Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 350: Josef Mengele Part III - The Hunt

Episode Date: February 3, 2019

On the conclusion to our series on Josef Mengele, we cover the hunt for the world's most famous Nazi war criminal.

Hey guys, I'm Carolina Hidalgo. And I'm Juan Camilo Zez and we're here for Last Podcast Network. Our show Escuela Sangre is a weekly Spanish podcast where each week we talk about Hispanic true crime serial killers, the supernatural folklore, and Walter Mercado. Icon. The cool thing about this show is that it's not just for native speakers, but also for anyone who wants to learn or brush up on their Spanish. Yeah!

If you go to LastPodcastNetwork.com and click on ES Scripts, you'll find the scripts to our shows. The transcript is not a direct translation to the show since we improvised a fair amount here and there, but the narrative is as close as it gets, I promise. Richie Valens Sacrifices Humanos de los Aztecas, Santería, Selena y Yolanda, Historias Hispanas de México, Colombia, Perú, España, Brasil, Puerto Rico! Puerto Rico! So if you want to hear about La Llorona, Juana Baraza, Popstar Gloria Trevi, and her time

in a sex cult. Hola Sangre is the show for you! You can find all the episodes at iTunes, SoundCloud, or go to LastPodcastNetwork.com under Shows. Los Shows. So búscalo. Búsquelo. Gracias, amigos.

Bye! There's still something that haunts me from last week. Um, can you imagine going up to someplace in the valley, going in for an audition, you're not really sure what it is, and you walk in and you pick up a piece of paper and the first thing it says, hi, I'm Henry Zabrowski, I'm here to play Glenn Borland. Oh my God! And then, this is what I'm supposed to do? Walk out of what you gotta do.

It's just me going in and be like, ah, name's Glenn, I'm here for your children, I'm gonna drink the milk of your children. Well, just stick to the script. Did you, Mr. Zabrowski, no reason to improv here. Well, I'm trying, I thought you wanted me to be Glenn Borland, that's what Glenn Borland sounds like. Just pretend, pretend his name is Al. Just pretend his name is Al.

Do you think if we put a baby next to your grandma's pussy, she'll start making milk in the grass again? Oh, right. Well, thank you, Glenn. Next please. Okay, everyone, this is the last podcast on the left. I am Ben Gissel with Mark Is Parks. Hello, Ben.

And with Henry Zabrowski, now I actually, I want to put on my little German Inquisitor hat here. Uh-oh. I have a question. I have a question. Does it come from your grandfather's name from antique Trump? No, I didn't get it from a family vault. But I have a question for you, Henry.

I was hearing on page seven that somehow you don't realize that the Los Angeles rams are in the Super Bowl. Now, the rams, of course, you live in Los Angeles. Now you know every kind of alien race, you know every cryptid that's ever existed, how are you simultaneously one of the smartest, yet dumbest people I've ever known? Because I have been up to my rapidly receding hairline in Mangalore. Did you not see a sign that said congratulations, Los Angeles rams? I saw a bunch of people wearing hats walking down the street, and I thought it was some

sort of racist rally. I didn't know that it was his, I didn't know that it was a sports team. Yes, I am sort of, I am now aware that the LA rams are playing the Super Bowl. Okay. I don't even know that it was this Sunday, because Eddie asked me to come over, he's like, hey, welcome over to Sunday, we're having a little gobble-goo, and I was like, actually, on Sunday, unfortunately, I will be recuperating from Jackie and I going to see Elton John this evening, so I will not be able to attend that party, and he's like, what if I beat

you to death? Well, that makes sense. Wait, when did the rams move from St. Louis? Are you kidding me? How are you guys both, I'm totally serious, I didn't know. They were moving from St. Louis, and we're back to the, we're working on the show. Okay. All right.

All right, so. And what is it, is that Kurt Rambas fella still playing? Kurt Rambas played for the Lakers in like the 80s, and that was basketball. This is how I know you're not really the Los Angeles rams, because they gave the Los Angeles rams, they would have changed your name to the Los Angeles Aresa. God! See, come on, guess what, you can't hit me, because I'm not in the room. All right, well, we are on, after last week's dare I say exhausting, but important episode,

we are going to have a little bit more fun, although there's some troubling information in this as well. Too soon. However, there is a little bit of vengeance. We're going to cover Joseph Mengele, part three, the Nazi hunters, the hunt for the Nazis. The hunt for the Nazis. There's not a lot of vengeance.

Some? There's some. There's some. I wish there was more, obviously, we all do. We all wish that there was a tour, where Mengele's body was put into a fucking box that you could send from state to state to state, and you could hit his bones with a rotten peach. That would be fun, but they don't do that, because of the fucking wishes of people that want bodies to be held sacred, or some fucking horse to be given to you.

But what we're hoping here is that we'll add a little dollop of feel better juice from last week. Right. We're going to throw a tomato at the corpse of Mengele. That would be really fun. So fun. I'd love to throw a tomato at any corpse. See?

Yeah, sure. Why don't we just stop doing this? There's already a body trade. Why don't we buy a bunch of bodies from these illegal body sellers and start putting that show on the road, calling like, good corpse, corpse taunting. You know what? I'll start the trend after I die. Each of you are allowed to throw a tomato at my corpse.

I gotta go buy a tomato, huh? All right. Thank you, Marcus. So when we last left Mengele, he, along with all the other SS rats, had fled Auschwitz in anticipation of the Russian Red Army's arrival on January 27, 1945. By this point, Mengele had spent almost two years straight performing experiments. He was up to his gap tooth, piece of shit, smile, and all of this horror. He had his assistance.

So that was a good thing I wanted to talk about last week that I didn't really get to, but Nisli, the man that wrote the book, basically being an eyewitness to Mengele's crimes was sort of like his fucking macabre, Igor, right? Completely against his fucking will entirely. He was, Mengele had his slaves. He was fucking, he was crushing it for the Reich and they were all of them when he was doing. They started noticing he'd gotten sad, right?

Because they knew that the Germans are losing the war and they said that Nisli was incredibly surprised. Because at one point, Mengele bemoaning what was about to happen to all of them in a moment of forgetting of who he was and who Nisli was, handed him a cigar to share together in his office, which, again, which is a house of fucking murder, even put the mouth on them like, because with the red concrete floors and everything covered with fucking gore, but he's entirely pristine. And Nisli's like, you give me cigar.

I am human. And Mengele's like, oh, no, oh, no, no, no. And took the cigar back out of his hand saying you can't have this. And they went back to their normal relationship. So he almost showed this like weird form of humanity at the very end. I don't think I want to share a cigar with Mengele. No, no. Cigars are very disgusting.

They're not to be shared. They're all smoked like Boss Hog from Dukes of Hazard. They're soaking wet at the end. They literally drip when you take them out of your mouth. Ah, no, that's not a, that's not a sharing tobacco product. So remember, he was at the top and now he's immediately getting chased out of fucking Valhalla. I think it would rather share chewing tobacco. I think it would rather have chewing tobacco.

Take it out of one gum. Put it in another. Do you want to be a favorite of the SS, high o' killer, kissle or not? So lay down on the ground. We are mama birding this. Yeah. This is spitin' tobacco juice in your throat. No, World War II was not quite over when Auschwitz fell, but the Russians, who did the majority

of the fighting, killing and dying when it came to taking down the Nazis, were nevertheless quickly on their way to Berlin. And yet, even as the Russians were tearing their way towards the capital from the east and us Americans were just across the Elba River, there were still some Nazis who believed that just maybe everything was going to work itself out. Guys, just be cool for a second, guys, be cool for a second, I'm thinking, maybe things are going to be cool. Why wouldn't they be?

Glenn Borland? Is that you? Yeah, I watched a great documentary called Hitler and the Olympics, and you mentioned them running, the Germans running to Berlin, and now I just think an Olympic sport needs to be fast goose-stepping, because I think it would be really funny looking. That is a great documentary though, Hitler and the Olympics, check that one out. Well, Joseph Mengele was not one of the Nazis who thought that everything was just going to work itself out, that Hitler was going to pull out a buzzer beater victory.

Oh, he thought he was going to fucking Jordan it at the final, but he was going to do the fade away, and that's all it was going to fucking take. Even though Mengele had sent some of his Auschwitz files to his Gore Crimes colleague, Professor von Vershure, Mengele also packed a few files, as well as some bloodslides from his victims in a suitcase, and took all with him on the road. But it's all nonsense work. It's all nonsense work, all of it. It's like Walter's undies in the Big Lebowski, it's the ringer, it's all nonsense.

So by the time the Russians were walking through the gates of Auschwitz to pretty much immediately find 650 corpses upon their arrival, that's before they even started doing an investigation, Mengele was already 200 miles away at another concentration camp called Gross-Röven. Gross-Röven is where Mengele figured that it was probably a bad idea to keep walking around wearing an SS uniform, complete with a death's head lapel that specifically marked him as a concentration camp participant. So Mengele took off his prized Waffen-SS uniform and traded it for one belonging to the General Armed Forces, the Wehrmacht, which meant that Mengele now looked just like one of the millions

of other Germans who were far less likely to be accused of war crimes. I feel like this is the first instance of a tiny bit of revenge, is that he worked so hard to get that uniform. That uniform was his pride and joy, he kept it immaculately clean, they all loved their shiny little death's heads fucking hats, all their bullshit, all their flair, they loved all that shit, and then he had to hide it, he had to burn it immediately, and he would talk about it, he's like, he hates these brown uniforms, did not as fun as the black ones, just not as fun to keep it clean.

We're gonna get used to Mengele bitching, because we've got Mengele bitching for the next fucking 30 years. Mengele bitching is something I can deal with every day, that's great. And Mengele, he had good reason to worry. Within just months of the liberation of Auschwitz, before the war was even over, Mengele's name and crimes were being announced on Allied radio reports. Now, I'm not sure whether or not Mengele knew this fact in particular, but he certainly had enough sense to know that people were gonna be looking for him once the survivors

of Auschwitz started talking, and Mengele also had enough sense to know that people were gonna be pissed. Yeah, I think that makes sense. Yeah, I think it's a fair assessment. Yeah. In fact, around that time German soldiers had a saying, even as, or perhaps especially because they were losing, enjoy the war, for the peace will be savage. Yeah, because you're a bunch of fucking criminals, and everything that you were built on is on

a sea of lies and hate, and they all, and at the time they're like, you know, if we just pull this out, maybe people will think we're cool. And then he's like, no, no, they weren't, buddy, and they all knew it rapidly. Wow, that is such a German saying, it's chilling. So Mengele joined a medical unit of Nazi soldiers and blended in on his way back west towards Germany from Poland, while the unit tried staying ahead of the Russians. By May 2nd, Mengele had made it all the way through Poland and had gotten as far as modern day Chechia when he heard the news on the radio.

Adolf Hitler had committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin, and the Nazi state had officially fallen. He started screaming when he found it, he was like, Hitler would never do that, I know Hitler, I know him, I follow him on Instagram, he would never do that. And he got really, really upset because that was the whole thing, right? You're like, I can't believe of all the people in the world, Hitler would be a hypocrite. Unbelievable. And of course, after the announcement of Hitler's suicide, it was followed by, get the lead

out Wednesdays. It was a Led Zeppelin rock block, which is always my favorite because they play the same songs. You gotta have those four Led Zeppes songs, every afternoon at 4 p.m. because if not, I am going to start hitting other cars with my car and the commute. I know it. Well, soon after Hitler's suicide, Mengele and his new unit crossed over into Saxony and settled into a strip of land right in the middle of the Russians on one side and the

Americans on the other. Yikes. So, in order to kind of save his ass a little bit, Mengele struck up a romantic relationship with a nurse and passed his Auschwitz notes to her for safekeeping. So, it's nice to meet you to name, what's your name, young lady? Glenda Borland. Oh, terrible name, but tell me, do you have a sister for chance? Yeah, Brenda Borland.

Oh, yeah, terrible names, terrible names. What I love about you is that your eyes are so big and so blue, I just want to pop some out. You know what I mean? I just want to pop some out and then I'll put a little big and I want to send it to my boss. Man, you are romantic. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that's the thing is that Mengele did pretty good with... Yeah, he was getting late. It's unbelievable. Like, throughout his life, he always did okay because he could be charming. He had that psychopathic charm that he could turn on. There is something with the gapped tooth. Some people love a gapped tooth.

Madonna closed hers up, remember? Yeah. I don't think she should have. Well, when Mengele passed his notes to that nurse, he was more or less clean and he was able to blend in with 15,000 other Trap Nazi soldiers. And at first, Mengele didn't even want other Nazis to know who he actually was. One of the guys who eventually helped Mengele escape knew almost immediately that Mengele was dirty, though, because every day during roll call, Mengele kept giving different names

because he hadn't remembered what fake name he'd given the day before. Yeah. Tom and Don, Winston, Hamburger? Yeah. Yeah. Winston Hamburger. Actually, what did I say yesterday? I think it was, uh, Colonel Sausage.

Yeah. Yeah. I could see. I could see how yesterday I was feeling Colonel Sausage, you know what I mean? Right. It seems like you're just gonna name yourself after what we had for lunch. No. No.

I should meet my brother, Mr. Ronald Stoolman sitting upon Stoolman. So he couldn't remember his own made up name. Yeah. He just kept giving different ones. They said he gave like five or six different ones. Oh my God. But on June 15th, American forces entered the forest where the Nazis were hunkered down and captured them, Mengele included.

Now at first when the Americans asked Mengele who he was, Mengele used the surname of a famous Bavarian artist. He used the name Hans Memling. It's a good fake name. Is it good? Hans Memling's fine. I don't know. It just seems like, like, it seems like he's searching.

Yeah. He's definitely searching. Yes, he is searching. He is new to running away. This is new. So this is, he's gonna learn and get better as he goes and he's gonna get a fairly paranoid about it. Mm-hmm.

But an old friend who just happened to be in the same camp as Mengele convinced him that it was dishonorable to use an alias. It was beneath the behavior of an SS officer to use an alias. You are a torturer from the movie Hostel. Dishonorable. Dishonorable. That's dishonorable. It's dishonorable to lie.

It's just, cutting apart twins is fine. Yeah. Okay. You know how they compartmentalize their weird ass morality. Everything has to be, like, it's in the moment. This is correct. Okay. So Mengele told Camp Authorities his real name.

