Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 349: Josef Mengele Part II - The Crimes of Mengele

Episode Date: January 28, 2019

On the second of our three part series, we cover the many, many crimes of Dr. Josef Mengele as we take a full deep-dive into the bogus and cruel medical experiments that were committed at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Hey everyone, how you doing? This is Ed Larson from The Rowl Table, a gentleman. How you doing, baby? I miss you too, but you don't gotta miss me too much because I got another show with Miss Amber Nelson called The Brighter Side. It's a cynics look at optimism. And we all need positivity in our life because if you're all negative, it's gonna globity gloop in your stomach and you're gonna be a miserable, nasty person. Nobody wants to be with the miserable nasties. They're bad. Skip them away from everyone else. Back, back. On our show, on a regular basis, we have this thing called, it's a game we invented. It's called Hoop-a-goo-goo-noo-noo-do-do. How would you say it? Hoop-a-goo-noo-noo-do-do-do.

There is no way to say it. It's a game we made up and basically it's a rapid fire edition of Finding the Positivity in Something Negative. We're gonna play a quick version for you right now so you see how it goes. Amber, could you give me something negative? Something negative. Horse manure. Horse manure. Alright, you could throw it at a car. I mean, you shouldn't be throwing horse manure at cars. It's a bad thing to do, but it's probably fun to watch. Heck yeah. And they got it coming for them, being a car and all. What's your positive of horse manure? You can use it to feed plants that make the food. That's right. That's right. Maneuver makes food. Isn't that great that poo poo makes food for more poo poo?

Aww. That's so nice. It's a circle of poo poo. I want to say, Amber, what is the brighter side of dirty blankets? Dirty blankets. You can put in a barn and keep a dog warm. You're such a nice person. I'm gonna say, I like doing laundry. I'm gonna clean the blanket. Oh, you like doing laundry? I enjoy laundry. It sends me out. It makes me peaceful. Fold it nice, put it in the cabinet. You gotta clean blanket for when guests come over or when it gets chilly. What I'm trying to say is, listen to the brighter side. It's a cynics looking optimism and it's on the last podcast network. And also, clean your sheets at least two weeks because you need to sleep in a clean blanket. Be good to yourself, baby.

There's no place to escape to. This is the last talk. On the left. That's when the cannon was started. Wow. Honestly, it's been a very tough week here for LPN. We've been dealing with quite a lot of emotional stuff. Quite a bit. Obviously, you've heard with the recent passing of Per Luger and what we've been trying to do and staying on topic in the middle of doing this series about Dr. Mengele. But there was a little German proverb that I had read that started to give me enough inspiration to get my head back in the game. This is gonna honor Kevin Barnett. It was just this little thing and I was like, something rings true about it. It was this German saying I read that said, work sets you free. That's sort

of like the Notre Dame, what's above their locker room, what's like play like a champion today. It's just that statement. I keep saying it back to myself saying, you're right. You're right. Rock can really make you feel better sometimes. So that's what it is. You know what I mean? Yeah. Oh my God. That was the point of that disgusting message. All right, everyone. This is the last podcast on the left. I am Ben Kissel. Marcus Parks is with me. How's your brain, Marcus? It's all right, man. How about you? Doing just fine. Marcus and I had a great opportunity to go honor Kevin Barnett this past Friday at the Bell House. Want to thank the Lucas Bros for putting that whole thing together. It was wonderful seeing

the fans out. And in Los Angeles, there is also going to be a tribute show to KB. We don't have the exact date yet, but we will make sure to let you know. And hopefully we can try to get out there and participate in that as well. And of course, we also have Henry Zabrowski. Yoss, I am just so grateful that like honestly, there is no one thing that it does put a lens on is that as much pain as you're going through every single time I was like going through my tab is to get back to work because now we've been sitting with Dr. Mangala for close to a month. And so there's a point where it's like I have a series of tabs open on my computer. And as I was like going through my day these last

couple of days, everyone's while I'd click the tab because I would just open up images of Auschwitz to look at so I could like have more visual references of it. And man, it is worse than a cup of coffee. Oh, yeah. Like it's just it's just the I don't know what the opposite. I don't know what the soul drenching version of a cup of coffee is, but it is that but at least it puts it to a positive perspective is that I'm not in Auschwitz right now. If you watch the docs, there's some there's some controversy, you have to say over the name Joseph Mangala. I watched one, they called him Mengele, which sounds like too much fun. Like Mengele sounds like someone who could tap, you know, and would do like fun performances

with a great Mengele like a horrible magician. I just don't like that one. But this is the consequences, Kessel, of when you actually research something and you start to see that kind of shit where it's like you're reading about something for hours and you hear experts all have to change the pronunciation just so that they make sure they sound as smart as possible. I do believe that's how it is. They'll say Joseph Mengele in order for you to like feel like well, he must really know how to pronounce like he must have really done the reading. Yeah, it's like Mengele sounds like a fun vaudeville performer and Mengele sounds like a freedom fighter. It's Mengele. It's Mengele. Mengele sounds the

most evil Mengele is who we're going with today. Absolutely, because of course he is the most evil. So we are on to the crimes of Joseph Mengele and there are many episode part two. Now, I think it goes without saying that this is going to be one of our most brutal gut wrenching episodes ever, truly the shiniest of gold stars. So in an attempt to try to lighten it up, even the tiniest bit, after certain particularly horrible bits of information, we're going to be providing Did You Know Facts about 90s sitcom Home Improvement. Okay. See, it's important for you to remember how much lore that is in Home Improvement. Yeah. There is a lot of side quests. There's a lot of with a whole bibliography that goes with

Home Improvement is very impressive. Absolutely. The show within the show to all time. I'm sure we'll get some facts on that. And of course, they were representative of the modern American family with the goth kid. Yeah. When the kid turned goth, he was so fun. I will say also about this episode, I don't know if this is like a crack a beer episode. I don't know if this is a fucking Skittles. I finally got some Skittles from the Dookie Brothers, which I've been talking about quite a bit. I don't know if it's that kind of shit. I don't know if it if blazing yourself into a stupor is going to help. But I think this is really important to really because we're handling Dr. Mangala like he's a fucking serial

killer because he is right. So we're now going through the weapons and his crimes as detailed as possible as we would with any other serial killer. Yes. And of course, there's a lot of information on Auschwitz out there. We're not going to do a total cover. No. Of Auschwitz but we're going to have a lot of information that's new to all of us specifically was really new to me. So but if you want more information, you can find it. You know that before we dive in that's a part of it is that as a true crime as a true true crime nerd as well inside of me Auschwitz and the world of the Nazis and Dr. Mangala particular involves this gigantic world of a rogues gallery of the worst villains to ever exist because Dr. Mangala is our spotlight

but all around him, the entire world of it is deeper and deeper and deeper and there's so many concepts. So at some point, I'm like, you know, seven days in to Auschwitz like we're eating all this stuff and I'm like, I'm not even scratching the surface. So you guys, if you run a full deep dive into just Auschwitz, there's many, there's many places to get that information. Right. So without further ado, let's get into the crimes of Dr. Joseph Mangala at Auschwitz. Now one of the most important things to remember in this episode is that the Nazis by this point had not only taken over Germany's government and military but damn near every inch of academia as well from universities to hospitals. By the time

they were finally brought down, the Nazis had established 33 university and research institutions, 18 university professorships and four research divisions dedicated to quote unquote racial hygiene within the Reich Health Office. Now, although this doesn't sound all that important when you compare it to say like a parliamentary body or an air force, what this meant was that the medical and scientific research community now had all the ethics and reasoning of a Nazi, which is to say none at all. When you mentioned the words parliamentary body, I just pictured like a really naked taft, just like a president taft. What does that look like? I have a parliamentary body. If you look at me, yeah, it's called sporadically

covered with air and it's a Polish level of soft, but still hard in some places. Of course, that's when you have to go to the doctor. These people felt not only invincible, but godlike. These were the men who believed they were having a hand in creating the master race, humanity's future. And nobody wrote this wave harder than Dr. Joseph Mangala. He loved it. He loved it. It was like he was born at the perfect time for himself and he knew it. He was like kind of came into himself in this time period. It's also very interesting to see how far they went to validate their own existence as a party in terms of the Nazis. That's why this ends up becoming insidiously the most powerful besides just the actual

war engine of the Nazis. It is this other idea of we are going to take and manipulate races until everybody looks just like us. We are going to eliminate everybody else using what's supposed to be the nice and the professional visage of the doctor, which is that's what they all did. But then it's also interesting that after the fact that was the first evidence to go. All that shit got flushed down the toilet, even though they spent all the time and money trying to validate their stupid fucking shit fucking existence. Well, it also just takes a total lack of like reality and a complete lack of like understanding even how goofy and weird your own culture is. You imagine they're talking about the

master race and then all of a sudden someone spits a pickle out of their mouth that they were having with a liverwurst sandwich. Somebody breaks wind in the corner. The whole room just smells like a disgusting cigar factory. Have you ever worn real laterhosen? Oh yeah buddy. Of course my parents, they guarantee embarrassment. I was six years old. My whole family wore laterhosen and my mom thought it was going to make us the coolest kids in kindergarten. And it did not work, believe it or not. Sounds like it just runs in the long line of your people, just holding to the line no

matter what, no matter what anybody says. Good. But when it comes to laterhosen, they're incredibly uncomfortable. They're just sweat bags. No, they're just made to give you a camel toe. And then somehow they've tried, this is the amazing marketing of the German people, they've tried to make it sexy. I know what's going on, St. Pauli girl. Nothing sexy about what's happening under that sweat box. So when we last left Mengele, the year was 1943, World War II was in full swing and a post had just opened up for an SS doctor in what would soon be known as the worst place in human history, Auschwitz. And Mengele had no qualms whatsoever about using the people

imprisoned there to further his and Dr. Ottmar Freiherr von Verschur's research into the medical phenomenon of twins. As we said last time, Mengele's original interest in twins was inspired by the work already being done at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Hereditary and Eugenics. Again, you give it a fancy name and it sounds legit, but it's actually total horseshit, Franken, Dr. Frankenstein like science. Right. Yeah. And seeing if they could unlock the breeding secrets of twins in order to double the master race with each pregnancy was only a part of it.

So they wanted twins, so twins were seen as like really special. Yeah, but you could double the master race, you could double your money. But you could also just have more than one kid. You don't have to do it all in one go. But then you don't have to wait nine months for another one. That's the idea, is you're getting everybody to have twins. So everybody is a doublement commercial from hell where you're here spirting these picture perfect copies of their Aryan parents out everywhere and they thought that we could literally just sew parts together until we make them by hand.

Now, these guys, they also believe that studying twins would unlike certain hereditary secrets as well. Because after all, if you had identical twins, then you had a de facto control group for comparison in whatever it was that you happened to be studying. But since the war had broken out, finding identical twins was pretty low on the priority list. So for these scientists, the concentration camps were literally millions of people were being held against their will with no hope of escape. These camps were a boon beyond these guys wildest dreams because it wasn't just that they were captive. Because when it came to certain segments of the European population, particularly the Jewish and Romani people, there were no boundaries

whatsoever on what was allowed to be done, even if it meant killing them in the process. In fact, when it came to most of Mengele's experiments, the killing was essential. And Mengele did it with no compunction whatsoever. Because his belief was that there were two gifted races in the world, Germans and Jews. And so, once the Jews were completely and totally annihilated, the Germans would be on top and the rest of the world would eventually just capitulate to the will of the German people. They'd grow to love pickles. But when it came to Mengele too, that motivation was not found out until his diaries were looked over after the fact pick up. Until then, he followed

the line of the idea that eventually when we will get to Auschwitz, they call them numbers and they were inhuman. And the outer motive was that these people are already dead. So I am doing nothing to dead people. But secretly, he had this side motive, saying that he felt that they were equal. And so it was almost like he was punishing them to make sure that they got beaten so that only the Germans would survive. So it comes to this other like in the end, if we're looking at it in like a serial killer, his missionary style killings and what would happen later on at the camp are fueled by actually pure black hatred.

