Also media.
Oh my goodness, gracious, Jiminy Christmas, it's behind the Bastards a podcast about Adolph Iikman for the last two weeks, mister Holocaust himself as I shouldn't have titled these episodes what's wrong with me? Uh?
What?
Enough time for that?
Whatever? Yeah, whatever is wrong with me? It's not what's wrong with our guest for today Joe Kassalian, who actually necessary similar kind of person in some way. So anyway, Joe, welcome to the show. Hello, what is wrong with us? Why do we do this?
And I don't know, I don't know.
All I know is that we're talking about friend of the pod, Adolph Iikman, who is, you know, the head of the Jewish Desk for Genocide at the SD at this point. He is, prior in the previous episodes, established himself as the Czar of the Jews, partly by taking credit for a lot of acts of genocide that he actually didn't orchestrate or that he had a smaller part in.
You know, he's been kind of pissing off a lot of his colleagues prior to this point by lying about what he's done and taking credit for shit they've done. And now we're at the point in the war where things are bad enough that everyone's like, oh, yeah, that shit I did Iikman definitely did it. This was absolutely him, right, And they're going from being like throwing his name around to get shit done to being like, oh, Iikman, I hardly know him.
You know Iikeman showing up at the Nazi table to see if everybody could like show off the ranks of war crimes. To find out he's the only one still doing it.
Like yeah, ah fuck, oh yeah, you're it's all on you. Oh buddy.
Yeah. I would have done that too, because I know he would have taken credit for it. Yeah yeah. It's like, look, man, you've been stealing my content for years now, you could have it.
Yeah, Heinrik Kimler's like, hey, you want my coat, my name documents, Yeah, buddy. So in the final two years of the war, sas perpetrators, particularly the crew of men around Iikman, would go through a rapid process of flipping from wanting the Holocaust to be on their CVS to wanting to hide their involvement, and this was often done by pinning their own actions on Iikman, who is their
most famous coworker in the field of genocide. He's the He's the Alan Smithy or whatever that fake director name that you like put on a movie if you don't want your name on it. He's the Alan Smithy of genocide where you're like, yeah, let's just say he did it. The Allies consciously sought to spook top Nazis and the
final years of the war. And it's very fair to critique the Allies, to critique Roosevelt, to critique even Eisenhower of not doing enough to put a stop to the Holocaust, because they don't.
They absolutely don't.
Choices were made not to bomb railroads, and they knew what was happening, they had reports. This is on them, right. It's part of why Eisenhower acts so strongly to document what had happened afterwards is he feels bad. He knows he could have done more.
Right, they all do, and they straight up refuse to bomb Auschwitz when there is an agent inside. I'm probably mispronouncing his name of it. Told Pilecki, yes, like beg them to bomb it.
It's like, look, we would all rather die stop it now, right.
Yeah, that was like the undergrounds, take inside the cams like we would rather all fucking die.
Yes, please blow this place up with us in it. If it's just said no, yeah, and they said no. One thing the Allies do do that does save some lives, right,
not enough, but some is. They start broadcasting the names of ss mass murderers on illegal radio stations that are broadcasting into occupied territory, saying we know who you are, and if you cut the shit off right now, you might have a chance of surviving post war the old doc sing right, Some number of guys are like, yeah, I'm gonna pull back a little bit, right, and that does save some number of life not nearly enough, but it's a thing that they're doing, right, And this is
partly why people start pulling back and letting Iikman take more credit and trying to because they're like, oh, I heard my name on the radio. That's not good. Have you heard how fast the Russians are advancing?
Shit, I am already running west.
Yeah. Yeah. Expunging the evidence of their own complicity and putting it on Iikman was made easier by the fact that the self proclaimed Czar of the Jews seem to have no overt sense of self preservation or desire to deny his role even once it became clear that this
was going to be bad for him. He must have noticed the rapid change among his colleagues, but Tina Stangnath rights than the last year of the war, his friends stopped meeting him for lunch quote even though the and I love this part, even though the canteen and Iikman's office building was one of the few who have to have remained untouched by the air raids. Right, he's the only guy of the working kitchen, and we won't go to lunch with him. That's how mad his position.
Is, said Aikman, sitting alone at lunch.
Yeah, does no one know that my kitchen is still working?
You guys want to trade by Bob ppa.
J Yeah, and they are all starving and they're like, nah, but I'm not gonna eat there. Bro, Like, you don't want to be seen next to that motherfucker right.
Fuck that, I'm boiling my boots. This sucks.
He is so toxic people will give up the guarantee of a full belly to be avoid being seen next to him. He would later complain about the whiplash of being dumped so unceremoniously by the whole less ass elite and complain that a few years earlier people couldn't do enough to invite me to minister's meetings or to unofficial meetings, private dinners and such like. But once the Russians broke through in Poland, he became a sort of ghost. Right. He's like man a year ago, two years ago, I
was at every dinner. No one even wants to eat at my place anymore.
We used to be cool. Man, What happened?
What happened? Right. For his part, while Eichmann didn't seek to erase his own record, he did later claim that he spent the last months of the war engaged just in simple logistics tasks. Right, Oh, I wasn't doing any more genocide at this point. I was trying to make sure enough food made it into Berlin for the defenders, right, and my office had enough defenses for the fighting, right, Like, I wasn't involved in anything horrible, right, just normal war stuff.
This is a lie. By the end of forty four, even the most deluded SS officials knew their goose was cooked, and also they had no more goose to eat. A decision was no more goose to step. Yeah, there's no more gooses to step or to eat. A decision was made that even if the war against the Allies was going to be lost, they still had to win the war against the Jews. Therefore, the killing would continue right
up until the last possible minute. Even if, and they make the choice, trains with critical war materiel are diverted from propping up the front line to the task of sending Jews to death camps. They choose. The high command Hitler in the military breast choose the Holocaust over delaying the Russians.
Outstanding, well done boys, Yeah.
Heinrich Himler personally approved such actions, and he had one on one meetings with Eikman to ensure that Eichman was properly briefed and supported to manage this task. While Hitler retreated to his bunker and travel within the Reich grew increasingly dangerous, Eikman spent the last months of the war on the move constantly. Stegnath writes Aikman was involved in the very last extermination campaign, the gassing of Ravensbrook concentration
Camp on January twenty sixth, nineteen forty five. Auto moles Notoria's Special Commando was sent to the camp with its gas fans, and gas chambers were also erected there. One of his duties. Eichman's duties was to gather up famous Jews and turned in different lower security camps. Some prominent intellectuals and celebrities have been kept in comparatively survivable accommodations in places like theresan stat in order, which is treason stat is like the nice concentration camp. And as we'll say,
I don't mean it was a nice place. I mean it was the best of the camps to be in, right.
If memory serves me correctly, it was the one that they set up to bring the Red Cross to.
Yes, that's what we're about to talk about. That's s. Eichman's job, right, And this is treason stat is comparatively nice because as you said, it's meant to be a show camp that you can display to the death camps. No, these are just camps for like political you know, we've got to everyone has some of these, right, and that's true.
Just h it's just a labor camp for y undesirables.
England has concentration camps for Germans, right, they're not death camps. They're just constant. And there's a difference between the two. Right, you're just concentrating people in a concentration camp, and that's the Germans. You're like, No, our camp is just like with the English hat for Germans. Right, these are people who are politically unreliable, but we're not killing.
Them, no, right, we would never do that.
This is why if you're a Jew who's internationally famous and gets caught, you saw, Obviously a good number of those people do get killed, but a lot of them are put into reason stat for a while, because well, people are kind of want to know what's happened to this guy, and if we can show him or her into reason stat, right, it'll keep the international community from thinking things are as bad as they are, right.
