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Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where every week I try to make you feel worse about life, even though life makes you feel worse about life every week. Why do I do this? Money?
Uh?
And also I live to hurt you. You know. That's it. That's all that's going on with me. Let's talk about what's going on with our guest today, Joe Kassebian. Joe, how are you doing?
Hey, I'm I'm great. I'm ready for pain to be inflicted on me and absorb the pain and the suffering like a sponge.
Yes, yes, yes, feature pain, your delicious pain.
Say that. But when you're hear what the topic?
Oh yeah, last time I was on it was like four hours of Laventi barrier. What could possibly be worse than that?
Oh, I'm so glad you asked that question.
It could possibly be worse than Laventi barriers. Stalin's head of the Secret police and almost certainly a pedophile on an industrial scale. What could be worse than that?
I'm glad you asked that question.
Could be worse than that, Sophie, what could be worse than that?
I mean, I know the top, yes.
But I think I think Joe, I think we've done an able job of finding a worse one for you, because this week and motherfucking next week, because boy howdy, you can't do this guy. In two parts, we are talking about mister Holocaust himself, Adolph Eichman. You're welcome, Are you fucking Serious's right, baby, mister Holocaust himself. I probably shouldn't call him, And.
I mean it's a good If he had a rig name, it would be Holocaust.
And he, as we'll talk about, he worked most of his professional career. He worked very hard to make himself the number one name associated with the Holocaust internationally, like that was a he was not actually like he his reputation. He was very involved, obviously, but his reputation is even higher than his actual involvement. And that was due to him trying to jink up his career. But I think it's.
Oh God, to juice up as Holocaust.
He really was here, really was.
And And Joe, when Robert told me he was writing the scripts, He's like, who should we get as a guest, And I was like, Joe.
Yeah, we probably gotta get Joe over this one.
Joe, Yes, yes, I'm glad I have a brand and it's horrible.
Uh huh uh, well boy, howdy, let's do it.
I'm gonna say though you had me in the first half because he said mister Holocaust himself add off of like did he did? He really? Motherfucking really bring me on for the Hitler ships episodes.
We've done so many Hitlers. I know, we've covered we gotta you gotta cover Hitler in like little pieces, like we'll do two parts on how we fucked you know, you gotta cover all the there's so much niche Hitler stuff. Although you know, let's let's come back from the cold open and I'll talk about the scope of these episodes. But we're done with the cold open. You're you're warm now very warm, and we're back. We're back. We're all
lathered up and hot bothered. So these episodes. If you know anything about Aikman, and he's like outside of Hitler, Gerbels, Himmler, you know, Gering, he's probably the first name, one of the one of the few names that like the average person who knows anything about the Holocaust, you've heard of Aikman, right, A lot of people will have if you haven't. As I always say, there's a great movie called Conspiracy about the conference where they planned the Holocaust, where Eikman is
played by Stanley Tucci, and it's perfect performance. He's played by Stanley Tucci.
Chooch can play any part he is.
And Stanley is incredible as Aikman, Like he really nails it.
I can see it, I can see he's got a face.
Is he also hot in the movie?
Because Stanley Tucci has been hot in every movie he's ever been and except the one where he played that pedophile.
I'm not gonna say. I will say one of the critiques the movie you got is that. And I also think he does an excellent job. Kenneth Branna plays Reinhardt Heidrich, and one of the complaints that, like some Holocaust scholars had is that, like he's a very good actor. He does a good job, but like he probably shouldn't have made Hydrich hot, right, Like maybe.
That is too sexy.
I tend to think the movie's just good enough that if you've watched the second season of and or the first episodes where they're planning that genocide on Gorman are themed after that movie, like that movie Conspiracy, seriously, yeah, yeah, had a big influence on it. Tony Gilroy is confirmed it.
But Eikman, the guy we're talking about today, is not the architect of the Holocaust because that that generally goes to hydric although obviously he was not the only person involved in setting up the architecture, but Heidrich and Eichman were both at this meeting, the Vonsee conference, where the
architecture of the Holocaust was set up. And Eichman's primary job, you might call him the trigger man, not because there were actually a lot of guys who just shot people, right, like the Einsatzgrupa who shot tens of thousands at places.
Like the World Federal trigger but.
In terms of like the Nazi state had to build a system that was effectively a big gun for genociding people, and Eikman was the man who worked. He was the guy who his primarily primary thing was like logistics, like making sure how we're going to move get all of these people out of the communities they're in and move them into the different camps.
Right.
He was the guy who managed that system. He was the deportation guy, right, that was a big part, and he was like overseeing a lot of that system. As we'll talk about there's other stuff that he did. But if you're making like a top five list of the Nazis who were most directly responsible for the genocide of European Jewry, Aikman is going to make the list every single time, right, Like he's that central to what happened
and kind of the biggest. Probably, I don't know, pop culture is probably the wrong way to talk about Hannah Rintz writing in twenty twenty five, but it was at one point popular culture, right, Like, because this guy goes on trial, he gets caught by the Masad, and he
goes on trial. In the sixties, and Hannah A Rent, who's a famous philosopher and scholar of totalitarianism, writes a book called Aikman in Jerusalem, right, which is very much worth reading today, although very flawed, right, And it's very
flawed in part. And one of the things that gets a lot of criticism for today is that as she is describing Aikman on trial, a Rent coins a term called the banality of evil to describe the man that she sees in Israeli captivity, because he's just kind of this late middle aged balding dude and he's mostly talking about like, look, I was just following orders, you know, I was just doing what I was told to do. I was one cog and a bigger machine. I didn't
actually kill anyone directly. That was like the bulk of his legal defense. And I don't think the banality of evil is a useless term. I think it does describe a lot of people who were involved in administrative levels of the Holocaust. Right. There are individuals whose job is pretty banal, and who were themselves pretty banal and played an important role in the killing machine. Eikman is not a good example of that. He was not banal at all.
He is like a super villain in terms of his actual personality and how he talked about what he did. This is not a that was his defense in court. The reality of Iikman was not a boring middle manager, right.
Yeah, yeah, Like she saw Iikman like out of power. It is old man's sweater pacing around, because there's famously a video of him pacing back and forth and Israeli prison cell on the stand like, yeah, of course he looked like the local accountant dork. Yes, yes, of course he looked like that. Yeah.
