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

Episode Date: July 8, 2021

Robert is joined by Matt Lieb to continue to discuss Reinhard Heydrich. 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. What's being recorded by this meeting? I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards. Zoom, if you're not aware, has recently added in a horrible voice that tells you when the meeting is being recorded. And it's very traumatizing.

But also because trauma has broken my brain, I am now in love with the Zoom recording lady. We're going to be married. She sounds hot. She sounds fine as hell, right? She sounds really good. First of all, I love a lady who understands consent. Oh, absolutely. You got an enthusiastic communication, baby. Yes.

That's what gets me on. Yeah, even though she really is just saying it's happening, whether you like it or not. But she gives you the option. Yeah, it's actually even consent at all. You could argue that it's... Well, you can press the leave meeting button, which... Can you, though? Can you?

I'm tempted every time. Every time I see it, I'm like, I could leave right now, as if any other time I couldn't. But, you know, it's nice. It's nice to have someone tell you when they're recording you, you know? Yes. That's the law, I think. Yeah, I mean, that's what you're doing. I'm assuming that's why...

It's not the law in every state. Like, where I live, I don't need to tell people if I record them. States are either one-party consent or two-party consent states, basically. So, like, either just the person recording needs to know or everyone does. Yeah. So, Matt, Leib... What's up, dude? ...cast comedian, funny guy...

...podcaster, guy who does Sopranos podcast, called Pod Yourself a Gun. He does Pod Yourself a Gun. I do my bug almost early, dude. Yeah. Yeah, you do. You get him in. You drop it into the P-zone straightaway. And this is, of course, behind the bastards.

Oh, yeah. And this is part two of our podcast series about Reinhardt Hydrik, maybe the worst of the Nazis. Which is... Saying a lot. Quite a resume line. Yeah. Yeah. Great statement.

Like, if you're getting your hell resume set, like, what did you do? I'm the guy Hitler thought was extra. Oh. I love the hell entrance interview where you're sitting with the devil and he's like, you've got some pretty impressive, you know, things that you've done in your life. I see here you were valovictorian at Nazi. Yeah. Yeah.

Yes, graduated Nazi come loudly and fucking, you know, yeah, you got the job. Burn in hell for eternity. Oh, yeah. What an amazing piece of shit. So Matt, you know, one of the problems with this episode, right? This is the thing. We talked, we just did the Dulles Brothers episodes, right? We did a three-parter and there was like four hours of fucking talking.

Oh, damn. And we left out a lot, you know? Yeah. And it was a lot of like, we mostly left out the stuff that was shitty, but kind of either, you know, like the Kennedy assassination stuff where I can't really say one way or the other, what their role was, or stuff like we didn't go into detail at MK Ultra because we're going to do it eventually. I preferred though to talk about like the, you know, the coups and the genocides that

descended from them so that we weren't leaving out the biggest crimes against humanity that they'd committed as part of the head of the, you know, the head and then of the CIA and the head of the State Department. Right. So, you know, when you talk about Friedrich, in order to make time, there's a lot of crimes against humanity that we're just leaving out or wallpaper because it's like, I can't talk about all of the apoco crimes against like human nature and civilization that this guy did.

Yeah. That's how many crimes against humanity he was responsible for. His bio is too big, you know? Yeah. You can't read his entire bio. You got to really fucking, you got to find all of the ones that you're like, this will work. You got to like, you got to rank them, which is hard to do in terms of crimes.

So, if you're, I mean, there's going to be numerous people listening to this podcast whose family members were exterminated as a result of something Reinhard Heidrich did. And if we left out the particular crime against humanity he committed against your ancestors, I do apologize. Yeah. There's too many of them. Yeah. Yeah.

We can't go into every single one, which is, just goes to show how much of a piece of shit this guy was. Really tremendous asshole. Bad dude. Bad. Really bad dude. Don't like him. We left off, Hitler had just kind of taken power, you know, 1933 was the year that Hitler

kind of got his not quite ultimate power yet, you know, there's still, he's the chancellor, there's still Hindenburg in there. He hasn't quite taken everything, but this is the year during which he consolidates and gets total power. And it's a process. The Nazis don't just get elected and become in charge. There's a lot of resistance to them at the start, including a lot of people, a lot of conservatives who are like, well, we're compromising by letting Hitler be in power, but he's not

going to get total power. Like we're still going to have all these different checks against them. So the first thing the Nazis have to do is destroy any chance of there being checks against them. And they do this by taking over all of Germany's police agencies. And this was, again, there's resistance to this in Bavaria and in a number of other German states, elements of the police resist Nazi control and they're all unsuccessful, right? At the end of the day, most cops just go along with it and none of the cops who don't go

along with it remain cops. Now in April of 1933, Heinrich Himmler is appointed commander of the Bavarian political police. So there's like criminal police, there's, there's order police, right? Which are kind of like your traffic cops, basically cops, you're like, ah, you're drunk in the street. Right. Then there's political police whose job is to like, are you seditious?

Are you going to carry out treason and shit? Right. And they'd existed before during the Weimar Republic. But under the Nazis, the political police are going to be by far the biggest and most powerful police because that's what the Nazis are most concerned with, right? Yeah. And Heinrich Himmler becomes head of Bavaria's, which is one state's political police. He makes Reinhardt Heidrich the police commissioner.

So Himmler is the big picture guy, Reinhardt is going to be running the day to day. Yeah. The behind the scenes guy. Yeah. The Nazis, when they, you know, first start taking over these agencies, they have themselves a party. And because it's a Nazi party, that means they're beating and torturing and murdering people that they'd had problems with for a while, but hadn't controlled the cops.

Yeah. Reinhardt's wife later wrote, quote, I had to laugh so hard when she found out that Heidrich had been made the police commissioner, quote, Reinhardt said he felt great satisfaction that the same people who had been locking up the essay and the SS just half a year ago, who beat them down with rubber truncheons, could now no longer straighten their backs for all the bowing they did. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It's cool. It's good shit. Yeah. Now that he was in charge of the political police, Heidrich's job was to arrest every communist and social democratic enemy of the Nazi party and have them tortured and beaten. More than 200 people were locked up in the first couple of days. Every one of them was beaten badly.

Now at this stage, Jews were not the Nazi party's chief priority. So again, they're rounding up mostly political enemies, mostly leftists. Some of those people are Jewish and they do go after, like there's, especially there's random violence against Jews, but the party is not focusing on fucking with Jewish people right now because they, they still aren't in solid power. The left could take things back at this point. So that's going to be their focus, right? That said, there is a lot of violence against Jewish people and Heidrich gleefully related

to his wife, the story of a Jewish man that SS officers brought into headquarters, quote, they made short work of him. They beat him with dog whips, pulled off his shoes and socks, and then he had to walk home barefoot in the company of SS men. That will give you an idea of how they do things. Many Jesuits and Jews have fled from here. No one is dead. No one has been seriously injured, but fear, fear, I tell you, that's really the goal.

And this is one of the things. There was not from the beginning and this is debated. There's a lot of argument as to whether or not from the beginning there was a concerted Nazi plan to, to exterminate the Jews. I think there was a concerted willingness to, to, to kill the Jews. I think there was a lot of joking and talking about it. I think there were plenty of people who didn't have an issue with it, but they weren't planning to do it necessarily from the beginning.

There's strong evidence that it's something that kind of evolved over time and particularly in this period. That's not, I think one of the important things is that it was not necessarily inevitable that the Holocaust would go the way that it did. It was inevitable that there were going to be Jewish people beaten, that there was going to be some sort of apartheid state, probably, not necessarily inevitable that what happened was going to happen. Right.

That's why that's the final part of the final solution. That's what, that's kind of, you know, it was, it was the logical conclusion of the ideology, you know, it wasn't, it was talked about and joked about and, you know, kind of considered something that people used rhetorically as a rhetorical device, but people didn't actually think this is something they would ever try to pull off. Like not because it just seemed just not only like irrational, but like, I mean, just logistically not possible. But boy, were they wrong.

Yeah. They, and it's, it's one of those things. It's important you bring up the phrase final solution because people don't think about what that actually means enough. The Jewish question, Germans didn't invent that phrase, right? That's something they asked all throughout Europe and the question is like, well, these people aren't like us, but they live in our societies. What do we do with them?

Right. And a lot of that's, you know, we've talked, you see the protocols of the Elder's Desiree episode. Yeah. The fact, it's the final solution because the Nazis try a couple of other solutions. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

The final one is genocide and that's an important part of the story, I think. Now, proportionally, more political enemies were arrested in Bavaria under hydric than in any of the other German states. By April 10th, 10,000 people had been taken into custody by his SD. And again, it's not just the SD, they're using cops as well, right? There's cops and also like, they're just kind of like deputizing a bunch of Nazis in the SS to act as cops so that they can take in people. There were protests against these mass arrests and these protests are violently dispatched

by the German police. One lawyer, Michael Siegel, lodged a complaint to hydric against the arrest of a Jewish client. Hydric had him beaten by SS auxiliary policemen and then forced march through the city carrying a sign that said, I will never again complain about the police. Man, fucking A. And that, honestly, it's just like, especially where we are now in America. Hard. Hydric says, Blue Lives Matter. Like straight up.

Yeah. Fucking straight up is like Blue Lives Matter. This is like the fucking the thin, the thin blue, right? You know? Yeah. The thin blue, right? Thank you for that. Yeah, it really is.

It's God, this fucking someone just printing out all your tweets and making you walk around barefoot. Yeah. Now, up to this point, Reinhard's achievements amount to a little more than being a good liar and knowing how to do very basic thug shit, but it was during this period that he would really distinguish himself as an innovator by helping to develop a new tool for repression. So German law, when the Nazis came to power, provided for something called Schutzhofft or protective custody.

This gave police the power under certain circumstances to detain a person without judicial review. So without a warrant, without it charges to essentially arrest someone, to take them into custody. And I think the original idea was to allow the police to take somebody to custody who might present a danger to themselves, who might be in danger, who's in a situation. And it was in the situation where they couldn't get a ruling for the courts at the same time. Right. Right.

The problem with giving the police any powers like this, even if the goal is maybe to protect people is that once that power exists, fascists will find a way to use it, which is the same problem we're having and we'll continue to have with our police. Yes. Now, in 1933, Heidrich and his colleagues redefined protective custody in a way that allowed his SD and policemen to detain any citizen for any reason without involving the courts. This is the start of the development of the concentration camp system.

This is the legal underpinning of why they are able to exist, of how they're justified under the law. From this point forward, no court cases or warrants were necessary for the police to take in someone who was defined by the Nazis as, quote, an enemy of the Reich. Now all these arrestees had to be put somewhere and the existing state prison and jail facilities were hardly built to accommodate such numbers. In March of 1933, an abandoned munitions factory was converted into a concentration camp.

This is not the first under the Nazis. There were, prior to this, what we're called wild concentration camps, we're basically just like, we're going to appropriate a facility to stick people we're arresting, right? But they get, and Heidrich is not the only person, he's a major driver of this. They get this abandoned munitions factory. They put walls around it. They turn it into a concentration camp. Now, you want to guess what the town this factory is in is called?

Oh, God. Guess what the town? Little summer village you might have heard of called Dachau. Oh, Dachau. Yeah. Yeah. This is Dachau. Yeah.

So the facility is quickly put in the hands of the SS. Heidrich is not in charge of Dachau, but he's in charge of who goes to Dachau and when they're released, right? That's important. There's a separation of powers here, but he's a big part of the Dachau system because it's he who gets to choose who gets sent there, you know? Dachau is, you, everyone knows the name Dachau. There's a shiver down the human spine when you say it.