Oh, absolutely. That's a really fascinating point, though, that I didn't quite realize how they actually thought of them as as true competition to take over the world. Yeah. And that's why this escalated and got so unbelievably aggressive and Tate filled. Well, the thing is about Mengele is that the destruction of the Jewish race wasn't Mengele's only driving force. For him, this was also a game of ambition, as Mengele wanted nothing more than to be a professor. But in order to do that, you got to have fieldwork and you got to get experience. There is nothing worse than a man failing at his dream. And if you want like the old

adage of like, if you can't do teach, but he can't teach. So what does he do? I mean, like that is so sad. I mean, look at us on the lowest level possible, what we covered last series with Mark Twitchell, where it's the same thing where a guy that was no good at being a filmmaker became a serial killer because essentially it was easier. Mengele, we're going to find out too, is that during his time period when he was writing his student papers, they all say his work was like pretty average. Okay, like it was okay. Like he did he did his perfunctory shit. But what he knew is that he needed to get involved in a hot project. Like he needed

to go get involved in the good place version of what the Nazis can put out, right? Like you got to be in that writer's room in order to get Emmys. So he knows that he had to be put himself in the middle of the heat of the most what they at the time were like the most buzz worthy experiments so that it would get the attention of the philosophical leaders of the Nazi party, mainly Himmler, where it's like all of this shit was to appease him because he knew that if Himmler gave him the tip of the cap, Mengele would be set for shit because he actually was a terrible student. So we have a failed artist in Hitler. We have a failed professor in Mengele. I don't understand how they spun that into being like we must

be superior. It is obvious that you are not obvious. Well, it's obvious how they spun it to we must be superior because every day they woke up knowing that they were a fucking fraud and instead of spending your life trying to then make your life work in another constructive way or maybe saying like, Hey, fuck these Nazis. You just kind of like followed suit to whatever work towards your advantage mediocrity rose to the top. Yeah. And Mengele, since he needed to do fieldwork, he chose to do his fieldwork at Auschwitz. But even just that decision says a lot about Joseph Mengele, the naked cruelty and the psychological games that he would play with both the prisoners and his staff of Jewish slave doctors suggests

a mind far beyond that of just an ambitious professor. In fact, many times the victims of Mengele's experiments and the victims of his straight up murders, as there were quite a few of both, these victims were all known to Mengele because the vast majority of Mengele's victims were children and Mengele would routinely make friends with them prior to experiments, even going so far as to bring them gifts. He was even beloved amongst some of them for a time. He even had nicknames. They called him Uncle Mengele, Uncle Doctor and Uncle Pepe. Oh, God. And it was, but it's eerily similar to the actual plot of the day the clown cried. Right. The failed Jerry Lewis Nazi, Nazi clown movie because I started going

to a deep dive of trying to find evidence of more Nazi clowns. And if that was that true or not, or you know, clowns are in the Holocaust, this movie sounds fucking brutal. The whole thing is about him like as a clown and then he volunteers to entertain the children all the way to the gas chambers and do all this kind of shit. But technically, that's what Mengele was doing. Yeah, it is really disturbing. And of course, you can watch a little bit of that Jerry Lewis film. It's on YouTube. It's not I don't even know. It's not even a full 30 minutes because it looks like they kind of broke it up with a with a person sort of hosting it. But yeah, humor at the Holocaust is a very interesting phenomenon

that you can do some research on yourself. It's fascinating. These children, no matter how fond they thought the Mengele was of them, they would all eventually see the Mengele that went down in history as one of the most inhuman figures to ever live. So by the time Mengele arrived in Auschwitz in May of 1943, the concentration camp already held 140,000 prisoners originally built in 1940 to hold Polish political prisoners. The function changed in April of 1942, when Jewish people began arriving by the thousands. Henry, you are allowed to you are allowed to scream about Polish victimhood at this time. You have you have 30 seconds to scream about how the Polish people were brutally my people

are strong. And we are out there serving vengeance to everyone else every day by slowly but in slowly but surely introducing Guy Fieri to liverwurst, which I've seen now on several episodes, letting it sleep into the rest of society. But also Auschwitz was built in a fucking no man's land. It was built in a part of Poland that no one would go live in. Because in the summers, it was brutally fucking hot. And in the winters, it was brutally fucking cold. It was essentially the closest you get to a Polish desert, which is in my mind a Polish desert would be like you show up and you think you're going to see a lot of sand, but actually it's a lot of cakes. That sounds like a fun desert.

Now, the first thing you got to know about Auschwitz is how mind bogglingly large it really was. It was actually a camp complex comprised of prison blocks, warehouses, workshops, barracks, factories, and quote unquote, medical facilities. The entire thing was actually split into three sections. There was concentration slaga Auschwitz one or KZ Auschwitz one as the Germans abbreviated it. That was the main prison camp. 28 prisoner blocks held about 1200 people in each block and barracks meant for no more than 700. But in 1942, Auschwitz was expanded twice to accommodate new functions. There was KZ Auschwitz three monowits, which was located about four miles away from the main camp and was responsible for much of

the slave labor produced by the prisoners. But where we'll be spending most of our time today is KZ Auschwitz two Birkenau. Now, while monowits and Auschwitz one certainly held their own special hells, Birkenau was truly the world center of misery and death in a time when misery and death reigned supreme. So you got basically what we'll call number one Captain Spaulding's gas station from House of 1,000 Corpses. Number three, that'll be the house where the Firefly family lived and then Dr. Satan is in number two. Pretty much yeah. I think that it's when we talk about this too, like when we've talked about other heavy hitters in the past and other serial killers in the past, we kind of talk about

their locations and how it is, how they would build their own worlds to accommodate their crimes to both either hide them or validate them or like we see like inner and outer worlds like we're Jerry Brutus where it's like he had his main house, but then he had his shed where he did all the shit or like Ed Gein where he had his whole house, which is a land of horrors except for the one room that he kept sacred, right? Because the idea of like exteriorizing psychology in a way for them to build their own little fantasy worlds. Hence this is just a government of serial killers build a house of killing. And so you go, you basically, Mengele volunteered to work in hell in order to be on top of hell.

Right. But achieving such heights of cruelty was not a simple thing. So in order to make it happen, this entire thing needed an infrastructure. That meant that Auschwitz actually functioned as a small town. It had a grocery store, a cinema, a theater, a swimming pool and a symphony orchestra. That is great. So there were like actors like community theater actors like just getting ready for their big performance of the nutcracker. Oh yeah, it is so like someone's just you just imagine going to the supermarket, someone's just smelling the cantaloupe be like, Oh, is it fresh or not? You're in Auschwitz. What are you doing? Get out of here. But that was really shocking to me. I didn't realize it was a full functioning town in

hell as Henry alluded to. Yeah. Yeah, it even had a functioning brothel called the Puff, which was used as a quote unquote reward for non Jewish prisoners who worked hard enough. In fact, the Puff was the first and I didn't know this. This is insane. The Puff was the first building on the left. Right after you walked through the infamous Arbite Mocked Fry entrance in block 24, which personally gave that sign an entirely new horrible context. Well, they also put the sign up there and the concept of work sets you free was a thing was a lie they told partially believing that saying saying people will you'll actually work your sentence off here. And then eventually horse that was the in charge of Auschwitz

say was actually was more of a philosophical statement. Right. AKA a lie. Yeah. The thing was for prisoners, the Puff was just another form of punishment. All the prisoners wanted was more bread, more rest, more water. But instead, the Nazis just announced in front of everyone who is going to be rewarded with a brothel that night. And most times the whole thing it was just a humiliating experience because the workers was just too tired and miserable to do anything. And furthermore, the women working in the brothel, they were prisoners to they were also there against the will they were all German and Polish political prisoners. It sounds like what's the name of the big fat, green bastard from Star Wars?

Oh, Jabba. Jabba. It is very similar. It is so disgusting to bring that. And just for the Germans to think that do they they did not think they were doing something nice here, right? They did. No, they had they have no they was they absolutely thought they were doing something nice. They thought they were going to do something nice here. Yes, that's a word they were at this point. Kissle. I'm sorry about this. You I mean, you know, this is how it is. They literally could not be more evil if they tried. Yeah, they want they wanted it all to be conversely. The rewards are also punishments. Every day is reflective on you are in this upside down world where everybody's time is limited. You are an expendable

man. We are even doing this for our own little fucking bullshit fantasy world where we are now in charge and we get to the thrill of telling you you're allowed to have sex now. Disgusting. There is no point in which the Nazis fail to be the bad guy. They always always succeed. Yeah, I mean, to make it even worse, like you think like even okay, maybe maybe they could commiserate their both prisoners, maybe they could talk to each other. Nope, because there was always an SS officer watching everything in the puff through a peephole to make sure that nobody did anything except the missionary position. Oh my, this is extremely German. Yeah, that's how I will clarify that and classify that. And some of the Nazis at

Auschwitz, they took the amenities even further. The Camp Commandat Rudolf Hess raised his five children with his wife in a white stucco house complete with a white picket fence and a garden tended by slaves, just a couple hundred yards from a prison block. Yeah, in the book, Mengele a complete story talks about how like they would have little pets and lizards and the family, the kids would go out there and they'd be playing in the yard. Meanwhile, they were with the the the Jewish prisoners that were forced to work for them and they would like Jewish prisoners would gain. They had like relations with their children and stuff like that. And then like, you literally have like father has come out me like, no,

no, do not get close to the gardener because the gardener will be gone tomorrow. And they would all be like, yeah, oh, good, daddy. It's fucking awful shit. Right. Absolutely disgusting. Yeah. Auschwitz was so big that it had stop lights, traffic regulations and an SS run traffic court. You could get a traffic ticket in Auschwitz and have to go to court for it. Of course, though. I mean, so literally you, I would just say, Judge, I understand I might have been speeding, but there are some bigger problems here, sir. And I do not think I deserve to pay this fine. Now, as we said last time, when Mengele arrived in Auschwitz, he was already somewhat of a man apart because he was one of the few stationed

there who had seen combat in the Eastern Front. In fact, many of the SS men at Auschwitz were in the camp specifically so they could avoid going to the Eastern Front where there was a damn good chance of getting your head blown off by a Russian if you didn't die of hypothermia first. And this cowardice was actually one of the main threats that kept mouths shut in the camp. Because if you didn't like what was going on around you, there was always Stalingrad in December. Mengele further distinguished himself almost immediately by the way he handled a typhoid epidemic that was working its way through the Romani camp when he arrived. See typhus is a disease that thrives in overcrowded, unsanitary environments. And since there

was no place in the world more overcrowded and unsanitary than Auschwitz, typhoid epidemics were a constant problem. Do yourself a favor and don't look up victims of typhus, which is a thing that I did to try to understand exactly what it was. And it's just a, it's horrible, just a worst disease, it's just a fucking terrible disease and you're also all on top of each other. But Mengele, he hit the streets of Auschwitz without winking his eye like Caroline in the city and he knew I can handle this, I'm ready to go. Like he was fucking, he jumped right into trying to handle the problem. And these people were still forced to work, well extremely sick. I have to say, if I get,

if I have a sneeze on a Monday, I'm not working until Wednesday. I can't do anything. We've dealt with this before. We know, we know that your institution is fragile. We just try, we just try to get all those golden words out of you as quickly as possible in between your bouts of sickness. Well since there was no place in the world more overcrowded and unsanitary than Auschwitz, typhoid epidemics were a constant problem. And upon arrival, Mengele had been put in charge of an entire block of prisoners that was going through a typhoid epidemic. So Mengele dealt with his first typhoid epidemic by ordering the execution of anyone even suspected of

having typhus. In all, that order resulted in the deaths of 600 people. And that was among the first things that Mengele did when he arrived. There was no slow burn, no progression, it was just boom, 600 dead immediately. Because he was dead on the inside and he knew that he had to make a good impression on his superiors. He looked at this stuff because before there were the people, because Mengele had bosses too. He had his boss, Edward Worfes, that was technically the head doctor of Auschwitz and then Hoss, that was the ones above him. And they were kind of like wringing their hands about what to do about this thing. And Mengele is just like, oh, he kills them all. And they're

all like, this is the kind of breath of fresh air we need here. Right, they rewarded him for this horrible act. They rewarded him constantly for everything that he did there. And the homicidal pragmatism when it came to dealing with the prisoners went far beyond just that one incident. Near the end of 1944, a food shortage in the Romani women's camp resulted in one of Mengele's most terrifying acts of cruelty. So when this food shortage came, an order came down from Berlin that because there was not enough food to sustain the population in this particular camp, the camp should be immediately, in the words of the Nazis, liquidated.

