process and managed the factory through the war years. IG Farben would rent Jewish slaves from the SS for three marks per day, four marks if the worker was skilled.

In 1941, Dr. Ambrose wrote to the IG Farben board, our new friendship with the SS is proving very beneficial. So are they are we building chemical plants to eventually do bad things to our own people? Like is it like a number of things? So the plants specifically that Ambrose is working, they're attempting to because obviously germinate not great on natural resources, right? That's why all of German history has been the way that it is. So they're trying to fuel by hate.

That's the main. Yeah. And J.K. obviously, Angela, you're fine. So they're trying to make synthetic rubber because they need rubber, but they don't have access to the actual raw material that makes rubber. Most of that comes from Africa in this period. And they're also trying to make synthetic gasoline because they need to be able to move their vehicles.

But Germany does not have a lot of, like in the territory they've conquered, doesn't have a lot of fuel. So that's part of what they're doing, trying to keep the war machine going. The other thing that the Nazis are trying to make at Auschwitz is Seren nerve gas and Dr. Ambrose is one member of a team of four that invents Seren nerve gas, which is one of the deadliest nerve gases ever. And that's so they're, they're making a mix of horrible chemical weapons and attempting to make different synthetic chemicals to allow the Nazi war machine to continue there.

Amazing. Wow. It's going to go in some surprising directions though. So high-ranking IG Farben employees at Auschwitz, like Dr. Ambrose, were allowed to purchase clothing that had been stolen from the people who were gassed. And the reason that this was a good deal for them was that Jews and other victims of the Holocaust were generally not told they were headed to a death camp and they were just told they were being, they were migrating, they were being forcibly migrated.

So they would generally wear their finest clothing because obviously you don't know if all of your luggage is going to make it, you're going to wear the best stuff you have so that you at least have it when you arrive at your new home. So a lot of times they're gassed in the finest clothing that they have access to and then it's taken from their bodies and people like Dr. Ambrose get to pick through it. Now, that is the smallest but cruelest detail and the most insignificant part of the Holocaust and death camps, but also such an annoying fuck you. Like that was my mom's necklace.

That was my finest like Chanel, whatever jacket. And you're just going to, mmm, that's not okay. No, it's all, I mean, it's the Holocaust. It's all pretty bad. Yeah. Yeah. I guess that's a good point. Yeah, it's a pretty good life though, working at Auschwitz as an IG Farben manager.

Unfortunately, the factory produced basically nothing of value for the Nazi war machine. Again, one of the overwhelming themes here is that like they were bad at a lot of this stuff. Like this is like people overemphasize because the history channel has done a million documentaries on like crazy Nazi weapons and Nazi science. They fucked up more than they got things right, which is part of why they lost the war. Yeah. Yeah.

I think it's so messed up because there is lore. Like I think anyone who's that into Nazi and Nazism and the Third Reich and is like a little bit, a little bit of a fanboy or girl. And I always like that line is so thin and weird, but like over inflating just how like amazing their medical, you know, like innovations were, it's like, no, they were injecting children with chloro, what chloroform? Chloroform was one of the things they injected children with. Yeah.

And found out nothing. Yeah. They got nothing useful out of that. I mean, and they had like a lot of their fucking, their super weapons was just like huge wastes of resources that would have been better spent towards making, I don't know, a not very sexy, but incredibly effective medium tank like the T 34 that would have allowed them to, you know, actually have more armor on the bed. Like they were like, I'm a member of a very awkward group of people, which are German

military history nerds who also have to repeat it, but I'm not liking that way. So in early 1945, the IG Farben facility, Auschwitz was abandoned after heavy US bombing. And this is actually where Primo Levy, if you know anything about Primo Levy, he is, he survives Auschwitz because he like gets, gets a gig working. He's a lab technician, basically, and he gets a gig working in the IG Farben lab, but he's able to hide when they, when they flee Dr. Ambrose though escapes the Russian army with the German soldiers who flee Auschwitz. And these soldiers take as many of their remaining prisoners as possible and lead them on a death

march through the Polish winter just to try to get rid of the rest of them. When the war ended and the camps were liberated, the role of IG Farben and doctors like Ambrose and Mengele became clearer. In 1945, after Germany sued for peace, the Allied command utterly dismantled German industry and put what remained under its authority. The stated intent was, quote, to render impossible any future threat to Germany's neighbors or to world peace. And I guess broadly you could say that was, well, Germany is not a threat to, I mean,

great podcast. Robert, I've really enjoyed myself the end of war. We did it. Yeah. And all the bad people face consequences. Anywho, what's this podcast again? Yeah, unfortunately, as soon as they figured out dealt with that Nazi threat to world peace, a new threat to world peace presented itself, which was that the US and the USSR

were just rubbing their dicks in anticipation of getting to kill each other, particularly the US at this point. And hawks within capitalist nations started agitating and preparing for a war against communist Russia as soon as the one against Germany ended. And it was decided by these guys that fully liquidating German industry would be a bad idea since most of that industry lay within the zone of Allied control and they might need to use it for the next war. This is the same reason why a lot of German military leaders don't get punished to the

extent that they should is there's this understanding like, well, these guys fought the Soviets. We're about to fight the Soviets. So who cares if they presided over a couple hundred thousand executions in Poland or whatever? You know, we need this guy. I mean, and therein lies the hypocrisy of war. Hey, they're good at mass murder. We might need them for murder. We might need to murder some people.

Yeah. One of, I think one of the, I mean, there's a number and it happens on all sides, not just the United States and Russia both, we're going to talk about this a bit, both take a lot of Nazis to use, but like France does it, Britain does it, like fucking Norway does it, like everybody's. It's like the beanie babies of Nazi's moment, like gotta collect them all and like you have like the doctor and then you get like the mad scientist, the guy who's good at running factories.

Yeah, exactly. It's like a fucking, it's like a rummage sale at the end of the third rite, like who needs an expert with questionable morality. When it turns out, that's what states do. I think the most, probably the most offensive example to me would be Albert Speer, who was like Hitler fucking loved this dude by kind of the end of Hitler's life. Speer was his favorite Nazi and Albert Speer was an architect, which Hitler always wanted to be.

And if he had, it probably could have been a decent architect. A lot of people say if he'd focused on the instead art school, but anyway, Hitler fucking loved architecture, loved Albert Speer, Speer would like make all these grand designs for like how the German Reich was going to look after the war. Speer was also the head of war production. And the head, as a result of that, the head of the Nazi like slave labor program, he was the one organizing where the slaves were going to make Nazi war production possible, committed a lot of crimes against humanity that all got whitewashed and covered up because we decided

we wanted Albert Speer's help planning our industrial economy in order to help fight the Soviets. Really horrible story. We built a space needle. Exactly. Great guy. Albert Speer. I'm assuming.

Yeah. Yeah. In 1947, the Allied governments began a series of war crimes trials for 24 directors and senior employees of I.G. Farben. Dr. Ambrose was one of those men. He was sentenced to eight years in prison for mass murder and slavery, which seems light to me.

I don't know. Like eight years for mass murder and slavery kind of seems like maybe not enough, but like I think I know people who got busted with pot who did more than eight years. And I feel like slavery is a worse crime. I don't know. I'm backseat Nuremberg-ing here. You're absolutely right. That's like, you know, we could use him in five and we'll get down to four and I'm sure

you're about to get into that. So he was one of 13 I.G. Farben men who were convicted and by 1951 he was released from prison like four years early. He was the beneficiary of a clemency grant so he could contribute to a buildup of European industry in order to oppose the USSR. Now when a quote from a write up about this by the international oncology networks magazine quote, the recruitment of these experts was sanctioned by the U.S. joint chiefs of staff

who approved the systematic exploitation of scientific and technical knowledge developed in Nazi Germany in a classified memorandum titled exploitation of German scientists and science and technology in the United States. They described these men as chosen rare minds whose continuing intellectual productivity we wish to use. And while the Soviet Union also worked hard in acquiring German expertise with the emerging Cold War, U.S. joint chiefs of staff supported every effort designed to guarantee that intellectual spoils were not to fall into Soviet hands.