And and it's one of those things I don't think it's a useless concept. It's just misapplied to Iikman, she does get We'll talk about it. She gets a lot right in this. We'll be quoting from it some in the last episode. And it's one of those things. I don't reject the term the banality of evil. I just think it often is it's less aptly applied to individuals, often in part because those individuals are not so banal
as they may seem from the outside. But I think there's a real banality of evil in like the systems that we allow to exist and that we live inside that can be turned into instruments of mass violence or slaughter because we collectively make the poor choice to hand over more of our responsibility for our security to elected officials and government institutions that are neither accountable nor interested
in our health. Right, Like, you could use the term banality of evil for the twenty years that voters spent continuing to fund DHS and to expand ICE right, or to the work of editors at hundreds of publications deciding to greenlight more stories about migrant crime because hey, that does well on Facebook and traffic is money. Right, The banality of evil is the Sulzberger family who owns The New York Times, ignoring the Holocaust because Eastern European Jews
from rural areas aren't, in their words, worth caring about. Right. The banality of evil is all of us like hearing about shit like this and being like, oh, man, that's fucked up, But like, I gotta make the mortgage, so I guess I'm going to walk right past the atrocity, keep going right. This can't be on me to fix, can it?
Right? Yeah, the concept of banality of evil is not like if you see a guy and you've heard of a guy Eikman, for example, he's not the definition of the banality of evil. Yeah, that makes him management.
No, he is again a super villain, like you stick this motherfucker in a Bond movie going on some of the rants he goes on and he fits perfectly. So A big source for my episodes is a book by German philosopher and author Bettina Stegneth, who wrote a wonderful book called Eichman Before Jerusalem, and in this book number one, she's trying to kind of break some of the myths that came up as a result of a Renz piece. But she also highlights, opening this book, how relatively little
we know about him. In this passage, we cannot speak of the systematic extermination of millions of men, women, and children without mentioning his name, And yet people are no longer even sure what his first name was, Carl Adolph Otto.
It's the simplest of questions, yet it can still surprise us, long after we thought we'd established who he was, because he you know, he has a couple of names, and he goes by a few in his life, and there's kind of this open debate is like what was he actually called as like a general rule by people that he knew.
He's had a symbol to go out, you like, prince.
Yeah, prince right, yeah, we get his call him that he was born Otto Adolph Eichman on March nineteenth, nineteen oh six, in Solingen, Germany. But Bettina's point is that depending on who you ask and what you read, there's room for debate as to what he would have given
as his name during different points in his life. Right, his first biographers were people like British journalist Comber Clark, who in nineteen sixty tried to chronicle Eikman's early life and came up with a sort of tale of woe you might expect from a great historic victim, right, And this is partly what you get when a journalist tries to do a biography, right as he's like.
Looking for that why what shit? Ye yeah, it's one of my biggest pet peeame not what we do a journalist trip into writing a biography or writing in depth history like not.
Our place, not our place. In Comer's telling Comber Clark's telling, Eikman's mother died before he was five years old. His mother had to move back to Austria from once they hailed when he was young, but his father had to go back to Germany after this to escape the sorrow of being trapped with memories of his late wife, and so his boy was raised largely by his aunts. David Csarini, who's a better Aikman biographer, summarizes the rest of Clark's
version of events. According to Clark, Eikman was repeatedly mistaken for a Jew at school and beaten up, which left him with a lasting antipathy towards Jewish people. Against this background, it was natural that he should join the Nazi party after hearing Hitler speak, and this is all nonsense. None of that's true, right.
If that happened, I really wish you would have learned the opposite lesson of that, which is racism. That's just that we all just must look the same, Like this racism thing is stupid.
Yeah, maybe if I can get mistaken for these people, Jesus, this racism thing must be both. Right. This is almost certainly not what happened. Cessarini, who is the author of Aikman, His Life and Crimes, describes similar cavalcades of bullshit from a generation of lazy ahistorical pop bios of this guy. Quote Quentin Reynolds, another British pressman, declared that Eichman was left motherless and introverted. His family was so poor that
there was never enough food on the table. Young Adolph turned into a problem child and suffered even more once his father remarried a harsh, domineering woman. As a young man, he was unsuccessful and friendless, not least because he looked Jewish. He failed in job after job and walked the streets of Lynz with the unemployed.
That sounds more accurate.
It's not, but it sounds like it should be right because it fits, it fits the Hitler profile. I think that's why they did this, is that like, well that's kind of I mean, Hitler was mostly in Austria by the time he was like living homeless.
Right, he was living in a men's home.
Yeah, he was in Vienna by that point. But otherwise, like, yeah, that's kind of Hitler's life, right, Like his dad dies early, doesn't have a lot of friends, he fails a job after job, right, Hitler didn't get mistaken for big Jewish often. But like you know, the rest of that's pretty simple.
No, just inbread.
The pieces fit together, right, dead mom, dad, not around, economic anxiety, bullying, that gives him a convenient reason to hate Jews.
Right.
It's an easy, easy thing, easy biography to accept for Eikman. Unfortunately, it's also hogwash. It's like if you were to do a biography of some modern day homophobic bigot and say, like, well, he got called gay or the f slur a bunch on the playground as a kid, right, so that's why he did such monstrous things as an adult. And if you're like someone three hundred years in the future and you read that, you might be like, oh, I guess yeah,
that makes sense. But if you were to talk to like either of us, like they could bring us forward into the future and be like, so is this why this guy did it? We could be like everybody get called those things on the playground man.
Yeah, like that's just like a universe then that was.
Like living in the late nineties, early two thousands. Man like that cannot explain why he did what he did.
I'm also a bit worried because it's like, oh, you know, he failed at all these jobs, you know, shitty home life. I'm like, okay, so he is at seventeen, he's going to list in the army, and that is me.
Ye.
A lot of guys, a lot of guys.
Who don't go on to commit hate crimes and war crimes. So maybe, like I don't.
Know, got beat up for thinking of a different race than I am. That is just me.
Now, in Eikman's case, there's even less reason to believe his anti Semitism resulted from bullying, because there's simply no real evidence that he was bullied about this or accused of being Jewish, you know, in any way that impacted his development. Likewise, the claims that poverty and desperation drove
him to fascism are baseless. And again I think this is like a mainstream Hitler discourse thing right, Like it sounds kind of like Hitler's backstory, So that makes it seem like, oh, of course, this is where fascists come from.
