Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Young, Evil God of Death: Reinhard Heydrich

Episode Date: July 6, 2021

Robert is joined by Matt Lieb to discuss Reinhard Heydrich, the worst Nazi. FOOTNOTES: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/reinhard-heydrich-in-depth  https://www.dw.com/en/did-reinhard-heydrich-aspire-to-replace-hitler/a-39108720  https://www.historynet.com/the-heydrich-equation.htm https://bleeckerstreetmedia.com/editorial/reinhard-heydrich-anatomy-of-a-monster https://www.nytimes.com/1979/02/07/archives/widow-of-heydrich-says-holocaust-ignores-facts-horrors-of-the-camps.html  https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/reinhard-heydrich-mastermind.html  https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/fabled-nazi-era-brothel-salon-kitty-finds-new-life-1.4446607  https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/kitty-s-salon-pillow-talk-could-be-fatal-at-the-berlin-brothel-bugged-by-nazis-nxcs78l8t  https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1992-02-27-9201180927-story.html  https://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Wives-Women-Hitlers-Germany/dp/1250271568 https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Hangman-Heydrich-Robert-Gerwarth/dp/0300187726 Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And waving around a knife. You just had to open the Benadryl somehow, Sophie. Jesus Christ. It's a little knife. At this point, both podcasts now, you started off with this one with a knife and the last one with a gun. Well, there's always a gun. I mean, there's a gun right behind me. This is normal for us. I'm excited for the next one. The next one. Just keep upping the ante. Yeah, I mean, I think I'm going to order my young Ward Garrison just found out how to order one of those Bolo wraps, which are the things the cops shoot at you now that like wrap around your body and stop you from moving.

So I think I'm going to get one of those. Oh my God. It wraps around you like in cartoons? Yeah, like in cartoons. I didn't know that was a real weapon. And the cops are going to find out how to kill somebody with it soon. But I'm going to buy one just to fuck around with. They've already made them lethal and like attached like little knives at the end of them. There's already kind of little knives actually on the things.

Of course there is. This is for people who don't know behind the bastards podcast bad people tell you all about them. I woke up feeling like shit as I was just saying last night I had a friend come over and then leave it like two thirty in the morning. And I had a choice once my friend left. Was I going to go to bed or was I going to buy a bunch of drugs and get fucked up until four thirty or five in the morning and then stumble into consciousness to do this podcast hungover. And I chose sobriety and I went to bed sober and I woke up exactly as late as I would have if I got in a fucked up. And I feel exactly as bad and the lesson is always do drugs.

Yeah, just say yes. Just say yes to drugs. You know, it's like that that movie yes man. Yes, exactly. Exactly. The movie yes man, which contains all of life's lessons in it. Yeah, really. It's a great movie about lessons. And was that one of the Jim Carrey movies or not?

I actually to be honest with you, I've never actually seen it, but I remember thinking about the plot and going, what if someone offers some heroin? I mean, that's the movie I want to see. You say no to heroin, really. Yeah, if someone's offering, it's just rude to say no. I mean, I've turned it down when it's been offered in an injectable form, but there was this one time in rural India where a guy had a bunch of black tar in his finger and was offering licks and I absolutely took a lick. Yeah, who's not going to take a lick of black tar on your...

Take a lick of a stranger's heroin in the desert. Well, I got to say yes to this. Yeah. Matt. What's up? How do you feel about the Holocaust? Oh, Auntie. Auntie.

Good call. That makes sense. That's a good call. That's really the only call with the Holocaust. Yeah, not a fan. Have you heard of a fellow, a dude, a chapereno by the name of Reinhard Heydrich? Reinhard Heydrich. Reinhard Heydrich.

I don't believe I have. I mean, in a way, it's like one of those German names where I'm like, if you just said it out loud out the propo of nothing, I'd be like, oh, that's that famous Nazi. Yeah, I mean, yes, yes, he is a famous Nazi and you're right. I think 90% of people hearing that would be like, he probably did some Nazi shit back in the day. Yeah, I mean, just judging by the context of the podcast we're on and that very German sounding name. But no, I don't think I've heard of him. Well, he's not just, he is a Nazi, but he's also the Nazi.

Oh, good. So here on behind the bastards, we pretty much exclusively discuss the worst people in history and their horrible crimes. Monsters are our business. So you, Sophie, and you, Matt, and also our regular listeners will know what it means when I tell you this might be the worst person we ever cover. Oh, great. Right at us.

Reinhard Heidrich is the man who is the architect of the Holocaust. Oh, here's the man who there were a lot of people who wanted to do a Holocaust. He is the guy who figured out the nuts and bolts of it. That's who we're talking about today. He was the most passionate about holocaust and he figured it out. Absolutely. He and he he found that was the niche he chose within the Nazi system. And he he made that be his thing. And then 11 million people died.

Yeah. He's he's a pretty bad dude. So fuck that guy. I mean, I'm anti him. Yeah, like definitely anti him. So to give you a little bit of context for this guy before we go into his life story, he was a Nazi for 11 years. And in that time, he earned these nicknames, the hangman, the butcher of Prague,

the blonde beast, Himmler's evil genius, the young evil God of death and Adolf Hitler himself. Adolf Hitler's nickname for Heidrich was the man with the iron heart. That I. OK, so first of all, some of those are like not going to lie. Pretty cool sound. They're all pretty bad ass nicknames. Which is like the worst thing about Nazis is their absolute commitment to just style. Yeah. And like, you know, whether it was how they dressed or like the what they named shit,

you're just like, fuck, that's a cool name. I hate that you're evil. At half of those would be really good EPs. Yeah, like if he was a hip hop artist, like fucking you see you see a dude's face and the young evil God of death on an album cover. You're like, well, fuck, I got to check this shit out. I literally I've definitely downloaded half of those nicknames on Napster in the 90s. You know, listen to the man with the iron heart fucking.

But he was not. He was a real piece of shit. Yeah. Yeah. And Dr. Werner Best, who was a horrible Nazi and was Hydric's deputy for many years, called Reinhard Heidrich the most demonic personality in the Nazi leadership and said that he was driven by an inhumanity which took no account of those he mowed down. And again, this is a Nazi saying this.

It's like this is Hitler calling him the man with the iron heart. And yeah, it's not just like a Nazi saying it. It's like they have Hitler to compare this person to on a live Hitler. Compared to Hitler, this guy looks bad. Even Hitler is like, damn, dude, tone it down a little bit. Yeah, man. Yeah. Peel it back, homie.

Yeah. He never said that to him. Yeah. No, that's not how Hitler worked. Yeah. Now, and I should note that because of all of the Nazis who say horrible things about Hydric, one thing we should note at the start and we'll note a couple more times in the episode is that the Nazis who talked about Hydric after the war were Nazis who survived

and thus had a vested interest in trying to downplay their own complicity and elevate Hydric's, right? So yeah, we do need to keep that in mind. But still, the fact that not just after the war, during and before the war, other Nazis consistently recognized Hydric as a terrifying and vile monster says a lot about the man. It's honestly, it's impressive in the most disgusting way that he is. I mean, the fact that you're calling him like the worst Nazi and Hitler and Hitler's there and I'm just like, fuck, man.

And like also, you know, shame on me for having never have heard of him, you know, was I, you know, was he in that movie? A conspiracy? Did someone play him in that movie? Oh, yeah, you've seen conspiracy. Yes, I have. He is the main Nazi in conspiracy. Oh, he's that blonde guy?

Yeah, he's the blonde guy. Yes. That dude, Kenneth Branagh. He's played by Kenneth Branagh in conspiracy, which is a very good movie. I think a very good movie about the the Vance conference. Yeah, no, I love it. I love that. Yeah, that's right.

Hard. Hydric. Wow. Yeah. And here's the thing about him. When you set him up like that, one expects Hydric to be almost a force of supernatural evil, like a fucking Wolfenstein Nazi, right? Fucking summoning demons and shit.

Right. The reality is that every single person listening to this knows at least one person with a personality similar to Reinhardt Hydrix. The most terrifying thing about this guy is that he was not a super anti-Semitic dude from the start. He was not a super committed Nazi from the start. His evil grew from the most mundane seed possible. He wanted to be a big man.

That's all. That's all. This is not a guy. This is not like Hitler. Hitler, this is a dude who has like fucking demonic dreams from a very early age, these dreams of conquest and violence against his enemies. He follows a decade's long plan to achieve them. That's not Reinhardt Hydrix.

Hydrix is a guy who wants to be important and respected and that leads him to plan the Holocaust. Yeah. Right. He was like, all right, well, what's like, what's trending right now? What's the one thing I can talk about that everyone's going to be into? Oh, hating the Jews? I could do that.