Hence, after defeating Nazi Germany in 1945, Operation Overcast, later renamed Operation Paperclip, more than 1600 Nazi Germans were secretly recruited to develop armaments at a feverish and paranoid pace that came to define the Cold War. In addition, America sent hundreds of experts to Germany to guide the transfer of scientific and technical knowledge back to the United States. And with this transfer of scientific and technical knowledge, a large number of chosen Nazi scientists migrated to the United States. Others, however, remained in Germany, where they were ultimately recruited by German companies.

You know, sometimes most of us, when we fail, we actually fail and we have to suffer the consequences. Others just fail up. And I feel like Nazis, man, they really knew how to fail up and other people helped them. Yeah. I think the best known example of this was Vernevon Brown, who was probably the single man most responsible for the US moon landing. He was the guy who designed our rockets.

He was the head of like a bunch of shit at NASA. He also designed the V2 rockets that were fired blindly at civilian targets in the UK. Real piece of shit used slave labor to make a lot of rockets under the Germans. There's a great Vernevon Brown song against him that includes the line, when the missiles go up, who knows where they come down? That's not my department, says Vernevon Brown. Good little song. Real piece of shit.

Oh my God. This is, you know what it reminds me of? There's a song that you learn in grade school called like, dirt made my lunch, dirt made my lunch, thank you dirt, thanks a bunch for my salad and my sandwich and my milk and my lunch. Thanks. Anyway, the point is, I feel like it's like Nazis made my lunch, Nazis made my lunch, thank you Nazis, you're fucking the worst, but a bunch of technology.

I mean, this is, you know what, I'm sorry, not to make this like super, like politicize this, but I feel like you kind of see, and I'm not drawing a one-to-one here and I'm going to get a lot of blowback for this, but you can edit this out. No, but I feel like when you talk about, you know, opposing the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, a lot of people will be like, Israelis have, you know, Israeli technology has done a lot and you're like, so, do you know what I mean, like these things are like, sort of unrelated and you have cool technology and not an ethnic cleansing. Exactly.

Yeah. Exactly. Anywho. Presumably those scientists could be doing the same work in a state that was not, I don't know, allowing armed settlers to gun down unarmed Palestinians is one example, but there's a lot of examples. For example, you could have a guy making sweet-ass rockets and not using giant slave labor camps in order to build them.

All of these things are possible. It's like the United States could have landed a man on the moon without rehabilitating a Nazi war criminal. All sorts of things are possible without doing the terrible things that come with them. We just choose to do the terrible things because it's easier and we're lazy. But also, like, what about locking them up? If they have great, like, if they have incredible skill and knowledge, you could still lock them up.

They can work from prison. They can work from there. They'll produce the blueprints, you know, but they are not free. Was that never explored? No, no, no, no, no. You want to keep them happy. I don't know. I think they should have all been shot is kind of my attitude.

I'm a big capital punishment for members of the Third Reich kind of guy. So the most enthusiastic of German companies, when it came to hiring old Nazi war criminals, was Grünenthal. Now, when the International Criminal Court went after IG Farben, Grünenthal was just a baby company. It had been formed in 1946, which technically gave it a clean record vis-a-vis Nazis, right? The war is over, West Germany becomes a thing, Grünenthal is started. It was a spin-off company from an existing business, run by the Wurz family for the last

hundred or so years. The Wurzes are your standard German pre-war capitalist aristocracy. Their ancestor, Andreas Wurz, founded the family firm in the 19th century, initially as a soap and perfume business. It quickly became prominent, coming to dominate the local economy of Aachen, a prosperous city in the North Rhine. Though the Wurzes were Catholic, they recognized Hitler for what he was, which is good for business.

The Wurzes' family patriarchs joined the party early, no, no, he was going to make them a lot of money. And he did. Yeah, so they joined the party right away, and they benefit right away. So it's important to understand, the Nazis were just gangsters, and they offered bribes to the German capital holding class in exchange for their support. A lot of these bribes were dispensed via a process called Arianization, in which Jewish-owned businesses were stolen by the government and handed over to Nazis.

The Wurz family were given two competing perfume companies, one of which made the tobacco perfume range that is still sold by the Wurz firm today. So this company is given a stolen Jewish perfume business, and in 2021, that same family still owns that perfume range and profits from it. It's good shit. When the Nazis broke up IG Farben, the Wurzes saw opportunity since making perfume and making various medicines use a lot of the same equipment, spinning off into a pharmaceutical company made sense.

It also made sense to make use of the huge number of recently freed, or never punished at all, Nazi scientists who are now out of work. In 1915- I hope this doesn't end in some kind of Sephora line being problematic, because like, you know- No, it's worse than that. It's not really put on the label. They're like, it's cruelty free.

When you say that you don't perform any tests on rabbits, I assume you also mean that this did not descend from a line of Nazi cosmetologists. I would say that cruelty free should also include, was never stolen by the Nazis and handed over to someone else. Yeah. I think that does count as cruelty. If you could put that somewhere on the label, but anyway, continue. This business was never owned by Nazis.

Robert, you know what, we know what other businesses are not owned by Nazis unless it's a Volkswagen ad. Unless it's a Volkswagen ad, or like a BMW ad, or a Mercedes ad, or a Bayer ad, or an ad for most of them, I mean, not owned by Nazis, but directly supporting the Nazis like if it's Shell, for example, Coke, IBM, oh yeah, IBM for sure, for god damn sure, yes, absolutely. But unless it's any of those companies, definitely guaranteed not ever owned by Nazis, probably, unless it's one like a company that's owned by one of those large like investment firms that had a lot of investments in Nazi Germany, which is pretty likely.

But you know, maybe not, anyway, ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way, and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't

a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the

youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the

world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. So in 1951, Gruninthal hired Dr. Ambrose, our friend who developed seren nerve gas and helped organize the death factories at Auschwitz. Four years. Four years in prison, right?

Yeah, he did. He did his time, you know? That's just a year for every other guy he worked on the seren nerve gas project with. So they didn't mind that he'd worked at Auschwitz, and they were very impressed by his other professional credentials. He quickly became chairman of the company's advisory committee. He's a good guy to have advising your company, the dude who advised the SS on how to make a death factory.

Dr. Ambrose was quickly joined by a number of other old party comrades, and I'm going to quote from the book Silent Shock by Michael Magazinik. Dr. Heinz Baumkater was a notorious SS doctor at the Saxonhausen concentration camp outside Berlin. In addition to overseeing executions and selecting prisoners for the gas chamber, he conducted experiments with injections, explosives, and chemicals. One such experiment saw prisoners strapped down and burned with phosphorus so that Baumkater could test an experimental SAV.

Baumkater was arrested after the war, charged with murder, and tried by the Soviets in Berlin in 1947. He was convicted after a short trial, not a surprising outcome given his appalling record in the efficient Soviet approach to war crimes justice. Baumkater was sentenced to life imprisonment, but served only eight years before the Soviets returned him to Germany. The exact point at which Grünenthal employed him is unclear, but Baumkater was certainly working as a salesman in Grünenthal's Münster office in 1960 and 61.

By this time, he was facing another round of war crimes charges in a German court. In 1962, after a trial in Münster, Baumkater was convicted of being an accessory to murder and of depraved indifference, and sentenced once more to eight years jail. The time he had already served in the Soviet... Another eight years. Take that, Nazi! Not really, because the time he already served in the USSR was taken into account, and so he never went to jail again.

He got time served for genocide. It's good shit. I once thought that American police officers got off with murder very easily, and turns out Nazi war criminals got off. Not nearly as easy as Nazis. It's been easier. What's really fun is looking at how many Einsatzgruppen they were. Those were the guys who played skeet shooting with literal babies, and how many of them

survived the war, and how many of the ones that survived the war suffered any kind of legal penalties at all as a spoiler. Not most of them. Now, by which I mean thousands of them lived the rest of their lives as free men. This is the... Okay. You believe in capital punishment for Nazis, and I'm with you. What I feel as though I'm coming off of...I just watched the Epstein docks on Netflix.