Yeah, and we can handle them later, and.
Yeah, we will handle And again, a lot of these people do get killed, they're just kept there for a while, right, And these same prominent Jews that it was hoped might provide leverage for men like Himler right, once the warg is late enough to like, well, now we don't want to kill these guys, but like, if we've got these
famous Jews that we've kept kind of in the fridge. Right, they're preserved, we can maybe trade them to let guys like Himmler escape, right to you know what, We'll trade them to the Allies postwar to keep our own asses safe.
So, oh, man, I don't think there's anybody famous enough for that to work.
No, no, not by the end of this shit.
Nope.
Iikeman's job then is to both ensure some of these people are safe and also you have to convince them to keep their mouth shut about the murders they'd witnessed. For example, after that last gassing at Ravensbrook, Iikman transfers several women from Ravensbrook Brook to Theresenstat in February of nineteen forty five, and he meets with them personally to basically be like, hey, y'all are gonna live. The Red
Cross is going to come here soon. What did you see at Ravensbrook, Right, you didn't see any genocide, did you?
And let me remind you this is a pinky swear. Yeah, yeah, this is a pinky swear. Right.
You wouldn't break a pinky swear to Aikman, would you. One of these women, Charlotte Salzberger required Eikman questioning her in a very polite manner about the extermination. His fame was such that even with that, he doesn't introduce himself as Adolph Eichman. But he's famous enough that she guesses who he is, right, She later says, quote, we knew who Aikman was even in a holland. We knew he was a man who used to a lot of Yiddish and Hebrew expressions. And there was also a rumor that
he spoke Hebrew and was born in Sarona. This was very clear from the way he spoke, right, because there are rumors that he's basically Jewish, and that's why he knows all this stuff.
Ah, yeah, right, right, he's had those servers for a while now.
Yeah, he spent some time asking them inconsequential details about their lives. Be like, well, well you have to you know, how are you like? Try to be friendly, right, He's he tries to be good cop before he pivots to the bad cop part of his routine.
Quote, how was your weekend? How was your weekend? You know, death camping?
This is a nice place, right, We got you some chocolate last week, Right, everything's been good? Huh. After this, he pivots to the bad cop part of his routine. He told us we now had the right to go to the Theresian stat ghetto, but if we said anything about our experience in Ravensbrook, or about anything we knew, then you will this was the phrase he used, be going up the chimney. Ooh god, yeah, he's still our Reikman.
You know.
Within days of this, Eichman himself was in too Reasonstad to prepare for what would be the last visit by the International Committee of the Red Cross. So again, Eikman is the guy who is show managing these Red Cross visits at the camp.
While being internationally famous for murdering millions of people.
Yes, it's already known that he's doing a lot of this. As I noted before, this was the Nice concentration camp. Nazi propaganda describes treason stat as being located in a SPA town where elderly juice could retire. Right, this is a Spa. Basically, we're sending him to a fucking Spa. You're calling us genocide.
Come on, everybody's gonna leave there with their hair all redone and like you know, Veneer's in it.
It's the shit you saw with a Brago Garcia, where they give him like water and a glass with salt on their to be like he's drinking margaritas at El Salvador.
Come on.
Yeah, So some famous Jewish internees are kept there, but the camp is also used as a transit camp for Chech Jews on their way to the killing centers. So this is not a nice place by any objective standards. In nineteen forty two alone, so many people were dying due to starvation and disease at Theresa Stat that the Nazis built a crematorium capable of handling two hundred bodies a day roughly. And again, this is the nice concentration camp.
Thirty three thousand Jews die into resent Stat itself, and this is the nice place. Yes, I just I can't exaggerate how bad all of this is. Even accounting for this, the living conditions there are still better than everywhere else, because Eichmann and his colleagues they don't want it nice all of the time. But you've got to be able to clean it up enough that at a moment's notice you can take the authorities there, right, so it can't get too bad.
I mean, the bar is so low in all of the other camps. It doesn't have to be good at Karisenstadta other than like, well they ate today.
Yeah, if we get the corpses out of here, it looks okay, right, yeah. In early nineteen forty five, his main concern was that rumors of the death camps had percolated widely within the community of Jews being held there, and Eikman did not want those rumors getting to anyone at the Red Cross. And you can't make some of this shit up. You want to guess what day they pick for this Red Cross visit to teresen Stott.
April first April. You are literally right, yeah, I mean, oh no.
April Day nineteen forty five is when Aikman personally meets Red Cross representative Hans did Not and announces himself to be quote the direct agent of the Reich's fewer ss for all Jewish questions. They literally pick April Fool's day, right, It's it's so fucked.
This is this is my least favorite thing I've ever been right about, Thank you, Robert.
So as soon as Eichman meets with this guy, he gives a kind of rambling diatribe about his theories are the Jewish question and has now ended planned. He's like, yeah, we're gonna make a reservation for these guys, you know, like America did with the Native Americans. We're not going to kill him.
Have you guys ever heard of Oklahoma? And we're gonna do.
That, right, Obviously, the United States killed a lot, we did a genocide several of them against we. But the average European wouldn't call what we did a genocide in this stage, in part because the ward doesn't exist yet.
Right, to be fair, the average American today says, it's.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but this is the way this they're trying to be Like, No, what we're doing is no worse than what the Americans did, right, That's all that
we're trying to do here. And what's weird though, is that Eikman also tells this guy, you know, Himmler supports the humane treatment of Jews in Nazi custody, and I don't entirely agree with my boss here, but I'm following orders, right, so I'm keeping things nice too, which is such a weird line for him to ride, being like, actually, Himmler wants the Jews to be treated well, and I think he's kind of crazy, but you know that's what I'm doing anyway. It's such a weird line.
Imagine being told this is a Red crossworker by a man where skull and cross boat.
Stolen Cross votes by literally Adolph Eikman. You're just like rolling your eyes so fucking hard now. So I bring this up to point out there's very little sign at all that the Czar of the Jews has any plans to flee from justice before the fall of the regime. And this is one time where we have to give Aikman credit for being a lot smarter than his colleagues, because this is part of his tactic. Right. He's not dumb. He's not. Actually it seems like, wow, he's either so
committed that he's ready to die. He's just trying to kill as many guys as possible, or he's really stupid for not trying to get his name off of stuff and to get out what he's doing is actually smarter than all of his colleagues. He knows your fault. You're
idiots for thinking you can escape this. Anyone at my level is a fool for thinking that you can get away I'm going to take I'm going to hide by pretending to be the guy that I've been pretending to be up until the last minute here, so that no one, none of my colleagues expect that I am setting up secret plans to get out right, But he is the whole time where he's doing this. He is making plans. He's getting fake identities printed, he's using like SS. The
SS has a printing press for fake IDs. He's getting multiple fake IDs. He's making an exit plan with his wife and with his dad to hide out in the countryside under a new name, like in the last stages of the war. He'd started laying the groundwork for his escape months earlier, when he lied to close colleague Deeter Weislinsky, who's a member of the SD and who would later try to sell Iikman out to the Allies. Eichman knows
well Wasslinsky's a worm. He's going to sell me out the instant he can, So he tells Weslnsky, you know, I actually cut ties with my dad, my family years ago. They don't believe in all this Nazi stuff as much as I do, so I'm not even in touch with them. Anymore. Now. The reality is Iikman's father is a committed fascist, right, and Iikman's still close to his dad. But by doing this, Weslnsky will tell the Allies, Oh, no, he wasn't really in contact with his family, right, which is who he's
going to be relying on. Eikman would also. So there's this guy, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who's an Arab nationalist and a Muslim leader with deep Nazi sympathies, and he spins a lot of World War two hiding out in the Third Reich, and he is super on board the genocide. Ikeman lies a lot and pretends that he and the Mufti are really close. They have nothing more
than like a passing connection, right. They're not actually that tight, which isn't I'm not saying that to say that the Mufti isn't The Mufti is a monster, right.