And then he just pivots to hating Jews. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a little, we're about to talk about it right now. So let's get into it. Reinhardt Tristan Eugen Hydrix was born on March 7, 1904 in the city of Halle in Prussia. His name was picked by his father, Bruno Hydrix, who was a composer and an opera singer of modest success and notoriety.

Bruno's first opera was Amen, which debuted in 1895 to significant critical acclaim. The central conflict in the opera is between Thomas, a peasant leader who represents the rise of social democracy in Germany, Thomas is the bad guy. And the hero is Reinhardt, a nobleman, a heroic nobleman, a fine-breeding and traditional aristocratic German values. Reinhardt is murdered by Thomas at the end of the play. And since Thomas is a devious cripple, he has to stab Reinhardt in the back to kill him.

The fact that Bruno Hydrix named his son after the protagonist of this opera is telling, this is the fact that the plot of this 1895 opera very much mirrors the right-wing reaction to Germany's defeat in World War One. It's the stabbed in the back myth, right? Like this. Yeah, right, right. Yeah, exactly. So, and also it's like, I mean, props to having commitment to just hating like the peasant

class and what not. Oh, yeah. Oh my God, for sure. I mean, it's just like in any other like context, like when is like the noble Lord, you know, is the hero of this? I would say it's not because there's, I think, an element in this guy's work of actually like deifying the peasant class, but the peasant class when they know their place, right? Right, of course.

This is like a hatred of the peasants who want, you know, to not be ground under the feet of the lords, right? Exactly, exactly. People just, you know, opera singing about getting the boot off their neck and then lords being like, nah, bro, stay there. Bruno is a monarchist. He's not a fascist. He's a monarchist.

He would have been a fascist if that had really been coming up in his time, but he was, you know, just a big supporter and didn't like the idea that there would be any kind of democracy. In Germany was prior to World War One, there were large democratic elements, right? The Kaiser is not as absolute an autocrat as, for example, the Tsar. Right. Yeah. So most of the sources I've come across online about Reinhardt tend to fall into the same traps when describing his childhood because he was such a monster as an adult.

Well, he seemed to have a need to sow the seeds of that evil and with a particularly vicious upbringing, the claim that like, oh, there was there was something in his background that made it clear he was going to do this. And I'm going to quote an example. Right. They're trying to, yeah, they're trying to cruella him, you know. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

They want to make a bunch of Dalmatians push his mom off the roof or something, you know. That's one of the silliest things. Like I would have thought that that was like somebody like fucking with me as opposed to that being in an actual movie. Oh, it's very real. Yeah. Yeah. And when a quote in order to give you an idea of how his background is usually kind of summarized

when you like read, you Google Reinhardt Hydra can read an article about him. Here's a quote from an article from War History Online about him. His father, Bruno, was a non-religious singer and composer who was kept out of the upper echelons of German society due to a humble background and a persistent, though false, rumor that he was Jewish. Reinhardt's mother, Elizabeth Kranz, was a practicing Catholic from a rich musical family in Dresden. As Reinhardt grew up, both his father and his classmates inculcated him with a virulent

anti-Semitism. He was a loner who tried to prove his superiority through his studies and through sports. This is largely wrong, or at least incomplete. Yeah. It is true that there were rumors that Bruno had Jewish ancestry. These were false. And while they were a semi-regular annoyance for Bruno, they had no impact on his success. So Reinhardt's dad grew up destitute due to the fact that Bruno's father had died early.

And Bruno was actually a pretty incredible guy. He was like, as a child, the breadwinner for his entire family, and he had to teach his younger siblings. And despite their desperate financial decision, as a young adult, he made the decision to strike out and have a career as a professional musician, which was not a common thing to be able to do at that point in time. It was very unlikely that he would succeed at this. But he did, with no money, no family money, and no family connections, which speaks to

his talent and dedication. The idea that the Hydric family was kept out of the upper echelons of German society is entirely false. Reinhardt's mother, Elizabeth, came from a very wealthy family. And the fact that they were willing to marry her off to Bruno speaks to how successful in respect that he was. He was a local celebrity and a significant one. Because his son became a monster, there's a trend among people writing about the Hydrics

to dismiss Bruno as a second-rate musician and composer, and be like, well, he was never very successful, and maybe that came off on his kid in this frustration. They love this origin story. They love the origin story of a failed artist goes Nazi, or his progeny goes Nazi, or failed artist who everyone said had low-key Jewish ancestry. They always add that, too, because I've heard that with Hitler. I mean, it's a thing both for there's rumors, both for Hitler and for Hydric. And for Hydric, it's a more significant thing.

But it's not a thing that stops his dad from doing anything, for sure. It doesn't stop Hydric either. I think it's just a slur that people used to do on the playgrounds back in the day. Everyone is like, yeah, he's a secret Jew. Everyone at one point got a call to secret Jew back in those days. It's not uncommon. It's not uncommon. And the more important thing to note is that Bruno Hydric was not a second-rate musician

and composer. He was extremely well respected in his time. He was even invited to join the Hall of Freemason Lodge, which he duly did. Which means if you're being invited to join the Freemasons, you're in the upper crust in the late... Yeah, no. Yeah, late 800s, early 1900s. Yeah, they had very strict guidelines for who they would let in to be a Mason.

Yeah. And it also is not true, does not seem to be true, that Hydric was a loner who tried to prove his superiority through studies and sports, at least not to any extent that was unusual at the time. He was mostly raised by his mother in governance while his father devoted his life to work. And this was very common for the time. It would not have raised eyes as an upbringing. I think people just hate the idea of people who commit evil acts being in any way ordinary.

They need to have some extraordinary origin story so that you can feel better about the fact that whatever your horrible beliefs are, you're like, well, at least I would never go as far as that person. They need to be evil and unredeemable from the beginning. So for example, Hitler can't have been a guy who, as a young man near destitute when he got his inheritance from his mother, handed all of that money to his sister because she was a young mother in a truly selfless gesture of love because Hitler can't have done a selfless gesture of love.

Right. Because it's much more frightening if he did. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, oh, shit. That means anyone could be a Hitler? Yeah.

No, I don't like that. I don't like that one thing. Yeah. Yeah. Now, the, so Bruno was so successful that not only like, I mean, his, his, his kind of his, his playwriting or opera writing kind of career eventually did level off. There was a point at which he stopped, you know, they stopped doing as well. But he also started a music school, a conservatory, which was extremely successful and the family

gets fucking rich off of this conservatory. So again, not exactly frustrated ambitions here. He's about as successful as a musician can be in this period. Yeah. Kind of crushing it. Yeah. Seems like everything should be going fine for them and no one should turn Nazi. And as the oldest son in the family, Reinhard was expected to inherit his father's music

school. And as a result, most of his early childhood was devoted to preparing him for this task. Reinhard received constant rigorous musical training from early childhood on before he started primary school at age six in 1910. He knew musical notation and he could play the piano. Yeah, that'll do it. Yep. That'll do it right there.

You teach the piano. Honestly, if you, if you've ever been a kid taking piano lessons after a while, you just start like, I'm going to commit atrocity. Oh, yeah. I hate this. So much. I'll tell you honestly, most of why I carry a gun is that if I ever see a piano, I'm just going to dump the mag into that fucking thing.

But I see one goddamn piano teacher. I see a fucking piano in this house. Yeah, exactly. Can't stand it. Yeah. Yeah. But like the fact is actually like you could hear this background to be like, oh, maybe he, he didn't like being pressured into music.

He fucking loves music. He loves music his whole life. He's very good. He starts violin lessons at age six. For everything we know, he seems to have been extremely enthusiastic about that path in life. His mother, Elizabeth, was raised Catholic and the, I think the like the family kind of went with her family religion.

And this did make her and later Reinhardt members of a minority in Germany. Catholics were about 36% of the German population. This is a Protestant country, right? Martin Luther, the guy who makes Protestant isn't be a thing is a German. Germany is a Protestant nation. Catholics are a large minority, but they're a minority. And this was like kind of the time that Reinhardt is being raised and his family is very Catholic. Like he's an altar boy as a kid.

And this was a period of time in which a lot of Catholics in Germany were starting to assert themselves as Germans first and Catholics second, because there were a lot of conspiracy theories and like bigotry against Catholics, right? That, oh, you're loyal to the Pope, not to the Kaiser, right? And this is a thing, fucking JFK has to deal with that, but like in like the sixties and shit. I saw someone do that with Biden recently on Twitter was just like, what the fuck is wrong?

Like are we bringing back? Popes aren't even loyal to popes anymore. Yeah. There's like two living popes right now hanging out. Nobody cares. I've seen that movie. Yeah. Um, so yeah, this is like, so this is like a thing that's happening in Germany at the

time. And the hydrics bucked this trend. Like, right. I'm not, I don't think they were like saying that we're loyal to the Pope over Germany, but they stayed extremely pious. They were consistent mass attendees. And their religiosity stands out particularly with contrasted with the fact that the early 1900s in Germany is a time of rapidly increasing secularism.