It was a horrible place. Prisoners were relatively regularly beaten to death. 13 people were killed in one month in 1933, and a lot more would follow. By early 1934, Reinhardt's police had arrested more than 16,000 people. Most of these people were beaten, arrested, and released. And given a warning, basically you were, you were arresting these people, you beat the shit out of them, and you say, hey, stay the fuck out of politics from now on, right? More than 2000, though, the people who were like seen as the real threats were interned

in Dachau. Now, it's important to note that the Nazis and Himmler in particular, again, were big about separation of responsibilities. So the guy who actually runs Dachau is a fellow named Theodore Eich, and we're going to talk about him for just a little bit because like Hydrik, Eich was a former military man who had been dismissed very quickly for bad behavior. So he'd been disgraced because of like fucked up shit he did in the military, kicked out of the military.

He had actually been arrested in the Weimar years and sent to a psychiatric asylum because he had illegal explosives that he was planning to do something fucked up with. He's like a McVeigh kind of guy you get there. So he does well under the Nazis and they give him, they put him in charge of Dachau. And part of why I'm bringing Eich's story up is because he and Hydrik have a similar background. These are guys who had nothing before Nazism, who had disgraced themselves, and Nazism gave them a second chance and they really saw it, not just in ideological terms, but this is

my only chance to matter. Because the Nazi regime was fiercely competitive and because competing within that crew often meant being the hardest and most violent, Hydrik and Eich would both compete to see who could be the most brutal. And that's a big part of why Dachau becomes so horrible. Hydrik's guys are competing to see how many people they can arrest, how brutally they can crack down on dissent, how frightening they can be. Hydrik is competing to make his concentration camp the most horrifying place he possibly

can. None of them are getting necessarily from most of the stuff. They're not getting orders from above. They're interpreting things that their superiors are saying and passing and seeing what can I do to please them and that leads them to be as extreme as possible. God, it's just like spawned from this like fucking petty egoistic competition about who could be a bigger piece of shit. It's like...

Exactly. It's like fucking John Lennon writing Strawberry Fields and Paul McCartney writing Penny Lane, but like the dark side of that, you know? Yes. It's like they both made themselves better at what they did, but at murder. But at murder, yes. You could call Ryan Hart, Hydrik, Theodore, Eich, Heiner, Kimmler, the Beatles of genocide. Yeah, that's what...

What I'm trying to do is tie the Beatles into Nazism just for fun. Can you get a t-shirt that's like the cover of Abbey Road but with the Nazis walking across the street? Can we... Do you think it's going to go over well? Yeah. I think that'll be really useful. Merch.

No. All right. I'm going to make it on my own. Yeah. I mean, conceptually, I get it, but probably not something that I would walk around with. Yeah. It's not a joke people passing on the street would get. No.

Yeah. I still get strange looks when I wear the... Maybe leaders are a bad idea, Merch. Mm-hmm. Oh, I like that. That sounds great though. It's not Rushmore, but with all the worst bastards ever like. Oh, okay.

Yeah, I could see how that's hard. Yeah, that could... Hard sell. It can be misinterpreted. It's fun to wear to family events though. Yeah, bring the shirt. Yeah. You bring it to family events and you mostly just keep it inside.

I have a shirt, an entire t-shirt that's just a giant close-up of a butthole. And I don't wear it outside, you know, but I enjoy that I have it. Yeah. I have a t-shirt from the band Millions of Dead Cops, which I only wear when I'm not driving anywhere. Yeah. Good call. You do not want to get pulled over in that shirt.

I mean, my behind-the-police shirt is strictly for the house. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All of your merch are just shirts no one wears. Don't wear these if you might be pulled over in them, please. Yeah. So, again, it's important to understand kind of the way this, these guys are kind of independently

trying to top each other. And that's how a lot of these, that's how a lot of the worst crimes of the Nazi regime are committed. And I'm going to quote from Robert Gervaught again. Hydrix actions cannot simply be understood as those of a bloodthirsty sadist playing a preconceived role in building a totalitarian police state. Since joining the SS in 1931, he had immersed himself in a political milieu which thrived on the notion of being locked in a life-and-death struggle.

Winning that struggle required decisive action against enemies in respect of whom even the most unimaginable cruelty was justified. As his future deputy, Werner Best, observed, Hydrix tended to project his own proclivity towards intrigues and violence onto his real or imagined enemies. Finally free to move against an ideological enemy who had supposedly enjoyed the upper hand until 1933, he considered terror a justifiable weapon. In fact, the only adequate weapon against such evil. We could talk about QAnon here.

We could talk about the modern Republican Party, the way that framing your enemies as like demonic, like inherently destructive omniscient foes justifies any kind of terror you can dream of. But we won't talk about it. Inhuman and also the perception that they are just constantly on top, even in moments in which you are literally on top. Yeah, so if you happen to get it, you have to murder them as soon as you get the chance because, you know, they're always winning otherwise.

Right. You're just trying to eat in the playing field. Yeah, because they would murder me if they had the chance to do it. And it's like, well, they've been had the chance to do it. They never did. They actually didn't. Yeah. Yeah.

You notice you're still alive and they never did that. But yeah. I don't notice that. Yeah. Anyway, so while Hydric used terror as a weapon, he also spent a lot of his time in this period and throughout actually his early career as a Nazi, as much as he is arresting dissidents, having them tortured, having them sent to concentration camps, as much as he does that, he threatens his subordinates with punishment for illegally beating or killing detainees.

This was not out of any kind of humanitarian desire. This is out of the fact that he wants to be seen, he wants the system he is running to be seen as orderly and lawful. He does not want the majority of the German population to be frightened of the Nazis because at this point they're still trying to win public support. Right. And all these guys who will be fine with, if you say, I've put a criminal in a concentration camp, they're like, fine.

If they see a dude getting beaten in the street, that's disorder. That's nasty. They don't like that. They want every death to be, at least have some semblance of justification in the eyes of people who aren't there, who don't know the reasons why and who are just going to take the story, the general story that the perpetrators are going to promulgate. A lot of Republicans were horrified by the George Floyd video, but at the same time, as long as they don't see a video of it, they're just like, oh, well, he might have had a gun.

Yeah, right. They don't care. All they need to know is like, oh, a cop shot a dangerous man. I don't care about that. You see the reality of it and it horrifies you. That's the thing. Hydric. He's very savvy.

He knows. I don't want random street violence. I don't want pogroms. I want orderly, state-sanctioned, legal repression and murder. That's Hydric's fucking bag, baby. So one of Hydric's most prominent victims in this period was the Nobel laureate and critic of the Nazis, Thomas Mann. Now, Mann had the fortune to be out on a reading tour of Europe when the Nazis took power and

he had been a vociferous critic of the Nazis. Very public. He's a very famous intellectual. He'd been attacking them for years and he's out of Germany when they take power and he is a smart guy. So he's like, I'm not going back home. Right. Seems like this isn't going to be good for me.

I'm going to hang out elsewhere and wait this shit out. I'm going to just chill for a minute on this whole going back to Germany thing. Just kind of see what happens. Yeah. I'm going to let this play out a little bit before I go back. And while he was away, Hydric's police raided Mann's home and took his cars, bank accounts and private possessions. He eventually succeeded in having Thomas Mann stripped of his German citizenship.

By 1934, Himmler and Hydric had created a remarkably effective terror regime in Bavaria. Their superiors noted their success and noted that Bavaria Nazi control is more complete. Their elimination of political enemies had been more effectively carried out than anywhere else in the new Reich. And so in April of 1934, Hydric is given control of the Prussian Gestapo as well. The Gestapo doesn't exist before the Nazis. The Gestapo is kind of like unifying these Nazi intelligence apparatuses with the state political police and that becomes the Gestapo.

That's more Göring's bag. But Hydric is kind of from the beginning in control of a lot of it and control of the practical details of what it does at least. And so he's given control of the Prussian Gestapo in 1934. This puts thousands of secret police in multiple states under his hands. So now he's basically in charge of repression in Bavaria and in Prussia. It also means that he's now officially a big man in the Nazi party. And this would give him meaningful input during the next critical stage of Nazi development.

Now, if you'll remember, Ernst Rome and his brown shirts had been a major locus of Nazi power in the early years. These guys are Hitler's street fighters, his gangsters. And Rome is a military veteran. He's a very tough man. He's good at organizing street fighters. He's also a revolutionary. Rome isn't satisfied when Hitler takes power.

For one thing, he doesn't want to rebuild the German military. He wants to replace the military with his essay. Right. And he's a he's a he's a he's not someone who is ever going to be satisfied with what the Nazi state became because he's just a lot more radical than that. And once you're in power, a guy like Rome is a liability. Big ass threat. Yeah, because he keeps doing the street terror and random violence and shit.

And at this point, the Nazis are trying to play nice with the conservatives. They want the center right, the middle class majority of Germany to like see like, oh, these Nazi guys are safe and normal and we can have a stable society under them. So they got to get rid of fucking Rome. And I'm going to quote from a write up by Bleaker Street media here. Well, still fiercely loyal to Hitler, Rome's vision for Nazi party future was increasingly at odds with Hitler's. For Hydrick and Himmler, there was a more pragmatic problem with the essay, although the two men

ran the SD in the Gestapo. These organizations were officially under the domain of the essay in Rome. To secure their independence, Himmler and Hydrick conspired with Herman Gehring to create a case against Rome. On June 24th, 1934, Hydrick presented a dossier of fabricated evidence to Hitler that detailed the trees in the splot in which the French were paying Rome 12 million marks to overthrow the Reich. Based on Hydrick's trumped up report, Hitler authorized a surprise attack against the essay

to take place on June 30th. Hydrick's men swooped in, arresting Rome with 80 along with 85 of his top officers, many of whom were intentionally shot to death in the process. When the smoke cleared, the essay had been dissolved between 150 and 200 people, including Rome had been murdered. And Hydrick and Himmler were now free to run the SD in Gestapo as they saw fit. This is the night of long knives. Yeah.

Hydrick is the big man orchestrating this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You got to you got to love a foreign plot. That's just classic. That's a classic tactic. Just you know, he's he's fucking I heard him talking to a Portuguese guy about taking

over. So time to murder all of them. It's really it's it's smart. It always works. Yep. Yeah. Yep. Now, so after the night of long knives, the big thing that this does is it removes the

SS finally from underneath the essay shadow and because of this, the essay is able to grow to become the preeminent terror organization within the Nazi state. Now, while Hydrick's career was soaring, his income began to increase commensurately as well. He benefited from a number of loans from wealthy members of the Nazi party, which he was not expected to repay. He's basically just being given money. It's graft, you know, so he's able to build a mansion and a summer home and a hunting

lodge. And despite his new wealth, he could not be arsed to take care of his family. His parents were destitute still, and they begged him for loans. Despite the fact that he'd begged them for a loan two and a half years earlier, he turns them down and doesn't give them a fucking dime. Damn. Yeah. Cold as ice.

He's cold as ice. What the fuck? His sister repeatedly tells him their parents are going to starve if he doesn't help. And eventually he's able to give he gives his mom like a little bit of money, but he requires her to take care of his kids in order to get it. Like he's just fucking. Yeah. Yeah.

Makes her work. Yeah. Such a piece of shit. Yeah. It's called a welfare to work program. Okay, mom. And obviously we're talking about one of the worst deeds in history being addicted to his family kind of pales, but it's useful because it provides some context just because of like

this guy wasn't even nice to the people he loved. He wasn't even nice to his mom. Like, yeah. He's just a real bad person. Yeah. Yeah. It just it adds color to it because you're just like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. He hates the Jews.