Right.
It's more comforting than being like, no, a, fascists come from the s in place, like the guy who runs the local fucking credit union came from right, like they just come from the world. I'm going to read another quote from Cessarini's book, and I want you to think about how easily you could do a find and replace on this paragraph and make it sound like modern reporting
on some American neo Nazi mass shooter quote. The NBC correspondent John Donovan concluded, on the basis of interviews with eikman schoolmates, that he was a lonely and distant fellow. He was a fragile, underfed youth, and an obviously unhappy one, a misfit. According to Donovan, Eikman represented the classic pattern of disturbed, introverted personality which so often produced the Larvae fanaticism.
His father, a struggling and underpaid manager of a failing electrical company simply could not provide for his abundant family, and more often than not, there was insufficient food on the table. The boy grew to manhood with a grudge and drifted around in a world without hope until he traded a threadbare suit for a splendid essay uniform. And
again not true. I'm bringing this up to talk like how how similar a lot of these very fake backstories are and what they say about what we want to believe about a guy named Iikman, Right.
Yeah, we always want to believe these people come from like disadvantaged backgrounds or tortured family homes, or we're bullied. I mean, I know we're about the same age, Robert, and what we're we always told growing about the Columbine shooters, right, oh, yeah, Like these people always need to be victims of some kind of lashing out. They can't be cold and calculated and ideologically driven, you know.
Yeah, And there's this Yeah it's tough too, because like there's this belief that is very common on the left and I think is not a bad guiding light that like, well, you should seek to improve people's conditions because that makes the world better and guys like Iikman point out that like that, yeah, you should, but that's not enough to avoid the birth of an Aikman Because what's kind of scariest about this guy's backstory is that if you grew up in the suburbs like ten fifteen years ago or
like you know today, a lot of his background's kind of sound similar to you, right, like in some ways that are like weirdly direct. So his birth town, Solingen, was an industrial town in the Rhineland, and his father was a modern German Man with a modern German job. He worked as a clerk for a company that supplied parts to power plants. His name was Adolf Karl Eichmann, and he was a strict disciplinarian, but not in a way that would have been weird to his son or
anyone else. This was very normal for the time. Our Eikman would recall in his own autobiography, I acknowledged my father as the absolute authority. The earliest recollection that he gives us of his education is of a kindergarten teacher with an illustrated book of Bible stories which showed Moses having demonic horns. Now Eikman gave this recollection when he was on trial for genocide, So he may have been trying to defray his culpability by making a point about
the deep roots of anti Semitism and his culture. That said, as I've noted before, you can today find churches in Germany and elsewhere in Europe with what's called a judensau depicted on the outside, which is a sculptural depiction of a pig suckling Jewish babies. These are like medieval churches, but they're around today and there were more of them back then. So like the idea that he would have encountered this in Sunday School. Not weird, right, pretty racist
at all? Culture, not at all weird. Germany was a deeply anti Semitic place. And I also liked the idea of like, maybe we shouldn't take the guy on trial for Jesse on trial, yeah, for killing for the Holocaust to face value.
Yes, maybe the concept of innocent until proven guilty needs to be ignored on this one.
Perhaps there were a lot of fascinating like Jewish prudential arguments about at the Nuremberg trials, And obviously this isn't a part of that. This was a different thing, but like, and part of it was like number one, well, technically everything these guys did was legal in their country, so like what law are we trying them under kind of expos facto? And number two like well we know, like we know Herman Gearing doesn't have an offense against being Herman Gearing.
Right, it's the first legal precedent of fuck that. Yeah, we've all come together and our our our six or eight judge brains have decided full yeah, all his life in my weird dress with my wig.
Oh man. I did watch the fucking Mandela movie with starring Idris Elba as Mandela, and it was like it was fine, but the opening of it is like early South African courts where everybody's wearing the wigs, even like yeah, the black lawyers, and it's like, oh man, this is did that really? I guess that must that must have really been how everyone dressed in those courts. See, it's weird. I guess it's a holdover.
I love that there's still places that do it, like this is ridiculous. I don't care if you're passing me, like I could be sitting in front of you, I'm sings cuffed together and you're like I sent you to death of like bro not you bring up the real judge?
Yeah whatever, Adolph Karl, his dad moves back to Linz to take a job managing a local power company, and his wife and kids follow that a year later. They were Evangelical Calvinist Protestants, which made them as much a minority in the small Austrian town of Linz as the Jewish citizens. Right, Jewish people are like seventeen percent of
the population, Evangelical Protestants are like nineteen percent. Linz is predominantly Catholic, and while Catholics believe that good works can win someone a place in heaven, Calvinists are as close to the opposite of Catholics as you get in Christianity.
Right.
The idea is there's an elect few that make it to heaven and those roles are fixed.
Right. Yeah, it's very Dutch coded.
It's very Dutch coded. But there's there's no real evidence that this difference caused Karl a much trouble. His family overall seems to have blended in. His dad was a German nationalist, and as a Protestant as well, he would have been drawn to George Rider von Schener's Pan German movement. This was a foundational pillar of the right in Austria and also a prelude to Nazism's conflict with the Catholic Church,
because the Pan German movement is a heavily evangelical Protestant movement. Right, that's where like the core of the membership comes from. And I want to read you a summary of Schoener's life and career written for Amsterdam University Press, which notes that his politics were quote founded on antagonism towards Slav's,
Jews and Catholicism. This culminated in his establishment of the Pan German Party in eighteen seventy nine and the subsequent away from Rome movement seeking mass conversion of Austrian Catholics to Lutheranism, echoing Bismarck's culture comp in Germany. Schooner became notorious for his pioneering use of physical and verbal violence. In eighteen eighty eight, he was imprisoned, losing his title and temporarily all parliamentary privileges, after ransacking the offices of
a Jewish owned newspaper. In eighteen ninety eight, the orchestrated mob protests that expedited the dismissal of the Austrian Prime Minister, Count Bedini, one year after Schener's own re election to the reix Rot. This was in protest against Badini's language ordinances obliging civil servants in Austrian Bohemia to speak Czech excluding germanifhones, and it helped his party reach a high water mark of twenty one delegates in nineteen oh one.
