Behind the Bastards - Part Two: How Nice, Normal People Made The Holocaust Possible

Episode Date: October 15, 2020

Robert is joined again by Sofiya Alexandra to continue discussing the, 'Little Nazis.' Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, welcome back to the podcast that this is, which is not the podcast that this isn't. Which is to say that this is behind the bastards. Yo, fam, what was that? Come on. I was being very specific, Sophie. I feel a love of God.

We talk about the worst people in all of history, okay? That's what we do. That's our milieu, is the worst people. Bad ones. Yes, and sometimes those bad people, there's dead babies. We always have this wonderful lady on. Sophia Alexandria is here today to talk with us about some dead babies. Robert, what did I say? I said, stop only inviting me to dead baby things. Can you break it up with some adult murder every once in a while?

Yeah, there was some adult murder in the last one. Come on, remember? But that doesn't count if part two is baby murder. That negates part one. I don't know that it does. I hear you. It just makes for more murdered people. I think that we do one baby murder episode, we do one other people murder episode, and that is a healthy balance for our relationship. You know what? I respect that, and I accept it.

Okay, all right, well good. See, this is why communication is so critical. Can you fit? I'm hugging you through the zoom. Thank you so much, Sophie. I'm hugging you. It's important to talk. Yeah. Yes. Well, thanks for having me. You're welcome. You're welcome. So this is part two of our episode, you know, about Nazis and stuff, right?

Do you want to actually introduce me, you fool? Okay, I did. I said you're Sophia Alexandria, who we talk about. Well, you're also a comedian. First of all, that's not my name. First of all, pronounce her last name right. Sophia Alexandria. Nope. What? Alexandra, sorry. How many fucking times? What a fucking, I was thinking about princesses.

I have literally spent hundreds of hours with you. I know, I was thinking of princesses. I too think of royalty when I think of Sophia, but I know how to pronounce her last name. You're so good at making him look like shit. I know. This is an episode about Nazis, and I'm looking worse than the Nazis right now.

I wouldn't go that far. Not after this episode, I'm not. Jesus. What with all the baby killing? All right, let's get to it. Come on. One of the nice things, Sophia, about studying the old Nazis, as opposed to studying today's fascists,

is that we do know how things ended with the old ones. You know they don't win in the end. We don't know that about our fascists. We're all still living through this, and there's a pretty good chance they'll wind up taking home the trophy. I believe in us. Yeah, I do believe in us, but certainly the game is not ended.

The game is certainly still afoot. Yeah, and I think we all have to get used to the idea. One of the frustrating things, I think there's this like, especially if you have friends and family members who kind of went Trump and have been getting increasingly at least far right if not explicitly fascy over the last few years,

you want some sort of emotional closure where they're like, I fucked up. I was wrong. I made a bad call. That's never going to happen. It's never going to happen. One of the things that I think is most interesting about Meyer's book, they thought they were free,

is that he talks to former Nazis about that. And these guys are, you would think if anyone can be like, oh yeah, that was the wrong horse to back. It would be guys living in Germany in 1946, but like, no, like they don't, like even those people weren't like, oh, you know what? This was a bad call.

My kids are dead and my house got burned down in a bombing raid. Probably voted for the wrong guy. That's not what I wanted. I'm sure there was some unfortunate mistakes, but overall it's been a pretty good couple of years. That's exactly what they said. I know. It's amazing.

These guys, these little Nazis, and again, these are not the guys who got rich under Nazism. These are not the venti Nazis. These are just merely tall Nazis. Yeah, tall, which again, in Starbucks and Nazi terminology means short. Exactly. So yeah, it's fascinating.

Rather than turning against Hitler, these little Nazis, the guys that Meyer befriended, they looked back on the Nazi time and power as like a golden age, and they blamed the Führer's failures on everyone but him. Only one of Meyer's 10 friends was actually willing to condemn large aspects of the Nazi system. As for the others, quote, the other nine decent, hardworking, ordinarily intelligent,

and honest men did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 45 that it was evil, and they do not know it now. None of them ever knew or knows now Nazism as we knew it and know it, and they lived under it, served it, and indeed made it. These nine ordinary Germans knew it absolutely otherwise, and they still know it otherwise. If our view of national socialism is a little simple, so is theirs.

An autocracy? Yes, of course an autocracy, as in the fabled days of the golden time our parents knew. But a tyranny, as you Americans use the term, nonsense. When I asked Herr Wettekind, the baker, why he had believed in national socialism, he said, because it promised to solve the unemployment problem, and it did, but I never imagined what it would lead to. Nobody did.

I thought I had struck paydirt, and I said, what do you mean what it would lead to? War, he said, nobody ever imagined that it would lead to war. And that's interesting when they talk about what it led to. They're not talking about the Holocaust. They're not talking about the deportations. They're not talking about the murder of the Roma. They're not talking about the murder of Hitler's political enemies.

They're talking about the thing that fucked them up personally. That's what they didn't realize it would lead to. But you know what, that baker has the kind of vibes where he would not bake a cake for a gay couple. Definitely not. And reading that quote reminds me of the perennially relevant tweet by Adrienne Bott. I never thought leopards would eat my face,

sob's woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party. It also reminds me of a Simpsons line. Sure, Nazis have made some mistakes in the past, but that's why pencils have erasers. Yeah, it's very funny. I think, though, if we actually want to understand what happened in Nazi Germany and understand our own times better as a result,

we do have to understand that, like, when these little Nazis say they had no way of knowing that Hitler was going to lead Germany into a war, they're not lying. It seems like, like, obviously, how could you not know German Hitler wanted war? But a lot of his early appeal to the little Nazis was the fact that he was a wounded war veteran

and that he'd been a private, right, that he'd been a very low-ranking war veteran. And one of the things he would say is that, like, hey, of course I don't want war. I know better than anybody how bad war is. I've been in the middle of one. Why would I want something like that? Like, that was one of the lines that he took.