He's going to kill all the communists, blah, blah, blah, blah, but his own mother fucking a Robert, Robert, you know, who will be nice to all of our moms. The products and services that support this podcast. I mean, one would hope except for Raytheon because you know who likes to show up at weddings is moms. And you know what Raytheon likes to do to weddings? Oh, no, here's some ads during the summer of 2020. Some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

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I can't stop with Raytheon. I can't quit them because they're just, they just give us material. There's an evil company whose former executive runs the defense department, who has orchestrated a series of, who's largely responsible for instigating and continuing to fund violence in a number of international countries in order to make profit for themselves. And their name is Raytheon. They're called Raytheon. Like fucking hell.

It's amazing. Just like a classic supervillain name and I also, you know, I love any like evil corporation social media account during any month in which they're supposed to be like, you know, sort of like an ethnic pride or like gay pride and they just woke Raytheon. We love trans people. We're Raytheon. Raytheon is asking all of our, all of our customers to be better. Not themselves.

I love it when IBM does shit like that because it's like they literally built the punch card system that tracks the Jews that I used in order to, to orchestrate the Holocaust. Thanks IBM. Surely Raytheon will never be a part of anything like that. No, certainly not. They wouldn't let their missile guidance technology be used to massacre, I don't know, incidents against the U.S. government or against like a U.S. backed regime in a foreign country. That would never be the Raytheon.

Not Raytheon. No. Not Raytheon. Not Raytheon. Not Raytheon. They support all AAPI people, as you could tell by last month's tweet. Thanks for that Raytheon. Oh God.

People keep like telling me that they found out that the knife missile, the R9X exists and they thought it was a joke I was making at first. You can't joke about, the funniest thing about the knife missile too is it's, they built this missile that is just filled with knives so that they can kill people who are like, they can kill a single target without killing the people around them, right? Because a knife missile less collateral damage than an explosive. Sure, I guess. It's legitimately, the fucked up thing about the knife missile, it's the best idea anyone's

had in the war on terror in 20 years. Yeah. Like, which doesn't mean it's not awful, but it's the only good idea they ever had. It was like, oh, hey, we can actually kill less people with a knife missile. Yeah, right. And it was invented by a middle schooler in the 90s who liked new metal, you know, it's like the most new metal idea. This is my band, knife missile.

Oh man. Fuckin Raytheon. Yeah. Anyway, when compared, yeah, so throughout the rest of the early and mid 1930s, Reinhard Eidrich embarked on a project to take control of all political intelligence gathering agencies in Germany. And I'm not going to go into extreme detail about all the politicking and Nazi infighting here.

And I think it's a very good biography, very readable biography, goes into a lot of detail about this. What's important is how he directed the increasingly powerful intelligence apparatus he came to control. Now, early on, the Nazis had had real enemies, you know, communists and social democrats were trying to stop the Nazis, right? They were trying to make a different kind of government. They were legitimately enemies of the Nazis.

By 1935, Reinhard, largely Reinhard, but he and his colleagues have wiped out the communist underground. There's no more political opposition to the regime that has any kind of meaningful power. Those guys have all been killed, put in concentration camps or frightened outside of political activism. This presented a problem because the Reich interior minister, a guy named Wilhelm Frick, who is a conservative more than really a Nazi, he doesn't. He doesn't really want a totalitarian state, right? He wants a right wing dominated state where the left is illegal, but he doesn't want like,

he doesn't want to live in what Nazi Germany becomes. And he's on paper, Himmler's boss. And now that the regime has wiped out the left, he's like, well, we should probably get rid of these extrajudicial powers we gave the SS to allow them to wipe out the left. Otherwise, this could get bad. We don't want this to get weird. Yeah. We don't want this to get bad.

Yeah. Frick, giant piece of shit. So Frick, there's a fight between him and Himmler and Hydrick. And Frick loses this fight in June of 1936, when Hitler formally appoints Himmler head of all German police. And I'm going to quote from the book Hitler's Hangman here. The victory of the SS and the power struggle with the Reich interior ministry was primarily the result of Hitler's decision to favor a more open-ended definition of Nazism's enemies,

a definition which Hydrick had crucially contributed to and which went far beyond the persecution of the political opposition that is typical of all dictatorships. In late 1934, Himmler and Hydrick came to the conclusion that the justification of a permanent police state required a carefully elaborated scenario portraying an all-pervasive and subtly camouflaged network of enemies who made necessary and extensive and sophisticated security system to detect, expose, and defeat them. In 1935, in a series of articles for the SS journal Dasch-Schwarzkor and republished in 1936 as the transformations of our struggle, Hydrick publicly defined such threats and

the means to combat them, indicating the need for a momentous reorientation of the Gestapo's activities. His central argument was that even after the successful elimination of the KPD and the SPD, the Communists and the Social Democrats, the enemies of the German people were by no means defeated. After achieving the immediate goal of Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January 1933, many Germans wrongly assumed that Nazi rule was now permanently secured. Hydrick insisted that the battle was by no means over.

Instead, the struggle against Germany's enemies now faced its most difficult and ultimately its decisive phase, which would require, quote, years of bitter struggle in order to repulse and destroy the enemy once and for all. According to Hydrick, the driving forces of the enemy always remained the same, world jewelry, world freemasonry, and political priests who abused the freedom of religious expression and spirituality of large portions of the population for political reasons. At first of all, I love that this is just like the foreign plot is now coming from inside the house.

Yeah. It could be anyone, specifically the Jews and the Freemasons and the Jesuits. Yeah, the Jesuits, yes. Which, and the fucking, weren't these guys Freemasons, wasn't he a Freemason? His dad was. His dad was. Yeah. And this is why he's letting his dad starve.

He's like, yeah. Yeah. You're part of the plot. You're part of the plot. I think he believes only parts of what he's saying. No, of course. Yeah. Yeah.

This is where we get into, because again, he's saying this because it justifies his power, right? Right. This is one of the most important things you have to understand about the Nazis. First off, even when Hitler came to power, it was not a foregone conclusion that Nazi Germany would become the kind of totalitarian state that it did or that the Holocaust would happen. We can argue over whether or not Hitler had a grand scheme or a desire to do that from

the beginning, but it was not foregone that he would have the power even once he was in charge, because once he became the chancellor, there are still a lot of people in the government people in the military who could overthrow him, who could kick him out and who didn't agree with most of what he was saying. And the evidence we have shows that Hitler did not pursue genocide in an organized and cohesive manner from the beginning of his time in power. The pivot from left-wingers as enemies to Jews and other internal enemies, which was orchestrated by Hydrick and justified by him in his public columns, was a key part of why

the Holocaust came to pass. And while Reinhardt was surely an anti-Semite by this period, he did this for fundamentally careerist reasons. If the Reich's new enemies were elusive racial and religious enemies, the police were clearly ill-equipped to handle such a threat. He was able to increase his personal power and his personal clout by pitching the SS, his SS, as the ideological shock troops, which is what he called them, of Nazism. Oh, man.

So it's just like, you know, it's completely void of any ideology beyond your own personal power. Not void, because I think he probably tells himself and believes elements of what he's saying, but the ideology is secondary to the desire for personal power. Yeah, it's secondary to it. It's like, you know, because you can take any German off the street in this period and they have, you know, a cultural fucking anti-Semitism, right? But like this guy is actively organizing a mass genocide because he wants a better title

and he wants more people to work under him. I mean, just like this is like, this is the logical conclusion of anyone in like the PMC class. It's like, I want to be the biggest, baddest middle manager of all time. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Pretty... And that's kind of hydric.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's a genocide PMC. Yeah. So, Reinhard saw Freemasonry and Communism, in fact, and also the political church, right? Which is the Catholic church here. You said Jesuits early.

That's a big part of... He goes after the Catholics. He does have to be very careful going after the Catholics, because a lot of Germans are Catholics. And he is too. I mean, yeah, he is too. So one of the ways he firms is that like Freemasons, Communists, these political clerics are agents of Judaism.

So Judaism is just one of a couple of internal enemies, but it's the one that's behind the others generally. And in fact, all social justice movements, and they do frame this as like they call it social justice movements, are part of a scheme to weaken Germany by the Jews. In order to combat this scheme, Hydric and his men would need, quote, utter hardness. He acknowledged that the cruelty his men would have to display in order to do what was necessary would be difficult for them, saying at one meeting, quote, it is almost too difficult for an individual, but we must be hard as granite or else our furors work will be in

vain. Much later, people will be grateful for what we have taken upon us. God, it's just like we all have to just stick together. Just a bunch of men. Hard as a rock. Hard as a rock. Hard dudes. Just hard dudes just fucking, I'm talking veiny and hard.

That's what we have to be in order to accomplish this. It was a major reason why the German police operated throughout the Reich in a permanent state of emergency. That's his big part. He's doing. He's the guy who suggests this, at least. He's like, we have extra powers because of a state of emergency. If the state of emergency is over because you've purged all of your political enemies, you

lose those powers. So he's like, no, no, no, no, because of all the Jews and the freemen, they're still in emergency. So we need these these powers still. They never leave this state of emergency. Yeah. Now, to help develop new plans to deal with this new threat, he brings experts into the SS.

One of these experts, his Jewish expert, is a guy you might have heard of named Adolf Eichmann. Yeah. Now, later on in the 60s, when he goes to trial and is eventually executed by the state of Israel, Hannah Arendt will famously write of Eichmann that he embodied the banality of evil because he's a middle manager type guy. He's this dude who looks like someone you might see in line at the fucking elementary school picking his kid up in a minivan.

And he's a big he's like Hydric in that he's a he's an implementation guy. You know, he's not the guy out there giving the speeches. He doesn't get anybody like he doesn't he doesn't fire up the masses, but in a meeting when you've got like multiple different government agencies, Hydric and Eichmann are the guys who are capable of wrangling everyone together. They're like whips in the Senate, right? They whip votes, they whip support together and they organize and figure out how to carry out plans of action.

Yeah. Adolf Eichmann is hired to the SS as his Jewish expert and his experience for being a Jewish expert is that he speaks a little Yiddish, not not at that point. Oh, no. Okay. He eventually does learn some Yiddish. No. He had been a salesman and he liked crime books.

He liked he liked crime. He liked detective novels. He liked the same books that Hydric did and that's why he gets the job. You're the Jew expert. You like the same books and you used to go to that deli all the time. You know a thing or two. Yeah. You ate locks once, get in here.

Yeah. You've had a kosher dill. Get over here. Tell us about them. What do they like? The articles Hydric wrote about the internal Jewish threat played a direct role in bringing on what scholars called the second anti-Semitic wave in Nazi Germany, which began in 1935 with mass spontaneous violence against Jewish people and businesses.

Hydric hated this because it was bad for the economy and for the sense of order. He knew that the German middle class center right families did not like seeing that shit. The Nuremberg laws then were a response to street anti-Semitism. The Nuremberg laws existed to stop people from beating and murdering Jews in the street and destroying their businesses because that shit is bad for business. Right. They were like, no, no, no, no, no. Listen, we're going to do this through the state.

We're going to have this state. But they're metaphorical boot on their neck. Yes. We need to oppress the Jews with law, not with random street violence. Exactly. Exactly. And we need to know what constitutes a Jew. We need to know how much blood you need to have, how many times you've been to the theater.

We need to know all this stuff first before we can categorize you. Exactly. And that's a big part of it. The Nuremberg laws, we're not going to go into nearly enough detail. I mean, there's whole books just about the Nuremberg laws. There's this process of determining what a Jew is because this is a big misconception. The Jews are not targeted by the Nazi state for their religion. They are targeted for their ethnicity.

If you're someone who had a Jewish mom and you're a hardcore Protestant or a Catholic, you're a Jew to Reinhardt-Hydric. If you're an atheist and you marry a fucking Bohemian woman who's a Catholic, you're a Jew to Reinhardt-Hydric. It didn't even matter if it was within Jewish law. If you had a Jewish father, but not a Jewish mother, that's not hololically Jewish. It depends. Because under the Nuremberg laws, I think, that guy wouldn't be a Jew.