Schoenerer helped create an entirely new political form and climate, described as being in a new key sharper, violent, demagogic, and Schoenerer is a massive because again Hitler grows up in Lenz. Schoenerer is a huge influence on Hitler right. He is like the way his party works is a
proto Nazi party. These guys are destroying Jewish newspapers, They're getting into fights in the street, and there are like a Pan German nationalist group right who is seeking to destroy any of these religions that have ties Like his issue with Catholicism is its ties to Rome Right, which is obviously not German.
Yeah, as a German nationalist that makes a lot of sense. I like that he he ascends to power because his entire thing is a I see, you guys have a nationalist movement and it's not doing very well. Have you considered violence, have you considered people out have shared street crime?
Oh shit, this is working great. Yeah, let's keep trying that.
This is wonderful.
So Aikman would later recall that his father had been essentially a political quote. At home, politics was never discussed. My father didn't bother with politics. But that's the kind of thing people say when like they don't view whatever their family believes as political right. And as a kid, Aikman doesn't think German nationalism or pan Germanism is political right. It's just correct. It's like how you get there's some religious extremists in the US. We'd be like, Christianity isn't
a religion. It's just the truth, you know, right, Like I've heard that's that's a conversation I've had.
It's like, I mean, and having Christianity in politics is neither something to argue for. Are you against? It just should be something that exists.
It's just the truth, right, Yeah, it's just the truth. You know.
I hate to see yet another father get radicalized by using Facebook.
Yeah, you know, tragic, Yeah, his dad would have lost it to Facebook, so Schoenerer's party would have was the first big political party to influence Hitler, and in a less direct way, the same would have been true of young Eichman. His family did everything a loyal Austro Hungarian family ought to do, which for Adolph's mom meant Maria popping out a child every single opportunity she had. Little Adolph was joined by four siblings, three of whom were boys,
in the space of about eight years. And in other words, Maria popped out a kid once every two years until she died in nineteen sixteen, and her death was a consequence of both World War One is on at this point everyone is starving in Germany and Austria Hungary and number two, she's just had not had enough time to recuperate between pregnancies, right, so like her body is already taxed and then there's not enough food while she's going through pregnancy number five in nine years.
Christ give the woman a weekend off.
Nope, that not the way they did it. Back then she dies it thirty two.
That was a lot.
Yeah, this dude couldn't pull out of a driveway.
Uh, the elder Hadolf Eikman remarried almost instantly. This was likely a product of two pragmatic realities. He had no desire to raise his own children, and he needed more children because that's what you did as a loyal citizen of the Empire and a good evangelical Christian right. His second wife was also named Maria. Perhaps, oh that's weird. Perhaps he had it type, although an Austrian woman named Maria not too uncommon.
I am looking for an Austrian woman named Ria who could give births in litters three or four at a time would be ideal. It really saves us time and money.
Yeah, he was like, I'm not learning another name. What are you talking about?
Yeah?
Oh no, this is the world's first puppy play enthusiasts, right.
I feel like I.
Feel like he just numbered his children and he's like, number one, come here.
Yeah, it's faster that way. Yeah.
Why is it always the psychos that want the most about of kids have the least about to do with parenting them.
Yeah, because the point is to have the kids, not to be there with them. So, you know, speaking of being with people, I want to be with our advertisers, you know, both both physically and financially and we're back, all right. So, uh, his second wife, we'll call her Maria to her family has money, which helps a lot because they're going to have more kids. Also, her family is closely tied to She has like a number of relatives who had married into wealthy Jewish families in Vienna.
And obviously by that you should know these are like urban sophisticated Jewish sophisticated by the term of the day, they're not there. They're trying to just be Germans, right, which is a not uncommon thing for people in like the upper class who are Jewish in both in Austria and in Germany to do to try to kind of leave behind the religion and like we're basically secular, we're
married into Christian families. None of this really saves a lot of these people come the Holocaust, but there is this attempt to like integrate that, like I'm a German before I'm anything else, right, And that's kind of Her family is number one, you'd say, probably more open minded than a lot because they are willing to marry into
these families. Although it's also you know this thing of like, well they got money, right, so that's that's that over you know, overwhelms the fact that they're this race that a lot of people don't like.
Right, they're rich.
Yeah, that that that that kind of papers over that to some people. But it's meaningful in the case of Eichmann because you often don't hear this with him. You know, every version of this backstory, of his backstory emphasizes cultural anti Semitism, which both he was raised with and tries to say that he was like a key of being Jewish, but it ignores the fact that, like he was exposed to positive images and accounts of Jewish people as part
of German society. His in laws were Jewish, some of them. Right, He knew Jewish people growing up, and he would have had like a family relationship with him. Right. So this is not a guy who was like destined by any means to be completely anti Semitic.
Right, destined by the stars to be a massive piece of shit.
Right, That's just not how it works. This is a choice. He makes it a point. Right Now. Obviously, his mother's death would have been traumatic for him. It's always traumatic for your mom to die when you were a little kid. But again, a lot of these stories are like and he hated his wicked stepmother, who was cruel to him. He never described her that way. He described her as a zealous and responsible guardian.
Like which is like the highest complimented German can pay you.
Right right, you get the thing. He didn't love her like he did his mom, which again isn't weird. But he was like, no, she was like respectable. She did the job that she was brought into do right, and three more children quickly joined the family. He later recalled of his family life, there was no disorder. We were brought up in a strict way and we had a normal,
quiet life. He did recall as a child that while his stepmother tried to get the family interested in the Bible, young Adolf Eichmann was primarily interested in the bits with battles and killing, which is not abnormal for young boys.
Yeah, that's more on brand. I would be more worried if he was it. He's like, no, I'm actually more really into the logistics half of this.
Yeah yeah, yeaha they what kind of food were they carter around the desert for forty years? How did they make that work? Right?
Let me see the wagons?
Yeah, So one of his best friends as a child was a Jewish classmate, Misha Seba. Seba's father was a pharmacist and his mother owned a salon, and the two were close enough that Cserini describes them as regularly staying over at each other's houses. So again, this is not a guy who's destined to the kind of anti Semitism that he is going to adopt in adulthood. It's a
choice he makes. Seba and Eikman would maintain their friendship in fact well into not just adulthood, but Aikman's involvement with like far right organizations into the early I think like thirty two is when they have their last contact, So like that's late, right.