Yep. Now Mengele, he fought against the order, but not because he thought it was morally wrong. His only concern was that he and the other Nazi doctors were losing a valuable crop of experimentees. That is, any single time anybody wants to say, because now also you read the revisionist here, the revisionist history of Mengele and all this kind of shit. And they all want to say, but no, you see, look, he showed compassion. No, he was trying to quote unquote, save people. He's doing something like, no, no, no, no, no. He knew he had a bottom line.

And his bottom line was that if these, if he doesn't have these bodies, he can't do the experimentations that are going to get him the shit that he needs after all of this is over. Right. Because he's just viewing after the war. He's like, Oh, this is just a fucking chapter of my life. After this, I'm going to be fucking, I'll be a doctor. I got my perfect blonde wife. I'll be pumping twins and out of her because by then I'll be crushing the fucking twin press. And you're like, this, this is the, I mean, obviously the most evil part

about the Nazis is that all this shit was done with a form and you just sign your signature and then everybody's fucking, then that's 600 people gone. And you know, it's really another example or a more primitive example of the monetization of humans, of human suffering and human beings in general. Obviously now we do it with data mining. We are, we are the product that kind of keeps the internet going. But that is, yeah, so that, because I have heard that revisionist history. And when we talk about all of these things like the puff and stuff like that or the poof, all these things, we're not even coming close to entertaining the idea that this was somehow a joyous situation.

No, it's just trying to explain that this is, this, this is like, what they built a whole world so they could do this shit in private. Yeah. And I think that's fascinating. They carved out a place in a desperate, in a desperate section of the world in order to make sure no eyeballs could see what they did because for them they said it was this proud thing and they were feeding Mengele this line of bullshit of being like, no, no, no, this is the real meaning of the season. This is why we need you. You're the one that's going to validate the existence of the Nazis. But instead what they did was they, they also,

it was a trick on Mengele too, because they're like, we can then just wipe it away clean and once it's all done. So because once they come to fucking hang us, we can get it rid of as much fucking evidence as possible. And it's, but something about it, but being like this like dead wood like town, it's just, it's just mind boggling. Yeah. Well, the things about Mengele, when this order came down, even though he was against it, Mengele, above all else, was still a good little Nazi. Right.

So he carried it out with such a vicious glee that one survivor said that after that day, whenever he sees a picture of Dracula, he thinks of Joseph Mengele. They look similar. They do. They actually very much do. But I wonder if that's on purpose or if that's just a coincidence. Dracula came long before World War II. Okay. So maybe Mengele was going for the Dracula look, I see.

He was trying to be Dracula. He's appropriating Dracula's culture. Well, his mothers were being loaded into trucks for transport to the gas chambers, the children hid. So Mengele, since he had a relationship with the children, personally calmed the blocks looking for them, rooting them out of hiding spots. Then, once he found them, he drove them to the gas chamber in his own car. And when one child pleaded with Uncle Mengele not to be sent away, he gave a casual wave of his hand without even looking at her to signal a Nazi capo to deal with it.

And so the capo grabbed the little girl and flung her against the wheel of a transport truck so hard that her skull shattered. Over 10 days, 40,000 people were loaded into those same trucks and taken to the gas chambers, either screaming in fear or merely sitting in terrified silence. All right. Well, that is extremely disturbing. Didn't you guys say we're going to have like a home improvement break because I could go for one of those right now after that absolutely horrific story? Al Borland's name was originally going to be Glenn.

And that's a terrible name. That's a terrible name. Oh my God. All right. That does, no, that does actually ease it a little bit. Wow. So this is... It takes the weight off the chest a little bit. Yeah, it makes me not want to just scream in existential terror. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Glenn, huh?

Glenn. Glenn Borland. Glenn Borland. Glenn Borland. Glenn Borland. Glenn Borland. Glenn Borland. Who's that?

Who's that? That makes no sense at all. My, my God. All right. But it's episodes like the liquidation of the Romani camp that caused one Nazi doctor named Heinz Thilo to give Auschwitz the name of Anus Mundi, or just simply the Anus of the world. Oh my God. But he didn't call it that because all the horrible atrocities that they were committing

there, to give you an idea of the pure disdain they had for other people, they saw Auschwitz as the place where the world disposed of its biomedical waste. And in Auschwitz, that especially meant the Jewish people. Now, when you think about this, they viewed the people that volunteered for it also in very specific ways, because a lot of times people went there again to avoid going to the eastern front. And we're also going to find, just like Josef Mengele, they went because they were a fucking monster and they knew that they could handle it.

And cowards. Yes. Absolutely. And there were a lot of reasons why Auschwitz worked, because when it comes down to it, even though genocides are a gigantic part of human history that continue to this day, shit like this, it's not in normal human nature. You're not. No.

It is completely against human nature, because we as a species, we evolved as a collaborative animal. Yes, we have wars and genocides and murders, but the vast, vast majority of humans who have existed throughout the eons never killed another person, never killed anyone, because it's against human nature. There was an interesting factoid I was reading about was on the mentality of soldiers that shoot to kill, that have specifically shot to kill in various wars. And in the beginning of time, it was like this kind of concept that are like really

only 2% of people that have fought in wars have fired their gun directly at an enemy combatant, especially in the beginning of war, was like muskets and shit like that. It was used more to like try to, people wouldn't get hit all the time, they would be shooting a musket basically being like get away, go away, run away, run away, because people have a really, like Dan Carlin described the idea of being on the front lines of a bayonet fight. And how a lot of times back in the day, when it got down to just two people with bayonets, one person would just run away. There are very few people that got murdered by stabbing another dude in the middle of a

gigantic bayonet fight because it is very difficult to look at the face of another human being and kill them. Your body doesn't want to do it. They called it, it's frostbite of the finger was a term that they said because the people's trigger fingers would stick when they would look at somebody in the eyes and then shoot them. So you have to dehumanize your opponent to such a degree where you can leap over this biological aversion to murder.

That was B.F. Skinner and what he added to the military training industry. Yeah, I mean that's a huge function of propaganda is to dehumanize the enemy. I mean, you know, we watch movies like, you know, Full Metal Jacket and it talks about, you know, the training of Marines, you know, what makes the grass grow, blood, blood, blood, like you really have to kill something within another human being to make this shit possible. And then if you look at the plot of the movie Good Burger, you think about, you know, the other burger company. I wasn't really thinking about this quite a bit during, as I was reading about Auschwitz,

I always thought of, hey, good, but welcome to Good Burger, can I take your order? That's all I thought of. But then if you really think about it, like my brain has evolved now, maybe the other burger company wasn't that bad, you know, I don't know. Maybe they were just demonized by Keenan. Now, we've already talked about the general socialization towards something beyond hatred in German society, but a further socialization had to occur within Auschwitz itself. And chief among the psychology of this place was its isolation.

The camp itself was tucked away in a far flung region of Poland, which essentially cut off everyone from the rest of the world. If you were in Auschwitz, whether you were a prisoner or a Nazi, Auschwitz was the world. And that's a cult-like, that is a cult-like, that is a cult-like technique. And I'm not equating these two things, but this is still what we do when it comes to prisons, right? Yeah. This is why you always say, oh, they're getting sent upstate.

It's never downtown. Wouldn't you be upset if there was a supermax prison just in Green Point? I think it's important. We do not be like into it. I think it's important to see what's going on so we don't forget them. When we drove from Phoenix to to California, it is so funny, first of all, Phoenix, Arizona is different than California. Yeah.

And then you cross the California line and they're like, grass exists. What the hell is this? But we were driving and off in the far distance, first on the road, we see this sign that says, don't pick up hitchhikers. You know, there's a prison nearby. I forget what they said, prisoners are often hitchhiking, whatever. And then you look way, way, way off in the distance and you can see this blip. And you're like, that is a frickin' federal prison.

And they are so isolated. Oh, yeah. So you forget about them. You forget about them. And it's, of course, demoralizing and obviously that's not the same thing as Auschwitz. But it's a common used technique. It's not, yeah, it's definitely the same type of technique because something like this, something like Auschwitz, it's not going to fly in the middle of Berlin.

If you're going home to a family every night and you're walking by people on the street who are just going about their day, it's not going to work at all. But if every single person you see is also involved in the same shit that you're involved in, no matter if they're doing the killing or if they're the ones being killed, then the entire thing gets normalized. Suddenly, that is the world and that is all that matters. It's like if you had a Captain Spalding's chicken restaurant in LaGuardia Airport. Yes.

This is a little strange and encrypted for an airport, isn't it? And I am not validating the soldiers with the Auschwitz too, but it's very interesting to see, by them volunteering to go and serve in Auschwitz, they themselves became prisoners. They subscribed themselves to the same exact world that the prisoners were in. They were forced to live in it and little did they know had shit actually gone down. Like if the Nazis had won World War II, honestly, and had taken over Europe, they probably all would have been liquidated as well. Yes.

I will play the world's smallest accordion for them because the sympathy is hard to drudge up for the people. I just think that it's not about sympathy, it's just this concept of they're all delusional. It's this whole thing, this concept that you're going to get out of clean out of this scenario as well. You're fucked. Well the thing about all of this as well is that it was all approached in just the coldest way possible.

I mean, one survivor said that the disturbing thing was that this was not something passionate or irrational. He said that there was nothing emotional about Auschwitz, and I don't know why that got me more than anything, because it's just cold. What's the hopelessness of the idea of looking at somebody and you think that you can plead with them and connect to them on their humanity, but they look at you over a clipboard like you're a nobody, it is very disheartening. I mean, it's a government facility.

It's a billion times worse than a DMV experience, and you just imagine feeling like trash when you go there, and now you have this situation. Maybe the biggest thing that kept Auschwitz going was pure perpetual motion. See, as far as the mass murder went, once they started killing people, it became necessary to keep killing in order to justify the killing that came before. Because if you stop for even a minute, then it might enter your brain that what you've been doing is kind of fucked up and completely wrong. So for many of them, the thought was that Auschwitz wasn't something you can change.

It's just something that you might as well go along with, because that's the way the world is. One person even compared it to systems of government, like you may say, okay, there's some things wrong with democracy, but it's still the best system we've got. He looked at Nazism that way, because they thought that Nazism, even with Auschwitz, is the best of all possible worlds. Conformity at its most devious and fucked up, because you built up a new social hierarchy when you go to Auschwitz.

There was a very interesting essay I was reading. I can't remember the name of it. I was sending it to Marcus, but a part of it is talking about how basically everybody shows up into this new social structure. And so now it's like, now that I'm in this world, I'm just going to keep it going, because if I gunk up the works, I'm on the other side of the clipboard. Now all of this can be traced back to a single word, Zendebehandlung. What was that?