He just didn't tell him his rank. Oh. He said, yes, I am Joseph Mengele, but he did not tell them I am often an SS officer. But the thing was, nothing happened even after Mengele came clean. See, when it comes to the end of World War II, all we usually see is footage of people in New York or London. They're kissing each other. They're hugging.

They're holding parades. There's confetti everywhere. Oh, yeah. Everything looks fantastic. What we don't see usually, unless we go looking for it, is the hellish, chaotic underworld that much of mainland Europe had become over the previous seven or eight years. What Dogmeat elucidated to me as we were going through this topic, right, because I want to, we were talking about covering the crimes and the escape of Dr. Mengele, and at some

point, Dogmeat was like, do you understand that this story overlaps some of the most complex issues of modern history that exist? And I was just like, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay, you'll do it, you'll do it. You'll be fine. You'll be fine. Or repeat. You'll be good. Order.

Don't order the dominoes that I ordered yesterday. It is coming back to haunt me. No, we're not going to go into the specifics right now, as far as what happened after World War II in Europe, because honestly, I do not have the energy for a whole new chapter of war crimes, except this time perpetrated by the Russians instead of the Germans. Pusser. Someone is a pusser. Uh-oh, wow.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We've got the troll farm over here. We've got the Russian troll farm over here. Just no, it was absolutely horrific. Oh, yeah. I mean, it was fucking, there's a, what's it called, I think it's called the Savage Piece on a documentary on Netflix that I watch. Uh, yeah, I just don't, I don't have the energy to go into it.

It's out there if you want to know about it, but it's fucking awful. It's absolutely awful. Things got fucked up. Yes. When the Germans left their, their vacuum of power, which was all based on total horror, the kickback against that, was, seemed to be absolutely mind boggling. Absolutely. People got, a lot of people got punished.

Oh, yeah. A lot of murders on the streets. There's great documentaries about it if you want to go check those out. In France, they used to just publicly shave the heads of German women and there was a lot of sexual assault, a lot of horrible things that happened. Well, that was French women who had slept with German soldiers. Oh, okay. But in the midst of all this chaos, the allies were still on the lookout for Nazi war criminals.

There were just so many Nazis that a couple of shortcuts were needed to look out for the worst ones. And unfortunately, those shortcuts led to a lot of Nazis slipping through the net. Now, to give you an idea of just how many Nazis there really were, by the end of the war, 8.5 million Germans officially belonged to the Nazi party. Wow. And there was no way in hell that the allies were even going to check all those people, much less prosecute them, so they had to narrow it down.

Part of this was to cross-reference lists of known war criminals with captured Waffen SS members, known far and wide to be Hitler's most vicious dogs. And luckily for the allies, it was easy to pick out the Waffen SS even if they changed uniforms. Oh. That's because it was custom among Waffen SS members to get a tattoo on the underside of their left arm of their blood type, just in case they needed a battlefield transfusion and just happened to be unconscious.

Okay. So, when the allies saw one of these goofy tattoos, the SS member's name would be taken and cross-referenced with the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects or CroCast. CroCast. CroCast. CroCast. CroCast.

CroCast eventually held 60,000 names and Joseph Mengele was near the top of the first edition. But unfortunately, Mengele had opted out of getting the Waffen SS tattoo because he was too vain to damage his pretty skin. Really? Yes. Interesting. So, with Irene, Mengele would stand in front of a full-length mirror, preening himself,

admiring the smoothness of his own skin. Ugh. He is totally Buffalo Bill in this, too. I know he's talking that thing. Would you fuck me? Would you fuck me? I'd fuck me. Wouldn't you, Dr. Mengele?

Yes, Dr. Mengele. I just had this image of him in front of a mirror going, I am Joseph Mengele's official champion, and he was a prettiest boy in town, prettiest boy who's ever lived, prettiest boy in the world, Zephyr Hitler, Zephyr Hitler, how much I wish to see, Hitler stick over here, on the top of my pale knee. Disturbing imagery to say the least. Yeah, and he thought that a tattoo would ruin the beauty of his skin. Okay.

And since he didn't have the SS tattoo and he told the Americans, yes, my name is is Yosef Mengele, they didn't check the list. They didn't check the SS list because as far as they were concerned, he was a part of the Wehrmacht. He was a part of the regular armed forces. They weren't like Mengele from Mengele Tools. We love Mengele Tools here. Listen to who's hammering.

We love that show. The speed with which we Americans process prisoners in these detention camps definitely contributed to Mengele slipping through our fingers. But we didn't really have much of a choice when it came to how fast we process them. See, just because Germany was defeated didn't mean that the 60 million plus Germans

still living in Germany just went back to their normal lives like nothing had happened. The cities had been reduced to rubble and the fields had been burnt, which meant that somebody had to rebuild the country so the people wouldn't starve. And a lot of the able-bodied men were in the army. Germany was so tapped out when it came to soldiers

that when the Russians finally invaded Berlin in 1945, they were fighting mostly old men and children. Honestly, that's a scary fight. What are they gonna do? Take them high, take them low. And then the kids got the spunk. The old folks got the wisdom. I mean, honestly, it's like kindergarten cop all over again.

But an army of kindergarten cop, an army of kindergarten cop. It was, I mean, it really, I mean, it was terrifying for the kids because all of a sudden you've got nine, 10, 11-year-old kids that are given machine guns and saying, go get the Russians, keep the Russians out. You're the last line of defense.

I mean, guys, we were like- I know it's bleak, but it's kind of fun at the same time. We were all 11 years old at the same time. Can you imagine that? Being nine years old, giving you a fucking machine gun, saying go kill all these Nazis. I just got done playing Wolfenstein. You know what I mean?

I'm nine, 10 years old. I literally just stopped playing Wolfenstein. You give me this fucking machine gun. I'm gonna go fucking to glorious bastards, man. I'm never coming back. No, no, these were not the Russians that were doing this. These were the Germans that were doing this. The Germans were being, it was the Nazis that were doing it.

I know, but you heat up the gun after you shoot it a bunch. You could put a hot dog on there. And next thing you know, you're grilling dogs with your boys. If we were all 11 years old and we were in the army, that would be kind of fun. That's when I could have been more safe from the horrors of it.

I mean, there's gonna be a lot of people. That's when you get the pushback from people saying, the lost children armies of Africa in various situations with these traumas built into generation after generation. But I'm saying, what if it was fun? What if it was fun? Yeah, remember that when Coney, Coney, 2020?

Coney, 2020, 2012. Yeah, that guy went crazy. Yeah, I remember he showed up naked in that neighborhood. I remember I went to go get an engagement ring for Natalie and I made a joke to the jeweler. He's like, so what kind of diamond are you looking for? And I was like, actually, I was looking for one of those blood diamonds.

And then I sat, I was like laughing to myself and they did not take that as a joke. They were very serious, but I think I got very upset. Yeah, I think they probably have an immense amount of guilt working in the diamond trade. Well, Germany weren't the only ones who were completely tapped out when it came to resources and men.

The allies were tapped out as well. Hell, we here in America, we still had the Japanese to take out at this point. We'd made so many purple hearts in anticipation of the invasion of mainland Japan, but we're seriously, we are still issuing purple heart medals that were made in the 40s to this day.

Really, that has got to be kind of scary if you're going into war and you're like, why are you guys making all those purple hearts? Are those people like almost dying in battle? Just to make sure, just to make sure we're covered. You know, like you're just, are you sending me to die or? The odds are good.

Okay, that's a lot of purple hearts. Well, you know, the other thing was, is that we also knew that we had the Ruskies to deal with even after the Japanese. And conversely, the Soviets knew they had to worry about us as well. Why do we start fighting them so soon? Ah, yes.

That's a whole thing. That's a whole thing. That's a big, gigantic, huge fucking question that there is no clear answer to. I wish we could go back to the good old days of the Cold War, man. On one enemy, the Russians were a great enemy. Yeah, the Russians were a fantastic enemy.

Scary too. Yeah, very scary. I like Putin's head. But the point is, Germany needed people to begin rebuilding immediately. So the faster the Nazis were processed, the faster that was gonna happen, and the faster everyone could get back to a regular life.

Whatever the fuck that looked like in 1945. Fucking watching old timey-walt Disney cartoons, drinking a lot of milk. I don't really, I don't know a lot about 1945. Eating things out of tin little boxes. That was a big fun thing I saw, like chemistry sets that you could explode your old house that they gave to children for some reason.

Totally. I always liked when you could peel back what you had to eat, like a grenade. Yeah. You know, and it was nothing but weird salted fish. Now, there have been rumors over the years that because Mengele was held for two months by us Americans and was never arrested,

the rumors that we took him under our wing and employed him as a scientist. Now, while we did employ quite a few Nazis, including Dr. Hubertus Strughold. That's not real. That man is full of jelly. That man is not a real person. That is a strudel person.

Oh, I'm not real. I am real. I can be full of jelly and still be a man. If I have the mind of a man and the jelly penis of a man, am I not a man? I guess so. Yeah, Hubertus Strughold, he was an actual concentration camp doctor.

And his human experiments in pressurization helped take us to the moon. Oh, my god. It wasn't just like Werner von Braun that we brought over with Operation Paperclip. Well, all of this is, I'm going to be honest, the part of this whole series is literally a lead-up to us eventually doing an entire series

in Operation Paperclip. But this just shows how bad Mengele was at science is that we didn't take him specifically. Interesting. So is this, if we, I don't know, what was the name of the movie about Unit 731? Man Behind the Sun. Man Behind the Sun.

What is it like that? There's a scene in there where they're working on pressurization. Yeah, there's video of it. You can go watch it. It shows up in a few Holocaust documentaries. Disgusting. What Dr. Hubertus Strughold did. OK.

But we didn't take Mengele. And Mengele, while he was in captivity, he thought that there was no way that he was getting out of his capture by the Americans alive. So Mengele fell into a deep depression. And as a result, he was treated by a senior physician named Colonel Fritz Ullmann. And Mengele came clean about Auschwitz during his treatment.

One of the only people that he came clean to. Because he never told anybody else exactly what he did in Auschwitz. Yeah. And so we're talking to this, who I guess is the great, great grandfather of Tracy Ullmann, which is terrifying for her. Great show, great show.

But instead of turning Mengele over to the authorities, Ullmann gave Mengele a copy of his own identification papers saying, you need this shit more than I do. So from that moment on, Mengele lived as Fritz Ullmann in post-war Germany. I do want to see like the Mengele Prozac ad, where he's just like a cloud is over his head and it's just raining everywhere he goes, like Eeyore.

Have you spent two years in a stinky dungeon doing things that nobody cares about? I understand your pain. I was a very good scientist that thinks no one should be a scientist about. So that's why I take mix-em-ups. It turns your frowns upside down. Oh, it's a mix-em-up.

Which I tried to do with several experiments, and I tell you what happens when you medically turn someone's frown upside down as they die. Ah, yes. That seems to make sense. We learned that from the Joker. Are you looking for a new horror-thriller movie to see in theaters?

Then look no further, because Orion pictures the prodigy hits theaters on February 8. And we have to tell you, it's one crazy ride filled with twists and shocking revelations. Orange is the new black's Taylor Shilling stars in her much-anticipated foray into the horror-thriller genre in The Prodigy, as Sarah, a mother whose young son Miles' disturbing behavior signals

that a malicious, possibly supernatural force has overtaken him. Fearing for her family's safety, Sarah must choose between her maternal instinct to live, and protect Miles, and a desperate need to investigate what or who is causing his dark turn. She's forced to look for answers in the past, taking the audience on a wild ride,

one where the line between perception and reality becomes frighteningly blurry. Find out what's wrong with Miles, played by Jackson Robert Scott, who starred as Georgie in 2017's It! When the Prodigy hits theaters on February 8. Meanwhile, Jews who would survive the concentration camps or had lost family members to the Nazis,

they were starting to recover. And for many of them, there was only one word on their mind, vengeance. Yes. Well, perhaps the most reckless of these was a group of 50 Holocaust survivors who named themselves, I think in Hebrew, it's nechem, which roughly translates in English to the Avengers.

In what was definitely a case of two wrongs not making a right, the nechem planned to poison the water supplies of major German cities in a bid to kill millions of non-combatant Germans. Their plan was to kill six million Germans. They called it a nation for a nation. And they almost pulled it off. The only reason why they didn't do it

was because they were caught bringing huge quantities of poison back from Palestine on a boat. And the British caught them and just made them throw it overboard. And they were like, we understand you're upset. But we can't let you do this. So dump the poison. And then we'll just kind of call it quits.

Yes, what if we don't? So they went to kill his fucking SpongeBob? They're going to do a fucking full genocide on the undersea world of Ariel and Sebastian the Crabbe? Yeah, exactly. Like, what if we just dump the water in the lake that we were going to? Does that work?

Everyone knows if you want to poison a water supply, you have to become governor. And everyone would support you to reroute the water supply like they did in Flint. And then it's legal. And then it's fine. And you're still a governor. Well, that was plan A. When plan A fell apart,

the Avengers moved to plan B, which was the much more reasonable plan to poison SSPOWs in American custody at Nuremberg by painting the bottoms of 3,000 loaves of bread with a mixture of arsenic and glue. Well, the New York Times reported that 2,283 German prisoners got sick, with over 200 sick enough to be hospitalized. But since the poison was spread too thinly,

no SS officers officially died, although it's suspected that we Americans were just too embarrassed to admit that quite a few of them actually did. It's suspected that quite a few of them did die. OK. But in other parts of Europe, Nazis were definitely getting what was coming to them.

In the weeks after the war, there were at least 1,000 public executions of Nazis in occupied countries all over Europe, with some executions resulting from trials that lasted only five minutes. But the problem with vigilante justice like this was that quite a few innocent people were murdered in the process, some for being only ethnically German, essentially dying for the sins of the fatherland,

and especially in places like Croatia. And that's why you found so many sombreros in your grandfather's trunks that day, because he was just like, no, no, no, just a simple Mexican traveling through Germany. What? Just trying to like, oh, Uruguay. You're incredible.

You know, they export a lot of talc from Uruguay. Yeah, we should go. Well, Uruguay is a beautiful place, beautiful beaches. Yeah, really nice. I think it's estimated that somewhere they're not really sure, but somewhere between 500,000 and a million Germans were murdered immediately following World War II.

Yeah. But following his release from the American camp, Mengele made it back to Bavaria just fine. The worst that happened was that he lost his original identification papers after hiding them in the handlebars of a bicycle he borrowed from an old man. There's never been a more humble way of escaping war crimes

than that. Like in a tiny little antique bicycle, it might as well have been in the bottom of a pail of milk that he got from a fine steer while he was making his bratwurst. All right. Yeah, I can't think of Mengele on a bicycle for some reason. It's a strange image, isn't it?