It seems like a real piece of shit.
He and Eikman don't know each other well, but Iikman pretends they're close friends. And at the end of the war he's telling Weslinsky and his other colleagues, I'm going to flee to the Middle East. The Mufti's got my back. I'm going to hide out somewhere like Syria, right, which some guys in the SS do. And so when Wislinsky starts being questioned by the Allies, he's like, oh no, his family wouldn't hide him. They hated him. He's got
some connection with the Mufti. He's fleeing for the Middle East, right, you got to start looking for him there or trying to make his way there. Right. So Aikman has seated a false story for his plans for the escape with his colleagues in the SS, knowing they're all going to rat on him. He wants them ratting and he wants them giving up the wrong info.
Of course, he knows that they're pieces of shit. They're in the SS.
Yeah, he works with these assholes. He knows how much they suck.
You guys, stop doing loud with me. You're all fake friends anyway.
Yeah, he knows they're fake friends. And you hate you don't want to give it to a guy like Eichmann. But he's really smart here. He knows like this is very, very intelligent and it's going to work extraordinarily well.
Game recognized game. He knows what kind of pieces of Yes, well, if he's one of them.
He's one of them. He's the worst of them, right. Yeah. Through all of this, he vocally expounds upon his commitment to the Nazi cause and the genocide he's orchestrating, so no one will expect that he's planning to flee or that he's been lying to them. He takes to posing with guys like Himmler in pictures carrying his service revolver. He didn't really needed to wear a gun. He starts wearing it, being like, I'm an old fighter. I'm gonna
go down shooting. You know, when this ends, I'm gonna die on the field, you know, in the last minute that I can still loyal to the cause. In his last meeting with his subordinates in Berlin, he told them, if it has to be, I will gladly jump into my grave and the knowledge that five million enemies of the Reich have already died like animals. Right, He's telling them, I'm happy to die because I killed five million people, you know, so I can go out with my conscience clear.
Now this is a lie. He was committed to killing those people, but he doesn't want to die. He's going to do whatever he can to escape. So April first is when the Red Cross visits treasonstat Hitler dies at the very end of April, the same month that had begun with that show tour. Peace and an end of the war in Europe is not far behind. By the point that Hitler kills himself, Eichman has already disappeared into the mass of Nazi war prisoners under a new name.
He just bounces one day, destroys his old info, picks up one of these fake IDs, and starts living under a new name, Adolf Karl Barth. Now. His last order that he had gotten as Eichman was given by his childhood friend kalten Brunner, and kalten Berner had told him, You're going to go and ca on this guerrilla struggle in the Alps, right, We're gonna keep on fighting, you know,
in the mountains, will hold out to the last. And Iikman's like, yeah, totally, absolutely, and then he just leaves one day, shows up a new clothes and like gets taken prisoner right as like a low ranking enlisted member of the SS. So he gets put in a pow camp with all of these thousands and thousands of other low ranking SS guys. And while he's in the camp, he actually transitions and destroys that old I D and
takes on yet another new ID. And there's a couple of reasons for this, but he starts going by he had been pretending to be Carl Barth, who's this enlisted member of the SS, and he upgrades himself to an officer to unterstorm fewer otto Eckman. Now, the logic of this was both, first off, Barth pretty far off from Iikman. If somebody recognizes me and calls out Aikman, I could be like Ekman, Ekman, No, No, I'm Ekman. Yeah yeah, yeah, Akhmen.
That's gate right, it's smart, right, like it's it's close that it won't draw suspicion if he responds to the name Eichman or something. And the other reason that he upgrades from being enlisted to a low ranking officer in the SS is that as an officer, he doesn't have to do labor on a daily basis.
I fucking knew it. I knew that was gonna happen. I knew he was going to switch himself to be either a Wehrmacht officer or an SS officer because no labor and better treatment.
Yeah. And for the record, most of the SS, most of the AST's GROUPA, even the officers, get off essentially scott free after the war. Of course, I am of the opinion we should have executed every member of the SS. Yeah, sure, as well as every member of every person in government in the Nazi state. There were so many more people we should have killed that we didn't.
If you want to be embraced by something warm and nice, just to know that most of the ones that fell into Soviet captivity died horribly.
Yes, And in this case you do have to give it to the Soviets, like the fact that we let so many of these go off is why this kind of shit keeps happening, Right.
Ninety nine percent of SS men got away with little more than a slap on the wrist and a quote unquote rehabilitation process.
If there had been another millionaire or two that had been taken out by the Allies after this, because there were that many who directly took part in the Holocaust, they deserved more. You could have justified even more. Maybe this wouldn't have kept happening, right, Maybe there would have been enough of a warning, you know, but we don't. We let most of these guys off.
Hey. And you know, once once you cut in, you know, take away the clean behr Mokdabeth, you got a whole lot of Germans achility. He'd still be all right with it, and I know I would be, yeah.
And part of what's so fucked up here is that like this shows how how soft we are on these guys. The fact that just by being like, no, I'm an SS officer, well, of course you don't have to labor in the prisoner of war camp as an officer. Why would we make an SS officer work? He did not have this is done. He's a gentleman. You can't make him do art labor.
Yep.
So you might expect were something like this out where he's like shifting identities while in at POW camp to be hard, but it really wasn't. His father outside the camp is able to fetch these forged documents that he'd
squirreled away for him and smuggle them to him. And because all of the central records in Breslau had been destroyed at the end of the war, there's not a lot of that no one can find out that this guy wasn't real, right Eikman had made sure that Ekman's birthday was exactly one year later than his, so it's not hard to remember. He doesn't have to keep it in his mind. It's his own birthday. It's just a
year later. You're just pretending you're a year younger. In the immediate wake of the war's end, most of the top players in the Nazi party, like Hitler, Himler, and Gerbels were dead. Now Hermann Gering is in custody, along with a handful of other Reich notables. By far, the largest Nazi in the Wind at the war's end was Aikman, who was noted by the Jewish Agency for Palestine as being the highest ranking wanted Nazi as of June eighth, nineteen forty five. So everyone is very aware. Everyone who
cares about the Holocaust is very aware. This Iikman guy is a real big deal and he's in the Wind and something needs to be done about it. Right, So that is known from the jump, and there's a there was a few Nazis that at the end of the war they did just vanish, and people thought they could have done a runner like everyone else. But yeah, then they just came was like, I think Alfred Rosenberg is one of those guys.
Yeah, yeah, they're like, oh, they're just one of the thousands of people who died in fighting and just namelessly died on the soide of like a fucking dog.
Yeah, I mean, beget the name of it. Yeah, there's a lot of there are some hiring because like, yeah, you were in Berlin at the end, and like it's not easy to get out, right, it's a pretty dangerous place, man. So you know who didn't escape Berlin at the end of nineteen forty five, Mitchubshi. That is right, they went pretty far away from Berlin. Let's not talk about what else Mitsubishi was doing. Oh god, no, So we're back,
Oh my goodness, just like Mitsubishi. You know, we're back, and we're cleansed of whatever crimes that we were implicated in previously. Right, all we made was engines, guys, Come on, all ig Farban made was medicine and some other you know, zyclone be a little bit, you know, not as that much, just a.