Church attendance rates were dropping dramatically during this period and the fall was most notable among Protestants, but it was significant for Catholics too. We'd be speculating to say what impact this had on young hydric, but it is worth noting also that 94% of his city was Protestant. So he grew up in a devoted religious minority and that's kind of worth noting. Yeah. One of the most significant things about Reinhard as a child is that he was weak and sickly.

And I'm going to quote from the book, Hitler's hangman by Robert Gerroth here, quote, as a child of slender and relatively small stature with a weak constitution and a susceptibility to illness, Reinhard was encouraged by his parents to take up every kind of physical exercise from an early age, swimming, running, football, sailing, horse riding and fencing. Hydric's lifelong passion for sport began here. The family's summer vacations were usually spent on the picturesque coast of the Baltic Sea and the swanky seaside town of Swinomunda on the island of Usedom. For the hydric children, this was surely the most exciting time of the year.

They spent their holidays sightseeing, taking walks and enjoying boat excursions and days on the beach. I'm so pissed because these guys, they have really great Instagram lives. Yeah. And I just, you know. Well, we crushed it on the gram. The hydrics. Early 1900s.

Yeah. They would be, they'd have a fucking TLC show about them. They would, God, it's just, it pisses me off, man. Like, why are these the people who do holocaustic? It's just, oh man. Yeah. Evil, evil, evil fucking like entitled rich kids who, you know, fucking, I don't blame the Jews for no goddamn reason.

Yeah. We'll get into why. Okay. Yeah. And again, it is worth noting that at this point in his early childhood, pre-World War One, this is a kid who by all accounts, like he's got some health problems, but he seems to be having a good upbringing. There's like no reports of him picking apart flies or torturing animals.

There's none of the stuff we have for Hitler either. These stories about him going on these bizarre unhinged rants or threatening suicide and murder. His family was successful. He was gifted. And when he grew older, it was decided that he would go to secondary school. Now only about 10% of boys got to do this at the time. This adolescence went kind of right into like learning a trade after primary school.

The school that about 10% of boys like actually went to secondary school. The school that Reinhardt's parents picked for him was also unique. It was called the reform gymnasium. And it was a new sort of institution in Germany that was focused on the scientific optimism at the time. And unlike about 90% of German schools in this period, secondary schools are religious schools, either Catholic or Protestant. I assume there's some Jewish ones in there.

But this is the reform gymnasium is a religious. So he doesn't have a strong like when he starts getting his education, there's no religious bent to the education in his secondary school. So he had like a secular, secular schooling, which is rare for the time. Yeah. Yeah. It's all one word in German. I don't know.

Yeah. Just sounds bad. Yeah. The word gymnasium a lot back in the day. Why? I don't know. Sophie, I don't know. I don't know anything about everything.

It was the old times. They just made up the word gymnasium and applied it to anything. That's a great word. Reform gymnasium just sounds like a Pilates class where you get bullied. I'm pretty sure there was a gymnasium in my reform temple growing up, but I don't believe that was a reform gymnasium. Yeah. So separate things.

Separate things. So Reinhard thrived at school at secondary school. His grades were particularly good in math and science, and his first ambition was to become a chemist. He also did well in languages and he fell in love with reading. He developed a special fondness for detective and spy novels. Now most of these novels that he loved as a kid had their origins in the United States or Great Britain.

He loved Nat Pinkerton novels, which were written by the fucking Pinkerton guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He also loved Sherlock Holmes and he would be a lifelong devotee of the detective novel genre. When Reinhard was 10 years old, World War One did its thing. He was a member of Germany's most awkward generation and as a result, the generation

that produced some of the very worst Nazis. So Reinhard, like Heinrich Himmler, was too young to go to the front and fight as a soldier, but old enough that he was fully conscious of the war and fully conscious of all this propaganda idolizing the front generation. So he's extremely kind of like spends his adolescence hoping to get to fight, but he never does because, you know, it doesn't work and go great for Germany. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. They lose that one. Yeah. And then they lose their their precious Kaiser. They do lose their precious Kaiser. He goes off to fucking the Netherlands to chop wood. Fucking weirdo.

Yeah. And this war was like, you know, as far as I can tell, none of the hydrics or their close relatives died fighting in World War One. I mean, I'm sure they had some relatives who died, but I haven't run across it. So it must not have been anyone who was super close to the family. But it was a disaster for the family. The war brought blockades from the British, which caused rationing and an economic collapse that cut the feet out from under Bruno's music conservatory.

Now you could say the hydrics were still lucky within kind of the majority of the German population, like a million Germans starved to death as a result of the British blockade. None of the hydrics starve, but they don't get to enjoy the kind of foods they had before the war. They're definitely hungrier. Like for an example of how bad this is nationwide, bread rationing starts in 1915. Bread rationing starts in 1916. And by 1916, so the pre-war average daily diet of a German citizen had been 25 calories.

It's about 1200 by 1916. So they suffer like everyone else. And while they're wealthy enough to avoid starving to death, the war ships away at the family income and erodes their fortune. Their vacations become a lot less fancy now. They're still on vacation. They're still doing vacations. They still live in a mansion.

But they're not. They don't have as much. We can't stay. We can't stay on the shore of the Baltic. We cannot stay on the shore. We have to stay in a flat inside the city, but it's only a 45 minute drive. It's a beautiful drive to the Baltic. Why are you complaining?

So the worst thing that happened to the, and this must have been a miserable time. But from what we can tell, kind of Reinhardt does not seem to have suffered unduly during the war, particularly compared to most people. And in fact, the worst thing to happen to the Hydric family during World War One was not the fact that was not any of the dying. Like this happens in 1916, which is also a year in which the German army throws a million lives into the meat grinder at Verdun. Right.

Right. The Hydric family's tragedy is that they're obsessed with this upcoming release of a new edition of Hugo Reimann's music lexicon, which is the most popular German encyclopedia of music and musicians. And they were really excited because Bruno Hydric was supposed to show up in the volume. He was going to get his own little entry in this music lexicon. And he does. But here's the great tragedy for the Hydrics.

They list him as a Jewish composer. Oh, snap. Oh yeah. That really pisses him off. Yeah. God damn, dude. That is. Woo.

It seems to have been that like a former student of Bruno's that he had a falling out with got hired by this and like inserted the like to fuck with him like nobody knew it wasn't true. Just wanted to like exact. It's like you said, it's a playground insult. So this guy doesn't like him works for the company and sticks it in the inside. He does a fucking prank. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That's like finding out that fucking Ashton Kutcher accidentally did the holocaust. You know, he's just like, oh, just fuck it with him. I was trying to punk them. I was doing punk. Oh, man, that sucks. So Bruno sues the encyclopedia for libel and he wins the case and they fix the encyclopedia.

But rumors about the family's Jewish ancestry grow more frequent after this and Reinhard schoolmates begin to tease him and his younger brother. Now, that quote I read earlier in a lot of summaries of Hydrics upbringing will note that his family was extremely anti-Semitic. And this is something that seems like it would have to be undeniable given his future. But his biographer Robert Gerroth argues that there's no evidence of this, which is not to say that they weren't anti-Semitic. But that's not the question.

The question is, were they anti-Semitic in any way that kind of exceeded the background level of anti-Semitism in German Catholic Protestant culture? Yeah. Yeah. Probably not. I'm going to quote from Robert Gerroth here throughout the war years, the Hydrics placed a great deal of importance on denying these rumors, threatening those who repeated them with libel actions, yet their own personal relations with the Jewish citizens of Hala

who numbered no more than 1400 in 1910 were quite normal. And there is no evidence to suggest that Bruno Hydrics' attitude towards the Jews was hostile. On the contrary, Jews sent their sons and daughters to Hydrics Conservatory. Bruno rented out the seller of the school as a storage space to a local Jewish salesman. And as Elda's son, Reinhardt, became friends with the son of the cantor of the Hala Jewish community, Abraham Lichtenstein. So again, Reinhardt has a Jewish friend as a kid. The family is willing to sell and like do business with them.

Right. They're particularly hateful to their Jewish citizens. Right. And Jewish people to them aren't some like weird foreign abstraction, you know, they're not like... The members of the community. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. They know them. They know Jews. They've talked to Jews. They're friends with Jews. They work with them. Yeah. Wow.

It's more the reason they react so violently to these rumors is that it's again, it's a very racist society. The rumors are bad for business. It's bad for the family honor. Right. Like that's the reaction. They're not unwilling. Like they don't treat Jewish people like there's some alien culture.

They just... Right. But they also, they're a part of this very racist culture and they don't want to have the consequences of being seen as Jewish. Right. Yeah. They're like, not that there's anything wrong with that. I don't think they're even saying that.