Anyway, another bastard. And I'm like, death is way too easy. This is unfair. Death is unfair if you're that big of a piece of shit. There's nothing fair if you're that big. Here's why I think just immediate execution. Democracy means some right-wing shitholes are always going to get elected, and they are always going to want to use the Nazis rather than punish them, which is you get a lot of

these guys get nasty punishments and then get pardoned a couple of years later. So I think you just shoot them immediately when everybody's pissed off. No time for resuscitation. Exactly. We don't have to like... Yeah. We don't have to see all their paintings, i.e. George W. Bush, and hear his opinions on Afghanistan.

Exactly. I mean, I feel the same about George W. Bush, but that's a story for another episode that they... Robert and I are on the same page here. Okay. Let's keep going before the cops are at my door. Wow. I know you're thinking, wow, two Nazi war criminals, one of whom was on war crimes trials

while working as a salesman for Grunenthal. That's a lot of Nazis at the company, but we're just getting started. Martin Steymler was another Grunenthal hire. As a prominent pathologist during the Third Reich, he wrote articles and published studies proving the racial superiority of the German race. He was a popular proponent of the Nazi racial hygiene program, which ultimately resulted in the Holocaust. After Germany invaded Poland, he advised the SS on their population policy, which means

it was his job to decide which chunks of Polish society to exterminate. Grunenthal put Martin Steymler in charge of their pathology department from 1960 to 1974. Grunenthal also hired Hans Berger-Prins, who worked with Hitler's personal doctor Carl Brandt. Now, if you're a Nazi knower, Brandt was the Hitler doctor who didn't give him a lot of methamphetamine. He wound up as the lead defendant for the doctors' trial at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, and he was executed for his involvement in medical experiments on prisoners and civilians.

Berger-Prins escaped any punishment for his role in working with Dr. Brandt, and he went on to defend the Grunenthal company as an expert witness in court. The most famous Nazi hire of the Grunenthal company was Dr. Ernst Günther Schenck. You can see him in the movie Downfall, played by Christian Burkle, which means he was in the bunker with Hitler at the very end. Schenck was the only member of Grunenthal who was a member of the SS. While of them advised the SS, Schenck was in the SS, and he was in fact the official SS nutritional inspector.

During the war, he developed an experimental protein sausage that was tested on 370 concentration camp prisoners, killing dozens of them because apparently Schenck was pretty bad at making sausage. He was actually captured by the Soviets and managed to survive 10 years in their prisons. When he returned to West Germany, he was barred from working again as a doctor. But Grunenthal didn't care. They hired him anyway. And then...

Wait, I need to learn more about the sausage. I feel like this is some Hannibal shit where it's actually made out of their loved ones brains and they're like, eat it, and they're like, oh. I think it's more boring. They were just trying to make better military rations out of synthetic shit. I don't know as much about the sausage as I should, but it was a bad sausage. Rubber and twin babies, yeah. I get it.

We've all been... We've all had a bad sausage, but this one sounds like it was designed. Ironically, I've never had a bad sausage in Germany, now. Other parts of the world, that's been a different case. And then there's the guy who's going to be the main Nazi for our story today, Heinrich Muckter. Here's Newsweek. Quote, during the war, his expertise had been anti-typhus work.

Outbreaks of the disease in the army made finding a vaccination a high priority because typhus cultures cannot live outside a body, it was kept alive by injecting it into prisoners. Once injected with the disease, the prisoners could then be used to try out the vaccines to see if they worked. And Muckter's experiments were purportedly carried out in Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Grodno as well as at Krakow. Now Buchenwald was the main experimental center for Muckter's typhus tests. One particular part of the camp, Block 46, was used by Nazi scientists to test treatments

for not just typhus, but yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, and diphtheria. One Nuremberg witness recalled dreadful horror at the thought of Block 46. Every person who, quote, went to Block 46 as an experimental person did not only have to expect death and, under certain circumstances, a very long drawn out and frightful death, but also torture and the complete removal of the last remnants of personal freedom. This is what I'm saying about capital punishment. Exactly. For Nazis, it is a little bit too easy, but I hear you.

We need to, like, what would, ugh, Block 36. I agree. There's better things to have done to them, but I'm just a fan of getting it done. So because, again, one of the things here, like, and people who are big fans of the Soviet Union will point out, rightfully, the Soviet Union killed a lot more Nazis who were captured, but most of the ones they killed were, like, normal soldiers. Got it. Who they starved to death.

So if you're going to be a piece of shit, be a talented. Be a prominent piece of shit, because you'll know. Be so prominent that, yeah, you're uncancelable, unkillable. Because we have, we have so far in the story, two prisoners who did time in Soviet prisons, two doctors, and then got out and went back to the West and did horrible things. But I mean, guy is this guy. Yeah, Mukter. Mukter.

Yeah. Now, all prisoners who were part of Mukter's typhus tests were given a particularly virulent strain of the disease of typhus. Half were injected with an experimental treatment, and the other half were given no treatment at all. Quote, there were cases of raving madness, delirium. People would refuse to eat, and a large percentage of them would die. Those who experienced the disease in a milder form, perhaps because of their, because their

constitutions were stronger, or because the vaccine was effective, were forced continuously to observe the death struggles of others. So that's what Mukter does. He was part of a horrible engine of unfathomable human misery. But a key word there is part. He wasn't a big face like Mengele. He wasn't the guy directly killing a bunch of people. He was one of a number of doctors organizing this horrific set of trials.

And as a result, he got off nearly scot-free. Polish authorities were only able to effectively charge him with mistreating prisoners and stealing scientific equivalent. And he was able to flee back to Germany across the Iron Curtain before he could face any kind of consequence for his work. And in 1946, he became one of Grunenthal's first employees. Now, kind of by default, a lot of German companies in the post-war era wound up hiring former Nazis.

It was kind of unavoidable in many cases because an awful lot of people joined the party. But Grunenthal was different. Not on time out. Does anyone say time out? This is me calling time out on Robert Evans. Did he discover anything after torturing that many people? I don't think they figured out a typhus vaccine. There we go.

Yeah. I think German soldiers were still dying a typhus by the end of the war. Now, I mean, not that it's any consolation. I guess if I or any of my relatives were in that, like, were performed on, like, rabbits, in cages, and injected with all kinds of horrible things, I feel like the last thing I would want is for them to go on and save German soldiers' lives. I'd be like, no, no, no, no, no, I don't want any advancements to come out of this shit at all.

Well, I guess the good news is that it did not work at all. Because the first typhus vaccine was developed in the 70s. There you go. So, no, this did not work. But they did figure some other shit out, which we're going to talk about in a little bit. By the way, Block 46, 36 or 46? 46. Block 46 is like what every COVID anti-vaxxer thinks that, like, the vaccine is doing.

And then, have you heard of Muckter? You're like, I think it's very different. It is very different. So anyway, we don't need to talk about how other fringe sort of spiritual beliefs wind up dovetailing into Naziism today. We talk about that a lot anyway. So again, a lot of German companies hire former Nazis. And hey, I should note, if you're a former Nazi in this period, obviously it means you

made a horrible moral compromise. It doesn't mean you were a direct part of the engineering of extermination. A lot of people just joined it to get a promotion at whatever bullshit gig they did in the local government or because they were a teacher or something, not a good thing, but not the same as organizing a series of tortures, torturous medical experiments at Auschwitz. So obviously, you were going to have a lot of former Nazis being hired in 1946, 47, because there's millions of them. But Grunenthal was different.