He changed that. Yeah. He liked the Nuremberg laws, but he thought they didn't go far enough. One of his big issues is that, well, this doesn't define enough people as Jewish. There's too many ways for someone with Jewish ancestry to slip into the people's racial community. That's a problem for me. But still, this is a big step forward, the Nuremberg laws, because now this is the first

real legal justification for sustained persecution of the Jews under the Nazi regime. In 1934, Heidrich had suggested in an internal memo that, quote, the aim of Jewish policies must be the emigration of all Jews. And he urged that voluntary emigration could be achieved by creating a legal climate so oppressive that Jewish people could no longer stand to stay in the Reich. To further this end, in 1935, he had the Gestapo start keeping track of all Jewish German residents. In 1936, he started monitoring their financial transactions to stop them from putting their money in foreign banks.

They had to leave, but he wanted most of their wealth to remain. Now, Heidrich supported, to an extent, the Zionist movement in Palestine. And in fact, we have these memos from him where he's saying, like, I want to crack down on any sort of organizations supporting Jewish assimilation into German culture, but we should support the Zionist movement. And in fact, he actually sends Adolf Eichmann to Palestine in the 30s to talk with a member of the Haganah, which becomes the IDF, to discuss how they could urge further immigration. And we should go into more detail about that.

There's some wild shit in this meeting, including the fact that this emissary of the Zionist movement tells Eichmann that the German, like, they're having problems with the German Jews who are leaving Germany and coming to Palestine because, number one, they don't plan to stay. They want to go back to Europe. And they're, in his words, work shy, which is also what the Nazis describe. Right. It's really a lot of interesting history there. Very interesting internal anti-Semitism amongst the kind of, like, right-wing class in Israel.

Yeah. And it doesn't, like, again, as soon as the war starts, the vast majority of the Zionist movement, like, is not just anti-Nazi, is, like, actively shooting Nazis. Oh, of course. Of course. Of course. But there's, as we talked about in some other episodes, there's a chunk of them that are willing to work with these guys because they both think Jews shouldn't assimilate.

Right. Yeah. Now, even the Nazis were not uniform in their attitudes about what should be done to the Jews. And again, this is actually a thing that there's a lot of debate over because there's large chunks of the Nazi party who want the street violence, who think that the pogroms are the way to go about achieving their ends. Gerbils is a big chunk of this.

Gerbils supports kind of a chaotic melange of boycotts, street violence, and vandalism against Jews. That's why he and his propaganda arms are trying, are stirring up a lot of the street violence, right? Yeah. They're trying to get Germans out in the street doing violence and destroying Jewish property. And there's a big competition between these two wings of the German party, both of which are essentially proposing different answers to the Jewish question.

Gerbils is saying, you know, we beat them and kill them in the street force, and that'll force, you know, the ones we don't beat and kill to leave. Heidrich is saying, no, no, no, we use the law to in an orderly way oppress them so that they leave. Those are two different answers to the Jewish question. In late 1935, these various sides of the Nazi party kind of came together, decided, like, we can't keep arguing over this. We have to have a concerted strategy.

And they held a big how to racism meeting. Now the impetus of this was a massive pogrom in 1935 that did millions of dollars in damage to the German economy. Because again, when you run through the streets destroying businesses and departments, it's bad for business. Right, right, right, yeah. These economies don't exist in a vacuum. Like you are actively hurting the German economy as well when you are doing this.

And so in this, like this meeting is actually is called because the German economic minister, a guy named Helmar Schacht, who's a friend of the Dolis Brothers and also I think a friend of the Koch Brothers dad, he's an anti-Semite, but he's I'll just tell you, I am shocked. He's shocked, having fun with names. That's good. So he felt that the economic consequences of this were unacceptable. And so he holds this meeting to be like, we have to figure out a better way to do this. And Hydric is very much in agreement with Schacht in this.

And he takes this meeting as an opportunity to try to whip, again, the thing he does best, he tries to whip everyone in line behind his strategy. He says during the meeting, quote, the only way to both get the Jews out and avoid violence is a concerted campaign of economic marginalization. He also suggested a ban on mixed marriage, the prosecution of sexual intercourse between Jews and Arians and restrictions of Jewish freedom of movement. His suggestion in this meeting led directly to the Nuremberg laws, which were formulated that September.

So again, that's why this all happens. So the Nuremberg laws are the legal basis for all organized Nazi persecution of Jews and are the first concrete step towards the Holocaust. And Hydric's performance in that meeting, his ability to wrangle his fellow Nazis towards his desired plan of action, establishes him as the leading Nazi authority on the Jewish question. Now, the mid 1930s are also the height of the weird Nazi period. This is the time when the occult wings of the party were at their strongest.

The shit you see in Hellboy, right? Elements of that were real. There was a bunch of weird like, ah, Heinrich Himmler thinking he's the reincarnation of a Danish prince, right? Hitler's best buddy who Rudolph, I think it was Rudolph Hess, who was like super into the occult and was like doing like seances and shit. Yeah, this is when they went like doing like full nerd shit, just nerding out on paganism. And that's not a big factor once the war starts, even right before the war starts.

And in fact, Hess's flight to Europe, because he kind of loses his mind and flies to England to try and that's like a big part of like, because he had been such an advocate of this and because he had so Hitler saw it as like a kind of a betrayal, like that that kind of spells an end to the influence of that. But there's always a level of it in the SS, and this is talked about a lot. It's probably overemphasized. Now, it's fair to say Heinrich Himmler, Hitler, the other big Nazis didn't trust his Christianity, particularly Catholicism, and they wanted to minimize its influence both in the Reich

and in the SS. To this end, Hitler replaced marriage ceremonies for SS men with the Ehwei, which was a new fascist wedding ritual. He replaced Easter celebrations with Midsummer celebrations, and he brought in a whole host of pagan rituals he claimed were ancient German old-time religion. Now, this new quasi-faith that Himmler kind of cobbles together for the SS is called Gaut Glaubekeit. And it was not popular.

Again, this gets overemphasized and its height about 22 percent of the SS follows this, whatever you want to call it, religion. About 54 percent are Protestant and the rest are Catholic. Heidrich is one of the 22 percent who buys into Himmler's weird neo-pagan Nazi thing. Although this is more toting, he's trying to impress his boss by doing this. After the war, Lena Heidrich would claim that she and her husband made fun of Himmler's weird religion in private. So he's not very committed to this.

He's doing virtue signaling to his Nazi overlords. But you know who won't virtue signal to their Nazi overlords, Matt? Is it the products and services? That is right. It's the products and services that support this podcast. None of them are believers in German pagan SS philosophy. Yeah. They will never do weird Nazi weddings unless you want them to.

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Ah, we're back. So in 1936, Hydric launched a systematic torture campaign against the Jehovah's Witnesses. And the Jehovah's Witnesses, this is important to note in terms of absolute numbers, not a lot of these guys, not a sizable chunk of the Holocaust, although a lot of them get killed relative to their population. But the Jehovah's Witnesses are the only group in the Third Reich who was persecuted purely on the basis of their religion. And that's because Jehovah's Witnesses refused to swear allegiance to governments and that

makes them enemies of the state under the Nazis. Hydric's crackdown would eventually lead 6,000 witnesses being arrested and interned in concentration camps. Hundreds died in camps who were executed straight away. I think they wore a purple triangle in the concentration camps. Now Hydric's prosecution of Freemasonry was by comparison a lot less brutal, mainly because Freemasons didn't hold that much power and like none of them are willing to die for their dumb club.

So once the Nazis take power, they all just kind of leave and he confiscates their stuff and he puts it in a museum. In subsequent years, he establishes another, a similar museum, which is filled with Jewish artifacts. And that's kind of his idea is like, we need to have these museums to show people the dangers of this ideology and like how, but also how silly it is and like, like that's, that's the, you know, and what do you put in museum, but things that no longer exist and are now in the past?

Exactly. I mean, it's the most foreshadowing fucking scumbag shit ever. Yeah. It's good shit. In 1937, Hydric had his criminal police launch a massive dragnet operation against what he called habitual criminals and asocials. Now these were people who didn't work or didn't work enough or lived on the street or made their living in a less than legal manner.

By the end of 1938, nearly 20,000 asocials were in preventative detention. These people were also sent to concentration camps, mostly as a scare tactic. The Reich was in the midst of a labor shortage and the point of this particular campaign was to force people to work, not to kill them. Now all these different crusades in the late thirties taxed the concentration camps system, which had not been well planned from the beginning. In late 1936 to 37, the SS reorganized the camps, shutting down most of the old ones and building new ones modeled off of Dachau from Hitler's hangman, quote, the Dachau

model designed to regiment the prisoners and dehumanize their relations with the guards was based on a system of graded punishment for various offenses, which ranged from denial of food to execution. To dehumanize relationships with prisoners, the guards behavior was regulated to maintain distance and eliminate human contact. The first of these camps was Saxonhausen, north of Berlin. And if you're ever in Berlin, I really recommend taking a tour of Saxonhausen. The German government has done a good job of making these places into museums. And when you get a tour at one of these places, it's not just like some dude who's doing a summer

job, some kid, it's somebody with like a degree. Like they they the people who work there. I've talked with a number of them. I did this tour. You can have long conversations about how to rent about the nature of fascism, about the development. They're very knowledgeable. I walked away very impressed. And we did. The tour I went on was in like the dead of December. So you know, you're covered in snow, it's freezing outside and everybody is like, you're bundled up. It's the German winter, you know, right? Yeah. And you're walking around, you're seeing this concentration camp. You're seeing I think one of the things that really stuck with me is they had these concrete pits, which are like these square pits, like

10 or 15 feet deep with a grate on top of them, that people would be stuck in for days at a time. And you could look in and you could see the marks where they clawed at the concrete. They were like fingernail marks still in it. And you would walk around like freezing your ass off, just utterly miserable in this cold. And you would go inside. And the first thing you would see was one of the concentration camp uniforms, which is this threadbare black and white unit hard thing. And it's just like this immediately. Oh, oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Certainly not taking the cold of the German winter into account with the uniform. Yeah. Well, or you could argue, taking it very much into account and using it to kill people,

you know. Yes. Yes. So Hydrick was one of the major drivers and backers of the Dachau model. And it's worth noting that unlike him, Heinrich Himmler, Himmler has trouble visiting in the concentration camps. He faints at Auschwitz. What a bitch. He does repeatedly. Here's the thing, though. He repeatedly visits these camps to see what they're doing. Hydrick almost never does. Now, this is probably not because it was too horrifying for him. In fact, his biographer thinks it was because he wasn't actually in charge of the camp, right? He decides who goes there and who's released from there. Once he's inside the camps, he's in somebody else's domain. And Theodore Eich, who we talked about earlier, the guy who's running the

camps, he doesn't like Theodore. They're both political enemies and they both are competing for Himmler's favor. Sure. And so he doesn't want to go to the camps because he's putting himself basically in someone else's territory. I love it. Why don't you go to these camps that you built to murder millions and millions of people? Oh, I don't want to be rude to a co-worker. Yeah. Well, I will say at this point, these are not camps to murder people. Right. Yeah, they're concentrated people. Murder happens. But the German concentration camps at this point, you could argue, no worse than the British concentration camps for the Boers. No worse, certainly no worse than some of the things that the Spanish camps did. No worse than the