Now, it was transparent nonsense, and it was obvious to people at the time who really, who were intelligent, who paid attention. Like, for example, have you heard that Hitler was a Nobel Prize nominee? That's like a thing people talk about, right? That's pretty well-known, isn't it? Are you, I'm sorry.

I didn't know if it was rhetorical or... No, no, he was. Yeah, yeah. That's a thing that gets brought up from time to time, that he was nominated for the Nobel Prize. I thought you were doing a thing where you're like, so we all know this, right? And then I was waiting for you to continue. No, I thought that was...

And then you were just waiting for me to say something, and I was like, oh, we're not on the same page. I thought that was, yeah. I don't think that it's something that people talk about as much as him being a vegetarian or whatever. Yeah, maybe not. Or a painter. I read a lot of Hitler,

so I'm probably off on what's common knowledge. Sure, you're a big Hitler head. We all know this. Yeah, he was a Hitler stand, yeah. He was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, but the nomination was a joke. It was a satire by a Swedish anti-fascist politician who was like being like...

It's absurd because this guy clearly wants to pull the world into war. So obviously, a lot of people, anyone who paid attention and who was modestly intelligent knew what Hitler was going to do. I'm not saying that it was hidden in any real way, but it was hidden to these little Nazis, not because Hitler obscured it particularly well,

but because the only media they paid attention to was essentially either completely idiotic or complete propaganda. They lived in a media bubble, right? We see that today. As Meyer wrote, quote, Remember none of these nine Germans had ever traveled abroad.

None of them had ever known or talked with a foreigner or read the foreign press. None ever wanted to listen to the foreign radio when it was legal to do so. None, except oddly enough the policeman, listened to it when it was illegal. They were as uninterested in the outside world as their contemporaries in France or America.

And you know Meyer gets it, right? You can see reading this book. He doesn't talk a lot about American fascism, but you can see in the way he writes the book like he knew we were vulnerable too. Like, because these people are everywhere. Yeah, I don't know. How are you feeling, Sophia?

Just, you know, real positive, waiting for the babies to get here. Yeah, we're just like waiting for the other shoe. Come on. Yeah, and then to leave immediately and to leave a pair of shoes behind. A pair of baby shoes, comma, never worn. Yeah, baby shoes.

I'll see myself out. Yeah, thank you. Sorry for the baby shoe joke. I've always said you're the Hemingway of this podcast, mainly because of the amount of time you spend shirtless firing a shotgun. I mean, people gotta get a load of these ditties. I always say this.

I reload my AR. So did Hemingway. 15. Yeah, yeah, that's the jacket quote for Hills Like White Elephants. People gotta get a look at these ditties. That is also the tagline for my titties. A lot of similarities.

You also spent a period of time in Havana, if I'm not mistaken. My titties are there right now. So yeah, Meyer points out that like for his Nazi friends who lived in small towns and away from like a lot of, where a lot of the violence the Nazis did occurred, like the negative things the Nazis did, the negative press about them was drowned out

by things like the Strength Through Joy program, which enabled working Germans to visit places like Norway and Spain at very little cost. These little Nazis and those like them were concerned with the economy. And again, that meant not starving in those days. And a lot of that appeared to get better under Hitler. Some of this was a losery and a great deal of it

was driven by what's called Aryanization, which was the process of stealing Jewish businesses and property and giving them to Germans, to Aryan Germans. But Meyer's friends felt like... Aryanization is like a really clean name for that. Yeah, it is. And there's a very good movie about it all

that was made in the Soviet Union in like the 60s called The Shop on Main Street. That's about like one like Russian peasant in an occupied village who is given this old Jewish woman's, I think it's like it sells like buttons and sewing equipment shop. And she and he become friends. And it's an interesting movie

because like all of the people acting in it were like peasants on the Russian steps when the Germans invaded. And they lived in villages that the Nazis took over and then like a lot of them turned in their own Jews. So like the actors aren't like just acting. They're like remembering. It's a fascinating film.

I really recommend it. I'm gonna see it. Yeah. It's a very, very good movie and a very dark movie because it's about Russia and World War II. I was gonna say, what do you mean? Yeah. It's kind of sounded like a lighthearted romp to me.

Yeah. Compared to... We did talk about love actually in part one. And you knew a name of an actor. I was like so impressed. Love actually? Of course, Hugh Grant. Yeah.

I was just impressed by your just pop culture knowledge. But is Hugh Grant in it? Yeah. Is he what? Yeah, he's in it. He plays the Prime Minister of England or something, right? He's the sketchy politician. Yeah.

He's the one that makes an insane number of body shaming fat jokes during it. Oh, does he? I don't remember a word of that movie. The whole movie is so fucked up. But the only thing I remember is that Liam Neeson is in it falling. He is? Yeah. For a woman that's a supermodel, but not a supermodel.

And speaking... She's not supposed to be a supermodel, but she is. And the joke, he just keeps talking about how, oh, like, the only person I'd marry is Claudia Schiffer or whatever the fuck. And then this Claudia Schiffer shows up or... You know what? It doesn't matter. That's not a good retelling of the movie, but it's partially true.

But you know what ties that back into our episode. How are you going to do this? I'm so impressed. Well, you were just telling me that Liam Neeson is in Love Actually because of when Love Actually was made. We're talking about... We're talking about... What's that Holocaust movie with the red dress?

Schindler's List. Schindler's List. Yeah, Liam Neeson. Bam! Back. We're back to World War II. Perfect. Six degrees of Hitler.

Oh, yeah. That's amazing. Well done, you son of a bitch. No, I know. I know. I know. You know, I'm only three degrees away from him. I mean, like, genetically or...

No, no, no. Just in terms of, like, direct handshakes. Okay. Yeah, I shook hands with a guy who at age eight, like, the Nazis came to power and he was a member of the Hitler Youth and they did a lot of meet and greet gathering stuff with Nazi hybris and he shook Herman Göring's hand. And obviously Herman Göring. So, by obviously by Nazi hand, transitive property, you have shaken Hitler's hand.

