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

Episode Date: July 10, 2025

World War 2 is coming to an end, and Eichmann cooks up an escape scheme that allows him to flee justice- for a while. Robert and Joe talk about what comes next and conclude the Eichmann story.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Oh my goodness gracious Jiminy Christmas, it's behind the bastards, a podcast about Adolf Eichmann for the last two weeks, Mr. Holocaust himself as I shouldn't have titled these episodes. What's wrong with me? Whatever is wrong with me. We don't have enough time for that. Whatever, yeah, whatever is wrong with me, it's not what's wrong with our guest for today, Joe Kasabian, who actually is a very similar kind of person in some ways, but anyway, Joe, welcome to the show.

Hello. What is wrong with us? Why do we do this? Not enough time. I don't know. I don't know. All I know is that we're talking about friend of the pod, Adolf Eichmann, who is the head of the Jewish desk for genocide at the SD at this point. He has prior in the previous episodes established himself as the czar of the Jews, partly by

taking credit for a lot of acts of genocide that he actually didn't orchestrate or that he had a smaller part in. You know, he's been kind of pissing off a lot of his colleagues prior to this point by lying about what he's done and taking credit for shit they've done. And now we're at the point in the war where things are bad enough that everyone's like, Oh, yeah, that shit I did. Eichmann definitely did it. This was absolutely him, right? And they're going from being like throwing his name around to get shit done, to being like, oh Eichmann?

I hardly know him, you know? Eichmann showing up at the Nazi table to see if everybody could like show off their ranks of war crimes to find out he's the only one still doing it. Like, aw fuck! Oh yeah, it's all on you, huh buddy? I would have done that too, because I know

he would have taken credit for it Yeah, yeah, it's like look man. You've been stealing my content for years now. You could have it. Yeah, Heinrich Himmler's like hey you want my coat Yeah, buddy This is an I heart podcast Hello, I'm John Lithgow. I want to tell you about my new fiction podcast. About Buzz Aldrin, one of the true pioneers of space. You're a great pilot, Buzz.

That's the story you think you know. This is the story you don't. Buds, starring me, John Lithgow. On the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. How could a beautiful young first grade teacher be stabbed 20 times, including in the back, allegedly die of suicide? Yes, that was the medical examiner's official ruling. After a closed-door meeting, he first named it a homicide. Why? What happened to Ellen Greenberg?

A huge American miscarriage of justice. For an in-depth years of the war, SS perpetrators, particularly the crew of men around Eichmann would go through a rapid process of flipping from Wanting the Holocaust to be on their CVs to wanting to hide their involvement And this was often done by pinning their own actions on Eichmann who was their most famous co-worker in the field of genocide He's the he's the Alan Smithy or whatever that that fake director name that you like put on a movie if you don't want your Name on it. He's the Alan Smithy of genocide. When you're like, yeah, let's just say he did it. The allies consciously sought to spook top Nazis

in the final years of the war. And it's very fair to critique the allies, to critique Roosevelt, to critique even Eisenhower of not doing enough to put a stop to the Holocaust because they don't. They absolutely don't. Oh yeah, absolutely. Choices were made not to bomb railroads and they knew what was happening. They had reports.

This is on them, right? It's part of why Eisenhower acts so strongly to document what had happened afterwards is he feels bad. He knows he could have done more, right? They all do. And they straight up refused to bomb Auschwitz when there was an agent inside, I'm probably mispronouncing his name, but Vito Polecki, like begged them to bomb it. It's like, look, we would all rather die.

Stop it now. Right. Yeah. That was the underground take inside the camp. We would rather all fucking die. Yes. Please blow this place up with us in it. If it stops.

And they just said no. Yeah. And they said no. One thing the allies do do that does save some lives, not enough, but some, is they start broadcasting the names of SS mass murderers on the legal radio stations that are broadcasting into occupied territory, saying, we know who you are.

And if you cut the shit off right now, you might have a chance of surviving post-war. Ye olde doxing. Right, some number of guys are like, yeah, I'm gonna pull back a little bit, right? And that does save some number of lives, not nearly enough, but it's a thing that they're doing, right?

And this is partly why people start pulling back and letting Eichmann take more credit and trying to, cause they're like, oh, I heard my name on the radio. That's not good. Have you heard how fast the Russians are advancing? Shit. I am already running West. Yeah, yeah. Expunging the evidence of their own complicity

and putting it on Eichmann was made easier by the fact that the self-proclaimed czar of the Jews seemed to have no overt sense of self-preservation or desire to deny his role even once it became clear that this was gonna be bad for him. He must have noticed the rapid change among his colleagues. Bettina Stangneth writes that in the last year of the war, his friends stopped meeting him for lunch.

Quote, even though the, and I love this part, even though the canteen in Eichmann's office building was one of the few to have remained untouched by the air raids, right? He's the only guy in the working kitchen and we won't go to lunch with him. That's how bad his position is. Sad Eichmann sitting alone at lunch.

Yeah, does no one know that my kitchen is still working? You guys want to trade my mom while we pack the PP and J? Yeah, and they are all starving and they're like, nah, but I'm not going to eat there, bro. Like, you don't want to be seen next to that motherfucker, right? Fuck that, I'm boiling my boots.

This sucks. He is so toxic, people will give up the guarantee of a full belly to avoid being seen You don't wanna be seen next to that motherfucker, right? Fuck that, I'm boiling my boots. This sucks. He is so toxic, people will give up the guarantee of a full belly to avoid being seen next to him. He would later complain about the whiplash of being dumped so unceremoniously by the whole SS elite and complain that a few years earlier, people couldn't do enough to invite me

to minister's meetings or to unofficial meetings, private dinners and such like. But once the Russians broke through in Poland, he became a sort of ghost, right? He's like, man, a year ago, two years ago, I was at every dinner. No one even wants to eat at my place anymore. We used to be cool, man.

What happened? What happened, right? For his part, while Eichmann didn't seek to erase his own record, he did later claim that he spent the last months of the war engaged just in simple logistics tasks, right? Oh, I wasn't doing any more genocide at this point. I was trying to make sure enough food made it into Berlin for the defenders, right? That my office had enough defenses for the fighting, right?

Like I wasn't involved in anything horrible, right? Just normal war stuff. This is a lie. By the end of 44, even the most deluded SS officials knew their goose was cooked and also they had no more goose to eat. A decision was made- And no more goose to step. Yeah, there's no more goose to step or to eat. A decision was made that even if the war against the Allies

was going to be lost, they still had to win the war against the Jews. Therefore, the killing would continue right up until the last possible minute. Even if, and they make the choice, trains with critical war materiel are diverted from propping up the front line to the task of sending Jews to death camps. They choose the high command, Hitler and the military press, choose the Holocaust over delaying the Russians. Outstanding. Well done, boys. Yeah. Heinrich Himmler personally approved such actions, and he had one-on-one meetings with

Eichmann to ensure that Eichmann was properly briefed and supported to manage this task. While Hitler retreated to his bunker and travel within the Reich grew increasingly dangerous, Eichmann spent the last months of the war on the move constantly. Stagnath writes, Eichmann was involved in the very last extermination campaign, the gassing of Ravensbruck concentration camp. On January 26, 1945, Otto Moll's notorious special commando was sent to the camp with its gas vans, and gas chambers were also erected there. One of his duties, Eichmann's duties, was to gather up famous Jews and turn to different lower security camps.

Some prominent intellectuals and celebrities had been kept in comparatively survivable accommodations in places like Theresienstadt, which is Theresienstadt is like the nice concentration camp. And as we'll say, I don't mean it was a nice place. I mean it was the best of the camps to be in, right? If memory serves me correctly, it was the one that they set up to bring the Red Cross to. Yes, that's what we're about to talk about. That's Eichmann's job, right? And this is Theresienstadt is comparatively nice because as you said, it's meant to be a show camp

that you can display to the internet. Death camps? No! These are just camps for like political, you know, we've got to have, everyone has some of these, right? And that's true. It's just a labor camp for the undesirables.