He did it quite a bit. We talked about it in the last episode. He loved his little bicycle. He loved his little bikes. He would show up, he would ride his bicycle around Auschwitz a lot. Bring it in, bring it in. Like, can you imagine how scary that becomes

when it's fucking Mengele? When Mengele arrived about 50 miles away from his hometown of Goonsburg at the door of his friend, Dr. Miller, Mengele almost immediately said, quote, Don't believe everything you hear about me. It's not true. And that's how you always want to open. When you meet friends for a while and they maybe suspect

you're guilty of, like, massive genocide or other stuff, it's always good to start with, it was nice. It was nice. Believe in nothing. That's a hell of an intro. There is, though, is the people totally bought it. See, to many people in post-World War II Germany, even if they weren't Nazis, they refused

to believe the atrocities of the Holocaust. Because, yeah, remember, these are people that have been fed a steady stream of Nazi bullshit for years upon years upon. They don't know what the fuck is true and what's not. It was also against all propriety. In Germany, you never asked anybody what they were doing during the war. Because really, the only way you could answer

is doing the na na na, I don't see anything, na na na, just covering your eyes and covering your ears. Yep, yeah. Well, that was the rule in Germany, is that you didn't talk about the war until someone else brought it up first. And that went double with the ones down in South America. Right.

Because those were what, if you, people at Germans in South America knew that if you were in South America, you were there for a reason. You had to hang out at the beautiful beaches. What are you guys understanding about Uruguay? These are gorgeous places with wonderful people, great seafood. Well, to these people in Germany right after the war,

the news coming out about the concentration camps was nothing more than Allied propaganda. And this is just a trickle of facts that was coming out over the airwaves. I mean, these people were still far away from even discovering the existence of things like the Einsatzgruppen. Now, Mengele was almost arrested that very night

at Dr. Miller's house, but not because the Americans were looking for Mengele. They were after Dr. Miller. So Mengele just hid in a back room and waited for them to leave. Just put a lampshade on his head. You're like, no, Dr. Mengele, he adjusts this very sexy lamp. Don't you want to see the smooth body of this lamp,

the hairless, untattooed, sweet German torso of this lamp? Thinking about him, thinking about his skin is making my skin crawl. Inspired by the near miss, Mengele decided to leave that very night and travel to the part of Germany that was controlled by the Russians so he could locate the nurse who was holding his Auschwitz notes, because he figured by this point

he was damn close to losing him, and there was no way in hell he was going to lose it now. Well, after Mengele retrieved the notes, he traveled to Munich, where he stayed with an old war buddy for the next month, moaning about how he was innocent and that he'd never killed or hurt anyone. According to Mengele, all of the prisoners who had participated in his experiments

were volunteers who were well compensated for their time and effort with extra rations and nicer quarters. Yeah, like when my buddy was really broke in college and went to do all those medical tests. Like a volunteer. Yeah, he just volunteered. Man, you know what, though?

War stories are very fun to hear. Remember going to the bar when you were a kid and you would hear it from like the non-people? And then we'd just sit there. Do you ever do that when you were growing up? No. The VFW and Stephen's point was badass. And you just hear these incredible stories

and they all laugh at parts where they're like, and then we lost Donnie. And then they laugh and you're like, what's funny about this? But it's very morbid conversation. But only if it's funny stories and not just the grumblings of a man trying to hide his war crimes.

Like my uncle can't talk about Vietnam because he was put into a fucking, we talked about it, he was in a bamboo cage for two years and he can't even go past the noodle shop. Like he freaks out. Like he'll throw a trash can at a Bon Mise store, especially in that's bad because in Brooklyn they're popping up like crazy.

Oh, and they're very good. Don't destroy those, please. Well, Mengele's idea was to turn himself in and let his name be cleared at trial. But Mengele's friend told him that that was a really fucking stupid idea. So Mengele was passed off to Fritz Ohlmann's brother-in-law for his next hiding spot.

In Mengele's autobiography, written years later, Mengele called this man Veland. Veland was not an official Nazi, but he was still a Holocaust denier from the beginning, once again thinking that it was all Allied propaganda. So he did his best to help hide Mengele and in October of 1945, Veland helped Mengele get a job at a dairy and potato farm

owned by a couple named George and Maria Fisher, who had no idea who it was that was actually working for him. Dairy and potato is the nastiest combination for a farm. Like, that must smell just horrendous. It's just called, it's just basically a how-to make gigantic Bavarian ankles. Just fill yourself with dairy and starch. But this is the beginning of Mengele's slide

into becoming a full-on farm worker. And guess what? This city boy did not enjoy working the farm. This is so, when we talk about vengeance, I mean, farm work is a respectable job. Absolutely. But he does not like it. So that's a little bit.

That's a tiny little bit. It's a tiny little bit. I mean, it's just, I mean, it is a sliver. He couldn't be clean. No, that's for sure. No, he's covered in dirt. He's got one of those floppy, humble hats on and they're weird German overalls.

He's covered in dirt. Then it's him just being like, I was an FSS officer. I was in charge of looking at old, I had files. I had files. And they're all like him screaming at potato patches. I don't know how potatoes are grown. I don't know. They're tubers.

They're tubers. They're a root. Would you call me? Tuber. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, get out of here, you're a tuber. Hey, dumb tuber? Yeah, you're being a real Glenn Borland right now.

Hey, get out of here. Leave my grandmother alone. Stop asking her for milk. So on the day Mengele arrived at the farm, he immediately took advantage of the fisher's kindness by eating them out of house and home. One fisher brother said, and this is a direct quote, he drank milk by Zalita.

I have never before seen a man who drank so much milk. This is, he is such an asshole. Yeah. Like he is just, so they're welcoming him into his home and then he drank all the milk. He drank every bit of milk that they had. Milk used to be like an energy drink. Yeah, I guess so.

Now we're not supposed to drink it anymore because of the fats, but I still like it. Yeah. Not as much as Jackie though. Jackie drinks a whole Mengele milk every night before going to sleep. Really? She's still doing milk.

You're supposed to get off of milk when you're an adult. It's bad for you. I love milk. You're supposed to be off of it. Uh-uh. Yeah. That's what you gotta call a full glass of milk from now on though, if you wanna have milk.

You gotta call it a full Mengele. Yeah, and then we'll see how much you're drinking. Now the fishers knew that Mengele was definitely a high ranking Nazi on the run because he'd given himself away with his educated Bavarian accent and his smooth as silk hands. Are you jealous of my hands?

I would be if I wasn't me, but I'm me. I'm Dr. Me... Uh... Roots. Pancake and Steinen, you're like... Your name is Roots, Pancake and Steinen? Yeah, come be with a normal name. Come, they used to name you after the jobs you did,

and my family, we used to put pancake batter into beer, Steins, pass it over. What are you doing, maybe? I'm gonna be with the potatoes! The potatoes must be put in order! I'm just here to ask you not to drink all the milk. Well, to the fishers like Mengele, he was just a young German that was down on his luck,

that they were helping out. They just didn't know that it was capital J, capital M, Josef Mengele. Jeez. For four years, Mengele woke up at 6.30 a.m. every day and shoveled shit, then had breakfast at 7 a.m. The rest of the day was spent milk and cows, pulling potatoes and cutting hay and tell supper.

And then he went to bed, and that was Mengele's day every single day. Mr. Mengele, could you please stop milk in the cows only with your mouth, because it's tainting all of the milk that you had then get out? I will get the milk as I see fit! No one wants to believe that there's a means to an end.

Okay? And this is how he gets the milk, my way. As Mengele worked for the family more and more, he started to open up just a little bit, because at first he wouldn't say a goddamn word, and eventually the family grew fond of him, especially after one Christmas day when Josef Mengele played Santa Claus.

Oh my God, that is. That's about right. It's not right. It's a horror movie. Horrible. Oh fuck no! Jesus Christ. But Mengele hated every second of it.

To keep himself sane, Mengele switched on his psychopathic brain and started doing selections just as he'd done on the ramps at Auschwitz. And this is true, on the farm, he was doing it with potatoes. Really? This is what he wrote in his journal about the potato selection process.

And this is a very true, this direct quote. Unbelievable. One had to take a scientific approach to sort out the edible, fodder, and seed potatoes. The frequency of the various sizes followed the binomial distribution according to the Gauss diagram. The medium sizes, therefore, are the most plentiful,

and the very small ones and the very big ones are much less frequent. But since the fishers wanted more medium-sized potatoes, I moved the border of the selection for the potatoes for consumption accordingly, and in this way, I obtained more potatoes for consumption than usual. In this very, my mind was kept active.

All right, well, you know, I just wanna tell him your job is gonna be lost to automation in 30 years, and all of your hard work is useless once again. He was a better farmer than he was a scientist. Yeah, I guess so. But while Mengele was playing with potatoes, the allies were forming a mechanism to prosecute the atrocities

that had been committed by the Nazis, because there was no precedence for any of this shit. Eventually, that resulted in the Nuremberg trials. Now, the allies had identified several hundred thousand Nazis the one might call evil as fuck. But at Nuremberg, only 22 Nazis were tried, mostly senior leaders. Now, these trials had two purposes.

One was punishment, obviously, but in holding actual trials, the crimes of the Third Reich became a part of the historical record as actual evidence, which the allies thought would make this whole Holocaust thing indisputable, because they knew that Holocaust now was gonna happen. They figured if we put it on trial,

there's no way in hell people are gonna be able to deny it. But what has the internet taught us? You write it down, and no matter what, people, no matter what happens, can always say, no, no, no, it didn't, though. And they just say that, and it becomes valid, because then they also wrote it down. Right.

Well, the first time Mengele's name came up in the Nuremberg trials was in April 1946 during the trial of Rudolf Huss, the commandant at Auschwitz, who had raised his family within the camp's confines behind the White Picket Fence. By October, 10 of the top 12 Nazis condemned to death were hung at Nuremberg, while Huss was taken

all the way back to Auschwitz to be hung in his own front yard. Ooh. Gotcha, bitch. All right. All except one of these Nazis, though, went to their death as proud, with some shouting, Heil Hitler,

as their sentence was carried out. And it was a sloppy job, too. But the sloppy job might've been done on purpose. So we covered executioners. You're thinking these guys, they're not doing a great job of it on purpose. Well, as we heard in our executioners episode, the British hangman, he went, he did his duty,

he did it fast, he did it efficiently. But our guy. Oh, this is an American hangman. Oh, this is an American. So he's an American. Yeah, and this guy showed up and he's like, hey, guys, if you really want somebody to fuck this up, but in a fun way, hire an American.

The Matthew McConaughey of hangmen. All right, all right, all right, I'll do it. I won't do it well, and I won't do it fast, but I'll do it. Smile on my face. They brought in a guy that was described as a beefy. Hey, he was all right. 35-year-old dude from Kansas named John Woods.

I love him. Oh, yeah. I love Johnny Woods. Two of the Nazis that Woods hanged took almost 20 minutes to die, and it was. At some point, he's just grabbing them by their ankles, jumping up and down, just be like, I don't know. I don't know what to do.

He's probably just like tickle them and shit being like, hey, they're laughing at it, they're laughing. It was highly suspected that Woods botched the job on purpose, because Woods had a deep hatred for Germans and for Nazis in particular. Okay. That's probably healthy, it's healthy, and it's a good way to put it.

He's the one who really got it out of his system for everybody. They must have really been jealous of him. Yeah, absolutely. He's the guy I want to hear telling the stories at the bar. Yeah. And then I fucked it up this way. And they're like, why aren't they dying?

I'm like, I don't want to fucking die. But it doesn't matter, because I'm just the one fucking doing it. They asked me, John Woods, to do something. Me, John Woods. My mom doesn't even let me touch go into the kitchen, because she says I'm going to fuck shit up. When I filled up my application, I lied. I'd never executed anybody before.

My whole shit is like, you know what I like? TV. TV. Well, after that, in December, the infamous doctors' trials took place. 23 SS doctors, many of whom we discussed in our first two episodes, were tried for conspiracy, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and membership

in criminal organizations. Those were just the broad strokes. Specifically, the trials were about mass euthanasia, sterilization, and human experimentation. And that's the things. We only went through, like, Mengele's experimentation last episode. We didn't talk about the shit they did at Ravensbrook,

where they stuffed wounds with wood shavings, and gauze strips infected with bacteria, so they could simulate battlefield conditions to see what the best antiseptics were to use to heal them. Yes, and also trying to figure out a way to use gigantic x-ray machines to sterilize people in one big go. That was the idea.

A lot of the other side of all of this experimentation was trying to figure out how to sterilize whole populations of human beings. And of course, they did perfect that technology. You can see it at the airport every time you go through security. Whoa! What are they doing?

I take from big people. What are they doing? No, no, no, no, no. We have TSA listeners. And I don't want to be fucking hassled, all right? So they do their job. Out of the 23 doctors on trial, seven doctors were sentenced to death while five

were given life in prison. Even in the face of these verdicts, though, Joseph Mangala still tried to justify his actions, even though his family knew that capture meant guaranteed execution. So the Mangala family went to great lengths to convince the American authorities that Joseph was dead. Irene even went so far as to regularly go

to the local Catholic church dressed in black, asking a priest to pray for her dead husband's soul. In reality, Irene and their son, Rolf, were visiting Joseph just about every day. I forgot to tell you that Joseph Mangala's son is named Rolf. Yeah, why do you just like, what if we, what if, how do we make sure he's fat? Absolutely, well, no.

And Jim Henson actually stole the name for the beloved dog, which is unfortunate. And I didn't know. I'm really sad that Jim Henson was such a massive Mangala fan, but if you look at the puppets and you can see his own obsession with creating little felt things that he could do whatever he wants to their buttholes, I can see the connection.

Yeah, sure, I could see Kermit ogling himself in the mirror as well about his beautiful skin. Well, yeah, Irene and their son, Rolf, they were visiting Joseph just about every other month down on the farm where Mangala was working. But since we Americans were starting to lose interest and we were in charge of looking for Mangala, we believed the Mangala family.

And on January 19th, 1948, Brigadier General, Telford Taylor wrote, typo and all, we wish to advise our record show Dr. Mangerly is dead as of October 1946. You can't get it right, huh? You can't get the name right on this one. If you want to get it done wrong, but in a fun way, ask in America.