British themselves had done at this point. Right. There's a difference. And the thing is, Hydrick, with these concentration camps, is stealing an idea from people. And it becomes more brutal than what had existed before when they transitioned to the Dachau model. Right. That is an escalation from what concentration camps had been. Sure. But they certainly didn't invent it, nor did they invent the race science used to justify it. Yeah. What they invent are the death camps. Yeah. That is an innovation that Hydrick gets. Yes, it is. Yeah. And again, that's what this episode is about. So by the late 1930s, Hydrick is on paper, a member of the upper middle class. And in reality, he's basically a millionaire. This happens to all of

the big Nazis. And the way it worked for them is that they would receive allowances from the Gestapo, gifts and loans from prominent men in the Reich. And his his rough income on paper, like what he would legally admit to having, was about seven times what a middle class German made. And despite the fact that they're now rolling in cash, have multiple homes, Lena constantly complained that his salary was, quote, barely sufficient to live on. In 1938, when his salary was increased yet again to eight times the German middle class income, he cut the salaries of his two domestic servants. Again, minor compared to the death camps, but it shows you like this guy is comprehensively. I mean, yeah, he's going through a checklist of

like fucking bullshit behavior of just banal evil shit, like fucking cutting the income. And also I love, I love that his wife is like still being like, you know, you don't make enough money. And he just has to be like, women, am I right? Yeah, they're always complaining about not having enough money for the shopping. Oh, my God, mind God, mind God, God. Women be shopping. So, Hydrick and Hitler first met at a birthday reception for the fewer in the early 1930s. And Hitler was impressed by Hydrick's Aryan looks and impressed by the fact that he and his wife are both kind of like Aryans. And in fact, when he sees them, he says, what a beautiful couple I am most impressed. I just love, I love every reaction to, to this guy is just like other

Germans going, wow, he's very attractive. Yeah, you're just like, wow, you look like they're supposed to look. Yeah, none of us actually look. Yeah, this is what you say in the propaganda that we look like. I love. I just want a world filled with Zach Morris's. No more screeches. No more screech. Just Zach Morris. Mm hmm. Now, despite the fact, Hitler, you know, is impressed with him from early on, especially kind of just likes the way he looks. Reinhard's never really in Hitler's inner circle. They're not personally friends, but the fewer increasingly by the late 30s came to trust him and see him as loyal and talented. And he gives a hydric increasing responsibility for settling the Jewish question.

Now, in the late 1930s, this is a fun little aside story, but we got to tell it. This is part of his like establishment of the Nazi security state. In the late 30s, Reinhard becomes aware of a woman named Kitty Schmidt, who operated a brothel in Berlin. Now, as Germany's head cop, his job is technically to arrest her, but he had a better idea. He had the SS take over the brothel and fill it with wiretaps. Kitty still ran everything. He allowed her to allowed her to keep running her brothel as long as he could use it. This kind of it's kind of like the Nazi best little whorehouse in Texas. Yeah. And his fascist Bert Reynolds. Oh my god. What a visual. Wow. Yeah. So the SS, Kitty, like they basically revamp this brothel and they do it

for a specific reason. They want to collect intelligence using prostitutes. So they first off kind of let go a lot of like the staff they see as lower class and they hire high class German ladies. Most of the women working here are like the wives or at least mistresses of wealthy upper class German men. Well, recruitment profile for women who work at the brothel, which reads, quote, wanted our women and girls who are intelligent, multilingual, nationalistically minded and furthermore, man crazy. We want the most boy crazy. We want horny fascist bitches. That's what we want. Give me all your horny fascist bitches. Just like radio commercials. Are you a horny fascist bitch? Welcome to the best fall house for you. Hi, I'm just laying Maxwell

and yeah. Oh, man. So the targets of this information gathering operation were German military officers. So a lot of them weren't Nazis, right? Most people aren't Nazis even in the Nazi regime at this point. Yeah. So German military officers who might not be loyal to Hitler, but also other Nazis and visiting foreign dignitaries, right? So Reinhardt and his men would, you know, they would sit down, they would have a meeting with some guy, you know, maybe they're having a meeting about some security matter, maybe they're having a meeting with a foreign ally and they would at the end of the meeting be like, hey, you know, you're in Berlin for another day or two for this meeting. Here's a special code word. If you go to this brothel,

they'll give you the special menu with this code word. And the menu did entitle them to this special menu of these like super, you know, from what the Nazis point of view, high class prostitutes. Yeah. But the menu, when you came in and told Kitty Schmidt this password, it also told her, OK, turn on the recording equipment. Right. They want to eavesdrop on this guy while he's fucking. I should have known when the password they gave me was honey pot. But I didn't put the pieces together. So one of the customers of this brothel, it was the son-in-law and foreign minister of fascist Italy, who repeatedly insulted Hitler while he was fucking. Hitler's a chip. I fucking hate that little bit. Oh, I guess he's Italian.

He could never do this. He can't fuck this good. He cannot fucking like me. Look at the size of my peony. Hitler has a one ball. Single meatball. He has only one meatball. And it is not a spicy one. Oh, boy. Yeah. So another who didn't give away anything, evidently, when he was there was SS General Sepp Dietrich, who is a terrifying man. In some ways, Sepp Dietrich is the founder of the idea of special forces. Like he's a really legitimately frightening man. And Sepp Dietrich, when he goes into this brothel, he gets the code word. He seems to know he's being recorded, but he just wants to fuck. So he goes in and demands all 20 of the women on the menu and has an all night orgy with these ladies. Oh, beautiful. You know, I mean, I hate this guy

on principle, but, you know, if you're going to do it, you know, live it up and just get your mouth shut. Yeah. Goebbels was also a frequent customer. He was said to enjoy lesbian displays. Another big customer was a major German tank ace who liked to drink toilet water after women use the bathroom. Yeah. Classic German schizoporn. Yeah. Yeah. Hydric himself also regularly visited the brothel, although the microphones were turned off for his visits. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yep. I mean, that's an amazing, amazing aside, you know, just like the levels of evil of this person. They just run the gamut. Mm hmm. He's real piece of shit. Real piece. So when Germany annexed Austria, Hydric's job was to put together a team

of SS men to go into the stolen country and arrest political prisoners. In addition to putting 2,000 people in camps, Hydric's men launched a targeted operation to confiscate Jewish property. He announced that anyone caught stealing from Jews, though, during this period would be punished mercilessly because their wealth was property of the Reich. Right. So both we're going to take everything the Jews have, but if random citizens start taking their shit, you're stealing from the government. Yeah. Now, there was, of course, a wide gulf between rhetoric and reality. The kind of men who joined the SS were thugs, and they were never able to help themselves from beating and murdering and robbing, no matter what Hydric said. A big part of his job was putting out the

PR fires started by his subordinates. Much of the violence of the Anschluss came from Austrian Nazis, who took the end of their old government as an opportunity to let loose. They burned and looted businesses. Jews were forced by crowds to kneel and scrub the streets. One observer later recalled, quote, the underworld had opened up its gates and set loose its lowest, most disgusting horns. The city transformed itself into a nightmarish painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Demons seemed to have crawled out of filthy eggs and risen from marshy burrows. The air was constantly filled with a desolate, hysterical shrieking, and people's faces were distorted, some with fear, others with lies, still others with wild, hate-filled triumph. One star. Yelp review. Yeah. One star for the

Anschluss. One star. Now, when the violence prompted an outcry and again, an outcry even from some people who were in within the German government, Hydric blamed the pogrom on disguised communists. It's Antifa. It's always that. Oh man. He said they were trying to make Germany look bad and create propaganda for her foreign enemies. After the initial uncontrolled violence, Hydric's SS was able to push a more orderly terror. He established a central office in Vienna, which would take and catalog Jewish property at the same time as it produced thousands of exit visas to allow Jewish families to leave the country. Basically, the idea was that we're taking the property of the rich Jews to pay for the process of immigrating the other ones out of here, getting them exit visas,

sending them elsewhere. Now, this system would become a model used by other Nazi annexations, but it did not go quickly enough for many Germans. The Anschluss brought 200,000 more Jews into the German Reich, which more than cancelled out the 128,000 who had left by the end of 1937. The most racist Germans were frustrated by this and Hydric responded with a crackdown on Polish Jewish immigrants in Germany. So one of the problems is they're trying to get these people out as fast as they can. And they're even to the point where if you're rich, they're taking some of your money. They'll leave you with some of it because otherwise you're not going to be taken anywhere. And in general, the biggest problem they have is, and this is one of the

things you do have to point out when you talk about, for example, Jewish immigration to Palestine during this period, that was one of the only places they could go. That was the number one place that Jewish refugees were able to go. Everywhere was close to them. Yeah, everywhere else. Yeah. No, the United States would not take any Jewish refugees. We let boats full of Jewish refugees drown in the ocean because we wouldn't let them onto our shores. And this is a problem for the Nazis, right? Because they're trying to get these people out, but it's difficult. They're not taking it. And the places that are taking them are places like Czechoslovakia, which then the Germans take, or places like Poland, which they want. And the Polish state

is as racist almost as the German state. So the Polish state, these Jews who had fled Poland because there were pogroms in the early 1900s into Germany and had become German residents, get kicked out and forced into Poland, who denies their citizenship. So they're like, it's a whole fucking mess. No, it's Earth in the 30s. Real bad place. Real bad place for the Jews. Nobody wanted them. And yeah, it's not fun for us. And in 1938, one of the families who gets caught up in this, Hydrick is pushing the Polish refugees out of Germany. Poland doesn't want to take them. One of the families who gets fucked over in this are the Greenspons, G-R-Y-N-S-Z-P-A-N-S. But I think it's pronounced Greenspan or something like that. Their son Herschel lived in Paris,

and he was outraged by his family's suffering by the fact that they'd gotten kicked out of Germany after barely building a life there. And, you know, this he kind of goes mad with grief. And because everything seems fucked up, nothing seems nothing. The Nazis aren't facing any consequences for their actions. The international community isn't doing shit to stop it. He can't think of anything better to do than to get a gun and go shoot a Nazi politician living in Paris. A guy who worked for a Nazi's full-time office. And can you blame him? No, of course not. He did nothing wrong. Herschel Greenspan did nothing wrong. Did nothing wrong. That's a shirt. Yeah. He shoots this guy, Ernst von Roth, and von Roth eventually dies of his injuries. And I'm going to quote from a write-up

in Bleaker Street Media here about what came next. Three days later, Hydrick sent out a memo with the subject line, measures against the Jews tonight. A communication that directed the police to maintain a hands-off policy to the spontaneous national riots that Joseph Goebbels and he had orchestrated. All night long, Jewish businesses were destroyed, homes vandalized or destroyed, and families rounded up and arrested, if not killed. In London, the Times calculated the damage. Quote, no foreign propagandist bent on blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings of black guardly assaults on defenseless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday. More than a thousand synagogues and 7,000 Jewish

businesses had been attacked. More than 90 people had been murdered and 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. To add insult to injury, the Jewish people whose property had been destroyed were charged by the state with its cleanup. This is the night of broken glass. This is Kristallnacht and Hydrick's not the only one behind it, but he's one of the organizing forces behind Kristallnacht. Maybe that seems a little bit odd considering his attitude towards street violence, but just wait for what comes next. There's a reason why this is not the worst thing in the world for him. No, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is you slowly becoming more and more okay with this, I believe. Well, it's even more subtle than that. It's even shittier than that. So the night of

broken glass, a lot of people don't know this, was a disaster for the Nazis and seen by Hitler and Gehring in particular as a horrible idea because it brings them all this really bad international PR. It makes them a pariah in the international community and it fucks the economy. It does millions and millions of dollars of damage to the economy. It sets back their five-year plan. It's a real big problem for a lot of Nazis. And because they're so unhappy about what has happened during the night of broken glass, they have a second big meeting of all the Nazis to be like, guys, we got to get on the same page about this. So because there's another that Hydrik helps to instigate and ensure won't be stopped by his police, because there's another mass violent

pogrom, that creates enough negative thought towards street violence that there's another meeting. And what is Hydrik really fucking good at? Taking control of meetings like this and getting everyone on board with his ideas. He's a big meeting guy. Yeah. So Hydrik uses the opportunity to make the case again that, yeah, of course, street violence is bad. It's bad for the economy. It makes people not like us. It makes us pariahs. We need to attack Jews through the law in an orderly manner. So he suggests an expansion of the restrictions that have been put in place at the Nuremberg laws. For one thing, Jewish people should be restricted from using buses, from going to hospitals, from going to theaters, from visiting public parks and other public places.