England has concentration camps for Germans, right? They're not death camps. They're just constant And there's a difference between the two right? You're just concentrating people in a concentration camp And that's the Germans are like no our camp is just like what the English have for Germans, right? These are people who are politically unreliable, but we're not killing them. No, right? We would never do that This is why if you're a Jew who's internationally famous and gets caught, obviously a good number of those people do get killed, but a lot of them are put into reason stat for a while because, well, people are going to want to know what's happened to this guy. And if we can show him or her into reason stat, it'll keep the international community from

thinking things are as bad as they are. Right? Yeah. And we can handle them later. And yeah, we will handle them. Again, a lot of these people, they could kill, they're just kept there for a while, right? And these same prominent Jews that it was hoped might provide leverage for men like Himmler, right? Once the war gets laid off, they're like, well, now we don't want to kill these guys. But like, if we've got these famous Jews that we've kept kind of in the fridge, right? They're preserved. We can maybe trade them to let guys like Himmler escape, right? You know, we'll trade them to the Allies post-war to keep our own asses safe. Oh man, I don't think there's anybody famous enough for that to work.

No, no, not by the end of this shit. Nope. Eichmann's job then is to both ensure some of these people are safe and also you have to convince them to keep their mouths shut about the murders they'd witnessed. For example, after that last gassing at Ravensbruck, Eichmann transfers several women from Ravensbruck to Theresienstadt in February of 1945, and he meets with them personally,

to basically be like, hey, y'all are gonna live. The Red Cross is going to come here soon. What did you see at Ravensbruck, right? You didn't see any genocide, did you? Did you? And let me remind you, this is a pinky swear. Yeah, yeah, this is a pinky swear, right? You wouldn't break a pinky swear to Eichmann, would you?

One of these women, Charlotte Salzberger, required Eichmann questioning her in a very polite manner about the extermination. His fame was such that even without, he doesn't introduce himself as Adolf Eichmann, but he's famous enough that she guesses who he is, right? She later says, quote, "'We knew who Eichmann was, even in a Holland.

"'We knew he was a man who used a lot of Yiddish "'and Hebrew expressions, and there was also a rumor "'that he spoke Hebrew and was born in Sarona. "'This was very clear from the way he spoke,' right? "'Cause there are rumors that he's basically Jewish "'and that's why he knows all this stuff.'" Yeah. Right, right. He's had those rumors for a while now.

Yeah. He spent some time asking them inconsequential details about their lives. Be like, so what were you up to? How are you? Like try to be friendly, right? He tries to be good cop before he pivots to the bad cop part of his routine.

How was your weekend? How was your weekend? Death campy. This is a nice place, right? We got you some chocolate last week, right? Everything's been good, huh? After this he pivots to the bad cop part of his routine He told us we now had the right to go to the Theresienstadt ghetto But if we said anything about our experiences in Ravensbruck or about anything we knew then you will this was the phrase

He used be going up the chimney Oof God. Yeah, he's he's still our Eichmann, you know chimney. Oof, God. Yeah, he's still our Eichmann, you know? Within days of this, Eichmann himself was in Theresienstadt to prepare for what would be the last visit by the International Committee of the Red Cross. So again, Eichmann is the guy who is show managing these Red Cross visits at the camp. While being internationally famous for murdering millions of people.

Yes, it's already known that he's doing a lot of this and as I noted before this was the nice concentration camp Nazi propaganda describes to reason stat as being located in a spa town where elderly Jews could retire right We're sending him to a fucking spa you're calling us genocide come on Everybody's gonna leave there with their hair all redone and like, you know, veneers in. It's gonna be great. It's the shit you saw with Abrego Garcia where they gave him like water and a glass

with salt on the rim to be like, he's drinking margaritas in El Salvador. Come on. Ah, yeah. So some famous Jewish internees are kept there, but the camp is also used as a transit camp for Czech Jews on their way to the killing centers. So this is not a nice place by any means. So, some famous Jewish internees are kept there, but the camp is also used as a transit camp for Czech Jews on their way to the killing centers.

So this is not a nice place by any objective standards. In 1942 alone, so many people were dying due to starvation and disease at Theresienstadt that the Nazis built a crematorium capable of handling 200 bodies a day. Roughly, and again, this is the nice concentration camp. 33,000 Jews die in Theresienstadt itself. And this is the nice place. Yeah. Jesus. I just, I can't exaggerate how bad all of this is. Even accounting for this, the living

conditions there are still better than everywhere else because Eichmann and his colleagues, they don't want it nice all of the time, but you've got to be able to clean it up enough that at a moment's notice you can take the authorities there, right? So it can't get too bad. I mean, the bar is so low in all of the other camps. It doesn't have to be good at Harrison's Dot other than like, well, they ate today. Yeah. If we get the corpses out of here, it looks okay, right?

In early 1945, his main concern was that rumors of the death camps had percolated widely within the community of Jews being held there. And Eichmann did not want those rumors getting to anyone at the Red Cross. And you can't make some of this shit up. You wanna guess what day they picked for this Red Cross visit to Theresienstadt? April 1st.

You are literally right! Yes! I mean, oh no. April Fool's Day, 1945, is when Eichmann personally meets Red Cross representative Hans Donant and announces himself to be, quote, the direct agent of the Reichsführer SS for all Jewish questions. They literally pick April Fool's Day, right? It's so fucked. This is my least favorite thing I've ever been right about. Thank you, Robert. So, as soon as Eichmann meets with this guy,

he gives a kind of rambling diatribe about his theories, are we the Jewish question, and his now ended plan. He's like, yeah, we're gonna make a reservation for these guys, you know? Like America did with the Native Americans, we're not gonna kill them. Have you guys ever heard of Oklahoma?

Yeah, we're gonna do that. Right, obviously the United States killed a lot. We did a genocide, several of them against them. Oh boy, did we. But the average European wouldn't call what we did a genocide in this stage, in part because the war doesn't exist yet, right? To be fair, the average American today

says it's not a genocide. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this is the way, they're trying to be like, no, what we're doing is no worse than what the Americans did, right? That's all that we're trying to do here. And what's weird though is that Eichmann also tells this guy, you know, Himmler supports the humane treatment of Jews in Nazi custody.

And I don't entirely agree with my boss here, but I'm following orders, right? So I'm keeping things nice too. Which is such a weird line for him to write being like, actually, Himmler wants the Jews to be treated well and I think he's kind of crazy, but you know, that's what I'm doing anyway. It's such a weird line. Imagine being told this as a red cross worker by a man wearing a skull and crossbones on his hat.

Yeah, the skull and crossbones by literally Adolf Eichmann. You're just rolling your eyes so fucking hard. Now, so I bring this up to point out there's very little sign at all that the Tsar of the Jews has any plans to flee from justice before the fall of the regime. And this is one time where we have to give Eichmann credit

for being a lot smarter than his colleagues because this is part of his tactic, right? That he's not dumb, he's not actually, it seems like, wow, he's either so committed that he's ready to die, he's just trying to kill as many guys as possible, or he's really stupid for not trying to get his name off of stuff and to Get out what he's doing is actually smarter than all of his colleagues

He knows your fault your idiots for thinking you can escape this anyone at my level is a fool for thinking that you can get Away, I'm going to take I'm going to hide by pretending to be the guy that I've been pretending to be up until the last minute here so that no one, none of my colleagues expect that I am setting up secret plans to get out, right? But he is. The whole time- That's a good point. Where he's doing this, he is making plans. He's getting fake identities printed.

He's using like SS. The SS has a printing press for fake IDs. He's getting multiple fake IDs. He's making an exit plan with his wife and with his dad to hide out in the countryside under a new name, like in the last stages of the war. He'd started laying the groundwork for his escape months earlier when he lied to close colleague Dieter Wislinski, who's a member of the SD, and who would later try to sell

Eichmann out to the Allies. Eichmann knows, well, Wislinski's a worm. He's gonna sell me out the instant he can. So he tells Wislinski, you know, I actually cut ties with my dad and my family years ago. They don't believe in all this Nazi stuff as much as I do. So I'm not even in touch with them anymore.