And that's also not uncommon though. No, all of these psychos who you know, maybe put the blueprints to the Holocaust in place where high ranking members of the Third Raich had some kind of hands on shit, Like all of them had close personal contacts with Jewish people and the mental gymnastics, state workers like, ah, well he's on the good ones. It's fine.
Yeah, And that is in fact a thing that was talked about, like and they cover this in conspiracy at the Vonse conference where they're trying to decide like how far do we go with this? And finally like, look, everyone has their good jew but we just can't build that into the plan. We have to try to wipe it all out, right, But like, as I'll like Hitler even there was one Jewish guy he picked to spirit out of Nazi Germany after he took power. His family doctor.
Right, oh there's here's also his personal driver. Yeah, his personal driver was Jewish as well.
Yeah yeah, yeah, he like he like all of these guys had relationships with Jewish people, right, But you know that's just the way racism works, right.
And no one ever accused him of being smart or logical in the racism.
No, there was a fucking a great Louis Throux documentary where he goes to see Tom Metzger, who used to lead an organization called White Area of Resistance or War that was responsible for the murder of a young immigrant
named Mlugeta Surah in Portland years back. And you know, Metzger is as violent and anti Semiti as possible, and during Louie's time with him, he like meets his neighbor who's like a Mexican man, and they're like friendly and Tom's like no, I mean, like we get along, like I like him, Like it doesn't change my overall opinion
about like different races. And it's just like, yeah, that's just how these people are, Like cognitive dissonance does You're not immune to it just because you're a bigot, right, Yeah, So anyway, Seba and Eichman are friends for a while, and yeah, another friend of his was Friedrich von Schmidt. And this is a friend more that you would expect from a guy who grows into what Eikman was. As you can tell by the Vaughn. Friedrich is the son
of a noble family. His dad had been a field marshal for the Austro Hungarian Army, which means he was terrible at his job. None of them were nobody's worse at their job. Yeah, not a single good field marshal in that army. And his family was impoverished by the time that Eikman met him, right, probably because of the heretoforementioned World War One.
Right, Yeah, I'm glad to see at least one family got with the deserve poverty.
Yeah. Cesarini notes that the mere fact that Eichman was allowed to play with this kid counters the narrative that he was like a desperate loaner on the fringes as a kid, because like von Schmidt's family wouldn't have let them play their son play with the weird kid, right, that's just not the way these groups worked.
So anything, it's evidence that his family was quite well placed in society to be hanging out with us, even though they are impoverished. It's that kind of European non nobility that's poor, but they still have social standing.
And they're no, yeah, and they don't. And like the Iikman family is not like impoverished. I think they go from kind of lower middle class to solidly middle class by the time he's like an adult, right, Like this is sort of how I And again, middle class terms like that are not as useful when we're talking about Austro Hungary in the first half of the twentieth century. But that's or Austria. But that's kind of like.
Used horse salesman, right, the used car salesman didn't exist yet. Yeah.
Yeah, they drive the they drive the equivalent of a Pontiac vibe and horses, which I guess is just a horse with no legs you pull mule, put my horse up on cinder. We pull the horse with mule is pontiac.
This is my horse vibe.
So if we're looking for signs in his childhood of the monster he would become, we don't have a lot to go on from childhood trauma, because he doesn't seem to have had a lot of childhood trauma more than probably you and I or most kids. Because he grew up in World War One. Right, he's not fighting in it, but everyone is starving for a while, right, that's probably
pretty bad for you. Now, what's interesting to me is that, like it is a seminal moment, this war for a lot of the Nazi old Guard, whether they fought in.
It or not.
But Eikman didn't talk about it much, and we get little of his backstory on that. Now, he would have been inundated with imperial propaganda and the shortages of the war years would have impacted him, but his father seems to have maintained a comfortable living for the family in spite of the times, and as it was never drafted himself, which also suggests that what he was doing was really useful during the war, right to not get drafted by the end of that fucking thing as a yeah, yeah he had.
He either had really good connections or he did something some kind of manufacturing.
He's working in power, right, yeah, I like that.
By the end, the Austro Hungarian Empire was scrape big, the bottom of the bottom of the barrel. They were drafting the horses with no legs.
Do you have one or more hens? Okay? That's not a good Austrian exit.
But what is that?
Okay?
How am I doing it?
We have paperwork for something called the horse vibe.
So the war cost to Austria what was left of her empire? Right uh? And a third of the German speaking population wound up separated into different countries, which really pitches off Pan Germanists like Aikman's father. But again, we have nothing that shows child Aikman was particularly traumatized at the war's outcome, nor is there any particular evidence that his dad blamed the Jews. We might do better looking at the place and systems he was raised in than
the specifics of his family life. This is because the town he was raised in, Linz, is also the town where Hitler had written raised a couple decades earlier, and the future Furor was at this point on the Western Front during World War One, but he and Aikman went to the Sane High School as kids, obviously with some time in between them, and they had some of the same teachers. Right, Aikman has Hitler's history teacher.
Who is this guy? This guy history teacher has the most cursed alumni minver.
And he's a piece like he's got some blame for what happens.
Yes to his track record is h is spotless and tragedy.
And this is why I always tell my friends who are teachers, don't teach children things. It never ends well, you know, keep their little minds empty. Rights.
I had a teaching job for years. I'm never gonna say it was a good one, but I'm willing to bet I did not teach American Hitler. Hitler, Yeah, way too busy watching remember the Titans?
Right?
Yeah, put that on um, sty'll be fine. His history teacher was named doctor Leopold poet poet O e like poet S. E. H. Both Hitler and Eichman later wrote about the impact this man had on their developing minds. So it's probably worth looking into him a bit deeper in mind comp Hitler wrote this about Poets quote an old gentleman kind, but at the same time firm. He was able not only to hold our attention by his
dazzling eloquence, but to carry us away with him. Even today, I think back with genuine emotion on this gray haired man, who, by the fire of his words sometimes made us forget the present, who, as if by magic, transported us into times past and out of the millennium mists of time, transformed dry historical facts into vivid reality. There we sat, often a flame with enthusiasm, sometimes even moved to tears.
He used our budding national fanaticism as a means of educating us, frequently appealing to our sense of national honor. This teacher made history of my favorite subject. And indeed, though he had no such intention, it was then I became a young revolutionary. Not a good teacher.
No, no, that's not good.
You fucked up, Leopold.