I basically shook Hitler's hand. Yeah, it's wild. That's what we're talking about. Yeah, the thing that's crazier about it to me is that that dude's grandpa had fought with a sword on horseback as a cavalryman. And, like, that it's that recently that people were doing that. Like, yeah, this dude fought in the 1871 with, like, a fucking sword on horseback. And I, like, shook hands with his grandson and as advanced as we are, we're that close

to, like, people stabbing each other while riding horses. That's so crazy. It's wild, right? Is that when you got into machetes? No, I've always been into machetes. Okay. So, um, yeah, yeah, sorry. We got off on a little bit of a tangent here.

Um, but kind of what we're talking about most of this is for you, but a little bit of this is for me. Okay. Okay. It can't be just Hitler, Hitler, Hitler. No. 100% of the time. Give me 2% of Hitler related.

Yeah. Hitler adjacent. And yeah, we're talking about a lot of Hitler adjacent little Nazis here. And these folks were able to kind of get on board because they were in, you know, distracted by a lot of the benefits of Nazis and they didn't see, they didn't go looking for the ugly stuff, even though they knew some of it was there, um, because the stuff that was positive was like way more in their faces. And that's really all they cared about.

And that's why even though the Nazis never had an electoral majority, almost every German got on board with Nazism, even if they didn't join the party, during the years in which Hitler was succeeding, right? Because people back a winner. And that's what gets, that's what scares me most about imagining the United States sliding into fascism. It's not, it's not the midnight raids, the abduction and execution of dissidents, the slow clampdown and resistance.

It's the idea that most Americans that like people I know and am friendly with would find ways to pretend none of it was happening while like people I love and maybe me are disappearing and being murdered. That's the scariest thing about it, right? Like that is so much more frightening than imagining than thinking about the actual fascists doing the killing. It's like the people that I've hung out and played video games with like turning and turning away while it happened.

Anyway, I'm going to read another quote from Meyer's book that's exactly on this topic. None of the horrors impinged upon the day to day lives of my 10 friends or was ever called to their attention. There was some sort of trouble on the streets as one or another of my friends was passing by on a couple of occasions. But the police dispersed the crowd and there was nothing in the local paper. You and I leave some sort of trouble on the streets to the police. So did my friends.

And it's the police who are disappearing the Jews in this period, right? That's what's happening along with all the political dissidents. And Meyer actually presented his friends with an article from their local newspaper from back in 1938 about a group of local Jews who were taken into protective custody by the police. And Meyer writes none of them, including the teacher, the anti-Nazi teacher, remembered ever having seen it or anything like it. And maybe they're lying. Maybe that's just our brains are that good at when we really hate reality, closing it

out. If we're able to escape it, if we're safe enough to escape reality, I don't know. I mean, people's memories of events are so unreliable. Incredibly so. In general, much less when you really want to forget that you were a Nazi. Yeah. Yeah. Or just don't want to remember that you knew what being a Nazi.

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Now, the cold hard reality is that most of the Germans who lived in the Third Reich knew it was being done to the Jews. Not every detail for sure, but they knew enough, right? The gas chambers, the death camps weren't tremendously widely known.

But the fact that the Jews were being disappeared and that something terrible was happening, you were, everyone was aware. This has not been kind of historical consensus for long. In 2001, Professor Robert Galataly, who we quoted from earlier, conducted a massive survey of German mainstream media, newspapers and magazines from 1933 on. And he started down this path of research when he was looking through old German papers and he found a report of a woman who had been sent to the Gestapo for looking Jewish and having sex with a neighbor.

Now at the time, and this is like the late 1990s when he came across this article, conventional academic wisdom held that the majority of Nazi atrocities had happened without the knowledge of most Germans. Galataly noted, for decades my generation had been told that so much of the terror had been carried out in complete secrecy. So coming upon that report openly in a major German newspaper made him wonder if this was true. And so he decided to look into the matter and into the way that academics do, very, very,

in a very, like, methodical way. And I'm going to quote now from a Guardian write-up on the study he conducted as a result of this. His media troll, with a research assistant, found that as early as 1933, local papers reported the killing of 12 prisoners by guards at Dachau, the first to be set up as a model concentration camp initially for communists. On May 23rd, the Dachauer Zeitung, which is the Dachau newspaper, said that the camp was Germany's most famous place and brought new hope to the Dachau business world, which

obviously there's a town also next to the camp. By 1934, the main and widely read Nazi-owned paper, Volker Schabeobachter, was reporting on a widening of policy to other political criminals, including Jews accused of race defilement. By 1936, communist prisoners were no longer mentioned. In a photo essay in the SS paper, Das Schwartzkorp, the Dark Corps, emphasized the camp's places for people for race defilers, rapists, sexual degenerates, and habitual criminals. That's interesting to me that that's how the Nazis spun the concentration camps first,

not as a place for Jews in specific, but as a place for race defilers, rapists, sexual degenerates, and habitual criminals. That process continued through the years of the regime's short life. In 1937, Heinrich Himmler made public announcements that still more camps would be needed for those with hydrocephalus, cross-eyed, deformed half-Jews, and a whole series of racially inferior types. In 1938, after Kristallnacht, Goebbels made a widely-reported public announcement that the final answer to the Jewish problem would occur via government decree.

So far from being unaware of the Holocaust, the little Germans were well-informed about a lot of what was going on. They knew their government was looking to a final answer to the Jewish question, and they knew what that meant more or less. So yeah, not only were the Nazi atrocities well-known as they occurred, but the desire of little Nazis to pretend ignorance at the crimes they were enabling was also really obvious to outside and inside observers at the time. There's a quote that I think is really useful from Peter Virek, who was a German-American

scholar, and he wrote this in 1940. Well-publicized among Germans, already before Hitler came to power and during a period when he still depended on their consent rather than coercion, were the many actual deeds of butchery. Some day the same Germans, now cheering Hitler strutting to Paris, will say to their American friends and to their brave German anti-Nazi friends, we did not know what went on. We did not know. And when that day of no-nothing comes, there will be laughter in hell.