Not only did Grunenthal hire way more former Nazis than any other pharmaceutical company, but they had a weird tendency to hire former Nazis who had been directly involved with forced labor and concentration camps. One German historian looking at a short list of Grunenthal staff in the 1960s said, it's absolutely astonishing that a small company should have such a concentration of convicted war criminals on its staff, unusual even by the standards of post-war Germany. So a German historian is like, by the standards of everyone else in Germany, these guys hired a lot of fucking war criminals, unprecedented amounts.

Grunenthal is like the worst in that field. Now with their staff of war criminals in place, Grunenthal set to the important business of making medicine. One of their first products was a penicillin derivative, which proved to be massively toxic and was quickly polled. They also marketed it to Berkelos' cure that was completely ineffective. There were some eventual successes and eventually they become rich off of painkillers. But as the 1950s hit, Grunenthal was still on the lookout for a big product hit, something

they could make a lot of money on. All of these patients, they keep on dying, what are we doing wrong? Is it the staff of war criminals who love to murder? I don't know what kind of accent I'm doing. It started out German, I don't know what it is anymore. I have to say Matt does a better accent. He does. He does a very good accent.

But you might look at the people you just hired, bro, who love to watch death and create death, and you're trying to make what, medicine, vaccines, something is not right here. Yeah, they're not great at the start. But they're looking for their big hit and they decide that synthetic drugs are probably the wave of the future. Dr. Heinrich Muckter put two of his staff doctors on the task of developing new synthetic antibiotics. Now, one of these guys, Dr. Wilhelm Kuhns, heated a commercially available chemical as

part of his experimentation and created a brand new substance in fatalial glutamic acid imide. It would soon become better known by the name phalidomide. You heard of phalidomide? No. But is that what's in mascara? Because I know that it's bad. Oh, no.

Oh, it's much worse than that. A number of people will be going, ah, shit at this point, phalidomide is very famous. It's in Billy Joel's, We Didn't Start the Fire, among other things. Real famous drugs. Did it start the fire? It started something. Okay. Now, Dr. Kuhns' partner is said to have believed the new compound was a structural

analog or a near copy of the kind of barbiturates that were commonly sold as sleeping pills. Based on this logic, the story goes, Grunenthal decided to carry out tests on rats to determine if the phalidomide might be something the company could market as a sleeping aid. Now, I say the story goes because this part is heavily debated. You may notice that it's kind of weird that doctors trying to make a new antibiotic would make a synthetic barbiturate analog and then immediately try to test it as a sleeping pill. Now, stuff like this does happen in medical development. Viagra started as like a heart medication, but it also does stuff that could be useful

as a heart medication. It's a blood thinner. But there are doctors who will note that it doesn't really seem like phalidomide started as a result of antibiotic research and that that's a weird claim to make. There are other suspicious things about the drug's origin. That first rat study on phalidomide, the first study that Grunenthal does on phalidomide when they find it, was based around what's called a jiggle cage, which is a special cage that tries to measure the amount of movement in drugged or undrugged rats to determine

whether or not a substance sedates them. Basically, you're giving them the drug and then you're shaking a cage and like the amount that they get agitated is like, okay, either the sedative is working and they don't notice it or not, right? Jiggle cage sounds like a strip club. It does. The jiggle cage is a great strip club name, actually. Now, this particular study is very odd.

One pediatrician who analyzed it, Dr. Widokindalyn, described the experiment as having so little scientific value that it should not have been published, quote, the authors claim to have shown a sleep inducing effect, though no sleep was observed. Other pharmaceutical companies later tried and failed to replicate phalidomide's sedative property on animals and they failed. Some suspect the rat study was fabricated in order to provide clean scientific evidence that phalidomide had promised as a sedative. But it is an extremely effective sedative for human beings.

It just doesn't sedate rats. So why is it a big deal that this rat study showed it worked as a sedative in rats when it doesn't if it does work as a sedative in human beings? What is the issue here? Well, the issue is that a lot of people suspect Dr. Mukter and Grunintal faked the rat study data because they already knew before Grunintal was founded that phalidomide was an effective sedative. They couldn't say why they knew because the phalidomide had been initially developed

during the Nazi era via experiments on concentration camp inmates. So they'd tested it on people, but they couldn't say that. So they needed to fabricate an animal study to be like, now we should test this on humans. Look, it puts rats to sleep. Yeah. We can't say. We know why this works. The cage jiggled a lot.

Yeah, yeah. And the humans, I mean, rats were trying to get out. I mean, having a good sleeping when they were sleeping. Now this is debated still. This is not a guarantee that it happened this way. There's a lot of argument as to whether or not the phalidomide started as a Nazi project. And before I read what I'm about to read, you should know that the jury is still out as to the origins of the phalidomide.

That said, I'm now going to quote from a write up in Bioncozine, the magazine of the International Oncology Network as part of the Physicians Weekly Magazine Network, quote, in his book, Hitler's Laboratories, the Argentinian writer Carlos de Napoli states that he has discovered documents dated November 1944 from IG Farben, which refer to a chemical agent with the same chemical formula as thalidomide. According to de Napoli, IG Farben's director Fritz Turmere sent a memo to Karl Brandt, the SS general who ran Hitler's euthanasia program, explaining that a drug with number 4589 with the same characteristics as thalidomide had been tested and was ready for use.

According to documents discovered after World War II, Muhtar and Ambrose worked under the supervision of Joseph Mengele, referred to compound 4589 being tested on female prisoners in Auschwitz. In these Auschwitz files, researchers discovered correspondence between the camp commander and Bayer Liverkusen, a part of IG Farben. The correspondence dealt with the sale of 150 female prisoners for experimental uses. With a view to the planned experiments of a new sleep inducing drug, we would appreciate it if you could place a number of prisoners at our disposal.

So there's real compelling evidence that thalidomide was first experimented during the war on female slaves as a sleeping pill and that Dr. Muhtar and Dr. Ambrose were a part of those tests working under Joseph Mengele. Why were they women? Anything that's like women who then go to sleep around men, especially Nazis, I don't like any of that. I mean, there was a decent amount of rape in these places. I think there's also a fact of men are potentially more dangerous to keep as prisoners, so you

might want to just kill the men immediately. Or you're working the men, it's a labor camp, so you have the men doing physical labor, the women. You either kill them or you use their bodies for experiments. And that was up to dipshit number nine or whatever the hell that guy was like. Yeah, it was up to Mengele. Yeah, yeah. Mengele, yeah.

Sorry. I mean, all of Mengele, Ambrose, Muhtar are probably all taking turns doing this. It's a thing doctors do. It's doctors making the selections in a lot of cases. Again, the complicity of physicians in the Third Reich is like an actually incredibly important story because most of them just like agree to be part of the machinery of death. It's a real problem in medical ethics.

Now, so there's a lot of reasons to believe, like obviously if you're grown and tall, you don't want to say, we know this is a great sedative because the doctors we hired tested it on enslaved Jewish women at Auschwitz. You don't want to be saying that. It's not a good advertising campaign. So you want to lie and say, oh, it works on rats. Let's test it on humans for totally the first time. This is the first time it's ever been tried on people.

Now there's other reasons to doubt Grunenthal's official story about the development of thalidomide. For one thing, their initial patent application in 1954 mentioned that the drug had already been tested on humans before official tests began. Official documents show that the company purchased the trade name that thalidomide was sold under, Conturgan, and presumably the drug itself from Sanofi, a French pharmaceutical company that was controlled by the Nazis during World War II. Grunenthal also claimed to have done multiple independent animal experiments showing absolutely no mutagenic effects and no birth abnormalities.

However, in the late 1960s, Grunenthal's documents regarding the history and development of thalidomide were subpoenaed for the civil actions against the company. It was reported that virtually all documents that showed where and when animal research, as well as clinical studies on humans, were conducted, had been lost. So a lot of reasons to suspect that this was developed in concentration camps and then its origin was hidden. But that might not be the worst part of thalidomide, which we're about to get to the worst part of thalidomide.