Little bit, just a little bit. Look, I was all on board with the Mitchibishi rehabilitation until they came out with the Model seven thirty one as a little too on the nose Jesus.
Christ, Oh, guys. So it had become clear by June eighth, nineteen forty five that there are going to be war crimes trials, and the World Jewish Congress asked later that month for Aikman to be tried as one of the main architects of the Holocaust. Since he was missing, Allied prosecutors had to interrogate his former friends like Weslinsky, who sang like a canary and blamed all of his own crimes on Iikman. Right, he made me doet. I didn't want to be in the SS. This is all Iikman.
What a dick. We all hate him, right.
Everybody would agree with me. Everybody hates him. You should get him, Yeah, you should get him. I'm basically a victim. He was so mean to me, like you don't even know. So while Eichman is interned as Eckman, there were attempts to catch hiding war criminals within the massive SS prisoners. They allies know some of the big dudes are in this massive like prisoners that we got to get some of them are hiding as Wehrmacht prisoners.
Right. He later recalled the days when quote Jewish commissions would visit the camp. Quote, we had to line up. They sized me up, yes, seeing if they could spot any mugs they recognized. We had the lineup by company, and there was a commission of maybe fifteen of these And then he uses a slur. They went carefully up and down the roads, staring each of us right in the kisser, Yes, me too, right in the mug, all smiles. We weren't allowed to speak, or we'd have called them
all kinds of names. And when they were done, two steps forward and on to the next line.
Right.
And he recalls this later while he's like in fucking Argentina with a sneering sort of arrogant glee that like they had me, they were face to face with me and they couldn't catch me. HAA. Now this is true that he does get away, that he is like that close to these guys and they miss him. But he's also he doesn't feel safe, right, He doesn't actually feel like No, this is a very dangerous position for him. Part of why is that the comradliness a lot of
these guys in the SS. No Ekman is in our company. I don't remember there being an Ekman in our company. This guy must There's something sketchy here, right.
And all these guys got captured together. They're probably in units together. They probably didn't know each other all that long due to you know, all the mass casualties, right, but they were at least familiar with one another. And now this guy comes in his.
It was this Ekman guy.
Was that guy your commander? He wasn't my commander.
Do you remember Ekman being around? I don't remember. Ekman sounds like Iikman a lot.
You know, he looks fucking familiar.
You know, in the war, these guys are all comrades. We're all on the same side, right, and that com radliness between not the burns up very quickly after the regime falls and its crimes become impossible to deny. There are enough soldiers in the camp who know that this guy isn't who he says he was, and they don't feel safe there, so Eikman begins to arrange his escape. I want to be clear that Eikman's fame, which he had aggressively cultivated, was the only reason that he was
in danger here. The Allies did not consider the Holocaust a priority in terms of prosecution. During the Nuremberg Trial, only one man was assigned to documenting and charging prisoners over the genocide. Stagnath notes quote. The prosecution was also cautious about placing too much emphasis on Jewish affairs for
fear of being criticized by their own countries. So during Nuremberg we're like, oh, you don't want to do that much Holocaust prosecuting, because then our own people might say we're like being too soft on the Jews, that this is all about the Jews to us, and like there's still a lot of anti Semitism.
You're going around here just so fucking much.
And this had been part of what Roosevelt doesn't do more prior to and during the war to save Jewish people is consciously there are people in his administration they're like, yeah, we didn't want to be seen as we didn't want this. We were trying to work up. Getting America involved in the war was hard, right, It was super controversial, and it would have been bad for our effort to get the US involved if we'd made it look like this was all about the Jews. Because they're just not popular, right.
Yeah, and like similar to Churchill as well, Right, the Nazis and Fascism were wildly popular within the British upper class, to include the fucking king, all the way up until they got dragged into the war.
And this is a thing where it's like in terms of Roosevelt, it is like that you wouldn't want to be in his position, where it's like, well, the right thing to have done would have been to put the Holocaust first and foremost, but maybe that stops you from being able to get involved as quickly. Maybe it cuts the support you need to try and start to keep getting arms to the UK. This is a hard I don't think he makes the right option, but it's a
everyone is. It's oh shitty, right, It's such a difficult position to be in where you're like, well, maybe doing the right thing here makes it harder to actually beat these guys, right, That's how they're thinking now. By the time Nuremberg is happening, it's just cowardice, right, and lingering anti Semitism on behalf of the Allies. So they're like, we don't want to be seen as being you know, is this all being about the Jews to us right.
So Weislinsky is the guy who gives most of the testimony about Iikman that would become a central part of Iikman's post war mythos as the architect of the Holocaust. As we've stated, this is an exaggeration. Weslinsky makes Iikman out to be a bigger player than he was because he's trying to protect himself. The bigger Wislinsky's like, the bigger a deal I make Iikman, the less likely they are to kill me. And this does not work out for Weslnsky. He is extra tited to Czechoslovakia and hanged
for war crimes in nineteen forty eight. So it doesn't work, but it does create the myth. It does help really bolster this myth in the public eye. Theodore Daniker, who had been Eichman's right hand man, was smarter. He avoided capture like his boss at the end of the war until he was caught by the US Army in December of nineteen forty five. He committed suicide in a prison camp before he could go on trial.
He was almost certainly going to hang as well.
Oh yeah, yeah, he would have fucking hung He was just too big, too implicated, and too much. You know. Unlike Westlinsky, he doesn't trick himself into believing he's got a chance. Eikman proved remarkably successful as a fugitive, working with a mix of a few former SS colleagues he could trust and their family members. He hid out on a farm in northern Germany, while he lived in a rustic college and engaged in a simple peasant life, working
basically as a forester. Right, he's doing like lumber work. What remained of the Third Reich's leadership When on trial, Eikman's name came up repeatedly in segments of Nuremberg that dealt with the Holocaust. Weslinsky blamed his old boss for being abusive and violent and basically was like, he threatened me into doing it.
Oh my god, shut up, you fucking bitch.
Another mess man, I think his first name was Otto Ollendorf entered into the record. Eikman's claimed that he would leap laughing into the pit of hell because he'd killed six million shows. Right, that's where we get that quote first, is Ollendorf being like, that's how bad Aikman was.
He said this, you can just go get him still not me.
And it's Gering is really the only member of the Nazi high command who doesn't do what Weislnsky does, where he's like trying to throw everyone under the bus. Right, Gerring states while he's watching Westlinsky on trial, this Westlinsky is just a little swine who looks like a big one. Because Eikman isn't here, Ekman is no longer there either. Three months after escaping the prison camp, Eikman is registered under a new name, Otto Henninger. He just turned forty.
He managed to stay employed, working for a lumber company and lived alone, a thing Westlnsky told Allied interrogators his boss could never do. Westlinsky says, anyone who knows Iikman knows he's too cowardly to be alone. So we see how well Eikman's cultivation of a fake per personality has worked to protect him. He really lied to the right guys. Yeah, yeah, it's it's unfortunate how good he is at this.
Yeah, it is impressive that he was able to hide effectively and play the sights. And I do wonder if he was oldly able to get away with this because the people that I mean, of course he trusted some SS men, but the people that knew him as this fake person also kind of knew he was Iikeman.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So by April of nineteen forty six, his friend Calton Brunner had taken the stand and claimed that Iikman was the man who carried out the whole extermination operation against the Jews. Now again, Calton Bruner is his boss. Calten Brunner brings him into the SS right, it's he did it, full isshuit.
Yeah, it's all him. Ah, he did it all by himself. Was the craziest thing.