No, of course not. Again, I'm not trying to whitewash it either, but it's not like, they're not like, they're not like laser targeted on being racist. Like they're pretty normal and perhaps even for the standards of the time, a little bit more enlightened than a lot of their fellow neighbors. Right. Like, yeah. You know who also isn't more anti-Semitic than the background level of the culture?

Sophie, I think that's not a good idea. It's not working. No. I like that one. Oh boy. Sophie, can you play me out like an air horn or three? No, I'm just going to say, hopefully it's a Volkswagen ad. Yeah.

Because if it's a Volkswagen ad, then it is a bit more anti-Semitic than the background level. 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. Because the FBI sometimes, you've 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. 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. 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. Don't think too much about the meaning of the word Volk. I love that they totally just, they KFC'd their name, where they were like, if BMW can

exist, that fucking VW can. Volk just means people, literally just people, nothing more can be read into the meaning of the word Volk, never mean anything, but there's no perfectly normal word people. It's a car. It's a car, Volks. It's a car. Yeah. A lot of, I think if there's any excuse for kind of bigoted German accents, it's this

episode. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The German people love when an American does an accent. There's a couple of different groups around the world that you can always make fun of. Americans are one of them, obviously. Russians are another.

And then there's the Germans and the Italians. Oh, and the British. The Italians for sure. Oh, yeah. The Italians. I mean, that's my entire Sopranos podcast is just two dudes doing real bad Italian accents. So if you like that, check it out. That's the legacy of imperialism.

Like the only downside you face as an imperial country is it's it's it's fine to make fun of your accents and hand gestures forever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You lose one thing. Big fucking deal. You lose one thing.

Yeah. We're going to we're going to make fun of your fucking pizzas. We're going to make fun of your accent, deal with it. So when the war ended, Reinhardt was 15, which was more or less a young adult by the standards of his time. 15 when it ends, but like 15 when kind of like it starts to everything because there's like, you know, it's it's not a super clean end. Now, German defeat was followed by a wave of protests in a number of left wing revolutions

in Germany. And this seems to be what really politicized Hydrik for the first time. He joined the German Nationalist People's Party, which was an anti-democratic monarchist organization in 1919. And in February of that year, a group of miners in Hala proclaimed a general strike against the Reich government. This was met by an anti-communist counter strike, businesses in Hala closed to deny strikers food, doctors, teachers and other civil servants refused to work.

And this was again, they were striking against the strike. So this is a wing strike and there's a right wing strike against the left wing strike. I love that like a left wing strike is when the workers get together and decide to make demands upon their employers and a right wing strike is when the the cabal of rich people who control everything decide to starve the people. Yeah. And you can see who has the power there, you know, yeah, it's the it's the starving workers.

Yeah. The the left wing mob cancel culture came for the yeah, it's it's exactly it's a damn antifa they're trying to cancel Germany just because of World War One. So the strike grew despite the counter strike, three quarters of the mines across Germany eventually closed and in a Hala alone, 50,000 workers gathered to demand the resignation of the Reich government. The defense minister ordered a Freikorps unit, which is like Freikorps are it's like the oath keepers, they're veteran, but like scarier because like the oath keepers, they all they

claim their veterans like 80 percent of them either didn't do anything in the military at all or were like a guy whose job was to like sign for the bullets that real soldiers use. Right. Freikorps guys are like these guys have just gotten off of the front where their job was to beat people to death in a trench with a wooden club like they're scary people. I love that the oath keepers are like half of them are just stealing Valor. It's like they absolutely are that's incredible, but these freikorps dudes are some of the most

terrifying men who have ever lived and the defense minister of Germany orders a Freikorps unit into the city to smash the strike. The whole situation ends in a bloody invasion with several days of insurgent combat in the city. Artillery was used to blast out leftists hiding in buildings in total 29 people were killed and 67 were wounded and shit like this is not just happening all over Germany. There's a bunch of different like attempts to take over cities and larger chunks of the government and like fights between right and left.

And by comparison to other cities, the rebellion in Kala is not like one of the most noted ones. Ryan hard. Hydric was distinctly on the fringes of this developing history. He joined a voluntary civil defense force, which was established by the Freikorps after they killed all the leftists in order to maintain order in case the left tried something again. And he's unlikely to have done anything meaningful odds are his joining was more or less a symbolic gesture, a way of asserting his manhood after missing out on the excitement of a real war.

Right. Now, that's 1919, 1920. There's another quasi rebellion in Holland. This one is a push by a far right German nationalist party, and this too was defeated in its defeat brought about another left wing attempt to take power, right? This is a collapsing fucking empire here, right? Right. You have all these political sides who have been kind of pushed down in terms of their

ability to fuck with each other by sort of the Kaiser's, you know, in charge. The Kaiser goes right. Everything collapses. And they just there's a couple of years where they're just kind of murdering each other in the streets. And yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's just such a strange impulse to like try to defend your fucking phantom limb of Monarch, you know, where you're just like, that's gone, dude. Time to move. Time to move on. He's bounced, he's living in a mansion now, he's the war went bad. He is gone. Your mind's starved to death and he never missed a meal.

Why are you such a fucking bootlicker? It's like, imagine licking a phantom limb, you know what I mean? It's like, that's insane. Like the fucking boot is gone and you're still licking it. Yeah. It's it's pretty great. So there's, you know, a series of street battles and hydric remains in the civil defense forces in 1920, but there's no evidence that he fought during any of this.

He had by this time developed what one friend called, quote, an extremely vokish attitude towards politics. And this means that he thought this is like the the proto fascist strain of ideology in Germany, vokish thought in this basically to sum it up. Vokish thinkers thought that the health of the Volk or the German people, generally the Aryan German people, right, took precedence over any other concerns, including petty morality. Obviously, there's a lot of racism, anti-Semitism wrapped up in this. Again, see see the Volkswagen for more.

So Hydric later claimed that during this time, he joined several of the racist and pro-Aryan societies that sprang up in Hala and all across Germany during this period. This was probably a lie that he told later to burnish his not credentials. There's no evidence that he joined any of these anti-Semitic societies in 1920. And the fact is that Reinhardt Hydric, while he was definitely kind of on the right wing side of thing, does not seem to have been primarily motivated by politics during this period. In fact, his his larger aspirations seem to have been a belief in himself and a desire

to be respected. What is important about the politics of the period in terms of Reinhardt is that he came of age in an era in which increasingly people who were very political were expressing their willingness and displaying their willingness to do a violence against their political enemies. That was increasingly common when he's a young man. And that's really the biggest impulse impact this has on him at the time. Yeah. Trying to try and approve themselves in the eyes of their sociopathic, psychopathic peers

and just being willing to fucking more traumatized peers, right? One of the reasons Germany is there's so much murdering over politics in this period is that like if you've watched some of these guys have literally seen tens of thousands of people die in front of their eyes. They've stepped over the corpses of their schoolmates, blasted apart by artillery. Yeah. Yeah. They just don't have any fucks to give.

Right? Yeah. Would you not murder somebody if you've been through that? What would mean to you? You spend like 24 hours at Verdun and you're going to be like, oh, people dying is that's normal shit. Yeah. I could do that all day.

Yeah. It just doesn't mean the same thing. And by the time Reinhardt was 18, the German economy was entering a period of hyperinflation that entirely wiped out the savings of the middle class and the upper middle class. By this point, the Heidrich family was in this category. They had been very wealthy. They had had a mansion. They lose their mansion at some point.

They lose their money. The conservatory doesn't quite close for a while, but it's barely hanging on there and it's reduced to begging for government funds to stay open. This much must have like rank old Reinhardt like he's again, he grows up with money. He grows up proud of his family. And the fact that his family business collapses because again, he loves music. It seems like that's the thing he actually would have. Number one, everyone seems to agree.

He was a very good violin player. He was a very talented musician. But the fact that his family business collapses, the fact that there's no money in teaching music or even really playing it in this period convinces him to pick a different career from his father. And in 1922, he joins the Navy. Oh, yes. Well, that's good.

Never a good idea. Yeah. Yeah. Kids. Yeah. Just try to avoid any state armed forces at all fucking cost. Yeah. Yeah.

Wow. Now, Reinhardt had spent most of his life up to this point living under the Kaiser and Wilhelm II had been absolutely obsessed with the Navy. Again, Wilhelm is like sees himself in a lot of ways as a British man. And he is. He's like he's like a grandson of Queen Victoria. Oh, of course. Kaiser Wilhelm is an admiral in the British Navy.

Yeah. Like and he's he's he's very obsessed with the Navy. He has this kind of unhinged need. He has both this love of British culture and this kind of unhinged need to to beat the British. And prior one of the things that leads to World War One, one of the factors is that he's obsessed with building up the German Navy to a point that it threatens the British Navy. And this is part of like why tensions escalate.