Zendebehandlung. Zendebehandlung. Zendebehandlung, which in German means special treatment. This was the euphemism that they used when they were really talking about mass murder. This imperative sets certain people, but especially the Jews, apart from everyone else and marks them for death. And since they were marked for death, then psychologically speaking, as far as the Nazis were concerned, the Jewish people were already dead.

And if they were already dead, then one needed to feel no guilt about anything that was done to them, whether it be sending them to the gas chambers or mutilating them while still alive in the pursuit of their version of science. Now a lot of these guys, they had to get fucking trashed to carry out their duties, just to dampen what little humanity they had left. Which is actually pretty interesting, because it's not dissimilar to how serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy had to get close to blackout to do the same fucking thing. Yeah, because it allowed their monster to take over, essentially like the other, the

bad side of the personality, which was the real them, needed to come through the booze in order for them to fuck, they had to like unleash the beast. Well, you can't have any sensitivity whatsoever, so you're already German. Yeah, I don't think you need to desensitize. I would say take some Molly. Maybe try to get some feelings of love into your body. Oh, God, I don't know if the Nazis could have handled Molly. What is this, Joey?

No. What is this? I love this fleece sweater I'm wearing, I can't believe I never noticed how wonderful the texture of it is. The last thing they needed was thunderbolt, that's all that was, or whiskey, you know? Oh, well, they definitely loved meth, in fact, they created meth, but that is a whole different episode. Yes, indeed.

A more fun episode, which we'll do one day. Yes, if you want to read an awesome book about that, Garida Blitzed, it's really fucking great. Technically, it helped them beat the Ruskies, the Russians. Not technically, it absolutely caused them to take over the French. It's fascinating, go read Blitzed, it's very good. But in this entire process, the one person who was always without fail sober was Joseph Mengele, who, judging from his behavior, Mengele never once questioned what he was doing or

how he was doing it during his entire time at the camp. Now, to really understand Auschwitz, we got to understand all the functions of the camp. They worked in three capacities, concentration, slave labor, and annihilation, which included experimentation. See, the reason why they were called concentration camps in the first place was because they were, as we said last time, originally built to hold or concentrate political prisoners. See at first, Auschwitz just helped polish political prisoners, in addition to being used for quarantine and transit.

And as Auschwitz sat at a railway junction with 44 parallel tracks, ATMAT, that people from all over Europe could easily be transported there by train. When the German war machine chugged along, the Germans found that their country wasn't up to the task of providing the labor that was needed to take on damn near everyone else in the entire world, except for Japan and Italy. So Auschwitz, among other concentration camps, expanded and became a slave labor camp as well. And it wasn't just for war-specific industries either, 34 German companies, many of whom

still exist today, including Telefunken, who makes high-end stereo equipment. These guys earned a collective profit of $160 million in today's money off of slave labor just in Auschwitz. That doesn't even count the other concentration camps, Auschwitz is just the most profitable one. And of course that happens, we've discussed this before as well when it comes to our prison systems here. Cheap slave labor is nothing new and these corporations have been benefiting off of it

for a long, long time. And the most notorious of these corporations was IG Farben. In addition to using Auschwitz 3 for the production of synthetic rubber, IG Farben provided the poisonous Zyklon B gas that was used to execute people in Auschwitz 2, Bergenau. So the company that was creating the chemicals that were killing the prisoners were also making the prisoners create the chemical that would then kill them and they profit off of it? Well Zyklon B was made elsewhere, but these guys were making like, they had a synthetic

rubber factory at Auschwitz 3. But that was also a huge argument among the Nazis. They were like, why are we killing them when we can have them just work until they die? Well that's what they were trying to do and then it was finally when the final solution came down because Hitler just finally gave that he said that this is the final solution, this is what we're doing and then everybody hopped to it. But up until then there was a constant argument between the military leaders of the concentration camps and the science officers of the concentration camps because they were like, we need bodies

for experimentations and they're like, we are trying to build more bombs, we're using these people to build bombs, we need more of them and it's very strange to see the political arguments within this world. A very macabre corporate boardroom in that situation, absolutely disgusting. Yeah man, I'm on a television show set in hell and it is that, it is the office set in hell. It is the worst place to work and talk that could possibly have existed. I could almost go for another home improvement fact, I don't know when one's coming up but

almost. No, no, there's plenty more to go Kissel, we're locked into this thing, this is going to be a long episode but part of that is that we need to show the fucking spotlight on as much detail as possible that we can't even cover the full extent in just this episode. Well, IG Farben also owned Bayer Pharmaceuticals and this is Bayer that you still can buy at CVS. For my headaches? For your headaches.

I have a heart problem? It's a fucking company. Bayer paid the Nazis at Auschwitz 170 Reichmarks or $68 American at the time for 150 female inmates for the purpose of drug experimentation and when all of them died as a result, Bayer just asked for more and they gave them more. But as far as the labor in Auschwitz that these companies profited from went, inmates were literally worked to death in the service of the Nazis and these companies. On average, a prisoner would last three to six months before dropping dead of starvation

or disease. But Auschwitz's most infamous purpose was annihilation. Now prior to places like Auschwitz and other pure killing camps like Kelno and Belzak, I think I'm saying that right, Kelno, Belzak. The answer to Hitler's Jewish question were mobile SS death squads called the Einsatzgruppen. The Einsatzgruppen were solely tasked with the cold-blooded killing of civilians. These guys traveled in the wake of the main German force that was making its way east towards Russia.

These guys were the closest thing that history has gotten to unleashing a roving band of serial killers into the world. These are among the most terrifying people that have ever existed. And like I imagine, the mixture of people that volunteer for the heavy service and any sort of military forces, it is a combo of those two, right? It's people that kind of ended up in this fucking group against their will and it's also surrounded by total mean fucking bastards that can't wait to be bullies to everybody that they meet.

They actually weren't a part of the regular army. They were kind of like- Oh my god. Private contractors kind of? No, they were still a part of the German government but they weren't a part of the regular army. They would get support from the regular army but they were a different part of it altogether. And in fact, sometimes they treated them almost like wild dogs, where if someone was getting

too much into it, these death squads, if someone was getting too much into it, they'd pull them back. Like they'd pull them back and say, okay, you need to cool off, you need to go back here for a little while. How bad do you- Good hustle, though. Good hustle and slap them on the butt like it's fucking the NFL. Yeah, how bad do you have to get?

Just imagine how bad you would have to get for a German officer to tell you to cool it during World War II. That is disgusting to think about. These guys, they traveled in seven battalions of about 500 men each. They murdered an estimated 65,000 people in Poland in 1939 alone. They killed Polish leadership, they killed clergy, they killed teachers, and especially they killed Jews. This was expanded in 1941 with the invasion of Russia, when the leader of the Einsatzgruppen

gave the order for all male Jews between the age of 15 and 45 to be shot immediately on site, in addition to any Romani they might find. By August of that year, the order was expanded further to include the entire population. So now you had, imagine this, seven groups of 500 serial killers searching for a very specific type of victim and having the full power of a government and an army behind them to accomplish this task. I mean, honestly, and they were rewarded for what they did, but also kind of kept at arm's length, right?

Because again, they're doing the dirty work. So we're not going to include them with the main pack because then that would sully the righteous power of the Nazis after they won the war. And of course you start with 15 to 45 year old men because those are the people that are most likely to have the ability to fight back and defend themselves and defend their people. Get used to it. Yeah, exactly.

So I mean, it's just so unbelievably planned out. Yeah, it went from men and then eventually it was men, women, children, the elderly, babies, whoever. They were all killed by firing squads. They shot them in front of mass graves. They dug the mass graves first. They lined everyone up and then they just shot them, you know, 100, 200 at a time. And then all the bodies would just fall backwards into the hole and they just did it over and

over again. In September, a mass execution of this kind lasted for two days straight outside of Kiev in Ukraine at a place called Babiyar. After 33,771 Jews were made to lie on the bodies of the ones that came before and were shot one by one in the head, two days straight, never stopping, almost 34,000 people. And some of these people actually survived the initial shot and spent days conscious and dying under a mountain of corpses. And by the end of October, the Einsatzgruppen, just that one, just that one battalion who'd

committed that massacre, they claimed a further 70,000 Jewish lives in just three months. Jesus. This is honestly, once again, I'm getting close to a home improvement fact here. This is getting pretty brutal. Colleges and universities in Michigan would send Tamal on sweaters and t-shirts to wear during tapings of home improvement. Oh, hold on a second. And he did.

Okay, so that's how I use always wearing them. That's an interesting fact. Tamal and sweaters were sent from universities. From universities and schools all over Michigan. Really? All over Michigan. All over Michigan. Wow.

And I'm still kind of haunted by Glenn Borland. Yeah. We're going to have a main character in a show called Glenn Borland here. Yeah, wow. And then all the sweaters there from, he loved Michigan. He loved Michigan. He's a Michigan guy. Naturally, it's good he's promoting the education system there in the great state of Michigan.

Check out Lake Superior. It's got kind of fun if you like water. And it almost deserves a name. It's a nice lake. Yeah. Yeah. But the Nazis, they had a problem with the Einsatzgruppen. And the Einsatzgruppen, I mean, we lightly touched on the atrocities of the Einsatzgruppen.

That could be a series in and of itself. We barely brushed the surface of it. But the problem that the Nazis had was that these mass executions, they were just too darn stressful on all these Nazis. Oh, is that the problem? I was about to say that. It does sound really stressful. Yeah.

That's the big issue here, the stress on the Nazis. Well, they were becoming- You know what it is? And because the thing about the Nazis, I think that their biggest crime, hypocrisy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they were becoming alcoholics. They were losing their minds or just plain shooting themselves in the fucking head because

they couldn't live with what they were doing. Right. I mean, the Einsatzcommandos had the highest rate of suicide of anyone. So the Nazis figured, okay, so we're not going to stop with this final solution thing. We're not going to stop with exterminating all of these people. So we got to find a different way to do it. So starting in late 1941, the Nazis took action T4, which we talked about last episode with the mental patients and all of the people that were considered undesirable to the Nazis.

They took all that infrastructure and they moved it to the concentration camps where they were already holding political prisoners. And therefore, the final solution was put into action. Because and they did it solely because the hard way was too hard. Yeah. So they wanted to find a way to make it more industrialized. They wanted to make it more like a big factory so we can do them in bunches so we don't have to think about them, which is an ironic because then it took all the way, actually, then Joseph

Mengele took that whole scenario and went again and made it personal where in a world of faceless mass extermination, Mengele really was a true serial killer, getting actually close to the mayhem that he was doing. But the problem was that if you were just killing them, then you'd end up with the same problems that you had with the Einsatzkommandos because Mengele was a singular character. I mean, he was very, very much in a league of his own. So the Nazis found a way to medicalize the killing process in the camps and the experiments of Joseph Mengele were a part of that medicalization.

So when a person arrived at Auschwitz on a train car packed with other prisoners, they were let out onto what was known as the selection ramp. This was the place the SS doctors would decide who would die in the work camps, who would die immediately, and who would be chosen for experimentation. Now, really, anyone could have done these selections when it came to picking those who could work and those who couldn't. Anyone could do that. But if you had doctors in charge of the whole thing, then it gave the process a medical

legitimacy. That's what Mengele said he was an expert on. He was part of the people that kind of sued for us doctors should be doing the selections because I can tell races by facial structure. He had this, they were doing this ancient medicine where he said that he could pick out what he needed properly by their ear shape, all this kind of stuff that makes no real sense now. Of course.

But at the time was like actual hard science. In a world of batshit madness, the craziest batshit person comes out on top. Yeah. And really, the whole thing was a psychological process for the Nazis as well because these guys, they practiced like this kind of weird twisted bedside manner. They treated the new arrivals. They treated them with this false respect, this kindness like, oh, hello, ma'am, how are you?

