Part One: Oskar Dirlwanger: The Worst Nazi

old school style, and we're talking about a Nazi. Yeah, Matt Lee our guest for today. Matt, you're a podcaster, uh, the host of the podcast Hood Yourself a Gun, which show the Sopranos, and obviously, Matt as a comedian, you understand that there's nothing more toxic than getting political. But I want to ask you to just kind of riskly delve into those waters and and and and answer me this question. The Nazis are we like are we like warm? Cold? Lukewarm?

Where what do you land on the Nazis? Honestly, bro jury is still out on the Nazis. I think people are starting to just like think, like, hey, maybe they had some ideas a lot of people are starting to think that way. Man. They're like, wait, wait, maybe some of that stuff about the Jews Connor Rings true. Um j K, I'm anti ant anti anti Nazis. Maybe Amtley, How would you like to learn about the worst Nazi? Oh? Man, I thought I've Every time I come on, I feel

like I've learned about the worst Nazi. And I'm like, well, we're done with the Holly Coast. This is when we talk about the Nazis, and we talked about the Holocaust. Obviously, there's a couple of different categories of worst. There's the guys who are actually like out in the field doing war crimes with our actual bodies against the people's actual bodies. And there's the guys who are like organizing it, doing the paper pushing that made it possible. There's the propagandists

who got everyone riled up. I tend to find those latter two categories more interesting, right, because there's always just like thugg thuggish pieces of ship who will hurt people. Um. The guy we're talking about today is kind of both straddles both those lines. And as a spoiler, this is a guy who got written up by the SS for violence during the Siege of Warsaw. That is that is the level of level of Nazi we're talking the s s was like, this guy's making us look bad. This

guy is really the Jews right now? Yeah, I mean I hate the Jews, but holy shit, she calms the fun down. Wow. Yeah, we get it. We get it's the Jews are bad. Just we're killing these people. But good lord, I understand you want to do a dollar now, but there's a process. Okay, we're trying to do it step by step. My god, mind, god mind, got Uh. There's nothing like making fun of a German accent. Um.

It is good. You never have to ask for permission to know you're officially I think for the next thousand of the thousand years, Uh, everyone can just do a German accent and make fun of them and for their history whenever you disagree with them on some random thing. That is the punishment instead of a thousand year Reich for a thousand years, we all get to be a little racist gets German people. But it's okay, they're going to complain a thousand year accent right where he's like,

I'm German. Look at Mr Crimes. Yeah, I like to climes and mountains. I don't like Jews, but I lost the whole war where look at my leader host and in my decision to invade Russia is out vinta cults. Yeah, I plan out for his in my hat. Look at me. I don't know what. Do they have feathers in their hats? I feel like at some point, yeah, feathers and that idle this flower whatever. Anyway, So we're talking about Oscar

Durrell Wanger today. That's his name. Ridiculous name, ridiculous name, um, but also quite possibly the worst personal history of bloodshed that I've heard about a Nazi having. Um. He is a real, a staggering piece of shit, said Oscar Durrell Wanger. Durrell Wanger, ridiculous name. We call him. Oscar is a grouch because he's so grouchy. He's a very grumpy man. He's a he's a thug and and just a gross thug. But he's also an, unlike most of the thugs, a

key part of like the organizing machinery of genocide. He didn't just take live's hand to hand. He helped orchestrate mass killings um and and made sort of paula see for Nazi field units doing genocide that was adopted on a pretty wide scale. But before we talk about him, we got to get into one of my favorite topics, Matt Leeb hitlerology. Yes, oh yeah, So a lot of people study Hitler, a lot of a lot of Hitler stands out there. Um, and there's a I'm a big

hitler ologistlogist too. Yeah. I've decided that I would not go back in time to kill him. Uh really yeah, because if you think about it by now, like Hitler has got to be a fucking expert at killing time travelers, right, that is a good point, because that's all he does all day. So every time traveler who's gone back in time has died at the hands of Hitler because we

still know who he is. Yeah. I feel like it's a trick to get the Jews to accidentally holocaust themselves by like inventing time travel and then dying at the hands of Adolf Hitler. Like he has a here's a little room that they all go to and his actual secret plan. See I had I actually have an idea for a TV show. I shouldn't be sharing this with the open Internet, But scientists go back in time, and they reverse the polarity of Hitler's brain and they make

him reverse Hitler. And then after that it's a matchmaking show, and he's just trying to get Jewish couples to get together and have babies to like undo all of his crimes. Like a Hitler yenta, like a Hitler love boat. Yeah, right, exactly, match makeup, make me I love that. Yeah, probably will be the Yeah. Probably shouldn't. Shouldn't say that on the open Internet, but I did so amongst people who are like Hitler nerds, which nobody who does this professionally calls themselves.

But I called her that. Um. There's a big debate as to whether or not Hitler was what some academics call a weak dictator. Now, this term, when it gets kind of like translated, particularly academics, is sort of un It gets people kind of interpreted the wrong way when the people who are the academics who are calling him a weak dictator are not arguing that he wasn't influential

or central to Nazi crimes. Instead, it's more of a debate about the way in which he exercised influence and the way in which the the actual structural ways in which he contributed to the Holocaust. Right, there's a debate about and and basically, so one side of this they're called intentionalists, and intentionalist historians argue that Hitler was quote master in the Third Reich, essentially a micro manager who exercised tremendous direct control and gave specific orders that are

behind many of the regime's crimes. Now, the other side of this debate, they're called generally either structuralists or functionalists, right, and these historians think that the structure of the Nazi Party and the Nazi state actually hamstrung Hitler from exercising direct power, and thus his influence in things like the Holocaust was more a result of his rhetoric and the culture that he helped build and helped have take over

Germany rather than actual specific minute orders that he issued. Right. Interesting, Okay, Yeah, so like the George W. Bush theory where everyone's right, he's not really were criminal because he's too stupid. It was Cheney who's the real war criminal. And I'm like, why not? Both yeah, And I do want to say most of the people who are making the argument that like he was a weak dictator are not trying to

mitigate his crimes. They're just trying to understand specifically, how did the Holocaust occur and how did the Nazi Party do the crimes that it did? Right, was Hitler? Was Hitler sitting there being like and you go killed and you go or was it more that like, well, he he puts these people in power, and he builds this system where all of these guys are kind of competing to be the worst Nazi to rise in this party.

And it was that sort of thing, right, So it's not I don't think most of them are not trying to mitigate his crimes. They're more just trying to be specific about And I'm not taking, by the way, a side here as to who is still calling I'm Hitler lovers, So the Hitler lovers Hitler. Yeah, some of these guys are Jewish, so he probably shouldn't. Well, you're trying to some it's complicated because some of them are Holocaust deniers. Um, It's it's messy Hitler. When you when you really get

deep into Hitler studies, it gets kind of messy. And part of one of the reasons why there's a debate, Right if you look at a guy like Putin nobody's going to argue that Putin is not a strong dictator and that he exercises direct personal control over what his regime does. Right. We know right now that he's like giving field orders to his commanders in Ukraine directly, which is like that strong dictator stuff, right, and then is

certainly something Hitler did from a military standpoint. No one really argues that he wasn't a strong dictator as regards his control of the military machine. In terms of the the architecture of genocide, you know, how do we how

do we categorize him? Um? And And part of the reason why there's this debate is that Hitler knew that he was committing a genocide um and was pretty careful about not having ship written down right, Like he he's the stringer Bell of this where he's like the fucking take no, it's yeah, motherfuck, are you taking notes on a cuminal conspiracy? Although there are a lot of notes on his criminal conspiracy, He's just kind of coy about stuff.