Yeah, at any point you're a teacher, and you get noted in your students that manifesto. Manifesto, yeah right, not a good vote of confidence.
So Poet was a German supremacist, although he was also a one. He was a weird kind because he was super loyal to the Habsburgs, which obviously Hitler does not become loyal to the Habsburgs he leaves Austria to join the German Army. His exhortations to nationalism influenced both Hitler and Eichman, though Eichmann recalled later that while he was never very political as a kid, he reflexively leaned towards right wing nationalism. This would have kept him well inside
the mainstream within Linz. For most of his childhood, the city government was run by Mayor Carl Burley, who headed a coalition of lawyers, teachers, small business owners, and government employees who were all bound together by a shared hatred of liberals, Jews, and the Catholic clergy.
And yes, just a normal Republican meeting these days.
A normal Republican meeting these days. His father went through several career changes, Aikman's and significant reversals of fortune while he's a kid. The job in Linz had initially seemed like a step to the upper middle class, and for time it was, but his dad retired early and put his savings into a fifty one percent stake in a mining company based in Salzburg. Which was experimenting with an
early form of what we now call hydraulic fracturing. Right, like he his family, he has some family money from fracking. Adolf Iikman even he's an oil and gas kid.
Oh so does this make him like ancestrally from North Dakota or something? Yeah? Is he Dakota?
Yeah, that's why adolf Iikman High School is located in Bismarck. No, I say sorry to our listener in North Dakota, but they don't have the internet there.
Do They explains all the Nazis there.
To be fair, it's I'm sorry North Dakota. I love you. I don't love you, but I've been to you.
I don't think anybody could be in love with a Dakota. Yeah, it's hard, more of a friend.
Like loving a vampire squid. You know, you can appreciate some of its characteristics, but.
A what a vampire squid is a vampire.
It's a squid that's a vampire today.
It is what it says on the tin.
Yeah, No, it's it's what's advertised.
Your brain is like this today.
That's a lot of days, Sophie.
Much like the legs of a vampire squid.
There we go.
So this uh, this fifty steak in a fracking company in Salzburg. It brings in a living, but it doesn't make them rich. Right, you're in it a little too early to get loaded from fracking. So Adolph's dad invested what was left of his savings and his wife's inheritance into a mill in Upper Austria. This was a bad choice and the investment went busted quickly. Carl pivoted to an investment in a company making locomobiles. I had never heard of these. They were they were steam powered cars.
That rules, I mean you have to you have to invent something with your horse as the fucking legs.
Yeah, so he gets into a locomobiles, but it turns out this isn't like a real investment. His business partner is a con man who hangs himself.
So well, yeah, you invested in steam powered cars with the local Austrian flim flam man.
You're an oil man. Some biographers would try to make hay out of the impact his father's unstable employment and financial situation might have had, as with the fact that his dad has gone for a period. There's like a year where he's working in Germany. Well, Iikman's a kid, But Aikman never related this as particularly traumatic, and the evidence shows, while again they had financial difficulties, they were never in danger of like losing their home or starving.
If anything, the Aikman's enjoyed unusual stability and financial security for people of their class in time. Right. Not that they were totally stable, not that they didn't have anxieties, but they had it better than a lot of folks. Right.
Yeah, I mean they're making a killing selling weird steam powered cars, saying their neighbors drinking on fire with frakin.
Yeah. Well, I mean his business partner in the steamcars thing killed himself because it would belly up. So I don't know about that part.
But yeah, you're right, it's more of a Shelbyville thing.
I guess it's a Shelbyville thing. Yeah, but he does get he does get tricked by yeah, the fucking music man. So, as I noted earlier when I read Ccerinia's biography, the big thing I took away was how similar Iikman's childhood was to like mine, which is not something that tends to happen with books about guys who grew up in Austria at the turn of the century. And I find this very weird. And I'm just going to quote from
that book now. Iikman's social life was typical of the children and youth of his class, Like every good bourgeoisie child. He was taught a musical instrument and he became a proficient violinist. His father encouraged him to learn fencing, and he took classes in jiu jitsu. He was enrolled in the Young Men's Christian Association and went to the club every Sunday after attending church with his family. He later joined the Wandervogel, a sort of scouting or woodcraft association
that organized hikes and camps for teenagers. The particular Wandervogel group he joined belonged to the Federation of Youth Organizations, which was ostensibly apolitical, although the movement had a strong, if diverse ideological currents running through it. Eichman's group, named after the Griffin Bird, introduced him to older boys who were already in the ranks of right wing Austrian militias. And just like the whole yeah, he like, he has
to learn an instrument. Everyone does. He takes fencing classes. He takes jiu jitsu like he's doing karate classes. I didn't know they were doing that at this point in time in Austria.
I love the idea of like of a Nazi brown shirt getting it a street battle. He just falls on his ass and starts scooting around to juju Brazilian jiu jitsu like.
A crab on his back. I'm gonna pull guard on the under man. It's so funny. It's just it's all, Yeah, that's fascinating to me. And yeah, the wander Vogel there were like there was like a left wing chunk of them. But the group he is in, he doesn't get involved in right wing militias, but he now has friends in them right, and he will know people kind of the rest of his life until he gets directly in the far right who are in far right groups.
Right. This makes sense to me as someone who did a lot of jiu jitsu or you never I expect that you're gonna end up in the middle of a group of right wingers, But the second you walk into the jiu jitsu chip.
Like, oh the vibes are off.
I guess I'm in a right wig space or.
Three people with hats that are problems walk in and I may not be happy here, speaking of places, I'm not happy a world without these products and services. Wow, and we're back. So Eiken was an indifferent student, we might even say a bad one. His later life would show him to be a generally smart guy, or at
least it possess kinds of intelligence. So the way I read this is that he's not motivated by any of the school work he's doing, nor is he motivated by any of the paths set before him by his education. His father takes him out of traditional school in nineteen twenty one. He puts him into a vocational program to train him as an electrician. Right, so his dad is like, you're not doing well in like school school and you have to learn how to like do something right. But
he fails out of vocational school. He ultimately drops out without any kind of degree. So he's now failed both of the different kinds of schooling tracks in Austria at the time. Now, for a young man with fewer means behind him, this might have ended with Aikman winding up like Hitler, you know, as some of those other biographies had claimed. Living on the streets of Vienna, homelesser at
the edge of it. But unlike Hitler, Aikman's father was still alive, and Eikman's dad used his plentiful connections to get his job. He owns a mining company, right, and he gets his job involved in the fracking company. Right, so Adolf Eichman, future foreman of the Holocaust. His first like big boy job is hydraulic fracking.