Yeah, please. Yeah, anyway. It's not bad enough. I'm just like, I'm not triggered. And yet, you know, we started off with, you know, killing babies and I was kind of triggered and I was like, I don't know, I feel like you need to level up. Yeah, we'll get the trigger. It's important to know, though, that there's a really good chance that Dr. Mukter, who worked

under Joseph Mengele, had tested this drug initially in concentration camps. And once he got Grunenthal to start testing the drug for widespread approval, he also had a vested interest in making sure it got approved and sold. Part of Dr. Mukter's agreement with the company gave him a share in the profits of every drug sold that he helped to develop. Whatever the truth of its origin, Grunenthal decided thalidomide held a lot of promise as an alternative to barbiturates. And barbiturates are your traditional sleeping pills in this era and they're really bad.

Not that they don't have any, like they do, obviously they have medical uses, but they can kill your ass. Like people die from sleeping pills all the time, especially in this period. Like we've gotten a bit better at it now, but like barbiturates number one can be very addictive and again, can fucking kill you. So and that's starting to be known in the fifties and early sixties that like, oh, there's some real downsides to these sleeping pills. And so if you can make a sleeping pill that can't kill people, that's, you make a fuckload

of money off that shit. Right. And Dr. Mukter basically was convinced Grunenthal, hey, we can sell sleeping pills that don't have dangerous side effects. And to make the case- Which is a big order for a Nazi to be like, hey, Nazi, don't try not to kill people. They're like, but I want to and like, no, no, just, just pull back on that. Almost kill them.

Don't kill them. Don't worry. He kills a lot more people. Oh, I figure. To make the case that phyllidomide was safe, Dr. Mukter's team fed increasingly absurd amounts of phyllidomide to a variety of animals in an attempt to establish it's LD50. And the LD50 is the dose at which a drug will kill 50% of test animals, right? It's generally just referred to as like, this is the potential fatal dose of a drug.

Didn't know that? Very cruel. Keep going. Yeah. I mean, you need to know it, right? It is. It's a horrible thing, but like you have to know what is a lethal dose of a substance you're giving people, you know, you do need to have an idea of that.

Yeah. No, of course. But 50 of them, or at least, or half of them. At least 50%. Yeah. Because obviously everyone like, one person can take a dose of cyanide that will kill them and another person like with medical treatment could survive. There's never 100% with this kind of shit.

It's like the same thing. Some people get bitten by rattlesnakes and recover. Some people die very quickly for a variety of reasons. Now with, so yeah, grudanthal testers try to find an LD50 for phyllidomide and they say, we can't find it. It's impossible to kill animals with this stuff. There's a lot of debate as to whether or not those studies were valid, but that's what they say.

So this. I just, we really need humans. I mean, these rats and rabbits, they're great, but you know, be really great humans. Well they're more saying we can't kill animals with this so people can take this and they won't OD. Yeah. Yeah. There's no way to overdose on phyllidomide.

So we can sell it as like, you can't die on this stuff. Like all these other people are dying on barbiturates. So grudanthal, when they've got this kind of establishment for how they're going to market phyllidomide, proceeds to what was the second round of human trials, probably assuming they'd done human trials and concentration camp inmates. And this round of human studies was comparatively a lot more ethical, but it was still very problematic perhaps due to the fact that grudanthal's research division was run by Nazis. In Bonn, one doctor treated 40 children, many of whom were brain damaged with huge doses

of phyllidomide over extended periods of time. Some kids received 20 times the recommended dose. None of the children's parents were informed of the study. The tests showed that phyllidomide was a very effective sedative. And by effective, I mean it killed two babies. One of the babies had a congenital heart defect and one a three month old suffered heart failure. In addition, one other child went temporarily blind. The doctor conducting the study decided these side effects had nothing to do with phyllidomide

and gave an endorsement to grudanthal that it was safe. It doesn't seem like good science to me, but I'm not a doctor. Seems like killing two out of 40 children is actually a pretty high death rate for a pill. I don't know. It's not half though. It is not half. So it's safe.

I guess it's okay. There were of course a lot of positive tests of the drugs. A number of testers, particularly adults it was tested on, did rave about its efficacy as a sleep aid. It's an effective like sedative and the fact that it had no hangover or other side effects. Some people say this and a number of doctors back it up. And in adults it did seem to be pretty effective, but as this segment from the book Silent Shock makes clear, there were problems from the beginning.

One doctor reported that he had dropped the drug because of absolute intolerability. Among the side effects he noted was slight, slight peristhesia or tingling or burning sensation often caused by nerve damage. Responding to this report, grudanthal's Heinrich Mukter conceded in a letter on 3 April 1956 that thalidomide seemed a very strong sedative, which if used in high doses over a long period could cause disturbance in the nervous system. Such information was pushed under the rug or explained away. Dr. Mukter did such a good job of manufacturing consent that other doctors in grudanthal thought

thalidomide was safe. Some of his own staff members tried it and one gave it to his pregnant wife. The first of what would be tens of thousands of thalidomide babies was born on Christmas day 1956 without ears. In early 1957, the drug went on sale across Europe under the name Contergan. It went on sale after babies were born without ears. One baby could have been anything. Sometimes babies don't have ears.

Who's to say? Who's to say? Who's to among us? It's God's will or a Nazi's will. But you know, either way, let's put it on the market. Now, you're saying also that Mukter is getting a percentage of everything. Oh, yeah. He gets a cut, baby.

So economic incentive, totally not a problem in the pharma industry at all to rush things out the door? No, it was not a problem then, and it's not a problem now. Get vaccinated. Contergan, aka thalidomide, became a bestseller. It was helped along by a recent string of deaths and life-altering injuries caused by barbiturates' sleeping pills. Michael's marketing campaign was based entirely around the fact that thalidomide, unlike those

competing pills, was totally safe. It soon spread across the world. Michael McGaznick writes, It was this emphasis on complete and unprecedented safety that allowed thalidomide to prosper in a crowded marketplace. The full page adds for Dystival, which was its name in Australia, placed by Distillers, which was the company that sold it there, in the Medical Journal of Australia. At a time, a key information source for doctors illustrates the marketing line. A small child is standing on a stool, raiding the family medicine cabinet.

The child has opened an unidentified bottle, and the reader correctly surmises that an enormous, potentially fatal overdose is about to occur. Thankfully, though, the advertisement can offer a happier ending. If the unnamed medicine is Dystival, there will be no tragedy. The child's life may depend on the safety of Dystival, an advertisement shouts. Consider the possible outcome in a case such as this. Had the bottle contained a conventional barbiturate, doctors were urged. Year by year, the barbiturates claim a mounting toll of childhood victims, yet today it is

simple to prescribe a sedative and hypnotic that is both highly effective and outstandingly safe. Dystival, thalidomide, has been prescribed for over three years in Great Britain, where the accidental poisoning rate isn't notoriously high, but there is no case on record in which even gross overdoses with Dystival has had harmful results. Put your mind at rest. Depend on the safety of Dystival, they're literally advertising it by saying like, Hey, your kids are gonna get into your medicine cabinet.

If they eat your barbiturate sleeping pills, they're gonna die, but they can take as much thalidomide as they want. Harmless thalidomide. You give it to kids like candy. Yeah, you know, why don't you put them next to the candy? Just put them next to the cookies. Fuck it. Throw it in the candy bowl.

It's thalidomide. It's safe. Look, put it, stuff it in their teddy bears. They'll snuggle with it, numb, numb, numb through the night. Yeah. Put it in their bottle. Don't give them breast milk. Give them thalidomide.

It's got everything a baby needs. Harmless thalidomide. So Grünenthal wasted no time in reaching out to thousands of doctors around the world. In the first year, or in 1958, so it goes on sale in 1957, in 1958, they placed 50 ads in medical journals and sent out more than 200,000 letters to doctors, plus 50,000 mailers to doctors and pharmacists. By early 1960, thalidomide was the best-selling sleeping pill in Germany. Mass use led to more problems, of course.