He also suggested forcing Jewish citizens to wear a yellow star. Now, during this, when he suggests this, even Hitler is like, well, that's a bit far. Yeah. That's a bit much. Reinhard, calm down. Reinhard, you're going to, you're going to Reinhard in the paint right now. Yeah. Going to need you to chillax and be Reinsaugh. Like that's, yeah. Yeah. This would be done eventually. But in Reinhard is the guy who kind of, he's the first big dude to suggest this. Yeah. But Reinhard, the thing that he succeeds in doing is he kind of very methodically during this meeting, he lays out how during the occupation of Vienna in 1938, his central office that he established had facilitated the expulsion of at least 50,000 Jews. So he points out like he walks them through, here's how we got, we got 50,000

people in a matter of weeks out of, out of Austria to leave for other countries. No one else has gotten so many Jews to leave so quickly and so, you know, without so peacefully, without disruption to the state as I have. And he claims that I can, I can set up offices like this all throughout the Reich. I can generalize this process and it won't cost us a dime because we'll pay to expel them with funds confiscated from wealthy Jews. And he does a good enough job of laying this out that by the end of the meeting, everyone agrees to put hydric in charge of purging the German Reich of Jews. You can do racism and balance the budget at the same time. What a man. Exactly. Exactly. He's able to get, he's able to marshal everyone behind, he's able to get them on the same page. You can answer

two questions, the Jewish question and who's going to pay for it? The two questions. Now, by the end of the meeting, everyone agreed to put hydric in charge of purging the German Reich of Jews. He estimated this would take 10 years. But for the first time since Hitler took power, the Nazis had a serious actionable game plan to purge central Europe of its Jews. And this brings us back to the question, the core question, one of the core questions of Holocaust studies. Was the Holocaust planned from the beginning or did it evolve over time out of the circumstances that that presented themselves? The reality of the situation seems to be that Adolf Hitler was an idea man, not a logistics man. He would give speeches, he would get excited,

he would talk about the Jews being the eternal foe, he would talk about needing to purge them. But he didn't come out with policy on his own to do that. Exactly. Hydric and everyone else under Hitler, there was a policy and this is what they called it in the Nazi state, working towards the fewer. And what that means is that Hitler doesn't come up with plans. Hitler doesn't say, this is how we're going to do this, this is what we're going to do next. Hitler comes up with ideas and it's up to Nazis. If you want to impress Hitler, if you want to make a place for yourself in the party to figure out what you think Hitler wants you to do and then to do it, right? Yeah, yeah. Because the Nazi government was so competitive, this process

evolved in increasingly extreme directions. Hydric's success came from the fact that he was a genius when it came to taking the racist rants of his boss and translating them into action. His job was turning ideology into policy. Yeah. That's what Hydric does. Hitler and the others talk flippantly about getting rid of the Jews. There's a lot of talk in the yellow Nazi press about exterminating the Jews. Hydric figures out how to make that shit happen. Yeah. He's the Steve Wozniak, the Hitler Steve Jobs. He's an architect. Hitler describes his dream house. Reinhard figures out where the load bearing walls need to go. That's the guy he is. When Germany annexed Czechoslovakia, Reinhard organized special task groups of the SS. The

German word for special task group is Einsatzgruppen. Their job was to arrest politically dangerous and undesirable people. They arrested between 10 and 20,000 people in a matter of days. Many were sent to Dachau or other concentration camps. I think about 7,000 in this period. Now, when Germany invaded Poland, which is what comes next, and I know we are yada-yada-ying a lot that's going on at the time, because he's got his hand in all of it. When Germany invades Poland, Hydric expands the ranks of the Einsatzgruppen. They had initially just been like 800 dudes, I think, during the annexation of Czechoslovakia. There was a lot more. They're like military units during the invasion of Poland. Their task is much more ambitious. Hitler didn't just want

undesirables and political enemies rounded up. Hitler hated the idea that Poland would be a nation. The concept of Poland as a country was repellent to Hitler and the Nazis. He had just inked a secret deal with Stalin to split Poland up after the invasion. He needed to kill any conception of Polish identity and the Poland that he was going to conquer. He needed to destroy any sense that Polish culture existed. Before the invasion, Hitler tells Hydric that his job is to organize his Einsatzgruppen to exterminate entire classes of Polish society, specifically the classes that were, in Hitler's words, quote, carriers of Polish nationalism. He means carriers is in carriers of a virus, carriers is of a disease. That's very much how Hitler frames this.

That's very much how he talks about the Jews, too. They're a plague bacillus is the literal term he uses. Yeah. I mean, he's just trying to get rid of any other ideological virus that is not Nazism and German nationalism. Now, before the invasion, Hitler's men created a mass or Hydric's men, I should say, created a massive index card library of 61,000 people who they would have to arrest and, in most cases, execute immediately upon taking over Poland. From Hitler's hangman, quote, in mid-August at a conference in Berlin, leading members of the Einsatzgruppen received further oral instructions from Hydric and Best, instructions which even by Hydric standards were, quote, extraordinarily radical and which included a, quote, liquidation

order for various circles of the Polish leadership affecting thousands. According to post-war trial testimonies of leading task force officers present that day, Hydric opened the meeting by conforming the men of the atrocities being committed against ethnic Germans in Poland, noting that he expected heavy partisan resistance against the German invasion. It was the responsibility of the Einsatzgruppen to neutralize these threats, particularly those posed by saboteurs, partisans, Jews, and the Polish intelligentsia, in areas conquered by the German army and to punish individuals who had committed crimes against Poland's ethnic Germans in the preceding weeks. Although carefully guarded in his language, Hydric insisted that in carrying

out their difficult tasks, quote, everything was allowed. Free for all. Yeah. God damn Nazi-ass murder free for all. This is when the real Nazi shit starts. This is when the Nazis truly distinguished themselves as worse than the other hell regimes that existed in this period. This is the start of the not just being a dictatorship, not just being fascist or whatever. This is the start of them being the fucking Nazis. Yeah. We could do a whole series of episodes on German war crimes during the invasion of Poland to focus just on one group of Hydric's men, a single Einsatzgruppe unit near the demarcation line for Soviet Poland was tasked by Hydric with inducing Jews to flee into Russian territory, right? We want them to go into what the Russians

are going to control, so we don't have to deal with them. They did this by going on a mass killing spree, which included burning down a synagogue filled with Jewish women and children and massacring roughly 500 people in mass shootings. In one week in September, members of Einsatzgruppe of four killed roughly 1300 Polish civilians. Now, while Hydric's men massacred thousands, he followed behind them and ensured the job was done properly. He remained concerned about destruction of valuable property and repeatedly investigated and punished SS men suspected of stealing from Jewish owned shops while they were burning down synagogues filled with people. Yeah. Yeah. You wouldn't want them to commit any crimes. You don't want the property

crimes. Yeah. That's the problem is property crimes. What do you say with the right wingers loving fucking property more than people? Yeah. It's just like you burned down all of the targets. We need those was the economy. Mm hmm. Yeah. So a truly accurate catalog of just Hydric's crimes up to this point would go far beyond the time we have to discuss him. Books have been written about just the conquest of Poland and the crimes in its wake, right? More books will be written in the future. I'm afraid we're going to have to yada, yada, a lot of other crimes against humanity just to move along here. Now, I'm sure you all know the broad basics of the war. From this point on, the Nazis conquer Poland. They conquer the

Netherlands, France. They conquer a bunch of places in Europe. They bomb this shit out of Britain. Things are going great for the Nazis. Hydric continued to direct his forces to round up Jewish property as well as political enemies. And his job is in all of these places, arrest political enemies, take Jewish property, catalog all the Jews in the territory. They're not yet putting them in camps. They're not yet. The death camps don't exist yet, but they're they're they're they're laying the ground for that. Although that said, even in 1940, it was not a foregone conclusion that there would be death camps because in 1940, Hydric becomes the the head of what is called the Madagascar plan, which is an ultimately abandoned attempt to take the now

millions of Jews and conquered territories and relocate them off the coast of Africa. Right. This had existed prior to the Nazis. Racists had been talking about pushing off forcing all the Jews into Madagascar for a while. And Hydric, again, I think there's people who will argue like, oh, he always wanted to do the death camps. The Madagascar plan was just sort of like a for show. He puts a lot of effort into trying to plan this out. Yeah, he spends a lot of time thinking about how this will work, trying to organize it. I don't think I think this was something they thought they might be able to do for a certain point. And it's important to understand like, this is a process of getting yourself ready for genocide, right? Even the genocide

committers have to amp themselves up. It's a series of steps. It's zero to genocide, right? That never happens. There's always a ramping up period. Yeah. And it's like, with these guys, especially, it's like the ethnic cleansing was going too slowly for them. And they were just ramping up and ramping up all to this end conclusion. Yes. Now, during the same time, Hydric trains as a fighter pilot. He wants to get in his combat time, right? He missed a chance to fight in World War One. So he becomes a fighter pilot. He flies like 20 combat missions. He's a gunner. Actually, he's not really a pilot. He doesn't like work as a pilot. He's a gunner. And he flies some missions that are non combat over England

with like a spy plane. And this is a matter of vanity. Again, he wants to he wants to have done his time as a soldier for the Reich so that he can stand up proud. And his time as a pilot kind of comes to an end because his plane has a landing accident and he hurts his wrist and he gets an iron cross and then goes back to his desk job. Now, on the domestic front, Hydric's marriage to his wife is consistently rocky from the late 30s forward, mainly due to the fact that he cheated on her fucking constantly. It was such a workaholic that she was basically abandoned with her children. After the war, Lena would admit that there were, quote, always other women in my marriage and that Reinhard would go after anything in a skirt. Now, at one point,

one of his subordinates, a guy named Schellenberg started having an affair with Lena with Reinhard's wife. Oh, shit. Now, she denies that she claims they never fucked that she was just kind of playing around with this guy to make her has been jealous because he was cheating on her. Yeah, Carmela did that with Furio and the sopranos. There's a lay. Exactly. Some soprano shit. There's a lot of debate over this. There's one possibly true story that they were fucking each other and Hydric found out about this. And so he takes Schellenberg out drinking and in the middle of this night drinking and talking and mid conversation, Hydric's like, I just poisoned you, by the way, and I'll give you the antidote if you'll tell me what you've been doing with my wife. And according to this story,

Schellenberg admits that he's been fucking around. He promises to end the relationship and Hydric gives him the antidote. Oh, we actually did poison him. That wasn't just maybe. I mean, we can't. I don't know. You know, I think Schellenberg tells this story. Also, Schellenberg survives the war and has some vested interest in making Hydric seem even worse because he's trying because it makes him seem less bad by comparison. And also, it's very embarrassing if he was like, I was just, I was kidding. Of course, I don't have any fucking poison and an antidote right here. Yeah. And then that would be a fake antidote to who knows, it would make him feel very stupid if he fell for that. Yeah. Yeah. So on June 22, 1941, the Nazis commenced their invasion of the USSR.