Mangerly. See, after Nuremberg, the American focus shifted away from the Nazis to a little thing called the Cold War. Ah. Now we would be hard pressed here at last podcast on the left to cover something more complicated than the Cold War between the United States and Russia. Yeah, it doesn't even matter, man,

because it's a Cold War, nothing fucking happened. A lot of people died. It wasn't good. A lot of proxies. Just told the hot war then. Why did it go hot war? Vietnam. Vietnam, you heard about it?

I'm proud of Vietnam. Korea. Oh yeah, Korea, I love Korea. Oh, you're talking about the war. The war was bad, the war was bad, but Korea is a nice place. The forgotten war, my grandfather was in that. Herb. Herb.

He fought hard and fought long. Didn't have to go to Uruguay. Didn't like the vacation, I guess. I guess not. I don't know. Long story short, in this context, Germany after the war was split up between American occupation in the West

and Russian occupation in the East. And the Russians were rapidly becoming enemy number one for us Americans. So, right or wrong, it was, in our view at the time, a hell of a lot more important for America to have a close ally in West Germany than it was to hunt down and prosecute Nazis. Plus, continuing to prosecute Nazis

didn't really work from a long-term propaganda perspective. You couldn't have JFK going out there saying, Ich bin ein Berliner. Do it the correct, Marcus. Ich bin ein Berliner. Thank you. Except all you fucking Nazis that we're still gonna hunt down and hang. Yeah, that's where it takes the right turn. You had to know your audience,

because he's in Berlin. And so, you gotta make sure. You don't want them turning against you. We saw what happened. The last time we let Berlin all get together and make a bunch of decisions. No, he's good to just keep it like that. You know, in that speech, yeah, that was 1963. That occurred almost 20 years after the end of World War II.

But if the Allies were to prosecute every Nazi that committed a crime worth prosecuting, we'd still be trying those fuckers today. Let's do it. To be fair, two of the Germans after the war, they were very sorry to Channel Mainter Canadian. And they were a very good ally. They were like, whatever you want.

We won't have a military. Just give us some cash. We will do whatever you want. And now they run shit again. Yeah, dude. Kiss all honestly. They're much better. And remember, they were cowed. But that was only a part of it. And how much of it was a fucking act.

And how much of it was then felt deeply, created deep resentment within the German people, which is what kept all of the hiding of the Nazi crimes going. Because then, at first, because how, what do we know about you, Kissel? Very proud. Very proud, remember. Every day.

And the Germans are very proud people. So the idea of having to walk around, bow-headed, sorry for their crimes, also didn't necessarily sit very well. No, there was a little bit of resentment. And I've known I have. Well, anyway, I don't want the winter. I wonder if you have some evidence

of some of the resentment. But it was, they did have to apologize for the rest of their lives, right? Fully so. Right, fully so. But of course, you know, you couldn't really have any job in government anymore. Like globally, you were laughing stock

and you were maligned. And of course, because you're a Nazi. Well, it was called denazification. And a lot of the young, a lot of the people in the generation below the Nazis, like kind of the younger generation, they fucking hated the Nazis because they had to live with it.

That was my dad. Yeah, they had to live with that bullshit. So by the time the Cold War began in 1948, the Americans, we'd not only stop prosecuting Nazis, we'd also started reducing sentences. We reduced the sentence of Ilsa Cook, the bitch of Bokenwald, the she-wolf of the SS. She was, remember Ilsa Cook?

I know, annoying. She was a, her trial had partly inspired Edgings-McCubb creations. And we took her sentence from life in prison down to just four years. That's a huge drop. That's a gigantic drop. But she was late, after those four years,

she was immediately arrested again and tried again and was given another life sentence. And she hanged herself in prison in 1967 at the age of 60. Was she just that much of a B word that the prison guards are just like, can you get her out of here? I can't have, it's also a life sentence for us, if you think about it.

Because we have to work with her every day. Can we just reduce it to four years? They were just trying, this is where we talk about, this is where things are difficult. We're gonna get deeper into the hunt of these Nazis. A part of it is you have to build legal precedent. You have to put together charges. You need to have evidence.

You need to do all this shit. So when these trials are really fucking complicated, it's like the reason why Osama bin Laden is with SpongeBob in undersea heaven is a part of it, trying to piece together all of the bullshit that would have taken a long period of time. But you could see how they, so they were just trying to fucking whip these guys through.

Right, right. Meanwhile though, the Mengele family business, Mengele and Sons, was thriving. Really, they're doing well, huh? They got some contracts coming through? Well, rebuilding Germany meant that a lot of rubble had to be removed. They got to make money off the whole fucking thing.

And there was nothing better for clearing the destruction that occurred as a result of Nazi aggression than with a wheelbarrow stamped with the name Mengele. Oh, that's perfect. I just saw that the big pharmaceutical companies were taking on the opioid epidemic. Cool. So it's the same thing.

Wow. Great, the problem solved. The problem. They're so brave. So brave. And actually, we got it wrong in the first episode. They didn't rename the company Mengele and Sons to rebrand. They named it that because they hoped Joseph would one day

be able to return to run the company with his brothers. Oh, god. The Mengele family actually believed that Joseph could wait out the heat until, quote, war crime fever settled down in Europe. Oh, yeah. Joseph Mengele, he's a CEO of Mengele and Sons again. I don't know why they're investing so much in woodshippers.

It seems like they're mostly just making woodshippers now. What's best part about woodshippers is that it goes in one end and it comes out so the other end's completely unrecognizable. But in order to wait out war crime fever, Joseph, and that's what they actually call this ridiculous. This is all this war crime fevers is going on. This is the face.

People are going to be, everybody's going to cool out. Don't worry about it. We'll give them some EDM. They're already past it. But in order to do that, Joseph had to leave the country. So in 1949, Mengele decided to join thousands of other Nazis in Argentina. Oh, again.

Pamp, pamp, pamp, pamp, pamp, pamp, pamp, pamp, pamp. Seen some footage of Buenos Aires from the 1950s, it seems really nice. I see why they wanted to go. Yeah, we're trying to plan a vacation down to Buenos Aires right now. Yeah, what'd you do? Yeah, or is it just a vacation?

So are you taking the Mengele vacation package? Are you going to go down there from farm to farm and go see the beach and do all that bullshit? This had nothing to do with Mengele. We were planning the Argentina trip long before. What if it even did subconsciously? You know what I mean? They just accidentally, like, Carolina's like,

where should we go for a vacation this year? And you're like, I don't know. Now, Argentina is one of the more interesting countries when it comes to World War II. They stayed neutral right up until the end, waiting until 1944 to finally declare war on the Axis powers. And we're fighting your mini tour, yes. This is not because they ever had any sort

of ideological problems with the Nazis. In fact, they greatly admired the Nazis. Argentina was just waiting to see who was going to come out on top. And when it was obvious the Nazis weren't going to win, Argentina went with the Allies officially. Unofficially, they'd been collaborating with the Nazis for years.

See, this is the power of travel agents. They controlled everything. They said, we know we're going to need, what's our economy? Tourism. We know we're going to need the Germans. So you mean to tell me that back in the day, if the Travago man was alive, he would have been,

like, a new dictator? Like, he would have been one of the New World Order. I think it's possible. See, by the time Mengele was on the move, Argentina was being run by a petty dictator named Juan Perón, who had risen to power through a military coup in 1946. Perón was a massive piece of shit who would snuggle up to pretty much anyone

if it meant getting ahead. So he made fast friends with the Nazis. Perhaps his greatest crime was being involved in what was known as Operation Land of Fire. From 1942 to 1944, six German U-boats delivered multiple crates marked with words like Auschwitz and Treblinka. Just literally erase Auschwitz and put, like, Pier 1 on it.

Like, why does it have to be like this? Why does it have to be so obviously evil? I do like that they named it Operation Land of Fire. That's what Argentina means. Yeah, but I mean, it's scary. You know, it's like, usually these operations are like, Operation Candy Corn coming from the sky. And it's like, that's when we nuke them.

It's like, it's usually named very pleasant things. And then the more pleasant the name, the worse the action. Yeah. It's not even scary. I think I saw Land of Fire, like, bean meat crumbles. Like, I'm pretty certain Land of Fire is like a bean-based meat company. I think that's Lando Lakes, the Monarch Company.

Oh. Well, inside those crates marked Auschwitz and Treblinka was millions of dollars in jewelry, art, cash, and especially gold teeth. Grusomely harvested from concentration camp victims. And they took it to the bank. They took it to the bank. It was all turned to gold, melted down,

and deposited in two banks by four Germans under the name Eva Duarte, Juan Perón's mistress, who was famously and quite positively played by Madonna in the 90s in the adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Aveda. Hmm. And I've got to say, I've never seen Aveda, but I went to the Wiki page and did a quick Control-F

on the words Nazi and Hitler, and nothing showed up. So I guess they just kind of gloss over all the Nazi collaboration parts of Eva Perón's life. I never understood the love of Eva. I never got it when Madonna was doing it. Her whole thing was she had like nothing but shoes. She had a lot of shoes. That's a Meldemarco.

That's a Meldemarco. No, I know what I'm talking about. There's a lot of shoes. And the people were starving, a lot of shoes. Something happened to that. I know, don't cry for me, Argentina. Where Madonna was trying to convince the world that she could fucking sing for real,

but she can't fully sing. But yeah, I don't remember any Swazica flags in there, but then certainly I'm like, I'm trying to see if I do see them, and you can really put a Swazica flag into any memory that you have if you want to. Yeah, you can plant that flag anywhere you want. No, I have no problem with Madonna, although her halftime show at the Super Bowl was not good.

I'm just going to say it. It was my favorite Super Violent Super halftime show ever. It was fantastic. It's going to be better than Maroon 5, of who I think is performing this halftime show. Don't you dare talk against them. Don't you dare cross the Adam Levine Mafia,

because they will shut us down. Well, I know Eva, she was Evita, as she was called. I know she was definitely for the poor in Argentina. The people, they called them the shirtless ones. But that's what Perone was built upon, was this concept that he was, because he's like, the Italians had the brown shirts, and the Nazis had the black shirts.

Our people, they don't wear shirts. And it was a little like a Burt Kreischer thing. But Perone was connected to the everyman, apparently, but he was addicted. He was a fascist. He was a populist fascist. Well, you know, you've got to keep them poor to keep the support.

And when Eva Duarte became Eva Perone, her bank accounts consolidated with Juan Perones. And each of the four Germans, who were involved in the deposits of all of the concentration camp treasure, they all died mysterious violent deaths. Really? Yes. And that left Juan and Eva with a large sum

of some of the most evil treasure in history. Honestly, going from different climates, like from Germany to Argentina, can get you really sick. Yeah, that's true. Maybe the natural violent causes. Yeah, natural violent causes, bullets to the head, poison cups to coffee. Well, it's made of steel.

What's steel? It comes from the ground. I don't know if that's true. But nonetheless, there is some natural chemicals to it. Well, Argentina was attractive to the Germans in more ways than one. The country had actually styled itself to have a more European flair than the rest of South America.

And as such, living in Argentina would sit to be the closest thing that one could get to being in Europe without actually being in Europe. And what do the Europeans, quote unquote, Germans at the time, like more than something that looked exactly like what they look like? Yes. You know what I mean?

So it's like continuing the Xeroxing of the world that they were trying to do scientifically with the Nazi eugenics purpose. I had a horrible stand-up show way, way back in the day, 15, 20 years ago, in a place called Germantown, Wisconsin. And it all looks like they're the same style German houses. Yeah. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum,

like a tube of players in each corner, everybody wearing fucking the leather shorts. It was horrified. It was horrified. It was a quarter for a beer. So the crowd was really hammered. Ooh. It was a very German experience.

Well, Argentina was also a plumb military assignment in World War II because it had the highest concentration of Nazi secret intelligence listening posts in all of South America. So when World War II ended, there was already a network of 1,500 Nazi Nazis ready to accept more. Perone opened his door completely to the Nazis when the war ended.

He set aside 10,000 blank passports for escaping Nazis because Perone found the Nuremberg trials to be, quote, unfair. Really? Oh. Yes, he said he was welcoming Nazi refugees, as he called them, for humanitarian reasons. Nothing scarier than a German refugee.

Yeah. But that's the problem is that none of those refugees, and Perone is doing everything for his own benefit. Yeah, because Perone was trying his own version of Operation Paperclip. And for those of you who don't know, Operation Paperclip was the smuggling of Nazi scientists, some of them very much war criminals here into the United States

so the Nazi scientists could help us go to the moon, which they did. They did. They did. We'll call it Operation Thumbtack. Can you imagine the little paper clip from Microsoft Word, but he was just saying, hey, click me if you need help killing the Jews.

What? That's crazy. But since Perone was kind of an idiot, he got stuck with two B-team scientists and a whole hell of a lot of war criminals instead. And one of the scientists he managed to get was Kurt Tank, who was one of the Luftwaffe's aerodynamics experts.

Oh, makes sense. Last name Tank. I mean, I guess not really, but. No, not at all. No, it's a landing. It's a land. Yes, it's a landing. It's a big heavy thing that purposely sits on the ground.

The other thing's a plane. Well, Kurt brought in another guy named Ronald Richter, who was a nuclear physicist who promised to build Perone, his very own nuclear reactor on an island off the coast of South America. Yeah, of course. Yeah, we'll just build you a nuclear reactor right off the where did you want it?

Yeah, we can build it there. Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, nuclear reactor, nuclear reactor. What do we got to do here? OK, I, OK, we need, first we need fuel. I could just fart into this jar. Break for lunch.

But since Richter had only about a half-ass idea of what he was doing, he had to admit failure. But only after they spent $300 million American on the project, in addition to announcing to the whole world that they'd cracked atomic energy. Oh, my god. Perone even hung out with war criminals, including Joseph Mengele.

Perone said in 1970 that he, back in the 50s, would hang out with a German specialist in genetics who would entertain him with claims of amazing scientific discoveries on the weekends. And you would not believe how clear and beautiful his skin was. How many times he'd show me, and I'd say, oh, Mengele, I mean, pancakes, diner, riken.

You have some beautiful skin. I wish to eat an empanada of your torso. Oh, my, an empanada. Well, according to Perone, who it must be said, was also a habitual liar. This man, whom Perone described as a stiffed-back Bavarian, left Argentina because he was improving cattle in Paraguay and had managed to produce a farm where all the cows gave

birth to twins. Well, who doesn't want that? More milk. Who doesn't want more teat for the milking? But even if Perone hadn't been such a gigantic Nazi supporter, Argentina still had a huge German population that was established even before World War II. And most of those people were Hitler supporters.