Now, the reality is Eichmann's father is a committed fascist, right? And Eichmann's still close to his dad. But by doing this, Wislinski will tell the allies, oh no, he wasn't really in contact with his family. Right? Which is who he's going to be relying on. Eichmann would also, so there's this guy, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who is an Arab

nationalist and a Muslim leader with deep Nazi sympathies. And he spends a lot of World War II hiding out in the Third Reich. And he is super on board the genocide. Eichmann lies a lot and pretends that he and the Mufti are really close. They have nothing more than like a passing connection, right? They're not actually that tight, which isn't, I'm not saying that to say

that the Mufti isn't, the Mufti is a monster, right? It seems like a real piece of shit. He and Eichmann don't know each other well, but Eichmann pretends they're close friends. And at the end of the war, he's telling Wyslinski and his other colleagues, I'm gonna flee to the Middle East. The Mufti has got my back. pretends they're close friends. And at the end of the war, he's telling Wyslinski and his other colleagues, I'm gonna flee to the Middle East.

The Muftis got my back. I'm gonna hide out somewhere like Syria, right? Which some guys in the SS do. And so when Wyslinski starts being questioned by the allies, he's like, oh no, his family wouldn't hide him. They hated him. He's got some connection with the Mufti. He's fleeing for the Middle East, right?

You gotta start looking for him there or trying to make his way there, right? So Eichmann has seeded a false story for his plans for the escape with his colleagues in the SS Knowing they're all going to rat on him. He wants them ratting and he wants them giving up the wrong info Of course, he knows that they're pieces of shit. They're in the SS Yeah, he works with these assholes. He knows how much they suck You guys stop doing lunch with me. You're all fake friends anyway He works with these assholes. He knows how much they suck. You guys stop doing lunch with me. You're all fake friends anyway.

Yeah, he knows they're fake friends. And you don't want to give it to a guy like Ikeman, but he's really smart here. He knows this is very, very intelligent and it's going to work extraordinarily well. Game recognize game. He knows what kind of pieces of shit the SS is full of. He's one of them.

He's one of them. He's the worst of them, right? Yeah. Through all of this, he vocally expounds upon his commitment to the Nazi cause and the genocide he's orchestrating so no one will expect that he's planning to flee or that he's been lying to them. He takes to posing with guys like Himmler in pictures carrying his service revolver. He hadn't really needed to wear a gun. He starts wearing it, being like, I'm an old fighter, I'm gonna go down shooting, you know? When this ends, I'm gonna die on the field, you know, in the last minute that I can, still loyal to the cause.

In his last meeting with his subordinates in Berlin, he told them, if it has to be, I will gladly jump into my grave in the knowledge that five million enemies of the Reich have already died like animals." Right? He's really telling them, I'm happy to die because I killed five million people, you know? So I can go out with my conscience clear.

Now this is a lie. He was committed to killing those people, but he doesn't want to die. He's going to do whatever he can to escape. So April 1st is when the Red Cross visits Theresienstadt. Hitler dies at the very end of April, the same month that had begun with that show tour. Peace and an end to the war in Europe is not far behind. By the point that Hitler kills himself, Eichmann has already disappeared into the mass of Nazi war prisoners under a new name.

He just bounces one day, destroys his old info, picks up one of these fake IDs, and starts living under a new name, Adolf Carl Barth. Now his last order that he had gotten as Eichmann was given by his childhood friend, Kaltenbrunner. And Kaltenbrunner had told him, you're going to go and carry on this guerrilla struggle in the Alps, right? We're gonna keep on fighting, you know, in the mountains.

We'll hold out till the last. And Eichmann's like, yeah, totally, absolutely and then he just leaves one day, shows up in new clothes and like gets taken prisoner, right? As like a low ranking enlisted member of the SS. So he gets put in a POW camp with all of these thousands and thousands of other low ranking SS guys. And while he's in the camp, he actually transitions and destroys that old ID and takes on yet another new ID.

And there's a couple of reasons for this, but he starts going by, he had been pretending to be Karl Barth, who's this enlisted member of the SS, and he upgrades himself to an officer, to Untersturmführer Otto Eichmann. Now the logic of this was both, first off, Barth, pretty far off from Eichmann. If somebody recognizes me and calls out Eichmann, I could be like, Eichmann, Eichmann, no, no,

I'm Eichmann, yeah, yeah, yeah, Eichmann, that's me, right? It's smart, right? Like it's close enough that it won't draw suspicion if he like responds to the name Eichmann or something. And the other reason that he upgrades from being enlisted to a low ranking officer in the SS is that as an officer, he doesn't have to do labor on a daily basis. I fucking knew it. I knew that was going to happen.

I knew he was going to switch himself to be either a Wehrmacht officer or an SS officer because no labor and better treatment. Yeah. And for the record, most of the SS, most of the Einsatzgruppe, even the officers, get off essentially scot-free after the war. Oh, of course. Yeah. I am of the opinion we should have executed every member of the SS.

Yeah, for sure. As well as every member of every person in government in the Nazi state. There were so many more people we should have killed that we didn't. If you wanted to be embraced by something warm and nice, just know that most of the ones that fell into Soviet captivity died horribly. Yes, and in this case, you do have to give it to the Soviets. Like the fact that we let so many of these guys off is why this kind of shit keeps happening, right?

Like 99% of SS men got away with a little more than a slap on the wrist and a quote unquote rehabilitation process. If there had been another million or two that had been taken out by the allies after this, because there were that many who directly took part in the Holocaust, these deserve more. More than that. You could have justified even more. Maybe this wouldn't have kept happening, right?

Maybe there would have been enough of a warning, you know, but we don't, we let most of these guys off. Hey, and you know, once you, once you cut in, you know, but we don't. We let most of these guys off. Hey, and you know, once you cut in, you know, take away the clean Wehrmacht myth, you got a whole lot of Germans to kill and you'd still be all right with it. And I know I would be. Yeah, and part of what's so fucked up here

is that like, this shows how soft we are on these guys. The fact that just by being like, no, I'm an SS officer. Well, of course you don't have to labor in the prisoner of war camp. As an officer, why would we make an SS officer work? Yeah, he's course you don't have to labor in the prisoner of war camp as an officer. Why would we make an SS officer work? That's not how this is done. He's a gentleman.

You can't make him do hard labor. So you might expect working something like this out where he's like shifting identities well in a POW camp to be hard, but it really wasn't. His father outside the camp is able to fetch these forged documents that he'd squirreled away for him and smuggle them to him. And because all of the central records in Breslau

had been destroyed at the end of the war, there's not a lot of, no one can find out that this guy wasn't real, right? Eichmann had made sure that Eichmann's birthday was exactly one year later than his. So it's not hard to remember. He doesn't have to like keep it in his mind. It's his own birthday.

It's just a year later. You're just pretending you're a year younger. In the immediate wake of the war's end, most of the top players in the Nazi party like Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels were dead. Now, Hermann Göring is in custody, along with a handful of other Reich notables. By far the largest Nazi in the wind at the war's end was Eichmann, who was noted by the Jewish Agency for Palestine as being the highest ranking wanted Nazi as of June 8th, 1945. So everyone is very aware, everyone who cares about the Holocaust is very aware. This Eichmann guy is a real big deal and he's in the wind and something needs to be done about it. Right? So that is known from the jump.

And there's a, there's a few Nazis that at the end of the war, they did just vanish and people thought they could have done a runner like everyone else, but then they just came, it was like. I think Alfred Rosenberg is one of those guys. Yeah. Yeah. And they're like, oh, they're just one of the thousands of people who died in fighting and just namelessly died on the side of like a fucking dog.