This is Operation Barbarossa, the largest war thing that has ever happened in the history of the human race. Yep. Just impossible to overstate like every war the US has ever fought would fit into the the Eastern Front battle between Germany and Russia with a lot of space left over for dead people. Yep. Now, within this territory, and again, the initial the Nazis are wildly successful. They conquer more territory faster than anyone ever has. And they take hundreds of thousands of military prisoners and they they bring in millions of new citizens into their their greater German Reich or whatever. Or, I don't know, citizens is not the right thing to call them. But in addition to all these people, they get millions of new Jewish residents to add

to the several million already brought in by Germany's other conquests. Now, even Hydrix well oiled immigration machine could not handle this many people. And also because they're conquering everything, where else are the Jews going to go? Yeah. So this was, you know, again, no one else is willing to absorb them, the Nazis keep conquering stuff. So they had this real problem. And this problem becomes and this is where we get to the kind of complicity of the German leadership. Because again, a lot of people will say, there's nothing that directly connects Hitler to giving the orders for the Holocaust. Right. Right. Now, that said, you can see where the orders came from, because Hitler and Göring have a conversation right around the time the

Germans invade Russia about the Jewish question about all these Jews they're capturing. And in July 31, 1941, Hermann Gehring writes a note to Reinhard Heidrich and orders him to quote, submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution of the Jewish question. And Hitler absolutely ordered him to do this. That's like, or it came about as a result of a conversation. Hitler definitely wanted the genocide to happen at this point. The thing on paper we have is you have Gehring tells Heidrich to start figuring this shit out. Yes. And Heidrich, this is again, they still don't jump right to death camps, because there's again a process of figuring

out how this is going to look. Now, the process of genocide, now that they're committed to genocide, starts with simple extensions of what Heidrich had already done before. The Einsatzgruppe had been enlarged significantly for the invasion of Russia. And in the wake of the initial invasion, they're killing political enemies, they're killing commissars. But they're also they start massacring Jews. And in fact, they start carrying out mass shootings on a scale never equaled before or since in human history. These are the biggest mass shootings of civilians, probably that there will ever be. We fucking hope. The first of these shootings is the Bobby Yar massacre, in which 33,771 Jewish civilians were shot to death in a ravine outside of Kiev in two days.

Bobby Yar was followed by the Odessa massacre later the same year, in which more than 50,000 Jews were shot to death. And again, roughly two days. There were hundreds of other smaller massacres from a couple of dozen people to thousands of people. And a lot of the killing is also it's not just shooting shooting is probably the biggest death toll here. But they're also killing people with mobile gas fans, which they had developed initially to execute the mentally handicapped. Now, at least one and a half million people, and perhaps as many as two million Holocaust victims were killed this way, just being gunned down or gassed in small vans by numbers of people. Now, this is still too slow for the number of Jews that they're

and other undesirables that the Nazis are acquiring in their conquests. And worse than being slow, it's bad for the men doing it. The Germans have limited manpower. They have limited ammunition. And they find that, you know, Hydrick had called his SS ideological shock troops, right? He made a big deal about how hard we have to be, how willing to do terrible things we have to be in order to save the Reich. But these guys, the hardest and worst of the Nazis couldn't handle the mental strain of what they were doing. Yeah, it was dramatic for them. Yeah, which is they are there are stories of them skeet shooting babies. Yeah, by the dozen. Yeah. And it destroys these people. The suicide is rampant. Alcoholism becomes endemic to the

insets group of men. It creates a problem with morale, a problem with orderliness, and it's a problem for the Wehrmacht. The guys not doing the killing are aware of it. And they have their are we the baddies moments in a lot of cases, like, oh boy. You know what? Yeah, this doesn't seem good. I've always like imagined killing babies as being a bad guy thing. Yeah, but not a defensive maneuver. Yeah. I mean, I guess I get it. Excuse me, Obersturmbannfuhrer. What is the self-defense motive for shooting babies with a shotgun after throwing them in the air? Can you at least lie to me and say the baby is actually a time bomb robot? It would make me feel better. And again, these guys feel bad. It breaks a lot of them. It's bad for morale. Almost none of them stop

being Nazis. Yeah. They all keep fighting for the Reich, even though they're aware of it. There's a big myth of the clean Wehrmacht, of the fact that most Nazi soldiers, you know, they fought well and they didn't really know what was going on. They fucking did. Yes. Every one of them at least knew enough. The numbers alone indicate that, like, just a huge portion of them had to have been involved directly in these atrocities. Yes. And like, yes, obviously, a lot of the Wehrmacht was involved directly in atrocities, more than any other individual military on a per capita basis in the war, other than maybe the Japanese. But also, they were all aware, broadly speaking, of what was being done in their name. Right. And there were some of them who spoke out. There were

some of them who went AWOL, you know, and good on those very few dudes. Yeah. Thank you, all three of you. Yeah. Not a lot of them, but some of them did. And yeah, I'll tip my hat to those fellows because of how few fucking did it. Now. Yeah. So again, this has becomes a problem. It's bad for the SS. They need a better solution to the final solution. And on January 20th, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich convenes a third meeting of top Nazi officials from across the Reich. Like, this meeting was held at a mansion, a mansion that had been confiscated by a Jewish businessman in a suburb of Berlin called Wonsei. You can go to the Wonsei House today. I've been there. You can see it. There's a very good museum there. The actual house is used in the movie we

discussed at the start of this conspiracy, which is basically based directly on the minutes of the meeting they have to plan the final solution. Right. I'm going to quote from a summary of that meeting in history.com, quote, the agenda was simple and focused to devise a plan that would render a final solution to the Jewish question in Europe. Various gruesome proposals were discussed, including mass sterilization and deportation to the island of Madagascar. Heydrich proposed simply transporting Jews from every corner of Europe to concentration camps in Poland and working them to death. Objections to this plan included the belief that this was simply too time consuming. What about the strong ones who took longer to die? What about the millions

of Jews who were already in Poland? Although the word extermination was never uttered during the meeting, the implication was clear. Anyone who survived the egregious conditions of a work camp would be treated accordingly. Months later, the gas vans in Helmo, Poland, which were killing a thousand people a day, proved to be the solution they were looking for, the most efficient means of killing large groups of people at a time. And the rest is unfortunately history. The Wonsei Conference led directly to the creation of death camps, which exterminated some four million Jews and five million other undesirables. These were, and still are today, the fastest and most cost effective method of genocide ever developed. Reinhard Heydrich gets rightful credit as

architect of the Holocaust, but the vast majority of people killed in the death camps died after he died. He would not live to see what he brought into being. And I'm going to quote from a write up by the United States Holocaust Museum here to explain why Heydrich gets taken out of the picture. After the invasion of the Soviet Union spurred a previously dormant communist resistance movement in Bohemia and Moravia, Czechoslovakia, into acts of sabotage, Hitler dismissed Reich Protector Konstantin von Neueroth and appointed Heydrich acting Reich Protector in September 1941. Heydrich first ordered a narrow wave of terror targeting real and perceived leaders of the opposition in Czech lands. In October and November 1941, Protector at special courts sentenced 342

people to death and turned 1289 over to the Gestapo. Heydrich also established the Theresienstadt Camp Ghetto in November under his rule. 14,000 Germans and Austrian Jews and more than 20,000 Czech Jews were deported from Theresienstadt to the Lodz Ghetto, to the government general in Poland, into the Reich Commissariat, Ausland, which is where they were exterminated. Heydrich is acting Reich Protector, then courted Czech industrial workers and farmers whose productive capacity was necessary to the German war effort, with wages and benefits packages equivalent to those of the German counterparts. The result of his policies was a 73% reduction in acts of sabotage within six months. By spring of 1942, the German authorities could boost of a pacification of the Protectorate.

Some have speculated that Heydrich aimed next to assume a newly created top civilian position in occupied northern France and Belgium. But he never got the chance to do this. The allies were well aware of Reinhardt-Hydrich and they needed a win, right? 1942, not a great time for the allies. There's some early signs that the Nazi shit is going to turn around for them, but they're not winning at that point. Now, so the British train and equip a two-man team of Czech soldiers because Czechoslovakia has a government in exile, right? They have soldiers who flee the country and the British government trains two of these guys up and air drops them into Heydrich's territory. They ambush him during his daily commute home from work, but one man's

machine gun jams, right? So they try to shoot him. They're gun jams. Heydrich, who's driving in an open-topped vehicle, very stupidly, sees that their gun has jammed. And again, think about everything about this guy. He's desperate to prove himself as a warrior, right? So his driver wants to drive the fuck away, right? Get out of there, get his boss to safety. Heydrich has his driver stop. He pulls out his handgun and he attempts to attack both assassins. One of them throws a grenade as he's trying to do his hero shit and it fucks Reinhardt right up. He gets horribly wounded. He's evacuated to the hospital. His wound turns septic and he's spent seven days in agony in the hospital. Slowly dying. Like really the only of the really bad

Nazis who gets exactly the death he deserves. Seven days and his body rotting. They pull his spleen out of him. Just seven days of sepsis, bitch. Yeah. A horrible death because he was a fucking idiot. I'm gonna fucking shoot these guys. When keeping it real goes wrong. I love it. Yeah. It's believed, although not certain, that the reason his wounds got infected and he died was because the upholstery in his car was made out of horsehair and the horsehair gets forced to do his wound by a grenade blast and it causes a deadly infection. Very funny. Good job, horse. Yeah. It was either that or he spent too much time around the Germans who were going to the whorehouse who like to eat the doodoo. He gets some VD in his gut wound. Exactly, dude. It's one

or the other. So dope. I love it. Publicly the whole Reich mourns and actually his funeral is one of the last really mass public events that the whole Nazi leadership attends because right, the war doesn't go so well for them after this point. He's mourned as a hero of Germany. Privately, though, Hitler thought him a fool for throwing away his life for a chance to look heroic, saying such heroic gestures as driving in an open unarmored vehicle or walking about the streets unguarded are just damn stupidity, which serves the country not one wit. Yeah. You shouldn't have done that. See, me, I'm going to just shoot myself in the head as soon as we're surrounded by the Red Army. Yeah. Solid, solid shade, Hitler. Critical support to Hitler for

yeah. King Queen Hitler. Why? Why can't he be smart and die cowardly like I do? Me? Yeah. After I shoot my dog and poison my wife or die heroically, like Joseph, like Joseph Goebbels grenading his children to death like a hero of the Reich. Yeah. Why did he do it with the grenade? I don't know. It was all he had. You just like you kill your children. Yes. When you have so many children, a grenade is just efficient. I think they actually poison them. Whatever. Fuck it. I need to be watched downfall the documentary. So great. Yeah. Both assassins are caught and executed and the Nazis carry out a horrific series of reprisal populations. Actually, the Czech underground in this period

had argued strenuously against desassinating hydric because they knew it would lead to them being wiped out. And they are. They're just annihilated as a result of this, as are a lot of people not even involved in the underground. The village of Littis, which was falsely implicated in sheltering the assassins, paid the brunt of the price. All 199 men in the village are executed. All 195 women are sent to a concentration camp. 81 children are gas to death and the remainder are sent out to other families. We don't really know. The surviving women of Littis go back to the destroyed side of the village and spend the rest of their lives waiting for their children to come home and never do. Oh, it's it's fucking heartbreaking. Yeah. The Czech village of Lizzaki

was also destroyed because a radio transmitter belonging to partisans was found there. Across the territory, more than 13,000 people are arrested and roughly 5,000 people are murdered in reprisals for Reinhard's assassination. And that's more or less the end of the story of Reinhard Hydric, a real piece of shit. Oh, man. I gotta say, you're right. He is a bastard. He really sucks. He sucks so bad. He is not a good guy, not chill. In fact, he is sketch. And I do not appreciate him. If you're making a short list of like guys for the that you're nominating for the title of like worst person in history. Yeah, he's got to be in the running. Right. He's a fine. Yeah, he is not top five. He's definitely top 10. Like he's up there with

Hitler because again, without a guy like Reinhard, I don't know that Hitler is at least able to carry out the Holocaust in the same way because you need the implementation man. Yeah. Yeah. You need the guy who's able to engineer the whole thing. You know, you got to get someone to execute it. And there's the peanut butter. Hydric is the jelly. Exactly. The underlying centuries of anti-Semitism are the white bread and you need all of it to make your Holocaust PB and J. Yeah. This is why I'm allergic to peanut butter. Yes. It's because I'm Jewish. All Jews are allergic to peanut butter, right? Yes. Yes. The most anti-Semitic sandwich is of course the PB and J. We've all been saying that for years. Oh, man. That is... Yeah, he's a bad dude and I don't like him.