Well, again, there are some on vacation. Yeah, they're on vacation. Hey, we're on vacation. That's what Nazis kept saying. And because you know how you do, as long as you never take off your Panama hat, you should never be allowed to be persecuted for war crimes. You're on vacation.

On vacation. And Perone, he just made it easier for Nazis to get to Argentina after the war. The Germans were already there. Right. And Mengele was not happy about having to go to Argentina in the least bit. What the hell, he wants to continue being a farmer?

No, he thought that all this shit was going to fucking blow over, dude. Is this whole idea that it's going to blow over somehow? Yeah, he thought that he tried to save his country from destruction by the Jews. And he had been repaid with a job on a potato farm and a constant fear of being hanged. He was, oh, woe is me about all of it.

Totally delusional. All of this shit is going like, want to go to Argentina. Want to go to Argentina. Always making me, and I made the potatoes a medium size in a perfect, simple way. And making it worse, the journey out of Germany was not going to be an easy one. Although it wasn't quite as clandestine

as people like to make these Nazi escapes. In truth, these guys got out of Germany due to laziness, corruption, and luck. But I will say, I mean, on first look, it's true. A lot of laziness and corruption allowed them to slide through. But there was some pretty embedded systems that ended up springing up real fast. Because the one thing about Nazis

is that they put organizing infrastructure in immediately. They seem to somehow understand how to give orders in a way that people fucking snap to attention. So we'll talk about this right now. Yeah, I mean, orders at the end of a bayonet, that's one good way to do it. Yeah.

So Mengele's path to South America began in Germany and ended in Italy, and in between were five mystery men paid off by Mengele's father, who all went by secret code names. Uh-huh, I wonder what those names could possibly be. Sir Hamburglar, the king of beers, the champagne of beers, Dr. Mephisto, and the lazy thumb. Who the lazy thumb? You never want to mess with him.

Well, escape routes like this one were called rat lines by the Allies. And there were at least four that led just to Argentina, not to mention the ones that went to eight South American countries in addition to Mexico and the United States. As what happens on this fucking show, every other series, the rat lines used by the Nazis should be an entire episode.

Yes. Once you lift the lid off of rat lines to see who was involved in this shit, this stuff gets wiggity, wiggity. You got old school American baddies, the fucking OSS, Vanova Bush, who fucking meets with these guys, basically using them to, first, one line of rat lines started as the OSS flipping Nazis and trying

to get them to get information about Russia. You got Vanova Bush being like, I hear you got this thing with twins going on. That's funny. My eldest daughter has twins, commiserating with these guys. But then the Vatican was also an entire network under its own, if you start researching this whole concept about the Vatican having a fucking office inside

a fucking Vatican city where people would go, because you had to get two forms of paperwork before you could leave. You had to get the fucking Red Cross paperwork, and then you had to get your Argentinian passport. You go there to get your Red Cross paperwork. It was a guy who was just like, welcome to Italy. Me, my name is Carlo.

He acting like he's Italian, but he's a fucking blonde-haired blue-eyed dude with a fucking priest outfit on. You will enter in some murky waters once you start looking into the Vatican rat lines, because there is a whole world of anti-Catholic conspiracy theory that starts with some of my favorite shit in the world, which is like old VHS copies, where you see the lines throughout the thing from the year 2001,

where it's a guy being like, and the Vatican shouldn't be trusted. The octopus arms of the pope are everywhere creating Vatican-led concentration camps. You shouldn't even believe me. Do your own research. OK. Back in the Bill Cooper days, you should believe me.

Do your own research. Do your own research. I can definitely believe the Vatican was up to some shady stuff, though, and that is for certain. Yeah, look into the fucking Vatican's connections to the Croatian massacre and their weird Catholic extermination system they go on there. I mean, there's a lot of sensitive topics in here.

What I think is really fun about this entire subject is how many fun, hotbed topics that we just talked about, one wrong thing. You're going to get a lot of people upset. Oh, yeah. It's a hot topic issue, hot button. Well, the rat lines shouldn't have even been necessary for a family as rich as the mangalas,

because the mangalas could easily afford a fake passport. But Carl Mangala, Joseph's father, had no experience on the black market, and he got duped with a forgery that was said to be so obvious that an idiot would have spotted it. An idiot would have spotted it? An idiot would have spotted it.

Bitter beer face. They had that one guy from Goonsburg that they always tried to run the idiot test pass, because he had a fucking pot in his head, and he went, this looks pretty good mine. And they were like, it's bad. It's bad, though. Do the opposite of what he says.

That's crazy. They should have just drove their tractors. You got all that equipment. That is interesting, his father wouldn't have anything to do with the black market, given the fact that he had government contracts and a whole bunch of shit. He has to have shady business dealings with Mengele and sons.

He was on the up and up. That was the problem. And that's the horrible problem, the horrible truth about all this, is that the Mengele family was on the up and up. Technically, they didn't break any laws. They were working through the government. It was just that the government was being run

by a bunch of fucking psychopaths. This is sort of a trading places moment, though, right? Where they're like, I would love to see, I don't even like to say the guys, whatever, like Donald Trump or something, where they're like, Howard Schultz, just like, no money. You have no money. You just dropped off in Detroit.

I would love to see Howard Schultz figure out how to get gas money and to get a car. Like, watch him do that. Well, you just have money. But no, I mean, Mengele is going to get that first hand. We're going to see he's already in the rough trade. He thinks this is the last bit of farm work he's about to do. He is mistaken.

Yes. Well, instead of just using a fake passport, Mengele had to be smuggled. The first man on the rat line was codenamed Xavier. Oh, yeah, I could see him in, like, bondage gear, ranger wings, all of that. He just got a limelight from 1997. Just a huge dude, and he just, like, bends over,

and he's like, enter. Like, just carry a race insurance team. So I just crawled up and, yeah, yeah, trojan horse. You got to do it. Well, Xavier got Joseph as far as the Brenner crossing, where they were met by an Italian who was codenamed Nino. And he used the codeword Rosemary. Hey, what the letter may use the codename of pizza?

And the word that we eat, you come on. I know stereotypical, but I am an Italian. Man, I'm still pissed off. Rosebud is a sled. Yeah. That's Rosemary, I know. But now I think of the Rosebud. It's a symbol of his childhood.

Ridiculous. Ridiculous. This is how the rat lines worked. OK. Is that you'd go from place to place to place. You'd go and hide. If you were on the Vatican full-on rat line, you'd go from monastery to monastery,

where they would put you in a monk's clothes and you pretend to be a monk for a little while until you move to the next spot. Until you move to the next spot. So these are what modern-day coyotes sort of? Pretty much, yeah, yeah. I mean, they're human track. Right.

Yeah, and Mangala, after Nino, was passed off to codename Irwin. That's not a codename, that's just a name, you nerd. Hey, man, hide in plain sight. I guess so. And Irwin was probably an old friend from Mangala's childhood named Hans Settlemaya, who eventually went on to become the Mangala family lawyer.

Everybody's making money. Codename Irwin brought along a suitcase to pass along to Mangala. And that suitcase contained all of the specimens that Mangala was able to save from his days at Auschwitz, because Mangala still thought that one day he was going to become a respected geneticist. So he thought he had to take all of his Auschwitz samples

with him because he thought, one day, I'm going to make a comeback. And I'm going to need this stuff. Now, Mr. Mangala, what are the better chances here that you're a respected scientist because of all your work, or you're carrying around a bunch of really damaging evidence of your war crimes? What do you think is more likely going to happen?

Six of one half a dozen of us another. And I tell you what, a broken clock is right two times a day. And I'll also say, you've got to watch what you say. And watch what you do. Just leave me alone. My name is Rupert Hatton. Rupert Hatton. After that, Mangala was passed along to codename Kurt.

Again? No. What's his real name, like Buffalo Cactus? Like, why? You can't just have that son of a codename. Well, what if your real name is worse? What if your real name is Blurt? And do you go by it, Kurt, because it's less noticeable

than a man named Blurt? I guess so. Well, Kurt was in charge of the last leg of the journey. And his main task was to acquire an international Red Cross passport for Mangala. Which, if you had an IRC passport, you could pretty much go anywhere in the world. Well, this stuff was done really easily,

because they were dealing with so many refugees. What they were trying to do was basically get as many people that needed to be back to their home countries as fast as humanly possible. And they manipulated this system, knowing that these ID cards can literally be done on a typewriter. So they were just going.

But it all took money to grease all these wheels. One thing that Mangala has over any of the other Nazis specifically, which we'll see, is that he had a lot of family money, because they were all making so much money in the restoration of Germany, they were fucking flush. And so you could just buy your way from spot to spot. And it is hard to think about now with technology the way that it is.

We have all these holograms or whatever on our ID cards. But we learned that with the Bundy tapes also. Even in the 70s in America, it was just like a typewriter. You just put it in, type it out, no picture, nothing. Very easy to do. Well, illegitimate IRC passports were actually the most popular way for Nazis to escape Europe after the war. And a lot of them were helped by the Catholic Church

using one simple trick. See, in order to get an IRC passport, you needed a previous document with your legal name. But the problem was that a lot of these ports had the names of all of these Nazi war criminals. So some Catholic priests would re-baptize Nazis and give them new names, which was perfectly legal. See, that's it.

You're making it up as you go. They're already doing fake shit. They're already wearing a fucking costume and talking to an entity that doesn't exist. What is the extra step of just renaming a bunch of Nazis? But I have to say, in defense of the Catholic Church, this is the last scandal that they ever had. There's been no scandal sets.

So that is why it's like I know we're making the last bad thing. In no way has there been a series of scandals in New York state when they open up the law so people can sue again for child sexual abuse and the hands of priests. It's not going to be just a floodgate full of accusations. Most all of them will be accurate and true. Go get them. Well, because the thing was that Pope Pius at the time,

I forget which number, Pius believed that the Nazis were the only thing standing between Europe and the flood of communism, which was, at the time, an atheistic political system. So they thought that they were doing everything for the name of their keeping the Catholic stronghold, as powerful as they possibly could, and places like Croatia.

We're going to be an example of what it would be like if we could create a Catholic society, which ended up being a bad example. Yeah. Not so great over there. Although they did give us Tony Cuckooch. Yeah, that's nice. Great Chicago boy.

That's good. That's great. He was the Michael Jordan of Croatia. If you want to know, the Michael Jordan of America is Michael Jordan, and then there, Michael Jordan is Tony Cuckooch. But he still played with Michael Jordan. He did.

Yeah, he wasn't quite as good. He was in a room with Michael Jordan several times. Yeah, totally. It's rumored that the Catholic trick was how Mengele got his IRC using the name Helmut Gregor. But Gerald Posner was pretty sure that codenamed Kurt got the IRC by sweet talking an old woman at the Swiss consulate, and the old woman just didn't really seem

to give a fuck one way or another. She's like, yeah, sure, here you go, Helmut Gregor, go ahead. God, a German war criminal sweet talking a lady. I don't know if that really. I don't know how it all works. But there was one more hurdle, and this hurdle was damn near the one that got Mengele caught. Before Mengele was able to leave Genoa by ship,

he had to procure an exit visa from the Italian authorities. But when they went to immigration, codenamed Kurt found that the corrupt official who had been paid off was on vacation. In Argentina. I love Italy. But they are always on vacation. They love vacation.

They are out there. They are real easygoing when it comes to work. And that doesn't seem to mix with the Germans, which I don't even know why they were so friendly to begin with during the war. Explain that, dog meat, as well. Why did the Italian's like, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. But you know what?

Yeah, Italians, for sure, they like vacations. But their economy is doing great. Yeah, they're fine. When everybody was going so well, have a break. Well, when Mengele went to immigration and the guy was on vacation, Mengele tried making it through with just a bribe. That bribe got him thrown right in jail.

Mengele spent three weeks in Italian jail, but seemed to be more upset about the obscene graffiti on the walls of a cell than anything else. All of these simpletons, drawings, their penises on the walls of another single one of them has the veins. And it's like they've never seen one, your simple little lines.

But the penises have drawn correctly. It's absolutely fascinating. And it has so many details. He must be upset, too, because it's hard to be in a jail made of pizza dough. You know, it's sad, because you know you can eat your way out of it. Kissle, come on, we've got to leave these Italians alone.

They'll leave them alone. We've got to be able to be let back in that country. No, I love Italy. Love Italy, great people. Well, Mengele also hated his cellmates, whom he described as a gnome-like street musician. A gnome-like? Gnome-like street musician and a morphine-addicted doctor.

And those people happened to be, it was Bob Dylan, which was incredible, that he was even there at that time period. The way history comes together is incredible. And it was Sherlock Holmes, who's real. Really? Yep. And he's real, and he was a doctor in real life.

This is none of this is fake. No, no, of course not. There is something great. There's a great irony, though, that he's getting the papers, please. He's being demanded his papers. He doesn't have them. This is a little, once again, vengeance.

It's happening on a small level. But just as Mengele was about to give up, the immigration official, who was supposed to have sent Mengele through, showed back up from vacation. Hey, I come and go whenever I'm going to go, huh? I wasn't even supposed to be here until Wednesday. But I come here on a Monday because it's more fun to be on the predictor.

Can you imagine? He's still got sand in his flip flops. He's wearing shorts. He's still got the little thing on his nose for sunscreen. There was a little dollop. He was on a three week vacation. Yeah. Yeah, dude, if you're going to make a lot of vacation.

I'm not even upset with Mengele. But what about the gnome-like person? He's just like, I could have gotten out of here too, you know. No one allows me to play my flute. There's a happy medium between us Americans working constantly in three to four week vacations from the Italians. There's a middle ground. We're working ourselves to death for no real reason

whatsoever, but sure. Yeah. No real reason other than we demanded of each other. All right. Well, the official, once he got back from vacation, he quickly freed one of the worst war criminals of the 20th century and sent him on his way to Buenos Aires with a suitcase full of Auschwitz notes and blood samples.

And when you're in Buenos Aires, I was just there. You're going to want to go to the skimpy crapper. It's a really, really great trip. Yeah, the skimpy crapper. That's where I'm going to want to go, pop on the floor. You tell me where I want to go. You hear where I'm coming from. I'm going to the first place.