And there's a lot to say about the forgetting that happened after the war, and some of it was because we wanted the Germans as allies against the Communists. The U.S. government was very much willing to let people forget. And it was not a unified thing, like one of the things Eisenhower did that I think was really laudable was force Germans who lived near the concentration camps to tour them, where there were like still corpses lying out and stuff like that. But for the most part, this was allowed to be the mainstream belief. You go find old documentaries about the Holocaust and stuff like this was a very widespread

belief that most Germans hadn't known because it was politically dangerous in the period when those same Germans were still running Germany to admit that they'd known and that they'd at least let it happen. And that's, I mean, it's a real bummer. Yeah, it also makes me think of like the fact that there's so many reminders of what happened in Germany and like all these monuments and stuff and how that's really important also for reckoning with something that is like a big historical event that most people would like to forget.

Their country was a part of. Yeah, they actually put a lot of, if you go to any of the concentration camps that are actually in Germany, like in order to be a guide at one of those places, like there's a certain level of education you have to have. And the people there are extremely knowledgeable about the Holocaust, and it's something that the German government does now put a lot of importance in because you have to, when people want to forget, it's not just they don't want to remember a bad episode from history. They want to forget that they might do that, right?

They probably wouldn't be Nazis, but they would let the Nazis do what the Nazis did, and nobody wants to remember that. Nobody wants to think about that. But it also just makes you think about how much wilder it is that people fight for Confederate monuments here because they're the opposite of those kind of monuments that you are trying to remember the people that were for something horrible and not the people that fought against them. Yeah.

So it would be like if you went to Nazi Germany and all of the monuments instead of being to the Germans being Nazis, we're like, let's not, this is so we don't forget that there were Nazis. Here's Heinrich Himmler's statue, oh, it's right next to Hitler and Hitler's garden. It's just like that's, I mean, and that's something that has been taken for granted in America for so long that like, yeah, Confederate monuments, of course. And on that side, it's time for an ad break so that we can all take some deep breaths off Mike.

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It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Woo. I like a one we can be more playful, Robert. Say welcome back. I say woo. Everything's fine in the world.

So yeah, so I think it's interesting and I think it's important to note because there's very little nuance in our education of the concentration camps that they started as a place to put criminals, right? Sexual deviance, you know, child molesters, right? That's what the Nazis, that's not what who they were putting there, but that's how the Nazis justified it. And you can look at things like who QAnon suggests going after and whatnot and see some lines there.

But also like what a crazy coincidence that like all the people that are the murderers and the rapists and whatever are Jewish and gay and Roma and communist and political dissidents. It's such a wild coincidence. Yeah, but it is like you see shades of that in our own fascist, this idea that like everybody who is opposed, who is actively opposed to the regime is a criminal, you know? And they're not just criminals because they're breaking laws and their protests, but they're they all have like they have to be like part of some pedophile cabal. They're doing like they're they're they're all like it's it's this it's in the reason

they do that, right? The reason they do that is because it stops normal people from caring because normal people don't give a shit if a criminal gets murdered by the cops because that's supposed to happen. You know, normal people care when someone they see as a good person gets hurt. They don't care about criminals because there's a lot that's fucked up in our society. The Nazis were taking advantage of that same thing, too. You know, you you don't you don't say we're cracking down on political dissidents. It's we're arresting criminals and then everybody's fine with it.

Yeah. I'm going to read a quote from a book called Backing Hitler by Robert Galataly who we were just talking about. It's a very good book and it talks about sort of how how the images that the Nazi regime put out to justify the people they were locking away. The social reception of the images that were projected no doubt varied enormously. At one end of the scale, these published accounts had a terrorizing or deterrent effect on potential opponents of Nazism and those who were officially stigmatized.

Certainly, many people in the country would have seen through the propaganda. However, for good citizens who wanted to return to an idolized version of German law and order, these images helped to ease the appearance of even the terroristic sides of Hitler's regime. They could read in the press that those who suffered at the hands of the new system were other people, communists and various social outsiders and the Jews. Good citizens were invited to see the camps as educative institutions and as a corrective and a warning to those described as social rabble, that is, men and women who were habitual

criminals, the chronically unemployed beggars, alcoholics, homosexuals and repeat sex offenders. Totally different now. With the amount of sighing in this podcast, it's like, Robert says something and then we're just like, ugh. So, one thing about Robert and I's chemistry that's not really, Robert and my chemistry, that's not really popping off over long, what is this? Zoom calls? We're on Zoom now.

Yeah. Yeah, thank you. I feel like you pause for me to say something when I have nothing to say and I'm just defeated by the content and then when I do have something to say, you're like, I'm in the middle of my thoughts and I'm like, you're right, you're right, my thing was stupid and that's what's happening. Podcasting. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, maybe delete that. They don't need to know how the sausage is made. No, I like it. You too. Stop saying that. Yeah. So, Jesus, what a time to be alive.

So, I could go through and link excerpts from articles that kind of make that point about Trump talking about violent criminals and camps at the border and all the Christophascist paranoia about trans people using bathrooms, which when they talk about the Nazis arresting sex criminals, that's who they were arresting. It's not rapists, it was people who had sex they thought was criminal. Yeah, or we could talk about QAnon's obsession with mythical child sex traffickers, but like, we've all been through the same news cycles. I'm sure you see the parallels and a read through of Professor Galataly's book, which

I do recommend, reveals several of them. Quote, Ulrich Herbert recently suggested that during the Nazi years, there was a growing lack of moral concern in German society for human rights and the protection of minorities, which grew rapidly during the years of the dictatorship and which led to a profound moral brutalization in Germany. That's familiar, right? Growing lack of concern for human rights and the protection of minorities in a society leading to brutalization.