It became very clear that thalidomide could cause a particularly horrible form of neuropathy, or nerve pain. There was no treatment for it, and the damage could linger for months after the last dose of thalidomide. Some people never recovered. Tens of thousands of Germans alone suffered long-term nerve damage from thalidomide. This caused some doctors to suggest that the drug should be pulled from the shelves. These were serious injuries, and no over-the-counter sleeping pill, which thalidomide was, was

worth that kind of risk. You could just buy this shit. No shit, bro. Yeah. In response, Grünenthal did, Nazi shit. They hired private detectives to spy on detractors, including doctors who complained about the drug. They bribed and threatened lawsuits to suppress bad press, and of course, they lied like a

cheap rug. At no point did they consider doing anything but going full speed ahead with sales. How many pens did they have to buy off these doctors with, how many free pens, lunches? I've seen that today, but back then. They are doing that... There's a lot of doctors that get tricked into giving their own families thalidomide, and a lot of doctors who work at Grünenthal, a lot of junior researchers at Grünenthal, give thalidomide to their wives, and there's birth defects. It's actually... Grünenthal employees suffer horribly as a result of thalidomide.

In 1958, a German doctor published a study on thalidomide use among breastfeeding women. He concluded that it was safe for them to use, although this doctor was very clear that this was only for breastfeeding women, not pregnant women. As quote, it is my fundamental outlook, never to give mothers to be sleeping drugs or sedatives. It is an old fact of experience in medicine that fundamentally, mothers to be are not to be given barbiturates, opiates, sedatives, or hypnotics because these substances can affect fetuses. This doctor is just being like, hey, breastfeeding women sometimes have trouble sleeping.

Is this safe for breastfeeding women? It is. Then he includes a long disclaimer saying, not for pregnant women. Don't give this to pregnant women. Don't give any of this kind of shit to pregnant women. Sus, especially that small humans are still gestating. That's all we're doing for two years is still gestating. I don't know that his research was wrong on that.

I haven't heard that it was bad for breastfeeding kids. It may not have crossed in that way, but that said, he was very clear that this is just for breastfeeding women. Grunenthal, though, sees this study and they read it as a green light to sell thalidomide to pregnant women. In August of 1958, they sent out extracts of the study, which don't include that warning, to more than 40,000 German doctors, arguing that this proves the drug is, quote, harmless to mother and baby.

They cut out his warning and just throw in the parts of it that they can say, no, it's it's great for babies that are great for fetuses. Give it to all the pregnant mothers you possibly can. Now, since many expectant mothers have difficulty sleeping, a lot of doctors started recommending this new pregnancy safe sleep aid to their patients. Tens of thousands of pregnant women in some 46 countries began taking thalidomide. Meanwhile, evidence of the drug's danger continued to mount. In early 1959, a doctor became pregnant and asked another doctor who worked for Grunenthal

whether or not thalidomide was safe for her to take. The other doctor answered, of course it is, and in January of 1960, the pregnant doctor gave birth to a child with malformations of the nose, lips, ears, hands, and feet. From silent shock, quote, another doctor's wife had a baby with shortened arms after her husband was told by Grunenthal that the medication would be perfectly safe if taken during pregnancy. Later, the woman pressed for a divorce, accusing her doctor husband of having been too gullible. In Munich, Mrs. H fell pregnant in October 1960, and her husband, a general physician,

asked a Grunenthal sales rep if he could safely give his wife Conturgan. Their response was boiler-prate. Point boiler-prate. Conturgan is totally non-dangerous and frequently prescribed especially during pregnancies. In July 1961, Mrs. H gave birth to a severely malformed baby. Her general practitioner husband believed Conturgan was to blame. When he spoke with a prosecutor in 1963, he said he had thought he made his suspicions clear to a Grunenthal sales rep after the July 1961 birth, but could not recall the

rep's name. They're getting reports about this, and they're not doing anything about it. Don't take Nazi meds. Yeah. I mean, it is hard not to do that in Germany in this period. No, exactly. But it's interesting because it is all just like, oh, many pharmaceutical companies operate in a very, yeah, we're just going to push the hell out of this, and a few malformations,

a few babies without ears, and we're going to sweep that under the rug and keep on rolling the cow. Some of the babies aren't going to come out right. That's just the way it goes. But you're going to sleep like a malformed baby. I'm so sorry. You also, can we just say this is really resuscitating ambient in my mind? Yeah.

Yeah. You could go on a rant about, you know, I don't know. So what your kids born without lungs, you know, like, yeah. This makes ambient just just come out swinging. Yeah. Ambient sounds a lot better than Thalidomide, doesn't it? Yeah. You know what is also better than Thalidomide.

I don't know where I, God. The products and services that support this podcast, better than Thalidomide. All of them. You know, it'll put you to sleep like a baby. These products and services, as opposed to having you be born without lungs, like a Thalidomide baby, which is not as desirable. Generally you want kids to have lungs. I'm not an expert.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver at the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse with like a lot of guns.

He's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful

lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all

bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Welcome to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your

podcasts. Oh, we're back and we're talking about... Okay, so how many years are we talking about here? It's been on the market. It comes on the market in 57. In 1961, Grunatal receives and they have started receiving information about birth deformations and they're also, the separate issue is nerve damage. So babies are being affected by this because their pregnant moms are taking it, but also

people taking it, adults are suffering serious nerve damage. One thalidomide victim, it was reported in 1961, had to be sent to a psychiatric hospital because they were just driven out of their mind by severe nerve damage. Grunatal began to suspect that rival drug companies were collecting case studies of thalidomide problems in order to damage sales. They hired a private detective to investigate and he began spying on critics of the drug. He became convinced that Merck was behind the whole thing. That same year, 1961, Grunatal sent executives to East Berlin to try and arrange for thalidomide

to be sold in communist East Germany. Thankfully, the East German health authorities had their shit more on the ball than their capitalist cousins. They declared the drug way too dangerous and refused to import it, which is great. So the communists are like, no, this seems like a really horrible medicine. It seems like it's doing a lot of bad shit and we should not allow this to do our country. We kept some Nazis, but we also killed more than y'all, so. Yeah, yeah, we are.

We do not want your Nazi death pills. Oddly enough, and this is one of the only times in history this will be the case, the United States of America makes the same call as communist Germany. We don't allow this. There are some thalidomide babies in the US, some of this stuff gets over as testing pills basically, but it is never sold widely in the United States. And we owe this to an FDA official named Frances Kelsey. She was an extremely accomplished doctor who worked as an editor for the Journal of the

American Medical Association before being hired by the FDA. One month after starting the job, a salesman from a company affiliated with Grunen-Tal came to her door with marvelous stories of a super safe, absolutely can't kill you sleep drug called thalidomide. Now at this point in 1960, West Germans were consuming one million doses of thalidomide per day. Oh God. Yeah, Grunen-Tal and the American company they licensed with were looking at a fortune

in potential profits if they could sell this in the United States. With so much money at stake and such widespread adoption overseas, US approval was seen as a formality. Obviously, they're going to let us sell this over there. And it would have been a formality if not for Frances Kelsey. Quote from the University of Chicago, Kelsey insisted on hard evidence to back the salesman's claims for the drug's safety and refused to be brow beaten. After the initial application, Kelsey noted the reliance on anecdotal testimony in place

of clinical data. She ran it by her husband, who then worked as a pharmacologist at the National Institutes of Health. One section of the submission he branded an interesting collection of meaningless pseudoscientific jargon apparently intended to impress chemically unsophisticated readers. Elsewhere he noted, the very unusual claim that thalidomide has no lethal dose. No other substance can make that claim, he wrote. Kelsey's concerns escalated when, in February 1961, she saw a letter from a physician in

the British Medical Journal, reporting cases of peripheral neuritis, nerve damage in the hands and feet among patients he'd treated with thalidomide. She insisted that the burden of proof was on Grunital to show their drug was safe and refused to approve the drug unless they could do that. The sales rep enraged, called Kelsey's boss Ralph Smith, and said that he considered the denial letter she'd sent him libelous. This is libel for her to say that thalidomide isn't safe. Yeah, haven't you seen our ads?