Yeah. I may be getting the name wrong. Yeah. There's a lot of, there are some high rates. Cause like, yeah, you were in Berlin at the end and like, it's not easy to get out, right? It's pretty dangerous place. Man. So, you know who didn't escape Berlin at the end of 1945? Mitsubishi.

That is right. They were pretty far away from Berlin. Let's not talk about what else Mitsubishi was doing. Oh, God no. So we're back. Oh my goodness. Just like Mitsubishi, you know, we're back and we're cleansed of whatever crimes

that we were implicated in previously, right? All we made was engines, guys. Come on, all IG Farben made was medicine and some other, you know, some Zyklon B, a little bit. You know, not all that much. Just a little bit. Just a little bit. Look, I was all on board with the Mitsubishi rehabilitation

till they came out with the Model 731. There's a little two on the nose. Jesus Christ. Oh, guys. So it had become clear by June 8th, 1945 that there are going to be war crimes trials. And the World Jewish Congress asked later that month for Eichmann to be tried as one of the main architects

of the Holocaust. Since he was missing, allied prosecutors had to interrogate his former friends like Wislinski, who sang like a canary and blamed all of his own crimes on Eichmann, right? He made me do it. I didn't want to be in the SS. This is all Eichmann. What a dick.

We all hate him, right? Everybody would agree with me. Everybody hates him. You guys should get him. Yeah, you should get him. I'm basically a victim. He was so mean to me. Like, you don't even know.

So while Eichmann is interned as Ekman, there were attempts to catch hiding war criminals within the massive SS prisoners. The allies know some of the big dudes are in this massive kit like prisoners that we got to get. Some of them are hiding as Wehrmacht prisoners, right? He later recalled the days when quote, Jewish commissions would visit the camp.

Quote, we had to line up. They sized me up. Yes, seeing if they could spot any mugs they recognized. We had to line up by company and there was a commission of maybe 15 of these and then he uses a slur. They went carefully up and down the rows, staring each of us right in the kisser, yes, me too, right in the mug, all smiles. We weren't allowed to speak or we'd have called them all kinds of names. And when they were done, two steps forward and onto the next line, right?

And he recalls this later while he's like in fucking Argentina with a sneering sort of arrogant glee that like they had me, they were face to face with me and they couldn't catch me. Ha ha ha ha. Now this is true that he does get away, that he is like that close to these guys and they miss him, but he's also, he doesn't feel safe, right?

He doesn't actually feel like, no, this is a very dangerous position for him. Part of why is that the comradliness, a lot of these guys in the SS know, Ekman is in our company? I don't remember there being an Ekman in our company. This guy must, there's something sketchy here, right? All these guys got captured together

They were probably in units together They probably didn't know each other all that long due to you know, all the mass casualties, right? But they were at least familiar as one another and now this guy comes in as opposite about this Ekman guy was that guy your Commander he wasn't my commander. You remember Ekman being around? I don't remember Eichmann. Sounds like Eichmann a lot, you know? He looks fucking familiar. You know, in the war, these guys are all comrades. We're all on the same side, right?

And that comradliness between Nazis burns up very quickly after the regime falls and its crimes become impossible to deny. There are enough soldiers in the camp who know that this guy isn't who he says he was, and they don't feel safe there. So Eichmann begins to arrange his escape. I want to be clear that Eichmann's fame, which he had aggressively cultivated, was the only

reason that he was in danger here. The Allies did not consider the Holocaust a priority in terms of prosecution. During the Nuremberg trial, only one man was assigned to documenting and charging prisoners over the genocide. Stangneth notes, quote, the prosecution was also cautious about placing too much emphasis on Jewish affairs for fear of being criticized by their own countries. So during Nuremberg, we're like,

oh, we don't wanna do that much Holocaust prosecuting. Cause then our own people might say we're like being too soft on the Jews, that this is all about the Jews to us. And like, there's still a lot of anti-Semitism going around here. Just so fucking much. And this had been part of why Roosevelt doesn't do more

prior to and during the war to save Jewish people is consciously there are people in his administration, they're like, yeah, we didn't want to be seen as, we didn't want this, We were trying to work up, getting America involved in the war was hard, right? It was super controversial. And it would have been bad for our effort to get the US involved if we'd made it look like

this was all about the Jews, because they're just not popular, right? Yeah, and like similar to Churchill as well. The Nazis and fascism were wildly popular within the British upper class to include the fucking king all the way up until they got dragged into the war. And this is a thing where it's like, in terms of Roosevelt, it is like,

you wouldn't want to be in his position where it's like, well, the right thing to have done would have been to put the Holocaust first and foremost, but maybe that stops you from being able to get involved as quickly. Maybe it cuts the support you need to try and start to keep getting arms to the UK. first and foremost, but maybe that stops you from being able to get involved as quickly. Maybe it cuts the support you need to try and start to keep getting arms to the UK.

This is a hard, I don't think he makes the right option, but everyone is so shitty, right? It's such a difficult position to be in, where you're like, well, maybe doing the right thing here makes it harder to actually beat these guys, right? That's how they're thinking. Now, by the time Nuremberg is happening, it's just cowardice, right? And lingering anti-Semitism on behalf of the allies. They're like, we don't want to be seen as being, you

know, is this all being about the Jews to us, right? So, uh, Wislinski is the guy who gives most of the testimony about Eichmann that would become a central part of Eichmann's post-war mythos as the architect of the Holocaust. As we've stated, this is an exaggeration. Wislinski makes Eichmann out to be a bigger player than he was because he's trying to protect himself. The bigger, Wislinski's like, the bigger a deal I make Eichmann,

the less likely they are to kill me. And this does not work out for Wislinski. He is extradited to Czechoslovakia and hanged for war crimes in 1948. So it doesn't work, but it does create the myth. It does help really bolster this myth in the public eye. Theodore Daniker, who had been Eichmann's right-hand man, was smarter.

He avoided capture like his boss at the end of the war until he was caught by the US Army in December of 1945. He committed suicide in a prison camp before he could go on trial. He was almost certainly going to hang as well. Oh yeah, yeah, he would have fucking hung. He was just too big, too implicated, and too much. You know, unlike Wislinski, he doesn't trick himself into believing he's got a chance. Eichmann proved remarkably successful as a fugitive. Working with a mix of a few former SS colleagues he could trust and their family members, he hid out on a farm in northern Germany.

While he lived in a rustic college and engaged in a simple peasant life, working basically as a forester, right? He's doing like lumber work. What remained of the Third Reich's leadership went on trial. Eichmann's name came up repeatedly in segments of Nuremberg that dealt with the Holocaust. Wislinski blamed his old boss for being abusive and violent and basically was like, he threatened me into doing it. Oh my God, shut up you fucking bitch.

Another SS man, I think his first name was Otto Ollendorf, entered into the record Eichmann's claim that he would leap laughing into the pit of hell because he'd killed six million Jews, right? That's where we get that quote first, is Ohlendorf being like, "'That's how bad Eichmann was, he said this.'" You guys should go get him, Phil, not me.

And it's, Gering is really the only member of the Nazi high command who like, doesn't do what Wislinski does, where he's like trying to throw everyone under the bus, right? Gering states while he's watching Wislinski on trial, this Wislinski is just a little swine who looks like a big one because Eichmann isn't here.

Eichmann is no longer there either. Three months after escaping the prison camp, Eichmann is registered under a new name, Otto Hinninger. He just turned 40. He managed to stay employed, working for a lumber company and lived alone, a thing Wyslinski told Allied interrogators his boss could never do.