Yeah, Galataly himself uses the term desensitization to refer to the impact the Nazis years long drumbeat of like news articles about the people they were arresting and sending away and killing, the impact that had on people. Desensitization. Again, we're experiencing a version of that ourselves with all of the hundreds of thousands of deaths from COVID-19, with the violence in the streets, with like these constant drumbeat of police murders, and just not even from like stories about death, but just like the sheer amount of horrible things happening, it just numbs you after a while.

That was going on then too. Another thing we don't talk about enough. So while we're talking about desensitization and genocide, we should probably talk a little bit about some of the little Nazis who wound up as cogs in the machine of death that actually made the Holocaust happen. This is the dead baby section, Sophia. Finally. Yeah, took you a very long time.

Gonna earn my keep here, Jesus. I had a fucking prologue in this, son of a bitch. So I want to quote now from an article in Der Spiegel titled, Every Day Murder, Nazi Atrocities Committed by Ordinary People, quote, perpetrators included both committed Nazis and people who had nothing to do with the Nazis. The murderers and their assistants included Catholics and Protestants, the old and the young, people with double doctorates and poorly educated members of the working class, and the percentage of psychopaths was not higher than the average in society as a whole.

One thing you have to accept if you really want to understand the Holocaust is that most of the people involved were what we would describe as mentally healthy. They were not people who could have been diagnosed with any sort of mental illness. Which again, like, this is why I pushed back whenever people talk about the Nazis as being crazy or Hitler as being crazy, like, no, these were rational people taking rational action that happened to be the worst thing you can imagine. And that's so much scarier. In the early 1990s.

Also, didn't they put mentally ill people in camps? They sure did. That's the first people that they executed in a lot of... Yeah, that's the biggest, then, most horrible irony to call people that were just, like, willingly being agents of fascism, comparing them to people that are actually mentally ill. It's very... It is.

It's sick and it's wrong because it completely ignores what was actually going down. And that's very important. The very first, you know, the gas chambers, before the gas chambers, they were actually using, like, trucks that they would hook up carbon monoxide gas to and pump into the trucks and they'd fill them with people. And the people they experimented on first, the first people the Nazis killed with any kind of poison gas, were mentally handicapped folks. Yep.

That's how it started. I think it was the T4 euthanasia program. I'm maybe getting things a little bit wrong there. But yeah. In the early 1990s, a large group of researchers and historians began the long plotting work of digging through mountains of the Third Reich surviving records. And their goal was to put together for the first time, and again, this is right around the time that they're starting to understand that, like, actually most Germans were complicit

to some degree. So they're starting to understand this and they're trying to put together a comprehensive list of actual active perpetrators in the Holocaust for the first time. Not just the leadership, but in everyone who pulled a trigger or the equivalent, the people who loaded Jewish folks in the train cars, the people who manned gas chambers, everybody. And at present, the number of active participants that they have listed, these are all individual people, include more than 200,000 Germans and another 200,000 Ukrainians, Estonians, Lithuanians and members of other occupied countries, including Frenchmen.

Now, one of the little Germans who pulled a lot of triggers was Walter Mattner. And Walter was a police secretary from Vienna, who had been just kind of a functionary in the Viennese police, and then joined the SS when the war started and became an administrative officer. And we have a lot of his letters to his wife back at home. And from those, we learned quite a bit about the man, and I'm going to have a link to just like a sheet that has all of his letters home on it, because it's very compelling stuff. In September 22nd, 1941, right after his first entry into the conquered territories of the

Soviet Union after the invasion started, he wrote, If I were not already a national socialist, the first day of my wartime deployment would have turned me into one through and through. Not that long after, on 29th of September, about a week later, he wrote a letter in which he assured his wife that he and his fellow men of the SS were not committing war crimes against the Jews of Eastern Europe. He insisted, at the most, we arrange things, i.e., everything is taken away from the Jews. But just a few days later, like three or four days later, on October 2nd, 1941, he wrote

this. This is again a letter to his wife. I should have already turned in. It's already 9 p.m. and I volunteered for a special operation tomorrow. Reveille is at 4.30 a.m. and we're moving off at 5.30 a.m. Tomorrow I'll also have the first opportunity to use my pistol. I'm taking 28 rounds with me. Probably won't be enough, but another comrade will lend me his pistol or carbine.

I don't even know if I'm being permitted to tell you this, but that the Jews are our misfortune, that's something you've known for a long time, and it's something we saw again and again on our journey to Warsaw and on to here, just how many comrades are already resting in the cool earth. And this is how many young men are sleeping, single and married, the prime of our German nation to protect our home from the monsters we have gotten to know here. It is simply dreadful to have to look at these Asiatic hordes. What we Europeans feel when seeing this, you can understand bitterness that takes a hold

of me and which everyone here feels when thinking of our home and our great fateful struggle which we have to wrestle through here for our people. What are 1,200 Jews who are too many in yet another city and have to be bumped off as the saying goes? It is only the just punishment for all the suffering they have inflicted and continue to inflict on us Germans. Until I arrive home, I shall tell you nice things, but enough for today, otherwise you'll believe that I'm bloodthirsty.