So there's I just want to say shout out to you for bringing a stringer Bell reference with because we're always looking for it. We're now covering the wire pot yourself the wire is the new show. So if you like Stringer Bell references and you're behind the bastards, sorry, I had to plug. I have a baby coming. I

need to plug. So Hitler, I mean, yeah, again, quite careful about There's not like a piece of paper where Hitler says, hey, guys, I want you to start doing death camp ship right, Hey guys, turn Auschwitz into a factory for murder. Right. We don't have like Hitler's signing that piece of paper. Obviously, again the spoilers. He knew about all of it. He was very involved in all

of it. But he's not like sitting down and being like and everybody make sure to note that I Hitler told you to do this, because it's a it's a pretty serious crime. He's committing, yes, and he knows it, and and it's it's the funk up thing is it's like the foundation of I think a lot of Holocaust denialism is the fact that they were so secretive about

the entire project. So you you know, to this day there are people who are falling for Hitler's fucking bullshit, and and there is there's a whole strain of people who are not quite Holocaust deniers who will say, yeah, the Holocaust happened and it was bad. They'll also say stuff like it wasn't as bad as the bombing of German cities. There wasn't bad, questions, it was all nonsense. But then they'll be like, but Hitler didn't direct it, right, like,

we have no evidence. This was just things like this is these are like things that there's weird Nazis out there, right, it's anyway. So the the actual phrase wicked weak dictator comes from a historian named Hans Momson, who argued alongside other historians that the Fewer was actually a weaker leader in a lot of ways than previous German rulers. Right in terms of the way he exercised power. He has less direct power than a guy like the Kaiser did. Right.

That's he's no kids, and and what he's saying is that he's not again, Momson, as far as I know,

is not trying to deny the Holocaust. What he's saying is that the way the Nazi state was constructed is all of these guys who are basically gangsters come in, they destroy a lot of the existing German bureaucracy and they replace it with the nest of like a this web basically of of conflicting criminal gangs that are all fighting each other and sometimes killing each other, and that makes it hard for Hitler to direct aspects of state personally in a way other autocrats are able to do.

This was not done to the military, which is part of why Hitler was able to like exercise so much direct control of the military is a lot of the old structure of the Imperial Military was still in place. Um Now, this line of reasoning is again it's not what Moms is saying is not inherently unreasonable. That said, it's also probably worth noting that it is unsettlingly similar to justifications that German citizens at the time, like during the Third Reich, made for how bad Nazi officials were.

Because Hitler by thirty eight is very popular, but the Nazis are bad at governing and a bunch of ship keeps going wrong that they were supposed to have fixed. So there's this attitude among citizens in the right that like, Hitler is great, he doesn't know about how fucked up some of these guys are. Right, he's too trusting, he's too gentle natured. Hitler he would never expect people to do crimes. That's the thing about Hitler is that he was always a very tolerant guy. You know, he's just

very nice, very sweet, non confrontational. I think that's a big thing about Hitler, the man who anti fascists with a whip and bar fights. I'm a bit of an introvert. I don't like confrontation, don't like direct conflict. Yeah, I just kind of want everyone to be cool and friends. Um,

it's yeah again. And this is so part of what's gnarlis that this is an important debate to have if you're trying to understand what happened during the Third Reich, because it's it's not there's nothing wrong with saying well, because of the structure of the Nazi Party and how like criminal and incompetent a lot of these guys were, Hitler was not able to exercise the kind of direct control in domestic policies that some people expected, and as a result, a lot of the early things, a lot

of things that were done by the Nazi state were things that were just sort of like done by guys that he trusted to do stuff, and so he wasn't direct, which is not saying he's not ultimately responsible because like if I were to hire someone on the cool Zone media and I were to say, like, you have a fifty thou dollar budget for that can only be spent on bullets, but I'm not going to tell you what to do with them, and then that person goes and

commits crimes, I'm responsible to some extent, right, Like, yeah, I mean it'd be weird if you were just like, hey, come join my podcasting company and I'll give you fifty bullets. Yeah, no microphones. Here's a list of people I dislike, Right, I wouldn't be saying go kill these people, but it wouldn't be my fault, right, Like, yes, um, I think

in that case. Again, one of the conflicts here is that a number of people who are proponents of the weak dictator hypothesis are fucking fascists, including a guy named David Irving. Irving was at one point a semi respected

scholar of German history. Kurt Vonnegutt quotes him in uh in a slaughter House five because one of the things Irving did is he he would write about how bad the Allied bombing campaigns were, and he seems to have exaggerated the death count substantially, but they weren't pretty bad. So there was a time in which a guy like Vonnegutt, definitely not a Nazi, would be like, oh, yeah, I was at Dresden. I know it was bad. I I this guy is saying the numbers are even worse than

I knew. That seems credible to me, and so Irving as as at one point semi respected, and then kind of turns into like it now he is a hard core Holocaust and I are right, and I guess he probably was at the time, but it wasn't immediately obvious. So you you do run into people like Vonnegut who like sited Irving fifty something years sixty years ago or whatever before he was a Nazi, and then it kind of comes out and it's kind of tarnished Vonneget a

little bit, even though it really shouldn't have. It was not It's not unreasonable for a guy who's sitting in Dressden during the fire bombing to well, that was pretty bad. The problem is, you know, Kurt Vonnegut didn't have um retweet stone equal endorsements on exactly. That would have solved the proud, would have solved the people like no, no, no, no no, no, he's cool. He's just he's not involved with the whole Holocaust and iing thing, but he does

think that Dresden was pretty pretty bad bombing. Yeah. Now, as is whenever you've got like a case where someone like me who's not a historian is saying, here's these camps in this like massive historical debate, the reality is near rely always that actual credible experts kind of like wind up more in the middle than anything else. That said, it's probably fair to say that the intentionalist interpretation of

things um is more spected among serious academics. And it's like Klaus Hildebrand will sum up that argument by saying that national socialism was basically Hitlerrism, right, And there's a lot to back up the fact that there was nothing to this ideology and there's nothing to this government beyond this kind of central focus on Hitler as a person, just straight and the fact that all resistance pretty much collapses when Hitler shoots himself is not uncompelling evidence that right, like,

you can make a strong case here very uh kill the night King, energy and everyone else dissolves. But that said, it's also worth noting that like you know, we're not done with Nazism today, and like a lot of a lot of fascists today are base have based their own

ideologies heavily on nationalist socialist principles. Millions of assholes all over the world are drawn to aspects of the political philosophy that animated the Nazis, even if they're not waiving an actual swastika themselves, Um, they're usually they're just wearing a blue Lives Matter. Yeah, that, and you can see that as evidencely like, well, maybe the functionalists have a point, right, Like, yeah, you know it was not just hitler Ism, there was

something more to it. Now. The story of the man that we're going to discuss today kind of lies at the heart of this debate because Hitler is a factor. And you can say in the same way that when I hire that guy and give him thousands and thousands of bullets, I am responsible for what he does with them. Hitler is responsible to some extent for every murder that this guy is going to commit, but his direct fingerprints aren't really on any of it. Right. Hitler never says, hey, Oscar,

I want you to go do some real fucked up ship. Um, but also ready to put in work. Oscar Hitler absolutely said send that guy Oscar out to do the worst things anyone's ever done. Right, He's a real go getter, he's got that entrepreneurial spirit. And this is all. There's a second debate that's kind of broader than the Hitler debate, which is are the physical culprits of the Holocaust willing executioners? Like did the Germans just raise up a narration of

real assholes who are willing to do horrible things? Or were they ordinary Germans? And it just turns out that normal people are a pretty malleable when it comes to war crimes. And again, the actual truth here is always

going to be from credible people. Well, it's kind of both, and it kind of depends on which group of them you're talking about one period of it, right, Um, anyway, that's all just interesting context, I think for sort of the philosophical debates that are going on behind all of the war crimes were about to talk about, because I don't just want to be like, yeah, it sounds like the twenty minute preface where it's like, we do not say that Hitler wasn't responsible for what we're just saying

there were some people who went above and beyond the call of yeah exactly, and and and also just like when you're trying to understand how genocides occur, it's important to understand that it's like structurally, a number of overlapping factors usually come together, right. Um, Anyway, I just wanted to talk about that. You can read a lot more about this. We'll have sources wherever we put sources, I'm

sure at some point. Um, but there's a bunch of there's a bunch of books about people write entire books arguing over this. Um. I am not again trying not to come down on either side because basically, with the exception of that Holocaust, and I are most of the people involved in the debate on both sides no more about this than I do so. Oscar Darrel Wanger was born on September eight in Wurzburg, Swabia, Swabia, which is a ridiculous name for a place in southern Germany because

they all came from really just ridiculous sounding places. Yeah, they come from fucking Swabia. And then they hear there's a city called crack Ow, which is a dope name from like, well, we gotta fucking take that ship. Warsaw. What a cool name. And we're over here with Stuttgart. Goddamnita is a name for a city, and I gotta be honest. Moscow pretty cool fucking name for a like