Right.
That's that's a fail sign as a fail son.
Yeah.
His dad seems to have put him through a number of roles at the company, trying him out doing everything from squeezing through underground tunnels to running machinery above ground. Iikeman liked work in the tunnels. It was physical and dangerous and seems to have been the first labor that
he found motivating. After some time working at the fracking company, he did an apprenticeship at an Austrian electronics company, which occupied him for two and a half years until his dad convinced him to take a gig as a radio salesman. This does not pan out, and ultimately Iikman gravitates towards a position he finds advertised in the paper at an
oil company. His stepmom used a family connection through one of her Jewish in laws to get him hired by the owner of the company, who was also a Jewish guy. Now the executive who interviewed him told him he was too young for the job, but said I've been told to hire you anyway, so congratulations, like welcome in.
He probably. I don't know if this guy survives long enough to regret this or not, but woo yeah.
If Ikeman was at all embarrassed or ashamed at the nepotism involved in keeping him afloat, he left no record. Instead, he seems to have enjoyed the job and the relative comfort it afforded him. He bought a motorcycle and devoted himself to the work well enough to get promoted. Key to his success was that the job involved constant travel, which he mostly did via the motorcycle that he bought already.
Eichman showed a preference for work that allowed him to set his own hours and mixed Dex's work with time in the field. He spent a lot of time out in rural Austria finding spots to build gas stations, and he had to handle a lot of logistical hurdles scheduling fuel deliveries to make sure that shit got where it needed to be at the right time. And he gets good at this, right, Like his training for how to make the Holocaust trains run is setting up gas stations
and gas fuel deliveries, right. That is honestly something I could see coming. Yeah, it's not so surprising when you lay it out like.
That, a middle management NEPO guy in the oil gas fuel to fascism pipeline. I feel like that's a pretty well trodden path.
Now. He was known to work hard, often during the weekend, but he was also not someone who led his social life atrophy. As Cesarini writes, his social life flourish now that he had disposable income, freedom to come and go as he pleased on weekday evenings, and a motorcycle with which to impress prospective girlfriends at the weekend. He was definitely a lot not the lonely Gausch outsider who depicted as the typical recruit to Nazism in many of the
psychological and socio psychological explanations for the movement's growth. His prison memoir is filled with gratitude to his father for the move to Upper Austria his second homeland, and for giving him a glorious, untroubled youth, A keen horseman. He spent hours riding in the countryside. He recalled that as for all young men, those days offered him love, spring and life, motorsports, mountain sports, work, coffeehouses, friends and girlfriends, and why not filled the days and years.
So good for him.
He's living it up. He's again not at all the guy he's described as by a lot of people. He's a dude with a social life. He's a dude who's reasonably good with women. He's a dude who's has options to be happy outside of joining the Nazi Party. Right.
Yeah, If you didn't know how the story ended, I would say, well, I'm sure this guy turns out perfectly normal for German of the.
Era, A normal dude. Yeah. Now, Throughout this period, the Nazi Party is arising up in Germany and in Austria. The left and right are engaging in open warfare in the streets, with the government cracking down hard against the social democratic militias. Eikmann is an ignorant of any of this.
Although he is not initially much of an activist, his particular chapter of the Wandervogel movement shares members with some of these militias, and this seems to be where he starts the years long onboarding process that eventually leads him to Nazism. His aristocratic friend von Schmidt convinces him to join an anti socialist nationalist association for veterans. Obviously Eichmann
isn't a veteran, but that's not a problem. He joins the young veterans wing of the group, which is I guess for non.
Veterans that a young veterans.
I think it's love that will be a veteran when the war we all know it's gonna come. Well, yeah, future veterans.
I mean a young veteran back then could have just been child soldiers as well, because there's plenty of them floating around. But I love like Adolf Eichmann, honorary Austrian veteran.
Honorary Austrian veteran. Yeah, we're gonna throw rocks at you, and it's like you're in the tyroll.
Right, Yeah, what a bunch of dirds.
So this is where he learns to march and shoot their leader. And it's so funny to me, how close this guy's last name is to Hitler. Their leader is Perman von Hiltel. Not quite Hitler, right Hiltel. It's like carsonalization, but for fascists, like evolution was always working to produce a Hitler. If Hitler, if our Hitler hadn't come off, the von Hiltel family would have produced a Hitler given enough time, right.
To shift, Yeah, give it enough time that the chances of Hitler approached.
Their leader, Colonel Hermann von Hildte, was violently anti Semitic and described Jewish Marxism as the enemy of Germany. He was an outspoken advocate of dispossessing Austrian Jews who owned land and stripping them of their citizenship. Von Hiltel railed against Jewish immigration into Austria and held regular rallies where his loud, violent young followers would encourage their Jewish neighbors to leave the country. Now this is the group that
Eichman starts hanging out in. There is a Nazi party in Austria by the late twenties, but Eichman isn't interested in it because it's really weak and small. It's like, by far the weakest part of what is at that point a vibrant far right ecosystem. So he's like the Nazis, like those are Germans and they're kind of losers. Like
there's better far right Austrian groups. Evan Berbuki, a historian of Lenz, describes the Nazis in this period as a party of outsiders, and Eikman's not an outsider, right, key aspect of him. He is never an outsider.
Party of outsiders.
Okay, it's the weirdos in the freaks who become Austrian Nazis in this period, right, and Iikman is is not. You know, he's a normal guy with pretty good connections. So he joins a mainstream far right militia that pats Jewish.
Sorry, not Nazi enough.
For me, No Nazis'.
I just think that you should be you know more Nazi.
Yeah, a little fringe for me, darling. So I don't know why I give Iikman that. I'm telling you your brain today is I have I've got I've got George Lucas disease. I can't help but imagine Germans as sounding like British people.
I mean to be fair.
Look, it works, it makes sense, right.
There's a reason why whenever they make like Nazi movies and the bad guys actually have speaking lines, they're always just played by people British accents. Yeah, there's a reason for that.