Yeah, he was so fast. Now this was a massive exaggeration, but it's one that sticks. Lying does not, however, say Calton Brunner. He's executed in October of forty six, but it serves to continue building the Aikman legend. Rudolph Hess, former commandant at Auschwitz, adds to this legend by crediting Eikman with helping to decide to use Ziklon beat to gas inmates. We never would have come up with that idea without Iikman.
Yeah.
I was trying to make a summer camp until he came around.
I was just trying to give people veniers.
Yeah, the only guy in.
This life Joe's obsession with me.
That's a health Boh.
Only Julius Striker, who is the Nazi propagandist. We've covered him on this show and he gets executed for war crimes. He's the only guy here to give an honest account, being like, fuck it, I've never even heard of this dude. Iikman's supposed to be the chief anti Semi. I'm the chief anti Semi. I don't even know his name, right. He's like offended the fuck this guy, But there's a certain amount of respective. It's like, no, he knows he's gonna die no matter what. At least he's not gonna
lie about it as he goes. He's committed to being like he's just angry that Aikman's getting all of the credit for the Holocaust.
I'm a piece of shit. Everybody knows about it so hard.
Why is he getting all the credit for sucking. While the legend of Iikman takes shape, the real man used his time in semi captivity to start writing his memoirs. This is a bold move for a man who knows he's going to be captured and tried at any minute, or he could be. And it speaks to the fact that Eikman is still very much a true believer and he wants still to get credit for his work furthering a great historic cause. He thinks, someday the worm will
turn again and will be seen as heroes. And I have to document how cool I was during the war, right.
Real Stringer bell moments though, right, like are you taking notes? Tomal?
He's taking notes on a criminal on the Holocaust. So while he's in hiding out, he reads voraciously about every news article on the on the trials, and he documents the Nazi genocide, cutting out mentions of his own name. He's cutting out the articles that mention him and pasting them into like a scrap book. Right while he's hiding as a forestry guy.
Now there's something off putting about him scrap booking.
Yeah, yeah, he's fucking scrap booking. He follows the growth of his legend and the increasing obsession among different Jewish organizations with finding him and bringing him to justice. Aside from this, though, he lives a normal life. He even attends a coworker's wedding in nineteen forty seven, where he's photographed in this rural location, and the fact of it is, if he'd stayed there forever, he might have lived the rest of his life in isolation. But he doesn't want
to live in isolation. He wants to live with his wife Sarah and raise his kids, and they're never going to be able to do that. In Germany, Vera is under constant surveillance. Right The Allys are watching her, figuring he's going to reach out at some point and then we'll catch him. Right. She is claiming at this point that she divorced Eikman in March of nineteen forty five, and she and Iikman's father tried to report him dead in nineteen forty seven, claiming that they'd heard that he
died fighting in Prague. The Allies don't really buy this, but you know that's kind of what they're attempting to do. It's not fully clear when Eichmann makes the decision to flee Europe for Argentina, but we know that he starts the process of getting his paperwork in order in nineteen forty eight. From pop culture alone. You're probably aware that a lot of Nazis escaped into Argentina after the war,
and it's worth discussing why and how. The first reason is that Argentina has a long tradition of hiring German military officers to train their soldiers. This is going on way before World War Two, right, So there's a lot of sympathy for Germany and for fascism in Argentina. Future dictator Juan Peron of Argentina received training in Mussolini's Italy while he was a young soldier, and it was attached
to the Italian Army from thirty nine to forty. The Argentine government was formally neutral but deeply sympathetic to Nazi Germany, as was a sizable chunk of the Catholic Church. In nineteen forty six, Cardinal Kagiano, the Bishop of Rosario and leader of a far right anti communist Catholic Action group,
visited Pope Pius the Seventh. David Csarini writes quote, Kagiano proposed to set up Upontifical Commission of Assistance that would provide identification papers for displaced persons and refugees in Europe. More precisely, Kagiano wanted to help anti communist fascists, Nazis and their collaborators who are now on the run. So Kagiato goes to the Pope is like, we have to create a humanitarian commission to help refugees from Europe, you know,
get their documentation. And by refugees he means members of the SS. Right, there's a chunk of the Vatican agrees to this plan and becomes a major active player in helping hundreds of SS war criminals escape. Right, that's the the Vatican is doing this.
I mean, at least it's I can't think of anything else the Vatican's ever done recently. So that's at least they've seen the the Vatican Jesus normally they're on the up and up. Yeah.
Now, and this is key. Adolph Eichman escapes Europe with the help of a Catholic cardinal who provides him with the documents he.
Needs, with the permission from the Pope. Yeah.
Yeah, the cardinals working with at least some degree of permission from the bo Beer. Now to escape, Iikeman also has to enlist the services of a people smuggler, and a people smuggler who had the personal approval of Wan peron his identity papers were issued by Catholic Bishop Alois Houdahl, who had appointed himself Protector of persecuted war refugees, a term here that means Nazis who did the Holocaust. It takes two years, but Iikman makes the journey to Argentina
safely in nineteen fifty. His family follows a short time after, and they are soon living together, a fassimile of a normal life with a few compromises. In light of his notoriety. Vera had to call him Otto, and he had to use a new name yet again, Ricardo Clement, But those who knew him said that he used his real name often enough with old comrades who were now made up a sizeable ca unity in Argentina. Iikman described his own life.
The world's most cursed diaspora.
Yeah. Yeah, Nazi diaspora in Argentina. Yeah. Oh, and he's like he's going by Aikman fairly often whenever he's around Germans. It's not super hard to figure out this guy at all. Oh, this guy Ricardo Clement, whose wife calls him Otto and who goes by Iikman whenever he's drunk. I wonder if he's eightolf Iikman.
That must be a different guy.
He lives a boucolic life in this period, though. He works for a hydro electric power station for a while, and he leads survey missions deep into the mountains, exploring on horseback and climbing mountains. He takes his two young boys with him regularly and teaches them to hike and fish and ride horses while he worked. That job eventually falls apart in the mid fifties, but he gets a better one managing a rabbit farm. Right, there's a little
bit of like historical symmetry here. Heindrich Himmler before joining the Nazi Party is a chicken farmer, right yeah yeah, and Eichman after the war runs a rabbit farm. Meanwhile, while they're in Argentina, his wife gives birth to two additional sons. He has to build a home with his own hands for his newly expanding family to live in, and they'd taken two dogs, a German shepherd on a dosin. In short, he lives the kind of calm, pleasant life
that his work had denied millions of European Jews. David Cesarini writes relations within the family were much as in any other His sons were good looking and sociable. There was no shortage of girlfriends. Klaus had already been engaged to a local girl and took him on and was the first to marry, move out and bring grandchildren into the family. But generational relations were not smooth. I've been looked upon his sons as boorish, interested only in trivial pleasures.
They in turn, thought he was authoritarian. Klaus told journalists in nineteen sixty six, you will not believe how strict he was. Our old man was very strict.
You all believe this.
But Adolf Eichman was kind of a dick as a dad man.
My dad is a real nut.
Yeah, yeah, he's kind of a Nazi. If he gets my drift.
My dad, Adelfhikman is a real Adulf Iikman.
Yeah, he's real Aikman character. So when Ceserini's book was published in two thousand and four, his understanding was that Eikman didn't talk politics with his kids and forbade them from bringing anything about the family up outside of the house. This is an exaggeration, to say the least. However, even back then, before Stangnet's book, there was documentation of Eikman writing on the war and his connections to other old Nazis.