Not bad. And I think that's the point of this podcast is to find more people who I'm like, I don't like him, you know? Yep. Because I like most people, but not that guy. That guy, fuck him. Oh, man. I'm just glad he... Fuck Reinhard Hydric. It's rad that he died in horrible pain over a seven-day period. Seven days of sepsis is... Oh, I love it. He's literally the one Nazi who gets what he deserves. Yeah. Like a horrific lingering death cause that... And he's thinking the whole time, shit, if I just drove it, driven away, I'd have avoided all of this agony. Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad he got to think about his death as he was dying. He really did. Like, fuck you, Reinhard Hydric. You piece of fucking trash. I'm glad your death was horrible. It is okay to luxuriate in

the nightmarish agony of the architect of the fucking holocaust. There should be a seven-day celebration all over the world. We should celebrate the day he got shot by those Czech partisans. Yeah. Reinhard Hydric started dying today. We should have seven days of gifts and dances as we think about how painful sepsis is. Everyone fucking just like marching in the streets. Oh, that'd be great. He is the closest to the pure embodiment of human evil, I think. Yeah. It's like he's like a Leopold of Belgium. Yeah. He's that kind of monster. Yeah. Which are the worst to me. I think in a lot of ways, he's worse than a guy like Hitler. Because again, Hitler, if there had been resistance to Hitler, if there had been a solid block of conservatives

who were like, we're going to have Hitler be in power, but we're not going to let him do this and this, and we're going to organize the militant, we're going to make sure, which was a thing that was happening. There was a chance that that would happen. Hitler could have been a quasi-dictator for five or 10, 15 years, and then quit. Which happened in other countries, right? Which happened. Oh, yeah. It had been like Franco. That was not necessarily impossible if there was resistance to him. Right. That's the way it goes usually. Yeah. He was a pragmatist. He would have preferred that to being forced out of power or assassinated if that had been like, that was not an impossible thing from the beginning. Yeah. Reinhard Heydrich is, I don't know, he might be worse. He might

be worse than Big H. Wow. Dude. At the end of the day, he got what he always wanted, which was a really big gold star on his report card. He got to be bigger than Hitler. That's all he ever wanted. Yeah. I mean, not in a way that most people know. No, of course not. There's no point, really. It's stupid to be like, well, who was a worse person? Like, they're all like, it doesn't matter. They're all at such a level of human evil. Right. Trying to parse out differences between them is silly. But what I should, the way I should frame is not that like, oh, I think he's worse than Hitler. He is the Nazi I find most personally offensive. Yeah. And frightening. He's the one who's scariest to me. Yeah. Yeah. Especially

because like, if you know, I haven't seen a picture of him yet. And so this whole time, I'm not hearing. I'm looking at Brown. I'm picturing. Yeah. Blonde, Kenneth Branagh. And it's like part of what's pissing me off about him mostly is just this like this fucking Zach Morris looking motherfucker committing the worst atrocities and executing atrocities going above and beyond, beyond Hitler even to like execute these mass, you know, this mass genocide, the Holocaust and and just yeah, I just like I this is why I hate hot people, you know, anyone who's attractive. Yeah, I wouldn't call him hot. He's definitely not as good looking as Kenneth Branagh, but he is the most like Aryan looking of the Nazi leadership for sure.

Yeah. Now I'm going to send you. Oh, yeah, I'm looking him up right now. Oh, you're going to look him up. Yeah, I was just going to send you that in the chat. Yeah. No, he's he's not you're right. He's not that hot, but he's not hot, but he is. He is like he's blonde haired blue-eyed. He's got, you know, prominent jawline. He's tall. He's in very good shape. He's an athlete, you know, he's the most Nazi looking motherfucker I think I've ever seen. Yeah. He really is the most Nazi looking of the of the of the high up Nazis, right? Yeah. Goebbels. You look at Gehring. You look at fucking Hess. You look at Hitler. You look at Himmler. Yeah. Ryan Hart is the one who looks like they say an Aryan. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's the one. He's the

one that they all draw when they're trying to be like, this is my perfect man. Okay. He's a super man. He's very tall, blonde, blue eyes, very sharp cheekbones. He's got the naked mole rat face. He's got naked mole. Yeah. He plays violin. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not saying obviously, like Kenneth Branagh, one of the criticisms actually the first time I watched conspiracy. So I dropped out of college, obviously, because fuck that. Yeah. But the last two years or so was in college. Most of my classes and the thing that I was thinking I might get when I thought I might get a degree was UTD offered like a Holocaust studies program and there was a series of classes on Holocaust and remembrance that I took, which is where I watched conspiracy. And like one of the

criticisms that people have of that movie, it's a very good and I think very accurate depiction of how the Vonse conference was handled, right? Sure. It does a very good job of laying out the way these people talk to the way they execute and the way that you see the way the thing we talk about repeatedly in this episode, the way Hydrick orchestrates, gets people on board, the way he whips support between different agencies to make them do what he wants. You see that in the movie. I think they do a good job of it. They make him hot. Yeah. Which, you know, Kenneth Branagh is a very good actor and I think he very ably plays. You get the evil. But also, you cast Kenneth Branagh, he can't not be hot. He's Kenneth Branagh. He's hot. He's fucking hot as hell.

Yeah. But people criticized it because they're like, why are you going to make him such a why are you going to make him hot? I think that's a fair casting, though, especially given the fact that, like, this was one of the reasons that he rose up so high. Yeah, it is. It is. I think there's an argument to be made that, like, well, Nazis saw him as good looking because he looked like a Nazi. Yeah. He was like a, you know, front facing Nazi guy, someone you could like point to and go, this is this is what we look like. In Hollywood, people are always better looking. So you got to have the the Nazi looking guy in the Hollywood movie be extra and Kenneth Branagh looks like a fucking Hollywood Nazi. Yeah. And yeah, I think it was good casting

is my my argument. Yeah. It's a controversial movie, again, from people who are Holocaust nerds, which is a horrible way to describe it. But no, but there are Holocaust nerds out there. There are Holocaust. Yeah. And I am on the side of I think it's and it's a movie I show people when we went to Saxon housing, it was me and a group, my my my partner at the time and like some Australian kids that we met while just like chilling out and getting wasted in Berlin together. We all went together and we watched conspiracy afterwards. Yeah. It's a good movie to watch to. Yeah, it's it's it's I recommend it to people again, you know, there's some controversies around it. No, it's very good. It's very good. And it's also and this is not

a so much a historical note. It's a great example of a movie that can be compelling and only be in two or three different settings. Yeah, like most of it takes place in a meeting and meeting and they never leave the grounds of this fucking house. No, they don't. Yeah. Yeah. There's like a scene in the bathroom. There's a scene in the hall and most of it is in this meeting room and it's very compelling. And also it shows the I think the the banality of evil is like a perfect, you know, like that's that's what especially Eichmann's portrayal by I think Stanley Tucci, who is just like, yes. Oh, he's so good in that. I forgot it is Stanley Tucci who plays Eichmann in that. Yeah. Yeah. And and he's like, you know, he's basically doing notes. He's taking notes.

He's taking notes. And the fact that he's taking notes enables the slaughter of 11 million people. Right. Exactly. His notes are a key aspect of the machinery of death. Yeah. Which is what the case was, right? That that's that is Eichmann. That is who he was. And there's this there's a wonderful scene in the movie where they're all quibbling because a lot of people this was a real problem. Again, we talked about how there's different chunks of the Nazis. They have different arguments. Some of the guys who had written the Nuremberg laws are angry because Hydric is basically throwing out the restrictions on the Nuremberg laws because you don't think they go far enough. And they're arguing about like this isn't legal. You're going outside the bounds of the law. And

there's a moment where Hydric, I think it is, asks, raise your hand if you're a lawyer and everyone in the room raises their hands, which almost all of these guys were fucking lawyers. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's yeah. And and you know, it's like I remember that specifically when we were talking about the Nuremberg laws and like Kenneth Branagh's, you know, changing of them. I'm just going to call uh, uh, Reinhardt, Hydric, kind of Brandon Branagh. Yeah. No, it's like, you know, kind of like just going, Hey, let's stop quibbling over how much blood if you have any blood, like he went one drop rule. And that that always stuck out to me as like, kind of like, uh, you know, that

that in the end was like, Yeah, this is about ethnicity. Let's stop pretending this is about religion. Let's stop pretending this is about Christ in any fashion. Like this is about DNA, racial makeup, and, and just it totally fake race pseudoscience. Yeah. Anyways, you know, man, any plugables to plug? No time to plug your plugables, like discussing the machinery that was built in order to enable the fastest mass extermination of an ethnic group in history. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I always like to, uh, plug my podcasts about the Sopranos right after talking about the Holocaust. Yeah. Think about those rooms filled with human hair and empty shoes. And yes, check out this podcast. Check out this great podcast in which we rewatch Sopranos and

talk about it with wonderful guests, uh, called pod yourself a gun. Uh, and season five, uh, is about to start right now. We're through one through four. So check it out, uh, wherever you get, you know, uh, your podcast and, uh, the broadcast, uh, which is the same type of podcast, same hosts, but, uh, we talk about movies instead. So check that out and follow me at Matt Leib jokes on Instagram and at Matt Leib on Twitter. Yep. Check him out. Um, you can check out, I have a novel. It's being launched as a podcast, uh, three chapters a week. Uh, after the revolution, you can also find the text every week. We'll upload a new EPUB and there will be in browser readable versions of the text too for free. No ads, uh, at after the revolution or sorry,

at ATRbook.com. So, you know, think about the most monstrous act of soulless evil ever committed and then check out pod yourself a gun and read my book. Please, please do those things. Yeah. And we hope you've enjoyed this horrible, horrible person. Yeah, this real, real bad guy, trash monster. Yeah. Hey everybody, initially, I was going to plug the go fund me for the sequel to my book, um, after the revolution, which you can find at ATRbook.com. But, um, here in the Pacific Northwest, we're having an unprecedented heat wave and it's causing disastrous conditions, life threatening conditions for a lot of, uh, houseless people, a lot of people without air conditioning, um, particularly in the city of Salem. Um, activists everywhere have been kind of

gathering to try and, um, mitigate, uh, set up cooling stations, hand out cold drinks to do things to help people get their temperature down. Um, I want to try and raise funds for the free fridge of Salem, um, which are doing cooling stations in the capital of Oregon, uh, Salem. So if you go to Venmo at free fridge Salem, uh, that's Venmo at free fridge Salem and send them a couple of bucks, they could really use it. Um, local government has destroyed a number like police particularly have destroyed a number of water and cooling stations they've set out. Um, it's, you know, we're not going to be in triple digit heats for the next couple of days after I'm recording this on Monday, but it's still going to be very hot. People still need this. So please,

Venmo at free fridge Salem, if you have, uh, the wherewithal in the financial resources to do. So one more time that Venmo is at free fridge Salem. Thanks. 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 with like a lot of guns, but our 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 I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your

podcast. 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 I heart 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

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