Are you feeling okay? Did you have a nice trip? Yes, please come with me. This was partly to keep the transports calm, but it also helped the Nazis to lie to themselves. That helped them to say that this whole thing was just a medical procedure. We're doing it to the entire world. This is the festering appendix that must be removed. It's like, well, you were talking about the last time about why serial killers have wives

and families and shit like that, where it's like, oh, part of it, is this part of an internal game? Is this the game that we're playing in terms of making it extra evil? Or is it the creating of a side personality, being like, see, there's no way I could do all these crimes. I'm a normal guy. I do all this normal shit. But when the night comes, when the shadow self takes over, then you're free to do your

crimes. And for Mengele, that was in his office. So this is how the Germans were able to say that this is not something inhumane, this is something medical. Yes, this is something medical. And they did it from the very beginning. They had to start the entire process with this is something that is medical. And the doctor, who was almost always in the middle of it all, was who else but Joseph

Mengele. With graceful, quick movements, sometimes while whistling an operatic melody, Mengele would send people either to work or to the trucks. Mengele was only one of two SS doctors who could work the selections completely sober. The other was a particularly virulent anti-Semite named Dr. Fritz Klein, who was said to have developed his hatred of the Jews after a Jewish dude seduced his fiance in college. Oh my God, of course. Of course it all stems from a cock block.

Yeah, it's a fucking stupid cocked nerd in college to take his rage out on everybody else. Unbelievable. So strong was his hatred that he was overheard once to have said to actually like the smell of the crematoriums. And I will say that was, you know, when Mengele showed up the first he was like, oh, what is a terrible smell? Oh, I have to get used to that.

But he did it like that, where he's just like, you just get used to it when you start hanging out in it. And he was so vain, he would dress up. And the one thing that everyone said that would stick out on their mind about Mengele, when he would show up on the line, was that he was incredibly clean, that in Auschwitz it was incredibly difficult to be clean. It was dusty roads, muck, literal shit ravines where people are emptying out the latrines onto the street.

I mean, blood from the various, I mean, literally mass shootings and also from the surgeries he was doing. But also it's under constant construction. So it's just this like sawdust and dirt. But they said he would show up fucking dressed in the nines, completely impeccable with his white gloves on, singing his opera song, sending you to the left or sending you to the right, coughing it, or eventually screaming with rage, looking for twins. Absolutely horrifying.

And for over a million people, Mengele was the first person they saw when they got to Auschwitz. He was either Mengele or Klein or a whole other rotating cast of assholes. Because they kept missing his twins. So he would go in and take more ramp duty. He kept showing up and he would negotiate with the guys that were in charge of and take over their shifts so that he could make sure that he could get the specimens that he needed. Well, if you were sent to the right, it was on to the camp.

But if you were sent to the left, that was immediate death. Most children under the age of 12 were selected for execution because they couldn't work. There was also the elderly, the pregnant, the sick. They were also sent to the left. They were all loaded into trucks, painted with the Red Cross symbol and told that they were going to the camp for the sick and the children. So complete was the Nazi's deception that some people actually chased down the trucks saying that they had diabetes or a heart condition.

It's like, no, no, no, I need to go. I need to go too. Please take me. Take me. But these were the trucks that were being sent to the gas chambers. Out of each transport, which held about 1,500 people, 75 to 90% of them were sent immediately to the crematoriums and were dead within five hours of arriving at Auschwitz. There were four crematoriums in Auschwitz, each one holding 15 ovens.

Each person followed an iron ramp inside, above which was a sign that said, Baths and Disinfecting Room in German, French, Greek and Hungarian. Once inside, the people were instructed by numerous signs to undress completely. They then had to tie their shoes together by the laces and hang all of their clothes carefully on the pegs provided as they were told that they would need to easily find them later after they all took a shower after their long trip to the camp. In reality, this was done so the clothes could be easily collected for distribution amongst German citizens whose lives were destroyed by the war.

But after the prisoners stripped naked, they would then be led to a 200 meter long room perforated with iron pipes. Then the Nazis turned out the lights. Unbeknownst to the people now terrified in the dark, another Red Cross truck driven by an SS doctor carrying a load of Zyklon B had just arrived outside. That doctor, a member of what was called the Hygienic Institute, would then deliver the poison by dumping pellets through vents in the roof or holes in the side of the chamber. And as the gas filled the room, the stronger ones among the victims would trample the

young and the old as they tried to climb upwards, scratching at each other and their own throats in a desperate attempt to breathe in the pitch blackness. The victims' faces would turn blue and blood would pour from their eyes, ears and nose. This horrific ordeal would last up to five minutes, but some who died in the chambers survived for up to 20. So after the murders came the disposal of the bodies, but this wasn't done by the Nazis. This task was left to what was called the Sonderkommando, which was made up solely of other Jewish prisoners.

And it is extremely graphic. I know for those listening, it's really hard to hear that stuff, but it is important to hear what it was like because otherwise we can't forget the history. We're going to be destined to repeat it as that old cliche goes, but it's a cliche for a reason. It's very true. This is where it ends. Yeah.

This is where the shit leads to. Yeah, absolutely. It's where Mengele had a form that he signed off on and he sent it out the door and then he never saw any of this process. It literally was just a bureaucratic little movement that set this whole thing in motion. So just that's what I'm thinking of is the fact that this is fucking his fault. Every single one of these pieces of shit you signed a piece of paper did this shit. Absolutely.

They put it in their hands and they tried it to act like it was just a part of business at the camp. And that's when we talk about politics or policy. There's the real world ramifications of somebody signing a signature on a bottom of a page. That's what it looks like. It can look like that. Yeah. So we always have to remember that.

Mengele was the one who sent these people there. Now the Sonderkommando, their main job was to dispose of the bodies, but they were also tasked to search the teeth of every corpse for gold caps and fillings, then pull them so they could be melted down and added to the war effort, along with whatever jewelry the victims were wearing. Then the corpses were jagged 25 at a time to the incineration room. Once there, the ovens would be opened and bodies would be thrown in three at a time every 10 minutes into a furnace that was heated to incandescence.

Once a week, the ashes would be taken out, pulverized, and loaded into trucks where they would then be taken to the river Whistler and thrown from the banks to be washed away. Eventually though, crematoria weren't enough to handle all of the bodies that needed to be burned. Because as one person said, and I think it was science in the swastika, killing people is easy. Getting rid of bodies is difficult. So the bodies, they just started throwing them into flaming trenches and they used human

body fat as an accelerant, because it was cheaper and more effective than benzene. I wonder what else there is to learn about home and poop. Yeah, I could kind of go for a tool time break, if possible, because remember we already learned that it's Glenn Borland, possibly, which is crazy. Tim Allen, we've also learned, and again, ladies and gentlemen, we're doing this so we can all live and emotionally cry in this podcast. And Tim Allen, we also learned, he had his sweaters sent from universities in Michigan, so okay.

In one episode of Home Improvement, it said that Tim Taylor is three years older than his wife, Jill. Oh, okay, yeah. But in real life, Patricia Richardson is two years older than Tim Allen. I think he should apologize. Wow. I think that Tim Allen should apologize for this kind of lying. This is what I'm going to be lied to.

I'm a Home Improvement fucking junkie, if we call ourselves Improvis, I'm a member of the Improvis, and I don't know this kind of shit. Really? I'm a tool timer. Show within the show. Interesting. So Tim Allen, younger in real life. He should apologize.

Yeah, younger in real life. And you know, the wife, Patricia Richardson, she didn't like the one-dimensional role that she played on that show. Yeah, she wanted more of a dimension. She's complicit in these lies. And I think she should also be forced to be punished and to apologize to her audience. Oh my goodness. Wow.

We are learning a lot of different things today. Okay. Now earlier, I said that most children were sent to the left. But there were a select few that were saved. See when each transport came in, one word could be heard above all others echoing through these train cars. Zwillinga. Zwillinga.

In German, Zwillinga meant twins. And that right there was the main reason why Joseph Mengele was present at most of the arrivals. It wasn't really because he enjoyed it. He just didn't trust anyone else to make sure all the twins were collected. Mengele was the only one who would show up to selections even when it wasn't his turn, just to make sure that no twins slipped through his fingers. This Dwight Schrute motherfucker.

Out there just being a nerd about it. Like that's the thing too, just being that kind of officious fucking nerd too, because not on top of all this shit, it's literally being like, you don't know how to do your job correctly. So it's all the layers of being a fucking shithead. Well here was the fatal flaw in Mengele's whole plan. Oh here it is. Oh this is, I was wondering, I was wondering when it hits, because so far it's been a

fucking luck. Well in order to truly study twins, you gotta just study identical twins. But Mengele, he took fraternal twins as well, which is pretty much bodies useful as just studying siblings. There's no difference, like with fraternal twins, like there's the same difference between fraternal twins as like say you and your brother, you know, genetically. But identical twins, you know, identical. I wish I was more identical to my brother Chris.

He was a model. He's very handsome. And he modeled in Milan, Italy. He is very handsome. I don't think he was. He's aging and everything like that. I am two years younger. I don't want not to bite our tool time, you know, trivia.

But I would have been nice if I looked more like him. Well because of this, all of Mengele's work was completely, utterly, and totally useless. That's the saddest thing about, no that's not the saddest thing about all this, but it's the most infuriating thing about all this. I mean, it's, as one observer said, you know, a scientist who was speaking on one of these documentaries, he said, when you lose all moral inhibitions, you stop caring about the rational details and therefore it's all in vain. So literally Jeffrey Dahmer is just as much of a scientist in trying to create a zombie

as Mengele. Yeah. All of its shit. You can really only compare them as if Jeffrey Dahmer would have gotten a promotion for his work and if he had shown it to an actual boss that said, Jeff, I gotta say, this is pretty great because this happened a couple of times too because that's what Mengele did. Mengele did this because these were the hot projects. The idea of being able to physically manipulate any human population to make them look like

the Aryan race, that was what his job was. He was the worst version of the show botched. That's what he, that was his goal. But on the other hand, since he also took fraternal twins, a lot more kids survived Auschwitz than if he didn't do that because some pairs of brothers and sisters who just looked alike and were close in age, they were able to pass and so therefore they were saved. Okay. But that's also what Mengele used an excuse afterwards to his fucking son, raises me like,

but no, I mean, how many people would have gone to the crematorium if I wasn't doing my experiments? I mean, like, yeah, buddy. Yeah, good. Oh, yeah. And he also tried to soften a little bit, he's like, you know, sometimes I send people to the work camps, it should have gone to the crematorium, but I just send them to the work camps because that's just the kind of guy I am.

It's disgusting. Someone give him the Meryl Streep Award of the best person in the world. I don't know what that award is. I don't know what it is. My God. But twins weren't the only ones given preferential treatment here. There was one other thing that Auschwitz and specifically the experimental part of the camp needed.

That was doctors. And those doctors, these Jewish doctors ended up as the personal slaves of Mengele and other doctors in the SS. The most well-known of these doctors forced to work for the Nazis at Auschwitz was Miklos Niezli, a Jewish pathologist who arrived in Auschwitz with his wife and daughter in June of 1944. Upon his arrival, Miklos heard Mengele shouting for doctors, so he and 50 others stepped forward. Mengele then asked who had studied at a German university and was familiar with forensic pathology.

Miklos was then the only one to step forward. After a short interview as to where he studied and who his professors were, Miklos was taken to a camp office a few hundred yards away and registered as a doctor. And Miklos thought that he was going to be sent to some German city as a replacement for a doctor who'd been drafted. But what he was actually about to become was Mengele's own personal pathologist. What that meant was that Miklos was going to have to dissect hundreds of corpses post-experimentation under the direction of Dr. Mengele.