Wyslinski says, anyone who knows Eichmann knows he's too cowardly to be alone. So we see how well Eichmann's cultivation of a fake personality has worked to protect him. He really lied to the right guys. Yeah. Yeah, it's unfortunate how good he is at this. Yeah, it is impressive that he was able to hide effectively and played

the sights. And I do wonder if he was only able to get away with this because the people that I mean, of course, he trusted some SS men, but the people that knew him as this fake person also kind of knew he was Eichmann. Yeah, yeah, yeah. also kinda knew he was Eichmann. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So by April of 1946, his friend Kaltenbrunner had taken the stand and claimed that Eichmann was the man who carried out the whole extermination operation

against the Jews. Now again, Kaltenbrunner's his boss. Kaltenbrunner brings him into the SS, right? It's foolish. Yeah, it's all him. He did it all by himself. It was the craziest thing. Yeah, it's all him. Oh, he did it all by himself. Yeah craziest thing. Yeah, he was so fast Now this was a massive exaggeration, but it's one that sticks lying does not however save Kaltenbrunner

He's executed in October of 46, but it serves to continue building the Eichmann legend Rudolph Hess former commandant at Auschwitz adds to this legend by crediting Eichmann with helping to decide to use Zyklon B to gas inmates. We never would have come up with that idea without Eichmann. Yeah, I was trying to make a summer camp until he came around. I was just trying to give people veneers. Yeah, the only guy in this like- I love Joe's obsession with veneers. Yeah, veneers.

It's a health spa. Only Julius Stryker, who is the Nazi propagandist, we've covered him on this show, and he gets executed for war crimes. He's the only guy here to give an honest account, being like, fuck it, I've never even heard of this dude. I've been supposed to be the chief anti-Semite. I'm the chief anti-Semite, I don't even know his name. Right?

He's like offended. Fuck this guy, but there's a certain amount of respect given. It's like, no, he knows he's going to die no matter what. At least he's not going to lie about it as he goes. He's committed to being like, he's just angry that Eichmann's getting all of the credit for the Holocaust. I'm a piece of shit. Everybody should know about it. I suck so bad hard. Why is he getting all the credit for sucking? While the legend of Eichmann takes shape,

the real man used his time in semi-captivity to start writing his memoirs. This is a bold move for a man who knows he's going to be captured and tried at any minute, or he could be, and it speaks to the fact that Eichmann is still very much a true believer, and he wants still to get credit for his work furthering a great historic cause. He thinks someday the worm will turn again and will be seen as heroes. And I have to document how cool I was during the war, right?

Pete Slauson Real Stringer Bell moments though, right? Like, are you taking notes to build a criminal conspiracy? Jared Slauson Yeah, he's taking notes on a criminal, on the Holocaust? So, while he's in hiding out, he reads voraciously about every news article on the trials. And he documents the Nazi genocide, cutting out mentions of his own name. He's cutting out the articles that mention him

and pasting them into like a scrapbook, right? While he's hiding as a forestry guy. Yeah, there's something off putting about him scrapbooking. Yeah, that he's fucking scrapbooking. He follows the growth of his legend and the increasing obsession among different Jewish organizations with finding him and bringing him to justice.

Aside from this though, he lives a normal life. He even attends a coworker's wedding in 1947 where he's photographed in this like rural location. And the fact of it is, if he's photographed in this like rural location. And the fact of it is, if he'd stayed there forever, he might've lived the rest of his life in isolation. But he doesn't wanna live in isolation. He wants to live with his wife, Vera, and raise his kids.

And they're never gonna be able to do that in Germany. Vera is under constant surveillance, right? The allies are watching her, figuring he's gonna reach out at some point and then we'll catch him, right? She is claiming at this point that she divorced Eichmann in March of 1945 and she and Eichmann's father tried to report him dead in 1947, claiming that they'd heard that he died fighting in Prague. The allies don't really buy this, but you know, that's kind of what they're attempting to do. It's not fully clear when Eichmann makes the decision to flee Europe for Argentina, but

we know that he starts the process of getting his paperwork in order in 1948. From pop culture alone, you're probably aware that a lot of Nazis escaped into Argentina after the war, and it's worth discussing why and how. The first reason is that Argentina has a long tradition of hiring German military officers to train their soldiers. This is going on way before World War II, right? So there's a lot of sympathy for Germany and for fascism in Argentina. Future dictator Juan Peron of Argentina received training in Mussolini's Italy while he was a young soldier, and was attached to the Italian army from 39 to 40. The Argentine government was formally neutral but deeply sympathetic to

Nazi Germany, as was a sizable chunk of the Catholic Church. In 1946, Cardinal Caggiano, the bishop of Rosario and leader of a far-right anti-communist Catholic action group, visited Pope Pius VII. David Cesarini writes, quote, Caggiano proposed to set up a pontifical commission of assistance that would provide identification papers for displaced persons and refugees in Europe. More precisely, Caggiano wanted to help anti-communist fascists, Nazis, and their collaborators

who were now on the run. So Caggiano goes to the Pope and is like, we have to create a humanitarian commission to help refugees from Europe, you know, get their documentation. And by refugees, he means members of the SS, right? There's a chunk of the, the Vatican agrees to this plan

and becomes a major active player in helping hundreds of SS war criminals escape, right? That's the, the Vatican is doing this. I mean, at least it's, I can't think of anything else the Vatican's ever done recently. So that's, at least they've seen the error of their ways. Really out of character for the Vatican, Jesus.

Yeah, normally they're on the up and up. Yeah, now, and this is key, Adolf Eichmann escapes Europe with the help of a Catholic Cardinal who provides him with the documents he needs. With the permission from the pope. Yeah, yeah, the cardinal is working with at least some degree of permission from the pope here. Now, to escape, Eichmann also has to enlist the services of a people smuggler and a people

smuggler who had the personal approval of Juan Peron. His identity papers were issued by Catholic Bishop Alois Hudal, who had appointed himself protector of persecuted war refugees, a term here that means Nazis who did the Holocaust. It takes two years, but Eichmann makes the journey to Argentina safely in 1950. His family follows a short time after, and they are soon living together, a facsimile of a normal life with a few compromises in light of his notoriety. Vera had to call him Otto, and he had to use a new name yet again, Ricardo Clement. But those who knew him said that

he used his real name often enough with old comrades, who now made up a sizable community in Argentina. Eichmann described his own life. The world's most cursed diaspora. Yeah, yeah. Nazi diaspora in Argentina. Yeah. Oh. And he's like, he's going by Eichmann fairly often whenever he's around Germans. It's not super hard to figure out this guy. He's not hiding at all. Oh, this guy, Ricardo Clement, whose wife calls him Otto

and who goes by Eichmann whenever he's drunk. I wonder if he's Adolf Eichmann. Must be a different guy. He lives a bucolic life in this period though. He works for a hydroelectric power station for a while and he leads survey missions deep into the mountains, exploring on horseback and climbing mountains. He takes his two young boys with him regularly

and teaches them to hike and fish and ride horses while he worked. That job eventually falls apart in the mid fifties, but he gets a better one, managing a rabbit farm, right? It's, there's a little bit of like historical symmetry here. Heinrich Himmler before joining the Nazi party is a chicken farmer, right? Yeah, yeah.

And Eichmann after the war runs a rabbit farm. Meanwhile, while they're in Argentina, his wife gives birth to two additional sons. He has to build a home with his own hands for his wife gives birth to two additional sons. He has to build a home with his own hands for his newly expanding family to live in, and they take in two dogs, a German shepherd and a dachshund. In short, he lives the kind of calm, pleasant life that his work had denied millions of European Jews.

David Cesarini writes, relations within the family were much as in any other. His sons were good looking and sociable. There was no shortage of girlfriends. Klaus had already been engaged to a local girl and took him on and was the first to marry, move out and bring grandchildren into the family. But generational relations were not smooth. Eichmann looked upon his sons as boorish,

interested only in trivial pleasures. They in turn thought he was authoritarian. Klaus told journalists in 1966, you will not believe how strict he was. Our old man was very strict. You won't believe this, but Adolf Eichmann was kind of a dick as a dad. Whoa.

Man, my dad is a real Nazi. Yeah, he's kind of a Nazi if he gets my drift. My dad Adolf Eichmann is a real Adolf Eichmann. Yeah, he's real Eichmann character. So when Cesarini's book was published in 2004, his understanding was that Eichmann didn't talk politics with his kids and forbade them from bringing anything about the family up outside of the house. This is an exaggeration, to say the least.