Stalin grad don't like Stalin pretty dope name like. And one of you guys got see his munichue skin Flagging's just gotten come ons like vomiting towns filled with vomiting. That's why they did it. That's why. Yeah, that's why they're bad. The secret to Hitler's madness is he grew up in a fucking shitty little town with a stupid name. Matt's here for this episode. Well, you know, I just I like to keep it silly when talking Holocaust. Yeah, you gotta, you gotta keep it light right, Yeah, fucking

brown now I'm in. Was the name of his fucking birthplace? What stupid? Anyway, Um, Matt, you know what's not stupid? What the products and services that support this podcast? Nine? We're back. So we just talked about how Oscar Durrell Wanger born eighteen, his family moves from the stupid named town to a slightly less stupid named town, Stuttgart Germany and nineteen hundred, which is where my mom was born

quite a bit laer Um. Yes uh. She told us later later in life, was like, yeah, you actually could have gotten German citizenship, And we were like, what the funk? Why didn't she do? What the hell? I could have to fucking passports? You know what kind of ship I could get up to. I could have had healthcare? Yeah. Um. So he moves to Stuttgart nineteen hundred when he's five, and then to the city of Esslingen in nineteen o five when he's ten. His family are probably you would

probably say they're solidly middle class, right uh. Durrell Wanger would later write that his parents were quote neither poor nor wealthy, and describe his father as calm, intelligent, and frugal.

He describes their familial relations as peaceful. Now, when you're talking about a guy who does all the horrible things that he does, and this guy is like, like the number of just I don't want to say this like flippantly, but like the number of people that he personally raped could fill like a large town, Like like like, really bad guy. You expect something horrific in his childhood. I think most people do because of probably because of unreason,

and it's one of those things we don't have much detail. Right. His youth occurs in the middle of like you know, he he's born in a period where there's not a tremendous amount of record keeping, where it is not abnormal to hit kids. But he doesn't talk about there being any abuse in his childhood. I think there might be a belief among people that like, well, there probably wasn't. He just didn't see it as as normal. But it's also entirely possible this guy just had a pretty good childhood.

It's it's interesting. Yeah, you really never know. I do feel like, you know, nowadays, we are always trying to understand the cycles of violence, especially sexual violence, and you know how that can kind of like, uh be hereditary, like generation after generation. You know, one person gets sexually abused as a child, and then as an adult they

become a perpetrator. Um. But I'm perfectly willing to believe that some people are just ship are born monsters and uh, you know, hey, it's then I'm not sure that's what's Well, we'll talk about this guy's backstory because it's interesting. Um, but I did want to look into like, well, how common is child abuse in like Germany and at the class level that he grew up in, because I wanted

to see, like, is there maybe something more there? And it kind of his youth actually occurs in the midst of this massive debate across the nation of Germany as to whether or not you should hit kids, like this is an actual serious debate, and it's it's obviously a good one to have, right if the norm was hitting kids for a while, and this is not a German thing, right, the norm has always been hitting kids, and most cultures, right, most cultures, by by number of people, smack the ship

out of kids every now and again. Right, So again not good. But Germany is actually having a debate and we're we are still having this debate, so they're ahead of us about like should you do this at all? Now?

Willhell mind? Germany? Which is you know, Germany, the the only Germany that exists prior to the Weimar Republic, because it's not an old country, had long embraced a concept that had existed in the region for a while called jesus Zuktigung sprect, which means to rear by hitting, and it was generally interpreted as referring to the use of

physical compulsion to ensure proper behavior and maintain order. Right now, this is both like this is how you raise little kids and also like you're in the military, this is how you trained soldiers. Right You're you're on a work floor in a factory, like, yeah, guy foxed up, you hit him, right, Like this is that that's that was

a pretty common thing. But in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, and it's important to note, Germany is like the medical superpower of the world in this period up like when World War One hits, Germany has probably the best doctors and the best medical hospitals on the planet. Germany is where you fucking go if you want like a fancy as medical education. They're the best

at it. So and this includes like psychiatry right obviously, like Freud and Ship like they are on the cutting edge of this very early, like the kind of what will become developmental and child psychology and stuff. And in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, there's all these debates and these like journal argues arguing about these cases that journalists will write about of child abuse in schools of like teachers beating the ship out of students,

and whether or not this is a good idea. I think. There's an article in the Journal for Central European History by Sace Elder that summarizes a nineteen oh three case from Bavaria. Quote, a young male tutor, Andreas Dippold, had beaten his young charges so badly that one succumbed to his mistreatment. So this teacher in nineteen o three, and this is when when Oscar is eight beats a student to death, and it goes very viral. It enrages the

entire country, and it seized upon. Part of why it pisses people off as there's an activist named Elizabeth Vaughan Ertzon, and whenever there's a Vaughn in a German name, it means she's a member of the nobility, right, So that's part of why she's able to be an activist. She's

independently wealthy. And Elizabeth bond arts and founds the Society for the Protection of Children from Mistreatment and Exploitation, which is an organ again nineteen oh three, and um, you know, basically goes to war over this, and I'm gonna quote again from that same paper the case demonstrated. Von Ertsen wrote that while torture had been abolished for adults, it

was still widely practiced on children. One of the chief causes of child abuse, according to von Ertson, was the claim to so called zuktigung sprect the right to use corporal punishment. Because of the defenselessness of children, it has become customary to exercise on them the right to use corporal punishment, even where it does not exist. She wrote. A host of people, including tutors, governesses, and babysitters, claim the right, but how far the right to corporal punishment

is transferable is entirely an open question. Curiously, von Urson asserted that there was both an objectively existing right to use corporal punishment and that there was no consensus on where that right lay. Again, she's not saying that you should never slap a kid or never spank a kid. She's saying we're doing it too much, and they used to be to a debate about who is allowed to do this right um, which is again pretty advanced for

his it's time. But also she is still saying that, well, yeah, sometimes you're gonna hit kids, of course everybody occasionally, which, again to be clear on the podcast, stance always bad and don't this is a good thing, right with it within the context of like every adult should be able to beat the ship out of kids whenever they want, a woman being like, hey, that's fucked up. We need to have a serious societal conversation about who and when

it's okay to like smack a kid. That's a that's a positive move, it's a step in the right direction. We're not We're not having that discussion in the US. I don't think I think people are just like, yeah, be a kid who gives a ship right there, kids a factory. I'm fine, which I just said earlier, But I am fine. No, don't beat your kids, yeah, and says Elder writes quote. Many popular and some scholarly depictions of German child rearing in the Wilhelmine period assumed that

methods were particularly harsh and brutal. Yet there is ample reason to doubt the stereotype of the harsh, brutal parent more ready to strike a child than embrace it. School discipline and other national contexts raises doubts about the extent

to which German practices were exceptionally violent. Moreover, investigations of parenting advice literature have suggested that while their were concerns about the inadequacy of soft mothers to adequately raise strong manly sons, the mother of the controlled child associated with the authoritarian personality and the rise of Nazism and merged in the advice literature only during World War One. Advice literature remained rather heterogeneous in its prescriptions for the training, correction,

and care of children. As Caroline kay notes, prominent reformers such as Ellen kay, Adel Schreiber and Friedrich Wilhelm Forster argued strenuously against corporate polished as detrimental to the development

of the self restrained, self determined individual. This diversity of views, and especially the influence of the pedagogical reform movement, suggests that normative ideas about the purpose of corporal punishment, the interests it served, and the source of the legal right to use it were highly contested in Wilhelm mind society and German legal cultures. So again, really common want to look for evidence of brutality in the upbringing of a brutal person, and especially to kind of blame the horrors

of the Nazis on the way kids were raised. But this guy, it's entirely possible that his parents never hit him. Because that was a lot of German families, and a lot of German families lined up on the no, this is not okay. There was a vigorous debate and a substantial number of people were like, it's bad to hit kids. I'm just like amazed that baby books have been around

for that long. Yeah, well yeah, I thought that was because like I'm I'm mid reading like three baby books right now, and I'm like, how can what just anyone who has a baby you can write a baby book? What are we doing here? One is just like if they cry, let him cry, And I'm like, this is get a book deal. Yeah. My suspicion is that, like baby books back then started like the ninety day points. So it's like, okay, so this one didn't die right through. It is old enough to count. Now it's time to

start thinking about investing resources at it. So you're having a life child, you have a living child, rat elections, What to expect when you're expecting a baby to live? Yeah, the most popular child we ring book in Billhell mind Germany so this fund didn't diet kicking and screaming hong.