It's got sausage. And if they don't have it, they got some explaining to do. Oh, yeah. No, you want to go to a place called Becky Tubes. They're all tube meats made by a woman named Becky, you see. But when Mangala arrived in Argentina, things went wrong almost immediately. He was supposed to have been met by a doctor

with the implausible name of Rolf Nuckert. Oh, man. Well, he, of course, he drowned in a sea of fudge. So he was not able to make it. He was only three inches tall. And so he was either fudge or peanut butter, whatever it was, the silly and sassy this way for that little man his guy.

But Rolf was nowhere to be found. Rolf never showed up. We have no idea what happened to him. I think we know. Mangala's notes almost got discovered as well. But luckily for Mangala, the customs doctor who was called over to look through Mangala's suitcase didn't understand a word of German.

So he just stared at him for a bit, shrugged, and sank Mangala through. What about the blood samples? You just take blood samples anywhere you go now? Yeah, yeah. This is jam. This is jam from Zephine's boys and berries of Bavaria. So be careful with them, if you would.

But since Mangala had nowhere else to go, he roomed with two Italians that he'd befriended on the long journey from Genoa and checked into a windowless room while he looked for work. But also note that every single time in all of his diaries, because there is information we have from his diaries that he wrote that he gave to his son. So every time he met somebody, he hated them.

He met these Italian people that took care of him. And he was just like, these spaghetti monsters. That's what I call them, those spaghetti monsters. He was so mad at everyone. Of course. Because all he wanted to be was in fucking Bavaria with his weird little fishing pole that had no gear on it, which is somehow all the children fished with that in Germany.

I mean, he's so disgusting. He probably wanted to be back in Auschwitz. Yeah. I mean, he's so nasty. That's his dream. That was his heaven on earth. Well, what his dream was, he would rather be back in, he would rather be in a respected professorship

with Auschwitz behind him. That's what Mengele wanted. That's where he wanted to be eventually. That's where he thought he deserved to be. But instead, he was visiting textile manufacturers hat in hand to see if there were any managerial positions open. But the only option that Mengele had there was something called a woolcomber on the factory floor.

He's like cousin Eddie from Christmas vacation. Oh, he's holding up for a management position. He's holding up for a management position. You lazy bastard. So after languishing in the single room for a while, Mengele finally hooked up with some of the other Nazis who had made their home in Argentina. And Mengele began what was an infuriatingly easy decade.

Yes, this is a part of it that's really tough, is that he started making his way here. He got into, he started working menial labor, which he hated. But then he started getting into it. I was watching, it was fun. A part of the research was going through the rat lines, was watching old timey date lines of Sam Donaldson discovering these old Nazis hanging out,

like going and meeting these 80-year-old Nazis. And they all have the same exact reaction, where it's Sam Donaldson be like, is your name William Fripka from Bavaria? And it's just them going like, they all have the same reaction of, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like the cat that makes the weird noises in the YouTube video. That's a YouTube video.

You got to check it out. Henry says it to me. Germans can't lie because they don't like improv. They don't know how to be creative. So they're really funny when they try to lie. Their lies are very interesting, because then they'll say, he's like, yeah, I mean, in 1945, I was William Fripka. Yes.

He's like, well, what are you now? I was like, oh, now I'm Hans Müller. And you're like, no, no, no, no, it doesn't change. You can't just lie like that. That's not how improv works. Different person, phoenix rising from the ashes. Oh, yeah. Well, during that time, Mengele hung out with other Nazi war

criminals, but none of them were as infamous or sought after than the main architect of the entire Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann had made a narrow escape to Argentina. And while Mengele was only mentioned at the Nuremberg trials, Eichmann was a star in absentia. See, at the time, Mengele had never been actively hunted. Eichmann had been hunted from the beginning. And as a result, he was a deserved wreck of a human being,

living penniless with his family under the name Ricardo Clement. Oh, of course, he looks just like Ricardo Clement. He looks completely like Ricardo. Of course. Mengele said that he had no respect for Eichmann, whom he considered a broken man. But Mengele also had it a hell of a lot easier. He was still living on the Mengele and son's dime.

Most Nazis, like Henry said, most Nazis came out of the war with nothing, but Mengele was a rich kid. And getting richer and richer, it seems like. Getting richer all the time. I don't like this nepotism. No, in Mengele, he just kind of chugged through the 50s. Irene, his wife, she left him in 1954

for a shoe salesman named Alphonse Hackenjoes. The Al Bundy of Argentina. Yep. But that wasn't much of a surprise. But Irene, she didn't leave Mengele up because of what he'd done in Auschwitz. She left him because she was lonely. But it's also this other weird, because they're all

obsessed with little Bavaria. They're all obsessed with these little German towns, with the castles, and little ponds. And they wish to be there. And Irene didn't join her husband, Argentina, because of racist reasons. Just straight up being like, oh, I don't want to go down there. So what is nice is that this begins a period of time,

is that while Mengele is vaguely comfortable, he is also completely alone. Because he can't trust anybody. Because Eichmann was falling apart this whole time. And all these other guys are falling apart. But him, with rigid discipline, knew he had to constantly be vigilant in covering up his identity.

Yeah, not too long after his divorce, Mengele got married again to his brother's widow. All in a plot to secure his place in the family and the company. You know, that's interesting. This is actually not a story that's talked about very much. But when Beau Biden died, his brother married his widow. Yeah?

And it just happened. And that's their business. But I know they look very similar. I'm just saying it's a little bit weird. I don't care what the Biden family died. I don't care either. I'm just saying it's a little strange to go with the widow of your brother.

That's all I'm saying. It happens. I know it happens. It happens. It happens. I guess, you know, horny for brother one, horny for brother two. I don't know if that's a proper way to put it.

I don't know. Well, this was the Mengele family's plan. If Mengele was a part of the company officially, then it could be seized as reparations. And this is a big thing in Europe. And this was a process, the reparations for Jews, that continued for decades. The family, this is actually true.

I found this out. The family of research assistant Rachel, her boyfriend, his family, they actually got an apartment building in Berlin in the 90s that had been taken by the Nazis back in the 30s. With reparations. With reparations, yeah. And all I got was a couple of goofy hats for my grandfather.

Honestly, he just had all these traditional, he had a traditional Scottish hat and traditional Polish hat. And that's all he ever gave me out of fucking World War II. So somehow you did. My grandfather was in Italy, and he was stuck in a tunnel for a long time. But he got to see the dead body of Mussolini. And he told me that quite a number of times.

That's fun. It's interesting that you've, first of all, I definitely believe your grandfather was literally stuck in a tunnel for the most of the war. Hey, man, we are an underground people. It is incredible, though, somehow you've made World War II, the Holocaust, Mengele about you. And your people deserving reparations.

And about gifts. And about just getting stuff. You might view all of this as a superpower, something that is to be envy that I can do no matter what. Yeah, yeah. Well, the thing about Mengele is that if he renounced his share of Mengele and sons and married his brother's widow, then he could still retain control

while setting the company free of any reparation obligations on a technicality. Then you get the fun thing where you get to goosh on top of your brother's goosh. Disgusting. But this is really what's fascinating, that he had this successful business. And the war was great for them.

Still successful to this day. Still going crazy. And to make it proper, Mengele even went to Switzerland in 1956, complete with a risky two-hour stopover here in New York City, where some of Mengele's victims still live in Jewish communities to this day. Well, which is the, if you look at Marathon Man, it's that whole story of them.

Matter, matter. I like seeing the fucking Nazi dude walking through the streets and shit like that. He's also strange enough in New York City around the same time that L. Ron Hubbard was in New York City. Well, I mean, he just had a layover at LaGuardia. I think it's fun. Let me have this.

Just imagining them meet each other, them sharing an airport ketchup soup, you know what I mean? Just talking about ideas. LaGuardia wasn't a very nice airport. Well, Mengele made it to Switzerland and met his son Rolf upon his arrival. But Mengele did not say hi, it's Daddy Mengele. He said, hi, I am Uncle Fritz.

Ah, wink, wink. No one will ever know. I mean, of course, Rolf was easy to find. He was being rolled down the street for the meeting. Very fun, big old boy there. Well, there in Switzerland, Mengele promised to marry Martha. That's his brother's widow.

But apparently at some point, Irene had run into Mengele and said something that had stuck with Mengele for the rest of his life. She told him that if there was anything that was going to give him away as the angel of death, it was going to be that gigantic fucking forehead of his. Whoa. Hey, you better watch out for that big fucking forehead

of yours. Let's just all fucking cool it for a second. I'm here on just a layover. And I have to go back to shit town USA really soon. Let's quit with the roasting of me. So when Mengele got back to Buenos Aires, he got plastic surgery to make his forehead smaller. Although I don't know how the hell you do that.

You can't. You can only raise your eyebrows. So no, your eyebrows are just in the middle of what is obviously a long forehead. No, they talked about this actually resulted in him being scarred for the rest of his life. It is a surgery. And this is true in which they cut the hairline

and scoot it forward like it's a mat, like in front of your door, where they push it toward the thing and essentially like staple it back in closer to your eyebrows to make it look like it's smaller and smaller. But the guy that he got was like a discount guy. Yeah. He was a guy that was willing to do it on the black market for cash.

And it fucked up his whole head. And in the middle of the surgery, Mengele had to take the surgeon's hands off of him. Because as he was watching him do it, he knew he wasn't doing it right. Oh my god. That is interesting. I mean, this man was so vain that he scarred his own body.

Yeah. And instead, he just wore hats for the rest of his life. Why didn't you just do that in the first place? Save yourself the scalping and just wear a cap. And guess what? And nowadays, there's a lot of fun hats you can wear. I'm discovering it in my time period. It's a lot of different ways you can cover your head.

You can use a wrap. You can just get one of those big skull caps like the hackers used to wear in the 90s. Sure. Remember in the movie, the net. Yeah. That's fun. You just can't wear any red hats for the next five years.

That's the only thing. But Mengele's paranoia is a constant paradox. Because by 1956, he was also so confident that people weren't searching for him that he got a West German passport under his own name through a fellow Nazi named Werner Junkers. Just as Christ. I just love these assholes.

Werner Junkers, for some reason, I view that as a poor name, a poor actor who's known for having the world's biggest balls. Yeah. Yeah, I could definitely see it. Werner Junkers. The only man with square testicles. It's really bizarre.

I'll make this horrible fucking male-born actor noises with these huge balls slapping against the back of her legs like they're being bad. Oh, my goodness. Mengele, at this time, he even felt safe enough to meet up with another war criminal. He met up with Walter Routh, the murderer of Milan, who had developed mobile gas vans that

were responsible for 97,000 deaths. Jesus. And they just sat around talking about what they considered to be the better times. Oh, my god. See, that is being a fly on the wall, though. That would be freaking fascinating to hear those two jig-offs talk.

It would be. Hell, dude, you could look up Martha Mengele in the phone book. Not that you'd want to, but if you did, she'd be there. Yeah, under M. Yeah. Yeah, good work. That's good. Are you waiting a second? Are you a famous Nazi hunter?

I know a thing or two about phone books. Remember those? No, I remember. No, I remember those. Else about it. Man, when you needed a book to look up the names of better simpler names. Yeah, remember that Dewey Decimal System.

Oh, yeah. Who the hell is Dewey, you know? Well, even though the Americans and the Soviets had given up the search for Mengele, the people had not forgotten. Hermann Langbein had been a political prisoner at Auschwitz and had been working tirelessly for years to bring Mengele to justice.

He was one of hundreds of amateur Nazi hunters who had taken up the task by using crocass as their Bible, working their way through archives, tracking down Nazis, and notifying the authorities once they found them. And Langbein had never believed that Mengele had died in the war. And the divorce papers from Irene Mengele

proved that Mengele was still alive. OK. But the news that someone was looking for him had reached Mengele pretty damn fast. So Mengele packed up his entire life and fled to Paraguay and stayed there. Now, once he got out, because it's true, because he had this set up life.

And he was doing a little bit of being a doctor. He was starting to set up a little office. He was a carpenter for a little while who was doing this kind of thing. Things were kind of settling into normalcy for him. And then this shit ripped up his whole life. He had to go to Paraguay, which at the time was not a very developed place.

It was known as a sea of criminals and criminality. It was a sketch-as-fuck place to live, and it was mostly barren farmland. So he went out there to, he got a severe demotion in lifestyle. Yeah, he went and settled in a place that was seriously called Nueva Bavaria. Hey, all right, New Bavaria.

Yeah, New Bavaria. Yeah. And he was there with just thousands of other Nazis that had fled to Paraguay, because Perone, he wasn't doing too great in Argentina either. No, the people weren't happy starving. No, they were like, we could go for some food. Yeah, they were not too happy either.

So yeah, I mean, Paraguay was, I mean, they said it was like a smuggler's paradise. So it was just this country full of criminals, regular people, of course, and Nazis. Jesus, that is, that'd be a fun place to see like a Hunger Games type thing, you know? Can you imagine the yelp of a whole Nazi community, just everything with one star, just being like,

not pure enough? How contankerous it must be, hanging out with these fucking Nazi neighbors. And it's not just war. Everybody's on the run. And it's not just Nazis. It is like war criminal Nazis. It is communities of war criminals,

the worst of the worst Nazis. And meanwhile, an indictment for Mengele had been drawn up back in Germany by a judge seriously named Robert Mueller. Interesting. Yeah. The Germans. Germany sought extradition from Argentina.

But by that point, Mengele had already gotten an ID card in Paraguay with his new identity, Jose Mengele. Of course, Spanish now, Jose Mengele. You could just see it adds a little bit more hip movement. It adds a little bit more like, you know, like you could get to the Ricardo loud. You could get that in there.

He's playing bongos. Definitely the kind of guy who gets one of those big drinks at TGI Fridays that has multiple, you know, two straws. But he's drinking for one. And maybe you can light on fire a little bit when the tequila is just right. And then he says, I know it's Monday, but in here it's Friday. In here it's Friday.

I know this is a drink for four people, but let's say I'm drinking for a family tonight. And they're like, oh, this guy. Jose Mengele. Then in 1959, Mengele's father suddenly died back in Goonsburg. He's still at his dad's. He's like, oh, it's crazy.

Yeah. Now, a lot of people thought that Mengele might try to make it back, with even the German version of the FBI attending the funeral in hopes of capturing him. But all they found was a wreath with a sash that read, grisa de ferne, greetings from afar. Even then, he is mysterious and a fucking Nazi about it. Yeah.