And this is one of those areas where we get into some revisionist history as Henry has alluded to before, you can go down in a YouTube poll and then they can say, well, look, there were Jewish doctors. There were people like Mengele, he was, his servants were all Jewish and there's some interviews with them. These people are just as much victims as anybody else. And what would you do in that situation? Because there's a lot of people in the comment section of these videos being like, I would

never, I would never, whatever it is. No, you have no clue. You have no clue what these people are dealing with. Because he was there with his wife and his daughter. He was there with his family and he, they got passed and a part of it got a little bit to do with the fact that he volunteered for this work. And also if somebody's going to be doing it, at least it's me because I know what I'm doing.

And at least I know these people and it's just a fucked up. It's a lot easier to be. It's very easy to think you would be some massive hero when you're far removed. Yeah, completely and totally removed. But before he even got to that position, Miklos had to have an audition. Yes, shit, dude. He said that he was brought to what he called a primitive shed like dissection theater. Once inside, he was brought two corpses, which both had their chest marked with the letters

Z and S stood for zur section. One of those men had hanged himself. The other one had been electrocuted. God knows how. But as Miklos sat there with these two bodies in came Mengele, two senior SS officers and the other Jewish prisoner doctors. Just like it's such a scene from a fucking horror movie there with literally Dr. Mengele, one of the worst human beings to ever exist, two of his fucking imp like evil cohorts.

And now you got to, you better be an expert surgeon. Oh my God. This is. Miklos opened up the skull, the thorax, the abdomen, one of the dead. He extracted the organs, he noted the abnormalities and answered questions posed by Mengele and the others. Mengele would just ask him questions in the middle of it and he just had to perform. And so three days later, Mengele took Miklos to crematorium number one or Miklos joined

the ranks of the Zunder Commando to assist in the disposal of the bodies in the crematoriums in addition to his work as Mengele's pathologist. I do feel like there's almost a psychological game in these choices as well because the prisoners that were chosen to be prison doctors and also the Zunder Commando's were treated better. They were given more rations, they were given visitation rights to go to the other parts of the camp, they were given all of these things. And a part of it too was, I believe in a way while they were also looking for able-bodied people, I think it was also a way of dividing the prisoners against themselves.

I think that the way that they would give these people horrible jobs but then treat them better was then a way to essentially psychologically divide the groups within the camp to sort of also like while they would play the idea of making people cheered going away to the gas chambers in order for them to not revolt, I think it was the same way, you keep them kind of divided amongst themselves so they do not unite and rise against us. And also to ensure that they don't unite and rise against you, the Zunder Commando every four months, it was about 860 usually in the Zunder Commando, every four months they would all be killed.

Yeah, because they were called, that was the term, the bearer of secrets where it came from because that's what they were labeled as because they knew where the gas chambers were. So it was the closest book, it's just called Auschwitz, it's the only first-hand written account we have of what the Zunder Commando actually had to do. Honestly, if you really want to ruin a fucking Sunday, read that book, it is very, it is important and it is, it's important to read but all of this shit, each one's a different punch to the fucking gut, each one of these things you look and the duress of these people

wonder is unimaginable. Now the doctors of Auschwitz, including Mengele, they were kind of a different breed from the rank and file. By accounts the doctors, most of them were gentlemen, these kind of guys just sort of came and went, they supervised actions, they smiled, sometimes they would tell jokes but they said that they were never unhappy, at least outside of the selections. When they were just, selections were awful, everyone hated, everyone except for Mengele and Klein hated selections but otherwise, it's just a job, just kind of going about

their day, smiling, laughing, joking but the thing was that was part of Auschwitz's allure. It was great for your career in the sense of being a Nazi. But only in the sense of being a Nazi because duty done well Auschwitz got you a pretty big feather in your hat, mostly because it showed loyalty and it showed a willingness to do anything. Right. But in terms of actual useful medical experience, Auschwitz offered absolutely nothing. Have you ever looked at the Hooker album?

Hooker? The Hooker, it's with the O with the Oomlaut on top of it, I don't know how to pronounce it, I think it's Hooker. But it was a photo album from a guy, an SS officer named Hooker that was one of the only evidences of Mengele being at Auschwitz. And it's these pictures of Mengele and Hoss and his boss and just laughing and hanging out. That's where the pictures you see of the SS officers like laughing and having a good

time but it's just a picture of them just all like, like literally Mengele slapping his knee with a fucking big smile on his face, his fucking gap tooth, horrible mouth, Ricky Ricardo fucking hair sitting there and they're all enjoying themselves. But that's important to remember, these are human beings, these aren't some supernatural beast. You know, if you get a chance, I think we mentioned this on the last episode, Hitler on vacation. It's just absolutely insane to see that side of them in the midst of all of this blood

and horror and disgusting situation. Yeah. I mean, and these guys, you know, if they just wanted to be Nazis and Auschwitz was great if they wanted to be a doctor, they had absolutely no, I mean, Auschwitz offered nothing because the research held no value at all. And a lot of times they just, they saved lives just so they could kill the person later in a different way. Yeah.

And all the shit was done on a scale so vast that we'd have to add a whole other episode just to cover the medical experiments outside of what just Mengele was doing. I mean, there was an entire block dedicated solely to sterilizations. That was run by a guy named Carl Klauberk. He actually rented space at Auschwitz from the Nazis, paid him one mark a week for prisoner doctors and human experimentees. He wasn't even a part of the military. He just rented space there to do sterilization work.

That is unbelievable. That makes... Can you fucking imagine renting off a space at Auschwitz, like literally going and renting a conference room so that you could use it in Auschwitz? You could go anywhere. Yeah. You could literally go anywhere. But he went there specifically.

That Kauberg is another fucking... That's what I'm saying, you just find another supervillain and another supervillain and another supervillain every single time you turn in this story. When you think about Auschwitz and then you're like, oh, that could be a good, like, we work type space, you know, where I'll rent it out hourly, not bad. That is so... That's how systemic this was. Yeah, he just rented space and they let him do whatever he wanted.

And there were collaborator doctors too, like these guys that came in like Polish prisoners, non-Jewish doctors, like this one guy, Vladislav Dering, he became so enthusiastic about working with the Nazis that he'd carry around a tobacco pouch that he'd made from the scrotum of a Jewish prisoner that they had sterilized and he'd show it to the other Jewish prisoners. This is a real life, you know, like Nightmare Before... Is it Nightmare Before Christmas? Yes, Nightmare Before Christmas. This is real life Halloween town.

Halloween town is fun, Castle Town is fun, I'm not dissing Tim Berns' Halloween town. I understand it is more of a children's movie. I am just saying, if the boogeyman ran the show and there was no Jack Skeleton to take him down, that is what we would have. He's saying this is the logical end of the boogey boogeyman? No, it's not. No, it's not. He was a villain with him.

This is if Halloween town was run by Nazis and I would assure you that is a, I mean, honestly, but a fantastic film, Jack Skeleton vs. the Nazis is a fucking great movie. I want to see another Jack Skeleton movie. We don't know the political leadings of boogeyman, it is extremely possible that he was a Nazi. For some reason I view the Halloween town as a vaguely innocent place, where the boogeyman would have happened to be a villain within that world, but he just had to be extra spooky. No, I know that and the Two-Face Mayor is amazing. What I'm saying is, if it was real, what did the boogeyman do that was so awful?

He was full of bugs. He tried to kill Santa Claus. That's true. He tried to kill Santa Claus and you don't remember that. Santa Claus is a liar, first of all, and we don't have to lie for him. That is a part of, I will, I also blame Santa Claus for the fact that we are burdened with the lie of his existence on the show. Not in Halloween town, in the movie, Santa Claus is telling the truth, he gave gifts.

We have to, we have to shelve this before we get more upset about this than about the Holocaust. Good Lord. All right. Well, as horrifying as the scrotum tobacco pouch of Lattice Law daring is, it was nothing compared to the collections of Joseph Mengele. He began his experimentations in Auschwitz by seeing if he could change the pigmentation in children's eyes by injecting 36 children into the eyes with different colored dyes.

Just a dye, just a dye that you might use on hair or a piece of clothing. He just popped a needle in and injected it just to see what would happen. And then he would dissect the eyes and he would send some to his boss, to literally, to Hess, in order for it to get in front of Himmler because Himmler was the kind of dude that was like, I love this shit. This is what I want to see. Because the part of it again was the cosmetic angle that Mengele was trying to show because all of this was to him being like, see how good I am.

Yeah. But even before that, I mean, that's the thing is that they didn't immediately, like, they didn't immediately murder them after this. They waited until there were infections. They waited until they were blindness because they were trying to see, oh, can we change the color of eyes just by injecting dye with a needle? But as soon as the kids are no longer useful, as soon as they were like, okay, well, we got all the information we have, they were gassed.

And they removed the eyes from the bodies. One witness said that she later saw eyes, children's eyes, pinned like butterflies, covering a wall in one of Mengele's laboratories. It is so, it's, I mean, everything's in fear rating, but it's also just so stupid. Yeah. It is so dumb that they could think that they would be able to do this. And you wonder if he even thought that they could though, or if he was just justifying his sociopathy, you know, complete psycho mind and just saying like, was he, I mean,

did he really think this was going to freaking work? Dude, I think that the line is blurred here. I think that he began to believe that all of this was true. I think that as he was doing this, they say that time and time again, he was a true believer. He was doing this for the cause. He also thought it was going to get him up in the ranks. He thought that it was going to pay off for him, especially doing the really dirty shit because he knew the Nazis and his bosses loved the really fucked up stuff.

And he wanted to show him how, again, how far he was willing to go. And this is an example of a mad scientist from a horror movie, like he legitimately was just using it as a playground to kind of just see what he was doing. Like he was inventing Dorito flavors. I mean, absolutely. It's just fucking disgusting. It's disgusting. This is just the beginning of it.

Well, I'm almost only the beginning of it. Okay. I'm almost ready for another home improvement fact. If we could. I think I only got like one or two left. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm just powering through this. Maybe we could put 10 more of those in. Well, these sorts of experiments, they were all a part of Mengele's plan because in addition to the birthing aspect, Mengele also was trying to establish which attributes and disabilities were inherited genetically in which ones were acquired by lifestyle and environment. And the advantage of using twins to study these sorts of things was that one child in the pair could be used as a control group. So while one twin would endure experimentation, the other would be left alone.

Then should the experiment upon twin die after the experiment, the twin who hadn't gone through the procedure would be killed as well. And both would be dissected to compare how the experimentee's body had reacted. Or even if the child didn't die in the course of the experiment, both would be killed so they could be compared. All that mattered was the experiment. All that mattered was the result. And that there is what Mengele thought was the true value of working at Auschwitz.

You can see anywhere else at any point in history, it was extremely rare that two twins should die in the same place at the same time. But in Auschwitz, that could happen on command whenever he wanted. So all of the twins that were in line for Mengele's experiments were housed in barrack 14 of Camp F in what was nicknamed the Zoo. There, the children were treated relatively well until the time came for either experimentation, death, or both. Mengele himself would actually visit the children on a regular basis and get to know him.

He'd bring him chocolate, he'd bring him clothes, he'd bring ribbons for the little girl's hair, and he liked them in a particular way. One day he walked in and freaked out at a caregiver because one of the ribbons in a little girl's hair was higher than the other. In Mengele's words, she was not how he liked her. So when you say relatively well, you mean like, relatively well like James Cahn in the movie Misery, when technically she did save him from a car crash, which was kind of nice. No, I mean, it was enough for the kids were fond of Mengele.

Oh, God. Because they didn't know. They had no clue what was happening. But they talk a lot about Mengele, the complete story about how the old life Mengele would try to come forward, that a part of this was like, well Mengele the father was the one who would be meeting these kids and then they wouldn't meet Mengele the doctor until essentially after they had already died or as he was killing them. But I think that there was never a Mengele the father.