Um so yeah, again, I just wanted to note that kind of because we don't know much about his childhood, it's worth noting he does not report any abuse, and he's born into a society that's probably the most proved aggressive place, at least in the Western world in terms of like the argument that you shouldn't hit kids. Um so yeah. Anyway, if we are looking for hit hints from his youth, that might have some sort of predictive bearing on his future behavior, right, that might like pressage

some of the crimes he commits. We'd do better to cast our eyes up then, towards the town of Words words in jeez, we're Sesnia again. This is a Polish town. It's part of Poland today, where Sesnia it's w r z E s n i A. It's part of Poland today, but at this time it's part of Germany. Right, because Germans, the Prussians in particular, occupy a big chunk of what is today Poland in this period, they don't lose it.

To World War One. The occupiers, like most occupiers, did not like the idea of a people they had conquered speaking a language that wasn't their's right. So the Germans are like, well, we got all these kids, and uh, I don't think it's a great idea for them to learn Polish because we don't really want Polish people in Germany right like we were. We want to get rid of that, you know. Um. So one day in nineteen o two, Johann Schultzen, who's a teacher and a Prussian

teacher in word Zesnia, decides to take action. And I'm gonna quote from a write up in the First News, a Polish news website. The peoples were crammed into a classroom on the first floor, where they were giving a final chance to repeat a religious song in German by heart. Those who did so were released home. The rest were held back to receive the flogging of their lives. Each child was individually frog marched to a chamber on the

ground floor set aside for administering the punishment. The children were giving four to eight stinging strokes from a birch cane. The boys were flogged on their backsides, the girls on their open palms. This was not just an ordinary case of disciplining children through corporal punishment. Which was common at the time. Each furious strike was intended to communicate the message, this is Prussia, we are in charge, you polls will do as we say. One girl passed out from the pain.

Others were not able to hold their books in their swollen hands. So that's pretty bad. Yeah, that I guess. I guess it was a necessity to have, you know, organizations being like stopped being your kids because there was literally flogging rooms the basements of schools. You for sure needed people who were like being like, we have to stop flogging the children. Perhaps you know what wild idea, guys, what if we try to be a no flogging society. I don't know that anyone needs to be flogged. Yes,

no flog zone. We might we might be able to get by, okay without floggings. Yeah, I think we could arrive. Problem. So this leads to the adults around them, the adults in town and stuff, like their parents are like, what in the fucking Christ are you doing to our kids? This is nuts? And again, all of these people probably slap their kids, bank their kids, right, that's normal at

the time. This is like a step beyond that, you know, So they engage in a strike that eventually and it's it's supported by the adults, but the strike spreads through and isn't to some extent organized by children and eventually comes to more than fifty thousand Polish children who like kids. Yeah, the kids go on strike and like so they will all at the same day's refused to answer questions from their teachers. Like I think they still go to school,

but they just won't do anything. They're um and you know, there's protests. There's what you might call a riot where a bunch of the adults start throwing stones at Prussian teachers. Because again, the teachers are the occupiers here. These are not like people are sympathetic inherently to teachers for good reasons. These teachers are Prussians who are like running schools in a military fashion and occupied territory. Right, So again, throwing

rocks at them probably fine. Like I'm just gonna say it, probably fine. I think in general, throwing rocks at all occupiers is what you should do. I'm usually on the side of the people throwing rocks at the occupiers. Um. Now, German police showed up and they put a bunch of striking children on trial, which is when the story blew

up into an international issue. Uh, and this is this there's like massive articles in the New York Times and like like major international newspapers cover this because again, this is a lot of fucking kids and child strike is a pretty good story, right, yeah, that's awesome. Um yeah. Twenty people are eventually convicted and one parent is sentenced to two and a half years in prison. The Germans even sentence a photographer to forty days in prison for

distributing photos of people connected to the case. And again, this is a massive story. There's no way that Oscar Darrel Wanger, who's you know, a kid at the time, would have missed hearing about this, right, Uh, this is like a big deal all throughout Imperial Germany. And in fact, based on kind of his age, it's a good good chance this is one of the first news stories he hears about as like a kid, like one of his

earliest memories might be hearing about this. But I mean, but it feels like he is his family, yes, and just being against the strike. Well it's because I'm sure and again he's an Imperial Germany. He's reading the New York Times coverage, He's reading like those those ungrateful poems are attacking teachers. They threw rocks at teachers trying to teach them to read German. Right, Like, that's more or

less how it would have come down to him. Um, so he makes his way through school, um, obtaining the German equivalent of like high school degree. It's called a baccalaureate in the source I found. But I think this is just like a high school degree. None of it, none of like schooling in this period maps exactly to our our modern ideas. Right. Um, they didn't have common core math, or they didn't have common Yeah, they had beatings. Yeah.

Christian Ingrau, who is the author of a book about Darrel Langer and his unit, makes a point to note that his education quote did not include the humanities. Right, so this guy is not being and this is not actually not super common. For again, Germany is one of the centers of learning for the world, center of art, center of culture. This is like the fact that he his spe ific education is kind of entirely focused on like industry and business and getting him ready to like

run a factory does not include humanities is kind of noteworthy. Um. After graduating, he endures further education with the goal of entering the private sector. Again, he's basically training up to be like a mid level functionary helping industrial Germany be industrial, right, trying to be rockets and ships. Yeah, So before he can finish any of this, before he can get his college degree, uh, he, like all German men, has to do a year of service for the Kaiser in the military. Right.

This is like there's a universal draft. It's kind of like what Ukraine was starting a version of this before the war, right, where like everybody goes and they do a little bit of time, right. Um. And this is so that when the big war comes that everyone knows it's going to come, we have a bunch of guys we can call up and we don't need to train them, right, maybe we do a refresher for a week, but they know how to hold a gun, they know what in march, they know how to do all the things soldiers have

to do. Um. So a lot of young men waited for the draft, right because it's it's the kind of thing where like eventually your number comes up. So a lot of guys try to get in as much of their you know, early adulthood as they could before they had to do it. Oscar volunteers, he joins on his own um. He spends a year marching and training for again.

Everyone assumes the next war is inevitable. Right. Germany had come to existence during a war that started in eighteen seventy with France that had lasted less than a year, and it was pretty bloody. A lot of people die. It's not like a like a nice war. This is like where we get Germany. Everyone knows, like, well, we got unfinished beef with France. Right, they're going to start some ship at some point, right, you know, Germany and