Right. But the impact of this for a kid like Reinhardt growing up as a child during this period is that there's a ton of propaganda about how fucking cool it is to be in the Navy. Yeah. Yeah. Look at all these giant ships. Look at these giant boats. Yeah.

You could hang out with all these dudes. You could listen to music and rock and roll, which hasn't been invented yet. You could eat all sorts of chocolates on the sea. It's a lot of fun. Oh, chocolate. Yes. You could. I'm here in the Navy, maybe it kills you for the Kaiser.

I don't know. We will probably throw you into a war with no real with no real, you know, objective us as in a land grab. But it'll be fun. Yeah. So the November Revolution in that and so there's being a Navy man becomes complicated after the war because at the very end of World War One, there's this thing called the November Revolution, which helps into the Kaiser's government and it starts with a bunch

of sailors in Kiel, which is a port city, refusing the orders of their superior officers to put the imperial fleet out to sea to engage in a last apocalyptic battle with the Royal Navy. So the whole of World War One, pretty much Germany has a Navy that is on paper, might be able to beat the Royal Navy, but the Kaiser is terrified of risking it, right? Because if you try to beat that, you might lose. And then you'd lose this beautiful Navy that you're so proud of. So he only ever lets it have there's only one in all of World War One, one full clash

between the German and Royal and British navies. And they both kind of claim victory. I think you could kind of argue the Germans did a bit better than the British, but it's really not clear. But they have this. It's very brutal for both of them. And so after that, they stay in port pretty much the whole fucking time. And at the end of the war, it becomes clear they're going to lose.

The British are going to like try to take all of the boats from them as part of the surrender agreement. And the Admiral of the German Navy and the Kaiser, I think, also kind of just want the Navy to sail out for one last glorious just to see if they could beat the Royal Navy, right? And the sailors are like, well, but the war is lost. Why are we going to die for this if the war is lost? I'm just doing an experiment, just go out there and see if we can win.

It's called a fucking Hail Mary. Have you ever fucking heard of it? Yeah. So they don't do the Hail Mary. They revolt, which is rad, the enlisted men of the German Navy. But this kind of among assholes ruins the reputation of the Navy, right? Like, if you don't suck, this would make the Navy seem cooler. Like, yeah, fuck dying pointlessly for the Kaiser, the dumbest man in Europe.

But this fucks up their reputation to people who are like shitty nationalists. Now, the Navy's reputation is saved after the fact that after the Treaty of Versailles, when the British are supposed to be given basically most of this German Navy that remains, German sailors heroically destroy their own Navy at Scapa Flow rather than hand it over to Great Britain. So it's been a complicated period of time for the Navy when Reinhardt joins the Navy. It's number one, vastly reduced from its previous size, and it's it's a complicated thing to be in.

Now, Reinhardt likely joined the Navy because in his childhood, Navy men had had a reputation for being dashing, capable, heroic, and sexy. He wanted the respect that came with being an officer and the steady paycheck that the military provided because, again, the whole economy is fucking collapsed, the whole country is in free fall at this point. And by all accounts, Hydra did very well at training. He was even sent to officer training straight away in 1924 after becoming a senior midshipman. Now, after World War Two, some of the guys who'd been Reinhardt's comrades during this

period would claim later that he, quote, had no friends among the crew. And again, they're trying to distance themselves from the Holocaust guy. Yeah. Yeah. This is pretty consistent. And it's it was probably accurate. And a lot of the claims made about him in this period, like, it's easy to overextend and said, oh, he had no friends because there's something wrong with him.

Like from the beginning, people could tell that he was he was just bad. That's not the truth. He was a class thing. And his biographer, Robert Gerwath, credits the fact that he was a loner in the Navy to his and he was particularly a loner when he's before he's an officer in the period early on in his Navy career. And Gerwath says this is because he's from an upper middle class educated background. And he's like he's too fancy for the enlisted Navy guys.

He spends his time off duty playing the violin on board and people make fun of him for this. Like that's why he's a loner. The German Navy, particularly like, you know, at the midshipment level is this hyper masculine world. And Hydrik is this urbane, a feet like violin player. Yeah, exactly. Violin player. They see him as a pansy Gerloth writes, quote, his musical inclinations repeatedly made

him the target of ridicule. During his basic training in Kiel, for example, a non commission training officer from West Prussia frequently woke him at night and forced him to play the Tiseli Serenade on his Serenade on his violin. Many years later, Hydrik recalled these humiliating incidents when making condescending comments regarding the racial inferiority of the West Prussians with their Polish infested blood. I love esoteric race hate of the day. It's just like, oh, you know, those goddamn West Prussians, you know, it's just another

kind of German, but you're like, no, they're infested with Polish blood. Yeah, they got a little bit of poll in them. They don't want any of that growth. No, they're a quarter slob. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Northern Italy.

They're basically Swiss Southern Italy. Those are Libyans. So Reinhard's early years in the Navy included a number of assassinations of liberal politicians by right wing extremists, including the murder of Foreign Minister Rothenau by one of Hydrik's fellow naval cadets, a guy he goes to Navy school with. Now, despite the fact that he was in close proximity with a right wing terrorist who assassinated a government minister, Reinhard exhibited no interest in this case. Like again, he's not political at this point.

He's like, you know, he doesn't give a shit about this. He just wants respect. He wants to wear big boy pants and be able to tell him how fancy. Yeah, he doesn't care about anything else. He's also not very interested. Another thing that happens during this period is Germany, you know, they're unable to pay back their war debts. They like strike in terms of war debt repayment and the French military occupies the Ruhr,

which is Germany's industrial heartland. This is a huge deal for the right wing. This is like a major. This is like fucking Benghazi for them, right? Like they go to they are obsessed with this fucking deal. And Reinhard doesn't care about it either because again, he's just not a political guy. His comrades in the Navy actually considered him a liberal and a lot of them disliked him for that reason.

Years later, his wife, Lena, would claim that at this stage, quote, politically he was clueless. He regarded all parties, particularly the Nazi party with arrogance and considered politics itself to be vulgar. In this connection, he acted very much the snob and regarded his naval career as the most important thing. The rest didn't matter. I just I love that he was a political because it's like it just, you know, it proves to me that like whenever someone gets goes from apolitical to immediately radicalized, it's

like, no, you have no ideology, you have no political beliefs. Your radicalization is absolutely dependent on just positive reinforcement. So like, you know, it's it's this isn't a deeply held belief that he's had for years and years. It's totally saw which way the wind was blowing and is pretending to have always been down for his fucking right wing revolution. Yep. Yep.

And I mean, we'll talk about that too in a bit because I think there is there is some more to it. But at this period of time, again, his his his enlisted Navy comrades consider him like an a feat liberal. Yeah. He's not super popular among his fellow comrades and his unpopularity in among them kind of brings a resurgence of the rumors that he was Jewish. One fellow officer cadet later recalled, Hydrick was more or less regarded as a Jew because

another crew comrade from Hala told us that his family was actually called Sus and that this was widely known in Hala. This is like that's where the rumors come from is that one of his relatives had it last name that was also a Jewish last name. Yeah. So Hydrick earned the teasing nicknames White Jew and White Moses. And in order to fight back against those rumors, Hydrick starts trying to claim that he's super anti Semitic.

And he starts claiming that he'd been a member of a bunch of anti Semitic organizations before joining the Navy again, probably untrue. He starts lying about this to counteract the rumors. Right. But also this is kind of the period in which his his commitment is number one. This is the period in which political anti Semitism is going viral in Germany. And Hydrick is kind of a long for the ride. And he's in part inspired by the fact that it behooves him politically to be as anti

Semitic as possible. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Despite all the difficulties he had with his crewmates, Reinhardt was a solid naval officer. His career moved steadily upward in the summer of 1923. He was transferred to a cruiser where he met Wilhelm Canaris, the future head of Nazi

Germany's military intelligence agency. Canaris was impressed by the young officer and became his mentor. By 1924, Hydrick had found his groove. He excelled as a Navy man, and he even begun to find respect within a certain set of the officer cast. Many of these men appreciated his artistic talents and noted that he seemed completely transformed when he would start playing the violin or discussing music. People will say that his his violin playing brings folks to tears like he's supposed to

be very good. Yeah, he's got to be good. In 1926, he was promoted to second naval lieutenant. His roommate reported that after this, he quote, developed significantly. His superiors frequently gave him recognition and good evaluations. He was obliging and showed that people could rely on him with every sign of recognition. His zeal increased and so did his arrogance. Ambition was undoubtedly Hydrick's strongest characteristic.