On October 7th, Walter and his comrades traveled to a village named Mogliov in Belarus. There they gathered up 2,273 Jewish people. They stripped them of everything but the clothes on their backs, lined them up beside an open pit and shot every single one of them to death at close range. Hunter Mattner, mild-mannered police secretary, wrote this home to his wife. For the first truckload, my hand trembled slightly when shooting, but one gets used to it. By the time the 10th truck arrived, I was already aiming steadily and fired surely at

the many women, children, and infants. Bear in mind that I also have two babies at home, to whom these hordes would do the same, if not ten times worse. The death we gave them was a nice short death compared to the hellish torture meted out to thousands upon thousands in the dungeons of the GPU. It's flew in a wide arc through the air and we blew them away while still in flight before they then fell into the pit and the water. Let's get rid of this brood which has plunged the whole of Europe into war and is still

mongering in America until it drags them into the war as well. Hitler's words are coming true, what he once said before the war began. If Jewry believes it'll be able to incite a war in Europe again, it won't be the Jews who will triumph, but it will herald the end of Jewry in Europe. Mogliov has now lost a number with three zeros, but that's of no consequence here. I'm already looking forward to it and many here are saying that when we return home, it's the turn of our local Jews. This probably a cool time to mention that my grandma's family was shot to death by the

Nazis, so bringing back some real fond memories. Yeah, these are the people who do that and it happened to a tremendous degree. The guys who did this for the most part were groups called the Einsatzgruppen, which means special task unit. The folks that they recruited for this, a lot of them had been local police officers before and these were folks who were willing, this was kind of the first attempt at carrying out a genocide en masse and they did it with gunfire. They realized very quickly that this was not efficient.

And we'll talk about that a little bit later, but reading about Mattner's crimes in particular brought to mind a passage from Meyer's book that I find rather striking, and I'm gonna read that passage now. The German language, like every other, has some glorious epithets, untranslatable, and whew, Will Gewardney Spiceburger is one of them. It means very roughly, little men gone wild. I think about that a lot when I think about us, when I think about some of the things I've seen in the streets, little men gone wild.

That's some powerful shit. Yeah. So as it turned out, Mattner obviously, former police officer, killing people in Belarus for the Third Reich and his fellow police back home in Germany were hard at work on that same task and they thought they were free. Meyer notes that his friend, the sensitive politician Hofmeister, quote, did his duty in 1938 when he was ordered to arrest Jews for being Jews. One of those he arrested, the Taylor Morrowits, and this guy survived the war, calls him a

decent man, which I have trouble getting into that guy's head too. But it's a shade of genocide that we don't see enough, I think that is important to tell people about. Yeah, definitely. One of the most bitter and fucked up realities of the Holocaust is that a lot of the killing was done by folks who would otherwise be described as decent men, people who were good husbands and good fathers and friendly, positive members of their community. Nice people, people who would have smiled at you as you passed them on the street when

they were old men, and people who also played an active role in the extermination of millions. People like, for example, Major Trap of Reserve Police Battalion 101, and I'm going to quote from The Guardian to tell you about Major Trap. According to witness testimony, Major Trap was in tears when he ordered the shooting of 1500 women, children, and elderly Jews near Warsaw, all the while saying, an order is an order. In July 1942, his men drove the victims out of their homes, loaded them into trucks, and took them to a remote clearing to be executed.

They shot them in the head or in the back of the neck, and in the evening the soldiers' uniforms were covered with bone fragments, brain matter, and blood stains. And that's, I think, almost a more useful picture of what it means to commit genocide. Is this man weeping and going through with it anyway? Because it's an order. That's just so fucking frightening to me. I think any time you justify anything with it's an order, it's a frightening thing because it just completely takes away the humanity of a decision all the way.

Yeah, and it's why we decided at Nuremberg that being under orders was not an excuse to commit genocide, because it's not. Precisely because of that. Of that guy. Now you may have noticed that a lot of the folks we're talking about in this segment about people who actually committed genocide by pulling triggers themselves, a lot of those people were cops. Yeah, strange.

Weird. I wonder what the connection is there, huh? Yeah, the Nazi state was adept at using regular police to round up Jews and other undesirables. And overwhelmingly German police officers who were not members of the Nazi party previously agreed to do this work without complaint. Timothy Snyder, a Holocaust scholar and one of the world's great experts on fascism, one of your must reads if you want to understand what happened, notes in his book Black Earth that regular police were a key resource for the Nazis.

After its triumph in the Night of Long Knives, the SS implemented Hitler's fourth innovation, the hybridization of institutions. Crime was redefined, racial and state organizations were merged, and cadres were rotated back and forth. In 1935, in a significant reform, Himmler explicitly redefined the SS and the police apparatus as a single organ of racial protection. Himmler, who served a racial movement rather than a traditional state, personally directed both the SS and the German police from 1936.

The investigative service of the SS proposed a new definition of political crime. It was not crime against the state. The state had validity only insofar as it represented the race. Since politics was nothing but biology, political crime was a crime against the German race. Now later on in that same book, Snyder continues, the Einsatzgruppen were also hybrid organizations mixing SS members and others. The police forces themselves were hybridized from within as police officers were recruited to the SS while SS officers were assigned to the police.

The secret state police, the detectives of the criminal police and even the regular uniformed order police were to become Himmler's racial warriors. Police are tools of the state. They are. They are. If we're talking about hybridization of the police with, shall we say, federal forces, can we think of anything? I don't know, say armored vehicles or I don't know.

Or deputized cops who get federal arresting powers or what's been happening with ICE for the last four years. I'm going to quote from a pro-publica article here. In the year after President Trump took office, state and local police officers across Pennsylvania swept carloads of Hispanic immigrants into ICE's net. In the process, they helped the agency's regional field office tally more at larger rests of undocumented immigrants without criminal convictions than any of the 23 other field offices in the country.

These are immigrants picked up in communities, not at local jails and prisons. Last year, five states, New York, California, Illinois, Oregon and Washington, limited how police can question immigrants about their legal status or hold them for ICE without a warrant. Separately, more than 400 counties restricted their engagement with ICE enforcement according to a national survey. On the other hand, 59 local agencies in 17 states have partnerships with ICE to train and deputize their officers to enforce immigration laws.

Even baby. So wrong and evil. Yeah. And it makes you wonder how many major traps exist on our police forces today. Men who might be friendly and polite, but who would stand there with tears in their eyes and shoot dissidents if that's what they were supposed to do. Popular history likes to focus on outrageous villains like, you know, Hitler. But I think these guys are more important to study.