Yeah, the big exception being Waltz in the Tarantino movie. We're like, oh, yet they actually have a German guy doing Nazi stuff. In nineteen thirty, Iikman gets engaged to a cops daughter. The relationship is not going to work out, weirdly enough, because she doesn't like Nazis right. She's like this cops daughter very, which doesn't mean she's not far right or racist, it just means they like another party
and the Nazis are kind of weirdos. One day, Iikman is over at her family apartment in nineteen thirty one, which sit in their apartment sits above a bar that Nazis would gather in regularly throughout the week, and Eikman later claimed in our circle and like he's talking about their friend group, it was the done thing to say that the NSDAP consisted of idiots and no hopers, and his fiance made the statement a statement to that effect when she saw a troop of brown Shirts marching down
the street Iikman got angry and snapped back. These idiots have order and discipline, and they march well. He ended the engagement shortly thereafter. Really good at marching.
I can't do it. They too good.
They're so good at walking. Goddamn, don't you understand how important walking is. By nineteen thirty two, the Australian economy is in the tank and Eichmann doesn't lose his job right away, but he can see the writing on the wall right that like his company is going to have to get rid of him. He may have ultimately joined the Nazi Party as much as anything because he saw a future there in the potential for paying work, right, not initially that he is such an ideological Nazi, because
he's still not at this point. He's a German nationalist. He's increasingly racist, but he could have gone a couple of ways. But he's like, look, the Nazis, they're starting to They're no longer a fringe group in Austria by like thirty one thirty two, right, they're starting to get
more normal. And if you know anything, like my career is based on a version of this, If you want to move ahead really quickly, you find a thing, an organization that's fairly new and growing rapidly, and you just kind of stick yourself in there and find like a place where you can sort of make it your own, right, And that's what he's gonna do with the Nazi parties, Like this is a new organization, I can push my way. Yeah, it's it's this is the way everything works, screening me. No, no, no,
this is this is the way before that. I'm talking about, like my early Like you find a company that's just started and they're desperate for people, and you just start deciding, my job's going to be this, My job's going to be that, And it's it offers opportunity that doesn't exist in like the Austrian state, right.
And I mean this is definitely a guy that's a very very comfortable job hopping whenever he's an opportunity, Like he doesn't have a career. He's like, I'm an oil man, I'm also electrician. Doing this for a little bit, I'll guess I'll be a non.
Oil man again. Well, and he's also he sees number one, the corporate economy is not going to be good for a while. The depression is starting and the Austrian government is a really ossified so that you don't move quickly in that the Nazis they're starting to take power and germony. By this point, the writing is on the wall there and he's like, well, maybe they'll take power in Austria. I think this is going to happen. And the sooner I get in, the better my chances of getting a
really good job in the new state. Right because this is still a small organization, I can make myself a big part of it, and when it takes over, I'll be really well positioned, right makes it's just a smart way to look at, like any kind of like organization, right Like, if you're looking to jump ahead in your career, find a place where they don't really have anything solidified yet. You know, that's just that's just kind of always how
big organizations work. By the end of thirty one, the Austrian Nazis had started getting their shit together, just as the dominant far right militia of the area, the Heimware,
starts falling apart. Right Eikman finally joins the party in the spring of nineteen thirty two, after the Nazis sweep a bunch of local elections in Vienna and Salzburg, right, and we should see this again, is he knows where the wind is blowing, right, Like he's aware of what's about to happen, and he's positioning himself for kind of the next big part of his life, which we will be discussing in part two. Oh boy, I uh, how we feeling about Iikman?
Weird? I don't. I don't know how to put it. Like, honestly, Iikman is a guy which you know, obviously we we know a little bit about him just from the background, knowing about the Holocaust, but the fact that he seems so normal is off putting, because even the normal Nazi guys there's something truly strange about them. He is very normal up until you know we're about to get to
in the Nazis take over Austria. He's still not even really ideologically driven other than what could be considered mainstream politics at the time.
Yeah no, and that's like, yeah, that that's kind of the thing about him, that's really and it's you can see a bit of this with Hydrick too, where well you're and even with Mengola where it's like, yeah, the big motivation is your career is this movement has allowed you to leap frog ahead at a much younger age to a high position than you would have ever gotten in the old German state or the old Austrian state. Right,
that just wouldn't have happen. And look if you look at like I'm just looking right now, this twenty two year old kid that was appointed to DHS to lead terrorism prevention. Right, it's the same thing going on right now. There's opportunities, oh my shit, like this for very young people who aren't good or great at anything, and who
wouldn't have risen up in the traditional system. But things have been disrupted and they're primarily good at not causing problems for the people above them, right, yeah, and yeah, you can make you can make a place for yourself that.
Way auto move fast and break break.
Yeah, bigs, it's.
A great picture. It's a great picture.
Though it's a horrible picture.
It's so scary.
Someone needs to give that kid of early immediately. I do wonder would we have been better off if Iikman did get the shit bullied out of him when he was a child? Like, is this a proper application of bullying?
There's only one way to find out Joe, you and me, we got to get in a time machine and we got to beat the shit at a little kid. Iikman, I mean, put that fucker in traction like Austrey and like a whole body, like a big old machine, like fucking rusted metal. Nailed his body until he gets better. That's what we're doing.
Me and you need to need to knock back a couple of pine skin, go back in time and beat the shit out of this child, just.
Wail on his ass. Absolutely, yep, call, this is it. This is what we're doing. All right, everybody, if you have access to a time machine, let Joe and I know. I promise that's all we'll do. We're not going to do any sports betting. Absolutely not going to do a lot of sports betting with it. We would never do primarily sports instead of saving lives. You know, we're not going back to two thousand and one to bet on
the World Series. Yeah, not me. Well, well, obviously we'll stop nine to eleven, of course.
Yeah, definitely. I promise that I will only go back in time to beat up children.
Mm hmm. That's right.
That's how I'll stop nine to eleven. I'll go back further in time, I'll beat up on the children.
Yeah, I'm gonna travel back to Saudi Arabia when Been Lotten's like seven and just kick the shit out of that kit until he's pissing blood. That's what we're doing exactly. This will fix all these problems.
The only way that will stop it is time traveling child abuse.
Yeah, that's the way to do it. Been Lodden waits another five years, and his big attack is ramming a plan into a podcasting studio. Good stuff. Okay, well we should probably stop now. We're back in part two for more genocide. Bye everybody.
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