Did you see the child? That kid got into all kinds of thalidomide, and look at the smile. Look at the smile, look how happy he is. Now the thalidomide rep asks Dr. Kelsey's boss at the FDA, are you really going to back what this woman says and not let us sell thalidomide? And to his credit, her boss is like, yes, of course I am, she's a very accomplished doctor and she's right. Can you imagine me hadn't though, it's just so scary that history and the lives of so

many children born in the 60s would have been at risk had some boss been sort of baited into that, she's just a chick, you're right man, let's go forward. And I think in the 80s she gets a major national award for saving the country from thalidomide. It really did come down to this one woman being like, it seems like everything you're saying is a lie and this is extremely dangerous, no thank you. And I don't know as much about the story in East Germany, but clearly there were people like her over there being like, no, this seems like a horrible thing to allow into our country. And it's interesting because she's like, okay, the literature and the things you provided,

all are really sus, and so you have to wonder just how fawning and glorious they were, like it will make the strong, stronger and the weak, well, it'll kill them, but it's fine. They deserved it anyway, if you can't survive, what kind of weird, overzealous, trial language were they using? I mean, they're literally saying there's no fatal dose of this stuff, which Dr. Kelsey's husband is like, well, that's not true of anything, everything has a fatal dose. They clearly did not do proper research if they're saying shit like that. So the company, the US company that partners with Grunital and this keeps trying to get

FDA approval for Thalidomide, but Dr. Kelsey successfully stymies every effort. And it's a good thing she did. In February of 1961, a scientist at a US firm partnered with Grunital had the brilliant idea that since Thalidomide was a sedative, it might stop women from miscarrying their babies. Now there's a lot of sexism based into why he thought this. He believed that miscarriages were caused by women, quote, becoming emotional about their pregnancies, and that, quote, habitual abortors could benefit from Thalidomide. So that's an idea of how it would have been sold in the US is like, this will stop you

from having spontaneous miscarriages. Take all the Thalidomide you can, it'll make sure your babies come out good. I knew that, like, you know that that's sort of, like when you immediately said that it started being prescribed to pregnant women who couldn't, who had trouble sleeping, it's like, okay, well, you got a lot of sexist doctors walking them down that primrose path of like, oh, you're having, you listen, little lady, you've got a little too many questions about gestating a life inside of you. You're going to need to go night and night.

Yeah, you're going to need to, why don't you just sleep through the next couple of months? Here's a drug with no consequences. By late 1961, the news had filled with hundreds of stories of infants born with severe deformations. Some had flippers for hands, others were missing their legs and pelvis entirely, and somebody's like, honestly, like the pictures that people freak out over are these kids with like flipper hands. That's the best case, because a lot of those kids are able to grow up and live normal lives, right?

They have to do some accommodations, but there's kids born without legs and pelvis is just no bottom half. There's kids born missing eyes and born without, with major internal malformations that make them, that either kill them outright or make it a pot. Like the best case scenario is that like, yeah, your hands come out a little bit different, but you're able to exist and like grow and live as a person. A lot of kids are born without, again, without like organs that they need to survive. Tell me that Grudenthal started, went on and like, marketed prosthetics, hey, we've got

ears. No, it's thankfully not that story, but it is that sad. So the reports had started to flood in by late 1960, and we know that Dr. Muckter personally was aware of at least 150 cases by that date. In one British distributor of the drug complained to him, he responded, hey, chill out, you're making money. Like, don't worry that some kids are coming out without lungs, worry about how much money you're about to make.

Of course. The first doctor to publicly expose thalidomide and get through Grudenthal's spies and PR flax was an Australian doctor named William McBride. In 1961, he published a letter in the Lancet laying out a clear connection between thalidomide and birth defects. This led to massive public outcry, which was helped along by the thousands of children with birth defects that started popping up on the front page of newspapers. Grudenthal withdrew the drug on November 26, 1961.

We don't know how many babies were born with thalidomide damage. Untold numbers, some estimates say 50,000 of women aborted their fetuses when the news broke. They were just like, well, I've been taking thalidomide. I don't want to make the camera risk it. We know at least 2,000 babies died as in were born and couldn't survive because they didn't have things that people need as a result of thalidomide, at least 2,000. And another 10,000 worldwide were born with birth defects.

The real numbers for both may be much higher. It was sold in some places for years after it got pulled out of others, including Argentina kept selling, I think, until the 90s. There was, of course, a massive lawsuit, nine Grudenthal employees, and there are some uses for it. Thalidomide is prescribed today in very specific cases. It has some medicinal uses. But it's not like a sleep aid.

How do we get to Billy Joel here, though? Oh, there's just a line in one of his songs about children with thalidomide. It's a big story. All of these pictures of babies with very people considered to be gruesome deformations, these pictures are just on the front page of newspapers for months. It's a huge... This is the stuff that the National Enquirer just has on file, like, let's put another deformed baby on the cut if we need it.

Exactly. There's a lot of exploitative aspects to this, but obviously it is a massive story. And there was a major lawsuit. Nine Grudenthal employees were charged with intent to commit bodily harm and voluntary manslaughter. The prosecution gathered huge amounts of data, more than 5,000 case histories that took six years to analyze. Hundreds of witnesses and 70,000 pages of evidence were gathered.

Among other things, the prosecution found a Grudenthal doctor who testified that he'd been mock-up packaging for the drug with warning not for pregnant women labels that executives at the company had nixed so that they could sell more thalidomide to pregnant women. One of the Grudenthal lawyers was a fellow named Dr. Joseph Neuberger. In November of 1966, which is a couple of years into the whole trial process, he was made minister of justice for the German state where the trial took place. Three days before he took office, he wrote to the prosecutors, I would be personally obliged for a rapid execution, i.e., I would appreciate it if

you would end the trial before we actually have to go to court over this thing. So they're doing like discovery and whatnot. He doesn't want there to be a real trial. Quote from the Guardian. The last thing he did in the afternoon of the day he was sworn in was meet with the prosecution in Aachen. Again, he asked them to stop action against Wurz. He told them he was resigning as a solicitor for Wurz on becoming minister of justice,

but then he discussed the case again and repeated his claims. His personal interest in defending Wurz and the company persisted, as stood his company's representation. In the end, prosecutors met with defense lawyers, the Grudenthal corporate board, and no representatives of felidimite victims. They worked out an agreement whereby the company paid what worked out to a couple thousand dollars per victim, and all victims agreed never to sue again, and the state agreed that no Grudenthal employees would be charged with anything.

They could have had Aaron Brockovich on this. Where was the German Brock? When the judges are angry about this, they write in their decision that had this gone all the way through trial, multiple Grudenthal employees, including Dr. Muckter, would have been sent to prison. They were guilty. This agreement that was made without the consent of the families is kind of fucked up. Can we take a second for that?

Can we just need a Brock? Yeah. I'm saying, we just needed some like, you know, like, mouthy redhead and a bustier to come in and be like, your family deserves justice. And people would be like, wow, she's hot and right. Yeah. Anyway. Alas, that is not what goes down.

Instead, they get off pretty much scot-free. It is worth noting what an outrageous prophet former Nazi Heinrich Muckter made on felidimite. Between 1952 and 1961, his salary was only 14,400 marks per year. In 1957, the year felidimite went on sale, he received a bonus based on his share of sales of 160,000 marks. In 1959, he received a 200,000 mark bonus. In 1961, his bonus was 325,000 marks. Grudenthal is still a very profitable company today.

They were eventually shamed into throwing another pittance at felidimite victims in like 2012. That same year, they made a public apology to the victims of their drug. And the CEO unveiled a bronze statue of a limbless child in front of their headquarters. No. I know. That's like the most fucked up part of it. Why would you think that would help? We took all those heinous photos and we just enshrined it and go.