These otherwise decent normal people who completely fail the thing that turns out to be the greatest moral test of their lives. ICE agents, anyone who's running any of the detention facilities or abusing children in those facilities, any of those things. But also, in a way, all of us who live with it, everyone who's able to live with it, you know, that brings me back to the littlest of the little Nazis, these guys, these men and women who lived in quiet, small towns and villages and suburbs, you know, and most of these people were people of conscience.

They didn't vote for Hitler when they had a chance to vote for Hitler. And, you know, to the extent that they were aware of what was going on, a lot of them probably wondered, what can I do? How can I keep this from happening? And part of why they let it happen, part of why they sat back while their camps were killing people, were sterilizing people is because they were just overwhelmed by daily life. Like, if you read these people's interviews, that's the thing you'll hear a lot is that

there was just so much going on, right? There was so much happening in the world and so many different, like, things occurring. I didn't know what to do and I was just exhausted all the time. It's a great excuse, isn't it? Like, yeah. So, in his book, Meyer talks to one of his German colleagues and this isn't one of the friends that he was studying because those guys were all members of the Nazi party. This man was not a Nazi, but he was a German who lived in Germany when the Nazis were in

power. He was a linguistics expert and an academic who was obsessed with the study of Middle High German. So, he had his field of study that he loved and was tried to kind of pour himself into while the Nazis rose to power. He told Meyer, quote, what happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated and secret, to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information

which the people could not understand or so dangerous that even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. So eerie. Yeah. And we've talked a lot about Trump in this, but that's not Trump. That's Obama. That's W. Bush. That's Bill Clinton.

That's Bush senior. That's an increasing thing that's been happening in America under all of the good presidents that have led us to this point is the habituation of people to being governed by surprise. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of being governed by surprise, I'm going to tell you to take an ad break right now.

Yeah. Surprise, bitch. Goods and services. Nailed it. Good to know that our comedic timing is still on point. Yeah. Thanks, Sophie. Thanks, Sophie.

Me and you are better than ever. Yeah. Rising to the occasion. 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 get 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. 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. 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. All right, we're back.

So for most ordinary people, the extraordinary degree of trust that they had in Hitler, and there was a tremendous amount of that, especially as he starts to win these victories, as he starts to achieve things that had seemed impossible, you know, the retaking the Sudetenland, rebuilding the German military, conquering fucking France. People had faith in him. And so that was one reason a lot of them were able to ignore the disappearances in the night. But that wasn't a factor for the people who weren't Nazis, the people who never converted. For them, the thing that stopped them from doing more was not just personal fear, it

was the exhaustion and burnout they had from living in a society like this. And I'm going to quote again from that linguist, this is him talking to Meyer, you will understand me when I say that my middle high German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist, then suddenly I was plunged into all the new activity as the university was drawn into the new situation, that new situation being fascism, meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and above all papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, questionnaires.

And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, one was expected to, participate, that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigamarole, of course, but it consumed all one's energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was then not to think about fundamental things. One had no time. Those, Meyer said in response, are the words of my friend the baker. One had no time to think, there was so much going on.

Your friend the baker was right, said my colleague. The dictatorship and the whole process of its coming into being was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your little men, your baker and so on. I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about the fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful fundamental things to think about.

We were decent people and kept so busy with continuous changes and crises and so fascinated, yes, fascinated by the machinations of the national enemies without and within that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing little by little all around us unconsciously. I suppose we were grateful. Who wants to think? Wow. Damn.

Yeah. That's real. I didn't like that. Yeah. Yeah. I see myself in this photo and I don't like it. That's how if you really study the Nazis, you should see yourself more and more with everything you learn in them.

And if you don't, you're not studying them right. That's what's scary about them. That's what's scary about the Holocaust. They thought they were free as a chilling book, but I don't think there's any competition for the most frightening passage in the whole work. Oh. So Meier sat down with one of his colleagues, a chemical engineer, and again, this is another non-Nazi.

Wait, this is more depressing than the one you just read? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yes. This is the bleakest thing I may ever have read. So he sits down with this anti-Nazi colleague of his, a chemical engineer who lived through the Reich and he asks him one day, tell me now, how was the world lost? And this is his colleague's response.

The world was lost one day in 1935 here in Germany. It was I who lost it, and I will tell you how. I was employed in a defense plant, a war plant, of course, but they were always called defense plants. That was the year of the national defense law, the law of total conscription. Under the law, I was required to take the oath of fidelity. I said I would not. I opposed it in conscience.

I was given 24 hours to think it over. In those 24 hours, I lost the world. Yes, I said, and this is Meyer speaking. You see, his friend responded, refusal would have meant the loss of my job, of course, not prison or anything like that. Later on, the penalty was worse, but this was only 1935. But losing my job would have meant that I could not get another. Wherever I went, I should be asked why I left the job I had.

And when I said why, I should certainly have been refused employment. Nobody would hire a Bolshevik. Of course, I was not a Bolshevik, but you understand what I mean. Yes, Meyer said. I try not to think of myself or my family. We might have gotten out of the country in any case. And I could have got a job in an industry or education somewhere else. What I tried to think of was the people to whom I might be some help later on if things

got worse, and as I believe they would. I had a wide friendship in scientific and academic circles, including many Jews and Arians, too, who might be in trouble. If I took the oath and held my job, I might be of help somehow as things went on. If I refused to take the oath, I would certainly be useless to my friends, even if I remained in the country. I myself would be in their situation. The next day, after thinking it over, I said I would take the oath with the mental reservation

that, by the words with which the oath began, I swear by God, I understood that no human being and no government had the right to override my conscience. My mental reservations did not interest the official who administered the oath. He said, do you take the oath? And I took it. That day the world was lost, and it was I who will lost it. Do I understand, Meier said, that you think you should not have taken the oath? Yes.