Cesserini wrote quote his marginalia in works that fell into the hands of investigators indicate that he remained an unrepentant Nazi. For example, he took exception to Jerhalard Bolt's The Last Days of the reich Chancellery because the author took an anti Nazi line at one point in the book, Iikman scrawled in the margins with swine like these, the war was bound to be lost. On the end papers, he jotted down his three line credo. It could all be
summed up as duty and obedience to orders Christ. One good friend post war was the former SA Special Forces commando Otto Skorzeni, who introduced him to a Waffen SS veteran named William Sassin, who'd himself been tried for war crimes and absentia. These men helped to induct Aikman into a community of unrepentant fascists, and Eichman leaned into the
reputation he decrued as the architect of the Holocaust. Among these friends, it was an asset again Eikman and other Nazis of the Sassin set felt no need to hide their opinions from the world. Sassin starts editing a far right German language newspaper Der Veg, which was so fascist that Perne's government eventually suspends it from open publication. Right, that's how bad this is when they get heat internationally.
And it was Sassin who introduced Aikman to the only other Nazi immigrae at his level of notoriety, doctor Joseph Mengela. Evidently the two did not get along. Aikman's frustrated because Mengela has got family money, so he's still rich while he's hiding. Well, Iikeman, they're like kind of poor while they're while they're hiding out in Argentina, they're not like super comfortable. And he's like, why does Mengela get to have money? You know, I suck just as bad.
My family did build tractors.
He also, this is this is so funny Mengola, and this is kind of like Mengoa is being a dick to ike when he's like, well, you know, if you guys are having trouble with money, I can be your family doctor for free, and Iikeman declines, I've seen your work.
I'm not a fan.
Yeah, I don't think doctor Mengelea is gonna be the family doctor.
Oh at all. It seems that your daughter has a bit of a cough. Have you considered injecting bleach into her eyes?
Yeah? Yeah, it's so funny. It's so funny too that that Mengeli does that as kind of like a dick move. He's like, well, if you're having trouble with money, I can be the fan. Like he knows what it means to offer to be the family doctor.
He knows nobody wants him to be the family doctor. Yeah. Yeah. The man just smells like corpse.
Yeah, he knows he's Joseph Mengola.
So.
Sassin had been a military propagandist during the war, and he wrote ghost wrote after the war. He ghostwrites biographies for several SS veterans. He proposed working with Eichman to lay out a full history of the Final Solution, one that told the Nazi truth. Sassin meant to minimize the number of people who had been killed and a clans Germany of its war guilt over the Holocaust. He also
wanted to clear Hitler's name. Eikman has Let's say different ambitions, and the result of their interviews was, in Cserini's words, sometimes blackly comic. And I'm going to quote from Csserini's book Eichman, His Life in Crimes here. Eikman initially welcomed the chance to unburden himself to someone who was both knowledgeable and supposedly sympathetic. I was happy to be able for once to talk about the whole complex matter and
to some extent, dispose of it. But he discovered that Sassin had a perspective that was not wholly in accord with his own. While he was happy to record that Hydrich had received a fewer order to exterminate the Jews, Sassin questioned whether Hitler was truly responsible and wanted hard evidence for such a directive. At one point, Eikman expressed incredulity that anyone would expect there to be a written order from Hitler himself, protesting that that was not how
the Reich worked. Where Assassin wanted to diminish the number of Jews to ported to the death camps, Aikman was happy to brag about his achievements. At Sassin's insistence, the dialogue returned again and again to statistical assessments of the numbers killed, with Sassin and Eikman arguing in opposite directions. The wine consumed during the sessions loocid, to Eikman's tongue, more than was good for him. His self pity and
self aggrandizing equally led to incriminating statements. He regretted his weakness in not being able to overcome the obstacles in the way of eliminating all the Jews impervious, or in caring as to what the transports meant in terms of human suffering. He lamented delays and rejoiced in trouble free deportations.
We had the same thing in Slovakia. We had the same thing in France, and although it started there very hopefully, we had the same thing in Holland, where the transports did, however, roll at the beginning, so that one can say it was magnificent, and where subsequently there was one problem after another. He remembered with satisfaction the times the deportations went well, notably in Hungary. So that's so Sassin's like, like, Hitler
wasn't involved. Do you have any evidence that Hitler ordered it? And I was like, you don't understand how this fucking worked. Like, what the fuck is wrong with you?
I don't think that many people died. I would have killed more.
I do like that the reason like I couldn't hold his wy.
No no light. Yeah he was a lightweight and got really moody afterwards.
Yeah he drank wine, got a little weird.
You know who also gets a little weird whenever they're drinking wine.
Mitsubishi.
Boy, you do not want to get Mitsubishi drunk. They'll start talking about the forties and it doesn't go well, We'll take your money Mitsubishi. Please, for the love of God, we're back and we just got reached out to by Mitsubishi. Uh, and this is very good. I think this is going to be really positive for the whole podcast. They stated, quote, if you continue referencing our name, we will bring you into court. So yeah, very excited. U super psyched.
Uh huh?
This and more in Wake Island Drift.
Yeah so Iikman's post war friendships all have one thing in common, his utterly repentant openness about the scale of crimes he'd committed. He told one Dutch Nazi immigray to be frank with you, had we killed all of them, the ten point three million European Jews. I would be happy and say, all right, we managed to destroy an enemy. So you know, he continues to be iikman.
Yeah he's still a piece of shit.
Yeah, still a fucking Nazi assle.
Oh h.
Now, Ricardo Clement lives with his wife and sons outside of Buenos Aires for almost a decade. As I noted earlier, his boorish sons grew up there and began dating. One of them started seeing a young girl who was also a German immigray, Sylvia Hermann. Now you might think this would make the two a good match, but there was a problem. Sylvia's family were the other type of European immigray. Right.
Her father, Lothar, hadn't informed her of this, but he was a Holocaust survivor who had fled Europe after surviving docow.
Now, oh, this is the world's worst fucking Hallmark movie.
Fuck You're the worst Meet cute. By this point, Lothar was old and blind as a result of repeated beatings by the Gestapo. As his daughter courted this eikman boy, Lothar starts putting things together in his head and is like, oh, fuck, I think this kid might be the son of like a major war criminal. Right now, these are initially just suspicions, and the family moves away from the area not long afterwards.
So Lothar doesn't think a lot more about this until nineteen fifty seven when he comes across news coverage of another Nazi back in Frankfurt. And I'm going to quote from an article by the Museum of Jewish Heritage here. Lothar's realization that Ricardo Clement may in fact be Adolf Eichman led him to the chief prosecutor of the West German state, Hessen Fritz Bauer, in order to pursue Eikman
and make a case for investigation. Bauer needed evidence. Bauer, who acted outside his official role as chief prosecutor, was concerned that his colleagues were Nazi sympathizers and would thwart the investigation. At Bauer's request, Lothar went in search of more details regarding Eikman. Soon enough, Lothar was able to positively identify Iikman, sending good word back to Bauer. So fucking Lothar is like, well, this German prosecutor has been
prosecuting Nazi war criminals. I'll reach out to him and say I think I know Aikman. Bauer's like, I can't do this as part of my legal job. There's so many fucking Nazis still in the German state. They'll warn him. If anyone becomes aware in Germany that I'm looking for Aikman, he'll get warned because again I'm surrounded by Nazis still.
So the ally should have killed way more of my code, so many more of these guys.
So Bauer is like, basically he once he gets like confirmation from this dude in Argentina, Bauer rather than like going after going through the German government to try to prosecute this guy, He's going to go directly to the massade because he's like, again, I'm surrounded by Nazis and this is not an uncommon state of affairs. Post War West Germany talked a great game about war guilt and hatred of the regime, but a ton of second and third tier Nazis were by now running the show.
Oh fuck yeah they were.