France or Prussian and France Austrian history. Right, you're not friendly, you know, you're you're looking at these two guys who every fifty years get into a giant fight, and they're like, yeah, I bet they're gonna have another one at some point right now, because it's been about fifty years the Revolution. They got Napoleon, they got another Napoleon, they got a king again. Yeah, now they don't have a king because

that last word didn't go great. So he was probably it's probably best to assume that like Oscar was eager for that war to start, a lot of German men were, and his assumption was that it was going to be you get called up along with everybody else. Germany's you know, field army marches out first and then the reserves come in quit behind them. You campaigned for a couple of months, maybe a year, and there's like a couple of big

set pace battles, right, that's what they're thing. Not like we're gonna be stuck in trenches for years, but like three or four real decisive, giant fights that will be ugly, but then it will be done, and one way or the other will happen, right, and that's on either side of exhaustion. One guy will get stabbed. That was war back then, you know. Well it was a little earlier than that when the German Scott. But they it was not expected to be that bad, right, Yeah, they didn't

know how bad it is. Not like one was like, hey, this is as fun as I remember. So these machine guns really, Raissa, boy, these muskets kill a lot of people. So Daryl Wanger is nearing the end of his year of service when the Archduke of Austria Hungary gets gets got in World War One starts. Christian Ingrow writes, quote Oscar Darrel Wanger's war began on August two in a machine gun company of the hundred and twenty third Regiment of Grenadiers who were heading to France from Oom by

way of Belgium. In the confusion of general mobilization, troops that had already had their basic training were considered as part of the Reich's standing army. Thus they were the spearhead of the Schliefen Plan, and Darrel Winger was thrust into the battle at a time when losses were their most nightmarish. So in the whole history of human beings fighting wars, this is like upper five percent of the worst things any soldiers in all of time experience, right

like fucking World War One early days. Ship units get like literally battalions, thousands of men getting wiped out almost to the man um just absolute fucking night air ship. And I think some additional detail is necessary here to really drive home the kind of experience Oscar has, because we're trying to figure out, like what makes him such

a piece of ship. Maybe he was from the beginning, some people just come out that way or whatever, but he is at this point, comfortable, middle class kid, good family peaceful family, as far as he says, goes to college on a pretty good life path, and then this happens. And in order to kind of contextualize his experience, I'm going to read a firsthand account from a British soldier, a young officer named Harold McMillan, who later becomes Prime Minister um and who there's a good chance he's feed

away from Oscar at points right. There's no way to know um. But it's easier, a little easier to find British firsthand accounts than German ones of this period, So that that's what we're reading. But I think this is more or less accurate to the kind of stuff that Oscar would have been seeing at this point. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the modern battlefield is the desolation and emptiness of it all. Nothing is to be seen

of war or soldiers. Only the split and shattered trees and the burst of an occasional shell reveal anything of the truth. One can look for miles and see no human being. But in those miles of country lurk like moles or rats. It seems thousands, even hundreds of thousands of men planning against each other, perpetually, some new device of death, never showing themselves, they launched at each other

bullet bomb, aerial torpedo, and shell. And somewhere too are the little cylinders of gas, waiting only for the moment to spit forth their nauseous and destroying fumes. And yet the landscape shows nothing of this, nothing but a few shattered trees and three or four thin lines of earth and sandbags. These, in the ruins of towns and villages

are the only signs of war anywhere. The glamor of red coats, the martial tunes of fife and drum, the aids to camp scurrying hither and thither on, splendid chargers, lances glittering, and swords flashing. How different the old wars must have been. The thrill of battle comes now only once or twice in a year. We need not so

much the gallantry of our fathers. We need and in our army at any rate, I think you will find it that indomitable and patient determination like this is, This is, this is most of this war is sitting waiting to get killed randomly, And then a couple of times a year you and all of your friends get mowed down by machine guns, right Like, That's what Durrol Wanger's war is.

Most of it is getting trench foot and being like I'm gonna die from this and you know, fucking watching watching like unimaginable horror because this is also at a time there's not cool movies about crazy sci fi horror ship. You know, this is like, this is unimaginable to most of these people. Yeah, this is like you know there there's uh we could tell. Token was pretty adamant that

his books weren't about anything that had actually happened. But like Token fights in a battle where thousands of men drowned in the mud get like sucked down by their boots and are suffocated while their friends watch. And then he like writes the chapter in his book about a marsh filled with corpses that you can see right like that that's the kind and durl Winger he's right there. He's in the middle of this. His job is he is a machine gunner, so he is number one. He

might have killed hundreds of people, like potentially thousands. Some of these guys literally individual dudes shoot thousands of people to death over the course of the war. Um, there's no way to know how many people he killed, and at some point he would have if he ever was counting, would have stopped right um. And probably also basically everyone he starts the war knowing dies right that, those early

nineteen fourteen soldiers not a high survival rate. No, No, there were imagining a war that you know from back in the day where there was like a drummer kid. Yeah, and he is as a machine gunner. Number one, he's valuable. Number two, he is exposed and isolated. And number three he is constantly targeted by artillery and snipers. So this is like, this is really bad bad war, bad war experience. Yeah, a lot of trauma there, I could say, a little PTSD problem a little a little bit and maybe a

little bit of PTSD just a little bit. Yeah, in his first three months of combat, he's wounded badly enough in his foot that he's sent away from most of a year to heal. Right, like whatever the injury is, it's fucking gnarly. He comes back the next year and in September of nineteen fifteen he gets wounded in the arm by a bayonet. So whatever happens, he is fighting

hand to hand with people and get stabbed nearly to death. Um. And again that's the everyone who fought, and it agrees the very worst combat in World War One was hand to hand trench combat. Um. Just a fucking nightmare. So he gets wounded badly enough. This is a very rare wound. Christian in Ground notes that only about one percent of

injured German soldiers have a similar injury. And that's because nearly a hundred percent of men who gets seriously wounded by a bayonet or a sword in close combat die because everything is ship and mud around you. It's getting jammed into your wound. You're probably going to bleed out like you you have better shot at a like per injury basis with like a gunshot wound than gett fucking stabbed in hand to hand combat. And do they even have They didn't have antibiotics back then, right, so they

don't know. They're kind of starting to figure them out in this period. But no, these guys are not getting antibiotics administered. UM. So he it is bad enough, he can never move his arm right again, and he gets raided by the military as fort disabled. Um. He severely heard enough that he probably could have ended his service there if he had pressed the matter, but he wanted to fight, and so in night he stays in the military.

In September of nineteen sixteen, he gets promoted to be an n c O and he's moved to be a machine gun trainer. Right, So he could have stuck at this job training people and like not getting in direct combat, but he repeatedly demanded to be sent back to the front, and in April of nineteen seventeen, he's back in combat, despite the fact that his arm and rister permanently injured. Um,

he serves well. He's particularly good now that he's commanding small groups of soldiers in combined arms using a mix of mortars which you call pocket artillery, so short range artillery, machine and maneuvering infantry and like these are a couple of hundred people engagements, right, he's very good at that. He's very good at. And this is the Germans in this period are inventing what we now know is just like standard combat tactics for small units. Right, all of

that's being figured out by the Germans. Everyone else is a few years behind. And so he is one of the first guys to be commanding troops in gunfights in what we would consider today to be a pretty modern way. Right, Um, so that's interesting to me. You know what else is interesting to me, mad Leab, what the products and services that support this podcast, which are also on the cutting edge of small unit infantry combat tactics. Boy, if you want to learn how to kill a man, Nathan's hot Dogs.

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made if the sausage is a war criminal. So Daryl Wanger, as an enlisted man, gets promoted to lieutenant, which is not common in most wars. Right. Enlisted in officers are very different and they're different. Like normally, to be an officer, you like go to school, you like get a degree. You are in the German military. You're generally someone who comes from a high social status. You get a Vaughan in your name. Maybe, Um, pretty rare for a guy who's just like starts as a private to become a

lieutenant through combat. And the reason this happens is that like everybody's dead, and this is a thing that happened a lot more back in the day. Like my grandpa was there for the like very you know, he was in World War Two as well, but when the Korean War started, he was in Korea and he was a sergeant and by the time the war ended, he was a major. Um, which does not happen often. It's just like,

you know, because everybody's dying, right, Like, that's why this happens. Um, he becomes he sent over to the Eastern Front where he becomes a company commander, and this is probably saves his life because things go really well for Germany in the East. Actually they win a war against Russia and then a war against I think it's Romania. Um, like they beat both of them while they're kind of at

this stalemate in the Western Front. We don't know a ton of his specific experiences on the aust Front, but Christian Ingrow writes, quote, if there were ever a library for the ethnic fear of the enemy. During the Great War, it was the Eastern Front. Over and over, soldiers letters spoke of the dirtiness, the inferiority, the primitive nature of the population, and this observation reinforced a social Darwinism and an essentialist view of the Eastern populations. Dura Wanger stayed

in Russia until November nineteen eighteen. Is a company leader and lieutenant, so he's probably number one. Comes into this pretty racist because most Germans are towards people in this region and that probably gets reinforced by being the occupier here, right, and when when the war ends and Germany does not win, there's all these rebellions, right, all these left wing rebellions across the Reich. And also like it's kind of a disaster and no one had really expected, particularly in the East.