However, even back then, before Stagnath's book, there was documentation of Eichmann writing on the war and his connections to other old Nazis. Cesarini wrote, Eichmann writing on the war and his connections to other old Nazis. Cesarini wrote, quote, His marginalia and works that fell into the hands of investigators indicate that he remained an unrepentant Nazi. For example, he took exception to Gerhard Bolz's The Last Days of the Reich Chancellery because the author took an anti-Nazi line. At one point in the book, Eichmann scrawled in the margins, with swine like these, the

war was bound to be lost. On the end papers, he jotted down his three-line credo. It could all be summed up as duty and obedience to orders. One good friend, post-war, was the former SS Special Forces Commando Otto Skorzeny, who introduced him to a Waffen-SS veteran named William Sassen, who'd himself been tried for war crimes in absentia. These men helped to induct Eichmann into a community of unrepentant fascists, and Eichmann leaned into the reputation he'd accrued as the architect of the Holocaust.

Among these friends, it was an asset again. Eichmann and other Nazis of the Sassen set felt no need to hide their opinions from the world. Sassen starts editing a far-right German-language newspaper, Der Weg, which was so fascist that Perone's government eventually suspends it from open publication, right? Like that's how bad this is when they get heat internationally. And it was Sassen who introduced Eichmann

to the only other Nazi émigré at his level of notoriety, Dr. Josef Mengele. Evidently, the two did not get along. Eichmann's frustrated because Mengele's got family money, so he's still rich while he's hiding. Well, Eichmann, they're like kind of poor while they're hiding out in Argentina. They're not like super comfortable.

And he's like, why does Mengele get to have money? You know, I suck just as bad. My family did build tractors. He also, this is so funny. Mengele, and this is kind of like Mengele is being a dick to Eichmann he's like well, you know if you guys are having trouble with money, I can be your family doctor for free and Eichmann declines I've seen your work. I'm not a fan

Yeah, I don't think dr. Mengele is gonna be the family doctor. Oh And off it seems that your daughter has a bit of a cough. Have you considered injecting bleach into her eyes? Yeah, yeah. It's so funny, too, that Mengele does that as kind of like a dick move. He's like, well, if you're in trouble with money, I can be the family.

Like, he knows what it means to offer to be the family doctor. He knows nobody wants him to be the family doctor. The man just smells like corpse. Yeah, he knows he's Joseph Mengele. So Sassen had been a military propagandist during the war. And he ghost wrote after the war, he ghost writes biographies for several SS veterans.

He proposed working with Eichmann to lay out a full history of the final solution, one that told the Nazi truth. Sassen meant to minimize the number of people who had been killed and to cleanse Germany of its war guilt over the Holocaust. He also wanted to clear Hitler's name. Eichmann has, let's say, different ambitions, and the result of their interviews was, in Cesarini's words, sometimes blackly comic.

And I'm going to quote from Cesarini's book, Eichmann, his life and crimes here. Eichmann initially welcomed the chance to unburden himself to someone who was both knowledgeable and supposedly sympathetic. I was happy to be able for once to talk about the whole complex matter and to some extent dispose of it. But he discovered that Sassen had a perspective that was not wholly in accord with his own. While he was happy to record that Heydrich had received a fewer order to exterminate the Jews, Sassen questioned whether Hitler was truly responsible and wanted hard evidence for such a directive. At one point, Eichmann expressed incredulity that anyone would expect there to be a written order from Hitler himself.

Protesting that was not how the Reich worked. Whereas Sassen wanted to diminish the number of Jews deported to the death camps, Eichmann was happy to brag about his achievements. At Sassen's insistence, the dialogue returned again and again to statistical assessments of the numbers killed, with Sassen and Eichmann arguing in opposite directions. The wine consumed during the sessions loosened Eichmann's tongue more than was good for him. His self-pity and self-aggrandizing equally led to incriminating statements.

He regretted his weakness in not being able to overcome the obstacles in the way of eliminating all the Jews. Impervious or uncaring as to what the transports meant in terms of human suffering, he lamented delays and rejoiced in trouble-free deportations. We had the same thing in Slovakia, we had the same thing in France, and although it started there very hopefully, we had the same thing in Holland where the transports did, however, roll at the beginning, so that one can say it was magnificent and where subsequently there was one problem after another. He remembered with satisfaction the times the deportations went well, notably in Hungary." So it's so, Sassen's like, but like Hitler wasn't really involved. Do you have any evidence that Hitler ordered it? And Eichmann's like, you don't

understand how this fucking worked. Like, what the fuck is wrong with you? I don't think that many people died. I would have killed more. I do like that the reason like, um, Eichmann couldn't hold his died. I would have killed more. I do like that. They're like, um, I couldn't hold his He was a lightweight and got really moody afterwards, yeah, he drank wine got a little weird You know who also gets a little weird whenever they're drinking wine Mitsubishi Boy, you do not want to get Mitsubishi drunk. They'll start talking about the 40s and it doesn't go well.

We'll take your money Mitsubishi, please, for the love of God. We're back and we just got reached out to by Mitsubishi. And this is very good. I think this is gonna be really positive for the whole podcast. They stated, quote, if you continue referencing our name, we will bring you into court.

So yeah, very excited, super psyched. Uh-huh. This and more in Wake Island Drift. Yeah. So Eichmann's post-war friendships all have one thing in common, his utterly repentant openness about the scale of crimes he'd committed. He told one Dutch Nazi, Emmy Gray, to be frank with you, had we killed all of them, the 10.3

million European Jews, I would be happy and say, all right, we managed to destroy an enemy. So you know, he continues to be Eichmann. Yeah, he's still a piece of shit. He's still a fucking Nazi asshole. Oh yeah. Yeah. Now, Ricardo Clement lives with his wife and sons outside of Buenos Aires for almost a decade.

As I noted earlier, his Borish sons grew up there and began dating. One of them started seeing a young girl who was also a German immigre, Sylvia Hermann. Now, you might think this would make the two a good match, but there was a problem. Sylvia's family were the other type of European immigre, right? Her father Lothar hadn't informed her of this, but he was a Holocaust survivor who had fled Europe after surviving Dachau. Now, this is the world's worst fucking Hallmark movie. Yeah, the worst meet cute.

By this point, Lothar was old and blind as a result of repeated beatings by the Gestapo. As his daughter courted this Eichmann boy, Lothar starts putting things together in his head and is like, Oh fuck, I think this kid might be the son of like a major war criminal, right? Now these are initially just suspicions, and the family moves away from the area not long afterwards, so Lothar doesn't think a lot more about this until 1957, when he comes across news coverage of another Nazi back in Frankfurt. And I'm going to quote from an article by the Museum of Jewish Heritage here. Lothar's realization that Ricardo Clement may in fact be Adolf Eichmann led him to the

chief prosecutor of the West German state Hessen, Fritz Bauer. In order to pursue Eichmann and make a case for investigation, Bauer needed evidence. Bauer, who acted outside his official role as chief prosecutor, was concerned that his colleagues were Nazi sympathizers and would thwart the investigation. At Bauer's request, Lothar went in search of more details regarding Eichmann. Soon enough, Lothar was able to positively identify Eichmann, sending good word back to Bauer. So, fucking Lothar is like, well, this German prosecutor has been prosecuting Nazi war criminals. I'll reach out to him and say, I think I know Eichmann. Bauer's like, I can't do this as part of my legal job. There's so many fucking Nazis still in the German state.

They'll warn him. If anyone becomes aware in Germany that I'm looking for Eichmann, he'll get warned because again, I'm surrounded by Nazis still. So the ally should have killed way more of my coworkers. So many more of these guys. So Bauer is like, basically once he gets like confirmation from this dude in Argentina, Bauer rather than like going after,

like going through the German government to try to prosecute this guy, he's gonna go directly to the Mossad. Cause he's like, again, I'm surrounded by Nazis. And this is not an uncommon state of affairs. Post-war West Germany talked a great game about war guilt and the hatred of the regime, but a ton of second and third tier Nazis were by now running the show.