That's always my view with a lot of these guys where I think he was born to be an evil shit stain. Oh, yeah. And died one. This is total manipulation. Absolutely. He knew what was going on. Well, one explanation put forth for this behavior is that Mengele had the same relationship

with these children that one might have with lab rats. You know, you're going to have to kill the rat someday, but you might as well have a good relationship with it in the meantime. There's no reason to be mean to it. So yeah, we'll be fine, but I know one day I'm going to have to kill you. Now, Robert J. Lifton in his book, The Nazi Doctors, he called this phenomenon doubling. He said that there were two parts to Mengele. There was his Auschwitz self and his prior self.

The prior self, that was the healer while the Auschwitz self was the killer. And this also kind of plays in to the Nazis entire way of looking at this shit, the healing, killing complex. And the best example of this involved a group of Jewish children who were suffering from Noma, which was a disease that causes painful mouth ulcers, and Mengele, he worked and worked on experimental cures, eventually he cured the kids, he made them feel better, you know, like they weren't in pain anymore. And that was his prior self, that was the actual doctor, that was the human.

But once the children were cured, the Auschwitz self took over. Now that the kids were relatively healthy, they were once again a threat to the purity of the Aryan race. So as soon as they were fully recovered, they were sent to the gas chambers. It's just unexplainable, none of this is explainable. My brain is like having a real difficult time wrapping itself around that logic or lack thereof. Another example, Mengele delivered a baby.

There was a woman, she went into labor, he delivered the baby, he did it by the book, used the utmost care, you know, it was like he had done it, it was like he was a doctor who did it 10 times a day, even when so far he delicately cut the umbilical cord, handed the baby to the mother, almost immediately, both mother and child were sent to the gas chamber. And he did it with the flair of like, take a look at this shit, take a look at what I can do, like I'm fucking, look how good I am, because he was a braggart and he was incredibly vain.

I mean Mengele, he even used this when the children were condemned to die, I mean he take the kids sometimes, he take them to the chamber himself, and he turn the whole walk into a game, he called it on the way to the chimney. That is literally the day that the clown died, the day the clown cried, that is literally the plot of that movie. That's not literally the plot, the day the clown cried is he's trying to make the kids feel better, he's not murdering the children, I think you have a complete and total misunderstanding of what the plot of the day the clown cried is.

It's just bad, it's just bad idea. There is a lot that we don't know about the film, it has nothing. This is all the more horrifying knowing how little care Mengele actually used when performing experiments on children. He almost never used anesthetic, he amputated limbs, he injected kids with typhus, he inflicted awful, awful wounds, all for comparative study to see how the body would react. And the level of madness only, it only gets worse from here, it only increase from there. In one experiment, he interchanged the blood supply of two twins just to see what would

happen. You know what happened? They died. And another, he sewed two children together by their backs and wrists and observed just to see what would happen. They died again green. And in the event that the twins didn't die together in experiments like the two that were sewed together had, the relatively healthy child would be killed by injecting chloroform

straight into their heart, which caused almost instant heart failure. Miklos said that he witnessed Mengele personally kill 14 kids in one night using this method. In fact, on Miklos' first day, he dissected eight Romani children under Mengele's direction because six out of the eight were twins that had different colored eyes from their partner twin, it was a heterochromia. Those eyes were removed and sent to Professor Ottmar von Verschur at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin in a crate marked More Materials Urgent. And by the way, von Verschur skated completely on this whole fucking thing, his entire relationship

to Mengele completely skated, died a respected fucking scientist. That guy, I mean, I don't know what I agree, I don't know what I think about what happens if you die, but these are the type of people that like Verschur is in some form of hell, like something about that too, because he just cleaned any record of his relationship with Mengele after the war. Like he just made it so he was like, oh, if I don't know what happened, and just covered his eyes. Like many people that lasted in Germany throughout World War II.

Yeah, von Verschur was the one who pushed Mengele into it, it's just like, no, you should go to Auschwitz, go on. He was the one that pushed him, and Mengele was constantly reporting back to him. And the eyes, those are far from the only things that Mengele shipped out to universities, hospitals, museums, all around Germany. In one case, Mengele, during a selection, when they were all coming down the ramp, Mengele spotted a hunched back father with a son who had a deformed foot. So he took them, he gave them food, he examined them, and then just shot both of them in the

back of the head. Then he had Dr. Michlos boil the bodies in iron casks so the flesh could be stripped from the bones. And then they sent the skeletons off to the Anthropological Museum in Berlin. But that's not even the worst part of that one. No, buddy. The worst part of that story was that the bodies had to be boiled for hours before the flesh would come off.

So Michlos left him unattended. And when Michlos came back, he found a group of prisoners who had no idea what kind of meat was boiling, eating the boiled flesh with their hands. Okay. Oh, my God. So Tim Allen, now he got, so the sweaters were actually from universities in Michigan. University of Michigan. Michigan, interesting.

That's where they were from, the University of Michigan. Oh my God. This is, this is honestly maybe the hardest episode we've ever done, or the least, and I don't know. It's really, oh, it's, that is really something horrible. The Toll Time audience was actually the live studio audience. Oh, is that right? Oh, that makes sense.

It just turned around the camera and just, you know, I should have known that. Yeah, Henry, that's why before Home Improvement would start, they would say filmed in front of a live studio audience. And then once you believe it, that was just the Toll Time audience. Why are they going to pay a whole new audience when they already got one there? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. The toilet that reclines, I mean, my God, that audience, that's the show within the

show, as I've said multiple times, and that's what I would be there for. That's what I'd be there for. This is just, this is the biggest Gold Star episode we've ever done, and it's just important for you to remember why, when we do next week's episode with the Nazi hunters, why we search for him so fucking hard and try to get him, and then hopefully, if it's true, conspiracy theories are true, that the Mossad drowned him and then left him on the beach, but I don't know if they did. That's spoiler, man.

Come on, did you get a spoiler? Well, hey, I'm sorry. It's a massive spoiler. Well, might as well just start it now. Might as well just talk about, remember, that we're hunting these fuckers next episode. That's right. Yep. Next episode, it's going to be a nice release from all of the rage and pain you feel right

now. Well, as far as Mengele's attitude towards all this went, it was all just a part of the job, and it was a job that he absolutely adored. Once, Miklos, he'd gotten a smudge of grease on a file, and he said that Mengele just gave him this withering glance and very, very seriously said, quote, How can you be so careless with these files, which I have compiled with so much love? With so much love. Oh, my God.

That was his exact words, with so much love. Now, twins, they weren't the only ones who were the subject of Mengele's experiments. One experiment involved eight women and a device that one witness described as, quote, electrical machinery, the likes of which I had never seen. The witness never saw what Mengele actually did, because the witness got the fuck out of the room as soon as Mengele entered, because that's kind of what happened. Every time Mengele would enter a room, everyone was terrified of him, so they would all find an excuse to leave as soon as they could.

But this witness said that after a lot of screaming, two of the eight women were dead, five were in a coma, and one was convulsing, strapped to a cot, and there was Mengele discussing the results casually with another doctor as the whole thing was done in the pursuit of testing endurance, just to see how far they could take the human body. Which we saw in Unit 731, which we covered in an episode not too long ago. They did this kind of thing, too, but it's something about also the personalities attached to this, where Mengele was just so pleased with his work all the time, so into it. Everybody else was horrified at their hands of it, but he was there just being like, excellent.

The other thing we didn't bring up was what that room looked like, which also sounds fucking terrifying, that it was a red concrete room that you go into, it had a red floor and red walls with white, the big marble slab in the middle of it and these white porcelain things, so it looked like a fucking, it looked like Suspiria in there. Oh my gosh, and then just having a cordial conversation in the middle of it. Yeah, and these endurance tests even extended these to babies, Mengele once covered a mother's breast with tape to see how long the baby could live without food, but the mother mercy killed the child rather than give Mengele the satisfaction, and signing her own death

horn as well, and other times, there are some of these things, I can't believe it. They said that he stood on pregnant women's stomachs until the fetuses were expelled, and he even dissected a one-year-old infant while the child was still alive, like it doesn't- And there's shit that, I mean like, there's shit that, it's not that it's exaggerated, but there's shit that like, you could look at some of those types of experiments that you're just like, I don't know if he did it, but I will say that if he felt that it could get his tongue deeper up Himmler's asshole, he would have done it. So I don't put anything past him whatsoever.

Oh, I'm not going to give Mengele the benefit of the doubt on anything, no, definitely not. But in the middle of all this, as he was literally killing babies and needlessly amputating the limbs of children and cutting off the breasts of female prisoners for experimental materials, his wife came for a visit. Really his wife came for a visit. But the idea of being like, she was like, I miss you, because as she was saying, because he had been gone for so long, he went out there, you can't get in contact, and he was like, off you, off you, you should come by the office, it meets me at the office.

And then so she comes all the way out to Auschwitz, we're talking about like days of a trip. And then at least according to Irene Mengele, she was like, what the fuck is this? She like walked in, and you walk in Auschwitz, you're going to go visit your fucking husband. And then you're like, oh, this is what you're, this is what you're doing. And she still was a hard-line Nazi, so she protected, but at least it cracked the veneer a little bit. Yeah, but she also said that the three weeks that she spent in Auschwitz. Three weeks.

Three weeks. That is a hell of a fucking vacation. That is way, way overstain. She said they were happy and peaceful, because she's complicit in all of this. Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. She was, and we'll find out later on too. She was extremely complicit, because they helped them fucking get away.

Yeah, I mean, and because part of what she loved about is that Mengele had a couple of personal slaves. He had Jehovah's Witnesses as slaves, because Jehovah's Witnesses also went to the concentration camps because of their vow of non-violence. And that's also why Jehovah's Witnesses, a lot of times, were used as household servants and went for SS officers. Yeah, they did all sorts of like vacation stuff. They went and swam in the river.

They went and picked wild blackberries. She made jam. Really? She did? Yeah, claimed that she had no clue that Auschwitz was anything more than a prison camp, despite the constant what she called sweet stench that permeated everything. I would believe if Geoffrey Dahmer had a roommate in his apartment, I would believe that he had less of an idea of what was going on.

The whole thing is evidence of what's going on. What you're doing, you're making some kind of sausage stew here? What is... Oh, these are the funniest looking sausages I've ever seen. Wait a second. Are these... Are these penises? It is so abhorrent that she is like three weeks on vacation there and even pretending.

She doesn't know what the hell is going on. Well, according to her, Mengele, charming, funny, sociable, she called him her first great love, even after knowing about all this, still called him her first great love. She said his only flaw was that he was vain because he was a little too obsessed with his height. He thought he was too short. Yeah, like that Corley Simon song. Jesus.

But that's the thing, though, is that as we'll later see in the next episode, that vanity would save his life. Now, although Mengele's actions were cruel in the extreme, in just his day-to-day work, he was even worse when he lost his temper. In one fit of fury, he took the newborn child of a Russian woman, grabbed it by the head and just threw it in a pile of corpses and said, leave it there. Another time, he took a newborn baby from a woman who managed to sneak her pregnancy into the camp unnoticed because if you were pregnant, you were supposed to go to the gas

chambers. And he was so angry that his subordinates had missed the pregnant woman that he took the newborn baby and threw it into a burning stove. God. And another time, he was so angry that a work detail had allowed prisoners who were chosen to die to join those fit for work. It was just kind of a little goof-up. Oh, those people are supposed to go to the gas chambers.

Why are they here with the workers? Why the fuck are they here with the workers? So Mengele took out his own pistol and shot each person in the head, one by one, shot each prisoner in the head, one by one, just to fucking show him. But perhaps the absolute worst thing that Mengele directed involved a group of 300 children who had arrived in Auschwitz from either a kindergarten or an orphanage in Russia. And this right here is almost beyond belief. This is one of the worst things I've ever heard.