But Germany wasn't the only country interested in Mengele. Although the Americans and the Soviets had pretty much moved on from the Holocaust, there was still one country that was holding what you might call a bit of a grudge. Iran. Is it Iran? Yeah, that's the one. Australia.

Australia. Yeah, you were upset. Israel. Awesome. Of course. See, one of those amateur Nazi hunters had managed to locate Adolf Eichmann and had reported this to an official

that they trusted in the West German government. Problem was that this official didn't trust anyone else in the government to not tip Eichmann off. So this guy, Fritz Bauer, who was AG of the West German state of Hesse, he kicked the information over to the Israeli Secret Service, the Mossad, and said, maybe you guys can do something with this. Yeah, I think we can figure out what to do with it.

I think we have some ideas, I think, yeah? And the Mossad is a whole other basket of fish here. Oh, yeah. That it's got, they do a lot of intense shit. You could see why they were pretty upset. And maybe some of that, the energy, would kind of fuel them. Yeah. Maybe go get a couple.

My understanding, if they're kind of happy, it's still not fun, you know? They're intense. And the Mossad figured, if they were going to get Eichmann, they might as well grab Mengele, too. And Eichmann had been found almost by accident by a German Jew living in Argentina named Lothar Hermann. And they got strong names, man.

These are some thick ass names. Yeah, yeah. And in the midst of Lothar's search for Eichmann, Lothar's daughter, Sylvia, had started dating a German boy named Nicholas. OK. Eichmann. Oh, that's not good.

That's like Romeo and Juliet. Yeah, kind of, if they're war criminals. Even though Eichmann himself had changed his name to Ricardo Clement, his ego would not let the Eichmann name die. So his children still had the surname Eichmann. My name is Ricardo Clement. I'm a pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays.

You don't know me. Exactly. You could be a center fielder for the Padres with that name. Yeah, yeah. And these kids, they weren't shy about bragging that their father was a big shot in Germany during the war. Maybe you shut the fuck up, kids. Maybe you shut the fuck up.

And so the daughter, as soon as she found out who she was, she flipped and she was suddenly a spy. But to travel all the way to Argentina for Eichmann was going to wipe out most of Assad's budget for that year. So in order to make it really, really, really worth it, they wanted to scoop up Mengele on the trip as well. These guys don't have airline points? Israel was a new nation.

They were very new. I mean, this is 1960. Israel was established in what, 47? Somewhere around there? Somewhere around there, yeah. And Israel also was trying to not get killed by every other country around them at the time. Right, it was an issue that still not quite resolved.

Still not quite, yeah, it's still a bit contentious here. So on May 11, 1960, Mossad agents waited at Eichmann's bus stop and waited for him to return from work after a day as an assembly line foreman at the local Mercedes-Benz plant. Still with the fucking German-made cars. Because you know they tried to get him at the Dodge plant. And he was just like, whoa, no, no.

I mean, that is crazy to think that someone has a car that Eichmann probably helped put together. Now Eichmann walked past two Mossad agents who were looking under the hood of their car, pretending like the thing was broken down. But just as Eichmann walked past the rear of the car, the door swung open, foreman jumped him, and they dragged him inside.

Got you, bitch. And as they put opaque goggles over his face and drove him to the Israeli safe house, all Eichmann had to say was this. I am resigned to my fate. But the Mossad agent's plane wasn't set to leave until May 20. So the Mossad agents had just nine days to find Mengele.

OK. Unfortunately, though, Mengele was long gone from Argentina by the time 1960 rolled around. He's over in Paraguay. He's in Paraguay. But no one knew that, except for all the rest of the fucking Nazis. But still, Eichmann, that's a pretty big get.

It's a good get. That was a good get. So they stuck him on a plane and brought him back to Israel. Now Argentina and a few people in the international community, they criticized Israel for kidnapping Eichmann on foreign soil. And so Argentina demanded that he be returned. But Israel pretty much just said, fucking make me,

and put him on trial instead. OK, good. During his trial, Eichmann claimed that he had nothing to do with killing Jews, and he's never killed a Jew, and he never ordered anyone to kill a Jew. How would I even do that? Why would I even do that? How would that even happen?

What is a Jew? What is the word is? That's stopped by the word is. He definitely did. He was the architect of the entire Holocaust. Oh, yeah, he's a villain, yay. Well, what's funny is that some in Israel actually said that Eichmann wasn't even really an anti-Semite.

Rafi Eitan, who led the operation to capture Eichmann, said, quote, he himself never hated Jews. That was my feeling. That's the banality of evil. Tomorrow, tell him to kill French people, and he would do the same. Interesting. Well, they said the same thing about Mengele.

The next big project was the Polish. Yeah. The whole Polish. The goal was to start with the Jewish people, and the Romani people, and all of the dissidents. And the next was to move on to my people. And then once again, we've gotten to Henry's people. Somehow.

I just know for a fact that I am the center of this universe, and everyone else is a figment of my imagination. Yes. Wow. That interesting. I love you both. I love you both. OK, all right, just checking.

Yeah, let's go. And so Eichmann was hanged on December 15, 1961, after having a last meal of white wine and cigarettes. What, is he Lindsay Lohan? Yeah, that is like a David Bowie phase there towards the end. Eichmann was cremated, and his ashes were dumped at sea without ceremony. Now, this whole operation naturally scared the shit

out of Joseph Mengele. And it also reinvigorated the search for the bastard. Extradition papers finally went through in Argentina, and Mengele's face and crimes were plastered over every paper in South America. This took a long time. This took a really long time. Think about this.

And there was a largely, I mean, obviously, I did a bad job with it. I can't remember his name. There was one man that was pursuing for the rights to get a criminal investigation going in Europe, because they were having a hard time piecing all together. And there was one guy who basically went and compiled as much evidence as he could.

And it worked. It finally got through and got to Argentina. And then, of course, it didn't help that Mengele published his book if I did it. And, you know, people were like, I think. Tiny if, always with a tiny if. Tiny if, yeah. Of course, Mengele used this opportunity

to feel sorry for himself and blame the Jews for the quote unquote lies in the paper. This is what he wrote in his journal. Like the rain that has covered the earth, sorrow has come over me. And sometimes you just have to sit in the bath, and I get a Yankee candle, and I hate to name Yankee candle. But I love the sense because it's grass.

It's not a nice smell. And I put on my wit mean. I just think one day I will rise. I will glow up from this. His paranoia finally reached the point where he left Paraguay altogether and resettled in Brazil. Outside of the town of Sao Paulo. Well, not town, the city of Sao Paulo.

He settled there with a friend that he nicknamed Lange. Do you know what that means, Ben? Do you? Do you know, Castle? Langer? Lange. Lange? Lange.

I think that means potato pancakes. No, that could mean. Let's see. What would he nickname his buddy? I'm going to say moose. Does it mean moose? No. It means cheese.

Technically long. But what it translates fully to is the tall man. Weird. So Mengele went and he befriended a tall German. Was it redhead? No, there's a lot of actually tall Germans. There's a taller people than most people. You wouldn't even think about that usually.

But yeah, there's actually a lot of tall. It seems weird to hit the tall. No, it does. And he hits the tall and is like, I know one family from Germany. Yeah, I know. Yeah, there is one. That was exceptionally tall. And you're the runt.

Kissel is the runt of the family. No, obviously, no, that's not a Kissel there. We are big. We're described as big, not tall tall. You've got to do the Kambi Matambo anti-Nazi. No, no, no, no, no, no, that's what they always do. Well, this guy, Wolfgang Gerhardt, was what you might call a real piece of work.

Gerhardt had gone to Brazil in 1948, not because he was a war criminal, but because he couldn't stand what ally-infested Germany had become. Brazil is a beautiful place. Gerhardt hadn't even fought in the war. He was too young to fight in the war. He just wanted the freedom to publish

his very own little anti-Semitic fascist newspaper called Der Reich's Brief without people getting all weird about it. Oh, it just sounds like a German term for skid marks. Yeah, it really does. Gerhardt was such a Nazi asshole that he even put a swastika on top of his Christmas tree. Yes.

And his wife was even worse. She gave their landlady two bars of Auschwitz soap, made from the corpses of inmates, as a Christmas gift. That's why I mean, when you handed our gift, Kessel, when you handed us a gift for our wedding, I was so scared to open it for a second. But then it was lovely. It was a very nice book that I purchased,

because I thought you might like it. Interesting. So I mean, they were pretty open about being Nazis. And I guess Brazil was safe. I mean, they weren't like, oh, we put the holocaust. We put the swastika on our tree with any luck. People will think we're Buddhist. They were pretty open about it.

Exactly, they think we're ancient Indian. Yeah. But he said that. I remember one quote I just meant from Gerhardt, being like, von muss always take care of the swastika, as he would take it in and out of the, because he had it all wrapped up in protective paper in a box.

Interesting. But that Christmas with the Gerhards was the worst of Mengele's life, because his second wife, Martha, had left him and returned to Germany. Oh, he didn't get to play Santa Claus again? No, he did not. Oh, this is what Mengele wrote in his journal. Again, Christmas has passed.

It was one of the most unenjoyable I have ever spent in my life. The details are so sad that I don't even want to talk about it. But I will remember it for the rest of my days. He starts to sound like my mom the one year we forgot to get her a birthday cake. There was one year that we forgot it.

And every year now, she's like, did you get me a cake? Like she's waiting to be disappointed. Oh, yeah. No, you can do anything. You can buy your parents a car. But you didn't remember a birthday cake. One year.

10 years ago. One year. You will never live that down. But for Gerhard, this was the best Christmas ever. Since he'd been too young to fight, being in charge of hiding one of the most notorious Nazis in history made him the happiest he'd been since he got to name his own son Adolf.

Oh my god. He's fucking fanboys. He's such a fucking jacket. Fanboys. Oh, Nazis are the worst. Oh my god. Well, it was through Gerhard that Mengele, under the name of Peter Hochbickler,

was introduced to Hungarian expats Giza and Gita Stammer as a possible manager for their 37-acre farm. Meanwhile, newspapers back in Argentina were turning Mengele into a super spy, claiming that a Mossad agent had been sent to seduce and kill Mengele. But before she had the chance, Mengele flung her to her death from the top of a cliff.

Oh my goodness. And Nazi hunter Simon Weisenthal, who was known to tell a tall tale or two in his day, embellished the false narrative even further, saying that this woman had been sterilized by Mengele himself at Auschwitz and had been killed after Mengele spotted her camp tattoo at a hotel dinner dance. I just have to say this when it comes to tall tale.

What's wrong with being tall or a tale that might be longer or taller than other tales? I just think this is ingrained heitism that we need to talk about. You never hear a lie called a short tale. Well, in reality, Mengele was spending 13 years on a farm called Cerro Negra, 98 miles north of São Paulo in Brazil, miserable and paranoid.

And some think that this contrast between reality and fantasy was why he was never caught, because it seems like everyone was on the lookout for the Mengele from the boys from Brazil. They all wanted Gregory Peck in a white suit living in a villa surrounded by dogs and bodyguards, trying to make Hitler clones in the jungle. You don't think he didn't want that?

I mean, I think in a perfect world, yeah. That's a great movie, by the way. It's awesome. Boys from Brazil, they don't make them like that anymore. They don't, and it's definitely the only time you'll ever see Gregory Peck and Steve Gutenberg in the same movie. I think so.

And I think that that was put in Gregory Peck's will to be like destroy any other evidence that I was ever in the same room of Steve Gutenberg. Instead, Mengele was actually spending his time brooding and writing nonsense bullshit like his 40-page, quote, childhood opus, which dedicated a full page and a half just to his time in the womb.

I tell you what, if it was small, it was fat. I hated it. It's like, what are we doing here? What is the deal with this tiny room? What is the deal with being a baby? Interesting. Or Mengele would write half-hearted love poetry to get a stammer who banged Mengele on the regular.

Here's a poem called Quiet Love. That's AKA German love. I don't like it. The only met so late, then we both had experienced how bitter life could be. Your love is never loud, and quiet your words and gestures, a fine smile, our secret knowledge. The secret knowledge is dingleberries.

Yes, it's fucking asshole. Because they're both just disgusting working on the farm all day. Well, Mengele, he knew people were after him. His paranoia was so bad that he actually had a watchtower built on the farm, where he'd go for hours scanning the countryside with binoculars.

They also said that he was so anxious. He developed health problems that they first thought maybe was cancer. He was having a problem. Long times, he was constantly complaining about his health and how bad he hurt and his aches and pains. But he actually had this thing, was that he had a big walrus mustache.

And out of pure anxiety, he used to chew on his mustache so much that his belly got filled with hair. He had this huge hairball in the center of his fucking guts called a bezel lock that he thought was killing him the entire time. He was like a cat. He was like a cat eating his own hair. The thing is, the Mossad did almost get him in 1962.

One agent had caught the trail of Wolfgang Gerhardt, the tall man. And that agent believed that he'd actually met Mengele at one point. But when he went back to Paris to report his findings, he found that the Mossad task force had been reassigned to the kidnapping of an eight-year-old girl. And then a year later, the agent in charge of finding Mengele

retired. And that ended the Mossad investigation. You can't retire until the job is done. Have you not watched Lethal Weapon? No, it's the opposite. You've got to retire before the job gets too involved. And then you become what? Too old for this shit.

I'm surprised the Mossad wasn't a little bit more aggr- I mean, I guess Ikemen is the big get, right? Yeah, Ikemen's the big get. But they also had other, they had a lot of shit to deal with. No, yeah, for sure. Well, all Mengele did for the entirety of the 60s was make life miserable for both himself and the Stammers. His Mengele was half owner of the farm

where he lived with the Stammers. Again, he used the Mengele money. And just as they depended on him for his wealth, he depended on them for his safety. And he resented him for it. As such, Mengele became bossy and authoritarian. No, authoritarian and bossy Mengele. Demanding that the Stammers never

speak their native Hungarian at the dinner table lest they plot against him. He legitimately came Jerry Stiller from King of Queens. He was this loudmouth old man who called anything that wasn't German low-minded chattering. He would go at them about every single time anybody had. He had something to say about everybody's bullshit on the farm. He was the worst roommate in the world.

They called him an impossible man. I believe that. How old is he here? Is he in his 60s? He's his late 50s at this point. He's about 58, 59, yeah. Unbelievable, he's got to live. I know it's not the greatest life,

but it's unbelievable he's got to live a life. And a lot of people who didn't commit war crimes have lived worse lives. Yeah, well, up until the very end, he lived in total secrecy. He would wear low-flow hats. He wouldn't go anywhere. He literally kept completely to himself.