And one of the people responsible for this is a famous anti Nazi Conrad Eidenhauer and Aidenauer had been he'd been an opponent of the party prior to Hitler's rise to total power, and he had been imprisoned several times by the Nazis. But he was like a liberal politician who hated the Nazis but was willing to govern beside them, right and.
Well, well, well if it isn't the consequences of my political ideology.
Right, And the good news is that Aidenauer was such a committed anti Nazi that the Allies let him form a government and become West Germany's first chancellor in nineteen forty nine. The bad news is that because he was such a committed anti Nazi, he was able to personally accept a ton of Nazis into his guyver and his own reputation acted as a shield for them, per the
Irish Times quote. Challenged on this many times by political rivals and foreign critics, Aid and Hour hit back that one does not have to throw out the dirty water as long as one doesn't have any clean water.
Right.
Well, everybody who knows how to run the state is so implicated in Nazism we can't afford to punish them all. Otherwise we won't be able to have a Germany. And we got to have a Germany.
Right. Uh, counterpoint, what if we didn't.
Yeah. Now, in nineteen fifty seven, Eikman had actually written an open letter under his own name to Aidenauer, right, and the letter was negative. He and Sassen both wanted to destroy Conrad's government. But it shows how much impunity he felt by this point that he could write a letter to the fucking chancellor right and feel like it was not a super dangerous thing now since he couldn't trust his colleagues anymore, but did trust Lothar snooping our boy.
Bauer sent the information about Eikman back to the Masad, who had a whole Nazi hunting division at this point, and we're ready to use it. In May of nineteen sixty, they sent eleven agents to Argentina after weeks of gumshoe work to track Iikman down and case his home in the pattern of his daily life, they launched an operation
to kidnap him and spirit him to the Jerusalem. Now there's a whole long story here, and I am really boiling out the details because it's the best known part of Iikman's life and it's really not superworth into us getting into detail here about it. But the short of it is, they capture the fucker and he winds up
on trial for his many crimes in Jerusalem. Now, the exact form that this trial takes is the work of David Ben Gurion, who's the Prime Minister of Israel and for whom this was not just a manner of justice but a matter of personal political pride. Hannah Arint, in her famous coverage of the trial, described Ben Gurion's motivations this way quote and this is from Eikman in Jerusalem,
there was the lesson to the non Jewish world. I went to establish before the nations of the world, how millions of people because they happened to be Jews, and one million babies because they happened to be Jewish babies were murdered by the Nazis. That's been Gurion's words, or in the words of Devar, the organ of Ben Gurian's Mapi party. Let the world opinion know this that not in Nazi Germany alone was responsible for the destruction of
six million Jews of Europe. Hence, again in Ben Gurian's own words, we want the nations of the world to
know and they should be ashamed. The Jews in the diaspora were to remember how four thousand year old Judaism, with its spiritual creations, its ethical strivings, its Messianic aspirations, had always faced a hostile world, how the Jews had degenerated until they went to their death like sheep, and how only the establishment of a Jewish state had enabled Jews to hit back, as Israelis had done in the War of Independence, in the Suez Adventure and in the
almost daily incidents on Israel's unhappy borders. And if the Jews outside Israel had to be shown the difference between Israeli heroism and Jewish submissive weakness, there was a complimentary lesson for the Israelis. For quote, the generation of Israelis who have grown up since the Holocaust were in danger of losing their ties with the Jewish people and by implication, with their own history. It is necessary that our youth remember what happened to the Jewish peoples. We want them
to know the tragic facts of our history. This is a rent writing that Ben Gurian. He's not just trying. He doesn't just want to see this guy brought to justice because he's a Nazi. He wants to see this guy brought to justice because the story of Iikman highlights how cowardly the European Jews were, that they let themselves be slaughtered, and that that's different from the heroic Israelis who are willing to fight.
Right.
That's part of why Ben Gurian puts this trial on.
Right.
There is a propaganda angle here.
There is a lot of very disgusting language that was used towards yes, European Jews, despite the fact that a lot of these guys are descended from them, or they're the kids or their neighbors or whatever. Yeah, it's absolutely horrible.
Yeah, and this is something a Rent is very critical of Israel and sees a lot of the problems that are going to result in the shit we're seeing today. Very early on, she sees a lot of the horror of like what's done to the Palestinians. She sees a lot of what's coming, and she's deeply critical of why this trial. Not that Aikman's on trial, she obviously thinks he needs to be, but she's deeply critical about why he's being put on trial and what else is happening here.
You've heard of the Imperial boomerang. This is their genocidal boomerang.
Right, And there's a lot of good modern criticism of a Rent and of her writing in Eikman on Jerusalem, because in Jerusalem, because her picture of Aikman as this banal pencil pushing figure is wrong.
He is.
I think we've made the case a pretty outwardly bombastically villainous Nazi.
She fell for his right personal portrayal of himself while submitting himself to a Jewish court.
Right. But when it comes to dissecting Israeli policies and the message that this trial was meant to show, a Rent is incredibly incisive. And I want to make it clear here she's not saying that what she lays out on the paragraph uncritically right. She's not saying and it's good that Bengaren is doing that she has deep reservations about what he's doing and about the treatment of Holocaust survivors in Europe. I'm going to quote again from Eikman
in Jerusalem. Equally superfluous was the lesson to the Jews in the diaspora, who hardly needed a great catastrophe in which a third of their people perished to be convinced
of the world's hostility. Not only has their conviction of the eternal and ubiquitous nature of anti Semitism been the most potent ideological factor in the Zionist involvement since the Dreyfus affair, it must also have been the cause of the otherwise inexplicable readiness of the German Jewish community to begin to negotiate with Nazi authorities during the early stages of the regime. This conviction produced a fatal inability to
distinguish between friend and foe. The German Jews underestimated their enemies because somehow they thought that all gentiles were alike. And yeah, that's such an important point to make too.
And this is why while we have to point out what a rent got wrong, you need to keep this in mind, right that both like, well, this is a lot of what Bengurian's doing is totally unnecessary, and it's also based on him kind of falling into the same mistake, a different version of the same mistake that a lot of European Jews made early on, which is thinking that all the gentiles are alike, right, which leads them to
misunderstand their enemies. One thing that really gets lost in casual discussion of Eichman's trial in Jerusalem is that Israeli authorities also kind of put Holocaust survivors on trial for their timidity. They of course needed witnesses to call to discuss the details of the killing system Iikeman had helped to implement. A Rent describes quote the prosecutor asking witness after witness, why did you not protest? Why did you board the train? Fifteen thousand people were standing there and
hundreds of guards facing you. Why didn't you revolt in charge and attack these guards? Harped on for all it was worth. But the sad truth of the matter is that the point was ill taken, for no non Jewish group or non Jewish people had behaved differently sixteen years ago, while still under the direct impact of the events. A former French inmate of Bukenvault, David Roussette, described in his
book the logic that obtained in all concentration camps. Quote the triumph of the ss demands that the tortured victim allow himself to be led to the news without protesting, that he renounced and abandoned himself to the point of ceasing to affirm his identity, and it is not for nothing. It is not gratuitously out of sheer sadism that the
essmen desire his defeat. They know that the system which succeeds in destroying its victims before he mounts the scaffold is incomparably the best for keeping a whole people in slavery in submission. Nothing is more terrible than these processions
of human beings going like dummies to their death. The court received no answer to this cruel and silly question, but one could easily have found an answer had he permitted his imagination to dwell for a few minutes on the fate of those Dutch Jews who, in nineteen forty one in the Old Jewish Quarter of Amsterdam dared to
attack a German security police detachment. Four hundred and thirty Jews were arrested in reprisal, and they were literally tortured to death, being sent first to book involved and then to the Austrian camp of Ma thousand. Month after month, they died a thousand deaths, and every single one of them would have envied his brethren in Auschwitz had he
known about them. There exist many things considerably worse than death, and the SS saw to it that none of them was ever very far from the mind to an imagination of their victims. In this respect, perhaps even more significantly than in other's, the deliberate attempt in Jerusalem to tell only the Jewish side of the story, to distorted the truth,
even the Jewish truth. And this is such an important criticism that not only are the victims of Iikman also on trial in Jerusalem, but that by framing it this way, by being so obsessed with well, why didn't they fight more? Why didn't there And by being so obsessed with just the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, they're distorting even the story of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. That that's also happening here.