It's so cruel and so strange that it doesn't sound real, but several people witnessed these events actually happen. So Mengele and a large group of SS officers arrived on motorcycles that day to a large fire pit burning in one of the Auschwitz yards. And the men got off their bikes, circled the pit, and waited. Eventually, 10 dump trucks arrived, each one full of children. An order was given, and one by one, the trucks backed up to the pit and SS officers began tossing children into the open flame.

Some children even managed to crawl out, half alive, but those were pushed back in by an SS officer who was armed with nothing more than a long stick. Not a single victim was over the age of five. You know what, it's almost like, I'd rather, it's almost like I need like a full house piece of trivia. Like I need like almost even something else besides home improvement. Oh my God. Alright.

Alright. In Germany, home improvement is called normal Verdahammert. You know, I don't even care about the Germans right now. I don't even want them to ever have home improvement. They didn't deserve home improvement. What does it stand for? It means listen to who's hammering. I hate that name.

The name of home improvement in Germany is listen to who's hammering. Why are they so German? Can they just make hammering? Who's hammering? From being so German all the time. Honestly. Come on. Who's hammering?

That's the name of the show? If you're hearing hammering, you're hearing it. It's like it's coming. You can't even actively not listen to who's hammering because it's happening and you're hearing hammering. Do we know what tool time was called in the show inside the show? Oh my God. It's like this is devastated.

But when Mengele was evaluated by his Garrison commander in August of 1944, the report described Mengele's mental state as quote, outstanding. Of course. Of course. Yeah. Further the praise by saying that Mengele had the impeccable demeanor of an SS officer while his character made him a favorite around camp. Isn't that nice?

Isn't that something? Wow. But this report came just a few months before Nazi Germany and therefore Auschwitz came to an end. As the Russians closed in, it was said that some Nazis at Auschwitz actually became more pleasant trying to, anyway they could, just trying to escape judgment. They became more pleasant to the prisoners. They became more helpful trying to escape judgment, hoping that maybe when the Russians

came, the prisoner would say like, well, that one isn't so bad. Don't kill him. Oh buddy, I don't know if they're going to be that sympathetic. As a matter of fact, I know for a fact that they won't be. But others actually became more brutal as the Russians got nearer. One doctor who was there was quoted as saying that these types of men, when the Russians were closing in and they knew that it was over, not only was Auschwitz over, but Nazi Germany was over, everything was over.

At that moment, it was more necessary than ever to believe that they were right. Oh God. And as far as Mengele went, when they were talking about, they were, his wife said he became depressed and at first they were like, well, he was mad and upset because he felt that all of his research would go to waste. But then I don't think that that is true at all. I believe that he got depressed because he knew he was about to get fucking hung or what should have happened is that he should have been gotten by the Russians and he should

have been forced to deal with the Russian work prisons. I feel like that is where, and he knew that it was coming. His work is trash. His work is trash. It's really garbage. And he continued for as long as possible. I mean, even his last experiment, and he continued killing people, like his last experiment was about a month and a half before the camp was liberated, just killed 11 female dwarves.

We don't even know what the experiment was about. No idea. No idea what the aim was. We just know that 11 were killed. And in his last days at Auschwitz, I mean, he created a fake pile of research notes because he knew full well that what he'd been doing all along was wholly and completely criminal in every way imaginable. And he wanted something to point towards when they got there.

I was like, no, look, that's my research. I didn't do all that other stuff because all that other stuff, all those other notes, those were all sent to Professor Atmar Frahevan Vershure at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Look at all that paper. I have so much of it. But then he got erased. No way to try. But he got erased, too.

That was a part of the way that they tried to distance themselves from the crimes that they allowed to perpetrate and actually ordered him to do. So they tried to erase every bit of evidence of the crimes and also what happened at Auschwitz. And it's a shame that we now, but we know because at least witnesses came out. Yeah. And von Vershure, he kept Mengele's notes until the 60s and then burned them in a bonfire. I have this eternal question. And I'm like, because obviously I'm only barely, the more I read about it, the less I understand.

And we're doing our best to go through his crimes piece by piece and talking about them. But my question for historians, if there's anything out there that knows far more than me of obviously, like if the Nazis felt that they were right, why did they want to erase the evidence? Like if they really felt that they were correct and that they were waiting to be the ones that were in control of the entire world, then immediately they must have somewhere inside knew that they were being criminals, but they were pushing this agenda for so long.

Well, it was that they knew that they were, they knew that other people thought of them as criminals. They didn't see themselves as criminals and they didn't see what they were doing. Why weren't they proud of their shitty results? Why weren't they so proud of everything that they did? Because they knew that how they got there, they would be punished for that. They knew that other people didn't want that. They knew that they were forcing their will upon others.

I mean, there's a reason why the movie was called Triumph of the Will, because they were imposing this upon others, it's for their own good. They don't know that this is what's best. They don't know this is what they actually want. I mean, it's like it's dictatorship, it's complete, it's fascism, it's all kinds of bullshits. Like this is what's best for them, but if they fight back and if they don't, if they catch me doing this type of shit and if they get into power, they're gonna get all weird

about it. It's totally cowardice as well. It's total cowardice and as soon as, you know, like with any bully, you know, as soon as the script is flipped, they're just, yeah. Well, that's why how many comedians were killed because a Hitler had a directive basically saying that they couldn't stand being made fun of. They were so vain and so they had such a superiority complex that they couldn't handle with anybody. They couldn't handle any sort of anti-rhetoric, anything that could possibly show that they

were in the wrong because their logic was so fucking flawed and tainted and light. It was so easily disposed of that you could pop their logic with a pin and they knew it. And that was the job. I mean, obviously everyone or, you know, the vast majority of people suffered under the Nazis and that's why we have to always remember that, you know, comedians and truth tellers or whatever, like that's why they're important. Even if you disagree with like whatever, but we just can't lose sight of that. Well, according to Dr. Michalos, Mengele's last orders were to destroy Auschwitz completely.

Two crematoriums were demolished while they were told to say that the third was used exclusively for natural deaths. Okay, I'll just keep the third one there, but you know, let's destroy the other two. And the fourth had thankfully already been destroyed the previous October in a Sonderkommando revolt that had resulted in the deaths of 70 SS officers. It's a crazy story. It's a crazy story. It is a crazy story.

The way they talk about how like because they would have a certain group of women were working inside of one of the munitions factories and they would hide little bits of gunpowder in pieces of paper and they would smuggle them out bit by bit to the people within the Sonderkommando that were trying to do a do the uprising and they they got enough over the years of working in the factory to blow up one of the crematoriums. It's a very intense. Now Mengele and all the rest of the Nazis fled Auschwitz on January 17, 1945 and the camp was officially liberated by the Red Army on January 27 exactly and we didn't plan this

at all. No. Exactly 74 years ago to this day. This is Holocaust Remembrance Day. We did not plan this. This just sort of happened that we ended up recording this episode at the same time. It just kind of happened that way. Yeah.

And we were not, I mean, we got pushed too. We got pushed. We were supposed to record this last week. It's very intense. Well, while many in charge of the slaughter at Auschwitz were caught, including the Kommandat who ran the place, a lot of them escaped, including Mengele. But he, like all the others, spent the rest of their lives running. And that's how this series will end next week with chasing down that sadistic fuck along

with all the rest of his shithead brethren in Joseph Mengele Part 3, the Nazi Hunters. Get those fucking pieces of shit enough of them, got, got. And ooh, man, oh, man, oh, man, is it nice to finally switch to start reading about Nazi Hunters? Because now that I've been reading about that, it does make me feel a lot better because these are the people, a lot of people did not sleep and made sure that Mengele did not sleep a night of restful rest again for the rest of his life. And a huge, gigantic special thanks to research assistant Rachel for her help on this episode.

She's great. She's been helping out with the book by Dr. Michlos Niezli. Awesome. All right. Next week, we'll get the, get all the frustration out, Nazi Hunters. It's going to be, I'm excited to see some, some vengeance, honestly, and you understand the rage and the hatred and the anger towards the German people in the Nazi Party at the end of World War II when all of this stuff came out.

And we'll talk about the basically decade long allowance of just do what you want to the Nazis. Yes. And this is, it's obviously a very intense story and it is, it is a lot of horrible grizzly details, but I think a part of that is facing it. It's facing these facts. I think that people have been talking about these crimes for many, many years in different aspects and we, we, for us, it was more of like trying to understand Dr. Mengele because

I think that we talk a lot of times, like when we did Rasputin or we do certain series where it's like, you hear about somebody, you hear about the legend of the angel of death, you hear about Dr. Mengele and what he was and a part of it is you end up putting yourself into Auschwitz reading about it. And I, I hope that I can learn something from this shit or you can learn something from this shit about like, this is a hug your dog episode. This is like a remember that we're all human beings in this together episode and that this kind of shit can't happen again and that the, but it did happen.

Oh, absolutely. And it's a stain on our species because it happened and then all we can do is hope to live lives as much as you can that fucking writes these wrongs everywhere you go. Yeah. And especially nowadays with all this misinformation, disinformation, all these ridiculous YouTube holes you can go on. It's real. The Holocaust happened.

This is 100% fact. There is nothing. We're not some, you know, disinfo agents. This is fucking real. Yeah. I just want to remember that and also Henry, I want to correct you. It's Rasputin. Oh yeah.

That's right. Rasputin. All right. We also have a couple of live shows coming up that we can finally start announcing. A lot of live shows actually. And we cannot wait to see everyone once again on the road. Last year was so exciting. Don't forget you can watch our special from last year, www.lastpodcastlive.com.

It's still fresh and it's still fun. So check that out. $6.66. So some, some of the first shows were announcing for 2019. We are thrilled in on Tuesday, March 19th, we'll be in Nashville at Polk Theater. Cannot wait to go to Nashville once again, Wednesday, March 20th, we'll be in Cincinnati at the Taft Theater. And we mentioned, we mentioned Taft's party today.

Oh yeah. That's right. Yeah. Big boys. Yeah. We can see Pansor Ram. That's where Pansor Ram was. Friday, March 22nd, we're going to be in beautiful Cleveland at the Masonic Auditorial.

I love Cleveland. I'm really excited to go back to Cleveland. Can't wait. On Saturday, we are absolutely thrilled. March 23rd, we're going back to one of our favorite cities, Pittsburgh at Buyham Theater. So those are the dates and Patreon, you'll be able to get access to those dates on Monday of this week and that's Monday, January 28th. Yep.

And then the following Wednesday, they will be available for all to purchase. So we cannot wait to see you guys. Well, very excited to get back on the road. Again, we want to thank everybody for the support that they've given us in this very intense time period that we've been in. It means a lot to see how far the community goes and how many people are super supportive of the community here at Last Podcast Network and it means the whole fucking world. Because we do as much as we can to make you guys laugh and be informed and it's really

nice when you guys can be there for us. Absolutely. Rest in peace, Kevin Barnett, Bird Luger. If you have any memories of Kevin that you would like to share with us, the Facebook page, which we have not plugged Facebook in quite a while, but if you go to the round ... No, we are still not even a part of that Facebook page. But if you go to the roundtable page or you can email us at thelastpodcastnetwork at gmail.com.

If you want to listen to some old roundtable episodes, send us a favorite clip or something of Kevin Barnett. I think we're going to try to put together a little best of here. It'll take a little bit of time, but feel free to do that. We'll definitely take your thoughts into consideration because honestly, the memories that you have all shared on social media about Kevin, because it's been years of working. It's just great to hear your thoughts and again, we love you, Kevin, and hug your friends and remind them that you love them because you never know.

So thank you all so much for being part of our Last Podcast family. Yeah, thanks. All right, everyone. Thank you so much. Hail Satan. Hail yourselves. Again. Hail me.

And let's do one. In the end. The end. Magoustillations? Yeah, I've heard that before. Yeah. I've heard that. I feel like we, I think that we own that name.

It's the name of our company, Henry. Oh, good. Oh, we have one. Oh, good.