So you've got all these skeleton units in the East that like, by the way, your country's government's dissolved and you've rusted the war, go turn yourself into whatever people are nearby, right like, and a lot of German soldiers are like, well know, yeah, I'm not going to do that.

And also I thought we were winning, you know, these guys are are all, you know, the great stabbing, the stabbing, the back theory type of well, yeah, because from there we fucking beat these guys to beat the French couldn't do it. Yeah, they got fucking Bolsheviks there because, um So, Nicholas dura Winger is one of the guy who's like, no, I'm not gonna turn myself into the fucking Romanian government, right, Like,

I'm not gonna do that. So he like grabs a bunch of and he makes it clear, like because again everything is kind of chaotic, everything's falling apart. He's basically just like yells to all of the Germans and earshot like, hey, I'm a comedy commander and I'm gonna get everybody out of here. Like, if you want to get the funk out of here and don't want to wind up in a prison camp, follow me. Um So, he gets like a shipload of people together and he leads them successfully

home to Germany. One of the men he saved later wrote, quote, it is rare for an officer to be honored as our comrade. Durrel Winger was this after his successful return, a return that the soldiers owed to him alone. He kept six hundred men from being interned as so many were before and after US. So, among other things, Durrell Winger will always be a guy that like his dudes fucking love him, and part of it is because like

he will throw down for them. He's not. He's not one of these guys who's like standing in the back waiting to see how things happen. He gets injured repeatedly because he's he. You have to say this about the man not afraid of getting shot. Yeah, he's into it. In fact, he's into it. In fact it might be a kick. Yeah, it is unsettling, actually so. By the terms of the Versailles Treaty, Germany is forbidden from fielding

an army larger than a hundred thousand men. Given the disastrous poverty that hits the country post defeat, these slots are pretty coveted by the militarized veterans, right, It's a it's a cushy gig. Adolf Hitler is one of the few lucky events who gets a job post war, and Durrel Wanger is another. But while Hitler is used by the Reich's fair that's the new German military. They have him infiltrating, right, wing groups, which is badly Yeah, that

don't work out so much. But really, maybe the worst single mistake anyone ever made was being like, hey, Hitler, see what those guys are up to. You gotta do an episode on that guy, the guy who was like, you know you have good spy and yeah, Hitler, guy, don't keep an eye on these National Socialists for us, and whatever you do, don't join them or don't join them, don't join them at all. Don't boy, imagine that guy in like nineteen forty five is like every building around

him is leveled by Allied bombers. Ship that didn't go out. Boy, I don't want to tell anybody what I did. Yeah, I have some regrets, Yeah, yeah, I mean a couple of mistakes in the past, one big one. Um. So Daryl Wanger also stays on it's not hard to see why right, why he's got He's got like one of the best records anybody has from World War One in terms of like a combat soldier. Um, And so they

put him to the task of violently suppressing left wing uprisings. UM. He fights a longside and often in units of the Free Corps, and the Free Corps are kind of like they're a little like the Oath Keepers and three per centers, and that they are groups of veterans that have been demilitarized who are taking up arms to defend the country

quote unquote against socialists. Right. One of the things that there's a couple of things that make them very different from those groups that we have in the United States, even though both try to overthrow the government. One is that the Free Corps are all made up of guys who have actually done nightmare things, right, Like, they're not They're not like dudes who like, did four years in

Korea and then like lie about their deployment history. For they're like guys who guys who's like friends, teeth got embedded in their skin after their heads were blown apart. These are guys who would you know by tactical sunglasses on TV. These men are dead inside and killing makes them feel nothing. The other thing is that these guys are being integrated by the military, right because the military is like, a hundred thousand men is not enough to

do anything. So we have these hundreds of thousands of veterans who like, if we throw them a little bit of cash, if we leave the other way, when they acquire guns, we can bring them in and we can use them when we need them to like maintain order and suppress things. Right. So, and this is very illegal under like the terms of the treaty they've signed, but also pretty again nothing gets done for a number of reasons, including the fact that, like a lot of people are like, well,

what are we gonna do? Fight him again? So, yeah, he's he's with these guys, he's with these Free Corps units.

But he's kind of he's in the Reich's fair and basically his job because he's commanding a unit they whenever there because there's all these communist insurrectionary strikes, right, and he's in his particularly areas, he's in his Wartenberg, and whenever the communists will like take over part of a town or like do it a big strike, he and his guys will like drive through town on an armored train and fire machine guns at them. Um. So that's that's his gig now, to be well, nice job, you

can get it, um now. To be fair. Number one, a lot of these communists also veterans, now, decent number of them are guys who didn't fight because they were like making bullets and stuff. Right, because factory workers were are very easy to turn into communists. It turns out, um, but a lot of them are veterans and they're not always unarmed. In March of night, communists with guns take over the city of Sangerhausen as part of a broader German uprising. It's this attempt at like a mass uh

like general strike Comma revolution um. And Max Holes, who who commands He's the guy in charge of the of the of the communists, has his Max Holes. H O E l z Um Max Holes. I'm gonna put Max Holes in your exactly how many guys, fucking dude, Max Holes must have done this. The guy got shot at thousands. Why do you insist on giving people maximum holes? So my name, Max Holes has his men. It pretty sounds pretty cool. They're robbing all of the rich people in

town to fund this wider uprising. Um. They destroy the telegraph service, which I think is probably to like limit the government's ability to communicate. And then they kidnap all of the wealthiest people in town with an eye towards ransoming them to fund the revolution. But then Darawanger drive through town again. He's got an armored train, his men are generally better trained and definitely better equipped, and they beat the copy They forced the communists out of town.

They actually kind of get the worst of the actual combat. Thirteen people die, seven of whom are Durroll Wanger's men, three of whom are insurgents, and three of whom are civilians. Um. Durro Winger uses explosives to level significant parts of the city, which is a big part of why Holes and his guy's bounce because they're like, so this guy is just like blowing up all of town in order. We're not

really ready for this. Um yeah, this is a strategy I had not considered, and I consider many holes really big hole. I'm not ready for this. Yeah. Um. So Durroll Langer's response the way he obviously he wins, which the government's happy with, but also he has blown up a significant portion of the town, which does not endear him to the townspeople, who were like, well, these guys were robbing rich folks, but they didn't blow up downtown. So I don't know, I don't know if I'm like

really on ward with either of you. Um yeah. One seems worse significantly. The Weimar government later decides that some of his actions have been extreme, right, he keeps getting like slaps on the wrist and even gets jailed a couple of times. But he's also he's really good at putting down insurrections, right, Like he's great at it. So they're not going to like actually punish him. Damn that sucks.

It's just like ever since those those children's you know, how to strike, He's like, I will make it my life's work to destroy any kind of solidarity between He's really just always been defending those teachers who got hit with rocks. Yeah, exactly, you forgot to give us homework. That's like his whole thing. He's that kid military is off and on in the military, right, Like he's i think always drawing a salary, but he's like trying to

do other stuff. And he just like will regularly to be like, hey, we need you to go shoot people from a train again, and off he'll go to go shoot people from a train. And it kind of in between suppressing these uprisings because there's a bunch in this eighteen eighteen one, like a lot of fucking ships going down in Germany, pretty wild history. He gets arrested twice and sentenced to prison for two short sentences, both times

for illegally concealing weapons. Now, we don't have great detail on this, but it probably because of the way it's written. It's probably not that he was carrying a gun concealed illegally, but that he was helping paramilitary Fright Corps units steal and concealed machine guns and other like like literally like hiding like burying weapons. Right. Yeah, I was gonna say it is job is is? I guess the train is not inconspicuous. Yeah, they were like, you're allowed to have

the gun. Train is fine, it's these other guns and awesome, Yeah, you can't be hiding gun. And the reality is like with our government, right, you've got these right wing ship head militiamen, and there are cops, and there are soldiers who are on their side, and there are politicians who like them. There's also a lot of people in the government and the judicial system who are like, no, you can't do that. Here's a slap on the wrist. You know,

did our job a liberal society? I'm sure that's the last we'll hear of Oscar Darrel Wager after he spends two months in prison for stealing machine guns from the military, dusting off his hands, solving the problem forever. So the end of his military career for a little while is the nineteen twenty three Munich Beer Hall Putsch Hitler attempts