He wanted to accomplish something and others were supposed to be amazed. Now, Hydrick began to dream of one day becoming an admiral. In 1928, he was promoted to first lieutenant. This brought him more free time, which he devoted to athletics, music and women. He had been noted by his colleagues as having a wandering eye. In 1926, when aboard the Schleswig-Holstein, which is a boat with a terrible name. Horrible name. Yeah, horrible name.

On a journey through Spain and Portugal, he gained a reputation for sleeping around with absolutely anything in a skirt. I'm looking for a Holstein to fucking Schleswig. I would like a Holstein for my Schleswig. All these Holsteins on the boats. I'm sorry. So not just ladies he meets in bars, but ladies he meets in brothels. There's even one point where there's like a joint naval social gathering with like the

German and British navies, and he starts really awkwardly, probably drunkenly, heading on a British officer's wife. She like turns him down very publicly in a way that's super embarrassing. So Hydrick had no issue engaging in casual liaisons with sex workers. But his real goal was to find a high class woman with social status that he could show off at fancy parties because again, he's an image guy. On December 6th, 1930, he met Linne Van Austin at a ball. So when you run into Germans with a Vaughn between their first and last names, it means

they're either a grifter pretending to be a noble or they have some sort of noble heritage. Linne's father was descended from Danish nobility, but the Vaughn Austin fortunes had fallen since the 1860s. So they're they're the aristocrat, the aristocracy, but they're also broke. They're broker than the Hydrick family by the 1920s. Linne is still upper class, though, because again, class isn't something that has just to do with money. It's about your breeding.

He's a high bread but broke and she and Hydrick fall for each other. Three days after their first date, Reinhardt Hydrick invites Linne to the theater and then to a wine bar where he proposes to her. She eventually accepts and to try and understand why she accepts, I'm going to cite a passage from the book, Nazi Wives. Quote, Linne found him intriguing. I felt sympathy for this purposeful yet reserved young man and agreed to a rendezvous the next

day. In the first few years, she breathlessly described how Hydrick opened his heart to her over a series of long walks, a visit to the theater and a meal in a restaurant, and then asked her to marry him during their third evening together. Lina liked to suggest that their love was written in the stars and could not be denied. Others have speculated that his sudden proposal was a necessary prelude to getting her in bed. That's game, dude, just like going, dude's rock, dude, you just you wind them and dine

them for three dates and then you go, hey, would you fuck me if I married you? Yeah, would you fuck me if we get engaged? Yeah, now you will. Oh, man. That's also at a time when I think like three dates, if you didn't ask someone to marry you by then, you were just being a harlot if you did not marry them. Yeah, your dating is, it was a different time. It was a different time, you know?

It was a different time. But you know what time it is now, guys, but we'll fuck you on the third date without getting married. Oh, no. Oh, no. No, Sophie, that's the way it is. That's true. All right.

Can I at least? I'm hoping for dickpill ads. That's all I'm saying. Oh, whether or not they're dickpill ads, the one promise we make on this show, the only promise we make about our sponsors is that they all fuck, absolutely fuck. Like these products, fuck. Fuck. Here's another Volkswagen ad.

I mean, if you ain't got laid in the back of a beetle, like, what are you doing? What did you do in your 20s? The 2021 Volkswagen by VW. By VW. No race mixing. 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. But 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. He's a nasty shark. 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. 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. 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. 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. We're back. Oh, good times. So they keep their engagement secret at first because Reinhard has to get the family's approval, right? Like, legally, you don't have to, I don't think, in this period, but it's like polite. And it's polite.

And also, he's he's comes from a high class family. They're rich as hell. They're not nobles, but they're very wealthy. They run in high class circles. She's a noble. You want to do things properly. So they get engaged in secret, but he promises her that he's going to get her family's approval before Christmas.

He just kind of wants to get all his ducks in a row, make himself look as impressive as possible. He writes her a letter shortly after their engagement that ends with this paragraph, quote, being straightforward and upright is the key demand I have always placed upon myself. It will thus not be difficult for me to look your father in the eye. You know, for me, there is nothing worse in people whom I love than beating around the bush in insincerity.

I don't hesitate to confront mean guys with the same weapons. Now, of course, he was lying. Yeah, I wonder like that's how it's translated. He was lying to her. He was not lying about wanting to be married because they did get married. He was lying to her about being a sincere and straightforward man. The truth is that Reinhardt Hydrick was a habitual liar when it came to sex and pretty much everything else.

He was already involved with another woman. In fact, he had gotten involved with another woman six months before he met Lena. We do not know the precise details of the story, but one of a couple of different things has to be true. Either he forced himself, you know, raped a woman and then promised to marry her afterwards to keep her quiet. And you know, I'm putting the words rape in there. But at the time, you might not like she might not have described it that way, right?

Because people talked differently about it at that point, we fucked and like consents not a thing in my culture, but you have to marry me now, right? That's one possibility. The other possibility is that he started sleeping with a woman and he had to claim that they to get he had to promise to get engaged to her so that they could keep fucking, right? They fuck once and she's like, well, OK, we got to get you got you can't make me a dishonest woman. We got married now because we fucked.

One of those two things is true. Robert Gerwath and I tend to he knows more about Reinhardt-Eidrich than I do. His take on this is you'll hear a couple of different ones. His take is that Hydric met this woman six months earlier at another bar and that this young woman just kind of assumed that she and Hydric were engaged because they were fucking. So maybe he didn't even promise to get engaged. But because of where things culturally are at the time, oh, we fucked.

We're engaged now. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what the case is. Whatever the truth, Reinhardt did follow through on his promise to tell Lena's family. They approved because he was a young rising naval star with a semi famous father. So they start printing engagements and announcements for the local paper to celebrate. And the woman that he's having sex with on the side sees one of these engagement announcements.

Oh, she is not happy about this. I'm going to quote from Hitler's hangman again. Reinhardt, who continued to cultivate the relationship even after he had met Lena, invited her, the second woman to Kiel, where he's stationed, and despite her request for a separate room in a hotel, encouraged her to spend the night in his living quarters. Further reproach ma probably occurred on this occasion. In any case, the young woman saw herself as compromised and reacted to the receipt of Hydric's engagement notice with a nervous breakdown.

Now we don't know who this lady was, but we do know that her father was some kind of prominent person in Germany because he was directly connected to the commander in chief of the entire German Navy. Which is a bad family to piss off if you're wanting a Navy career. Yeah. In the Navy. Yeah. In the Navy.

So Hydric gets court-martialed over this and it's because it's dishonorable behavior, right? Honor is a big thing. This is like scummy behavior. You can get in trouble for this. And most sources, including Gerwath, seem to agree that normally he would have just gotten kind of a little more than a slap on the wrist, but it wouldn't have ended or even derailed his career, right?

Right. It's what it's fucking like all of these rich dudes are sleeping around, right? Yeah, yeah. They're all doing it. Yeah. Probably he would have just if he had as soon as they brought him in been like, yes, you know, I'm just a man. I fucked up.

This is my bad. I'm so sorry. Who among us? Who among us? And all the other dudes have been like, yeah, you know what? We're all rich Navy officers. A hundred percent of us are cheating on our wives and we're cheating on our mistresses. Okay.

Like he would have gotten the punishment in order to mollify the father of this woman and it would have gone away. But that's not how it goes because Hydrick cannot take responsibility for his own actions. So instead he tries to blame everything on the woman for seducing him. Wow. Yeah. And again, you're talking about one of the most patriarchal misogynist cultures in history, Germany and the German Navy in the early 1920s.

His behavior is so gross that it horrifies all of these admirals, right? Wow. Like you. And that's difficult in this period to be misogynist for like the admirals of the German Navy. Yeah. And they saw they saw like thousands of people dying like on the on the Rhine and they're just like, you disgust me.

But not you. Right. Not you. Wow. I mean, this is so upsetting to them that they decide he is not fit to wear a German uniform and he is discharged from the Navy. You have to you have to really think in your head how gross you have to be for all these guys.

Again, I can't overemphasize all these guys in the 20s going like, this dude's kind of anti-woman. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I beat my wife and my girlfriend every day, but this guy seems to really. I don't hate them. Yeah.

I hit some because I love them. He's just a meanie. What the mean man? So this fucks up all of Reinhardt-Hydrex plans. Oddly enough, his Lena, his fiance stays with him. This might sound odd if you don't understand the fact that and this is a rarity for the show. Lena Van Austin, Reinhardt-Hydrex wife sucks as much as he does.

She's a terrible person. Yeah. And I don't say that lightly. Normally, I try to have because it's a hard time. Women don't have a lot of great agency by the society in this period. She's really bad. She's a really bad person and not just because she stays with like not because she stays with her husband during or Reinhardt during this, but for a lot of other reasons.

Yeah. She sounds independently bad. She's independently shitty. Yeah. Wow. In the book, Nazi wives, James Wiley writes, quote, beyond the powerful physical attraction between them, Lena and Hydrex shared some key characteristics. Both were fixed on escaping their backgrounds and forging a different destiny for themselves.