He had almost no friends except for the Stammers. Well, that's the thing is that Geza, the guy that owned the farm with his wife Gita and Mengele, Geza would give Mengele a shit right back. He'd just sit there and provoke him. And Geza would sit there and ridicule Mengele's race theories. He'd tell him, I'm a Hungarian.

I'm just as good as you fucking Aryans. And Mengele would get furious. They'd sit there and have screaming matches. Yeah, the cartoon steam comes out of his ears. His hat spins upon his head, six inches above. You got some splitting to do. Was that Pedro? And since Geza wouldn't take a shit,

and the Stammer children just tried to ignore Mengele, because I mean, can you imagine that? You have a war criminal. I mean, just walk it around your house. They knew, right? They had to know. They knew, yeah. So why didn't they just, if he was

such a colossal pain in the ass, why didn't they just be like, yo, by the way, authorities, we got this guy? Or maybe they would find themselves in trouble for harboring him for 10 years. Who knows? Yeah, they owed him. And they had known who he was for quite a long time. They were also using his money.

Everybody was using each other. This was no man's land. They're out here like it is. It's intense, hard living that they're doing. And so they were getting something out of it too. And they couldn't fully connect to his crimes, because so much shit had come out about it. And it's like what you even hear when we were just

describing crimes at Auschwitz. It's very difficult for them to believe. No one had done the true crime reading that we have it. You know that sometimes people will do unbomberable things when they believe that they're completely validated. He was, they just didn't know. And they didn't know the full extent.

Yeah. And since Gezer wouldn't take his shit, and the Stammer children just try to ignore him, Gita Stammer was the only one left to listen to Mangala. And she'd have to hear him lecture about philosophy, morality. He would lecture for hours about the housekeeping budget. I would rather listen to BTK.

I would rather listen to him do poetry. Yeah, it's very similar. And it sounds like Ted Bundy, when he was on the move, the same shit, between his intense paranoia, but also the need to lecture and show everybody how advanced he is for everybody else. Yeah, Mangala would even freak out about the placement of the pencils in the pens.

He'd yell at the Stammers if the writing utensils weren't put back exactly what they were supposed to be after the Stammers had used them. You know where that is. My rectum. And my rectum. My rectum. As far as the workers on the farm went,

the workers only knew him as Pedro, the silent morose boss who would signal orders instead of speaking them using the same movements that he'd use on the raps at Auschwitz. There's something very Nazi about this guy. Have you noticed? Like, Pedro seems like a workable type. Yeah, he's crazy uptight.

Eventually, the Stammers couldn't stand Mangala anymore, so Gerhardt began to integrate Mangala into another set of friends in the hopes that one of them would take the disagreeable old fuck off the Stammers' hands. They tried to pawn Mangala. That needs to be a movie, pawning Mangala. Maybe a reality show.

It's what we did with my horrible grandmother. Used mover from place to place. Finally, Gerhardt found a match. The farm was sold, and Mangala was passed off to Wolfram Bossert. Mangala and Bossert hit it off almost immediately, finding they had quite a bit in common when it came to certain opinions.

Interesting. Well, they met on nazidate.com. They loved the Dallas Cowboys. Oh, yeah, sure. And both were huge fans of memory phone toppers. That's it. Yeah, because that's difficult. Because some people like it squishy.

I like it squishy. Yeah, yeah, no memory foam. Yeah, it's nice. So eventually, Mangala came clean once again, and Wolfram helped Mangala to integrate back into city life in Sao Paulo. His Mangala, when he was in the city, he had the habit of covering his face with his hands

like a scared little bitch every time he walked past someone on the street. No one will think I'm a ghoul if I cover my hands like a ghoul. Wolfram told that probably wasn't a good idea, because he said, you know, Sao Paulo has a population in the millions, but there's only one weird old German who's walking around covering his face with his hands all the time.

I am Nosferatu. I'm certain there was at least 10 other Germans who were doing the same thing. Well, eventually Mangala moved into a tiny yellow bungalow on the shitty side of Sao Paulo in 1975. Holy hell. Grape and buy on $250 a month and plagued with spinal pains, migraines, insomnia, prostate problems, rheumatism,

and a permanent swelling in one leg as a result of a tropical insect bite. His main companion during that time of loneliness was his 16-year-old gardener, Luis Rodriguez, who would come over to Mangala's house on Sundays so they could watch the wonderful world of Disney together. But he would still scream at the television

about the decadence of America. So you literally have him watching Mickey Mouse, being like, Mickey thinks he's so funny, he's solving mysteries, solving mysteries with him. I believe that Donald Duck, he is the vanille root for him. Oh my goodness. That's ridiculous. That's something only a Nazi would say.

Well, of course, Walt Disney, he had some affiliations with the Nazis as well. He did not. Well, he did not? No, he did not. Are you sure? I am sure. That was a rumor that was started by unions.

Because while he was not a Nazi, he was very anti-worker. He was not great to his workers. So those were rumors that were started back during union negotiations. How can it be nice? Walt Disney was not an anti-Semite. It just sounds like Marcus is covering up for the Disney crime.

It is possible. Maybe you're good for our career, though. I fucking love Donald Duck. Oh, wow. Wow. Put some pants on. I'm sure. It's a little bit too much.

Get your cock out of the back of that duck there. My goodness, gracious. And Walt Disney being all mean to those cartoon characters like that, give him a living wage. My god, Mickey wants to marry Minnie for crying out loud. Well, it was during this time that Mengele's son, Rolf, came to visit after a separation of 21 years. He begged his son because he would send letter

after letter to Rolf being like, I've heard news about you, but I'm just the shame that I had to hear it from other people and not from you. And sounding again like my mom, doing the thing where he's just guilting him and guilting him. And then when he finally agreed to come to visit him, he sent him this gigantic Byzantine series of directions of leave here, get a fake passport, go all the way,

do all the stuff to try to sneak your way into the country. But then Rolf was just like, I just kind of look like my buddy, so I used his passport. Yeah. And I went over there. And of course, little known fact about Rolf, the way that he got there, he actually had a cork in his butt. And he had had that the entire, for 21 years.

He pulled it, and then he sort of thwarted his way to Mengele. Isn't that strange, like a blip? It is cute. It's cute. Yeah, it's fun. On the two weeks that they spent together, Rolf found that his father was kind of an asshole. Really?

What? Dad, you're like, well, I would love to hear the family fight between Rolf and Mengele. Well, what the? I don't want your life. Varsity blues. Well, it kind of seems like what it was, is that it was just kind of an awkward two weeks of Rolf

trying to get his father to even admit just a tiny bit that maybe what he did in Auschwitz was a little fucked up. Oh, my god. Because Rolf had been here in this shit his entire life. And Rolf was definitely, I mean, he was like, yeah, that shouldn't, he shouldn't have done that. That was fucking awful. Right.

And so Rolf left unsatisfied, just like everyone listening right now, is about to leave unsatisfied. No, we've just done this for three hours. I cannot be unsatisfied. No, man, that's just called the experience of being with the last podcast. OK, well, we're making it up if it's unsatisfying at the end. Well, on the afternoon of February 7, 1979,

Joseph Mengele had a stroke while swimming in the ocean. And he died. No, no, no, he just drowned. He just drowned. Well, if you watch that documentary, Iconoclast, there are conspiracy theories that he was drowned by the Mossad and left. But the thing is, is that they would have claimed it

if they did it. I imagine. Well, what I did not drown, they'd know he had there was very multiple witnesses to say like he was swimming, he had a stroke, and he fucking sank like a stone. Well, what I'm doing in my head right now is because I watched the lively footage of Gaddafi out

of Libya and putting Mengele's head on Gaddafi. Yeah, that's a bad way to go. Well, meanwhile, the rest of the world kept looking for Mengele. Nazi hunter Weisenthal said that Mengele was in a Nazi colony in Chile. In 1981, the New York Post reported that Mengele had been seen in Westchester.

That's where my grandparents were. Interesting. Well, what finally spurred the last push to find Mengele was the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1985. West Germans finally raided the home of the Mengele family lawyer and found a letter from Wolfgang Bessert, announcing, quote, the death of our common friend.

Authorities traced the letter back to Wolfram in Sao Paulo, where they found a shrine built to Mengele in Wolfram's house still on display six years after Mengele's death. Wolfram then led them to the grave where Mengele was buried and the body was exhumed. And despite what anyone might say, it was definitely Mengele. They proved it forensically at the time.

Then in 1992, they proved it again with DNA testing. So that's it. I mean, that is the story of Joseph Mengele. And while it is a good story, just like most things having to do with the Holocaust, it's terribly unsatisfying. I mean, Mengele was a symbol for the Holocaust from the very beginning.

He was a representation of the blind cruelty and the disdain that the Nazis had for the Jews. But in the end, Mengele became a symbol for the dissatisfaction a lot of people had and still have when it comes to justice and the Holocaust. When it comes to this, there is no real balancing of the scales. There's only grief and I am sorry for leaving you with that.

We are all sorry. Yeah. But I also think a part of it is, at least we know in his last moments, because that's what he said, is that after his son had left, he was like, I just wish I could go back to the hills of Bavaria

and write the history of Goonsburg and sit with my degrees into my tweed jacket. That's what he wanted. But he didn't get it. No, he didn't get to live like Gandalf. If they had gotten it at some point and they just hung him, it would have been over and he just would have been dead.

And we would have had justice. We would have the same feeling of unsatisfaction. At least he got to live the opposite life of anything that he wanted for that period of time and he died in the end. Yeah, and he did live miserably and in a paranoid anxiety state for 20 years. I do that right now.

I mean, all of us, then all of our lives. None of us have committed war crimes. People have lived so much worse lives you didn't hurt anyone. Technically, just on vacation. And I also want to hit you with a couple of terms. If you want some more fun deep dives, look up the Odessa group, which is the group,

the belief of a bunch of fucking underground SS members that's helped facilitate the rat lines, which is very interesting. And also Opus Dei, Opus Dei, which is this weird, this inner group that connected to the Vatican that they believe also made money off the rat lines and that they believe that George Bush Sr.

gave a wink to in his inauguration address saying thank you for your Catholic secret society money. Very good. Interesting. And on this one, I definitely want to give a huge thank you to research assistant Rachel. She also did a lot of great research for Nazi hunters on this episode.

And also thank you for sharing that story for your boyfriend, obviously as well. And also thanks to Carolina. She helped out quite a bit on the Juan Perón research on this episode. Thank you, Carolina. Thank you, Rachel. Thank you, Rachel's boyfriend, Avi.

Thank you, everyone. Thank you, everyone. And thank you all for listening. Good work, dog meat. This is a great story we chased down. We did. It's out there. Mangal has been got.

This is a long ass episode. I don't know what you've been doing during this episode. I hope you took a couple of breaks so you masturbate a little bit. No, I don't know about that. I guess you could have if you wanted to. This is our longest episode ever, actually. Is that right?

Yeah. Well, look at that. We got the motherfucker. At least he's dead. Yep. At least he's dead. At least he's dead. Could have been a little bit different.

We didn't get him. No one got him. There was a lot of revenge taken on a lot of Germans during the, you can look into the history of that. There was a lot of vengeance taken. And Kissel is just a living revenge against his whole German family

just for his lifestyle and the way he lives. Thank you. I don't know what it means, but thank you. Very nice. Very nice. All right, everyone. Thank you all so much for listening. If you haven't yet, now the tickets

for our live shows, upcoming live shows, they're open for the general public. Open on sale. So check them out. We'll be in Nashville, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Yinses. We cannot wait to go see everyone. And we can announce the March for Bell House, right?

The show at the Bell House. Come on out. The first show is already sold out, but we got some tickets for the second show. And now those are open in general as well, I believe. Yeah. We're working out our shit. You can see us run our show for the first time.

Oh, yeah. And it's a bit of a stumble through. It's going to be, it could just be horrible. So it'll just be all hanging out. So if something doesn't work, we'll acknowledge you. Be like, that doesn't work. And then everyone can laugh at how horrible we're doing. Yeah.

And we'll have fun. That's the whole point. Give to our patron if thou feelest such generosity. Absolutely. I had a great conversation with the dude who runs the extremely unique oddity store here in New York City for this week's interview. Oh, which one?

Mike Zahn. He is the owner of Obscura Antiques in Oddities. And he was very, very fun. So we talked about a lot of stuff. So thank you all so much for giving it to our Patreon. And I hope you enjoy our little interview series. Patreon.com slash Last Podcast on the left, if you want to get. And don't forget, you can still watch our live show,

www.lastpodcastlive.com. Check it out. It's super fun. It's the best $6.66 you'll ever spend. Unless you're hungry, get a sandwich. Yeah. But if you are full. Get a sandwich first, and then build up the funds again,

and then get the live show. Again, thank you for all your support, y'all. The fucking best. Man, this has been thick. Yeah, this has been thick. And thanks to everyone for being so kind over the last couple of weeks throughout all of this. It's been a really hard time.

And yeah, we really appreciate everyone's support on all this. Yep. It means a great deal. And we're also, man, at LP on the left, all our social medias, if you want to follow it. And next week, we're going to get back to silly shit. Yeah, oh yeah.

We're going to do some silly shit for a little bit ourselves, a bit of a break, mentally, and y'all as well. And I'm very excited to get back into some, I mean. We're going to go to a little town called Nilbog, which is a hint of what we'll be doing next week. One thing I do need to thank someone for making me smile. Someone, some mysterious benefactor, sent us a copy of a horse illustrated in the mail.

Oh, really? Oh, that's amazing. It was addressed to Bird Luger. And it was, yeah, just a no name or anything like that, just someone who wanted to make a smile. And it definitely did. So thank you very much. Thank you so much, of course, Kevin Barnett.

We love you. And thank you, Randy, for sending over the beef jerky once again. Did you get beef jerky in LA? No. Yeah, you loser. We got it over here on the East Coast. We're also freezing to death.

So just let us have the beef jerky. Yeah, Randy Katzen, best beef jerky in the world. Love it. Thank you, Randy. We miss you. We're all out through that. All right, everyone. Thank you for listening.

Hail yourselves. Hail Satan. Hail again. Hail me. Don't start singing Mengele. What? Mengele. Magustalations, everyone.

This show is made possible by listeners like you. Thanks to our ad sponsors, you can support our shows by supporting them. For more shows like the one you just listened to, go to lastpodcastnetwork.com. And don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe to our channel.