to take over the government. Doesn't go very well, and Oscar is not part of the Nazi Party at this point, but he's in a bunch of different right wing organizations that are close to them. And when Hitler does this, he attempts to send in the Stuttgart Police's armored vehicles

to support Hitler's attempt to take power. This does not He he doesn't have the power to do this, right, Like, he's not in charge of them, So this doesn't work out, and he kind of like he gets ship canned for this, which is fair, right, I would I would fire somebody for this, Yeah, um, or at least have hr kind of like do I don't know, suspend him for should do something right, you should do there should be some sort of process when you attend gun train, for one, Yeah,

you don't get to get on that gun train for a whole week scared. So by the time he's kind of out of the military, he is unemployed. It is nineteen twenty three. He's twenty nine years old. He has several chronic injuries that trouble him, and he's looking for a gig. Now. While this period, everything we've talked about with him suppressing all these left wing uprisings is going on, Oscar is also going to college. Right, he's basically doing

his g I bill equivalent shiit uh. He had enrolled at a technical university soon after the war, and student culture in Germany during this period super right wing right universities are filled with veterans who had like we're returning from the front. A lot of colleges were basically just recruitment grounds for free corps um. At the same time, student organizations had been taken by a trend towards the Vulcansh movement. So a lot of like student organizations at

different colleges are explicitly Vulkish. And this is the it's a German ethno nationalist movement that eventually kind of leads to the Nazi movement. But it's this like, you know, there's a German people, it is a specific subset of us, and we're better than everyone, right, Like we could get into it in more detail, but it's not really necessary. And I'm gonna quote from the S. S. Durrowanger Brigade by Christian Ingrau quote. He distinguished himself very early by

his volkish convictions and expressed them with unusual violence. The university threatened him with disciplinary proceedings for avowed anti Semitic agitation. This fact merely reflects Durrol Wanger's political involvement. Since nineteen nineteen, he had been a member of the deutsch volk Shutsund trust Bund, one of the most virulent organizations in terms of both anti Semitic hatred and of revolutionary nationalist feeling.

It counted in its trust Bund Baby, And again, we don't know if he was like super anti Semitic his whole life, if there was a thing, because some guys pick it up during the war, right like because easy way, you know, we we don't really have that kind of context. Could have been something he got at home, could have come later. But he's real hardcore racist by this point. Um, I'm gonna continue that quote about the trust Bunda. It

counted in its ranks. Future leaders of Nazi repression such as Ryan hard Hydrick and Ryan hard Horn there's our buddy, shout out a friend of the pod, Ryan hard Hydrick. Yeah. Oh man, I love getting all the all the boys back to Yeah, the gang's really coming together here. Yeah.

This is like the Avengers of but they're all yeah, yea, yeah, it's it's the Avengers if the Hulk was looked like the Hulk, but like more like well, actually, Edward Norton played the Hulk too, so yeah, actually, yeah, there's a there's a way to work this. You figure it out for yourselves, you know, the incredible Yeah, there we go.

Um yeah. Dr Winger belonged to an beula of parties and associations linked by the feeling that Germany was an imminent danger of disappearing, diminished as it was by territorial losses, the rulings of the Treaty of Versailles, and internal and external enemies who, despite the peace treaty, had not disarmed. So Darrel Winger's scholastic career was not interrupted either by his arrests or by his disciplinary proceedings for racism. Because he gets in trouble with the school for being racist.

He eventually moves to Frankfurt, where he finishes his education and winds up with a pH d in political science. He is a doctor. He has doctor Oscar Darrell Wanger is doctor of a startling number of the worst Nazis were doctors and lawyers of some sort of. It's a great scene in the movie Conspiracy where like one of I think it's Umdlo Globoschnik, but one of like the Nazis planning the fucking Holocaust because they're having an argument

over like legal matters. Is like, raise your hand if you're a lawyer, and all of the guys at the table race there because yeah, they're all fucking yeah, um, some of them are literally doctors of law actually, so yeah, he gets his PhD and he becomes an accountant and for the next several years he has a successful, if

boring career in business. Now his his overt political involvement in right wing stuff fades after the putch because for a while, like the Hitler movements illegal, you know, there's there is a bit of a crackdown, um, And if Hitler's movement had died out, he might have just wound up as like a low key racist businessman, like that's possible, But the Nazis don't go away. The band against their activism fades and eventually ends, and in the late nineteen twenties,

Dura Wanger gets back into it being involved with the Essay. Right, he can't do much in the streets because from nine to nineteen thirty one he's made the executive director of a textile factory owned by a Jewish family. But he embezzls a shipload of money from this Jewish factory and he gives it to the Essay so they can buy weapons. Um yeah, yeah great, Um so he's he's funneling shipped to the Essay until nineteen thirty two when he can

like rejoin publicly because it's safe. Um so, I do love The part of me is just like it would be dope to be that Jewish family who owns the fucking textile meal and watching this little anti Semitic piece of ship not be able to say anything, just the it would have been. It would have been cool if like that's how things had ended. Yeah yeah, no, right, yeah yeah yeah, the rest of the bad. But you know, for a second, there it's time. There's some fun moments.

Probably so Darrow Winger's loyalty and the enthusiastic support of guys he'd led into battle who had become Nazis meant that once he's publicly in the essay again, he gets promoted very quickly. By nineteen thirty three, he's been given a cushy job as director of the hell Brawn Employment Agency. The economy was once again in the shipter Right. Things aren't going great for the German economy, and the fact that they can hand out jobs is critical to the

new Nazi regime. It's part of how they're like consolidating power. So the fact that Oscar is running an employment agency for the Nazis means that he's in a really trusted and important position. Right. He's doling out money, essentially to people who are supporting the regime, and he's able to because he can hand out cushy gigs. Probably is making

a good amount of money via bribes, you have to assume. Um. So his position is solid enough that he's able to fight off embezzlement allegations from his former employer, which are definitely true. Um. He gets arrested. So he's arrested twice because he gets drunk and does drugs and crashes his car into people. Um. But all that all that goes away. Yeah, he's a he has a hardcore drug addict, probably cocaine. People usually aren't specific when they talk about it, but

that would be my guess, although maybe a few things. Um, but I like it because it's white powder ZVI tist of drugs. So he's doing great. He's he's handing out jobs, he's crashing his car while wasted. Um. If life is going well for Dr Oscar Darrel Wanger. But then on July twenty two, nineteen thirty four, tragedy strikes Matt because he gets caught having sex with a fourteen year old girl. Um yeah, oh yeah, um, oh yes, I thought you meant tragedy strikes for him. It is a tragedy um too.

But like yeah, no, I was not referring to him. So he had met her while she she was she's a volunteer for the Red Cross that he meets in his official duties. Um. He will argue when he goes to court that she just lied about her age. She claims she was violently raped and the medical examination suggests violent rape. So I can tell you whose account I trust, and it's not the Nazi. Um. Now this is a problem for his Nazi employers. Right, they don't. They're not

like cool with this. Right. Again, these guys are Nazis, but most of them have been normal p most of their lives. And when you hear that this guy who you're like involved with, rapes a child, they're like, well, no, we don't want you to be in our organization for a while. Yeah, people might think it might not like the Nazis. Yeah, you know, we want people to like us first. So he gets stripped of his doctoral title, he loses his PhD, he gets removed from the essay,

and he's sent to prison for two years. Um. He also gets hizzled punished for embezzling the money that he'd sent to the essay. So they just kind of throw the book at him. I think this, Yeah, they just tacked like, yeah, get him. It might be that this girl was also the daughter of a Nazi who like had some poll right, and so that's that's part of Like Again, if he had done this to someone who was you know, marginalized by the Nazi state, probably would

have been a punishment. But he does pick. He picks like an Aryan girl. Um, so that's a big part of why he gets in trouble. But he does get in trouble. I would say two years is not enough time, but it's not nothing. Um. So he gets out of is An in nineteen thirties six and he sets to work immediately, begging his former bosses for forgiveness. He's like, I want my please reinstate my doctorate. I've done all