They were stubborn and extremely ambitious. Each had a cold, calculating streak. Neither suffered fools gladly. Both had an inflated sense of their own worth and felt that the majority of people were inferior beings. So real power couple of being trash. Yeah. Yeah.

Just sitting around in the living room going, I fucking hate the Italians. Me too. You know, you know who I don't like, the Vist Prussians. Yeah. Just the whole vest of Prussia is just gross to me. It's Polish is what it is. Yeah. It is.

Let's get married. Yeah. Is this love? They're both like looking like, they're like at a museum touching a phrenological like, like one of those hands with a bunch of bumps on it to tell you, like, and like their hands meet in the middle. That's like lady in the tramp. It is Simoy, Simonite or whatever they phrase it.

We were both about to measure the same skull and the hands met. So you've surely heard the phrase behind every man is a great woman. And unfortunately, this is also true of history's greatest monsters. Yeah. Had Lena not been the sort of woman she was, we might not have had a Reinhardt hydric because he might have killed himself after getting discharged from the Navy. And I'm going to quote again from Wiley's book, fucking Nazi wives quote on 30th April 1931.

He was dismissed from the Navy. Lena said that he was so shattered by the verdict that he had a total breakdown locking himself in his room for days on end, smashing furniture and weeping uncontrollably. And she had to piece him back together again, whether true or not. And it's hard to imagine the man Hitler called iron heart behaving like a hysterical child. The most startling thing about the whole incident is Lena's unswerving loyalty. Under the circumstances, nobody would have blamed her if she'd called off the engagement. She was only 19.

So this was hardly her last chance at happiness. Clearly, Lena was convinced that with her guidance, Hydric would could still rise to the top. I can fix him. I can fix him. I can I can make him powerful and that would be famous and I can make him so much worse. Yeah. The Vaughn Austin family rescinded their approval for the marriage after Hydric got fired.

This was not like necessarily a moral thing. It was a pragmatic thing. The family is broke and they needed to know that Hydric was going to have money before they would accept this. Right. It seems to have considered it her duty to make sure her husband to be got the chance to be as great as she knew he could be. She was convinced his chance would come through the National Socialist German Workers Party.

While Hydric was fairly apolitical in 1930, when they met, Lena was already a dedicated Nazi. She had first attended a party rally the year before where she'd swooned over the sexy black uniformed men of Hitler's new bodyguard unit, the SS or Schutztoffel. Now when she met Hydric, her only disappointment with him came from the fact that he had never even heard of Hitler's Mein Kampf. In fact, he mocked Nazi leaders regularly, calling Hitler a bohemian corporal and Goebbels a cripple.

Again, he's racist against the Nazi leadership. Hitler's an Austrian, that piece of shit. And basically slobs. And this guy's got funny legs. I like is a cripple. Yeah. Yeah. First off, so was the Kaiser.

Yeah. Right. The Kaiser. He might not have known. They kept that pretty under wraps. So that's true. Lena's brother was a committed Nazi, a member of 1929, since 1929 of the SA or the Stormtroopers. He was one of the first hundred thousand Nazis.

Her whole family as embarrassed and impoverished aristocrats appreciated the Nazi message of German rebirth. Lena particularly appreciated their racism. Decades after the war in the 1970s, she admitted to interviewers that as a teenager, she'd come to view Polish refugees who entered Germany in 1918 as, quote, intruders and unwelcome guests. Their presence provoked her so much that she had to hate them. Yeah.

Yeah. It was their fault. She made her hate them by not looking like her. Yeah. Yeah. She compared seeing refugees who'd fled to Germany to avoid massacre as a forced marriage. They're raping me with their presence, basically is what she says. Like that's again.

Yeah. She's trash. She's really bad. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. She is trash and she is canceled. She is a big driving factor in hydrics developing anti-Semitism because it really hits warp

speed once he meets Lena. I think she kind of drives his racism in a lot of ways. She certainly drives him towards the Nazi party. And so Lena advised her beau to join the Nazis and offer his services to the SA. Again, the SA are the brown shirts. These are the street fighting Nazis. And at this point, they have about 150,000 members. They're kind of creating a parallel military to the German military, the Reichswehr.

And as a result, they're actively recruiting former military officers whose experience could help the SA's leader, a fellow named Ernst Röhm, turn the organization into a real military. Now it's important to note that the Nazis are not hydrics only path to avoid destitution. This is not his only choice after the Navy. He gets offered a cushy, well-paying job teaching sailing that would have paid him more honestly than he'd made in the Navy, but he wouldn't have had respect. Sailing teachers don't get uniforms.

They don't get ranks, right? Yeah. The Nazis. Yeah. Those who can't do teach, you know, and he's just like, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna go down that road. Yeah. No one gets less respect than a teacher.

I love that. That's just a universal concept. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing's worse than being a teacher. I'm going to join the Nazi party. Yeah, exactly. Now, meanwhile, the Nazis, cognizant of Reinhardt's experience as an officer, offered him an

elevated position within their organization. One on the staff of a little dude you might have heard of named Heinrich Himmler. You know, at the time, Himmler had newly been put in charge of the SS and the SS, again, SS stands basically for bodyguard. It's like protection squad, I think is the literal translation. These are, they start just as a small group of the most loyal and also most like an Aryan looking Nazis to guard Hitler's body, right? Yeah.

They become a state within a state. There's eventually like a million or so of these guys. At the time, there's very few SS men. They're subordinate to the SA, so they're not independent, but Himmler's in charge of them and he has a dream to supplant the SA, to make them the biggest thing in being a Nazi. Now, his first step to doing this was to increase the party's capacity to carry out counter-espionage, because both anti-fascists and the German police are infiltrating the Nazis and the SA at this point.

So Himmler, his first vision is like, OK, what are we bad at? We're bad at rooting out spies. So that's one of the things I'm going to have the SS do. I'm going to build a capacity for counter-espionage into it. And he needs a guy to lead this, because he doesn't know anything about counter-espionage. And the friend of Reinhardt and Heidrich's family, and of Lena's family, who basically comes to the Nazis and say, hey, I know this officer who wants to join if you'll offer him a cushy job.

He claims that Heidrich is an ex-naval intelligence officer. This is not true. It came out as a result of kind of like a miscommunication. He was in like signals intelligence, but he doesn't know anything about espionage. But Heidrich gets the interview anyway. He immediately impressed Himmler, who saw in his his new SS like Himmler wants the SS to be the racial elite of the Nazi Party. And so from the beginning, there were strict requirements for genealogy.

They would reject mainly on appearance if you had like an inferior body, which it's funny because if you look at Heinrich Himmler, he looks like an extra from Trekkies. Yeah. Meanwhile, Reinhardt Heidrich, though, like it makes sense that Himmler falls in love with this dude. Heidrich is tall. He's over six feet. He's athletic.

He's in very good shape. He's blonde-haired and blue-eyed, right? Yeah. He's played by Kenneth Branagh, you know, played ably by Kenneth Branagh. Yeah, very well. Yeah. Yeah. So it's clear that I love that the whole Nazi leadership are just the most fuggly fucking

ghouls you've ever seen. And all of their propaganda is just like the other most beautiful people on earth. We have blonde hair and we never bald. We never get fat. And you just look at like Martin Borman and you're just like, what the fuck? Yeah. Fucking janky ass Martin Borman hit her with his screwed up intestines, shitting himself constantly.

Like, how he's fucking Herman Gehring horribly addicted to heroin. Yeah. Just the most sickly, flawed, disgusting people just being like, you know what, we are, we're hot. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not like, look, hey, we're all, we all have IBS and drug abuse. Yeah.

Problems. We just don't pretend not to. Yeah. Yeah. Create a fake racial hierarchy that murders other people who basically, yeah, it anyway. I know what my features look like, you know, and I say, rather than being like, no, I have a small nose. I'm like, no, big noses are sexy.

This is what I look like. So anyway, Himmler loves Hydric because he's a fucking sexy ass blonde-haired blue-eyed dude. And yeah, so Himmler's thrilled with his appearance, of course. But that didn't necessarily mean he was going to get the job because Himmler's hiring for a specific technical task. He wants someone to build a counter espionage agency. Hydric has no experience in this.

And to explain how he gets the job anyway, I'm going to quote again from Hitler's Hangman. Undeterred by the realization that the applicant in front of him lacked any previous qualification for espionage work, Himmler asked Hydric to sketch out an organizational plan for an SS intelligence agency and gave him 20 minutes to complete the task. Without any previous experience in the field of espionage, Hydric resorted to the minimal knowledge he gained from years of reading cheap crime fiction and spy novels and wrapped his suggestions for a future SS intelligence service in suitably military phraseology. His minimal knowledge of espionage appears to have surpassed that of Himmler.