Oh, fuck yeah, they were. One of the people responsible for this is a famous anti-Nazi, Konrad Aidenauer. Aidenauer had been an opponent of the party prior to Hitler's rise to total power, and he had been imprisoned several times by the Nazis. But he was like a liberal politician who hated the Nazis, but was willing to govern beside them, right? And- Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of my political ideology.

Right. And the good news is that Adenauer was such a committed anti-Nazi that the allies let him form a government and become West Germany's first chancellor in 1949. The bad news is that because he was such a committed anti-Nazi, he was able to personally accept a ton of Nazis into his government and his own reputation acted as a shield for them. Per the Irish Times, quote, on this many times by political rivals and foreign critics, Aidenauer hit back that one does not have to throw out the dirty water as long as one doesn't have any clean water.

Right? Well, everybody who knows how to run the state is so implicated in Nazism, we can't afford to punish them all. Otherwise we won't be able to have a Germany and we gotta have a Germany, right? Counterpoint, what if we didn't? Yeah.

Now in 1957, Eichmann had actually written an open letter under his own name to Aidenauer, right? And the letter was negative. He and Sassen both wanted to destroy Conrad's government, but it shows how much impunity he felt by this point, that he could write a letter to the fucking chancellor, right? And feel like it was not a super dangerous thing. Now, since he couldn't trust his colleagues anymore but did trust Lothar's snooping, our boy Bauer sent the information about Eichmann back to the Mossad, who had a whole Nazi hunting division at this point, and were ready to use it. In May of 1960, they sent 11 agents to Argentina. After weeks of gumshoe work to track Eichmann

down and case his home in the pattern of his daily life, they launched an operation to kidnap him and spirit him to Jerusalem. Now there's a whole long story here and I'm really boiling out the details because it's the best-known part of Eichmann's life and it's really not super worth into what's getting into detail here about it. But the short of it is they capture the fucker and he winds up on trial for his many crimes in Jerusalem. Now the exact form that this trial takes is the work of David Ben-Gurion, who's the prime minister of Israel and for whom this was not just a matter of justice, but a matter of personal political pride. Hannah Arendt, in her famous coverage of the trial, described Ben-Gurion's motivations this way.

Quote, and this is from Eichmann in Jerusalem. There was the lesson to the non-Jewish world. I went to establish before the nations of the world how millions of people, because they happen to be Jews, and one million babies, because they happen to be Jewish babies, were murdered by the Nazis. That's Ben-Gurion's words. Or in the words of Devar, the organ of Ben-Gurion's mapai party, let the world opinion know this, that not in Nazi Germany alone was responsible for the destruction of six million Jews of

Europe. Hence again, in Ben-Gurion's own words, we want the nations of the world to know and they should be ashamed. The Jews in the diaspora were to remember how 4,000 year old Judaism with its spiritual creations, its ethical strivings, its messianic aspirations had always faced a hostile world. How the Jews had degenerated until they went to their death like sheep and how only the establishment of a Jewish state had enabled Jews to hit back, as Israelis had done in the War of Independence, in the Suez Adventure, and in the almost daily incidents on Israel's unhappy borders.

And if the Jews outside Israel had to be shown the difference between Israeli heroism and Jewish submissive weakness, there was a complementary lesson for the Israelis. For, quote, the generation of Israelis who have grown up since the Holocaust were in danger of losing their ties with the Jewish people and by implication with their own history. It is necessary that our youth remember what happened to the Jewish peoples. We want them to know the tragic facts of our history. This is a rent writing that Ben-Gurion, he's not just trying, he doesn't just want to see this guy brought to justice because he's a Nazi.

He wants to see this guy brought to justice because the story of Eichmann highlights how cowardly the European Jews were, that they let themselves be slaughtered and that that's different from the heroic Israelis who are willing to fight. That's part of why Ben Gurion puts this trial on. There is a propaganda angle here. There is a lot of very disgusting language that was used towards European Jews, despite the fact that a lot of these guys are descended from them or their kids or their neighbors or whatever. Yeah. It's, it's absolutely horrible. Yeah.

And this is something, Arendt is very critical of Israel and sees a lot of the problems that are going to result in the shit we're seeing today very early on. She sees a lot of the horror of like what's done to the Palestinians. She sees a lot of what's coming and she's deeply critical of why this... Not that Eichmann's on trial, she obviously thinks he needs to be, but she's deeply critical about why he's being put on trial and what else is happening here. You've heard of the Imperial Boomerang, this is the genocidal boomerang. Right. And there's a lot of good modern criticism of Arendt and of her writing in Eichmann on Jerusalem,

because in Jerusalem, because her picture of Eichmann as this banal pencil pushing figure is wrong. He is, I think we've made the case, a pretty outwardly bombastically villainous Nazi. Yeah, she fell for his personal portrayal of himself while submitting himself to a Jewish court. Right. But when it comes to dissecting Israeli policies and the message that this trial was meant to show, Arendt is incredibly incisive. And I want to make it clear here, she's not saying that what she lays out in the paragraph uncritically, right? She's not saying, and it's good that Ben Gurion is doing that. She has deep reservations about what he's doing and about the treatment of Holocaust survivors in Europe. I'm going to quote again from Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Equally superfluous was the lesson to the Jews in the diaspora who hardly needed a great catastrophe in which a third of their people perished to be convinced of the world's hostility. Not only has their conviction of the eternal and ubiquitous nature of anti-Semitism been the most potent ideological factor in the Zionist involvement since the Dreyfus affair. It must also have been the cause of the otherwise inexplicable readiness of the German Jewish community to begin to negotiate with Nazi authorities during the early stages of the regime. This conviction produced a fatal inability to distinguish between friend and foe.

The German Jews underestimated their enemies because somehow they thought that all Gentiles were alike." And yeah, that's such an important point to make too. And this is why, well, we have to point out what Arendt got wrong. You need to keep this in mind, right? That both like, well, this is a lot of what Ben-Gurion's doing is totally unnecessary.

And it's also based on him kind of falling into the same mistake, a different version of the same mistake that a lot of European Jews made early on, which is thinking that all the Gentiles are alike, right? Which leads them to misunderstand their enemies. One thing that really gets lost in casual discussion of Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem is that Israeli authorities also kind of put Holocaust survivors on trial for their timidity. They of course needed witnesses to call to discuss the details of the killing system

Eichmann had helped to implement. Arendt describes, quote, the prosecutor asking witness after witness, why did you not protest? Why did you board the train? 15,000 people were standing there and hundreds of guards facing you. Why didn't you revolt and charge and attack these guards? Harped on for all it was worth. But the sad truth of the matter is that the point was ill taken, for no non-Jewish group or non-Jewish people had behaved differently.

Sixteen years ago, while still under the direct impact of the events, a former French inmate of Buchenwald, David Rousset, described in his book the logic that obtained in all concentration camps, quote, "...the triumph of the SS demands that the tortured victim allow himself to be led to the noose without protesting, that he renounce and abandon himself to the point of ceasing to affirm his identity. And it is not for nothing, it is not gratuitously out of sheer sadism that the SS men desire his defeat. They know that the system which succeeds in destroying its victims before he mounts the

scaffold is incomparably the best for keeping a whole people in slavery. In submission, nothing is more terrible than these processions of human beings going like dummies to their death. The court received no answer to this cruel and silly question, but one could easily have found an answer had he permitted his imagination to dwell for a few minutes on the fate of those Dutch Jews who in 1941 in the old Jewish quarter of Amsterdam dared to attack a German security police detachment. 430 Jews were arrested in reprisal and they were literally tortured to death, being sent

first to Buchenwald and then to the Austrian camp of Matthausen. Month after month they died a thousand deaths, and every single one of them would have envied his brethren in Auschwitz had he known about them. There exist many things considerably worse than death, and the SS saw to it that none of them was ever very far from the mind and imagination of their victims. In this respect, perhaps even more significantly than in others, the deliberate attempt in Jerusalem to tell only the Jewish side of the story distorted the truth, even the Jewish truth. And this is such an important criticism, that not only are the victims of Eichmann also on trial in Jerusalem, but that by framing it this way,

by being so obsessed with, well, why didn't they fight more? And by being so obsessed with just the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, they're distorting even the story of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, that that's also happening here. It's something that continues to happen with, unfortunately, Israeli history of the downplaying of the other victims and even other genocides as well. And in order to, uh, tell their own crafted version of it, of going like sheep to the slaughter is a famous quote. And it was even used as a rallying cry by, I believe his name was Abner Kovner.