But, Meier said, you did save many lives later on. You were of greater use to your friends than you ever dreamed you might be. His friend's apartment was until his arrest and imprisonment in 1943, a hideout for fugitives. This man hid people from the Nazis. For the sake of argument, he said, I will agree that I saved many lives later on, yes, which you would not have done if you would refuse to take the oath in 1935. Yes. Of course I must explain.

First of all, there is the problem of the lesser evil. Taking the oath was not so evil as being unable to help my friends later on would have been. But the evil of the oath was certain and immediate, and the helping of my friends was in the future and therefore uncertain. I had to commit a positive evil, there and then, in the hope of a possible good later on. The good outweighed the evil, but the good was only a hope, the evil a fact. There then is my point, if I had refused to take the oath of fidelity, I would have saved

all three million. He says three million. He's talking about all of the 11 million people we now know died in the Holocaust. This was before they had a full count. You are joking, Meier said. No. You don't mean to tell me that your refusal would have overthrown the regime in 1935. No.

Or that others would have followed your example. No. I don't understand. You are an American, he said again, smiling. I will explain. There I was in 1935, a perfect example of the kind of person who, with all of his advantages in birth and education and in position, rules or might easily rule in any country. If I had refused to take the oath in 1935, it would have meant that thousands and thousands

like me, all over Germany, were refusing to take it. Their refusal would have heartened millions, thus the regime would have been overthrown or indeed would never have come to power in the first place. The fact that I was not prepared to resist in 1935 meant that all the thousands, hundreds of thousands like me in Germany were also unprepared and each one of these hundreds of thousands was like me, a man of great influence or of great potential influence. Thus the world was lost. You were serious, Meier said, completely, he said.

These hundred lives I've saved, or a thousand or ten as you will, what do they represent? A little something out of the whole terrible evil, when if my faith had been strong enough in 1935, I could have prevented the whole evil. Your faith, Meier asked, my faith. I did not believe that I could remove mountains. The day I said no, I had faith. In the process of thinking it over, in the next twenty-four hours, my faith failed me. So in the next ten years, I was able to remove only antiles, not mountains.

How might your faith on that first day have been sustained, Meier asked? I don't know, I don't know, he said. Do you? I am an American, I said. My friend smiled, therefore, you believe in education. Yes, Meier said, my education did not help me, and I had a broader and better education than most men have had or ever will have. All it did in the end was enable me to rationalize my failure of faith more easily than I might

have done if I had been ignorant. And so it was, I think, among educated men generally, in that time in Germany. Their resistance was no greater than other men's. And do you think the day was lost here? I don't know that it has been. But I know that if things- I just mean in terms of how far, like, that we couldn't have imagined so far that, like, we didn't know that Trump's presidency would have resulted in all of the things that it

did, even though we did know that it would be terrible. So when do you think was the moment that that mass miscalculation happened for the people that were not, like, active Trump supporters, but that went along and voted for him? I mean, I guess you could say when they cast a ballot. There's an element of which, obviously, the thing that had happened in Germany that this person's talking about has not happened to us yet. There's no regime making us take loyalty as- No, no, no.

Of course not. But that's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying it's a one-to-one. I'm just saying that as pessimistic as I was when Trump got elected, I couldn't have even imagined this. It's been so much worse. So yeah, so it just makes me wonder at what point people who voted for him while, quote-unquote, holding their nose or whatever, at what moment it was lost for them when they decided that,

you know what, I'll just fucking vote for him. Yeah. I mean, it's got to be- It can't be the emails. Like, what was the straw? I don't know. That's a question I go with all of the time. And some of it is that as it was then, you know, the thing that I think this fellow's

talking about that we have not hit yet is the time at which decent people completely surrender to the regime. But it is a thing that will happen if the regime gains enough power because decent people are always scared of dying. And I think the folks who have crossed the line already were neither decent nor educated. You have to have had a failure of education or decency to have voted for Trump. And it's not the people who vote for him that scare me the most. It's again, the people who didn't vote for him.

But if it meant the difference between their lives or not, would let the camps on the border where there's forced-ticks directemies occurring and babies being put in cages, would let those turn into full-death camps. Because the alternative would be their own, not even loss of life, but loss of comfort and prestige. That's the thing, the lesson that this guy's trying to get across to people is that it is not the fascists' decision to let the fascists win. They don't make the final call.

We do. They only win if we consent to their victory, as millions of decent people consented to the victory of the Nazis. Mic drop. Yeah. You want to plug your plug-able? Fuckin' fuck yourself. Sorry, I'm on the edge of tears, so I'm trying to-

Oh, I know. I know. I feel that. I felt that energy this whole time. I was on the verge of tears earlier. It's the kind of life we're living, my man. Yep. Cool time.

Yeah. Guys, follow me. Check it out. Yeah. I'm just, I really don't want to do this. Hit us up on the gram. If you want to not kill yourself, I guess maybe listen to my comedy album, Father's Day, available wherever you listen to things.

Hell yeah. I just say that when I press shuffle on my music library, and it's you, and you come up after a really somber song, it's so great. All of that, it's just you being just your radio itself, and it just makes my day every time. That's so lovely. Thank you, Sophie. If you guys want to find my podcasts that are not about dead babies, learning some of

great transitions from Robert, you can catch me talking about 90 Day Fiancé on 420 Day Fiancé with Miles Gray from the Daily Zay Geist and Private Parts Unknown, my podcast with Courtney Kosak about love and sex. Yeah. Yeah. Let's fight fascism real quick. Yeah, real quick. Just for a second.

Just for a second. Just as a treat. Couple of minutes. Yeah. Podcasts. Happy Trump COVID Day. No comment. Not a single comment.

Was given. No comment. Good stuff. That's the podcast. Sorry, sorry, it was so depressing. Yeah, damn, thanks, I guess. All right. Well, sorry, Sophia.

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. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed

the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get

your podcasts.