this stuff for the movement. Um. He sends so many letters directly to Hitler begging for clemency that he gets arrested again and sent to a concentration camp. Like they're like, you gotta stop bugging Hitler. You know it'll cool you all some time. And doctor goddamn letters. Yeah, he gets sent to I think it's Doc au for like it might have been Saxon Housen for sending Hitler too many fucking letters, which is I have to say, there aren't a lot of silly reasons to get sent to a

concentration camp, but that is one. That is the silly reason. Silliest there's dying of tid Like, that's ridiculous, that's why you're here. What the funk man? What are you waiting for? Um? I really want my doctor at back. You see, I have this certificate that was it meant a lot too, So I couldn't hear you might he fell out what what so? Um, Yeah, he spent some time in a camp. When he gets out, he is now thirty nine years old. Um, and he is. He kind of doesn't have a whole

lot of options, right. He can either he can force his way back into civilian life and find a job that will take a convicted child molester, uh and kind of just scraped by on the margins. Or he can get ahead again the only way he'd ever known how, by being exactly by being the most violent fascist son of a bitch he could be. It just happens that nineteen thirty six is a pretty good year to be

that guy. So that is the first year of the Spanish Civil War, which is maybe the best time in history to be a German combat veteran with zero morals. Um so dura Wanger. He's lost most of his connections because of the whole molesting a child thing, but he still has one friend, a guy named Gottlab Burger that

he had these they had been war buddies, right. Burger had risen to a pretty respectable rank within the New s S which is again, the SS is pretty new organization at this point, and Burger is fairly well placed in it. So Burger puts in a good word for his old friend to have Oscar serve with Germany's military expedition in Spain. The Condor legion, right, and I'm gonna quote next from a right up in the fifth field here here he helped train Spanish cruise in tank warfare.

After arriving in Spain in April of nineteen thirty seven, his commander Oberst Ritter von Tooma of the German Army rated his performance in Spain as outstanding. For his superior service there, darrow Winger received the Spanish Campaign Medal, the Spanish Military Service Cross, and the Spanish Cross and Silver. Oscar darrow Winger returned to Germany from Spain in May of nineteen thirty nine, and commenting on his past, durrow Winger said, at this point, even though I did wrong,

I never committed a crime. I gotta you gotta love someone who's willing to be accountable. Yeah, it's amazing, Like what a what a way to refer to molesting a child? Right? Show me where in Sevaimo Republic Constitution. It says that I can't molest child, so tell me where this is. Basically, the deal is that you help us brutally suppress the left in this civil war, and we will pretend you didn't molest that child, right like that. That is literally the deal that the Nazis make um And this is

like signed off. I believe Himler is one of the people who signs off on it. At a pretty high level. This is signed off because what he's done is bad and he probably this is something we don't have a lot of context on, but probably he also did piss off people who were influential by doing this. So when Dura Wanger returns home, his government is in the final

stages of planning its invasion of Poland. Now this is going to be a different sort of conflict than the one that the Reich had faced, a mass war, with German troops facing the brunt of enemy engagement, not Spanish soldiers who were like just dudes. The fear of every general in this kind of a war is rural saboteurs or insurgents. Now, the German army has a law long

and nasty history fighting such men. A lot of the war crimes they commit in World War One are dealing with these sabbo tours, um, So they've got experience fighting these guys, but also a lot of their experiences that like it's really hard to capture these guys, and the things that make normal soldiers good at being normal soldiers tend to make them bad at fighting insurgencies, right, like

not entirely transferable sets of skills. So in order to train people to do that, the Nazi high brass and this is decisions being made at like the Hitler level, are like, we should probably what if we were to make a unit entirely out of criminals, specifically poachers, right, guys whose job is to go into the woods, survive

off the land, hunt and kill things and not get caught. Right, And that's not a bad line of thinking, right, Like, if you're like, who's gonna be good at hunting down insurgents, well, poachers probably actually probably wouldn't be pretty get at that job there. Yeah, And then you know, so that the idea is we're going to like take men that we have in prison for these poaching crimes and we're going

to turn them into commandos. Now, during his time in Spain, Durlanger has redeemed himself in the eyes of the Nazis. His convictions get ann oled and he gets his doctorate back. They give him back his PhD um. So yeah, I got my certific. Yes, I'm going to frame it again. So as these Nazi leaders turned to the task of like finding a guy, who are gonna who's gonna run this this criminal unit, naturally they're like, well, this guy actually number one, he's fought insurgents for us in Germany.

We know he's good at it. He's good at normal soldier stuff, and like them, he's a terrible criminal. So yeah, yeah, yeah, They're like, yeah, he's molested a child, he's got a severe alcohol and drug problem, but like we're sending him to Poland where it's fine for him to do all that, right, we don't care who he molests in Poland or how fucked up he as well, he does it, get him over there. So that is how Oscar Darrel Wanger becomes the commandant of what will become known to history as

the Darrell Wanger Brigade. And that's a story we're gonna get into in part Do I am I excited about it because this guy's I just I feel that all the crimes that you've talked, and there have been a lot of, he has committed a significant number, yes, already, And now I'm like, oh, now we're gonna let this fucking Tasmanian double loose. This is uh, it's gonna get

bad and depressing. Yeah, this guy is already pretty bad, dude, and he's about to get sent to Poland right, Um, yeah, I want you in the gun train was in the press, Yeah, yeah, trade is before he was really that bad. Honestly, the wind up was guy had gun training a miss gun train in a second. Before we do that, I feel like the only proper way to end is, Matt, I want you to go to Google, and I want you to type in the name Oscar Darrel Winger. I want

you to see what this motherfucker looks like. So A all s K A R D I R L E W A n G E R oh my good makeup cast this guy as an orc in a fucking Lord of the Race show, like he looked or a goblin. Probably he looks like a monster. Fucking just I mean like, we don't like to attack people for who have done actual bad things. For their appearance. But this guy looks like a monster. Like you see this motherfucker in the street and you're like, well, this is a bad person.

You could draw this guy just from like just guess, and you are correct. This guy is frighteningly evil looking. Um dead eyes, yeah, mainly evil looking is the perfect description. What a what a monster? Of course he looks exactly like this. It's just he's got just that perfectly skeleton totally skull face right like, yeah, just a skull and receding hairline and just like one of those shitty German mustaches where they're like, we're going to make him, but

he didn't fully commit to it. So there's a little bit stick and he kind of is a petal stash, right like, he's got that going on a little bit. Anyway, he's got the it's originally it's the darling that's the stash. I'm I'm not proud of attacking a man for his his his appearance, but take a look at this guy and tell me we shouldn't be right, Like, just get a look at this motherfucker. Just look at him. I feel like I understand the you know, the impulse to

be like don't fat shame. It's not about but this guy. This guy looks like the life he's led and the life he's led running a gun train in between committing rape. Yes, yes, exactly anyway, Jeviny, I think you want to plug for us, matt Leeb absolutely, Um, So I have um a new podcast, uh called pod Yourself The Wire. Before we did a Sopranos podcast called pod Yourself an now we're doing the Wire and it's a great show. And um, I would

love for y'all to listen to it. And you know, if you're like, no, fuck, I don't want to listen, um, just go to the Apple podcast store and give us five stars in review anyways and then press play and then mute. You don't even have to listen. But if you could just do that five stars in review, get

that for us, because I got a fucking baby. I got a baby now, dog Well, yeah, in a couple of weeks, matt Leeb has a baby in a up a low weeks, So go draw, send us all of your art of matt Leeb's baby as Tony soprano, and if you want to, you know, you can make our baby look like Jimmy McNulty, Oh yeah, man, oh yeah. Especially pose it with like a couple of empty bottles, like baby size bottles, little Irish wasted Jimmy McNulty, Yeah, have it, you know, taken a ship and going she she,

You know that'll be fun. Little Clay Days, Yeah, do it as Clay Davis. Get a little omar baby costume with like a double barrelled shotgun and yeah, fucking hell yeah. You come at my diapers pressing like something like zigg Botka somehow I don't know. Do it do all the seasons even to which nobody likes. But it is a great season. I like season too. A bunch of polls give it. That's one of the strengths of the show.

But now we're veering into your territory. I'm I'm, I've staggered into like the German Army is about to do in Poland, staggering into the wire. Yeah, alright over, Bye bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.