And it's there forever. There's like Flipper Kid. That's like, that is- This'll make it, right? It's so funny. It's like a weird attempt at becoming woke for a pharma company to lean into the birth defects that they cause. Like, no, dude, you're not like, yay, disability rights, motherfucker, you did this. You can't just champion children who don't have ears now.

It's awesome. And I need to read you an excerpt from his apology because it's- Sure. We've heard a lot of bad apologies the last couple of years. This might be the worst. This might be the worst apology I've ever heard. We ask for forgiveness that for nearly 50 years, we didn't find a way of reaching out to you from human being to human being.

We ask that you regard our long silence as a sign of the shock that your fate caused in us. We wish the Thithilitha my tragedy had never- We denied you money and fought to make it illegal for you to sue us because we were so shocked at how badly we'd fucked you up. It took us a good- That's all it was. We were so scared of what we did to you that we couldn't do anything right to make it right. You were traumatized by the trauma we inflicted.

We're victims too. We're victims by how scary you look because of the things we did to you. Because you're like so gross. Like, amazing apology, incredible apology. You took us at least a piece of shit. Pull our jaws off the ground once we saw what you look like. Like 60 years, actually. Oh my God, it's- Okay, so was there a lot of money?

Are we talking about- The company should be dissolved for the amount- I mean, I agree. I'm a big believer that when companies do stuff like this, and this should have been the case for cigarette companies, you know, when it was found that they'd done all the fucked up shit, it should be the case for ExxonMobil, and Shell, and BP. Cough, Monsanto. When you find- Yeah, Monsanto, well, yeah, and fucking Sackler, the Sackler Purdue Pharmaceuticals, that the actual right punishment, in addition to charges against the individuals, you charge

the company, since corporations are human beings, you charge them with murder and you execute them. And that means you, like, literally dissolve and destroy the company. If there's one benefit to corporations being human beings- Why not? Yeah. It's that they can be executed. I 100% agree.

Yeah, I think the Grunen-Tall corporation should have been dragged out behind a shed and shot with a bolt gun. It's hard for me to believe that this was the only medicine they marketed under false pretenses that killed people or led to horrible birth defects. I mean, I think there's other complaints about the company, but yeah, it's hard to be up on the same level as Thalidomide, which is considered to be one of the great, up until fucking oxy, was like the number one pharmaceutical disaster in history, pretty much. Wow.

It's good shit. That's rich. Anyway, brought to you by Ambien. Look, Ambien, it's not Thalidomide. You will go on a sleepwalking rage about, I don't know, lizard people, but look, it's not Thalidomide. Ambien, it'll be funny for your friends. That's the terrible thing, isn't it?

So no one saw any more four-year sentences? No. No, nobody went to prison as a result of this. Dr. Mukter retired while the as are the rest of the Nazis who worked there. The good die young, the bad die very, very old. The good die young because they're born without fucking crucial organs as a result of Thalidomide poisoning. The full circle on Nazis killing babies is, I mean, yeah.

It's incredible in this story. You just do. Yeah. Classic Nazis. Well, Francesca, that's going to do it for us here at Behind the Bastards today. Thank you so much, Robert. Now I'm going to go Google these images of children and cremes up to sleep. I mean, it's not great.

I mean, because to be quite frank, the birth defects or whatever that go viral, like people who don't have Thalidomide get stuff like that as well. The thing that's particular, number one that's horrible is that these wouldn't have happened without Thalidomide as opposed to it just being some quirk of genetics that makes it happen. But the other thing is that a lot of kids aren't able to live because they're born without things that they need to live. It's like one thing is like, yeah, your hands are different.

We can figure out ways to make that work. Like, you don't have all of your legs. We can figure out ways for you to live a full life. If you're born without lungs and shit, it's more difficult. There's not really an easy way to deal with that. And that's in addition to the fact that Thalidomide, there was just a shitload of kids who would not have been born with any sort of differences or difficulties if they hadn't. This whole story is very like, it is like if you give a mouse a cookie, but it's more

like if you hire a Nazi scientist. Yeah. If you hire a Nazi scientist, they will do Nazi shit. He's probably going to do Nazi shit. And then sort of... Because they are... I mean, look. Yeah.

What did you expect? Yeah, that's exactly the musical sting for Thalidomide. We should... I mean, it should be... This is definitely the next chapter of understanding the Holocaust is also understanding what happens when you hire the people that did the Holocaust to do other things. Which is why they all should have been tossed into a mass grave after being shot in the face.

Oh, you worked for the... You worked with the SS in any capacity. Off you go. Time to kill you. Right. Unless you're like one of the nine SS guys who were secretly helping concentration camp inmates. There were a few of those dudes.

Their stories are important. But unless you're one of those like, again, like nine dudes. Off you go. Put a bullet in your head. Kill them all. It's like, if you're going to be part of a murderous regime, work your way up, bro. Because, you know, if you're successful enough, again, you're going to land on your feet. I mean, the lesson here is you want to be mid-level when you're part of an organization

that commits unprecedented war crimes. You want to be in the middle. You want to be like the nougat center in the snickers of crimes against humanity. Because then you don't... Don't be a peanut. Everyone knows the Mengele. The peanut stands out. Like, yeah.

Absolutely. You're definitely going to get it. It was a peanut. Yeah. Yeah, fucking... Eichmann is a peanut, right? The fuck Israel went after him. Right.

Like, we spent so much money catching Eichmann. Nobody's going after Dr. Muckter because he's, again, nicely mid-level. That's where you want to be, baby. Just a nondescript evil nougat. Yeah. Yeah. Again, some advice to our listeners who are considering taking part in a genocidal death regime.

Stick to the middle, baby. That's the safe place. The squeaky reel occasionally gets hung after a war crime's tribunal. That's the lesson here. Or... Occasionally. Honestly, not that often. You're probably fine if you're at the top of it either.

We do not as a species like punishing war criminals. So that's good. That is good. This has been fascinating. I've learned a lot. I got to sing a children's song. Thank you, Robert. You did.

You did. Oh, my God. What are you going to plug? Let's plug the Bituation Room podcast for a weekly little rundown of the news with some jokes. I love jokes. And somehow is less dark than this podcast. Low bar.

Yeah. That's true of most podcasts. Yeah. I'm such a fan, Robert, and it was so good to be on, though, man. Someone's got to do this. Thank you for coming on. We have done a lot of horrible crimes against babies episodes recently. So thanks for...

So, child soldiers, arm a baby, y'all. Well, OK. Look, you have kids, right? They're going to find a way to have like a toy gun. Kids love toy guns. They're going to find a way into your guns. Give them real guns and have them fight your wars. Yeah.

What are you saying, Robert? All I'm saying, right? You're leaving money on the table if you're not weaponizing your children. That's all I'm saying. Right? Already is caught on to that. Like... I know.

I know. Half of the people outside of abortion clinics with bloody fetus signs are actual fetuses themselves. They are babies doing their parents' work. Yes. I more mean like an army of babies to do like retribution on Nazis and Nazi profiteers. If you could train a baby to kill, they could get into like they could crawl through crawl spaces really easily.

They can get into areas full-size adults can't. And they're harder to hit if you're shooting back at them. I think there's a lot of untapped potential in, you know... So he's like, we got to edit a lot of this out. Child soldiers. Yeah. We should probably call it for the week. But if you have, if you're a billionaire listening to this and you want to invest in my private

military contracting corporation that only hires children of the age of nine, hit me up at Blackwater Types. That's what we're calling it. Lil, Lil Blackwater. Lil Blackwater. Lil Blackwater. But cute. Yeah.

Lil Halliburton. Yeah. Why not just Lil versions of all the Lil, Lil Rathion, Bape Theon? Bape Theon is, yes. We'll work it out. We'll work it out. All right. This has been Behind the Bastards.

Thank you, Francesca. Check out the Bituation Room. Check out my novel at atrbook.com. It's free. Yeah. My kittens are crying in the background. Yeah. They're not going to get it because I'm bad.

And scene. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of goods. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then, for sure, he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space, with no country to bring him down.

With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest?

I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.