Mmmmmm. It's something that continues to happen with unfortunately Israeli history, of the downplaying of the other victims and even other genocides as well, in order to tell their own crafted version of it, of going like sheep to the slaughter as a famous quote yeah and was even used as a rallying cry by I believe his name is Abner kovnor.
Yes yeah, conor yes.
Yeah, to launch attacks against surviving ss men and even attempt to poison an entire city in Germany.
Yeah, as we talked about the part of a group called NACAM, Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, And that was like the rallying cries, like we did not go like sheeps to the slaughter.
Yes, and they did, And there were so many other examples of resistance. Right. But the point that our rent is making is both that like, you can't imagine the position these people were in and what had been done to them already, and also like the degree of like critiquing them for this. They acted like everyone else. And we know this because every other group that was targeted by the Nazis that was put into this system, they more or less all behaved similarly.
Right.
Of course, this is not just a problem with Jewish people in Europe. This was just something. This was a result of the sheer amount of violence that was deployed and what it does to people.
It happens with every genocide, and this story gets told with every genocide. I am Armenian, and Armenians tell the same thing that they they put their own history through the same Well why did they why did they just walk off like that and do as they're told? They're like, how fucking stupid, are you? Yeah, it's it's how fucking dare you.
It's this desire both to avoid what you see is the shame that like they didn't fight back more, and also this belief to think that, like, well, I would never be in that position. I'm built different, I'd fight back. And I can see it because like now that I'm on the side, now that I'm part of a country that has a military that's capable of like fighting, I'm you know, we're we're we're fighting, right, Like we would
never just give up, you know. And it's this desire to believe that, like you were now safe from this horrible thing. Yeah, and this desire to believe also that it's it's it's this deeply insidious attitude that like people who suffer something that badly, even if they're your people, they must have done something wrong. Yeah, exactly, they didn't fight hard enough. Right, There's something that they could have done that I would do if I was in their situation, right.
Yeah, everybody, Oh, that couldn't happen to me. I would do this, I assure you will. Yeah, it would be me, Yeah, it fucking would.
And I think a rint's work is so valuable in part because she brings this criticism up. That is, it's very hard to talk about this. It's very hard to be critical of, like, especially in public, of how Israel handled the Aikman and what they did, And the story of Israeli treatment of Holocaust survivors is much deeper than just this, and it's difficult to be for a lot of people to be critical about it because it's hard to not seem like you're saying something fine, and like
a Rent is a Holocaust survivor. She has smuggled out of Europe right like she is, and she is the one making these criticisms of Israel during the trial, right as she's reporting for I think the fucking New Yorker. You know, Uh, it's very important, and her and Iikman in Jerusalem, for all of its flaws, is still very important to read for these reasons. Now, I find stuff like this much more interesting than Aikman's actual performance on trial.
In short, his defense council tries to use the argument that Hans Globke had drafted the Nuremberg racial laws in nineteen thirty five, and thus Eikman had only been following orders. Eichman himself sought to inhabit the image of a timid middle manager. Oh, we'd handled some logistics. Sure, he'd helped send Jews to camps. He was making the trains run, but he wasn't putting people in gas chambers. He testified personally,
I had nothing to do with killing Jews. I've never killed a Jew, and I've never ordered anyone to kill a Jew. The German government, for their part, when he brings part of what Germany's doing, when Eichman brings up Globka to try to be like, no, this was the
guy responsible. Germany tries to hush that up, right, and they're like really taught, like pushing internationally, like we've got to keep this shit quiet because Globca at this point is the senior most civil servant in West Germany working under Conrad Idenauer.
Right there it is, Yeah.
The guy who drafted the Nuberg racial laws is working for the government. Again, he's the senior most civil servant in West Germany under Edenow. So obviously the outcome of this trial is never really in doubt. And there are some very valuable things that happen during the trial and that get out, and it's very valuable that a lot of Eichman's victims are allowed to talk about what happened to them, are allowed to put that on the historic record. I'm not claiming that like this is all a failure
or bad. A lot of good does come of his trial, right. That is also a part of the story, and it's an important part of the story. And the fact that a lot of victims of the Holocaust get to go in front of a perpetrator and lay out what he did to them is good. There are also horrifying moments, right. One of the worst moments of the trial is a former Auschwitz inmate is shown a camp uniform while he's on trial, and he has a stroke in the courtroom.
Oh geez, it's fucking nightmarriage. And in this case they are trying to do like the right thing, where it's like we need this on the record, but like, of course that's what happens sometimes, right, Like it's just it's horrible, Like there's no easy way to handle all this stuff. On December eleventh and twelfth, in nineteen sixty one, laired Adolf Iikeman guilty of crimes against the Jewish people and humanity as a whole. He was sentenced to death by
hanging and executed on June first, nineteen sixty two. He died unrepentant, and that's the Iikman story.
I mean, it's not surprising he went screaming to hell, refrising tod not that he was wrong.
Yeah, no, that scance.
Yeah. Well, uh good, I guess. Yeah, I'm glad to end it that way rather than going out the mangal away, which I dying of a people swimming.
Yeah yeah, oh man. Anyway, No, admittedly, I.
Feel like drowning would be a lot worse. So who's to say?
Yeah, who's to say? I mean, I don't know. My grandma nearly drowned to death and always had said it was a pretty pleasant way to go, like you feel really warm and nice at the end. I don't know. I've never drowned.
Uh do we know? If Israel did it right and he didn't strangle to death. I feel like that's something that an Israeli prison guard would fuck up on purpose.
Yeah, I mean I don't think he like it wasn't like, because that happens to a lot of the Nuremberg guys, like the hangman, like purposefully fucks up.
Oh Yeah, that hangman ruled.
Yeah, we've done episodes on him as like a pretty cool guy.
Just a drunk guy who wanted to strangle a lot of Nazis and accidentally kind riped their heads off.
Yeah, he was the right man for the job. Yeah, he is executed by hanging. I don't I don't think he was particularly fucked up. It should have been.
Yeah, it's unfortunate.
Yeah, do it the slow way, like, oh no, we built it too low a isreel.
You can't fuck up the one thing we want you to fuck up.
Yeah, yeah, really screw over this hanging. Yeah. Anyway, Well, if you ever get a chance to hang a Nazi, be bad at it exactly. Yeah.
The only way to be good at that job is by fucking it up harder than you fucked up anything you fucked up before you.
Need to get drunk. You've got to really practice to be incompetent at this.
There you go.
Yeah, yeah, all right, everybody.
Listen to listen to Joe's podcast.
Listen to Joe's podcast.
Yeah, yeah, if you want to know more about actually weird that this everything you bring up keeps coming back to a series that we've done. But we did a series in Auto SCORESMI. Uh yeah, he's a psycho. You can listen to that. You could listen to that series that we did, or one of the other three hundred or so episodes we've done over the last seventy years. You'll find something you like. Gold Lines led by Donkeys. Listen to it. We have a Patreon check it out.
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