Yeah, Kovner, yes. Yeah, to launch attacks against surviving SS men and even attempt to poison an entire city in Germany. Yeah, as we talked about, part of a group called NACOM. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that was like the rallying cry, like we did not go like sheeps to the slaughter Yes, and they they did and there were so many other examples of resistance, right?

but the point that are rent is making is both that like you can't imagine the the position these people were in and what had been done to them already and Also like the the degree of like critiquing them for this They acted like everyone else and we know this because every other group that was targeted by the Nazis, that was put into this system, they more or less all behaved similarly, right? Of course.

This is not just a problem with Jewish people in Europe, this was just something, this was a result of the sheer amount of violence that was deployed and what it does to people. It happens with every genocide. And this story gets told with every genocide. I am Armenian and Armenians tell the same thing that like they put their own history through the same,

well, why did they just walk off like that and do as they were told? They're like, how fucking stupid are you? How fucking dare you? It's this desire both to avoid what you see as the shame that like they didn't fight back more and also this belief to think that like Well, I would never be in that position I'm built different I'd fight back and I can see it because like now that I'm on the side now that I'm part of a country that has a

Military that's capable of like fighting. I'm, you know, we're fighting, right? Like we would never just give up, you know? And it's this desire to believe that like, you were now safe from this horrible thing. Yeah. And this desire to believe also that it's this deeply insidious attitude that like, people who suffer something that badly,

even if they're your people, they must've done something wrong. Yeah, exactly. They didn't fight hard enough, right? There's something that they could have done that I would do if I was in their situation, right? Yeah, like everybody, oh, that couldn't happen to me, I would do this.

I assure you it will. Yeah, it couldn't be me. Yeah. It fucking would. And I think Arendt's work is so valuable in part because she brings this criticism up that is it's very hard to talk about this. It's very hard to be critical of like, especially in public of how Israel handled the Eichmann

and what they did. And the story of Israeli treatment of Holocaust survivors is much deeper than just this. And it's difficult to be, for a lot of people to be critical about it because it's hard to not seem like you're saying something and like Arendt is a Holocaust survivor. She is smuggled out of Europe, right?

Like she is, and she is the one making these criticisms of Israel during the trial, right? As she's reporting for, I think the fucking New Yorker, you know, it's very important. And Eichmann in Jerusalem for all of its flaws is still very important to read for these reasons. Now I find stuff like this much more interesting than Eichmann's actual performance on trial. In short, his defense counsel tries to use the argument that Hans Globke had drafted the Nuremberg racial laws in 1935 and thus Eichmann had only been following orders. Eichmann himself sought to inhabit

the image of a timid middle manager. Oh, he'd handled some logistics, sure, he'd helped send Jews to camps, he was making the trains run, but he wasn't putting people in gas chambers. He testified personally, I had nothing to do with killing Jews. I've never killed a Jew and I've never ordered anyone to kill a Jew. The German government, for their part, when he brings, part of what Germany is doing, when Eichmann brings up Globke to try to be like, no, this was the guy responsible.

Germany tries to hush that up, right? And they're like really pushing internationally, like we've got to keep this shit quiet. Because Globke, at this point, is the senior most civil servant in West Germany working under Conrad Aidenauer, right? There it is, yeah. The guy who drafted the Nuremberg racial laws

is working for the government again. He's the senior most civil servant in West Germany under Aidenauer. So obviously the outcome of this trial is never really in doubt. Now there are some very valuable things that happen during the trial and that get out. And it's very valuable that a lot of Eichmann's victims are

Allowed to talk about what happened to them are allowed to put that on the historic record I'm not claiming that like this is all a failure or bad A lot of good does come of his trial, right? That is also a part of the story and it's an important part of the story and the fact that a lot of victims of the Holocaust get to go in front of a perpetrator and lay out what he did to them as good There are also horrifying moments, right? One of the worst moments of the trial is a former Auschwitz inmate is shown a camp uniform while he's on trial and he has a stroke in the courtroom. Oh, Jesus.

Like it's fucking nightmarish, right? And in this case, they are trying to do like the right thing where it's like, we need this on the record. But like, of course that's what happens sometimes, right? Like it's just, it's horrible. Like there's no easy way to handle all this stuff. On December 11th and 12th in 1961, the court declared Adolf Eichmann guilty of crimes against the Jewish people and humanity as a whole. He was sentenced to death by hanging

and executed on June 1st, 1962. He died unrepentant. And that's the Eichmann story. It's not surprising he went screaming to hell, refusing to admit that he was wrong. Yeah. No. That scans. Yep.

Well, good, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad it ended that way rather than going out the Mengele way, which I dying of a drowning Swimming yeah, yeah Man Anyway, no, literally I feel like drowning would be a lot worse. So who's to say? Yeah, who's to say?

I mean, I don't know my grandma nearly drowned to death and always had said it was a pretty pleasant way to go Like you feel really warm and nice at the end. I don't know. I've never drowned Do we know if Israel did it right and he didn't strangle to death? I feel I feel like that's something that an Israeli prison guard would fuck up on purpose. Yeah Yeah, I mean, I don't think he like it wasn't like cuz that happens to a lot of the Nuremberg guys Like the hangman like purposefully fucks up. Yeah that hangman ruled Yeah, we've done episodes on him as like a pretty cool guy. Just a drunk guy who wanted to strangle a lot of Nazis and accidentally kind of rip their heads off.

Yeah, he was the right man for the job. Yeah, he is executed by hanging. I don't think he was particularly fucked up. It should have been. Oh, that's unfortunate. Yeah, do it the slow way. Like, oh, no, we built it too low. Israel, you can't fuck up the one thing we want you to fuck up. It should have been. Aw, that's unfortunate. Yeah, do it the slow way. Like, oh, no, we built it too low. Israel, you can't fuck up the one thing we want you to fuck up.

Yeah. Yeah, really screw over this hanging. Yeah. Anyway, well, if you ever get a chance to hang a Nazi, be bad at it. Exactly. Yeah. The only way to be good at that job is by fucking it up harder than you fucked up anything you fucked up before. You need to get drunk. You've got to really practice to be incompetent at this. There you go. Yeah.

Yeah. All right, everybody. Listen to Joe's podcast. Listen to Joe's podcast. Yeah. Yeah. If you want to know more about actually weird that everything you bring up keeps coming back to a series that we've done, but we did a series in Otto's Grazani He's a psycho. He's a psycho listen to that You could listen to that series that we did or one of the other 300 or so episodes

We've done over the last 70 years. You'll find something you like called lions led by donkeys. Listen to it We have a patreon check it out. Yeah, check out their patreon and Yeah, go do something happy now. Have fun. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com

slash at Behind the Bastards. Hello, I'm John Lithgow. I want to tell you about my new fiction podcast about Buzz Aldrin, one of the true pioneers of space. You're a great pilot, Buzz. That's the story you think you know. This is the story you don't. Buzz, starring me, John Lithgow. On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. How could a beautiful young first grade teacher be stabbed 20 times, including in the back,

allegedly die of suicide? Yes, that was a medical examiner's official ruling. After a closed door meeting, he first named it a homicide. Why? What happened to Ellen Greenberg? A huge American miscarriage of justice. For an in-depth look at the facts, see What Happened to Ellen on Amazon? All proceeds to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.