The Reich leader SS was impressed and hired him in preference to a second applicant, a former police captain. Oh my God. Okay, let's say pros and cons. Pro, he's a police captain. Con, he's not as hot. And he hasn't read every Sherlock Holmes. So we're going with the hot guy.

So Mr. Hydric, you're saying we need to be doing more heroin? You're saying more heroin and you're saying we need like a little fat man who will also help us out in Watson. I love it. Oh, man. The horrible historic irony here is that in in picking Hydric over this police captain, he actually made an excellent decision for a dumb reason. But this police captain turned out to also be an undercover cop trying to infiltrate

the SS police. Oh, shit. Accidental decision. He actually makes the best of the two decisions just for the dumbest possible reason. Damn it. And it's funny. We talk about this in one of our very first behind the bastards episodes, like the influence that like shitty fiction has on the Nazis, Hitler is hugely influenced by like a con man

and cowboy novelist who wrote writes like these these like fantasy cowboy novels about like, you know, Native Americans and yeah, boys and shit. Yeah. And it's funny because like Hydric gets hired to basically run the SS secret police because of his knowledge of these these fantasy detective novels during World War two during the the Russian war, when like things are going badly for the Nazis. Hitler sends hundreds of copies of these shitty cowboy novels to his generals on the eastern front because he's certain that they're filled with like strategic insights.

Like I can't overestimate the degree to which these guys are just a bunch of fucking nerds. It's the the nerdiest fucking fools. I swear to God. It's like fucking really like, OK, I have read every Tom Clancy and I think I can run counterterrorism. I'm certain that like when our fascist takes over and invades, I don't know, fucking China and the war goes badly, they're going to start like mailing copies of R.A. Salvatore novels to their generals fucking hell.

So God damn it. Yeah. Anyway, Hydric gets hired by Himmler and his starting salary is a lot of money. But when combined with the money he was still receiving from the Navy after getting fired, Hydric was now making a modest income enough to support he and his wife to be. Now Hydric seems to have had something of an instinct for party politics. He's good at this job. He's good at the politicking part of this job.

We can debate how good he is at counter espionage, but he's good at making a place for himself in an organization and consistently expanding that place. He recognizes Himmler early on as a guy he should tie himself to. And he sets about mimicking every opinion and deeply held belief his boss expresses. He also dives into proving himself as a Nazi. Now the best way to do this in the early 1930s is to get into a bunch of street fights with communists and social Democrats. During the run up to the 1931 Hamburg elections, the Nazis sent small motorized SS units around

to assault left wing party gatherings and they were in cars so they could disappear before the cops would arrive. Hydric leads one of these squads. He's good at this job and his shock troop actually gets a reputation for being particularly brutal. Hamburg communists start calling him the blonde beast. So this is how he really proves himself to the other Nazis. You got to crack some fucking skulls in this period.

Yeah. Now, Reinhardt also knows that one of the best ways to make yourself valuable in a new organization is to find something it's not doing, but it needs to do and then create that thing for the SS. This is the I'm not even going to try this security service hereafter referred to as the SD. This is the SS intelligence branch that Himmler had been wanting to make for a while. Hydric jumps on the task and it starts off at the beginning.

Hydric is the only man in the SD. The organization is just him and eventually this will this will be tens of thousands of guys. That's kind of how he grows this like himself alone in a room to the the head of security basically for all of Nazi Germany. Now, again, he's a pretty humble position at the time in reality. But the fact that he's the head of something makes him sound impressive enough that he's able to write to Lena's parents and ask for their blessing to go forward with the wedding.

And eventually they say yes. Hydric also impressed his new Nazi colleagues. His first big task was to convince his superiors to give him the funding to put together a group of SS men who could unmask spies within the organization. This strike force would be able to act quickly to get rid of threats. He had in effect created the first Nazi secret police, a fact that was discovered by a local newspaper which described it as a fascist checker, which is like that's the the Soviet secret police.

Oh, OK. Yeah. Now, the article named Hydric as the brains of the operation. So he's he starts to be known for what he's doing. Yeah. Yeah. He's getting ink spilled about him. Which means, you know, maybe he's not actually all that great at the secret part.

But right. Being in a party. Yeah. At the end of 1931, he had more than 50 officers in his SD. The Vaughan Austin family finally gives him their approval. And in December of that year, he and Lena are wed. Now, at the time they got hitched, the SS of the essay were briefly illegal as the result of a temporary crackdown by one of the Weimar government's like last independent ish kind

of leaders before Hitler's rise. Despite this, the Hydric's wedding was conducted in uniform. Here's how Lena described her husband's wedding in a letter to a family member. The essay and SS dressed in white shirts and black trousers formed a guard of honor all the way to the cemetery gate. The pastor was also on our side and gave us a Luther quotation as a wedding motto. And though this world with devils filled should threaten to undo us, we will not fear for God hath willed his truth to triumph through us.

As we marched out of the church, the organist played the Horst Vessel song. As we left the cemetery following the wedding, several guards of honor were arrested by the police. So that's the Hydric wedding. Very Nazi wedding. Very Nazi. I mean, you've got everything. You've got people dressed up all all goth and shit.

You've got a fucking it's they got married at a church with a cemetery in it. I mean, these guys were really going for it like fucking style wise. Yep. Nice. And so, ordered for his hard work and for getting married, Himmler promoted Reinhard Hydric to SS Sturmbannfuhrer, or major. This was just seven days after his last promotion. The happy couple moved in together, but they did not spend much time enjoying themselves.

Hydric was a workaholic constantly at his desk or out in the street fighting for the party. His work ethic only somewhat compensated for the fact that he had no experience doing the kind of job that he'd gotten for himself. Robert Gerwath writes, the need for reforms to Hydric still highly amateur a spy network in Germany became apparent in February, 1932, when the SD suddenly found itself in a crisis prompted by the arrest of one of Hydric's agents, who had tried to gather secret military information from Navy command and Wilhelm Chauvin.

And although the police investigation did not reveal Hydric's involvement in the case, he nevertheless recognized the need to restructure his intelligence service in order to avoid further embarrassment. And he restructures it in a way that seems to be fairly effective. By June of 1932, Hydric's SD was the best intelligence gathering operation in the Nazi Party. Its competition, which had been the SA intelligence division, is actually shut down because his SS intelligence, his SD makes it unnecessary.

Hydric gets promoted yet again. This time to Colonel. And now he has eight full-time employees. You know, things kind of go up and down for the Nazis in this period. There's some dark times in late 1932 when they get kind of beamed in an election. By this point, Hitler was adjacent to power and, you know, he orchestrates his way into power by 1933 and he and his comrades succeed in seizing control of the Weimar government through a trail of fuckery that we detail in our non-Nazi bastards behind Hitler episode.

Reinhardt Hydric was not a major player in the Nazi seizure of power. By the time Hitler wound up in control, he had established himself as the chief of the Nazi secret police. Now, that had been an inter-party secret police, but now the party was the government and Reinhardt Hydric was about to find himself in near total control of the German police. We're going to talk about that and what came after in part two. But you know what we're going to talk about right now, Matt? What?

Yeah. Your pluggables. Plugs, plugs, plugs, plugs. Oh, man, I got so much to play. Well, if you love talking about real bad Nazis, you're also going to love the HBO series The Sopranos, and if you love The Sopranos, check out Pod Yourself a Gun. That's a podcast that me and Vince Mancini do. It's like a Sopranos rewatch podcast.

We also do a movie podcast called The Frotcast, F-R-O-T-C-A-S-T. Check that out. That's about not The Sopranos. It's about movies and stuff. Yeah. And yeah, follow me on Instagram, at Matt Leib Jokes. At Matt Leib Jokes. All right.

All right, well, friendos and enemies, frenemies. A lot of enemies listen to this podcast. A lot of enemies listen to this podcast. Shout out to Reinhard Heydrich, fan of the pod. Fan of the pod, loves it. From hell on his zoon. Love you so evil. He has a zoon.

Yeah, I know. He has a zoon energy. That was a great detail. No. The level of evil that we can't even fathom. Hitler's there on like an iPod original being like... Right, right, exactly. What are you doing with the zoon?

It's an inferior technology. It runs on Linux. Yeah, I love this Hitler as a Microsoft chauvinist. Yeah. Yeah, that's the big split in the Nazi party in hell, it's between like the Microsoft and then like the Strasserites who go for Linux. Yeah, right, yeah.

I've got a diamond reel. It only holds 12 songs since that's all you need. Anything more is vanity. Best MP3 player on the market. All right, well, that's the end of the episode. We'll be back on Thursday to just... A lot of genocide coming on Thursday. Very fun.

All right. All right, bam. 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 was 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.